The sentient land speaks. It always has, it always does and always will. But lately, more people are listening, out of desperate necessity.
Poems function as the land’s memory, reminding us that we carry the stories of the land in our own bodies. The land, even when stolen, savaged, forgotten, ignored, has a living ghost that needs to be heard, and this insistence echoes in our skin and breath.
We’re all feeling all this in very practical terms as we worry about the toxicity of the debris in our air, settling on the surface of our garden soil, coating our hair and eyelashes when we set out for the day.
Poets Sehba Sarwar and Lester Graves Lennon share the honor of serving as the 2024-2026 Altadena Poets Laureate, and will host and participate in numerous panels throughout the two-day LitFest in the Dena. This year’s event theme: “Books That Teach Us About Character.”
We recently chatted with both writers as LitFest in the Dena, now in its lucky 13th year, presented by the Light Bringer Project approaches. Both are writing about the devastation our region has endured in terms that magnify, not merely witness. And while both writers eschew facile partisan attacks, their work is deeply political on the most fundamental level.
Sarwar is an activist, poet and educator who finds wonder in the drifts of mist and mustard-blooms wrapping our foothills. She has participated in LitFest in the Dena pretty much from the jump. As we talked over tea and cookies at Panera, she quoted Sandra Cisneros, saying “I always go for the deep end. I go as deep as possible.”
Her title is Poet Laureate for Community Events, and for decades her work has confronted social justice issues at both a local and global level, winning awards from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division and Mid-American Arts Alliance, among others. In 2000, she founded the nonprofit Voices Breaking Boundaries. Working across genres, Sarwar wrote her first novel “Black Wings” in 2019, and there is another in the wings, so to speak, that she says continues to get pushed back by more urgent assignments.
She says, “I grew up under military dictatorships in Pakistan when many poets were jailed for speaking the truth, so these times feel very familiar to me. It’s a time when speaking out is dangerous. You have to be quiet, and let your allies speak for you.”
“My father’s sister was a feminist poet, she wrote in Urdu,” says Sarwar. “My parents’ home was saturated with Urdu poetry readings called mushairas, and intellectual / political conversations. South Asian literary culture is connected to the land, to history, to the moment. As such, I don’t feel responsibility, but I am inspired to write about issues — landscape, mustard fields, education, borders — in relationship to society and the world around us.”
Her poem “How Many Monuments Must We Construct?” examines genocide — Japanese, South Asian, Jewish, indigenous First Nations American, colonial African — with lines as sleek and devastating as a blade. In “Quest for Water,” the author / avid hiker writes:
One day,
Borders will collapse,
Water will rise
Break past cement
Create pathways for coyotes
that howl at night, calling for open trails,
so they can follow the hawks
to reach the Pacific Ocean.
Although her voice is unflinchingly fierce, she also says, “I have faith that ideas are stronger than repression.”
Of Displacement and Reclaiming
Lester Graves Lennon, Poet Laureate Editor in Chief, was displaced from his Altadena home of 32 years as the result of serious smoke damage. He left his hundreds of LPs behind to burn, and of his library of literally thousands of books, he retrieved only four volumes, all the work of poets: Yeats, Neruda, Hughes, Whitman. He and his wife expect to return to their home in June.
Lennon says that the “most difficult, painful time” was when he had to call a neighbor-friend with the news that the neighbor’s house was gone. His friend, he says, was stoic. Lennon was not: “I was crying. I’m 77 years old, I’m too old for this shit.”
Nina Simone summoned creative people to reckoning by saying, “An artist’s duty is to reflect the times.” Lennon agrees, stating that he feels no guilt, but instead a responsibility to tell the story of the land, and the people who move across it. To this end, he has been nominated twice for the prestigious Pushcart Prize, among many other accolades.
Lennon sits on the board of directors of the Community of Writers and is a member of the Friends of the Center for Humanities at the University of Wisconsin. He is an emeritus member of the Board of Visitors for the English Department at the University of Wisconsin, and a past member of the board of directors for Red Hen Press. He was the primary mover in the creation of the Poet Laureate positions for both the City of Los Angeles and the City of Oakland, and was a founding member of the Los Angeles Mayor’s Poet Laureate Task Force.
