Letter from an American poet

It was a poem by Dylan Thomas that opened my mind to the power of poetry, a poem whose title makes it flow smoothly into the current of poetry dredged by Walt Whitman.

I was 18 or 19, at the tail end of boyhood, when I found “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” a Dylan Thomas poem that repeats the title in the first line:

It gave me a jolt, but a jolt without exegesis – I had no clue what it told me.

What it showed me, however, is that man and nature are one. If Thomas had set out to tell me that, he would have failed. But, by way of a line of poetry, he introduced me to myself.

When that happened, I only knew I’d been stunned. I wouldn’t find out how or why for fifty years, until I read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Divinity School address, wherein he expands upon his brilliant insight:

Instruction precedes education

Precious little of what the sisters and brothers of three Catholic orders sought to pound through my thick skull (their words) ever found a home there, even though they pounded religiously from 1953 until 1967.

I do recall being told, during grammar school, that I must put ‘i’ before ‘e,’ except after ‘c’. Then a friendly high school nun made sure everybody knew that the Battle of Hastings was waged in 1066, the truth of which I didn’t find within, but the fact of which I still recall.

Just now, I’m drawing a blank on what else the monks were after at the boarding school I was sent to before college? But, that’s where my education began, thanks to Brother Roland’s reading list, which included such authors as Victor Hugo, James Joyce, Guy de Maupassant, Leo Tolstory, Gustave Flaubert, and Boris Pasternak. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky merits a line of his own just for the sound of his name. The plainness of my own name may account for my appreciation of their melodious monikers.

The sounds of their names amounted to a litany far more pleasing to the ear than the ones from scripture I heard every year during Lent. Despite the exotic circumstances and social practices of the people those writers portrayed, I kept seeing something of myself in story after story.

Boarding school also is where I first wrote for publication, as sportswriter of the school’s weekly newsletter. I had begun writing with a readership in mind in 1961, when I hammered out summaries of televised hockey games for my father to read after his usual Saturday night on the town with my mother.

Someone had given him an ancient Remington typewriter in trade for legal work; when typewritten, words looked like they could stand on their own two feet, compared to the lazy things they resembled when drawn by hand.

From such cloistered schooling, I was released into the open ocean of university life, in Boston in September, 1967, while in San Francisco, the Summer of Love sought to smother the fire of war. Before my sophomore year began, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy will have been assassinated.

Since I didn’t bother to read the small print appended to my university tuition bill, I had no idea I was obliged to attend a certain number of class sessions to qualify for course credit. Even though I had passing grades across the board, in March 1969, my only option was to withdraw from school, otherwise they would have flunked me out!

Thus I learn another lesson in the series learned since i-before-e: Thou shall read and abide by the small print. And I learned that lesson well, because when Uncle Sam wrote to tell me to report to my hometown draft board, for transportation to my pre-induction physical, I saw the small print that let me postpone the ordeal.

The small print said to go to the nearest draft board if some hardship kept me from the one in my hometown. And so, on the May day I had been ordered to present myself in Oswego, NY, I waltzed into a draft board office in Boston, and pled my case of hardship.

They were delighted to add me to their roster and eventually scheduled my pre-induction physical for late June. I’ve long since meditated on that stroke of luck, because it saved me from having to say no to LBJ & Co., because I flunked the physical and escaped the greedy hands of the country’s errant war machine.

As I learned later from a friend who had done the research to dodge the draft, there was documentation that revealed my good fortune was for being one-half inch too short for my weight, or one pound too heavy for my height.

That spring in Boston, I was a veritable machine of consumption, and on the night before the physical, may have broken the record for beer and popcorn consumed during a single screening of Von Ryan’s Express at a drive-in movie theatre!

Ah gluttony, my avenging and life-saving angel!

Get a Job!

Between dropping out in spring 1969 and re-enrolling at the state college in my hometown the following fall, I hitchhiked to California and worked a couple months in Yosemite, then hitched to Miami, New Orleans, and Houston, doing a myriad of Manpower jobs, from convention set-up at The Fountainbleau on Miami Beach, to cleaning barges on the Mississippi, and small-time non-union construction work in Houston.

That was enough to convince me I’d rather have people work for me, so I finished college and went to law school, but left after a year for reasons that don’t belong in this sketch.

By the time I joined the workforce, the public marketplace was firmly in the grip of the same forces responsible for the Vietnam war. After their longtime masters, the French, lost Vietnam to Germany at the outset of WWII, we tried and failed during the 1950s to help our original ally re-establish her colonial dominion in southeast Asia.

