On A Guest In All Your Houses

This first collection by a poet well into his middle years is settled and rich in its appreciation of the western states of the U.S., especially Arizona and New Mexico.  It has become difficult, now that every reservation has its shop and Monument Valley only brings to mind decades of corny movies, to conceive of poetry coming out of this part of America.  What brings Ludwin his amiable success is the steadiness of his attention.  He loves this region, the mountains, the dreams, the sagebrush, the history, the locals he never sees without a beer.  Much of the time he chooses prosaic, talkative cadences, and the effect when he bursts into full-throated lyricism is all the more striking, as if after a companionable conversation a friend should begin to sing: “The earth says My grasses sweep away /to horizons like the sea, // and the buttes say From my heights / you can see beyond the horizons ,// and the sky says I rule the earth / and I have no horizons, // and I say I am the wind, / I will be a guest in all your houses.”  This is a winning, thoroughly appealing book engaged in that most primaeval of human acts: naming the things of this world.  

On A Guest In All Your Houses

   Jim Doss
 

Peter Ludwin, A Guest In All Your Houses, Word Walker Press, 2010,
ISBN 978-0578003900, pages 89, $13.95.
 

Henry Ford once said: “History is more or less just bunk.” Thank goodness Peter Ludwin didn't listen to him. History is like an unseen ocean washing over the pages of his debut volume of poetry, A Guest in All Your Houses, shaping his landscapes of prairies, the desert southwest and Mexico, washing over the people that populate these pages, subtly influencing them in ways they don't even understand. History is alive, like the bones of ancient buffalo that rise up from the roots of prairie grass to plow the wheat and corn fields of the Midwest, the songs of the Anasazi that still echo through the red rock canyons, or the faces of the conquistadors that peer through the features of the conquered.
    The book is divided into three sections: Compass Points, Four Corners, and Fugitive Kind. Ludwin fills each section with narrative poetry that stitches the past and the present together into a quilt of many colors, many meanings, a checkerboard of characters and events that pull the reader sympathetically into his world. One of my favorite pieces in the book illustrates his seemingly effortless gift at creating a multi-textured, multi-layered poem:             

            Bluestem

            Driving east, you smell Kansas
            before you ever reach it,
            the stench of feedlots
            like faded, splintered wood
            that warns of poisoned drinking holes.
            After this: corn, wheat, silos, water towers,

            flat horizons of domesticity
            raising young Republicans for Christ.
            When you find, somewhere between
            Wichita and the Missouri border,
            a few swaths of bluestem prairie,
            all that simply blows away

            like lives caught up in a twister.
            Shaken, you stumble over debris
            brushing pigs and Protestants
            from your hair, wonder about the origin
            of the river that now carries you
            through a pack of mating wolves.

            This is what the grasses give you:
            the owl you reclaim in the mirror,
            the night wind wooing its tail.
            The quickened pulse, the stalks
            whose rolling swells contain it---
            what do they reveal but the profligate

            licking his self-inflicted wound?
            The voice he strains to hear
            stuffs its own mouth with carrion,
            the severed cry of the dung beetle.
            Plowed under, plowed under,
            his eyes and ears bereft.

            Buffalo, too familiar now, graze our dreams.
            Hidden in shadows: pronghorn, grizzlies, prairie dogs.
            When Lewis and Clark hauled their bullboats
            up the Missouri, neither they
            nor their Book spoke of ecosystems.
            All those wagons, plows, cattle

            kicking up dust from Texas to Montana,
            iron horses filled with rifles
            spitting their bright death,
            that mandate, revealed in the Word,
            in dull syllables of lead,
            to tame the land.

            Grass to a horse's belly,
            that rivaled a man's head.
            And that invisible grass,
            damp with uncountable mornings,
            that lurks where we drown the wild echo.
            So much fear from the sky:

            fire, hail, the moon that undresses itself.
            Yet in the dawn rising raw in the nostrils---
            what use for history, what need
            to be anything but an oracle:
            our own chalk scripting paths,
            giving permission to let go?

