History of My Reading: Vietnam

I’ve long delayed my next installment of this series mostly because I knew this would be its subject. I have books and other materials on the Vietnam War from that period that I had no desire to look at again. Why revive all that pain when there are plenty of new sources of distress to contend with?

I guess that’s not just me. Benjamin B. Barber begins his essay, which begins the 1990 compilation The Legacy: The Vietnam War in the American Imagination (Beacon Press): “There is no event in America’s recent history more painful—more memorable yet less remembered—than our long and futile military engagement in Southeast Asia...Vietnam is an invitation only to amnesia—a hard and numb scar we prefer not to notice.”

On a track of Randy Newman’s great 1970 album 12 Songs, the singer describes the promising start of a love affair, except that she wants to talk about the war. “I don’t want to talk about the war” the singer asserts.

 By the time I heard this song I was heartily sick of talking about the war. I had been talking about it, thinking about, bewildered and angry, bitter and immensely sad about it, for what seemed like forever, even if, all told, it took up a wearisome decade. In particular I was aware of how it was poisoning my college life and beyond, my early to mid 20s, with all of its immutable experiences and all of its urgency in determining the course of my life.

For we were shadowed by Vietnam war events until, for a few years we ate, drank, slept, read and talked the Vietnam war, and what it was doing to our personal lives, our generation, our country and humanity, as well as the people living and dying in that faraway land.

Meanwhile it took friends and acquaintances and distant contemporaries, wounding their bodies, minds and lives, and killing them dead, whether they fought in the war, fought against it, or otherwise witnessed it close up. It deformed the country, turning family members, friends and generations against each other.

Knox History prof John Stipp

In college, Vietnam also became an education in itself, and eventually central to my education there. The first event I recall was a “teach-in” on American policy in Vietnam given by a group of Knox College faculty in my first year, probably in the spring of 1965. With lots of competition for attention, it drew only about 100 students (according to history professor John Stipp, the one speaker I definitely remember.) But I was one of the students in the audience, and I’ve never forgotten at least the feeling of that event.

Our professors placed the American military presence in the context of the geography and history of southeast Asia and Vietnam specifically, from even before the French Indochina war. They described political and moral implications. They provided facts and sources that already contradicted US official statements.

Their scholarship and analyses (some familiar, some not) were daring to contradict official policy, lambasting the mistaken reasons for a war and its conduct while it was happening. This was academic discourse with a contemporary purpose. It meant something to our lives at that moment. And it was at least a little dangerous for them, as it would be very dangerous particularly for the male students listening, and not listening.

The amount of scholarship and writing on Vietnam already by 1965 is suggested in The Viet-Nam Reader published that year, edited by Marcus Raskin and Bernard Fall. Reporter and scholar Bernard Fall in particular was a respected voice on Vietnam, since he started out a supporter but became a critic. He had been reporting on the region since the early 1950s and warned the US was making the same mistakes as the French. He continued to report on the war, and was accompanying US Marines in Vietnam in 1967 when they were ambushed, and he was among those killed.

That spring of 1965 was when the US became fully involved in a war in Vietnam, with the first ground troops, the first search-and-destroy missions and in particular, the first bombing of North Vietnam. Escalation (a word we were learning) continued through the summer, and so student interest also escalated the following fall. I’m hazy on whether it was my first or second year that I took a public position against the war in a debate sponsored by the Speech department, but I remember it as a defining moment for me.

Then by 1966 and 1967, Vietnam was on everybody’s mind. We saw our time, thought and emotions absorbed by meetings, debates, petitions, marches, demonstrations with four or five people or thousands—in hot rooms, in the cold and snow, in the rain, and a broken-hearted poetry reading in the spring sun. Draft calls began to ramp up, which added to the urgency for those of us facing the draft in our near future.

Much of the reading I remember was in pamphlets, booklets and periodicals. We relied on periodicals partly because these events were happening rapidly, and books take a long time. But a lot of the press seemed to be simply repeating government and think tank misinformation and lies. We relied on different periodicals, such as Ramparts and the New York Review of Books, which published, among others, Mary McCarthy’s journalism (collected in Vietnam, 1967) and Noam Chomsky’s analyses.

In The Nation magazine I was particularly reading William Eastlake’s columns from Vietnam, probably before and certainly after he taught a semester at Knox. Esquire under editor Harold Hayes published provocative pieces, as did Harper’s Magazine. I didn’t regularly see the better New York Times reporting while I was at Knox, mostly because the paper didn’t get to the Knox Library for several days by mail. I might read the Sunday Times on Wednesday, if I remembered.

I.F. Stone

Another invaluable resource (when we could find it) was I.F. Stone’s Weekly. It was unique—the product of one man, a veteran Washington journalist who was blacklisted in the 1950s, but refused to be silenced. He became virtually the only journalist to question the official account of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident that LBJ used as a pretext for war. He was later proven correct. His lacerating critiques of US Vietnam policy and the lies the government told were often based on careful reading of public sources including newspaper stories. A wonderful 1970s documentary on Stone showed him literally tearing the New York Times apart, page by page.

There are now several collections of I.F. Stone’s work. The two I have are The I.F. Stone’s Weekly Reader (1974) and Polemics and Prophecies 1967-1970 (1972.) Also in the early 70s, when the poet Celia Gilbert, my colleague and friend at the Boston Phoenix, turned out to be I.F. Stone’s daughter, I got the opportunity to meet him several times.

“It is time to stand back and look where we are going,” Stone wrote in early 1968. “And to take a good look at ourselves.” The students I knew felt this was something we were more or less forced to do just about every day.

Eventually the periodical reporting got into book form. I read Jonathan Schell’s long article in the New Yorker in the summer of 1967 that became the book, The Village of Ben Suc, a detailed account of the destruction of a Vietnamese village by American troops.

But the book that had the most direct and profound effect on me in my college years was an unheralded paperback by an unknown author. It was Air War: Vietnam by Frank Harvey, a factual account of exactly what the title said. I read about it in Robert Crichton’s review in the New York Review of Books, and the excerpts he quoted were so horrifying that, when I read them aloud as part of Bill Thompson’s teach-in in the Gizmo, I had to choke back the tears.

The Bantam paperback was troubling and exhausting, mundane and horrifying—I often had to stop reading, fearful I would fall into a melancholy without end. The incredible damage that this bombing did was almost beyond understanding—I still remember one fact: B-52 bombers—with conventional bombs-- could kill every living thing within a fifty mile radius.

