Maurya Simon: California Poets Part 8, Three Poems

Maurya Simon

January 8th, 2025

California Poets: Part VIII

Maurya Simon

Three Poems

In the Bois de Boulogne

September 1956, Paris

My mother’s braid, a black snake, dangles down

her back, spins around her waist as she turns

from a Parisian poster to watch the bald Spaniard—

short, nimble-footed, bowlegged as a bull dog—

strolling down our lane in this golden park.

I’m five and I know how beautiful she is, despite

her yellow fingertips, crooked teeth, heavy-lidded

Sephardic eyes. We’re taking our après midi stroll

in the Bois—me, my sister, our mother—

while every Frenchman we pass turns to stare at her,

though she doesn’t notice. We’ve brought some

stale breadcrumbs for these iridescent birds

that shimmer like bobbing sultans when the man

nears us, walking a thin grey cat on a blue leash,

making the pigeons scatter into fluttering cries

and feathery alarms. Pardon, Mesdames, he says,

then he stops to look my mother up and down.

My god, she whispers, Picasso, burning beneath his

stare. He wears a paint-stained sailor shirt, the grip

of genius in his grin. He bows low to her, to us,

scoops up his cat and is gone. My mother lights

a Gauloises cigarette, throws back her raven head,

then laughs out a ribbon of smoky joy. Later, she tells

my dad about our brush with fame, saying, Imagine, even the pigeons clapped their wings for him!

Baila Goldenthal, Tamara and Maurya Simon and unknown couple (August 1956, Bois de Boulogne, Paris)

Wildfires

Hell’s ripped open our forests— lambasted, roasted, and scorched them so that they burn on and on for days, weeks, and months like interminable, flame-haired furies.

In Spain, Portugal, France, even down-under in Australia’s koala forests, wildfires are raging, just as they are here in our droughty western expanses of North America.

Doesn’t it seem all the world will end in fire, and not in ice? It’s as if R. Frost posted this end-of-times query, knowing that desire always trumps hatred in matters of the heart.

Or does it? I’d like to think what burns brightest in our souls is a combustible yearning, and not our loathing springing up from an inner coldness deadening

whatever it encounters, numbing us into oblivion. It’s good to know wildfires propagate billions of newborn forests that we’ll never see, but which our great-great grandchildren,

we hope, will amble through with awe, knowing how casually we tossed matches out our collective windows, how our fevered world hasn’t ended yet, but turns its other cheek—

Anthropocene Prayer

A storm is blowing from Paradise. It’s caught in his wings with such violence, the Angel can no longer close them. - Walter Benjamin

With his stalactite-toothed jaw jutting out, and his parchment curls wildly unscrolling, Angelus Novus flaps his chicken-wing arms

and floats above the world on three-toed bird feet. Caught up by history’s cruel winds, he flails his ungainly wings and hums a dirge.

Floods, hurricanes, drought, famines,

heat waves, wildfires, the displacement of millions of climate refugees—

Oh, how to save earth from ourselves to insure its survival? Let’s call the Angel of History to hover above us again,

to awaken the dead and repair the living— Where we perceive a chain of events, the Angel sees one catastrophe and ash, yet he survives…

Trees raise their arms to him in supplication, stars recede: he’s turned backwards to view our past’s wreckage, our endless tragedies—

still, he’ll try to rescue us. Oh, frail seraph, raise up those whom we’ve lost, and help us salvage the earth in order to save ourselves.

Angelus Novus, by Paul Klee, oil transfer drawing with watercolor, 1920.

Interview

July 15th, 2025

California Poets Interview Series:

Maurya Simon, Poet, Essayist, Visual Artist

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: Your latest book, La Sirena: A Novella in Verse, traces a girl’s story as she enters adulthood, but it is so much more than that. It is the connection between the female spirit and the flushness of the earth— the fluid nature of what surrounds it, which is water. The work has European elements but also elements from the New World, much like your life has been. Though each author writes from their own experiences, some do more so than others. To what extent is this project autobiographical?