Soon after the reigns of American presidential power had been handed to LBJ, rays from every facet of life in America could be seen to radiate from the Pentagon. War makes it the artificial sun upon which the planners of the American enterprise wholly depend.

So much money is at stake that the planners seek to minimize uncertainty in the minds of citizens. They must be convinced of the righteousness of the economy they design, but otherwise made to understand its inevitability, to minimize grassroots input, protest, and dissent.

That’s a job for the moving image, not the printed word. What people read, they can mull over for as long as it takes, then decide one way or another on an issue. Not so with moving images; they short-circuit the mind and go straight to instinct and emotion. If Hitler had had TV at his disposal, he would’ve cemented his popularity ten years earlier.

I tried, but failed to squeeze my smooth, hip self into the rough, square holes of the marketplace. Following one snafu after another, and not long before the Social Security Administration began sending me monthly checks, I embraced my fate and began to ply the poet’s trade.

To begin at the beginning, I stared deep enough into memory to meet the boy who became the poet. He reminded me that, from the nighttime sounds of the nearby railroad, “the rhythm track of my green mind is laid.”

It led me to write Overture, with Locomotive, which portrays the boy at six, as he fledges into the world where Senator Joe McCarthy and lawyer Roy Cohn become two of the first people TV catapults to fame.

For all we know, those hearings also are what made Cohn the hero of a boy downstate, in Queens, for whom perception became reality, a mental disorder that must be incurable, because it’s not in the DSM.

In the early days of Eisenhower’s reign, more American households subscribed to a daily newspaper than owned a television set. Most Americans only read about politics in the autumnal run-up to elections.

By the time of the stunning success of the shooters in Dallas, however, the tables had been turned. No longer were the American people free to ignore politics; since then, it pours, like blood, through screens we’re helpless without. It is impossible, now, to ignore the public politicians and the private donors who make them omniscient.

And thus, I discover not only my calling, but also the function and direction of poetry. If Dylan Thomas wasn’t also drawn toward Walt Whitman’s home, as he certainly was toward American milk and honey, then his fellow British enfant terrible, Oscar Wilde had been.

Not only did Wilde make a pilgrimage to America, but he went straight to Whitman’s New Jersey house and planted a kiss full on the good grey poet’s lips! W.H. Auden, Seamus Heaney, and other old world poets have continued to flee home and feed in the new world, on American milk and honey.

In the other direction went T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. One felt so at home in the old world that he died in London, re-Christened an Anglican, while the other lost his mind there, and was nearly shot for treason.

After Ezra Pound’s stint as Mussolini’s mouthpiece, he was rescued by a posse of good American poets, which included his University of Pennsylvania classmate, William Carlos Williams.

Birth of Hate Speech?

We Americans sprung Pound from an Italian prison and let him spend old age in a locked psychiatric facility. Whether or not that extraordinary act of charity inspires current efforts to outlaw various words and phrases, a.k.a. “hate speech,” also is beyond the scope of this missive.

While Mr. Eliot devoted himself to aristocratic decadence in The Wasteland, the decline and fall of inauthentic aristocracy in America was portrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby.

Whereas the depressive, perfumed odor of war and decadence overtook Eliot, Pound, and Fitzgerald, the perpetual renewal of spring, and all the promise apparent in the birth of every baby, led America’s pediatrician poet, William Carlos Williams, to publish Spring and All, the following year.

It is no accident that America’s once famous baby doctor, Benjamin Spock, was the only prominent member of the American Medical Association to openly oppose the war in Vietnam.

Because many in the medical profession receive training in exchange for time served in the armed forces, the profession is loathe to bite the hand that feeds it. Doctors prefer their portrayal as lovable, miracle-working, party animals, such as Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John, nor do they disown the likes of Nurse Rached, who struggle to keep us properly dosed and on the beaten path.

Nor is it widely known that the republican fund-raising tool of abortion is the product, not of any religion, but of the first A.M.A. convention, which promulgated America’s first statutory prohibition of abortion.

Williams published Spring and All in 1923, the year after Eliot published The Wasteland. Today, his revolutionary little book is unknown, while yet millions of people have made the acquaintance of both Jay Gatsby and J. Alfred Prufrock.

Oxford Don

I’d been plying the poet’s trade about fifteen years by 2012, when I chanced into a scant acquaintance with Donald Hall. In the early 1950s, when I was playing on the railroad tracks, he spent a week in Rome interviewing Ezra Pound. A few years earlier, T.S. Eliot had advised him, over tea in London, to pack woolen underwear because it’s cold at Oxford, where he was bound, following Eliot’s path there from Harvard.

Donald Hall’s own boy-born love of language, coupled with his father’s profound unhappiness in the family dairy business, had led him to declare, at 12, his determination to become a poet.

