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.