my thoughts are with men I have heard of
I will confess to getting a lump in my throat
when I hear "Dixie." A widely held view of
American history has succeeded in defining the
Civil War as a contest for or against slavery,
but for the white South it was also, and more
importantly, a war that tested our ancestors'
loyalty, courage, and willingness to fight bravely
against impossible odds. That said, I reluctantly
no longer have the Confederate flag hanging
on the wall of my study, because racists have,
sadly, defined it as a symbol of bigotry.
A statistic I cited in Sewanee in Ruins is that in 1860 only 3 percent of Tennesseans
owned slaves. And though my maternal ancestors were among that 3 percent, I still see the
Southern cause as a fight to defend the homeland. A story passed down in our family tells
of deaf Uncle Joe in Bells, Tennessee, who did
not hear the Yankee soldier call out "Halt!"
and was shot in the back while riding out of
town one day in 1864. I have his watch, a
solid gold Elgin with a hunting case.
One paw bandaged.
The generation of men who won the war for
us represented authority and security for me
as a young child. The affection I feel toward
that generation is related to the sense of security I derived from images of our victory
World War II:
Against a backdrop of blue sky and
I see in my poetry a continuing involvement
with history and politics, as well as a strong
inclination to let images carry much of the
meaning. Looking back, it seems that I arrived
at both of those qualities very early on.
Rising from sickness
Things seem to rush at me.
The poem, influenced by Sylvia Plath, succeeds
pretty well in rendering how strange it felt to
leave the hospital, where I floated in a comfortable passivity, feeling very little. The poem
closes almost brutally, with the brittle coldness
of my adolescent indifference toward my parents:
Less and less I feel I am falling forward.
From an emotional standpoint, that ending
appalls me today. Perhaps my having, in 1966,
fallen temporarily under the spell of Sylvia Plath's
weird, thrilling, inhuman bravado partially explains my attitude then. Now that I have children of my own, I have a hard time recognizing the young man who could turn such a
cold shoulder toward his mother and father,
who had gone through the deepest grief during my illness.
His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,
To those of us who were lucky enough to sit
around a seminar table or, later, to drink pitchers
of vodka martinis with him at the Iruna, near
Harvard Square, this single-mindedness was the
gift Robert Lowell transmitted.
I
was wild to go to California, where every
thing seemed to be happening. Academic jobs
were plentiful in those days, particularly for
someone with a Harvard Ph.D. When the chairman of the Berkeley English
department came
to Cambridge, I showed
up for the interview
wearing motorcycle boots and my best suit, which
I had had made on Savile Row a few years
earlier. As it happened, my interviewer was
wearing the same kind of suspenders ("braces,"
we Anglophiles call them) I was wearing. We
had got them at the same shop in the Burlington
Arcade. Clearly we had something in common,
and soon I found myself with a job offer from
Berkeley.
In addition to introducing me to the arcane
astral worlds that existed perhaps only in
his own noble and contradictory mind, Pir Vilayat
inspired me to make the pilgrimage to India.
On sabbatical leave from the University of California in 1970, after spending most of the summer at the Camp des Aigles, I set out on the
overland trip east. This pilgrimage turned out
to be even more inspiring, frustrating, comical, and unforgettable than my years under the
tutelage of Pir Vilayat. Soon my sabbatical time ran out and I
was back at Berkeley. To no one's surprise I
was not given tenure, and returned to the hippie
life most of my friends were living, unhindered
by gainful employment. If there is anything to
regret about the sixties (for most of us it began in the mid-sixties and lasted into the late
seventies) it is the excessive emphasis on the
nonverbal. In addition to my pursuit of that ignis fatuus called "enlightenment," I took up
drumming again in the early seventies and wrote
song lyrics. It was possible to draw unemployment and live on my savings for a few years,
but eventually it occurred to me that I would
have to earn a living. For one who had followed Timothy Leary's advice to "tune in, turn on, and drop out," it came as a hard lesson
that, while dropping out was easy, clawing my
way back in took every ounce of will, resourcefulness, and determination that I could muster.
I see in its steel
like the river old like rain
With the pride of parenthood came an impulse to provide for my family so strong I
am tempted to call it an instinct.
I have observed it in other young fathers. One of my
first jobs was doing carpentry work for a small
outfit; all of us who worked on the job were
musicians. At this time I also maintained and
repaired a succession of Volkswagens, and though
it was often frustrating, at the same time I
found physical and mechanical work satisfying.
I had never done any before. This feeling developed into a respect for hard work that I
had never felt before, and I began to work
very hard on my poetry. I had a small workroom above our garage, and I scotch-taped drafts
of poems to the walls. My new book came to
life within the four walls of that room. I was
still a hippie, though, and Mary and I played
in a rock/soul music/reggae band called Beauty
and the Backbeats. Playing alongside the bass
player Leroy Shyne, I experienced the rock-
steady fusion of a tight rhythm section.
Were days like this foreseen
Eventually, in 1976, I started teaching againin the college program at San Quentin Prison.
If carpentry and automobile mechanics had not
been part of my upbringing, the criminal world
of my convict students was another world altogether. At first prison scared me, with its steel
and concrete, its tattooed heavies in their mirrored sunglasses and black watch caps, the armed
guards, the gut-freezing clang of the gate that
slammed behind me as I entered San Quentin
every night. It was the hardest work I have
ever done, teaching three-hour classes two or
three nights a week. After about six months I
became what they called "conwise" and lost the
romanticized view of prisoners I had learned
in the demonstrations at Berkeley. A lot of the
soul and suffering, passion and tragedy, of those
men's lives found its way into what may be my
best poem, "Lost Cove & The Rose of San
Antone." I perform it in almost all my readings, and it never fails to thrill me as I read
aloud the lines about this imaginary outlaw,
based on the lives of many of my friends from
San Quentin:
The fiddles and autoharp fill up the dark room
I felt a bond with these men, some of whom
were fellow Southerners. Some came out of the
same counterculture I had been living in. My
sympathy for Islam helped me with the Black Muslims, and a shared love for music brought
all of us together. At the same time there were
evil men there, men whose cruelty and willingness to hurt and victimize could not be explained away by cloudy indictments of that receptacle for all blame, "society."
