Valley Center: Area poet, teacher receives national honor
By: CHARLES CARR - For the North County Times | ∞
Congratulations to local resident and Cal State San Marcos professor, Brandon Cesmat, who was selected to be a Poet of the Week on the Poetry Super Highway Internet site (http://www.poetrysuperhighway.com/PoetLinks.html). As well as past works, the site is featuring three new poems by Cesmat all this week.
At Mark and Dorothy Steinbeck's New Year's Day party last Sunday, the tall, strong-featured, Cesmat flipped back his ponytail and quipped self-deprecatingly, "Actually, I think it might have been the weather that got me selected as the first poet-of-the-week," referring to "A Cold Heart," one of his shorter pieces:
The symmetry from my heart of dust
branches out as a snowflake.
This is the shape of my love
that I can't explain and you don't understand,
but the mirrored evidence shows
I am enigmatically whole for you.
In this dry cold I have pulled all nearby moisture to me
for one moment. Quick, see me, this one side of me
that rings in the quiet, then melts into the rushing hum.
Cesmat, who was born and raised in North County, told me "A Cold Heart" was written at a Palomar Mountain ranch during snowfall. He added, "My wife (Andie, a counselor at VC High School) and I survive gracefully on the edge of a mesa above the San Luis Rey River Valley."
Cesmat is also a freelance writer ---- in fact, he penned this very column before I took it on.
As well as teaching literature & writing and Film Studies classes at CSUSM, Cesmat is an adjunct professor at Palomar College, area coordinator for California Poets in the Schools/Border Voices, and poet-in-residence at San Pasqual Union School.
Cesmat earned a San Diego Press Club award for a critical writing about film and a San Diego Book Club award for his 2003 work, "Driven into the Shade" (Poetic Matrix Press). In March, Cesmat will perform in "Writers Who Play" during the Associated Writing Programs Conference held in Austin, Texas.
Cesmat also designed and conducted the first Family Writing Workshop for EvenStart at the San Pasqual Indian Reservation in Valley Center. He wrote one of his first poems, "How to Learn a Thing or Two," after telling the class, "You can use anything to make a poem as long as it leads to a discovery for the writer." Then, to make his point, he turned and scrawled on the chalkboard a superb first draft.
Whew! Fortunately -- for me at least -- Brandon does not play poker nearly as well as he writes poetry.
That's all he wrote. Next time: Can't videotape our own kids at the Maxine Theater? What up with that? Answers right here!
Contact Charles Carr at his Web site, http://www.charlescarr.com, with your comments or column items.
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