Tribute to Elsie Whitlow Feliz
Monday, Oct. 17 at 7:30 PM
R25 at 1719 25th Street
Host: Bob Stanley
Elsie Whitlow Feliz (1938-2011) was born and raised in San Francisco where her mother’s family settled after fleeing Stalinist Russia. In 1960 she married and followed Pfc. Don Feliz to West Berlin, where she attended the Goethe Institut and the Free University. She saw how the Berlin Wall changed the lives of many. She graduated from San Francisco State University with a major in Economics. Elsie was a member of Zica Creative Arts and Literary Guild, Chaparral Poets, First Friday Poets, Sacramento Poetry Center and the River Park-Elk Grove Writers Group. Her poetry has been published in Rattlesnake Review, Drumvoices, Poetry Depth Quarterly, Chrysanthemum, San Fernando Poetry Journal, The Poet’s Guild, Inky Blue, Mediphors, Poetry Now and the anthology, We Speak for Peace. She has 3 chapbooks, Cornered, Tea With Bunya and To Berlin With Love, written with her husband, Don Feliz. She is the former founder and co-editor of Free-Wheeling, an annual poetry journal published by the Towe Auto Museum.
OF ELSIE:
For many “workshop years” Elsie was an endearing part of this poetry life—enviously prolific—her own ‘seekings and learnings’ given generously to others by example—her energies and fruition of such personal growth of equal value to others by this example and sharing. Her remarkable intelligence gave her work a depth of mind, and comprehension into the complex workings of the human mind and spirit. Her essence is still with us. In this she is still with us in heart and mind.
Joyce Odam, Editor, Brevities
In 2005 our hearts were warmed by the luminous poems of Elsie Whitlow Feliz in her chapbook, “Tea with Bunya”. We became part of her Russian Potrero Hill family in San Francisco. Elsie died in 2011 but she left her assembled chapbook of 32 related poems titled: Complaints Of The Artist’s Wife. In these poems Feliz explores the complexity of love and marriage. The artist could be any husband and the wife’s complaints all women recognize. The artist wants his wife to “sit like a pear on a plate” and she complains that “he has no idea who she is”. Most of her poems are ekphrastic, written in response to works of art. In “Complaint Of The Artist’s Wife # 4”, (after La Nebuleuse) she begins saying “He never sees me the way I am.” In the next to last poem she tells us that love means war. There is something so human and down-to-earth in her poems we cannot help but smile. We are glad to have known her and to keep with us her wry humor, her gentle wisdom in this book of poems.
On Complaints of the Artist’s Wife Allegra Jostad Silberstein, Poet Laureate, Davis, CA
The artist’s wife – that enigmatic and frequently marginalized figure who has traditionally served the male artist as lover, helpmate, model and muse – has been given a voice in this stunning collection; to be precise, she has been given multiple voices, as Elsie Whitlow Feliz explores the highly-charged and intensely- genderized relationships that obtain between male artist/female model, male artist/female muse/, and male artist/female lover. In poem after poem, Feliz probes the nature of the male/female relationship with intuitively-nuanced insight, deconstructing the intersection of the esthetic act with the sexual role-playing of the male artist and his female subject. Predictably enough, the result of these stresses and dichotomies can be devastating, leaving, in some instances, “…only/the outlines of love,/the color and remnants/of bright passion./” (“The Leaving Of Love). In the elegant pantoum, “’When She Posed The First Time,” the artist’s wife “…shivered at the thought of posing./”, both excited and reluctant about her new role. On the other hand, the conjoining of esthetic tension with marital love can act as an astonishingly effective aphrodisiac, as it does for the wife in the poem “Torpor,” the wife who “…has no/shame, can’t/pry herself/from bed./” This is a passionate and intense collection which belongs in everyone’s library.
Carol Frith, co-Editor, Ekphrasis
Elsie wrote these poems during seven years of meetings on the first Friday of every month with four Sacramento poets. Most of the First Friday Poets’s wrote ekphrastic responses to challenges presented the previous month. Elsie often chose the artist’s wife’s view and collected these poems as she wrote seven of them in 2010.
Complaint Of The Artist’s Wife
An artist marries to save the cost
of modeling fees. My husband
studies the human head and face.
I cut my hair short for him. Hair
distracts, he says. Once he loved
my hair. Don’t ever cut it, he said.
But now he studies face and head.
He likes my eyebrows, and the way
my ears don’t protrude. I’m getting
a crick in my neck. And why am I
sitting naked? If he’s not painting
my body, I should be wearing clothes.
Oh, no, he says, that would distract
me. It would be too much challenge.
I’d want to undress you, and make
love all afternoon into the night.
Elsie Whitlow Feliz
Complaint Of The Artist’s Wife #4
After La Nebuleuse, 1939 by Raoul Ubac
He never sees me the way
I am. To him I am nebulous,
and always slightly out of
focus. I am blurred beauty,
black and gray. I am gray meat
sold on the hoof. He cuts off my
arm like some butcher at the market.
Even I can not recognize myself
after long years of marriage to this
man who paints in monotones.
Elsie Whitlow Feliz
