Lessons of Time, Velocity, and Hard Music: Remembering Walt Pavlich
By Thomas Aslin
This morning I searched through my file cabinet before latching onto a file of letters and postcards from the late poet Walter Pavlich. One card, mailed from New Orleans, and covered with Walt’s odd, inky scrawl—half in cursive, half in crabbed-print-style lettering—refers with some heat to the scantily dressed blonde on the flip-side: a French Quarter dancer that danced for him and his buddy, Jack Heflin, “just the other evening on Bourbon Street.” They were in the midst of a road trip to Florida, driving from Missoula to Gainesville in June of 1982.
Having just separated from my wife that May, I moved from Olympia, Washington, where I taught high school English, to Missoula for the summer. Putting most of my belongings in storage, I drove straight through, shuttling past Spokane, my hometown. I was too ashamed to stop, to talk with family or friends there. The next day I rented an apartment close to downtown and settled in. For days my spirits were buoyed by my visits with friends, by talking with Walt about Dick Hugo and our time in the writing program at the University of Montana. Missoula was a town filled mostly with good memories for me. But on the morning Jack and Walt left on their trip, selfishly I was sorry to see them go.
Within a week another card, postmarked Gainesville, followed the one from New Orleans. Walt wrote of a fine afternoon and evening spent in the company of the novelist Harry Crews. Back in Missoula I gathered Walt’s mail, gave birth to a series of horrid little poems, and since I could not sleep straight through the night read a novel nearly every day.
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佤邦
Later after he quit drinking and helped others maintain their sobriety, I heard his generosity and helping hand were theirs for the asking. As it turns out he may have been admired for his kindness as much or more as he ever was for his fine writing.
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When I first met Walt at Cannon Beach, Oregon, at The Haystack Writers’ Conference in the summer of 1977, his hair was long, hung past his shoulders. His demeanor calm, controlled. We were enrolled in Dick Hugo’s poetry workshop, a ten day class bracketed around a free weekend: Each morning a three hour session was held in a small grade school less than a block from the beach. By the second day of the workshop we were hoping to enroll in the MFA program at the University of Montana, though neither of us believed we had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting in.
The second poem Walt brought to class began with a bit of family history and was set in his grandfather’s butcher shop on Front Street where meat was sold cheap and wrapped in butcher paper on gray days on the Portland waterfront. The poem had rain in it. Rain mixed with zinfandel dreams, depression era work, bridges and bridge tenders. This sounds about right. Coupled with Walt’s innate love for his ancestors was an utter fascination and love for crows, for rain, for walnut trees and their fruit, for lifting free weights at his parents’ home in southeast Portland, for boneyards and boozy evenings, for his father’s friends, for bohunks living in the old neighborhoods, for his father’s thirty some years of labor in iron foundries, for the beauty of his mother when his parents met and were later married.
His imagery had surprising turns annealed with a close examination of what lay in front of him. I was intrigued by his unusual sensibility, his sense of the absurd, his passion, always his passion. He liked an image of mine in a poem about my father’s grain elevator: baby chicks doing a bloody foot-dance in their wire cage home. From a brief exposure to each other’s work and through a shared love for Hugo’s poems and Hugo’s teaching, a friendship deepened.
Hugo was in grand form those two weeks. Of course he knew there was fresh meat in the room and having recently finished the essays collected in The Triggering Town, he taught from it, taught with brusque humor and a touch of fire. He turned students’ good poems into better poems with the quick twist of a phrase or with a nuanced suggestion. He took our poems and praised certain moves made or a tone found in the language. He particularly liked one of Walter’s poems, saying, “Though he writes a bit like me here, he won’t for long. His language, his attention to rhythm and sound, will serve him well.” Other than a few younger poets like us, and a few older women, there were several other men and women in class who were quite good. It seemed they had been in Dick’s classes before (or other classes there) and brought an intelligence and verve to their poems that some of us did not.
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Over time we’d laugh and laugh again when recalling the scene. For most of the rest of our days at Cannon Beach, I recall Walter telling me “to lighten up.” And I remember coming up with a silly slogan he’d have printed on T-shirts for us, the words becoming our mantra for a time: Think Missoula.
Over the next seven months we wrote poems, sent them to one another for critique, and made application to the University of Montana’s MFA program. During these months each of us visited the other twice. On his first visit to Seattle, we toured Hugo and Roethke haunts: found Hugo’s boyhood home in White Center, visited Roethke’s classroom in Parrington Hall at the University of Washington where his workshops were held (appropriately a greenhouse sat just beyond the classroom windows), and rummaged through the Roethke Papers in Special Collections at Suzzallo Library. When I visited Walt in Eugene where he was finishing his degree in English at the University of Oregon, I slipped into one of John Haislip’s classes. Haislip, a former student of Roethke’s, spoke of Roethke that day, then spoke in Roethke’s voice, a voice I’d heard in a movie about Roethke (“In a Dark Time”) and on Caedmon Records. I was delighted. Poems Walt sent to me during this time included lines such as:
Die once then leave The death alone; In my dream A river stops Birds lose their way. Above the trees The moon shows One face at a time And I fall gently To the roar Of its perfect whirl.In another poem he wrote:
Leave Blue River blue. It remains the only passage Left certain. And then this: Alarm is in the quiet. Lay your hands on the tracks Feel the train howl Deeper than any wind.
And then a short, stunning poem that he enclosed in a later letter:
The Closing Two hours along a quiet road I tramp the first tracks Of a woods heavy with snow. Grandmother Is this how it was The corners folding The room closing In white?~ ~ ~ ~
After Walt returned from his road trip to Florida, we went fishing with Dick, spent the better part of two days with him. Dick died two months after I returned from my escape to Missoula. I was shocked when I was tracked down at my brother’s house on Mercer Island and told over the phone by my mother-in-law of his sudden death. And like many was bereft with the loss. I had heard Dick read in Seattle at Blessed Sacrament Church in the University District less than five weeks before. And though he didn’t look well and hadn’t for some time, no one would have imagined or thought to dwell on what was coming.
佤邦
Walt was quick to say after bringing in that fish that “Maybe we should let Dick use the boat?” We rowed back toward shore and tied the boat to a cleat on the dock. Hugo, may have been scowling, though in that light, in the shadows of early afternoon who could tell. Dick said, “Tom, you stay in the boat. You and I will take it out.” As he stepped in the boat, it lurched a bit from the dock, I caught sight of a metal plate under the gunnel. The boat’s specifications read: Weight Limit 450 lbs. I did the math. The lake water had risen to the edge of the gunnels. Whenever Hugo rose to cast (and he did often) lake water came close to spilling into the boat. I can’t swim and almost no one knew where I was living that summer. I envisioned some grim headline in the Missoulian the next morning: Renowned Poet Safe After Boating Accident. In small type near the end of the article a brief reference to an anonymous former student who died at the scene.
Dick never caught a fish that day, and Walt and I didn’t catch another. Back at his house, Dick said that Ripley, who was visiting her mother, the novelist Mildred Walker, in the east was flying home the next afternoon, then added, “Ripley loves trout. Do you think I could have a couple?” We felt like heels for not having thought of it first. We left six trout with Dick, saying all we wanted, all we needed were a couple for breakfast one morning.
If you are familiar with his poem, you know Walt says Dick cleaned the fish, “dug it empty with his fat thumb.” Not true. Walt and I cleaned the fish at the lake. In the poem you will find two trout preserved in a freezer and moved from place to place whenever Walt moved. This is mostly true, though there were three trout in that Mason jar, not two. Walt told me the trout made even that last move to Davis, California. This is decidedly true. Walt’s widow, Sandra McPherson, remembers as much, saying they were buried eventually under the root ball of a sapling in the schoolyard across the street from their house.
You will find that I am absent from the poem. I think the poem is better for my absence, though ego being what ego is, I’m sure I didn’t see it that way originally. I hoped to be in someone’s poems someday, especially a poem as good as this elegy. You will find a dog in the poem circling a cabin in the woods the evening after Dick died at Virginia Mason in Seattle. This is true. I talked to Walt the day after Dick’s death and he described the dog and the hound’s curious behavior to me.
When writing a poem, truth and beauty and the facts, such as they are, do their own strange dance. Hugo said in class one evening that reality was a big bore. He knew that the undercurrent of sound and rhythm carried a poem, the good poems. Factual truth is just not very important. In truth the facts often stand in the way of writing a good poem.
In the poem Walter says about the fish he kept and kept frozen:
They have lost their need for seasons and lie together heads to tails soldered by a line of blood and frost without one heart between them.
What’s not to love about “soldered by a line / of blood and frost / without one heart / between them”?
Later he moves us to a scene in which he is twenty and working in a zero-degree warehouse where a salesman would pass one of my hands / under his smoky nostrils…” The salesman adds: “Must have had a good time / last night. There’s only / two things that smell like fish…”
The poem has taken a dramatic turn. And with this abrupt intimation of sex not too far outside the scene, the poem takes us places we never dreamed we’d be going. And then surprisingly he gives one trout [in the poem] to the rather crude salesman. I think we know or suspect where the other is going, but then that dog surfaces. That haunted, haunting canine who, as it turns out,
cleaned the afternoon of words, then left trotting away through the snow,hushed for a way to keep warm.
So many marvelous turns in the poem, such surprising, though believable, even heart-wrenching language in the poem. And at the end, though it is never stated, we are led to believe that the speaker finds himself alone, bereft, and without words. He seems stunned into silence, even speechless, though this is never said directly, only suggested. What is said is that the dog had “left a sound that cleaned / the afternoon of words.”
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After several years we seldom sent letters to each other, seldom showed each other poems. Mostly we kept in touch with phone calls. Mostly I called him. He wasn’t one to waste his money on long distance calls. Sometimes I’d reach him in Florence, Montana where he lived for a time. Once on a card I received he asked me to call him in Plentywood, Montana. He included a phone number. He was teaching in the Poetry-in-the-Schools program at the time and Plentywood was a long ways from anywhere.
