Norman Schaefer in Conversation with Shin Yu Pai

Norman Schaefer was born in Olympia, Washington in 1947 and studied art history at the University of California at Davis, graduating in 1983. While in Davis, Schaefer also worked as a laborer, finding time for mountaineering in the Sierra Nevadas and long walks on the beaches and bays of the northern California coast. He did not begin writing until his forties—his books of poetry, which include The Sunny Top of California, Fool’s Gold, Lower Putah Song, and Records of a Broken-down Mountaineer, came out in the years that followed. In 2004, finding that Davis had grown too big and noisy, Schaefer moved to Port Townsend, Washington, where he now lives with his wife, surrounded by maples, birches, lilacs, and plums.

Shin Yu Pai, the guest poetry editor for Moss: Volume Nine, spoke with Schaefer in the summer of 2024.

How did you first come to writing poetry?

It goes back to the fall of 1968 when I took a leave of absence from UC Davis. I needed to catch up on my reading, work some, and deal with the Vietnam War draft. My friends had been saying to me for a long time, “Schaefer, you’ve got to read Jack Kerouac.” So I read On The Road and then The Dharma Bums and liked them a lot. I also read Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion. A little later I read Kerouac’s Lonesome Traveler and liked it the best of the three.

It’s common to read his books and be curious about the other characters in them, and one afternoon I went over to the department of Special Collections in Shields Library at UC Davis and asked where I might find the material that could tell me who some of these people were. The person who helped me was a graduate student in English named Christopher Wagstaff, who to this day remains a close friend. He’s been with my writing every step of the way. During that time reading Kerouac, I heard about City Lights Bookstore, which was owned by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Back in the fifties, Kerouac would sometimes drop in and Allen Ginsberg visited too. So on a beautiful spring morning I hitchhiked to San Francisco and walked up Broadway to City Lights. I asked where the Beat author’s books were and was directed down the basement stairs to the avant garde section. I sat at a little round table and made myself comfortable reading from Kenneth Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems from the Chinese and some selections in A Coney Island of the Mind by Ferlinghetti. I also read the first part of Howl and Lew Welch’s little book called Hermit Poems. That day is still very clear to me.

I was getting hungry so walked up to Sam Wo, a unique Chinese restaurant a block away. I originally thought Sam Wo was a person’s name, but it turns out it means “three harmonies.” I ate a big plate of chicken chow mein for 75 cents. The sun was going down when I went back to City Lights and read a few more poems from A Coney Island of the Mind. Then I saw Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems by Gary Snyder. I remember thinking to myself, this is what I’m looking for. I was inspired by his character in The Dharma Bums. I read the first poem, “Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout,” and was deeply moved. It was written in two stanzas, five lines each and I read it several times. I thought if it was okay to write poetry like this, then count me in. The language was plain and spare but there was an elegance in the poem that was undeniable. Snyder was only twenty-three when he wrote it. Then I read his Han-shan/Cold Mountain poems and remembered in The Dharma Bums when Kerouac came over to his backyard cottage in Berkeley and found him sitting cross-legged on the floor, sipping tea, and working on the Han-shan translations.

It was getting dark and I bought Riprap and a few other books that I’d browsed that afternoon. Then I walked back down Broadway to Sansome Street where the freeway entrance was and hitchhiked home. I was sitting in the front seat with the driver thinking what an unbelievable day in my young life it had been. I wondered if I could write poetry someday, and maybe even soon. But the summer went by without even a couplet. I just wasn’t ready yet. But reading poetry every night then was a joy.

Twenty-two years later, I was reading in some art history books one afternoon at Shields Library. Art history was my major in college. I headed for the stairwell to walk home and by chance passed through the poetry stacks. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Snyder’s name. What had he been up to, I wondered. From a high shelf I pulled down one of his books. It was Axe Handles, which he had written in 1983. I read the first poem, which was also called “Axe Handles,” and experienced the same big thrill I had in City Lights reading “Mid-August on Sourdough Mountain Lookout.” I took Axe Handles down to the main floor where the comfortable leather couches and chairs were and read the first section. Then I checked it out, walked home, and finished it that night. Early the next morning, before going to work, I read it again. That afternoon, walking by Putah Creek outside of town, I heard some lyrics of my own and three days later wrote my first poem. It was an awful thing really, but I didn’t care. I kept writing and slowly but surely my poems began to improve. I was on my way.

Who were the poets that you read and studied most deeply then?

