Songwriting: Wisdom from Willie Nelson

I've had a rough few weeks since getting home from the last roadtrip out West. First of all, I was sick for the entire second half of the trip, which is never any fun, and it really wore me down. Secondly, after over a year and a half of writing music and words and music for Heartlands, including the time in the middle of all that for surgery and recovery, I've been experiencing some post-partum depression: the "what next?" depression that follows the completion of any great project. That's something I'm prone to, and I know that I always have been. Sometimes the bigger the gig, too, the harder the fall afterwards. I know that Heartlands was a big success for me as a composer/lyricist in part because of how depressed since I got home from Denver and the Southwest. And since I got home I've been laying mostly fallow. I haven't made much art, I haven't really written anything, or worked on many lyrics or poems or sketched much music. I don't mind lying fallow, because I know that crop rotation is essential in both healthy farming and in my creative work. I just worry if it goes on too long, or gets tangled up with that post-partum depression. I finally hit bottom a few days ago, and lost an entire day to despair, depression, and weeping. Again, that's just something that seems to happen, part of my pattern.

And this past month, with the long drought here in southern Wisconsin farm country, punctuated by occasional torrential rains although we're still in a rain deficit, has been awful for anyone like me who's allergic to ragweed, hay, grass pollens, dust and molds. It's been a memorable allergy season for many here, along with the memorably dry and hot summer. Of course according to the political idiots who like to ignore scientific data when it doesn't serve their ideology, climate change isn't really happening. But I digress.

I'm writing in a conversational stream-of-consciousness mode because I've just been reading a book written that way.

I spent a couple of hours this morning reading Willie Nelson's 2002 book The Facts of Life, and Other Dirty Jokes. It's a breezy oral history, full of conversational asides, comments about touring on the road, growing up, and full of anecdotes about the music business, friends, and songwriting. It's much more than a book of collected lyrics, which are woven into the book in between rambles. I read the book in about two hours (I'm a very fast reader) in part because reading song lyrics on the page is faster than listening to the recorded songs.

The first album of Willie Nelson's that I can remember really getting into was Stardust, which is still a classic (and has been reissued as such on CD, in an expanded version). That was my discovery and entry point. I was still mostly listening to classical and jazz at that point in my life, but I was impressed by Willie's way of performing old standards and jazz songs. In fact, and I'm probably letting out a secret here, the way Willie sings is from jazz singing: always behind the beat, giving it that trademark laid-back feel, but arriving on time at the critical moments and the end of a phrase. That laid-back feel in the music is similar to way he writes this book, and lives his life. The important things in life are worth getting passionate about; almost everything else isn't. He does mention his Farm Aid activism in the book, quite passionately, and is passionate about the things and people he loves, and what has influenced him in life. And then there are all the dirty jokes laced throughout. A contradiction? Not really, just pieces of the whole cloth.

As many who know me know, I have strong opinions about lyrics printed on the page: they rarely stand up as purely poetry. Many poets, and fans of various songwriters, make the claim for their favorite songwriters as being pure poets, and often cite lyrics as poetry when discussing them. The problem is, if you really know the song, you're not really paying attention to just the words, as if you know the song the music will be playing in your head as you read. My point is that songwriting is words-and-music, not just words. Lots of poets, and fans, get hung up on the lyrics and forget that songwriting is synergy: words-and-music in perfect symbiosis, each synergizing the other to a higher level.

Several of Willie Nelson's song lyrics printed in this book are to songs that I didn't know (several early songs) or knew on;y slightly. So I was able to read several lyrics on the page as poems. I learned a little bit more about the craft of songwriting from this: both in terms of metric form and when you can really make a phrase stand out by not rhyming. Most songwriting uses older poetic forms, notably ballads and blues, most of which are metric forms with end-rhymes. These patterns are inherited and evolved from folk music—country is the descendent of old-timey mountain folk music, as is bluegrass, and is in turn descended from the music brought to the Appalachians by immigrants from the British Isles for the most part. (Blues and its many related and branched descendent forms were brought to Turtle Island by African-Americans.)

What Willie often does in these songs is stick to a simple rhymed metric form, then break it for effect. Outlaw that he is, he also invents forms, often in songs with very short and simple lines, using fewer words for song than many other songwriters. They're striking to read as lyrics on the page. You constantly trip over your own running feet. There's real gold in breaking away from couplets and quatrains, and other classic song-forms that on the page often look like rectangles of text; these songs rarely look like rectangles on the page.

What makes Willie a great songwriter shines out in this written ramble of a book of collected lyrics and anecdotes and memories: he's an excellent storyteller, period. Of course, I also love his attitude. Actually, I've always loved his attitude. He knows how to laugh at himself, and make you laugh along. There's also a very serious man under all this, and always has been: it's the serious artist, always observing, recording, and telling us stories. That's pretty much the old Viking definition of a skald, or bard. Willie is certainly one of our own bards. Plus the man can really sing.

What leads me to book reviewing The Facts of Life, and Other Dirty Jokes more formally is a long passage Willie writes about the power of song itself, for the writer and the performer as well as the audience. I found this passage very wise and telling. Willie includes the lyrics to two early songs that I didn't know about, "No Tomorrow in Sight" and "Sad Songs and Waltzes." He comments in an aside between giving the lyrics of these two songs: I wrote that way back in the early '60s. Very few people have even heard it because sad songs and waltzes weren't really selling that year.

Then Willie follows this up with a very telling commentary:

Both of these songs put together probably sold about four copies. That's not the important thing. To me, just getting the words out of my head and onto paper was an exercise worth performing. Those kinds of thoughts left bottled up inside can do more damage than good, and can probably cause everything from cancer to heart break. Sometimes just saying the words can cause some kind of healing to begin. But if you sing those songs every night year after year, I believe you can also prevent a total healing because you're always opening old wounds.

So what's the answer? Who knows. If you have a hit with a sad song, just remember when you wrote it, it was for you. When you sing it over and over, it's for the benefit of the listener. Don't let it spoil an otherwise good night. Attempt to sing the song for the audience, and try not to get involved in it yourself. It's a very thin line, and a lot easier said than done.

Sometimes I believe the reason a lot of country singers and writers have gone off the deep end was because they could not find that thin line, and could never fully recover from the evening that caused them to write the song in the beginning. Hank Williams, Floyd Tillman, George jones, Lefty Frizzell, and myself included, could in some ways be victims of our own words.
—The Facts of Life, and Other Dirty Jokes, p. 186

I find this to be incredibly timely and useful advice. Coming out of a post-concert/concert/roadtrip/concert depression, more aware than ever that you just have to keep going, even if you don't want to, this kicks me to keep on going.

Willie also gets at something that's perhaps at the heart of his endurance as an artist, and at why some artists crash and burn. This gets into the toxic myths and stereotypes (usually promoted by non-artists, although some artists buy into them as well) of the Starving Artist, the Drunken Writer, the Suffering Artist, the Lonely Poet, the Underapppreciated Songwriter.

That entire awful cluster of stereotypes that circle around the idea that "I'll be rich when I'm dead," plus the core devaluing of all the arts that goes on in our culture. People want to be able to download all the music they love for free, even though it means the singer they love goes broke. People will pay hundreds of dollars to go see their favorite athletes throw little balls around various kinds of grassy fields, but they balk at paying 99 cents to download a song? Get real. I lost all remaining shreds of sympathy for professional sports players the year the baseball players went on strike: essentially that was millionaires going on strike against not being able to be double-millionaires. Any one of those undereducated professional athletes could have taken their already-inflated salaries and funded the entire educations of ten artists or dancers, or more. (Although dancers are in fact better athletes overall than any sports stars. They have to be: it's a whole-body art.) But I digress.

The truth is, life is full of so much suffering as it is. You don't need to go looking for it.

What a lot of people who recycle those toxic stereotypes miss is that the art isn't the result of the suffering, isn't caused by the suffering, and you don't necessarily make better art because you have suffered. The artist's first response to all of life's experiences, both positive and negative, is to make art about it. That's what artists do. Just that. Full stop. An artist makes art. All of life is fuel for the artist, good and bad alike. In fact, making art is often the best way to cope with whatever life is throwing at you, good and bad. Artists do make art as a form of self-therapy: just getting the words out of your head and onto the paper is worth doing.

But it doesn't stop there. Afterwards, you go on with life. You're not supposed to dwell on it, you're supposed to let it go, and continue on. Don't stop, don't wallow, just get back on the road and keep moving on. One of the best quotes I ever heard coming from an artist was that the secret of life is to do the next thing.

"On the road again. . . ." I don't know where Willie Nelson learned his enlightened Zen detachment, but it's the real thing. And it's a good role model for all other bards to heed.

•

Here are some other brief quotes from the book that caught my eye as I was reading, and made me stop and think.

‎Success and failure—same number of letters.

Puts worry and despair in perspective.

I believe that you can't lose if you don't give up. Even if you die, you'll die fighting.

Another good reminder to never give up. I needed to hear that today.

Ninety-nine percent of the world's lovers are not with their first choice. That's what makes the jukebox play.

Which means you will never ever run out of material.

We authors deal in words. You can't tell a songwriter he ain't any good because he knows better.

A comment on artistic stubbornness that I can agree with. It's certainly true that almost every poet knows that he's right and you're wrong.

If you ain't crazy, there's something wrong with you.

Words to live by. If you're a sane person living in an insane world, others might judge you as insane, but really, you're not, they are.

RIP Ray Bradbury

One of the grand masters of fantasy and science fiction, Ray Bradbury, has just passed over at age 91. It's all over the literary news, although I doubt many who aren't readers or writers will notice. Bradbury was a writer's writer, revered by writers and readers alike, who impressed and captivated everybody from generations of science fiction fans who later became writers themselves, to Christopher Isherwood, who thought Bradbury to be one of the most original writers he had ever read.

