Successful Poet in Colorado

I have some veal for ossobucco coming to room temperature in the kitchen. And I went out and bought carrots and parsnips to have with it. I just had my first glitch with the cable modem and I haven't even tried to hook up Kimberly's laptop yet. I did finish up another batch of chicken stock, so we'll be having soup and bread tomorrow night. Paige is coming this weekend, which usually means seafood for Saturday.

Next monday, the last day of February, I go back to parttime work at the University. And none too soon, for the money supply will be very tight this month. But you do what you have to and you get by.

The pretend president has been overseas this week, trying to get the rest of the world to do what he wants, even though he won't give them the time of day, respect-wise. If you go to Free Republic you can see all sorts of insults to other nations and cultures, as a normal occurrence. The pres and his people do not believe anybody really counts except themselves.

But when the dollar starts to implode in the next year or two we shall see what we all have reaped from the votes of those who put him there in the first place. The house he hsa built is a house of cards, monetarily speaking. The only thing that is sure to come out of it is that the rich will get very very rich and the rest of us will get screwed badly.

And the pope went back to the hospital today. It won't be too much longer before the italians take back control of the vatican. I don't see how they could be any more conservative than that evil little polish squirt, with his pals in opus dei and the general movement among the bishops it will be more of the same. No women need apply. Though there was a female pope in the first millenium. But, the church will deny it because if there really were a female pope and females can't be pope then that would disturb the unbroken chain from Peter the first prick, I mean pope. Karole Woityla has a lot to answer for when he crosses over. I think that's why he's hanging on so hard. On some basic level, he knows his own deceptions.

If John 23 had lived, or even if the first John Paul had lived (and hadn't been assassinated), things would be truly different for the RCs. But, same old same old rules the bureacratic day. Secrets kept.

I discovered the website of someone I knew in the late 70s early 80s Springfield writers community. Victor Pearn was this weedy, skinny guy, very fair, with a high squeaky voice. He lived in Auburn at first and he used to go bother Knoepfle all the time. Knoepfle complained to me about repeatedly. I got to know Victor and rather liked him, but his life was a disaster and he did complain about it alot. His second wife was always leaving him. They had two daughters, Spirit and February and they were good xtians. I never could figure out what the deal was with their marriage. But, not my business. In any case he got a degree from Sangamon State and went to Colorado and got a masters degree and made a writer's life for himself. His web site touts his books and his awards and gives a bit of biography. I'm of two minds about Victor.

It wasn't his fault, but Bradway and Knoepfle prevailed upon me in the summer of 1980 to apply for the second graduate assistantship in literature at SSU. They did this because they were afraid that only Victor would apply and it would go to him and they would have to have him around all the time. I was not up for this at the time. But I let myself be talked into it. That semester was a major war semester for the Lit people. The non-creative (and I use the term advisedly) teachers were mad that the two creative writers, Jackie Jackson, and Knoepfle, had the same student base taking them over and over again. Anyway, the long and short of it is that Norman Hinto told a bunch of lies about me and there was some awful meetings and this little vampire girl, Becky Blair, took Norman and made him her minion. The bad guys won, with the help of the middle roaders, as always. I took the bullet for Knoepfle and resigned the assistantship over the xmas break.

The other fond memory I have of Victor is that he was there at BB's apartment the day the cops came for the guy in the next space and he came up through the basement and knocked on the door and asked Becky to hide him. Naturally she and Victor went sprinting out the front door, pointing back inside for the police. The guy had one arm. What excitement.

I read Victor's collected poems, American Western Song, late last year. It's several hundred pages and there's some really fine poems in it. But it suffers from being a complete collection. There are a lot of lists in there. When does prosaic poetry become prose? I wonder about that. And, often, it doesn't seem like the man has any use for metaphor. For me, metaphor is the language of poetry. But, hey, what do I know? So I don't mean to be a snot. He's written good things and published them and he's been nominated for the pulitzer prize several times.

Pearn's latest book, Devil Dogs, is a set of poems about his service experiences. He was a marine in the 1970s. As skinny and weedy as he looked you would never have guessed he survived marine training. But he did. I have the same critique of these poems: They aren't poems. They are prose, for the most part.

And I know the guy can write prose. I have a manuscript of a wonderful short novel in my basement that represents Victor doing his best work. Sort of late Brautigan with a side of Vonnegut.

Where this eventually goes, of course, is that I have very strong, almost religious feelings about the art of poetry. Of course nobody reads my poetry, so there you are. I think poetry's role in the race is diminished in certain specific ways. Maybe the Allan Ginsbergs have been replaced by Eminem, or Jeff Gordon, or maybe there is no longer any need for a relationship to the symboligical underpinnings of the human species. In any case, I don't actually care. Most of the poets I met during my years hanging ten with Knoepfle were sad, creepy litte hideout specialists, mostly interested in their own specialness. And Knoepfle was always good at kissing ass. I guess that is where BB learned to do it so well. I could never get the hang of it.