David Biespiel - The Education of a Young Poet

Praise for

THE EDUCATION OF A YOUNG POET

Woven throughout the memoir are inspiring anecdotes about leading a literary life, including insights into the craft of writing and the power of language in everyday life and in literature.

Poets & Writers

As a match newly struck, The Education of a Young Poet recovers a dream-like glow of this world... The authors journey restores our sense of the visionary power of language.

The Carolina Quarterly

I love the scope of The Education of a Young Poet , which opens fifty years before the authors birth. What better way of expressing the idea that poetry, like all art, is a matter of lineage, growing in equal part out of what we learn and who we are? Indeed, what David Biespiel has in mind here is less a craft bookalthough there are great craft riffsthan a memoir, a kind of portrait of the artist as a young man. Feeling alien within the familiar, Biespiel describes it, the sensation of being a new poet. Its as good a description as Ive seen for the mix of distance and proximity, alienation and empathy, that all art requires, and perhaps most especially that of poetry.

DAVID L. ULIN , author of Sidewalking

What a memorable, companionable, and singular book. I cant think of another contemporary memoir that has this mix of political and literary intelligence, all embedded in a personal story that is told with great candor, historical consciousness, and wit. How I wish it had existed when I was a young poet!

CHRISTIAN WIMAN , author of Hammer Is the Prayer

Whether he is writing about poetry, politics, competitive diving, or the glories of great conversation, Biespiels recurring subject is the tension between freedom and disciplinebetween the sublime release of our own wildness and the precision that comes only from exquisite self-control. Part memoir, part ars poetica, The Education of a Young Poet is a feast: of language, of memory, and of insights into how one young writer came into his own.

PATRICK PHILLIPS , author of Blood at the Root

and Elegy for a Broken Machine

Lyrical, affectionate... Graceful reflections on creativity.

Kirkus Reviews

Biespiels memoir delivers with wit and intelligence exactly the kind of inspiration any young writer requires: A voice and a past and a story to tell.

Empty Mirror

ALSO BY DAVID BIESPIEL

POETRY

Charming Gardeners

The Book of Men and Women

Wild Civility

Pilgrims & Beggars

Shattering Air

PROSE

A Long High Whistle

Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces

ANTHOLOGIES

Poems of the American South

Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets

RECORDINGS

Citizen Dave: Selected Poems, 1996 2010

The Education of a Young Poet

Copyright 2017 by David Biespiel

First hardcover edtion: 2017

First paperback edition: 2018

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover as follows:

Names: Biespiel, David, 1964 author.

Title: The education of a young poet / David Biespiel.

Description: Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint Press, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017026011 | ISBN 9781619029934 | eISBN 9781619029958

Subjects: LCSH: Biespiel, David, 1964 | Poets, American20th centuryBiography. | Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) | Authorship.

Classification: LCC PS3552.I374 Z46 2017 | DDC 811/.54 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026011

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-64009-110-8

Cover design by Bill Smith

Book design by Fritz Metsch

COUNTERPOINT

2560 Ninth Street, Suite

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by Publishers Group West

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For Brian Spears

I assumed that everything would lead to complete failure, but I decided that di dnt matterthat would be my life.

JASPER JOHNS

M y life in poetry began when Harry Borg left Ukraine for America in 1910.

Life is not the exact word. Since Harry was born in Cherniostrov in the Pale of Settlement in 1879, and I was born in Oklahoma in 1964. Between us is his eldest son and that sons eldest daughter and that daughters youngest son, me.

Harry and me left Cherniostrov by train for Lvivhe was going on ahead of his wife and their two small sons. From Lviv we found passage to the States. Then we went by train again to Iowa. We were looking for a place we could afford. There was a young fellow near Elma, 160 miles north of Des Moines, who offered us something. Later there was a cart and a mule and then peddling rags and pots, second-hand coats and slacks and blouses, every day except Friday nights when, even if on the road and miles from Elma, Harry would take shelter overnight in a customers barn to make Shabbat.

Riding the trains across the heartland was really in vogue in those days. The cornfields were like a green ocean with shoals and shallows and waves. You could see humpback whales in the wind through the stalks, whales shivering in the underside of the midwestern air. Then suddenly, like a lighthouse, thered be a silo. The wind was soft as flannel, too. The oaks longed for the sparrows and the sparrows longed for the sky and the sky longed for a wife. Days of rain blushing with passion and a quivery blessing. Me and Harry would stare and stare, smearing our eyes against the windows of the train. We were travelers who noticed every sun-weathered brick in the towns.

That summer the Iowa rivers receded under the trestles from the spring floods that had blossomed in July. The headstones in the cemeteries long ago had taken to peeling. At night the moon bristled over the open porches with the wicker chairs empty of their celibate lovers. The crossroads were like sideburns turned to gravel. We tumbled along the tracks, a little stoic, a little proud, a couple of puzzles needing to be solved. The dappled rows of shaggy corn sloping toward us plunged back into the velvet, green, windy distances. The rattle of the train faded again and again to the muffle of our sleep.

This was a time when polio was raging. There were 186 cases in Iowa that year. This was the summer of Halleys comet, too. Me and Harry could see it all right even from the train. It was no apparition. It was a match struck against eternity, an eyeless orphan. In 1986 I would look for Halleys comet again. I was living in the haze of cheap weed in Boston on Glenville Ave. near the expressionistic trees of Ringer Park. In Elma, though... Harry found Elma to have the kind of personality that was its own avant-garde. You couldnt erase Elma. Year after year the population decreased. But still the town remained. In 1910 Elma was eight hundred people and about to be redesigned with an orthodox Jew. Back then Elma was a town of aching look-alikes. There was the aroma of wood burn and laundry on the line. White farmhouses and neat fences. It was a place you could live in all your life but if youre werent born there you were always an outsider. Every stranger could be a murderer. Harry arrived like new foliage.