Death of a Poet

In Memory of Terry Hertzler

[This post aims to help mark the passing (and, above all, the life), of our friend and fellow poet, Terry Hertzler (1950 - 2018).   Getting drafted and sent to Viet Nam changed (perhaps dominated) his life and his poetry.  His childhood . . . .  In his latter years he had long-term health problems, and spent a lot of time looking after his mother.  All in all, his life was not one many of us would have chosen to live; but the quality of the poetry he made from that life is admirable.  On a personal level, he brought to the table a deep and consistent loyalty to poetry and literature, a lot of knowledge, an inclination to help, and a cheerful but realistic view of his circumstances.  I liked him, though I never knew him well; and, obviously, I appreciated his poetry -- and his thoughtful help with my own poetry in workshops.]

Death has taken Terry Hertzler. We miss him.  Perhaps none of us really knew him well, though we knew his poems.  As Joe Somoza mentions below, those poems were solid and good; and Terry was both the affable man a San Diego poet describes him as, from earlier in his life, and the somewhat lonely-seeming gent that Joe alludes to.  He was a good man, whose life the Viet Nam War had split in half, like a lightning bold splitting a tree.  Below, I'll reprint a few of his poems, which often did reflect the war's affects on his life or bring into sharp and moving focus a well-remembered moment from his experience in country.  Although much of the subject matter of his poems was sad, even tragic, Terry himself was not, and he injected humor and insight into both the poems and his conversation.
It seems sad that none of us knew exactly when it happened.  We knew that he was feeling worse than usual, and then that he was in Beaumont Army Hospital in El Paso.  For weeks the emails preceding our semiweekly workshops included one from Terry noting that his health would keep him away, but he looked forward to the next workshop, and then in the emails preceding our April 5 workshop, his voice was silent.  Looking back, I see that on February 1 he wrote us, "Hi, everyone, / I was looking forward to this evening's workshop (been revising a poem all week), but I think I've caught this damn flu that's going around, so  I won't be there tonight. Sorry.  /  All best,   Terry"
Then on February 12, he wrote, "I plan on being there if I'm feeling better by then; I'm at the tail end of this flu (I doubt I'm still contagious since I've been fighting this for about three weeks now). But I'll let you know on Wednesday or Thursday morning. If anyone is concerned, let me know and I'll stay away."
And on March 11: "I am still in the hospital, but may come home on Tuesday; if I do, I may be able to make it Thursday. I hope so."
Reading back through those, I see why none of us felt forewarned that this illness would be his last.

Below, we reprint several of Terry's poems and also some comments by friends and fellow poets concerning Terry.


[Terry's The Case of the Stolen Feather Duster, recopied below from my blog post concerning that year's "For Love of Art" reading in Las Cruces, is a whimsical transformation of a sad and frustrating situation.  Terry was a last-minute cancellation from the 2018 event, for health reasons.]

The Case of the Stolen Feather Duster

So, my mother calls me at 4:00 in the morning, tells me she found her large feather duster. She's been up since 2:00 cleaning her house and was worried that someone might have broken in and stolen the feather duster when she wasn't looking. "It's an expensive one," she says.

"If someone broke in, Mom, they'd probably steal your flat-screen or your jewelry. Most burglars aren't really looking for used feather dusters."

"Did I wake you?" she asks.

My mother's 80 years old and generally gets up at 2:00 in the morning because that's when her dog, Joy, likes to get up. Joy pretty much runs the house. I've asked my Mom numerous times not to call before 9:00 a.m. or so, but her memory is bad and she forgets.

I moved from San Diego, where I lived for 30 years, to Las Cruces, New Mexico, to help my Mom. Sold my condo, left the beaches, a job, my friends. I'm only five minutes away now instead of 12 hours.

One morning we're sitting in her TV room, where she spends most of her time, watching the Today Show, when she suddenly looks startled. She turns and asks, "Am I late for work? Do I have a job?"

"No, Mom," I assure her. "You're retired."

"Oh, that's good."

She loses her keys sometimes, pushes the wrong buttons on her TV remote and calls to tell me she has a blue screen or a snowy screen. I drive over and fix it for her. I've showed her the procedure many times.

She's often in pain—ruptured disk pinching her sciatic nerve. Sometimes she gets angry, turns paranoid and mean, tells me I never loved her, that I'm fat and lazy and a liar, that I moved here just to get her house, that it's clear to her why I'm divorced.

In those moods, reason is impossible, so I leave, hurt by her accusations, while that small voice that each of us carries deep in our bellies whispers its own cruel indictments.

She always calls a few hours later or the next day, apologizes for being so mean if she remembers what happened—says she doesn't know why she acted that way, that she loves me, that I’m her favorite eldest son (my brother her favorite youngest son). So, humor survives. I always forgive her.

"I'm sad to learn that Terry died. For the past 4-5 years he took part in our open-mics at Palacio Bar in Mesilla, New Mexico, and for the past 2-3 years he was a regular member of our community peer-group workshop in Las Cruces, a sweet, lonely guy who enjoyed the fellowship as well as the poetry discussion. He was a good poet, always bringing something solid and convincing, sometimes a memory from Viet Nam. I'm sorry that he's gone."
                                                -- Joe Somoza

"He was a valuable Vietnam War poet, telling us how it was. Now he is with his mom and dad." 
"I will never forget Terry's enthusiastic, loud, interesting stories about his life and family, and his insightful critiques of our poems. His own poetry was always carefully crafted and deep. We learned and can still learn through his poems about his experiences in Vietnam and how that war shaped and changed him. His poems, sometimes prose poems, on other subjects will always be arresting.  He certainly will be missed by the writers in Las Cruces who knew him."
                                                            -- Anna Underwood

"His book Second Skin is one of the best books about the Vietnam War and its effect on veterans that I have ever read."
                                                            -- Brandon Cesmat (a friend of Terry's whose April 5 FB post has more to say about Terry

[Cribbed from Ted Burke's blog, "Like it or Not" :
"Terry was an energetic and constant force in the Southern California poetry scene. The loss of him is a sad moment for the community of poets and poetry aficionados in our town.   

   

"I met  poet Terry Hertzler in the mid seventies. Terry, a Vietnam vet who'd recently published his first book of poems, The Way of the Snake, recounting experiences and baked-impressions as a soldier in that ill-fated adventure, was a great guy, affable, gregarious, and , it turned out, a fine poet, a strong writer. 

Way of the Snake revealed what would become Terry's stylistic signature,a spare, lean presentation of image,impression, fact, a sharp and acute journalistic sense for the telling detail,an ear for the crusty, rich, terse rhythms of speech. . . . The man could write.

"He ran poetry series, championed the work of other writers, and had a small press from which he issued a steady stream of quality chap books that brought the world up to speed on how Terry was responding to the world, reflective, deeply felt, beautifully fit, image to page, word to musical phrase."