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intro to A Line of Talk

Bob Arnold & Jim Koller 

I walked up to a brakeman
to give him a line of talk,
he says if you've got the money
I'll see that you don't walk.
		Jimmy Rogers

PREFACE

Jim Koller has had most of these questions from this interview knocking around in his head longer than I have--his questions got me on the stick to write these short essays, and they have been a line of talk in our friendship over the last decade. When Jim and Leslie and the kids visit us, or vice-versa, Leslie, Susan and the kids turn in early at night knowing Jim and I will stay up late talking. Some of my talk I've remembered in these essays. Both Jim and I make a living working with our hands--building and landscape work--and we also write poems and have edited literary magazines. It's no big deal. Others have done it. Speaking for myself, writing poems and hand labor are both one, they work off one another, and combining the editing of a poetry journal are the things I love to do. The hand labor earns a pay check, but moreso it earns the poems I write, and the editing derives from a literary enjoyment of gathering poets into the same pages, no matter their poetic landscape; the poems simply have to be good. Not just good to me, but good for poetry. Like when you hear a Woody Guthrie song, that's good. Bad is easy to smell. It's the same idea Whitman lit into our heads when he wrote: "who touches this book touches a man"--we've heard it a hundred times, but how many have you read? How many even get published? I try to find these poems built into such a book, and when I find them I want to put them into other hands.

Robert Frost wrote good poems in his early years, they were poems that felt lived-in, and curiously read as if they were written before Frost knew what he was doing--which doesn't mean he was ignorant--rather what Olson said: "we do what we know before we know what we do." Later, when the world ate him up and gave him 4 Pulitzer prizes the poems have already suffered from too much pollination; they had become only poems, down right expected of him. That treatment would kill anything that bleeds. My point is that his early poems talked a real talk, made a poem sing/made the reader sing, brightened the eyes to a connection of life and words. And to find these words you have to hunt, become a reader--a doer--and one good book will always steer you to at least one more good book, and finally to the man Whitman knows you can touch. In these essays when I write of the outsider I'm thinking of the writer with no easy definition or identity, call him what you want. It is Montaigne who is always reminding me "The reader who is not willing to give an hour is not willing to give anything." What isn't explained in these essays is yours to find--it's out the door, the tip of an ear to a sound, and how much you really do want to find. Don't kid yourself.

When Jim and I get together to talk it is usually after a separation of many months, and in my case, months of being with Susan and Carson, working outdoors, talking to myself, piling up books to read at night. To some it might sound too simple, romantic--where are the bad days? they ask. Fortunately I can't accommodate them. Why people want you to be as miserable as they are, is anyone's guess. My bad days are mine, I don't waste them into a poem unless it naturally flows in that direction. I'd rather work it our where bad days begin, in my gut. Sametime, the best love poems are never written. I've been lucky and Susan has helped, and so have other friends--just a crow flapping up river sets a pleasure. You notice these things and follow them through. When Jim and I talk he might be sipping whiskey, Leslie gives Susan jam they've brought from travels through the southwest, and little Bert and Ida Rose really smile at littler Carson which makes him smile. I want to take it all in, Susan and I talk about the visit later and months fill in between the next visit. Other friends visit and we all talk about what we're doing--share books, music, go places with the talk and the silences between visits. Jim talks less then I do but when they return from a cross country car trip he likes to get out the map and show us where they've been, even though he has crossed this country more times then I can remember. It excites him, he may not always show it, but it goes into the poems. Poets put into poems what they do. My feeling is that the less they do, the more literary tricks show up--gumballs, forced language, because they're-poets-and-they-must-write-a-poem! Spare us.

I have a photograph near my desk of Van Wyck Brooks and Jaime de Angulo, it's a favorite of mine. Brooks is wearing a sweater, tie, and suitcoat standing proud into the eyes of the camera. de Angulo is on horseback in a ragged shirt looking sideways from the camera. What a meeting of the minds! Eastern establishment shaking hands with western soil, reminds me of Emerson seeking our John Muir in the Sierra. Like Emerson, Van Wyck Brooks had a generous mind; it was a mind that stayed open, hung on the lip of vulnerability, took chances, and because of that nerve both achieved more than most American literary historians in finding the gist and flesh of our literature. Brooks went looking for Jaime de Angulo because he knew de Angulo, like any good writer, must first live away from the pages of his writing. I first read Jim Koller as a teenager, looked him up and published him in my twenties...we've been visiting, working, talking, sharing things ever since. A Line of Talk is some of the hours.

--Bob Arnold, winter 1986

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