WIPing a Book into Shape

I suspect that most writers—at least writers with better working habits—try to stay focused on one book at a time. I’m not one of them. I’m usually reading five or six books at the same time, and do the same with books I’m writing. I’ll go back and forth between these Works-In-Progress, and sometimes find that problems encountered (and solved) in one can inform other books as well.

One of my current books-in-progress is tentatively titled Meetings with Remarkable Men ...and a Few Others. I’ve posted portions of this book before (such as Illegitimi Non Carborundum and Fifty-one Years Ago This Week). This morning, I added some material to its Afterword, and wrote the little entry included below.

Mixed Media

About six decades ago, in one of my college painting classes, we had a guest speaker. We had never had guest speakers before, and—I suppose—I should have found that to be unusual. But much of college life was new and unusual, so the thought never occurred to me.

Another thing that should have triggered questions was the speaker himself. Why, in a painting class, would we be spoken to by a poet?

His talk was fascinating enough that its incongruity never came up. I don’t remember if I asked him any questions, but I must have—because he recognized me, later that night, in the Wine Cellar (the basement of a bar where art students—and their musical or poetry-mongering friends—hung out).

We spent a few hours talking, just the two of us—mostly about art and literature. The one specific thing I recall is that he asked me what magazines I read.

I expected my answer to disappoint him (since it wasn’t a poetry journal), maybe surprise him (it was Scientific American). Instead, he told me that it was his favorite magazine too. As someone who has been told, most of my life, that my interests in science and art were incompatible, this was quite reassuring.

While I had never wondered, at the time, why this poet was in town—and why he only spoke in a painting class—I believe that I have since found an answer.

The poet Robert Creeley had been among the creative cloud of artists, musicians, writers, designers, and architects who had worked together in Black Mountain College, between 1933 and 1957. The renaissance of American art that began with the Abstract Expressionist painters, and continued through Pop and Op art, and Conceptual Art, can trace its origins to that creative Camelot in North Carolina.

My painting teacher, Manny Bromberg, had been one of the artists at Black Mountain—and Creeley was an old friend.

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