poetry

Self Doubt by Dale Williams Barrigar

(image provided by DWB)

Self Doubt

If you don’t question yourself from time to time, or even frequently, even the things you love best, it can rightly be said of you by anyone who wishes to – that you’re an idiot. Not the saintly idiot variety that Dostoevsky so convincingly portrays in his fascinating novel The Idiot; but the kind whose personality is lacking in somehow massive ways; the kind with blinders on who thinks they know it all and has got it right about everything in this endlessly confusing, mysterious world.

None other than Socrates himself, probably the second or third smartest human who ever lived (if such things can be calculated that way, which they cannot, necessarily), after Jesus, and along with Buddha (and a few others who can match them), repeatedly pointed out that the smartest among the smart know first what it is that they don’t know.

I’ve seen too many bored and boring, gossiping, chattering, small-talking busybodies in this world who think they know it all so that I have to agree with him.

Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, in her riveting, genius book Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (devour it immediately if you haven’t already; the chapter on Lord Byron alone will blow you away if you’re awake) describes how the depressive side of the artist leads to the necessary self-critical moods that lead to artistic shaping of the highest variety. So: it’s all worth it: for the artist, anyway.

Christina, in the following poem, is lost in a low mood, a very, very low mood.

In the final poem of this series (scheduled to appear tomorrow), she gets out of it alive.

Alone

“…the better fortitude / Of patience and heroic martyrdom / Unsung.”

– John Milton

Gas gauge

Nearing empty

Now

And earlier

She pulled over and wrote

In kind, gentle

Violent

Desperation.

All the mileage and the empty

Credit cards. Maps, colors and lines,

Colors and lines, blurring

What’s left

Of my mind.

Roadside diners. Coffee cups. Rest stops.

Gas stations. More coffee stops. Pep pills, a downer from

Back home in Chicago. Throbbing Bob

Marley music. Bob Dylan – Street Legal. Hiding

Rasta baggies from charming

State troopers. And I’m lonely now

And I’m

Alone…

And she realized,

I’ve eaten almost nothing

But nut-containing candy

Bars washed down with water

Or tea three whole days!

In search of

These things

I don’t even know

About.

I’ve got

Blisters on my fingers from

Too many pencils and papers,

Eyes weary, and bleary, from

Reading, looking, seeing or driving

And I’ve been on the road now

I don’t know

How many days

And how many

Ways.

The end

Will come when

It will come

(Or should I hurry

It)

But it’s

Giving me the

Creeps now

(And my skin

Is crawling like

With mean, nasty

Bugs)

And I’m

Wondering

Seriously

If all this aloneness

Can be

Good for

My soul.

Dr. Dale W. Barrigar has suffered so many crushing, brutal depressions that he’s often considered throwing in the towel and leaping off the Mackinac Bridge, in honor of John Berryman and Hart Crane, but he’s always resisted – and always will resist (unless somebody pushes him). For Barrigar, daily doses of Depakote and various other sedatives and mood stabilizers (plus a few other things) do wonders for steadying the nerves, and do nothing to dampen his creativity even in the slightest. He looks forward to the day when, like Leonard Cohen, he ages so much that he can throw the pills away. Until then – you do what you need to do, whatever it is. This life will end soon enough for all of us – don’t take that leap, it will all get at least a little better tomorrow – he promises you.

In the Car by Dale Williams Barrigar

(image provided by DWB)

In the Car

People used to think I lived in my car, because I carried so many items around with me in it, items that shall be (and are) elaborated in the following poem. Truth was, I did sometimes live in the car, but mainly only the times when I got kicked out of other places, and also all those times when I was on the road in America.

People used to think I only went on the road in America because of my passion for Jack Kerouac. And it was true that I did go on the road because of my passion for Jack (Kerouac and Daniel’s); but there were many other artists who often superseded Kerouac in my mind and imagination as my inspirations: for years, Jim Harrison, the great poet, essayist, and fiction writer Jim Harrison of Michigan and Montana, was my primary inspiration, and the list is long of other American drifters who also inspired me for years. Many of them were musicians.

And while a passionate fan of music and musicians, and while I can pluck the guitar and plink on the piano and blow the harmonica and drum the drums a little bit when the moment is right, I’ve never been a musician, because I’m not a performer in that way. I’m a performer in other ways, but not that one.

The following poem is about a nineteen-year-old girl, because I used to be a nineteen-year-old boy with a (not-very-obvious-usually) feminine side (everyone has both masculine and feminine sides, as Sigmund Freud both pointed out, and proved), and also because I now have daughters who are both eighteen at the moment.

Sketch Books

“A wayfarer by barren ways and chill…” – Dante Gabriel Rossetti

And I’m still looking

At the ghost,

She wrote,

That isn’t even there

Beside me any more,

After all, since childhood

When it had been.

My

Haunt-eyed closet ghost; so later will I label those

The Haunt-eyed Ghost of Warrior Traveling the Sky

Sketch Books

As she tossed the sketch books

Into the trunk of the car

With the rest of the papers

And notebooks.

The battered traveling library

Was spilling

Over into the back

Seat. Books

Are everywhere, and under

And next to

My pillows

From home.

