Dave
Cope: On Poesy & Work
Interviewed by Maura Cavell
First Set: 26 October 2000
1. What would be your
definition of poetry if you had to capture all that it is to you?
I think I'd start by saying it's
what saved my life, emotionally and intellectually—those words gave me a way
out of the two-car garage whistle-while-you-work mentality that pervaded—and
still pervades—the city and suburbs where I grew up. Poetry gave me a way out of fake dreams and
an emotional firestorm that engulfed me in my family's breakup, but it also
helped me define myself, what mattered, whatever wisdoms one can gather in life
beyond the stupidities of checkbooks, TV ads, families breaking into shards
even as Ozzie & Harriet or The Life of Riley blared on, the real
soundtrack from hell with its brightly shallow illusions of heavenly suburbia.
For a formal definition, I'd start with Pound's ideas of phanopoeia, melopoeia, logopoeia—the image, the sound or rhythm, the "dance of the intellect among words" which I find most solidly explored via place, the local and the specific; and the three principles of imagism in "A Retrospect": poetry is compressed language which, in WCW's phrase, formally presents its case as an artistic object which uses no word that doesn't contribute to the presentation. I'd define the second of these, melopoeia, a bit more broadly than merely taking the music of the line—its rhythm, meter, rime, alliteration, assonance, etc.—into account; in deaf poetics, there can be no sound, yet there is the visual dance of the signs on the hands of the poet, in which sound translates into the skillful movement of the visual signs. The third of these, logopoeia, is of course quite suspect to the present-day deconstructionist rehashers, but I'd suggest that the writer who doesn't come from a specific sense of place, of events and people in his or her life, is working words as a mere intellectual game, the mind untied from the particulars of one's existence. Williams said, "go back to the people. They are the origin of every bit of life of conceivable human interest . . . if we don't cling to the warmth which breathes into a house or a poem alike from human need . . . the whole matter has nothing to hold it together."
2. Place is significant to
your poetry, and I was wondering about your
"philosophy" concerning it.
I guess I've covered that
here, though one could take Williams's notion that "the local is the only
universal" and apply that here—though I find the term
"universal" fairly suspect, I'd suggest that you can't make the
"necessary translations" until you confront the specifics of where
you are.
Part of my fascination with
place is the ways in which it opens up vision and the other senses, opens up
one's awareness of the world one has inherited, but another part is the simple
pleasure of a frosty morning with the sunlight through the leaves. Part of it is the ways in which words evoke,
however imperfectly, the gifts of the moment & the day.
3. Much of your poetry seems
to focus on city details, and then I can't say you're 100% a "city"
poet because you give equal time to nature in your own unique way. Would you
please address these observations as to how each "landscape" or
"cityscape" inspires your work?
I grew up on the cusp of
what was then the suburbs of Grand Rapids, a medium-sized provincial city in
southwestern Michigan, but I've always been very conscious of the equidistant
proximity of Detroit to the east and Chicago to the west, each roughly 140 miles
from home, each with its own attractions and repulsions—and with its own
cultural particulars. I was born in Detroit—my father's family came from
there—and it has always been my grandpa's peach trees and library, Tiger
Stadium and the Diego Rivera murals to me, as well as my father's stories of
the Grande Ballroom and the Purple Gang, the shootouts in the neighborhood
where he grew up. Chicago has been the
smog of Gary, the skyway, Toulouse Lautrec and "La Grand Jatte" and
Picasso's blue guitarist, the miles of brick neighborhoods and the inlets and
waterways with their strange copper-green water, and my own Lake Michigan like
a blue dream beyond the rush and horns of the magnificent mile. The world I
knew as a child consisted of the high forested morraines along the banks of the
Thornapple River, the miles and miles of farmland and oak and maple forests
available on all-day bike rides, seemingly endless days of canoeing. There were
also the long days and nights along the upthrust dunes of the Lake Michigan
shore, that sense of the inland sea and
the legendary echoes of the lost tribes and of Father Marquette canoeing along
the coast—the landscapes and seascapes of my world were imbued with all that,
and fired my dreams. Even today,
kayaking and going north to Sleeping Bear, to the Straits of Mackinac, to the still-unspoiled
At the same time through my
early years, my father ran a small die-casting shop downtown in the middle of
the industrial wasteland, among block after block of grimy factories, ash
piles, broken-down neighborhoods with tall sad sunflowers and smoking chevies,
duck's-ass hipsters and bobby soxers hoppin' to go, old folks sitting on porches spending their last days yakking
in Polish or German, dirty kids in diapers waddling down the sidewalks trailed
by the family dog. Some days my dad left
me in his shop while he worked a deal in the office, or took me to dinner among
burly factory workers—being the boss's kid, no doubt unaware of how they
must've seen me—yet these men treated me like "the kid," and
sometimes showed me other sides of life, as when Hank Cool, strong-armed
diecast man with a friendly grin, turned up with molten aluminum in his eye,
later miraculously getting his sight back, taking the crucifixion his job
handed him with patience and calm.
There are, of course, many other
parts to this story—after quitting school,
the early years of my marriage to Sue, in which I worked as an EDM
operator at Johnson Mold, a lugger and spray-paint set-up man at Miller Metals,
later moving to night custodial work at ghetto schools and at our local
facility for retarded and disabled kids.
I later settled in as a head custodian at a barrio school and eventually
became dock manager at
So when I got through with
my years of experimenting with verse, when I finally came to settle down to
write the poems I thought would tell my time truly, it was these landscapes and
seascapes, these city workers and ordinary folks that were my subject. It wasn't really a conscious representational
choice so much as it was just "my life."
4. As you know, work is part of the focus of this volume. While
I'm certain that poetry is your true work and calling, if you will, the subject
of your trades, doing work, is also significant to who you are; how has that
part of your life related to the whole of your development to date? --First: as
a human being; second: as a poet.
I dig working, doing four or
five jobs at once, switching back and forth between tasks to increase my
involvement and to prevent boredom, and driving myself like a dog—when I was
younger, I loved throwing my whole body into it, like a madman—I'd drive myself
to exhaustion, to the point where, at age 38, I ripped a calf muscle trying to
push a 300 pound load up a ramp. When I
switched from manual to intellectual labors after that, I found that same kinds
of work habits followed me—yet it's not obsessive in the usual sense, there's an exhilaration, a bigtime high that comes with it. As a poet, I've never subscribed to that
business of "emotion recollected in tranquillity"—poems come at any
time of day or night, the words come flashing down out
of the air in the middle of things, & I have to make room for them. There's no separation—the poem is part of the
work, the work is the life, & it all works like that for me. Despite all this going, I also value the silence at the heart of the moving, &
in fact I think one can only maintain all these levels of moving with any
equanimity if there is a stillness within, not
something one has to strive for, but something that's simply there, the rock.
5. Do you see your work
(poetry) growing and shaping itself into a vision as you matured as an adult,
or do you see it as being consistently the same? Please address this idea
according to theme, subject matter, style, or anyway you see fit.
My writing began with what
Allen Ginsberg identified as the "tradition of lucid grounded sane objectivism . . . following the visually solid practice of
Charles Reznikoff and William Carlos Williams," and while that visual
aspect—attentiveness to what Blake called "minute particulars"—has
been important to me, my books have developed as a series of experiments in
constructing interlocking
suites of poems using a variety of images as connecting motifs, continuing series
(the love poems for Sue, the "canoeing" poems, the poems for Billy,
etc.), and the use of allusions to develop intertextual matrix. I have also deliberately approached style and
technique with the idea of maximizing variety, not only continuing the objectivist
"postcard" series derivative of Reznikoff and Cendrars, but also developing Kerouacian
jazz-solo performance pieces, my own idiosyncratic variations of middle-eastern
ghazals, "weird sonnets," funky villanelles, dialect testimonies and
dramatic monologues involving voices overheard in lunch rooms & on dark
streets, free verse triads loosely based on the dantescan model, dream &
visionary poems scribbled out of sleep, spatial explorations after WCW's late
models—the open spaces signifying silences between words or syllables—and
multi-stanzaed poems set up as an Aleutian chain of stanzas—islands loosely
connected in a sea of silences,
Whitmanic prophetic rants and quietly
Berriganlike personal poems written as letters, etc.
These styles have evolved
from that initial objectivist shot—at the same time, I'd suggest that I've
grown more and more aware of how rhythms and silences in the lines function with the subject matter and
technical syle the poem develops. When
the poem succeeds, it's like a musician who, with practice, learns to play more
and more subtly, surrendering to nuance.
6. Based on
your poetry, you seem to have a deep gratitude towards friends, family, and
mentors. While this is a beautiful
way to be, I can't help but wonder if there is an under-lying philosophy behind
this goodness, or if "something" may have happened to make you behave
as all should?
I hope I've learned to be good & grateful—it's
been a long and uneven trip.
I was a complete asshole
after my dad left the family, all through my teenage years—blaming all my rages
and stupidities, gang-activities, cruelties and lashing out on my father. Yet despite the difficulties, my mother
raised me and my three siblings patiently, working almost twelve hours a day as
a kindergarten teacher, and while she herself had enormous unfinished emotional
business, she stood by me, never gave up on me.
Later, my wife Sue tried to help me let go of those rages, and when I
finally met Allen Ginsberg, his message to me was that I would never be free
until I let all that crap go and make peace with my father. Doing that set me free as much as anything
I've ever experienced—it allowed me to have my childhood back, to mend my life
and find love at the center—it was the closest thing to enlightenment that I've
ever experienced.
Secondly, my wife Sue and I
came out of a strong matrix of being socially responsible, of not simply
spouting opinions, but acting on them.
