Child of My Child: Poems and Stories for Grandparents
Thursday evening, 7:30 p.m., February 10
Moe’s Books, Telegraph Avenue, between Dwight and Haste, near the U.C. Berkeley Campus.
Presented by Poetry Flash
Kenneth and Sandi Salzmann have created a unique anthology, begun in 2009. In describing the inspiration behind Child of My Child: Poems and Stories for Grandparents, Ken Salzmann says this is “not your grandparents‘ collection of poems and personal essays about grandchildren.”
Salzmann notes that “the arrival of a new generation brings undeniable evidence of aging and mortality. That may be a particularly tough pill to swallow for the millions of Baby Boomers who have aged into this new role (and sometimes bristle at taking on traditional grandparent names).” Whether they like it or not, many baby-boomers now find themselves caretaking grandchildren as their own children struggle in an unpredictable economy.
Among its 60 writers, Child of My Child features eight Bay Area writers. Five will be on hand for a celebratory reading at Moe’s Books in Berkeley, hosted by Poetry Flash. Linda Lancione, John Oliver Simon, and Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, will be joined by Meredith Escudier and Elaine Starkman. (The other three local contributors are Pearl Karrer, of Palo Alto, Lynore Banchoff of Menlo Park, and Arlene Mandell of Santa Rosa.)
Lancione and Simon share a strong connection. Beside being writers, Lancione and Simon also have a granddaughter in common: her son is married to his daughter, and Tesla Rose is the subject of several poems each submitted to Child of My Child.
Another contributor is Elaine Starkman, a Walnut Creek poet and popular creative writing teacher, whose work was most recently featured in My Dreaming Waking Life: Sixty-Six Poems, Six Poets, a collection by Contra Costa County poets. Starkman comments that “as far as I can remember, I’ve never been to a poets’ reading on grandkids!”
Starkman recalls taking a walk in a nearby apricot orchard with her grandson, Isaac, when he was five-years-old. She was inspired by Isaac’s “sense of adventure,” which put her in mind of her own, very different childhood. She adds proudly, that Isaac, now 15, is a freshman in high school, and the sixth fastest runner of his age in Northern California.
Remarking on difference in being a grandparent from being a parent, is that “We are able to interact with grandkids in new ways,” and may even be “more appreciative than we had been of our own children.”
Having a grandchild inspired essayist Meredith Escudier to write her first poems. She found the experience so profound that it seemed poetry was the “only genre that could even approach the emotions” she was wanting to express. Escudier and Jungian analyst and poet, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky will also be reading at Thursday evening's Moe's event.
Baby Picture
I put your photograph in
a picture frame but
how strange
your little soft parts are enclosed
in hand-painted Venetian glass
right angles surround your face
squaring off your features
closely capping your pulsing fontanelle
posing supposing limits when
you are not limited not to this moment
and not to this space your
life is commencing your inner life
dancing unbridled prancing you
are a free-flow a torrent a rush
transforming freeforming roaring
a mountain river.
-- Meredith Escudier
***
Tesla Rose 14 Months: Redondo Park
Now you’re a big girl and you walk by yourself,
I spot you up the steps of the dark tower.
Up there, on the battlements, in the kitchen,
two witches, five or six, are making dinner
out of sand. Their names are Gretchen and Isis,
they know the secret language of fantasy.
Isis takes our order on an action figure:
Chow mein. Gretchen fills a blue bowl up with sand.
You empty sand on the deck and mouth the bowl.
Gretchen doesn’t understand the word agua.
What little water’s left was carried for miles
in my pocket, as you slept against my chest
in the May sun, past all your grandmothers’ doors.
--John Oliver Simon
***
Hallowe’en
Our tiny princess--prickly costume shed--
sits on Mom’s lap in a pink sweatshirt, watching
Grandpa pushbroom the sidewalk under the laden persimmon.
“Hi, Nana,” she fans me a wave. I drop a kiss
on her head, then pluck a low-hung hachiya,
and settle it into her hands. “Put it by Nana’s purse,”
I say, reaching for more. She hesitates,
points to my black bag, “Eh?” Again, “Eh?”
gesturing at the fruit. Oh, purse/persimmon. to her,
they sound the same. It’s a time of distinctions, between
toes and toast, Grandpa’s cat Dusty and Nana’s cat Duffy,
between the grandpa who comes every day and Papie,
who’s arrived from afar and now emerges from the house,
face more veined than last year, scotch in hand.
Our son, right behind him sipping the same bitter gold,
sees the swept pile of squirrel-ravaged fruit
and goes for the ladder. In moments a full-blown harvest
is on, Grandpa reaching for the high ones, Papie and I
chaining the red-orange globes over to our granddaughter,
who bumps them into a paper bag with serious joy.
It’s a mythic moment, generations harvesting in amber light.
Soon we’ll help this girl sow her own backyard pumpkin,
learn snails and kales, sweet potatoes and potato bugs.
Later she’ll glean a sense of single malt and sauvignon,
slowly make out for herself what nourishes, what poisons.
--Linda Lancione
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