-- for my father, Walter Jones --

Some notes on my early poetic development.

I

      My life as an aspirational writer began around my eighth or ninth year. I became an avid reader as soon as I learned to read, and my engagement with “serious literature” came about rather early, as I’ll describe. I had a particular ear for poetry. At bedtime my mother would recite to us the King James version of the 23rd Psalm, in addition to the Lord’s Prayer. On occasion I would ask her to recite the psalm even if it wasn’t bedtime. I experienced a sense of infinite comfort mulling over the sonorous Early Modern English and the beautiful imagery and thoughts as I was heading off to sleep.

      Both my mother and grandmother read to me and my two younger siblings on a daily basis. Favorites included the Spanish classic of Ferdinand the Bull, a Victorian-era book of manners entitled The Goops, and at least half of Dr. Seuss’s wonderful books. I remember the pride I felt at age five or six when I could read Seuss’s entire Hop on Pop to my sister who was two or tbree at the time and show her how the long words in the final phrase (“Constantinople and Timbuktoo”) were to be sounded out.

      The first “chapter book” that I read on my own from cover to cover was Beverly Cleary’s Ribsy – a book about a dog that got lost. This was during 3rd grade. I loved this book very much, and it instilled in me the desire and plan to read for life and eventually work up to the hundreds of books that my parents had stuffed into the several bookcases that lined our smallish living room in the half-double in which we grew up in Spring City, Pennsylvania. Those shelves housed my history teacher father’s ever-accumulating collection of books about history (including the epic and popular Will and Ariel Durant series, from which I would gradually develop a basic and overarching view of world history to which I still refer), as well as many novels of the ‘60s and ‘70s – books that both parents avidly enjoyed such as To Kill a Mockingbird, E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, and several Ian Fleming originals from the James Bond series, with their under-a-dollar price indications on the cover. 

      Also present was a single-volume edition of Shakespeare, whom I learned early on was regarded as the greatest of all writers, and which I would frequently haul off the shelf to admire the colorful names of all the plays listed in the Table of Contents, the seeming antiquity of the words from an earlier stage of my own language, and the intriguing scholarly apparatus of footnotes and commentaries. I learned that, in addition to these plays that he was famous for and that I’d occasionally catch glimpses of through television productions, Shakespeare had also written a bunch of “regular old poems” that were reserved for a special portion of the tome, including more than a hundred sonnets that were fairly obscure to a pre-teen, but also the one about “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” which I could mostly understand and which reminded me of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. My grandmother had begun reading to us the Lewis Carroll classics, although I eventually lost patience with my younger brother and sister’s constant questions and finished reading them on my own, in fascination if not always with complete understanding.

      After Ribsy, I turned to the “Three Investigators” series – an update of the somewhat better-known Hardy Boys series – that was enjoyed by many boys and girls born during the 1960s. My love for reading was facilitated at this time through connections with a handful of other readers my age, and together we made the transition from children’s literature to more mature reading material. (This was before the commercial explosion of the “Young Adult” literature market which furnishes the imaginations of young readers in the 21st-century. “Young Adult” has always seemed to me a misnomer, as the genre appears geared for children making the transition into early adolescence, not adulthood as we normally understand it. I have often asked myself whether YA literature has helped create more readers or whether it has simply prevented young readers from advancing to more mature and challenging reading material…particularly now, when high school students are shunning novels that have traditionally been deemed “age-appropriate” for teenagers – familiar works by Dickens, Twain, Alcott, Stevenson, C. S. Lewis, Salinger, etc. – in favor of the latest installments in the YA genre…if, that is, they are reading novels at all rather than engaging in post-traditional reading on the Internet and on their digital devices.) By 5th grade we were all beginning to ransack our parents’ book collections as well as school and local public libraries for contemporary popular press literature. I went through many “genre phases” that would last from a few days to several months. Sometime during the late 1970s I saw my first James Bond movie on TV – Diamonds Are Forever, which was the last installment featuring Sean Connery before he handed off the role to Roger Moore. I immediately immersed myself in the several Ian Fleming novels on our living room shelves. I was disappointed at first to discover that the books weren’t as sensational or as exciting as the movies, but I quickly learned that they conveyed a deeper satisfaction, particularly in granting a fairly extensive acquaintance with mid-20th-century British culture and linguistic differences between British and American English – fascinating aspects of the narratives that the film versions generally ignored or reduced to viewer-friendly cultural stereotypes.

      A favorite with scores of young readers at the time was Stephen King’s first big novel Carrie, a much worn and smelly copy of which passed through at least half a dozen Spring City households. Peter Benchley’s Jaws and sensational books about the Bermuda Triangle mysteries were popular, as were the latest contributions to the nonfiction serial killer genre; reading about the Manson murders would dovetail profitably with in-depth explorations of the Beatles catalog – an obsession many of us shared with Charles Manson himself. Science fiction was also experiencing the down slope from its classic peak, and between the ages of 11 and 14 I devoured dozens of genre classics by Heinlein, Bradbury, and others, with Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy being my favorite and its hero, Hari Seldon – a fascinating amalgam of Jesus, Marx, and Einstein – an abiding source of imagination and inspiration.

      Another genre in which I became heavily invested was historical fiction. Our living room shelves were filled with my father’s scholarly and popular press histories and biographies of important people, as well as historical fiction. James Mitchener was treated by millions of dedicated readers in that decade with an unusual amount of reverence, and I enjoyed several of his novels, particularly Hawaii, never dreaming that I would eventually spend much of my adult life in such a fascinating place. James Clavell’s Shogun first inspired in me a curiosity about Asian civilization and history, as did a close friendship with a peer whose parents were immigrants from Mao-era Beijing. Perhaps my favorite of the popular historical fiction novels of the time was Alex Haley’s Roots, which I read concurrently with the now classic television production that captivated millions of Americans during the late 1970s.

      I began several paragraphs back with the sentence, “My life as a writer began…” and went on to describe my childhood reading – a natural thing to do, as writing is always an outgrowth of reading. The genre to which I initially applied myself as an aspiring writer prior to my tenth year was the formulaic haunted house story ala The Three Investigators and Scooby-Doo. There were a number of large, abandoned houses – including a few late-Victorian and veritable mansions – throughout my town of 3000 that suggested themselves to children with restless imaginations and budding literary proclivities, and these served as the basis for several stories or partial stories that I wrote during elementary school, none of which I preserved. I remember next to nothing about the story lines, but I do recall entertaining groups of neighborhood children with them from time to time, an older girl enthusiastically volunteering to type one of them up, and on at least one occasion acting out one of my tales with several others in a cousin’s basement before an audience of parents. I rapidly lost interest in this sort of thing after moving beyond The Three Investigators series.

