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Moonrise Press announces the publication of Marlene Hitt's second full-size poetry volume, Yellow Tree Alone. Selected Poems. Written between 1998 and 2022, these 129 poems bring together the fruit of a lifetime of wisdom and creativity. Some poems are reprinted from earlier publications; the poet's favorites have appeared in print several times. Others are either new or have never been published. The poems have been selected by Marlene Hitt, Alice Pero, and Maja Trochimczyk from Marlene's vast output of well-crafted and insightful verse. Alice organized poems into seven chapters, borrowing their titles from Marlene's poems: 1. That Silken Wisper, 2. Threads, 3. Along the Path, 4. Fallen Words, 5. Thunder under the Ground, 6. The Web, 7. Pillars of Motes.
The title is borrowed from the last poem in the book, a description of a bright yellow tree, lonely in a vast empty field - a symbol of the loneliness of the poet, often misunderstood by those around her. It is a universal condition of every poet, every creative and inspired soul that reaches beyond the mundane, beyond their immediate surroundings, transmuting the chaff of experience into the gold of words. Marlene Hitt's poetry perfectly exemplifies this alchemy of creative craft.
182 pages (xviii pp. prefatory matter, and 164 pp.); 6 in x 9 in.
ISBN 978-1-945938-34-4, paperback, $22.00 plus S & H
ISBN 978-1-945938-35-1, ebook, ePub format, $10.00
Cover photo by Karen Winters, cover design by Maja Trochimczyk
Yellow Tree Alone
Yellow tree
Stands glowing
In sideways light
Regal and glorious
Her beauty
Her message
For life’s meaning
Wasted
With no one
To see that golden
Radiance
She sings
To no one
Who’d hear her
But the Sun, Ra
The Giver of Gold
ABOUT MARLENE HITT
Marlene Hitt was the first Poet Laureate of Sunland Tujunga (1999- 2001). She has been a member of the Chupa Rosa Writers of Sunland- Tujunga and the Foothills since its inception in 1985. Her critically-acclaimed first poetry collection Clocks and Water Drops was published by Moonrise Press in 2015. In addition to publishing numerous poetry chapbooks, she has authored a non- fiction book Sunland-Tujunga, from Village to City. Her poems appeared in Psychopoetica (UK), Chupa Rosa Diaries of the Chupa Rosa Writers, Sunland (2001-2003), Glendale College’s Eclipse anthologies, CSPS California Quarterly and Poetry Letter; three Moonrise Press anthologies (Chopin with Cherries, 2010; Meditations on Divine Names, 2012; and We Are Here: Village Poets Anthology that she co-edited in 2020 with Maja Trochimczyk).
Most recently she was one of 12 poets invited to contribute to Crystal Fire. Poems of Joy and Wisdom (2022). Her work appears in Sometimes in the Open, a collection of verse by California Poets Laureate, and The Coiled Serpent, anthology of Los Angeles poets, edited by Luis Rodriguez (2016). She served at the Bolton Hall Museum in Tujunga as Museum Director and docent for many years. Ms. Hitt was the history writer for the Foothill Leader, Glendale News Press, North Valley Reporter, and Voice of the Village newspapers. She has been honored as the Woman of Achievement by the Business and Professional Women's Club, Woman of the Year by the U.S. Congress, and many congratulatory scrolls by the City and County of Los Angeles, and the State of California. In 2019, Village Poets of Sunland-Tujunga presented to Marlene and her husband Lloyd, a Lifetime Achievement Award, recognizing their support of poetry in the Foothills.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT BY MARLENE HITT
No poem emerges alone but is the product of many influences. Mine have come from years with the Chupa Rosa Writers, The Village Poets and from the influence of many other individuals. For this selection I thank the beauty around me, the work of other poets, of song writers and novelists whose words I admire. I thank my friends and family; the children who have taught me how to see.
More specifically, I thank Alice Pero who found my great stack of poetry, whose eyes saw and whose heart connected with my thoughts. Alice chose those she found worthy and arranged them in order and in the appropriate spaces. I am always grateful to Maja Trochimczyk who, with her expertise as publisher has made possible the work of many to be seen and appreciated, and whose support has made firecrackers of my enthusiasm.