We sponsored refugee families, led anti-nuclear teach-ins, helped raise
money and awareness for AIDs victims, and have worked on numerous other social
projects—and when I retire, I hope to devote more time to those kinds of
things, when I have more time to give. I say this not out of pride or
attempting to take credit, but because these things are important to me. I've been blessed with forgiving peers,
patient parents, loyal friends, a good and gracious mentor in Allen, a lifelong
lover who has been willing to kick my ass when I've got it coming and who has
shared projects and life-affirming activities with me for thirty years, &
as old Joe Kennedy once said, much is expected of those to whom much is given.
7. Your poetry
seems to be truly American in imagery, universal in emotion, and living in the
moment or experience in its awareness. Please
express what you feel is relevant to your poetic vision in terms of these
characteristics.
American in imagery, yes,
certainly—when I was working in the factory, I read Whitman's deathbed edition
cover-to-cover for the first time (thank god, not in a classroom full of bighead analysis, but rather out among
the "roughs"), & I was struck by the importance of catching your
people in all their walks, their ecstacies and horrors, their lives as they
pass in the time one is given. Objectivist
writing practice—especially if learned from the incomparable eye of Charles
Reznikoff—trains one to catch the moment as it passes, to write almost as if
one is doing spontaneous snapshots or short films, and I guess that training
has as much to do with poems that live "in the moment" as any. Emotion:
I believe with Pound that "only emotion endures"—whether
that's universal is up to somebody else—one just tries to be true to one's own
feelings as they occur.
8. You have had some incredible
poets help shape you, it seems, as mentors. Would you please address who
influences your poetry and in which ways?
Allen Ginsberg was my
mentor—I sent him my little chapbook, Stars,
in 1975, and he wrote back, sending me a check and requesting ten more copies
to send to editors and poets. Later, he
helped me, Andy Clausen, Antler, and a host of other poets find
publication in City Lights Journal #4,
in New Directions #37, and in other
smaller magazines. By 1980, he decided
to bring us together out at Naropa Institute, and so began a series of readings
at Naropa, in
Their influences have been
continuous and subtle, not so much on my writing (which stylistically is
probably far more influenced by the poets whose works I teach every
year—primarily Shake- speare and Whitman and Williams, whom I regard as the
mother lodes of technique and style) as on my understanding of how to live with
my peers, to love their work, to appreciate their peculiar gifts and
personality quirks as the emblems of their brands of genius.
9. Do you feel that
accomplished poets have an obligation to mentor "younger" poets,
poets who are newer to their own development, and in what ways?
No obligations: you do what you do because it's right for
you, as old Wesley Holmes, King of Junk Hill, once said. But yes I've mentored some younger poets,
always with the understanding that they have to find their own way & that
any advice I give, only when asked for, should be tested. I've got a wild crowd of young women poets in
my creative writing class right now, one of whom counselled her less
self-assured peer not to listen to me—a good piece of advice for someone not
yet sure of herself. The older poet can
caution, can show some element of style, can perhaps show a good model of
kindness and compassion—but cannot show the way to visions or in any way set
limits on the youthful experimenter.
Each generation has to find its own way, and peculiarly enough does so
while connecting to and extending the works that preceded them. Make it new, old Ezra said.
10. What do you see as the
role of the poet in
I guess the role of the poet
in
Having said that, poets do
serve a role beyond the purpose of writing well. Certainly it's the pleasure
of singing well and truly, in & of itself—but it's also the comraderie of
peers and the "arab telephone of the avant garde" keeping the dream
alive, surely, but there's a more important issue. That kid is still out
there—that kid who knows there's more to life than the shit the TV hands him or
her—that kid who's screaming for some compassion somewhere, that kid who needs
a ladder out of the abyss—and if we write truly and well, the poems may be
there for him or her. That kid may learn
to sing and save herself from herself, himself from himself
and, as Bob Marley once said, pass it on.
Second Set: 3 November 2000
11. How do
language and rhythm come to you? Do you
revise for "poetics" or does the right word or phrase just leap up
for you or to you? Also, your poetry can be quite lyrical at times, nearly
narrative at times, and sometimes it is both at once. What kinds / stages of
your writing process do you deem to be significant to who you are as an artist/
craftsman?
There's no single way in
which language and rhythm come:
sometimes the words just appear, composing themselves as I get them
down. At other times, the words and the
images go so fast, or I'm in a complicated situation from which I can't
withdraw, and I simply record a phrase—once even writing on the palm of my hand
when I had no paper—and when I get home later, use the phrase to reconstruct
the lost poem. I don't plan them out or
anything like that—though at times, it's recording an event as it happens,
knowing in advance that it will be significant—as when one visits a dying
relative and needs to record whatever happens, both as a door to memory and as
a future remembrance of loves past.
Some poems become their form, as in
"Vision" in Coming Home: I'd been teaching the great Lakota visionary
revelation, Black Elk Speaks¸ and
Dylan Thomas's famous villanelle, "Do Not Go Gentle" as the Gulf War
buildup was beginning—and I woke one night with the lines "our bodies
appear as streams of light . . . shine darkly, phantoms in endless
night." As I recorded those, the
second line, "turn, sun & moon—stop voice, blind sight" came to
me, and I inserted it between the first two.
Later, I was thinking of the spotted eagle of Black Elk—the bird that
flies closest to the heavens—and the fourth and fifth lines came—and as I was
recording them, the first line came back to complete the second triad. I saw that the poem had a villanelle-like
pattern already, so I set the first and sixth lines as the 12th, and
18th, and the third line as the 9th, 15th, and
19th—and tinkered with other images to fill in the rest, keeping
idea of apocalyptic warfare prominent.
The funny thing about that poem is that it became a hodge-podge of
literary allusions—not only Black Elk, but also, in "darkling armies"
a reference to Arnold's famous "Dover Beach"; in "spheresong
bells"—a deliberate kenning invoking the music of the spheres (I'd been
reading and absorbing Dante); and in "stone rolls from pathway &
gravedoor tonight" the obvious image of the stone rolled away from
Christ's tomb, with all its implications of dark mystery and the passing of an
age. When I got the thing done, I
thought to myself, well, you can regularize all these lines and follow the form
to the letter, or you can let it go as it is and call it a "funky
villanelle," a bit irregular & content with that, as I decided it
should be.
Overall, I revise for
compression, following Pound's "use no word that doesn't contribute"
and Allen's maxim: "syntax
condensed, sound is solid." I also revise for vividness, replacing the
vague image with a key detail or minute particular, replacing the ordinary verb
for one that focuses action or heightens drama.
Finally, I sometimes revise for sound:
the Old English patterns of alliteration, assonance, caesura, and stress
are all important ground for my work,
and if I can develop a line that sounds as
it senses, after Pound's notion of
absolute rhythm, I'll do it. Most of the
really lyrical-sounding lines, however, come on their own, unplanned,
unrevised.
12: Your poems
all seem like natural speech for your speaker, anyway, yet one cannot ignore
the artistry in them (alliteration, even qualities to the lines of various
types of poems: lyrical and narrative). Sometimes, too, you write poems that
appear to be blocks of prose (prose poems), free verse that is alliterative,
yet flush left, and still, at other times, you write more concrete types of
poems that use space for meaning or sound emphasis. Does organic theory come
into your chosen forms consciously as you write or do you work on form during
revision?
The shape of a poem suggests
itself as I write, though sometimes it's a struggle. In the second verse paragraph of
"Fireworks over the Flatirons," the lines were coming in 2 syllable
groupings, heavily stressed—"dead friends— / sweet-faced / boys like /
these now / howling /—a spondee followed by four trochees; the second part of
these phrasings came in 3s—"so mangled / their caskets / were
sealed"—which slowed the recitation down, giving it a turn through the
rhythmic changeup. As I looked at the
poem, I decided to start that second stanza on the far right—across from the
foundation first stanza, as contrast—and work my way back to the margin; I'd
then work out from the margin right at the crossing point of the 2 and 3
syllable groupings. It took a little
playing with the tab key, but the poem was complete pretty quickly.
On the other hand, the rant
"Back Thru the Veil" came fast, just as it is. I simply moved a few words from line to line
in order to create some vague impression of regularity in the lines while
looking to end each line on a word that would emphasize some sense of
off-balanced grasping for something,
which is what was going on in the poem.
Poems like "Audubon in Fog" in Coming Home or "push off" in Silences both use "space for meaning"—they are poems of
wide-open spaces, a mountain top and a river in snowstorm—and I wanted to capture
that sense of the silences between syllables, of the open-ended perception
derived from those kinds of experiences.
So, yes, organic theory
definitely comes into my chosen forms, but I'd insist that the selection
process is also organic: as the poem
comes together, the form finds itself, suggests itself in the peculiar
relations of subject, sound, and even sometimes the conditions of
notation.
13. In a poem
such as "leaving classes," in Silences
for Love, there is an acknowledgement of the past visiting on the speaker's
present life, an acceptance of the younger version of the speaker, an
appreciation for the speaker's wife and children, and even a longing for that
careless life of yesterday. While some writers must reconcile parts of
themselves in terms of where they have been or huge events, it seems to me that
what you struggle to reconcile in your poems is your inner landscape and
events. Would you comment on the idea of recon-ciliation in this poem and on
your work as a whole; also, in the silence where the accep-tance comes into
play?
This particular poem, of
course, centers around the fact that "the surgeon found no cancer in the
lesion on my lip." The images that open the poem—the "nubile women
& young men," my kids in their "aimless play," the long
journey to love with Sue—are all images of Time and the stages of life—I was,
quite naturally, concerned with my own death, and like one who'd received a
reprieve from the death sentence of cancer, these scenes from the morning
classroom and from my memory had suddenly earned an intense poignancy. The images the follow the thankful center
recall my own misspent youth, the deliberate throwing away of all those
tomorrows "for kicks," especially involving the kinds of behavior
that could've caused the lesion on my lip—heavy smoking, drug use, alcohol,
"pouring whatever came to hand down my throat," and all that
"burning for that lost high," that attempt to recover the lost
innocence of youth when trapped in that anger stemming from my father's leaving
the family. So the poem's balanced on
the fulcrum of freedom from cancer, with the current poignant images on one
side, the carelessness of my own childhood on the other. I don't know that it necessarily attempts to
reconcile these, but rather follows the thoughts passing through my own mind on
the drive home after learning that indeed I was not in immediate danger: I think resonance
is the key, with its multiple poignancies and ironies (the fact that others—the
kids in my classes, my own kids—will have to face that day when one sees death
as a distinct possibility), and the ironies, for myself, that I had been a
prodigal son, tossing away what now seems so precious. The poem's ultimately a poem of Time, what
Shakespeare calls the "common arbitrator," and about the passages of
life.
