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e.e. in the U.S.S.R.

In America, Arts & Letters, Books, Emerson, Humanities, liberal arts, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Modernism, Philosophy, Poetry, Politics on August 25, 2022 at 6:00 am

This piece originally appeared here in Discourse Magazine.

Born in 1894, E.E. Cummings—poet, painter, playwright, novelist—is known for his innovative idioms, very unconventional punctuation and experimental forms. He is less remembered for his staunch commitment to philosophical and political individualism, in the tradition of 19th-century transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, which found its fullest expression in his opposition to the ascendent Marxism and communism of the early 20th century.

Cummings was raised by Unitarian parents around Harvard Yard (his father taught at the university) at a time when the chief modes of transportation were not yet by automobile. The ebullient young poet enjoyed his academic milieu with its residual transcendentalism. Even the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., an allegedly cold realist then serving on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, acknowledged Emerson as his inspiration and wrote about “an echo of the infinite” and “a hint of the universal law.”

An urban center for publishing and speaking and all varieties of expatiation, Cambridge, Massachusetts, was at the time home to American intellectuals such as William James, Josiah Royce and Charles Eliot Norton, as well as to the nascent pragmatism that would eclipse republicanism, Unitarianism and other New World paradigms in its importance to the identity of educated Bostonians and Harvard highbrows. Burgeoning industry generated prosperity and energetic commercialism in Boston and its surrounds. The Civil War had tempered the optimism of earlier generations, but vibrant efforts to fashion a uniquely American culture and to break free from the constraints of European customs and traditions continued to shape the growing market for newspapers and books.

In this stimulating climate, under his parents’ care, young Cummings cultivated his creative talents, especially for poetry. He entered Harvard University in 1911, published his first poem in 1912, graduated in 1915 and earned a master’s degree from Harvard in 1916. As a college student he became, according to biographer Susan Cheever, “a new man, an archetypal questioner, and with this newness would come a different kind of poetry.”

Originality was the hallmark of American writing long before Cummings. The national literature, such as it was, sought discontinuity and inventiveness. The crass humor of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), the gothic grotesqueness of Edgar Allan Poe, the bold activism of Margaret Fuller, the caustic realism of Edith Wharton, the performative independence of Henry David Thoreau, the shocking obscenity of Walt Whitman—each contributed to the paradox of the emergent American canon: its derivative novelty and mimetic resistance to outside influences.

Strictly rhyming meter and syntax in American poetry gave way to a rebellious free verse and democratic improvisation. The ostentatious vocabulary and syntactical pretensions of upper-class Europeans were not suited to rugged American prose, which—as in Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”—featured common speech, plain diction and vulgar colloquialisms. But how far could writers push boundaries? How could they transcend the inescapable past or reimagine inherited orthographies? Could language exist without recognizable precedents, rules or structures? What approaches had not been tried? What poems could satisfy the endless aspiration for American ingenuity?

Stretching the Limits

Cummings may have stretched the limits as far as they could go. His anarchic, avant-garde style signaled his rogue, rollicking individualism, which, in his view, defied the dehumanizing forces of collectivism. This is not the space to examine his extensive oeuvre or undertake close readings of his thousands of brilliant poems. Yet two acclaimed examples suffice to show the lyric distinctiveness of his curious method:

when my love comes to see me it’s

when my love comes to see me it’s
just a little like music,a
little more like curving colour(say
orange)
       against silence,or darkness….

the coming of my love emits
a wonderful smell in my mind,

you should see when i turn to find
her how my least heart-beat becomes less.
And then all her beauty is a vise

whose stilling lips murder suddenly me,

but of my corpose the tool her smile makes something
suddenly luminous and precise

—and then we are I and She….

what is that the hurdy-gurdy’s playing

[in Just-]

in Just-

spring          when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles          far          and wee

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it’s

spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer

old balloonman whistles

far          and             wee

and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s

spring

and

the

goat-footed

balloonMan          whistles

far

and

wee

In the first poem we experience a traditional theme: tender, romantic love. The second, with its evocative images, vague figures, fragmented lines and unusual, disruptive punctuation, is like the scene of an abstract painting or photograph, a rendered moment, the sounds purely imagined.

