Bill Hotchkiss, 1936-2010

Bill Hotchkiss died on May 18, 2010 He was an accomplished, prolific writer of poetry and novels and spent almost his whole life in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada (near Grass Valley, where he went to high school), with some stints in the foothills near Mount Shasta. He was probably more personally immersed in the Sierra Nevada than even John Muir or Gary Snyder.

Many of Bill's poetry books were published by presses he operated, first Blue Oak Press and then Castle Peak Editions.  (Before founding these presses, Bill started with one called Ponderosa Press.) He founded Blue Oak Press with Art Petersen in the late 1960s, starting with a Colt Armory press. Art went on to teach at the University of Alaska Southeast. Among the authors Blue Oak published, in addition to Bill and Art, whose book of poems was the first off the press, were Edith Snow and Randy White, as well as William Everson (Brother Antoninus): William Everson: Poet of the San Joaquin (Blue Oak, 1978). It was edited by Bill, David Carpenter, and Alan Campo. Blue Oak also published a collection of essays about Everson: Perspectives on William Everson, 1992. 

Bill's book of poems Climb to the High Country was published by W.W. Norton, as was what is probably his best achievement in the novel-form, Medicine Calf, an historical novel based on the life of James Beckwourth, a "mountain man" of both African American and Native American heritage. A pass through the Sierra Nevada mountains is named after him.

Bill had a gift for writing narrative poetry that reflected his fierce love of the wilderness, most particularly the areas around the South Fork and the Middle Fork of the Yuba River northeast of Sacramento in the Sierra Nevada range. As noted, Bill attended high school in Grass Valley, California, and excelled in track and field events--as did his brother Richard "Dick" Hotchkiss.

He also published  several novels in the "western" genre with major publishers, but these focused not on cowboys and gunslingers but mountain explorers and Native Americans.

To a degree, Bill did the impossible: He taught for decades at a community college (Sierra College, in Rocklin) but still managed to be a prolific writer. He was still on the faculty of Sierra College--the Nevada County branch--when he died. For several years, he team-taught a course with his brother, Dick, who is a master ceramicist.

I took literature courses from Bill at Sierra before I moved on to U.C. Davis. They were terrific classes, and Bill liked to heap on the reading. He read drafts of several early poems I wrote. We kept in contact over the years; we last exchanged emails a few months ago.

Bill earned the following degrees:

Bachelor in English, University California, Berkeley, 1959.

Master of Arts in English, San Francisco State University, 1960.

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, University of Oregon, 1964.

Doctor of Arts in English, University of Oregon, 1971.

Doctor of Philosophy in English, University of Oregon, 1974.

Bill also served as the literary executor of the aforementioned William Everson (Brother Antoninus), who was, peripherally, part of the Beat Movement. Both Everson and Hotchkiss viewed themselves as the literary "children" of Robinson Jeffers, to some degree. 

So raise a glass of wine--I think he preferred red--to Bill Hotchkiss, teacher, poet, novelist, publisher, editor, and advocate for the wilderness.

Some books by Bill:

Medicine Calf

Pawnee Medicine (American Indians (Dell))

Who drinks the wine

The Graces of Fire and Other Poems

Yosemite

Climb to the High Country: Poems

Heavy Metal Monk

I ran across a video from Reuters that features Cesare Bonizzi, an Italian friar and former missionary to Africa who performs Heavy Metal. No fooling! He records under the name Fratello Metallo. Here is a link to the video:

http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=87126

The video put in mind William Everson, the poet and member, peripherally at least, of the Beat Generation. Everson was also known as Brother Antoninus, for he was a lay monk in the Catholic church for quite some time (I forget which order he belonged to). Everson defrocked himself--literally and figuratively--during a poetry reading at U.C. Davis in the late 1960s. He took his monk's robe off during the reading and announced he was not going to be a monk anymore. Also, Everson very much liked the music of Janis Joplin--more blues and rock than heavy metal, certainly, but in the same primal vein that appeals, apparently, to Fratello Metallo. Everson's books include Man-Fate and The Residual Years. Everson was also a master printer of books and a well known conscientious objector during the Second World War, as was William Stafford.

