Friday, July 10, 2009
Poet William Witherup
Poet William Witherup died June 3 at age 73, in Seattle, of leukemia after a brief hospitalization.
I first read Bill Witherup's poetry in the fall of 1971, my last year in high school, in the poetry anthology Quickly Aging Here edited by Geoff Hewitt. The handful of his poems in the anthology stuck with me over the years since, poems of gritty working-class grappling with life, an unsentimental warmth, and at times nightmare visions of the political events of the larger world. An aura of mythology is present in many of his poems, as a part of the texture of ordinary things, a continuous amazement with living beings and the movement of life.
Although I would occasionally find a poem of his in a magazine or anthology over the years, it was only a few years ago that I got my hands on a book of his poems, Down Wind, Down River: New and Selected Poems, published in 2000 by West End Press. All of the passages quoted here are from that collection.
A few years ago a mutual friend put Bill and me in touch by e-mail, and we corresponded sporadically. We met face-to-face once, at the Albuquerque Cultural Festival on Labor Day weekend in 2007, and we had a chance to talk a little here and there during the three days of the festival. I remember him as a large tall man, quiet almost to the point of shyness, with a soft somewhat self-deprecating humor. A mild irrascible muttering in his voice at times. And I also had an impression of delicacy in his movements, an eye for minute detail in things, an almost fragile quality.
These the impressions I came away with from a brief meeting and a few conversations. I sensed him as someone hard to get to know well, though still with a disarming openness about himself. I didn't find out till later of his long struggle with bipolar disorder. It's not easy to cross the vast distances between each of us, even under the best circumstances.
Witherup's more politically explicit poems sometimes remind me a little of William Blake in their visionary quality, though the tone is always thoroughly 20th century, always with a tactile immediacy. Bill Witherup was a poet who wrote with his hands. From the poem "Living by I-5, August 6, 1995":
I first read Bill Witherup's poetry in the fall of 1971, my last year in high school, in the poetry anthology Quickly Aging Here edited by Geoff Hewitt. The handful of his poems in the anthology stuck with me over the years since, poems of gritty working-class grappling with life, an unsentimental warmth, and at times nightmare visions of the political events of the larger world. An aura of mythology is present in many of his poems, as a part of the texture of ordinary things, a continuous amazement with living beings and the movement of life.
Although I would occasionally find a poem of his in a magazine or anthology over the years, it was only a few years ago that I got my hands on a book of his poems, Down Wind, Down River: New and Selected Poems, published in 2000 by West End Press. All of the passages quoted here are from that collection.
We were each alone:(From the poem "We Were Each Alone.")
San Francisco is a desert to the shyness of love.
You sat in a rocking chair by the window,
wanting to die. The streetlight on the corner
shone on your face and bathrobe with the bluish-whiteness
of desert moonlight. I looked in your eyes
and the pupils were as wide as a Saharan night.
You were not in the room, but we were walking among ruins,
trailing a broken wing.
A few years ago a mutual friend put Bill and me in touch by e-mail, and we corresponded sporadically. We met face-to-face once, at the Albuquerque Cultural Festival on Labor Day weekend in 2007, and we had a chance to talk a little here and there during the three days of the festival. I remember him as a large tall man, quiet almost to the point of shyness, with a soft somewhat self-deprecating humor. A mild irrascible muttering in his voice at times. And I also had an impression of delicacy in his movements, an eye for minute detail in things, an almost fragile quality.
These the impressions I came away with from a brief meeting and a few conversations. I sensed him as someone hard to get to know well, though still with a disarming openness about himself. I didn't find out till later of his long struggle with bipolar disorder. It's not easy to cross the vast distances between each of us, even under the best circumstances.
A thousand miles and two months away(From the poem "A Day of Scattered Rain.")
and I am still disturbed
by these metaphors of your skin.
Nose, pores and heart
are overloaded with memories of your smell.
I have become a cloud
swollen with blossoms and moisture--
the pain of left-over love.
Take me, wind, over the mountains
and let me break open!
Witherup's more politically explicit poems sometimes remind me a little of William Blake in their visionary quality, though the tone is always thoroughly 20th century, always with a tactile immediacy. Bill Witherup was a poet who wrote with his hands. From the poem "Living by I-5, August 6, 1995":
Woke up to "Yes, that freeway susurationOr this, from "Elegy for George Jackson," a section of the poem sequence "The Soledad Prison Poems" originally written 1970-71:
Is Hell-flame"; cars and trucks hurtling by
Are ghosts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki dead
Yet fleeing that quick lick of white fire.
Melted faces looking for a lost eye,
A missing breast--
Souls tortured as at any Auschwitz,
Belsen, Dachau flayed for lampshades--
These dead are burning headlights at 2:00 am.
And there are demons on the overpasses
In labcoats and dark goggles, checking
Dosimeters for permissible radiation levels.
