Remembering Lew Welch

There's been a bit of a buzz on Facebook lately about Beat poet Lew Welch. Poet/guitar maker, L. Layne Russell posted a link from PennSound and I found myself listening to audio bytes of Lew's poems and writing a small memory fragment on David Meltzer's wall. I realized I'd never written about that memory as there wasn't very much to it. No context by which to frame it other than our family names.

But then the little bits of Lew fragments began to add up into a strange constellation of words wanting reassembly. Like Brodsky, I'm "caught up by the relentless centrifugal nature of language." So I guess I have David Meltzer's Two-Way Mirror to blame for this wee blogeen. Go raibh maith agat! They are so few and far between.

David wrote on his wall: "Lew was mentor & friend & we all miss him & keep waiting for him to buzz the bell & visit & listen to Lester Young & knock back a fifth of something strong & then say goodnight & split."

Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine:
people live in one another’s shadows.

My mother, nee Maureen Reilly, then, Maureen Hurley, who chucked out all her given and married names, and went by the stage name, Kellé Hurley, and later, Kellé Green, as the name Maureen Hurley was already taken at SAG. She was a Project Artaud artist-painter, an actor, fey poet, and friend of Bobby Kaufman, the first poet who was reputed to have been called a "Beatnik." (Thanks to the press in Herb Cane's weekly column, the moniker stuck).

My mother occasionally hung out with the Beats in North Beach but they were really an exclusive bad boy's club. No women need apply. Many women who later aligned themselves with the Beats were ex-girlfriends and hangers-on. She was no one's girlfriend. She was her own woman. (I once saw a photo in a coffee table book, of my mysterious mother dressed in a striped Marseilles style sailor shirt and black capri pants. Several Beat poets and artists are standing on a street corner. But she's standing off to one side, by a street post, as if not quite with the group, slipping out of the confines of the frame and time. But she was like that.)

I was raised—not by my mother, but by my Irish grandmother who hailed from Bantry Bay, County Cork—out in the west country, in the wilds of Forest Knolls, which in those days, was light years from Fairfax, let alone, San Francisco.

We lived in an red iron oxide stained house perched on railroad ties; it had a summer porch with copper screens and windows salvaged from St. Vincent's School for Boys. It sat alone on a southwestern slope above the watershed of Arroyo Creek on Barranca Road.

My grandmother named the land Coom an-nÓr, the Hill of Gold, with twinned live oaks lining the gateway. Our place looked remarkably like my grandmother's lost family farm in Bantry. Hence the name.

Living out so far in the country in the late 1950s without public transport or a car, meant we were fairly well isolated, and dependent upon neighbors and relations to go Over the Hill (White's Hill) into Fairfax for shopping, or out to Point Reyes, where my doctor, Dr. Whitte (the poet), lived. (But I didn't find that out until years later). But the land was good to us, it fired and fed the imagination.

My grandfather had died a few years before, of throat cancer so I was my grandmother's sole companion. They sold the City victorian on 131 Third Avenue after he died. Forest Knolls was always our country home since the early '20s, we were Old Marin. My grandfather bought the house back in 1910 and the two other lots later from a railroad man who kept his silver under the floorboards. We had thirteen acres straight up a steep coastal hill replete with its own dolmen and artesian spring, facing westward towards Mt. Barnabe, was home.

During the Great Depression, my family lived in Forest Knolls year round, with my grandfather commuting into San Francisco by train and by ferry. The train tracks were all pulled up during WWII for the steel. We used to love hiking and riding along the level railroad beds. No greasebush meant no ticks.

Anyway, one bright afternoon, this yellow checker cab came bounding up our long dirt driveway, lurching and leaping the potholes like a wild pony. The white cab sign perched on the roof, like a nurse's cap. Maybe it was a Red Cross rescue mission. Who was being rescued will never be answered in this lifetime.

We rarely had visitors. In those days, there was very little traffic in the San Geronimo Valley. In those days, it was so quiet, you could hear the progress of a lone car shifting into third gear up the long mile stretch of Arroyo Road from Sir Francis Drake, the highway that bisected The Valley.

We were trapped on an island lost in time and place, caught somewhere between a metaphoric incarnation of Appalachia, the Ozarks and the Azores. We were a backwash of immigrants and welfare families. Not part of Marin proper. The Point Reyes National Seashore was still working ranches, not an urban escape route.

