What is it that made Bukowski such an unmissable figure in the reading life of young poets and others in the ‘70s and beyond?

You probably wouldn’t want to meet him in person, he seemed to be rather obnoxious, even ugly, even before getting drunk or in a fistfight. He was, from evidence he presents, an abusive lover.

Even so, part of the appeal came, I sense, in his unflinching reflection of life in near-poverty, a world where many of us were also residing. His subjects, though, were everyday poor people, drudging away in marginal jobs when they could, rather than recent college graduates intent on moving on.

Another part of his appeal, though, was his embrace of being a Poet and the ways the daily practice of writing kept saving his miserable life. Black Sparrow Press, with its signature look and literary dedication, was created for his work, and the successful relationship provided a platform that gave exposure to many other poets and novelists – the “bird mob,” as one poet I knew said with outright envy.

Was there even a poetry scene in Los Angeles at the time? The focus in California was almost totally on the Bay Area to the north.

I was especially fond of his short novel, Post Office, but the spare lines of his poetry are unpretentiously masterful and sharp-eyed. He cut the BS, for certain, in a life of squalor that’s a revelation. It’s a life most of us would rather avoid yet somehow touches on our own.

Although she was known as a poet and story writer, her book that I most value is An Island Garden (published the year she died), with illustrations by Childe Hassam, an Impressionist painter I admire highly. (He hated the term, by the way, and didn’t fit the label neatly, but it gives you an idea.)

The island, in the Isles of Shoals of the shore of Maine and New Hampshire, is a remarkable place, as I found in a visit I posted here on June 14, 2020, “Celia’s garden … on Appledore Island.”

Under her guidance, the hotel her family owned and operated became what can be seen as the nation’s first artists colony every summer, attracting a who’s who of writers, painters, musicians, and more. Her influence can be seen especially in many of New England’s authors of the period.

Reading about her, I’ll confess, can be as pleasurable as reading her work itself.

The newest addition to my list is someone I’ve come to know and admire since moving to Eastport.

Lee, a longtime high school teacher and valued community figure who has written short fiction for most of her life, finally released a collection of 12 stories in 2022, and it’s a treasure. Island Secrets is rife with every-day, blue-collar existence on a remote fishing island in Maine – veiled Eastport – but the secrets are those that lurk unspoken in the open. Consider the trials of harvesting scallops in the dead of winter, which runs through the final story. Few consumers have a clue to the dedicated labor involved in the occupation (I’m tempted to call it a profession, including the fact that it is highly licensed and regulated) or of the domestic tensions that accompany the precarious business.

She’s original, a consequence of digging intuitively into the world in front of her, with her prose infused with the precision of her succinct poems as well.

My introduction was at a multidisciplinary conference at Fort Warden State Park in Port Townsend, Washington, in the late ‘70s. Lopez had just published his celebrated Of Wolves and Men, and this was a weeklong gathering of writers, naturalists, scientists, and a few others.

Three of his smaller, later books have especially held my attention: Desert Notes, Arctic Dreams, and Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter, presenting Native American mythology, especially the Trickster figure, Coyote. These volumes are sometimes classified as fiction, but they really straddle genres.

Maybe that’s why I return to Lopez more than to Rachel Carson or Annie Dillard or even Henry David Thoreau.

He did serve as an inspiration for two of the novellas that appear in my book, The Secret Side of Jaya. Well, maybe even the third one, too.

I had already drafted my longpoem, Recovering Olympus, as well as probing Native American lore since my years in the ashram, where Asian mythology also started infusing my awareness.

Lopez, though, had some serious fieldwork to support his visions.

My first encounter with concrete and minimalist poetry came as an art exhibit in the late ‘60s. Maybe I already knew of otherwise traditional verse presented typographically to represent a visual image on a page – a vase or bird, perchance – but this time, the words themselves took on an independent visual wonder. Think of Robert Indiana’s famous LOVE as a cube of giant building blocks.

The writer I most appreciate in this field is Aram Saroyan, the son of a famed Depression-era novelist. Aram came to fame at age 20 with a one-word poem:

lighght

which became a source for right-wing scandal when it won a $750 award from the National Endowment of the Arts. As conservatives charged, it wasn’t spelled right and it wasn’t a real poem anyway. Things got ugly.