14. What
imagery that you find you go back to has taken on symbolic meaning?
I'd hesitate to assign a
symbolic meaning to any image: if, as
the Hindu proverb goes, "a work of art has many faces," so too does
an image. Some images seem almost invested with symbolic or emblematic
resonances—bird images, mountains, seas, etc.—but they're also birds and
mountains—Charles Reznikoff liked to recall the old proverb, "sometimes a
fly is just a fly," and I think it's important to keep that in mind, as
regards my work. In Silences, the images of bones, winds, and the repeated characters
of the sailors, the lovers, and the one-eyed boy or man pop up throughout the
book. Some were quite deliberately
placed to resonate against the others when a poem could accommodate that
particular image (as in the case of the one-eyed boy or man, an image derived
from the mysterious appearances of Odin-in-disguise to warn heroes in the
various Norse sagas—an image I chose not for its symbolic meaning, though many
would see it as such, but rather because I liked that sense of mystery and presence at a moment when the narrator
or the poem's central character is vulnerable and open). Others just cropped up and became part of a matrix
as the book developed—the paean to MLK, for example, begins with the line
involving "the flesh made word that bones may walk," a conflation of
the Xtian notion of Christ being "the word made flesh" (with the
implicit conceit that Martin made the flesh word,
gave the situation its definition) with God's question to Ezekiel, "shall
these bones live?" All the other
bone imagery in the book sort of plays with those notions, just as the wind
imagery leads to and culminates in the whirlwind image from Job in "Deeper into the
Mountain." Those patterns weren't
planned out: the images kept cropping
up, and eventually the way to fix the
resonances appeared to me in a poem which I had to wait for. The point here, though, is not to develop symbols so much as to create resonances.
15. If not
poetry, what art, if any would have put you in touch with your
"life"?
Poetry gave me the outlet to
express my inner self, but painting also gave me a centering device. As spectator, audience, receptor, I found
many arts "tuned me in"—though perhaps in more basic ways than in the
ladder of self-expression. My debts to
the various arts range from Royal Shakespeare Company stage performances or the
industrial wasteland set and exquisite thunder of a Rolling Stones concert, to
the quiet moments sitting before Robert Hayden's favorite painting, Monet's Waterlilies.
All of these taught me attentiveness to the details of presentation
or the use of rhythms, ranging from an actor's playing a Shakespeare line like
a jazz riff to learning time-keeping through mimicry of Charlie Watts's snare
and cymbals, beating time with my hands on my thighs. Mick Jagger's and Janis Joplin's stretching
and snapping of syllables taught me how a word can march, slide, leap, or snap,
depending on vocal modulation and emotive purpose: these singers also taught me the colors of syllables, the blues and
greens and yellows and reds implicit in tonalities as, obviously, in a line
like "no more will my green sea go turn a deeper blue," but also in
the deep blue echoing
"baw-aw-awl-ah-awl" in the finale of Janis's rendition of Big Mama's
"Ball and Chain." One can see
similar kinds of tonalities in Shakespeare, as in "within his bending
sickle's compass come," or in "strike flat the thick rotundity of the
world," where the combinations of
stress and sound hiss or slam and roll, implying variations of syllabic usage
and certain kinds of tonal coloring.
On the other hand, the
wordless ecstasies, despairs, flights and runs of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring or Beethoven's choral
symphony, the harmonies played in invisible clouds far above the human
wilderness in Bach's Brandenburg
Concertos left me, and leave me, with whole tales, scenes and worlds and
people living out their lives in sorrow or love or wistfulness or ruin,
conceived so deeply that one merely emotes without pinpointing
specificities: that too is training for
a life in the arts, in the wonder and the majesty of the conceptions, in the
dreamlike suggestions of images that may be
contained in the form and conception.
Finally, my first trip to
MOMA gave me, in quick succession, the enormous agony of black & grey &
white in Picasso's gigantic Guernica—a
painting no longer there, alas, but perhaps serving a deeper purpose in
Spain—and the side-by-side strange pleasures of Van Gogh's Starry Night and Salvador
Dali's The Persistence of Memory. The details of presentation are, in
their own way, very much like the details in the poem, whether in the
incredible lights on the deep night waves of the Thames in Turner's Burning of the Houses of Parliament at
the Cleveland Museum, or in the hollow gaze of Toulouse Lautrec's prostitutes
at the Chicago Art Institute, or the moody light and shadow of El Greco's View of Toledo. Attentiveness is the key, and it's all in
the details—whether of tonalities, rhythms, or the visualized minute
particulars.
One should, of course, train
all the senses—to avoid the tyranny of the eyeball, and to coordinate the eye
and the ear and, when the poem becomes a dance, with the whole body in motion.
16. Who in
your family or what in your young life before or after the break up of your
family helped shape you into a poet, an artist? When did you first want to
write? Were other creative outlets available?
Well, my grandfather turned
me on to books quite early, though his interest was in histories, factual
narratives, and science. I first learned
the power of words as poetry in a
second grade presbyterian Sunday school, where I had to memorize the 23rd
and 100th psalms, and in a "favorite poems" book, where I
remember being puzzled, quite early, by the contrary pictures presented by
William Blake's "Spring" and "London." During my early years, I wrote, edited, and
published a neighborhood newspaper featuring stories about my friends and the
goings-on at their houses, and I tried my hand at writing fantasy stories based
on Greek myths or stories dreamed from the events talked about in history
classes, but it really wasn't until after my dad left that poetry "grabbed
me" and gave me a love of words as a world "they" couldn't
touch, a channel to my inner heart. This
started around 9th grade, when I devoured all the Hemingway books I
could find (many of his short stories grew out of the Michigan I knew intimately
as my own land, and The Old Man and the
Sea gave me a hero unlike the Odysseus or Julius Caesar of English class),
and two friends turned me on to Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac.
We were all a bunch of bad
boys from broken homes, getting in all kinds of trouble which today no doubt
would put me on some list of potentially dangerous students—but Todd's older
brother had shown him "Fern Hill," and Greenhole, the straight A
student who hitch-hiked to New York, California, and points south each summer,
brought back stories of gay bars and hopping freights, and along with those
tales of his own, On the Road. "Fern Hill" was a poem we sang
as we first met the Creature in all its alcoholic splendor and nausea—"it
was all shining, it was Adam and maiden," and the "round synagogue of
the ear of corn" and "though I sang in my chains like the sea"
all peculiarly a propos for a group of boys hiding out in cabins and singing in
the light of the forested window as the bottles clinked and the fire
roared. Yet On the Road led us downtown, hitch-hiking or roaring into town in a
dilapidated Ford to investigate the beats, and from there I met Allen
Ginsberg's poems—and the die was cast.
By my senior year, I was reading Pound and Eliot, memorized 35 lines of
Chaucer's prologue for an English class and recited it with an accent borrowed
from my French studies, and had already devoured my first poems by Rimbaud and
Baudelaire.
17. You say
Sue and Allen helped set you on a positive path to get away from your anger,
but something in you was waiting for permission to get past it and get beyond
it. Would you please reflect on what that was?
You have to reach a stage in
your life where you become receptive to changing yourself—you have to be so
miserable that you're ready to listen, and the people talking to you have to
bring a level of love and trust that you can't deny. I was tired of hating—hating my dad for
leaving the family, hating the society I lived in for the hollowness of a freedom
based on killing and being killed and being proud
of it, all while spouting platitudes formed in hypocritical Sunday
saintliness, hating a job that was killing me day-by-day, hating the way my
life was closing in around me. Sue
wouldn't back off when I was in one of my funks, forced me to see that, unlike
hers, my father was still alive and I could
get him back, no matter how rotten the world we'd inherited would prove to
be; and Allen came to the National Poetry Festival and opened me up with a
simple phrase: "you'll never be
free until you let go of your anger."
Sue and I were also lucky
enough, at that conference, to walk out to the midsummer solstice bonfires with
George and Mary Oppen—to hear Mary Oppen tell the stories of their own youthful
love, taking off for
That was also the conference
where I first understood the meaning of poetic lineage, of the relations of the
generations. When Charles Reznikoff,
George Oppen, and Carl Rakosi—who were together for the first time in
thirty-some years—took the stage for a discussion of objectivism, Allen and
Robert Duncan sat at the front of the students—and like prize students,
peppered the three sages with questions, treating them with the reverence that
was their due. For the first time in
years, I opened myself to the meaning of honoring elders, of learning from
them.
Through my own experiences
with family break-up and with the Vietnam conflict, I'd been cut off from
myself and from so many people that really mattered in my life, and here in one
conference were the keys to reestablishing those connections, all wrapped in the love borne of poems.
18. When Sue,
I am assuming, is sick in "all night," all you can do is offer calm.
Given that you are normally a man who does not hold still, who acts, how do you
manage when the need of a loved one cannot be met through action?
