Musing about Students

I found this blog by Frank Hill, one of my former students at SUNY Oswego on line on Sunday, May 17, 2009:

“’Fearless Speech’ [at http://fearless-speech.blogspot.com/ ] is the blog of the Parrhesia Institute of Subjective Self-assimilation, an establishment of higher learning founded by Frank D. Hill. It is the mission of the Parrhesia Institute of Subjective Self-assimilation, or PISS, to provide readers with a self-referential experience. Through the habitual and seemingly maniacal reiteration of past failures, it is hoped that PISS might shed light on that greatest of human tragedies: hope.”

Frank included on his blog some of the assigned exercise poems he wrote for my class “The Nature of Poetry” back in 1991, which I reproduce here (in order to make an image larger, please click on it):

 

 

In order to receive one of my “poetic licenses” students had to complete about fourteen exercises in all sorts of forms and prosodies including the calligramme (picture poem), Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, and so on, including even a prose poem.

 

 

 

My running across Frank’s blog brought to mind this memoir titled, “Musing about Students,” which was originally published in Poesis, and subsequently included in my book A Sheaf of Leaves: Literary Memoirs, Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press, 2004, copyright and all rights reserved:

 

Although there are those who maintain that it cannot be done, I taught writing arts for more than three decades.  It’s true that it is impossible to teach anyone talent; however, I can teach anyone who can read, and who wants to learn, the techniques of writing.  That is no small favor to do for someone.  I know there are teachers, such as the late William Stafford (q.v. elsewhere on this blog), who feel that their main job is to encourage students in their writing and little more.  But many of the students I have taught, if not most of them, have jobs in the field of writing, one way and another: advertising, public relations, journalism, broadcasting, editing, publishing, free-lancing, teaching.  Some have even become well-known professional novelists, like Robert O’Connor and Alice McDermott, or poets, like Matt Spireng, Christian Langworthy and Ben Doyle.  I helped give them the tools with which to make a living at something they like to do.

One of the first things I learned is this: A teacher should never tell a student he or she has no chance to become a writer, for one will be sure to be wrong every time.  I've seen the light go on in students' eyes at every point from the first week of the first freshman semester to the year a businessman retires and goes back to school.

Nevertheless, teaching undergraduates how to write poetry can be a lot like trekking across a great plain.  Now and then something unusual occurs to break the routine of the journey. When one has done this sort of thing for three decades and more, one can look back and discern some unusually interesting features of the landscape.  Some of those features for me were the undergraduate student-poets Russell Salamon, De Villo Sloan, P. J. O'Brien, and Judith Phillips; the non-traditional graduate student Charlie Davis, and the Fenn College Poetry Forum attendee d. a. levy.

Russell Salamon was an undergraduate student at Fenn College — now Cleveland State University — during the early 1960s when he developed the grammatic prosody called "parenthetics."  His showcase for these poems, a chapbook titled Parent[hetical Pop]pies appeared in 1964, the year of his graduation. The publisher was a young man, "d. a. levy" [sic], who, though not a student at any college, attended Fenn's Poetry Center Forums which were conducted by yet another Cleveland poet and publisher, Loring Williams of American Weave magazine and Press (see “Founding the Cleveland Poetry Center” elsewhere on this blog).  Levy — as one can tell, perhaps, by the uncapitalized name — was influenced by E. E. Cummings, as in

BOP FOR KIDDIES

 

i watermeloned down the lawn

and summersalts in season

a red balloon

a blue—a green

an orange one all

floating skyward

with childrens dreams tied

 

Though I'm sure he wouldn't have known the term, Levy here used the schema called anthimeria, substitution of one part of speech for another, as in "watermeloned down the lawn," where a noun is substituted for the verb.  A similar thing happens in line two, where somersaults is perhaps, though not necessarily, deliberately misspelled.  D. A. published many interesting poets and poems before he took his own life.

When my student and d. a.'s friend Russell Salamon came into the office in Fenn Tower and showed me how his parenthetical system worked, I told him I thought it was ingenious, but that it was too complicated to become a popular prosody.  I was partly wrong, for although one can't strictly call it popular, I have seen other poems written in the system since, by more than one poet, and I have introduced it to many people in many situations, in particular at the Philadelphia Writers' Conference in June of 1993.  Many find it challenging and interesting.

