“Well then, we better give this critter a name so he knows who we’re talking about.” Tin y smiled. “I thought up agood one already!”He paused for effect: “Posthole.” “That is pretty good,”Granddaddy agreed, “but I got a real good one: Fup.” “Fup.” Tin y repeated blankly. Granddaddy gave him his full-five-toothed grin: “Fup Duck. Ya get it? Fup . . . Duck.” “That’s a terrible name,” Tin y groaned. Fup, A Story, is part fable, wacky myth, bigger-than-life adventure, Zen Koan with a mystic finish, and backporch hokum all rolled into one. The prose itself is saturated with a sweet kind of hard-won wisdom that gives it an uncanny dimension. Jim Dodge has woven a real regional yarn that transcends its region at the same time that it sanctifies it. As the epigram, by the great Japanese poet Basho, says: The temple bells stop. But the sound keeps coming out of the flowers. Jim Dodge wrote the story over a long period in his Sonoma County cabin on a place on a place called Root Hog Ranch. He wrote the first few pages up to the finding of the duck, and then stopped. Something was wrong. The duck was male. A while later he realized that it had to be female, and from then on the story told itself. Now there was a rightness, a balance, with a she-duck set amongst two such wildly male characters as Jake and Tiny, it had the right cosmic resonance. When it was finished, the story got passed around in manuscript among the rural literati and forest aficionados, and everyone loved it. Then Jim Dodge sent it to Michael Helm, publisher of City Miner Press, who had run short pieces of Jim’s in his City Miner Magazine, and a hilarious chronicle of his not so peaceful coexistence with the Dusky-Footed Woodrat in the City Miner anthology, City Country Miners, brought out in 1982. Soon it was an underground classic (people kept buying extra copies for their friends). Fup was first published by the City Miner in a handsome, thin, inexpensive edition with a stiff, emblematic mallard spreading its wings on the cover. The book became so popular that it went through four printings. Finally it attracted the attention of The Big Publishers, and it can now be found in bookstores in a new edition, out this year, by Simon and Schuster, snazzier, the cover-duck livelier but less wise looking, with sentimentalized illustrations inside, but destined for a wider audience than the City Miner edition could reach. Hollywood has bought the story as well, and a major motion picture is in the process of being made. (When I finished the book, my first reaction, so touched by its purity, was to hope no movie would ever be made of it.) Fup is becoming one very successful duck. In Fup, a regional masterpiece, the Jakes and Tinys of this country slug it out in the wilderness. It is country life, but not the artificial, off-balanced life of city folk too quickly transplanted into alien territory; not land-bound, almost feudal countryfolk, numb in country sleep, inbred and weighted down. Jake and Tiny are fully alive, even outrageously so, totally and ideosyncratically themselves. People being themselves is one of the main interests of City Miner Press. City Miner Magazine was the first manifestation of its publisher’s intentions, coming out in 1976. No publisher in the Northern California area was concerned at the time with regional literature. And with papers like Berkeley Barb slowly fading out, no one was keeping alive the best of the '60s visions: political, environmental and literary. Helm was also responding to a major media freeze on the best of the '60s trends, since they were saying, “The ’60s are over, let’s get onto something new!” But they were literally throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Michael Helm chose the name City Miner because, it started up in the ’70s, when people were making a big thing out of fleeing from the nasty cities into the paradisical country, battered pickup trucks and all. And the cities were getting very bad PR. But Helm felt that there were good things to city living worth expressing, dealing with and even singing about. Then a little later on, people started drifting back into the cities from the country, saying, FUP and other stories: BL/ Abd al-Hayy Moore Image, by Tom Wesselmann from the couer of Howard Hart, Selected Poems. City Miner Press. “It’s total boredom out there,” or “you can’t get work in the country,” and started bad- mouthing country life as well. So after a good run of City Miner Magazines with every kind of city and country story, poem and article, with interviews with great ’60s era thinkers and writers, fifteen magazines in all from 1976 to 1980, Helm published the anthology City Country Miners. Of course, the old controversy of city versus country rages on, but it’s got a lot of vitality to it, at least. Maulana Rumi, great Persian poet and Sufi Master, says, “You should keep your face to the city and your back to the country.” In a way, that settles it. Both city and country are part of man’s environment, and each individual is the balancing agent between the two: the intellectual excitement of the city, the social tangles, the gathering of the tribes; and the harsh and wise master of country life with its seasonal heartbeat, its natural light and enveloping darkness. From the end of its magazine days, City Miner has been concentrating on publishing