As with most males, that's a
lesson that usually must be learned over and over: whether it's inherent nature or social
programming, most men are wired to "do," to act, problem-solve, plan
and demarcate, to mark boundaries and establish control—and perhaps, among the
most important lessons of a long love relationship, is that such a one must
learn that love sometimes involves listening
more than doing, and on occasion,
stopping the world and simply being in the beloved's presence, reassuring
simply by sharing time in silence. The
funny thing is that, just when I think I've learned that lesson, I do something
stupid and have to learn it again. An
early poem, "The Hard Truth," (page 86 of Quiet Lives) announces the theme for the first time in my work, and
"all night" is the latest reverberation of it—one can follow that
theme through many of the poems dealing with gender throughout the five books.
19. As you mentioned, you organize your works
into series and suites. One of your series in Silences for Love is family, which includes tender, yet honest and
not overly nor overtly sentimental poems. Would you please address how these lovely
family poems here and elsewhere fit into the overall larger process of the
books? Also, how does family, both as poetic subject and as real human beings
who live and grow with you in your relationships as a dad and husband, fit into
your larger poetic and life vision(s)?
Further, besides Sue and the three children, Jim and Allen seem to be
your closest family. Please comment on
their presence as a kind of extended family as well.
One facet of what I've tried
to do is to create many series, poems
running along the same themes or lines through all the books, a continuity
practice, but also because each forms a separate "story" in the
larger story of the books. If the suites—the
subtitled sections of each book—form the continuity of a single time frame (all
the poems that grow from a specific period in my life, with their jostling
themes and collective collage-like quality), the varying series make up the
transcendent mode—each poem a part of a suite, but also transcending it for the
series to which it belongs.
The series you mentioned,
family, Sue and our 3 kids & two miscarriages, lost kids—I recorded all
three of their births in the books, Anne, now 25, is the child in
"Birth," p. 18 of QL; one
of the miscarriages is on p. 48 of same; in Fragments,
Sue's pregnancy with Jane, now 13, is subject of "Sky Spread Out with
Stars," and Jane's birth follows in "Jane Marie," p 14 and 24;
similarly, the birth of William, now 11, is in "Will" (p. 100 of Fragments)—this poem recorded literally
on a napkin alongside birth table 15 minutes after he was born; Anne at age 14
appears in "July," page 114 of Fragments.
Anne turns up again in "Catching Nothing," page 102 ff in Coming Home—as a teenager, she'd go
camping & canoeing with my brother & me up on White River and Big
Manistee River in April, when we have to "get out." In Silences, Will turns up in "July
Dusk"—the man & boy are the two of us.
The poems for Sue make up a
much larger series, probably too big to document here. The key point, though, is that if I am to
tell my story truly, whatever wisdom I have learned must be placed in the
context of my family and love relationships:
if love is the center, then in some ways Sue and the kids must be in the
center, as the long and dear friendships such as those with Allen and Jim must
be in the center—as foundation. All else
builds from that, and if that is clear, if that is love, the rest will take
care of itself.
20. Sometimes—frequently, even, you have a pattern
in your poetry of two forces set in direct opposition to one another. It is
quite powerful in your poems. There are weddings opposing funerals and death; a
bum who once was a baby crying for love ("Sunday Morn-ing"); the
theme of young and old; a mother amid war gently soothing the wrappings on her
dead child as she once did, perhaps, with the living child in its blanket; the
young you versus the adult you; talkers versus doers ("Words"); and
this is where the tension comes from, and is it where acceptance comes from,
too? Or is there no way to resolve such tensions?
It's a habit of mind that
began quite early, probably around 7 or 8 years old—as noted earlier, in my
first encounter with Blake's "Spring" and
"
21. Why does work on the
sea, not just the sea, but the life of human beings acting on the sea call you
back to it so frequently?
The images of the sea and
the river are both part of living in
Sometimes the poems place a
night's experience and my own current states of mind against historical and
legendary sites, as in "The Mirror of Heaven," which plays off on the
Ojibway love legend of Kitchitikipi Spring and the historical fact of shipwreck
at Seul Choix on
Beyond all that, there is
some archetypal attraction to water:
consider how much literature and dream signs involve travel by water as
a basic motif that resonates deeply in the consciousness. Carl Jung, if I recall correctly, interpreted
entering the water as a sign of moving into the deeper regions of
consciousness, and Freud of course found in it sexual imagery. The resonances are multiple, from the travels
of Odysseus and the prophecy that he would die on a sea journey, the many water
journeys of Shakespeare's plays, Walt Whitman's "Passage to India"
and his uncle's farewell in "Old Salt Kossabone," Emily Dickinson's
sexual rite of passage in which the Tide "went past my simple Shoe—And
past my Apron—and my Belt and past my Bodice—too." In her poem, the Tide becomes the Sea, which
only withdraws when she returns to the "solid town"—as though that
openness to experience is synonymous with a move from the solid to the
liquid. Whitman, too, has a similar
image in "Song of Myself, where the young woman can't join the 28 young
men down at the sea—though she's prohibited by her social class and her sex
from joining their naked play, in imagination she does join them: the sea is the locus wherein all are
joined.
22. Home means
something unique to us all. Coming Home
is the title of one of your books. What is the significance of home to you? Is it
where Sue is? Is it the others to whom your books are dedicated? Are they your
landscape, your home? Is it poetry? Is it the silence within as you move? Is it
all of these? Something else?
Coming Home is coming home from the
career ambitions of poetry, but it's also coming home to the realities of the
Gulf War—it's the soldier coming home—but it's also the massive sign in the downtown heart, in my case
Alexander Calder's masterpiece, "La Grand Vitesse," with all its
spiritual and erotic resonances among business people too trapped in their
money dreams to step free of the dollar signs that mark their souls, festival
promoters unwilling to confront the honesty of poetic art, patriotic Americans
obscuring their own history, whether the yellow ribbon intent on our losses while ignoring others, or the
murder or the long-dead Anishnabes whose shades stir invisibly among us. Coming
Home is also coming home to Sue, coming home to find one has to stop the world, that one's dreams must bend "where dreams strut
in flesh . . . & nothing sings its silent roar." There's of course more, as Williams said,
but if a work of art has many faces, home itself must resonate in many
ways: one searches for the complexities
of the motif and lets the pieces fall where they may.
23. Historical allusions come up frequently in
your poetry--are they symbolic, or is history important to some of your poetry
in the same way that personal history is?
History is always personal,
for it involves the lives of real people, ancestors if you will, often on a
massive scale. It's everything from the
lives lived on the soil where I now live, the shades of their hopes and
heartbreaks still present with me, to the ways in which we blind ourselves to
it, the ironies of passage, as in Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts,"
wherein the ploughman and those on the ship don't even see the boy falling from
the sky, too caught up in work and the goal—"somewhere to get to."
Among my poems, "Antietam" is perhaps the most obvious example—all
that blood and sacrifice, 23,000 men in one day, reduced to curved walkways and
painted cannons, the odd sense of even the landscape lulling one to sleep, in
the bees in the corn tassles and the rippling of the lazy river, the odd
comment of the old man leaning on his cane and the distant vista of farmers
spreading insecticide to kill insects on a massive scale: warfare, killing on a massive scale, which is
simultaneously a "beautiful vista."
The key is resonance, not symbol: the images jostle to create emotive openings,
not intellectualized connections. Again,
I'd caution against "symbolizing" it—there's something inherent in
symbolism that removes it from its emotive, imaginative, breathing core,
transforming it into a hardened motif that merely resonates intellectually,
inelastic and deadened.
24. What does
it mean to you to be a responsible father to a daughter? I know you have two
daughters and a son, but your own abandonment by a father, not having the best
model, somehow makes it even more fascinating to note that you allow Jane to
have space of her own in which to observe bees buzzing about, that you give her
room to really be a child and explore her world in "For Fin and
George." It seems acutely sensitive to me––your
watching her figure out nature. Was this conscious? Was it hard to let her
explore and maybe worry that she'd be stung, even though you could have quickly
removed her from the area?
Being a father reawakened in
me, right from the birth of my first, Anne, the unhesitating fascination that
children have with the new world they've been given, the sense of the
marvellous which so many adults have utterly killed in themselves. My relationship to my daughters and son are
all very different, as different they are from each other. I am intensely involved in their journeys not
as participant, but as a conscious guide, allowing them to make their own
discoveries while at the same time reserving the "stern father"
persona for times when they need correction.
The key is to enable them without creating a codependent parenting
style—by which I mean those parents who seem to think that their role is merely
to give, give, give, and to negotiate everything with their children. Some child behaviors are simply wrong—and one
corrects them without offering candy.
As for the resonances with
my own father, part of my journey involved realizing that he didn't abandon me, that his own ordinary
human failings left him with a terrible choice, and he made the best of it—a
motif central to works like Carlos Castaneda's Journey to Ixtlan, in which one must overcome all the excuses one
makes for not forgiving one's parent for ordinary weaknesses. All during my angry teenage years, he
faithfully tried to reach out to me whenever his visitation times came, and
suffered rejection after rejection; despite that fact, he and his second wife
did teach me how to run a household, how to gracefully accept rebuffs from
their loved ones while maintaining a constant love that would eventually reach
us. Giving up my anger and getting him back
was, as noted earlier, the closest thing to spiritual liberation that I've ever
experienced—and the passage, both my own and his, has given me the model for my
own version of how to love my child:
acknowledge your own frailties, let them have their feelings, and never
give up on them.
25. The raven, the leaping bass, rippling wind through a
construction worker's shirt--nature is life and movement and work for human
beings, too, yet these are peaceful as noise creeps in, noise of the trucks and
drivers. Is this the material world clashing with nature/ time and money versus
cold rain? Yet these are beautiful or common images. Then there are war images,
idiotic politicians who let ill-equipped doctors treat children, amputate their
legs. And, again, are you longing to ask for the vision or reconciliation that
brings beauty or the general motion of life together with such ugliness, or is
it all just the mess of the world coming into the psyche of the poet?