His poem “Altadena Chimneys,” also the title of his next book, begins:
Homesteads in ashes
Fire Next Time rode mountain winds
Proud chimneys still stand
I cite Baldwin, and then Lennon cites the Genesis 9:11 (not THAT 9/11, although it seems uncanny…) covenant. But here’s the thing: Scripture assures us that the Almighty will never again destroy the earth by flood. But there’s no Biblical mention of the fiery “next time,” making that self-fulfilling dread an entirely human projection.
We discuss the larger human culpability in global warming and the resulting folly, which Lennon tempers by simply saying “Grief kills.” He adds, “There are times when I am writing, and I feel that this is what I was meant to do. This is one of those times.”
Lennon says that he rejects the position that the origins of Altadena’s destruction were racial. “I don’t see it that way,” he explained when we spoke on the phone. “The cruelty is in the caprice of it.”
In no way, however, does Lennon, a full-time investment banker, shy away from the reality of racism. His book of poems entitled “Lynchings: Postcards from America” may serve as a wake-up call to the casual reader. The reference is not metaphorical, with props to Carrie Fischer, as in “Postcards from the Edge.” The postcards to which Lennon alludes are actual historic souvenirs. For centuries, a lynching was a social event on a par with today’s Waffle House Weddin’: ya’ll come. Amateur photographers snapped images of the strange fruit, often capturing jubilant expressions on the faces of the gathered crowd in the process. The bodies were frequently decapitated, dismembered and burned. The photos were then printed up as postcards to keep as mementos, or to mail out just to say howdy.
Of that project, Lennon says, “I was so drained by writing ‘Lynchings’, I could not write another long poem for two years.”
Writers’ Beginnings
Both poets began writing early in life. Sarwar grew up in a home saturated in literature and intellectual and political discourse, and both of Lennon’s parents were teachers. His contentious relationship with his father is enshrined in Lennon’s collection of poems called “My Father Was a Poet,” a dialogue with the difficult man who was the dean of a small Black college in Mississippi. Lennon calls the collection a “fable,” and the poems written by Lennon in his father’s imagined, wished-for voice strike uncomfortably, brilliantly close to the bone.
Of their process, Sarwar tends to write poems in longhand, then move to her keyboard. Lennon writes his poems with a fountain pen.
Lennon says, “I will confirm that I write poetry with a fountain pen. In fact, all three of my books were written with the same Parker fountain pen I have had for over 30 years. I started messing around with pen and ink when I was a child sitting at a desk in the living room that had crystal ink containers and pens with varying sized nibs that you had to dip in ink to write. When I finally settled in to writing poetry I was always on a quest to find the right mixture of ink and nib, going so far as to use a hypodermic needle to fill ink cartridges with the right color of blue-black ink that was then not available in a cartridge. My Parker I found at Fowler Brothers Books in downtown Los Angeles around 1991.”
Sarwar says, “I do love writing in longhand, and I used to have a passion for fountain pens. But after I started my own social justice arts organization in Houston and my daughter was born, life became more hectic, I grabbed any pen that I could find, but I am particular about my notebooks. I write prose on my computer, but start first drafts of my poems in my notebooks. When I first started writing professionally more than three decades ago, I was much more into the writing ambience. I needed my own room, quiet space, time, and structure. But as time became more precious, I grabbed what I could. Now I can write anywhere, anytime. And I do.”
Lennon says, “I don’t have a strict writing schedule like some people do. I don’t make myself write between five AM and nine AM, or that sort of thing.” Lennon reports no conflict between his artistic life and corporate role, seeming to traverse easily between the right and left-brain hemispheres. “It’s all creativity and energy, fluid and always dynamic, always changing, whether I’m writing a poem or a proposal,” he says. “It all requires thinking outside the box, expanding the box.”
Discovering a Father’s Secret and a Mother’s Kitchen
For both poets, a strong awareness of the tactile arises as the poems turn to family matters. Lennon describes “My Father Was a Poet” as revealing a record of heartache that he describes as wanting “…a conversation with him that I never had.” With blindness running in the family, the fable recounts that his father lost his vision and secretly began writing poems in Braille:
I did not know my father was a poet
who wrote in Braille after he lost his sight.
He was a man of secrets.
I usual ones I knew: alcohol
And women. Poetry was his alone.
After his death I found them carefully
Packed in the closet of his nursing home.
