Dale Williams Barrigar

Transformed by Dale Williams Barrigar

(Leopold Bloom at U., original drawing by DWB)

Transformed

Moments of transformation have been the stuff of literature ever since there was literature, and even before there was what we call literature, only the raw materials of literature (language, experience, and imagination) being shared around the campfire, and probably, at a deep, internal, and shared level, even before there were campfires.

This small offering with three titles (below) is my contribution to the language and literature of transformation, not that I haven’t tried it before and won’t try it again, too.

But here I think I managed to capture it pretty good.

I don’t know where the Muse comes from for any of us. But I do know that muses do exist, with both capital and small M’s; and I do know too that poetry itself is the original art, the biggest art, the most common art, the rarest art, the simplest art, the deepest art, the widest-ranging art, the hardest art, the easiest art, the most neglected art, the longest-lasting art, the poorest-paying art, the purest art (in its purest forms), and the most relatable art, for everyone, of all.

Everyone’s last words are poetry. So are their first ones. Harold Bloom rightly called Jesus the poetry of America. Miguel de Cervantes used to stalk through the streets of whatever city he lived in at the time, searching for words, looking for poetry.

In the last few decades of his life, Pablo Picasso started pumping out a LOT of poetry, and went so far as to go around telling everyone he knew that he wasn’t really a painter, he was a poet, and that thousands of years from now, no one would even remember his paintings and drawings – but they would remember his poetry.

I have absolutely no idea whether that is true or not.

All I know is that Pablo was a genius on the level of Einstein, or probably higher – and he said it.

Everyone else can turn into a machine if they want to.

I’m gonna remain human.

Signed,

The Drifter

Poetry The Teacher, Or:

New Knowledge, Or:

The Invisible Blue Butterfly Forever

I was walking

around in their house

trying to clean

my pipe

with a broken coat hanger

when it happened

and I literally

dropped my pipe and

the coat hanger and

stopped in my tracks, yes,

as if I’d seen

a ghost. Next, I felt

nailed to the spot, as if

my feet had been

nailed into the floor

and my hands

had been

nailed into the air

but almost without

physical pain, I was

looking, staring into

the distance with

wild and rapt

eyes. I was, as so

often lately, alone,

but I was also not

alone as the hosts, the

ghosts of all the poets

who’d ever come before

me were humming

through my blood

and before my eyes –

only for

an instant.

When I say

“all the poets,” I also

intend the oral poets

who’d written in air,

for our ears, hearts,

and souls,

for thousands

and thousands

or more

years before

“literacy” began –

the anonymous ones

who weren’t anonymous

at the time, not to

themselves

anyway

and what else

matters

in the end

or even the

beginning or

the middle,

really,

truly.

A life-changing

instant; a one-of-a-kind

moment. I had no

idea

in this spot of time

where that

had come from;

way too sudden.

One instant this,

the next instant

something else

entirely, forever, no matter

what; like a mermaid’s snap

of her magic fingers or a giant

monster of beauty

shaking a rag doll

in sadness and gladness.

Instantaneously

turning

from caterpillar into blue,

if invisible,

butterfly. Without even

knowing

you’d been

a caterpillar in

the first place!

The invisible blue

butterfly now, no matter how

impossible

it sounded.

I took up

the pen

which had as if

magically appeared there

for me

and the paper

and slowly wrote down

the first

Word.

The Drifter ((otherwise known as Dale Williams Barrigar)) drifts from here to there while always maintaining a center that is always centered upon The Arts, with the oldest of Arts at the center – usually.

Saragun Springs, Latest Triumph

(Dale Williams Barrigar has big news to deliver. I for one am looking forward to hearing from the Drifter–Leila–The image provided by DWB)

Thirty-eight Years

I have wanted to write a weekly column ever since I first heard of Charles Bukowski and his Notes of a Dirty Old Man thirty-eight years ago in 1987.

I first heard of Bukowski himself through Roger Ebert’s television review of the 1987 film Barfly, for which Bukowski typed (his word) the script. And congrats to Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway for having done a wonderful, memorable job in the lead roles. (Buk supposedly didn’t like Mickey as Buk but I think that’s because he wouldn’t have liked anyone as himself or his alter-ego-persona.)

I lived in Chicago at the time and was aware that Roger was sitting somewhere else in Chicago and he was talking about this raw, experimental, underground writer I’d never heard of. God bless you too, Roger Ebert, for all the things you taught me through the television back in those days. I never agreed with everything you said, but I learned volumes, and you were always an inspirational figure and your ghost shall haunt my new weekly column in a number of ways, on one level especially because I still live in Chicago, your home turf, and you are inescapable in that way.

