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BECOMING A POET
by Max Reif

1. Beginnings

In college I did not understand poetry. Certain distant acquaintances walked around in what appeared to be a kind of haze. People spoke of them with a kind of awe, as poets. I didn't grasp their poetry, but I wanted to be spoken of that way, too!


Whether most poets begin with such crass aspirations, I don't know. Most things that are worthwhile in my life, though, have begun with some form of longing, some perception of their absence. Nor was my motive completely gross. The adulation people had toward poets likely implied something substantial in their work. I suspected a rich dimension of experience that I was simply not tuned into


I attended a number of poetry readings during my first year at Northwestern University. I remember walking into the appointed room each time to find an anemic-looking man (never a woman) in a dark suit, standing before a few rows of people sitting in desks. He would proceed to stiffly mutter words that sounded opaque, like some obscure, dead language.


One night in the spring, though, Allen Ginsburg came to campus. Several thousand people jammed into an auditorium to hear him. I soon grasped why. You could actually understand what he was talking about! He chanted about the Vietnam War, the moral and psychic state of America, and sexuality—-intimate matters that affected everyone. Ginsburg was an event as much as a poet, but he showed me that it is possible to use words in ways that are intense and close to home. I went right back to my dorm, opened a notebook, and started writing. Although I no longer regard those first efforts as successful, at least I was trying. I sent the sometimes flowery, sometimes stilted efforts to a friend with a strong literary sensibility. He encouraged me to continue, gently suggesting I try to be “more poetic” and quoting back to me, as an example, a passage of mine he did feel was successful.


The first real poem came out of me in the summer of 1968, shortly after returning home from my second year of college. I was driving through an area of St. Louis, Missouri known as Gaslight Square. A few years earlier, the neighborhood had been nationally known for its bistros and beatnik coffeehouses. Kerouac had even mentioned it in On the Road. In the mid-'60s, however, a tourist had been murdered, and after that, people had stopped coming.

As I drove past in June, 1968, Olive Street looked like a bombed-out city. I was suddenly taken up by feelings of the transience of earthly things. The feelings became very strong. I felt as if they were brimming over inside me. I pulled over, got out a pen, and opened a notebook. Lines of verse started pouring out of my heart. In the piece that took shape, Gaslight Square became a symbol of a lost mother, or Great Mother. I no longer have this poem, but the single line I recall—“since your great hip/ shook itself to sleep”—conveys something of its essence.


Later that same summer, a second trance-like experience resulted in another poem. This ode grew out of an experience of the beauty of a peach tree full of ripening fruit. Each stanza had a refrain line: “You bear your smooth fruit,” a line that was ubiquitous and self-contained, like the growing peaches themselves.

Earlier that week, Soviet tanks had rolled into Czechoslovakia, putting a chilly end to the “Prague Spring” that had partially thawed Cold War relations. The last stanza of my poem extended the symbol of wholeness and generation even to the troubled city: “On streets of Prague today/you bear your smooth fruit.” I felt myself participating, via the poem, in events half a world away.


The experience of writing these poems, half active and half ecstatically passive, left me addicted to the creative process. I remain so, four decades later. In my "inner biography", events such as the creation of a poem or a painting have equal weight with great political occurrences, and even with the external landmarks of my own life.


It was not until 1976, when I was 28, that the gift of poetic utterance began to flow out in a steady stream, sometimes, even, a mighty torrent. This occurred after a dramatic spiritual awakening ended a long, deep period of depression. Quite simply, the awakening was an experience of the overwhelming abundance and beauty of existence. There was so much there—here—that a million poets, working all day and night for hundreds of years, could not begin to exhaust the potential of what there was to say! Creative streams flowed everywhere, connecting to, and in fact centered in, the heart of Man. The heart was, you might say, a ringside seat on the ongoing miracle that was life itself! And even during the inevitable times when this abundance was not self-evident, it remained a reality, once one had tasted it. The times when it was inaccessible gave rise to longing, which may actually be the other true poetic emotion, besides celebratory joy.


During one period in the 1980s, verse poured out so of me prolifically that I could scarcely drive. At every red light, a line would come into my head. I'd pick up my pen and notebook. By the time I'd jotted down the line, the driver behind me was likely to be honking. Many poets will understand this.


2. Robert Bly

My verse has been, in its own modest way, deeply influenced by great Sufi poets like Hafiz and Rumi, as well as by contemporary poets such as Ginsberg and Robert Bly, who have also, of course, been cultural icons of our times. Several years after I first saw Ginsberg, when I was finishing undergraduate school at the University of Cincinnati, Bly came one day to a small seminar I was taking in "Eastern Thought and American Literature."

