Denise Low Posts Poems on Climate Blog curated by Joe Harrintong

I am honored to have Joe Harrington select two new poems that are from a new collection of reflections on climate, natural processes, and imperfect bisymmetries. His essential site is Poems On Climate. https://writingoutoftime.weebly.com/home/two-poems-by-denise-low?fbclid=IwAR0mbigVmerIW4EkJyjbhQcyrgK1B-DPQ18PWfvh0FfbK3DudksAvsl6nzw

Denise Low recommends a poetry anthology website: HEARTLAND!

This ongoing, collaborative sequence of weekly poems, with editors changing every month, features wonderful work, like that of James Benger, "Blood,"  this week, monthly editor Ronda Miller.  , The poem begins:

Blood — By James Benger

11 11 19

Dad sold his blood

on Saturday afternoons

a couple times a month.

Mom off waitressing,

or maybe the warehouse job,

or any other place the temp agency

would send her,

Dad’d load us into the

rusted quarter panel conversion van,

soup can dangling from baling wire

(I think it was beef noodle)

to catch the constant oil leak. . . [continued on https://150kansaspoems.wordpress.com/ ]

Denise Low describes evacuation from the Kincade Fire

Dear Friends / Family,

Thank you for good wishes during the trying time of evacuation from our home during the Kincade

Fire, Oct. 26-Oct. 31.  A small fire in the Fitch Mountain neighborhood in August helped us to mentally prepare for a mandatory evacuation. We saw the local firefighters in action and how they were quick, had effective defenses, and worked with helicopters that carry water bins; jets that spew retardant; and impressive fire trucks. New to firefighting in this region is use of motion camera surveillance on mountain peaks. Also new is the meteorologists’ experience of what these Santa Ana-like winds can do in Northern, not just Southern, California. The fire crews were alert and arrived quickly.

So, when the bleepingly intrusive alarm of the Kincade Fire came over our phones Saturday noon, Tom and I were somewhat prepared. We had our legal papers together in a portable file box. We had a go-bag of food. We had gas in the cars, water, and some cash. But we were still overwhelmed when we got a 3-hour notice that we should evacuate. The fire was 5 miles away with strong winds blowing toward us. We unplugged appliances, found our overnight bags, and charged our phones. We then had time to select a second tier of possessions to pack—finer clothes, family photographs, jewelry, mementos, a few books and paintings, and the Sabatier knives my brother gave me in 1972. Wine. I packed a case or so of my winemaker son’s wine from the basement, for barter and for solace.

This process of  choice was a rapid recapitulation of our year of packing for the move to California

last July. The resonance added to the surreal quality of the day. Our home was dissolving under us, again.

We found someone willing to take us in—our daughter-in-law Allison’s mother Tami lives in Santa Rosa 15 miles away. We started the drive through back roads to Tami’s house, and luckily, Tom found a gas station and topped off the tank. At Tami’s we shared burgers from a local joint and some of the wine. All seemed normal, except for the layer of smoke to the north. At nightfall, Tami and her friend decided to leave for another city, while we stayed and went to sleep. We thought we were set.

We did not really understand the likelihood of a progression from an evacuation warning to a mandatory evacuation. Nor did we understand where we were on the map in this new town and how close we were to the fire. At 4 a.m. the phones made the wretched alarm again, and a neighbor pounded on the door and told us to evacuate. He affirmed that we were in the projected path of the fire.

We were loaded and on the road fifteen minutes later. We headed out the driveway with no clear plan

of where to go—north to friends in Ashland, Oregon, who would not be awake, or south to be with relatives? Our son was in Petaluma with his in-laws, and he texted that address, so we decided to join him. We edged onto Highway 101 and joined the stream of trucks, motorcycles, cars, and emergency vehicles. This was the scariest part of the entire experience. A few drivers were panicky and trying to weave in and out of the moving wall of cars crammed together. Ambulances were in the median shoulders because no one would give them room. Nightmarish. Going south was the right choice, because we found out later that Ashland  was only accessible from the south—101 North closed within minutes.

Two hours later, we turned off 101 onto dark country roads near Petaluma and managed to find Uncle Bob and Aunt Elaine’s ranch, thanks to Siri the Omniscient. At 6 am they had coffee ready, good pour-over coffee. That meant a lot. Then they cooked us a seriously good breakfast. Our son David advised us, and we mapped directions to Oregon, where former Lawrence friends Jim Gilkeson and Diane Tegtmeier live. They had been displaced by the Valley Fire four years ago. They would understand.

