Finding Wild Florida

"Lie with your ear to the ground. Let birdsong trace its complexities onto your eardrum."

Susan Cerulean, nature writer, Floridian, biologist and educator, writes these instructions in the elegant (if alarmingly short) anthology she co-edited, The Wild Heart of Florida: Florida Writers on Florida’s Wildlands.

Eighteen months ago I came to live – part-time and unwillingly – in Miami. I did not expect to find much wilderness. To my surprise, I have spent more time camping in South Florida than I ever have in Seattle. Perhaps that’s because Miami is easier to leave behind. Or because I prefer sweating to shivering. Whatever the reason (and in spite of the best efforts of developers, pro-business legislators, and oil-spillers), I recognize more tree and bird species in South Florida than I do in Western Washington.

There is no recycling in our eighty-unit Miami apartment building – though it’s called “Nirvana” (really!) – but less than an hour’s drive west of our home is a fifteen-mile bike-loop through the Everglades. Our metal coffee mugs are often rejected at cafes (public health hazard, they say), but eighty miles southwest lies the wonder of the Middle Keys.

 
On Long Key, you can pitch a tent just five feet from the calm emerald lips of the Atlantic Ocean. I did that this weekend and hardly left my campsite for two days. I sat at the picnic table and watched sanderlings flip small piles of dried seagrass in search of a meal. I scribbled in my notebook until Ursa Major rose like a question mark in the sky, asking Orion and the Pleiades what to make of happenings on the blue planet below. (A punctuation mark to the question that fills all my notebooks.) Orion pretended not to hear while Atlas’s daughters just shrugged. They’d never much cared for pointless questions.

I let birdsong and birdtracks trace their complexities onto my eardrum, as I asked myself another question that would only make the those seven sisters shrug: What will become of South Florida? 

For now, the sanderlings splay seagrass with their blunt beaks, until two black-headed laughing gulls swoop from blue sky toward green waves. Fifty (or seventy? one hundred?) sanderlings rise from the mudflat as a single being, flying away from the shoreline and then back and then away again, seeming to disappear like smoke. (And I pack up my tent and notebook and head to Key West.)

A Harborview Haiku and American Sentence

Life's garden shelters…
soil, sun, weed, root, rock. Bright shoot
cut, will grow taller.

As in our bodies: a break might mend more strongly than a bone unscarred.

Peggy Weiss and me, July 2010

Peggy Weiss, the Art Manager (aka Miracle Worker & Duchess of Art-Healing) at Harborview Medical Center, orchestrated my six-week immersion in the grit and wonder and pain of King County's public hospital and regional trauma center last summer.

Later this month, a Haiku and American Sentence I wrote one afternoon, thinking of Harborview's View Park, will be distributed via meal trays to all the hospital's patients. I am inviting them, along with their friends and family members, as well as Harborview staff and volunteers, to create their own poetry. I look forward to sharing it with you.

The Light of Translation

“You can’t think of it as a transfer from one language to another, because we would be left with something horrible in Spanish. You must think of them as parallel poems, a poem created in our language and another poem in Spanish. Both versions uphold their respective literary traditions.”

And so poet / educator / activist / translator Irma Pineda explains the difference between the Zapotec and Spanish “versions” of her poems.

Poet Irma Pineda, photo courtesy of the poet.

Born and raised in the city of Juchitán, where she still lives, Irma Pineda has been writing poems since childhood. She now has five published collections of poems, one of which had a print run of more than ninety thousand copies.

Juchitán is the only city in Mexico in which an indigenous language dominates – not just on the streets and in homes, but in the mayor’s office. Like eighty-five percent of Juchitán’s residents, Irma’s first language is Zapotec – a language whose literary history reaches back two thousand years. The Zapotecs were probably the first society to invent writing in the Americas -- long before the Maya.

February 21 marked the UN's International Native / Mother Language Day. Linguists estimate that half of the languages currently spoken in the world will have fallen silent by 2100. It's a fact that fills me with panic, grief, and a urgent desire to spread Zapotec poetry far and wide.