II

      An important aspect of my creative and intellectual development involves my rather abrupt shunning of popular press genre literature in favor of “the serious stuff.” The key names involved in this shift are Agatha Christie, Poe, Sherlock Holmes, and Hawthorne. The somewhat roundabout story goes something like this:

      I got into the beneficial habit early on of reading all of the prefatory material and any scholarly apparatus with which novels might be published. The fact that my father was a Social Studies teacher and a history buff was influential in encouraging me to take early account of the basic historical and social contexts of printed literature, and my father’s contextual approach to reading material was reinforced in me by my maternal Uncle Jay, another devoted reader whose library included everything from translations of ancient Greek and Latin classics to Romantic poetry to chess manuals, sports literature, and books on auto maintenance. Taking his budding scholar of a nephew under his wing, Jay frequently emphasized to me the importance of familiarity with what today we refer to as “foundational literature” and of pursuing trends in classical as well as popular literature to their points of historical and cultural origination.

      Thus, in tracing the origins of the detective and mystery genres, I worked back from Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie to Conan Doyle (I devoured the dozens of short stories devoted to Sherlock Holmes, and, among the novels, at least Hound of the Baskervilles), then further back to Poe as the ultimate source both of detective literature (with Auguste Dupin serving as the model for both Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot) and of contemporary horror literature ala Stephen King. My discovery of Poe was revelatory. I requested and received a single-volume “complete Poe” for Christmas during my 5th or 6th-grade year and read it from cover to cover over the course of a few months. This happened concurrently with my discovery of Mark Twain. A reader cousin who lived up the street called me on the telephone one day and excitedly told me that I had to read Tom Sawyer, which he said was hilarious and would remind me of characters in our own town’s many neighborhoods, and which book’s sequel Huckleberry Finn, with which he was currently struggling, was much more difficult but still very funny and good. I read both and continued on for a couple of other Twain novels, including A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which in turn inspired a casual but abiding interest in Arthurian literature.

        I fell especially in love with Poe’s poetry. “The Bells” became my favorite poem, and I annoyed family members by reciting it repeatedly, in various intonations, and always accompanied with a loud foot-tapping. I was obsessed with everything about that poem – the rhythm and meter, the sonorous rhymes and alliteration, the imagery, the deliriously ecstatic positive message that was a sort of antidote or flipside to Poe’s horrific element. It amazed me what one could do in a poem. I began to see poetry as a site, a special zone in which language can be placed into action in a much different way that it can in prose or in common speech. In which a different dimension of language and of experience through language can be accessed.

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      It was around the same time that I became attracted to the great rock lyricists. Uncle Jay, who can be described as nothing less than an avuncular pot of gold, had a copy of the then popular Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits album, which introduced me to such seminal songs as “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” My favorite Beatle was John Lennon, and I internalized lyrics to songs that would become lifelong favorites, including “Hey, Bulldog,” “Dear Prudence,” “Come Together,” “Across the Universe,” etc. 

      Queen’s single “Killer Queen” hit the airwaves in 1974 and was the song that made Queen a household name in the United States. A friend who lived up the street owned the single, which we passed around liberally to play on our beat up and already outdated mid-20th-century record players. The sounds on the record transfixed me, long before I could sense that its sonic brilliance had much to do with guitarist Brian May’s nods to early popular jazz chords and melodies – of the sort that would likely have been performed on the clarinet in the years following WWI – and  his transformation of them into searing post-Hendrix melodies for the electric guitar. Equally intoxicating were Freddie Mercury’s lyrics, which accessed a dimension of poetic language that hinted at future limitless growth and transformation to the young person that could understand them:

She keeps her Moët et Chandon in her pretty cabinet.

“Let them eat cake,” she says. Just like Marie Antoinette!

A built-in remedy for Khrushchev and Kennedy.

At any time, an invitation you can’t decline.

Caviar and cigarettes, well versed in etiquette,

Extraordinarily nice!

She’s a Killer Queen!

Gunpowder, gelatine!

Dynamite with a laser beam!

Guaranteed to blow your mind…

anytime.

I wouldn’t learn until years later what “Mo-ay and Shandone” were. I knew about Khrushchev and Kennedy, of course, but was less sure about Marie Antoinette. I knew that caviar was expensive fish eggs that would probably make me want to vomit but that I might enjoy someday as an adult if I could afford it or if someone treated me to some. I knew from my grandmother’s readings of The Goops that “etiquette” was something that I would need to cultivate pertaining to manners and appearances. I couldn’t understand what gunpowder and dynamite might have to do with gelatine. But it didn’t matter. Freddie, whom we venerated as an older British cousin who had likely been as naughty as ourselves in the eyes of his elders, was singing about adult matters that apparently were of little concern to the adults in my own small-town blue-collar Phillyburb environs, and they hinted at a fancier, more knowledgeable, more opulent, more expressive world that I might access, at least imaginatively, if I could continue to explore such lyrics and perhaps someday even write some of my own.

      But my favorite lyricist at this time – several years before I had spending money with which to acquire a record library and become intimately acquainted with the full catalog of American song genius Bob Dylan – was Bernie Taupin. I remember feeling vaguely disappointed with Elton John when I learned that he hadn’t written all of those fantastic lyrics by himself but had had to rely on a lyrical partner. But I soon came to admire Bernie as much as I admired Elton, and my favorite collection of lyrics was on the Captain Fantastic and the Brown-Dirt Cowboy album, which still represents a lyrical pinnacle for me five decades later:

Snow, cement, and ivory young towers!

Someone called us Babylon – those hungry hunters

tracking down the hours.

But where were all your shoulders when we cried?

Were the darlings on the sideline dreaming up such

cherished lies

to whisper in your ear before you die?

It’s party time for the guys in the tower of Babel:

Sodom meet Gomorrah, Cain meet Abel!

Have a ball y’all!

See the letches crawl

with the call girls under the table.

Watch them dig their graves.

‘Cause Jesus don’t save the guys in the tower of Babel.

I didn’t know what “call girls” or “letches” were, and I read/heard “letches” as a British alternative to “leeches” and – in keeping with the lurid “postmodern neo-Boschian” Captain Fantastic album art with all of its fantastical creatures and scenarios – imagined some unfortunate captive girls my age confined to a cage underneath a massive table, battling an infestation of malevolent slug-like creatures.