In his poem "She," Salamon began by taking parentheses themselves as his center:

 

().

 

He then took a sentence, "my hands cup her cup," broke it after the subject, and inserted the set of parens into the break:

 

my hands () cup her cup.

 

This is a metaphor: my hands are a set of parentheses.  Next, a second sentence: "all parentheses in which I am warm drizzle-rain inside her," thus:

 

All parentheses in which I am

[my hands () cup her cup]

warm drizzle-rain inside her.

 

And a third, "sizzling on snowscapes of her skin, her face, her arms, her thighs, forests full of soundless flowers waited once unseen, translucid; she carries rain constellations to fill flute basins where" with some changed punctuation and a bit of typographical dispersion, appears this way:

 

sizzling on snowscapes of her skin.

Her face, her arms, her thighs,

all parentheses in which I am

[my hands () cup her cup]

warm drizzle-rain inside her.

Forests full of soundless flowers

waited once unseen, translucid.

She carries rain constellations

to fill flute basins where

 

And finally, "My finger touch dis[s]olves into a shiverlong echo of rains; we wash our morning faces off":

 

My finger touch dissolves

into a shiverlong echo of rains/

sizzling on snowscapes of her skin.

(Her face, her arms, her thighs,

all parentheses in which I am

[my hands () cup her cup]

warm drizzle-rain inside her.

Forests full of soundless flowers

waited once unseen, translucid.

She carries rain constellations

to fill f lute basins where

/we wash our morning faces off

 

The split between f and lute in the penultimate line appears as it was originally printed in Parent[hetical Pop]pies; it may or may not be a typographical error.

Others have written parenthetics since, and made other parenthetical experiments, as for instance Vito Hannibal Acconci (who was not one of my students) in his poem titled "Re," which I used in my college textbook, Poetry: An Introduction through Writing. Here, Acconci worked primarily with sets of parentheses themselves — there were to be three in each line:

 

(    )  (    )  (    )

 

Only one set in each line was to be filled with words:

 

(here)  (     )  (        )

 

As the poem progressed, there would also be a progression in the set of parentheses to be filled; that is, it would be the second set in line two, the third set in line three, and then the order would be reversed — the second in line four, the first in line five, and so on back and forth to the end:

 

(here)  (        )  (       )

(    )  (there)  (                      )

(    )  (                 )  (here and there—I say here)

(                             )  (I do not say now)  (          )

(I do not say it now)  (               )  (                    )

(                 )  (then and there—I say there)  (       )

(                               )  (       )  (say there)

(       )  (I do not say then)  (                  )

(I do not say, then, this)  (              )  (       )

(                           )  (then I say)  (            )

(          )  (           )  (here and there)

(I said here second)  (             )  (             )

(                 )  (I do not talk first)  (     )

(                 )  (          )  (there then)

(           )  (here goes)  (                )

(I do not say what goes)  (             )  (         )

(                      )  (I do not go on saying)  (     )

(                   )  (                  )  (there is)

(        )  (that is not to say)  (              )

(I do not say that)  (                )  (                )

(                 )  (here below)  (                         )

(          )  (             )  (I do not talk down)

(                 )  (under my words)  (                       )

(under discussion)  (               )  (                  )

(             )  (all there)  (                 )

(      )  (       )  (I do not say all)

(             )  (all I say  (     )

 

People who see this poem for the first time are baffled by it.  But the poem says visually, as well as in so many words, that "only about one-third of what one has to say can be communicated to others."  This poem, however, is a paradox, because it expresses this theme completely, which contradicts the theme!  The last two lines are, in fact, explicit: "I do not say all / all I say."  Acconci invented a form that does exactly what he wanted it to do.

Poets must use an imperfect vehicle, language, in order to attempt to say things perfectly.  Acconci did the impossible by using two pieces of punctuation as well as words and spaces.  Acconci did other things with parenthetics in his long poem Kay Price and Stella Pajunas (1977).

