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Morton Marcus: This is- this is KUSP Santa Cruz, community sponsored radio for the Monterey Bay and Salinas Valley. [Recorded music playing]: [Hank Williams singing] I tried so hard my dear to show that you're my every dream. Yet you're

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afraid each thing I do is just some evil scheme. A memory from your lonesome past keeps us so far apart. Why can't I free your doubtful mind and melt your cold, cold heart. Morton Marcus: He said:

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Not willing to exert the mind enough even to sense the quality of the lives of those nearest us, we will, however, late at night, create from scratch around a few random sounds in the cellar, pipes knocking, the furnace working, a whole human

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being, the prowler come to punish us for lack of love. [Recorded music playing]: [Hank Williams singing] You never know how much it hurts to see you you sit and cry. You know you need and want my love yet you're afraid to try. Why do you run

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and hide from life, to try it just ain't smart. Why can't I free your doubtful mind and melt your cold cold heart. Morton Marcus: He said: This is the poem's dream. The poem is hungry for the dream of

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resurrection. The failing dream grown strong with the muscles of helplessness, with the ink of the invisible which is why I write my way back with gravel, inventing my own watch towers of death and viscera. My DNA model twisting more obscure than

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backroads traveled only once by drunks. His name is Vern Rutsala and he is the subject of the third in a series of programs I call "Lost Voices." Hello, this is Marcus. This is Morton Marcus, host of the Poetry Show. Last spring I

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began a series of programs dedicated to contemporary poets of importance who have remained unknown to the general reading public. Previously, I've done shows on Bert Meyers and Paul Blackburn in this series. Today's subject, fifty-one year

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old Vern Rutsala, is the first poet in the series who is still living. Author of six books, Rutsala was born of poor Finnish-American parents in McCall, Idaho in 1934. He moved with his family during the war to Portland, Oregon, where his

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father was going to work in the shipyards. And he grew up in that city playing football and basketball in high school and receiving a BA degree from the city's famous Reed College. After a stint in the army and doing various odd jobs, he got

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an MFA degree from the State University of Iowa and returned to Portland to teach at Lewis & Clark College where he has been a member of the English department for more than twenty years. His poems have appeared in virtually every literary

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magazine in America and England, and in a number of anthologies. He has also received two National Endowment of the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship, yet still he has not attained the reputation many of his fellow poets think he

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deserves. This program is inspired by the publication a week ago of Rutsala's sixth book, "Backtracking," which was brought out by a new local press, Storyline Press, a publishing arm of Reaper Magazine. And so today, the

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poetry of Vern Rutsala. First, before we get into that, I would like to thank Plaza Books for a donation of funds to support this program. And second, I would like to get to the poems of Vern Rutsala, and

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what I'm going to do is I'm going to say some minimal things about him, as I always do, things that will allow you to get into the poems, what is the poet all about, and I'm going to do this chronologically. I'm going to talk about Vern Rutsala

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in such a way that we will be able to see a development in him. He starts off- and these are poems from his first book called, "The Window," which is still out by the way from Wesleyan Press. So it can still be gotten and is every once in a

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while in the Bookshop Santa Cruz or Plaza Books, so you can order it. He starts out as a poet of insight and sardonic wit, though I don't think many people have considered him that. His commentary is trenchant and unrelenting, and even reminds

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one at times of an American Celine. And what his commentary is about is what has happened to America. Simply he sees an America that is totally concerned with materialism, an America which has allowed lack of feeling and total show to

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take over for meaning, a life that is essentially empty. Now remember, he is writing in the 50s. Let me give you an example of a part of a poem which does this. Here is a 50s suburb. And I think one of the things you should hear from Rutsala is his

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wonderful imagery, and even more than that, his exquisite phrasing. His phrasing is just wonderful. And this poem called: NIGHTFALL, from, "The Window," illustrates it perfectly. Here's his picture of America in the 50s.

