BIOGRAPHY
with my parents (1949).
OVERVIEW
After studying with Donald Hall (US Poet Laureate 2006-7) at the University of Michigan, KEN LAUTER has published poems in a number of journals and 14 books. His work has been compared to Robert Lowell's, and distinguished poet William Meredith (US Poet Laureate 1978-80) has said that Ken's poetry displays "a splendid and various gift."
His awards include a Hopwood Award for poetry, an American Academy of Poets Prize, and a Shubert Playwriting Fellowship, and he has also written several plays, including The Dancing Apsaras, or Captain Willard's Blues, a prequel/sequel to Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. He has taught literature and creative writing at four universities and worked as a mayor's aide, a university administrator, and a grass-roots environmental activist.
Ken and his wife Dr. Judith Lauter – a neuroscientist, poet, and author of How is Your Brain Like a Zebra? - A new human neurotypology; Light from the Left: Poems on paintings by Rembrandt; and eight books of haiku live in Nacogdoches TX.
____________________________________
A Micro-Autobiography
ars longa, vita brevis - Horace
My life raft on the torrents of time (genetics, sex, love, rock ‘n roll, cars, real estate, politics, capitalism, war, global warming, etc.) has been words. As a middle-class American, I don’t have a richly mysterious like Nabokov's Speak, Memory; but as a child I received something I suspect he lacked— unconditional love— and my mission, as a poet and a man, is to be worthy of that blessing.
Childhood
Born on a freezing night in 1943 in the middle of WW II, I grew up in a cramped, 2BR-1B house with a big front porch and a coal furnace in the dank basement, located in a suburb of Kansas City MO. Our back yard was studded with trees (apple, pear, peach, cherry, walnut, elm) and bordered a creek and woods that was my Arcadia. I roamed there with other boys and my fox terrier Sox, built campfires, played hide-and-seek, cowboys-and-Indians, and hunted for wasp nests to lob stones at— a KC Huck Finn.
The woods seemed magical, a corridor between our house and the school on a hill half a mile away. Next to the school was a pasture spreading southward over rolling hills to meet a bend in the wide brown Missouri River (from there, downtown KC was visible upstream as a low gray line of granite teeth). I walked to school through fragrant fall, snowy winter, and sweet spring. In the first grade, I fell madly in love with Ann, but to my everlasting shame, I dropped her in the third grade when I discovered she was dirt poor. I liked my teachers, got good grades, made friends, thought life good.
My parents were over forty when they married in 1942 (a second try for both of them). My dad, Kenneth Arthur Lauter, the oldest of four brothers in a family of German immigrants, was a recent arrival in KC from St. Louis, his hometown. When they met, my mother Kathryn was living on an 80-acre farm she and her first husband had acquired not long before he had himself committed for schizophrenia and convinced Mom to divorce him. Two years later, she sold the farm and married my father. The middle-aged newlyweds then moved to the suburbs.
With The Feminine Mystique decades away, Mother was proud to be "just a housewife" (or so she said). She cooked, cleaned, sewed, cut magazine coupons, went to a beauty parlor now and then, and shopped for a new hat for church (Baptist) at Helzberg's department store downtown twice a year (Easter and Christmas), with me in tow, fidgeting and intimidated by the ornate décor and the perfumed salesladies who winked at me.
After a small-town Missouri childhood as one of eight kids, two of whom died in childhood, Mom had gone to secretarial school and then clerked in a Western Union Office, but my father insisted that no wife of his would have to work. So she made meat-and-potato suppers, shared highballs and cigarettes with him when he got home from “the salt mines,” and loved us both. After dinner and homework— with Dad often helping me— we watched TV: Ozzie and Harriet, the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, Gunsmoke, Johnny Carson. Then Dad relaxed in his recliner, reading detective stories (Mickey Spillane, Shell Scott) and historical novels (Thomas B. Costain, A.B. Guthrie) while I assembled hyper realistic plastic model warplanes.