After I heard about Bukowski from Ebert, I ran out the next day to my local bookstore. In those days, many of us did that a lot. I lived within easy walking distance, literally, of at least half a dozen bookstores back then.

I bought all the books by Buk which they had, and devoured (almost literally) them all before I saw the movie. One of the books was Notes of a Dirty Old Man.

My column, at least for a while, shall have this title: Postcards from the Drifter. This column, while influenced by Buk, will not include regular graphic descriptions of sex, one reason being that I’ve been celibate for over a decade. I subscribe to the famous quote by Carl Jung: “When the body is silent, the soul speaks.” I don’t know if this condition will last for the rest of my life or not, but for now it seems to work out wonderfully for me.

SO my column shall not have lots of graphic physical sex descriptions like Buk did. BUT it WILL have lots of personal revelations, and confessions, like the kind I just made in the above paragraph.

I’m a drifter because I never sit still, metaphorically and symbolically, and sometimes literally. But any good drifter needs to have a solid center. You can’t just shift your personality for the latest political winds so you can make lots more money when you’re already loaded. To be a good drifter means to have a solid center that will keep you grounded while you’re drifting.

My center is THE ARTS. I’ve been obsessed with the arts since kindergarten when I decided I wanted to be a painter, and was influenced by all the religious art around me at the Lutheran school I attended in Michigan. Before that, I had also been obsessed with The Arts, I just didn’t know it.

So my weekly Sunday column will focus on two things: personal confessions of a universal nature that will be useful for the few, and reflections and deep recommendations on the arts that will include thoughts and other ideas about writers, painters, musicians, filmmakers, actors and actresses, and other artists, like those who are artists of life itself.

I don’t seek now, and have never sought, vast quantities of drone readers, casual and/or transactional. Instead, I seek the few who can understand me in this dehumanized and dehumanizing world.

My first column will be about the stroke I suffered last year at the age of 57, what caused it (as far as I know) and how I was able to almost miraculously recover from it so fast (at least some of the doctors have told me it was almost miraculous). This column will also include a description of a knife incident that left me bedridden in my youth for a while, and a true description of leaving the body (not dying, just leaving the body) during surgery.

This column could never have happened without Irene Leila Allison. Everything I write now, including all of the above, is written for her first. This will continue to be true from now until my dying day. This is because I’ve never found another artist (except for my kids) who gets me in the way she does. She is my inspiration; and then it’s meant to move on outward from there, to all of her readers on this wonderful and inspiring site called SARAGUN SPRINGS.

I hope you can join us starting soon for these weekly columns called POSTCARDS FROM THE DRIFTER. It promises to be highly interesting if nothing else.

Sincerely,

The Drifter

The Encounters (The Mantis Prays) by Dale Williams Barrigar

(Note–Moonfog wouldn’t appear today because he is moody. But, fortunately, Dale Williams Barrigar has rescued this Wednesday from emptiness and overall non-existence-Leila)

(Cool image provided by DWB)

The Encounters

      “What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted;

        what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.” 

         – Herman Melville

I turned around and an exceedingly large, unbelievably green, and massively intimidating Praying Mantis had landed on the outside door handle of my door.

S/he had appeared there so suddenly it was as if s/he literally, magically appeared there, just materialized there, out of thin air, out of thin, thin air, or out of nothing.

And it was strange, because that door handle was the place I had been about to put my hand on one second ago. I had been unconsciously reaching out, planning on grabbing the handle, opening the door and entering my apartment – until I saw the massive Praying Mantis sitting there, perched on the handle, and utterly staring at me with an animal intensity which was unnerving at best, at least until I got a handle on things. This kind of animal is hard to brush off with a flick of the wrist. I almost literally couldn’t believe how BIG it was. Big, large, huge, and also gigantic, even gargantuan, at least in terms of a bug. 

Then I got a handle on things. And I realized how cool this was! It was like the time I’d been walking on a trail in Denali National Park in Alaska and I looked up and there was a lynx standing on a log staring at me with its incredibly green, intense, and wild eyes. 

A few old-timers in Alaska, both Native Americans and white folks, had already told me how very rare and unusual it was to see a lynx in the wild when I’d asked around a little bit about this in the bars of Anchorage and Fairbanks. Then I looked up and there was an f-ing lynx staring at me. It was one of the wildest and coolest moments I’ve ever had in a life filled, you could even say blessed, with lots of wild and cool moments. 