The best thing that has happened to me in the last decade, though, was the year
(1990-91) my family and I spent in Ireland
thanks to a travel grant from the Amy Lowell
Trust. This is a grant given to an American
poet every year, the only stipulation being
you live outside America for twelve months. When
the Turkish course was over I flew home from
Istanbul, and less than twenty-four hours later
the six of us took a plane to Ireland, where
we had rented a house in Kinvara, a fishing
village on Galway Bay. The grant was just enough to live on, and we gladly did without a television, a telephone, and a car. The children went
to local schools, and Mary pursued her interest in traditional Irish music and became close
friends with the other women her age in Kinvara. I had the great luxury of being able to write
every day.
the broad-shouldered gravity
I wrote most of The Stonecutter's Hand in
Kinvara. I would work at a big table, given me
by Jessie Lendennie of Salmon Press in Galway,
set before a south-facing window in our bedroom. Or I would hitchhike into Galway and
work at a table in Bewley's coffeehouse there
or in a snug at one of my favorite pubs:
Naughton's, Mick Taylor's, or The Quays. Galway
is a medieval city with a Georgian overlay. Its
streets still follow the curves and digressions
of the medieval lanes and alleys. Fragments of
old stonework may be seen here and there if
you know where to look. Every writer, I suppose, has particularly lucky times in his career
when a bit of writing time presents itself just
at the moment when he wants passionately to
practice his craft. That happened to me in Ireland. "I had my innings there," I wrote in "A
Backward Glance at Galway":
hitching the coast road
Also in Kinvara I started writing literary essays
often for the New Criterion, the conservative New
York monthly, one of the few places in the
country that publishes literate, jargon-free essays of an ample length and also pays well.
Beginning during the year in Ireland, I have
written on Rebecca West, William Trevor, Brian
Friel, Elizabeth Bowen, W. H. Auden, Somerville
& Ross, Bob Dylan, and the Grateful Dead for
the Criterion, the Gettysburg Review, the Sewanee
Review, and other periodicals. Somerville & Ross were two Anglo-Irish second-cousins who wrote
the Irish R.M. stories around the turn of the
century. Edmund Wilson is my model for these
essays: I like the task of reading deeply and
widely into a favorite author and then writing
up my sense of that author for like-minded
nonspecialist readers.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Poetry:
Sleep Watch, Wesleyan University Press, 1969
(Contributor) Ten American Poets, Carcanet Press, 1974.
The Knife and Other Poems, Wesleyan University Press, 1980.
Sewanee in Ruins, illustrated by Edward Carlos, University of the South, 1981.
Fossils, Metal, and the Blue Limit, White Creek Press, 1982.
Our Flag Was Still There (contains Sewanee in Ruins), Wesleyan University Press, 1984.
A Quiet Pint in Kinvara, Salmon Publishing/Tir Eolas (Galway, Ireland), 1991.
The Stonecutter's Hand, David R. Godine, 1995.
Memoir:
Robert Lowell's Life and Work: Damaged Grandeur,
University of Michigan Press, 1995.
Also contributor to numerous periodicals, including Antaeus, Atlantic Monthly, Boston Globe,
Boston Review, Crazy Horse, Critical Quarterly, Georgia Review, Harper's Bazaar, Harvard Advocate, New
Republic, New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Sewanee
Review, Shenandoah, Southern Review, Washington Post, and Yale Review.
and read of
who, possessed by a fatal romanticism,
killed at fourteen,
ate corn burned in the field,
and wore the dead enemies' shoes
in 1865, when everything burned
but the brick chimneys
and a way of talking.
Shelby Foote, whom I interviewed for the
Southern edition of Ploughshares that George
Garrett and I edited in 1983, summed up the
rationale of the average Southern soldier. "This
is a rich man's war. You don't have anything
to gain from it," a Union soldier called out to
a Rebel across the line of battle. "Why are
you fighting?" The ragged, hungry Southern
veteran unhesitatingly shouted back, "'Cause y'all
are down here!" Does this mean I wish the
South had won the Civil War? Of course not.
I would not like to contemplate what the Confederacy triumphant would have been like. But
in the time and place where I grew up, the
war lives in memory as the quintessential Lost
Cause.
When I was one year and twelve days old
the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. And though
I had not quite turned five when the Second
World War ended, I have discovered as an adult
what a hold the images and emotions of those
years have on me. I stress "images" here. Before I could read, my grandmotherno doubt
in an effort to keep me occupiedhad me
cutting pictures out of magazines like the Saturday Evening Post and pasting them into scrapbooks. Pictures of fighter planes, aircraft carriers in the South Pacific, the American flag being
raised over Iwo Jima-images which were everywhere during the war-implanted themselves in
my consciousness. While writing the title poem
of my fourth book, Our Flag Was Still There,
these images, mixed with memories of my own
not derived from external sources, came rushing to the surface. Some are seriocomic, like
this picture of "Chessie," the Chesapeake &
Ohio's advertising mascot, taken from the Post:
A Congressional Medal of Honor
red-white-and-blue-ribboned around his neck.
As convincingly at attention as a military-style,
family-oriented cat can be in a pullman car.
On his well-groomed chest, rows of campaign
ribbons.
A dignified, "can do" look
hovers about his muscled smile.
innocent clouds,
a line of six blunt-nosed P-47 fighters
boxy and powerful like the grey Olds
we bought after the War
and drove to the Berkshires for the
summer
flew off on a mission to Corregidor.
As a boy I spent a lot of time drawing. My
perusal of the World Book, our family encyclopedia, led me to become knowledgeable about
the Napoleonic wars. Like Robert Lowell, the
man who would become my writing teacher and
most influential mentor when I was in graduate school, I could rattle off the names of
Napoleon's generals at an early age. Some of
my earliest drawings showed the confrontations
at Waterloo between the phalanxes of British
infantry and the French cavalry. All through
my youth, until I went away to college, I took
Saturday, summer, and sometimes evening classes
at the Memphis Academy of Art, which in those
days was housed in two wonderfully decrepit
Victorian mansions in a down-at-the-heels part
of town. Learning to draw, painting still lifes,
sketching the models who posed for us in what
had been the parlors of an Italianate mansion
built by the Lee family, who had made a fortune from Mississippi riverboats, I thought that
one day I would be a painter. Though I have
not made a career in the visual arts, I can see
now how important that training has been to
my image-making ability as a writer.
