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

Workshops, Pride, and Humility

The shoreline begins to recede.

Well, I've sent out in the neighborhood of forty emails in the last two weeks, and had replies to only a couple. Is this the dog days of August? Are we on vacation, or taken up with going back to school? All these things and more, I am sure. Although not entirely sedentary this current life is solitary. In the 1970s, when I spent many hours of my life alone, with just my typewriter, I filled in the need for human contact by writing extensive letters and by running my household as a salon. A place where others could come and talk about music, rock music, poetry, fiction, politics and the Cubs. And I also threw quite a few parties in those days. Mostly for dancing and pot and speed, mixed with copious quantities of beer and hard liquor. I suppose the sort of party everyone has in their twenties.

Of course, I lived with a woman who was in her late thirties and early forties through that time. She worked for a living and I kept house and tried to write novels and generally ran things in what was the Scarritt Occasional Society. Years later, in the mid 1980s, John Knoepfle wrote a long exegesis on writers in Springfield in the 1970s and 1980s and he pretty much left me out entirely. He attributed the Scarritt group to Pat Smith. She had been instrumental in founding Brainchild, along with Sandra Martin and Peg Knoepfle (also Maurie Formigoni). His desire to write me out of the picture had to do with his guilt over having dumped me as a friend because of his wife's insane notions and my own guilt over having had an affair a decade before with a fourteen year old girl.

Well, that happened. But the fact of the matter is that there would never have been a Scarritt except for me. There may have been something else. Pat was a social person, but I did the work and I brought in the writers. It would have been nice to have some recognition of this along the way. My later writing group, The Writers BARBQ, for that I get some credit, though Becky Bradway gets a lot of the credit too. Yet, that group also would never have existed except that I was there to organize it, and to, as they say these days, facilitate it.

So I did those things. I made those phonecalls. I wrote those letters. People would come to my house for oh so many years, on Fridays generally, and I would ask who had material to read, and then we would read and speak to that material. Literally several hundred people over those thirty years. I developed early an ability to move things along. Also I figured out how to critique people without being negative. I believed then and still believe that it is better to encourage the good aspects of people's work and lives and not to dwell on their faults beyond merely mentioning what doesn't work from one's own perspective.

And I always believed in a democracy among artists. There was never one person who was better than the others, even though it is always true that some are indeed better than others. But for a reading group, for a workshop, everyone should be treated equally. Because we are all there to "improve" what we have brought to the table. Sure, there are always some people who come strictly for praise, for appreciation. And that's not of itself a bad thing. So much of this art takes place in a solitary world that getting some affirmation is very important. And since there will probably never be any real money, even for the published writer, it becomes even more important over the years.

But it is actually true that the person who desires to become a writer for the many, for the social aspect of writing (that is, to have an "audience") will inevitably be attracted to true criticism. Criticism that helps that person learn something about their work, their style, their content, and how it affects others. Those people are the people who learn the most, and who often make the most difference in a workshop.

And I think I gave pretty good workshop. Not strung out with the tricks of the trade. Knoepfle in his class had his string of things he told people. But he was always a lazy arbiter of the word. It shows in his own poetry which much of the time deserts its feelings for the sophisticated turn of the phrase. That's okay for him and he has made a career of it. But as someone who was in this world almost entirely for the sake of seeing good art created his workshop classes ultimately fell short.

As it was I ran many of those classes. Yes, John made the money, but I carried the buckets of water in the undergraduate world. Of course I had neither bachelor nor masters and certainly no phd. What did I have that he left me in charge of his class many many times? He knew I could do it. And I could do it. I could do it better than he could. But he always had a constant stream of people who took him under the delusion he could make them famous/get them published. In my entire 18 years hanging around Knoepfle I can tell you he was little help to anybody but himself. And as he aged he became ever more insufferable about his own work which became ever more trite and dependent entirely on an empty cleverness. So it goes in the land of academic poetry. He is not alone in this arc. Look at Kevin Stein.

