Poem "If There Is A Center, No One Knows Where It Begins"

“Enlightened Koi at Swami’s”
Original Photo © Renee Podunovich, 2023

The obsidian morning.
I hurl my heart out
into this incomprehensible starscape
and there it will reside a burning fire orb,
blazing and consumed
by the intensity of its aliveness.

Things are so far apart-
light years and galaxies,
your life and mine,
yet this morning,
everything is suspended in the prehistoric dark
the thick lagoon of the cosmos,
aquatic universe, sparkling stillness,
quiet. Nothing
but the churning mind,
nothing to do but sit as witness
to the rising and falling
the clinging and letting go
the chronic bubbling up and drifting away
of awareness.

If there is a core, a nucleus, a source,
Gaugy saw that some souls reach toward it,
some are stunned, frozen in reverence,
some contemplate the inferno from within,
others move away from the white heat of essence.
This morning, some are being born,
some are dying,
some are casting a net of forgiveness over
the sea of despair.

The sea like a tear
holds what is precious,
impossibly huge, I drink it
with a straw.

- Renee Podunovich, from Chapbook If There Is A Center (Art Juice Press Editions, 2008)

Used at text in song "Obsidian Morning" by Juantio Becenti, featured at the New York Festival of Song, 2015 

Poem "It Makes All the Difference"

“Tangles”
Original Photo © Renee Podunovich, 2023

She is lounging on a pool float

but not swimming.

no one has used that long-handled net scoop

and the dead bugs are floating

            like show girls in leotards

fallen from their trapeze,

now suspended by a safety net of green murk.

she skims her fingers across the surface

and the algae hangs there

            like a lover’s hair,

slowly slides off and flies

like a private jet

as she hurtles it at the wall of the courtyard.

it splats. stays stuck to the stucco.

no one joins her pool party.

they smile sweetly from the sides.

check their watches. make excuses:

the kids. a meeting. forgot a suit.

I  have an extra Speedo, she offers,

the cabana boy will fetch it for you.

I’m in the weeds at work, he says,

straightening his tie nervously,

then waves a sheepish goodbye and hurries away.

She flings a clump of slimy algae

at the back of his head

like a grenade.

she misses. oh well.

she adjusts her straw hat and sunglasses.

sips her iced tea. points her pedicured toes

and dips them gingerly into the muck.

she prepares for a refreshing plunge

by closing her eyes. it makes all the difference

to close her eyes.

- Renee Podunovich from the chapbook Let the Scaffolding Collapse (Finishing Line Press, 2012
First published in Caper Literary Journal, Winter 2010 (honorable mention for the Maravillosa Magical Realism contest)

Poem "Illustrious for Brief Moments"

“Winter Garden”
Original Photo © Renee Podunovich, 2023

Illustrious for Brief Moments

Today is another chance

            to be fully alive,

            present in the What

            Is —                the light and dark embodied,

                                    the movement from dreaming

                                    to waking dreams — all of it

the same mysterious fabric. 

Sunrise — Juncos feast at the feeder

cheerful in the chill white,

light lands on feathers and drifts,

                                    on me at my writing desk,

                                    on you, somewhere —

Webs of distance

I won’t write about longing ever again.

I have already wandered that endless path,

followed it to the distant most planets.                           

I am here, not there, not anywhere else.

I exist inside the silk lining

            of pockets of snow, softly

elevating me and the winter birds

far far from our summer selves,

                                    stillness, seeds and scattered

words become 

dream food.

We are held aloft — illustrious — for brief moments

before our feet sink through

to the solid, frozen earth,

dark matter, the underworld

that will once again

birth us at

sunrise —

Renee Podunovich, from the chapbook “Illustrious for Brief Moments” (Finishing Line Press, 2021)

Satchel Story Objects: A Visual and Literary Arts Exhibition

Tea with My Grandmothers, Collage on Wood Panel, 18”x18”, Renee Podunovich 2022

"Satchel Story Objects" runs Aug. 19th - Sept. 30 2022 at the Cortez Cultural Center in Cortez, CO.
This is a collaborative exhibit with artist Sonja Horoshko funded by an Individual Artist Grant from The National Endowment for the Arts through Colorado Creative Industries. The project explores the theme of human migration stories handed down through familial objects.

Tea with My Grandmothers, Self Portrait Cyanotype on Silk, 8”x11”, Renee Podunovich 2022

It was such a pleasure and challenge to be involved with this theme which has a literary and visual arts component. I pushed myself as an artist to include several visual arts pieces using self-portrait photography I have been experimenting with over the past year. I was able to combine the photos in collage and alternative process cyanotype developing.

