by Jim Cohn
Internationally acclaimed poet Anne Waldman is well known as a force in poetry. She was one of the founders and directors of The Poetry Project at St. Marks’s Church In-the-Bowery, working there for over a decade; she also co-founded with Allen Ginsberg the celebrated Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, where as Distinguished Professor of Poetics she continues to work to preserve the school’s substantial literary/oral archive. A recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, and a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, Waldman is the author of more than 40 books, including Fast Speaking Woman (City Lights, 1975), Vow to Poetry: Essays, Interviews, and Manifestos (Coffee House Press, 2001), and several volumes of selected poems. She has concentrated on the long poem as a cultural intervention with such works as Marriage: A Sentence (Penguin, 2000),Structure of The World Compared to a Bubble (Penguin, 2004), Manatee/Humanity (Penguin, 2009), and the monumental anti-war feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press, $40), a project that took 25 years to complete. We discussed the book on April 2, 2012, the poet’s birthday.

Jim Cohn: You began work on Iovis in the late 1980s; Book I appeared in 1993. What were the circumstances that gave birth to your writing? Did you conceive it as a trilogy all along?

Anne Waldman: The plan was always a trilogy, the classical triad. Outer, inner, secret, Heaven, Earth, Man (which is the triad of the haiku), Nirmanakya, Sambhogakaya, Dharmakaya (realms of form, light, and emptiness—a Buddhist triad), and so on. Aeschuylus’sOresteia, Dante’s Commedia. Endless complicated triads. H.D.’s War Trilogy as well, a deep bow of gratitude in my project to the power of her epic, written against a backdrop of war. I was also thinking in terms of a feminist plan of explicating the male, usurping with the female and the hermaphrodite, and then resolving in something transcendent beyond gender perhaps. And personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing—and third: the act/act of vocalizing. The subtitle “Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment” came with “Book III: Eternal War” but seemed to serve the entire project with its implication of unmasking layers of “concealment.” I wanted an expansive form that would make a demand on my time—tithe my time—at least a quarter century. That would be a record—a slice of history—for my son and his generation. It was interesting to publish IOVIS gradually, as it un-wound and progressed. Iovis is the generative of Jove, Zeus, and I was seeing how everything is of the Patriarch. The actual title is “The Of-Jove Trilogy,” and came from Virgil’s line “Iovis omnia plena,” all is full of Jove. You need a trilogy to cover the subject.

JC: The physical production of your 1000-plus page epic poem, as an object, a relic, is no small achievement. With its highly visual formal arrangement of words and image on the page, the sheer duration of the ink-based performance pushes the envelope of printing. How involved were you in actual book’s layout and design?

AW: I like the idea of the object, the relic. And I see it as a time machine too or a device you plug into a socket that activates a sound and light show. I was completely involved with the design and production. I wanted the Balinese figure dancing on the front cover. It’s as I envisioned it, actually, once I knew they would not be able to do afford a three-volume book-set. I was both amused and horrified by the sheer size and heft and decided to embrace it, rather than feel embarrassed. The tome feels like—and carries the burden—of 25 years, the years spent on writing it and the actual documentary time-frame of the poem, which is very different, say, fromManatee/Humanity, an ecological narrative, which is meant to take place over three days, although it took three years to write. I was extremely fortunate to have, in my editors at Coffee House, a very supportive team. I was pleased they supported the image of the “plutonium pit” from Rocky Flats. And the drawings. And the skewed spelling. And all the rest: circles, triangles, stars, musical notation.

JC: What is the relationship between the “abstracts” or “narratives” that begin each section ofIovis and the “poem” that follows? What models, if any, did you follow in doing that?

AW: Essentially it was meant as a guide for the reader through the twists and turns of the poem, to locate place, site, event, state of mind. I always appreciate the prose abstracts or summaries to Dante’s Cantos, not his I believe, but preparatory maps, and then wanting to include other events and details important to the poem but in a different mode or genre, somewhat like thealap in an Indian raga, where all the themes are laid out, was useful. Victorian and other period novels carry heady explanations in their chapter headings. Perhaps a didactic thrust but essential to guide the reader though this long montage-trajectory (as one reviewer said, Iovis is “not for the faint of heart”) and have a kind of documentary “voice,” as it were, which is another path of the rhizome. As in the Commedia, I used the first person with all its avatars and split personalities and doppelgangers, and the abstracts helped ground whoever the consciousness of the poem is. Clearly an amalgam.

JC: In the opening prose section at the beginning of “I Am The Guard” you write of your founding of the Kerouac School with Allen Ginsberg and note your Jovian intention regarding the male poets you admired: “The challenge of the elder poet-men is their emotional pitch she wants to set her own higher than.” Do you think Iovis achieves this higher “emotional pitch”?