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Night settles like a damp cloth over the houses, the houses that are shut, that show nowhere. Lawns are patrolled by plywood flamingos, or shrubbery clipped from magazines. Night locks have been put to work, their single fists tight in the wood. Within

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each floor- within, each floor has been swept until bone shines through. Each light bulb has been washed and polished. And now the readers of newspapers, those who savor the taste of box scores, recline in chairs that have perfect postures. Air

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ruffles dry ferns on mantles and touches intricate clocks underneath bell jars. A pipe is tamped with a lacquered hand, repose flutters in a match flare and a face is turned toward a window. Then, as if seen, eyes pressed like stamps to the

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glass, it turns quickly and lunches on 'want' ads, others recline. The army of competence, the many firm turners of lathes, the knowledgeable numbers who know the secrets of fuse boxes, the tricks of storm windows, the precision with which flagstones

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must indent the grass. They lean back, these artists of roasts, these heads of tables, listening to dishes shift in warm water, hearing bills collect on their doorsteps like gypsies. Night drops firmly. Now the second car sleeps beside the first. The

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committee meetings are over and each chairwoman prepares late snacks, of corsages and pewter door prizes. Some turners of lathes move toward dreams where they wear masks with giant cleft chins. Some wives watch their phones grin at their unused

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appointment pads. Others think of daughters driven to seek late at night hot solace on leather couches, or of sons, failures as halfbacks, forced to mold cars around power poles. But they move towards sleep, letting dreams float, as in the tips of

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fingers. That's part of a poem called, "Nightfall," by Rutsala. Here's another thing, this is what he pictures marriage to be in middle class America. Now he has never considered himself to be

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part of that middle class really, he comes from laborers, his parents were laborers and were always trying to pick up the odd manual job, a skilled manual labor job, but still he does not see himself as part of this world at all. Here is again

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a poem from the 50s which is a talk about the relationships between man and woman, and it has a short introduction and then two matching stanzas and it goes like this: THE MARRIAGE CONTRACT

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No one spells out the unwritten agreement, the fine unphrased concessions made between the two parties. She, party of the first part, protects him from seeing his own face on mirrored walls. She covers the glass with delicate pictures, subtle

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drawings, which equal his imagined self as he lumbers through halls, breaking China, shattering delicate glass, and smiling a ludicrous grin at dreams of himself. He, party of the second part, accepts his role and plays the crude but

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sensitive man. In the night he practices his gait, lumbering through dreams of flowers, breaking the stems of trees, hiding his own soft face like mollusk flesh within the grinning shell he's sworn by secret law to wear.

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In many of the poems in "The Window," Rutsala is an observer, he is watching other people and doesn't really come into the poems himself. And so there seems to be an alienation, a Waking, afraid to touch the woun that morning has inflicted, w

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distance between himself and his subject, but there are some poems which bring him into the poems themselves. And to match turn and lift the bandage of th blinds. Beyond the window, win -up birds totter, seeming t listen to the grass. In ou

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the poem, "Nightfall," here's a poem called, "Gardening," which may have been one of the first poster poems of its time in the yard, the weeds are doing wel and give their seeds to any win 50s, a fine hand printer in Iowa made a beautiful poster of this,

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that blows, even to our wordles neighbors who try, it seems, t or broadside, if you will. Now, Vern takes pride in not set the world straight each da with hoes and hoses. Their hand gardening, and not doing the things that a middle class

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are all green thumbs that tes the pulse of twigs. Sittin householder should do. So here he is, he's actually merely back, we watch their rituals o the spring. In clothin renting this house, but here he is, looking at us and them. And

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carefully aged, they work an work, prying flowers from thei 'us' here is the poet and his family, and 'them' are the dirt or pinching bushes unti the welts of buds appear people who keep their gardens up perfectly. And it's called,

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"Gardening," and again, I think these early poems have a very Pausing, they scout wit glances the No Man's Land of mordant ironic tone, and a trenchant social criticism. our yard, which must for them conceal mines. Well, they long

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GARDENING perhaps to harness the worms that wander our bloomless soil. In the bands of shade taped below the brims of their straw hats, their pious eyes float, possibly irrigated by tears for

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all our wild grass that aches for the quick teeth of a mower. But they are busy people, and so they bend again to tease color from their dirt. Over wh t breakfast we find, we watch t em poke for frail tendrils un er stones, and imagine that t

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ey dream all day of times when t ey will pose sunburned and ear hy beside their prize azaleas. ut our flowering weeds bother t em and we half expect to see t em at night, quietly prowling our yard, burying dead seeds t ey hope the moonlight will m

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ke green again or cutting out th hearts of our undisciplined wee s. Below their callous kne s, well-known and indiff rent worms labor and diges , lost in thoughts of lengt and the coiling of links desig ed to invade the very cells

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of secrets. As roots explor earth, grubs assemble and re eive assignments. And while he neighbors work, huntin worms and flowers, flower and worms wait patiently for th m.