I thank the Village Poets and Bolton Hall Museum for these many years of happiness, especially the Laureates: Joe, Pam, Elsa, Katerina, Damien, Ursula, Maja, Alice, and Dorothy whose gift is to unpack a poem to fully fathom its meaning. Thelma Reyna has been the gift of a friend. I am grateful too to Genevieve Krueger of the Chupa Rosa Writers who gave me a better education in literature than any university course. We will never forget her.
It takes many minds, many more than I can say here to influence any work. They are all a part of me and of my words.
Marlene Hitt, 21 March 2021
PREFACE BY ALICE PERO
Some people, wise or not so wise, seek to put poets in boxes and categories. This one is “academic,” that one “beat,” another “confessional” and then there is the “ecstatic.” But reading Marlene Hitt’s work is like coming into a room with poems of all colors. She is both conscious and unconscious. Her poems come from deep memory which contains the pioneer, the American Indian, the American housewife, the howls of coyote and the silent slither of snake. We find the landscape of Sunland-Tujunga, dry and rocky, powerful and mystical all at once. We find the solidity of the “real” and the ephemeral of the spirit world.
She “sits before us” without excuse or modesty, a person who does not hide her doubts and confusions as she says in A Meditation, “Yet I am A new universe/ a Shy mutant/I am/A confusion/I am/Unsolved And in the same poem, Here I sit before you/Eyes the color of an echo,/Skin pretending to look wise,/An ordinary room in a/House of un-ordinary/Dimension.” As a poet she can conceive of her eyes being “the color of an echo” and so we realize she will never be in any “ordinary” room; she is extraordinary.
These poems are history, threads through her own life mid-20th century when women still embodied home. She struggled with her differences, never able to really “fit,” yet always able to love. She writes of her father, mother: “Who is she, my mother?/A genius with wool and threads/ Oblivious to a poem…grandparents, great grandparents, husband.” But she is never without doubts. Do they know that under the floorboards, under the table laden with bounteous food, heads bowed in prayer, under our feet, below the wood and “slab/there would be hardened prints/of warriors? /Pieces of rusted knives,/black arrowheads/a lost flintlock…What would be the purpose of the prayers?/Or the wars?”
Her poems take us through known history, back to pre-history, to gods of the past, to stories she has found and reinvented. In these marvelous poems. Hitt is an observer; she reflects life, a mirror with words. Her poem, “Everywhere” that previously gave rise to the title of her first Moonrise Press book, Clocks and Water Drops (2015) has the flavor of Walt Whitman flying through the world, as she repeats the refrain… Water drips in a London flat, she travels “everywhere,” asleep, yet totally awake as she wanders, seeing all the tiny things that make life something worth wandering through. scree falls in “Utah/falls on a silenced beetle/just one B flat howls in Sylmar/an intruder is caught/a stone skims on Lake Victoria/close to shore… everywhere there is movement/please that it shall never stop.”
Find these poems and wake up. Marlene Hitt’s voice is movement and thunder and it will never stop.
~ Alice Pero
IN APPRECIATION BY DOROTHY SKILES
Marlene Hitt’s new collection of poems, highlights her gift as a storyteller. Sounds of life in all of its forms speak to us in her poems: Everywhere, “water drips in a London Flat/a canary sings in Paris…”. The Music, “music fell, the little notes,…/dropping much like snowflakes/drifting everywhere.” What the Thunder Said, “thunder shouted with/dry/deep voice…/“no more,” he rumbled! /no more!” Oaks, “…the sound of the ax/the sound of the saw/eats into my sleep/with its open maw.” And Wasps, “…speak in whispers/and pray/in their own words.”
Threaded throughout Hitt’s poems is a deep love of nature and of “words” spoken. In Naming the Garden, “Bushes with plain and simple leafy life/reveal themselves and I speak their names/savor the sounds my lips make.” In All Beautiful and Treasured Things, the poet speaks, “I fly/over wild buckwheat, …”/ “…touch the wild rose” /”My temple stands among the flowers of the chuparosa.” In Cremation of the Sycamore Tree, the poet mourns the cutting down of so many trees. Her litany of “never love a tree,” runs throughout the poem. “It’s not wise to love a tree/that interfere with men/Watch the smoke of sycamore form/smoke lifts as if to mourn.”
