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Youthful Poet
Some Background Info
Introduction. During my career as a poet, I wrote about 450 poems. A few were published, but most were not. I wrote my first poem at age 7 in Europe, and the last but one at age 27 while stationed with the U.S. Army in West Germany during the 1970s. Some points of detail on all this may help you, dear reader, find perspective on my long day as a writer (over sixty years now, counting those few poems written during my childhood). Yes, I am in my seventieth year as I write this, and still going strong. It's 15 December 2018, to be precise, and this website is probably my best Christmas present to myself aside from having a nice, warm Christmas with family and friends (including at least one cat).
Long Story Short. The entire purpose of what turned into a Napoleonic epic below was to tell you simply that I stopped writing poetry at age 27, having been at it for ten years seriously and actually twenty years from when I wrote my first poem as a child in Luxembourg. I was a published poet by age 19, but most of my output languished in a thick binder (well over 400 pages) until I had a friend type it up in recent years and published it. I gave up years ago on all that crap about submitting to various strangers who could care less, and who are generally interested either in how they can make a profit, or how they can feed their own ego. So most of it languished in a box in the garage or under the bed, so to speak. Make no mistake: I have never lost faith in my gift as a writer, and I am absolutely certain that in the end, the work will speak for itself. There are always those who don't understand, or who don't even read but want to throw rocks. I could care less. They are barking dogs. I am doing this project (Galley City) online to find my readers—the good, perceptive souls who will enjoy my work and make it into some small part of their life and memory. I am publishing my work (including the teenage SF novel now titled Far Wars for fun, originally Cosmopolis: City of the Universe) to give some recognition that a talented but ignored (and enough times bullied) teenage author deserved or deserves. The work will speak for itself, and that is the main theme of my website. And thank you for visiting.
Three Collections as of 2018. Continuing my adventures (see below) after driving to California, and deciding I wasn't ready to settle down, I enlisted in the U.S. Army. With a degree in English, I couldn't quite get a commission in that post-Vietnam era, so I satisfied myself with a wonderful opportunity (and it was stellar) to see Europe again, travel all over to wonderful cities in which I sometimes spoke the language, and get 'three hots in a cot' working for Uncle Sam. It wasn't always easy, and it never is being a single soldier stationed far from home in the rather brisk, hup-two environment of the Green Machine, but I made the most of its challenges. During that time, one of my novels was a manuscript titled provisionally Jon+Merile. Written in a melancholy air, filled with nostalgia for the lost world of a New England college town, I created a somewhat John Updike-like romantic story of a young, broke poet mowing lawns around the Yale campus while having a tempestuous affair with a lonely young faculty wife (Merile, pronounced like Merrill) whose professor husband is AWEL (Absent Without Emotional Leave) in Australia on a paleo dig, and digging the chicks there, and talking divorce to his poor, beautiful young wife. Years later, when I finally got the ms typed and digitized, along with all my old poetry, I saw that it had merit. So I created a troika (threesome) of (1) On Saint Ronan Street, as the novel is finally titled; (2) Cymbalist Poems, collection of some of my poems as if written by the fictitious hero of On Saint Ronan Street; and the two together in a volume titled 27duet. The '27' represents my own flameout as a poet and transition to prose (fiction and nonfiction) and of course is a nod to the mythological age when rock stars die. In this page, you'll find my own scientific hypothesis about explaining the 27 myth, while noting that I chose to survive and continue living and creating. So Cymbalist Poems (a play on words about the Symbolist movement in the arts; see Wikipedia for a quick lookup.
The Big One: Postcards to My Soul. I have in recent years published a large selection from that binder of 425+ poems I typed up from scraps of paper in the power station at New Haven Harbor, age 23ish, 1974ish. That collection, organized by years (
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What Do I Mean: Career As A Poet? The main reason for writing this page at all is to let you, dear reader, in on some perspective. I began writing as a seven year old, and I'll talk about that in a moment. I was passionate about story telling even as a toddler, before I knew how to read or write. When I did learn to write, the magic had arrived. I began my fervent scribbling as a child, and by age ten was borrowing my mother's portable typewriter to peck (with one finger) stories that were the germ of my later devotion to writing fiction, nonfiction, and poetry as well as an early start (age 17) at professional journalism as a summer interne reporter at a metro newspaper in New England. I won't turn this into a massive autobiography. Rather, I have a purpose for inserting these notes to frame my poetry career in perspective. That career (I was a published poet by age 19) lasted primarily from age 14 to age 27. now about that…
Flameout Age 27. This is an extremely interesting matter. At least, being an egghead, I think it is fascinating, for several reasons. This turns into a long story as I am typing, so I'll make it several grafs (journalist terminology for paragraphs). Not to be coy, 27 is the notorious age of rock star deaths (Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and others. See for example Wikipedia. When those three died (I was finishing my UConn studies) I happened to hear a lecture by Prof. Uhlig of the German Dept, which unwittingly tied in with this theme (and, as I will elaborate briefly, our human biology; it's in our DNA).