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Well, more and more of this tone of alienation, this removal gets blunted. And though he will remain ironic, in almost- in many of the poems, in almost all of his books except for the last two, there is more compassion that comes into the tone of the

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poems and the playfulness goes out. One of the last of these is a poem called, "The Fat Man," which I will read right now, in which again Rutsala comes into the poem itself. He is a large man, I do not think that he would admit that this is about

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him, but certainly it is about an 'I'. And one of the things that you miss in a lot of the early poems is the presence of the I and: THE FAT MAN

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I call everyone shriveled, dried apples fit for cellars, nothing more. They have no folds, no flesh to touch, gangling reminders of the grave. Existence melts in my mouth, I relish, I taste the sweet jams of life, I gorge and worship the

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place of love: All kitchens everywhere. Diet is sin, an effort to turn limbs to razors that slice a lover's hands. Right angles pierce my eye. I love the arc, soft ovals, a curve, things molded to be touched, the soothers of sight.

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I feel at least ten souls swimming in my flesh. I feed them with both hands. Someday, I will become a mountain. I eat the world. He published several other books but one of the most interesting,

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which is also still in print, is called, "Paragraphs," and they are a series of prose poems, which he defines as prose poems, as aphorisms, as many different kinds of utterance, but they also are extremely ironic and also extremely insightful, and

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make us think, and I think this is probably clear to you, of the everyday world in new ways. One of the things about Rutsala that is so interesting and has captured those people who have had a chance to hear him, and made them fans, is that one, he

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is writing about the everyday world. He is writing about the objects and utensils that all of us use and live with. And two, he is doing this in a language which is extremely accessible to everyone. Though it is rich, though it is original in image

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and metaphor and certainly insight, it is also the spoken language of the street, the language of the American idiom. Well, here are some of these poems, some of these paragraphs. I'll read around three or four of them. And I think you will

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see what I'm talking about and how ironic and mordant they are. Here is one called: THE EMBARASSED You see a woman you know, and unaccountably, you become

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embarrassed. You stammer and can't wait to get away. It is only later that you remember, yes, last night, you were together in your dream. The next time you see her, you look closely, eagerly seeking some hint of embarrassment in her

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actions. And here's a paragraph called, "Lunchroom," which I particularly like, and if you've ever been in a large lunchroom cafeteria, this is a feeling you might have had, or in some

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unconscious part of your mind given vent to. THE LUNCHROOM The knives on the table are there for a purpose. But their true function has been forgotten over the years. Actually, the

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lunchroom which now appears so calm and civilized is an arena. The trays and tables converted shields, and we who sit so quietly are gladiators. The man who cleans up, the one who looks so dull, grew tired of the mess and has cleverly diverted us by

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serving food to slice and eat, thereby satisfying our need to use weapons, which he stealthily reduced in size, until they now seem innocuous, just as he has assuaged our desire to kill by teaching us the rudiments of gossip.

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Well, that will be all I will read from the early work of Vern Rutsala. And I certainly urge you to look his poems up in, "Paragraphs," and in other books that he has written, the titles of which very simply are, "The Window," which I read from

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first, "Laments," "The Journey Begins," and the book I just read from, "Paragraphs," but what I am most concerned with is the change that has come into Rutsala's work over the past dozen, well, the past ten years. He has gone from being a poet of

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insight with sardonic wit, whose trenchant, unrelenting commentary certainly moves us, to one who has become a haunting, compassionate visionary of all we've lost as a nation and as individuals. And he has taken us back to a

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landscape, which is the landscape of Idaho, and a valley near McCall where he and his Finnish American forebears lived for a while and that is now become a ghost town. And in the back of his current book, "Backtracking," which is the

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reason for this program, the editors say: "The current volume is a dark, deliberate and complex narrative that recreates that past landscape as current in memory. Rutsala's rural Idaho joins William Carlos Williams'

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Patterson, Charles Olsen's Gloucester, and Philip Levine's Detroit as one of the most haunting places ever evoked in American poetry." I agree with that. And many of these poems have received

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attention, though not of the kind of attention one would want. Robert Peters has written a wonderful review of the book that starts the series off, it's really a two book series and that book is called, "Walking Home From the Ice House," and it

