Tag: Counterculture

How are you feeling about the trial’s revelations?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

You know the one I’m talking about. Even before getting to the others just ahead.

Let’s just say I’ve been watching this building up, step by step, for decades. The corruption by big money and trickery, the erosion of the middle class, the polarization, the sleaze, the breakdown of the checks and balances or a loyal opposition.

Working in the newsroom, I was bound to give both sides their voice, though one was doing everything it could to discredit us and those distortions went unchallenged. There was more, of course, going on in the dark, things we sensed but couldn’t prove outright.

Let’s just say I was outraged but had to keep it bottled up. But then, after retiring, I let it out by indulging in a stream of poetry I usually steered clear of – the polemic rant akin to Dr. Bronner’s Moral ABC or Allen Ginsberg’s The Fall of America collection or Phil Ochs’ protest folksongs.

The result is Trumpet of the Coming Storm.

While the pieces that spewed forth in my collection may look like history from the Reagan years through the Bushes, they do reflect the origins of what’s coming to a head today. Even the poems that can be considered sophomoric seem prescient.

There are good reasons I subtitled it Blasts of Alarm and Rage, 1976-2008.

Do take a look.

It’s available in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. You can also ask your public library to obtain it.

Acid test poet: Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

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.

Acid test novelist: Grace Metalious (1924-1964)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

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.

Acid test poet and essayist: Gary Snyder (1930- )

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

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.

Hari Om Tat Sat!

Acid test poet: Frederico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

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.

Acid test translator: Everett Fox (1947- )

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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.

Acid test novelist: Ernest Callenbach (1929-2012)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

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.

Haunted by a big bad Wolfe in a white suit

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

“You’ll be the next Tom Wolfe,” one creative writing prof promised me. I loved the guy’s flashy writing and, for the most part, his subject matter.

Where he eventually rubbed me wrong was his consternation that no big novel of the hippie era had appeared. There, he kept ringing as a prompt for me.

Part of his hook for me was the fact that my dream job in the newspaper world would have been as a columnist, especially one like Hub Meeker’s State of the Arts in the Dayton Journal Herald. Arts journalism was, alas, a shrinking field, along with the more general community columnist, like that paper’s Marj Heydock or Binghamton’s Tom Cawley.

Wolfe had briefly been one of those, at the New York Herald Tribune.

The bigger part, of course, was about that novel. He was dismissing Richard Brautigan’s unique voice altogether and others, like Gurney Norman, John Nichols, Tom Robbins, who rode the vibe.

Wolfe was also snidely suggesting that he had been the one exception, with his Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test, which really wasn’t a novel and predated the blossoming of the hippie movement.

His idea of the Big Hippie Novel reeked of the misguided quest for a Great American Novel.

Quite simply, there were too many strands of the movement to fit into a single book. Political or social action, anti-war witness, civil rights, gender equality, environmental awareness, organic and vegetarian foods, intentional community, group housing, alternative education were all part of it, even before the sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, hair, fashion, or slang.

These other factors would come more fully into play when I revised Daffodil Sunrise into Daffodil Uprising, and Hippie Drum and Hippie Love into Pit-a-Pat High Jinks.

I’d like to think of those books as nominees for the Big Hippie Novel distinction.

Wolfe’s charge also overlooks the outstanding nonfiction books that reflected the experience, such as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Moreover, I still feel that many of the difficulties in the current political scene arise from a failure to clearly understand the demons raging from the Vietnam conflict, both for those who fought in the army and those who fought the unjustified war itself.

So here we were, struggling through disco without having faced the lessons of either the hippie outbreak or the Vietnam disease. Hippie had become a dirty word, and many who had been happy to be one were no in psychological denial. It was something nobody wanted to relive either, apart from maybe Woodstock.

As others have observed, an ignorance of history carries a heavy price.

Acid test poet: Diane Wakoski (1937- )

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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.

Acid test novelist: Diane DeVillers (1956-2023)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

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.