My grandfather, Julian Drachman, was a pretty cheap guy. When I was a kid, and he came to visit, he’d also have a present for me; more than once it was the free calendar he picked up at his bank. As I sort through his papers (he was a writer and a poet, especially), trying to put them in some order, I’m frustrated by the many scraps of paper, like the backs of envelopes, on which he wrote hundreds of drafts of unpublished poems.

He didn’t like to waste paper.

But I don’t think even he was stingy enough to save a gum wrapper sleeve to write a poem on!

Still, I made this little discovery a couple of hours ago.

On August 28, 1930, a Thursday, I think he was enjoying nature; it was the last full week of vacation before he would return to work as an English teacher. He had recently become a late-in-life newlywed, and my dad, his first son, was born in June. Maybe the family was in Sharon Springs, where he used to summer as a young adult; maybe they were just sitting by the seaside in Manhattan Beach, where they lived. The weather was sunny but not too hot. His star student, Clifford Odets, who had dropped out of high school a few years before but had kept in touch with Grampa, had just started to make his name in the theater world, which might have been a relief — Grampa must have been disappointed when his star student dropped out of school and glad to see how things were turning out. He had two books to his name, and magazines and papers were publishing Grampa’s own writing more and more often. The Great Depression was under way, but he was unaffected.

He was in love, he had a new baby, people around him were doing well, and his career was on the upswing. Things were going well. The weather was nice.

Grampa was inspired; he had no paper with him; he had a stick of gum. Luckily, he had a pencil in his pocket, not very sharp, though.

He wrote this:

Prescription

Sunshine & air in generous pro-
    portions
the sight of forests and of mist-
    clad hills
The talk of streams, the aimless
    road’s contortions
Sick soul, take these instead of
    drugs or pills
Swallow the world whole and
    Forget all ills

I don’t know if this is the way it happened. But one thing that I find kind of interesting is that he didn’t have the freedom to write a poem that was whatever length he wanted. He was artistically constrained by the size of the gum wrapper, not just with respect to the length of the enter poem, but also the length of each line, so the size of the gum wrapper had a big impact on the rhythm of the poem. The first line breaks in the middle of a word, by necessity for spacing, but he made it work rhythmically. He also didn’t have space to scratch anything out, so the poem had to be perfect the first time through. The poem itself is OK. It is fine. Its context on the back of the gum wrapper makes it a better poem.

He tossed this in a drawer, went back to his job. When he moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan in the 1960s, he moved all his papers into disorganized files. Those files went into boxes when he died twenty years after that, which the family shipped to my Uncle Dan’s house. When Uncle Dan died a couple of years ago, Grampa’s papers came back home to Brooklyn, where, this morning, I found his gum wrapper.
^^^

This article is by Steven S. Drachman.

His grandfather, Julian M. Drachman died in 1983. His poetry appeared in numerous prestigious magazines and journals during his lifetime.