De Villo Sloan was an undergraduate student at S.U.N.Y. at Potsdam (not Oswego, but I used his poem as an example of a student poem in Alberta Turner’s "Poetry: The Art of Language," Poets Teaching: The Creative Process, New York: Longman, 1980, pp. 49-51) where he wrote "A Portrait of the Day."  The primary technique he used was prolepsis, the expansion of a general statement, particularizing it and giving further information regarding it.  This is how the poet began his portrait:

 

Morning, afternoon, and evening

A portrait of the day should be simple.

 

Simple, like the opening statement.  The reader has too little information yet, on the typographical level, to know whether this is going to be a prose mode or verse mode poem — what appears on the page, however, looks like a couplet; moreover, it seems to scan loosely.  The second strophe helps to a degree:

 

Green morning, brown afternoon, and black evening

A portrait of the day should be simple.

 

Sloan's method begins to come clear — he has added a few adjectives to modify the nouns in his initial sequence.  He is going to modify and amplify.  It is also possible to begin to see this will not be a metrical poem.  Some might call it "free verse" at this stage, but as ought by now to be apparent, free verse is merely a mask-term for prose, though in strophe three it still appears that Sloan is using a couplet unit:

 

With morning's green, afternoon's brown, and evening's black,

a portrait of the day should be very simple.

 

But Sloan has dropped the conventional capital A of his second line now, and what the reader has is clearly prose:

 

With morning's green painted on the edges of the day, afternoon's brown set in the foreground, and evening's black dispersed across the colors, a portrait of the day, with a suitable frame, should be very simple.

 

Another technique Sloan used was incremental repetition; that is, changing a repeating unit slightly each time it appears:  grammatically, each strophe was one sentence.  There was line-phrasing in the first three stanzas, but the reader was not confused when it was dropped because at this point the poem was so frankly a prose poem, and the phrases were so long, that there was no sense of a premise abandoned, especially since the poem's rhythms did not derive from phrasing, but from repetitions and parallel structures:

 

With morning's green painted around the edges of the day, creating the impression of sunlight through curtained windows and clothes on hardwood floors, afternoon's brown set in the foreground, intermixing on the edges with green, turning the morning face to brownsad afternoon, and evening's black dispersed across the colors, reminding the observer that the absence of light will prevail, a portrait of the day, with a suitable frame to complement its wild design, should be very simple.

 

This poem is a clear example of the premise that subject and form cannot be divorced from one another, nor can one be ignored except at the expense of the other.  The two things are one thing — language is the poem, and Sloan evidently learned the lesson young.  Here is the last stanza of "A Portrait of the Day":

 

With morning's green painted around the edges of the day, creating an impression of sunlight through curtained windows and clothes on hardwood floors, that digresses into hues of minutes and hours, through lacquered halls and coffee, through artbooks and palettes searching for colors and symbols, afternoon's brown set in the foreground, intermixing on the edges with green, turning the morning face to brownsad afternoon, trying to find the spot where green ends and brown begins, following in the footsteps of one who went before, through tea and conversation, throwing flowers at a singer's feet, beginning to see that this job is not so easy, and evening's black dispersed across the colors reminding the observer that the absence of light will prevail, that sees the day changing in degrees like the colors of the spectrum from radiating green to blackdeath, a portrait of the day, with a suitable frame, carved in a way that would complement such a wild piece, that would firmly transfix the images of a day upon the wall for all to see, should be very simple.

 

Successful prose poems like this one derive their cadences from grammatical structures — line-by-line phrasing, such as Sloan began with; sentences in parallel construction, as throughout this poem; strophic paragraphs, and so on.  "A Portrait of the Day" is uniquely structured; Sloan invented his own grammatical prosody, but that prosodic structure is clear.  So is the poem; therefore, it is dense and rich.

 

The critic can merely quibble with "A Portrait of the Day."  Only here and there, in single words and an occasional phrase that slips from one level of diction to another, can one point to flaws.  For instance, the clause in strophe 6, "this job is not so easy," and the word wild in "such a wild piece," are not in keeping with the sophisticated level of diction of the rest of the poem.  The same might be said of the epithetic compound "blackdeath," which seems too theatrical for the meditative air of this work.

