Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only €10,99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    To the Tune of Me
    To the Tune of Me
    To the Tune of Me
    Ebook167 pages52 minutes

    To the Tune of Me

    By Evelyn Leah Belvin, Kathy Evans and Tom Centolella

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    come, let us share eyesights I will show you a shining drop on a leaf, what will you show me? - Evelyn Leah Belvin

    To the Tune of Me is a sharing of many such shining drops, fictions and revelations, imaginings and insights. The poet's is a world of endless possibility, vision, and perception. The richness of Evelyn Belvin's ability to experience
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWordsworth
    Release dateMar 15, 2012
    ISBN9780983678632
    To the Tune of Me

    Related to To the Tune of Me

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related categories

    Reviews for To the Tune of Me

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      To the Tune of Me - Evelyn Leah Belvin

      About the Cover

      Once upon a time, not so long ago, my dearest and oldest friend, in every sense of the word, called to speak her latest poem, Incubus.

      A few days later, I was working on a painting in my place on the Bowery at Bleecker when I glanced out the window to see, across the street on the southeast corner, a tall thin being in a black skin-tight body suit, with a whitened face made into a mask, moving and elegantly juggling in slow motion two small balls, to the sounds of a little boombox. It was the Incubus made visible, without a doubt.

      I did the drawings, called Evelyn in excitement. She was thrilled.

      — Joyce Rezendes

      Foreword

      I marvel to this day at Evelyn Belvin’s resilience. . . . She remains with me on foggy days. I can still see her sitting in her wheelchair, dressed in her beads and bright T-shirts with irreverent sayings scrolled across the front or back of them, usually beaming. I loved her small, pithy poems, her keen observations (e.g., the bottle of port opened, the bottle of sake not).

      But most of all, I loved our talks, usually in the late afternoon in her Tiburon apartment. I would show up on her porch of struggling potted plants with soup (she loved Butternut Squash with a hint of pear), or sometimes with Stilton cheese (another favorite) and figs, or with red tulips, which she couldn’t eat but would savor with her eyes.

      Even when she was tired, she had enough energy to scold me for being late, then she’d offer me chocolate or a children’s book. She would listen to any gripes or dilemmas, as only Evelyn could, with humor, humanity, and insight. She was a wise friend. She was an honest friend. Evelyn never pretended to be happy when she wasn’t, and her poems bear this quality. She looked at each feeling head on, never retreating, and she didn’t harness her opinions, either. From her wheelcair in the middle of that cluttered living room, she’d shake a good fist at the heavens and their gods, or at the government, and inevitably offer a wide-angle lens, a perspective that usually shifted my own.

      Or, she might give me a small angle lens—a way of seeing in the moment what others might not consider: music on the radio, a new rose in a pot, the paintings or photographs of her friends. Always the view outside—the walking path, or an unnamed bird on a branch in the sun.

      At the end of the visit, she’d read me a poem, then send me on my way to love again something in the world.

      — Kathy Evans

      California Poets in the Schools

      Introduction

      For something like 18 years, Evelyn Belvin was royalty among my many writing students. More importantly, she was a presiding presence in my life—friend seems too insufficient a word. I admired Evelyn’s feistiness and self-possession (see the end of Interview), as well as her enthusiasm, which was legendary and hardly diminished by a stroke in her 80’s. Evelyn was a person, and poet, of feeling, if ever there was one. But she carried her enormous reservoir of sentiment without allowing it, somehow, to spill over into sloppy sentimentality. She cared deeply for moments of connection with her fellow creatures, human and otherwise, but didn’t suffer fools gladly; her b.s. detector was fine-tuned and enviable. So was her vast joie de vivre. Evelyn’s cackle was her great trademark, a sonic version of appreciating the world’s pleasures and thumbing her nose at its intolerable crap.

      But I’m feeling the impossibility of doing justice to the largeness and shrewdness and elation of Evelyn’s spirit. Luckily, we have her writing (though even her engaging language can go just so far). Evelyn was a poet of flowers, of bittersweet desire, of beloved demons and solitary ruminations deep in the night. Whitman would have loved her; she possessed an expansive curiosity about human nature, including her own:

      I turn for comfort

      to the tune of me—

      it is slow and rather

      mournful; as I

      listen, I am interested

      and the tone is stronger

      Mortality, the imminence of death, is nothing she shirked from. On the contrary. In one poem she extends her hand to death, and death, caught off-guard by such bravado, hesitates. And Yeats might have had Evelyn in mind when he said that of arguments with others

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1