Most poets write of themselves or lovers or at least things around them: poetry as a conversation with yourself. Or maybe God, on a good day.
Tag: Literature
A fresh perspective on the craft of poetry
Lew Welch (1926-1971) was a Beat-era poet I’ve enjoyed very much. He was influenced by Gertrude Stein early on. At Reed College, he was a roommate of Gary Snyder and a friend of Philip Whalen – what a Trinity of fine poets! William Carlos Williams certainly thought so after meeting them in Oregon.
Here are ten insights gleaned from Welch’s take, “How I work as a poet.”
- All poems are translations.
- Language is speech. The din of a tribe, doing its business. You can’t control it, you can’t correct it, you can only listen to it and use it as it is.
- Speech is the most powerful single thing we human beings have.
- Whose kid is that? (With force!)
- All poetry should be that intense.
- It very seldom is. The few poems we praise over the centuries and across all cultures and times are more intense than this.
- (Discussing a copywriter, Do Not Disturb): He is in a trance. All he is trying to do is make his living writing baby-talk ads for a mail-order house. But Li Po, while extemporizing intricate lines on whatever subject the Emperor happened to throw at him, dropped, I am sure, into the same glaze-eyed state. His eyes would widen then clear, and he’d wittily speck his lines. I saw William Carlos Williams do this on a challenge from Snyder and Whalen and me back in the 1950s.
- Usually, of course, we don’t speak with any exactness at all. It is mostly ceremony and blather. … Exactness to what?
- All that trochee, iamb crap, it’s British. Forget it. It doesn’t have anything to do with us.
- The poet doesn’t want to be understood. He wants to be believed!
Welch left a suicide note, but his body has never been found.
Right under our feet or the hill
As my journals record, my return to southern Indiana took me well beyond the college campus. I’ve already mentioned my explorations of the wooded Leonard Springs and its cave system just beyond our house at what was then the fringe of the college town. Let me remind you that my Thistle Finch editions blog has free PDF downloads of the related chapbook of my resulting poems as well as a photo album I put together from online gleanings to refresh my memory.
Related photo lookbooks slash storyboards are Ghost Towns, Iconic Farmers, Mills by the Springs, and Wonders Under the Ground, assembled to assist in my revisions for what is now “Miller at the Springs” in my novel Secret Side of Jaya.
Poetry chapbooks originating in this period include Cornflower Eye, Blurring Into Smoke, and Green Wonder, all available as free PDF downloads,
I did encounter a lot in a short year-and-a-half, even beyond my paying employment. I do would how my writing would have evolved if I had been able to remain in place.
Welcome to another Rabbit Hole on the Internet.
Back to a personal refuge
A recent post here told you of my early encounters with the Leonard Springs. The then largely unknown wooded ravine soon served as a kind of personal refuge for me just beyond our house. It became a microcosm of something much larger in my emerging awareness.
For the chapbook of poems originating in those explorations as well as a supporting photo album, go to my Thistle Finch editions free digital bookstore. Do take a look.
Welcome to another Rabbit Hole on the Internet.
Plowing and planting what I could
While much of my Great Black Swamp residency has been distilled into my novels Nearly Canaan and Secret Side of Jaya, it also infused an outpouring of poetry. By the time I arrived, the land had long been drained and turned into some incredibly rich farmland. Something, apparently, had been drained from the people as well.
Among the free PDF poetry broadsides available at my Thistle Finch blog are Toward Tiffin, Farmer Disking His Fields, and Prairie Wind. Once again, I must confess to being quite fond of micropoems as well as “found” poems. Poetry can be a state of mind as well as craft, wherever you are.
In addition, you’ll also find a free poetry chapbook, Furrow, and two photo albums, Prairie Depot and Vast Plains. It is hard to envision such a landscape if you haven’t traveled across the American Midwest of Great Plains.
Do take a look.
Welcome to another Rabbit Hole on the Internet.
I have tried to change the course of history
Perhaps you never thought I’d meet President Ford or movie legend Marilyn Monroe, but I’m finally revealing what happened. Take a look at Night Visions. It’s free at my Thistle Finch free digital bookstore.
For more on yoga back in the day, when it came with its own natural inebriation
In my early journals review, I set apart two sequences from my ashram entries for presentation as Chronicle PDF downloads at my Thistle Finch editions blog. Remember, they’re free. One is Early Yoga, drawing on my initial experiences with the mysterious woman swami who came up to our town to teach classes. The other is Dark-Haired Beauty, a captivating fellow yogi, also from that introduction. In addition, the poetry broadsides Ahamsukhi and Ashram are available, as well as a photo album Ashram Memories. My, how young and green we were.
Do take a look.
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Perhaps Peter Max captured the visual reality
My Binghamton sojourn reflections at my Thistle Finch editions free digital bookstore also include a Chronicles set of notes, Escapes to Cornell, and the photo lookbooks/storyboards Somewhere North of the Big Apple, reflecting my novel Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, and Dark Transit, for Subway Visions. In my life, these could have been the rings of Saturn.
Do take a look.
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And here I thought it was a dark stretch
My time in Upstate New York did generate a prolific amount of poetry, which you can now find as free PDF chapbooks at my Thistle Finch editions blog. Among them are Susquehanna, Splitting the Rent, Halle Street, Riverside Neighbors, and Still Tender. There’s also a prose piece, Escapes to Cornell. So much of note was happening in my life when it seemed nothing of importance was. On top of that, I do wish I had been journaling back in the summer of ’68 when I lived in a boardinghouse across the river from the office and had only a bicycle and my feet for everyday transportation. Whatever scribblings I had from then, alas, have been lost in letters to a long-vanished lover.
Do take a look.
Welcome to another Rabbit Hole on the Internet. Maybe you’ll even sit beside the river with me. I won’t say anything about the bed.
Dixie fiction friction
In the Southern literary tradition was a linkage with Scotland, a love of Walter Scott and, unsaid, its Presbyterian literal Bible, clans becoming klans, some of the same intonations and expressions, a shared rebellious nature, plus the repulsion of Quakers in general.
Yet many of its young writers in the ‘50s devoured Jewish influences (Mailer, Malamud, Bellow) and then the Calvinist Congregationalists of New England (Updike, in particular) and then their own Thomas Wolfe and Faulkner. So I’ve read.
Their own writers had been presenting the Dixie heritage as all happy and macho, which did not fit what they observed. The Jews and Congregationalists, on the other hand, were presenting something hard and ugly about themselves.
From that, I’ve wondered: where and how my Midwestern heritage was being addressed or examined. I saw escape but no reality being addressed. Things that ought to be said but weren’t, at least in the mainstream view.
The best I’ve come up with is Jeffrey Eugenides, Greek-American of Detroit. And, my, how he delivers.
