This is about the practice of poetry, about why it can be a struggle.

In “The War of Art” Steven Pressfield discusses what he terms the artist’s “orientation.” It’s a dichotomy (or, to use a more trendy word, a “binary”) of “the hierarchical” versus “the territorial.” You may know what he means by hierarchical, especially if I mention that he takes as his examples Hollywood, Washington (not just government; think of the cocktail parties) and the DAR. Perhaps the best examples, though, are from the animal kingdom: the wolf pack, with its fights to find a leader, the hen house, with its pecking order.

The territorial does not, in Pressfield’s description, yield as vivid examples as these, because, as I understand it, the territory is personal, and inner. It is a field planted and watered, weeded and nurtured, by a muse. The artist’s work is itself a territory, not found in a group, as is the hierarchical, but in the practice itself. The distinction is crucial, and I’m thinking of the root of that word “crucial,” which is “cross.” because here, between hierarchy and territory, are the artist’s crossroads. You know that the Devil waits at the crossroads, right? So, in the other direction, lies what Pressfield – and any artist – terms “a true calling.” At the crossing between the territorial and the hierarchical, the artist meets the devil and the muse. And decides whether to sell the soul for the gift of success or surrender the soul to whatever one is truly called to do.

We know how unreliable the Devil is. He has a habit of grabbing souls without keeping promises. One can argue, as well, that following one’s calling instead of selling one’s soul doesn’t guarantee fame and glory. But that’s where the real crossroads lie, at the junction of the hierarchy and the artistic territory. The hierarchical compass, the  way I understand it, points toward success which is outside, external, defined by others. It locates the practitioner in an artistic hierarchy. How many Pulitzers? How many Guggenheims? Commissions, best sellers? The territorial is, well, an end in itself, because her territory is where the artist belongs and where success is defined not as the product of the work but as doing the work. It’s the familiar principle of the work being an end in itself, its own reward.

Okay, that’s a cliché, I know. I wouldn’t be a poet if I couldn’t recognize a cliché. But there is truth in a cliché. That’s how an idea, an expression, becomes cliched. by repeating an important, if familiar, truth.  We realize this, make real the truth expressed, not by spouting cliches but by putting their truths into practice, in specific situations.

For me, in my poetry practice the struggle is with the hierarchical orientation. With the hierarchy of “great” poets. Even with less but still highly reputed poets. I don’t have to read Shakespeare or Milton, Keats or Wordsworth, to know that I’m not a great poet. The hierarchy of American poets of the past 100 years alone is enough. I’m not nor likely ever to be a Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, or even a Billy Collins. In fact, any given issue of “Poetry Magazine” presents a heap of poetry that I’m at the bottom of.  Reading just about any good poem – and I can tell the good from the not-so-good – I find myself saying “I could never have written that poem.”

I’m placing myself, and my practice, in the hierarchy. And at a very low position in the pecking order. I’m allowing the hierarchy to determine the value of my poetry and to question my purpose. Why am I writing poems only to find them at the bottom of the heap?

Basically, I’m cancelling my practice before I even begin.

Except that I continue to write poems. Why? Because somewhere in my tortured psyche something – or someone – is telling me that I’m called to do this. To do it no matter where in the heap I end up, no matter how successful I am by any measure of success, and no matter what I might think of my poems. It’s the work that counts. It’s the work itself that I’m called to do.

And the work is hard. I don’t know any poets who say otherwise. Mary Oliver wrote somewhere that writing a good poem is like trying to carry water in a sieve. But language is, to a poet, to someone who is truly called to poetry, an endlessly fascinating thing. And a thing capable of great beauty.  That’s the territory, the fertile field where the poet works: language. If he or she does the work, something will grow. And if he or she works hard enough, persistently enough, that something will be beautiful.

My youngest, my one-and-only Meg of the satiric tongue and mermaid hair, asks me if I was at Woodstock.  No, I respond (this is all in text messages), that famous rock concert/love fest/mud bath was in New York and I was on the west coast in a body cast because I’d almost been killed in a motorcycle accident.  “You were almost KILLED?!”  Meg expresses shock in a stockade of question marks and exclamation points.  “Why didn’t I ever know this???!!!”

Then I think of this blog and remember that its purpose is to record family history.  I grew up knowing far too little of my family’s past.  I hope my children will know more.

