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What My Father Didn't Know I Learned From Him

by Harry Youtt

151 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #02-0376; ISBN 1-55369-563-1; US$17.00, C$19.50, EUR14.00, £10.00

This collection of poetry should be read by everybody who is a father and by everybody who has or ever had a father. Written by a poet and teacher of creative writing on the West Coast of the United States, it is a long-delayed search for the discovery of his father - a search that reveals to all of us a part of the universal quest to find the significance of our immediate roots. What My Father Didn't Know I Learned from Him has been labeled a new and easily accessible art form, as fresh a departure from the conventional poetry of our current culture as Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass was in its time.

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about the book      about the author      excerpts      catalogue info

About the Book     What My Father Didn't Know I Learned from Him, by Harry Youtt, is a collection of poems that are a reminiscence of his father, one that carries within it the seeds of the universal that have meaning for all of us. A photo-album of a man's soul. The first selection: Skyline, sets the tone for the entire work: When my father died, it was like the towers coming down. Our skyline was changed beyond recognition. Now, parts of my father I never recovered are still down there buried in the rubble.     The collection has been labeled as almost a new art form, as fresh a departure from the conventional poetry of our current culture as Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass was in its time. Easily accessible to everyone, it is the story of a "simple-complicated man," presented not as an epic or saga with a forced, over-arching theme, but as a series of starbursts, one episode at a time. The result is that, like a box of popcorn, one can reach in and grab a handful at a time from any place in the box, leaving the rest for later. Most contemporary poetry strives to be poetry. It tries to twist language into a message the poet wants to get across. It seeks phrases that call attention to themselves as poetry. By contrast, in these poems, as Harry Youtt says, "I just write them down and let them reach back for me."     This is a different approach. It is what Walt Whitman recognized when he characterized the poet as not an "arguer"but as pure "judgment"itself. "He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun falling round a helpless thing."     The collection is a long-delayed search for the discovery of the poet's father * a search that reveals to all of us a part of the universal quest to find the significance of our immediate roots. As Harry says: "We are all mystified by our parents. And many of us spend a long time trying to make sense of things for ourselves, so that we can move on into our own individuality. In demystifying my own father, I hope that others will gain insight in their own separate singular struggles and will be encouraged or inspired to light out in their own directions. The book will honor me best if it stimulates others to seek to create their own poetic starbursts as they go."

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About the Author     Harry Youtt has become one of our Renaissance People. For twenty years he was an East Coast trial lawyer specializing in Constitutional and intellectual property issues, but he has long since recovered from all that. He moved to Los Angeles in 1987 and currently also spends as much time as he can at a cabin in the mountains near Prescott, Arizona.     A frequently-published poet and writer of short stories, Harry has been teaching fiction-writing in the UCLA Writers' Program (Extension) since 1990. He also designed and wrote the acclaimed official pilot season website for David Kelley's ABC episodic television drama: "The Practice." He also teaches classes in writing for multi-media in the Digital Arts Program at the University of California, at Irvine.     For the past couple of years, Harry has conducted a workshop for poets in Wales in the Swansea house where Dylan Thomas was born. He has been a drama critic for local newspapers, and he has served as editor of the literary journal: The Hermosa Review. He has also presented scholarly papers at academic conferences in Wales, England, Canada, Mexico and the United States.     Find out what Harry is currently up to by accessing the website he leads as the "URL-der" ("You have to say it to remember it!"): www.url-der.org

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Excerpts

Skyline

When my father died, it was like the towers coming down.
One day there he was where you always could find him,
anchored in rock, solid as structural steel even though
he'd learned to sway and bend in the wind without breaking,
polished and glimmering every day the sun shone,
and bright-lit every night.

Then, suddenly, something we never imagined
smashed into his upper floors.
He just burned out of control for awhile, still proud.
And then, without us being able to do a thing except
stand around and watch, the whole building
just collapsed in front of us.

Our skyline was changed beyond recognition.
Now, parts of my father I never recovered are still down there
buried in the rubble.

Kansas City Cowboys

When he went there on his business trip,
Kansas City was as far West
as my father had ever been,
and after a week away, he came home
on the same train that took him,
bringing as much of it back with him as he could.

Sure enough, folded into the brown leather suitcase
he'd bought new for the trip, were cowboy clothes
for my brother and me, fresh from my father's
version of Wild and wooly West-ness.

Purple vests made from felt and stamped
with images of horse shoes and branding irons,
also a cowboy hat for each of us, with
chin strings and bead cinchers,
and cotton cowboy gloves with exaggerated cuffs.

I had hoped at least for a Lone Ranger mask,
but there wasn't one of those.

We put the vests on over sweatshirts,
and then the gloves and the hats,
and we wore them out into the cold afternoon,
not knowing exactly what to do
without horses, but armed - just in case -
with cap pistols.

Somebody came along and took our picture
when we were just standing around smiling
and being cold in front of the house.
We didn't look like cowboys,
more like a couple of confused and
homeless hoboes, fresh off a freight train and
just back from the Depression.

But in my father's eye, we were Tom Mix and
Hopalong Cassidy, bound straight down the line
for Hollywood.

The Photo in the Aluminum Frame

In that photograph you brought back from the coin machine
the one with the stamped aluminum frame
(was it from your trip to Kansas City or New York?) -
In that photograph your hat is tilted back and
your smile shows the real self of you that everybody loved.
It is the part of you I always could see, even without the picture,
in spite of words you might have been saying
that I could never listen to.

I see that photo and I know I still can talk to you,
and seeing it makes me certain that you can understand.
Perhaps you always could.

In that photo, your smile is happy and any trace of
interfering static is disappeared,
as if you have a separate family there and
they are all standing around you,
with nothing for you to criticize or recommend,
and they are coaxing you to laugh and
you don't have to worry
about being an example of anything to anyone.

Sometimes I wish I'd been that family.
Sometimes now, I wear a
brimmed hat like that and tilt it back
and try to feel as happy as you seemed to be,
right at that moment.

I end up feeling silly and usually I just
pull the brim down and hope nobody was looking,
but sometimes it works. And always I remember
the real part of you that showed through,
in that one simple picture.

Words and the Dalai Lama

I would like to say I remember the words that my father said,
but most of them I forgot.
Most advice he gave to me never sank in and took root,
and it couldn't be revived, even when I found it repeated
on those sheafs of yellow legal paper with vertical folds
that he used for making speeches
to folks who came to hear him.
I didn't listen when he said the words;
I only felt the resonance that always was at his core,
and that confused me, in the light of most of what he said.

Our souls are saved in this world
by the tones that sound in the spaces
beyond the edges of words.
I learned this first from feeling my father move
contrary to what he said and then deny it
even when confronted.
and then I learned it from the melodies and rhythms of music,
and finally from the Dalai Lama, who never mentions it,
but who, despite his best effort at eloquence,
confirms his meaning only with a dazzling presence -
that goes so far beyond what he ever manages to say.

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Catalogue Information

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