      At one point, age ten or eleven, I asked my mother what a call girl was. “Um…well…It’s another word for prostitute.” “What’s a prostitute?” I believe I already had a dim notion of it from various figures I had encountered in my Biblical readings. I don’t remember my mother’s response, but I do recall being jarringly and somewhat disturbingly alerted to an “adult” level of meaning in this and other lyrics. 

      Perhaps this question alerted my mother to the likely “age inappropriate” (as we would say today) content of some of the music my younger brother and I were listening to. Jeff, equally fascinated with the entirety of the Captain Fantastic album (it was he who had purchased the album with “paper boy” money), mounted the poster which came along with original pressings of the album on the wall of our bedroom, the poster duplicating the fantastical album art, which featured prominently a “bird woman” with an unshaved Venus mound in the lower left corner. One day Mom unceremoniously removed the poster. I wasn’t that upset about it. But my nine-year-old brother, who had purchased the album with his own money, was livid with anger. Imagine two boys aged nine and ten planning out and then delivering an impassioned protest on the basis of the claim that the poster was art, not pornography (we probably didn’t use that word, with which we might not yet have been familiar…more likely we declared that it wasn’t a “dirty picture”), and that ancient Greek as well as Renaissance artists had regularly featured nude women, etc. Our mother listened sympathetically, as she always did. She may or may not have been impressed, but she was certainly unswayed. 

      Elton and Bernie’s Captain Fantastic album, and with it the Madman Across the Water album which preceded it by several years, represents a significant moment in my musical, poetic, and aesthetic development. It included one of Elton’s biggest hits and most masterful compositions – “Someone Saved My Life Tonight.” For a good year, this song more than any other was on the tongues and in the mouths of hundreds of thousands of American youths who heard it played constantly on FM radio stations. Like its near contemporary, Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” and like Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” (released in my birth month – July 1965) a decade previously, it forcibly demanded disc jockeys to play it in full and to ignore the truncated “single-friendly” version. Equally compelling was the title song, which began as a folksy tune with acoustic accompaniment before veering into the “hard” chorus replete with electric guitar and melotron, and the incisive lyric:

For cheap easy meals are hardly a home on the range – 

too hot for the band with a desperate desire for change.

We've thrown in the towel too many times,

out for the count and when we’re down.

Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy:

From the end of the world to your town!

The last line in particular captivated me. That’s what art could do! It could take me way, far away from my small town, which I somewhat loved and somewhat didn’t, to exotic and exciting places of imagination and reality. 

      And the words beginning the longish second verse after the galvanizing chorus:

And all this talk of Jesus, coming back to see us –

Mmmmm. Couldn’t fool us!

along with Biblical references scattered throughout the album, helped confirm in me a budding secular yet appreciative attitude towards Christianity, its texts and its history. I was raised Roman Catholic from the time I was old enough to attend church until I discontinued my weekly churchgoing during my college years away from home. Catholicism was the religion of my father; my mother, the granddaughter of a prominent Unitarian minister in Hartford, had adopted the Episcopalian Church as an adult. She would attend church on her own, but my Catholic father, two siblings and I would often join Mom for special services such as at Christmas time. My parents never argued about their respective faiths, and I had the opportunity while growing up to learn scripture in two versions and to become acquainted with the subtle liturgical differences between contemporary Roman Catholicism and Episcopalianism, which set the seeds for a comparatist and increasingly secular approach to Christianity and its literature, which I would slowly transfer to the study of history and civilization as a whole. Through my own reading, and through frequent conversations with my erudite and non-believing Uncle Jay, I came to the conclusion by age ten or eleven that the supernatural characters in the Bible were most likely the products of human imagination and mythological lore and that even the person of Jesus himself must have gone through considerable distortion in his translation from some sort of social activist and motivational speaker in the Roman world to the messianic half-man half-god in the Gospels. This secular interpretation of Christianity was reinforced by copious readings in contemporary science fiction – particularly Asimov and Heinlein. 

      To this day, the general agnosticism that I adopted before embarking on my teenage years has never resulted in outright atheism. My scientific thinking only goes so far, and my poetry indicates to me that there is an unmistakable teleological element in my thinking that may be unscientific as well as unfashionable with respect to large swathes of modern and postmodern thought. But I’m unable to embrace the idea that the universe or multiverse or omniverse or whichever cosmic program has given rise to my own existence was exclusively devoid of purpose in doing so. Nobody so far has disproven Kant’s most fundamental argument in his three critiques. And that argument boils down to, “Whatever else we choose to call ourselves, at bottom we are all thorough agnostics” – a modern update of Socrates’ lifelong interpretation of the Delphic oracle that the only way he could possibly be the smartest and wisest of men was through his simple realization and public acknowledgement that, in terms of ultimate questions, he was in the same state of ignorance that he shared with the rest of humanity. In short, to sum up Socrates and Kant – the “wisest of men” in their respective eras: “Pretty much all we know is that we pretty much don't know much at all.”

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      But I began several pages back to explain how I came to shun “popular genre literature” in favor of “serious literature.” The “break” occurred suddenly and almost without warning during an 8th-grade class in which we were given a choice of novels to read. Our teacher mentioned that The Scarlet Letter was a novel about the Puritans and that it was the most difficult novel on the list that she had presented to her classes of 13-year-olds. I had a big curiosity about the Puritans and had already learned quite a bit about early European settlers through my grandmother, who served as a volunteer tour guide for the wonderful Moravian Museum in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. I would accompany her on her 90-minute tours once a year on my annual visit to “Nana and Jay’s house.” Both Nana and Uncle Jay – Hartford transplants who had moved to Pennsylvania in the late 1950s – had acquired a comprehensive understanding of the culture and history of the Lehigh Valley and its most interesting town, which they would share with us liberally on family visits to this or that museum or historical site, on weekend drives through the area, etc. 

