Glenna Luschei is the author of several chapbooks, special editions and trade books, the most recent being Seedpods, Presa Press, 2006. She published an artist book, Enigmas, of her translation of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in 2006. She has taught many years for UCLA Arts Reach, for Chaplin College at the California Men's Colony, for Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and at Atascadero State Hospital. Luschei completed her PhD studies in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Santa Barbara in December 2005.
Glenna Luschei has published the poetry magazines Café Solo and Solo for forty years. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a D.H Lawrence Fellowship in New Mexico, an Honorary Doctorate of Literature from St. Andrew's Presbyterian College in Laurinburg, North Carolina and a Master of Life Award from her alma mater, The University of Nebraska. She was named Poet Laureate of San Luis Obispo City and County for the year 2000. For four years, she served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Glenna Luschei - a Critical Essay
by Hugh Fox
Glenna and her husband Bill (Horton) live in a huge house in Carpinteria, California, on top of a hill overlooking a huge avocado grove and in the distance is the invisible, barely audible freeway, then the ocean and the mountainous channel islands in the far, far distance.
While visiting I stayed in a little cabin at the bottom of the hill because the house with all its huge living rooms and office rooms, dining rooms, kitchen-space and patios, rather strangely has just one bedroom. Bill's Aunt leveled the Victorian house her parents had built after coming to California, following the Civil War. She built the house where Glenna and Bill live as a honeymoon retreat, for herself and her doctor husband, who had treated her parents who both lived until nearly one hundred.
Glenna is seventy-two, still her beautiful blonde self. Originally from Iowa, her mystical roots going back to a strange little spot in Northern Spain -- Celtic (as in Irish, Welsh, Scottish) Galicia.
Where I'm sitting writing this essay in my notebook to my right there's a photo of her and Bill (A retired professor of Electrical Engineering from Cal Poly)maybe twenty years back (he's eighty now), in front of me a painting of thin, sylph Glenna in a blue-blouse that must go back some fifty years. All kinds of flags at the top of the wall, Japanese, Turkish, German, Bavarian, Austrian, Russian, Puerto Rican, Portuguese, along with posters from Istanbul, Esztergom (the Hungarian Danube), Budapest, Istanbul, Italy. And then outside, beyond the glass wall, there's a huge roofed patio filled with patio furniture with very Spanish-looking lanterns hanging all over the place, and off to the left the beginning of a palm forest.
Maybe I'm not in mid-California at all, but in Istanbul. Or the Garden of Eden.
We go out and pick apples, Glenna, Bill and I, and there's this tree with tiny grape-ish berries on it.
"Taste them," says Bill, and I do.
"Guava. Strawberry Guava."
My favorite thing in the world, Guava.
There a huge mountain towering over us, and then the ocean, and one of the Channel Islands out there is at its mountainous best with the morning fog burned off.
We talk a little about aging and death and Glenna says "Don't die, I can't live without you....you're my soul-mate." Gives me a strong hug.
Almost forty years of friendship already. A total kind of closeness. When I married a Brazilian, Glenna went and got a Ph.D. in Portuguese....a beautiful kind of spiritual, ontological oneness. Originally born in Iowa, with a B.A.,B.S. and M.A. from the University of Nebraska, she has her M.A. in Spanish and Ph.D. in Portuguese from the University of California in Santa Barbara.
Her poetry is exotic in unexpected ways.
Let's go back to 1974, Back Into My Body, published first by Thorp Springs Press (now in Austin, Texas), re-published in Mille Grazie Press in Santa Barbara in 1994.Let me use the original:
3.
MOOD EKELOF
I was invited out to dine
but my host
would no disclose himself.
I lived in the goosepens
of the redwoods
sowed my trail of corn.
Who will come to find me?
Who reaps the grain?
Who finds it?
(no pagination)
"What Ekelof?" I ask her.
"A Swedish poet."
No wonder that for years I saw her as Lithuanian or Norwegian, Rumanian, Swedish.
And N.B. how she "hides" herself in the poem. Not "I felt," "I wanted," "I saw," but the trail of corn (children?) and the sense of un-attachment...turning herself into grain...wheat....whatever.
This kind of transformation into "things" is very common here. Luschei loves being transformed into something "out there," un-fleshed:
Night Song
We were banished
to pocks in the moon
rafts on the desert
sail and boom
Nights wore veils
camel bells
hours ran
without bobbing their heads
and carried me
eight days without water
(no pagination)
Moon pocks? Desert rafts? Eight days without water?
Total metaphorical transmutation, depersonalization.
I would think that "carried me/eight days without water" should mean eight days without sex. But, she tells me, it's exactly the opposite: "It means that I spent eight days not needing anything else because I had so much sex."
The sources of such total transmutation?
"Lorca," she says, "Spanish and Portuguese poetry."
Which makes her rather unique on the contemporary poetry scene, doesn't it? Sometimes I can't help but feeling she goes into a kind of Amerindian primitivism:
SOLSTICE
From a crack in the sky:
Shalakos retreat
to their hills
done with clocking,
feasting.
Sun tracks them, crook of an eye.
Shadows walk on stilts.
(not numbered)The Shalakos (pronounced Shál-akos, not Shal-á-kos) are a New Mexican deity. Again, what happened to the usual contemporary American confessional, autobiographical routine? The immersion in the out-there reality? It's poetic conversion here is complete. Shadows on stilts.
Only rarely here does she turn personal/confessional:
MY MOTHER IS DYING
My mother is dying.
I give her a bath,
she's pregnant with death
swollen belly and one nipple gone
where I bit down as a baby.
I'm taking her back into my body.
(no pagination)Then something inside her pushes the metaphor button, and here we go again:
My mother is pulling
silk from the cocoon
not to lose the thread.
