Rhymes with Rubes
April is National Poetry Month, and I am touched to be the one reintroducing this lost art form to the masses. This includes people like you and me! Because odds are, we don’t understand poetry.
Poetry has lain dormant since history days, murking its modern-time meanings. What I can tell you with authority is that poetry used to be a noble calling, largely because humans had not yet invented doctors. Once we could compare it to medical science, we got the notion that poetry was HARD and did not earn actual money. Plus, with doctors on hand, people weren’t all dying by the age of twelve. With all that extra time to challenge our brains, build our vocabularies, and deepen our understanding of human nature, we as a species chose to browse pictures of puppies jumping into swimming pools after tennis balls....
When Women are Overwhelmed
Two new Albuquerque theater productions, Mother Road's The Penelopiad and Fusion's The New Electric Ballroom, share a common theme: women who are overwhelmed because they are unable to cope with the demands that society and they themselves impose on their lives. What is more, the demands, and the failures, are due to the fact that they are women.
Aside from this theme, the two productions are about as different as is imaginable, once again reflecting the startling diversity of our small regional theater companies...
Nicaragua, Part 4: Safe places are the most dangerous
A quarter century ago, my wife and I were winding up our travel through a clutch of West African countries with a visit to Cameroon, my favorite of the dozen African countries I’ve seen. At that time (much has changed since, but alas, the president remains the same) it was lush and green, relatively prosperous and sophisticated, at peace with the world and itself. Feeling good about our successful journey in a difficult part of the world, my wife and I relaxed, wanting only to melt into the local scene and recover our energy for the trip back to our base in Niger...
Remembering the Battle of Valverde
Most of us don’t think about the American Civil War being fought in New Mexico, but this past February 21 marked 153 years since of the Battle of Valverde. Below Peralta, a short throw from Hwy 380, not far from the Owl Bar, there is an area on the Rio Grande called North Ford. It is also called Valverde—“green valley”—a rather picturesque name that does not quite tell the true story of this bloody bend of river.
Valverde was the first engagement in New Mexico between the forces of the Confederacy and the Union in what was then called the War of the Rebellion...
La Cabalgata
“We’re tired from the dancing, not the cabalgata,” one of the horsemen says. It’s Saturday morning, March 7 and I’m in the stockyards in Palomas, Mexico where dozens of Mexican riders—men, women and kids—are saddling their horses and preparing to cross the border, join American riders and parade into Columbus, New Mexico.
This is the sixteenth annual Cabalgata Binaciónal Villista or Binational Villa Cavalcade, a very different experience than that day ninety nine years ago when General Pancho Villa’s troops attacked members of the US Third Cavalry Regiment...
Exploring Nicaragua, Part Two: Emerging from a brutal past
On a volcanic island in vast Lake Nicaragua, a team of oxen slowly trudges along a dirt road pulling a cart laden with large logs. Driving the cart is a young man with only part of his mind on his task. The rest of his attention is devoted to his conversation on a cell phone.
Hundreds of kilometers and a week later, a heavily set, elderly woman makes her way slowly and painfully through the cloud forest and up a dirt track in Parque Arenal high in the mountains in northern Nicaragua. She, too, is talking on a cell phone.
In the second largest hotel in the small city of Somoto, gateway to what is sometimes called the Grand Canyon of Central America, I am awakened before dawn by a rhythmic pounding...
Mercury Poetry: Two poems from Joan Logghe
Sweet name for a new place.
I cruise your supermarket with poetry
in my heart. I finger the Pendleton,
spend a lot of time at the Pendleton blankets,
and if time is money I own a Chief Joseph.
If time is money I sleep in a Best Western
with metal stallions rearing out front...
Gone Fishing — New Works by Heidi Pollard
Local artist Heidi Pollard has seventeen new gouaches at The Outpost Performance Space, 210 Yale Blvd. SE. The show opened February 6th and will be up through the end of March. The small but alive and evocative images shouldn’t be missed; viewers are welcome from 2 to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Friday or during the Outpost’s regularly scheduled performances.
In contrast with most spaces that are not designed specifically as galleries, The Outpost is a good place to see art. It shows this work off to its best advantage, the pristine gray walls really popping the luminous colors....
Home, Part One: Ties that bind
Later this month, I will be traveling far from home. My wife and I will be exploring Nicaragua, a country we have been trying to visit for 25 years but year after year kept putting it on the deferred list. Now, however, we are pulled by opportunity and pushed by two realizations: now in our 60s and 70s, we are unlikely to get any younger; and Nicaragua itself is moving toward a point of crisis with totally unpredictable results.
But while I am preparing to be far from home, I find myself thinking almost obsessively of home—what it means to have and not have it, to find and lose it, to leave and return, or not...
Five Questions for New Mexico Authors—Lois Palken Rudnick
This week we ask editor, scholar, teacher, and writer Lois Palken Rudnick about the reissue of her condensation of the four books of memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan, titled Intimate Memories, which make up Luhan’s autobiography. Rudnick’s work as an editor and as a writer of the book’s wisely insightful introduction and afterword gives readers an entry into Luhan’s life and contribution to American culture that has not been possible before. Intimate Memories is published by the University of New Mexico Press...