It's the dance of
Shiva. Allen's old guide, Chogyam
Trungpa, pointed out that the ground of all liberation is the recognition of
the world as it is, without the blinders we use to try to reconcile what often
cannot be simply reconciled: it is not
merely acceptance, either, for one works to bring love or awareness into the
world, which implies some dissatisfaction with things as they are. The question is whether we carry the burden
lightly and learn to dance with it, or whether we let it define us, bog us down
in ten thousand emotions that could drown us in our own rage. The poem works two ways in this: as in the best blues, you've got to let it
out to be free of it, but in letting it out you also give it definition and form
which allows you to examine how it works on you. That model becomes the rungs of the ladder to
move through the horrors and pleasures with equanimity and insight.
26. Sometimes
your poetry takes the path of sorrow or joy or a path between such states. You
seem to get deep into an experience and then connect it to another experience,
the two or more experiences somehow operating as an equation, adding up to
truth, exposing a secret we already knew...but didn't see in that way then. I
wonder if you have thought about this, yet another pattern,
that you seem to employ frequently?
Initially, the pattern is
simply that juxtaposition which Pound learned from Fenollosa. Two signifiers, placed side by side, create a
third signification which is found in the relation of the one to the other. You can see it most simply in Allen's
"hydrogen jukebox" or in Walt Whitman's "Old Salt Kossabone" In Allen's
simple image matrix, he welds two opposing images together—the atmospheric
hydrogen bomb tests and the soda shop jukebox where teenagers met each other to
flirt after school—creating an intensely ironic resonance between that image of
"death, destroyer of worlds" and the innocent courting ritual of
teenagers. Whitman's late poem
juxtaposes the aged sailor watching the ship that can't get out of the harbor,
both breaking free at sunset—the ship on its way into the open ocean, the old
salt leaving for his journey to the next life.
In my poems, I've employed this as one of many strategies to create
resonances.
27. How has your poetry helped to heal you? Are the Silences
part of that healing process, a place where perhaps acceptance comes into play?
Silence is the space wherein
the sign comes into play. One must find
the silence before the sign—the poem, the song, the artistic whole—can properly
signify, both through the artist and the audience. It is also that meditative state, samadhi, in which one opens to
experience and really lives it: so it's
a prerequisite for that clarity and awareness which can function through all
the complexities, pressures, hollow sounds reverberating throughout the
world. If one can work toward recovering
that silence, there is a point where one's own emotional and spiritual states
become disclosed, and then one can work with them if there is aspiration to do
so. But it's a long journey,
there is no set path, and no sureness of destination: one has to find one's way and read the signs.
Third Set: 10-13 November 2000
28. What are your writing habits concerning poetry? Do you write
every day? Do you designate a certain time of day?
I write two to three hours
every day, but not poetry—most of my time is spent with correspondence: I maintain a continuous dialogue with several
very close friends, ranging from the daily (and sometimes three to four times
daily) exchanges with Jim Cohn, to the ongoing friendly arguments I have with
my old professor, Edward "Mike" Jayne III, who's spending his
emeritus years writing a history of atheism and skepticism in the west,
detailing the various thinkers and their arguments and lineages, but also
exploring the various ways in which religion has acted to stifle and censor
free thought. Because I know a great
deal about medieval and renaissance literature and thought and about
multicultural literature, he has used me as a sounding-board for his writings
in those areas—and while we disagree about an enormous number of things, that
disagreement is unfailingly cordial—I love a good fight with words, and Mike
gives me a hell of a good argument, forcing me to clarify and refine my own
positions in the process .
I also correspond with quite
a number of poets and editors pretty regularly—those 3-4 page
"catching-up" letters, but also all the vagaries of lives, careers,
publishing.
Beyond that, I do a lot of
work on my Shakespeare Project website each week. I'm currently in the process of entering
text—adding currently out-of-print Elizabethan and Jacobean prose works to the
website for my Shakespeare students (at this point, excerpts from Thomas
Putten-ham's superb1585 poetics book, The Art of English Poesie,
Thomas Dekker's famous 1604 plague pamphlet, The Wonderful Year, and his 1609 send-up of fops and dandies, The Gull's Hornbook). I'm hoping to add several
selections from puritan tracts such as The
Anatomie of Abuses by Philip Stubbes—a pamphlet attacking poets and dramatists
for immorality-—and several counterblasts from the poets themselves, as well as
prose pieces from Hakluyt and the travellers.
Beyond that, I spend one hour each week searching libraries for new
Shakespeare and renaissance drama literary criticism—books to add to the
bibliographic section of the site—and have added sections involving interviews
with teachers on teaching Shakespeare, and usually update the two course notes
files every few months.
So as to poetry, it comes
when it will, "when the stars align" or when I've had an experience
that seems profound, requiring definition and clarification—when something
happens to send me to the computer with a "headful of ideas . . . driving
me insane." My daily writing
practices may be compared to practicing the playing of words—the poetry, when
it comes, is the performance, the proof, the real heated thing spinning out of
control and requiring the subtlest and gentlest of curbing to draw it into a
form, still flashing and flaming up.
29. Would you
comment on your references to certain motifs—war imagery—stumps, gauze, fighter
pilots,
War—its psychological and
physical effects, the way it resonates on the land, around break tables, in the
memories of its survivors—forms three major series in my books, probably
because as a child of the Cold War I've spent much of my life hearing the
testimonies of veterans, whose eyes betray the cold knowledge of Hell itself and the inability to fully communicate it
despite the nature of the tales they tell, and which many feel compelled to
tell and retell, if only to get it out for a time; but also for myself—because
I grew up during the Vietnam War, lost dear friends both to death and to the
wounds of psychological alienation, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and was
there as the other half of my generation tore itself to pieces trying to stop
that war.
One does not retell such
stories idly or for some vicarious kick or sense of sympathy. I believe that a nation and its people are
marked, are changed, must confront their history—that
a nation's wars are the prime locus of that confrontation. Hemingway once said that though it is
difficult to write about truly, war is a peculiar gift to the writer, because
so much of what it is to be human is most fully exposed in the stress and shock
of that horror, and so in some sense if my task as a poet is, as I have stated,
to tell my time truly and to reflect that central humanist theme of ecce homo in the late twentieth century,
then my responsibility with regard to the wars of our time is clear: for here it is that the darkness of our
nature and, peculiarly, the great light of love and compassion come most fully
into play. Further, though there are
strident poems in the various collections—particularly as regards the
pronouncements of leaders and generals, whose agendas so often represent
patriotic claptrap while deflecting their audiences from the facts of what they
are doing—I have generally tried to get at the psychology of its victims, not
only the refugees, but also the killers themselves, the soldiers whose minds
echo and re-echo the horrors they've experienced, usually for their entire
lives following the war experiences.
Those tales must be told, if
only to understand how one survives, if only to inform later generations of the
ground whereon they walk and the sacrifices of their elders. Yet I doubt the old line that "those who
are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it"; I believe knowing
the past will not prevent future
wars, that under certain conditions wars are going to happen and that in the
clash of opposing materialist claims—simple human greed elevated to a national
obsession through ethnic and racial prejudices, religious and political ideologies—humans
seem condemned to butcher each other, despite our clarity of memory and our
highest aspirations. But one must have
some idea of what has gone before, what one may accept and what one may not,
recall compassion and prevent war if possible—and perhaps writing about it
serves that purpose.
The three series of war
poems involves (a) testimonies of surviving warriors and my and Sue's own
personal losses, beginning with the men around the break table in
"Peace" and the death of my childhood friend Chris Clay in "The
First Death," continuing through "At Flanagan's" and "Party
Talk," "Midwinter Cleanup," the memento of Sue's father in
"Sky Spread Out with Stars," break table talk in "Trapped in a
Ravine," the bright boy of "All That You Can Be, "the massacre
of innocents in "The Gist of His Command," the horrors of the
Tiananmen Square massacre in the final suite of Fragments, through the two suites involving the Gulf War, the
horrors of El Salvador in "El Mozote" in Coming Home and "The Job" in Silences. These poems record
the events recalled by veterans and their psychological effects, or my own
perceptions of the unfolding horrors.
(b) The poems of refugees and victims, tracking the Vietnamese family Sue and
I sponsored—their initial amazement in this new American world, their
recollections of their homeland and their adjustments to a new life; as well as
the refugees of "Strafing in El Salvador," the young woman in Gaza in
"Hot Coals Burning on Your Tongue," the Kurdish woman in
"Words," the horrors of the recent wars in Yugoslavia in
"Sarajevo Market Massacre" and "The Detail," where even
non-participants were faced with impossible questions. (c) Battlefield visits and the ghosts of the
dead, as in "Antietam" or "Devil's Den" or "In the Iao
Valley"—through my own perceptions of walking on the ground where so much
horror happened, so briefly, meeting the ghosts of the fallen who, I swear, are
still there, and musing on the spirit of America and of our human nature on the
ground of their sacrifice.
30. A work
ethic moves behind and through "Killings to be made in Soybean
Futures." What are your feelings or philosophies behind this poem and
others as far as work is concerned?
As regards work, I tend to follow the buddhist precepts named in their eightfold path—that all work is honorable as long as one does not engage in harmful labors—work which is environ-mentally irresponsible or denigrates sentient beings. Yet there are agonies borne of scarcity, alienations both in the sense of the investor or the power broker whose decisions are so removed from the actual conditions of labor that they either don't see or don't care that another may be suffering from those decisions, as well as the alienation and social disruptions leading to self-destructive mental states on the parts of the workers—and that is what this poem and others like it deal with.
So "Killings to be
made" and "Trucker's Story," as well as more recent poems like
"Sirens & flashing lights stop" or "He took a long pull on
the stout," all deal with the ways in which economic scarcity distorts and
twists the worker's psychology.
"Killings" is a modern day dustbowl ballad in the vein of
Woodie Guthrie—the effects of drought on a Kansas farm in 1980, in which the
old timer wistfully recalls a life devoted to the land, seeing "the last
time he'll cultivate these rows" as an exercise in futility, and realizing
that for others the conditions are much worse—"families packing up"
and "men out behind their barns staring into their own shotgun barrels." The title of the poem both contrasts with and
confirms the subject: those investors in the markets see "killings"
in one way, while the guy behind his barn sees it entirely differently.
