I first enrolled in the Creative Writing Program at San Francisco State in the fall of 1966. It was something I did almost at the last minute, having been persuaded by my first wife, Rochelle Nameroff, that student loans and food stamps would make school economically viable, and that colleges were going to be the center of whatever was happening in society for the next several years. But because I enrolled so late – and because Leonard Wolf rejected my manuscript application into his poetry class – I found myself with a minimum of courses that first term, the only one of which I remember 38 years later being an omnibus Intro to Creative Writing course team taught by George Price, Wright Morris and George Hitchcock.

 

So I had a lot of time on my hands that autumn and spent most of it in the San Francisco State Library, reading the American poetry collection, basically A to Z. In addition to all the obvious texts, the SF State Library in those days had a really comprehensive poetry collection – the consequence I would learn later of having had Robin Blaser as its poetry buyer. I filled out what I already knew of American poetry – mostly the New Americans and a few of the moderns – and found several lesser known poets whose work I would come to appreciate, such as Kirby Congdon, Tram Coombs and Roger Shattuck. There were several books by SF State alum Tracy Thompson, whose jacket material made note of the fact that he was the most widely published poet in America in the early 1960s. And there were little magazines, some of which I had only heard about before. I recall quite distinctly carefully reading issue after issue of Origin, Second Series. I don’t think the library had the first series. So it must have been there, in the tenth issue of that run, where I first came upon a long prose work by Robert Duncan, then called The Day Book.

 

At the time I knew who Duncan was, but had not met him. I didn’t know, for example, that he had once been the assistant director of the Poetry Center. Indeed, it was hard for me to imagine just how this character I’d seen on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, usually at a poetry event, always surrounded by a group of older women I’d heard referred to as “Robert’s Theosophists,” with wildly crossed eyes and, in those days, the first signs of mutton chop sideburns, made any sort of living. He didn’t look like anyone I’d ever seen in an office. And he certainly was too debonair to be a beat or hippy. Maybe because he was always the center of attention, but Duncan seemed quite extravagant and that was before he began sporting the purple cape and wide-brimmed hat that became calling cards for him later on. 

 

I met Duncan briefly the next spring when he came to speak to Jack Gilbert’s poetry class. I don’t recall what he talked about, other than that it was vaguely about the relationship of knowledge to poetry. Every time he made a point, Duncan literally made a point, with a blunt piece of chalk on the blackboard. By the time he finished talking, the board was virtually white with dots. It had been as much theater as lecture and I will concede to having been enchanted. It was very much like having been visited by a creature from another dimension. Lisa Jarnot’s phrase, Ambassador from Venus, is surprisingly accurate and not at all hyperbolic.

My time at SF State was curtailed after that first year when my wife became ill and I ended up working full-time in the U.S. Postal Service, limiting my studies to what could be cobbled together at night for the next 18 months. I recall at the time that there were two books I was reading constantly during that period, trying to fathom their implications not just for poetry but for my poetry & indeed my life: The Cantos by Ezra Pound and Roots and Branches, by Robert Duncan. I read & reread both books constantly, noting their similarities as well as their differences, not yet able to sort out generational distinctions let alone political nuances. I got none of the references in either – which in fact convinced me at the time that reading for references wasn’t reading at all.

Some time during 1967 I had a run-in with Duncan of sorts, the first, but certainly not the last. The San Francisco Police Department in a vain attempt to stake a ground in the culture wars of that decade made a raid on the Psychedelic Shop, a bookstore & poster palace on Haight Street, where they confiscated several publication, including Jack Fowler'sGrist, in which I had a poem, but in which the full front nudity of Gerard Malanga with a heroically backlit erect cock was more what the cops had in mind. They finally settled on prosecuting one book, Lenore Kandel’s The Love Book, which they later followed up with a prosecution of Michael McClure’s The Beard, ostensibly for the act of cunnilingus that occurs in the play’s final pages.

 

As local literary figures began to marshal up a defense for Kandel’s book, which was a rather two-dimensional derivation of Walt Whitman and possibly Ray Bremser celebrating the physical act of fornication, I found myself at first bemused and then somewhat alarmed by the overstatements that were being made in the press and on TV about how Kandel had discovered a new language for love. So I wrote a flippant note to the Chronicle suggesting that the book had more important First Amendment implications than one might imagine. Up to that moment, every defense of allegedly obscene material had depended on a claim of the work’s literary importance, from Joyce’s Ulysses to Ginsberg’s Howl & William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. The Love Book, I suggested, presented an opportunity to defend the right of mediocre writing to engage in erotic discourse as well. It was, I thought, a curious world in which only great books could get away with being obscene.

 

Duncan, I soon learned, thought of himself as Kandel’s discoverer or patron and had a deeply vested interest in the idea that she was embarking on a new feminine – the word feminist was not used – language for lust. He wrote a lengthy letter denouncing this Babbitt Silliman, reading it aloud at a rally at San Francisco State and later on a TV show on KQED, the PBS station.Gilbert and some of my friends were ecstatic – they thought it was great fun watching Robert get his knickers all twisted on account of some callow schoolboy – and frankly they agreed with my assessment that Kandel’s poetry wasn’t about to change literature. I, however, was appalled. In 1967, Robert Duncan represented everything I wanted to be as a poet. But Robert Duncan had met the enemy, and he thought it was me.