Bird Poems

Like love, death, and sunsets, birds seem to almost every poet to require yet one more poem. And like love, death, and sunsets, birds tempt the unsuspecting poet to write something sentimental, or to personify birds, as I just did when I wrote “birds tempt.” Actually, of course, poets tempt themselves to write sentimentally about birds, who have more important things to consider than poets. As with the rest of poetry and the subjects of poetry, a chief rule for bird poems is this: there are no rules. However, before writing a bird-poem, a poet might want to do what a bird-watcher does: observe; and then observe some more. That is, as long as the poet doesn’t rush to the writing with stock images of and prefabricated ideas about the bird in question, things should go all right.

The ultra-famous bird-poems include, of course, Poe’s “The Raven,” Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Stevens’ “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and Hopkins’ “The Windhover.”

Over the years, I’ve noticed that a fair percentage of students react negatively to “The Windhover,” partly because Hopkins’ sprung rhythm and heavy alliteration create some difficulty, but also perhaps because of the epigraph, “To Christ Our Lord.” Obviously, the poem does have its religious dimensions, but mainly it’s about that hawk up there, gliding, pausing, diving. It's also about the explosiveness of language itself. Even when I was only 17, I took easily to this poem and Hopkins’ work, for some reason. I think I simply sensed that Hopkins was doing in verse what jazz musicians do in music, and so I just found myself enjoying everything he was doing with words and lines, stresses and alliteration. It was pleasurable to me, even on the first reading. I also liked what he was doing with the hawk in the poem. I felt he really was trying to see the bird and to help us see the bird as the bird is. So although I don't try to argue students out of their resistance to the poem, I don't entirely understand the resistance.

Other fine bird poems include William Everson’s “Canticle of the Water Birds,” which I heard/saw Everson read several times; Robinson Jeffers’ “Hurt Hawks"; Emily Dickinson’s poem about the sparrow and the twig; and Ted Hughes’s book-length work, Crow. Dickinson also has the one that begins “A bird came down my walk.”

Karl Shapiro wrote an interesting poem in which he depicted a bird counter-intuitively in terms of a mechanism, a machine, and he wrote another one about having been attacked by a crow in Chicago. They’re both in his Collected Poems from Random House, published in the late 1970s.

At the risk of committing literary heresy, I'll admit that I believe Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" to be a hugely over-rated poem--and a problematic one, insofar as it glorifies rape, but also insofar as it's a bit silly. I know geese and swans can get mean, hiss, and bite, but if one really attacked a woman like Leda, I think Leda would simply wring its neck or kick it. The whole scene has always seemed a bit unintentionally comic to me. If Zeus appeared in the form of a lion, that would we one thing--but appearing as a large bird, but not even an eagle or a vulture? I mean, really. And finally, the question, "Did she put on his knowledge with his power?" seems not terribly pressing, and I've always wanted to answer, "Who cares? The woman was raped by a bird!" A more basic question might be, "Can a swan really have sex with a human?" Or: "Who does this lousy bird think he is--Zeus?!" It's one of those myths that I wouldn't mind a parodist like Mel Brooks retelling on film. . . .

. . . . In an homage to Dickinson, whom I regard as one of the great literary observers of nature, I played off “A bird came down my walk”:

Homage to Emily Dickinson

A bird came up

My mental walk.

It pinched a Dickinson

Scholar in half.

In my scrappy hometown,

I knew weirdos like you,

Liked them. They

Lived their lives,

And just their lives.

How rare that is

I began to know

Even at age six.

Your poems are prim

Graffiti scratched

On the back of Piety’s pew.

Good old you.

Your poems know more

Than ever they let on,

Were postcards sent

From privacy, anon.

© 2007

I also wrote a poem not just about a wren--but a Bewick’s wren (now that's specialization):

Wren

A Bewick’s wren landed on a fence-rail,

presented its image to my surprised view.

All of natural history had contributed

to this bird’s mere form, gray-brown

finish, up-slashed tail, and quick

departure into an atmosphere that is

no longer visible to us. When I saw

a Bewick’s wren today, I sensed

spirits nearby smiling wryly

at my mere thimbleful of awe.

© 2007

And here’s a link to “An E-Anthology of Avian Poems”:

http://birding.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ/Ya&sdn=birding&cdn=hobbies&tm=6&f=00&su=p445.92.150.ip_&tt=14&bt=1&bts=1&zu=http%3A//www.usd.edu/%7Etgannon/bird3.html

Happy birding.