Haroldson,1970

"Rommel Limps On Deep into Nowhere"
Thomas Haroldson
The Fifth Estate [Detroit, MI], vol. 5, no. 5, 9 July 1970, p. 16.
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Anyone who has been thinking of reading Richard Brautigan's poetry should not buy his new book. Almost every worthwhile poem he has written is available in The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster which came out two years ago. The Pill contains 104 outstanding poems written between 1957 and 1968—all are above average; a third are very good; a dozen are great.

Rommel, on the other hand, is nothing more than a mediocre collection of verbal doodles. Of the 85 "poems," 25 are sentences, four are merely titles (no poems under them), and what remains is uniformly inferior to almost all of Brautigan's previous work. No more than six poems in Rommel are even worth reading.

It is unnecessary to say that that the author has experienced better days, because he says it himself. In many ways, Rommel reads more like a suicide note than a collection of poetry.

For example:

"I feel so bad today
that I want to write a poem.
I don't care: any poem, this
     poem."

And:

"Drinking wine this afternoon
I realize the days are getting
     longer."

And:

"Too many lifetimes like this one, right?
Hungover, surrounded by general goofiness,
lonely, can't get it up, I feel just like
     a pile of bleached cat shit."

And:

"In a room that knows your death
a closet freezes like a postage stamp.
A coat, a dress is hanging there."

It could be argued that these four poems aren't poems at all, but their lack of quality (except perhaps the last one) is more disturbing than their brevity. In the past, even when Brautigan was discouraged, his work managed to retain a certain degree of vitality and humor:

"Yup
A long lazy September look
in the mirror
says it's true:

"I'm 31
and my nose is growing
     old.

"It starts about 1/2
     an inch
below the bridge
and strolls geriatically
     down
for another inch or so:
     stopping.

"Fortunately, the rest
of the nose is comparatively
     young.

"I wonder if girls
will want me with an
     old nose.

"I can hear then now
the heartless bitches!

"'He's cute
     but his nose
is old.'"

It may be that more than Brautigan's nose has grown old since he wrote the above poem four years ago, but most likely his recent work merely suffers from comparison. The Pill is a tough act to follow, and nothing as carelessly conceived as Rommel can hope to match it.

Roddan,1970

"Come Home, Richard Brautigan"
Brooks Roddan
Los Angeles Free Press, vol. 7, no. 22, 29 May 1970, p. 36.
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Richard Brautigan may yet turn into the Rod McKuen of the hip set. I'm afraid his latest book of poems, Rommel Drives On Deep Into Egypt, is a cloying, cute, half-assed collection of rather uninteresting tripe.

The witty, groovy, mellow Brautigan of Trout Fishing and Watermelon Sugar only appears in flashes. Nowhere are poems of caliber and substance of, say, "The Galilee Hitch-Hiker" to be found. Instead, short, sentimental drivel and boring reminiscences are contained. One of Brautigan's previous fortes had been turning the small into the cosmic, the cosmic into the small, but most of Rommel is already at its lowest common denominator. Two of the poems just have titles, no substance—I would rather have no titles and a little poetry.

Some of the Brautigan magic survives. He is still beautiful with a metaphor and simile. Witness: "too many times she slept like/a mechanical deer in my caresses/and I ached in the metal silence/of her dreams." When his word choice rhythm succeeds it is a sound and a feel very akin to rock and roll music.

But the contrived cleverness rips the occasional joy away. Maybe I'm picking on all the wrong things, but when a poet must rely on a title for the success of a poem, something is wrong, and too many of Brautigan's do just that. Most of these poems are all flash, the summer of '67 acid and flowers all over again. There is no over-riding purpose or integrity that a book like Watermelon Sugar had. Perhaps Brautigan is more at home writing short stories, and poetry is more or less a diversionary trip.

I still love R.B., and as one who awaits anything new from him as eagerly as rock freaks await a new album from the Beatles or Stones, I'll try to get into Rommel. I understand that he is busily working on a collection of short stories that are gonna blow a few minds. Rommel is a disappointment. Come on home, Richard, and get the hell out of Egypt.

