Whittier is a poet I’ve come to know largely through Dover, where his maternal grandparents and an uncle and cousins on his father’s side lived. His parents in fact, married in our Quaker meetinghouse.
His poems aren’t about himself but rather a greater faithfulness. While he’s self-effacing, many of his works are deeply felt political and social protests that remain biting and land on-target.
Despite the seeming simplicity of his rhyming form, his lines are sharp. When you read his poems, don’t stop at the end of the line but keep moving onward as a full-sentence thought. There you can breathe. Robert Frost follows in Whittier’s footsteps.
His poem, “How the Women Went from Dover,” commemorates an important event that appears in my Quaking Dover as well.
One of my colleagues at the New Hampshire Sunday News insisted that Metalious was a much better writer than the tabloid image that plagued her and her notorious book.
After reading Peyton Place, I have to agree. The realities it exposed are no longer scandalous but widely acknowledged. The novel, meanwhile, is skillfully accomplished and hints at more that could have been accomplished under other conditions. She certainly understood the unspoken skeletons of northern New England as well as anyone else I could mention, and she took the risks of admitting the dark undercurrents of survival in a small town anywhere in the country.
Her personal life, on the other hand, is an American tragedy.
It’s pure coincidence that he should appear in this series on Earth Day, but it’s totally fitting.
The tumultuous spring of 1970, when the first Earth Day was observed, was also when I first saw someone sitting in deep meditation. The figure was in lotus position under a beech tree totally motionless for perhaps a half hour while I waited for my girlfriend at the street corner nearby. My inner reaction was hostile, wondering how anybody could withdraw from the world amid all of the conflict around us at the time. Only later did I put the events together – Gary Snyder, just back from years of Zen practice in Japan, was giving a reading on campus. I even admired some of his calligraphy in a display in the Student Union. And, as I would discover, he was a leading activist on progressive fronts.
About a year later, when I took up yoga and its meditation, I had already begun reading his poetry and was struck by what seemed wild construction. What I eventually detected was how precisely it fit an American voice yet moved on Asian meters with utmost economy and, in his case, clarity.
About a year later, I was living in a yoga ashram, a monastic community not that different from the Zen monasteries he had known in Japan. In addition, one of his essays told of visiting the ashram of our teacher’s teacher in India. It was perhaps the best portrayal of Sivananda I’ve yet read, free of the usual guru adoration.
Similar flashes continued as I returned to Indiana, where he had done graduate studies, and then on to his native Washington state, where he had long been a much better mountaineer than I ever would be. Still, the high country he celebrated was both real and transcendental, even in my briefer experiences. His familiarity with Indigenous tribes also informed my own encounters while living at the edge of the Yakama reservation.
I relate more of this in a poem in my Elders Hold chapbook, should you be interested.
Or, for a thinly veiled biography of him before he left for Japan, there’s Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums.
Much of my writing, poetry and fiction, has concentrated on place itself, and that’s been something Snyder, too, has done. While I have moved independently of his example, I have been indebted and inspired.
When surrealism hits the mark for me, there’s something natural rather than forced about it. The juxtaposition of images connects organically, without need for the intervening steps.
That’s why Lorca is among the writers who serve as a touchstone for me. Besides, I can more or less follow his Spanish in the original, not a given with other Spanish masters I’ve admired and enjoyed – Jorge Borges, Garbriel Marquez Garcia, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, for instance. His volumes are the first I pull from the shelf in that direction.
I love the way he saw New York, by the way – did it influence my novel Subway Visions?
Add to that the tragedy of his life being cut short by Nationalists at the outbreak of the Spanish civil war.
His gorgeous large volume, The Five Books of Moses, leaves the reader agog that the Hebrew Bible wasn’t written in King James English. Fox’s rendering instead sticks close to the original tongue and has a rough-edged, field-research vividness where many of the characters come in unfamiliar names – Ish and Isha for Adam and Eve, for starters. Familiar quotations sometimes differ so sharply that they pass unrecognized.
The translation evokes the sounds of reading the text aloud and hews to puns, word play, word repetition, and alliteration – with detailed notes and footnotes, as needed – that give a sense of what’s been stripped away in conventional translations that polish and soften the action.
It’s my go-to version these days, augmented by others to context to my earlier readings. I wish we had more of the Bible rendered along the lines Fox pursues.
Somewhere in the past I heard about a kind of public journal that wasn’t overtly personal but carefully recorded by devoted individuals. News items, witty thoughts, chance encounters, weather observations might fill them.
Recently, I came across one of those, the Record Book Kept by Daniel C. Osborne (1794-1871), Quaker and Banker. The copy was online at the Friends of Allen County’s website – the highly regarded genealogical center at the public library in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
What especially interests me is that he was a member of Dover Friends Meeting in New Hampshire. His entries provide fresh insights on the life of the congregation and the broader community, both the subjects of my book, Quaking Dover.
A record book, as this one demonstrates, is a collection of random accounts the individual found fascinating or significant. Daniel’s, for instance, has entries on the manufacture of watches in U.S., John Jacob Astor’s will and estate, the popular vote for president 1848, the wife of president Franklin Peirce president-elect, population of the states 1855, English Bible translations list, executions for murders, steam boat accidents and Atlantic Ocean steamers lost, even the royal family of England – most of those notations are on distant events – but they accompany family genealogies and other things closer to home.
