Pam Uschuk on Poets Cafe

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

Biographical Information—Pam Uschuk

Political activist and wilderness advocate, Pam Uschuk has howled out six books of poems, including Crazy Love, winner of a 2010 American Book Award, Finding Peaches in the Desert (Tucson/Pima Literaature Award), One-Legged Dancer, Scattered Risks, and Wild in the Plaza of Memory (2012). Her Without the Comfort of Stars, was published by Sampark Press in New Delhi. A new collection of poems, Blood Flower, appeared in 2015 and was a notable book on Book List.

Translated into more than a dozen languages, her work appears in over three hundred journals and anthologies worldwide, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Agni Review, Parnassus Review, etc.

Uschuk has been awarded the 2011 War Poetry Prize from Winning Writers, 2010 New Millenium Poetry Prize, 2010 Best of the Web, the Struga International Poetry Prize (for a theme poem), the Dorothy Daniels Writing Award from the National League of American PEN Women, the King’s English Poetry Prize and prizes from Ascent, Iris, and Amnesty International.

Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Editor-In-Chief of Cutthroat, Uschuk lives in Tucson, Arizona and Bayfield, Colorado. Before becoming a professor, Uschuk taught poetry to indigenous students throughout Montana and for years in Southwest Arizona through ArtsReach. She has taught at Pacific Lutheran University, Marist College, Salem College (where she was the Director of the Center for Women Writers, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Fort Lewis College, Universty of Arizona Writing Works, and given many workshops at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Often a featured writer at the Prague Summer Programs. In 2011, Uschuk was the John C. Hodges Visiting Writer at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. During January of 2017, she was a featured writer on faculty at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu. With her staff, Uschuk edited the anthology, Truth to Power: Writers Respond to the Rhetoric of Hate and Fear, and she’s finishing on a multi-genre book called The Book of Healers Healing: An Odyssey Through Ovarian Cancer.

__________

After the Election We Watch the Super Moon Rise over the Rincon Mountains

The mountains are burning and we cannot sleep.

We light candles at the Grotto where daughters toss the dark braids of sick mothers at
Guadelupe’s feet, where fathers pin photos of the stricken for slivers of miracle, uphill from the
Mission’s dome, White Dove catching sunset’s irridescent wishes in sky biolumenescent as plankton in the Sea of Cortez.

We breathe the dust of conquistadors who must applaud these election results caught
in the tyrant’s clenched teeth calling hate from under the cracked sidewalks of the despised
poor who believe in promises thin as light disappearing at our feet.

The mountains are burning out of control, flames higher than our dreams of peace, eating pine
trees, the hearts of deer, flames higher than the orange-faced despot’s fiery rhetoric of fear.

At hill crest, we sit on concrete losing heat to stark dark taking desert in its irrevocable mouth, sit
stunned despite the stinging bites of the fire ant colony skittering up our invading calves.

Unsheltered, we cannot sleep, see the huge yellow corona crowning, the birth of our moon
closer to earth than its been since our own births more than half a century past.

We wait, women holding tight our arms against news that darkens daily, against the crisp flap
of white sheets, the sneering narcissist chorus recounting rapes on TV. There is nothing else
to do but lean against one another’s sorrow, our disbelief.

We’ve left our candles of hope burning in the maw of the Grotto below to witness
the balm of moon rise while mountain slopes turn inferno sending contrails of smoke
to choke twilight’s last blue song.

Oh, Moon, you are so late, grinding up slow behind jagged Rincon peaks, backlit
with enough gleaming milk to feed thousands of refugee children hunted like rabbits
by our border guards. Have you heard their small bones cry sleepless in detention cells?

We watch wildfires more immense than our nightmares consume miles of ridges, burning past
our history as the super hunter’s moon blesses supplicant cacti offering thorns to heaven.

Closer we lean into our shivering until a blizzard of crushed diamond light breaks
screaming white, striking us blind, cauterizing our battered hearts, rejecting the nuclear
wasps of power and revenge hissing from the tyrant’s tongue.

The moon’s perfect snow glows sharp as an arctic blade slicing open our hopeless arms, baptizing
our faces with reflected light, and we know no tyranny can long last under such scrutiny.

Even in darkness, doves breathe, nestled in sparse mesquite leaves. We recall the canyon wren
displaced roosting in the mission’s adobe eaves with angels that have flown for centuries,
moon-dazzled, drizzled by light bouncing from solar storms translated in their genes.

Moon’s ice white chin lifts for Venus. Mica glitters each of our steps over volcanic rock past
the Grotto’s knotted prayers for compassion, past our long burning candles, navigating treacherous
gravel the color of winter fields, taking us home, beyond any terror or grief.