Tundra & Bone

The chairs filled slowly. There was some worry that, two days after Thanksgiving, folks wouldn't be in the mood for a reading. But this is was the evening that worked best for the feature, Anne Coray, who called JoAnn Anglin out of the blue to arrange something in Sacramento, part of her book tour that darted around points in the lower 49: Colorado, Utah, Sacramento, Oakland. We said yes at the bookstore. Writers of the New Sun sponsored; and from their ranks was pulled in Rebecca Morrison to make the event a double-bill.

Now it takes more than a spiffy event title --Tundra & Bone -- to make work a reading where the two features are coupled together exclusively because of their regional association. Fortunately, last night's reading with Anne and Rebecca, both from Alaska, unfolded crisply, evenly. If JoAnn hadn't elaborated in her introduction about building an event around a poet she knew nothing about (before a Google search), one might've thought the event perfectly balanced; two poets sharing a sensibilty perhaps only possible from those who've spent anytime in the vastness of Alaska.

I had approached the evening with a sense of obligation. It was close to Thanksgiving, out-of-town family still around. And as I laid out chairs and uncorked the wine, my mind was elsewhere; hovering over the large circular table at our favorite Chinese restaurant, watching my daughter, 7, skilled with chopsticks, a harpooned piece of garlic chicken.

More souls entered to fill empty chairs. Rebecca began with Ode to Exxon (as read to the Beatle's I am the Walrus) and my attention returned to the room. Corporation penguins singing Armageddon man you should have seen them rape / THE LAST FRONTIER. / I am the dead one, they are the yes men--WE are the walrus./ GooGooGooJoob /. It was a good beginning. The remainder of her poems came from a new chapbook from Flyway Press (poet Crawdad Nelson's imprint) titled the cook inlet poems; a beautiful book with its contents pulled from a childhood living in Alaska. The poem I Used to Dance for my Daddy stood out; bittersweet, autobiographical, reaching back to polish off pieces of the past.

Morrison will always be one of my favorite Sacramento poets. But too often she's found sharing the stage with the monkeypoets she so deftly describes on her website. And she's not a poet who screeches or chest thumps (that I've seen.) She's quiet for a poet with so much to say. It was good to finally have a quite place to hear her think.

It's windy outside, the weather inclement by our Sacramento standards. And I wonder what Anne thinks of it as I leaf through her book, Bone Strings, pulling out lines, collecting random fragments of life in Alaska where tonight's bluster, I imagine, must seem mild, insignificant. Earlier, JoAnn referred to Alaska as "An iconic state -- you think you know what it is." To test the assumption, she asked around the room for our immediate impression of the place. I think I wanted to say vast, which had already been used, and instead the word wasteland rolled off my tongue.

(Do I really think that? I suggest that we return the favor and allow those from Alaska (a surprising number in the audience) to toss out their off-the-cuff reactions to California. It doesn't happen, but it's amusing to assume their comments. )

Anne's poems, like Rebecca's, unveil a landscape defiant to simple explanation. Vast? Of course. Beautiful and vulgar; a source of joy and utter heartbreak. Anne was 10 months old when her father, a Bush Pilot, was killed. She rebuilds her memory of him in her poem To a Father, Lost:

Drowning is not kind to the body.
They never found yours--just as well. The image
I keep is my own, sheltered, much as a bird's wings
shelter a nest. I skipped ahead to your skeleton, clean,
unbroken--almost composed, a mise en scene
suspended indelibly beneath the water.

It's occasions like this when I feel most fortunate to have the bookstore, and that we can roll aside the wheeled shelves and make space for a poet travelling, visiting, looking for another outpost where their poetry might be well received, as it was this evening with Anne. We were lucky she thought to touch down here; that JoAnn Anglin took up the charge to find her space, and that Rebecca Morrison was chosen to compliment the evening.

Poems Read:

Rebecca Morrison the cook inlet poems flyway press $5
Ode to Exxon
Summer 1965
I Used to Dance for My Daddy
My Mother's Hands
Resurrection Pass
A Power of Birds

Anne Coray Bone Strings Scarlet Tanager Books $15
One March Animal's Desire
Common Measures
Eight Songs
After a Fashion
To a Father Lost
Elegy for Four Wolves Killed by a Neighbor Last December
Dirge
Dolly
Heracleum Lanatum (Cow Parsnip)
A Hand Half in Darkness

Anatole remembered on Medusa

There's a fine remembrance of Anatole Lubovich on Kathy Kieth's Medusa's Kitchen blog, including several poems Anatole had within the pages of the Rattlesnake Review.

211-214 | Lubovich

Anatole Lubovich

I just received an email from Pearl Stein Selinksy reporting that Anatole Lubovich died during his heart surgery. There were no further details. It's 9pm on Thursday, I'm at home, without access to my email list to send this out to a larger community of folks. Not to mention that this is a lousy way to hear such terrible news, via blog, via website, via email. But I have this need to tell people, between sips of red wine, from within this feeling of sunkenness.

Picture: Anatole Lubovich (center) with Donald Sidney-Fryer (left) and Bill Pieper. (The Book Collector, October 2005)