There weren’t many others then but James Laughlin and Hayden Carruth were two who were helpful in the years that followed. However, that summer I found a poem by Ezra Pound called “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”—that was terrific. It was in a small collection of Chinese translations called Cathay published in 1913. Pound got some notes on Chinese translation by Ernest Fenollosa, an art history scholar. He had passed away and his wife gave them to him. Pound’s translations are inaccurate—he only knew a few Chinese characters—and sinologists reject them. But “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” as well as the other poems in Cathay, brilliantly capture the sentiment of the poet regardless of errors in the translations. If Li Po, the poet, had read Cathay, I think he would have been delighted with Pound’s renditions. T.S. Eliot once described Pound “as the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time.” Cathay, Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems were more than enough for me to read, but later that summer, I think, Kenneth Rexroth came out with more translations from the Chinese and Japanese, and I read those too. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Basho’s travelogue, was remarkable as well. He wrote beautiful haiku and years later it was largely because of him that I tried to write short poems of my own. Basho loved to take long walks, and in the company of some of his students hiked all over Honshu, the central island of Japan, writing haiku hither and yon. He was frail physically but tough, and he was a strict teacher when it came to writing haiku. I read his book a couple of times during the summer and kept it and the other poetry books I had on a little shelf above my kitchen table. I was living then in a little stucco farm worker’s shack outside of town on the old Lincoln Highway.

I can remember visiting you in your backyard writing cottage and seeing a stack of books rubber banded together with a post-it note that said “Essential Books.” Who’s in that stack? Who inspired you?

Yeah, shortly after your visit I had them put in my archive at UC Davis. Those books were very important to me and still are. One was an old first edition of Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North, and Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. I’ve had an interest in Zen for many years and admire Shunryu Suzuki, who was the founder of San Francisco Zen Center. His teachings for whatever reason speak straight to me. There was also Walden and Mary Barnard’s translations of Sappho. She taught me the value of line and stanza breaks. I learned from Thoreau how to save money and still enjoy life just as much. You know, how to grow more with less.

Your poems are deeply connected to the sensuous world. Tell me about how your poems are shaped by place and the non-human neighbors and species that we share space with. How do you think of ecology, the natural world, and our place within it?


  

Well, I’ve spent a lot of time outdoors either at work or play, so it’s probably easier for me than most to feel connected to the natural world. But I still have a lot to learn. You can study ecology in a classroom and that’s a good thing to do, but I think it’s better to learn the lessons of nature, especially wild nature, by putting yourself out in it. However, just walking through the woods in a city park or along a beach, certainly makes it possible to feel a greater connection with it. You don’t have to do it every day but it would probably help if you did. It’s just a healthy thing to do. Experiencing nature not only enables you to come home to where you are, but also to who you are. Jackson Pollock once said to the artist Hans Hofmann, “I am nature,” and he was totally right. So you don’t need to walk the John Muir Trail or climb Mt. Rainier to experience the natural world because it’s everywhere: a museum, a park in a neighborhood, a garden, a gym, a tavern, a corner grocery. These places are just as much part of nature as the Grand Canyon. Nature is all inclusive; it leaves nothing out.

 
Port Townsend is a such a wonderful and rich place for literature—from Copper Canyon Press to local writers like Bill Porter, Conner Bouchard-Roberts, Gary Lilley, Tess Gallagher, and so many others. How did you end up in Port Townsend? And what has the poetry community in PT been like for you?

In 2004 I left Davis. I had hoped to live there the rest of my life. When I enrolled for school in the fall of 1966, it was a much smaller campus than it is now and downtown was like a village. For most people, especially students, bicycles were the primary source of transportation. I grew up in Olympia on south Puget Sound, but in Davis I was landlocked and didn’t mind at all. It was surrounded by vast stretches of farmland with lovely groves of valley oaks scattered among them. Lake Tahoe was 90 miles east and Point Reyes about the same distance to the west. Those days you could hitchhike and ride freight trains just about anywhere. Hobos often waited on the outskirts of town to catch them. But Davis grew so much and so fast that by the nineties I knew I would have to leave. I just had to decide where. I narrowed my choices down to Nevada City, Arcata, Mendocino, and Port Townsend. I’d seen what gentrification was doing to Marin County so it was out of the question. I visited Port Townsend for a few days, walked around, and liked what I saw—it really is a lovely place—and decided to move there. So far it’s been a good choice.


