INTRODUCTION

Before traveling to Greece, where he and his wife spent a productive and rejuvenating sabbatical year, William Minor learned Greek. Evidence of his knowledge of the language and his affection for things Greek run rife in Goat Pan, the book of poems he published on his return. Those pages also signal this remarkable writer-artist's affection for the enduring poetry, music and painting of Russia. To prepare himself for a sojourn to the U.S.S.R., Minor learned Russian. The result: Unzipped Souls: A Jazz Journey through the Soviet Union, his stunning account of the Soviet jazz scene just before the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. Unzipped Souls is a joy. Set down in Minor's good-natured, straight-ahead, poetic prose, the book is part memoir, part travelogue and part adventure narrative. To write The Heart Within: Jazz Journeys to Japan, the book he has recently completed, Minor studied Japanese.

William Minor's ease and familiarity with three other languages---the language of music, the language of poetry, and the language of love---proved invaluable when he set out to write Monterey Jazz Festival: Forty Legendary Years, and the two poem cycles that make up Some Grand Dust, this lovely volume you now behold. These polyglot efforts and offerings, far from rounding out Minor's shots at spiritual fulfillment, represent a gleaming streak, one lovely facet of his many-carated diamond of artistic gifts. Trained as a visual artist and coming from a family of wedding musicians and tap dancers, he taught himself drums, piano, guitar and clarinet. Still, his love of drawing, sketching, painting and writing never flag. One of the countless delights of reading Minor is his thrilling unpredictability. "If it's unpredictable," sayeth biologists, "then it's alive."

"We are alive in the glamour of this moment," a choice line from the late John Weiners' poem sequence, The Hotel Wentley Poems, expresses concisely and unforgettably the juice and gist of Minor's Our Peasant Life (A Poem Cycle in 42 Parts). This opening act of a two-act play on Love and its faithful sidekick Life sets the mood for Some Grand Dust. The poet addresses his ultra-bohemian tribute to marriage, passion, friendship, parenthood, family, community and the religion of artistic endeavor to Betty, the lifelong partner he adores. Unsurprisingly, Betty aids and abets her beloved. In Minor's romance they are peasants, co-conspirators against bourgeois dullness. Quiet revolutionaries, they lead a life that expressly opposes the thickening plot of the bourgeoisie to make the world nothing more than a comfortable habitation.

"Yet now, just when I feel your sexual juices flow," he writes, "you still manage, at four in the morning, to say No (on principle, as always). I know: I woke you up unfairly, all too early. Tomorrow I may get lucky. You may wake up on your father's side, a man who liked his drink and dropped some seeds, I like to think, all over Oakland county." For those who note how, all across the ages, the big stories, the power myths, begin with or turn on a woman and a man in bed, Our Peasant Life will flesh out the story---and in ecstatic detail. "'O God, make clean our hearts within us and take not thy holy spirit from us.' I think that at 1:37 a.m., just before, fed up with this life, I nearly pass out. I've had it, Lord. Fed up. With work, art, drink and friends, even with You."

Truly there is nothing around to match this late-life confessional lyric of Minor's. While he cites such seminal inspirations as poet-painter-mystics William Blake and Kenneth Patchen, his writing voice and its sound owe much to singers and to song. That Bill and Betty managed to raise their two boys on a modest income in the magnificent setting that is Monterey Bay seems amazement enough. That the two of them keep falling irretrievably in love with one another and with creative imagination swells the heart. For good measure, the poet keeps bringing back, in the form of metaphor, the uncrackable champagne bottle that launched them on this sea voyage of heady, heartfelt discovery. Should you take time to read this first-act cycle aloud, put your hand on your heart from passage to passage and feel how close, how physical and entangled feeling and thought can get.

Moker, the second act of this poem cycle, you can view as a stand-in, a shoe-in for William Minor. In a grand and vanishing literary tradition, Moker pops up as alter ego, a ventriloquial device, the dummy carved from an authorial tree. Into Moker the poet projects yet another voice; an overtone, a quivering harmonic that travels the length and girth of Minor's own branches and roots. "Love," Moker tells himself, "is not a rose outside the window,/trapped in autumn, lured by cheese/and peanut butter, the false portent of life/beyond ourselves, beyond our own./Love is what happens or doesn't happen." In the same way that you can define a memory as something that happened and hasn't stopped happening, you can define Moker as a specter who haunts and is haunted by memory and the idea of himself. Yo-yoing between lyric lines and flat-out prose, Minor lets Moker unwind. He describes (sometimes by rhapsodizing) what Moker feels or sees or overhears; his hungers, desires and fears. More often than not, it is what Moker imagines that glues in place the emotional puzzle-pieces of this complex sequence. Crucial to this are Moker's hungers, desires, obsessions, such as the phantom child he wished he'd sired, his unborn daughter; the unchecked fantasia of his Gypsy-woman-champagne-tinted eroticism. If you stand up high enough, you can see William Minor working the strings and doing Moker's demons and angels in different voices.

"He can feel it in his bones and nose./October's punishment. November's first kind frost./They hardly seem to matter here, nor the fact he wears/trousers that resemble Baghdad pajamas,/an ancient cardigan sweater and no shoes---all/without seasonal import, as far as Moker knows,/who knows but one thing, obsessed as always/with the eternal in the elemental."

In recent American literature, there is nothing at all like this somber, rollicking, double-headed chronicle of one set of linked lives lived out in the overlap of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Al Young

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