St. Paul, MN 55102
Dear John Minczeski,
This is just to say that three years after giving me your book, Gravity in San Francisco, I wish to finally thank you. Last week I accidentally pulled your book off the shelf: synchronicity comes in 3s; I also stumbled across Daniel Gabriel’s address. As if on cue, the latest COMPAS anthology arrived today, opening to a student poem and your name leaped out!
On the eve of going off to Billings for a reading at Writer’s Voice and to teach poetry, I opened your book to A Poet in the Schools: Brainerd, Minnesota. I always meant to write; I didn’t realize you’d tucked your card between the sheets of delicious poems. So all this flurry of connections, coupled with Catholic guilt, prompted me to write.
Perhaps it’s also because of another unrelated event for I also received a letter from Poland today—from a friend, once afraid of commitment, who married the girl next door: a civil wedding and a church one—as if the first one didn’t quite take—Soviet rules still apply. He sent photos of a post-industrial Walbrzych where happiness is possible because the mines have closed.
Lonesome for California, Richard visited a Hard Rock cafe in Wroclaw. Sent translations and poems in yet another adopted tongue—his Polish is improving; Lithuanian, his mother tongue. From the look of his letter, I’m afraid he’s losing his English. I vaguely recognize the word Narodzenia—like the Russian (which I’m losing). The letter smells of cheap tobacco and coal smoke. Tak! I thought of Milosz’s lamenting: I did not choose California, it was given to me. . . and Never again will I kneel in my small country, by a river,/ So that what is stone in me could be dissolved… I write here in desolation.
I remembered something you once wrote about your grandfather in Poland, so I found myself returning again to your book: Janosz. One poem led to another, not necessarily in the given order. The ramparts of memory work in such strange ways. Our own poems, and the poetic landscape of others continues to haunt us, and we’ve no control over it. Tongues loosen other tongues. A slagheap of words sliding down the slopes of despair. Zgoda, zgoda.
I remembered something you once wrote about your grandfather in Poland, so I found myself returning again to your book: Janosz. One poem led to another, not necessarily in the given order. The ramparts of memory work in such strange ways. Our own poems, and the poetic landscape of others continues to haunt us, and we’ve no control over it. Tongues loosen other tongues. A slagheap of words sliding down the slopes of despair. Zgoda, zgoda.
I particularly liked Asparagus, Monteluco and My Father’s Kitchen. A friend of mine, Celia Woloch, searched for ancestors in winter; the City of Light offered refuge from what she found in the darkness of Prague. She writes about being a hunkie, the silent steel mills of Pittsburgh where her father first worked, then later, in the hangars, but he never flew the blue distance of sky. Before his stroke, we spoke a rough English peppered with Polish, Ukrainian & Russian. Now it’s too late to translate the secrets trapped behind his eyes. Your words remind me so much of Celia Woloch’s. A common ancestry and native tongues. What is poppel?
At this point you’re probably wondering who is writing you literally out of the blue. In case you can’t place me, we met at the California Poets in the Schools international conference at Fort Mason Center for the Arts in—1993? Everything’s been a bit of a blur, as my father had died the previous Christmas, and my mother, after the CPITS conference, then my uncle—all within a year’s time. I just went down, down, down.
At this point you’re probably wondering who is writing you literally out of the blue. In case you can’t place me, we met at the California Poets in the Schools international conference at Fort Mason Center for the Arts in—1993? Everything’s been a bit of a blur, as my father had died the previous Christmas, and my mother, after the CPITS conference, then my uncle—all within a year’s time. I just went down, down, down.
Suddenly it’s important to write those letters—because death made me realize they needed commitment to paper. Little in the way of poetry (or letters) has emerged from grief. A coming up for air as if grief were a river to drown in, then I learned the crawl.
This letter, not quite the beginnings of a poem but it roils around like a steelhead on a thin line, so I just gave in to the urge. I hope you won’t think it too strange an impulse. A New Year’s resolution of mine is to write to those I’ve been composing imaginary letters to in my head for the past few years. This, my new art form. Sending them, of course, is an entirely different matter.
