carol lee sanchez-allen

I first met Carol Lee Sanchez in 1973.  She was running the Coffee Gallery Open Reading in North Beach in San Francisco, living with the poet, Paul Vane, and raising two of her three children.  The Coffee Gallery was home to Jack Micheline, A. D. Winans, Ruth Weiss, Eugene Ruggles and H. D. Moe among a host of others, who read there almost every Wednesday night.  Bob Kaufman, at this time, was not reading poetry as a protest to the war, but was a regular at the bar and often went into the back room to listen.   

When I walked into the Coffee Gallery for the first time, carol lee (she prefers lower case) was reading one of her "crystals from dialogues," "i read somewhere/that kindness/was the beginning/of cruelty..."  She ended her five-minute set with "tribal chant," "yo soy india/pero no soy..."  As we said then, I was blown away.  She spoke a rich language (in the case of "tribal chant," two) that I had never heard before.  (I was able to understand quite a bit with my elementary Spanish and she, in the "pocho" tradition, usually repeated an English translation on the line after the Spanish as part of the poem.)  She also uses Keres (her Laguna tongue) and, later, German in her poems.  Though her poems sometimes included using two languages, it was her thought forms that enchanted me and that experience did not wear off.   She is also the first person I heard use the term, multi-cultural, to describe her work.  

carol lee is a dynamo.  At the time we met, she was planning (with Barbara Gravelle, another poet and then North Beach reading coordinator) the Bay Area Poets Coalition, an organization that would host in 1974 three solstice and equinox festivals, where more than two hundred poets would read in a week all over San Francisco at unlikely places such as buses, cable cars, ferries, hotel lobbies, in every park as well as the usual cafes, bars, street corners and libraries.  The BAPC is still alive and well in Berkeley!   carol lee is the eldest of five siblings, two of whom have made considerable reputations as poets, writers and editors, Paula Gunn Allen and Lee Francis.  (In 1974, all three lived on one block on Collingwood St., near Market.)  Carol Lee is a Native American/Lebanese-American, who was born on the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico, near Albuquerque.  At birth, she was given a tribal name which translated means:  message bringer woman. This given name became the title of the first book she did with Taurean Horn Press.  She has authored six books in all and one poemphlet.  In 1974, she also joined California Poets in the Schools.  By 1976, she was Statewide Coordinator of the program.  During her tenure, she restructured the program 1) to make it less dependent on grants (foreseeing the Reagan-Bush years) and  2) to make it less central and more local and community-oriented where schools hired their own resident poets as poet/teachers.  The program is still functioning today as she re-created it over thirty years ago.  

Inspired by this individual, I created Taurean Horn Press in 1974 to show the world the riches of the San Francisco Bay Area writers.   Yes, I am provincial.  I have published three books by carol lee sanchez (of the fourteen that I have published), message bringer woman (1977), excerpts from a mountain climber's handbook (1985), which was a continuation of the message bringer woman story, and from spirit to matter, new and selected poems (1997), which includes many of the poems in the first two books, both of which sold out, and also her other books, Conversations from the Nightmare (Casa Editorial), she) poems (Chicory Blue Press) and the poemphlet, time warps, which she also designed and which Taurean Horn published on a Gestetner press in 1976.  Regenbogenvisionen und Erdwege (Rainbow Visions and Earth Ways) was published by Universitätsverlag Rasch as the sixteenth book in their series, Osnäbruck Bilingual Editions of Marginalized Authors, in Germany, taking their selection of Carol Lee's poems from our from spirit to matter.  Did I mention that Carol Lee is also a visual artist?  No,  well, you need to know that.  That was her first love and something she continues to do.

After her CPITS directorship, she was invited to teach at San Francisco State University, first, in the Native American Studies Department and later, she also joined the Women Studies Department.  Carol Lee began a new adventure in 1985 and left San Francisco and eventually (1989) ended up in central Missouri where she still resides.  To fill out some of the rough edges in my narrative, there is a nativewiki page about Carol Lee at http://www.nativewiki.org/Carol_Lee_Sanchez

A bit more media trivia about Carol Lee Sanchez:  sometime after the publication of message bringer woman, KQED, the PBS station in San Francisco, filmed Carol Lee reading her work.  It got such a great response that they flew her down to New Mexico to film her reading at the sites mentioned in some of her poems...  The Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University also have video-taped (& audio-taped) three readings that Carol Lee did with them and they are still available.  I am planning to do a cd of all these Poetry Center readings together, but the economy has not allowed me to do so as yet...  The City of San Francisco Arts Commission chose an excerpt from her poem, "wind song," to bronze and embed at one of their elevated munibus stops on the Embarcadero...  Sharon Welch, in her After Empire, the art and ethos of enduring peace (Fortress Press, 2004), uses Carol Lee's poems and ideas as one of her models for seeing a peaceable world.  

Here are what a few other writers have said over the years about her writing:

I've never been to New Mexico or Arizona, but you make me feel I have.  The very first poem (in message bringer woman) is an example of what I mean,  ...It's strange to feel so acquainted!

—Josephine Miles

Carol Lee Sanchez writes fully about life, death, love, loneliness, betrayal and the sheer joy of being in the world.  Like a memorable repast, message bringer woman nourishes us with language that longs to be tasted.  These are living poems, deep and bittersweet; salted with one woman's  raw and seasoned experiences, and peppered with welcomed exuberance.

—Al Young 

About excerpts from A Mountain Climber's Handbook: 

  These poems build life on the page, burn with it.

  They are each honest, clear, strong.  Their shape is wit and candor and savvy.

  Carol Lee Sanchez is a woman of many tongues, a mingling of languages and heritage.  

She listens to her life and its living environment and marks it down.  She re-carves time, unifies the experiences that are seen, felt, inherited, intuited, thought.  She knows how to read signs, even if those signs are the tiny breathings spiders leave on lamp posts.

Discovering Carol Lee's work is the act of discovering how moments and acts of life fit together.  She is visionary and realist.  Her pages vibrate with the common and the extraordinary.

—Faye Kicknosway

About from spirit to matter:

Carol Lee's poetry combines satiric wit, irony and sheer fun with profound humanistic reflection and insight.  It arises from a complex context of Native and European cultures, interweaving physical dimensions of matter, mind, heart and spirit.  Her wise words—inspired by the love of peoples and lands as well as the Trickster—carry messages of a deep-souled woman who artistically blends humor and truth with beauty and delight.  She is a mezclada/mixed blood in the way she mixes the aliveness and potency of diverse cultural heritages.  It is a great pleasure to enjoy this lifetime of experiences so finely crafted.

—Mara Lynn Keller

These poems allow us a glimpse of a wise woman's passage through her years, the deepening journey of a playful sage.

—Charlene Spretnak

Probably the best book of poetry by a Native American woman that I have ever read. 

—Lawrence Ferlinghetti

See Image Gallery for the cover of from spirit to matter.