Love Poems

The late 1970s was in some ways the ideal time to go to college. No one cared about anything (sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll excepted). There was no war to oppose. There was no war to be called up for. The economy was a mess, but I remember few discussions of what people would be doing when they graduated, with the exception of premeds and the few aiming for Wall Street.

At some point, I found the pond to be too stagnant for my taste. I ran a two-line ad in the college paper that said something like “Tired of apathy? Join Bedrock!” and gave some contact information about a meeting. I think we got 8 people to that first meeting, only 3 were of which were my roommates. The agenda was to get people on campus talking about the global environment, cultural conflicts, energy and feminism.

The name Bedrock came from a poem by Gary Snyder. It’s a love poem, and I’m going to say I knew that, but I have it on better authority than that. I managed to arrange a visit to Kenyon by Snyder some months after founding Bedrock. He was giving a reading at Oberlin and all we had to do was get him a ride from Oberlin to Kenyon on the appointed date. I had a car and a friend, and we snapped to it. I think that was the only longish car trip my ‘73 Audi Fox ever made without breaking down, and I remain slightly, grudgingly grateful for that.

Gary Snyder was the first “famous” person I’d ever met. He’d featured (as Japhy Ryder) in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, he’d won a Pulitzer for his poetry, and he was cool beyond belief. He had a hip flask of bourbon—he preferred Rebel Yell, but was settling for J.W. Dant while in Ohio—and he shared with us. Could be the first moment when I though bourbon was worthy of my attention. Oh well.

He asked me about the name Bedrock, noting that it was a love poem. Lamely, I explained that I was trying to establish some kind of foundation for even getting started to get people involved in thinking about what was going to happen next in the world and whether we could do anything to make it better.

He said: “Why the Hell are you guys so diffident?”

We were all that, but maybe that was the difference between 1978 Ohio and 1978 California, and the difference between him and us. And maybe this sounds even more lame, but I am proud of several moments in Bedrock’s history, notably when we had a great panel discussion (40 years ago!) of the conservative case for carbon taxes.

So, love poems. The Kenyon Review had just been revived during those years. I asked Philip Church, poetry editor of the Review, if I could do an independent study with him, and to my surprise he agreed. I had a set of poems I’d written, wrote some more, and met with him weekly in his office. He was generous in his criticism (probably this was not a good sign, although I didn’t get it back then), and we had great, wide-ranging conversations about music, evolution, and even poetry (Loren Eiseley was a touchstone for both of us).

One week I brought him a poem called “Scotch Symphony.” It was a memory of an event from late Spring of my Junior year, when a friend soon to graduate took me to a lake where great blue herons nested. The language in the poem was abstract enough to get Dr. Church intrigued. When I told him it was basically a love poem he was deflated. It did feature whiskey and birds as well, but I guess the love was problematic. To say the least, but that was not in the poem.

I’ve buried the lede again. Love is what it’s all about, people! As I’ve confronted my own mortality (sure I’ve been granted a reprieve, but all we’re--any of us--going to get is a reprieve of one kind or another), I’ve done a fair amount of reflecting on what all the noise and confusion of my life has amounted to: I’ve made some contributions to science, passed some genes on to the next generation, had a few transcendent moments in some sport or other, viewed some spectacular scenery, and so forth. The real experience of life, though, has been to love. The other emotions leave a mark, of course, but when I am lying in a bed and drawing my last, I am hoping to remember the love I’ve felt for all the others: family, friends, colleagues. Romantic love is its own thing, of course—I can’t compare Liz to anyone—whatever shape my brain is in by the end, I know right now that our love is flying out into the universe at 186,000 miles per second and can never be erased. I didn’t even write her a love poem until we’d been married 17 years, but I think there is other evidence out there.

The same goes for my children, both of them. If you truly love your partner, the love you feel for the spawn of that relationship is every bit as intense, if differently conceived. I don’t know how it is if you have less positive feelings for your partner. Might not make that much difference, but I’ve only experienced it the one way, and I am beyond grateful for that.

It’s certainly true that hateful people are frequently remembered long after they die. Who cares about them? We care because we don’t want to follow their example. We may or not be remembered—I would like to be remembered—but it will make no difference to we who are deceased. Better, I think, to feel love in your last moments. I’m going to try.