Missoula Spring

                I have become
one of my own poems.
This morning the covered streets
opened black in melting snow.
                I was wrong.
Winter gone, a flower
opens in me, a song, words
crawl in my veins,           
a carnation of the brain,
a dogwood.

 

Recently I received an email from someone preparing a book on the writing program at the University of Montana, Missoula. As an MFA graduate (1974), thinking about Missoula and my time there started me down a joyful path of reminiscence about my mentors and fellow writers – a coterie of flamboyance that is indicative of the time: a buffalo-robed musical poet, a rodeo poet, an heir-apparent poet. It was the time of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Gonzo journalism. Everything in that era was larger than life, none more than my mentor Richard Hugo. To know Hugo was to be invited into the storm that was his life.

I was a little older (32) than most of the graduate students because I had done a fair bit of living before I got there. I was already widowed and remarried with two small sons: Demian (9) and Caleb (3).

I had graduated from Birmingham Southern College (1964) with the full intention of going to graduate school for a doctorate in philosophy and becoming a college professor, but life got in the way. My academic career was sidelined by the suicide of my first wife. I started at NYU but dropped out after her first attempt. At Vanderbilt she succeeded. I moved home and took to my bed for weeks.

After emerging from my cocoon, I taught at institutions from Head Start to Stillman College, earning the ire of my Dixiecrat father. After a series of flings and fights at home, I had to get out of Birmingham. Go West, young man, my Philosophy professor told me. Finally I applied and was accepted for a Teaching Assistantship at UC-Berkeley. By the time I had made the cross-country journey in my red Corvair (unsafe at any speed) with my friends Lee Fesperman, Michael Hughes, Bob Valacovich and his girlfriend Pam, and my young son Demian, then-Governor Reagan had cut the budget and my post no longer existed. I secured employment in the burgeoning computer industry, and it was at Demian’s daycare that I met my second wife Maggie. Things were good for awhile. We had enough to get by. Along with others, I started a poetry magazine, the Berkeley Poets Cooperative.

During that time, Caleb was born. Bringing another son into the world was a big change in my life. I was working as a contractor, but I changed jobs when I lost my California State Employees contract. They decided that going with an individual was too risky. They said, “What if you get hit by a truck, what would we do?” I ended up working for a company called Programming Methods Incorporated. They made me the lead programmer for a NASA contract. This project was to track funding by Congress for NASA. That was an interesting project for lots of reasons. It was such a big project. We had to become extremely inventive because it required doing some things that IBM software wasn’t designed to do, like having Job Control Language (JCL) pass codes from one job to the next to indicate which jobs should next execute.  It was really big fun and very creative. At the same time, it was a long commute. I had to leave Berkeley at 6 am in order to get to Mountain View at 8 o’clock, and then I couldn’t leave until 6 pm, arriving home around 8:00.

Maggie was under stress, parenting both Caleb (toddler) and Demian (grade school). I was under stress and life was beginning to be difficult even though we had plenty of money. Something had to change. I had no more time. And when I did have time it wasn’t good time. It was stolen time. I was coming home, fighting with Maggie, helping her put the kids to bed, walking the dogs, then going down to my study and writing into the wee hours of the morning. I would get up in the morning and start over again.

I had things to work out about my past, and poetry seemed the best medium to work with. I wasn’t able to give it the attention it needed. I was becoming depressed and needed to take a break from the daily grind of painful memories, work, kids, commute – I knew a way out. I would become a graduate student and study how to be a poet who could invest my psychic energies in meaningful expression that would give me relief.

I had enough money put away in savings. I wanted to get a Teaching Assistantship and study poetry with Richard Hugo. I was interested in the Missoula Creative Writing program because I had read and admired work by Hugo in American Poetry Review. What attracted me most was the transparent honesty and passion and concerns to investigate his own motives and realities for living, his inner self and his emotional life and well-being.  He was the perfect poet for me to study under. His distinctions between the “public” poet and the “private” (Triggering Towns, 1979) make perfect sense to me, in retrospect, although I wouldn’t know that until later.

I wrote off to University of Montana to be a TA and they accepted me. I told Maggie, “We are going to Montana. I’m going to quit my job and become a graduate student again.”

Maggie cried all the way to Montana. She didn’t want to go, but I was feeling suicidal. I had to change directions. I asked one of the members of the Coop, Pat Dientsfrey, if she would take over the running of the Coop for me until I could come back to Berkeley. I loaded up the car with Demian, Caleb and Maggie, and drove to Montana for a one-year hiatus—graduate school.

