pussy a black boy needs—
how Shine said now pussy is good and that’s no jive
but you got to swim not fuck to stay alive—
And Shine swam on Shine swam on—
This language both rocked me back and echoed how Daddy talked. I mean, if he thought I was persisting in something I couldn’t get done, he’d say, You keep trying to thread a noodle up that wildcat’s ass; if he thought somebody was poor, He couldn’t buy a piss ant a wrestling jacket.
Back in Minneapolis, I took the low-tipping day shift just so I could rathole my notebook by the beer spout and scribble.
Crazed to see my name in print, which would prove poethood, I mailed to hapless editors work bad enough that—in retrospect—I’m surprised the rejections didn’t come with a cyanide pill. One snotty bastard commented solely on my failure to hit the space bar after periods and commas. If you could bring yourself to use standard spacing after punctuation, we would find it most helpful .
Two nights a week, Etheridge held a private poetry workshop at his house, charging young writers like me a pitiful hundred bucks to sit for four months in his living room while he conducted our discussions from the sagging trough of a chenille armchair.
The green and imploding house he shared with his poet-wife, Mary, and their two kids (adopted from Africa back when it was odd) stood out amid the tidy tract houses. Everything about Etheridge’s place was off-kilter. The roof sagged. One gutter was untethered. The front screen door hung from a single hinge. Inside, the wood floors buckled as if frozen mid-earthquake. Add a few cypress trees, a front-porch glider, and a hound dog, and the entire tableau could have been picked up by tweezers and used as a set for Uncle Tom’s Cabin .
Mary, a smart, curvy blonde from Oklahoma, drew paychecks as a social worker plus writing and fighting against apartheid, but even if she’d cleaned from dawn till dusk, I believe that from whatever spot Etheridge occupied, chaos would’ve spread out like kudzu vines, for he was an addict of the first caliber. Allegedly sober, Etheridge ran his own beer-and marijuana-maintenance program. While he spouted lines from Dickinson, he kept a forty-ounce of Colt malt liquor between his knobby knees.
Back then, in magazines like The New Yorker , stories were mostly about ex-Yalies wearing deck shoes. (Ray Carver was about to change all that.) By contrast, Etheridge lectured wearing a string T-shirt and dark pants of a stiff material that I swear to God looked prison issue. He turned his plaid house shoes into slip-ons by stepping on their backs. The Free People’s Poetry Workshop, he called us.
What I wrote was mostly unintelligible, except for one bit about a suicidal dog. The first line went, alliteratively enough, Don’t do it, dog . The stuff I was fighting to avoid sometimes slipped out in vague disguise: a kid raped, a lost father, a woman on the shock treatment table. But because I refused to use sentences—just strung phrases willy-nilly—nobody understood it anyway. The word cerulean , I believe, was used.
It’s experimental, I argued to the baffled readers arrayed on Etheridge’s furniture.
It’s in-fucking-comprehensible, he shot back.
Still, the first poems of mine that ever saw print were sent out under Etheridge’s aegis, in envelopes he paid postage on. Thrilled to see my name in type, I told my pal John, who’d wallpapered his bathroom with high-class New Yorker rejections. His response? Just as there’s a woman for every man, no matter how ugly, there’s a magazine for every poem.
Etheridge’s blessing also helped me to snag a job as a poet-in-residence for the city of Minneapolis, the most dubious post I ever held. The city had scrounged up some grants to promote the arts. Some fifty or sixty poets and painters and dancers—hell, we even had a mime, the Mime Laureate of Minneapolis!—got hired to do…well, what?
We weren’t sure. It was the seventies.
how Shine said now pussy is good and that’s no jive
but you got to swim not fuck to stay alive—
And Shine swam on Shine swam on—
This language both rocked me back and echoed how Daddy talked. I mean, if he thought I was persisting in something I couldn’t get done, he’d say, You keep trying to thread a noodle up that wildcat’s ass; if he thought somebody was poor, He couldn’t buy a piss ant a wrestling jacket.
Back in Minneapolis, I took the low-tipping day shift just so I could rathole my notebook by the beer spout and scribble.
Crazed to see my name in print, which would prove poethood, I mailed to hapless editors work bad enough that—in retrospect—I’m surprised the rejections didn’t come with a cyanide pill. One snotty bastard commented solely on my failure to hit the space bar after periods and commas. If you could bring yourself to use standard spacing after punctuation, we would find it most helpful .
Two nights a week, Etheridge held a private poetry workshop at his house, charging young writers like me a pitiful hundred bucks to sit for four months in his living room while he conducted our discussions from the sagging trough of a chenille armchair.
The green and imploding house he shared with his poet-wife, Mary, and their two kids (adopted from Africa back when it was odd) stood out amid the tidy tract houses. Everything about Etheridge’s place was off-kilter. The roof sagged. One gutter was untethered. The front screen door hung from a single hinge. Inside, the wood floors buckled as if frozen mid-earthquake. Add a few cypress trees, a front-porch glider, and a hound dog, and the entire tableau could have been picked up by tweezers and used as a set for Uncle Tom’s Cabin .
Mary, a smart, curvy blonde from Oklahoma, drew paychecks as a social worker plus writing and fighting against apartheid, but even if she’d cleaned from dawn till dusk, I believe that from whatever spot Etheridge occupied, chaos would’ve spread out like kudzu vines, for he was an addict of the first caliber. Allegedly sober, Etheridge ran his own beer-and marijuana-maintenance program. While he spouted lines from Dickinson, he kept a forty-ounce of Colt malt liquor between his knobby knees.
Back then, in magazines like The New Yorker , stories were mostly about ex-Yalies wearing deck shoes. (Ray Carver was about to change all that.) By contrast, Etheridge lectured wearing a string T-shirt and dark pants of a stiff material that I swear to God looked prison issue. He turned his plaid house shoes into slip-ons by stepping on their backs. The Free People’s Poetry Workshop, he called us.
What I wrote was mostly unintelligible, except for one bit about a suicidal dog. The first line went, alliteratively enough, Don’t do it, dog . The stuff I was fighting to avoid sometimes slipped out in vague disguise: a kid raped, a lost father, a woman on the shock treatment table. But because I refused to use sentences—just strung phrases willy-nilly—nobody understood it anyway. The word cerulean , I believe, was used.
It’s experimental, I argued to the baffled readers arrayed on Etheridge’s furniture.
It’s in-fucking-comprehensible, he shot back.
Still, the first poems of mine that ever saw print were sent out under Etheridge’s aegis, in envelopes he paid postage on. Thrilled to see my name in type, I told my pal John, who’d wallpapered his bathroom with high-class New Yorker rejections. His response? Just as there’s a woman for every man, no matter how ugly, there’s a magazine for every poem.
Etheridge’s blessing also helped me to snag a job as a poet-in-residence for the city of Minneapolis, the most dubious post I ever held. The city had scrounged up some grants to promote the arts. Some fifty or sixty poets and painters and dancers—hell, we even had a mime, the Mime Laureate of Minneapolis!—got hired to do…well, what?
We weren’t sure. It was the seventies.
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