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is published by Carnegie Mellon and it too is still in print. And it is that book that was reviewed by Robert Peters in Reaper, I would think it was Reaper number nine, Reaper number ten maybe. And that can be gotten in the bookstores in

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Santa Cruz because Reaper, at least half of Reaper, comes out from Santa Cruz now. What I'd like to do is read some of these poems and show you what is going on. There's some- again, the insight continues, but the sense of the world is really

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wonderfully given in these poems. Let me give you some short ones to show you what I mean. Well, let me first of all give you a sense of this place, which is the place of Idaho. And in these poems, and certainly in the new book, "Backtracking,"

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Rutsala is using poetry, he is using memory, he is using the power of the imagination to recreate a world that has been lost, and a subculture in America that no one has ever written about that I know of and which is totally gone. It was

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the Finnish-American loggers and odd-job men who lived in Idaho during the 20s and the 30s. THE WORLD, and he writes: I moved back by shortcut and dream. I fly above it all. The

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dark stained with swamps soaks up the lakes extravagance, stubble hills, the valley's green finger. This is the place of pure invention, secret as old wood under a hundred coats of paint. I invent my way back, invent these wings, this Piper

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Cub of tissue paper I glide in, circling the valley, chasing my shadow across the lake, twisting each layer back through air. The town scatters out along the highway, and I cut low buzzing the school, signaling my old teachers chalky bones. I bank

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away approaching town along the old road that rises from a low plane where the land tastes bad, where dust even slips under rich men's doors. I trace it like a route on a map and it climbs, kept company by a creek with a mouth full of boulders. I think

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a wind for updrafts, slowing above the dump, then sweep around the village, past Indian village and summer homes. Steering hard I top the mill, my steering wheel an old lard can lid on the end of a stick, my seed a log setback in the woods,

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the shade cool and safe, and the ark cut by the rope swing– thirty years ago. And with that, and with other poems in which he tries to get back, in which he uses the poem as incantation, the poem as

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shall we say a mantra, he forces himself, he forces his memory and imagination to bring him back to that place. Well, this valley in which he lived, the center of which is a lake, was very famous. One, because they had their own supposed monster,

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which drew summer guests to come and look for it. And two, because movies were shot there. One of the most famous movies was a movie called, "Northwest Passage." And, if you don't know about, "Northwest Passage," is based on a Kenneth Roberts'

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novel and it occurs right before the revolution and concerns Rogers' Rangers who are coonskin cap mountain men who are looking for the Northwest Passage. And it was all shot, starring Spencer Tracy and several other stars, in this town, McCall,

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where Vern was born and grew his first ten years. So here is: NORTHWEST PASSAGE, and it's a wonderful poem because of the way it ends. Out past Sylvan Beach is the place they still call Indian

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Village, built only to be burned the summer Spencer Tracy came to town. For years after that, whole families would picnic there, scavenging the debris for rubber arrowheads. But when Spencer came, everyone got jobs. $5 a day and lunch, the

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depression ending with glamour, and the chance to sew on a button for a star. Some of the men were extras, growing beards and wearing buckskin. Rogers' Rangers looking for that passage all summer long from eight to five. My father was among them,

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and once years later, the summer after he died, I saw the movie on The Late Show. I stared at it hard, even recognized a few landmarks. I scavenged every frame for the smallest sign of him. I found them.

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And it is that sense of loss, loss of the personal, but more loss of an America that never really existed. That is what Vern Rutsala's poems have become. They have become very elegiac in tone and they have become very, very powerful and

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moving for a great variety of people, not because he is talking personally about his own experience, but because the suggestion of that experience, what is evoked from it somehow moves us all and speaks to our own lives. Here's a short poem

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called: ERRANDS FOR THE OLD MAN, and it goes like this: I've been rummaging all my attic lumber. The attic I always carry but it's too late now. I have all these things: a maple bar

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and a spotted sack, ten penny nails, a can of gas, a hopeless quart of raspberry ripple, and two copies of Ring Magazine. What do I do with these things? Why do I have them? I can't even give them away. Why did you send me for them? And why, why on

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earth did I never bring them back to you? [Recorded music playing]: [Hank Williams singing] Some folks might say that I'm no good that I wouldn't settle down if I could. But when that open road starts to callin' me there's

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somethin' o'er the hill that I gotta see. Sometimes it's hard but you gotta understand when the lord made me he made a ramblin' man. Morton Marcus: This is the Poetry Show and this is Mort

