My Friend & Teacher: Ellanor White, 1936-2011

I don't remember the first time I met Ela White. It was probably at one of the fundraisers for the Writers BarBQ, the magazine I ran in the late 80s and early 90s. I remember Ela sitting in the backyard at the house I lived in on Bryn Mawr Boulevard in Springfield. We had a cookout with readings to raise some cash to get the magazine going. My friend Ted Samsel had brought his cooker over. He had one of those rebuilt metal drums and was himself a master of the slow cooked meat.

Various people did some reading, Gael Carnes, and Martha Miller, I remember for sure. I believe Ela was somewhat involved with Martha at the time. She looked pretty butch that day. Later I found out she still lived with her crazy husband, John White, down on the Illinois River. They ran an operation that involved having a reproduction of a Mississippian native american village setup. You could go spend time in the village, living like the aborigines and hunting, cooking, and flintknapping like they did. John White was a well known anthropologist and Ela herself had done a lot of work, creating weavings based on the decorations of pot sherds from the time period. I know her work exists in numerous museusm.

Although her relationship with Martha ebbed, she did start attending the Friday night sessions on Bryn Mawr. Most of my adult life I had some sort of writers workshop going on. The last one, the Writers BarBQ, lasted from 1986 through 1999, when I finally called it quits on Springfield, after 27 years. Kimberly and myself moved to New Hampshire where we almost stayed. We ended up back in Illinois though, a year later, in Urbana where we are today.

Ela's work was very intense. She had spent many years researching the greek myths and their origins. And this led her into re-telling these stories, in what she considered their more primal forms. By the time I met Ela I was already pretty much a complete Goddess worshipper. I had my major Robert Graves going on (The Whtie Goddess) and I was really ready to move as far from bible culture literature as I could go. I recognize, of course, that xtian discourse, the stories and their interpretations, color everything in western society, for good and ill. The King James Bible is second only to Shakespeare for forming the basis of what we think of as literature.

In any case, Ela was working on a series of stories. The plots and characters were all familiar, Hera, Demeter, Artemis. The stories we all learned at Edith Hamilton's knee, in school. Ela had vast quantities of information that informed these stories in sometimes radically different ways. She gave us what she could defend as the "original" versions of these myths. Of course, as myths, they were probably oral tradition for a long time, so discerning what came first was a serious task.

Ultimately Ela had two books working in those days. One of them was the stories themselves. We encouraged this book the most, because we were mostly fiction writers and hearing these stories presented in a somewhat modern idiom with the new and different information that Ela had made them come alive and truly sparkle with that kind of energy that humans can have. The other book was the scholarship. And it was large and hunky and difficult to get a handle on. If you've ever tried to read the long version of the Golden Bough you know what I am talking about.

I think the most distressing part of my forays in "literature" in the 80s and 90s was the projects like this that were well written, thoroughly researched, and something new and different, that couldn't get a bit in the land of the publishers. Really. This story went on and on. These books were really important and were never published, despite Ela's scholarly chops and background. I assume that the real story in publishing, particularly academic publishing, is that you have to kiss a great deal of ass and smooch up to the people who control things. There is a lot of subjectivity in the arts, so they can always say well that was good but this was also good. So I published my friend's treatise on coffee tables over your re-telling in a feminist voice of the greek myths. It's a fucked up world. I know John Knoepfle spent years kissing Lawrence Lieberman's minor poet ass to get his book published at the University of Illinois. Ultimately it turned Knoepfle into such a sad egocentric loser. But his book was out there. Mind you he never got to be the "Illinois" poet. That was reserved for What's his face, at Bradley, Kevin the Stein man.

Well. Like my other Crone friend from the 70s/80s, Jane Morrel, there came a time in Ela's life where she began to have physical troubles. She had adult lieukemia, but survived it, but she also began to suffer from some form of dementia. I don't know if it was Alzheimers. But the fact was she didn't really remember who I was after a point. This mirrored what happened with Jane Morrel, who also lost her own memories. So, I haven't seen Ela in several years now. I hear about her occasionally from her daughter, Karli, who works at the labs for the Illinois State Museum.

But a couple of weeks ago, Claire Martin, another old friend from the writing group days, sent me the news that Ela had gone from the scene.

I have missed her for some years now. But now I will miss her in the rest of this lifetime that I live. But I will never forget her, nor what she brought to my life and my understanding of our time and our culture and mostly where we really came from. I know she is with the Lady now, and there is celebration and honor there. For the Lady is merciful, and She loves us. That is something Ela and I both knew right away when we first spoke. Be well, old friend. Give my love to Her.

The Ice Tinkles in My Glass— Jane Morrel & Her Poems

Everyone I knew always thought Jane was a remarkable person. I believe Jane was 69 when I first met her in 1972. Janne Hanrahan and I always made it a point to try and see Jane when Janne would come to town. Janne had a definite relationship to Jane's work. Several times she wrote poems that were deliberately similar to Jane's work. And I always invited Jane to all the parties I threw in the 1970s and often she came. She came to my writing group many, many times.

I remember one time at the Friday night group (the Second Scarritt group), John Ranyard had been reading from a novel he was writing that was meant to be a satire of pornography (example, there was a chapter entitled "the 120 mph blowjob"), so Ross Hulvey and Gary Adkins brought in their porno project about a minor league baseball team and decided to read from it. And what was Jane's comment after they read these episodes of minutely described oral sex and orgy? "I guess some things never change." In that deadpan way of her's.

