(Photo: Alan Bernheimer)

Larry Fagin:

Portraits & Home Movies
(1968 – 69)

Many Allen Ginsbergs - only the middle row is real

In 2008, the late Carolyn Cassady, one-time wife of Neal – Jack Kerouac’s trickster muse – revealed some lingering bitterness in an interview when she remarked that as “far as I'm concerned, the Beat Generation was something made up by the media and Allen Ginsberg." That’s an unfair dig at Ginsberg. When Lawrence Ferlinghetti & Shig Murao were prosecuted for the sale of Howl, Ginsberg – who became a household name from the resulting media coverage – stayed as far away from the trial as he could. It would have been a far better – even obvious – career move for him to have been sat in the front row of the courtroom in support of Ferlinghetti & Murao. Instead, he stayed as far away as he could &, when the chance presented itself, didn’t take a victory lap after the City Lights publisher & his book seller were vindicated, but instead hightailed it to India.

This was well before Ginsberg got to watch fame, alcohol & the media celebrity machine tear Jack Kerouac limb from limb, a painful public process that led to the novelist’s demise first as a writer & then as a person. Indeed, it might not have been until Ginsberg’s stint as Kraj Mahales, the King of the May, in 1965 Czechoslovakia – to which Ginsberg had been deported from Cuba of all places after protesting Castro’s persecution of gays – that the author of Howl seemed fully to appreciate his own potential as a symbolic public figure. But even then other poets rolled their eyes & looked askance. Jack Spicer’s very last poem, written just weeks after Ginsberg expulsion from Czechoslovakia, accuses Ginsberg of not understanding that “people are starving.”

That was 48 years ago &, if anything, the mythos of Ginsberg & radical beat culture as a forerunner of all things liberational has intensified over the past half century. In a five-day span late last fall, I saw three separate motion pictures, either current or very recent, that each included Ginsberg:

• John Krokidas’ Kill Your Darlings, starring Daniel Radcliffe as the future author of Howl, Jack Huston as Kerouac & Ben Foster as William S. Burroughs, which may still be in some theaters
  
  
• Walter Salles’ On the Road, an attempt to contain Kerouac’s sprawling autobiographical novel as an intelligible film narrative starring Sam Riley as Sal Paradise (Jack Kerouac), Tom Sturridge (like Radcliffe, a British actor) as Carlo Marx (Ginsberg) & Viggo Mortensen as (as Bull Lee, Burroughs), relatively new to the Netflix & DVD round after a modest theater run
  
  
• Robert McTavish’s documentary, The Line Has Shattered, recounting the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, during which 48 “students” took seminars & participated in readings over three weeks from Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov & Margaret Avison – this film is still rolling out via the art film / festival circuit

Ginsberg’s stature on the curious fulcrum between public intellectual & public anti-intellectual is worth noting. In addition to Radcliffe & Sturridge, Ginsberg has also been portrayed by Roger Massih, Wade Williams, James Franco, Charley Rossman, Hank Azaria, Yehuda Duenyas, David Cross, Tim Hickey, Jon Schwartz, Ron Livingston, Bill Willens, John Turturro, Richard Cotovsky, David Markey, Ron Rifkin, & George Netesky. David Cross, who played Ginsberg in in the Dylan anti-biopic I’m Not There, plays Allen’s father Louis in Kill Your Darlings.¹

The Poetics List is coming to the end of its run after 20 years. I don’t know how many messages were posted, but as of the last round-up of December’s posts into a text file (a process that is still incomplete), the verbiage totaled more than 302 megabytes. Not an impossible quantity, it would barely take up space on a thumb drive today. Of course, it’s worth noting that when we first computerized the student records for the California Institute of Integral Studies back in the early 1980s, those records – dating back to the school’s founding as the California Institute of Asian Studies three decades before – were held in their entirety on a blazing fast Compaq PC that boasted 10 MB of capacity. This month, I read of the list’s demise on my Nexus 7 tablet, not to be confused with either my desktop or my laptop. 

