Poetry Centered
Poetry Centered
Manuel Paul López: Small and Immense Mysteries
Manuel Paul López curates poems that draw us into the nourishing mysteries of water. He shares Ofelia Zepeda’s evocation of moisture’s deep ties to people and land ("The Place Where Clouds Are Formed"), Li-Young Lee’s meditation on weeping and the gifts given by those we’ve lost ("'Why are you crying,' my father asked…"), and Quincy Troupe’s precise, tender visions of sunlight and sea ("The Point Loma Series of Haikus and Tankas"). López closes with "Green Water," his own meditation on "the wild taste of self-preservation."
You can watch the full recordings of Zepeda, Lee, and Troupe reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:
Ofelia Zepeda (2015)
Li-Young Lee (2020)
Quincy Troupe (2001)
Full transcripts of every episode are available on Buzzsprout. Look for the transcript tab under each episode.
Voca is now fully captioned, with interactive transcripts and captions available for all readings! Read more about the project here, or try out this new feature by visiting Voca.
[00:00:00.00] [MUSIC PLAYING]
Julie Swarstad Johnson:
[00:00:02.88] You're listening to Poetry Centered, the show that brings you archival recordings of poets reading from their work, selected and introduced for you by a contemporary poet. This podcast comes to you from the University of Arizona Poetry Center and from Voca, our online audiovisual archive.
[00:00:21.48] I'm Julie Swarstad Johnson, the Center's archivist and outreach librarian. And I am so glad to be welcoming you to the podcast again. Today's episode is a beautiful reintroduction to the podcast hosted by poet, editor, community teacher, and professor, Manuel Paul López. His most recent collection is Nerve Curriculum, out from Futurepoem earlier this year.
[00:00:46.98] Paul brings us a selection of recordings that, as you'll hear him put it, reawaken us to small and immense mysteries that surround us in land, place, and human relationships. The poems come from Ofelia Zepeda, Li-Young Lee, and Quincy Troupe. Paul, thank you so much for being our host today.
[00:01:05.93] [MUSIC PLAYING]
Manuel Paul López:
[00:01:09.36] My name is Manuel Paul López, recording this edition from San Diego, Califas. The first recording I'd like to share is Ofelia Zepeda reading "The Place Where Clouds Are Formed" recorded on March 12, 2015.
[00:01:25.00] When I was offered the opportunity to curate a segment for this program, I was thrilled but knew identifying three poems that I'd like to share would definitely be a challenge because there's so much in the archive to sit with and learn from and be transformed by.
[00:01:41.00] While exploring the different offerings, I was so happy to encounter Ofelia Zepeda's entries in the archive. Overjoyed with discovery, though a little anxious, I began the difficult exercise of trying to choose a poem from her various readings at the center. I met and spoke briefly with Dr. Ofelia Zepeda at the 2010 Tucson Poetry Festival during my first and only visit to Tucson. A quick encounter, but it certainly left an indelible impression on me for sure.
[00:02:11.66] After that experience, I was fortunate enough to listen to her read at San Diego State University in 2013. Needless to say, I'm a devoted reader of Ofelia Zepeda's work. As a matter of fact, her 2008 collection Where Clouds are Formed is one that I've gifted to others over the years, my father being the last to receive a copy for a recent birthday.
[00:02:34.34] In the end, the piece I've chosen to share with you today is Zepeda’s classic poem "The Place Where Clouds Are Formed." A piece that I love and often return to when I'm in need of direction, of wonderment, of communion. It's also a poem that I revisit to reawaken myself to both the small and immense mysteries that surround us.
[00:02:56.38] This poem is composed of three sections situating the reader in Tucson where Zepeda's poem gracefully traverses seasons and the shared encounters between people and the landscapes around them with language that is musical and penetrating, meditative, and mysterious. This poem for me is also about endurance, the tenderness, shared between loved ones, the cyclical manifestations of nature, elemental intimacy, and the blurring between us and the environments we inhabit and interconnectedness that I find so beautifully affirming and necessary.
[00:03:33.03] "Where is it the clouds are formed?" Zepeda asks us. "What does it mean to find it in the eye of another?" And when clouds come in succession, what will come of Earth's muted shadows?" With this, I ask you, listener, to close your eyes, steady your breath, and open yourself to the aspirated healing sounds of Zepeda's crystalline poesía. Ofelia Zepeda reading "The Place Where Clouds Are Formed."
[00:04:01.59] [MUSIC PLAYING]
Ofelia Zepeda:
[00:04:06.71] This one with the title of the book, "The Place Where Clouds Are Formed."
[00:04:16.18] "Every day, it is the same. He comes home. He tells her about it. As he speaks, his breath condenses in front of his face. She goes about her business. Every now and then, she looks over. She doesn't hear his voice. She sees the soft fog that continues to form a halo. She knows he is still talking about that place. He never tires of it like she does.
