Doctor Jazz
Hayden Carruth
Copper Canyon Press
$18.00 Paperback
On a bleak day
in 1972, in Denver, Colorado, two young men hauled an old printing
press up three flights of tenement stairs. One of them, Sam Hamill,
had had a dream which “had returned me to childhood memories
of watching the huge open-pit mine in Bingham, on the southwest
corner of the Great Salt Lake Valley, slowly devour an entire mountain.” This
made Hamill think of “copper
canyon,” where the Northern Utes dug for the low-grade copper
from which they made medicine bracelets.
Ten years before,
while serving in the Marine Corps, stationed in Okinawa, Hamill
had become a Zen Buddhist, dedicating his life “to spiritual
practice, social activism, and poetry.” Thus, by naming the
nascent poetry press Copper Canyon, which interrogates “ecological
and spiritual values,” he could fulfill all three of his vows.
Working days at paying jobs, Hamill, and friend Jim Gautney, soon to be joined
by Bill O’Daly and book designer Tree Swenson, taught themselves typesetting
and editing, then began publishing chapbooks of poetry in editions of 500
and under. In 1974, Centrum, a nonprofit arts organization in Port Townsend,
Washington, invited Copper Canyon to be their “literary press in-residence,” offering
it a permanent home.
Copper Canyon
Press was built on a tradition of small to medium-size literary
presses that reached one apex during the 1950s, when New Directions
Publishing, in New York, introduced some of the most innovative
writers in the world to an American audience, and City Lights Books,
in San Francisco, published many of the underground poets who came
to be known as the Beat Generation. Both these presses, however,
thrived in large urban environments, while Copper Canyon set up
shop on the Olympic Peninsula, where Hamill and Swenson moved into
a trailer without electricity or running water. While Swenson handled
the day-to-day administration, as well as designing and printing
the books, Hamill, besides reading and editing the manuscripts,
became a journeyman artists-in-education teacher around the Northwest
and Alaska, in what he calls his “transitory life-by-begging-bowl.”
During the first
decade, the Press published elegant limited edition books by distinguished
poets, such as Kenneth Rexroth and Denise Levertov. When this became too expensive a venture,
the operation shifted into photo-offset trade editions, which allowed
for the publication of new poets, such as Primus St. John and Gladys
Cardiff, along with translations of Ancient Chinese poets dear
to Hamill. Although still surviving on grants, Copper Canyon Press,
sequestered in the rural Northwest, was gaining a national reputation.
When Hayden
Carruth inquired as to whether Copper Canyon would be interested
in reissuing his book, “The Sleeping Beauty,” a long
and fruitful relationship began, producing volumes such as “Collected
Shorter Poems,” which won the National Book Critic's
Circle Award, and “Scrambled Eggs & Whisky,” winner
of the 1996 National Book Award.
Carruth was born on August
3, 1921, in Waterbury, Connecticut,. After spending many years
living in rural Vermont, he moved to upstate New York to teach
at Syracuse University. Without compromising his political beliefs—he
proudly calls himself an “anarchist” -- , Carruth has
carved out a career as poet, critic, and professor of poetics
and literary history.
Early in his career, Carruth already
carried the seeds of what the German writer Hermann Broch called “the
style of old age,” in which the artist, “not content with the conventional
vocabulary provided him by his epoch…must find a point beyond it.” Which
brings me to Carruth’s love and respect for Jazz, the hard lives and,
in some cases, genius, of its musicians. Most importantly, the poet has learned
from the central position Jazz gives to playful improvisation.
“Doctor Jazz,” Hayden
Carruth’s 45th book, displays the seemingly effortless
skills of a mature artist, coupled with wisdom and a crusty sense
of humor. It is a volume devoted to the poet addressing his past,
along with the people and relationships that enriched those seven
decades. Included is the long tender poem, “Dearest M-,” written
on the day his daughter, Martha, died, “as she had lived
for many years, / far away,” and a laconic letter to Sam
Hamill: “By the way / the Buddha has his place across town
on / Elysian Drive. We call him Bud. He’s lost weight /
and got new dentures, and he looks a hell of a / lot better than
he used to.”
“The ‘style of
old age’ is not always a product of the years,” Broch
wrote, but is often found “blossoming before its season
under the foreshadow of death.” In, “The Sound,” Carruth
looks back to a day when he was a boy listening to the buzz of
unseen bees from his “sweet/grave in the grass.” Gazing
the sky, the would-be poet and lover of music said to himself—