Cummings famously embraced lowercase font (or, if you prefer, infamously avoided capitalization). The spatial arrangement of this poem—large gaps between words, for instance, or the swaying effect of differing line lengths—lends the impression that the wind has blown the letters and words back and forth, together and apart, and that the ominous perspective is that of a child who is unable to articulate clearly or cogently the evanescent flurry of activity he beholds.

Emerson coined “individualism” for the American lexicon to capture the “individualisme” that Alexis de Tocqueville recorded in the early 1830s in his observations while touring the United States. The individualism that Cummings developed was more than merely a youthful sense of bravado and self-importance that would moderate as his testosterone receded with age. It was deep-seated, rational and enduring—in a word, Emersonian.

Mentor. Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1857. Image Credit: Josiah Johnson Hawes/Wikimedia Commons

Lasting beliefs earn staying power through lived experience; trying circumstances force people to validate or renounce their convictions. Two pressing events reinforced Cummings’ individualism, which he exposited with an ever-maturing understanding of the dangers of totalitarianism.

One was his detainment during World War I, right out of college. He and novelist William Slater Brown had volunteered for the Norton-Harjes Ambulance service in France. Charged with espionage because of cryptic comments in their letters home, they were imprisoned for three months in holding cells at a military detention camp in the French town of La Ferté-Macé. Meanwhile the U.S. Department of State erroneously notified Cummings’ parents that he had been aboard the SS Antilles, which a German U-boat had torpedoed and sunk.

Cummings was released from confinement without commotion or fanfare shortly before Christmas 1917 and was stateside again by January. He would later portray this period in his autobiographical novel “The Enormous Room,” which biographer Richard S. Kennedy describes as a “symbolic attack upon all governmental structures whatsoever.”

Lenin’s Tomb

The other belief-affirming event was Cummings’ five-week trip to the Soviet Union in 1931, which hardened him against communism and its American supporters. During this trip Cummings kept a diary that became his second prose book, “Eimi.” The title is Greek for “I am.” In his 1958 preface, Cummings wrote, “To devotees of the Old Testament, this may suggest Exodus III, 14—‘I AM THAT I AM.’” Cummings’ signature “i,” rendered in lowercase throughout his poetry, lacks the grandeur and majesty of the Hebrew God. Yet, paradoxically, it seems mighty in its diminutive size: a sign of individuality that draws attention to itself, its power made perfect in weakness.

First published in 1933, “Eimi” abounds with bitter, biting critiques of collectivism and of its corollary, a planned economy. This diary-invective can be obscure, its plot sequencing at times difficult to follow. Guided by a derisory version of Virgil, Cummings—the mocking and mythical narrator, a 20th-century Dante—undertakes a depressing, disturbing passage through the “unworld,” Stalinist Russia: a nightmarish hell of senseless bureaucracy, unimaginative ideology and brutalizing oppression.

His first stop on this journey: “A singularly unbanklike bank:outside,mildly imposing mansion; inside,hugely promiscuous hideousness—not the impeccable sanitary ordered and efficient hideousness of American or imitation-American banks,but a strictly ubiquitous whenwhere of casual filth and aimless commotion and profound hoping inefficiency.” Such bleak, odd imagery and frank disgust anticipate the surreal, satirical episodes he later sees and records: propaganda plays, indoctrination speeches, a plethora of comrades, secret police, a socialist jail. The neologism “whenwhere” emphasizes the managerial pointlessness of Soviet administration, which homogenizes society into a monotonous, mechanistic mass of inept, brainwashed automatons.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow “Harry” Dana (grandson of the renowned poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who had died in 1882), a union-loving advocate of labor causes, a Harvard habitué and a lively expert on Russian drama, happened to be in Russia when Cummings arrived there. With entrée into Russian cognoscenti society, Dana was Cummings’ Virgil, introducing him to the glitterati, the literati and local theater. Anti-authoritarian to his core, Cummings was unimpressed. He “went to the Soviet Union with his eyes open and without an agenda,” explains biographer Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, but “his experiences there, in which he witnessed first-hand the privation and sadness of the Stalinist state, certainly helped him develop an agenda.”

