Steven Alfred Dolgin, in the 1970s

Driven, as I am this morning, by checking the stats icon to the right of this post, I think today I will write a short piece on what I know of the poet and educator, Steven Alfred Dolgin. At least, what I remember from the years that I had some relationship with him, 1972-1982.

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

Belief, Current, from a number of Letters to My Friend, Jamey Nyberg, Star-Guide

I'm not much for male versions of the Deity any more. I think that comes from a hundred years or so (I know it was only ten+) of the Our Father and reading in the Old Testament. That particular Father God was such a complete asshole. And petulant?! My way or the highway! Jesus, or as I like to call him (his actual name) Yeshua, seemed like a pretty decent sort, though it is hard to say, so many people, particularly that spiritual samurai warrior Paul, having fucked with the source material. But, most Father Gods are kind of stuck in pride central. Still, gotta love the ultimate vision of today's (Wednesday's) father god, the All Father is own self, Odin. He has that Gandalf vibe going for him, and doesn't seem to be all about ego, like so many Popes and Rabbis.

You didn't respond to my brief statement on the actuality of dying. I thought it was pretty lyric and somewhat accurate, at least as regards my own timber. But statements of religion are always kind of hunky for all of us. For one thing, what exactly is it all about within one's self? That for me is the failure of organized religion: People wanting to tell you what is what and have it be entirely their vision with no room for the very complexity of detail that is the defining characteristic of biological life. Humans like to turn things into simple structures and then define them as either positive or negative.

As to the New Testament and the Jesus (Yeshua) story: but the sorry truth is that there are enormous holes in that story and the whole thing is now a shill run by a cult-like group that takes money and makes statements that veer ever farther away from the lives of the people they supposedly are serving. The xtian churches have a pretty mixed reality going these days. The ones that say they are the most xtian tend to be entirely focused on issues of sex and reproduction. The Roman church talks about the poor and acts of grace and mercy, but it puts its money into controlling people's sex lives. This is ignored more and more. As it should be. The priesthood has never really controlled its own sex lives. Just gotten good at making statements about it all. Load of shit, of course.

There are some okay xtian denominations: some Methodists, the Episcopalians, church of the brethren. But they all fail for me because they are all based on the lie that is the story of the new testament. It's a good story, and you can see how people could come to believe it, in an era where the concept of magic was a given. It's a better version of the old Corn King stories. And it is put together in a way that allows it to use ancient texts to support its conclusions. And it has the first really well done horror movie at the end, the Apocalypse of St. John. And named for a john, the common name for men that hookers use.

Well, I spent years trying to justify a version of Yeshua's story. I read all the Nag Hammadi materials, and the great library at Qumran. And I already knew I hated the reasoning that informs The City of God (Augustine, a nasty little prick if there ever was one). Phil Dick's Valis and the other books from that period that he wrote, certainly supported some concepts that I thought could be so. But ultimately it was the years I spent reading and re-reading the White Goddess (Robert Graves; who also wrote King Jesus and the I, Claudius novels), and speaking within myself to the plethora of stories about the Circle, the waxing and the waning moons, the repetitions of actual reality, that led me, inexorably to defining the Deity as essentially female. A creator, and of course, a destroyer. But the creation and destruction are not in the service of power or acquisition or ego. More like art is in its very existence. What did Baba Ram Doss say? Be Here Now. He was Richard Alpert, Leary's associate in the earliest acid days. In a way he is absolutely right, be here now and pay fucking attention to here, now, and being.

Well, is god personified? Damned if I know. Do we live on after death? Seems like the fact of spirits existing gives some credibility to this concept. Why do some dead people stick around? I refer to Colin Wilson's traumatic death causes some sort of electrical recording in objects or buildings that is replayed by water running/or rain. Does not account for all spirits, only ghosts in hauntings. The fact that things exist in a way that is not accounted for by physical science guys gives us to believe that

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Thanks Hamlet. Once again you've hit the nail on the head, data-collection-wise.

Well, you know that I already believe in an after-life of some nature. And you know I believe in a version of the old religions judgement concept. You know, Peter with the big Book, but more like Maat weighing your soul against the Feather of Truth, the Egyptian version of judgement day. I believe you are forced to recognise in your own consciousness what the truth really is, and since the greatest of all sins is essentially the lies we tell ourselves, the real pain of judgement is being forced to accept the actual truth and with it all that happened because of your lies to yourself and to everyone else in existence. A dark vision, I understand. I do think that's why most people don't actually get a second chance on the wheel. I myself think this is not my first run, as I have pointed out in my Janne poems. I know that I have known her before. Not that it seems to have ever gone all that well. So it goes. There is always a chance I have deceived myself into thinking that there was something important there, merely because I wanted it to be. Pride is the sin that creates the need to lie to yourself.


