You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
The poems in this rant aren’t in my usual voice, but they do address today’s political precipice, only from a slightly earlier historical perspective. And yes, that’s scary.
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Just go to my Jnana Hodson author page at Smashwords.com.
Her dry, acerbic approach to the subjects in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and other writings were invigorating at the time, especially when they reflected the hippie counterculture. I didn’t especially consider it New Journalism, much less its use of novelistic techniques. Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin were already there, ahead of her, in my reading.
I didn’t keep up with her output, though, and returning to the early work I now see much that strikes me as dated and shallow. Maybe that’s a consequence of seeing national reporters come briefly into a locality and then write of it as if they have some authority, in contrast to what I know after longer residency.
More recently, reading Where I Was From, the account of her upbringing in central California, I felt her telling was more novelistic than actual nonfiction.
Multilayered and deeply personal, Goatwalking: a Guide to Wildland Living is a rich blend of social activism, clandestine adventure, wilderness survival, political resistance, witness for justice, and spiritual growth and grounding.
It’s all based on Corbett’s experiences as a founder of the Sanctuary movement for persecuted Central American refugees. He escorted many of them on foot through the desert from the border to safety within defiant congregations across the Far West. On the trail, he was accompanied by milking goats who provided needed nurture – hence the title.
The book is as a much a journal as a history or social philosophy. As I found related elsewhere, when Corbett first came among Quakers, he knew more about Buddha than Jesus. But then, waiting for his next party to arrive at a remote chapel, he meditated on the crucifix on the wall before him and realized that if anyone could possibly know the terrors his charges had suffered, it was Jesus. Later, working with a dedicated priest, he was treated as an equal in everything but the serving of the eucharist – “I’m a Jesuit, a member of the Society of Jesus,” he was told, “and you’re a member of the Society of Friends,” or Quakers. “What’s the difference?”
His insights are as relevant today as they were when first published.
Here’s your chance to get two of my most recent ebooks free, thanks to Smashword.com’s annual summer sales sweep.
Light Seed Truth is an original examination of ways we use metaphor to think about things that aren’t things or even energy – and that leads to many no-things that are intensely passionate for you or me or the people around us.
Also free this month is Trumpet of the Coming Storm, a set of polemic poems I simply had to get off my chest.
In addition, I’m offering two other ebooks at half-price: Quaking Dover, a contrarian history of New England, and my playful Hamlet: A Village of Gargoyles poems collection.
To get you own copies, go to my Jnana Hodson author page at Smashwords.
My encounter with Technicians of the Sacred: A range of poems from Africa, America, Asia, and Oceana came about the same time I was taking up yoga in the early ‘70s. This sampler of so-called primitive peoples had a freshness I found stunning. Many of the translations were fragmentary, giving the sense of having just been excavated from an archeological dig. Others reflected my sense of discovery arising from the practice of meditation. These were unlike any poems I had previously encountered, and they altered my writing direction.
Thus, I was immersed in what he called deep image and ethnopoetics before I’d ever heard the terms.
I know it’s not his only book in my library, and I am anticipating looking for the others when we move many of our goods out of storage.
As the 21st century got underway, I was baffled that all of the published contemporary novelists and many of its poets I admired were in place by the time I graduated from college at the beginning of the ‘70s. Where were those my own age or younger?
Yes, the publishing world was in turmoil, but that couldn’t have been the entire problem.
I was also recognizing that my native Midwest, especially as I experienced it in industrial Ohio, went unrepresented – something missing largely from Hollywood presentations as well.
And then, as I discovered Greek-American culture, I was amazed to find how little of that culture, too, existed in public awareness.
The one exception who came to light was Detroit-born Eugenides. And how!
His three novels, each one a unique take on the novel itself, address the previous blanks. For large stretches of the Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, I thought he was talking about Dayton, including the race riots of ’68. The Marriage Plot, meanwhile, looked at Quaker practice in ways that gave me confidence in the Greek-American dimension of my own novel What’s Left.
The man is a master, for sure.
The most powerful of the public ministers in the early Quaker movement, Nayler remains unjustly tarnished by what I see as a street theater event that erupted into scandal and his conviction by Parliament (not court) on blasphemy. His shameful treatment by Quaker leader George Fox afterward furthered the sleight.
He’s seen as the most systematic theologian of the emerging movement, as I’ve written elsewhere. What fascinates me the most, though, is his articulation of the Light, as early Quakers experienced Christ. Nobody has written more insightfully in its wide-ranging appearances.
One difficulty is that the experience isn’t “like” anything else. What, for instance, is light itself like? Or the color green? Nayler’s writing, then, can make full sense only to others who have experienced a spiritual Light inwardly. Logically, we’re stuck in a tautology.
His text, though, works and sounds more like contemporary poetry than you’d expect from 17th century English prose. Well, Ezra Pound did describe literature as “news that stays news,” which I think fits here.
His wild poetics drawn on linguistics theory broke ground for a number of us. Quite simply, the narrative within a poem – or a series, as Spicer soon turned away from the single-page model – no longer had to conform with factual reality. I can only imagine what he would have done with Donald Trump as a figure. An image, however, took on a life of its own.
I didn’t realize how central the Los Angeles born character was to the West Coast poetry world. He was co-founder of the Six Gallery in San Francisco, where the Beat movement burst forth, and later in the Berkeley side of the Bay Area literary scene.
His collected poems, published posthumously by Black Sparrow and Grey Fox presses, remain core works on my bookshelf.
I also loved the way Ed Dorn picked up and continued Spicer’s stream.
My introduction to Kerouac was the 1968 Paris Review interview he gave to Ted Berrigan (accompanied by Aram Saroyan, if I recall right – they did have to crawl through a bedroom window to get around Kerouac’s watchdog wife). The idea of typing on long scrolls of teletype paper was something I certainly took up after graduation from college – many mornings I had to go into the newsroom before dawn to attend to the teletype machines and replace the rolls of paper. Nobody else was interested in the discarded bolts.
I’ve never been able to get through On the Road but have read about everything else he wrote, especially Dharma Bums. What appealed in the hippie experience of the early ‘70s was Kerouac’s narrative of similar questing for transcendental awarenesses in music and poetry, music, travel, spirituality/religion, and romantic love – often in the realities of borderline squalor. His experiments with Buddhism resonated with my early yoga, though I now see how much it was more an exploration of French-Canadian Catholicism. The jazz details the excitement of the transformations of the ‘50s and its Beat movement, history as it happened.
At the time, I didn’t realize how much Binghamton in upstate New York resembled Kerouac’s native Lowell, Massachusetts, but without the French-Canadian dimension. The rawness of his freeform narrative was nevertheless entrancing.
Eventually, when I moved to Manchester, New Hampshire, I encountered the Quebec element in the city’s West Side and then in the mills of Lowell itself. We even had obituaries for some of his distant kin who spelled the name Kirouac.
For a fact-oriented journalist like me, his dark and cloudy and openly emotional approach to a story was a revelation. As an aside, I must confess that I now see Henry Miller’s earlier stream-of-thought fiction is superior.
As for Kerouac’s celebrated and lamented Cody? I seriously doubt that he measured up to his image. But that’s a matter of being human, too.
The Pine Tree State has long inspired painters and other visual artists, most of them attracted from elsewhere.
Here’s a sampling:
Jnana's Red Barn 