conversations with hiawatha bailey

Monday, June 10, 2013

a younger hiawatha

Posted by arwulf arwulf at 7:48 AM

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arwulf arwulf: My name came to me when I was about fourteen years old. I was out for a nocturnal stroll with a couple of girls, looked up at the sky and one of them said to me "don't move - your shadow looks like a wolf howling at the moon." So they took to calling me Wolf, as did a lot of other people I knew at the time. Within months this had morphed, with the 'o' becoming a 'u', and wulf preceded by 'ar'. Over the years I doubled it because people would ask what's your name, then what's your last name, and I'd just keep saying arwulf. Over the years I came to prefer the lower case. One day when poet Gary Snyder came to town, I bought a copy of his magnum opus "Mountains and Rivers Without End", went to a public book signing and had him inscribe it. When I told him my name he cocked an eyebrow and asked about it. I told him it had been with me most of my life, that it chose me rather than me choosing it, and that it might be some kind of variant on the name of a small animal called an aardwolf - "aard" like "erde" meaning "earth". So I guess it means I'm from here. Gary Snyder looked at me intently and said "it means you're fiercely from here."

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