America's speech waterfalls forth in meltingpot tongues of Babel in

telegraphic ads, pop songs, street-corner rapping, bar room brag & bluster, bad-mouthing, put-ons, putdowns,

the home-made rhetorics of Whitman, Melville, Andrew Jackson Davis, L. Ron Hubbard; the streamclear prose of Thoreau or Hemingway; Gertrude Stein's devotions;

the sportcaster's spiel tracing a horse race over & thru the radio; the hawking, squawking, conning & jiving; preaching, teaching, wheeling & dealing; the jive-ass realms of speech; the hard-sell, the soft-soaping;

gossip columnists, breathless, telling-all; right-on; can you dig it? letting it all hang telling It like It is; out

anyway, it's all semantic;

hermetic trade lingo: jazz musicians, short-order cooks, truck-drivers, car mechanics, stereo buffs, doit-yourself, tool talk -- the technologic speech forms, machine-sprouted vocabularies whose sounds rebound in & out of USA livingrooms & bedrooms;

the self & tribe protective languages, shields against a rude deluge -- layer & layer -- worthless degrading words --

the black man's linguistic counter-attack on white America's word-gas clouds webbed with war-blood; the same cloud hanging over the American Indian (whose language was charged & precise as what a poet wants his to be), the Chicano, the Puerto Rican; curt New England speech brittle as icicles; the Southerner's smoothing-out of word sounds; the Midwesterner's flat speech of plains; the shtetl-to-ghetto Yiddishisms of the Eastern cities; the regional, community, tribal tongues;

shop-talk, cop-talk, bop-talk, TV's hypno-rant; the daily dose of phony baloney; the nightly hot air; animal invective clash of sounds as radical meets reactionary, as power crashes down on the powerless;

these sounds, the languages, these codes & messages, all meet in the ears & eyes of poets who have been Jacob-wrestling Europe since landing on Plymouth Rock.

America was claimed: a new place, a new space to build great cities on.

The poets began immediately to innocently & arrogantly fashion a language to meet & match America's impossible largeness.

KR: I don't think there were very many people in the thirties. There were people in San Francisco who were writing and not publishing anything when I came. Most of those people became involved in red San Francisco. The interesting thing is that most of them became practical labor organizers, rather than Bohemians sitting around in Union Square arguing about proletarian literature.

There was a real pattern there, due to the fact that there were all sorts of things wrong with red literature in the thirties in New York. But when the Communist artist and writer's groups were formed, the John Reed Club the one in San Francisco, they put up some pretty stiff qualifications. The members were actually artists and writers. They stayed around.

What happened in New York was that the clubs became dominated by Bohemians who didn't do anything except argue about Marx, whom they had never read, and they would avoid the artists and writers. It's very hard to convey to the present generation what that was like. People talked about communism . in those days the way people talk about acid or smack. I mean, they bored you to death, and they didn't know anything about it.

I was sort of the outdoor organizer for the John Reed Club. I was organizer of everything in the West, and, of course, the New York apparatus thought the West started at Hoboken and that is one reason the Chicago organization was better the reason it had people like Dick Wright and Farrell and people like — Outside of New York, we tried to confine the thing to bona fide artists and writers. In San Francisco our people were actually involved in the real labor movement. You have to understand that there was an enormous amount of bullshit. People were running around talking about "the masses" and there wasn't really any contact with the masses. But hell, I mean, I wrote the Waterfront Worker ... all of the goddamn thing, week after week after week. A mimeographed thing we used to hand out on the waterfront long before the strike. All of us were actually were involved. We were involved in the Agricultural Workers Industrial Union. I had somebody ask me one time at an anarchist meeting in Italy, "Is The Grapes of Wrath true?" One-eighth is true. In the novel, one guy gets killed. In a Bakersfield cotton strike, to which I took Steinbeck, eight guys get killed.

You see, all of us were very actively involved and this makes all the difference in the world. Another thing, very few of these people were orthodox Commies because the basic tradition on the West Coast was IWW. The attitude was really an anarchistic attitude, and for many years I treasured to — flaunt in the face of the FBI, if they ever bothered me — an application to the Communist Party that had written across it, "Comrade Rexroth is a very valuable comrade, but he is entirely too much of an anarchist to be good party material." It was signed by Earl Browder, the general secretary of the Party. This movement stretched all the way from Seattle, where the dominated the intellectual and Bohemian world in the years around the First World War and well into the twenties. People like Gary Snyder, over a generation later than myself, and I grew up in very similar worlds.

Whereas the counterculture as a culture, as a way of life ... you can't catch up with it, it's in the bloodstream of society. You can't pin it down. Its effect is continuously corrosive. It's these capsules they stick in people that keep feeding medicine into their bloodstream for twenty years. The more the poetry of music is massive confrontation, the less effective it is. It may be effective in a very limited range, but the other thing is effective over a long term. This is true of the whole protest-rock and protest-folk bit. Young people are wise to the fact that Donovan is more revolutionary than Dylan. The whole thing that has grown up around Leonard Cohen is more subversive than Country Joe and the Fish. And as the years go by, it becomes completely phony. Play Pete Seeger singing "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night" ... it would make you throw up.

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 hair more white.
I know that the country is
Overrun with war. The moonlight
Means nothing to the soldiers
Camped in the western deserts.

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 dragonflies
Dipping the surface of the
Water again and again.
I cry out to the Spring wind,
And the light and the passing hours.
We enjoy life such a litde
While, why should men cross each other?

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 aesthetic. Traditional literary values were used to orient the mind into violational areas, sexual explicitness subsumed in the aesthetic intuition. Miller taught me the truth of going-for-broke even without the blessing of the aesthetic. Just the raw force of language humping you through, that preaesthetic draft into the unconscious, the sexual surcharge lifted out of the pornographic, not by aesthetics as other writers had done, but by the naked energy invested in language itself. That alone. I never attempted it for myself, but at last I began to realize what was possible. With those three masters behind me I was set up for the work I had to do.

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: 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 something like this: what you can communicate maintains the point of contact, but it isn't the essence of your total effect, which is witness. By witness I mean a personal confrontation, a personal encounter, a psychic crisis deliberately precipitated to produce a change in attitude, a new center of gravity, a displacement of consciousness from cognition to faith. I don't mean faith in the Catholic sense. I never proselytize. I mean faith in the sense of commitment to life and to living. To live my faith, rather than by the mental thing that our education inculcates. To enter via the ideational world, yes, but to move through it. To be able to field the questions as they come to you and at the same time to throw back into the questioner a different principle of life. We are familiar with this from the example of the Zen masters, but my point of orientation is not Zen.

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 which the world exacts. We begin as introverts, the reason why so many poets are poor readers. For the art of the platform is an art of extroversion. You master the problem by throwing a more challenging confrontation back to the world than it is prepared for. This enables you to survive even as you insist on your own terms. For this reason I will sometimes outrageously exploit my poems when I read. Whereas when I write, it is as private a thing as my love life. There is all the privacy of the bedroom about it. Procreation and insemination. Except that the dialogue is with the self, the unknown self. In the act of creation we find the pagan in ourself, the primitive. We find him, or her, or it — whatever it is that has not yet yielded to formality.