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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.
lol. amazing
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.
damn
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.
interesting
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.
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.
LF: It depends on which revolution you are talking about. I mean, the first thing a poet has to do is to live that type of life which doesn't compromise himself. It seems to me that taking government grants and living on them is compromising himself before he even starts writing.
i dont know if i agree on this specific issue but im glad this is a conversation being had!
LF: The radical would say that these large foundations are just as big murderers as the government is. Are they? I figure it is important to lead the kind of where you don't have to take grants from any organization. You have to make it on your own without any help. At any point you can tell them to go fuck themselves. And not only can but do tell them. The real problem is to decide who's "them." ... Well, you can say or print anything you want, according to the government foundations. The director of the program is obviously sincere in saying that there are no strings attached to the money. Grants are renewable the second year. Suppose during the first year you publish something that is really offensive politically, or offensive to the sensibilities of those in Washington who hold the purse strings? If you say "Fuck you, Agnew" will you get your grant renewed the second year? Maybe yes.
i guess im kind of doing this even if my views are maybe less extreme than his lol
The intellectual in Europe is like the intellectual in South America, Latin America. He doesn't wash dishes, for instance. Still a woman's place to do all that crap. The intellectual in Latin America (this leather, clothes, books, tools, . . . isn't so in France) may talk very revolutionary ideas, but he is usually very well dressed in a white shirt, necktie, and even cuff links. When Ginsberg and I went to South America in 1959 this surprised me. We met poets and writers and intellectuals and professors from all the South American countries at this conference in Concepcion. Including a lot of Communists. And practically everyone was meticulously dressed. They didn't have drip-dry shirts in those days either. In other words, there was a housekeeper, a criada back home, ironing those shirts and doing the laundry. No one questioned this, in public at least ...
lol
I must say this in defense of my mother. One of the best things she said to me was: "You know, all the knowledge of the world is in the library and I will show you how to use it." And she did. She took me to the library and we walked in and she showed me how the card catalog worked and she introduced me to the lady who worked there and I spent a very beautiful summer there and was very proud of it. Like I could really go up to the card catalog, look up books, get authors, pull the books off the shelves, and so on. It was too much, man.