February 14, 2012
Pearls

by Zsolt
from Living, Loving, and Other Heresies

When he wrote the essays in Living, Loving, and Other Heresies, Zsolt was suffering from a progressive, debilitating neuropathy that eventually killed him. The essays began as letters to loved ones, but slowly evolved into group emails not only about his disease, but also about life in general. They functioned as a kind of blog—with the exception that as Zsolt was writing the entries, he was simultaneously losing the ability to play music, ride a bike, walk, speak, and even take care of himself in the most basic ways. Indeed many of the essays were written using word-recognition technology on a keyboard, one very slow letter and return keystroke at a time. Living, Loving, and Other Heresies is a testament to a carefully examined and purposeful life. It is a book of witnessing and testifying, intensely personal and yet expansive, characterized by careful art throughout.

In the essay this excerpt is pulled from, Zsolt has just described losing or accidentally breaking all but one of his treasured pearl necklaces.

Learning to get about with walkers and wheelchairs is one thing. Having to give up one’s pearls is quite another, though I suppose it must be done at some point and better strand by strand than all in a lump. THAT would devastate. I am afraid it will not help for you to say, “But Zsolt, my dear, they were mere costume jewelry.” This is rather like the Prince saying of a woman who has just died, “Oh, she was just the milliner.” Milliner or not, she had her stories.

Regardless, all of these pearly tragedies point up the fact that it is always easier to dispose of things oneself than to have them wrenched away by the hand of Destiny. Somehow, at times like this, when you thought you knew Destiny well, the feel of his hand is not quite what you remember.

With this in mind it is a queer thing that we continue obsessively living an illusion of Life as Accretion and Ownership: how we painstakingly accrue degrees, years, objects, wrinkles, honors; we have children, grandchildren, defenses, spouses, houses, sex. In fact we are so damn confident of the ownership of our accretion, rather like plaque on the teeth, that it is quite a joke when, somewhere in all the fuss of Having, we begin to find that the dominant feature of life is not Accumulation, but Loss. Quite likely in our earlier years we lost a kitten, or a toy, or a friend, or a grandparent, even a parent. As we age, however, and even with the persistent amassing of birthdays, we find ourselves losing everything from muscle tone to memory, pearls to hair. As the dust piles up and inflation grows, as undone chores multiply and wrinkles are added daily, many of us begin questioning whether our glittering personal empires are stable enough to maintain themselves to the end.

***

Yes, I am growing accustomed to living life without the exuberance of dancing, without the thrill of bicycling, without dimly-imagined futures that never came to pass, and as I contemplate my own future I am gradually coming to peace with the thought of living without this object or that, without the full use of my legs, without the playing of music, without much of what has previously defined me, both in my eyes and in the eyes of others. Oddly enough, though, this persistent dissolution of things, whether real or conceptual, is leaving me feeling ever more alive, not less. What remains, however vulnerable, is yet tough and brilliant as a diamond. And on each facet of that diamond is reflected the face of someone I love.

It is here where I most resist having to dismantle my life: those I love. Thankfully there is no need to dismantle them at this point. And perhaps there never will be. While we are often told that we will have to take that last step alone, I wonder if this is true, for in some queer way the love we have been given, part of a magnificent universe, as well as the love we have lived and shared is not only who we are but also that into which we will step at the threshold of death. Even if it be dust to dust, some kind friend is bound to plant a seed in it and watch with awe as it sprouts into luxuriant growth whose berries vaguely resemble pearls.

So toss out the old toaster ovens, throw away the clothing that no longer fits, burn the moth-eaten years of your youth, your life, but the people you love, take them with you, for it is into their love that you will dissolve at the threshold.

Oh hell, take along a string of pearls, too.

(Source: conundrum-press.com)

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Filed under: zsolt conundrum press life death crippling pearls love 
February 8, 2012
Ambition

by Bruce Berger
The Geography of Hope: Poets of Colorado’s Western Slope 

Think of those naturals who started right off
        blowing horn
Like mad, who were born with terrific prose styles,
Who made principled campaigns for public office
Too soon. They cleared the ground so fast you thought
They’d turn you into someone who knew them
        back when,
And just kept shrinking into thin air until
You forgot to watch, then forgot you forgot to watch.
Now they turn up. They look healthy, perhaps
        even trimmer.
They’re just as full of subversion, puns, scenarios,
Are teaching, fundraising, doing little theater,
Have creative homes, a family started, a shot
At tenure or first percussion. They don’t even
Seem older, just a bit quieter, and it must be only
You who feel let down. Have they consciously dimmed
Their sights? Revised their timing? Or are they
        withholding
Whole seasons when acedia strikes them dumb?
Even creative homes are cored with midnights
Notched on the bedside clock. Perhaps by day
They spin elaborate counsels to steady themselves.
Patience, they say. One must sit out a time
        without breaks.
One has to let go to regenerate. Nothing gained
By forcing a gift till it blocks. Fruition comes
Of its own accord; meanwhile I must lie fallow,
They tell themselves. I am lying fallow. 