books that bridge this gap and provide the balance in its own way. Some recent books highlight this focus and range. With Bump City, Winners and Losers in Oakland, by John Krich, published in 1979, the regionalist arrow hits the mark, the target being one of All-America’s really nondescript cities, or rather, described in all its grimy mediocrity. John Krich writes: “Oakland: one wide picnic table. Oakland: one comfortable old moccasin. A ‘City of Homes,’ but a city of homesick. Nobody in Oakland is from Oakland. Nothing is native, nothing rooted but the oak. The past is so recent, the recent is so past. Who can find the Indian’s burial mounds?” In this book, the sense of “place” is desolate, the city an urban disaster, an industrial trash bin, the populace out of touch with either earth or spirit, bereft, but still able to catch brief flickers of joy on the run. But overall, the spiritual dimension, like the remarkable vintage photographs which grace this book, by Dorthea Lange, is black and white. Re-emergent Beat poet Howard Hart’s Selected Poems/Six Sets, 1951-1983, is a velvety but dangerous confection of gentle surrealism, jazz-oriented and color- soaked, as vivid as the photo sharp painting of the hand and tropical flowers on the cover. Howard Hart is originally from Ohio but makes San Francisco his home, playing jazz and continuing to read poetry to jazz in pubic, as he did in the frenzied ’50s, appearing on-stage in New York in memorable gigs with Jack Kerouac. Hart’s poetry is distinctive, deceptively simple, like a sea shell, or a finely wrought piece of mahogany furniture, highly polished. It is also deceptively serene, for under its glossy surfaces lie detonations, anguish and nostalgia, a wry eye joining the sharp edges into a whole. Conceived as jazz solos, rhythmically Miles Davis-like, Hart’s poems are oddly tactile, with a kind of full color, pre-Rafaelite after image. I am drawn to the field of dark flowers to the cavern of blue and pink unbroken line of umber and olive coloured mound of silt My love lavender Noontime each day my love is made of ginger My gold I shall place over her knees My silver shall light her shoulders Here the region is the psyche, fragmented and re-unified at another level of surreal welding. This is not an unfamiliar universe, nor one of pure fantasy, but the down of dream has thrown its transparent cloak over the distinct pieces of hard-edged furniture and made a smoothness. The book is a kind of Renaissance for Howard Hart, and a scent of life emitted from the human heart. In Steve Kowit’s Passionate Journey/ Poems and Drawings in the Erotic Mood, with its explicit but non-pornographic, delicately human drawings by Arthur Okamura, we enter love territory. Here the emotions are simple, pang-ridden, sexually heated, then desolate, love-lorn and filled with the human destiny of all emotions: fleeting. Pathetic & ephemeral the coupling of lovers A moment at best & even that an illusion. Bound to the wheel of desire —O bitter & miserable fate! & yet, tho I meditate on this truth for a thousand years it will not erase the sound of her voice in the summer night or the taste of her lips. (after Dharmakirti) The poems in this book are renderings inspired by the erotic/religious devotional poetry of the ancient Hindu tradition. The poet’s modern deftness is reminiscent of Sappho: economical, supple, lithe and sincere, making its point by understatement rather than hectic panegyric. But Passionate Journey has been overlooked by reviewers, perhaps because it has no easy niche to fall into in American letters. Its region is Eros, and there is no real erotic traditon in American letters. Whitman’s eroticism was cosmic, his infatuations sublimated populist, and only Emily Dickinson, of all people, a totally non-erotic poetess, could use language with almost erotic intensity, usually to suggest higher dimensions. But what is remarkable about this book, whose region is so volatile, is that it maintains a noble tone in a time gone so pornographic. A deft feat in itself. Michael Helm has made a ten-year commitment to publishing writers of the Northern California region, presenting, as he says in a note at the back of City Country Miners, “the urban and rural weather of Northern California’s most finely tuned minds." Regionalism often has a bad name. People consider it too place-defined, too parochial, unable to be translated to people from other regions, like a joke that falls flat on its transmit into another language. Intensely the opposite, City Miner’s regionalism is a breath of fresh literary air, showing strength at the core of a given “place,” consciously connected and open to the world. Health in a whole sense begins by concentrating on what is closest to home. Once we have our house in order, we can go out into a further radius with confidence. In one of his “Snap Thought” poems, put out in 1979 in one of the first City Miner books, Michael Helm said: Getting it together to help your friends and even neighbors when necessary creates a lot more security in the long run than you’ll ever get from the bank Abd al-Hayy Moore is a poet living in Santa Barbara whose books Dawn Visions and Burnt Heart were published by City Lights Books under the name Daniel Moore. Clinton St. Quarterly 39
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