Reminiscent of “Starting From San Francisco,” one of the first books by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, San Francisco is also where Victor Depta spent some of his early years and where this 2024 reprint of his 1973 book “The Creek” (Ohio Univ. Press, 2024) begins — with references to Coit Tower, Nob Hill and the Fillmore District when he was there and reading Wordsworth, Whitman and Rimbaud.
But the surreal narrative of his poems is more akin to the early poems of San Francisco’s surrealist poet Philip Lamantia and quickly move out into the countryside as his focus changes from streetcars and cafes to forested hillsides and mountain streams. He is visiting his grandparents with accompanying family members and in this sense these poems are a kind of memoir of those days and that experience. In essence one could say that “The Creek” is a kind of long love poem to nature as well as to an anonymous young lady back home.
While some of these are surrealistic love poems written by a youthful protagonist, Depta also gives the things in nature the qualities of humans, personifying them. “I met some wild carrots, dainty/ones with lace and long arms and skinny/elbows … rigid and blue-veined and scarlet and the/oval of love,” he writes. Then, describing the corn growing in his grandfather’s garden, he writes: “… the blades/are Indians who don’t understand the big/to-do and flit among the corn stalks.” All this to say that the main focus in “The Creek” is on family, place and shelter.
“I wanted to sit quietly and write a poem of/quality that you could see through to some/raspberry vines with wine stems powdered/ lavender,” he tells us. In the following pages we have poems filled with grasshoppers, butterflies, turtles, worms, nightcrawlers and birds, goldenrod, roses and weeds, sycamores, beech and hickory, cantaloupes and cherries. As he forages the forest, he gives us youth-inspired poems, abstractly imagined if not always fully formed, but one sees the potential mature poet blossoming as he sits in a cafe in San Francisco reminiscing of time spent in nature with family and well-met wildlife.
With “budweiser cans lying at the bottom of the creek,” he thinks of his imagined love: “dreamed you from California,” he writes in his love poem “But I Can’t Disappear.” And then in the poem “It’s Raining” we have these lines: “It’s raining, and out by the creek the crows/are cut stones lifting across the wind…. My fifty-two year old mother/is waiting for a crow to fly through the window with the news he’s here! He’s here!. But nobody came and the crow flies out the door and/she’s waiting for somebody more wonderful/than God, but nobody shows up.” Again, we get surreal references to his mother in the poem “When I Went In My Grandmother’s Flower Garden:” “I saw my mother in bed with some lilies. She/ had gourds under her eyes, pumpkin seeds/on her mouth and a piece of broccoli/leaning out of the top of her head.”
In many of the descriptions of his experiences in nature there is lovely alliteration: “the purple haze of the grass is/anthers scattering sparks of blue chromosomes/on the skin,” he writes. Or in self-descriptive passages like “I know myself. I have violets for eyes. My/spine is a ragweed of nerves.” I especially like his description of his soul: “What used to be called the soul is a/portable RCA television whose love when/from its built-in antenna reaches the/skin does not stucco it all over with/animals but with flowers.” Who today writes like that? Or when he writes: “My nerves/streaming in sounds for Faberge, Pepsi/ and Coca-Cola.”
His perceptions of the natural world are far-reaching. “The creek is masculine upstream and feminine/ where I stand,” he writes. And then one of my favorite passages from the poem “Into the Hill Proper”: “There’s pokeweed and thistles, sagegrass,/dewberries and poplars with large /chubby leaves and slender trunks/and the ironwood and beech are delicate as/the white hands of Victorian ladies /waving hello.” I love his images and great poetic leaps.
In the end, Depta comes back to the love poems. “When I think of love, it’s a field with/puffballs or brown dust of mushrooms/when you step on them,” he writes in the poem “When I Think of Love.” Having stepped on those cloudy puffballs myself, I can’t say that I ever related that experience to falling in love. But herein lies Depta’s brilliance. “Disguising poems so the family doesn’t think/I’m a freak sure is hard,” he laments toward the end of the volume. But then he states: “My poems have the appearance of photographs.” And his poems are, in fact, like photographs. And we see this in one of the almost hallucinogenic images with which he ends the book: “I’ve been dreaming recently of a house/… Everybody I knew including the white Buick and/the blue jellyfish went inside, all of them. The walls blossom/and the petals above my head are changing/to sails which whirl like white silk and/glisten as my mother walks in with bourbon from/behind the refrigerator and smiles.”
(Thomas Rain Crowe is an internationally-published and recognized author of more than 30 books, including the multi-award winning nonfiction nature memoir “Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods.”)