E.R. Baxter III
interviewed by Mike Basinski
E.R. Baxter III, poet, novelist, all writer, here about we know him as Bob, Bob Baxter or just Baxter--he is one of them guys that just has one name and when you say it everyone knows who you are talking about--like Zeus. A long time ago, in the Baxter being schooled days, critic Leslie Fiedler, author of such major texts like Love and Death in the American Novel, once said to him, “I have no doubt that you’ll eventually write something that’s publishable.” (Ain’t it great when a critic puts his cigar out in the eye of a novice writer!) So, anyway, Baxter just kept on writing, cause writers write and Baxter is a writer, first and foremost. He started his career as part of the mimeo revolution of the 1960s. That was the era of magazines like Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, OLE Magazine, The Mariwanna Review, Runcible Spoon and Meatball. And it was the time of editors like Jon Webb of the Outsider and Marvin Malone of the Wormwood Review. It was an era that fist extended in full force the notion of speaking speech rhythms of street life into, full into poems and poetry and prose. Well, yeah, poetry was not and is not reserved for the academic parlor and the charge in that decade proved that so. Baxter was part of this. Baxter was part of that poetry pioneer adventure. He was a destination, a place between the poetry highway that ran from Toronto to Cleveland and back. He read at The Gate in Cleveland at the request of d. a. levy (The Gate being that poetry reading place raided by the cops when the were hunting levy.) and Cleveland’s Black Rabbit Press published his: A Good War. A long time teacher at Niagara County Community College, he lives on a farm in Niagara County, New York, with his wife, the lovely Loraine. The Buffalo Audubon Society recently awarded him a Conservationist of the Year award. Yep, he is that active in the environmental issues. You see, he cares. You see, he is a fighter. You see, poets and writers do live in the real world. You should hear him read. He gets up there with his big cigarette beard and gets a rolling and inflecting this word and stopping there and here posing the people a question to answer. It’s nice. Slipstream Press, the same as Slipstream magazine, published his only true full-size book, which is called Looking for Niagara, in 1993. Yes, he has been a good member in good standing of the Western New York army of poets for a good long time and still stands well within it? sure, with a lantern showin the way. He’s a mentor and a fan of the good poem and a friend.
Around about in March of this year, when I thought about speaking to Bob Baxter for this spread in Underbeat, I sent him a bunch of questions. Some of them were, for example, like: What were your lasting impressions of poet d. a. levy?; What can you tell me about small press publishing in the 1960s?; How many cows do you have?; and What about Kenneth Patchen? Of course, in his most generous way, he wrote back the following, which is the Basinski interview with E. R. Baxter III. The spaces between the various sections are spaces in which questions were posed.
Responses to Questions Asked, Hinted at, Implied, Left Hanging, Etc.
by E. R. Baxter III
Incidentally, the little story I told you about Leslie Fiedler wasn’t quite complete. While he was saying what he said to me, he was slowly pushing a manuscript of mine across the tabletop toward me with his fingertips. With this added info, the depth of my stupidity really becomes apparent, doesn’t it?
So you begin to write at a very early age and everyone who reads is your potential audience, family, neighbor, friend, pen pal. But after a time you realize that putting those words into sentences and those into paragraphs one after the other is very hard work. “Ah, hah!” you say. “I’ll write poetry!”
This is akin to starting out as a carpenter and, realizing how hard it is to saw 2 x 4s straight across, deciding to become a brain surgeon. But that aside, the decision to write poetry dropped your audience to 1% of those who read, lower if your poetry turns out to be anything other than conventional.
For me, there was a slowly maturing recognition over 25 years in dawning, that what I wanted to write about was broader than the sudden insight, the illumination, those examined moments in the poetry of others I most admired. That, combined with the dismissive observations of a few more accomplished poets that my poetry was of a narrative/prosy nature caused me to admit that I wasn’t that good, really. I’m back to carpentry.