And so it’s been raining like hell today, over 5 inches in one to three hours, depending upon the rainshadow —a good a time as any to write. So much water, the roads are swollen creekbeds. Flashfloods. I suppose you’ve heard of our January floods. (See diatribe below). The facts, so astounding, they’re no longer comprehensible. The Russian River’s to crest tomorrow morning at 36 feet; today I watched sheets of water cascade off the vineyards onto the roads (tomorrow they’ll be underwater), and the creeks rising up several feet in 2 hours.
Jan.1-15, 1997: New Year’s Eve. The rain falling in sheaves at the stroke of midnight as if the sky had opened a vast drain, water flooding the roads. I nearly skidded out of control when I hit invisible pockets of water. My New Year’s resolution: to find my driveway, an impromptu creekbed after 7 inches of rain. The river, 40 feet above its banks and rising. New Year’s Day, The Russian River (near my cabin) crested at 46 feet above summer banks, 32 feet is flood stage, but the floods of 1986 (at 53 feet), and 1995 - 96 were worse. I had no idea the Central Valley would fare worse. The worst recorded storm in California’s history, and of the century—a warm, tropical storm called the Hawaiian Punch (as if naming tamed storms) dumping oceans of hurricane-style rain, melting the snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas. The Great Central Valley, under 6 - 15+ feet of water, will continue to suffer massive flooding at least another week due to a series of seasonal high tides. More rain on the way. They say it’s like a vast bathtub slowly overflowing.
When the rains moved east, they restored ancient shorelines of the Great Central Valley laguna that once extended 700 miles from Mt. Shasta to the Tehachipi Mountains near Los Angeles, to its original pre-1850s goldrush state (before hydraulic placer mining in the Sierra Nevada range silted the Delta, and land reclamation projects drained it). How soon people forget the land was marsh, though “reclaimed” isn’t exactly the right word, since the land was dyked within the past 100 years. Most of the “islands” (really polders) are 15 feet or more below sea level. Then 7 foot tides and high winds created 28 breeches along 6,000 miles of levee; the ungirded rivers: the Sacramento, Feather, American, Mokelumne, Stanislaus, Tuolumne, Merced, and the San Joaquin mingle and wander where they please. Each day, a new catastrophe. From Lake Tahoe, the tentacled Truckee River in Reno went gamboling into all the casinos at once. The streets had rapids! Yosemite is a lake again, not a valley. Whole campground floated off, the bears wakened early from hibernation, are partying on food abandoned by fleeing winter campers.
Meanwhile on the coast, the Russian, the Eel, the Gualala, and the Napa rivers meekly climbed back into their beds after a few days’ freedom. The Russian River has had four 100-year floods within a year’s time. As one man asked, “How many 100-year floods can we have within a decade?” The theory is that the river disastrously floods on the average of once every 100 years. We’ve had a dozen big floods since 1950. This year Santa Rosa got 23 inches of rain in 7 days, nearly its total annual rainfall. We got double the rainfall—12 miles away in Forestville, and Cazadero, at 100+ inches, is a “rainforest”.
Damage is estimated at $1 billion; 44 of our 58 counties, disaster areas; more than 290 square miles underwater. After 40 inches of rain in a week (14” in one day), the Feather River crested 70 feet above its banks, carving a new channel (or reclaiming a prehistoric one) across the Central Valley. Boulders the size of micro-buses clattered down the Feather River Canyon, sounding like giant pool balls, or ninepins. They say the canyon vibrated all night long. All that newly exposed gold in the riverbed! Hydrological numbers are staggering. Oroville Dam flowed at 100,000 gallons per second (imagine six Olympic-size swimming pools filling every second), downstream it was even faster! Within the first 7 days of the New Year, the Sacramento River, at 500,000 fps, carried enough water to meet the needs (89,600 acre feet) of San Francisco for 33 years. An acre-foot is the equivalent of a football field flooded one foot deep; a family of 5 uses less than that a year. All rivers have either reached or exceeded highest recorded flood levels recorded in modern times.
