You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
I have no idea anymore which tribe or tribes these notes reflected, but the list still stirs something in my imagination.
As I noted in October, ’76: Good two weeks of poetry acceptance — 12-14 pieces taken.
That confusion some have, mistaking Jimm for Swami Jnana. Though they live together, they are distinct. One is the patron, who pays the bills by laboring on newspapers, complains about things, tries to live in some style, occasionally smokes, sometimes eats meat, likes to dine out (despite his income), listens to classical music, reads Newsweek, snuggles with his wife. Swami Jnana is his guru, appreciates silence, honest laughter, high country hiking, hardline poetry, animals, and fully human circles. Although they share the same household and many of the same interests, they are distinct. They met in early 1972 and things progressed from there. They have lived together in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and now Washington state. Since joining, Jimm has been calmer and happier while Jnana spreads Dharma seeds. Jimm’s childhood and historical roots have become less urgent; he may disappear altogether. There’s nothing more to say at this point. I’m not certain whose journal this is. It doesn’t matter. They each enter lines on these pages.
Rexroth amazing in the number of unknown poets he admires and the candidness with which he demolishes others. The Paris expatriates were, he says, drawn there by booze (Prohibition in the U.S,) and cheap dollars. Frost wasn’t modern at all but old-guard and compares poorly with similar English poets of a century earlier.
Duane Niatum an often bad poet who comes up with some fine lines, “pine cone city in rain.”
My introduction to Marnie Walsh of the Dakotas, sounding as if created by the people and place.
Her flattest possible diction with all of its crudeness almost a parody of pig-Indian English (“Um! You white!”) almost imitation Black and yet, how utterly devasting.
Yet with a freshness that cannot be ignored, especially in its directness.
~*~
Liz Sohappy, given her Palouse name, Om-na-ma, in 1969: “My Indian name has made great difference in my life. I really felt like a floating body until I received my name. My grandmother said that was how it was to be — no one else is here on earth until he has an Indian name”
I resonate with that, having been given the name Jnana in 1972.
As for the Native poet Dave Etter?
~*~
How strange, the Ginsberg’s The Fall of America is filled with place names and realizing he has no sense of place, but exactly the opposite — that is, a loss of place and roots and thus center, as in perspective, turning the Hari Krishna and Buddha to stop the movement, to cease the spinning …
~*~
Reviewing some of my work, wishing there were something more personal, intimate and yet more forceful there …
In W’s novel, it’s haunting freshness. No feeling of the veneer of (& chilling) revisions, editing …
If the book satisfied us, why would we want to read another piece by him or in the same voice, when there is no other
Andy Wyeth confession of losing himself in the character of what he’s creating but his lack of interest in the finished work; also, the difficulty of being watched while working: his need for secrecy, the self-consciousness intruding in the event of observation-in-creation, “Don’t talk out,” don’t analyze, don’t smooth out or you’ll lose the spark. The feeling of a compulsion forcing him to do a piece, submerge himself when there’s that sweeping instant of perception (a certain touch of light, for instance). The need for solitude and for tactile feeling to get beyond the eye’s flat view.
As for Christina, she is the essence of New England — even its witchcraft. (This, before I had ever been to New England.) Sprung something in me, a recognition of America and truths we do not allow ourselves to admit. A strand I kept denying in Binghamton and Bloomington, the Poconos and Fostoria. Some lack, too, in the Anglo culture, despite exorcism-slaying.
~*~
Wed. 17 Nov. 76, see I was reading Robert Bly “Looking for Dragon Smoke” … I would come back to its impact much later, somewhere in New England …
Snyder is to me what Thoreau was to generations of Americans.
But if Henry is the amateur, Gary is the professional.
Ginsberg, meanwhile, runs with old Walt Whitman.
Snyder works from the inside-out, where others try from the outside-in.
The difference is clear meditation.
~*~
From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.
Tribal dancing at Sipayik is a major community activity at the annual Passamaquoddy Days gathering. It does bring back memories for me of the Native dance competitions (and big jackpots for winners) when thousands from across the continent gathered for Tinowit in the Yakima Valley. This is much smaller and closer to home, in more ways than one.