My freshman year at Central High School,
playing drums in the marching band
looked like a good alternative to being a cadet
in our school's Reserve Officers Training Corps. Our band played for weekly military exercises
when the cadets marched from Central to their
parade ground. My fellow percussionists and I
were a mischievous bunch of rebels. We delighted in speeding the beat up to unmarchable
levels or substituting for the straight, military
4/4 rhythm an improvised samba beat we were
pretty good at. The cadets would trip over their
brogans and their M-Is trying to keep up with
what we were playing, until the order inevitably came for us to bring the beat back to what
the sergeant considered acceptable.
My first two jobs were bagging groceries
down at the local super-market and shelving books
at the public library. From my earnings my first
two purchases were a drum set and a tuxedo.
Throughout high school I played in bands: jazz,
rock 'n' roll, and country and western. The
fifties were an exciting time to be playing music
in Memphis. My brother played the banjo and
I played the guitar, and we learned folk songs
from singers in the Ozarks, where we camped
and fished and went canoeing in the summers,
as well as from the Weavers records and Alan
Lomax folk music collections we got from the
public library. When we took our instruments
to parties for the employees at my father's plant
in North Mississippi, there were singers among
the black workers who would plug in their
amplifiers and play the blues in that Delta style
that had been making its way north to Chicago. At country club dances white band leaders like Colie Stoltz would sometimes bring on
an old bluesman to play a set.
Rockabilly was in its prime. Elvis Presley,
Roy Orbison, and Carl Perkins were popularizing an eclectic style that brought a rock 'n' roll beat to country and western lyrics. Every one my age
listened to Dewey Phillips's "Red Hot and Blue" show on
WHBQ and rhythm and blues was the music we danced to and
played in our own bands. The hippest among us listened to
jazz; Marvin Stamm, first trumpet in the band at Central High,
is now well known in the world of jazz.
The jazz and rock gigs we played were fairly conventional
parties or dances attended by middle-class kids like the ones I
went to school with. The country-and-western gigs were
something else entirely. I played in a band with three truck drivers, and we were booked into
low-life nightclubs, most of them on the outskirts of town, the very existence of which I'm sure my parents
were unaware. Memphis has been called the capital of
Mississippi; it also acts as a magnet to the surrounding
countryside in West Tennessee and across the river in
Arkansas. Some of the roughest nightclubs are
to be found on the highways that run into
town from Millington or Bolivar, Tennessee, or
from Mississippi. I remember playing gigs at a
dive called the Rodeo Club, halfway out into
the county. We would set out for a gig with
the piano player driving his old Chrysler, my
drums in the trunk, and the bass fiddle filling
most of the passenger space-the butt of it resting on the ledge behind the backseat, the
fiddlehead resting on the dashboard right under the rearview mirror. The Rodeo Club was
famous for its bare-knuckle brawls that would
clear the entire club about once every Saturday night. The drum set offered protection when
these fights erupted. When somebody broke the
neck of a beer bottle on the edge of the bar
and went after somebody else, I would get down
behind my bass drum and watch the action
unfold.
The guitar player would arrive in his '48
Buick four-holer with his wife and kids in the
car. They would sit out in the car while we
played. The guitar player was really hot, but
he drank. At some point during every gig he
would pass out while playing. The biggest problem with this was that when he blacked out
he would fall backward onto my drum set. I
would listen carefully to how he played and
try to anticipate the precipitating moment. When
it happened I would leap up and grab him
before he hit the cymbals. Then we would carry
him out to the Buick, where he would be revived and sent back in to play the next set.
No greater contrast can be imagined than
between the Saturday nights I spent at the
Rodeo Club and my undergraduate days at the
University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. As a freshman I was already a reader of
Southern writers, including William Faulkner,
Robert Penn Warren, and John Crowe Ransom.
The sense of the South as a land of mythic
dimensions had a strong purchase on my imagination. The small towns of Tennessee, with their
white clapboard houses, big shade trees, and
memories of guerrilla raids by Nathan Bedford
Forrest, took on the dignity of literary distance
in Ransom's poems. As I read Warren's All the
King's Men on the bus during the high school
band's tour of Louisiana, the novel's straight
slab of highway blended in my mind with the
actual road we were traveling. That the real life setting for William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha
County was only eighty miles from Memphis
encouraged me to believe that I too could make
something solid and lasting in words from my
life in the same part of the country. Witnessing the transubstantiation of place through the
written word has remained for me a thrilling
and almost holy experience.
In his memoir, Lanterns on the Levee, William Alexander Percy writes of Sewaneewhich
graduates of the school call "the Mountain"
as Arcadia. It was that and more for me. Dreams
of myself as a future artist or musician melted
away. Poetry became everything for me; I wrote
constantly. The Victorian Gothic fantasy of the
college's architecture, the steep limestone cliffs
with their views over the surrounding lowlands,
the vivid autumns and startling springswhich
could begin in February and keep going through
Mayall of this was like a waking dream for
me. I was also caught in the throes of a tragic
teenage romance, which in time-honored style
contributed to the sweet sorrow of my first year
on the Mountain.
Sewanee is an Episcopal college, and in those
days chapel was compulsory. My time there
predated the recent adulteration of the Book
of Common Prayer, so I heard the stately cadences of Cranmer's prayer book along with
the King James Bible on a daily basis. An enduring sense of the greatness of the English
language seeped into my awareness. Our professors were our idols, however much we might
parody them and chafe against their authority.
Of all the fortunate things that have happened
to me, the experience of studying Shakespeare with Charles T. Harrison, English history with
David Underdown, Victorian prose with Abbott
Cotton Martin, political science with Arthur
Dugan, and modern poetry with Monroe K.
Spears was one of my great pieces of luck.
Monroe Spears also published a dozen poems
of mine in the Sewanee Review; these were my
first publications.
In the fall term of sophomore year my habits
of staying up all night, smoking heavily, and
otherwise neglecting my health caught up with
me. The doctors diagnosed my hacking cough,
which wouldn't go away, as acute bronchitis.
Early during Christmas vacation that year I went
into the hospital, where about a third of my
right lung was removed. When a staphylococcus infection developed in the operation scar,
things started to look grave. At the time I drifted
in the somnolent euphoria induced by shots
of pain-killing drugs, but I later found out that
I came close to dying. I actually enjoyed being
in the hospital: I listened to music a lotGilbert and Sullivan in particular, for some reasonand sketched and wrote. Nowadays I loathe
hospitals, but then the place easily replaced
the reality of the outside world.
My hospital stay amounted to two months,
and then I sat around the house recuperating
for some time more. My mother took me to
Florida for a while. This experience barely got
into my poetry, except in one called "Less Than
Yesterday, More Than Tomorrow," which I wrote
eight years later while spending a month in
Amsterdam. In the poem I recapture the
convalescent's sense of fragility:
my bones thin, bending, tender to the touch.
a lightness in the inner ear
I huddle away from them, my mother driving
the street is shocking to the wheels.
My mother is less patient,
My father will send me to Florida.
For them I am closing the door to the place
where the dead children are stored,
where the pets have gone to Heaven.
Though weakened and subsequently susceptible to colds and bad coughs, I recovered from
the operation and infection. Back at Sewanee
I was picked to be captain of our College Bowl
team. The flight from Chattanooga to New York
was the first time I had flown, and I can still
feel the surge and liftoff as our jet ascended
from the airport. New York was a revelation.
Just as I had enjoyed the sense of suddenly
being taken seriously as an adult, with ideas
and talent, upon arriving at Sewanee, in New
York I luxuriated in having left Tennessee behind. Plus, my girlfriend, Nancy Pringle, whom
I would later marry, was at Bryn Mawr and
could join me for weekends in the Village. Our
team did well in the contest, and that meant
four free trips to the city. One moment on
the quiz show showed me the extent to which
I, as the novice intellectual, was still the teen-
aged rock 'n' roll drummer from Memphis. When
asked to give bonny Prince Charlie's other sobriquet (the Young Pretender), I sounded the
buzzer and called out, "The Great Pretender!"
(For readers who are unfamiliar with rhythm
and blues, that's the title of a song by the
Drifters.)
When Andrew Lytle came to the Mountain
to edit the Sewanee Review, he hired me as an
editorial assistant during my senior year. Also
during my senior year I began to spend time
at the nearby Highlander Folk School, where
the first stirrings of the civil rights movement
were in motion. Folk music became protest music.
With a small group of professors and friends,
I became gradually aware of the injustice of
racial segregation. My attitude toward Southern tradition soured. We had our own, rather
genteel demonstrations on the Mountain, and
Sewanee was officially integrated. I was suddenly
a student radical and couldn't wait to leave the South. I lost the election for editor of the
Sewanee Purple because of the stand I took against
a racial incident on campus. Graduate school
at Harvard was the logical next step.
Like the alma mater that she is, Sewanee gives her
favorite sons and daughters a
high opinion of themselves that is not always
completely justified. Robert Lowell's poetry-writing
class at Harvard, which I took side by side with
my English Lit courses, opened me to unfamiliar writing styles and introduced me to some
very good poets my age and younger.
Sewanee had one of the best English departments in the country, but it was satisfying
to get the graduate education in literature that
Harvard's solid, unflashy English department was
equipped to give. To read Chaucer line by line
in Middle English in B. J. Whiting's class, to
get a thorough grounding
in eighteenth-century prose in Walter Jackson Bate's course on
Dr. Johnson, to study the literature of the English Renaissance with that dry Texan, Herschel
Baker, who smoked a pipe and delivered his
wry observations out of the other side of his
mouth-graduate education at Harvard was a
revelation of good sense and unhurried reading. Most satisfying to me
was the exposure to
Old English I got from William Alfred's class.
As soon as I heard him read aloud from Beowulf,
"The Wanderer," and "The Seafarer," I knew I
had stumbled onto a poetry that would remain
a touchstone for the rest of my writing life.
My one source of discomfiture was my Southern accent. This was the heyday of Northern awareness of the civil rights movement, and
the sound of a white Southern voice was enough
to throw one's fellow Harvard students into attack
mode. There was a certain irony to this. While
most of them had come no closer to the struggle
than the nearest television set, I had participated in sit-ins, had confronted the vice-chancellor at Sewance over his refusal to let Pete
Seeger sing on campus, had carried protest signs
in Atlanta, had been
threatened by rednecks
in bars, and had been called names I choose
not to repeat. In trying to explain the South
to them, it was hard to know where to start.
Meeting Robert Lowell, though, was the experience of my years in Cambridge. Lowell had
a genius for friendship. He liked Southerners,
and he saw a kind of symmetry in our literary
migrations. While he as a young New England
poet had gone to Tennessee to study with John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, I as a young
Southern poet had come to Massachusetts to
study with him. Lowell had recently published
his breakthrough book, Life Studies, in which,
for most readers, he had left the Paleface stockade by cover of night and joined the Redskins.
All true in a sense, but not for those who
could appreciate the subtle intermingling of
rhyme, meter, and free verse in his new work.
While I was learning about free verse from other
poets in Cambridge, Lowell was clearly pleased
to discover a young poet who could construct
a decent stanza. He would read aloud one of
my elaborate ten-line stanzas from a poem like
"Enter Your Garden" and challenge the other
students: "Could you write something that well
constructed?" "No, and who gives a damn?" they
were likely to say. But the fellow feeling that
came from a shared understanding of the craft,
as well as some of the familiar Southern ways,
bound us together as friends. Through Lowell
I renewed my acquaintance with Peter Taylor,
whom I had first met at Andrew Lytle's house
in Monteagle, Tennessee.
A Lowell poem was not written but built.
This was true of his own poems as well as
those by writers he admired, like Thomas Hardy,
Gerard Manley Hopkins, George Herbert, John
Milton, John Crowe Ransom, Elizabeth Bishop.
Lowell taught taste, probably without even intending to do so. I define tastemuch derided
at this particular moment in timeas earned
opinion. As the convicts at San Quentin, where
I taught in the mid-seventies, liked to put it,
"Opinions are like [anal orifices (to euphemize)].
Everybody's got one." Taste has a bad name
because it is, understandably, associated with
snobbery. But without cultivating taste, an artist cannot grow. Lowell lived and breathed poetry. His attention to the art was thorough and
unwavering. Like Elizabeth Bishop's "Sandpiper,"
looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
Working with Lowell was only one of many
things that were happening to me during the
mid-sixties. In 1964 1 became editor-in-chief of
Let's Go: The Harvard Student Travel Guide, The
editorship financed a trip or two to Europe
and gave me my start as a travel writer. My
parents had sent me to Europe in 1961; just
as had happened the first time I went to New
York, in Europe I encountered a culture that
impressed me as being aligned with the things
that were important to me. At least half of the
poems in the last section of my first book
Sleep Watch, were written in Europe-the genesis of an important circumstance in
my writing life. Being on non-native ground, breathing different air, seeing unfamiliar landscapes and buildings, all this gets poems going. Having grown up feeling inwardly alienated from
most of the people around me, I came to feel
most at home when away from home. I first
saw Istanbul in 1964. The exotic atmosphere
of the city struck some chord, and I have returned there five times since.
In 1965 1 married Nancy Pringle in Charleston, South Carolina. She studied classics at Boston University while I did my graduate work. A Sinclair-Kennedy travel grant from Harvard allowed us to spend the academic year 1966-67
in Europe. We sold the new car my parents
had given us as a wedding present and bought
a new Volkswagen at the factory in Wolfsburg.
The way we handled the grant enabled us to
see a lot without feeling we were rushing about
like tourists. We spent two or three months in
Paris, London, Amsterdam, and Rome, toured
Burgundy, Tuscany, the south of Italy, and
Greeceincluding several islandsand made a
short trip to Istanbul.
Wherever we stayed we met young Europeans and expatriate Americans. Their way of life,
their intellectual and artistic ideas, again broadened my sense of my own possibilities as a
writer and gave me confidence to rise above
what I considered to be the limitations of
American culture. A bohemian culture, the
beginnings of what would become "the counterculture" in America, was thriving in Paris
and London. We lived in the City Hotel on
the rue Monsieur-le-Prince in Paris, where, after we had breakfasted on the boulevard St.
Michel, I would write poetry during most of
the day. Then we would go out to the cafés
at night. A friend was studying anthropology
at the Sorborme with Claude Levi-Straussmy
first exposure to making comparisons between
different cultures, a practice that would become
part of my thinking from then on. After a psychedelic experience in the apartment of my
friend Henry Wolff on New Year's Eve 1966, 1
wrote my first long poem, "The Old Mill," which
took me back mentally to the amusement park
at the fairgrounds in Memphis to find a metaphor for the experience. On our way back to
the United States, passing through Brussels, Nancy
and I bought a copy of a new LP called "Sgt.
Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."
Perhaps during our year in Europe we were
exposed to too much that was new. This was
the beginning of what has come to be called
"the sixties," and its appeal to me was enormous because it seemed to offer liberation in
every part of one's life: psychic, sexual, political, literary. Nancy and I separated during the
fall of 1966 (to be legally divorced in 1970),
and I moved into digs in Kirkland House at
Harvard, where I was a tutor. Many of my friends
thought I was slightly out of my mind, and
they were probably right. But it's hard to tell
how much freedom one needs, and at that time
I needed all the freedom I could get. The
breakup of my marriage, though that was what I wanted, wounded me deeply, and the wounds
took a long time to heal.
Anyone who reads
poems like "Come Home and Be Happy," "The
Same Bird Again," "Everything Is Going to Be
All Right," and "A Letter" from Sleep Watch will
know how deep the pain went.
Up to that point I had done my course
work in the English Renaissance, but now that
seemed too-what? Too hidebound, too English,
too tradition-bound. I decided to write my dissertation on Robert Lowell's poetry, about which
very little criticism had been written at that
time. Over the next couple
of years I enjoyed
going over Lowell's poetry carefully, one line
at a time. Later, when I had finished the thesisin Berkeley in 1969I never wanted to see
it again. But it laid the groundwork for the
critical memoir of Robert Lowell I would write
later.
I had never been to California before. I
had only the vaguest idea what it even looked
like. But I loaded my Volkswagen full of my
few possessions and took off for the West Coast.
The poet Bob Grenier and his wife Emily, friends
of mine from Harvard, invited me to share a
house with them near the UC campus. My years
on the faculty at Berkeley are a bit of a blur.
I have kept up with only a handful of my colleagues from the English department there: the
historical novelist Thomas Flanagan and his wife
Jean; Seamus Heaney, who was at that time a
little-known visiting poet; Bob Tracy and his
wife Becky, whom I see in Ireland every summer; and until his death, Tom Parkinson, the
critic and godfather to the Beats.
The late sixties and early seventies were
heady days in Berkeley. The campus was the
scene of one demonstration after another. The
pattern was: a campaign of campus demonstrations, followed by police intervention, tear gas,
and police charges, with picketing, singing, and
rock throwing by the crowd of students, sympathetic faculty, and lumpenproletariat from the
Berkeley streets. At this point the faculty would
decide to go on strike, which meant that you
would be manning the barricades with your students, or else the class would be meeting off-
campus at your apartment so as not to violate
the strike. None of this was particularly good
for formal education, but it was exciting and
liberating in many ways, I suppose. We learned
a lotthough some of what we learned would
make our later reentry into "straight" society
difficult.
Part of what we learned was an attumement
to wildernessthe environmental movement was
in its infancy. My friends and I made frequent
backpacking trips to the Sierra Nevada, only a
few hours away. And in the San Francisco Bay
Area you are never far from beaches and
parkland. I was also spending a lot of time
with friends who were students of a Sufi master from San Francisco; I was gradually becoming involved in the "spiritual" subculture, taking yoga classes, learning to meditate, going
for weekends with Tibetan lamas, and so on.
My English department colleagues were not
thrilled when I proposed to offer an experimental class that would bring some of these
practices to the study of works of literature
like Walden, the poetry of Wordsworth, Allen
Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and the Don Juan books
of Carlos Castaneda. My chairman decided we
would call the course "Literature and Transcendent Experience," which had a respectable ring
to it.
Every Thursday afternoon my students and
I would drive up to my cabin in Sonoma County
and spend two days together reading and discussing books, meditating, doing Sufi dancing,
and sleeping out under the redwoods. That cabin
near Freestone provides the setting for the first
two poems from The Knife and Other Poems: "Return" and "The Thief." In memory the place
is drenched with an atmosphere of redwood
forests and incipient mysticism. I meditated and
did yoga for hours on my deck, which over
looked an apple orchard. Suzy Papanikolas, a
friend I had met at the Highlander Folk School
and traveled with in Europe years before,
lived just down the road and taught me a lot
about Zen.