Other than what I read at The Poetry/Rare Books Collection, SUNY at Buffalo’s mimeo revolution celebration of d. a. levy’s 60th birthday party [November 2002--see Baxter’s In the Beginning in this issue Underbeat], I have two memories of him. The first is that he seemed diminished in Buffalo, smaller, intimidated, if not close to being frightened. Buffalo was bigger in some way then, more tug and shove in all directions. The image of him looking bewildered, shoulders hunched as we walked down Main Street a few blocks from the University is stuck in my mind. (I had an apartment above a Chinese laundry on Main--a genuine one, the owner was Chinese and my landlord--and before I left Buffalo or shortly after there was a Helpee Selfee laundry right next door.) This was not Cleveland, where he was recognized and loved. Not to be overly dramatic, I experienced a sense of shame then, which surfaces almost full strength when I think of it, because I was unable to introduce him in some way, somewhere, to some combined literary community audience, to tell them what a large contribution he was making to the little mag world, of art and experiment, poetry, publishing, and general American outrageousness. Such a combined literary community didn’t exist, of course, at UB (University of Buffalo) or anywhere else.
The second memory is, speaking of things American, for years some American rug makers produced, “oriental rugs,” a cheaply made version of the real thing. 1 believe these were very popular in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. They wore well, but the colors faded, and they continued their drab lives in old farmhouses, homes, flats and apartments across the country. On a visit to Cleveland, entering levy’s apartment, I saw a half dozen or more felt-tipped pens of bright inks, yellows, red, purple, green, scattered across the faded “oriental” rugs where levy and his girl friend, Dagmar, would stretch out and work on restoring the original designs. You like the image? I do.
The door to the littles opened to me in a number of ways to the best of my recollections. Mags like The Wormwood Review and The Beloit Poetry Journal, I think were listed in The Writer’s Market, an annually published directory available in public libraries. Sending for sample copies of these, or submitting, resulted in receiving dozens or more of other little mags and addresses (Wormwood often listed other mags) and additional submissions and the whole thing mushroomed until, finally, you are being solicited for submissions by Kop Killer, edited by, and who can forget these names, real or fictitious, Darlene Fife and Robert Head. [Fife and Head published the radical tabloid Nola Express in New Orleans.] I never submitted. I didn’t want to kill kops. Kops were my friends.
D. R. Wagner was another door opener to the littles for me. He first discovered Dustbooks’s The Directory of Small Press & Magazine Editors & Publishers, for starters. We grew up in essentially the same neighborhood, thought technically divided by a road. He said to me, read this, read this, you gotta read this, and dumped armloads of books in front of me, everything from On the Road to Gasoline. No he wasn’t a motor head.
So I had been writing little cramped rhyming poems about hunting and dogs and sending them off to The New Yorker magazine (Is it any wonder I later loved the library in Brautigan’s The Abortion?) Wagner was writing lyrical free verse poetry about dreams and waking up and other things. We shared our writing with one another. He was very enthusiastic when I’d write something better than what I’d been doing--you know those quantum leap-up poems that come from unknown places--and he published my Hunger after forming Press:Today:Niagara. It was letterpress, all those tiny lead-type letters set painstakingly by hand. That’s how much he wanted to do it, and so he was not only the door opener, but pulled me through it. When I got a poem accepted by Beloit Poetry Journal, he was more excited than I was. I remember him shouting out loud at the news.
Granted, that during the mimeo revolution, so called, there were tons of crap published, some few pounds of it mine (more weight could be attributed to me if I’d been more prolific), and self-serving drivel, political, anti-war, etc. Not that there hasn’t been brilliant anti-war or other politically driven poetry written--we all know better. But all of that aside, my general memories and impression of those full years that passed all too quickly are those of a great sharing and generosity of spirit, of kindness and cooperation and humor, a sharing of not only poetry , but of materials, paper, machines, staples, tape, paint, postage money--and of ideas. This didn’t always extend to policemen, presidents, and other poets. This was, after all, America, sometimes with a “k.”
But anyone who investigates the era w ill find, for example, poetry pages in mags coming from Cleveland with maps on the reverse side. Someone who worked at City Hall took the old maps being discarded, high quality paper, blank on one side. This was a necessity, not being cute, although the cut up maps turned out to be great--roads to somewhere on both sides of the page. Someone else did silk-screens for the mag, someone else begged use of a church mimeo. This, of course, was pre-email, pre-inkjet or laser printers and the like. It was the birth of desktop publishing, though, taking place in basements and bedrooms and kitchens and on living room floors with a lot of people pitching in. There was great flurry of poetry and correspondence and little mags floating across the continent (including Mexico and Canada) and beyond. Lots of contributor’s copies as pay, lots of complimentary copies, and exchange copies and copies to friends. The walk to the mailbox or the mail being delivered was the most exciting of things. To this day, my expectations rise as I go for the mail, and I haven’t submitted anything for publication in years, and the revolution’s come and gone years before that.