It is not necessary, however, for student poets to invent a new prosody or formal structure in order to come up, sometimes, with something original and fine.  P. J. O'Brien was a pupil in a writing arts class at the State University of New York College at Oswego when he wrote "Cartoon Show," which I used in my college text, previously cited.  The assignment was to write a series of related poems on a particular subject.  O'Brien took as his model a Saturday morning children's television cartoon show such as older Americans will recall from their or their offsprings' youth. The first poem in the set was "The Old Skipper," the local host of the show, who spoke the prologue:

 

I announced every episode of

your lives,

knowing just what would happen;

that you would love, lust,

fight, go mad and a thousand other

meaningless passions.

And I sat on my film with my fake beard

looking like Zeus and feeling like an

oldtimer in a Greek chorus.

 

The mode of the poem is clearly prose, not verse, and all that O'Brien did was to disperse the prose lines according to phrases, one phrase to a line.  Some people like to call this method "free verse."  I call it "line-phrasing," and others call it "lineating."

The second poem in the set, "Brutus" — later called "Bluto" — moves us directly into the cartoon:

 

In my lumbering ox obscurity

I lusted over you, Olive Oyl.

With my thick lipped bearded mouth

I wanted your flesh, to take it by

force and never let it go.

I had not the strength of vegetables

nor white clothes and noble ideals,

only the desire of animals.

With the cunning of beasts

I tracked you until, each time,

that runt kicked me silly, and

running with my tail between my legs

my hatred filled the land like poison.

Why couldn't that bastard have left his

spinach at home just once?

 

Although we recognize the character and the situation, we have never heard this language from the cartoon itself.  This is a "confessional" poem spoken by Brutus, and we detect a serious purpose behind the lines, even though we smile or even guffaw while we read.  The next character to enter is "Popeye":

 

I have tasted the spinach of victory,

transforming matter with my bare fists

turning bulls into packaged meat

and alligators into shoes and purses.

I have fought every creation of man and God

on every battleground from Alaska to Mars

to prove my love, Olive Oyl.

But still you questioned it,

flirting with that lummox

with the "nyah nyah" in your voice,

the challenge in your eyes.

And yes to protect your chastity

after you had aroused the animal,

I swallowed my spinach and became

your white knight again and again.

Each time hoping I would lose,

to escape your prison.

But when films flashed in my biceps

and tattoos danced across my chest;

I loved you more than the sea,

I loved you more than spinach.

 

And "Olive Oyl," the object of contention, who turns out to be a human being also:

 

I am Helen of Troy.

I am Deirdre.

I am all the women men

have died for.

I am all the women men

have made fools of themselves over.

But I asked to be no Goddess,

and I asked to be no object.

All I simply asked for was

a mayun.

 

One of the overtones that O'Brien worked with was created from simple allusion — to the Greek chorus in a classical tragedy, to Zeus, to Helen of Troy and Deirdre.  Although this is a humorous poem, it takes a solemn dimension from such epic land tragic referents.

"Sweet Pea" provides an element of mystery and unease:

 

My parentage was never explained.

Continually crawling in my

Doctor Dentons, a doubt.

A doubt that kept me young,

never dreaming of puberty or

responsibility, cut off from

the forbidden vegetable,

I wanted your breast, mother.

I wanted your piggyback, father.

So I continued to creep away

from those strange sailors and

their lady friend, looking for

answers in circuses and construction yards,

missing lions' jaws and

iron girders by inches.  "Saved"

ad nauseam by the muttering bowlegged

warden with green teeth.

 

Alice the Goon" is the spurned woman, the pariah:

 

I have been fed on the dog-food of despair

and in my raging bitterness I saw your

foolishness, my lungs filling with hysterics,

my mouth rabid with foam.

And because you could not understand

my madness you thought yourselves sane

and ran from my outstretched arms,

trying to impress that wench Olive Oyl.

Because I am tired of screaming alone,

tired of crying in the hills,

I will ask you why?

Why, in a world of ugliness, was mine so

repulsive, my flesh so leprous?

