January 25, 2020

Introducing: Charles Cote

One of the pleasures of moving to a new state has been the opportunity to hear and meet poets I had not been aware of in my old Northern California stomping grounds.  One of these poets is Charles Cote.  A few months ago, I had the pleasure of sitting with him in a Rochester café where we shared stories and work.  It gives me great satisfaction now to introduce him to you.  I’ll begin with a statement from Cote himself about his remarkable collection, I Play His Red Guitar, followed by a few poems from the book. 

Gregory Orr writes that “poetry is the thread that leads us out of the labyrinth of despair and into the light.” Poems that emerge from crisis have the power to heal and re-stabilize us. That’s what I set out to do with this collection, to fashion a container for the chaos and grief of losing a son to cancer. Kim Addonizio in Ordinary Genius writes about Eckhart Tolle’s concept of the pain body, how our despair can be seductive, a perverse drama, and that art is a creative response, a way to transcend pain and come into the light. Rumi said, Become the light. So hopefully, the poems in I Play His Red Guitar sing toward the light. Not surprisingly, I’m teaching myself to play George Harrison’s Here Comes the Sun on my son’s red guitar, and I’d say it’s all right. My intention is to help others who are grieving a terrible loss to find some solace and light in the art of poetry and any form of creative writing, to share my book with bereavement groups across the country. David Whyte talks about how poetry initiates us into a conversation with profound silence which is a kind of liberation, the place we reconnect with our most authentic self so we don’t get lost in the chaos of everyday confusion. For me, that’s essential and why I write these kind of poems.

                                                                        — Charles Cote

I Curse You, Melanoma, Curse

your humidity and bitter taste,

your fattened spiders spoiling

in metastatic corners, curse

.

your rotting cinders and peeling paint,

walls that bear no weight,

curse your pumps and wasted gates,

.

the scourge of putrid shapes,

forsaken stink in Gehenna, blackened

moles and pock-marked face.

.

May you drown in the bile

of your clogging drains,

choke in coagulate bags,

.

die with tumors that gorge

and fester, wracked

by relentless spasms

.

and unbearable break-through

pain, over-medicated, rotting

in a vat of tasteless radon.

.

Tin Man Villanelle

Fear’s the tail that wags the beast,

the scarecrow skitters in the straw.

Oz never did give nothing?  Please.

.

As famine trumps the wedding feast,

a wife will find a husband’s flaws.

Fear the tail that wags the beast,

.

the bit of leaven that bloats the yeast.

A swollen tongue.  A rusty jaw.

Oz never gives nothing, see?

.

He’s the one who would be last but never least,

who wouldn’t know his license from the law.

Fear’s the tail that wags that beast

.

as far as west is west and east is east,

as cooked is good and bad is raw:

Oz never did give nothing.  Please,

.

your gold is lead, your wallet fleeced.

Your house is cold.  The pipes won’t thaw.

Fear’s the tail that wags the beast.

Oz never did give nothing?  Please.

.

My Body

takes the shape of graves in church yards, of blossoms

falling off the tree, the roots of rhododendron

on backdoor paths.  I press its hunger

.

into the osprey’s nest, a branch curled

toward heaven, rapt beaks and claws, an ache

in every soft belly.  My body hangs

.

between a sycamore and black walnut,

between shale defining the shore, wind chimes

bright in the rafters.  It spills

.

out to the marsh, to the heron’s grace

in the current’s meditation, lazing open

to the sea.  My body, a diamond lair, a gaslit

.

labyrinth, a timbered kingdom that takes

the shape of flame before match strikes flint,

that listens to catbirds mewling for space

.

in flits and calls, brother to cardinals and crows,

gathering what it can of this spoken world.

__________________________________

All poems shared with the permission of the author. 

.

You can order I Play My Red Guitar by going to www.tigerpress.com.

Please send your reactions, comments or questions about this work to me at kfhastings (at sign) mac (dot) com.

.

“Yet you shall sometimes find the lotus flowering

In the mortal mind’s so narrow room..”

— Babette Deutsch, “The Lotus”

January 18, 2020

OUT OF THE ASHES

As you know from reading the introductory page, this website has, as just one of its purposes, a desire to bring together the work of poets from New York and California. When you walk to the poetry section of your local bookstore you are certain to see works by Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, Mary Oliver, Walt Whitman and a few others. But unless you are in a store like City Lights in San Francisco, you may not have a clue as to the hundreds of other poets who have books out that might also call to you.

Because we left Northern California for Upstate New York, in part, as a result of the October 2017 wildfires in Sonoma County, I’m going to start this blog off with a poem by Santa Rosa poet, Jodi Hottel. It appears in her chapbook Out of the Ashes, a collection she dedicates to the 42 people killed in the fires and to the first responders who put their lives on the line.

Firestorm

First, came orange incandescence

            from beyond the hills.

Then wind and embers, clearing the way

            for a roaring flame-river.

When it passed — ash-fall,

            sigh of silence.

.

Second came the uncertain waiting

            for the gut punch or the guilt of relief,

the ghostly images sent by satellite

            where red means green

and white means gone.

.

The visits to a changed-same landscape

            of black spires and brick monuments,

parked skeletons, sad sifters, searchers for felines.

            then the flood of insurers and law firms

clamoring to be first.

.

Third came a deluge of videos, each a blow

            to the brain, vision of hellfire

that blew through our neighborhood.

            And the telling of tales —

each devastating or heartening but singular.

.

Soon came the saws, falling redwoods

            and ancient oaks, the stumps.

Shiny guardrails replacing

            charred, twisted ones.

Then a held breath.

.

Later, hazmat suits of white,

            blue tents, floodlights, trucks

roaming a moonscape.  Close behind,

            the front-loaders, breaking earth

and silence.  Coyote howls.

.

Then came sprouts of promise,

            earth resilience, responding to

the lure of rain, beacon of velvet hills

            trimmed with singed-oak lace,

hooped straw-wattles.

.

Backhoe-clangs, tractor-trailer deluge,

            night and day, weeks and weeks,

leaving cleared lots, for-sale signs.

            Vacancy awaits the inevitable —

contractors, architects, surveyors.

.

I hunger for a poured foundation,

            fresh lumber, barrage of hammers.

My eyes search for leaf-sprout, yellow

            peeping from deeply buried bulbs,

spot Canada geese on their return journey.

.

Jodi Hottel’s previous chapbooks are Voyeur from WordTech Press (2017); Heart Mountain, winner of the 2012 Blue Light Press Poetry Prize, and Through a New Lens, 2015. She lives in the Larkfield neighborhood of Santa Rosa, CA.