She came to the Sierra festival thanks to an unusual invitation. (Photo: Radu Sava)

At the Dodge Poetry Festival two years ago, Los Angeles poet laureate and National Book Award winner Robin Coste Lewis was one of the honored guests. She sat at a table to perform the inevitable ritual of signing books for her many fans.

But one of the people in the queue was much more than a fan: she was the mother of Jeanne-Marie Crowe, the midwife who had delivered Lewis’s son. “It felt like meeting the grandmother of an angel,” she said. A visitation, she said, because “doors opened in so many directions in my heart and mind.”

Judy Crowe was also a member of Nevada County Arts Council’s Literary Arts Committee, and so she invited Robin Coste Lewis to be the keynote speaker at this year’s Sierra Poetry Festival, which took place last weekend. “I’m southern,” said Lewis. “There’s nothing you can say to your midwife’s mother other than, ‘Yes ma’am.’”

Memory is “a tricky thing” for the African diaspora. (Photo: Radu Sava)

Lewis has a masters degree in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from Harvard University’s divinity school, and PhD from the creative writing and literature program at the University of Southern California. She used to be ancient language professor. She now teaches at a low residency MFA program in Paris, which sounds like heaven to me. When she won the National Book Award for her 2015 collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus, however, her life changed.

“One of the things I’ve learned on tour for a year-and-a-half straight,” she said. “I became a public servant, using poetry to do that.”

She was welcomed by Shelly Covert, spokesperson for the Nisenan and Executive Director, California Heritage Indigenous Research Project, and also a singer, a songwriter, musician, and storyteller.  The Nisenan are part of the southern Maidu tribe that had been native to the Nevada County region.

The gesture was particularly moving for Lewis who, as poet laureate, has launched a truth and reconciliation effort for Los Angeles. “It occurred to me that I have been waiting for centuries for our country to have Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Native Americans,” she said. “I’m hoping to create model for other communities.”

She applauds the movement to “reclaim the language and culture that had been wiped away,” she said. “It’s a dream come true.”

She opened her reading with another “indigenous language” – an entrancing, babbling poem called “Dog Talk.” (You can read it here, if you scroll down a bit.)  “All the kids in the neighborhood spoke this language, to the chagrin of our parents. It’s a statement of gall and tenacity of children to live anyway – and retain cultural agency.”

“What we’re starting to learn is that children are the arbiters of cultures almost as much as adults” – as revealed in architecture, sculpture, and the games children carved into stone at foot of temple stairs.

She also read a “riddle poem” recalling her parents “reading the newspaper in bed when I was tiny,” while she was cuddled between them until she was sent to her own bed. She remembers her father’s riddles and jokes, and her poem, “Red All Over,” recalls his frequent repetition of the old saw, “What’s black and white and red all over?” The answer to the ancient joke is, of course, the newspaper…or is it?

This was the ’60s, and the deaths of black people was very much in the news. “What he was talking about was blood and segregation,” she later realized. “The laughter was more sinister.”  The poem is here.

But always her conversation returned to language and memory, the latter “a tricky thing” for the African diaspora, she said. But sometimes the two come together. She noted the vegetable okra, popular in the American south is called “gumba” in Senegal – almost identical to “gumbo,” the famous stew of the U.S. South in which okra is a crucial ingredient. “So some things remain.”

“Judy, are you happy?” she called out. I suspect that Judy was.

“I became a public servant, using poetry to do that.” (Photo: Radu Sava)

Jane’s not her thing.

She’s tried. She’s tried again and again. But she cannot love Jane Eyre. 

Author Kim Culbertson was the moderator for my onstage discussion of “literary citizenship” with David Kipen, my former editor when I was a critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and afterwards literary director for the National Endowment for the Arts. The occasion was last weekend’s Sierra Poetry Festival. “I have tried to love it many, many times,” she pleaded. “And I hope I make up for it by loving James Joyce and Jane Austen.”

At the opening night festivities the night before, we discussed of the books we’re ashamed we didn’t “get” or didn’t love even if we did. She also warned me of the wide literary disparities in the audience I would be addressing. Some, she said, were intimidated by “critics” – they didn’t yet have confidence in their own literary judgment.

Well, nobody should. Our tastes sharpen and deepen as we read more, think more, feel more. The book we dismissed in our twenties acquires a different meaning in our forties. Half of it is the willingness to voice your opinion, listen to challengers, argue, reread, and maybe admit that you changed your mind.