      Reasoning that I had already gotten my feet wet in 19th-century literature with Poe and Twain, I became the sole student in my class of a couple dozen to accept the Hawthorne challenge, and I immersed myself in his most important novel, immediately both identifying and falling in love with the unfortunate Hester Prynne (who was even made to wear my first initial stitched onto her dress!). My interest and satisfaction pleased my teacher immensely. She hadn’t given me the common suggestion (which I have since given my own English students) that I skip over the lengthy, famously dense and difficult prefatory piece, “The Custom-house,” or at least save it until the end. I plodded through the first few pages, realized its prefatory character, and wondered if I could or should skip it. Then I asked myself, “What would Jay say if I skipped the preface?” Uncle Jay was a very thorough reader and certainly wouldn’t approve. So, I made myself continue through the preface, eagerly anticipating the main narrative and the delayed gratification and joy I would experience in finally getting to the story after fifty pages of hard and possibly dreary reading. To this day I’m glad I did so. “The Custom-house” suggested a dimension of literature that I hadn’t previously considered – namely, the need for an author to provide some sort of context or rationale establishing that the novel served a deeper purpose besides simple narrative entertainment, and the additional need to creatively incorporate that urge for explanation into the fiction itself so that the statement would serve as a sort of “custom-house” between fact and fiction, history and informed, imaginative recollection.

      I devoured the challenging text in a matter of days, and I also made a point of adopting my brainy and bookish little sister Heather’s habit (Heather was in the 4th-grade at the time) of having a dictionary handy to look up unfamiliar words and attempt to incorporate them into my lexical memory and everyday working vocabulary – a habit that became further ingrained with thoughts that I might devote my life to writing.

      After The Scarlet Letter, I immediately lost interest in reading material that didn’t seem to have accrued the designation of “serious literature.” Having read dozens of contemporary science fiction novels, I decided that in the future any science fiction I read would have to have been sanctioned as foundational to the genre – Jules Vernes, H. G. Wells, Orwell and Huxley in its dystopian sub-genre, etc. Unfortunately, even Tolkien fell under my new strictures with respect to the fantasy genre. I had read The Hobbit in 7th-grade and continued on for the first volume of The Lord of the Rings. I refused to go on to the second volume after my experience with Hawthorne, failing to recognize Tolkien as the great imaginative author that he was and lumping him in with the numerous authors of the pulp fantasy genre that was popular in the 1970s and 1980s.

      Of course, we live in a time during which the distinction between “serious” and “pulp” literature/art/entertainment has been called into question by everyone from Bernstein to Warhol to Zappa to Tarantino to scores of students of postmodernism. I have spent much of my own life as a poet ignoring or breaching the distinction, beginning with my Mahlerian choice, in a poetic age dominated by post-Whitmanian free verse, to adhere to the formal parameters of traditional poetry that during the 20th-century many post-war poetry snobs ensconced in universities or serving as editors for poetry journals increasingly, naively, and myopically relegated to the “lesser” genre of popular song lyrics. (This anti-lyrical bias has continued into the 21st-century with controversy – one that I regard as unfortunate and pathetic – over whether Bob Dylan should, as a singer-songwriter and popular musician, have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016…a discussion from which Dylan himself, predictably and wisely, has entirely abstained, apart from his brilliant, enigmatic, and typically vague acceptance speech.)

      Towards the end of my teen years, I immersed myself in the work of writers and musicians who would force me to abandon any sort of snobbism that might eventually lead to cloistered and pedantic academicism. Kerouac would become a watershed figure for me. In On the Road, he had written a controversial bestseller during the 1950s which led to division, much of it generational, in academic and “informed lay reader” opinion. Either he was a genius who had developed a new type of lyrical prose to convey a fascinating period of his life in a scarcely concealed fiction, or he was simply an alcohol-and-amphetamine-fueled nut who engaged in scattershot post-Joycean stream-of-consciousness writing that was more of an exercise in prolific typing than anything else (an accusation on the part of one of the more critically respectable mid-century writers…was it Norman Mailer?). Of course, Kerouac was both of these, often alternating between the two from one sentence to another…which is why readers continue to love and be frustrated with him. But who were Kerouac’s primary inheritors? The great songwriters and lyricists of 1960s hippiedom – Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison perhaps most famously, but also by extension Jimi Hendrix, Lou Reed, John Fogerty, Patti Smith, Robert Hunter and the various members of the Grateful Dead, Bruce Springsteen, Chrissie Hynde, Tom Petty, the underrated Sheryl Crow (who in my view is, along with Beck Hanson and the misfortunate Elliott Smith, one of three best American songwriters of my own generation)...also Canadians such as Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and Robbie Robertson. These were the true great poets of the post-war era, I decided sometime during my college years, despite the fact that they were known primarily as musicians – as singer-songwriters. And as I began to study contemporary poetry with a budding desire to write it myself, I found extremely little of it (with the notable exceptions of John Ashbery and James Merrill, whom I didn’t begin reading until my mid-20s) that was anywhere near as compelling as the lyrics of all of the aforementioned singer-songwriters, or as the lyrics of my favorite British and Irish musicians such as Ray Davies, Van Morrison, and David Bowie (and to this list I should add the neglected Joan Armatrading, with whose music I became acquainted only belatedly and whose half-century body of songwriting represents for me one of the supreme pinnacles of popular song). While rock music (and, more generally, contemporary song) presented to me an almost inexhaustible array of lyrical forms and topics – everything from the youthful but multi-faceted and often profound existentialism embedded within Dylan’s seminal first seven albums, to Ray Davies in The Village Green Preservation Society arguing for a return to simple English values and traditions away from the bustle of modern cities, to George Harrison’s hilarious list of the confectionary delights that were challenging the dental health of his friend Eric Clapton in “Savoy Truffle,” or his incendiary takedown of the British taxation system on the first song of the Revolver album...While contemporary songwriters were exploring entire new vistas of lyrical possibility, authors of “respectable” verse, increasingly produced within academic contexts and in order to further academic careers, seemed to have reduced their poetic landscape to mundane observational and descriptive exercises pertaining to regional landscapes on the one hand and uninteresting, egocentric “confessions” of personal histories, hang-ups, and (more recently) ethnic identities that as poetic self-reflection and autobiography somehow fell entirely short of Wordsworth and Whitman on the one hand and Kerouac and Dylan on the other. 

      Finally, the formal degeneration (as I saw it) of verse into the clipped prose known as “free verse” was uninspiring to me as a budding poet increasingly steeped in the labyrinthine technical and mathematical rules of music (more on which below). So, when in my early 20s I finally happened upon Frost’s succinct and sententious verdict on the “versified prose” that is free verse – “It has its qualities, but I don’t write it” – I felt validated, both in my love for Frost as one of America’s greatest poets and in my own decision to avoid what I saw as the uninspiring conventions and limitations of mainstream contemporary free verse…which was still portraying itself as revolutionary and cutting-edge, despite the noteworthy decline from the free verse summits reached in the preceding decades in such works as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste-land and Four Quartets and Ezra Pound’s Cantos.