During our year in Montana, Demian turned 10, Caleb turned 4, and I turned 33. It was a challenging year because I had to convince the administration to let me take five academic courses each semester. I only had enough money for one year. We got on food stamps, I got a TA salary, and I had my savings. We rented a place right off the Clarks Fork River, and I settled in as a Creative Writing grad student.

That was a great year and, in retrospect, I wouldn’t change a thing about it. Richard Hugo was everything I’d hoped he’d be, and I met some other fabulous teachers there: Madeline DeFrees and Ed McClanahan. What I admired most about Richard Hugo was his willingness to become emotionally transparent in his poetry. He was willing to put into an art form a kind of nakedness. He was the most honest character I had ever run into. He did not shield himself from the world. I think he suffered a lot because of that, but it was an amazing thing to watch. There is a term I once heard about, I believe in a Psychology class, called “involucrum”– that envelope of space against which one resists intrusion. Hugo seemed not to have one. He seemed emotionally available. You could walk right in. He would invite you to his own storm of feelings.

If you are a private poet, then your vocabulary is limited by your obsessions. — Richard Hugo 

 

I took poetry workshops and independent studies and studied poets like Rainier Maria Rilke with Hugo. He was a great big glorious open man. You couldn’t be in his presence without being affected by it. He cared – a lot – about language and poetry and place. He was intense and his workshops were intense. He poured himself into his students, as well as into every poem and every workshop lesson and every discussion. He invested himself — his time, energy, and attention  — in the way the poem worked or didn’t work. His attention to detail and intensity about whether a poem was working or not created tension in the room. Each poem was treated as either a magnificent success or an abject failure.  Anxiety in the room was palpable. Fellow classmate Clay Morgan recently reminded me about a time during a class on Rilke: “… when Dick was reading a Rilke poem and I [Clay] had my ‘seizure’ and Quinton Duval got on top of me and tried to stuff his wallet in my mouth to stop me from swallowing my tongue.  Oh, how we fought. Hugo said, ‘That’s the finest reaction to a poem I’ve ever seen.’”

Hugo On Campus

for Richard Hugo, in Montana

His forehead wrinkled in thought
like a massive scar, he seemed
a monument, and his civilization
asleep, working hard at discovering
what one wanted to work hard at,
and finding it hard work, and
                in a stage whisper, he hisses,
“Isn’t she a beauty?” about the coed
he had in bed one night
and couldn’t get it up, and
wouldn’t you just know it, still
impotent then. . .
                that self-mockery he used to dis-
guise himself from himself, and
making me blush, want to turn away, sane,
not hear the inner workings of his soul,
delicate as maidenhair, like a silky green fern
ripping at your skin, the sudden surprise and pain,
the rush of contact.

He could be intimidating to colleagues because he was so passionate, and he was deeply immersed in the writing of Triggering Town during my time at Missoula. He was casual, a product of the Northwest. Honesty and transparency were of vital importance, as were relationships and people and places. He was fascinated by names of places, the historical nature of a place, how Indian names stuck, the richness of the place-names that were reflected in language. He frequently disagreed with his New York editors, believing their academic perspective clouded the essence of what a poet should be working on: the honest evaluation of the poet’s real inner self as reflected by events and people and their language. He would get absolutely furious, freaking people out (students and instructors alike), going on rampages. His forehead blazoned when he got upset—angry or frustrated—a “v” like a heat flash, that would grow in intensity. It was a real sight to see. He was so sensitive, so passionate, so open, and he was unafraid to take you into his heart and share his innermost feelings – whether ecstatic or furious.  Madeline DeFrees once tried to calm him down and ended up leaving for the day. I didn’t really have any classes with Madeline DeFrees, but I do remember her mentioning, in discussion, that part of her morning ritual included daily recitations of poetry over breakfast with her partner. From memory.

In one class Hugo taught Rilke’s Duino Elegies. I remember particularly a class about angels (I don’t remember which elegy). He came into class, said he couldn’t make head nor tail of the poem. Class dismissed. He looked like he was having a nervous breakdown, talking to himself about how only academics from New York could understand the angels—too abstract. He was unlike anyone I had ever met, that sense of a man who has no defense against the world around him. This quality had a powerful effect on me.

Read your poem aloud many times. If you don’t enjoy it every time, something may be wrong. — Richard Hugo

 

Hugo invited me into a full immersion in poems, a full commitment to what a poem was about and the craft that was required to give it its full raison d’etre.

