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Morton Marcus: Hello again, this is Morton Marcus and this is The Poetry Show. And in the background, we're playing the music of Vivaldi to introduce us to the spirit and the mood of today's show, which is a double show with two local poets,

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Miriam Malloy and Eliane Roe, and we will be talking to both these poets and listening to their poetry for the next hour in 15 minute sections. That is, first we will listen to Ms. Roe for 15 minutes and then we will listen and talk with Miriam

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Malloy for the following 15 minutes, and so we will have today's Poetry Show. Today- the first poet today will be Eliane Roe. Welcome to the show, Eliane. Can I call you Lil? Eliane Roe: Yes, you can. Thank you.

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Morton Marcus: I see and I know that you have published poetry in Reed Magazine, Quarry West, Foothill Quarterly, Oak Zone, and the San Jose Studies. And I also know that you are coming out with a book from Harper and Row within the year. Where else

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have you have published? Eliane Roe: That's about it. I've done a lot of readings, but not a lot of publication. I've published articles also in newspapers.

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Morton Marcus: Okay, where and what got you into the writing of poetry. So starting with the most impossible question first, where are you from? First of all this will- Eliane Roe: Well, I come from Northern Ontario in Canada. And

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I officially started to write poetry, the way I think a lot of women have started to write poetry, a lot of the women I've met anyway. I was a re-entry student in college and when I got into graduate school and taking more advanced courses in

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poetry, one of our professors invited us to write in the forms that we were learning, that we were studying to try to get inside the forms and see what they involved. And so we all wrote sonnets and sestinas, and then I went on to look for my

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own forms. I became very intrigued and that's how I started. But lately thinking about it, I realized that I've probably been getting ready to write poetry most of my life. I'm a French Canadian and growing up with two languages, I

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think has made me very sensitive and aware to language, and to its possibilities, and to its frustrations. And also lately, I've become more aware of the fact that I- in my very large family, I have a number of extremely witty and eloquent

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siblings, and I think I've grown up listening to them and that also got me started. I think. Morton Marcus: Wait, were you always the quiet one in the family?

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Eliane Roe: Yes, I was. Morton Marcus: Now you get your revenge with sharpened words. Well, let's hear some of the poetry of Eliane Roe and this will introduce us more to just what sibling rivalry and French

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Canadian language has brought to us. Eliane Roe: Okay. As long as I have already talked about my siblings, I think I'll I'll read a poem about them here, and it's called ‘’Eating Tomatoes.‘’ A lot of my poems are about food,

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in fact, a lot of the ones I brought today are about food. This poem has two epigraphs. The first one is from Milton, from ‘’Paradise Lost‘’ Book Nine, ‘’greedily, she engorged without restraint,‘’ and that's a- the line describing Eve eating the

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apple. The second epigraph is from my father in law, Nat Roe, ‘’she eats them right out of her hand like apples,‘’ he's talking about the fact that I would eat tomatoes, just like apples. He'd never seen that before.

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EATING TOMATOES Is it blasphemy, this luscious biting and sucking on a Sunday morning? Is it a sin to stand naked among the tomato vine with no Adam and no serpent? Only this roundness in my hand, warm

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as breasts, as heads of babies. In my mother's garden, the tomatoes grew and ripened even in the dark. On Saturday nights, my brothers crept in, fresh from mouthing sunburned girls, then crept out again, with flashlights and salt shakers to

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take a second harvest. To my mother's silence at their depredations, they said they'd exchange any woman any day just for one of her ripe tomatoes, fresh picked. Here in the gilded air, I am safe from brothers, and the soft tongue that licks

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my skin for salt is my own. Okay, I'd like to read another poem that's rather more positive about my family. And this- this poem is part of that awareness that I was talking about. As you get older and especially when

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you have children, you become more- more sensitive to your parents, to your birthplace, to your own origins. This poem has a general title and then some- some subtitles, the general title is

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Corbeil, Northern Ontario, which is the small farming community where I was born. Corbeil is my maiden name, it was the name of my grandfather, who was the first man to live in this area, and so it was named after him.

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CORBEIL, NORTHERN ONTARIO Birthplace, untouched since the glacier passed here. These smooth rocks ignited at our fathers hands are still exploding into angles of mica, granite, feldspar, snow sparkle

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in deep summer. They call this the temperate zone, where cleared fields grow quickly to forest, grasses, to tender herbs, then the wild flowers, daisy, fissel, goldenrod, the soft trees, pine, and alder, broadleaf woods, oak, and maple.

