Dale Barrigar Williams

A Life of Drama by Dale Barrigar Williams

A Life of Drama

His book

had become

its own living entity

unto itself. Every time

he thought it was

finished, and these times

were many, something else

was sure to change

again within a week

or so.

Among many other

gifts,

this book

had delivered

him

a life of drama.

This life

we live

is filled with

involuntary immediacy,

as Lou Salome

pointed out.

Now, with this book

in his life, every unexpected

arrival was a bigger

shock. Each departure

had a greater

reverberation. Words

between people

lasted longer

inside the mind.

Tiny details

took on looming,

symbolic

significance.

Every squirrel

he passed as he was walking

his pit bulls, then later his

Siberian Huskies, along the sidewalk;

every song playing

in the grocery store or from

a passing car;

every cloud;

every wind that blew

or door that slammed

shut;

every woman

laughing

down the street

and every man turning

the corner so you’ll never

see him again; was loaded with

spiritual significance.

The unseen

correspondences

that make up the real

layers and levels of

existence

had become

both

more meaningful, and

less important.

Everything

was important

beyond belief; and

nothing was, because

everything changes

and gets redeemed.

The religion of poetry, and he

suddenly

realized

it was a religion

that had become his,

left nothing

and everything

to chance.

Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar is a poet whose own poetry transformed his own life: suddenly, and then gradually. It’s good enough for him.

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.

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.