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Number
282
August
September 1999
Whatnot:
A Talk with Philip
Whalen
DAVID MELTZER
Copyright ©
1999 Poetry Flash
On the release of Overtime: Selected
Poems, by Philip Whalen, and two upcoming major
readings to celebrate that publication, August 21
in San Francisco and September 18 in Los Angeles
(see photo caption, this page), we are happy to
present this new conversation. David Meltzer, poet
and interviewer, had this to say about the occasion
of this talk: "Reconnoitered with the interview
crew: Marina Lazarra (a New College MA graduate in
Poetics, amazing poet in her own right & keeper
of the taperecorder) & James Brook, in-house
editor for City Lights, who coedited their
Reclaiming San Francisco & a gifted
translator (see his Verso Panegyric by Guy
Debord). We met at the Muni underground Castro
Street station the day before the Gay Pride
Festival which was already pulsing with pre-party
partying. Our project is Golden Gate, a
revised expanded version of San Francisco Poets
(published first in the sixties by Ballantine
Books), now a forthcoming City Lights book
incorporating the earlier interviews (Lew Welch,
Kenneth Rexroth, William Everson, Michael McClure,
Lawrence Ferlinghetti) with new ones (Philip
Lamantia, Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder, Joanne
Kyger, Jack Hirschman, Jack Micheline, & Philip
Whalen). The three of us jump-started w/some coffee
at Castro rocket-launcher & then ambled to the
Hartford Street Zen Center where retired abbott
Whalen lived. Knocked on the door, punched some
buzzer buttons, waited & muttered, &
finally Whalen opened the door to let us in. We
asked him, as an ice-breaker, "How are you?" He
answered, "Fat and short of breath." Barefoot, in
T-shirt & loose fitting pants, Whalen escorted
us into a dining room area where we set up the
taperecorder, found our places at the table, &
began. (I must confess that Whalen, as the other
poets we interviewed, are/were mentors &
exemplars; we've all shared a history &
disparate community. No matter how fractured &
contentious it might appear to be, there was always
a weird undertow of unity & regard.)"
PW: I was born to poor but honest
parents in Portland, Oregon, in 1923, October the
20th, which was my mother's birthday. At that time
and for many years thereafter, my father worked for
the Honeyman Hardware Company in Portland as a
traveling salesman. Shortly after I was born--I was
maybe two or so-we moved up to Centralia,
Washington for about two years. And then from there
we were transferred to The Dalles. Capital T-h-e,
capital D-a-l-l-e-s, on the south bank of the
Columbia river about eighty miles from Portland.
And that's where I grew up more or less and went to
grade school and high school. And, after my mother
was dead, my father and I removed from there to
Portland, and I lived with him in Portland for a
year or so, and then I got drafted in 1943 into the
U.S. Army. Of course it isn't the U.S. Army; it was
called the Army of the United States actually, and,
at that time they were collecting people to be Air
Corps ground crew folks, so I was lucky I got
selected into that group. And even though I have
and had limited service, this meant I couldn't do
very active things because my eyesight was very
bad--and it hasn't improved. Then I had basic
training at Keesler Field in Biloxi, Mississippi,
and we moved from there after about two months up
to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where I went to the
Air Force radio school, and learned Morse code and
learned about doing simple repairs on radio
equipment, and was kept on there to be trained as
an instructor, and then later on I worked at
different bases as either a radio mechanic or as a
radio mechanic instructor, so I got to do some
flying when I was stationed at Yuma. God, over the
desert was beautiful. Over the desert and over the
Salton Sea and over the Gulf of California and
around all the mountains was very beautiful. Then I
got discharged in 1946 and came back to Portland.
And I wanted at the time to come down here to go to
University of California and study Chinese. But
that didn't work out because I squandered all the
money I had, somehow. And so the next thing to do
was to apply to Reed College to be a student, so I
could get taken care of on the G.I. Bill. That's
what happened, and so I stayed there for five
years. I was thrown out of college for about one
year because I wasn't doing enough scholarly work
and wasn't attending enough classes, but I got
re-admitted and graduated in 1951. I should have
graduated at the same time as Lew in 1950, but I
missed that boat. So Gary and I were in the same
class in '51. And that's the summer of '51, I moved
down here to San Francisco, and things didn't work
out terribly well. And so I went down to L.A. where
a friend of mine was living out at Venice, and he
and I both got jobs at North American Aircraft
Plant. I was there not too long, probably less than
a year, I dare say, because it was too busy. It was
hard to travel back and forth from Venice to--I
forget the name of that street that is out there--
International Blvd., I guess. So I came back up
here and floundered around trying to find work and
so on, and getting some, a little bit, but not very
much. It was very hard--I was overqualified--so
that was very discouraging. I forget what year it
was.
Anyway, at some point I went back down again and
wandered around, and then I came back up here and
joined Gary who had found an apartment on Telegraph
Hill he could share with me. And at that time, he
had started going to Cal as a special student in
Chinese and Japanese because he wanted to find what
the Zen business was about from the inside, which
took a lot of language. And so, anyhow, there were
various moves and switches and whatnot, and in 1955
Ginsberg and Kerouac showed up, and we
began…the revolution…which had been
started by Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer and
everybody earlier on, and we was all carpetbaggers,
which did not set well with the locals. Anyhow, at
that time I was living in Berkeley and got a job,
fortunately. Through a friend I got a job at the
Poultry Husbandry Department washing laboratory
glassware. So I was able to live and eat food and
things. And every once in a while they gave me a
free dead chicken to take home or a laboratory
creature that had lost its… and also many
eggs. Very cheap. So, I was eating, which was very
interesting. And presently, Allen got his job with
the M.S.T.S., Military Sea Transport Service, and
he was going off on a trip to Alaska. He gave me
the cottage on Milvia Street where he had been
living. So I lived there for several years and
worked for the university.
