History of My Reading: The Pressure of Reality

Books come alive in real time, and in its context.  The book, a product of its time, enters into a kind of dialogue with readers in their time and place; the year, the year of their age, the month and season, the days and nights of sun or rain or snow, of being in love or longing, bereft, lonely, beset, anxious, ebullient, tired.

Seymour Library at Knox College 

In sunlight or yellow lamplight, in a specific room, on a train, within glancing distance of a tree, of tail lights bright in the dusk, in a noisy coffee shop or under florescent lights at a quiet table in the dead of night.

 But the context extends more generally. Part of it is what's in the newspapers, what's on the radio, what's on everybody's mind, what's most insistently on the reader's mind, the state of the reader's heart.

All the rhythms of life affect the rhythms of the words, and if the book casts a strong spell, the rhythm of its words will affect the rhythm of the reader's heart and spirit, and the kinds of things the reader sees and hears, thinks and feels.  Some effects evaporate, while others marinate.  The reader may forget the book, but the book seldom forgets the reader.

It matters to a greater or lesser degree how the book and reader find each other, who introduced the book, why and when, and who if anyone shares the reading, and what they say.

So the books I read in the college year of 1965-66 form experiences that are one with my head colds, my weekends, the wind in the trees, the scream of the war, and especially the web of events and relationships that seemed so dominant at the time, so fraught, so consuming and above all so fateful.

The class on Yeats lost in the blond hair inches in front of me. The fatal walk through the mist of Standish Park, with bursts of rain at the cinematic moments of highest emotion.  The surreal departmental party in the room where Lincoln had slept; flattery, cruelty, confusion and deception, with too much interior paramour punch.

In a prior post I mentioned how busy I was that year from the start of school, and subsequent posts indicate something of the intensity of that year's new reading.  I was also writing more, and more intensively, than I ever had: poems, plays and fiction as well as  columns and articles and course papers.  Though I took writing courses in poetry and plays, I also had an ambitious program of writing stories.

 So says the disorganized piles of paper that have survived, as well as a few notebooks and letters. This was all confused and confusing.  My poems reflected a cacophony of what I was reading.  In part it was experiment, in part exorcism, especially the attempts at grand statements on my time that read like collisions of "The Wasteland," "The Comedian As The Letter C" and "Desolation Row."

 Even the short lyric poems we all were writing seldom cohere.  Occasionally I stumbled on a resonant image. For instance: The light of her eyes is a sad light/ like moths in October in which I accidentally accessed a sense not only of autumnal sadness but of moths attracted to light.  (I suppose there was an unconscious association.)  But that’s the exception.  Mostly the images are simply unusual, too cute.  The strength that stands out now is the rhythm, the music of the best lyrics.  (Not too surprising, then, that I was also writing song lyrics that I actually set to music, or sent to my songwriting partner.)

All of this, all of this hothouse life at a small college, had its cost.  I'd had always been prone to colds (whereas now I go years without one), and my letters quite often mention them and their related conditions, and cold and cough and sore throat and flu remedies. Even a visit to the college health service is recorded, which indicates some desperation, since I had been warned of its reputation for resident quackery.

 Besides suggesting a mundane indication of physical strain, colds at Knox were a public thing.  I used to joke that you could wake up in your room with a cough, and on the walk to breakfast be asked three times how your cold is.

Towards spring, the pressure of reality got to be a bit too much, and I rebelled by demanding solitude.  I insisted on a single room by myself at Anderson House.  I even went to the extent of occupying an empty room without authorization (it happened to be my old turret room on the third floor) until I was finally given a small room near the foot of the stairs from the second to third floors.

 It's taken me years to begin to understand the probable effects of being deaf in one ear.  In many ways it's not noticeable to others, and became conscious to me only in certain situations.  But I've since realized these effects were profound.  For one thing, the act of hearing--of transforming sounds into intelligible information-- required more attention and energy. We all must sort out the signal from the noise (to put in information theory terms.)  Those with the confidence of two ears can be more relaxed about it.  I could not, even if that wasn't a conscious process.  I could not so easily block out the noise, because there might be a signal to decipher in it.  But it could also be overwhelming-- at a certain point it was all noise.  Only in solitude is there peace and a sense of safety and control.  That had to contribute to my mental state that year.

Again, I've written a little about events and activities in the fall and winter.  But spring did come--that brief and beautiful Galesburg spring.

  At some point in the year, I fell in with a group that tending to revolve around James Campbell, a student in the class a year ahead of me. He had a large apartment in a somewhat ramshackle frame house on West Berrien, which he painted entirely black.  He wrote poetry and fiction published in the literary magazine the Siwasher, and did finely rendered etchings of houses and plants--his work was featured on the cover of both Siwashers of this year. I remember him wearing crew neck sweaters without an apparent shirt or t-shirt underneath, and a blazer or jacket over it.  He taught me to keep a book of matches in the jacket's top pocket--"to light old ladies' cigarettes," he suggested.

James Campbell. Photo by Leonard Borden.

I don't actually know if he went to prep school, but in memory he does represent my first experience of a preppy--though a Bohemian preppy in his case. When I saw the PBS Brideshead Revisited on TV, I saw a little of him in the charismatic Anthony Andrews character, at least in how he functioned in our college ecology.

Though I suppose his apartment was something like our version of Gatsby's. He was at the arts and political center of things that year.  He was behind his friend, Student Senate president Mike Chubrich, in his successful efforts to bring Chicago blues musicians down to Knox, including the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the Siegel Schwall Blues Band.   They were largely responsible for me being appointed a student representative to the Faculty Committee on Student Affairs beginning the next school year.