At dawning the sun explodes--
An orange flash shakes my windows.
Swallows, after the first stir and seethe
Of insects, ignite in air.
There is a terrible stench from the freeway--
Each car has an aura of blue flame.
They say you died in a patch of sunlight.Poet William Witherup strove to tell the truth of the beauties and horrors of the world and our lives, no matter what effort it demanded, or how painful or difficult. We are greater for what he left us. As briefly and slightly as I knew him, I nevertheless found my life on the earth and my life as a poet made fuller by the little that I did know him, and, in abundance, by his poems. Having known Bill Witherup and his poetry, I feel just a little less alone.
After ten lightless years.
Gunned down from behind.
Black man running through the woods
for two hundred years.
Gunned down by the sheriff.
Strung up and burned by the Klan.
Gunned down by the tower guard.
Gunned down running through the alley
toward that patch of light,
that open space where you might breathe
at last.
I hope it is true
that you died in the sun,
that at least they are not lying
about that.
Bless the grass that sponged your blood.
Bless the ant that drank from your tears.
Bless your mother's pillow
that has turned to a block of salt.
Out getting wood again(From the poem "For the Alders Again.")
I draw my bow across
the bones of your dead
and play saw music.
The morning light flashes
from leaf to leaf
from leaf to saw
and back to leaf.
I am a blessed man.
I shine in a new skin of sweat
as I lift in my arms
your great spinal discs.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Poefrika on the 1976 Soweto events
Found this in the blog Poéfrika, a powerful deeply moving post by bloghost Rethabile on the events in June 1976 in which residents in Soweto, South Africa, rose up in rebellion against the apartheid system there. Rethabile's blogpost is here.
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
John Berger on Gaza and Darwish
Really liked this, a short piece by British Marxist art critic John Berger: on the siege of Gaza, visiting the grave of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, and underground art in Ramallah: in the website of the literary magazine The Threepenny Review, here.
I've written previously in this blog about Mahmoud Darwish, here; and about John Berger, here.
I've written previously in this blog about Mahmoud Darwish, here; and about John Berger, here.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Rexroth and the busy world
The world, wrote Wordsworth, is too much with us. He was right. Each day throws at us too much stray noise, too much "breaking news" that isn't news, too much of people in the rarefied air of bureaucracies saying things they don't mean when it's obvious what they do mean. The past few nights I've been reading, rereading, the poems of Kenneth Rexroth. Rexroth is one of the poets whose work I've returned to again and again over the years, when I've deeply needed the renewal of spirit and reawakening of the senses that poetry can offer.
Sometime back in this blog I wrote about Rexroth's translations of classical Chinese poetry, here. The past few nights I've been reading from The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (published a few years ago by Copper Canyon Press); all of the quoted passages below are from that collection. Rexroth lived 1905-1982. His earliest poems date from 1920 or earlier. Over the course of his life, in addition to more than a dozen books of his own poems, he also translated from several languages ancient and modern, wrote many essays, an autobiography, a few plays, and edited poetry anthologies, among other work.
Rexroth's politics for most of his life were more or less anarchist, in some sense of the word. He had a distrust of institutions of all kinds, and an affinity for political movements across a broad spectrum of the political left. A number of his poems from the 1930's deal, in part, with the events of the Civil War in Spain.
Rexroth was born in Indiana. His mother died when he was about 10 or 11, and after living briefly with a grandmother he wound up in Chicago, nominally living with an aunt though largely making his own way by sometime in his teenage years. In 1927 he headed to San Francisco, then still largely a wide-open city by his account, and he stayed some 40 years before living out the last years of his life in Santa Barbara, California, where he taught a couple of lively, informal and popular university classes.
On at least one occasion he quoted someone (Voltaire? I don't have the reference in front of me) to the effect that people who feel find life tragic, and people who think find life comic. Rexroth very much had a sense of humor, evident in many of the stories he recounts in his autobiography and in various of his poems and essays. But the most pervasive tone I find in his poems, and in his work in general, is a kind of reverent sorrow, sorrow at the erosion of life and the world around him.
From the poem "Another Early Morning Exercise":
Kenneth Rexroth's poetry can seem deceptively simple, deceptively easy to make: many of his most deeply moving poems appear to be made up of little more than a series of straightforward statements, with just a slightly heightened emphasis of feeling or descriptive skill. On closer reading the weave and layered currents of perception and experience, the lyric grace and epic sweep, begin to emerge. No matter how many times I read Rexroth's poems, I continue to be touched with wonder and surprise.
An excellent website about Rexroth and his work is the Kenneth Rexroth Archive, in the Bureau of Public Secrets website, here. The website includes many of Rexroth's essays, articles and reviews, the complete texts of some of his out-of-print books and unpublished manuscripts, some poems and translations, critical articles about Rexroth by other writers, and other material.