Chris turned one when I was in the hospital, in June of 1969.  I seem to remember his coming with Celia on his birthday.  It was Seattle’s Public Health Services Hospital, now defunct as a hospital (the building was occupied by Amazon for a while; I don’t know what’s there now).  It was one of the teaching hospitals for the UW School of Medicine, where (the UW hospital) Kate was born later that year. (Another bedside moment was Celia telling me, as I lay on my back in traction, that she was pregnant.)  There were wonderful moments such as these in that hospital bed, but most of the time I was doped up against the pain.  And against the difficulty of sleeping on my back with my arm held up in the rigging.  But I get ahead of myself.

It’s hard to say exactly what turned me into a motorcycle freak, other than the usual male fascination with speed and machines.  I had always been obsessed with cars, and any day dream or fantasy that didn’t involve sex was about cars.  (Guns also, I should add, sex, cars and guns; good things come in three, right?)  Owning an actual sports car, a Healey or an MG or one of the more exotic machines I saw in Road and Track, was impossible for a middle class high school boy.  But as the object of fantasy, well.  That’s another thing, and completely possible.  I could pretend, and in the summer especially, mowing the lawn (we had a very large yard, and it was my job to mow it) I could relieve the tedium of plowing back and forth across the grass by imagining myself at the wheel of something low and red and topless.

When it came to actual cars, I wasn’t practical, nor did I know as much as I should have.  When I got married, on my 24^th birthday, my bride, Celia, had some money.  To my shame, I persuaded her to leave our lovely honeymoon spot in the White Mountains and drive into the nearest city and buy a used, blue Austin Healey 3000.  When my dad, who really did know cars, saw it he was clearly skeptical as to its condition and value.  I can’t remember the details, but I think the shocks were bad.  I thought that, as a Healey man, Dad would simply approve of the purchase and congratulate me.  To his credit, he did not express scorn, but neither did he clap me on the back and welcome me to the select circle of auto aficionados, as I’d hoped he would.

The Healey didn’t last long.  I mean, in my ownership.  I lost control on an icy road in Saratoga Springs NY that winter, 1967-68, and totaled it.  (Actually, and as most car owners know, “totaled” does not mean “this car is a total wreck and not worth fixing.”  It simply means “this here British sports car is too expensive to repair so we’re going to pay off your loan and sell your car to someone who would be happy to fix it.”  A few weeks after the insurance settlement I saw my Healey on the street in Saratoga, repaired and looking more fetching than before.)

I can’t remember what we did for transportation the rest of that winter.  In the spring, before we left Saratoga Springs, we bought a 1952 Chevy, a heroic vehicle which I wish I still had.  It took us from coast to coast in the summer of 1968, with baby Chris in a bassinet in the back seat.  But that is another story.  This one is about motorcycles.  And about that brush with death.

I had a friend in Saratoga Springs, Harold Britton.  Harold had two immensely important influences on my life.  He taught me those two great folk songs, “Banks of the Ohio” and “Long Black Veil.”  And he sold me his 1954 Harley Davidson hard tail.

And that was the beginning of my love affair with motorcycles.  The Harley needed work, so I moved my wife and myself into a large walk-in closet and moved the bike into our bedroom (which had back door access), where it smelled of gas and oil and got fixed enough to ride.  It started hard – I suspect it badly needed a valve job —  but my 24 year old  right leg was strong and I could kick enough life into that old engine that I was able to ride the bike to work, and then back to Massachusetts, where, being practical enough to realize that I couldn’t easily move a wife, baby and ancient Chevy to Seattle along with a cranky old bike, I sold it to my brother Blackie.

But I remained hooked.  We had not lived in Seattle for more than a month before I got the itch to buy another bike.  At the time, Honda had graduated from the friendly little 60 and 90 and 120 cc models (“You meet the nicest people on a Honda” rang the ad jingle) that countered the stereotype of the tattooed, chain-encumbered “biker” on big, 1200 cc Harleys, and was now producing technologically advanced and seriously fast street machines.  Please understand that we are talking advanced and fast by the standards of 1968.  That was when the Honda 450 showed up in American show rooms, a handsome machine sporting a 450 cc twin overhead cam engine.  I walked into University Honda in Seattle and learned, much to the surprise of my youthful inexperience, that salesmen have ways of directing potential buyers to the money needed to buy their products.  I managed to avoid the loan sharks, though.  I was in the Navy and learned I was eligible to join the Navy Federal Credit Union, which for some strange reason thought I was a good credit risk, and lent me the money to buy a shiny red new Honda 450.  I was in heaven.