One mark of a great writer is that you can go back to their books years later and still have the same experience, be immersed in the same feelings and images, that you had the very first time you read them. They endure. The list of writers I can honestly say this about, that each time I read them is like the first time, is a very short list; it includes, among a few others, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, and Ray Bradbury.

For me, there have been only a few writers who ever successfully conveyed the experience of being a young teen boy in small-town Midwestern towns in summer as well as Bradbury did. His novel Dandelion Wine is one of the best novels I have read more than ten times, each time as fresh as the last. Something Wicked This Way Comes was a novel that actively terrified me when I read it as a teenager; and it remains compellingly scary. His essential short novel for young adults, The Halloween Tree, is a great adventure story that also is a detailed history of the roots and origins of the festivities of All Hallow's. Many people know Bradbury best for his themed collections of short stories, many of which have been made into movies, including The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. And then there's Fahrenheit 451, an Orwellian novel about a repressive future society in which literacy itself is banned.

Bradbury has often been ahead of the literary curve, writing in styles or exploring subject matters that other writers only came to decades later. His short story "A Sound of Thunder," about the dangerous changes in history that can be caused by tiny careless mistakes made by time travelers, has been adapted into more than one movie, has turned up in the literature again and again, been the premise of TV shows, and even has a connection to the origins of chaos theory and fractal mathematics. The principal known as the butterfly effect is what I'm talking about here. This is so common a theme in speculative literature now that it's become an archetype itself.

When I was a young reader, already having read lots of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and other "hard SF" writers before encountering Bradbury, and already having had some science training myself, I was at times put off by Bradbury's relaxed interest in accurate scientific detail; he openly admitted that he was interested in the human stories first and foremost, and often skated on the technical details. But my initial doubts about the details of his stories were quickly overwhelmed by the sheer intense and powerful beauty of his language, and I was quickly won over. What Bradbury was, was a master storyteller. Sometimes his stories were set amidst the trappings of science fiction, such as rocket ships, and trips to other planets, but they were always human stories. He made you think, and his stories remain in memory long afterwards. I can think of several of his stories that are clear in my memory still, in many different genres.

Dandelion Wine is technically magical realism—written long before that term was coined to apply to Latin America authors such as Garcia Marquez; so in a way Bradbury invented the style—but what is so incredibly engaging about Bradbury's novel is how emotionally real it is. It is incredibly personal. You know people like the characters in Dandelion Wine. Perhaps you've even been those people, at some point in your life. The episode in the novel, that was originally published as a short story called "The Sound of Summer Running," is one absolutely vivid in my imagination, because it perfectly conveyed the total experience of getting new sneakers at the beginning of summer, and what that meant to a boy just freed from school for the season—right down to the smells.

So I'm feeling sad tonight. I will miss not seeing more new stories from Ray Bradbury, who wrote every day for decades. I will miss Bradbury not only for his fiction but also for his commentaries on life. His book on writing, Zen in the Art of Writing, is essential reading for every writer. It's one of the most genuinely inspirational books on writing that I've ever read.

Finally, I will let the master speak for himself. Here is an excerpt or two from Bradbury's Paris Review interview:

INTERVIEWER:
Why do you write science fiction?

RAY BRADBURY:
Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

Imagine if sixty years ago, at the start of my writing career, I had thought to write a story about a woman who swallowed a pill and destroyed the Catholic Church, causing the advent of women’s liberation. That story probably would have been laughed at, but it was within the realm of the possible and would have made great science fiction. If I’d lived in the late eighteen hundreds I might have written a story predicting that strange vehicles would soon move across the landscape of the United States and would kill two million people in a period of seventy years. Science fiction is not just the art of the possible, but of the obvious. Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

INTERVIEWER:
Does science fiction satisfy something that mainstream writing does not?

BRADBURY:
Yes, it does, because the mainstream hasn’t been paying attention to all the changes in our culture during the last fifty years. The major ideas of our time—developments in medicine, the importance of space exploration to advance our species—have been neglected. The critics are generally wrong, or they’re fifteen, twenty years late. It’s a great shame. They miss out on a lot. Why the fiction of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can’t explain it, except in terms of intellectual snobbery.

May Sarton

Born May 3, 1912, in Wondelgem, Belgium, and a naturalized U.S. citizen from the age of two, she remained something of an outsider, which no doubt made her a better observer. That's probably one of the reasons I have always appreciated her: a perpetual outsider, not always a happy one, occasionally caustic, but with an eye for detail that missed little of what was around her. Nobody sees what's actually there better than a stranger. Her poems were usually compressed lyrics, often reflective of the universal within the particular, often full of those details that an outsider sees. Sarton didn't follow any poetic fashions or schools, and was not a self-conscious literary experimenter like many of her generation. In her novels, which I would also call lyrical, she had a fine ear for the subtleties of relationships and human family drama. Some of her very best fiction is about love, insightful and funny and harrowing and profound all at once.

Sarton considered herself first and foremost a poet, with more than a dozen volumes of poetry published, but she also published nine volumes of journals and nineteen novels. It seems likely that her journals and memoirs will be what she is most remembered for, as they remain her most popular books. They continue to inspire new generations of readers. There is an honesty, even in edited form, about the difficulties of reconciling life and art. Journal of a Solitude is still one of the most often read of the journals, a story of living alone on the Maine coast, mostly cut off from others, with the occasional visitor: such an occasion as makes an artist go within and examine one's own darknesses and shadows.

In 1965 she published her tenth novel, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, which describes a woman’s quest to belong in the world as an artist and a lesbian. After that novel was published, to some controversy even though her reputation as a novelist was already well-established, her later journals were more revealing about her own love for women. In Journal of a Solitude she wrote, "The fear of homosexuality is so great that it took courage to write Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing . . . a novel about a woman homosexual who is not a sex maniac, a drunkard, a drug-taker, or in any way repulsive, to portray a homosexual who is neither pitiable nor disgusting, without sentimentality. . . ." Eventually she admitted what many readers believed, that this novel was autobiographical in spirit, if not literally so in every detail.

Nonetheless, she always insisted that she wanted to known as a poet and novelist, not a lesbian novelist. Some of that of course was the more circumspect times, and the generation she belonged to. There was some critical backlash against Sarton after that, but she has always had a devoted and dedicated fan following. I find this interesting because it means she was always a success to her readers, even if some of the critics were not supportive. What artist doesn't feel sympathy with that?

That double assessment continues to this day. Every so often I still get comments on my blog post here about the day I spent in Nelson, NH, where Sarton lived before Maine, and where she is buried: May Sarton at Nelson, NH. Yet two years after Sarton died in 1995, Margot Peters published May Sarton: A Biography. I read it a few years ago. It's thorough, discusses her entire life, her most important friendships, the places where she lived, and what she wrote. It's also a hatchet job, a biography that is biased towards depicting Sarton as an impossible person who was hard on her friends and angry all the time. Well, she was indeed restless, tempestuous, and strong-willed—but to be a woman artist in her times, one needed to be strong-willed. She doesn't paint herself as perfect in her journals, she doesn't pretend to be without fears or hard times. Nonetheless the journals contain moments of exceptional beauty, of near-awe, of pathos. Any artist who struggles with making a living and making art can sympathize; that many readers do just that speaks highly for her relevance. Plant Dreaming Deep, her first mature memoir, a series of short pieces about her house and friends in Nelson, set a new standard for memoir and journal writing; it remains a lucid and engrossing book, in some ways exceptionally brilliant. So I didn't like Peters' biography very much; it felt quite unbalanced. I think we're still waiting for a more balanced, definitive biography.

Standing By Words

April is annually dedicated as National Poetry Month. There is even an annual proclamation that comes out of the White House. (Another annual White House tradition of course is to have the President use his executive powers to pardon a turkey every Thanksgiving, which then lives out its life to its normal lifespan, and is not eaten.) What does National Poetry Month mean? Not much, really. It means that many stereotypical events happen, mostly.

Many poetry workshops and organizations sponsor "A Poem A Day" rallies, wherein participating poets are invited to write a poem a day and share them. Poetry readings multiply in number for a month. Poetry is given a higher public awareness profile for a month, after which most non-poets go back to completely ignoring it. Schools often teach a month-long unit on poetry study and writing.

I rarely take any of this seriously. I have in the past, when I was involved with online poetry workshops, occasionally participated in poem-a-day gatherings. But as I have often pointed out, I write when I write, and when I write on demand it usually sucks. I can recall perhaps two, maybe three, poems written by myself during poem-a-day rallies that were worth salvaging, rewriting, and finishing.

Always excepting haiku, of course, which I can pretty much write on demand—which are also pretty much the only kinds of poems that I can write on demand. I'm not really sure I can explain why haiku come easily to me. Perhaps it's the result of lifelong immersion in their aesthetic. It's true that when I'm sorting through photographs, as for example I am still doing after the recent roadtrip out West, I often am spontaneously moved to write poems to go with the photos. More often than not, those poems written to photo prompts are haiku. This is also of course a variety of ekphrastic poetry: written in response to visual art.

Anyway.

I've managed to ignore National Poetry Month this year for most of the month. Now, however, I find myself reading as I often do books of poetry criticism by poets. This is actually some of my favorite reading: books by writers about writing. I have quite a stack of such books, which I add to from time to time. So, this year, what I will do to memorialize National Poetry Month is give some excerpts and quotes regarding books on poetry by poets.

•

Wendell Berry is one of our greatest living writers. A national treasure, his books are on a special shelf in my library next to others I feel are essential reading. He is a poet, a novelist, and an important essayist. His viewpoint is rural, conservative in the sense of conserving what is good and real and true, and rooted in his day job, which is farming. Many of his poems are accessible windows onto the philosophy of rural life, and the way of the earth. At times Berry seems to reflect a very deep land-based, earthen, belief system, something that all people who have lived close to the land have shared, regardless of whatever religion they nominally follow. The flow of seasons and the life of the land is a deeper system than received beliefs.

