(“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)

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“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.