One of the mags I still have from those years is an edition of Sum, published by Carl Woideck [Sum published three issues in 1968 and was located in Sacramento, California]. Even the envelope he mailed it in is a piece of art, handmade from heavy tan paper and transparent tape. The outside lettering is neatly done in different colors, my name and address and his return in purple, a “First Class” in blue, a “Do Not Bend” in red, repeated larger in red on the reverse side. It’s postmarked Feb. 19, 1968. It took twelve cents worth of postage, stamps neatly affixed in a block, two 1-cent Andrew Jackson’s and two 5-cent George Washington’s. There were actually two editions of Sum in the envelope, one of them 5 1/2 x 8 1/2”, ten pages, with a dust cover yet, on which the pen and ink long-legged waterfowl of the inside cover is duplicated. If you’re interested, I checked this out recently, and it would cost 83 cents to mail the envelope today.
The other edition is 4 ¼ in. x 5 in, thirteen pages, with a heavy card stock cover, two-stapled saddle stitched, black abstract watercolor glued to the front. There are two foldout pages, a whimsical pen and ink drawing of a naked man sitting with a knee-supported table having tea with a large bird, and a long-lined poem by Carl that wouldn’t have fit across a single 4 1/4 in. page. Other contributors in this copy are Thom Szuter, Kent Taylor, and Hak and Jean Vogrin (pen and ink drawing, lyrics, music, and a poem.). The song lyrics and music are on the page facing the fold out pen and ink. “There’s a bird in my attic/ he’s rather erratic/ a blackbird with a yellow bill,” the song begins. They end up having tea together. Every time I think of it, I smile. I’m not a collector, but I treasure this little Sum. It encapsulates all those little mag years for me.
In university lit classes was where they fell at the feet of Eliot and Pound, but hadn’t heard of Kenneth Patchen, where they pondered Olson, but sneered at Kipling, the imperialist versifier. This was where Proprioception [an essay by Charles Olson] was a required text and “Gunga Din” was a racist joke. Can you quote me some Olson lines? Me neither.
“My son was killed while laughing at some jest. I would I knew w hat it was, and it might serve me in a time when jests are few.” That’s Kipling. And it’s not from “If.”
Not that lines that commit themselves to memory are necessarily the measure of great poetry, or that Olson should be ignored. I certainly don’t ignore Olson. But to be ignorant of one poet and scorn another? What’s a university for? There should be a clue in the name. The irony here is that Eliot. I believe, had a high regard for Kipling. Both were Nobel winners, no? For what that’s worth.
I taught Patchen, as the expression goes, to Intro. Lit. students for years. Not his experimental work, which a half century afterward writers did all over again, but not as well, thinking they’d pioneered it, but poems in isolation, just his name on mimeoed page, no history, just that old new criticism stuff, the text. “23rd Street Runs Into Heaven.” You know that poem? It ends “Supper is plain, but we are very wonderful.” He has the courage to write quiet, ordinary words, trusting that they still have the power, in spite of overuse, so that a reader can feel the impact of their original magic. Wonderful? full of wonder.
Get out the felt tips, boys and girls. Let’s illuminate those old words and make the world new and vibrant again, like it was in the beginning. As a teacher, without the dedication, ability or inclination, I was never a scholar. But I did wave my arms around a lot, pointing at doorways.
I was about five years older than many of those individuals in the mimeo revolution, which means something when two of those years were spent in the Army. That’s probably why I didn’t have much sympathy with the Kop Killer Krap. Blue collar background. Grew up on an industrial edge of Niagara Falls, New York. Saw the night sky shimmer with the glow from the open-hearth furnaces. I remember the trembling excitement I felt seeing this from my bedroom window, every one else in the house asleep. I believed that I was looking at the Northern Lights. I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but not that the plant was named Vanadium, that my father worked there for a time, that he died of cancer at forty-eight. I found out years later that Vanadium processed ore for some part of the Manhattan Project. Perhaps there was no connection. Nothing of the plant remains today, furnaces, buildings, everything gone. But I know where it was.