AW: I would hope so. I think it goes higher in pitch because of the advantage of distance, and of a feminist outrage. And my vocal chords reach the high notes of “coming after,” so to speak, in the multiple guises that foreground the female, rather than having her reified as with Charles Olson and William Carlos Williams. There was a way “she” gets lost in their epics. That clear-sighted seer is sidelined, she’s not enough real flesh and blood with her own throbbing poet-consciousness. The feminist consciousness in Iovis wants you to see where she has travelled—to the complicated tin and cardboard slums of India, to a survived yet struggling land where a whole generation (my own) is decimated (in Viet Nam). In his extraordinary The H.D. Book, which importantly explores the role women played in the creation of Modernism, Robert Duncan sites the discordant note—“the rant of Pound, the male bravado of Williams, the bitter anger of Lawrence”—and calls them “purposeful overcharges” and speaks of theirs as a therapeutic art. I would agree. And we would share that. But the feminine principle of putting makeup on empty space seemed absent, and I was also driven to create also (albeit with my male comrade Allen Ginsberg, as well initially with the very strong poet Diane di Prima) a zone such as the Kerouac School that would embed what I call the architecture of the feminine, that is the “environment,” the space that allows gestation and generation. There’s reference in the Tao Te Ching (6th century BCE) to the “dark female-enigma” which is called the “root of heaven and earth,” and this text says this spirit is like “gossamer so unceasing it seems real. Use it: it’s effortless.” The environment is always there, waiting.

JC: I’m also thinking of the letter from “B.B.” which suggests you rely more on personal history rather than political or geological history in the making of the poem—and in doing so, create a different kind of poetry than the “masters.” Although you obviously included this letter to argue the point that you had achieved a greater degree of accessibility to the reader, do you believe that Iovis is actually any less dense or complex or arcane than those modernist long poems by Pound, Olson, Williams, etc?

AW: No, I would say it is as dense, but also invokes “’istorin” (the root of the word “history”) as a mode to explore the political history of this slice of war/lifetime. How infuriating it is to be continually born to war that continues one’s whole lifetime, even as one protests it—what futility. It is perhaps a more public epic in this regard, and carries a ritual vocalization. And I was concerned with certain modalities of sound and enactment, as in the tribute section “Pieces of an Hour” to John Cage. And influenced, as well, by Buddhist and Balinese rites and practices.

JC: The multipersonae of a traveler of the physical dimension, as well as others, suggests a central concern of the poem. Travel grounds the traveler in the poem’s wired global scale, its worldwide interplanetary scope. Can you share a few of your itineraries while you were writingIovis in terms of those specific locales that drove you to write sections based upon what you learned being there?

AW: I referred to India and Viet Nam above, because I have felt a strong link to those places and their cultures and their role in my own life and poetics. I first travelled to India in the early 1970s as a curious spiritual pilgrim and “took refuge” and began a Buddhist practice with Tibetan teachers, but I was also enamored of India culture—Vedic chanting, the Bauls of Bengal, and the raga as an expansive form inspired aspects of Iovis as well. But the reality of being offered an infant to take back to the U.S. with me by a family in Bubaneshwar was a startling and poignant “luminous detail” that conjured an extreme and hard reality. I couldn’t comply but I could tell the story. That area along the Bay of Bengal also suffered terrible floods after I left. In Viet Nam—traveling primarily in the North—there were few people of my generation left, they had died in what they call “The American War.” I felt a strong karmic link to my own generation, how much blood on our hands, protest as we may? My father had served in World War II and that was still palpable as I explore in the book, Korea was more distant, Viet Nam was virtually in the living room and in the streets. There’s an earlier “History lesson for my son” on Viet Nam and then the later pilgrimage, “Dark Arcana: Afterimage or Glow.” The trip up the Yangtze (“Tears Streak The Reddest Rouge” from Book III) was a revelation. This section comes out of notes from that trip. The gates of the Three Gorges Dam were like the gates of hell, the river itself the Styx. This monolithic dam misplaced whole villages and cultures, drowned important sites and historical artifacts, and was an ecological disaster as well.

JC: The 7th-century BCE Greek poet Archilochus wrote of being a poet and a warrior, which became a model for Homer. You seem to have taken that as your own investigation into concealment of women when you wrote: “I am both therapon.” Can you discuss how you came upon this multi-alternative “I” and how you placed it within the book’s heroine?

AW: Yes, the negative capability of “both, both.” And the warrior and poet, indeed—cutting though the underbrush and detritus of civilizations and layers of psyche with her stylus-weapon-scythe. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet might join in here as well. But interesting you pick up on “therapon”—Greek for an “attendant” and related to the word “therapy,” also a wonderful double entendre: there upon. “I am there upon.” I am upon this work, I am upon my subject, so to speak. I think of Robert Duncan’s title “Before the War” not as relative to temporality but as standing, facing, in front of the war.

JC: I’d like to ask you more about your views on male energy because it is so central to the work. On page 61 of Book I, you write:

Don’t mock me as I avenge the death of my sisters
in this or any other dream
In order to make the crops grow
you men must change into women

On page 62 you write:

The poet . . . tries to write in anti-forms without success. But the boy, her son, guides her through her confusion . . .

On page 111, you argue:

I wanted you in agreement that women invented the alphabet . . .

and on page 122, you explicate the epic journey

to the underworld & steal the secrets of the male energies that rule there . . .

