Rick Smith & Carol V. Davis Headline at Village Poets on Sunday, August 25, 2024 at 4:30 pm

Summer is in high gear at Village Poets with two amazing features, Rick Smith & Carol V. Davis at Bolton Hall Museum in Tujunga.

Two segments of open mic will be available and refreshments will be served. Bring your best poems for the open and enjoy The Bolton Hall Museum, 10110 Commerce Ave, Tujunga, CA 91042. Bolton Hall is a Los Angeles Historical Landmark built in 1913. Our reading starts at 4:30 pm and goes till 6:30 pm.

 

Rick Smith was born in New York. His father was artist William A. Smith whose work is in the National Portrait Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress. When Rick was eight, his father took him to live in post-World War II Paris. There, he experienced the devastating aftermath of war, which features in poems his new collection entitled Ear to the Rail.

The Smiths settled in Bucks County, Pennsylvania where they were once snowed in with Carl Sandberg, a close family friend. Rick began writing during high school at Solebury then honed his craft at Bard College, studying with Anthony Hecht then later with Frank Polite, at University of Iowa, and Sam Eisenstein, at Los Angeles City College. During college, Rick taught himself to play blues harmonica, a lifelong passion. He played “basket houses” in Greenwich Village, and roadhouses in Duchess County, earning his chops with Big Joe Williams, Steve Mann, Van Dyke Parks, and others. Rick recorded with the Rick Smith Band, the Hangan Brothers, and currently The Mescal Sheiks, for whom he is the lyricist. 

Rick’s three poetry collections, The Wren Notebook (2000), Hard Landing (2011) and Whispering in a Mad Dog’s Ear (2014) were published by Lummox Press. His poems have appeared in many journals, including Hanging Loose, Wormwood, Ante, Stonecloud, West Coast Poetry Review, Poetry LA, Rock Bottom, and Delirium. 

Three Poems by Rick Smith

Entry # 74 from "The Wren Notebook"

Seagull takes an indirect route

to Havana,

is delayed over the Yucatan

while a storm has its way.

She is on a mission,

carrying a message of longing

from those who stayed behind.

 

Wren holds a grudge,

mistrusts the gull,

always has.

 

Gull enters Cuban airspace,

becomes intoxicated by

geranium and mint

and by the strains of “La Gavina”

played by a single violin

rising through the airwaves

and distracting her intent.

Gull swells with pride for a moment,

forgets her mission,

drifts off to the Caymans,

spends the day grooming

and dozing by a cluster of ghost orchids.

 Judy In Santa Fe

 You’re selling Navajo rugs

to a deaf lady

down on The Square.

She needs your lips,

she steps toward you,

parts your hair like a curtain

to see your lips.

You are talking about the red dye,

how they make it

from a thousand crushed beetles.

She needs your lips

to know

how they make red.

from Whispering in A Mad Dog’s Ear (2014) Lummox Press

North Light                                                                                

                         ......for Mama Smith

 Upstairs,

the smell of turpentine

and cadmium red,

oil rags and gesso pads.

It’s what we’ve always known.

And downstairs, you’re cooking

mussels and artichokes,

steam rising from pots.

And the radio is always

between stations.

There is north light

and sometimes flame,

a brain pan in heat.

It’s a signature,

like Imelda’s blue espadrilles,

Batista’s jeep,

like the toothy whistle

of “Sweet Georgia Brown”,

it makes things snap and tick.

At 75 and

stark naked,

holding yourself up

with a cane:

a self-portrait in pencil

and the point

is not

how good you look.

You could live in Chinatown,

join your neighbors for tai-chi at dawn

under the Williamsburg Bridge.

After,

you could walk it off,

the chill of the East River,

steam

off the perfect teacup.

The thing you could not teach me                                            

I am able to learn on my own.

Here,                                                                                                  

you’re wearing a straw hat,

no shoes,

and you hold a paint brush

like a baton, no,

a weapon,

landscape in flight:

the sun, the lilies, the river.

A small canvas is taut and

returns the favor.

It fights you,

has a will of its own

just the way you like it.

The button of a heart

I can feel

even at my wrist

and throat.