 I was not in the inner circle but was often included socially.  I remember being at his apartment listening to a record by a new folk singer, Eric Anderson.  I'd heard someone (possibly Eric but I doubt it) do one of his songs on that album in my only visit to a Greenwich Village folk music club the previous summer.  I followed his music for decades.  Close the door lightly as you go.

James Campbell also is associated with one of the few books I remember that year not generated by a course.  He was very enthusiastic about a novel called The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy. He was particularly taken with the line "Bang on, wizard."  I found a copy, and was also swept up in its rhythm, language and personality.  The book was just taking off, and led to a series of Donleavy novels published in the 60s and 70s especially, and I read them all.

The only other novel not related to a class that I associate with this school year is A Separate Peace by John Knowles, a coming of age story set in a prep school. Perhaps ironically (and perhaps not), it was too suspiciously popular to win the approval of the Campbell group.  I read it in one sitting on a long train trip, to or from Galesburg.  I was utterly absorbed in it and charmed by it, yet once I finished it I never opened it again.  I don't know that the copy I have is the one I read, but it is a 1961 first paperback edition, and is in pristine shape.

 The Campbell group is the center of a sweet memory of that spring, a ceremony of innocence amidst the angst and anxiety.  (For this was the spring that an April TIME magazine's cover asked "Is God Dead?" and that LBJ proclaimed that the US would never leave Vietnam except in victory, on the same May day that the highest weekly number of US deaths in the war so far was announced.)

Linda Wise Campbell. Photo by Leonard Borden

But it was also the spring of "Batman" on television, and the Frisbee.  Adam West's Batman, with its camp-serious dialogue and crazy-angled action shots broken by cartoon balloons of BIFF!, POW! and ZONK! caught Campbell's attention. It soon become a national sensation. The Frisbee had been introduced in the late 50s but for some reason was only becoming popular, at least at Knox, that spring.

 Television sets, even in student apartments, were rare.  So the group of us would meet to throw a Frisbee around out on the green lawn in the last warm sunlight before going inside, to Campbell's apartment (I believe),  sweaty and happy, to watch Batman.  It was on twice a week then, on successive evenings.

  On the radio was "Good Lovin,'" "Wild Thing," "Secret Agent Man," "Gloria," "Red Rubber Ball."  On the jukebox: "Paperback Writer," "Monday, Monday," "Eight Miles High," "Pledging My Time," "Homeward Bound," "Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?"  Though the music of what would soon be called the counterculture was edging in, especially with the release that May of Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, the deluge wouldn't begin until summer.  Broadway show tunes still led the album charts, and the top selling record of the year was "Ballad of the Green Berets."

At spring parties we danced to the songs on the Stones' new album Aftermath (hearing that title, Ringo Starr proposed that the next Beatles album should be called After Geography): "Mother's Little Helper,""Under My Thumb," "Paint It Black," "Out of Time."

 It was the year of Levi's.  Female and male students wore them--the ones called "white Levi's" though the most common color was a brownish beige.

 They also came in actual white, light blue, dark green and black. They were far more popular than blue jeans (although that would soon change.) This was still an era in which it wasn't uncommon for males to wear blazers or sports jackets on campus: corduroy, cotton or wool blend but seldom tweed. Except for James Campbell, and maybe a few others.

  My first poems in the Siwasher appeared that year, but I'm more intrigued now with my short story in the spring issue, "The Pressure of Reality."  Early in the school year I had tried several realistic stories in the John Updike mode.  But this was different.  It incorporates several experiments--dropping capital letters as a way to speed up the rhythm, and a modified use of the punning Lennonesque/Joycean language I employed in some pieces published in the Knox Student.  But basically it is an attempt to enact rather than describe the pressure of reality that year.

The phrase comes from Wallace Stevens, introduced to me by Doug Wilson (not in our Stevens class actually, but before that--I heard him talk about it on WVKC campus radio.) "It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence from without," Stevens wrote in his essay "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words."  "It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.  It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives."  

Spring issue. Cover by J. Campbell

Those surviving piles of paper suggest that I was making notes and doing drafts of this story for some time that year. It's not a good story.  I can see with embarrassing ease that rhetorically I was trying to render campus life from the perspective of a Beatles movie, including a verbatim line or two from Help!  

How others experienced this I don't know. But mostly it has the same basic flaw of most of what I wrote then and for the next many years about college, of trying to enact the emotional chaos of everyday life, and especially the multiple collisions of relationships in the general tedium.

This involves too many names and oblique daily events which, though most absorbing at the time, turn out to be not that interesting to read.  A real moment dramatized, a real place described, would now be valuable (though there is some of that in those pages of drafts.)  At best, the snatches of coffee shop and in-class dialogue and so on provide something, a flavor, of that time and place, only suggesting the pressure of that reality.

 Still, a notebook records that another student told me the story made her cry.  I was 19, and it was both a technical experiment and a reflection of how I experienced Knox. So there is authenticity to it.  I can not like it that much, and still be fond of it.

  So this is how Pound and Eliot, Dylan (who wrote about them fighting in the captain's tower) and the Young Rascals, Wallace Stevens and Batman, John Lennon and J.P. Donleavy, LBJ and Walt Whitman are all part of the same experiences and memories, along with many people I could name, and therefore all part of each other, in my life and reading of that spring, that year.

