February 11, 2025

In 1965, when I was starting to write poetry, trying to sort out what that would mean for me, one of the very first practicing poets I got to know was Clifford Burke. He was the editor of Hollow Orange, which that year became the fourth publication to include me.1 Clifford introduced me to Keith Abbott, warned me never to trust a poet who kept Philip Whalen’s poems further than arm’s reach from their bed, warned against capitalizing at the left margin unless there was an active reason to do so, and was passionate about the craft of fine press printing which he was then learning. He might also have introduced me to Wes Tanner, who was just learning that craft back then, taking courses at Laney College in Oakland. Even more memorably, Clifford loaned the money to pay the preacher for my first wedding to Rochelle Nameroff, on Halloween of that year. He and Shelley both worked for a Berkeley campus publication called Slate, which sent students to the large courses that used auditoriums, to take notes which would be ready the next morning for registered students who had slept in or proved too drunk or stoned to have taken meticulous notes.

In general, Clifford’s advice was always good. I haven’t always done as well taking it, but I can’t blame him. In my new downsized home in Springfield, PA, I have three separate libraries, one just for my books2, another primary one for poetry, fiction and nonfiction, and a third of the books I need to keep at hand in my office. I call that the Alps (it’s upstairs but it’s also where one can find The Cantos). The Alps’ W section goes from Watten to Whitman to Williams. Whalen, alas is in the larger main library in the semifinished basement, although I do keep On Bear’s Head as well as the Collected Poems there. On Bear’s Head (which did not yet exist when Clifford admonished me to keep Whalen close to hand) seems to me unquestionably one of the ten best books of 20th century American verse on a par with the best of Duncan or Creeley. More often, whenever I get somebody’s collected poems the many smaller volumes from which it was built depart so that I have room for new great poets. It’s the solution that applies to anyone who lives in limited space: to buy a book one must sell a book.

I don’t know when precisely Clifford Burke bailed on Berkeley and the Bay Area, but I suspect it was well before I got the phone call from IBM that brought me to Pennsylvania in 1995. I had heard – from Drummond Hadley perhaps, or maybe Larry Goodell – that he had moved to the southwest and was living with artist and activist Virginia Mudd, but it appeared to me that Burke had either stopped writing himself or at least taken it private, say the way Ebbe Borregaard, one of the three surviving contributors to The New American Poetry, has turned his attention the past several decades to boat-building up in the Napa valley.

But things happen and Donald John Trump is such a thing. An ongoing tantrum against all things that the sixties imagined under such rubrics as peace and love. The story our grandchildren, if any, will tell about the second and third decades of this new century is very much one of the rejection of a kinder, wiser America opening up to a post-Cold War planet, just as little Vlad’s grandkids will write of his sad attempts to reconstruct Ye Olde Soviet Union, nostalgia flecked with bombs and drone warfare. What Trump gets most intuitively about Putin is that both want to return to a world that they thought they understood. And they are perfectly willing to kill to get their way. From their POV, the problem with narco-terrorists is that they were and are small time thugs, whereas Vlad and Donny have much bigger game in mind.

What is to be done? If you are a writer, what can one do in this new global dystopia? Every act seems small and when Trump attempts to prosecute the likes of Mark Kelly for saying that troops have an obligation to the Constitution not to break the law and Jeff Bezos buys the Washington Post just to shut it down or to turn it the way Larry Ellison hopes to turn television into one grand vision that stretches between Lawrence Welk and Kid Rock. Some time ago, I began to receive post cards, between one and three per week, beautiful little letterpress sonnets, each signed by Clifford Burke and with a return address of Virginia Mudd, box 50, San Jose NM 87565. Here is Small Elegy, dated 25 January 2026:

The poem’s inadequacy rankles

that words alone will not convey

what rouses so deep in the soul

dismay that such monstrosity

yet lurks so potential among us

nurtured by what vile hatreds

then loosed encouraged excused

finally beyond all countenance –

perhaps the turning point’s arrived

and we will gather in our millions

mourning lives so viciously taken

appalled yet vulnerable yet strong

determined to undo and rebuild

in truth decency love and joy

Clifford Burke  

I put Virginia Mudd’s address up above because I think others would appreciate – indeed, cherish – the words and wisdom of Clifford Burke and could use these much as I have reports from the Buddhist Peace Walk. Or you could write to her at virginiamudd.com. I have seen no evidence that Clifford Burke has ever even seen the internet – he is very much off the grid so far as I can tell. But he is also very much on point as a poet and his is a voice I need to keep hearing. It’s been over 60 years since he first gave me good advice, but it’s a gift he keeps on giving.

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1After Richard Krech’s Avalanche, Will Inman’s Kauri and David Waggoner’s Poetry Northwest.

2Slight fib: I also keep oversized art books there. I’m currently reading Nancy Boas’ biography of David Park, which is quite good.