Steven Alfred Dolgin, in the 1970s

Driven, as I am this morning, by checking the stats icon to the right of this post, I think today I will write a short piece on what I know of the poet and educator, Steven Alfred Dolgin. At least, what I remember from the years that I had some relationship with him, 1972-1982.

Today Steven is a teacher with a school in Michigan, and I'm sure he's a good one. He always had a serious approach to literature, though there was also humor there. I met him at Sangamon State University in the good old days when it was still Antioch-West in demeanor. Before they drove all the people with heart and soul away.

Steven and myself were in John Knoepfle's first poetry workshop at SSU. Besides us, there was also Jane Morrel, Janne Hanrahan, and Sandra Riseman. It was a remarkable group in so many ways. That would've been the fall of 1972.

Steven was a beautiful man, physically speaking, all long dark wavy hair and gallic features. Although short, he was so romantic and byronic. A veritable chick magnet. But he was never a player, so his relationships with women were pretty much monogamous I believe.

Primarily he became involved with a woman, Mary Ann Gerlich, who, after she left her husband Duane and divorced him, became Mary Ann Demas. She was a finely formed person herself, with great heart, and a good poet. She was an original member of what at the time was the women's poetry collective known as Brainchild (not to be confused with the later fiction-centered version that was fostered by Rosemary Richmond). Brainchild published at least five anthologies and I believe Mary Ann's poems can be found in four of them.

The summer of 1973 came after Becky McGovern threw me out, and I ended up living with my advisor's wife, Pat Smith. We ran away to Chicago and lived on the near north side on Bissell off of Armitage. While we were there I wrote a series of love letters to Janne Hanrahan, exchanging a lot of poems and criticism. Janne took some of those poems to Knoepfle who used them to make a pitch for some funding for a series of poetry chapbooks.

The first of the Sangamon Poets books, Outtakes, consisted of a number of short poems I had written in Chicago. By March of 1974 Pat and I had returned to Springfield, where Pat had been offered a job with the Department of Children and Family Services, a government agency she was with for the next twenty odd years. I think Tom Teague helped get her that job. Tom had been in the magazine production class that Pat had team taught with Sandy Martin. Their husbands, John Knoll and Larry Smith, pretty much ran the Communications Department at SSU at the time. I published things in two of the magazine projects.

The second Sangamon Poets chapbook was Steve's collection Between Lunatic Ears. But Knoepfle hated that title, judging it not serious enough. There were a couple of long poems in Lunatic Years. The one I remember best was entitled Blue. Later we attempted a recording of the poem to serve as the soundtrack for a surreal short feature that Janne made for a film class. A project lost now, though it featured Steven dressed up as a knight, using aluminum foil for his armor. The tinfoil knight we called the character. I played a drag queen. I think a number of people thought I was gay because of this role (and because of an article on drag queen rock and roll I published in RipOff, A Magazine of the Arts).

I still have rather fond memories of being in Janne's apartment on Bond Street, putting on makeup and hanging out with Mike Getz, who had done an illustration for my chapbook, and who later illustrated a piece I had in a magazine called Calligraphia that somewhat recounted that time in my life and which featured references to the tinfoil knight.

Well, Steven had left Springfield for the south. He studied very briefly in a writing program, was it in Lousiana? I'm not sure, I just know that he flipped out at some point, rented a truck and threw his stuff in it and drove to Springfield. He showed up at my house on Scarritt one evening, looking for a place to stay, and brought in his trunk. It never left that house, and later on I dragged it all over the country.

Steven however went on to Chicago in there somewhere. I think he had this really contentious relationship with Mary Ann, though I don't know why it was so fucked up. Later on he published another collection of poems, many of which were about her and had a distinctly bitter tone. He dedicated that book, to M.A.D. from S.A.D. She wrote some pretty caustic stuff about him along the way.

Memories of Steve: When he would show up in Springfield and we would get Hanrahan and the three of us would buy some booze and drive out to Auburn where Knoepfle lived and get him as drunk as we could. One time Knoepfle ended up reading from papers of his service record to us. Knoepfle was in the navy in wwii. We had a great time. I can remember sitting in the irish bar, the County Cork, on North Sixth Street with him and Hanrahan and getting into a drinking contest. Hanrahan won, of course. She could drink normal people under the table. Pretty amazing for such a slim irish chick.

I also remember him at Hanrahan's apartment on South Seventh Street (1719 1/2), where she was living with John Large and Mary Gael Cullen. She later married and much later divorced Large. Anyway, she was hosting a Brainchild function that night, and we hung around (it was before Brainchild got scared of having men at their gigs) and after people left Mary Gael, MG, came home from working at St. John's and started complaining about her doctor boyfriend who had blown her off. MG talked real fast in those days and she was blowing insults right and left. Steven, who was seriously drunk at the time, started honking, in rhythm to her monologue. She would look at him and he'd smile. Then she'd talk and he'd honk some more. I remember she lobbed some remarks about the guy being a Jew and I later wondered if Steven had found it insulting. It certainly was, though at the time I just thought it was in bad taste. And MG was often in bad taste in them days. She later ended up being a minor figure of some repute in Springfield. A competent and interesting person over all. I wonder if she remembers Steven being obnoxious that night. Looking back, I still find it humorous. He was soooo handsome. She was taken by that so she didn't get outright pissed at him.

