Rochelle Nameroff (in circle) listening to Phil Ochs
Vietnam Day Teach-in, Berkeley, 1965

 

Today is the fortieth anniversary of my first marriage, to the poet Rochelle Nameroff. I was 19 and we were in the midst of an intense romance. The marriage itself lasted almost five years to the day &, tho we've traveled very different paths since then, I still consider Shelley a dear friend.

When I first got to know her, Rochelle Nameroff was a political activist, working on putting together the very first Vietnam War teach-in on the UC Berkeley campus. The coordinating committee was looking to contact Dave von Ronk as a possible act & I knew that you could reach him through Izzy Young's store in Greenwich Village. We got into a discussion over the Beatles in which I was, she perceived, too dismissive of what I took to be a manufactured bubblegum act aimed at teen girls that lacked the integrity I found in folk music. So Shelley took me to see Help & won the argument & one thing led to another & there we were in a glade by Strawberry Creek with most everyone but my mother & grandparents in Halloween costumes (& my grandparents seriously hoping that those Hells Angels outfits were just costumes, which they weren't), saying our vows.

Shelley came from a completely different world than I had known before – midwestern, Jewish, with grandparents who had come from the Ukraine not so many decades before. She was the person who convinced me that I should attend college. Her argument, that the university was going to be the center of social change for the rest of the decade, made a lot more sense to me than anything I had heard from a school counselor. And college was something my own family had not had much of a sense of, even living in Berkeley, since nobody had ever attended one before.

At the time, I was a walking contradiction as a poet, reading everyone in the Allen anthology, but patterning my own attempts at poetry rather consciously after Alan Dugan. This I found to be shockingly simple – within two years of starting to write seriously, I had acceptances from Poetry, TriQuarterly, Southern Review, Poetry Northwest & a number of smaller Quietist houses, which led me to give up that approach altogether. By the time I transferred as a student to Berkeley (from SF State, with a stop-off at Merritt College in Oakland to pick up the units I needed to qualify for the transfer as a junior) in 1970, I had abandoned the School of Quietude forever. It was not, I had decided, about using the written word to make a serious exploration of life at all, and that was what I needed.

Shelley didn't begin to write poetry herself until perhaps the third year of our marriage, but she started out day one in the post-avant vein. In those days, we were both reading all the Creeley, Williams, Eigner & Olson we could get our hands on. She enrolled at UC Berkeley long before I did – they wouldn't take her as a transfer student at SF State from the University of Wisconsin because of a foul-up microfilming her SAT scores. There, Shelley was a student of Denise Levertov's, whose classmates included my best friend, David Melnick, plus Rae Armantrout, Aaron Shurin & Barbara Baracks.

Shelley published one book, Body Prints, which came out the same year we formally divorced. I have an enormous fondness for those poems, most of which I saw written while we were living in a curiously woodsy apartment building just north of the UC campus. As it turns out, it's her one book & not necessarily one that she feels close to today. In the years since we parted, her own poetry has moved in precisely the opposite direction of my own. Presently, she teaches at Cal State East Bay, where she helps to edit an online journal called Tattoo Highway.

But I still turn to Body Prints from time to time, because it's filled with some terrific writing. Here is “Lecture”:

touch, you say, he sd, the poets
              touch you
& reaches for
texts, hides
from texture
                        too loud the pressure
          too late
he stepped out
& sat
somewhere
      I touch you some

how
I sit on my bed
I think
       boldly
       how each time some new
                       indentation
             brings me closer to

flailing
I sink through
fingers
– burnt off skin
crazy for
fingered pleasure –

       each whorl
       alive
       aloud with
       motion, high tension
       wire requiring
       circuits:

something to
hold whole:

hot velvet
ropes, matchbooks, the
wick
unequaled in
any fire

       still
comes the words
see, we cannot
douse it

       brazen anemone

I stretch
as if my
hands had no
membrane
under or over
water for
waterfall