Poets House Brings New Readership to Diane Burns With Digitization of Riding the One-Eyed Ford

Riding the One-Eyed Ford by Diane Burns (1956–2006) is the newest "launch" out of Poets House's generous digital chapbook venture. Alongside the scan of the book itself is a terrific conversation about Burns with Britta Ruona, Diane Burns's daughter, and Bob Holman, conducted by poet Nicole Wallace.

Other audio and video of Burns accompany the text, such as Burns reciting her poem, "Alphabet City Serenade" (shot by Holman in 1989 in NYC), and a video elegy from the much-admired filmmaker Sky Hopinka. A feature on publisher Contact II sheds light on the flourishing years of the small poetry press (1970s–1990s, of course). A bit from the conversation follows:

Nicole: …[W]hen I talked with Steve Cannon about your mom, he said that she was always reading and always writing and couldn’t be stopped.

Britta: Yeah, she was always reading. Even when she would come with me downstairs to play with my friends in front of the building, she would just sit on the porch and have her book out and be there for hours with her drink and her book.

Nicole: Do you remember if she was also writing a lot? One of the things that a lot of people ask about is—you know, there’s Riding the One-Eyed Ford, which now people are going to be able to read in a much wider capacity—but everyone’s always asking about other work. And if there are other things that were never published?

Britta: Yeah, there were a lot of short stories that were never published. Not so many poems, but she also drew a lot. She was a really good artist. She would do nice sketches. She had one, I think that one is actually in the book, in Riding the One-Eyed Ford, of crossing Bowery on the horses. You know which one I'm talking about? So she did a lot of things like that, where it was almost like a city landscape with Natives just in the middle of it. She had a lot of similar ones like that, that she never really got out. And a lot of short stories and little things here and there.

Bob: Do you have all of those manuscripts, Britta?

Britta: I have some, I don’t have all of them because I never got them afterwards. But, I do have some. She was working on a book called Tequila Mockingbird.

Bob: I happened to find this one page of Tequila Mockingbird. It’s in A Gathering of the Tribes magazine, 1993.

Britta: Oh, yeah. That’s it.

Bob: It’s a wonderful beginning of a novel or something, you know?

Read the book, and check out the rest of this conversation, at Poets House.