A Review of Alan Weltzien's On the Beach: Poems 2016—2021,

Cirque Press, 2022

Music, Montana, and Geography of the Heart: on a beach touching agate, holding a life well-lived…

I’m thinking of a camera obscura when I fold myself into a dark room with blackness and a pinhole from which to gather the words of poets.

The process of seeing landscapes from words is sometimes easy when writers craft their life’s journey and work, layering various points and stops to reveal an inner sanctum—as if I am along for the run. Think road work when reading Alan Weltzien’s work.

For me, Weltzien’s poems are my incredible lightness of being humane, yet I am in my dark box, my room, waiting for the next image, for clarity, for flashes on the wall while I succumb to sketching quickly what I imagine developing with photographic magic what this poet sees.

We Western writers gather up our own scrapbooks recording individual tutelages west of the hundredth meridian, traveling through it, turning its soil, and angling its light. The West is a state of mind, a spiritual presence, heart and soul and dream: a place Weltzien calls Montana.

We sometimes exit the poet’s camera obscura with latencies very difficult-to-discern. With Weltzien, I see captured: light, shadow, and all the grays in between. When I pickax through his work, I see and feel Wallace Stegner in the loam: “Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend” (Angle of Repose) and “Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed…" (The Sound of Mountain Water). The long angle of repose can be cut into a river bank with a quick blast of flashflood or over time with the slow meandering of water slicing a cutbank.

University of Montana Western professor Alan Weltzien carries a rucksack filled with his life’s ruminations, travelogues and a peculiar sensibility as both a wannabe “sage on the stage” and honest lover of literature. Weltzien taught for almost two decades in the West, and we are there with him as he goes through recalling his own tutelage and roadwork.

From the Salish to the Flathead

In his Cirque Press collection On the Beach: Poems 2016— 2021, Weltzien circumrotates through family histories, as well as sets in place his own rites of passage in myriad attempts to “sense place” in order to catalogue a sense of place, a rootedness with a universal grasp for his readers to grab in order to sketch their own geography of enlightenment. Alan’s are easily accessible.

Like many who have ended up in the West, Weltzien admits his mere mortality in the universe:

Big Sky Country shrinks a guy, enfolds me within countless open benches and ridges.

In this collection, he's etched poems representing the span of his life, and his roots of his Norwegian forefather coming to America, Puget Sound, specifically, in the story which makes up his Introduction, “Ruud by Nature.” There is radicalism, stage acting, adultery, near-bigamy as Weltzien corners his roots. It’s a funny tale, emblematic of so many men who left the Old Country to eke out a life in the New Eden, hoping the past could be erased in order to shape a new future. It never happens, but it does through offspring, in this case, great grandson O. Alan Weltzien.

Life in Five-Part Harmony

Cascading from these roots comes the balladry of this 200-page book and its five sections: “High and Dry,” “On Youth and Aging,” “Observations and Professions,” “Distant Geographies,” and “Home Ground.” The collection is a mother lode of direct, almost like Buddhist haiku in its presentation. Weltzien has arrived at this point in his life with a sense of gravitas anchored to land, rivers, and hiking, that embraces the philosophies of writers like Gary Snyder, Norman Maclean, and Thomas Savage.

This poetry collection is Weltzien's life trawled into a net, but I delved further, into another of his distinctly autobiographical books: A Father and an Island: Reflections on Loss (Lewis-Clark Press, 2008), where Weltzien groundtruths trauma—his own, his father's, and his family’s as he dives deep into what the loss of a father to an incurable disease means to him and to us, the universal reader. In his memoir, like many of the poems in On the Beach, Weltzien builds a quintessential monument to his own younger days spent with his father on Camano Island, Washington.

In On the Beach, we get a sense of the power of memory throughout, particularly in the snapshots of his father flowing in many of the poems. They become the planks and timber Weltzien pulls apart in his poem "Unbuilding My Father" where we glimpse the poet's own slippage of time:

…Once a college friend, Marsha White, slept in the A-frame but I only kissed her goodnight, too shy for sex. I walked into my adulthood as did my brothers and after more summers, sons or nephews unrolled sleeping bags, warmed the hut with laughter but they too departed and the A-frame stood abandoned, storage shed of forgotten voices. Moss surged on cedar, dirt moistened corner posts and plywood edges. New owner of familiar ground, I crowbar soft panels, intent on replicating Dad’s weave, board by board. I dig out corner anchors, hear hammer or bar sink into pulp, concede the spread of rot. Instead of makeover, my brother and I pry the supports, pummel patches of siding, break the floor, undoing step by step Dad’s measurements and curses and sweat. Never a builder easy with tools— a failed inheritance—my hands touch his half a century later. I throw down the pieces he crafted into a fairy tale A, its smell lost in time’s thickening soil.