This book led me many years later to Gerald J. DeGroot’s 2005 The Bomb: A Life (about the atomic bomb) and in particular Sven Lindqvist’s A History of Bombing (The New Press, 2002.) I wrote about the latter book in a piece for the San Francisco Chronicle, on the eve of the bombing of Baghdad that began the Iraq war. Lindqvist’s book further deepened my conviction that arose from Frank Harvey’s book in 1967, that all bombing of civilian settlements is fundamentally immoral.

When the internal government documents purloined by Daniel Ellsberg—which later became known as the Pentagon Papers-- began appearing in 1971, they confirmed what some of us already knew or at least strongly suspected. The pattern of official lies was there for all to see. In his 1972 book Papers on the War, Ellsberg used them as a basis for his recollections about Pentagon analysis and how it was used, and misused.

Two of the classic nonfiction books on the Vietnam war appeared near its end. Fire on the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam was a nearly 600 page history by scholar and freelance journalist Frances FitzGerald, published in 1972. Some of it had appeared in The New Yorker. It won a Pulitzer.

A year later, former New York Times reporter David Halberstam devoted more than 800 pages to a history of hubris-directed policy on Vietnam in The Best and The Brightest. By then I was the books editor at the Boston Phoenix, and interviewed Halberstam on this book (his first) in the Boston Ritz hotel—his energetic eloquence and intimate buzzsaw voice that made him a talk show favorite for decades were already in evidence.

I also met Frances FitzGerald, when we were both at a futurist convention in Washington on assignment to different magazines, and again in New York. She also had abundant wit and charm, but she was not as much of a media personality as Halberstam throughout a writing career that also resulted in a number of distinguished books on a variety of subjects.

The memoirs and fiction from the Vietnam war mostly came later, towards the end of the war or afterwards, such as Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July (which exposed the horrors of the medical care wounded veterans received, years before this became a public issue), Michael Herr’s Dispatches (expanding on his work as a Vietnam correspondent for Esquire) and Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam books. In the 1992 book Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers, Herr and O’Brien both had trouble describing the nature of their books—memoir, New Journalism or fiction? It seems these war experiences required hybrid forms.

But in the late 1960s, three of the contemporary novels we were reading that had some bearing on Vietnam were actually about World War II. All three employed black humor to expose the deadly folly. Castle Keep by William Eastlake was about the war in France and later Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter-House 5 was about the firebombing of Dresden. But the novel everyone I knew was reading in my later college years was Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

Here was a war novel unlike any other, especially for young men like me who had grown up on war movies and war comics and playing at war with our friends using World War II surplus and souvenirs.

The main protagonist is an American bomber pilot named Yossarian, who is convinced that the American military is trying to kill him. The novel is a model of the painful humor of the absurd. But that insight wasn’t absurd to me. By its actions, I was convinced that my country was trying to kill me, or at least cynically devaluing my life by using me as an instrument for unjustified ends. And though one could argue whether this was chiefly impersonal or semi-personal, even today I can’t see much evidence that I was wrong.

It was a point of view buttressed by a few other things we were reading and hearing about in the late 60s. One was The Report From Iron Mountain, about a supposed secret government commission that concluded that war was necessary to the US economy and way of life, including the need for combat deaths. Eventually it was claimed to be a satire, that no such commission existed, but its arguments remained.

The other was a Selective Service memo on “channeling”: the use of the draft and draft deferments to channel young men into desired occupations useful to the military, or—in the parlance of the time—to the military-industrial-university complex.  (This language in Selective Service documentation for years has since been confirmed.)

This spoke to the larger context as well as to a specific subject of great moment: namely the draft and what to do about being drafted.

I remember talking with draft counselors in Chicago several times. Some were sponsored by American Friends and other pacifist organizations with religious affiliations. Others were more specifically against the Vietnam War, and offered technical knowledge and advice on laws governing the draft, including our rights as potential and actual draftees.

So I read a lot of associated pamphlets and booklets and books, a few of which survive in my collection, if not specifically in my recollections. One is We Won’t Go: Personal accounts of war objectors, collected by Alice Lynd in 1968 and published, as many of these books were, by Beacon Press.  Another is In Place of War: An Inquiry into Nonviolent National Defense, prepared by a working group of the American Friends Service Committee, and published in 1967 by Grossman. It's a thought-provoking thought experiment in a different kind of civil defense.

1967 poetry reading at Knox College. Leonard Borden photo.

We were also reading—and listening to—poems about the Vietnam War, which were important in both deepening and sorting out my thoughts and feelings. Robert Bly brought his collection,  A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War, on one of his Knox visits. We had our own such event on the Old Main lawn, as I described in an earlier post.

Bly’s collection, published by his own Sixties Press, contained some nonfiction excerpts by I.F. Stone and others, appropriate lines from Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln, and poems by contemporary poets who participated in group readings. They included Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Lowell, George Hitchcock, James Wright, Donald Hall, John Logan, Louis Simpson, William Stafford, Robert Creeley and Bly.

Denise Levertov visited in the spring of my senior year, and handed out antiwar factsheets as well as her antiwar poems. I was one of the students granted a few private minutes with her, up in Sam Moon’s office. I remember I brought her a cup of tea from the Gizmo, which pleased her. I recall mentioning to her how the barrage of news and necessary decisions relating to the war was becoming overwhelming to “us.” Some wondered, I said, if we could even justify doing anything else. She was startled by this, and quickly affirmed that of course we should still take time to do life-giving things every day, like read, write and “think about your dreams.” It was that think about your dreams everyday that stuck with me.

(Levertov also edited the 1968 Peace Calendar and Appointment Book for the War Resisters League, which interspersed poems among the calendar pages by scores of American poets, including William Stafford, Robert Duncan, Jonathan Williams, Nancy Willard, Galway Kinnell, Sam Hazo, Gilbert Sorrentino and Jim Harrison, as well as these poets who visited Knox while I was there: Robert Creeley, Robert Bly, Gary Snyder, David Ignatow, Mitchell Goodman and Levertov.)

I left Knox in 1968 without a degree, vulnerable to the draft. I kept changing my official address all summer—a tactic recommended by one of those draft counseling handouts or articles—so a draft notice couldn’t find me. In the fall I became a student in fiction and poetry writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop, but I never really settled in Iowa City. I was often in restless transit, to Galesburg, to Chicago where Joni was living in the Del Prado Hotel near the lake on the South Side along with other student teachers for a semester in the Chicago school system. And back again to my narrow winter room, my pork tenderloin sandwich at the lunch counter before class on Tuesday afternoons, with the Moody Blues on the jukebox.

But my every step seemed dogged by the draft. I was sunk into myself and my conundrum. I learned one thing from responses in every place, from family, lovers, friends and other strangers. That no one knew what I felt as I faced what was before me. Only other young men with a draft physical looming at that moment could begin to fathom it.