      In short, I gradually came to the conclusion that contemporary poetry had ceased to be a site for the imaginative exploration of language and for the freeing up of the prose-bound ego, and that the venerated creative impetus of poetry had migrated into popular songwriting. Maybe Bob Dylan, in fact, was to blame. 

      But to return to my point…The distinction between “high” and “low” was temporarily useful in directing me towards reading material that would challenge me and that would help me carve out a path for my own creative aspirations.

III

      The year in which I read my first chapter book as described above was also the year in which my formal musical training began. After school on the first day of 3rd-grade, age eight, I began piano lessons with Mrs. Marion Paugh, whose large old multi-storied home up the hill formed a roughly equidistant triangle with my house on Main St. and Spring City Elementary School – a ten-minute walk from place to place. My mother and grandmother had already guided me in learning the treble and bass clefs, which I could match with the piano keyboard, along with some basic fingering and ability to puzzle through single-line melodies. I had been asking for piano lessons since before I could remember, and this desire, along with my penchant for reading and for acquiring a solid vocabulary early on in life, became part of the particular family lore surrounding my personal history. I took to the piano immediately. Mrs. Paugh, a widow and grandmother who lived with her son’s family and who had studied music in Germany decades previously, was precise and exacting in her instruction, and also very kind as long as she could see that I was practicing an hour per day (and I quickly learned that repercussions for not doing so would lead to scoldings administered without warmth, and perhaps to worried phone calls to my mother). I rapidly advanced out of the usual pedagogic material and by 5th grade was working on Bach preludes and fugues, shorter pieces by Chopin and Debussy, the easier Beethoven sonatas, etc. I sometimes found it difficult to meet the hour per day requirement with respect to the music she had assigned, but I would often sit down for 3-4 hours at a time clumsily sight-reading through pieces in the piano repertoire for which I wasn’t yet ready, or music such as Scott Joplin rags and items from the Rodgers and Hammerstein songbook – music that wasn’t on the approved list but that Mrs. Paugh didn’t mind that I played for fun, as long as I wasn’t neglecting the “serious” stuff.

      One of the most wonderful aspects of Mrs. Paugh’s instruction was her recognition of the importance of building in her students a solid foundation in music theory. I soon became fascinated in particular with the circle of fifths and with technical questions as to why and in what context an F-sharp, say, might be written as a G-flat, or why a composer would feel the need to change the meter or key signature in the middle of a piece. Mrs. Paugh would quiz me on the keys of the pieces that I was working on, which I was expected to know as intimately as I knew the notes themselves. She also helped build a foundation of knowledge in music other than piano music, and one of our favorite activities was to sight-read through four-hand transcriptions of famous orchestral works, sometimes scored for one piano, sometimes for two. My favorite was Beethoven’s “Eroica,” and Beethoven emerged early on next to Bach as one of my two favorite composers.

      The rudimentary knowledge I began to acquire of music history and theory helped affirm and reinforce the contextual, informed approach I was adopting as a reader and as a student of religion, history, civilization, etc. It also entered into my thoughts about the sort of writer I desired to become. I would need to be a writer who was constantly attentive both to the rules, regulations, structures, and normative procedures of the English language as well as to its as yet unexplored potentials and possibilities, just as Beethoven and Bach had comported themselves with respect to musical language.

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      I shouldn’t neglect another aspect of my evolving literacy during my pre-teen years and early adolescence, which consisted of attending concerts with Nana. Each May I would accompany her to various sessions at the annual 3-day Bach Festival at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, which always culminated on Sunday morning in a performance of the Mass in B Minor or one of Bach’s Passions. Other sessions throughout the weekend would include cantatas, motets and oratorios, instrumental music such as organ and keyboard works, the Brandenburg Concertos, etc. – a generous sampling of the thousand or so extant works by J. S. Bach. 

      Often by this time in May it was already quite warm, and I would have difficulty staying awake during longer pieces such as the Mass in B Minor. I noticed that some of the audience had brought their scores to study while listening to the music. One year I asked Nana if she would purchase a score of the Mass in B Minor for me at a table outside of the cathedral at which scores of the Mass and other featured works were being sold. She happily agreed, and the score proved to be a godsend that kept me awake and engaged during the lengthy Mass. I enjoyed gradually familiarizing myself with the different musical forms and structures that comprise Bach’s large sacred works – solo arias, duets, recitative (in the passions and cantatas), massive choral fugues such as the Kyrie Eleison that opens the Mass in B Minor and that became a lifelong favorite, etc.

      This annual ritual helped increase my musical, linguistic, and religious literacy on many levels. Not only did the evolving ability to read a complex choral score reinforce the musical training I was receiving in my lessons with Mrs. Paugh; I also developed an ear for Latin as I learned how the words in masses should be correctly pronounced. I similarly established a foundation for my college study of German through the cantatas and passions (I remember being amazed to discover that all nouns in German are capitalized), and it was also instructive to compare the liturgical structure of Bach’s masses with the structure of the Catholic mass that I was accustomed to studying on Sunday mornings and that still retained key phrases in Latin here and there –  sometimes in the priests’ spoken delivery throughout the mass, but also as headings and subheadings in the printed guides provided in church pews that I would follow in order to stay awake during church services.

