Storyteller of the Week

Joe Cottonwood

  

 Joe Cottonwood and grandsons

Joe Cottonwood has published poems in numerous journals including Poetry Breakfast, Red Eft Review, Silver Birch Press, Verse-Virtual, Sheila Na Gig, Your Daily Poem, Muddy River Review, Black Coffee Review, Rat’s Ass Review, Gyroscope, Allegro, Anti Heroin Chic, Halfway Down the Stairs, Williwaw, Windfall, San Pedro Review, Roanoke Review, Picaroon, Snapdragon, Plum Tree Tavern, Naugatuck River Review, Blue Heron Review, Literary Nest, Freshwater, Amsterdam Quarterly, Hobo Camp Review, Broadkill Review, Bracken, Dunes Review, Nixes Mate Review, New Verse News, Fifth Wednesday, Third Wednesday, Potomac Review, Uppagus, Stoneboat, Ink Sweat & Tears. He has also been nominated several times for Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize.

He is the author of three books of poetry, “Random Saints,” “Foggy Dog” and “Son of a Poet,” nine novels and a memoir, His children’s novel, “Danny Ain't” won the BABRA Award (Bay Area Book Reviewers Association) as Best Book for Children in 1992. The audiobook of his adult novel, “Clear Heart” won the Founders Choice Award for "excellence in serialized audiobook production" in 2008.The audiobooks of his children’s novels, Boone Barnaby and Babcock won the Founders Choice Award for "impeccable quality" in 2009. His memoir, “99 Jobs: Blood, Sweat, and Houses,” based on his experiences as a contractor, carpenter, plumber, and electrician won First Place for nonfiction in the 2014 IndieReader Discovery Awards. He lives in La Honda, CA with his high school sweetheart among the redwoods. They are the parents of three children. Learn more at: http://www.joecottonwood.com/

Comments by Editor Sharon Waller Knutson

Storyteller Poetry Journal would not be the same without the master storyteller, Joe Cottonwood. I couldn’t think of a better poet to feature on Father’s Day Weekend because Joe shows men can be vulnerable and sensitive as well as tough and masculine as he writes humorous and poignant poems about the challenges of being a father and son.

I was smitten when I read my first Joe Cottonwood poem on Your Daily Poem in 2017:

My Daughter Says

My daughter says
every tree has a soul.
Some are good, some are bad.
But always, a soul.
My daughter is young enough
to know these things.

My daughter says also
some trees have a spirit.
(But only the good trees.)
People, too.
She is old enough
to say these things.

Guided by spirit, we can grow
from the crack in a boulder.
We can lift sidewalks.
We bend and yet are strong.
We flower, we bear fruit, we give seed.
We are where the raccoon sleeps,
the hawk nests, the monkeys play.

Without the spirit we twist,
we wither, we break.
With the spirit our roots take hold.
My daughter knows. So young, so old.

I googled Joe Cottonwood and was impressed to find on Wikipedia that he is the son of two scientists, has a Bachelor of Arts degree from Washington University in St. Louis, is a self proclaimed hippy and articles about him appear in the Library of Congress, Publishers Weekly and numerous newspapers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Cottonwood

Joe and I didn’t meet until 2020 on Verse-Virtual when he read my poems and emailed me: “You’re a breath of fresh air. My kind of poet. Downhome. Funny. Smart.”.

I felt the same way about his poetry and since then I think of him as my brother from another mother.

“Apparently, I got a worldwide reputation as the Redwood guy after a poem I wrote 40 years ago called ‘Redwood Prayer’ was translated and traveled around the planet,” Joe emailed me as he sat in his office overlooking a Redwood Tree, with a gigantic trunk which he described as “a highway for squirrels, a platform for spiders, a landing place for birds, an adventure for raccoons, a tower of patience, a river of life.”

“Because of that poem Kew Gardens contacted me out of the blue (via email) asking me to write a poem for their redwood grove, Joe continued. “I wrote ‘because a redwood grove’ which was posted on a giant billboard in the Kew Gardens of London to celebrate their redwood grove. I am pretty proud of that poem.”

To read both poems and see photos of the billboard:

https://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=4435

https://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=4283

When I published a poem recently about the sudden death of my father, Joe emailed me that he was inspired to write this poem:

Estate

At my father’s house of brick
the morning after he stroked out blue,
Doris his second wife not my mom
said I should take his dreadful books,
 just get them out of here.
 
As I was loading box after box
to my rented Taurus, a truck arrived
delivering 300 daffodil bulbs.
Doris weeping refused delivery
but I said I’d take them, too.

I shipped 22 cartons air freight
from Maryland to California
where old paperbacks with lurid covers,
noir detectives with dangerous blondes,
sleep in stacks growing mold.

