ENTRIES:
Am I Pretty or Ugly?
Snapshot Gravity
New SoundCloud Tracks
Flamenca Duente-Maria Benitez
Roadwork In The Boneyard
Bucking Horse Moon
Christmas Wish Triptych
Russia Tour
Cowboy Confessional
Chordwood
Hard Traveling
Labor Day
Stephen Bodio Review
Amazon 51 Ranking
“51” links
For Immediate Release
COMING SOON TO A THEATER NEAR YOU!
Montana Quarterly, Fall 2010
Delia ‘Dee’ Zarzyski eulogy
Delia ‘Dee’ Zarzyski obituary

ARCHIVE: 39 previous entries

© Paul Zarzyski. All rights reserved. These words may not be reprinted or reposted without the author's written permission.

Flamenca Duente-Maria Benitez a duet from the cassette—yes, cassette, as this was Paul’s first recording effort—“AIN’T NO LIFE AFTER RODEO” is now available on SoundCloud [click here]. See the other tracks Paul wrote the lyrics for from this cassette on the Discography page from the Music Room.

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an excerpt from “5 Memoir Rounds With 1 Paul Zarzyski” from Paul's latest book, 51: 30 Poems, 20 Lyrics, 1 Self-Interview

ROUND 4

If you’re up for it, I’d love to open Round 4 with another “triggering subject” scenario or episode in a similar spirit as those surrounding “The Hand” and “Montana Second Hand.”

I lived outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico for a bit in the late 1980s—culture-shock, to say the least, for someone beamed-up out of the Midwest with a long layover in Montana. But I love the landscape, love the people, and especially love the food. I experienced a good number of firsts there, among them my first encounter with flamenco, performed by artist Maria Benitez. I was still riding a few broncs, and felt a distinct kinship between Maria’s passionate pursuit for the dance-perfected and that of the bucking horse twister. Her performance—the electricity, the panache, the verve, the moxie, the élan, the ardor, the disciplined tempestuousness, the grit, the soulful downpour of two-hundred-proof passion—flipped the switches on my epinephrine pumps to full-tilt. I absorbed the dance—one stomped foot and handclap per pore—into my deepest being, where it has taken up residence for life. Months later, back in Montana and living in that hundred-year-old ranch house, Maria’s dance rose to the surface, busted through the cold and ice and into the warmth of the room, where I sat two feet from the wood stove and worked up the first draft of “Flamenca Duende.” The title arrived much later, after Gary Thompson cued me to a Federico Garcia Lorca essay from which I plucked the epigraph, the springboard into the poem:

                        Flamenca Duende

                                          “The duende is a power, not a work;
                                           it is a struggle, not a thought . . . ,
                                           not a question of ability, but of true,
                                           living style, of blood, of the most
                                           ancient culture, of spontaneous creation
                                           . . . . It is, in sum, the spirit of the earth.”

                        Not just any hot Latin blood, but the fiery
                        blood of Maria Benitez—her heart’s
                        whole voltage into each muscle, perfect
                        choreography of the body’s troupe,
                        500 strong—is not just any passion
                        but passion a-horseback
                        full-gallop with gut-stringed, cypress guitars
                        to the stampede of hand clap, castanets,
                        laughter and tragic Andalusian wail
                        cracking the night like lightning
                        striking Gypsy moons afire.

                        Into this flamenca’s dance goes the faith
                        of all saints, one poet’s soul, vaquero savvy
                        and toreador grit, predator
                        frenzy at the taste of blood, plus a shot
                        of erotica, rage, and mother love.
                        When the blur of feet mesmerizes me—
                        holds me in the black bonds between stars—
                        I miss the gait of her eyes,
                        and when I follow her face, chin poised
                        for passage into the meteor storm of rhythms,
                        I miss the aerial steps of one hand. Yet,
                        when I focus on that flight,
                        the mate solos out of the frame—
                        impossible to track a duet
                        of acrobatic toucans through a tropical
                        canopy’s kaleidoscopic dance.
                       
