[Landline] The uncanny Helen Adam

Featuring Robert Duncan, Van Morrison, Andrew Schelling, Ron Mann, Kristin Prevallet, more

John Szwed’s bedazzling Harry Smith biography, Cosmic Scholar, has sent me to a bunch of books lately¹.

One of them is Tracks Along the Left Coast: Jaime De Angulo & Pacific Coast Culture by Andrew Schelling. It's a kind of freestyle, wide-ranging biography of De Angulo, which I've been enjoying dipping in and out of, as if it were some kind of…literary waterhole, one with weird edges and depths, wild visitors arriving at all hours. Rather than, say, a cement pool with straight lines, where you get in, do your laps, get out. Anyways, right near the book’s opening—page 6, to be exact!—Schelling goes off on a tangent:

!!!

Helen Adam! Somehow I'd never heard of this woman (born 1909, died 1993), so I started investigating as best I could without buying a bunch of expensive out-of-print books.² One of my favorite bits I've come across is this, from Adam scholar/poet Kristin Prevallet‘s introduction to Sing Doun the Mune, a 2021 collection of Adam’s ballads³:

Such a fascinating character; each biographical detail, each poem, each collage, each interview has been deepening my interest—there doesn’t seem to be a bottom to it, which is unusual. Here, look at this, the opening to a 1979 interview:

From Blaze of Distance, a 1979 collection of poems and interviews published by the Oregon Coast Council for the Arts, co-featuring Robert Hass and Barry Lopez.

The interview goes on and on like this. Marvelous, energizing, insightful stuff.

There are some videos floating around online of Helen Adam reading/singing/performing her poetry. Here she is reading a delightfully spooky poem, from filmmaker Ron Mann's essential 1982 documentary Poetry in Motion, Vol. 2:

And here she is, from the same film, discussing her approach:

Such a charmer! I will be investigating further. (Might need to get a reading group together on this one. Reply to this email if you’re interested…)

Okay, I think that’s more than enough for now; hopefully these excerpts and links do something for you. If not, well, there’s another, lengthier Landline on the way this weekend. Thanks again for reading, tipping, subscribing, etc.!

Fondly,

Jay

Southern Arizona

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1. And online resources, too: see the previous Landline featuring cosmic/inner-eye film artist Jordon Belson.

2. The blessed website archive.org has a lot of Adams. But not enough.

3. This excellent, in-print (!) 120-page book from Annie Finch’s Poetry Witch Press also includes “A Few Notes on the Uncanny in Narrative Verse,” an essay on magical ballads by Adam herself.