Howard McCord, an award-winning American poet, novelist, and essayist, who received his BA from the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) in 1957 and his MA from the University of Utah in 1958, shared his attraction to knowledge, poetry and geography with his students and everyone he encountered. He is a man who joined the Navy and fought for his country when he was only 18 and full of fighting spirit and a man who 
explored different areas of the world, from the artic deserts of Iceland to the hot deserts of New Mexico. McCord has received many awards for his work: a research fellowship from Bowling Green State University (this one sent him backpacking in Iceland!), the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship from the University of New Mexico, not one but two fellowships from The National Endowment for The Arts, two from the Ohio Arts Council, and an E. 0. Holland Fellowship award from Washington State University. A Fulbright award sent him to study at the University of Mysore in India, and he was named "Author of the Pass" by El Paso's own Herald-Post in 1988. In 1990 McCord was presented the Gold Nugget Award. These are achievements that most writers and poets only dream of achieving. McCord went out of his way to earn them. He is an El Pasoan who saw the stars and pressed forward to be with them, a lover of hiking and a lover of his native region. His life was and continues to be more than a list of accomplishments. His life transcends into nature, becoming one with the greatness of this Mother Earth. Below we explore McCord in slightly greater depth than a list of accomplishments in an attempt to get inside his mind, even if just a tiny bit.
Image caption: Howard McCord, 1959. Courtesy of Howard McCord.
Poems are marks of our wanderings - blazes that glint in the forest and permit others to follow our trail. Who are we? Why are we here? And where is here? We meet others, live a while together, seek the balm of love, ask our questions, then go our way, always alone. The simplest moments of our lives are incredibly strange. We measure, we calculate, we use language. We search for clarity, and when we find it there is still mystery. Music and dreams and our stories, shapes and colors and dance, all celebrate our search. We wish for magic but have none. We are no closer to understanding than the first one who thought to ask the questions. All that we know reveals nothing of the immensity we inhabit. All we can do is meet it with courage, leave a poem, go on. --Howard McCord
The Heritage Fellowship Award recognizes Ohio masters in their perspective fields. Being a master in any field is not an easy task. By definition, a master is a skilled practitioner of a particular art or activity. For McCord, it is poetry. Critiquing W.S. Merwin's 2009 Pulitzer Prize winning book of poetry Opening the Hand, McCord displays his mastery, dividing the book into three parts. "Eight of the poems in the first part are constructed with a medial caesura, indicated by a quarter-inch gap in each line. This serves no discernable purpose except to irritate me," McCord says. "It is a visual affectation, probably arrived at in idleness and boredom. The lines are not alexandrines (most are closer to rude fourteeners) and need no such signature; and though on occasion the hemistiches reflect the pattern of Old English alliteration and draw attention to it in such lines as 'they that were shaken at the sink and stripped of water' I still cannot see the usefulness of the gap." McCord may have lost some readers with his analysis of Merwin's poem, but it is equivalent to possessing Chopin-like knowledge of music theory or listening to a highly skilled surgeon discuss a complicated abdominal exploration.
Born November 3, 1932, and raised at his family's Joy Ranch in New Mexico since the age of 12, McCord acquired a fascination with mountains and deserts, becoming "a walker, rock climber and spelunker across three continents," as many descriptions of him have it. McCord and his friend frequently rode their bikes to the base of the mountains, taking food and a bed roll with them. They hiked up the mountain, set up their tiny little camp, and gazed in wonder at the brilliant, glistening stars blanketing the night sky. In an interview with Ring, a French publishing agency, McCord comments about El Paso: "All my early years were there in the middle of the Mexican border. In the middle of the Chihuahua desert with miles and miles of desert in all directions. Ranges of mountains that crop up like archipelagos of islands." That in itself is poetry. With hiking dear to him, McCord never expected to fall in love with poetry. After attending Austin High School and graduating in 1950, his senior year, his English teacher turned his world around when she told him, "We've been reading poetry. Why don't you try writing some poetry?" Of course, to no one's surprise, McCord wrote a poem about hiking.