The pump and pull

of life in my palm,

the way I hold you,

it’s all true

Hanging Loose #83 (2003), Swallow Dance, Silver Birch Anthology (2014)

 Carol V. Davis is the author of Below Zero, Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2023, Because I Cannot Leave This Body (Truman State Univ. Press, 2017) and Between Storms (TSUP, 2012). She won the 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize for Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg (TSUP, 2007). Her poetry has been read on National Public Radio, the Library of Congress and Radio Russia. Twice a Fulbright scholar in Russia, she taught in Siberia, winter 2018 and teaches at Santa Monica College and Antioch University, Los Angeles. She was awarded a Fulbright Specialist grant for Siberia in 2020. Her poems have recently been used by Donna Sternberg and Dancers in dance concerts at the Skirball Cultural Center with the theme of ancestors’ voices.

 Three Poems by Carol V. Davis

It Is Even Colder in Irkutsk             

I no longer understand numbers.

-22, -32, what’s the difference?

Branches covered in a sheen of white,

fingers slicked in a second skin.

A breeze barely audible

shudders twigs and snaps icicles.

It’s not that Siberians don’t get cold,

they say, but that they know how to dress.

Sable. Mink. Black Persian lamb.

Fur hats round as kitchen knobs

perch on women’s heads.

Yesterday at a lecture the other women

wore muted shades: gray, lavender, beige.

Why, when this Siberian world must

crave color to survive the long winter?

The Angara River that slices Irkutsk

is frozen, though fisherman cut holes

to catch the prized omul, even in January.

How strange it will be to return to

California, the temperature rarely

dipping below 50 F.

Where I am often cold.

originally published in Prairie Schooner, from Below Zero, Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2023

Defending the Prairie                    

You can’t love the mountains if you don’t love the prairie,

the minister’s daughter proclaims, leaning back

in the luncheonette booth.

 

Books and grasses are what she loves most.

A slight edge when she recounts visitors’

dismissal of these flat fields, as if height overrules all.

 

The Chassids believe the world is recreated each moment.

The chipping sparrow’s trill bounces from box elder to bur oak

as the cardinal’s two-syllable call, thumps a base line.

 

The light shifts looking for refuge, hooking

in the bluestem; shadows shrink as the sun hurries

to settle its body for the night. Air cooling,

the meadowlark tests its lungs.

originally published in Poet Lore, from Below Zero, Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2023

Admiral Nimitz              

Every day in summer I’d cross the border;

he’d nod, pick up the horseshoes,

hand me one, triple the size

of my palm, and say, You first. We’d play

away the afternoon. Few words

punctuated the clank of horseshoe

against stake, until the fog rolled in

and I’d retrace my steps home.

I was five or six; he, white-haired,

however old that meant.

 

One evening my father sat me down,

spoke in the exaggerated tone

adults adapt for children, asked

if I knew who he was.

Admiral Nimitz, of course, though

I knew nothing of his command

of the Pacific Fleet and was less impressed

than if he’d landed a horseshoe.

 

He was a calm man, a useful attribute

for sending young men to their deaths.

The only time I saw him upset,

raccoons had invaded from their hideouts

in the hills, attacked the goldfish in his pond,

leaving muddy footprints as they escaped.

As far as I knew, this was his only defeat.

from Because I Cannot Leave This Body, Truman State University Press, 2017, reprinted in American Life in Poetry: Column 625 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poet Laureate of the Foothills, Kathleen Travers, with RG Cantalupo on Sunday, July 28, 2024

 

 

Kathleen Travers was crowned the 1^st Poet Laureate of the Foothills on May 19, 2024 at the historic McGroarty Arts Center.  A fourth generation Angeleno, Kathleen has lived in her 100-year-old historic home in Sunland (which she restored) for more than 20 years.  With graduate degrees in Art History, Victorian Studies and Professional Writing, she has been the recipient of fellowships to the Prague Writers’ Festival and for post-graduate study at Cambridge University.  Formerly a high school and university educator, she is a historic restoration expert, specializing in architectural ceramic.  A preservation advocate, Kathleen authored the successful Historic-Cultural Monument applications for the Hills of Peace Cemetery and Cross of San Ysidro.  She served as docent at Bolton Hall for ten years, where she co-curated the Foothill Moderns exhibit and lectured on local artist Margaret Morrish. She has read her poetry at venues as diverse as Maddingley Hall, Cambridge, England, and Gasoline Alley, the L.A. Times Festival of Books and the Iguana Café.  She served on the board of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival in its glory years, and was a founding director of the Poetry Society of America in Los Angeles in the time of The Act of the Poet at Chateau Marmont. Featured in 49 local civic light opera and drama productions in decades past, and having sung with a bakers dozen of Los Angeles choral ensembles, her mezzo is currently in search of a choir, although she always has a song in her heart for life in Sunland-Tujunga.

