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.

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.

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.