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Kingfisher Dedicated to
the appreciation of poetry, fiction,
painting, Autumn
2003, Volume Two, Number
Four
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 Morris Graves, "Waking, Walking, Singing" |
This may well be the last
edition of Kingfisher Journal. Frankly, it is a lot of work for one
person to prepare and the number of visits to my web site since the first edition, two
years ago, have not increased enough to justify its continued existence. Please
email me if you feel differently about it, or want to help.
Robert Arnold
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Guy Anderson, "Sharp Sea" |
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Well, Fishtown May Be Gone, But It Lingers in the Minds of Some Read Bruce Brown's article about his visit to Fishtown in 1988 We've recently been contacted by two old inhabitants of Fishtown who have thanked Kingfisher Journal for its efforts in keeping the name and place alive, long after history and progress have dismembered it, sent its occupants flying. And Charlie Krafft pointed out that our efforts in investigating and writing about the place were sadly incompetent. We agree. He writes, on November 11: "If
you want to be more accurate in your article about who lived at Don't have a guestbook, Charlie, but people can always email us at rcarnold@direcway.com, same way as you did. And then from Hans Nelsen: I
sent you a message the other day, which you may not have received
because I am having some trouble with my email This
went on till my cabin burned to the ground due to my own stupidity, and
I moved into a Nice hearing from you, Hans, and sorry we haven't met, or perhaps we have, when I went to visit friends and relatives who lived there. And hope you got to visit our home page and see the first issue of Kingfisher Journal, when we saluted the then recently deceased Robert Sund (who now seems to be honored on his birthday and a celebration in LaConner.) Sund was a long-time inhabitant of a Shit Creek cabin, only a short row away from Fishtown on a slack tide. Robert was a complex person, and not all what he seemed on either short or long acquaintance. He had so many friends, yet complained about chronic loneliness, as though it were something he did not seek but was thrust upon him. One dies alone, of course, but Robert died surrounded by friends who flowed in and out of his hospital room until he drew his last, labored breath. Some of these loyal friends were Dana Rust (owner of Edison Eye Gallery), Kathleen Faulkner, and Ken and Verna Maclean of Seattle. SOME THOUGHTS ON FISHTOWN AND ITS POET/PAINTERS Robert
Arnold I knew most of these men. And those I didn't know, I know now, at least those still living. I respect and admire them, and the decade of life they lived more or less together, back in Sixties and Seventies. But I in no way wanted to emulate them. They read Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg, Ezra Pound, the Chinese Poets Li Po and Ku Fu. So did I. They painted, much in the Northwest Tradition personified by Morris Graves and Guy Anderson especially. They read in the literature of the Zen Buddhists and took for themselves the lives of the mendicant monks. They practiced what they preached and wrote about it. Looking at these fine photos by Paul Macapia from the Seattle Art Museum, and reading these poems again (they appeared in the February 1978 edition of Puget Soundings, published by the Junior League of Seattle), I am struck by the great similarity in attitude and expression. It is almost as though a single person had written them. Let me describe the life, for I visited there and, even if I hadn't, the life is well described in poem after poem. It is there for all to discern (and perhaps envy). It was a hard existence, but they were young men (women were frequent visitors but generally didn't live there, or if they did, not for long.) Hence the monastic aspect. Each person had his own shack. In Sund's words, the shack provided a kind of "medicine" to the stresses of contemporary life. A war was raging in Viet Nam. They wanted no part of it, or the society that furthered war as a means to a social or political end. They were not lazy. Their ideals and life styles were remarkably alike. Sund's poem about gathering alder firewood in his boat, and his fear of running out of fuel for heat was a serious concern, yet he wrote proudly about his scavenging, after bringing back a large load in a skiff on slack tide. Movement took place either on foot, such as walking into LaConner to play pool for beers and to get drunk as old Li Po did, the patron saint of poets, or on slack tide in a boat. Sometime they mooched a ride with somebody who had a car or pickup truck. Much time is inordinately taken up with finding food, hauling drinking water, chopping stove wood, and mooching oil for lamps. They had few labor-saving devices. They read: the picture