So I spent my 20s/30s/40s running writing workshops, not for money, but for the love of the work itself. Did I get something out of it? Well, I still have many unpublished manuscripts in my boxes in my basement of people's novels and poems. Some of these stories and words I still pull out and enjoy and learn from. And while the groups continued I would get a certain amount of ego affirmation from them. After all, when someone listens to your critique and then applies it to their work, you can assume there was value there.

My last group lasted from 1986 through 1999. I am still in contact with most of the people in this group. And one of those humans, Martha Miller, published a new novel this year, which I was allowed to read in manuscript along the way. Very satisfying to me.

But now I live somewhere else. Somewhere other than that town, the city of my discontent, as Lindsay nicknamed it so many years ago. And I see few people where I am now, though I have been here ten years. I have few face to face friends. I don't remember the last time I threw a party. I am married to the best person I have ever known, Kimb, and we had our child, Piper, in 2003. The fact that Piper has turned out to be a special child, Aspergers Syndrome, has contributed to the increased isolation that I feel. The next ten years will be getting into the last years of this person's life. I might live twenty, but I would doubt much beyond that. My family history has the men leaving the scene around 80, and I am 61 this year. I will struggle to be there for this child, as she grows to adulthood.

Pretty much this takes up a lot of my existence, family time. And for this time I am very grateful. Those 70s 80s years my son did not get to have much from me I am afraid. Part of that was his mother moving to Oregon and then to California. But much of that came from my blowing off my twenties trying to be a writer and consequently having little in the way of money to help him or see him. Perhaps that is why these days I get little information from him and he and his wife and children have never come here, though we have been there several times.

Now we have the internet. Sometimes that seems like a good way to communicate. But often it feels to me as if I have left out something important. And I am essentially a confessional writer.You would think I have put down everything in one post or another.

Still, this day the end of August in the year 2011, I feel isolated from the whole of humanity. The desire in the body politic to destroy one group over another, mainly a republican conservative desire, is breaking down the essential idea of hope that must be at the heart of growth.

And I miss being with the writers. Often they were pretty silly. I have a box of audio tapes that Cheryl Frank made in the late 1970s. I keep thinking I should make them into cds before they are gone forever. But really, is it worth it? I wonder.

Meanwhile, there is that magician aspect of Tim Osburn. Divine Bear indeed. He lives on the precipice of his own humility. He can never quite bring himself to believe it was all worthwhile. And no one will actually read this. That is the demonstration of what I have become.

Notes on Scarritt People, Adkins and Hulvey

From the memory pit.

Gary William Adkins. This piece is resurrected from my poetry blog. Having given Adkins time to respond to this information, and having been completely ignored for more than ten years, I feel free to publish whatever I have to say about that time and his role in it.

I was good friends with this guy on and off for a decade. It's amazing though how well you can think you know someone and then realize they have done something you have no understanding of whatsoever. So Adkins was a big part of the Scarritt scene, and long term close friend of Ross Hulvey. He also had sexual relationships with a couple of Scarritt people, Gael Cox and Sandy Riseman. He went to Hollins College in Virginia, after Davidson went there, in the mid 1970s (along with Ross Hulvey, his gradeschool friend). And he wrote the other pretty successful novel ms. from that group, The Horror At Ceal Springs. Along the way he played some banjo music and generally did his best Mark Twain imitation.

I came back to this poem (folk music), which I wrote about four years ago, because it needs work, still needs work though it is better than it was, and because of all the things that happened in my life, the way Adkins simply slipped away confuses me the most of all. He married in 1980 in Virginia, to a woman who apparently was so self-centered and full of her own needs that she couldn't be bothered to actually meet and interact with any of Gary's friends, despite having moved to his hometown from Pennsylvania. Karen. So, right away we are clear on the facts here: He married someone who took control of his life. Later on he came to work for the Illinois School Boards Association where Jessica the witch Weber Billings was the editor. Gary ended up taking over that job, after Jessica escaped to New Mexico.