On A Guest In All Your Houses

American West coast poet Peter Ludwin’s first full length collection, A Guest in All Your Houses is a successful book of poetry, meaning that it creates and maintains a coherent world, in this case the American Southwest. Ludwin’s biography of traveling and time spent in the deserts of Texas, Arizona and Mexico give the poems a truth of description that comes only from experience and subsequent meditation. “Terlingua,” an elegy for an artist named Miguel Arguello, is an example of how Ludwin’s well-earned poems gather strength from precise description of memory and the land in which the memory was formed:

"Stay as long as you want, you said.
I remember waking from the ground
in front of the old adobe studio
that housed your Grand Canyon canvas,
my rest shattered by a terrifying shriek.
I turned to see a red-tailed hawk
perched in the caliche road, brazen
as lechiguilla, a member of the agave
family that can shred bare skin."

Typically for Ludwin, this poem places the narrator within a vaster, more powerful realm of nature. While nature in these poems is not always terrifying, it is always awe-inspiring, endowed with the power of the sublime. Ludwin’s use of authentic place and plant names gives the poems an authenticity which would be otherwise unavailable. The reader may recall Pound’s explanation of the use of foreign languages in his Cantos: if a meaning isn’t clear immediately upon reading, it will be explained somewhere close by. Fortunately, A Guest in All Your Houses includes a series of notes explaining the significance of key vocabulary and the historical events which inform many of the poems.

History is the main driving force of these poems, some of which act as voices for Native Americans or early settlers. The final section of A Guest In All Your Houses, “Fugitive Kind,” is the most powerful of the book. The poems describe and memorialize Ludwin’s time spent in Terlingua, Mexico, and many of the people and places which have stuck in his memory, gaining significance with time and reflection. “Collie” is one example,

"Each time I see her bus I want to abandon
everything and move right in: flat
tires fused to the ground like adobe,
the ramada a cloak of weathered tin
propped against it for shade…"
[…]
"Down in the tangle of the bosque
snakes lie deep in their dens.
Benign in frost season, they do not
hear her gather mist of the river,
cache old memories in mud."

Ludwin’s narratives pulse with history and emotion which might undermine their stability if he did not ground his poems in setting and specific details, bus or bosque. Like the fossils and stone formations which often appear in A Guest in All Your Houses, or the “old memories in mud,” Ludwin’s poems both preserve the past and offer a key to reopening it.

Repetition is the inherent danger of composing a book of poems revolving around the same subject or place. A Guest In All Your Houses reflects a trend in contemporary American poetry of creating such books, as if any one book of poems could be the definitive source on a certain subject. Ludwin for the most part avoids repetition, but his book will be most interesting for those who have a hunger for knowledge about the Southwest, for it contains the well-crafted poems of a man who has spent significant periods of time there, steeping physically and emotionally in the local color. The most successful poems in the book use setting as a stepping stone, or rather, a plateau from which to grapple with lived experience and examine the emotional difficulties of memory. In his best work, Ludwin has found a language to express, in concrete terms, the tension between personal and regional history and in so doing, has created a book of poems which both informs and inspires. 

On A Guest In All Your Houses

A Guest In All Your Houses
by Peter Ludwin
56 Poems/89 Pages/$13.95
Word Walker Press
Glendale, CA
ISBN: 978-0-578-00390-0
Author contact: peterludwin@q.com
Review by Karen Schwartz

Faced with non fiction accounts of a culture and its traditions of which I know little about, I first studied this collection as a stranger, awestruck by Mr. Ludwin’s poetic abilities.

I was fascinated by the ease with which the poet used metaphors throughout, as in Among the Fundamentalists at Short Creek, “The earth itself now a secret/withheld from the mirror…”

His use of similes, as in The Source, “…I swung her around and pulled her against me,/ her body fitting in perfect, mysterious synch/ like a wall of Inca stones.”

As well as delivering effective guided imagery, for instance in his poem, Symbiosis, where he describes heat so hot his readers feel its burning sensation. Here he describes Gilberto Luna, “How in the mid-1800s he settled/ here in a desert so brutal/ a doorknob can singe a dream...”