From Alice's Restaurant (1969)

A draft physical order finally caught up with me.  On one of my preliminary visits to moving to Iowa City, I was warned by Workshop students not to register with the Iowa City draft board, so I remained registered in Galesburg.  That turned out not to be so wise either.

I was called for a pre-induction physical in Chicago. I caught the train from Galesburg, and had my draft physical straight out of a nightmare Alice’s Restaurant movie. I had hearing test results with me that clearly showed I was functionally deaf in one ear, which I’d been assured by a joyful draft counselor would get me out. But it didn’t.

Among the multiple ironies--none of which I was in the mood to savor at the time--was that my fondest ambition at age 11 or 12 was to become a Naval Academy midshipman.  Because Members of Congress could appoint a qualified candidate to Annapolis, I figured I had a chance, since I was known to ours.  But I think I can remember the moment--trotting down the steps made of piled rocks from my house to the street-- when it came to me: I could not meet the Annapolis physical standards because of my deafness, and there was nothing I could do about it.  And so I had to give up that dream.  All that I knew about Army standards now told me my deafness should be disqualifying again.

But standards seemed to be functionally relative. There were quotas to meet, and it was a high draft call that month.  Still, the times were such in the late 60s, and the war so controversial, that substantial disagreement if not dissidence had begun to appear within the military. This was clear at the draft physical. Comparing notes later with others from Knox and Galesburg who had their physical that day, it seemed that its outcome depended more on the luck of the draw than any factual basis. If your line led to a sympathetic doctor, and you wanted out (some even asked), he got you out. If it led to a functionary or an angry true believer, you were in, no matter what. I was unlucky.

There was a written part to the exam. We started out at school desks in rooms set up like school rooms, filling out forms and taking psychological tests, directed by a no-nonsense young lieutenant.

After our humiliating physicals we returned to the same room for further forms. When we finished, the lieutenant closed both doors, and told us what it was really like in Vietnam. It was the most powerful anti-war message I had yet received. He told us that in effect our lives were being thrown away.

Dazed and disoriented, I managed to also get my wallet stolen so I left penniless as well as hopeless. I borrowed a dime for a pay phone to call Joni at the Del Prado.

But I soon went back to the pamphlets and books, wrote letters and got an appeal physical. Unfortunately it was also going to be my induction physical. If I passed, I would be inducted into the army.

I also started the process of obtaining conscientious objector status. I’d been corresponding with William Eastlake, and he cautioned me not to let my perfectly reasonable objections to the Vietnam war become opposition to all wars—a justifiable one might come along any day, he wrote.

At the time, CO status was granted almost always only on religious grounds if you were a member of a recognized church, and only if you were conscientiously opposed to all wars and killing, and not only to killing in this war.

But this was the only war they were going to send me to fight or support. And potentially killing me wasn’t as infuriating as forcing me to kill others I had no reason to harm. The first might kill my body, but the second would definitely kill my soul. To me this was personally and morally clear. It was defining.

Still, I was torn about CO status, but I filled out the forms, and I was prepared to use them if necessary.

And if all else failed, I knew my last step. There would come a moment in which inductees would be asked to take one step forward, indicating they accepted induction.  That was a step I would not take. That would set off another process which could send me to prison, if I didn’t figure out how to survive in Canada first.

My appeal/induction physical was at Fort Des Moines in Iowa. The Obamas stayed at the Fort Des Moines Hotel, but it’s a little different from the place where I stayed back then, in the barracks for three nights. My physical lasted three days.

I took a bus alone from Iowa City. As the only person in my “group”, the Army designated me as its leader, and assigned me the responsibility of filling out the forms and keeping the expense accounts.  On the forms I had to keep an accurate count of myself each time I got off and on the bus.

 I got to Des Moines early, and spent a giddy afternoon with a girl I met, whose name was Trish. She worked at the phone company. We walked around in the sunny air and may have gone to a movie. I do remember that we eventually were talking to each other in slight English accents.  It was a time when the practice of youth, freedom, sunshine and innocence was summarized by the Beatles.

I arrived on time at Fort Des Moines, though my actual physical was to be the next day. I was billeted in a barracks for the night with at least a hundred others from all over Iowa, most of them younger and very excited and eager to be leaving Iowa in uniform.

Robert Bly in the 60s

But there were a few, identifiable by age and hair length, who quickly found each other, and found me. One of them knew even more about our rights than I did, the first of which was we were still civilians and the Army had no legal right to hold us there. So we went somewhere for a beer, and I got more valuable advice about the physical itself.

My physical at Fort Des Moines replicated the conflict among the personnel conducting it that I saw in Chicago, but this time more dramatically. My appeal physical was managed by a desk sergeant on the first floor, who was mutely if clearly sympathetic. If I wanted out, that seemed pretty ok to him.

But that decision was to be made upstairs (literally—I think it was the third floor) by a doctor, a young lieutenant who eventually told me that no matter what I brought to him, he was going to pass me. He’d been drafted out of medical school, and if he had to go, I would have to go.

This back and forth, this circuit from downstairs to upstairs with occasional trips to off-base doctors, went on for three days. I caught on to the drill early: maybe because this was an appeal, or maybe because of the desk sergeant, they were duly if not actually examining every claim I made. And so I kept making them, and they kept sending me for more tests and evaluations.

There were a couple of highlights. They sent me to a doctor elsewhere in Des Moines for another hearing test. He was elderly, and had the most primitive equipment I’d seen since my first grade hearing exam. I’d been tested several times since with the latest machinery at the University of Pittsburgh, but this guy’s idea of a hearing test was to stand behind me and ask me to repeat what he said. “One,” he said, and then moved a few feet. “Two...”

Denise Levertov in 1968

So by the time they sent me to see the psychiatrist I was either hallucinating or seeing some odd things, like a film crew following me, and a nurse smiling brightly as she emerged from a broom closet door I’d been staring at as I waited.

Eventually, after three nights in the barracks and three days on the first, second and third floors, the desk sergeant was briskly amused and rather pleased to tell me that I’d essentially worn them out, and that I would be reclassified as unfit. The papers I got in the mail merely stated that my appeal—based on my hearing—had been successful.

My journey back from Fort Des Moines began with hash browns at the bus station eatery, and in the adjoining arcade I bought an old red marching band coat, Sergeant Pepper style.

It sounds like a Joseph Heller story now, but it was hell at the time. I was so traumatized and conflicted by the years and months leading up to the hours and days at Fort Des Moines that I dropped out of the Workshop, left Iowa, and wound up back in Galesburg, fulfilling my own prophecy in a poem published in the Siwasher my senior spring: “I will hide.”

Next time: Related political books, Kent State, and the Students Are Revolting takes over a dean’s office at Knox College, fifty years ago this May.