And, what happened next was that my friend,
Richard Anderson, had been practicing law in
Newport, Oregon, and suddenly the new governor, the
first Democratic governor in a long time, appointed
him to the circuit court bench. He was going to
have to run for the office in the next election,
which was the following year, and he asked me to
come up and help with all that and do publicity and
his paper stuff and travel around and meet all the
local yokels, and talk to them 'cause they wanted
to look at him. Apparently he impressed them
because he won the election. Anyway, that was about
1957, and around 1959 LeRoi Jones wanted me to give
him a book manuscript, so I sent him off the book
that became Like I Say. And at the same time
Dave Haselwood printed up a broadside poem of mine
that later appeared in Memoirs of an
Interglacial Age, so I could go on a trip with
Michael McClure to New York to do readings at
colleges and stuff. And everything sort of went
billowing up after that, a lovely bohemian life.
And sometimes it was nice, and sometimes it was a
little too rackety… I was older than most
people.
Anyhow, I got into the business of having
readings arranged for me at different colleges.
They would buy me an airplane ticket, and I would
go out and see them, and talk to them, and read
poems, and talk to students, and do a seminar on
poetry or something like that. So I was making
money for the first time. So that was a grand
period that finally culminated in Gary coming back
to this country in 1954 or something like that--no
he was here in '54, '55--anyway he went off to
Japan in '56, if I remember right, and then when he
came back it was several years later. And he had
heard from a friend of his, who still lived in
Kyoto, that the Kyoto YMCA school wanted teachers,
and would I be interested going over and teaching
there for a year. So I said, "Fine," 'cause I was
totally broke and here in San Francisco. It all got
magically put into place, first of all…. I did
a short movie of myself reading poetry and walking
around in the Legion of Honor and so on. Richard
Moore [of KQED] asked me to participate in
this shot. So Gary and I, and Duncan, I guess, all
did a bit part in a series about American poetry.
That was right when I needed money, and so I got
$300, and then Allen promoted me into a grant from
the American Academy, or something like that, who
came up with a thousand dollars. So I was able to
move by boat to Japan to stay with Gary temporarily
'til some other friends helped find a place to
live, and so it was great. I had a job, and I was
living in an elegant house in Kyoto, which is a
gorgeous city. You have to have a city that's a
real success, I think. So I was there in something
like '56 until about the end of '57, and I came
back here to work on the publication of On
Bear's Head 'cause I didn't want to do it by
overseas mail. And it was a mistake because it
wasn't very long before I was getting homesick for
Kyoto. So I came, and had to sell things to raise
money to go back and get my job back in Kyoto. It
all came together. I went back there in 1958 and
stayed until l971. That was just wonderful 'cause I
could spend a lot of time writing, looking at
things, and writing, reading a lot, and writing. So
at some point, not too late after I got back, I had
this poetry manuscript and sent it to Donald Allen
who took it to print. And it was very shortly after
that I got a letter from the man that does the
Black Sparrow Press.
DM: John Martin.
PW: Yeah, John Martin wrote to me
and asked if I had any poetry to print. And I wrote
back and said, "No, but I have this prose
manuscript that I've been lugging around for a
while." And he said, "Well, let's see it." And so I
sent him a short number called You Didn't Even
Try. I think that was the one he took. Anyway
he wrote back with a contract.
So that came out later on. One of the books that
Don had taken came out before I left, and maybe
even two--I don't remember now--they were done by
his Gray Fox Press and his Four Seasons Foundation,
and that was very pleasing.
In the beginning of 1971, the school that I was
working at decided that all the people who were
teaching there had better have a Masters in
teaching English as a foreign language because
these two bright guys came over from America and
sold their school on that idea. And so about thirty
five of us were left out on a limb. So I was going
to have to make arrangements to come back to the
United States, and my friend Margo found out that I
could rent a tiny apartment in the basement of her
house in Bolinas. So I removed from Kyoto to
Bolinas in one fell swoop. And the main floor of
the house was rented by Joe Brainard, which is
interesting.
DM: Oh, I didn't know.
PW: He was doing a huge quality of
work, and everybody else was in town and writing
everything. Lewis MacAdams and Tom Clark, and
Joanne was there, and god knows who all; it's a
huge crowd of old time poets and things. And it was
very comfortable and pleasant; then at some point
Donald Allen told me that he had this space in his
house that was too much, and would I be interested
in renting it. And I said, "yeah," 'cause it was a
much more private and elegant arrangement than
living in that basement. I moved up there on the
hill. Up on…
DM: The mesa.
PW: The mesa where his house was.
And then on New Year's Day of 1972, Richard Baker
came out; he and his wife Virginia were visiting
Mike Dickson, who lived right near to Don and other
folks, to say Happy New Year, and he asked me,
"What are you doing?" And I said, "Well I'm
thinking about moving to the city for more peace
and quiet because up here there's a party about
once every five minutes. People get mad if you
don't come, and people get mad if you do go. It's
not interesting." And he said, "Well why don't you
come look at the Zen Center and see if you could
live there." "Oh all right, when can I come?" And
he says "Oh anytime. Call up Yvonne and tell her
you want to come."
