Working in the thralls of daily newspaper journalism in the heartland was not my dream. Literary fame was. Of the critically acclaimed sort, as if bestseller status would follow.

Whoa, expressing that so boldly feels harsh, yet true. Even so, I did plod away on both fronts.

And now? I’m a survivor wondering what would have resulted if I had narrowed my focus.

I had no idea how crassly market-driven the shrinking book-publishing world was. So much for idealism.

~*~

Still, I pursued, working on my own into the wee hours.

These days, I have the luxury of revisiting my earlier work and wondering just who wrote it. The pages are so unlike what I’d venture today – wilder, for sure, and more profuse, often leading to an Oh-Wow! of admiration. The dross, fortunately, has been stripped away.

That’s been my reaction in presentations at our monthly open mic night here in town even when I’ve veered toward the edge of embarrassment yet still being warmly applauded.

Passages in both my prose and poetry make references I no longer understand but trust to leave untouched, perhaps for others to reconnect.

Writing? It’s like talking to yourself, ‘cept sometimes you have to get up to allow the rest of you to reply.

~*~

Another recent experience has come in assisting a friend to create a remarkable novel, one he finally presented to a literary agent whose thoughtful response seemed quaint, actually – the perspectives of three people in the agency, even though no. Somebody actually has time these days for such reflection?

It really did feel like an earlier era. I was rather envious.

~*~

I’m also recalling another experience after I had returned “back east” and was reading an essay about Snyder, Whalen, and Kerouac in the North Cascades, I felt sharp pain, knowing the lookout stations and High Cascades were so far behind me and the rest of my generation.

~*~

Add to that the fear of being discovered once your early book approaches publication. How strong are you in its potential storm?

Except, that you instead encounter indifference.

~*~

It can lead to bitterness, considering all the years and lost potential.

As for inscriptions at book signings?

Keep the faith!

Share your Light, too!

That image seems especially appropriate as we celebrate the appearance today of my newest collection of poems, Ocean Motion, now available in the ebook platform of your choice. Yes, let’s envision a book floating on the water like a boat.

For much of the first half of my life, the concept of an ocean was incomprehensible, even more so than mountains.

As I’ve noted earlier, I grew up far from the seashore or even craggy ranges like the Rockies or Alps. The Great Smokey and other Southern Appalachian glories were a bit closer. I didn’t encounter the ocean until I’d reached adolescence and we visited Florida on a camping trip with some of Dad’s old Army Air Force buddies. I next saw surf my senior year of college, with my then-girlfriend and her parents. From there, my encounters went to a few times on the Staten Island ferry or other points in New York City or Long Island, and then the ferry rides in Washington state, a few days camping along the Pacific (recorded in my American Olympus book), a jaunt along the Oregon coast, and then Maryland, New Jersey, and ultimately New England, plus a few returns to the Gulf Coast of Florida.

In all of those, I faced an enigma, a recognition that I didn’t quite grasp its appeal. Something was missing. It was like a gray Lake Erie looming with whitecaps I had seen around age seven, except that there was something else called tides. It was water with nothing else but sky on the horizon.

The pace of my encounters picked up, especially once I moved to New England, nearly half of my life ago now. Having a boss who owned a 32-foot sailboat fostered some of that, especially when we ventured forth once or twice each summer from Newburyport, Massachusetts, or once from Portsmouth, New Hampshire – both notoriously treacherous harbors.

As I describe in one poem, my first time of being in a sailboat was also my first time out on the Atlantic and my first time of seeing whales (including a minke that surfaced only feet away from me) and my first time of setting foot on an island, one that was now a Unitarian and Congregationalist churches summer retreat.

Those experiences all infuse these poems.

Moving to Dover, as I remarried, picked up the pace. The tides reached downtown, after all, and Great Bay along one side. Plus, with the kids, we got to visit Maine beaches and Cape Cod at their grandfather’s. And later, picking up one after her work at a coastal motel, I had repeated exposures to the ocean at midnight, another world altogether. I wouldn’t say it was romantic, even with a full moon.

The resulting poems eventually appeared in small-press literary venues around the globe as well as a series of PDF chapbooks at Thistle Finch editions.

As these poems demonstrate, the more I’ve gotten to know ocean as the North Atlantic along New England, the more in awe I am. Other writers can express the ocean from their own locale and nuances.

Still, I have come to love lighthouses and do treasure opportunities to climb up within them to savor the view from the top. But don’t get too romantic, it was a harsh, often dangerous, life for the keeper and his family. I hope these poems reflect that reality and more.

Do note that New England thrived on seafaring, designing and building distinguished vessels along its forested shores and sailing them around the globe to Asia and elsewhere and then back or out to hunt whales. The memories are imprinted in the muscle and soul of its people.

Remember, tides rise and fall dramatically in New England. You learn to be alert, even wary. And, do note, I’ve learned so much more since I first expressed that.

