Janice Rose - Poet, Actress, Author

"Art is the sacred word in heart."

---Janice Rose

Welcome to Janice Rose's website! Janice has a passion and ardor for poetry that is reflected in her writings, teachings, and performances of her work.

Janice Rose

Photographer - Paul C. Rose II - "On the drive up Kitt Peak"

As a poet of 67, feeling much closer to the end of my physical life rather than womb-gestation and birth, I now have the need, almost like a kind of knowledge-starvation towards outer-space back where my ancestral, genetic origins began. Way back towards the deafening silence of the Big Bang and beyond.

Watch Janice reading, "Ode to The African Woman"

Through therapy, narrative and poetry, my search into inner-space of how and why my life happened as I thought and felt it did in childhood and older, is much less of an incomprehensible mystery. Through research, process of feelings and writing, I know most of my foibles and strengths and understand more of who my parents were as people. Dysfunction intertwined with massive doses of love and southern sacrifice filled volumes of journals and poems. Poems like the ones in my finalist book-award chapbook, Magnolia Moon, Texas Sage. I’ve investigated my internal star-soul, now it’s time for my outer-star-soul search and universal connection.

On our drive up to Kitt Peak National Observatory, near Tucson, Arizona, on the Tohono O’odham reservation where my husband and I stopped so I could buy a dried Saguaro cactus at the Trading Post (I think the Tohono women must have bust-a-gut about the pale face buying that . . . my husband thought $40 too much to pay!) riding the switchback mountain around 7,000 ft. high covered in patches of unbulldozed snow, we finally reached the sacred peak which helps to hold up the sacred sky.

My statistical memory of names and planets alludes me at times, but when the Peak Observatory guide began asking the audience questions, I burst forth with my answers. He asked quite a few questions and I kept blurting out the wrong answers! People’s heads began turning in my direction when I got so many answers incorrect . .. yet hardly ever answering any school teacher’s questions when I was a student due to shyness and feeling inconsolable when I answered wrong . . . my therapeutically boosted ego now willing to take multiple risks, decided immediately to forgive myself and go on to the next question. My husband who is a former Boy Scout steeped in star-gazing and navigation out of wild forests, soon came to my aid and quickly articulated the correct answers before I could open my wide mouth. Even though he and I were sitting a couple of rows apart, now when people looked towards me hoping for another mistaken bleep, I pointed towards him, as if to say “He’s aligned with me!” While walking the trail to the observatory, I would have pulled up my jacket’s hood, if I’d had one.

It seems that other intellects have had problems with names too. Kitt Peak in the early 1900’s was often referred to as Kits Peak, Kit Peak, or even Kit Sap Peak. Hundreds of years before that, The Tohono O’odham Native Americans officially named it LOLIGAM: which means place of the red leaf (Manzanita) bush. (Let’s give credit where it’s due!) But George Roskruge, Pima Co. surveyor of the peak, requested that it be named in honor of his sister, Philippa Roskruge Kitt.

(See Photo of Philippa. My apologies for the white orbs in the photo. Other than flashbulb glare, the orbs could be named UFO’s!)

(Kitt Peak Observatory is on the r.)

Unfortunately, it was futile for my novice camera to take photos inside Kitt Peak Observatory. As you can see from the photo, the outside of the observatory kind of looks like a gargantuan white steel bullet, or space-thumb silo. The mammoth telescope inside is behind 2-4 inch thick glass; it’s huge white steel cylinder and the roof are mounted on a rotating platform at the bottom with massive gears. All kinds of adaptors at the bottom of the telescope could hold cameras to take different areas and images of the night sky. The room housing the telescope behind thick glass was climate-controlled air inside and out to prevent moisture, or condensation on the 4-meter Mayall lens. There is an observation deck just below the domed roof, again behind enclosed glass where we tourists and guide could see almost all of the 26 telescope structures on top of Kitt Peak. The most astronomical telescopes on any one peak in the world!) One of them is a 12-meter radio telescope; the National Radio Astronomy Observatory radio-scope is a 25-meter VLBA lens. There is a National Solar Observatory with a 2-meter McMath-Pierce lens. And lo, and behold, one of the smaller telescopes is sponsored by the Vatican in Rome! Someone said its nickname is the Pope-scope.

My cliff-hanger is this: My husband and I had planned to stay all day and view the night-sky in Kitt Peak National Observatory, but a familiar January-evening of snow was forecast and our view of beautiful night-stars, shooting meteors, planets and my ancestral root-origins from the Milky Way could not be seen! Mother-Nature gave us a booming, silent No! that, perhaps, once-in-a lifetime evening. However, I'll always keep looking Up and Out!

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Copyright © 2009 by Janice Rose. All rights reserved.
Revised: 10/05/10 22:36:27 -0400.