 

"Wimpy" comes bringing up the rear, as he always did.  He provides the poem with an architectural symmetry, for he speaks the epilogue as "The Old Skipper" spoke the prologue.  Both are observers more than participants:

 

I'm not bitter, nosireebob.

While you have talked of love and lust

I have devoured the hamburgers of fulfillment,

tasted the cheeseburgers of tranquility

and supped off the fat of the land.

You who laughed at Alice the Goon,

You who laughed at me, the roly-poly sponge,

I have watched your petty wars

waged for the smile of the ugliest

woman in the world.

I have watched you all chew your loco weeds.

And carrying my omniscience quite unobtrusively

I watched the cartoon roll by,

picking my teeth with celluloid

and farting noisily (Turco, Poetry, 328-331).

 

O'Brien's poem does something remarkable: it satirizes satire — the Popeye cartoon show is already parody — and, in satirizing satire the poet achieved a basic seriousness.  O'Brien mythicized the characters of the cartoon show so that they no longer stand merely for parodies of humankind, they stand for humanity itself.  They become symbols of being, and at the heart of the symbology is a paradox — life is both ineffably comic and tragically serious.  The poem is inclusive, not exclusive; both possibilities exist, so the poem does what life does: it holds both.

It also holds people, and O'Brien let the people speak for themselves.  In their voices we can hear each individual comic tragedy, and as a group they represent this world; we can see types and prototypes in the characters.  We can even see ourselves in them.  One never knows what a student is going to do next.  O'Brien turned to music and produced an album titled Starship Beer — Nut Music as Free as the Squirrels (1979).

At SUNY Oswego five main genres are taught: fiction, drama, poetry, nonfiction, and journalism.  In each of these, except in journalism, there are three tiered courses: basic "Nature of..." courses; "Creative Writing in..." workshops, and "Advanced Writing in..." major project courses (in journalism the last course is an internship).  Back in the early 1980s Judith Phillips had taken the first two classes in the poetry series without distinguishing herself.  In the advanced course there are one-on-one sessions with each student the first half of the semester instead of classes.  At the second of these each student comes in with three ideas for a series of related poems or a long poem.  Judith's first idea had to do with some sort of princess and a prince or a dragon, or both, but I told her that I didn't teach children's writing — another teacher did.  I don't recall what her second idea was.  For her third, she told me that she had her great grandmother's diary which chronicled her trip across the prairies in a covered wagon, and perhaps Judith could do something with that.

I stared at her a moment, and then I said, "You've got your great-grandmother's diary, and you want to write a poem about a princess?"  We eventually agreed that what she would do was turn her grandmother's diary into a set of poems.  I told Judith that, since the diary had gaps and hiatuses in it, her biggest problem would be to invent incidents and put them into words that the reader could not distinguish from those of the grandmother.

And that was what Judith did.  The result was "The Taproot Diary," one of the most remarkable series of undergraduate poems I have ever read.  No sooner was it completed than it was published as a whole — all fifteen poems — in Escarpments, a periodical published at SUNY Buffalo and edited by Carol Sineni:

 

THE TAPROOT DIARY:

 

THE LANDSHIPS

Diary Entry; May 1st, 1850.

  LaPorte, Indiana

 

The landships traveled waving

their floating gray sails through

the endless desert sea.  The wheels

rutted the arid soil cutting the tumbleweed

waves; they broke against the side.

 

"Onward they went towards

the promised land of Honey

Lake; where they were bound by

the tales of golden wealth.  The

wild mountains lay before them."

 

 

LOOKING BACK

Diary Entry; May 4th, 1850.

LaPorte, Indiana

 

The prairie schooners were anchored by hemp rope

in front of the general store.  We loaded up

the crafts with flour, coffee, muskets, and blankets,

along with other supplies.

The wagons were weighed down heavily.

Teams of oxen were hitched to the rigs;

pulling, the schooners through the cloud of dust.

Father sat at the helm, steering us on the journey.

 

 

THE JOURNEY

Diary Entry; May 10th, 1850.