We made it as far as Redding that day, where we spent a tense night in a motel. In the morning, we watched television news of the fire, miniaturized on the tube into brief, dramatic clips. This odd echo of our experience, distorted, added a sense of unreality.

Then we traveled to Ashland, by way of Mount Shasta. We stopped and appreciated this white-topped

eminence. Out of the fire zone, such touristy normalcy was eerie.

By the time we reached Ashland and found our temporary abode, I was snappish. I was disconnected from my surroundings and did not register the beautiful colors of an Oregon autumn. Our patient friends served a lovely dinner, and we contributed wine. Food and drink and talk worked their magic. Jim and Diane conducted informal therapy with us for the duration—listening, comparing stories, sharing outcomes. They introduced another survivor of the Valley Fire, and I listened as she told her story. We were becoming part of a new fellowship in the evolving pattern of days.

On the 3^rd day came the rescinding of the evacuation order. The narrative that we had been living

would move toward a “happy” ending, unlike that of our friends, whose workplace had burned to the ground. Survivor’s guilt is real, but I did not expect a rush of satisfaction for getting through the difficulties. 

We made the long drive home on Halloween, expecting power outages but happy to have an intact house. When we reached Healdsburg, we saw burned hills directly above our son David and his wife Allison’s house. Everything was okay, but oh so close to the upturned Tower of the Tarot deck. Out our back yard, we could see pink fire retardant on hills across from us and a burned patch. Light ash covered the rose leaves. 

And that should have been the jubilant ending. But the gas was still out. Still is out. At first, this is not such a problem. The microwave, a single space heater, the refrigerator, even the washer and dryer work. The coffee pot works. But the stove does not, nor the hot water heater. This is too many days without a shower and a week without a shampoo. Nights are very cold.

So, we are still between worlds, in a suspended time. We can’t leave the house unattended from 8 am

to 10 pm because the power company might appear. The day revolves around this fact. Grocery stores are slowly repopulating their shelves. There is a shortage of mayonnaise. When refrigerators don’t work, everyone throws out the mayonnaise, so remember to keep an emergency supply. The meat department only had veal and rack of lamb at first, but very little ground beef or other middle-class cuts. Ice cream is a distant dream.

We are having unpleasant emotions about Pacific Gas & Electric, which turned off our gas well after the major threat of fire. Our insurance company emailed and offered to spray our house with fire retardant gel 6 hours before we were cleared to return. We declined. After collecting and totaling receipts, I found our expenses were $50 less than the deductible. Some things never change.

The power outages and evacuations are all worth it for one outcome—no fatalities. We will contribute to the relief effort for Sonoma County evacuees who are less fortunate (our church is taking a collection for undocumented workers), and we will count our blessings. For now, we are trying to adjust to a new understanding of our environment and new identities, for we do identify with our surroundings. The water, air, and local foods circulate in our bodies. The burned scar on the slope opposite us is a reminder of this time of fragility when our houses and bone-house bodies were in balance.

After a few weeks, we will have a family meeting, Tom and I, and maybe a few of the turkey vultures

that circle our house regularly. We definitely will make some improvements on our emergency strategies. Until then, we wait for our town and our region to return to regular, forgettable routines.

We truly appreciate each of you and your kind words of support. This is my first national disaster, so I have been fortunate to live this long without a tornado or other catastrophe—just those of my own making. The gas company might come tomorrow, and Tami has offered her house for a hot shower. Life in this interstitial space is, well, goodish.

Best to all, Denise  

PS, we just had the gas turned on. End of the evacuation saga, part I.

Denise Low comments on National Book Award-Poetry Finalists

The winner will be announced November 20, 2019. In alphabetical order, here are the finalists for the NBA in poetry (my comments in italics):

Jericho Brown, “The Tradition” Copper Canyon Press. This might be my frontrunner. Brown works with passion, cultural layers (including biblical, Gospel music), and sheer lyricism. His work is inventive and moving, joining head and heart. From the publisher: “The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we’ve become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown’s mastery, and his invention of the duplex―a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues―is testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.”

Toi Derricotte, “I”: New and Selected Poems University of Pittsburgh Press. Derricotte is a master, a founder of the important Cave Canem, a fine poet. Her new book of selected and new poems shows a full range of an important career. From the publisher: “The story of Toi Derricotte is a hero’s odyssey. It is the journey of a poetic voice that in each book earns her way to home, to her own commanding powers. “I”: New and Selected Poems shows the reader both the closeness of the enemy and the poet’s inherent courage, inventiveness, and joy. It is a record of one woman’s response to the repressive and fracturing forces around the subjects of race, class, color, gender, and sexuality. Each poem is an act of victory, finding a path through repressive forces to speak with both beauty and truth.