Hitt’s work portrays glimpses of human relationships. In the poem, Echo, “I hear my mother’s voice/and the coughs and curses/of my father/and all those whispers/from the ages past.” In Smoke Rings, “The grave lies open for my father’s death/I curl his coat around and smell/the smoke rings tangled there/think of them over his curly hair/he left too soon. I loved him well.” Finally, In Bury Me, the poet tells what she wants to be buried with: “a leaf from the cottonwoods, the seed of an oak, a vessel of stones, a feather from the road, ”…Then touch your hand/to my lips/that I may taste love on my journey.”
Dorothy Skiles, 16 March 2023
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
I am delighted to share with readers this new collection of poems by Marlene Hitt, written over a period of almost 40 years. The first Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga, member of Chuparosa Poets, Village Poets, and other poetry groups, Marlene Hitt practiced her writing in near isolation from the “official” poetry world, while dedicating her time to the local community, as a historian, poet, and activist. As a sixth Poet Laureate of Sunland Tujunga, member of the Village Poets, and co-editor of our 10th anniversary anthology We Are here: Village Poets Anthology (2020), I am profoundly grateful for Marlene’s collaboration and dedication to poetry. Over the years, her work has also appeared in several Moonrise Press anthologies: Chopin with Cherries (2010), Meditations on Divine Names (2012), and Crystal Fire. Poems of Joy and Wisdom (2022).
As the publisher of Moonrise Press, I am even more grateful for her poetic insights, her gifts of keen observation, reflection, and vivid expression. In 2015, it was my great pleasure to select poems for Clocks and Water Drops, her first full-length poetry volume. The current collection reprints some of these poems, and gathers other work scattered in various publications over the years. But there are plenty of poems here that never saw the light of the day and are here to enlighten and inspire us. I am thankful to Alice Pero for the enormous effort of selecting poems from thousands of pages and arranging them into seven chapters with distinct moods. In collaboration with Marlene, I changed the title of the whole volume from the Thunder Under the Ground proposed by Alice, into a more euphonious Yellow Tree Alone, that shines with the gold leaves of Marlene’s unique talent.
~ Maja Trochimczyk, Ph.D.
THELMA T. REYNA ABOUT THIS BOOK
Two lines in Marlene Hitt’s poetry collection, Yellow Tree Alone, encapsulate the spirit of her captivating book: “In this box is the past,” she writes, and, “Memories! I have used them all again and again, have dusted, polished, have put them away.” Her book—like a metaphorical “box”—overflows with vivid, soulful vignettes of ancestors braving turbulent oceans; parents and grandparents nurturing their progeny; childhood homes decaying into earth; townspeople navigating wars and ceaseless change; family members parsing love or lack of it. Matters of the heart, or of the metaphoric natural world, big and small, pulse and undulate in Hitt’s poems with strong rhythms, rhymes, and poetic imagery. This book is a tribute to her compassionate understanding of the human condition.
