If I am being brutally honest—and why the hell not be brutally honest under the circumstances?—my poetic career, such as it has been, began at the Kettle on Lindsey Street in Norman, Oklahoma. The cliché states that the child is the father to the man, but adolescence is the randy little creepazoid who fathers our more highfalutin intellectual endeavours. I haven’t lived in the place on a permanent basis since those years, but Oklahoma, or that bit of it I inhabited, nevertheless remains a fundamental part of my understanding of the universe.

The Kettle wasn’t a very likely venue, what with pictures of old sports teams, a wait staff that tended to view us punk rock types with some suspicion—even when we weren’t high—and a regular clientele that included a creepy tattoo artist who’d found Jesus in jail, a crew of rednecks who’d file in just after the bars closed, singing “Oh My Darlin’ Clementine” and such, and, if you stayed late, some score of schitzos with nowhere else to go. But there was also that clot on the near side of the smoking section, the often thin, intense-looking, stoned-looking bunch. And that was my bunch.

Norman’s a college town in the slow process of converting itself into a white-flight community for Oklahoma City. When I began high school, there were two cafes near campus. Last time I was back, there were none. One of them long since became an adjunct to a slightly posh clothing store—along with the independent bookstore which it had adjoined. The other is now an antiques store (because those undergraduates sure do like that antique furniture). Yeah, yeah, sic transit gloria mundi and all that, but the point is that the very basic trappings of college-town bohemia were under more or less constant threat from rising rents and, on occasion, low-level police harassment. We inevitably felt embattled. And, like many other disaffected bookish types in relatively out-of-the-way places, we found ourselves camped out in a twenty-four-hour diner.

But the advantages of being in a college town were manifold. There was the university library for one, and since the bookstores weren’t all that good and since the days I’m describing were before Amazon.com and the like kicked off and since we really didn’t have much money, anyway, that library got heavy use. In the second place, there was not a huge division between the high schools and the university. A large number of Normanites stayed in town to go to college, and they continued to inhabit their old haunts, often taking the same booths, smoking the same brand of cigarettes, and having the same conversations they had in earlier years, only interlaced with a couple of years of college coursework.

I really hadn’t given much thought to poetry up until the end of middle school. My mother had read the stuff to me as a child—mostly nineteenth-century American stuff like Poe, Longfellow, and Whittier—but I had, by the time I started to notice girls and my voice became unreliable, largely forgotten that. No, my introduction came via Jon Soske. Jon was a freak of nature. Still is. Brilliantly intelligent, with a wide range of interests, and a formidable capacity to absorb just about anything you put in front of him, he swooped in from Oklahoma City with books by e. e. cummings and T. S. Eliot (of whom I had heard), and Ezra Pound (of whom I had not). I’d already made tentative stabs at the existentialists—that last line of L’Etranger has a particular ring when half the football team is actively trying to kick your ass. But Jon really put poetry in my consciousness in a serious and sustained way.

Ditto Hayes Moore, whose acquaintance I was able to renew when we were both doing our doctoral work at Columbia. I can still remember Hayes calling me up at the unheard-of hour of half-past eleven—my parents were asleep!—and reading me Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”. It had to be set to music, he informed me. Well, when the day arrived and we sat with two unplugged electric guitars in Hayes’s room, nothing really took shape—we probably just talked about girls. But we’d intended to set “Goblin Market” to music. Hayes is also the guy who turned me on to Thomas Hardy.

So, we armed ourselves with dribs and drabs that we’d read. The various offshoots of punk rock that we listened to helped as well. Goth rock gets a bad rap, frequently justly so. But I read Antonin Artaud because I’d heard the Bauhaus song named after him. I came to a different impression of Eliot after realizing that some of the early Sisters of Mercy lyrics lift lines more or less straight out of the man’s oeuvre—and not necessarily the A-list Eliot. The example I can think of is from “Sweeney Erect.” Here’s Eliot:

Tests the razor on his leg
Waiting until the shriek subsides.
The epileptic on the bed
Curves backward, clutching at her sides.

And here’s the Sisters of Mercy (“Valentine”, from the Reptile House EP):

The razor bites and the shriek subsides
He arches clutching at his sides
Across the floor across the tiles
The man is dead and the razor smiles

Without going into the relative literary merits of the two (the latter really works better with the music), the point is that a fascination with underground music led to some important literary discoveries. Hell, even Los Angeles-based goth-rockers Christian Death, who dedicated their second album to Andre Breton, got me into Surrealism and from there into French Symbolism, which reconnected with some of the Modernist stuff my friends and I were already reading.

So, armed with all of this, not to mention the more typical gossip and shit talk of the teenaged years, we’d file into the Kettle after school, order a coffee, and start talking. And sooner or later, the college students cramming for their exams or vaguely aware of us through a younger sibling, or what have you, would join in. They’d recommend books to us, which, being precocious little snots, we’d go read, pulling them off the shelves of friends’ faculty parents or plopping down in the garret-like stacks in the OU library, trying to find a way to sit with only about a foot between the rows.

But it never felt like duty. Intellectual pursuits were, in the final analysis, not particularly encouraged. We were supposed to do well in school, of course, but, by and large, but the powers that be did not always seem to care if we were terribly interested in what we studied. We had some good teachers, mind you, but it always seemed in school as if what you really wanted to do was coming up the next year. Added to which, the denizens of the “advanced” English classes were more often in there due to being white and middle-class than having any particular aptitude for the subject. By and large, we picked things up on our own—not just how much liquor we could hold before our guts told us to go fuck ourselves, but also a fairly sprawling, idiosyncratic canon.

The thing is, we were serious, but the business of becoming well-read was always something that we did because we wanted to do so, not because we felt particularly duty-bound to do so. We read poetry for the same reasons we listened to Black Flag or stayed up all night or took up smoking. And up to the present, I like a bit of danger in poetry. The domesticated little fucking epiphanies that dominate so much verse in the English-speaking world really do very little for me. I want to feel the adrenal gland in full gear. I want a sense of sleep deprivation.

I wrote some verse in high school and the first year of college, but it petered out after a while. But in the spring of 2003, I found myself back in Norman for a time. My father was dying, and I had just come off a serious break-up. I can recall sitting on my father’s porch, twenty-seven years old, heartbroken, and completely at sea, and I just started writing. And it was surprisingly good—at least I thought so. And, just as importantly, it was true to what that skinny adolescent would have wanted to read back in the day.

The Kettle on Lindsey, which had been the hub for those early years and in which I racked up, I’d estimate, about 1,000 hours, was gone by 2003, replaced, most recently, by a Mexican restaurant. The Kettle wasn’t a great restaurant, but it was a place to go when you had nowhere else to go. I wonder where they go now.

* The album in question, Catastrophe Ballet, has to be a beacon of hope for all in the arts, because the first album, Only Theater of Pain, is dreadful.