Richard Brautigan Poetry Project
Richard Brautigan was an American writer born in Tacoma, Washington in 1935, who rose to international fame in 1967 with his novel "Trout Fishing in America", written in his adopted home of San Francisco. He was considered a symbol of the counterculture's youth movement. He was a lifelong depressive and alcoholic, and beyond his countercultural gravitas, he was widely dismissed by critics and his contemporaries for his naivety and lack of literary cultivation. He wrote and wrote and wrote, however, with pathos, humor, lack of concern for tradition, and wild imagination until his death by suicide in 1984.
His novels and poems have been in my life for as long as I can remember. My parents, hippies living in New Hampshire who dreamed of being in the scene in San Francisco, devoured Brautigan's novels and poetry, and there wasn't a single book of his missing from that special bookshelf. I read "In Watermelon Sugar" when I was twelve, in awe of the world he'd created and the mysteries that I felt I could never access. I started to carry around a copy of his poetry book "Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork" as a teenager, both because he was so unknowable to me and he WAS me when I would enter the book; his vague yet stylized, first person poems were anti-feminist, misogynistic; yet, I felt I was the author of them. Even when he was saying something absolutely offensive, I could feel the parts of me that were dirty, naughty and trashy light up in a neon lit way that has never left me.
I moved to Montana in 2005, and dreamed of his home in Pine Creek, where he pared down his poetry to such an extent that sometimes the title was longer than the poem itself. You could feel his love for the beauty and stillness in this big sky, and as my love grew for the land and the sky, I became even more connected to him.
In 2018, after turning forty, I started to see how I had grown and morphed from the young girl struggling to understand the words he laid out, to the teen girl who felt the words blush me from the inside out, to the twenty something who started to recognize the yearning and disappointment of the struggle for love and success, to finally, the established creative who felt deeply and completely the words: "Finding is losing something else. I think about, perhaps even mourn, what I lost to find this".
It was then that I recognized the way I could express my complete devotion to the words of Brautigan and the meaning they had had in my life for nearly thirty years was to make a body of work about my personal experience, through the lens of the wild, sometimes misogynistic, idiosyncratic, and truthful words of his poetry.