Sometime back in this blog I wrote about Rexroth's translations of classical Chinese poetry, here. The past few nights I've been reading from The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (published a few years ago by Copper Canyon Press); all of the quoted passages below are from that collection. Rexroth lived 1905-1982. His earliest poems date from 1920 or earlier. Over the course of his life, in addition to more than a dozen books of his own poems, he also translated from several languages ancient and modern, wrote many essays, an autobiography, a few plays, and edited poetry anthologies, among other work.
Rexroth's politics for most of his life were more or less anarchist, in some sense of the word. He had a distrust of institutions of all kinds, and an affinity for political movements across a broad spectrum of the political left. A number of his poems from the 1930's deal, in part, with the events of the Civil War in Spain.
I see the unwritten books, the unrecorded experiments,(From the poem "Requiem for the Spanish Dead.")
The unpainted pictures, the interrupted lives,
Lowered into the graves with the red flags over them.
I see the quick gray brains broken and clotted with blood,
Lowered each in its own darkness, useless in the earth.
Alone on a hilltop in San Francisco suddenly
I am caught in a nightmare, the dead flesh
Mounting over half the world presses against me.
Then quietly at first then rich and full-bodied,
I hear the voice of a young woman singing.
The emigrants on the corner are holding
A wake for their oldest child, a driverless truck
Broke away on the steep hill and killed him,
Voice after voice adds itself to the singing.
Orion moves westward across the meridian,
Rigel, Bellatrix, Betelgeuse, marching in order,
The great nebula glimmering in his loins.
Rexroth was born in Indiana. His mother died when he was about 10 or 11, and after living briefly with a grandmother he wound up in Chicago, nominally living with an aunt though largely making his own way by sometime in his teenage years. In 1927 he headed to San Francisco, then still largely a wide-open city by his account, and he stayed some 40 years before living out the last years of his life in Santa Barbara, California, where he taught a couple of lively, informal and popular university classes.
On at least one occasion he quoted someone (Voltaire? I don't have the reference in front of me) to the effect that people who feel find life tragic, and people who think find life comic. Rexroth very much had a sense of humor, evident in many of the stories he recounts in his autobiography and in various of his poems and essays. But the most pervasive tone I find in his poems, and in his work in general, is a kind of reverent sorrow, sorrow at the erosion of life and the world around him.
From the poem "Another Early Morning Exercise":
I walk along the street at three in the morning.He translated poems from classical Greek and Latin, Chinese and Japanese poems ancient and modern, poems from French and Spanish and one or two other languages. His breadth of knowledge and study and experience was astonishing; this is evident in his writing and in the accounts of people who knew him. Along with his many politically explicit poems, he wrote sublimely beautiful poems of love and loss and the beauty of nature. One of his most famous poems, "When We With Sappho," written sometime in the early 1940's, begins with a fragment of Sappho translated by Rexroth: "...about the cool water/the wind sounds through sprays/of apple, and from the quivering leaves/slumber pours down..." It was during the Second World War. Half the world was in flames. Every continent caught up in it in one way or another. The full scale and horror of the concentration camps, and the atomic bombs that incinerated two cities, still lay ahead.
It is spring in the last year of youth.
The tide is out and the air is full of the smell of the ocean.
The newly arrived mockingbirds are awake
In the courtyard behind the houses. [...]
The armies of the Kuo Min Tang have taken the birthplace of Tu Fu;
The Red Army has retreated in perfect order.
I wonder if the wooden image erected by his family
Still stands in the shrine at Ch'eng Tu;
I wonder if anyone still burns paper
Before that face of hungry intelligence and sympathy.
He had a hard life he hated war and despotism and famine;
The first chance he got he quarreled with the Emperor.
Venomous papers dry their ink on the newsstands;
A chill comes over me; I walk along shivering;
Thinking of a world of miserable lives,
And all the men who have been tortured
Because they believed it was possible to be happy.
Pickets keep watch by the bridge over the mouth of the Sacramento,
Huddled over the small fires,
Talking little,
Rifles in their hands.
We have grown old in the afternoon.Two of the losses Rexroth felt most keenly in his life were of his mother, Delia Rexroth, and his first wife, Andree. Among his work are several poems written to each of them in the years after they died. In his Autobiographical Novel, he gives a heartbreaking account of Andree's slow death from brain disease during the years they lived in San Francisco in the '30's. From one of three poems he wrote, at separate times, titled "Andree Rexroth," this one written sometime in the early 1940's:
Here in our orchard we are as old
As she is now, wherever dissipate
In that distant sea her gleaming dust
Flashes in the wave crest
Or stains the murex shell.
All about us the old farm subsides
Into the honey bearing chaos of high summer.
In those far islands the temples
Have fallen away, and the marble
Is the color of wild honey.
