I was looking at one of our typically outrageous dawns or maybe it was a sunset and realized it was as amazing as an aroura borealis.
Tag: Thoughts
So why did I write poetry?
A poetry editor a decade or two ago asked why I write poems, and in response I came up with this:
I’ve been writing poetry and fiction for so long the questions of “how” and even “when” and “where” arise long before any consideration of “why.” That is, the practice quickly turns directly to “just sit down, start keyboarding, and see where it goes.” Even so, my “why” quickly turns to a succession of motivations within an evolving exploration that continued to present itself as poetry. So here are some of my primary Whys along the way:
- Because it sustains expansive dimensions of language and thinking that have been precluded from my employment as a newspaper (and, briefly, social sciences) editor, where expression is intended to convey a single layer of factual presentation.
- Because it allows me to pursue wordplay, surrealism, ambiguity, innuendo, absurdities, but especially my own emotions and experiences that are forbidden in objective third-person writing. (Intentionally or otherwise, my literary endeavors have worked as a reaction against and counterweight to the strictures of professional journalism, the way a pianist might balance classical and jazz or country-western performance.)
- Because it has kept my skills as a headline writer sharp and pliant.
- Because it collects and distills the seemingly random wanderings of my Aquarian mind and my often-obscured impressions and feelings.
- Because it reflects the intuition and clarity that arise in my practice of meditation.
- Because revision, a crucial element of writing poetry, pushes me beyond linear narrative to a more mysterious matrix as I looking between the cracks and broken syntax to admit other voices to appear.
- Because it allows me mythologies for exploring and celebrating places I’ve lived and people I’ve known along the way. (If I’d taken more photos during all those years, would the drive have been lessened?)
- Because it immerses me in a long stream of poets, troubadours, singers, storytellers, mystics, prophets, and shamans before me.
- Because it’s a kind of prayer.
- Because it keeps me looking at the world around me with an awareness of gratitude and wonder.
Well, that’s what I wrote at the time, and the editor fired back with a round of questions I didn’t have time to answer. Way back then. I have no idea how I would answer now. I do hope it would be less ethereal.
What is poetry, anyway?
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.
Getting the rest of the story about one of my heroes from adolescence
One of the joys of blogging has been the way it’s opened connections I wouldn’t have otherwise found.
An example of that came after an email exchange with Paul Glover, who had come across my references to Hub Meeker, who had been the fine arts columnist at my hometown newspaper, the morning one that later gave me an internship as my first professional stint.
Hub had a position that was long my dream job, but a rarity in American journalism. Fine arts coverage is marginal, at best, and these days often limited to press releases rather than performance reviews. Even the Washington Post is a near zero on that front.
And there I was in the same newsroom, sometimes even going to lunch or dinner with him.
You can imagine.
Shortly before my graduation from college, Hub moved on from Dayton and eventually from sight altogether. And his position went to another, more established figure, rather than me, despite my own little fan club in the room. At this point, I’m thinking it would have turned out disastrously.
(I need some time for that thought to sink in.)
~*~
Turns out Paul knew Hub from a different perspective, a stepson of sorts, though falling in that range of family relationships that currently lack an exact word that fits.
He related that Hub had recently died and was wondering if I had any memories
or stories of interest that I could send his way in British Columbia.
So here’s my quick stab.
~*~
Naturally, you’ve stirred up so much more.
For starters, I’m not sure what high school he attended or even college. Ohio University? As for a major? Or even how he got hired at the Journal Herald, though Glenn Thompson had an eye for the unusual. Glenn hired me because of a letter to the editor I had submitted and then talked me into changing my major at Indiana University, from journalism to political science.
I graduated from Belmont in ’66 and gather that you’re a decade or so younger. Do fill me in.
The art institute, as you probably know, was undergoing a major shift at the time, from a collection that had included samurai armor and an Egyptian mummy in its displays to instead focus on picking up first-class works in a particular style or period rather than second-rate works by big names. Hub was happy to proclaim the purchase of pre-Columbian pieces at a time when nobody else was aware of their glories.
The DAI was also on the cutting edge of the arts scene, including its degree-producing art school, which several of my friends attended. Or, as my high school art teacher once said during a visit to her home when I was home from college with my girlfriend (from the other side of town), it was the kind of place that displayed the constructions of my girlfriend’s mother and her close friend slash mentor. Don’t know if she called it rubbish, but she certainly didn’t see it as “painting.”
By the time of Kent State, Dayton was already in a downward economic cycle — National Cash Register had laid off almost all of its workforce and was demolishing its factories, and General Motors’ five divisions were all getting hammered, too. The dysfunctional school board’s refusal to work on racial imbalances led to court decisions that, well, pretty much destroyed public education in town.
