“Books drugs razor whiskey shirts
/ Henry lies ready for his Eastern tour”. Everything you need for a tour of
poetry readings! The poem references his broken arm—no neckties because he can’t
tie one with his cast, and while there are some fairly mundane details like
that, they alternate with this: “there’s also the dough, to help out Vietnam”
and “it’s doing what must be done, / helping them kill each other.” A poet has
to make a living, and in his day as much as now, royalties from book sales
weren’t going to cut it. There is teaching, and well-paid readings if the
artist is of sufficient fame and stature, in one case where the attendees
ponied up a $500 dollar fee to watch the famous poet do his act, and the money went
to the war effort, to help the South Vietnamese kill the North Vietnamese, who
by the way were trying to kill them as well, and isn’t war grand? Confessional
poetry gets a bit sullied by such accounts, perhaps: “Warm / should everybody
mouth a lawless tit.”
The poet and Zen philosopher,
Gary Snyder, notes somewhere in The
Practice of the Wild, I believe, that when times are out of joint you’re
forced to make compromises. So, for example, I recognize the fossil fuel
industry now for the thuggish, planet-devouring institutions they’ve become.
Thuggish because they use their wealth and resultant power to further their
ends, which is simply to mine and sell more fossil fuel—to the tune of almost 90
million barrels a day of oil alone—at the expense of the ecological integrity of
communities, ecosystems and the planet as a whole. But I have to drive a car. I
can buy a fuel-efficient car, advocate and vote for public transportation,
alternative energy sources, but in the end I still drive to work. The world is
out of joint, and if I am going to live and work in this particular community,
my choices are constrained. So that’s partially what’s going on in this poem, a
recognition of forced constraints and a snide response to the money that comes
from supporting something that compromised his values.
I attended a literature and
environment conference, which most of the attendees flew to. Bill McKibben, the
outspoken activist who has worked, spoken and written for years about fossil
fuels and climate change, was a speaker. He noted the discrepancy there as well—to
fly somewhere in a jet airplane is a carbon-loaded activity. His advice: Make
it count. Compromises loom everywhere. It doesn’t have to mean you’re a
hypocrite. Just make it count.
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