Two sleeping bags.

Long, heavy watchman’s

Flashlight

From Grandfather.

For night time reading

And protection. And

I’m living in my car,

On the road

In Arizona,

New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming,

Montana, Idaho, Washington…don’t know

if I’ll ever go

Home!

D.W.B., sometimes referred to as The Drifter by none other than himself, has always had a penchant for moving from one place to another in a kind of restless, and sometimes listless, fashion, since this helps him to refrain from getting bored. He doesn’t take fancy vacations, or any vacations for that matter, but he does maunder from here to there on a daily basis – whistling in his soul.

Artist of the Western Plains by Dale Williams Barrigar

Mystery Writer

Mystery surrounds us, we live now in an eternal mystery, mystery here is endless, mystery is our meat and drink, the air we breathe, the ether we swim in – and yet it’s so easy to forget this simple fact, so terribly, horribly easy to forget it and become bored with it all. And perhaps that is the greatest sin of all.

REAL ART is not about scoring points with your teacher, setting yourself up with a fancy career, making lots of money, building yourself a comfy nest egg in academia with all your like-minded friends, nor even (predominantly) about getting yourself legitimately famous, now or later.

It’s about connecting, or reconnecting, ourselves with THE MYSTERY.

When we walk in mystery, we’re never bored. James Joyce’s epiphanies, William Wordsworth’s “spots of time,” the revelations in The Book of Revelations are all about reminding us that the world is not about “getting and spending,” as Wordsworth put it.

They asked him to tell them the ultimate truth. Buddha showed up with a single flower, said nothing, and sat there holding it out toward them for a long, long time – before he vanished in front of their eyes.

Artist of the Western Plains

“I can conceive that this is the essence, of which all other poetry is the dilution.”

– Virginia Woolf

Alone she was

Most of the time,

Hiking and sketching

With many-colored

Pencils and pens

On empty

Western deserts

And plains, under cold

Battlefield hillsides,

Searching for

Something

Spiritual.

Maybe a single, bent

Evergreen tree, three feet

Tall

And dark, on the ridge

Top.

Fully living.

Fully alive!

All alone. All by

Itself, but also with

Its friends:

The ground,

The wind,

The elk

Shadows in

The distance.

Dale Williams Barrigar, MFA, PhD, is a visual artist and poet from the midwestern USA who likes to spend lots of time contemplating the real relations between true religion and art-making. To the busybody world at large, it can sometimes sadly appear as if he’s doing nothing but lounging on the couch or in the grass with a vacant look in his eyes. Not so!

Deliberately: Dale Williams Barrigar

(Note: through Saturday, DWB will entertain us with his Christina Poems. I think you will find them as wonderful as I and The Moving Hoof do-Leila)

(Image provided by DWB)

Deliberately

One thing I can say for sure about the following poem below, everything in it is on purpose, including the line lengths and the capital letters. I lived with the character in this poem, named Christina, who appeared to me in a daydream, for a long time until one day in a field by a river in the wilds of northern Michigan most of the lines suddenly occurred to me.

The year was 2014 and I didn’t even own a cell phone yet – on purpose. My paper and pens were all back in the car, a couple of miles away somewhere down the trail.

So I walked back down the trail humming these lines in my head so they wouldn’t disappear, or rather the lines were as if humming themselves in my head, and they stayed there, they didn’t go away, they didn’t vanish into thin air by the time I’d made it to the car – that was how I knew this poem deserved to get written down.

The list of poets who influenced this poem is long, but a few of the key names include Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Robert Frost, Jim Harrison, and Charles Bukowski. I’ll stop there for now because 7 is a magic number. There are four more poems about Christina.

And I would like to say to her here: “Christina. I still see you in my dreams.”

Road Warrior Christina

“I’m a road warrior for the Lords of Karma.”

– Hunter S. Thompson

“My life is like a broken bowl.”

– Christina Rossetti

Christina, at nineteen

In 1991, A.D.,

Was a lone,

Young-hearted

Poet

Who didn’t know

It,

But her fast, moving

Feet showed it, also her

Wild, red-brown,

Messy-long, cut-by-her-ex-boyfriend

Hair, not her boyfriend exactly but her

Boy

Friend, one of

The few.

And now she was

Traveling

Solo,

Traveling far, in her

Battered little car,

Dusty

Sandals

On her feet,

Cut-off jeans shorts,

Baggy T-shirts, sometimes

Black lipstick on,

Red polish on

Her toenails, and her

Heart, and her

Art, they were

Partially

Guided by

Geronimo’s kind

Native star in her

Driving blood

Commemorative:

Her hair, her

Heart, her

Art.

Geronimo, medicine man

Of the Christ

Without end, she wrote,

While driving

On the highway,

On the back

Of an envelope

With a red,

Red pen.

(To be continued…)

Dale Williams Barrigar is an American wanderer who sometimes calls himself The Drifter.

Saragun Verse: Moonfog Madrone and The Sun

i

Moonfog Madrone stared at the Sun.

And the Sun gazed upon he.