Page after page of tactile patterns lured
My fingertips. I had them translated,
If that’s the term, from darkness into light.
There were no letters only poetry.
He wrote an ordered formal verse,
Four beats always four beats per line.
It was a powerful uncompromising
Line for a man who did not compromise.
He knew I wrote and never asked to hear.
I read each poem of his, placing the Braille
Next to the flattened text. The pair revealed
VERSE Maps of constellations from the star
Atlas a son would follow to find his father.
Lennon writes his father’s verses in tight iambic tetrameter, a particularly unforgiving form, while in his own filial voice, Lennon the poet writes in the more flexible iambic pentameter, this structural difference crystallizing their estrangement.
This work, Lennon says, is “…a good way toward better understanding, and to find grace.”
Who among us has not longed to stumble upon the key, the code, the secret alphabet to solve the riddle of a flawed, broken, departed love?
When Sarwar writes about her mother cooking, the warmth of nurturing family is underscored by a narrative of stark resistance to oppression, seemingly managed as matter-of-factly as savory kitchen ingredients:
Rotation Dedicated to my mother She heats oil Rolls puri Drops flat flour into bubbling oil You conquer enforce rules ban travel In another pan She pops coriander seeds Tosses sliced potatoes You build walls deport passengers obstruct asylum-seekers She serves flaky puri With crisp potatoes —we devour together You demand documents collect fingerprints require face-identification Our choice: eat, speak, wear Practice as we please Where we wish You cannot hinder climbs prevent tide stop earth rotation Like waves we cross We fly We roar We stay or leave —our movement permanent.
Even Sarwar’s poem about her two-year-old daughter at the zoo seems to embed a sense of warning:
(excerpt from “My two-year-old, a giraffe and a conejo”)
She points, claps, and laughs
as the conejo devours grass
laid out in a velvet carpet for the giraffe,
who is too busy staring at the sky
to see what’s being stolen beneath his stomach.
This year’s Litfest in the Dena lineup is packed with surprises, including a pop-up bookstore hosted by Flintridge Bookstore, student voices from a Pasadena Unified think tank, and workshops and panels addressing a broad range of topics ranging from shepherding a manuscript through the publishing industry, queer speculative stories, zine creation, to creating “twisted” fairy-tale retellings.
Red Hen Press partners in the annual event, and Media Director Monica Fernandez says “Toby Harper Petrie, our Marketing Director, and I are on the Organizing/Planning Committee of Litfest in the Dena, which means we help review panel submissions, figure out the best programming schedule, suggest local authors, themes or events the festival could or should feature, and pull together one or two panels of our own. As a member of the Pasadena/Altadena family, we’re always thrilled to be a part of spotlighting literature and the local literary community. This year especially, we’re eager and honored to provide a place for artists of all kinds to gather and be in community with each other.”
Among the pop-ups will be the chance to sip a cup of Bibliophilia, the bespoke tea-blend created for Tea Spectral by its founders Stephanie Warner and Eugene Cordell, who curated the recipe during COVID lockdown.
Warner says, “Most people that try Bibliophilia for the first time are surprised by a balance of sweet and a hint of the unexpected savory. Like chocolate, tea leaves carry a profile of umami. Adding the element of sage and damiana to the mix allows the herbal notes to play a more dominant role in the overall body of the blend. It catches them off-guard, but they are surprised in a pleasant way. I think that engaging them in that first experience of unique blended tea is a great representation for the rest of the collection of blends that Tea Spectral has to offer.”
Tea Spectral — named for those souls haunting book shops and libraries — will host the Tea & Fiction panel under their podcast name, Authoress Café. For those who prefer a sharper buzz, Litfest in the Dena welcomes newcomer 77 Drip, hosting this year’s coffee booth.
Whether enjoying a Pekoe with your pantoum, or quaffing some Juan Valdéz with a villanelle, this annual gathering arrives just as the parrots return, and flicks of green peer up from the ashes like nothing bad ever happens here.
DEETS
- Litfest in the Dena
- Friday, May 2, 6:00 PM – 9:30 PM
- Saturday, May 3, 10:00 AM – 5:30 PM
- Pasadena Presbyterian Church in Playhouse Village, 585 East Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena 91101
- 626-793-2191
- Free of charge to the public
- For full schedule, visit www.litfestinthedena.org/schedule
