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
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