In revising my novels Nearly Canaan and Secret Side of Jaya, I created several lookbooks slash storyboards from images found online to sharpen details in some of the passages. It’s a great writer’s hack, by the way. You pick up bits you overlook at the scene.
I do wish I had my own photographs from the decade of journals we’re sampling, but often I had no camera, much less training in how to use anything except the simplest point-and-shoot.. I did, however, work with some of the best photojournalists and knew some outstanding fine arts photographers as well. It would have been wonderful to work with them on these posts, but time has intervened. Well, I still have memories, faded as many are. And with a camera, I wouldn’t have worked so devotedly on writing, no doubt. There’s only so much time in a day, even without a paying job to attend to.
For a sense of my visual encounters in the Pacific Northwest, take a look at these free PDF albums at my Thistle Finch editions site: Apple Crates, Glorious Mount Adams, Know Your Salmon, Reflecting the Coast, Unexpected Northwest, and Yakama Beadwork.
Not that I haven’t attempted to re-create that world in immortal words.
Pick one or pick these booklets for your armchair travel.
Welcome to another Rabbit Hole on the Internet.
My encounters with the unfamiliar terrain of the Western mountains and desert had me reading everything I could find. The public library was a good start.
As I noted:
Rainier, honeycomb mountain, radiating heat under all that ice and snow — so fragile a good explosion could level it all … a new appreciation for “the temple tops” …
Regarding petroglyphs at the Dalles, to the south of us on the Columbia River:
“It seems impossible to decipher these inscriptions satisfactorily as it is not likely anyone except the makers and those living at the time the work was done could tell what was meant by them” — Newcombe, 1907
Also in Beth and Ray Hill’s Indian Petroglyphs of the Pacific Northwest, 1974, University of Washington Press:
“To make my name good” as a Northwest Native’s goal in life …
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My explorations fill a number of poems and much of my novel Nearly Canaan and of Kokopelli in the Secret Side of Jaya. In fact, I’ve considered the place to be a central character in itself.
~*~
One book I found most useful in understanding the social differences in the Far West was Anti-California. Many of the points its author raised regarding the Golden State fit what I was seeing in the Pacific Northwest. For instance, few children grew up within a day’s drive of their grandparents or aunts and uncles. He saw that as extending into social life in general, which tended to be more polarized, using the Roman Catholic church as an example in having both one of the most conservative cardinals in the world as well as an entire order of nuns that broke away. (I could add that Quakers there came in two opposite camps, liberal “unprogrammed” meetings and pastor-led evangelical churches.) You get the idea. The author had been a correspondent for Newsweek magazine and other respectable periodicals. I didn’t recall the 1971 book’s subtitle, “Report from our first parafascist state,” or know anything about the author, Kenneth Lamott, father of novelist Anne Lamott. As I’m now hearing, he was quite a flamboyant character, to put it mildly. I do wonder how I’d see that book now.
~*~
From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.
Walking unrushed, meaning outdoors, in fresh air, releases something within me: I feel freer. When I begin, I’m like a slightly out-of-tune violin. I enter the woods full of thoughts, problems. The office is still with me, along with many worries. The wind may scurry up leaves, and I jump and then freeze, startled that I may have scared up a large animal of some sort. Or perhaps it’s be a twisting item that resembles a snake. Sometimes the sun stings my eyes. I adjust, from one system of time and timing to another.
As I fall into a rhythm, my mind clears. Poems begin.
In the hills or mountains or along the water, the world is always fresh: sunlight on branches or water.
Picked Kitty up after her job Friday and hit Keoki’s for cocktails and appetizers. How I wish she would like it here! Indian crafts show in Toppenish this morning, stopped at Wappenish Bead Shop/Trading Post, very nice vibes — mild ashramic throughout, a place to return. Both Rainier and Adams in the sky.
Ray’s Meat Store, hardback bacon and shoulder of lamb — free pound of ground sausage, free pound of ground beef — friendly old shaky fat fellow. Kitty, afterward, “Do you cook the shoulder the same as the leg?” and then phoned her mother, who said, “The shoulder’s better!”