Satchel Story Objects Exhibition Catalogue is Available through Sonja Horoshko and Cortez Cultural Center

The exhibition catalogues sold out fast, but more are coming. They are a great way to take the whole exhibit home with you as they showcase all the art in color and the full writing submissions from each of the 17 artists involved.

From the gorgeous full-color Satchel Story Objects Exhibition Catalogue:
Last Dance at Midnight in Kiev, Ukraine, before the Bombfall Oil and gold leaf on Arches paper on board, 24”x24”
and The Iconostases of Loss, Lament and Grief, Ukraine, Mixed Media, including oil on Arches paper mounted on board, 34”x34” by Sonja Horoshko 2022

Sonja Horoshko has served up a timely and timeless theme, interpreted by 17 very diverse voices, histories and artistic approaches, in a manner that gives a full picture of the common humanity around family stories and objects, migration and the changing conditions of life, as well as the resilience to be found in such challenging times. There will be a documentary about the exhibit coming out this year.

---

Containers of Resilience and Care
by Renee Podunovich
Published in Satchel Story Objects Exhibition Catalogue (Art Juice Studio Press, 2022)

When I got married, I was gifted with the usual array of household items; items that one needs to set up a home and start a family of one’s own; a stable life, a place to keep family heirlooms, carry on traditions as well as start new rituals in the current milieu of the times. My husband and I loaded all these gifted items in a big moving van and took them far away from family and the Southwest Colorado desert to lush Portland, Oregon, where we started our new life. Within six months, we sold everything except what would fit in a pickup truck we had outfitted with a camper shell designed to hold all we would need to live in a teepee (including hauling the long poles on top). Our family was horrified at this decision, but we knew we must take a journey into the unknown, see for ourselves what it meant to adventure, to find one’s spiritual calling rather than follow a predetermined practical path. It was a fantastic time, and I am grateful we took that journey.

To be the one in my family who has ended up with the treasured sets of china of both my maternal and paternal grandmothers is curious, considering my early pattern of discarding physical objects as burdensome and unnecessary weight in the world of movement and adventure. Here is the story of how I came to hold such delicate yet resilient items of beauty and utility in my hands, and how I inherited the knowledge to create a “safe container” for myself first and then for those I love.

“Oh, that beautiful wedding and all those gifts…and you sold them,” my paternal grandmother Podunovich (née DiCesare) often stated, aghast. In my 30s, when I did settle down into a home that I have now occupied for 20 years, my grandmother Podunovich was sure to send me household items she felt I needed. Most significant is a 50-pound pasta maker made in Italy that she sent by mail along with her handwritten dough recipe and a side note stating “Good Luck!” I still cherish it and use it. Lenora loved being a homemaker, cooking, and entertaining. She especially loved beautiful things of the Victorian era; figurines, glass candy dishes, a fabulous lamp with a naked Venus figure surrounded by plastic foliage around whose voluptuous body oil dripped down invisible wires, creating the look of illuminated rain.

Whenever I would visit, she would show me her china cabinet holding all the delicate cups and saucers she had been gifted or curated over the years, stating I should decide which ones I wanted so she could tape a note with my name to it. This way, everyone would know who would get which treasures when she passed. Most beautiful to me was a set of pale pink Depression Glass dishes. The story goes that her mother Nunzia Chiola brought them with her from Italy when she immigrated from the Abruzzo region of Italy in 1919. Imagine choosing such a delicate treasure to take on a ship to a new land, to meet a man for an arranged marriage. The story also goes that when that man showed up to meet her at the docks, he hid first to catch a glance, to ensure she was attractive before committing. It is a story told with humor and ends happily with her getting married and raising a family in the steel mill town of Gary, Indiana. Yet I can’t help but wonder at her position in that story. She did not have the option to hide and consider the man she would marry. She didn’t have the power of that choice. I am told she was very loving and also loved beautiful delicate things, which my grandmother cherished after her.

This is how I came to have the Depression Glass of my great-grandmother. I, too, keep it safely; in a sidebar cabinet rather than a china cabinet, keeping it not for daily use but because they are beautiful and they came from the women whose blood is mine and because they are important somehow in connecting to the story of where my roots evolved.

At the funeral of my maternal grandmother Minniti (née Armour) my mother and aunt didn’t want to give her china to a thrift store, even though they did not want it. There was something precious about it— but what? I was standing there and was offered the heirlooms and took them. I was the only one who would, the one person in the family who had abandoned such attachment to delicate items that are precarious to move and care for. My mother had them professionally packed and shipped to me, ensuring they would arrive unharmed.