The classics obviously don’t change; we do. Hence, a few years ago I rediscovered Stendhal‘s The Red and the Black, a book that left me cold when I read it in my teens. Maybe I should even give Don Quixote another go, since I read it first during those same years. But then again, maybe not…

Revered author of a single joke?

Here’s what A.N. Wilson had to say about that august novel. I’ve been reading his biography of John Milton, but though he has incandescent praise for that bard’s epic, the Spanish author leaves him cold: “It is a one-joke book, and it goes on for hundreds of pages.”

“The joke is that a silly old man keeps mistaking events and characters around him, because inside his head, he is living in the romances of Amadis de Gaul. Great amusement is had, both by characters in the book who take delight in mocking, tricking and deriding the silly old man; and by the author, who plainly expects us to join in the sadism.”

The quote is from a recent article in The Spectator, “The Greats We Hate,” that I shared with Kim and others.

Cervantes isn’t the only one who takes a beating. Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Henry James all get their comeuppance. Take this example, from critic and satirist Craig Brown:

Which classic work do you think this comes from? ‘Her teeth were white in her brown face and her skin and her eyes were the same golden tawny brown. She had high cheek-bones, merry eyes and a straight mouth with full lips. Her hair was the golden brown of a grain field that has been burned dark in the sun but it was cut short all over her head so that it was but little longer than the fur on a beaver pelt.’ Jeffrey Archer? Jackie Collins? Lee Child? I’ll give you one more clue.

Perhaps she needed one, too.

After another 150 pages, the hero finally gets to roll in the heather with the brown-skinned, brown-eyed, brown-haired woman with the straight mouth and the hair like a beaver pelt, ‘and all his life he would remember the curve of her throat with her head pushed back into the heather roots and her lips that moved smally and by themselves’.

Well, my lips move smally and by themselves, and I imagine yours do, too, unless you’re the dog (‘Oh, yuss!’) on the Churchill insurance ad, but it’s not something we boast about. The writer is, in fact, Ernest Hemingway, and the book For Whom the Bell Tolls. It’s described on the cover, by the Observer, as ‘one of the greatest novels which our troubled age will produce’ but it strikes me as soapy old tosh.

In fact the word “tosh” comes up more than once in the piece, though Jane Eyre does not. But Charlotte’s sister Emily Brontë does, with her acclaimed masterpiece Wuthering Heights. Says Executive Director of the Forward Arts Foundation Susannah Herbert, “the sexiness of Heathcliff is much overplayed. He needs a good bath.”

P.D. James, Susan Hill, and many others weigh in. Read the whole thing here.

Angeleno David Kipen will be in the Sierra foothills for an onstage convo this weekend.

Another gig this weekend. I’m heading to the hills to be (I’m told) a “celebrity presenter” at the 2018 Sierra Poetry Festival on Saturday, April 28, which will be held at Sierra College in Grass Valley. Ever so tiny a celebrity, I should think – a National Book Award winner Robin Coste Lewis, is the keynote speaker, after all. And as always, Executive Director of Nevada County Arts Council Eliza Tudor is the magnificent organizer and visionary behind the event. You can hear her discuss the event (with poet Marcelo Hernandez Castillo) over here.

I wrote about the Sierra festival in its inaugural year, 2017, when California poet laureate Dana Gioia was the keynote speaker. He gave a terrific talk – read about it here.

Last year’s poetry festival, with Dana Gioia and Moi (Photo: Mary Gioia)

Said Eliza of this year’s program: “We chose our theme, Ordinary Light, as a nod to our brand new United States Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith, for the title of her award-winning memoir.” We’ve written about the poet, a Stanford alum, here.

I spent about a dozen years in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, “Gold Country.” The twin cities – Grass Valley and Nevada City – are the best and largest souvenirs of the Gold Rush period in California history, and have a growing tourist industry. (Both cities are now under state designation with the California Cultural District program.)

That’s one enticement. Then there’s the company. Consider this an invitation to come and join me. It’s an all-day one-day event. I’ll be having an onstage conversation with David Kipen at 3:30 p.m.

David, born and raised in Los Angeles, is the former literature director of the National Endowment for the Arts, during the time it was under the chairmanship of a fellow Angeleno … Dana Gioia. Since then, David opened the Boyle Heights bookstore and lending library Libros Schmibros in 2010.

He is also the former book editor/critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, which is where I encountered him in the late 1990s. I was a critic at that time for the august San Francisco institution.

However, he was for the most part telecommuting from Los Angeles. So we only had one brief encounter, years later, at an event for the National Book Critics Circle we both attended. He moved through the room like the sun, and his conversation is engaging and lively.

