Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Finley

I had a literary career in the 70s that anyone in their twenties would have envied. I published five little books of poems in the space of three years. I met and hobnobbed with famous poets, and became a publisher and translator. I felt I attained a sort of short-list status, whereby if I sent poems to a magazine, and the magazine fell into the realm in which I was well regarded -- basically, a swath from beat to surrealist work -- the editor would have to stop and say, hey, he's someone I have to pay attention to. Which was pretty good for a young writer without a whole lot to say.

Let me round up the seminal events for you. Begin at college in 1968. William Stafford, the wonderful Oregon poet, was paying the College of Wooster a visit. I knew nothing about his work -- I was 17 and knew nothing, period. But because I styled myself as a poet, I was invited to meet Stafford, along with a handful of other campus bohemians, in a closed circuit TV interview. I went in without any questions, but determined to spot an opportunity. The other students asked academic questions about the meanings of this image and that, and about the use of form in his work.

When it was my time, I asked a question that made the other students cringe: "Do you have fun when you write?"

But Stafford -- I came to love him very quickly -- brightened at the question, smiled broadly and said, "Yes. Yes. Yes!" And went on lovingly about the joy writing gave him, how it was the best part of every day, how it lifted him up from the barely breathing to the noticing, and wondering, and self-amusing tasks of poetry.

 

That tore it for me. I wanted to be just like that, writing from passion and enjoyment, not "to be a poet" or some musty purpose described in T. S. Eliot's late letters.

I dropped out of Wooster, traveled to L.A., ran a storefront church commune, met Charles Manson, toured Alaska, got drafted, got undrafted, and did a lot of other crazy stuff before settling down in Minnesota, and editing the University of Minnesota's literary mag. The magazine was a dreary thing when I took it over, called Academy. Like Caesar crossing the Rubicon, I took this tired student rag and reshaped it into a 70s lit mag, renaming it Kedemi (the first e is actually a schwah, an upside-down a), an idea I got from Marcel Duchamps. First rule -- student work was strongly discouraged!

I was an editor so writers kowtowed to me. And I got invited to things. When Yevgeny Yevtushenko read at Macalaester Fieldhouse, I was in the front row. Beforehand a group of Ukrainian dissidents leafleted the audience, blasting the poet for the frustrations of a people. Yevtushenko was splendrous in his Wranglers, drank occasionally from a crystal pitcher of milk. Suddenly a band of bearded Ukrainians stormed the stage, knocking the poet down and upsetting the dais. I and a few others instinctively rose to block the protesters' escape, and did manage to slow them down enough to let security people take them into custody, and prevent an international incident. Yevtushenko stood on the platform and blinked away milk, and the audience rose to applaud the shaken Russian poet.

A bigger event was the arrival by night of Russian dissident poet Andrej Voznesenski's. Well, dissident may not be right word -- he was a surrealist, so it was unclear whether he was really dissident. But he sure sounded dissident. TheSoviet Union refused him a visa until 24 hours before his schedule visa, so he arrived nervous and tired from his trip. But the energy returned when he took the huge stage. Northrop Auditorium was cordoned off so that 50 people dotted the 5,000 seats while Vosnesenki groaned like a swinging pendulum through readings of "Goya" and other poems in the only language he knew.

Afterward we poets got together at English professor Chester Anderson's to boast and jostle and drink, Voznesenski sitting alone on the couch, a slight frown on his face. Several beers later, I took to the bathroom, where Chester's collie lay, and stepped over him to pee. As soon as I started, Voznesenski entered, smiled politely at me, knelt by the dog and scratched his ears, not more than a foot from my pee stream. Confused, I turned to see the poet kneeling, eyes closed, his hands stroking the golden dog, his face held out to me, the dew like manna on his face, and a smile as if finally, finally free. When I left the party, Voznesenski stood by the door and pointed to me. "Yes, you," he said, and smiled coolly.

 

Then I met Robert Bly. I sent copies of Kedemi to all the good poets in the region, to attract contributions. He sent me a nice handwritten note -- hand-drawn would be a better description, as he wrote in those days in a kind of pictographic swirl, using butterflies and birds as punctuation. But what he said he liked wasn't the poetry, but the design! He liked a photo of a pretty girl standing under a bare tree. I thought it was kind of hackneyed, but I sent him the original print with my compliments.

