Bill Witherup, poet, playwright and activist

He wrote that the name Witherup could be found somewhere in Finnegans Wake, though the letter he sent citing it is nowhere to be found.

Nor is it to be found in his last book, down wind, down river: New and Selected Poems (West End Press, 2000.)

And Bill is dead. No more letters out of the blue, singled-spaced and written on a manual typewriter. No more poems scrawled on 8 1/2 x 11 notebook paper and signed "Willy." No more rants, loves, hurts, lashing administered and offenses taken, no more political causes. No more popping the top of a cold can of Bud or smoking the occasional cigarette.

Just memories.

Driving up the coast from San Luis Obispo to Big Sur in Hannon's suspect VW, spending a couple of nights at the Witherup cabin in Bixby Creek with its way-ahead-of-its-time outdoor shower. Drinking whisky and laughing until it hurt as Bill read from The Collected Poems of Mary C. Witherup, a book he'd found the book bin of a Goodwill store in San Francisco. Eating chinese in Petaluma, listening to Bill lament the job he'd taken as the caretaker of a fancy bed-and-breakfast on the coast, thinking he'd 'have more time to write' and resenting the patron demands. Having a two hour conversation about Flaubert, after he'd read Madame Bovary for the second time. Hearing him wake in the guest room of my house in LA and ripping a fart so loud it woke my two little boys.

Moving way north, moving back home. Still writing poems, taking shitty little jobs, in-and-out of a loony bin or two, raising hell about nuclear power, organizing, still in love with the world and angry with many of its human occupants to the end of his days. When he died, June 3, 2009, in a vet's hospital in Seattle, the obit in The Seattle Times id'd Bill as "poet, playwright and activist."

His sister told the paper that Bill carried a fake cellphone in his pocket and would talk on it when he saw other people talking on their cellphones.

"Bill hated technology," his sister said. "He felt that technology does not enhance society but does the opposite."