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)

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.

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