On page 154, you posit a distinct male position where

The “male” here is more dormant deity, integrated into a transcendent yet powerful hermaphrodite. . . a “double” . . .

Can you elaborate on the mechanism of male energy you hacked into in Iovis and how that may or may not have evolved over the twenty-five years you spent writing the poem?

AW: The psychological mechanism was there to be exposed in a way, and there was also the need to transcend to the hermaphrodite, help the male “get” there—explore the “both both” of sexuality and eros and how eros moves, ascends beyond gender construct. I think Iovisexplores identity in this way, instructing—correcting—the male on how to behave so he too can get free of the habitual patterns of the warring god realm, the need to always hallucinate an enemy and thereby justify his bellicose existence and lust for blood. Which also goes to the greed of plunder and loot and empire. So I watched that over 25 years, and the only power I had was in my poetry, tracking the deeds of the patriarch. But I was also tracking the life of my child, my world, my lives, my elders, the school I had helped create—a temporary autonomous zone of sanity. The dark trajectories forced the poem into being in a sense—maybe I would go mad if I didn’t track Rocky Flats, from demonstrating in the ’70s to the present with the nuclear plant decomissioned and yet the soil still toxic with plutonium, visiting Bhopal to see the residues of the Union Carbide genocide in 1986. We see how “the fix is in, the fix is in” continues to manifest in the ugly scenarios playing out in Iraq and Afghanistan. Criminal wars. A million Iraqis dead? You have to wonder and weep and rage over this horrific pathology. And the new human-less weaponry—drones and surveillance—more mechanisms of concealment. All those horrors, and how they are inter-connected and how we are “before them,” and can’t ignore them. And expose the agendas of Halliburton and so on. Quite exhausting.

I hope people of the future will go to this poem for some of the history, as well as for the imagination and beauty that counters and chides and is still in a wild place. I experience Iovis as—ultimately—a generative project. The boy guiding through confusion is key here as well. Who inherits this larynx? Who comes after us to clean up the mess? Who might sing of the darker times?

JC: You mention the Occupy Movement of 2011 in Book III. Iovis has a kind of 3-D political activism—its interconnected themes of war, feminism, and language. The poem has been described in a Publishers Weekly review, as your “attempt at a new world history, a radical re-creation myth, an homage to Blake's epics and Pound's cantos, and a mystic or matriarchal answer to the male-dominated civilization (Jove or Iovis, the male god).” Do you agree with that?

AW: Yes, I would agree. There is that tri-partite braid you mention. And it might be the language the poem finds is the answer. That our need to reimagine our world through the vibratory larynx, that’s what matters. Re-awaken the world to itself. Through ideas, pictures, sounds. Hold the mirror up to “nature.”

JC: Your own Vajrayana Buddhist practice was front and center in Book II, “Rooms”, and is woven throughout the trilogy. You wrote of your fear of “passion toward others, toward anything” and how the room of mind you lived in “was a prison.” Were there particular moments over the twenty-five years of writing the poem that informed your personal goal of attaining some kind of freedom—“this poem is the occasion of my complete LIBERATION”—in this lifetime?

AW: O dear, I sound arrogant. If you speak of your own liberation or enlightenment, clearly it hasn’t happened! Still too much ego. But certainly writing this work over a long period of time was liberating. I got all that mental projection and montage and history and sense perception OUT in front of myself where I could shape it. There’s an aspiration to keep working free of “small mind” in the Iovis project which also reflects an allegiance to reflection, contemplation, and following the breath of yourself and others, including the “plants and trees and so on. . .” and seeing poetry is also a means of liberation, in that I am awakened to this life and its beauty and mystery and complexity through the graces of a “making” of language. And there are energies that reside in each phone and phoneme. And we can release them. And it can be grand and vast and you can create a realm where you can dwell for a while. Where things are perfect symbols of themselves, no manipulation. And that connects to me to the Buddhist view. From that perspective we can wake up on the spot, be conscious of our world, think of others. Not push ahead on the line, hog the road, and so on. Most of us have glimmers of that. Little gaps in our “me me” monkey mind consciousness.

JC: You include numerous personal letters throughout Iovis, but none speaks as potentially critical of the poem as one by your longtime Kerouac School colleague Anselm Hollo. Hollo argues that “the poem needs to be more than just raw material to present to an . . . audience, in ways intentionally or unintentionally designed to cover up weaknesses in the writing. . . .” How would you respond to post-publication criticisms of the work that in fact there are vast numbers of pages in which a radical syntactic linguistics is at play and meaning is at-one with no-meaning?

AW: I took Anselm Hollo’s ars poetica to do with a critique of reading the telephone book, or some such performance strategy, more conceptual in purpose. I suppose the best response is to let Iovis find its readers and place in the spectrum, which it seems to be doing. I have great confidence in its many surprises, delights, and strategies, to use that male word. Even humor. There are intentional spaces for “raw” material, but so much of it has been worked through the “poem machine.” I see endless permutations are possible as well with how one might read it.

