Here is the eighth question in the 9 for 9 poets project.

 

Most poets seem to have at least one poet they've read and admired who is not well-known, a poet whose work we like to share with those who will appreciate the work. Is there such a poet's work in your life? If so, who is this poet? Tell us something about how you came to discover their work, and how it inspires you. Maybe share some favorite lines, and titles.

 

One? I can probably think of hundreds who might fit this definition. Particularly if I were to choose those poets who might be well known, might even be famous, but whose reputations don’t meet up to my own sense of their excellence. Certainly Rachel Blau DuPlessis & Barrett Watten are hardly unknown, but if I were to proclaim this the Age of Watten, say, I would not necessarily be kidding. Rod Smith should be a household name, as should Rae Armantrout & Graham Foust & Linh Dinh. Or David Melnick. Or Lee Ann Brown, or Simon Ortiz. Or Kenneth Irby.

 

One of the reasons for me to have a weblog is that it presents me with an opportunity to talk about my enthusiasms. I’ve already written about most of the above, as well as such unlikely characters as Besmilr Brigham, Judson Crews & of course George Stanley. Thinking of Stanley, I’m reminded that a project that desperately needs to be done is the creation of a compleat Spicer Circle anthology. It’s one thing to know the work of Spicer, Blaser, Stanley, Joanne Kyger & maybe Steve Jonas – the folks most everybody knows – but Harold Dull was a singular presence on that scene. He seems to have stopped writing in the 1970s, tho Tom Mandel & I were successful in getting him to give a reading at the Grand Piano. Nowadays, he’s one of the leading aquatherapists in the world. Also part of that whole mix were people like Stan Persky, part of the scene in British Columbia for almost 40 years, active in the gay community and with the New Democratic Party there. James Alexander and Ronnie Primack have disappeared from view & I see from Joe Torra’s “Chinese” poems that Joe Dunn must have died. Someone else from that scene who passed on far too early was James Herndon, tho his wife Fran (with Joanne one of the few women in the mix) seems still to be around the Bay Area. I have friends in the California Federation of Teachers who speak of Jim Herndon with great reverence, so his work there must have had lasting impact. Lew Ellingham was there & we’re very lucky indeed that he was taking notes. Another poet who was part of the world at Gino & Carlos, but who is not often thought of in San Francisco terms at all, is Larry Fagin. Then there were the others who were “around” it, but never really part of it. Duncan, for one. Ron Loewinsohn for another. Jack Gilbert for a third. That would make for one hell of a book, but I’m not the right person to edit it.

 

Then of course there are the poets of one’s youth. David Gitin was the writer who convinced me to start Tottel’s, simply by virtue of sending a submission of work that had to be published, even tho I thought at the time I didn’t have a journal. He’s still around the Monterey area, writing lovely poems that sometimes make me think of what George Oppen might have done if he had been a Buddhist.

 

Another poet from that same period who meant a lot to me was John Gorham, a one-time student of Robert Kelly’s at Bard, from the same 1960s generation of Kelly students that gave us Tom Meyer (whom Gorham first introduced me to) and Harvey Bialy. Gorham was a grad student at Berkeley for awhile, then dropped out of the scene altogether. He’s a freelance writer now, doing features for trade magazines. He was somebody who had read Dorn (another person to whom he first introduced me) very deeply. Once, when I’d been billy-clubbed by the Berkeley cops at a demonstration – they’d made a point of going for my kidneys – he got me to a hospital, for which I’m eternally in the man’s debt. There are still a few lines of his that pop up in various guises in my work – waylaid by brigands on a voyage to get millions – I love the measure of that, always will.

 

A good poet from that scene, now gone, was d alexander – d (no caps) was his full first name, which frankly he resented. He was the first poet I ever knew who worked in the computer industry, tho he died long before the dot com boom & the rest of that sillyness. He was living somewhere down the peninsula from San Francisco, in the hills behind Stanford, La Honda or some such, and had been a college mate of Clayton Eshleman’s. When he’d heard I was starting a magazine, he showed up at my front door one day with his address book. His address book! He knew that I would want to know how to reach poets & once, when he’d been younger, Paul Blackburn had done the same for him. I barely knew the man at the time, but it was a great act of giving.

 

A final poet from that era who disappeared altogether was Seymour Faust, a Brooklyn poet as I recall, who I first met through Cid Corman. Cid & I may have been the only people ever to publish him.* But it was the 1960s and he was a hawk on Vietnam, which neither Cid nor I were, and our relationship couldn’t survive that conflict. Here is a poem of his I published first in Tottels #6 in October, 1971:

 

With Reservations

 

1.

old books

words polished for a hundred years

and put away a thousand

stories polished for a thousand years

odyssey, logia of jesus,, and of kung

how you have been true to us, and false

 

2.

in this century

how you have been false

how the airplanes have made liars of you

the nuclear piles in the pressure hulls

electromagnetic waves

how you are undercut by the spectroheliograph

the cardiogram

optics

guidance systems and gunnery

how advertising puts you down

and the unions and the powerful

the whole radio audience knows better than him

whom you mislead

 

3.

how your paradoxes pall

your parables and fables

your modular stories

how your symbols fail

techniques of dialog

stream-of-consciousness

points of view

figurae

 

4.

better anything than you

better to strain your eyes on protoplasm

s it flows indistinctly in bright or darkened field

under the lenses of the turret

in the utter silence of concentration

at your cosmic distance

                   or

close at hand

to trace the rockflows of the maria

the traces of devastation that radiate

from the circular maria

or film the solar prominences in hydrogen light

 

5.

better the doctors lifetime

the lifetime of the assyriologist

the searcher of beach terraces of the north

at Denbigh or Krusenstern

or Onion Portage

     disinterring flints and cores

already seeing man as something over

or one at work

     on the improbable future

the designer of high speed high altitude aircraft

the meteorologist

     tracer of clouds

or at opposite poles

the observer at Byrd Station

 

The mix between rhetoric & vocabulary here is unique to my experience, yet I don’t believe he ever published a book. I have no idea what became of Seymour Faust, and I know that Cid lost touch as well. What I have of his, as with Gorham or alexander, is an echo I can hear in my head to this day, utterly articulate, completely unlike anything – or anyone – else. I’ll never be able to thank them enough for all I was given.

 

 

 

* No, I see that Frank Kuenstler – another one of the lost strange bards, a New York street poet if ever there was one, halfway between Bob Kaufman and Khlebnikov – and Tuli Kupferberg (better known as one of the Fugs) published Faust also, in an issue of Bread&, published in 1960. You can find references to him in the selected letters of William Bronk & in Corman’s papers, but every other mention of Faust on the web is actually by me.