To Seek A Newer World –With The Dead Poets Society In Mind

To Seek A Newer World –With The Dead Poets Society In Mind

 

Ethan Hawser did not know when he first dreamed the dream, the dream of being an outlaw poet (in his thinking any poet worth his or her salt like the madman American wild west seeking visions of some impossible democratic furor after all the blood he saw Walt Whitman, the clairvoyant beat hipster max daddy howling in the night seeing visions of the living dead of the new industrial  society from which we had to run, the sweet negro street angels anyway Allen Ginsberg and the free spirit mother of pearl drawing a wagon load women’s choice words Joyce Levin was by definition, by definition do you hear, except the academic poets who of course have ruined the whole profession, the prissy little Eliots and Stevens, Wallace that is, gave both poetry and outlawry a bad name).

Maybe it had been that first time, that first feverish night after he had run through the poetry of Francois Villon who expressed it so well that he was as stranger in a straight land, exiled in his own country (we will not stop to think through the implications of whether that nasty crowd he ran around with, the larcenies, big and small, which he and his gang were alleged to have committed which might have contributed to that feeling of isolation from his kindred after all this is Ethan’s dream), spoke endlessly that he was willing  to pay the price of exile to be able to write as he pleased, and not as the court ladies for whom most poetry was written wanted him to do to tout their beauty and their virtue, particularly the former (they would let the latter take care of itself in due course by bedding whatever stallion came to their portal).

Maybe it had been when Ethan he first stole over to the adult section of the Cliftondale library where he had grown to maturity and read, hell, re-read Walt Whitman and his vagabond words which spoke of a more democratic vista, spoke of the common clay (he was not as enamored of his stuff about Lincoln, that Captain, My Captain stuff that seemed way to flowery for the other stuff that he wrote in Leaves Of Grass. And maybe it was that first breathless night when he heard Allen Ginsberg doing his Howl on YouTube and he flipped out at the mad monk speaking of the best minds of his generation being atomic blasted into submission, about the lively negro streets groaning up the horror of their urban hipster existences, of the eternal conundrum of Ginsburg’s own homosexuality in an age when the crime against nature, the crime that dare not speak its name was illegal and prosecuted and shunned like witchcraft and other examples of high fagottry, of the angel of death calling out amount the fumes and the dust, of wicked clouded smoke reefer dreams, of endless wars against Moloch and his henchmen.       

And there he Etan Hawser, Junior. son of a stone crazy business executive who had pulled himself up by the bootstraps to give his son what he never had like many an average Joe, stuck in Saint Elmo’s Academy, all of seventeen and stuck, damn stuck with the grind before him. With the desperate fight against losing his mind, his mind that could have been and maybe would have been one of the best minds of his generation, might have made that big breakthrough to the hard rock candy mountain that some elementary school teacher put in his head and it stuck .

There was the rub though. He was about eighteen ways stuck because his father, Ethan, Senior, had placed every ever loving hope that he ever had on his son’s making a place for himself in the richness of life world, a world that he had had no opportunity to experience. So sweet dreams of outlaw poetry, hell, of any poetry seemed to be some much dry dust blown away with the sea.

That is where Mr. Byron, his senior year English teacher, came in and put ideas into his head. Told him first about Villon and bandit poets. Put ideas of bucking that father love, of escaping the dragnet that was furiously surrounding his escape routes. Mr. Byron had graduated from Saint El, had gone on to become a teacher then after the requisite time of his own education and apprenticeship had come back home to partake of glory and give back as he in his turn had received from Mr. Donne his senior year  English teacher. Had come back highly recommended (although that apprenticeship had been at Summerdale, a known hideout for those who were acolytes of Ivan Illich the scourge of any kind of Saint Elmo expectations but the headmaster of Saint El, Mister Regan had been classmates with the current “head teacher” there and so did Mr. Byron a favor) and Ethan when he began his senior years had the good luck to draw the whirlwind of his class.

The guy (always Mr. Byron in person, school rules, maybe number two after reporting on any untoward behavior by fellow classmates and by Byron’s rule too although at freer Summerdale he was known as Dick by students and staff alike) was as mad about poetry as Ethan was, read all kinds of meaning into the material. Preached Yeats the bloody Anglo-Irish mystic saint to the high heavens and banged heads with anybody who thought the lovely Ezra Pound’s words the utterings of a mad man. Drew all kinds of seemingly odd-ball connections between the poems and life. Saw lots of cautionary tales in the seemingly simple language of poetry. Saw say Robert Frost’s Two Roads Taken and he took the less travelled one as the clarion call for independent thinking, words to live and die by even if the old man put on the dog with his swamp Yankee persona.  Saw Tennyson and his “seeking a newer world,” his not standing pat against the encroaching dark night that was descending on the world when the machine went wild, as a way of living a new way, a not his father’s way.

All these ideas day after day in conversation and during long solitary walks got to Ethan, got to him heart and soul and he finally showed Mr. Byron some of his work. Mr. Byron approved, saw in a word here and idea there that his music might draw mighty gales, a saw lots of promise, was willing to go to bat for him to get into a good college to learn the great poetic works, get washed clean by them and then forget them and listen to his own heartbeats and not to go into business like his father wanted, demanded that he do. Got Ethan all excited, less obtusely teenage rebellious and more focused on bringing a new consciousness to his poetry. One weekend Mr. Byron brought Ethan to poetry reading in New York City, to the Gaslight then one of the hotspots of hipster coiling poetry, the poetry played to a be-bop tune. Ethan was getting it, getting to articulate that be-bop sound that was banging in his head, had been there all along maybe had been part of his DNA from birth, begging to get out. Life was good, everything was possible.          

Then the hammer came down, Ethan’s father adamantly refused to hear either his son’s or Mr. Byron’s pleas. Mr. Howser forthwith withdrew Ethan from Saint El and planned to send him to military school in the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, a place cold enough to “freeze the fucking poems out of his son (Mr. Hawser’s words).” Ethan freaked, fled the house that his father had him practically imprisoned in pending transfer to Siberia, and hit the road. Left no forwarding address, left no way to find him. Six months later Ethan Hawser was gunned down in North Carolina by an off-duty police officer as he attempted to rob a night cashier of twenty some dollars on hand to feed his new cocaine habit gathered on the road somewhere never disclosed  in a Seven-Eleven convenience store. Ethan had gotten the outlaw part of the outlaw poet okay, had got it straight up.