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Marcus bringing you another in a series I call "Lost Voices." And today we are doing the poetry of Vern Rutsala. And we have just started talking about the last two volumes he's come out with called, "Walking Home From the Ice House," which I was reading

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about before, or from before. And, "Backtracking," his newest book, which has just been out for one week. And it's put out by Storyline Press, a new press right here in Santa Cruz, though its address is both Santa Cruz and New York City, and it is a

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subsidiary of the Reaper Magazine, a fine literary magazine which is coming out of Santa Cruz but it gets distributed all over the country. Before we get back to the show, I do want to make an announcement and that is that

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the fifth reading of The Celebration of the Muse will take place on November 12th at Louden Nelson Center at 7:30. Again, the donation is 3.50. And as you know, the Celebration of the Muse readings have lady poets, women poets who live in

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the area, and they are- there are six readings, a series of six readings, we've had many of the poets and the organizers on the show. I would also like to tell all of you out there who called in with your pledge that we are waiting for your return

00:34:43.330 - 00:35:03.880

of funds and we have already packed, in wonderfully shock resistant packaging, the two broadsides that you were promised, so everyone who is signed up for the Poetry Show and said they were going to pay that money, just send your

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premium card back in and you will get these two broadsides. Don't forget, it's one thing to pledge, but it is another thing to come in with the money when you are asked for it, so do send those in if you happen to forget. And as I said, you will

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be sent that very, very day, you will have your two broadsides sent to you. Well, okay, we're talking about Vern Rutsala. And for those people who tuned in late, Vern Rutsala is a poet, fifty-one

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years old who lives in Portland, Oregon, and who I think has not received nearly as much attention as he should, even though he has won a number of prizes, has six books out now and is recognized not only in the United States but England

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where he has made several visits. These two books interest me so much, because -- that is, "Walking Home From the Ice House," and, "Backtracking," his last two books -- because they really do speak of an America that most of us have never

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experienced, and then something happens in, "Backtracking," which is even a further extension of this. It is the creation of a world, a recreation of a world that is gone, something that is lost to history, that is lost to time.

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And what he is trying to do is to resurrect a life and a meaning, not only for himself but for all of us. So let me read some of these poems. We are presenting Hank Williams, for various reasons, and that is because his music to me

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represents a lot of the feeling of these poems. And so let's just sort of read several of the poems that do that. Here is, "On A Binge With Dakota Slim." Vern was born in '34 and this poem is about '32, so it's obviously talking I would think in his

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father's voice, or he is trying to imagine himself what it must have been like with his father and Dakota Slim, and Slim does come into other poems. ON A BINGE WITH DAKOTA SLIM

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I pick a year, say 1932 and travel back by hearsay, back to the old kitchen with its glass of spoons in the exact middle of the table. We are there together, letting it all get too much for us, letting it all build up. Sitting night after

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night, with only two sounds: her radio, our steady honing, a snick and whir, the static straight from Boise and every blade already keen enough for surgery. How much coffee can you drink? How sharp the knives have to be? It's one of those things

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we dread and long for. The cold bedroom, the single bed, getting up at five to work the pond. We're like cats on those logs. But it's all too much for us. How much kindling can you chop? It's one of those clockwork times, three months gone and

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time to get the hell out. Time to trade that whetstone in on the rusty edge of bootleg booze. "Think we'll go into town," we say and get out just before the skillet hits the door. Woman's got a hell of an arm, we say. In town we hear the skillet ring

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and let the first drink slide down slow as summer weather. "That's a little better," we say, "just a little better now." Let the goddamn radio dim those blades dull again. We don't care. We're here and by god, we'll stay until we drink our

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paycheck dry. Well, here's another inhabitant of this area, and it's Mr. Reedy, and it's a wonderful little memory and vision. It's one of my favorite poems, it's very, very short, of Vern's. And

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this is called: REEDY'S GALAXY On summer nights, the south wall of Tim Reedy's tarpaper shack looked like a sky full of stars, lamp light shining through the

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countless tiny holes he put there, killing flies with his silver 22. And since that is so short, let me just read that again and just realize how precise every word here is. And by the way, I am

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reading it the way I'm reading it because every one of these lines has two beats in them. And every line demands a breath stop after them so that you will read this poem slowly, and you will absolutely chisel out each word with your tongue and teeth.