There is nothing left of the gardens
That were once about them, of the fat
Turf marked with cloven hooves.
Only the sea grass struggles
Over the crumbled stone,
Over the splintered steps,
Only the blue and yellow
Of the sea, and the cliffs,
Red in the distance across the bay.
Lean back.
Her memory has passed to our lips now.
Our kisses fall through summer's chaos
In our own breasts and thighs.
I know that spring again is splendidRexroth was conscious of history, of human history and the life of the earth and the heart, a force running through all he wrote. The poems of his I've loved the most are those in which the human presence alive in history is most evident. Little by little, over the years, his politics became embittered and cynical; I've found some of his writing from his later years, especially his essays and other prose, less compelling because of this. At his greatest, however, his poems are a call and a whisper of the sorrow and beauty of humanity alive upon the earth.
As ever, the hidden thrush
As sweetly tongued, the sun as vital --
But these are the forest trails we walked together,
These paths, ten years together.
We thought the years would last forever,
They are all gone now, the days
We thought would not come for us are here.
Bright trout poised in the current --
The raccoon's track at the water's edge --
A bittern blooming in the distance --
Your ashes scattered on this mountain --
Moving seaward on this stream.
Coming back over the col between(From the poem "Strength through Joy".)
Isosceles Mountain and North Palisade,
I stop at the summit and look back
At the storm gathering over the white peaks
Of the Whitney group and the colored
Kaweahs. September, nineteen thirty-nine. [...]
[...] I loiter here like a condemned man
Lingers over his last breakfast, his last smoke;
Thinking of those heroes of the war
Of human skill, foresight, endurance and will;
The disinterested bravery,
The ideal combat of peace: Bauer
Crawling all night around his icecave
On snowbound Kanchenjunga, Tilman
And Shipton skylarking on Nanda Devi,
Smythe seeing visions on Everest,
The mad children of the Eigerwand --
What holidays will they keep this year?
Gun emplacements blasted in the rock;
Machine gun duels between white robed ski troops,
The last screaming schusses marked with blood.
Was it for this we spent the years perfecting
The craft of courage? Better the corpse
Of the foolhardy, frozen on the Eiger
Accessible only to the storm,
Standing sentry for the avalanche.
Kenneth Rexroth's poetry can seem deceptively simple, deceptively easy to make: many of his most deeply moving poems appear to be made up of little more than a series of straightforward statements, with just a slightly heightened emphasis of feeling or descriptive skill. On closer reading the weave and layered currents of perception and experience, the lyric grace and epic sweep, begin to emerge. No matter how many times I read Rexroth's poems, I continue to be touched with wonder and surprise.
(From the poem "A Christmas Note for Geraldine Udell".)So much has escaped me, so much lies covert
In memory, and muffled
Like thunder muttering through sleep, that woke me,
To watch the city wink
Out in the violet light under the twisting rain.
Lightning storms are rare here,
In this statistically perfect climate.
The eucalyptus shed
Branches, doors banged, glass broke, the sea smashed its walls.
I, in my narrow bed,
Thought of other times, the hope filled post war years,
Exultant, dishevelled
Festivals, exultant eyes, dishevelled lips,
Eyes dulled now, and lips thinned,
Festivals that have betrayed their occasions.
I think of you in Gas,
The heroine on the eve of explosion;
Or angry, white, and still,
Arguing with me about Sasha's tragic book.
Here in the empty night,
I light the lamp and hunt for pad and pencil.
A million sleepers turn
While bombs fall in their dreams. The storm goes away,
Muttering in the hills.
The veering wind brings the cold, organic smell
Of the flowing ocean.
An excellent website about Rexroth and his work is the Kenneth Rexroth Archive, in the Bureau of Public Secrets website, here. The website includes many of Rexroth's essays, articles and reviews, the complete texts of some of his out-of-print books and unpublished manuscripts, some poems and translations, critical articles about Rexroth by other writers, and other material.
Saturday, April 04, 2009
Summer ripening
The first poetry writing class I took was in the summer of 1970, between my sophomore and junior years of high school. The class was part of a large summer program sponsored by Minneapolis and St. Paul schools, which included classes in the arts, social sciences, and other activities. The teacher was poet John Caddy, together with St. Paul high school English teacher Dave Evertz.
The summer program took place on the campus of Augsburg College in Minneapolis, a few blocks from Cedar and Riverside, which was a kind of magnetic crossroads of hippie life in Minneapolis during those years. The poetry class met five mornings a week, for about six or seven weeks, in an old house at the edge of the campus. An adjoining part of the house had a theatre stage, and was used sometimes by the Theatre class; the Poetry class used the large main room.
I remember the class having a dozen or so people, though my memory could be faulty on this -- a few people tended to drift in and out during the weeks of the class. The total number might have been larger.
