From 51: 30 Poems, 20 Lyrics, 1 Self-Interview (“5 Rounds with 1

Paul Zarzyski”)—Bangtail Press, 2011

 

If you’re up for it, I’d love to open Round 4 with a “triggering subject” scenario....

 

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 poet-friend Gary Thompson cued me to a Federico Garcia Lorca essay from which I plucked the epigraph, the springboard into the poem:

 

                                       “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.”

        

                                                            

                                                      Maria Benitez

                 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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                               Flamenca Duende

 

                                          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

                                          put 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, to echo the title of my first chapbook, because the power of her dance had not diminished and—I swear this truth on my sacred Smith-Corona Silent-Super typewriter—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, I believe she said.  Try to convince me that “Flamenca Duende” isn’t 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 hitch a ride, sans reins. Rendering the lyric, I took more control—albeit control with a hackamore rather than with the potentially, in the wrong hands, 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.