The next few years saw a minor flourish of correspondence between us. Bly was fairly flattering, and I was very flattered. Remember that I was 20 whenI met him, barely more than a boy, and one whose own father had abandoned him. The idea of being taken in by a major figure like Bly seemed a very acceptable trade-up. When he came to Minneapolis to read I would make sure and meet him and pledge my allegiance.

But Bly in person, wrapped in his Peruvian poncho and sweeping into a room to the sound of beads knocking together like a nun's rosary, was not as gracious as Bly on paper. Perhaps when he met me face to face he read the hurry and ambition that was written there. Or perhaps he saw I was younger than he supposed. In any event, he quickly took to teasing me with little jabs, calling me "Irish" instead of Mike. I sensed the pullback -- he wasn't teasing me out of affection, but because something about me bugged him.

I went outstate with the poet Franklin Brainerd, who was dying of leukemia, for a poetry reading at a rural university. Franklin, a very kind, down-to-earth man. suggested I bring some poems of my own, in case the opportunity to read arose. So I did. Robert Bly and Thomas McGrath were also on hand for the poetry event. The three headliners took turns reading, and they were well received. Afterward, Tom and Franklin waved me upon stage for a kind of poetry improv -- audience members would shout out an image, and poets would scramble to produce and read a poem featuring that image or idea. It was just nutty and open-ended enough, that I shone. I remember very vividly that McGrath and Brainerd were very pleasant and hospitable to me -- and that Robert scowled when I beat him to the punch by quickly locating a poem about hibernation.

Afterward we all caroused in his motel room, drinking red wine from a varietal jug, and I noticed that besides me there were a half dozen other young men poets in attendance, mainly from Duluth. They all loved Robert, and waited on every word. It dawned on me, through the haze of red wine, that our role was that of acolytes.

At one point Bly wrote me a letter, asking me to do him a favor. There was a young poet he favored named Gregory Orr. He had the great fortune to be the protégés of two great men, Minnesota's Bly and New Hampshire's Donald Hall. Bly told me that he had some friendly disagreement with Hall about what to do with young Orr. They were playing some kind of game with one another, and Orr was a queen in the game, and I was to be a knight. Blky asked me if I would ,write a review of Orr's book Gathering the Bones Together for a local magazine. The fix was in -- I didn’t need to contact the editor about this.

Now, Orr wrote very somber, dreamy, melancholy poems much like my own, so in my vanity, I imagined that Bly wanted me to learn something from Orr for my own growth as an artist. I wrote a friendly review that nevertheless coaxed Orr to move beyond dreaminess to something more substantive. At the end, I quoted an image of James Wright to sell the idea to Orr: "What are you afraid of? Go out on the limb of your life. The branch won’t break."

The review came out and I was very pleased with it. Until I got a cautiously worded letter from Bly. "Michael," he said, " a misunderstanding has occurred between Donald and myself. He thinks I coached your review, and you know I didn’t. Further, he thinks your last paragraph suggests that Gregory take his life, and he is very upset about that." Bly asked me to take a moment and write a note to Hall assuring him that I was a free agent and that Robert had nothing to do with it, and that I in no way intended to suggest Gregory hang himself.

Which I did. But I made a serious mistake. Thinking it would simplify matters, I photocopied Robert's letter to me and forwarded that to Hall. A week passed, and I got a furious letter from Robert again, telling me I had violated his trust and that we were no longer friends. Aghast at what I had done -- I remain very bad at keeping other people's secrets, 30 years later -- I wrote letters to Bly and Hall, apologizing up and down.

Only afterward did I realize I had been played like a cheap violin. My job all along was to deliver Bly's message about Orr to Hall. I botched the assignment, and Bly blamed me.

I have two other stories about Bly. The first happens four years later, when I am a newspaper editor in a small town not far from that prairie university. Robert again came around to read his work, and I covered his visit as a journalist. Afterward he agreed to meet with several of us at a tavern. He was in good form, enjoying the attention, and playing the role of Sufi mystic, a person apart from the cares of the world, to the hilt.

To his dismay, however, his teenaged daughter sidled up to him and began begging him for money. "Come on, daddy, there are some cords for sale at The Gap, and they're only $14.99." She forced him to open his wallet for us to see. None of us took this as unusual. Teenage girls need jeans. But I could tell from the look on his face that he felt she had blown his cover. He was just a man. Credit card, driver's license, a couple of twenties -- terrible.

