The West Marin Review is one of the remarkable things locals brag about, and the newest issue justifies their pride. As was true of each of the previous editions, the seventh volume, released last month, is a potpourri of prose, poetry, paintings, photographs and other forms of art.
Many of the entries are from people living in West Marin whose names will be quickly recognized; some are well known for their accomplishments nationally and in other countries, but others are talented amateurs. Though most of the submissions come from West Marin, there is no geographical restriction for entries. All of the pieces are subject to blind review by panels that rigorously assess them for quality and suitability. The roughly 500 submissions to the latest volume were winnowed down to a total of 52—12 prose pieces, 20 poems and 20 works of art.
Some earlier volumes have included musical scores and even a reproduction of beautifully written 19th-century letters. But what has distinguished each volume is its artfulness as a whole, beginning with the cover. If this sounds like hyperbole, the editors can point out with pride that the journal has been recognized far beyond West Marin. Volume 6 won first place among periodicals and literary journals from the Book Industry Guild of New York. Doris Ober, the review’s managing editor, maintains a carful overview of the written work but attributes the overall attractiveness to artist Madeline Corson, who oversees the design.
The age diversity of contributors—who range from children to nonagenarians—is another important feature of the review. The editors have actively recruited submissions from youngsters; Gerardo Loza, a freshman at Tomales High, has a poem in Volume 7 that evokes his experiences of both California and Mexico.
At a release celebration at the end of October, Heather Quinn, one of the authors featured in the new volume, read her poem, “Mindspill: A Paradelle.” In the most intriguing presentation of the afternoon, Quinn told listeners: “… the paradelle was created as a joke by [former United States poet laureate] Billy Collins in 1997 to create an impossible, ridiculously restrictive poetic form to poke fun at older forms of poetry, like the villanelle. He then published a paradelle that is considered to be quite awful and is assumed to be intentionally so, as if to say, ‘There is no way to write a good poem with this form.’”
To maintain the deception, she went on, Collins claimed in a footnote to the poem that it was one of the fixed forms of 11th-century love poetry. A Wikipedia entry describes the form as “… four six-line stanzas in which the first and second lines, as well as the third and fourth lines of the first three stanzas, must be identical. The fifth and sixth lines, which traditionally resolve these stanzas, must use all the words from the preceding lines and only those words. Similarly, the final stanza must use every word from all the preceding stanzas and only these words.”
Although the paradelle was meant as a spoof, Quinn reported that “crazy poets” like herself took it as a challenge. Her poem concludes with the following all-inclusive stanza:
My grandpa’s love is unspooling
like a spillway. From every roof I perch
then lull into the ribbon of childhood
mind. I remember my home, another day,
the bee, t-shirt, backyard crying,
and red sting in the word forget.
I encourage readers to consult Volume 7 to see how all of these words are used in the previous three stanzas as a poetic prevue to this final amalgam.
Another highlight of the release party was the peripatetic David Miller’s synopsis of his entry, “Our Family Farm.” Miller, one of the review’s founders, has moved from West Marin to Davis, where he works as the program director for the Research and Innovation Fellowship for Agriculture at the university. He calls himself “an international development economist by day suffering from chronic jet lag, and an insomniac writer by night.” He has published some of the results of his insomnia—fascinating anecdotes about his life and travels—in the last several volumes.
His most recent entry describes how the back to the land movement of the 1960s persuaded him and his wife, Susan, to give up “tedious” graduate studies and, on a whim, buy a run-down 150-acre farm in upstate New York. The focal point of the story has to do with coming to grips with using a gun. As he explains, “It was impossible to imagine that pulling a trigger would occupy so much of the life of a tiller of the soil.”
Miller’s farmer neighbors were largely indifferent to his consternation. When he confessed that he had not killed a woodchuck he had spotted, his closest neighbor replied, “What’s the matter, you chicken?” Miller’s embarrassment led him to hunt down the offending animal, and the confrontation was both amusing and instructive.
Although the Millers gave up farm life and went on to work in many exotic places throughout the world, they held on to the farm and periodically returned for short stays for 30 years. As to these international adventures, previous volumes and the next one promise more results of Miller’s insomnia.
Another riveting presentation at the launch party featured Vicki DeArmon’s “A Mother’s No,” an evocation of how often she invoked “no” in raising her child. It will ring a bell for many parents, though probably not with such dramatic consequences.
And the celebration is not over. This Sunday, Nov. 13, Point Reyes Books presents Robert Hass, a former U.S. poet laureate, and friends reading from the new volume in a benefit for the West Marin Review. The event starts at 3 p.m. at the Point Reyes Presbyterian Church; tickets are $25.
Herb Kutchins retired to West Marin in an effort to keep up with his neighbors’ creativity.