JC: You discuss sexism and the Beats in a long letter to Jane Dancey, in which you state that the biggest problem with the Beats was “the inattention to women and often sexist attitudes about women that undermine some of the early writing.” You follow that with an interview with poet Joanne Kyger in which she states something very real for any experimental writer working under the radar: “No one’s going to tell you you’ve got it.” What would you say is the heart of the long-term personal power that fueled Iovis?

AW: Yes, exactly, no one asks you to do this. And the male-poet compadres are not always helpful. It took Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg too long to see what a great poet Joanne Kyger is! But indeed, no one begs you to be a poet or write a 1000-page poem. You have to be fueled by a drive, a conviction—a need, a necessity, a vision that is so pressing that it has no other outlet but through you. That doesn’t mean that you are unconscious or in trance, but there can be moments like that. You are deliberately making this work for yourself—to see your own mind, to learn something, to wake up, to observe the work can be arranged, shaped, held, transmitted.

JC: You are a poet “enamored of syllabaries, alphabets, the phonemes of old tongue & groove.” You also mention how the reference point of your writing of the epic was the mantra “War, gender, language” (“Lacrimare, Lacrimatus: ‘Dux Femina Facti’”). Can you discuss your appreciation of Gertrude Stein and her “include it all” poetics in the making of Iovis?

AW: Yes, as much that could be included. I did have to cut about 100 pages at Coffee House’s insistence. They would not have been able to bind the book. It was also unfinished pages in draft that weren’t as strong. The epic is a story of your time, your wars, your heroes. For her it was Susan B. Anthony, Picasso. Stein is a champion of her own continuous present mind-grammar. The world is constantly reflected in her patterns and associations, and she is miraculously liberated by a lack of restraints. She could use the intimate things in her life, and also simple objects, names as well—where they are “reduced” to language in relationship to itself and flattened out quite democratically—so that in an interesting way they become neutralized. She wrote freely and yes, maybe things are coded, but she wrote a great many works, dense and demanding. You feel her liberation when you hold and read her notebooks in the Beieneke Library at Yale. The assertive child-genius.

JC: The “Spin or Lace It In Story” piece In Book II exemplifies the poet’s role in retelling “traditional myth”—its relationship to “phenomenal obstacles the imagination conjures & vivifies. . . .” It seems to call attention to the centrality of imagination. Can you discuss the roots of this story? Is it from a film?

AW: It’s the spider woman myth, from Navajo/Diné, Keresan, and Hopi Native peoples. A kind of creation myth, a survival myth. In this version she’s a “spinster” with “no man to touch her,” as I say. She’s probably Grandmother Spider Woman. I wanted to invoke the sense of her “spinning,” and spinning a tale, this tale—this epic—as well. The artist as solipsistic, complete-unto-her-self, letting “the centrality of imagination” as you say, come and unravel. Myths, by their definition, involve transformations, struggles through various worlds or layers of reality and of obscuration. Other characters such as Copper Man appear, and all the natural (including cobweb and gossamer) elements. I think I retold this story while being in a retreat. I was indebted to Paula Gunn Allen and her book The Scared Hoop. She was raised on the Laguna Pueblo and was an important thinker (anthropologically), wanting to restore a sense of the gynocratic to Native Amerian history, and myth. The centrality of the feminine.

JC: You begin Book III, “Eternal War,” with an introduction in which you write, “The sending and receiving practice of tonglen I recommend again as it is the crux of this project: take negatively (sic) upon oneself, call it out, breathe out the efficacy. Practice empathy in all things. Pick a cause and tithe your time relative to the half-life of plutonium.” What is the place of tonglen in your conjectures of “future . . . radical poetries”?

AW: Tonglen is taking it all in, including it all, as Gertrude Stein recommends, but for the scope of Iovis it’s all the toxicities of our world as well—the ugliness, violence, disparities, the suffering of all kinds and degrees, of others near and far. Your compassion travels beyond your own inner circle. And then you breathe out an alternative version where you mentally and emotionally and psychologically purify the poisons. So indeed, the generative idea is in the crux of this practice and of my propensity toward poetry, which is a practice of the imagination. We humans need to do better with our vast minds and alchemical powers. Future radial poetries might be more symbiotic with the rest of consciousness.

JC: There are exquisite sections of Book III, such as “G-Spot” and “Matriot Acts,” that would be the apex of most poets’ careers. And then there is “Problem-Not-Solving,” which really was the highlight of the entire poem for me. Can you talk about how your activist work at Rocky Flats in 1978-1979, as well as all your tireless antiwar, antinuke rallying over the years, came to be seen in this formulation of “problem-not-solving”?

