from Kansas
with love, the music of Ken Irby
for
Ed Schelb
Prelude
A triangulation of texts for Black Spring Lawrence
Issue
We thought of stopping in Kansas
City, but when we
got there we found a train ready and a crowd
of hospitable Kansians to take us on to Lawrence,
to which we proceeded. I shall not soon forget
my good days there with . . . true Westerners
of the noblest type.
–
Walt Whitman, "Lawrence and Topeka, Kansas"
(in
Specimen Days)
. . . from your
St. Joe to present Lawrence
is a cut as far
and continental as the reach
to California
– Ken Irby, "To Max Douglas"
. . . I have partially explored your charming city
(Lawrence) . . . and, standing on Oread hill, by the
university, . . . have launch'd my view across broad
expanses of living green, in every direction – I have
again been most impress'd, I say, with that feature of
the topography of your western central world – that
vast
Something, stretching out in its unbounded scale,
unconfined, which there is in these prairies,
combining the real and the ideal, and beautiful as
dreams.
–
Walt Whitman, "The Prairies An Undelivere'd Speech"
(in
Specimen Days)
the mustard seed falling through
the Westward-facing heart
beat
germinates...
intense green, after the first rains
out of the dun
–
Ken Irby, "To Max Douglas"
He is more alive than ever he was. He has
earned immortality. He is not confined to
North Elba (NY) nor to Kansas. He is no
longer working in secret. He works in public.
And in the clearest light that shines on this
land.
–
Henry David Thoreau, "The Last Days of John Brown"
to talk to those now gone
is natural, to you especially
–
Ken Irby, "To Max Douglas"
My early ideas of Kansas were
formed by a strange and vivid
group – The Wizard of Oz, Truman Capote's In
Cold Blood, and what
we learned in school of John Brown. Add to this the Kansas
City
Chief O Gauge Lionel train engine I had as a child, the glory
of
the legendary sounding Atchinson, Topeka & Santa Fe line.
These ideas and images of Kansas
began to undergo a
transformation in the spring of 1969.
That was when I first heard
of Lawrence, Kansas, from a self-
styled wildboy whose name I don't recall (we'll call him Mike).
Mike's father was a professor at the University of Kansas
in
Lawrence and a visiting lecturer, for a term, at nearby Dartmouth
College. Mike and I were juniors in high school and found
each
other and hung out together, via getting high and talking
about
and listening to music. When he was comfortably stoned, Mike
would get homesick for Lawrence and tell me wild, vivid tales
of
the life there. It seemed to be a place filled with
revolutionaries and drug action, political awareness, and
violence.
At the same time, Mike would wax poetic about the landscape
there, so different from the rocky New England terrains he
got
tired of having to hike in.
Mike was a good talker, and
he left me with such a vibrant
image of Lawrence that I determined to visit the town someday.
I've not yet been physically
to Lawrence,
but I've already traveled there through the years via figures
real, imagined, and historical. My sense of a deep connection
with
Lawrence is via writing and writers, publishers, and editors.
Lawrence has been for me a beacon of hope and spirit, especially
as
exemplified in the work of Jim McCrary and my friendship with
him, and,
now, also with his Honor, Boog Highberger, Jim edited and
published an
always exciting journal, a tryptic-styled three page foldout
called SMELT Money. It presented poetry with an edge
towards
visual layouts and wide play with letterings and phrasings.
I looked
forward to every issue and, later, felt very honored to have
my own work
appear in it. Jim presented work I always found inspiring,
work that one didn't
find anywhere else in terms of its direction and vision. SMELT
Money had a genuinely original vision that was truly
refreshing.
Boog Highberger I learned of
via the Mail Art Network, in a
call for an assembling journal Boog did called @RtH*Le.The
name
intrigued me with its Dadaistic sense of humor and aggression,
so
I sent in the required number of original pages and waited
for
the mail to one day bring the completed collection. I was
stunned when it did arrive, for it was the best assembling
journal
I'd ever seen – with a really beautiful cover and excellent
notes
by Boog and page after page of brilliant works by some of
the top
innovators in Mail Art and Visual Poetry.
