An Interview with Ed Baker
At the Border of Silver and Tacky
Monday, November 10, 2008
Last Friday, I spent five hours with
the famous Ed Baker.
I assume, at least, there are other Ed Bakers and that they are
not as famous as he is. These Eds Baker may not be poets or
artists or madmen of Silver Spring, Maryland. Our Ed, the Ed,
lives on the road that serves as the border between Silver
Spring and Takoma Park, and he is happy to be on his side of the
street. Anyway, the sun gracefully hits his front porch as it
settles down for the night at this time of year.
It becomes clear immediately that
his home is not a standard American household suffused with
sameness. From his back deck, I look down at a small shed that
Ed built to serve as a writing studio, outside of which runs a
long workbench upon which he creates his sculptures—some of
wood, some of stone, many multimedia. Upon his lawn are littered
a few of his outdoor sculptures, and a clothesline full of
clothes runs across the backyard, though he removed the clothes
from it when we left, part way through our conversation, to pick
up Nancy. Art, in the world of Ed Baker, is everywhere, and I
spent hours looking at his art and poetry, both of which fill
his house.
His studio is a sturdy little
building, heavy on the little, but there’s scant evidence that
it ended up being the writer’s retreat he wanted it to be. Upon
entering it, I thought it more of a garden shed, but it also
seems to support the creation of his art. Ed is one of those
poets who, like me, gave up the craft at some point in time and
then returned with better than renewed vigor. (I think also of
Mark Young and George Oppen when such poets spring to mind.)
After twenty or so years out of circulation, having finished his
masters degree at Johns Hopkins (where he thesis was a book of
visualized poems entitled Okeanos Rhoos), Ed returned to poetry
and began making poetry and art with a ferocious intensity. Some
days, Ed sends me three things he’s made that day.
When Ed picked me up from my hotel
(which was maybe a mile from his house), I had no idea of the
extent of his artwork. He tends to send me haiga, drawings
accompanied by a haiku, which gave me no sense of the
three-dimensional pieces that predominate around his house. Even
the back wall of his house has a sculpture upon it,
“Motherboard,” which incorporates a tactile representation of
Ed’s way out into the world (through the Internet) and his
constant focus on the goddess.
In some places in his home, the
paintings are so numerous that they cover almost the entirety of
the walls, from floor to ceiling. When I asked Ed what medium he
used for the paintings, he was amused by my terminology. His
medium is any cut-price mis-mixed paints for sale at his local
hardware store. He makes do with what he can find, as a man
retired from the life of daily work for someone else. Each day
now, Ed works for himself, creating work that is often—to use
his term—erotic. His son Micah said that he prefers his father’s
“boobless paintings,” but they are difficult to find. I pointed
out a nice boobless painting of two hills just after this
comment from Micah, only to have Ed tell me he couldn’t paint
the boobs right on that one. At one point, Ed warned me—why
would I need such a warning?—that when I turn fifty—say, in
eighteen months—my penis will immediately go limp and I’ll lose
my sex drive. I asked Ed why, if that were true, he spent so
much of his time creating erotic art, so much time entranced by
the image of the woman as earth, creation, lover, mother, other?
I could not capture the beauty of
Ed’s art well enough with my camera. It was rough-hewn or
–painted, but was brimming with imagination, in terms of
meaning, forms, shapes, the manipulations of the materials—even
though almost every piece of art was a woman. Ed filled the day
with stories of women he’d known: his wife, his girlfriend,
beautiful women, married women, women everywhere in his life. He
went quickly through his stories and quickly through his art,
rummaging through boxes to find a manuscript to show me, to
discuss how he created a visualized poetry without the example
of others to follow. And, sometimes, he would stop to tell me
that I was rushing him, that he didn’t have enough time. Of
course, we never have enough time, but I noted to Ed that I was
not rushing him, that I was waiting for him to show me what he
had, and when he did I read it, I drank it in. At one point,
after he had told me much about his life, he asked me, “Aren’t
we supposed to talk about you?” I answered, No, saying that I
was there to listen to him, to learn about him. That I am, that
I was, an observer. Let life wash over me, so I might remember
it, so I might memorialize it.
As we all do, in our own ways, Ed
works with found materials, with pieces of wood in intriguing
shapes, with rocks, with pieces of material culture left behind
as if trash. So I find in his living room, almost devoid of
furniture because it is a gallery space, a bend of wood like a
ship, strung with string (like an instrument), held aloft on a
narrow platform, beside a stone head of a goddess. He calls it
“Temptress: Goddess of Stone and the Hunt.” It balanced itself
before me, graceful of curve, the design of a man whose eye
tells him how to go, a man never taught a day how to draw, or
how to make art, yet he makes it. Like all of us unlettered who
write poetry.
Early on in our conversation, Ed
said something I had to write down: “Everything comes out of
silence and goes back into silence.” The two nothingnesses: the
time before life, the time after death. And we live between
them, so, as we do, we try to make something of that time, we
try to make. And that is what Ed does. He makes. When we brought
Nancy into our midst and Ed took her around to show her his
world, she was impressed with his art as well, and with his
nature, this man who fed us dinner, who boiled a pot of water
for tea for me, who plied me with books and with stories of
poets he’s known, who said he had to teach me everything
whenever I admitted not knowing of a poet he’d mentioned—well,
this is who Nancy says is her favorite person now. As well she
might, since Ed is a man for women, even as he takes a forked
stick, a true furca, a stick from which he has carved a perfect
apple breast, just one, and carved a vulvagina out of the
upraised crotch of the stick, explaining that there is a goddess
he has heard of who raises her vagina up to the sky.
