| September'99 | . |
This Journal |
|
Safe to say I'd never met anyone like Charlie Langton before. Of course, I'd run into a few odd characters back home, but hadn't given them much thought (which is how we handle oddity in Joliet). Charlie struck me as a different, interesting, curious character when I first met him; but he was only one of an exceptionally strange group (as was I) that assembled in Milwaukee, August 1968: thirty guys who, apparently, were thinking about becoming Carmelite priests. I was a shy, quiet one. Coming from my particular house, neighborhood, and city, I found oddity everywhere. Others were friendlier, louder, bigger, funnier, smarter, more of a group. Fifteen of us had come from high schools across the country. The other fifteen already had an inside advantage, having been together at the minor (high school) seminary in Hamilton, Massachusetts. They knew Carmelites and their ways; they knew the stories. Charlie was in that group, which was so tight and odd that it took some time to sort them out. Some talked funny because they were from the East. But Charlie talked funny because he was from the South, Georgia, Atlanta. He was a skinny guy with a sharp face, troubled complexion, pretty bad teeth, and an awkward toes-out kind of stride. He was no "golden boy" (a seminary term which, I later learned, signified the chosen few whose good looks, self-confidence, athletic prowess, and intellectual potential singled them out as natural leaders and Hope for the Future.) Though I didn't yet know the term, I could tell he was no golden boy (cuz neither was I); and I liked him immediately. He would smile, ask me something about myself, make some rude and insightful comment about someone else, and laugh. His humor was sharp, but it didn't take me long to recognize that this was common among the Hamilton guys. They knew each other well enough to understand the context and, apparently, not take any of it too seriously. Theirs was a culture of insult in which I never felt too comfortable. But Charlie welcomed me into it all and helped me fit in. He was kind, smart, funny, and he had more words than I could imagine (and I was no language lout). In time I learned that Charlie had not come from the kind of "normal" family with its Ozzie and Harriet stability that I had known. He writes, "Some of us didn't begin in families/where affection was ladled out at supper time..." At Thanksgiving (is my memory correct?) he came home with me, to the delight of my younger brothers and sisters, the youngest of whom he would allow to stand on his stomach...quite a trick. At Christmas he gave me a used paperback copy of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas which I keep to this day; it opened up a world to me. At the end of our first year, Charlie was among those who chose (or had it decided for him) not to continue in the seminary. He would not be entering the novitiate. In August Don Meyer and I flew to Atlanta (my first flight) and stayed with Charlie, his sister and brother-in-law for a few days. They were as gracious and welcoming as Charlie himself. There I encountered my first bowl of grits and my first German cockroach. I learned that fire-ants down there are also called piss-ants. We went out to see "Midnight Cowboy", which had just opened. I was off to novitiate for a year, and then back to Marquette. Charlie was around but I didn't see much of him. He got a couple poems into the literary magazine. I was impressed by the dense images and language, but I didn't get the poems...or didn't think I did. He was serious about poetry and was wrestling something - language and life, maybe - to make it. I haven't seen him since I left Milwaukee in May 1973, but Stein's book on my shelf has kept him in my thoughts. This past May or June, Don Meyer checked in with me and mentioned that he had an e-mail address for Charlie. I typed off a quick one but it came back, no such address. Then about three weeks ago John Downey surfed into The Closet, and soon after that I heard from his wife Alexis, who has provided me with another address for Charlie and word that he had recently published a book of poems. A quick trip to the Amazon confirmed this. I haven't yet tried out the new e-mail address (why not? will I?), but this morning I read his book, Keep Silence, But Speak Out. I don't know if I'm ready to say much about them except that these are damn good poems. Very accessible, packed with revelation, never evasive. They remind me why I feel so comfortable calling my own work Pretend Poems™. These are real poems - plenty of art but no pretense. And if you're reading this you should buzz off to Amazon.com and order your own copy. Right now. Am I only saying this because I once knew the guy and am getting a buzz off of his tiny celebrity? (How tiny? Amazon lists the paperback's sales rank as 1,331,868.) Hell, no. These are good poems. You know there's a life being lived in them and beyond them. You know there's a real, not-so-perfect, human being speaking. True songs. I guess this book has stirred up a lot of stuff in me, maybe some fodder for future entries. Some of it is extraneous to the book itself, but the best of it springs from what the poems themselves are doing. Good. Good. Stuff. |
||
|
|
. |
John Keats |
|
This
Journal Home |