Benjamin A. Saenz, El Paso Poet, Interview

Benjamin A. Saenz, El Paso Poet

Interview on Centrum

Border Talk:

An Interview With Copper Canyon Poet Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Interviewer Farid Matuk, a Austin poet and freelance writer:

http://www.centrum.org/writing/2008/05/border-talk-an.html

an excerpt

"I was born in 1954. My parents were not educated and our circumstances were humble, to say the least. Not one house I ever entered while I was growing up had libraries or books. Everyone worked hard, lived from paycheck to paycheck, had too many kids, too many debts, drove cars that were always breaking down. Needless to say, I do not have the same background as a W.H. Auden or a T.S. Eliot. This is not to say that I was not surrounded by civil and intelligent people."

Downstairs Dance Floor by Taylor Graham

Downstairs Dance Floor.

By Taylor Graham (i.e., Judith Ann Taylor). Huntsville: Texas Review Press (dist by TAMU), 2006. Paperback 29 pages. ISBN 1-881515-94-X http://somersetsunset.net/

Winner of the 2005 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize
Taylor’s life is certainly sensitive to nature, given her compelling interest in birds and trails. But she’s sensitive the handful of family members whose lives and dreams and channeled to you via The Downstairs Dance Floor. This well published Californian’s connection comes via Texas Review’s broad vision of literary commitment. Graham focuses mostly on older persons here – mother, father, and stepfather. The vignettes are snapshots, overheard snippets of conversation, and emotional gestures playing in the slower eddies of life. Somewhere in California there is nightclub “Tonight at the Yellow Rose.” There amid the two-stepping boots and jeans where “Country love-songs catch / like fishhooks in the throat / you can’t pull back, not even / when you’re in love with someone / who isn’t anymore -- ….”

The Magic of Mechanics.

By Lawrence J. Clark.

Cypress, Texas: American Mutt Press (POB 273, zip 77410), 2006. soft cover, 62 pages ISBN 0-9764591-0-8 http://americanmuttpress.com/

Lawrence originally hails from Maine, but he’s made his way on down. Here in his poems, songs, and short narrative, you’ll explore his doings – his admiration of his home life, his teenage awe, his loves, his shock over injustice, his quandaries over the poetical experience. He overcomes his education and writes in accessible lines of common human events. Some is raw and naked, others laden beneath sweet nostalgia.

In his prose he notes his reason for writing and that is to reach people’s hearts and souls. He certainly finds mine as he writes about his first newspaper route.

http://www.listentolawrence.com/ http://www.mytexasmusic.com/lawrencejclark booking@listentoLawrence.com http://www.lawrencejclark.com/

Border - Cleatus Rattan

The Border.

By Cleatus Rattan. Huntsville: Texas Review Press, dist. By TAMU Consortium, 2006. ISBN 1-881515-47-8 paper $12.00, 5 1/2x8 1/2. 80 pages. Poetry. http://www.shsu.edu/~www_trp/

Rattan, a former marine, taught at Cisco Community College and ranched nearby while these poems were collected. He won awards for his previous work, including being Texas’ Poet Laureate, and this volume won the 2002 Texas Review Poetry Prize. Rattan writes of what is important – family life, the teaching life, and the hardscrabble life west of Fort Worth.

When folks visited him there “their hands reach for the dog’s head. / They see sheep, / mesquite, scrub oak, the smile / on my face, and the stars meandering to nowhere.” When Aunt Mary came she told “about how young Jeffrey took / her for rides on these same ranch roads / in his 1937 Ford every Sunday / and how he had wanted her to marry him, but he was killed / in the war.” And Rattan has had his incalculable quandaries, “Is virtue your faith? And me, is love my sin? / Because I love and cannot help myself, / Must I conclude the fault is deep within / My genes? Or can I blame some capricious elf?” But he clarifies entrancedly to the winsome woman wearing his ring “Your lulling music, dance / give me power / to fend off dragon fire, / protect our poem bower.”

If you’re looking for them moment when mortality and grace meet in the saddling of a horse, turn to page 63. Cleatus will give you a boost.

Where Skulls Speak Wind, Poems - Larry Thomas

Where Skulls Speak Wind, Poems.

By Larry D. Thomas. Huntsville: Texas Review Press, 2004. 80 pages, 5 ½ x 8 paperback, $12.95 ISBN 1-881515-64-8 http://www.shsu.edu/~www_trp/, dist by TAMU http://www.tamu.edu/upress/
Winner of the 2004 Texas Review Poetry Prize and 2004 Violet Crown Book Award for Prose & Poetry.