And at that time she was one of the big bosses.
He had only recently moved into that building up
there on Page Street. So I went up there and looked
around, and it looked very nice. He gave me a
conducted tour and talked. And finally I says,
"Well when can I move in?" And he says, "Anytime."
I say, "Okay, I'll come by next week." And he said,
"Okay." And this is very interesting because it all
happened that way. But then I found out a couple
years later that the usual way that anybody came to
live in that building was that they came to San
Francisco and got a job, hired an apartment in the
neighborhood there around Page Street and lived
there, and then went every minute they could spare
to the Zen Center to do meditation and ceremonies
and stuff. And you had to do that at least for a
year or so before you could be on the list of
candidates to live in the building. I was terribly
embarrassed when I found out Richard had railroaded
me in there. And then it was even more embarrassing
when I asked him in the fall if I could go to
Tassajara because I wanted to see what the
monastery was like 'cause I had already asked to be
made into a monk. And he says, "There's a truck
leaving on Saturday morning." And I said, "That's
fine." So, Yvonne helped me pack up all my books
and put them in the basement of that house that's
right next door.
And early the next morning I was off to the
monastery. I talked to Richard later when he came
down. He asked how I was doing; I said, "I felt
overtrained. It's too much like the army." But, at
the end of that practice period, the fall of 1972,
I came back up here for the ordination ceremony and
was here for about a year acting as Richard's
attendant. And at the end of--no I think at the
beginning of the following year--I went back for
another training period at Tassajara. It was
awful.
DM: Why was it awful?
PW: You know, I was bucking the
system, which is ridiculous. It wasn't until the
next year that I gave up and said, "All right,
Tassajara." If you just follow the schedule and
shut up, everything is going to be fine. And that's
why I moved out. After that I did about seven more
practice periods in just one summer. Ten practice
periods in the summer.
DM: What was the practice
period?
PW: Three months.
DM: And what does it
encompass?
PW: Hours of meditation, a little
bit of studying time and working time. Mainly I
took care of the library.
DM: That's appropriate.
PW: So the next year, '73, I guess
it was '74 when I first came down there in the
condition of a monk; 1975 was the year that I was
chosen as head monk in the autumn practice period.
And that was a marvelous experience. And, I don't
know, I finally got used to it.
DM: What are the functions of the head
monk?
PW: Oh, you have to do all of the
ceremonies everyday.
DM: How many are there?
PW: You know, in the morning,
first of all, you preside over the morning
meditations--there are three of them. And then
there's the incense offerings service that follows.
You have to lead that. At some point you start
lecturing...and, at the end of that practice period
when you [are ordained as unsui, a Zen
Buddhist monk], you have to sit up in front and
face all the people who are the former
unsuis and answer whatever questions they
ask. Then all the people who have participated in
the practice period also get to ask you a question
which you are obliged to answer in some way or
another. And you get two tries to each question.
It's very hard.
DM: Is there a possibility of striking
out?
PW: Oh yeah, I struck out. A guy
called Bob, anyway, asked me some question or
another, and I had no idea what the answer was or
if there was an answer. I didn't know. I think that
in a regular place they would have thrown your ass
out. And so, I always thought what I was doing
between 1972 and 1984--some of that time, of
course, I was going out to do college readings,
fussing over having things published, having to do
proofreading. And it was satisfactory. Then in
1983, there was the grand hoopla at the Zen center
when Roshi Richard Baker was made to resign. The
next year, he had arranged for a Zendo in Santa Fe.
And he asked me would I go down and look at it. So
I went down and looked at it and said, "It's just
fine. I'll come down…." That year I was
supposed to go to Naropa Institute to teach. So I
had to pack up my apartment and store stuff and
sail off first to Colorado and then to New Mexico.
That was in 1984. And so I stayed there until 1987,
continuing to study the Zen business with Richard
and going through the transmission ceremony with
him, which gave me authority to teach.
DM: What is the transmission
ceremony?
PW: The Zen lineage… the
succession of patriarchs is passed on from teacher
to student--they say from warm hand to warm
hand--which means from the eldest to the eldest
without interruption; in other words, the teaching,
the understanding, the Buddhist understanding of
the teacher is passed on to the student, and the
student understands that that's what's happening.
The private ceremony, very elegant, very elaborate,
it takes hours and hours, and endless quantities of
equipment and so on. It's a huge affair that goes
on a week. Culminating in all night, all day, all
night ceremonies, after which you are added on to
the list of patriarchs of the Zen school.
And at the end of that year I decided to come
back here. I forget how it happened. I got here
right at the moment when Jack and Dolores were
going to make a trip to Boston. They wanted someone
to watch their house for them. So I fell into a
place to live accidentally, which was very nice.
They had that big funny house on Church Street that
had many, many rooms and studios, and a wonderful
garden with those strange South American chickens
that lay the blue eggs. Then they got back
eventually, and so then I was looking for a place
to live. Brit was a friend of Jack's and Dolores's,
and Brit came over one day, and he was moaning
around the house. The fella that he had had, who
shared his apartment, had packed up and left him.
And I said, "Well I'm looking for a place." And so
we figured that that would be nice, and I went over
and looked at his place, and it was fine, so I
moved in there. So I was there for a year, during
which time I did a lot of traveling back around the
United States and went to Europe to help Roshi do a
session in Germany, and got to see Paris on that
trip, briefly. It was wonderful.