MS: I’m so grateful that you’re such an attentive and insightful reader, David. First, yes, La Sirena is much more than a bildungsroman: it strives to achieve more than simply charting its heroine’s emotional, spiritual, and psychological growth. I also hoped to infuse the story with the visual and sensual richness of the ocean, and with its transformative powers, which are mirrored in Melusina, the story’s protagonist. In my mind, the ocean is a powerful character in the story, and I wanted the “fluidity” that you’ve mentioned to imbue not only Melusina’s shapeshifting sense of herself, but also to ripple through the other characters’ identities. Water touches every character’s existence, in one way or another, often altering it.

Actually, this book is quite autobiographical, and I think of it as autofiction, although that’s a strange literary hybrid. Yet La Sirena is not just a retelling of my adolescence in third person, blending both autobiography and fiction, it’s also a blending of myth and reality (whatever “reality” is)—and, as you’ve noted, it draws on mythologies from both the New World and European folklore. So, like Melusina, the story transforms itself as it progresses.

DG: Your work has been translated into a variety of languages—everything from French to Farsi. If you could write in any one of the languages your poetry has been translated into, which would it be and why?

MS: I’d love to be proficient enough in French to read and write it fluently. I say this because, as a child living in France for several years, I learned enough French to understand it pretty well, so it almost seemed (at the time) like my second language. Since then, though, due to lack of usage, my French has dwindled down to the barest of essentials. I love the sound of French, and I also love the sound of Italian, which I studied in college, hoping to learn enough Italian to read Dante in the original. Though my poems haven’t yet been translated into Italian, how thrilling if they were to be!

DG: The teaching of creative writing has been a staple in your career—an effort that has spanned thirty years. How have approaches changed and what are the most important things you’ve learned about your own writing in the classes you’ve taught?

MS: I learned many lessons from teaching poetry to others—and not just to college-age and post-grad students, but also to primary and secondary school students. Early on, and for several years, I taught in California’s Poetry-in-the-Schools Program, which was both difficult and enlightening. (I still also teach poetry to the middle school kids at Mt. Baldy School every couple of years.) Most of the students whom I’ve encountered are hungry for self-knowledge and self-awareness, although they may not perceive their quests as such. There’s such a deep yearning among even novice writers to know themselves and their role in the world, and to learn what they believe in, and what’s most important to them in their lives. So, this was my first lesson: that Michel de Montaigne’s dictum, “know thyself,” is often a leaping off place for even seven- and eight-year-olds, who can be surprisingly self-reflective. I also discovered how natural it is for children and teenagers to approach writing poetry through a love of word play and word games, which is how I was initially drawn to poetry, as well. Word play leads to world play, I think—small concerns often lead to large emotions, insights, and ideas.

DG: The years between 2009 to 2016 were difficult ones for you. Can you talk about the challenges you went through and how that affected the subsequent writing you went on to do?

MS: During those years that I was seriously ill and suffering from extreme chronic pain, just getting through each day required a huge effort. I wasn’t able to write much during that time, and because I experienced what seemed like an existential abyss, I subsequently underwent a profound re-examination of myself and my life. Being unable to teach, drive, walk, have a social life, etc. meant that I was not the same person I’d formerly been—but who was I now? If anything, I became someone who valued even the tiniest acts of kindness, the most fleeting of joys. My recovery was gradual, and I’m eternally grateful that I have recovered. When I emerged from that seven-year-long tunnel, I wanted my writing to tackle the most serious and significant aspects of my own and others’ lives, and not to waste anyone’s time with frivolities.

DG: Early on, you spent a considerable amount of time in Europe and your family story is quite fascinating. What were the challenges and upsides, and would you want to be a child again? In other words, how nostalgic do you feel about those times?