History of My Reading/ Fall '66: A Modern Ecstasy

Greater Pittsburgh Airport 1960s

I’d arrived at Knox College for my first year in my family station wagon, a black Mercury. After that my trips were by train—from Greensburg or Pittsburgh west to Chicago; Chicago southwest to Galesburg, Illinois. This year--fall of 1966-- my transport from Pittsburgh to Chicago was different.  I flew.

It had always been expensive to fly, and a lot of people were wary of it—too many airplane crashes in the headlines. There were lots of airlines competing and rapidly expanding in the 1960s, but they were regulated, so prices were pretty much the same for all the airlines, and they didn’t change very often. In 1966, they started offering half fare standby tickets for passengers under age 22. That made a flight cheaper than the train—about $15. (Remember the era-- just the year before the Gizmo had doubled the price of a coke from a nickel to a dime.)  Part of the idea was to get a new generation used to traveling by plane, and it pretty much worked.

I left from the Greater Pittsburgh Airport, the largest air terminal in the country when it was built in 1952, just 14 years before. It had a huge Alexander Calder mobile, and a movie theater—after my return flights on later trips, I saw films there while my father drove the 90 minutes to the airport, since I never knew which flight I would get standby. My destination, O’Hare Airport in Chicago was even newer. It had become Chicago’s main passenger airport only four years before, in 1962.

My first flight was probably in a four engine propeller plane. The airlines had started using jets but still mostly for longer distances. When I was growing up, my friends and I spotted planes flying towards Pittsburgh, and learned to distinguish the two engine DC-3s from the four engine DC-6s. Now there were DC-7s, the last big prop planes. I probably made the transition to 707 jets at some point in my standby career.

In those years, TWA had a major presence at O’Hare and a smaller hub in Pittsburgh, so it’s likely that was the airline I took. But if you bought a TWA ticket, that was good for stand-by on Eastern, American, United and Northwest flights—on all the airlines.

Though the prop planes held around a hundred passengers, the average flight left with 40% of the seats empty, so standby was easy, at least at first. Once the college students of America caught on, though, it got harder, especially out of O’Hare. It involved keeping track of upcoming flights and running from airline to airline, gate to gate.  But it became the way I traveled to and from Chicago.  I still took the train from there to Galesburg.

All I remember about the cabins is that there were just two seats in a row. The cabin was the province of the stewardesses, mostly tall young women in their 20s and early 30s, in official looking uniform jackets and matching skirts. (This was a few years before some smaller airlines began featuring stewardesses in bright colored miniskirts and go-go boots.)  They were friendly and had an air of glamour and competence.  One of their jobs was to calm and reassure passengers not used to flying, and there were a lot then.

The stewardesses were nice to me. Besides meals and drinks, they distributed small packs of cigarettes. Once one of them surprised me by giving me all the extras in her basket at the end of the flight. I had just turned 20 but they seemed in another category somehow, no matter how close in age they were. Whatever was going on with older businessmen, to me they were the vestal virgins of these temples of the sky.

I may have flown back to Pittsburgh from Chicago the previous spring, but in any case, my first airplane trip was in 1966. The flying itself fascinated me. I always tried to get a window seat. As a child, I pressed myself against the sofa cushions to gaze fixedly out of the picture window at the clouds, imagining myself riding across them, like Hopalong Cassidy. Now I was riding through them, over them, in them...

Then I arrived back at Knox to an unwelcome surprise.  I thought I was taking over another student's rental, but his landlord was advised by his lawyer not to rent to me.  (Eventually, the other student's lease wound up in court and I spruced up my old suit to give my paltry evidence.)

So I was back at West Berrien while I looked for another place.  I found one, and extolled its merits in a letter home: large bedroom and large kitchen, mostly furnished, with stove and refrigerator, not too far from school, and very cheap.  I mentioned but glossed over the fact that the bathroom was shared.  

What I didn't say was that the apartment was on the second floor, with the bathroom at the foot of the stairs.  Using it required latching two doors, and not forgetting to unlatch the one to the first floor apartment, which I assumed belonged to the semi-fierce old landlady.

The apartment was in a sagging wood frame building on West Simmons, with my more or less private entrance around the back. The kitchen was indeed pretty large, but the tiled floor bowed a little alarmingly.  The bedroom however was cozy.  The landlady's rules included no parties or guests, and though I didn't tempt fate with a social gathering I did have individual visitors, from pretty much the first week.  However dubious, it was my first place living on my own.


That fall was the beginning of the trimester system (I don't think they called it that, but in effect that's what it was.)  It meant fewer courses in a shorter period of time.  For me, that fall was very short of courses.  I made yet another attempt at the distribution requirements in language, but it quickly became apparent that I couldn't bluff my way through upper level Spanish.  I detected among my fluent classmates a familiarity with spoken Spanish I didn't remotely have.  I got the sense that they'd taken years of Spanish in high school, or otherwise learned it. They were starting out at a level I couldn't even aspire to reach by the end of the course.  So I dropped it.

That left me with but two courses: Romantic Literature with William Brady, and Modern Fiction with Howard Wilson.

William Brady's signature courses were in Shakespeare, but he also taught several other historical English lit courses.  Tall, bearded and with a theatrical voice and manner, he was affable and acerbic, and it was hard to tell which was the more sincere aspect.  We were both on the Faculty Committee for Student Affairs, and we had our run-ins this year and the next.  Perhaps we wound up friendly enemies. I liked him in spite of myself, and like to think the reverse was also true, but maybe not.  For as outspoken as he could be, including public insults, he was not a transparent sort of person.

I remember little of his Romantic Lit course, which surprises me since I'd been drawn to the Romantic poets in high school, and remained interested in that approach as it developed in America.  I've since been curious about that period in England and all the relationships of the Byron/Shelley/Keats circle, and both the Romantics revival of attention to nature and their keen interest in science and technology.

For example, among my books are Nicholas Roe's revisionist biography John Keats (Yale 2012),  Daisy Hay's delightful Young Romantics (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010), and a book that would have been of particular (and subversive) interest in 1966, Mike Jay's The Atmosphere of Heaven (Yale 2009), which tells of the influence of experiments with the mind-altering nitrous oxide on some of the founders of the Romantic movement, and on their key ideas such as the permeability of objective and subjective knowledge.  Psychedelic, man.

I don't remember our books for this course.  By this time, I had a paperback collection of The Major English Romantic Poets (ed. by William H. Marshall) but I doubt this was the text.  All that's survived of this course is a short paper on "Romance and Realism in the Bride of Lammermoor," a novel by Walter Scott I don't remember reading. (Maybe I didn't, but the paper indicates at least a very skillful skim.)

