WHALE SONG: A POET'S JOURNEY INTO CANCER, by Kenneth Brewer, Dream Garden Press, 48 pages, $15, softcover
Ken Brewer was Utah poet laureate when he died March 15, 2006, after a nine-month battle with pancreatic cancer. I had the privilege of interviewing him shortly before his death at his home in Providence, just outside Logan.
Brewer had dropped from 215 pounds to 155, but he looked good. His eyes were still dancing.
He was on fire with poetry swirling around in his brain. He had already published nine collections of poetry, but his approaching death had given him new determination to write about his disease.
At first he used military terms — "fight, battle, kill," and it is reflected in his early poems in "Whale Song: A Poet's Journey into Cancer."
With complete composure, he looked at me and said, "It's your cancer — a houseguest who stays longer than you wanted him to. You kill your spirit when you use military language. There are other parts of you that need to be healed. I focus now on spiritual healing."
So Brewer wrote a poem a day — without any of the revision he used to apply for polish.
"I'm an oral poet," he said. "I don't follow the poetic line. For me, the rhythm is the whole piece. That creates a problem in getting poems published. A lot of the breaks are pretty arbitrary, so I'd much prefer to be heard than to be read on the page."
Besides this wonderful volume, three others he wrote during his illness will also appear.
If you saw Brewer read his poems, you know he always waved his right hand as if he were conducting a symphony, and his feet bounced to further reflect the rhythm. That means that it helps when reading "Whale Song" to imagine him reading it to you "in a flash of spontaneity," as he wrote for the introduction.
In "Stoic," Brewer recalls his "death sentence," when he was told his cancer was terminal. He decided to be "cool and philosophical," but that ended when he talked to his grandchildren — and he wept. A friend told him "Stoicism is overrated."
He became more appreciative of nature, writing eloquently about storms. He imagined "the taste of radiation and chemotherapy bound like tree roots full of dirt and rocks, full of tenacious night crawlers tugged from the ground by robins."
He asked his oncologist about "the rhythm of death." Was it iambic pentameter? "What does a dead poet write if not free verse?"
In a touching tribute to his wife, Bobby, he compared their love to "the love of old horses in a field, head to tail, gently sweeping flies off each other's faces, our eyes half closed to the sun. We stand by a gate for the hay to come or another cool rain. Ours is love beyond time while tall grasses grow and grow."
For the title poem, Brewer realized his "anatomy" no longer matched most other humans, his stomach shaped like a "J," veins running "silent and deep and not where surgeons expect them," comparing his "inner rumblings" to a "whale song."
Describing chemo, Brewer pronounced it "not too bad — like the time I fell out the back of a semi running 100 mph on I-80 between Rawlins and Rock Springs and got dragged 20 miles til I got knocked loose by a 'Sharp Curve' sign then thumped by the next 15 rigs till I rolled into the median where the magpies waited to peck at my scalp in the afternoon sun. Yes. I've had worse."
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com