Serving the High Plains

Poetry readers return with fiery words and high drama

link Words and reading by Levi Mericle, interpretive dance by his sister Hannah Mericle and music by Rick Haymaker, all Tucumcari residents, highlight an evening of poetry reading Friday at the Eastern New Mexico Artspace gallery in

Tucumcari.

QCS Managing Editor

For a second time, about 50 Tucumcari area residents enjoyed supercharged words and fiery deliveries Friday evening as the Eastern New Mexico Artspace gallery hosted local and guest poets.

The turnout matched last year’s poetry session of the gallery’s “Criss-Cross Applesauce” series of monthly artistic programs.

Fil Peach, president of the New Mexico State Poetry Society, called last year’s reading the society’s best-attended rural event.

Albuquerque’s Zachary Kluckman made a repeat performance. Since last year, he has added national titles his state championships as a “slam poet,” who emotes physically while reading his own charged words.

Peach and two other Albuquerque-area poets joined Kluckman at the podium in Tucumcari.

Local poets, however, also distinguished themselves in eloquence and drama.

Tucumcari’s Levi Mericle again delivered impassioned rhymes while his sister Hannah Mericle accompanied his reading with interpretive dance.

Rick Haymaker, owner of the Tapestry of Sound studio, compiled a soundtrack.

Local poet and songwriter Jake Walker introduced the evening’s performance with rapid-fire rhymes and high drama.

Gregg Howard, who teaches writing at Mesalands Community College, delivered his own powerful imagery. “The Most Beautiful Girl in Santa Fe, ” he said, “trails thin red lights like gossamer fire” and “keeps carnivals in her eyes.”

His daughter Carrina, 12, read a poem about the animals that populate the seemingly barren desert, which she called “the sandy home.” It ended, “You're never really on your own, when you're in the sandy home.”

Judy Ross of Tucumcari read works that celebrate her Native American ancestry. Jesse Lee Garcia read works that included responses to the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Center.

T.J. Evans, a young Tucumcari poet, reading his work in public for the first time, talked of “collecting cataracts in your mind's eye,” among other images.

Peach, writing about a butterfly that alighted on his hand, said, “Unexpected strength shone with an unexpected grace.”

Jesus Lucero, a Rio Rancho poet, compared a child to a sculptor’s wood block and urged the child to bear with mean talk.

“Do not allow their termite words to eat into your every fiber,” he said. “Do not let them set you with fire.”

Katrina Guarascio, a poet and teacher from Albquerque, finished the reading with eloquence about love and relationships. “Don’t forget,” she warns a lover in one poem, “I was raised with wolves.”

The audience stayed to converse with the performers and among themselves after the performance.

Poetry can come from many sources, the authors said.

”I think there a fire in me I can't quench,” Kluckman said. “Poetry helps me mediate the flames.”

Guaracia said she has written since she was very young, and was published for the first time at age 19 in a poetry journal in California’s San Francisco Bay Area.

Peach was driven to poetry to deal with soaring joy and grinding sadness that hit him at the same time just as he was graduating from high school.

He had just won a state science fair, he said, when he learned his mother was dying of cancer.

He went on to win national acclamation at the next in a series of science fairs as his mother’s condition worsened.

His mother died shortly before he enrolled at Yale University at the end of the science fair period.

“I wasn’t even able to mourn,” he said. “The only way to deal with the conflict was to write poetry.”