This collection features more than thirty new poems as well as selections from five of Derricotte’s previously published books of poetry.”

Ilya Kaminsky, “Deaf Republic” Graywolf Press. Kaminsky brings reader’s into the 21^st century of dictators, coded language, disability—places where readers enter into a new citizenship. This is important work, and this is a frontrunner for the award. From the publisher: “Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear—all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galya’s girls, heroically teaching signs by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain. At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea—Ilya Kaminsky’s long-awaited Deaf Republic confronts our time’s vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.”

Carmen Giménez Smith, “Be Recorder”  Graywolf Press. This high-profile editor of Noemi Press, co-director for CantoMundo, Professor of English at Virginia Tech, and with Steph Burt  poetry editor of The Nation is a powerhouse writer. Be ready to learn new pathways in your brain when you follow her inventions. From the publisher: “Be Recorder offers readers a blazing way forward into an as yet unmade world. The many times and tongues in these poems investigate the precariousness of personhood in lines that excoriate and sanctify. Carmen Giménez Smith turns the increasingly pressing urge to cry out into a dream of rebellion—against compromise, against inertia, against self-delusion, and against the ways the media dream up our complacency in an America that depends on it. This reckoning with self and nation demonstrates that who and where we are is as conditional as the fact of our compliance: “Miss America from sea to shining sea / the huddled masses have a question / there is one of you and all of us.” Be Recorder is unrepentant and unstoppable, and affirms Giménez Smith as one of our time’s most vital and vivacious poets.”

Arthur Sze, “Sight Lines” Copper Canyon Press. Sze taught many years at Institute of American Indian Arts. He is a fine, fine poet in addition to his role of mentor. His Chinese American perspective gives him layers that make this a very global and very 21^st century American book. From the publisher: “From the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor, from the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium triggers, Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and divergent into stunning and meaningful focus. In this new work, Arthur Sze employs a wide range of voices―from lichen on a ceiling to a man behind on his rent―and his mythic imagination continually evokes how humans are endangering the planet; yet, balancing rigor with passion, he seizes the significant and luminous and transforms these moments into riveting and enduring poetry.”

JUDGES FOR THE NBA-POETRY (from the NBA website):

Jos Charles is the author of feeld, winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series and Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry, and Safe Space. She is a recipient of the 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Charles has an MFA from the University of Arizona and is pursuing a PhD in English from UC Irvine.

John Evans is an owner of DIESEL, A Bookstore in Los Angeles. He has been a board member of the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association and the American Booksellers Association. He has been a judge for the CLMP Firestarter Award for Poetry, the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Award for Poetry, the ABA’s Indies Choice Book Award, and other awards. He is also a poet and has an M.A. in Poetics from New College of California.

Vievee Francis is the author of three books of poetry: Blue-Tail Fly, Horse in the Dark (winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize for a second collection), and Forest Primeval (winner of the Hurston Wright Legacy Award and the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award). Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, textbooks, and anthologies, including Poetry, Best American Poetry 2010, 2014, 2017, 2019 and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. In 2009 she received a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and in 2010, a Kresge Fellowship. She has been a participant in the Cave Canem Workshops, a Poet-in-Residence for the Alice Lloyd Scholars Program at the University of Michigan, and teaches poetry writing in numerous modes and venues including the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop (USA, UK, Caribbean). Francis serves as an associate editor for Callaloo and is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH.

Cathy Park Hong‘s latest poetry collection, Engine Empire, was published in 2012. Her other collections include Dance Dance Revolution, chosen by Adrienne Rich for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Translating Mo’um. Hong is the recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in Poetry, A Public Space, Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Baffler, Boston Review, The Nation, and other journals. She is the poetry editor of the New Republic and is a professor at Rutgers-Newark University. Her book of creative nonfiction, Minor Feelings, will be published by One World/Random House in Spring 2020.

Chair – Mark Wunderlich is the author of four books of poetry, the most recent of which is God of Nothingness, forthcoming from Graywolf Press. His other collections include The Earth Avails, which received the Rilke Prize, Voluntary Servitude, and The Anchorage, which received the Lambda Literary Award. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and elsewhere, and his poems have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, New Republic, Poetry, The Paris Review, and have been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. He is the director of the Bennington Writing Seminars graduate writing program and lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.