[00:04:46.03] Only on summer days when the air is hot and moisture's still a long time in coming, she asks him to tell her about that place. She sits facing him waiting for the first vocalics nonstops, the push of air from his lips. He tells her of the place where clouds are formed. The cool dampness of his voice is rich even on a dry June day. Her face beads with wetness as he talks directly to her. Each aspirated sound, a gentle burst of coolness.
[00:05:25.15] Tell me again. Tell me again, she teases. If he knew she only wanted the relief from the heat and not the story, he would stop talking. He begins. The first time I saw the place where clouds are formed was from the window of a train and at the time was in a mirage in the heat outside Tucson. Once, he thought he saw it in the dry light of stars.
[00:05:52.33] The place he remembers best was when he saw it in the eyes of a woman he spoke to. When he first noticed it, she hid it by lowering her gaze. Soon, she let him look freely. There were times when she opened her eyes wide allowing an obscured view. Sometimes he saw her eyes smolder with dryness on a summer day. Other times, she was rich with moisture. Clouds came in succession. The Earth shadows muted.
[00:06:27.00] You know the forty days and forty nights? I was there. I'll be there when it happens again, she said with a slight smile. Like a child, he rushed to look into her eyes at every opportunity. If he could, he would hang on her eye socket, peering inside, marveling at her display."
[00:06:49.28] Part 2. "An unusually cold December day around Christmas, clouds, mist find solace in the canyons of the Santa Catalina Mountains. White moisture quietly moving amid the cactus. Truly, clouds, wind, and rain are the few elements that can touch the saguaro from head to foot oblivious of spines, needles. Rubbery hide surrounded, soothed by elements. Contact triggers stored heat from remembered summers. Moisture beads roll forward, unstoppable. From the city below, we see mist rising, mist rising."
[00:07:32.35] Part 3. "We sit close in the cab of the truck. The weather is cold, wet outside, too messy to stand in waiting for a school bus. My father's truck is warm inside having been at work since 4:00 AM. The sound of the engine is soothing, heater working to capacity. Inside the cab, we are silent. We don't need language. We listen to the regular hum of the engine, rhythm of the windshield wipers, rhythm of the windshield wipers, soft rain on the hood, aware of the cold air surrounding our temporary shelter.
[00:08:15.58] We look out over the fields where the fog clings to the soil. Every now and then with the back of his gloved hand, he wipes the windshield. Is it coming yet? The three of us sit quietly breathing clouds. Clouds condense as they contact the coolness of the windows. My father appears to breathe air with moisture and balance. He forms no clouds. He watches us. We continue to breathe gray, soft mist, waiting for the school bus."
[00:08:51.19] [MUSIC PLAYING]
Manuel Paul López:
[00:08:59.38] The second recording I'd like to share is Li-Young Lee reading "'Why are you crying?' my father asked…" recorded on January 23, 2020. Li-Young Lee's Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee is one of my prized collections on my bookshelf. It's a book of selected interviews and conversations with Li-Young Lee that really captures the brilliance of his mind and heart along with the deep mysticism behind his work.
[00:09:26.24] This is a collection that I often recommend to students, fellow writers, and potential poetry converts. To me, Li-Young Lee's poetry represents a remarkable attentiveness or total presence as he describes in one of his interviews in the book. The Li-Young Lee poem that I've chosen to share with you from the archive is a relatively new one entitled "'Why are you crying?' my father asked…"
[00:09:49.20] At the time of the reading, Lee shared that it was a work in progress and interestingly, part of a group of poems that were initially meant to be whispered, which also reminded me of a response he shared in an interview when he stated, I want something so intimate that it's less than whispered. In addition to the content, form, and the extraordinary delivery of this poem, I was struck by the date that the reading took place.
[00:10:15.38] As I mentioned earlier, it occurred on January 23, 2020. A moment in our recent history that marked the beginning of what we would soon encounter globally just a couple of short months following this event. A pandemic that brought grief, fear, separation, anger, anxiety, economic uncertainty, loss, violence, realities that many of us are still experiencing today.
[00:10:39.97] This poem, as with many of Li-Young Lee's poems, is a conversation between a father and son. The counsel that the father offers his child in this poem is something that's been useful to me as I contemplate today's reality. Here is a voice that consoles and instructs with great wisdom, humility and tenderness, a meditation, a courage prayer, a reminder that when we confront the truth that we must all say goodbye. We must also continue our life's journey, our collective journey embracing the shifting of these energies because they also bring renewal.