AW: As for the activist work, it just goes on, and it seems to be more and more about how to preserve Archive, how to preserve culture, how to hide the treasures so that they can be found at a later date and re-activated. For me poems are acts re-done, and that can vibrate well into the future. So Iovis has that potential. And it was written for my son Ambrose Bye so that he could see where I had been, and he could see something of the world that he would inherit. This is the Kali Yuga, remember, according to many traditions a dark age, and we will need some paths and trajectories through it. “Problem-not-solving” keeps the potential to actually solve. Solve is close to salve—balm, a healing ointment—and also to salvare, to save. That little “not” (knot) could be eliminated. And there’s that active “ing” in “solving.” The situation in Israel/Palestine is the most crazy-making, suffering-inducing “knot,” perhaps the greatest conundrum of our time. We need a Peace Tzaress in the cabinet. We need a world-wide Department of Peace. The will is just not there yet, the other way is still so darkly lucrative. Poets have to keep pushing, pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well.

Jim Cohn is director of the online Museum of American Poetics (poetspath.com), which he founded in 1998. His most recent books are Mantra Winds (2010) and Sutras and Bardos: Essays and Interviews on Allen Ginsberg, The Kerouac School, Anne Waldman, Postbeat Poets and The New Demotics (2011). He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

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For decades, Illinois-born writer Gerald Nicosia has made it his business to follow the fortunes and misfortunes of the spunky writers of the Beat Generation. This year, with three new Beat movies on the horizon, he’s as vigilant and as outspoken as ever. Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame stars as Allen Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings; Jack Kerouac’s dark night of the soul will be depicted in Big Sur; and Walter Salles, the director of The Motorcycle Diaries, directs the big-screen version of On The Road, which will be among the titles competing for best film at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

An adviser on Salles’s film, Nicosia is betting that it will help spread the rebellious spirit of the Beats. The author of the Kerouac biography Memory Babe (Grove Press, 1983) as well as a new Beat chronicle called One and Only: The Untold Story of On the Road (Viva Editions, $22.95) and a poet in his own right, Nicosia carries on the cultural and spiritual legacy of his literary heroes. For him, American literature is the literature of protest and rebellion that goes back to Henry David Thoreau and that includes socialist adventurer Jack London, and the tribe of Chicago writers such as Nelson Algren, author A Walk on the Wild Side.

Though he lives in bucolic Marin County, California, he walks and talks with the gusto of Chicago and its rough-and-tumble novelists and poets. I’ve known Nicosia for thirty years; we first met after a poetry reading by Allen Ginsberg. When I heard that three new movies about the Beats were on the way, I thought it was time to talk to Nicosia again and find out what he was thinking about Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and their friends and lovers.

Jonah Raskin: With new movies about the Beats coming to theaters what would you hope Americans learn about Kerouac, Ginsberg, Cassady, and their wives and girlfriends?

Gerald Nicosia: That they were responding to an urgency in America, a wrong direction taken, a loss of community, a loss of brotherly love, a loss of a moral center.

JR: You worked as an adviser to the film version of On the Road. What suggestions did you make to the actors and the director?

GN: I told the actors not to worry about getting the exact details of the lives they were portraying. I told them that what was important was to give people a sense of their open-heartedness. With the director, Walter Salles, I got into things more deeply. He wanted to talk about the main characters’ search for identity and for the father. I told him I thought the brother relationship between Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac was at the heart of the novel—these two outcasts, misfits, learning to care about and take care of each other, breaking down the walls of isolation that were being so rapidly erected in postwar World War II America.

JR: Why do you think there are three Beats movies coming out now?

GN: The cash-in on the Beats began several years ago. Now, you have three estates, those of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, discovering that there is unlimited money to be made in marketing these properties in electronic media and film.

JR: Will any of the new movies do justice to the Beats?

GN: I have the highest hopes for the movie of On The Road, because it was made outside the Hollywood system, financed by a small European company, MK2, and made by people who genuinely care about Jack’s message. I don’t think Salles was under the same pressure to make a “hit” that American moviemakers are under.

JR: When and where and how did you first become interested in Kerouac?

GN: I was at the University of Illinois in Chicago, getting my master’s. My officemate was a hip kid from Harvard who kept dropping Kerouac’s name because he knew I hadn’t read him. This was 1972, three years after Jack died. The Dharma Bums and On The Road were the only two Kerouac books in print. I was blown away by Kerouac’s compassion for the down-and-out, the working class, those on the wrong side of American capitalism.

JR: On what side of capitalism were you raised?

GN: My family was working class—my dad a mailman, his father a construction worker and chimney sweep; my mom’s father was a barrel maker, my mom’s mom ran a grocery store, my mom was a secretary all her life.

JR: How do you explain the Beats? Kerouac came from a Catholic working-class family; Ginsberg was from a Jewish left-wing family; Burroughs was White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. What did they have in common?

GN: Amiri Baraka says they all came from minorities not yet fully assimilated into the American capitalist dream. I would say they were individuals who, by birth, temperament, political persuasion, and economic status, did not fit in with materialistic, chauvinistic, and belligerent American society. They were trying to find a way they felt had existed during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

JR: You spent years doing research about Jack Kerouac. What would you say was the biggest surprise?

GN: Kerouac’s books portray a hero and narrator free and easy, confident, sure of his rebellion against the American system. In reality, Jack was torn between Catholicism, Buddhism, and his own demon-driven pursuit of kicks, between spirit and flesh, between mom’s house and the Beat coffeehouse, patriotism and subversion, men and women, society and solitude, carousing and meditation, sacred and profane, secular and divine. It’s a miracle he survived as long as he did.

JR: For years the Sampas family controlled the Kerouac estate. For those who don’t know, who are they and what damage did they do?

GN: Sam Sampas was Jack’s first friend who gave him the courage to be a poet despite the jeers of his working class community. Late in life, when Jack’s mom had a stroke and refused to go into a nursing home he married Stella Sampas, Sam’s older sister, to take care of his mother. The marriage was a disaster, and Jack was about to divorce her when he died of liver disease from drinking at forty-seven.

JR: What happened with the will of Jack’s mother?

GN: Gabrielle Kerouac’s will was forged, probably by Stella, thus stealing the estate from her grandchildren: Jack’s daughter, Jan Kerouac, and Jack’s nephew, Paul Blake, Jr. The damage they did was to sell Kerouac’s archive into private hands. Not one of the nine or ten manuscripts Jack wrote on long rolls of paper is now in a library where it can be studied.

JR: I’ve heard it said that if it weren’t for Ginsberg and his savvy with promotion and public relations, there would be no Beat Generation. How important was he in the marketing of his friends and their books?

GN: He was very important—both in terms of things he wrote, and in schmoozing people in positions of power who could help the Beats get recognized. His thousands of readings carried the Beat message to millions of people.

JR: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, and Cassady knew one another from New York in the 1940s. How was that time and place significant for their development?

GN: I think for all of them the key was to break out of the conformity, narrow-mindedness, and materialism that New York represented. Neal Cassady with his visions of Western individualism provided a way out for Ginsberg and Kerouac; for Burroughs the way out was through Tangier, Paris, and London, and finding more freedom in older cultures.

JR: If the major figures of the Beat Generation were alive today, what do you think they would be doing now?

GN: Kerouac would be writing. Cassady would be taking Viagra and chasing women. Ginsberg would be teaching. Burroughs would be taking his daily Methadone and plotting his next novel. They were driven people, on a mission, and only death could stop them.

JR: We know now that there were women of the Beat Generation and that they wrote books. What do their books add to those written by their lovers, husbands, and boyfriends?

GN: There was a heavy price to be paid for that male-led revolution. Somebody had to support it by hard work and carrying the daily load, the family load, that those male revolutionaries didn’t have time or inclination for.

JR: In what ways do you think the Beats led to the rebellion and the protests of the 1960s?

GN: They absolutely made the crack in ’50s consciousness, through which the counterculture of the ’60s poured. It couldn’t have entered without that wedge driven into the concrete wall of Eisenhower-McCarthy-Billy Graham America.

JR: The Beats became a global phenomenon. What is it about them that appealed to citizens of the world?

GN: They are citizens of the world; they speak as citizens of the world. It was a rare American ecumenical movement—even more so than the Transcendentalists, who were also reading Asian and Indian texts. The Beats actually went to those places, mingled with people, shared their writings, and learned from other cultures. I think people in other countries see this as a rare phenomenon among Americans.

JR: The Beats didn’t do anything in moderation. If you knew them back in the day, would you have cautioned them not to be as intense as they were?

GN: No, you can’t slow down intense people. They have to burn at their own rate. People on a mission are unstoppable. God bless them for it. It would be a poorer, more miserable world without them.

JR: For someone nineteen or twenty years old now, what Beat books would you recommend they read?

GN: On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels by Kerouac. Howl, Kaddish, and The Fall of America by Ginsberg. Most of Burroughs is going to go over their heads, unless they’re lit majors. Gregory Corso’s poems, “Marriage” and “Bomb.” Diane Di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters, Ted Joans’s Teducation, Bob Kaufman’s Cranial Guitar, Jack Micheline’s River of Red Wine, and Ray Bremser’s Poems of Madness and Cherub.

Jonah Raskin is the author of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012

by Paula Bomer

A native of Chicago, Ben Tanzer is the author of several works of fiction, including Lucky Man, 99 Problems, You Can Make Him Like You, and So Different Now, among others. He also edits the online journal This Zine Will Change Your Life. His prolific small press presence is a defining characteristic of his work—heartfelt, honest, and straightforward. In one of his most recent books, My Father’s House (Main Street Rag), Tanzer tackles the death of his father; his serious attention to craft and incredible thoughtfulness to structure are an enormous pleasure, despite the gravity of the book’s subject matter. It’s a book that should be read by anyone who has a father.

Paula Bomer: Due to my own recent loss, I’ve been reading literature dealing with death and grief. Joyce Carol Oates and Joan Didion both wrote non-fiction about losing their husbands (and in Didion’s case, her daughter as well), and the recently published Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes deals with the loss of his mother, with whom he lived for 60 years. Even well known fiction writers like Jonathan Franzen and Alexander Hemon have written about death and grief in the essay form. You’ve chosen to write about your father’s death in the form of fiction. Why use the novel for this material?