IV

      I’ve left out so far the activities of a less creative or intellectual nature in which I engaged as a child. My childhood was typical of millions of American children born in the 1960s and 1970s, growing up in small towns situated along rivers and within an hour’s radius of a major city; towns that were traditionally blue collar but that were beginning to transition into a mix of older blue-collar families and upwardly-mobile blue-and-white collar families with ambitions that in most cases exceeded the modest small-town ambitions of individuals and families in previous decades. Each town consisted of half a dozen or more neighborhoods in which packs of kids would roam from their early elementary to high school years, having fun after school and on holidays but also getting into frequent trouble and engaging in delinquent activities, some of them with potential legal consequences. I was an on-again-off-again member of such groups, though increasingly more “off-again” as my musical and literary interests and ambitions became clear to me upon advancing into adolescence. As a “lightly vigilant” parent of children whom my wife and I have raised in the “lightly urban” environment of 21st-century Honolulu, it’s both fascinating and a bit alarming to think back on the laxity that parents of that era living in suburban areas typically invested in monitoring their children’s after-school and weekend activities. As long as we completed the little bit of homework we were assigned at school, as long as we reported on time for dinner, and as long as our parents did not hear from neighbors, other parents, or (worst of all) the police about questionable youth activities, we were pretty much free to do as we pleased. What pleased us (or at least us boys…sometimes girls joined our groups, though just as often they’d be recalled by their parents as soon as the boys were suspected of being up to no good) included playing “Army” with walkie talkies and BB guns in the wooded rectangular mile of land that intervened for several hundred yards between Main St. and the river (this area was replete with a canal that had fallen into an advanced state of disuse and disrepair but that proved useful for winter skating and hockey). It included building tree forts in these woods and others that lasted for a month or two until neighborhood adults invariably discovered cigarette butts and “girlie magazines” on strolls with their dog. It included participating in the local Little League chapter and vaguely aspiring to train as a pitcher until Mrs. Paugh, fearful either that my hands would be injured or that she’d lose me to ‘70s small-town baseball culture, gave me via my mother an ultimatum – piano or baseball. It included trading dime-store novels of all types, including those that our parents would prefer we not read. It included the collective sharing of knowledge, much of it gained through such novels, about sexual reproduction and (of more immediate interest to us) the joys and ecstasies that could be experienced through sexual activity. It included raiding the secret stashes of cigarettes hidden in various town locations by older boys, then getting into hot water when the older boys discovered who was taking their cigarettes, and being relieved when all they demanded for not beating you up was an apology and a dollar of your paper boy money in recompense. It included, for kids in towns scattered throughout Southeastern Pennsylvania, becoming an avid Philly sports fan in a decade during which all four major teams were experiencing peaks of greatness – Dick Vermeil’s Eagles, Mike Schmidt’s Phillies, Dr. J’s ‘76ers, and Bobby Clarke’s Flyers. It included becoming literate in popular culture during the classic period of American sitcoms, featuring such Norman Lear-produced favorites as All in the Family and its various spinoffs, and also enjoying the weekly hilarities of the memorable first cast of Saturday Night Live. It included early fraternizations with persons of the opposite sex, replete with eventual remorse and regret for pre-teen and early-adolescent less-than-chivalrous behavior – misgivings that would settle in with later puberty. It included group rivalry and eventual mingling with other neighborhood groups, which by later adolescence would translate into rivalry and eventual mingling with groups of kids in neighboring towns. It included plenty of sleepovers at others’ houses, and hosting such sleepovers, and, at the center of the sleepovers, plenty of prime time, late-night, and weekend morning TV viewing, with a generous sampling of re-runs dating back to the inception of television entertainment. Perhaps most importantly, it included rock music, idolization of favorite rock stars, pilgrimages into the city for concerts by the Police, the Grateful Dead, the Who, Genesis, Bruce Springsteen, and many other bands…and, eventually, musically inclined kids forming bands and taking their own stab at guitar, bass, drums, and (in my case) keyboard.

      These are all activities in which I engaged, but my collective affiliation was always part-time, as I would frequently excuse myself to stay home and fiddle around at the piano or finish the latest novel that I couldn’t put down. The eventual result of which was a certain amount of intended or unintended marginalization and exclusion, and occasionally a bit of minor bullying that rarely exceeded anything more than light teasing from kids who expressed a mix of pride and envy in “Andy Jones – Jeff Jones’s older brother who plays the piano, reads a lot, likes to use big words, and used to write ghost stories back when we were in elementary school.”

      While my poetry is almost entirely non-biographical at the level of surface and/or narrative content, I did write a homage to my “1970s Phillyburb upbringing” in the form of an extended apostrophe – entitled “Spring City, PA” – to Tom Wunder, the cousin who had introduced me to Mark Twain and Tom Sawyer and who sadly died of leukemia in my 8th-grade year. It’s based on the melody (or “melos” – the Greek word I’ve adopted for metrical structures based on song forms) of Brian Eno’s “Mother Whale Eyeless” from the Taking Tiger Mountain album and is included in Open Seven, the book that I began in 2004 and completed in 2007.

V

      I come now to the watershed event of my childhood on the basis of which I decided to become a poet. It occurred in my tenth year, in Mr. Jones’s (no relation) 5th-grade class. Mr. Jones was absent from school for a couple of weeks to support his wife as she gave birth. We had a substitute teacher whose name I now forget – a woman in her 30s who was a familiar face as a frequent substitute at all grade levels throughout the Spring-Ford Area School District. She led us through a poetry unit that consisted exclusively of American poets – Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Robinson, and Frost. I don’t remember everything we read. I had already become steeped in Poe, as mentioned earlier. I was less interested in Whitman than in the others, and it was only in my later teens and 20s that I developed a good sense of him. Even then I tended to appreciate his more traditional formal poems over his revolutionary free verse, with its long, prosey albeit rhythmical sentences that were always “reverse indented” when they flowed over a line of print. But I was entirely captivated by everything else. The three poems I remember from Frost were “Mending Wall, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and “The Road Not Taken.” I immediately took to the latter two rhyming poems. “The Road Not Taken” gave me a lot to think about, particularly because I spent much of my summers roaming through woods on camping and fishing trips with my father and brother. “Stopping by Woods” seemed like a little miracle of perfection. I noticed that it was metrically regular and perfect in its regularity, long before I had acquired familiarity with terms such as “iambic tetrameter.” “Mending Wall” was challenging. At first I didn’t like it because it lacked the rhythms of my favorite poetry and song lyrics, which generally featured shorter lines, and because it didn’t rhyme. But as the instructor guided us through the poem closely, the simple occasion of an everyday disagreement with a neighbor over property borders became clear, and once more I was amazed at the range of human experience that could be expressed in a poem.

      That same feeling arose again with respect to Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Cory.” A guy could even shoot himself in a poem as a sort of surprise ending, similar to the surprise endings you’d see on reruns of The Twilight Zone!

      Finally, there was my initial experience with Emily Dickinson. Her deistic argument in “I never saw a Moor” appealed to my sense of a mysterious divine creator much larger than the temperamental and all-too-human God that the Judeo-Christian tradition had dreamed up. The poem that really grabbed me, though, was the “I’m Nobody” poem. That was something else you could do in a poem – renounce your identity! It was as if Charlie Brown had grown up and elevated his feelings of social worthlessness to a universal principle, a principle of existence. There’s a lot that you could accomplish if you were able to divest yourself of this identity to which you were attached, either by others or through personal inclination or a combination of the two. This set of thoughts would eventually mesh with my initial readings of Freud during high school. If you could banish your Superego from its stranglehold on your Ego and allow your Ego to float down into your Id, how much more of your true being – that Unconscious which Jung emphasizes is collective – could be accessed through pure undaunted Id production? Perhaps this was the key force and principle behind Emily’s 1700 genius if stubbornly enigmatic poems!