"Trucker's Story"
and "Sirens & flashing lights stop," on the other hand, are tales
of how scarcity can make workers turn on each other over what work there is,
the latter poem exploring both the rage of strikers being tossed into police
wagons and the strange ironies that scabs live with, subverting other workers and
accepting a job after years of being jobless or "scrambling as burger
clerks, errand boys, part-timers & sweepers" merely to "pay the
rising rent & fill the hungry mouths."
In "Sirens," I was far less concerned with taking sides than
with detailing the ways in which workers in need are divided against each other
by the powers-that-be—how human lives are commodified, the minds alienated
through the manipulation of their common need for bread and shelter.
Finally, "He took a
long pull" is a testimony from the Upper Peninsula, an area long depressed
economically—the governor had closed down the local mental hospital, forcing
locals to choose between caring for their mentally ill family members at home,
or relinquishing them to a hospital 300 miles away, a difficult choice because
that long drive not only imposed economic hardships and the problem of making
time for such visits, but also because the former mental hospital had been
converted into a prison right in the middle of town—what for some seemed an
economic boom, an opportunity. The local
boy in the poem testifies about these events, recording his anger at the change in his town as well as
his feelings of helplessness at the governor's decisions—again, the decisions
of the powerful, justified through their own ideological or economic agendas
and insulated from the effects of their self-righteous decisions, reverberate
in other ways among ordinary folks, some of whom don't care about anything but
getting the job, while others are enraged by the upsetting of their lives.
The point of such poems is
to develop meditations on the problems of power and the lack thereof, not to
merely vent but to understand the brittleness, the rage, the ironies of
political agendas and the psychological stresses that come from the perceived
lack of empowerment. Our local paper, in
reviewing Silences, completely missed
the point of "He took a pull," probably because the reviewer saw it
merely as an attack on the governor, a rant—which of course it was, if all a
reader perceives is the speaker's point of view, confusing the speaker with the
example he presents—yet his testimony captured so much more.
There are, of course, many working poems and poems of the
street and of tough neighborhoods all through the five books, ranging from
observations of life from my own various apartments before getting my house to
lives and testimonies from my years as a ghetto and barrio custodian or from my
years of weekend apartment cleaning, making enough money to pay my own rent,
for slumlords.
31. Does being
a father of three mean you have three distinctive roles as father? How does
your role of father, creator or nurturer, relate to your role as a poet? What
will you share about the poems dealing with their births?
As a father, I fill many
roles, not only guide but fierce lord, chauffeur, servant and clean-up man,
tease, teacher, friend, protector, sounding-board, and so on. There are some distinctly different roles for
each child, in the sense of nurturing their interests and curbing their
excesses, but in the main they've taught me a lot about the various motivating
factors for achievement and in guiding them through the storms of youth towards
that calm and perspective necessary for maturity.
The poems of birth are each
quite unique, stylistically and otherwise.
The first two poems trace events chronologically, the first a long-lined
open verse piece tracking of Sue's labor and my own reactions as the helpless
expectant father, the second a short-lined Creeleyesque poem tracking the
C-section itself, again attentive to Sue's reactions as seen through my
eyes. The third poem departs from
realistic description, exploring parental hopes for the newborn with a variety
of stylistic techniques.
Anne's poem,
"Birth," is a blow-by-blow account of Sue's long labor, my inability
to calm her and exhaustion, with the final blow coming to us after seventeen
hours of labor, the doctors deciding to do a caesarian section—which, during
that time (1975), still forced the husband out of the birthing room. We had gone into the experience confident
that we'd weather it well, believing in the rosy natural birth testimonies of Our Bodies, Our Selves without really
considering how much could go wrong, how close birth and death are, "doors
into new worlds." The poem is an
agony and triumph, but it's also a learning curve.
The birth in "Jane
Marie," on the other hand, was pre-planned as a C-section. I'd already expanded on the "doors into
new worlds" theme with "Sky Spread Out with Stars," a poem that
really is a meditation not only on the mystery of birth, but also of the
parent's inability to see how the child might grow, what horrors and ecstasies
she might face, expanding at last to consider the whole sweep of history, in
which dead voices echo "yet as babes in the hollow chamber of the
attentive ear." The actual birth
poem is restricted to the last hour before Jane was born: it too is a blow-by-blow description, but is
limited to that part of the birthing process from which I was excluded with
Anne's birth. It's more formally
constructed, too, set up in short-line Creeleyesque triads, each line
presenting one image or action, slowing the reader down to build the picture
very slowly, step-by-step, as the surgery actually happens.
"Will" was, as
noted earlier, inscribed on a napkin alongside the birth table, at a stage when
Sue was utterly exhausted from the effort, I relieved that she'd gotten through
it with a kid to show for it. Willie's
birth was also a planned C-section. The
image of the opening door, from "Birth," came back into the matrix
here—it was not a planned image, but perhaps reflects the way I'm wired in a
similar situation. Yet this poem is
quite different from the others: first
of all, it's an apostrophe directly to my son, but it also reflects a much
stronger sense of phrasing than the earlier poems, both in the repetitions of
"come / comes" and "suffered," and in the sense of passage (not only birth, but the
passages of life itself) which "isn't simple" and involves "no
promises." Later in the poem,
listing the various stages of life ("child, young man, hard laborer, sage,
old fool") reflects my current reading of that time—specifically Jaques'
famous "seven ages of man" speech in As You Like It, which I condensed here for my own purposes. The poem is also marked by its puns on Will's
name, a practice employed to quite different effect in Shakespeare's sonnets
135 and 136: here, the will which can
become willful if one doesn't "will to make it well," with the final
advice to "freely bend your will":
let your freedom of will lead you, but also foresee the need to bend
your will to the circumstances your life will give you.
I can't account for the
variations in style and substance with the three poems: I spoke with the voice that seemed natural to
each situation, and the poems came out reflecting as much on the speaker/father
and, to a less clearly perceived extent, the mother, as on the child
her/himself. I had at one point thought
that Sue should be more in the center of the poem—no one experienced the birth
as she did, and I was literally the helpless spectator, hoping by my presence
to give her comfort through the dark passage.
In the end, however, I thought it would be presumptuous of me to pretend
to know what she went through other than in what I could perceive in her
behavior: I realized that I could not
"be" in her shoes, nor on the birthing
bed.
32. "The Breakwater" in On the Bridge starts with what's
closest, the physical items, concedes that this togetherness of father and son
is too seldom an occurrence, and then moves out and away to other men and boys
who are also fishing. The middle stanza
is a bridge between the experience of now and moves
the reader to notice the many boys and men, perhaps fathers and sons who can
take a day like this one and time together for granted. Did the son want to establish something with
the father? Is there something that
needed to be established at this point between the immediate father and son, to
build a bridge to bring them access to one another?
The poem's a wistful
recollection of the child's almost-lost bond, prefigured in the "New
Windows" suite with "June," in which a father pleads with his
wife's lawyer to be able to see his child—the divorce papers arriving in the
middle of the conversation; also with "Come Down & Go With Your
Father," the son's rejection of the father after the divorce, of wandering
among the woods and along the beach angered to the point where not even
favorite places or natural beauty held any meaning; and with "He Sighed,
Looking Out the Window"—a poem in which the newly-divorced husband
wistfully recalls his in-laws. "The
Breakwater" is part of the "Lips to Lips" suite that follows,
balanced between the youthful midwinter evening ecstasy of “Sail Skating,” and
"The Lights of St. Ignace," one of my earlier free sonnets, this one
dealing with a storm in my own love life—a poem built on the image of the
husband desperately trying to keep the tent up through the storm while the wife
lies flat, staring up: this poem has
some resonances with Robert Frost's "silken tent," in which the wife is the silken tent (I’d been reading
that and Ted Berrigan's sonnets on that trip).
As a whole, On the Bridge is a
book of transitions—and these two suites strain with the interpenetrations of
past and present, of memory and desire, and of locating what the self sees of an experience such as a marital
breakup, depending upon one's place in the situation—child, husband, wife,
parent, etc. each caught in his or her own limited awareness, seeing only what
he/she is experiencing, with the implication that none sees with any
perspective until the various narratives are collaged.
The idea through both of
these suites was to intersperse a variety of poems resonating on the themes of
the child's view of parents breaking apart and of marriages shattering or
struggling to stay together, with poems built on a variety of relatively
unrelated themes around them—as these things actually occur. "The Breakwater" establishes the
son's wistful memory of the lost years, beginning with the kitchen where father
and son would gather before heading out to the break-water. In my own life, this was my father's first
cottage after the divorce—where he and his second wife established a new life
together, where I could not find a language or confidence to state my own
states of mind, but treasured what little experience we could share in this new
life. The poem revisits that passage as
part of the ground necessary to relocating what has been lost, to the extent
that one can.
33. In "Lucy" there is a movement from
interior (her home in this case), to her sad life, to her brother, the
speaker's father, and his treatment of her, and outward to the shore. What
understanding/ insight did the speaker gain of his father here?
"My Father" and
"Lucy" are both part of that suite, "Leaves & Roots,"
and in each of these two poems my two aunts—my dad's older sisters—appear. In "My Father," my father's world
was alien to my own, from the calendar pin-up to the "roar of fans &
motors"—and yet he defended "my first struggling poems" against
my aunt's dismissal of them as worthless:
this poem is a recognition piece,
finding the man beneath the mask, which is what all children must eventually
do—in the sense that elders are always perceived as wearing masks which, if the
child is to properly mature, must be torn off to discover the person beneath
what the child thought he or she saw when younger. "Lucy," on the other hand, involves
a peculiar reversal of roles, in which the child become
the confessor and sees, perhaps fully for the first time, his father's vulnerability. These two poems, of course, reverberate as
more fully formed connections to those resonances I was only beginning to establish
through poems like "The Breakwater."