 My reading and my book collection got a big helping hand that May, when I won the award for the second year student who had done the best writing in English classes.  The prize was (as I recall) $75 in books from the Knox Bookstore. Bonanza! It set me up for a magnificent summer of reading.  Or it should have.

To be continued...

History of My Reading: The Zen of Sam

Sam Moon: official photo 1966 yearbook

"We think by feeling.  What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow." Theodore Roethke

  I took a poetry writing course from Sam Moon in the fall semester of 1965-66 and a playwriting course the following spring semester, both in  my second year at Knox College.

Sam was not only head of the Knox writing program—he was the Knox writing program that year. Harold Grutzmacher, who taught fiction writing, had left after the 1964-5 year, and Knox had not replaced him. Nor would there be a permanent replacement until 1967-68.

 Contrary to current college propaganda, Knox had a writing program going back beyond Moon’s first year at Knox in 1953. Moon credited his predecessor, Proctor Sherwin with starting it. It's just a guess, but maybe the excuse for dating the current writing program as beginning in 1968 is that a creative writing major was added for students after that year.  But Knox already had a literature and composition major, which pretty much amounts to the same thing.  I ought to know. It was mine.

 I have general recollections of the classes I took from Sam Moon, a little hard to separate from non-class conversations. There were just a few students each time, and I believe we mostly met in Sam’s office in Old Main, either near the window overlooking Alumni Hall and the campus, or clustered around his desk. The classes might entail examining the work of a published “professional” poet or fellow student work.

Sam Moon, probably in the 1950s

Sam Moon’s students tend to remember him for their one-on-one sessions or moments. This might be analyzing a poem by an established poet or the student’s own work, or a conversation about aspects of writing untethered to a particular work. When Sam retired, and later after he died, many came forward with stories of how he helped them, and in some cases changed their lives.

Sam Moon was certainly an encouraging and nourishing influence on me, from my registration and first semester throughout my time at Knox. Sam always read and talked to me about anything I showed him, or anything of mine that appeared in campus publications, whether I was in a course or not. Though these one-on-one moments might happen in private or the Gizmo, some might be moments from a class, especially when the classes were as informal and intimate as I remember.

 I’ll skip to spring because I do have a specific memory about my playwriting class. I’m reasonably sure I took this course in the spring because I used a line from Wallace Stevens as the title of a play I wrote (now lost) and I was reading Stevens that spring term for Doug Wilson's class.  I also used the verse in which the title appears as a quotation before the text of the play. (I liked those lines so well that at about the same time I wrote a song lyric around them, and with my songwriting partner's music, the Crosscurrents performed it.)

 On the day the class discussed my play, I began by verbally correcting the quotation—I’d left out a word. It was a very small class—maybe a half dozen students. I remember that when I made the correction, several of those present—including Sam—feigned shock, joking that this additional word cast an entirely different light on the play. I remember one student comment, which came from Mike Stickney. The protagonist of my play made a fairly long speech at the end. Stickney said that a more realistic and convincing speech at that point would be: “Oh, fuck.”

The professional plays we read were in One Act: Short Plays of the Modern Theatre (Grove Press), edited by Samuel Moon, who also wrote the thoughtful introduction.  He clearly enjoyed seeing plays as well as reading them.

  I’ve got textual notes on only one play: Yeats’ Purgatory, which was produced later in the Studio Theatre. I’m not sure which other plays we read as a class, but I am sure that I read Ionesco’s The Chairs, Thornton Wilder’s Pullman Car Hiawatha, Arthur Miller’s Memory of Two Mondays, and Hello Out There by William Saroyan, whose fiction I’d avidly read in junior high or high school when I came across his books in the public library.

 Plays by Strindberg, Pirandello,Tennessee Williams, Sean O’Casey, Jean Anouih, and Archibald MacLeish are also in the volume.  Perhaps I read them all. These days, one act plays have almost disappeared, between the epics with multiple meal breaks and the ten minute (and now one minute) plays. Permit me to observe—as someone who has seen contemporary plays done across the country, at least until a few years ago—that today’s playwrights might benefit from the discoveries and disciplines of writing one act plays, and audiences might enjoy seeing them.  In any case, this book is still in print.

Sam Moon was also especially qualified to teach the poetry writing class in the fall. He was himself a poet who published in Chicago’s Poetry Magazine, historically one of the most important American periodicals for the poetry of the 20th century. Eliot, Pound, Joyce and especially Wallace Stevens all published there. (Examples of Sam's work here and here.) Though he was steeped in that history, he was foremost at Knox in bringing contemporary writing into the curriculum and the culture. He not only knew contemporary poetry, he knew the poets, on equal terms—as one of them.

The major anthologies of contemporary poets I remember—either assigned or recommended—were Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Donald Hall, and The New American Poetry, edited by Donald M. Allen. The Allen anthology had the larger and broader selection, and remains a very good representative of post-World War II American poetry up to 1960 or so, especially as it includes both poets who became famous, and poets that have slipped into obscurity.

 (In 1973, Allen and Warren Tallman added a companion volume, The Poetics of The New American Poetry, with statements of purpose by some of these contemporary poets plus relevant pieces by their forerunners, including Walt Whitman.)  The anthology included representatives of the various "schools:" the Beats, Black Mountain, New York, etc. The Hall anthology was smaller (even the book itself was a smaller-sized paperback) and somewhat more focused. I bought the first edition (1962). (I also have the second edition of 1971, which was revised and enlarged.)

first edition cover

In Hall's first edition--which we probably used for this course--I made check marks before the names of certain poets and poems.  I don't know if these indicate what we read for this class, or just my preferences, but they are what I remember reading.

