Dennis Finnell
University of Georgia Press ($15.95)

by Daniel Sumrall

More than ten years ago Alice Fulton introduced the concept of fractal verse, however few have been the poets willing or able to implement such a poetics without falling back into techniques more akin to language poetry, neo-confessionalism, or post-modern bricolage. Fractal verse reveals itself as a more necessary form as our contemporary age moves closer and closer to a viewpoint expressed by Fulton in a recent interview: "Who needs more reality? There's enough of that around us everywhere. What I like, and what we need, are forms that go beyond or extrapolate reality." Far from being escapist or transcendental, Fulton posits following through the myriad possibilities of the present tense. Fractal verse doesn't ignore the present or the past, but has a grander approach to historicity. The fractal poet seeks to demonstrate, through the poem's "varying densities," a "modulating depth of field" which would allow "us to experience the poem as a construct of varying focal lengths." Therefore, fractal verse "is interested in that point of metamorphosis, when structure is incipient, all threshold, a neither-nor."

It makes sense then that Dennis Finnell should choose as his threshold Gauguin's painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? This painting is merely a point of reference; the resulting poem-suite, as Finnell says in an end note, "does focus upon the painting, yet not at every moment; it also considers my origins and identities and considers whether any individual's story is a mutual story." However, The Gaugin Answer Sheet is hardly a sort of hyper-ekphrasis or confessional springboard. Finnell views the painting from right to left while coupling this exegesis with an intimate chronology moving "backwards to Mary Keenan, my nineteenth-century great-great-grandmother." In effect, Finnell is 'plugging-in' the factors of his non-linear equation, resulting in a creation of "dimensions—time and space, painting and history" that, to use Finnell's word, "interlocute."

Fulton has suggested that before we declare a poem fractal we ask "whether comic, bawdy, banal, or vulgar lines are spliced to lyrical, elegiac or gorgeous passages" that we may cross-reference with these fractal precepts: "Any line when examined closely...will reveal itself to be as richly detailed as was the larger poem from which it was taken; the poem will contain an infinite regression of details, a nesting of pattern within pattern...; digression, interruption, fragmentation and lack of continuity will be regarded as formal functions rather than lapses into formlessness; all direction of motion and rhythm will be equally probable...; the past positions of motion or the preceding metrical pattern will not necessarily affect the poem's future evolution." The last three precepts are perhaps what we may most clearly recognize in a poems' form and content, and Finnell's poem certainly embodies these, engaging the notion that "the search for a style is a search for a language that does justice to our knowledge of how the world works."

What comes to the forefront immediately upon encountering fractal verse is the prevalence of flush-right margins which halt "the eye abruptly, almost rudely, stranding the gaze in an unbidden white surround before deflecting it leftward and into the next line." This formal device stresses the poem's constructedness, yet while such a device tempts the reader to assume a different speaker has arisen, "the speaker doesn't necessarily change when lines are indented. It's more as if another part of the self, another subjectivity, breaks in." The poem/section entitled "Come, Endure" illustrates this (while also providing an example of mixing the bawdy with the comic and elegant):

We've migrated from the bed that orphans us to the next cushioned chair that adopts our shape. We trail the harvest of desire or necessity, all because someone's eyes or our stomachs make us take just one more step, or because a voice says, "I can't live without you."

then later in the poem:

::

But he undrapes himself, his hard-on
under a tiny straw hat, fitted up like a village idiot,
a smile in mascara just under its crown.

"April fool's," he says.

"Who's the idiot?" she whispers.
"Take that stuff off, love me good."

Soon they are mouths, kissing—

::

(We at this window know their pleasure,
how touching is always
untouched, as if yesterday's caress left no residue.)—

 

An ambiguity arises concerning the proper mode of interpretation: "is the use of white spaces mimetic, abstract or temporal; do such effects serve to emphasize or to defamiliarize the line?" The maneuver changes the manner in which we read the lines, both aloud and silently, leading to the posing of the question which stresses the necessary occupation by the reader and the poet within the space of interpretation, effecting what Fulton terms "the orchestration of verse through echo."

Also, by paying attention to techniques like refrain and repetend we may grasp fractal verse in a somewhat more 'tangible' way. Making use of these techniques, Finnell introduces the symbol of the coin in the opening of the book:

A coin is a guess with somebody's face on it.

This penny flashing Lincoln's face,
then Lincoln's Memorial in midair
is a fatalist's stab in the dark, no matter
how it comes down on the back of my hands: heads, tails.

Whose in our indivisible nation
is more legal tender, its face of dirty copper,
my freckled one?
(from "Some of you look into this, my mouth")

Alluding to commerce between individuals, the symbol of the coin through its passage from hand to hand in anonymity problematizes, in its real presence, the relational lines from one to another. Finnell links this sentiment to Gauguin's work implying the ethics of the face crouched in post-imperial/colonial terms:

A coin is a guess
with someone's face on it, and whose on our indivisible globe
is more legal tender, your faces of Tahitian
dirt at the end of Gauguin's hand and brush, or my freckled one?

Your face is as good as mine.
(from "Out of Mouths")

At this point the nationalist currency of the coins has faded, or obscured itself through attention leaving only the call of the other's face, which in "Ultimata" is re-inscribed as

A face is a guess
and whose is more tender, yours of Tahitian
dirt at Gauguin's hand, my freckled one?
My face is as good as yours.

Reciprocity is established through this repetend: one's face for the other's, the other's for one's own in such a way as to cast the individual's responsibility to the other in immediate terms. A coin has a face upon it, a coin is anonymous, a guess toward identity and is exchanged (sometimes given) to another whose face is a real presence although still a guess. All that may be concluded is that commerce trades on contact, possessing within its procession the act of recognition that at any moment may call an individual up to address, just so:

A coin is a guess,
and whose is more tender, yours of dirt, my freckled one?
Your coin is a good one.
(from "'From, from...'")

The symbol of the coin here becomes a 'souvenir eye' embodying the moment of contact and its memory, but also the casual novelty of interest that at any moment may turn to disinterest. This would seem the tentative fact of human relatedness.

Finnell's application of repetend parallels his use of refrain. Speaking for two of the painting's characters, "Gauguin's two skeptical girls still cock their heads. / 'But where do we come from?'" This chorus not only mirrors but coalesces the sentiment of the repetend, appearing more regularly. This device illustrates the fractal form's structural replication in which "Increasing detail is revealed with increasing magnification, and each smaller part looks like the entire structure, turned around or tilted a bit." Because Finnell applies these devices in a manner that fulfills the fractal precepts, because the structural surface of the poem is so fluid, and because the "poem's growth and resolution are activated by self-determined imperatives rather than by adherence to a traditional scheme" we may identify his poem as fractal. Fulton admits to us, and it is an admission of proper involvement by the reader, that fractal verse may only exist if "readers imagine or build, identify or locate, the representative works themselves." Finnell factors out a fractal poetry, but does so in order to address the concern "If parents give us two genetic legs to stand on, / grandparents make us quadrupeds.I am a spider, I am a millipede" (from "Aorta, keeping the white caps white"). This concern appears only able to be addressed through a fractal poetics, which Finnell has spun out quite well.

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Alice Notley
Penguin ($18)

by Dawn Michelle Baude

Alice Notley's latest book, Disobedience, is a feisty, irreverent volume that gives the finger to many of the received ideas and unexamined assumptions inscribed in dominant culture. More discursive in many ways than other of Notley's recent books, including the Pulitzer nominee, Mysteries of Small Houses (1998) and the epic Descent of Alette (1996), the poems in Disobedience are organized in five sections of chronological units, beginning on July 30, 1995, and running through August 28 of the following year.

Within the sections, black lines stride across the page, segmenting the poems into sequential units of journal entries, lyrics, narratives, dramatic monologues, rants, philosophical meditations, and various, hybrid forms. Unlike other devices that Notley has invented to open her work to new measures—such as innovative use of parentheses, ellipses, and dashes—the lines on the page in Disobedience are less prosodic than visual. Cumulatively, they become almost strident, as if by some strange act of collaboration, they could bar the political, social and artistic injustice that the poems protest.

Although Notley has never been one to pull her punches, she has perhaps never been so outspoken as she is here. The "disobedience" is, in part, saying what you think instead of what you're supposed to say. Describing "life as the shape of the ways I've been fucked / by prevailing thought & practice," Notley announces a political campaign to redeem the "suppressed," what I take to be the life force that is censured within and stymied without.

The topical, objectified world—in this case, France at fin-de-siecle, with its strikes, its political imbroglios, its precious culture, its 'local color'—is apt to be on the receiving end of her mordant, even vitriolic commentary, as are Republican senators, the affluent, the greedy and other power-mongering "you's," but the real target of the politic campaign for the suppressed is individual psychology. In Disobedience, Notley takes on sexuality, the soul and the 'source' of poetry, as well as the vagaries of identity, art-making and death.

The principle subversive strategy in the book is to rupture the façade of daily life by encouraging, even forcing, an exchange between the "conscious," and "the various / levels of unconsciousness: dreams, and then / below that / is that grailish?" The poet charts these largely unexplored reaches of interiority by writing in a sustained hypnogogic state; by training herself to wake up and transcribe dreams; and by writing with the unsocialized left hand. "Hypnotize self into a fantasy world / a world of caves," she writes, "(Yes, I do this, I can)."

Followers of Notley's work will recognize the caves, the owl, and the 'guides,' as well as other of the poet's symbols, from her previous books ("Descend descend descend—I do that in all my poems"). What makes Disobedience very different is the seemingly direct insight it gives into the poet's thinking processes. It's a great read, even for readers unfamiliar with Notley's work. "To change the world, as I always say, / change the forms in our dreams."