Others, me included, find it a vibrating both in the thought and the image. If that silent “gh” adds something to the sense of the word, either as illumination or as featherweight or even carefree, why shouldn’t two intensify the sensation?

It revives that wonder and puzzlement we’ve all felt, but many writers, I think, more keenly, when we first encounter many quirks of the English language but then later glaze past.

In this vein, Saroyan also has a playful

aaple

as another entry.

His small collection, Pages, has traveled from one side of the continent to another with me. A downside of these works is that they don’t work at an open mic or featured reading. They really do belong to the page.

For my own ventures along these lines, check out Sun Spots and Drumming at my Thistle Finch blog as well as the weekly Kinisi entries here at the Red Barn.

Perhaps best known as a cofounder of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in Manhattan as well as the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics each summer at the Tibetan Buddhist Naropa Institute in Boulder Colorado, Waldman has worked with many of the famed Beat poets a generation older in a life of experimental writing and social activism.

In preparing this post, I was surprised to find she’s only a few years old than me. She’s often seemed to be that much further ahead in the history of contemporary literature.

She first impressed me with a few poems in Disembodied Poetics, an annual review she co-edited. I liked the way the disparate elements danced, something in common with much of what I’ve written. Later, in her collected works, I was taken with the ways she employed repetition, something I had avoided as, well, redundant. My Preludes & Fugues, especially, are beholden to her on that front.

Short fiction is something of stepchild when it comes to literary respect in America. Novels get the serious attention, and the bigger royalties, yet as I discovered once I opened a collection by Andre Dubus, “Finding a Girl in America,” a short story can deliver much more than a rambling bigger tale. I quickly devoured two more of his compilations.

I came across his work too late for it to influence the early versions of my novels, but I deeply appreciated his craftsmanship and freshness. Though I’m far from the no bullshit, Cajun/Irish Catholic in a wheelchair in a dilapidated New England mill town character he was, the directness of his writing and his first-hand knowledge of blue-collar life in the Merrimack Valley resonated with me. I lived upstream of Dubus for 13 years and then just to the north, and there’s nothing fictional in his stories, from my perspective.

Before I had read any of his tales, bits of quirky encounters others had with the author, including the sharpness of his teaching had floated my way. Especially telling were the free weekly sessions in his home after an errant car had left him, in his words, a cripple sound much livelier than anything he had probably been doing at the now defunct Bradford College across the street from a friend of mine.

After I started blogging, one follower, an English professor, commented that he liked how much my posts reminded him of Dubus. I won’t go that far but did feel honored, all the same.

I do need to add his son, Andre Dubus III, to my TBR pile.

You’ve no doubt heard more than one person boast that their life could be a book, perhaps even adding that it would make a fortune and lead to fame. Perhaps you even shuddered because this was somebody who doesn’t read books, somebody essentially uninterested that way. As a fellow writer once quipped, he could simply look at a page and tell immediately if the creator was a reader.

The fact is that good writers are also devoted readers. We are inspired by good models, informed by their content, and strengthened by their style and structure. They give us standards to measure up to, excellence to aspire toward, and frontiers to explore. They caution us against getting lazy or complacent.

As my diamond jubilee winds down, I find myself reflecting on novelists and poets and a few others who have accompanied me at some crucial stretch in my writing and editing practice. I’ve come up with a list of 50 plus one.

It’s a quirky list, with an emphasis on those who have been influences at one point or another. Sometimes just one book is enough to leave an impact. I’m not calling these “favorites” – much of my pleasure reading isn’t necessarily that original or elicit that spontaneous “Oh, wow!” reaction. Think of what I’m presenting as godfathers and godmothers of a work. These have served as touchstones or charm stones, elders, wilderness guides, guardian angels. They weren’t there to be imitated or copied but to provoke, definitely, and sometimes comfort.

Over the coming year, I’ll present one a week. They’ll run alphabetically – by first name, just to shake up expectations.

Feel free to name your own personal top writers in the comments as we go. If you’re a reader, one name will lead to another.

Onward!