As the director of the creative writing program at Bowling Green State University from 1971-1980, a great accomplishment and even greater responsibility, McCord's integrity and ability to inspire and instill pride in not only his students but the faculty and staff is another critical reason for Howard McCord receiving the Bowling Green State Fellowship award. McCord imparted his love of poetry as a guest professor at many other colleges, such as the Navaho Community College he visited in 1975, the University of Alaska, and the California State University at Northridge.
But things only get interesting from here.
Along with esteemed poet and writer Allen Ginsberg and poet, painter, and social activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti, McCord introduced the Indian poets of the Hungry Generation to Western readers. W hile at Columbia University in the 1940s, Ginsberg sparked a friendship with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, and together they formed the core of the Beat Generation. Ferlinghetti, founder of City Lights Booksellers and Publishers in San Francisco, became notorious for his obscenity trial after publishing Ginsberg's influential collection, Howl and other Poems. McCord, in 1965, teaching at Washington State University and taking an interest in the Hungryalist Movement, traveled to India to meet Malay Roy Choudhury and others in the Movement. Roy Choudhury was a Bengali Howard McCord poet, playwright, and author who founded the Movement in the 1960s.
Image caption: Howard McCord. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Later in 1965, McCord published an English edition of Roy Choudhury's controversial poem "Stark Electric Jesus" to raise money to aid with Roy Choudhury's legal expenses. McCord writes in "1-Iungryalist Movement: The Poetry of Chaos and Death," which appeared in City Lights Journal Number Three, "Malay Roy Choudhury [ and others] had been arrested and charged with conspiring to produce and distribute an obscene book in violation of Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code. The book was an anthology of their writings, and 'Stark Electric Jesus' was Malay Roy Choudhury's contribution."
In "The Beat Generation Meets the Hungry Generation: U. S. - Calcutta and the 1960s 'Revolt of the Personal,"' Steven Belleto notes that in the Afterward of Rod Choudhury's poem:
McCord argues that however supportive Ginsberg was to the Hungryalists, it would be inaccurate to say he inspired them: 'The Indian press believes to this day that the group's origins can be traced to the 1962 Indian visit of Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gary and Jeanne [sic] Snyder. But however stimulating the visit of these American poets ... I believe the Movement is autochthonous lindigenous rather than descended from migrants or colonists I and stems from the profound dislocation of Indian life.' The very fact that McCord felt obliged to claim the Hungryalists as autochthonous suggests how they had already become entangled with the Beats by 1965.
In the "Hungryalist Movement: The Poetry of Chaos and Death," McCord argues:
Malay Roy Choudhury ... has been a central figure in the Hungry Generation's attack on the Indian cultural establishment since the Movement began in the early sixties .... In spite of prosecution and harassment, the Hungry Generation has continued to produce and publish poetry and prose. Acid, destructive, morbid, nihilistic, outrageous, mad, hallucinatory, shrill - these characterize the terrifying and cleansing visions that the Hungryalist insist Indian literature must endure.
For more on this fascinating story of the Hungryalist Movement, read McCord's essay "Hungryalist Movement: The Poetry of Chaos and Death."
With that said, McCord is described as a poet philosopher of the interactions between the mind and the natural world, having written more than 30 books and having given readings from his work at over 200 universities. The vast emptiness of the desert greatly occupied McCord's mind. He writes with the compelling vitality of an adventurer and the engaging curiosity of a naturalist and historian. To be alone, separated from society, is where he received his true pleasure. Much of his interest in geography transcends into his work. It is said he once walked 90 miles across the Jornada del Muerto (A Single Day's Journey of the Dead Man or Route of the Dead Man). The Jornada del Muerto is an arid and flat desert landform stretching 100 miles from Las Cruces, New Mexico, to Socorro, New Mexico.
Image caption: Howard McCord reading at Papagayo Literacy Center. Courtesy of Lawrence Welsh.