You were lucky to escape.
You touch on your parents’ marital difficulties. From meeting Hub’s wife a few times, I got the feeling that their relationship was rocky. Yes, she was British and daffy and likely neurotic — a smoker? — all with their charms, and, yes, quite pretty (brunette?) to my 20-year-old eyes. I later wondered how much of that factored in the decision to move to Rhode Island. Looking back, I do believe she really was hitting on me late one afternoon, though I rather brushed it off at the time. (Gee, I was still virgin. Hard to admit that, even now.) (Ditto, for another encounter, at school a few months earlier.)
I’m also wondered how Hub managed financially after leaving Dayton. Writing is rarely lucrative, even for some major authors, as I’ve learned from one friend who envied my steady income while I envied his New York Times critical acclaim. Well, Paul, you know the arts scene. Did you continue in that vein or find another path?
Being together 50 years, though, is quite an achievement. I always saw Hub as a gentle soul. I hope he was that in your relationship, too. Stepping in as the new male authority figure is rarely smooth, as I found in my own remarriage.
I am impressed by your efforts on the memorial service and hope it brings comfort to your mother, you, and the rest of those closest to you.
Oh, yes, and thank you for visiting the Red Barn. I was surprised to see I had mentioned Hub five times over the past dozen years.
~*~
This must have been in a follow-up dispatch:
Hub had what for me was a dream job on a newspaper. His wasn’t just a column – ideal enough – but one covering the fine arts, all of them – visual, literary, and performing – just as they were becoming important in my own adolescent life.
At the time, Dayton was a thriving industrial hub that also had a heavy Air Force presence. It wasn’t someplace you thought of as having an artsy side, even as the ‘60s took shape.
Glenn Thompson, editor-in-chief of the morning newspaper, one of a moderate Republican stance, believed in raising readers’ visions a bit higher. Somehow, in recognizing Hub’s potential, he created the State of the Arts beat.
For Hub, this was an opportunity to discover creative work in many veins, and in doing so, he nurtured a growing scene. Vanguard Concerts surfaced to bring top-notch chamber music to town; an opera company was formed, presenting some up-and-coming stars along the way; his coverage of new architecture was cited by, I believe, it was Time magazine. The local art museum was hailed by the New York Times as, “Dayton, Dayton, rah-rah-rah,” no doubt influenced by Hub’s columns.
He did get to cover the arts elsewhere, too. Some of his columns reveled in the richness of London, which had all of five symphony orchestras.
Turning to Cincinnati, with its zoo, he opened a report with “Hip, hop, hippopotamus, it’s the zoo. Where …” and then took us behind the scenes with a world we’d otherwise never see. The story was accompanied by a page-wide photo of a giraffe’s neck stretched out to an ice cream cone.
Every fall he and the outdoors writer headed off to the hilly part of Ohio to review the fall foliage. Their columns then ran side-by-side. Fun stuff, seeing the same event from different perspectives.
And then, in my sophomore year of college, I got to intern at the Journal Herald and actually meet the guy, go out to lunch – I remember the open-face cheeseburgers from one of those at an old-fashioned downtown dive, even share a staff party or two.
He admitted feeling he was on thin ice, trying to cover so much. I think the spirit of wonder and curiosity he conveyed made up for any lack of formal expertise. He did come from humble roots on the wrong side of the river, as I recall – well, my part of town wasn’t exactly classy, either. And then there were rumors of a used hearse Hub and his wife drove, perhaps somewhat scandalously.
And then, shortly after I transferred to Indiana University, the paper announced that Hub was off to Rhode Island.
It hit me as a shock. He had been a crucial influence shaping my own artistic tastes and outlook.
~*~
What I learned in return was that Hub had left journalism but done some writing along the way. Spent his later years in Canada and serving in community service of various strands. In the photo that was enclosed, both he and his longtime sweetheart look very happy.
On to the Pacific Northwest via the prairie and Ozarks
My second brace of fiction, ultimately three books in all, addressed the dozen years in the aftermath of the hippie outbreak, though I’ve tried to fudge the era precisely. I do think much of it is continuing.
Naturally, for me, they were semi-autobiographical, even though the protagonist is now a woman named Jaya who winds up with a much younger lover who becomes her husband.