History shows, “The first cultural device was probably a recipient... Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier,” says Elizabeth Fisher in Women’s Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). “Before the tool that forces energy out- ward, we made the tool that brings energy home.” This is what Fisher calls the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution.

I first read about Fisher’s theory my freshman year of college in a women's literature course. Ursula K Le Guin discusses it in her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Literature” (theanarchistlibrary.org, 1986). However, I hadn’t thought of this essay in years until I considered further the value of this china and why it is the main thing I have inherited from these women, their migration, the new lives they created, and their homes and love from which I continue to benefit.

Le Guin speaks of human culture (and literature) by reclaiming the value of the gatherer’s story— the bringing home of “wild oats” rather than a sole focus on the “hero” story of hunting with tools developed for killing and dominance. She states, “If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again — if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.”

My grandmother Minniti’s family history is broken. Jeanette’s mother died when she was 14-years-old and her father died when she was 17-years-old and so she was cared for by aunts and older siblings. She was married by age 17 and had four children by age 22. She worked full-time most of her life at a public utility company. She lived in the same home my grandfather purchased that was built for veterans returning from World War II. It was a small, modest home, and she also had a china cabinet with fragile, special items. Despite experiencing disrupted stability in her early life, she provided a stable home for her family. I love her china, and it is a pattern I would choose; deep ochre and cream with detailed gold leaf trim. It is elegant in a way that makes me consider her life and passions more deeply.

When I consider Le Guin’s insight about the development of containers to ensure care and survival, I also consider decoration and beauty. There is another level of tool making that includes beauty, and this is what interests me about the china because, in a way, it is frivolous, fragile, and a step beyond utility and purpose. If I had to take a few things to start a new life, it would not be fine china. It would be my computer, journals, and documents, things that are not replaceable. Perhaps this china felt irreplaceable to Nunzia as she came to a new land and life. Perhaps it felt irreplaceable to my grandmother Minniti, who had few evident material joys in her life.

 Le Guin ends by saying:

“(I am) not, let it be said at once, an unaggressive or uncombative human being. I am an aging, angry woman laying mightily about me with my handbag, fighting hoodlums off. However I don’t, nor does anybody else, consider myself heroic for doing so. It’s just one of those damned things you have to do in order to be able to go on gathering wild oats and telling stories.

 It is the story that makes the difference. It is the story that hid my humanity from me, the story the mammoth hunters told about bashing, thrusting, raping, killing, about the Hero…The killer story. It sometimes seems that the story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all, some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we’d better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one’s finished. Maybe. The trouble is, we’ve all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.”

The beautiful, fragile, cherished, kept and passed on to me “containers” hold stories I am listening to more deeply now. As so many things break in the world, still these dishes are intact and they connect me to rapidly disappearing times and places that will change with political and climate crises. Yet, what they connect me to is the resilience of women, the adaptation they find to continue to create “safe containers” for their own lives so they might flourish as best they can despite the repressions of the times they find themselves in. And further, to pass that flourishing on to their family and loved ones for generations.

In a world where meaning, identity and belonging are rapidly shifting, the china seems more fragile now than ever. I will keep these treasures as long as possible in my sidebar cabinet. But if I have to flee quickly for any reason, they may not be the things I chose to take with me. I am the next generation of these amazing women, seeking to continue to create safe containers for my loved ones in drastic and unprecedented times. I will know what I need to take when the time comes, and I will do so with my foremothers’ resilience, tenacity and beauty.

Exhibit Extended!! First Exhibit of "Paper Wings" Letterpress Artist Prints and Hand-bound Manuscripts at Turquoise Raven Gallery, Cortez, CO thru 12/6/21

“Paper Wings” Hand-bound Letterpress Manuscript by Renee Podunovich & Sonja Horoshko

The first exhibit of “Paper Wings” has been extended and will be up from Thursday, Nov. 18th through Sunday Dec. 6th, 2021 at The Turquoise Raven Gallery in lovely Cortez, CO.

Come and view this extraordinary project which is an example of history, craftsmanship, persistence, attention to detail, and artistry. This collaborative project with artist Sonja Horoshko was completed over 14 months during 2019-2020.

This was our first showing for the project since the pandemic delayed our efforts. The “Vernissage” and Artists Talk went well and we look forward to a few other upcoming exhibits next year.

Paper Wings Letterpress Prints by Renee Podunovich & Sonja Horoshko

Canyon Time Broadside from Talking Gourds Bardic Trails Event

Many thanks to Daiva Chesonis at Between the Covers Bookstore in Telluride, CO for creating this broadside of my poem Canyon Time.

