Get Lucky

After reading some of my Amazon reviews, a writer friend asked: What happened to the great writers? Good question. I keep thinking I'll get lucky. Living writers: who do I admire?

I do like Pat Conroy, but he's a tough read all the way around, I adore Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco, V.S. Naipaul, Isabel Allende, Paulo Coelho, Barbara Kingsolver, Jane Smiley, John Nichols. 

 Notice that most writers on that list are not American writers. Gabriel García Márquez is dead (I'm keeping this list to living writers, so Edward Abby, Peter Matthiessen, and Bruce Chatwin are also off list). I guess I should toss in Barry Lopez too. But that moves me off fiction and into another realm...

I really don't like Dan Brown, and many other "famous" or best-selling living writers. I will read John Grisham in a pinch, but I can't say I enjoy his work. Nor Mario Vargas Llosa, or Annie Dillard. Has she done anything since Pilgrim at Tinker Creek? Or Michael Cunningham's, The Hours, what a struggle that was to read; AS Byatt, and Milan Kundera, I felt cheated by them. Paulo Coelho could easily join that cheatin' list.

What do I mean by cheatin' list? Author's use of deux ex machina to get out of a story, too much reliance on godtalk—that includes new age spirituality bytes, etc. Sometimes a book is just a chore to read, despite good craft and metaphor.

I don't seek out Stephen King (I hate horror, and most sci-fi). Ditto Ursula le Guin and Margaret Atwood. Hated Earthsea Trilogy, and Handmaiden's Tale. I read Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, enjoyed them but I would never revisit them.

Yeah, yeah, I read all of J.K. Rowling's Harry Pottery tales, and was momentarily enchanted, but this is supposed to be a list of great writers. Popular, best-selling, or top 100 living writers does not equate to great writers. I used Ranker's Best Living Writers List Criteria: writers who are still alive, in order to compile this list, and then I diverged. It got me to thinking about the process of how we construct lists. So, other types of lists evolved. 

There's the List you need to read for Grad School: Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, John Irving, Tom Wolfe, and the ones I'm supposed to like: Neil Gaiman, Nicholas Sparks,Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, etc. This list is thankfully short as I'm limiting it to living writers. Otherwise, there's no telling where this blog post would end.

And then there's the uncategorized list of writers who've jumped ship, the poets I've known, who later became novelists (vs. novelists who became poets:  Edna O'Brien): Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, Sherman Alexie, Michael Ondaatje, Colm Tobin, Dave Eggars, etc.

Thank Gawd I'm not compiling a list of 100 best poets. Would I have to limit it to poets who are famous, poets I don't know, poets I've read, poets I've read with, poets I've worked with, poets I've slept with? Now there's an incestuous list. Better to stick to dead poets for that list.

And there are the pulp fiction lists of popular writers I secretly read: James Patterson, and Dick Francis (didn't he die? I know his son's been co-writing books with him, perhaps they've a special arrangement. Adds another dimension to ghostwriting). 

Jim Patterson's a thoroughly nice guy, I like what he does with his money, and long ago, and far away, I once read with him at Book Passages, and because he was interested in young writers, I gave him a CPITS anthology of student poetry.... Not sure of his hack partnerships, they read fast and furious (three-page chapters), but I do love his Maximum Ride series.  (See, I do like some sci-fi.)

I hurt my knee a few years ago, I've had a lot of down time, laid up, don't like TV, and then I discovered free ebooks on Amazon, I devoured them, then had to get the bad taste out of my mouth and wash out my eyes, so I began to write rather warty reviews.

I've read so much utter dross, it's frightening. I'm afraid it will rub off and then I will become complacent, so I hone my skills by reviewing ebooks. As penance, perhaps. Sometimes it's purgatory. More like hell. 

But then, I'm a poet, not a novelist, what do I know? We take leaps of faith with obscure metaphor, nobody reads us, we don't even write in complete sentences...