The Mountain in My Yard

 It is this admirable and immortal instinct for beauty which causes us to regard the earth and its spectacles as a glimpse, a correspondence of the beyond.

-Charles Baudelaire

I recall the picture, my grandmother

aproned Mode-O-Day at her kitchen sink,

I on the floor, above my toddler head

the makings on the counter of a pie;

behind, a craftsman balance of matched cupboards,

banks of drawers, archetype of my own,

but that above my kitchen sink and same

tile backsplash thinly lined in contrast –

mine white/red, hers green/black – a mountain.

She rises sharply through the soft fullness

of oaks and sage, cutting into sky

and dark against the lavenders and reds

and golds of California flowers. How

I’ve loved the mountain’s changing rise: from winter

lace, its white against the chilled gray dream

of sky as startling as my kitchen walls

against the tile’s mellowed cream; in spring

she warms to gold, a froth of light and brilliant

green that blooms and spreads, turning dark

and smoky like the drift of sage upon

the summer air; then crisp and brown with danger,

while autumn sunsets blaze reflected fire

on her face, embraced by purpling clouds.

I have never been amazed by what

we love beyond what moves and breathes,

hard-wired to attach by a million

generations of selection.

So when I received the notice of foreclosure,

though I knew I would, as when the cancer

victim finally succumbs, the jolt caught,

breathless ribs collapsed, the grief a shock.

For a moment I was back, watching from

the sink as Station Fire flames crept up

the mountain’s sides and all around, days

of dark red glow and heavy skies and air as thick

as sorrow – it took a year to wash the black away.

But even charred, my true north, the gentle arch

of her peak sliding down, curving up the next,

an odalisque reclining, her geography –

my Sun Land an ordinary magic that lulled

in dreams of poetry, while life went on in prose.

No, I have never been amazed by what

we love. And I have loved this house,

this place, this air, and Sister Elsie’s Peak.

As necessary as love is to us

is never a surprise as much as how

we will survive the loss; what will amaze

me is if I survive the loss.

The Currency of Childhood

                                        for an afternoon at Descanso Gardens

Polished carob beans–

sun-dark grapes in clusters–

silky pods that split to gelled

trails, black on sidewalks:

these were the currency of childhood,

as firm and reliable

as our parents' silver certificates.

Such round and pleasing coinage

bought favor among concrete

blocks swelled by roots

and streets just steep

enough to speed bike-bound

wheels tracking green and worthy

enterprise.

Buddy's mother had sung

the witch in Hansel and Gretel–

a fact worth buttons

and honeysuckle

just in the reminding;

when you'd venture the treasure of other blocks

it was often just to see if you could dodge

the sound of the call on her diva voice,

crawling like notes up a staff

through the high arms of trees

and never enough streets from home

to flee the aria of his name.

But that was a magic you wanted no deliverance from.

It was coinage in an alchemist's mold

that never knew inflation

merely dropped from use

replaced by the standard

of the redder empire

of adolescence.

All grown too tall,

we bartered time

for bold and surfeit kisses,

sacrifice as legal tender.

And have spent years since

unable to count

all that has passed,

all that we have lost

or spent in the losing.

But today we traded shirts,

those skins we had fingered

to imprint the fabric of our moment;

inhaling you in this exchange,

I have found handfuls of that lost currency

which I will spend on the laced

limbs of live oak that sighed in God's breath

and bent to brush us with their golden cones.

I will feel time slip with our hurling

down slick blades before the long

arm jerk of the water wizard

through a sky recognized from other years,

a glow of purple stone worth everything

and a pilgrim's path to magic

in a smooth hard seed; ever after

it will open for us

to the feeling of a child

who from his mother never heard his name

but that it was sung.

