Posts Tagged ‘Kim Addonizio’

On Friday, a slim book arrived at my Stanford mailbox in a brown envelope with a neat, small, handwritten address written on it. I wasn’t expecting Molly Fisk‘s California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology to be such a trim endeavor, but here it is, weighing in at a compact 190 pages for $15. It’s a reminder that an “anthology” need not always be a staggering door-stopper to make its point. The book was supported by a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, funded by the Mellon Foundation, and packs 143 poets into, including some heavy hitters – Gary Snyder, Brenda Hillman, Jane Hirshfield, Kim Addonizio, Juan Felipe Herrera, and even a page for my humble self, as well as poet-teachers, poet laureates from all over, and students of all ages.

Editor Molly Fisk, an American Poets Laureate Fellow, explains the rationale behind the volume in the preface: “If you don’t experience a disaster yourself, it can be hard to imagine it. Photos and video are shocking, but they don’t hijack your nervous system the way reality does. And they only last a few minutes. One thing I’ve learned about disasters is how far-reaching the consequences are and how long the effects last.”

So when Molly was Nevada County’s poet laureate in the Sierra foothills, she took matters into her own hands: “When I saw a new grant that asked me to address something important to my community, of course I thought of wildfire.” So did most of the contributors, it appears – fire seems to dominate the table of contents. But not only.

Fisk: honored poet of the Sierra foothills

She continues: “Fire is not the only trouble we’re up against, so I broadened the lesson plan scope to include any kind of climate crisis our state has seen: floods, mudslides, smoke, drought, coastal erosion and sea level rise, refugee populations.”

UCLA’s SA Smythe in the foreword wrote that the book is a compendium of voices “working to make meaning of their lives and futures amid ongoing climate crisis … this book is a soothing gesture of solidarity, an outstretched arm in the wake of helplessness that can befall those of us confronting the harsh reality of a planet engulfed in flames. How can we continue to navigate a life in extremis? We bring together our memories and cobble together our defenses – ancestral and contemporary, coalitional and creative – to ward off the fires, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes that persist and shape our lives today.”

I was very pleasantly surprised to see a poem by a longtime friend, Kate Dwyer – not a narrow escape from catastrophe, but a rueful take on a wet springtime in Nevada County:

Spring as Adversary

Mid-month it rained so hard
the daffodils lay down and did not get up again.
The apple trees pelted us with blossoms,
death by wet confetti.
I emptied the rain gauge 6 times in 3 weeks.
And a sinkhole the size of a battleship
swallowed the parking lot at the tire store.
It took no prisoners.
Still, after 5 years of drought,
we dared not complain.
I put on my rain suit for the 64th day in a row
and tried to be grateful that
I would be soaked through before
the dog walk was over.

                                        – Kate Dwyer

Having been nominated for a prestigious prize, and then lost it, poet Kim Addonizio learned that one judge had characterized her as “Charles Bukowski in a sundress.” Hence the title of her newest collection of essays.

Meredith Maran reviews the volume in the Chicago Tribune‘s “‘Bukowski in a Sundress’ by Kim Addonizi: Don’t call it oversharing.” (We hope the Trib will correct the misspelling of her name by the time you read this blogpost.)

If this sample is at all representative, I want the whole book:

“Necrophilia is a term that is commonly misunderstood. You probably think it means being so attracted to dead people that you skip the dating part and go straight to their place with a little wine …. What necrophilia is, really, is this: sexual obsession for men who are incapable of having a real relationship because they have no heart in their chest cavity. What they have is an empty socket that will electrocute you if you try to get close and touch it or maybe just point a flashlight that way to see what’s wrong.”

From a chapter called “How I Write”: “I write and it’s good and I am queen of the kingdom and every flower is for me. I write and it’s not good enough; I go and read someone who is very, very good and feel inspired, and go back and write again.” Well, it’s a good thing it doesn’t make her feel envious and frustrated and wanting to break something and move to a remote island and whittle sticks for the rest of her life, which is how Humble Moi tends to feel in the same circumstances.

Maran concludes:

The best memoirs have a paradoxical effect on their readers. On the one hand, they make us attach to their authors, which in turn makes us wish they hadn’t suffered the indignities that spawned the tale. On the other, we’re grateful for the pearl that came from the irritation, the rich gift of the book. If there is any justice at all in the literary world (a premise Addonizio might dispute), “Bukowski in a Sundress” will have that effect on the wide-ranging audience its brave, brilliant author deserves.

Read the whole thing here.

Postscript on 7/10: It occurred to me that some of you may not know who Bukowski is, in the first place. Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) is a Los Angeles poet who has been called “the laureate of American lowlife.” You get the picture – booze, women, and hard livin’. Photo at left. He smoked, too.