Voices, language, stories have garnered my rapt attention all of my life. I remember eaves-dropping on the conversations of my parents lying in bed, the arguments they’d have in the kitchen, the card game banter they’d engage in with visiting relatives or friends, the adult-talk, the endless stories. I loved listening to the radio programs and broadcasts, but I’d discovered my first poets spinning my brother’s and sister’s records for hours on end and memorizing the words.
By the age of ten if I had a couple of bucks to spend when we made our “trip to town” (thirty miles from Alberton to Missoula) I knew what I wanted to buy: a record at the Music Center. The wall behind the counter had all the latest hit singles for just under a buck, those 45 rpms. If I was lucky I might get two. My favorite poet at that time was Roger Miller: King of the Road, Dang Me, Do-Wacka-Do, England Swings, One Dyin’ and a Buryin’. Those were my kind of stories (or poems)! The voice, the slang, the rhymes, the drama, those tales about life, humor, and pain. His lyrics took me places I’d never been and places I knew in my heart: the imagination, that’s what poetry does! Before I had a clue what universality and existentialism meant, I knew these musical stories were my “true human experiences.”
Those songwriters, my first poets, showed me how to express emotion and tell personal stories in a way that brought people together for a shared experience about what it was like to be a human being. I collected records and studied lyrics long before I ever read books. Of course the melodies helped grab my attention. I remember years later when I made my pitch to a college professor that I believed many songwriters were great poets, he told me that they (Mr. Dylan in particular) leaned a little to heavily on their guitars to be recognized as a poets. A small smile crosses my face knowing that the Swedes agreed with me about Bobby Z.
The first time I remember hearing poetry out loud was when my dad would read us some of Robert Service’s ballads of the North. I fell in love with The Cremation of Sam McGee and Dangerous Dan McGrew, those tales of sourdoughs, the freezing cold of the Yukon, tough characters and brutally harsh conditions (be they human or mother nature). Again, like the songs, I was drawn into the voice and the drama, the story of a struggle to survive, and often times the loss of that fight. Service’s poems felt honest, real. I recognized my truth in them.
I was familiar with the light and the dark of human nature. Living with alcoholism was a dramatic roller coaster of emotions. Navigating that world as a child shapes how you walk through life. Everyone’s journey is different, but the awareness that life is complicated and not fair, is thrust upon you in those situations. You have to deal with it in some way. So others’ stories of life’s travails were an odd comfort to me. I realized I wasn’t alone in this complicated world. A melancholy child falls in love with the blues, and since the racism in the “land of the free” hadn’t made the art form of the blues available to little white boys, the only place a mildly depressed and outwardly hardened ten-year old could find that kind of moan and soul was in rock and roll.
After my older sister married at eighteen and had her first baby at nineteen, I inherited her record collection: Elvis, the Everly Brothers, and Johnny Cash. So I spun those records over and over until I was able to start buying my own. After Roger Miller I added more Elvis, The Beach Boys, The Beatles, The Stones. The first LP album I bought (monophonic of course) was The Dave Clark Five: I Like It Like That. What I loved about those Brit bands was the influence of American Blues on their records: that hard edge, that wild-throated-darkness you could hear that was somewhere between a scream and a moan: a felt language like, “You take Sally, and I’ll take Sue, we’re gonna rock away all our blues! Come on! Come on, let me show you where it’s at. The name of the place is I Like It Like That!”
Being an insatiable lover of lingo, music, and gritty stories, I became addicted to television and movies, too. My family didn’t have a TV until I was in the second grade, so you’d often find me over at one of our neighbors’ houses glued to the tube. I was mesmerized by it. After each episode or whatever, I’d replay the characters, the story, become those shows. So much so that I was convinced I’d someday be an actor. I remember early on that the chance to perform, to put on the mask of someone else, was more comfortable than just being me. Fear of speaking in front of a group is supposedly as common as the fear of death, so probably most kids feel shy and insecure when called upon to respond in a classroom or group situation. As an actor or storyteller I never felt uncomfortable. It was fun to entertain. My first memory is a recollection of being the center of attention.