One of the ocean chapbooks included in the final collection was titled “Land Overlaps Sea,” an outlook that still impresses me, considering that it’s actually the other way around. The poems in the collection reflect places close to where I lived at the time and ways they interact with the Atlantic. It has been quite instructive over the years, even for an old landlubber like me.

Meanwhile, bits of sea shanties – the chanted or sung work ditties of sailors over the years – muffled and muted by the wind, flit through background, even if you don’t quite catch their words.

While the poems reflect a period of my life before moving to a remote fishing village at the far end of Maine, what I’ve encountered since confirms my impressions.

Maritime historian and sea chanter Stephen Sanfilippo and his wife, Susan, have definitely added much to my comprehension, as have my new friend, Captain Robert J. Peacock, and my times out on the waters, especially week-long cruises aboard the historic schooner Lewis R. French, as you’ve been seeing here.

~*~

So here we are, with my thought that each new volume is akin to the space within a vessel:

a book launch
rather than release

BOOK
BOAT

the connection floats for me
my experience on the water flows everywhere

For my poems of the sea, check out Ocean Motion at Smashwords.com. You can find also find it at the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. Or ask your public library to obtain it.

After a couple dozen or so years that have been focused largely in the revision of fiction and then the roots of Dover Quaker Friends Meeting, itself a challenge to conventional New England history, I’ve found myself revisiting my trove of poetry.

It’s part of a big cleanup project that’s accompanying our downsizing move from New Hampshire to the far end of Maine, and I’m at a point of trying to discard everything I no longer need and put in order anything else I feel is of value.

As a result, several central full-length collections that had been presented piecemeal as chapbooks at my Thistle Finch editions blog are now released as ebooks at Smashwords.com and its affiliated digital bookstores. You’ll be hearing more about those as the year progresses.

In their place in the Thistle Finch lineup are new chapbooks of sets of my more recent poems, meaning ones from this century, though their origins go back further.

The task has come as a revelation, watching the evolution in my style and underlying voice. Each stage, reflecting geographical moves in my life and the upheavals of my closest relationships, edged me away from narrative-driven content to increasingly image and confetti centered clusters. Don’t ask me to explain them, they just are, whatever.

For me, poetry is a kind of mysticism – one foot in the inexplicable wondrous, the other in everyday life. Prose, of course, is more secular.

My newly released chapbook Aquarian Leap leads off the new run at Thistle Finch. Frankly, looking back over these, I’m not sure what to make of them other than the wild energy they inhabit. I certainly wouldn’t – or couldn’t – draft them today.

These poems, in some manner, still reflect the working of my multi-layered, mercurial thought process. (Never mind my heart, all the more elusive and often contradictory!) I love those lucid moments – sharp, brief – when everything, including thought and emotion, is centered, full, and stilled. Rarely, however, does my intellect flow in such a focused narrative. That requires more effort.

More typically, it flashes on something and then leaps to another, seemingly miles away. Some say this is characteristic of my natal sun sign. That is to say, the typical Aquarian will hear one subject and shuffle through fifty-two logical connections in a flash, and then blurt out something that will leave everyone else in the room wondering, “Just where did that come from?” (Except, perhaps, for another Aquarian, to whom it will seem perfectly logical.)

Often, my writing was constructed and amplified and then distilled from notes, many of them scratched out on a daily commute or on a hike in the woods, or sometimes even a twist while journaling. Curiously, when I assembled these into collage-poems, I was conscious of an underlying logic. That is, many snippets did not fit the emerging sense and must be laid aside. But a few others did, leading to what I hope is an internal thesis/antithesis/synthesis that’s ultimately beyond any surface or attempted cleverness. I prefer for my work to discover and uncover rather than invent.

The result in this set and a few ahead feels more like confetti. So there!

Something similar happens in disciplined meditation, such as traditional Quaker worship, where routine thoughts are patiently laid aside while one’s awareness clears and sinks to a more intuitive and integrated state. Perhaps some of that also infects these pieces.

I should confess to a few works by two poets, G.P. Scratz and Aram Saroyan, I’ve long admired, poems that defy explication or understanding yet spring from the intuitive burst that takes us beyond apparent meaning – and closer to a jewel-like condition.

Or even the freedom of dancing, which I find in a similar vein in the work of Philip Whalen, especially.

Consider the linguist’s Wolves and Consonants. (My reading of “Vowels” in a book title my elder daughter was reading.)

The growling of wolves adds a whole new way of following the Voice here.

As for any effort to define poetry itself? I guess I prefer the wilder side. Go figure.

You can find Aquarian Leap at Thistle Finch editions.

Or maybe that should be, “bloodied.” The experience has been bruising, even without physical violence.

For the record, half of the newspapers where I worked had Republican identities on the editorial page. Of the remainder, one was liberal, one was neutral, and two did not endorse political candidates, period. And in the ‘80s, when I was presenting editors with a range of political columnists, the only ones that sold were conservative.

