I have never quite left the main road since; I have toyed with free language placement, and with obscurity and renounced them both after a time. I still think a public can be won back to poetry if you have something big to say.
If you can turn the malls and suburbs upside down, split them open like lobster tails and find some unexpected mystery and goodness in their trite forms. I follow Pound’s advice – never let the poem stray too far from song or dance or it will die. But I don’t like the kind of poem the University of Iowa gave to the world through Paul Engels’ writing workshops, and now the standard American lyric of most journals and writing programs. You know the kind – a new feeling opens the poem, traced to a cause, and a twist at the end in the form of a sudden aha! The pure, distilled American talk of W.C. Williams, the Lowell poems of Life Studies, the dense, nuggety speech of George Oppen appealed to me deeply. But the Lowell of Catholicism and self-pity repelled me, and still does. An openness is all I want in poetry, an openness that is at times self-annihilating, transforming, liberating.
The books of my poetry I care about and that established something of my voice are Signs of the Whelming (Latitudes 1983), Weights & Measures (University Editions, 1987), Where Three Roads Meet (Cedarshouse, 1999), Blue Alleys: Prose Poems (Stone River, 2001), The Mottled Air (Stone River, 2003), and Hard Country (Thorp Springs, 2005).

In 1991, I was given a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts; and twice the Writers’ League of Texas gave me the “Violet Crown Award” for best books of poetry: Blue Alleys and Hard Country.

My prose first surfaced in a book on Charles Olson: Call Him Ishmael (U of Texas Press, 1979), where I explored everything I had learned and (later discarded) could apply to criticism of other poets. That was followed by an edition of letters, In Love, In Sorrow: the Complete Correspondence of Charles Olson and Edward Dahlberg (Paragon House, 1990 in which the two writers played son and father and saw their friendship explode like a Greek tragedy. A year later, Black Sparrow Press published my look at Clayton Eshleman, Minding the Underworld. In 2001, I published my first prose memoir, West of the American Dream: An Encounter with Texas (Texas A&M Press, 2001). In 2005, Rick Bass and I co-edited a book of prose and poetry on the debasement of the Texas environment, Falling from Grace in Texas (Wings Press). Now Wings is bringing out my second memoir, Strangers in Paradise: A Memoir of Provence.

So where is my place in the great mill of literature in our time? I am a regionalist because I feel Texas wants someone or some of us to write down its neglected soul: The soul in nature, the spirit of the grass lands, the power and instinct of its native people. We live in a vast amphitheater of history, with ruins of the Maya and Aztec people to rival the best of Egypt and Greece. Alas, no one has been able to embrace these great civilizations and make them a part of the living consciousness of Americans. So much of the record of what that curious corner of the Southwest means has been written by Anglos steeped in the ideals of Protestant European individualism. In much of this writing and art man comes first; an aching desire to find heroes populates the fiction. The thrust of creation is still rooted in that need to justify the invasion and violent take over of the land. The cowboy myth continues to cover up the reality of what was done to take the land. The poor southern deserters who became cowboys after the collapse of the South, the blacks who had escaped from slavery, the rag tag bands of wanderers from decimated native tribes, the Comancheros, the half-breeds and renegades of an anarchic era were all buried under a quick-fix romanticism of the Plains. And it is the task of other writers (Cormac McCarthy chief among them) to bore through the crust of these strategies and find the still living pulse of the land as it was and is.

I feel the same way about the part of southern France I inhabit part of each year – with its tourist hordes and displacement of the brilliant, gifted peasants who first shaped this place. I want to find the spiritual base of the region and of Texas. To do that means moving through endless circles of self-negation, ordeals of dis-education of the clichés and false assumptions one carries with you when you live in a place. If it means insulting the status quo or poking holes in its vulnerable armor, I do it, sometimes guiltily. I know I have disappointed some of the writers of Texas by sticking my neck out so far, by going in by odd ways to find the truth I am looking for. But I do it anyway.
Because I was sprung from the U.S. at twelve years old, something didn’t quite fuse to my nature about America of those years. My immersion into the ideology was interrupted and I was given other worlds to absorb and understand. I came back to the U.S. in the heart of the Cold War. Sputnik was in the news, frightening us into the space race, the arms race, the ratcheting up of nuclear technology. America was in a frenzy of fear, and I rejected it from deep down in my heart. My nerves were taut in the years leading up to the ‘60s, the Beatle years, the drug years. I wanted to embrace a reality no one wanted to show me. It was buried under the rhetoric of the Commie scares, the black lists, the gray men of the Pentagon, the grayer men who filed into the cavernous doors of the State Department like army ants, the great leaden doors of the Department of Justice under Robert Kennedy, the peace marches, the sit-ins, the rancor and chaos of an America clinging to its racial majority as blacks and women, gays and hippies all struggled to be heard, to release the immense energies that Washington and public education so forcibly repressed from the light.

Somehow, in the logic of my own out-stretched imagination, I concluded that to know my own soul I had to know the soul of the place I lived in. The forces that would conceal or blur its presence were enemies to my own self knowledge. My writing, my teaching, my day to day life are lived in the service of that uncovering, however I can approach it. If my efforts are chaotic at times, so is the very process of detecting what lies at the base of American identity, what hungers after us and asks us in a thousand subtle ways to turn out of our course and question who we are, what we mean. Anytime a poem works or a piece of my prose stands the nerves up on my arms, I am that much closer to the door that is hard to open, the stair that leads to the dark attic, the basement chest that has no key.

What I teach is discovery, both in what there is to read, and how one can begin the process by which the thick laminations that contain us can be peeled back, thin layer by thin layer through words, the worm-like crawl of phrases toward a truthful thought, the patter of syllables that seem like throws of the dice and make a kind of eerie music the more you work on them. Writing is a kind of unraveling of the stuff that binds us, and as we feel our skin or our real self underneath the armor and the protective outer rinds, the more writing flowers out of us. If a teacher can be an example and show that such work of self discovery will not harm or endanger us, but make us live more fully, then what else is there to teaching? What have I left out?