Row crops washed out to sea: asparagus beds, wheat, rice—gone. The orchards & vineyards will survive. After the water receded in Forestville, cabbages & “yuppie” lettuce floated across Guerneville Road at the Laguna de Santa Rosa. Like dense mats of colorful leaves, unharvested red chili peppers and enormous yellow squashes floating atop the orchards & vineyards on River Road marked the high water mark: red chilies dangling in the treetops on this last day of Little Christmas! Massive livestock losses. The surviving cattle refuse to leave pastures, spend their days looking like spotted hippos in a chocolate sea. No way to milk them, creatures of habit, they resist rescuing. The legs of the unlucky ones pluck strands of barb-wire fences until they drown. Or hypothermia kills them. No arcs or hot tubs in sight. Blue skies, sunny days, and an Arctic cold snap, black frosts, rare coastal snow.We’re not used to such weather in this “Mediterranean” zone. California continues to remind us it’s a sometimes dangerous land of extremes, as we continue to mindlessly grow (31 million), develop & build on a fragile land that is be better left for agricultural use.
* * * * * * * *
Not hard to guess what’s on my mind. In 1994 I wrote a flood piece that turned into a book-length series of prose poems, Obsession: Building an Arc in the Dark of the Year with scratchboard drawings (they’re like woodblock prints), and I joke that the river keeps rising each year to give me new material because I haven’t yet finished the piece! However, I’m nearly saturated (pardon the pun) by it. They say we never finish our poems, they abandon us. Or is it the other way around? I’ll glean some images from the above insert, do a few more scratchboards, then seek a publisher.
I hope all’s going well with you, your writing, teaching, etc. Any new books? I’ve not been very diligent about sending out my poetry manuscript. I’ve a long essay coming out in a South African publication—I was at Poetry International in Rotterdam, working with South African poet Breyten Breytenbach, on a translation project. Picked up a smattering of Afrikaans in the process; it’s very close to Dutch which I profess not to know, but I’ve spent so much time in Holland, the language has gotta be in there somewhere along with my Spanish, fractured Russian, and almost non-existent church Latin and Gaelic.
And so it’s been raining like hell today, over 5 inches in one to three hours, depending upon the rainshadow —a good a time as any to write. So much water, the roads are swollen creekbeds. Flashfloods. I suppose you’ve heard of our January floods. (See diatribe below). The facts, so astounding, they’re no longer comprehensible. The Russian River’s to crest tomorrow morning at 36 feet; today I watched sheets of water cascade off the vineyards onto the roads (tomorrow they’ll be underwater), and the creeks rising up several feet in 2 hours.
Jan.1-15, 1997: New Year’s Eve. The rain falling in sheaves at the stroke of midnight as if the sky had opened a vast drain, water flooding the roads. I nearly skidded out of control when I hit invisible pockets of water. My New Year’s resolution: to find my driveway, an impromptu creekbed after 7 inches of rain. The river, 40 feet above its banks and rising. New Year’s Day, The Russian River (near my cabin) crested at 46 feet above summer banks, 32 feet is flood stage, but the floods of 1986 (at 53 feet), and 1995 - 96 were worse. I had no idea the Central Valley would fare worse. The worst recorded storm in California’s history, and of the century—a warm, tropical storm called the Hawaiian Punch (as if naming tamed storms) dumping oceans of hurricane-style rain, melting the snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas. The Great Central Valley, under 6 - 15+ feet of water, will continue to suffer massive flooding at least another week due to a series of seasonal high tides. More rain on the way. They say it’s like a vast bathtub slowly overflowing.
When the rains moved east, they restored ancient shorelines of the Great Central Valley laguna that once extended 700 miles from Mt. Shasta to the Tehachipi Mountains near Los Angeles, to its original pre-1850s goldrush state (before hydraulic placer mining in the Sierra Nevada range silted the Delta, and land reclamation projects drained it). How soon people forget the land was marsh, though “reclaimed” isn’t exactly the right word, since the land was dyked within the past 100 years. Most of the “islands” (really polders) are 15 feet or more below sea level. Then 7 foot tides and high winds created 28 breeches along 6,000 miles of levee; the ungirded rivers: the Sacramento, Feather, American, Mokelumne, Stanislaus, Tuolumne, Merced, and the San Joaquin mingle and wander where they please. Each day, a new catastrophe. From Lake Tahoe, the tentacled Truckee River in Reno went gamboling into all the casinos at once. The streets had rapids! Yosemite is a lake again, not a valley. Whole campground floated off, the bears wakened early from hibernation, are partying on food abandoned by fleeing winter campers.
