Jeff Biggers is the author of In the Sierra Madre (University of Illinois Press, 2007) and The United States of Appalachia (Shoemaker and Hoard, 2007). The University of Illinois Press recently published James J. Lorence’s A Hard Journey: The Life of Don West.
In the evenings, I often loitered near West’s front porch, where I would join him for long walks along the back roads. He listened to my youthful rants, my half-baked ideas, my endless questions. He recounted the details of his exploits in the 1930s with fire in his eyes. He planted the idea of attending the Danish folk schools, which I would follow up several years later. We plotted our own schemes in that tedious Reagan era—I will never forget helping West knock down a hornet’s nest on the rafters of a barn once, which resulted in a thousand stings. “Just toughening you up for the Washington thugs,” He said, grinning.
We laughed a lot; in fact, far from being the embittered old man that some had described, Don had a biting humor and wit. This much was clear: he didn’t suffer the breathless academics with no dirt on their hands or jail records to prove their commitment; he didn’t suffer middle class liberal do-gooders who would walk away when a fight broke out. He had been beaten, jailed, burned out, blacklisted and despised much of his life for his beliefs; he had allowed hurt and heartbreak among his family. Fairly or unfairly, he demanded the same commitment from anyone who claimed to be an activist or a writer. The rest of us were dilettantes.
He was also deeply caring and personal. I often tagged along with Don as he took his truck into rugged back hollows and abandoned coal camps, and delivered food and books; I marveled at the way he would quietly listen to the travails of folks living on the edge of despair. He was never patronizing. Ramrod tall, he reminded me of my grandfather, a John Henry-like coal miner in the hills of southern Illinois who had been struck down by a mining accident, diabetes and black lung disease.
“Mother Jones is buried in your coal fields in southern Illinois,” Don admonished me. “Never forget that.” He lectured me about learning my own family history.
Reaching into his overalls, Don fished out a book of his poems. He said, “Read poetry, a lot of poetry. Go find your grandpa’s poetry.”
I went back to my cabin and devoured Don West’s poems that summer, his rhymes about callused hands and gaunt mothers and living on gravy, his didactic musings about injustice and mining camps, his exhortation of wondrous mountain life and history. Somehow, it placed my wandering thoughts back on track that summer, and provided a meter of structure to my life. It led me back to my family, my roots, to school and to a career as a writer. I can honestly say it was my first book of poetry. It led inevitably to rebel poets and bon vivants like Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, Rabindranath Tagore, and Robert Burns. More importantly, I began to understand poetry as a means to peel back the layers of misunderstanding about our histories and cultural heritage. For the first time, I saw poetry as an act of resistance, in giving voice and celebrating the hidden histories of our own times. This led me to the legion of contemporary poets, like Lorine Niedecker, Denise Levertov, Grace Paley, Ron Rash, and Martín Espada, who have altered the way I envision the world now.
Some might think this hard to imagine, considering the work I admire and review these days. Some of West’s poetry now raises the hair on the back of my neck with its clichés and slogans, much in the way some of Neruda’s (and Hughes’s) genius was derailed into hackneyed mottos for ideological wags. But I am old enough to realize that this artistic Achilles heel, shaped by the angry 1930s and the proletarian poets and their world unhinged, doesn’t liquidate the rest of West’s groundbreaking work or the value of its contribution to miners, mill workers, sharecroppers, and others in a horrific period in the South. West’s poetry mattered.
Here’s the coda: Years later, after Don had died, his books had gone out of print (and it grieved me that Appalachian scholars, activists, publishers, editors and writers that had come of age in his shadows had shamefully allowed his work to stay out of print for well over a decade), I met Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz in a bar in Flagstaff, Arizona. Milosz had endured the wrath of Polish communism, eventually choosing to defect to the West. His poetry had also been considered dangerous and subversive, though among the censors and purveyors of the official working class behind the Iron Curtain. In those days, I treasured Milosz’s poetry and considered him the greatest living poet and had invited him to a literary festival I had organized in rural Arizona. His work, of course, was in another literary academy than that of Don West. That night, as we discussed poetry and the banter of roadside dogs, I never once thought to mention the Appalachian poet and his simple ballads.
Days later, though, I discovered that Milosz had written in his Nobel address about poetry’s ultimate inability to anticipate the catastrophes of our fractured times. At the same time, invoking his own obscure poetry heroes, he urged us to “publicly confess our attachment to certain names,” if only to celebrate literature and its possibilities for life, instead of attacking it; to not forget our sources of inspiration in harrowing times.
“Poetry saved my life,” I had told Milosz. Only now do I realize that I should have added, “thanks to Don West.”
*****
Jeff Biggers’s “Don West: Let Us Now Praise a Dangerous Poet, Part 1” was posted on November 7, 2007.