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Bruce Andrews
Coach House Books ($22.95)

by Joel Bettridge

Lip Service is a sexy book, with its sexiness functioning both ironically as cultural critique and erotically as an exploration of desire. All uses of the phrase "lip service" are in play at once: as insincere complement (for Andrews, the ironic turning of social graces back on themselves), as oral sex, and as the erotic language of phone sex. This implosion of desire creates a poetics which implicates a reader in his or her own sexual politics and also revels in the linguistic possibilities of sexual vocabulary:

I'll talk to you just as long
as you're fucking me, wounded lips pawn
a milky roll mixture bouquet hesitant
stiff kittens' heartbeat finger

then later on:

on top of me—plump & pliant leash bended knees to sleep
tracing knees on cream abandonee.
Coy close again cameo
I'm hocking for this guy licks lick it off
rubber gets the juices going off your purpose—

Importantly, the dual move to both parody and excite sexual encounter works to dispute the very terms and social function of desire—often heterosexual male desire. Certainly Lip Service moves past this category by shifting the gender of the first, second, and third person positions throughout the poem, as well as by obliterating any recognizable stable sexual "identity"; disrupting the patterns of a dominant sexual division clearly drives much of the work.

Often this disruption of sexual identity in Lip Service gets played out as tension: the tension between a sexualized body and the desiring subject; the tension between a sexual culture of desire and the individual subjects within it; and the tension between erotic language and that language's tendency to first undermine and then transform itself:

There's romance in a zipper, reaching for that little
membrane of lambskin—de-heinous denunciamento
clings to clitoridean penalty dissolves
co-fecund craving cleft bliss bare wax won
horror only intoxicates zest
& languished denium orality:
abject adore harder bedroom—

In this passage the sexed body disappears as the fetishized objects "zipper" and "membrane of lambskin" mediate the sexual act. By removing the individuals from this sexual encounter, Lip Service undercuts any power dynamic available to a sexualized subjectivity. Be they male, female, homosexual, or heterosexual, all bodies in this passage, because they are only available through association, are subjected to the sexual act instead of controlling it; as soon as a subjectivity is read into the passage, the sexual subject is put into a dependent and secondary position to the fetishized objects. Importantly, this move reverses our normal roles where these objects would be our tools.

The erasure of a clearly defined sexual identity is not, however, only a form of subtraction. The somewhat abstract language of the above passage achieves a similar register as the ecstatic state when it foregrounds the tumbling words, "clings to clitoridean penalty dissolves / co-fecund craving cleft bliss bare wax won / horror only intoxicates zest / & languished denium orality." In other words, this passage is also about cumming. The sounds and pace of these lines push the reading forward in such a way that they become the drive to climax in the material of language itself. This is language ecstatic in character; regardless of the circumstances, or how you feel afterwards, the moment of orgasm is a decidedly egocentric, even an out of body, activity. In this sense, language as a material rhythmic movement is erotic over and above any single use of sexual activity. Lip Service is nearly seamless in its move between highly sexualized lines and lines that are more wide ranging. Much of the book, like other Andrews's work, outruns itself through an attention to rhythm and sound above phrase content, creating a near rapturous appreciation of the material sounds and movements available to the English language:

prong disarming saints' leakage threshed passé passive glass sure
vaccinates the vision,
sordid spatialized vicar of virtuals
the lessons of quiet—Don't Call Me—
immediacy of the flesh weighs heavily how it gets from zero
to one.

In characteristic Andrews style, a reader must recognize language operating beyond narrative and signifying functions at the same time that signification helps move him or her through the poem. Certainly there is not a narrative point, but words makes each reader think of specific, worldly things. For one, "Don't Call Me" automatically brings to my mind the opening line of Moby-Dick. If we are now not to call "you" anything, then the stable narrator, to say nothing of narrative as a literary project, loses its grounding. The lines "immediacy of the flesh weighs heavily how it gets from zero / to one" suggest a sense of the burden of our physical, particular lives as they try to come to grips with the different, multiple ways of being in the world that occur, not just someplace else, but in our own "flesh"—its physical, particular, sexual context. To make meaning in a world that seems more and more out of joint we must confront language on its own terms and our place within it—where meaning is always only possibly taking place around us. To find a way to get from here to there, a place of "value," a place where we count ³from zero to one," we must find a way to make meaning in the possibly meaningless act of speaking and writing.

The exquisite rhythm of the above passage reinforces this persistent movement as it beats the poem's sound into prominence—and with it Andrews' exploration of possible meaning in the more physical registers of language. The strong dactyls, trochees, and alliterations of lines like "prong disarming saints' leakage threshed passé passive glass sure / vaccinates the vision, / sordid spatialized vicar of virtuals," overtake the reading before it can begin to sort out any signified meaning. The textual pounding of lines themselves comes up against the difficulty of meaning in language by forming a hard hitting oral/aural wall. This physical sound texture drives the poem forward, keeping it from resting in developed imagery or metaphor, and in doing so, the poem becomes a work of political and social hope, regardless of its textual violence and difficulty. To look for new meanings and formations of sexual subjectivity means believing in the possibility of new meaning and new social realities, and Lip Service is a decidedly affirmative poem in this way. Too often the "language poetry" practice, and Bruce Andrews's poetics in particular, is read only as an attack on reference or the political status quo. And yet, at the heart of Lip Service is a poetics that has faith that our words' refusal of our attempts to make meaning finds us in a condition in which we approach words as things that make us, not as things we make.

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House Made of Silver
Kelsey St. Press ($11)

Harrow
Omnidawn Publishing ($12)
Elizabeth Robinson

by Ken Rumble

Elizabeth Robinson's latest two collections of poems, Harrow and House Made of Silver, are like the work of Brancusi and Henry Moore—intense meditations on fundamental forms. In both Robinson deftly treads the edges between the structure of faith and the experience of it.

The first section of Harrow sketches in airy and compelling language the threshold of transcendence, the place where one leaves pattern behind to become something willed by the self. This tension between determining patterns and individual action is picked up in the opening lines of "Plaid" as Robinson writes, "To engineer traffic / is to move in one's sleep." Robinson eschews such unconscious action as represented by "sleep." These patterns stand in for and regulate bodies, creating appearances without substance.

What matters most is to appear tidy.
I see it in the bloodstream,

arteries translucent
with orderly movement.

To be faithful, properly,
is to be transparent via this.

Transparency—becoming a body through which light, faith, passes—breaks the patterns down. As paths create repetitious movement, the paths become "Ridden until the route / is glossy." The pattern wears itself out, becomes "glossy"—reflecting light as opposed to allowing it to pass through.

In a similar vein, "Uprising" examines the way truth becomes static. Robinson writes, "The mute coating of these many cells / hardens in response to its articulation // like paths of frequented truths / or well-circulated air." All of these patterns, however, are "forms of illogic" as Robinson suggests in "Experience." Articulation fences experience into the form of expression: "What is created, like a word, is circumscribed the word in its state of experience / is never spoken." Each act of perception creates a self-reflective context; it "becomes the object of its own lunar orbit." Self-creation is not the enemy in these poems however, it is the goal. In "Slope" Robinson asks "how one fares / or is formed, // lingering. // You were gone / in resemblance." In the absence of external guidance it is faith and will that determines "what your regular substance is // at its leaving off point."

"As Betokening," the poem that makes up section two, is an extended examination of the interdependence of faith and doubt. In an introduction to the piece, Robinson brings faith and doubt literally face to face as she writes, "To profess faith to nurture doubt, to force the twain to come together—two miscreant children tugged by their ears until face to face. Twins, simultaneously they close their eyes. Refuse to see the reflection." Robinson posits tradition as the mediator between the pairing of faith and doubt, "a daily uniform, unattractive but reasonably comfortable." Tradition in this poem takes the place of pattern in the earlier poems, both impulses springing from the same source—to regulate the uneasy relationship of faith and doubt. Language is also tied into this triumvirate by "faith's attendant tenderness for the open door of language and, on the other, with the real but unstable value, the unbearable constraint of tradition's grammar."

In the final section of Harrow, Robinson turns inward, examining the relationship of the inner and outer worlds, sketching the borders of the physical while revealing the spirit within. In "Entry for Song" Robinson meditates on the surfaces, attempting to open them through baptism. She writes, "This is the contour / that I'd deliquesce." As water and rain penetrate the ground, God and faith erase these borders. Physicality tethers the spirit by distraction: "For you are benumbed by this ether // and your soul now resides // in season // at the right hand // of God." This is the flaw of humanity, our physical existence focuses our attention away from the spirit and on the physical. Robinson recreates the story of Mary Magdalene as a template for salvation. She writes, "I come to the garden alone // and pour // on his feet // a misstep of // my own choosing. / Mopping with my hair // mistaken oil." By making use of the body in an act of worship, the speaker attempts to gain entry into the interior, to bring the soul and body together. In "Little Book" the speaker becomes a dove lost "in vehement fog." As the dove navigates its borders, the speaker exhorts it to "Wing, to alter the shape of the outermost." Ultimately, the spirit expresses itself in physical ways, pushing the envelope of physical limitations.

While the poems in Harrow achieved their aims through a gesture at excess, the twelve poems in House Made of Silver arrive spare and sparkling like a spider web. Robinson addresses many of the same themes in House Made of Silver that she does in Harrow—faith, doubt, the relationship between the soul and the physical world. House Made of Silver, however, distills these themes.

In "Return" Robinson balances images of water, birth, and flowers in a meditation on becoming. She writes, "I repeat my selfhood endlessly / but there are still blotches." This process is one of both birth and baptism. Robinson writes

One

who would be you
brought hand over hand

under water

Distant from advent
or any sense

But still there are
lilies Your hands
submerged

The one is born through water in a baptism that leaves her still flawed—"Distant from advent / or any sense"—but blossoming as the submerged hands that appear like lilies. The speaker sees herself as an active participant in her rebirth, that it is a choice. She writes, "Beneath that fluid border / one has to // prepare for the responsibility of presence." As in Harrow, becoming is an act of will, a responsibility to an existence however flawed. The flaws the speaker sees within herself balance against the recurring images of flowers. By the end of the poem, the speaker has achieved a sort of balance between the "blotches" and the "petals"—"Begin to hover in your name / at its midpoint." The speaker does not transcend the world by becoming, but instead reaches a balance within the physical and spiritual worlds.

Robinson's focus on self-will appears again in "Site Legend." As in other of Robinson's poems, this one uses the conceit of maps to examine predetermination.

Maps are for
the badly behaved.
Stickiness
of the construction
I want to make less petulant.

The presence of glue,
I believe,
forestalls randomness.
No longer
a matter of building
but locating.