I also learned in a roundabout
way that Jim worked with
William S. Burroughs, who had become associated with the Lawrence
mystique I’d created in my mind as well as those of
hordes of Burroughs’ fans.
In addition, I’d started reading the superlative journal
First Intensity, which had
been Lawrence based, and I knew the work of Judy Roitman,
with whom
I shared a love for Larry Eigner's poetry. But my true
inspirations were Jim's and Boog's productions. I appreciated
very much their sharp eye and ear for verbal/visual confluences,
and for the wilder side of these.
One Lawrence poet whose work
greatly affected me from the
outset is Ken Irby. I first learned of Irby's work from the
gifted poet and essayist Ed Schelb. Ed was wildy excited by
Irby's work and showed me copies of Irby works he'd made from
books in the Special Collections at the University of Wisconsin-
Milwaukee's Golda Meir library. Ed especially showed me the
way
through passages of Catawpa and OREXIS and
directed my attention
to Irby's musical phrases and close, near mystical attention
to
the landscape. From Ed I thus gained a great opening into
Irby's
work, especially evident in subsequent years with further
reading. I
always carry with me Ed's shared insights and his deep
enthusiasm for the work.
Here
I want to focus on Irby’s To Max Douglas for
this early
collection of the poet’s serves as a grand entry into
many of his
touchstone concerns with local/West moving topologies, histories,
historical and literary figures, and deep sense of kinship
not
only with these landscapes and locales, but also with the
poets of these.
It's very important in regarding Irby's work (and life) to
honor those
who form a fellowship in which he finds a way to locate love
and be/longing
in the world. (I especially have in mind David Bromige, Ed
Dorn, Robert Grenier,
Robert Kelly, and Michael McClure.) It is a shared conversation,
a gathering of
voices and heart:
the breath on the edge of the lip
into the mouth, some
where the baseline of the heart
to jump on off
of love
this highest shove
To
Max Douglas is a wide ranging travel book of
visionary/spiritual journeying that takes Kansas as a site
of
departure and arrival, a site of homecoming, a place where
visions
and voices have their fullest resonances, even when heard
from
far away. Kansas is a sounding ground, a tuning fork, for
many
routes, of many roots: "what's happening at home // the
towns of
Kansas," Irby asks from California in the title poem
"To Max Douglas."
And in "Delius" he has Harry Crosby en route to
the Mediterranean reading
Hart Crane's The Bridge "in the shadows of that
room that smelled
like childless parlors on the plains."
To Max Douglas, the
book, is three separate yet subtly
interrelated poems, the eponymously named first poem, followed
by the poems "Jesus" and "Delius." I find
the three most clearly linked
by the figure of the biker/hiker – the man on the move
towards a
spiritual/artistic goal, an intenisty that swells forth into
immensities,
up to and past the point of death. In "To Max Douglas,"
for example,
there is the opening line: "We hiked the long late Sunday
afternoon,"
and among so many other travelers along the way appear the
biker
("So a last morning motorcycle in the Berkeley Hills
/ disappears
into the gulf") and the hitchhikers:
Stanley Baker 22
Harry Stroup 20
hitching in the Sur
In
"Jesus":
Jesus the revolutionary
the man of the wheel
standing beside the road
carrying a motorcycle flat
Tarot trump of the Hitchhiker...
recurring wanderer of the Great Plains...
In
"Delius":
but it would be the younger man
who hiked each summer over Norway
untiring on the trails of the Coast Range
–
and percieved by Irby from the Coast Range of the Pacific
Northwest as both musician and poet are
...following
a hearing as if seeking a homestead
into music
that
homestead being again linked back to the plains ("the
childless parlors on the plains").
