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.

My first encounter with concrete and minimalist poetry came as an art exhibit in the late ‘60s. Maybe I already knew of otherwise traditional verse presented typographically to represent a visual image on a page – a vase or bird, perchance – but this time, the words themselves took on an independent visual wonder. Think of Robert Indiana’s famous LOVE as a cube of giant building blocks.

The writer I most appreciate in this field is Aram Saroyan, the son of a famed Depression-era novelist. Aram came to fame at age 20 with a one-word poem:

lighght

which became a source for right-wing scandal when it won a $750 award from the National Endowment of the Arts. As conservatives charged, it wasn’t spelled right and it wasn’t a real poem anyway. Things got ugly.

Others, me included, find it a vibrating both in the thought and the image. If that silent “gh” adds something to the sense of the word, either as illumination or as featherweight or even carefree, why shouldn’t two intensify the sensation?

It revives that wonder and puzzlement we’ve all felt, but many writers, I think, more keenly, when we first encounter many quirks of the English language but then later glaze past.

In this vein, Saroyan also has a playful

aaple

as another entry.

His small collection, Pages, has traveled from one side of the continent to another with me. A downside of these works is that they don’t work at an open mic or featured reading. They really do belong to the page.

For my own ventures along these lines, check out Sun Spots and Drumming at my Thistle Finch blog as well as the weekly Kinisi entries here at the Red Barn.

Perhaps best known as a cofounder of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in Manhattan as well as the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics each summer at the Tibetan Buddhist Naropa Institute in Boulder Colorado, Waldman has worked with many of the famed Beat poets a generation older in a life of experimental writing and social activism.

In preparing this post, I was surprised to find she’s only a few years old than me. She’s often seemed to be that much further ahead in the history of contemporary literature.

She first impressed me with a few poems in Disembodied Poetics, an annual review she co-edited. I liked the way the disparate elements danced, something in common with much of what I’ve written. Later, in her collected works, I was taken with the ways she employed repetition, something I had avoided as, well, redundant. My Preludes & Fugues, especially, are beholden to her on that front.