Seeing a cab this far out in the wilderness was akin to seeing a mirage or maybe seeing the bus, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (but neither Priscilla nor the Magic Bus had yet been born—there's a story about that too.) In those days, there was an unwritten rule: a San Francisco cabbie didn't cross the Golden Gate Bridge. Ever. Besides, there was a $50 surcharge. A bloody fortune in the 1950s and '60s. If my mom had paid that cab fare, it would've taken her SSI checks for the next six months.

Whenever my crazy mom got her SSI check, we could expect a visit, so it must've been at the beginning of a month. What month, I couldn't tell you. Or what year. Or whether it was spring, or fall, but it felt like it was a Sunday afternoon in the fall. Perhaps because my grandmother was lying on the couch reading the Sunday paper, or because it was sunny and there was something evocative about looking up at that indefatigable blue sky of childhood so irrevocably linked to memory that will haunt me forever.

The cab pulled around the Bishop pine at the bend by the big live oak into the turn-around in front of our house and came to a sliding halt at our front door. A puff of dust. My mom and a tall fellow unfolded themselves from the car. My grandmother looked out the kitchen window and said, "Oop, it must be the beginning of the month. Here's your mother." She put the kettle on.

In our house, the ritual of tea was required to properly welcome all visitors, whether they were family, friends or strangers. Fill the kettle to the top with spring water from the tap. Bring the water to a full rolling boil, scald the big teapot, measure in a rounded teaspoon of loose Irish tea (McGraths, Barry's or Lyons will do), one for each guest. Don't forget to put in an extra spoonful for the pot. Reboil the water. Fill teapot to brim. Brew 5 minutes.

Mom and the cabbie, Lew Welch came in and settled in on the other couch by the window; my grandmother got up from her couch, stooped over the tea tray atop old Life magazines and the Sunday paper scattered on the heavy octagonal oak card gaming table, with sawed off legs cut down low to coffee table size. As my grannie poured tea, it was the music of running water and ancient healing wells. My mom had resurfaced the"coffee" table with an awful gold and white mottled faux marble finish, and in the middle of that gold lake, a large crescent black and gold moon shaped ashtray floated; it matched the painted black legs. Very homegrown '50s moderne.

Scores of escaped cigarette butts had burned and scarred the table surface so that it puckered up like tiny craters. But a permanent layer of newspapers hid them from sight. Besides, over the decades, the original oak surface had been burned so many times it looked like a herd of tiny black feet had trompled across it.

What made that oak table really great, was being able to put both your feet up on it, and kick back. It was funny to watch a guest realize that he was expected to put his feet on the table—thinking he'd died and gone to heaven. Someone said those old oak tables were made heavy on purpose so that no irate gambler who lost a fortune at a bad hand of cards, could tip it over in a rampage. It was made to keep gamblers honest. It was so thick, it could probably stop a bullet too. I sat on one corner and watched my mom and Lew chat.

My grandmother poured the properly brewed Irish tea into big mugs, mixing it with milk and sugar, the spoon beat out a melodious rhythm like the clapper of a small bell— like the ones the altar boys rang during the mass. Lew was in luck. There were thick wedges of her famous sodabread hot out of the oven, slathered with butter too. He settled back with a jailhouse mug of tea in hand. Put his feet on the table and kicked back while the Bushmills was released from its prison of closet and shoes to baptize and benedict their cups.

Conversation droned on, sonorous as bees converging on the hive. My grandmother launched into yet another long diatribe about the ancient Celts or politics and such…. Her index finger punctuated each point. My grandmother's maiden name was Walsh. She was busy telling Lew that Walsh and Welsh/Welch were all the same name, meaning the Welshmen who came into Ireland with Strongbow during the Norman Conquest (1169) and settled in Wexford and Bantry.

By the second cuppa tea, we were practically cousins in her telescoping of time. She was deep into the abduction of Dervorgilla, a Breifne chieftain's wife (Tiernan O'Rourke), by Dermot MacMorrough and his traiterous deed which led to Ireland's downfall and played her into the hands of King Herry II of England.

At the creek of Baginbun, Ireland was lost and won.

Welch-Norman lord, Richard FitxGilbert de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, AKA Richard Strongbow (moniker for Welch longbow archers), had fallen out of favor with Henry and saw the invasion of Ireland as a way to curry his back into Henry's good graces. Strongbow's forced marriage to Dermot's daughter Aiofe and the fall of (Viking) Wexford in 1170 pretty much sealed Ireland's fate; when Dublin fell, she would be forever wedded and chained to England.

