Verse flowed from dying poet

WHALE SONG: A POET'S JOURNEY INTO CANCER, by Kenneth Brewer, Dream Garden Press, 48 pages, $15, softcover

Ken Brewer was Utah poet laureate when he died March 15, 2006, after a nine-month battle with pancreatic cancer. I had the privilege of interviewing him shortly before his death at his home in Providence, just outside Logan.

Brewer had dropped from 215 pounds to 155, but he looked good. His eyes were still dancing.

He was on fire with poetry swirling around in his brain. He had already published nine collections of poetry, but his approaching death had given him new determination to write about his disease.

At first he used military terms — "fight, battle, kill," and it is reflected in his early poems in "Whale Song: A Poet's Journey into Cancer."

With complete composure, he looked at me and said, "It's your cancer — a houseguest who stays longer than you wanted him to. You kill your spirit when you use military language. There are other parts of you that need to be healed. I focus now on spiritual healing."

So Brewer wrote a poem a day — without any of the revision he used to apply for polish.

"I'm an oral poet," he said. "I don't follow the poetic line. For me, the rhythm is the whole piece. That creates a problem in getting poems published. A lot of the breaks are pretty arbitrary, so I'd much prefer to be heard than to be read on the page."

Besides this wonderful volume, three others he wrote during his illness will also appear.

If you saw Brewer read his poems, you know he always waved his right hand as if he were conducting a symphony, and his feet bounced to further reflect the rhythm. That means that it helps when reading "Whale Song" to imagine him reading it to you "in a flash of spontaneity," as he wrote for the introduction.

In "Stoic," Brewer recalls his "death sentence," when he was told his cancer was terminal. He decided to be "cool and philosophical," but that ended when he talked to his grandchildren — and he wept. A friend told him "Stoicism is overrated."

He became more appreciative of nature, writing eloquently about storms. He imagined "the taste of radiation and chemotherapy bound like tree roots full of dirt and rocks, full of tenacious night crawlers tugged from the ground by robins."

He asked his oncologist about "the rhythm of death." Was it iambic pentameter? "What does a dead poet write if not free verse?"