Much of the experience in Ed’s house
concerned, without Ed realizing it, my evaluating his vernacular
archivy, how every human has an urge, somewhere, to keep a
record of a life, though their processes of saving, of trying to
preserve, might fall short, might be a bit disorganized, might
mix the highly acidic with the less so, might store shelves’
worth of original artworks on paper in vinyl binders. And
somewhere within these archives were poems that I read, most of
them short, most of them influenced, in one way or another, by
Asian writing, including this opening poem of the unpublished
Hexapoems, based on the I Ching:
1. T’ai / Peace
it is not your sex
that i eat :
it is the pears
;not much smaller
than your breasts
and the yellow flowers
There is a poem that I find simple,
affecting, effective, romantic, imaginative, perfect—the last
line almost a surprise, our discovering there was a better way
for the poem to end.
Even Ed’s front porch was a gallery,
one that included a sculptural haiga mounted on plywood. These
are the materials of the simplified earth, things discarded to
be remade. And they filled with sun during our descent into
twilight. At one point, Ed told me to put a cup of water for tea
in the microwave for one minute and thirteen seconds, because he
had discovered that that was the perfect amount of time for a
cup of tea. I asked Micah, “Now, how much time would he have had
to’ve spent to determine that that was the perfect amount of
time.” Micah, a young man, and quiet, maybe a little embarrassed
by his father’s ways (something my kids share with him) but
brimming with a quiet love for his father, laughed. These are
the pieces we are made of: words and eyes and love and sound
and, finally, silence towards sunset.
In his backyard, there grew a fig
bush, tiny branches out of a stump where a thick little trunk of
a fig one once grew. The leaves were beautiful, and I yearned
for the figs of its branches. Ed, ever the poet, noted that he
had cut down the little tree because huge figs would drop from
it, more than he could eat, and rats ("huge rats") would engorge
themselves on the soft sweet fruit.
Besides the gallery of Ed’s living
room, we also spent a good deal of time at his bookcases, which
were filled with poetry, but also all other manner of other
books. Ed told a story about a woman he met, decades ago, on a
train right from Luxembourg to Rome, an Indian woman who is now
a famous singer in her land. She appeared to be a stately woman,
on her CD, and Ed played us her songs, turning it off after
maybe a quarter of an hour, complaining about Indian music. He
replaced the CD with the music of an American, but one of the
greatest shakuhachi players. Not knowing what the shakuhachi
was, I had to have Ed explain to me that it was a bamboo flute,
as he told me a story of sending the man haiga of his only to
have the man respond that he had hurt himself and could no
longer play the shakuhachi, so he was glad to discover, through
Ed, a new way to create. After a few more minutes, Ed turned off
the shakuhachi music, explaining that Japanese music can drive a
person crazy after a while. So it is how Ed was, vacillating
between love and impatience, a little turbine of energy, barely
able to contain himself, working with word and image and
word-and-image.
Ed works with saw and pen, with
brush and wood, with whatever he needs. And when he signed books
for me, he made a production out of it: drawing pictures,
signing his name, and pressing his Asian chop with its thick red
ink to the page. At one point, I found two copies of a book of
poetry by another poet on his shelf and offered to buy one of
them from him. He refused, saying I could find a copy of the
book elsewhere. I explained I was just trying to help get a
duplicate off his hands, but he explained that he read books by
holding two copies side by side, as if they were slightly
different images for the two windows of the stereopticon. Always
gracious, always pseudo-gruff, Ed remained an enigma to me. I
never quite figured out everything about him, but I had a great
time. What is it about the visual poets, the poets, the creators
that attracts me to them? They are all totally different and all
the same. It is in making that we are made.
Nancy had a hard time getting a good
picture of Ed and me together. I like most of them, but my
expression seems strange in almost all of them, even the one
above. Let’s say that Ed’s putting bunny ears behind my head
didn’t increase our chances of getting a good picture—but it
ended up making for the best one. Ed and I had a good time
together, and he was constantly trying to find places for me to
send my poetry. He kept trying to give me things when all I
needed was stories about him, a man who taught college only for
a short while, then went into manual labor, the making of
things, a man who became a single father early in his marriage,
when his children were still small, and who raised Micah and
Evie to be the children he was proud of. Two of the artworks on
his walls, prominently displayed, are framed college diplomas
for these two children of his.
It is difficult to get Ed to stay
still, stock or otherwise, for any amount of time. He was always
moving through the house, always searching for something, on a
shelf, in a box, on the Internet, handing me a manuscript to
read, showing me a newspaper clipping. But when I captured him
still, and staring, his blue eyes out at me, I could see in them
a depth, a man driven, by the horror of silence, to make, to
create, to simply be, a man haunted by the life he’s had, that
great void of productivity in the middle of it, a man of action
and words and life, amazingly full.
When we die, what we finally leave
behind are records of ourselves, not quite ourselves but as
close to ourselves as we can muster. Inside Ed’s unassuming
house are all the little evidences of him, in his archives, in
his books, in his artworks—all his little creations, great and
small. As I pored over his archives, the careful early
manuscripts, the various versions of his poems, including one
book so large I really needed two arms, not just hands, to read
it, I told him to take care of these records, I suggested that
he might want to contact the University of Maryland’s archives
and special collections, since it collects the papers of writers
from Maryland, and Ed is a man of Maryland, born there, educated
there, living nearly his whole live there, and destined to end
it there. When he brought out this box of early archives of his,
I was entranced by it, by the promise of records, by the secrets
they hold, by the way they reveal us and keep us alive. Without
records, none of us will have ever lived.
I thank Ed for the time he gave us in his home, for the insights
he allowed me into his life and his art, for the promise he
holds, the achievement he has met, the fame he crawls towards
like a man running a marathon one leg at a time.
Geof Huth
Photographs by Geof Huth