 The poets marked are Robert Lowell, Denise Levertov, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, James Wright and Gary Snyder, with individual poems by Louis Simpson and Donald Justice.  (Others in this anthology I don't recall reading at the time became important to me later: first Galway Kinnell, then William Stafford and most recently W.S. Merwin.)

 I marked these sentences in Hall's introduction: "Yet typically the modern artist has allowed nothing to be beyond his consideration.  He has acted as if restlessness were a conviction and has destroyed his own past in order to create a future."

According to many of these poets, and Sam Moon as well, the major inspiration for postwar American poetry came from William Carlos Williams. Born in New Jersey in 1883, he practiced medicine there for the rest of his life, while becoming the foremost advocate for an American approach to modern writing. His work was eclipsed for awhile by the stardom of T. S. Eliot, but he emerged as the single most important influence on the new American poetry we were reading in the 1960s.

 Though it was poet Archibald MacLeish who came up with the foundation sentence, “A poem should not mean but be,” William Carlos Williams was the exemplar of that credo. This I learned from Sam Moon.

 My copy of Williams’ Selected Poems comes from this year, and I would subsequently acquire his masterpiece Patterson, as well as several books of his prose.

Jay Matson, who was a senior when I was a freshman, recalls reading a number of poets in his classes with Moon, including American poet Theodore Roethke, who died in 1963.

 Jay and Sam worked together examining Roethke's poem "The Waking" (the quotation at the top of this post is the second verse.)  I was surprised to learn this, because Roethke was not a fashionable poet in my years, though his reputation has grown since. Personally I was drawn to his work--especially "The Waking," "Elegy for Jane," "The Far Field" and "Wish For a Young Wife," and his children's poems.  There was something about him I understood, and I liked the music.

Now I also see how at least some of Roethke might appeal to Sam Moon.  I believe I discovered Roethke on my own, in a magazine I read in the Knox library. But maybe I'm wrong about that--maybe it was Sam Moon.  In any case, I remember acquiring one of Roethke's books, Words For The Wind, and got the first edition of his Collected Poems, published in 1966. That's the thing about influential teachers--or any teachers: we don't always remember what they taught us.  Perhaps the best lessons are the ones we thought we'd always known, or found ourselves.

A major aspect of Sam Moon's contribution--and one that many remember--was the writers he brought to Knox.  Many were poets who knew him as a poet.  But he also brought fiction writers and other contemporary artists.

 They weren't always well-known--yet.  His first guest writer was the 29 year old Philip Roth, who hadn't yet published his first novel.  Gary Snyder was barely back from Japan when Sam brought him to Knox for a week. Archibald MacLeish visited before my time, and Galway Kinnell after it, but during my years I saw and heard fictionists Grace Paley and Richard Yates, poets Mark Van Doren and W.H. Auden, as well as poets who were in those anthologies: Robert Creeley, David Ignatow, Denise Levertov, Snyder, Robert Bly and James Dickey.

 We got to experience these writers often in several contexts.  We heard them reading their work and answering questions, often in the Commons Room of Old Main.  We saw some of them in the classrooms as well, and around a lunch table or informally around campus, and often at an evening party in their honor.

Both Bly and James Dickey were on campus in the spring of 1966.  Bly came first: mesmerizing, flamboyant, opinionated and unlike anyone else.  He read his work in a very individual way.  He must have enjoyed himself at Knox, for he came back a year or two later.

 Immediately after his reading, I bought Bly's latest collection, Silence in the Snowy Fields, which furnished most of the poems he read.  I also amused a few credulous souls by imitating his delivery.  Bly probably talked about Pablo Neruda and James Wright on this occasion, which led me to these poets.  And I would keep my eye on Bly and his work for some years to come.

 James Dickey's first public event on campus was just a few days after Bly's last.  It's possible their paths crossed in Galesburg, although it might not have been comfortable if they did.  Bly, who had praised Dickey's earlier work, wrote a review excoriating Dickey's latest collection, Buckdancer's Choice, not only in poetic but in moral terms. (It's not clear when this review was first published, but it is included in Bly's 1990 book, American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity, with a date of 1967.) Nevertheless Buckdancer's Choice won the National Book Award for poetry, and Dickey was appointed the United States Poet Laureate in 1966. This was several years before his novel Deliverance and the subsequent movie made him rich and famous.

 Dickey was on campus, as many writers were, partly to make the final choices for that year's student writing awards.  I was completely surprised when he named me as the third prize winner in poetry.  That could be why I remained in a fog as he talked about my poems, and read one of them--he even paused and grinned over a line or image he liked. (I actually may remember it: "my eyes from cold coffee run to her.") He described them partly in terms of other poets, some of whom I knew but others I'd never read.  I had to resist the temptation to write the names down then and there, but that would have given me away. I did try to remember them however, so I could read the work that had apparently influenced me.

Physically a big man, Dickey made a big impression, though not all of it good.  He had a dazzling smile and was ebulliently theatrical, pouring on the southern charm.  He entertained a group of us at lunch--his imitation of how the original King Kong turned his head was uncanny.

But some who spent more time with him were not so charmed. His constant self-referencing act wore thin.  More than one person (and I was one) noticed his less than subtle lechery at parties.  Who could forget him asking every female student he met her age, and then drawling at them "That's a fahn age for a woman," often ending with an invitation to leave the party with him?