Daniel, a son of Marble and Mercy (Nock/Knox) Osborne, operated an iron foundry and was later president of the Strafford Bank, now part of TD Bank. He lived in a Georgian Colonial style home his father had built adjacent to the Quaker meetinghouse, where Daniel continued as an active member while the congregation aged and declined.
These entries note visitors from other locations to Dover Friends Meeting, perhaps all of them in traveling ministry.
Although his penmanship was impeccable, I’m not confident in my ability to decipher it clearly. Even so, I find his records filling in details I’m not sure I’d uncover otherwise. The family genealogies, for instance, have details otherwise lost from the Quaker records when an individual “married out of Meeting,” was “disowned” for other reasons, or moved from the area.
The accounts of deaths, mostly around Dover but sometimes including U.S. presidents, the Marquis de Lafayette, or soldiers at Lexington, Massachusetts, also name neighbors who weren’t Quaker. Perhaps they were even involved in business dealings with him. Notations in the margins point to a surprising number of suicides and, especially, drownings. One 53-year-old man was killed by his own father. Mention of the passing of Quaker evangelist Joseph John Gurney reflects the branch of Friends that Dover followed while that of Congregational minister Lyman Beecher indicates an openness to religious liberalism.
Notations of family marriages point to a much broader interaction of Dover Friends with fellow Quaker families in Rhode Island than I had suspected, including the Wilbur family, prominent in a schism in the yearly meeting, through no blame of their own. I’m guessing it’s because so many attended what’s now the Moses Brown School in Providence.
I wasn’t expecting this tidbit.
Of special interest to me is this notation, “10th mo 22, 1864. Israel Estes of this City, died this day, aged 64 years. He was a lineal descendant of Joseph Estes, who died in Dover Neck in 1626, coming over with Edward Hilton, in the first vessel, and had lands assigned to him as early as 1631.” If true, it would add another person – and, obviously, eventually a wife – to the settlement before the Puritan invasion that multiplied the frontier settlement now known as Dover. As the history stands now, Thomas Roberts was the only other person who arrived with Edward, and they were followed a few years later by brother William Hilton.
It would also place the origin of the surname in America at Dover rather than Massachusetts.
Well, that’s what I get in a first sweep through the record book. I suspect there’s much more to glean.
I’m not big on sci-fi, but the 1975 utopian novel Ecotopia looks rather prescient in that vein considering so much that’s happened in the years since.
The book came out just before I relocated to the Pacific Northwest for what turned out to be four years, but it springs from a recognition of how much the region stands apart from the rest of the nation. It’s a state of mind as much as watersheds and mountain ranges.
As an expression of hippie mindset, I find it more expansive than, say, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
When my poetic focus shifted in the early ‘90s from nature to romantic love as I had known it, Wakoski hit home for me. Hers were love poems but far from the sunlight, chocolate, and roses “I can’t live without you” stereotype of the hopeless/helpless romantic.
Hers were alive in an admission of the continuing impact of adolescent awakening and desire, no matter your age, and the imagery was unmistakably American with a rock’n’roll plus Hollywood warp.
The title Motorcycle Betrayal Poems captures the energy, and her fine volumes from Black Sparrow Press fill a stretch of a shelf in my library.
She was a kind of guardian angel in a stream of poems I produced in the decade. For a sample, see my Blue Rock ebook collection.
While Tom Wolfe charged that no great novel sprang from the hippie counterculture, a challenge akin to the holy grail of the great American novel, his quest overlooked some fine stories that reflected any of its many dimensions.
Among the gems are the three self-published novels of DeVillers’ Eve Chronicles, grounded in the author’s experiences in moving from her native Wisconsin to the Pacific Northwest, where she spent several years – harsh winters included – with a crew in the rugged mountains of eastern Oregon replanting forests in the wake of clear-cut logging. I had heard of the legendary Hodads in the western part of the state (they took their name from the short-handled pick/spade they used), but DeVillers’ case gently probes the realities of the marginal existence and the varied types of people it attracted. Though this was not the Haight-Ashbury stereotype of the era, it was one of the counterculture’s many flavors. She was definitely back-to-the-earth throughout the span of the books.
Another was the holistic health-care work she took up in what she called a nomadic life before settling down in the Willamette Valley, where the Chronicles continue, again reflecting the conflicts of living out deeply felt values.
She began writing the novels after being diagnosed with MS and drew on her spiral-bound notebooks as source material. (Fortunately, those had survived her many moves.) I love the fact that she’s not inventing stories or characters but distilling what she’s known firsthand. She presents scenes – even aromas and lighting – I’ve experienced, too.
I was going to say her tone is reminiscent of Joni Mitchell but now see the singer was an inspiration. How right, then.
She was working on a manuscript about the health care industry and big money and big politics set in the Covid pandemic, but I don’t know how far she had gotten with it.
Levertov is a poet I began reading the summer after I graduated from college. There was something in her work that seduced me, something along the lines of Brahms and Rilke, as one early advocate said of her. (It was Kenneth Rexroth, whom you’ll meet later in this series.)
What I didn’t see straight-out was the religious underpinning of her work, even in her atheist phase.
I do remember an encounter after a poetry reading in Baltimore, where one audience member approached her and asked how one could sustain a pacifist stance while remaining an atheist. She replied that without faith, the practice was very difficult. A few minutes earlier, I had asked how she had come to become a pacifist and she replied it was through her first lover, who was a Quaker.
Jnana's Red Barn 