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Were antlers of moose, elk, deer move among the branches, majestic as candelabras as branches of trees, where mosquitoes and deer flies, light as snowflakes, as flakes of mica have the power to drive us mad on warm nights in full summer

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reunion. Our mother and father moved too quickly into the earth, are moving still in our mouths, the angle of cheekbone, our hands on needles, access wheels, in the tender bodies of our children. I have wanted to tear your body from mine, as

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soft fields are cleared of rocks and the deep hard roots of trees, but we are the same body. I know now I have always known, this zone is not temperate. Departure, water draws to the eyelid as melting ice draws upward under the shingle, as

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rocks to the surface of the earth through the frozen bodies of cleared fields. Snowflake on rock, glacier on pebble, the roundness of time explodes into angles of sunlight through sharp crystal.

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Morton Marcus: Are a lot of the poems about Canada or this- is sort of the introduction? Eliane Roe: This is the introduction. Yes. Morton Marcus: Well, it certainly, I mean- I just asked

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it off the cuff, you know, how this influenced it, and it certainly has. I thought that- that tomato poem was wonderful because I didn't know where it was going. I didn't know what your brothers were going to have to do with a poem and it was

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really wonderfully woven into a circle by the end. Very suggestive of some of the- the earth family and then the movement outward and yet always sort of coming back that it's mother's tomatoes, there's sort of a nurturing of the earth and

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the influence of mother becomes almost mythological. Eliane Roe: Yes, I think that motherhood and fatherhood, parenthood is a very complicated business. And the more- the older your children get, the more complicated it becomes. And

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I like this- the silence of the mother who is is glad, as you say, to nurture her children, is proud to nurture her children, and does it as a- as a natural function. And at the same time resents- resents their demands, I call them their depredations.

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So it's not- motherhood is not necessarily 100% positive, there are these feelings that you're being taken from, that you're losing. Morton Marcus: Do you have more of the Canada poems? So it might

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be nice if the first 15 minutes which really will amount around two more poems. If you read from- if you don't, then, you know, it's just my sense of symmetry. Eliane Roe: All right, I'll read-

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Morton Marcus: If you weren't planning on them, please don't. Eliane Roe: I'll read a prose poem. I wasn't sure how we were going to go here. I'll read a prose poem I wrote. In fact, lately I've been writing- I've become very intrigued with prose

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poetry. So some of- and this is a little long, maybe there won't be time for two, just this one. This poem has a title in French, which gets explained later. The title is: LA VEILLEUSE

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After Effie's farmhouse burned to the ground, they found the base of a kerosene lamp in the hot earth under the ashes. Effie was in a nursing home at the time of the fire, and she died there a few months later without knowing that her house had died

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first, and that a lamp base made of green glass was all that remained. My sister, Effie‘s daughter in law, inherited the lamp, which I coveted for its voyage into death and resurrection. I carried it three miles to the hardware store in

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the village and bought a wick, burner, and a chimney. These plain words reminded me of Effie and made me linger to tell the storekeeper the lamp‘s history, and my true reason for coming such a long way on an errand of so little urgency. He searched

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an ancient mail order catalog and opened it to a page filled with pictures of lamps. Most of them were tall and elegant, and had regal names like Duchess Melba, Victoria, but the one that looked most like Effie‘s was called "La Veilleuse," that-

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the late watcher. That night I lit Effie‘s lamp and took it with me into my sister's guest room. I watched the flame while I waited to fall asleep. The lamp burned calmly, except for an occasional tremor that made me look around the dim room to

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see what had gone by and moved the air. Somewhere between waking and sleeping, I saw a tiny flame shaped woman standing inside that chimmey; she looked supremely benevolent, like Effie, like the blue fairy metamorphosed out of a table

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lamp to watch over Pinocchio. Morton Marcus: Our second guest for the day is Miriam Malloy who has a book out from the Shore Press of Aptos called "Right Mirror on the Window." Welcome to the show, Miriam, and let's-

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let's see if you are also not a native of California. Where are you from? Miriam Malloy: Well, I am, a native of San Franciscan as a matter of fact, and lived most of my life in Northern

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California. Morton Marcus: When did you start writing? I know that you have had a fairly interesting childhood as well as adult life, weren't you- don't I recognize that name as being one of the

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Whiz Kids on radio? Miriam Malloy: Oh dear no, wouldn't that be nice though? Morton Marcus: You weren't? Well, someone told me that you were one of the original quiz- quiz -Whiz kids. I guess they-

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Miriam Malloy: Oh, I think what you're talking about is that I was one of those who was selected by Terman for the study of gifted children. Then when he went through the public schools in California, maybe that's what you heard.