It’s been years since I paid much attention to the List itself, but once it had a huge impact on my life. In 1995, when I was recruited by Technology Service Solutions and given the opportunity to pretty much name my salary in return for moving to the vicinity of Wayne, Pennsylvania – a place I had never even heard of – the idea that I could continue to stay in touch with the poetry world electronically was a major element in my decision to make the move. 

The Poetics List was the first poetry tool to make serious use of the internet. Prior to the existence of the net, geography really mattered in ways that younger poets may never appreciate. If, in the 1970s, you were a post-avant poet in someplace like Kent, Ohio or Tucson, Arizona, you were at a serious disadvantage. The relationships articulated in a collection like In the American Tree, let alone The New American Poetry two-plus decades earlier, were almost entirely face-to-face, which meant that the anthology was really representing a discussion then going on in three  metropolitan areas: the SF-Bay Area, New York and Washington, DC. When I first published the book in 1986, I got serious blowback from several of the poets – at least a quarter of the contributors – for including a writer, Tom Beckett, whom nobody had spent much time with in person. The absence of poets from the Chicago & LA scenes, both in the Tree and The New American Poetry, can be attributed to the same geo-centric phenomenon. In the 1980s, we were just 20 years beyond Jack Spicer’s prohibition of the distribution of the magazine J anywhere east of the Oakland  hills. Indeed, Leland Hickman used to complain that he got protests from many of his compadres – the exception seems to have been Bill Mohr – for including poets who lived east of the Valley & north of Santa Barbara in Temblor, a journal that wasn’t begun until 1985.

Ammiel Alcalay

“To Write a Republic”:

Experience, Heroism, and Poetry

in the National Security State

School of Visual Arts, 2010

Kevin Killian’s keynote
at the NPF’s
Poetry & Poetics of the ‘80s conference:
“Activism, Gay Poetry, & AIDS in the 1980s”

An international poetry festival is a little like one of those lab experiments that science students are forced to perform. Take a creature that does one thing well – make art with their language – and put them into a container with other creatures who seem similar enough, but lack that one key common element – a mutual language. The possibilities are more or less obvious, and the folks in Rotterdam earlier this month were blessed with the fact that all 19 of their on-site participants¹ were actually nice people. One of the festival officials joked that this was an “innovation” they were trying this year, and that it had not always been the case in prior years.

It’s not an accurate statement that the poets lacked the same language. Eighteen of the 19 spoke at least some version of English, and four of us – Karen Solie of Canada, LK Holt of Australia, Sascha Aurora Akhtar of Pakistan &amp Britain, & I – use variants of it for our writing. With language, of course, history comes encrusted. When Moosejaw-born Karen Solie lists manufacturers of tractors in her work, US companies like John Deere turn up. And I heard Australian Lucy Holt asked on at least one occasion if she was British

Wise Guys Meet in La Jolla
Clockwise from RS at rear of table:
Rae Armantrout, John Granger, Ted Pearson, Dustin Leavitt
(photo by TC Marshall)

Because I was in California for half of April, I missed the Poetry Communities & Individual Talent conference that took place at Kelly Writers House while I was gone. But the relationship of poetry & community was constantly on my mind, reading at UC (which still fails to treat me to the usual glut of alma mater literature, a mistake that SF State never makes, tho in fact I never actually received a degree from either), going past the house I grew up, the house eight blocks away that I owned prior to the move to Pennsylvania, visiting dear friends, including David Melnick in San Francisco & Cecelia Bromige in Sebastopol. I’m co-editing collected poems for both Melnick & David Bromige and had things I needed & wanted to discuss with each. Plus the primal pleasure of visiting dear friends. I was amazed, at the Prison Law Office in Berkeley, to see that Steve Fama has a pretty good collection of my writings on prisons from my days with the Committee for Prisoner Humanity & Justice (CPHJ), which is to say 1977 & before. Later in the week, Kathleen Frumkin & I sorted through the NY Times to find the crossword puzzle that listed “Pulitzer Prize Poet Armantrout & others” on April 13 (Rae’s birthday – did they know that?), plus the solution the following day, which was “Raes.” It was one of those deeply satisfying psychic journeys in which I traveled more than just geographical distance.

