Tag: Literature

On my own, I was writing contemporary literature, except that it turned into underground history

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When I was starting out in my career and sitting at the edge of the semi-circular copy desk, one broad story I kept seeing in the headlines didn’t reflect what I was finding in daily life. It was the hippie experience, told one the public side as drug busts, antiwar protests, and rock concerts, while the personal side I sensed something much broader and transformative, which was largely ignored.

Tom Wolfe, who had come to prominence as a newspaper columnist, was right in saying that the great hippie-era novel needed to be written, though he was wrong in thinking a single book could cover it.

From my perspective, a traditional facts-and-quotes approach couldn’t touch the emotional reality, pro or con. Interviewing celebrities posing as leaders wouldn’t work, either – they largely betrayed us, maybe like never-a-hippie Trump would do later. Hippie was a grassroots movement on many fronts, many of them outside of the big media headquarters in the biggest cities.

In previous Red Barn posts, I’ve touched on many of the hippie movement’s continuing influences, things our kids and grandkids take for granted, but so much – especially of the broadest nature – remains to be examined and presented. I’ll leave that to someone else who can give it full and fresh attention.

For my part, I leave four novels as foundations for others to build on.

I’ve looked hard for work by others but found little yet faithfully left reviews online where I’ve could. Those works are, alas, slowly vanishing. Yes, we are passing.

I am haunted by a definitely hippie copy editor from the year I interned as what we called the rim, but he was gone when I returned a year later, perhaps after pressing for union organization. A lot had changed in those nine months. I wish I knew more about him, other than the ticket for Woodstock that I couldn’t accept, considering the scheduling and my bicycle as my only transportation.

~*~

The core of my perceptions remains in four novels to my credit.

 Daffodil Uprising: I was on campus when the repressive constraints of institutional America blew apart in the late 1960s. Crucially, many of the radical currents emerging on both coasts began connecting in academic nerve centers in the Midwest – places like Daffodil, Indiana, where furious confrontations exposed positions that later generations now take for granted. My novel revisits the upheaval and challenge, both personal and public, triumphant and tragic. As I still humbly proclaim.

Pit-a-Pat High Jinks: The hippie movement that is usually thought of as the Sixties actually appeared most fully during the Nixon administration, 1969-74, and brought changes that younger generations now take for granted. Yes, the ‘70s. In my case, that was Upstate New York where I lived in bohemian circles near the downtown and then on a rundown farm out in the hills where a grubby assembly split the rent and a bit more. My, we were so green and so wild-eyed.

Subway Visions: There were good reasons so many of my freaky housemates and new friends came from the Big Apple. My jaunts to The City, as they called it, provided high-voltage flashes of inspiration that ranged from grubby to psychedelic. It was a whole new world to me, even as a frequent visitor.

What’s Left: So much remained unvoiced and unexamined in the aftermath. I drafted a series of essays that came together as a creative non-fiction volume, but that went nowhere. But then I had the flash to reshape it from the encounters of the hippie protagonist of the previous three books but explored by his curious and snarky daughter. My intention for a big book about the revolution of peace and love turned into one asking what is family, primarily. Hers was quite the colorful circus.

~*~

I still believe there’s much in these that’s “still news” despite the dated surfaces that usually pass for the era.

This year, though, I’m finally saying good-bye to maintaining an effort to engage in an awareness. It’s ultimately in others’ hands.

You can find my novels 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. They’re also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain them.

If only I could have come out as a bloody liberal

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

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.

Is anyone reflecting you or those you know?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Look in the public media around you and tell me where you see your life presented. Is there anywhere in TV shows, movies, advertising, magazines, newspapers, or novels that reflects life as you know it? Beyond that, is there anywhere that voices your aspirations and values? You know, where you want to be?

Writing this is a painful admission, but true. Somehow, though, I don’t picture myself in a typical suburban strip mall, either, no matter how often I’ve wound up there or been stuck in associated traffic.