Death

I am the breath that leaves the shell behind, the husk that once held me, gave me movement and voice. In the night when my mind slips away there is that light at the far end of the valley. The warmth of the delta returns me as a wind in a temperate zone. She is always there, for me, and for you. We are always in Her belly, that belly which is the 14 billion year old universe. I myself won't let the husk be buried in the ground (though that is fine), but rather I will send it to the fire that turns matter into energy. And what is left of my husk will be scattered in forests of New England, or on the waters of a glacier lake.

Always grateful for these days and nights, always glad for Her mercy, always true to the search for the truth. What else is there?

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.

My Artist Friend

Greg Lakebrink is perhaps my oldest continuous friend in this world. I met him at St. Louis University in the fall of 1968. We were both in the honors program there, as freshmen. Later we were both involved with publishing a kind of bohemian newspaper called The Aardwolf. Greg was essentially the art director. He also contributed the name of the piece. Later on, after I had moved to Springfield in 1972 and then split with my wife, Becky McGovern, and ended up living with Pat on Scarritt Street in 1974, Greg called me up from Iowa City where he had just quit the Graduate Painting Program at U. of Iowa, three hours short of his MFA, and asked if he could come look for work in Springfield.

Greg then lived at Scarritt until 1977, when he moved out and took an apartment in the Iles House (the oldest house in Springfield) when it was down on South Fifth Street. They moved it over to Seventh Street a few years ago. Greg lived in a large one room on the top floor.

The entire time I have known Greg he has painted, mainly water colors, but many oils. In my living room right now there are three of Greg's oils, one of my son when he was six (1976), one of me painted in 1981 that I didn't even know about that he gave to Kimb when we moved away in 1999, and a third one that I seem to have always had, known as The Red Lady, painted in 1969. There are many photos that have the Red Lady in the background. The irony is that the figure is actually a guy wearing a red apron.

Anyway, Greg eventually married a beautiful strange woman, Evan Kurrasch, who was taller than him, and looked like Vanessa Redgrave. She had, however, been in a camp stove accident and had much scarring over her body. I always thought that Greg really liked that, as an artist it appealed to him visually. In any case, he was married to Evan for five or six years, but she was very highly sexed, and he was not. I performed the marriage ceremony for them, in the nature preserve south of Springfield. My one marriage and it failed, ultimately.

Evan is married to someone elsenow. And Greg eventually married this funny, sweet woman, Sybil, who is also a visual artist. They live over on Fayette, near Washington Park, in a charming little Victorian place. Greg and Evan had a house on that street right across from the med school parking lot down at the end of Bond there. The med school scarfed it up and he had to move to Fayette somewhere along there. He had this really long backyard that stuck out behind houses on Bond and he and Evan let the grass grow like the tall grass prairie. Eventually the city made them cut it all down. They were always big Sierra Club people. Greg did the Sierra Club newsletter for many years. Also the Springfield Bicycle Club newsletter. Greg is to this day one of the true liberals I know. He's the kind of guy who's been giving money to NOW and the abortion rights people for many years now. He's a true person, if you know what I mean. No lies, no dissembling. Not much tact, either.

I used to always call on Greg when I needed artwork for a project. He did many drawings for The Writers BarBQ. He did most of the art in The Village Magazine 1979, for the Vachel Lindsay centennial. For that one, it was a rush job, he required me to be a Cardinals fan for a year. I was always a big Cubs fan. Greg grew up in St. Anne, the suburb of St. Louis out by the airport. He went to St. Louis University High School, the Jesuit high school. I went to the Jesuit high school in Wichita, Chaplain Kapaun Memorial High School, and had many teachers who had gone to SLU High and to SLU. And eventually I went to St. Louis University. My sister's Phd in literature is from SLU.

As a matter of fact, my sister going to St. Louis U. for grad school is how I got involved in this whole thing. My sister, Kathy, was great friends with Sandy and John Knoll in St. Louis. She and Sandy shared an office both at the grad lit dept. at SLU and then at Forest Park Community College. Then Sandy and John moved to Springfield. so John could run the Communications Department at Sangamon State University. Larry Smith was John's colleague there, and the four of them, the Smiths and the Knolls, became friends and eventually lived across the street from each other.

