On Fish, Frightened Ants, and Frankenstein

 [Part Two of My Reading Life: Richard Brautigan]

This past year, I gave a Richard Brautigan poem to my juniors as part of their midterm, and asked them some simple analysis questions.  I already knew the poem, and it was also on the Poetry 180 website, giving it credence to use with high school students.

Gee, You're so Beautiful That It's Starting to Rain

Oh, Marcia,
I want your long blonde beauty
to be taught in high school,
so kids will learn that God
lives like music in the skin
and sounds like a sunshine harpsichord.
I want high school report cards
   to look like this:

Playing with Gentle Glass Things
   A
Computer Magic
   A
Writing Letters to Those You Love
   A
Finding out about Fish
   A
Marcia's Long Blonde Beauty
   A+!

Brautigan is associated with the Beat poets -- Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and the like -- who were breaking the rules of poetry.  Even still, plenty of poetic devices are evident in many of his poems.

This is one of his more "Beat" style poems, always a favorite of mine:

The Alarm-Colored Shadow of a Frightened Ant

The alarm-colored shadow of a frightened ant
wants to make friends with you, learn all about 
your childhood, cry together, come live with 
    you.

So much longing.  As a young adult, a poem like this would grab a hold of me and not let go.  I think for a time I even had it memorized.

Brautigan can do that to a person.

After writing about Brautigan yesterday, my friend Sara sent me this  poem, which I was only vaguely familiar with. She said she had it taped in her high school locker when she was a student.  It is a real high school poem, to be sure:

Your Catfish Friend

My Brautigan poetry collections

If I were to live my life
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by
one evening
when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge
of my affection
and think, "It's beautiful
here by this pond. I wish
somebody loved me,"
I'd love you and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be
at peace,
and ask yourself, "I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond?It seems like
a perfect place for them."

Again with the loneliness and the excruciating desire to belong! I definitely think that is going to be a good one for middle-schoolers.

Brautigan would sometimes weigh in on historical events and literature.  Here are a couple of poems in that vein:

Jules Verne Zucchini

Men are walking on the moon today,

planting their footsteps as if they were

   zucchini on a dead world

while over 3,000,000 people starve to death

   every year on a living one.

Earth

July 20 1969

Formal Portrait

I like to think of Frankenstein as a huge keyhole

and the laboratory as the key that turns the lock

and everything that happens afterward as just the

   lock turning.

I especially like the Frankenstein poem, because it plays a game with my mind.  

One correction I need to make from my blog yesterday -- I discovered Brautigan in 1976, not 1979.  I remembered a night hanging out with my friends Cathy and Kim, after playing cards for several hours, drinking beer and eating Fritos, we passed around the Brautigan poetry books and read the poems out loud to each other.  Previously, I had read them my favorite chapter from the novel (more like what is now called "linked stories") -- Trout Fishing in America.

The chapter is called "Trout Fishing in America Terrorists" and it is a sweet story about sixth graders so bored at recess that they start writing "Trout Fishing in America" on the backs of the first graders.  The chapter takes us through the boys having to go to the principal's office and how he brilliantly handled them.  It is my favorite chapter because it is so human and so evoking of the experience of getting in trouble in school.  Soon afterward, I think for my birthday, my friends gifted me with this shirt:

It doesn't fit me any more, but it resides in my memory box, as my Brautigan books sit together on my bookshelf, always there to remind me the author that challenged my mind and heart with language when I was a young adult.

P.S. I didn't hear about it at the time, but Brautigan took his own life in 1984.  I suppose by reading some of these poems, one might think "no wonder."  But, of course, we never know why anyone does themself in that way.  I can only have compassion and gratitude for his gifts to the literary world. I am well aware he joined the legions of artists who have done the same.

Godspeed, Richard.

All poems copyright Richard Brautigan.

Setting Fire: My Reading Life with Brautigan

One of the most engaging books I read over the past couple of years was My Reading Life by Pat Conroy -- his personal tribute to the writers and the books that made an impression on him and helped him become the radiant writer he is.  I was so impressed with his book, I immediately gifted two people I knew with copies.

Writing tributes to pieces of writing appears to be a trend. This year I read one called My Poets, in which Maureen N. McLane goes into depth about a variety of poets whom made an impression on her -- Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore among them.

Thinking about these volumes caused me to begin making lists of books from My Reading Life (fiction and nonfiction), as well as My Songwriters, My Poets, My Short Stories, and My Best Books to Teach.  I have enough to keep me going for a while.  I just didn't know where to start.

Then today I spun for a poem on my Poetry Foundation app and came up with a poem called "So It Goes" by W.S. Di Piero.  The title caught my eye because it is the catch phrase in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five, which I will write about one of these days.  But the poem itself is about a couple watching a marsh hawk beating its wings over the Pacific Coast, which causes them to stop arguing temporarily. 

Read the poem here -- it is a worthy read!

This poem brought to mind my favorite short story: "Pacific Radio Fire" by Richard Brautigan.