 It's hard to overestimate the value of these writers and artists visiting campus. Physical presence is exciting for everyone--we may have been excited to briefly meet Robert Bly, but Bly had once been thrilled to briefly meet T.S. Eliot.

It's true that sometimes seeing and hearing a poet read actually ruins the experience of reading them .The voice in person is not the voice in your head. (Judging from recordings on YouTube, I suspect I would have felt that way about Roethke.)

  But most times it adds dimensions to the printed words.  Some of these experiences at Knox opened new doors and provided new choices for student writers and readers by bringing sound to the words, and the words to life.

 They provided models, and gave at least some hint of what it was like to be writing in our time, and in the various places and situations we might end up.  We may have looked upon some as heroes, but we also got glimpses of their human weaknesses.  Some were living cautionary tales. But the good and bad were proportions in most.  Seeing and hearing them in the same room, meeting them even briefly in different circumstances, eventually enabled me to relate personally to writers and artists I met, at Knox and then afterward.  I had the confidence to meet them on equal terms, not equal as writers but as intelligent human beings with common interests, and certain common writing experiences.

Robin Metz and Sam Moon

Sam Moon taught at Knox College from 1953 until 1984.  Together with Robin Metz, who joined the faculty in 1967 as a fiction writer, he presided over the expansion of the writing program that continued after his retirement.  Big writing programs are a national trend but Knox has been one of the exemplars.

 I last saw Sam on a brief visit to Galesburg more than a decade after I'd left, a few years before he retired.  Apart from Doug Wilson (my host) and Robin Metz (who was invited to lunch but didn't show), he was the only teacher at Knox I sought out.

I walked up to his Old Main office, knocked on the door and opened it.  I'd forgotten the rule--if the door is closed, it means there's a class in session.  I stood at the entrance, seeing across the room a familiar scene as if it were a sepia print: Sam at his desk in the far corner with a semi-circle of students clustered close around him, all heads bent to a text.  He said sharply that this was a class.  I mumbled an embarrassed apology and began backing out the door. Then I heard his voice again, in a different tone: "Is that Bill Kowinski?"  We agreed to meet in the Gizmo after his class.

I don't remember what we talked about, but except for the changes in the Gizmo (all for the worse, in my opinion), it was another familiar scene.  A few years later I was one of his former students to be asked to write a tribute, to be collected with others and presented to Sam on his retirement.

The Sam Moon I knew was modest and unassuming, with a lively sense of humor.  I can't say I knew him well.  But I am still discovering the Sam Moon I didn't know.

a Cortland, New York landscape

According to Jay Matson (who knew Sam a lot better over the years), Sam and his wife Doris stayed in Galesburg for some years after his retirement, and spent summers at their place on Lake Huron in Canada, where Doris was from.  They moved to southern New York state when Doris became ill, to be near their daughter Vicky.

 Sam remained in Cortland, New York after Doris died, and eventually reconnected with an old love, with whom he shared some years intermittently at her home in Colorado, as well as his homes in Canada and New York.

Sam weathered his last illness in Cortland. He died in 2011 at the age of 89.  He'd spent 31 years at Knox, but after he left he had  27 years of another life away from it. Even in his Knox years, Sam had a more complicated personal life than most people knew.  One of the smaller things I didn't know about Sam is that he was an avid swimmer, and wrote a series of poems about it while at Knox.

After he retired, he published a book in 1992 that wasn't poetry or about plays or literature or teaching: it was about Henry Goulding, the man who ran a trading post in the Four Corners area of the southwest, and his relationship to the Navajo.  According to Doug Wilson, he worked on this book for some 20 years.  The novelist William Eastlake had a ranch in the area, and wrote about the people there in his early books. Sam brought him to teach a term of fiction-writing at Knox my junior year, so I wonder if he had anything to do with this.  The title of the book is Tall Sheep and it is available on Amazon.  I look forward to reading it.

 Sam got interested in Buddhism, as many of us did in the 60s, but he went deeper into it.  Initially intrigued by reading Thoreau (again, according to Wilson) and by John Cage (who he brought to Knox several times) and (my guess) by Gary Snyder, he went beyond the philosophy to the practice of Buddhist meditation.

He also translated the Tao Te Ching by Lao T'zu and provided a commentary on the text and his translations.  For awhile after his death no one seemed to know what had become of this manuscript, but eventually Sam's daughter found it, and sent a copy to Jay Matson, who sent a copy to me.  It's wonderful.

After Sam's memorial at Knox in 2012, three of his former students--David Gustafson, Jay Matson and Dave Lunde--set about collecting some of his work and creating a book, A Little Farther: Selected Works of Samuel Moon. The cover was designed by Sam's daughter Victoria Moon Delaney, and Doug Wilson wrote a short biographical sketch of Sam.

 The book begins with those swimming poems, and though other poems are undated, some (like "Man in the Landscape") are identifiably from his Knox years.

  But about half of the book is given over to his last work, a beautiful and unusual prose piece called "The Dunes."   It's a fable about a meditation circle held by animals in the woods, presided over by a cat.  Though it reminds me of animal teaching stories in many traditions, it is also strikingly original.

 Within the terms of its world it deals realistically with spiritual questions, inspired by the natural world. Most conspicuously it has profound things to say about single-point meditation (which usually involves paying total attention to the breath of the present moment, as in Zen meditation)  and the Buddhist concept of emptiness.  It's in short chapters, and lately I've been reading one aloud before each of our evening meditations.