For three summers in the early seventies I
camped out and taught meditation at the Camp
des Aigles, an international school run by the
Sufi master Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan in the French
Alps near Chamonix, precariously perched on
the side of a mountain, with a stunning view
across the valley to Mont Blanc. Most of the
people who came there were my age or a little
younger, and most of them were from France,
Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, and the
United States. We improvised madly. We turned
a shepherd's hut into our kitchen, ran a Honda
generator for electricity, slept and meditated
in army surplus tents that flooded when in
rainedas it almost always did. My poem "Legends about Air and Water" from The Knife attempts to capture some of the atmosphere of
that mountain retreat.
Pir Vilayat, who taught an eclectic brand
of meditation drawn from all the world's spiritual traditions, lectured alternately in English,
French, and German. Like most New Age gurus, he slept with his female students, though
most of us didn't know that at the time. He
also had a wife in Paris and would later have
another in California. When I discovered that
side of the man I regarded as my spiritual
teacher, I felt he had deceived us. Looking
back on it, I may have been a bit narrow-minded. I treasure the mad gleam that came
into his eyes when in the midst of a spectacular Alpine thunderstorm he would play a mass
by Josquin des Prez on his big reel-to-reel tape
playerthe generator cranking away not quite
beyond earshotand urge us to contemplate
the heavenly orders that were so clear to him
and so hazy to me. The "spiritual hierarchy"
that invisible government that, in Pir Vilayat's
Zoroastrian view of things, fought the everlasting battle of good against evil-had, I now see,
some relation to the noble warriors of the Confederacy. If the armies of the masters, saints,
and prophets ever need reinforcements on the
plain of Armageddon, I'm sure they can
count on the astral shades of Generals Lee
and Jackson.
In 1970 one could travel unhindered overland from Europe to the Indian subcontinent.
On the train from Geneva to Istanbul I met
an English teacher from Tabriz in Iran who
was bringing home boxes of consumer goods,
including a television set he had bought in
Amsterdam. He taught me some Turkish and
Persian phrases, and I kept an eye on his possessions whenever he had to leave the train
compartment. I remember the two of us wandering around Sirkeci in Istanbul carrying the
TV and the boxes, looking for a cheap hotel,
and then having to move from one hotel to
another because of the bedbugs.
After putting him and his boxes on an
eastbound train a few days later, I went to
Konya, headquarters of the Mevlevi dervishes,
with a friend from the Camp des Aigles. In
Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist countries the
spiritual life of the community centers on some
holy place, often a saint's tomb, called a türbe
in Turkish, around which a shrine has grown
up. We spent our first evening in Konya at
the türbe
of Mevlana Celalettin Rumi, a place
with a very light, inspiring atmosphere. Mevlanaor Rumi, as he is called outside Turkeywas
the founder of the Mevlevi order of dervishes,
known for their ecstatic music and dancing.
My friend and I happened on the building where
the dervish musicians were rehearsing and sat
on the ground underneath the windows for hours
listening to them play haunting music on their
stringed instruments, hand drums, and wooden
flutes. Inside these shrines rest the massive biers
of the leaders of the Mevlevi order, covered
in green clothgreen being the sacred color
of Islamwith the departed man's massive turban coiled and resting over the head of the
long box. Pilgrims walk around the shrine with
their palms raised upward in the Muslim prayer
posture to receive the blessings of the place.
The writings of Pir Vilayat's father, Hazrat Inayat
Khan, speak of developing the capacity of attuning oneself to the atmosphere of holy places
like the shrine at Konya, and for me this traditional Sufi practice is not that far from the
famous sense of place that Southerners are
supposed to have. I pay tribute to Mevlana in
my poem "Eight Lines by Jalal-ud-Din Rumi,"
which appears in The Knife.
Visiting prerevolutionary Iran, I was taken
aback by the hostility I seemed to arouse everywhere I went. Boys in a bazaar once threw
stones at me. At first I thought it was because
I wore my hair long and sported a big bushy
beard, but later I concluded it was because I
was a Westerner. The shah was spending millions of dollars celebrating the one-thousandth
or some other equally fantastic anniversary of
the Pahlavi dynastya ludicrous exercise, since
in reality he owed his throne to American backing, a brutal secret police, and his father, a
petty general who had seized power from the
democratically elected government with help from
the CIA. The country bristled with soldiers. I
have never seen such a display of force on
the streets of any country in the world. I wanted
to visit the meetings of the Kalendar dervishes
in Turkestan, but they had been canceled by
the government for the duration of the shah's
celebration because the Kalendar rites, in which
the participants would go into a trance and
run metal skewers through their cheeks to prove
the power of spirit over flesh, were considered
too barbaric for Western eyes.
Who can explain the appeal of travel and
of all that is exotic? I was particularly taken
with Afghanistan, my next stop east of Iran.
This was before the Russian occupation, the
war to drive the Russians out, and the civil
war that followed, reducing this mountainous
home of fierce tribesmen to a wreckage of
charred rubble. It seems that every other person walks on crutches in Afghanistan now or
is missing an arm or an eye. Twenty-five years
ago I saw ancient mosques and adobe forts
that dated from the days of the Silk Route
caravans and the conquests of the Mongols. I
was amazed by Chinese-looking faces out of which
peered the bluest of blue eyesthe inheritance
of centuriesold racial intermingling. Statues and
murals in remote caves spoke of a time when
this part of the world had been Buddhist. The
history I had imbibed in my own native region
went back no more than two hundred years.
Here I felt part of historical currents that dated
back to wars, migrations, and spiritual and cultural movements that were as old as the human race.
In Herat, where I spent most of my Afghani
days, I bargained for Baluchi rugs in the bazaar and learned pidgin Hindi from other sojouners who had preceded me to India. Then
on to Pakistan, where I lived in a Sufi khankah
and practiced the Islamic rituals surrounding
the observance of Ramadan. The sheikh of the
Khankah had a tailor sew me up a suit of the
local clothes so that I would not stand out so
much in a crowd of Pakistanis. In the Lahore
museum I saw art from Bokhara that blended
Russian and Central Asian Islamic motifs, once
again sharpening my appreciation of the fluidity of cultural traditions in this part of the
world. I was overwhelmed by the hospitality of
people to whom I had been provided invitations by Pir Vilayat and other fellow travelers
on what we called "the spiritual path." Islam
fosters a sense of brotherhood unlike anything
I have ever seen.