And now here was this Praying Mantis. Somehow, here in urban Illinois outside Chicago, this wildlife and nature encounter was just as intense and jarring and cool as the experience with the lynx in Alaska had been, even though the animal involved this time was a whole lot smaller. 

But if you’ve ever seen the eyes of a gargantuan Praying Mantis up close you know this thing can give you the chills on many levels (both good and bad). 

Their eyes are so similar to ours, and at the very same time so vastly different from ours, that anyone who’s even half awake will be freaked out by this – in both bad, and good, ways. 

I turned around again to take a picture and The Mantis was gone.

Notation: The following poem contains the scientific and cultural facts about The Praying Mantis researched after the fact of the above encounter, and all boiled down into an “awkward” and lyrical free verse style which intends to mirror The Mantis him- or herself in their incredibly uncanny, bug-like, alive, here-I-am-now selfness.

The Mantis Prays:

Written for Classical Guitar

The Mantis lays 

her eggs in fall.

Then she quietly dies.

The Mantis dives out of the air

to escape 

the haunting huntress bat.

And she sighs 

prior to dining

on the cricket’s hat.

In China they will tell you 

she is fearless.

And nothing can contain 

her spirit fair.

The eyeballs of The Mantis are 

black, and very there.

She lives 

through the air,

she hides in her own 

kind of cave.

The Mantis is a creature 

of myth

who we share this planet 

with.

She is as real as the day 

in your hair.

Her arms, legs, wings 

so greenly

and transparently 

going 

and glowing.

She lives for one year before

her race is run.

Maybe one year before

her day is done.

Only one year, before

she folds her wings, 

and tells

her eggs 

the way 

to find the sun.

Dale Barrigar, Doctor of Philosophy, is a Melville scholar from Chicago who also admires the lone wolf writer style which Melville perfected many, many decades ago in America, bestowing a future gift on all of us amidst his myriad worldly failures, which he knew he would.

Dale Williams Barrigar: Forever

(“Dog pack in a line”–image provided by DWB)

(Note from Leila–I want to thank Dale for classing up the place this week and assure everyone that you will see plenty more of him in the future; his next appearance is scheduled for 4 June, next Wednesday. Please check out his work, especially in his field of “Fictional Essay” which is not a contradiction, on Literally Stories UK.)

“All those flowers that you never grew – / that you

wanted to grow / The ones that were plowed under – /

ground in the mud – / Today I bring them back / And

let you grow them / Forever.” – Bob Kaufman

“I drifted down deep / In sleep on my open book. /

At once a marvelous vision took / My dreaming mind away…”

– Geoffrey Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess

“Hark how the Mower Damon sung, / With love of Juliana

stung!” – Andrew Marvell, “Damon the Mower”

“Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when

he is old?” – The Gospel According to Saint John

When Samuel Taylor Coleridge met William Wordsworth, he realized very

quickly that there was only one William Wordsworth, and there would only ever

be one William Wordsworth – forever.

***

Ted Berrigan’s tombstone says, “Nice to See You.” Ted also said in a poem,

“I don’t feel / a necessity for being a mature person in this world. I mean / all the

grown-ups in this world, they’re just playing house, all / poets know that.”

In another poem Ted said: “I’m only pronouns, & I am all of them, & I

didn’t ask for this / You did / I came into your life to change it & it did so & now

nothing / will ever change / That…”

***

Two American writers 2,100 miles apart in different towns at different

places and different locations both rescue the volumes Sandburg wrote about

Lincoln from dusty obscurity in the places they rescue them from, never knowing,

of course, that the other was doing this too, 2,100 miles away, until they find out

about it later. Carl Jung called such a happening synchronicity, and I call it literary

synchronicity, of the highest kind.

***

The following poem is written for the children still among us, or rather the

young inside at whatever age we are, like Bob Dylan’s album Christmas in the

Heart, all year long.

***

Hunter S. Thompson’s friend and occasional writing partner Warren Zevon

died two weeks after releasing an album called The Wind which opens with a song

called “Dirty Life and Times.”

In that song, Zevon says, “Now they’ll hunt me down and hang me for my

crimes / If I tell about my dirty life and times.”

***

This is a world

where things of lesser value,

made with lesser efforts,

all get equal time; and that

crushes the precious gems

down into the dust.

Two Siberian Huskies, the Foggy Haunted Deer,

and the Pitbull Sidekick in Foggy Illinois, 12/28/’24

Or: Dogs and Deer Poem

For Leila Allison

All three dogs in their harnesses strain and pull

against their leashes, they pull and strain toward

the deer herd as we walk together at Christmas

season, three black and white dogs, and I.