DM: You'd never been to Europe
before?
PW: No. Wait, let me see. What year was it? It
was 1980… I think it was 1983 or a little
later that I got invited to that international
poetry festival in Rome. That was my first trip to
Europe. I really dug it. I really dug Rome because
I was hung up on it when I was a kid, and studied
Latin. So, anyway, that was the first time in 1989;
we went to this Buddhist Center outside of
Andernach, after which we went and visited
Heidelberg, where Roshi had some friends, and came
back. So I came back here to San Francisco; that
was in 1989. And I moved from Sanchez Street to
this place, to help Issan Dorsey on New Year's Day,
1989. And that was the year I went off to
Andernach. And, 1989, his son was becoming ill. And
the following year he perished of AIDS. And Steve
Abbott, who had been working here with him… he
had Steve take over the job. And then Steve, after
about a year, found the business of trying to
operate the Hospice, which had started now, and
trying to run the Zen Center also, and all kinds of
attendant horrors and scraps and screams and
things, resigned in 1991. That was a disaster in
his memory ever since. And so, here we are on
Hartford Street and feeling pale because in 1992 I
came down with a case of endocarditis, which put me
in the hospital for weeks.
DM: What is that?
PW: It's an infection inside of
the heart. There were all sort of staph bugs in
there tromping on the heart valves.
DM: Jesus.
PW: And so, Sander Bernstein
bumped me into the hospital at Mt. Zion, and I
dropped in just gallons of all sorts of exotic
antibiotics and pills. It was terrible because it
gave me nightmares. You can't imagine what kind of
exquisite, horrible nightmares you can get from
antibiotics. So anyway that was pretty nasty. And
then after I got out of the hospital, Sander was
worrying about me, and fussing, and telling me,
"You're still in heart failure." I thought, "This
is wonderful. It's like being in Peoria." And I had
to take pills and things.
It was the next year that he said, that he and
several other people said, that I had to have a
heart valve replacement operation. And I said,
"C'mon this is too fancy." And so I was introduced
to a celebrated heart specialist who was then at
the county hospital, a guy who had been President
Eisenhower's cardiologist. And he came up--after he
looked at me and looked at the records--and said,
"Well, if you don't do an operation you're gonna
have liver failure, kidney failure, heart failure,
and everything is going to hell. You'll be in bad
trouble."
So I was in between him and Rick and Sander, and
I finally got roped into doing this goddamned
operation. Horrendous! You know they kill you?
First of all, they refrigerate you. You don't know
about that 'cause they anestheticize you; they
refrigerate you and bring your body temperature
down to some wonderfully low level where you're,
what'd ya call it, the functions, life
functions…decline and fall; everything comes
nearly to an end, and then they get out their
electricity and pop you with that and hook you up
to a heart lung machine. And you don't breathe
anymore. And your heart isn't leaking anymore.
DM: The machine is breathing for
you.
PW: The machine is doing
everything, and you're deader than a doornail. It's
very interesting. I didn't know anything about it.
The next thing I knew…well first I was being
anesthetized, which was a very good job. It didn't
bother me at all. I passed out cold. But the next
thing was that I was waking up in the intensive
care unit and people pulling tubes and whatnot out
of my person, and there I was. So I've been sick
ever since. I have the arthritis in my knees. I
have the rotary cuff trips going in my shoulders. I
can't see anything. So it's all wonderful.
I suppose it would be gracious of me to mention
along the way that the Academy gave me an award for
inventive modern poetry, or something. It's named
after some guy; I forget what it is called. I'm
sure it was engineered by Allen anyway. And books
are published; things are published. I haven't been
able to read anything for years now.
DM: How does that then…how does
that affect…can you write?
PW: No.
DM: So have you not been able to write
for the last several years? Do you give
readings?
PW: No. Can't see print. Well I
certainly can't remember what I write, so I write
it down.
DM: That's a difficult turn isn't it,
for a poet and a person of letters.
PW: It's very frustrating.
DM: I've heard that Leslie Scalapino,
for instance, [who wrote the introduction for
your new collection, Overtime] would
come and read to you. So you have people, besides
Leslie, who…
PW: Sporadically, yes… Lou
Hartman from the Zen Center comes on Wednesday and
reads to me out of Buddhist texts.
DM: When you have other people coming,
like Leslie, reading to you, do you choose what it
is you want to hear, or do they choose?
PW: Fifty-fifty.
DM: What have you heard
lately?
PW: Well, most recently it was a
book that Leslie had discovered and got for me
[The Zen Poetry of Dogen, Verses from the
Mountain of Eternal Peace, Steven Heine, Tuttle
Publishing, 1997]. Lou read it to me, most of
it anyway. It's all about Dogen's poetry, which is
interesting, his ideas about it and so forth. The
translation was nice. The learned explanations by
the translator were a crashing bore.
Anyhow, the translations are very pleasant. Lou
also read to me the entire volume called Crooked
Cucumber, which is the life and times of Suzuki
Roshi. It was very funny and very interesting. All
the trials and tribulations that that fella went
through to get to where he was was something
else.
DM: Is most of the hearing dealing
with Buddhist material?
PW: Yeah. It's what I want to know
about. Of course, Leslie reads me her own writing
which I admire immensely, and Michael McClure reads
stuff of his to me, the new stuff.
DM: That's great stuff.