I’m not involved much with the literary community here. Perhaps I should be, but poets need a lot of quiet time alone so I try to respect that and not mix with them very often. Poetry isn’t a social activity per se but I’ve come to know Bill Porter (Red Pine) and have met Finn Wilcox and Mike O’Connor, who sadly has passed on. The three of them are/were excellent writers. The other people you mention I haven’t met I don’t think, but I am aware of Tess Gallagher—she lives in Port Angeles, I believe—and have read some of her work. She and Raymond Carver were married for a time. I haven’t been over to Copper Canyon but once or twice since Sam Hamill left. But as much as I admire them, I think it’s better to leave these writers alone. As for myself, I came here with a lot of writing projects to work on and for years had little time for
anything else.

We share a publisher and some friends in New Mexico. Tell me about how you got connected up with La Alameda Press in Albuquerque.

Yeah, that would be JB Bryan. I had a friend named Anthony Hunt who lived in Albuquerque and had published a book on Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End. He had come to Davis in the 1990s to do some research and that’s where I met him. Tony called me some years later to tell me a man named Charles Little, an old cranky funny fellow, wanted to publish some poets who wrote about wild places. Charles, who also lived in Albuquerque, called his project “Voices from the American Land,” and Tony gave me his number and urged me to call him, which I did. Charles and I had a lively conversation and he asked me to send him some of my Sierra Nevada poems. He called me soon after to say he liked them and would I send more because he wanted to publish them in a chapbook. Then he phoned me again to invite me to read in Albuquerque with some other poets on Christmas Eve. The reading took place in a church and we read by candlelight. JB was there and came up to me after I read—I read last, I think—and we chatted a while. I knew he was the publisher of La Alameda Press and made handsome books. I asked him if I could meet up with him before I left the next day. He agreed and we got together the next morning in his studio in Placitas where we sat cross legged on the floor, sipped green tea that he carefully brewed on his wood stove. We talked about about a lot of things, but not poetry. It wasn’t even mentioned, I don’t think. Then he asked me to send him a manuscript of Sierra Nevada poems and he would make a book. We needed to find a cover and I chose a painting of the Sierra Nevada by Chiura Obata. I called up his granddaughter—she lived in Berkeley—and asked for her permission to use it. She kindly agreed and I paid her fifty dollars. JB knew Obata’s work and liked the painting. We split up the books fifty fifty, and one morning I came home and found some cardboard boxes of The Sunny Top of California on the front porch. I was psyched. Three years later JB brought out my second book, Fool’s Gold. I remember thinking now that I was a published poet that I’d better clean up my act and be well-mannered in all my dealings because I didn’t want to give poetry a black eye.

Tell me about your work with Alcuin Press in Portland.

That’s the name of Charles Lehman’s press. He’s a wonderful man who, before we met, had studied and mastered Roman italic calligraphy at Reed College under the instruction of Lloyd Reynolds. Charles wrote a little book on Roman italic writing. I found it years before in Shields Library when I was living in Davis. I’ve always appreciated beautiful penmanship. Mine was so bad for such long a time, but one day I got out my Webster’s and copied in pencil the caps and the lower cases of the alphabet each day for a few weeks, and no one has complained about my handwriting since. Someday I’d like to take a class in it.

One day I got up the nerve to call Charles to tell him I’d read his book, and asked if he could write out one of my poems and I’d pay him for his time. He said yes and invited me to come to his home for a visit. Charles and his wife took me out to lunch and when we said good-by, he told me to send some poems and he’d write one out and do a little painting on it for a broadside. He did it for nothing. We talk regularly on the phone. My wife and I have stayed at his house and once joined his family there for a big Christmas celebration. Years ago, he selected some poems from my books and wrote them out by hand, including a brief preface, and did the cover too. We named it Wind in the Pines. Later he published Lower Putah Song and more recently my Sierra Nevada memoir, Records of a Broken-down Mountaineer.

Your poems are incredibly plainspoken and there’s a quality of talking or conversation in them. Tell me about when you let speech and thought come into your poems.

Well, I learned the value of “plain talk” in my writing from William Carlos Williams, Gary Snyder, and Bob Dylan, among others. I’ve always tried to speak clearly and simply, so why not write that way? I appreciate single, double, and sometimes three-syllable words the most; I don’t have a very big vocabulary. To be sure, there’s a place for scholarly language but I like better the kind of talk you hear everyday in bus stations and diners, hardware stores and shoe repair shops, taverns, alleys, street corners, and strip clubs. It’s clear, straightforward speech and often very funny. And it’s language that’s easily remembered. I wish our politicians could speak more clearly; they’re often hard for me to understand. My wife who has followed politics closely for most of her life, told me not to worry because they usually don’t understand what they’re saying either. And, I might add, they don’t want you to understand as well. But out in life where the real people are, you can hear wonderful lines for poetry.