Rose,1970

"The Grand Penny Tour: Brautigan's 'Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt'"
Kate Rose
Minnesota Review, vol. 10, no. 3-4, 1970, pp. 115-116.
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Reading Mr. Brautigan's latest, I'm struck by the fact that "the thirty-five-year-old San Francisco author of Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster and In Watermelon Sugar" (as Dell bills him) cannot be aspiring to poetdom as it is commonly conceived these days.

Brautigan's poems suggest his presence as an imaginative, sensitive, and unexceptional observer. However, they neither explore his personality nor offer a reader anything else on a very deep or elaborate scale. The poetry is not tense, not particularly noble, not, seemingly, aspiring to anything other than the presentation of somebody's reactions, clarified and reduced into tasteful bites. A simpler way of saying this is that Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt should be gulped, like a session of Laugh In, that Mr. Brautigan is attempting to be an entertainer rather than a Great Figure in Literature, and that from anybody's point of view the attempt is worth having around. After all, his emphasis on entertainment is his distinction; attempts at presenting the thoughts of a plain man have been around since Catullus.

How, then, are we to be entertained? As entertainer Brautigan downplays himself and needs good jokes, which, short and strung together through the book, hit a response say, seven times out of ten. The material has a fresh touch, is clearly presented, and is delivered as a series of one-time tries. The effect he seems to be after is sensibility-tweaking. He presents a world which is comfortable, if pleasingly strange, and which will carry a reader along with very little effort. This makes him a good guest-room poet, if you like, but he does manage to tweak enough to make the show come off, one way or another. (And how much can be said of other poetry?)

For me, he's at his best when his lines go beyond quipping, though the quips are often deft, considering the relaxed, colloquial sound he wants to use: "Clad in garments like a silver disease / you parade around the house. You're quite happy. / The lights are out. The shades are down. / It's your business." The poem-quips are lighter usually, as in "Critical Can Opener" ("There is something wrong / with this poem. Can you / find it"), though some are serious - briefly - and some fall flat. The best lines in the book are the opening four of a longer poem, "Professional, Non-offensive, Bland":

"The gunman holds the wind
     in his hand.
Autumn and spring pass like robberies
     across his eyes."

The gunman is, at first glance, gentle, almost poetic, but he's also ominously still for a man who "holds the wind / in his hand," and for all his connection with natural events he has no interest in nature. To him the seasons are "robberies"—nothing so overt as murders—which suggests still more disquieting questions. Where is the gunman during the robberies? What is his actual power? Enclosed in a sense that one understands the figure, such questions are the lines' strength: they make the gunman clear but strikingly menacing.

The bad lines of the book are easier to describe. They are either overelaborate and "inventive" or talk at the reader, and so do not hold the pathos-simplicity pitch Brautigan so often makes. An example of the first is archetypical: "The alarm-colored shadow of a frightened ant / wants to make friends with you, learn all about / your childhood, cry together, come live with / you." For weal or woe the poem is pitched on the first line, and the first line is terrible, as—for their baby talk are the two lines that follow those quoted in "Professional, Non-offensive, Bland" continuing to describe the gunman in terms of seasons:

"He doesn't blink while one stops leaves
     and the other starts them."

Sometimes I just can't see his images, and given the pace of the book, am unwilling to stop for them, as with "Chosen by beauty to be a handmaiden of the stars, / she passes like a silver brush / across the lens of a telescope." (Others may like that—for me it's too pretty and vague even for a beginning.)

Ideas, tough, involving ideas, are not Brautigan's specialty. He tends toward gestures and insights and words; but anyone who's been afraid of poetry because of its formality, glumness, bookish references, obscure, private visions, long words or politics can read this book. The man is not writing to poets or his educated peers; he may be writing instant culture, but he will be read.