(Source: conundrum-press.com)

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Filed under: fallow ambition bruce berger conundrum press samizdat youth family tenure 
February 6, 2012
They Also Serve

by Burton Raffel
from Beethoven in Denver and Other Poems 
(in which Beethoven returns from the dead and moves in with Raffel for extended conversations on music, politics, women, history, chocolate, mountains, love, and God)


“They pay you so much—for teaching?” Beethoven
        asked.
“Universities are a big business, these days,” I assured
        him after noting
That it was not really so much that they paid me, not
        so much at all.
“The world of education is not what it was: time
        marches on!”
He sighed and drank some beer. “In my Vienna,
        Herr Raffel,
Teaching was much more a matter of public relations—
        of what you call advertising today—
Than a real source of income. And what dunderhead
        pupils I had!
You are fortunate, more even than you know.”
I wanted to insist that I worked for my keep, but
        instead I commented that, somehow,
The Beethovens of the world seemed always to
        manage—but Raffels, you know,
Well, we had to scramble. “And after all,” I concluded
        with a flourish,
“How many Beethovens are there?” He blinked and
        stared hard at me:
I had not noticed, before, how exceedingly blue his
        eyes could become.
“And how many Raffels are there?” he demanded
        bluntly—
And with such plain intent that I could not answer,
I could only look down and wish that somehow I had
        managed, just this once, to keep my
        mouth shut. 


Author of over 60 books, including a translation of Beowulf that has sold more than one million copies since it was published in 1963, Burton Raffel is one of the most widely read American poets of the second half of the twentieth century. In addition to six previous volumes of his own poetry, he has published critical studies of T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, and many other figures.

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Filed under: beethoven denver teaching universities Conundrum Press literature 
February 3, 2012
Poem for a Cold Walk Home

by Chris Ransick
from Never Summer: Poems From Thin Air 

If I told my story, you might doubt
how high snow piled along the street,
how smooth the ice lay all about

low places in a glassy sheet,
green and black as dusk came down,
late January freeze complete.

I measured steps, a little clown,
with songs and jokes, the squirrels and birds
the only audience around.

I think they knew the tunes and words
but were too cold to sing along;
instead the wind pulled minor chords

across the weedy fields, a throng
of silver maples, branches bare,
conducting our shared winter song

with clacking tips in swirling air.
Halfway home I left the road
for a secret path in the forest where

a frozen stream, swept clean and hard,
curved off toward my father’s place
and passed the boundary of our yard. 

I worked to free each frozen lace,
exchanged my boots for battered skates,
fat snowflakes falling on my face.

My mother would be setting plates
on the kitchen table, still warm
loaves of bread on cooling grates.

Then I would move with wind, the berm
of snow on either side my shield
from the now advancing storm.

I skated curves and leapt the stones
protruding from imperfect ice
until I saw the lights of home.

Sometimes I finished with a jump, twice
as high as the banks of snow,
landing with a sweet release

deep in a drift. Sometimes I know
I stopped and stared into the rooms,
dark shapes in foursquare panes, below

the chimney’s smoking plume.
So I return now, years gone by,
my memories a winter bloom. 

[Watch for the re-release of Never Summer, and more books by Chris Ransick, from Conundrum Press in 2012].

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December 27, 2011
A New Year’s Poem For You

A Horse Named Habit

by Mark Todd (from Wire Song)

You bet a Habit
Is hard to break,
You tall-standing
Son of a bitch.
I still gimp
From your knee-bust
Stomp and bronc ways,
A hit-hard lesson.
And to see you still
Too-grained full
Of yourself
While I feel only
The punched-breath
Crunch of flat
Pack and trail.
But I’ll find the cool
Of your blood yet
Between my knees,
The settle-down
Of your gait,
The steady
Of quieter days. 

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Filed under: mark todd poetry poem conundrum press colorado author literature 
November 14, 2011
Backlist highlight: Living, Loving and Other Heresies

“If this is heresy, we need more of it! A timeless book of compelling prose and poetry.”—Bill Moyers

In 1999, Zsolt, a writer, musician, dancer, and teacher suffered from a progressive neuropathy, and when he was no longer able to write, began a group e-mail list to which he sent out regular essays about how the disease was affecting his life.