I worked in plants, too, at International Graphite and on the yard-gang at Pittsburgh Metallurgical, breaking up ore with a sledgehammer. I hunted for many years, mostly small game, kept rabbit hounds, coon hounds. I wrote about this. Do you think it impossible that a hunter could be respectful of nature? Years later my wife and I moved to the country , something we’d both wanted, but also riding on the crest of Mother Earth News and that whole nostalgic back-to-the-land wave that issued from the flower children. We raised livestock, kept horses, chickens, ducks, pigs, cattle. We heated the house, partially, with wood. Gradually, I stopped hunting. Still raise beef for friends and family. All farming is labor intensive. That’s a euphemism. Do you know what a pitchfork is? Can you run one of those? I’ve been running a pitchfork for over a quarter a century, an activity that keeps me connected to the fifth basic element.
Images of industry and the natural world have been a large presence in my writing since the start. Turning more directly to subject matter concerned with the environment underscores a long time interest. One essay published in newspapers locally: “Why I Want the Robert Moses Parkway Removed.” [The Robert Moses Parkway is a superhighway that separates The City of Niagara Falls, and surrounding areas, from The Niagara River] is now on websites ( www.niagaraheritage.org & www.nfwhc.org ) along with other activist writing. There’s a hunting element in the Parkway essay. It’s been a privilege to have perceptions influenced by sledgehammer, shotgun, pitchfork, and pen, my own misshapen little history of human development.
I write everything in longhand these days on lined white tablet paper, one side, while sitting at the kitchen table, with tea and smokes, music playing, usually after dark, I make these notations with a half smile, knowing they’re irrelevant, but remembering Dick Cavat interviewing writers, always asking such questions: “What kind of paper do you use? Pen, pencil, or typewriter?” There was a plaintive tone to his voice that suggested if only he could nail down the right artifacts, he, too, could be a writer. Or maybe that was how his voice sounded all the time.
The writing of poetry for me was comprised of selecting exact words to create images and making the right line breaks. This latter had general rules. Never, for example, break after an article, preposition or conjunction, unless... and other considerations based on rhythms, broken or otherwise, natural phrasing, and accumulations that should or could not be interrupted to advantage and so on, and these in dynamic tension and combination. It was in some part intuition and feel - and how it looked on the page.
This was before word processing, so each revision or version--once I counted fourteen--had to be pecked through the old Underwood. Oh, no, I liked it better how it was? or the third line should be broken after “obsessive,” I think. I want all those hours and years back, tacked on to the end of my life.
The culmination of these tinkerings and thematic focus comes together in the out-of-print Looking for Niagara. {Published by Slipstream Press, 1993, 120 pp, edition of 300.}
So, I’ve written four novels, three of which are worth a final edit. This is in the works. New writing is non-fiction, a book of various flailing chapters, entitled Niagara Digressions, maybe subtitled The Reflecting Pool. I am not sure yet. Perhaps Fiedler was right. I’m writing and hoping.
Around about in March of this year, when I thought about speaking to Bob Baxter for this spread in Underbeat, I sent him a bunch of questions. Some of them were, for example, like: What were your lasting impressions of poet d. a. levy?; What can you tell me about small press publishing in the 1960s?; How many cows do you have?; and What about Kenneth Patchen? Of course, in his most generous way, he wrote back the following, which is the Basinski interview with E. R. Baxter III. The spaces between the various sections are spaces in which questions were posed.
Responses to Questions Asked, Hinted at, Implied, Left Hanging, Etc.
by E. R. Baxter III
Incidentally, the little story I told you about Leslie Fiedler wasn’t quite complete. While he was saying what he said to me, he was slowly pushing a manuscript of mine across the tabletop toward me with his fingertips. With this added info, the depth of my stupidity really becomes apparent, doesn’t it?
So you begin to write at a very early age and everyone who reads is your potential audience, family, neighbor, friend, pen pal. But after a time you realize that putting those words into sentences and those into paragraphs one after the other is very hard work. “Ah, hah!” you say. “I’ll write poetry!”