My first event on the West Coast was at the Center for Psychoanalysis in San Francisco, an interesting blend of resonances in my life given just how many psychoanalysts I know, how many therapists & the number of decades I’ve been in therapy of one sort or another. One of the first questions in that informal give & take setting was did I still think of myself as a Language Poet and had my sense of Language Poetry changed since the 1970s. My response was to begin with something I’d written in the foreword to in In The American Tree, that I understood Language Writing as a moment more than a movement, which was true in the early 1980s when I first penned that sentence, and is even truer today, when that moment seems to me clearly past.

Charles Bernstein & Yunte Huang
discussing Charlie Chan:
The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective
& His Rendezvous with American History
at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop

One value of Sarah Rosenthal’s sumptuous collection of interviews, A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Bay Area Authors, just out from Dalkey Archive, is Rosenthal’s introduction to the collection, which offers a solid history of Bay Area poetry. Like the interviews themselves – a dozen in all, averaging maybe 25 pages in length – Rosenthal’s intro shows a depth of homework on her part that may come as a sobering reminder to the Facebook generation that this is how it’s done when executed properly. The book contains discussions with Michael Palmer, Nathaniel Mackey, Leslie Scalapino, Brenda Hillman, Kathleen Fraser, Stephen Ratclife, Robert Glück, Barbara Guest, Truong Tran, Camille Roy, Juliana Spahr & Elizabeth Robinson.

Not that the introduction is perfect. Whether it’s an emphasis here¹, or a detail there², one could argue the minutiae because the larger structures are basically right on. Rosenthal is careful to document her sources & qualify her approach, noting that Stephanie Young’s Bay Poetics includes 110 poets, dozens of whom could just as easily have been interviewed here. Personally I hope Rosenthal continues her work here. Future volumes beckon. Some writers I would love to see Rosenthal devote this same attention to would include Judy Grahn, Lyn Hejinian, Al Young, Kit Robinson, Etel Adnan, Bob Grenier, Bill Berkson, Bev Dahlen, Dodie Bellamy, Mark Linenthal, Norma Cole, Joanne Kyger, Kevin Killian, Barbara Jane Reyes, Aaron Shurin, Robert Hass, Pat Nolan, Alice Jones, Stephen Vincent, Eileen Tabios, Bill Luoma, Laura Moriarty, Alli Warren, Stephanie Young, Jack Hirschman, Curtis Faville, Diane di Prima, David Melnick, Michael McClure, Norman Fischer, Adam Cornford, Mark Linenthal, Jack Marshall & Jack Foley. That’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure I’m forgetting as many others just as worthy.

The one thread I don’t feel Rosenthal’s introduction does sufficient justice toward is the relationship between post-avant writing & literary traditions that consciously understood themselves as working class &/or even lumpen in their orientation. One is that post-Beat aspect of street poetics that has roots in the New American Poetry, from the late Bob Kaufman to Jack Hirschman to many of the poets particularly around North Beach. A second is a similar approach to LGBT poetries. Paul Mariah & Steve Abbott are gone, as are Pat Parker & Paula Gunn Allen, but it would be really useful to note how the interactions of these writers informed & impacted much that is covered here. Mariah, for example, was as instrumental in keeping Jack Spicer’s memory & work alive in the first ten years after his death as anyone. I was surprised to see Claudia Rankine note the Left/Write Unity Conference spearheaded by Abbott & Bruce Boone in her blurb on the book’s back cover, but not to see it mentioned in the introduction. The important role Actualism – explicitly a Bay Area literary movement – played in the poetries of the 1970s (especially in the “poetry wars”) is entirely invisible here. Given Rosenthal’s own engaged approach to poetics, these little blindspots seem surprising.

All of which is to say that Rosenthal’s introductory history is superb, tho the reality was still a dimension or two more complex than even a first-rate telling can suggest.

