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Friends read poet's work as tribute

UNM's Frumkin remembered for his compassion

By J.A. Montalbano
Friday, May 4, 2007

Smart Box

In his words

Here's an excerpt from Gene Frumkin's poem "The Rainbow-Walker":

Revolt, the peaceful man's brother

rainbow across the waters of the dead

But I walk so slowly my comradely image resembling my father

smiles up at me saying, `Walk faster walk on circusfoot

Let your fist be olives and your eyes gazelles

let your eyes be hammers

When your toes touch the secret arc of the rainbow-circle

all the colors are yours.'

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To folks who knew Gene Frumkin and his work well, the word is that his poetry could be dense and challenging.

But the man himself - not that hard to figure out, they say.

"His poetry was imaginative and full of images," said George Kalamaras. "At the center of that was this sweetness, a big heart. A sense of human compassion. A sense of humanity."

Frumkin, who taught creative writing at the University of New Mexico for 30 years, died Feb. 18 at age 79.

On Sunday, colleagues, friends, former students and admirers gathered to remember him and pay tribute. About 80 people gathered at the Anasazi Fields Winery in Placitas on a sunny day to reminisce, read Frumkin's poems and share the elegies they penned in the past two months.

Alvaro Cardona-Hine, who met Frumkin 50 years ago in Los Angeles, read two poems to be published this fall in the collection "The Curvature of the Earth," a book the friends collaborated on after a trip to Spain.

"The Girl on the Beach" finds Frumkin in Honolulu imagining a particularly friendly young woman, perhaps a student of his, in a moment he describes as a "beginning to a satire on tragic decorum."

Gloria Frym, a student of Frumkin's in the late 1960s and early '70s, now lives in the San Francisco area. She was a visiting professor at UNM in 2002. She read Frumkin's "Placitas Night" and "Subject," the latter revealing, "I am a gap in myself, like a pause."

Kalamaras discovered Frumkin when they both were published, with just one poem between theirs, in a 1987 issue of Caliban magazine.

"It was imaginative and unlike anything I had read," Kalamaras recalled.

Kalamaras then scoured bookstores looking for Frumkin's books. A few years later, he invited Frumkin to Indiana-Purdue University Fort Wayne. They struck up a friendship, which Kalamaras likened to falling in love. In recent years, Kalamaras made pilgrimages to New Mexico to visit, recalling annual photo sessions on a bench in Old Town.

The sweetness he found after meeting Frumkin "just permeated his person," Kalamaras said.

Kalamaras read his tribute, which touched on the inscrutable nature of Frumkin's poetry:

"Please, Gene, help me not to make sense. Of the living. Of the dread. Of the dead weight of walrus-rock we climb to get a view."

UNM colleague Tony Mares reached back for his memories with his poem "Reading Gene Frumkin While Eating a Salami on Rye."

Another elegy referred to Frumkin's writing as "words like exiles, dissidents."

Cardona-Hine has lived in Truchas since 1988, where he runs a gallery with his wife, Barbara McCauley. He and Frumkin helped launch the literary journal Coastlines in Los Angeles in the mid-Õ50s. They would talk about poetry and life as their children played together in the park.

Cardona-Hine called his friend political but not strident, and a quintessential American poet in a time of turmoil.

"He reacted to America in a very experiential way. He reacted to the culture," Cardona-Hine said.

And, more than colleagues and contemporaries, they were friends.

"He was an exceptionally sweet man," Cardona-Hine said. "No temperature of intolerance. None of that ambition that steps on people's toes."

Is Frumkin's work appreciated?

"Not enough," Cardona-Hine said. "It's difficult work. His poetry is never easy.

"But I think at the university level it should be studied and appreciated."