MS: I feel extremely nostalgic about those years during which we lived in Europe. My bohemian parents were footloose and fancy free, and we spent three and a half idyllic years enjoying amazing experiences. For instance, one summer we pitched our camping tent and slept within Stonehenge’s sacred circle for a few nights, with only a herd of wandering cows interrupting our dreams there. In France, my sister and I ditched the guide my parents had hired, so we could explore the caves of Lascaux on our own. We spent a couple of weeks in Rome one August, where our mother took us to the Coliseum every day so she could sketch that magnificent monument, while my sister and I would have the Coliseum to ourselves. We staged gladiator battles in the lower regions of that haunted place, long before there were guides and guards there. So, I experienced few challenges, but many memorable good times during our 1954-1958 sojourn in Europe.

I wouldn’t want to be a child again, however. For every childhood’s also rife with confusions, fears, embarrassments, doubts, emotional and physical pain, and uncertainty. Well, so is adulthood, no?

DG: You have visited India and even wrote a book about the country in a work called The Golden Labyrinth. The word “labyrinth” to describe the culture is an interesting one, especially when coupled with the substance of gold. The title seems to create a fine line between disorientation and not wanting to be found. The book was published in 1995, and the six-month writing fellowship happened in 1991. To what extent was the manuscript finished when you left India and how much editing did you subsequently need to really put things into perspective?

MS: Though the Cretan labyrinth may have been built to guard against gold diggers, and also perhaps to defer or trap evil spirits, my use of the term (in my book, The Golden Labyrinth) had more to do with a spiritual quest. Also, India has always seemed to me to be a labyrinthine, golden beehive, with its myriad of cultures intermingling and its richly complex religions cohabitating (though not always peacefully.) While living in South India, I often felt that I was traveling inside a labyrinth as I tried to understand India’s beautiful and dazzling traditions. 

It’s interesting what you say about the book’s “title [seeming] to create a fine line between disorientation and not wanting to be found.” I certainly felt disoriented during my years living in Chennai and Bangalore, but I was more bewildered (lost in the wilderness of other cultures) than opposed to being found. I was quite happy to be found by my husband, whom I met in India!

DG: Images—quite literally and figurately—are an important component of your work. The most natural assumption would be that poems arise out of looking photos or paintings. Does it, in fact, happen that way most of the time or have you also written pieces for which you’ve found visuals after composition?

MS: This is such an astute question, David. What a pleasure it is to have in you such a close reader. Because I grew up as the daughter of a visual artist, I spent a lot of time in my mother’s studio watching her paint, and often creating my own art beside her. So, consequently, I apprehend the world in an intensely visual way. My poems most often don’t arise from looking at photos or paintings: they spring from my own visual imagination, which is usually hyperactive and acute. (“Who needs to drop acid,” I used to ask during the 1960s heyday of psychedelic drug experimentation, “when reality is a daily carnival for the senses?”) I’ve written a scattering of ekphrastic poems, but, strangely, I find them more limiting than when I give reign solely to my visual imagination.

DG: In 1987, you conducted a lengthy interview with renowned poet Robert Mezey. Towards the middle of it he says the following in response to a question about peace, and I’d like to quote the whole passage: “There’s a sense in which love and war are not exactly opposites, and even if they are, then you can’t have one without the other. You can’t have good without evil, or love without war. But obviously, we can’t continue with the kind of war that we’re used to fighting, or else we’re all done for, and I do believe that’s a bad thing. Then again, who knows, maybe it’s a good thing. There’s a sense in which the whole cosmos is alive, and it may well be that we’re just a little pimple on a far distant extremity. It matters to us intensely, of course, but in the great scheme of things, the God I believe in does not care whether we flourish or whether this planet is engulfed by the sun, which is what will eventually happen. If there is such an intelligence, it dwells far beyond such concerns. I’m not a philosopher, and I’m not sure what all of this has to do with poetry, although I suppose it does have a great deal to do with poetry. But the question of belief obviously troubles me and stirs up a lot of thoughts. There are times when I feel that I believe in nothing, except the taste of myself, which is always with me, and in the world around me, which sometimes seems extremely unfamiliar, as if it’s something I’ve never seen before.” Your response to his statement was a connection to Williams’s dictum, “no ideas but in things.” If the interview had happened in the present day, do you think you’d have given a different response and, if so, how would it look like?

