Loading...
 
Print
Lew

by Robert Creeley?

First flash memory of Lew Welch? is at a party after some event at Berkeley Poetry Conference '65, and we're on interior, upper balcony, swirl of dancing people below, and he's pointing to one thus extraordinary, a pounding, muscular woman wet with sweat and visible ecstasy as she keeps the beat, like they say. That was Magda, last companion of Lew's life, who could speak here far more usefully of what he was, and continues in heart to be, as complex human being. What I knew, and that all too briefly, was fellow poet and man — literally one from whom I could learn in that respect.

I'd met him much earlier, at celebration for Gary Snyder's first going to Japan — a mussel feast on McClure's Beach mid-fifties — spare, quick seeming man, recall running into surf with him, wow, cold! But not much subsequent till conversation mid-sixties, when at one point he was telling me how he & friend at Reed had made intensive study in order to locate the theoretically ideal place to live in this world, climatologically and elsewise speaking, and settled on Santiago, Chile — where, as Lew said, river runs fresh from mountains to east, direct through city, then to western sea. Terrific — all in the delighted mind. He was an intensive perfectionist, hard on himself in this respect since he felt that many of his own poems were lacking and so refused their publication often. "Alice Herlihy had hard hands..." He's saying that now (on tape playing next room, generous talking to students, California, April 22, 1967). Can you hear that ear? As he emphasizes, taking it from Williams, "melody in American speech is percussive..." You have the information apart from the literal poems, where it's all come true, in How I Work as a Poet — great, clear compilation of his own insights and commitments.

Lew's loves, Stein?, Williams?, docks and people yakking it up, language in the physical mouth and ear — all prove the actual, energizing world (a man's lifetime), and words, the substantive things of speech you must listen to as much as understand, viz., "Let's take out the car and park it/ at the big new supermarket..." He's singing it.

In fact, seeming simplicity of Lew's statement masks delight of melody, if you only read it with eyes. Like abstract items make lasagna on page of cook book tasteless, if no actualizing goodies meld with simmering heat, etc., etc. Like — don't just sit there, do something.

He did, risks of mind, risks of body — heavy drinking till depressions got impossible weight. Still — there he specifically was, in his own hands.

Buffalo, N.Y.
September 19, 1976

From The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley