The Poetry, Essays and Personal Journals of Larry L. Dill
History becomes possible only when the Word turns into words. Only verbatim traditions enable the historian to reconstruct the past. Only where words that were lost can be found again does the historiographer replace the storyteller. The historian's home is on the island of writing. He furnishes its inhabitants with subject matter about the past. The past that can be seized is related to writing.
Beyond the Island's shores, memories do not become words. Where no words are left behind, the historian finds no foundations for his reconstructions. In the abence of words, artifacts are silent. We have often felt frustrated but we accept that prehistory cannot be read. No bridge can be constructed to span this chasm.
--Ivan Illich "ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind"
The beguiling scope of an infant’s mind! Adultly considered
to be limited to toys and toes.
--Paramahansa Yogananda “Autobiography of a Yogi”
When a man amid a mystery
finds he wants to wish for words
he may look into a history
or into the sky for birds.
But he'll find no final feeling
that will heal his haunted heart
'til he searches for the meaning
of what made him want to start.
--Larry L. Dill , "The Early Poems (1968)"
When I was a child I used to create little homemade books out of scraps of paper and string. I would illustrate them with my own drawings and copy into them a litany of words and phrases cobbled together from the movies I saw on Saturday afternoons at the Harlandale Theater in San Antonio, Texas—the language of gangsters and pirates and cowboys. I would add phrases from my favorite children’s stories like Little Black Sambo, and The Ugly Duckling. I would pepper these stories with the voices of the real adults around me—my parents and grandparents and teachers and preachers—and all my little friends…and enemies.
Later I went to college and read a great deal of what is called Literature. I read Faulkner and Hemingway, and Thoreau and Twain. And then Stevens and Yeats and the philosophers ancient and modern—Plato and Aristotle, Sartre and Camus. I was much impressed but little changed. I gained and lost religion over roughly a 10 year period from age 15 to age 25. By the time I was 35 I had been married twice, been in and out of the Army and had two children. And yet I still thought of myself as the maker of little homemade books that might someday be read and appreciated by strangers. Which strangers, I had no idea. Anyway, all those early books are gone.
But I never stopped writing and somewhere in my 30s I began to gather up my writings—poetry and short stories and essays and letters and journals…and drawings--and call them, collectively,
The New Hope Journal. It mattered little to me that the collection was not being published by Knopf or Random House or that outside a few essays published in a small town newspaper in the 1970s, I was a completely unknown and unpublished writer whose work (and only a small portion of that) was known only to my closest friends and family. I had come to see my adult self, the same way I had seen myself as a child—a maker of little homemade books out of scraps of paper and string.
As time passed and I became an old man, more, rather than less obscure with each passing day, I began around 2003 to feed 40 years or so of writing and illustration out on to the internet. And so with that ongoing project the circle of my childhood imagination is now complete. The solitary soul stranded on the desert island sending little scraps of paper with cryptic messages in bottles and coconut shells and tiny bamboo boats out into the sea. That’s me. That's
The New Hope Journal.
--Larry L. Dill
Rabbit Rock, NC
August 1, 2007
New Poems in The Poetry Project
My Generation (2007)
The Elgin, Texas of the Mind (1993)
Circle and the Sacred Fire (A chant, 1994)
The Star People (1984)
www.newhopejournal.com
copyright 2007 by Larry L. Dill
banner photo: interior of the main lodge at Rabbit Rock, hand built by Larry L. Dill and Deborah J. Gaddy in the late 1990s near Asheville, North Carolina