In real time: Sharon Niederman debuts first poetry collection with 'Ungentrified: Poems of the North Valley and Beyond

You may know Sharon Niederman as a travel writer. Her travel books include “Backroads & Byways of New Mexico.”

You may know Niederman as a freelance journalist, the author of essays and columns for Sunset magazine, New Mexico Magazine, the Santa Fe New Mexican and the Albuquerque Journal.

You may know her as the author of the novel “Return to Abo,” which is about three generations of ranch women struggling to maintain their ways of life.

In real time: Sharon Niederman debuts first poetry collection with 'Ungentrified: Poems of the North Valley and Beyond

Or you may know her as the writer of “The New Mexico Farm Table Cookbook.”

However, you probably are not familiar with Niederman in her recent role as a published poet.

“Ungentrified: Poems of the North Valley and Beyond” is the title of Niederman’s first poetry collection, and also the title of one of the poems.

In an interview, Niederman suggested a synonym for ungentrified might be “real.”

As in, real people who are her neighbors.

“They are real to me. They can only exist here with their particularities, their customs, traditions, beliefs,” Niederman said.

She lives in Los Ranchos de Albuquerque.

“The North Valley is a source I can always turn to. There’s a bench under a sheltering cottonwood. I can sit there with my notebook … and see what comes forth,” she said.

There’s the poem “Mrs. Alderete” about a neighbor.

Here is the second stanza: “Your son built his house behind yours/Your grandsons tend your garden, your fruit trees, your grapevines/you feed your chickens, gather your eggs/The sun dries your laundry/No one cooks beans like you”

As in real food. There’s the poem “Quelites,” for wild spinach.

The poem concludes with a quick recipe for cooking quelites — “With no abuelita to teach preparation/grasp the spoon, intuit the method: Rinse well, boil/chop garlic onion, fry bacon, add leaves,/stir gently until tender, serve hot, enjoy.”

As in real flowers. Consider her poem “Learning to Love Petunias.”

Early in the poem, Niederman writes that she used to scorn petunias. She found them ordinary, boring. She much preferred antique roses. Not anymore. She’s found reasons to love petunias.

“Now I keep pots of petunias, translucent pinks mixed/with indigo, coral alongside scarlet, gaily thriving. They are no/trouble, they require only water and sunshine … Pests avoid them, however, bees sip from their open hearts …” she observes.

Niederman said she started writing poetry at the age of four. “I think I gave my dad a book of poems for his birthday,” she recalled. “I remember my dad teaching me how to read. Maybe that’s where my interest in poetry came from.”

Right after college, she lived in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Niedereman remembers walking to St. Mark’s Church, where she encountered some of the great poets of the 1960s, among them Anne Waldman and Patti Smith, “exercising their voices. That lifted me up. Probably as significant a part of my education as college.”

Niederman thinks back on reading Emily Dickinson.

“Her style, her terseness. I love the simplicity of her poetry,” she said.

Niederman has been in New Mexico for 40 years, residing in Santa Fe, Raton and Albuquerque’s North Valley.

In the introduction to “Ungentrified” Albuquerque poet Demetria Martinez writes, “That Niederman has dared, time and again, to pick up her pen, is a gift for us all and for which we can be profoundly grateful.”

Niederman has also worked as a writing teacher, a photographer, and as the producer of a planned film documentary about Indigenous women trying to maintain their homeland in Navajo country and to hold those accountable for catastrophic uranium spills.