We were getting to know salmon and crab and rainbow trout, too.
~*~
As my then-wife accused me, where the hell was I taking her? Much of the land was settled within the memory of some of the oldest living residents. The route we entered by, with heavy cloud cover, was highly honky-tonk cowboy. Here’s a historic photo reflecting the early settlement, 1880 to 1920, via Wikimedia Commons.
~*~
Touchy around Kitty, who’s speaking baby talk more and more, drawing me into pointless conversation or interruptions, “How do you spell …” for the umpteenth time, and desires to spend (I just noticed the clutch needs tightening). Now she wants a $139 necklace for Christmas.
Where am I going? What am I doing here?
To again be passive and receptive wouldn’t be bad.
She’s impossible to live with these days. She wants something, wants to buy everything, but that’s not it. Unhappy, clinging to me yet feeling trapped, not knowing which way to go.
A man can live on next to nothing but not a woman. Even in the war, when they were starving, they had cosmetics, they had perfume. (So says my father-in-law, with a sly grin.)
Her Christmas list:
Paul [a new sports writer?] was talking about the spirits in his parents’ house (behind you, the cold), thermostats clicking on within warm rooms. Well, it was a funeral parlor.
Where everyone has a fireplace
or wood stove
that works,
everyone burns.
Or could.
Watch the flames
while pondering life
facing death.
With or without smoke.
Or a snake.
Kitty got her four-harness loom on our dash to Seattle … and we stayed with [former Workshop colleague] Franny’s parents, Cortes Island … quite lovely on the waterfront with light snow.
Putting presents away: Avon bottle, English Leather aftershave, an electric can opener — things you get used to, the trappings of middle class.
~*~
From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.
Here are ten more confessions on being a published author.
In reviewing my journal scribblings, I’ve been surprised how little I recorded about my introductory months at the Herald-Republic. By the way, that had been “Republican” for much of the paper’s history. What I am seeing, though, is how much I was Gil’s right-hand man, rather than the newbie at the bottom of the pecking order. Still, I was a utility player who had to jump in wherever the need arose. Not exactly a floater but close.
For the first time in my career, I was working closely under a manager who was actively grooming me. It was definitely different from my internships at the Journal Herald, which had presented some solid coaching all the same.
I don’t know how much of this period was reacclimating myself to daily journalism after my year-and-a-half break in academia, but in addition to adapting to a new landscape quite different than any I had known, I was also observing the lay of the land inside the newsroom, where Kent and Gil hadn’t made any big changes yet.
Astrologically, my Aquarius was a complementary opposite to Gil’s Leo, and from the ashram, I had learned to let him shine. In return, he respected my need for independence. It worked well. He was an avid sports fan, contrary to me, and had even been executive sports editor at the Miami News in one of his stints.
One bit of interesting coincidence was that in the Air Force, he had almost been posted in Enewetak in the Air Weather Service, 1957-’58, when Sam [my father-on-law] was the meteorologist in charge during hydrogen bomb tests.
In trying to catch up now, I see that he was born in Omaha in 1936 and died in Newburgh, New York, in 2015. I always thought of him as a Californian and learn from his obituary that he moved there after his military service, attended college, and then worked at a series of California papers before joining Kent as the assistant managing editor in Yakima.
~*~
As for my floater situation? As I noted:
Tenth straight day of work. The Sunday night/Monday morning doing me in. But have built the GR boards (timeless backup stories ready to paste up if the system crashes) and removed deadwood. …
On day shift this week and told I’ll be editor of special sections — day shift, M-F, beginning early December … [four months away] .
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Should you wonder why I go by Jnana:
Ours was a newsroom of Jims: both the current and future publishers, the city editor and his assistant, the sports editor, our local columnist, maybe a reporter or two … ultimately, a third of the males in the newsroom … as for the composing room, advertising, the pressmen? It was like being named “Boy.”
Even so, I was back to my pedestrian given name in this setting, unlike Bloomington. Here, Jnana became reserved for my friends, fellow Quakers, and literary endeavors. You’ve probably figured out by now that I have often functioned by relying on a compartmentalized life.
~*~
From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.
Jnana's Red Barn 