No matter what I’ve told myself over the years, I’ve always been steeped in this kind of Gothic. A childhood in the rust belt around folding farms and closing steel Mills, all just a few degrees separated from day-to-day existence… but close enough that I had a front seat to the sort of geographic necrophilia that happens in the country.
I can never quite meditate it out of my bones.
The Gothic that makes for good television is a more urbane kind a Gothic that lacks that determinism. It’s a Gothic without determinism. It languishes and chokes like the endless summers and New Orleans. Undying, but never quite replenished. Strangled.
This Gothic that infects me, this Ohio River Valley Gothic, is imbued with that determinism. It means you know where you are and hang the fuck on, no matter what. Grit your God damn teeth, spit and keep moving. There’s no escape from pain. What escape exists is only temporary and comes with a hefty price. Better to grit and hang on.
The Southern Gothic languishes in the past. the Midwest Gothic is all hard and deterministic, ike the high desert winters. But the Ohio River Valley Gothic waxes in wanes. It ebbs and flows. It both languishes and is bone and sinew built with determinism. This is what the river brings, deposits like high water mud and driftwoodbone and garbage from up river. It rides in on cross currents.
—
no escaping the massive corn fields etched into the imagination.
we take turns playing scarecrow as the water rises, biding time
Know that your work speaks only to those on the same wavelength as you.
Jean Cocteau, Diary of an Unknown (1988)
I’ve been active and enagaged in my development as poet since I was 10 years old. From conversations I’ve had with other poets, I know that was probably entirely too young to know who and what you are in the world. But that’s what it was. I just knew. I was a word junkie from the first time I put pencil to paper and wrote something that meant something to me… a poem about a sunset. Looking back, what a wonderful gift. To know. Also looking back: what a terrible knowledge to have. Most poets wander into it later. They discover a knack and become addicts. They wander into the literary trap house and there I am, already flopped out on a mattress, poems and prosey bits strung around amongst the rats and field mice, far gone and now just a cautionary tale they mostly choose to ignore.
The problem then is figuring out the way. When you’re 10 and have no in-person guidelines to work from, you go searching. Before the great gogging Google Machine, all the search spiders were intuitive. And no matter what anyone tells you, sometimes intuition is just plain wrong. So it took me a while. I missed out on some life, maybe, waiting for life to happen. But I like to think I’ve made up for that, too. Once I found Walt Whitman and then the Beats, I found a pathless land. I stopped waiting and I went. College was a pretext to find some way through the world. More than once I fell into the trap of thinking about writing as a way to make a living. I wandered into space filler jobs, avoiding career and the potting and rooting effect that can have. I eventually stumbled into teaching almost accidentally, trying to find a safe shelter to write from and found probably the only other vocation I will ever have, which I was, at length, exiled from. But the words were still there.
Now, I know there are “professional” poets… which is to say, they get paid to go be poets. They lead workshops. They write reviews. They teach in creative writing programs. They publish in Poetry. They have a well-earned niche. That’s never been my experience, but one of the things I picked up along the way… or maybe it was something I had to begin with… was a deep impatience for the Great and Wonderous Oz of the poetry culture engine. I read recently on Substack an article referencing something the author(s) called an ecomonic culture engine. And with all due respect to the author(s), it did bring to mind the man behind the green curtain.
But I do understand the mechanical universe as a metaphor. It’s one I fall into a lot because it is the aptest description not only of the universes that people build but of the way we are bound, by our blood and bone roots, to describe: the universes we collectively experience that we haven’t built. After so long, you start to see the giant pistons spinning the earth pushing somewhere above the clouds.
I suppose, based on my position – or lack thereof – in mainline poet culture, I could think of myself as an “outsider.” I used to. I think “outsider art” might still be a term used to describe art that happens outside of mainstream machinery. But anyone I ever met who used it was careful to delineate between “outsider” art and “folk” art, which — which, as far as I can tell, has more to do with what the skyline outside your window looks like.
The standard equations: Mountains + “unschooled creativity = folk art. Brick, steel, and cement + “unschooled” creativity = “outsider” art. If you include the variable of schooling the equation looks more like the ideal gas equation.
One more fucking niche. No thanks. Leave the marketing to the suits in marketing. Just make sure to pay them their percentage. Which is, if anyone is being honest, what the poet culture engine is about: marketing.
That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of good work that comes out of the poet culture engine. There is. But like all engines, the poet culture is a closed system. Sometimes it needs new gas or fresh oil. But the basic operation of the engine doesn’t change.
I think if I had found any recognition when I was younger and believed it was inevitable it would have been the death of my work. At least, that’s what I tell myself now, at 50 years old, 40 of them writing and focusing on being a writer. But I like where I am. I’m not headlining readings and workshops. I’m not quoted in articles. But I am still writing.
River City Mick 