Ono - it's me!

Here I am, or rather was. This is me in my Lennon-esque, Bohemian phase in the 1960s. The glasses were purely for effect, as was the water heater behind me! 

Hidden Moments

How I got into poetry needs a little more explanation. There was, back in the sixties, a vibrant cafe, or pub scene. Among many of them, there was regular poetry readings at the Lamb & Flag pub in Covent Garden, London, organised by Norman Hidden, the Chairman of the Poetry Society. It was to several of those that I ventured as a young man and became hooked on poetry & literature.

Not just the subject, but the people. This was, what they later called, the swinging sixties. And whilst, conventionally, I was earning a living, like everyone else (and looking after my family) vicariously I was a bohemian. When I get my head around this technology I will show you a b/w picture of me looking like John Lennon (with short hair). Add to that a mixture of strange friends (who, of course, were poets & writers) and you have the general idea.

One or two of these larger than life characters needs some more attention. David Chapman, for instance. A poet through and through. He was tall, with a granite like face hewed out of the Hollywood hills. His shock of blond hair lying limply on his head gave him the appearance of a Roman senator that had just stepped through a damp mist. He smoked (we all did then) played with drugs (I never did that!!) and ended-up in a psychiatric hospital, where he wrote a book called WITHDRAWAL that he dedicated to me. We supported each other like brothers, me giving him some real support, he giving me inspiration and a view into the psyche that is the crazy mind of the Dylan Thomas type poet.

Let me give you a taster of David's work (we were both published in Poet Lore):

LOTUS

Leaves and petals on the water floating
Cool and hard, untouchable
Drifting echoes of birds in a downward sky.

And a face in the water with them
Of one who fell into the water
While she watched them
Slowly, with the current turning
To a dead rose
A reflection
Drifting downstream with the leaves and petals


When I got married in 1965 David read a poem that I wrote, at the wedding service. He stood by the altar reciting the poem, dressed in black trousers, a white shirt with a loose tie and a green flannel jacket - sticking out of his breast pocket was a poppy, he had snatched from the roadside, placed at a clownish angle. Pure theatre. Needless to say my wife was somewhat phased out by this (being the innocent girl next door) but she got used to it (and is with me still some 45 years !).

I said there was another character, that was an even more amazing mixture: George Paul Solomos. A middle aged, American/Greek writer, friend of Gore Vidal and many others. Then living in Tufnell Park in London, poor and sponging money from people like Jonathan Guinness. I was one of his acolytes. He had published a novel in 1952 called The Man Who Went Away - I thought it was the best thing I had ever read. Every weekend I would spend the days with him and the evenings with my soon to be wife. To reach him I had to get 2 buses and walk the last half mile. I think I would have travelled to the ends of the earth. He introduced me to high society (attending a party in Eaton Square), to real writing and bringing the two together in a film magazine he published called FIBA, where I was asked to interview the famous film producer, Leon Clore, and turned in a 3-page feature (my first professional assignment). GPS then asked me to write a screenplay for a vamp on vampire called Count Dracula. It was all heady stuff. But, at the same time, I was trying to hold down a job and support a family of, now, 2.

I had to choose, a writer's life, or conventional comforts? As it is I called my son Dominic Maleo and set about writing a novel ... called Maleo. Life had only just begun...

Let's go back to the beginning

OK, after the adolescence bit, when I got hooked on poetry, I was fortunate enough to have my first poem published in America in a very famous magazine called Poet Lore (established in 1889).

 

The poem they choose was very personal, but also had imagery and associations that could interest anyone.

 

The year was 1966 - the year my son was born. Maybe that was the event that inspired me to write:

 

 

Father come to me, watch the black stare

of green eyes: falling winter lays dread

upon thought of spring.

 

Follow the tree, my love, away from twisting

wind into ashen bark. I see her on the hill

with violets rising through her breast and

streams running into the seed. Of serpents

that ride in the heather and tussle the

albino forest a cast in the moon.

 

 

I was 23 at the time, married with one son. Ezra Pound was on the horizon, but not yet the towering influence that he was about to become in my life.

 

More of that later ...

 

 

Update

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A life in poetry & prose

I have my son to blame for this. I wanted to spend the rest of my life gathering together some selected poetry & prose that I had written over the years, publish them privately and present them to my nearest & dearest on my demise. 'No.' said my son. 'Publish a blog, and share it with the rest of the world!'

Well, I cannot believe that the rest of the world will be in the least bit interested, but here goes - as a toe in the water.

Let me begin at the end, or the present. I have always been interested in poetry and my life-long study has been about Ezra Pound. In May 2003 the following poem of mine was published in The London Magazine:


Pound's Oyster

And, in the spirit of others before
a great journey was to unfold.

Being in the eye of the mind
it had a splendour of its own.
More than that;
but how to show it.
How to describe such a majesty:

you'll have to trust what I say
in describing it to you
as though you were the lids of my eyes
opening up to what I see.

But because it is only between us
there will be the need
of some interpretative signs,
save others may stumble upon this
and the beauty be bountiful.

Let the colours be unsaid
for who knows what red is blood
what sea is green
what grass is green,
if they all suffer from the same name.

It must be a new experience
sepulchral in its importance
for that is what Pound saw
by opening the ancient oyster shell
and finding a pearl where there was no pearl.

On such a deity will this be fixed
for if you look you see
and if you don't you have not:
it is a colour of a different hue.


So there we are, but where have I been and what part has poetry & prose played? Enough of a compass to steer me in many directions.

Shall I tell you more?