With nothing but the innocence of youth available to guide him, Hall thought school was where poet’s learned their trade. And so his father sent him to prepare for Harvard at Exeter, where an English teacher sought to save him from a wasted life in poetry, which he thought Hall had no talent for.

I am grateful Don Hall ignored that teacher, and continued to Harvard, where lifelong friendships with Robert Bly and George Plimpton began.

When my poem Afterparty was included in a book of poems by poets he’d influenced, in 2019, a year after his death, I was invited to read it at a bookstore in Cambridge, where I met the son of that Exeter teacher.

Hall and Bly were daily correspondents, until dementia silenced Bly around age 80. Hall’s reunion with Plimpton at Oxford led to him being named the first poetry editor of the Paris Review, co-founded by Plimpton and Peter Matthiesson, whose handlers at the C.I.A. had ordered him to find a way to keep an eye on American ex-pats.

What better way than to encourage them to share their poems, stories, and drawings?

Here is the poem, mentioned above, from the depths of my memory:

The title is an homage to William Carlos Williams, whose poem Overture to a dance of locomotives, was included in the 1913 Armory Show, which, by attracting the leading artists of Europe, led to the recognition of New York as the new capital of the art world. Williams’ poem can be seen as a textual representation of a more famous work included in that show, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, the Marcel Duchamp painting that shocked the immature American establishment.

With Eliot busy at his editor’s desk, working for Faber and Co., and Pound putting himself at the beck and call of W.B. Yeats, James Joyce and others over there, Williams was home delivering babies, and re-imagining the poetry of America’s second century.

Only now do I see that the Dylan Thomas poem that kindled the poet in me, is also apparent in a poem at the start of Hall’s career. My Son, My Executioner, found in Exiles and Marriages, his first poetry collection, published in 1955.

America’s popular republican magazine of the era, TIME, chose to launch Hall’s book into popular orbit with a favorable review. Hall is the only poet with the aristocratic Henry Luce to thank for leap-frogging him over his sisters and brothers in the poetry trade.

Henry Luce and the effect of TIME on American poetry

Someone fated to follow Hall into the business of poetry, is Lewis Turco, who got turned on by the review he read in TIME, which he subscribed to during an early 1950s stint in the U.S. Navy. After his time at sea, Turco got an English degree at the University of Connecticut, where his poetry mentor was John Malcolm Brinnin.

Brinnin would go on to become the friend and agent of Dylan Thomas during his three American tours, including the famous, final one, when he is supposed to have slugged back eight whiskeys at the White Horse Saloon in Greenwhich Village before dropping dead.

Turco would go on to publish The Book of Forms, a Handbook of Poetics and to establish the creative writing program at SUNY Oswego. I met Turco when I took the classes in that program before getting a BA in English in 1973.

From 1974 onward, the courses I took would have resulted in a BA in Creative Writing, which puts Oswego in the first ten of the now many hundreds of institutions that accept tuition in exchange for telling would-be writers what expierence tells them free of charge!

It was the fraud conviction of Bennett Cerf’s Famous Writer’s School, in 1970, that led to the discovery of the cash cow of creative writing as a course of study, for a population that already favors screens over books, and food from trucks, gas stations, and drive-up windows to mom’s home cookin’.

It was only after I had taken all the creative writing courses but still needed credits to finish my degree, that I asked Professor Turco if I could do an independent study of Dylan Thomas. His reply, a week later, was that he knew too little of Thomas to be any help to me.

When I asked him about it a few years ago, he told me that he never again spoke to Brinnin after he declined an invitation to address Turco’s students at a program he had begun in Cleveland in 1962.

That should be all you need to know about the cynical growth in the numbers of institutions that profess to the care and feeding of inchoate imaginations.

But if it isn’t, look up the condemnation of Professor Hall that Professor Turco published in The Hollins Critic, a few weeks after Hall’s death. It’ll make you sad for Turco, soured simply by Hall’s growth as a poet, if not by Hall’s eventual Poet Laureateship. After Turco set out to make poems they way Hall made them, Hall had the temerity to write in other ways, and Turco could never forgive him, even after death.

It wasn’t until my third visit with Hall in New Hampshire, in June 2017, that I admitted my youthful mistake at SUNY Oswego. With a smile, the man who turned out to be as helpful to me as any Oxford don could’ve been, let out this loud guffaw: “Oh, Turco hates me!”

At his own valediction five months later, when the University of New Hampshire hosted his final public reading, Hall reminded us that Walt Whitman’s poems remain unsurpassed in English literature, a judgment I think Dylan Thomas was in agreement with.

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July, 2024.