The Jornada del Muerto remains today highly uninhabitable and undeveloped. McCord exquisitely details his time there in his book Walking to Extremes, devoting 54 pages to it, calling the desert ground "a fine old lava bed." He explains how he and his companion prepared, each having six liters of water and the goal of reaching a water and food cache 25 miles away. Walking three miles an hour is not easy, even for a dedicated and fervent hiker. The Jornada del Muerto desert is so vast and mostly empty that it is known as the location where the first atomic bomb was tested in 1945. Though he did not hike it for his work, it transcended into it. Walking to Extremes describes how the desert took away his water just as quickly as he would take a breath. McCord calls his walk across the desert "a dance." He also writes about the history behind Jornada del Muerto and Robledo, the first European buried in the Jornada desert.
During a short reading from Walking to Extremes, audiences' minds are opened to new aspects of the world. McCord, seen in a video to be far into an unknown wilderness, reads the opening paragraph of Walking to Extremes, describing the vastness of Jornada del Muerto:
The desert is austere and dignified. While a forest beckons and lures a wayfarer, the desert begins with reserve, with hesitation. And it is only after I've entered it fully again that I realize how much it covets my presence, how much it will possess me, by offering those extreme gifts of silence, distance and heat. In the northern reaches of the Jornada del Muerto in central New Mexico is a fine old lava bed, a Pleistocene Malpie, and in the center rises the cone which fed the field. It was there that I began my walk of the Jornada. lt was as if the Iceland I had wandered years ago had been continued at a different temperature and the vastness of the Odadahraun, the grim astern wasteland was being repeated in the miles of nameless Malpie before me.
Ron Standerfer, a self-published writer and critic in the YourHikes.com website, calls Walking to Extremes "A magical book, for sure, one fashioned from a rich fabric that seems to be skillfully woven by a consortium of poets, raconteurs, philosophers, naturalists, outdoorsmen, and hikers; and so, it is, except that the consortium exists only in the mind of one man, Howard McCord."
Guy Birchard, a British Columbia-based poet, says of McCord, "He urges our steps and points our view. A figure shimmers in the heat ahead - I'll follow Howard McCord the distance." Rodolfo Anaya, the highly esteemed author of his 1972 novel Bless Me, Ultima and considered one of the founders of the canon of contemporary Chicano literature, notes, "McCord's poetic voice calls us to be companions in his vision quest, seeking the truth in the deserts he loves. He writes the reality of the Southwest landscape and its songs and voices. In these brilliant and philosophical essays Howard shares his intimate and sometimes haunting journey."
Image caption: Howard McCord at the Organ Mountains, New Mexico, 2012. Courtesy of Lawrence Welsh.
Of walking Howard McCord says:
I have often wondered why I enjoy walking. It totally liberates my mind and my imagination. There is no better time for me to let my mind just sort through the day, the universe, the night. When I am just plotting alone in the desert, in the mountains, or up on the Tundra of Iceland and Lapland or wherever I might be, it's just a remarkably liberating time. I enjoy the silence, the quiet, the feeling that you are not being disturbed in this world, that the whole world is yours. There's no one else in sight, there's no distracting sounds. There is just the world itself. It is sort of slow breathing, an occasional flight of a bird or the rustle of some creature on a hillside.
So, if you are a nature lover and are thinking of a hike, you might consider taking a Howard McCord book. Picture yourself alone in a measureless desert at the stroke of midnight, bundled up in a sleeping bag, facing up, your arms stretched above you with a slight bend at the elbows, your hands holding Walking to Extremes, the book opened arbitrarily to, say, page 35. You occasionally glance toward the night sky to catch a sweeping shooting star in a hurry to get somewhere or sneak in on a flurry of stars dancing to the twinkling of glittering lights. You read the provocative lines nurtured with a sense of offbeat adventure and become afflicted with a taste of wanderlust. Scheming within your stream of consciousness that at the moment daylight seizes the night and the sun becomes your dictator, you will trek across the great expanse, pulling out the McCord book now and then, enrapturing yourself between the vastness before you and the splendidness of McCord. You read, "I have learned walking that language does not break silence any more than I disturb a rock by stepping on it."
And so, you walk.
Walking to Extremes by 