richard duerden

for a while now i've been very interested in & by the late SF Renaissance poet richard dueden.  i first became acquainted with duerden's poetry upon first reading it in donald allen's seminal & influential 1960 anthology.  his bio is terse.  he states that he wa raised in the Bay Area, served in the merchant marines & took classes at UC Berkeley.  the Bay Area was where duerden made his home until his death in 2000.

duerden was in the smack dab center of where the good shit was happening.  his best friend is the poet larry kearney.  he knew jack spicer quite well [duerden is in spicer's bio Poet Be Like God by lewis ellingham & kevin killian (university press of new england; 1998)].  philip whalen lived in his garage [see whalen's poem 'Duerden's Garage, Stinson Beach' esp. the concluding stanza where duerden's cat Alfy makes himself known].  apparently duerden was quite fond of cats.  i believe duncan mcnaughton also has a poem where duerden's cats frolic.  joanne kyger was an ally.  so was robert duncan.  i've been told that duerden didn't like his photo taken so there is a dearth of images of his visage but duncan's longtime partner, the great artist jess, painted a portrait of duncan, with duerden & a few other bay area poets, playing poker.  

the following is the intro by robert creeley to duerden's book The Air's Nearly Perfect Elasticity [tombouctou; 1979]

this book arrived this afternoon.  i'm thrilled to have it.  i'm still reading, studying & falling in love with richard duerden.  how to explain love?  or why?  sometimes when it comes to falling in love we have no choice in the matter.  we just do.  but i think it might be for, among countless reasons, that richard durden created a life in poetry, outside the academy.  he was in the thick of it.  i understand when duerden discovered pound he hanged pages of the Cantos in his apartment in SF.  

in the meantime, there are the poems.  duerden's work is not rare even as it should be, i think, better known.  his correspondence with whalen is archived at reed college.  duerden's work & more of his correspondence is archived at stanford.  i'm not a scholar or academic but a poet in love with life & reading/writing [watching horror movies too!].  as the beatles said, let it be.  & as the stones retorted, let it bleed.  i have the poetry of richard duerden.  

singles [1992]

anna reminded me a couple days ago that this flick is now 30 years old.  this movie is a lodestar for Gen X cinema.  that doesn't mean it is a great, or even good, film.  but writer/director cameron crowe captured the zeitgeist of twentysomethings in Seattle right at the moment of the founding of the name for my generation & the rise of grunge music.

this pic was broadcast tonight on a cable music channel.  no, not MTV.  a different one that doesn't play music videos but will broadcast live performances & programs dedicated to music & band trivia.  as well as movies that are at least tangential to popular music.

crowe is a gifted filmmaker.  & Seattle is his city.  i consider the great john cusack/ione skye vehicle Say Anything [1989] to be crowe's magnum opus of which captured late 1980s pre-grunge Seatle culture.  but it was this flick under review that really captured the era of its making.  Seattle was the hot city to be in & for bands to emerge out of.  members of pearl jam, sound garden, alice in chains, et al.  make their appearances in this movie.  hell, there are so many cameos, from tim burton to paul giamatti, that anna & i had to pause the movie & to go to our phones to check to see who we thought we had just seen was indeed that same person.

& so the premise of the pic is a small apartment building populated by quirky Gen Xers who are doing their fucking best to navigate young adulthood & romantic/sexual relationships.  often the actors, matt dillon, campbell scott, kyra sedgwick, bridget fonda et al. breaks the fourth wall to speak to the audience on the goings on.  does this shit work?  kinda.  but fucking hell, i'm biased in favor of this flick.  it's got a killer soundtrack.  it is so much of its time.  & it is one of the few movies made about my generation that was called TWENTY-NOTHINGS or THE SLACKER GENERATION until novelist douglas coupland published his groundbreaking novel that put a name to it, GENERATION X.

not that i'm complaining of neglect for my generation.  who fucking cares.  & yet, i do, in a small way.  for the sounds & fashions of this movie are very much part of the DNA of my own twenties.  i enjoyed the fuck out of watching this movie again & i'm shocked that those 30 years blinked right on by.  fucking hell.  when i was a wee lad the elders would tell me to slow the hell down & savor my youth for the years would soon gallop swiftly by.  i was a cocky i-know-everything young man who ignored these elders as if they didn't know shit.  time flying past at light speeed?  p-shaw!  when you are 20 a summer can feel like a lifetime.  

