Choose Three Famous People

Molly Fisk asked on Facebook: Name three famous people you'e known.

Mine would be a litany too long to post. How do I choose just three?

Then there's "what kind of famous?" Do I choose from writers, poets, actors, musicians, public figures, etc.? By how well I knew them—an actual event vs. a one-off? 

Writers: I shared a wee drop of whiskey with Seamus Heaney in an elevator in Rotterdam with the African poets. Rita Dove was my partner in the Breyton Breytenbach translation sessions. We did not drink whiskey.

I went drinking and sang Irish songs with Tess Gallagher and Raymond Carver at the Port Townsend Tavern in Washington. Let's just say alcohol was consumed and I was a lightweight. They weren't.

I hung out with Maya Angelou and her son Guy at National Poetry Week. We sat backstage with Lucille Clifton waiting for Maya to come offstage. They talked about the gravitational speed of their breasts reaching to their waists.

VARIATIONS IN WHITE AND BLACK

       Language is the music of thought.
—  —Andrei Vosnesenski

The composer Satie, who ate only what was white
would've loved this cavernous room suspended from dark beams
with its white rug, walls and venetian blinds of white linen.
The hostess, the guests, even the keyboards of the baby grands
and our poems—all in variations of white and black.
Sighting down the vault created by the raised piano lids
snuggled in each other's curves like tired lovers,
Kirk and Marilyn play a four-handed improvisation
on Pachelbel's Canon in D. Dah dada dá dah-dum. . .  I think: gun barrel.
Just after the war we are overly sensitive to images of war.
Sasha, a Soviet vet who survived fire, reads about Afghanistan.
More piano wires taut around the slender necks of poems
of those who can never break free or go back:
Marilyn to Cuba, Oleg to the Ukraine, Sasha to his unscarred face.
We prepare to read translations, but because each line
requires a leap of faith from one image to the next,
we fine-tune them mid-air. Music is the mother of mathematics.
At one point, near the end of Haydn's Variations by Brahms,
the notes begin to merge, forming new ones like hawks mating mid-flight.
At the right moment a chorus of frogs joins in
but there's a hole in the sky; how do they measure time?
As the last note descends, it is silent; they say frogs
are the living barometers of the earth's health.
They say Gaia's final chorus will be silence in spring.
They say in some places it's already begun.
Where does a Möibius strip begin and end?
Sasha transliterates Kirk's name, and we are drunk on this music,
the sum of this defenseless layer of human culture.
Notes leaping over the small mossy stones in our ears
add up to a temporary respite from the shadows of raptors—
useless angels of the war, any war.
Even the frogs are listening to the Hallelujah Chorus.


3/29/91
Santa Rosa 1991 The Paper Sasha: Alexandr Karpenko

Andrei Vosnesensky, National Poetry Week

Andrei Vosnsensky reading my CPITS/CAC poetry book, Poem for a Russian Child.

I spent an afternoon with Andrei Vosnesensky, who was the headline poet for National Poetry Week, ar Fort Mason, San Francisco. I was attempting to give Andrei a tabloid anthology I had edited with Oleg Atbashian, Soviet Poetry Since Glasnost. Herman Berlandt published the tabloid, via National Poetry Association.

Andrei Vosnesensky commenting on our publication, Soviet Poetry Since Glasnost, National Poetry Week, SF, 1990. Oleg Atbashian was my co-translator from Cherkassy.

Little did Oleg know that within a year (1990), he'd be in San Francisco, frantically working with me round the clock in an old military complex-cum-art center, Fort Mason, pasting up a newspaper-style tamizdat journal, "Soviet Poetry Since Glasnost," (Mother Earth), in time for Herman Berlandt's annual National Poetry Week. From 1989 to 1991, we published many new Soviet poets including Yan Martsinkevitch, and Viktor Kulle. (See also.)

Poetry Unites the World by Dr. Andrei Bantaş 

Soviet Poetry Since Glasnost 

Letter from Oleg Atbashian
The New Zamizdat

Oleg Atbashian—my jacket, my guitar.
National Poetry Week, SF, 1990.

October 31, 2010 at 12:15am ·

Maureen Hurley I think Celia Woloch took this photo

Alastair Ingram Is that Oleg Atabashian? The guy I recorded with when he was here?

Maureen Hurley Yep! He went back to the USSR, then it fell and he came back to NYC, he's a political commentator for the Russian Community. Google him.

Alastair Ingram Wow. That was quick! I will google him. I really like the recording we did together. Have you heard it?

Maureen Hurley Yeah, I'm having a bit of a nostalgia moment here. Pulled out my negatives to find a guy who was imprisoned at Manzanar—for a blog I'm writing and I got VERY distracted. Scanned my Galapagos prints too, Don't think I'll get them up tonight.

Oleg went back to the USSR, & to his wife, had another kid and she began stalking me in the internet...too creepy. Haven't talked with him since 9/11. He was next door in the AMEX building but he overslept and missed his train.

Now he's become the loose leaf darling of the ultra right teabaggers.


compiled from Facebook notes 4/24/2016