When I was 17½ (year : 1977), long before I had anything of consequence to say, I found myself inexorably developing the habits and persona of the poet, which may explain the neglect my academic persona encountered, and the reason my father pressured me into “joining” the US Navy upon my 18th birthday. After basic training, I was placed on the USS Roanoke stationed in the South Pacific and set to 12-hour days, 7 days a week, of unskilled manual labor upon a sun-pummeled deck coursing through an infinite ocean, docking for 2 days’ leave at the atrophied colonial outpost Manila Bay every 9 months. Although this life was monotonous, grim and occasionally sadistic, being young and resilient, both physically and psychologically, I persisted in continuing my poetic inclinations. In order to do so, innervated by innumerous cups of coffee available in the nearby messroom, I wrote verse upon verse in my precious notebooks in the ship’s smoking room, forgoing sleep every other night. Maintaining this discipline for a couple years turned a teenage dilettante into the makings of a career poet.
My nocturnal lucubrations did not go unnoticed by the crew and were variously met with amusement, contempt, social isolation, assaults and even a “tar and feathering” (axle grease taking the place of tar) which by contemporaneous standards would be classified as gang rape. None of these social dissuasions proved sufficiently inhibiting. Indeed, I made an appointment with the Captain himself, the very Lord and Master of the sea-bound vessel, and, shown into his quaintly luxurious personal quarters, I proceeded to bring to his scrutiny a few of my latest volumes of poetry, duly illustrated (in colored pencils) by the author, produced onboard. I ventured to opine to the august personage before me that I wasn’t in a proper setting for my particular skill-set burgeoning so conspicuously and asked, ingenuously and sincerely, if I could be released from further military obligation. He thrust my booklets back at me, squinting a terrible squint of disbelief in my direction, and muttered, “Don’t worry, Kurtz, we’ll get you squared away. Dismissed!”
Now that it is some 40 years later, that particular individual is no longer with us. I must say, and not without some measure of aplomb, that the good Captain, his crew and the entire US Navy infrastructure, cultural as well as penal, failed to get me “squared away.” I spent the next 25 years AWOL, a fugitive from justice, never owning or driving an automobile (lest the DMV traced me or a traffic violation identified me), moving from town to town (lest the Navy agents who repeatedly importuned my mother located and apprehended me) and fearing every annual IRS return with cold sweats — in effect, altering the trajectory of an entire lifetime. Except, I continued to write, and record, poetry (up to and following my settlement with the Navy as brokered by the Quakers). I wrote the beginning of yet another of my multitudinous poems in the middle of the night just hours ago. In a better future, sailors will be even rarer than poets.
“Weirdos On the Street” – my first professionally recorded song poem, 1979.
Personnel: John Kuthe (moog), Scott Shipman (guitar, bass, violin), Eric Schmidt (drums, piano), Craig Kurtz (narration, microphone feedback). © 1979 C. Kurtz.