Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Poet David Allen Sullivan Explores Love And Loss Amongst Father And Sons in "BLACK ICE"


Christal Cooper

All excerpts given copyright privilege by David Allen Sullivan and Turning Point Books




David Allen Sullivan’s
BLACK ICE
Masks:  A Love Story Between Father & Son

“The poems are about the changing natures we undergo throughout our lives. The masks we adopt and shed. The ways in which we are greater than the sum of what we can remember.”

David Allen Sullivan on Black Ice 




       This past September of 2015 Turning Point Books published David Allen Sullivan’s third poetry collection Black Ice.


       Sullivan’s other two collections are Strong-Armed Angels and Every Seed of the Pomegranate.





       Sullivan described Black Ice as “a book of poems about my father’s dementia and death, as well as the complex relationships between fathers and sons.” 
       Life for David Sullivan, the youngest of three sons, changed forever on December 23, 1981, when his father, Denis Garland Sullivan, was in an automobile accident.


      
Black Ice 2

My dad’s hands were yanked
from the Datsun’s steering wheel
as the bucket seat

back broke and he sailed
past racing telephone poles
and slurring pine trees

to shatter rear glass
and smash a pick-up’s grille, then
drop back as the car

met the snowbank’s fist.
His brain in its liquid case
slammed against bone,

contused as he stilled.
Back windshield diamonded him
in a blood-mask, streaked

by snowpack the dazed
truck driver used to staunch flow.
radiator’s shrill

broke through deadened ears
We’re thrown by what we don’t know.
Ice slides beneath us.

       Denis Sullivan survived the horrific accident but lost a huge piece of his identity by suffering a brain injury that left him with frontal lobe dementia, mental illness, the loss of basic tasks such as communicating, reading, and writing; but, even more tragically, he lost his livelihood, but fortunately only temporarily.
       “My father taught political science at Dartmouth College.  He specialized in analyzing politicians facial gestures, and their effect on viewers.” 


       Politicians have long been described as wearing many masks –and masks is a great description to describer all of these poems:  the masks describe Denis’s livelihood, which at the time seemed hopeless that he would be able to resume due to his injuries.  But Denis returned to teaching, which amazed everyone, and remained teaching for the next twenty years until his death on June 8, 2013.

In grad school he trained himself
on politicians,

watched video clips,
interrogated facades-
displays of power,

untended flinches
of fear – and here I am face
to face with a man

who withheld himself.

Excerpt from “Reading Faces”
      
       Masks also describe the different personalities and routines each of the family members had to maintain in order to function – father became son, son became father, wife became mother, husband became child.



 “Papa, you can’t talk.”
Why not?  He bellows, You are.
Heads angrily turn

as Ramaswami
attacks a slow mangalam
and I find way

to prayer.  “Whatever
can mend this, let it come.”  Turn,
kiss his cheek.  He calms.

Excerpt from “Attending an Indian Concert.”


Black on the windows
for the months his wife held him
when he balled up, cried, or Fuck-you’d
the world. 

Excerpt from “Darknesses”

Eventually Denis did learn to read and write and, as part of his therapy and recovery, wrote in an accident recovery journal which gave him a new mask – that of rebirth and hope.    

“As I feel better the sun shines more brightly and as I see the sun I walk as close as I can towards it.”
-from my father’s accident recovery journal

Excerpt from “Appetites”


These journal entries are quoted throughout the book Black Ice: 108 pages of 72 poems divided into three parts:

1.     Daily Diminutions
2.     Sons of Fathers
3.     Enter the Fire

Sullivan described the writing of Black Ice as a
therapeutic journey.
       “This collection has been a powerful journey for me. A way of reconciling myself to my Dad's dementia and death, but of also recognizing the gifts that occurred even as he declined.”


       The entire family experienced a decline –his three sons, Marc, Kevin, and David especially his wife Margaret (Peggy), who had to give up her dream of pursuing a PhD in art.


       She believed he’d teach again,
relearn how to read and write.  She
Would be confidante and guide, her dream
of a PhD suspended.

Excerpt from “Darknesses”

       Denis has to wear a mask of pretending that he can read a book by Dr. Seuss to his granddaughter, David’s daughter Amina Barivan.


He holds Dr. Seuss
while my daughter turns pages.
Whispers his panic:

I can’t read.  We laugh.
“Neither can she.  Make it up.”
He wants yellow eggs . . .