 

¹ Barbara Guest, to my reading, didn’t just continue “to produce important work” once she moved to Berkeley in her seventies, she really blossomed, becoming one of the most influential poets of the past 30 years & offering a model for “late work” that may yet prove transformational for poetry going forward.

² e.g., “Spicer … spent much of his adult life moving within a few blocks in San Francisco’s North Beach” ignores Spicer’s soujourns to Minneapolis & Boston, his day jobs – when he had them – in Berkeley, and the simple fact that his home at Polk & Sutter, an address made famous for poetry by John Wiener’s Hotel Wentley Poems, is a considerable distance from North Beach. The same holds true for Spicer’s favored afternoon hangout of Aquatic Park.

Allen Ginsberg typing 1956.

James Franco as Allen Ginsberg in Howl

Over the years, some versions of the top photograph have alleged that Ginsberg is typing (or writing) Howl, tho the date is one year too late. With regards to the bottom photo, our first thought is that the typewriter has changed – it’s gray instead of the more common black. Our second thought is to wonder if that particular model was even available in 1955. Franco has stripped to a t-shirt because he’s hunkier here (Allen would like that!). And he’s moved from the kitchen to a dining room or study. But you gotta love that lamp. It’s the light source for the original photo, tho not for the recreation.

The Poetry Foundation invited nine writers, myself included, to address the question of “How has poetry changed in the last ten years?” Travis Nichols edited the feature, trying to get nine authors who might address different aspects of the overall scene. The other writers include Matthew Zapruder, Annie Finch, Rigoberto González, Marjorie Perloff, Brent Cunningham, Camille Dungy, Francisco Aragón, & Eileen Myles. The feature has been up for a few days (see that first link or click on the photo). I wrote on the role of technology change over the past decade. Since it appeared, Don Share has written some very nice words about my piece. And Henry Gould, one of my own private oxpeckers, offers his perspective at length in Don’s comments stream.

Since Don felt permitted to quote my entire little note on his blog, I guess I can do the same here, except that I want to note that you should read all of the other contributions to this feature as well. And I should add that, ten years ago, the Poetry Foundation would never have thought to invite this particular set of poets & critics to address this sort of question – that in itself is a significant phenomenon of the new decade.

Poets blogging is just a symptom. The decline of indie bookstores, including the closure of such stalwarts as Cody’s & Shaman Drum, is just a symptom. The slow painful death of newspapers, most of whom have already tossed their book review section and literary critics overboard, is itself just a symptom. The collapse of academic literary journals – viz. TriQuarterly, Southern Review & Poetry Northwest, three of my first publishers – is just a symptom. Trade publishers openly speculate that they may be next, and even universities are starting to fear that their turn may be coming. They’re right.

Just as MFA programs have pumped the number of poets writing and publishing in the United States up from a few hundred a half century ago to tens of thousands today, the major institutions that not only embodied all of this activity but served an important (if hotly contested) gate-keeping function are now all being undermined or transformed by the ongoing revolution in communications technology. The poet’s relationship to his or her audience is undergoing a profound transformation. The poet’s relationship to the institutions and even to tools of her or his practice is doing likewise. Everything is up for grabs.

Some poets have chosen to embrace the new with everything from flarf to technology-based visual poetries. Others have decided that the “timeless” values of tradition will outlast even this. They recall and sometimes reiterate the archaeologist’s maxim that ultimately hard copy is truth. If you can’t dig it up in 5,000 years, did it ever exist? Ian Hamilton Finlay, with his stone-carved minimal texts, may outlast us all.

What’s apparent is that (a) this joyride isn’t over, and (b) we’re all in this together. When I realize that any chapbook publisher with a Blogspot page and PayPal account can sell directly to readers worldwide, I feel hopeful. I just hope we can find time to read & enjoy this great bounty.

Here’s a little thought experiment. Place the following three poets into chronological order –

A) John Ashbery

B) Clark Coolidge

C) Basil Bunting

Most readers I dare say will select the sequence C, A, B – not only replicating the order in which these poets were born, but also that of the emergence of the literary movements with which they are associated: the Objectivist Bunting (tho you may have a harder time explaining why he should be so labeled), first generation New York School icon Ashbery or Clark Coolidge, who has been associated at times with both the 2^nd generation New York School and with language writing. And who am I to say that anyone is wrong here?

