{"id":852,"date":"2017-10-18T20:39:06","date_gmt":"2017-10-18T20:39:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/?p=852"},"modified":"2017-10-18T20:39:06","modified_gmt":"2017-10-18T20:39:06","slug":"the-soulful-traveler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/2017\/10\/18\/the-soulful-traveler\/","title":{"rendered":"The Soulful Traveler"},"content":{"rendered":"

[The following is Scott Edward Anderson’s Introduction to Sensational Nightingales: The Collected Poems of Walter Pavlich<\/em>, just published by Lynx House Press. –Editor]<\/p>\n

\u201cWriting is a way of saying you and the world have a chance,\u201d poet Richard Hugo wrote. Hugo\u2019s student, Walter Pavlich, once said in an interview, \u201cI\u2019ve always tried to define \u2013 and celebrate \u2013 sort of hard things in life. To try to find beauty in them \u2013 or to be more patient and watch the beauty unfold.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like Hugo, Pavlich wrote about the western landscapes he inhabited and the people he encountered there, and like Hugo, he was a regionalist in the best sense of the word: someone who knows the place where he lives and writes from that place well-observed.<\/p>\n

Hugo\u2019s influence, and by extension Theodore Roethke, with whom Hugo studied, is fairly evident in Pavlich\u2019s work, especially the early poems. Yet, as his widow and soulmate Sandra McPherson wrote to me, Walter \u201cwas incredibly rich & rare & doesn\u2019t merely sound like Dick Hugo at all; [he] also had subjects from his engaged life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pavlich\u2019s engaged life included work as a wildfire fighter, \u201csmoke jumper,\u201d and poetry teacher in prisons and schools. Born in Portland, Oregon, Pavlich graduated from the University of Oregon in Eugene and earned an MFA from the University of Montana, and his fondness for the forests and coastal environments of the Pacific Northwest of the United States pervades his poetry.
\nSomething Sandra said to me also seems pervasive in Walter\u2019s poetry: he had \u201ca kind of spiritual isolation or loneliness he\u2019s not explicit about.\u201d<\/p>\n

I think of Walter Pavlich as a \u201csoulful traveler\u201d; indeed, it was one of the things I think drew us to each other at Squaw Valley, where we met in 1992.<\/p>\n

Seven or eight years his junior, I was still very much in an apprentice stage as a poet, and perhaps Walter saw something of himself in me \u2013 a poetry outsider who preferred the outdoors to stuffy classrooms. I know he appreciated the presence of nature in my poems and we shared a love of Laurel & Hardy comedies.<\/p>\n

There was something in Walter\u2019s eyes; photographs don\u2019t quite do them justice, where they appear heavy-lidded, almost sleepy. In Walter\u2019s eyes you could see he had seen things, had seen life.<\/p>\n

In a poem about Walter\u2019s last days, Sandra noted, \u201cHe overflowed to feel any vacant space.\u201d To feel any vacant space. You can sense the depth of such feeling in his poem \u201cIn the Belly of the Ewe,\u201d<\/p>\n

And so he told us how he had been sewn<\/em>
\n into the belly of a ewe by his father<\/em>
\n and a couple of uncles, because his legs<\/em>
\n would not unfold after delivery,<\/em><\/p>\n

as though in the womb the ligaments<\/em>
\n had looped around bone and kinked,<\/em>
\n heels clamped to thighs, a spiritual<\/em>
\n cramp from God, an execration<\/em><\/p>\n

for what they did not know.<\/em>
\n His mother kept next to him in the barn,<\/em>
\n pinching off sheep ticks, not sleeping<\/em>
\n while the baby slept, helping the animal<\/em><\/p>\n

to its side when its own legs hardened<\/em>
\n from the standing, and kept the hooves<\/em>
\n from kicking his exposed tottering head.<\/em>
\n On the second Sunday of his life<\/em><\/p>\n

they slit him free, limbs in a dangle<\/em>
\n like severed rubberbands, and slaughtered<\/em>
\n the beast with the same knife for that<\/em>
\n day’s blessed supper. He told us this<\/em><\/p>\n

in the yard of the world’s largest prison,<\/em>
\n on the way back to his cell where<\/em>
\n he continued to cough up little wet<\/em>
\n moths of blood, where he was always<\/em><\/p>\n

cold, always ashamed, as he gathered<\/em>
\n the wool blanket up and around him.<\/em><\/p>\n