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Morton Marcus: That's what I heard, things get changed. When did you start to write some poetry? Miriam Malloy: Oh, I suppose I was doing terrible imitations of Robert Louis Stevenson when I was very young. And then I wrote

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some of the typical adolescent kind of poetry when I was in high school. Then I got much too busy and interested in other things while I was in college, and married, and was working, and had no time for such things. But except for occasional-

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occasional poetry. For someone's birthday and that kind of thing on the staff was the library where I was working, or if somebody went on a vacation, or came back from a trip, we had a tradition of having a little celebration for them and- and

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having a silly poem read. So I was sort of in the habit of writing, I had the itch to scribble I suppose, and I was writing professional library parry- articles all at time too. But the real push was the death of my husband and- after four

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years of terrible illness. And there was no other way to express the emotion. So I branched out from the elegy type, you know, to- to a lot of other things. I was very interested that I had picked a number of poems to read today

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that dealt with family just as Lil has done and- and with the particular one about the orchard or about eating the apple. And I did one about that called "Out of the Orchard." Morton Marcus: Well, let's hear that and just begin right with

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the poetry. It is interesting, just one more thing to Lil, the- what I really enjoyed was the unobtrusive way that a lot of that religious imagery, especially Catholic imagery came in there, it was very, very nice. And in fact, I think that

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was a suggestion, certainly in Miriam's mind, of the apple in the tomato. Yeah, really, really very nice, Miriam, please. Miriam Malloy: Okay, well, this is peaches rather than tomatoes, but you'll see a third- a certain similarity I think

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OUT OF THE ORCHARD Peaches in a covered bowl after a long warm day have pursed their fragrance to a wind that sweeps me backward to an orchard 40 years away. Now I'm dancing there, under the fruit and sun,

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nose in the brandy air, mouth full of strange and several thirsts, asking father, "Can I pick one?" "May, not can I, ask correctly first." Eating today of the fruit, I know the heat that drove me out of the orchard clothed in words.

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Then I have a whole lot of poems about various members of the family. This one about my grandmother in whose home I grew up. And this, by the way, was inspired, as several other of my poems were, by a television program. You know, we all like

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to make such fun of the boob tube and claim that we never watch it and all that. Actually, I've gotten the inspiration for a number of, I think my better poems from programs on television. And this one came after watching Cousteau with his

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submarine archaeology in the Mediterranean. DEEP SEA DIVING After Cousteau I plunge through dark and cold, into childhood and grandmother's home thinking to find encrusted monuments of

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an ancient goddess. Is this a pedestal? Fingers of my memory fumble to pry the barnacles of 50 years away from the shape, how shrunken, of a Victorian bed, until I find the footboard, row of spindles, and peer between them at the night. I

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fold the thought of a feather quilt around my dream. Deeper, more shapes disclose themselves, I chip carefully at concretions of forgetting, freeing each lamp and table, toys retrieved to furnish the wrecked playhouse I have dreamed whole. I swim up

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carrying a doll sized figure. Now I break the surface, "Grandmother, warm sun!" Of course, I was talking there about the fact that as children, we see everything as so big and when we grow up, we find out how

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small it is. Morton Marcus: Very vivid imagery, though. I've noticed already in the two poems and of course I say this is a total fiction muse, I know your work, that you do write in different

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styles and some of your verses very closed and and rhymed and the other is free. Why don't you talk a little bit about that, about pursuing closed forms in this day and age? Miriam Malloy: Well, I think it's- it's wonderful practice.

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It's- it's just as an artist must learn draftsmanship before he can do modern non-representational poet painting. I think that poets should all know the forms, the classical forms, and as I sa they're sometimes- they're like

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finger exercises on the piano; they may not amount to much, but it's nice to feel that you've that you've conquered that, tha you know something about tha form and what it demands. And i gives you insights, I think into ways to write free vers

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Morton Marcus: Very, very definitely, I definitely agree. too I've also noticed in your poetry that when you do get into very strict or closed form, sometimes a lot of wit comes out and

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they're very, very funny poems. I don't know what you plan on reading next, but certainly at some time during the program, I would have the listeners out there be ready for that because Miriam made some very, very funny poems. Anyway, continue on

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another poem. Miriam Malloy: Well, all right, I'll go on with some about people, and this one's about my great grandmother. I've spent a lot of time, years in fact, doing research about her and-

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and studying the letters that my grandmother saved from my great-grandmother. And this has to do with the relationship between myself and her letters and her personality as I knew it as a small- when I was very small child.

