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Editor,
Oregon Literary Review

MFA, Playwriting, University of Oregon

Writing faculty, Portland State University (part-time)

Retired playwright and screenwriter.
Active novelist, librettist and teacher.

Email: cdeemer(at)yahoo(dot)com

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	Blood is the worst gyre

	Curtis William—

	Deemer is the terrible carnage

			given again unto the sons;

	the seed is focus,

			focused

	the parent’s face & hour, the inheritance is familial,

	a lobe the blood is surfaced & fed in to,

	the children.

			Who are encircled by ancestral ghosts.

To compare these lines to what I was writing at 19 is to understand the difference between adolescent and sentimental doggerel – and the rough birth of a genuine poetic voice.

My brother and I, being six years apart, were never close in the sense of doing lots of things together as kids. Bill, however, has a strong memory of my playing guitar and singing cowboy songs to him, one of which (it must have been “The Cowboy’s Lament”) always brought him to tears. Bill was asthmatic and spent a lot of his youth sick, missing more than his share of school. At home he watched lots of movies, especially westerns, and became a great film buff and amateur movie historian.

I first learned of how seriously he was taking poetry in a distressed letter from my mother. Bill wanted to drop out of high school in order to become a full time poet. He may have been a junior. What could they do to convince him he should stay in school? My parents wanted my advice.

I knew my brother had genuine literary talent. I wrote back what my parents may not have wanted to hear, that school was something Bill could always make up later if he needed it and, at any rate, he wasn’t going to get much out of it if he didn’t want to be there. Maybe they should support him in his quest to become a poet.

Apparently they took my advice. Bill dropped out of school, and my parents bought him a mimeograph machine. He and a friend started publishing a poetry journal of their work called The Mushroom Flower. I believe several issues came out before greater ambitions led Bill elsewhere.

Bill left home. I recommended an international high school in Denmark I’d learned about, and my folks agreed to send him there. Bill didn’t like it and didn’t stay long. He spent some time in Mexico in a community of American expatriates, then ended up in San Francisco.

Before he was old enough to vote, Bill had earned the credentials of a professional poet. Several of his poems appeared in Poetry magazine, perhaps the country’s most prestigious place to publish at the time, and the small, independent and very respected publishing house, Auerhahn Press in San Francisco, came out with his first collection of poems. In San Francisco, Bill became friends with Lew Welch and other legends from the Beat era. And he met his mate, Toby.

Bill’s wedding just after his twenty-first birthday is captured on home movies. He is tall and dark with black hair falling to his shoulders, strutting in front of the camera in his cape, looking like a twin of Oscar Wilde. From the time he could walk, Bill strutted before Dad’s camera. He was a born ham.

One summer I edited the family home movies, making reels organized by subject matter, and I put together a “silent movie” of Bill’s antics before the camera. Called The Death of Artie Rainbow (a takeoff on Arthur Rimbaud), the short film captures the quest of a budding poet for a mythological Polynesian princess, Diana (the title of Bill’s second book).

Bill’s common antic as a child was to race to the camera as soon as he saw it, and to see this action repeated from the time Bill can barely walk to the time he is a teenager was one of those family images that brought a smile to your face. I cut in images from Dad’s Guam movies to represent the princess, who at first is seen as a beautiful bare-breasted teenager, smiling at the camera in her grass skirt, but who near the end of the quest becomes a fat woman walking with a cane, her bare breasts falling almost to her waist. Dee, who had artistic talent, made title and subtitle cards for the film, which gave it a professional look. I even played taped music to accompany it. This was my sole adventure in film editing, and I loved every minute of it.

Bill and I did one joint project during the short period he lived with us. We published a single issue of a literary magazine called Potpourri. The volume contains Bill’s poems, some verse and a literary essay by me, and a children’s story by Dee, who also designed the magazine. We gave the magazine to a few friends, and that was the end of that.

Despite his auspicious beginnings as a prodigy, Bill soon discovered that poetry reputations are controlled by the academy. He was still a high school dropout. Although he later passed his G.E.D., Bill never got on the university poetry circuit or accepted into the university literary magazines, which kept him out of contention for the major literary prizes in this country. At the same time, he received one of the first national grants for poetry at the recommendation of a poet-friend, and small presses continued to publish his work. In 2000 his book Variations was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in poetry.

Not long ago Bill told me he no longer wrote poetry. When I asked him if he had retired, he replied no, he had resigned.

The remark captures Bill’s wit and intelligence perfectly. To me he’ll always be the poet in the family, an artist of great integrity and talent. He and Toby have been married for over 35 years, an accomplishment regarded with awe by someone like myself, with four marriages and half-a-dozen failed relationships. Sometimes it’s the big brother who looks up to the little brother.