Portable Bohemia was launched in June 2016 as a successor to my earlier blogs Memo from the Fringes and House Red with the promise that essays, reviews, rants, screeds, ruminations, and poems would be coming soon. Already the editors were screeching like peacocks in lust. And here we are.
Family, friends, and readers who have been with me for a while may be aware there is not an entrepreneurial bone in my body. Or as I put it in the poem On the Approach of My Fiftieth Birthday:
Indifferent to possessions, but for books And running shoes, downwardly mobile And marginally employed, I remain at heart A card-burning member Of the Far Left lunatic fringe. I take my stand— Poet by choice and by chance— Chained to the wings of the sky. Moonburned my brain cobbles A lyric of grace.
Marketing consisted of sharing posts on Facebook and briefly Twitter, an account created solely for that purpose and deleted when Elon Musk took over. Readership was predictably modest. I used to quip that on good days it soared into the low two figures. On April 16 of last year I moved Portable Bohemia to Substack, hoping to expose myself to a wider audience, maybe a little bit in the spirit of former Portland mayor Bud Clark who exposed himself to art. Readership remains quite modest, but old readers followed and new ones came on board and the chorus encouraged me with comments, likes, subscriptions, and most of all by reading my little essays. I am grateful for each and every one and hope you continue to find these musings interesting, informative, thought provoking, maybe even sometimes amusing in lighthearted moments, which in these dark times come less frequently than I would like.
My approach has always been haphazard. The typical pattern has me floundering in the days following publication of an essay as I ponder what to take up next. You might think this would not be a problem. Ukraine and Gaza are ever present sources of outrage and anguish. The House blockhead caucus, the shenanigans of Taylor Greene and vaping, groping Boebert, and the judicial pronouncements of Judge Aileen Cannon make up a small portion of a treasure trove of gifts that keep giving for an intrepid scribe with ink to spill. Just this week the rise and precipitous fall of Ronna Romney McDaniel at NBC and Jr. Kennedy’s choice of Nicole Shanahan as his running mate on the…well, I would say blockhead ticket, but that would invite confusion with the blockhead caucus. Time to consult the index of piquant terms in my edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary. Aha!
politicaster : A petty ignorant pretender to politics. Johnson illustrates with a quotation from L’Estrange, who may be Sir Roger (1616–1704), identified by Wikipedia as “an English pamphleteer, author, courtier and press censor”: There are quacks of all sorts, as bullies, pedants, hypocrites, empiricks, law jobbers and politicasters.
“Politicaster ticket” works. “Quack ticket” would also serve. I welcome other suggestions if you have any to share.
I allow myself a brief aside here. What the heck was NBC top brass thinking when they signed McDaniel to a two-year contract for a cool $600,000? Did they really think she would be welcomed, or even accepted, as a colleague by a news team she repeatedly and routinely smeared and disparaged throughout her tenure at the Republican National Committee? McDaniel’s career in journalism has come to an end for now with a single appearance on Meet the Press where she was interviewed by Kristin Welker. There she showed no remorse for lies about the election, attempts to overturn it, the absurd claim that January 6 was “legitimate political discourse,” and so much more, defending her role as taking one for the team. For this she will apparently reap the full payout on her contract and surely the scorn that she has earned. As for Shanahan, her primary qualification for the slot on the politicaster ticket is her liberation of a substantial sum of Google money from second ex-husband Sergey Brin when they parted company. Ah, but I digress.
Dostoevsky was a voracious newspaper reader who often drew on events of the day for entries in his Writer’s Diary. Reading news reports, analysis, and commentary on whatever piques my interest and much dithering precede settling on a subject and digging into research that generates an inchoate mess of notes and quotations. Then comes more dithering before the first sentences and paragraphs are hacked out to open the way into actually shaping the mess into some semblance of coherence. I think of old Ezra Pound:
But the beauty is not the madness Tho' my errors and wrecks lie about me. And I am not a demigod. I cannot make it cohere. (Canto CXVI)
I forge ahead, beset by doubt that it will ever come together, until it does sort of begin to come together, whereupon I go at it in a fury of writing, revising, rewriting, and rewriting some more. Not all of it happens at my desk. Much takes place in my thoughts during downtown wandering in the spirit of the flâneur, an espresso and journal session at Park Avenue Cafe, long runs, walks to the grocery store or neighborhood library. There is an element of obsession to it all. Maybe I should consult a trained professional headshrinker. Or get a life.
This is how I have always gone at it. I never acquired the ability to develop an outline and work from that. The theme or argument comes together in the course of writing and rewriting driven at least in part by constant self-doubt. In college I usually finished papers well before they were due only to revise and rewrite substantially the last day or two before the deadline. The papers were better for it.
