Working On Gallery Vol. 7 - No.4
Guest Poet: Irene Adler
Afterword: Angela Narciso Torres
Curator: Naoko Fujimoto
Guest Poet: Irene Adler
Afterword: Angela Narciso Torres
Curator: Naoko Fujimoto
WEAVE is a theme for the Working On Gallery Vol.7.
For this volume, I am focusing on writers and artists who weave elements into their creative community.
Those elements could be family relationships, neighborhood activities, or academic interpretations. Either way, one thread tightens and makes us stronger like a universal cloth.
For this volume, I am focusing on writers and artists who weave elements into their creative community.
Those elements could be family relationships, neighborhood activities, or academic interpretations. Either way, one thread tightens and makes us stronger like a universal cloth.
Have you ever thought about what your poems would be after your death?
Does your partner have responsibility for it? Perhaps, your close editorial friends? Despite if you want to have a poetry book or not, you cannot contribute to it because you are gone. It is difficult to publish a book even when you are alive. If you are dead, it becomes more challenging. Angela Narciso Torres found crews to read incomplete poems scattered in boxes and computer files. She found a publisher, Paloma Press, and communicated with Irene's husband, Alan Adler.
I jokingly said (but with a slightly serious tone), "Angela, please do not leave 2,000 poems to me because I cannot do what you do."
Does your partner have responsibility for it? Perhaps, your close editorial friends? Despite if you want to have a poetry book or not, you cannot contribute to it because you are gone. It is difficult to publish a book even when you are alive. If you are dead, it becomes more challenging. Angela Narciso Torres found crews to read incomplete poems scattered in boxes and computer files. She found a publisher, Paloma Press, and communicated with Irene's husband, Alan Adler.
I jokingly said (but with a slightly serious tone), "Angela, please do not leave 2,000 poems to me because I cannot do what you do."
RHINO Poetry 2017
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Irene Adler was a poet and English teacher in Palo Alto, California where she was also a co-owner of the company that invented the Aerobie flying ring and the Aeropress coffee maker. By the time of her death in October 2023, she had written over 2,000 poems spanning 25 years. Paloma Press Quote: "Bone Flute is edited by award-winning poet Angela Narciso Torres whose friendship with Irene spanned more than 20 years. It has been a joy working with Angela on the production end of this project, described as a “longitudinal poetic record of American life and womanhood.” This book is a testament not only to Irene Adler’s mastery, but also to the enduring power of sisterhood and friendship." |
Irene Adler and Angela Narciso Torres
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Reading more than 2,000 poems was not easy. Angela Narciso Torres had fellow RHINO editors, Gail Goepfert and me. Her son, Timothy Torres, a computer programmer and emerging poet, coded a program to narrow the pool to 1,770 discrete files, grouping poems with earlier versions. I also reselected and ordered her tanka collection, which were beautiful nature themed poems. All the process details are in the book.
Praise:
Reading Bone Flute, we travel with the poet through the seasons of her life, moving through history, through memory, through geography, and yet with a powerful sense of immediacy. I feel certain that there are poems here . . . that will survive the way poems do, lodged like a tough plant in a crack in someone’s heart. - from the foreword by Nan Cohen, author of Unfinished City
Reading Bone Flute, we travel with the poet through the seasons of her life, moving through history, through memory, through geography, and yet with a powerful sense of immediacy. I feel certain that there are poems here . . . that will survive the way poems do, lodged like a tough plant in a crack in someone’s heart. - from the foreword by Nan Cohen, author of Unfinished City
Irene Adler’s poems are pragmatic, patient, and wily, defiant in their desire for forgiveness and forbearance. With a stark, self-reflexive beauty both airy and earth-bound, Irene’s small and sacred meditations reveal what the owls, birds, and beetles already know: life’s “wild velocity” lives in every “quill, bone, and feather.” As a sister, daughter, and mother, these poems that “sing with delight/for secret reasons” will live in me for a long time. - Robin Ekiss, author of The Mansion of Happiness
In this passionate, moving collection, Irene Adler distills a lifetime of asking the big questions into slender lyrics shimmering with longing, grief, and awe. With a delicate sense of music, these poems explore themes of romantic love, familial bonds and trauma, childhood and coming of age, the natural world, and intimations of the divine. In “Genesis,” after laying out an alternate cosmology, Adler writes in a line both wry and uncanny, “In the beginning, even God was green.” Cleaning voracious pests from her grandmother’s garden, her speaker sees not devastation but a vision of ecstasy: “We might all be drowning in roses.” The deepest subject of the book is mortality, both that of the speaker and of those she loves, a subject she treats with unsentimental bravery, as in this terse advice from “Heading Home”: “leave this life more lightly than / you came and make swift goodbyes.” Bone Flute is a wise testament to the pain and wonder of being human. - Peter Kline, author of Mirrorforms