  Sedley, Indiana

 

Ahead of the fleet,

scouts searched out safe routes

of travel, to insure no indian

pirates lurked on the rough roads before us.

 

Our journey was slow.

Somedays only ten mile

was covered before the sun

sunk slowly beyond the westward horizon.

Under the stars we rested 'til dawn

opened our eyes.

 

The fire was smoldering

when we woke, bellowing high

white smoke.  It was a sorry

sight, the fire dying where we spent a

restless night.

 

 

THE SWARDLANDS

Diary Entry; May 20th, 1850.

  Illinois

 

Spring grasses grew around

us, as we walked along

side of the wagons.

 

The sun sent its ruling rays

down, beating our backs, heads

and shoulders.

 

The road was overgrown

with grass and rocks.  Not

a tree was in sight.

 

No shade was found

on the swardlands.  Miles and miles

lay before us, trudging on shank's mare.

The mountains and valleys were

no where to be seen.

 

 

NIGHTCIRCLES

Diary Entry; May 25th, 1850

  Illinois

 

We made camp on

the setting of the sun.

The six wagons in our party

circled the nightfire.

 

The scouts came back

from a large buffalo kill.

The fresh meat was roasted over

the glowing embers of dried grass and wood.

The fuel for the fires is getting low.

 

The wind blew through

the grasses, making our bones

chill to the marrow.  The coyotes

howled from off in the distance.

We huddled together for warmth.

 

 

THE STORM

 

Diary Entry; June 3rd, 1850.

  The Prairie

 

Morning broke with a

thundering bang.  The air hung thick

in the sky.

 

The lightning scared the

horses, they reared up with

whinnying moans.

 

In the Northwest

red balls of fire rolled

along the prairie floor.

 

Thin stalks of rag grass

burnt like torches lighting

up the brown earth.

 

When the rains came,

we took shelter under the

canvas of the wagon,

 

crouched together for comfort

in the cramped space.

 

 

WASHDAY

Diary Entry; June 8th, 1850.

  The Prairie

 

The men found a small clear spring

welling up from the ground.

We gathered some buckets together

for some fresh cooking and drinking water.

Then, we commenced to wash the clothes.

 

The milliner washed her bonnets

with strong lye and laid them

on a big rock to dry.

 

We scrubbed the clothes

on the rocks with soap and

rinsed them in the spring.

 

I hung my clothes on the whiffletree,

to let them dry in the fresh, sweet

breeze of honeysuckle.

 

 

THE CROSSING

Diary Entry; June 18th 1850.

  The Prairie

 

The mountains seemed no nearer, as we crossed

wearily through the endless field of yellow

straw.  Dust rose up underfoot, the wind

blew it in our faces.

 

The soles of my shoes wore thin from the long

walk across the plains.  Small stones stabbed

the bottoms of my feet, making the walk

almost unbearable.

 

 

THE AGUE

Diary entry; June 25th, 1850

  The Prairie

 

The peepers squeaked their

eerie song from a swamp

filled with black water and

tall weeds, by our camp.

 

The mosquitoes swarmed our

campfire like bees swarming to

a honey tree.  They must have

smelt the human skin.

 

The wheel wright got the

ague, from a bite on

his neck.  He shook day and

night with the fever.

 

The journey took its

toll.  The men dug a

shallow hole with axes and shovels.

 

We stood and prayed

for the soul of the wheel wright,

whose body was left in a

hollow unmarked damp grave.

 

 

THE SIGHTING

Diary entry; July 6th, 1850.

  The Prairie

 

Above the horizon peek the

blue and white snow capped tops

of the mountains.

 

The distance between us and the

land is still great, but we are getting

closer to the new found land of promises.

 

 

THE DESERT

Diary Entry; September 1st, 1850.

  The Black Rock Desert, Nevada

 

The heat is like an

open hearth burning the land.

 

There is very little good grass

growing on the crusty soil.

Burned out wagons line the trail.

 

Hundreds of ox skeletons

are scattered on the ground.

 

Not the rustle of a leaf or

the hum of an insect break the quiet.

 

It is only us

who break the still air.

 

 

THE DIGGERS

Diary Entry; September 3rd, 1850.