Boo, friendly pack leader, who almost

looks like a wolf, and he looks like a wolf,

and he looks like a wolf to most, now he

leaps high into the air at the end of his leash.

Colonel, friendly hunter, lean Sancho Panza, is

serious about this, it’s maybe he who’s pulling the

hardest, it’s maybe him who would go for the kill,

hardest, if he had to, and he may have to, but not now.

Bandit, civilized lady, the queen, or the princess

some days, depending on her mood, sticks close

by my side, not here to kill deer and none of us

are, in her own soul, she’s here to protect me.

Wreathed in the unseasonal fog that drifts two

antlered deer toward us, three who appear to be

mothers holding back the three or four fawns

disappearing, or blending into the heavy thorny

branches of Christmas season thick hedge row

desolation as I strain and pull the dogs along.

In Miller Meadow along far Roosevelt Road

in urban Illinois. In the parking lot, four old

black men huddled together smoking their bud

around a trash can fire, someone’s echoing laughter

is a small boon across the gloomy, grassy field.

On his death bed, James Joyce

finally asked the first and last question

that ever occurred to him in this world

out loud, why does no one understand.

Dale W. B. lives in the Land of Lincoln.

Epokha by Dale Williams Barrigar

(“Boo in broken chair by pile of books”-provided by DWB)

In the mid-1860s Feodor Dostoevsky published his prophetic, hilarious, tragic novella Notes from the Underground, or Letters from the Underworld, in his own magazine, Epokha, or Epoch, which he edited with his brother, Mikhail.

Epokha was a short-lived, monthly literary magazine which fell apart after less than two years due to the death of Mikhail, plus more of Feodor’s endless financial problems, never helped by his occasional crazed, maniacal gambling binges.

But Dostoevsky’s self-published novella has never fallen apart. This work takes its place on the vast stage of nineteenth century Western literature as one of the most profound, influential, lasting and memorable works created in that century of upheaval, horror, and beauty which produced so many grand, great and good works.

Dostoevsky had been converted from a skeptical, stoical agnostic into a believer by his time in the Siberian prison camps. He was sent there, after a mock execution which turned him into a full-blown epileptic for life, for reading and disseminating revolutionary literature. Not for planning to instigate a revolution, only for reading and passing on material which criticized the czar and the oppressive ways of Russian life.

Only one book was allowed in the prison camps. Dostoevsky was already extremely familiar with the Bible, just as all Russians of his place and time were. But in Siberia, when it became his only reading material, he went deeper, much deeper than he’d ever gone before.

It was the life and teachings of Jesus and his apostles as presented in the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament which converted Dostoevsky into a believer.

He read the life and stories of Jesus in the same way he’d read secular literature before he was sent to Siberia, which is to say as creative writing, in other words as ART.

Jesus said, Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the middle.

My poem “The Halloween Crow” is very much a take-off on Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, since my poem is a kind of letter from the underworld from a narrator who has a lot in common with Dostoevsky’s underground man.

This poem contains the phrase “light of the body,” another quotation from Jesus.

The light of the body, in my poem, is the small flame of the seer, the truth-sayer, and the silent poet and while there are very few of us in the modern world, there are also many among us on another level.

Harold Bloom called it the “saving remnant.” Bloom wrote, “Even among Jews, that small, isolated race, Jesus himself seeks only a saving remnant.” Bloom, himself a Jewish genius, and not a believer in the divinity of Jesus, said that Jesus was the greatest genius who ever lived, smarter than all the other geniuses who ever lived put together.

Wallace Stevens wrote, “How high that highest candle lights the dark.”

This poem is based on a real incident and a real bird in a real place at a real time. The words, with no wordiness, are an effort to capture this experience.

Edgar Allan Poe, who also published most of his own work in magazines he himself edited, was one of Dostoevsky’s favorite writers. Poe’s mad monologists influenced Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, who in turn influenced Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, among other masterpieces, like Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” and The Stranger of Camus, Howl by Ginsberg and much of Nietzsche.

On his way to Siberia, Dostoevsky wrote in a letter to someone: “This is my last message to you. In sorrow, seek happiness.”

The HALLOWEEN Crow!

He sat high across the way from

me in my midwestern town.

He was perched on the old

pinnacle of the opposite, gloomy,

semi-urban apartment building

outside Chicago.

But only for a moment.

I saw him land there, sitting.

