​POETRY 

"the speech of one looking down
from the summit of a mountain,"
​
                                     Photo by  Weebly.com                                    

Evergreen Review
by Steve Surryhne

​In 1960, for the first time ever,     
I submitted a poem for publication.
I typed it up on my old Remington,
mailed it with a SASE,
and sent it to—the Evergreen Review!
 
Aspiring to be published in that hippest,
that most avant garde venue,
at age fifteen, I was very ambitious--
why not aim high, aim for the highest?
 
It was entitled A Quietus
(I don't know where I found that word
or how I knew what it meant.)
Would that I still had a copy!
But it's long gone, my juvenilia,
lost to time with my younger self.
The refrain: “And from these heights,
a quietus” is all I remember of it now.
 
This poem purported to be the speech,
portentous, in blank verse, of one,
apparently crucified, looking down
from the summit of a mountain,
his voice, that of a visionary
at peace, a great peace,
in spite of his crucifixion,
a seer, a Prometheus 
in chains, having a vision of
the vast panorama of anarchy and futility
that is the contemporary world,
not to mention my high school,
there, spread out before him.
 
And he's beat, man, so beat!
It was the beatest poem ever.
And the angst, ah, the existential angst!
I was sure they would
greet receipt of it,
nodding in cool approbation,
wise to what I was laying down.
I might have been the new Rimbaud 
and this my drunken bateau!
 
But what had I been trying to say?
I'm afraid we'll never know.
I thought to write about meaninglessness,
one must write meaninglessly,
keeping my meaning murky and oblique
taking care not to expose
my deep, dark profound thoughts to the light.
In short, I was emulating the cool stuff--
Beckett! Burroughs! Sartre! Camus!--
I read in Evergreen Review.
 
Nice try.
For my pains I received
a polite but firm rejection.

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​​Steve Surryhne was an Associate Lecturer in English Literature at SFSU from 1993-2012. He is currently semi-retired and has recently returned to writing poetry. A native of San Francisco, he was a baby-beat in the sixties, knew some of the beat poets and is now a neo-beat. In his alternate career, he worked in Community Mental Health in San Francisco from 1979-2012. He took first place in the Jack Kerouac Poetry contest in 2015 and has been published in The Blue Moon Review, Interpretations and San Francisco Magazine. He is currently working on a project with a photographer friend on poem-texts and photos.

Other works in this issue:
Poetry:
​Daphne

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