  Deep Hole Springs, Nevada

 

Shrieks were heard outside of the

wagons, in the still darkness.

Night had fallen when the

Diggers made a raid upon our camp.

 

They tried to drive the oxen

off the site and into a deep pit

for an easy catch.

 

When they found that they couldn't,

the Diggers crept behind

the sage, armed with bowes and arrows.

They shot two of the animals

and a watchman.

 

The man was struck in the shoulder,

but somehow managed to fire his gun.

He killed one of the Diggers,

the rest ran off.  It won't be the last of them.

 

 

THE ARRIVAL

Diary Entry; September 10th, 1850.

  Honey Lake Valley, California.

 

We've reached the promised

wilderness of Honey Lake.

A few miners have settled

here in log cabins.

 

The only bands of people

we see are travelers,

indians and miners.

 

There is plenty of water

and the land seems fresh

and bountiful.

 

Father started to build

us a cabin, and has set his

mind on becoming a rancher.

I do not know why they call this

"the land of the never sweats"  (Sineni, 5-15).

 

One never knows what a student is going to look like, either, or when someone will decide to become a student.  Charlie Davis, a legendary character in Oswego, New York, and in the worlds of folklore and jazz as well, turned from music to business to poetry and fiction writing and editing.  He established his own publishing company, Mathom, in 1977.

For many years Davis had been a partner in a local business firm, and when he decided to return to college in the mid-1970s he was half-retired.  Retirement for Charlie simply meant expanding his horizons — not that they had been previously very limited.  One might say he now had more time to devote to his vocations.  Two of these had always been music and verse composition.  He began by taking courses in poetry writing with Roger Dickinson-Brown, then a member of the staff of the Program in Writing Arts at the College at Oswego.

Davis had grown up in Indiana.  His father had been a close friend of a neighbor, James Whitcomb Riley, the "Hoosier Poet," and Charlie early came under Riley's benevolent influence.  Later on, Charlie graduated from Notre Dame University and, upon his graduation, organized a group of musicians during the hey-day of the Big Bands — he wrote about it in his book, That Band from Indiana — and was very successful on the swing and hot jazz circuits.  One of his compositions of the period was "Copenhagen," a jazz classic that has been performed by nearly all the famous swing and jazz artists since it was introduced.  The composer in 1990 still drew royalties from it twice a year.

The first course Davis took was titled "The Nature of Poetry."  It was a beginner's course, but stringent and technical.  In it the student must write verse exercises in every prosody, schema, and genre imaginable, including parenthetic prosody.  At one point in the course students were even required to invent a prosody of their own, as Russell Salamon had done when he was an undergraduate.

Davis did well for Dickinson-Brown, and he began to involve himself in the extensive literary scene on campus.  He gave readings with other students, and his work was always popular because it was..."quaint" is the only word to describe it.  The Riley influence was clear, at least to the faculty if not to the students, who had never heard of the Hoosier Poet.

When Davis asked to take the second course in the sequence of three undergraduate poetry courses in the Program he was asked whether he had ever completed a B. A.  He replied that he had a Ph.B. in business administration from Notre Dame, and he was denied permission to take the course, but he was told that he could enroll in the graduate seminar titled "Conference Course in Writing Poetry," which he did.  He was told that the project of the course involved writing a long poem, something he had never done, and he was (atypically for the class) given a proscription: he was not to write a single rhymed couplet.  Instead, he was going to do something difficult.  Difficult for him, that is.

 

"But what?" he asked, baffled.

 

"Well, have you ever heard of William Carlos Williams?"

 

"No, should I have?"

 

"Yes, since he's a famous contemporary of yours.  Your first assignment is to read Williams' Paterson."

Davis did so.  No sooner had he digested the book than he began to write...And So the Irish Built a Church, a story about Oswego written, like Paterson, in prose and verse, with diary entries, newspaper clippings, songs, and what-have-you (it is impossible for the reader to identify what Davis invented and what he researched), tossed together in a seemingly random, but for all that, nevertheless, highly wrought melange of lore and character and incident.  Davis got so carried away that he even composed a pseudo-nineteenth century musical piece and copied it out on aged paper suitably charred to look as though it had been saved from the conflagration that had consumed the original church.