In my early teenage years I had a notebook I used to keep listings of things that interested me, mostly about music, and occasionally a cut-out cartoon or article.  One of the things in the notebook was a story I found in one of my mother's magazines.  It was called "Pacific Radio Fire" and I do not know exactly why I kept this story. Something about it caught my attention, probably because it mentioned music, and I am sure that a part of me was intrigued by the way the author used language and the pure mystery of exactly what was happening in the story.

Fast forward seven years.  I have read all of Kurt Vonnegut's novels and was looking for a new writer to take his place in my reading life. I was wandering around B. Dalton bookstore at Great Northern Mall when I saw this book sitting on the shelf, facing out:

Just the title alone intrigued me.  But the quote from the book, the opening line, was the selling point: In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.  I purchased the book (a whopping $1.25 in 1979) and brought it home.

That is when I fell in love with Richard Brautigan.

In Watermelon Sugar had a prose style I had never encountered before in my life.  Not only that, there were magical qualities in the world he created for his characters -- in this case a world where the sun shines a different color every day.  And the fact that he lets the reader make their own decision on just what watermelon sugar is made it all the more abstract.  I was hooked.

I started returning to B. Dalton and scooping up every book by this author.  There were other novels (Trout Fishing in America, The Abortion:An Historical Romance 1966), poetry collections (The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, Rommel Drives Deep Into Egypt), and short story collections, most notably this one:

So I plunged into reading the stories, each with its own weird title like "1/3,1/3,1/3" and "1692 Cotton Mather Newsreel" -- I'll be the first to admit I very often read these stories not really understanding a word of them.  Nevertheless, the use of language was intriguing and I was really just looking for the "thing" that would draw me in.  I knew I didn't have to love every single story: I was on fire with the language.

When I arrived at the fifth story (the collection has over fifty stories, the shortest just being two sentences), there was something I immediately recognized about it. I went and pulled out my notebook from high school and sure enough, here was the story I had cut out and pasted into my book all those years ago.

As it turned out, I had loved Brautigan for a very long time.  This strange connection to the past fascinated me -- but not more than that story itself, which I still find to be the finest ever written. Some of the lines from the story still delight me today, just as they did originally (dare I say, 41 years ago?)  I don't want to give anything away, because I am including the story here, but my favorite line from my first read until now is still, "His eyes were wet wounded rugs."

 I have had minimal success teaching this story -- it is deceptively simple and every carefully chosen word is loaded with meaning.  It is extremely hard to grasp, for as concrete as it may appear, it is still obscure.  Just try to write like this -- it is beyond difficult, but if I could ever craft such a story, I think my writing life would be complete. That is how strongly I feel about the language, the action, the setting, the characters, and the poetic and metaphoric language of "Pacific Radio Fire."

 

"PACIFIC RADIO FIRE"

The largest ocean in the world starts or ends at Monterey, California. It depends on what language you are speaking. My friend's wife had just left him. She walked right out the door and didn't even say good-bye. We went and got two fifths of port and headed for the Pacific.

It's an old song that's been played on all the jukeboxes in America. The song has been around so long that it's been recorded on the very dust of America and it has settled on everything and changed chairs and cars and toys and lamps and windows into billions of phonographs to play that song back into the ear of our broken heart.

We sat down on a small corner-like beach surrounded by big granite rocks and the hugeness of the Pacific Ocean with all its vocabularies.

We were listening to rock and roll on his transistor radio and somberly drinking port. We were both in despair. I didn't know what he was going to do with the rest of his life either.

I took another sip of port. The Beach Boys were singing a song about California girls on the radio. They liked them.

His eyes were wet wounded rugs.

Like some kind of strange vacuum cleaner I tried to console him. I recited the same old litanies that you say to people when you try to help their broken hearts, but words can't help at all.

It's just the sound of another human voice that makes the only difference. There's nothing you're ever going to say that's going to make anybody happy when they're feeling shitty about losing somebody that they love.

Finally he set fire to the radio. He piled some paper around it. He struck a match to the paper. We sat there watching it. I had never seen anybody set fire to a radio before.

As the radio gently burned away, the flames began to affect the songs that we were listening to. A record that was #1 on the Top-40 suddenly dropped to #13 inside of itself. A song that was #9 became #27 in the middle of a chorus about loving somebody. They tumbled in popularity like broken birds. Then it was too late for all of them. 

In searching for the text, I discovered that someone has named their blog after this story (I wish I had thought of that; but then, I guess it was already taken!)  And I also found this video some young women made of this story -- they changed the gender, and left out some of the best prose from the story, but I think their rendering of the ending is quite good.  It is great to see that this story lives on in popularity. And even as I reread it today, I thought again of the brillance of the wording, the richness of emotion, and the many layers of inference about music and its place in our lives.

video based on "Pacific Radio Fire"

More on Brautigan tomorrow.

"Pacific Radio Fire" copyright Richard Brautigan, 1971