PW: Yeah. And every--sort of a
schedule on every other week--Michael
[McClure] and Diane di Prima and I have
lunch together, and yak and carry on down at the
sushi restaurant on Church Street.
DM: How was your selected poetry
volume put together?
PW: That was done with an immense
amount of work for me by Michael Rothenberg. He sat
here with me, and we went through all of my books
page by page practically, to pick out what would be
a manuscript for Penguin; and decided what we could
use and what we could throw away, and then we went
through it again to throw away some more, because
they were only going to give us three hundred pages
plus Leslie's essay, which is remarkable.
DM: So, in a sense, you are through
with poetry?
PW: Not really, no. I hear things,
and see things, and think about things.
DM: One thing that interested me was
your relationship to music. In fact, I think of all
the poets we've interviewed, you're probably the
only one who's had any kind of background in it or
is familiar with the language.
PW: Yeah that's sort of busted,
'cause I can't remember anything, and I can't read
[now]. [Then] I was always reading
music and playing, and I certainly miss doing that.
I miss having a radio that will pick up this
classical music station. I have three radios. One
is a Sony with two speakers in it, and I have
another little one that has a CD player in it, and
I have a Sony Walkman. Somehow-or-another if you
hold the Sony Walkman in the right position you can
pick up that classical music station when none of
the other equipment will.
DM: It's like the wireless or the
crystal radio you have to jockey around to get the
station located. I remember when we talked many
years ago about Gertrude Stein, and you painted
this picture of you in the Army reading an awful
lot of Gertrude Stein in between your other roles.
And I know that when you, and Lew, and Gary were at
Reed, Lew was working on his Stein
thesis….
PW: The thing is I was able to
continue reading more of her 'cause they had a lot
of stuff in the Reed library that I hadn't been
able to find anywhere else.
DM: You talked about coming upon her
Narration?
PW: A high school friend of mine
had liked that book, and he was by that time in the
Army over in Germany, and he had written to his
mother and told her to get me a copy of it. And so
she wrote to the University of Chicago Press and
had it inscribed for me in his name and sent it to
me while I was someplace else. I forget where I was
in the Army at that time, where I was stationed. In
any case, I really loved it; I thought it was
marvelous. And then I went around to locate
Lectures in America and stuff like that,
which I think I read later on. It got me into
searching for books.
DM: You talked about a deep
involvement with her work and in learning from
her.
PW: The way she talked about what
it was she was doing made a great deal of sense to
me. In that essay called "Composition as
Explanation," I think it is, she says "I am not I
when I see." Meaning that the place, as I
understand it, the place where the poetry operates
from is not a programmed business where you sit
down and say, "Oh I got an idea," and then write a
sonnet, etc, etc. And instead she would hit
something and start writing, and what came out was
what it was.
DM: It was interesting for me to
realize how so much of her writing was speech
driven. And once you understood that she was
speaking, there was no problem in reading her. It's
only when you started reading her as you expected
to read writing that you got tangled up and would
have to re-read it.
How did you first receive poetry? When did you
first get poetry, in a sense that it really woke up
a different sensibility in you?
PW: Oh, when I was in high school.
I was maybe fifteen or so. I suddenly decided, or
suddenly had read a bunch of stuff, and I was
sitting in, I think it was supposed to be a study
hall at that particular time, and I wrote out this
thing, four or five lines, and handed it to the
girl ahead of me, who was somebody I had known
since grade school. And she thought it was
wonderful. So that was very encouraging. So there
was a very lively teacher in the high school, and
he was teaching Creative Writing, Drama, Speech,
and god knows what all, and he also directed the
plays and so on. And he got into getting everybody
to perform Gilbert and Sullivan, and it was such
great fun and very nice. And I got a lot of
encouragement from him working with his Creative
Writing class and his other classes as well.
So I kept reading more and more stuff. There was
an anthology of American poetry that's published in
the Modern Library Giants…
DM: I know the one.
PW: Is it Seldon and Rodman? I'd
been on Pound, and although I'd already seen his
Chinese translations and stuff, here was one of his
cantos which I thought was terrific. And then there
was e.e. cummings, which I thought was very funny.
And probably anybody could do that.
DM: If you had a typewriter.
PW: And various other things
turned me on to the idea that poetry didn't have to
be like Edgar Allen Poe, 'cause I never did believe
it, and that idea was confirmed by the anthology.
And then of course the Louis Untermeyer anthologies
came out while I was in the Army, and always with
the same people, though, unfortunately. Do you
remember that?
DM: The same Williams poem too, the
atypical poem about the boats in the
harbor.
PW: "The Yachts."
Well, I'm fried. In the synapses. I'm sorry, I
can't remember what it is I wanted to tell
you--well, I can't tell you. A geriatric
moment.
DM: Okay. We will cherish it.
PW: I got into the idea of trying
to do experiments, trying to write as freely as
possible, and so on. The next really encouraging
thing happened when I was in college, after I got
out of the Army. William Carlos Williams came up to
read for a week, and we got to hang out with him
and talk with him and hear him read.
DM: How was his health then?
PW: He was very bad. He had had
the first couple of strokes, and he was able to get
around pretty good, and he had a lot of energy at
that time. When I saw him, maybe five years later,
at the University of Washington, I was up there on
my way up to Lookout, and I heard from friends of
mine that he was coming, or was there, or something
like that. So I went over to the university to hear
him read, and then I talked to him after the
reading. And he was really sort of gimpy by that
time, slurring, and one of his hands was sort of
bent.