behind Charlie Krafft to the right shows a row of books on his window ledge; I can make out the photo on the back cover of one. Contemporary literature. It is of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. (I have the book, too. It was an icon of the times, as was Pound's Cantos., probably also there.) There was much sharing, but there was hoarding, too, and disputes often broke out, and soon somebody wasn't talking to somebody else. The sharing was of books and ideas, art and art materials, such as Sumi ink, rice paper, brushes, typewriters, typing paper. These poems read largely as though they were written by one person. They are mundane. The poet writes out of the details of daily life, for daily life (the quotidian) is holy. Holy. Most of the poet/painters were from Seattle. They almost all had some college. English, usually. Lit. Krafft once asked me, "Who is this Roethke you and Sund keep talking about? Some sort of saint?" I said he was. Fishtown was a communal living experiment, one similar to others taking place concurrently in North Beach and Berkeley, California. Often dissidents, artists, bums, flocked to camps and cloisters near major universities. Harvard, Yale, Chicago, had them. Sometimes those nurturing institutions tried to distance themselves from what was happening on their fringes. And local business were terrified at the panhandling that went on and feared it would scare away customers. Sometimes a criminal element appeared and persisted. Fishtown wasn't like this. It was more kindly and optimistic, in spite of the war and the sorry division within the country, America. There was a sweetness about their simple life and their wish to stand outside conventional society. They produced some fine art and poetry. The life was conducive to creation. Their poems were published (usually in chapbooks) an their paintings and drawings were sometimes shown by local galleries and purchased. Today some of them hang in respectable museums. Today we have those poems and painting to admire and enjoy. You might call it, the Fishtown Legacy. Enjoy this selection and seek out more examples from this difficult and productive time in the regional history of America. It is well worth the effort.
Once Upon a Time in America . . . A great new version of a famous movie has just been released on DVD--the nearly four-hour production of Once Upon a Time in America, directed by Sergio Leone. It had been cut to about 90 minutes for commercial distribution because it was feared that an American audience wouldn't sit still that long. It was first shown at Cannes in 1984, where Roger Ebert saw it, and shown in its entirety throughout the world. At last, nearly 20 years later, we can see it on a two-CD set recently released in our country. It is well worth the wait, though that wait was an aesthetic crime. But now that crime has been set right.  Tuesday Weld as Carol, the nymphomaniac
Roger Ebert asks: "Is the film too long? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that it takes real 1entration to understand Leone's story construction, in which everything may or may not be an opium dream, a nightmare, a memory, or a flashback, and that we have to keep track of characters and relationships over fifty years. No, in the sense that the movie is compulsively and continuously watchable and that the audience did not stir or grow restless as the epic unfolded. "Here are some of the specific problems with the shortened version. A speakeasy scene comes before a newspaper headline announces that Prohibition has been ratified. Prohibition is then repealed, on what feels like the next day but must be six years later. Two gangsters talk about robbing a bank in front of a woman who has never been seen before in the film; they've removed the scene explaining who she is. A labor leader turns up, unexplained, and involves the gangsters in an inexplicable situation. He later sells out, but to whom? Men come to kill De Niro's girlfriend, a character we've hardly met, and we don't know if they come from the mob or the police. And here's a real howler: At the end of the shortened version, De Niro leaves a room he has never seen before by walking through a secret panel in the wall. How did he know it was there? In the long version, he was told it was there. In the short version, his startling exit shows simple contempt for the audience. "Many of the film's most beautiful shots are missing from the short version, among them a bravura moment when a flash-forward is signaled by the unexpected appearance of a Frisbee, and another where the past becomes the present as The Beatles' "Yesterday" sneaks into the sound track. Relationships are truncated, scenes are squeezed of life, and I defy anyone to understand the plot of the short version. The original ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA gets a four-star rating. The shorter version is a travesty." from Cinemania 1997, copyright Microsoft Corp.
