Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around.
—in a letter from Mrs. Melville to her mother, 1859,
as quoted in Confessions of a Barbarian: Selections
from the Journals of Edward Abbey
I don't see how poetry can ever be easy.… Real poetry, the thick dense intense complicated stuff that lives and endures, requires blood and sweat; blood and sweat are essential elements in poetry as well as behind it.
—Edward Abbey
My late friend Edward Abbey preferred to think of himself as a novelist, and in fact published eight fictional works, including the immortal The Brave Cowboy, the anarchic The Monkey Wrench Gang, and his semiautobiographical "fat masterpiece," The Fool's Progress. Of the eight, seven remain in print (all but his first, Jonathan Troy, written when he was but twenty-five) and continue to sell like proverbial hotcakes. Two of Abbey's novels, The Brave Cowboy and Fire on the Mountain, have been filmed and a third, The Monkey Wrench Gang, is presently under option to Hollywood.
Not bad for a spud-digging farm boy out of rural Pennsylvania.
But, to paraphrase Ed's good friend Doug "Hayduke" Peacock, Abbey's opinion of his own work is only one among many, and Ed will likely be remembered as much for his fourteen volumes of literary nonfiction as for his novels. And few, except perhaps the author himself, would dispute the proposal that the high point in Abbey's literary career was his prose masterpiece, Desert Solitaire.
But… Cactus Ed as poet? Where does poetry fit in the big picture of Abbey's literary accomplishments?
Well, it doesn't, really. This collection, in fact, is something of an anomaly, not proffered as great poetry, but rather, offered as a revealing and entertaining insight into the mind and emotions of a great contemporary novelist and essayist, a great man. For Ed, writing poetry was alternately cathartic and playful, but never, it seems, intended to be "the thick dense intense complicated stuff… [requiring] blood and sweat" on the poet's part. Yet, because the seventy-one works contained in these pages are absolutely and irrefutably Edward Abbey, they are sure to "live and endure."
Abbey's immutable iconoclasm and nonconformity—which he preferred to think of as "anarchy"—the alternating joy and pain that marked his life, as well as the unique and eloquent voice used to express it, shine through in this collection, the only collection of Abbey's poetry that has ever been or ever will be.
Although he rarely published his poetry, and only occasionally read it in public, Ed nonetheless was a passionate producer of verse. Most often, he drafted a poem in a single go, writing in longhand in his journals and rarely revising. All but a few of the selections contained herein come undiluted from the twenty-one volumes of journal notebooks Abbey kept across the last thirty-eight years of his eventful life. And all were written between November, 1951—when Abbey was twenty-four and a Fulbright fellow studying literature and philosophy at Edinburgh University, Scotland—and March, 1989, when he died at age sixty-two.
The early journals contain Abbey's original poems mixed in freely with the works of others, many of the latter quite obscure and copied into the journals without attribution or quotation marks. Consequently, my most daunting chore in the editing of this collection has been to cull these non-Abbey works from the true pommes. After asking several well-read others to go over the collection, and after consulting poetry indexes for titles, first lines, and key words, I do believe the collection offered here is pure Abbey. But there are literally millions of poems in print, I haven't read them all, and I could be wrong. You'll let me know about that, I'm sure.
Earth Apples comprises three sections. The opening (1951 to 1966) and closing (1972 to 1989) Confessions sections together contain thirty-four raw "apples" harvested directly from the journals… with two exceptions, duly noted, both of which were written during the mid-1950s Arches years and appeared in Desert Solitaire.
Sandwiched between these two sections are another thirty-seven pieces that Ed had lifted from his journals during the 1970s, polished, and sorted into five "Books," apparently thinking to publish the lot under the title Poems & Shards: 1965–1970. He never got around to it.
Earth Apples derives from the French equivalent, Pommes de Terre, and is the author's idea, indirectly at least, dating back to 1951. Although the common French phrase translates literally as "apples of the earth," or "earth apples," it is generally understood, and used, to mean "potatoes." In his early journals, Abbey often employed the personal slang term "pomes" (rhymes with gnomes) as a comically self-disparaging reference to his own poetic efforts, which, it seems, he never took too seriously. After visiting France in late 1951, he added the second m, converting "pomes" to pommes, apparently pleased to think of his earthy poesy as "spuds." Some years later, he penned a nostalgic open-verse celebration of his childhood recollection of the harvest of a bumper potato crop, calling it "Pommes de Terre."
Thus, Earth Apples seemed predestined to serve as the title of this tasty little volume.
Concerning the titles of individual poems: All of the center-section "Book" pieces wear the names given them by the author in his journals. When known, I have added date and location of writing in parentheses.
But many of the works in the opening and closing Confessions sections appear in the journals untitled. Consequently, rather than employ the repetitive and eminently forgettable "Untitled" to introduce these works, I've promoted their date-place citations to titles: "August, 1959—Albuquerque."
As Ed would likely say of this arrangement, "It ain't art, but it works."
Abbey's Apples also work. As the widely respected southwestern poet Leonard "Red" Bird (River of Lost Souls) commented after reading a draft of Earth Apples… "This collection carries Abbey's voice, his eye for significant detail, his humor, his lust for life and his anger at all who would destroy or succumb. In his poetry, as in his novels and essays, Abbey was a man of passions. He felt… love, loneliness, rage, regret, despair, joy and hope."
Just so.
Michael McCurdy is an American master of the woodcut and scratch-board arts, and Clarke Abbey and I are delighted to have his work illustrating and illuminating this little volume—as, I feel certain, would be Ed himself.
For their essential help in bringing this collection to print, I thank Clarke Cartwright Abbey (the best thing that ever happened to old Cactus Ed); Leonard "Red" Bird (teacher, adviser, poet, friend); James Hepworth, Larry Hartsfield, Richard Shelton, and the Durango Public Library research staff (lifesavers, one and all); Roger Myers, Peter Steere and their energetic crew at the University of Arizona's Special Collections Library; Bob Weil at St. Martin's Press; and (always) Caroline.
—DAVID PETERSEN
San Juan Mountains, Colorado
March 1994