Irma Pineda creates her poems in Zapotec, then recreates “parallel poems" in Spanish.And then, I create a “parallel poem” in English. Learning that Irma considers the Spanish and Zapotec versions of her poems to be parallels, not translations, freed me as a translator. I’d made hesitant attempts at translating the work of Zapotec poets in years past, but stopped because I don’t know Zapotec and couldn’t read the original poem. Pineda’s process allows me to think of the Spanish version as a new original that stands on its own.

My office in Oaxaca, December 2010.

I spent the month of December 2010 in Oaxaca, completing first-draft translations of forty of Irma’s poems. After I completed the translations, I spent four days with Irma in her home, reviewing my drafts.

Here is one of Irma’s poems in all three languages. “Light / Biaani’ / La Luz” appeared in the Sarasota, Florida literary journal
New CollAge in 2010.

Light

Light allows the vocation of looking at walls,
discerning colors that fill faces.
Light floods bodies,
draws silhouettes,
phantom shadows
that taunt the nighttime solitude
of one fragile figure
held on the wall of fear.


Biaani’

Ne biaani’ zanda gu’yu xi cá cué’ yoo,
zanda gannu’ xhi dié’ lú binni.
Biaani’ riguiñená ni nexhe guidxi layú,
rutie’láadi binni,
rutie’ bandá’ dxaba’
cuxidxi ti nuu xtubi lu gueela’
ti miati da
sucá cué’ yoo cadxibi.

La luz

La luz permite el oficio de mirar paredes,
adivinar colores que llenan rostros.
La luz inunda las formas,
dibuja siluetas,
sombras fantasmales
que se burlan de la soledad nocturna
de una figura frágil
sostenida en la pared del miedo.

This is the first poem that appears in Irma Pineda’s first collection of poetry, Ndaani’ Gueela’ (En el Vientre de La Noche), published by Casa de la Cultura de Juchitán, Mexico, in 2005. The poems in this collection were written by the poet with the support of a grant for indigenous writers from the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (Mexico’s National Endowment for the Arts). They appear here with the persmission of the author.

Notes on a Poetics of Indexing

"Anglo-Americans: all look alike, 29"

That is one of the first lines in the index for No Word for Welcome. I recently reviewed that index, a project by turns frustrating, illuminating, and entertaining. I approached the task with dread, avoiding it for as long as possible. Not because I fear order or laborious detail – even my spice rack is alphabetized – but because it required reading my book Yet Again.

As almost any author can tell you, when your book is close to publication, reading the phone book in a viper-filled pit seems more attractive than reading one’s own manuscript one more time.

To my surprise and relief, it wasn’t all that bad. Yes, it was strange to see a portion of my brain, and a dozen years of work and experience, plotted out as a list of five hundred and fifty topics. But as I worked my way from Acapulco and American season to Ernesto Zedillo and Zoque, I enjoyed laughing at myself, and delighting in the poetry of simple entries like the one above. The lack of ornament and embellishment of "Anglo-Americans: all look alike" gives it more power than the long passage to which it refers.

Some entries offered word-problems, puzzles to solve: How to translate El Día de la Raza?

The indexer had chosen "Day of the Race," a homely term that seemed too easy to misinterpret. I asked several friends for suggestions. "Mestizo People’s Day," one suggested. Well, I can assure you the istmeños in the Oaxacan town where I lived were not celebrating mestizaje. One of those istmeño townies, a human rights lawyer who is now the Executive Director of Long Island’s amazing Workplace Project, thought the holiday first needed a name-change in Spanish, to "Día de la Resistencia." (I agree, but that’s, unfortunately, beside the point.) A friend who teaches Latin American literature suggested "don’t translate it, explain it." (Great idea, but not possible in an index.) Another friend chimed in: "Roots Day?" (Conjuring Alex Haley?)