Eventually, though, I wanted to move on
to India, the source of my pilgrimage. War was
threatening between Muslims and Hindus on
the subcontinent. From the hotel where I had
moved at the end of Ramadan I could see
crowds demonstrating on the streets of Lahore,
calling for confrontation with India. It was in
that climate that I crossed the border between
the two countries. My first day in India, two
things happened: war was declared, and either
I lost or someone pinched the pouch that held
my passport, my shot record and other travel
documents, and eight 100-dollar bills. I arrived
in India broke and without any legal identity.
Mysteriously, the pouch turned up in a small
town eighty miles from Delhi. Word from the
chief of police in the town reached me where
I was staying in Delhi, and I took a car there.
The chief of police, whose name told me he
was a Muslim, invited me to his house, where
a good lunch was served on the lawn. Then,
as I watched in amazement, he handed over
everything from the pouch, including the hundred-dollar bills, whose serial numbers he wrote
down on an official form that he asked me to
sign. I returned to Delhi feeling as if some
strange morality play had been acted out for
my benefit.
The whole time I spent in India seemed
equally marvelous and unreal. With David Freidberg, a friend from California with whom
I was traveling at that time, I visited holy men
of all persuasions, as well as ashrams, shrines,
and temples all over northern India, with results that were sometimes mind-boggling, sometimes laughable. We bathed in and drank water from the Ganges with no apparent ill effects. We roamed the hills above Rishikesh conversing with saddhus, who kept little retreats in
the forest. I experienced a startling moment
of awakening when we were meditating with
an obscure holy man in a small temple in the
Himalayan foothills. We were debating some point
from the Bhagavad Gita, which I had learned
Sanskrit in order to read, when he unexpectedly called out, "Do you understand!?" at the
same time striking me on the forehead with
his bony, ascetic hand. And then, yes, I did
understand.
There is much else to tell about that journey but little room here in which to tell it.
Using Kathmandu as a base, I went trekking
by myself in Nepal, carrying only a small pack.
I would buy food along the way or eat rice and dahl in the little inns to be found along
the path in the mountains. In 1970 and 1971
trekking had not become as popular and well
organized as it would be later. I met other
Americans and Europeans occasionally and sometimes hiked with them for a day or two, but
mainly I was on my own in a meditative solitude where I was often lonely and introspective, at other times thrilled by views of Annapurna
and the other high peaks above where I was
hiking.
As I have suggested, this is a part of the
world where out-of-the-ordinary things are likely
to happen. I was staying at an inn on the
Tatopani River in the Kali Gandhaki Valley in
western Nepal when something else happened
to me that I still regard with wonderment.
Tatopani has hot springs that bubble up in the
places along its bank, and I was alone, bathing and washing my clothes, recovering from a
day during which the trail had climbed two
thousand feet and then descended two thousand feet. Sitting in one of the hot springs, writing in my notebook, I suddenly realized that I would return to America, get married and have a family. This realization came in a quick series of mental images. I even sketched a little picture of the house we would live in.
Shortly after returning from India, I met
and fell in love with Mary Graves. We married
in 1973, and our first child, Joshua, was born
in 1974. Josh is a professional bass player, and
I attribute his excellent sense of time to his
having heard me practicing my drum on a
daily basis while he was in the womb. I kept
my drum set in our big bedroom in the communal house where Josh was born in Mill Valley. Josh's birth was the most intense experience of our lives to that point. Becoming the
father of a son touched off strong feelings about
being a man. In "The Knife," which was triggered by Josh's birth, that object, which is not
a weapon but a tool, provides a connection
between three generations: my brother and
our father, and my firstborn son.
the worn gold on my father's hand
the light in those trees
the look on my son's face a moment old
older than anything that dies can be.
Out of many grease-stained, knuckle-bruising hours solving problems and doing work that my study of English literature had not prepared
me for, I earned the long poem called "Fossils, Metal, and the Blue Limit," a somewhat
comical meditation on automobiles, fishing, ecology, and much else. During the days I spent
working on cars I also gained new appreciation for my engineer father and the tradition
of inventors and machinists he came out of.
"Fossils, Metal, and the Blue Limit" approaches
that tradition obliquely, from the point of view
of the frustrated amateur mechanic:
in the Platonic heaven of machinists?
or by the generations of men,
with boots and soiled caps and wire-rimmed
eyeglasses
and daughters and sons,
who brought iron ore out of the earth,
learned to smelt it, and formed it into steel.
and push out through paint-blackened screens
into black oaks that press against the house.
His face hurts me. It doesn't look right.
Our daughter Julia was born in 1979, and
finally, six years after leaving the University of
California, I was offered a full-time teaching
job at Sewanee. It was only for a year, but
now I was back inside the academic profession. Mary, who cried over leaving her friends
in California, took to life in Sewanee like a
native. She was soon involved in a quilting group
there. We lived in a great big stone-and-clap-
board house at Morgan's Steep on the edge
of a cliff overlooking the valley, and I did research for my long poem Sewanee in Ruins,
handsomely printed two years later, with drawings by Ed Carloswho teaches art at the University of the Southby Sewanee's university
press; the job was overseen by my friend Arthur
Ben Chitty. Andrew Lytle used to talk about
the generation of men who had fought for the
Confederacy, how they had come home from
the war bone-tired and wounded. The poem
explores the 1870s, that defining but often ignored decade when the defeated Confederacy
attempted to recover from its losses.
The year 1980 saw the publication of The
Knife and Other Poems, as well as our move to
Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I was offered
a three-year Briggs-Copeland lectureship at
Harvard. This move reinforced the sense that
my career had moved in one enormous circle,
starting in Tennessee, moving to New England,
then to the West, and now circling back to
Harvard again by way of Sewanee. I read Robert Lowell's letters and papers at Houghton
Library, and I finished Sewanee in Ruins in
the little upstairs office at 34 Kirkland Street,
where Seamus Heaney had an office down the
hall.