That fact facilitated the affair that Pat had with John for the two years before I moved to Springfield with my wife, Becky McGovern, in January of 1972. I met Jane Morrel in the fall of 72 when Knoepfle had his first poetry seminar. I had taken Knoepfle's novel writing class at St. Louis university, where he was the poet in residence. John Knoll had gotten him to move to SSU. (Knoll also brought Norman Hinton to Springfield. Norman was on my sister's Phd board.) Anyway, Sandy Martin and Pat were best friends, so my relationship with Pat Smith comes from my sister's friendship with the Knolls in St. Louis. Sandy's brother was a priest, Harry Martin, and Harry performed my first marriage to Becky McGovern in February of 1970. We were pregnant, of course. Stupid catholic kids. Harry also performed the funeral service for my friends' Nora and Jack's four month old baby, Emil Zapata Jones two years later. We called him Harry the Pot Smoking Priest. He was a good guy and was a protege of Knoepfle's in St. Louis.

Complex histories of a personal nature. I do know where most of these people are today. I saw Greg about four years ago in Springfield. He and his wife both have fairly serious health problems. I know he is working somewhere, but I don't know where.

I have a collection of his water colors. He came to writing group for many, many years. Of course he lived at Scarritt when the first group was meeting there. Greg has also come to pretty much every group I had in Springfield. He would come and sit in the corner and paint people and small scenes. So there are perhaps a couple of hundred of these watercolors that catalog the many years of my writing groups. And many of these watercolors are so beautiful. He really is a great artist.

Hey, you know, I love Greg. He's a really weird guy. He has what is called flatness of effect and often he seems removed, but at heart he has a beautiful passionate soul. I have a little book of his poems on my shelf that I still pull out from time to time and read through. He has always been a true friend to me. He has put me up when I was thrown out, he has sheltered me when Bill Panichi beat me up. He has given me money when I needed to get back to Springfield from Wichita in 1983.

May he live in the Lady's mercy and know Her great love.

Forgotten Birthday

One year, when I was married to Becky Bradway, she completely forgot my birthday. That very day she forgot to pick me up from work. I remember, walking south on South Fifth street, I got to South Grand Avenue, on my way to our house on Bryn Mawr, at least fifteen more blocks, and she came driving up and said we should go out to dinner, as it was my birthday. Of course we ended up going to a mexican restaurant on the east side that was new. Becky was a mexican food freak. Not my thing, but she was one of those people it was easier to do what she wanted then to deal with the weirdness of her not getting her way.

As a matter of fact, she was better at giving off a hostile vibe then anyone I'd ever met. I conjecture that it was because when she was a child, being abused both by her father and her mother, if she said anything they actually used soap in her mouth and basically hurt her. So she got really good at just giving off the fuck you vibe. Her grasp of that darkness was pretty much complete. I undertstand, of course, why she was like that, what had happened to her as a child. When we had separated and she was living down the street under Laura Giese and her husband, she would come for dinner every night. Why not? I cooked it and cleaned it. I paid for it. She did this for nearly the whole year she lived down the street before she engineered moving to Bloomington to go to ISU to get her doctorate. Of course that was right after she promised me, signed a paper, that she would never move Paige out of town. Anyway, I used to say to her, hearing all that was going on in her head about her family and about working for Rape World (which is what she called ICASA, the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault) that she could turn out to be a serial murderer and if people knew what she had been through they would understand.

But that business about breaking her promise was par for the course for my relationship with Becky. She basically broke every promise she ever made to me. And we were together for fourteen years, first fuck to last. To be precise though, I lived with Pat the first year and a half, though I was sleeping with Becky, and Pat knew it. I spent that year looking for work, after having lived off of Pat for six and a half years. Mind you, I was the housewife in that relationship. Well, that and the fuck toy.

So I am always of two minds about Becky Bradway. I have enormous sympathy for her. I lived with her family for several years in the early 1980s, and they were definitely so screwed up you could pretty much taste it. But I had no idea how truly cruel they had been. So, I feel bad for what happened to that little girl.

But I also despise her for how she treated me. Mind you, I am grateful I am no longer with her. And I am very glad she found a decent man, Doug, to be there for her. She will always be a serious user, and she will suck up all the resources that are around her if you let her. I was a very co-dependent guy when I was with her. I did not resist any of that. My mother made me into the one in my family who gave in to the younger kids and to my sisters. Basically I learned to do what other people wanted to keep the peace.