The conversation will be moderated by author Kim Culbertson, who will try to rein in David and me. Our topic: “What does it mean to be a literary citizen?”

She’s back: U.K.’s Mel Pryor (Photo: Radu Sava)

I don’t think the type on the poster is quite readable when reduced to blog size (bel0w), but you can go and see the full line-up and more legibly here. You can also register for the event online here.

The highpoint: Keynote Speaker Los Angeles Poet Laureate Robin Coste Lewis will speak at 9:30 a.m.

From The Guardian:

At age six, Robin Coste Lewis told her aunt that she wanted to be a writer. This, she thought, meant being a novelist.

“I thought that if one wanted to be a writer, one had to write novels because I didn’t know that one could be a poet,” says Lewis, whose debut collection Voyage of the Sable Venus won this year’s National Book Award for poetry. She believed this in middle school, high school, college, graduate school, and afterward while teaching, and trying to write fiction. She believed it when she published She Has Eight Arms But Only Shows Me Two in the Massachusetts Review, a work that she thought was a short story, “even though all my poet friends at the time were like, ‘Girl, that’s a prose poem.’”

To the marrow … National Book Award winner Lewis

Things changed after she was in an accident that caused permanent brain damage and kept her in bed for two years.

The recovery was difficult. Lewis had to do speech-language therapy and stop reading and writing. “My neurologist told me, ‘You can only write one sentence and read one sentence a day,’” she says. “I decided, ‘OK, if it’s one line a day, it’s going to be a goddamned good line.’” …

“I am an artist through to my marrow,” she says, though adding, “which might be a curse and not necessarily a good thing.”

And poet Mel Pryor will be flying in from England – as she did last year – to attend. Closer to home is Nevada City poet Molly Fisk.  But read the schedule here, and the list of presenters here. Tickets are here.

See you there.

A marriage that was a “long conversation” … and plenty of papers, too. (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

We’ve written about historian and poet Robert Conquest before – most notably for the Times Literary Supplement here, but also here and here and here, among other places. About his widow Elizabeth Conquest – a.k.a. “Liddie” Conquest – we’ve said comparatively little. That’s about to change. She will be one of the panelists at the Another Look book club on Monday, April 30, discussing Philip Larkin‘s early novel A Girl in Winter. But you might also turn to the pages of the Tunku Varadarajan‘s article in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, titled:  “The widow of historian and poet Robert Conquest talks about his legacy – which includes three books still forthcoming”.

Liddie Conquest in London.

Robert Conquest was the first historian to chronicle Stalin’s murderous havoc. His book “The Great Terror,” published in 1968, was among the 20th century’s most influential works of investigative history. Yet Conquest was also a seriously accomplished poet and a prolific letter-writer. His correspondence includes letters to Amis and Larkin (880 pages to the latter alone), as well as to the novelist Anthony Powell and poets including D.J. Enright, Thom Gunn, Vernon Scannell, Wendy Cope and others …

Banker boxes full of papers cover practically every flat surface in the Conquest household. Sideboards, tables, floors and shelves—all heave with typed and scribbled sheaves. Not only is Mrs. Conquest readying “The Great Terror” for its 50th anniversary edition this fall, she’s editing his complete poems—more than 400, some never published—for publication next spring. She’s also editing his memoirs—he died with one chapter unwritten—as well as a fat volume of his correspondence.

“There are thousands of pages of letters that he wrote,” Mrs. Conquest says. “Bob warmed up before a day’s work by writing letters. He would sit at his typewriter and he’d fire off.” Toward the end of his life, he would dictate email messages to Mrs. Conquest, who sent them from their shared account. “He was never really fond of trying to figure out the computer.”

The lot of a literary widow, Mrs. Conquest says, “is not a happy one, for she must master the management of her husband’s literary estate.” But she doesn’t sound grumpy when explaining that she has a veto over the use of his writings, including the power to say yea or nay to any requests to reprint them. This is all “notoriously tricky territory,” Mrs. Conquest concedes, and such widows have “long been caricatured in writerly circles as pantomime villains”—the younger wife who “single-mindedly devotes her remaining decades after her celebrated husband’s death to championing his artistic legacy and slaying those who dare to question it.”

One of the many comments the combox: “Mrs. Conquest seems to be an absolutely wonderful woman.” We couldn’t agree more. Read the whole thing here.

More papers: Conquest at work. (Photo: L.A. Cicero)