For the speaker these definitions of space—maps, directions—foil individual creation. The map becomes a blueprint for repetitive motion, a way to eliminate individual thought and replace it with a script that is not the speaker's. She writes, "all the effort / to scale down the sense of fit, say, / to the size of a human, / whoever she might be." The speaker resists that singular and prescriptive account of location, instead she writes, "There should be many types of fields / supplanting gestures. Manageable / gestures, how they / refer back to familiar directions. / The arm that points, here, / is not habitual but genuine."

In both of these books, Robinson undertakes a ruthless examination of faith, ultimately arguing that faith without doubt is impossible, that faith is the result of an individual unmediated act of will. She eloquently enacts her own claim that "Faith and skepticism chain me to my will, foster a generative ambivalence. This is what poetry says: faith is uneasy, an erotic uncertainty. Poetry makes faith out of willed attention."

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by Burt Kimmelman

The creation of history—as this activity has been commonly understood since the beginning of the twentieth century—is, at heart, beset by relativism; the past is what the historian makes it out to be. Nowhere is this dynamic more true than in literary history, inasmuch as the initial literary past, in other words its "facts," begins as documents, states of text that from the start are amenable to emendation or deletion. Looking back on literary Modernism, what anthology or literary history details the many verse magazines, besides, say, Poetry and The Dial, which were flourishing in the early 1900s? What is kept in memory and what is allowed to recede into the mists? To be sure, forming and reforming the literary canon has at times been a favorite blood sport of scholars and editors, and at times writers and poets. Like a veil, canonizing is a critical intrusion that can hang between readers and poems, softening their edges, hiding their idiosyncrasies and basic impulses. It is in this context that the historiography of the St. Mark's Church Poetry Project must be understood—a timely example of critical refashioning, indeed one that has given rise to an inaccurate understanding of what is now thought of as New York City's downtown poetics.

For 35 years, the Project has been the most important phenomenon in avant-garde poetry—since, notably, Black Mountain College closed its doors in 1957, and subsequently, since a vibrant artistic community arose in lower Manhattan. The Project has been a Mecca, the poems emanating from it widely hailed as later manifestations of the New York School represented primarily by Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery. Indeed, St. Mark's Church became the epicenter of a new poetic genre, the postmodern urban poem. To contemplate this new genre, however, is to realize that the Project's story needs retelling. That downtown arts scene gave birth to the Project, and most of the writers involved in this eventual passing of the poetic mantle would not, today, be categorized as New York School. Rather, the benchmark of this new urban poem was the 1967 publication of The Cities, a collection by Paul Blackburn (a poet writing in the Black Mountain tradition) of poems that were originally disseminated and widely read in little magazines of the fifties and sixties.

Anne Waldman, who directed the Project for a number of years starting in 1968, barely recognizes the Black Mountain influence on the Project, in a number of interviews and memoirs. Yet, beginning in 1966, she worked under another Black Mountain poet, Joel Oppenheimer, who ran the Project and its first workshop in which she was a participant. The Project came into being once Blackburn had brought a popular reading series to the Church, which he maintained there, a series made up of a great many Black Mountain folk who were the Project's principle readers. Increasingly, the poetry heard and taught at the Project reflected an urbanity consistent with not only O'Hara, say, but also with Oppenheimer and Blackburn. Of course Beat writers, fellow participants in that downtown community, were also evoking a cityscape with growing intensity and also played a role in the Project's formation. The Project, in short, became the fount of a cosmopolitanism articulating post-World War II experience but peculiarly urban life and then again the life lived in New York City that, by the 1960s, had become the cultural and financial capital of the world. And, arguably, it was the Black Mountain poetics, holding imagery to be crucial to the successful poem, as in keeping with the precepts of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, which fundamentally sponsored the various evocations of a cityscape that were emanating from the Project.

New York was, in Koch's words, a place "of dizzying anonymity, the feeling of freedom, the 'availability of experience', as Marianne Moore says in a poem about New York, the feeling of excitement and nervousness" (Koch 1991, 205). The city was a place of noise, chaos and intimacy where people were thrown together on crowded streets and public transportation. And it was ground zero for artists, musicians, dancers, actors and writers to find, see, talk with and read groundbreaking work still not sanctioned by society. Oppenheimer once recalled that, when he first arrived in New York from Black Mountain, what was most important to him was discovering "Gilbert Sorrentino, Hubert Selby, and LeRoi Jones, Baraka. And then, because we all four came out of different things, our group started to expand" (Marlatt 1983, 205). These people were not to be linked to the eponymous New York School painters. On the other hand, Oppenheimer said that there were two mentors in his life: Charles Olson and Franz Kline (Oppenheimer 1988, 93). Robert Creeley, as well, always a welcome reader at the Project, has had a great deal to do with cutting-edge visual art both socially and aesthetically, throughout his career.

In a letter to Olson, in which he complains about how Donald Allen was forming his now famous New American Poetry anthology, Oppenheimer writes, "the shit of it, sucking around don allen and the grove press, and i find, from him, I ain/t a new york poet, that/s o/hara and his boys. isn't that nice. i live here, work here, write here, and where will he get a label?" (Gilmore 1998, 124). The New York-based writers were not so clearly defined. Diane di Prima, a featured reader at the Project who was central to the formative downtown scene, is now thought of as a Beat writer although she continues to repudiate that classification (cf., e.g., di Prima "The Movement of the Mind) and recalls those early days in this interview: "[T]here was no such thing as Beat in the '50s. What I felt was: Oh good, other people are writing in the vernacular that I knew. This was very interesting. It was very important, the language we were speaking. We didn't think of ourselves as a movement. We were people writing" ("The Movement of the Mind"). A leader of the Poets Theater, she was instrumental in providing exposure for plays by O'Hara (di Prima 1984, 27), Oppenheimer and many others (Gilmore 1998, 124-125). With LeRoi Jones she co-edited Floating Bear, a key mimeograph magazine that published virtually every poet who was to be grouped as New York, Beat or Black Mountain.

Di Prima later explained, "All my writing was completely predicated on getting the slang of N. Y. in the period in the early 50's, down on paper somehow or another" (di Prima 1984, 29). Here, for example, is one of her late fifties lyrics:

In case you put me down I put you down
already, doll
I know the games you play.

In case you put me down I got it figured
how there are better mouths than yours
more swinging bodies
wilder scenes than this.

In case you put me down it won't help much.

(di Prima 1974a, 119)

This is the language of jazz and communal living and it is most of all the proclamation of freedom in an alternative life style—all built into the word "swinging." This verse is melodic and democratic, echoing dissonances as well as agreements di Prima serendipitously encounters. These attributes get perpetuated. She, Oppenheimer and Blackburn could not have been avoided by a younger generation of Poetry Project writers like Waldman, Ted Berrigan, Lewis Warsh, Ron Padgett, and Bernadette Mayer. The ambience of city life, a crucial element in their writing, is also quite palpable in the title work of Oppenheimer's 1962 book The Love Bit:

the colors we depend on are,
red for raspberry jam, white
of the inside thigh, purple as
in deep, the blue of moods, green
cucumbers (cars), yellow stripes down
the pants, orange suns on ill-
omened days, and black as the
dirt in my fingernails.
also, brown, in the night,
appearing at its best when
the eyes turn inward, seeking
seeking, to dig everything but
our own. i.e. we make it crazy or
no, and sometimes in the afternoon.

Similar in diction to di Prima's, this poem names the details of the everyday—as will become typical of later Poetry Project writing in order to create an explicit list of odd juxtapositions concatenating into a welter of perceptions, so that the poem's voice becomes a vision of things, things usually not to be found on a horizon but instead on a street or out a window facing other windows and people.

It is odd, therefore, that Oppenheimer and Blackburn receive short shrift in Waldman's edition, Out of this World: An Anthology of the St. Mark's Poetry Project, whose poems were first published in The World, the Project's magazine. Consider the jazzy riffs in Quincy Troupe's poem, "Leon Thomas at the Tin Palace," from the collection, and his ability to alight on details evoking an edginess:

eye thought it was music when
in fact it was a blender
grindin down the ice
making stuffings for drinks, but then
you jumped right on in on the downbeat leon
strokin rhythm inside time
inside the bar, then

people flew deeper into themselves
became the very air sweeping language too crescendo
between feathers of touch looping chord changes
your voice blued down, blues cries, field hollas
mississippi river flooded gutteral
stitches through your space
images of collective recall, leon

your voicestrokes scattin octaves ­
ice grindin down still inside the blender
making stuffings for piña coladas ­ then
you scooped up our feelings again
in the shovel of your john henry doowops, leon
jazzed through ellington count & yardbird

yodeling coltrane blues cries
the history of joe Williams
sewn into the eyes of our eardrums
transmitted to the space between
the eyes, where memory lies

your scattin licks brings us back dancing
in our seats, you kick swelling language inside
your lungs, leon, voice strokin colors painting
the Creator's Masterplan
as pharaoh explodes inside the tone blender of his horn

ice grinds down the bar jumps out of itself
scooped up in the shovel of your john henry doowops
blue as a mississippi gutteral river flooded
octaves kicking back black scattin
rhythms loop bustin your chops

feather stroking phrasing, leon Thomas
yodelling octaves, sewn back black

where they came from

Setting aside its tour of African-American culture, this poem uncannily summons O'Hara's perhaps most famous poem "The Day Lady Died." Troupe begins with a drinks blender at the bar of the night club, peripheral to onstage goings on, which does not so much distract the poem's speaker as teach him how what is off center, like counterpoint, is what is true—this is the surprise of bebop jazz—and continues with the line "people flew deeper into themselves," which subtly resonates O'Hara's final words in his poem, "and everyone and I stopped breathing." Yet in its attempt to recreate the sound of the music heard the night Troupe was seated, unprepared, in that magical night club (again like O'Hara's "leaning on the john door in the FIVE SPOT"), Troupe's poem might also remember Blackburn's lyric "Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five Spot," which is obviously aware of O'Hara yet which moves toward Rollins' music in order to convey the thrill experienced by the poem's persona who, as he listens, approaches ineffability.