Excerpt from “Judge”

       Despite this suffering and this separateness father and son connect – in a very rare moment where Denis is the father figure and David his son.

He doesn’t ask why I wake him,
folds me against his chest –
forty-odd years whispered away
as he strokes my hair.
His condition grows him kinder.

Excerpt “Back Home”


        
       It’s painful to read of Denis’s suffering – from the physical of not having control of his own body in “All Fall Down”; not able to tell time in “Drawing the Clock’s Face”; the loss of hearing in “Back Home”; the loss of his independence in “Life and Death Before Breakfast.”; not able to twist the plastic rig from an orange juice jug in “Assisted Living”, but most tragically he seems to have lost the ability to remember.


Clock reads 1 a.m.
Where am I again?  I blink,
and my father leans

over the couch where
I’d been sleeping:  David?
Where has Peggy gone?

I pat him calmer,
repeat Mom’s itinerary,
then lead him to bed.

Excerpt from “Hay Caracoles!”

       Despite this sadness there are sparks of triumph – where Denis does remember – he remembers how to express love to his son by stroking his hair in “Back Home”; he remembers how to play Hearts in ‘Judge”; and perhaps the most emotional compelling memory is described in “Touched” when father and son visit the mbulu ngulu figures at Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum. 

 

My dad’s hand rises
to stroke shimmery metal.
Panicked, I look around.

Gallery’s empty.
Each sculpted elder aches to
have their features shined

by attentive hands
and the grit of sand – the gods
feel when we touch them.

Dad guides my palm to
the glint.  When you were young
your skin felt like this.

Excerpt from “Touched”

 

In “Mask Making 101” David Allen Sullivan makes a mask for his own son Jules Barivan.  This mask symbolizes the new roles grandfather, father, and son must live out– roles that are both familiar and strange.

He disappears under headlines and blurred car crashes.
Feels like wet noodles, he says until his mouth’s sealed

and only nostrils allow him to breath. Strip
after strip builds him up, a hardening mirror.

Quietness discomforts me.  I want him still to need
what I have to give.  When he pulls it off

his double lies in his hands.  He stares into it
then turns it over.  Does this really look like me?

Excerpt from “Mask Making 101”

       The final mask to be unveiled is the death of Denis depicted in the poem “Beached”, where Sullivan describes his father’s death as the red ocean ebbing.  In the poem, Sullivan, who is with his brother Kevin, reads his father a poem by Mary Oliver. 


I read a poem.

Kev lowers one hand
to the laboring heart and says:
Go if you want to,

stay if you need to.
Ocean swell lifts, a red wave
rises through neck and

face, suffuses him
with color and a last breath
he releases.

Excerpt from “Beached”

            “My brother really did say these things, and my father did take in a breath, let it out, and was gone.  Amazing when something like that happens, and you suddenly realize that some part of him was still conscious, still with us, and still aware of our touch and words. Spirit dwells inside, even as the body dies.”
Out of the collection “Beached” was the most compelling and emotional for Sullivan to write. 


             "As I composed this poem, near the end of finishing the book, it felt like a way to unite the separate strands.  And in that goodbye my older brother and I were united in a special way. That send off of our shared father was a way of sending us off as well. Transformed. It was a privileged time where the spirit of our father was manifest, and its leaving a gift."

Monday, March 7, 2016

Scripted Interview with Painter Francisca "Paquita" Esteve Barranca

Christal Rice Cooper


SCRIPTED INTERVIEW:
Painter Francisca “Paquita” Esteve Barranca



1. 
Birthdate and birthplace?
August 17, 1947
Barcelona (Spain)


2.  Education history?
Holy Trinity (Santísima Trinidad), Catholic religious school. All grades and BA. In Barcelona.



3. Career history?
Escuela de Artes Aplicadas Massana (Fine Arts School.) In  Barcelona. Interior Design and Painting Techniques.
I taught Art at a University in China where my husband was teaching. 




4. 
Describe your childhood and how it affected you as an artist?
I always loved design and drawing. My teachers and family encouraged me, but also they wanted me to study something more productive than art. But I went to art school anyway.


5. 
What is your first experience of drawing?
Very early, drawing in our school notebooks was forbidden by the nuns, but one young and very sweet nun allowed me. She made an exception. Then I won some award there, which was important to me as a child. Unfortunately I do not have any of my drawings from that time. Later I moved from Spain to Mexico. In the move, I lost all of my belongings.