Successfully painting vivid pictures of his native heritage and own intimate experiences.

In his poem, Comanche Moon, 1844, Peter shares with us the dread one woman endures as her enemies approach, “Once before she saw them/ from a distance, the finest horsemen in the world,/ ...She’s heard stories/ of capture, of ingenious torture, her thoughts/ branded as surely as if she’d pressed a glowing/ poker to her skin, the stench of burnt flesh/ a cautionary tale woven through her dreams/ by wolves tracking a deer from its scent.”

I found many of Peter’s poems brilliantly narrated with sombre undertones that tugged at my heart strings, calling upon my compassionate side. Before long I discovered myself yearning to “belong”, to gain a better understanding of the history behind it all amidst a strong desire to shed personal ignorance in the spirit of fellowship.

The poet gives the wind, the earth and the sky their own voice that speaks to his readers in ways only inhuman creations of nature can, sharing wisdom in its purest form through a sense of spiritual enlightenment. In his poem, Driving North toward the Hopi Reservation, we are reminded, “So open this land/ even the fences along the road/ sing their freedom./ …and the sky says I rule the earth/ and I have no horizons,/ and I say I am the wind,/ I will be a guest in all your houses.”

Sizable entries of unfamiliar text throughout this inspiring collection enticed me to further research their meaning on Google in order to internalize the true essence of the poet’s words. It is only after reaching the end of the book that I became aware of the “Notes” section at the back which offers valuable insight helping me immensely in preparation for a second reading.  It is suggested to those in need of clarity that the notes be visited simultaneously as the reader enjoys each poem.

In the beginning, I came to this collection feeling like a stranger and left feeling in the end like a gentle wind; a warm, welcomed guest. I recommend A Guest In All Your Houses for its well-written poetic styles, its content and for its capacity to shed light on a fascinating culture.

On A Guest In All Your Houses

On A Guest In All Your Houses

On A Guest In All Houses

It would be enough were Peter Ludwin's A Guest in All Your Houses merely a sensual, spiritual geography of the human heart.  But so much more, this breathtaking first collection of poems is an opulent, operatic score of the American West.  These are poems filled with deep experience, bold imagery and reverent observation.  Music and soul abound on every page, as in these lines from "Midnight, Steens Mountain:" "This hour/the hawk's own vespers/feeds on the unsuspecting.//Fingers the shiny mandolin/dangling from its belt of stars."

--Lana Hechtman Ayers, author,
Publisher of Concrete Wolf Chapbook Series

On a chaos of angels

As implied by its ironic title, there's nothing paradisiacal about "A Chaos of Angels." Edited by Lois Jones and Alice Pero, this thoughtful anthology addresses those experiences and perceptions resulting from our society's dependence on randomly prescribed psychotropic drugs which in our relentless and indiscriminate search for happiness bring, not angelic serenity, but chaos.

The theme may be premised on chaos but there is nothing chaotic about this anthology. While the poems--one hundred in all--include traditionally metered and occasionally rhymed verse, lyrical free verse and some avant-garde poetry, their common concern with drug dependency unites them. They range in tone from the dogmatic to the humorous, the confessional to the painfully intimate. This diversity, in turn, contributes to the collections' readability.

So does the diversity of topics. Everything from communication, art, religion, psychiatry, human relationships and dreams--both drug induced and drug free--is addressed. Thus, regardless of our personal histories these poems speak to us all and reflect the multi-faceted backgrounds of its contributors. These include painters, psychologists, students, teachers, human rights activists, songwriters, editors, a divinity student, a waiter, a bookstore manager, a textile designer and a Pulitzer prizewinning cartoonist. Some are widely published, others are not, but despite occasional unevenness in the writing, the poems work well together.

Some of the "angels" included here limp through life, others defy a broken wing and soar. Yet at the core of the collection lies a message of survival and spiritual solace, a fitting antidote to spiritual malaise.

Diana Anhalt

On a chaos of angels

Excerpts from Poetix review:

"As Dean Blehert states in the introduction, "What these poems have in common is a shared notion spiritual potential." He further says, "It's the sense that there are beings here who are unlimited in potential to be and create and love, who are not brains or chemistry."

