Beginning

More years ago than I would like to contemplate, I came across the poetry of Robinson Jeffers in one of those Sierra Club picture books that were so popular for coffee tables, for those of us who had coffee tables, or anything more than the blocks and boards chic that was at the time so de rigeur.  Whatever the decor, the photographs were, I believe, Weston, the Big Sur coast, and the poetry pure and brutal, unvarnished, an homage to chthonic gods: "The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those / That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant."

Although I then qualified (and most would say still do) in the latter category, a mericiful friend made me a gift of Robinson Jeffers Selected Poems, a small paperback that I would carry with me for years.  Dog-eared and yellowed with age, Jeffers still speaks to me through its pages, the dark voice of the apocalypse; just the right tonic then for a brooding twenty-something, and seems appropriate now to the times in which we find ourselves adrift.

For Jeffers, in his poetry, was not a cheery sort, part Nietzschean ubermensch, part nature worshipper, all bathed in the brooding mists and thundering surf of the pre-Esalen Institute Carmel coast.  In a time of wars  hot and cold, and an overweening national hubris spawned by martial successes, Jeffers offered a counterpoint to popular opinion.  Not necessarily the voice of reason, but reasoned, and principled.

So, as I, effete snob (thank you Spiro) that I am, make a tepid attempt at throwing thoughts into the electronic aether, I return to Jeffers and to his poem "Hurt Hawks," for the title to this incipient blog.  Because I believe that inside each of us is something fierce and noble that we would protect from the "curs of the day" that torment us.  In this space I will talk ideas and books, natter about politics and poetry, but more often than not blather on about the weather outside my window, and the mortal splendors of the passing seasons.

For, as Hugh Prather opined (in Notes to Myself) "Ideas are straight- / but the world is round, and a / messy mortal is my friend. / Come walk with me in the mud. . . . ."

Indeed...