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Density in the Poetry of Lew Welch

by Charles Upton?

When I first read the poetry of Lew Welch, I thought he was dense. Later on, when I’d read more, I began to realize just how dense he was. Take the poem

DOCTOR, CAN YOU SPELL NEBUCHADNEZZAR WITHOUT ANY Z?*

(*Overheard from the mouth of a senile old Irish lady on her deathbed.):


A turf and a clod spells "Nebuchad"

A knife and a razor spells "Nebuchadnezzar"

Two silver spoons and a gold ring

Spells Nebuchadnezzar, the King.

My first impression of this poem was, "Nice, extremely pleasurable, it has density, I can chew it, it’s tasty. But it’s slight, it’s just word-play, it’s only melody." Somehow, though, it unconsciously engaged my understanding, till I came up with a deeper interpretation:

A turf and a clod: The grave.

A knife and a razor: Surgery (razor to shave the skin, scalpel to cut it).

Two silver spoons and a gold ring: A hard marriage, two doted-on children, all finally wearing her out.

The title: Two ideas of death intersecting in delirium – the last letter of the alphabet representing death, and Nebuchadnezzar as King Death, to whom she is espoused. She asks the doctor if she can escape by a spell or re-spelling of her fate. The poem’s answer is "No".

age and youth/ entering the whirlpool" (samsara).

And note how time flows backwards: Death, surgery, childbirth, marriage. This is what the Tibetans call "the bardo of seeking rebirth." In the words of Eliot, from The Wasteland: "He passed the stages of his

Now that’s dense. The poem, by this density, was music to my understanding as well as my ear.

NOTE BY CHARLES UPTON:


My latest book is The System of Antichrist: Truth and Falsehood in Postmodernism and the New Age. In it you can hear the story of how Lew introduced me to Carlos Castaneda at one of his Full Moon Mussel Feasts, Muir Beach, California. You can get it through:

seriousseekers.com

In Lew Welch's book Ring of Bone, three riddles appear. One (the Rider Riddle) can only be answered by each one for himself. The other two (The Riddle of Bowing and the Riddle of Hands) each have only

one right answer. Lew told me the answer to The Riddle of Bowing, and I solved The Riddle of Hands by myself. (The answer was confirmed by Lew’s wife Magda). So if anybody wants to try and solve them, e-mail me at uptonjenny at hotmail.com, and I can say "pass" or "fail".