In the Weeds
*
I am comfortable lying
in the weeds
looking at the sky
be it warm summer or musty fall.
I like watching the bugs
crawl, the flight patterns
of butterflies and bees, chewing
stems and smelling the grass-
earthy scent around me, contrails
etching across turbulent clouds
unfolding images locked
in my head. I listen
for any sounds: trains, voices,
planes, the occasional car
driving by, barking dogs,
chain saws, the thumping of
my heart, the wind in the trees
and in my chest.
No one can see me there
buried flat as a fawn.
Sometimes I'm with a friend,
but it's best by myself
because the silence is all mine.
Those who jump to disagree
with my proclamation of loving it
“in the weeds” probably haven't
been there face down
with the beetles and ants,
eye-level to voles, then rolling
over to watch hawks hover
in thermals against the blue.
I guess to those figurative souls
“in the weeds” is to be lost—
“at sea” or at least “in a funk”—
certainly it has to be an inability
to act decisively. Of course, for me
that's the most interesting place
to be, literally in the here and now
of this constantly transforming
magical trip, that wonderland
we paid more attention to as kids—
uncertainty—call me Peter Pan
if you will, but I love it
deep in the weeds.
Up until high school I was a “liver” not a reader. I lived for playing outside in the dirt pile, on the creek, in the weeds, or in the snow. We played mini-war games, capture and tag, all sports that involved balls. We listened to music outside, watched television, but in grade school I didn’t read for entertainment. My freshman year a new, young English teacher moved to town. She loved language, was passionate about it. We read Shakespeare out loud, and I fell in love with that, the music, the drama, the mystery (I had to be told what the hell was going on). She also introduced us to modern writers like Vonnegut, Heller, Mailer, and Kesey who spoke to me and led me to explore older writers like Steinbeck and Hemingway. She read Yeats, Eliot, cummings, and Plath to us after she'd introduced us to Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Before this, all we'd been exposed to in poetry were the English formalists. Prior to Mrs. E turning us onto this “new” poetry, my favorite poets had been the Bobs, Robert Frost and Robert Service. I liked Poe for his morbidity but never felt poetry held much relevance for me.
Maybe Mrs. E's greatest contribution was the classroom paperback library she started full of contemporary writers and some avantgarde literature. I found a slim volume in 1968 that blew my mind, opened me up in a way that nothing else had at that point: Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan. I fell in love with the short lines, few words, all that white space of the empty page, but I was drawn to the voice most, the brevity, the humor, the tragedy, the irony, the mockery, the audacity, the youthful arrogance, the humility. All that shit was in my head. The poems said things I knew, felt, thought, said, and had been afraid to say. This “poet” spoke to me. Maybe it was partly because I was a slow reader who often got distracted by a sentence or bored by a page of dense prose that went on for hundreds of pages. This writer was perfect for the likes of a lazy reader who liked to spend more time thinking about each line and how it related to his life than plowing through all those words attempting to articulate War & Peace. Brautigan inspired me to read, to discover more poets, more thinkers. I pushed on to Camus, the transcendentalists, and Dostoevsky. I think the trigger in his work for me was the way he blended humor and pain, tragedy, in so few words.
I always loved stories! I loved hearing them and repeating them, watching movies and television shows, acting them out, imitating the character voices. I knew I was good at doing that, impersonations and improvisations, and writing is the logical extension of those exercises. Unlike many of my fellow poets who started writing and reading at an early age, I wasn't interested until Mrs. E. fed me the voices and language that spoke to me.
Then in my junior year a poet from the Montana Arts Council came to our school to teach students interested in poetry for a couple of weeks. He was an Indian poet who'd studied at the university with Richard Hugo. James Welch would go on to become one of Montana's most acclaimed writers, but at the time he taught us poetry he was unknown, working on his first book, a collection of poems entitled Riding the Earthboy 40. He shared those poems with us to model what he wanted us to do, write poems about where we came from. Welch grew up on the Montana High-Line, back and forth between families in Browning and Harlem, the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap reservations. His poems spanned that landscape and moved forward and backward in time. He too decided in high school he wanted to be a writer, a storyteller, like the poets he'd read, so in college he joined Hugo's poetry class and wrote poems that emulated the poets he'd read, the great poets in the Norton Anthology, what he knew was poetry.
James Welch, photo by William Stafford
Hugo and Welch's fellow students were writing about their own experiences. Welch didn't think his life on the High-Line was worthy of poetry. He couldn't imagine anyone would be interested in daily existence on the reservation. Only when he was specifically assigned to do just that, did the Earthboy poems we were hearing in class come to be. No one had heard anything like these poems: In My First Hard Springtime; Christmas Comes to Moccasin Flat; Harlem, Montana: Just Off the Reservation; and The Renegade Wants Words. The voice, the cadence, the cultural influence, the names and word choice, the characters' speaking voices, each poem was like a thumb print, unique to the poet. That's what Welch asked us to do, write poems in our own words about the places and people we knew, about our life inside and around us. That gift was a ticket to freedom. I began writing poems in 1970 and haven't stopped. And maybe the actor in me wanted to share them with others, but I also wanted to know if and how they resonated with them. It didn't take long to dream of seeing them collected, printed, and bound in a book. I was hooked. I knew I couldn’t proclaim to the world that I was a poet, but I didn’t have to tell myself I was, I felt that bone deep, in my heart.
