…I wander around the house like a sewing
machine
that’s just finished sewing a turd to a garbage can lid.
— Richard Brautigan
Let’s begin way back in the wild and woolly ‘60s, Vancouver, Fourth Avenue and Kitsilano Beach being a Mecca for young people high on The Age of Aquarius, free love and loco weed. It was during a grade eleven English class that we were descended upon by a student teacher who was the perfect TV image of those hippy-dippy days: young, slim, blonde, blue-eyed, tanned, gorgeous west coast type wearing one of those loose-fitting, scooped-neck, tie-dyed cotton muumuus and beads and sandals and recently met with a bummer broken leg accident on a Whistler ski trip, so sporting a hip-high plaster cast covered with gaudy coloured flowers, peace signs, paisleys, and goofy well-wishes and florid signatures from friends and family. All the boys in the room were immediately smitten, and if not in love, at least, in lust. All the girls were, in their own way, equally intrigued.
It was this young student teacher who dropped a vinyl album on a portable record player and explained to us the close relationship between song and poetry and how this was epitomized in the works of a certain Mr. Leonard Cohen.
And how could I not identify her with Suzanne and how could I not place my hand upon the thigh of poetry and not feel the thrill?
Well, things were not quite that simple. At least, not yet.
I recalled part of a poem I had memorized as an assignment in primary school that went: “In the seaport of Saint Malo ‘twas a smiling morn in May, when the Commodore Jacques Cartier to the westward sailed away. In the crowded old cathedral all the town were on their knees, for the safe return of kinsmen from the undiscovered seas.” I caught myself wondering about the adjective “smiling”. Do morns in May ever “smile”? Or was it poetic license? Or had I made an error and exchanged one word for another? I couldn’t remember, just as I couldn’t remember either the name of the poem or the poet. At any rate, the poem certainly had a sing-song quality to it that probably made it more approachable and easier to memorize, but it (and Cohen’s), were a long way from the stuff that was on our current curriculum and I had a difficult time trying to imagine the poems of Coleridge or Wordsworth or Blake being put to music and sung, never mind being listened to by present-day teenagers.
I bought the album, enjoyed the songs, but stayed away from the poetry.
Years later, banging out short stories and having some success seeing them published in small mags, I registered at Simon Fraser University as a mature student where I took classes with leading poetic luminaries such as George Bowering, Lionel Kearns, Robin Blaser and Roy Miki. Stanley Cooperman, the only (reportedly) Jewish west coast Surrealist poet had already suicided, though his spirit and myth lingered among casual hallway and pub conversations.
Where were the female poets, you might ask? Teaching at UBC for the most part, or hanging out in the paradisal Gulf Islands with Susan Musgrave, eating raw oysters fresh from the beach, drinking dirty martinis (maybe), not frequenting the isolated scrabbled rock that was Burnaby Mountain.
That said, it was a minor poet, d.h. sullivan, the author of two slim volumes from Fiddlehead Books, who guided me toward poetry, telling me that applying myself to the compact form would help to tighten my prose. It made some sense. He also pointed out the books of Richard Brautigan as an example of a poet who was a master practitioner and whose work I might find both interesting and educational.
The strange thing is, I had run into the Brautiganesque style many years prior. My former wife and I had been vacationing, driving down the west coast toward Tijuana (another coincidence given that Brautigan had written a novel titled “The Abortion” that recounted a trip by his two protagonist lovers to Tijuana, though for a substantially different reason than carefree sightseeing), and stopped in San Francisco where she picked up a copy of “The Pill Versus the Springhill Mining Disaster” and began flipping through it. She read me I Feel Horrible, She Doesn’t and laughed. I like these, she said, they’re funny. And short. And sexy. And I can understand them. Like most of us, she had been raised on long, deadly-serious poetry replete with dense allusion, metaphorical significance and vague euphemisms used to blanket both genitalia and the sexual act itself.
Not that Brautigan’s poems are simplistic, because they aren’t. They’re generally loaded little gems that are finely crafted with a sharp mind and a deft hand. Pretty astounding given he was (by all accounts) a total fuck-up in his personal life, a social misfit, and an eventual suicide.
My ex read more poems aloud as we drifted further south. It was fun. After that, the book got stashed away somewhere (likely packed and disappeared along with her) and I forgot all about him. Now, here he was again, dug up and dusted off and set to lead me into the mysterious ways of poetry, grasshopper.
I had obviously hit my “critical period” of imprinting. I set out like the proverbial “duckling out of water” to put together a collection of my own, reading and researching other poets, other styles, other voices; imitating, borrowing and stealing as I went, in order to develop — perfect? — my own particular/peculiar version of the ars poetica.
And so it goes. And so it went.
Quack!
Stan Rogal — along with his artist partner and their pet jackabee — operates out of the small hamlet commonly known as Torawna, just west of The Hammer. He is the alleged author of a handful of books, plus several chapbooks (some of which were published by above/ground press, thanks!) An autodidactic intellectual classicist [reformed]. Speaks semi-fluent English and controversial French. Also: personal confessor, truth teller, and psychic investigator — no job too small, cheap rates, call now for a free estimate.