The Poetry, Essays and Personal Journals of Larry L. Dill
by Larry L. Dill
a poetry cycle in 5 parts
Plus
Notes on George Carlin
A Postscript to Self Portrait at 64
New Haiku and new essays by Camen Gupta
New Sightings on the Web
And
This Month's Readings
(See Links at the Bottom of this Page)
Self Portrait at 64
It seems I make a lot more mistakes than I used to.
Bad choices at Walmart are only the tip of the iceberg.
A soldier in command at 45 is not to be contravened.
I’m 64 and never was in charge. Age and wisdom are overrated.
No fool like an old fool.
But one advantage is a point of vantage of a life lived
For better or worse, without malice. With an open mind.
I suppose I closed off truth a few too many times--
By accident mostly, I think--turning the flame down just a bit too low,
Or way up too high.
Mistakes though, you find with age, can make all the difference.
Best, not so much to be too careful, as just to pay attention.
On Living in Appalachia
It’s a rich wood we live in
Snakes and birdsong and poison ivy
Bear shit and poachers
Tall trees, small springs, delicate flowers
Here we are at last
In nature
Us and God and evolution
All showing up in the Garden of Eden
At precisely the same time.
Black Dog Barking in the Dead of Night
Black dog barking in the dead of night
The intrusions of someone else’s plight
Into my own
The black dog at home in his own world
Me in mine
Murder waits
And violence on a scale that neither of us would understand
Go down Moses
Way down into Egypt land
Tell ole Pharaoh
Let my people go
I love the black dog
Who’s keeping me awake
He’s just making a simple mistake
I knew a woman once
Who did the same thing
Tried to love me too hard
All she wanted was a ring
We’re all sheep out here
On the windy plain.
Some get lost
And some remain.
We’re all alone now
In the quiet night
The black dog barking
Me trying to write.
Nothing saves us from the final end
No new treatment
No new friend
The black dog barks
But his silence tells
Of private injuries
And private hells
To speak the truth or to simply endure
Which of these methods is a better cure?
On Reading Faulkner
“How can you fight in the mountains, Father?”…
“You can’t. You just have to.”--William Faulkner, The Unvanquished
In the social structure of our lives
We must always compromise
The drunk in times past
Had to find a sober moment
To refill his flask.
I’m hiding out from life.
It’s just another way
Of avoiding what you really have to say
But why bother now that the end is near.
I don’t think Faulkner wanted to tell the truth either.
But he did it anyway.
Stolen Apples
The odor of love is the scent
not of bought but of stolen apples.--Yevtushenko
Dad stole watermelons when he was a little boy.
Yevtushenko stole apples.
I stole peeks up little girls dresses.
Even before I knew what might be there.
I’ve stolen books and hardware and ideas from other people.
I’ve stolen hearts and dreams
And never given them back.
Now at 64 I walk beneath a stranger’s apple tree
Plotting another crime in the fall.
We live on borrowed time
And stolen apples
And the fruits of the labors of others.
When we die we steal ourselves away
From those who loved us.
Steal away my friend
Steal away to Jesus.
Notes on George Carlin
George Carlin, who died June 22 at 71, was one of my heroes. I first saw him back there in the 60’s on a summertime replacement variety show doing the Hippy Dippy Weatherman and Biff Burns sports news. “Here are some temperatures from around the nation: 28, 56, 85.” “Here are some ball scores: New York 10, Boston 12, Philadelphia 8.”
Thirty years later Carlin was a legend. As Bob Dylan had become the heir to the legacy of Woody Guthrie, so Carlin was the heir to the throne that had belonged to Lenny Bruce. At once imitator and fulfillment of an artistic vision. In his last years his much appreciated irreverent, x-rated, left wing humor had evolved into tasteless tirades. A very angry old man--like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright of recent infamy. But I loved him anyway just as I do Reverend Wright. A voice crying in the wilderness must sometimes use fowl language and express outrage and unthinkable thoughts out loud just to get the attention of the complacency gene we all seem to carry within us.