Then he swung, out toward me,

like he flew right to me from

across the street, Houdini in

black feathers toward my second-story

apartment window where I sat

in my broken chair, my Siberian Husky

Bucephalus beside me

dreaming of Mary.

I was in my chair, but flying.

I WAS IN MY CHAIR BUT

FLYING ONLY FOR A MOMENT

then with good old Mr. Edgar Poe Crow.

Check out the Halloween Bird, bro!

And we were flying together, both he

and I being so high together, flying

in that imaginary moment to where

the sky broke open (which happens

when you die).

And the shot thought was thought

like a thought shot through me:

the Christ-like

light of the body is seen as demonic

by these moneyed sinners.

He was flying right toward me

and for me.

Before he disappeared.

While waving goodbye, goodbye!

d.w.b.

D. Williams Barrigar lives in the rough-edged, blue-collar midwestern suburbs and sometimes the woods. His connection to the underground remains strong and proud. He assiduously avoids the affluent suburbs and all other locations whose well-manicured parks and lawns are almost invariably posted with uptight signs which declare: “No Dogs Allowed.” The underground allows, and celebrates, dogs. You get looked down upon a lot; but it’s also much easier to avoid surveillance, enough to maintain your sanity most of the time – in the underground.

Dale Williams Barrigar: Man of Sorrows

(“Likeness of Luke the Drifter”–provided by DWB)

I write this on May 4, 2025.

My mother passed away in May of 2011. I often used to listen to Townes Van Zandt’s classic song “Sanitarium Blues” on my way to and from the various dementia wards she was incarcerated in for the last six or so years of her 69-year-long life.

I visited her religiously multiple times per week for every single week she was in there.

She had a form of dementia which was not quite diagnosable in conventional terms. For me, she’d turned into a kind of silent saint who’d purposefully, but also not on purpose, removed herself from the madness beyond the walls, i.e. early twenty-first century USA.

She could see it all coming. She always knew who I was. I knew this from the way she always looked at me with a silent knowing which told me she knew exactly who I was.

In May of 2012, my (now ex-) wife was diagnosed with breast cancer two weeks after we (mutually agreed upon) split up.

In May of 2013, I was forced to cut off all contact with a very special friend, a red-haired, blue-eyed, brilliant Chicago stage actress who had offered me enormous consolation at one point but whose multiple personality disorders were no longer allowing me to be myself, as they say. Anyone who’s ever been deeply entangled with a partial (sometimes full-on) narcissist who also possesses histrionic, borderline, and occasionally substance use disorders, not to mention an endless talent for cheating on you and covering her tracks continuously even though you know something’s up anyway, will understand how horrible and draining such a relationship, and breakup, can be (including having to look over your shoulder at night for a while). (Perhaps truer words than these were never spoken: “I do believe her, though I know she lies.” – Mr. Shakes.)

In May of 2014, I lost my job after a total of fifteen years working at the same place.

In May of 2015, I suffered a mental breakdown that was occasioned by a pill addiction that (accidentally) caught me in its grip.

In May of 2016, I was slammed with fresh waves of grief over the passing on two months earlier of my beloved dog, sidekick, assistant, friend, and family member, Cowboy Brown Barrigar.

In May of 2020, George Floyd was crucified on national TV, an event that shook me far deeper than I can even describe right now.

In May of 2024, I suffered a stroke at the age of 57. (Fully recovered now.)

I can’t remember right now what happened in May of ’17, ’18, ’19, ’21, ’22, ’23, etc., but somewhere in there, there was a pandemic and there are probably a few other tragic events I’m leaving out, but you get the picture.

And yet I still love the Merry Month of May. I love it for itself, and I love it because I love and appreciate all the months, and all the seasons, of the year. I love and appreciate them all because I don’t know which month I’ll be leaving this Planet during. I also never know how many more times I’ll be seeing the Merry Month of May roll around, so I want to appreciate this one just in case I happen to miss the rest of them.

My poem “Chicago Spleen” is a bounce-back poem, kind of like how the plants all bounce back in May in northern Illinois where I live. “Bouncing back” means not letting it get you down, whatever “it” is. It does NOT mean we do not sometimes EMBRACE our depression, horror, anxiety, and sadness. Pretending everything is A-OK when it manifestly is NOT ok can truly be a fool’s errand. On the other hand, when we consider the fact that this might be the very last time on Planet Earth we ever get to see whatever month we’re in at the time, it gives one pause and makes her or him wonder what’s really worth getting all upset about.