This is akin to starting out as a carpenter and, realizing how hard it is to saw 2 x 4s straight across, deciding to become a brain surgeon. But that aside, the decision to write poetry dropped your audience to 1% of those who read, lower if your poetry turns out to be anything other than conventional.
For me, there was a slowly maturing recognition over 25 years in dawning, that what I wanted to write about was broader than the sudden insight, the illumination, those examined moments in the poetry of others I most admired. That, combined with the dismissive observations of a few more accomplished poets that my poetry was of a narrative/prosy nature caused me to admit that I wasn’t that good, really. I’m back to carpentry.
Other than what I read at The Poetry/Rare Books Collection, SUNY at Buffalo’s mimeo revolution celebration of d. a. levy’s 60th birthday party [November 2002--see Baxter’s In the Beginning in this issue Underbeat], I have two memories of him. The first is that he seemed diminished in Buffalo, smaller, intimidated, if not close to being frightened. Buffalo was bigger in some way then, more tug and shove in all directions. The image of him looking bewildered, shoulders hunched as we walked down Main Street a few blocks from the University is stuck in my mind. (I had an apartment above a Chinese laundry on Main--a genuine one, the owner was Chinese and my landlord--and before I left Buffalo or shortly after there was a Helpee Selfee laundry right next door.) This was not Cleveland, where he was recognized and loved. Not to be overly dramatic, I experienced a sense of shame then, which surfaces almost full strength when I think of it, because I was unable to introduce him in some way, somewhere, to some combined literary community audience, to tell them what a large contribution he was making to the little mag world, of art and experiment, poetry, publishing, and general American outrageousness. Such a combined literary community didn’t exist, of course, at UB (University of Buffalo) or anywhere else.
The second memory is, speaking of things American, for years some American rug makers produced, “oriental rugs,” a cheaply made version of the real thing. 1 believe these were very popular in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. They wore well, but the colors faded, and they continued their drab lives in old farmhouses, homes, flats and apartments across the country. On a visit to Cleveland, entering levy’s apartment, I saw a half dozen or more felt-tipped pens of bright inks, yellows, red, purple, green, scattered across the faded “oriental” rugs where levy and his girl friend, Dagmar, would stretch out and work on restoring the original designs. You like the image? I do.
The door to the littles opened to me in a number of ways to the best of my recollections. Mags like The Wormwood Review and The Beloit Poetry Journal, I think were listed in The Writer’s Market, an annually published directory available in public libraries. Sending for sample copies of these, or submitting, resulted in receiving dozens or more of other little mags and addresses (Wormwood often listed other mags) and additional submissions and the whole thing mushroomed until, finally, you are being solicited for submissions by Kop Killer, edited by, and who can forget these names, real or fictitious, Darlene Fife and Robert Head. [Fife and Head published the radical tabloid Nola Express in New Orleans.] I never submitted. I didn’t want to kill kops. Kops were my friends.
D. R. Wagner was another door opener to the littles for me. He first discovered Dustbooks’s The Directory of Small Press & Magazine Editors & Publishers, for starters. We grew up in essentially the same neighborhood, thought technically divided by a road. He said to me, read this, read this, you gotta read this, and dumped armloads of books in front of me, everything from On the Road to Gasoline. No he wasn’t a motor head.
So I had been writing little cramped rhyming poems about hunting and dogs and sending them off to The New Yorker magazine (Is it any wonder I later loved the library in Brautigan’s The Abortion?) Wagner was writing lyrical free verse poetry about dreams and waking up and other things. We shared our writing with one another. He was very enthusiastic when I’d write something better than what I’d been doing--you know those quantum leap-up poems that come from unknown places--and he published my Hunger after forming Press:Today:Niagara. It was letterpress, all those tiny lead-type letters set painstakingly by hand. That’s how much he wanted to do it, and so he was not only the door opener, but pulled me through it. When I got a poem accepted by Beloit Poetry Journal, he was more excited than I was. I remember him shouting out loud at the news.
