"SMOKE FROM THIS ALTAR" - читать интересную книгу автора (L'Amour Louis)

future
in "Let Me Forget," the poem that he used to close the
Yondering collection.
Earlier, he had taken a few stabs at poetry. In the beginning he didn't even know
about rhyme and meter. A friend who read some of his attempts in the late twenties
told him that "it didn't scan." He had no idea what she was talking about, but being
Louis, hack to the library he went to read and reread Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson,
Frost, and Service, to discover just what it was that made a great poem.
During his travels he would occasionally compose poems, and it always seemed remarkable
to me that he could both create and then remember them without writing them down;
it seemed as if he could never forget a line or even a word. Louis explained that
before the development of writing, poetry was one of the tricks ancient people used
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to remember stories. The rhyme and meter of each line would help you to remember
the next. Because of this, poems that told a story, like those of Robert Service,
were very popular with the hobos and sailors of his day. They were men with few possessions,
some even illiterate, and so they were, in a way, like those ancient people who carried
their literature in their heads.
One night in a ship's foc'stle, Louis had been trying to work out a particularly
romantic poem when several of the other seamen began to tease him about only being
able to write "love-stuff." After several hours of work he presented them with "My
Three Friends," proving that he indeed had other talents.
When we first began dating, Louis gave me a copy of Smoke From This Altar,
and through it I began to learn a little about the man who would become my husband
and the father of our children. Many of the poems are about what he saw and thought
and felt while he was in China and the South Pacific; others are about places he
visited that we went back to together. We drove out to Secret Pass, the subject of
a poem in this book, just after we got married. If I remember correctly, it is on
the old Hardyville stage road outside of Kingman, Arizona. "Biography In Stone" was
written about an outcropping of rock that Louis thought looked slightly like a man;
he had become fascinated by it when he was a young man working at the Katherine Mine
in the same area. "Enchanted Mesa" was written sixty years ago about what he saw
when he first came through the area just west of where we now have our ranch.
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Because he was having little luck with his other writing, Louis decided that he
would collect the best of
his poetry into a book. He hoped that publishing it wou
ld bring him some attention and prestige. A small Oklahoma City publishing company
fi
nally agreed to release
Smoke From This Altar in 1939. Although not very many copies were sold, the book
was well
reviewed. Kenneth
Kaufman, editor of the book page for the Daily Oklahoman, wrote, "What struck me
first was his delight in and love
for words; and what struck me next was his industry. He has that infinite capacity
for
taking pains, which Carlyle, I believe it was, gave as a definition of genius. And
he has the ability to take punishment which only a trained fighter (which he is,
along with all his other accomplishments)