BEGINNINGS

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New Mexico 1956-1960

Berkeley, California 1960-1968 My beginnings in poetry Journal Blue Is the Color That Made the World

New Mexico 1956–1960

I WAS BORN AT THE HEIGHT of summer in New Mexico in 1956, so I love the heat of that season and the large expanse of sky and mountains in the clear light. At that time, my parents, Blair Boyd and Connie Fox (who kept her maiden name as her painting name), had a house in Tijeras in the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque. Following that, we moved to Corrales by the Rio grande, where my brother Brian was born.

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 1960–1968

My beginnings in poetry

For five years, starting when I was seven, we spent the school months in Berkeley, California, and took the train back and forth to New Mexico each summer until I was 12. That year, my parents separated, which marked a huge transition for me.

My father cared a great deal about words, about their exact use and meaning, and he gave them the same eye for detail he gave the statistics of a baseball game as he monitored its unfolding play by play. At my father's memorial service in the late fall of 2010, people who had worked for him at Landscape magazine spoke of his mastery as an editor. He had the ear of a musician when working with words. For him, editing wasn't merely about being grammatically correct but about being true to the meaning and to a code of authenticity that was strongly rooted in liberal philosophy. Books could be found in every room of his house — lining even the stairs in piles going up the steps — in groupings relating to their interior territories. His training was in geography, but he also had a great interest in people, in personal as well as social, political, and anthropological relationships; and his magazine focused on social geography: on people in relation to their surroundings, or the interplay between towns or cities and their people and how they intimately transformed each other.

My father's love of travel and of exploring new places infused my younger years with a great sense of adventure and a love of natural landscapes. When I was 13, he took my brother and me with his new family for a week of river rafting down the Rogue River in Oregon. I remember the majesty of the natural world on this journey and how I delighted in being on the river, feeling its power and mystery as we made our way down, camping alongside it each night. This archetypal imagery of water has worked its way into my poems throughout my life.

My parents both had a love of all things cultural, literary, and musical as well as of the arts in general, and it must have been a vibrant time for them to be involved with the University of New Mexico and later UC Berkeley. It's fascinating to reflect on which part of my artistic sensibility I inherited from my father and which from my mother and, through her, from my grandmother Eva Fox, whose birthday — August 19 — I share. My ongoing relationship with words as an expression of thought comes from my father, while my deeper intimacy with the poetic imagination comes from my mother, who throughout her life has had a love of poetry as well as close friendships with poets and writers. I am grateful I inherited this love of words along with a love of the artistic process I grew up with as part of my environment.

The way I "work" on my poems is similar to the way my mother has always immersed herself in her painting: intuitively — part wrestling, part dance. No matter where we lived or what form our family situation took, my mother's painting was always her lodestar as she navigated her life, and this gave me an unwavering sense of the artistic process as the way to tap into the underlying life force throughout life's inevitable changes.

I have also been deeply influenced by visual imagery through witnessing my mother's painting process as it evolved into abstract expressionism from her earlier imaginational landscapes. Landscape in abstract form has played a strong role in my mother's art all through her life, whether we lived in California, New Mexico, Denmark, or on Long Island, and it has helped us both build a sense of place. She has titled several of her paintings with lines from my poems, such as "your lamp far back between the trees," "I grow wings where no one can see," and "this room is wrinkled with light."

When I started writing poetry at the age of ten, and throughout the next few years, I would bring each poem I finished to my mother to read it to her. To me, it was like a wonderful treasure I had just discovered, and I wanted to share it with her immediately. She would listen intently and then say, "Read it again ..." It was her responsiveness and delight that planted the seed of inspiration in me to pay attention to those moments when the desire to write a poem would rise up within me, and that would lead to another and then another.

The world of the poem first opened to me through the transformational teaching of Marvin Moss at John Muir Elementary School — an unusual public school, but the time and place was Berkeley in the '60s! Mr. Moss took our fifth-grade class on walks through different neighborhoods where he would teach us about wild edible plants, tell us about reincarnation, and give us lessons in problem solving through intuition rather than logic, even introducing us to Zen koans. On our walks, Mr. Moss would draw our attention to the contrast between nature and civilization, providing me with the inspiration for many of my poems back then. We memorized and recited poems by Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, so that the sound of the poems became a part of us. By writing free-form haiku (ignoring the syllable counts), we experienced the power of the image in all its simplicity and presence. This sense of the image as the core impulse of the poem has remained at the root of my process ever since.

JOURNAL

Assignments from Mr. Moss

November 8, 1966

What a prayer should be:

A prayer should be what you really feel inside, and not memorized. It should ask forgiveness, but not often. It should have simple words and stay off politics or greed. It should thank god, not ask god to thank one of your own kind when you can walk right over to them and say it.

November 17, 1966

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