Poets Role Call #2 - Lew Welch (1926-1971)

There are a great many poets whose works I enjoy. There are even more that I respect, despite the fact that their universes and mine don't ultimately overlap to a great degree. There are, however, very few poets who truly move me, whom I truly love. Lew Welch is one of the poets that exist this exclusive realm.

Who is Lew Welch? I suppose that I have to answer this question in a somewhat direct manner, because though time has treated his poems well (they are still as fresh as a cool spring rural Northern California dawn 1961), it has been far from as kind in keeping our memory of the man and his work front and center. To keep it very simple, Lew Welch was one of a group of poets who began finding their voices in the 1950s and who in body were centered in the Pacific Northwest of the United states.

This group, which also includes such luminaries as Gary Snyder, Joanne Kyger, and the late Philip Whalen is today often referred to as the 'Pacific Rim Poets," partially because they largely have turned their backs on European poetic traditions and instead look to American values born on the western frontier, Native American ecologies, and outward to the spiritual world of the East (Mahayana Buddhism, most often) in search of a truer, more meaningful version of what it means to be perched on one side of a vast blue ocean so unAtlantic-rim like in its eco-cultural concerns and needs ("America" moves in both directions, it is often forgotten--it's impossible to go back east if you've never before been there).

If I had to describe Welch as a person I suppose words like "wanderer" and "hermit" would first come to mind--for Welch's poetry conjures up extremely lucid images of a man who is far more at home living alone in a shack in the Sierra of Cascade woods than in anything even approaching town, let alone a city. To these terms I should probably also add words such as "simple" and especially "pure"--because I have never read an American poet of recent vintage whose verse is less affected by our burgeoning electronic suburban world.

In the poem "In Answer to a Question from P.W.", Welch offers up a nice summary of his defacto philosophy as it seems to be taking definite shape:


Going to Mexico by motorcycle would be the coolest, but
Thoreau warns against any undertaking that
requires new clothes
Walking is pure, but I haven't achieved simplicity yet.
I'll never willingly hitchhike again.*


Such a point of view not surprisingly leads Welch to become deeply connected to the world he wished only to walk thru, as exemplified by this passage from the long poem 'Wobbly Rock":


On a trail not far from here
Walking in meditation
We entered a dark grove
And I lost all separation in step with the
Eucalyptus as the trail walked back beneath me


Much of Welch's poetry, though, is that of the common place, or at least the common place of a lone poet surviving on little in order to be able to write his poetry. And much of Welch's work does constitute a somewhat sublimated struggle with his muse, the muse that drives him to become a strange low-key kind of American-Buddhist hero.


The hermit locks his door against the blizzard.
He keeps the cabin warm.

All winter long he sorts out what he has.
What was well started shall now be finished.
What was not, should be thrown away.

In spring he emerges with one garment
and a single book.

The cabin is very clean.


The previous lines were from the poem, "[The Image, As in Hexagram:]", but similar ones can be found in dozens of Welch's poems. They are typical, in other words, of his struggle--his version of the struggle of the lone artist to understand himself and the world thru himself.

Sadly (or at least I feel it to be sad), Welch chose to end this struggle before it appears to have been completed: in 1971 he famously walked into the woods near Gary Snyder's central California home with a pistol and was never hear from again.

Still, his poems, found in the wonderful Ring of Bone: Collected Poems 1950-1971, allow his journey to continue, in that it can be so easily transferred to his open-hearted readers, who have and will discover his poems, poems so pure that time is almost irrelevant in their reading. 1971 was truly a sad year for the flesh of Lew Welch, but not the spirit, say I, still deeply enamored, awed, and inspired by his work in the year 2009.

*All poems quoted from Ring of Bone: Collected Poems 1950-1971, Grey Fox Press, Bolinas, California, 1979