The problem was that at University Honda I ran into a serious motorcycle crowd.  No, not Hells Angels.  These were guys who raced motorcycles at weekend events.  They were cool, and they were friendly, guys with the real common touch.  They hung out at University Honda, where one of them was a Honda Factory-trained mechanic.  They drank at the Blue Moon tavern after work and raced on weekends.  I was already besotted with power on two wheels, now I was coming under the charismatic influence of cool guys who knew how to race those machines.  About six or eight months later I traded the 450 for a Bultaco Pur Sang, a serious dirt racing bike.  And that was the deep end of the pool for someone who was still doing the dog paddle.  I should have signed up for beginner classes.  Instead I bought an old Ford panel truck from one of those bike friends so I could truck my Bultaco around, and went riding in the dirt.  And that was where I nearly met my Maker,  in a small dirt-bike-rider’s wilderness in West Seattle.

How we ran into each other, I and David Miller, he with the Honda factory training and some genuine pretensions to riding skill, no one knows.  David and I were the only witnesses to the accident, and we were rendered seriously unconscious by the collision.  It was clear that we had run into each other, but how it happened has never returned to my memory.  If David has finally remembered, he hasn’t said.  I woke up in the hospital with total amnesia.  In addition to a serious concussion, I’d suffered a compound fracture of my right humerus as well as of right tibia and fibula.  (And a serious laceration of my right knee, but “serious” is relative here.  The cut sewed up and healed easily.)  The problem was what to do with the broken arm.  It took nearly a month to prove that it wasn’t going to set in traction.  My orthopedist, Dr. Lester, finally decided on a bone graft, a plate screwed into the bone across the fracture, and a body cast to hold everything in place.  This in addition to a full leg cast to stabilize the broken right leg.  I headed to the OR.

Treatment of bone fractures has advanced a lot in 46 years, so an orthopedist today would probably look at that awkward plaster cast and scratch his head, and, reading the clinical reports from 1969 would probable think, “I could have had this kid out of that hospital bed in under a week.”  As it was, I lay in traction for a month, went into surgery, and, totally plastered, returned to our house in the University District early that summer.  I enrolled in courses at the UW, read Thoreau, slept on my back, and one day that fall was freed from the cast.

I could have been dead and, some might argue, probably deserved to be.  But I was alive and still in love with bikes.  In January 1970 I bought my friend Eric’s 1969 Triumph Bonneville.  But no, Meg, I never made it to Woodstock.

One of my earliest memories of Dad is from the first of two periods living in Middletown, Rhode Island, across the inlet from Newport.  I would have been about five or so, and had just gone to bed.  Dad came in to kiss me goodnight, and I remember how rough his chin felt against my cheek as he did this, and how soft that feeling was.  A tender man, and a stern one.  From that same period: I was outside in the yard playing with my cap pistol, and I must have pointed it at someone, perhaps my brother Blackie, perhaps at Dad himself, who very sternly told me that it didn’t matter that it was a toy gun, if I ever pointed it at anyone again, he would take it from me.

Three or four years later, for my eighth birthday, he bought me a single-shot .22 caliber rifle, sawed an inch or two off the butt so it would fit my young arms, and began to teach me to shoot.  He was a strict, demanding, and unrelenting teacher, and a good one.  We moved that year to Ankara Turkey where he was stationed as an attache to the Turkish navy–“spying on the Russians,” he used to say–at a desk job (mostly desk; there were mysterious journeys away from his desk to unidentified places), which gave us time on weekends for rifle shooting.  We would go outside the city to an area where a dirt bank provided a safe backstop.  Dad would dig small holes in the dirt to hold my elbows in place, and grind my hand and arm into the sling-supported prone position.  I remember that it was painful. Dad’s instruction was precise and exacting, and by the time we were back in the states, at the target range on the island, I slung naturally into prone, and the other positions, with confidence and without any pain.  By the time I finished high school I had gone through the entire marksmanship course offered by the NRA, and earned my Distinguished Rifleman badge.  I was shooting in state-wide competitions, and one year came in second place in the Maine State Smallbore Championship, behind our friend and neighbor, Irving Merry.  I would never have progressed this far without Dad, who was, to my young eyes, nothing less than a champion teacher.  He was supremely confident in his knowledge and expertise (he was an expert shot himself), and in teaching mode he inspired another kind of confidence, confidence in his love and concern for me as his son.