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REEDY'S GALAXY, and every time I take a breath pause, that means it's the end of the line. On summer nights, the south wall of Tim Reedy's tarpaper shack looked like a sky, full of stars, lamp light shining

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through the countless tiny holes he put there, killing flies with his silver 22. And here's another one called, "Something Like Spinks," and this will- Spinks will define itself right here. I love,

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again, the sound of the rhythm in this and the the wonderful sense of language that comes into the tone of this and the rhythm and the choice of words. It's called: SOMETHING LIKE SPINKS

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Now I stay awake to dream. I invite the old times in and they arrive clean, free of travel grime, so honed down, they're only bone and ink, flat dreams, the needle of the pin withdraws. That girl, I don't even remember her name, something like Spinks.

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And the town's wild man, Dingaling Red. They're here now, come back in pieces, free of [unidentified], come back from air and the rust of thirst. She was a neighbor's cousin from a farm, a farm I saw once, cowshit hip-deep in the yard, everything

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falling down. He even called himself that, proud of the title, Dingaling Red, father of a friend who ate with us and often spent the night, a frightened little black-haired kid called Wart. They're all here now, insisting, faces

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through a fog. She was older, maybe twelve. She was skinny but strong and she had a mean streak. But mainly I remember how she rode on the pickup's front fender, one hand on the radiator cap, feet on the bumper. For a while, Red owned a

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bar with a whorehouse attached, but he went broke, gambling and drinking, his face red as his hair. He didn't seem to care. She rode on the fender. It was a big family or maybe the truck bed was full of cow shit. Anyway, that's how she rode. Her

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ugly old man squirreling all over those back country washboards, driving like the damn fool he was, trying to make her flinch. When they wheeled in spitting gravel, she hit the ground running and swearing, it was a fine thing to see. And

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when they left, she sat there so casually with style and a kind of whipcord spirit like she knew exactly what it meant. I remember Red grinning and winking, and how his laugh seemed raw red, too. He died in a fiery wreck and for a week,

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the slow drivers felt pleased with themselves. But then the beer went flat, the war began, and things were never quite the same again. About the girl? Oh, you know the story. Something happened and she fell off and was killed. Everyone said it

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would happen someday, and it did. There's another poem in here, which is called, "Words," and it says, wonderfully, the difference between the uneducated working class, the laborers, and the educated

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middle class that came down for vacations to this place in the summer, but also it has to talk about the American dream to me. And what it has to say about the American Dream, very simply, is that it's not the dream, it is not allowed to be the dream of a

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lot of people. And so people use "incorrect" usage and language to show that the dream has nothing to do with them. And it is a wonderful excuse for not learning grammar and not being good at school and to explain why you speak the incorrect

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English you speak. It's done with tongue in cheek and yet again, there is a real trenchant commentary about a class system in America which supposedly doesn't exist. And it's very simply called:

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WORDS Words, we had more than any we could use. They embarrassed us. Our talk fuller than our rooms. They named nothing we could see. Dining room, study, mantlepiece, lobster, thermidor. They name

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things you only saw in movies, the thin flicker Friday nights that made us feel empty in the cold as we walked home through our only great abundance: snow. This is why we said, "ain't," and, "he don't." We wanted words to fit our cold linoleum, our

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oil lamps, our outhouse. We knew better but it was wrong to use a language that named ghosts, nothing you could touch. We left such words at school, locked in books where they belonged. It was the vocabulary of our lives that was so thin. We knew this

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and grew to hate all the words that named the vacancy of our rooms. Looking here, we said "studio couch" and saw cot. Looking there, we said, "venetian blinds," and saw only the yard. Brick meant tarpaper, fireplace meant wood stove, and

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this is why we came to love the double negative. There are many wonderful poems in this book, and I would like to read- I'm not going to have a chance to read some of the great ones. The longer poems are really wonderful poems, and I'm

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not going to have a chance really to read them. But I do want to read a poem for you to show you it seems as though you're listening to an artless poet but Vern Rutsala is a poet of great art. And I want to read you how he makes very difficult

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forms, and poetics seemed like a tossed off bit of nothingness. This, of course, is the sign of the great craftsman, the great practitioner. There is a form, which is an Italian form, and it is called a sestina. It is composed of six stanzas of six