      Some of her poems were a bit too complex or too syntactically compact for ten-year-old brains to process effectively. But the complexity in itself intrigued me. I figured that, if I could understand Emily’s simpler poems now at age ten, I would eventually be able to understand the rest of her poems, and this thought in itself was exciting. Certain surface aspects of her poetry particularly intrigued me, including the odd punctuation (and almost exclusive use of dashes) and the fact that, like the Germans in the Cantata texts I was studying at the annual Bach festival, Emily capitalized most of her nouns. Her biography also fascinated me. I quickly identified with Emily’s choice of hiding away from the world so that she could write her great poetry without distraction from others. The choice seemed lonely yet valiant. I wouldn’t necessarily want to be a social hermit and recluse to the extent that she was, but the idea of having a small workshop all to myself that I could duck into in order to spend great heaps of time writing poetry that others would enjoy was compelling.

      I have always regarded this important visitation from a substitute teacher armed with poetry as one of the turning points of my life. During that week, as a ten-year-old in a 5th-grade class at Spring City Elementary, I reflected on how much I had always enjoyed poetry and on my love for the lyrics of Bernie Taupin. I told myself that, like Emily, I would devote my life, or at least a significant part of it, to studying and writing poetry. While my actual poetic activities were sporadic throughout my teenage years and even into my early 20s, I revisited this commitment several times each year. During high school I read that it was only in his mid-30s that Walt Whitman – along with Emily, one of America’s two most significant foundational poets – began to see himself as a poet, after acquiring years of experience in other aspects of life that furnished Whitman with much of the content of his poetry. I promised myself once more during my 11th-grade year that I would devote my life to poetry, but that, like Whitman, I would settle into this commitment gradually and with the confidence that maturity would bring by living life and acquiring knowledge of people and history, art and literature, music and poetry, etc. 

VI

      As I advanced into later adolescence, I became further and further immersed in musical and other studies that would eventually inform my development as a poet. With respect to the actual poetry I wrote, the first serious period of experimentation took place during the summer between my 10th- and 11th-grade years, when I turned 16. From then through the end of my freshman year of college I wrote at least a hundred short poems. I approached each poem with serious intent, carefully considering aspects of vocabulary, theme and imagery, meter and lineation, etc. I knew that poetry had to be a craft before it was an art, and I took craftsmanship seriously, although my craftsmanship was biased, skewed, and limited by the fact that the ready models in my head were mostly popular songs rather than poems per se. Half of the poems I wrote were free-verse poems loosely imitative in both form and theme of Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, and the free-verse poems of Bob Dylan, some of which were included as inserts with his early albums – The Times They Are a’Changin’ perhaps most notably. I also played around with song forms – numerous poems consisting of three or four quatrains in common meter or in similar meters with short lines derived from Dickinson poems, church hymns, and pop songs. Emulating Emily, I would experiment by occasionally throwing a slant rhyme into the arrangement of perfect rhymes that I then preferred and that I have always favored. 

      These early poems have fallen by the wayside, and I may have actually made like the youthful Plato and discarded them during my 20s so as to avoid eventual embarrassment. Some of them reflected conventional themes borrowed from early Dylan – fear of nuclear war in the years immediately prior to Gorbachev, glasnost, and perestroika (plenty of models for which I found in Dylan’s early ‘60s songs such as “Masters of War” and “With God on Our Side”), alternately happy and gloomy love poems for which Dylan again was the model (favorites included “I Want You,” “Fourth Time Around” and “Just Like a Woman” – all songs from the Blonde on Blonde album), poems that were immediately identifiable as adolescent and pre-mature stabs at existentialism (influenced particularly by a 12th-grade, fully engrossed reading of Camus’ The Stranger) or at visions of a future exploratory life on the road ala Sal and Dean in On the Road and traveling rock bands such as The Grateful Dead. One of the best of these, and one of the last that I wrote before dropping the activity early on in college with the view of returning to it eventually (which, as I will describe, occurred half a dozen years later at age 25) – and also with the understanding that I needed to devote myself thoroughly to my musical studies for the time being – was a poem that described a sort of spirit bird that embodied all of the budding existential restlessness I felt as an older teenager busy with my college studies and rapidly acquiring knowledge of all sort of things under the sun – things that had me asking constant questions about the sort of human being I wanted to be as an adult, the sort of art I wanted to create as a person gifted or simply burdened with a serious creative need, the sort of career and/or life path I might entertain that would allow me to pursue creative expression over an extended period of time, etc. I remember feeling proud of this poem as the best that I had yet written – that to my ears was pleasing and that also wrapped up my sense of self at that particular moment of time. I also, however, compared it to the superior same-age poetry of Rimbaud and Verlaine in France and Dylan Thomas in Wales (whose free-verse and more traditionally formal poems had increasingly informed my own attempts) and found it to be primitive, epigonic, and deficient as true poetry. I knew that, if I wanted to develop as a poet, I would need eventually to immerse myself seriously in “poetry proper” rather than contemporary rock song lyrics. I would need to become a true apprentice to Calliope. I decided that I would allow this poem to conclude the “poetry of my youth,” and that sometime, hopefully sooner rather than later, I would embark upon a rigorous “poet’s education” that would allow me to mature as an authentic poet such as the poets I most revered, which at the time included the poets I had been exposed to during those transformative weeks in 5th-grade, and also Dylan Thomas and Lord Byron – my early favorite of the English Romantics, who struck me as godlike and Beethovenian in his comprehension of the humanity of his time and in the sardonic yet playful humor with which he characterized that humanity in his poetry.

*                              *                              *

      But there were other things I needed to do first, and foremost among them was to develop into a competent classical pianist, which became the focus of my late-teen and college years.

      After an impressive start during my first several years of piano instruction, my piano studies had gradually languished for several years in early-to-mid-adolescence. While Mrs. Paugh had set an excellent foundation for me in guiding me through the initial standard pedagogic material replete with theory lessons and in getting me started on some fairly challenging piano repertoire, she had a difficult time understanding let alone inspiring a pubescent boy who had many things on his mind besides the acquisition of pieces in the classical piano repertoire that were rarely less than half a century old. I made little real progress between my 8th-grade year and sometime during my junior year of high school when I suddenly decided to get serious about things and major in music in college.

