Infamous as much for his brilliant magazine illustrations and political caricatures as he was for his white beard, Gene Holtan segued into abstract painting during his final years. The results were stunning counterpoints of expressionist marks and squiggled lines that almost resolve into recognizable entities. Yet they don’t.
With a meandering palette of pinks and hunter greens, the Santa Cruz–based artist filled the surface with forms leaning against each other, as if trying to hold each other up, shambling shapes jostling for attention while suggesting an accidental perfection lying just behind. Whatever his imagination was aiming at, Holtan got gloriously sidetracked in the foreground of his picture plane.
A fabled letter-press printer, holding forth in the seclusion of the Green Gables Victorian on Beach Hill that he shared with his beloved partner, Elizabeth Sanchez, Holtan became over the years a close friend and mentor to fellow printer and broadside poet Gary Young.
Young recalls the loquacious Holtan as having taught him “more about being a poet than any of my poetry mentors ever did.” Cherishing the words, observations and ironies of his departed friend, Young has put together a stunning collection of poems around the second oldest human condition—loss.
American Analects, the title of Young’s latest suite of 60 poems, just launched from Persea Books/New York, is exactly the right size for a book that invites long, slow sips and plenty of time to savor the sensory bouquet. Beautifully printed, it allows each crisp rectangle of words a lavish surround of white space. As always with prose poetry by this prolific craftsman, each poem pretends to be simple. Direct. Effortless to read and understand. Until you read it again and watch more meanings emerge like stars in a twilight sky.
His delicious suites of words, some only two lines long, are mercurial. And deceptive. Just when we are lulled into the word-perfect rhythm of the piece, a sudden shiver occurs. Of what? Some surreality that becomes a portal, pointing to exactly what we did not expect. “The metaphor we create for our own survival is difficult to dismantle, but not impossible.” That’s very Gary Young. Offering the brusquely unexpected wrapped up in supple images of nature, or saucy sayings of his late departed friend.
The poems seem to describe a familiar world, and yet one in which we observers have been turned inside out. How can the unexpected sound so familiar?
We are seduced over and over again, until (the poet suggests) we get it. And when we do, we are invited to throw away the bread crumbs. Just step out onto whatever is behind it all. The last words of Gene Holtan were: Follow the instructions to the door. When you get to the door, throw the instructions away.
Ultimately, while romancing death, songbirds, disappointment and the mundane mystery at the edge of each day, these poems are about resilience. See what we can enjoy? they ask. See what we can endure? they suggest. We will come, and we will go, but “The rain and the moss never tire.”
Such a pleasure it is to savor Young’s poems that one scarcely minds not entirely knowing how they cast their spell. A literary magician, this man shows but never tells. American Analects (a gloss on the Analects of Confucius) will ensnare you. Painlessly it rewards the turning of each page. Come hear Gary Young read from his new book. Doors will open.
Feasting on the World: Paintings by Gene Holtan, Poems by Gary Young. Book launch andreading by Gary Young from 3 to 5pm on Dec. 8 at the MK Contemporary Art Gallery on Front Street. An accompanying exhibition of Holtan’s drawings pops up in the MAH’s Atrium from noon to 6pm on Dec. 6-8.