I Believe I Remember Love
*
My mother was transforming
another tough pot roast into meat loaf,
grinding up chunks of gristly beef, bovine scraps
she'd boned off a shoulder blade.
*
As she bore down on the stiff
crank handle & fed the iron gullet
of the meat grinder, the auger hole, I stood
beside her, a shadow, not yet two,
*
held onto the counter & cutting board, listened to
the squish & roar of meat pushing through
spaghetti sized holes. I was mesmerized
by those oozing red hamburger strings.
*
In a flash I reached up & plugged a hole
with my finger to stop the flow, didn't know about
the slashing, windmilling knives
turning industriously, cleaving all meat.
*
My mother & I screamed, cried hysterically,
held hands & a dish towel full of blood
while my dad drove the thirty miles of curvy
road, a two lane along the river, cussing,
*
full throttle. They hustled me through the lobby
of the clinic, brick & glass. I saw wheel chairs,
white gowns running about, watched
an overhead light fade. Finally, at home
*
I remember sitting on the floor in overalls,
a lemon sucker in one hand & plaster
cast on the other, people laughing, smiling at me:
the fabled "Little Dutch Boy" who survived
*
the flood. I was the talk of the neighborhood,
the focus of the family. My first memory,
that trauma, was perfect drama. An audience brings
us joy. Our greatest happiness is
*
the belief we are loved. It's what we live for,
what we desire most. We learn to tolerate
any pain, risk blood or breath, anything, if
we believe we are loved, right now, forever.
When a new (young!) English teacher showed up my Freshman year of high school, she instituted a paperback library in her classroom. And I discovered reading poetry, song lyrics without the score. She also introduced us to the modernists, free verse, stuff I’d never read nor knew existed. In her class we read Shakespeare out loud, and though I didn’t understand most of it, I loved the sound of it and the mystery of it, finding that kind of sense you sort of find when hearing someone speak another language. The more I was exposed to poetry and plays, the more I was convinced that a life in the theater was for me.
But in 1970 a young poet who worked for the Montana Arts Council came to our high school to teach a group of interested students about writing poetry. James Welch was an unknown and unpublished poet working on his first collection of poems, Riding the Earthboy 40. He stayed for two weeks, and my life was forever changed. He told us we should write poems that came from our lives, from this podunk railroad town in western Montana situated in the Clark Fork River valley. He told us to name things and write about what we knew. He used his own poems as examples of what he meant. He grew up on the high-line of Montana traveling back and forth between families in Browning and Harlem, the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap reservations. These poems were not written in English forms or iambic pentameter. They were held together by voices, the phrasing of the people he knew, the language of those places and those cultures, his family and friends. The topics of the poems ranged from weather and conversations to struggles and dreams, from alcoholism and humor to laughter and pain. All stories I could easily relate to.
That’s when I began writing poems. And I discovered that no matter what I did to make a living, no matter where I was or what was going on, at some point when I was alone, I could think about things and write a poem. Sometimes I didn’t write for weeks, maybe months, but the fire never went out. It was always there, the embers smoldering, waiting for me to return. That old “English teaching” phrase, “I don’t know what I mean until I write it down,” is true. Every human is a poet, a keeper of the flame inside of them. Some of us rarely write it down. Some of us can’t stop. The practice of poetry has helped me to understand myself better, and by understanding ourselves better, it’s easier to understand others. Poetry builds empathy. Empathy is love, what the world needs now, has and will always need to survive and thrive.
Peace. Write a poem, your poem. Show it to yourself. And if you show it to someone else, you’ll understand what I mean. “Poetry,” as my old friend and former Poet Laureate, Sheryl Noethe, says, “can save your life.”
Hit its mark, right to my heart. Excellent Mark.