Social Presence in the Pacific Northwest

Paul Constant at the Seattle Review of Books writes in "The Patron Poets of Open Books" that I am socially present in the Northwest, but Robert Sund was present in the Northwest with intense nature involvement.  It is an interesting comment, and I wonder how the intense contrast can be viewed. 

I met Robert Sund two times, once in San Francisco in association with Intersection, a literary group, and once when the Distinguished Poet Series arranged for Robert Sund to give a poetry reading at the Pantages Rehearsal Room in downtown Tacoma.  His opening reader was Deborah Miranda. 

Paul Constant places me at one end and Robert Sund at the other end of a line with all the other Northwest Poets in between on this intense Northwest nature involvement versus Social Presence Northwest involvement.  A lot of concrete near bus stops at the side of the road allots me the claim that I have never owned a car.  I have ridden a bicycle in Tacoma for over twenty-five years.  However, Robert Sund owned his own shack, I understand, from which he could roam in the woods, so if I am the phantom of the opera he was Snow White.

Creature From The Black Lagoon Featured On A Poetry Website

My poem Creature From The Black Lagoon is featured on a poetry website just now from Seattle.  The poem Creature from the Black Lagoon recreates a child frightened by The Creature that followed them home from the movie and hid in her closet.  Her inconsolable fear frightens the other child who runs for their mother.   The poem recreates for me a fear I held onto for so many years, and for different reasons thoughts about the past are an important part of life for me. 

I could rely on my parents and admire the younger people they had been.  It has been over thirty years since Dragon Gate published Shelter, during these years I have shoplifted time away from the big cash registers to spend with thoughts about my parents’ letters, papers, and photographs.  So I became bold and looked up Creature From The Black Lagoon at the Proctor Theater in newspaper microfilm to realize my mother probably brought us over to see the other feature,  Broken Lance, with Robert Wagner.  Robert Wagner portrayed a half-breed, Native American and American White, during a range war between the sheep and the cattlemen.  

 

I wish to share a 30-second video today on Facebook.  If I share the video it saves the video to some degree.  My video is about a jar with a partly ruined diary inside it.  I included the University of Washington Tyee from 1968 and books of poems I had from my first year at the U of Washington.  I impulsively set the diary on fire in 1968,  perhaps recreating the burning of a town on a junior high school relief map from our garage.  The town had a river, a huge castle on a promontory, trees, and more.  The fire was a solution to its slow decay on top of the ping pong table. 

I immediately saw I did not want to do this to the diary, so I put it out and saved it inside a mason jar.  My idea about old papers, old letters, is to save them.  Some of the entries could be partly read, mostly about 1961 to 1963 in Junior High School.  (My oil paint set was a birthday gift not a Christmas present.)  I had brought the diary out again to write about a May, 1966 trip to Ellensburg with history classmates for the Model United Nations.    The Model United Nations trip by bus with classmates was fifty years ago in May.

My Grandmother Amanda Died Fifty Years Ago This Month

Amanda Malm entered Lowell School in 1896 soon after her August, 1896 immigration to Tacoma with her mother and younger sister.  They joined Amanda’s father, who immigrated to Tacoma from Finland in 1887.  She was eleven, her sister Johanna Maria about nine or ten.  In 1955 Lowell School celebrated a reunion, and Amanda and her children, among them my mother, appear in the newspaper article as the family with the most Lowell School pupils from the past in attendance.  It was in April 1966, that my grandmother died.  She was seventy-nine.  My grandmother died fifty years ago this month.

About A Childrens' Book, Paper Boy

With technological change digitally edited newspapers emerged from presses faster.  Many papers, including The Tacoma News Tribune, could switch from afternoon to morning.  And an after school job that meant active time outdoors for a child before supper changed into getting out of bed as early as four a.m. every day.  Newspaper distribution centers did not anticipate children removed from paper boy jobs by their schools when they could not stay awake in class, but soon papers reassigned the delivery job to adults. 

The children's book, Paper Boy, which I read at a sidewalk book cupboard Little Free Library location, appears to feature a child in the middle, his experience framed only in one morning of the job.  Not only are rainy and snowy mornings not shown, also not shown is his job loss, perhaps when, at school, his head nods and nods and his teacher asks him to visit the school office.

Children's stories are often idealized portraits.  Among the lovely illustrations in Paper Boy are sunrises that could be sunsets in an earlier time when paper boys worked after school.  Newspapers might be correct to locate student jobs after school in other areas of their systems, because the association of youth with the news is so long-term and was so enduring.

This book reminds me of a favorite from childhood, Little Owl Indian.  One reason Little Owl Indian is reserved for historic children's literature collections is, I am sure, narrative.  In the narrative, Little Owl Indian tells the forest animals that a fire is coming.  Probably Little Owl Indian was alerted to the fire by the animals.  But in Little Owl Indian the horses are beautiful. 

(I delivered the morning Tacoma News Tribune for over five years, 1999-2004.)