I-70 Review

Writing and Art from the Middle and Beyond

My early stomping grounds were in the Westport area of Kansas City, Missouri within a bike ride of the Nelson Art Gallery and Loose Park.  An old guard seeing me alone at the gallery entrance occasionally invited me, a ten-year-old boy, to view the exhibits at the gallery under his supervision and instruction. My favorite painting was “John In The Wilderness,” by Caravaggio.  I have carried that secular image of John The Baptist as a guiding light and Caravaggio, a talented iconoclast, as my patron saint.  The pond and willow trees of the park were my escape from a troubled family home.

     Encounters going to and from inner city schools did not prepare me for an academic career but I learned how to navigate the streets well enough to survive the darker shadows of my neighborhood.  By chance I was awarded a half time scholarship at Rockhurst College, left home just before my seventeenth birthday and was able to find work as a copy boy and junior reporter at the Kansas City Times only to be drafted in 1966 on my way to graduate school.

     My national guard unit was activated during the race riots of 1968, then nationalized by Lyndon Johnson.  In 1969 I served with the 4th of the 9th Infantry along the Cambodian Border in Tay Ninh Province and at the 25th Division Headquarters Company in Cu Chi.

     My life has been enriched by experiences as a caddy at area golf courses, as a club house boy in the visiting team's locker room at the old Kansas City Athletics ball park where I waited on prominent baseball players of the late 1950's and managers like Casey Stengel, at a gourmet deli in a store where I learned about uncommon foods, cutting fiberglass at a plastics factory where I learned about unions and worker's rights, as a driver for the Coca Cola Bottling Company and as a psychiatric and medical nurse's aide where I learned a little about caring for people in pain.  

     At age eleven my father took me to a meeting of the Westport Landing Democratic Club and I became hooked on politics.  In the early 1970's I worked as a volunteer in two of Rep. Richard Bolling's election campaigns.

     When I returned from the Vietnam War I was newly married and flat broke.  Against all instincts I went to work for a reinsurance company in their libel insurance department where I was also exposed to special risks accounts like kidnap/ransom and professional liability insurance. In 1979 at the suggestion of the risk manager of a prominent national publisher I formed  Media/Professional Insurance, an international underwriting and claim management firm that insured and defended the First Amendment rights of the media, and then developed a national one-of-a-kind errors and omissions program backed by Lloyds of London for special risk exposures. My partner and I sold the company in 1992 when funny money investors began to flood the insurance market.

     My first book of poetry, The Eye Of The Ghost, won the 1985 BkMk Missouri Poet Contest.  Years later, my poem, “In The Morning In Missouri,” was chosen by The Kansas City Star as its official state poem.

     I am also the author of three other books of poetry: Last Lambs: New and Collected Poems of Vietnam (First and Second Editions) and Promises In The Dust, published by BkMk Press, and Pear Season and The Boy Who Ate Dandelions,  published by The Mid-America Press.

     My poems have appeared in several anthologies including, From Both Sides Now:  The Poetry of the Vietnam War and its Aftermath, Scribners, and are you experienced?:  baby boom poets at midlife, University of Iowa Press, and various poetry reviews and journals.

     I also write “long” stories, am in the process of writing a novel and maintain a website at billbauerpoetry.com.

     I currently serve as managing director of Scattering Skies Press, Inc., a non-profit publisher of unique and original poets who allow us to publish their work under the SSP imprint.  (SSP does not accept or return unsolicited submissions).

     I live and write on the island of Maui with my wife, Kathy.  My son, Erik, founder of Middle Class Pig Records and a concert promoter, lives in Tubingen, Germany.  My daughter, Laura, a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Design and Manufacturing (FDIM), a poet and a standup comedian, died of a seizure at the age of 34.

Bill Bauer

ON WRITING POETRY     

     I discovered poetry through an early bond I formed with my mother who read me nursery rhymes and later competed with me to see who could be first to ace word jumbles in the daily newspaper.  Our sessions led to my fascination with the sound and provenance of words and how they formed the happenings we call poems.

         While I will always be angry about being robbed of an academic career by being drafted against my will into a no-account war, I concede that the life-changing detour led me to witness the gamut of human foible, tragedy and enterprise as an underwriting manager in the special risks insurance market.  A lot of irony, and many examples of injustice, fraud and hypocrisy, are to be found there. Conversely, I have been fortunate in life to experience the beauty and violence of nature, and the basic goodness of people everywhere.  I consider these experiences to be the grist of poetry.

         Aristotle wrote, “Nothing is in the mind that is not first in the senses.” Those words have become my touchstone –– to keep an eye and ear open to the voices of authentic people and real life events.

         Since I find no evidence of an afterlife, I am stuck sparring against metaphysics by telling stories.  For me, that is what poems do: tell stories that cannot be told in any other way.  The kinds of poems that appeal most to me are those that display a unique way of hinting at the inexplicable.  As a form of storytelling, poems are a “for example,” because the details of a story rarely tell the whole story.

         Writing poems is an individual matter.  To each our own.  As with any human experience, there is no good and bad, right or wrong.  I do not think writing authentic poems can be taught.  Poems occur; they cannot be invented.  I write them down in the shape and flow and rhythms that they come to me. They are not word games or shorthand for anything.  They can be as long, as short, as musical, as prosaic, as they need to be.

         My interest in how we know things led me to experimental psychology, today known as neuroscience, the pursuit of which cost me my military deferment and dropped me into the middle of the Vietnam War.  At some moments I am a poet;  others a “scientist;” a business guy or a political activist. First and foremost, like it or not, I will always be a soldier.  There are no particular ways to describe what it is like to be a combat soldier.  There are poems.  So how it is goes with the rest of being born into this world.

         The hows and whys and conventions of writing poetry are less important to me than the poems themselves.  Poems are to be seen and heard and relished.  As Mama Cass has sung, to take a reader, “somewhere they've never been before”.