Poet David Allen Sullivan highlights the work of Hummingbird Press
David Allen Sullivan—perhaps you’ve heard of him? Cabrillo College teacher, poet, and Hummingbird Press current poster boy, Sullivan has long been an avid supporter and participant in the literary arts. Recently, GT caught up with him in an effort to dissect this poet whose recent collection of poems, “Strong-Armed Angels,” was released by Hummingbird, a revered local publishing house for poetry. Sullivan has been writing poetry since he was 14 years old. Inspired by a teacher when he was studying at the American National School in Vienna as a teenager, Sullivan began writing awful Walt Whitman knock-off poems. At age 17, he was already taking himself and his poetry quite seriously: He lost a notebook while hitchhiking across the country and was devastated, only to remind himself that maybe, just maybe, he’d write much better poetry in the future. As Sullivan continued his poetic journey he discovered his affection for the literary choice was due to the intense and personal emotions that could be conveyed through writing poems. Now, with this collection, he strives for that provocation and more. “The simplest events will connect us to the deeper spiritual world, and poetry doesn’t tell you, it shows you,” Sullivan says. And indeed, this is what “Strong-Armed Angels” guides us through. The opening poem in the book, “Transcendental Hunger” marks a theme throughout the collection. A line from the poem, “Signatures of the invisible,” is a phrase that urges us to respond to those simple, forgettable beauties that we see each day and tend to them until we learn what’s happening and find the deeper lesson within life. Here is “Transcendental Hunger” in full:
All the storm-bent reeds
are made right by their
V’d or X’d reflections
in Struve Slough—
an alphabet of signs
the Great Heron, itself
perfectly reproduced,
deigns to ignore since
the only sign that matters
is the flash of fish
I attend to these geometries
hoping the world
will break open.
Signatures of the invisible
abound, so I wait,
pen poised like a beak. Sullivan’s poems cover all our emotions, but a running theme in the book is grief. After the loss of a newborn, Sullivan struggled to cope, but found his solace with his writing. “Ark” is another in his collection that touchingly redirects grief from loss into a sending of his baby girl’s soul into his own. “We shove death in the corner,” Sullivan claims. This book of poetry has been a catalyst for his understanding of life: “I needed to write it to understand my world and give it some shape and words.” Sullivan was invited to write for the Hummingbird Press and “Strong-Armed Angels” is the resulting work. A collective of writers and poets in Santa Cruz operates the press, which was started by Joseph McNeely, a former teacher at Cabrillo College. The idea was simply to get local authors published. Their first publication was Ken Weisner’s “The Sacred Geometry of Pedestrians,” and the latest is Sullivan’s collection of poems. The collective operates through the investment of time and money by its members. Currently there are 12 members and they hope to each publish through Hummingbird Press by 2010. Sullivan says the press acts as an intense writing group. There are great poets, voices and editors within the group that provide feedback on a macro and micro scale up until the point of publishing. They are not ego-driven and they always celebrate success both individually and collectively. Sullivan acknowledges that reading someone else’s poems makes him feel better. Similarly, as Hummingbird Press posts on its website, “we want to be able to pull their books off the shelf at home and read them when the mood strikes us and we want others to have that possibility, also.”
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