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 Mexico. He was looking for people to recommend for government grants. Jean-Jacques Lebel suggested Blaisdell recommend the young Berkeley poet. It happened that Blaisdell didn't dig this fellow's poetry. That wasn't my point.

My point was that it surprised me that someone who considered himself a full-blown revolutionary would be the first to accept government money. Even though I dig that using establishment money for antiestablishment ends is subversive part of the cultural "rip-off." The Kayak Press in San Francisco, for instance, took $10,000 two years in a row. One of the editor's justifications was that he would sponsor a — poem on Che Guevara. The prize poem on Che Guevara was $400, I beprize for the best for the best lieve. I have heard that the Kayak editor, George Hitchcock, was a radical in the thirties and it seems to me that this is sort of what happened to the whole old liberal movement in this country. The labor unions were bought off. They loaded the ships for Vietnam. From my point of view, which I admit is disputable, poets and little presses are also being bought off. Any one of them that took the money would say, "No, that's not true. We are free to do anything we want with the money." But it's logical that if you're a real Bad Boy the first year, you won't get the grant renewed. And then too someone in another country a radical in France or Germany reads about your taking this money and they don't see the rationalization and the various gradations of your reasoning. All they see is the fact that you took the U.S. government money. ... I guess mine is the "pure" purist position — though I hardly consider myself "pure"—

JS: Perhaps what happens today is that most poets of David's generation and the younger poets of my generation don't take the whole thing that seriously. And free money is . . .

LF: Jean-Jacques's argument was that it depends on what you use the money for. If you take the money to live on, that is one thing. But if you take it to instigate a plot to blow something up, or to throw sand in the wheels of the machine, then it is justified. He said this kid in Berkeley is interested in using money to buy materials to hatch a big plot. The kid doesn't have time to work because he is working full-time on the revolution. This Government money will save him from having to get a job and he can work fulltime on blowing up the system.