What I do see, though, points to the reality that so much of what’s being presented and ingested is an escape from the daily grind. I don’t intend this as a judgmental stand, though I would counter it with the spiritual approach of trying to live in harmony with life as we encounter it in a specific place. Still, what I’m seeing generally rings hollow.

I’d issue a call for revolt but doubt that anyone would follow. Oh, well.

My, I didn’t expect to be hitting at the psychological malaise in the national soul, definitely not this quickly, but here we are. Just don’t hand me a cape and expect me to save anyone. I’m just a lowly writer, remember? Well, you could hand me a very dry martini (gin with an olive), but that would be my own favorite escape.

Now, to return more or less to the topic.

During my stint as a field representative for a major media syndicate, I called on newspaper editors in communities across 14 states. What struck me was how little sense their papers gave me of a unique local identity. There was rarely a distinctive voice in the generic mix. Maybe I’ll wax on some outstanding exceptions as a future post. I did try, mind you, to accomplish some of that where I was as an editor.

~*~

When I entered the workaday world, it was in the height of the hippie explosion, as well as the Vietnam quagmire and the first moonwalk and civil rights and, well, you could say generally everything was in flux and has remained so.

The pace of daily journalism, however, left me feeling there was so much change in the works that we were overlooking, especially in any in-depth way. For me, my impressions became fodder for fiction, which would allow me some leeway and definitely free me from footnotes and fact-checkers, not that I’ve veered from relating what I witnessed or even imagined as truthfully as I could, even with a degree of inventiveness and aspiration.

In that journey I wound up living in places that were outside of the big media spotlight, and what I faced ultimately differed from what was coming out of New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, or similar backdrops. My record reflected, I hope, just everyday folks who had to muddle on, best we could, in irreplicable circumstances of human progress or tragedy.

Ultimately, I tried to distill what I experienced from these unique viewpoints into novels that originated as “contemporary fiction,” though I’ve come to see the paradox of the label. Even without the scheduling conflicts of working a “day job,” I was caught in a time-delay of drafting and revising, even before trying to find publication. At the least, that would be a two- or three-year gap before a piece became public. Tastes and trends drastically change in that span. And here I am, shrinking from the crap shoot of fashion.

Or, now we are, decades later, perhaps trying to make sense of it all.

Not that I was alone. Every book author was running behind the frontlines where even the boldest got shot down, should they make it that far.

The consequence, quite simply, is that too much has gone unexamined beneath the superficial rush of what we once Baby Boomers and now creaky seniors and perhaps great-grandparents lived through, individually and jointly, from Watergate to today. No wonder things are such a mess. Look, kiddos, it wasn’t all our fault. Do note, I’m among those who wants to lend you a hand.

Mea culpa, then, though I’ve left some evidence of sorts to build on. Please stay in touch. That matter of “Don’t trust anyone over 30” was a brilliant slogan but ultimately BS.

As I’ve noted, we definitely needed elders. And so do you, on the frontlines now.

You can find my ebooks 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. They’re also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain them.

A true confession of one writer’s life, in perspective to date

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

If we’re counting from the time I got hooked on what became a journalism career, I’ve pursued a writing life for six decades now.

It began with hope, of course, including the dreams of glorious success and celebrity. You know, prizes and bestsellers and fame plus fabulous romance, family, and social life all reflecting intellectual brilliance. These were all wrapped up in the dream of a teen and beyond.

The reality, as you’re probably already about to pipe up, is that the practice of writing – whether literature or any of its other forms, including newspapers – is ultimately grubby work with none of those high-life perks for most of its faithful ranks.

That side’s not any different from all the fine pianists in our communities who never solo in public, despite their talent and passion, or the athletes who exercise daily and play unpaid in the parks on weekends, or a minister’s lifetime of well-crafted, scholarly Sunday sermons. The list of examples can go on and on. Practice, as I’ve come to embrace, is essential in many life activities, even in medicine and law. Forget the results, just do it.

