Today Steven is a teacher with a school in Michigan, and I'm sure he's a good one. He always had a serious approach to literature, though there was also humor there. I met him at Sangamon State University in the good old days when it was still Antioch-West in demeanor. Before they drove all the people with heart and soul away.
Steven and myself were in John Knoepfle's first poetry workshop at SSU. Besides us, there was also Jane Morrel, Janne Hanrahan, and Sandra Riseman. It was a remarkable group in so many ways. That would've been the fall of 1972.
Steven was a beautiful man, physically speaking, all long dark wavy hair and gallic features. Although short, he was so romantic and byronic. A veritable chick magnet. But he was never a player, so his relationships with women were pretty much monogamous I believe.
Primarily he became involved with a woman, Mary Ann Gerlich, who, after she left her husband Duane and divorced him, became Mary Ann Demas. She was a finely formed person herself, with great heart, and a good poet. She was an original member of what at the time was the women's poetry collective known as Brainchild (not to be confused with the later fiction-centered version that was fostered by Rosemary Richmond). Brainchild published at least five anthologies and I believe Mary Ann's poems can be found in four of them.
The summer of 1973 came after Becky McGovern threw me out, and I ended up living with my advisor's wife, Pat Smith. We ran away to Chicago and lived on the near north side on Bissell off of Armitage. While we were there I wrote a series of love letters to Janne Hanrahan, exchanging a lot of poems and criticism. Janne took some of those poems to Knoepfle who used them to make a pitch for some funding for a series of poetry chapbooks.
The first of the Sangamon Poets books, Outtakes, consisted of a number of short poems I had written in Chicago. By March of 1974 Pat and I had returned to Springfield, where Pat had been offered a job with the Department of Children and Family Services, a government agency she was with for the next twenty odd years. I think Tom Teague helped get her that job. Tom had been in the magazine production class that Pat had team taught with Sandy Martin. Their husbands, John Knoll and Larry Smith, pretty much ran the Communications Department at SSU at the time. I published things in two of the magazine projects.
The second Sangamon Poets chapbook was Steve's collection Between Lunatic Ears. But Knoepfle hated that title, judging it not serious enough. There were a couple of long poems in Lunatic Years. The one I remember best was entitled Blue. Later we attempted a recording of the poem to serve as the soundtrack for a surreal short feature that Janne made for a film class. A project lost now, though it featured Steven dressed up as a knight, using aluminum foil for his armor. The tinfoil knight we called the character. I played a drag queen. I think a number of people thought I was gay because of this role (and because of an article on drag queen rock and roll I published in RipOff, A Magazine of the Arts).
I still have rather fond memories of being in Janne's apartment on Bond Street, putting on makeup and hanging out with Mike Getz, who had done an illustration for my chapbook, and who later illustrated a piece I had in a magazine called Calligraphia that somewhat recounted that time in my life and which featured references to the tinfoil knight.
Well, Steven had left Springfield for the south. He studied very briefly in a writing program, was it in Lousiana? I'm not sure, I just know that he flipped out at some point, rented a truck and threw his stuff in it and drove to Springfield. He showed up at my house on Scarritt one evening, looking for a place to stay, and brought in his trunk. It never left that house, and later on I dragged it all over the country.
Steven however went on to Chicago in there somewhere. I think he had this really contentious relationship with Mary Ann, though I don't know why it was so fucked up. Later on he published another collection of poems, many of which were about her and had a distinctly bitter tone. He dedicated that book, to M.A.D. from S.A.D. She wrote some pretty caustic stuff about him along the way.
Memories of Steve: When he would show up in Springfield and we would get Hanrahan and the three of us would buy some booze and drive out to Auburn where Knoepfle lived and get him as drunk as we could. One time Knoepfle ended up reading from papers of his service record to us. Knoepfle was in the navy in wwii. We had a great time. I can remember sitting in the irish bar, the County Cork, on North Sixth Street with him and Hanrahan and getting into a drinking contest. Hanrahan won, of course. She could drink normal people under the table. Pretty amazing for such a slim irish chick.