In “Eimi,” Cummings allegorizes his haunting visit to Lenin’s mausoleum, calling it the “Vision of Satan.” The revulsion with which Cummings illustrates the procession of bodies to the grave is palpable. Too lengthy to quote here, these lines scramble with intensity in the manner of the mourning throng—a “number of numberlessness”—which mobilizes toward “the Tomb of Tombs,” toward “Lenin our life!” and “Lenin our hope!” The tomb, discussed much earlier in the narrative, is “a rigid pyramidal composition of blocks; an impurely mathematical game of edges.”

The picture here is religious, or irreligious—the hallowed Lenin in his sacred space, wholly consecrated, absolutely revered. If Lenin is God, then his state—his government—is holy. Nothing could have been more frightening or distressing to Cummings.

Kennedy asserts that the concluding lines of “Eimi” attempt to “express something similar to an Emersonian transcendental experience, a mystical union with the creative force”:

silence is made of

(behind perfectly or

final rising

humbly

more dark

most luminous

whereless fragrant whenlessly erect

a sudden the!entirelyblossoming)

Voice

(Who:

Loves;

Creates,

Imagines)

OPENS

Notice the emergence of sound from silence: the voice a mode of agency, a source, a genesis, a conception. The result is as if to say, “You, reader, are now released from Soviet censorship, restraint and restriction; you have ended that chapter and may close this book; the future is yours to make.”

Standing Alone

Kennedy explains that the self-celebrating and increasingly embittered Cummings sometimes “felt isolated from other literary contemporaries, mostly leftists who shunned him because of his strong anticommunist views.” True Emersonian self-reliance means standing alone, if necessary, in the face of hostility and to the chagrin or ire of the naysaying multitudes. Cummings, “no base imitator of another,” struck out on his own, taking great risks with his poetry despite harsh charges that his writing was indecipherable, esoteric or impenetrable.

His acrobatic, often puzzling techniques represent aesthetically the prevailing motifs of his romantic, nonconformist individualism: imagination, life, emotion, instinct, spontaneity and love. His liberating eccentricity contrasts with the crushing, repressive and absurd Soviet system. “Eimi,” a sustained indictment of Marxism and communism, depicts the all-encompassing despotism of mobs as well as a cruel and implacable government run by myriad comrades who lack character or personality because they are subservient sycophants: dispensable units within an indiscriminate superstate of interchangeable agents and functionaries.

When the idiosyncratic Cummings died of a stroke in 1962, he was a household name, his stature secured by the blooming hippie, hipster subculture that, dissatisfied with current affairs, followed his lead in rejecting establishment standards and submission to authority. His obituary in The New York Times, published the day after his death, commences on the front page and, because of its length, extends to another section. He was a force, a giant of his time, a modernist trendsetter whose trends were insuperable, a transparent eyeball, the “i” and the person he decided to be, the Whitmanesque “me myself” who would not capitulate to badges, names, large societies or dead institutions. He was e.e. and E.E., living truly, seeing truly, acting singly. There can never be another.

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Two Poems by Amy Susan Wilson

In Arts & Letters, Humanities, Poetry on July 12, 2021 at 10:14 am

Amy Susan Wilson is the founder and editor-in-chief of Red Dirt Press (www.reddirtpress.net). She is an Oklahoma native and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. A Pushcart nominee, her work has appeared in numerous publications, and she is the author of Fetish and Other Stories (Balkan Books) which was named December 2015 Read of the Month, Southern Literary Review. Her fiction and nonfiction currently chronicle the rural South in the Covid era and the 1980s punk era. (reddirtpressandforum@gmail.com)

The Retarded Boy

lived in a barn

his Daddy a DOC guard

women’s penitentiary.