While daily journalism paid my bills for most of my adult life, I was shunted to the editing side of the field, sharpening the prose of other reporters and correspondents and crafting headlines to capture the essence of their dispatches for a parade of readers rather than appearing under my own byline. Spare me the liberal elite label of the rabid right, please; real journalists, unlike the folks at Fox, put their leanings aside before touching anything. Facts are facts, which I see as important in fiction and poetry, too. Well, let’s not rule out their role in anything smacking of rationale behavior.

As far as my own writing pursuits went, I engaged in my free time in what I consider “the real stuff” – poems, fiction, work somewhere in between – much of it getting published in underground literary periodicals around the globe. It was enough to sustain me in the larger quest, no matter that the big successes kept eluding me, despite some near misses.

So here we are, at the beginning of another new year and a birthday soon to follow, and I have to admit the impact of aging, this time from the perspective of a writer. Narrow that to novelist, poet, blogger, and Quaker. One who finds there are still too many piles of drafted material remaining in the way to wherever comes after.

While I don’t have a new major writing project on the horizon – especially no new novel – I am feeling drawn to see what might still have energy in some of the drafts I’ve done in support of my earlier literary projects. There may be some fresh lessons to be gleaned or perhaps even wisdom in the light of time. It’s even an opportunity to reflect on a writing life.

An important elder for me has been the poet Gary Snyder, usually at a distance. This time, it’s from his Zen perspective of reaching an advanced age, almost a generation ahead of me:

My wife is gone, my girl is gone,
my books are loaned, my clothes
are worn, I gave away a car; and
all that happened years ago.
Mind & matter, love & space
are frail as foam on beer.

So for now, I’ll be going through the piles and clearing them away – before someone else has to. Yes, sort through the debris and move on.

It’s one more step in the practice of writing, something like daily prayer, something that needs to be done even if it seems nobody’s listening.

Now, let’s see where it leads.

Who would be on your list of favorites?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

So here you have 51 of my favorite writers. Looking back over them, I recall one girlfriend who, on entering my apartment the first time, burst out with the question, “Have you read all these books?”

I was equally startled by her question, realizing that this romance wouldn’t be going very far. Of course I had read them. Well, most of them. The others were simply biding their time.

Now there’s also the startling question of just how I found the time to read them, considering I was working fulltime and also writing and submitting to journals intensely on the side. On the other hand, it’s been more than 50 years since I graduated from college, so if I devoured just one book a year, it would add up.

Long ago I discovered that if you ask a classical composer for his favorite composers, or a painter for favorite painters, or writers for their favorites, the list will be filled with names totally new to you. I suppose actors and playwrights and photographers and architects will be just as quirky.

I hope this weekly list of writers has turned up some new names for you in that manner.

I can think of some bad influences, like William S. Burroughs, Hunter Thompson, and Cormac McCarthy.

And think of others who didn’t make my list, though I’ve admired and enjoyed them – Rilke, Rumi, Bill Stafford, Wallace Stevens, Hermann Hesse, Saul Bellow. It could go on and on.

And a few more who are coming into focus as a to-be-read pile. Ursula LeGuin, Cynthia Orzick, Philip K. Dick …

It even has me pondering the question, Does a writer ever read for mere pleasure?

Who wrote the copy on all those cereal boxes I read as a kid, anyway?

The doors on this train are about to close

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The clock’s winding down on my offer of a free ride on my novel, Subway Visions. Who knows when, if ever, you’ll have another opportunity on such a deal.

The surrealistic story presents an adventurous ride in its flashes through underground culture. Some of it even erupts into verbal graffiti.

It’s one of five novels I’m making to you for free during Smashword’s annual end-of-the-year sale, which ends just a few hours from now on January First. Remember, the ebook comes in the digital platform of your choice.

Step aboard promptly, then, before the door closes. There are good reasons I see these mass transit rails as an urban amusement park. Check out the ebook and you’ll discover why.

For details, go to the book at Smashwords.com.

