Bibliographic record and links to related information available from the Library of Congress catalog.
Note: Contents data are machine generated based on pre-publication provided by the publisher. Contents may have variations from the printed book or be incomplete or contain other coding.
CONTENTS PREFACE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND THANKS CANYON ROAD CHRONICLES Naked Ladies on the Road You've Just Got to Love Their Lingo (The Way We Are/Were) Planted in a Good Acre Artwalk Canyon Road The Saga of Gypsy Alley The Canyon Road Gallery Scene (Shit Happens) High Walls Luminarias DeVargas and the Canyon Road (The Fiesta Run) Avocado ONE BLOCK NORTH AND ONE BLOCK SOUTH Santa Fe River Plumbing Crisis How Santa Klaus Came to the Kremlin Epitaph for Escondido La Acequia Madre (The Mother Ditch) Rites of Passage City Different Drought PAST ATALAYA THE PATHS TO PECOS LEAD BUT TO THE BRAVES El Camino del Cañon Out to the Randall Davey The Ridges of Santa Fe County On First Looking into Chapman's Boner Chapman's Road (Paso por Aquí) Remarks at Pecos National Monument OUTPOSTS Melting in the Dark, 1-5 Living in the Lap of Luxury. It's for the Birds THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY NOTES ON THE POEMS PREFACE The neighborhood through which Santa Fe's Canyon Road runs suffers from city schizophrenia. Residences, whether modest or palatial, all enjoy market values far over reasonable New Mexico values. As our real estate brokers tell us: location is everything. Owners fantasize of the possibility of sliding into commercial uses, which translate into higher value and rents, while at the same time maintaining quiet, peaceful, neighborly, residential living space. Canyon Road, once the domain of resident artists, families, mud huts, and small shopkeepers, has become a creeping commercial dreadnought of high-density, high-traffic, high-end sophisticated art galleries and restaurants, with land values and rent high beyond imagination. Potential commercial users covet residential areas. Midway between the Acequia Madre (mother irrigation ditch) and the Santa Fe River and within easy walking distance of the historic downtown plaza, Canyon Road attracts both visitors and locals. In a state where poverty levels are also high, the average downtown hotel room rates are reported to be higher than those in seven major tourist cities. The poems you will read took shape within this framework. In the eyes of some, Santa Fe has become a national treasure, a high-desert Disneyland, a small city in search of an identity, "tourist town U.S.A.," a caricature of itself. Santa Fe is marketed as a multi-cultural, artistic, high-tech infomesa, a high-thought, book-buying, laid-back, dress-down, animal-and-peace-loving, liberal, live-and-let-live, playground paradise in which the world is wonderful, the weather is wonderful, the light is legend, small businesses are locally gardened, and as the place to get and be high. All these images are projected to the outside. Often overlooked to the dismay of the over-confident and the oblivious (those who live without Santa Fe's invisible world) is the community's deep and fervent religious and racial roots that are passionately preserved and protected. See the title poem. They don't call it the City of the Holy Faith for nothing. The City's strength lies in a cornucopia of cacophonous and quirky characters contending, complaining, cajoling like an uncontrolled chorus in a small town hall meeting, and communicating through all available channels, many with a reverence for preservation in all its societal and cultural aspects. They are free-spirited, expressive, devotional people and activists on both sides of many issues. Let's open up an argument in Santa Fe. Choices exist for the voices of the people, people who are doing all those things that are normally expected of human beings. The poems capture and capsulize some wonders and some warts. This, my second published volume of poetry, continues to reflect a preference for, but not strict adherence to, formal and traditional English versification that uses metrical patterns and the device of rhyme to heighten effectiveness and, in the absence of either, at least some rhythmic quality. The use of lines that are pleasing to the ear do not create limitations on expression. Understanding poetry is often difficult. The ear of the 21st century is not tuned. The meaning of many poems is not easily accessible. Some of the poems in this volume offer references to assist the reader. These references are found near the end of this volume. A poem need not have meaning. The meaning need not be evident. As discussed in the Broadview Anthology of Poetry, one school of thought suggests that "meaning should inhere in the poem's expressive and sensuous qualities, not in some explicit statement or versified idea" and that "expressiveness works through figurative rather than literal modes." Others look to poetry for insights into the "nature of human experience, and expect elevated thought in carefully wrought language." Some of the concepts expressed in my poems may offend, because of what may seem to be moralistic or didactic or judgmental expression. Suggestion has been made that an appropriate subtitle should be "feces, species and coprophilia." Many have stepped in it. A prominent poet, William Everson, has written: As a genre political poetry is both didactic and rhetorical. To be effective it must be intensely involved and ideologically committed, though such commitment must be moderated by intellectual discrimination, moral courage, and, sometimes, irony. Within these bounds it is best when it is extreme: intemperate, explosive, and scornful. Indeed, unless it invokes the leap for the jugular, we are not apt to pay much attention to it. Only when it shocks with relevance can it change the course of human inertia. Being poetry, it must be concentrated and blistering rather than rational and discursive, or we will cling to prose and remain in dispassionate analysis. As an axiom it can be said that the rougher political poetry is, the better we will like it, or, if it opposes our own predilections, the more deeply will we fear it. Political poetry speaks to the mind, certainly, but at least it speaks through the mind to the passion. In spite of ourselves, hearing it, we are moved. I was first a sports writer and I am now a lawyer, having practiced some 46 years with a heavy concentration in business and economic development and having published a number of legal articles in national and local venues. I have run long races and climbed high mountains. It is hard to know how poetry grabbed me to provide a release from the strain of daily life in all its professional, health, and familial components. I love to think about things around me and to express in poems how I feel about them, feelings that seem to be universally enjoyed. I feel blessed that my daily life is haunted by poetic images. Yes, it is therapeutic, but it is also something more. I hope the poems evoke and provoke your emotions, for that is the purpose of poetry. I thank my wife Esther for hanging in there with me, reading and correcting the manuscript, and designing the cover and all interior artwork. I thank Rose, whose fingers have lingered over these poems for years, and Ahza for fine-tuning. I thank Jim Smith for publishing this book, more than he will ever know. And, thanks for reading. Mike Sutin Santa Fe, New Mexico April 2005 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND THANKS: For permission to use the cover page photographs, acknowledgment and thanks are made to the following: For "Children's Fountain" originally installed in DeVargas Park, Santa Fe, New Mexico, to the sculptor, Linda Strong. For "Innermost," to the sculptor, Malcolm Alexander. For permission to publish or reproduce the poems in this volume, acknowledgment and thanks are made to the following: For "Naked Ladies on the Road," to the author, Guadalupe Villegas (pseudonym), and Gershon Siegel and Linda Braun, publishers, from Eldorado Sun, Vol. 216. For "The Canyon Road Gallery Scene," to the author, Calderon Chichicastanega (pseudonym), and New Frontiers of New Mexico, the publisher, from New Frontiers of New Mexico. c by New Frontiers of New Mexico. For "High Walls," to the author, Moises C. de Baca (pseudonym), and New Frontiers of New Mexico, the publisher, from New Frontiers of New Mexico. c by New Frontiers of New Mexico. For "DeVargas and the Canyon Road" and "Out to the Randall Davey," to the author and to the Santa Fe Striders, the publisher of Mile Markers. For "Avocado," to the author, Joaquin de la Raza (pseudonym), and publisher, The Sun.
Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication:
Santa Fe (N.M.) -- Poetry.