Artist Rosie Carter provided the drawing. Rosie and I have been working together on pairing poems with her drawings around the theme of “geoligical time” for a while now. The idea started with the intention to create broadsides and has shifted to include ideas for prints with letterpress elements, maybe a small book. Being that we are both occupied with many other projects, it has been as slow as geological time in terms of ruminating, shifting, and evolving ideas and actually getting to production. I am enjoying the slow ease of it, which feels congruent with the theme. When Daiva asked for content for this broadside, I passed on something Rosie and I had been working with and I like the end result.

Regarding broadsides, I am always hesitant to engage them for poetry and continually interested in why poets use this format. Broadsides are historically a popular ephemeral format. They are single sheets of paper, printed on one side only, and are intended to have an immediate popular impact and then to be thrown away. “Historically, broadsides have been used to inform the public about current news events, publicize official proclamations and government decisions, announce and record public meetings and entertainment events, advocate political and social causes, advertise products and services, and celebrate popular literary and musical efforts.”

Enjoy this one commemorating my very satisfying evening with Bardic Trails, Talking Gourds Poetry Program, Wilkinson Library, a bunch of my family, friends, and others I couldn’t quite see.

Renee Podunovich set to read at Oct 5th, 2021 Bardic Trails Zoom poetry series

Join me Tuesday, Oct 5th at 7pm MT for a free online poetry reading.
I will be reading from new and older works.

You can register for this event at this link through the Telluride Wilkinson Library.

Thanks to Leslie Vreeland for this heartfelt article in Telluride News. I appreciate Vreeland's ability to discuss the significance and healing quality of poetry and the creative process in our own healing journeys and as medicine for our troubled world. Read more here: Through it all: poetry

Dreamdrift and Star Rain : free verse poetry about disappearing into space

Ursa Major Constellation by Brian Colley on Behance.net

In the palm of the new moon
a new rhythm begins —
soul notes spiraling
around the central downbeat
of my heartbeat,
how her stellar darkheart presents
the opportunity to disappear along with it —

So that I am just the breeze and the stars,
the earth humming and the cricket chants,
the slow-motion of planetary rotation
rocking me into dreamdrift
diaphanous dissipating drowning

And all of nature echoes inside
the empty space of my skin,
where the light of celestial bodies,
perhaps now invisible to themselves,
is still bright for thousands of years
over immense distances,
reaches me as starrain ricochet ringing

I’ve been waiting for its arrival all winter and spring,
yet it is just now upon this summer swell
that I finally sense illuminations and sonic vibrations
emanated so long ago

so that I am now
and I am then

A continuum of awareness
in the enormous evolving unknown,
where larger patterns hide in a sea of changing conditions,
the constellations are my momentary still points
and where I anchor
— it is my own choice —
I am beyond obligations:
refuse to be needed or summoned!

Rather, I rest my head in the lap of Ursa Major,
the Night Bear and I — we are fecund and untamed
within the desires of our own destinies
everlasting erasing emerging
uncatchable invisible ethers
cast like a net of blaze across the vastness.

Renee Podunovich, 2021

There is something steady and familiar to me about the first new moon after Summer Solstice each year. As if the movement of awareness back outward into the world that initiates at Winter Solstice, finally feels like a fully completed exhale at this just-past-midsummer point. I live in a part of the world with dark skies and take advantage of it all summer long. In my nightly stargazing, I yearn to rise towards the heights, seeking communion with the universe, accompanied by the light and warmth of the sun and its companions; the stars. I’ve been courting Ursa Major this year. How lucky we are to be here on our living, intelligent, constantly emerging Earth. Happy Summer from the Northern Hemisphere.

Also featured in The Lark at Medium

Notes From the Shore - Prose Poetry

Earth & Cloud photo by Renee Podunovich

Notes from the Shore

I. End of the Line

The city’s edge. A solid concrete pier meets the softly moving ocean. Once, waves shaped the amenable land around it, mingled with melodies of shorebirds and the rustle of dense foliage. Today, it trembles and sparkles in rock salt and solarity, splashes against the solid city fortress where

           —the fluid nature of us—

becomes formed and concrete, imprisoned in the shapes that shaped minds conjured.

In the Mission District, the Miwok Indians became slaves to the demands of a foreign and decadent god, from fluid to static to extinction. Now, what was preached has become frozen and absolute. These appearances no longer yield to elements— are stubborn and unwilling, will go kicking and screaming.

