April is....

The cruelest month according to T.S. Eliot, and it's National Poetry Month, and it's also half over -- or there are still two weeks and two days left, depending on your perspective and whether you're a poem-loving pessimist or an optimist. A poet voted Class Pessimist and Greatest Wit in high school was Kenneth Fearing (1902-1961), who has a kind of restless stream of language, thoughts and moments quality to his work. Fearing also wrote a novel called The Big Clock, which was made into a 1948 film noir classic starring Ray Milland and Charles Laughton and which is definitely worth seeing. This is a portrait of Kenneth Fearing circa 1935 done by artist Alice Neel (currently at NYC's Museum of Modern Art), and here are some excerpts from Fearing's "Love 20¢ The First Quarter Mile:"

All right. I may have lied to you and about you, and made a few

pronouncements a bit too sweeping, perhaps, and possibly forgotten
to tag the bases here or there,
And damned your extravagence, and maligned your tastes, and libeled
your relatives, and slandered a few of your friends,
O.K.,
Nevertheless, come back....

Because I forgive you, yes, for everything.
I forgive you for being beautiful and generous and wise,
I forgive you, to put it simply, for being alive, and pardon you, in short, for being you.

Because tonight you are in my hair and eyes,
And every street light that our taxi passes shows me you again, still you,
And because tonight all other nights are black, all other hours are cold
and far away, and now, this minute, the stars are very near and bright.

Come back. We will have a celebration to end all celebrations.
We will invite the undertaker who lives beneath us, and a couple of
boys from the office, and some other friends.
And Steinberg, who is off the wagon, and that insane woman who lives
upstairs, and a few reporters, if anything should break.

without a trace

Lew Welch was one of the Beat Generation's West Coast members, starting out studying Literature with other Beat poets Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen at Reed College. He had a nervous breakdown in Chicago, pieced it together then worked as an advertising copywriter, then left it all to focus on his poetry and leading a truer life. He drove a cab in San Francisco and wrote some fine poems about the experience, and he also drove Jack Kerouac from San Francisco to New York in 1959--a long road trip that involved many stopovers and drinking binges and crazy poetic creations. In Big Sur, Kerouac's novel about his California sojourns, Lew Welch is Dave Wain, a lanky, loquacious, redheaded free spirit who drives a jeep named Willie all over the place. Kerouac (Jack Duluoz in the novel) notes that while Neal Cassady a/k/a Cody a/k/a Dean Moriarty had been the great cross-country driver to inspire On the Road, Cody still had driverly jealousy about his rival Dave's skill behind the wheel:

[Dave] comes blattin down to the bar in his jeepster driving that marvelous way he does (once he was a cab-driver) talking all the time and never making a mistake, in fact as good a driver as Cody altho I cant imagine anybody being that good and asked Cody about it the next day -- But old jealous drivers always point out faults and complain, "Ah well that Dave Wain of yours doesnt take his curves right, he eases up and sometimes even pokes the brake a little instead of just ridin that old curve around on increased power, man you gotta work those curves...."

Towards the end of his life, Lew Welch was starting to come into his own as a poet, but issues with alcohol and depression kept pulling him down into darker places. He disappeared into the California woodlands with a rifle in 1971 at the age of 44; he had left a suicide note, but his body was never found. It's highly unlikely, but since nothing of Lew was ever recovered we can always hope he just felt the need to walk away from a flawed life and didn't pull the trigger. Maybe he even started fresh under the name Dave Wain and he's 81 and living in Costa Rica and/or surfing the Internet right now in a quiet place. Or maybe he just vanished into the proverbial thin air and became part of the landscape he loved so much.

the ball turret gunner

(WWII veteran John Gillard next to a B-24 with a ball turrett gunner. Click for link to original webpage.)

When I was in the 10th grade, we encountered a poem called The Death of The Ball Turret Gunner. It was in a heavy paperback anthology with very thin tissue paper pages that were always tearing, and there was a brief paragraph about World War II pilots and the American poet Randall Jarrell who had served in the War and how it had given him a great deal of writing material. We all read it, didn't understand it, then moved on. World War II was at that time something vague and past that our grandparents or older relatives talked about, and the men who'd fought never really confided what they'd been through unless it was privately to other men.

If you've been watching Ken Burns' The War on PBS and you saw the segment on the pilots who dropped bombs over France and Germany and fought in the air, The Death of The Ball Turret Gunner will make perfectly horrible sense. I don't know if they mentioned the poem during the show because I missed some of it and I am not living in the modern DVR world, but one of the veterans even noted how the ball turret area forced a soldier to be packed in with his knees up around his ears, in the belly of the plane, almost in a fetal position.

This same veteran interviewed said that they'd been fired on and the plane's pilot was killed, and he was in this strange ball turret section below bleeding for hours. His own blood froze because the temperature was minus 30 at such high altitude, and he wondered while floating in limbo like that whether he'd ever survive. His name was Earl Burke and as he was talking I remembered The Death of The Ball Turret Gunner from years ago and finally understood it. And maybe that's the function of a lot of poetry taught in high school -- to create a consciousness of something that you're not going to be able to fathom when you're 15, but it might just stay in your mental archives for however long it takes for someone else's words and your reality to intersect.

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

The Death of The Ball Turret Gunner, Randall Jarrell

wcw

Today would have been the birthday of the great William Carlos Williams (WCW) -- slight amount of bias there but I do love him. I also like how the first line of WCW's Brittanica entry reads:

U.S. poet who succeeded in making the ordinary appear extraordinary....

WCW was a doctor in the small city of Rutherford, New Jersey. His medical practice influenced his poetry and gave him a keener sense of humanity, and while Rutherford was close enough to Brooklyn and Manhattan to allow WCW to visit frequently and be part of the city's artistic energy, it was also still fairly rural at that time. This gave WCW some mental and physical breathing room, so that he could truly look at a patch of Queen Anne's lace or white chickens and red wheelbarrows and immortalize them in his own unique way. And even though if you note how WCW's place of birth and death are both Rutherford, New Jersey, he clearly traveled to many other places beyond through his work. And what he told us about his own small world was fascinating as well.

The rose is obsolete

but each petal ends in

an edge,

the double facet cementing the grooved

columns of air--

William Carlos Williams - b. September 17, 1883

d. March 4, 1963

Rutherford, New Jersey

days and moments

Poet, novelist, short story writer, critic and translator Cesare Pavese was born today in 1908 in Turin, Italy. Cesare's life was troubled due to romantic disappointments and he ultimately committed suicide, but his writings show a great love of life and nature beyond the pain and a wry sense of humor.

This is Cesare lighting his pipe--quite a lean, intriguing-looking fellow. The photo is from the official City of Turin website, which has more information on Cesare Pavese and clearly is very proud of him being one of Turin's native sons. I always think that not many people in the U.S. know about Pavese, but then I just noticed a picture of a little boy making his way through a hay bale maze in this month's issue of Country Living magazine with the quote:

We don't remember days,

we remember moments.

Cesare Pavese