The pivotal piece is Yoga Bootcamp, with her now as a central character, along with the guru they sometimes called Elvis or Big Pumpkin. My residency in the ashram was a transformative period in my life, even in the face of details I’ve since learned. We were a rogue outfit in the period when yoga took root in America. This down-to-earth story will probably scandalize your local yoga studio instructor, but the experience did reshape many of our lives, hopefully for the better. I’ve certainly carried many of its lessons far through some other faith traditions.
The central piece is now compressed into Nearly Canaan, originally an ambitious triptych that comprised the hefty novels Promise, Peel: As in Apple, and With St. Helens in the Mix. At the outset, a sense of place was central as Jaya relocated from a small town on the prairie in the American Midwest to the hardscrabble Ozarks to the apple orchard country in the desert of the Pacific Northwest, but the central theme now condenses as the question of how much influence one person can extend over others, hopefully for the better. I can ask now whether it would have been more compelling if she’d been conniving and manipulative.
The third book, The Secret Side of Jaya, is a set of three novellas, each one set in the places she lived after leaving the ashram. Each one, quite different, is premised on hearing and seeing figures in a locale that others don’t. Maybe you encounter them, too, where you are.
You can find these books 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.
Thinking of repeated-digit birthdays
11 – In an American Midwest industrial city during a gray period. Boy Scouts and chemistry were everything in my world. Hiking and camping, especially. Much of the rest was a blur.
22 – My senior year at Indiana University, deeply head-over-heels with my first lover and spinning into hippiedelic as a promising young journalist. But just ahead was an unexpected change of events, pointing my route into Upstate New York and then yoga. See Daffodil Uprising, Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, and Yoga Bootcamp for parallels.
33 – Back in Ohio, in a Rust Belt small city, after four years of what I considered my Promised Land, the interior Pacific Northwest. My marriage was rocky, but I was gaining recognition as a poet, despite the exhausting hours I was working as a management-level newspaper editor in some admittedly exciting work. On the other hand, I was also moving into Wilburite Quaker circles of deep spiritual grounding. See Hometown News for parallels,
44 – Now in New Hampshire after a round in Baltimore and a stint as a field representative for a major newspaper syndicate, I was recovering from a divorce and crushing engagement. But I did have a first novel in print and a trove of manuscripts in hand, along with being active in New England contradance circles and about to explode into my second summer of love – the first having been nearly half of my life earlier. The Quaker practice now had a tinge of Mennonite, too.
55 – At last, I had remarried, this time with children, and relocated to what we called our City Farm in New Hampshire’s seacoast region – the place with my Red Barn. What a whirlwind! I was being widely published as a poet, had a decent income for a change, and enjoyed union representation as a member of a Newspaper Guild local. Both ocean beaches and mountains were at hand. Life had never been better, apart from my getting older.
66 – Finally retired, I could focus what I considered the Real Work of literature, mostly. The blogging was underway, as were the novels as ebooks. I was even applying my Mennonite part-singing abilities to more demanding scores as a founding member of the Boston Revels community chorus. I was amazed to be surrounded by such fine singers and grateful it was not an auditioned choir.
77 – In the throes of downsizing, I’m now residing in a remote fishing village with a lively arts scene on an island in Maine. Yes, I’m feeling my age but not complaining. It’s been a remarkable span, overall. You’re reading about it here on this blog.
88 or 99 – I wouldn’t bet on either. I’d much rather take each day as it comes. However much longer.
No, I’m not going swimming nude in a group at a summer lake any more
As I’ve previously mentioned, for much of my adult life, I’ve thought of myself as a retired hippie. Or I’ve simply been called one by others. One of millions and, unlike many, one who’s not embarrassed to admit it, that was a time to remember, no matter how short we’ve fallen from its promise and potential, even though I’m not so sure how much I’d want to go skinny-dipping with others these days or even sleep on the ground or a mattress on the floor.
That said, I’ll also admit that much of my first year after graduation from college in the height of the hippie movement was deep misery and loneliness punctuated by playful discoveries. The writing of Richard Brautigan definitely fits in here.
What’s often overlooked in the era is that the central element was the hippie chick. Plus, personally, I was without one, since mine had moved on and left me stranded. (Oh, misery, oh, woe, I am sounding pathetic, but let’s move ahead.) My novel, Hippie Farm, celebrated her in her many guises, even if you can’t even use the term “chick” anymore without being corrected. At the time, though, it was a badge of honor and invitation – one leading, in this case, to that rundown farmhouse in the mountains outside a college town I definitely restructured in terms of fiction.
A second novel, Hippie Love, retold the same plot line from a different perspective, one more of a what-if optimism. I would love to have heard that story retold from their impressions. Ouch? Were they as lost as I was? One I’ve been in contact with all these years has shared her insights, helpfully, and another, reconnecting much later, barely remembered who I was. And here I had thought she might be The One. Oh, my.