Granted, that during the mimeo revolution, so called, there were tons of crap published, some few pounds of it mine (more weight could be attributed to me if I’d been more prolific), and self-serving drivel, political, anti-war, etc. Not that there hasn’t been brilliant anti-war or other politically driven poetry written--we all know better. But all of that aside, my general memories and impression of those full years that passed all too quickly are those of a great sharing and generosity of spirit, of kindness and cooperation and humor, a sharing of not only poetry , but of materials, paper, machines, staples, tape, paint, postage money--and of ideas. This didn’t always extend to policemen, presidents, and other poets. This was, after all, America, sometimes with a “k.”
But anyone who investigates the era w ill find, for example, poetry pages in mags coming from Cleveland with maps on the reverse side. Someone who worked at City Hall took the old maps being discarded, high quality paper, blank on one side. This was a necessity, not being cute, although the cut up maps turned out to be great--roads to somewhere on both sides of the page. Someone else did silk-screens for the mag, someone else begged use of a church mimeo. This, of course, was pre-email, pre-inkjet or laser printers and the like. It was the birth of desktop publishing, though, taking place in basements and bedrooms and kitchens and on living room floors with a lot of people pitching in. There was great flurry of poetry and correspondence and little mags floating across the continent (including Mexico and Canada) and beyond. Lots of contributor’s copies as pay, lots of complimentary copies, and exchange copies and copies to friends. The walk to the mailbox or the mail being delivered was the most exciting of things. To this day, my expectations rise as I go for the mail, and I haven’t submitted anything for publication in years, and the revolution’s come and gone years before that.
One of the mags I still have from those years is an edition of Sum, published by Carl Woideck [Sum published three issues in 1968 and was located in Sacramento, California]. Even the envelope he mailed it in is a piece of art, handmade from heavy tan paper and transparent tape. The outside lettering is neatly done in different colors, my name and address and his return in purple, a “First Class” in blue, a “Do Not Bend” in red, repeated larger in red on the reverse side. It’s postmarked Feb. 19, 1968. It took twelve cents worth of postage, stamps neatly affixed in a block, two 1-cent Andrew Jackson’s and two 5-cent George Washington’s. There were actually two editions of Sum in the envelope, one of them 5 1/2 x 8 1/2”, ten pages, with a dust cover yet, on which the pen and ink long-legged waterfowl of the inside cover is duplicated. If you’re interested, I checked this out recently, and it would cost 83 cents to mail the envelope today.
The other edition is 4 ¼ in. x 5 in, thirteen pages, with a heavy card stock cover, two-stapled saddle stitched, black abstract watercolor glued to the front. There are two foldout pages, a whimsical pen and ink drawing of a naked man sitting with a knee-supported table having tea with a large bird, and a long-lined poem by Carl that wouldn’t have fit across a single 4 1/4 in. page. Other contributors in this copy are Thom Szuter, Kent Taylor, and Hak and Jean Vogrin (pen and ink drawing, lyrics, music, and a poem.). The song lyrics and music are on the page facing the fold out pen and ink. “There’s a bird in my attic/ he’s rather erratic/ a blackbird with a yellow bill,” the song begins. They end up having tea together. Every time I think of it, I smile. I’m not a collector, but I treasure this little Sum. It encapsulates all those little mag years for me.
In university lit classes was where they fell at the feet of Eliot and Pound, but hadn’t heard of Kenneth Patchen, where they pondered Olson, but sneered at Kipling, the imperialist versifier. This was where Proprioception [an essay by Charles Olson] was a required text and “Gunga Din” was a racist joke. Can you quote me some Olson lines? Me neither.
“My son was killed while laughing at some jest. I would I knew w hat it was, and it might serve me in a time when jests are few.” That’s Kipling. And it’s not from “If.”
Not that lines that commit themselves to memory are necessarily the measure of great poetry, or that Olson should be ignored. I certainly don’t ignore Olson. But to be ignorant of one poet and scorn another? What’s a university for? There should be a clue in the name. The irony here is that Eliot. I believe, had a high regard for Kipling. Both were Nobel winners, no? For what that’s worth.
I taught Patchen, as the expression goes, to Intro. Lit. students for years. Not his experimental work, which a half century afterward writers did all over again, but not as well, thinking they’d pioneered it, but poems in isolation, just his name on mimeoed page, no history, just that old new criticism stuff, the text. “23rd Street Runs Into Heaven.” You know that poem? It ends “Supper is plain, but we are very wonderful.” He has the courage to write quiet, ordinary words, trusting that they still have the power, in spite of overuse, so that a reader can feel the impact of their original magic. Wonderful? full of wonder.
