Poetry Connection | Connecting with Poets at the Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge

The Louisiana Book Festival takes place every October. Last weekend, the festival celebrated its 20^th year. I have been invited to present my poetry a few times. Festival organizers make authors feel special by throwing them a party in the state library the night before the book festival, which features hundreds of panels and presentations. Events take place inside the state capitol building in Baton Rouge, the state library, and in tents on the grounds of the mall. There is something so fun, almost naughty about having a party in the library with food, drinks, and a jazz band. Authors and guests take over the place, plates of shrimp and gumbo and wine glasses in hand, and mingle amongst the stacks.

Thanks to poet Gina Ferrara, I have had the pleasure of reading at the Poetry Buffet in New Orleans, a series that is as old as the Louisiana Book Festival. I first read at the Poetry Buffet Series 12 years ago with poet Kelly Harris-DeBerry. Now, Kelly has an 11-year-old daughter who is an author herself. The middle-schooler wrote a picture book, My Daddy Needs a Gift, about her father needing a kidney transplant. Someday, the young author might be a transplant surgeon and I can brag that I knew her before she was born.

While next week brings what I hope will be an end to the election anxiety I have been feeling, it also brings more local poetry in form of the Blue Whale Series, featuring two past poets laureate: Emma Trelles and Enid Osborn on Wednesday, November 13 and the Poetry Out Loud Competition in Santa Maria on the 14^th. November also happens to be my birthday month. In addition to poetry duties, you might find me singing, dancing, and playing music. On Saturday, I will be playing songs on guitar with the Ladies Social Strumming Club at the Farmers Market at 11 a.m. Come by and say hello.

Upcoming Poetry Events:

November 10, Poetry Zone open mic at the back patio of the Karpeles Manuscript Library, 1:30 p.m.

November 13, Blue Whale Series, Enid Osborn and Emma Trelles, Unity of Santa Barbara Chapel, 227 E. Arrellaga Street, 5:30 p.m.

November 14, Poetry Out Loud, 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., Joseph Centeno Betteravia Government Administration Building, Santa Maria.

November 14, Poetry Book Club, a discussion of Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely at Timbre Books in Ventura, 1910 E. Main Street, 6:30-7:30 p.m.

November 16, Writing in the Galleries, poet and UC Santa Barbara professor Rick Benjamin leads the poetry workshop at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2-3:30 p.m.

This week’s Poetry Connection poems are from Santa Barbara-based poet Susan Chiavelli.

Susan Chiavelli is the recipient of the Chattahoochee Review’s Lamar York Nonfiction Prize for “Death, Another Country,” also named a notable essay by Best American Essays. Her award-winning prose and poetry have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, SALT, Miramar, San Pedro River Review, The Packinghouse Review, several Shoreline Voices anthologies and elsewhere. Susan was born and raised in Seattle and lives now on the edge of Rattlesnake Canyon in Santa Barbara.

Wild Turkeys of Las Canoas
By Susan Chiavelli

After you cross the stone bridge
by the leaning sycamores, go round
the bend where the old mule hangs

his large, brown head — a mounted
trophy with mournful eyes. 
This is the place where the turkeys cross

so frequently there should be a sign.
Turkey Crossing.
Imagine it there by the oak tree.

Stop for the tom and his hens
and their Jakes and Jennies.
Wait for the whole shimmering posse

to pass as they lurch toward the creek
and what they remember — acorns and lizards
and berries, perhaps some golden corn

if the mule’s owner is feeling kind.
No matter how hurried, be grateful
for a reason to slow down. Be grateful

for a reason to stop. Gaze into the eyes
of something other, something ancient.
See how the iridescent feathers reflect

their history — the brown of acorn,
the green of lizard, the red of berry.
Fall under the spell and give thanks.

This poem first appeared in San Pedro River Review, Vol. 10 No. 2, Fall 2018

In Need of a Poem for my Mother’s Funeral
By Susan Chiavelli

‘although I still dream that someday
we will be together again in one body’
 —The Hades Sonnets, Edward Hirsch

Mother, after your sudden death I journeyed
back to the mythical place
of  my childhood, in search of the unspoken.

Here the lake light casts its silver net
of memory — catches me in and out of time.
You’re the ghost, yet I haunt these places.

I’ve come in search of comfort — the names
of familiar streets, the presence of weeping
hemlock and cedar, the sight of the homes

we once lived in, now dream houses painted
the wrong colors and filled with trespassers.
Our old department store — a book store now.

The same escalator I rode through my teens
lifts me through remembered light
and now I’m falling, falling upward

through a rabbit hole where time dissolves,
where all my girlhood dreams appear as curios —
tainted with endless wanting.

Here, in a reincarnated book store, I see
the past lives of mannequins wearing
the fashions of my youth — vintage now.

Mother, you were just up this street cooking dinner,
potatoes boiling, heart beating, steam misting
the kitchen window into a blur you could not see

my future through, could not see me lost
in a maze of best sellers and self-help —
lost in my own mythology, hidden from you.

In this space I once tried on prom dresses
I couldn’t afford and can still see my reflection
in the three-way mirror disappear into infinity.

On the other side of the mirror, I discover
poetry.  The book shelves tower, and the light
is dim and hushed as church.

There, a thin black spine.
No reason for this book to catch
my eye among the brighter covers,

but it gleams. I choose it, or it chooses
me in the ancient art of bibliomancy.
Lay Back the Darkness.

The pages fall open to the Hades Sonnets,
and we read together — my younger self and I,
her reflection in blue satin tripled in the mirrors.

The poem speaks the language of grief —
shattered pomegranates, torn poppies,
wild, gushing hearts. 

Mother, you could not save me
from the severed, silver cord,
from the darkness that swallows us all.