Four or five times guest poets John knew came to class and read their poems and talked with us: Michael Tjepkes, Michael Kincaid, Franklin Brainard, Keith Gunderson, and a man whose first name was Larry, whose last name I can't remember, though John said he was widely known as "Larry the Goat." The poetry world was smaller then than it is now. It might actually have been possible, then, to name all of the living poets in Minnesota who had published books, after just thinking about it for a few minutes. Anyway the number wasn't huge.
The class met informally. We sat on the floor, due mainly I think to the lack of furniture in the room, also to get away from conventional classroom set-up. We spent many class sessions writing, from ideas or exercises John would bring into class. We spent a little time talking about writing techniques, what trochees and iambs are, etc., though more often John had us do things to get us closer to our physical senses.
The first day of class we formed pairs, each of us with one other student in the class, and we took turns leading each other around blindfolded for a few minutes outside the house. John used the word "tactile" a lot -- it was the first time I'd heard the word. In the blindfold exercise the girl I was paired with accidentally led me to step into a puddle left over from rain the previous night; when we switched places, she was nervous that I would take "revenge," and wouldn't go anywhere I tried to lead her.
I was awkward and adolescent and needed to spend less time in my head and more in the rest of my body. It's easier for me to understand this now than it was then. I'd been writing poems for just a couple of years, and was highly ignorant of what had been written previously. I'd heard of T.S. Eliot, but was somehow under the impression that he was about 25 years old, and I'd never heard of "The Waste Land" until someone mentioned it in the class one day. I'd heard of Allen Ginsberg but hadn't read or heard of "Howl." The world of poetry still mostly lay ahead for me.
One time John brought a bunch of oranges into class and handed them out. He had us peel, pull apart and eat the oranges with our eyes closed. It was a quiet meditative experience. John sort of guided us, asking questions, suggesting things to notice. "What do you smell when you peel the skin off the orange?" "When you bite into a piece of the orange, feel what happens in the glands in your cheeks." Then we wrote for a while.
Another time he brought in some kind of plants, wild weed-looking plants with long stiff stalks and fuzzy plant hair all over, and had us just spend some time sitting and observing the plants, feeling with our hands and faces, smelling, tasting, again while John asked questions and suggested things to notice. And then we wrote about it. We did a lot of that kind of thing in the class.
John brought in a half dozen pages of poems by other poets, with the heading at the top, "A Nosegay of Poems." The bundle included Gary Snyder's complex poem "A Berry Feast," so full of wild places and mythological images; several poems by e.e. cummings; Robert Creeley's famous poem "I Know a Man" ("drive, he sd...") and maybe one or two others by Creeley; and some of the odd small obscure poems of Stephen Crane. John would have us take turns reading the poems out loud, and then might ask us a question like "What's the poem about?" Creeley's "I Know a Man" -- what was it about, in the most basic literal sense. Two men driving somewhere? Two men arguing? A man remembering a friend, with humor, with irritation?
John would often ask similar questions when we would read our own poems in class. Always emphasizing trying to meet a poem as much as possible on its own terms.
He talked sometimes about how poems looked on the page, and how that shaped the rhythm and movement of a poem. Sometimes when he would read poems out loud in class -- his own, or by other poets -- he would gesture with one of his hands to try to illustrate how the lines in the poem were moving across the page. He talked about sounds in poems, a lot. We were talking about a brief poem, a haiku or something like, with the first line "treefrog on a limb." John commented on the lightweight sounds in the line, then said to listen to how the line changed if it said, instead, "treefrog on a branch."
The war in Vietnam was all over the news every day, was the great pervasive fact of life. All of the male students in the poetry class, and in the other classes in the summer program, would be draft age within three years, or two years, or a year. It was impossible to ignore, impossible not to think about, impossible not to have an opinion about. You would have to decide, you would have to act, somehow, or it would take your life. The previous spring I walked with 50,000 other protesters in a marathon anti-war demonstration from the University of Minnesota campus to the state Capitol in downtown St. Paul. During the previous year someone set off a bomb in a department store in St. Paul. National Guard soldiers gunned down students on the Jackson State and Kent State university campuses. The merest poem was, of necessity, on fire with the weather of those years. Weather that remains with us to this day.
One week that summer all of the arts classes in the summer program went to a camp in northwestern Minnesota. It was a built-up camp, with dorm buildings, a cafeteria, a camp library, a gym and other facilities. The camp was on a large lake with much marshland and wild rice fields, and groups of us went out in canoes a couple of times. I found it hard to adjust to life away from the city, even for a few days. A lot of that week is a blur in my memory, though I do remember a moment when I noticed large high clouds (possible storm clouds) far off above the forest, and for some reason it dawned on me that I'd heard no news of the outside world for several days; World War Three might have started, for all I knew, and I would have had no idea.
