Preface to Nolo Contendere

by Judson Crews

It's presumption indeed to interrupt another man's altogether competent conversation, especially before he's even had chance to begin. But—Judson Crews is a modest man and a most honest one, and he won't tell you himself what I think you have right and reason to know. For one thing, he is a man of absolute principle, by which I mean that he has taken explicit care to consider the world and he has come to some conclusions—not to lie, not to cheat, not to murder, not to kick one's fellows when they're down. You'd be surprised how few people ever get around to thinking about such things, much less to taking a stand.

For years Mr. Crews lived in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, with his wife and two daughters, working as a pressman for the local newspaper at one dollar an hour. At the same time he published a number of little magazines, Suck Egg Mule, Poetry Taos, The Naked Ear , among them, and a series of his own books—and usually he put a photo reproduction of a naked lady in each one, as much as to say, if you can't 'understand' these poems, you might test your powers on this person; i.e., I'm sure that God loves us all.

Coming from the East, I had a larger than lifesize sense of Texans. When we were still kids, a friend of my father's just back from Texas brought us a donkey in a taxicab from Boston, after having got it that far by train. So it was clearly a real place, and when I later read of the Alamo and who was there, and how they literally held

out till the last man went down, I hoped one day to know the people of that state because it seemed they might well be a little bigger, a bit more ample, more generous, and factually finer than their somewhat bedraggled countrymen. Sadly the events of the past twenty years have cut that dream down to very meager size—and I'm sure we've all met a lot of Texans, like they say. But I'd still like to remember, as a company, Sam Houston, Robert Rauschenberg, Janis Joplin, Judson Crews, and Freebelly Norton, just that he was the first Texan I ever met (it was the Second World War) and certainly he was no disappointment.

So what does this have to do with Mr. Crews' poems? A great deal, in fact. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. You can't get an egg to break without a chicken to lay it. Mr. Crews is not so simply an autobiographical writer, and I don't know whether or not he's done all the things he talks of in these poems. I'm damn sure someone has—and that their wry, laconic, sensitive perception is fact of very human experience. Integrity is a very apt word for Judson Crews' way of being human. He won't do what he doesn't believe in doing, nor will he say something for simple convenience. That's cost him a lot at times, jobs included, but you can no more be a little bit committed to telling the veritable truth than you can be a little bit pregnant. So you might as well go for broke.

One day, when we're all, as Jack Kerouac put it, "safe in Heaven, dead," I'm sure that Judson Crews will be both remembered and honored for the loner wisdom of what he had to tell us and that wild down-home elegance of what one might call his delivery. Like in that knife fight when the one guy says, you never touched me!—and the other says, just try to move your head—maybe it will take time to catch up with this dear man's delights. But if you're reading this, you're surely getting close. Onward!

Placitas, New Mexico
June 30, 1978