Love At 19th & Guerrero

These love poems were inspired by my admiration for three people who had been, in the early 1990s, regular performers in the Café Babar poetry scene, but have since passed on. The book was inspired by my profound sense of loss when the news came in from Michigan that Dominique Lowell had passed on in June of this year, 2017, just four years after Joie Cook. Eli Coppola had left us back in the year 2,000. Each of these women had something that was irreplaceable, a particular style of communicating, not just in their manner of speaking, but also in their manner of listening. My experience of them had one common thread, and that was my feeling, whenever I left their presence, that I had been deeply heard. And here I am not referring to the kind of technique-filled faux-humility that passes for good listening now. (In this Neo-Victorian age mere self-suppression and blandness are mistaken for good listening, and simple enthusiasm and expressiveness are counted as bad listening.) Instead, I'm talking about empathy. This is not to say that these listeners didn't all have their dark sides, but rather, it is to say that they were the kind of people I felt I could call and simply say what I was feeling, however frightened and lonely I might be. And, having opened my deepest self up to them, I walked away feeling known. Some of these relationships never went further than conversation, and some went a bit beyond that. The poems can speak to that matter for themselves. In any case, they were each, in their own way, quite obviously muses, and not just for me, but for many other men and women. Perhaps a hardbound volume could be filled if one were to gather all of the love-poems and tribute-verses written for them, whether publicly or privately. This short tract of poems, collected from several other books, letters and magazines, is a tribute to the vibrancy, the generosity, and the concern these fantastic people showed me. I miss them every day of my life.