                        But the Spanish, heir to that grace,
                        cheer her on: Olé! Maria! Olé!
                        and the ruffled grouse drumming
                        accelerates to cicada chirr, that chain
                        reaction of ricochets
                        rippling through the train of her gown,
                        through her shawl’s foot-long fringes
                        flailing wild as hot wires
                        in a gale. As she pivots
                        finger-snap fast, an earring
                        whiplashed to the stage
                        flickers to life, ignited
                        by the charge of its atoms dancing—
                        dancing to the pulse of passion’s lithe flame
                        burning for Maria
                        from the molten center of the earth—dancing,
                        that gold earring dancing, ‘til it too burns.
                       

So is the poem’s intent to harness the essence of Maria’s passion conveyed through her dance?

Don’t ask me. Ask the poem. As did “The Hand,” it wrote most of it itself, without much direction from me. I have yet another postscript, however. I saw Maria dance again in 1997. I did so with heavy trepidation. What if my response this time was less pronounced or, far worse, what if it was every bit as profound but made the poem seem anemic? Call me Lucky, because the power of her dance had not diminished and—I swear this truth on my sacred Smith-Corona—I came away not wanting to alter a single image or syllable. For a perpetual, punctilious tweaker such as myself, the odds against this are colossal. I spoke with Maria after her performance and she told me that as a young girl she and her mother had lived in Montana for awhile—on one of the Indian Reservations.  Try to convince me that “Flamenca Duende” isn’t also a cowboy poem.

And then there’s your song lyric companion piece, “Maria Benitez,” which singer-songwriter John Hollis put a melody to and recorded. You’d agree that, thematically, it’s more of a cowboy song than “Flamenca Duende” is a cowboy poem?

I wrote the lyric long after the poem, and seem to recall consciously focusing on that bucking hoss-twister flamenca-dancer kinship I mentioned. The poem chose not to address that—at least not directly—and I trusted the poem’s instinct to veer wherever it needed to veer, as well as my instinct to ride along. Rendering the lyric, I took more control—albeit control with a hackamore rather than with the potentially more severe spade bit. I just this instant realized how I’m prone to leveraging some control with the lyric, whereas, to the contrary, I’ve seldom used anything more than a halter and a buck rein with my poetry. I’m partial to giving the poem its head and trying to stick with it through every acrobatic literati-lariati trick or contorted feat it throws at me. All Equus caballus metaphors aside, John Hollis was the first musician to field my neophyte attempts at songwriting. He sent me a demo cassette, and I’ll never forget the elation as I listened for the first time to a musician’s melodic interpretation of my lyric narrative. John augmented the chorus with some Spanish, and created a beautiful lilt. Tom Perlman, Jean Prescott, and Justin Bishop of Horse Sense also cut “Maria Benitez,” which, as you suggest, most definitely is more of a cowboy story—much varied from the original poem, focusing purely on Maria, on the dance, in a more ethereal, universal vein.

The Lyric, one of the 20 Lyrics from 51: 30 Poems, 20 Lyrics, 1 Self-Interview

Maria Benitez                                              (with John Hollis)

A bucking horse-twisting Gypsy
Trailing the moon to each show
I’m drawn to Maria’s arena
In the piñons of New Mexico.

Her castanets, they telegraph passion
Her Spanish heels are a-Gatling gun quick
Like the fast ratchet sound of my rowels spinning ‘round
And the ricochet ring when they click.

            Viva Maria Benitez
            Ole! Maria Ole!
            Tu Estampa Flamenca
            Mi alma tan bronca
            Like a stampede through ol’ Santa Fe
            Ole! Maria Ole!

Flamenco, Gitano, the Gypsy
The stage is her own Loving Trail
She’s cool as a matador dancing
To a high Andalusian wail.

And I ride on the wind of her rhythm
With her dance in my veins I can’t lose
And I crave the bronc’s fury and fire
The wild flame that we can’t refuse

            Viva Maria Benitez
            Ole! Maria Ole!
            Tu Estampa Flamenca
            Mi alma tan bronca
            Like a stampede through ol’ Santa Fe
            Ole! Maria Ole!

                        I’ll ride with her soul for 8 seconds
                        Each muscle a-rippling like hers
                        And I’ll sing to her hoof-pounding tempo
                        This love song that trills from my spurs.

            Viva Maria Benitez
            Ole! Maria Ole!
            Tu Estampa Flamenca
            Mi alma tan bronca
            Like a stampede through ol’ Santa Fe
            Ole! Maria Ole!

            Viva Maria Ole!
            Ole! Maria Ole!