Speaking of being taken by Steven's handsomeness, there was this girl who lived down the alley when I lived on Scarritt Street, Nancy Isaacs. Nancy used to come and hang out with me. I was a stay at home keep house writer at the time. Pat went to work and I wrote novels and letters. Mostly letters, but five real novels none of which worked. Nancy would show up and hang with me, because I was friends with Steven and she was obsessed with him in a careful kind of way. I think she was living with a young man who was a good friend of Steven's, but I had no doubt at the time that Nancy would've welcomed Steven's attention.

But Steve was obsessed with Mary Ann throughout that time. He may have had a lot of other action in Chicago. Darned if I know. He would show up for Scarritt parties and sometimes for the Friday night reading groups. Usually he brought his guitars and he would sing a couple of songs. Particularly good was his rendition of Steve Goodman's "You Don't Have to Call Me Darling, Darling."

One more Steve item: The Knoepfles organized something called The Creative Bash, at the coffeehouse that used to be downtown in them days, Rudolph's Bean. Pretty much everybody in the writing community at the time showed up. I read my long poem, On Samhain's Eve, which Peggy Knoepfle said was the longest poem anybody read. That wasn't actually true, but I think what she meant was that it was boring. Steven read Orexia and the other long poem which title is escaping now. I'll have to dig it out. Anyway, the crowd loved Steven's poem and I later said to Knoepfle that Steven was definitely the star that night and Knoepfle got mad at me for saying that. Many years later I came to understand what a weak person he was at heart, poor mediocre bastard. On some basic level Knoepfle always knew he was something of a fraud. But he wrote some really good poems along the way. He just couldn't ever be honest enough to write the great stuff. So many of the writes I have known fall into that: they get the chops, but by the time they have the chops they've lost the fearlessness required to be truly honest.

Anyway, Steven had the chops and the fearlessness. I'm surprised he isn't more of a major voice then he is. But, modern American poetry is at best a sad affair, basically run as a club of ass kissers. They don't like me; I'm sure its because I'm such a poor writer. But I write anyway. What the hell. I always thought Steven was good.

Let's see, that's about it for the moment. Here's a link to a picture of Steve, playing guitar and singing, next to Pat Smith, on the couch on Scarritt Street, 1974-ish: Link.

I also have a manuscript of a novel that Steven worked on for awhile, entitled Maybe I'm a Sailor. Which appears to be a fictionalized account of his romance with MAD. It's somewhat turgid, but has that distinct idiom Steve was farming in those days. Now that I think about it, I recall that when Steve first lived with Mary Ann Demas, he rented a "writing apartment" in the old house across from the YMCA on fourth street. That house had been cut into apartments. He said he needed a place of quiet, away from things. I think that meant Mary Ann.

Sometime during this period Steve also stayed with friends of his who rented an apartment upstairs at the movie theatre, old timey, that was on Fifth Street in downtown Springfield, somewhere around Capitol Street. That's where we recorded Blue/Nexus? for Janne's movie. A wild and drunken night indeed.

All I got today. If you have questions, feel free to ask: tosburn59@gmail.com

The Under News, Poison in the Body Politic

Here is a quote from David Frum's column today (which is mainly about response to the death of that black kid in FL):

You can read the answer on the past four years’ worth of front pages on the hugely popular website, the Drudge Report. Month in, month out, Drudge spotlights gruesome black-on-white crimes. In a country of 300 million people, there are always examples. These same stories circulate in e-mail chains — and often become the focus of local right-wing talk-radio shows.

The U.S. journalist Mickey Kaus calls it “under-news”: news that never quite emerges into the national media, but that shapes the consciousness of millions of people. And what is being shaped is a conviction among many white people — especially fearful elderly whites in the South — that the Obama presidency has licensed a rampage of black-on-white violence. That’s not what the statistics say. But as Stephen Colbert would say: statistics are elitist.

Frum was a speech writer for George W. Bush, and is a well known middle of the road republican. He blogs on The Daily Beast and is mainly a pro-Romney guy, but he is willing to critique the right and they don't like him because of it. He is absolutely right in this paragraph: There is what some have called "the undernews", Obama is a muslim, there are concentration camps being set up, the govt is getting ready to confiscate your guns. All of these stories are lies, made up to stir up ignorant people and give them specific reasons to hate Obama, democrats and black folk. We are in big trouble, and its because of these lies more then anything else. What do they think is going to happen if they win the white house? Do they think everybody is just going to fall in line and accept their lies???

In any case we have to stand true and vote for the democrats. There was a time I voted for Republicans, but they drove the middle of the roaders out of the party and I haven't voted for a republican in the last fifteen years. Too bad. We were a better country when the repubs weren't insane and capable of blatant lies. I have seen Romney say things that are completely false that he has to know are false, checkable on the internet in seconds, and he says them with a straight face. You don't see Obama doing that. If you did, Fox news would put it up on a repeating tape and run it for weeks.