Meanwhile on the coast, the Russian, the Eel, the Gualala, and the Napa rivers meekly climbed back into their beds after a few days’ freedom. The Russian River has had four 100-year floods within a year’s time. As one man asked, “How many 100-year floods can we have within a decade?” The theory is that the river disastrously floods on the average of once every 100 years. We’ve had a dozen big floods since 1950. This year Santa Rosa got 23 inches of rain in 7 days, nearly its total annual rainfall. We got double the rainfall—12 miles away in Forestville, and Cazadero, at 100+ inches, is a “rainforest”.
Damage is estimated at $1 billion; 44 of our 58 counties, disaster areas; more than 290 square miles underwater. After 40 inches of rain in a week (14” in one day), the Feather River crested 70 feet above its banks, carving a new channel (or reclaiming a prehistoric one) across the Central Valley. Boulders the size of micro-buses clattered down the Feather River Canyon, sounding like giant pool balls, or ninepins. They say the canyon vibrated all night long. All that newly exposed gold in the riverbed! Hydrological numbers are staggering. Oroville Dam flowed at 100,000 gallons per second (imagine six Olympic-size swimming pools filling every second), downstream it was even faster! Within the first 7 days of the New Year, the Sacramento River, at 500,000 fps, carried enough water to meet the needs (89,600 acre feet) of San Francisco for 33 years. An acre-foot is the equivalent of a football field flooded one foot deep; a family of 5 uses less than that a year. All rivers have either reached or exceeded highest recorded flood levels recorded in modern times.
Row crops washed out to sea: asparagus beds, wheat, rice—gone. The orchards & vineyards will survive. After the water receded in Forestville, cabbages & “yuppie” lettuce floated across Guerneville Road at the Laguna de Santa Rosa. Like dense mats of colorful leaves, unharvested red chili peppers and enormous yellow squashes floating atop the orchards & vineyards on River Road marked the high water mark: red chilies dangling in the treetops on this last day of Little Christmas! Massive livestock losses. The surviving cattle refuse to leave pastures, spend their days looking like spotted hippos in a chocolate sea. No way to milk them, creatures of habit, they resist rescuing. The legs of the unlucky ones pluck strands of barb-wire fences until they drown. Or hypothermia kills them. No arcs or hot tubs in sight. Blue skies, sunny days, and an Arctic cold snap, black frosts, rare coastal snow.We’re not used to such weather in this “Mediterranean” zone. California continues to remind us it’s a sometimes dangerous land of extremes, as we continue to mindlessly grow (31 million), develop & build on a fragile land that is be better left for agricultural use.
* * * * * * * *
Not hard to guess what’s on my mind. In 1994 I wrote a flood piece that turned into a book-length series of prose poems, Obsession: Building an Arc in the Dark of the Year with scratchboard drawings (they’re like woodblock prints), and I joke that the river keeps rising each year to give me new material because I haven’t yet finished the piece! However, I’m nearly saturated (pardon the pun) by it. They say we never finish our poems, they abandon us. Or is it the other way around? I’ll glean some images from the above insert, do a few more scratchboards, then seek a publisher.
I hope all’s going well with you, your writing, teaching, etc. Any new books? I’ve not been very diligent about sending out my poetry manuscript. I’ve a long essay coming out in a South African publication—I was at Poetry International in Rotterdam, working with South African poet Breyten Breytenbach, on a translation project. Picked up a smattering of Afrikaans in the process; it’s very close to Dutch which I profess not to know, but I’ve spent so much time in Holland, the language has gotta be in there somewhere along with my Spanish, fractured Russian, and almost non-existent church Latin and Gaelic.
I house-sat the summer in Amsterdam—it must’ve rained the whole time, so I came home this fall—to more rain! Should I devolve? Gills and fins could be interesting—or a social challenge. Inexplicably I am reminded that the Russian words for soul and shower are close enough in sound to be confusing. Duchá. What’s the Polish word?
Maybe this letter’s merely a purgatorial floundering in the baptismal font called California. . . Best to you—and perhaps we will meet again someday in San Francisco, St. Paul and/or on the page?
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