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Traci Gourdine’s poetry and stories have been published in numerous literary magazines, and she has been anthologized within Shepard and Thomas’ Sudden Fiction Continued (Norton Publishing). Traci and Quincy Troupe were paired in a year long exchange of letters for the anthology Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Saturnalia Books). She is co-editor of Night is Gone, Day is Still Coming (Candlewick Press), an anthology of writing by young Native writers, as well as We Beg to Differ, poems by Sacramento poets against the war. She has also co-
edited the Tule Review with Luke Breit for the Sacramento Poetry Center. Traci Gourdine is a professor of English at American River College and chaired the Creative Writing department for the California State Summer School for the Arts from 1998 -2013. She was Chair of the Sacramento Poet Laureate Committee for three laureate terms. For ten years she facilitated writing workshops within several California state prisons in the Arts in Corrections program for the William James Association. Her recent collection is Ringing in the Wild, out of Ad Lumen Press 2015. In the In-Between
If you want to hear a story, you’ll have to sit here in the dark with me outside of your own here In the in-between of now and then memory and forgotten, the place between lies and truth synapse and thought before one mood chases the other Now to then that moment of breath before the kiss the feel before the tears yes the silence before the noise In this in-between, I stand on this stage removed from life and away from next The in-between of thinking it up and writing it down The in-between of liking what’s spilled and crossing it out. This is the place of story, of poem, of song words put together and tossed into air a spectacle like stars flung to falling I try to forget the me in this to find meaning in the space in between each letter each word, line, apostrophe and comma Breath the in between the rise of my eyes the dip to the page the inhale and exhale in between the constrict of throat to what I look for between what I have found in the in-between begins like this Traci Gourdine (7/18/14) |
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Patrick Grizzell is a poet, songwriter and visual artist. His books include Dark Music, Chicken Months (about which Robert Bly wrote, “… the poems have a sweet spontaneity and tenderness”), Minotaure Into Night (with sumi paintings by Jimi Suzuki), 13 Poems, and It’s Like That. Two manuscripts, Writing in Place, and The Vignettes, are in progress. He was a founding member and previous director of, as well as an editor for, the Sacramento Poetry Center. He has performed poetry and music with, among others, Allen Ginsberg, Leon Redbone, Gary Snyder, The Iguanas, Jim Ringer and Mary McCaslin, Ed Sanders, Taj Mahal, Shizumi Shigeto, William Stafford, Robert Creeley and Anne Waldman. He studied art and literature at CSUS with Maya Angelou, Dennis Schmitz, Leon Golub, Eugene Redmond, Kathryn Hohlwein, John Fitzgibbon, Jimi Suzuki and others.
His band, Proxy Moon, released its premiere CD in November, 2015. A second is in the works.
John Lee Hooker once said he “sound pretty good” on the dobro.
THE PROBLEM
Listen, there is a way around most things. That elephant cloud is as real as it gets. Any hungry child is real. The woman weeping over a closed coffin is real. It’s history eventually, and in that way can be given weight, then made not real again, as is our way. The young man slumped on the curb weeping is coming to terms with something. The man sitting in the center of a circle of garbage near a collapsed tent of cardboard and blue tarps in a river camp is real enough. The woman whose lost face stares up at the façade of the cathedral with bags piled around her feet? For all her options she may as well never move. People will sweep around her until the sidewalk turns to sand. The heroin-addicted girl at the clinic with a needle broken off in her inflamed arm dances anyway to some private music. When the nurse calls her name, she doesn’t answer. The cut girl at the market with her bag of plums parts the shoppers in the aisles with the prow of simply existing. Each is an imagined shape. A horse. A rabbit. Wait, and the wind will shift them, will sweep them away until all that remains is avarice, the enrichment of sorrow, a count taken, a measure in vapor, in revised history, what doesn’t make the books. |
