Yes, Poetry, Yes! Book Party with Richard Baldo, YES!
Saturday, February 8, 2025
Yes, there will be a poetry reading featuring Richard Baldo this Saturday. Our strong open reading will follow the feature. The event will be available both in-person and via Zoom. If you’re in Las Vegas, Richard will be here (!), so come out to Winchester Cultural Center, 3130 McLeod Dr., Las Vegas 89121. To join the reading via Zoom, just click on the underlined link below.
Book Party & Reading for Richard Baldo Feb. 8, 2:00 PM PST
To Join by Telephone: (669) 444-9171
Meeting ID: 867 8022 9462
Passcode: 988095
Richard Baldo’s brand new book is Learning to Walk on Quicksand (Zeitgeist). The poems are drawn from a long career of psychotherapy. As Gailmarie Pahmeier, Emeritus Poet Laureate of Nevada, describes “his journey of compassionate care…from a mature and astute observer of what being human means.” The first highly memorable section of the book includes poignant, moving poems of life and death, of miraculous healing and intractable pains.
Here are a couple of poems as a taste for you.
NEW PATIENT APPOINTMENT Minutes into the session, holding myself frozen at my desk, my spine shivers in its confinement, unable to bolt for the door behind me, only three feet, too far for safety. I discard the impulse to run and attend his fist, pounding on my gray Steelcase desk. My heart answers with blood pulse pounding in my ears. The man's senseless shouting continues to shake my office. Breathe –wait, master the bullied boy inside me. The shouting continues, now ready to kill. He shouts he will: He will. His face red, his voice hard, too real, He will kill. Scenes of blood on the walls, bodies in the sagebrush pass through me. Who has he killed already? Killed??? My young therapist heart calms, wait, wait…. Hold firm with steady eye contact, just let the threat pass. The patient gradually tires of his own helpless rage. I watch as the angry shield gives way, My therapist self acknowledges how much misery and helplessness feeds that scary outer rage. As the conversation continues, he agrees to sit down. He starts his real story. I suggest, Just raise the recliner footrest. At the end of the hour with parting words he turns to leave the office. I see the wooden grip of the revolver sticking out of his back pocket. How afraid must he have been to need that. ~ THE PRIVILEGE A family member called to cancel the appointment. My patient was lost in an abyss of darkness, lying unconscious in a distant city, dying. Her urgent need helped me overcome my shock and helplessness at the news. We had worked so hard to heal such near-deadly wounds that bound her at the stakes of childhood brutality. There must be something I could do to overcome the indignity of life's new assault against her. Could she not have a moment of comfort, to be at ease? The ICU doctor answered my call and said there was nothing else he could do, her husband and children on a plane, expecting to be too late. There was only enough 0-2 getting through to keep her brain alive for a short time. Doctor, you may think this weird, but would you put the phone to her ear? He replied, At this point, I'll try anything. and ran a line to her pillow. The one-sided conversation reached into her life, asking her to choose it with all its pain, with her children, the hard struggle to heal, anchoring memories lived in our shared years, desperate, reaching for moments of innocent light. Perhaps I was there, somewhere among the pulsing screens, beeping machines, IV poles and tubes of precious air, there, in that white automated room two thousand miles away. Twenty minutes later, someone picked up the phone. Something had changed. The pulse of life was quickening, oxygen piercing inflammation, being metabolized. In the chart, a change of heart was noted. They put the phone back to her ear, an hour longer, and she breathed stronger. I put down the phone, shaking. It’s an excellent portrayal of the event.” —Patient Communication, January 2024 ~
Richard’s poems in the book include the experiences we mostly all have with parents, grandparents, marriages, and family. Though most of these poems reflect gratitude and satisfaction at those experiences, I think the density and portrayal of feelings in a difficult moment make this one a gem:
BORNE FROM OUR DECEMBER
Our cold breaths freeze words
to shatter between us.
The cold window shines with white frost
from the ice moon.
I want to walk into the winter wooded yard,
lie down between the trees and shrubs,
let the roots and dirt enfold me
to take me from this life.
Maybe in spring,
something she can love
will grow.
~These poems show a serious talent for inhabiting and representing varied psychological space. So much of our experience of life is conditioned by the roles and positions we put or find ourselves in. There’s the young therapist who wants so much to help, even as the patient becomes crazed. The poem lays out dramatically in the last detail of the patient how this therapist wasn’t maybe looking clearly enough at the potential for danger. Yet the desire to help, to be of service, is his consistent approach and achievement. Also in the poem of the woman at death’s door, the reader is carried convincingly along with that satisfaction at being able to help. Yet in his own personal travails, which of course even the therapist experiences, there’s chill, conflict, despair. This poem represents that brilliantly, concisely, because it’s rooted in the human feeling, it’s in-side-out.
Can you portray a unique feeling or series of events so well from the in-side-out? If you start with the emotion, that will tell you where the perspective needs to be rooted to create an effective portrayal. So start rooted in your feeling, then let the poem tell its own story, find its own truth. Keep your hand moving across the page. Of course, use vivid description that match your tone and emotional perspective. What kind of images best represent the emotions? Don’t be afraid to include them, just stuff them right in there— they don’t need logical explanation or orderly role call. Fill your poem with images that match and represent the emotion, the tone, the perspective. After you’ve got a bunch of words drafted, take a break, blink, have a coffee. Then read it again. What kind of meaning or truth or summary does this experience bring to mind? Write it at the end of the poem. Bring the poem to the reading. Or just bring whatever you’re reading and writing.
Hope to see you at Poetry!
Our weekly workshop events are sponsored by Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Our in-person workshops are supported by Clark County at Winchester Dondero Cultural Center. Thank you!Bruce Isaacson
Poetry Promise, Inc.
a 501 (c)(3) Corporation
Phone: (702) 205-7100
Bruce@PoetryPromise.org