AN INTERVIEW WITH POET LINDA E. CHOWN & A SAMPLER OF HER POETRY, PART II
“Poetry refreshes who we are and opens our eyes. It is a second sight on all that we’ve known and done. It penetrates into the invisible world we don’t speak of often and thus can bring us together . . . Poetry is the biggest surprise. It can be our double, echo, enhance our solitudes and tell us how the world is in its mysterious questioning ways. Poetry is a beautiful agent of radicalism in all ways.” Linda E. Chown
In Part I – published yesterday – we served up two of Linda’s poems along with her interview. Today, we share six more of Linda’s poems. A rare and rich treat for all of us. Thank you, Linda Chown.
POETRY SAMPLER
Uncle Sasha
Dear Sasha. Great Sasha.
You were something very special.
In Moscow’s somber streets, flagellated
and smothered by summer’s heat
and simmering peat bog fires,
you in that outrageously dignified hat
and cane, sickness pushing your bones,
overcame these pains and your daughter’s
shame of you to cut a swathe of finesse.
Haunted man who knew prison.
Proud man whose family split and fissured,
warred in the expected Russian Jewish way.
Sick man just three days out of bed.
I’d watch you as patriarch at your end
of all the tables heavy with food and talk.
You barely had the energy to smile sometimes
but you did and lectured about smoking
through all-conveying looks
of emotion when you caught our eyes.
My grandmother grew red from the efforts
of translation.
I babbled in smiles while the women
stroked and rubbed the top of my head.
I felt a volcano in you.
A bursting open in the long gray hair.
There.
Two worlds
barely touching in the air:
American blue jeans. Chekhov in English
My Darling Clementine Slavicized on a dusty Victrola.
You’d look at me, the youngest,
wanting and getting something
but all my claims, living in Spain,
the bases, were wanting.
My mother’s birthday dinner night
on the 25th floor of Moscow’s swankest hotel
I read the speech you wrote
in English the whole afternoon long
and you stood up speaking in Russian,
saying things that made all the relatives cry,
the agility of Fred Astaire in your body’s texture,
the weight of a visionary in your eye
and I felt an unexperienced pride in family,
the inherited forms.
Dead of pneumonia and gone
you fused so much and played so lonesome
light, so honor driven.
Man who knew pogroms and the family’s
leaving you and war and jail and revolution.
Uncle who said my name like I used to
as a little girl, Yinda,Yinda.
I didn’t get enough of you.
© 2018, Linda E. Chown
Time of terror
Then, when they killed
the Rosenbergs
for espionage
it was
a time of terror
for my family
eyes peering everywhere
no iPhone, no tv,
rumors turned to fact
in a mystery.
We turned to poetry
which would howl
and music with a whole
lotta shakin goin’ on
which spoke us true
stranded as we were
then in the quicksands
of conformity.
© 2018, Linda E. Chown
My Father Had a Dream
He had a dream
My father taught me to dream,
to take bigger steps,
his eyes flashed with happy need.
At the Lincoln Memorial
whose steps he went up like the tall giant he was with
his bad knees and flappy cane tap tap tap.
Us-all at the top like a vision
marble white we saw greatness,
something you can’t measure or fathom,
My father did more than smile:
he beamed, he purred peace and salvation,
like his life’s work had been done
by taking us there.
My father such a simple good man
whose light reached beyond
our messy, contentious, lives.
© 2018, Linda E. Chown
The Three Kings: Later
It is not that we don’t have
gifts and luxurious robes:
the child robbed the cradle
and his daddy’s not home.
The mare is in the kitchen
and the pope’s just on loan.
The food’s all dried out now
and the whistle doesn’t blow.
The roads have all been polished
and the stars don’t hardly show.
The roots are somewhat buried,
the times a passing slow,
we’re moving into darkness
where the candles rarely glow.
Where the gifts we bring
are seldom seen,
where there is no place to go.
© 2018, Linda E. Chown
When all fell away from me
Paul Celan
No Ballroom Dancing
in the stark stare of wide-snow and beggars hiding under the Blue Bridge
in the stark slant of a pilgrim’s walk to the plenty of the poor
silk slack people with their lips plunged in
to the silence of their dark thoughts
of the endless ending cursing and coming in this pen, sneering
when that old woman there with a Red Hat
can not go in without her teeth
she clinks and the pauper people point and peer stare
like pauper people are wont to do
where her Red Hat falls into a pea soup of fear
just a happenstance
no ballroom dancing here
© 2018, Linda Chown
A day they say to remember
It’s Memorial Day again,
a day they say to remember
those missing in action
remember missing those
long blue sky sailor stripes
remember your father in action
when you were little remember the Marne
and he was in action burning the brush
fire mixed black soot on white
fog drifts remember when you were
little with that big frown
and your mother sat there waiting
pulling down on her red skirt
© 2018, Linda Chown
PART I includes Linda’s interview and two poems HERE.
LInda E. Chown
LINDA E. CHOWN grew up in Berkeley, Ca. in the days of action. Civil Rights arrests at Sheraton Palace and Auto Row. BA UC Berkeley Intellectual History; MA Creative Writing SFSU; PHd Comparative Literature University of Washington. Four books of poetry. Many poems published on line at Numero Cinq, Empty Mirror, The Bezine, Dura, Poet Head and others. Many articles on Oliver Sachs, Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, and many others. Twenty years in Spain with friends who lived through the worst of Franco. She was in Spain (Granada, Conil and Cádiz) during Franco’s rule, there the day of his death when people took to the streets in celebration. Interviewed nine major Spanish Women Novelists, including Ana María Matute and Carmen Laforet and Carmen Martín Gaite.
ABOUT
Poet and writer, I was once columnist and associate editor of a regional employment publication. I currently run this site, The Poet by Day, an information hub for poets and writers. I am the managing editor of The BeZine published by The Bardo Group Beguines (originally The Bardo Group), a virtual arts collective I founded. I am a weekly contributor to Beguine Again, a site showcasing spiritual writers. My work is featured in a variety of publications and on sites, including: Levure littéraure, Ramingo’s Porch, Vita Brevis Literature,Compass Rose, Connotation Press, The Bar None Group, Salamander Cove, Second Light, I Am Not a Silent Poet, Meta / Phor(e) /Play, and California Woman. My poetry was recently read by Northern California actor Richard Lingua for Poetry Woodshed, Belfast Community Radio. I was featured in a lengthy interview on the Creative Nexus Radio Show where I was dubbed “Poetry Champion.”
The BeZine: Waging the Peace, An Interfaith Exploration featuring Fr. Daniel Sormani, Rev. Benjamin Meyers, and the Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi among others
“What if our religion was each other. If our practice was our life. If prayer, our words. What if the temple was the Earth. If forests were our church. If holy water–the rivers, lakes, and ocean. What if meditation was our relationships. If the teacher was life. If wisdom was self-knowledge. If love was the center of our being.” Ganga White, teacher and exponent of Yoga and founder of White Lotus, a Yoga center and retreat house in Santa Barbara, CA
“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.” Lucille Clifton
Jamie Dedes' THE POET BY DAY Webzine 