Larry Thomas was born and reared in West Texan, was educated at University of Houston, began writing poems in the navy, and retired from the Harris County Adult Probation Department in 1998. He now lives in Houston and Galveston. As with this volume, he has won prizes and recognition, and his poems have appeared widely in literary and popular journals and anthologies. His web site is http://www.thetexaspoet.com/

As you leaf through Larry Thomas’ volume, he gently takes you back the hand to a private, quiet slow dance. The dance begins in stark, western Texas where the wind will “never, never stop,” where the rivers when they sluice attract “frozen bodies, / … to the river’s edge, / and launched their secret, ghostly boats / creaking with the cargo of desire,” and where crosses, cyclones, and O’Keefe skulls convince the human populace of their sins so worthy of God’s punishment. There bull riders, antique cowmen, and grandmothers rock in the two-step with death.

In the wind sparrows feed and fight, ravens caw in the snow, and vultures in torn black fabric shine their beaks on bleached bones. Moving across the land, a brown pinto strikes a dazzling image in the snow, a black stallion thunders in the night, and longhorns “flaunt their sun struck hides.”

In Midland, youngsters remember their dry afternoons after church, rose colored Fords, dewberries, oh, the dewberries, first communions, mothers’ feather dusters.
In regret, there is long kept secret unknowingly shared by a father and son – acknowledged upon a death too late.

In West Texas not all gods are football players, some are awed by the red hummingbirds and spread their galactic “crushed light” as blessings on “everything we touched.”
Take a little light from Thomas, and you’ll dance a little longer.

Routine Heaven - Jack Myers

Routine Heaven.

By Jack Myers.

Huntsville: Texas Review Press, 2005. ISBN 1-881515-78-8 paper $14.95 51/2x 81/2. 96 pp. http://www.shsu.edu/~www_trp/, dist by TAMU http://www.tamu.edu/upress/
Winner of the 2005 Texas Review Poetry Prize

Jack Myers (http://www.smu.edu/english/people/FacultyProfiles/Myers.htm) lives in Mesquite, teaches at Southern Methodist University since 1975, and wins awards for his poetry. He was the 2003-2004 Texas Poet Laureate, gained entry to the Texas Institute of Letters, and took Austin’s Violet Crown.

Myers poetry is accessible and warmly playful and surprisingly cold at times. Myers refers to his dog so often that some readers may imagine that his dog may rival his wife as his most insightful medium, but folks at Dallas’ Writer’s Garret may differ. He may call himself a “failed calligrapher” but he is a successful poet. Reading his work is akin to your following him down some vernacular hallway only to find at his modest gesture the two of you watching yourselves watching yourselves in a mirror.

He informs on us all as in “Trying to find the origins of anger / by looking into my heart / is like a dead leaf feeling for its roots.” What husband has not had the delight of stumbling in on his wife’s hair washing, rinsing, and drying ritual? If you were Myers, you could catch a ghostly epiphany there in the hair. In “An Old Dog’s Tale” the commonplace hound shakes Baghdad missiles from his fur. Myers does not worry so much about Buddha “finding his way back” through a line of incarnations, but rather accepting his own humanity in “pouring water downhill.” Finally, readers will find practical life advice; for instance, what is the best quit smoking regimen, play “Strip Polka.”

Myers’ plain words and behind the scenes rhythm make for a comfortable reading companion.

Take Your Time Coming Home - Cleatus Rattan

Take Your Time Coming Home.

By Cleatus Rattan. Huntsville: Texas Review Press, 2005. pbk. 81 pp. ISBN 1-881515-82-6. $12.95. http://www.shsu.edu/~www_trp/

Cleatus Rattan, Mayborn Professor at Mary Hardin-Baylor, has published several volumes, his own poems and explorations of major Europeans poets, and placed poems in many literary journals, including the prestigious Sewanee. Another recent title, The Border has been selected for wide study in Texas by the UIL. His honors accumulate.

Here, the reader has sections: Now and Then, The Nerve of Some People, Remainder, and The Players. Rattan is plain-spoken, even seemingly casual, in his word plays. Sophomoric teenagers may roll their eyes, but adults will find Rattan’s offerings insightful, amusing, melancholic, and tragic. Fortunately the “Good News” is that “Aunt Mary popped from a coven of Methodists” but was saved by the family. So through scenes of personal quandary, family moments, poetic dissonance, football, motorcycling, and ranching, Rattan reticently leads the reader to his places of private dialogue. It’s worth listening and taking your time.

For poets laureate, see also:
http://www.unt.edu/northtexan/archives/p05/poetrattanmore.htm
http://www.tsl.state.tx.us/ref/abouttx/poets.html
http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/PP/kzp1.html
http://www.loc.gov/rr/main/poets/texas.html