All that I remember is sitting in class one day--a large Old Main classroom-- bargaining with a female student.  In exchange for a look at her notes I'd make her laugh.  So I scribbled her some verses on Romantic Lit topics in a kind of blues form, based on the Salty Dog Blues.  I remember two:

Wordsworth was the Poet Laureate of the Nation
Until he lost his Imagination
Honey, let me be your salty dog

Keats got Shelley, Shelley got Byron,
I got a shirt that don't need ironin'
Honey...etc.

Howard Wilson, spring 1967.  Leonard Borden photo.

Howard Wilson, chair of the English department and one of its senior members, taught Modern Fiction that term.  He didn't confine his choices to English and American authors but had a hefty representation from Europe.  I have three levels of confidence in my list of the books we read.  The highest level goes to only one--Andre Gide's Lafcadio's Adventures, because I wrote a paper on it that's survived.

The second level of high confidence is based on memory, bolstered in some cases by at least a shred of evidence (such as I still have the book, and can date the purchase to that year.)  In this category are A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce, The Plague by Albert Camus, The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence and Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone.  My third level of confidence includes Gide's Strait is the Gate, Camus' The Stranger, William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom.  We probably read Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" and other stories--my list of books from 1966-7 includes the Modern Library Selected Stories of Kafka.  I no longer have that volume, replaced by a 1971 edition of Complete Stories.

Perhaps we also read Joyce's stories in Dubliners.  It's possible we also did Confessions of Felix Krull by Thomas Mann, but I don't remember.  I also had Mann's Death in Venice and other stories, but I think I got it the year before.  Besides I can't imagine we discussed Death in Venice. We simply did not talk about homosexual themes. Beyond these I can think of likely candidates but have no confidence they were included.

I don't know if Camus' nonfiction book, The Myth of Sisyphus was required but I clearly bought it at the same time as his novels.  Though it is best remembered for its central myth (pushing the rock up the hill, only to watch it tumble down, pushing it back up in an endless cycle) as a metaphor for life, it functioned also as a primary text in postwar Existentialism, particularly in its definition of the absurd.

 Existentialism and the absurd were in part responses to the helplessness, violence and disorder of two world wars and a Depression between them, topped off by the atomic bomb.  The 1960s were providing events and pressures that evoked these critiques.

This book also has the most attention-getting first sentence I'd ever read: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide."  Philosophical or not, suicide was a live issue and anxiety for many of us, and the absurd was all around us, particularly as the Vietnam War intensified other cultural dislocations.  One of the few passage I marked at the time was this: :...in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger.  His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land."

At this point in my young life I hadn't yet recovered the memory of a lost home, and the hope of a promised land was fading fast, as Vietnam and the nuclear age sharpened awareness of the culture's cynical folly, and its plentiful methods of forcing compliance, unto death.

Exile, but artistic exile, was a theme of Joyce's Portrait, the only one of these books I'd already read, which had been important to me with a slightly different emphasis in high school.  Now I look at these two books, by Camus and Joyce, and I see much of what I felt about the world and the future, for the rest of my college time and beyond.

I might have found some sense of a lost home in Silone's Bread and Wine, which was set in the Abruzzi region of Italy. But the fact that this was the region where my mother and her family were from had not yet impressed itself on my consciousness.  (I've since read Fontamara, the first in his Abruzzi trilogy.)

Of the class, I recall only one moment.  It was a small class, that may have met in Wilson's office.  He once asked, very cautiously, whether something we were discussing from one of the books was perhaps "blasphemous."  I was shocked and offended that the word was even used in an English class, such was my continuing rebellion against my Catholic schooling.

On the other hand...both Lafcadio's Adventure and The Stranger involve the protagonist killing someone, raising various philosophical issues.  Gide's protagonist kills an old man as an expression of his freedom.  I struggled to follow and to justify their actions based on ideas of existentialism.  But I soon rejected it all as bullshit, first just rejecting Gide's justification, but gradually losing interest in existentialism, as well as any excuse for killing people.  The sense of the absurd, however, remained and dominated.

Of these books I remember reading Camus' The Stranger and then The Plague (very different narratives.)  I remember getting through the Faulkner, but though I could admire the writing, it didn't speak to me.  Since grade school, the prevailing image of white southerners I saw was the arrogant racist with a face twisted with hate.  (That didn't include southerners I actually knew.)  Faulkner's characters didn't interest me. I've still read very little Faulkner; mostly the short stories. Maybe it's time to try again.

I remember reading Lawrence's The Rainbow, alternately slogging through it and being transported by it.  Perhaps we also read Women in Love, but if not then, I eventually read it after seeing the famous 1969 film, which ignited a small boom in Lawrence film and TV adaptations, and therefore new paperback editions.

I was enthused by Lawrence for awhile (short stories, poems, novels and essays) and by Joyce for longer.  But of these specific books, it is only A Portrait of the Artist... that I've read and re-read again over all these years.

That I had only two courses didn't mean I wasn't busy.  For one big thing, I had a part in the Knox main stage production of Shakespeare's Macbeth.  At Knox in those days, we did not receive class credit for what was an extensive commitment. Even though my part was relatively small, there were a lot of long rehearsals and performances.

I played the Thane of Ross, who is the pivot point of the play.  (That's an actor's joke, sort of. In fact, Ross joining the rebellion against Macbeth is a turning point.) A couple of other minor roles were folded into it.

It was directed by theatre professor William Clark, who talked me into it with the same basic argument he used to get me into his theatre history class: if I was going to write plays, I should experience what it's like to go through an actual production, and to be on stage, required to say the words the playwright wrote.

Professor Clark was the department's technical director, and he designed the show.  He may have spent time with the principal actors but as I recall the rest of us were left to our own devices, beyond our blocking and cues.  We struggled with how to speak the lines--should we be adapting English accents?  I remember my fellow thane Harry Contompasis wondering "why is everybody trying to sound like James Mason?"

Memorizing the text was hard enough; figuring out what it meant didn't seem that important.  Which is too bad, because Ross has some choice lines:
Alas, poor country,
Almost afraid to know itself! It cannot
Be call'd our mother, but our grave. Where nothing,
But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile;
Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air,
Are made, not mark'd; where violent sorrow seems
A modern ecstasy.

Macbeth program: click to enlarge

Being one of the lesser characters--the workers of the production--was an interesting perspective.  We witnessed rehearsals of scenes with the principals in which our part on stage was equally as mute witnesses.  Other than that, we had little to do with the stars: Richard Newman as Macbeth, Valjean McLenighan as Lady Macbeth.  I had one big scene with Paul Woldy as Macduff.  Most of the time I was hanging out with the other thanes and assorted characters.  I don't think I saw David Axelrod at rehearsals but once or twice, before he routinely stole the show as the Porter.