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FISHTOWN REVISITED . . . a series of poems celebrating life at the mouth of the river, the Skagit's North Fork--a random sampling of work produced by some of these artists and published by Puget Soundings magazine in 1978 (pictures are by Paul Macapia)
ALONE IN FISHTOWN 1 It's raining a lot so the river is
soupy 2 Years ago in Seattle
FLYAWAY (1) Geese crying in the night
sky I am the brother of geese (2) Let me hear wave after wave same song Robert Sund POEM FROM DISAPPEARING
LAKE Woodpile down to nothing, Looked for dry alder
trees. I came back with a boat
full Looked downriver; Robert Sund FROM RAIN
DRINKER Two melons and a lemon I want to run too I want to see the people
in that place Charles Krafft
SNOW OWL 1 An erratic, set path-- With unseen work of
joints, 2 One morning fresh snow Below the triple-bay
windows-- No broken wing. 3 Spring now. Glen Turner
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Once upon a time in America, there was a small renaissance of regional poetry and art. Some of it took place at a camp of abandoned fishermen's shacks strung out along the north fork mouth of the Washington State's Skagit River, not far from the town of La Conner. This was when the town had a natural charm and had not yet become a tourist trap. The colony drew its water from Buster and Margaret Lee's well, nearly a quarter of a mile away, on the crest of a hill. No electricity at the cabins, they were dependent on wood fires for heat and oil lamps for light. In winter it rained nearly all the time and the nights were long, cold, and damp. Who would want to live there? They did. The place was called Fishtown, and it is lost, gone forever. It has vanished into a past that has been swallowed up by development, and what some call progress. First its environs were threatened by logging; a dedicated group of naturalists fought them off. Later, the Fishtown property was sold because of high taxes and private homes were built along the dike. But for about ten important years it existed in a kind of seedy splendor. It plays an important role in the development of the Pacific Northwest--its history, literature, and art.
They lived there essentially because it was cheap. You didn't have to hold a job to stay alive. You could exist on the margin. Your time was your own, not bought by somebody else. Poor, sure, but your were free. But there is an enigma to life at Fishtown. This was the time of the hippy counter-culture, and living in such a community was highly fashionable among artists and intellectuals. People would leave you alone there. Yet it was in a small way locally famous. People knew about Fishtown and newspapers and magazines often sent their reporters there to do a story. It held a fascination for people who would never thing of doing such a thing, living such a life, but were thrilled by the idea of it. And artists led such a wild life. . . . Fishtown had a wonderful illicit air about it. Dope was smoked on a regular basis, wine guzzled, and girls and boys came and went, looking for sex. You could do there whatever you wanted there.. There were no rules, no parental figures judging you. You could sleep till noon, or early afternoon, if you felt like it, or if you were up all night, partying or writing a novel. .People left you alone to do your work or to play. The choice was yours. If you worked, it was just long enough to pocket some money, enough to last a few weeks, and then you quit. You did what you wanted. Friends helped you out. Trouble was, nobody had any money to lend you. But you could cage a meal with friends and, as Sund so often did, sleep on somebody's sofa until they got tired of you and sent you on your way. For art is hard work.. Ezra Pound wrote, "Sing we for love and idleness/Naught else is worth the having." Many took his words literally. Getting drunk, getting stoned, making music, sleeping late, reading all night by the light of your dying lamp: these were the disorders of the day. Some of the days lasted for weeks, for months. They could even be stretched into years, for the most determined of them. Today, in these online pages, we salute them. They are our heroes. Fishtown inhabitants included Charles Krafft, Robert Sund, Bo Miller, Paul Hansen, Arthur Jorgenson, and Steve Harold. Others came and went. It was a revolving community. And now it is gone.
Charlie Kraft, 30 years after he is pictured at the top; he may have lost hair, but not his artistic dedication
Fishtown existed on the edge of the world. It was a wild place, with hawks and owls, snow geese and salmon, herons, loons, coyotes often sighted. They were the denizens, your neighbors. They appear frequently in poems written there. Yet civilization in the form of taverns, restaurants, art museums, grocery and hardware stores was not far away. You could walk to LaConner, or if you needed food or were all out of beer or wine.. This was sometimes necessary, for neither Sund nor Krafft could drive a car. It was either walk or mooch a ride with your thumb held high in the air (as accomplished hitchhikers do). A friendly neighbor would often pick you up. Sometimes you had to depend on the essential kindness of others. In America nobody quite starves to death, though many go hungry each day. It is what it's like. Sund had a lot of giving friends, as we found out when he died. They fed him and gave him money. (It was not loaned, for you never expected it back.) He died slowly of cancer, much of his work intentionally unpublished in his last years. Friends paid him a last pilgrimage. Hundreds came to his memorial poetry reading. A fund and a foundation were started to collect and publish the remainder of his work. Two websites were developed to honor him and his work. I urge you to click and visit them. http://www.poetshousetrust.org/
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