Early on in my career, I learned that as a true journalist I had to put personal feelings aside and attempt to listen to both sides of an issue. Much later, in Quaker decision-making I saw how that could lead to a third, and much better, solution to a problem before us, not that the general public seems open to that these days.

As for critical neutrality, the critical lesson came the time I was an intern and wore a Nelson Rockefeller button sticker into the newsroom after our paper endorsed him for president. I was told to remove it, and I did. Remember, he was a Republican and this was a Republican newspaper in a town that still had two – the other one was pro-labor and Democratic and had the bigger circulation. And this was during the period presented in the TV series Mad Men. My daughters are still aghast and intrigued by the outrages and great fashion style of that period the series presented. They’re still appalled by the hippie influences that followed, the very ones I found liberating.

As a journalist, the point I learned was that to listen to people, I had to be neutral, all ears. Unlike Fox TV, still far off in the future. It’s still not news in any vein I respect. But I come from a camp that abhors sleeping with your sources, OK?

Apart from that, the reporters and editors I knew weren’t paid enough to identify with the rich? Our incomes were an embarrassment, even to the local Catholic priest the first time I married. As well as my-then wife’s uncle. If we identified with the poor at a gut level, we had good reason. And, across the nation, most of our newsrooms were non-union – trying to organize in the face of national conglomerates was suicidal, since they could outsource at a moment’s notice. Do note the party divide here.

For much of my career, newspapers were incredibly lucrative. Period. Not that pay levels reflected that. But then the business model, sustained by advertising far surpassing the newsstand or subscription price, came crashing down. Somebody has to pay the bills of covering a community. Walmart definitely wasn’t, nor were the other Big Box stores and their colorful inserts didn’t match the rates of those local ads abutting the news.

So, even apart from that, I’m not surprised American newspapers are in crisis. In my four decades as a professional journalist, I saw news coverage under attack – not just from the outside, but more crucially from owners who first bled billions from its renewed growth and vitality and then started giving the product away online without a viable business model in sight. My novel, Hometown News, paid homage to the battle and what could have been, along with journalists’ role in the survival of communities across the continent and democracy itself. In the book, it was like Richard Brautigan and Molly Ivins met Dilbert and Kafka in an industrial city vaguely in the Midwest, even when their names, sex, and races were changed.

My career as a journalist placed me in enough decaying Rust Belt industrial cities to shape one novel of high-level global investor intrigue, though it will likely remain in unpublished draft. It definitely rambles.

What is available for you to read begins as a factual distillation of some of the communities and newsrooms where I labored, but it soon turns surreal in the face of corporate management (make that mismanagement) and global conglomerates that step-by-step decimate the local economy and very existence.

While the initial draft of the book was completed in the mid-80s, revisions took time, and the work failed into fall into a marketable genre. Publishers saw it as too much of a risk and then, as newspapers lost their power and prestige on the public stage, reader interest in what really happens in newspapers dropped sharply. We are in trouble.

Let me emphasize, though, I never saw political arguments sway the development or placement of developing news stories. The decisions were made on other factors, like is it interesting? Does it have impact? Oh, really?

If we true journalists do have a bias, it’s for factual truth. We hate being lied to or being used as unwitting dupes. The consequences to that, unfortunately, have been diluted under the right-wing deluge.

For local perspective, let me recall a candidate for the board of education telling me point blank, for the record, that he wouldn’t be moving away after winning reelection and renewing the contract of a controversial school superintendent – and then he did precisely that, It still leaves a dirty taste in my mouth, may he rot in hell, no matter his professions. We ran his quote, that much was exactly what he said. But he lied, on behalf of a Republican majority on the board. Would that affect how I saw the rest of them? You betcha. And it wasn’t the first time, even back then.

But they would still get a fair hearing, even if I hadn’t moved on.

Something similar went on elsewhere with a maverick sheriff who got elected to Congress as a Democrat while being investigated for Mob connections and a host of corruption charges. Somehow I’m recalling that an undercover agent fell from above the ceiling and onto the restaurant booth table where our suspect was dining – or whatever. We pursued that story and more, not that it didn’t keep him from winning and being reelected. For details, look up Jim Traficant’s wild record.

For that matter, he could have been an inspiration for Trump.

~*~

Leap ahead to the current polarization in the political spectrum. My decision to subtitle the novel “Reports from Trump Country,” seems prescient, given the array of Blue states as metropolitan centers with a sense of vibrancy and a future – largely on the East and West coasts – while the Red states are more rural and stagnant in between.

The hometown in my novel wound up on the rocks and, from what I’ve seen since, that hasn’t changed.

What I am finding disturbing is the rampant spread of patently false stories. It appears that way too many people don’t want to face verifiable facts, like half-empty arenas. As journalists, we knew all too well that some seemingly great stories proved baseless once we made “one phone call to many.” Do note the unsupported delusions being repeated by people with very definite biases.

Maybe I’m shouting in vain to the wind, but I’ll leave that up to you to determine.

You can find Hometown News 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. It’s also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain it.