How can I describe this "white conflagration", who showed up in a colorful Mexican serape’, hair blindingly white, voice a nasal Scandinavian, mind blade-sharp? He spent the next hour and a half burning away cobwebs from my mind. I remember a rising crescendo in his voice as, in full nasal imperative, he told us: "Those 'logical positivist' philosophers on the college campuses say they're value-free! They're not value-free! They're evil!"

Then Bly brought out a gray face mask and put it over his face. He began monotonously singing the Campbell’s Soup jingle: "Mmmm,mmmm good. Mmmm, mmmm good. That's what Campbell's Soup is, mmmm, mmmm good.” After the fourth or fifth repetition, we got the idea of what such mantras of advertising do to the human mind. I loved this demonstration of “show, don’t tell”.

Bly told us, "Beware of professors of English who don't themselves write!" He pointed to our own teacher, my friend (Dr.) Michael Atkinson, as an exception. Michael was an accomplished potter, as well as a meditating Buddhist. In recent years he’s written a popular nonfiction book, as well.

Finally, Bly helped the class work its way through a Thomas Merton poem I'd brought in. He prefaced his comments about the poem with an anecdote about the poet. Merton had once been asked the question, "What is your biggest obstacle as a monk?" His reply had been, “other monks.” “They hated him at Gethsemene!” Bly rasped. “He was a free spirit!”


As Bly began like a white tornado to make his exit from the room, I stopped him and asked a question I don’t even remember. It must have been something about thought and feeling, because he looked at me and said, "You have a lot of feeling!" That was surprising, because I was in the midst of my depression at the time, and wasn't aware of feeling much at all.


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That night and the next, Bly was giving readings in a large lecture hall at the university. I attended the first night sitting near the front. Around half way through his reading, the poet looked out at his audience and passionately barked at us, "You people shouldn't be here listening to me! You should be home writing your own poems!"


Considering what Bly had said as he went on to his next poem, I came to feel he was right. A couple of minutes later I made my way from the center of the row I was in, out to the aisle, and then quietly exited to go home and follow the bard's advice.

The next night, accompanied by a two friends, I arrived at Bly's reading five or ten minutes late. The poet paused as we came down the center aisle to claim three vacant seats we saw near the front of the packed room. "We're doing Yeats now," he said, looking straight at me. And then, to the audience, as I sat down, he commented, "I love that man!"


3. Words and Silence

The poet who has been my primary contemporary influence, however, is Francis Brabazon, an Australian who died in 1985. Brabazon was a disciple of Meher Baba, the Indian master who has also re-vivified my own life and who, directly or indirectly, figures in everything I’ve written.


I can pinpoint a specific debt to Brabazon. It had to do with my becoming perplexed about using words, after a powerful initial experience of Meher Baba which took place in silence and changed my life forever. For spiritual reasons, Meher Baba had observed silence from 1925 until he passed on in January, 1969. Two years after that, in a wordless experience, I “met” him, an Ocean of Love with which, for a brief time, I merged.


It was after this experience that I became perplexed about words. Prior to that fateful, silent moment, I had been deluged with words for twenty-two years; and yet none of them, or very, very few, had "stuck". Words are just meaningless, I decided, simultaneously wondering how one could live that proposition.


Then someone showed me a copy of Brabazon’s epic poem, Stay With God. The book stunned me. It contained glorious hymns of worship, as well as a critique of modern society that was poetically powerful and as scathing as Marx. Brabazon's solution to the modern dilemma, however, was a spiritual transformation, rather than a material one.


Gradually, as I read, I came to re-orient myself toward language. Words could be useful not in their own right, but to the degree that they had their origins in Silence, which was the same as Love (and both words deserved capitalization, in certain usages.).


4. The Preface to My First Book of Poems



Whatever my 'inner literary critic' may say today, my first chapbook, Young Man Gone West, was a true labor of love. In the summer of 1983 I had hitch-hiked to Denver from Cheyenne, Wyoming to visit my old buddy, Ed Luck, after my wife had abruptly taken our car and left Cheyenne with it. I felt a mixture of thrill at the prospective exploration of a new city, and confusion about my direction in life.


Those were the days when I was discovering self-help groups. My daily routine as I settled in Denver consisted of going to meetings, exploring the city, writing, and for several enjoyable months, being a street minstrel in front of Woolworth's at the big, new outdoor mall downtown.