National Book Award for Poetry Finalists Will Be Announced Oct. 8

The National Book Foundation announced the Longlist for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry. Dan Beachy-Quick, Variations on Dawn and Dusk, Omnidawn Publishing; Jericho Brown, The Tradition, Copper Canyon Press; Toi Derricotte, “I”: New and Selected Poems, University of Pittsburgh Press; Camonghne Felix, Build Yourself a Boat, Haymarket Books; Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic, Graywolf Press; Ariana Reines, A Sand Book, Tin House Books; Mary Ruefle, Dunce, Wave Books; Carmen Giménez Smith, Be Recorder, Graywolf Press; Arthur Sze, Sight Lines, Copper Canyon Press; Brian Teare, Doomstead Days, Nightboat Books. 

Here is the NBA press release: "As was the case in 2018, the majority of the poets on the 2019 Longlist are newcomers to the National Book Awards. The exceptions are Jericho Brown and Arthur Sze, who were Poetry Judges in 2016 and 1999, respectively, and Toi Derricotte, who received the National Book Foundation’s 2016 Literarian Award for her work with Cave Canem. Three of the poets have won Whiting Awards, and four have received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Other prizes that have recognized the ten Longlisted poets include the Lambda Literary Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and the Pushcart Prize. The Longlisted poets have also received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, and Poets House. All ten of the books come from independent publishers, and this is the first time publishers Wave Books and Tin House Books have been Longlisted for a National Book Award. The list features poets in all stages of their careers, including one debut.

"Two titles present strong environmental themes, addressing the beauty of nature and the impending climate crisis. Sight Lines, Arthur Sze’s tenth collection, uses a broad spectrum of voices and forms to reflect on the imperiled natural world. The site-specific poems in Brian Teare’s Doomstead Days were “drafted on foot” at various natural and industrial locations, and explore what it means to be alive in the anthropocene.

"Climate change is just one of the many themes Ariana Reines addresses in A Sand Book, which also considers social media, sexual trauma, Hurricane Sandy, and the various manifestations of sand in our lives. In contrast, Dan Beachy-Quick’s Variations on Dawn and Dusk is more singular in its focus, serving as an ekphrastic meditation on the interplay of light and space in untitled (dawn to dusk), Robert Irwin’s installation in Marfa, Texas.

"Politics, resistance, and social justice are notably visible themes in at least four of the Longlisted collections. Build Yourself a Boat, the debut collection from Camonghne Felix, the Director of Surrogates & Strategic Communications for presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren, considers what it means to survive in today’s fractured political climate, particularly for black women. Deaf Republic, by Ilya Kaminsky, who was born in the Soviet Union, imagines a protest where a gunshot literally deafens the populace. In her sixth collection, Be Recorder, Carmen Giménez Smith sounds a call for rebellion against American complacency and compromise. And Jericho Brown’s The Tradition examines the growing presence of terror and trauma in our lives—and introduces a new poetic form called “the duplex.”

"Two of the poets, Toi Derricotte and Mary Ruefle, are among those who have been delighting readers for decades. Derricotte’s “I”: New and Selected Poems includes more than 30 new poems and uses an autobiographical perspective to respond to issues of race, gender, class, and other themes. Dunce showcases Ruefle’s celebrated wit, wisdom, and uncanny awareness of the world.

"Publishers submitted a total of 245 books for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry. The judges for Poetry are Jos Charles, John Evans, Vievee Francis, Cathy Park Hong, and Mark Wunderlich (Chair). These distinguished judges were given the charge of selecting what they deem to be the best books of the year. Their decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors; deliberations are strictly confidential. Winners announced at the invitation-only National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner on November 20 in New York City.

2019 LONGLIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY:

Dan Beachy-Quick, Variations on Dawn and Dusk

Omnidawn Publishing

Jericho Brown, The TraditionCopper Canyon Press

Toi Derricotte, “I”: New and Selected PoemsUniversity of Pittsburgh Press

Camonghne Felix, Build Yourself a BoatHaymarket Books

Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf RepublicGraywolf Press

Ariana Reines, A Sand BookTin House Books

Mary Ruefle, DunceWave Books

Carmen Giménez Smith, Be RecorderGraywolf Press

Arthur Sze, Sight LinesCopper Canyon Press

Brian Teare, Doomstead DaysNightboat Books

Beats in Kansas-Denise Low Describes Beats and Their Place in Kansas Literary History

BEATS IN KANSAS program sponsored by Humanities Kansas, April 7, 2019

Beat Writers of Kansas: The Lawrence-Wichita Magnetic Pole by Denise Low

The book, The Beats, edited by Seymour Krim, is where my story begins. In the mid-1960s I was a junior high kid in Emporia, when I found this paperback book in a newsstand. George Laughead has told me, how at about the same time in Dodge City, he found The Beats and began his awakening to alternative literature. The book influenced many of us as soon as we could get to a bookstore without parental supervision. It abetted our rebellions.

