“Do you remember what you sent me?”
Who? A 250 area code, British Columbia. Don’t know anyone there,. Still, my curiosity nearly got the better of me.
Getting started at the paper — my early work
In the initial job description, if there had actually been one, I would have been doing some basic reporting, including the lead for Crossroads, the weekly religion tab section we ran on Saturdays.
I was also working nights and weekends, including one Saturday or Sunday night when I wound up in the copy desk slot rather the rim after Belcher handed it over to me after he had had it with superiors’ memos. We finished pasteup with one minute before the 12:30 deadline. I’m a whiz.
My basic schedule seems to have been day shifts, 10-7 tues-fri, then late weekend Saturdays while Gil’s in slot. So I do scrub work on advertising-driven special sections and love it … He’s appreciating my willingness and flexibility … he asked about weekend slot, “Kent was in Sat.” and then asked if I was comfortable there, adding he has plans … so things looking good (did new TV listings logo last night, it’s OK) …
One reporter’s husband had Keogh as his PhD chairman at IU… turns out Rash is the top man in his field in the country, yet one more humble Quaker in my exposure.
In retrospect, the early office was more conflicted than I recalled … my erratic hours did give me most Mondays off …
Kent’s big dream, with me being assigned much of the effort, was a weekly outdoors tab to be called Action Northwest. At this stretch, it was still in the early planning stage.
Essentially, I was learning the local ropes first.
~*~
From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.
So clear it could shatter a heart
The first three cuts on my first Joan Baez album (acquired in ’62 or ’63) were classic folksongs – “Silver Daggers,” “East Virginia,” and “Fare Thee Well.” Along with a few others, like “Wildwood Flower,” they exhibit a very moving quality that comes not so much from directed words (as in “calf with a mournful eye”) but from a sum that arises outside of the text.
The lyrics themselves are dry, compressed. The songs are best sung emotionally flat, with a childlike beauty and comprehension (or lack of it). Above all, there is a kind of detachment that makes the whole thing even more touching or eternal.
From Maynard Solomon’s album liner notes: “A remarkably compressed love story. … In its four short verses loom enough tragic characters to populate an 18th century novel … the haunting and mysterious opening verse, with its claim of historical authenticity and its foreboding of personal bereavement. … Perhaps its beauty comes from its biblical connotations, for the imagery of the closing verses is related to New Testament descriptions of the Last Judgment, and the song ends with a quotation from Mark (XII,20) – ‘Till all these things be done.’ … The seemingly obscure and disconnected text is emotionally fused. … Like many another favorite from North Carolina and its neighboring states, [it] has the strange quality of rejoicing as it laments, exulting as it weeps …”
I did not yet know my family roots in North Carolina, but I have taken this, internalized, as an ideal in my own writing that has followed, not that what’s followed has manifested that way over the years. Think, too, of how her material changed.
Off into another swirl
My journal entries from the Yakima years weave together — or more accurately jump among — a half-dozen major fronts in my life. In revisiting these in the upcoming postings, we’ll focus on one front at a time, hoping to gain a little more context of what was happening at the office, at home and my marriage, in the great outdoors, in my literary efforts, in my spiritual life especially as a Quaker, and with a grab bag of extras. The result will mean overlapping the chronology in advancing the timeline, but it’s the best I’m coming up with.
I should introduce Yakima, however briefly, by noting it’s the name of the River and Valley, the County, the City, the Avenue. Sometime after we left, the tribe and its large reservation altered its spelling to set itself apart from all of these other usages. They use Yakama, rather than Yakima. Fair ‘nuff.
Hardly anything grows without irrigation, so water becomes a significant consideration. The economy is principally agricultural — a fifth of the apples sold in the U.S. are raised there, with another fifth in Wenatchee County to the north. Peaches, pears, apricots, cherries, and plums are also prominent, as well as hops for beer brewing, barley, hay, and, after we left, wine vineyards. Cattle, sheep, and horses were the primary livestock, and logging was also a major industry.
Getting used to the arid landscape was a challenge … “like living on the inside of an ashtray,” as I read somewhere, describing another interior Far West scene.
The big snowy mountain to the west, which we could view almost everywhere, was Mount Adams, which we initially confused with Mount Rainier, which was visible from a few points.
Politically and socially, it was conservative, yet participated in a high level of collective action. Perhaps it was pragmatic more than ideological at the core.
~*~
Produce, produce
clear dry air
and everyone a gardener
I just hope this elation lasts.
~*~
Here goes!
~*~
From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.
A fresh perspective on the craft of poetry
Lew Welch (1926-1971) was a Beat-era poet I’ve enjoyed very much. He was influenced by Gertrude Stein early on. At Reed College, he was a roommate of Gary Snyder and a friend of Philip Whalen – what a Trinity of fine poets! William Carlos Williams certainly thought so after meeting them in Oregon.
Here are ten insights gleaned from Welch’s take, “How I work as a poet.”
- All poems are translations.
- Language is speech. The din of a tribe, doing its business. You can’t control it, you can’t correct it, you can only listen to it and use it as it is.
- Speech is the most powerful single thing we human beings have.
- Whose kid is that? (With force!)
- All poetry should be that intense.
- It very seldom is. The few poems we praise over the centuries and across all cultures and times are more intense than this.
- (Discussing a copywriter, Do Not Disturb): He is in a trance. All he is trying to do is make his living writing baby-talk ads for a mail-order house. But Li Po, while extemporizing intricate lines on whatever subject the Emperor happened to throw at him, dropped, I am sure, into the same glaze-eyed state. His eyes would widen then clear, and he’d wittily speck his lines. I saw William Carlos Williams do this on a challenge from Snyder and Whalen and me back in the 1950s.
- Usually, of course, we don’t speak with any exactness at all. It is mostly ceremony and blather. … Exactness to what?
- All that trochee, iamb crap, it’s British. Forget it. It doesn’t have anything to do with us.
- The poet doesn’t want to be understood. He wants to be believed!
Welch left a suicide note, but his body has never been found.
One thing I did note was things I threw out in the move
It’s amazing how much piles up in a short time. As they say about moving every five years to get clear of unneeded possessions? Here’s what went out in this relocation.
- Newspapers pages from places I almost worked.
- Notes to myself.
- Narrow neckties, worn-out belts.
- Love letters and photos.
- A wooden finger. Yes, that one.
- Rough drafts and manilla folders.
- Torn-up mat board.
- Crayons.
- Cardboard boxes, wrapping, and stuffing paper.
- A half ream of employment rejection letters.
- Topographic maps of Monroe and Lawrence counties, Indiana.
- Also, Catskills trails maps, Upstate New York.
- Day campers’ cartoons of “Fat Steve.”
- Duplicate copies of my college journalism or the embarrassing mistakes.
~*~
As I also noted:
After three months of unemployment, dejection, and waiting, we’ve made it … to Yakima, WA.
No Friends Meeting, but perhaps someday … Lord will make a way
~*~
From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.
Kinisi 253
Key
East
…
Kay
Nada
The notebook covers themselves frame a story
As my Bloomington/Daffodil entries in this presentation became grouped by subject, rather than chronological order, we lost a sense of the progression of the notebooks themselves. Take a look now.
- 18, Cornell Campus Store, 90 sheets, kraft cover. Undated. The Cornell spiral-bound lined volumes have wide margins, 3½ inches. My, how I loved those wide margins! Such luxury! Poetry drafts, early ashram experiences. A few bits saved for possible current poems now.
- 19, Cornell Campus Store, 90 sheets, kraft cover. Undated. Let me repeat, these Cornell spiral-bound lined volumes have wide margins, 3½ inches. More poetry drafts, early ashram experiences. A few bits saved for possible current poems now. (How is it I had a stash of these varied campus notebooks?)
- 20, Cornell, 90 sheets. Undated, except one entry in late November. “Swami Jnana-Devananda into winter: ashram.” Mostly quotes: Zen, Ginsberg, Hutterites, etc. Includes Swami’s return from first India trip. The onset of my ashram residency. 23:XI:71
- Vol 21 Winter ’72: ashram. Begins with our first week-long seminar. Some really bizarre group action, both from the guests and the staff. includes trip to Ohio for Grandma’s funeral; she died June 21
- Vol 22 summer ’72, ashram, and well into autumn. More tracings in the water / into Sannasyn, 8:VII:72 11:45 am.
- Unnumbered red cover stenographer book, mostly October 1972. Includes trips to New York City and Binghamton.
- Vol 23? Starts 23:XII:72 and ends with leaving ashram.
- Vol 24? Miscellaneous, though where the pages fit in is uncertain now:
- 24, Yellow Varsity. Has inner cover His Holiness Sri Swami Jnana-Devananda in the middle of Erewhon 22 January 1973. So my ashram residency ended earlier than I recalled …
- 25, green Indiana cover, beginning 19 February ’73 in a Bloomington visit, then turning into the first of the Fostoria series. Some overlap with the previous volume.
- 26, hunter green cover, beginning December 1973. Filed out of sequence, opening with many Tibetan notes. Three-inch left margins.
- 27, blue IU (Aristotle’s Inc.), 23:III:73 on inside cover
- 29, hunter green, 17:I:74, Fostoria. By now I’m dating the entries, in one of the new styles (colons or periods, depending). National Blank Book Company Holyoke, Mass. Wide margins!
- 30, BGSU, 24:VII:74, Fostoria. Verge of marriage.
- END OF CRATE 1: the plastic milk carton cubes, which were so handy in all of my moves from place to place and then turning into instant bookshelves later. Remember those?
- 31, Hunter Green cover, begins 18:X:74 Another wide-margin notebook. Glory be!
- 32, avocado green Penrite 4 Subject Divider Theme Book, 98 cents, 2409 W. Second St., Marion Indiana 46952. Undated entries, mostly stabs at verse and a few other notes in closing up in Fostoria and traipsing on to Bloomington. The last three divider sections remained blank.
- 28, green Campus twin-wire, 59 cents, product of Mead Corporation, Dayton, Ohio. Out of order.
This does have me wondering if you saved any of your college notebooks or the like in your life journey to wherever you are now. What souvenirs have you kept? Or what have you intentionally discarded? Perhaps even with regrets later? Photos, letters, cards as well?
By the way, I hate to think what a spiralbound notebook costs nowadays.
First, to wrap up the Bloomington sojourn
“If thee needs anything and cannot find it, just come to me and I’ll tell thee how to get along without it.” — Etta Macy, Owen County, Quaker, in “Indiana’s Self-reliant Uplanders,” National Geographic, March 1976.
It’s something I’ve heard from others later, across the country.
~*~
Oh, my, one of my favorite off-the-cuff poems of all time wasn’t by the poet I’ve long attributed it to but rather our dear colleague, Richard Pflum. To wit: “In the garden / the women are pacing to and fro / speaking of fellatio.”
I stand corrected.
Reacting to an attack on “just folks poets” by an Iowa staffer in Kayak, criticizing those he looked down on in circles of poets who didn’t aspire to greatness but rather preferred comradery and “goodness.”
“All American poetry today sounds the same,” to which Paul Solyn replied, “not if you listen to it.”
“There aren’t any memorable lines in today’s work,” was equally glib. What was he expecting, advertising slogans? By the way, as one poet told me, “The lines I in my work I find most memorable, other readers don’t.”
[Gee, I found nothing about packing up everything or loading the U-Haul or farewells. Guess I was just too busy.]
~*~
Gleanings from my spiralbound journals plus commentary from now. .
Beyond conventional religions
In contrast to the legalistic foundation of major religions, with their Thou Shalt Nots and punishments counterposed with rewards for faithful practitioners, metaphor employs an alternative approach to spirituality, one built on personal relationship with the Holy. It also opens an awareness of experience beyond empirical matter and energy, the mindset of materialistic Western society.
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Jnana's Red Barn 