I felt like some visiting icon of poetry that the undergraduates wanted to disgust and therefore impress. Like a dope I encouraged the guy to read more. "No go on, it's fine, I said." This was after he had already said more degrading and depressing things than I had heard in ten years. I think you'd have to go back to a really cynical beat generation drunk poet to get anything quite so disconnected and destructive as his stuff. And it lacked art. Plus kindness, consideration, and perspective.
Yes, this was the final note in the famous "Poetry Reading from Hell" that Diane Frank and I gave in Cedar Falls in a small, dark cafe on the "Hill," just adjacent to the University of Northern Iowa campus. We were invited up there by a feminist poet and publisher to give a reading in their off-campus series. Since Cedar Falls is about two and a half hours from our home base in Fairfield, we stayed at the poet's house and made a day of it.
Which was fun because Cedar Falls is my home town. I lived there until the family moved to Des Moines when I was sixteen. It was fun to drive my published poet friend Diane around my home town and show her things. Showing things to a poet you always have the chance that she'll come up with some illuminating insight, and maybe someday part of what you did with her will end up in a poem. It was a fruitful day for poems. Later, anyway.
So we're driving around my home town while Diane sees Cedar Falls as it is and I see Cedar Falls as it was. The contrast is, of course, not favorable. The eyes of childhood see a more innocent time, a time of walking up onto the hill from our home only half a block away on 22nd street, and going to get the Des Moines Register for my dad at "The Hub," a classic 1950's restaurant with the orange vinyl seats, soda fountains and waitresses. The eyes of the child remember Steele's five and dime across the street where you could wander the aisles with a nickel and buy your fantasy girl a toy watch and then she would call you a flirt.
But what Diane sees is the Hub turned into a black paint and old dayglo painted bar. The five and dime is a now a pizza parlor, complete with glowing Coors sign. And the house next to your old house is torn down and a bar half a block long sits there with a "free popcorn" sign in the window.
Revisiting your home town is like driving through a world of ghosts which no one else sees. The creek that Chuck and I dammed up, now nearly choked with trees. The house that my father had built, originally painted pink, with vertical pink and white stripes as a decorative element on the top of the front, now painted a dull ochre all over. The school two blocks away, with the new field house floor replacing the dirt one I remember. And the two or three teachers old enough to remember my family.
Then, of course, there was the field behind Chuck's house. Chuck's house was across the creek from my house, one block west. there was nothing obscuring the view between the houses, just field. And the field behind his house was the universal playfield for our entire youth together.
It's the field where we played pom pom tackle, pom pom pull-away, baseball, football, and trail tag. Trail tag was set up by mowing the grass in a maze-like pattern, which became the running lanes for the game of tag. You had to stay on the mown areas. That was fun.
It's also the field where we found and were bitten by our first garter snakes, where we dug the large round depression that was to be the top level of our never-finished fallout shelter, where we took the bamboo poles that rugs used to come wrapped around and pole vaulted over makeshift standards long before we were old enough for the track team. And it's the field where I used to lie on my back and stare up at the sky and wonder about what kind of a life I would have.
Just lie there and dream. Staring at the clouds. Watching them drift by. Or watching the stars and wondering, what will I do, will I get married, will she be beautiful, and other such questions. Now I am answering all those questions, but I still love the field where I first asked them.
Diane and I drove by, and I tried to tell her about the significance of the field, but I'm not sure I got the job done. We didn't have a lot of time to tour on the day we got there. We did better on the way out the next morning. In the mean time, we had a poetry reading to do.
We found a place in the student union to do our TM program, though the nice little meditation room they had there years ago had been turned into a jobs interview center and we had to find a lounge and not be too conspicuous. Sitting with your eyes closed in public is confusing to some onlookers. They usually think you're sleeping, or just weird.
We weren't asleep. And I wouldn't say we are weird, but I would admit to the adjective "unusual." But not because we meditate. It's because we're poets. You don't find a lot of those guys in every crowd. And if you do, they're probably doing the wrong thing, or looking the wrong way, or having an emotion or insight that is completely different than what's going on with the rest of the crowd.
We found some food that we could almost live with in a fast food place quite close to the cafe where the reading was to take place. It was bitterly cold and we prepared ourselves to scurry over to the reading. This really was Diane's reading, and she invited me along as a second reader and to have some company on this long trip. Plus it was in my home town.
So we got there at the last minute, anticipating a smoke filled cafe, and were pleasantly surprised at the smoke level: not much. Of course, that was partially due to the fact that there were only three people there. We looked around. A thoroughly dark place with a small stage about four feet on each side, which was half set back in an alcove which was almost exclusively decorated with clippings of articles about Bob Dylan. Somebody was a Dylan freak.
It was a little embarrassing to be there. Mainly I guess because we had driven two and a half hours, spent all day preparing for the thing, and only five or six people showed up. By the end, though, probably eight or nine people had come through, but some had left.
