“I saw myself a ring of bone in the clear stream of all of it and vowed always to be open to it / that all of it might flow through / and then heard ‘ring of bone’ where ring is what a bell does,” Welch writes in 1963, living in an abandoned Civilian Conservation Corps cabin near Sierra Nevadas. He attempts to write a letter to Robert Duncan, a letter that is never sent and the effort amounts to a series of ‘Hermit Poems’ published posthumously years later, after Welch has wandered into the woods with a revolver, May 1971, never to be seen again. He left a note, requesting translator Donald Allen be his literary executor and much of Welch’s writing is preserved today in various anthologies because of this last act. “He must have been thinking of a larger collection that would include more poems from all periods of his life,” Allen wrote upon publication of work from lost broadsides and contributions to college literary magazines. He allowed Welch’s early writing to speak for itself and did not surmise beyond the factual. What was an obvious bereftness within Welch would not be the primary memory of those closest to him, rather the intensity and good-natured humor of his chidings and beliefs, best seen through prose, would be most salient.
"When you write down a poem," Welch said, "you are transcribing a voice." Welch’s poetics are scrappy, informal, sensual and highly descriptive in imagery; having spent most of his adulthood working as a cab driver, mechanic, sales assistant at men’s clothing store, commercial salmon fisherman and advertising copywriter in Chicago, he is skilled at improvising and explicating life’s many textures and responsibilities. “You think you read for the heart’s cry / But you do not / You read because no stone ever skips perfectly / The need for another world that always works right / Is the heart’s exuberance / We don’t hide there / We spill over and make it,” Welch writes in ‘For Joseph Kepecs.’
He fashions a whole set of poems after his star sign, Leo, and includes recollections of living with Philip Walen and Gary Snyder in late 1940s Portland, while delivering final thesis on Gertrude Stein. The writer best able to incorporate highbrow and lowbrow is the writer I find myself searching for often; I feel anyone who wades too deep into either camp is inhibited by arrogance or negligence and my introduction to Welch began along this tangent. A friend relayed his nuanced writings, and added that Welch was born in Phoenix. This friend was born in Phoenix, I was born in Phoenix, together we conspired theories on what it meant to be a writer or artist from a ‘B Las Vegas,’ a sprawling desert city known for mirage and cycles of deprivation. A mirage could be a vision or a dream, it could reinvent itself in roadside wildflowers. Cycles of deprivation are as they sound, and one must slough away a feeling of hopelessness. I’m not sure what Welch thought of Arizona, or his having been born there. It was a brief stay, only three years, and his upbringing was marked by frequent travel throughout California, raised by a single mother. To me, he is ambidextrous, he is clever unto sorrow and joy, sophistication and colloquialism.
“Language is speech. You ought to be able to say language is speech and then get on with the rest of it, but you can’t because so very few believe it,” he exclaims. “Language is what goes on when you open the door of a banquet room and there are 300 ladies having lunch...it rises and falls, every once in an inexplicable while it will stop, there will be a total silence, and then all 300 ladies will hear that silence and comment on it at the same moment. That is language. Speech. The din of a Tribe doing its business. You can’t control it, you can’t correct it, you can only listen to it and use it as it is.” My favorite poem of his, ‘Small Sentence To Drive Yourself Sane’, is the sort you’d tuck in a lovingly thrashed wallet, one that’s been through the wash, lost then found perhaps in one of these very banquet rooms. “The next time you are doing something absolutely ordinary, or even better / the next time you are doing something absolutely necessary, such as pissing, or making love, or shaving, or washing the dishes or the baby or yourself or the room, say to yourself: ‘So, it’s all come to this!’”
-Katie Calderon