By the time I was ten, an air of exhaustion and regret had crept into our house on 4321 North Spruce. (The street number seemed magical, a countdown to something— nuclear war maybe… or poetry?) My handsome, much older half-brother Clark had died in a car wreck in 1949, leaving Mother with an enduring sadness. Working for an insurance company, Dad rode up and down dark, dangerous elevator shafts on the roof of the elevator and pored over client budget books with green-eye-shade rigor. After two decades as an office manager, he made less than $10,000 a year— which didn’t bode well for my college fund— and was deeply depressed when he lost his last chance at a big promotion.
Youth
In high school, I gave up sports as a sophomore because I couldn’t practice two hours every day and still do my homework. Besides, I was a mediocre athlete and got no girls for that. I loved Elvis, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, and the Kingston Trio (until Dave Guard left). I also loved geometry, algebra, physics, history, drafting, and English lit. And I really loved Janice, Catherine, Glenda, Linda, Marsha, Della, Judy and… Marilyn Monroe! I liked most teachers, got good grades but few friends, still thought life good, and won a prize for a poem beginning: “O mighty ball of sun on high/Riding through the clear blue sky.” (Not exactly Keats.)
With advice from our family doctor (a chiropractor and former Navy CPO) my father conspired to get me into the Naval Academy— no tuition, “great engineering school”— but once I got there it seemed childish after having read Robert Frost, For Whom the Bell Tolls, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Bridges of Toko Ri. In 1964, though near the top of my class at Annapolis, I resigned at the start of my third year, because of my opposition to the Vietnam War, not wanting to die young, and a growing realization that I liked Shakespeare better than ships.
Continuing with college back at Mizzou-KC , I had summer jobs driving a cab, unloading boxcars, and working the info desk at the public library. A year later in grad school in Ann Arbor, I studied poetry with Donald Hall, got a Masters degree, and won a Hopwood Prize in poetry. I stayed in Michigan that summer, carrying plaster for a mason, doing union day labor, and falling in love with Judith Snider, a beautiful tan brunette whom I met in one of Hall’s classes. I noticed two things about her immediately: she wore wonderfully taut white blouses, and her poems were better than mine.
In 1966, we married in Tucson— a desert paradise to us mid-westerners. I taught English at the University of Arizona by day and wrote poems by night. Judy got the first M.A. in creative writing awarded there, and then discovered her real love (the human brain) after reading Arthur Koestler’s The Ghost in the Machine. We left Sonora desert and Tucson in great sadness, vowing to return ASAP.
After a year at the University of Denver, where we spent as much time driving through the Rockies as we did in class, we moved to St. Louis in 1971. There, in grad school at Washington University, we both went vegetarian, Judy dove into neuroscience, and I swam among poets from Blake to Yeats and novelists from Austen to James. In 1979, because of the poor the market for PhDs in English was, I left academe to become a mayor’s aide, enjoying/enduring the circus of big-city politics. We lived in muggy St. Lu for 15 years, desperate to return to sunny Tucson, which (a miracle!) we did, in 1985, only to become embroiled in a bitter, five-year environmental battle that got us excommunicated from Arizona by the local power-brokers in ‘91. We were both nearly 50-- our youth was over.
Middle Age & Beyond
1991-2001
Our next decade was spent in Oklahoma, where Judy taught at the OU Health Science Center and founded a neuroscience lab, while I wrote, wrote, wrote. We also traveled to Holland twice, loving it except for the incessant rain; and to England once, hating the combo of cold rain and boiling heat, not to mention the crappy hotels, crappy food, and crappy RSC— but loving Steven Berkoff this side of idolatry in Coriolanus at the Mermaid Theatre just off the Thames. We saw the play four times in a month. Unforgettable.
2001-2011
We moved to Judy’s home state of Texas, beneath the pines of “Deep East,” where she taught at Stephen F Austin University, founding and directing a human behavioral neuroscience lab there. Besides her professional journal publications during this period, she also published a popular science book, How Is Your Brain like a Zebra: a New Hunan Neurotypology and is currently working on The Neural Rainbow: the Center, the Perimeter and the Brain - A New View of Human Nature, a unique revisionist theory of evolution. She retired in 2012 and has subsequently devoted much of her energy to composing books of haiku based on her original photography.
At 68 I was still hungry to improve at what Chaucer calls the craft so longe to learne— by which he meant both poetry and love. I’m no longer so sure if life is good; but my primary life raft, though a bit battered after years at sea, still consists of those utterly ephemeral yet steel-strong things: words.
2012- 2019
Serious health issues for me: a) the day before Thanksgiving 2011, a hemorrhagic stroke (while playing basketball); b) May 2013 a second stroke (ischemic); c) February 2012, a bad, possibly viral flu. A parade of medical specialists (in four cities), with inconclusive tests and three failed attempts to gain admission to the Mayo Clinic— plus the “predictable age-related decent,” in James Fallows’ felicitous phrase, for people like me, bumping up on 80 (hearing loss, cataracts, bronchitis, sleep apnea, a touch of arthritis, and acid reflux). Recently, a TIA briefly occluded the vision in my right eye with later episodes of severe dizziness, leading to a heart-monitor chest implant. The worst problem: my ability to walk continues to deteriorate.
My muse was not amused but kicked herself into high gear, with an outpouring of poems and four books in progress— Interrogations: Poems Posing Questions; Cosmic Questions: Poems in Our Galactic Moment; On the Wall & On the Page: Poems in Response to the 2018 Texas National Competition and Exhibit; and Mortality and Other Hassles: Poems at the Margins of Life.
The best news: Judy is flourishing. By increasing her walking routine (3-6 miles/day) and weight training, she has dropped 40+ pounds, looks great, and is devouring a wide variety of books, mostly novels, including— the Michael Connelly series, Patrick O'Brian's historical seafaring tales, and works by more "literary" authors such as Martin Cruz Smith, Particia Highsmith, Paulette Giles, Annnie Proulx Cormack McCarthy, Martin Amis, Muriel Spark, Thomas Pynchon, Somerset Maugham, Evelyn and Alex Waugh, Hilary Mantel, Graham Greene, E M Forster, Joyce Cary, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, and her great favorite, Charles Dickens. Some these works we have read aloud to each other, but most are her bedtime reading as I'm in the next room strapping on my CPAP.
I'm now in the zone T. S. Eliot spoke of: "I grow old ... I grow old ... / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled." In fact I do need to have the hem of my jeans taken up an inch or so; but my linguistic life raft is still afloat— though maybe I hear the sound of the falls not far ahead. No mermaids singing, though.
March 2021
After Trump, Covid, masks, no restuarants, no in-theater movies, two killer snowstorms (a falling pine branch left a hole in our roof and bedroom ceiling), and the Texas power grid clusterfuck, the past 14 months have felt like a decade— but we somehow survived it all. None of our friends or family got the virus, we ourselves stayed virus-free and were vaccinated last week. We became Netflix addicts—way too much Nordic noir— but we’re also both more deeply immersed in writing than ever.
Interrogations has just come out. Cosmic Questions and Wall & Page will soon follow. Mortality & Other Hassles is nearly complete and hunting for a publisher. The most exciting thing in my entire creative life is In the Company of Animals: Poems & Prose on the Path to a Peaceable Kingdom. This collection of older poems coupled with 50 new ones is my personal magnum opus, an obsession, a joy. It simply demanded to be written. Here are a few words from the Introduction:
Part memoir, part polemic… with memories of animals from childhood through adulthood threaded between ethical meditations, this book mounts a full-scale attack on the depravity of homocentric consciousness… The obscene treatment of animals by humans has gone on for so many centuries that it seems normal to most people (sadly, including many poets). This must end.
A bit fanatic, maybe? Yes, it might be taken that way, depending on your quotient of empathy for animals. Bottom line, there’s a slow but immense revolution in human compassion currently under way, something long scorned and subverted. In the Company of Animals is my attempt to speed up this revolution. Its most cogent and concise battle cry, however, comes from G.B. Shaw, who once observed: “Animals are my friends, and I don’t eat my friends.” Is there really any room for argument here?
Judy’s newest book, Green in Certain, is the first of a projected multi-volume poetry and prose autobiography. Vol. 1 describes her life and poetry from childhood up though high school in Ann Arbor; Vol. 2, dealing with her undergrad years at the University of Michigan, and especially tumultuous senior year, will be out shortly. This project has been a grueling task for her, unearthing some long-buried, pretty dark memories, as well as cherished ones, and has given her the kind of peace, acceptance, and sense of renewal.
Frankly, I hope that before continuing with the autobiography, Judith will return to her major scientific work, The Neural Rainbow. I believe it can be an important contribution to evolutionary theory, and a range of other disciplines like psychology, philosophy, and anthropology. The book has a world-changing potential. Few writers have been given that kind of challenge— but I know you can meet it, Esposa mia. If humanity doesn’t go extinct in the Anthropocene, it will be forever grateful that you did.
In any case, if Gaia’s willing and the creek don’t rise, we will both still be engrossed in writing on into our eighties. Knock on wood, of course.
_____________________________
Coda: An Age of Biography?
When I first began writing regularly in the 1960s, biography and autobiography were not the hot ticket items they are now. Why this cultural shift occurred isn’t clear to me, but it was real and consequential. Some time in the ‘80s, I seemed to notice that the bookstore shelves devoted to this kind of writing suddenly expanded exponentially, as did the books themselves— like Richard Ellman’s James Joyce, a work of some 900 pages. It appeared in 1959 to a storm of praise (Anthony Burgess dubbed it “the greatest literary biography of the century”). It may or may not have opened the biographical floodgates, but it was definitely a paradigm of relentlessly combing through a writer’s life for even the most minute clues to his or her work.
Autobiography has an older pedigree, of course, from Augustine’s Confessions (400 AD) up through), Rousseau’s Confessions (1765-1789), John Henry Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua, (1864) and on and on, to 20th century works like Frank McCourt’s Angela's Ashes (1996). Such life stories have found an avid readership. What they provide is a sense of intimacy, the human voice in your ear recapitulating a life as lived and felt, whether cherished and boasted of, or regretted and condemned.
The popularity of this kind of material is attested to in today’s virtual era by the arrival of the A&E channel, The Biography Channel, the History Channel, etc. and countless You Tube bio clips of politicians, celebrities, criminals, scientists, lottery winners, etc. We just can’t get enough. And we want to chime in ourselves, as demonstrated in the advice in the first paragraph of one of the most highly regarded autobiographies in history, by the 16th century Italian goldsmith, sculptor, draftsman, soldier, musician, and and poet Benvenuto Cellini.
Here is Cellini’s clarion call to those tempted to brave an autobiography: "Everyone… ought to write the story of his own life.” There it is, a core truth: We want to hear your story, you want to tell it— so why not? But Cellini cautions that you should wait until you are over forty to start, and wistfully adds: “I remember some of the delightful and some of the indescribably terrible things that have happened to me, and when I think back to them I am startled to realize that I really am fifty-eight years old…” [1] He was “startled” to realize how old he was. Really? Yes, for anyone who has a reasonably long life, this is surely universal: a sense of the strange remoteness of passing time and aging— La Reserche du Temps Perdu.
Doesn’t precisely that feeling— the need to investigate your life, to “sort it all out,” to grasp its full significance, its emotional textures, its cause-and-effect nodes— lies the heart of the autobiographical urge? We tell our story to prove, if only to ourselves, that it really happened, to arrest it in time in a way that our biological self can never be. You can’t fully understand your life until you write it down-- and probably only partially at that. When it’s actually happening, it’s in constant flux, moving in and around you like a river you must swim in to stay alive.
* * *
This “Micro Biography,” then, is only a preview of coming attractions. The full story may be treated in three volumes: Poet in Cow Town, Poet in City Hall, Poet in Sonora, already in draft form, with the possible addition of Poet in Deep East, assuming I live long enough to render the last 20 years of my life here in Texas. Parts of all these stories have been evoked in the poems of previously published books. Maybe they deserve a full prose account too… and I can’t believe I’m 78 years old.
[1] The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, The Son of Geovanni Cellini, As Told by Himself in Florence - marketed as Benvenuto Cellini: Autobiography (Penguin Books, 1998) - translated and edited by George Bull.
After studying with Donald Hall (US Poet Laureate 2006-7) at the University of Michigan, KEN LAUTER has published poems in a number of journals and 14 books. His work has been compared to Robert Lowell's, and distinguished poet William Meredith (US Poet Laureate 1978-80) has said that Ken's poetry displays "a splendid and various gift."
His awards include a Hopwood Award for poetry, an American Academy of Poets Prize, and a Shubert Playwriting Fellowship, and he has also written several plays, including The Dancing Apsaras, or Captain Willard's Blues, a prequel/sequel to Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. He has taught literature and creative writing at four universities and worked as a mayor's aide, a university administrator, and a grass-roots environmental activist.
Ken and his wife Dr. Judith Lauter – a neuroscientist, poet, and author of How is Your Brain Like a Zebra? - A new human neurotypology; Light from the Left: Poems on paintings by Rembrandt; and eight books of haiku live in Nacogdoches TX.
____________________________________
A Micro-Autobiography
ars longa, vita brevis - Horace
My life raft on the torrents of time (genetics, sex, love, rock ‘n roll, cars, real estate, politics, capitalism, war, global warming, etc.) has been words. As a middle-class American, I don’t have a richly mysterious like Nabokov's Speak, Memory; but as a child I received something I suspect he lacked— unconditional love— and my mission, as a poet and a man, is to be worthy of that blessing.
Childhood
Born on a freezing night in 1943 in the middle of WW II, I grew up in a cramped, 2BR-1B house with a big front porch and a coal furnace in the dank basement, located in a suburb of Kansas City MO. Our back yard was studded with trees (apple, pear, peach, cherry, walnut, elm) and bordered a creek and woods that was my Arcadia. I roamed there with other boys and my fox terrier Sox, built campfires, played hide-and-seek, cowboys-and-Indians, and hunted for wasp nests to lob stones at— a KC Huck Finn.
The woods seemed magical, a corridor between our house and the school on a hill half a mile away. Next to the school was a pasture spreading southward over rolling hills to meet a bend in the wide brown Missouri River (from there, downtown KC was visible upstream as a low gray line of granite teeth). I walked to school through fragrant fall, snowy winter, and sweet spring. In the first grade, I fell madly in love with Ann, but to my everlasting shame, I dropped her in the third grade when I discovered she was dirt poor. I liked my teachers, got good grades, made friends, thought life good.
My parents were over forty when they married in 1942 (a second try for both of them). My dad, Kenneth Arthur Lauter, the oldest of four brothers in a family of German immigrants, was a recent arrival in KC from St. Louis, his hometown. When they met, my mother Kathryn was living on an 80-acre farm she and her first husband had acquired not long before he had himself committed for schizophrenia and convinced Mom to divorce him. Two years later, she sold the farm and married my father. The middle-aged newlyweds then moved to the suburbs.
With The Feminine Mystique decades away, Mother was proud to be "just a housewife" (or so she said). She cooked, cleaned, sewed, cut magazine coupons, went to a beauty parlor now and then, and shopped for a new hat for church (Baptist) at Helzberg's department store downtown twice a year (Easter and Christmas), with me in tow, fidgeting and intimidated by the ornate décor and the perfumed salesladies who winked at me.
After a small-town Missouri childhood as one of eight kids, two of whom died in childhood, Mom had gone to secretarial school and then clerked in a Western Union Office, but my father insisted that no wife of his would have to work. So she made meat-and-potato suppers, shared highballs and cigarettes with him when he got home from “the salt mines,” and loved us both. After dinner and homework— with Dad often helping me— we watched TV: Ozzie and Harriet, the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, Gunsmoke, Johnny Carson. Then Dad relaxed in his recliner, reading detective stories (Mickey Spillane, Shell Scott) and historical novels (Thomas B. Costain, A.B. Guthrie) while I assembled hyper realistic plastic model warplanes.
By the time I was ten, an air of exhaustion and regret had crept into our house on 4321 North Spruce. (The street number seemed magical, a countdown to something— nuclear war maybe… or poetry?) My handsome, much older half-brother Clark had died in a car wreck in 1949, leaving Mother with an enduring sadness. Working for an insurance company, Dad rode up and down dark, dangerous elevator shafts on the roof of the elevator and pored over client budget books with green-eye-shade rigor. After two decades as an office manager, he made less than $10,000 a year— which didn’t bode well for my college fund— and was deeply depressed when he lost his last chance at a big promotion.
Youth
In high school, I gave up sports as a sophomore because I couldn’t practice two hours every day and still do my homework. Besides, I was a mediocre athlete and got no girls for that. I loved Elvis, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, and the Kingston Trio (until Dave Guard left). I also loved geometry, algebra, physics, history, drafting, and English lit. And I really loved Janice, Catherine, Glenda, Linda, Marsha, Della, Judy and… Marilyn Monroe! I liked most teachers, got good grades but few friends, still thought life good, and won a prize for a poem beginning: “O mighty ball of sun on high/Riding through the clear blue sky.” (Not exactly Keats.)
With advice from our family doctor (a chiropractor and former Navy CPO) my father conspired to get me into the Naval Academy— no tuition, “great engineering school”— but once I got there it seemed childish after having read Robert Frost, For Whom the Bell Tolls, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Bridges of Toko Ri. In 1964, though near the top of my class at Annapolis, I resigned at the start of my third year, because of my opposition to the Vietnam War, not wanting to die young, and a growing realization that I liked Shakespeare better than ships.
Continuing with college back at Mizzou-KC , I had summer jobs driving a cab, unloading boxcars, and working the info desk at the public library. A year later in grad school in Ann Arbor, I studied poetry with Donald Hall, got a Masters degree, and won a Hopwood Prize in poetry. I stayed in Michigan that summer, carrying plaster for a mason, doing union day labor, and falling in love with Judith Snider, a beautiful tan brunette whom I met in one of Hall’s classes. I noticed two things about her immediately: she wore wonderfully taut white blouses, and her poems were better than mine.
In 1966, we married in Tucson— a desert paradise to us mid-westerners. I taught English at the University of Arizona by day and wrote poems by night. Judy got the first M.A. in creative writing awarded there, and then discovered her real love (the human brain) after reading Arthur Koestler’s The Ghost in the Machine. We left Sonora desert and Tucson in great sadness, vowing to return ASAP.
After a year at the University of Denver, where we spent as much time driving through the Rockies as we did in class, we moved to St. Louis in 1971. There, in grad school at Washington University, we both went vegetarian, Judy dove into neuroscience, and I swam among poets from Blake to Yeats and novelists from Austen to James. In 1979, because of the poor the market for PhDs in English was, I left academe to become a mayor’s aide, enjoying/enduring the circus of big-city politics. We lived in muggy St. Lu for 15 years, desperate to return to sunny Tucson, which (a miracle!) we did, in 1985, only to become embroiled in a bitter, five-year environmental battle that got us excommunicated from Arizona by the local power-brokers in ‘91. We were both nearly 50-- our youth was over.
Middle Age & Beyond
1991-2001
Our next decade was spent in Oklahoma, where Judy taught at the OU Health Science Center and founded a neuroscience lab, while I wrote, wrote, wrote. We also traveled to Holland twice, loving it except for the incessant rain; and to England once, hating the combo of cold rain and boiling heat, not to mention the crappy hotels, crappy food, and crappy RSC— but loving Steven Berkoff this side of idolatry in Coriolanus at the Mermaid Theatre just off the Thames. We saw the play four times in a month. Unforgettable.
2001-2011
We moved to Judy’s home state of Texas, beneath the pines of “Deep East,” where she taught at Stephen F Austin University, founding and directing a human behavioral neuroscience lab there. Besides her professional journal publications during this period, she also published a popular science book, How Is Your Brain like a Zebra: a New Hunan Neurotypology and is currently working on The Neural Rainbow: the Center, the Perimeter and the Brain - A New View of Human Nature, a unique revisionist theory of evolution. She retired in 2012 and has subsequently devoted much of her energy to composing books of haiku based on her original photography.
At 68 I was still hungry to improve at what Chaucer calls the craft so longe to learne— by which he meant both poetry and love. I’m no longer so sure if life is good; but my primary life raft, though a bit battered after years at sea, still consists of those utterly ephemeral yet steel-strong things: words.
2012- 2019
Serious health issues for me: a) the day before Thanksgiving 2011, a hemorrhagic stroke (while playing basketball); b) May 2013 a second stroke (ischemic); c) February 2012, a bad, possibly viral flu. A parade of medical specialists (in four cities), with inconclusive tests and three failed attempts to gain admission to the Mayo Clinic— plus the “predictable age-related decent,” in James Fallows’ felicitous phrase, for people like me, bumping up on 80 (hearing loss, cataracts, bronchitis, sleep apnea, a touch of arthritis, and acid reflux). Recently, a TIA briefly occluded the vision in my right eye with later episodes of severe dizziness, leading to a heart-monitor chest implant. The worst problem: my ability to walk continues to deteriorate.
My muse was not amused but kicked herself into high gear, with an outpouring of poems and four books in progress— Interrogations: Poems Posing Questions; Cosmic Questions: Poems in Our Galactic Moment; On the Wall & On the Page: Poems in Response to the 2018 Texas National Competition and Exhibit; and Mortality and Other Hassles: Poems at the Margins of Life.
The best news: Judy is flourishing. By increasing her walking routine (3-6 miles/day) and weight training, she has dropped 40+ pounds, looks great, and is devouring a wide variety of books, mostly novels, including— the Michael Connelly series, Patrick O'Brian's historical seafaring tales, and works by more "literary" authors such as Martin Cruz Smith, Particia Highsmith, Paulette Giles, Annnie Proulx Cormack McCarthy, Martin Amis, Muriel Spark, Thomas Pynchon, Somerset Maugham, Evelyn and Alex Waugh, Hilary Mantel, Graham Greene, E M Forster, Joyce Cary, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, and her great favorite, Charles Dickens. Some these works we have read aloud to each other, but most are her bedtime reading as I'm in the next room strapping on my CPAP.
I'm now in the zone T. S. Eliot spoke of: "I grow old ... I grow old ... / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled." In fact I do need to have the hem of my jeans taken up an inch or so; but my linguistic life raft is still afloat— though maybe I hear the sound of the falls not far ahead. No mermaids singing, though.
March 2021
After Trump, Covid, masks, no restuarants, no in-theater movies, two killer snowstorms (a falling pine branch left a hole in our roof and bedroom ceiling), and the Texas power grid clusterfuck, the past 14 months have felt like a decade— but we somehow survived it all. None of our friends or family got the virus, we ourselves stayed virus-free and were vaccinated last week. We became Netflix addicts—way too much Nordic noir— but we’re also both more deeply immersed in writing than ever.
Interrogations has just come out. Cosmic Questions and Wall & Page will soon follow. Mortality & Other Hassles is nearly complete and hunting for a publisher. The most exciting thing in my entire creative life is In the Company of Animals: Poems & Prose on the Path to a Peaceable Kingdom. This collection of older poems coupled with 50 new ones is my personal magnum opus, an obsession, a joy. It simply demanded to be written. Here are a few words from the Introduction:
Part memoir, part polemic… with memories of animals from childhood through adulthood threaded between ethical meditations, this book mounts a full-scale attack on the depravity of homocentric consciousness… The obscene treatment of animals by humans has gone on for so many centuries that it seems normal to most people (sadly, including many poets). This must end.
A bit fanatic, maybe? Yes, it might be taken that way, depending on your quotient of empathy for animals. Bottom line, there’s a slow but immense revolution in human compassion currently under way, something long scorned and subverted. In the Company of Animals is my attempt to speed up this revolution. Its most cogent and concise battle cry, however, comes from G.B. Shaw, who once observed: “Animals are my friends, and I don’t eat my friends.” Is there really any room for argument here?
Judy’s newest book, Green in Certain, is the first of a projected multi-volume poetry and prose autobiography. Vol. 1 describes her life and poetry from childhood up though high school in Ann Arbor; Vol. 2, dealing with her undergrad years at the University of Michigan, and especially tumultuous senior year, will be out shortly. This project has been a grueling task for her, unearthing some long-buried, pretty dark memories, as well as cherished ones, and has given her the kind of peace, acceptance, and sense of renewal.
Frankly, I hope that before continuing with the autobiography, Judith will return to her major scientific work, The Neural Rainbow. I believe it can be an important contribution to evolutionary theory, and a range of other disciplines like psychology, philosophy, and anthropology. The book has a world-changing potential. Few writers have been given that kind of challenge— but I know you can meet it, Esposa mia. If humanity doesn’t go extinct in the Anthropocene, it will be forever grateful that you did.
In any case, if Gaia’s willing and the creek don’t rise, we will both still be engrossed in writing on into our eighties. Knock on wood, of course.
_____________________________
Coda: An Age of Biography?
When I first began writing regularly in the 1960s, biography and autobiography were not the hot ticket items they are now. Why this cultural shift occurred isn’t clear to me, but it was real and consequential. Some time in the ‘80s, I seemed to notice that the bookstore shelves devoted to this kind of writing suddenly expanded exponentially, as did the books themselves— like Richard Ellman’s James Joyce, a work of some 900 pages. It appeared in 1959 to a storm of praise (Anthony Burgess dubbed it “the greatest literary biography of the century”). It may or may not have opened the biographical floodgates, but it was definitely a paradigm of relentlessly combing through a writer’s life for even the most minute clues to his or her work.
Autobiography has an older pedigree, of course, from Augustine’s Confessions (400 AD) up through), Rousseau’s Confessions (1765-1789), John Henry Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua, (1864) and on and on, to 20th century works like Frank McCourt’s Angela's Ashes (1996). Such life stories have found an avid readership. What they provide is a sense of intimacy, the human voice in your ear recapitulating a life as lived and felt, whether cherished and boasted of, or regretted and condemned.
The popularity of this kind of material is attested to in today’s virtual era by the arrival of the A&E channel, The Biography Channel, the History Channel, etc. and countless You Tube bio clips of politicians, celebrities, criminals, scientists, lottery winners, etc. We just can’t get enough. And we want to chime in ourselves, as demonstrated in the advice in the first paragraph of one of the most highly regarded autobiographies in history, by the 16th century Italian goldsmith, sculptor, draftsman, soldier, musician, and and poet Benvenuto Cellini.
Here is Cellini’s clarion call to those tempted to brave an autobiography: "Everyone… ought to write the story of his own life.” There it is, a core truth: We want to hear your story, you want to tell it— so why not? But Cellini cautions that you should wait until you are over forty to start, and wistfully adds: “I remember some of the delightful and some of the indescribably terrible things that have happened to me, and when I think back to them I am startled to realize that I really am fifty-eight years old…” [1] He was “startled” to realize how old he was. Really? Yes, for anyone who has a reasonably long life, this is surely universal: a sense of the strange remoteness of passing time and aging— La Reserche du Temps Perdu.
Doesn’t precisely that feeling— the need to investigate your life, to “sort it all out,” to grasp its full significance, its emotional textures, its cause-and-effect nodes— lies the heart of the autobiographical urge? We tell our story to prove, if only to ourselves, that it really happened, to arrest it in time in a way that our biological self can never be. You can’t fully understand your life until you write it down-- and probably only partially at that. When it’s actually happening, it’s in constant flux, moving in and around you like a river you must swim in to stay alive.
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This “Micro Biography,” then, is only a preview of coming attractions. The full story may be treated in three volumes: Poet in Cow Town, Poet in City Hall, Poet in Sonora, already in draft form, with the possible addition of Poet in Deep East, assuming I live long enough to render the last 20 years of my life here in Texas. Parts of all these stories have been evoked in the poems of previously published books. Maybe they deserve a full prose account too… and I can’t believe I’m 78 years old.
[1] The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, The Son of Geovanni Cellini, As Told by Himself in Florence - marketed as Benvenuto Cellini: Autobiography (Penguin Books, 1998) - translated and edited by George Bull.
Copyright Ken Lauter - 2021
