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 ...