      My interest in the classical piano repertoire took a backseat during those years to rock music, and I spent more of my spare time devoted to the project of affording and acquiring a record collection than I did on anything else, including my high school classes. After having shown much promise early on in the standard “college prep” track, I became a rather indifferent student during my later high school years and glided through school with As and Bs by paying attention in class while doing as little work outside of school as possible. Math came easy to me – a fact for which I’ve always thanked Mrs. Paugh for her devotion to music theory, which I believe reinforced the “math logic” I needed both to enjoy Math class and to score well on standardized tests. Doing math homework in between classes or on the bus ride to school always seemed like a pleasure rather than a burden. 

      While I often shirked the accompanying assignments, the literature choices that my English teachers made for their students did lead to a number of epiphanic encounters with great literature that were formative and of lifelong influence. Crime and Punishment quickly became my favorite novel, with whose protagonist Raskolnikov I strongly identified, as have millions of adolescent readers since the novel’s first publication in the 1860s. I fought my way through Hamlet slowly and painstakingly, and felt a triumph at finally having understood, at least at a basic level, the famed best play of the famed best writer who had intrigued me since early childhood. Works by Camus and Kafka resonated with my interest in the dystopian, which I had acquired through close acquaintance with David Bowie’s first dozen or so albums and through Orwell’s major novels, as well as with fondness for the absurd that I owed to Monty Python’s original television series, which by the mid-1970s had become a staple of PBS’s late-night programming. Gulliver’s Travels had me rolling on the floor with laughter on every page. I fell in immediate love with Emerson and Thoreau and in particular claimed as my own the labyrinthine syntactical structure of the former’s sentences that filled the essay on “Self-Reliance” as well as his “transcendental secularization” of lofty abstract ideas. I knew that, when it came time eventually for me to “get serious” as a poet, I would want to utilize the rich grammatical precision and expression of our nation’s foundational essayist, and something of his lofty ideation. Emerson of course had also written poetry, but it was his prose – his approach to diction and syntax – that strongly influenced my own poetic inclinations. My poetry, like Shakespeare’s sonnets, like the poets of the English Romantics with which I was gradually becoming familiar, and like Emerson in his essays, would need to make the reader work to derive enjoyment and meaning from them…as much as it would make me work to access and express subtle and complex thoughts. My poetry would also need to emphasize meaning. It couldn’t consist solely or predominantly of random collections of words floating around my inner consciousness, as sometimes seemed to be the case with Kerouac in his poetry, with many rock song lyrics, and with numerous lesser, disorderly poems by e.e. cummings.[1]

      My high school years were characterized by a combination of intellectual and creative restlessness on the one hand and a mix of alternately spirited and half-hearted attempts to participate in conventional school activities and social relations on the other. An important highlight was achieving athletic success as the strongest long-distance runner on our Track and Field team for three consecutive years, and winning age-level medals in local running races. I was drawn to individual rather than team sports, and the long daily runs afforded me ample time for reflective and prospective thought. I also had the great fortune to attend a school that featured one of the state’s richest and most storied drama programs, owing to the extraordinary after-school exertions of the late legendary English teacher and drama coach, Charles (“Chuck”) Yerger, and his wife Sherry, who frequently choreographed Chuck’s productions. Our program produced a number of noteworthy national talents over the years, including television writer and producer Chuck Sheetz, actress Lisa Waltz, and playwright Dennis Bush. (Mr. Yerger retired from high school teaching sometime in the 1990s, and he and Sherry relocated to Orlando, where he was recruited as a top trainer for a generation of Disney kids and worked with the likes of Brittney Spears and Justin Timberlake.) I landed the lead roles in two class plays during my senior year – the familiar Peanuts musical A Good Man, Charlie Brown, and a not terribly well-known comic murder mystery entitled Agatha Christie Made Me Do It. For my efforts I was voted Best Actor of my graduating class of 1983. My talents as an actor, I believe, were never better than modest, and memory tells me that I was a bit too young to think about acting as anything more than a way to attract girls and hopefully do something to make my peers laugh. But I was fortunate in that in my senior year I landed into a relatively weak pool of dramatic talent, a sort of “down year,” and so was able to acquire these experiences playing lead roles in two plays. My theatrical activities were extremely influential in the development of my poetic and aesthetic outlook. Some of my favorite literature is stage literature, and the sort of theatrical aesthetics eternalized by Shakespeare in many of his plays through explicit comparisons of stage to life (and updated by Goethe for the late Enlightenment and German Romanticism in Faust and elsewhere) has provided my poetry with a large reservoir of motifs relating to drama, plays, the stage, the philosophy and beauty embedded within mimetic art, etc.

*                              *                              *

      I’ve often surprised people who know of my poetry and of my English teaching but not of my musical background when I tell them that I studied music, not English Lit, in college. When it came time to choose a college major, I had done enough reading to have reached the conclusion that “real” writers generally don’t become great writers at universities or in academic contexts. Of course there are exceptions, but generally speaking the great writers have developed by reading and writing, reading and writing, reading and writing. Perhaps, when they were lucky, by sharing their reading and writing with other aspirational readers and writers. Doubtless since the early decades of the 20th-century many esteemed writers have been influenced by college courses. But few of them have permanently attached themselves to university posts. By the time I was a high school junior, I was already modeling my future path as a poet on the biographies of the great modern prose writers such as Faulkner, Joyce, and Proust, whose ties to academic institutions were tenuous at best, and also on the more adventurous spirits in literature whose lives were as interesting as the lives of their best characters – Twain, Melville, Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Kerouac, etc. So, I would learn to write under the tutelage of the prose writers and the great poets. I could do that on my own.

      I could not say the same about music, however. I desperately wanted to see what I could do as a pianist, in a strong music program with a strong piano teacher, and surrounded by pianos better than the lowly console I had spent ten years playing at home. Unlike writing a novel or a poem, you couldn’t just teach yourself classical piano. There was simply too much requisite knowledge and technical expertise to accomplish the feat of acquiring it all on one’s own.

      It is with such an understanding that I arrived on the main campus of Penn State in the fall of 1983, enrolled as a piano major in the College of Arts and Architecture.

[To be continued…]

Honolulu

December 2023 – February 2024

[1] After such detractions of two celebrated authors, I should add that I have always viewed Kerouac’s poetry as an important ancillary to his ground-breaking prose, and also that I value the influential experimental impulse behind the work of cummings.