~Thelma T. Reyna, National Award-Winning Poet
Author of Dearest Papa: A Memoir in Poems
CONTENTS
Chapter 1. That Silken Whisper ~ 3
1. Humankind ~ 4
2. A Meditation ~ 5
3. I Wonder ~ 10
4. Give Way ~ 11
5. If I Knew ~ 13
6. If I Had Known ~ 14
7. Up and Over ~ 15
8. At a Campfire ~ 16
9. The Whisper ~ 18
10. The Music ~ 19
11. Back and Forth ~ 20
12. Prophecy ~ 21
13. Question ~ 22
14. Yes, I Grieve ~ 23
15. Success, Fame ~ 24
Chapter 2. Threads ~ 25
16. A Long Thread ~ 26
17. Threads, the Children ~ 27
18. Thread One ~28
19. Voyage ~ 30
20. Going Home ~ 31
21. Everywhere ~ 32
22. Shawl ~ 35
23. Smoke Rings ~ 36
24. Healing ~ 37
25. Who is She, My Mother ~ 38
26. All about Ashes ~ 41
27. My Mother Visits ~ 42
28. Mother’s Day 1998 ~ 43
29. Take Me Away ~ 44
30. Scent of Mystery ~ 46
31. Tell Me a Story, Daddy ~ 47
32. Curiosity ~ 48
33. Homecoming ~ 50
34. Great Grandfather’s Reply ~ 51
35. More Than the Parts ~ 52
36. The Landmark ~ 53
37. A Story ~ 54
Chapter 3. Along the Path ~ 55
38. New Year on Canvas ~ 56
39. Devil Wind ~ 57
40. What the Thunder Said ~ 58
41. What Could You Do with a Bubble ~59
42. Take it Back ~ 60
43. Enlightenment ~ 61
44. Guilt ~ 62
45. The Grown Up Year ~ 63
46. Flowers ~ 64
47. Reveries ~ 65
48. The Real Reason ~ 66
49. As a Fly Buzzes By ~ 67
50. Walls ~ 69
51. The Glass ~ 70
52. Catatonia Stone ~ 71
53. Collision ~ 72
54. Thought Fermentation ~ 73
55. Cleaning out the Past ~ 74
56. Caged Things ~ 75
57. Here I Lie Still, ~ 76
Chapter 4. Fallen Words ~ 77
58. Puzzling ~ 78
59. New to New ~ 79
60. How Far Have I Come? ~ 81
61. Fibril Underneath ~ 82
62. Night Lights ~ 84
63. Topography Map ~ 86
64. Child on the Floor with a Marble ~ 87
65. I Missed You ~ 89
66. Fallen Words~ 90
67. New Box of Crayons ~ 91
68. Echo ~ 92
69. All This ~ 93
70. The Word ~ 94
71. Darkness ~ 95
72. The Day the Poets Were Silent ~ 96
73. Love Poem ~ 97
74. If I Knew Your Name ~ 98
75. No Listing in the Yellow Pages ~ 99
76. Where Will I Put the Keys ~ 100
77. To the Stones ~ 101
78. Bulky Item Pick Up ~ 102
Chapter 5. Thunder Under the Ground ~ 103
79. Two Times Around is a Mile and a Half ~ 104
80. The Fire That Drinks the Water ~ 105
81. This Mad Journey ~ 106
82. Ripples ~ 107
83. River Cutting ~ 108
84. Color of the Mind ~ 109
85. Oaks ~ 110
86. Cremation of the Sycamore Tree ~ 112
87. All Beautiful and Treasured Things ~114
88. Prayer of Thanks ~ 116
89. Disaster ~ 117
90. Memories ~ 118
91. A Cloud Passed Moon ~ 119
92. Spine Flower ~ 120
93. Musings about Walls ~ 121
94. Rock, Bush, Sand ~ 122
95. Blind Born Fish ~ 123
96. In Any Forest ~ 124
97. Intersection ~ 125
98. Death Dances ~126
99. Deep in the Spring ~127
100. My Very Own Place ~ 128
101. This Romance ~129
102. It Wasn’t Always This Way ~ 130
Chapter 6. The Web ~ 131
103. Cards at Midnight ~132
104. Green and Cresting ~ 133
105. Homeless ~134
106. Thorns ~ 135
107. Naming the Garden ~ 136
108. That Day ~ 137
109. The Gallon of my Life ~ 138
110. Wasp ~ 139
111. Green ~ 140
112. The Web ~ 141
113. The River of Time ~ 142
114. All the Way Down ~ 143
115. Now I Can Hear the Plodding of Beetles ~ 144
116. To J. Alfred Prufrock ~ 146
Chapter 7. Pillars of Motes ~ 147
117. The Wind is the Wind ~ 148
118. After ~ 150
119. Dust to Dust ~ 151
120. Underneath ~ 152
121. Need the Light ~ 153
122. Old Ones Gone Away ~ 154
123. No Words ~ 155
124. No Poem ~ 156
125. I Wish for You ~ 157
126. Hummingbird ~ 158
127. As the Hawk Flies ~ 160
128. Bury Me ~ 161
129. Yellow Tree Alone ~ 162
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