The other members of the class were no less busy than Charlie Davis, and as the semester developed it became obvious that this was a remarkable group of students doing fine things. The Davis piece was not the first work to be published from that class, but he was without doubt writing the longest work — it turned out to be 120 pages in length — and the most popular. Everyone was interested in reading the next installment though Charlie, doing something totally new and experimental for him (except where he managed to sneak in a rhymed song against orders), could not believe his classmates were not dissembling when they applauded him.  Here is a sample of Charlie's epic:

 

Peter Lappin and the sixteen families grouped together to form a parish, hoping to bring a local or traveling priest to Oswego for regular or at least occasional services.  The following names, found on the sand and wind-burnished tombstones in the oldest part of St. Paul's Cemetery, are probably the names of the sixteen:

 

Shephard         Navagh         McCann         Carlin

Lappin                  Murray         Allard         Fineran           

O'Connell         McCarthy         Burnes         Dailey

Kenefic         Reilly         Costello         Galvin                   

Mullen                  Farrell

 

They became noted for their

ability as fighters.  And later on became

fighters in the ring, the prize ring; for money.

 

Names like John L. Sullivan,

Bob Fitzsimmons and Sharkey and Irish

Mick Kelly.

 

All got their full page

pictures in the Police Gazette.

The Lapides, the Ostrynskis,

 

The Cohns and Schmidts,

all changed their names to

O'Brien, Murphy and Irish Bob

 

Delaney and Killer O'Neal

so they could get

their pictures in the Police

 

Gazette and make

it big in the ring.

 

Within sixty days of their application, the Bishop wrote the good news: Reverend Father Donahoe (sometimes spelled Donahue) who was covering the central tier of New York State (Auburn, Rome, Camden, the villages of Central Square and a few small hamlets)...would come to Oswego, say Mass and hear confessions every three months beginning at once.  Father Donahoe said his first Mass late in 1830 and his second in early 1831. He traveled mostly on horseback...sometimes in daylight...sometimes at night.

 

Patsy Fineran speakin' . . ."what

a year it was!  Seems just like

yesterday.  Made enough money

to fill a corn-crib doin' nu-

thin' but shootin' the pesky

timber wolves.  Put a musket

ball in fifty of 'em that

year.  Put fifteen hundr'd

American $ bills in my

money belt.  They've

gone now to where

it's a mite health-

ier.  Last year I

only got two.

This year

I got

0"

 

Since its publication in book form, there have been people who know W. C. Williams who claim that...And So the Irish... is more readable than its model.  Since Paterson is a modern classic, this opinion is heretical.  The main criticism of the Davis opus may be that it begins to a degree shakily.  Riley is recognizable in the sentiment, and Williams in the form: the two do not mix well early on.  But as the book progresses, Riley and Williams disappear and Davis rises above his sources to become one of the most engaging literary personalities of recent years, just as the man himself is larger than life.

The town of Oswego comes alive.  People emerge and turn real before one's eyes.  Davis managed to build a microcosm that is convincing and engaging.  How many poets can claim that in the twentieth century?  And how many teachers can hope to have a pupil like Charlie Davis more than once in a career?  Yet it happens all the time.

WORKS CITED

 

Vito Hannibal Acconci, Kay Price and Stella Pajunas, 1977.

Paul Carroll, ed., The Young American Poets, Chicago: Follett, 1968.

Charlie Davis, ....and so the Irish Built a Church, Freeport: Bond-Wheelwright, 1975.

Poesis, vii:3, [1986], pp. 27-37.

Russell Salamon, Parent[hetical Pop]pies, Cleveland: Renegade Press, 1964.

Carol Sineni, ed., Escarpments, 4:1, Autumn 1983.

Lewis Turco, The New Book of Forms, Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986, and The Book of Forms, Third Edition, 2004.

——, Poetry: An Introduction Through Writing, Reston: Reston Publishing Company, 1973.

——, A Sheaf of Leaves: Literary Memoirs, Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press, 2004