She's larva again.
4.
It's refreshing to be back in real poetry-land again, n'est-ce pas, off the socio-economic racial war streets, isn't it?
Let me jump from 1974 to 1990 now, Bare Root Seasons, published by Oblong Press in Los Osos, California.
What a change! Difficulties have disappeared totally and we're in the world of quotidian accessibility:
Of my first affair
in Paris
I remember
brown leaves falling
on a sculpture by Rodin
skylight in autumn
Sundry
boats on the Bois de Bologne.
Once someone paid our fare.
We were lovers and poor.....
"Tell me," I said to him,
"About existentialism."
"Oh," he said, "you could never
understand existentialism."
("Secret," no pagination)
Luschei had been existentialism incarnate, an abstract existentialism from the heaves of transformative reality, but now suddenly she's more streetwise.
Not that the Impressionist-Surrealist has disappeared entirely, but the metaphors are easily recognizable as such:
5.
You are a doll of dahlia tubers.
I am the sea.
We are the cloud
with thunder inside,
ribs pushed out with the tide.
("Dahlia," no pagination)"The tide," I suppose, is an orgasm, but even here we're still on home territory and not in outer-inner space. Not that I didn't like the experimental, but in a way it's nice to be back on earth again too:
Remember when the oak crashed into the roof?
Branches longer than the kitchen,
but a dead root allowed the tree to topple,
that was the November Michael died....
("Matriarch," no pagination)The next year we find Luschei making an interesting match, worldly poetic miniatures into which she places the fifteenth century ecstatic poet from Benares, Kabir:
My lament;
It's gone so fast,
this glittering life.
And now my children
are grown.
"Rejoice!
It's gone so fast,
your children are grown....."
The blue jay
steals the fledgling
from the nest.
"Savagery,"
I say to Kabir.
"Yes,
but the birds are singing."
(Offering the Throat, poems by Glenna Luschei
and Kevin Patrick Sullivan, Solo Press, 1991, pp.4-5)Luschei's philosophy begins to clarify, turn into a Sufistic but at the same time hedonistic celebration of simply BEING. None of the usual rules and curbs, but TO BE IS TO BE ECSTATIC. Nothing else counts. It's a philosophy toward which she's been moving for a long time, and if we go back to Unexpected Grace (Turkey Press, 1984), we can find a strange mixture of almost-Rimbaudish/Baudelarian impressionism with what on the surface may even at times seem realistic:
AUTUMN
Rains reach down
to rough the fur of sand
and men rake sand
instead of leaves....
I watch an old man watch the sea
wash out his castles.
He leaves the stars alone with me,
an unexpected grace
that makes me know at last a foreign place
and season.
(p.10)
I'm writing this essay on the dining room table in Luschei's hilltop house, what normally would be the outside wall pure glass looking out on tree-rich hills, and beyond, in the distance, the usual mountains. On the wall behind me are rows of framed programs dealing with conferences/workshops on Lusophone and Hispanic literature/culture:
1. The Voice and Chore of Women in Portugal And
In the Diaspora. U. of California at Berkeley, Institute
of European Studies, April 21-24, 2005,
2. The Spanish and Portuguese Department of Yale Presents:
Portuguese-American Literatures, the First One-Hundred
Years. April 24-25, 2001,
3. U. of California, Santa Barbara, Fifth Annual Conference
on Lusophone and Hispanic Literature and Culture, May
1st and 2nd, 2003.....And so they go on.
The last issue of Luschei's Café Solo, the fortieth anniversary issue, no less, in a sense is the real key to Luschei's work. Not Eliot, Rimbaud, Baudelaire...but the whole Portuguese-Brazilian, Spanish-Latin American mystique that she has been immersing herself in for most of her life.
In the introduction to this final issue of Café Solo (series 47,48 and 49, 2006) (which she has now replaced by a new magazine called Solo Café), she makes interesting, revealing points about Bandeira's work, and I found her remarks on Pessoa particularly interesting:
7.
Fernando Pessoa differed from the early
Gallego-Portuguese troubadours in pioneering
a new kind of poem, an open-ended dramatic
monologue unlike the troubadours' one-sided
laments. Pessoa created alter egos within
himself....And then she gives a translation of a poem by Alberto Caeiro, one of Pessoa's alter-egos:
I never kept flocks,
but I feel as if I kept them.
My soul, a shepherd,
knows the wind and the sun
and walks hand in hand
with the stations
to follow and watch.
(p.8)
It would be easier to translate "estações" as "seasons," instead of "stations," but using "stations" creates a whole different view of the year-structure, doesn't it!?!
But four different poets inside one poet...is that the key to Luschei's own multiplicity?
There's the subtle nature-poet who gets into the center of nature and looks out (in this case seeing the world through the eyes of a bee):
over piles of bituminous coal
the bee gathers honey from vetch
and yarrow.
Foolish one
to think that winter could ever come.
("Foolish One," Unexpected Grace, p.355)Then there's the mystic-ecstatic medieval poet, Kabir-Luschei, who turns everything into the Voice of Revelation:
What you say is true
I have been asleep 1000 years
How beautiful!
When the wind blows
grass leaps up the hills like
antelope....
("Offering the Throat," p.8)The Take-It-As-It-Is Realist who at the same time is very aware of her other mystic self:
I grew tall at any early age
always stuck out at bat
and spent the Spring
out in right field
with my mitt
dreaming
("Fielder," Back Into My Body,
no pagination) 8.
And so it goes.
This is only a glance into the Luschei-soul, but all the travel-posters, Portuguese, vases, Luso-Hispanic conference-posters, L'exotique-personified Luschei herself points the way toward a full-length study of her work in all its multiple stances and disguises.
Glenna Luschei's Solo Press