Guest post by Sarah Matalone
In his novel All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren suggested, “West is where we all plan to go some day.” That westward instinct shines in the Poems of the American West anthology, which was previewed with a reading at New Dominion Bookshop on Sunday afternoon.
From Laguna Beach to Montana, from Houston to the Mojave, we traversed a swath of the great American west, seated comfortably in the landing of the bookshop. A six-year old poet began the afternoon with a seasonally appropriate poem about Halloween. Following the young poet and in lieu of a promised performance by Chamomile and Whiskey, a friend of the band named Jimbo stepped in to play us some guitar and harmonica music, swooning us out of time and place with the words, “I love those cowboys, I love their gold.”
Toes still tapping, we quickly shifted gears. Pulitzer-prize winning poet Charles Wright read a few of his west-centered poems, one of which is included in the anthology. Wright, aptly sporting a silver bear claw-inscribed belt buckle, started us off with “Laguna Blues,” wherein the hot California weather conveys the speaker’s intangible unease. Loath to leave the west coast, Wright read his poem “California Dreaming,” the tile of which, he admits, he stole from The Mammas and Poppas. “Yesterday hung like a porcelain cup behind the eyes,” he read, his voice low. This wasn’t the California most tourists are used to.
From California, we moved to Montana, where Wright’s wife inherited a property and where he completes the majority of his writing. In “Sun-Saddled, Coke-Copping, Bad-Boozing Blues," an elegy for Wright’s brother-in-law, who died in 1986, we get the life of a man whose life was equally as hard as his death: “Renaissance boy, / With coke up your nose and marijuana in your eye, / We loved you the best we could, but nobody loved you enough. / Except Miss Whiskey. / You roll in your sweet baby’s arms now, as once you said you / would, / And lay your body down, / In your meadow, in the mountains, all alone.”
After Wright’s reading, we heard a variety of poems from the collection: “B.H. Fairchild’s “Brazil,” Nancy Ware’s “No Name,” Robert Frost’s “Once by the Pacific,” followed by a few poems from Olivia Ellis. Ellis, whose work is also included in the anthology, read us poems depicting the events from her own western experiences, bringing characters such as her father, mother, grandmother, and brother (who had flown from out west to see her read) to life in the poems “Signing Your Life Away” and “Looking West, Academy Cemetery.”
The sun setting on our eastern town, and Jimbo led us in a final sing-along. Like cowboys (and cowgirls) around a campfire, we sang the old folk ballad “The Streets of Laredo.” Even for just an hour, it was nice to get out west for a little while.
