Out of the Gate: Selected Early Poems 1960–1970

By Ken Lauter

Drawing on poems composed between 1960 and 1970, Out of the Gate makes available for the first time a sampling of previously unpublished work by Ken Lauter, the author of fourteen previous books of poetry and a prose/poetry memoir of his experiences as an environmental activist, The Ratlue Diaries: Two Poets and the Rocking K War in Tucson Arizona (SFA Press, 2017).

These early poems were originally assembled in three manuscripts: In Praise (which received a Hopwood Award for Poetry at the University of Michigan), Metronome, and New Light. Lauter, now seventy-four, looks back on these poems written in his late teens and early twenties with a combination of bemusement and awe, seeing them as raw and remote, as though written not by him but by a ghost-poet he can now barely recognize. (The ghost, in fact, makes a surprise appearance at the end of the book.)

This collection includes love poems to his wife (a neuroscientist, photographer, and poet, Judith Lauter); an elegy for his father; anti-Vietnam War protests; meditations on the Apollo mission to the moon, as well as on the music of Mozart and Beethoven; and several longer narratives on a variety of themes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543440447

Ken Lauter

Ken Lauter studied with Donald Hall (US Poet Laureate 2006-07) at the University of Michigan, and his work has been compared to Robert Lowell’s. Distinguished poet William Meredith has said that Ken’s poetry displays “a splendid and various gift.” His previous books are: The Other Side, Before the Light (both from BkMk Press, University of Missouri at Kansas City), The Ghosts – Notes from a Field Study, Songs from Walnut Canyon, Grand Canyon Days, Searching for Mr. Stevens, The Structure of the Body, and First Kingdoms – Poems from a Vanishing Landscape (all from Xlibris). He has also written several plays, including The Dancing Apsárás, or Captain Willard’s Blues, a prequel/sequel to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. He has received a Hopwood Award for poetry, an American Academy of Poets Prize, and a Shubert Playwriting Fellowship. He has taught literature and creative writing at four universities and also worked as a mayor’s aide, a university administrator, and a grass-roots environmental activist. Ken is married to poet and neuroscientist Dr. Judy Lauter, author of How Is Your Brain Like a Zebra? — A New Human Neurotypology and A Year of Haiku (both from Xlibris). They currently live in Nacogdoches, Texas.

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Copyright © 2017 by Ken Lauter.

Photo credit – cover, daderot GNU Free Documentation License

ISBN:                   Softcover                         978-1-5434-4043-0

                            eBook                              978-1-5434-4044-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 08/24/2017

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Contents

Preface - The Ghost Poet

In Praise (1960-65)

Metronome (1966-67)

New Light (1968-70)

Coda - The Ghost Poet Speaks

Notes

Author Bio

Acknowledgements

Poetry Morphology, Hemophiliac’s Dream, and The Gun in the Bedroom, were first published in The Other Side (BkMk Press, University of Missouri Press at Kansas City, 1973). Lanugo appeared first in PRIZE POEMS 1968-1972 (University of Denver Department of English and the American Academy of Poets, 1972).

for Judy

whose belief in these poems

saved many of them from the shredder

Preface - The Ghost Poet

During the 1960s my life was a constant stream of change. I graduated from high school; spent a year at the University of Missouri-Columbia; fell in love; spent two years at the U.S. Naval Academy; completed my senior year at UMKC; was dumped by my girlfriend; got an MA at the University of Michigan; fell in love again (with the woman I would spend the rest of my life with¹); taught at the University of Arizona— and across the entire period, I was trying to get out of the gate as a poet.

Today, however, the poems from those years (only four previously published) seem raw and remote, the voice of a ghost poet I can barely recognize. So I honestly don’t know how to rate what I wrote then. I hope some of it has the subtle linguistic click of sound and sense that all good poems must have; but what I’m sure of is that the work of this decade made me understand that language is a very challenging artistic medium and that to master it— with sweat and humility— is the task of a lifetime. After all, getting out of the gate is only the start of the race.

* * *

Who was the ghost poet? He had a pretty normal childhood.² And yet,

born to lower-middle-class parents who were in their early 40s and had lost much of their joie de vivre by the time he arrived, he carried a certain degree of sadness throughout his life.

This was reinforced by several things: childhood dreams of a nuclear mushroom cloud rising above the KC skyline; when he was 10, his much older half-brother dying in a car wreck; at 13, a year after being dunked in the baptismal tank of a small Baptist church, trading in Jesus for Darwin (as more credible and more awesome). When he was 19, his father died, possibly accounting for the frequent recurrence of death in his early poems (though not as obsessively as in Whitman or Keats).

A more or less typical American boy-with-dog (fox terrier), he learned to read before grade school via Dick and Jane, and was soon a real bookworm, beginning with boys’ adventure tales (Silver Chief, Dog of the North; the Horatio Hornblower books), and going on to historical novels like Thomas B. Costain’s The Moneyman and A.B. Guthrie’s The Big Sky. He also followed his dad into detective stories— sadly, Mickey Spillane, not Raymond Chandler.

His first poem was a ploy to get a kiss (also his first) from the girl next door: Flowers for my lady fair! / Wear them in your golden hair. / And if you think it’s not amiss / Won’t you grant me one sweet kiss? He recited this doggerel to Janet Bentley (curly blonde hair and dimpled chin) as they sat on the ground in his backyard one warm spring afternoon while Janet’s twin sister Joyce looked on amazed. While saying the words, he presented Janet a bouquet of dandelions. She let him peck her on the cheek, grabbed the bouquet, and darted away giggling with Joyce. He was about ten at the time.

The only poems he remembers hearing during grade school were Casey at the Bat and, from the Colliers Encyclopedia for Young People, The Highwayman, both read to him by his father. Later, rock- and-roll came pounding from the radio: Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Connie Francis, Brenda Lee, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and the incomparable Lavern Baker. The Kingston Trio’s robust folk ballads also appealed to him, not only because of their lyrics and musical brio but also (secretly) because his peers weren’t interested in them. Bob Dylan and Paul Simon arrived much later but were more impressive to him than most other rock/folk artists (or poets) of the time.

The ghost poet’s second poem came during his junior year in high school, as an extra-credit exercise from a history teacher. It began: "O mighty ball of sun on high / Sailing