i love words. i am a lover of words. this means we sleep together, move our bowels in one another's company, exchange hot glances, and sometimes squabble.
my mother introduced me to poetry. she has a doctorate in "the humanities" whatever those are....she published her poetry in her hippie days as a grad student at oklahoma state. and we read some charles dickens when i had chickenpox back in 5th grade. deep impressions!
i started writing my own "poetry" when i was 17 and girlfrisky. they are embarassingly bad by my own reckoning. trite, cliched, and not even sophomoric yet....but the object of those affections, a girl named gay (really) let me cover her bedroom wall in those scribblings of my senior year.
my family's home WAS in the country, outside of stillwater. her home was a few miles further out. on several occasions i'd sneak into her bedroom window at night to be with her, rise before dawn, romeo style. never got caught. one night, going out there, cop cars were blocking the highway...a guntoting killer was on the loose. really. he'd shot a convenience store clerk and was on the run, in the hills around our home in payne county.
he was found hiding in a barn days later, across the highway from our home. i walked out that day and saw more police and their big toy cars than ever in my life, lining the highway. there must have been 20-30 squad cars, and a helicopter flapping the sky. they gunned him down, alright.
so anyway, i kept at writing poetry my first horrid year at OSU. the year of my parents divorce. my poetry improved, though the pain saturated all i did. when ann ewing and i moved to lawrence, kansas, my heart focused on writing more intently. i was away from home!
the first poem i ever submitted was accepted and published. it is "in the hammersmith garage," published in The Allegheny Review, an annual anthology of undergraduate literaturd....whatever that is...
and then KU gave me some smarmy award and good cash for the poem. but i didn't become a poetry major ha ha ha. no, i read and read and wrote and read, becoming a well rounded square from oklahoma. i published here and there in a few literary rags. my favorite mag, now defunct as most seem to go, was CALIBAN. Lawrence r. smith,editor i believe. my poem, "hairbrain" was about ann having brain surgery for a ann/u/rism. she had long, fine, straight blondish hair.
she got a punko hairdoo and they took care of her brain, thank you.
when i graduated with an english degree, i had been accepted at Columbia University andBrown, two grad writing programs that didn't require a GRE test. duh, why should word/artist/poets be judged on such limited terms? i decided to move to san francisco instead of more whipwhip read read school.
and with all the time in the world, i wrote. and wrote. crazier, longer.
the last poem i sent out for publication was to The Exquisite Corpse. i'd met codrescu in lawrence, sat with him at the bottleneck during the river city reunion, a beatnik get together featuring burroughs, ginsberg, creely, snyder, di prima, waldman etc etc. i'll go into my ginsberg stories later. anyway, the corpse didn't publish the whole poem, it ended up in their BODYBAG where a few lines out of context made for a disillusioned poetboy=me.
screw publishing! and to heck with even sharing! i used to read at cafe lena in portland in the early 90s. that was a fun scene. certainly a scene. then i moved out of the city into a schoolbus with my baby surreal and her momma becca. selling our jewelry at the portland sat. market on the weekends, "in the sticks" the rest of the week.
which reminds me: "burnt stick poems." that is one codrescu liked
"we're farmers, not men farming/i should go into computers or health care/the fields of tommorow..."
i wrote that with an actual burnt stick on some paper while camping in the gila natl. forest. taking slightly from whitman i think he thinked.
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