So let me add a little more detail to my thought experiment and run it again:

A)  John Ashbery’s River and Mountains

B)  Clark Coolidge’s Flag Flutter & U.S. Electric

C)  Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts

By now even the sleepiest reader must realize that there is some trick afoot. Let me add a few other titles: The Diaries of Anaïs Nin, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Jack Spicer’s Book of Magazine Verse, George Oppen’s Discrete Series, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, Louis Zukofsky’s All: The Collected Short Poems, 1956-1964.

All of these works were published in a single year, 1966, although both the Oppen & Stein were reprints of long unavailable editions.

This is a detail I pulled out of the bibliography that’s in the back of The Grand Piano, Part 7, the most recent volume in this collective interrogation into the history of the poetry scene of San Francisco during the latter half of the 1970s. We decided that it would be a good idea to simply list, in order of their year of publication, the books that were important to us, starting in 1965 and running through 1985. Nor did we just list the poetry that mattered to us. 1966 was also the year that LeRoi Jones published Home: Social Essays and Kenneth Burke brought out Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method, from UC Press.

Going through the list again Wednesday night, trying to distract myself from a too long flight from LA to Philadelphia, I thought to myself, “Hey, how about that?” seeing Ashbery, Coolidge & Bunting all bunched together like that. Rivers and Mountains is actually one of Ashbery’s early books (also one of my personal favorites) & Bunting himself has been defined by the volume Briggflatts as by nothing else in his life. But here is Clark Coolidge already tossing the onions & chard in what Robert Sward would later dismiss as “psychedelic word salad” in a review of this very book in the journal Poetry. In my mind at least, these three works fit into very different slots, which is to say that each volume has become part of a larger narrative, and that these narratives themselves are parts of a larger whole ensemble.

All of this is thoroughly imaginary, even if I fancy it as some sort of history of contemporary poetry – and I’m perfectly capable of arguing for my sense of it in reasonably strong terms, downgrading the likes of Robert Lowell, for example, or elevating (as a few correspondents tell me I have done without justification) Elizabeth Bishop from some margin of trivia. What is not imaginary, however, is the actual history of publication of any of these works. George Oppen published Discrete Series some 32 years before in an edition of maybe 300 copies. But in 1966 he was publishing for the first time in a generation and his terrific first books from San Francisco Review / New Directions had generated interest in the even earlier pre-communist poetry of the 1930s, so Ron Caplan of the Asphodel Bookshop in Cleveland brought out this reprint. Likewise Dick Higgins (one of the most underappreciated poets & publishers of the entire period) brought out Stein’s early opus, a big brick of a book at a time when all you could get of The Cantos, say, was an edition of the first 90.

I know only one person who’s truly a member of my generation – Yanks on the high side of 60 – who claims not to know where he was or what he was doing the moment he learned, 45 years ago today, that John F. Kennedy had been shot. This friend is a former member of the rock band, the Beau Brummels.

In my case, I was attending Latin class, a senior at Albany High, when someone came to the classroom with a note to send me to the principal’s office. The teacher read the note aloud. Since I was a member of the stage crew – where all the geeks-before-our-time hung out – and thus responsible for converting the school gymnasium from a basketball court into an auditorium for a school wide assembly, I was needed downstairs at once as the president had been shot. I was in the school’s front office when word came that he had died.

I know also where I was & what I was doing when I first heard of the mass suicide in Jonestown 30 years ago this month, as I do the instant someone on the Mission Muni turned their boom box up full blast so that we heard that George Moscone & Harvey Milk had been shot & killed, also thirty years ago this week. I was actually on my way to City Hall where I had planned to buy my monthly Muni pass for December, which I then did. They hadn’t even closed off the building as a crime scene by the time I got there. I have a memory of watching deputy mayor Rudy Nothenberg in a grey three-piece suit sprinting across the large rotunda on some terrible mission, and you could hear the total chaos up the grand flight of stairs that led to the mayor’s office & those of the board of supervisors. Later that morning, after I got to my job at Central City Hospitality House, just a few blocks away on Leavenworth, the staff at “HH” and more than a few street people who used its drop-in facilities chipped in so we could purchase a bouquet of roses that we took as a group to lay on the steps of City Hall.