Like those pictures

of Jews, Auschwitz,

the DHS worker said

when she found him

near-starved

hunkered over

his own skin and bone.

A salt block

for cows

bucket for water

shoved in a 4X4 space

that was caged

as if for chickens

not human boy. Four locks:

two key two combination.

Dark as night all day.

His mama snuck him beets

carrots, Payday candy bars.

II.

When the State came

he learned his name

age fourteen: Cameron.

Elk River Residential Home

tan linoleum floor,

central heat and air

a place where he learns

to eat with a spoon,

always has tube socks

orange Jell-O galore.

Twin bed

white sheets

Lysol-clean,

his Daddy, brother Wilfred

chase him in dreams

lock him back in the barn cage

his mama sneaking

cabbage, M & M’s

green ones.

May 1981

Dwayne Worley

struck by lightening

fishing at Lake Okataloa

in his cousin’s canoe.

His body never found.

Gators dumped

from Lincoln County

when they got too big

for baby pools and bath tubs.

Mrs. Stokely

Okataloa High School

physics, trig and calculus teacher

face frozen in not a frown

nor smile

not mean nor kind

giving out awards

in the new auditorium.

Posthumously

she announced

his name

Best mathematics student,

Young Scientist Award,

scholarship to M.I.T.

Voice cracking

a sniffle

glazed eyes

she called allergies

and apologized

as if the weight

of grief

could cause the dead

to rise.

Three (More) Poems by Bruce Craven

In America, Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Humanities, Poetry, Writing on April 29, 2021 at 10:09 am

Bruce Craven is a member of the Columbia Business School Executive Education faculty in New York City. In addition to directing and teaching in a variety of executive programs, he teaches graduate business students his popular elective Leadership Through Fiction.  His book Win or Die: Leadership Secrets from Game of Thrones, was published in March 2019 by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.  The book is currently being translated into Russian and Turkish. He wrote the novel Fast Sofa (1993) which was published in Japanese and German. He also co-wrote the script for the film adaptation, starring Jennifer Tilly, Jake Busey and Crispin Glover. His collection of poetry, Buena Suerte in Red Glitter was published by Red Dirt Press. He lives with his wife and two sons in the Coachella Valley in California.

Bee Spears Talks Illicit Substances

No snow, no show.Seventies slang, but in ’69, rural

Tennessee was all about speed, weed, booze. “Peyton Place.

that’s what happens with whiskey & amphetamines.” Mural

of venues as the band burned miles. Spears, the bassist,

said the Ridgetop place was “wild as hell.” Mailbox read:

Willie Nelson and Many Others.” It was a commune,

before the honky-tonks heard the term hippy said

about locals. Bee learned to play the tunes

on a steep curve: twenty-eight gigs, twenty-eight nights.

“I snapped real quick that Willie plays bass lines

on his guitar.” Bee backed him low. Lucky Strikes

were still Will’s three-pack habit, and now weed. Nine-

teen, Bee was hired delivering mota to the band.

Then coke hit. Will: “You’re wired, you’re fired.” Shotgun’s drug stand.

Dred Scott

Part One:  SCOTUS & Freedom

Fred Douglass voted for a Republican,

John C. Fremont. His vote supported more

pragmatic views, like free soilism. Veteran

of the battle for freedom, Douglass knew war

might happen, also knew the Radical 

Abolitionist Party’s overly firm stance,

while right, could lose the 1856 Electoral

College struggle. He thought Fremont’s chance

against Buchanan, the Democrat, Slave

Power fan, might prevail. Fremont lost. Hope

cratered when the Supreme Court gave Dred Scott

and all black Americans up. The scope

of Chief Justice Taney’s ruling was clear:

blacks were inferior. Their future? Fear. 

Christian Property

Part Two — The Shape of a Heart

“My poor mother,” Douglass wrote, like many

other slave women: she had children,

but no family. She could be lawfully

sold off or raped, and not live within

a distance to visit or protect,

teach or love the child she created. Legal

sales could steal a husband. Owners select

to beat and abuse her. The child? Her meager

hope might be to walk all night once a year

and surprise her son with a small sweet cake.