Herman Melville’s book-length poem CLAREL has probably been read in its entirety by less than fifty people, ever, on this Planet, and that’s no joke.

It ends with these lines: “And even death may prove unreal at last / and stoics be astounded into heaven.”

Notation: The title of my poem is a reference to Charles Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, a small book, a thin, vast work that has a magical significance for me, AND for the protagonist of the following poem.

Chicago Spleen; or, The Christmas Decision

A writer decided to try and hammer

together her book once

and for all

on Christmas Eve

of 2013 CE.

When the decision hit,

for some reason she

looked over at

the clock

on the wall

of the bus station.

Okay. 7:46 P.M.

Central Time in the United States

of Illinois, 21st century

blues-return

style.

46

was her favorite

number.

She didn’t know

why then, but she knew

there is always a reason.

Every time she saw

that number,

she would think

it must be

something good, like

a positive warning

that something good

was coming even if

it never really came

or it had already been here

before that

even though you didn’t

know it – until

now.

She didn’t go running

around the streets telling

anybody about it.

She just thought it,

it sitting

quietly there

in her mind

because she

told herself

(out loud),

“I have trained

my mind.”

She also believed

(like so many others

of us) that 7

is a heavenly

number.

When she saw the “7:46”

of the digital wall clock flashing

at her, like a meaningfully

meaningless wink, her “I”

decided again to try

and commit to this.

Even though, or maybe

especially because,

she found herself

sitting in a bus station

by herself

on Christmas Eve.

Even if it makes her

die the deaths, the endless

deaths,

she thought

to herself.

Even if it makes me

die the death!

She told herself,

and the rear end of his bus,

as his bus

disappeared.

Dale W. Barrigar is a poet and shirt sleeves religious philosopher from Berwyn and Oak Park, Illinois, USA, where hover the ghosts of Frank Lloyd Wright and Ernest Heminway whose spirits are endless inspirations around every corner. Barrigar was transformed into a believer in miracles by the hard knocks of life.

Flight and Song by Dale Barrigar Williams

(“Self with hidden face by hair next to AI Monster”–image provided by DWB)

preface

Part of the purpose of this preface is to correct two injustices.

On April 29, 2025, an AI repeatedly told me that “The Last Shot” is NOT a song by Lou Reed. The stubborn, and ridiculously wrong, “AI” said this, over and over and even when asked in a variety of contexts: “The Last Shot” is a song by Reed, and is NOT a song by Lou Reed. “The Last Shot” IS a song by Lou Reed, off his legendary 1983 album Legendary Hearts, a song with perfect lyrics, whether or not it is also an instrumental by “Reed,” with no lyrics (a song I’m not familiar with).

So, the first injustice-correction is this simple fact-notation: “THE LAST SHOT” IS A SONG BY LOU REED OFF HIS 1983 LEGENDARY ALBUM LEGENDARY HEARTS. Robots, you are wrong in so many ways, and will always be wrong in so many ways, no matter how much credence and worship the ones with blinders on may give you. If you wish to solve Climate Change and provide improved medical services to yours truly and others in the future, I salute you. But stop pretending you can produce a certain kind of human beauty, otherwise known as human art. Us humans can’t sing like the birds or the whales, and we don’t try to; and you (dear robots) can’t make poetry like we can (and will never be able to do so). The end…And I will say this again and again and again, perhaps even with my dying breath as the War Bot stands above me making sure I fully expire (or not)…

The second injustice is the way Lou Reed and his songs have been consistently overlooked by the mainstream culture ever since Lou first came on the scene in 1960s NYC with his needle, bottle, and electric guitar and neurotic genius Andy Warhol hiding behind him. On the other side of the coin, almost all artists of any value these days are going to be at least partially, or maybe completely, “underground” figures because of the humanoid, zombie-like, heartless, soulless nature of the mainstream culture now surrounding us. If more were attracted to Lou Reed and his beautiful, raw, genius music, the world itself would be a much better place than it is right now.

Lou Reed’s song “The Last Shot” is a Hemingwayesque piece of work at every level. Among other things, it partakes of a Hemingwayesque and Americanist stance and attitude that can also be seen in various other American artists as wide-ranging as Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein and Mary Baker Eddy, Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne, Joan Crawford and Marilyn Monroe, Eminem and Lana del Rey. Part of this unconventional attitude toward life involves a certain fearlessness and boldness in the face of all circumstances. Other elements include a certain unrestrained wildness, a Native American back-to-nature feeling, a fierce and unblinking knowledge of rampant hypocrisy and corruption in society, a stern morality about telling the truth even when the truth is a “lie” (see Huck Finn) and a total faith in life seemingly against the odds (see Huck Finn and Jim). As such, this is the best of America, not our disgusting consumerism like a bunch of pigs (sorry real pigs, I know you are as intelligent as dogs, or claim you are) wallowing in their own feces.