DM: Williams gave you what kind of
permission as a poet?
PW: Well, just that. He looked at
our stuff; all the students that were interested in
writing came to hang out with him. And he would put
in time reading your stuff and marking it up and
making comments on it and so on, which was very
useful. And the thing was, he accepted us as
writers. That was permission, I guess.
DM: As an example, of his
work…
PW: Well the thing that was
important to me at that particular time was the
Paterson material that was coming out. I
think I got the first volume of it before I got out
of the Army. And then I took the rest as they came
along. I think that Paterson, Three had come
out by the time he was up there. And so it was very
exciting to talk to him about some of it,
especially one point about some punctuation. So he
bestowed a semi-colon on it, which was very nice. I
don't know whether it survived into the later
copies of the poem anyway.
DM: I can see Paterson in
relationship to lots of your work with those kinds
of streams and strands of heard language and
written language and also this notion of the
concreteness as the source of this mystery.
PW: "No ideas but in things."
DM: Yeah, that's right.
PW: The trouble is, I no longer
believe in concreteness. I think that everything is
fluid. And so maybe that has a lot to do with where
my head is at now. But I'm very embarrassed when
people don't know I'm blind, and they want me to
come and read to them in various places in various
venues, and I have to tell them I can't do it.
Although I would like to.
DM: For the record, for the book, you
were a participant in the famous Six Gallery
reading and also had a friendship with Kerouac. I
wonder if you could detail or just speak to the
reading and the friendship with Kerouac.
PW: Well, that's hard because he
was such a difficult character. Sometimes he was
very open and funny and telling stories, and other
times he would just be kvetching and cranky and
fussing about various people and things and so on,
and moaning about how nobody loved his poetry or
his books, and he was unhappy. And I tried to cheer
him up once in a while, but I was not very
successful at it. But, somehow, I think that both
Gary and I were strange creatures that he had never
seen the like of before, being from this part of
the world, this West Coast and so on. Being people
who spent a lot of time in the woods or outdoors or
whatnot caught his attention. And he went out of
course and got a job as a lookout one year. And so
we were sort of responsible for that. And he went
and did a lot of writing, I guess, up on the
lookout, and he wrote me into several books, which
is embarrassing anyway. But it's all right because
he always was very gentle about what he said and
did. I never really could pick up on his poetry
very well, somehow, and I don't know why. But the
prose books are marvelous anyway. And he was very
religious. You know, he did that funny book called
Some of the Dharma and The Scripture of
the Golden Eternity, and he never stopped being
a Catholic.
DM: That's right.
PW: He's quoted by that lady who
did that biography…
DM: Ann Charters
PW: …saying, "I fooled all
those people on the West Coast about Buddhism." I
never supposed that he had become a Buddhist, but
he was certainly interested in the teaching, and I
think especially in the language of the
translators. He had quite a lot of insight into
Buddhist writings, actually. I don't know how it
was he could set all his favorite saints off in one
corner and really plug into all of this Buddhist
stuff that he did.
DM: Well maybe as a Catholic, as a
sort of mystic Catholic, he could see the
hierarchies and structures of very similar yet
removed…
PW: Yeah, I think you're right. He
had all these favorite things about Catholicism
that he enjoyed, particularly various saints and,
what's her name?&emdash;the one who was called the
Lily Flower of Jesus?
DM: Theresa?
PW: Theresa of Avila, I guess, was
one of his favorite persons. And sometimes he would
draw pictures of Jesus in various ways and
sometimes of The Virgin. He never talked very much
about her. He had this wonderful relationship with
his mother. Which people seem to have misconstrued,
misunderstood or something. They thought some
simple thought….He never talked about doctrine
at all; about what it was about. He would just go
and do it, and get a lot of good out of it in some
way or another. But at the same time, it would whip
up his guilt feelings in various ways about stuff,
and he would be very unhappy.
Anyway, his mother was this wonderfully lively
Canadian, and she was a great cook, and a great
storyteller. And he says that's where he learned to
tell stories, from her. She was a bouncy, lively
lady, and she was very devout, and she wore little
religious medals pinned to the straps of her slip,
and so on. He was much attached to his father, who
apparently was not a very nice man. But he was very
attached to him. And in many ways, perhaps, when he
was into his curmudgeon mode he was probably being
his father.
But his mother was much more lively and funny.
She would tell stories, and he would say, "Well,
Ma, Phil and I are going to San Francisco." And
she'd say, "Oh, Jackie, why don't you stay home? I
will cook dinner for you and…"
"Ahh Ma."
So we would go off into the wild sweet bop neon
American Night, run around North Beach, and hang
out in Chinatown. And, we'd be out running around,
and he'd be busy asking me did I see this or that,
and he'd be writing in his notebook. He was very
perceptive. He saw lots of things. His eyes were
real good, which mine are not.
But he told me, he said it was out walking with
Williams in Rutherford, and Williams pointed out to
him that there was moss growing on the underside of
the railroad tracks. And he thought that was kind
of wonderful.
He was very attached to much of his family
besides. There remains his sister, Caroline, who is
called Nin, his nephew Paul.... I forget who else,
but he was always in contact with them. And
wherever he went he was always writing back to his
mother and telegraphing for money. So she was
always bringing him back from wherever he was.