but at my advanced age a year goes past so quickly i am often confused.  those elders were right!  & but so, cameron crowe has crafted a movie that redounds its time.  & i had a blast reliving it.

happy autumnal equinox

 & it was utterly lovely fall day 

we have officially entered into my favorite time of year

a time for pumpkins, autumn leaves, cooler temperatures

& things that go bump in the night

suddenly my moods lifted 

a fucking mircacle!

& i dunno how to express the ambient sounds of the city right now

perhaps the sound waves have something do with the barometer?

i don't know

but it is a pretty fall night 

our windows are open 

to the clement air

& i can hear the doppler effect of the nearby freeway

the effect is oceanic

like waves on the beach

sounds of the city

which makes me fall in love 

once again

returning to earth

is the title of a collection of poems by the late wonderful poet/novelist jim harrison.  it is also an emblem of my own mental state.  i have been battling the blues off & on for a few weeks now.  nothing, as the beatles would say, to get hung about.  but still, anxiety, panic attacks & the blues is a permanent feature of my own physical & mental makeup.  

& but still, today is the last official day of summer.  it rained today, & monday, like a mofo.  first rains we got in a very long time.  welcome?  you bet!  scary?  sure, because we live in a world of extremes now.  i worry that we don't get rain.  we will have a deluge.  

even so, we are moving in to my favorite time of year.  the scary season.  fall.  the time of shorter days, longer nights, cooler [i sure as fuck hope] days, etc etc.  & autumn nearly always lifts my mood.  every day is halloween!

but still again, i was looking at videos of a seminal poet of mine, tomas transtromer, on youtube.  digital age we possess i can use a platform to search for the sounds & images of some of my favorite poets.  trantromer won the nobel prize for literature in 2011.  he is a wonderful poet & the vids i watched tonight prove that a good poet need not be an asshole.  i have no idea what the personal life of tomas transtromer really was like but the videos show his wife, monica, as the strong woman she is.  how both tomas & monica function as a couple especially after tomas' stroke is revivifying.

watching these vids of transtromer in sverige makes me long for sweden.  it is the only other country, other than my home in california., i know fairly well.  i live among swedish women.  their customs have become mine.  my own dna is fifty percent norwegian  my maternal grandmother emigrated to the u.s. after WWII.  i am more norwegian than anything else.  but i have become, at least, honorary swedish because of my life with anna & the rest of our family.

so when i am watching a short documentary about tomas transtromer & i can see out his apartment window i recognize the land & the weather & i long to be there too.  

does this rant make sense?  probably not.  i think of that haiku by basho, 'even in kyoto/hearing the cuckoo's cry/i long for kyoto'.  something like that when i watch videos from sweden for i feel i have touched down on earth.

i rob banks

is how i introduced myself to the poet james, & his wife leah, denboer upon our first meeting.  i don't remember the year of our first acquaintance but it was definitely before nick was born.  this was a poetry reading.  i was sitting behind the denboers at a Barnes & Noble & at the break both jim & leah turned around & introduced themselves to me.

i was a brash young budding rimbaud.  my head filled with verse.  everything about the art of poetry consumed me.  still does.  but the denboers were gracious, curious, funny witty, & erudite in a manner that displayed their learning lightly.

finally, they asked me what i do for a living.

i rob banks, i answered.

we hit it off.

today i learned jim den boer died at the age of 85.  our paths, after a couple of years of friendship, parted.  leah passed away a couple of years after nick was born.  i was a new father.  i stopped going to literary events.  

the last time i saw jim was at Ikea.  he was grief-stricken from the loss of his beloved wife.  we passed each other in the aisles until i walked up to him.  we said a few words, embraced, said we'd meet & catch up again.  & then we went our own ways.

jim is a damn fine poet.  at the time of our first acquaintance i was reading basil bunting.  i found bunting's poem 'the spoils' in an anthology & was blown away.  the city library had his collected.  man!  what music.  jim was amused by my ardor for bunting.  why?  he studied under the late british master.  in a poem published in jim's book dreaming of the chinese army [blue thunder books;1999] about bunting 'black tea' begins with these lines, 'There is an unpublished letter: "Of course I remember DenBoer/he seems like an intelligent bloke/though I can't remember why I thought that..."

85 is a good age.  i have not seen or spoken to jim for about 15 years.  i regret it.  for he was - is - a good man & a good poet.  he was also a good friend when i knew him.  his, & leah's, devotion to their black dog [subject of a sequence of poems] was near legendary.  they would leave events early to walk their pooch.  

we turn the death of others toward our own.  i am no different.  i am growing old too.  & i consider living to 85 a pretty good span of time.  i don't know the circumstance of jim's death.  i sure as hell hope it was fast & without suffering.  i think of other old rapscallion poets like ikkyu & t kilgore splake & jim denboer & i hope to be among their ranks.

but even if i don't this span of life is both long & too short.  the concluding stanza to 'black tea' is a fine summation of a life in poetry, "Trying to help, he brewed black tea in his leafy cottage/steaming, sweet with honey, and when he passed the cup,/I touched the hand that touched Pound's hand/and Yeats' and Ford's...beginning to try to learn the words/for stone, for mason's tools, for music, and the heart."  

i can find no better epitaph to the life & the art of james denboer. 

yes, this was the actual temperature today around 5 pm. this kind of heat is freaking unbearable. a dry wind is blowing & it feels like you are trapped in a hair dryer set on high. this is also the forecast for the next few days. we might be in hell.

 

a hot nite living in the '80s

i just got back from a nostalgia tour of 1980s bands.  b, c & i headed over to The Venue at the Thunder Valley Casino in lincoln for the show.  this is an outdoor stadium & in this horrible heat it was nearly unbearable.  the heat, fucking horrible.  i mean really really really terrible.  it was around 107 F at 6 pm when the show started.  it only started to feel a bit comfortable at 10 when the show ended.

but even with the heat the concert was great.  a long line up of 1980s era bands, like flock of seagulls, missing persons, wang chung et al., performed their hits.  b & c are our oldest friends.  i've known them for well over 40 years.  & we came of age in the 1980s.  sure nostalgia can be a bitch but man is it fun to see/here live music & who doesn't feel sad & stoked about their youth.  

even more so, i love people watching especially during live music performances.  we lose ourselves at concerts.  we sing aloud to the songs, we dance in the aisles [except for me cuz i look like a boneless chicken left in the wind whenever i try to dance], we allow ourselves to move out of our ordinary experiences to be with the crowd who are all singing along.  

& after these last two pandemic years going to see live music is magic.  yes, the bands onstage last had a hit 40 years ago.  when i was a younger dude i might have made fun of my older self going to see legacy acts.  but, i am at the age where i say fuck it.  music is ageless.  it is timeless.  if it makes you groove & makes you happy then it is good.

like i said, we are suffering a massive heatwave.  tomorrow is expected to be even hotter.  i sweated so much that when i stood up my butt was soaking wet.  or so it felt.  i wasn't alone in that feeling.  & but so what.  again, what makes us human is what makes the world beautiful.  oh, most of the audience was older dudes & dudettes like me, b & c.  but there were much younger people in the audience.  one of the most endearing sights tonight was watching a father dance with his young daughter & son.  they really grooved during flock of seagull's set.  & i wonder if there might be a subculture of 1980s kids of high school age in a similar spirit of the rockabilly scene when i was in high school.  

then again, perhaps not.  but i do wonder if these first two decades of the 21st C will produce its own legacy bands.  each decade of the 20th C was utterly unique with their own fashions & sounds.  the 21st C all blend together.  at least it does for this old dude.  but the MCs of tonight's concert would keep the energy going between sets by saying, 'who here graduated high school in the '80s?'  all the while videos of duran duran were playing.  i wonder if 30 years from now a MC would say, 'who here graduated high school in 2010?'  all the while a youtube or tik tok video was playing. 

perhaps i'm just being a cranky old man.  today's kids are alright & will also have their own nostalgia.  so get off my lawn!  & turn up that song 'to live & die in l.a.' by wang chung!