David Ray (photo Judy Ray)
A tribute to a UMKC literary giant
“A certain diminishment of ambition has set in,” writes eminent American poet Christian Wiman in Harper’s August 2024 issue: “Poets no longer feel they can or should attempt to speak for all humans.”
Wiman is speaking here of the poet’s public voice, which has been replaced, he says, in many cases by a focus on the self. I write here to honor one great poet of the public voice, David Ray, who died Aug. 8, 2024, at the age of 92. David was a poet, professor, prose writer and founding editor, in 1971, of the literary magazine New Letters at UMKC, where I worked as his managing editor. He co-founded, with his wife, Judy Ray, the long-running public radio series New Letters on the Air.
During David’s near-quarter century in Kansas City, before the Rays moved to Tucson in the 1990s, he enriched and helped shape the writing culture here — a culture, in my estimation, of emotionally direct, concise poems, a fierce advocacy for justice, love, international peace and environmental causes. His voice was personal, yes, and particular — never private. “We are not going to steal the water tower / in Malcolm, Iowa,” he writes in an early poem, “Stopping Near Highway 80,” about town folks suspicious of strangers who picnic there. It is for humanity, I think, that the poet wonders how these closed, wary people could, he writes, “have told us anything at all / we’d want to know / for living lives as gentle as we can.”
That last line remains, for me, the emblematic image of David Ray’s life work. He co-founded with Robert Bly American Writers Against the Vietnam War, in 1966, and co-edited with Bly “A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War,” among many other works. He and I traveled to TV stations in the 1980s to record our editorial pleas over environmental concerns; once, David gathered a group of school children — and their teachers — from Nelson Elementary in Midtown to help save a grove of trees at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, destined to be cut down for parking spaces. They saved about half of them, as I recall.
David’s poem “Bhopal” laments the death of children gassed in a chemical plant accident in India years back, and the poem reminded us, “they’re all our children now,” he wrote, “and thus / I’ll say goodbye to this son, too, and yours.” That reference to “this son” alludes to the death of David’s own son, Sam, near that time and in so doing, as often in David Ray’s poems, embraces all our children now, as Wiman might say.
David and Judy, herself a fine writer, founded New Letters on the Air in 1977, with the blessing and help of then station manager Sam Scott; the series came to find weekly broadcast in over 50 cities, including some in Europe, and now includes one of the largest archives of original audio literary interviews in the country. The idea for such a literary radio program, David once told me, came from seeing the impression of a leaf in wet cement on Holmes Street near 53rd, right in front of the home, then, of Kansas City’s public radio station, KCUR. David thought at the time, a weekly poetry broadcast could help cement poetry, itself — and all kinds of literary work — into the life of the community.
“I remain suspicious of psychology and the valorization,” Wiman writes, “of the individual self.” Neither Wiman nor David Ray reject personal subjects, such as with David Ray’s “At the Washing of My Son” and “Gathering Firewood,” but the self, in Ray’s poems, looks outward and is not, as Wiman says, “an end in itself.”
As editor, David Ray published many of the major writers of his time, such as Derek Walcott, Josephine Jacobsen, Chinua Achebe, even Isadora Duncan, and was way ahead of his time in discovering and promoting minority writers. He published over 20 books of his own poetry, plus a memoir, “The Endless Search,” and other prose, anthology editorships and more. He won many national awards, including the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. His poem “A Few Words About Prayer” draws me to its last line, about moments like this, “the theme of which,” he writes, “was taking for granted the routine trip.” David never took this trip for granted, for himself or for us all.
Even As Birds
“We all die, even birds….And so I went out into the world.”
—Maxim Gorky, My Life
You were two years old – or ten, or twenty, or fifty—
the first time the world opened before you as if
meant only for you, your advance into the green
or the blue that was like a sharp gong sounding
on the air, or perhaps a swarm of molecules busy
as bees stung your eyes, and after that the clouds
seemed to part just for you, not the jet plane in which
you were a passenger, and never again could museums
compete with scenes of such gold and glory as you
beheld by strolling the earth. Since that day when
you first saw or heard the strange message of nature
you have had an odd faith that nothing is quite
random or not designed by some divinity. You
have honored as many gods as a Greek or Roman,
yet rarely have managed to believe in the light
within you, the one others claim they see in your eyes.
David Ray
from Burnt Offerings, 2019
Whirlybird Press
