D.R. Wagner poem – Under The Table

The poet and artist D.R. Wagner died on the Winter Solstice 2023. I just got word from his neighbor in Locke on the Sacramento delta. I cried and cried when I got the news. D.R. was my good friend and a constant in my life from 1980 until I moved from Sacramento to Berkeley in 1995, after which I saw him occasionally over the years until 2010. From then on he sent me announcements of his newest books of poems, and I would send him word of my new books and albums of songs.

In 2009 I self-published my novel Under the Table Books and Marcia and I went on a road trip from Mendocino to the San Juan Islands and back giving performances of our music along with readings from my books. We read in friends’ living rooms, libraries, and bookstores, our final performance taking place in Time Tested Books in Sacramento.

For this ultimate performance I prevailed on my three favorite Sacramento poets – Ann Menebroker, Quinton Duval, and D.R. Wagner – to read their poems that appear in Under the Table Books, a novel of stories set in a fantastical anarchist bookstore. The finale of the novel is my favorite D.R. Wagner poem The Milky Way, which I will append at the end of this remembrance of D.R. That evening when all three of those marvelous poets read their poems to enhance the evening was an apex moment in my life.

I met D.R. shortly after I moved to Sacramento in 1980. Because of the recent success of my novel Inside Moves, the Sacramento Poetry Center asked me to read with another writer to benefit the poetry center, which I did. Quinton Duval hosted the gathering after the reading, and that is when D.R. and I first collided.

We liked each other immediately and not long after I was asked to join D.R., Bari Kennedy, and Pat Grizzell for what would become the annual Sacramento Kerouac reading. D.R. and I enjoyed performing together so much we decided to put together a two-man show combining poetry, stories, music, projections of D.R.’s fantastical petit point creations, and various combinations thereof. We eventually performed as a duo seven times, and always had a great revelatory time together much to the delight of our audiences.

D.R. was the most prolific poet I’ve ever known. I’ve only read a tiny fraction of the poems he wrote in his life, yet I’ve read several hundred of his poems. I have many favorites stored on my computer for easy call up. The moment I begin to read one of his poems he is here with me, an ebullient spirit glad to be sharing what arose from his mysterious artesian source.

His petit point creations are in many private collections and art museums, and one of them is the cover art for my novel Night Train in which a fictional version of D.R. appears.

D.R. was a true cat, and by that I mean every word he wrote and every stitch he stitched came straight from his heart and soul.

The Milky Way by D.R. Wagner

We live in a spiral arm of a spinning

Field of stars. We whirl around, a carnival

Ride, full of birds, loves, emotions, endless

Varieties of things unfolding in seasons;

Full of bells and an endless weaving of hearts.

These connections ride upon our consciousness,

Demanding constant performance from us.

Each of us, most royal and majestic as night,

Vile, vindictive and spoiled even before we speak;

Sorrow and joy, the way we sound our name.

We endure all of this, our lips kissing each moment,

Crushed, elated, misunderstood, praised for things

We do as part of ourselves, damned for these same things.

There is no road, there is no plan. Only love

Survives. Everything is forgiven, finally.

Understanding limps behind the parade,

Always late, always burdened with qualifications,

Always abandoning every opinion and argument,

Leaving each of us our place only, describing

This place, the swirling arms, the myriad ways

We twist ourselves to achieve

This weaving, this carnival of love.

fin

Card Quest notecard and postcard by Todd

I love the postal service. I love getting letters and postcards and packages. I’m sixty-seven; thus for much of my life there were no such things as personal computers and email and smartphones. The mail, the actual hold-in-your-hands letters and cards, was the great connector over long distances, especially among artists and writers and less conventional folks.

When I was in my twenties and thirties, I got two or three letters and postcards every day, and some days I might get seven or eight. Nowadays I get a postcard or letter, if I’m lucky, once a week. And though I gladly partake of email and depend on my email connections for an important part of my daily happiness, I still think of letters and cards I find in my post office box as holy relics.

In response to what I consider the new Dark Ages that have descended upon us, I have revived my habit of writing and sending out letters and cards each week. I don’t expect these missives to elicit replies via the post office or otherwise. I write these notes and letters because I find the process satisfying, and because I know such communications bring pleasure to the recipients.

To facilitate my pleasure and the pleasure of people I write to, I like to create postcards and notecards that are the kinds of notecards and postcards I wish to find in stationery stores or bookshops, but never find them—because they don’t exist unless I create them. In the last year, since reviving my habit of sending handwritten messages on one-of-a-kind postcards, and handwritten letters in one-of-a-kind notecards, several correspondents have asked if they could purchase copies of my cards. One thing led to another and I decided to launch a line of notecards and postcards and offer them for sale from my web site. If you’d like to see the new line, go to Underthetablebooks.com and click on CARDS in the menu. Then on the CARDS page click on Postcards or Notecards. Voila.

Many of my postcards and notecards are ideas related to people communicating with words, and these ideas are written out in colorful handmade lettering. The process of creating the wording for each idea is identical to the process of writing a poem; many iterations resulting in a final construction of words. Here are a few examples.

My SOMETHING postcard reads: Something reminded me of you today and I wanted to let you know I was thinking of you. Then I saw this postcard and thought, “Yes! Exactly!”

My CONNECT postcard and notecard reads: One day a person receives a card that seems to be about a person receiving a card. But that is just the beginning of a story about someone who wants to connect with you.

My WILD ADVENTURE notecard reads: This card went on a wild adventure through time and space to reach you (via the Postal Service). This card is both a message and a carrier of a message. The card’s message is: Look Within. The message within is…

I also have a card called SHALL WE DANCE? An extremely fanciful and colorful parrot is flirting with a flower, with the words Shall We Dance? writ large in the air above them.

So far, the buying public has not beat a path to my web site door, but that’s okay. These are the Dark Ages. Much in our culture and society is obscured, and most things of value are invisible to the general public. Keepers of the flame, you and I, do what we do without regard for fortune and notoriety. We keep the flame burning because engendering originality and excellence is our job.

Taking a break from writing this morning, I walked to the post office and found in my box a package from the visionary poet D.R. Wagner. I haven’t heard from D.R. in several years and I was eager to see what was in the package. But rather than open the package in the post office, I used my curiosity about what D.R. sent me to help propel my body, the old mule as Kazantzakis liked to call the corpus, up the steep hill to home.

In the package were two new volumes of D.R.’s poems, The Generation of Forms and Love Poems, published by small poetry presses—NightBallet Press in Elyria, Ohio, and Cold River Press in Grass Valley, California—keepers of the flame in these new Dark Ages. Reading some of D.R.’s new poems made me hungry to read my favorite D.R. Wagner poem, The Milky Way, which D.R. allowed me to use to conclude my novel of stories Under the Table Books. Here is that poem.

The Milky Way