THERE WILL be many other nights like
be standing here with someone, some
one
someone
some-one
some
some
some
some
some
some
one
there will be other songs
a-nother fall, another ­ spring, but
there will never be a-noth, noth
anoth
noth
anoth-er
noth-er
noth-er

Other lips that I may kiss,
but they won't thrill me like
thrill me like
like yours
used to
dream a million dreams
but how can they come
when there

never be
a-noth ­

(Blackburn 1985a, 316)

Blackburn's diction and syntax, more casual and streetwise than O'Hara's, lays the groundwork for Troupe's opening pun "eye thought it was music."

Indeed, while Waldman's anthology—which, astonishingly, represents over two hundred writers—includes Blackburn, Oppenheimer and di Prima, it excludes a number of writers whose work appeared in The World magazine and who were a vital part of the first workshops at the Project, such as Michael Stephens, Tom Weatherly, and Jerrold Greenberg (three of many); they were, in fact, Oppenheimer's coterie. The book features a preface by Ginsberg, an introduction by Waldman, and a salutary epigraph by O'Hara. Such an anthology sets a model that others follow. Recently in the American Book Review, for instance, Oppenheimer's posthumous Collected Later Poems was treated in a casually derogatory manner by the poet Sparrow who provided no literary analysis to substantiate his posturing he characterized as "seventh-generation New York School" (23). There is one other significant review that needs mentioning, by Marjorie Perloff in 1988, on the occasion of the posthumous publication of Blackburn's Collected Poems. She took the opportunity to compare his work extensively with O'Hara's and to conclude about the volume: "I know of no better place to learn what the sixties in American poetry were all about. Not the sixties of our most prominent poets—that is by now familiar territory—but the sixties as represented by what is, so to speak, the second string of the orchestra" (213). Perloff's review-article is a programmatic repudiation of Black Mountain poetics (e.g., she questions the concept of "'composition by field'" and "the very notion of 'projective verse'" as having any enduring significance [208]), and equally a programmatic solidifying of a theoretical ground for what has continued to be (and I hasten to say it is admirable) her explication of the Language poets (perhaps incongruously, Charles Bernstein is cited by her)—a stunning irony, since the Language group claims the Objectivist poets as their forbears, poets who were retrieved from obscurity by Oppenheimer, Blackburn, Charles Olson, Creeley and other Black Mountain folk with whom the Objectivists professed their greatest affinity; moreover, they read at the Project due to Blackburn and Oppenheimer. Perloff is repulsed by Blackburn's sexual fetishism and generally a male sexism that Peter Baker has shown gets conveniently overlooked by her when discussing O'Hara (51). The poem she particularly takes aim at is Blackburn's "The Yawn" in which a roving eye in a subway car takes in the social dynamic of people gathered together by happenstance:

The black-haired girl
with the big
brown
eyes
on the Queens train coming
in to work, so
opens her mouth so beautifully
wide
in a ya-awn, that
two stops after she has left the train
I have only to think of her     and I
o-oh-aaww-him
wow!

(Blakburn 1985b, 104)

Perloff notices the "sexual innuendo" in "the 'mouth' opening 'so beautifully / wide' to 'yawn' referring, of course, to that other 'mouth', the thought of whose opening is enough to make the poet-observer 'come' along with the Queens train," and so forth (202-203).

Yet Perloff misses several key points in her critique, such as Blackburn's spacings, spatial markings, favoring of nouns and verbs over adjectives and adverbs, and privileging of speech particles, all having come right out of William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" or some other like paradigmatic verse, all true to both Objectivist and Black Mountain praxis. Also ironic is her claim for O'Hara's "jaunty and absurd 'action poems' (in which the words become the actors)"; such a description surely fits Blackburn's Sonny Rollins poem, his subway poems and much else. Most of all, though, what separates Blackburn, and all of the Black Mountain lineage, from O'Hara, and perhaps the rest of the first generation New York School, is the latter's willingness to play with the subjunctive tense, a modus operandi that goes unmentioned by her. Perloff quotes extensively from O'Hara's "Poem (Kruschev is coming on the right day!)," which reads in part: "New York seems blinding and my tie is blowing up the street / I wish it would blow off / though it is cold and somewhat warms my neck" (205). She compares this with Blackburn's poem "Clickety Clack," a raunchy piece in which the speaker is reading on a train heading for Coney Island:

. . . when I reached the line : " the cock
of flesh at last cries out and has his glory
moment God "
some girl sitting opposite me with golden hair
fresh from the bottle began to stare dis-
approvingly and wiggle as tho she had ants
somewhere where it counted

Both poets exhibit, in James Breslin's words on O'Hara, the "[absorption] with a kind of evenly suspended attention that does not permit discrimination, emphasis, or even interpretation" (as cited in Lowney 1991, 245-46). Both also typify what Perloff describes as the "process poem, charting the mental antics of the poet as he moves around the city" (206). The arrangement and emphases of words in Blackburn's poem are to my mind as much an "action poem" as anything in O'Hara. To be sure, while the subjunctive (i.e., "New York seems blinding and my tie is blowing up the street / I wish it [my tie] would blow off," my italics) gets put to brilliant use by O'Hara, it is avoided by Blackburn, Oppenheimer, di Prima, as well as, for that matter, by all of the Objectivist poets and Gertrude Stein (another proclaimed ancestor of the Language school), because it interrupts the active process of language-as-poem or what Williams called "the machine of words" in which linguistic particles enjoy great stature and are seen as beautiful. Thus, the materiality of language can be realized variously.

Taking into account Waldman's possibly unconscious editorial bias, it is remarkable how wide-ranging her anthology is. Still, there are common tendencies, traceable back to Berrigan, Warsh, and Waldman, most of all to Mayer who began running workshops in 1972 yet who was part of the Project's activities early on (see Libby Rifkin's "My Little World"). A likely forerunner of her work, though, is this poem by Greenberg, which was published in Cuchulain, a mimeo magazine containing work by Oppenheimer, Blackburn and others connected to Oppenheimer's workshop (there were more magazines of this sort, such as Noose edited by Sam Abrams, now forgotten).

bebop and butterflies

there's more to it than we have seen
more than just (days and nights)
bebop and butterflies
me lying above you
and you
sometimes above me

there's more to it
we tell each other
my love lying nude

(Greenberg 1967, np)

The ease of speech and the seemingly casual yet precise juxtaposing of the lovers' bodies to one another and to be bop jazz are grounded in di Prima, Oppenheimer and Blackburn, and reflected in Mayer. Here is Mayer's representation in the anthology, a poem whose roots in Blackburn are apparent in its repetitiveness and syntax, especially her penchant for anacoluthon:

No matter what the above
what comes before stands for
it means they
wont let me die
& as a piece in this frame
(I make that mistake over & over)
Again today when
I created your absence
today when I created your absence then
the whole tone of the day
was like the rest of a day
pick one any one that
any of the dead ones
dies
To be simple: I was aware of that.
When colors come clean at the edges,
this is how mescalin works
But when they do when can you look? Aloud.
it's only when you cant look at them
& to remind you the tone
of a day
A day I was spectacularly reminded
of what you do & how you look
on a day any day
day any of the dead ones dies,
But not me.
[etc.]

(Waldman 1991, np)

Later in the poem we find the sort of visual gamesmanship Blackburn was famous for, here the use of graphics along with alphabetic text to create a visual "meaning."

Mayer is also represented in Ron Silliman's 1986 anthology In the American Tree, as is Robert Grenier whose poem, included by Waldman, seems a lot like a poem by Weatherly, also published in Cuchulain:

act of forgetting
lackluster having
unlocked the door

on purpose so as
to be able to go
back in through it

and to having forgotten
going back to around through
the upstairs with the chair

(Grenier 1991, 256)

The poem's wrenched syntax and foregrounding of prepositions is reminiscent of Weatherly's lyric:

to john wieners

these men i've kissed
and wrestled love from,
satisfied the spirit
of the act,
but not the drama of
weighing down weight
:the tension of fucking
springs to.

(Greenberg 1967, np)

What the Black Mountain impulse (and here I add in di Prima who had completely digested Ezra Pound when she was still very young) contributed to the emerging poem of the city was a precision of imagery and a voice of utter candor. Both qualities can also be ascribed to O'Hara's work, but an insistence on the materiality of language, also an attribute of Black Mountain, and Objectivist, poetics, exists to such a degree that the very voice of the poem can manifest in the breakdown of statement, as particles of speech come to stand on their own much like, to borrow from Perloff, brush strokes do in an action painting (cf. above). Add to this complex a penchant for urban grittiness, typified by Oppenheimer's parenthetical "cars" and the black dirt under his persona's fingernails, and later by Troupe's poem "116th Street and Park Avenue," again from the anthology, which begins as follows.

116th street fish smells, pinpoint la marqueta
up under the park avenue, filigreed, viaduct
elevated tracks
where graffitied trains run over language
there is a pandemonium of gumbo colors sitting up
jambalaya rhythms
spanish harlem, erupting
street vendors on timbale sidewalks
where the truth of things is what's happening now
[etc.]

(Waldman 1991, 576)

This overcrowded, hot and perhaps grimy cityscape is realized by a plenitude of nouns—indeed the poem is Objectivist especially in its self-conscious reporting of "elevated trains track over language / run over syllables on elevated tracks, fuse words / together, (w)rap lyrical que pasas on the move."

It is no accident that the majority of the poems dated 1966-76, the second section of Waldman's anthology, makes reference to the city specifically and to cosmopolitanism generally—not counting a number of obviously urban poets whose poem or two selected for the collection just happen not to meet this criterion. To equate urban poetry with the New York School misses the point, in other words, even though its contributions to this genre are undeniable. There are wonderful pieces that are clearly "New York" such as Tony Towle's "Social Poem" containing lines like "I seem to want to talk about something, / but it is missing, / which makes it a personal remark / which I stop to listen to / as if the bells had stopped ringing / but I were persisting / as if the walls were further away / than just on the other side." Even so, there are other lines that could have been found in Blackburn: "And I still cross Houston Street / in the path of the many drivers from New Jersey / who I am sure all nice people / when they get back home; but in the meantime / they are after me" (Waldman 1991, 365-366). Or here is one of Alice Notley's "Postcards":

Feb. 18
Dear Fuckface,
Everyone thinks you're
the Goddess of Compassion
but I know you also have
piles & a scarcely controlled
urge to sing for a living.
So much for you.
(Waldman 1991, 301)

I read this poem and recall seeing, decades ago, in a mimeographed magazine, Ted Berrigan and Joe Brainard's "bugger poems." I also hear Blackburn again, and in Notley's easy challenge, "So much for you," I recall di Prima's "In case you put me down I put you down / already" or, from another piece in the same series, "I hope / you go thru hell / tonight / beloved. / I hope / you choke to death / on lumps of stars / and by your bed a window / with frost / and moon and frost and / you want to scream / and can't" (di Prima 1974b, 118); these lines border on the subjunctive mood and at the same time patiently enumerate the nouns of the world (to echo George Oppen) as seen through a city window. It would be wrong to insist that this poem is not indebted to O'Hara whom di Prima read and was friendly with. In any case, I have not been trying to argue that the New York School should not hold a place of honor in the history of the Poetry Project; it's just that other poetries, and other persons who wrote them, should be equally honored. The status of the image afforded by Black Mountain poetics, as derived from Pound and Williams primarily, gave rise to an urban poetry of sensation and milieu that especially captured, moreover, New York City.

 

Baker, Peter. "Blackburn's Gift." Sagetrieb: A Journal Devoted to Poets in the Imagist/Objectivist Tradition 12, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 43-54.

Blackburn, Paul. "Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot." In The Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn, edited by Edith Jarolim, 316. New York: Persea Books, 1985.

---. "The Yawn." In The Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn, edited by Edith Jarolim, 104. New York: Persea Books, 1985.

Di Prima, Diane. "More or Less Love Poems: Poems for Bret." In Dinners and Nightmares, 119. New York: Corinth, 1974.
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by M. J. Fitzgerald

In the last 20 years I have moved from the U.K. to Italy to the U.S., and there has been plenty of opportunity and encouragement to dispose of books. When I had to relinquish my flat in south London in the mid '80s, I was forced to be positively miserly; I put a lot of books in boxes and took them on the 2B bus along Norwood Road to the library as gifts. Some were very fine books, many held fond memories. But I was ruthless, sparing only a few. Among these were four novels by a writer called Rosalind Belben: Bogies, Reuben Little Hero, The Limit, and Dreaming of Dead People.

The early books Bogies and Reuben Little Hero seemed slight compared to The Limit, which in parts was gross and in other parts spellbinding. A mesmerizing description of an unreported hurricane begins with the ship's captain understanding that it is too late for the ship to avoid it, or skirt it, and that they are heading straight for it:

I observe gospel truth writ plain upon the barograph. Pressure has fallen, quite a lot, during the night, during one recent hour of our night. I look at the log. It has been entered thus: 2300hrs 1012, 0200hrs 1007, 0400hrs 1002, 0500hrs 997. Or 5mbs in 60 minutes. Falling, still falling. Now 996, it's no mistake. Where has the wind gone. Shifted. Turned completely, from SSW to ENE, soon will arrive strongly on the port bow.

Almost the best thing about these pages is Belben's dating of the unreported hurricane—10th of September 1967—which guarantees an authenticity to the whole experience. Was it this section that compelled publishers to buy Rosalind Belben's next novel?

Dreaming of Dead People grated on every self-conscious nerve. Reading it was at times as painful as the masturbatory activity Lavinia engages in the section, "The Act of Darkness." Too exposed, too raw, too personal, I thought—although the section called "Owl," which charts the euthanasia of one man's disobedient dog, gave me an understanding of the love one can feel for an animal that no other book has done:

I had to blanket my mind, to hide all my conscious and unconscious thoughts from him: he must sense nothing, suspect nothing. She was more complicated than a horse. If I possibly could, I had to. I knew what to do, psychologically, and how to do it. I strained everything I had in me, to do that much for him. I think I succeeded, for the first and only time in his life.

I took all four books with me, and when Is Beauty Good came out while I was living in Italy, I went to all the trouble and expense of ordering it, but when it arrived I found I could not get through it, though I loved the opening pages, the philosophical question of the title, and sentences such as,

If what is ugly didn't strike me as ugly, he thinks, I shouldn't mind staring at it, I shouldn't feel pained by my journey home; if I were indifferent, if each building, old and new, struck me indifferently, my journey home would not be a matter of seeing but of being jolted and dreaming of coffee and biscuits and sometimes cake.

When I moved to the U.S., all five books came with me, jostling with the spaghetti and the Perugina Baci I stashed in the trunk, not sure that the Midwest had even heard of either. (I was wrong about the pasta, right about the chocolates.) I placed them on the bookshelf in my office and forgot them. A steamroller of cultural differences was flattening me, and the all-pervasive assumptions about writers and writing, none of which seem to correspond to my own, were overwhelming: what was I doing here and why on earth had they hired me were questions that spun in my head. But I was no longer young enough to live like the birds of the air or the fish of the sea, and had to accommodate myself to this new world.

Choosing Spectacles, Belben's next work, reached me while I was in this state of mind, and it galvanized me. Not only did this fragmentary narration of the experience and thoughts of a man who has left Lithuania and wanders on small unspecified grants all around Europe, from Berlin to Israel to France, parallel my own in an uncanny way, but it somehow seem to me to refract in its particularity the story of every migratory group, the Somalis and the Mexicans, the Hmong and the Chinese. Rosalind Belben had written THE novel that showed the experience which the media and the intellectual elite endlessly talked about from their multicultural-awareness bog.

History is indomitable, and there will be more of it, fresh excitements, worse horrors, to lighten up the television screens. Washed up on the beach; and free, to return. In our former countries the great changes dreamed of are taking place, or have already, and there is no place left for us there, we are finished, and must live on, aware, it is really what exile means, not a temporary banishment but a rupture so total one can't catch one's breath.

I was finally a firm convert to Rosalind Belben. I forced the book on uncomprehending students on two occasions, to demonstrate the ultimate consequences of the hallowed tenet 'show don't tell', and how we have to adjust our reading when we are looking through one character's spectacles. Belben's use of fragmentation and ellipsis was too much for most of them—they were too accustomed to the description of emotions to recognize the manifestation of them in the very texture and punctuation of a piece—but the consciousness of a few was stirred away from the familiar to the sparsely charted territory of reading totally from within one consciousness, with only minimal props as titles and section breaks.

Belben's new book, Hound Music, has recently been published in the U.K. by Chatto & Windus. The ellipsis and particularity of punctuation remain, and the author's unique style is still present, but the consciousness of one has splintered into the consciousness of many; humans and animals think and act side by side.

In this novel she has clamorously succeeded in making real a period (1900-­1902), the particularities of British Landed Gentry, and the details of turn-of-the-century upbringing in a world that, despite a shattering event, seems to be able to reorganize itself around change and remain essentially the same. She also succeeds in showing the sport of fox-hunting—so relentlessly condemned by animal activists that its practice has almost disappeared—as a complex and highly ritualized engagement with the countryside, with nature and with animals rather than a simple cruel slaughtering of the defenseless.

Though Belben is fearless and faultless in weaving within and without the consciousness of many, the main focus of Hound Music is on Dorothy, mother of five children and a woman as fully realized as Mrs. Ramsey. In fact, more fully realized, because unlike Virginia Woolf, who shies away from the complicated pattern sexuality makes in the fabric of one's life, Belben shows a fully sexual woman limited by her Victorian upbringing from having a vocabulary for it:

She'd had a sensation so brief, so tantalizing now and irretrievable, that parting with it had proved to be, and was still, the most ghastly wrench. And, although convinced that restraint was a thing for which one lived to be thankful, she did at times wonder whether a life-time of that didn't border on the lunatic

and

Though she had taken to heart George's early strictures on her "moving" and all that kind of thing, she had enjoyed the consequences of being married—it was not unlike riding—she had entertained whole-heartedly all that she had stared in awe at her own reflection "afterwards" and put her hand up to her flushed cheek

This is the novel that should have won the 2001 Booker prize, but of course it was not even on the long short list. Never mind: it confirmed my hunch of twenty years ago that here is a writer whose novels have been worth hauling around the world.

Click here to purchase Bogies, Reuben Little Hero, The Limit,Dreaming of Dead People, and Hound Music from Amazon.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2002 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002

by Mark Terrill

John Bennett is the founder of Vagabond Press, the former editor of the seminal small press magazine, Vagabond, and the author of over 21 books of prose, poetry and "shards," a high-octane, hybrid form of short prose pieces. He also edited Ragged Lion, A Tribute to Jack Micheline, and recently recorded a CD of his shards entitled Rug Burn.

A true iconoclast and die-hard individualist, Bennett has a strong aversion to all schools, movements, isms, etc, championing instead the voice of the socially dispossessed and the marginal outsider. Published on a hand-cranked 1917 A.B. Dick open-drum mimeo that was found in a garbage heap, Vagabond was one of a handful of magazines back in the Sixties such as Wormwood Review, Olé, The Outsider, December and New York Quarterly, where Charles Bukowski, Lyn Lifshin, d.a. levy, Doug Blazek, Anne Menebroker, Jack Micheline, Jerry Bumpus, Gerda Penfold and many other now-familiar names first appeared in the small press scene. The Vagabond Anthology, originally published in 1978, still serves as a monument and testament to both literary and individual integrity, two ardent strands that wind their way through all things Vagabond.

More than 35 years after the founding of Vagabond, Bennett is still going strong, now armed with a website (http://www.eburg.com/~vagabond/) instead of the hand-cranked mimeo, washing windows for a living, and churning out his shards like a man possessed. This interview was conducted by email in September-November 2001.

----

Mark Terrill: Your latest collection of shards, Fire in the Hole, just came out from The Argonne House Press. In the introduction, you say that "Shards are not prose poems, short stories or political persuasions. They're not cattle prods of social awareness. Toss a term like "social awareness" into a shard and see what happens—it's like tossing a chunk of red meat into a fish tank of piranhas." Maybe you could tell me a little more about the genesis of the shard. Was there any particular catalytic event that led to the form? Any particular influences? They seem to be very spontaneous in nature, definitely more from the gut than from the mind.

John Bennett: The old body/mind conundrum. The either/or game. The gut/mind simple-Simon package. Duelality. Someone gets shot dead and then what? Loneliness sets in. (Please don't put "sic" after duelality.)