I have been reading Wendell Berry's book of six long essays about poetry, Standing By Words. I find reading Berry's essays on poetry to be essential, even when I disagree with them—which I do moderately often, finding them to be even reactionary at times. Rural myself, I am not as traditional as he. Yet Berry's voice is one of those you must encounter and deal with, regardless of whether you end up agreeing with him or not. He must be confronted and reconciled. Reading Berry helps you figure out your own stance, your own values and opinions. He is incredibly well-read, has a good grasp of the history of literature, and thoughtfully explains his positions. His writing is among the clearest of essayists', his thinking always presented without affectation or unnecessary device. There is an elegant simplicity in his writing that one can learn from, simply by reading.

Although Berry's opinions do feel to me sometimes to be reactionary and anti-modern, overall his views on poetry are congenial to my own approach and attitude. When he writes about what has gone wrong with contemporary poetry, I often find myself in agreement; although I may not always agree on the historical choices that led to the current situation, nor with his proposed remedies. We share a concern with where poetry may have gone off the rails, even if we don't always agree on how to restore it to life.

The basic premise of Standing By Words is encapsulated by a quote from the book itself:

My impression is that we have seen, for perhaps one hundred and fifty years, a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless or destructive of meaning. And I believe that this increasing unreliability of language parallels the increasing disintegration, over the same period, of persons and communities.

Berry makes the connection between the debasement of artistic language and the debasement of general language usage, from broadcasting to the political sphere, where the loss is particularly toxic. Politicians who one day say one thing, the next day say something opposite and deny that they ever said what they said before—in other words, blatant unabashed lying—are prominent and obvious more so than ever. The obfuscation of clarity that is the essence of bureaucratic writing has led to deliberate misuse of language. If you don't feel you can trust people in positions of authority to tell you the truth anymore, you are not alone. Berry is not making causative connections here; rather he believes that both artistic and general language have become debased from the same root causes, which are inherent to and reflected by the Modernist enterprise: social fragmentation, the loss of moral center in culture, the sense of uncertainty about what really matters in life that began with the Industrial Revolution and reached a peak of global insecurity in the 20th C.

None of this is strictly necessary. We have taken fragmentation and disconnection and disjunction and existential angst to be the norm. In fact, Berry argues, they're relatively new phenomena, and are connected with the changes in culture that began during the beginning of the radical changes in technical craft, when the agrarian norm morphed into the new urban industrial norm. With the rise of the Romantic period in the arts, there also arose the romantic myth of the solitary, suffering Artist. (Starving Artist, Lone Misunderstood Sensitive Artist, and all the other variations on the theme of Artist-as-Other.)

In the essay "The Specialization of Poetry," Berry writes:

History certainly offers examples of unhappy or obsessed or mad poets, but it offers more examples of poets who sang or wrote in the exuberance of sanity, health, wholeness of spirit. One instantly credits Ann Sexton's statement that "Pain engraves a deeper memory," not because one believes it invariably does, but because one senses, in the modesty and brevity of the sentence, the probability that it sometimes does. . . . One is simply aware of too much joyous poetry that has been the gift of the Muse, who apparently leaves the ratio of pain and joy to be determined by the poet. To attribute to the Muse a special fondness for pain is to come too close to desiring and cultivating pain. There is, I believe, some currency to the assumption that a fragmented, diseased people can make a whole and healthy art out of their fragmentation and disease. It has not yet been done.

This is a refusal to accept that all artists make art primarily from their wounds, which is one of the most toxic myths about creativity ever. It can be laid squarely at the feet of the Romantic period, wherein the suffering genius artists was first given us as a stereotype. Yet art that endures isn't the art of pain and suffering, it's the art that exalts. Pain is not ignored, nor denied, but it isn't the end-point. There is transcendence.

The danger may not be so much in the overcultivation of sensibility as in its exclusive cultivation. Sensibility becomes the inescapable stock in trade of the isolated poet, who is increasingly cut off from song and story because the nature of these is communal. And isolation, or the sense of isolation, is moving much of our poetry toward the tone, rhythm, and structure of what Mark Strand calls "not overly excited discourse." This is what Denise Levertov calls "an unexampled production of notations: poems which tell of things seen or done, but . . . do not impart a sense of the experience of seeing or doing, or of the value of such experience. . . ." The union of overcultivated sensibility and undercultivated verse cannot produce song. It produces—not prose—but the prosaic, unessential prose. The art does not press hard enough against experience.

Human life is a full range of sensibilities, a full range of experience, of emotion, of the creation of memory. To stay in one mode—fragmentation, disconnection, disjunction, expressing as it all too often does urban angst and Modernist disassociation—is to neglect all the others. To write poems in only one mode means incompleteness. What Levertov is talking about is the same thing that Adrienne Rich talked about: rather than being something written about an experience, a poem should be an experience. When art doesn't press hard enough against experience it becomes virtual, itself disconnected, and doesn't recreate an experience in the reader, it just tells us about one.

Song is natural; we have it common with animals. For humans, it is also artificial and traditional; it has to be made by someone who knows how to make it and sung to someone who will recognize it as song. Rhythm, fundamental to it, is its profoundest reference. The rhythm of a song or a poem rises, no doubt, in reference to the pulse and breath of the poet, as is often repeated, but that is still too specialized an accountingl it rises also in reference to daily and seasonal—and surely even longer—rhythms in the life of the poet and in the life that surrounds him. The rhythm of a poem resonates with these larger rhythms that surround it; it fills its environment with sympathetic vibrations. Rhyme, which is a function of rhythm, may suggest this sort of resonance; it marks the coincidences of smaller structures with larger ones, as when the day, the month, and the year all end at the same moment. Song, then, is a force opposed to specialty and to isolation. It is the testimony of the singer's inescapable relation to the world, to the human community, and also to tradition.

Obviously I would appreciate any musical definition of poetry. (Even though I have at times questioned the many, many times that poets look to music for their definitions and terminology of discourse—not because I think that's wrong in any way, but because it soundly refutes the arguments that some poets make that claim poetry to be a "higher," more abstract artform than music. If poetry is actually more abstract than music, why do you need music's language to discuss poetry? Which becomes the more fundamental artform, then?) Obviously I am likely to agree that poetry needs to have both song and meaning. Well, I do mostly agree.

At a basic level, the entire cosmos is singing: every atom in the universe is vibrating, and according to M-theory even the subatomic particles that make up atoms are vibrating strings of matter/energy. The tiniest level of resolution of scale in the Universe, the smallest particles on the smallest level, are not a void but rather a dancing foam.

Everything in the Universe is vibration: this has been said not only by theoretical physicists but by seers in every religious tradition. The universe is frozen music: what we perceive as solid matter is in fact just slower-moving energy, but everything is still vibrating. Song is the basic organizing principle of the Universe: "in the beginning was the Word. . . ."

Where i do not agree with Berry is his implication that rhyme is therefore fundamental to poetry, because it shares its nature with rhythm. Rhythm, in poetry, is usually called meter. (Again, we're stuck in terms borrowed from music theory.) It can indeed be argued that rhyme, in some conceptual or literal form, is essential to poetry. It can be just as easily argued that poetry is not limited to requiring rhyme, especially where that usage is superficial and literal, blatant and clichéd: you do not create new music only by imitating old music, despite a reverence for tradition. It can be argued that music is organized sounds in time—and that definition can also apply to poetry—without requiring any other aspect of sound that we commonly associate with music. Tradition is defined by cultural expectations of normative forms. But cultural expectations are local, and both musical and poetic traditions vary widely across the breadth of the planet, and over time. The breaking of normative forms to discover or invent new ones is inherent to the creation of new art. Traditions are not static; they never were. Every tradition was once an invention; it is only time that makes it seem to have been always, eternally existent.

Actually, I agree with Berry that poetry that functions purely on the sounds of language, ignoring what that language refers to, to be mostly meaningless. I like pure sounds, I even like language as pure sound, and I've composed music that uses words as its constituent sonic components. But poetry on the page that is purely language-oriented poetry is sensibility rather than sense, to use Berry's own terms. It is exactly the kind of poetry that he finds lacks song and story. On this we agree.

But even more suggestive of the specialization of contemporary poets is their estrangement from storytelling. Typically, one can find this debility cited as a virtue and a goal.

I agree with that, but Berry goes on to a long discussion of narrative, particularly the loss of narrative used in poetry over the past century. This is where Berry sometimes gets a bit reactionary for my taste. In lauding tradition, he sometimes tramples on innovation. He is right to point out that the new does not have to replace the old, but can coexist alongside:

Why is it necessary for poets to believe, like salesmen, that the new inevitably must replace or destroy the old? Why cannot poetry renew itself and advance into new circumstance by adding the new to the old? Why cannot the critical faculty, in poets and critics alike, undertake to see that the best of the new is grafted to the best of the old? Free verse, for instance, is a diminishment of the competence of poetry if it is seen as replacing traditional prosody; it is an enlargement only if it is conceived as an addition. Freedom from narrative is a diminishment—it is not even a freedom—unless it is included with the capability of narrative among the live possibilities of poetry.

This is a plea to not throw the old out in favor of the new. I agree with that, yet at the same time I don't privilege tradition over innovation. I don't reject the new in favor of the old. I think there is room for both, and innovation does indeed add to the tradition. It doesn't have to replace it.

But this is where Berry gets interesting, for me. I have written before about the re-enchantment of poetry, of art, about bringing the soul back into work that often seems too dry, too intellectual, too disconnected from anything but the idea of the body, rather than body itself.