34. What does "The
This is one of those poems I
wish I had back—I'd cut out the whole last stanza. The poem really explores the ways in which a
people enshrine and memorialize ideas, reducing them to deadened symbols while at the same time seemingly
worshipping the ideas within them. The
poem's a snapshot of a variety of human types, their attentiveness and
foolishness as they stand before their freedom symbol, with the Sikh at the
back, musing on what the shrine and the various peoples' reactions to it must
signify.
This poem, of course, signifies
ironically with the one that follows it, pitting the subtle ludicrousness of an
enshrined national symbol against an overtly ridiculous macho gender
ritual. "Try the Hammer—Ring the
Bell!" features that different kind of bell, the carnival hammer &
bell, which attracts a variety of male types all jostling to prove their
"manhood," all of them slightly ridiculous—the thin boy lost in the
ritual, perhaps even unmoved by it, thinking only of the girl who herself is
mesmerized by the blond boy.
35. Consider "Dark Evening": would you comment on the speaker's or your
view of capitalism as background to the poems, this vision of a war-monger
This poem was written during
those days when Reagan was engaged in a name-calling game with the soviets—the
But the point here, as
relates to your question, is the ways in which materialist power ploys destroy
lives even as the illusions fostered by capitalist commercials—"sex lives
saved / by Jordache jeans, tooth paste, panty hose"—trap whole populations
into running on the hamster wheel of "happiness" as a way of keeping
them from seeing what's really going
down. It isn't capitalism, per se, though better than any communist or fascist
propaganda machine, capitalist corporations have mastered the art of dosing
populations with commercial soma—illusions
of personal happiness drilled into their heads every ten minutes on TV and
through a thousand other media, including the most masterful stroke of all,
internet promotion and advertising—to keep them running and making profits for
the masters, and to keep them blindly believing that "missiles are plows
& bullets are seeds."
36. Since you have women
poets, individual and lively spirits in your poetry classes, I wondered what
you thought of women's voices in poetry. One must admit that until recently
there were far more male poets whose voices had been the status quo. How are
women shaping the direction of poetry, in your estimation?
As poet and teacher, my
concern is to find and nurture the liveliest talents that come to me,
regardless of sex, race, or ethnic background.
Having said that, I'd also add that, given that one of the functions of
poetry is to explore identity, it's important that people of all backgrounds
and sexes have poets speaking for them, that each group have its own
traditions, geniuses, ways of making verse, ways of constructing the realities
they live with. The relationships of all
these various traditions are of course fraught with ironies: the descendents of former slaves may sing in
an entirely different key than those sprung from masters' seeds, though both
may approach the problems of empowerment and bridging their different frames of
reference with honesty and vigor. The
woman and the man may confront each other across physical and psychological
gulfs, long histories of oppression, of conscious or unconscious rebellion and
of fragile attempts to touch the other both
in themselves and in each other.
So when it comes to the
women poets who've graced my classroom in years past and in this year, my task
is to locate their individual trajectories, to open new avenues to them so that
they may see other ways to find what they're after in that complex notion of
traditions and identity. As a man, I
cannot presume to fully grasp their agonies, their culture, their ways of
being, other than what may be communicated through words—tenuous as that
connection is—but I can give them
tools and links in their own and other traditions with which to expand their
range of expression.
As far as how women are
shaping the direction(s) of poetry—I'm not sure. I've been fortunate enough to know several
interesting women writers, from one brief night walking with Mary Oppen, to
Diane di Prima and Anne Waldman, and to have observed the growth of young
geniuses like Carmen Bugan—and each of them has taught me lessons good for my
own life. Mary, as noted earlier, showed
me in her stories of youthful love with George—and gave me a model of how
relationships grow and thrive through years.
When I first came out to Naropa, Diane was my next-door neighbor and,
when all the younger poets threw a loud party at my apartment, I worried that
I'd offended her. When in the morning I
went to her place to apologize, Diane smiled and said one takes these things in
stride—and over the years, she has sent me her own work and the work of younger
poets, kept in touch in little ways that affirm the connection. Anne, of course, gave me the model of the
wild teacher, but I've also enjoyed watching her incredibly poised amd
seemingly effortless leadership in that incredibly complex, emotion-charged
task of administering the Naropa summer program during some of its most
complicated and boisterous years. As a
poet, she has presented an interesting model of the wiccan sage—the beautiful
hag who "falls apart" before the audience's eyes, drawing them into
the poems' prophetic and emotive matrix with all its resonances of cultural
connections, crazy wisdom motifs, relationships across and through
generations. Her Iovis is, I think, a signal piece in women's poetics, combining
Gertrude Stein's impish associative networking of words and sentences with
Pound's mode of collaging identity, with multiple levels of resonating
historical and cultural references, in the Cantos—all
while exploring Anne's own identity formations, dependencies and rebellions,
separation and reformation, in relationship to her selves, and to males and
maleness.
I look forward to seeing the
kinds of works that will be produced by women born after 1980—I think they'll
open up doors that no one of this generation has located yet. I say this on faith, believing that their
frames of reference are significantly different than those of the women and men
of my own generation.
37. You often bring a variety of cultures into
your poetry, and from our conversations I have gathered that you embrace and
respect many cultures, including your own background. Is poetry, do you think,
moving to a more interesting place by including the work of poets of many
cultures?
One thinks of the variety of
cultures Allen and the beats opened my generation to: by my senior year in high school, I'd already
devoured The Bhagavad Gita, portions
of The Upanishads, and Suzuki's Manual of Zen Buddhism—cultural references a thousand miles beyond
anything being addressed in most American colleges and universities, except as
footnotes to Emerson and Thoreau, or to the final lines of Eliot's "The
Wasteland." In college, my poetry
teacher was Robert Hayden, perhaps the most gifted
There is the question of cultural appropriation, which bothers
some—Langston poses the central question, "they've taken my blues and
gone," turning it into "swing Mikados"—what right does one have
to take someone else's way of singing, to change it and call it one's own? The problem's also
prominent in criticism of "Song of Myself" #33, where Walt claims he is the "hounded slave" who
winces "at the bite of the dogs," that the riders "beat me
violently over the head with whip-stocks"—where, sympathetic though he may
be, Walt claims experiences and psychological stresses that he knows nothing of. I believe that there are some bridges one may
not cross—that one cannot appropriate another's experience and claim it as
one's own, though the writer also has an obligation to tell another's story
when the telling is culturally and emotively significant, and when enough of
its details are apparent to make it coherent in the telling. I do not believe in the balkanization of
American culture—that "mine is mine and yours is yours, and never the
twain shall meet"—but rather that the attempt to reach out and build
bridges across the gulf is imperative, even when it fails—though one should
carefully distinguish between representing
and appropriating another’s
experience, avoiding the latter.
Motifs and forms, poetic
structures, etc. are another matter—though one may identify a form as coming
from a particular culture, the imperative to open up possibilities of
expression supercedes any claim of ownership
or exclusivity, no matter what
culture’s involved. Are Claude McKay’s
sonnets, for example, stealing a cultural form, or are they an immensely
poignant use of that form? I opt for the
latter. At the same time, in my
“Vision,” I could not presume to know Black Elk's passage, but the spotted
eagle from his vision brings resonances which expand my poem, forming too my
homage to him as one who taught me to expand my own frame of reference,
culturally, historically, and in terms of how I relate to others—for he taught
me, more than any other author, about the ground I walk on, the price this
land's earliest lovers paid for it.
I do believe that, no matter
one's background, all poets have an obligation to learn as many traditions as
possible, not only to grow and be prepared to write with some earned wisdom,
but also because no one tradition can contain all the tools necessary to
"make it new," to see with new eyes, to expand the language and our
abilities to express ourselves. One
should learn not only human cultures, but preferably the cultures of the
animals, the names of the stars, the flora and fauna, the rock strata, weather
patterns, the histories, the philosophies and theologies that construct the
world we have been given, that are the spinning references for yet unwritten
poems whose wheeling stars have yet to find their centers.
Works Noted in Interview
I. Written Works
Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum.
- - - - . The
Divine Comedy. 6 vols: Text and commentary. Trans. Charles S. Singleton. Princeton:
Princeton U P, 1970.
Arnold, Matthew. "
Auden, W. H. "Musee des Beaux Arts." Collected
Shorter Poems 1927-1957. New
York: Random, 1966.
Baudelaire, Charles. The
Flowers of Evil: A Selection. Ed. Marthiel and Jackson Matthews. New York:
New Directions, 1955.
Berrigan, Ted. So
Going Around Cities: New & Selected
Poems 1958-1979. Berkeley: Blue Wind, 1980.
- - - - . The
Sonnets. New York: Grove, 1964.
The Bhagavad
Gita. Trans. Franklin Edgerton. New York:
Harper & Row, 1944.
Black Elk. Black Elk Speaks. John G.Neihardt, recorder. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989.
Blake, William. The
Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed.
David V. Erdman. Garden City: Doubleday, 1968. [See especially the Songs of Innocence and Experience and
Plate 91 of Jerusalem Chapter 4,
pages 248-49, for Blake's description of "minute particulars"]
Castaneda, Carlos. Journey
to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan. New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1972.
Cendrars, Blaise. Complete
Poems. Trans. Ron Padgett. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: U of California, 1993.
- - - - . Complete
Postcards from the Americas: Poems of
Road and Sea. Trans. Monique
Chefdor. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and
London: U of California, 1976.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. Prologue to "The Canterbury
Tales." The
City Lights
Journal. Vol. 4. Ed. Lawrence Ferlinghetti. San Francisco: City Lights, 1978
Cohn, Jim. The
Dance of Yellow Lightning Over The Ridge.
