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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Honest and Generous,
By
This review is from: How I Work as a Poet (Paperback)
Lew Welch takes us into the heart of his creative process with disarming honesty and generosity. He must have been a fantastic teacher, though the work he discusses is sometimes (as he himself admits) still in process. I've just reread these essays after ten years and find their optimistic take on poetry and their absolute, unconditional, gift of insight, a bargain for the price. Would that he were still around to thread the labyrinth of post-L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing. With his pioneering work on Stein, he would have been able to cut through some of the smoke and bring us all along.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Learning Lew, Learning Poetry,
By Gabriel Goltz (Phoenix, Az United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: How I Work as a Poet (Paperback)
Lew Welch is one of the most shadowy figures still lurking in the already shady Beat scene. He was an amazing poet whose influence was far-reaching and whose talent was limitless. This much is known. But, because he checked out far too early and because the literati decided to forget him, those who come across his name or work are generally left to fend for themselves to gain some deeper understanding of this beautiful man or his amazing work. How I Work..., along with a good collection of his poems (Ring of Bone being the best), are just the keys to doing this.Welch's skills were unique. He was able to combine both a Zen Buddhist's overflowing love for every corner of this world with a stiff, old-world understanding of the science of language and poetic form. This talent runs through his poetry like a personal footprint in the history of written art. There are those poets too liberal in the language explorations they undertake and who subsequently lose their audiences in a maze of word games incomprehensible to anyone except the poet (and snobby critics who cannot admit they don't understand it either). Other poets come to be wound too tightly around the more stale considerations of language and form. Welch, on the other hand, very successfully juggles both pressures: a heart overflowing with love, barely containable within the puny confines of standard language and the formal skills of an English professor (remember his now-legendary undergraduate thesis on Stein) who always keeps his eye to the fact that language is not each time some newly-found animal without rules and that audiences have demands which must be met. For those who want an intimate portrait of one of this world's greatest life-lovers or those who are looking for a primer on how to be what a poet should be, How I Work... is a great place to start. The selections in How I Work... range from "Language is Speech" (my personal favorite), a very study-able manifesto on how beautiful and insightful "normal" language can be to the more radical meditations "Greed" and "Final City/Tap City," which themselves function easily as either poems or essays. Readers will not leave this book lighter than when they entered. It is full of good stuff and, like an onion, more layers can be peeled off after each further reading. A master at his best!
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Lew Angers & Pleases Me All In a Breath,
This review is from: How I Work as a Poet (Paperback)
The Ancient Order of the Fire Gigglers (aptly named from a line in one of Lew's poems), a band of outlaw poets (also, dancers & musicians) mostly from Colorado, of which I am a "member" (not that there are dues or anything, just a shared love for the natural world, for poems and other expressions of imaginative discipline), looks to Lew Welch as something akin to guardian spirit. Most of us actually agree with what he says, particularly his discussions of American English and how poetic language should be exact, tho not forced. But I'm a cantankerous bastard who finds Lew a bit too preachy at times, a bit too dogmatic in his writings about poetry. The essays in "How I Work as a Poet" are all certainly well-thought, easily comprehended, and well-expressed. I admire his courage (writing *about* poetry, after all, is dangerous ground to tread--poetry should really speak for itself) and his clarity, and I enjoy thumbing my nose when he proselytises overly much. Most poignant to me are "Manifesto: Bread vs. Mozart's Watch" and the delightfully bizarre "Final City/Tap City: A Crack in the Bottom of It". The former essay argues that poetry is WORK, as valid a vocation as any other; the latter establishes the poet as the soil's prophet: "...underneath this thin skin of City, Green will come on to crack our sidewalks." This is Lew at his best, gentle and iconoclastic all at once. Even at his worst, he's genuine. And a damn fine poet. How Kola, Lew! Thanksabunch.
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