Genesis? Listen, I don't have long to live. My kind keeps getting culled from the herd. At 20 it seems we are legion ("We want the world and we want it now"), at 40 there's Jackson Brown singing "Running Against the Wind," and at my age—I think I can make out two or three other fleet-footed gazelles bounding far off across the tundra, but it's hard to be sure, the place is cluttered with wolves. Critical mass is more like it. Fusion. A great meltdown. Think of lava snaking its liquid way down a mountain side on some Pacific island. One day four or five years ago it just happened. I woke up with the words "The Ghost of Tokyo Rose" going around in my head. I went straight to my typewriter and wrote those words down. All hell broke loose. Page after page. I thought I was into a novel, a hugely spontaneous novel. Okay, I thought, I can ride this bronco. After a month or so the thing was going in so many directions at once I began getting vertigo—it exploded into shards like a volcanic eruption. I gave up on the myth of continuity and a lot of other myths that we shackle ourselves with.

There wasn't a catalyst that sparked shards into existence, shards are catalysts that drive fragile flowers straight up out of concrete, that spark chaos and mayhem and fear and disorientation—all the things necessary for breakthrough, for quantum leap, for a change of heart. I'm Henry Miller's love child. Charles Bukowski's arm-wrestling partner. I'm a shard serf. An indentured servant waiting on emancipation. No time to say hello good-bye. Read 'em and weep. Shards are the language of an improbable future.

MT: What's the difference between a shard and a prose poem?

JB: A prose poem is a form. A shard is a prophecy.

MT: You've been involved in the alternative/small press scene for over 35 years now, having made the transition from a hand-cranked mimeo to cyberspace. How would you compare the small press scene of today with that of the mid-sixties?

JB: Guerrilla warfare vs. workshops.

MT: How do you see the current proliferation of workshops, seminars, MFA programs, poetry slams, etc.? You think it represents a bona fide increased interest in writing in general, or is it just another attempt to make a commodity out of art?

JB: I'm not sure I'd put poetry slams in the same boat with the other phenomena you mentioned. Poetry slams are more like Roman arenas full of gladiators; gladiators with plastic swords, perhaps, but definitely a step above an MFA program.

Workshops, seminars and MFA programs are all lessons in political correctness. The best that can be said about them is that they are geared to the mechanics of writing. Mostly what they do, however, is sell formulas for pleasing editors and supposedly audiences, formulas for "making it." They're rooted in greed, fear and vanity. There simply aren't that many true poets and creative writers with poetic depth. I think the ratio to the general population has been roughly the same throughout history. The so-called proliferation of poets that so many see as wonderful is actually a sign of advanced spiritual decay. There is no such proliferation, it's all packaging. And what's packaging but deceit, an attempt to make something look better than it is? Poetry is a bare-naked thing. It has nothing to do with image.

MT: What was your last contact with Bukowski? What do you think about his legacy? Do you see it as a boon or a curse?

JB: When was it Bukowski died? March of 94? Almost eight years ago. Our correspondence began thinning out in the late '80s.

His legacy is a boon. What is being done with it by eager literary types is largely a disaster. A lot of people drinking themselves senseless and feigning a skid-row outlook on life. You can get all tangled up in the contradictions and complexities of Bukowski, but for my money the most important thing his writing does with enormous success is subliminally spotlight and verify the individual while flinging the whole corporate, institutionalized world into the shadows—I think this accounts for his enormous world-wide popularity more than anything. Hell, at one time Bukowski's books held two of the top-ten best-seller spots in Brazil simultaneously! Brazil!

MT: What did you think about Howard Sounes' biography of Bukowski?

JB: It doesn't make sense to write biographies about people like Miller (Henry) and Bukowski. It smacks of necrophilia. Looking for love in all the wrong places.

MT: Are there any magazines, periodicals or small presses out there these days that seem to be carrying on in the "guerilla warfare" spirit?

JB: I know there are down-to-business, non-literary tabloids out there with a strong radical social orientation, similar to the Berkeley Barb and the San Francisco Good Times of the Sixties (Seattle's Washington Free Press comes to mind), but I'm not aware of any literary presses with chops like Doug Blazek's Open Skull Press, Jon and Gypsy Webb's The Outsider, or the whole astounding and brutalized Cleveland scene with d.a. levy as residing guru.

MT: The life and death of d.a. levy has become a sort of legend in the interim. Did you actually know levy? What do you know about the circumstances of his death?

JB: Never met levy. It's the work, you know, in the final analysis, that counts. I knew Joel Deutsch out in San Francisco, and Kent Taylor, both Cleveland poets from that era. And I've stayed in close touch with t.l. kryss over the years. kryss is about the purest poet I know. Another poet of great power that almost no one knows about because she just doesn't give a rat's ass about networking and publishing and what the hell anyone thinks about her is Maia Penfold. I don't think she's ever been to Cleveland, but she's a Cleveland poet in spirit. People put way too much emphasis on eras and movements and geographical identity, and that creates a fictitious coherency and obscures the essence of poetry.

levy's death—christ, people just don't know when to let something go.

MT: I don't have any problem with letting go, especially when it comes to death. I was just curious about levy in particular since there seems to be some controversy as to whether or not he actually committed suicide. Is Maia Penfold related to Gerda Penfold?

JB: The controversy is what I'm talking about letting go of. It's turned all sorts of people against each other. I mean, did Christ really get crucified? Did he really ascend into heaven? Was it really Judas who dropped the dime on him? And off we march behind the banner of Christianity on our crusade to get seasoning for our meat... Is this too esoteric?

Maia Penfold is Gerda Penfold. She changed her name to Maia about 20 years ago. Didn't seem to change her one iota, thank God...

MT: Any contemporary writers that you particularly enjoy reading or would recommend?

JB: Sure. Jesse Bernstein. Moritz Thomsen. Albert Huffstickler. Charles Bowden. Thomsen and Bernstein are dead, does that disqualify them? Albert Huffstickler is old but hard at it, a first-class poet, does he count?* Bowden has a great book out called Red Line. What's contemporary in a world where everyone is famous for fifteen minutes? (*Note: Since this interview was conducted, Albert Huffstickler died. As did John Thomas who wasn't listed above but should have been. As should have/could have a long list of other writers and poets—died and/or been listed...)

MT: I'm not familiar with Charles Bowden. What can you tell me about him?

JB: Not much. He's an ecologist, very much in the Edward Abbey vein. He understands that hawks kill and that it's part of the natural order. He drinks hard and wanders off into the desert for long stretches of time. A couple of his other books are Blue Desert and Mezcal. Red Line is an undulating mix of personal dilemma, desert life, and drugs. I discovered the book because I'm involved in doing a book based on the life of a cocaine drug-cartel kingpin. This guy decided to let me write his book after talking with me for a couple of hours. At one point he asked me, "Did you ever have someone stick a gun in your face?" I told him yes. "Who?" he said. "Me and one other person." "What did you do when it was your finger on the trigger?" "There was only one bullet in there somewhere," I said, "so I pulled it." "And the other time?" "I said, 'Go ahead and do it, but you're going to make a fucking mess out of the cab of your truck.' " I think that's when he decided he wanted me to do the book. Way to-hell-and-gone outside the world of seminars and workshops.

MT: You were included in the anthology, The Outlaw Bible of Outlaw Poetry. How did that come about?

JB: Alan Kaufman, who edited Outlaw, contacted me, asked me to contribute something. I did. They butchered my work (whole stanzas left off), my name and my bio. When I pointed this out, I was told I should be glad to even be in there with all those names. Too many names, for my money. Too many celebrities and far too few outlaws. I managed to get Jesse Bernstein in there. Kaufman didn't know who Bernstein was. Jesse was Seattle's quintessential outlaw poet, he wrote a fine, fine line, and he took everything to the limit. He was the spirit of the Sixties toughened up for contemporary America. He was more outlaw than anyone else in that big thick book. It was not a good idea to fuck around with the skinny, pop-eyed little fucker. If you handed him a pistol with one bullet in it and said, "I dare you to put the barrel to your head and pull the trigger," he'd do it without a moment's hesitation and then hand the gun to you and say, "Your turn." He offed himself, stabbed himself three times in the throat. The world was just too nasty and ugly for him. Bukowski wasn't in there because Bukowski was dead and his estate wanted more than the $25 Thunder's Mouth Press was paying each of the contributors.

MT: Your own Vagabond Anthology is an amazing collection. Why don't people write like that anymore?

JB: Well, there are people mimicking "writing like that," but it's somehow not the same. It has something to do with the times. I no longer write like that. I write shards now (to the dismay of many) because they seem to shape words in a way that sheds light on the pulse of the times, down under the onslaught of technology and shrill speed, down under all the packaging. You have to listen to that inner voice in order to get beyond the packaging, down to the heart of the beast. Once you make contact at that level, it's astonishing what sort of language comes into play, what concepts and juxtapositions...

The Vagabond Anthology is a clean, lean machine. It's a monolith of its time. A good reference point to check your compass by... I've still got copies. $10 a pop for anyone who wants one.

MT: Vagabond was originally conceived by you and Grant Bunch in Washington D.C. back in '64, but the first issue didn't come out until a year later when you were living in Germany. Why the transition from D.C. to Munich?

JB: Grant and I got inspired to start our own mag in a bar called Brownley's near George Washington University in D.C. Other than Marvin Malone's Wormwood Review, we were unaware at the time of any small press activity, leave alone a "movement." We just knew that what we needed wasn't available in the university and big-name magazines.

We kicked the idea around for some time, and then I went to Munich with my wife and son to study at the University of Munich. That didn't last long. I wound up washing dishes, and my wife at the time, a German citizen, got a job with the German post office. Grant showed up at our 5th floor one-room efficiency one day, and the idea for the magazine erupted again over a few bottles of good German white wine. We kicked names around, and my wife, said: "What about that poem you wrote called "Vagabond," why not call the magazine Vagabond? It was appropriate. We were always moving from place to place, and the trend continued. So Vagabond it was.

Grant split on a Norwegian freighter and was never active in the mag again. He was our wandering emissary. We did five issues out of Munich, and then it was D.C., New Orleans, San Francisco and Ellensburg.

MT: What were you studying at the university, and why Munich?