II. Everything is a Mess

We are solid and fluid, blood and bone; a metallic river of drivers on the homo sapiens highway, a 21st-century traffic jam. From beach and redwood to Golden Gate, autos assemble on the freeway, sit in obedient rows. The road starts to sizzle, black in the midday sun; exhaust fumes come in through the vent like ghostly hitchhikers; hot, irritated, annoyed— wondering about this whole process of every day all day working until we die of breathing noxious gases.

In the bowels of the city, pedestrians roam the humid and dense streets. A child picks up a broken toy from a box of trash on the curb, is sought out by steam ghouls that escape from the gutter. Lingering smells ricochet off the cement, live a thousand lives from nostril to nostril. Small pigeons try to clean up;

           —this is life—

III. Money is a Temporary Buffer

Across the Bay, Sausalito side, where everything appears to be just fine. We are water; we are stone; we are solidly fluid. We are bursting rays, uncontainable, yearning to escape the milky prison of consumer numbness 

           —we try to remember— 

inside the heliographic night, inside yoga studios and juice bars, inside workshops and self-help, looking for something inside, looking for trails of invisible wonder through the city’s slumber, searching deep in the bones of skyscrapers, between the ribs of excess, picking at the toxic leftovers of the brilliance of industry. 

I contemplate the collapse of civilizations, but this city still appears to move in perfect order, does not submit willingly to the cannibal tide.

IV. It’s All a Blink of an Eye

Time is a bodiless maritime goddess, her hair like smoke meshing with wisps of fog, taking us to different places, the places in our minds. Polished smooth obsidian city, your impenetrable hardness, it is only my perception. I could be in heaven without celestial eyes.

          —Perception is a collective endeavor—

This city could have been anything, could become malleable again to the watery heart, could discover that it is only an infant and climb into her arms.

V. Once the Earth was Covered with Water

Shabby seagull dives into that opaque matriarch and does not resurface.

Renee Podunovich, 2021

Water Will Find You (because you belong here)

Road to Everywhere photo by Renee Podunovich

Water Will Find You (because you belong here)

at Cannonball Mesa 

I. Junctures

 all roads end. especially an unmaintained, 2-track county road increasingly indistinguishable from landscape, an obstacle course of boulders and ruts that will knock the bottom out of the vehicle unless you stop, park, put on your daypack

           and begin to trek.

here, my footprints begin, stirring fine flushed dust rising in spirals with each step, airborne and errant on Spring Equinox winds that whoosh a primordial oomph, carrying the smell of minerals and ancient silt, the touch of saltwater on swaying waves, hues of cerulean ice melt, songs of elk bugling under moonlight;

           all of these drafts in on invisible vapors from snow-covered crests,

           from as far west as the Pacific Ocean and its volatile fault lines holding visions dreamed by sunsets.

II. Anonymous

 on some spring days in the high desert, the wind is intolerable, but today, it feels like being shaken awake, purified, cleansed, my hair and lungs full of disorderly elemental intersections. I am in a new current; I accept this baptism by whirlwind, this walk into expanses so endless it is like stargazing. snow from distant mountain ranges travels beside me though its path is elusive in this bone-dry vastness, and that moisture is never easy to discover. through Sage, Juniper and Yucca tangled into a weaving of peculiar geological mishaps—I travel so far that I am suddenly small and unknown but somehow at home; 

            how awe is simply the sudden recognition of place,

            a sense of belonging to the vastness you had forgotten.

III. Desert Emeralds

hidden by boundlessness— sudden chasms. at the edge of one of hundreds of crisscrossing canyons, I can see a pool of water lingering in the bottom, evidence of a recent snowstorm. sparkling a promise of well-being, it beckons me down a narrow path where suddenly cold, damp air rises from a sandstone overhang, greets my dusty face, shivers my mammalian body, invites me into a shallow cave with walls covered by vibrant, verdant moss, green like a supernova, feeding on snowmelt seeped through underground stone shelves. droplets hit small pools of transparent water—rippling, rippling, rippling.

 IV. Here You Are 

there is no other sound than water meeting water. of my breath caught in eternity. no other moment, no other reason needed to open my heart again. despite impending endings, some jewels emerge in unlikely places; create a motivation to keep traveling bumpy side roads, to keep going no matter how and despite obstructions. There will be moments like this—

don't despair any longer,

water will find you.

