While Tom Wolfe charged that no great novel sprang from the hippie counterculture, a challenge akin to the holy grail of the great American novel, his quest overlooked some fine stories that reflected any of its many dimensions.

Among the gems are the three self-published novels of DeVillers’ Eve Chronicles, grounded in the author’s experiences in moving from her native Wisconsin to the Pacific Northwest, where she spent several years – harsh winters included – with a crew in the rugged mountains of eastern Oregon replanting forests in the wake of clear-cut logging. I had heard of the legendary Hodads in the western part of the state (they took their name from the short-handled pick/spade they used), but DeVillers’ case gently probes the realities of the marginal existence and the varied types of people it attracted. Though this was not the Haight-Ashbury stereotype of the era, it was one of the counterculture’s many flavors. She was definitely back-to-the-earth throughout the span of the books.

Another was the holistic health-care work she took up in what she called a nomadic life before settling down in the Willamette Valley, where the Chronicles continue, again reflecting the conflicts of living out deeply felt values.

She began writing the novels after being diagnosed with MS and drew on her spiral-bound notebooks as source material. (Fortunately, those had survived her many moves.) I love the fact that she’s not inventing stories or characters but distilling what she’s known firsthand. She presents scenes – even aromas and lighting – I’ve experienced, too.

I was going to say her tone is reminiscent of Joni Mitchell but now see the singer was an inspiration. How right, then.

She was working on a manuscript about the health care industry and big money and big politics set in the Covid pandemic, but I don’t know how far she had gotten with it.

Levertov is a poet I began reading the summer after I graduated from college. There was something in her work that seduced me, something along the lines of Brahms and Rilke, as one early advocate said of her. (It was Kenneth Rexroth, whom you’ll meet later in this series.)

What I didn’t see straight-out was the religious underpinning of her work, even in her atheist phase.

I do remember an encounter after a poetry reading in Baltimore, where one audience member approached her and asked how one could sustain a pacifist stance while remaining an atheist. She replied that without faith, the practice was very difficult. A few minutes earlier, I had asked how she had come to become a pacifist and she replied it was through her first lover, who was a Quaker.

A longish poem addressing his father, The Eyes of Blood, and then the poems experimenting with Kabbala are what caught me either in my return to Bloomington or right after, in the Pacific Northwest. Neither example fit the typical 20- to -28-line poems that filled the literary magazines, and each one worked a different vein – one essentially lyrical, the other, bullets.

At the time, I was reading and enjoying a wide range of the San Francisco poetry outpouring – I’ve long felt more at home there than I did with the New Yorkers of the era. Smeltzer’s on my list over some other better-known colleagues, probably because of a feeling of connectedness.

Despite acquiring a handful of his chapbooks, I wasn’t aware of his role in the San Francisco Beat scene, including jazz performances, but that detail has me wanting to go back to revisit his work, once we have room here for what’s currently in storage at the other end of Maine.

What is it that made Bukowski such an unmissable figure in the reading life of young poets and others in the ‘70s and beyond?

You probably wouldn’t want to meet him in person, he seemed to be rather obnoxious, even ugly, even before getting drunk or in a fistfight. He was, from evidence he presents, an abusive lover.

Even so, part of the appeal came, I sense, in his unflinching reflection of life in near-poverty, a world where many of us were also residing. His subjects, though, were everyday poor people, drudging away in marginal jobs when they could, rather than recent college graduates intent on moving on.

Another part of his appeal, though, was his embrace of being a Poet and the ways the daily practice of writing kept saving his miserable life. Black Sparrow Press, with its signature look and literary dedication, was created for his work, and the successful relationship provided a platform that gave exposure to many other poets and novelists – the “bird mob,” as one poet I knew said with outright envy.

Was there even a poetry scene in Los Angeles at the time? The focus in California was almost totally on the Bay Area to the north.

I was especially fond of his short novel, Post Office, but the spare lines of his poetry are unpretentiously masterful and sharp-eyed. He cut the BS, for certain, in a life of squalor that’s a revelation. It’s a life most of us would rather avoid yet somehow touches on our own.

Although she was known as a poet and story writer, her book that I most value is An Island Garden (published the year she died), with illustrations by Childe Hassam, an Impressionist painter I admire highly. (He hated the term, by the way, and didn’t fit the label neatly, but it gives you an idea.)

The island, in the Isles of Shoals of the shore of Maine and New Hampshire, is a remarkable place, as I found in a visit I posted here on June 14, 2020, “Celia’s garden … on Appledore Island.”

Under her guidance, the hotel her family owned and operated became what can be seen as the nation’s first artists colony every summer, attracting a who’s who of writers, painters, musicians, and more. Her influence can be seen especially in many of New England’s authors of the period.

Reading about her, I’ll confess, can be as pleasurable as reading her work itself.

The newest addition to my list is someone I’ve come to know and admire since moving to Eastport.

Lee, a longtime high school teacher and valued community figure who has written short fiction for most of her life, finally released a collection of 12 stories in 2022, and it’s a treasure. Island Secrets is rife with every-day, blue-collar existence on a remote fishing island in Maine – veiled Eastport – but the secrets are those that lurk unspoken in the open. Consider the trials of harvesting scallops in the dead of winter, which runs through the final story. Few consumers have a clue to the dedicated labor involved in the occupation (I’m tempted to call it a profession, including the fact that it is highly licensed and regulated) or of the domestic tensions that accompany the precarious business.

She’s original, a consequence of digging intuitively into the world in front of her, with her prose infused with the precision of her succinct poems as well.

My introduction was at a multidisciplinary conference at Fort Warden State Park in Port Townsend, Washington, in the late ‘70s. Lopez had just published his celebrated Of Wolves and Men, and this was a weeklong gathering of writers, naturalists, scientists, and a few others.

Three of his smaller, later books have especially held my attention: Desert Notes, Arctic Dreams, and Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter, presenting Native American mythology, especially the Trickster figure, Coyote. These volumes are sometimes classified as fiction, but they really straddle genres.

Maybe that’s why I return to Lopez more than to Rachel Carson or Annie Dillard or even Henry David Thoreau.

He did serve as an inspiration for two of the novellas that appear in my book, The Secret Side of Jaya. Well, maybe even the third one, too.

I had already drafted my longpoem, Recovering Olympus, as well as probing Native American lore since my years in the ashram, where Asian mythology also started infusing my awareness.

Lopez, though, had some serious fieldwork to support his visions.