 |
Cover of Program
From Floating Poetry
Gallery 1979 |
Wednesday Open Books in Seattle hosted a remembrance event about Gwen Head and her press Dragon Gate. I brought a memento and spoke briefly with Sharon Bryan and Marlene Blessing. Some of my comments:
Gwen Head
and I first met forty years ago, in summer 1979. It was at the Floating poetry gallery on July
12, 1979. For five years after graduate school I had
been a self-employed poet, and I lived in Tacoma, my home.
My father
and mother lived in the house where I had been a child. On March 22 my father had a slight
stroke.
My mother
kept a daily diary. She writes that she
came home to find a note from him that the ambulance was taking him to the
hospital.
I kept a
week-at-a-glance, where I note that he telephoned me about this, and I got in
touch with my mother later.
My mother
had performed on that day in March with a women's singing group. She was their piano accompanist. She visited the hospital often, I went with her after church on Sunday.
A day or so
after my father was brought to the hospital I kept an appointment to see
Suzanne Ferris of Sea Pen Press about publishing. I rode the train to Seattle with a friend and
her son. We saw daffodil fields, I think
Suzanne Ferris met us at the Railroad Station, we also saw the cherry blossoms
at the U of Washington Quad.
My mother
cleaned my father's room and I helped.
She needed to turn the mattress and dust and sweep for him before he was
allowed to go home. My mother was 68
then and my father was 77.
July 12,
1979, a few months later, Suzanne Ferris had made a broadside of my poem
“Patchouli” for the Floating Poetry Gallery.
Pieces from the Floating Poetry Gallery would appear later at Seattle businesses. I felt concerned privately that the show
might have been a chance to show a 1968 painting on four by six Masonite that
was stored in my parents’ upstairs. I
had painted two pieces on Masonite that summer I was home from University of
Washington. But one reason I lived in a
small apartment was that I wanted my parents to not be upended by my noise and
activity. I felt shy at the thought of
the disruption of lifting the Masonite painting down the narrow stairwell that
turned twice between the bottom and the top.
Also
represented at the Floating Poetry Gallery were, Sharon Bryan, according to the
program, and Gwen Head. Gwen Head had
three poems featured in The Floating Poetry Gallery. And Sharon Bryan also had a poem in The
Floating Poetry Gallery.
A letter
from Gwen Head in December 1979, reintroduced her plan to publish books. Gwen Head brought her press Dragon Gate into
existence. In 1979, in notebooks where I
wrote poems, I began first efforts on the poem, The Gord Family Orchestra, about
my mother and her piano talent. In 1981
as I finished the poem I showed it to Gwen Head. I remember her suggesting that I should write
another poem, to go with it, about my father.
I wrote the poem, and both poems appeared in a second book Gwen published
by me, Shelter, in 1985.
I was happy
to give my parents copies of these books, with the poems about them.
New Facebook entry - on facebook there are some wonderful photographs of the Dime Store from the poem I had in the chapbook Tapwater - the poem called Kite. I placed a photo of the poem among Facebook Comments. 