. . . our malaise, both in our art and in our lives, is that we have lost sight of the possibility of right or responsible action. Publicly, we have delegated our capacity to act to men who are capable of action only because they cannot think. Privately, as in much of our poetry, we communicate by ironic or cynical allusions to that debased tale of futility, victimization, and defeat, which we seem to have elected to be our story. The prevailing tendency, in poetry and out, is to see people not as actors, but as sufferers. . . . To how great an extent is modern poetry the record of highly refined sensibilities that could think or feel but not do? And must not this passiveness of the poetic sensibility force its withdrawal into the world of words where, for want of sustenance of action, it becomes despondent and self-destructive? . . .

In the last ten years there has been a reaction against this passivity. But for the most part this has produced only protest, which is either a gesture and not an action at all, or a negative action that either repudiates or opposes. The shallowness of protest is in this negativity; it is also in the short-winded righteousness by which it condemns evils for which it accepts no responsibility. In itself, protest implies no discipline and no correction. . . . That we have no poets who are, in that sense, public persons suggests even more forcibly the weakness of our poetry of protest. In his protest, the contemporary poet is speaking publicly, but not as a spokesman; he is only one outraged citizen speaking at other citizens who do not know him, whom he does not know, and with whom he does not sympathize. The tone of self-righteousness is one result of this circumstance.

The vast majority of contemporary poets never seem to even think about any of this, except perhaps to avoid discussing it. Sincerity is far less fashionable than irony and cynicism. Actually having something to say seems far less interesting to many than the fact that they want to express themselves about something, anything. One sign of the times is the retreat into narcissism, which leads us towards the self-absorbed self-confessional lyric. Another sign is the focus on technique over subject, which leads us to the word-games and puzzle-box crowd. Yet another sign is the (frankly neo-conservative) reactionary attitude of the neo-formalists, which is largely an attempt to simply roll back the clock of artistic progress, no matter what rhetoric they use to veil their purpose.

Berry's response is not to ally himself with the neo-formalists, despite his reverence for tradition, because he does not restrict himself as a poet so obviously. Rather, his response is flexible in form, fluid in approach, if essentially non-Modernist. Berry's poetry and attitude occasionally reminds me of Robinson Jeffers, in that both seek (or sought) a poetry for modern times that is not self-consciously Modernist, and do not believe that fragmentation and disjunction are necessary or sufficient. There is also an affinity in Berry's work for the pastoral tradition—which seems obvious, given Berry's agrarian roots, yet I don't hear it stated that way very often—leading back to the English pastoral poets, but also encompassing contemporary poets like Gary Snyder, William Everson, and Linda Hasselstrom. Poets who extend the oldest human values of all.

Elsewhere in Standing By Words, Berry speaks positively of Gary Snyder, who is one of the few poets who do succeed in making a new poetry rooted in the very old; Snyder has openly stated that his values are not Modernist, but Paleolithic, encompassing ecology, myth, bioregionalism, and human partnership with the land. (Which is one reason Snyder is one of my own touchstones as a poet.)

What Berry is describing in the passage above are the conditions of artistic mannerism, which I have also discussed before: the retreat from engagement with the world, and the simultaneous focus on the small and inward.

I think there's a hunger for the poetry that Berry describes. I see this partly in the revival of interest around poets engaged with the world, with social issues as well as ecological ones. Snyder has already been mentioned. But the revival of the reputation of Robinson Jeffers reflects this trend, as does the growing revival of interest in Jeffers' disciple William Everson. Hayden Carruth is another. On the same page as Snyder, with his interest in and promotion of deep ecological values and the relevance of Paleolithic myths and values to modern life, is Clayton Eshleman. There are others.

Despite the cynicism of many of the louder voices in contemporary poetry—one notices that this cynicism is often simultaneous with urbanism and the view that humanity is more interesting than anything else in the world—there is a growing re-enchantment with the older values found in the land. Wendell Berry speaks most elegantly of this. His ideas are well worth our discussion, even if at times his ideas seem reactionary rather than revolutionary. I have tremendous respect for him as a person, and a writer. I find myself enjoying his writing style so much that he can almost talk me into agreeing with him even in those areas where I don't. The world is more alive when he describes it. That too is a kind of re-enchantment, a valuable one.

Songwriting: Touchstones

There is a small group of musicians, composers, lyricists, singers, and singer/songwriters, who have influenced me during the writing of Heartlands, rarely directly in terms of style or content, but in terms of their attitude and approach towards writing words and music.

The list of names here is partial and incomplete. These were the songwriters who I was listening to and learning from during the writing of Heartlands, but most of them were already favorites long before then. Coincident with the writing of the commission, Stephen Sondheim published his two books of collected lyrics; in fact, these two volumes bracketed the writing of the commission. During the middle of writing the commission, digging back into folk music for sources on a couple of the songs, folk music being one of my key musical roots, I took the Pete Seeger route towards discovering Bruce Springsteen, who frankly I had never given much attention to before; I had not been a fan before, but I am now, and have absorbed a great many of his albums in the past few months.

•

Stephen Sondheim.

When I was just beginning to write Heartlands, I acquired the first of Sondheim's two books of collected lyrics: Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981). Just after finishing the writing, I acquired Sondheim's second book: Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011). I can't say enough positive things about what it was like to read these books. I readily admit that I am not a huge Broadway fan, liking very few musicals among those available. Sondheim, however, holds place on my list with the largest body of work that I enjoy listening to repeatedly.

These two books of collected lyrics are amazing, because they are more than just that. Reading these books was like going to grad school in songwriting, not only for Broadway (which I still don't have much interest in) but in general. Sondheim still writes some of the freshest lyrics around, with very original takes on familiar life-situations.

This is like going to grad school on how to craft a lyric. The meat of the lessons are to be found in his commentaries, sidebars, and the several instances in which he gives multiple versions of the same song. Sondheim has a few basic prniciples which can be stated very simply, yet are very profound. I copied these into the front pages of my pocket notebook that I started many of my own song lyrics in, to remind me at all times. This is what Sondheim himself has to say in his Preface—and this should be etched into the hearts of all writers of song lyrics:

There are three principles for a lyric writer to follow, all of them familiar truisms. They were not immediately apparent to me when I started writing, but have come into clearer and clearer focus over the years through the combination of Oscar Hammerstein's tutoring, Strunk and White's huge little book "The Elements of Style" and my own practice of the craft. I have not always been skilled or diligent enough to follow them as faithfully as I would like, but the underlie everything I've ever written. In no particular order, and to be written in stone:

Less Is More

Content Dictates Form

God Is In the Details

all in the service of

Clarity

without which nothing else matters.

If a lyric writer observes this mantra rigorously, he can turn out a respectable lyric. If he has a feeling for music and rhythm, a sense of theater and something to say, he can turn out an interesting one. If in addition he has such qualities as humor, style, imagination and the numerous other gifts every writer could use, he might even turn out a good one, and with an understanding composer and a stimulating book writer, the sky's the limit.
—Stephen Sondheim

I don't care if you write lyrics for Nashville or Broadway, if you write for solo voice with acoustic guitar in San Francisco or St. Louis, or if you write for a rock band in Los Angeles or Detroit: the lesson remains the same. Less Is More. Content Dictates Form. God Is In the Details.

•

Bruce Cockburn.

Bruce Cockburn is absolutely one of the great living singer/songwriters. I put him ahead of Dylan and Cohen both, ahead of Neil Young. His only real peer is Joni Mitchell.

Bruce has probably influenced my own lyric songwriting more than anyone else (again except maybe Joni Mitchell). The songs I'm writing right now owe what's good in them to what I've learned from Bruce, from Joni, and from Stephen Sondheim. That's the short list. I hope my songs are in my own voice, and my prior experience as a poet makes me tend to think that they are, but I can still hear resonances that I am happy to acknowledge.

His influence on me as a singer/songwriter is not literally in terms of content, but in terms of writing approach. Although I do very often agree with Cockburn's progressive politics as presented in his songs—which are stellar examples of how to do a political poem or song well—that's not my main subject matter. I'm not afraid to write a political song, but more often I am moved to write about the inner world of spirit and experience. I tend not to write in the abstract. What Cockburn often does, in his songs of social commentary, is take a very personal moment, a very concrete experience, and connect to the universal human experience that we all share. He makes the leap from personal to universal regularly and compellingly.

Cockburn's lyrics are, unlike most songwriters' lyrics, able to be read and appreciated on the page as pure poetry. I'm very much of the opinion that most singer/songwriters who are declared by their fans to be Poets are not; I am not, as I've said a member of the Cult of Dylan or the Cult of Cohen. But Bruce Cockburn, like Joni Mitchell, actually is one of those rare songwriters who really cam be called a poet.

Bruce has a remarkable ear for metaphors and turns of phrase, and some of his lyrics are so stunningly perfect when you first hear them: something described so perfectly that you relive the experience in yourself, even if you've never put it into words before. His turns of phrase wake me up and catch my attention. A song like "Tibetan Side of Town" is so immediate, so surprising, that you feel like you're right there, in the experience, drawn in by the imagery as if into a film. Early in the song is the remarkable line, from when the leaps onto a motorcycle to drive through Kathmandu to go drinking in another part of town, "butterfly sparkle in my lasered eye." You know exactly what that means, you can see it, even though you've never heard it phrased that way before.

Through rutted winding streets of Kathmandu
Dodging crowded humans cows dogs rickshaws -
Storefronts constellated pools of bluewhite
Bright against darkening walls

The butterfly sparkle in my lasered eye still seems
To hold that last shot of red sun through haze over jumbled roofs
Everything moves like slow fluid in this atmosphere
Thick as dreams
With sewage, incense, dust and fever and the smoke of brick kilns and cremations -

Tom Kelly's bike rumbles down -
we're going drinking on the Tibetan side of town.