And it was embarrassing because of who we were. To understand, you have to have read Diane's poetry, and maybe hear some of mine. Diane is the embodiment of free-form, beautiful, imaginative San Francisco consciousness with all the exotica of Nepal, Fisherman's Wharf, and the Kabbala thrown in. She is thin, delicate, yet with a strong mane of hair like some ancient Egyptian priestess. Her poems are all love, insight, images, birds, adobe homesteads, and sherpa packers in Nepal.
And my stuff, well... It's kind of like a cross between Zen Buddhism and a romance novel. Most of what I write is extremely vulnerable and poignant stuff related to the flow of the heart between me and some amazing babe that I am currently experiencing as an aspect of God. And there's often a humor element.
So for us to read in this place was kind of like putting a beautiful iris and big brassy sunflower in a closet and saying, "Do your stuff." We did light up the place, of course, but sometimes you had to squint to see how much.
It was kind of a win/lose situation for both of us. The final variable in the Poetry Reading from Hell was the lady who invited us. She was kind to let us stay at her house, but there was a passive/aggressive trip coming down in our dealings with her. She kept referring to Diane's three books as "chapbooks," which is a term used to describe a small collection of poems. And yet she was fully aware that Diane's books were all full length books, published with a spine and everything.
And she really seemed to take a disliking to me. During my reading especially. Which was weird, because the rest of the audience loved me. My readings are somewhat lively, and humorous, and dramatic, because I amp them up with stories, background, and quips that interplay with the audience. And because it was such a dead place I was really working the place over, trying to milk a response. And I got one. But the lady who invited us just seemed to be totally uninterested in anything I did. It was like having a big dead log in the middle of your living room.
Normally I don't worry about audience reaction so much, and try to just enjoy myself up there. But this time I tried hard, probably too hard.
Diane, on the other hand, had the opposite experience. The lady listened to her with rapt attention. But the high-flying and intricate poems that she presented seemed to be just beyond the capacity of the crowd to fathom.
And when we were done, the open mike session came on, with a progression of people that were pretty much beginners or terrifically grumpy. The final guy was so cynical that he apologized vaguely and almost stopped. But we, in our liberal, visiting-poets-who-support-your-personal-expression mode, nodded to him to continue. Which was like telling a doctor, "Sure, make some more stitches in my skin, just for practice."
It was as if these little Cedar Falls poets had to show the big hot dog poets from San Francisco and Iowa City that they, too, could be radical. But they did it with such darkness and cynicism that they only succeeded in showing how out of touch they really are. We were not impressed. We were not even depressed. We just wanted to get out of there.
Which we eventually did, and we returned to the lady's house, slept the night, and then got out of there as soon as we politely could in the morning. We left in such a hurry that Diane left her hot water bottle in the bed, which the lady probably found someday as a kind of cold, totemic replica of the reception that we had felt, to some degree, in our visit.
So we forged out into an extremely cold February morning, praying for my little car to start. We had to leave that place, and soon! And we did. And that's when our trip paid off.
On the way out of town, we stopped at my old Latin teacher's house to visit her. Her name is Miss Struble. Now, Miss Struble is a legend to anyone who went to school at the Lab School in Cedar Falls and studied in either her rigorous Latin classes or her rigorous French classes. I took Latin.
She was always single, dignified, and formidable. She has traveled the world with other teachers in the summers, and usually served as the language liaison in all of the countries in Europe. I always remember her as a grey-haired fortress of knowledge who ruled her classes with a firm hand, yet gave out Russell Stovers chocolates on every student's birthday.
And she was a humanitarian who every Christmas relentlessly gathered food and donated gifts and got them into the hands of people who otherwise would have been without. And more than once when our family was broke or particularly down hearted due to my mother's hospitalizations, she would suddenly invite out all seven of us to dinner which she paid for all on her own.
The only thing is that I'm a little cautious when I talk around her, because she notices every "uh," "you know," or mislocutions of any kind, and she sometimes calls me on them during these visits. And I'm transported out of adulthood back into Latin class.
On this visit, she seemed aged to me, for the first time. She was always clear, and cheerful. Even on this visit she still had an amazingly clear memory. Of course, I had thought she was old in Latin class, twenty eight years ago. But every visit since then she had seemed essentially the same. But fading eyesight and hearing plus an increased stoop to the shoulders made her finally seem really old to me. But Diane was fascinated. We had a delightful talk with her, went our way, and Diane, at least, had the gem of the trip she was searching for, and she later wrote a great poem about Miss Struble.
I didn't get a poem out of it, but I did get a reminder, that if and when I do kick off the old mortal shell, I want to be toasted at high temp and have my ashes spread over the field behind Chuck's house. Just so that I can come full circle, so my life will have moved from my original dream space, through the long dream that has been my life, and back home to dream again. And maybe I'll do the grass some good for trail tag.
Map of Iowa Index Page
Next Chapter, #13. Agency