I cannot recall how I first came across Seth. I want to say it involved his offer to buy me pizza in Amarillo on my next waltz across Texas either coming from or going to Colorado. Truth or not I should probably hold him to that offer. I do remember once watching a short video of him driving while quoting one of his poems. I liked the rhythm of the poem. And I also thought that man has a poet’s face, of course I can’t tell you what that means only to say I know one when I see one. Seth’s a vampire as I’m defining it here in this series. Enjoy!
Seth Weick grew up on a farm in Umbarger, Texas, which had a Catholic church, a post office, a grain elevator, and a liquor store but lacked a school, so he went to school in nearby Canyon from Kindergarten through Bachelor’s, earning a degree in English and philosophy, before getting work in Amarillo as a technical writer, an ad copy writer, a high school language arts teacher, an appraiser of real estate, and a writer of the literary kind; however, the varieties in which a person makes a living are hardly a biography, so more weight should be given to the relationships he’s maintained over the years, especially with his wife and three kids for whom the living is made. You can find Seth here on Substack.
What are you reading right now, and how is it challenging or confronting you? (And this would encompass that expansive reading vampires do which means sucking from many necks—books, movies, music, art, etc.)
~I am a slow reader. For a long time, I considered it a deficiency, and sometimes it still is.
For pleasure, I am reading Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels. These books are a daydream kind of pleasure, but they're higher-minded, fuller-souled than mere pulp. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Macdonald--in that order--created the Humphrey Bogart-in-a-fedora, private detective genre that's been copied and parodied a million times with diminishing returns. I've been a fan of Chandler's sentences and his Philip Marlow books, especially The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, but I had put off reading Macdonald because I worried that he'd be a knock-off Chandler. But it turns out Macdonald took Hammett's model, as Chandler had done before him, and gave it new life. I just finished The Barbarous Coast. I'm fairly convinced that these kinds of stories aren't really taking their model from Hammett, not even from Sherlock Holmes or Edgar Allan Poe before him, but from Dante. The stories are winding descents into an infernal Los Angeles that usually begin with a minor mystery--find a missing wife, for example--then with each interview, Archer reveals some new layer of sin and fig-leaf coverup that is progressively more serious before he eventually climbs back out and we arrive where we started finally to know it for the first time. About halfway through The Barbarous Coast, Archer winds up in the basement of the beach club interviewing the security guard, an old boxer who was broken by the ring, a lecherous wife, and the year-old, unsolved murder of his daughter. That chapter alone has such a gravity that the rest of the book carries its ghost, even as it ascends to a resolution. And if I was worried about his sentences paling next to Chandler's, my concern evaporated when I read this description of a druggie, piano player from The Way Some People Die: "The pianist could have passed for a corpse in any mortuary if he had only stayed still, instead of tossing his fingers at the suffering keyboard. His batting average in hitting the notes was about .333, which would have been good enough for a Coast League ball-player."
For a more difficult kind of reading--not less pleasurable, just a lot more chewing-- I'm reading David Jones with some podcast friends. Of all the British writers who served in the Great War, Jones spent the most time on the front at 117 weeks. He tried to enlist with the English army but was turned down for his weak constitution, so he returned to his father's native Wales and enlisted with them instead. He entered the war a well-trained artist and his sketchbooks full of soldiers and ruined European towns and landscapes would be enough reason to study him. However, upon his return to England after the war, he converted to Catholicism and joined a guild of printmakers. While working on illustrations, the shell shock of the war cracked loose and he began writing poetry. He wrote two book length poems over the course of his life--In Parenthesis and The Anathemata--which I don't even know how to describe, other than relaying an event that happened to him in the war. One night as he was fulfilling his guard duty in the trench, he wandered out into the front line and he perceived a light coming from a barn. He crept up to the wall and found a knothole through which he watched a priest presenting the Eucharist to soldiers. The moment lasted no more than eight seconds, but The Anathemata which recounts the moment is 243 pages. It's the most difficult thing I've read since Finnegans Wake, and I'm not sure I can claim that I actually read that. I was complaining about the difficulty to my friends Jack and Sam, but Jack showed us a picture of the frontispiece to Jones' other wartime, book-length poem In Parenthesis. It's a painting that shows its underlying drawing. The subject of the painting is a soldier caught in barbed wire, but also passing through it. The man is clothed, but we can see his naked body through his clothes. I began to imagine the scene of wandering through the dark on the front line of a foreign war. The men in your company speak a language that you're only vaguely familiar with, which is itself a distant cousin of the English you grew up speaking. The wars about which you'd read with fervor as a child were different sorts of wars, full of virtuous knights on meaningful crusades. The bombs falling from the sky and the minefields littering the farmland are destroying forests that have been there for tens of thousands of years, and cities for thousands. Foreign landscapes that literally inspired your language and the language of your enemies, had also been under the rule of the Roman empire, and they're suddenly obliterated along with your closest friends and contemporaries. And in the darkness, you see a light, and for eight, ecstatic seconds you see the presence of the tortured, broken body of Christ, the Word in the beginning and there too in a barn on the front. It's a beatific vision that happens outside of time, but somehow must be presented in time and language, and be carried back from the mind-breaking trenches. I'm nowhere near finished reading it, as if moving from cover to cover will get me anywhere closer to having read it, but the more time I spend in it, the more I feel like I'm learning a new language by being immersed in it. His paintings, illustrations, and essays have been helpful toward that end. At the very least, I'd recommend his recent biography David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet. And read it with friends.
Tell us when you were last amazed, astonished, or awed? Charm us with the whole sucking story (charm from the Latin carmen “to sing”).
~For work, I drive a lot through the rural, Texas panhandle. I'm like most people, coping with sitting still by myself for hours by listening to podcasts, music, and audiobooks. The landscape is almost always a flat, treeless horizon, and there isn't much to look at except the straight ribbon of highway. In my best moments, I remember that being able to see this place is a gift overlooked by most people and I try to give it language. And sometimes, a little crack in the horizon glimmers. One afternoon, on the stretch of highway between Dalhart and Stratford--a stretch the Joads passed through on their way to California--I saw the gift: a sculpture made by a farmer in the middle of nowhere. Here's the poem that came from that (published earlier this year by New Verse Review).
Stratford-upon-Nothing
Highway 54, SW of Stratford, Texas, pop. 1886
Seventy miles at seventy miles-an-hour
lullabied by sunlight, tiresong, and wind.
There’s not stitch nor sign of civilization
except the highway and highline of wires;
or save the waves of native short grass plains
carved into squares by five-line barbed-wire
four fathers ago then quietly maintained.
Those slide by at eye-level, parallel
lines laid on lines, as though a book were tipped
on end and the reader tasked to discern
the meaning of some dozen or sixteen lines
by the inked letters’ mere elevations.
Where the highway comes at you and at your
eye, and your eye finds no distance in the land
on which to land as all lines converge and blur,
there is a farmer who was only patroned
by tenuous contact with humanity,
holed up in his shop, woodstove roaring
with the winter wind in his chimney.
Taken with a vision of fortifying
the broke down frame of a windmill
rebuilt as a forty-foot windvane.
A half-ton, balanced, galvanized tin cobble
like the flipped fuselage of a paper airplane
shorn of its wings, he mounted on a pivot,
so when spring winds come screaming where there is no lee
the invisible hand of God can give it
a spin. Show you where to look and what to see.
Thanks, Seth! Hands on the wheel, man. Hands on the wheel.