"The Dunes" also incorporates lines from those swimming poems, which suggests that Sam had been living a version of meditation for a very long time. Someone asked Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen master who founded the San Francisco Zen Center, why he meditated.  To prepare for old age and death, he replied.  Judging from "The Dunes," Sam Moon was about as prepared for death as a man could be.

 Unfortunately the book is hard to find.  The Knox Bookstore carried it before it sold itself out to a notorious national chain and stopped being an actual bookstore.  It was published by Village Books in Bellingham, Washington, but I can't find it on their website. Jay Matson has a few copies, and he thinks that David Gustafson does as well.  At the moment, they're your best bet.

  These three teachers--William Spanos, Doug Wilson and Sam Moon--formed my second year of college and a great deal of my subsequent life, with their teaching, their example and the worlds they opened to me through the books and writers we read.  Other teachers of this year, notably Donald Torrence and Phil Haring, made their mark as well. What remains to tell about this year surrounds and permeates these experiences.  There was a dark side to the intensity of this year, but also new friends and acquaintances, and the experiences I shared with them, which included books we read that weren't part of any classes. And then there's summer, and one of the strangest days of my life.  Laters.

History of My Reading: Seasons of Belief

"The law of chaos is the law of ideas,
Of improvisations and seasons of belief."

--Wallace Stevens: "Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas"

[Dedicated to the memory of Sharon Wilson (1935-2020]

The poetry I was reading--mostly for the first time--in Mr. Spanos' course that spring of 1966 seemed overwhelmingly dark, portentous and ominous. "Between the idea/and the reality/Between the motion/And the act/Falls the shadow..."  "A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,/ I had not thought death had undone so many..." (T.S. Eliot.)

  "There died a myriad,/and of the best, among them,/For an old bitch gone in the teeth,/ For a botched civilization..." (Ezra Pound)

  "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...And everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned..." (Yeats)

 It was grim, and we took it seriously. Though written decades before, it colored our present world.

But it wasn't just in this course.  Existentialism, often in its gloomier assertiveness, was everywhere on campus that spring, if memory and the Knox Student are reasonably indicative.  My notebook says I was reading Sartre's novel Nausea, so it's likely I had already purchased my paperback copy of his No Exit and Three Other Plays, where I read the immortal line, "Hell is other people."  

Existentialism was part of other campus experiences, like plays and movies, and courses in  philosophy, religion, theatre and some languages. However formed by the past, these were explanations, poetic and otherwise, of what we felt happening in the world around us, and what this said about the human condition.

 In particular, there was the ever more threatening escalation of the Vietnam War: another substantial increase in US troops had been announced in March.  But the continuing troubles on campus seemed threatening as well--the resurgent anxiety over the exodus of good teachers, the enervating politics over campus issues like women's hours and the planning committee.  These poems gave oracular context to an apocalyptic anxiety dampening and deadening our present, as it confirmed fears about a future deformed before it begins.

 Fortunately for me, I was also taking another course, and reading poetry that was quite different.  It was Douglas Wilson's American Studies course in poets Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens.

Wilson had constructed such combinations before (Henry Adams and Mark Twain in my first year) and would again.  Whitman and Stevens were admittedly kind of an odd couple (although in Poetry and the Age (1955), poet and critic Randall Jarrell followed his essay on Whitman with his essay on Stevens.)  But together with how Wilson taught this course, it was a combination that saved the spring.

Our basic Whitman text was Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose (Modern Library 1950), edited and with an introduction by John Kouwenhoven.  For Stevens we got his Collected Poems in hardback (the 1964 6th printing of the 1954 first edition, which I still have.)  We also had the paperback of his essays, The Necessary Angel. 

 There was more Stevens than made it into the Collected Poems, so late poems and other writings--I was particularly taken with his Adagia--were collected in Opus Posthumous.  We had the Prentice-Hall selection of critical writings by various authors, edited by Marie Borroff (titled simply Wallace Stevens.)  I no longer have this book but wish I did.  This series on individual writers (Twentieth Century Views) was invaluable, and these days I pick up every volume I come across.

The "Children of Adam" and "Calumus" sections early in Leaves of Grass are particularly marked up in my copy, suggesting in-class analysis, though later underlinings could be either from class or my own reading. Of my class work, two short papers survive, one on the key section 24, which includes discussion of Whitman's use of the word "kosmos" here as well as in a poem titled Kosmos.  I allude to a Leslie Fiedler interpretation, but it seems neither Fiedler nor I catch the relationship to the famous book by Alexander von Humboldt (Kosmos or Cosmos) which Whitman is known to have read.  (I know about it now mostly as a product of living next door to a university named after Humboldt.)

But I have even less surviving evidence from the Stevens half of the course.  Because I didn't want to deface the hardback, I bought a paperback of selected poems and marked that up. Unfortunately, it has quite recently disappeared.

 None of my Stevens papers survive either, including one that Mr. Wilson thought was publishable.  He assigned a major poem to each of us, but I don't even remember which one I wrote about. So partly by necessity I will be more general, though it is also appropriate, because the effect of this class then was more important than the details, and that applies as well to the lasting effects.

 In some ways, Whitman and Stevens were hard sells.  Even Whitman defenders admit he wrote a lot of bad or at least embarrassing poetry, and Stevens is either criticized for the philosophical aridity of his late work or the frivolity of his early poems.  In terms of the poetry we were learning to value, Whitman was at best an anomaly and Stevens as a modern was questionable (Mr. Spanos for example found him wanting.)

