Melinda Palacio, Santa Barbara Poet Laureate 2023-2025
Enid Osborn’s new poetry collection, Pedregosa Street is a
special volume of poetry which spans 28 years of living in a
hundred-year old Victorian house. Osborn served as the city’s poet
laureate from 2017-2019. Her latest book is delight for anyone who
has ever been to Santa Barbara or dreamt of living here. Pedregosa
Street makes the reader appreciate the cast of characters who
inhabit the house, neighborhood, and town. Osborn’s haunting words
compel the reader to relish and revisit each poem again and again.
The book is divided in six sections: Cul-de-sac, Jon, Birds, Ghosts,
Heaven, and Awake. The book is published by Shela-Na-Gig
Editions, a poetry journal and small press, based in Los Angeles.
All of their books are gorgeous, including Pedregosa Street. I
had the pleasure of speaking to Enid and asking her six questions
about her book. She also shares two poems from the Awake section of
her book.
Are
there particular poems that were harder to write?
The
poems in the section titled “Heaven” were some of the hardest to
write, dealing, as they do, with mortality. For instance, “Paradise”
was hard to write because it speaks a bitter truth. At the point
where one is facing life and death choices, one may choose a
different path and a different set of people to hang around with. It
can bring about freedom from old ways.
I
love the freedom of the last section of the book, which very much
inhabits a dream world and the world of time travel. Can you
talk a little bit about how that phenomenon enters those poems? In
particular, Paradise, Lost Shoe, A Spirited House.
Notions
such as a dreamlife that informs the waking life (“The Causal Arrow
of Time”); layered time frames/realms (“A Spirited House”,
“Paradise”); and enspirited objects and creatures (“Lost Shoe,”
“We are all God’s poems”) commonly occur to me in my daily life
(and are the reason I love magic realism in Latin American fiction.)
How
did you come up with the idea to cover such a long span of time in
this book?
I
never imagined I would live in one place for so long, especially a
rental. I somehow became a part of the house, and vice versa. This
stability of 29 years has allowed me to accomplish things with art
and writing that I couldn’t accomplish as a younger artist, living
with roommates and moving around. I am grateful. I wrote about the
house and neighborhood from 1997 to 2017, then put together a slim
manuscript. Another growth spurt came during the pandemic, when I was
at home a lot and wrote a passel of poems. I expanded the book themes
and watched my manuscript grow fat! Now that I have the book in hand,
new poems keep rising, so I may have to issue a “revised and new”
Pedregosa
Street
up
the road.
In
your foreword you say that the presence of rats is exaggerated. How
did the rat enter your poems?
In
truth, there were only a few rat encounters. But it’s shocking to
find a rat in one’s home—I think the poem “One Rat Theory”
explains the phenomenon where, once you encounter a rat, you think
every little sound is a rat. Mostly, I was having fun with the rat
theme.
Why
I Did Not Cut My Hair says so much about the poet. Were you
surprised by how candid this poem wanted to be?
Initially,
this poem was in response to 3 friends, all of whom asked me during
the same week why I didn’t cut my hair. I may have been feeling a
little defensive at the outset, but enjoyed exploring the actual
reasons why, especially when those reasons were not conscious choices
on my part. I think the most telling line is, “Because hair wants
to do its own thing.”
The
Agitated Heart offers a whole life. Did people like Jon inspire you
to remain in the house?
Jon
was a very accomplished painter. At one point, we hung some of his
large canvases in the common hallway. I was painting furniture, which
he knew a lot about. He was excited about my poetry, which was taking
off at the point when we became neighbors. He very much liked “The
Agitated Heart,” which was written for him. Jon’s friendship and
also his death tied me to this house. It sounds morbid, but it’s
just the way of human devotion.
Meet the poet in Malibu. Saturday, January 10,
Caffeinated Verse, featuring Enid Osborn, Malibu Library,
23519 West Civic Center Way, Malibu, CA 90265, 11 am, free, host
Malibu Poet Laureate Charlotte Ward.
This week’s poems
come from Enid Osborn’s latest book, Pedregosa Street.
ENID
OSBORN has lived in Santa Barbara, California for 45 years, and
served as Poet Laureate in 2017-2019. Her work has appeared mainly in
West Coast and Southwest journals and anthologies. She
co-edited A Bird Black as the Sun / California Poets on Crows
& Ravens (Green Poet Press). Her collection When
the Big Wind Comes (Big Yes Press) takes place in Southeast
New Mexico, where her family at one time raised quarter horses. Her
new collection, Pedregosa St., has just been released by
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Poems describe her long residency in—and
relationship to—a Victorian house by the railroad in Westside Santa
Barbara. In addition to poetry, Enid writes songs, stories and
reviews. She is an avid birder and longtime advocate for organic
growing and preservation of bees.
THE
AGITATED HEART
A
heart fits well in a hand.
Even
a small hand.
Even
a large heart, like yours,
swollen
from work and damage.
They
separate the sternum,
pull
you apart like a food bird.
What
would you choose
if
somebody came for yours?
Say
you were a shy man, and hands
came
reaching for your heart:
Would
you choose love
or
precision?
The
hands you see through your eyelids
are
covered in wax and they’ve
touched
many hearts and they
talk
about yours and they
talk
about yours and they
pass
it beating and they
pass
it bleeding from hand to hand
and
your heart pleads for its life.
How
could it know, more than a wild bird,
who
means to save it
and
who means to kill it?
Deals
are made with heart tailor, pulse taker,
tube
layer, blood sucker, seller of sleep.
You
see it all, but judgment is white white white.
You
cannot speak or change a thing.
When
you waken, you look down your nose
at
the crooked seam. You are strangely calm,
even
buoyant, as you receive
an
accounting of the surgery.
But
when you ask your heart,
your
heart won’t speak. It shudders
in
its broken cage.
Mended,
but not safe, it relives
the
moment when the hands came.
LÁZARO
THE PAINTER
Lázaro
the painter sings a corrido
on
the stairs, where the ceiling is high
and
boomy. He hams it up, mariachi-style,
as
he rolls out the primer coat—
the
layer that boosts the final coat,
allowing
the color to shine true.
Lázaro
bears the name of a man
who,
entombed in darkness, was called forth
to
demonstrate the rewards of faith.
Even
a dead man may balk at such
an
offer, may choose to remain
in
a world dark and now familiar.
But
Lazarus emerges and walks
into
the arms of a stranger with a voice
seductive
as living water.
Indeed,
his first view of new life
quivers
behind a veil of tears,
his
brain doubting more than ever
what
his eyes tell him to be true.
A
painter’s life is truth—
trueness
of color—
no
guesswork involved,
each
recipe exact as a baker’s.
He
falls in love as he fingers the sample,
again
as he pries open the can.
This
house will be the shade
of
winter squash. Red for the doors
like
blood of the bull.
Not
your prim old lady, this,
but
a male Vic—square,
with
strong cornices.
Under
the high eaves, Lázaro clings
like
a spider, reaching to accent
sill
and curlicue with expert stroke,
the
size and hair of the brush
chosen
for each detail.
In
the morning, he sings on the stairs.
In
the afternoon, he sings in the sky.
*an earlier version of this post was published in the Santa Barbara Independent
