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Down Wind, Down River: New and Selected Poems by William
Witherup . 2000. 178pp. Paperback, $16.95. West End Press,
P. O. Box 27334, Albuquerque, NM 87125.
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I
often think with envy of the poets of 18th century
England, writing in a country that was small enough everyone
knew everyone else. They might not all have been friends—indeed,
some of their quarrels were legendary, but to a considerable
extent, they recognized each other as citizens of the Republic
of Letters.
In
contrast, it is possible to pass most of one’s literary life
in these United States without even being aware stellar talents
exist among us. Curiously, the fashion for creative writing
programs hasn’t really helped, as most academics write only
for themselves, and for their professorial colleagues.
“Poetry,” Hart Crane lamented, “is about to become
all the rage in America, and it’s a dead bore to anticipate.”
He solved his own problem with this by jumping overboard
into the Gulf of Mexico
If
it hadn’t been for David and Pat Brodsky of Kansas City, I
would never have heard of Bill Witherup.
A few years ago they introduced me to his work; I was
pleased to publish a short appreciation by Pat in my late
newsletter, People’s Culture. Then Bill connected up with John Crawford, resulting in this retrospective
volume. For various
unavoidable reasons, it has taken five long years for me to
be able to write a proper essay on this important book.
Shelley said poets are “unacknowledged legislators
of the world.” In any real Republic of Letters on this continent,
Bill Witherup would be a Senator.
This
is a man who has literally paid his dues, as a laborer, in
several trades and trade unions.
He has a special affinity, it appears, for trees, as
he is built like an oak. But like many such, he’s has his share of hard
traveling—stupid bosses, aches and injuries, the hidden pain
and stress of manual toil.
Here’s “Working Class Haiku”:
Scorpion shadow
Of the backhoe falls
On a ditch deep as my grave.
Then
a coda:
I was tripping out on the feathery
patterns I was making in the sand
with my square edge shovel when
the super appeared at the ditch
bank and said: “Jesus Christ, Witherup,
we’re not making a work of art here!
Hurry it up, man!”
Who,
having done such work and under such a master, has not resented
the mentality he enforces in his slaves, what Hamlet calls
“the spurns that patient merit of th’ unworthy takes”?
Witherup
is haunted by death—graves, ditches, burial.
These poems are filled with nightmares: “My mattress
floats in an ocean of newspapers/through the eternal night
of the fifty states.” Reading his work, I am convinced all over again
that true poetry must plumb such depths, or be rightly forgotten.
The
nightmares began for him in the days of his youth in the dusty
nuclear towns around the Hanford plant in rural Washington
State, where his father worked.
I wonder who of us, growing up in the Fifties, either
in the U.S. or in Russia, didn’t fear that at any moment,
we could all be converted into ash?
How did that hideous, omnipresent possibility infect
our minds, and sew our bodies with Strontium?
There are poems here that express the subtle, secret
poisons pulsing within. On his own father dying: “He hums with prostate
cancer./Carried plutonium home in his underwear,/Ashes of
Trinity, ashes of Nagasaki.”
Those responsible are named: “And there are demons
on the overpasses/In labcoats and dark goggles, checking/Dosimeters
for permissible radiation levels.” The “suits” themselves will regret their insane
negligence: “They will pound their chests,/Grief-stricken;
ask themselves/Why they did not read the poets?”
By
the Sixties, Witherup was in on the “scene” in Santa Fe and
San Francisco, and his poems of that era ably evoke the free-wheeling
spirit of the times. But he was already deeply in touch with the
real world, with nature with a capital N.
Indeed, the list of animals and insects and plants
given poems here reads like a biological catalog of Western
America: “His cabin is damp—/March storms battered the porthole,/And
a school of sow bugs poured in.” Wasps, hornets, an enormous moth, and water
striders. And birds. From “On a Dead Swallow,” this sharp line:
“your tail two columns of blue smoke.”
I’m particularly taken with the poet’s fondness for
crows. “I love crows,” he writes. “If I met one human size/I would invite him
into my living room.”
We
are, Witherup perceives, unquestionably a part of nature,
yet why are we so often at war with nature?
How has the Unnatural become Natural?
Chemicals to green and brighten suburban lawns are
deadly, and “sear the dearest freshness/Deep down things.”
Americans “hide their suffering/hide their death” in
prisons, mental hospitals and foreign wars
Other
sections of the book deal with prisons in some detail. An entire series is devoted to Soledad, where
the African-American prisoner George Jackson was murdered
by guards. Our factories are like prisons too; in a cannery
The boss’s old sea turtle face
rises from deep water.
We are about to get orders
to murder five million squid
for the gourmet tables
of the Greek dictator.
From
such dismal circumstances, what else could help but some kind
of rough solidarity, “unless you are one of those academic
poets/Who has never roughened his paws with labor.”
To
save his sanity, Witherup fixates on ritual objects such as
a Zuni fetish. He is thoroughly acquainted with the Chinese
masters of poetry, who faced the emperors of their own times,
and sought solace in stark landscapes.
He invents his own rituals, as in “For a Still-Born
Niece”:
A thousand miles from you, sister,
I plunge my wrists in the ocean
until they are braceleted with salt.
Then I raise them to the sun
as beacons for the child’s soul.
Though
he often experiences near-fatal submersion, Witherup salutes
Life, contradicting Wagner’s absurd claim that love is fused
with Death. This is,
indeed, “a journey that should be made.” Ave atque vale, Senator Witherup!
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