I was once again able to have long conversations with my old friend William Alfred at
his house on Athens Street; to drink single-malt Scotch with Stratis Haviaris, who ran the
Poetry Room at Lamont Library; to discuss poetry with old friends Frank Bidart, Gail Mazur,
DeWitt Henry, and Lloyd Schwartz; to haunt
the Grolier Bookshop, now in the hands of
Louisa Solano and her little dog Pumpkin; to
carouse with my old friend Peter O'Malley, one
of the founders of Ploughshares, of which I became an editor. Harvey Shapiro called me from
New York and asked me to start reviewing poetry for the New York Times, something I have
been doing once or twice a year ever since. I
ran a low-budget reading series at Dunster House,
where Robert Bly, Stephen Sandy, Derek Mahon,
Jayne Ann Phillips, and other writers appeared
and read their work for pennies.
I recall fondly two great parties, both held
out-of-doors. One was the lamb roast and christening party for Elektra Haviaris; the other was
a Derby Day barbecue Mary and I gave at our house in Watertown, when we served ribs and
mint juleps to what seemed like the entire
Cambridge literary community. Robert Fitzgerald
was kind enough to let me audit his versification class, and I learned from him everything
about rhyme and meter that I would later deploy when I returned to that discipline.
After three years at Harvard I was offered
a tenured position in Ann Arbor. George Garrett
had been brought to the University of Michigan to start up an MFA program, and he brought
me on board. This was an offer I was very
glad to get. Our sons Andrew and Charles had
been born in 1981 and 1983, and our family
of six needed some financial security. Charles
was two weeks old when we once again moved.
We bought a two-story stucco house with four
bedrooms, a good fireplace, a porch, and a
deck in Burns Park, inhabited by station wagon-driving, softball-playing, PTO-attending, New York
Times-reading folk, many of whom are my colleagues at the university. I took up gardening
seriously for the first time. After my father died
in 1981 and my mother had moved into a nursing home, my brother and I had to sell
the house in Memphis. One December morning in 1984 we drove off from 190 South Cox
Street in two 24-foot U-Haul trucks, transporting the furniture we had grown up with to
our separate homes in Michigan and South
Carolina. Our house here has a Victorian feeling to it, and I like sleeping in the bed my
parents slept in, using their table silver, hearing, as I write these words, the tick of the
Seth Thomas shelf clock from our kitchen in Memphis.
Our Flag Was Still There,incorporating Sewanee in Ruins, was published in 1984. These new
poems concerned themselves with war, with technology, with popular American culture. While
preparing the manuscript I had an inspiration:
I would write a poem about America during
and after World War II, contrasting the generation who fought that war with my own sixties generation, and I would call it, quoting from the national anthem, "Our Flag Was Still There." This look at postwar America would
resemble what I had earlier chronicled about
Tennesseans during the aftermath of the Civil
War. It was the first time the title of a poem
had come first as a concept, and it was certainly the first time I had set out purposely to
write a poem that would solidify the theme of
the entire book.
In the late eighties I took a swerve off my
path as a poet and wrote a long work of fiction called "Paint It Black." I wanted to prove
to myself that I could write a novel. Writing it
was enjoyablewhich should have been a tipoff
to me that the results might not be so satisfying. The book is a thriller, travel book, and
love story, with elements of academic satire.
The hero is a poet who has to solve a mystery. The agents to whom I showed it thought
it would be hard to place, so I gave up on it
and returned to poetry. Parts of the book are
set in Turkey, and on impulse one summer
night in 1987 I decided I would learn Turkish. This spinoff from the project of writing a
novel turned out to be endlessly fascinating.
Turkish is so hard, so different from English,
the mentality so different from our own. I have translated some contemporary Turkish poetry, and
in the summer of 1990 I got a fellowship from the American Research Institute in Turkey
to take an advanced Turkish conversation class at the University of the Bosphorus. This gave me a chance to reacquaint myself with the city that has intrigued me since I first went
there in 1964. And that renewal of acquaintance allowed me to write poems like "Pasha's
Daughter, 1914," which was included in my book, The Stonecutter's Hand.
I have celebrated the village in more than
one poem, including "A Quiet Pint in Kinvara," which I wrote right around my fiftieth birthday and dedicated to my friend the journalist and historian Jeff O'Connell. I love Kinvara's weather, its people, and its architecture:
Of houses from the eighteenth or nineteenth
century
Limestone, three storeys, their slate roofs
slick,
Aglow with creeper and the green
of mosses.
No force off the Atlantic
Could threaten their angles or budge their
masses.
They rise unhurriedly from the strong cellar
And hold a fleshy palm, palm outward,
against the sea,
Saying "Land starts here. Go peddle your salt
airs elsewhere."
From farms down lanes the meat and milk of
pasture,
Root crops and loads of hay,
By hoof or wagon, come down to Kinvara
quay.
Through salt meadows saturated and green,
Then walking up from the quays-a wind at
my back
With the North Atlantic behind it, that
thinned the coalsmoke
And refreshed with raindrops the chiseled
limestone.
I would hole up in Naughton's pub with my
notebook
Ferreting words from a secondhand thesaurus,
Sounding out rhymes in a snug with a pint
of Guinness.
Mary and I spent many nights in Kinvara's
pubs listening to traditional Irish music, and it occurred to me that the New York Times might
like an article on the experience. They did,
and since then I have written often for the
travel sectionon Georgian architecture in
Dublin, driving across Ireland from Dublin to
Galway, old churches in Charleston, South Carolina, the Museum of Appalachia in Tennessee,
Michigan's wilderness island Isle Royale, Memphis barbecue, and other subjects. This writing
combines my love for travel with a way of financing it.
Two weeks after I finish this piece my critical
memoir, Robert Lowell's Life and Work: Damaged
Grandeur, is coming out. It's a way of paying
homage to the poet who taught me much of
what I have learned about the art. I have nearly
finished a new book of poems. I continue to
travel around the country giving poetry readings. My wife and I will celebrate our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in a couple of
years.
Every day I look around in wonder at the four
flourishing lives Mary and I have brought into
this world. In my fifties I am doing my best
writing, bringing a passion and exactitude to it that I seem to have built up to only slowly
during forty years of working at it.
This review is copyrighted by Gale Research and is reproduced from Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 23, 1997, pp 301-319.