There are only a handful of "new" Amazon writers, whose serialist work I admire, and will actively seek out: Jinx Schwartz, RP Dahlke, R.E. Donald, Chip Hughes, Mike Faricy, Brian Meeks, MZ Kelly, Steve Gannon, Jennnifer L. Jennings, Bev Pettersen, M. Ruth Myers, Abigail Keam—but her books have gotten sloppy as of late. Children's author, D. B. Patterson's adult novel, Perdido River Bastard, may be a one-hit wonder. Ditto Auburn McCanta's All the Dancing Birds. I'll keep my eye peeled for work by Florence Osmund and Ellis Shuman—they both are writers of promise.

As to how much I read, I read fast, furiously fast. Most of what I read does not require much by way of grey cells. That is not to say that I haven't read most of the classics, I've read most of those too as well. Grad school sort of ruined me for reading escape fiction, in order to escape, as it were, so the review process is my penance for reading so much poorly crafted writing. 

Every little once and a while I get lucky and am sucked in by the storyline. That's what it's all about, isn't it? 

David Bromige 1933-2009

I learned of David’ Bromige's passing on Facebook. And on the cusp of Walt Whitman’s birthday, at that. David was instrumental in my becoming a poet. I remember well that fateful day, in 1979, auditioning for him over the phone (I was a housecleaner-nanny in Belvedere). I wanted to take his poetry class, and upon the urging of friends, I sent in a manuscript, never expecting that I would be accepted into the poetry class, or that it would become my life’s work.

He once quipped that I came charging into the Sonoma State University creative writing program with a full head of steam. No matter that I had absolutely no backgrounds in literature, and had to start at absolute zero with language. I had no inkling what a noun or a verb was, let alone, a modifier. When it came to my unorthodox uses of language, syntax, and punctuation, he was a patient man. What I appreciate most about having been his student is that he allowed me find my own voice and style.

And I ran with it to become editor of Sonoma Mandala Literary Review (now called Zaum), Open Hand and a coordinator for countless poetry events at SSU and in the community: Ear to the Ground, Russian River Writers’ Guild, etc., for 20 plus years.

It was through coordinating poetry readings and events at many Sonoma County venues, from SSU to Inn of the Beginning, West of the Laguna, Cotati Cabaret, Garbo's, Leonard Matlovitch's Stumptown Annie's, Higher Grounds, Copperfield's Books, and the Johnny Otis Niteclub—was where I apprenticed my varied and sullen craft.

At those readings I met the contemporary poets who became my extemporaneous teachers: Andrei Codrescu, Charles Bukowski, Thom Gunn, Charles Bernstein, Anselm Hollo, Allan Ginsberg, Carolyn Forché, Sandra McPherson, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Doubiago, Robert Hass, Eugene Ruggles. Bobby Kaufman, Diane di Prima (I put on a reading for her when "Loba" came out), to name a few.

Wisely, David did not attempt to shape and mold me into a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet. Fractured syntax and the exact placing of the eroded coastline of the word on the page was not my cuppa tea,

I was a narrative poet with a story to tell. He handed me readings lists: the poetry of Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert, Herrick, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Elliott, H. D., and Chaucer—to name a few.

I later came to appreciate much of what David introduced me to, but I was a stubborn, if recalcitrant student, at best. Not much of a follower, more mulish than brilliant, and certainly not much given to idle hero worship. We had our moments.

I remember one time he called me into his office, I thought, uh-oh, it was going to be bad news, Surely I’d failed a class, but he reached into his filing cabinet and pulled out some beer, cracked it open, and we went over my writing portfolio.

I knew David suffered from childhood diabetes, and having a beer on the sly, was a real no-no. I sat through the tutorial, watching him like a hawk, terrified that he might slip into a diabetic coma. And then what would I do? Campus was closed for the weekend, no 911. Phones couldn't dial out off campus. It was an in-house system. (Pre cell phone days may be hard for the current generations to imagine, but watch '70s-'80s cops & robbers reruns, and you'll see a fair amount of film spent on people hunting down phone booths.)