During the weeks of the class, we worked from time to time on how to read poems out loud. Someone in the class was reading a poem fairly quickly, and John suggested, "Read mouth speed, not eye speed. Your eyes read a page faster than your mouth says the words; try to read the poem at the speed your mouth wants to go, not the speed your eyes can go." I've remembered this ever since, and have found it highly useful when I've read poems to audiences.
And John told us, one day in class, a story from Hindu mythology, about poison-changing, in which Krishna was said to have swallowed poison, and transformed it inside himself into divine song. The significance, or usefulness, of the story didn't really sink into me at the time, though I kept it with me, and over the years I've come to understand it as a useful metaphor for what poets are sometimes able to do -- to take the poisons and terrors of the world, and through the making of poems -- through telling the truth in poems -- change terrible experience into something good and beautiful and essential.
During the year following the summer poetry class, many of us from the class continued to meet, usually once a week, to read and talk about our poems. We alternated meeting at each other's homes around Minneapolis and St. Paul. People came and went somewhat irregularly, and a few people started coming who hadn't been in the summer class; we managed to keep meeting regularly through May or June of 1971 before we more or less disbanded.
The poetry class in the summer of 1970 was not, at the time, a deeply transforming experience for me, nor was the weekly continuation of it through the following year, but I did take things from it that have been deeply important for me over the years since. Some things, I guess, just need time to ripen.
I've long since lost touch with most of the people in the class. One of the other students, Clare Rossini, eventually became head of the Creative Writing program at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and more recently has taught elsewhere, and has published a couple of books of poems. Once or twice I've gotten fleeting word of a couple of other people in the class, though haven't had contact with any of them in decades.
John Caddy is still writing and has published several books of poems. In recent years he's been actively involved in a project to integrate poetry writing and the study and knowledge of ecology. More information on his work with this can be found at the website Morning Earth.
The summer program took place on the campus of Augsburg College in Minneapolis, a few blocks from Cedar and Riverside, which was a kind of magnetic crossroads of hippie life in Minneapolis during those years. The poetry class met five mornings a week, for about six or seven weeks, in an old house at the edge of the campus. An adjoining part of the house had a theatre stage, and was used sometimes by the Theatre class; the Poetry class used the large main room.
I remember the class having a dozen or so people, though my memory could be faulty on this -- a few people tended to drift in and out during the weeks of the class. The total number might have been larger.
Four or five times guest poets John knew came to class and read their poems and talked with us: Michael Tjepkes, Michael Kincaid, Franklin Brainard, Keith Gunderson, and a man whose first name was Larry, whose last name I can't remember, though John said he was widely known as "Larry the Goat." The poetry world was smaller then than it is now. It might actually have been possible, then, to name all of the living poets in Minnesota who had published books, after just thinking about it for a few minutes. Anyway the number wasn't huge.
The class met informally. We sat on the floor, due mainly I think to the lack of furniture in the room, also to get away from conventional classroom set-up. We spent many class sessions writing, from ideas or exercises John would bring into class. We spent a little time talking about writing techniques, what trochees and iambs are, etc., though more often John had us do things to get us closer to our physical senses.
The first day of class we formed pairs, each of us with one other student in the class, and we took turns leading each other around blindfolded for a few minutes outside the house. John used the word "tactile" a lot -- it was the first time I'd heard the word. In the blindfold exercise the girl I was paired with accidentally led me to step into a puddle left over from rain the previous night; when we switched places, she was nervous that I would take "revenge," and wouldn't go anywhere I tried to lead her.
I was awkward and adolescent and needed to spend less time in my head and more in the rest of my body. It's easier for me to understand this now than it was then. I'd been writing poems for just a couple of years, and was highly ignorant of what had been written previously. I'd heard of T.S. Eliot, but was somehow under the impression that he was about 25 years old, and I'd never heard of "The Waste Land" until someone mentioned it in the class one day. I'd heard of Allen Ginsberg but hadn't read or heard of "Howl." The world of poetry still mostly lay ahead for me.
One time John brought a bunch of oranges into class and handed them out. He had us peel, pull apart and eat the oranges with our eyes closed. It was a quiet meditative experience. John sort of guided us, asking questions, suggesting things to notice. "What do you smell when you peel the skin off the orange?" "When you bite into a piece of the orange, feel what happens in the glands in your cheeks." Then we wrote for a while.
Another time he brought in some kind of plants, wild weed-looking plants with long stiff stalks and fuzzy plant hair all over, and had us just spend some time sitting and observing the plants, feeling with our hands and faces, smelling, tasting, again while John asked questions and suggested things to notice. And then we wrote about it. We did a lot of that kind of thing in the class.