This personality trait serves me well now. The woman I live with these days is also very much a giver. I've really never been with anyone who seemed to take my feelings into consideration as much as Kimberly does.

I still remember walking down that street, in late June. I must've been 42 or 43 that day. It was depressing.

Thanks to the Lady Arianrhod for helping me live through that time. She sent me the possibility of a true priestess to be with, and sure enough. I can practically see the curved moon tattoo upon her brow. Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley.

Moving to Springfield

I've decided to resurrect this blog which started out as a series of scans of notebook pages from the 1970s. I still intend to do that some, but I thought I would now devote this section of my piece of the internet to remembering the people and places I lived and worked in the 70s and 80s.

Primarily then this is a story of my view of the literary community, small fry division, in Springfield, Illinois.

I ended up in Springfield pretty much because I got lost one day on the way to Peoria. I had been to see the Who at the Mississippi River Festival the previous evening. There was vast quantities of smokeables and drinkables and there were too many people there. It took place in a natural bowl, outside, which comfortably held about 20,000. 35,000 showed up. We went early. Actually our party sent someone out around noon for a nine o'clock show. I went with Russell Mill and his wife and his brother from Texas who had brought a suitcase of pot up to sell to pay for the trip. Russell ran the Akashic Record Store, which was in Webster Groves at this time. The Who had just brought out the album, Who's Next, and they played all of it and most of Tommy, and there was a half hour encore of Eddie Cochran songs. It was great. Particularly memorable for me, lo these nearly forty years later, it was the first time I heard the song "Bargain." It really moved me, and it still does. Of course, I don't remember leaving, getting home, any of that. Lots of marijuana and wine.

My wife in those days was Becky McGovern. We had married in February 1970 because, primarily, Becky was pregnant with the human being Joel Osburn. I was a good catholic boy and abortion was out of the question at this point. Two and a half years later, having struggled to be together and to make enough money to keep going Becky and I drove to Kansas City to get an abortion, in September of 1972. I have no regrets about having Joel, though. He is a remarkable person and has made himself a good life. And he has given me two beautiful granddaughters.

So Becky and Joel were at Becky's parents house in Peoria. I was supposed to get up that morning and drive to Peoria and eventually bring them back to St. Louis. But, to be honest, I got up way late and hopped in the car and didn't really have a clear idea of what I was doing. Anyone who's driven Highway 55 past Springfield knows that the left hand lane goes into town with little warning.

So I found myself on the south side of Springfield, Illinois, lost and a little disconcerted. I remembered that two of my old friends had moved to Springfield a couple of years before. John Knoll, and his wife Sandy Martin, were originally friends of my sister Kathy Osburn. Kathy went to graduate school at St. Louis U., one of the reasons Mother stuck me there. She knew Sandy from the Literature Dept. where they shared an office as Grad Assts. Later she and Sandy both taught at the new community college, Forest Park Community College, by the great St. Louis park.

John Knoll did the coursework for his PHd at SLU. Then he was hired at a new college in Springfield, Sangamon State University. John was the head of the communications department. His specialty was film and he knew much about it. He and Sandy lived on North Sixth Street in the Hatch Mansion, a property they rented from the Marine Bank.

So I called John Knoll from a payphone (remember those?) and his brother from Indiana answered, Jerry. And Jerry said John was out but hey, come on over. So I drove all the way across town to the north side and went in and then John and Sandy came home and I had a great time hanging out with them. I called Becky in Peoria and she was not pleased with me. They'd called the state police. So that wasn't good.

Before I left I was talking with John and told him I was hoping to go back to college. I was working at the post office in downtown St. Louis, 18th and Market, on the graveyard shift. I said I was looking at that crazy school in Ohio, Antioch. And John said, why don't you go to Sangamon. And I said, what's that? So he told me about his school and his gig and how he could get me in and pretty soon it turned out to be a plan.

Becky and I spent the next six months driving to Springfield and staying with John and Sandy in the maid's quarters of the big house and looking for a place to live and getting set for the school.

SSU at the time was a senior college, last two years. So I had to CLEP into the program. Which was no problem. In those days I took multiple choice tests like peanuts. I always did well.

Finally, Becky and Joel and I moved to Springfield in February 1972. I lived there, on and off, for the next 27 years, finally escaping to New Hampshire in 1999.