Poet and Dear Friend
In Loving Memory
I still can't believe she's gone. My wife Angelica and I miss her terribly. We spent time with Sharon whenever we were in Manhattan, and for about five years I was working in Manhattan, so I saw her there regularly.
We first met in 2001 when we were both on the bill of a public reading at the now permanently closed Cornelia Street Cafe.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelia_Street_Cafe
After the reading, we started speaking to each other as if we'd been friends forever.
And we remained friends. She adored my wife, Angelica.
I spoke to her in 2022 on the phone from Virginia, calling her at least three times in San Antonio during a month-long stay in Charlottesville where Angelica and I were sorting out last-minute details for our work permits for the UK. Sharon kept needing to hang up to deal with medical issues, calling me back, keeping our conversation going and then tiring quickly and promising to call me back the next day, which she did.
We talked quite a bit, as was habit with us, about poetry and politics, and she even read to me some stanzas from a poem she was working on.
We talked about her good friend, the late poet and novelist Paul Pines, and the novel she'd just read by him, The Tin Angel.
If Sharon liked the work of a particular author, such as Pines, she went out of her way to share praise and recommendations. I tried my best to pursue any author she thought worth my time. Paul Pines was certainly one of them. It's strange, but I can't think of Sharon without Paul Pines coming to mind. Perhaps this is because Sharon, a native New Yorker born and raised in the Bronx, connected at a deep level with Pines. She knew Pines well. He was a fellow New York native born in 1941 and raised and Brooklyn.
Pines died in 2017 in Glen Falls, having led a fascinating life as a pyscotherapist, a Vietnam veteran, a merchant seaman, a jazz bar owner, and the founder and programmer of Jazz At The Lake, a Lake George Jazz Festival.
My favorite of Pines's thirteen books of poetry is still Last Call At The Tin Palace. The setting of many of these poems is his Lower East Side jazz club, The Tin Palace, which Pines opened and operated in The Bowery, and which is also the setting for his novel, The Tin Angel.
Sharon and I both admired Pines's biography. He was the kind of man Sharon gravitated toward, those who branch out and take risks and, as she once told me, "Don't complain in their writing about how wounded they are by their efforts."
Sharon and Paul Pines were both published by Marsh Hawk Press. https://marshhawkpress.org/
Her 2006 collection with MarshHawk and publisher Sandy McIntosh is titled, The Good City, which focuses on the history of Izmir, Turkey, harking back to its time as Smyrna.
Sharon spoke effusively about her travels in Turkey, just as she spoke about her time in Kosovo, and her years in New Orleans as a journalist writing for the Times Picayune back when it was a newspaper and not mostly a web site.
At her request, I wrote a short review of The Good City https://www.amazon.com/Good-City-Sharon-Olinka/dp/0975919784 It appeared in a journal based on Long Island. Unfortunately, at this time, I can't recall the journal's name. I'm not even sure it still exists.
This was another topic we discussed often. Just how quickly our world was changing, and how mindlessly, or so it seemed. She had no appetite for the digitization of the writing and publishing process. What she liked was getting to know other poets whose work she admired. Getting to know other artists, and editors and publishers.
She also liked showing me around Manhattan, a city she'd known since a little girl. A city she often lamented that was changing beyond recognition, losing all of its charm and becoming prohibitviely expensive to live in, especially for an artist.
Sharon's husband, Pete, was a similar type of man to Mr. Pines. Pete was about the same age, born and raised in Montana, and worked all his life as an engineer.
Sharon was renting an inexpensive apartment in Astoria, Queens when I first met her, but she had grown weary of Manhattan's new face, the mask it had donned post 9-11.
I remember her once grousing after she'd returned from a poetry reading, that if she heard "any more poems about the streets" she was going to vomit. And this from a woman raised in the Bronx, who'd seen her share of the streets, a goodly share, and seldom wrote about it.
What she had, and one could see it in her eyes, was the earned resilience of being raised by a single parent in the Bronx. She knew her confidence, her toughness, and her limitartions. She didn't need anyone else's approval of them. Nor did she need attention.
Pete, oddly enough, loved residing in Manhattan. He had already retired and was spending much of his time researching topics of interest to him at the New York Public Library. https://www.nypl.org/
"I love the lions there," Pete once told me with a big smile. He was a sweetheart and Angelica and I never tired of spending time with him and Sharon.
Author Naomi Shihab Nye, pictured below, wrote the following about Sharon's book, Old Ballerina Club, published by Dos Madres. https://www.dosmadres.com/
Here is the book's title poem:
Old Ballerina Club
Here they come, hobbling on canes,
elegant despite pain, silver haired,
settling on upholstered chairs.
Draping shawls of pale English wool.
Eighteen karat gold gleaming on rings, brooches.
Holding court to ghosts.
Talk in Russian, English.
That Sergei, he tried to rape
my sister in the Bolshoi cloak room.
Another voice. When I had bronchitis,
Limontev made me dance.
Babies gone, houses, landscapes bits
of green paint on a moving stage.
Done with work. Done with men.
Their heads turn as I walk
through the Wellington Hotel lobby.