The first time I ever encountered Jane's poetry was in Knoepfle's first poetry class at SSU. I believe that was the fall of 1972. I was in that class with Janne Hanrahan and Sandy Riseman. Also Steve Dolgin. We all thought we were hotshit poetry people. We thought, Jane = old lady, hearts and flowers. In those days you'd read a poem and then Knoepfle would gently take it apart and make suggestions. He and I had some serious set to's there. He invited Jane to read at the second or third class and she pulled out "Open Heart Surgery," and pretty much everyone's mouths fell open. Ha!

And Knoepfle said, "Well, that was fine. (Pause) Do you have anything else?" He couldn't find any way to make that a better piece. He couldn't even really think of anything to say. It's so short and exquisite. It's profound. It's a metaphor, but its grounded in the physical world, yet it transcends so much. It's about survival, and romance, and the possibility of hope. That was a great moment. We all knew then we were with someone special.

Then she read "Lesson in Anatomy," and Knoepfle tried to wrap his head around that. Naturally Jane listened to him, but she kept that piece pretty much like it was. And with good reason, "A cochin ate their gritty heart..." "Too human, my mother said ..." So that was Jane's first round with that crew and after that we all waited expectantly for what she might pull out next.

In the early days of the women's writing group, Brainchild, when it was at first an all poetry performance group, they would get together at various people's houses and do some workshopping and some planning for their gigs. They did some mass readings in those days. This group had been started by Peggy Knoepfle because she was tired of living in John's shadow in St. Louis. When they moved to Springfield she set out to have her own impact. Steve Dolgin and myself and Knoepf attended some of those soirrees. One time, when Janne Hanrahan was living on South Seventh Street, in the upstairs apartment (with Mary Gael Cullen and John Large) she hosted one of these evenings.

I happen to be walking up the stairs to Janne's place, and Jane was behind me, carrying a great platter of something tasty, and behind her was Billie Sue Shiner (I believe) who was a fine poet herself and a very sweet woman. And Billie Sue asked Jane when we were going up the stairs if she could carry the platter for her and Jane said something to the effect of "You can carry it for me when I'm old."

That was so cool. Because all those nice liberal ladies had a tendency to make Jane into the old lady (she has a great poem about being perceived as old, being kissed at random), which she did not want at all. I was with her on that. I remember Brainchild kept making her read "Alberta Lived to Be Ninety Three" at their mass readings and finally Jane rebelled and insisted on not having to read Alberta anymore.

When I had known Jane for many years and was very familiar with her work, I grew to respect her process. She once left her small notebook at our house on Scarritt Street, and I looked through it, finding there as many as thirty or more versions of the same poem. I grew to respect the hard work that created those lines that seemed so effortless. Knoepfle and Jane had an interesting relationship. In most respects she was the better poet, and of course Knoepfle had a sense of that. But he also thought he could elevate her work and he often tried to impose changes on her. Jane appreciated his interest, but he was no Randall Jarrell, and, although she wouldn't say anything critical to John, she knew that.

They had a long term fight about this poem of her's, "The Center of Interest". It is set on a summer's day, reflecting on nature as a metaphor for being. But it has this chorus line, "the ice tinkles in my glass," that drove Knoepfle to distraction. Because of the word "tinkles", which Knoepf said could not help but bring up urination. The first few years of this argument I was on Knoepfle's side. But as time went on I changed my opinion on this. I started to feel the line rather than analyzing it. Although I would say that Jane was to some extent an intellectual writer, I believe that it is in line's like this that she is a true poet. Like Graves said, the words cause you to have an emotional reaction. The full couplet is "The ice tinkles in my glass/I stir my tea."

It causes you to stop, glass in hand, and hear the music of the glass and ice, and feel the chill, and taste the bittersweet brew. Time stops. You can see the sharp picture, understand the thought. Knoepfle was wrong about this one.

The last time I saw Jane, before she lost the memory of me, was at Jessica Weber's apartment on Spring just off South Grand. We had an event, featuring Mexican food. And I had just discovered martinis at the time, but I didn't understand how powerful they really are. I had made a martini in a twelve ounce glass and I was drinking it and had had about two thirds of it, and I was talking with Jane, and it suddenly hit me that I was so drunk I could scarcely speak. So I staggered out on the back steps and threw up a couple of times, finally ending up on the small square of grass that served as a backyard. I remember lying there in the night when Randy Frank and his friend Timmy rode up on their BMX bikes and started making fun of me. They were both about 15 at the time. "Osburn's shitfaced," is, I believe, an accurate quote. I never made it back upstairs, and never got to talk with Jane again. Talk about regrets, I've had a few, and that's one I'll mention.

The last time I saw her was at the Sangamon County Fair. She was there with Corlyss Disbrow, her daughter (and a fine writer in her own right) and Corlyss' friend and business partner, Henry, and Jane had no clue as to who I was. She had suffered profound memory loss. It marked me, that you could lose your access to your own information. The idea that you couldn't find it again, the words, the memories.

I read "Stops: On the Through Bus to El Paso" at her funeral. It's a poem that has spoken to me for all of these years. I pull out Jane's books (This Paradox Shadow, and Wordings Like Love) and look at them many times every year. She had a much greater effect on me, work-wise, than Knoepfle did. I can remember some of John's things, but they rarely hold the emotional power that Jane could get.

I miss her, very much. Like I miss my mom. Jane grew up in Oklahoma and my mom was born in rural Oklahoma in 1914 and grew up in Waukomis, and then Enid. Just a few years younger than Jane. She was also a good catholic woman, and she had a lot in common with Jane. I miss these women.

Red rocks, red road, red river/there were faults, there were chips,/but there were no breaks.