 6.
Your first experience of interior design?
During the time I was at the School of Art, I was working with designers and decorators and getting experience. Then, when studies finished, I had my own design company in Barcelona. Luckily Barcelona is a very modern city, and because it was so modern, I didn’t have trouble finding work in interior design. Mexico City, however, was very different. (There isn’t really a market for interior design there.) It was my way of making money and I could paint without being in a hurry.  I lived in Mexico City for 30 years until I married Marlon.


7. 
Who are some artists/interior designers that inspire you?
I liked several designers that had a certain simplicity and elegance in common. Always, Japanese culture inspired me, especially in its aesthetic balance. So I was thrilled two years ago when my husband and I traveled to Tokyo and Kyoto.  


About painters, my preference is the impressionist style (Monet, Manet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Gauguin…. Also surrealism: Remedios Varo, Dali, although I myself don’t feel like I have the ability to be minimalist. I seem to be drawn to the realistic and detailed. 


Thanks to my husband, Marlon Fick, I have been learning about American artists: Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth among others. I would like to be closer to that level of simplicity—a simplicity that’s achieved through tremendous struggle.



9. 
What is your day-to-day routine like when it comes to your art form?  
I usually have several projects going on at the same time. Also, for years I only used oil, but I recently changed to acrylic, and now I’m experimenting again with pastel and pencil. 


I have never tried painting for an exhibition, (maybe I will do one some day), rather I paint for myself, my friends, or my husband, our families. as long as they sincerely express a liking for the work. Someone gave me good advice. "Do not give anyone a painting if the person doesn’t ask.  This can make them feel awkward… He or she will not know where to hang it without offending you… if they do not like it."


 

Photo 1
Paquita in her sunroom in Mexico

Photo 2
Painting Green Thumb

Photo 3
Charcoal painting Joan, 1972

Photo 4
Pencil drawing Isa, 1972

Photo 5a
Poster in Chia of Paquita’s art activities at Wenzhou Kean University

Photo 5b and 5c
Paquita’s students in China

Photo 6
Painting Chinese Girl and Lighthouse
“The curiosity of this painting is that I was painting a seascape, and the landscape in front of me in reality was actually of mountains ad a river.”

Photo 7
Painting Translucent Tulips
“I went back to the primary colors for this and oversized everything.  I’m not sure what I was thinking, but I like the idea of a translucent flower.”

Photo 8
Paquita and Marlon at the Government Awards Banquet in China.

Photo 9
Painting Marlon’s World
“Marlon has everything he loves in one place after several years.  I painted his world without walls because his imagination is boundless.”

Photo 10
Painting Morning Coffee in the Tetons:  Portrait of My Husband

Photo 11
Painting Full Moon
“This is only a study which I did of the view from our front door I the Rockies of Colorado.”

Thursday, March 3, 2016

Yahia Lababidi's Balancing Acts: New and Selected Poems (1993-2015) is now #1 on Amazon’s Hot New Releases


Christal Cooper

All excerpts given copyright privilege by Yahia Lababidi and Press 53





Yahia Lababidi’s Balancing Acts
“Writing Poetic Conversations In The Head”

I read, and carry on conversations in my head, which sometimes spill onto the page in the form of aphorisms, poems, and essays.  I write, primarily, in my head and transcribe it on the scraps of paper, napkins, even my iphone or whatever else is handy wherever the muse strikes – in bed, on the road, or at my desk.” 

Yahia Lababidi


       Yahia Lababidi’s sixth book, the poetry collection Balancing Acts:  New & Selected Poems 1993-2015, published by Press 53, is already available for pre-order on amazon. 



Lababidi’s other five books are Barely There (Wipf and Stock, 2013), The Artist as Mystic: Conversations with Yahia Lababidi (Onesuch Press, 2012), Fever Dreams (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2011), Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Belly Dancing (Common Ground Publishing, 2010), and Signposts to Elsewhere (Jane Street Press, 2008)













Balancing Acts: New and Selected Poems 1993-2015
is now #1 on Amazon’s Hot New Releases in Middle Eastern Poetry which is rare since the book has yet to be reviewed and only has been mentioned via word of mouth.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/new-releases/books/13788371/ref=zg_bs_tab_t_bsnr
Press 53 is owned and operated by Kevin Morgan Watson and its editors, the legendary poets Pamela Uschuck and William Pitt Root, selected Balancing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1993-2015 for the Press 53’s Silver Concho poetry series.  


       “It is a remarkable thing to bind and put out into the world 20 plus year of confessing in verse, or being and becoming – which is how I see my New & Selected poems (1993-2015).  I hope the many selves and styles in this poetry collection, Balancing Acts, will be engaging to readers of literature and, ideally, even draw in some nonreaders, as well!”


       Lababidi, 42, was born in Cairo, Egypt where he had his first experience of writing poetry as a young child.  He wrote rhyming couplets for his grandmother whom he described as having the “smile as long as the Nile.”  He was named after his grandfather who was a poet and a musician. 


       It wasn’t until his mid-teens, while attending the International American School in Cairo, aka Cairo American College, that he finally recognized himself as a poet while reading Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray and Hesse’s lyrical novels.



I thought ‘I want to do that’. This further confirmed to me that I was implicated in the literary project.”    


Lababidi also fell in love with poetry written by Gibran, T.S. Eliot, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Rilke, and Rumi. 
         "To quote the Persian Master Rumi who spoke of the limitations of poetry when he had become a celebrated poet:  "What, after all, is my concern with Poetry?  In comparison with the true reality, I have no time for poetry.  It is the only nutrition that my visitors can accept, so like a good host I provide it."

         He attended George Washington University in Washington, DC where he majored in English and Humanities.
He spent a decade in Cairo, Egypt working with the United Nations as a speechwriter and editor.


He spent another decade in the United States as a freelance writer for magazines, a theater company, and a conflict resolution NGO.
      

During these two decades he also discovered a spirituality that helped him mature as a poet and make sense out of life.
       “Philosophy I left behind, after a ruinous decade or two, at the feet of Existentialist Nihilists.  My entry into spirituality was the Tao te Ching, a tremendous little book which I still return to.   


        I read the lives of Christian saints for inspiration, but more and more find myself drawn to Sufism, the mystical strain in Islam.”    
       During the past few years he kept up a correspondence with Pam Uschuck, when, in 2014 Uschuck contacted him about his book of collected poems.        

“I told her I was still massaging it and tweaking it and she looked at it (again) and then a year ago I got an official statement from Pam and Bill that said they would like to take that on.  I was ecstatic of course that is my whole life.  


We moved along and Kevin suggested it would be a better idea to make it a new and selected instead of collected edition.”
       Balancing Act is 204 pages of 157 poems with a forward by H.L. Hix.
       The most popular poem in the collection is “What Do Animals Dream?”
“It seems to get the most play, being included in a best-selling US college textbook, Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing (10th edition) and soon to be published as a stand alone, illustrated book by Onslaught Press."



What Do Animals Dream?

Do they dream of past lives and unlived dreams
unspeakably humor or unimaginably bestial?

Do they struggle to catch in their slumber
what is too slippery for the fingers of day?

Are there subtle nocturnal intimations
to illuminate their undreaming hours?

Are they haunted by specters of regret
do they visit their dead in drowsy gratitude?

Or are they revisited by their crimes
transcribed in tantalizing hieroglyphs?

Do they retrace the outline of their wounds
or dream of transformation, instead?

Do they tug at obstinate knots
of inassimilable longings and thwarted strivings?

Are there agitations, upheavals, or mutinies
against their perceived selves or fate?

Are they free of strengths and weaknesses peculiar
to horse, deer, bird, goat, snake, lamb or lion?

Are they ever neither animal nor human
but creature and Being?

Do they have holy moments of understanding
in the very essence of their entity?

Do they experience their existence more fully
relieved of the burden of wakefulness?

Do they suspect, with poets, that all we see or seem
is but a dream within a dream?

Or is it merely a small dying
a little taste of nothingness that gathers in their mouths?

       Lababidi’s inspiration for “What Do Animals Dream?” happened fifteen years ago, when he watched a sleeping dog display twitching and rapid eye movement.
      “And the idea was seeded:  What could it be dreaming?  When I sat down to actually write the poem, it expanded into a meditation on dreams and the human condition.  When I sat down to write the form of the poem, the imagery suggests itself.  My practice is to write on paper, and then type up on computer – out of a superstitious fear that once I type a poem up, the dye will stick (so to speak) and there will be no more room for it to breathe/grow/change.”


Visit Lababidi’s soundcloud page to hear him reading poetry that matters the most to him. https://soundcloud.com/yahia-lababidi and connect with him via twitter at Twitter: @YahiaLababidi