My weekly offerings at my free digital bookstore, Thistle Finch editions, include some remarkable new entries gleaned from our ongoing journals review.
There’s the Chronicle, Antiques Dealer, profiling a woman who saw deeply into the landscape she adopted. I do miss her.
Another Chronicle, Shakers and Me, has me now reflecting on a late friend who had held extensive conversations with Eldress Bertha, one of the last Shakers; I urged him to set the exchanges down on paper, to no avail. Yet a few he mentioned still echo. What I present here could be a prelude.
Still another Chronicle, On the Rock Wall, underpins the petroglyphs and petrographs I would later see firsthand in the Pacific Northwest.
I am fond of Scenes From a Life, prose sketches of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
And then there’s Sue’s Bread Recipe. Yes, learning to bake loaves was one of my lessons in the yoga ashram, one that led to hundreds or maybe thousands later. Here’s what Little Sue introduced to me.
If that weren’t enough, there are the poetry broadsides Within a Bigger Order, Kansas and Kyoto, and Bronx to Brooklyn (about someone I’d still love to talk to once more).
Put them together and I think you’d have a great magazine. Well, I am open to letters to the editor.
As for poetry? “Wonder if my work adds up to summa, if it has a point” …
The night before (so where were we?): “the aging aesthete dismissing Pfingston’s piece, ‘This isn’t a poem,’ as though he knew, this uptight, pretentious high-school teacher whose 30 friends kept clinging to him, whispering comments about ‘classical forms’ and the ‘need for discipline’ and keeping a guard against ‘imitators’ and how Joan Stone can’t STAND Duane Niatum, ‘He borrows everything.’”
“That’s what happens when you get a PhD,” I almost said.
How many tall tumblers did that guy down — a dozen? How can any drunk evaluate a poem, appreciated its silence?
I’m tired of veneer, tired of poetry tasters — everything but the purely original, primitive, religious incantation …
[I had not yet delved into Jackson Cope’s “incantatory language” perspective on early Friends …]
When a batch of submissions go out, the first back are quick rejection slips — usually overstocked — then the mixed bag of acceptances and misses — and finally the slow anguish of almost-takens and those returned unread …
It’s almost a pattern
~*~
Wollah Wollah = whistling water = Walla Walla
~*~
When Coyote desired Beaver’s beautiful daughter, Rain sent his own beautiful daughter to plead with Coyote, who instead tried to rape her and make her his other wife. And thus, enraged, Rain punished the east — Coyote’s land — by raising the Cascades mountains so that Coyote and Wind could not steal all the clouds.
I’m left wondering about Beaver and his child.
~*~
Meanwhile, these local poets and artists who don’t study, don’t know what’s been done before, wouldn’t recognize ancient excellence, don’t know what’s being done now, don’t experience the nature out there or the scary, untapped energy fields within themselves … who don’t try to make each piece unique but merely a repetition of their static non-discovery closed-in closed-off non-lives …
[How’s that for non-judgmental?]
~*~
Hops, which are used to favor and stabilize beer in its brewing, were another famed agricultural product from Yakima. The vines would climb the ropes to the top, with the whole vines being cut down at harvest. Note Mount Adams in the background. (Photo by William Borg via Wikimedia Commons.)
~*~
I used to write poems about the weather. But what can you say about a place where the weather’s always good? Only that the wind’s blowing?
[Think of a comment I recently heard, about a poetry editor who scorned Weather Report pieces. Gave them an instantaneous rejection.]
While my novels Nearly Canaan and Secret Side of Jaya contain many details from my Yakima Valley years, the experience also prompted a proliferation of poetry.
In the Far East there is a vital, well-read proletariat literature – speaking for a people.
Here, we have intellectuals playing games. Along with populist idiots.
Still, how much of the Far West book scene I knew revolved around poetry-conscious, well-stocked bookstores that were also patrons to readings, broadsides, and small private volumes.
Suppose, now, a poetry journal allied with a bookstore where its authors’ books could be purchased …
This was pre-Internet, which has opened new opportunities, or before I knew of radical publisher and bookseller Giles Calvert and his Black Spread Eagle on Ludgate Hill near St. Paul Cathedral in London, the voice of many early Quaker tracts and volumes.
As I noted in October, ’76: Good two weeks of poetry acceptance — 12-14 pieces taken.
That confusion some have, mistaking Jimm for Swami Jnana. Though they live together, they are distinct. One is the patron, who pays the bills by laboring on newspapers, complains about things, tries to live in some style, occasionally smokes, sometimes eats meat, likes to dine out (despite his income), listens to classical music, reads Newsweek, snuggles with his wife. Swami Jnana is his guru, appreciates silence, honest laughter, high country hiking, hardline poetry, animals, and fully human circles. Although they share the same household and many of the same interests, they are distinct. They met in early 1972 and things progressed from there. They have lived together in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and now Washington state. Since joining, Jimm has been calmer and happier while Jnana spreads Dharma seeds. Jimm’s childhood and historical roots have become less urgent; he may disappear altogether. There’s nothing more to say at this point. I’m not certain whose journal this is. It doesn’t matter. They each enter lines on these pages.
Rexroth amazing in the number of unknown poets he admires and the candidness with which he demolishes others. The Paris expatriates were, he says, drawn there by booze (Prohibition in the U.S,) and cheap dollars. Frost wasn’t modern at all but old-guard and compares poorly with similar English poets of a century earlier.
Duane Niatum an often bad poet who comes up with some fine lines, “pine cone city in rain.”
My introduction to Marnie Walsh of the Dakotas, sounding as if created by the people and place.