Ben Tanzer: Just today I was listening to Darin Strauss talk about his memoir Half a Life, and he said that he felt like the material in that book deserved to be a memoir and not a novel because someone had died and he wanted to honor that. I suppose my feelings when writing My Father’s House were the antithesis of that thinking. I initially thought I would do a memoir about my experience of my father’s death that would be an homage of sorts toThe Basketball Diaries. But it never quite worked out and I shelved it. When I was finishing my last novel, I started thinking about what I might work on next and I found myself thinking about several things. First, I felt like having written about friendship in Lucky Man, love in Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine, and birth in You Can Make Him Like You, I needed to write about death to complete some kind of collective effort to capture these milestones. I also thought about how I needed to tweak my own approach to novel writing so as not to repeat myself. I have favored humorous, pop culture driven stories wrapped around themes of how we cope with pain and confusion, and so I was interested in how I might invert that formula. Finally, I was having drinks with a publisher who was damning creative nonfiction, and this discussion reminded me of my attempt at memoir and how it hadn’t worked for me. Unlike Strauss’ story, I realized my focus on nonfiction was limiting the creative possibilities for the story. From there I started thinking about what a fictional riff on a son coping with losing his father might look like, how people would talk and what their days would become, and then I was off and running.

PB: Toward the beginning of the novel, when the father character first gets sick, your narrator thinks, “I feel like today has been one long out of body experience. I’m doing the things I always do, I know, making breakfast, going to work, doing the laundry, watching television, and whatever, and yet even as I’m doing these things, I feel like I have been watching myself do them from afar.” The enormity of the possibility of his father’s death already transports the narrator into another world, so to speak.

BT: I think there are a lot of ways to discuss this, which is partly related to the fact that while the world as you once knew it is blowing up and splintering around you, the world as a whole is not, and probably doesn’t care. The world keeps going, and because it keeps going, you have to keep going, and even if you drop things to focus on the dying person, or your grief, you don’t drop everything, and definitely not the mundane things—laundry has to be done, you will watch television—all that. The difference is that you’re aware that your world is not normal, and so on the one hand, those mundane things are even more rote, and on the other hand they feel unreal. Part of you is aware of this, but it’s not always present, and then something triggers those feelings—a song, a phone call, a memory—and you think fuck, I’m not only going through the motions, I’ve been a full step removed from even doing that. I’ve been watching myself go through the motions, because really, none of this matters all that much right now, and so not thinking about death, yet thinking about it all the time, is about all I can really handle.

PB: Three things outside of his marriage and family seem to comfort your narrator: running, drinking large amounts of beer, and having sex—first with a stranger, and then, more pointedly, with a woman from his childhood. This sort of behavior comes up a lot in the literature of grief, but the sexual acting out is complicated—in your novel, it is self-destructive, guilt inducing, something that could destabilize the narrator’s marriage, and yet it’s also a grabbing onto life, which perhaps drinking can also been seen as—it’s a “celebratory” behavior. Why do you think this is?

BT: I think we are talking about how people cope with what is confusing and painful and how many of the things that allow us to cope, or not cope, and to lose ourselves in something other than grief and anger, are the same things that can bring us pleasure and joy and more healthy escapes in completely different circumstances. I also believe that what we’re drawn to and compulsive about when we’re happy or content is only heightened when we’re grieving—anything to escape, to feel better, and sometimes just to feel. You could probably write a similar book to mine where the coping behavior was focused on things like eating and OCD behaviors, both of which are touched in the book, and which are also interesting to me—just not as interesting as substance abuse, running, and sex. Running in particular is a personal compulsion and release, and sex is the one activity I think we all obsess over, men for sure—should I, shouldn’t I, can I get it, will I get it, how will I get it, is it good for me, for her? It dominates our thinking even when we aren’t interested in it, because we are immersed in it, it comes at us from every direction, and it never quite makes sense. Like death I guess.

PB: Throughout the novel, the narrator thinks back on his dad, what kind of father and man he was in general. I wonder if it’s sort of an homage to your own father, a way of immortalizing him—what better way to preserve a dead father than to write about him?

BT: My reaction to this question is very similar to my reaction to the journal notes I wrote when my dad first got sick. I was reminded of a phrase by the writer Graham Greene: “There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer.” I cannot say My Father’s House was conceived as an homage to my father in any conscious way. While unconsciously I may have wanted that, my initial impulse was more coarse: my thinking was that there will be a story here, this experience will be fucked-up and twisted, fraught with conflicts and tensions, as father and son relationships are anyway. But my father’s life is as ripe as any for homage: he was a great artist and teacher, beloved locally and regionally, though he never achieved the kind of fame and respect he wanted from the larger art world. And it wasn’t a pipe dream or the frustrated longings of someone with a rich fantasy life either—he was the real thing, he just never quite figured it out. Another sort of irony is that any immortality he might ultimately receive with this book will be somewhat of a letdown for him in death, because he would have wanted it while he was alive so could revel in it.

