A Portland Poetress

Just a quick opening word...Mr T...Thomas Bickle, the gutsy little two year old who is battling cancer that I mentioned in an earlier blog, had his surgery today to remove another tumor, and his mom reported this afternoon that the surgery went well...I'll keep you updated when I find out more...

And while we are speaking of children, I have three of the grown-up variety, at least they are 20, 21 and 24 years into being grown-up, and I am equally proud of all three. I know parents are supposed to say that even if one of them is an evil Chucky child...which none of mine are...they are, in fact, all beautiful, all smart...occasionally smart-asses...refreshingly cynical, and remarkably independent and free-thinking young adults...and I wish I could take credit for it, but everyone who knows us knows they are just pretty special. Anyway the eldest of that trio is Ariele, which is pronounced like the letters R...E...L... It is Hebrew for "lioness of God", but the traditional pronunciation comes out sounding like "aerial" (you know the thing sticking up on the front or back of your car that lets you listen to annoying talk radio) so we softened the beginning "a". One of our friends early on called her "REL Speedwagon" which regretably, never quite stuck. Ariele lives and works in Portland, Oregon with an organization called The Burnside Writer's Collective. She has been a writer since she was old enough to collect thoughts and put them down on paper, walls, encyclopedia margins and anywhere else she could find. When she was in the 7th grade, she was a part of the gifted and talented program for a school district outside of Austin, and the teacher who worked with that program called me one day and said, "Mr. Gentiles, I'm a little worried about Ariele's choice of reading material for this special literary project we are doing which involves choosing a book regarded a "classic" and then constructing a tangible representation of the great themes and messages of this work." When I asked her what the issue was, she replied, "Well...she has chosen Fyodor Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov" and frankly Mr. Gentiles that is a book most students don't read until upper level college courses, and then they are usually English majors specializing in Russian literature...I'm just concerned that the reading will be too difficult and it would only set her up for failure." I thanked her for her concern and diligence, but assured her that Ariele could handle it...which she did beautifully. When she was a sophomore in high school she submitted a paper on Herman Melville's "Moby Dick", making the case that this classic work was, in fact, an example of one of the first literary works of postmodernity. Now that was in the late 90's when theologians, philosophers and educators had just begun to debate the postmodern cultural paradigm shift. I was not surprised. She entered her college undergraduate work as a pre-med/forensics major. She was CSI before CSI was cool, but at the end of her sophomore year changed her major to English because she missed the outlet that writing and literature provided in feeding her soul...and today she is one of the rare English graduates actually doing work in her field... I don't know all that awaits her along her journey, but her unique passion and insight has left an indelibly written impression on this dad's heart... I'm proud of who she is and who she is becoming.

Here's a example of a post from a few days ago on her own blog Saint Vespertine to give you some insight as to why I love her and her writing so...

human beans.

i like to playtend that we human beans
are more than just ivory sinew and skin,
more than thewless puppets on
stringsSuspended from clouds
dancing us onward to mortal fate’s end.

and those

red beating hearts sagging on shirtsleeves,
stitched and re-stitched with gossamer threads
of hope and the like, repairing the rends
split by those knock-about kinds of dreams
and sinister forces seemingly unseen.

yet then there’s

the art of growing up into cleverish beasts
of vague and clawing responsibility,
stretching our skin and excavating our bones
into adult-sized tombs, long red claustrophobic rooms
to lie and wait, lighting fires for heat
against the cold prospect of death and defeat.

so

i hold my red kite against the blue of the sky
and count the dust clouds as the ambly pull by.


Roar on "Lioness of God"...

Pling...Pling...

dg