Austin Straus on Poets Cafe

The following interview of Austin Straus by Lois P. Jones originally aired on KPFK Los Angeles (reproduced with permission).

Biographical Information—Austin Straus

Austin Straus was born in June 1939 in Brooklyn, New York. He has lived in Southern California since 1978. His poems and illustrations have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, including Alcatraz 3, The Maverick Poets, Men of Our Time, New Letters, Plainsong, Stand Up Poetry, and This Sporting Life, among many others. He is an accomplished painter, printmaker, and book artist with work in several private collections, including The Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry. His one-of-kind books combine poetry and graphics and are in many art collections throughout California and elsewhere. He frequently, informally, exhibits prints, drawings and paintings in conjunction with readings. As the host of Pacific Radio’s The Poetry Connexion, he directed the show on KPFK from October 1981 through June of 1996 with co-host Wanda Coleman. Drunk with Light, a book of poems, was published by Red Hen Press in 2002. Intensifications, his second book from Red Hen appeared in 2010. The Love Project, A Marriage Made in Poetry, poems written by himself and his wife of 32 years, Wanda Coleman, also from Red Hen, was published in 2014, after Coleman’s death. He continues his life-long exploration of visual poetry with paintings, collages and unique books.

__________

Pictures of You

The thing is to paint as if no other
painter ever existed.
—Cezanne

1.

You break no Kodaks, so camera
friendly, the lens loves you.

Painting is another story…you are
variegated, light and dark browns
tinged with ochres, reds, oranges, siennas,
umbers, maroons and salmons, all blended,
everything but green and blue!  What you wear
changes your skin tone, and where you sit
and how you hold yourself, look up, down,
sideways and your expression, sad, meditative,
thoughtful, worried, calm, delighted,
and is it sunny or shady or rainy, and
what’s the atmosphere, the barometric pressure,
humidity…the very air and light change you,
my brown/black, Indian red, multi-colored,
multi-brained, multi-sensed multiple, my
million women in one, my elusive, changeable,
unpindownable, ever unpredictable, highly
unpaintable you.

2.

No one ever saw an apple before
or that mountain

and I never saw you, try now
to see you as if no one
has ever seen you, see you new,
from every possible angle and
nuance, real and surreal, flat,
round and cubed, collaged and
montaged, in shadow and light, color
or black and white, etched, sketched
and painted, in delicate pencil,
charcoal and pastels, or hard, linear,
contoured, barely seen or superreal,
totally, to all your levels, with all
the depths, complexity, truth and care
you have always deserved…

The Love Project, A Marriage Made in Poetry
(Red Hen Press, 2014)