[00:11:16.37] Our beloved deceased equip us with wisdom, ancestral inheritances that we carry on our backs like the shell of a caracol marching steadily on its path. To once again evoke Breaking the Alabaster Jar, it's important to remember what Lee shares. A poem doesn't simply transpose being. It also proposes possibilities of being. So here's Li-Young Lee's "'Why are you crying?' my father asked…"
[00:11:45.81] [MUSIC PLAYING]
Li-Young Lee:
[00:11:52.12] I thought I knew what I was going to read, but I keep changing my mind. I'm going to just work my way and try to feel my way through this. I'm going to read some new poems. I'm still revising these. I think these were meant to be maybe whispered. I don't know if I can pull that off.
[00:12:19.77] [LAUGHTER]
[00:12:22.75] Can you hear this? "Why are you crying? My father asked, lifting me out of my small bed and that recurring dream that began when I started speaking sentences in a second language. There were two languages in that house. Three if you count the unspoken between a father and a son.
[00:13:04.78] If you loved me, you'd never die, I answered him. And he laughed and kissed me all over my face and neck. And I didn't know what I had said or done to bring him so much pleasure. Oh, sweetness, he said. Have you already forgotten everything I told you? And I stopped my sobbing and listened to his breathing come to me in whispers and fell asleep on his shoulder uncomprehending and wake now a man still listening.
[00:13:56.71] My sleep sometimes still infringed upon not by dreams of loved ones disappearing. But dead ones come back strong, loved, and loving. Each year, I understand better what was ministered to me first by him over and over. Each night before sleep, that man whose own sleep was so often broken by a child's growing wise to death in the middle of the night and later self-administered after my father stopped speaking forever.
[00:14:55.38] Why are you crying? He asks now lifting me. And in our third language, he speaks all breath. Have you forgotten time is your true body, and the years are your limbs? Have you forgotten death is an employee whose trade is trick sleeves and fake interiors? That assistant you pay each day misdirects you, repeating those powerful spells of here and there, this and that, before and after.
[00:15:50.83] You must have utterly forgotten fire, water, Earth, and air are your true ancestors. In their likeness, mind and body consume and shine. Heart and soul refract. And all compass points are imprinted in you, who empty and fill, holding all and keeping nothing.
[00:16:28.37] Desire is fire’s longing for the wood. Joy is water’s seeking its own plumb. Grief is Earth's remembering its true weight. Freedom is air's omnipresence. Remember, when these joined, you were born. When these separate, you'll be restored to burning, quickening, brooding, and true breathing.
[00:17:12.05] My love for you is the ancestor's convening. Your love for me is the ancestors adjourning to seek their source. My love for you. Your love for me. My love. Your love. What can only be received as a gift cannot be possessed. But you must have forgotten. Why else would you stand at this fork in your life weeping like a heartbroken child?"
[00:17:57.34] [MUSIC PLAYING]
Manuel Paul López:
[00:18:07.01] The final recording I'd like to share is Quincy Troupe reading "The Point Loma Series of Haikus and Tankas" recorded on April 27, 2001.
[00:18:17.24] As I record this segment, I'm sitting at my desk in San Diego. The sun is out. Cars drive by. There are seven or eight crows outside my window chopping it up in the silk oak trees and jacaranda. And I'll try to reward myself later with a visit to Sunset Cliffs to watch the sun slowly slip behind the Pacific horizon.
[00:18:37.95] Near Point Loma and Ocean Beach, the cliffs stand high above the water. A landscape that is very special to me. My wife and I visited the cliffs almost nightly during the early days of the pandemic. It nourished us as we often sat in silence lulled by the ocean's rhythms, its language. Both of us contemplating things that were happening at the time.
[00:19:01.14] There certainly was worry and uncertainty, but we had each other. And it was these quiet moments together that reminded us, there's something deeply gratifying and cleansing about this place, which brings me to my next selection. I was so happy to find Quincy Troupe's recording of "The Point Loma Series of Haikus and Tankas." This project, these poems are among my favorite from his large body of work.
[00:19:27.89] As he explains in his preliminary remarks, this series was written for the Point Loma Waste Management Project as part of a collaboration. My understanding is that this series was sandblasted into the walls of the underground tunnels. The series is composed of a mix of nine haikus and tankas, a form that Troupe has often used. As a matter of fact, he uses other forms from time to time such as villanelles, sestinas, sonnets, and others.
[00:19:54.08] He also invented a form called the 7-11 after the dice game that got me into trouble one too many times growing up. When I first read "The Point Loma Series" and Troupe's collection Transcircularities, I was reminded of the great Roque Dalton poem "El Mar," a poem in sections that also brings the sea to the reader. In Troupe's poems, he aims to electrify the imaginations of the workers who toil underground, who ironically work so close to the bright California sunshine and roaring Pacific Ocean but experience very little of them during their workday despite their proximity.
[00:20:30.29] With precision, tenderness, empathy, and imaginative leaps, Troupe opens the reader's mind and fills it with sea salt, sunshine, and ocean breeze, transporting them as great art does. When Troupe writes in the first haiku of the series, beauty all places, here. Look inside yourself, look deeper. It's there. He's right. The beauty is within us. And fortunately, we have poems like this to remind us. Quincy Troupe's "The Point Loma Series of Haikus and Tankas."