Lalley,1971

"Brautigan: Caught in Success?"
Michael Lalley
Great Speckled Bird, 28 June 1971, p. 11.
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Waiting for a new book by Richard Brautigan, after the success of his Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar, was like waiting for a new album from Dylan. Each time Brautigan brought out a new book his admirers were more amazed by his talents and potential, and their ranks grew, starting with his first novel A Confederate General from Big Sur. But the old American success story must have struck again: SHAZAM! & you're sold out . . .

Rommel Drives Deep into Egypt is a book of poems, many of which are less than ten words. Okay, poetry should not be judged on how many words the poem contains. The Japanese, among others, were masters at poems containing very few words. And it is obvious in some of these poems Brautigan is deliberately or unconsciously attempting to create the kind of experience such Japanese poetry generates.

But the Japanese, like other Eastern cultures, have a world view that has little time for the black and white of life but makes much room for the gray. They see "truth" and "beauty" and all the other traditional Western concepts as goals which can only be approached, but never reached. And they realize that in order to get as close as humanely possible the approach must express reverence for the goal, the object. Brautigan's poetry seems to have little of this kind of reverence for what his poetry might be attempting to reach. Poems like the one called "Melting Ice Cream At The Edge of Your Final Thought" which goes:      Oh well, call it a
     life.
seem to me to be completely self-satisfied, self-contained and self-deluded.

I feel poems like many of the facile ones in this book show a lack of respect for my taste, intelligence, and financial situation. Why should time and money and much effort be put into publishing a book that fills one whole page with banalities like:

"     Third Eye
        For Gary Snyder

There is a motrocycle
In New Mexico."

It seems to me this poem is some kind of "climb on, cash in, cop out" bullshit that the hip entrepreneurs get into when they rip off our culture and sell it back to us. Only this is worse because it is more subtle. Brautigan is not saying, "this thing I have to say is inexpressible in normal language only the language of metaphor, image, dream, surrealism, or something can communicate it." He's saying, "this thing I have to say is so hip I know you won't want to admit that you don't get it, or won't want to feel left out on a private line between me and that other guru Gary Snyder."

At least poems like "Negative Clank" which goes:

"     He'd sell a rat's asshole
     to a blindman for a wedding
     ring."

are fun. This so obviously comes out of a very American, very non-elite, non-upper-class, non-WASP etc. cultural experience that it doesn't come off as pretentious "new gentility" of that basically "New York" tone of the others. There are poems in the book that are amusing, and there are some that are really good, maybe even beautiful. But most of them wouldn't make it in an anthology of Reader's Digest rejects. And that's the hitch. Not that Brautigan wrote some poems some of us would call rotten, he's got a right to do that. And not so much even that he published them, if he hadn't published others first. But it so obviously comes right on the heels of his other successes, including his other Delta book of poems called The Spring Hill Mine Disaster [sic], that it just looks like a big fast-money hype. Put the Brautigan name on it and it'll sell, you know the hip types, they don't want to be left out of what's happening any more than any other red blooded American consumer.

Unfortunately this kind of deal gets fostered by elitism, where Brautigan is elevated to the parthenon of underground heroes because he wrote some things that expressed where a lot of people were at, at a certain time. But we have to keep reminding each other that we dig artists usually when not many others are saying it at the same time, and usually the reason we can relate to what they are putting down is because they are expressing us, where we are at, or where we would like to be, and that means their art would be nowhere without us.

Brautigan's poems are as much a result of you and me getting loaded last week, or digging ourselves, or each other, or ripping off a bank next week, or whatever, as they are of his own private musings. He's just a brother, that's all. Just like Dylan, just like Abbie, just like Snyder, just like you and me. As for sisters, I figure this rap is already in the dust where they once were after one look at the covers of the Brautigan books, or a few looks into The Abortion and others. You know how to sell a refrigerator: make people think they got to have it and for good measure put a woman next to it and make the men feel that somehow that goes with the extra large freezer.

Sour grapes? I doubt it, because I still love Trout Fishing in America, which I had long before Delta published it, and a lot of other things Brautigan has written. I still pass my copy around and recommend it, just like I still love the music of Dylan or Cash, even if they all did do that old American trick—sell their souls to the devil who in turn sold it to us, at a nice profit.