Harriet dying at Holm Hill, the sheer

suffering to Fred. No chance to make

his way to visit. “No striking words of

hers treasured up.” He ached for her love.

“Frederick’s Choice,” A Poem by Bruce Craven

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Poetry on September 16, 2020 at 6:45 am

Bruce Craven is a member of the Columbia Business School Executive Education faculty in New York City. In addition to directing and teaching in a variety of executive programs, he teaches graduate business students his popular elective Leadership Through Fiction.  His book Win or Die: Leadership Secrets from Game of Thrones, was published in March 2019 by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.  The book is currently being translated into Russian and Turkish. He wrote the novel Fast Sofa (1993) which was published in Japanese and German. He also co-wrote the script for the film adaptation, starring Jennifer Tilly, Jake Busey and Crispin Glover. His collection of poetry, Buena Suerte in Red Glitter will be published in 2019 by Red Dirt Press. He lives with his wife and two sons in the Coachella Valley in California.

 

“Frederick’s Choice”

From my earliest recollection, I
date the entertainment of a deep
conviction… Douglass’s faith showed him why
he’d beat slavery’s foul embrace to meet
his dream of freedom. This good spirit? God.
…to him I offer thanksgiving and praise.
The young man trained with pain and hate’s rod,
confronted Covey with courage, raised
his fists, didn’t crumple. Sophia’s goodness?
A woman of the kindest heart. She takes
back her gift, stops her lessons, her promise
to help the young boy read. Fred’s hope shaken
as Hugh instructs his wife on slave-owning.
Quit? Fred swaps bread for letters the next morning.

“Civil War Nurses in D.C.,” A Poem by Bruce Craven

In American History, Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Humanities, Poetry on September 2, 2020 at 6:45 am

Bruce Craven is a member of the Columbia Business School Executive Education faculty in New York City. In addition to directing and teaching in a variety of executive programs, he teaches graduate business students his popular elective Leadership Through Fiction.  His book Win or Die: Leadership Secrets from Game of Thrones, was published in March 2019 by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.  The book is currently being translated into Russian and Turkish. He wrote the novel Fast Sofa (1993) which was published in Japanese and German. He also co-wrote the script for the film adaptation, starring Jennifer Tilly, Jake Busey and Crispin Glover. His collection of poetry, Buena Suerte in Red Glitter will be published in 2019 by Red Dirt Press. He lives with his wife and two sons in the Coachella Valley in California.

“There comes that odious Walt Whitman
to talk evil and unbelief to my boys.”
That nurse, writing her man, was not a fan
of the bearded, self-published journalist. Joy
riding the ferry from Brooklyn for beer at Pfaff’s
in Manhattan, shifted Walt from writing
to war. Forty two, Walt knew his soul’s map.
“I could never think of myself as firing
a gun or drawing a sword on another man.”
Why? “…the work of my life is making poems.”
He went to the federal city, planned
on a government job. Two years he roamed
hospitals. This soldier’s missionary
did six-hundred visits, all voluntary.

“Hunter S. Thompson,” Three Poems by Bruce Craven

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Humanities, Poetry on August 26, 2020 at 6:45 am

Bruce Craven is a member of the Columbia Business School Executive Education faculty in New York City. In addition to directing and teaching in a variety of executive programs, he teaches graduate business students his popular elective Leadership Through Fiction.  His book Win or Die: Leadership Secrets from Game of Thrones, was published in March 2019 by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.  The book is currently being translated into Russian and Turkish. He wrote the novel Fast Sofa (1993) which was published in Japanese and German. He also co-wrote the script for the film adaptation, starring Jennifer Tilly, Jake Busey and Crispin Glover. His collection of poetry, Buena Suerte in Red Glitter will be published in 2019 by Red Dirt Press. He lives with his wife and two sons in the Coachella Valley in California.