“We leave things at a wild velocity,” poet Irene Adler writes in Bone Flute, her moving, posthumous collection. In poems that demonstrate an equal tenderness toward life and loss, Adler celebrates the small but profound joys that make any life a miracle in spite of suffering, “black clouds fringed silver.” Here, love and sorrow walk hand in hand. Such poems are like a bone flute, one that plays “notes that made a bleak night shine,” notes that continue to echo and shimmer in our memory and in the poems found here. Adler plays a fine, sweet music you won’t want to miss. - Sally Ashton, author of Listening to Mars
AFTERWORD
By Angela Narciso Torres
February 15, 2025
Oceanside, California
By Angela Narciso Torres
February 15, 2025
Oceanside, California
On June 28, 2023, four months before Irene Adler left the world she loved, she wrote me:
Yesterday in our clear blue skies I watched the wild up-rushing wind exciting the young, young trees as if the spirits of life could hardly contain themselves. What was it Hopkins said—'All that juice and all that joy!’ I am drifting away but joy, that is eternal . . . Every day I rise to see what the world is doing!
Nan Cohen read at Millennium Park in Chicago @workingongallery Instagram
Despite a two-year struggle with the cancer that claimed her in October 2023, Irene’s voice carried that unfailing wonder and excitement of being in the world—“the glory and pain and mystery of it.” It was the same voice I knew and loved throughout twenty-three years of friendship, beginning with a poetry workshop taught by Nan Cohen through Stanford’s Continuing Studies Program in 2002.
A rare thing sometimes happens in a writing workshop. Someone’s poems strike a chord, and somehow you know you’ll remain friends long after. Despite our age difference—I, then a young mother of boys, and Irene, a retired high school teacher from Palo Alto—were soulmates from the start. Our friendship grew from a shared love of poetry but went well beyond. Over the years, we took several classes with Stanford CSP’s illustrious faculty—Robin Ekiss, Bruce Snider, Peter Kline; at the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference; and later with Sharon Olds, Ellen Bass, Dorianne Laux, and Sally Ashton. We formed a monthly peer workshop with fellow Bay Area poets. Irene continued to host poetry workshops at her home for many years.
Irene and I had a long-standing ritual of meeting over lunch to discuss writing and life—children, grandchildren, marriage, ailing parents, music, gardening, climate change, and more. The ritual often ended with a bookstore run to browse the latest books from poets we admired: Sharon Olds, Jane Hirshfield, Jack Gilbert, Mona Van Duyn, Linda Pastan, Seamus Heaney, Li-Young Lee. Our shelves looked strikingly similar.
Like Didion, Irene wrote “to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.” Like Plath, writing was her way of “ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.” Her poems sought to “praise the mutilated world,” as Zagajewski’s poem goes. In a 1999 journal entry, she writes “Poems keep coming and make me delirious with joy . . . I don't think I could live anymore without writing.”
When Irene’s husband Alan asked me to edit a collection of her poetry, it was not without warning about the enormity of the task. She left over two thousand poems from the late nineties to 2023, rarely seeking publication despite encouragement from those who knew her work’s merit. As poet Sally Ashton said, “Irene wrote to write, but her work deserves to be read.”
Like Didion, Irene wrote “to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.” Like Plath, writing was her way of “ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.” Her poems sought to “praise the mutilated world,” as Zagajewski’s poem goes. In a 1999 journal entry, she writes “Poems keep coming and make me delirious with joy . . . I don't think I could live anymore without writing.”
When Irene’s husband Alan asked me to edit a collection of her poetry, it was not without warning about the enormity of the task. She left over two thousand poems from the late nineties to 2023, rarely seeking publication despite encouragement from those who knew her work’s merit. As poet Sally Ashton said, “Irene wrote to write, but her work deserves to be read.”
Naoko Fujimoto & Gail Goepfert
Fellow RHINO editor-poets Gail Goepfert and Naoko Fujimoto helped me organize, read, and cull poems for the manuscript. My son Timothy, a computer programmer and emerging poet, coded a program to narrow the pool to 1,770 discrete files, grouping poems with earlier versions when possible. Though Irene and I exchanged poems for decades, many of these I was seeing for the first time. I sometimes felt I was getting to know her more deeply than in her life. She once wrote in a letter, “Maybe poems are the truest things we say to each other.”