JB: Literature and philosophy. Why? Good question. It was my last attempt to somehow fit in with the system. I thought I would become a teacher, largely by osmosis. It all came crashing to an end one day after an altercation with an academic advisor. She said, "Herr Bennett, Sie sind ein Bauer! " and I replied, "Fräulein Doktor Riegler, lieber ein Bauer als eine alte Jungfrau." ("Herr Bennett, you are a peasant." "Fräulein Doktor Riegler, better a peasant than an old virgin.")

That's when I began to cook. That's when my writing took off and Vagabond became a reality. When I finally gave up the ghost. When I dared cut the rope and be free. I wrote Bukowski and he sent a book's worth of poems and a sheaf of chalk drawings. He said my letter made his friend (unidentified) run howling into the night. I wrote my first true short story shortly after that, and it turned out to be my first published story—"The Night of the Great Butcher." Curt Johnson of December Magazine accepted it with a letter in which he said, "Damn! The story that makes the issue always seems to come in just under the gun." Raymond Carver had a story in that issue of December.

MT: And that was the end of your academic aspirations? How have you earned your living since then?

JB: That was it for academia and me. Bounced around after that doing construction grunt work, idiot-savant gardening, janitorial gigs, and working the bars and honky tonks in New Orleans and San Francisco as waiter, bartender and door man. Started cleaning windows over twenty years ago to give my son something to apply himself to one summer—he was heading in a bad direction. He kept going in a bad direction and I've been cleaning windows ever since. "Just a working man in my prime, cleaning windows." Van Morrison.

MT: Part of my previous question didn't get answered—why Munich, of all places?

JB: Good beer. I lived across the street from the Theresien Wiese, which is where the Oktoberfest takes place. I mean literally across the street! Step out the door in the morning, and it was like the aftermath of a war zone. Bodies strewn everywhere, puddles of vomit. Good old Gemütlichkeit.

MT: You moved to Germany to study literature and philosophy at the university in Munich because the beer was good?

JB: Best beer in the world. In the summer I'd disappear into the Augustinebräu beer garden for days on end, they'd have to send in a search party to find me. I lived in Munich's West End, a tough little blue-collar neighborhood. Have you read my Munich stories? They're in The Night of the Great Butcher and The Names We Go By. I was the resident Ami at the corner bar, a good old-fashioned Gasthaus. Americans never came in there. Alois, Siegi, Julius—my running mates. We raised a lot of hell.

Look, the handwriting was on the wall. I'd done my army time (that's how I got a German wife), and I was bulling my way through George Washington University in D.C., working two jobs on the side to support the American Dream. It was terrifying. It was summer, and I snapped. I put on my Robert-Hall el-cheapo suit, picked up my empty attaché case, and started hustling. I was good at it back then, working the system. In one afternoon of cruising from office to office, and two months past the deadline, I'd talked my way into the University of Munich via one of those junior-year programs. I had to take a proficiency test and sit down and chat in German with some dude for ten or twenty minutes, and I was in. I sent my wife and son to Berlin for the rest of the summer and went wild. I got off my Icelandic flight in Luxembourg with a backpack, a portable typewriter, and about $200 in cash. I hitched to Munich.

I checked in with the junior-year people, then signed up for a lot of courses that were not affiliated with the program. I never went back except to pick up a financial aid check every month and to hook up with a couple of ex-army guys who were doing the G.I. Bill. I spent more and more time drinking and less and less time going to classes and finally I threw in the towel on the whole thing and—as I think I already said—began to write like there was no tomorrow.

MT: So you went to Munich under the pretense of getting an education and came back instead as a published writer and the editor of Vagabond. How did you go about soliciting material for the first issues of Vagabond? You said you wrote Bukowski—had you already known him previously?

JB: I didn't know anyone. Somehow The Wormwood Review got into my hands back in D.C.—my first poem was published in Wormwood. I hop scotched via Wormwood to some other small mags that were springing up. It was a 12th monkey sort of thing. These mags were springing up independently of each other and then finding each other after the fact. There was rapid escalation and then spontaneous combustion. It was a phenomenon endemic to the times, across the board. We were feeling our oats. A veritable magical mystery tour...

It was in Doug Blazek's Olé that I first read Bukowski's poems, and they set me on fire. I wrote him a long, crazy letter. I wrote everyone whose work I liked and asked for poems, stories, whatever they had. Good work came flooding in, but to be honest, it took me a while to hit my stride, to find my editorial chops, to scour out the last vestiges of conditioning that was there in spite of my loner, outsider existence. Simply slapping a bunch of good poems and big names between two covers doesn't make for a good mag. Publications with that feel to them always make me uneasy. There has to be a cohesive quality, and that is editorial presence. Shit, with today's technology, anyone can slam a bunch of words between two covers and call it a literary magazine. Back in the days of manual typewriters, stencils and mimeo machines, it was messy business and a labor of love.

MT: You mentioned that Raymond Carver had a story in the same issue of December where your first story appeared. What do you think of Carver? And what about Richard Brautigan? Not that they necessarily have anything in common, other than the fact that they were both establishing their careers at the same time that Vagabond was happening, and were two very unique and inimitable voices.

JB: I made a mistake. Carver had some poems in that issue, not a story. There was a lot of good stuff in that issue—early Blazek, Lifshin, Richard Hugo. Curt Johnson's December was one of the better little mags around. December had it all—poetry, fiction, film, reviews, art, opinion, and that all-important editorial presence; hefty but without the pretense of its well-heeled cousins, the university mags. Johnson is a heavy. As tough as they come. The only person I ever ran into who could drink me under the table. And with one lung and all sorts of health problems, he's still at it (drinking)—I quit.

What do I think of Carver? He's a master storyteller. It's embarrassing to see the way Tess Gallagher feeds off his name and his talent, years after his death. A little bit of trivia—Tess Gallagher's ex-husband (pre-Carver) is my landlord. He was in here doing some repairs not too long ago. Ex-fighter pilot, sculptor. It's his name Tess carries.

Brautigan? He was great to read back in the Sixties, sitting in the sand dunes along the Great Highway in San Francisco, stoned out of my head, but he's a lightweight compared with Carver. I heard him read outdoors on the Berkeley campus on the same bill as Gary Snyder. He didn't look so good up against Snyder, man of steel.

MT: I had the same impression of Brautigan for years until I recently stumbled across an excerpt of Trout Fishing in America somewhere, which prompted me to read it again. I wound up reading everything by him that's still in print, and I would have to include In Watermelon Sugar in my top-ten list of all-time greatest books. I think his lightweight status was/is very deceptive. I think he was a genius. A confused, mixed-up genius, but a genius. His stuff reads even stronger today than it did back then, even when you're not stoned out of your head.

Anyway, so Vagabond got on its feet in Munich and went for how many issues/years in total?

JB: "The genius is the one who plays most like himself." Thelonius Monk.

I'll have to circle back around and give Brautigan another read. Things change. Things Fall Apart. Have you read that book by Chinua Achebe? Did I spell his name right? Is my tie straight?

Everything is in a constant state of flux, including perceptions. Surfers have the right idea. You catch that wave just right, and you ride it in. Then you paddle back out and catch another one. I was a teenager when the James Dean movie Rebel Without a Cause came out. It blew me totally away. I saw it six times. I saw it again years later, when I was in my early 30s, and I was embarrassed. I saw it again, just last year, with my teenage adopted grandson, and it blew us both away, but for different reasons. So many facets. This is important to understand. If a person doesn't understand this, they can put out literary magazines and accumulate kudos until the cows come home and all they're doing is trashing an already battered psychic landscape.

The circumstances of my life kept things lean with Vagabond. Five issues out of Munich, six counting the one we did in German. When I returned stateside I eventually drifted down to New Orleans, found an A.B. Dick open-drum mimeo, 1917 vintage, in a garbage heap behind the American Legion, and cranked out a few issues on that. Also did a few books, like French Quarter Interviews, and a few issues of something called Mr. Clean Magazine which landed me and Glenn Miller, the art editor, in jail on pornography charges. I got the hell out of New Orleans after that. I wound up living on a roof in a converted pigeon coop in San Francisco's Mission District and cranked out a few more issues. I was wifeless by this time and moving around with an old steamer trunk and the mimeo. I could slam that trunk shut and be gone with a half hour's notice. And I was writing like a stallion, stories and poems and a novel, The Adventures of Achilles Jones, which two editors from Atheneum wanted to publish, but the thing got shot down by "The Committee," meaning the sales people. Joe McCrindle of the now defunct Transatlantic Review took a shine to my writing, published three stories. He came to San Francisco, a well-mannered, nice little guy in a double-breasted suit, and I threw him in my VW van and raced all over the city drinking beer and smoking joints and checking out a Jackson Pollock retrospective. I terrified him. He never answered my mail after that. I was lost in the labyrinth of Blake's palace of excess. I kept shooting myself in the toe.

Anyway, I hooked up with an intense little number while working the Christmas rush at the post office, I thought she was a speed freak but she was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, and the next thing I know we're married and heading for Ellensburg, Washington, where she had a teaching position. I've been here ever since, with numerous forays out into the world. The marriage didn't last, I'm very unhappy anywhere near academia. I wound up cleaning windows, a gig I do to this day to pay the rent.

Ran up a total of 30 issues of Vagabond over the years (seemed appropriate, the telegraphers—30—signifying the end of a transmission) and a good number of books. But I can't keep my hand out. Within a year after the last issue of Vagabond I did something called Once More with Feeling, which was touted as an anthology but in reality it was just more of the magazine. I'm like some prehistoric beast that's been snare-trapped and staked down. Every now and then someone pokes me with a stick to see if I'm still alive, and I raise my head, let out a roar, rip an arm free and swipe a half dozen Twinkie-eating smocks right off the face of the earth. It is—ha-ha—the nature of the beast.

No one's going to print this. It's too long. But we're having fun, aren't we? I like the thing you did on Paul Bowles, by the way. That should be put out in book form. If I wasn't so overwhelmed with things I'd do it myself. But some young blood should take it on... We need to recognize truly worthy things in each other and support those things. "If we could only get enough good men to walk together," Bukowski wrote in an early poem. "But we won't."