Ashley,1971

"Books"
Ashley, Nickie
Guerrilla [renamed Toronto Free Press, Toronto, Canada] 1 March 1971, p. 21.
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Poetic imagery takes a tremendous slap in the face from the author of TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA. Richard Brautigan combines positive and negative esthetcis in a fast-paced collection to produce a series of moments functional, emotional, and totally immediate.

Brautigan murders emotional and observational conventions by using short, deadly-to-the-point poems with shockingly evocative punchlines. In most of his efforts he succeeds brilliantly; the reader quickly becomes breathless from the impact of his revelations. In effect, he strips the psyche bare by combining lyricism with conversational candor.

We age in darkness like wood
and watch our phantoms change
     their clothes
of shingles and boards
for a purpose that can only be
     described as wood.

Rommel is dead.
His army has joined the quicksand legions
of history where the battle is always
a metal echo saluting a rusty shadow.
His tanks are gone.
How's your ass?

Oddly out of place in this collection are a number of poignantly beautiful pieces:

It's a late starting dawn that breathes my vision,
inhales and exhales the sound of waking birds
and pokes ten miles of cold gray sky at a deer
     standing alone in a meadow.

ROMMEL contains a few failures, which stand out horribly against the gems:

I feel so bad today
that I want to write a poem.
I don't care: any poem, this
     poem.

Brautigan's worst poems carry built-in excuses; phrases like "forgive me", "I don't care," and "even if," which, although they might reveal the author's mood, never render those pieces acceptable as literature.

This is an exteremely important work. It captures perfectly the spirit of the times: surface irreverance that drives on down as deep as Rommel into Egypt. Some of the poems seem to be satires on imcomprehensibility in modernliterature. On a second reading, they prove to be startling lessons in the fluid possibility of language, as when Brautigan mocks media jargon:

A transparent bridge across
the elbow of a dead duck
beckons, friends, like a boiled
     radio station
toward a better understanding
of yourself in these crisis-ridden
     times.

With this talent, Brautigan ranks potentially with writers such as James Joyce and Dylan Thomas.

Lynch,1976

"The Poetry of Richard Brautigan"
Lynch, Dennis Daley
Towers no. 47, Northern Illinois University, Fall 1976, pp. 49-52
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Poetic imagery takes a tremendous slap in the face from the author of TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA. Richard Brautigan combines positive and negative esthetcis in a fast-paced collection to produce a series of moments functional, emotional, and totally immediate.

There is something wrong with this poem. Can you find it?

Richard Brautigan, "Critical Can Opener"

While the major publishing houses are cutting back on the amount of poetry published each year, and while young poets are struggling to get enough money together to privately print chapbooks, Richard Brautigan is proving that a poet can be commercially successful in the seventies. Both Rommel Drives On Deep Into Egypt and The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster have gone through multiple hard cover printing; copies from the gigantic paperback runs can be found not only in bookstores throughout the land but also in places which are generally considered anathema to poetry, such as supermarkets, train stations, and head shops.

After perusing the jacket blurbs ("His poems are, by turns, brutally realistic or surrealistically witty," -Time; " ... [Y]ou're startled by what's being set down, or by a single twist either in content or in image, or by the honesty with which the poet is expressing himself ... " -Poetry], the reader who has enjoyed Brautigan's novels may also expect to find the poetry just as aesthetically pleasing; but Brautigan continually confounds expectations: Trout Fishing in America and A Confederate General from Big Sur challenge traditional notions about both the American Dream and novelistic structure; In Watermelon Sugar and The Abortion parody the romance; The Hawkline Monster is subtitled "a gothic western," just as Willard and His Bowling Trophies is subtitled "a perverse mystery." Each of Brautigan's novels is an imaginative and largely successful experiment with form. His experimentations in the poetic genre, on the other hand, are almost complete artistic failures. When the reader finishes Rommel Drives or The Pill he feels as if he has just finished a notebook of random jottings instead of a volume of poetry. Few poems run more than ten lines; many have fewer than ten words. We can thank the Japanese poets for teaching us about word economy, but I wonder if Jisso would appreciate the succinctness of "Nice Ass" ("There is so much lost/ and so much gained in I these words.") or "Melting Ice Cream at the Edge of Your Final Thought" ("Oh well, call it a/ life.") Less is not always more.