In the light of the publication of What’s Left, those two books were then greatly revised and newly released as a single volume, Pit-a-Pat High Jinks. Compressing the two was a major effort, but ultimately satisfying, at least for me. So much happened personally within that short span.
The inspirations cover quite a cross-section of people, with one becoming a United Way executive, another a U.S. Attorney, yet another one an OBGYN physician. Not that you would have guessed it at the time. As for most of the rest, I have no clue. Some were real losers, likely lost to drugs now. Others, tragically damaged. Being hippie wasn’t always a quest for enlightenment, justice, and equality. And when it was, it was countered by powerfully invested self-interests. Sometimes I’m surprised any of us survived, even before we look at the Vietnam veterans on the other side and their continuing traumas. Not all addicts, by the way, were hippies.
Flash ahead, then, and I don’t see youths today finding community anywhere, much less a shared cause. This is supposed to be an improvement?
Contrary to many people who lived through the era, I saw much that happened needs to be remembered and often cherished, even comically. It’s a place where people can begin rebuilding. I’m holding on, then, in my Quaker Meeting as one root to be grafted.
Look closely at the women, especially, and see how much of the legacy continues in spite of everything. (The kids today have it right, their perception of hippie as a girl thing.) Or, as they say. We’ve come a long way, Baby.
Yet that hippie label, I should add, has undergone its own transformation, rarely positive. Alas. Especially for us males.
Most of them, I hope, come across better in the book.
Still, it’s an account of history as we encountered it.
You can find Pit-a-Pat High Jinks 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.
Why, thank you!
“You look better as you age, a rarity.”
For better or for verse, here are more lodes I’ve also mined
By the standards of many, I’ve been a prolific poet, though if you consider that just one new poem a week would come to more than three thousand now.
Sounds about right, even with the arduous revisions they underwent, pressing the original inspiration into something quite different, always in an “experimental” rather than traditional vein. Add in all the hours of submitting the results to journals and small press openings, and all the rejection slips that followed, it was an obsessive amount of time – I had been warned that even “successful” poets averaged 20 rejections for every published poem. And beyond that, simply preparing a “clean” page for those submissions back in the days of typewriters pressed the limits of patience.
Still, poetry could be done in shorter spurts than fiction in my free days and nights while I was engaged working fulltime in a newsroom. As a minus, it did divert my attention from the local news scene and related gossip, but it did sharpen my editing and writing skills, both of which chafed at the limitations of newspaper style.
Many of my early poems sprang from my journals, something that changed over the years, especially as I got into Deep Image and related techniques. While more than a thousand of my poems were published in journals around the globe, book-length collections remained elusive. Now, however, some are available as ebooks, allowing you a chance to sample my evolution over six decades.
Here’s a lineup:
American Olympus: This longpoem is also a mythopoem set in a single week of camping on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state. The book came close to being published by a prestigious letterpress imprint but fate intervened, sending me spiraling back eastward. Many other nature and landscape poems reflecting my experiences from one end of the continent to the other and back in my early adult years await full collection. Please stay tuned for future appearances of those works.
Braided Double-Cross: Intense attraction, sexual ecstasy, and long-term dreams ignite this set of contemporary American love sonnets that reflect the conflicting emotions and unspoken expectations that surface in the eruption of breakdown and breakup. The set, my first run of poems composed as a series, explores passions that sugarcoat realities and betrayals. Sometimes something so truly hot leaves a lover branded for life.
Blue Rock: Continuing in the conflicted passions line, these poems reflect attraction, romance, and the aftermath in today’s society. Just groove to their beat.
Trumpet of the Coming Storm: Admittedly polemic, these are brimming with buried anger erupting at last. Sometimes you just can’t ignore politics, even in a historical perspective.
Hamlet, a Village of Gargoyles: This playful investigation of human identities alternates between gossipy and confessional, set within the context of close community. The collection now hits me as somehow prescient, considering that I’m now living in a real village with characters I hadn’t considered. The tone is contemporary with nods to Shakespeare and Chaucer.
Ebook formatting does limit the visual array of what you would otherwise find on a defined page of paper, but it does make my daring work available inexpensively around the world. I can live with that and so can you, especially if you’re reading on a smart phone.
I promise, there will be more.
You can find these 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. Or you can ask your local library to obtain them.
Well, I started out as an ‘old soul’
The voice inside me has never aged. If anything, it’s grown younger.
Now, just don’t ask me to bend over and get back up again.
Jnana's Red Barn 