Rochester: Writers &
Books, 1998.
- - - - . Grasslands. Rochester: Writers & Books, 1994.
- - - - . Prairie
Falcon. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1989.
- - - -. Sign Mind:
Studies in American Sign Language Poetics. Boulder:
Museum of American Poetics, 1999.
Dekker, Thomas. Excerpt from "The Guls Hornbooke: or Fashions
to please all sorts of Guls." Elizabethan and Jacobean Pamphlets. Ed.
George Saintsbury. Freeport:
Books for Libraries, 1970. Online Posting.
The Shakespeare Project Homepage. David Cope, curator. Available: http://web.grcc.cc.mi.us/english/shakespeare/
- - - - . Excerpt from "The Wonderful Year: 1603." Three Elizabethan
Pamphlets. G. R. Hibbard, ed.
The
Dhammapada. Trans.
P. Lal. Farrar, Straus, & Girous,
1972.
Dickinson, Emily. The
Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed.
Thomas H. Johnson. Boston and
Toronto: Little, Brown, 1960.
di Prima, Diane. Correspondence and conversation with the
author. 1980-2000.
Dylan, Bob. Bringing
It All Back Home.
Eliot, T. S. "The Wasteland." The
Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950. New
York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1971.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "The Red Slayer."
Fenollosa, Ernest. "The Chinese Character as a Written
Medium for Poetry."
Ginsberg, Allen. Collected
Poems 1947-1980. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.
- - - - . Composed
on the Tongue: Literary Conversations,
1967-1977. Ed. Donald Allen. San Francisco: Grey Fox, 1983.
- - - - . Deliberate
Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995. Ed. Bill Morgan. New York:
Harper Collins, 2000. [Allen's
Foreword to Quiet Lives and blurb for
same volume appear on page 434 of this volume.
The same section features promo- tional blurbs and essays for several of
my contemporaries, including Antler, Andy Clausen, and Eliot Katz.]
- - - - . Lectures, private conversations, materials
from ms. copies of Allen's classroom anthologies, personal correspondence with
the author.
Hakluyt, Richard. Voyages
and Discoveries. Ed. Jack
Beeching. London and New York: Penguin, 1972.
Hayden, Robert. Angle
of Ascent: New and Selected Poems. New York:
Liveright, 1975.
Hemingway, Ernest. The
Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.
The Finca Vigia Edition. New
York: Scribner, 1987. [Stories with Michigan settings include
"Up in Michigan," "Indian Camp," "The Doctor and the
Doctor's Wife," "The End of Something," "The Three-Day
Blow," "The Battler," "Big Two-Hearted River" I and II,
"The Killers," "Ten
Indians," "The Light of the World," "Fathers and
Sons," "Summer People," and "The Last Good Country." ]
- - - - . Ernest
Hemingway on Writing. Ed. Larry W.
Phillips. New York: Touchstone, 1999. [See pages 23-24 for EH's
comments on writing and war]
- - - - . The Old
Man and the Sea. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952.
The Holy Bible. Revised Standard Version.
Homer. The
Odyssey. Trans. Richmond
Lattimore. New York: Harper & Row, 1967.
Hughes, Langston. Selected
Poems of Langston Hughes. New
York: Knopf, 1981. [See "Note on Commercial Theatre,"
page 190.]
Jagger, Mick, and Keith
Richards. "Paint It,
Black." Aftermath. By The Rolling
Stones.
Jayne, III, Edward
"Mike." Correspondence with
the author. 1995-2000.
Jones, Gwyn, trans. Eirik
the Red and other Icelandic Sagas. Oxford
and New York: Oxford U P, 1980. [See especially "King Hrolf and His
Champions."]
Keats, John. Excerpt:
"A Letter to George and Thomas Keats." The
Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and
Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H.
Richter. New York: St. Martin's, 1989. [This letter is source
for Keats' notion of "negative capability."]
Kerouac, Jack. Mexico
City Blues (242 Choruses). New
York: Grove, 1959.
- - - - . Old
Angel Midnight. Ed. Donald
Allen. San Francisco: Grey Fox, 1995.
- - - - . On The
Road. New York: Viking, 1957.
Marley, Bob. "Pass it on" Burnin'. By The Wailers. Island Records, 1973.
McKay, Claude. Selected
Poems of Claude McKay. San Diego,
New York, London: Harvest/ HBJ, 1953.
Morgan, Bill, and Bob
Rosenthal, eds. Best Minds: A Tribute to Allen
Ginsberg. New York: Lospecchio, 1986. [Allen’s festschrift volume: among many others, the volume contains my
homage, “Congratulations.”
New Directions
Anthology. Vol. 37. Ed. James Laughlin. New York: New Directions, 1979.
Oppen, George. Collected
Poems. New York: New Directions, 1975
Oppen, Mary. Meaning
A Life: An Autobiography. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1978.
Oppen, Mary, and George
Oppen. Midsummer Eve's conversation.
National Poetry Festival. Grand Valley
State University. Allendale, Mi., 1973.
Our Bodies,
Our Selves. The Boston Women’s Health
Collective.
Puttenham, Thomas. Excerpts from The Art of English Poesie. Ed.Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker.
Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1936. Repr. ed. 1970. Online Posting. The Shakespeare Project Homepage. David Cope, curator. Available:
http://web.grcc.cc.mi.us/english/shakespeare/
Pound, Ezra. The
Cantos. New York: New Directions, 1972.
- - - - . Literary
Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New
Directions, 1968. [See especially
"A Retrospect" and "How to Read."]
Rakosi, Carl. The
Collected Poems of Carl Rakosi. Orono: The National Poetry Foundation / U of Maine,
1986.
- - - - . Lecture, reading, and conversations with
Allen Ginsberg and David Cope. Naropa Institute Objectivist Conference. Boulder, Co. Summer Session, 1987.
Reznikoff, Charles. The
Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff. Two
vols. Ed. Seamus Cooney. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1976, 1977.
- - - - . Lecture and discussion on objectivist
poetics. With Carl Rakosi and George
Oppen. National Poetry Festival. Grand Valley State University. Allendale, Mi., 1973.
Rimbaud, Arthur. Poetiques
completes. Paris: Editions
Gallimard, 1960.
- - - - . A
Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat. Trans.
Louise Varese. New York: New Directions, 1961
Shakespeare, William. The
Stein, Gertrude. Lifting
Belly. Ed. Rebecca Mark. Tallahassee:
Naiad, 1989.
- - - - . Selected
Writings of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Carl
Van Vechten. New York: Random, 1962.
- - - - . Tender
Buttons. Mineola, N. Y.: Dover, 1997.
Stubbes, Philip. Anatomie
of Abuses.
Sturluson, Snorri. The
Prose Edda. Trans. Jean I. Young.
Suzuki, D. T. Manual
of Zen Buddhism. New York: Grove, 1960.
Syrkin, Marie. Lectures on Charles Reznikoff. Naropa Institute Objectivist Conference. Boulder, Co. Summer Session, 1987.
Terry, Patricia, trans. Poems
of the Elder Edda. Revised ed. Philadelphia:
U of Pennsylvania, 1990.
The Thirteen
Principal Upanishads. Second Oxford India
repr. Trans. Robert Ernest Hume, 1877.
Delhi: Oxford U P, 1995.
Thomas, Dylan. The
Poems of Dylan Thomas. Ed. Daniel
Jones. New York: New Directions, 1971.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden
and Civil Disobedience. Ed. Paul
Lauter. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
Thornton, Willie Mae. "Ball and Chain." Sung by Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the
Holding Company. Cheap Thrills.
Trungpa, Chogyam. Cutting
Through Spiritual Materialism. Boulder
and London: Shambhala, 1973.
- - - - . The
Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation.
Ed. John Baker and Marvin Casper.
Boulder and London: Shambhala,
1976.
Waldman, Anne. Conversations, correspondence with the
author; lectures.
- - - - . Iovis: All is Full of Jove. Minneapolis: Coffee House, 1993.
- - - - , and Andrew
Schelling, ed. “A Declaration of
Independence.” Disembodied Poetics: Annals of
the Jack Kerouac School. U of
Whitman, Walt. Leaves
of Grass: Including a Fac-simile
autobiography, varorium readings of the poems and a department of Gathered
Leaves. Philadelphia: David McKay, 1900.
Williams, William
Carlos. The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. New York:
New Directions, 1967.
- - - - . The
Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams.
2 vols. Ed. Christopher
MacGowan and A. Walton Litz. New
York: New Directions, 1991.
- - - - . Paterson. New York:
New Directions, 1963.
- - - - . Selected
Essays. New York: New Directions, 1969.
- - - - . The
Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams.
Ed. John C. Thirlwall. New
York: New Directions, 1984.
II. Art works / Museums Noted
Calder, Alexander. "La Grand Vitesse." Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Dali, Salvador. "The Persistence of Memory." The
El Greco. "View of Toledo."
Monet, Claude. "Waterlilies." The
Picasso. "The Blue Guitarist." The Chicago Art Institute.
- - - - . "Guernica." The
Rivera, Diego. "The Murals of Detroit." The Detroit Art Institute.
Toulouse Lautrec. Paintings.
The Chicago Art Institute.
Turner, J. M. W. "The Burning of the Houses of
Parliament." Cleveland Art Museum.
Van Gogh, Vincent. "Starry Night." The
III. Musical Compositions (excluding lyrics)
Bach, Johann Sebastian. The
The Beatles. All recordings: 1963-1970.
Beethoven, Ludwig Von. The
Ninth Symphony: Choral.
Dylan, Bob. All recordings: 1961-1999.
Guthrie, Woodie. Dustbowl Ballads.
Joplin, Janis. All recordings: 1967-1970.
Marley, Bob. All recordings:
The Rolling Stones. All recordings and videos: 1964-2000.
Stravinsky, Igor. The
Rite of Spring.