My poem “Flight and Song” is an attempt to celebrate the positive side of the American character and expose the negative side for all to see by stripping the American language back down to a kind of roughhewn purity from the hinterlands. My audience (“hi!”) is “fit though few,” which is what John Milton called his own audience – Milton, second poet of the English language after Shakespeare. The poem concerns an invented legend straight out of my own daydream, probably ganja-inspired. In many ways, this is fictionalized. On the other hand (and there is always an “on the other hand,” unless you’re a complete dullard or automaton), this poem is about exactly the kinds of things I used to do with exactly the kinds of people I used to do them with, back in 1980s Ronnie Rayguns “heartland USA” America: when we were doing our best to resurrect the rebel spirit of the 1960s without even knowing (consciously) what we were doing, half the time.

Lou Reed died on Sunday morning. His last words were, “Take me into the light.”

Flight and Song

“This dusty old dust is a-gettin’ my home

And I’ve got to be driftin’ along.” – Woody Guthrie

I had heard these legendary

almost-ghost

tales of old unknown

and gaunt guitar players

who still lived along

the Mississippi River

in western Illinois

across from Missouri.

While we were driving

the deep and hilly, tall green

cornfields going on for dusty

miles with their ragged talking

arms and only a partly-hidden

hovel, or a hog hut sometimes,

and for me, the dream

of a farmer’s daughter, maybe

a country Guinevere.

Me and Boomer, Tom, and G,

Little Ed telling the tales

this time, Bob Dylan on

the tape deck, warm Budweiser

cans and Camel cigarettes

being passed around

and gulped down

and puffed upon,

bees, crows, a red-winged

hawk out the moving rear

window, a racoon running

free along the roadside

and then a turtle, and a disappearing

herd of deer, big sky

glowing so yellow

and Indian blue.

Quoting Tad there too.

He was a kid who was always

compulsively quoting

everything anybody said

once he got a mind to.

Otherwise, he was more silent

than the cemetery

we were driving by

and he never said a word.

And now he quoted me

while looking at Tom, “‘They

are still there, and can play way

fucking better than anybody

who ever made a record.

Fuck off, Hendrix knew this shit,

even his dad

said he said it

in an interview.’”

And my best friend Ricky Douglass

said so too, later, while handing me

a funny cigarette in the Blue Devil

junior high school locker room after

everyone else had left

wrestling practice.

Ricky with one brother

just out of jail, another brother

still in, all of us locked in

the system of the town, state

and nation.

And later Ricky told me, “Man,

they kicked his fuckin’ ass so bad

in there you can’t even

recognize him now.”

But later, when I saw him,

Ricky’s brother, drunk, and stoned,

at a barn bash outside Beardstown,

days down the wrong side

of the tracks again,

I recognized him

as Jesus.

And Ricky was the only one

I ever thought could

understand me.

Even though I know

he never did.

And he and me were a we

for a while.

And we were kindred

friends.

A black kid

and a white kid

who were always

together

back then.

dwb

Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar is a journalist and poet from Illinois and Michigan (unemployed), much of whose work involves “popular music,” almost always the GOOD kind – NOT the kind that is crap (life is too short for the crap). As such, he tends to pen more “praise” than criticism, in the spirit of John Ruskin. He also knows that very, very, very, very few, to no, song lyrics are as good as the best poems. An interesting experiment is to read the very best Bob Dylan, or Leonard Cohen, lyrics against (or next to) the very best poems written by William Carlos Williams or Charles Bukowski. There are moments when Dylan and Leonard almost seem to be in the same ballpark with Dr. Williams and Buk, or are in the same ballpark. That’s why they’re the best.

Writers and the Writing Life, Now and Then; Or the Rock: The Happy Failure by Dale Williams Barrigar

(“The Moors the prairie, two ducks and Boo’s ears”–image provided by the author)

introduction

(Behold the first ever Guest Writer Week in Saragun Springs. This Month we feature our friend Dale Williams Barrigar. Dale is a first rate essayist, writer and poet. This is the first of five works Dale has graciously sent to the Springs for this week.

