I've been following the Muse Times Two poetry series with some interest, if not just because co-creator Dana Levin is a friend and former mentor, then because rather enjoy poetry and I like the venue.---
Collected Works Bookstore, where the readings are held, was once located in a claustrophobic cubbyhole space on E. San Francisco Street. Three years ago, the bookstore relocated to its present, much more comfortable location, on the corner of Galisteo and Water streets, and integrated a full coffee bar and performance space.
I harp on about this a lot. As one of the city's few surviving independent bookstores, it's not only hip, peaceful downtown hideout, but it's also an underdog that has won Best Independent Bookstore in SFR's Best of Santa Fe contest multiple years running. Back in the summer, I interviewed mother-daughter owner duo Dorothy Massey and Mary Wolf for Best Of, and Wolf told me that the building which now houses Collected Works was once the incarceration site for Billy the Kid.
Appropriate, then, that the latest Muse Times Two reading should be held here. Matt Donovan, the current head of the creative writing department at Santa Fe University of Art and Design (formerly College of Santa Fe), was selected this year as one of 10 recipients of the $50,000 Whiting Writers' Award. There, in Collected Works' café-artspace, Donovan stood before an assembly of strangers, and current and former students (some of whom had gone on to become writers and unusual journalists), and read a series of poems from his new manuscript-in-progress.
In "Prelude for Musical Glasses," Donovan reflects on Ben Franklin. "Such were the heavenly sounds Ben Franklin made," he recites. "Nothing made him giddier than this contraption he built."
From less-accomplished poets, the invocation of other artists might come across as a lack-of-confidence, but Donovan's poetry evokes memories of Billy Holiday and Donovan's former music teacher—who had an obsession with Scott Joplin—through images such as "her lips locked on a shard of melody" and "what I mean to evoke is voice becoming a disconsolate wail."
Following Donovan, Seattle-based Emily Warn took the stage. An unimposing figure, Warn joked about the Santa Fe weather (as opposed to Seattle, where it is not only freezing but wet at this time of year—well, actually, most of the year) and read a series of poems from her book The Shadow Architect. Each piece is broken up into smaller segments, based on a specific character in the Hebrew alphabet. Indeed, Warn's interest in the Kabbalah comes through in every poem. This can be as clear as a line such as "God of my importance, the minds are bored" in "Self-Publishing" or as obscure as a multi-valenced interpretation of concept: "At night, I walk along the harbor, watching what love makes" from "Conductor."
If God is infinite, Warn questions, how can the finite exist? This, she explains, is a central theological puzzle of Jewish mysticism, and something she meditates on in several of her poems, which appear as trifectas of poem, proof-text (a concept also adopted from Judaism; Warn's proof-texts include works by authors such as William Blake) and the associated Hebrew symbol.