John brought in a half dozen pages of poems by other poets, with the heading at the top, "A Nosegay of Poems." The bundle included Gary Snyder's complex poem "A Berry Feast," so full of wild places and mythological images; several poems by e.e. cummings; Robert Creeley's famous poem "I Know a Man" ("drive, he sd...") and maybe one or two others by Creeley; and some of the odd small obscure poems of Stephen Crane. John would have us take turns reading the poems out loud, and then might ask us a question like "What's the poem about?" Creeley's "I Know a Man" -- what was it about, in the most basic literal sense. Two men driving somewhere? Two men arguing? A man remembering a friend, with humor, with irritation?
John would often ask similar questions when we would read our own poems in class. Always emphasizing trying to meet a poem as much as possible on its own terms.
He talked sometimes about how poems looked on the page, and how that shaped the rhythm and movement of a poem. Sometimes when he would read poems out loud in class -- his own, or by other poets -- he would gesture with one of his hands to try to illustrate how the lines in the poem were moving across the page. He talked about sounds in poems, a lot. We were talking about a brief poem, a haiku or something like, with the first line "treefrog on a limb." John commented on the lightweight sounds in the line, then said to listen to how the line changed if it said, instead, "treefrog on a branch."
The war in Vietnam was all over the news every day, was the great pervasive fact of life. All of the male students in the poetry class, and in the other classes in the summer program, would be draft age within three years, or two years, or a year. It was impossible to ignore, impossible not to think about, impossible not to have an opinion about. You would have to decide, you would have to act, somehow, or it would take your life. The previous spring I walked with 50,000 other protesters in a marathon anti-war demonstration from the University of Minnesota campus to the state Capitol in downtown St. Paul. During the previous year someone set off a bomb in a department store in St. Paul. National Guard soldiers gunned down students on the Jackson State and Kent State university campuses. The merest poem was, of necessity, on fire with the weather of those years. Weather that remains with us to this day.
One week that summer all of the arts classes in the summer program went to a camp in northwestern Minnesota. It was a built-up camp, with dorm buildings, a cafeteria, a camp library, a gym and other facilities. The camp was on a large lake with much marshland and wild rice fields, and groups of us went out in canoes a couple of times. I found it hard to adjust to life away from the city, even for a few days. A lot of that week is a blur in my memory, though I do remember a moment when I noticed large high clouds (possible storm clouds) far off above the forest, and for some reason it dawned on me that I'd heard no news of the outside world for several days; World War Three might have started, for all I knew, and I would have had no idea.
During the weeks of the class, we worked from time to time on how to read poems out loud. Someone in the class was reading a poem fairly quickly, and John suggested, "Read mouth speed, not eye speed. Your eyes read a page faster than your mouth says the words; try to read the poem at the speed your mouth wants to go, not the speed your eyes can go." I've remembered this ever since, and have found it highly useful when I've read poems to audiences.
And John told us, one day in class, a story from Hindu mythology, about poison-changing, in which Krishna was said to have swallowed poison, and transformed it inside himself into divine song. The significance, or usefulness, of the story didn't really sink into me at the time, though I kept it with me, and over the years I've come to understand it as a useful metaphor for what poets are sometimes able to do -- to take the poisons and terrors of the world, and through the making of poems -- through telling the truth in poems -- change terrible experience into something good and beautiful and essential.
During the year following the summer poetry class, many of us from the class continued to meet, usually once a week, to read and talk about our poems. We alternated meeting at each other's homes around Minneapolis and St. Paul. People came and went somewhat irregularly, and a few people started coming who hadn't been in the summer class; we managed to keep meeting regularly through May or June of 1971 before we more or less disbanded.
The poetry class in the summer of 1970 was not, at the time, a deeply transforming experience for me, nor was the weekly continuation of it through the following year, but I did take things from it that have been deeply important for me over the years since. Some things, I guess, just need time to ripen.
I've long since lost touch with most of the people in the class. One of the other students, Clare Rossini, eventually became head of the Creative Writing program at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and more recently has taught elsewhere, and has published a couple of books of poems. Once or twice I've gotten fleeting word of a couple of other people in the class, though haven't had contact with any of them in decades.
John Caddy is still writing and has published several books of poems. In recent years he's been actively involved in a project to integrate poetry writing and the study and knowledge of ecology. More information on his work with this can be found at the website Morning Earth.
Friday, March 13, 2009
The First Light Touches Me
My new book of poems The First Light Touches Me is now out from Red Dragonfly Press. The above link is to the publisher's webpage for the book; ordering information can be found there.
Red Dragonfly Press is also the publisher of two of my previous books, What Is Buried Here and If There Is A Song. Again follow the links here for information on ordering the books.
Red Dragonfly Press is also the publisher excellent work by many other poets. The main page for the publisher's website is here.
