"Richard Brautigan"
Caroline J. Bokinsky
Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 5: American Poets Since World War II. Edited by Donald J. Greiner. Gale Research Company, 1980, pp. 96-99.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington, the son of Bernard F. and Lula Mary Keho Braurigan. He married Virginia Dionne Adler, from whom he is now divorced, on 8 June 1957, and he has a daughter, Ianthe. He moved to San Francisco in 1958 and there befriended such poets as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Duncan, Phillip Whalen, and Michael McClure. He is often categorized as one of the San Francisco Poets. Brautigan was poet-in-residence at California Institute of Technology in 1967 and received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1968-1969. He maintains no single place of residence, claiming San Francisco, Montana, and Tokyo as homes. He lives a secluded life, despite his wide-spread popularity, often retreating to his home in Montana.

He began his writing career as a poet, gained most of his acclaim from his novels, and became a cult hero with Trout Fishing in America (1967). One of his few published comments on writing is recorded in David Meltzer's The San Francisco Poets (1971): "I wrote poetry for seven years to learn how to write a sentence because I really wanted to write novels and I figured that I couldn't write a novel until I could write a sentence. I used poetry as a lover but I never made her my old lady." By experimenting with poetry, he developed his skills with language. Many readers consider him a master of the simile and metaphor because he is able to link seemingly unrelated ideas and concepts.

In precise, lucid words, Brautigan encourages the reader neither to pry deeply nor to overinterpret. As Robert Kern notes, Brautigan's style is like that of William Carlos Williams, with a "Poetics of Primitivism" that "does not look like literature and is not meant to." This primitive, pure form of writing is almost "preliterary," according to Kern, because it is based on no historical traditions but instead is invented "out of the daily events and objects of [the poet's] immediate physical locality." Brautigan's primitivism, according to Kern, lies in the intentional naivete of his poems as the poet draws attention to himself in the act of articulating his emotional responses and observations of the world. Tony Tanner, although focusing more on Brautigan's novels than his poetry, finds Brautigan's achievement in his "magically delicate verbal ephemera."

What appears as nonliterary in Brautigan's work is more an attempt to start anew. Deliberately using poetry as a stimulating "lover," he experiments with his sensations, tests his emotions, and observes external reality, with the ulterior motive of grasping language at its most elementary level and recording his gut responses. His creative imagination is constantly at work as he looks at life in terms of analogies; one form of experience, or one particular observation, is like something else. The poet imposes his unique order on the world's chaos as he sees life in a new way, giving meaning to the meaningless. The reader must strip himself of expectations and conventions in order to approach and accept Brautigan's poetry as a refreshing new version of experience. Despite his concern for the new, Brautigan has been influenced by the Imagists, the Japanese, and the French Symbolists. From the Imagists and the Japanese he inherits a concern for the precision of words, while the Symbolist influence is apparent in his references to Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud and in his use of synesthesia, in which one type of sensation stimulates a different sense, or a mental stimulus elicits a physical response, or vice versa.

Brautigan's earliest published poem, The Return of the Rivers (1957), is an observation of the external world as a surreal, romanticized setting in which the cycle of life is exemplified in the river, sea, rain, and ocean. He demonstrates the creative power of the poet's imagination to an even greater degree in The Galilee Hitch-Hiker (1958). The book consists of nine separate poems in which the speaker describes his encounters with Baudelaire, who appears in a different pose in each section. Terence Malley considers the collection "one of Brautigan's finest achievements" and suggests that Baudelaire is a symbol of "the artist who can transform anything into anything else."

With his next book, Lay the Marble Tea (1959), Brautigan's exploration of language extends to similes and metaphors with humorous twists as suggested by such titles as "Feel Free to Marry Emily Dickinson" or "Twenty Eight Cents for My Old Age." His experiments with the simile include strange analogies in which "a dish of ice cream" looks "like Kafka's hat," or in "In a Cafe":

"I watched a man in a cafe fold a slice of
bread as if he were folding a birth certificate
or looking at the photograph of a dead lover."

Brautigan's imaginative reconstructions of reality also include such recollections of his youth as "The Chinese Checkers Players" and "A Childhood Spent in Tacoma."

The Octopus Frontier (1960) continues Brautigan's creation of order and meaning from objects in the literal world by using them to construct a fantasy world within his own imagination. In many of the poems the speaker leads the reader through the maze of Brautigan's imagination, as in "Private Eye Lettuce," an attempt to show how man's imagination makes connections, no matter how extraneous, and gives significance to "objects of this world." While "Private Eye Lettuce" makes logical associations, in "The Wheel" the poet assumes a child's view of the world where the analogies are more fanciful. "The Winos on Potrero Hill," however, relies more on realistic detail and precision. The poet acts as a painter, in a meticulous step-by-step process, putting each object in a specific place to create a painting. "The Postman" creates its effect by allusion because although the poet never says what "The smell / of vegetables / on a cold day" elicits, the accumulation of similes causes a synesthetic response. The sensation of smell suggests the taste of fresh summer vegetables. The taste in turn stimulates the feel of a warm summer day. All sensations merge in the imagination, and even those that are illusions appear real for a moment.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (1967) provides a transition to the collection that was to become his most popular and was to establish his position as a poet, The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968). Recalling the romanticism of The Return of the Rivers while looking forward to the humor that characterizes The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, the long poem, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, presents a vision of an ideal world where man and nature exist in harmony, "where mammals and computers / live together in mutually / programming harmony," and where the perfect world is "all watched over / by machines of loving grace."