Her flattest possible diction with all of its crudeness almost a parody of pig-Indian English (“Um! You white!”) almost imitation Black and yet, how utterly devasting.
Yet with a freshness that cannot be ignored, especially in its directness.
~*~
Liz Sohappy, given her Palouse name, Om-na-ma, in 1969: “My Indian name has made great difference in my life. I really felt like a floating body until I received my name. My grandmother said that was how it was to be — no one else is here on earth until he has an Indian name”
I resonate with that, having been given the name Jnana in 1972.
As for the Native poet Dave Etter?
~*~
How strange, the Ginsberg’s The Fall of America is filled with place names and realizing he has no sense of place, but exactly the opposite — that is, a loss of place and roots and thus center, as in perspective, turning the Hari Krishna and Buddha to stop the movement, to cease the spinning …
~*~
Reviewing some of my work, wishing there were something more personal, intimate and yet more forceful there …
In W’s novel, it’s haunting freshness. No feeling of the veneer of (& chilling) revisions, editing …
If the book satisfied us, why would we want to read another piece by him or in the same voice, when there is no other
Photo of Goat Rocks and Mount Adams by David Toth at Pexels.
Andy Wyeth confession of losing himself in the character of what he’s creating but his lack of interest in the finished work; also, the difficulty of being watched while working: his need for secrecy, the self-consciousness intruding in the event of observation-in-creation, “Don’t talk out,” don’t analyze, don’t smooth out or you’ll lose the spark. The feeling of a compulsion forcing him to do a piece, submerge himself when there’s that sweeping instant of perception (a certain touch of light, for instance). The need for solitude and for tactile feeling to get beyond the eye’s flat view.
As for Christina, she is the essence of New England — even its witchcraft. (This, before I had ever been to New England.) Sprung something in me, a recognition of America and truths we do not allow ourselves to admit. A strand I kept denying in Binghamton and Bloomington, the Poconos and Fostoria. Some lack, too, in the Anglo culture, despite exorcism-slaying.
~*~
Wed. 17 Nov. 76, see I was reading Robert Bly “Looking for Dragon Smoke” … I would come back to its impact much later, somewhere in New England …
Snyder is to me what Thoreau was to generations of Americans.
But if Henry is the amateur, Gary is the professional.
Ginsberg, meanwhile, runs with old Walt Whitman.
Snyder works from the inside-out, where others try from the outside-in.
In revising my novels Nearly Canaan and Secret Side of Jaya, I created several lookbooks slash storyboards from images found online to sharpen details in some of the passages. It’s a great writer’s hack, by the way. You pick up bits you overlook at the scene.
I do wish I had my own photographs from the decade of journals we’re sampling, but often I had no camera, much less training in how to use anything except the simplest point-and-shoot.. I did, however, work with some of the best photojournalists and knew some outstanding fine arts photographers as well. It would have been wonderful to work with them on these posts, but time has intervened. Well, I still have memories, faded as many are. And with a camera, I wouldn’t have worked so devotedly on writing, no doubt. There’s only so much time in a day, even without a paying job to attend to.
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.
As you’ve noticed, I fell into the practice of journaling rather haphazardly. At times compulsively, even. I started to say the “habit” of journaling, but it was rarely that effortless,
I was still in spiralbound volumes — eight years before a stretch of using hardbound sketchbooks followed by a return to spiralbounds before the hardbounds took hold a dozen years after the journal at hand.
No. 45, for those keeping track, was the first of the 8-by-12½-inch books I’ve truly appreciated. The added inch-and-a-half of length fit my hand and pen well, though not the bookshelves or the milk crates that generally wound up holding my journals.
Eventually, there were 17 of those in all, plus three fat softcover sketchbooks, 15 black-cover spiral sketchbooks, and three bargain thin hardbound journals nearly that tall. Thirty-eight in all, out of 200-plus. Why did that shape vanish from the market? Probably because I preferred them. I have long run contrarian to the marketplace, not exclusively involving my tall, skinny clothing size.
Somehow, I had thought that my legal-size notebooks started at the Cornell bookstore, but it now looks like my first ones were bought in Bloomington.
In looking up what’s called “legal pads” (as if the others are clandestine?), I find most today have shrunk to 11¾ inches height, though at least one exists at 8½ by 14 for those willing to pay a premium. And that’s not bound. As for filing those in storage cabinets? I’m not a lawyer nor a legal secretary. It no doubt requires special filing furniture.
~*~
The first third of the volume covered our final month-and-a-half in Bloomington, aka Daffodil, followed by my flight to the Pacific Northwest.
As I look ahead, I see pages that were used to draft and refine poems that found publication as well as other entries that more or less became fiction in my novel Nearly Canaan and the third novella in The Secret Side of Jaya.
I’ll skip over those in this series and instead look for the unexpected.
Reporter Jerry Handte, someone I saw as a grizzled old-timer. Threw the word “hardscrabble” at me in a story, one I didn’t know. Changed my perception of him.
AP’s middle-class conformity.
Contrived news stories, with formulated sentimental reactions: hippie story, Agnew story, dog or handicapped child story, medical/scientific breakthroughs, etc.
“Chimes,” the Evansville Courier’s wrap-up of church activities.
The Press won’t hire anyone else as long as it can slide by as it is.
~*~
The tug toward middle-class: security: keep job, get a degree, build retirement, home, house, and family. It’s gonna be so hard telling Mom and Dad I’m splitting.
I’m becoming like them: Don’t rock boat, don’t do deep fixes on stories, let it slide, why bother with better headlines and layouts, etc.
Jnana's Red Barn 