And, my book The Idea of Legacy is available from Musical Comedy Editions. No weblink for this one -- the book can be ordered from the publisher by paper mail, at Musical Comedy Editions, 5136 Lyndale Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55419. The cover price is $8.00, and I'm sure the publisher won't mind if you include an extra $1.00 to cover postage and handling.
And thanks.
Red Dragonfly Press is also the publisher of two of my previous books, What Is Buried Here and If There Is A Song. Again follow the links here for information on ordering the books.
Red Dragonfly Press is also the publisher excellent work by many other poets. The main page for the publisher's website is here.
And, my book The Idea of Legacy is available from Musical Comedy Editions. No weblink for this one -- the book can be ordered from the publisher by paper mail, at Musical Comedy Editions, 5136 Lyndale Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55419. The cover price is $8.00, and I'm sure the publisher won't mind if you include an extra $1.00 to cover postage and handling.
And thanks.
Sunday, March 08, 2009
Cherrie Moraga on Obama; and some more reading
Found this: from last November, an excellent commentary by writer Cherríe Moraga, in her website, on the election of Barack Obama and the continuing unfinished struggles for peace and justice
Moraga's commentary is here. The main page of her website is here.
*
A couple of items I spotted at the AWP bookfair, and have gotten my hands on since then (at the bookfair the publisher had just sample display copies):
Arrows in the Gale and Other Poems by Arturo Giovannitti, published 2004 by Quale Press. Giovannitti, who lived from 1884 to 1959, was active in the Industrial Workers of the World, and remained involved in literature and radical political work throughout his life. According to the brief Afterword by Gian Lombardo, the book gathers together the collected poems Giovannitti wrote in English.
Light in Hand: Selected Early Poems by Lola Ridge, edited by Daniel Tobin, published 2007 also by Quale Press. Ridge (1873-1941) was born in Ireland, came to the United States in the early 20th century. She was an editor with the literary magazines Others and Broom, and was involved with labor organizing. Light in Hand includes poems from her collections The Ghetto and Other Poems, Sun-Up and Other Poems, and Red Flag.
*
And, two others that came in the mail recently from Red Dragonfly Press:
Transparencies by Robert Edwards, just out early this year, a collection of great power and lyricism, poems of somber pain and rowdy beauty, by a fine poet who is also the editor and publisher of the online poetry magazine Pemmican.
The Extended Words: An Imaginary Dictionary by Sid Gershgoren, also just out. This one has to be seen to be believed. Not only has Gershgoren compiled a full-size dictionary of made-up words, with full (and sometimes multiple) definitions; he also includes, with each entry, a made-up quotation, from a made-up literary or scholarly work, by a fictitious author or authors, citing the made-up word; and, in an appendix at the end of the book, he includes made-up biographical notes, sometimes quite lengthy, for many of the made-up authors ("Helen Wrinkle Pause;" "Dooubt Fogbottom;" etc.) of the made-up cited quotations. Whimsical would be putting it mildly. Browsing through entries I shake my head in marvel and disbelief, even as I can't put it down.
Moraga's commentary is here. The main page of her website is here.
*
A couple of items I spotted at the AWP bookfair, and have gotten my hands on since then (at the bookfair the publisher had just sample display copies):
Arrows in the Gale and Other Poems by Arturo Giovannitti, published 2004 by Quale Press. Giovannitti, who lived from 1884 to 1959, was active in the Industrial Workers of the World, and remained involved in literature and radical political work throughout his life. According to the brief Afterword by Gian Lombardo, the book gathers together the collected poems Giovannitti wrote in English.
Light in Hand: Selected Early Poems by Lola Ridge, edited by Daniel Tobin, published 2007 also by Quale Press. Ridge (1873-1941) was born in Ireland, came to the United States in the early 20th century. She was an editor with the literary magazines Others and Broom, and was involved with labor organizing. Light in Hand includes poems from her collections The Ghetto and Other Poems, Sun-Up and Other Poems, and Red Flag.
*
And, two others that came in the mail recently from Red Dragonfly Press:
Transparencies by Robert Edwards, just out early this year, a collection of great power and lyricism, poems of somber pain and rowdy beauty, by a fine poet who is also the editor and publisher of the online poetry magazine Pemmican.
The Extended Words: An Imaginary Dictionary by Sid Gershgoren, also just out. This one has to be seen to be believed. Not only has Gershgoren compiled a full-size dictionary of made-up words, with full (and sometimes multiple) definitions; he also includes, with each entry, a made-up quotation, from a made-up literary or scholarly work, by a fictitious author or authors, citing the made-up word; and, in an appendix at the end of the book, he includes made-up biographical notes, sometimes quite lengthy, for many of the made-up authors ("Helen Wrinkle Pause;" "Dooubt Fogbottom;" etc.) of the made-up cited quotations. Whimsical would be putting it mildly. Browsing through entries I shake my head in marvel and disbelief, even as I can't put it down.
