Poetry Connection | Connecting with Women Poets Laureate

I am deeply drawn to poetry by women. This rich tradition juxtaposes the individual with the collective and elevates accessible language to craft the spoken-song that is poetry.

So, imagine my delight at the chance to hear on November 14, not one but two Santa Barbara women Poets Laureate at the Blue Whale Reading Series, curated by the energetic and welcoming Laure-Anne Bosselaar (also a Santa Barbara Poet Laureate) and Christine Kravetz.

Emma Trelles is a Cuban American poet, who authored Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. She is the ninth Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara (2021-23). Trelles shared that she is fascinated by the complex ecology of our city.  She finds herself thinking and writing increasingly about place now that she lives here. Correspondingly, her poems can be lyrical meditations on the natural world.

SATURDAY AFTERNOON REVIVAL
By Emma Trelles 

The world is falling and the rain is calm.
Gingko leaves disperse, petals blown and gone

To earth. I am reading a book about birds,
What else – their mending and metaphors.

The passage is hushed, lamplight is my home,
The world is falling, the rain calm.

Originally published on the Line 4 bus as part of Poetry Passages, a project in partnership with the SBMTD.

Trelles’ poems can also range widely in viewpoint, just like the visual instruments she references here:

NIGHT OF TELESCOPES
By Emma Trelles

I have buried my share and hardly anyone knows.

A house must hold ghosts, writing

Names across funereal woods and windows

Good for viewing the lingering past.

This night of telescopes fixes the cold

October sky—a Saturn so delicate as if

Sketched by moths holding to nearby stones

For their lives. The sutures of the moon drift

Into sharpness and a man points to the inevitable screen

Another haunt in this dim garden where voices rise

Across pines and the invisible fountain locked

In the same little song. Here is the Sea of Crisis

And I would recognize its expanse anywhere

Having visited often, even beneath my lids when I disappear

At night to visit with a father who no longer knows me

Or the dead who always do, and glow like the rain or a rose

Finished with the business of becoming. I can’t say the worst

Because I’ll keep living it. Machine of the mind. Belt

Of the hunter. I can spot his patient blade from either coast—

The one where I drown the one where I love the one

Where I keep rowing through the blaze and the black.

Originally published in Zócalo Public Square.

Trelles’ poem invites us to simultaneously consider and wonder at the close and the remote — our family wounds, and the beauty of the cosmos.

Enid Osborn is a long-time resident of Santa Barbara and served as Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara from 2017 to 2019. She is the author of the book When the Big Wind Comes, and a series of chapbooks including Queen in Exile, Milagro, Wormlore, and The Burden of Decency.

Osborn read work that navigated between the natural and the personal, invoking but not dwelling on sadness, loss, change, and hope, as in the following elegiac poem, which calls to mind Walt Whitman.

TREE PRAYER
By Enid Osborn

I summon my soul,
tree upon whose limbs I hang.

I summon my soul, upon whose trunk I lean.

I summon my radiant soul,
tree upon whose roots I lay despair,

this corpse of bitter losses
I offer as dark bread
to the soil between her roots.

I shall rise and walk in lightness.

I summon my soul.
My name means soul.
I summon my radiant soul.

May the trunk of this tree
give me strength.

May I unloose my hands from sorrow
and look up to see how every gift
hangs shining from her boughs.

I touch this tree always,
at whose living feet I touch the earth.

Elsewhere, Osborn’s poems celebrate resilience and power in expected places:

GUILLERMO                                                                                   
By Enid Osborn

After a photo by Henri Cartier Bresson (1934)
of a Mexican woman in mourning clothes
with two small children.

My name is Guillermo.
I was ten months old when this photo was taken.
My father Guillermo had died one year before.

My mother’s heart beat on
but her moods abruptly ceased,
the seasons having no dominion,

and occasions—there were no occasions
save the tides of her grief,
oppressive in their regularity
as a heavy man’s snore.

The celebration of my birth
lasted the duration of one blessing candle,
then she wrapped me in a shroud,
pobre hijo sin padre,
and tied me to her body.

Her weeping shook my waters as before,
and I waited, perplexed, for life to begin.

My sister Claudia lived in the world of color
but, having lost both parents at once,
attached herself to the wraith of my mother
like a weird little mendicant.

When she cried, my mother did not pick her up
but wept in the adjoining room.

And so it was that darkness delayed my birth.
I grew in my shroud like a secret child,
until my elbow sharpened and split the cloth.

I came out needing shoes like El Niño,
telling my visions to anyone who would listen.

My mother, astonished, uttered a sound
almost like laughter.

In an email conversation, Osborn opined that “personal poems have the greatest authenticity and, therefore, the greatest power to touch lives.”

Both these poets do just that: touch lives through the personal. Their poetry moves us out of our particular individual bubbles towards greater and deeper communal consciousness.

About the Guest Columnist: Stephanie Barbé Hammer is a seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her most recent book, the mystery Journey to Merveilleux City was a 2023 finalist for the Foreword INDIE book award.

Upcoming Poetry December Events

December 5, Hospice Light Up a Life, Poet Laureate Melinda Palacio will read a poem at the annual program. Star sales and music begins at 5 p.m., Montecito Upper Village Green, Corner of San Ysidro & East Valley Rd.

December 7, Ladies’ Social Strumming Club at the Farmers Market, 11 a.m., a musical performance, no poetry but Poet Laureate Melinda Palacio joins the group of female musicians for a set on guitar at the Farmers Market.

December 8, Hospice Light Up a Life, 5 p.m., Poet Laureate and Hospice Hero (and recent Independent Local Hero), Perie Longo will read a poem at the annual program, Goleta, Camino Real Marketplace. Storke and Marketplace Drive.

December 10, Poetry Reading and Book Signing. David Starkey and Catherine Abbey Hodges read from their new poetry books, Chaucer’s at 6 p.m.

December 14, Join “Friends of Sojourner” to honor and dedicate a king palm tree for Santa Barbara Poet Laureate Emerita, Sojourner Kincaid Rolle, Saturday, December 14, 1 -1:40 p.m. The plaque is located on Santa Barbara Street, behind the County Courthouse at the fifth tree down from Anapamu Street.

December 14, Hospice Light Up a Life, Poet Laureate Melinda Palacio will read a poem at the annual program. Star sales and music begins at 5 p.m., Carpinteria, Seal Fountain, Linden Ave.

December 15, Hospice Light Up a Life, Poet Laureate and Hospice Hero (and recent Independent Local Hero), Perie Longo will read a poem at the annual program at the Lobero Theatre, 33 E. Canon Perdido at 5:30 p.m.