Another two years pass. I've moved away from the prairie city, gone to live in New Haven while my girlfriend (now wife) Rachel went to nursing school. I'm still writing, but I'm much more beat up by literature. No editors want to see my work. But I attend a special Kalachakra installation rite of the Dalai Lama in Madison, Wisconsin, with my pal Barry Casselman. It's a very solemn event, with plenty of pomp and saffron robes. Suddenly, I look up, and who should be passing through the crowd but -- no, not the Dalai Lama -- Robert Bly.

I went up to him, delighted to see someone from my past, assuming he would at the least call me "Irish." Instead he stopped, looked coldly in my direction, took a sharp left and veered away from me.

 

Other stupid things happened. I submitted a book of poems to a local press called Vanilla Press. The name should have served as a warning, but I was ambitious, and wanted everyone to publish me. The publisher was a Finnish woman named Jean-Marie Fischer. She had taken her mother's property in Michigan and invested it in publishing bad poetry. Her problem was that the reading committee she named liked my work, but she didn’t. Specifically, this being 1977, she wanted to never publish another book by another male poet, but she had not made that decision until my book was accepted.

"I'm sorry, Michael, but we're changing as an organization. I truly think we can best meet our mission by focusing on the work of emerging women writers. There are so many books out by so many male poets."

I tried to make it into a joke. "Oh come one, what harm will one more do?" I pleaded. To no avail. Here in Minnesota we have an ethnic joke: Have you heard about the Finn who loved his wife so much he almost told her? Jean-Marie was that sort of Finn.

"I'll tell you what," she finally said to me. "I want you to prove yourself worthy of publication."

"But the committee voted to publish it."

"I'm overruling the committee," she said. "It's my money."

"OK, what do I have to do?"

"I want you to go to Meridel LeSueur, and get her permission."

Now, Meridel LeSueur is an icon of Minnesota letters. Vanilla Press had just published a selected poems edition of her work. She was about 85 at this point, and had a remarkable career as a Hollywood actress, labor organizer, blacklist fighter, women's rights advocate, and every other politically correct thing. She was smart, frisky, radical, and a little scary. She did not suffer fools gladly, and she was so revered throughout our region that she wielded considerable political power. There were no circumstances I could imagine in which she would want to even acknowledge the existence of a zany surrealist like myself.

"Well," I said, "what exactly do you want me to do with Meridel?"

"I want you to woo her," Jean-Marie said. "If she decides you’re OK, then we'll take it from there."

I cannot tell you how awful I felt as I dialed Meridel LeSueur that night.

"Hello?" a froggy voice asked.

"Uh, hi, Meridel. This is Mike Finley. You may remember me, I'm the guy who edits Academy magazine? We met at the small press fair last spring? I was the one who --"

"I know who you are, Mike."

"Yes. Well. Jean-Marie Fischer and I were talking today, and she thought it might be a nice idea if the two of us, you and me., were to get together a little bit and maybe get to know one another. You know?"

"Why?"

I swallowed hard. "Well, there was a sense that if you and I didn’t get along, that she would cancel publication of a book of mine."

Meridel started cackling on the other end. "Honest to God? She said that?"

"Uh huh. She wants to move the press in a more exclusively feminist direction. Which I understand, but I also want to see my own work, you know, get out there."

"Listen, Mike, I'm taking a nap. You go to Jean-Marie, and tell her if she ever wakes me up from another nap, I'll put a flaming curse on her."

"I will do that, Meridel."

"And the same goes for you." Click.

Jean-Marie got word that I passed muster with Meridel, and she went forward woith the book, called The Movie under the Blindfold. Of all the things I wrote in the 70s, I like that book best. It's mysterious, but you can tell it's about relationships, and identity, and coming to terms with the particulars of one's life. It combined two strengths -- the vividness of surrealism, with a down-to-earth quality my future work would go in.

Unfortunately, the book sold horribly. Maybe 30 copies of 2000 were sold. Another hundred or so were remaindered. The bulk of the books sat in boxes in Jean-Marie Fischer's garage. When heavy rains hit Minneapolis later the next year, every nonremaindered copy of my book was destroyed.

But years later, I did locate three of the remaindered copies, at a St. Paul bookstore, marked down from $203.00 - MANY THANKS! to $.99 and snapped them all up. And I wrote perhaps my favorite poem, "Remainders," about the opportunity represented. The last few lines tell you just how intensely I saw the role of poet, and how intensely I felt the failure to find an audience:

Let us go now, you and I, to Odegards.
For life has many sales but few true bargains.
Let us take the silver coins and hand them to the person
And remember to ask for the receipt, if you're a poet
Your whole life is deductible.
Oh daughters of Homer gather round his feet
And hear him sing his saltstrong songs.
There are myriad of you there,
A speckled galaxy of brave little lights,
Fresh washed garments tucked under your knees,
Eager for instruction and keen for meaning,
He cannot see you but he hears you breathing.