•

Joni Mitchell.

Joni is the songwriter who I have listened to longest in my life. Unlike many of her earliest fans, I applaud the truth that she is creatively restless and doesn't repeat herself. There are still fans who want her to stay in the flower-girl waif mode of her earliest albums, such as Blue, and complained when she overtly took up jazz, and playing with jazz players, as on Mingus and Shadows and Light. The complaints were not as fierce as when Bob Dylan "betrayed" his Woody Guthrie roots by taking up the electric guitar, but they were similar in tone. I've listened to some of Joni's albums so many times that I have them completely memorized, most notably Hejira and Turbulent Indigo.

In fact it was Joni's interest in jazz, and its increasing presence in her music, that introduced me to her. By that time in my own life, I had moved away from my roots in classical and the contemporary avant-garde to explore jazz. I had just finished college, finished my degree in music composition, and was very tired of music theory. I was creatively constipated with Western art music. I was also playing Javanese gamelan music at the time, which remains a music I love. Then I started to teach myself how to improvise on the piano. Not just in jazz standards, but more specifically in the open-ended free improvisational style that Keith jarrett was doing in his live concert recordings; that Charlie Haden and Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman were still doing; I saw a concert with Ronald Shannon Jackson & The Decoding Society that I can still remember knocked me out of my chair; I saw the Art Ensemble of Chicago several times; and so on. So my ears were being opened to jazz, to improvisation.

Then I heard Joni Mitchell's Mingus album, which I got into because it was a collaboration with Charles Mingues, the great jazz composer and bassist. Bass was my second instrument, after piano, and still is. (Although I recently had a moment in a music store where I surprised one of my best musical buddies by picking up an upright bass and playing it; he'd known me mostly as a Stick player throughout our friendship.) I mean, come on, this was the great Charles Mingus! Well, that album blew me away, and then I heard Hejira with its incredible songs, and I was hooked on Joni for life. Here's the first verse of "Amelia":

I was driving across the burning desert
When I spotted six jet planes
Leaving six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain
It was the hexagram of the heavens
it was the strings of my guitar
Amelia — it was just a false alarm

There's so much in there to unpack. Like you'd unpack a poem. The thing with joni, even when she was writing her autobiographical albums (from Blue through Hejira), she always makes the personal universal. She is able to take you from a detail of life and love and connect with you by showing you how your life is no different from the narrator in the song: we all have these same complex human feelings.

During the summer, just before the surgery—which interrupted my creative process for a month, albeit surprisingly only a month—I found a copy of the first book-length literary biography written about Joni Mitchell, with the artist's cooperation: Michelle mercer, Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell's Blue Period (New York: Free Press, 2009). This is the first time that Joni has let herself be extensively interviewed for this kind of writing. The book is a study of Joni's autobiographical albums, from her earliest through Hejira, but it also is a history of songwriting, a biography of the prairie girl who grew up to become a songwriter, and much more. Many aspects of the songs are connected to events in life—but that on;y goes to underline how Joni is able to take personal details and transform them into universal stories and poems.

There are a million quotations I could include here, as I found this book, like Sondheim's two volumes, to be like going to songwriting graduate school: I learned a lot about the process, the sources, how to use your inspirations, how to write a lyric that has a long unrhymed line that is still musical. One thing I learned from Joni Mitchell is to not be afraid of complex jazz chords in your accompaniment; in other words, don't oversimplify the music in favor of the words. As Sondheim says, "Content Dictates Form," and any Joni Mitchell song is a demonstration of that principle.

Another thing I learned, from reading this book, was how to make the personal universal; how to take your own story, and make it one that many others will be able to relate to. I did this with one of the last songs I wrote for Heartlands, which of all 19 movements in the piece, is the one story that's most mine. It's called "Wheatfields," and is in fact a revision of a poem I wrote back circa 1994, about a childhood spiritual experience of mine—as a two-spirited boy who would grow up to be a two-spirited gay men, this spiritual aspect of my life has always been very foregrounded—when it first became clear to me that I was not destined to follow a traditional religious path. The story in the song is very much as it happened to me—and I have already received comments from singers in the Chorus that they too can relate to the song. So, the personal becomes universal. This is how art does that: by helping us connect with each other's stories, through the telling, the singing, the music.

•

There are some other singers an songwriters I want to credit as touchstones, who I will write about at another time. I've covered here the most important touchstones: Sondheim, Mitchell, Cockburn. Listening to this other list of artists was important to my writing process during the creation of Heartlands, and I've written before about how folk music came to be an important aspect of the overall work. For now, here's the list of names, and I'll come to writing more about them later, when I get a chance:

Michael Smith

Carol Noonan.

Lynn Miles.

Bruce Springsteen.

Pete Seeger.

Sarah McLachlan.

•

Since I've become a songwriter, through this process of the commission and the handful of songs I've been writing since completing it, I've been listening to lots of music from singer/songwriters both old and new to me. There are avenues I know I still need to explore. I received a great compliment following a recent performance of a song I wrote after Heatlands: a couple came up to me after the show and told me that when I was thinking they thought of Neil Young. I take that as high praise; I also take it as needing to fill the gaps in my knowledge of Neil Young. So that's on my to-be-listened-to list now.

I've been listening to a lot of what is now known as Americana music: something with folk and country roots that tells stories of life in the rooted heartlands of America. In browsing through the stacks of used CDs at thrift stores, I encounter songwriters and bands I don't know, but who intrigue me, and I take them home. I continue to discover new songs and writers that interest me.

I notice that there are a lot of Canadians on my list. I'm not sure that's accidental. I'm from the northernmost parts of the USA, right up there living next to Canada, and when I was a kid in Michigan, we got Canadian radio and TV as well as Detroit. We had Motown, but we also had CBC. It's also true that when I was a young boy in India, we were the only American family among the Lutheran mission folk there; the rest were Canadians or Brits. So I grew up with the Empire all around me, and the Commonwealth as well. I'm comfortable with Canada, just as in some ways I'm more Asian than North American. I'm comfortable with the open prairies of Manitoba because they're not unlike the same open prairies of the Dakotas and Nebraska. Maybe there's something to all this, or maybe I'm just looking for patterns where they aren't any. It doesn't really matter. The truth is that we have a lot of Canadians in the music and entertainment business in the USA; some of their best and brightest come south to make their fortunes, and we're the better for it.

Heartlands: A Bibliography of Sources

I have written before about completing the large music commission I spent most of last year writing, both words and music. I'd hinted a few times at my sources. My touchstones. There are several musical touchstones I'll write about separately; this essay is devoted to LGBT touchstones that fed the creation of Heartlands.

The most important source, of course, was the men of Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus. It was their stories, their thoughts gleaned from writings they shared with me, and from the interviews we did together, that make up the core of Heartlands. Some of the stories were so good that I basically converted them into poetic lines and set them to music with little change. Other threads emerged from several different people telling different stories; stories that had common threads. Some of these threads were tangled in mood, and I set them to music that matched the experience, both light and dark.

The stories in Heartlands are about what it's like to live, to grow up, to survive, to spend one's life, as gay men in the Midwest, in the Heartlands of the center of the United States. Lots of gay men's choruses have commissioned works about the experiences of the men who make up their membership, but most of those I've heard haven't been on this topic, from this terrain, grown from the fruits of the lives of the men (and women!) who live by the Great Lakes, on the eastern edge of the Great Plains, the open Prairie. I'm a Great Lakes native myself, having lived in many places around the world, but mostly, and originally, in Michigan, Wisconsin, and other states that border on the Great Lakes.

There is a spirit here, in the Midwestern Heartlands, that I testify to be unique: different from the rest of the country, maybe not in kind, but in degree. Maybe only subtly, maybe strongly. The dominant economic and cultural tides of America are indeed on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, and they do tend to ignore us here in the Heartlands, even referring to us disparagingly as the "flyover zone." To their loss and detriment, I am convinced. But that's whatever it is. People are who they are. Actually, the live and let live attitude is very Midwestern.

So, the core of Heartlands is the stories of the men in the Chorus, of what it is like to live gay in the Midwest, to grow up here, to go through life here. That's the core of the main narrative of the 19 movements of Heartlands.

There were other sources to my inspiration, though. Not direct sources, but contextual ones, which I call touchstones. This is a topic that in some ways I feel was inevitable for me to write, as it's one I've been thinking about, reading about, and writing about for some years. It's a story I've lived. It's my own story, as well as theirs. Some of my inspirations came from my own rather extensive library of LGBT books. Within my library is a small subset of books that are about rural gay life, about Midwestern gay life—a very small group of books, which is all that has been published about such lives.

Most LGBT publishing is about city life, the gay ghettoes in the big metropolises, which most gay men view as normative. I've gotten into more than one argument with citified gay men about this: that their city ghetto lives are not only the only way to live, it might not even be the most humane way to live. I've gotten into arguments with city fags about Brokeback Mountain, along these same lines.

It seems to me a lot of misinformation still exists among the LGBT urban ghettoes about life outside the city. I’ll spare you the occasions, true as they were, when I’ve been wilderness camping with gay groups miles from electricity, when someone complained about the lack of access to their blowdryer, refrigeration, or reading lamps; I’ll spare you the details, but I do have to wonder what they were thinking before agreeing to come along on such a trip.

In fact, many of us live in small town America, or rurally, and prefer it that way. By choice. Not because we can't live in the Big City, but because we don't want to. Myself included. My favorite places to live, in the many places I've lived in the USA, have been small rural towns, usually not too far from the big city cultural centers, but far enough away to be peaceful during the day, and quiet at night. I like to be surrounded by green growing things, and I like to be able to see the sky at all times. I like being close to the weather, to the land. I like the changing of the seasons. Just a short walk away from my home is a placid river I love; just a short drive away are the farm fields under the endless sky.