[00:21:06.36] [MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:21:12.63] I’ll read these haikus-- I’ll read this, this poem, this last poem, which is-- I like to close with. Now, these haikus are down under the ground where these people come and go in the morning. And they go into the ground. And they come out-- come out. And it's 5 o'clock. And then other people come in at 5:00. And they come out, and it's dark.
[00:21:32.76] So when I went to talk to them, we all talk to these people, talk to these men who work there. And I asked them how it was to work underground all the time. And they said it was really daunting. It was daunting. It was like, really-- down there, it was dark all the time and was-- it could be-- want to think of something nice. So I thought about that. And I thought about that. And I also thought because the bureaucrats, bureaucrats don't understand poets. They're always saying, don't write nothing long.
[00:22:01.31] [LAUGHTER]
[00:22:03.68] Do not write-- just make it short. You look at it like, [LAUGHS] I did never see that much energy out of them. They were always passive until they thought about the poem. Then they said write short, short, something short. Or we won't put it up there. [LAUGHS] So I said haiku, tanka. That's short.
[00:22:24.80] [LAUGHTER]
[00:22:26.73] So this is called “The Point Loma Series of Haikus and Tankas.” And they're down in the ground. So I'll read you a few of them. And one is not a haiku or a tanka, it’s just about five lines, but it's not either one. And I'll just pause in between.
[00:22:46.00] "Beauty, all places here. Look inside yourself now. Look deeper. It's there. Gray day underground in the tunnel. Bright, warm sun outside in the blue. Inside your own deep, working time, thoughts of making sweet love. Think of making love to the work that you do here. Think of it as song, music whispering, a breeze, a tongue of someone you love.
[00:23:29.08] Think of a sweet place now that you are here in all this darkness. Light where you are standing with yourself wherever you have to go. Smile whenever you think of the sweet love blooming inside your heart here. Think of it as a flower you will hand to someone soon. Down here in darkness, think of roses when you look at these concrete walls.
[00:24:02.91] Your mind, a window to look inside yourself. See a rich garden there bright with flowers whose faces pop the air like sweet music. Deep rumblings in air. A sound of sea waves smashing skulls of wet, black rocks. Your lover's eyes speak to you so softly in this place of wind, sea, bright blue day sky. Sunlight after the gray grayness stuns your face into smiling."
[00:24:43.90] [MUSIC PLAYING]
Manuel Paul López:
[00:24:52.31] I'd like to end with the poem that I've written that is the first section of a poem entitled "Green Water," which is made up of five sections. This particular poem comes from my collection Nerve Curriculum that will be published early 2023 by Futurepoem. I guess the theme or the connection I've seen between all of the selections I've made is, I guess, the natural elements, I think most specifically water. And that's why I've chosen to include this one in the conversation.
[00:25:34.69] "Green Water." "Nestor once told me that the most unique heroes in life are the ones filled with fragrant water. Nestor said, and you know what, mijito, when they inevitably acquire their bullet holes, that greenish liquid that smells of hibiscus and revolution’s camouflage will exit their bodies and nourish the soil your punk ass walks on. What grows from your footsteps is the question.
[00:25:58.17] Mm, I droned. I couldn't think of any other way to respond. Nestor didn't expect me to either. He never expected me to. He was the talker, and I, the faithful listener, the documentarian, the archivist, the dutiful leather-bound artifact awaiting discovery. Nestor stared at the floor and grinned, still speaking, if you could believe, without ever moving his lips. In time, for no reason I can explain, my hand raised toward the high desert sun that leaned softly into the palm of my hand. Like that, I thought of nothing but salt and the wild taste of self-preservation.”
[00:26:37.75] [MUSIC PLAYING]
Julie Swarstad Johnson:
[00:26:46.10] Paul, thank you again for that tender vision of Voca. It was truly restorative. Listeners, thank you so much for sharing this time with us. We love sharing Voca with you. We'll be back in two weeks with a special episode from Radical Reversal, a project that highlights the reformative power of the arts for incarcerated youth. Poet Patrick Rosal makes a surprise guest appearance on the flute. Don't miss it. It's so good. Thanks again so much for listening.
[00:27:14.98] [MUSIC PLAYING]
Sarah Gzemski:
[00:27:17.06] Poetry Centered is a project of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, home to a world-class library collection of more than 80,000 items related to contemporary poetry in English and English translation. Located on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson, the Poetry Center Library and buildings are housed on the Indigenous homelands of the Tohono O'odham and Pascua Yaqui people. Poetry Centered is the work of Sarah Gzemski-- that's me-- and Julie Swarstad Johnson. Explore Voca, the Poetry Center's audiovisual archive online at voca.arizona.edu.