I took on the mantle of translator. I could speak no language, but I had studied Latin, French, Italian and Spanish in high school and college. I felt I had a good reading vocabulary. And anyway, translation in the 70s took a very strange turn. Suddenly there translators like A.J. Poulin and Bly himself, working not from the original texts but from previous English translations.

So I undertook to translate, for Red Hill Press in California, a book of sonnets by the mercurial shepherd poet of the Spanish Civil War, Miguel Hernandez. Hernandez, like Lorca, was nabbed by the fascists in the war and died in captivity. He had not arrived at the lofty status of Lorca, but he was clearly cut from the same bolt -- fiery, imaginative, and free. Keats on acid would place him pretty accurately.

So I ploughed into his best-known book, El Rayo Que No Cesa -- Lightning that Never Ceases. At least that's how I translated it. In truth, the book posed many thorny problems for me. There were many times when he would revert to what I call Castilian kenning -- repeating a reference image like "heart of nacre," which does not easily yield to English. But I did my best, focusing on making good, readable poems.

But when I submitted the book for publication, Red Hill hired a local Chicano poet to go over my work. I never knew what the complaints were, but the poet nixed the entire effort, and I was out about four months of work.

 

But I had numerous other irons in the fire. My small press, The Kraken, had begun to put together a philosophy. I decided I would never go after grants or foundation gifts. Instead I would fund the entire enterprise out of my pocket, as an act of love. Furthermore, I would only publish strange projects by other writers who had run into problems such as I had run into with Vanilla Press and Red Hill Press -- like St. Jude, we would be the patron press of lost causes.

Thus, in the 1970s, we published five books. One was a book of very strange, ellipticasl anthemic poems by my buddy Barry Casselman, called Equilibrium Fingers. Barry was very gifted, but very proud and also very obscure. Since I was a fair publisher but a lousy promoter, his book went nowhere. Another title was a suspense novel by Helgi Michelson, an Estonian poet who relocated to Minneapolis after World War II. The story takes place in Hungary, about a fascist torturer who goes on to become a kind of mystical saint. Honest to God, you feel you are reading Dostoyevsky when you read it -- it has that luminous, yet drab skin that some great works have.

But the big thing about Helgi was that she gave up on the book after her son died in a bicycle accident. I took her book, shepherded it through to distribution, and managed to get a few reviews of it. And I took the story of her son, and made it into a poem, which won the highest honor any poem of mine ever won, a Pushcart Prize in 1984. Best of all. you can see that I have figured out something very special -- how a poem can be about something:

 

"No, you've got this part all wrong,"

Says Gise, swatting a poem about birds

With the back of one hand.

 

"You have whippoorwills sobbing in the limbs

Of poplars, but whippoorwills don't perch

In poplars, whippoorwills don't perch anywhere,

 

Because their legs are just tiny twigs,

They are gone into atrophy, no muscle left,

So all they can do is plop themselves

 

Flat on the ground and make the best of it

There on their haunches.  And furthermore,

What is this sobbing business?  It's poetic

 

But hardly accurate.  Their cry is more

Like a cheer, it is a call my son Peter,

Before he died, liked to imitate

 

On his walks home from school.

Many times, late summer nights in our cabin,

Hendrik and I would be feeling morose,

 

Only to hear out there in the darkness

The cry of a creature pressed close

And shouting from the cold of this earth

 

To all who might hear him:

VIP-poor-VEE!"

 

And in the end, everything comes around. A year after Vanilla Press ublished and then lost my book, I was in her house for some party. I was headed upstairs, and who do I bump into on the landing but William Stafford, the guy who got all this started in the first place. I was a little drunk, and I had to laugh to see him so unexpectedly. He didn’t know what I was laughing about, but he started laughing, too, and we decided to leave it at that, and he clapped me on the back. I never saw him again. He died in 1993.

Then, just a few months ago in April 2000, I was visiting San Francisco with my son and wife, and driving a rental car to the John Muir Woods north of the city, to see the giant redwood trees. En route we came upon the town of Fairfax, and San Rafael, and even, off by the roadside, Red Hill itself, the promontory named for the press that scorned my Spanish.