The diatribe of Cromwell the antiChrist, was up next. My grannie was on a roll. We were well beyond the Pale. My attention wandered, I was a child, and I wanted to play outside, so I don't remember much else.

What I do remember was looking up at Lew; he was a tall, thin cool drink of water, with his auburn hair slicked back, looking so much like my uncles, I thought we were related. They all had the same pointed widow's peak, freckles, and a toothy Irish grin. Lew looked like a cross between Uncle Myles (who had recently died of melanoma) and Uncle John. We were down to two men. Lew was a shoe-in.

But Lew's widow's peak was more pronounced like Uncle Bill's. He looked closest to an old picture of my Uncle Feilim on horseback, but I never met my Uncle Feilim as he died at 17, in my grandmother's arms, of a ruptured appendix right in this very room. Perhaps that's why my grandmother and my mom took such a shine to Lew. Family resemblance. My grandmother never got over Feilim's death.

How my mother and Lew met, the details are lost to history, or herstory—interrupted by death, but my mom probably was a fare he'd picked up in San Francisco, and they got to talking. You know how gregarious the Irish are, with the gift of the gob, I mean, gab. I suppose Lew was living in Corte Madera or Fairfax (or maybe Bolinas) in those days, so he was probably on his way home after a slow day trolling for fares.

But Lew did rescue my mother from the streets of San Francisco more than once. She was a damsel in distress (I'm sure it didn't hurt that she was a a tall, willowy stunner with a long mane of fiery auburn hair and a classic Irish face). Those two crazies decided to take a ride out in the country to meet my rather remarkable Irish grandmother who was an active bearer of the oral tradition and language.

Besides, Lew had friends in The Valley. Grover Sales was living right down the road with Chuck (Charlene) Sutton, the jazzman's wife, in Lagunitas. Sutton and Tristano were hot in the New York jazz scene. When I was in my 20s, a boyfriend, Geoff Davis loaned me a copy of Ring of Bone autographed by Lew over to Grover Sales. But Geoff took it back when we broke up. So I made a photocopy of the book because Ring of Bone was out of print and Lew hadn't yet been "rediscovered" so there were not reprints and posthumous collections in their second incarnation.

In those days, Kenneth Rexroth still had his summer cabin past St. Cecelia's Church on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard between Dead Man's Curve and the cutoff to China House by Shafter's Bridge and the Inkwells. Though Rexroth probably wasn't there as he lived mostly in town.

Come summer, we saw his wife. Marie in church on Sundays. Never Rexroth Himself (my grandfather once hiked up Devil's Gulch with him). My grandmother religiously read Rexroth's weekly column in the News Call Bulletin. Mrs. Rexroth sat in a pew near my grandmother. They always sat on the left side of the church, facing the altar, third pew from the front.

Well, my mom came home that afternoon for tea, stayed a while and then, inexplicably, she left again with Lew. Oxymoron. I was pretty upset as I rarely saw my mother as it was. Sometimes it was months, or a half a year or more between visits. I pined in loneliness like a dog. Hid my scalding tears so no one ever knew.

I guess my mother was no longer just a fare, but an affair of sorts, she got around, some memories are better lost or forgotten and buried along with the dead. She was always leaving me behind. The road, always longer than memory. I carried an ache that was never erased by posthumous promises and tearful embraces at Christmas.

I remember Lew coming back up to the house a couple more times, dropping my mother off. I used to confuse him with Keith Bullock whom I knew long before I met his son Ken, in high school.

I don't remember meeting Huey Lewis, Lew's stepson (it was plausable), but we went to different schools. I knew of Huey because when he played at Uncle Charlie's in Corte Madera with Alex Call, we'd make a pilgrimage to see Lew's stepson play music on Monday nights.

I remember meeting Magda and Honey (Lenny Bruce's ex-stripper wife) in the '70s at The Sleeping Lady Cafe in Fairfax. I may even have a photo buried somewhere. I knew that Huey took Lew's name as his own. But I was not a writer. I had to wait until I was 30 before I began to write. So it comes in transparent dream fragments—shattered, reflected images trapped in pur-blind mirrors.

I can't help but wonder if my grandmother's Irish stories affected Lew, did he remember them? Who was Alice Herlihe? ("Winter") Herlihe is the Irish form of Hurley.

Mt. Tamalpais from Big Rock Ridge, Lucas Valley.

One of my favorite Lew Welch poems is "The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings," perhaps because I was conceived on the western slopes of the Sleeping Lady. I imagine my mother looking over my father's shoulder at the jewel, Bolinas Lagoon, sparkling in the distance at sunset, whenever I read this poem.

