The Unending Connectedness of the Books We Write and Love
By: Terry Trueman
Tags: Works, Connections, Art, Life, Poetry

How poetry started for me, and why/how I’ve come full circle — Two or three book reviews of a sort:

Image courtesy of author

One morning in 1967 or 68 when I woke-up I glanced over and my wife Linda had already gotten up and started her day. But on her bedside table was a book of Ancient Chinese Paintings and Drawings. I reached over and began thumbing through it and pretty soon I was taken aback by how much the subject matter of these artists, many of them dead for the last 500 years or more, reminded me of what I saw and felt in the world: the mountains, rivers, trees, daily lives of people and animals and nature.

I’d wanted to be a poet since I was 16 or 17 but felt I had nothing to write about, nothing to add to poetry or any part of life for that matter. But this art inspired me. I grabbed my journal and began to write what I immediately thought of as “translations,” not of Chinese poetry, but of these beautiful works of art, translating them into my language, my sensibilities, my work.

In an hour I had written 25 or 30, and I liked what I’d done.

Within a year or two I met and became a friend and protégé of the Pacific Northwest Poet Robert Sund.

Robert Sund and Terry Trueman, 1968 from author’s pers. pics

Sund had studied under Theodore Roethke, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet who had died in 1963 and who had taught for many years at the University of Washington. Robert had been inspired by him to become a poet, just as I was now inspired by Robert to follow the same path.

As luck and miracles and serendipity sometimes happen, at the time we met Robert was trying to put together his first book of poems , a collection about working in eastern Washington’s Palouse country on the wheat harvest. He wasn’t having much luck. His mind didn’t work in strong organizational ways. And being stoned most of the time didn’t help.

Robert Sund, pic taken by author 1968

He’d read my Chinese painting poems and had said he liked them a great deal. This, as much as any other thing had led to our meeting one another. At some point, I’m not sure how or when or exactly why, he handed me his wheat harvest poems and I began to read them. Robert was in his early 40’s, I was 20.

As I read his work it reminded me so much of the Chinese paintings and the poems I’d written; clear, simple, direct, the subject matter perfectly balanced with the length, style, language and accessibility of the works.

Inside flap copy of First Edition Bunch Grass, by permission of publisher

We ended-up working together on organizing the poems over a long weekend and at the end we had a manuscript that eventually became Robert’s first book (and one of only three ever published of his poems and art,) Bunch Grass (University of Washington Press, 1968).

Image courtesy of publisher

Many years later, I pulled my Chinese painting poems together, mostly those previously published and a few others and made them into a small chapbook.

Image courtesy of author and publisher

If it hadn’t been for that book of Chinese paintings, and my writing inspired by them, and Robert’s reading my poems and inviting an unpublished 20 year old kid to help him with his work, I can safely say Bunch Grass might never have come to be (or if it had it wouldn’t have been the book it became), and that it’s unlikely that any of my future books would have been written and published.

I once heard Alan Ginsberg talk about his connection, looking back through friends and lovers all the way to Walt Whitman. Ginsberg wanted to claim an ancestral connectedness to Whitman, I think justifiably so.

Robert and I stayed friends for the rest of his life, he died in 2001. But we never were as close as we had been while working on Bunch Grass. He had asked me, numerous times, to help him with later books but it never worked out. Life had pulled us far apart in different directions, me to family and children and him to his own passions and lifestyle.

The last picture taken of Sund and Trueman, courtesy of Terry John Pratt, Flickr

Our books, like our lives are not created in a vacuum: not artistic, not social, not historical or aesthetic — our works are connected, one generation and one work to the next, directly and obviously and invisibly and mysteriously.

A Chinese painter in the 14h century picks up a paint brush and 600 years later a young poet, about to be influenced for the rest of his life by an older poet, connects and begins to work.

This is how our books are made.

This is why our books are loved and why they demand a place in our lives and hearts.

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Part of the reason for posting this story is that I will be posting some of my Chinese Painting Poems in the days and weeks to come. I hope you’ll read and enjoy them.

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