I'm not alone.

Anyway. In the mid-1990s there was a wave of books published about rural LGBT living. Shockingly, nothing like these had ever appeared before. Some of these books were the first on the topic, and have yet to be supplanted or surpassed. In fact, it seems to me that most of the city queers I know have forgotten all about it, all over again. So I now believe it’s time to clear that air, once again. I know I’m beating a dead horse, and yet it seems to me that it’s time for another wave of understanding to develop between urban and rural peoples, in general, and between LGBT groups in general. So, here’s a sampling of books that are still required reading, in my opinion, about rural LGBT life.

So here's a partial bibliography of sources about rural and small-town LGBT life. I re-read all of these books while working on Heartlands, and thus the stories therein contributed to the commission's context and tone and grace. Each of these a gift.

•

Will Fellows, Farm Boys: Lives of gay men from the rural Midwest. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996) If you only ever have time to read one book on growing up gay in the rural Midwest, read this one. It is one of the best books on the topic that I've ever read, and re-read. The book is divided into three sections, by decade—it is mostly a book of oral history, interviews, and memoir (some of it creative writing), and is mostly about coming-of-age as gay in the farmlands. There are stories in here of grinding poverty; a lot of death and sadness and loneliness; but also revelation, connection, discovery and joy. More than one man talks about living presently in the city, often for economic reasons, but wanting to move back to the farmlands and live rurally. The interviews are with adult men who grew up gay and rural, on the farm; which accounts for some of the book’s occasional tone bittersweet nostalgia; but there is also much wisdom learned at a young age. Many men speak with pleasure and pride of their accomplishments in farm and home activities, set within the context of a conservative social climate, rigid gender roles, etc. Farm Boys is revelatory, essential reading. It breaks the silence that has often fallen on gay rural life. Very highly recommended.

•

Michael Riordan, Out Our Way: Gay and lesbian life in the country. (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1996) This book is mostly oral history transcribed from interviews, conducted mostly in person. The treasure to be mined in this book is the incredible insight and wisdom of ordinary people you wouldn't look at twice at the county general store; proving once again that life itself is the greatest teacher of wisdom. One thing a lot of couples talk about is their mutual dependence upon each other, in the face of otherwise sometimes severe isolation. There is much discussion of the pros and cons of public displays of affection. There are many voices here, with many different experiences and viewpoints. The people interviewed here run the gamut from young to elderly, First Nations to Anglo, individuals to couple to communities, country socials to rodeos, and more. This is a Canadian book about Canadian LGBT people, and tremendously insightful reading. If you ever felt like moving to Yellowknife, read this.

•

Karen Lee Osborne and William J. Spurlin, editors, Reclaiming the Heartland: Lesbian and gay voices from the Midwest. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) If you believe that, just because you're LGBT you need to pack your bags and move to one of the big cities on the coasts, think again. This book of poetry, fiction, essays, memoirs, and interviews, is all about living the USA's heartland. This isn't purely a rural LGBT book, as there are Chicago and Milwaukee writers in here, among others. But as we all know, all of us who live out here, we have more in common with folks in Chicago than we do with folks in New York City, much of the time. The editors of this book are self-conscious about their book being a "corrective" to the usual rhetoric that gay culture only exists in NYC or San Francisco or LA (or Chicago, which is a Big City often overlooked by those on the coasts), but the strength of the book is that it does represent real Midwestern values presented by real queers living in the real Midwest. I can affirm from when I lived in San Francisco, that there really is a uniquely Midwestern viewpoint and attitude about life. So, for me, the real joy of this book is in the poetry and fiction, which show rather than tell the reader what that Midwestern viewpoint is all about. There are about 60 individual contributors here, so you also get a wide range of viewpoints on several different issues, for example, being accepted by one's small-town parents, growing up in small towns, finding love out here, and more.

•

Darrell Yates Rist, Heartlands: A gay man's odyssey across America. (New York: Dutton/Penguin, 1992) This is a "road trip" book, a travel book, a post-Kerouac book, a book in the footsteps of William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways. I have a special bookshelf in my library for books on nomadics: road trip books, travel memoirs, books very much like this Least Heat Moon's, and this book. (Nomadics is my own word, inspired partly by Bruce Chatwin's excellent book "The Songlines," which remains a seminal book on the topic.) This book by Darrell Yates Rist, though, is a journey through sexual desire and identity. It's a road trip book that looks to find the gay quarters of each sector of the continental USA. So we meet a Mississippi drag queen, we visit the Denver Gay Rodeo, we meet a roughneck on the Alaska pipeline. Ordinary men leading ordinary lives, in small towns, in big cities, in rural areas, dealing with everything from mild discrimination to outright bigotry, but also luminous moments of comradeship and neighborliness. Some of the most memorable conversations reported in this book are in small-town roadside bars and diners. One of the themes that comes to the surface several times is how, despite our many commonalities around being gay, around AIDS, and so forth, we are still incredibly diverse, even divided, about so many other aspects of life. You meet in this book leftist activists and conservative rednecks, and more—people who share being gay in common, but about many other things completely disagree, be it politics, race, religion, or attitude. You come away from this book with a sense of the incredible diversity and differences among gay men, which is why it's so hard to get all gay men to form a unified political front to create social change. Rist concludes that one reason much of the activism seems to happen in the coastal big cities is because you can get together enough men of like attitude to agree on any form of action and ideology: you get a critical mass of interested bodies who will join in. It may not possible to ever create a unified, monolithic "gay culture" that agrees on what to do about gay rights; and Rist concludes that it might not be possible but it also might not be necessary. Just by living our diverse lines, wherever we are, we make ripples of change that spread outward—that's what he comes away with after all his time on the road, and it's a good message. Rist is a New York City writer, but he wears it lightly; he misses a few things about rural gay men, but he isn't judgmental. So, this is a big sprawling diverse unending inconclusive chaotic adventurous disturbing illuminating empowering book—rather a lot like life itself.

•

James T. Sears, Growing Up Gay In the South: Race, gender, and journeys of the spirit. (Binghampton: Harrington Park Press, 1991) This is a book critical to the understanding of gay youth, containing many individual stories and overviews. This is one of those books that could help prevent gay teen suicide, if it was more readily available; bullying is a frequent topic of discussion. There is a unique Southern culture, just as there is a unique Midwestern culture. But Southern culture still remains more homophobic, more closeted, than many other regions of the USA. This was a difficult book to read, and a sad one. Not all of the stories told—stories of rebellion, in most cases, as being LGBT automatically makes you a cultural rebel in,say, Georgia—end in triumph. Some end sadly, some have no endings, just as in life we just keep going. Politeness and discretion have always been prized in the South; but this can lead to willful ignorance, and worse. In many instances, in the days of AIDS, gays in the South are the new "niggers." There is hope for change—but change will come from the rebels whose stories are told in this book, and it will have to be won through struggle, as the grace and politeness behind Southern politeness is also the inertia of the closet.

•

Chris Packard: Queer Cowboys, and other erotic male friendships in nineteenth-century American literature. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) More than just a book of literary history and criticism, Queer Cowboys reveals a great deal about frontier and rural culture, not all of it dead and in the past. I've lived in Wyoming and New Mexico, and I can attest that frontier culture endures. Face it: If you spend a lot of time outdoors with no women around, even supposedly straight men become erotic with each other; this was accepted, if not widely advertised, on the frontier. This book documents the literature that suggests, hints, and reveals country homoerotic life (long before the word "gay" was used this way), is profusely illustrated with period photos, and is a fun read with a light touch. Packard's tone is light-hearted throughout, supported by thorough research. This book reintroduces to modern readers a forgotten culture of exclusively masculine, sometimes erotic, camaraderie between men of the WIld West. It reminds us that Brokeback Mountain was in fact not a new story, but a modern instance of a long-standing one.

•

Scott Herring: Another Country: Queer anti-urbanism. (New York & London: New York University Press, 2010) This book, which I discovered mid-way through writing Heartlands, is my topic in an academic theoretical nutshell. The book begins with the same premise as I did: by expanding queer studies beyond the city limits. The author counters the usual (and easy) assumption of metronormativity that saturates LGBTQ politics, criticism, and artwork, by examining queer rural art, media, photography, literature, performance, and fashion. He develops a theory of queer anti-urbanism that, despite the somewhat academic technical language used at times, very much matches my own experience. (I have no problem with academic theory-speak, being a recovering academician myself, but some readers may find themselves needing to consult theory primers such as Riki Wilchins' excellent Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An instant primer, which I highly recommend.) The history of the Radical Faeries, and R.F.D. magazine are touched on, as part of the origins of queer anti-urbanism. (Being affiliated with the Radical Faeries myself, I found a lot here that resonated with me, and many other Faeries I know.) There is a fascinating look a queer redneck white supremacists in the Deep South featured in photographs by Michael Meads. There's a in-depth study of Alison Bechdel's Dykes To Watch Out For and other writings, which points out how Bechdel's small-town origins have led her to always have a critical take on urban lesbian culture. Overall, this book is a mind-bomb. If you're a dedicated city fag, there's a lot you'll see by looking into this book's mirror that will make you re-evaluate yourself, and might even make you squirm. But that's all to the good. There is something essential in Another Country and its thesis that gay culture at large must talk about among ourselves, now more than ever in this age of reactionary political retrogression. Very highly recommended.

