THE CARTOGRAPHER

by David Bowen

 

 

I knew Okla Elliott for almost seventeen years. We met in 2001, soon after I started my MFA program at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. It was a rainy night and Okla was the night circulation manager at the campus library. My shirt was damp as I placed my library picks on the circulation desk. He noted the story collection by one of the MFA faculty and asked if I were a new recruit. I confessed, and then we got to talking about Leonard Cohen's poetry, and then Okla admitted he'd been writing some poems himself. So I invited him to a party at my apartment where people had been promised they could read poems aloud.

Graduate student apartments are small. Maybe eight people were sitting on real furniture while the rest of us sat cross-legged on the floor, sheafs of poems or somesuch in one hand and ceramic coffee mugs of wine in the other. Okla arrived with half a bottle of Canadian Club and a manuscript of poems rolled into a baton. His girlfriend wore a black leather collar with punk rock spikes. It was an entrance.

Okla and I formed New American Press the way kids form a garage band. We were in our early twenties, fresh out of undergrad. We drank beer with our friends on the porch and talked about writing—our own and that of the writers we admired. Okla was a kind of beacon for creative people, and the usual crowd included musicians, writers, film people, playwrights, actors, a crew of modern dancers. We assembled an arts collective called American Distractions that lasted about a year, but there were too many moving pieces. Okla and I had been the literary arm of the organization, so we split off to begin New American Press. Okla coined the name. It gave homage to the organization where it began, and it also exuded a certain gravitas that would help frame the work we would do together for the next sixteen years.

Okla liked to say that the history of literature is a history of friendships, and Okla was a giant in both realms. While many of us toiling away in university English departments focused our efforts in one or two genres, Okla published widely and with almost annoying frequency in poetry, short fiction, personal essays, scholarly articles, book reviews, political commentary, and translation. And he injected the same energy and enthusiasm into several long-term collaborations with his friends, whom he encouraged with relentless enthusiasm to get to work on their own projects as well. He also edited manuscripts for his friends; pitched their work to editors he knew; read over job application cover letters; covered some rent; picked up some utilities; helped find some work. Okla bought a washing machine while we were roommates and soon after started inviting our broke writer friends to come over and wash their clothes.

Okla’s compassion for others made him a natural advocate for social justice. He detested unfairness, especially systemic unfairness. You would meet no greater champion of equal pay for equal work. Okla opposed oppression on grounds that were both moral and rational: injustice fails to recognize the individual person’s humanity, and this causes suffering, which is abominable in all forms; but oppression also fails as a social policy, because it leads to a breakdown in the social fabric. Injustice, therefore, is irrational as well as morally reprehensible. Okla’s passion for social justice led to a partnership with Green Party vice presidential candidate, Matthew Gonzalez, which became the political blog As It Ought to Be.

Okla’s intelligence was remarkable. His speech was quick and precise, like his thoughts. Prior to beginning his academic career, Okla thought he might go to law school. He scored in the 98th percentile of the LSAT entrance exam, and we should assume the other two percent cheated. Okla was a rare creature even in graduate departments where many of us had ten or twelve years of higher education under our belts. His raw intellect was astounding but the depth and breadth of his reading was totally unparalleled. Back when we were roommates in North Carolina, he’d bring a book when we met up for lunch. If we went out for a beer some night, he brought a book. When later we were doing our PhDs and he came to visit, he always had two bags when I picked him up at the train station: a small bag for some clothes and a duffel bag filled with books.

And the breadth of his reading bears special mention. He read all the poetry from the contemporary to the ancient. He read all the fiction. He read literally thousands of pages written by Joyce Carol Oates and Norman Mailer, but he also loved Dostoeyevsky and Tolstoy and Sartre. His taste was always to work in any genre that was propelled by big questions and challenging ideas, so he read Pynchon and William T. Vollmann with the same energy and enthusiasm he brought to Hannah Arendt, Slavoj Žižek, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, and Margaret Atwood. He enjoyed reading Lacan in the original French. He loved enormous doorstopper books so much that he often carried around lesser tomes of only 400 or 500 pages with an air of pained resignation, like a kid stuck with his second-favorite toy.

And Okla loved trains. He sounded like a nine-year old sometimes when he talked about how much he loved: trains. He enjoyed the anachronism of traveling on steel rails in the digital age. He talked about the pleasurable civility of reading a book—or writing one—while hundreds of miles of landscape slipped by the window. I think he also loved the audacity of the locomotive in general, the idea that someone would come up with a machine that could transport people across entire continents. Trains appealed to both the inventor and the explorer in Okla. Trains also appealed to Okla the romantic; the notion of being in a space between spaces, the anticipation of imminent arrival, of becoming.

Okla also loved food. He loved Thai food, vegetarian food, empanadas, tacos, Mexican street food. He loved hushpuppies and barbecue, cornbread and fried okra. I never saw anyone get so excited about a restaurant that served tofu exclusively. He was famous for the plastic cup of iced coffee that he took wherever he went. When we were sitting around reading manuscripts or working together on our own writing, he enjoyed inventing new kinds of tea by combining bags of peach tea with bags of green tea to make: peach green tea! He once showed me the Horizon organic milk container and explained that the cow in the logo was flying because it was so happy to be making healthy, environmentally-conscious organic milk.

Okla’s palette was formed in part by his travels. He lived in several places around the United States, including Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. As an undergraduate, he traveled Europe, where he studied German, Polish, and a little Russian. (When I discovered a Polish-language edition of Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber on his bookshelf, I felt like I'd discovered my better twin.) While a masters student at Ohio State, Okla studied Korean. In more recent years, he spent time at language immersion programs in Guadelajara and Montreal, where he studied, respectively, Spanish and French. When we were roommates in 2004, I sometimes heard him listening to Al Jazeera in his bedroom at night, because he was teaching himself Farsi and Arabic.

Autodidacticism was one of Okla's primary traits, but he wasn't just a lifelong learner. He was also a teacher and mentor to just about everyone he met. He loved maps and the idea of cartography, the idea of drawing worlds and making tools for navigating them. He drew maps for me when we first met, introducing me to new writers, literary magazines, perspectives on art and politics. His bed was surrounded by towers of library books, literary journals, foreign language dictionaries. Okla's writing itself is a map of the man's consciousness—his loves and fears, his prevailing interests and obsessions. Like all great art, they create a map of a singular and unique humanity. But such a map also teaches us to recognize and navigate some of the universal tensions and contradictions that come with the miraculous and often painful experience of being human.

Okla was a man obsessed with the power of language. In the tradition of great writers like Goethe and Robert Penn Warren, Okla was a man of letters. He wrote remarkable fiction and essays, but he was most prolific as a poet. He published more than a hundred poems in the past twenty years. Okla’s poetry combines a rare mixture of erudition, an impeccable ear, conversational ease, and metaphysical vision. He was equally accomplished working in formal verse and experimental forms, though Okla liked to say that he didn’t much like experimental writing; he liked writing that conducted experiments. This was how he approached his work as a writer, always to measure and verify and discover and finally to share what his work had revealed. Okla once told me that his great wish in life was to have a beautiful singing voice, and it’s in his poems, stories, and essays where we can hear the remarkable range and beauty of his song.

 

 

Return to Tribute table of contents.

Return to issue 11 table of contents.