Rewilding: A Return to the Writing Life

Rainbow Over Mesa Verde, Original Photo Renee Podunovich

I left my writing studio in 2012 after 15 years of creative reverie in the SW Four Corners region of CO and moved to a newly booming but still easy to live in city. I just wanted a break from the creative deep dive and the endless expanse of the Colorado Plateau. I wanted to play in an urban setting; I wanted to be new. I left my art supplies and writing journals in a box in my shed on my property in the high desert and showed up to my downtown apartment creatively empty-handed. I still wrote some psychology articles and did daily journaling while living there and enjoyed a rich immersion in dance and conscious movement modalities. Yet, five years later, in the middle of a mindless shopping experience, I decided that to go another year without being claimed by the vitality of poetry was unacceptable.

Therefore, I decided then and there, in Nordstrom’s lingerie department, I must re-wild my poetic self. From experience, I knew it would require me to expand in ways that would stretch my current capacity to meet all those words I had left running feral in the massive wilderness of the unconscious.

At the time, I had picked up a copy of Scatterlings: Getting Claimed in the Age of Amnesia, which is Martin Shaw’s very manly poetic and eco-philosophical meanderings. Inspired by his passionate, raw dedication to place-based writing, which had been my mainstay writing style before abandoning ship, I started contemplating in earnest what my next best option was at this mid-life juncture. It probably was not another cocktail at another newly opened restaurant in that little foodie city.

It is never with ease that I dance with poems. It requires an effort to leave the comfort of self as I have thus far imagined it. It takes a willingness to address limitations in awareness to approach the imaginal realms’ immensity. Allowing new lexis to swell up is like deciding to catch a wave one is not sure can be surfed entirely. What it wants to communicate is always uncertain at first. Still, the call, after years of being in the fallow, filled me with gratitude and awe at the creative process and its absolute unwillingness to be tamed, managed, or corralled.

Setting up writing projects for myself has been a way to keep the flow flowing. So, in early 2017, I decided that a trip to Costa Rica, written off as a business trip, of course, would be a suitable way to consider what would come next for my creative life and an excellent way to celebrate my 48th birthday. I planned to try my hand at travel writing. It seemed like a safe way to dip my toes back into the fomenting ocean of wordplay. And people make money from it, so it appeared practical too. Within a month, I had booked the trip. I headed abroad only to find my brain turning off the minute I landed on the runway in San José, Costa Rica, despite the intention to be seduced by the muse, fully and unabashedly.

Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash

Upon checking in to the Airbnb rental in Esterillos Oeste, the cottage owner told me that if I saw any giant toads in the courtyard, I should not lick them. An unusual but fair warning. A few days later, I would find my brain in a melted state similar to the yard’s mangos. The magnificent tree was huge, abundant with fruits with thousands on the tree yet and thousands on the ground. The smell of them was a layering of fresh and ripe to overripe and rotting. It wafted into the open-air courtyard on waves of warm and warmer air steeped in humidity I had not experienced prior, even in south Florida. The smell was layered and intriguing, at first delicious, then quite sickening. In fact, the smell was absolutely distracting, such that I could not write much for the days I stayed there.

Since I had split the trip between Airbnb authenticity and a resort, I decided to spend my time interacting with the locals, both the Canadian ex-pats that have settled the steep hillside in the undeveloped, tranquilo beach town and the local Ticos. They were patient with my rickety Spanish. I wandered the beach a lot, ate breakfast each morning at an outdoor beachside cafe, enjoying the establishment’s freshest fruit smoothies amid a pack of 6 rescue dogs who had notably large smiles. It was a mangey dog love-fest, and I lingered there sipping freshly squeezed juice, letting the breezy sea air soothe me. I watched a three-foot-long iguana take a mango and haul it up a palm tree to snack on, heard the racket of the Scarlet Macaws in the local almond trees, and saw their brilliant flock many times. The town has a Mermaid! The statue (pictured above) is so far out into the surf that I did not meet her up close. She is a mystery still, a presence surrounding the place, gazing into the sea at Something Profound.

Siren of the Sea photo by Jerri Johnson on Flickr

“The heat will suck the soul out of you,” the man running the front desk at the resort told me when I checked in a few days early. I had decided to move from the Airbnb due to invisible insects that bite ankles relentlessly (perhaps some relationship to the rotting mangos). I was looking forward to proper air conditioning and poolside drinks. Still, I was hoping something more would come from this burst of rededication to my writing, to my vitality. Too bad I am not a better visual artist. In the tropics, I can see how one might enjoy painting nude bodies in bright pastel colors like Gaugin did on his “exotic” travels. That kind of effort seemed appropriate in some way that engaging my brain to organize words did not.

