Margento Guest Series #1: Poet and Professor David Baker

David Baker. Photo by Miriam Berkley.

One year after David Baker's trip to Brasov, following the launch of his Omul alchimic (Vinea Press) (new and selected poems translated into Romanian by Chris Tanasescu) in Bucharest, where he performed and did a couple of studio sessions with Margento.

Hum Along: How I Took Up Guitar and Became a Poet  

by David Baker

Bob and Carol Crawford lived four houses down from us, on East Circle Drive, in Jefferson City, Missouri. Right in the middle of their tiny trimmed yard was the white-brick house, so heavily paneled and carpeted inside that, sitting there one summer afternoon, I felt like I'd been plunked into a Kleenex box. But when Mr. Crawford—Bob—leaned over to slip me a new half-dollar, silver as a tooth, I knew I was destined to play music for the rest of my life. It was 1966. I had lugged my plum-red Gibson Melody Maker guitar and my amp, the size of a boot box, down to Crawford's for my first professional performance. I played two songs—some scaly melody out of Mel Bay #2 or #3 and "Wildwood Flower" (or "The Groovy Grubworm," as one guitar book called it). I no longer own the amp or guitar, but I still have that coin.

Music is one of my two great expressive loves. The other is poetry. The connection between these two arts is ancient and obvious. No other form of language aspires so completely to musical tactics like repetition, balanced intonation, rhythm, and harmonic phrasing. Remember Edgar Allan Poe's contention that "It is in Music, perhaps, that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired with the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles." He further connects the two: "I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty."

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I started playing the guitar 1965, at age ten, when Bill McMillan, and later Smoky Burd, gave me lessons in an empty room above Shaw Music. I began to teach the guitar at thirteen and did so through college. During this time I traded my Melody Maker for a scorching, sunburst Fender Stratocaster, then traded that one for a guitar I still have, a 1964 Gretsch Nashville Chet Atkins custom—the orange one, if you know guitars. I played just about every kind of music for every kind of occasion from weddings and church meetings to college formals, jazz festivals, pit orchestras, pre-disco dance halls, little-town proms and big-city bars. And our high-school talent show. I won first place in 9th grade, playing "Yakety Axe" with my best friend, Tim "Firedog" Gaines; third place in 10th grade accompanying on my acoustic twelve-string our school's hippie singer on Elton John's "Your Song"; first place in 11th grade, wah-wahing to "Shaft" with an eight-piece pre-fusion band; and first place in 12th grade, picking "Dueling Banjos" on banjo with Firedog Gaines on guitar.

And more: I played most Saturday nights at Tonanzio's Italian Restaurant with Tom Snodgrass and one or two happy-hours per week, with Tom or by myself, at the local Ramada Inn's lounge, The Library. I started bands, played with other bands, even wrote the score for a Missouri Highway Department movie, "The Watching Tree," and recorded the guitar part at a studio in Kansas City. Once Firedog and I were banished from a live radio broadcast from Ozarkland at the Lake of the Ozarks, where we'd been invited to be the "featured youngsters" on a weekly musical show. We played three songs— "Yakety Axe" again, "Alley Cat," and a thumping rendition of "Proud Mary"—after which we announced on air we didn't think country-and-western was cool. Long static. Then we "left." My father's white silence on the ride home (we were too young to drive) clarified his feelings about our disclosure. I still agree with Buddy Rich who, when wheeled into the operating room for a medical procedure and asked if he was allergic to anything, relied, "Yeah, Doc, I'm allergic to country music." The operation was a success.

While other kids were suffering teenage angst, parental hatred, underage consumption of, well, everything, I was practicing, traveling, playing, and listening hard to music. I played with musicians famous, not-so-famous, wholly unknown, and yet almost always cool. It seemed—it was—a touch or two removed from the simmering mediocrity and boredom of middle-class middle America. That's not to say I wasn't a typical teenager. But I was able to miss some of the usual tortures and rotten summer jobs, thanks to my playing. I was the local guitar kid, and I thought for years that's what I would do for the rest of my life.

Well, yes and no.

Playing and performing was hard work—hard on the ears, the body, sleep, time, and solitude. By the time I went to college, I was tired. This was 1974. I opted not to major in music and started taking literature classes. I still played guitar but had decided —without saying so aloud—that I didn't want to live as a musician, or at least as the kind of musician I'd wanted to be. At age twenty I laid down one instrument and picked up another. My guitar became a poem.