I’d
like to focus on "To Max Douglas" as the poem I
find the
best gateway into Irby's deep felt kinship with landscapes
and
fellow poets of these. The poem works well as a guide for
the
reader as it's also a guide book for the then recently deceased
poet Max Douglas. It's a poem of journeys West, as well as
one
back into Kansas, bringing sites/sights/cites vividly to both
reader and
Max:
between those Sunday points of Northeast Kansas
that isn't home
it's what the heart is given
to make home out of
While
a good half of the poem certainly has to do with Westward
journeyings and North-South trajectories, to me it's
Kansas – and the Kansas sections of the poem –
that constitute the focal
point of a triangulation of journeyings, directions, discoveries,
memories, and references. As Irby puts it, writing from
California: "We both, Max, face out / to reach the Great
Plains in
the back of the head."
In his “Philosophy
of Composition,” Edgar Allan Poe asserts
that the theme of the death of a beautiful woman is the ideal
for
(hetero male) poets to make use of. In "To Max Douglas,"
it's the death of a
beautiful young male poet: "your high golden head the
apple / roman beauty of your parents' single eye." The
death is
learned of at second hand, from another poet: “David
said, did
you know / Max Douglas is dead, of an overdose." Throughout
the
poem, Irby plays on the needle which brings Max death, and
the
ways it works in relation to proverbial images of needles:
the camel on the back
can only come home
through the eye of the needle
and:
...if i were where you
see through the eye of your needle
and:
your open eye was finer than a needle's
to hang loose by
to
the sadness and pleading "e" sounds of:
and the lonely heart alone
hears ‘needle
ease
ease
ease’
There's
a shift from needles having to do with eyes, to
this,"ease," or "e's," the voice. If one
thinks of needles in terms
of a compass, it marks a change of direction in the emotions,
the
outreaching to the dead Max. As Whitman has it: "My voice
goes
after what my eyes can't reach."
The reaching out from this intense
longing is to try to show
Max that he is not alone, yet to mourn his aloneness also,
that which
led him away from the fellowship of Kansas-love, and of poets,
shared:
O Maxie
what did you do
to be so sad?
turns
into the beautful mourning-music:
it must have been hopeless
and what do the hopeless
do but go on, to, "What's
on the other side of despair?"
air
the air of October
blowing your spirit
back in my face
bringing
the need to respond to that spirit, so that voice and
music bring ongoing sound, life to one who's always been quiet:
What good does it do
to talk to the dead? . . .
to talk to those now gone
is natural, to you especially
who hardly spoke at all while you were here
The
little I know of Max Douglas, "Missouri Max," as
Irby calls
him – was that he was from Missouri yet loved Kansas.
A poet of
vast promise, with a book out, he died very young. This early
death brings the sense of interruption, incompletion which
haunts the poem, and drives it – with an energy to find
a sense of
"jointure" which the needle could not thread, and
which can be
shared with/to Max via the poem.
The poem IS "TO Max
Douglas" in a very ALIVE way – via inner
conversation with Max, to continue on with the intense longing
for talk but barely begun:
We met only once
At Bromige's, talked of Dorn, Ratzel and Sauer
before dinner, never again
This
one meeting, to be continued in the talk in the
poem, is linked with the search for the "jointure"
of three
lines:
I was off to Oregon in the morning
the line of that journey
and the line of that poem
are eternal, are what this still is getting at
the line of the continent
Yet
to accomplish this, Irby needs to turn back to Kansas
with Max, as, immediately on hearing of Max's death, Irby
returns:
so young, so unwanted, thought, so unknown
to himself – what's happening at home?
the towns of Kansas would be the Flint Hills
but that NE corner facing St Joe across the Missouri
And
what is there? A site of poets, poetry of strange
histories developing:
...poor
lost Missouri Max, McClure
was born in Marysville
you were still
in the whirlpool of the continent
And
in the whirlpool, the plunge into voices, histories:
but the first bridge
was at St Joseph
the wonder is, Max, did you cross
it first, going down to Lawrence
...before you entered
the Bloody Land?
Irby presents violences which
begin with the land itself at
the core of a history which will affect Max himself:
. . . the boundary between
Kansas and Missouri is a zone
as violent of movement
as the San Andreas Fault