ANOTHER GREAT QUOTE

TOO LONG AGO

me with my mother and father in front of the house I grew up in, in April (Easter?) of 1966, two months after I got out of the military and stopped shaving, and only weeks before my mother died from a heart attack during an operation for the cancer that was growing inside her (but which she never revealed or complained about to most of us as she kept a smile for everyone but our next door aunt who she'd run over to cry with and then put her smile back on)...I was visiting from a Brooklyn apartment supplied by a patron (a woman editor who believed I was was going to write "The Great American Novel") with my wife Lee (taking the photo I assume)...the night my mother died in Saint Michael's hospital in Newark, soon after this shot was taken, with me beside her but when she called out for my oldest brother and me and I said I'm here ma, she didn't recognize me, I made a vow to shave the beard and did and to never have one again, a vow I've kept, as silly as it may seem...I miss her every day...him too most days...

GOOD POINT

WILLIAM MCPHERSON R.I.P.

William McPherson, or "Bill" as I knew him, was a dear friend who I am very sad has died. We met at a dinner party in DC in the early 1970s, when I was still living there. He was the editor of The Washington Post Book World, which I told him was better than the New York Times Book Review, except for reviews of poetry books, which I thought were terrible. He challenged me to do better and sent me Ann Sexton's new book to review. I wrote a mostly unflattering piece and he put it on the front page of the Post's book section. Walking through Dupont Circle the day it came out a woman screamed at me because of the review, and another later spit at me!

Those people cared about books, and so did Bill. I reviewed more books for him at The Washington Post for years, even after I left DC. But when he won a Pulitzer for his critical writing, he came to visit me in the city just as I was giving up the only office job I'd ever had, and for less than two years, to try and make acting in movies and TV my poet's day job. He took heart from my risking that move, and with two children to support on my own, and subsequently quit his prestigious and financially secure job at The Washington Post to write his first novel, TESTING THE CURRENT. Which won acclaim (read it and you will see why), as did his second TO THE SARGASSO SEA.

Forever after, whenever we saw each other, and often in our correspondence and phone conversations (and in his inscriptions to me in his books), he would bring that up, even after living the life of a freelance writer led to his financial decline (see his obit in the Washington Post here), for which I always felt a little responsible, though I know in the end I'm not that powerful and he was a man who made his own decisions, often as unexpected as mine, which is just one of the things we shared.

Bill was a handsome, witty, highly intelligent, impressive wordsmith and, in my experience, a generous and kind person. I am so happy and grateful he got to write those novels and live the life he'd wanted to. My condolences to his daughter Jane, his grandchildren, and all his family and friends and fans.

MY LATEST FAVORITE QUOTE AND WORK OF ART

[click and zoom in to enlarge and read]

JOHN SJOBERG R.I.P.

Since first meeting him around 1970, my encounters with Iowa poet John Sjoberg—whether in person or through correspondence, always infused with his kind and gentle spirit—left me feeling filled with a kind of childlike sense of love.

There was an innocence and artlessness to his presence that translated to his poetry. His work wasn't what is sometimes called "faux naif"—because there was never anything "faux" about it, in my experience—but genuinely and uniquely a product of who John was, in the way that Satie's music or Henri Rousseau's paintings, are the results of who they were.

John's published output is minimal, compared to most poets (let alone a graphomaniac like me), but choice, as they used to say. Because no individual poem of his is duplicated, either in its approach or its outcome, and thus can't be compared to any other.

I'll leave you with three examples from his first collection (I believe), HAZEL, that he inscribed and sent to me when it came out in 1976 (a lovingly produced work of art itself and example of independent fine book printing and design, by Cinda and Allam Kornblum and their Toothpaste Press out of which later came Coffee House Press):

3's INTO 4'S

rattling leaves
wind blowing
music from a cello.

thin sensitive features
music from a cello
a lamp burning oil.

a slow drop of water
a second drop of water
a second drop of water
music from a cello.

a second drop of water
a slow piece of music
a raft, floating
a ball of string.

a lamp burning oil
music from a cello
the end of a long shaft
a slow piece of music.



A SANDWICH

Penguin Bread.
pumpkin.
pumpkin.
pumpkin.
Penguin Bread.


PORCH WINDOW

my head is green
the songs here, the bird songs
here & here & here
are my heart.

the tractor engine beats,
drives fall corn up into the granary.
my whole body can feel it. i wonder
if they'll take me into town
in a  wagon.

i'll stop at your house
in a bushelbasket,
grinning from ear to ear.

A FORGOTTEN GREAT PASSAGE FROM KEROUAC

I never do assignments that people post and request on the Internet but for some reason did when I got one that said go to the nearest book and open to page 56 and point and copy the sentence. There's a bookcase next to my little desk and the closest book to me is VISIONS OF GERARD, Jack Keroauc's elegiac lyric memoir about his brother who died when he was a precocious child.

But when I opened it to page 56 I found a blank page (because it's the back of an illustration in my hardcover first edition once-library-book that a friend from my DC days, Deb Fredo, gave me back in '74)...so that was that. But I skimmed the following pages and on page 62 found this full-to-overflowing memorable Kerouac-ian passage that I had marked (and assume the mistakes are intentional though some seem not):

"I curse and rant nowaday because I dont want to have to work to make a living and do childish work for other men (any lout can move a board from hither to yonder) but'd rather sleep all day and stay it up all night scrubbling these visions of the world which is only an ethereal flower of a world, the coal, the chute, the fire and the ashes all, imaginary blossoms, nonetheless, "somebody's got to do the work-a the world"—Artist or no artist, I cant pass up a piece of fried chicken when I see it, compassion or no compassion for the fowl—"