Along the tubes to nirvana

 

Back to the last big Turning Point

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The four years covered in my novel Daffodil Uprising brought about tremendous change in the nation and around the globe. In the light of recent events, a fresh overview of the period may provide some essential perspective on current events. For some readers, it may even be a stroll down a Memory Lane of an activists’ protest march. Maybe you remember or maybe you’ve just heard of it as ancient history. In my story, the Revolution of Peace & Love unfolds at the crossroads of the America, where it never got the attention it deserves.

This week, you can still get the ebook for FREE during Smashword’s annual end-of-the-year sale, which ends January First.

Act now, before the deal ends, and you’ll have Daffodil Uprising to read in the digital platform of your choice for as long as you like.

For details, go to the book at Smashwords.com.

The making of a hippie

Not that it’s led to fame or fortune

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

All those hours away from family and friends or at least video viewing or home repairs or whatever writing I intended weren’t like sitting there simply yet pleasurably reading. No fault to other authors, by the way.

As for riches, I would have been better off financially by investing those savings I had back in Baltimore and later by working an overtime shift once every week or two, back when they were still available, an option that had vanished by my last five years in the newsroom, a time when I had instead thought I might indulge in fattening the nest egg for retirement now that the kids were off on their own.

Back to that urban studies certificate. I loved big cities, at least the ones I had visited. Museums and classical music, especially, were the big draw for me, along with the kinetic buzz of a place. I might not be able to afford all the fashion and bling, but I could admire. Binghamton afforded repeated opportunities to hit Manhattan and its other boroughs.

What New York City had new for me was the subway, an initially terrifying underground that turned into a kind of amusement park, once I acquired a few ins and outs for navigating it. So much for a prompt.

How ironic, then, to think that I’m now living in a very small city where the entire year-‘round population would fit aboard a single NYC subway train.

By the time Hitchhikers appeared in print, I was living in New Hampshire and had added the subways of Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington plus the Seattle monorail to my rail mass-transit rail checklist.

I had even lived in Iowa, not far from where I had placed Kenzie’s childhood.

For the most part, my creative writing focused on poetry, which fit around my paying and crazy work schedule better.

An intense round of editing reshaped the book to its original scope and produced a lacy air, something that reminded me of the Robert Rauschenberg pop art collages of the period. But it also left me with many pages of outtakes. Could I salvage them? I believe I did and then some.

For half of my life now, I’ve felt the time for literary success was running out, both on the project at hand and my own life. I could start with one apartment’s neighbors and a fire and the new owners in bankruptcy. After that, just as I was moving across town, I got a nibble. But no sharp editing help.

In terms of writing fiction, I’ve been solo. Believe me, I would have loved to have had an editor, someone to guide me through the ropes and help me see what I was really hoping to develop. Instead, I worked on a manuscript, put it aside to season, and came back to it months or years later, usually on a vacation week dedicated to the project.

Curiously, working in that role that guide for a friend who has a truly amazing concept, I recently got a look at an evaluation of his manuscript by a literary agent and her two associates. While they were passing on the book, their reactions fit in that old-fashioned close combing of the manuscript and pointing us toward a right pathway for the next steps on transforming the opus. I’d be envious if I weren’t so impressed and grateful.

~*~

Much of this series of posts has reflected the role of deep revisions.

An insight I haven’t yet mentioned is what I’ll call “finding the zipper,” a perspective that pulls everything into place – a new, better place. A big book might have several.

In What’s Left, the zipper appeared when Cassia’s childhood black clothing of mourning evolved into goth during her adolescence and then Eileen Fisher when she starred as a young adult high-finance exec. That move also spurred some crucial scenes in her teen years and helped bring her oldest cousin to the fore as a character. Another zipper came in peppering the dialogue between Cassia and her best friend with texting slang. WTF, but I feel it works.

Another helpful approach is the use of photo prompts, especially when a stretch of dialogue falls flat. Online searches are helpful in building look books, which in turn can provide sharp details I would otherwise overlook in real life. Just how does a particular character look in contrast to another? It definitely stretches my thinking.