Mt. Tamalpais from Loma Alta/White's Hill, Fairfax.

THE SONG MT. TAMALPAIS SINGS

This is the last place.

There is nowhere else to go.

Human movements,
but for a few,
are Westerly.
Man follows the sun.

This is the last place.

There is nowhere else to go.

Or follows what he thinks to be the
movement of the Sun.
It is hard to feel it, as a rider,
on a spinning ball.

This is the last place.

There is nowhere else to go.

Centuries and hordes of us,
from every quarter of the earth,
now piling up,
and each wave going back
to get some more.

This is the last place.

There is nowhere else to go.

"My face is the map of the Steppes,"
she said, on this mountain, looking West.

My blood set singing by it,
to the old tunes,
Irish, still,
among these Oaks.

This is the last place.

There is nowhere else to go.

This is why
once again we celebrate
the great Spring Tides

Beaches are strewn again with Jaspar,
Agate, and Jade.
The Mussel-rock stands clear.

This is the last place.

There is nowhere else to go.

This is why
once again we celebrate the
Headland's huge, cairn-studded, fall
into the Sea.

This is the last place.

There is nowhere else to go.

For we have walked the jeweled beaches
at the feet of thr final cliffs
of all Man's wanderings.
This is the last place.

There is nowhere else we need to go.

—Lew Welch

Speaking of Lew the Cabbie, I found this poem:

AFTER ANACREON

When I drive cab
I am moved by strange whistles and wear a hat.

When I drive cab
I am the hunter. The prey leaps out from where it
hid, beguiling me with gestures.

When I drive cab
I am guided by voices descending from the naked air.

When I drive cab
A revelation of movement comes to me: They wake now.
Now they want to work or look around. Now they want
Drunkenness and heavy food. Now they contrive to love.

When I drive cab
I bring the sailor home from the sea. In the back of
my car he fingers the pelt of his maiden.

When I drive cab
I watch for stragglers in the urban order of things.

When I drive cab
I end the only lit and waitful thing in miles of
darkened houses.

—Lew Welch

In 1971, while staying at Gary Snyder's house on Kitkitdizzie Ridge, Lew Welch walked off into the wilderness carrying his shotgun; his body was never found. So the story goes. Fare meter up. He left a note for Snyder:

"I never could make anything work out right and now I'm betraying my friends. I can't make anything out of it — never could. I had great visions but never could bring them together with reality. I used it all up. It's all gone. Don Allen is to be my literary executor — use MSS at Gary's and at Grove Press. I have $2,000 in Nevada City Bank of America — use it to cover my affairs and debts. I don't owe Allen G. anything yet nor my Mother. I went Southwest. Goodbye. Lew Welch."

And at a fateful reading of Gary Snyder's at Olney Hall, College of Marin, CA. 1976, I heard Gary read Lew and Manzanita. He was reading poems about MY watershed, my ridges and groves, that's when I decided to become a writer. I said, "I can do that." Little did I know what I was in for...and some 33 years later, I'm still teaching the children about the life cycles:

FOR/FROM LEW

Lew Welch just turned up one day
live as you and me. "Damn, Lew" I said,
"you didn't shoot yourself after all."
"Yes I did" he said
and even then I felt the tingling
down my back.
"Yes you did, too" I said -- "I can feel it now."
"Yeah" he said,"
"there's a basic fear between your
world and mind.
I don't know why.
What I came to say, was,
teach the children about the cycles.
The life cycles. All the other cycles.
That's what it's all about,
and it's all forgot."

27.IV.76

—Gary Snyder

from An Appreciation of Lew Welch,
edited by S. Fox, Stone Soup.

Gary Snyder, Phil Whalen & Lew Welch

For more Lew stories, check out "Hey Lew." Clew Press, Bolinas, CA,1998.

Audiotape of Lew Welch reading at SF State Poetry Center (via Ron Silliman's Blog).

On Writing & Dreams

Have you ever had the experience of making mental notes to say this or that to someone, something terribly important (or at least half-way intelligible) and in their presence, despite best intentions, you turn featherbrained on yourself, betrayed by a cheesecloth-that-stands-for memory/mind: whatever thoughts you had, driven clean out of your head, only to re-emerge at the oddest hours—say, at 5 AM, in a strange flat (and country) not your own—even the cats have deserted you because your tossing and turning like a crazed narwhal reminds them of the bilious sea, and water is not their favorite subject, unless fish are involved.