Our costumes were variations on the traditional doublet and hose.  I wasn't the only neophyte who was astonished at the blatant artificiality of the props, and the bold lines of makeup that looked absurd in the greenroom mirrors but were standard for making our faces visible to the audience.  Such is (or was) the theatre.

We had a number of performances, including some for busloads of high school students.  I managed to get through the run with only one real screw-up.  My first entrance and speech came very early in the play, but for one performance I was still in the greenroom, leaving Richard Hoover as King Malcolm to pace up and down the stage, waiting for me to announce Macbeth's great victory.  It turned out to be a bit of method acting for me, however, as I tore up the stairs and came on stage running and out of breath, as if Ross ("what a haste looks through his eyes!") is indeed rushing from the battlefield.  I believe however this was the moment that Richard started thinking about switching to set and production design.

If I embarrassed myself, no one told me about it, and I did get a couple of compliments: someone whose judgment I respected said that I had one of the better Shakespearean speaking voices, and a female student of my acquaintance thought I looked pretty good in tights.

I can't honestly attribute my participation in this play to my subsequent interest in Shakespeare, but it had to play a part. I saw Romeo and Juliet at Stratford (Ont.) in 1968, and Kevin Kline's Hamlet at the New York Public Theatre in the '80s. But my involvement intensified in the 1990s, when I attended the University of Pittsburgh Shakespeare Festival summer productions, and later when I was a theatre columnist, and got prime seats for productions at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.

I also became fascinated with film and television productions (Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing remains a favorite), and read history of Shakespeare productions and performances as well as works about Shakespeare and (broadly speaking) critical works.  (Favorites among these include W.H. Auden's Shakespeare lectures, Northrup Frye's book of essays, Shakespeare The Thinker by A.D. Nuttall, and Shakespeare's Game by William Gibson, which is also one of the better books on playwriting.)  I must have 35 such books now.  And I've also carefully read many of the plays, often in annotated editions.  As a result of this reading as well as this seeing, I've written thousands of words on Shakespeare's plays.

And professor Clark turned out to be right about an influence on my playwriting, at least eventually.  Also in the 1990s I wrote a play, Young O, which was a prequel to Shakespeare's Othello.  This Macbeth production dipped us into a myth-ridden past while we remained otherwise immersed in the demanding 1960s.  I wasn't thinking about that when I wrote Young O, but in fact it is set in a mythical stage time that combines 16th century Venice and the 1960s.

But even if this production of Macbeth wasn't the direct start of all that, it did plunge me into the theatrical world of Shakespeare, and created some opening edge of familiarity.  I've often found that after reading a difficult text straight through, it suddenly makes much more sense on the second attempt.  This production was a little like that.

It also resulted in strengthening friendships with Rick Newman and Valjean, and a new level of acquaintance with others in the production.  It also may have helped send me to the hospital.  But that's a winter's tale.

History of My Reading/ The Zen of Sam

Sam Moon: official photo 1966 yearbook

"We think by feeling.  What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow."

Theodore Roethke

I took a poetry writing course from Sam Moon in the fall semester of 1965-66 and a playwriting course the following spring semester, both in  my second year at Knox College.  Sam was not only head of the Knox writing program—he was the Knox writing program that year. Harold Grutzmacher, who taught fiction writing, had left after the 1964-5 year, and Knox had not replaced him. Nor would there be a permanent replacement until 1967-68.

Contrary to current college propaganda, Knox had a writing program going back beyond Moon’s first year at Knox in 1953. Moon credited his predecessor, Proctor Sherwin with starting it. It's just a guess, but maybe the excuse for dating the current writing program as beginning in 1968 is that a creative writing major was added for students after that year.  But Knox already had a literature and composition major, which pretty much amounts to the same thing.  I ought to know. It was mine.

I have general recollections of the classes I took from Sam Moon, a little hard to separate from non-class conversations. There were just a few students each time, and I believe we mostly met in Sam’s office in Old Main, either near the window overlooking Alumni Hall and the campus, or clustered around his desk. The classes might entail examining the work of a published “professional” poet or fellow student work.

Sam Moon, probably in the 1950s

Sam Moon’s students tend to remember him for their one-on-one sessions or moments. This might be analyzing a poem by an established poet or the student’s own work, or a conversation about aspects of writing untethered to a particular work. When Sam retired, and later after he died, many came forward with stories of how he helped them, and in some cases changed their lives.

Sam Moon was certainly an encouraging and nourishing influence on me, from my registration and first semester throughout my time at Knox. Sam always read and talked to me about anything I showed him, or anything of mine that appeared in campus publications, whether I was in a course or not.

Though these one-on-one moments might happen in private or the Gizmo, some might be moments from a class, especially when the classes were as informal and intimate as I remember.

I’ll skip to spring because I do have a specific memory about my playwriting class. I’m reasonably sure I took this course in the spring because I used a line from Wallace Stevens as the title of a play I wrote (now lost) and I was reading Stevens that spring term for Doug Wilson's class.  I also used the verse in which the title appears as a quotation before the text of the play. (I liked those lines so well that at about the same time I wrote a song lyric around them, and with my songwriting partner's music, the Crosscurrents performed it.)

On the day the class discussed my play, I began by verbally correcting the quotation—I’d left out a word. It was a very small class—maybe a half dozen students. I remember that when I made the correction, several of those present—including Sam—feigned shock, joking that this additional word cast an entirely different light on the play.

I remember one student comment, which came from Mike Stickney. The protagonist of my play made a fairly long speech at the end. Stickney said that a more realistic and convincing speech at that point would be: “Oh, fuck.”

The professional plays we read were in One Act: Short Plays of the Modern Theatre (Grove Press), edited by Samuel Moon, who also wrote the thoughtful introduction.  He clearly enjoyed seeing plays as well as reading them.

 I’ve got textual notes on only one play: Yeats’ Purgatory, which was produced later in the Studio Theatre. I’m not sure which other plays we read as a class, but I am sure that I read Ionesco’s The Chairs, Thornton Wilder’s Pullman Car Hiawatha, Arthur Miller’s Memory of Two Mondays, and Hello Out There by William Saroyan, whose fiction I’d avidly read in junior high or high school when I came across his books in the public library. Plays by Strindberg, Pirandello,Tennessee Williams, Sean O’Casey, Jean Anouih, and Archibald MacLeish are also in the volume.  Perhaps I read them all.

These days, one act plays have almost disappeared, between the epics with multiple meal breaks and the ten minute (and now one minute) plays. Permit me to observe—as someone who has seen contemporary plays done across the country, at least until a few years ago—that today’s playwrights might benefit from the discoveries and disciplines of writing one act plays, and audiences might enjoy seeing them.  In any case, this book is still in print.