Satellite photos have also helped me reconstruct physical locations and also revealed how many of my residences in my moves across the country have been razed. Health hazards? Fires? Condemned? Mine really has been a tenuous journey.

One other technique I’ll mention is editing from the last chapter forward, especially in a later revision. We tend to put most of our effort into the opening chapters and then peter out toward the ending. Reversing that provides some extra sharpness and also encourages foreshadowing in the earlier parts of the work.

~*~

In the old days, when I began, newspapers had copy desks, which was where I wound up working. They were usually U-shaped, with a chief editor, called a slot man slash copy-desk chief, sitting in the middle surrounded by the rest of us. A lot of serious editing and rewriting still took place, especially at the first paper I interned at, but already I was hearing the laments of how standards were declining. I can’t help picturing Harry Perrigo, sucking on his pipe while evaluating a headline and story before sending them up the pneumatic tube to the composing room or casting them back to the rim editor for another try. Once computers replaced typewriters, that physical configuration generally faded from the newsroom. Still, I now see that as my introduction to intense revision. A story had to go through a series of hands and eyes to make it into print, even on tight deadlines.

In contrast, in my literary efforts, I was working solo. As I’ve said, the best I could do was work intensely on a piece, put it aside for a while to season, and sometime later to return to it afresh.

Much of my work fell under the label “experimental,” along with the accusation that I’m more of a poet than a novelist, as I heard from one of the best novelists.

Whatever the case, having something of my own in hand still feels good.

And do I have a deal for you!

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Today, for many Americans, is defined as After-Christmas Sales rife with “big savings.”

The one I’m opening to you is even free.

Smashword’s annual Year-End ebook bonanza is into its second – and final – week, and I’m offering you five of my novels at no cost. Pick one or all or something in-between. They’re all different.

It’s your chance to pick up these ebooks at no risk. If you like the stories, perhaps you’ll leave a brief review and five stars at the website, just to encourage other readers who come along in the future.

The titles are Daffodil Uprising, when youth across the country went freaky; Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, with lovers and friends setting forth in premature adulthood; Subway Visions, with wild rides through the Underground; What’s Left, as a bereft daughter tries to make sense of her bohemian parents and close-knit Greek family; and Yoga Bootcamp, where Asian spirituality sizzles in a back-to-the-earth funky farm not far from the Big Apple.

It’s still a good time to give yourself a present. This one carries my blessing. For details, go to Smashwords.com.

 

Acid test poet: William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The coincidence of ending my list of favorite writers with Dr. Williams M.D., is appropriate. All but eight of the writers I cite are American, and one of his goals was the establishment of an authentic American voice. Or, as it turns out, voices. And the majority of the writers are from the second half of the 20th century or later.

Williams was an influence on many of them, and he was generous in his encouragement, even if he had met them just once.

I first encountered him as an assignment for a contemporary poetry I was taking at the beginning of my junior year of college. I opened my textbook on a rainy Saturday morning while visiting a friend at another college in Indiana and was soon entranced. The reliance on imagery was unlike anything I’d previously read. Returning to them is always refreshing and unexpectedly surprisingly.

I have a fondness, too, for his short prose, often drafted on a hidden typewriter between patients back in an earlier era of medical care. I’m not sure I’d call them short stories, not in the sense of being deeply crafted like those of Dubus or Lee I’ve mentioned or of being abstracted from real individuals, but they are direct flashes of humanity.

What makes him stand apart from the other big figures of the emerging American poetry – Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Edward Arlington Robinson, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, among them? His form, for one thing, openly reflected American voice patterns, as did his subject matter, arising from everyday circumstances of the common people, for another. I appreciate Kenneth Burke’s insight that poetry was, for Williams, “equipment for living, a necessary guide amid the bewilderments of life.” I’ll extend that to the fiction I love, too.

Looking at his upbringing, filled with Spanish and some elite schooling, I more fully appreciate the fact that he is the one who worked to free us to listen to our own voices rather than some nasal, high-pitched affection for our culture.