Activity

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…

Every day on the way home from
My office I pawn another
Of my Spring clothes. Every day
I come
home from the river bank
Drunk. Everywhere I go, I owe
Money for wine. History
Records few men who lived to be
Seventy. I watch the yellow
Butterflies drink deep of the
Flowers, and the dragonfl…

The Autumn constellations
Begin to rise. The brilliant
Moonlight shines on the crowds.
The moon toad swims in the river
And does not drown. The moon rabbit
Pounds the bitter herbs of the
Elixir of eternal life.
His drug only makes my heart
More bitter. The silver brilliance
Only makes my h…