1971

“Never mind, I said, we’re responsible
people.” Hunter & his attorney tested
the Great Red Shark for stress factors. Rental
Man asked, “Are you fellas drinking?” Arrested
will be the fate for too many literal fans,
but our heroes “ride this strange torpedo
all the way out to the end.” Enraged, they stand
against the forces of Old and Evil. Gonzo
is the term: protagonist journalists
who make beasts of themselves to hide their pain.
But what is that high-water mark looking west?
Missing the sixties, Thompson’s typing blames
the American Dream for failing. He attacks
our leaders, ourselves, our hope broken, rolled back.

1975

My teenage bookstore? The Raven. The valley?
San Gabriel. Mid-Seventies. Our town?
La Canada, still in 213. This alley
Mom pointed at…solved her challenge. She found
how the super-market experience
could improve. Her son could go, pick a book:
Mom’s deal. I was delirious:
aisles of groceries swapped for books! I’d look
at sports, sci-fi, heroic, epic. “One paperback!
she insisted. Cool! But why didn’t Tolkien
write more? Skimmed fantasy, attacked
the Hunter S. Thompson books. McGovern
& the ’72 Election? I’d gone door-to-door
barely twelve for George: Stop the Vietnam War!

1980

“I remember saying something like: ‘I
feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should
drive…” Hunter’s novel won’t ever die.
His dream both truth and amped fiction. White hood
of Pete’s Camaro trembling at 120
miles per hour. Not yet twenty-one. Blast
of desert air. Huge bats shrieking: Freedom! Empty
highway pointing us towards Needles. Toss
sleeping bags on the sand beside the Colorado
River. We never had ether. Constraints
on cash tempered our decadence. Beer pillowed
us under kaleidoscopic stars. We baked;
found a Brit hitching, skin so red…so white.
Drove home to a party, where Pete started a fight.

“Christian Property — 1838,” A Poem by Bruce Craven

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Poetry on August 12, 2020 at 6:45 am

Bruce Craven is a member of the Columbia Business School Executive Education faculty in New York City. In addition to directing and teaching in a variety of executive programs, he teaches graduate business students his popular elective Leadership Through Fiction.  His book Win or Die: Leadership Secrets from Game of Thrones, was published in March 2019 by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.  The book is currently being translated into Russian and Turkish. He wrote the novel Fast Sofa (1993) which was published in Japanese and German. He also co-wrote the script for the film adaptation, starring Jennifer Tilly, Jake Busey and Crispin Glover. His collection of poetry, Buena Suerte in Red Glitter will be published in 2019 by Red Dirt Press. He lives with his wife and two sons in the Coachella Valley in California.

 

Christian Property — 1838

“Waking amid the hurrying throng, and
gazing upon the dazzling wonders of Broadway.”
Harriet’s orphaned son, Fred, left the Hudson
River Ferry, stepped onto Chambers street. Day?
Tuesday, September fourth, on the night-train
from Philadelphia. Fred’s first steps free
of bondage, but Hugh Auld didn’t refrain
from efforts to regain his property.
This contraband in New York, at last away
from chains! “I was a FREEMAN…” But free land
north was the same nation. Auld wanted pay
due to owning the caulker with skilled hands.
Baltimore shipyards had paid Fred spondulix,
good cash, but Hugh took it all, that Methodist.

 

 

 

 

“Whiskey River,” A Poem by Bruce Craven

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Creativity, Humanities, Poetry on July 22, 2020 at 6:45 am

Bruce Craven is a member of the Columbia Business School Executive Education faculty in New York City. In addition to directing and teaching in a variety of executive programs, he teaches graduate business students his popular elective Leadership Through Fiction.  His book Win or Die: Leadership Secrets from Game of Thrones, was published in March 2019 by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.  The book is currently being translated into Russian and Turkish. He wrote the novel Fast Sofa (1993) which was published in Japanese and German. He also co-wrote the script for the film adaptation, starring Jennifer Tilly, Jake Busey and Crispin Glover. His collection of poetry, Buena Suerte in Red Glitter will be published in 2019 by Red Dirt Press. He lives with his wife and two sons in the Coachella Valley in California.

