This episode of Buckham Alley Theater Presents features Diane Wakoski reading “Ode to a Lebanese Crock of Olives” on January 3, 1989.
John Kotarski produced a series of television programs in 1989 at Buckham Alley Theater in Flint, Michigan. They featured many nationally recognized writers and musicians. This is an excerpt from "Couplets: Michigan Poets on Poetry" that John co-produced with Joe Matuzak. John also had help from friends, including Steve Hester, Lloyd Richards, Dave Goldsmith, Norreen Violetta, Anthony Sims, Patrick Hazlewood, and many more.
𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐃𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐞 𝐖𝐚𝐤𝐨𝐬𝐤𝐢
Diane Wakoski (1937-) is an American poet born in Whittier, California. She studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated in 1960 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. During her time at Berkeley she participated in Thom Gunn's poetry workshops. It was there that she first read many of the modernist poets who would influence her writing style. Her early writings were considered part of the deep image movement that also included the works of Jerome Rothenberg, Robert Kelly, and Clayton Eshleman, among others. She also cites William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Bukowski as influences. Her poetry career began in New York City, where she moved with La Monte Young in 1960. She remained a resident of New York City until 1973. Her later work is more personal and conversational in the Williams mode. Wakoski is married to the photographer Robert Turney, and is University Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan.
Wakoski received considerable attention in the 1980s for controversial comments linking New Formalism with Reaganism. Wakoski's literary works have been recognized and highlighted at Michigan State University in their Michigan Writers Series.
Her work has been published in more than twenty collections and many volumes of poetry. Her selected poems, 𝘌𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘭𝘥 𝘐𝘤𝘦, won the William Carlos Williams Prize from the Poetry Society of America in 1989. She is best known for a series of poems collectively known as "The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems." Many of her books have been published in fine editions by Black Sparrow Press.
𝐀𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐆𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐬
William Carlos Williams Award for her book 𝘌𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘭𝘥 𝘐𝘤𝘦
Guggenheim Foundation grant
National Endowment for the Arts grant
Fulbright Grant
Pansy Award from The Society of Western Flowers
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐨𝐞𝐦:
"Ode to a Lebanese Crock of Olives" (1975)
𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘞𝘢𝘭𝘵𝘦𝘳'𝘴 𝘈𝘶𝘯𝘵 𝘓𝘪𝘣𝘣𝘺'𝘴
𝘥𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘴
As some women love jewels
and drape themselves with ropes of pearls, stud their ears
with diamonds, band themselves with heavy gold,
have emeralds on their fingers or
opals on white bosoms,
I live with the still life
of grapes whose skins frost over with the sugar forming inside,
hard apples, and delicate pears;
cheeses,
from the sharp fontina, to icy bleu,
the aromatic chevres, boursault, boursin, a litany of
thick bread, dark wines,
pasta with garlic,
soups full of potato and 9nion;
and butter and cream,
like the skins of beautiful women, are on my sideboard.
These words are to say thank you
to
Walter's Aunt Libby
for her wonderful olives;
oily green knobs in lemon
that I add to the feast when they get here from Lebanon
(where men are fighting, as her sisters have been fighting
for years, over whose house the company stays in)
and whose recipes for kibbee or dolmas or houmas
are passed along.
I often wonder,
had I been born beautiful,
a Venus on the California seashore,
if I'd have learned to eat and drink so well?
For, with hummingbirds outside my kitchen window to remind of
small elegance,
and mourning doves in the pines & cedar, speaking with grace,
and the beautiful bodies
of lean blond surfers,
dancing on terraces,
surely had I a beautiful face or elegant body,
surely I would not have found such pleasure
in food?
I often wonder why a poem to me
is so much more like a piece of bread and butter
than like a sapphire?
But with mockers flying in and out of orange groves,
and brown pelicans dipping into the Pacific,
looking at camelias and fuchsia,
an abundance of rose, and the brilliant purple ice plant
which lined the cliffs to the beach,
life was a "Still Life" for me.
And a feast.
I wish I'd known then
the paintings of Rubens or David,
where beauty was not only
thin, tan, California girls,
but included all abundance.
As some women love jewels,
I love the jewels of life.
And were you,
the man I love,
to cover me (naked) with diamonds,
I would accept them too.
Beauty is everywhere,
in contrasts and unities.
But to you, I could not offer the thin tan fashionable body
of a California beach girl.
Instead, I could give the richness of burgundy,
dark brown gravies,
gleaming onions,
the gold of lemons,
and some of Walter's Aunt Libby's wonderful olives from Lebanon
Thank you, Aunt Libby,
from a failed beach girl,
out of the West.