In some correspondence with Jessica this last year, and that is a story in itself, she told me that Adkins was essentially an alcoholic these days and had broken all social contacts with anyone from that time, including John Knoepfle and more importantly Ross Hulvey. Gary had been very close friends with Ross from approximately the sixth grade, even in the early Karen years, he made time to see Ross. Well, age brings the recognition of your failure and I'm sure that Adkins has retreated to the comfort of his wife and dog. They didn't reproduce because his wife didn't want to. I remember him telling me in the 80s that he was sure Karen would come around on this issue, that she would eventually need to reproduce. But, she didn't. So he didn't ever have the children he talked incessantly about having. Just as well, clearly he couldn't be trusted to always be there.

At one time I really thought Gary Adkins was my best friend. What did I know? Really, not much, eh? I thought Janne loved me. I thought Knoepfle cared about my work. I thought Pat Smith thought I was a true artist. Pretty much none of this was true. Or maybe it was, but it changed. That is more likely, of course.

And some notes on Ross Hulvey, III.

This poem (born twice) is about Ross Hulvey the third. Early in his life, at nineteen, Ross had heart surgery. He had a fabulous scar from this event. He doubted his ability to survive for long, and cultivated a fairly gothic world view, a marked interest in Lovecraft and all things "eldritch".

In his mid-twenties he was suddenly given a clean bill of health and told he might live a long and normal life. At that point there was a remarkable change in him: he gave up his overalls and he shaved his beard. Also he began smoking pot as if there was no tomorrow, having been given ten thousand of them. In the 1970s several of the writers I knew spent time in the graduate writing program at Hollins College in Virginia. Richard Dillard was some sort of old friend of Knoepfle's and John kept sending people over there to write. Ross went with his old friend, Gary Adkins. It was a good deal for them as Hollins is, on the undergraduate side, a girls' school. So there were plenty of available females there.

Naturally, Ross fell deeply in love with a girl named Heidi. Unfortunately her father intervened. Ross was too old for Heidi; he was unsuitable. Well. To be honest, he probably was. There was a long period where Ross got past the emotional devastation of losing Heidi. Part of what helped him through that was a weird relationship with Jessica Weber. Jessica took Ross on, not exactly as a boyfriend, but sort of.

She told me, and I have this written down in an old notebook, that in reality she was out of Ross's league. But she herself had been dumped by a guy who turned out to be dying in his thirties because, he told her, she wasn't special enough to be his last love. I've often wondered if that was why she let Ross hang around for year after year.

In any case, Ross eventually met, had an affair with, and married a girl named Julie who ran a bookstore with her sister-in-law and mother-in-law, Trilogy Books. Of course that came to an end when the partners discovered that she was cheating on their son/brother with Ross. Julie and Ross married after the divorce came through.

Julie had a child from the previous relationship. Ross was really always too selfish to have a child himself. He was a child, himself, in many ways. He was cheap, and selfish to the max. Yet he was also a repository of much fun and weird information. What he wasn't was a writer. In all the time I knew him, fifteen or twenty years, he wrote two or three stories and the mildest beginning of a novel. One of these stories, The Gerber Syndrome (Cosmic Circus), was about a man trying to commit suicide by enacting a crime horrible enough to bring back the death penalty (in the UK where this was set). He settles on stealing an infant and eating that child. After he has done this he realizes he now has something so wonderful to pursue that he wants to go on living. Yes, a weird, grim piece, but darkly funny.

I pointed Ross to a magazine called Cosmic Circus, and sure enough the piece was printed, and eventually reprinted in a best of collection. It is still available today. Google it and you will see. Ross' father died in his early sixties in 1986. Ross himself must be nearing sixty, same as me, now, and I wonder if he is thinking about leaving the world. I know I am. I wonder what it all means. Oh, and Ross, when I knew him, owned maybe 15,000 books, 3,000 records and a 1,000 movies and the hardware to play them all. Lots of odd stuff. There is a discography of the Fugs (Ed Sanders wonderful beatnik rock group) on the net that Ross compiled.