•

Melissa Harris, ed. Our Town. (New York: Aperture, 1992) An issue of Aperture, the premiere photography magazine, devoted to small towns, hometowns, rural life, and related topics. There is a tone here, in the writings accompanying the photographs, of Big City snobbery towards the "ruins" of small towns. The photo essays do a better job of it, giving us slices of life, tableaus of Midwestern rituals, with no comments, just photojournalistic rigor. This is in some ways a book I reacted against in writing Heartlands, presenting my own version of Midwestern life that is authentic, sincere, and un-ironic—a stance few New York commentators seem unable to take, or even understand. One of the attitudes that makes us the Midwestern Heartlands is a willingness to embrace sincerity and authenticity, and a suspicion of knee-jerk Big City irony, especially in the arts. Two essays in this volume are worthwhile, though: "Whose Town: Questioning community and identity," by Michele Wallace, which asks us to think about what we take for granted as our community, our origins, our hometowns: in our culture of people moving around from town to city following work opportunities, our culture that is at least always partially nomadic, Wallace asks: "How many family locations in history determine one's community? How many races determine one's ethnicity?" The other good essay here is by Nan Richardson, titled "The Fruited Plain," a look at how essential agrarian culture is to our national consciousness. The Heartlands of the Great Plains are also called the "breadbasket" of the world, supplying grain and produce not only to our own nation, but to large parts of the world. Richardson discusses how changes in farming practices and political policies have led to many rural communities shrinking, even dying out; she goes on to discuss how rural landscape photography (I include some of my own photographic work in this bucket) has taken on an advocacy role, a response to the loss of the family farm, not only elegiac in tone but also questioning the government policies that have led us down this path, and if it mightn't be wise to return farmlands from the large agricultural corporations into family stewardship.

•

Philip Gambone: Travels In A Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ Americans. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010) This is a book of interviews, made with people from all strata of LGBTQ culture, although focusing mostly on artists, activists, and movers and shakers. What was valuable to me in writing Heartlands was the recollections by the interview subjects of their lives, both rural and not, the stories of living LGBTQ in all parts of the USA, in difference decades. Wisconsin's own Tammy Baldwin was a memorable interview here; so was George Takei, who I have to say is one of my personal heroes. Life stories with common threads to all our experiences.

•

Ron Fisher: Heartland of a Continent: America's plains and prairies. (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1991) This gorgeously photographed book, part of a series by the National Geographic Society on the United States. It's the sort of book NGS does extremely well: excellent writing accompanying evocative, even iconic photographs that tell us the story all by themselves. This is a contextual book for me, an overview of the land and culture of my part of the country, Plains and Prairies and Great Lakes. I live on one end of the Great Plains, and some of my favorite places, including Wyoming, are on the other end, at the feet of the Rocky Mountains. This book gives us a sense of history, of continuity, and of speculation about the future. It's good reading, full of local stories from the Heartland. Recommended.

•

Alison Bechdel: Fun Home: A family tragicomic. (Boston & New York: Mariner, 2006) This is one of the most memorable books I've read in recent years. It's a memoir and family history in the form of a graphic novel, by Alison Bechdel, of Dykes To Watch Out For fame. The story is of a young lesbian growing up in a small town in New England, and her complicated family life. The story is in many ways about the mysterious life and death of her difficult father, who may or may not have been having sex with men on the side, on visits to New York City. The story revolves around public presentation of self, and private reality, and how they often differ—as every young person growing up gay knows. Especially in small towns, where everyone knows everyone else's business, being "discreet" is a buzzword that means hiding, secrets, and lies. The was the story is told is elliptical, spiral, circling back to the same events from different perspectives as the narrator, Alison, thinks things through and creates narratives that make sense. This is a great example of the art of memoir, a beautiful graphic novel, and a disturbing yet satisfying story about family secrets and truths being revealed, at last. very high;y recommended.

Making It New

Scrambling around for something to do to make the new year feel new, feel worthwhile (ah, the joy of putting on a fresh ostomy appliance in the first morning of the new year! such celebration!), I stumble across in my morning reading, sipping my tea, a long interview between Robert Birnbaum and Sven Birkerts. Birkerts, always-thoughtful author of The Gutenberg Elegies, had more than one thing to say that was epiphanic to me.

This is of course the season, just after the calendar adds a number to the year date, to talk explicitly about epiphany. Epiphanies are not always revelations of the unknown: sometimes they are encounters with a formulation or explanation articulated by someone else that seems so true to your own experience that it goes off like a bomb, even retroactively, so that things in your past are reframed in a way that now makes new and more solid sense. In a sense, this other kind of epiphany is when you encounter something that you realize you already knew, all along, on some level, but you hadn't articulated it to yourself quote so clearly, elegantly, or thoroughly; so when you hear it coming from another source, there's a big "Aha!" moment, and part of the moment is your realization that this was something you already knew.

Birnbaum and Birkerts spent a long time talking about reviewing, its changing climate, its current diminution and failures (reminding me in a way of the long conversations between Michael Ventura and James Hillman transcribed in their mind-blowing book We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World's Getting Worse), and its possibilities.

One moment early in the interview that came across as an epiphany—one of those things I already knew, on some level, but hadn't yet articulated to myself—was in regard to a fundamental aspect of the creative process. They were talking about journalism and book reviews:

•

RB: How do you do with deadlines?

SB: Eschew them (both laugh).

RB: I guess that disqualifies you from journalism.

SB: I could have gone that way. I have done a major life-flip because I’d say the first 15 years of writing was a huge amount of reviewing and most of it was on deadline. I created a discipline-monster who I have since repudiated, or begun to. And I am not sure which leads which, but the stuff that used to arrive effortlessly in terms of the kind of mental structure of a review—it was like butter, I could just sit down and it would all come together. And that very thing has become almost unthinkably difficult for me. Everything in me resists writing the sentence that says, “In the opening of her latest novel…”

RB: Too facile, too banal?

SB: Well, you wear yourself out with your own repetitions. That’s also the basis of any progress in the arts, turning against what you can’t do anymore.

•

Pay attention to that: The basis of any progress in the arts is turning against what you can't do anymore. This makes so much sense to me. It strikes me as the root psychological force behind any avant-garde. All avant-gardes are on some level a rejection of the past, of the status quo, of the existing prevailing winds of artistic fashion, of received wisdom.

As an artist, there are things you have done before—whether they were rote exercises done during your apprenticeship, or whether they are received wisdom about what Art is or should be—that you can't stand to do anymore—you have an almost visceral, gut-level reaction against repeating your old habits and patterns. You wear yourself out with your own repetitions. The notion that the new is always better than the old is at root a Romantic ideal—and keep in mind that the artistic Modernism of the early 20th C. was the full and final flowering of the Romantic period that had begun almost a century before, in terms of its ideas about who makes art and why—and so the various avant-gardes of the early 20th C. were really rejecting the old ways of making art, while not really rejecting the archetypes and stereotypes of the Artist that are part and parcel of the Romantic ideal. (The Solitary Artist, the Starving Artist, the Misunderstood Rebel, etc.)

I've said often that as an artist I don't really ever get bored. And that's true. If something starts to seem stale, I can go do something else. I practice crop rotation between several artforms, as one way of staying fresh. (This past couple of weeks, even though in many ways I've had a personally crappy time, I continued to make art. I'm almost done with a new song, and I did a couple of rounds of papier-maché, and a couple of smaller poems. It's never a vacuum, even when things are bad.) Yet even though I never get bored, I do get tired of repetitions. I've invented at least four new forms for poetry, that I can recall off the top of my head, which I've then used several times for my own poems—until they seem stale, then I go on to invent new ones. (One contention that some formalist poets seem to have with what I do as a poet is not that I occasionally do use forms, but that I don't use existing, inherited, historical forms, like the sonnet: which are, after all, another form of received wisdom. The objection seems to be as much about the act of invention, itself, as it is about any poetic content.)

I am self-aware enough of my worldviews and mindsets to know how they appear in my art—and how they affect the basic assumptions I make about the nature of the Universe, of life, and therefore of art. It is characteristic of me as an artist to not repeat myself. At least, not very often. There are various creative grooves that I return to, for fresh idea-mining, but if you were to closely observe my process, it's often about variations rather than repetitions. This operates on both large and small scales. I am aware of my own preference to not repeat a melody exactly in every verse of a song; there are always a few notes different, in variation. If you listen to live performances of signature songs by familiar recording artists, they usually change the arrangement that was recorded on their album. This is another way of keeping it fresh. I am aware that when I write a poem within one of the forms I've invented, even then it rarely exactly matches its predecessors. My life's experience has led me to be very conscious that nothing ever repeats exactly the same way twice, that change is always active and inevitable, and that most things are ephemeral. One reason I don't like to repeat myself is because life's too short to waste time on repetitions. I periodically turn against what I can't do anymore, what doesn't work for me anymore. I periodically therefore must try new things, or invent them. I suppose it's a form of artistic restlessness, but it's a fertile sort.

Of course, this means that I will usually tend to find myself allied with an avant-garde, philosophically if not in terms of what my art actually looks like. I've always been allied in spirit to the avant-garde, although I have rarely used self-consciously "avant-gardist" styles or means. I'm not a member of any school or -ism. Neither an Expressionist nor an Existentialist be. I usually find myself in disagreement, sooner or later, with all keepers of artistic ideology. (The classic example was the Surrealists, who began as disruptors of the old way of making art, precisely as Birkerts stipulates, very fresh and original in their approaches to making art—yet ended up being rigidly encoded, with ideological purity enforcement about who was good enough to be a member of the group or not.)

I know that the price of this, as well as the price of not repeating myself, is likely to be a lack of popular or commercial success. Pop music audiences, for example, don't really want innovation, they want repetition. Most intelligentsia like to re-affirm existing (received wisdom) values and truths, and not seek out new territory. We still, as Jean Cocteau once said, tend to judge what is beautiful by what we are already familiar with. It takes time to educate the audience. So be it.