By far the best poems in the book examine the larger issues. Among these are Miriam Axel-Lute's "Wade in the Water" (which I would have to quote in its entirety to give its full power) and Peter Ludwin's "Walking to Watmough Bay":

   All points now
to a great shutting down of things,
   a flutter
of wings above a thin white candle
   burning
where the world unveils a minor key."

"A Chaos of Angels certainly raised a number of questions in my mind, although I'm not sure if they are the questions the editors intended.

The first is, Why do so many poets have poems about psychotropic drugs? Is this a reflection of American society at large, or are poets more likely to have experience with such drugs?

This is actually a serious question. There is certainly a popular conception that there is a correlation between creativity and madness. So it certainly seems possible that creative people are prescribed psychotropic drugs more than the general population.

But a more important question is whether creative people react to these drugs differently. One recurring theme in the book is that the drugs stifle one's ability to "feel", and that this "feeling" is vital to the creative process. Among the poems expressing this idea are "Cezanne the Builder", by Leslie Silton (p. 107) and Dean Blehert's "Poor Beethoven-He Wasn't Nuts After All" (p. 76): "...remember,/ in the absence of appropriate medication,/ one in very 6 billion of us/ may be afflicted with Late String Quartets/ or Seventh Symphonies."

Such poems raise the possibility that "feeling too strongly", seen as a psychological problem, and "creativity", generally considered a positive trait, are almost the same thing. A creative person is obviously going to be bothered by the idea of giving up their creativity, even for such a goal as "mental health." My question is, is a non-creative person also going to be bothered by this? Or would they, perhaps, happily give up that hypersensitivity?

Another consideration is whether creative people are better able to deal with mental problems. Creativity can well serve as an outlet for thoughts, emotions, feelings they might otherwise be unable to handle. So poets may not be the best judges of the usefulness of psychotropics, as they both value the very things the drugs cure, and have a way of handling those conditions without the drugs.

But this raises yet another question: is there such a thing as a non-creative person, or are they just people who have not learned to tap into their creativity? Put another way, are some people happy to give up their hypersensitivity only because they haven't learned its value?

Using creativity as a form of psychotherapy is not a new idea, but I believe it is an under-explored one. If I am correct that creativity provides not just an outlet for emotional trauma, but a way to find it valuable and meaningful, then perhaps creativity could be used in place of some of these drugs.

Not that we could ever replace medication entirely. Creativity is not easy, and many people prefer the easy way. We can keep Prozac, Zoloft and the rest for those who would prefer to go through life as Zombies.

On other hand, A Chaos of Angels makes it clear that there are many others who prefer the challenges of creativity. And that our world is better for their presence in it."

- G. Murray Thomas

On a chaos of angels

"A Chaos of Angels (Word Walker Press: This is a lovingly compiled collection of poems that touches on the culture of psychotropic drugs–how the individual for whom they are prescribed struggles, both with and without them, to be real, be themselves. The poems speak as well for their family, friends and society at large as we all seek to understand and respond to the ever increasing numbers of men, women and children who walk among us who are living drug-induced intellectual and emotional lives. It is the soul seeking to break free that is heard in these poems, the voice of the individual, of the poet inside of all of us, fighting for its very life in an increasingly electronically spinning world. Thanks to Alice Pero and Lois P. Jones, two local L.A. Poets, who dedicated themselves to the creation of this book of poems."

Poetry Evolution
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Creating a Poetry Community
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On a chaos of angels

"What these poems have in common is a shared notion of spiritual potential. The sadness or hysteria or desperate or icy edge of the pill poems hint at the magnitude of the worlds that have been cropped to socially acceptable sizes by these drugs. The expansive poems about self-realization hold up a mirror to the more nightmarish poems, as if to say, 'This, too, is you; this is who you really are.'"

