That was then. This is now, when every publisher with in Internet site opens the daily e-mail with a certain trepidation. Because e-mail has expanded the size of the old transom to a slot as big as the planet. One morning not long ago, our gigantic e-mail transom yielded the following note: "Y'all interested in a gen-u-wine artifact, a reminder of
what America was like before the 1960s and all that? At least as seen through the pre-LSD
eyes of an over-educated, hypersensitive young maverick from the wild of deep West Texas.
I was cleaning out my saddle bag and came across this here manuscript of stuff I scribbled
down from about 1959 to 1965. No rock n roll, no dope, no Vietnam, just young me standing
in what I knew was a cultural desert but seeing no oases and not sure what to do about it.
What I did is a whole other story. I guess I must have tucked those old pages away before
I got on with my life. Strange stuff that, I thought, with your penchant for publishing
strange stuff, you might enjoy looking at. Intrigued, I replied with a one-word message ("Yes") and waited. Next day, here came Totentänze. Lots of adjectives flew through my mind as I read it: quaint, clumsy, irritating, wistful, arch, adolescent. But by the end, I felt what I had just read was pretty much as Bohner had advertised: a strange, skewed snapshot of white American culture before the country itself started the painful process of growing out of its own prolonged adolescence. The poems can speak for themselves, in their breaking, pubescent voice
from what seems now an ancient time. Just one note: The title is a play on the German
word, Totentanz, which means "dance of death." Totentänze is
the plural form, meaning "dances of death." UPDATE: |