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OLD CAMEO Oh formidable great-grandmother, mender of immigrant rags, unmoved through earthquake, outliving six husbands. I have studied your letters there flint and fossils. Listen for echoes

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from any who had seen you, and struggled for years to carve your face in words. Still, you keep me bound, bound to the chisel and brittle stone of my trade: typewriter, yellowed newsprint, plush covered albums while I try to clothe and house

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you to understand your spell and my obsession to immobilize you, leave you frozen, a classic specimen encased on a shelf out of my life at last. Today I opened a cotton padded box and found again your antique cameo. I had forgotten that carved

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image, Medusa of the serpent locks. I understand, I am the one transfixed. And about that same great grandmother who has taken up so much of my time and thought, this one:

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DURABLE MATERIAL which summarizes a good deal of her early life. I came to your musty basement sewing room, great grandmama to play with ball fringe, fancy braid, and old brass buttons.

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Looking up I saw your sidewalk sweeping skirt, a hearing aid hanging black and heavy from your blouse, and then a wrinkled face atop your ramrod posture. You were like the clothing in your sewing trunk, gray satin, navy serge, brown gabardine

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saved to be made over, durable, drab, soon boring, forever old. But 50 years have nearly filled a trunk of my home and taught me the skill of making over. Now, from patterns found in letters, I know how to tatter your blue drugged pinafore trudging behind

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the immigrant cart through knee high grass and Kansas flowers. I cover the skeleton of tradition with taffeta to drape the bustle of your russet dress that swirled and danced with young Sam Clemens in Virginia City. On old newsprint you advertise my

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terror when you lose a purse and warrant for your army with a pension. Now I see you stepping down from a San Francisco horsecar, a dark haired girl of 24, penniless, dry-eyed, clutching your baby daughter.

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Morton Marcus: For everyone who has just tuned in we are talking on a poetry show today to Eliane Roe and the person you just heard reading was Miriam Malloy, and we're doing this in 15 minute sections. I would also like to take this opportunity to

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thank Plaza Books for the generous donation which goes a long way to make this program possible. Miriam, as we come up to the half hour time, we either have time for two short ones, or one medium long one.

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Miriam Malloy: Well, I think I want to read this one because it's about a local person and is someone you know Morton, it's about Charisse Wilson, who happens to be my housemate. And I hope everyone will realize that when you take a character

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to write about, you must not believe everything that is written is literally true. Characters have a way of taking off, poems have a way of taking off just as fiction characters do on their own unexpected voyages.

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TESTIMONIAL I would say she has herbs and vinegar, but that would tenderize the texture and she is tough. First one admires her, then envies, then resents, flatly she is too capable at

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everything she tries. She has her own one way to do the simplest or the greatest thing and that is the one right way. Neither you nor any scripture can teach her a better. Give her several drinks and listen, She will pontificate. She knows all:

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politics, philosophy, feeding birds, running a club, or threading a needle, she can give you the final word. She loves to mystify, to say without prelude: "I read the article on Alice," leaving you to guess, Toklas? In Wonderland? Longworth of The

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Blue Gown? Does she really assume you knew? Her offhand manner puts you down. Still in revolt against her parents, polished furniture and formal dinner fuss. She is utilitarian tossing out beauty and balance with a cold bath water custom.

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And yet her letter are sardonic gems for the collector, her cooking rightly redolent and when distressed you need a mother confessor or a nurse for a gravely injured pip, no one can match her patient tenderness. Herbs and vinegar

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after all. I recommend her, yes. Well this is about another local person, or used to be local. She's moved away now: HOPING TO MEND

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Childless she takes in runaways, broken toys and tables from garage sales, cats whose owners have moved away, and gets her alcoholic handyman readmitted to the treatment center. She phones me, her line is always busy. I need to take the Flemings a

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casserole, they have the flu, you know the address? I just can't find my phone book. Vividly I see the clutter of her home. When I need a ride, she comes in her latest secondhand car overflowing with intentions. You won't mind holding Plum Toy

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while I take her to the vet? She hands me her aging cat. Let me clear the seat for you and here's a dress might fit your daughter. She tosses orphaned pillows and table mats to the backseat. Already a jumble of cardboard cartons, wooden boxes

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crammed with tools, gift wrappings, towels, homemade cookies, rolls of wire screen, a flat of eggs from a farm, and a nearly perfect ivory statue with Quan Yin Goddess of Mercy. Morton Marcus: This is The Poetry Show and we're now

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halfway through. And today we are talking with Eliana Roe and Miriam Malloy, and in a moment we will get back to talk to Ms. Roe and hear some more poems. But right now, some more announcements tonight in the only regular poetry reading

