Activity

Jean-Jacques Lebel and I had a running argument over the last six weeks while he was staying here. He considers himself a revolutionary, and he proposed that a young poet he met in Berkeley get a $1,000 grant from this foundation. There was a scout in town, Gus Blaisdell, from the University of New…

WE: I distinguish between the poem written and the poem read. The poem read is the confrontation with the world, but the poem written is the confrontation with the self, the unknown part of the self, which is hidden. This is carried on at an entirely different level than the blazing confrontation w…

DM: During all these disruptions you were spending a great deal of time on the reading circuit. How did you regard that experience?

WE: I regard it always as a witness. On the college campuses the emphasis is on communication, what you know. I can communicate, but the witness is greater. It's so…

DM: Is it true, that in the week between your leaving the Order and your formal marriage to Sue, Rose showed up at Stinson Beach to dissuade you from it, to make you return to the Order?

WE: She did.

JS: Would you care to talk about that? WE: No.

DM: Was Miller's work influential?

WE: Not in any stylistical way. What Miller taught me was ... how shall I put it? Not just the desirability, but the necessity of going-for-broke. And not just in the aesthetic sense.

With both Jeffers and Lawrence there was always the primacy of the aesthet…