Poetry is an intensely musical art. Its hours are demanding but flexible. The pay is invisible. Its performative aspects are complex and fascinating, at the podium or on the page. I remember one rock band of mine, The Back Country (named for a Gary Snyder book), that was particularly good at vocals. I remember singing away in four-part harmony during one late-night gig at a dance bar in my hometown; it was an Earth, Wind, and Fire tune or perhaps something from the Doobie Brothers. I remember turning around to check the P.A. system, seeing my microphone unplugged, and realizing we sounded so good because my voice was not part of the amplified mix. I remember singing along anyway.

That's what it's like to work on poems—to sing along, alone, in the quiet, with a wonderful, intricate, harmonic melody in your head. To sing with Keats and Dickinson, Sappho and Merwin, the whole big band of poets.

These days I listen to everything from Arvo Part and Edgar Meyer to Birelli Lagrene and Buddy Guy. When I was young, I listened to what all my friends were talking about—the Beatles, the Stones, James Brown—but I realize now that what really absorbed me were the guitar-driven bands and musicians of the time. For rock-and-roll, it was hard to beat The James Gang. Joe Walsh's languid guitar licks were heaven to me. I loved The Best of the James Gang, which has songs from Funk 49, Bang, and Miami. Carlos Santana's Abraxas dazzled me with his lightning-fast fingering of Latin phrasings; I can still play "Black Magic Woman" and "Oyo Como Va," two very hard guitar tunes. Earlier, when I was just starting, I soaked up the great instrumental group, The Ventures. Telstar was the coolest album, though I owned and wore out a dozen more like Walk Don't Run, Where the Action Is, and Wild Things. Likewise, I worshiped, and still do, the great Tennessee picker Chet Atkins. It was highly uncool to like him then, but I did. I loved Chet Atkins Goes Hollywood for his incredible self-chorded solos and Chet Atkins Picks on the Beatles, which showed me how Lennon and McCartney's rich melodies could deepen. My own finger-method derives from Chet's: I hold my pick with thumb and forefinger but also use my third and fourth fingers to strum or to pluck. Chet is now considered the guitar-god of the last forty years by everyone from Ricky Skaggs and George Benson to Walter Becker and Bonnie Raitt. About Walter Becker: Is there any better rock band, for guitar and instrumentation (and intelligent lyrics), than Steely Dan? Gods, they were and are, especially when Skunk Baxter played second-guitar for them, as on Can't Buy a Thrill. But the most powerful band I ever heard was The Stan Kenton Orchestra, whose 1972 Live at Redlands sounds like pure energy. I performed with the Kenton band one time, in Springfield, Missouri, on one song, "Bogota." I'll never forget that Ken Hanna tune, charted in G-flat—truly hellish for a guitar with its six flats!—and featuring guitar in a long trill solo. "Nice work, kid," Mr. Kenton said later. I was 18. It was my greatest guitar moment.

I see now that what most turned me on as a musician was, and is, fusion—the blending of styles, musical histories, where hillbilly Chet plays The Beatles or where jazz and rock coexist: Chicago I and II, Blood Sweat & Tears 4. Do you remember the super-charged album, Chase, fronted by jazz trumpeter/singer Bill Chase along with two other stratospheric trumpets, a trombone, sax, bass, piano/organ, drums, and a slashing rock guitarist? I have that album still.

And I still play. When I taught my daughter, Katie, to play guitar, she used my first guitar, a $10 Kent, which I strung with silk strings so her hands wouldn't bleed like mine had. I still own a banjo, a mandolin, and four guitars: the Kay, the orange Gretsch, a fine old Yamaha acoustic, and my prize. Four years ago I bought the guitar of my dreams, an archtop jazz box, a Heritage Super Eagle custom with twin gold Humbuckers, Grover tuners, hand-carved Swedish spruce top and carved maple sides and back, ebony bridge and board, split-block mother-of-pearl inlays on the curly-maple neck, and gorgeous blonde flame. It's three inches thick and eighteen inches wide at the lower bout, with a fatter sound than a Gibson L-5.

To celebrate my new instrument, I did what I've always done. I joined a band. For the next year I played guitar with the Rick Brunetto Big Band, in Columbus, Ohio, a seventeen-piece jazz band specializing in big-band era tunes. True hep-cat stuff. What a blast, performing with real musicians again. The guitarist's job in a big band is mostly to keep rhythm, chunk-chunking away like Freddie Green on finger-bending chords. That's what I like. Keeping time with the band. And, even when another soloist stands to play, humming along with the melody in my head.