While the early poems may be filled with what poet David Axelrod calls \u201cspitting anger,\u201d often focusing on the hard things in life with an equal measure of toughness and compassion, Walter\u2019s later poetry is perhaps characterized by a deep empathy.
\nThomas Aslin, Walter\u2019s friend and fellow student of Hugo\u2019s, wrote of him, \u201cWalt, who could be quite emotional at times, felt things strongly.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a 1993 review of Pavlich\u2019s Running Near the End of the World<\/em>, I ventured that Walter\u2019s \u201cthemes are timeless \u2013 fire, loss, the inability of words to communicate, the frail humanity of the imprisoned and the persecuted \u2013 and he treats them with a verbal grace and a spiritual discernment of the complexity of human life, warts and all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Walter Pavlich died far too young, a month before his 47th birthday. I always thought he died from complications related to an enlarged heart \u2013 a condition known as “cardiomegaly.” I\u2019m not sure where I heard that or whether Walter actually had that condition, but it seemed fitting that this man of generous spirit would have a heart too big for his body, a heart that couldn\u2019t be contained no matter how much he poured out onto the page, ever feeling that vacant space around him.<\/p>\n

Ours is a lost world in need of such empathy. Walter\u2019s empathy for the human condition also extended to the non-human, such as the last surviving animal in the Sarajevo zoo during the siege of 1992, which Walter immortalized in his poem, \u201cSarajevo Bear\u201d:<\/p>\n

The last animal<\/em>
\n In the Sarajevo Zoo<\/em>
\n A bear<\/em>
\n Died of starvation<\/em>
\n Because the leaves<\/em>
\n Had fallen<\/em>
\n From the trees<\/em>
\n Because<\/em>
\n The air was<\/em>
\n Getting colder<\/em>
\n So the snipers<\/em>
\n Could more easily see<\/em>
\n The few remaining people<\/em>
\n Who were trying to<\/em>
\n Feed it.<\/em><\/p>\n

Several years ago, Thomas Aslin published his notes from Richard Hugo\u2019s classes in the Georgia Review<\/em>. I don\u2019t know whether Walter Pavlich was in class that day, Aslin could probably confirm, but there\u2019s one quote that seems to fit Walter as a credo: \u201cBe great on the page and modest in real life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pavlich was modest in real life. In his last days, running an online antiques business and writing very little, he told an interviewer, \u201cIt\u2019s okay to be silent and not write for a while. I don\u2019t force it anymore. I relax with it. It might be a way of saying less ego \u2013 or less rhapsodizing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Walter once sent me a cassette, somewhere I still have it, filled with gospel music he loved. He was especially fond of the quartet known as the Sensational Nightingales. One of their most popular songs, \u201cMorning Train,\u201d sings about going home on the morning train because \u201cthat evening train may be too late.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his later poems, especially those in The Spirit of Blue Ink<\/em>, Walter\u2019s yearning spirit is palpable. Almost I want to say you can sense his getting ready to board that morning train. As David Axelrod put it to me in an email, \u201cHe seems to have arrived at or was approaching a brokenhearted and generous philosophical quietism.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is Walter Pavlich, leaning into the rhythms of the music he heard, whether in churches or among the blackbirds along a highway, filling himself with a \u201cshivery ephemeral blush,\u201d until, finally, as he wrote in a late poem,<\/p>\n

It is time<\/em>
\n to sing again, to pray<\/em>
\n with notes, sorrow harmonized<\/em>
\n with joy, asking for wings,<\/em><\/p>\n

beautiful wings to the resting place.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[The following is Scott Edward Anderson’s Introduction to Sensational Nightingales: The Collected Poems of Walter Pavlich, just published by Lynx House Press. –Editor] \u201cWriting is a way of saying you and the world have a chance,\u201d poet Richard Hugo wrote. Hugo\u2019s student, Walter Pavlich, once said in an interview, \u201cI\u2019ve always tried to define \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":164,"featured_media":854,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[117,113,150,165,112],"class_list":["post-852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-basaltblog","category-featured-articles","tag-richard-hugo","tag-sandra-mcpherson","tag-scott-edward-adnerson","tag-sensational-nightingales","tag-walter-pavlich"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/164"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=852"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/852\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":855,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/852\/revisions\/855"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}