Back to Adkins:

Adkins was depressed about women and about his future. He had hoped to write and publish books, but ended up being a shill for a Springfield lobbying group. It was marrying that girl Karen that took him away from the work. At least it looks so in retrospect. The really sad part of his story is that he always wanted to have children. We always joked that his girlfriends had "wide, childbearing hips," and they did. Karen too. Unfortunately for him she didn't want to have kids. I remember him telling me that she'd change, as the years went by, and she would want some kids. Didn't happen. I hear they have a dog. Well, nothing wrong with that. Still, you wonder what happens to people. I also wonder what he had to do to be one of Jessica the witch's minions. Something, I am sure.

I myself was pretty damned depressed at the time. Still, the piece has a certain gritty desire lingering in it.

Neurological Damage Control

Here it is, mid March 2010. I keep looking up and realizing I've lived in this burg (Urbana) for going on nine years now. We had hoped to only spend a few years here, but then things happened. In any case, nine years along on this particular bend of the river. I have to admit, though, that the blog has turned out to be a very decent diary/journal, up until Randy Britton made me de-personalize it for the sake of his paranoia. Well, he's a paranoid person, very Navy. Good for him. As if anybody out there is interested in his life, much less mine.

When I do get people surfing through it is primarily either a subject that brings them, or it is a specific figure from my complex past. Thus, no one is likely to come looking for this particular post, unless I drop a significant subject or name into it.

Someone recently surfed through looking for Lucia Getsi, a person I know very little of but whom my ex-wife, Becky #2, positively hated when she lived in Bloomington-Normal. I guess Getsi must've been on staff at ISU there. I knew her primarily through her poetry. She had made a reputation, having written a book of poems about dealing with her daughter's disease. I forget what it was, but it was something profound and dramatic. As I recall, from hearing her read once, the poetry was pretty good. It is, of course, the politics that tell the real tale here. I believe Getsi was one of the people who panned the Writers BarBQ in the lit community.

So far as I know, though, everybody panned it in the writers community. It was just not too ultra cool for them. We published all over the map, sci fi, fantasy, realism, gay people's lives. Boy, you name it, we thought if it was a human experience it ought to be in the mag. But the Illinois Arts Council thought we sucked. We didn't publish enough Illinois writers. Then we published them but not the right ones. Then we published them but not their significant work. Get the drift? I always thought it was that guy who ran TriQuarterly in the old days, Gibbons?? He had a budget of a half a million dollars a year (Chicago University). We had a budget of a couple of thousand. Yet, we were considered the offensive group that he needed to keep out of the grant machinery.

That was another experiment of Tim's life that was flushed down the drain by those who think they are smarter and better than me. And I let them, too. Because after all is said and done, I just don't play well with the other children. I don't compete and I don't much like people who do compete. My brother Greg ruined competition for me before I was in my teens. And let's face it, when an art becomes a bureacracy, then the people who run it aren't the artists anymore, they are the people for whom power is the reason to be. And that is certainly true in the Illinois Arts Council. And for most of the socalled heavy heads I knew in Illinois letters over the years.

For every Jim McGowan, there was a Larry Lieberman. For every Dave Etter, there was a Dan Guillory. For every Gwendolyn Brooks there was a John Knoepfle. Eek. The good work was so often subsumed by the merely competent but well connected people. And you had to be nice to them and kiss their anuses and pretend like they had something going on or they wouldn't give you shit. And even then they wouldn't give me shit.

So I read my poems every day and I send a few out, here and there. No one seems to actually read them. I never get a comment. I can ask a couple of my friends to read things and comment, and they do. A line or two. But even my closest friends often choose to just ignore my work. The reason for my life.

I have tried to keep my integrity in this art, in these words. As far as I know I have. If this means I have consigned myself to the basement, that is too bad for the species as a whole. Because it means there are others like me, lost and never given the attention they deserve. Who knows what great art and science is out there, in boxes in the garage?

When I die I suppose all this will dissipate. What's the word? Attenuate. Indeed as all lives must eventually become thinner and thinner and then disappear into the ether. Who do we remember from five thousand years ago? Mainly kings and other killers, and the ideas of the gods. And in ten thousand more years will any of this have any kind of substance?

Thanks to the Lady Arianrhod, for this time and for this space.