Thematically the poems run the gamut from .anti-war ("'Star Spangled' Nails") to pro-fellatio ("I've Never Had It Done so Gently Before"); from the horrors of drugs ("Diet") to the wonders of penicillin ("Flowers for Those You Love"); from praise of a girl named Valerie (one poem in Rommel Drives) to praise of a girl named Marcia (fifteen poems in The Pill). Thomas McGuane, himself a young novelist of considerable talent, finds the style of Brautigan's poetry as hackneyed as its themes: "Apparently relaxed in their poetics, they are in fact strenuously a la mode. [1]" Though purportedly anti-poetry, the poems of Richard Brautigan, with their mixture of sex, San Francisco Zen, and strung-out metaphors, in fact follow rigidly the manner of the Padgett-McClure-McKuen-Cohen school.

Brautigan the novelist has often been accused of being a literary "Charlie Brown," innocently believing, as Johnathan Yardley has said, "happiness is a warm hippie [2]" and naively singing the praises of the organic millennium. I would take exception to this view; granted, each of Brautigan's novels is narrated by a rather shallow, idealistic nebbish. However, we must realize that the narrator is not Brautigan; that, instead, Brautigan's irony often catches his narrator as the main victim. In In Watermelon Sugar, for example, the narrator celebrates iDEATH as the new Eden. But the reader can see the truths and horrors behind the illusions; he can see the death lurking in iDEATH. The novelist Brautigan, by a subtle manipulation and reporting of events, can undercut the romantic excesses of the unreliable narrator who embraces the pastoral ideal.

" Yet the case for reading Brautigan's novels ironically is not helped by his poetry, which regretfully seldom exhibits any ironic element. While in his novels Brautigan is at pains to distinguish himself from the narrator (usually by appearing as a character himself), in his poetry he unabashedly speaks his own voice. As a result the poems are all too often personal to the point of being maudlin. The odes to Marcia which comprise such a large portion of The Pill are uniformly and effusively sentimental ("Pissing a few moments ago /I looked down at my penis I affectionately./ Knowing it has been inside I you twice today makes me I feel beautiful." - "The Beautiful Poem"; "Just because people love your mind, I doesn't mean they have to have your body, /too."-"Just Because"; "Do you think of me. as often as I think/ of you?"-"Please."). When one reads such poems as these he cannot help but feel the same way as if he had just read someone else's love letter: embarrassed. Surely the poems have been written with feeling, but the printed page is a harsh arbiter and can turn heartfelt emotion into banality.

When Brautigan's poems are not so sentimental and shallow, Hallmark cards of a counter culture, they are often so esoteric as to defy analysis. "Crab Cigar" reads, "I was watching a lot of crabs I eating in the tide pools I of the Pacific a few days ago. I When I say a lot: I mean I hundreds of crabs. They eat I like cigars." "Third Eye" reads, "There is a motorcycle/in New Mexico." Poems such as these may carry some significance for Brautigan, but they provide too little information to be meaningful to many others.

