JIM HABA
Good morning, everyone. A bit cooler today, in our new two-seasons-only weather here in the northeastern U.S. I hope you’re still well.
Full disclosure: Our poet today is one we’ve featured before (back in 2010, actually), and also my co-editor for an anthology just released by IPBooks: What They Bring: The Poetry of Migration and Immigration. But there’s a bigger reason for my re-introducing you to Jim Haba today. When you see the book you’ll note that the striking cover is from a painting by Erica Barton Haba, Jim’s wife and longtime artistic partner, a dear person lost to all of us just a few months ago.
Last month, National Poetry Month, was celebrated by D.& R. Greenway Land Trust at the Johnson Education Center in Princeton, New Jersey in memory of Erica Haba, the artist who designed their iconic Donald B. Jones Award, which honors “Poetry of the Earth.”
Erica had been a serious artist ever since she began classes at the Art Students’ League in Manhatttan when she was thirteen and then continued classes in Venice, where she lived as a young adult. In Italy she became interested in the ceramic tile murals and floors she found in church after church, an interest she further explored when she moved from Italy to Carmel, California, where she maintained a studio and produced scores of ceramic tile murals and portraits that are now in collections around the U.S.
During that time she fulfilled a commission from the City of Monterey to design and produce 88 large (4 x6 feet) unique, colorful angels that became the signature holiday decorations for the city. More than a decade later, they commissioned 40 more, each one different. All are still used to decorate the streets of Monterey every year over the winter holidays.
Erica returned to ceramic tiles in the early 1980’s, when she and her husband Jim created their own company to produce all manner of custom tile murals, backsplashes, fireplace surrounds, etc., for showrooms in Boston, New York and Princeton. Gradually, Jim, who had always glazed and fired her work, began to design and produce his own tiles. This work is now also in collections and houses around the U.S.
Together they worked to produce, pro bono, dozens of banners of all sizes that were used in anti-war demonstrations and against nuclear power. One of their anti-nuclear power banners is now in the Smithsonian Museum.
Jim Haba, as many of you already know, was the Founding Director of the biennial R. Dodge Poetry Festival in New Jersey, the largest poetry event in North America. Readers may know him best as the editor of Bill Moyers’ best-selling poetry book, The Language of Life and television viewers for three series of PBS poetry programs he made with Moyers. In 2000 he received the Elizabeth Kray Award from Poets House, given annually to a member of the poetry community for distinguished contributions to the art. He has had numerous other awards for his work, and in 2006 published two new chapbooks.
Yes, I know this is an unusually lengthy introduction, but this is a tribute not just to one but to two fine artists, whose lives and works are inextricably intertwined.
Here, at last, are three poems by Jim Haba — and please, all of you, take care of yourselves and stay well
–Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
Pussy Willow Wreath
Thinking of me she would of course
think of what I needed something
she could give me or do for me
something that would let her be
a mother again in the only way
she knew to be a mother not
the woman who gave birth to
this man she was now encountering
but the mother of that boy who
having lost his way and ended
up thousands of miles to the east
now certainly needed pussy willows
yes who could hope to be whole
without pussy willows and a wreath
of them to signify the everlastingness
of her connection to him and of his
connection to the world she knew
and loved as the child she always
and still was God bless her God bless her
Driving a New Friend to the Airport in Early March
(for Robert Bly)
A peach in the hand suddenly
and tall peach colored grass bending over old snow.
Talk is a fountain
and hearing a warm gust heavy with fish.
I love these broken cornstalks
and this muddy windshield.
Let our teeth crack with curses
and the birds of our wrists feed among algae at the bottom of ponds.
Among Vultures
Walking back to the house in early March,
mist clinging to the still cool ground, I turn
compulsively from the wet gray-brown trees
and tangled underbrush to the headlines
of the newspaper in my hand and notice
yet another article about cloning, remember
our fear of losing uniqueness, the threat
of dissolving into mere undifferentiated being.
Then I am startled to hear, just before
passing under a cluster of overarching
branches, bursts of heavy fluttering
as a hulking flock of vultures lurches
into its ragged and laborious ascent
leaving me lonely, even as I notice
one holds fast when I move again
and begin to pass gratefully under it
until small pockets of warmth slowly
swirl around my face and, looking up,
I realize I am wading through remnants
of upper air pushed down by those great
raptor wings already headed somewhere
else and nothing, just then, could have
made me happier nothing could have
made me feel more fully myself.