Believing in human potential – An interview with Ian Tregillis
Ian Tregillis represents two sides of New Mexico’s collective brainpower: the sciences and the arts. By day, he works at Los Alamos National Laboratory. By night—and on weekends and days off—he writes sharp trope-busting fiction. The ink is still cooling on the final volume of his Milkweed Triptych, Necessary Evil.
Is the series science fiction, or is it fantasy? Ian blends the two genres as artfully as he does physics and creativity. Through the expanded parameters of these genres, the trilogy pokes and prods at the very human issues and choices that face us today. The writing is far smarter than the dust jacket would have you believe, and the entire series bolsters New Mexico’s literary cred.
The last poet standing
In Amiri Baraka’s review of Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, I was struck by not only the vitriol, but how he was making a similar argument that I had made a few years ago during my review of In Company: An Anthology of New Mexico Poets After 1960. Lacking the vitriol, I took the editors to task for trying to be inclusive but missing what was happening outside the Academy...
Weekly Poem: When Will the Next Chance Be?
-written in response to Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Patio Door with Green Leaf”
There are doors
we never see.
Just this morning
I failed to find
the door that would have led me
to a deeper understanding of your heart...
ABQ theater scene is hopping
Albuquerque had more than 20 plays opening in April, appealing to almost every conceivable taste, from children's stories and musical comedies to cutting-edge contemporary drama.
Among the latter was “Humble Boy,” a strange and generally confounding British family drama staged by the Fusion—at the Cell, the KimMo and the Lensic in Santa Fe through May 11.
Expertly directed and skillfully acted by a highly professional ensemble cast, the play describes the homecoming of a Cambridge University professor after the death of his father.
Solar Decathlon ingredients: College students + construction + competition
The Solar Decathlon is an international collegiate competition in ten contests for a fully solar powered house sponsored by the US Department of Energy Solar Decathlon. University of New Mexico students have had the opportunity to compete alongside many of the best and brightest students in the nation to design, construct and operate a solar house under competition standards. A highly competitive evaluation will be held October 2013 in Irvine, CA...
Herb Goldman Among Us
When I think of Albuquerque’s preeminent art scene at the mid twentieth century, I think of Raymond Jonson, Jack and Alice Garver, Connie Fox, Dick Kurman, Don Ivers, Bainbridge Bunting, John Tatchel, and Herb Goldman. I think of visiting UNM professor and artist Elaine de Kooning, who did as much as anyone to bring this group together, and help nudge several of them to national prominence. Many of these artists are long gone. Others have moved elsewhere.
Herb Goldman, who died in September 2012, was one of New Mexico’s most unique and powerful artists...
Weekly Poem: Wash
Sometimes—like right now—when you
need to see yourself from
outside, so you can say, objectively, how it
really feels in there,
your mind is a translucent sheet of plastic
taped on to the hotel room window in a
ragged part of town
that looks over a parking lot, a late night
Weekly Poetry: Drought
Fire season and we walk out of the Lensic
into haze, each street light ringed
like van Gogh or when I first wore
contact lenses. All the glare of air
kept me from vision.
Fire season waiting for monsoon
my husband drives into the mountains
with a friend and her daughter, daughter of
the woman I saw in the ground, can’t talk about it
but after these weeks of smoke
rest in peace has a different ring to it.
A spoonful of cinnamon: Poetry is better in doses
When V.B. Price asked me to curate the poetry section of his online venture called the New Mexico Mercury, I told him I thought the way poetry was being delivered actually worked against people enjoying it. I thought that having too many poems at one time only catered to the audience that loved poetry. What about the audience that might be interested in poetry or the audience that didn’t “understand” poetry? So I argued that we too often give people who might be a little wary of poetry too big of a dose...
Elegy for Johnny Tapia
Johnny,
did you die the way you wanted to?
Did you want the mystery
to cloud your demise?
Everybody arguing
as to what finally killed you.
It was the pisto.
Nah the method.
The coca.
Or was it the pills the doctor
gave you to kill the phantoms
of chingasos,
la vida loca?