The index offers an explanation that’s pertinent here: istmeños (people of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec), xxiii

The explanations that the indexer offered for some terms created their own poetry:

"bienvenid@s" (de-gendered greeting), 170
chahuixtle (corn disease, something bad), 8, 9, 53, 274
cual mitcats ("missionary's child," one who fawns on foreigners), 190
protagonismo (unwarranted self-promotion), xv

An index’s flat, uninflected presentation, its egalitarianism, struck me as both humorous and elegant. Joke and metaphor, deep theme and small quirk, are all laid out with equal emphasis.

time: God's and Zedillo's, 68; as a spiral, xxiii, 152

A brief explanation of how istmeños refer to "regular time" and "Daylight Savings Time" (imposed throughout Mexico by former president Ernesto Zedillo, but ignored in the countryside) is on a level playing field with my realization that the istmeños’ sense of how time passes matches my own lifelong experience: it’s not a line, it’s a spiral.

My favorite entry:

immigration, 74-75; and Central Americans, 63; for employment, 30-31, 118-19, 184; from outer space, 154

As for Día de la Raza, I ended up choosing Kathleen Alcalá’s suggestion: "Day of the People." An incomplete translation, to be sure, but if a reader wants the full story, she’ll have to read the whole book.

Scraps from a Grief Quilt

For the last four years, I’ve been writing about hospice, grief, all things funereal. It began when my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2006. Until 2009, I wrote only short fragments; the subject was too painful for sustained attention, yet too overwhelming to ignore. Now, I’m basting those small patches into something larger. Here’s one from the scrap bag:

Doing the Math

Mom’s oncologist must have been one of those students who mastered biology without ever mastering math. (I know; I was, too.) She considers this equation sound:

(four to six months life expectancy) + (gemcitabine-tarceva chemo-drip)

= (four days each week bedridden) + (two months’ longer lifespan).

Mom taught middle-school math; knows better.

The Last of Her Village

“My horoscope advises: notice connections to your childhood
home. Women and men the age my parents were
when they died are everywhere.
One has my mother’s hands. She weaves insights
like soft cloth, holding it to my shoulders when I chill.”

This is the ending of a magical, fearless poem called “Festival of Lights Revisited” by Yael Flusberg. (In March 2010, Yael dazzled my students at New College of Florida when I invited her to be a Guest Poet there. I took this photograph during her New College reading.)

Yael is a yoga teacher, a healer, and a writer. You can hear her talk about braiding these three roles together in a radio essay that aired on WAMU, American University Radio:
Therapy And Yoga At Walter Reed

On the first day of autumn, last September, "Festival of Lights Revisited" arrived in my mailbox, as part of Yael's first poetry chapbook. I have read all the chapbook's poems before. Some of them, a half-dozen times. I sat down that fall equinox and read them again. (A poem is never to be read just once, nor twice.)  As I prepare to spend a week with Yael in her home in Washington DC, some of her poetic lines are scrolling through my mind.  

The Last of My Village is a collection about moving through a year, moving through a life, letting what is not needed fall away, and learning not to need what has fallen away.

The Last of My Village won Poetica Magazine’s 2010 Chapbook Prize. Read it.

Out in the Silence

“We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re going to show a film in your library.” Those are the words of a movement in the making.

All over America, local LGBTQI-rights organizations are going into their local libraries, explaining that they have a documentary film about LGBTQI rights in rural America, and saying they would like to hold a showing. All over America, the film Out in the Silence is ending the silence. On Tuesday, February 2, this film will open the 2011 DC Human Rights Watch film festival. And as I am packing my bags for a week in DC, I will be there!

A bit of backstory:
Around the time I started writing No Word for Welcome (that is to say, one long decade ago), a friend of mine began, as he put it, “playing around with a video camera.” Joe Wilson is now (along with his husband, Dean Hamer) the producer-writer-director of Out in the Silence, an enormously important and inspiring documentary film. Joe and Dean have done far more than build a good film, they have honed a powerful tool for social change. And that film is helping to build a movement.

"Libraries are a great bastion of participatory democracy," Joe says. For books. For film. For all of us.

Read more at the film’s website and watch the trailer for the film: