Román Leão

Tag: poem

  • The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings—Lew Welch

    Scanning the used books over at the wonderful Book Passage in Corte Madera, I came across several faded paperbacks by Beat writer Lew Welch. One of the lesser-known Beats, Welch is probably best known as the other hopeless drunk in Jack Kerouac’s majestically depressing Big Sur.

    Flipping through his work, however, I found Welch to be a gifted poet with a value system more in line with the nascent hippie movement that was emerging in the mid-to-late-’60s. That Welch disappeared into the woods around Nevada City with his 30-30 after writing a goodbye note only adds to the mystery of this important writer I had somehow missed during my fascination with all things Beat.

    Welch’s brief, lyrical chapbook The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings, originally published in 1969, and reprinted with three additional poems by Berkeley’s Sand Dollar in 1970, features a stunning wrap-around scratch board illustration of the Marin Headlands with a slightly more provincial San Francisco peeking (peaking?) over the hills.

    The title poem, the first in a pair of bookends that feature the mountain, intones the mantra: This is the last Place. There is nowhere else to go, as Welch boils down the western movement of humankind. Centuries and hordes of us, from every quarter of the earth, now piling up, and each wave going back to get some more. Buddy, you have no idea.

    The last poem, Song of the Turkey Buzzard, looks deeper into a riddle posed in a triptych of Zen-like koans (complete with commentary by Welsh’s literary alter−ego, the Red Monk): If you spend as much time on the Mountain as you should, She will always give you a Sentient Being to ride… What do you ride? (There is one right answer for every person, and only that person can really know what it is)

    Of course Welch, like anyone would, wishes for a cool totem animal like a mountain lion, but the mountain has other ideas: Praises, Tamalpais, Perfect in Wisdom and Beauty, She of the Wheeling Birds. Throughout the course of the poem, the mountain throws some pretty clear hints at him until in the second canto, he finally acquiesces, and given his final act two scant years later, it begs one to wonder if he hadn’t been planning it all along.

    With proper ceremony disembowel what I no longer need, that it might more quickly rot and tempt my new form NOT THE BRONZE CASKET BUT THE BRAZEN WING SOARING FOREVER ABOVE THEE O PERFECT O SWEETEST WATER O GLORIOUS WHEELING BIRD

    Sand Dollar

  • Always Something—Jim Dodge

    I am always hoping that Jim Dodge will surprise us all and finally announce the novel he has long been threatening to finish; his most recent, Stone Junction, dropped in the far-distant reality of 1990. A collection of poetry, Rain on the River: New and Selected Poems and Short Prose, followed twelve years later in 2002, but only served to whet our appetite for his deft wordplay and masterful use and abuse of the English language.

    Whenever I get the itch, now that the all-mighty algorithms know everything, I’ll check in to see what the good ol’ apple picker has been up to. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Idaho’s Limberlost Press, a beautifully archaic letterpress printer of chapbooks, broadsides, and I’m guessing… manifestos, had published a new collection of poems, Always Something, in 2023.

    Limberlost’s publications are artifacts from an anachronistic world of archival-quality papers and hand-sewn assembly—not a shout against the digital darkness, but more of a whispered word of kinship in a sun-dappled meadow, but I digress.

    I recognized one of the poems, the sublime, Owl Feather, from a broadside that Dodge was gracious enough to send me upon the publication of my first novel, welcoming me into the guild ten years ago, so this collection has been simmering for a minute, all the better to let the flavors infuse.
    

    I have no doubt there are powers far beyond us
    Because the grey-and-brown barred wing feather
    From a Great Horned Owl that I found this afternoon
    While walking the old logging road above McKenzie Creek
    Seemed beautiful beyond the ability to behold it…

    Dodge’s capacity for wonder has always been a feature of his personality and his work, it’s in evidence here as is his prankster’s sense of humor. In A Manual of Sabotage, he incites delightful mischief.

    Of course, only a heartfelt kiss can derail a munitions train,
    Explode the tube in a color TV,
    Destroy a computer’s mother board,
    And get you so exited
    You want to feel completely totaled and totally complete.

    Further imaginings should be enough
    To get us together to wreck more stuff.

    I, for one, am ready.

    Limberlost Press



    Also by this author:

    Rain on the River: New and Selected Poems and Short Prose