--Dean Blehert, Author

On a chaos of angels

"Taking their queue from a tag line used in the 1997 film Gattaca that “there is no gene for The Human Spirit,” editors Lois P. Jones and Alice Pero have assembled an ambitious and heartfelt anthology on the broad topic of chemical driven happiness, the propensity of our society to look for quick-fixes in pills. The book is tastefully laid-out from the front cover to the contributor notes, and the editors have done a skillful job in selecting an interesting and varied mix of poems. This is no easy feat, considering most of these poems deal with the effects of psychiatric drugs on individuals and their loved ones, and the pretensions and mind-sets of those who practice in this field. There is the occasional rant, but given the subject matter the anthology is surprisingly rich, complex and rewarding.

One hundred poems written by both well-known and lesser-known poets fill the pages of this book. The background of these poets range from full-time writers to teachers, computer programmers, waiters and psychologists. The styles of the poems run the spectrum from rhymed formal verse to confessional, avant-garde and experimental.

A poem by Amanda Crowell Steibel, a teacher, touches upon the human price of over-medication in a very personal and disturbing way:

Blackout

There are two years missing

No photos
No memories
No poetry

I had lost my job
Lived in a one-room mouse hole
And coughed up blood from a month's bronchitis
Got so bad I needed help

The shrink I paid $150 an hour
Asked me 30 minutes of questions
About sleeping, money, sex and wine
Diagnosed and wrote two 'scripts

Severe bipolar
Zyprexa
Prozac
Sleeping pills

Life slowed, stopped
Glazed over
Two years
65 pounds

Hours, dollars
Thousands later
I awoke
Doubled over in a week's withdrawal

Remembered
And wrote
And lived
And lived

Jeanette Clough, with two collections of poetry to her credit, explores healing and rejuvenation:

Self

Something has its fingers around my lungs.
Non-breath. Constriction. Also release
when I reach into that vacancy.
Hearsay of elsewhere- hobbles me.

Perhaps I sought to fall freely into the void.
Instead I find myself grasped, grasping,
adding lengths to my rope.

Alas, poor self. Shall I tell stories about you? Tattle & gainsay?

Something has cut through. Phlegm rattles in protest
then yields to another invasion of air

repeatedly.

Flighty and casual, this vital exchange:

an open poppy, and the same ruffled color.

I picture myself shouldering through the soil.

My bloom is said in many ways.

Laura Freedgood, another teacher and writer, pens a tender poem about letting go of a loved one after a death:

For my Mother

You asked for ashes,
fearing the heft of dirt,
a box where you could not breath.

Last year on this date you were gone,
a small plastic pouch
I hugged to my chest

as I walked along the pier
until it bucked up against the river,
undid the tie and looked:

no flecks of bone,
no smell of the oven
where they sized you down to an urn

you didn't want
preferring brine and
the swoon of seagulls.

So I let you go,
watched your ashes
settle on the waves

the drift towards the ship
in the next birth,
promising to carry you

across the Atlantic
where it turns aquamarine and exotic,
swirling about the city

you found irresistible,
with its piazzas and palazzos,
its Titians and Tintorettos,

the sea folding you
in its arms,
a sign on the salt spray.

This sampling of poems demonstrates the diversity and wide range of themes contained within the volume. While ostensibly focused on the pill-dependent society, these poems really are a study of the spiritual potential that exists inside of all humans free of the outside influences of chemicals. In a sense, it is an invitation to turn away from the artificial utopias of Huxley's Brave New World or Vonnegut's Harrison Bergerson. In a world where the pharmaceutical companies regularly encourage TV viewers to lobby their doctors for the latest miracle cure for the slightest ailment, it is refreshing to see a different point of view presented where humans long to be rugged individuals embracing their quirks and idiosyncrasies rather than searching for the chemical compound that brings lasting happiness or the boredom of conformity or the norms of behavior. How many great artists (painters, writers and musicians) of previous ages would be numbed into mediocrity by today's doctors? The pharmaceutical industry has certainly helped those with the most extreme cases of psychiatric problems, but it has gone overboard and to extremes to medicate where other alternatives are more healthy and appropriate. Thanks to Jones and Pero for raising these issues in the form of an artistic discussion that all serious artists should participate in. Now it is up to us to set the chaos of angels inside ourselves free for the betterment of the world."