On the other hand, later in their conversation Birnbaum and Birkerts discuss the ongoing contemporary balkanization of popular media, the lack of a centralized critical value-system, the anarchic tendencies of the new publishing media. There is no real Top 40 list of songs in popular music any more, instead there are many genres and sub-genres each going their own way. Birnbaum is as critical of Top Ten lists as I am, and for similar reasons. Many balkanized genres openly ignore the Top 40 nowadays. Even such public praise as winning peer-recognition awards like the Pulitzer or the Oscars comes under scrutiny as meaningless to creativity. Many younger artists simply ignore the entire awards process.

So there is also the possibility, as Birkerts points out, that with all the new niches being created, an artist who might never have gotten published by a large publishing venture, or received much mainstream critical attention (such as myself, or you), can find or create their own niche to fill, and an audience that might be small but loyal. So there's hope even for me (and you).

Just as there are artists who tend to not repeat themselves, there are audiences who do like to be surprised, and enjoy the adventure of not knowing what they'll see next from the artists they like. I too am that sort of fan, and mostly follow artists who veer and migrate, rather than following the straight and narrow. Unpredictability is a positive virtue, in these cases. (Which is why I will always prefer the unpredictable Brian Eno, or the genuinely original Bjork, to the Michael Boltons and Lady Gagas of the pop music world.) Again, my experience has taught me that to embrace chance and change; which you must do, even if you don't want to, as that's how the world turns.

Which brings me around to epiphany again. Epiphany, as I said above, is about revelation, and about realization. It's also about making it new. How do we make it new? Sometimes by discovery. And at other times by refusing to re-enactment the old and familiar. It's an epiphany to realize, for myself, that I have always been inclined towards not repeating myself. It's an epiphany to accept that as being a good and proper way to be, with its many possibilities for the positive uses of restlessness.

Published Poets

There are two younger gay poets I've met online—Christopher Hennessey and Stephen Mills—who are both celebrating, in their individual ways, having their first volumes of poetry published. Congratulations to both of them for seeing their books into print. I look forward to reading both books, sooner or later.

I feel connected to both of these younger gay poets in part because they are both of Midwestern origin, as am I, no matter where we all find ourselves now. That there is a Midwestern attitude towards life, and a viewpoint that colors how we confront life and the world, I have no doubt. I have been immersed in a writing project that is based on just that premise, that the Heartlands in the middle of the country do have something unique and different to offer, culturally, spiritually, creatively. Both of these younger gay poets make sense to me, when I read their poems, in way that is unfashionably non-ironic and sincere. There is a connection based on real experience, not just imagined experience. That there is a wide difference in style and means only makes the experience given from reading their poems more genuine, more authentic. "Only connect," E.M. Forster wrote, and these two poets do connect.

So I congratulate them both, and wish them all the best—and at the same moment feel a deluge of complex emotions. A blend of pride, pleasure, and some envy. I try to keep the envy to myself, because envy is at root self-centered, and present unvarnished congratulations.

Questions arise, not regarding the quality of these poems being published, but regarding the entire paradigm of publishing. Are we still tied to the idea of A Book being somehow more important to a poet than any other form of presentation? Does being published by an Established (or New) Publishing House somehow make you more legitimate as a poet than not being published? Is it poetic merit rather than the luck of the draw that gets one a book contract? Why do some publishing careers seem to begin younger than others? Do publishing careers that begin young sustain themselves for the long haul?

None of this really has much to do with Christopher or Stephen, beyond being elicited by observing their good fortune. Emotions are like the weather, and many questions don't have definitive answers.

There has been a stigma for many years about self-publishing, about "vanity" presses. The gatekeepers of publishing taste have long insisted that publishing one's own work diminishes its worth and impact. This stigma is losing a lot of traction these days, however, as are the gatekeepers of taste (publishers, editors, critics). Self-publishing has become very easy to do, using new media and print-on-demand, and the criticisms of self-published works on the grounds that they lack quality of writing and quality of design are falling away, because so many good books have now been self-published that the usual claims by the gatekeepers have been called into question.

Walt Whitman published his own poems, in their early editions. He even typeset and printed some editions himself, since he was a pressman with the necessary skills. Whitman even wrote his own reviews, anonymously. Had he not done so, would his poems ever become known? Would Whitman the Poet ever have been known by the world, have the influence he has had, changed the face of English-language and American poetry to the extent he has? His poems were considered unpublishable by the gatekeepers of his day, which is one reason Walt went ahead and printed them himself. And it's a good thing he did.

What I'm doing right here, writing a post on my blog, is considered to be "publishing" by some, and not by others. A large number of poetry journals, both online and offline, are now insistent that poems submitted have not been previously published—which for some poetry editors means, never, anywhere, in any media. So, a poem I posted on my blog is unacceptable to them, even if it's my best current writing. Other poetry journals and editors don't care so much about this veil of invisible originality. There seems to be some anxiety in publishing around things never having been seen before, by anyone—as if, by posting a poem on your own website, your have diminished it, or at least diminished its usefulness to the poetry journal in question. How much of this is lingering stigma over "vanity" publishing, and how much of it is wanting to scoop the competition? It may seem odd to think of poets as competitive, yet many are, and so are many journals. "You saw it here first, folks!" Acquiring first publishing rights is a big deal for some editors and publishers. Poets who habitually share their poems on their websites or blogs, as I often but not always do, can run afoul of these publishing expectations.

Well, that's okay. If there's a journal I really like, that I want to submit a poem to, that only accepts previously-unpublished poems, I can just write a new poem. Some poet friends have a hard time with that, because they wait to be inspired in order to write a poem. As do I, but where we differ is that I know inspiration is endless, to be found everywhere and anywhere—the triggering moment is readily available—and that creativity itself is an endless river of life that never ebbs. I've met more than one poet who writes, as I do, from intuition, from inspiration, and who believes, as I do, that craft exists to serve the moment of inspiration, not dictate to it, who yet also believe that inspiration is a rare thing. Perhaps for them, it is. For me, I can always write another poem. Inspiration is not rare, it's everywhere.

We live in times of turbulence and change, on all fronts. There's a lot of uncertainty. People are anxious, and the old definitions and maps don't seem to apply any more. The psychology of retrenchment, which is what a lot of publishers are doing, is based on fear. The other option, of course, is to embrace change. Maybe it's still scary, but at least it's alive.

Poetry publishing is in severe fluctuation, like all publishing. I applaud the genuine, actual, physical books of poetry being produced—because, it must be said, never has more poetry been produced and published than ever before. The new media technologies make it so much easier to self-publish than in Whitman's day. They also make it easier for traditional routes towards publishing to be pursued: agent, editor, publisher, printing press, book. The gatekeepers complain that a lot of bad poetry gets published now—as though they were a new trend, and had not always been true. Most things published are crap, and always have been. What the gatekeepers want is the return of their power to influence who gets published, and who gets read. I don't have a physical book of poems in the works right now, about to be published, but I still get read. It's not a large audience, but it's an actual one. I don't think that's cause for despair, rather, it reminds me of Whitman's times, and how his fame grew slowly because his poems were good (especially in those early editions).

My two young poet acquaintances have been doing the proper work of authors who are being published: the work of self-promotion, of poetry readings, or advertising, of getting the word out. Both of them have promoted their books on their blogs and websites. That's a good thing, because that's what you have to do these days. Stephen has written about how necessary it is to participate in the business of poetry. He rightly points out that the Romantic myth of the public clamoring at your door for your works of genius just isn't going to happen. You have to get out there are participate.

I'm thinking of new projects to take on. My biggest source of anxiety remains my medical situation, surgery, recovery, surgery, recovery. I am only too aware of how life-saving it has been for me to have been writing a new music commission, the occasional poem, making art, making photographs: being engaged, every day, creatively and artistically. Making art has kept me alive, and has given me a reason to go on living. So now that I'm finished with the music commission (except for finishing touches and other post-production details, of course), I don't want to stop. I need to keep going. To keep making art.

I take a moment's pause, and look over what I've written in the past year or so, as part of this medical adventure. I realize that I've written enough poems in two or three series to assemble at least two full books of poetry. Perhaps I will edit and produce such a book. I doubt anyone will want to publish it, though, as I'm more than convinced than ever that my own poems are too "different" to be widely publishable. That must have been how Whitman felt: that he faced rejection, unless he published himself. Well, I don't compare myself to Whitman, but I think I know how he felt. And so I might take that same route, and make the book myself.

Although I'm not going to rush into it. The poem series that I've been writing don't feel "complete" to me. There are more poems to be written in each of those series, I think, because I'm not done with the part of life which spawned them. Maybe in a year or two, the series will have stopped, and I'll have moved on to something else. You never stop making art, or writing, although what you're working on changes are you do, and as your inspirations change. So I might just wait till the poem series that have been evolving feel complete. Meanwhile, nothing stops me from producing another chapbook of poems anyway. There's certainly enough in the hopper, enough accumulated material, to make that worthwhile.

I've been thinking, too, about more multimedia approaches for my work. I don't really separate visual and written work. There's a book I could assemble from my photographs of the Western lands, with accompanying poems. I would probably do it B&W, although with some color. On my next roadtrip out West, I will at least partly be focusing on making infrared photographs, some no doubt of favorite places I have photographed before. It all changes when you look through a different lens. You see things from a completely fresh viewpoint when you change your artistic methods. The familiar becomes strange and beautiful again.

So I have some options. The main thing I want to do, regardless of what it is, is start a new, long-term, all-encompassing creative project. This too is part of the business of art: Staying busy, making art. Even if you have to end up self-publishing, because only a few people care, it's important to get your art out there, get it available, make it keep happening and growing. As long as you keep growing and developing as a person, so should your art. And that's the important thing I would say to any younger artists: Keep going. Make art. Don't stop. Never give in. No matter what happens, your art is necessary to the world.