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going in Santa Cruz that is a continuous one, we have Marjorie Simon, Steve Turner, and Ellen Farmer who will be reading from their poems at Sweet Williams. Again Sweet Williams, for you people who do not know, is at 538 Seabright Avenue in Santa

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Cruz. There will be an open mic after the reading, and the reading begins at 7:30 and usually goes till 9:30. So that's Ellen Farmer, Steve Turner, and Marjorie Simon, and if Marjorie's name seems familiar to you, we did a show

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with her around four or five months ago when her second book, ‘’The Oatmeal Eater‘’, came out. So try to make that reading and it should be a good one. Also, I want to remind you that time is growing short, you only have until August 8 to enter your

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home in the county- the County Fair Poetry Contest. There are- [cut off] Well, Lil, it's probably seem a long time since you've been on microphone.

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Eliane Roe: No. Well, I‘ve enjoyed it. Morton Marcus: Great. This gives us- has given you a chance to get to Canada, get through customs and possibly make your way to California. Why don't you tell us what you're going to

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read now? Eliane Roe: Okay. Well, before I do, I wanted to mention a couple of things. One was- we were talking about tomatoes and eating peaches, the- the the bridge between the two of us

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just before, and there are people who believe that- that in the in the Garden of Eden, it wasn't an apple, it was a tomato. You often hear arguments for the pear as well. And the other thing I want to mention about tomatoes is that I

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understand that they were considered to be poison for a long time. People didn't eat tomatoes because they thought they were poison. They were called love apples. Yes. Maybe that's part of their tremendous appeal for some people. Writers

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are often asked where get their ideas and- and usually by non-writers because writers are aware that the problem is not ideas, it's what you do with them that gives you the heartache and the tears. Occasionally, I'll come across

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an idea that I have no other way of describing it other than that it's already a poem and I can't seem to be able to write a poem out of it- it just- it's- it overpowers me. This is a quotation from the San Jose Mercury News last October and it

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was an article- a general article describing the aftermath of the Lexington Fire, which raged for many, many days, and which I and a lot of people around here were very attentive to because it was on its way over the mountain to our houses

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here. This is the- the sentence, two sentences from the San Jose Mercury. "Lizards were consumed by the heat of the fire, leaving only featherweight outer skins that were carried aloft with hot air convection currents. One resident spoke of lizards coming

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down out of the sky, days after.‘’ I tried many times to write a poem on this quotation on our epigraph and I haven't been able to. I also want to read a poem that is found- that's another found

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poem, it's a poem made up of eight epigraphs from a Julia Child show. I didn't write any of this, this is all quoted from Julia Child and if you were- if this were television, you'd be able to see that the poem is in the shape of a fish. It's also a

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concrete poem. I call the poem: FISH FRAME One: A lot of people are afraid of fish because of the bones. Two: A fish frame is what's left after the edible parts are

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removed. Three: Always leave the head of the fish attached so that you'll know what it is afterwards. Four: To protect the fish from drying up- from drying out, dip

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it in fine breadcrumbs. Five: You may want to eviscerate the fish through the mouth [in French - unidentified] it's much prettier because you don't make a hole in it.

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Five- Six: After removing the bones, roll up the body, and make two circles on each side of the head like a pair of spectacles, this is called [in French - unidentified]. Seven: To make "une truite e colère," which means "a trout

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in anger," you simply pull the ail through the mouth, as if the fish were eating its own b dy, it's a very amusing thing to Eight: This trout comes from Idaho. Morton Marcus: People may want to know what a found poem is, in

00:38:37.320 - 00:38:48.190

one sentence or less, so it doesn't interfere with the rest Eliane Roe: A found poem is a poem that you find, it's already of your poems? there. One example of a found poem that I came across years

00:38:48.190 - 00:39:05.110

ago, I was driving past a- a housing development that was just being built and the walls were still only two by fours and through the houses I could see the sky, and there was a sign of real estate sign pointing to these houses that said, ‘’open

00:39:05.110 - 00:39:25.570

house.‘’ And maybe you know that Theodore Roethke wrote a poem called ‘’Open House.‘’ I noticed that one of your poems was on- about a dream, right? Where you went through the water. Was that-

00:39:25.600 - 00:39:34.220

Morton Marcus: I think that was actually swimming. I was actually swimming. Eliane Roe: I thought it had a certain dreamlike quality. Miriam Malloy: The one about Cousteau?