Not Such a Good Friday For All of Us

It's good Friday. That's a joke, in and of itself. The xtians took Easter, Oestres feast, and tried to make it about the lie that underpins their religion, the idea that a Jewish Rabbi named Yeshua actually died and then got up from his bier and walked around for a day or two. Millions of people believe this and perhaps they can be forgiven, for they have been told this all their lives and they have never looked into it too deeply.

The other sad fact that this story brings to the festival of spring, of renewed life, is one of horrible murder of innocents. The Passover. One only needs to look at this story, to begin to nnderstand how fucked up it must be to be born a "jew". In this story the Jews are victims of the Egyptians and are only freed because their god murders every first born in every house not marked with the blood of a slaughtered lamb.

It is always interesting to me to read all the rules for sacrifice in the old testament. I suppose they weren't the only culture that obsessed about killing things to make "god" happy. What kind of god is all about getting animals killed and burnt?? What does this mean and why does it exist? Sure, there is little actual communication with the deity, despite what all the books want you to believe. I just find it difficult to think that any god worth knowing would cook up this evil and vile scheme, to kill all the firstborn children of the egyptians. It does sound like something certain humans would concoct. It has a very Game of Thrones, or nazi feel to it. But, why would god do it??? And even it you tell me that the children didn't suffer and got to go to god (we don't know that). What about all the people left behind who were then devastated by these deaths? I suppose it is sort of the same reasoning as sanctions. If enough of the population complains we can get Ayatolah Khameini to do things the way we want him to. Never mind the toll on the families and women and children.

So I hate Passover. I hate the very idea of the Seder. I hate the faux resurrection of the man Yeshua. I hate the fact that so many have transferred the natural festival of Oestres, the Goddess of creation, into a celebration of blood and death, and rebirth, but just for the one guy. Not the rest of us.

And then there's the absolute canard, "the chosen people." Man, as soon as you hear that you now the sound of self delusion. Being chosen by the god of the old testament, a minor babylonian figure, is pretty much a nightmare proposition. It helps me understand why most of the gnostics had that meme about the insane god. That's a big part of Phil Dick's version of western religion. Well, give me that old time religion, the one practiced before the xtians and the jews came along and fucked everything up, the religion based on the real world, the natural world of the trees and the rocks and the cycle of life and the flow of water through us all.

Finally, on this Passover weekend, let me just add that the people who are running Israel at this time are clearly extremely intent on pulling a masada. They are out to destroy themselves. And they seem dedicated to evening the kharmic score with the nazis. How incredibly sad and scary is that? They will never be evil in that same sense, but they seem to want to make the world accept that they can be as awful and unjust as they want, in the pursuit of making a world where that won't happen again. Because they are doing that now. So much bad kharma right now. who would've thought in the 1970s that the palestinians would gain the moral high ground? There is no doubt they are flawed, too, and perhaps more flawed then the Israelies, but it is getting hard to tell. The religious parties in Israel are intent on creating a sharia law state, using of course, the Torah to condemn everyone who isn't them. Wow. So very wrong.

Maybe it is as Andrew Sullivan has said, the idea is to completely eschew power.

You got me. I am just grateful that I looked up and the Lady was there, full of grace. I know that by Her love and Her mercy I will be given the chance to be honest with myself. Only the truth is worth living for. Only the truth is the door through death.

Supreme Betrayal

We are at a profound moment in the history of this country. The possibility of the Supreme Court making a political decision about the Affordable Health Care Act creates that moment when it finally becomes clear that this system will not stand. Everything in the ACA started as a Republican conservative idea and now the arbiters of conservative thought, Scalia and Roberts, are about to say it is unconstitutional because it wasn't done by one of our guys.

What this will make clear is that the moneyed rich have wrested complete control of the system away from the average people. It will mean the end of any meaningful democracy and the repositioning of the United States as the kind of oligarchy that currently exists in Russia and China. And the authors of this change will be the rich men and the republican leaders. The rest of us will just suffer.

They will have the hired guns of the socalled "volunteer" army. They will have those whose hands are on the levers of finance. It will be a zero sum game. If you are part of the cabal you will get richer. If you aren't you will get poorer.

It makes me sad that the same institution that ended segregation and gave us one man one vote and that stood up for women's right to choose what to do with their wombs, is now going to cede control of everyone's lives to the Koch Brothers and their allies among the rich. Will there ever be a more despised Chief Justice then Justice Roberts? Will there ever be a more evil Justice than Antonin Scalia?? And the worst, in many ways, of all of them is the heir to Thurgood Marshall's chair, Clarence Thomas. He represents the worst in America. His betrayal of all the rest of us is breathtaking. His crossing over will be one of the worst that any human has endured. None of these people believe in an afterlife. They couldn't because they know their own perfidy. They know the lies they have told and the manipulations they have made.

"A scheme is not a vision..." Leonard Cohen, The Story of Isaac. This land is now the land of schemers,not visionaries. How sad for us and for our children.