When I began, somewhere in college in the 1960’s, to imagine my own career as a writer, I had several mentors in mind: Thoreau, Hemingway, Twain, and on the naughtier side of myself, Henry Miller, Bukowski and George Carlin. Thoreau’s pastoral-romantic-social-criticism, Hemingway’s manly ways, Twain’s irreverent humor, Miller’s raw sexuality, Bukowski’s honest loser, Carlin on stage saying what every radical writer wanted to say but knew he couldn’t. I came close at times to seeing it all come together not in myself but in Philip Roth. Still, Roth for all his ground breaking accomplishments has never had the public persona that Twain had in his generation or Carlin in ours. I identify more with Roth’s aloofness but I wanted to be some combination of Twain and Carlin. I always wanted to be able to walk out on a stage and speak directly to a live audience. In many ways The New Hope Journal was always intended to be the script for a one man show.
I remember thinking years ago that Portnoy’s Complaint is what had done Roth in as the public voice of his generation. I loved Portnoy’s Complaint (a book basically about adolescent male masturbation and the real world adult sexual life that must inevitably follow). But I was still hanging on to Twain and I wanted to be a writer who dealt with adolescent subjects like the incorrigible Huck Finn and his place in a wild, racist world without ever mentioning sex and at the same time somehow not leaving out the sex. This was, and is, the great “Writer’s Block” of my life. This conflict, more than anything else I can imagine is why I consider myself a “failed” writer.
Carlin may have worried about the same things that I did. But he never let it show. As Jerry Seinfeld put it in his New York Times remembrance of Carlin,
His performing voice, even laced with profanity, always sounded as if he were trying to amuse a child. It was like the naughtiest, most fun grown-up you ever met was reading you a bedtime story.
It is fitting that Carlin’s life will be celebrated (posthumously, unfortunately) with the Mark Twain Prize in the fall because, like Twain, he was the greatest humorist of his generation. And though much of his humor was clearly not appropriate for young ears, his importance as a public intellectual was that he sought tirelessly (and with great humor) to bring America’s historically puritanical sexual, religious and political hypocrisy out of the closet. In so doing he came far closer than I had ever imagined myself as someday doing in closing the gap in literature between the serious social criticism of Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau and the sexual honesty of Miller, Bukowski and Roth. As Seinfeld said, “Carlin’s already done that.”
Postscript to Self Portrait at 64
All my life I’ve stayed away from my body,
From medicine, from anatomy and physiology
As a source of inspiration and knowledge.
Despite my skepticism of religion and mysticism,
Mythology and ideology
I’ve lived my whole life in my imagination,
Consistently denying reality
In the name of an idea.
If that’s your life,
You have to stick with it to the end.
Your ideas become your anatomy.
And getting your mind right
Is the only medicine you have.
No one survives: neither geniuses, nor saints, nor fools.
The key to dying gracefully
Is to follow your own rules.
--Larry L. Dill, Rabbit Rock North Carolina, July 1, 2008
Also in this edition of the New Hope Journal
Responses from Camen Gupta and Bob Salmon to Six Degrees of Desperation.
Six haiku with a dissonant theme and one not so dissonant
by Camen Gupta
And Featuring in the ongoing Series Varieties of Vegan Experience
Sex in the City (and Down on the Farm) by Camen Gupta
Sightings:George Carlin on The American Dream, Dan Koeppel on The strange history and sad prognosis of the Banana and Michael Dickinson on The Bush family connection to Geronomo's bones
Readings: William Faulkner from The Unvanquished, Yevtushenko's Stolen Apples, Viktor Frankl from Man's Search for Meaning
June Issue of the New Hope Journal
Complete Site Index
larrydill@newhopejournal.com
www.newhopejournal.com
copyright 2008 by Larry L. Dill