And he appreciated it. So that when he was able
to take care of her, he did. Like he bought that
little house in Northport to take care of her, and
she didn't like it. So, he had to…I guess they
went down to North Carolina for a while to where
Nin was. And then to Florida, and then back to
someplace, maybe back to New England, and then back
to Florida again. I guess it was, maybe when he got
back to New England that he married what's her
name…[Stella Sampas].
Oh, god.. isn't that awful? Memory just fails
completely. Anyhow, probably I'll think of it
tomorrow. Anyway, I didn't see much of him after
1960. I think that was the last time he was out
here, and he wrote that piece about Big Sur.
It was very funny. We were supposed to go on
this great expedition with Lew and Lily Carr and
everybody. We were all supposed to drive down to
meet Henry Miller at Big Sur, and have dinner with
Emil White and everything. It was later, and later,
and later, and more and more wine, and more and
more grass, and more and more everything. God knows
what time it was when we left, and we arrived down
there many hours after we should have. So we never
met Henry Miller, or Emil White, or anybody. It was
very embarrassing.
But we did stay at what was then Larry
Ferlinghetti's cabin, which was a very rough piece
of carpentry. Big doors that could open out into
the deck on the outside; it was very pleasant. It
was by a crick in Bixby Canyon. Very nice place.
Later he built it into a real house. Very, very
pleasant. One time, Allen, and his father, and
stepmother, and I, went down there and stayed there
for a weekend or something. And thinking about Jack
and hearing the ocean and being scared.
DM: Of the ocean?
PW: Yeah. And of course there's
the adventure that you recorded of Lewie going
there at that time, or near to that time. Golly, he
sort of went to pieces there too.
DM: Do you want to talk about Lew
[Welch]?
PW: Yeah, all right. I first met
him in the Reed College coffee shop. I think it was
1947, spring. And I was sitting with somebody or
another, and in the next booth there was this guy
sort of spouting off all sorts of wonderful
nonsense. I kept listening to it. I heard him say,
"Red glass birds! In brass dome!"
I said, "Wait a minute." So I got up and went
over to the next booth where this redheaded guy
was, talking to people. And I said, "What was all
that about red glass birds?"
"Oh," he says, "no no." It was a song that he
had been working on that had to do about how, "She
hollered and roared and tore all of her hair. And I
carved my initials on her breast bone." "Thin
breast bone" is what I heard as "bright brass dome"
or something like that. And, ahh, "Told her don't
cry little darlin' that's the mark of the man." And
so we continued talking and telling, "You ought to
write things down, for god sake." And he said,
"Well that's no good."
And so we went on from there talking about
Gertrude Stein and about Williams and all sorts of
things. He was very funny. He was like Jack in that
he was sort of bipolar. He would be fine sometimes,
and other times he was down. And you knew him well
enough to know when he was down what he was
like.
DM: Inconsolable.
PW: Yeah. It was very funny. We
would go to the mail room on the main floor of
Elliot Hall at Reed College, where the student mail
came in. And I wouldn't have any letters, but he
would come out with a package. And I says, "What'd
ya got there?" And he says, "I got another
god-damned sport coat. My mother goes out and
spends $200 on this sport coat, which I don't need,
and I do need the $200." And he's got his hands on
it, "Why don't she send me the money!?" It was just
terrible. He'd grouse around about he was broke and
was having a hard time, and then, you know,
presently, a couple of hours later he'd be
sparkling all over everything and having a grand
time.
So he was very interesting. He had had this
marvelous life in California being the son of seven
or eight other people at different times but always
his mother's child. She's a funny lady; she was
very talkative and lively, bustling around. So that
when Lew went to college up in Portland after
having been down here at--what did they call it
then?--the Stockton, ahh, College of the
Pacific?--where he knew Brubeck and Desmond and all
those people and sang with them, and anyway, his
mother was inspired to return to college and
complete her education. And what does she do? She
gets this degree in Home Economics or something,
over at the University of Utah. And she parlays
that into this fantastic job working in a lunatic
asylum, or no, it was a home for bent babies or
something like that. And anyway, the state paid her
immense sums of money to do the cooking or arrange
the cooking. And there she was. She was happy and
making lots of money. And Lewie would fuss because
he said she would go down to Macy's and buy some
"goddamned porcelain shepherdess." And all wrapped
up pretty in a box, she would take it home, and
then she would put the box, with the shepherdess in
it, up in the closet. Never bothered to unwrap it.
And, "Goddamnit! She has all that money!" And he
was absolutely tortured by the fact that his
mother, who was born rich and had her money removed
from her variously by certain nefarious husbands
and so on, even then made this big comeback on her
own as a successful Home Economics lady. And she
was a lively one, and the two of them together in
one room was something else because they were both
talking at once. Her name was Dorothy. Lewie would
be mooching around town here, driving a cab or not,
and going broke and whatnot, and finally he would
say, "Goddamnit. I guess I'll have to call up
mother and go and see her." And so he would leave
on the appointed day and come back at the appointed
time with a hundred dollars and all wore out and
crazy. Of course he would drink the hundred dollars
as soon as possible. This was tragic.
And anyway, he could also get out from
under…something could pull him out from under,
maybe, I don't know whether it was the hypoglycemia
or what it was; he'd eat a candy bar or something
and be turned on for a week afterwards. He was very
funny, and lively, and smart, and had all sorts of
ideas about writing and about everything else. And
then he would say, "You know, I've got this idea
for a poem it's gonna go: Do-do-Da-do-Dee-do
Pop-Pop-a-Dop-Doop-Zep-Zep."
