Along the Kaw, 1968-1978

Chronologically, these poems begin in my graduate school years, which started in 1967. The next year I went to the Vietnam war, came back in 1970, finishing in 1976. I took my first full-time teaching job in Algeria, found it not to my satisfaction, finishing my "year abroad" in Spain. In the Fall of 1977, I came back to KU and got a part-time post to hold me over until I could find another full-time position, this time in Japan. From Algeria, I brought back a long poem called "Constantine Journal" which later was on my website for some years. I've taken it down and print it here for the first time. By 1968, when I was twenty-two years old, I had begun to take to heart Rimbaud's drunken-boat instruction that the poet must derange his mind. It was time for me to begin, though I had no idea of beginning anything. It was all desperation. So many things had gone wrong and continued wrong. I was a miserable worm and believed I was damned. I couldn't get the story of love to go right. I took thorazine. I saw a psychologist once a week. I was in a state of depression, and the only dependable medication I found for it was alcohol. Thus, "Kaw fished the innumerable river." The poems reflect none of the good times that were part of graduate-school life. This is largely deliberate, for I believed then that poetry was a way of dealing with misery, and that happiness did not call for expression in verse. I even thought that melancholy was the more important emotion. After all, darkness identified and defined me, whereas sunshine did not. In long retrospect, I would now call the melancholy reflected in my verse of this period the struggles of a much delayed adolescence. I was Esau. I'd "sold my birthright / for this mess of learning."