Richard Hugo’s poems, and his peerless book of lectures and essays on poetry and writing, Triggering Town, have been influential in my approach to coaxing, writing and refining a poem.
Say Your Life Broke Down. The poet, Richard Hugo.
Painting by Greg Keeler
I'm re-reading Painting Water, a yet-unpublished novel by Greg Keeler.
My head is 10 inches beneath the flight path of a very purposeful swath of honey bees.
Since this swarm arrived from Boulder two weekends ago, I have been mesmerized. Common interest rules the hive. Bees have a genetically hard-wired purpose. They work for the common good, then die. It'd brutally unceremonious.
In Trash Fish: A Life, Greg Keeler longs for the clarity of purpose a water ouzel has as as it dips it head and dives into a chilly Montana river.
"If I knew my life like an ouzel knows a river, instead of longing for rehearsals, I might wander in and out of surfaces and alien environments, at home with water, air and earth. Love would be as easy as diving off a rock, and death would be as familiar as the moon seen from underwater. Yes, in ouzel mode, I might shoulder the pain and wreckage I've inflicted on myself and those I love as an ouzel shoulders the current - not so much as a burden but as a way of staying in place where everything else is moving."
While Greg is shouldering pain and wreckage in ouzel mode, I am in bee mode – more specifically, drone mode -- hoping to find purpose beyond the male end of procreation.
I am taking my time re-reading Painting Water – savoring it like I let dark chocolate melt in my mouth, or like I sip my way through the layers of a Speyside scotch. I savor the occasional scotch, like I savor an emotionally raw memoir like Trash Fish, or a melancholically lyrical and brilliant novel like Painting Water.
If I had to choose an excerpt from Painting Water that encapsulates my profound connection to Greg Keeler's work, it would be from the preface of the book. In the preface, the novel's protagonist Clinton asks for the reader's indulgence saying,
“...I have never been successful in the charting of my intentions and the life that eluded them, either in theory or in practice.”
Do you sense a correlation between small-minded, dogmatic religiosity and just about every truly evil event you've witnessed or read about?
It's my measured, but unvarnished perception that dogmatic fundamentalists are fundamentally fucking shit up all over this hairball.
My buddy Garry Smith gave me a bottle of George Dickel Tennessee whiskey the other day.
Me:What's this for? Garry:For turning me on to Greg Keeler.
That is, rocky mountain raconteur, poet, essayist, biographer, painter, professor, and fisherman Greg Keeler (cf. Trash Fish: A Life). Here's a video of Greg singing one of my favorite tunes, an original composition called Left Behind.
At the end of the tune, Greg ceremoniously kills the shot of Dickel sitting on the table. Greg's escapades with cult-novelist Richard Brautigan (Trout Fishing in America) were often kick-started by George Dickel as recounted in Greg's closely personal memoir, Waltzing with the Captain.
Greg Keeler was my creative writing teacher in 1980. He was an endearingly awkward, untenured professor in those days who indulged a few of us upstarts by reading poetry side-by-side with us at the now defunct Union Hall Coffee House on Main Street in Bozeman, Montana.
Greg's poems were ridiculously superior to the self-absorbed, half-baked drivel the rest of us dished up (e.g., River Men), nonetheless Greg treated us like comrades-in-words.
River Men Bozeman, 1980
From manly notions careening down
Ejaculatory duct in kayaks, from
Mount Everest to Katmandu waving
Nature awaits our wiggling semen
Seductively clad in lugged soles
And housed in ultra light tents
Idiot minoes swimming to
Beat the river to the rock
