Charlotte’s Acceptance Speech

“The Space That Keeps You: When Home Becomes a Love Story”

~ J Jeremiah Brent, Harvest Books/Harper Collins, 2024

Before I saw it, my determined aim
had been to live on the light-filled
Southern California shore.
I had dreamed banks of bougainvillea
and potted tree ferns, the white stucco,
even the towering flame.

After we had repeatedly driven due
south from Seattle to San Diego,
touring each Japanese garden enroute,
I scouting neighborhoods,
Fred accommodating, our son
finally asked, “What about Malibu?”

I recognized immediate reality
pictured in a real estate brochure
lying on his car seat
when I landed to help him move.
“Chris! That’s our house!”
We drove toward the aerie,

winding up to the promontory
surrounded by recurrent chaparral
and far-reaching silence:
shining under the North Star
and the Milky Way above the Pacific,
at eleven hundred feet, safe from tsunami—

Meteoros. “Between heaven
and Earth,” the owner sighed
at leaving what he had built, “uplifting”:
complete with boulders of native sandstone,
bonsai, and a bamboo fountain
frequented by quail, chickadee, and wren,

a fuchsia carpet of ice plant that closes
to bees each April night, mornings that open
to ravens, hummingbirds, scrub jays,
and Ceanothus, hibiscus, olive, citrus,
and pomegranate trees, milkweed blooms
for Monarchs, and for us, roses, roses, roses.

Twenty Thanksgivings have come and gone.
Collections still inform the beauty;
memories paper the walls.
This place keeps witness to our story,
a home we never want to leave,
a love to savor from now on.

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For me, a poetic notion arrives like a small miracle, a wonderment, unbidden from some coupling of emotions in a nether region of body and experience, mine if I choose to attend: something to consider, to work with, to hone for days on end. That activity in contemplative time requires the quiet beauty of an inner vista and the environment that we are blessed with here at City Hall, the library, the park, the mountains, the shore.

And then, finally, to complete the honor, we give voice to our creation: We say, we listen, we harmonize on unique wavelengths, each and every lyricist a gift to us all.

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East to West, a Rhapsody

Only desire remains. I whisper words you no longer
hear into a Miami thunderstorm, where sunlight bronze
infusing aqueous clouds plunged us headlong, dripping,
into thick green flashing essence—a tangled lush
density of lurid spiking heliconia, flying shuttlecock fronds,
and atomized jasmine scenting the restless curtain.
Natural agency exuded from every follicle\
of every bush and tree and flower and fern,
while languorous humidity proved too heavy to resist.
The frenzied growth arrested us, not with ennui,
but an exotic interlude from concern.

Rarely, an atmospheric river deluge rains chaos
from the Pacific. Quick, fierce bursts dash hail;
sheets of water pelt the panes before a comforter
of even grayness hovers gently into place.
Beneath cloud cover across undulating chaparral,
the sun beams a primary rainbow. One end
highlights hillsides where plumed ceanothus,
violet lupine, and dayglow-orange poppies transpire,
then ease to reverie among folded tufts of sedge.
The other end of the ribbon drips colors into froth.
Chromatic brio refracts in us entire.

A fanciful notion of relocating cross country disquiets
the aura. Memories urge me to reconsider home.
True, desert dry Santa Ana winds desiccate
a tree fern, my favored specimen. But buoyed
by Santa Monica Mountains, my misgivings foam
west into oceanic oblivion. Without horizon, shadowless,
I cocoon in mist. Lifting my eyes in Malibu
is like dreaming everywhere else. Lotus-bloom,
pink gold glides the city toward vast blue stillness
open to planets and swirls our galaxy
shimmering out to sea over Point Dume.

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Poetry is a force of nature, risen to us through ancient vibes, meant to stir the body like coyotes howling or bird song or waves calling us to the sea. Poetry is meant to matter. What the artist emits, the receiver interprets to exponential effect.

Something about the varied techniques of language and meaning travel about the body, awaking peptides and causing cellular reactions. Walt Whitman was physiologically correct: “I sing the body electric.”

Over the course of millennia, people have devised rhythmic and tonal cadences to tingle the vagus nerve and patterns to thrill the ear and tongue and larynx and to mirror the human heartbeat. We thrum to those key signatures and chords, so that our body rings with ideas on winged sound.

When others read their words and we listen, the poem itself acts as a cultural ambassador, its own effect echoing everywhere.

When my husband was interviewing a woman for a National Geographic story, she bent toward him and said, “Ah, Señor, in Cuba, happiness is very serious business.”

To echo her sentiment, I say today to this community, “Ah, Friends and Neighbors, POETRY—ENCHANTMENT—is our very serious business.”

Sharing very serious business is what this moment in Malibu is about. We have gathered to celebrate creativity, which the City has honored with a distinct role in our community. We have a plan to continue enhancing wellbeing, welcoming creativity, supporting sadness with healing activities, providing purchase for genius in each of us as we give and receive and indeed, live words. We have invited an array of talent from near and far to sing with us.

Malibu is a poetic community, perhaps because so many creative people have chosen to live here and certainly because we are enlightened by beauty—from the chaparral to the mountains to the vast blue skies and ocean before us. You may be surprised at how popular our programs have become.

The word creative springs from the same root as the word creature. Both words burst with aliveness and possibility for new ways of being. So it is that poetry brings forth new ways of feeling and saying the world.

This year the Malibu Arts Commission and the Malibu City Council are sponsoring a unique array of renowned poets to please many tastes. We are holding two events a month for our enthusiastic attendees:

Caffeinated Verse features readers who perform their poetry and an open mic where our local poets thrill, amaze, and regale us with their own work.

For those who want to write and share as they create, we offer a Vibrant Cycles Poetry Writing Studio under the leadership of various Poets Laureate. We encourage all ages, all interests, all levels.

Each event is free. Each will be extraordinary in its own way. We will meet in the accommodating surroundings of the Malibu Library. What will make the difference is your presence.

I am thrilled to accept the honor you have bestowed on me. I pledge to expend every effort to enrich your experience of participating in a Malibu frame of mind.

Come join the fun—the height of wit, the depth of pathos, the beauty of chosen words that ring off the page. Revel in the voices of our guest poets and neighbors and thrill us with your own special words.