Sojourner

by Lee Foust

From the musings of a punk kid composing verses to a drum beat in suburban California to the old man walking the streets of Naples, come to live under the volcano, 40+ years of nomadic poetry.

251 pages, Paperback

Published June 3, 2023

About the author

I am an author, raconteur, and performer, i come from California with a drum on my back, i live in Naples, Italy, the sun's so hot i froze to death and i want to write a story that will make you cry if you will only listen, oh.
http://www.leefoust.com/index.html
http://leefoust.blogspot.com/

Reviews

[Ulysse · Rating 5 out of 5]

On Liking

As much as I like a dead poet
I like a living better
One who bares his naked throat
To all sorts of real weather

One who from the darkness of the Burbs
Does rise like smoke from burning trees
As the volcano's bubble bursts
And lavas over birds and leaves

A poet who knows what a punk is
Because he knows that punk is dead
And that the fascist and his flunkeys
Will never enter a punk's head

He’s on social media like you and me
But not because he's just some sheep
No he goes there to share poetry
With the promise of a friendship

And in this world of shameless capital
Where mediocrity produces likes
It is so nice to meet a chap
Whose poems I sincerely like

And I think you would like them too
If you would go and find his book
—If you want me to I’ll show you
Mid all the garbage where to look

[Lee Foust]

INTRODUCTION


This collection represents all of the verse that I’ve composed in my forty plus years of practicing writing as a vocation that I feel worthy of publication. I’ve arranged the poems in chronological order, dividing them into sections named for the cities in which I was living when they were written. For I feel that my peregrinations from the California suburb where I grew up to San Francisco, then to Florence, Italy, New York City, San Francesco (an ignominious hamlet in the Val d’Arno), back to Florence, and my current city of residence, Naples, Italy, act as watersheds marking the various stages of my progress through this, my literary life.

Looking back over these lyrics, suites, and a couple of longer meditative poems, I’m pleased to see that they act as a record of my thoughts and feelings about things, held together by my Post-Romantic punk rock aesthetic and the cohesion—even over many years’ time—of the mind that composed them. There is, I believe, a progression of thought and poetic acumen, yet also a circling return to topics that remain important to me: place, history, the class struggle, gender, my own melancholy, the old myths, art and artworks, the concept of the deities, love, the mystery of time, and, of course, literature itself.

You will no doubt note the poems’ many places of composition, as well as their reflecting on place itself, the theme that’s led me to the collection’s title. This is partially explained by the fact that I have for some years divided my time between two cities while commuting two days a week during the academic year to work in a third. It’s also because I’m often prompted to write in the short form when confronted with the unfamiliar, or because I turn to verse when I have a fleeting thought while sitting on a train or an airplane that demands an immediate literary expression of some sort. Writing about the places where I have lived or visited has haunted all of my compositions, even my short stories and novels. Thus the theme of place is, I believe, the best way to frame my poems, as residence in a place creates signposts for our shifting identity as we live and change in time, even as our consciousness seeks to hold us together as individuals—at least in terms of a speaking, literary voice.

There are a few exceptions to this chronological arrangement: I've put together six elegies for my brother Bill, the first three composed in Lubbock, Texas, where I visited him at my mother’s urging—as she didn’t think he would recover from the lymphoma that had already made him very ill—two others written the next month when he passed away, and the last composed on the first anniversary of his death. There are eight lyrics, written over many years, salvaged from an abandoned project to compose a book of verse responses to works of visual art. I’ve also grouped together a similar series of poems inspired by visits to various Italian churches. There are two lyrics written at different times, one for San Francisco and one for Florence, that compliment each other too well not to be placed side-by-side. I’ve slipped these themed sections— and a couple of longer poems or suites—in-between the other, place-bound sections for variety and cohesion.

Every once in a while I write in Italian. (For I took my old friend, North Beach poet Jack Hirschman, at his word when he encouraged me to learn the language of my adopted country by reading and writing verse.) Occasionally I have translated poems originally written in English into Italian, or vice-versa, or others have done so for me. I’ve included both versions here if I think they each have their own merits, the original text always preceding its translation. (The Italian texts are dated in the European fashion: day, month, and then year.) Often, when a poetic line is a parenthetical phrase, I put the first comma at the head of the verse rather than at the end of the previous line because it feels more right to me. In some of the texts I use a lowercase i to express a particular kind of humble, anarchic, and slightly-less-phallic or egotistical collective individuality—unable to eschew these particular techniques in certain poems, I have opted to remain consistent with them throughout.

One way to read these verses is as a journey through time and space, beginning with a nineteen-year-old punk composing a song of sorts to a drum beat in Walnut Creek, California, in 1981 and following me on the journey that my literary life has taken to arrive at this professorial desk in Naples, Italy, in 2022, when I began putting these poems together for publication.

It’s always nice to have a traveling companion.


7/27/2022
Naples, Italy