(As the actress Tallulah Bankhead said, I nevah drink the watah, dahling, fish fhuck in it. By the time it reached the sanitized public, it was "piss" versus "fuck". As if piss were preferable to fucking. Tell me why San Francisco society was not ready for that Anglo-Saxon word. My first and only opera I attended, there she was in a peacock sequined gown, Tallulah brandishing a cigarette holder longer than her arm, speaking in a sotto voice that carried across the marble lobby and into the streets. Fresh from the hills, I was wide-eyed in amazement, but that’s another story.)

This mental indulgence exacerbated by bad cramps tempered with aspirin, cognac—one gets these images of wheels spinning in the muddied ruts in the backroads of the mind, ends up having entire one-sided conversations that never actually reach their intended victims. I’m a lousy correspondent—either dead silence for years, or a series of volumous ramblings like this one. Nocturnal epistolic documents, personal essays produced under duress by the obsessive urge to write. An unwillingness to let go.

Ah, one could say, self-indulgence is a fine thing, as long as it goes no farther than the page but essays demand an audience, that’s the other half of the Faustian pact. The monks had it right: indulgences. These, my indulgences—not poems (too self-absorbed and convoluted), but poet’s work.

Practice for scholarly glosses in the margins of what may later become a poem (if one is lucky).

I like Brodsky’s attitude on writing and the personal essay: A man of my occupation seldom claims a systematic mode of thinking. He elaborates that a writer is caught up by the relentless centrifugal nature of language. . . . where . . . ambivalence and open-endedness as the essence of [the poets’] endeavor.

This of verbal excess began in earnest when I had a Ukrainian boyfriend. Suffice to say, in 1989 letters rarely reached their intended destination, the KGB (or NKVD or NVKD—they were forever changing their acronym every decade or so, but not their technique, their headquarters, the Lubiyanka, cold solemn stone fortress/oubliette in the krasnaya heart of Moscow) working overtime to intercept love letters complicated by poetry between the sheets of Soviets and Americans.

So we wrote everything in a gonzo journalistic fashion, in triplicate, mailing one copy, sending the others via “couriers.” (Yes, our mail was opened.) I met many Russian couriers traveling to the USA, I received mail postmarked from all the cities of the free world, or got late night calls from homesick Russian friends of friends wanting to talk with someone—anyone who'd been there—a sort of sympathetic magic. The friends system was amazingly good.

Luckily, there were many Russian delegations traveling back and forth because of the efforts of people like William Mandel, a NPR radio commentator, Armand Hammer, the baking soda king, and the stuffed toy animal king, Henry Daiken. They all were couriers for me, they allowed me to stay in touch, to communicate with my Soviet lover—who now lives in New York and shared afternoon coffees with Josip Brodsky—who gave his Nobel money away to struggling Russians.

Strange offerings I received from people I didn't even know from Mother Russia—pre-revolutionary peasant dresses, coral & amber necklaces, USSR army watches, belts and pins. The Russians sent things of value to the west to raise valuta to buy an airline ticket out, or to pay for delivering packets and letters.

Once I flew back from St. Petersburg smuggling out dozens of letters, lacy silver spoons and tea glass holders, and more US currency than I arrived with, I was afraid I would get caught red-handed, so to speak. A counter-counter-revolutionary of sorts, I said No when they handed me an old icon. Ironically, I’d smuggled in as much money from Russians working in California for their families to live on; a thousand dollars was worth more than a year’s salary in Russia.

I chased elusive dreams to distant countries specifically because they were off limits, I purposefully slept with the enemy because in 5th grade I learned of a mythical Russia with troikas in the snow, in love with horses, I couldn’t let go of the image, and little did I know it was somehow tied to the frozen canals of Holland—Hans Brinker’s mythical silver skates—

I lived in St. Petersburg one winter, small patches of ice-free water beneath the bridges relentlessly patrolled by the ducks who knew: to let go of the open pond was to die. Friends are everything in Russia; without them survival is impossible. On the Field of Mars I stood overlooking the converted palaces, children sledding down the steps, and really, it was no different than here in Amsterdam.

Only later I learned Tzar Peter modeled St. Petersburg after this city we now inhabit. That inhabits us and our writing. Czaar Peterstraat and the birth of the Russian Navy. Amsterdam was his window to the west.

Of course, I’d be sentenced to spend time here looking out these windows, letting go of the myths, only to reinvent them in the poem. I perversely learn history through the back door, as a traveler in search of some elusive mystery. For what reason? Why do we write, and who for?

