George Stanley is reading today at Writers House, at 6:30 PM Eastern. It will be webcast live by Writers House – for more information, email whstanley@writing.penn.edu. But you better do so pronto. The reading is an exciting event, in many different ways. I haven’t seen George read in some time, but I’ve never heard the man give anything less than a great reading. He is one poet who I’ve been reading for over 35 years who has never bored me for one minute.

 

Perhaps the most successful reading that Tom Mandel & I ever put on during our tenure as the curators of the poetry reading series at the Grand Piano in San Francisco was a joint Ted Berrigan/George Stanley event. For one thing, the two readers packed the place – I remember stopping counting at around 110 – the place could reasonably seat 80. For a second, each poet brought roughly half the audience, an ideal balance for a two-person event. And, finally, many (perhaps most) in each part of the audience had never even heard of the other reader. Berrigan was the hotshot star from out of town, of course, and at that moment in the mid-1970s, there were plenty of Actualist poets (in addition to more than a few langpos) who had been his students, mostly at Iowa. But George was the local hero, returning home to give a reading after nearly six years in Canada, meaning that he brought out an older audience, one much more tuned to the San Francisco renaissance. Both poets gave terrific performances.

 

My happy task today is to introduce George &, after the event itself, to lead a discussion with the man. With that in mind, I’ve been rereading both A Tall Serious Girl and At Andy’s, as well as reading Barry McKinnon’s 1998 interview from It’s Still Winter, the excellent webzine of Canadian poetry. I’ve been thinking up questions as I go along, knowing full well that I will get to ask very few of them. If you join the webcast, you should call or email & contribute some of your own. Here are some that have been percolating in my head as I read:

 

1. You grew up in San Francisco, but went to college in Salt Lake City. What in 1952 takes a young gay male poet to such a place? How did that affect you?

 

2. And then you went into the Army? Did you think about the seminary as well?

 

3. Having finished your military service & enrolled at UC Berkeley, you first met Jack Spicer in 1957 in a bar called The Place in San Francisco. What was it about Spicer that made him the right teacher for you? What made Jack stand out?

 

4. Let me ask that question in a different way. You’ve said that the first poem that you showed to Spicer was “Pablito at the Corrida,” the first poem in A Tall Serious Girl.  What do you think it was that Spicer saw in that poem? In many ways, it doesn’t seem far at all from the other poems in the first section of Girl. What were your influences at that point, given that you’d been writing since you were 16? Where you even aware of the New Americans yet?

 

5. You are often mentioned in conjunction with the Spicer circle & likewise what Americans sometimes think of the post-Spicer diaspora, the migration to Canada between 1966 and 1971 by yourself, Robin Blaser & Stan Persky. And you’ve spoken of the influences of Robert Creeley & Louis Zukofsky. Yet you have also invoked another very unusual trio – Eliot, Olson, Lowell – as being your decisive set of influences. Why? How? In what way? This list seems incommensurate, to say the least.

 

6. Living in Canada for 30 years, you have had to teach Canadian literature and even become Canadian literature. What does that mean to you? Are there Canadian influences that a discriminating reader ought to hear? Do Al Purdy & Earl Birney or Louis Dudek enter into your work? What about younger Canadian poets?

 

7. The very next poem in Girl, “Pompeii,” is one of the most powerful poems to come out of San Francisco in the 1950s, which is saying quite a bit, what with Ginsberg composing “Howl” on Potrero Hill & both Duncan & Spicer nearing the peak of their careers. How much time is there between it and “Pablito?” What were you doing & going through that caused such a concentrated work so early in your career?

 

8. “Pompeii” sounds as though it were at least in part a response to some of Robert’s work, especially his poem “This Place Rumord to Have Been Sodom,” written about the same time. Did you see it that way? Did he? Is this an aspect of the poem as communication, possibly even a challenge?

 

9. Of Spicer, you’ve said that you “got drawn … into these wars that he would have with Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser where [you were] always on the wrong side, the losing side.” What were some of those wars & why were you always on the losing side?

 

10. I want to ask about collaboration. Poets in the San Francisco renaissance tradition appear to have done much less of it than their peers in the New York School. One notable exception to that is the Carola Letters, written jointly by you & Joanne Kyger. Robert Duncan is said to have tried to light at least one manuscript page of that project on fire during a reading. What was Robert so upset about?

 

11. Writing of your work, Stan Persky has identified a trend or movement he calls “Aboutism.” What is that? How does it differ, say, from the writing of Allen Ginsberg, or Jack Spicer, or perhaps the younger poets around the Kootenay School of Writing?

 

12. Of all the major writing communities of the 1950s, the one that has been least well documented over the subsequent decades is the Spicer circle. Your work and that of Joanne Kyger is in print, and Ebbe Borregaard has a small but loyal following as the result of his presence in the Allen anthology, but others – such as Jim Alexander or Ronnie Primack or Harold Dull – have largely disappeared. Are readers & younger poets – I’ll include myself in that last group – missing anything in not being able to get our hands on a good solid anthology of that whole scene? If so, what?

 

13. You were very much a key figure in a major “scene” in the 1950s & ‘60s. Then you moved to Canada, all the way up to Terrace, which I presume to be fairly remote & northern compared with, say, Vancouver & Burnaby. You spent something like 15 years in Terrace – did you have or maintain, even at a distance, any sense of a literary community. Do you have one now in Vancouver? Do you even need one?

 

14. On of the symmetries of Girl that seems noteworthy is that it begins & ends with titles that evoke Mexico, “Pablito in the Corrida” & “Vera Cruz.” Elsewhere in your poetry, there are references to Scotland & Ireland. You’ve lived half your life in San Francisco & the second half in western Canada. In the fourth part of Vancouver you write:

sometimes the mind
is just aware of its
dumbness – the skull – the unnerving
pathos (unjustified, yes, I’ll always
scream –

is that all, just
location, location, location

Can you talk about the function of place in your poetry & life? Is it all “location, location, location?” Do you have an Olsonian sense of this, or some other?

15. The first two sections of Vancouver can be found at the end of At Andy’s. I’ve now seen sections up through number 9, mostly online in It’s Still Winter. That passage I just read goes on to invoke Paterson, for example, another long poem with a city for its name. What’s your vision for this poem?