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Not long after Walter and I found an apartment to share and moved to Missoula, his parents and his mother’s sister, Ruby, came to town. Within short order we took them to the Eastgate Lounge and Package Store where we found the novelist Jim Crumley ensconced one fine afternoon. He asked us to join him. Beer was ordered. Walt introduced his father, his mother, his aunt. Jim was delighted to meet them. The air was punctuated with laughter. Then during a lull in conversation, Walt’s father took a long, sober look at Crumley and said loud enough for anyone in the bar to hear, “So you’re one of the tin gods he’s always talking about.” Crumley erupted with laughter.
Often when talking on the phone one of us would voice problems he was having with his father. The other, though sympathetic, would see the outrageous humor in the situation and laugh until both of us were caught up in the dark humor. At other times what we shared about a father’s abusive words or behavior was no joke no matter how it was told.
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Several weeks after talking with Walt, I received a phone call from another friend, Rick Robbins, a classmate of ours at Montana. He told me Walt had died. I remember immediately thinking car wreck or mugging or something of the sort. I even said as much over the phone. It was difficult to believe he had died, apparently from a heart attack in his sleep or upon waking in the evening or early in the morning.
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I return to his poems often. He’s never far from my thoughts. Just this morning I read an uncollected poem of his that appeared in a magazine named, Fine Madness. From “After the Animal Hospital”:
Old squirrel-chaser, you are grounded now. Jupiter’s stacked on the moon tonight and you can see just far enough into your dish, the cold close milk of heaven.I’ve always loved that “cold close milk of heaven.”
In a poem from The Spirit of Blue Ink another cat appears, though in this instance the cat appears with a convict in the exercise yard at a prison:
He loves the beast in a fat way, Because it pisses off voluntary jays, Because it once backed up And sprayed a lieutenant’s pant leg, Because it won’t eat what it kills.
Both poems show his unique sensibility and diction, the care he took in choosing his words. Something else I admire is that Walt wrote about family, music and musicians, animals, prisoners, fire fighters, comedians, and his wife, the poet Sandra McPherson. In other words about what he loved and cared for deeply. And the poems matter to us because of the care he took, the humor and passion he infused in them.
Walt and I used to talk about the integrity of the line, how each line was important, that none of its words should be wasted. We were often discussing Roethke when this came up. Take a cold close look at Walter’s poems and you will find his lines have integrity, which is a kind of morality not found in some of the poems favored or fawned over these days.
His poems speak to his inventiveness, his humor, his attention to detail. His unique voice is immoderately present in the work. This is a good thing. In “My Glasses Make Her Sad,” he writes, “I have learned a little more about heaven / From five blind singers from Alabama.” And then , “…I’ll feel my way through the dark, / The braille of the low shoulders of couches, /Cold handshake of a doorknob.” In another, “The Fifth Season,”) this:
I remember students smug with their knowledge Of the Bible. It was Deuteronomy this, Galatians that. So I dropped the course. Had we discussed trouble, Jesus’s blues[.]
And from the title poem of his last collection, The Spirit of Blue Ink, these couplets,
…A school bell across The street teaches the lessons Of time, velocity And hard music. A mirror waiting…that end with:
And if I’m lucky, I can approach The spirit of blue ink, the glory Of the hand that works the difficult And the dead, that waits out the past, Attached as it is, not to a wrist, But the heart. The heart that is The leaf, that blows its way to you.
As Joe Stroud said to me after I sent him a copy of Walt’s last book: “No one writes like him.”
This is obvious when one spends time with Walt’s poems. Surprises abound: “A gospel record, Christ in vinyl from / The Fifties, 33 1/3 hallelujahs / Per minute.” Or as in these lines from “Readiness”:
A Hmong family fishes From their Toyota, out of the wind. A loon dives under the wake Of an incoming vessel. All of us ready For each other. Even the missing egret, The one with snow in its name.
At other times, as in “Etherealness,” he surprises with something as simple as: “The man thought Jesus would have made / A good neighbor, patient, good / With his hands.”
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In the last stanza of “The Fifth Season,” Walt wrote: “Your soul is a pillow in the dark. / You leave on its feathers. / It takes you to meet your dreams.” I’m not alone in wishing I could meet my dreams every night knowing Walter was inhabiting our physical world, writing his poems, and praying as he says “in the open-air church of his arbor, / Wisteria stars overhead.”
我
I felt as close to Walt as I ever had. I had a wonderful time. So as regrets go, with this friendship I have only a few. He and I had entered a new phase, I think, care and kindness came along with the memories. He said over lunch, “You know I have known you for more than half my life. We’ve been friends more than have my life.”
Regrets? Well, I have a few, but those are part and parcel with what I have learned about time, velocity, and hard music. So much of what I learned early on of poetry was learned in the company of Walt Pavlich, in classrooms he and I sat in together. All of that, as it turns out, is all caught up and mixed too with what I have learned about time, velocity, and hard music. So much so I can hardly separate one from the other.
For Walt’s friendship and for his poems and so much more, I am grateful.