This first Beatnik anthology, copyright 1960, includes Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Diane Di Prima, Jack Kerouac, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti—twenty-five writers in all. Wichitan Charley Plymell moved to San Francisco after this book was published by an East Coast press. Michael McClure also is missing. But still, it is a good snapshot of the first decade of the movement.

In the 1950s, Beats began using psychotropic drugs, drinking, writing, and art-ing together in New York City and San Francisco. The bicoastal interaction, between the hip Village scene in the East, and the Asian-influenced West, created a vital dynamic. Gary Snyder was the first writer to bring Zen meditation from Japan to the U.S., to California, as he told me himself,. He is the ultimate West Coast beat writer, with his respect for Indigenous narratives and for processes of nature. His first book was Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (1959). Burroughs, with his suits and uptown bearing, might represent the East Coast Beatnik. Both places fostered interest in alternatives forms of consciousness, whether through Zen, meditation learned in India, psilocybin, uppers, downers, or alcohol—or admixtures of all. Both Beat hangouts in New York and San Francisco were havens for gay people, which is no coincidence. And Kansas—well it is in the middle. All roads go through Kansas, and I understand there was a gay bar in Wichita and a gay culture in Lawrence.

Writers especially are the spokespersons for the Beat movement, and milestone publications are Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959). Each has had a tremendous influence on literature. Howl refreshes Walt Whitman’s distinctive style and breaks down academic rules of poetics. On the Road uses stream-of-consciousness as a strategy and celebrates the American anti-hero. It also develops the distinctive road trip theme of United States literature. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch led to a censorship trial over its perceived obscenity. The first amendment was upheld, finally, in 1966. This is a landmark legal case.

Beat writers found their work unattractive to the literary establishment, and I once heard scuttlebutt that Ginsberg was stung by his rejections from major poetry publications. Karl Shapiro, a powerful critic, champions the Beats in the New York Times Sunday Review of Books when he describes the status quo of 1960: “’Modern American poetry is rightly called academic; it is textbook poetry, good for teaching. . . .  But nobody reads it except around examination time’” (9). Krim writes up a description of what Beat writing stand for, beyond rebellion:

Beat and hip writing—with its 1960-sudden combination of realism, surrealism, drastic out-in-the-open acts of murder and love that do justice to what had been sickly saved up for centuries, and with its jazz sentences and bad grammar or no grammar or new grammar—has the excesses and rawness of every unmapped revolt; but why pick on its goofs rather than the enormously positive power and Voice of the movement, which even a deaf man can hear? (10)

This is still a good overview of the writing, especially the break-down of the formality of sentences. Beat poetics abetted Black Mountain poets and led to Language Poetry—and an explosion of new entries into literary expression.

Ginsberg is the most vocal of the Beat poets, and both Wichita and Lawrence share stories of his visits. Kansas appears early in Ginsberg’s career, 1956, in Howl, the 22nd line: “who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas.” He refers to Kansas as a mystical place where cosmic vibrations intersect.

In the 1959 poem in Krim’s collection, “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear,” Ginsberg begins another poem with a reference to Kansas:

Poet is priest

Money has reckoned the soul of America

Congress broken thru to the precipice of Eternity

the president built a war machine which will vomit and

            rear up Russia out of Kansas    

The American century betrayed by a mad Senate which no

longer sleeps with its wife     (149)

Kansas here is a geographic counterpart to Russia, representing the whole of the United States as a synecdoche. In Wichita Vortex Sutra,” Ginsberg expands his idea of Kansas with Wichita place names,

Ginsberg was a secular pilgrim when he traveled to Kansas, which already was an important part of his poetic geography. According to James Johnson, Ginsberg wanted to visit Wichita because: “He wanted to see the city that produced so many great minds and so many weapons of Death.” His friendships with Wichita-connected Beats made an impression on him, according to the interviews in the Wichita Vortex documentary film, especially Charley Plymell, Michael McClure, Robert Branaman, Bruce Conner, and David Haselwood. “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” written in 1966, begins “I’m an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas.” The poem interweaves snippets of Vietnam War facts with Kansas landscape and history. With his visit to Wichita, he knit together his imagined poetic Kansas with specific site references.