And, "Well that's great Lewie. Why don't you
write it down?" "Ahhhh. I don't know. I haven't
finished it yet."
And you'd see him two weeks later or so, and he
says, "You know that poem I told you about. it
goes: "Da-do-da-da?"
And I says, "Yah"
He says, "Well it continues like: So-so-So-So
Sa-sa-Sa-Sa Zoop-ze-Zip-pah-pah."
I says, "Well great Lewie. Why don't you just
write it down?"
"Ahhh. It's no good."
And then maybe three weeks later he would come
up with some sort of typewriter version of it to
read, and we'd say, "Well that's great. Why don't
you sell it or somethin' or do something with
it?"
"Ahhh. It's no good. It's no good at all."
But he would, like Williams taught us, put it
away in a shoe box and save it, not throw it away.
Anyhow, I thought that was very remarkable how he
did all his composition and these rather
complicated things in his head without recourse to
paper and pencil. And keep it there and be able to
resurrect it and tell you what it was and so on.
And then later on write it down, and then tell you
it was no good.
DM: Yeah. He more than most I know,
would fuss, and fuss, and fuss over each word once
he put it down on paper, sometimes erasing a poem
completely by fussing, and fussing, and fussing
with it.
PW: It was very sad to see him
when he was sad and great to see him when he was
up. And then he had all those problems with all
those ladies. That lady that he married in Chicago,
Mary, was a very nice but very square lady. She had
wanted to be a nightclub singer. And so when she
was in college she was able to sing with different
outfits, but when she didn't become rich and famous
doing it, she just stopped. Said, "Well that's
obviously no good; I'm obviously not a nightclub
singer, and goodbye," and gave up on it. And that's
very sad, I guess.
DM: Again one of these simple
questions: When was the first encounter with
Buddhism?
PW: Oh, I think when I was still
in high school. First of all, I ran into the
writings of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. And then I
went to see where was she coming from? Where is she
getting all this stuff? And then I found the actual
translations of the actual Vedanta writings. You
know the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita and so
on. And that was very satisfying that this system
was really there, and it made sense to me; the
Christian religion never did. And that led me into
Lin Yutang's big anthology, Wisdom of China and
India. And then also to a book, a very obscure
little book by a friend of Yeats's, called A.P.
Sinnett, called Esoteric Buddhism. And it
was sort of a run down on tantricism. But very
interesting and clear. And then, of course, I run
into the Evans-Wentz translation, which he calls
The Tibetan Book of the Dead. But I couldn't
read it. I couldn't get past about the second page
because of the density of the footnotes. And at
that time I had not yet learned the joy of
footnoting and reading them. They were this tiny
print that was hard to understand. I couldn't do
anything with it. But the pictures were
interesting. So, and then reading Lin Yutang's book
and then scraping some elsewhere that Buddhism was
interesting but overcomplicated I thought compared
to Vedantism. So for a long time I might have well
been a Vedantist. I was also very interested in the
idea of being a Christian, to fit in with, sort of,
the world. And I couldn't do it. First of all, I
had to decide what was real. And then I finally
decided, well all right, the Roman Church has all
of the backing for being real, although it was
pretty clear that the Russian Church was a kinder
gentler Christianity, I thought. Their emphasis was
on the resurrection, whereas the Catholic business
was about blood, and tears, and nails, and so on.
So that was rather unattractive. And I couldn't do
it. I couldn't do Christianity on any level, even
in spite of the Christian mystics…it was too
sticky to me. Too many little gummy things,
infinite damnations and so forth. So I gave up on
that. And when I got out of the Army and was
looking in Portland, I found that there was a local
Vedanta society operating there. It took me a long
time to get up the courage to go and visit one of
their evening lectures. And I went, and I was very
surprised because it all was about stuff I had
read. I thought that was very nice, but it was
depressing because it was a collection of elderly
people sitting around this room. We got to sit on
straight chairs, and they had this lady play sad
songs on the piano while they were waiting for the
Swami to come in and lecture. And then he would
come in and lecture on some aspect, which was very
good. I enjoyed him; I thought he was really a cool
guy. And I finally went through another crisis of
trying to get up the nerve to go see him and talk
to him. Which I did, and I thought, "Well that's
very good." So I thought, "Well, I'll just keep on
trying to meditate at home and come over here and
see this guy." But after a while I couldn't do it.
I couldn't get through the middle class miasma.
That was a very interesting trip because I found
out: where was I getting off criticizing other
people's middle class miasma? Why wasn't I just
going there and shutting up and doing what I did? I
didn't go anymore.
And then there's a great controversy about
whether Snyder had found something about Zen in the
Reed College library. He denies it categorically.
But I have a recollection about, at some point,
about everybody talking about what is the sound of
one hand clapping, and all sorts of stuff. But he
says, "No, no, no. We didn't know anything about it
till we all moved down here." So that's a mystery.
He was busy going to see Alan Watts over at the
American Academy for Asian Studies, which was then
over on Broadway. And listening to lectures by him
and by other visiting Japanese folks. And that was
where he met a painter--I can't think of the man's
name at the moment [Chiura Obata]--but he
tells about it in the introduction to Mountains
and Rivers Without End, getting the idea of
writing this long poem based on a Chinese scroll.
And he was busy, as I say, studying Japanese and
Chinese language over at Berkeley. I found this
very interesting. Especially when he turned up with
the essays of, well first of all, with the
translations of Haiku poetry by R.H. