How I Work AsA Poet and Other Essays by Lew Welch

Author:Lew Welch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

Well, so anyway, from that we decided that the trouble is — most of the words are in what’s called your passive vocabulary. You can read them and understand them, but you never use them. But if you ever use the word in a poem, it becomes definitely part of your active vocabulary because you had to work it so hard to fit it in there, see. Like the first time you had a four-by-sixteen. You’ll never forget the four-by-sixteen, right?

So, we were just bored, and we decided: let’s go through the dictionary and find five words that none of us know — and dig, we all have; fifty thousand vocabularies and they’re not the same, so there’s not going to be very many words left. There’s only three hundred and sixty thousand in the big one. And it was true. We just couldn’t find any word that nobody — didn’t know, except these five. Look at these-. [Writes on board.] Does anybody know what that means? Flamen. Uh, this is a beauty, man. Liripipionated. [Laughter.] No kidding. Means hooded, wearing a hood [with a long tail]. That’s all it means. Isn’t it a pity? Such a big word. Anybody know what that is? It’s [bema] pronounced beema. It’s the [enclosed area surrounding the altar] in a cathedral. Then — we couldn’t find very many words. Look how weird they are. So we allowed geode because everybody had never used it. Everybody now — a lot of you know geode, don’t you? Hollow rock crystal. Right. And propolis. Everybody knew that, but it was so pretty — [laughter]. So you see we weren’t very strict. All right, there’s the five words. This is a Roman priest devoted to but one god. This is hooded. This is that [area around the altar] in a cathedral. Hollow rock crystal. And bee [glue]. And we had fifteen minutes to make a poem using all those words. [Laughter.] And Whalen comes up with:

Sated flamen Liripipionated

Paces, chanting, in the bema

While demented hillside bees

Pack geodes with propolis and honey —

Sweet rock eggs Tribute to no walking god

[Laughter.] Isn’t that incredible? Wow. Boy, that guy really has it. That Whalen really is so good you just can’t believe it.

Now, all right, so let’s put it this way. All that I’ve been talking about so far is what you do, or what I did, as a very young man with really not very much to say — trying to get the toolbox together and get my materials ready, so that if I had something to say, I’d be able to do it, you see? And then as I got older I had things to say, that I wanted to say, and sometimes the writing of the poem was ridiculously easy. Other times it took a long time.

Now, “Wobbly Rock” is an interesting poem from the standpoint of how it was made. I had just left my first wife and I went out to this rock at Muir Beach and I sat down there to think everything over.

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