The philosophical poems, on the other hand, suffer from a simplemindedness which renders them too easily apprehended. While the Zen of "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" anticipated the ideology of Charles Reich and Robert Pririsig in its union of mechanism and humanism and technology and nature, other poems, such as "Deer Tracks," would find Kharma merely through "Beautiful, sobbing, high-geared fucking I and then to lie silently like deer tracks I in the freshly-fallen snow beside the one I you love. That's all. "

What poems remain in Brautigan' s canon are generally random thoughts which pose as poetry. "December 30" is typical: "At 1:03 in the morning a fart/ smells like a marriage between/ an avacado and a fish head. I I have .. to get out of bed I to write this down without I my glasses on." One wonders how much the cause of poetry would have suffered had Brautigan stayed in bed that fateful night. In a laudatory article in Poetry Lewis Warsh states that "Brautigan writes poems whenever an interesting thought or phase occurs to him. [3]" Yet Brautigan' s lack of selectivity is a problem; for one "interesting thought or phrase" ("Ah, I you're just a copy I of all the candy bars /I've every eaten."- "Xerox Candy Bar"; "He'd sell a rats' asshole I to a blindman for a wedding/ring."-"Negative Clank") does not in itself make a poem. If the term is to retain any validity we cannot accept Brautigan's notion (as implied in "Albion Breakfast" and "April 7, 1969") that anything a person writes is poetry.

Such random thoughts as found in "December 30" do liven up Brautigan's novels, however; but standing alone they are frail and shabby. Occasionally some of the absurd Brautigan humor can be found in his poetry, but too often he resorts to the cheap jokes of the "Negative Clank" variety, and, like a vaudevillian of old, Brautigan apparently subscribed to the dictum, "The more times you repeat a bad joke, the funnier it gets." Thus, the body of "A 48-Year-Old Burglar from San Diego" is a blank page (heh-heh), as is that of "8 Millimeter (mm)" (heh-heh-heh), "1891-1944" (heh- heh-heh-heh] and" '88' Poems (heh-heh-heh-heh-heh].

Only a few times does Brautigan' s truly humorous self shine through the clouds of comic cliche. "The Symbol" finds Moby Dick reincarnated as a Californian truck driver who thinks, "Hoffa is a lot better I to us whales than Captain Ahab ever was." The sequence of poems entitled "The Galilee Hitch-Hiker," one of Brautigan's earliest works, anticipates Trout Fishing in America (here Baudelaire sits in for Trout Fishing in America Shorty) in its synecdochical technique, its American theme, and its raucously absurd good humor. Hardly any of the serious poems can be labeled successful, but "Restaurant" works as well as any:

Fragile, fading 37,
she wears her wedding ring like a trance
and stares straight down at an empty coffee cup
as if she were looking into the mouth of a dead bird.
Dinner is over. Her husband has gone to the· toilet.
He will be back soon and then it will be her turn
to go to the toilet.

Here, for once, tone and imagery are tightly controlled and avoid excessive sentiment or obscure metaphors. The stark, flat language mirrors the bleakness and emptiness of a trapped life.

Yet most of Brautigan's poems fail; it is a gifted artist who in our time can achieve critical success both as a novelist and a poet (as have Dickey, Updike, and just a few others). Lewis Warsh has enthusiastically stated, "The readability of Brautigan's poems makes me not want to think too hard; they exist to give pleasure to anyone who wants to go along. [4]" but therein lies the deficiency of the poetry: it is less art than it is a substitute for valium. To those of us who treasure Brautigan's novels, his poetry will remain an embarrassment. In a revealing comment to Bruce Cook, Brautigan has admitted that he only began to write poetry so that he could learn to write sentences for his novels.5 Perhaps, the, Brautigan's poetry should be viewed as his minor league, his testing grounds, and we can be thankful that he was a wise enough novelist to discard the contorted constructions, the sentimentality, and the cliched counter culture worldview of his poetry. while retaining the flashes of whimsey and irony in order to produce works of subtlety and magic.

"I am a minor poet."
Richard Brautigan, "The Literary Life in California I 1964."

NOTES
1. Thomas McGuane, "Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, In Watermelon Sugar," New York Times Book Review, 15 Feb. 1970, p. 49.
2 Johnathan Yardley, "Still Roving," New Republic, 20 March 1971, p. 24.
3 Lewis Warsh, "Out of Sight," Poetry, (1970), 444.
4 Warsh, p. 445.
5 Bruce Cook, The Beat Generation (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971), p. 206

Bokinsky,1980

"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."