Doug Strong: A gentleman and a poet

Last column, I noted that poets can seem to cultivate melancholy, of having a “glass half empty” worldview. And yet I also noted that poetry is a place to develop empathy, to feel deeply, and to notice who is not getting a fair shake in life.

My great friend Doug Strong, who left this world last month, was a living example of this. In “Poet’s Laundry,” he wrote:

I cultivate the infinite forms of anguish, my rich despair.

I beat them flat against a rock like soiled laundry, and listen for their music!

Doug knew that everything we live through — joy, sorrow, gain, loss — made music, even if some of it can be hard to hear.

Resident in Mendocino County since 1964, Doug’s poetry rang with praise for the beauty of the mountains, the coastline, and of its abundant flora and fauna, both wild and cultivated. Changes of seasons are recorded with a mixture of wistfulness and awe. So are the tragedies, joys, and daily struggles of the people around him.

Of a friend who dies of AIDS, Doug writes plainly of the dying man’s suffering: We see his eyes/cloud with dementia/as this merciless adversary/claims another victim. And yet at the end, everyone attending the sick man has transcended their differences in favor of forging an enduring bond;/parallel lives/on his journey into silence.

Having worked for County Social Services for many years, Doug was acutely aware of the legacies of poverty, broken families, and anti-indigenous racism. In perhaps his most successful poem on the subject, “Testament,” Doug takes on the voice of one of his subjects, a weathered woman raised among “a succession of/renegades and roughnecks/and other lost souls,” who defies the caseworker who presumes he can help her:

A multitude of feuds and grudges have I weathered in my ample span of years,

and settled many scores;

an excess of bitterness and rage

has bent my mouth down like a bow tearing my face in half. I carry a buck knife on my person, young man, and the Rancheria knows,

I am dangerous! Although this woman’s life is far from enviable, there is a satisfying ring of authenticity and rightness in her statement; she is battling for her life in an environment that might otherwise swallow her whole. This firstperson testimony of a survivor of hard times taps a rich vein in American cultural history, from Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen’s folk ballads to the poetic testimonies in Jean Toomer’s “Cane” and Edgar Lee Masters’s “Spoon River Anthology.”

Mendocino Coast poet Devreaux Baker notes of “Earth Goddess,” “The lives depicted in this collection are lives lived on the edge; yet filled with the stark beauty of the Northern California landscape.”

I first got to know Doug when, newly resident in Mendocino County, I began to attend Writers Read, a monthly gathering of poets and creative writers then happening at the Art Center Ukiah. I was immediately impressed by the friendly flavor and quality of talent present at the readings, epitomized by Doug, who always gave me an encouraging comment or apt quote from the wide range of poetry he read.

Later, I would run into him at the Starbuck’s on Talmage, where he sat drinking coffee — the elixir of all poets, I sometimes think — with his good friend Larry Sheehy, a longtime activist for peace and environmental causes. (Doug helped Larry stage a Watershed Poetry Festival, modeled on the one in Berkeley, between 2008 and 2012.)

Doug always had a greeting for me, and, often, a poem. He’d give me a Xeroxed copy of one of his recent creations, and ask me for one of my own. When I replied that I didn’t have a copy on me, he looked shocked; didn’t every good poet carry around copies of their own work? He insisted I send him a copy; when I did, he always sent me a note back. In this era of digital connection which often results in personal disconnection, I deeply appreciated this encounter: poetry passed hand to hand, a folded piece of paper, an impromptu reading in a coffee shop.

I got to know Doug betterin 2017, when he approached me to helped it his second group of poems. Together, we dived into Doug’s manuscript, an unruly assortment bristling with limericks; long reflective set-pieces where his mind roamed fruitfully and freely; and short lyrical pieces. Doug was as capable of uttering an arch statement or a sly witticism as of an eloquent summary or sad reflection. He was at once sensitive and irreverent. And sometimes he was all of these things at once, as in this stanza from “Portrait of a Garden—late Fall”:

Pumpkins bask in Autumnal sunbursts,

awash with smudge and seepage,

packaged in the soft-rot membrane of their fluted rinds, like obese voluptuaries, plump and complacent arbiters of the vine.

Luckily, Doug was able to complete this second collection, “Thought Fragments,” in the summer of 2019 before illness prevented him from proceeding further. As he grew more frail, his mind remained sharp and playful, and he remained interested in reading and listening to poetry. When I would visit him at the care home, I would read him a poem from Rilke or Neruda, two of our favorites. Although his eyes remained closed, and his breathing labored, he would always take in the poem, and respond to it when I was finished. Upon parting, he would kiss my hand in gratefulness.

Doug was assiduously attended to by his wife, Erika, at times of fragile health in his later years. He is survived by his wife and by two daughters, Sharon and Ellen. In notifying me of his death last month, Sharon wrote, “Not a conventionally religious man, he did once say that he considered poetry to be his religion.” Let me end, then, with some final thoughts from Doug, so relevant to this season, from the title poem of “Thought Fragments”: There are, you see, primal forces to explore before the altars of the universe.

Order, structure, and cadence

to impose, fuse, and finish in the glare of a bewildering arrayof

causes, creeds, and dogmas,

that tax our understanding

yet admonish us to dare, attain enlightenment, and bend this madcap world to our will, and see our speculations clad in axioms eternal, or the weight of metaphysics drive us mad; thought fragments that expire upon our pillows… until the morrow, when another round of inquiry begins, and the infinite comes into play.