Poet Doug Anderson and I meet before one of our weekly meetings of Group 18, a critique group that’s been meeting in Northampton for 30 years, to talk about his recent book, “Horse Medicine,” published by Barrow Street Press in 2015.
Anderson will be reading from the book as well as newer work at Spoken Word Greenfield, Tuesday, March 15 at 9 Mill St., Greenfield. Doors open at 7:00 p.m. and 10 five-minute open mic slots begin at 7:30. Anderson and poet Cindy Markevich follow the open mic as this month’s featured readers.
The cover of “Horse Medicine” is a photo Anderson took of a horse running in a paddock at Blue Star Equiculture, a sanctuary for working horses near his home in Palmer.
“Horses changed my way of seeing the world, really,” Anderson says. “They’re phenomenally sensitive, especially the big draft horses.”
Anderson wonders whether, given its title, the book is sometimes mis-filed with books for veterinarians, an error we agree would not necessarily be a bad thing for the vets. But the poems in “Horse Medicine” are about plenty of other things, too.
Glancing through the table of contents, Anderson recites a litany that includes: poems about Vietnam; about the dissolution of a marriage; a poem “casting love as religious ecstasy;” poems about getting old, about writing; about the Northern Lights; about jazz; about sex; about films; two homages to Hafiz …
And he’s not even done yet.
We choose to talk about “Kind of Blue,” because Anderson says the poem represents a new direction he’d like to explore further.
Anderson says he likes to, “Try and emulate with language what a horn player does in a jazz solo, so that it has an improvisatory feel to it.” He wasn’t listening to Miles Davis’ 1959 jazz release, “Kind of Blue,” when he wrote the poem, Anderson says, but he was thinking about it.
“This album is so etched in my mind that I can play it back to myself … It’s, to me, a perfect jazz album. It’s the most perfect jazz album I’ve ever heard: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley. It’s an amazing record.”
“I used to be a jazz musician,” Anderson adds. “And that’s very much a part of me, still.”
Anderson smiles as he recalls his days of playing drums with jazz bands in clubs in Tucson, Ariz. when he was 16.
“I was big for my age, so I got away with it,” he says. “I worked in a place called Smiley’s that had strippers in the regular hours, and in the after hours, all the jazz musicians would show up to jam.”
As he was writing “Kind of Blue,” Anderson found himself remembering a John Coltrane solo that brought up images of water running downhill.
“Like the streams in Sabino Canyon in Tucson,” Anderson says. “They run down rapidly and then they pool in places. And then they run a little bit more, and then they pool in places. And that reminded me very much of a jazz solo.”
Once he was in that remembered landscape, the next line came to him: “A whorl of hell-heaven heat carves mind glyphs in rock all the way down.”
“All over Arizona there are these old petroglyphs from Indians,” Anderson says. “Prehistoric, some of them. And just by working with the remembered sounds of this music, I’m churning up all kinds of other material, which I find fresh.”
“I’ve written a lot about love, and I’ve written a lot about war and I’m suddenly hungry for different things to write about,” Anderson continues. “I don’t know if I have anything more to say about love at this point in my life. Other than that it baffles me. That I know less about it every day, if I’m honest.
“And war, I could probably go on writing about war for the rest of my life but it seems to just keep going on. There’s a war all the time. The camouflage uniforms have changed but it’s the same thing.”
Anderson was a Navy corpsman stationed with a Marine battalion in Vietnam, where he worked as a combat medic. He’s become known as a “war poet,” a handle he doesn’t much care for.
“I would like to have people look at my poems as poetry, instead of (focusing on) one very heavy content,” he says.
Anderson has published widely in journals and has two previous collections of poems: “The Moon Reflected Fire” (1994) and “Blues for Unemployed Secret Police” (2000). A memoir, “Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties, and a Journey of Self-Discovery,” was published in 2000. Awards include grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the McDowell Colony, a Pushcart Prize and more. He’s taught at the University of Connecticut, Smith and Emerson colleges, and in the MFA writing programs of Pacific University of Oregon and Bennington College. Anderson also leads reading and writing workshops for veterans, which he views as a continuation of his service.
The war poems, Anderson says, “were like contents under pressure. I had to write them. They had to be said.”
“And, how powerful language is when it’s coming from that kind of place,” he continues. “My project for the rest of my life is to find other places that kind of energy can come from.”
Ask for “Horse Medicine” by Doug Anderson (Barrow Street Press, NYC) at local bookstores or order it online at: barrowstreet.org/press/book/horse-medicine-doug-anderson/
Watch Anderson read another poem, “Blue,” to some horses at:/youtu.be/SURikFLkc_I