The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster includes most of the poems that appeared in previous volumes and new poems that confirm his magical power of transforming an image into something else. The title poem, most often mentioned by critics, is a Brautigan classic. A sudden revelation, which flashes into the poet's head as an insignificant moment, becomes an analogy with greater proportions. Robert Kern praises "Haiku Ambulance," a brief poem often casually dismissed as pointless, and links it to William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow." In some of the poems Brautigan's extravagant metaphors become farfetched. Such poems as "The Harbor" "The Horse That Had a Flat Tire," or "Death is a Beautiful Parked Car Only" verge on the incomprehensible. Yet in "The Garlic Meat Lady" he is absorbed in the elemental delights of life. He identifies passion with Marcia preparing dinner:

"She takes
each piece of meat like a lover
and rubs it gently with garlic.
I've never seen anything like this
before. Each orifice
of the meat is explored, caressed
relentlessly with garlic."

Brautigan continues his experiments with similes and metaphors in the next volume, Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt (1970), but his poetry also begins to move into social commentary. Some pages are blank, with only titles at the top, as if poems were intended to be there but were never created. Along with the humor, he takes a verbal stab at critics, alludes to Robert Kennedy's death, suggests the economic plight of the country, and depicts the lack of communication between husband and wife. In "Jules Verne Zucchini," he hits hard at the discrepancy between scientific progress—man walking on the moon—and people starving on the earth. "Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt" suggests the futility of war, the cycle of history, and dead heroes forgotten by the passage of time. A momentous occasion, like Rommel's penetration into Egypt, is meaningless to someone seeing the news account (the title of the poem is an old newspaper headline) years after the event.

A new tone emerges in Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork (1976). Brautigan's terse messages and witty similes are overshadowed by a blacker humor and a darker, more pensive mood. The poems are more personal; the reader even glimpses the poet in the process of writing. The blacker poems include references to Captain Martin who is lost at sea and to "a freshly-dug grave," "a blind lighthouse," or "a poorly-designed angel." An awareness of growing old is a key subject, as in "The Last Surprise":

"The last surprise is when you come
gradually to realize that nothing
surprises you anymore."

A poet who once saw life in pleasant, whimsical analogies is now filled with foreboding and pessimism. His sensations are no longer so acute. In "Fresh Paint" the speaker expresses perplexity over his associations of the sight of funeral parlors, the smell of fresh paint, and the sensation in his stomach. He retreats to a private wilderness in "Montana/1973" to reexperience life in nature, to rediscover his true essence, and to get back in touch with his own sensations, with the world, and with the cosmos. He concludes the volume with an existential pose, convincing himself that retreating to Montana is an action with some value:

"Nobody knows what the experience is worth
but it's better than sitting on your hands,
I keep telling myself."

In June 30th, June 30th (1978) Brautigan comes to terms with an important moment in his youth: the death of his uncle in 1942, which was indirectly caused by a head wound from bomb fragments during the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. He died a year later from a fall that Brautigan felt would have been avoided had he not been injured. In the introduction to the poems, Brautigan states that after going through a period of hatred for the Japanese, "the war slipped back into memory." When he discovered their art and their humanity, he could forgive the Japanese and was eventually drawn to the country, where he confronted his animosity during a visit that lasted from 13 May to 30 June 1976. Leaving Japan on the evening of 30 June, he crossed the international date line in mid-Pacific and landed in the United States at the beginning of a second 30 June, feeling that part of himself was left behind in Japan. The book's title signifies the divided self, while also implying the poet's coming to terms with his other self.

Brautigan calls the poems a diary: critics have referred to them collectively as one poem. June 30th, June 30th is the most unified of Brautigan's volumes not only because the poems pertain to a single experience but because the speaker of all the poems is Brautigan himself examining his reactions to this experience. For the first time, Brautigan is a confessional poet, lost and alone in a strange land, unable to communicate. There is a barrier separating him not only from those who do not speak English, as "The Silence of Language" and "Talking" indicate, but also from those who speak his own language. He effectively conveys to the reader this greater lack of communication in "On the Elevator Going Down." He is just one individual among the millions in Tokyo in "The 12,000,000" and "Japanese Children," and he discovers that Tokyo is no different from any other city. His observations of a sleeping cat, a fly, or dreams could have been made anywhere else in the world. In "A Study in Roads," he comments that with "All the possibilities of life, / all roads led here," expressing the feeling that he has been a sporadic wanderer. Although he is well known, "Ego Orgy on a Rainy Night in Tokyo with Nobody to Make Love to" ends with a despairing tone: "I will sleep alone tonight in Tokyo."

As Brautigan told Meltzer in 1971, "I love writing poetry but it's taken time, like a difficult courtship that leads to a good marriage, for us to get to know each other." June 30th, June 30th is the transition from a lifelong courtship of poetry into a commitment whereby he gives himself to poetry, making her his "old lady."