“You should never give up on a poem,” Hugo said. “You should just keep working on it.  Even if it means working on the same poem over and over. The poem has its right to exist and you shouldn’t let your ego get in the way. Let the poem assert itself. It doesn’t matter if the reader knows what the poet is talking about, it only matters that the reader trusts that the poet knows what he is talking about. You should fully engage your imagination and invent what the poem needs to succeed.”

It was a wild time and everybody partied a lot, but I was in married student housing with a wife and two kids, taking a full course load of five classes, teaching a class, and immersing myself in the poetry workshops. Nonetheless, once in a while we would visit Eddie’s Club on the drinking side of Missoula. The walls were decorated with pictures of miners and cowboys and ranchers and patrons. The people who had already died had a star on their portraits.  There was often a fight –who knows what about – lovers and angry husbands. Poets James Crumley, William Kittredge, and Jim Welch held court. I was there the year Ken Kesey showed up and battled with Marge Piercy over macho vs. feminist issues (what fun that was!) During the same conference, I got to visit with Wendell Berry (who was close friends with Ed McClanahan) and participate in discussions on the nature of evil.

 

By transferring my academic coursework from my graduate work in Philosophy, I was able to complete my degree in one year. My study and writing space in Montana was a room in the basement next to the furnace. It was a cemented-in crawl space with just enough room for a desk, light bulb, and my books. I would go down to my crawl space at night and work on my studies and my poetry. Montana gets pretty cold, and all the pipes were wrapped to avoid freezing. My writing space, near all the hot water pipes, was warm and completely isolated, which is what I needed for writing. I managed to get all of my academic work done and still have time left to work on my stories and poems. I was able to finish my MFA and publish my thesis. It became my first book, All Pieces of a Legacy, dedicated to Richard Hugo.

 

Masters

                I pick you out, a man to become,
yes and no together; you lead me
into the desert.  Your single words
are too thick for meaning.  I
can’t make them out.  The cactus
plants are all I understand.  And
the heat.
                In the moment I look around
you fall behind:  whose death
do I feel?  This is all a dream.
I wake, think of writing it down.
A man walks in thru my window
from Montana.  “Thirty white geese
are saved from extinction,” he says,
helps himself to my liquor.
We ignore the snow.
                I was just in Mexico. “I said,
did you feel something die?” He rages out
in the midst of a blizzard, with my liquor.
This is another dream.  The white petals
all sink to the ground in a row.

 

Fellow Graduate Students:

Clay Morgan grew up a free-range child in Idaho, where summers had one rule: Be home by dark. After college, he became a Forest Service smokejumper, parachuting to fight wildfires in the western US and Alaska. He married his college sweetheart, astronaut Barbara Radding. Their sons, Adam and Ryan, helped Morgan write his  young adult novel, The Boy Who Spoke Dog. He has also published several adult novels, including Aura and Santiago and the Drinking Party. Morgan has been awarded the NASA Public Service Medal, Idaho Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, and was an Idaho Write- in-Residence. He teaches creative writing at Boise State University.

Milo Miles is Fresh Air’s (NPR) world-music and American-roots music critic. He is a former music editor of The Boston Phoenix. Miles is a contributing writer for Rolling Stone magazine, and he also writes about music for The Village Voice and The New York Times. Incidentally, he was the buffalo-robe wearing poet.

Quinton Duval was a revered professor of English at Solano Community College for 29 years, where he specialized in creative writing. On his retirement, the Humanities Division created the Quinton Duval Prize for Creative Writing, awarded annually to an SCC student writer. Quinton published three books of poems. He was also editor and publisher of Red Wing Press and active in the local poetry community. A man of elegance, great charm and wit, Quinton could make a song out of anything. He will be missed by all who knew him.

“Remember the music, the food, the dope, the cheap gas and junk cars, friendship, love, moonlight, firelight, cold water, geese, wine, poetry, liberty, happiness, when we were still too far from the end to see it turn to history.” Quinton Duval

“Thank you for the sea, for what the river discovers at its end, what waits for all of us to come calling.” Quinton Duval

Steve Flick, M.F.A., LCSW, was born in Kansas but raised in California. He attended San Francisco State University, San Jose S.U., Stanford, University of Montana, Humboldt State University, and Boise State University, where he received his Master’s in social work and then became a licensed clinical social worker. He has worked with sexually abused children, clients with psychiatric disorders, couples, families in crisis, adolescents, and the aged. He has written several books along the way: The Feeling Process: A Workbook for Men, Teller’s Last Brand (a novel); Speed Writing: A Workbook for College Composition; The C.O. (a novel); and Creative Writing for Counselors and Their Clients. He has won fellowships from the federal government, IV-E Grand for at risk kids, and the Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship at Stanford University. He has been a counselor for fifteen years in Boise, Idaho, most recently with All Seasons Mental Health, and lives there with his wife Loretta who is a silversmith.