I can remember also the last time I saw Moscone alive (at a Basque restaurant on upper Market Street a few weeks earlier), even the last time I saw his killer Dan White – I was having lunch at a restaurant on Golden Gate Avenue called Knights with a young lady who was a secretary for criminal defense lawyer Charles Garry, whom I knew from his work with the prison movement. At that very moment, Garry was with his latest client, Jim Jones, in Jonestown (Garry escaped by running into the forest). I don’t have a memory of where I was the last time I saw Harvey Milk, but that’s because the peripatetic Milk seemed to be everywhere all the time. Until suddenly he wasn’t.

When I was boy, my grandmother would talk about the two great public tragedies in her life – the attack on Pearl Harbor & the death of FDR – she was in the kitchen for both events & the radio figured heavily in each tale. And anyone who can read this knows what they were doing September 11, 2001.

Such moments are burned into our memories and become part of a secret rhythm of our lives. They blend in with the more gradual horrors of daily life – like when in 1982 I realized that Dick Gamble, the housing agency bureaucrat I sometimes worked with who would be the first person I knew to die of AIDS, was really sick. Off hours, I would see him dressed to the nines in black leather, quite a change from the suits of his day job, and I ran into him on the bus one day after I’d returned from teaching at UC San Diego. He’d already left his job because he was suffering from what was then being called “the gay cancer.” He looked so pale & fragile & so incongruous in the assertiveness of his leathers. In just a couple of weeks he was gone.

This is the nightmare side of Joe Brainard’s great poem, I Remember, himself a victim of that plague. Once you “get it,” the literal words of Brainard’s poem almost don’t matter. What counts is how the specificity of things, what the French poet Francis Ponge would call their nature, construct our own identities. And these large scale tragedies turn out to be the details we all share.

Now most of my neighbors here in Chester County could not tell you just who Harvey Milk was, let alone George Moscone or Dan White. Maybe the forthcoming Sean Penn movie will change that for awhile, but I rather doubt it. I wonder just how many of the kids attending Bayard Rustin High School in nearby West Chester understand, or have even heard of, the difficulties the great civil rights leader had because he was gay at a time when that simply was illegal. Not so long ago. Indeed, I wonder just how many know that Rustin was a great civil rights leader. I can recall also just where I was the day Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream” speech & am aware that it was Rustin whose hard labor made that event happen.

Because of how all these hinge events fit together, one recalls details that would otherwise be lost. That lunch in Knights in 1978 was the only “date” I ever had with that woman – she’d seen me on the bus reading History and Class Consciousness, we’d had a short conversation &, after she got off, she ran after the bus to shout her phone number up at my window. But over lunch it became clear enough that she thought I was too serious & political, and that I thought rather that she was not serious or political enough. (And to work in the office of Charles Garry?!?) She’s a country & western singer now, living in Nashville, with a few albums out on her own label. Her husband is her manager, or maybe vice versa. Would I know any of this had not Dan White walked in just then with an entourage. He was, at that moment, trying publicly to persuade Moscone into reappointing him to the post he’d resigned from just a few weeks before. Milk was openly advocating that the mayor appoint anyone but the homophobic ex-cop.

I would like to think that such moments might be behind us, but I know they aren’t. Humankind’s brief journey on this planet has never been easy. The state of California is still arguing over the civil rights of its gay and lesbian citizens. This is one argument that Pennsylvania hasn’t even yet begun. And the forces of bigotry haven’t abated so very much. Maybe that’s why I feel the election of Barack Obama may yet prove to be more important symbolically than politically. After all, when he was born, his own parents’ interracial marriage was illegal in roughly half the states of this union. And what were they afraid of? They were terrified of babies like Barack Obama.