Well Bottom Blues

Reading the long, narrative poems in the stout Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers takes me back to a book I read long ago: H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau. So many of his characters are monstrous deformities, half human and half animal. Not that such people don’t exist-the news today is filled with them-but he’s chosen a rogues gallery of the worst of the worst to people his narrative poems and make his car against humanity.

I admire his craftily voluptuous descriptions of nature. I’m also interested in examples of long and narrative poetry. I think our place on the coast has storied to tell that deserve better than Longfellow.  But reading “Tamar,” “Cawdor” and “The Double Axe (The Inhuminist)” make Botticelli and Goya seems practically pastoral. (It’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting into. having devoured the anthology The Wild God of the World including “Cawdor.”)

In his studied misanthropy I am looking for the glimpses of light on the surface of the brooding ocean, the bright mica in the stark granite, the song of the hawk on the wind.

I am looking for some way to bring humanity, or as much of it as I can,  to the hawk, the ocean and the stone, to learn to live harmoniously like Jeffers’ salmon fishers and seaweed picker without throwing all of humanity into the wood chipper. My model is Edward Abbey: solidarity against the horror, not escape imto the mountains and devil take the hindmost.

Like Don Juan in Casteñeda’s fable I want to lead my readers to see the resonant divinity all around them.