 

Goodbye, is
                for Andy Grossbardt, 1979

a word that always finds
its own place in the language,

like friend, a dark seal aswim
in the same ocean, or
she, a ship, or, he,
who went down with it,

and isn’t it always this way,
random as sand by your seaside,

or filled with useless explanations,
like Friday morning traffic in Manhattan

after he leaped from the window
last Thursday.

 

Ed Harkness is the author of two full-length collections of poems, Saying the Necessary, 2000, and Beautiful Passing Lives, 2010, both from Pleasure Boat Studio press. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana, where he studied with some of the best in poetry: Richard Hugo and Madeline DeFrees. His poems have appeared in print and online journals, including Fine Madness, Great River Review, The Humanist, The Louisville Review, Midwest Quarterly, Mudlark, Switched-On Gutenberg, and The Salt River Review. He lives with his wife, Linda, in Shoreline, Washington. More about Ed can be found online at Pleasure Boat Studio.

David Lambert (Editorial Director, Author) is the author of eleven published books. He has received numerous awards for magazine articles and short stories published in such places as Virtue, Moody, Story, Christian Parenting Today, Sweet Sixteen, Decision, Montana Magazine, Campus Life, Outreach, and many other periodicals. David has an M.F.A. in fiction writing from the University of Montana. He has held a variety of positions in publishing, spending eighteen years as an acquiring editor at Zondervan, most of that time as executive editor for fiction, and more recently, three years as senior fiction editor at Howard Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. David and his wife Cindy work through their own company, Lambert Editorial. lambertedits@aol.com

Gary Thompson’s fifth book of poetry, One Thing After Another, a collection of six lyric sequences, was published by Turning Point in 2013, and recent poems have appeared in Arroyo Literary Review, December and Hubbub. He earned an MFA from the University of Montana, where he was a founding editor of CutBank, and taught in the creative writing program at CSU, Chico for nearly thirty years. In 2010, he edited Quinton Duval’s posthumous collection of poems, Like Hay, for Bear Star Press. He and his wife, Linda, live on San Juan Island, home port for their old trawler named Keats.

Paul Zarzyski is a cowboy poet who grew up in Hurley, Wisconsin. The recipient of the 2005 Montana Governor’s Arts Award for Literature, Paul Zarzyski received his Master of Fine Arts Degree in creative writing in the mid-1970s at the University of Montana, where he studied with Richard Hugo, Madeline DeFrees, and John Haines, and where he later taught Hugo’s classes after his passing. In the same breath in which he first pursued his poetry passion, he discovered a second unexpected calling—bareback bronc riding—and competed on the amateur, ProRodeo, and Senior circuits into his early forties. Zarzyski has performed at the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, NV for the past 30 years, has toured Canada, Australia, Wales, England, and Russia, has recited at the National Book, Folk, and Storytelling Festivals, at The Kennedy Center Millennium Stage and the Library of Congress, and has appeared with the Reno Philharmonic Orchestra and the Spokane Symphony. He was also featured on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, aired from The Mother Lode Theater in BUTTE! The author of twelve books and chapbooks, Paul’s most recent collections were published by Bozeman’s Bangtail Press: Steering With My Knees: Zarzyski Lite in 2014 and, in 2011, his “triptych,” 51: 30 Poems, 20 Lyrics, 1 Self-Interview, the latter offering 120 pages of question-answer prose that traces his otherworldly journey from his 1950’s and ’60’s, rural, Polish-Italian, blue-collar childhood in Hurley, Wisconsin, to the poetic pages and stages of the American West.

 

Notable Neighbors

Dave Thomas, the Walking Poet of Missoula

Maggie Crumley (James), audited the class

 

The Art of Poetry

                Once more, buddy, your last ride
has left you behind and nothing can be done.
You want someone to come, a silver angel,
to seize your hair and lift you from the earth.
                But the weight of your two feet
presses against the ground.  No one comes
to save you.  It’s too cold to stand still
and too dark to run.
                Once more, buddy, you write
to save yourself.  Here’s the barn.
Here the horses are warm.  Here, on a dark
night, between towns, between meals,
simply the heat of other animals is enough.

 

All poems are copyright Charles Entrekin. “Art of Poetry,” “Hugo on Campus,” and “Masters” are dedicated to Richard Hugo.