The bulbs, paper white and yellow bell
pop up bewildered in my meadow
among redwood trees, those shaggy giants
my father vowed some day to see.

I’m proud to publish these other poems Joe sent me.
 
Autumn Hatch

Sporting a blue beret
my father stoops in swamp rot.
As I hold out mason jars,
his fingers scoop jelly marbles that quiver,
bunched like clear grapes,
a black seed in each center.

At a roadside stand we stop for red
Jonathan apples named, my father says,
after a lawyer named Jonathan
who didn’t breed them
but got credit the way lawyers do.
He asks the freckled farm girl
for a single Helianthus and explains,
after she crinkles her nose,
a single sunflower.
She squints and says Are you a scientist?
Later he asks me How did she know?

In the aquarium day by day
seeds become black bullets with lips. Legs.
Lo and behold: frogs in late autumn!
Hopping toward winter, toward fates unknown.
Some, toward Queenie the cat. He explains:
Random nonconformity assures survival of a species.

He puttered for his own pleasure.
I could tag along growing legs, lungs.
Your family is your reality
until you hop away.

To My Daughter Who Was Never Born 

I know you are a daughter because
we already had a boy, a girl, a boy.
It was a girl’s turn when two cells
in a womb chanced not to meet.
Now here’s a prom date waiting, corsage in hand,
at our door. Aren’t you ready yet? Our family,
never big on proms. Or dressing up.
Will you dance in blue jeans?
As parents, we made it hard.
You, only seven when your mom got cancer.
Not easy. I’m sorry for that.
In your fourteenth year, daughter,
we blew up. Yes, I came down hard on you.
Stealing a car is serious trouble.
But I promise not to dwell on that. Except to say
I secretly admire your gumption to steal
the candy of a billionaire’s spoiled brat,
to without lessons drive that Jag to San Diego
to free a dolphin who, it turned out, didn’t want
to leave his private tank where fish appeared
like magic twice a day precisely timed.
Some souls prefer order. Not you, not me, this family,
beyond the bedrock expectations: Get an education.
Be kind. Don’t steal cars to rescue dolphins.
Here, daughter, some fish.
Next year again I will lose you who I never had
as you burst from your tank swimming,
leaping the prow of this aging boat
with such grace, such hope,
your home the ageless sea.

A Daddy’s Dilemma

‘My 'gina hurts,’ she says. She's four. We're camping.
No mothers, doctors. Nothing. Nobody.
A bat swoops low over the fern.
‘Leave it alone,’ I say.
‘Your body will fix it.’ (I pray.)
She brushes her teeth and spits into the fire.
‘It hurts,’ she says.
There are limits to my first aid training. A splint?
Tourniquet? Score it with a knife and suck out the blood?
I grasp my flashlight. ‘Let me see.’
She is standing. ‘Sit down.’ She sits.
‘Spread your legs.’
My hand shakes.
I'm no prude, you see
yet something down there frightens me.
In four years, in spite of diapers, baths,
shameless prancing nudity, I have somehow
never looked closely never dared
feared what I would
what I now see is a
     lovely
     little
     vagina.
‘I don't see anything wrong.
Except it's dirty.’
I wash it. She squeals at the cold water.
But she's cured.
So am I.

Tony Lamas

I buy a dump of a house in Frisco.
It comes with a tenant named Tito
who stays a few days trading work.

Tito spreads plastic on the steep roof
as a storm blows in from the Pacific. He's agile,
a daredevil in blasts of wind and splats of rain
as the sky turns black. Easier, Tito says,
than some sailboats he's crewed.

 "I don't do good with kids," Tito says.
He has a child in Maine with cerebral palsy.
The mom, he says, started out gorgeous.  
"I'm the snakebit type," he says. "I'm a bad star."
I tell him I don't believe in fortune and stars.
"Try sailing," Tito says.

Soon Tito departs, crewing to the Panama Canal
then up the coast, back to Maine.
"Kid's got my nose."
Traveling light, he gives me a pair of boots.
"I ain't the cowboy type," he says.

I find I'm not the city type. Sell the house,
go rural where my child Joshua finds
those Tony Lamas, too big for little legs
but he clomps merrily into the yard
only to be struck by a giant rattlesnake.

My heart screams.
Joshua literally jumps out of the boot.
The rattler can't extract fangs from the leather
and goes thrashing and dragging into the weeds.
Joshua unbitten.

Out there where the tumbleweed tumbles,
if you find by the light of stars a single Tony Lama
with a rattlesnake skeleton attached, take it.
Keep it. For good fortune.

“My Daughter Says,” first appeared in Dove Tales, “To My Daughter Who Was Never Born” in Califragile, “A Daddy’s Dilemma” in Joe’s chapbook Son of a Poet and “Tony Lamas” in  I-70 Review.