I met Steve thirty-six years ago when I moved to San Diego for the first time. But
within the last year, comparing our early poetry years and time in New York City,
we discovered that we may have been close to first meeting years before. I was in
my late teens, from a farm in Maine; Steve, in his early twenties, had grown up
in New York City. There was a coffee house in the East Village called Deux Magots
that had poetry readings every week; this was probably 1962. I got up the courage
to read a poem for the first time in public. In the middle of the reading that evening,
a guy named Taylor Mead read a letter he had received from Allan Ginsberg who was
in India. It was a pages-long letter and Allan talked about bathing in the Ganges
River and watching “the burning Gahz.” Steve remembered that evening.
He didn’t remember my poem. Just as well.
He was the same irascible, wonderful character thirty-six years ago when it came
to poetry as he was right to the end. About a month before he died, he published
an op-ed piece in the Review Journal about modern poetry. Look it up. A kind of
final bugle call from Steve.
I was emailing back and forth with Dorianne Laux about Steve (he was her first poetry
teacher and close friend) and asked her who was going to wave the flag of clear
and accessible poetry now that Steve was gone. She answered, “We all have
to.”
He was supportive to all poets no matter how they wrote. But if you were one of
his close friends, he could be very, very direct. I took his last poetry class at
Southwestern College before he retired. The class was filled with amazing writers
all wanting to get one more “Steve fix.” I had known Steve and exchanged
poems with him for years but never took a class from him. I met many writers in
that class, many who have become close friends. Steve was showing us poems that
while we didn’t exactly understand what the poet said, we knew what he meant.
He used one line from Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,”
the line that says “an orphan with a gun,” as an example. Steve said
we don’t really understand this but we know what he means. Then Steve, waving
his arms, sent us off for the night with the direction to go home and write a poem
that had lines like that. I brought mine in the next week, showed it to Steve—he’s
standing at the front of the class, waves the poem at me and yells, “What
is this Shit?” He had forgotten he gave us the assignment. All the “professional
Steve students” had not written such a poem; they knew better. He was notorious
for forgetting what he had assigned.
We would often walk along the beach in Pacific Beach and talk. It was on one of
those walks when I told him I wanted to go back to college and get my MFA in Poetry.
And what did he think of the idea. He asked if I thought I’d learn how to
write poetry at one of those programs. No, I answered, I thought it was too late
for that. If I wasn’t doing it now, I never would. But I wanted an MFA so
I could spend my last few decades teaching young poets in a college MFA program
somewhere. Steve, as only Steve could be, wrapped his arm around me and said, “Forget
it. No one’s gonna hire an old shit like you.” Ah Steve. No one talked
to you straight like he did.
At readings, open mics, Steve was the first to applaud, the loudest, the last to
stop clapping, always a big smile. He’d sit in the front row, had to, he couldn’t
hear very well. What you don’t know is that often, he’d leave his hearing
aids home. On those walks along Pacific Beach, the subject of open readings, open
mics, frequently came up. Steve likened most of them to the experience of a root
canal.
So, Steve, this is my gift to you tonight. This is an open reading. I am a poet.
I am not going to read a poem.
lives in San Diego where he continues to publish, write, and study in San Diego
State University’s Master of Fine Arts program, Creative Writing. His work
has been published in Eclipse, The Cape Reader, Serving House Journal, Alaska
Quarterly Review, Spitball, Soundings East, The Briar Cliff Review, Hiram Poetry
Review, A Year in Ink, and others.
Awards include Semi-Finalist for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize (2012), Finalist
for the ABZ First Book Contest (2014), First Runner-up for the Brittingham and Pollak
Prize in Poetry (2014), and winner of the 2015 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award,
which includes publication of Miss Desert Inn in November 2015.