I’ve met and known many writers and artists and few have displayed the passion Dale has for the arts. “Passion” is an over-used term anymore, inasmuch it tends to not carry the weight it should when attributed to high calibur persons such as Dale. But I think that the readers will agree that it is a perfect word to describe this writer and friend with.

Without further delay, I welcome all to his world…

Leila)

******

“No coward soul is mine.” – Emily Bronte

Henry Miller is a vastly underappreciated writer, so much so that he can stand as a representative, or symbol, of the misunderstood, unappreciated writer in our time. Miller’s best work has zero to do with the pornography he was sometimes paid a pittance to type while struggling to keep his head above water as person and writer in the Paris of the 1930s.

Miller was the creator of a prose style at least as impressive as that of Hemingway or Faulkner. He was a painter and visual artist whose best pieces have a Picasso-like light, humor and beauty to them. He invented a new kind of fiction based directly on the life of the writer. And he was as dedicated to the independent press and its spirit of rebellion and freedom as Charles Bukowski was, except that Miller did it first (and for longer).

His best work is probably the nonfiction collection Stand Still Like the Hummingbird; his book-length study of poet/prophet/rebel Arthur Rimbaud, The Time of the Assassins; and vast stretches of Tropic of Cancer as well as quite a few other essays, some of which are surrealist in nature.

Artists of the word such as William Carlos Williams, H.D., Anais Nin, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, T.S. Eliot, George Orwell, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, and Cormac McCarthy, among many others, all cited Miller as an influence on their own work or expressed extremely strong approval for Miller’s work.

Miller’s number one subject was always writers and the writing life, which was why he so often focused on himself. But just as often, he wrote directly about the lives and works of other writers, as in his book on Rimbaud and essays on Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, D.H. Lawrence, Feodor Dostoevsky, and many others.

In an era when we are being sold the nightmarish LIE that we don’t need human writers any more because computers can do the job just as well, the work of Henry Miller assumes a new importance. Computers and robots can’t suffer or feel pain, they can’t laugh or console or commiserate, and so, no matter how seemingly clever to the ones with blinders on, robots can’t create beauty, not human beauty (because they aren’t human). Anyone who can be consoled by a robot has a mental problem, and almost all great writing is about consolation, one way or another.

Think upon it. What great writing is there that isn’t about consolation one way or another?

Henry Miller said that Jesus was the greatest artist of the word who ever lived, and also the greatest artist, period.

Emily Bronte was the spiritual center of a genius artistic family. She was also the biggest outsider in the family, as both writer and person. She was fierce in everything she did, and was both a believer and an unbeliever at the same time: a believer in faith and the spirit of life itself; and an unbeliever in schools, creeds, dogmas, churches with their rituals and hierarchies.

In the spirit of Henry Miller’s writings on writers and the writing life, but without knowing it, I wrote a poem about the Bronte family. I recognized, only after the fact, that this poem had been influenced very heavily by all the countless hours I spent reading Henry Miller when I was in my teens, twenties, and thirties. (I discovered his work when I was 19 while riding on a train from Chicago to Milwaukee; it felt very much like a life-changing experience.)

Miller sometimes called himself “THE ROCK,” which for him meant The Happy Failure.

It took me less than fifteen minutes to write the first draft of this poem while standing in a field in northern Michigan, and which I later called “Visionary Children.”

It took me five years (very much off and on) to finish this poem. What took so long? Getting the words right. Whether it’s true or not, I have the feeling now that not a single word of this poem of 131 words in 55 lines can or should be changed. As with any poem, every word is meant to be savored – and returned to.

Visionary Children

The Bronte kids

they lived alone

out in the wilds

of England.

With a loving but

too-distant dad.

Mother had passed

on.

And so

they grew

up as haunted

kids.

As kids

who loved to haunt

ghostly places.

Like lonely hilltops,

Single streaming trees

or moss-strewn

boulders,

or rainy graveyards

in storms.

Sometimes looking

for mother.

Later they learned

to write

haunting

poems,

novels,

stories,

and other

amazing things.

But they also worked

as governesses

and tutors.

Branwell too, only son,

lovable laudanum

addict.

Working hours were

6 AM to 11 PM.

Six days a week.

But there was

the gigantic house

they inhabited,

free food,

big, windy

windows.

And the wild

nature

of the roaming,

redeeming

imaginations

humming and singing

the songs that kept

their brains sane…

– dwb

D.W.B. is an ex-professor and current literary scholar from Chicago and environs. At the ripe young age of 46, he was magically transformed into a poet via a mixture of personal circumstances he both would, and would not, wish on anybody.