So much of poetry is both lamentation and lucid recall, and in this collection, Alan places his own journey center stage as a way to reconstruct life and to determine a certain philosophy and ethos with his own perspectives as a poet.

He is a man who wants nature, wildlands, and the silence of animal life but has also hitched much of his work around Montana and the state’s writers—and there are many, including Ivan Doig, Thomas McGuane, Rick Bass, Doug Peacock, Peter Bowen and Jim Harrison. His edited book, The Norman Maclean Reader (2012, University of Chicago Press), is a must for those who want to know more about this most distinctive of Montana voices.

Savagery as a State of Mind

In his 2020 University of Nevada Press book, Savage West: The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage, Weltzien looks at a complicated writer, a gay man, now famous because of the 2021 movie "The Power of the Dog," based on Tom Savage’s 1967 novel of the same name. We have the 2005 movie, “Brokeback Mountain” (set in Wyoming and Texas), adapted from a 1997 short story by Annie Proulx, that covers her concept of cowboys and homosexuality. The Jane Campion directed/written adaptation of Savage’s novel is cited as “revisionist Western psychological drama.” So goes post-modern Hollywood.

Finding Literary Voice in Montana

I ended up in Montana, considering a doctorate at the University of Montana, Missoula, and spent time with writer James Crumley, and I spent time alone in Big Sky country hiking and camping. I understand the allure of that place. So here I am, reading Weltzien poems and tasked to review them, but I cast myself out on some grizzly-trampled path, in Big Sky country, with my own narrative flowering like knapweed in this review-slash-riff.

So many roads and paths are traversed in this poetry collection, and the reader should be honored to have been gifted from Weltzien a writer’s keen eye and fabulous turn of a phrase. His juxtaposing of his own vulnerabilities as boy, father, man, teacher, and child, to the songs of his verse make it a pleasurable read. He invites us to spend time with him as he kayaks near orca—Puget Sound’s J-pod—but he also places us in travelogue mode while he pries beauty and sadness from his own observations of the Polish people when he taught there, as well as tourist views of the Philippines, Myanmar, Greece, Hawaii, and Chesapeake Bay.

You’ll feel the long arm of age and time reach Alan’s shores—that ever-present beachhead—as he quickly peels back nostalgia to just get down to the basics of decluttering life, emblematic in this process he described of giving away his extensive library when he calls it quits as an English faculty (“On Giving Away Most of My Library”).

From flesh torn, scabbed over and healed, some poems recount the hard knocks of living through life. Weltzien writes about his own hard work as a son and father and husband, and many of those poems are most compelling for me. In “Pouring My Mother,” Weltzien takes the spreading of his mother’s ashes as a statement of his own closing chapters in life, a perspective only found as a seventy-year-old man:

My face clenches and eyes pour behind sunglasses as my finger breaks open the bag and I pour Lorraine, a steady sifting stream, into the bay where, seventeen years and four days later, she finally rejoins Father. The eulogies of others, some tearful, offset my sobbing silence. I flash in and out of our private ceremony, wracked by the gap between tongue and heart, my reputation as wordsmith vanished.

In the stretching silence I mutter “Let’s go” and after we beach and tie the boats, I breast stroke out in the gathering tide and almost meet the random constellation of mums that bob gently towards me in my basin of tears where, as Whitman knew, we rock endlessly in our beginning and end and beyond, from salt to salt.

The memoiric aspect of this collection allows the reader to sound the depths of this man’s life, and one would enjoy a cup of wine with the fellow as he navigates the world he’s lived.

The book’s title poem, “On the Beach,” speaks to this perspective of aging:

How have I nearly reached my Biblical allotment of seventy years? On this beach I contain multitudes including shadows of earlier selves and somehow, in my sauntering, I thread decades and geographies. No matter the distant time zones, I fly home to this backwater bay where I’m never alone and fix the compass of this life on this beach, endlessly rocking

Ecosystem of the Mind

In an interview he did in Portland in 2017, Weltzien crystallizes what he sees as his art: “The personal or social relationship between the self and a given topography or two represents an abiding, fascinating, endlessly new and variable genre for people like me. I love writing, whether [it’s] called eco-fiction or eco-poetry or some other label, that foregrounds physical setting.”

Alan Weltzien, will assist any reader out of pitch-black sorrow into a place where they can say, no matter the circumstances, “I have lived.”

Kathleen Tarr