I need that reassurance of the personal conviction as testimonial. For poetry makes us whores— it is a relentless, unforgiving mistress. I’ve found myself in unusual circumstances for the sake of poetry. I’m merely the scribe.

And this Celtic insensibility—of course I skirt the issues, isn’t that Celtic nature, the Gordian knot? The muse comes in strange forms I no longer question. And so dawn nudges the trams into play, here, as in Russia, still I can’t sleep, but soon oblivion will find me like all the rest.

The cats are semi colons at the foot of my bed: I dream of people before I meet them. Crazy? A good Cartesian response to the unmeasurable. I know craziness second-hand, my mother’s indulgements influenced by the drug-induced ’60s & ’70s.

Then, my grandmother spent her free time wandered about the house muttering Cromwell; the Anglo Saxons & Jutes. The sassanach, she spat. When I was a child, I thought they were swearwords. I knew they were bad, very bad, that I mustn’t forget my history. And so when I recognize “kin” so far from home, I am overwhelmed. There’s a word for it: anim chara (soul/heart friend).

I don’t want to “make” precognitive dreams come true. Once I went to great lengths to try to change them. To my horror, the circumlocutions were also part of the dreaming cycle. If anything, I err in being too passive, waiting for them to unfold, & then wonder what the (fuck the) significance is. It’s not like a storyline, it’s a series of isolated moments, that upon waking, I sometimes mistakenly string them together into a narrative thus confusing the picture.

Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine:
people live in one another’s shadows.

I didn’t get a chance to tell you I dreamed I had to memorise 5 lines in Welsh—it was all a jumble of sounds, with no images to hang onto. I no sooner got one line down when it forced out the one preceding it, and so on through the night. I can’t even begin to pronounce the Welsh, I barely know the rules of Irish. I awoke with the cadence.

Pay attention to the rhythms. Teachers come in the most surprising forms. Poetry is a two-way mirror. The inside looking out. The outside looking in. You have to be ready to reassemble the pieces, wrote David Meltzer.

Once Vins and I went to Louven in Belgium where he went to University to study philosophy. Wandering the city, we stumbled upon an arch with Old Irish enscribed on the lintel. To my surprise, I was able to decipher it. . . perhaps one of the few visitors able to do so in the past several hundred years. A college founded by Irish monks in the so-called Dark Ages. And here we are, archaic sentinels from a culture (and languages) on the verge of extinction for nearly as many centuries. And we’ve so rudely taken a long time dyin’ at that.

How does one come to terms with: Cenedl heb raith; cenedl heb galon (a nation without a language; a nation without a heart).

I prefer phrases like Tá grá agam ort or Yr wyf yn du garu to the names of war.

Glamour, corrupted from grammar, this rough magic by which we strike. It’s in the blood. The dark, threatening sky. Again.

As I watched the stairs, I remembered subject/ object/ verb, but not the details—like inside vs. outside. I got to WH Smith bookstore 10 minutes early, I went downstairs 5 or 10 after 3, but didn’t think to go outside, and there he was out there all the time standing in the rain. I sat in the bay window, the rain falling, thinking Paul had gone home first, and got caught up in something. The story of star crossed lovers stood up by a miscommunication, the clock kept chiming the quarter hours with a vengeance.

What I recall of Ted Hughes’ animal poems in Thought Fox, I liked very much—especially the one about the horses. I need recommendations to “get” a particular poet. Maybe it’s because I’ve never “gotten” his voice in the small bits of anthologised poetry I’ve read in Norton, etc.

Of course, at the time (early 1980s), feminists were blaming him for Sylvia’s death. . . I was still new to poetry. So much to learn. . . In context to Ted’s poems, Heaney’s seemed a bit flat, but I was already familiar with many of the poems.

Some poems take their own time coming in.



© Maureen Hurley 2002. A shorter version/ variation of this piece, Anim Chara, takes the form of the epistilary letter—actually a confluence of two posts to Walo Rojas, Chilean poet, and to Paul Evans, Welsh poet and translator. The original piece dates back to 1996 when I was living in Amsterdam, after participating in the Poetry International festival. Amsterdam is very much a dreamlike city. For years, I repeatedly dreamed of the canals of Amsterdam, long before I ever went there. It was already part of my dream psyche, only I always thought the shining city of light was San Francisco with weird mantle clock houses. I was shocked to recognize the place of my dreams in Amsterdam.