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lines each with a three-line envoy, or an ending of three lines. Now, these six lines and in words that must be repeated, the first six lines in the first stanza, and in words that must be repeated as the last words of every other stanza in the poem,

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in a prescribed order. For example, what you'll hear very clearly is the last line of one stanza, the last word of one- the last word and the last line of one stanza becomes the last word in the first line of the next stanza. But all the other

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words have a prescribed place where they have to be, then in the three line envoy, all six words have to be used. Well, here he is talking about Idaho, and this world, and taking this classical form and making it suit in tone, in diction, and in

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content exactly what he wants it to do, a perfect sestina. And he even calls it by the six words that are the six ending or rhyme words that the poem must repeat again and again. It is very hard to write these kind of poems, and have them mean anything more

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than a clever game. But here's a time for you to see that they really can be made meaningful. The six words on the title of the poem are: gravel, roads, fathers, Idaho, hobos, memory. We move slowly now over gravel. The last hint we've had of roads

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in this long search for our fathers. We hope this place is Idaho. As we were told by hobos so far back in our memory, it's nearly lost. Or is this memory we touch, and only think it's gravel? Our path more lost than any hobos. Perhaps we follow too

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many roads as imaginary as the place called Idaho where they said we would discover fathers. But still, we are without fathers, except those fading images in memory, who invented this wilderness of Idaho. Soon enough, we'll eat the gravel.

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Soon enough, we'llabandon roads and jungle up forever with the hobos. Or do we dream the hobos as we dream our lost fathers night after night along these roads? There's something in our blood, a memory grinding like gears to produce this gravel we

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scatter like seeds all over Idaho. Give us a break. We're lost, Idaho. We can't even find those old hobos, and quarry as we will, there's too little gravel for the single file we need to reach our fathers. We're drunk, confused. Our memory

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bulldozed and gouged by new roads. We travel circles, not roads, and have never admitted Idaho to the union, much less our memory. And we carry within strange hobos who all insist they are our fathers, and voices harsh as gravel. So we give up

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roads and gravel, and every memory of dim hobos who lied of Idaho and our fathers. We are discussing today the poetry of Vern Rutsala, and I have just a moment to get into maybe two more poems here. And

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I'm going to read them from, "Backtracking," which is the new book. And what's interesting in the change in, "Backtracking," from, "Walking Home From the Ice House," is that, "Walking Home From the Ice House," which is by the way the title poem, is a

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long poem, which is an excellent, excellent poem, very, very moving. There are also very moving poems about Vern's father and his father's death in this book. But the actuality of being in Idaho, which happens in, "Walking Home From the Ice

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House," is approached in a different way in, "Backtracking." In, "Backtracking," what we are really coming to grips with here is, well, let's put it this way: it's a book that charts the cost of retrieving the past through

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meditation, dream, and poetry. The experience in it- I guess, I'll have to put it this way, is the poet's attempt to get back there. And in the entire book, he never manages to get back there. Even though in the land, and even in the last poem, which

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I'll read, he says, you know, that I know, I didn't get back there but it is the journey, that ritual trek that is needed, and can be done through the imagination, and can resurrect these lost worlds, and in art you do this. Maybe I should put

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it even another way. The book is about the attempt to get back to the lost world of origins, of youth, a vitality of spirit. And it does it through the poem as meditation, through the poem almost as spiritual technology. And the interest of the book is

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that in most of the poems we are allowed to go along with the poet as he tries to resurrect this world and that is the experience. It is a unique book and I do suggest that you will go down and get yourself a copy. And if it's not there, it's easy

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to get as I said, since the press is here in Santa Cruz, just ask the bookstore to get it for you. Well, let me read some of these poems and give you a sense of what's going on here. Here is a poem called, "The Mood of Elegy." And I would like to

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read that because that is the mood of, it seems to me, both, "Walking Home From the Ice House," and, "Backtracking." THE MOOD OF ELEGY Upstairs just now, I stood in the hall letting the rafters

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settle on my shoulders, listening to the sleepers, and then fell down this page again, the only snow in town. And the mood of elegy falls, my words soaking in it like rags. It forms as my neighbors do, a roadblock. A mound of grief

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between here and there. The mood of elegy falls, dusting meetings with old friends. We talk and smile, uncover gems of anecdote, polish the stones of memory from a past neat as a display case, that museum we visit. But I feel myself listening, always