First appeared in Poetry Northwest, Issue #3. Copyright © 2007 David Baker. Appears with permission of the author. All rights reserved.

Dust to Dust

1.

Footfalls on the brickwork road many fathers laid  

by hand and heavy mallet make a sandy sound.  

You can hear, in the dusted scuff, a kind of gasp  

as from the crumpled lungs of those bent double  

by depression, by wagonloads of work—

you can hear huffs of hot wind kick the dust

around them. You can feel the brickwork give.

This is how the town found a way from starving.

Three summers running: nothing but dust rained down  

to choke out cornfields and wheat. The council  

paid any man driven to his knees to lay

a road from here to Cedar City to keep working.  

They tapped in bricks from the limekiln one season.  

They turned each one one-quarter twist the next.

2.

All night, so far, I have waited for the train to come  

calling through a cotton curtain on its breeze.

It always does—low as a mourning dove long minutes  

over the far, darkening fields and many trees.

How huge the world must be to hear so far  

beyond the shade, beyond the grasp of night.

There are apple boughs brushing my fine screen lightly.  

And a dozen stars, I know, like pinpricks on an arm.

Before it stops, a train will hiss, grind, clatter  

all the way back while its car-locks bang.

Then the engine at idle—hubbub, wood smoke,  

and trouble in the hobo camp below the trestle.

How sad the world is to hear nothing for so long.  

It always comes. Sweet night wind like cider.

3.

I was watching the road where his car went  

and thirty years burned off, as in a drop of oil.  

I was scanning for dust on the rise, a cartoon

cowboy’s gallop. It’s where he drove each morning  

off to work somewhere hard with the road crew—

he returned each evening, burned and hurt.

I have a good life and hands too soft for labor.  

Who would guess it takes this long to come home?  

All week I have checked the old road, as if

nothing had come to pass—jars of peaches pinging  

on the kitchen sill, her voice like silverware.  

I was playing with a soldier and blue truck.

There’s a road to everywhere, the song sweeps on.  

I am watching the road where the car drove.

4.

You can feel the brickwork give beneath your step.  

Each such shift in sand and balanced earth  

is kindred to the world’s intrinsic drift.

Cars kick up a clatter, rumbling down the road—

their tires grind brick to brick, turn dust to dust.  

When a truck goes by, the whole street quakes.  

You can feel your life begin to shake.

5.

Hanging primrose breeze. Haze of barbeque.

The many children quieted by baths, put to bed—

they wait for the locusts’ buzz and homing trains.

One lone bat recurrent in the streetlamp glow.

Four blocks down the road gives way to asphalt blacktop.  

But here the block stamp macon brick hasn’t rubbed off

the red clay bars the many fathers wrecked  

their knees to pack tightly back into earth.

How small a world it is to want such work.

I will come here only once more to lie down too,

having lived to praise one thing made so well  

it sings with each slow passage, rimmed

with sleepers safe in all their loved and many beds.  

Flowers line every sidewalk down the breathing road.

First appeared in The Truth about Small Towns, published by University of Arkansas Press. Copyright © 1998 David Baker. Appears with permission of the author. All rights reserved.

BIO:

David Baker was born in Bangor, Maine, on December 27, 1954. He was raised in Missouri and has spent more than forty years of his life in the Midwest.

His first collection of poems, Laws of the Land, was published by Ahsahta/Boise State University in 1981, followed by Haunts (Cleveland State University) in 1985. Since then, Baker has published several collections of poetry:

Never-Ending Birds

Midwest Eclogue

The Truth about Small Towns

After the Reunion

Laws of the Land

Haunts

Baker is also the author of three books of criticism: Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry (Graywolf, 2007), Heresy and the Ideal: On Contemporary Poetry (University of Arkansas, 2000), and Meter in English. A Critical Engagement (1996). About Baker, the poet Linda Gregerson has said "[He] writes with the distilled, distinguished attentiveness only the finest poets can reliably command," and Marilyn Hacker has called him "the most expansive and moving poet to come out of the American Midwest since James Wright."

He is currently a Professor of English, Chair of the English Department, and the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Creative Writing at Denison University. He is also a faculty member in the M.F.A. program for writers at Warren Wilson College. Baker currently resides in Granville, Ohio, where he serves as Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review.