00:39:35.140 - 00:39:51.700

Eliane Roe: No, I think it was another. Well anyway, I like to write poems about dreams, speaking about sound poetry. I think that in our dreams- well, first, if you write a poem on your dreams, you begin to ask yourself is if it's a cop out.

00:39:51.700 - 00:40:09.430

Most people are bored to death by- by dreams, and don't want to think about them. But dreams can be extremely boring, but they can also be very fascinating. I also think that they're very important. And in- in many ways, in one way, everyone is a poet

00:40:10.900 - 00:40:26.320

who dreams and everyone dreams because that's when we use metaphors at their most powerful level and their deepest meanings. And- and maybe that's why we find them boring because we can't read the metaphors. We don't know how, or perhaps we're

00:40:26.320 - 00:40:37.270

afraid to Morton Marcus: Your- your a Jungian. I never realized that before. Eliane Roe: I don't know if I call myself a Jungian. Okay.

00:40:38.200 - 00:40:58.870

This poem is a poem based on a dream and in this- and in the poem I described- I described what the dream was. It's called: DREAM READING The women poets have gathered to read their poetry. The members

00:40:58.870 - 00:41:17.800

of the audience are wearing hats that change color and shape with each poem they hear. The reader has a perfect body from exercise and careful nutrition. Dancing is part of her reading and when she lifts her leg, the dusty soul of her shoe is a second

00:41:17.800 - 00:41:38.950

face. Later on in the poem, she arches her upper body backwards, it forms the letter C. She is the woman I saw yesterday at the beach. She was sitting on a low wall facing the sunset and moving her firm arms in ritual angles around her head. She also

00:41:38.950 - 00:41:57.100

bent her body to form a C, but forward and grasped her ankles with her hands. A backward arch like the poet's is much more difficult. Many people walk past the woman on the wall, but no one read the full clear sentence she was writing with her body.

00:41:57.910 - 00:42:17.920

The men stared especially hard beyond her at the water. The poet is moving down the aisle. She is dancing now with three other poets who are wearing dance skin leotards, American beauty rose. All four have taken the same aerobic dance classes.

00:42:18.550 - 00:42:34.480

They have studied the same diet books, and theatrical supply catalogs. They are the only people in the room who understand the poem. When the poem ends, the four poets form a straight line and dance. They hold on to each other from

00:42:34.480 - 00:42:51.580

behind like chorus girls, and kick as high as they can to show off their Hanes pantyhose. A woman from an advertising agency has come to the reading to choose a poet who will appear in a Hanes commercial. The chosen one will receive a generous

00:42:51.580 - 00:43:08.860

income for the next five years and will have time to write many more poems. The advertising woman chooses an eight year old girl with curls like Shirley Temple. She picks up the child and holds her high in her arms to let the audience know that

00:43:08.860 - 00:43:25.450

the poetry reading is over. Morton Marcus: Lil, as you look for another poem to read, what is the book that you're having out next year from Harper & Row? Eliane Roe: Well, it's a- it's a book for teenagers and it's- the

00:43:25.480 - 00:43:35.800

working title is ‘’Family Honor,‘’ which the publishers hate, and they want to change. Morton Marcus: It sounds like a mafia title actually. Eliane Roe: That's right, makes you think of the mafia? And

00:43:39.850 - 00:43:54.610

it's- it's an- it's a- was the right title for the- for the book that I set out to write and the wrong title for the book that I ended up writing, I'm sure that happens often. And it's a book- maybe that's why I'm so sensitive to thinking

00:43:54.610 - 00:44:06.190

about my own family lately, because it's a book about my own childhood. Morton Marcus: In the form of fiction, Eliane Roe: Yes, yes. So I've had that pleasure of reliving

00:44:06.280 - 00:44:18.820

all these experiences that I had, good and bad. Morton Marcus: Will you be reading anywhere in the recent future around the area? People come here [unintelligible] read? Eliane Roe: Not as far as I know.

00:44:19.920 - 00:44:27.180

Morton Marcus: I know you, as I said you had read with the Celebration of the Muse Readings two years ago. Eliane Roe: Yes, I did. Morton Marcus: I think it's a little too long that we have not

00:44:27.180 - 00:44:42.180

heard another Lil Roe reading, especially since hearing you today. Eliane Roe: My readings have been at the San Jose Poetry Center, and I read there last spring, but I haven't read there

00:44:42.180 - 00:44:53.460

lately. I've been busy writing this novel, as you know, it takes over your life. Morton Marcus: Okay, we have time for a couple more poems. I'm- times go so quickly.