Messy dark hair, young, cracked leather of
my black jacket, silver bracelets
jangling. How their eyes probe me.
Like they know me
to the core.
And I make my way
out the door, past Carnegie Hall,
ruby lights on losers and whores,
Sabrett hot dog carts,
happy tourists swarming
near Broadway shows,
to test pavements.
Become irrevocably fractured.
Until I let go
*
She has, indeed, let go, and she's not suffering alone any longer. Her last years in San Antonio were not easy ones as Pete was eclipsed by Alzheimer's and forced to live away from her and under constant care. This, in my opinion, took a heavy toll on her.
She died far too young, with too many poems still blossoming inside. She wrote seriously, with passion, daily, but she did not write quickly or sloppily, but with care. She'd sometimes criticize me for writing too fast, and perhaps I wrote too much. She was candid in her appraisal. She told me she liked my poems, generally, but thought I was a better prose writer than a poet. None of this ruffled me in a negative way. From her, knowing how genuined she was, I accepted any appraisal of my methods or my work, as a compliment.
Writing and literature were interests we shared, but they weren't the basis for our friendship. We just got along. I felt often from her the approbation of an older sister. She and my wife were very close, and would talk for hours about the situation in the former USSR, and the countries of Eastern Europe.
One of the saddest moments the three of us shared was when Sharon met us in New York's East Village wanting to take us to a Polish bakery there, one of her favorites. She had taken the subway in from Astoria, arriving late due to delays which, she lamented, were getting more frequent and trying her patience and wearing her out.
We met in front of the old bakery, which had been a staple in that neighborhood for a couple of decades, only to discover it was no longer open. The door was bolted behind iron accordion bars, and there was gang-tag graffitti all over it. "Just one more of what I love about this city gone," is what Sharon said, deflated, distressed, finding it hard to accept.
Fed up, exhausted, a year later she would convince Pete to move to San Antonio, where life was a whole lot less expensive, even though Pete missed his ramblings at the public libary.
The biography below can be found online, and though it's fairly complete, like all such bios it doesn't capture the essence of the person. She was a wonderfully kind and giving soul, with a generous and piercing sense of humor. Nothing was off limits to her when it came to laughing at how absurd our lives can be. She didn't criticize harshly. Nor did she seek to injure anyone in order to get ahead. If anything, I think she, due to her gentility -- in spite of coping with some harsh childhood realities in the Bronx -- was often trampled by whatever stampeding life forms came her way.
Here is the bio:
"Born in New York City, her books are Old Ballerina Club (Dos Madres), The Good City (Marsh Hawk Press) and A Face Not My Own (West End Press.) Poems from The Good City won a Barbara Deming Memorial Award. After being published in Poetry Australia, her editor John Millett invited her to come to Australia. She read at the ADF Library in Canberra, and later edited an issue of American Book Review on contemporary Australian poets. Her writing appeared in Poetry East, Jewish Quarterly in England, Poetry Wales, Confrontation, Colorado Review, Poet Lore and Barrow Street, among many publications. The Library of Congress included her poem “It Must Not Happen” in their website Poetry of 9/11. Her anthologized poems can be found in Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, and Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Possum: Critical and Creative Responses to Everette Maddox, from Xavier University Press in New Orleans. She writes newspaper articles and book reviews, and has resided in Los Angeles, New Orleans, Arlington, Virginia, Astoria, New York, and San Antonio."
Here is what the late poet, Colette Inez, pictured below, wrote about Sharon's The Good City:
"These vibrant poems beam their light on history's bad dreams of lost empires but also recall past harmonies of a great city. The lost voices of Izmir, the former Smyrna, are given rich particulars of passion and suffering that resonate in memory. With narrative drive and empathy for her subject, Olinka invites us to inhabit present and past worlds in turmoil. Her book deserves a wide audience"
*
For a while, Sharon was quite productive and comfortable in San Antonio. Here is a link to a poem of hers, "Under The Malls Fist" that appeared in The Texas Observer.
https://www.texasobserver.org/under-the-malls-fist/
She wrote reviews and short articles, and continued placing her poems. Here's a link to "Getting Her Rady" from Taos Journal Of Poetry
https://www.taosjournalofpoetry.com/issue-7/getting-her-ready
I had no idea that within two weeks the medical issues she was battling would end her life. No idea at all.
What worsened the shock was that Angelica and I didn't hear from Sharon -- and she was quite conscientous at keeping in touch -- for about eight months. I had been writing letters to her from England. She preferred letters, especially from abroad. I wrote her quite a few during my four years in Ankara, Turkey. And a handful from Russia, as well, back in 2014 and 2015. She didn't trust the security of electronic communication, and was adamant that I avoid emailing her.
If I was in the States, I should phone her. And I did whenever possible. This is how we kept in contact, and maintained our friendship. She was happy to recieve the postcards and cards I'd send, seeking them out, trying to find an image that I knew she would like and appreciate.
It's a struggle to accept I won't see her again, or hear her laughter. We were such good mates.
At least -- and it's a consolation -- there are the poems. They will endure.
No comments:
Post a Comment