| Oregon Haiku & Tanka Society |
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| June 8, 1997 Flickinger tribute to honor career of local poet Ann Newell by Angie M. Meck, Alamogordo Daily News Local poet Ann Newell is being honored with a 25-year retrospective of her work today, June 8, at 5 p.m. at the Flickinger Center. The program is titled, "Walking the Land Backwards," which is also the name of a book she is currently working on. Ann Newell shared her thoughts about the retrospective while sitting cozily on the daybed in her "workshop for the spirit" room. People ask me all the time about that title, "Why walking the land backwards? I really feel I must be," she said. I'm an adventuresome person. I'm looking to where I've been, but I'm walking backwards because all the excitement and surprises are still behind me. I like that." "Nothing is ever over. Just one more step backwards, and there it is," she gestured to the side, to indicate something new coming into view. Newell describes the tribute as a "partial retirement." She has been organizing the Tumblewords projects in this area for the Department of Cultural Affairs. The purpose of Tumblewords is to bring literature into small towns and cities not served before. After putting together two successful projects last year with workshops by poets and writers, she called Judyth Hill, director of the Tumblewords project for the state, to say she wouldn't be able to continue. She had become ill last fall, and since then hasn't been able to do much. Newell has had a hard time adjusting to a slower pace. As the daughter of a violinist (her father) and a pianist (her mother) who owned their own studio, she began exercising her creative skills at an early age. At 14, she taught in her parents' studio, and by age 16, she had her own radio show for which she wrote and performed all the music. "I was going at it pretty young. Now, at age 76, I break down and I can't believe it because my mind is full of ideas," said Newell. |
| Alamogordo Daily News�Ann Newell |
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| Albuquerque Journal�Ann Newell (Cont.) |
| Shortly after her first book was published, Ann traveled to Seoul, South Korea, as a "friendship ambassador." During a stay in the home of a novelist, Newell's hosts told her she "had an air about her" of the South Korean poet Kim-Yang Shik. When the two poets met they discovered the titles of their books were virtually the same. Newell's book was Time in a Space; Kim's was Beyond Time in Space. "And as we opened the books," Newell says, "you could hardly tell which hand had written which book." In Mount Gasson's Slope, Newell describes haiku as "layers of knowledge in few words." That might also describe the poet herself. "She is extremely perceptive and sensitive to every nuance," says Harvena Richter, a writer, poet, and former visiting lecturer at the University of New Mexico and daughter of the late novelist, Conrad Richter. |
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