00:44:53.610 - 00:45:10.050

Eliane Roe: All right. I think what I'll read are a couple of poems about my daughter. I've read- I've read poems about my family and about my siblings, and I'd like to read a couple about my daughter. The first one is called:

00:45:10.870 - 00:45:30.200

MENDING I am an alien in this violent land, where a single hand can tear a path that no turn or counter turn of mending will repair. I speak the tongue of threaded needle and live where

00:45:30.200 - 00:45:52.700

lovers ease buttons through one by one, an ordinary cloth is strong enough. This work is obedient to my hands. Unlike my daughter, who's tender feet I witness in my dreams on soft beds and stir all tables. I labor now to mend the past and

00:45:52.700 - 00:46:09.770

to create from our wounds damask roses in petit point, but the pattern in my tapestry maps the unyielding stone beneath, and the slightest turn, or counter turn in time unravels my most cunning stitchery.

00:46:14.930 - 00:46:30.480

Second poem is called: PIANO ACCOMPANIMENT From the blood warmed passages of her throat, my daughter is giving birth to the blues. The glistening indigo snakes slides

00:46:30.480 - 00:46:49.920

through her vocal cords, slips his head through the snare, leashed together, they walked down Basin Street to the tune of her sermon about life, and love, and love life, about male meanness and female pain. The beast obedient but untamed,

00:46:50.190 - 00:47:11.040

flashes its smoke pearled collar, waits for her memory to slip as mine has except when I feel it's cool reptilian slither cross the petals of the upright beneath my instep. My fingers stroke the keys, soft hammering on hard- on hard tongues of

00:47:11.040 - 00:47:29.610

ivory as smooth as the ivory of her neck, under my fingertips, my lips when she was three. Morton Marcus: Thank you very much Lil. That was Eliane, better known as Lil Roe, reading from her poems, and I certainly

00:47:29.610 - 00:47:38.620

hope that we'll be hearing you read around here soon so that the listeners can come and see you. Eliane Roe: Thank you. Morton Marcus: We will continue without a musical break to get

00:47:38.620 - 00:47:54.280

in as many of Miriam Malloy‘s poems, Miriam, I do say Marian, and it's my lips, you know, Miriam Malloy‘s poems as we can, but before we start, where have you been published? I mean, this can take up the next 10 minutes so

00:47:55.650 - 00:48:18.390

Miriam Malloy: Oh, no, not really, I‘d just say a few national places. Writers Digest once printed one little rhymed quatrain, The Horn Book Magazine, some weird places like the Worm Runners Digest which is a scientist's periodical, and

00:48:18.390 - 00:48:36.690

local places like the California State Poetry Quarterly, and Joe Drucker's Ally locally, and In a Nutshell which was printed in Sacramento. Oh, a lot of funny places that, you know, the kind that will take poetry.

00:48:37.770 - 00:48:52.440

Morton Marcus: And you've won the- several contests of the Chaparral(?) [unidentified] Miriam Malloy: Yes, I'm I won the the grand prize, the golden Pegasus trophy, from the State Chaparral(?) Convention and I

00:48:52.440 - 00:49:12.480

won the grand prize that same year at the Poets‘ Center in Berkeley and, you know, where can you go after that but down. I did wait- rent- win some of the county fair contests, and I've retired from that now I'm on the committee, so I'm not

00:49:12.510 - 00:49:25.980

submitting any more. Morton Marcus: Committee members are out. And in fact, if people have been wondering who judges that contest, the committee very wisely has established, I guess years ago, on the fact that all

00:49:25.980 - 00:49:40.130

judges will be from out of county, right. So no friends are going to win that thing. Please, we don't have much time, and I want to hear as much of your poetry as we can, Miriam Miriam Malloy: All right, well, here's one. Again, this is with

00:49:40.130 - 00:50:02.810

a relationship and this is a form, also it's a quatrain- I mean, a sinking, excuse me, made popular by Adelaide Crapsey as a form with two syllables in the first line, four in the second, six, eight, and then two again, so five line poem. And this is

00:50:02.810 - 00:50:15.510

called TO A SECOND HUSBAND Believe the words I say, when I lie in your arms, and never asked whose arms hold me in dreams.

00:50:19.590 - 00:50:40.170

Morton Marcus: I have only always feared that. Miriam Malloy: And this is one of relationship to daughters. TO MY DAUGHTERS WHO BRING ME RED ROSES With love and humble thanks let it be said, as I recall how many

00:50:40.170 - 00:50:54.960

of your years I brought you chiefly cabbages and tears, these roses glow like coals upon my head. I guess that's the kind you were talking about, I have a little wit and ping and rhyme and so on.