“Tell me star, away so far,

What can you do for me?”

ii

And the Sun said: “I can boil the rivers and blast the land;

I can melt the peaks and glass the sand.”

Moofog laughed, “I’ve seen it before and will again.

No my friend, what’s in it for me?”

iii

And the Sun said: “Whatever god made you won’t allow you to die;

You go on forever and will even outlast me, I expect.

The perfect candidate to mock eternity:

An arrogance never to know the mercy of death.”

iv

The Sun fell below the distant range

And Moonfog laughed throughout the night

“He’s a poor old fool cursed to rule,

A toss of rocks for his own spite.”

Ode To Forage by The Moving Hoof

*

You ask why I love alfalfa and hay,

Apples, celery, barley and salt lick;

Peas, carrots and the darling legumes of May

But ne’er nasty corn dogs on a stick

*

I’ve heard all the rumors about my breed

We eat tin cans and other vile stuff

Let me set you straight our food is from seed

As you are what you eat, talking cheese puff

*

Bean sprouts singly sing a beckoning song

But not for humans who store them dumbly

We Goats wonder how you get them so wrong

E coli from shoots? the heart beats glumly

*

My fey sonnet began with a question

The answer is natural selection

The Character Here by Dale Barrigar Williams

(Druid Girl Image, provided by DWB)

The Character Here

The main character in the following lyric cry goes barefoot most of the time, wears animal skins when he wears anything, carries a spear, wears an amulet around his neck that protects from evil spirits which he knows often, but not always, come from other people, and has never shaved, although he has cut off his beard and hair when they get too long so they don’t get in his way; he also takes magic mushrooms, walks for days on a regular basis, hangs around the fire a lot, also spends a lot of time alone, sees visions, makes cave paintings he never looks at again, or sometimes returns to as if to an old friend for days on end; and in this poem, is inventing, or elaborating, human language, while also simultaneously developing the gift of human mercy which Jesus himself, and his mother Mary, would bring to perfection many thousands of years into the future from where this character is perching in this poem – right now.

Alone at Blue Rocks on the Shoreline

Prehistoric Man/kind perches on the cusp of a decision, and speaks.

The rocks here at shoreline are blue.

Blue like the water and sky.

Blue like the blue bird and the big ice.

And they rise half as high as the ice, as the big ice.

The rocks here under this sunset tree are red.

Red like her hair, and the sacrificial hare in the sun, in the trap, twitching.

(LET IT GO.)

Your costume only becomes you

and your uniform once you

wholly own it somehow

after long tries

and once you wholly own it you’ll

uniformly know and your uniform

costume will simply become a way

of knowing and a way of knowing more

about what you already know you know

but aren’t always so sure about, in this land

of the wooly mammoth having you for breakfast

on his horns

and the saber-toothed tiger around

every

bushy

turn.

So the hare, let it go, LET IT GO.

The hare released.

Look at him go!

He flies because I

have chosen

not to sacrifice.

Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar is an impoverished poet-scholar from the Midwestern USA who learned much of what he knows about primordial humankind by reading and pondering the works of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, William Butler Yeats, William Wordsworth, William Blake and William Shakespeare, as well as lots of intuition, imagination, and experience thrown into the balance. Experience alone is never enough, and neither is reading; they have to be combined.

The Continuing Rubaiyat of Saragun Springs by The Moving Hoof (translated by Leila Allison)

(Note–Daisy has acquired a Penname. As you have guessed it is “The Moving Hoof.” She is now, as she just informed me, Dame Daisy Cloverleaf-Kloverleaf, the Goatess of GOAT and The Moving Hoof. A gallon of vodka weighs more than The Moving Hoof yet it contains only half as many delusions–LA)

i

Buckfast Geeply Geep is my half brother

Same Goat father, a Sheeply Sheep mother

You can usually find him at the track

Wagering hobnobs on a good mudder

ii

Hobknobs are the coin of the multiverse

They have value everywhere but earth

Whereas the billions of Musty Musk

Wouldn’t rate a spoonful of Saragun dirt

iii

Buckfast loves to bet on the Peonies

Racing flowers raised by Magic Donkeys

On quick moving blooms they rush gate to gate

Encouraged by sweet Butterfly jockeys

iv

Being a Geep is a million to few

Ram and Nanny or Billy and Ewely Ewe

Not Bob and Carol nor Ted and Alice

Will land their offspring at the petting zoo

The Continuing Rubaiyat of Saragun Springs by The Moving Hoof (translated by Leila)

i

When Big Ed the Woodpecker is glum

He beats the chimney cap like a drum

Our boy suffers from small bird syndrome

He longs to be King of the scrumly scrum

ii

Big Ed envies the mighty Eagles

They don’t put up with Seagulls

It’s Bang! Zoom! Straight to the Moon!

For the selfish Me-Gulls

iii

Big Ed is in love deep and fancy

A whippoorwill has got him romancy

Her name is McGill, she calls herself Lil

But everyone knows her as Nancy

iv

The Moving Hoof has heard from Rocky Raccoon

He has promised lawyers, many and soon

She laughs and scoffly scoffs as she tells him

He may go and suck by the banks of his own saloon