Mid-June 1969 - fifty years ago -
half a century - l opposed serving the U.S. military in the Vietnam War. It was likely this week, possibly this very day, that I boarded a plane, an unofficial police escort tailing my parents' car on the way to the Miami airport. This morning a CBC radio piece on the music of the Woodstock Festival reminded me of this crucial date in my life. Five decades on, the decision I made this week so long ago has been a deciding and continuing factor in my life, and the fact that I've been able to live this long, and at peace with my conscience, to the ripe old age of 71 in a couple of weeks, continues to amaze me.
A little over 30 years ago I wrote my memoir of what happened in the 3 years I lived in the UK after my departure from the U.S. Tai Grove, publisher of Hidden Brook Press, reprinted a professional glossy version of my originally self-published story as
Eel Pie Island Dharma in 2012. Here's the opening chapter:
PEACE : )
EEL PIE DHARMA - a memoir / haibun - © 1990 Chris Faiers
Chapter 1 - A Psychedelic Basho
At community college I began writing bad poetry around 1967. When I
realized that I was not cut out to be a science student, I immersed
myself in arts courses and declared myself a poet. Some poems submitted
to the student magazine reminded the editor of haiku. Having never
heard of haiku, I didn't know what to make of the comment, but browsing
through a literary magazine I found a classified ad offering copies of Haiku magazine from a Toronto address.
Haiku duly arrived, and I fell in love with the haiku form.
The similarity between haiku and the brief poems I had been attampting
was obvious, and soon I was submitting haiku to the editor of Haiku, Dr Eric Amann.
After initial rejections. I was thrilled when Eric Amann accepted
several haiku for his magazine. Encouraged, I began to devote myself to
writing haiku. Basho, the wandering haiku poet/priest of medieval
Japan, was added to my role models. The lonely life of a commuting
college student in Florida presented a few of my early poems:
Christmas vacation
tame ducks starving
by the campus lake
|
Rain
gray doves
strung on a wire
|
Light breeze
striding across campus
a thin professor
|
Almost from the beginning of my student days I had been fighting an
appeals battle with the draft board. Unfortunately I had registered in
Georgia, just before our family moved back to Florida. In retrospect,
and after corresponding with former classmates many years later, I
believe that I was an easy target for the Atlanta draft board. Living
out of the state, drafting me wouldn't stir up any local antagonisms,
and the fact that I was also a resident alien (as a Canadian citizen by
birth) probably didn't help my cause. Ongoing struggles to keep my
student status caused me to intensely question the Vietnam War, and I
was living day-to-day with the life-and-death questions of duty to
country versus participation in an unethical war. This personal turmoil
provided a fertile ground for writing haiku poems. Often I had
insomnia, and I would think back over my life. A family vacation in the
Blue Ridge Mountains provided:
Cavern pool
tourists watching
blind fish
|
Memories of a far off Halloween in Canada when I was five years old inspired:
Halloween
a young boy
in a skeleton suit
|
Some days I would escape to the beach after class:
Lobster antennas
waving from the twin caves
of a cement block
|
Blue sea
bobbing red and white
lobster trap buoy
|
Summer moonlight
rotting on our roof
a starfish
|
As I became more and more disillusioned with the Vietnam War, I began to
hang around with the other radicals and longhairs on the campus. Miami
was, and is, a very reactionary city, and psychedelia, which had
flowered in California in 1966, was just reaching Miami in 1968. I was
one of the first long hairs on campus, and the second guy on Key
Biscayne to grow long hair. The centre for the slowly evolving hippie
community in Miami was Coconut Grove, an artistic haven located around
the Dinner Key docks and the adjacent waterfront park:
Bay wind blowing
Coconut Grove sailboats
tinkling rigging
|
First green appearing
buds on the new stake hedge
and chameleons
|
The flower
of this old tree
a treehouse
|
At the peak of the Vietnam War, in June 1969, I received three draft
notices in a week. It was time to leave. I flew from Miami to Nassau:
Mounted sailfish
lining the walls
of Nassau airport
|
From Nassau I caught a flight to Luxemburg, and then I caught a train from Brussels to London:
Luxemburg
black paint on pink brick
U. A.
|
I lived with my cousin and his wife on the outskirts of London for
several months. It wasn't a comfortable arrangement for any of us. I
continued writing my haiku, always carrying a notebook with me in a tote
bag. One of my first visits was to Piccadilly Circus, where the
traffic island in the centre of the world's busiest intersection had
become an international hippie rendezvous under the statue of Cupid.
The day I visited Piccadilly there was a bust for hash smoking. A bobby
was about to arrest me when he spied my London guide book, and he let
me go:
Piccadilly Circus
Cupid's fountain spraying
hippies
|
By now I had a large collections of haiku, many of them published in Haiku
and numerous other small haiku journals which had sprung up in the
United States. I spent many days visiting Kew Gardens, and after one
afternoon of meditation, I explored a side road on my way back to Kew
Station. I found a little printing company, and somehow got the courage
to go in.
I'd like to publish a collection of my poems, I shyly told the balding,
potbellied printer. Despite my hippie appearance, my American accent
tipped him that I might have money, and he got me to show him what I
wanted.
When he saw my Luxemburg poem with the swastika, he wanted to know if I
was a fascist. I convinced him that I wasn't a fascist, only a poet,
and he agreed to print my poetry in little booklets for £50 for 500
copies.
A week later I went back and picked up the box of my first chapbook, Cricket Formations.
I lugged the booklets down the hill to the post office in the hamlet of
Kew, and spent the afternoon mailing them all over the world.
Eel Pie Dharma is protected by international copyright laws.
Individuals may print off a copy of this work for personal use only to
facilitate easier reading.
|
Eel Pie Dharma - contents
|
next chapter (2)
Eel Pie Island (words & pics)
|
history of haiku
|
Alan Watts - This Is It
|
draft resistance
No comments:
Post a Comment