I wish I knew more about Dad’s background.  Growing up, I knew he had been born and raised in Des Moines, that his father had died when he was, I heard, thirteen.  It was said that my grandfather had been a cabinet-maker, and Dad’s skill at wood-working certainly bore this out.  Growing up during the Great Depression was hard, I remember hearing, with little money.  His widowed mother earned a living, in part at least, by giving music lessons (she was an accomplished pianist and composer).  I heard he sang treble in an Episcopal choir in Des Moines.  He told us about the packets of yellow die that used to come with margarine, to be used to make it look like butter.  He told us about the poor boys’ entertainments of those days, such as rolling down hill inside large tires.  But I wish I knew more, and there is probably some, if not much, that I heard growing up which I’ve now forgotten.

I did know my grandmother, Grandma Jeanne, later, when she came to live with us in Maine after we moved to The Island in 1959.  She was an eccentric woman with, as we would say today, “issues,” a hard woman, a female Captain Ahab of the household, with no white whale other than her own demands, and, in my limited teenage judgment, no eyes for the feelings or concerns of others.  When Mom would say that Dad “was the way he was” because his mother had shown him little regard as a child, I understood what she meant.  “The way he was” referred to Dad’s growing disinclination to compromise in family struggles, his increasing self-isolation, especially after he retired from the Navy at the young age of forty-three.

But I am seventy as I write this, and have little stomach for describing the hard edges of my father’s character, or of his mother’s.  I come to understand the meaning of that fifth commandment, honor thy father and thy mother.  It comes with a promise, that honoring, the promise “that your days may be long in the land that the Lord is giving you.”  In recalling the best that Dad was, and that he gave, I feel at home and alive in the life the Lord gives me now.

Dad joined the Navy when he was very young, at least by today’s standards.  In the fabled Royal Navy of the days of sail, young men went to sea as midshipmen when they were scarcely out of short pants.  In Dad’s day they were more likely to be out of high school.  There was a rumor that Dad had lied about his age and joined up at seventeen, but I never knew whether that was true.  (Mom was, like the girl in Saki’s story “The Open Window,” adept at “romance at short notice,” and she had a tendency to believe her romances were factual.  This may have been one of those romances, or perhaps that notion is something my own imagination is creating.)  His first ship was the battleship Texas, but he sailed before the mast for only a few years, because by the time he was twenty-three, some five years later, he had graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with the class of ’39, with a commission in the Naval Reserve.  He had earned a “fleet appointment” to the Academy by passing a battery of tests.  (His older brother John had won the political appointment; this made Dad ineligible for the same.)

I don’t know much about his time at Annapolis.  The one story I remember is that he was chosen for the color guard at graduation because he had never fainted on the parade ground during drill, and there are pictures of him, in his yearbook, parading the colors during that ceremony.  His time in the reserves was short.  I don’t know when he went active, but we were at war two years later, so it would not have been long after he was commissioned.  He served in combat, and as far as I know, for the duration of the war, most notably as skipper of PC1263 during the Normandy invasion.

I have no memory of Dad until after the war, and still have virtually no memory of his naval career until he was stationed in U.S.S. Fargo as chief gunnery officer.  That would have been some time in the late 1940’s, when I was five or so.  After that the record is fairly clear.  We moved to The Island when I was seven, and at that time he was still on sea duty, I believe with the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean.  Then from fall 1951 until spring 1954 he was on shore duty in Ankara, taking us with him.  We returned to the States when he was posted to U.S.S. Preston, DD795, as commanding officer, living for a month in Key West while he attended destroyer school, then moving to Middletown for the second time, because Preston was sailing out of Newport.

Dad took ill with a bronchial condition some time the following year.  I know little about the details, only that he required surgery and that this put him on sick leave long enough that he was relieved of his command.  When he went back to sea, some time in 1955, he was in U.S.S. Coral Sea, CVA 43, flagship of Carrier Division Six, I think it was, as navigation officer on the admiral’s staff.  As he was sailing out of Norfolk, we all moved to Virginia Beach in the fall of 1955 (we were spending summers on The Island and then moving in the fall, in time to start school wherever Dad was stationed).  I attended seventh grade in Virginia Beach, having completed sixth grade in Middletown.  (I had begun elementary school in Middletown in 1949.  From there, I went to second grade in Newcastle Maine, in–this is not a cliche–a one-room school with eight grades, one teacher, and an outhouse in the back.  I completed grades three through five in the American school in Ankara, the only time I was more than one year in a given school until beginning high school in 1957.)