One of my great regrets was that I attended KU a year after Ginsberg visited Kansas, including Lawrence. The stories of Ginsberg were still fresh and influenced the arts scene at K.U. The wonderful Abington Bookstore was a revelation, and I bought Ginsberg’s books there. Those were wild times. I had a boyfriend in the 1960s who had turned Jack Kerouac onto peyote—he was a Lakota guy. A man rooming in my boarding house, Gene Bernofsky, had been part of the LSD experiments at Harvard in the 1960s and had lived at Drop City. Edward Dorn spent a semester in Lawrence and vied to get a position despite showing up to class ripped. And so forth.

Through the 1970s and into the 1990s, Ginsberg made intermittent trips to Lawrence. First, he was brought as a visiting reader, and he packed ballrooms. He was a great musician and understood how to use sound, rhythm, and parables. Another perspective—he had worked in an ad agency in New York before his poetry career, and he understood how to promote himself. He understood staging, theatrics, spectacle. This skill, in my humble opinion, amplified the public profile of the Beats. He was a prime mover for that group.

After Burroughs moved to Lawrence in 1983, Ginsberg visited every year or so to maintain their close friendship. Burroughs had an appointment as a visiting writer-in-residence at KU—he was in his 60s and needed some retirement credits. He was required to do so many public appearances. 

There were salons for him afterwards, where he and I were introduced. It was normal to run into part of his entourage, both the local residents like James Grauerholz, Wayne Propst, Ira Silverberg, sometimes George Laughead, and also the visitors— Allen, Anne Waldman, Keith Haring, Patti Smith, Kurt Cobain, Peter Weller, Steve Buscemi. Sometimes these were superficial sightings; other times I was lucky to be invited to dinner with Burroughs. He was a brilliant man who opened his mouth and paragraphs fell out. He had a keen interest in alternative consciousness of all sorts, not just drug-induced, and he had fascinating stories. He read a lot of science to research cutting edge discoveries and fringe areas like cryogenics. A man trained in Lakota ceremonies guided him through some ritual fasting. His acquisition of a section of Albert Einstein’s brain in Lawrence has been documented in the book Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain by Michael Paterniti. Shotgun art, the Gentleman’s Quarterly fashion shoot in Kansas City, the Japanese science fiction film crew—so many stories.

            A bit about Gary Snyder in Lawrence. The KU Spencer Museum of Art has an excellent Asian collection. They had a series of lectures and conferences based on that collection, with Snyder as an honored guest several times in the 1970s and into the 1980s. The English Department co-sponsored some of his visits, and I was honored to interview him (with Robin Tawney) for Cottonwood Review. Snyder was such a powerful influence on the arts scene in Lawrence that people collected together their Gary Snyder dreams—which everyone had. He was social and enjoyed a number of informal meals with writers and Zen practitioners in Lawrence. His early explanations of ecopoetics had a large influence on my own writing and that of others.

            Stories of the Beats, or near-Beats, go on and on. Kansas, the center of the vortex, is a complicated place, it is a place where much undisturbed land still exists, it is a place with an intersectional heritage—not quite East nor West, not Southern and not Northern. William S. Burroughs lived in Lawrence longer than anywhere else in his adult life. The Koch brothers are born and bred Kansans. Barack Obama’s grandparents who raised him are from outside Wichita. This is a place of contradictions. The Beat movement has braided into different channels, like the Arkansas River, but it has never stopped. No one story has the full truth; only listening to many stories approximates the real narrative.

Ginsberg, Allen. “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear.” The Beats, ed. Seymour Krim. Fawcett, 1960. 149-153. This poem is reprinted  from a Nov. 1959 London Times Literary Supplement issue.

Ginsberg, Allen. “Howl.” Poetry Foundation. Accessed April 4, 2019. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl

Grawe, Jim, producer/director/writer. Wichita Vortex: A KPTS Documentary. 2016. Accessed April 4, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NeSJNi0xcM

Johnson, James. “The Wichita Group.” Beats in Kansas (website maintained by George Laughead). Accessed April 5, 2019. http://www.vlib.us/beats/wichitagroup.html

Krim, Seymour. The Beats: A Gold Medal Anthology. Fawcett, 1960.

Paterniti, Michael. Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain. Dial Press, 2013.

Shapiro, Karl. Quoted in Krim, The Beats, p. 9.