As the illness progressed and he lost the ability to walk, speak, or even to take care of himself, he was able to continue writing by using a word-recognition keyboard program. By this means, he was able to chonicle the disease’s effect on him.

At the same time, Living, Loving, and Other Heresies goes far beyond coping with degenerative disease. Zsolt’s essays and poems range across a passionate and deeply examined life, in which his debilitating illness played but one part. 

By turns tender and passionate, playful and indignant, humorous and committed, Zsolt affirms the beauty of life and transforming power of love while simultaneously confronting his own stark fate.

“Living, Loving, and Other Heresies lingers upon the absolute specter of mortality…both as the author confronts it and as the reader will one day experience it. A timeless expression of philosophy, moral dilemmas, and the pain of confronting the inevitable, written with great artistic and literary flare.”—Midwest Book Review

“Zsolt’s collection of short essays is remarkable, not only for the physical effort required in their production, but also in their unflagging optimism and fearless acceptance of death…Zsolt’s writings provide us a template for a compassionate life and the courage to face our own transfiguring dance of death.”—Lance Waring,Telluride Watch

“For the people who will not meet Zsolt in person, this book will be a bridge to an aliveness that is poetic, a sense of humor that cancels despair and beauty that can be breathed in effortlessly. Renew your commitment to living, loving and heresies of every order by journeying with the companion you always hoped would meet you: with Zsolt and his irresistible gossips.” —Barbara Riley, Southwest BookViews

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Filed under: lit poetry conundrum-press.colorado 
October 24, 2011
The Non-traditional Traditionalist

by Robert Garner McBrearty

My stories usually start right where the time of calm ends. I place my characters right at the moment of change, when they find themselves in new, precarious situations.  For instance, four men find themselves on a life raft when their fishing boat goes down and they make awkward stabs at spirituality as they attempt to survive.  A private investigator has a crisis of conscience about the woman he’s following.  In “Alamo Dreams” a modern couple find themselves besieged in the Alamo.

As a writer, I think of myself sort of as a “non-traditional” traditionalist. The “non-traditional” part often shows up in quirky, even somewhat absurdist stories.  Two western outlaws discuss the merits of decaf over regular coffee.  The “traditional” shows up in my desire to tell real stories with movement and change, stories I hope that matter to people’s lives.  One of my early writing teachers said to me once, (no doubt too generously), “You write delightfully.  In the sense of giving real delight.”  When she said that, it registered with me that that was what I wanted my stories to do – to delight, to transport, to carry readers away.  I sometimes think of my reader as being a poor soul at 3am in a bombed out building, and one of my books is discovered amidst the ruins.  With nothing better to do, the reader begins to turn the pages, at first skeptically, and now with a growing interest, as if there’s a friend out there, someone speaking amidst the ruins.  I wonder if that’s why one of my favorite books is Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins. That’s sort of what that Alamo story is about, people trying to love amidst this crazy, chaotic, yet beautiful world, and I think that’s a theme that runs through my new collection Let the Birds Drink in Peace.

By delight, though, I don’t mean “light.”  Keep in mind I’m a guy who found Crime and Punishment a “delight” to read, though I did skip the original Russian.   

Robert Garner McBrearty is the winner of the 2007 Sherwood Anderson Writer’s Grant. A native of San Antonio, Texas, he is a 1981 MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a contributing editor of The Pushcart Prize anthology, and a consulting editor for Narrative magazine.

McBrearty’s new collection of short stories, Let the Birds Drink in Peace, was published in October 2011 by Conundrum Press. His previous works, Episode and A Night at the Y, were met with rave reviews.

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October 9, 2011
Beethoven in Denver and Other Poems by Burton Raffel

Beethoven in Denver and Other Poems by Burton Raffel

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Filed under: books colorado poetry small press conundrum archive 
October 8, 2011
Our first new publication

For the past few weeks we’ve been working with Colorado author Robert Garner McBrearty on his new collection of short stories, Let the Birds Drink in Peace. The stories feature a variety of characters, from reluctant private investigators to worried brothers to kidnapped kids, and the stories’ styles range from contemplative to comedic. At the heart of them all, though, are characters willing to explore deep below the surfaces of their lives. We loved the collection when we read it and knew that it would be the perfect inaugural book.

Local organization Stories on Stage will read one of Robert’s stories on October 23 at Su Teatro at the Denver Civic theater at 1:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. The whole slate of performances feature Colorado authors: In addition to Robert, there will be stories by Laura Pritchett, Nick Arvin, and Joanne Greenberg. 

If you can make it, please join us. Supporting independent local arts builds a community we want to be a part of.

—Sonya Unrein, editorial director

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Filed under: stories on stage small press conundrum press colorado