Kathleen Travers 

 

rg cantalupo is a poet, playwright, filmmaker, novelist, and director. His work has been published widely in literary journals in the United States, England, and Australia. He graduated from UC Santa Cruz where he studied under such luminaries as George Hitchcock, editor of Kayak, Gregory Bateson, and Norman O. Brown, and received his MFA in Poetry and Non-Fiction from Vermont College of the Fine Arts. His books of poetry include Involving Residence, No Thanks, Walking Water On Earth, The Art of Naming, Remembrances, The Endurance: Journey To Worlds End, (a lyric novel), Graces For The Wonder: Poems 1998-2023, I Will Not Die Here: War Poems  1990-2023,  Never To Die: Book One: The Last Strigoi; Book Two: Love’s Body, Waking In Dawn’s Early Light, and Private Entries,You Don’t Know Me, (a five book young adult series), The Light Where Shadows End, and The Shadows In Which We Rise, (memoirs), American Patriot, Surviving Covid, and a number of plays and stage adaptations including the musical versions of “The Giving Tree” and “Where The Wild Things Are.” He is the Founder and Artistic Director of Stages in Santa Monica, a performing arts center. He served in the 25^th Infantry Division as an RTO, radio operator, for an infantry company from 1968-69 and received three purple hearts and a Bronze Star with a Combat V for Valor Under Fire. His books can be purchased through New World Publishers or through the author at rgcantalupo@gmail.com.

Note: RG is taking a rain check as he missed the reading scheduled in 2023, due to unforeseen circumstances. We are happy to welcome him this coming month!

 For A Young Poet

Already at seven, you’re naming the garden,

writing “rose”, “lilac”, “daisy” along the walkway

with colored chalk. We watch you, say how

this world we live in, this green patch in Angel City,

will be yours soon, then we let you take our hands,

guide us through your creations, show us how

even the prickly weed “thorny” has a home here.

Out beyond us, where our sight ends, are predators,

I know. I know. They peer out from inside shadows

like frightened cats, drive by stalking behind glass.

And that too, you must name, write in red so those

after you know what else lurked here. Remember,

even leeches rise in this earth. Remember also, how

yours must be the words we long for, for without them

there is only this dying garden without colors or

sounds to sing. Look at your fingers, green from

leaves and grass. Let that be your guide. Look at how

your eyes reflect the sun’s light. Just so. Just so.

Light is a prism there, shoots off sparks igniting

whatever it hits. Take it in. Take it in. Let your heart

be the diamond that bears our light.

Published in The Wisconsin Review

Scene From The Promenade

Evening, late, the lights

of the promenade

dimming to dark.

I walk out of a movie

into the reality of

storefront windows,

stop in front of a

billboard-sized snapshot

with the name J. C. Crew.

 

Shot in some exotic,

third world country,

(Guatemala maybe,

or Paraguay), it sells

adventure: an exotic tundra,

a dirt road leading to an

endless horizon, warm,

earth tones drifting off

into matching mannequins.

 

Up close, an enormous,

furry, white dog getting out

of a sand-colored Land Rover,

a man in khakis unloading

rattan suitcases, a woman,

also dressed in khakis,

standing nearby, smiling.

They are both rugged, slim,

blond, beautiful as angels

 

looking down from two stories

above.  Below them, humans,

me, a homeless couple

vacationing in the alcove—

two writhing lumps

under a newspaper and

a gray, tattered army blanket,

grunting, then moaning

as I pass.

Published in The Willow Review 

The Stars

The stars do not want me to write them sweet poems.

They have no desire to be “my heaven”, or “the flickering

embers of my love”, or “a theme park for aliens

saucering around the universe”. No, the stars

don’t want to be anything but stars, twinkling along

in their own reveries, going nowhere in particular.

They don’t even like being called “stars” really.

They’d much prefer a more feminine name—“astral”,

or “celeste”, or “estelle” say, though even “phoebe”

would be acceptable. They especially don’t like the way

we’re always pointing at them, calling them dogs,

or bears, or serpents, or soldiers, how we make up

scandalous stories about them like celebrities and then,

later, pretend they actually occurred. Nor do they like us

reading our future in their random configurations

as if we were reading tea leaves in the cup of the sky.

But what the stars hate most, is our ceaseless probing,

our intrusive cameras spying on them as if there were

some kind of conspiratorial plot to their vow of silence.

No, the stars would just rather be left alone, cruising

through the dark matter without a care in the cosmos.

Isn’t it enough, they ask, to fall like a teardrop from

the night now and then, to die out in a hail of fire

like a fiery god?

 Published in The Southern Review

 RG Cantalupo 

Sunland Backyard, photo by Alice Pero