Ring of Bone by Lew Welch

Author:Lew Welch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

UNCOLLECTED POEMS

EDITOR’S NOTE

By the fall of 1969 Lew Welch had completed assembling, from the work of two decades, his collected poems, which he called Ring of Bone after a Hermit Poem based on a vision that had come to him in a cabin in Bixby Canyon, Big Sur, in 1962. During the next few months he finished writing his Preface, added several more early poems to the “On Out” section, and completed, at last, “The Way Back” poems, a sequence he had first drafted in 1963. By February of 1970 the book had been accepted by a New York publisher, a contract signed, and an advance on royalties paid. All seemed fair sailing for Lew Welch and his book.

Alas, such was not to be. Storm clouds soon gathered and publication of the book was many times postponed. Then when Lew Welch walked away in May of 1971 he left a farewell note naming me his literary executor and directing me to use not only his assembled Ring of Bone manuscript but all of his papers as well. In other words, he must have been thinking of a larger collection that would include more poems from all periods of his life. The contract lapsed in 1972, as he had anticipated, and I assumed the final editing and publication of his collected poems.

After a careful study of his mss and correspondence, particularly with fellow poets Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen,

I came to the conclusion that what was needed, in the present, much changed situation was a more extensive collection than Lew Welch had conceived of in 1969. To that end I have assembled in the following pages a large number of uncollected poems from the two decades of work, as they have survived in literary magazines, as broadsides and free poems, in manuscripts and in letters. These include not only late poems that he clearly intended to publish in subsequent volumes, but also poems from all periods which he had left out of Ring of Bone, perhaps because he felt they were not “exactly accurate” (his phrase), or were incompletely realized, or were too naive, sentimental, fragmentary, unfinished or did not allow themselves to be “organized into” the structure he had established, as he describes it in his Preface. Yet all these poems possess considerable interest.

The first two "The Importance of Autumn” and “Monologue of ()nc Whom the Spring Found Unaccompanied” — are the first poems Well It published (in 1950 issues of Janus, the Reed College literary magazine of the period). Several are fragments cannibalized from long philosophical poems he worked on at various times but never completed to his satisfaction. “Invention Against Invention,” as an example, is a long poem describing the events of a day in 1960 San Francisco from which he carved two of the “Four Studies in Perception” and “Entire Sermon by the Red Monk” as well; I have included it as a fascinating example of a long poem in progress and for what was not rescued from it.

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