I loved being an accidental TA as well, when David was in Oakcrest, the local looney bin, and I learned far more from the process of having to teach my peers, cold turkey, all at once, than if I’d been just a sedentary student in our Poetics Senior Seminar. Clifford Schwartz (who was auditing the class), Jim Montrose and I carried on with the class as if the professor had just stepped out for some air. The English Department wisely let us carry on with no one at the helm.

One time we were all in the Sonoma Mandala office, I was typing up poems for the latest issue and I had a momentary starstruck dyslexic faux pas of a moment when I blurted out: "Would you trust a poet in your mouth?" David was quick to quip back, "Hey ya, that's great!" recognizing the metaphor embedded within the Spoonerism. I was so utterly embarrassed, that to this day, I've no idea of what I was really trying to say. But David taught me to value those slip of tongues as random acts of poetry.

Instead of being nitpicky, David had a kindly way of pointing out typos and other glaring printed glitches. In the days before computers and spellcheck, we used an old IBM Selectric. He'd say, "I wonder who...typed 'it's' instead of 'its';" or "'there' when they meant 'they're'?" Or, "Hey, that's interesting. What do you think that comma's doing there? Or "Why do you think someone spelled it 'in memorium' instead of 'in memoriam'."

That was me, on all counts. I feigned innocence on the "it's/its" typo (and never repeated that mistake again, but the"memorium" was a calligraphic scribal error, I was distracted and it was a little harder to pass off as it was my own handwriting, not the IBM Selectric to blame.

Besides, I'd already run off the flyers for Boschka Layton's memorial service, so I spent the afternoon turning that "u" into an "a" on some 500 flyers. Because of David, I learned to pay closer attention to the grammar and structure of language, as well as to punctuation.

Another time, I happened to be in Vancouver, B.C, visiting a poet friend, Fred Herskovitch, who mentioned that a British poet was in town. Imagine my surprise when we trundled off from the depths of the Capilano Gorge to hear David read in a stuffy, hot and overcrowded bookstore loft, in Old Town, Vancouver. (It was a rare, humid sunny solstice evening). Somehow hearing his work out of context of the insular Sonoma County poetry circles put a new emphasis on his words. Or rather, to my listening skills. I was able to hear him in a fresh "voice.

Perhaps that weird Canada connection was the beginning of our friendship, and the beginning of my transition from that of student to peer. Like all good poets, we all went out for beer. Margaret Atwood was there (this was before Handmaiden's Tale and her subsequent rise to fame), David's son, Christopher, and I forget who else, was squeezed into our booth. But we talked into the wee hours as poets do.

(I am still processing what David meant to me as our early relationship was sometimes a firestorm of wills. Sometimes he could be so damned English! And me, well, so Irish. So as I process and remember, perhaps this blog will expand at a later date. Ironically, David lived in Ireland for a time—sent there to recover from TB—and had fond memories of his extended stay among the Irish. So our angst may have been merely a pedestrian garden variety of professor/student, rather than that of political boundaries.)

I have not even mentioned David's illustrious career as a poet (see the Wiki entry below), he contained a multitude of writing styles, but by far, one of my favorite, delightfully earthy and humorous poems of his is from:

Tiny Courts in a World without Scales

Mañana from Heaven

I just want a couple acres
in beautiful country
where I can put two-three Chevys
up on cinder blocks
and abandon a stack
of automobile tires

Last time I saw David was in Sebastopol, ca. 2001, right before he had his stroke. We bumped into each other coming from the market, and so we popped around the corner into a wine bar and we sipped a lovely tall glasses of cabernet mid-afternoon. Sinfully delicious. The circle completed—from student/professor to comfortable old friends. Like the whisper of worn corduroy. That day, tranquil, indelible as stone, will remain with me forever.

May the road rise lightly at your back, David.
May it rise like your words on the wind.
Here's to you, lad, I raise my class on high.

P.S. Hey David, look, I got "memoriam" right this time.