"Loading Mercury With a Pitchfork"
Terry Link
Rolling Stone, 11 June 1970, p. 26.
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Seven hundred people went trout fishing in here [in San Francisco], but the wily Richard Brautigan eluded them by means of a deep skin-dive into his poetry.

"I have a feeling this whole audience is prose writers," he said several times to the crowd filling the First Unitarian Church Thursday night [San Francisco, 7 May 1970]. "For a while I thought I was reading in a mortuary. I guess a church is the same thing."

But the reading was sponsored by the S.F. State College Poetry Center and although the most applause he received all night was when he announced a forthcoming collection of short stories which would include two chapters left out of Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan steadfastly refused to stray from his "short, flat, funky poems" which "lie like mush on the page."

He also rejected a suggestion from someone in the audience (who demanded to be "turned on" for his $2 admission) that he try free association. "I'm not an improvisational actor, I'm a poet," he replied.

So forget all those lengths of used trout stream stacked in back at the Cleveland Wrecking Yard. Never mind Shorty still pedalling down the freeway to San Jose at a quarter mile per hour in his wheelchair. Don't give another thought to the Mayor of the Twentieth Century. And if you see any first graders with Trout Fishing in America chalked on their backs, just dust them off.

Once this adjustment was made, it was a fine evening with one of our very best poets.

Brautigan appeared shortly before eight PM dressed in blue denim, a blue vest and a long blue scarf, almost like a priest's stole, considering the location.

Where the sanctuary would be in most churches, the Unitarians had a raised oval stage, with a pulpit on each side and oriental rugs on the floor. Against the back wall were three ceremonial thrones and where a crucifix might have hung was a modernistic metal frame reaching nearly to the ceiling to hold candles.

He quickly poured a glass of white wine from a half-gallon jug he carried in a paper bag and set the glass on the edge of the pulpit to the audience's right, the bag with the jug at his feet. As people came up to say hello, he would sip from the glass and then offer it to whomever he was talking. From time to time, he would walk across the platform, swinging his arms and do a few knee squats, like an athlete warming up.

When the church was nearly filled, he began reading poems written within the past few weeks, including some that morning. They had titles like "Voluntary Quicksand," "Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork," and "Your Love" (the last in its entirety: "Your love/Somebody else needs it/I don't).

Commenting that he doesn't "think the purpose of a poet is to write good poems" but rather "to work out the possibilities of language and the human condition," Brautigan also read some of his rejects.

"I'm shameless to read this stuff," he said. After about an hour of reading in a style he described as "bang, bang, bang, bang" and "pausing afterward to feel what you were feeling and I wasn't feeling anything," Brautigan began answering questions from the audience.

To a suggestion that he "talk politics," he responded by holding up his two forefingers in the form of a cross. "I know you're not a warlock, but I just thought I'd make sure," he told the person making the suggestion.

The discussion kept coming back to the lack of interaction of poet and audience, but in between Brautigan said:

Poetry may be defined as "language and spiritual mercury."
At 17, he "grew bored with the response" of warm-blooded creatures when a lead missle blows a hole in them, so he traded in his guns and "had a lot of dental work done."
He played Shostakovitch's Fifth Symphony continuously "maybe 400 times" while writing A Confederate General from Big Sur.
He accepted from someone in the audience a medallion from the 1924 Texas Cotton Exposition held in Waco.

"God, it happened so long ago," he replied when asked how he got started writing poetry. "Maybe I fell out of a tree on my head." By now, "it's a physical thing like eating or breathing . . . it's organic, it's part of my metabolism."

Towards the end, someone asked if Brautigan was going to pass the jug around. Brautigan invited him up for a drink and then asked if he wanted to read a poem. The guy did—one of his own—much to Brautigan's delight.

"Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork"
Gerald Locklin
Independent Press-Telegram [Long Beach, CA], 1 Aug. 1976, p. L6.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Brautigan carries the notion of occasional verse to an extreme. Practically anything may constitute for him the occasion for a poem. Sometimes either the subject just isn't there, or else his unique metaphorical apparatus is not working, or both, as in these examples:

BIG DIPPER
This is the biggest Big Dipper
that I've ever seen.

NINE CROWS: TWO OUT OF SEQUENCE
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 6, 8, 9

NIGHT
Night again
again night

On the other hand, when subject and imagination coincide, the poem that results is one that no one but Brautigan could have conceived:

IMPASSE
I talked a good hello
but she talked an even
better good-bye.

THE BOTTLE
A child stands motionless.
He holds a bottle in his hands.
There's a ship in the bottle.
He stares at it with eyes
that do not blink.
He wonders where a tiny ship
can sail if it is held
prisoner in a bottle.
Fifty years from now you will
find out, Captain Martin,
for the sea (large as it is)
is only another bottle.

As in Brautigan's Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster and Rommel Drives On Deep into Egypt, there is much that is flat and ordinary in this book, but, when one has just about given up, there is the flash of life, of wit. No matter: how many great poems did Donne, Keats, and Arnold write? And, at their best, his novels shine forth poetry as well.