And so, the inspiration I aspired to on my first days in the country, in the cooler mountain setting of Alajuela, was in the end like the mangos; simply feeding the hunger of the dialectic, changing shape and form, stewing in its own life forces and creative juices, as any good creative process must. It was more proof that I never know what the pen will spill when the creative fire takes off. And sometimes it just smolders for a long while before catching, and that’s ok, part of the process, though staying with the smoke can be a challenge. In my favorite travel memoir, The Songlines, the storyline, so wonderfully sung throughout, has entirely unraveled by the end, as Chatwin is claimed by the magic of the Australian Outback and his encounters with Aboriginal culture. In the last chapter, he appears to give up sewing it all together and lets his notes, written on bumpy roads and by firelight, be a list of loose threads. He let go, was reclaimed.

Note: the last four paragraphs were the extent of my “travel writing” attempts. From here, I can chart in my notebook how the thoughts and words spiraled off into philosophical grappling with the 6th great extinction and radical climate change theories, half-baked personal essays about existential dread, and unfinished poetry. The trip was a success in relaxation and adventure but did not produce a finished product. Until just now perhaps as I reflect upon its true success with new eyes.

Fast forward a few years, and I find myself back at my writing desk in the high desert. I moved back from the city, rededicated to settling into a quiet writer’s life. It has been a wonderful homecoming with multiple projects and collaborations that feel meaningful and challenging, including a new chapbook and a letterpress project. The global pandemic and sheltering in place have unexpectedly helped me “settle in place.” I continue to re-wild my life and let myself be thoroughly claimed by my spot on the earth without the distraction of unquenchable wanderlust. The situation has challenged me to stay grounded in my creative flow without the overindulgences and manic energy that used to accompany my creative life in my younger years.

For me, poetry is part of living an engaged life, a daily medicine that keeps me tethered to balance despite the uncertainty and anxiety of current uneven conditions. Nothing is forever or permanent, but for brief moments in this global pause, I find a connection to my writing life that felt elusive prior. As if something I was constantly chasing is right here in the end. I am grateful for the net of words holding me steady in the uncharted waters of the times.

Also published in Inedible Ink at Medium.

It is the Wild in the Pink: Poetic Essay on Eudaimonia ( A Flourishing Life)

Flourishing photo by Renee Podunovich

It is late summer, and I am sitting with Sonja in her garden lush with wild pink roses, which on some years she harvests to make rosary beads using a 100-year-old recipe whereby the petals are dried, mixed with salt and alum, then hand-rolled and baked in the heat of the oven.
She is telling me about a local band 
made up of mostly men in their eighties,
how they still play together all these years, 
how there might be funds for a bandshell at the city park,
how it would add such enchantment to this tumbleweed town
precariously perched at the edge of Western civilization, 
how such a thing of beauty might offset the fact
that this place is in a perpetual state of continually-falling-apart 
before it spills forth into the desert and Indian country.

I am half-listening, enchanted by summer’s pleasure and a bit tipsy on chilled white wine, but when she says, “so and so, who plays the euphonium…” my brain halts, like that scratch across a record kind of stop and I store the word to look up later, and in the silence of darkness thick with stars
I end up on a 2 am tangential internet exploration 
that starts with the history of brass instruments
and ends with me listening to Brian Eno.
Euphonium is not Eudaimonia,
though it is also from an Ancient Greek word:
 εὔφωνος euphōnos, 
 meaning “well-sounding” or “sweet-voiced” 
which is a kind of “well-being” I suppose, though honestly, it is merely the off-rhyme that interests me, which is strange enough for a word-lover to make a point of it.

Eudaimonia is the wild in the pink roses, the light on the wine inside the glass before you taste it, then the lingering sweetness on your tastebuds.
It is the meta-awareness of the ever-possibility of being spun off into inconsequentiality or ether
but for the mystery of gravity, 
the feeling of warm dirt under bare toes,
the essentiality and rightness of intimate conversations 
with a beloved friend about beauty and hope.
A sure path to happiness is to forget — 
sit still enough that morning glory vines tangle ankles, 
be silent long enough that pollinators think you are wild roses,
open your soul wide enough to consider what might thrive
in a place so arid and isolated it is difficult for much to take hold,
but believe it can anyway.

In the best moments, I know I belong in this universe, in this life,
and can flow with ever-shifting meaning and constant change.
What was happening last year is gone, 
gone like all of the time spent spacing out,
not being present, missing the opportunities
to touch, stargaze, dance around the fire of well-being — 
that interstice between the contentment we hope for
and what we actually engage in every day,
that pull towards our potential existing somewhere 
between the desire to make prayers out of petals,
and the commitment and wherewithal to in reality make them.
Happiness is beyond λέγω — logos; it is the sway of your body
when the music begins, as the euphonium hums and bellows
from the stage of the new bandshell in the park,
and what was once just a plan, dreamed in the garden,
is now living notes that move us flourishingly.