Using the rigorous criteria and rating system we employed at RHINO, my co-editors and I agreed to select only poems that required minimal editing, if any. Each poem received at least two readers before the final selection. Since Irene regarded many of these as drafts, it was important to use the highest standards, guided by my years of workshopping with Irene and an intuitive sense of what she would consider finished.
The decision to present the poems in reverse chronological order was borne out of a desire to recreate the experience of meeting Irene for the first time, gradually peeling back layers as one does with a new acquaintance. A poet’s development is often circuitous. Themes are revisited and ideas tested again and again, yielding new discoveries. For Irene, reinvention and revision were constants in the attempt to say something true.
Each of the book’s five sections is introduced with a poem from the author as an organizing insight for the poems that follow. This epigraph poem is given in parts, each beginning a subsection while providing a unifying thread. Like amuse-bouchées served between courses, these breaks refresh, awaken, and offer glimpses of the poet’s hand: her presence in absence.
An overarching goal was to represent Irene’s mastery as well as her boundless curiosity. Irene was a master of lyricism, rhetoric, and form. Inspired by Bishop and Dickinson, her poems covered the ephemera of life, the rewards of attention, the wonders and sorrows of being alive. There are poems that lament environmental collapse, the political chaos of the times, the cost of technological advancement in human connection. Her poems reflect on the afterlife, work through childhood wounds, honor friendships, and sing of hearth and home. When a grandson died unexpectedly in 2012, poetry helped Irene make sense of that unfathomable loss, giving rise to some of her best poems. Several appear in these pages.
An overarching goal was to represent Irene’s mastery as well as her boundless curiosity. Irene was a master of lyricism, rhetoric, and form. Inspired by Bishop and Dickinson, her poems covered the ephemera of life, the rewards of attention, the wonders and sorrows of being alive. There are poems that lament environmental collapse, the political chaos of the times, the cost of technological advancement in human connection. Her poems reflect on the afterlife, work through childhood wounds, honor friendships, and sing of hearth and home. When a grandson died unexpectedly in 2012, poetry helped Irene make sense of that unfathomable loss, giving rise to some of her best poems. Several appear in these pages.
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Sixteen months after a large box of poems arrived at my doorstep, we have this debut collection representing over two decades of Irene Adler’s poetry. Only the laxest generosity has made this miracle possible. My deepest gratitude goes to Aileen Cassinetto of Paloma Press for believing in this project from the start; to my co-editors and friends Gail Goepfert and Naoko Fujimoto for their collaboration and support; to Timothy Torres for many hours of technical and editorial assistance. Huge thanks to cover designer Kai Jiang for her vision and artistry. Immense gratitude to Nan Cohen for her encouragement, wisdom, and friendship. Endless thanks to Alan Adler, without whose energy and vision this book would not have been born. Recently, I stumbled upon this letter in which Irene recounts a dream about one of her favorite poets, Emily Dickinson. What better way to close than with these words, which reflect on the abiding spirit that infuses so much of Irene’s poetry: |
Irene Adler
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I woke this morning murmuring, and Alan asked if I were speaking to him. But it was Emily Dickinson I was speaking to. "A narrow fellow in the grass occasionally rides..." Her words seem so fresh after a couple of centuries. Did she wake up with words? We know she percolated them through the day while she did ordinary things. I so wish she could know how much those words mean to me and to uncounted numbers of people for whom she spoke. Her passion and abiding love for the natural world fairly leaped from her pen, pencil - whatever scrap she had nearby to get the words down on. But so few people valued the poems she wrote while she was alive.
Since her death, of course, she has become a beacon to people like me in other centuries. Our worlds differ in so many ways - but not in that deeper understanding of what it is to be human, to wonder at earthly life, to live it without knowing why. And then to yield it up in a disconnection we cannot fathom. Words are the poultice we use to ease both joy and sorrow. We are made to love wholly - without wholly understanding. And she speaks for us in cadences that accept and honor the mystery. Shakespeare says we owe God a death. We also owe poets a debt for their voices, especially those who had no acclaim. Maybe clouds are the best poetry - endlessly, marvelously reinvented and outlasting all voices.
Sometimes I wonder what will happen to all [these] pages of poetry. It could make an enlightening display, a windblown letter to the world. A kind of praise.
It’s been my great honor and privilege to serve as the courier for Irene’s windblown letter to the world. I can think of no higher tribute for a fellow sojourner in poetry and in life. I hope that, like the bone flute, these poems will continue to sing through the ages.
