Introduction

There is something quite comic involved in the process of editing, to wit, the notion that a successful self-editor should end up with nothing at all. Everything written in the past should be discarded in favor of the free flow of what is at hand. Life, anyway, is an immutable disappearing act. Pitch the manuscript and catch a plane. That sort of thing.

But then cautionary good sense tells us that to publish is to rid ourselves of a burden and offer it to someone else, pleasant or not. In this case the burden began as seven hundred pages which was reduced to half of that. The effort was not to sanitize the past but to present experiences that were more fully realized in the writing. The only piece about which my mixed feelings still run deep is called “A Natural History of Some Poems” in the “Literary Matters” section. I view this as juvenilia, of interest only to assistant professors, should my work prove durable. My choice of a publisher far from the centers of ambition was based on wishing to avoid the enervating hoopla that tends to accompany the publication of books in New York.

It had occurred to me early, by the mid-sixties in fact, that I was temperamentally unsuited for teaching, the usual career of a literary writer. I hadn't thought it through at the time but the real reason for the brevity of my teaching career was that the universities I admired were so far from the woods and water I had emotionally depended on since my youth. To earn a living for my family I began an essentially quadra-schizoid existence, continuing to write the poems I had begun with and adding all matter of journalism, novels, and screenplays.

When a writer lifts his obsessed and frazzled head from the work there is frequently what Walker Percy called “the reentry problem.” Literary history abounds with cases of multi-addiction and personal mayhem of the most childish sort. To put it modestly, I have not been consistently innovative in avoiding the usual problems, but have tried to counter them with equal obsessions for the natural world, fishing, hunting, the study of Native Americans, cooking, the practice of Zen, not as a religion but as an attitude. “To study the self is to forget the self and become one with ten thousand things,” said Dogen.

When you lift your head from the work you want to return to earth, simply enough. Just recently I visited the Animas Mountains in New Mexico where I explored the Gray Ranch, a five-hundred-square-mile spread acquired last year by the Nature Conservancy. In my journal I wrote: “Before making camp on Double Adobe Creek I headed up a feeder creek, the dense riparian thicket of a long, narrow canyon. I felt a wonderfully mindless eagerness toward exploring the new territory, a palpable return to the curiosity of childhood when the responses to the natural world are visceral. The pulse races at an unrecognized welter of tracks (javelina), then softens, determining where mule deer and a single, large bobcat stopped to drink. Walking at twilight owns the same eeriness of dawn. The world belongs again to its former prime tenants, the creatures, and within the dimming light and crisp shadows you return to your own creature life that is so easily and ordinarily discarded. I have always loved best this time just before dark when the antennae stretch far and caressingly from the body. I heard the flap of a raven's wings before I saw it, and exchanged a series of greetings before heading back.”

Of course today's serenity easily slips into tomorrow's nonsense. To become prematurely autumnal is to lose the writer's most cherished possession—the negative capability that keeps the work's heart pumping. Perhaps, as someone said, there are no truths, only stories. I began as a young poet, standing on the roof looking at the moon and stars, smelling and listening to the swamp out back, dreaming the world. As a middle-aged poet, an identity that seems undisturbed, I have seen much of the world and am trying to dream myself back to where I already am. Midway between these two points I wrote a series of poems that took the form of letters addressed to Yesenin, a long-dead Russian poet I admired. This one in particular shows some of the character of the journey of the book that follows: