Introduction

My father wrote humorous poetry—influenced by the great American humorist and punster Ogden Nash, (“Who wants my jellyfish? I’m not sellyfish!”) He (my dad) regularly produced two-liners and even a few minor epics—for family events, letters to us in school and camp and for his colleagues at work. Somewhere there is a folder of his writings. I think my sister Nancy had it. I’m not sure where it is now. But I remember a couple of lines of a poem he sent to me when I was eighteen and directing a summer camp production of The King and I.

The wabbit with the golden hair
hops awound like Fred Astaire
The king and I and me togetera
etcetera etcetera etcetera

From there to the fact that my brother Harry, my sister, Edie, and I wrote poetry from the time we were children and won prizes in school and belonged to poetry societies later in high school and college.

It is perhaps not so big a leap as it might seem. We loved to play with language. Early on in the form of elaborate puns shared at the dinner table and whenever the smallest opening, a propitious moment we could sneak in a good groaner. We played with language—playmates and friends that became lovers of language and writers even on to the next generations including my grandchildren who write poetry effortlessly and share easily.

Much of my writing remains in journals and unpublished letters to family, friends and lovers. But two collections—the early poems of the seventies and eighties from The Russian River and Provincetown and The Montclair Poems that include some from Mexico and California were preserved in neat manuscripts and labeled manilla envelopes.

For a good part of these neatly assembled and preserved collections I owe Gordon Carrega, poet, whom I married in 1973 in Monte Rio in the Russian River area of California. He introduced me to the life of the poet as opposed to someone who writes poetry. We participated together in poetry readings around the bay area, Sonoma County and the Russian River and published a page in The Russian River Stump that I illustrated featuring friends of Gordon’s, Hunce Voelcker, and Andrei Codrescu. We also contributed to a lively small magazine from the Russian River called Paper Pudding. But mostly Gordon enabled me to step out of the box labeled visual artist and dancer/choreographer and allowed me to take myself seriously as a writer of poetry. The poems written in Montclair were shared weekly with Gordon after we had found each other again—following a twenty year silence. For a brief time we continued to share work on a regular basis via email.

A small collection of poems from Israel survived neatly typed (with a few translated into Hebrew by WUJS (World Union of Jewish Students) director Rav Aubrey Isaacs. Thanks to the staff of WUJS in Arad and to London performance poet Leah Thorn who managed to make them take us seriously. The last section of the manuscript represents my recent work (Mexico, Berkeley, New Jersey, Provincetown.) And I continue to cull my surviving journals and notebooks for gems or could be gems—The latest inclusion in the manuscript from the Galilee ancient city of Safed—is Hospital Tzfat. Finally, the fact that I am putting it all together in one cohesive manuscript is owed in no small part to Truro (Cape Cod) poet Keith Althus who twice annually offers a free workshop for senior poets at Castle Hill in Truro, its members chosen by some mysterious lottery. In which all the trappings etc. come together to form an almost religious atmosphere punctuated by humor and pathos.

But—I write poetry because I love writing poetry. The process tickles a part of my brain that is untouched by the painter, dance maker part. Its process is closer to the sudoku and wordle solving part than it is to my prose writing brain—it is deductive and intuitive and playful even when the poems are intense and self-exposing. A line of poetry is right when it feels right and sounds right. Its musicality and its provocative allusions may be worked at or upon but the real meat of poetry is about the puzzle, the way it all fits together with as little pomp—so that it comes across as beshert—meant to be— discovered rather than manufactured or manipulated. All the parts of the puzzle fit together in the only possible way. When the life of a painting feels this way I often refer to it as its poetry.

The cover is . . .

Links and shortcuts

In any page, you can click on or touch links to jump around in this book.

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You may find the following keyboard equivalents to be convenient. Here I use the symbol ⌥ for the option key on Mac/OS or the alt key on Windows, ⇧ for the shift key, and ⏎ for the return (enter) key. Arrow keys are ◄ (left), ► (right), ▲ (up), and ▼ (down).

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The poet

Artist, activist, actor, dancer, director, expressive arts therapist, horticulturist, gallerist, painter, poet, printmaker, professor, teacher, and Zen practitioner, Bunny Pearlman has lived a vivid, adventuresome life.

From her 1940s post-war childhood in Queens, NY, her love of the winding road drew her to the deserts of Israel, canals of Venice, redwoods of Northern California, beaches of Florida, mountains of Colorado, prairies of South Dakota and arts communities of Mexico, New York, New Jersey and New England.

For many years, Provincetown, MA, was her home base for her peripatetic inquiry into the healing power and the joy which is connected with storytelling. Now, as she is nearing 90, it is her year-round home with cat Gilligan, her garden and a wealth of stories to share.