 Among Whitman's embarrassing qualities is his insistence on writing in detail about the body; despite our 1960s advanced thinking, we were made wary of such discussion by the cultural mores we had absorbed.  And until Stevens got super serious in ways we could at least analyze, he wrote poems and lines that Randall Jarrell noted in 1955 are "ordinarily considered" nonsensical, like the verse of Edward Lear.  (Actually I love Edward Lear.)

Douglas L. Wilson 

On the other hand there were currents we felt in our time that, once we were given permission and a few keys to it all, made these verses attractive.  Both writers rebelled against a staid time ("The steeples are empty and so are the people," Stevens wrote.)  Whitman was revolutionary: "Unscrew the locks from the doors!  Unscrew the doors from their jambs!"

 I can hear Wilson reading out this line.  Normally even-toned and even-tempered (though I can attest there was some wildness in him) he read them with glee.  He did not neglect the technical aspects, the historical and the textual complexities of these poems, but above all he enacted his enthusiasm, releasing the energy in the lines.

 At 31, Doug Wilson was one of the younger teachers at Knox, and he likely understood the new cultural currents that might bring new life to these poets in our time.  But he had to push we stick-in-the-mud 19 and 20 year olds, skeptical and suspicious, to hear the poems sing, and feel their exuberance.  "I sing the body electric!"  That registered: there was no more potent symbol for the mid-1960s than the electric guitar.

 Especially in the early poems in "Leaves of Grass," the ones in the original 1855 edition, Whitman is the personification of ebullience, even as he makes the physical sensations spiritual.  Wilson got us to hear these lines sing, and in the singing we heard the exuberance that becomes characteristically American--that runs through our literature from Whitman and Emerson to Thoreau and Twain, Thomas Wolfe and Faulkner, Henry Miller and Kerouac, Robert Bly and James Wright, and beyond the US to Hopkins and Garcia Marquez.

 In particular, Whitman had an heir who was reaching the height of his contemporary fame: poet and prophet Allen Ginsberg.  Wallace Stevens was also such an heir, we were to learn, as he himself acknowledged in a poem.  Wilson pointed out aspects of these poems that prompted insight and wonder.  His deep intelligence reassured us: it was academically okay to explore the visionary, the exuberant, the humanly transcendent, and maybe even the delightful. We knew poetry could be serious.  Now suddenly, poetry could be joyous.

from 1966 yearbook

Wilson's enthusiasm released a fundamental aspect of both Whitman and Stevens: the seriousness and importance of playfulness.  Looking back, I see that it was this quality that made the Beatles so deeply important to me, beginning this very school year.  It took seeing them in a comic movie (Help!) the previous summer to reveal the joy in their music to me.

 Their playfulness was subversive and at times satirical, just as Stevens' could be desperate.  But this stubborn need for playfulness--also often satirical and desperate, a defense against despair-- became a strong current in my life, especially for the next several years. At times it was perhaps too strong and overwhelming for my own good and that of my work, but seemingly essential to my survival.

 (I also note another Beatles connection: outside of class, Doug and I were talking about a song then new on the Gizmo jukebox, the Beatles' "We Can Work It Out." Doug said he admired the use of the 'long line' of the lyrics.  We were of course reading the conspicuous champion of the long line, Walt Whitman.  While I also admired that song, we differed on another--the biggest seller of 1965, "Wooly Bully" by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs.  Doug liked it.  I did not.)

 For Whitman, play was one of the ceremonies of innocence: "There was a child went forth every day And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day Or for many years or stretching cycle of years."

It is not a big jump from this to the identification both Whitman and Stevens found in aspects of nature and even other people, or the ultimate place they both gave to the Imagination.  

  Just how committed they were to the imagination is suggested by the fact that the many places and scenes evoked in their poems were the products of two basically stay-at-home guys. Whitman wrote about many more places than he ever traveled to; he rarely strayed from New York, at least until the Civil War. Except for Florida vacations, Steven’s poems about places outside of Connecticut and Manhattan were often based on business trips as an official of an insurance company.

 But the places and scenes became the essence of themselves and more than themselves, through imagination, and the skills of the singers.  Whitman made poetic music never heard before, and Stevens' music carries even his most abstract poems.

In her study on the phenomenon titled Exuberance: The Passion for Life, Kay Redfield Jamison notes, "The exuberance of play is, in some respects, a joyous improvisation on the knowledge newly acquired through exploration."  That suggests the flavor, not only of Whitman and Stevens, but of this class.  I recall a sense of communal excitement unmatched in any other course I took at Knox.

 In a talk he gave in 1994, Wilson spoke of his introduction to Wallace Stevens' work in graduate school, and his particular fondness for a couple of poems in Harmonium (Stevens' first book): "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" ("Only, here and there, an old sailor,/Drunk and asleep in his boots,/Catches tigers/In red weather.") and “Anecdote of the Jar” (I placed a jar in Tennessee...)  He conveyed that to us as well.

 Wilson credited Knox student James McCurry for involving him in Stevens' later, longer philosophical poems, through McCurry's honors project in the year previous to our course.  One of these poems, "Credences of Summer," frames the rest of his talk. There's a considerable body of critical work on Stevens now, but little existed when McCurry wrote his paper, Wilson said. That suggests it still didn't exist when we took this course. We were explorers in more ways than we knew.

 Reading Whitman now I realize again that one purpose of this course I took at 19 would be that I would have motive and context to read him again in my 70s. But that impetus does not come from the poet alone—the context of enthusiasm and exuberance is as much a creation of Wilson’s teaching as it is in the long gray lines on the page. Much more than Whitman, however, I’ve been reading Stevens for more than 50 years. In all that time, the experience of his poetry has been linked directly back to Doug Wilson and that class. There isn’t one without the other.

One of Valjean's children's books

I’m not the only one who was so inspired. Classmate Ted Szostkowski told Doug that he still reads Stevens, and has interested his daughter in reading him, too.

 The class meant a lot to Valjean McLenighan, my friend over the years. She noted this on the blog she started during her terminal illness, when she had dinner with Doug and Sharon Wilson in Chicago. After she died, a friend’s eulogy mentioned that one of her favorite poems was Stevens’ “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.” Its last lines:

  “We say God and the imagination are one...
How high the highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.”

 We were there together—around a long table, we felt these discoveries as a communal experience. And with former faiths assaulted all around, with things falling apart, we heard Whitman and Stevens sing of individual experience and the imagination as the human credo. So that this spring could be a season of belief.

Douglas L. Wilson remained teaching at Knox, through the crazed 60s and the apocalyptic anger that peaked in the early 70s, through the 80s when students not studying to become lawyers were studying to become doctors, and into the 1990s.

 He also directed the Knox library for awhile, and spent four years at Monticello, where he was the founding director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies.

 But his most prominent achievements are the many books and articles he wrote, edited or co-wrote with Knox history professor Rodney Davis on the life of Abraham Lincoln, under the aegis of the Lincoln Center they co-founded.

Wilson received multiple honors for Honor's Voice (1999) and Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words (2006.) Wilson's work is characterized by meticulous and judicious scholarship and clear writing with subtle structures of narrative.

 Besides being interesting and entertaining to read,  Honor's Voice for example is practically a guidebook on how to evaluate historical testimony, then how to carefully and creatively use it to adjust previous assumptions and gain new insights.  Lincoln's Sword is not only absorbing as history; as a book on writing I find it inspirational.

 In 1998 Wilson and Davis edited  Herndon's Informants, a collection of testimony about Abraham Lincoln solicited from his former friends by Lincoln's law partner, William H. Herndon.  This book so entranced novelist George Saunders that he used it extensively in his novel Lincoln in the Bardo, mentioning the book and its editors several times in the text.  This novel won a Pulitzer, a National Book Award and the Man Booker Award in the UK.  (Wilson learned of Saunder's praise from former student Barbara Cottral Bean.)

Wilson published his first book decades earlier when I was still at Knox: The Genteel Tradition,  nine essays by George Santayana that he edited, and for which he wrote a contextual introduction.  I have a generously signed copy.

Wilson was active in college matters in those years, and was a member of the Faculty Committee on Student Affairs, including the year I was a student member. He had a great deal more patience and tact than I ever could manage.

 I also note that in a 1969 essay in the student publication Catch (which seems in that year to be a substitute for both Dialogue and the literary journal that must not be named) he went after distribution requirements (which, he wrote, have lost credibility) and in particular the math and language requirements.

 "If the members of the faculty were to be judged as educated persons by such a test (say ability in one language and calculus), does anyone doubt what the result would be?  Nothing less than the 'Emperor's New Clothes' played out in academic regalia." He also notes that the advisory study titled the North Central Report had pointedly asked if these requirements aren't "mere political devices."  I believe Knox did dump these requirements, at least for awhile.  Had they done so a little earlier, I might actually be a Knox graduate.

 Doug Wilson and I have corresponded intermittently throughout the years, and we do so now. His friendship and guidance when I was a student, his calm good humor and his intelligent enthusiasm were vital to me.  His belief in me as a writer was encouraging then, and his belief in my writing now (at least, before this post) I keep as a kind of secret award from a highly credible source.

  As for my recurring exploration of Wallace Stevens, or at least enjoyment of his music, this has required a few additions to my book collection. Just this year I read Paul Mariani’s revelatory if uneven biography of Stevens, The Whole Harmonium.  A review of Mariani's book in the New Yorker had this choice quote: "And if a primary function of poetry is to expand and enrich the scope of a native language, Stevens has no equal in American English except Walt Whitman."

Some years back I lucked out by coming upon a copy of Wallace Stevens: Musing the Obscure by Ronald Sukenick, one of my favorite contemporary fictionists since the 70s. Published in 1967, this book was his doctoral thesis at Brandeis, and contains his interpretations (or "readings") of many poems (coincidentally or not, Mariani’s often coincide.)

 I've got Stevens’ Collected Poems in paperback now as well as the old hardback. But I usually kept at bedside and at times carried in my backpack the compact paperback called Palm at the End of the Mind, a generous selection (with chronology) edited by his daughter Holly Stevens, which I also got at Knox. Eventually I wore it out, until the binding disintegrated (the line across 'End of' in the scan above is a rubber band.)

recently I acquired a newer edition, which is a little larger but almost as handy (though the chronology of poems is left out of the table of contents, alas.)  I've also replaced my old--and now MIA--Opus Posthumous with the revised and expanded edition.

inside title page,1931 edition

I’ve got a hardback copy of Stevens' letters, and the pride and joy of my collection: a 1931 second edition of his first book, Harmonium. It’s a library discard so not quite auction-worthy, but the price certainly was right. I got it for a dime, discarded by the public library of my childhood. Tells a story right there.

 Here's another story: the first edition of Harmonium sold so poorly (about 100 copies) that it was remaindered, and priced at the original bargain basement of Filene's department store in Boston at 11 cents.