Neglected Poets (1): Donald Schenker

This will be an onhgoing series of pieces and selections from poets unjustly neglected. I'll lead off with Donald Schenker (1930-1993).

 And I'm very open to submissions of profiles in this format on your own neglected poets. Query first, then submit 750 2ords prose, a few poems. Have permission.

There is no Google image available for the beloved, almost forgotten Berkeley poet Donald Schenker (1930-1993), other than this modest yellow cover, from the Ahsahta Press edition of Up Here (1989). Here indeed lies one whose name was writ in water.

Up Here was a cabin in Siskiyou County where Don Schenker wrote his best poems in the eight years between his diagnosis and his death. Don, in David Shaddock’s phrase “a New York Jew in the wilderness,” found in Hurd’s Gulch an ordinary tragi-comic stage in the backwoods where poems could occur.

Message

The orchard clamors

in the sun

for my attention.

Trees wave

all together,

letters in a grid.

Read me,

read me.

Now read me again.

I met Donald Schenker in January, 1971, when he asked me to read with John Brandi to benefit Walden School in Berkeley. He showed me his jazzy book Say X. I was just back from pushing my strong stupid 29-year-old body 150 miles over three mountain ranges in the dead of winter, and was too self-absorbed to take in Don’s work, or anybody’s really beside my own. In November, 1990, I went to hear Don read at Cody’s Books and was enchanted by his radical insights so laconically folded within everyday speech. At that point he had just over two years to live.

In those two decades I had published a number of books and chapbooks to not a whole lot of acclaim. Don had published one thin book, Up Here, and was about to publish another, High Time, not attracting much recognition either. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1985, sold his business, and devoted himself full time to writing. My friendship with Don was based against the shadow of death, freeing us from a competitive edge that often undermines the friendships of poets.

Don Schenker was a Jewish boy from Brooklyn who’d served in the Navy and wandered to San Francisco to be part of the beat scene; he hung out with Rexroth and Ferlinghetti but none of the glamorous poets really noticed him. He married lovely blonde Alice from Wisconsin and had three kids and they bought a summer cabin in Siskiyou County. Don’s early poetry has a lot of chatter and jabber, irrelevant brilliance, a voice in the middle of the air, sharpening his chops; once he was told he was going to die it concentrated his mind wonderfully. He got permission to write when he drove up to into the little cabin in the Klamath Mountains with wet wood crackling in the stove and the six million wasps to be killed with rolled-up newspapers, Coyote howling at dawn, the woodpeckers asking about money, and grasshoppers complaining at his passage like frenetic political Lilliputians. Eternity in the details of any moment, and Death over his shoulder.

Don was pissed off to the end that he wasn’t famous. Of course, his best work came pounding in over the last few years, with Death watching. And maybe it’s also true that if he had been recognized early it might have taken off a certain edge; maybe he needed to be alone against the void without the comfort of posterity in order to write the poems he had to write. At least we could grouse together about the randomness of the name game.

Hundreds of people turned up at the Unitarian Fellowship for Donald Schenker’s memorial. Poets, folks from the Gulch, old Berkeley hands. When I got to the mike, I warned the crowd I was going to abuse my privilege and read two poems. Never leave a poet alone with a microphone. Don would have done the same. Not many dry eyes in the house.

Months later, I went up to the Gulch and stayed alone in Don's little cabin. His ashes are up on the ridge, scattered around the boulder with the owl stone. I hadn’t thought to bring my hiking boots, so I had to borrow Don’s, and left his footprints all along the frosty paths where once the bear had come but couldn’t stay.

Great news 2012: Jorge Luján's deft and ludical Spanish translations of Schenker will be published later this year (after 15 years of trying — some obscure syndrome obstructs Don's posthumous career as it did in life) by Carlos Ferreyra in Buenos Aires as El hombre linterna.