Are Poets On The Road Or On The Bus Today?

by Kent Chadwick

Life Of The Bones To Come by Larry Laurence, Black Heron Press, 1999, 66 pages, paper, $11.95

Pacific Northwestern Spiritual Poetry Edited by Charles Potts, Tsunami Inc., 1998, 380 pages, paper, $20

Ragged Lion: A Tribute to Jack Micheline Edited by John Bennett, The Smith Publishers & Vagabond Press, 1999, 211 pages, paper, $14.95

Poets understand our American car mania. The car is a symbol of freedom, a means of escape. Jack Kerouac's most loved work is On The Road of course. Seattle/White Center-born Richard Hugo set the tenor in the Northwest with great car poems like "Driving Montana":

The appeal is that, as Larry Laurence notes in his very good new book Life Of The Bones To Come, "No one owns the old road." "The ease of it all scares me," Laurence writes in his poem "Three Departures." "New red pick-up I ram through light fogs / to here and overtime." Cars and family intertwine in many of Laurence's poems, the brother and an old Buick, the squad car his father is forced into with "The cop's palm pushing down, almost tenderly, on the / crown of my father's head... ."

Drinking and driving has become a Northwest subgenre, with its culmination perhaps in Sherman Alexie's sestina masterpiece "The Business of Fancydancing":

"The Business of Fancydancing" has been reprinted as the opening poem in Charles Potts' eclectic anthology Pacific Northwestern Spiritual Poetry. Potts has extended the meaning of "spiritual" beyond all usefulness. However, his opinionated editing makes for an interesting and idiosyncratic anthology, which, while leaving out indispensable Northwest poets of the spirit like Madeline De Frees and Sam Hamill, includes good work from lesser-known writers like Ford Swetnam and Zig Knoll.

Pott's poets drive all over the West. The exciting Oregon poet Sharon Doubiago drives her son "over the mountain to the airport, / the glens and meadows shadowy green with the coming summer / ... / We crested the mountain and looked down on the clouds /," as he is leaving her for college in the poem "Danny Boy." Pocatello poet Will Peterson writes of driving towards the beautiful Sawtooth mountains,

As a poet of loneliness and bittersweet love, Larry Laurence knows how useful the private isolation of the automobile can be--good for sex, for mourning, and for indiscretion:

But poets are also ready to follow the Oregon magician Ken Kesey and do America by bus instead of by car, knowing that buses can be magic. There are fantastic cars of course, think of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Batman, James Bond, but those fantasies of unfettered power are for adolescents. Magic buses are for adults-- they can take us into shared experiences. The purpose of his 1960s Merry Prankster bus odyssey was, Kesey has said, to "set out in a direction that, in the first place, is practically impossible to achieve, and then, along the way, mess up the minds of the crew with as many chemicals as we can lay our hands on, so it's almost certain that we can't get there."

It's interesting that Sherman Alexie in his breakthrough film Smoke Signals puts Victor and Thomas Builds-the-Fire on a bus to Phoenix instead of on an airplane, which is how they traveled south in the original short story.

Jack Micheline, San Francisco poetic legend and patron saint of vagabond bus poets, would have complimented Alexie's change. One of Micheline's most famous poems, "Rock Song," begins:

Ellensburg writer and editor John Bennett has published a wonderful anthology of reminiscences--Ragged Lion: A Tribute to Jack Micheline. Micheline died of a heart attack on a BART train on February 27, 1998 - "A pretty classy way to cash it in," Bennett notes. How fitting for "America's quintessential street poet" to die a public death on a public train, the next best thing to a bus.

Yet a bus can leave silences sometimes as much as a car, as Larry Laurence describes in his strong poem "Bus Ride To The Coast: San Blas, Mexico." The speaker travels again and again by bus to his lover, absorbed obsessively: "I'll ride the silence the bus leaves / up the stairs, through the door, a long hug. / Ride it riding her."

Finally, a dream I had in January: I walk downtown towards the bus station looking to buy a ticket to take me where the poetry gathering will be. I've left the other poets; but I find that some of them are headed to the bus station too.

Kent Chadwick will be one of the featured readers in a KUOW broadcast of the 1999 Jack Straw Writers Program on Friday, May 26th from 9:30-10:00 p.m.

Homeless Rich in Art and Poetry

StreetLife Gallery, at 2301 2nd Avenue & Bell, is an exciting space where Seattle's homeless can create and show their artworks. It's open daily from 11am to 8pm. Call 206-956-9472 for more information. Work by these homeless and low-income artists is for sale, with proceeds going to the artists. StreetWrites, another homeless project associated with Real Change, the newspaper of Seattle's homeless, is also hosting an open mic at the Lux Coffee Bar, 2226 First Avenue (two blocks from Real Change). This is scheduled to be a weekly event!

--Renee Kjartan