PB: There is a famous book that talks about the “stages” of grief that isn’t really of interest to me—who wants an instruction manual?—but it is true that emotions run the gamut, and rage seems to be quite normal. Two instances of this in the book stand out for me: one where your narrator lets himself be angry at his father for not taking care of a hernia, saying, “I realize that his decisions, and non-decisions, don’t just affect him, they affect all of us, and they always did.” Another instance is toward the end when a friend of the father’s recommends a ton of morphine to end his father’s consciousness. Your narrator thinks of him as a murderer, but I also see it as the narrator’s inability to let go.

BT: Letting go is terrible, torturous, and it doesn’t matter what kind of relationship you had, good or bad. If it’s good, you feel cheated, because something has been torn from you that you cherished and planned to hold onto and watch evolve, and now that’s fucked. And if it’s bad, you’re still cheated, because if you find some kind of closure then you wasted a lot of time being angry, and if you don’t quite work it out, then you feel set-up. There is endless shit with parents, even great parents, that never gets worked out, and some of this is what allows you to separate from them in the first place, but it’s also what can cause anger as well. What I was also interested in, though, is how the rage of loss is further warped by our own personalities, our past, how we perceive ourselves and our memories. This character wants to be tough, but being tough is only so affective in the long run. It can mask feelings and suppress them, just as running or sex or alcohol does, but for how long, and in what ways, and how does it impact your ability to understand what you’re feeling, and even how you remember things? How cut off from what you’re experiencing do you become? The character could have told the father’s friend to shut the fuck up, but he can’t quite grasp what’s being said. It’s not really so confusing though, so is that an inability to let go, or is it an inability to see clearly what’s happening in front of you because of all the other junk bouncing around in your head?

PB: Both the narrator and his father have tough guy personas and yet both are artists, and in the case of the narrator, a caregiver. There’s a lot of ambivalence about masculinity and what it means, how confining it can be but also how necessary. Eventually, your narrator is allowed all sorts of release—crying, really letting go of his father, and figuring out what he needs to do next. Perhaps it was the slow painful aspect of a death by cancer; not to diminish the loss, but I’ve heard people say about certain deaths, “it was his time.”

BT: It’s funny because one reviewer wrote how there were certain ways the character managed his emotions in the book that bothered him as an editor, but then he realized that maybe his own need to be tough was affecting his ability to embrace the emotions being expressed, and that made me smile. He was the first person to touch on this thread, and now you are the second. It was a conscious thing I wanted to play with, but if I’m the only one who sees it in the text, I’m not sure it qualifies as being part of the book at all. The character does need to find a way to be sad though, and experience grief, and to embrace that tough guy persona—or not—regardless of confusing signals about masculinity and what it means to be a father or son. I don’t know that the character gets there in a healthy way, but he does get there because he’s ultimately so overwhelmed by all of it he has no choice. It’s an implosion of grief, though in this character’s case it is also the start of something, because I wanted to connect all of this to being an artist as well. When my father died, my mom and I talked about whether he might have been more successful and better able to bring more layers to his work if he could have better embraced his feelings and been less caught up in being tough and not exploring things. I wanted the character to come to understand this in the latter stages of the book as he realized that he wants to create art as well. In terms of the idea that “it was his time,” we always have to separate out people’s suffering from their actual lives. If someone is suffering, then yes, it can feel like someone’s time because you can’t bear to watch them suffer, but that has nothing to do with what they may have still done with their lives if they were healthy and how you may have yet interacted with them. From that perspective, it’s never anyone’s time.

PB: You’ve published seven books with a variety of independent publishers and it seems to encourage you to be both productive and free—no agent telling you what to do, no publisher asking you to do something similar to your last book, and so on. In many ways, I feel you could have a career like Charles Bukowski—revered but remaining an outsider, doing what feels true to your heart. I mean no disrespect for writers with more mainstream careers, of course, but as both of us come from the small press world, I thought you’d tell us your feelings about your experiences.

BT: My experiences as a whole have been very positive and over the last several years especially I have had the great pleasure of working with people who I either sought out and hoped would want to work with me, or people who wanted to work with me that I had been trying to cultivate in some way. There is definitely some freedom that comes with that: I never worry about audience, because one, there isn’t much of an audience, which is liberating in its own way, and two, I focus on what I find entertaining and hope at least some publisher will as well. Not having an agent or a big publishing house behind you, though, I think you lose some “heft at the table” (to quote my friend Michael FitzGerald), and to have those relationships certainly means it’s more likely someone will express interest in things like movie rights and foreign rights. I have no opposition to selling tons of books or having an agent or publishing house supporting me, it just hasn’t worked out so far and I haven’t pursued it as much as I might have. I guess this means that I may remain an outsider, and I’m fine with that if the opportunities that have been coming to me keep coming. As far as being revered or even mentioned in the same breath as Bukowski, that seems incredibly unlikely to me, but even with all of my ambition, the idea of being a Bukowski-like presence—well, sans his incredible fucked-upedness—is way cooler to me than having a best seller or being nominated for awards. The worst thing would be the have no one interested in my work at all. I would still write, and I would still write what I find entertaining, but it would disingenuous of me to say that I would be happy to write for an audience of one.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012