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| Gene Ruggles and Shirley Kaufman in Petaluma |
Gene Ruggles was an old friend of my mom's from North Beach. My mom, she got around, sometimes she'd bring her City friends home to meet my grannie and me in Forest Knolls. Gene Ruggles and my grannie got on like a house afire. She would make Irish sodabread and brew a pot of strong tea liberally laced with Irish whiskey, which she kept hidden in the bedroom closet, for Gene.
They'd talk of things Irish and politics until the sun slipped behind Mt Barnabe to bathe in the ocean. Then, when the stars studded the sky, my mother and Gene would stagger down Arroyo Road, half-lit, to Sir Francis Drake Blvd. more than a mile away, and hitch back to the mysterious City. Sometimes I wonder what they talked about as they wandered down that dark country road to civilization.
When I became a practicing publishing poet, ca. 1980, in Forestville, Gene had moved to Petaluma, we became reacquainted at poetry readings, and I occasionally produced a few readings for him at Sonoma State, Cotati Cabaret, and for the Russian River Writers' Guild, but he was a liability—falling down drunk, so I never knew what to expect. No one could keep him sober. It was always a harrowing experience.
Gene used to call me up late at night, out of the blue, roaring drunk on Red Mountain, to have a little chat. One time he called to tell me that Joseph Brodsky had died. The evening's libation had run dry, so he sought solace over the phone. Brodsky wasn't that old, he said. Only 55. Heart failure, he said, but his stout heart never failed him. Nor did Gene's tired heart fail him until he was evicted from the Petaluma Hotel, right after his open heart surgery.
After Gene died, everyone jumped on the poetry bandwagon producing memorial readings and benefits for him, they, who had largely ignored him during his lifetime, and didn't offer help when he was down and out and desperately needed their support. They were pompously making the poetry rounds, as if it were a badge of honor to host a reading in honor of Gene. It was as if he were more important to them dead, than alive.
Last time I read with Gene was at the Cafe International, in 1997. It was too soon after my car accident. I had PTSD, and I couldn't control my breath (a punctured lung), so necessary for reading poetry aloud to a large audience. Stars on the edges of my eyes, I didn't know whether to pass out, or run for the hills. It was a long time before I was fully healed.
I dropped out of the poetry scene. I don't think I ever saw Gene again after that reading. Of course, because I had fallen off the poetry map, no one even thought to invite me to read at Gene's memorial readings. So I never got closure.
Sometime, late at night, when the phone rings, and there's no one there, I think it's Gene on the other end of the line, calling up to say hello.
Compiled 4/7/18. I posted this on the year of his death because it made more sense to do so. Not wanting to face his death, I procrastinated for more than a decade. I can't explain it. Perhaps he was too close to me to get the distance I needed. I scanned a photo of his and the floodgates opened. Time to put it to rest.
SF Gate Obit
Delia Moon's interview THE LIFE STORY GENE RUGGLES LIFE STORY from an interview,"A room of one's own: Pioneer poet Eugene Ruggles faces hard times with illness, search for a new home" - John Geluardi, Special to The Chronicle Friday, May 28, 2004. He was raised on a Michigan dairy farm and moved to San Francisco after finishing ...
The Poetry of Gene Ruggles - Facebook
Poetry Foundation: two poems: The White Goddess, and Poem at Sea on My Thirtieth Birthday
Gene Ruggles' book, "Lifeguard in the Snow," (Pitt Poetry Series 1977) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, is available at AbeBooks, his posthumous book (2010), Roads of Bread: The Collected Poems of Eugene Ruggles, is available on Amazon.
This moving collection of poems includes work from the late Ruggles's various collections (The Lifeguard in the Snow; Spending the Sun; Enough) as well as a handful of unpublished and stirring love poems. Ruggles's oeuvre is shaped by his deeply felt, evolving experience, with poems ranging from the explosive "Eros" of the late 1960s to the more recent "Inscription for the Door," in which he acknowledges no enemies, only "some friends who are late." Ruggles was a poet of the people, and his early work set in the Michigan farmland of his youth reflects a deep pathos. In "An Old Man on the Bum Sitting in an All-Night Detroit Diner," he writes, "He lets the counter drift higher/ around his shoulders,/ and then raises with care/ completely with both hands/ the white warm cup/ like a breast and drinks." Impressions meld into epiphanies concerning war, the masses ("Who will speak/ for the simple and dumb/ with their voices/ in shoes and gloves/ all their lives/ hanging onto their homes"), and small, lovely moments between men and women. Ruggles possesses a compelling social vision and workingman's sensibility.
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