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.
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