Wildflower Feast photo by Renee Podunovich

Note: I am currently reading, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World by Owen Flanagan. In a philosophical exploration of how modern humans make meaning, he uses the scaffolding of “Eudaimonics” — but shifts this philosophy from its roots in Eurocentric biases to include views from the East. In doing so, he helps to alleviate the cognitive dissonance experienced when we attempt to make sense of things within the old dyad of Science vs. Religion. This is a dated dyad, he claims, relevant at the time when Darwin was arguing with western religion, but not so useful to us currently. To resolve the problem of finding meaning in such a limited dialectic, he expands it to include six “spaces of meaning”. This broader sextet for considering “well-being” is made up of Art, Science, Technology, Ethics, Politics and Spirituality. He states, “Living is a psycho-poetic performance, a drama that is our own, but this is made possible by our individual intersection, and that of our fellow performers, with the relevant Space of Meaning.”
Published also at Literary Impulse at Medium

Adventures in Letterpress: Ready, Set…Type Setting

“The Platen Press” Illustration by Sonja Horoshko

In the late summer of 2018, visual artist Sonja Horoshko and I were sitting in her enchanted garden in SW Colorado, dreaming up another collaboration. This delightful conversation was the seed of the 18-month long “Paper Wings” collaboration which resulted in a series of 12 limited edition artist prints and 6 hand-bound artist manuscripts which are now available for purchase to collectors internationally.

The project was started in 2019 and completed over 14 months; first through a 12-month artist residency with Mancos Common Press in Mancos, CO, and completed during a week-long artist residency at Willowtail Springs Nature Preserve in Mancos, CO.

At the time, Mancos Common Press was restored enough to let artists use the renovated presses for fine arts projects. You can watch the story of how the press was restored on PBS. When we arrived as the first artists to have a working residency there, things were still being sorted, discovered, and learned about this lost form of printing.

When we arrived on the first day of the project, we knew we had 12 poems paired with 12 illustrations that we would use to create a limited run of artist prints. We knew we would print some of those as “signatures” or double-sided prints for hand-bound manuscripts or “livre d’artistes” to be completed at a later time. We were naive, to say the least, but inspired and willing to learn this lost art. We planned to complete one print per month, and largely stuck to that timeframe despite having other jobs and projects to tend to.

Letter of Lead photo by Renee Podunovich

The fullest set of type at the time was Garamond 24 point, meaning it had enough letters for the task at hand. However, those letters needed to be put in their proper places in a type case drawer. You can see in this picture the unsorted type and so it was this job we started on day one.

We were thus introduced to the tedious attention to detail and the “willing to get your hands dirty” dimension of working with lead type, ink, and press tools. We realized that first day that we would learn from these materials, they would inform the project as much as our own vision. The length of poems was immediately affected, which affected the flow of the visual narrative as well. On day one, we conjured the ability to be flexible and adapt language and form to the particular constraints that the letterpress presents.

Backward Words photo by Renee Podunovich

It took a long time for me to handset the first poem. Words are set by placing individual lead type letters in a cartridge, from right to left, setting the words and sentences backward. Each letter has a spacer (leading) between it and the next letter. It takes precision, dexterity, and patience. Nothing is more frustrating than setting a sentence and then realizing a “d” was used where a “b” should have been. That means loosening the carefully placed spacers, pulling out that one small letter with tweezers, all the while hoping not to knock the whole sentence amuck. So, mind your “Ps” and “Qs”!

Proof photo by Renee Podunovich

You can see in one of our first proofs these types of mistakes. We did get more proficient as we went along, but the learning curve was really steep at first. Most artists had worked with the press as a visual art medium; a few holiday cards had been set with limited type. No one had attempted a full book until we showed up with our complex vision and project.

We didn’t print as we had naively imagined on that first day. It was a tedious day, but we were satisfied to be starting on our vision. The “pressman” we had lured in to help us had studied letterpress in his industrial arts classes and had good advice and know-how, and the manager of Mancos Common Press was delighted that we were there starting to use the space. We pushed through that day, determined to face the many challenges that we knew we were to encounter during our long courtship with the platen press.

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You can visit the Paper Wings Blog to learn more. We also presented at the Bluff Arts Festival Online 2020 where we talk about our project in depth.

Illustrious for Brief Moments, Artist Print