Postcard from Victor, 10/5/1978

Someone put up a comment to this post today which I rejected. As I have said before, you must sign your comments with an actual name. This person signed their comment "J". Not good enough. If you can't be responsible for your words, don't send them my way. TJO

dear tim,
hereissome jabberwaki. the language of the first stanza of the poem you read friday night gave rise to some quintessential truth. Altho each writer at scarritt associates seems to read in contrapuntal relationship to all the others you are the nexus of the literary group.

a conscript veteran
vic

Victor Pearn back in the day. I've been reading Victor's letters of late, roaming through the various bits and pieces he produced in that period, 1977-1980, that I knew him well. I have mixed feelings about him. While a serious writer, and a talented one, he was also kind of a serious downer due to the complications of his existence. It wouldn't have been that bad, let's face it we all have those periods where things go wrong, but Victor's voice was high, thin, and could drive you up a wall. Though I never complained to him. I mostly remember Knoepfle, himself an inveterate whiner (but in those whisky raspy tones he used to charm the old ladies), complaining bitterly about Victor living down the way from him in Auburn and coming over all the time to tell John of his troubles. Well, Knoepfle had his own troubles in the financial department, and his relationship with his wife, Peggy, was no better than Victor's was with his wife Maureen. So when you are trying to be an artist/poet it often doesn't help to have somebody else going on about the same pressures you are facing.

Anyway, Victor turned out to be somebody who was haphazardly good at playing literary boy in America. He lives in Colorado where I believe he got some degrees. His poems have been nominated for prizes (mind you, I don't know by whom) and he once had Garrison Keillor read a piece of his work on The Writer's Notebook. And Victor published a collected, American Western Song, a few years ago, and a book of poems built on his experiences being in the Marines, Devil Dogs (I think; I've got it in the other room, but I'm too lazy to go get it out). My feelings about both of these books is that Victor's often beautiful language is missing from a significant number of the poems in these books. Many of them come off as lists, or prosaic statements listed out to no great effect.

Victor if you ever read this I ask for your forgiveness, but know that I am equally hard on my self and think that in the day I was no better than you at much of what we were trying to do. Perhaps I had a leg up on you because I had escaped that phony xtian poet thing that Knoepfle liked to pretend gave him some cachet. Probably not.

Victor had that late seventies Jesus trip going on. I had one other writer friend deep in the xtian god thing, the schizophrenic Dan Bialas. Both of them were quite obscure about this aspect of their literary lives but I suppose that Jesus was just exactly the crutch they needed to survive those hard times. Mind you, Dan Bialas was a five hundred pound schizophrenic who never had sex in his life and Victor was a thin as a reed, blonde boy from Jacksonville who was married twice to my knowledge and had four daughters. One of my favorite things to recalla bout Victor is that the two daughters I knew were named Spirit and February. Wow. What a remarkable amount of chutzpah to name a child a name that almost nobody as an adult can spell. Poor baby. She should be around 33-36 now, I would think.

About this postcard: I wish to heavens I could figure out which of my poems he is referring to. The night in question I read more than one poem, so this card is not specific enough.

I realize now, looking back on it, that Knoepfle hated both of those guys, Bialas and Pearn, because they irritated him and because they were both actually xtian and Knoepfle himself was a phony about stuff like that, though he liked to pretend otherwise. I myself was not a xtian by then, although Pat Smith, the woman I was living with, loved her episcopalian trip and often read in the Book of Common Prayer, telling me how darn great it was/is. And I am sure that it is great, coming from the time of the King James and the work of the elizabethans. Pat also loved Clive Staples Lewis, someone I think is pretty much a b.s. loser apologist for a religion that long ago turned into an excuse for some men to judge the rest of us for our reproductive urges. Lewis, I note, was scared to death of women. Like Augustine he was quite convinced that women are the downfall of the race. Thus the villain in the Narnia books is, of course, a woman. The Goddess. I bet he was turned on his head when he hit the afterlife.

May we find Her mercy when we lay our heads down this night. May Her love form the dreams we construct from our time in this world. Might that I understand the construction, this night, and then tomorrow. To my Lady ...

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.