MT: 30 issues is a long haul, especially under those circumstances. That's a great image—the steamer trunk, the mimeo, and a magazine named Vagabond. Like, "Who was that masked man?" And I know what you mean about changing perceptions. The same thing happened to me with Henry Miller. First time I read Tropic of Cancer, I thought I'd seen the light. Read it again years later and thought it was crap. Read it again recently and realized again how great it actually is.

So being on top of those changing perceptions is definitely crucial to achieving that sort of "editorial presence" that you were talking about earlier. That and having the luck to hook up with poets and writers with "poetic depth." What are the other necessary ingredients for putting out a good, solid literary magazine, besides the basic finances and a sort of psychic stamina? What advice would you give to someone starting up a small mag today?

JB: I think you've about covered it. That's all you need! You might take out the word solid. You don't want to be solid. You want to be mercurial. You want to flow with all those oscillating perceptions. You really have to be driven. The last thing you need is an agenda. It's all attitude, longing. It's an attempt to live your longings. That is liberating, and it helps liberate others who down in their marrow long for liberation, deep-down psychic and spiritual liberation, down under all the crap—and there is a lot of crap. If you're not doing that, if you're not tending in that direction, you're wasting everyone's time, as far as I'm concerned.

There are a zillion (allow me some hyperbole) "literary" magazines coming and going all the time that are deadly boring and predictable and anchored in some form of largess or another. I got voted onto a CCLM grants committee once, back in the late 70s, along with Harry Smith and Diane Kruchkow. We wound up with controlling votes. We gave everyone who applied exactly the same amount of money—$812.76, I think it came out to. This put mags like Partisan Review who were asking for $20,000 into a financial crisis, while other mags with names like Butchered Pigs threw blowout parties because they got four times what they asked for. This was in Seattle. When CCLM saw what we were doing, they flew in lawyers and big-name writers and publishers and tried making us an offer we couldn't refuse to change our minds. We stood fast. I'm despised in a lot of circles.

MT: Maybe that's one necessary ingredient we overlooked—the willingness to risk your ass in the face of the accepted norms, to go against the grain and be a real trouble-maker. No risk, no gain, right? And by gain I don't mean subscriptions, grants, etc., but rather a broadening of the literary landscape, from which all of us stand to benefit.

JB: I don't like the word literature any more than I like the word poetry, because the words have been co-opted, become flimsy. I'm into divination, the rest is claptrap. If you've got divination in your bones, you get labeled a trouble maker. There's nothing to be gained, only unearthed. The Big Lie beats just under the skin like a bestial black heart. Ka-thum. Ka-thum. If you stand perfectly still long enough, you hear it. Come on, Mark—broaden the literary landscape? What the hell is that supposed to mean? It's so Orwellian it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

MT: Another false step in the semantic minefield. I think it goes without saying that the terms "literature" and "poetry" have both been co-opted (or recuperated, as the Situationists say), but for the sake of this interchange, we need to call them something. And by "broadening the literary landscape," I merely meant opening it up (or ripping it open, or whatever) to include all the Huffsticklers, levys, Bernsteins, etc., instead of having our aesthetic tastes hammered into shape by the Corporate Combine, with their marketing strategies, trends, chain-stores, "political correctness," etc. That, to me, is the truly Orwellian part.

Or do you see it as a sort of ongoing Them vs. Us continuum, the establishment and the underground locked in some kind of perpetual, yin-yang, symbiotic tangle? The one constantly being challenged by the other? Maybe that's actually necessary to keep the whole thing healthy and alive, to keep it from becoming just one big moribund homogenous mass, producing the kind of McLiterature that I think we're both leery of.

JB: Now we're talking. You got a little pissed, a little miffed, and your language honed up. "Broadening the literary landscape" has a euphemistic ring to it. It's gelded language. The words do the opposite of what they advocate, which is very Orwellian. Smash assumptions, smash preconceptions, like smashing egg shells so the little chickies can come out and play. Not in others, in ourselves. Over and over and over again. By any means possible. Raze high the roof beams, carpenters. Yes, "sic" on raze. Salinger, there's someone did a lot for me years ago. Put a footnote in here if you have to.

All hell breaks loose when you dare cut the rope and be free, when you don't stand still long enough to have a saddle thrown over your back. Them/Us? We are the walrus—all of us. Ku-ku-ka-choo. Give me your givens, your downtrodden, your nubile young daughters...

MT: Another writer who dared to cut the rope was Jack Micheline. Your tribute, Ragged Lion, was obviously a labor of love in the truest sense. Why Jack Micheline?

JB: Micheline was the quintessential outsider. He lived more or less on the streets for over 40 years, and he never knuckled under. He was an outsider in his own clan, the Beats. He was cantankerous, a curmudgeon, an iconoclast, always turning over apple carts and ruining people's plans. If he'd been Native American in another century he would have been a Contrary. The literati would gather to congratulate each other on being such high-level sentient beings, and Micheline would come crashing in, reciting his poems in a loud voice and smelling bad. So, I was moved to do a tribute. I had in mind something much less extravagant than what I wound up with. I had in mind ten or twenty pages, something photocopied, a press run of 100. But, the thing got out of hand, and over a year later I wound up with 210 pages, scores of contributors, art, photos, poems, stories and reminiscences galore. Cloth and paper editions. Harry Smith of Smith Publications helped bankroll it.

MT: All that response just shows what a huge impact Micheline actually had. Now someone just needs to come along and put together his collected works.

Previously you mentioned Salinger. It seems like he's holding up pretty well amidst all the oscillating perceptions. The Catcher in the Rye just keeps selling and selling. Not that sales are any criterion, but he obviously hit a nerve that's still twitching after all these years.

JB: Matt Gonzales brought out Micheline's Sixty-seven Poems for Downtrodden Saints shortly before Micheline died. It was also a labor of love. Gonzales is a lawyer, not a publisher. The book went into a second edition. Micheline's son, Vince Silvaer, also a non-literary type, has set up the Micheline Foundation, replete with a website. Yes, a complete collected works would be nice. Micheline was the poet of the streets that Henry Miller was always talking about.

Salinger—his stories got me as much as Catcher. Back in a long-ago perception matrix, "For Esmé, with Love and Squalor" just blew me away. There are some pirated editions of his uncollected stories floating around—have you seen any of those?

Another writer from that era who impacted me was Alan Silliltoe with his Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. Also, a very good movie was made from the book.

MT: What about Ken Kesey? There's another outsider who came in the Sixties window and who had his own ideas about what writing should be.

JB: For me there are two Keseys. The one Tom Wolfe mythologized in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and the one who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion. Somewhere along the line, Kesey got trapped in the messiah box. I saw him and his troupe of not-so-merry pranksters perform a bizarre Wizard of Oz spin-off in Seattle four or five years ago, and it was a dreary affair, drenched in political statements, psychedelic spasms, and societal finger waggings. Having his picture on the cover of the Rolling Stone probably robbed him of his thunder more than all the LSD he ate. His first two books hold up better than he does, especially Cuckoo's Nest.

MT: I guess that's always one of the dangers of getting caught up in or associated with any particular movement or cultural phase, be it the Beats or the Sixties or whatever. Look what happened to Kerouac. An exception is Burroughs, who transcended all the sideshows and retained his integrity while remaining hip from the beginning to the end. Bowles is another one.

What about your CD, Rug Burn? How did that come into being?

JB: Rug Burn? The Hip-Hop group LogHog ran into a book of my shards—Domestic Violence, I think it was. It touched a nerve. They came knocking at my door. They have a recording studio, they call it the Bomb Shelter. They got me down there, night after night, reading shards into a microphone. Later they put the beats and the licks, the music behind what I read. Presto—a CD.

MT: What about present and future plans? How much can you tell me about your book about the drug cartel without revealing too much? Are we talking about fiction or nonfiction or creative nonfiction or something else altogether?

JB: Can't say anything about the drug book, except if I pull it off, it will be epic, reaching back into the smuggling world in the late 1800s (opium, whiskey and human cargo) and lunging ahead through Prohibition and straight into the present. Epic, ambitious, different—it will go beyond Blow and Traffic. I'm dealing with people on both sides of the fence who are active in this world. There's a mild degree of danger involved, which will increase once I start making trips to some out-of-the-way places ...

Future plans? Is this the end of the interview? That's the question that always comes at the end. I don't make plans. Doors open, I walk through them—after checking for trip wires and Bouncing Betties. I've always lived on the outside, and I'm more there than ever. I'm more at ease there than ever. Prolonged illness is my biggest fear. But it's astonishing how good my health is considering how I've lived my life. Good genes, I guess. Hoka-hey, say the Sioux and the Cheyenne. A good day to die. The only mindset that leads to freedom.

MT: One more question. What was the context in which Bukowski said to you, "You've fought a harder, cleaner fight than anyone I know." What kind of fight are we talking about?

JB: It was in a letter written in the winter of 84/85. Our correspondence had picked up again after a long lull. I was living in a one-room shack north of town with my dog Sundance, a bucket and a squeegee, and a 63 Ford Econo Van that wouldn't start—winters get cold east of the Cascades, 20 below is not uncommon. I was out there in that shack sobering up from 25 years of non-stop drinking, going through a divorce, my son in prison, no money, 46 years old. I was cranking out my trilogy Survival Song on the old mimeo and living out of my steamer trunk again. Those were the circumstances, a letter was the context.

What kind of fight? I think he was referring to my entire life. Also, I'm not much for ass kissing, and I think he appreciated that. I don't network and cluster, and I didn't publish what I didn't like in Vagabond, as Bukowski well knew—I sent back a lot of his poems.

I ran Survival Song in an edition of 500 copies. It was the final installment in a series of books that broke me out of the standard poetry/short story/novel mode and set me up for shards a few years down the line. Last week a Korean publisher contacted me about translation rights—a Korean publisher, 17 years later! How the hell did they ever get hold of it? And why the hell are they interested in publishing it?

It's amazing how organic life and writing are if you hang in there, don't force things, and "follow your bliss," as Joseph Campbell used to say. Bliss is a little too bland a word for my money, but things evolve as they're meant to if you're willing to free fall off the edge of the cliff. I had someone e-mail me recently and say, "I think I'm going to start writing shards." Just like that. I wrote back and asked, "Have you paid your dues?" He didn't know what I was talking about.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2002 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002