You mentioned my writing poems in conversation and yeah, I like doing that. I’ve done it in prose too. Part One of Lower Putah Song is a novella called “When I was a poet in China.” It’s an imagined conversation between Li Po, the eighth century Chinese poet, and me. He’s been alive all these years and happened to turn up one day by Putah Creek near a thicket where I was taking a nap after work. He’d been walking from Taos on his way to Inverness in Marin County where one of his girlfriends lived. We talked and laughed all afternoon about a variety of things until it got dark. Then I gave him some money for dinner—he was broke—and we said goodbye. Li Po’s still out there walking around, keeping track of things. Writing a poem or prose where you imagine animals or trees in conversation with each other is a great way of getting closer to the natural world. Children love it. It’s a kind of writing that has existed worldwide for a long, long time.

Let’s talk about the shift that came with writing Fool’s Gold and short poems.

Well, I started writing short poems because I was having trouble with a lot of the longer ones in The Sunny Top of California. For some reason they didn’t cohere. I thought if I could learn to write short poems well, then I could go back to the longer ones and fix them. The lessons learned writing good short poems are basically the same writing longer ones. I worked for a year or more writing poems of two, three, four, and five lines, and it went pretty well, I think. I was able then to go back to the longer poems and fix them without much difficulty. The short poems were later arranged to become a book called Fool’s Gold. This is one of the little poems:

                   Is this poem fool’s gold
                  or a nugget at the bottom
                  of a clear stream.

In these last few years, you’ve taken up boxing and writing poems has been less of a regular practice. What has changed for you over these many decades of writing poetry and listening to your inner voice?


  

I finished Records of a Broken-down Mountaineer in 2019, but couldn’t think of anything to write next and still haven’t. The pandemic came the next year so I stayed at home and began re-reading it, hoping a new idea would come. It didn’t, but I cleaned up some paragraphs and added a few more memories and sentiments that had been left out. I also added several poems. It’s possible we’ll do another printing. Records is a better piece of writing now.
   
If I never write again that’s OK; I’m not worried about it. Nothing lasts anyway and there are a lot of things that need to be done around the house. Writing poetry improved my language skills, which I needed, but what I’m grateful for the most are all the invitations to read and the letters and phone calls I still receive from people I’ve never met. Somewhere they had read my poems and appreciated them enough to call or write and say thanks. You can’t beat that.

Yeah, my daily time for writing has now been replaced by boxing. I work at it for a few hours each day and enjoy it immensely. I got introduced to boxing when I was a little boy watching the fights on television with my father. It was called The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports and I sat on his lap and watched the great fighters of the fifties—Sugar Ray Robinson, Kid Gavilan, Ezzard Charles, and my favorite, Floyd Patterson. They were magnificent, they really were. I’m fortunate at my age to be able to do everything in boxing training except sparring. I’m too old for it now, but at the moment have no chronic joint pain—knock on wood—so I can practice everything else the young guys do. My reflexes, speed, and punching power have fallen behind of course, but it doesn’t discourage me much. Showing up every day to work at it is what matters. I’m shooting for 10,000 hours and if I stay healthy, I can do it. However, if something new to write comes, I’ll find the time to do it too.

If you don’t mind, I’d like to say a few more things about writing poetry. I’ll make it quick. First of all, start by reading poetry. Don’t be too eager yet to write your own poems. There will be plenty of time for that later. The poetry of the past is the ground you walk on, so read, read, read; read and enjoy all the poets of every race, religion, and nation. And when it’s time to write, think of it as a kind of meditation—“one phrase after another, each phrase refreshing.” And be sure to choose your nouns and verbs with care. That’s crucial; too many modifiers will muddy a poem every time.

And one more thing: play a developing poem over and over in your mind and don’t write it down until you can clearly visualize it. That way you avoid a lot of revising. Be patient enough to let the poem come forth on its own. Let’s say for example there’s a bobcat in the woods where you have a cabin. It’s curious about you but still wary about approaching. One night, it takes a chance and steps up on your porch. You hear something but when you go out to look, it’s gone. Another night it visits again but this time waits for you to see it before hurrying back into the woods. Some later day, the bobcat comes to your door and stays there. You’ve been patient and it trusts you now. You let it come in the house and give it some food. The bobcat is the poem come home to the poet.