 

Whiskey River

Willie committed to stay after every show
on stage, signing autographs until the last
item was signed. My wife’s merch hat cost dough.
50 bucks?!” She was mad at my gift. I sassed
her stinginess, hurt, sipped my pricy whiskey.
Our tix, an in-law’s X-mas gift. Will ancient,
but Shotgun stepped on stage, nailed a couple nifty
licks on Trigger. T-shirt black, skin crepe. Patient,
the packed, tiered casino venue breathed as one.
Then his voice, his band and Whiskey River broke
open the roar. The room lifting: people up! Cheering his runs
on that battered guitar. The troubadour smoked
out riffs like Hendrix would’ve in his eighties. Will played long.
My wife, joyous, alive! Will signed her hat, then was gone.

“Branson,” A Poem by Bruce Craven

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Creativity, Humanities, liberal arts, Poetry on July 15, 2020 at 6:45 am

Bruce Craven is a member of the Columbia Business School Executive Education faculty in New York City. In addition to directing and teaching in a variety of executive programs, he teaches graduate business students his popular elective Leadership Through Fiction.  His book Win or Die: Leadership Secrets from Game of Thrones, was published in March 2019 by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.  The book is currently being translated into Russian and Turkish. He wrote the novel Fast Sofa (1993) which was published in Japanese and German. He also co-wrote the script for the film adaptation, starring Jennifer Tilly, Jake Busey and Crispin Glover. His collection of poetry, Buena Suerte in Red Glitter will be published in 2019 by Red Dirt Press. He lives with his wife and two sons in the Coachella Valley in California.

 

Branson

The Live Music Capital of the World wasn’t good.
We were stuck in one spot. Artistically,
it sucked,” said Mickey Raphael. Willie should
not have committed months without simply
talking to Mark, his business advisor,
but Tillis brought tequila, weed, smiles. Shotgun
signed to play the venue-town for guitar survivors
in need of steady short sets, repeat forever. Fun
for some, sure, merchandise, tourists, but for outlaws?
No freedom. Still is still moving for Will, but no bus
was a cell. In the Ozark motel, Mark saw
the sleeping bag, the tent pitched on carpet. This deal’s a bust;
rust, not freedom. “Get me out of here!” Willie blamed
the road for his pain, but Branson was prison, just loss, just fame.

“Pancho & Lefty,” A Poem by Bruce Craven

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Humanities, liberal arts, Poetry on July 8, 2020 at 6:45 am

Bruce Craven is a member of the Columbia Business School Executive Education faculty in New York City. In addition to directing and teaching in a variety of executive programs, he teaches graduate business students his popular elective Leadership Through Fiction.  His book Win or Die: Leadership Secrets from Game of Thrones, was published in March 2019 by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.  The book is currently being translated into Russian and Turkish. He wrote the novel Fast Sofa (1993) which was published in Japanese and German. He also co-wrote the script for the film adaptation, starring Jennifer Tilly, Jake Busey and Crispin Glover. His collection of poetry, Buena Suerte in Red Glitter will be published in 2019 by Red Dirt Press. He lives with his wife and two sons in the Coachella Valley in California.

 

Pancho & Lefty

Willie and Merle were compared to bookends. Look
at the two brothers…and their shelf of music history!
They had a tour planned before Merle shook
off the world on his birthday. Penitentiary
life marked him early, double pneumonia stole
him from fans and family, 79. The Hag kept
on the fighting side until the end: playing shows,
recording Django & Jimmie with Will. His lungs ripped
from hard-living’s disease. Back in the Eighties, sleeping
in his tour-bus, Pedernales studio, 4:00 am, Will knocks,
needs Merle for a last tune. Not later, now. One take. Meeting
Shotgun the next day, Merle thinks about his vocals, talks
to Willie. Can we do another take, get it perfect? Will grins
The tape is sent. Townes Van Zandt’s song hits #1, wins.

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