Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

‘After all these years, there can’t be anyone “out there” unfamiliar with the work of Dave Church…’ wrote Joseph Verrilli in a 2001 review of the poetry chapbook ETERNAL HUMMMMM, and while that might well be true in the U S of A, it most certainly is not the case on this side of the Atlantic. “Dave who?” would be a probable British reaction, which is a pity because he is a writer well worth getting to know.
 
    Born in the state of Rhode Island in 1947, one of eight children, he grew up on a 220 acre farm which boasted a 150 head herd of Holstein milkers until the dairy business faltered in the sixties and the farm was converted into the Kirkbrae Country Club. Young Church, in the meantime, was studying at LaSalle Academy in Providence, when two books came along to completely change his life.

     One was Bertrand Russell’s WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN, which not only had a powerful effect on his thinking but set him against the Christian Brothers at his educational establishment. The second was Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poetry collection A CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND, which he happened upon while browsing around a bookstore in 1965.

     As he described it himself: “Flipping the pages at random I was astounded. Here was someone speaking to me about much of what I was feeling at the time.”

     He felt an immediate empathy with the poem ‘Constantly Risking Absurdity’, especially the line: ‘The poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making’.

     Without graduating, Church elected to leave the LaSalle Academy during his senior year, deciding instead to study the Beat poets and free thinkers of the day. After Ferlinghetti he read Corso and Ginsberg. Then, in another defining moment, he turned to the works of Jack Kerouac.

     Ferlinghetti had inspired the teenage Church to believe that he 
was not alone in being out of step with traditional society, and that he could justify his ‘oddball’ thoughts and impressions by becoming a poet. Kerouac offered both a lifestyle and a blueprint.

     As he himself reported, upon completing the seminal ON THE ROAD: “I no sooner read the last page, I was on my way to Florida with 40 cents in my pocket.”

     From the tomato plantations of Florida, where he spent time on a ‘chain gang’ for being drunk and disorderly, the eighteen year old youth had set out on a Beat odyssey that was to occupy much of his life from then on in. He has worked as a roofer, bouncer, street barker (for Big Al’s, a strip joint seen behind the opening credits on the old ‘Streets of San Francisco’ TV series), and even cut the lawn for a doctor who paid him in drugs. He walked the walk, talked the talk, wrote the words, and worked his way through three failed marriages. It was during the third, on the day his son Jonathan was born in 1978, that he ended his flirtations with morphine and heroin and took time out from his life as a poet in the making. He formed his own house painting company and with daughter Michaela also arriving, spent the next ten years supporting and bringing up a family. Which left little time for writing.

     Dave Church, today, drives a taxi for a living, and writes because it fills a need. He has known the underbelly of American society and has experienced many a dark period in his life, and knows how to put it into words.

     I first came into contact with his work via a word of mouth route. New Yorkers Herschel Silverman and Steve Dalachinsky had given Church my address after I had published them in one-off jazz poetry anthologies. He did nothing at the time but it jogged his memory when he saw my name in an issue of Jeanne Conn’s CONNECTIONS magazine, and he sent a couple of poems at a time that coincided with my vaguely conceived notion of  starting a new magazine.

      Dave Church has been in every issue of OUTLAW to date, and I have become a confirmed fan.

      American small press editor Tim Scannell has described his more recent work as: ‘cranky, rueful, humourous, big-hearted, wincing at the harassing “normalities” of the day/poking them satirically/sarcastically... ’ — a summing up I would not disagree with, but you cannot complete an overview of Church’s poetry without looking at his ‘Dark Days’ output. Mainly from times long gone, though often still being looked at and rewritten right up to today, this is work that can sometimes rip out your heart or damage your brain. Church can indeed be a powerful and important writer.

      To date he has authored eight poetry chapbooks and one of prose. He wrote his first poem, called ‘Confusion’, in 1965, and claims to be just as confused now as then, saying: “It almost sounds surreal or insane when I think about it these days - me, a 56 year old guy sitting alone in an attic loft in front of a typer trying to make poems. Broke by choice but rich with the ‘Wisdom of insecurity’ and plenty of ‘Negative capabilities’.”

       Part Beat, part Street, Dave Church has lived the life and his work is thoroughly deserving of both investigation and recognition.