In 1956 Dad was ordered to the United States Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point on Long Island as Professor of Naval Science and, to the best of my knowledge, commanding officer of the NROTC unit there.  We moved to Plainview in central Long Island and Dad commuted to Kings Point.  Two and a half years later he retired from the Navy, and at the end of the school year in the spring of 1959, we moved to The Island as our year-round residence.

Dad was promoted to captain on his retirement, such promotion, with all benefits, being an honor then accorded to officers decorated in combat.  But he and I never talked about his retirement.  What I heard from Mom was only two things, that he had been passed over for captain, and had decided to retire rather than become junior to officers who had been his peers.  I did hear rumors of his being offered a job at the Bath Iron Works, and this would certainly have been possible, as naval officers did sometimes become consultants in the defense industry.  BIW was building–still builds–destroyers and Dad was a destroyer man, so it would have been a good fit.  But I consider the rumor as belonging only to the realm of possibility.  Dad was still a young man in terms of time in career, but I suspect that he was too much a sailor to think he’d ever be happy driving ships in dry dock.

So he retired to a remote farm house in Maine and began a second career, restoring antique sports cars.  But that’s another blog.  Here’s a poem Dad wrote on one of the more famous days in modern history.

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6th June, 1944

My God, as on this day I sail into

The crucible of battle, take my hand,

And lead me on with courage to subdue

The mortal fear that I may not withstand

Death’s choiceless search.  Grant me a steadfast will,

To prove the trust of men whom I command,

So that, if I return, I may fulfil,

With them, the end whose means are close at hand.

And give me strength to see my weaknesses.

In knowing them I may evaluate

The bigotries that cunningly suppress

The dignity of Man, and tolerate

Man’s individuality.  If, here,

I die, then grant that I may live somewhere

Within the hearts of those whose love I share.

And say I was in death, as life, sincere.

The name of this blog.  “At Every Gate” is from Emily Dickinson, #453 (she didn’t title her poems, and neither does her editor, R.W. Franklin).  The last stanza goes-

Retreat – was out of Hope- / Behind – a Sealed Route – / Eternity’s White Flag – Before / And God – at every Gate.

Who I am.  And why.  This is a family blog, meaning it’s about family.  I am Dad, Skip, Dr. Stevens to some, Ralph to others.  Just in case you want to know.  For purposes of this blog I happen to be the pater familias a title I adopt because I’m the oldest member of the family and I happen to be a father.

The audience for this blog is the members of my family.  This simply means that when I write I am thinking of my family, I am writing to them.  But this is a public blog.  I don’t mind others reading it, and those who do are members of my “blog family.”   And if you are not a Stevens or related to a Stevens, please don’t be confused if what you read doesn’t seem to include you.  I have no intention of excluding anyone; I am just addressing members of my family and not the world in general.  I only hope that you who read this, whether family or not, are folks who will cut me some slack.  I like to think that those who read are people who could watch me having a nightmare and still be kind to me.

Why.  Meg says, “Why do you never tell us these things!!”  “I’m sorry, Meg, I guess it just never came up in conversation, that we used to live on a boat in Seattle, or that your Aunt Jeanne and I used to read Winnie the Pooh together when she was a little girl.”  But eventually it does, of course–come up in conversation.  And then I realize that there are a lot of things I wish I knew about family, things that did NOT come up in conversation when I was a boy, and that probably are not coming up in conversation now.  And then there’s the problem of communication, of sharing news about what’s going on now in the family, information that at least some, and sometimes all, family members need to know.  “Hey, everybody, Ben just called from the Arctic Titan and said the Whittier trip might be delayed because of electrical problems on the boat.”  That sort of thing.

Why this blog, then?  Two purposes.  Keep the family informed, and tell something of the family story.

My mom–Grandma Ruth to some of you, Aunt Ruth to others–kept a blog.  Only in those days it wasn’t called “blog” which as you know is short for “web log.”  She didn’t live into the Internet age, so she simply called it a log, “The Stevens Log.”  It was a journal (a daily record, after the French for day, “journee,” which if I remember correctly is the origin of “journey” meaning how far one could travel in a day–but I’m getting off the subject)–a record of our life on “The Island,” which was the name we gave our place on the Sheepscot River.  After we moved in (this was in 1950, on my seventh birthday), my dad went to sea, so Mom was left alone on The Island with two boys, a seven-year-old and a four-year-old, our brother Blackie, who had turned four the previous March.  A city girl, in an isolated farmhouse in Maine, with no telephone, and a mile from the nearest neighbor, facing a Maine winter with two little boys to take care of.  So she started blogg–uh, logging.

It’s good for families to tell their stories.