The minstrel days ended when the weather turned. An angel whispered in my ear a possible new project: "Put a book of poems together." I realized that a number of the poetic jottings I’d been scrawling in a notebook would go well, and kept writing until the same angel said one day, "That's enough."

Then came the “high-tech” part. For me, high-tech in those days meant taking busses and trudging repeatedly in blizzards to Kinko's, the new little shop near the university where you could make copies, collate, and even create a book cover out of colored card stock. The only way to put my book together was to make the lengthy journey again and again from Ed’s apartment on Colfax Street.


Around that time I started feeling the need for a work space, for future writing and editing, and set about the hopeless task--given my paltry means--of finding an 'office' to rent. Checking the bulletin board at Rainbow Foods, the new-age grocery store around the corner from the apartment, was a good beginning.

Miraculously, I soon stumbled upon an old, 5-story building that was owned by a progressive proprietor who rented space cheaply to the Sierra Club and other liberal organizations. Incredibly, a tiny room was available for $35 a month! Even I could afford that!

I bought a used desk and somehow lugged it up the freight elevator. Tipping it on its end, I pulled it through the office door.


By now, Young Man Gone West was almost finished. A little more writing and a couple more trips to Kinkos, and I was riding home on the bus cradling fifty copies of my baby in my lap.


The first copies had gold covers. They felt like pure gold. I brought the books back to the office. The late November evening was cold, windy, and delicious. Deep snow lay on the ground.


As I entered the building, a man about my age was walking in the lobby. “What have you got there?” he asked.


“A book of poetry I just finished writing!” I said proudly, holding up my beautiful cover.


“Wow,” he said. “May I read it?”


“Sure! Here, you can have a copy.”


“That's so kind of you,” he said. "Will you autograph it?"


Soon I was walking toward my own little space on the second floor, eager to make a cup of tea and go over the poems one more time. I pulled my keychain from my pocket. It was heavy with keys to several churches I opened each week for self-help meetings. Pushing the door closed behind me and putting the books down on the desk, I suddenly began to feel completely naked emotionally! It was as if my psyche was being x-rayed.


What could be making me feel this way? As far as I knew, I was completely alone and had been filled with nothing but expansive feelings.


Then I knew. The young man downstairs had opened his book and was reading. He was reading my soul. That was what poetry was: the book of one's soul.


But this little book only skims the surface of what I’ll have to say, I thought, savoring this delicious taste of the writer's secret life, and the promise of many more adventures to come.

I'm 62 living in California now, still trying "to penetrate into the essence of all being and significance, and to release the fragrance of that inner experience for the guidance and benefit of others by expressing in the world of forms truth, love, purity and beauty."(Meher Baba). Very rich time, right now. My website, WHAT REMAINS IS THE ESSENCE, can be found at
http://www.realnothings.com/

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Silent, thank you for posting the piece by Max Reif. Please bear with me, these comments might offend, but I mean them in context to where-in-the-world-is-poetry-read. I found it interesting that Reif’s memory of Bly is wrapped in his encouraging people to write instead of listening to him. The upshot of the article is the finding of one’s self as the writer by writing, that essentially writing is an act of living, development, insight, enlightenment. The creative act is somehow primarily important to the creator and apparently secondary to the witness / audience. Writing as soul searching, cathartic, psychological and spiritual healing is dandy, but intrinsically is self serving. I would be hard pressed to name a creation of art that I have enjoyed or been inspired by that was created for its therapeutic values. For that matter, most that come to mind were the product of artists tormented in some manner or another. No, I am not advocating that art must come from suffering. I am questioning the value of art as an instrument of worship for a group of worshippers. Gathering together with like-minded folk will wither the creative spirit like a drought.

I think, perhaps this is part of the impetus behind the plethora of navel contemplating work, work that finds its pilings stuck in the selfish, let-me-tell-you-what-happened-to-me kind of avalanche that the media is covered in. Somehow the idea that everyone is different fuels the impression that those differences are interesting enough for everyone else.

Now, it is important for me to note that I have not read any work by Mr. Reif other than this essay and his poetry may very well stun me, snap me to the back of my chair, so these notes are not directed at him. They are directed at the proposition that writing for the purpose of having it read is ignited by the fuel of becoming a better person. The idea that the “the writer’s secret life” is valuable to any other than the writer is somehow misleading. I am not convinced that the remarkable work generated by Emily Dickinson or W. Stevens was achieved in order to exorcize some run-away spirit. Perhaps our ability to discern the difference between a private musing and public discourse is disabled, thank you NBC.