The days at my desk when it comes together in that fury of writing, reviewing, and rewriting and I finally throw it out into the internet aether are some of my best, most satisfying days. Elated. Near euphoric. Then I think of things that could have been worded better, put in, taken out, and that the piece would have benefited by sleeping on it one more night, with one last review and revision before clicking to publish. And if I slept on it one more night, I would have the same thought again the following night. At some point you either let it go or succumb to paralysis of the pen.
When I speak of this writing life I have in mind the Portable Bohemia essays and the poetry. I have tried my hand at fiction and found my hand wanting. My files are cluttered with half a dozen or so failed novels, titles like I Wanted to Feel Exalted, Sketches from the Days and Nights of Charlotte Reine, Until We Remember to Dream, with some decent characters, scenarios, and dialogue, but nothing I could ever manage to pull together. Perhaps I did not have the discipline to rewrite enough. In the end I always returned to poetry. Much of my life, encompassing some of my best and some of my most foolish moments, has been about keeping faith with that dream of being a poet I had when I was nineteen (a formulation borrowed from Jim Harrison).
These days the poems do not come as readily as they once did. Or so it seems. Perhaps I am cherry-picking from memory when I write that. There have always been dry spells when I wondered if the muse had abandoned me.
While searching for poems to submit to the Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Anthology Volume Three I shocked myself, amazed that I had a record of this stuff, when I found a spreadsheet with a listing of poetry readings that included one for Christopher Luna’s Ghost Town series in Vancouver, Washington, on May 10, 2012. I was introduced to the Ghost Town open mic by Ric Vrana, a fine poet and even better human being I met when I began showing up at the Broken Word open mic at the Blue Monk on Belmont in 2007. Ric described himself as “yer average leftist patriot, born on the Fourth of July and critical of every kind of authority. OR…a middle aged, grumpy single father of two teenagers overeducated and underpaid and a frustrated ‘artiste.’” He was a teacher, a union man, an activist who believed devoutly in the idea of public service. Also a baseball fan.
A year or two after I began attending Broken Word, Blue Monk eighty-sixed the poets to open up the time slot for belly dancers. A few years later Blue Monk itself expired.
It must have been around 2009 or early 2010, give or take, when Ric discovered Christopher Luna’s Ghost Town open mic and invited me to join him for a monthly trek across the Columbia River to Vancouver. This continued for a couple of years until Ric was downsized out of his job at Tri-Met during one of the transit agency’s periodic budget crunches. If memory serves, his job involved pursuing grant funding for Tri-Met projects. While working at Tri-Met Ric also taught courses in urban planning part-time as an adjunct professor at Portland State University. Earlier in life he took a crack at an academic career only to find that he did not care for aspects of it that lay outside the classroom. He taught as an adjunct because he loved teaching. The role was perfect for him.
After Tri-Met Ric landed a job mapping out the city’s infrastructure in Warrenton on the coast at the mouth of the Columbia River and moved to nearby Astoria. There he discovered a lively poetry scene where he fit right in and went on to found the Port of Call open mic.
At Ghost Town I renewed acquaintance with friends from Portland poetry readings at Blue Monk, Mojo’s Coffee Den, 3 Friends Caffeinated Mondays, and a host of others that have come and gone with the years, and I found a welcoming community bound together by mutual respect and shared love for poetry and art and belief in their importance. The Ghost Town Poetry open mic is as the flyer proclaims “anti-racist, LGBTQ+ friendly, pro-science, anti-fascist, pro-choice, all ages, and uncensored since 2004.” Twenty years is a remarkable run for an open mic. Christopher Luna, co-host Morgan Paige, and all the others who keep it going are indeed special.
I fell away from Ghost Town after Ric moved to Astoria. That is my loss. Ric stepped on a rainbow in 2016, much too young, born on the fourth of July, 1952, making him just six weeks older than I was. That was a loss for all who knew him. And for poetry.
It seems I remain on Christopher Luna’s mailing list. Earlier this month I received a call for submissions for the 20th anniversary anthology. The guidelines specify poems that were read at the Ghost Town open mic. That sent me scurrying to my files and the record for the May 10, 2012, reading. Three poems I found there struck me more than I anticipated. They were written in the late 1970s, during my first years in Atlanta, where I landed in the midst of the blossoming Little 5 Points scene. Those poems, “The Bar Is Crowded,” “Moonsong,” and “The Unspoken Language,” are marked by a surrealist sensibility and the influence of Gregory Corso, of whom a friend at the time told me, after I had loaned her a book of Corso’s poems, that he had my style. Well. It was the other way around of course. I really kind of like these poems. There is, I think, something that distinguishes them as mine. Maybe some spark of that is still with me.
Keep the faith. Stand with Ukraine. yr obdt svt
Keep on, keeping on David.
Thank you so much for your sharing your musings, essays, and poems.