Sam Moon was also especially qualified to teach the poetry writing class in the fall. He was himself a poet who published in Chicago’s Poetry Magazine, historically one of the most important American periodicals for the poetry of the 20th century. Eliot, Pound, Joyce and especially Wallace Stevens all published there. (Examples of Sam's work here and here.) Though he was steeped in that history, he was foremost at Knox in bringing contemporary writing into the curriculum and the culture. He not only knew contemporary poetry, he knew the poets, on equal terms—as one of them.

The major anthologies of contemporary poets I remember—either assigned or recommended—were Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Donald Hall, and The New American Poetry, edited by Donald M. Allen.

The Allen anthology had the larger and broader selection, and remains a very good representative of post-World War II American poetry up to 1960 or so, especially as it includes both poets who became famous, and poets that have slipped into obscurity. (In 1973, Allen and Warren Tallman added a companion volume, The Poetics of The New American Poetry, with statements of purpose by some of these contemporary poets plus relevant pieces by their forerunners, including Walt Whitman.)  The anthology included representatives of the various "schools:" the Beats, Black Mountain, New York, etc.

The Hall anthology was smaller (even the book itself was a smaller-sized paperback) and somewhat more focused. I bought the first edition (1962). (I also have the second edition of 1971, which was revised and enlarged.)

first edition cover

In Hall's first edition--which we probably used for this course--I made check marks before the names of certain poets and poems.  I don't know if these indicate what we read for this class, or just my preferences, but they are what I remember reading.  The poets marked are Robert Lowell, Denise Levertov, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, James Wright and Gary Snyder, with individual poems by Louis Simpson and Donald Justice.  (Others in this anthology I didn't read at the time became important to me later: first Galway Kinnell, then William Stafford and most recently W.S. Merwin.)

I marked these sentences in Hall's introduction: "Yet typically the modern artist has allowed nothing to be beyond his consideration.  He has acted as if restlessness were a conviction and has destroyed his own past in order to create a future."

According to many of these poets, and Sam Moon as well, the major inspiration for postwar American poetry came from William Carlos Williams. Born in New Jersey in 1883, he practiced medicine there for the rest of his life, while becoming the foremost advocate for an American approach to modern writing. His work was eclipsed for awhile by the stardom of T. S. Eliot, but he emerged as the single most important influence on the new American poetry we were reading in the 1960s.

Though it was poet Archibald MacLeish who came up with the foundation sentence, “A poem should not mean but be,” William Carlos Williams was the exemplar of that credo. This I learned from Sam Moon. My copy of Williams’ Selected Poems comes from this year, and I would subsequently acquire his masterpiece Patterson, as well as several books of his prose.

Jay Matson, who was a senior when I was a freshman, recalls reading a number of poets in his classes with Moon, including American poet Theodore Roethke, who died in 1963.  Jay and Sam worked together examining Roethke's poem "The Waking" (the quotation at the top of this post is the second verse.)  I was surprised to learn this, because Roethke was not a fashionable poet in my years, though his reputation has grown since.

Personally I was drawn to his work--especially "The Waking," "Elegy for Jane," "The Far Field" and "Wish For a Young Wife," and his children's poems.  There was something about him I understood, and I liked the music.  Now I also see how at least some of Roethke might appeal to Sam Moon.

 I believe I discovered Roethke on my own, in a magazine I read in the Knox library. But maybe I'm wrong about that--maybe it was Sam Moon.  In any case, I remember acquiring one of Roethke's books, Words For The Wind, and got the first edition of his Collected Poems, published in 1966.

That's the thing about influential teachers--or any teachers: we don't always remember what they taught us.  Perhaps the best lessons are the ones we thought we'd always known, or found ourselves.

A major aspect of Sam Moon's contribution--and one that many remember--was the writers he brought to Knox.  Many were poets who knew him as a poet.  But he also brought fiction writers and other contemporary artists.  They weren't always well-known--yet.  His first guest writer was the 29 year old Philip Roth, who hadn't yet published his first novel.  Gary Snyder was barely back from Japan when Sam brought him to Knox for a week.

Archibald MacLeish visited before my time, and Galway Kinnell after it, but during my years I saw and heard fictionists Grace Paley and Richard Yates, poets Mark Van Doren and W.H. Auden, as well as poets who were in those anthologies: Robert Creeley, David Ignatow, Denise Levertov, Snyder, Robert Bly and James Dickey.

We got to experience these writers often in several contexts.  We heard them reading their work and answering questions, often in the Commons Room of Old Main.  We saw some of them in the classrooms as well, and around a lunch table or informally around campus, and often at an evening party in their honor.

Both Bly and James Dickey were on campus in the spring of 1966.  Bly came first: mesmerizing, flamboyant, opinionated and unlike anyone else.  He read his work in a very individual way.  He must have enjoyed himself at Knox, for he came back a year or two later.

Immediately after his reading, I bought Bly's latest collection, Silence in the Snowy Fields, which furnished most of the poems he read.  I also amused a few credulous souls by imitating his delivery.  Bly probably talked about Pablo Neruda and James Wright on this occasion, which led me to these poets.  And I would keep my eye on Bly and his work for some years to come.

James Dickey's first public event on campus was just a few days after Bly's last.  It's possible their paths crossed in Galesburg, although it might not have been comfortable if they did.  Bly, who had praised Dickey's earlier work, wrote a review excoriating Dickey's latest collection, Buckdancer's Choice, not only in poetic but in moral terms. (It's not clear when this review was first published, but it is included in Bly's 1990 book, American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity, with a date of 1967.)

Nevertheless Buckdancer's Choice won the National Book Award for poetry, and Dickey was appointed the United States Poet Laureate in 1966. This was several years before his novel Deliverance and the subsequent movie made him rich and famous.

Dickey was on campus, as many writers were, partly to make the final choices for that year's student writing awards.  I was completely surprised when he named me as the third prize winner in poetry.  That could be why I remained in a fog as he talked about my poems, and read one of them--he even paused and grinned over a line or image he liked. (I actually may remember it: "my eyes from cold coffee run to her.") He described them partly in terms of other poets, some of whom I knew but others I'd never read.  I had to resist the temptation to write the names down then and there, but that would have given me away. I did try to remember them however, so I could read the work that had apparently influenced me.

Physically a big man, Dickey made a big impression, though not all of it good.  He had a dazzling smile and was ebulliently theatrical, pouring on the southern charm.  He entertained a group of us at lunch--his imitation of how the original King Kong turned his head was uncanny.

 But some who spent more time with him were not so charmed. His constant self-referencing act wore thin.  More than one person (and I was one) noticed his less than subtle lechery at parties.  Who could forget him asking every female student he met her age, and then drawling at them "That's a fahn age for a woman," often ending with an invitation to leave the party with him?