I also remember him at Hanrahan's apartment on South Seventh Street (1719 1/2), where she was living with John Large and Mary Gael Cullen. She later married and much later divorced Large. Anyway, she was hosting a Brainchild function that night, and we hung around (it was before Brainchild got scared of having men at their gigs) and after people left Mary Gael, MG, came home from working at St. John's and started complaining about her doctor boyfriend who had blown her off. MG talked real fast in those days and she was blowing insults right and left. Steven, who was seriously drunk at the time, started honking, in rhythm to her monologue. She would look at him and he'd smile. Then she'd talk and he'd honk some more. I remember she lobbed some remarks about the guy being a Jew and I later wondered if Steven had found it insulting. It certainly was, though at the time I just thought it was in bad taste. And MG was often in bad taste in them days. She later ended up being a minor figure of some repute in Springfield. A competent and interesting person over all. I wonder if she remembers Steven being obnoxious that night. Looking back, I still find it humorous. He was soooo handsome. She was taken by that so she didn't get outright pissed at him.
Speaking of being taken by Steven's handsomeness, there was this girl who lived down the alley when I lived on Scarritt Street, Nancy Isaacs. Nancy used to come and hang out with me. I was a stay at home keep house writer at the time. Pat went to work and I wrote novels and letters. Mostly letters, but five real novels none of which worked. Nancy would show up and hang with me, because I was friends with Steven and she was obsessed with him in a careful kind of way. I think she was living with a young man who was a good friend of Steven's, but I had no doubt at the time that Nancy would've welcomed Steven's attention.
But Steve was obsessed with Mary Ann throughout that time. He may have had a lot of other action in Chicago. Darned if I know. He would show up for Scarritt parties and sometimes for the Friday night reading groups. Usually he brought his guitars and he would sing a couple of songs. Particularly good was his rendition of Steve Goodman's "You Don't Have to Call Me Darling, Darling."
One more Steve item: The Knoepfles organized something called The Creative Bash, at the coffeehouse that used to be downtown in them days, Rudolph's Bean. Pretty much everybody in the writing community at the time showed up. I read my long poem, On Samhain's Eve, which Peggy Knoepfle said was the longest poem anybody read. That wasn't actually true, but I think what she meant was that it was boring. Steven read Orexia and the other long poem which title is escaping now. I'll have to dig it out. Anyway, the crowd loved Steven's poem and I later said to Knoepfle that Steven was definitely the star that night and Knoepfle got mad at me for saying that. Many years later I came to understand what a weak person he was at heart, poor mediocre bastard. On some basic level Knoepfle always knew he was something of a fraud. But he wrote some really good poems along the way. He just couldn't ever be honest enough to write the great stuff. So many of the writes I have known fall into that: they get the chops, but by the time they have the chops they've lost the fearlessness required to be truly honest.
Anyway, Steven had the chops and the fearlessness. I'm surprised he isn't more of a major voice then he is. But, modern American poetry is at best a sad affair, basically run as a club of ass kissers. They don't like me; I'm sure its because I'm such a poor writer. But I write anyway. What the hell. I always thought Steven was good.
Let's see, that's about it for the moment. Here's a link to a picture of Steve, playing guitar and singing, next to Pat Smith, on the couch on Scarritt Street, 1974-ish: Link.
I also have a manuscript of a novel that Steven worked on for awhile, entitled Maybe I'm a Sailor. Which appears to be a fictionalized account of his romance with MAD. It's somewhat turgid, but has that distinct idiom Steve was farming in those days. Now that I think about it, I recall that when Steve first lived with Mary Ann Demas, he rented a "writing apartment" in the old house across from the YMCA on fourth street. That house had been cut into apartments. He said he needed a place of quiet, away from things. I think that meant Mary Ann.
Sometime during this period Steve also stayed with friends of his who rented an apartment upstairs at the movie theatre, old timey, that was on Fifth Street in downtown Springfield, somewhere around Capitol Street. That's where we recorded Blue/Nexus? for Janne's movie. A wild and drunken night indeed.
All I got today. If you have questions, feel free to ask: tosburn59@gmail.com
Labels: Duane Gerlach, Janne Hanrahan, John Knoepfle, John Large, Mary Ann Demas, Mary Gael Cullen, Nancy Isaacs, Peggy Knoepfle, Steven Alfred Dolgin