Professor Uhlig Speaks. First, as an English Major at the University of Connecticut (late 1960s, early 1970s) I studied not only Literature but also History (my absolutely real passion on the nonfiction side) and Classics (propelled by early exposure to Latin in the old Mass as a Catholic; and four years of Latin at a Catholic high school) and Languages (because of my European origins in Luxembourg, West Germany, and France as a U.S. Army brat with a Luxembourgeois mother). I had already been translating (in high school) the work of Catullus, Virgil, Ovid, and other Romans; was well exposed to the great U.S. Transcendentalists of the 1800s plus Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, et al., and I discovered other global poets on my own (Italian Cesare Pavese, Chilean Pablo Neruda, Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, French Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine and a lot of others… plus the English standards from Beowulf to Chaucer to Shakespeare and (my favorite) W. H. Auden… in other words, it was a grand exposure, a banquet, and I ate it up. In my scattered course load, I took a German Lit course from a Professor Uhlig. By then I was head over heels about the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926; who was actually from Prague, in the old Austro-Hungarian empire but wrote in German and, like so many European artists, became a Paris poet for a time 1902-1910). My favorite Rilke poem was and remains Autumn Day (Herbsttag). To make a long story short in that context, Dr. Uhlig spent an entire lecture on the topic that lyric poets (like Rilke) generally tended to stop writing poetry before about the age of 30, and turned to prose or other matters. In a different context, the great French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891, born not far from where I wrote my first poem as a child) created his enduring work as a teenager, stopped writing at about age 20, and went off to unrelated adventures until his death at 37. So again, bottom line, Professor Uhlig's lecture stayed in my consciousness for years. When by age 27 I stopped writing poetry, it came as an expected terminus. I wasn't surprised or disappointed. I had already worked as a journalist by then, and written several novels.
Biological Aspect (DNA). It seems clear to me that, normatively speaking, 27 is around the peak of our biological reproductive arc as a species. There are of course countless younger/older variations to be regarded case by case, but I think as outliers. Consider that in previous ages, humans did not live as long as we on average do since about 1900 (roughly the introduction of significant hiegenic and medical protocols from sterile surgeries to routine bathing to food preservatives and sanitary water supplies in urban glomerations). It's not clear that the addition of optimal conditions will in any way increase the natural life span (again very normative or average), but with the elimination of significant mortality factors through social and industrial progress, it looks very much as if our peak reproductive years lie in the mid-20s. All of that said, as a writer, and a student of Literature and publishing, I find interesting natural correlations in the arts (of which I'll write another day). Most importantly, I have personally come to the opinion that there is an important hormonal transition in that age zone. In one sense, it may be said that we mate, we become parents, and then we nurture. We settle down. And some of the extreme living and extremely expressive artists tragically meet an end as dramatic as their famous lifestyles. As I write this, I am particularly thinking of the late, talented English singer Amy Jade Winehouse (1983-2011) who died at 27. I don't subscribe to myths or conspiracy theories; I am strictly a hard-headed, logical thinker and I do see a biological basis to all this. A study of modern publishing and marketing suggests much merit in this idea, including the branding and categorization of fiction and poetry into such categories as Young Adult (YA, about 18-22ish) and New Adult (NA, about 20ish to 26ish or 27ish). For various reasons, also, at last half of all readers in these categories are adults over 30. I'll be blogging about all this as I get Galley City fully rolling. So what about me at age 27?
Survivor at 27 and Beyond. As I mentioned above, I was prepared by age 20 or so (based on the Uhlig lecture) for a transition around age 27. I had a hard, sometimes brutal early life, and as an independent soul with a great deal of determination, I was writing novels already as a teenager. I finished my SF novel Cosmopolis: City of the Universe at 19 while a sophomore at UConn. I had written hundreds of poems by then (which are now published in at least three volumes, a few of them duplicated). In all, I wrote about 450 surviving poems by age 27. I was not allowed to drive until I reached emancipation at age 21, so I spent many years at considerable risk hitch-hiking by day and night, in snow and rain and sunshine, on New England highways and byways. I hitched thousands of miles by myself across the USA at around age 23. At that age, I was about ready to leave Connecticut and strike out for California, where my parents had moved several years earlier. So the first closure of my life as a poet came in a rather factory-like building in New Haven Harbor. I was working there as a security guard, in an industrial environment that resembled something between post-Apoc and an Upton Sinclair urban nightmare. Between clock rounds, I sat at a portable typwriter with a box of my life's scribblings at my side (about 400 poems by then, on napkins, notebook paper, and other scraps). I had purchased a ream (500 sheets)of fine, durable onion skin legal size typing paper at the Yale Co-Op, plus a sturdy (also legal size) black doctoral thesis binder with steel clamp back (which would last centuries, I'm sure, and it's still sitting here at my side today). Over a week or two, while trucks roared and ship whistles let off steam and gulls wheeled outside and my supervisor came once per shift, shaking his head and quickly leaving, I typed 425 pages of my life's poetry. I added a note to each, as best I could remember the time and place of its writing. I think I was clearly, consciously, setting the parameters for ending my poetry career. I fully anticipated flame-out, but I am a determined survivor at heart and was not about to contemplate life's end. I took my share of risks (hitching across the USA by myself, with $40 in my pocket, and a home-made backpack enclosing one blanket and for shelter a plastic garbage bag; it was summer 1972, and sunny). I have also driven it several times over the years—an epic journey with its share of remarkable moments.
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