It's hard to overestimate the value of these writers and artists visiting campus. Physical presence is exciting for everyone--we may have been excited to briefly meet Robert Bly, but Bly had once been thrilled to briefly meet T.S. Eliot.  It's true that sometimes seeing and hearing a poet read actually ruins the experience of reading them .The voice in person is not the voice in your head. (Judging from recordings on YouTube, I suspect I would have felt that way about Roethke.)   But most times it adds dimensions to the printed words.

 Some of these experiences at Knox opened new doors and provided new choices for student writers and readers by bringing sound to the words, and the words to life.  They provided models, and gave at least some hint of what it was like to be writing in our time, and in the various places and situations we might end up.  We may have looked upon some as heroes, but we also got glimpses of their human weaknesses.  Some were living cautionary tales. But the good and bad were proportions in most.

 Seeing and hearing them in the same room, meeting them even briefly in different circumstances, eventually enabled me to relate personally to writers and artists I met, at Knox and then afterward.  I had the confidence to meet them on equal terms, not equal as writers but as intelligent human beings with common interests, and certain common writing experiences.

Robin Metz and Sam Moon

Sam Moon taught at Knox College from 1953 until 1984.  Together with Robin Metz, who joined the faculty in 1967 as a fiction writer, he presided over the expansion of the writing program that continued after his retirement.  Big writing programs are a national trend but Knox has been one of the exemplars.

I last saw Sam on a brief visit to Galesburg more than a decade after I'd left, a few years before he retired.  Apart from Doug Wilson (my host) and Robin Metz (who was invited to lunch but didn't show), he was the only teacher at Knox I sought out.  I walked up to his Old Main office, knocked on the door and opened it.  I'd forgotten the rule--if the door is closed, it means there's a class in session.  I stood at the entrance, seeing across the room a familiar scene as if it were a sepia print: Sam at his desk in the far corner with a semi-circle of students clustered close around him, all heads bent to a text.  He said sharply that this was a class.  I mumbled an embarrassed apology and began backing out the door.

Then I heard his voice again, in a different tone: "Is that Bill Kowinski?"  We agreed to meet in the Gizmo after his class. I don't remember what we talked about, but except for the changes in the Gizmo (all for the worse, in my opinion), it was another familiar scene.  A few years later I was one of his former students to be asked to write a tribute, to be collected with others and presented to Sam on his retirement.

The Sam Moon I knew was modest and unassuming, with a lively sense of humor.  I can't say I knew him well.  But I am still discovering the Sam Moon I didn't know.

a Cortland, New York landscape

According to Jay Matson (who knew Sam a lot better over the years), Sam and his wife Doris stayed in Galesburg for some years after his retirement, and spent summers at their place on Lake Huron in Canada, where Doris was from.  They moved to southern New York state when Doris became ill, to be near their daughter Vicky.

Sam remained in Cortland, New York after Doris died, and eventually reconnected with an old love, with whom he shared some years intermittently at her home in Colorado, as well as his homes in Canada and New York. Sam weathered his last illness in Cortland. He died in 2011 at the age of 89.  He'd spent 31 years at Knox, but after he left he had  27 years of another life away from it.

Even in his Knox years, Sam had a more complicated personal life than most people knew.  One of the smaller things I didn't know about Sam is that he was an avid swimmer, and wrote a series of poems about it while at Knox.

After he retired, he published a book in 1992 that wasn't poetry or about plays or literature or teaching: it was about Henry Goulding, the man who ran a trading post in the Four Corners area of the southwest, and his relationship to the Navajo.  According to Doug Wilson, he worked on this book for some 20 years.  The novelist William Eastlake had a ranch in the area, and wrote about the people there in his early books. Sam brought him to teach a term of fiction-writing at Knox my junior year, so I wonder if he had anything to do with this.  The title of the book is Tall Sheep and it is available on Amazon.  I look forward to reading it.

Sam got interested in Buddhism, as many of us did in the 60s, but he went deeper into it.  Initially intrigued by reading Thoreau (again, according to Wilson) and by John Cage (who he brought to Knox several times) and (my guess) by Gary Snyder, he went beyond the philosophy to the practice of Buddhist meditation.

He also translated the Tao Te Ching by Lao T'zu, with a long commentary on the work and his translation.  For awhile after his death no one seemed to know what had become of this project, but eventually Sam's daughter found the manuscript and sent a copy to Jay Matson, who sent one to me.  It's wonderful.

After Sam's memorial at Knox in 2012, three of his former students--David Gustafson, Jay Matson and Dave Lunde--set about collecting some of his work and creating a book, A Little Farther: Selected Works of Samuel Moon. The cover was designed by Sam's daughter Victoria Moon Delaney, and Doug Wilson wrote a short biographical sketch of Sam.

The book begins with those swimming poems, and though other poems are undated, some (like "Man in the Landscape") are identifiably from his Knox years.

 But about half of the book is given over to his last work, a beautiful and unusual prose piece called "The Dunes."   It's a fable about a meditation circle held by animals in the woods, presided over by a cat.  Though it reminds me of animal teaching stories in many traditions, it is also strikingly original.  Within the terms of its world it deals realistically with spiritual questions, inspired by the natural world.

Most conspicuously it has profound things to say about single-point meditation (which usually involves paying total attention to the breath of the present moment, as in Zen meditation)  and the Buddhist concept of emptiness.  It's in short chapters, and lately I've been reading one aloud before each of our evening meditations.

"The Dunes" also incorporates lines from those swimming poems, which suggests that Sam had been living a version of meditation for a very long time. Someone asked Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen master who founded the San Francisco Zen Center, why he meditated.  To prepare for old age and death, he replied.  Judging from "The Dunes," Sam Moon was about as prepared for death as a man could be.

Unfortunately the book is hard to find.  The Knox Bookstore carried it before it sold itself out to a notorious national chain and stopped being an actual bookstore.  It was published by Village Books in Bellingham, Washington, but I can't find it on their website. Jay Matson has a few copies, and he thinks that David Gustafson does as well.  At the moment, they're your best bet.

These three teachers--William Spanos, Doug Wilson and Sam Moon--formed my second year of college and a great deal of my subsequent life, with their teaching, their example and the worlds they opened to me through the books and writers we read.  Other teachers of this year, notably Donald Torrence and Phil Haring, made their mark as well.

What remains to tell about this year surrounds and permeates these experiences.  There was a dark side to the intensity of this year, but also new friends and acquaintances, and the experiences I shared with them, which included books we read that weren't part of any classes.

And then there's summer, and one of the strangest days of my life.  Laters.