00:51:01.920 - 00:51:19.800

Morton Marcus: [inaudible] Miriam Malloy: Ah! That kind. Needless to say [unidentified] doesn't see herself in it completely. Well, here's another that's in a fixed form and it has a local interest. It comes

00:51:19.800 - 00:51:42.420

from the storm, you read one about the fire, but this is about the big storms that destroyed so many homes on the coast, and it's a villanelle with many refrain lines. Waiting for an order to evacuate. All day, all night we

00:51:42.420 - 00:52:03.660

hear the roll and roar of trucks with patching gravel, stone, and sand, of wind and waves that eat away our shore. With windows boarded, sandbags at the door, the next house drowns when seawall breaks expand. All day, all night we hear the roll and

00:52:03.660 - 00:52:24.210

roar from mountain quarries, boulders by the score are bulldozed over cliffs to feed the strand of wind and waves that eat away our shore. Upstream the flood has slashed and fume- floomed a gore of redwoods, timber cutting never

00:52:24.210 - 00:52:46.500

planned. All day, all night we hear the roll and roar. These logs and planks of yesterday's wrecked floor return as battering rams at the command of wind and waves that eat away our shore. If we are dispossessed, can trucks restore our windowed

00:52:46.500 - 00:53:02.580

world? Another storm's at hand. All day, all night, we hear the roll and roar of wind and waves that eat away our shore. Morton Marcus: That actually is the sound to me, like a fairly strict "Oh no."

00:53:03.270 - 00:53:16.860

Miriam Malloy: It is, really is, there's only two rhyme sounds and- and the last lines- first and last lines are repeated as refrains alternatively Morton Marcus: Remember I tell my class about that, they don't-

00:53:16.860 - 00:53:25.560

they don't believe it when I tell them what that poem is like. No- No man a woman would put themselves through [inaudible] Miriam Malloy: Well, I've written another one but I won't

00:53:25.560 - 00:53:48.300

bother reading that one. How about: RELATIONSHIP WITH PEOPLE, YES, BUT ALSO WITH PETS Quiet please day sleeper, curled on my unmade bed, fur filling a crescent valley between blanket ridges, nose against that soft

00:53:48.300 - 00:54:09.150

consoling he lies purr fragmenting into fringes. Every morning when his bowl of food is tongue rasped clean he finds this nest Adede(?) must have made for him alone to rest in after a hard night's prowl. And I compulsive picture

00:54:09.150 - 00:54:35.910

straightener, rinser and stacker of dishes, plumper of pillow, sigh passed the rumpled bed, too tender to dispossess the smugness in that hollow. Here's one about a painting that is still on my wall, and its

00:54:35.910 - 00:54:53.310

painter. A still life has hung in my room so many years that it glazed my eye, the look of it, and I'm the one who painted it, who gave it, faded flat into the wall. But moved tonight, I look through

00:54:53.310 - 00:55:17.310

long new frames as doorways open and there it hangs, a house length perspective away, the giving 30 years ago, at this remove trompe l'oeil, the melon, persimmon, and lemons stand out as in a shadowbox. Globes of flesh and skin ready to roll off

00:55:17.310 - 00:55:37.590

the wood that reflects them. The plate perched against a wall and a pleat of cloth might tilt, crash if my head were to shake or my breath to blow. Still life, dead painter, stand firm inside my shadow box of bone.

00:55:45.120 - 00:56:03.960

Well, I could give you a song. I can give you- no I want this one. "Artist as Mystic" because we've been talking a lot about where you get your inspirations and how you write and so on. And this was inspired again by a television program on three

00:56:03.960 - 00:56:19.470

artists of the Northwest, including Theodore Redgrave of course. ARTIST AS MYSTIC The artist moves slowly, studies ropes on a wharf, knots in a

00:56:19.470 - 00:56:44.580

lightning cloven tree. How a cabbage may be sliced, how rocks may be piled, how ripples reflect, how love, how memory, how the mind brush, chisel, pin, or camera may frame the instant universe in the slow art.

00:56:49.290 - 00:57:06.360

Morton Marcus: We have been talking with Miriam Malloy and Eliane Roe who have been reading their poetry for the last hour on this- The Poetry Show. I'm Morton Marcus and I would like to thank Plaza Books and Stuff for their generous donation

00:57:06.360 - 00:57:25.410

which has made a good portion of this show possible. Next week Joe Stroud will be back with another show. I'll be seeing you probably the week after that. Or I'll be talking to you the week after that. Stay tuned for Leon Allen's "Jazz Kitchen" when he

00:57:25.410 - 00:57:28.110

will be cooking up a mess of good sounds.