I loved the possibilities available in poetry: the endless, open-ended variety of language forms; the sense and nonsense; the specificity and ambiguity; and most of all I loved that I made the rules regarding each poem, its conventions were a part of my creation. Poetry seemed to be the place where anything could be done with language. That freedom of expression along with the brevity of the form was the perfect fit for me since I was busy working overtime and being a husband and dad. So I had no regular writing schedule. When the occasions arose, I took advantage of them: in motel rooms; behind the wheel of a truck (in my head); on weekends; all those available golden moments when I could squeeze in a few words on the page.
Because of those constraints, many of my poems were written in response to events. I called myself an “occasional poet” because of my irregular practice and the fact that I was often asked or personally compelled to write a poem for a wedding, a birthday, an anniversary, or a funeral. Growing up in a town of 300 people was like having a huge extended family or living in a tight-knit neighborhood. I felt close to all those people, and since I had the skill set to be there for them at important life events, I became one of the community spokesmen. I am by nature empathetic, and as any 9 year old will tell you when you ask them what poetry is or how it’s different from other writing, the first two things they will say is: “it rhymes” and “it's about feelings.” Sharing poetry in a group setting creates bonding, it’s like singing love songs together, a cross between prayer and entertainment. Poetry explores what it is like being human, and that’s always a roller coaster of emotions.
So I was excited and terrified when I enrolled in Hugo's workshop at 21. Nothing else about college was very interesting to me at that time, and I hoped that a poetry workshop would help me focus on what mattered most to me. When I started college at 18 I had great expectations which dimmed by the end of the first quarter and practically disappeared by the end of the second one. It looked like college was just an extension of high school. I naively thought it would be a deeply rich, student-centered adventure rather than the consumption of more information that meant nothing to me, jumping though hoops, hitting those same old meaningless marks. Besides, I never felt comfortable there. I was intimidated from the beginning being a small town kid who was socially shy, unsure of himself, and afraid of failing. So when my self-directed (unschooled idea of) poetry was put to the workshop test it became example A of what poetry was not. A couple weeks of that, and I said fuck it, dropped out of school and took a job with the forest service.
I don't know what it's like for you, but I do what I like to do until I feel like moving on and doing something else. The staples in my life have been family, friends, and poetry. I wasn’t much of a planner, lived pretty much for today. Since that experience with Jim Welch in high school, this grasshopper knew poetry would always be there for him, that it was the bridge between his head and his heart, the key to himself, his chance to voice what he thought or felt, a way to try and connect with others, someone, anyone else. Nothing came closer to making that happen for me than writing poetry, so I knew I would never let it go no matter what. And the biggest test of that was when I took a whole stack of poems to Richard Hugo in 1982, not long before he sadly left us way too soon. I just dropped in on him one afternoon, no appointment, and he graciously waved me into his office. I told him who I was and what I'd been doing, driving truck and working overtime, scratching out these poems whenever I got the time. I held a big pile of poems and asked if he'd be willing to take a look at a few, let me know what he thought. “Sure,” he said and began leafing through this stack, periodically peering up at me over his glasses like I was from another planet. That wrinkled forehead and furrowed brow resembled the grill of his old Buick. Finally, he took off his glasses and sat back in his chair. He praised my efforts to compile all these pages while holding down a full time job, “That's admirable, but there's only one problem,” he paused for effect, “they're just not poems.” I felt like a bomber getting hit with flack and plummeting fast toward destruction . . . BOOM! Then he said, “You know, human beings are funny goddamn animals. For years they will beat their head on a wall trying to get through, and then one day they will step back holding their throbbing, bloody head, look up, and they'll see just to the right a bit, there's a goddamn door they can walk right through! I think you should try your hand at fiction, a larger landscape,” then he picked one of my poems up and said, “Poems are small and specific. The scope of this one is huge! It could be a novel.” I thanked him for his advice and taking the time to look at my writing. I told him if I could scrape together some bigger blocks of time, I'd try my hand at the prose form. So I returned home and continued writing my “leetle” unpoems, even compiled a manuscript entitled Unwanted Outlaw.
I have two pieces of advice for those who have read this far: first, don't heed any advice no matter who gives it to you if that advice runs counter to what you know in your heart to be true for you; second, never give advice, you can't know what is best for someone else. I realized fifty-some years ago that it was pointless blaming others for what happened to me in my life. I could see that whining and being angry were only hurting me, and it was up to me to live my life. I had to think for myself.
I Think
*
therefore, I have made
myself a poet by insisting I am
a poet after years of insisting
I wasn't a poet even though I did
know it back then when
I kept insisting I was just a guy
who wrote the shit that came to mind,
those thoughts and observations
we all have, but most don't
take the time to write down.
*
So I became a poet by virtue
of putting words on paper
and publishing them in books,
reading them aloud and
acknowledging the proclamations
of others calling me a poet.
I guess a poet is someone who
is determined to be a poet,
wants it enough to read and study
those deemed or claiming to be
*
poets—a mysteriously undefinable
club begging absolute freedom
for contradiction—that uneasy comfort
of nonconformity—constantly seeking
the safety of distance to confess
ignorance, fear, ecstasy, and suspicion.
*
Poetry—the delirious diary of existence—
those fragmented lingo-bits gathered
and strewn—a display intoning
straight-on-honest spews or veering
into-through the elliptical, surreal,
ba-jibbity voodoo of language
voiced and heard—our scribbled
account of dreams whispered.
*
I have made myself a poet
because I claim I am. Therefore,
just ask me, and I will tell you
I am a poet (I think).