MS: I sure hope I’d give a different response today! I remember feeling overwhelmed by the profundity and complexity of Mezey’s comment during our interview, way back in 1987, and that’s probably why I responded with a facile and vague comment. Now, if I could live that moment over again, I’d agree with his notion of the interdependency of the ideas of war/peace and good/evil, rather than the notion that these concepts are always contradictory. And I might have also agreed with him about the nature of God: “…the God I believe in does not care whether we flourish or whether this planet is engulfed by the sun, which is what will eventually happen. If there is such an intelligence, it dwells far beyond such concerns.” However, I think I’d have wanted to enlarge and extend our discussion of “belief,”  since it’s one of the most intriguing aspects of being alive, and it’s also a crucial part of being a poet—especially apropos one’s belief in oneself, and the belief that poetry can change people’s lives.

DG: Let’s stay with Mezey and talk about his defense of form. In the same interview he says: “It is my belief that young poets are cheating themselves, and that poetry is damaged, when they don’t attempt to master metrical verse. It’s like learning how to draw, if you are a painter.” What’s your feeling about how modern poetry is crafted these days, and do you have any indication of how Mezey felt about its craft towards the end of his life?

MS: I very much agree with Robert Mezey: young poets who learn to master metrical verse will instill within themselves a greater musicality and a solid rhythmical scaffolding. They’ll have developed a more finely attuned poetic ear, which can’t help but enrich their poems. It doesn’t matter if young poets go on to abandon metrical verse and embrace free verse, or some postmodern variant of free verse. They’ll have gained so much by formally disciplining their poetic ears.

In the decade before Mezey’s death, he and I would meet monthly for lunch in Claremont, California, and we’d often talk “po biz,” as poet Maxine Kumin termed it. At that time, he strongly advocated for a return to teaching and writing metrical verse, decades after his famed and controversial abandonment of it in the 1960s and 70s when he published his influential and seminal Naked Poetry anthologies. During those lunches together, I’d commiserate with him over the decline of contemporary poetry, that is, over so many young poets’ lack of having any literary knowledge of poetry before 2000, and their lack of technical expertise and astute craftsmanship. I guess I feel the same way today: there’s an awful lot of “drek” being published in literary magazines, and it’s often touted as being cutting edge or wildly innovative, when it’s often tone deaf, and/or manipulative, and/or banal.

DG: What are you reading or working on at the moment?

MS: I’ve just read a terrific new volume by fellow southern Californian, Cecilia Woloch. It’s called Labor: The Testimony of Ted Gall, and I’ve been rereading the later books by my former mentor and teacher, Charles Wright. I’m also reading a terrific new anthology, Like a Hammer: Poets on Mass Incarceration, edited by my former student, poet Diana Marie Delgado. I highly recommend it.

Since I recently finished my twelfth volume, The Blue Bridge, which is due out from Etruscan Press in February or March of 2026, I’m taking a break now from poetry and working, instead, on a memoir about my father. It’s a decades-long project that I’m really anxious to complete.

Author Bio:

Maurya Simon’s poetry volumes include her forthcoming, twelfth book, The Blue Bridge (Etruscan Press, 2026) and La Sirena: A Novella in Verse (Cloudbank Books, 2024). Her earlier volume, The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems, received the 2019 Gold Medal in Poetry from the Independent Booksellers Association (IPPY). Simon’s poems have been translated into Hebrew, French, Greek, Bengali, Rumanian, Spanish, and Farsi. A Fulbright Senior Research Fellow (South India), NEA Poetry Fellow, and a Poetry Society’s Lucille Medwick Memorial and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awardee, she’s served residencies at the American Academy in Rome, the Baltic Centre for Writers & Translators (Sweden), Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), the Djerassi Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. Simon’s poems have appeared in a myriad of literary magazines, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, and American Literary Review. A Professor Emerita at the University of California, Riverside, Simon lives near the Angeles National Forest in the San Gabriel Mountains of southern California.