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listening for some other voice, some other past. What I hear is like a cough at night from an upstairs room, some old message I never understood and wherever I am, I listen for such sounds, night cries from a child never born. I lurch toward him, trying

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to capture the cause of nightmare, the dark comment of a cough. It's for this poem I listen. This poem and the huge wilderness it moves toward, the way the woods close darkly behind the old house, the way the dark breathed hard at

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apartment doors. I stand in the hall again and feel the yokes of the rafters settle. I keep the house together through this deep winter. But for pay, I want a long ride by Greyhound and then [unidentified]. A long, hard ride until I reach that other

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winter and high country, until I pass the timberline where the world becomes rock and ice, a place higher than any we have known, higher than rafters and pages, higher than every destination.

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Well, let me read what happens to people like Reedy, happens to people like Dingaling Red, and happens to many of the people from Idaho. And it is the heroes, Vern's heroes, the lost, the desolute, those who have been disenfranchised, those who

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inhabit the one-night cheap hotels, if you will. And he calls this poem: MY BUDDIES My buddies breathe dust where the rubber plants die, in the

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lobby of the Lotus Hotel, room $5 and up. You can see them there anytime on mirror's shadows, but tonight is special. This is their club, the hub that draws them on rainy nights like this. The murky light suits them. The dry ferns, the

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street-glass suit suits them. First, of course, is the social hour and for those without Muscatel or Tokay, there's a coke machine that works sometimes. Later, chili dogs and beer for the faithful. A talcum of dust rises from the hairless

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sofa and every chair sinks low as a bucket seat. "Drive to your heart's content. There ain't no speed limit here," the chairman says, beaming. Everyone likes him. They voted for his thin hair and the little broken veins around his nose. A man like that

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is honest. They gab and sulk, each member bringing out his past like a snapshot. "I could have made a go but the location was lousy." "That woman took every fucking cent I had!" "He cheated a blind, son of a bitch." They like this but as

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the wine goes around, they grow feisty, grinning and nodding as they talk of heroes. Ex-pugs rocking on their heels. The runner up, the hot rookie who, the chairman says, "succumbed to the sophomore jinx, they curved them to death." Someone yells,

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"Winners never quit and quitters never win!" Everyone roars, "shiiiet," the chairman whips, dancing a jig and hooting and now they know everyone is there. They love the list, sweeter than any menu. Contenders with glass jaws, patsies, masters of the

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bonehead plague, Wrong Way Roy, bums a month, sluggers buried in the minors, men over the hill and out of gas, pitchers who lost it, all the tragic flaws. Dr. Strangelove, the Strikeout King, oh, yes, especially the Strikeout King. This is the

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losers' caucus, but "Come on down" they yell. "We ain't particular, there's plenty of room for you." I hope today you've gotten some sense of the poetry of Vern Rutsala, who has been the third subject in the series I call

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Lost Voices. Next week, Joe Stroud will be with you. The week after that I will be here with Maude Meehan, who has just come out with her Collected Poems. And then two weeks after that, I will have a Greek poet and translator on the program by

00:59:43.410 - 01:00:00.750

the name of Eleni Fourtouni. After that, interesting shows and I hope you keep listening into it. But right now, I'd like to end this program with the last poem in Vern's new book, "Backtracking," and it's called:

01:00:00.780 - 01:00:23.220

SO BE IT, and it is a poem to poems. Old poem you preach and the- Let me start again. Old poem, you preach, and the tree across the street is gone. Shaved smooth, it's stumped like a huge wooden nickel. It omens

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the end, journey's over, the peace beyond the poem. And so the long poem of travel without arrival travels itself out like a typewriter ribbon, feeding back and forth, beginnings and endings blur. Without words, we lose the way. Nameless, all the

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lights go out. The old lake breaks up, spring descends on this roundtable. I wash my hands in that cold water. I stir the monster up. We stay alive with words. A poem of travel without arrival arrives. And someday when it's too late to be to

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late, we'll found a town an call it "Smithereen [Recorded music playing]: [Hank Williams singing] If you loved me half as much as I love you You wouldn't worry me half as much as you do You're nice to me when there's no one else around

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You only build me up to let me down If you missed me half as much as I miss you You wouldn't stay away half as much as you do I know that I would never be this blue If you only loved me half as much as I love you If you loved me half as much as I

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love you You wouldn't worry me half as much as you do You're nice to me when there's no one else around…