Get out the felt tips, boys and girls. Let’s illuminate those old words and make the world new and vibrant again, like it was in the beginning. As a teacher, without the dedication, ability or inclination, I was never a scholar. But I did wave my arms around a lot, pointing at doorways.
I was about five years older than many of those individuals in the mimeo revolution, which means something when two of those years were spent in the Army. That’s probably why I didn’t have much sympathy with the Kop Killer Krap. Blue collar background. Grew up on an industrial edge of Niagara Falls, New York. Saw the night sky shimmer with the glow from the open-hearth furnaces. I remember the trembling excitement I felt seeing this from my bedroom window, every one else in the house asleep. I believed that I was looking at the Northern Lights. I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but not that the plant was named Vanadium, that my father worked there for a time, that he died of cancer at forty-eight. I found out years later that Vanadium processed ore for some part of the Manhattan Project. Perhaps there was no connection. Nothing of the plant remains today, furnaces, buildings, everything gone. But I know where it was.
I worked in plants, too, at International Graphite and on the yard-gang at Pittsburgh Metallurgical, breaking up ore with a sledgehammer. I hunted for many years, mostly small game, kept rabbit hounds, coon hounds. I wrote about this. Do you think it impossible that a hunter could be respectful of nature? Years later my wife and I moved to the country , something we’d both wanted, but also riding on the crest of Mother Earth News and that whole nostalgic back-to-the-land wave that issued from the flower children. We raised livestock, kept horses, chickens, ducks, pigs, cattle. We heated the house, partially, with wood. Gradually, I stopped hunting. Still raise beef for friends and family. All farming is labor intensive. That’s a euphemism. Do you know what a pitchfork is? Can you run one of those? I’ve been running a pitchfork for over a quarter a century, an activity that keeps me connected to the fifth basic element.
Images of industry and the natural world have been a large presence in my writing since the start. Turning more directly to subject matter concerned with the environment underscores a long time interest. One essay published in newspapers locally: “Why I Want the Robert Moses Parkway Removed.” [The Robert Moses Parkway is a superhighway that separates The City of Niagara Falls, and surrounding areas, from The Niagara River] is now on websites ( www.niagaraheritage.org & www.nfwhc.org ) along with other activist writing. There’s a hunting element in the Parkway essay. It’s been a privilege to have perceptions influenced by sledgehammer, shotgun, pitchfork, and pen, my own misshapen little history of human development.
I write everything in longhand these days on lined white tablet paper, one side, while sitting at the kitchen table, with tea and smokes, music playing, usually after dark, I make these notations with a half smile, knowing they’re irrelevant, but remembering Dick Cavat interviewing writers, always asking such questions: “What kind of paper do you use? Pen, pencil, or typewriter?” There was a plaintive tone to his voice that suggested if only he could nail down the right artifacts, he, too, could be a writer. Or maybe that was how his voice sounded all the time.
The writing of poetry for me was comprised of selecting exact words to create images and making the right line breaks. This latter had general rules. Never, for example, break after an article, preposition or conjunction, unless... and other considerations based on rhythms, broken or otherwise, natural phrasing, and accumulations that should or could not be interrupted to advantage and so on, and these in dynamic tension and combination. It was in some part intuition and feel - and how it looked on the page.
This was before word processing, so each revision or version--once I counted fourteen--had to be pecked through the old Underwood. Oh, no, I liked it better how it was? or the third line should be broken after “obsessive,” I think. I want all those hours and years back, tacked on to the end of my life.
The culmination of these tinkerings and thematic focus comes together in the out-of-print Looking for Niagara. {Published by Slipstream Press, 1993, 120 pp, edition of 300.}
So, I’ve written four novels, three of which are worth a final edit. This is in the works. New writing is non-fiction, a book of various flailing chapters, entitled Niagara Digressions, maybe subtitled The Reflecting Pool. I am not sure yet. Perhaps Fiedler was right. I’m writing and hoping.
This interview was previously published in Hold.Com Underbeat Journal, issue # 2, July 2003. Fingerprintpress, Depford, NJ.
Used with permission.
Used with permission.
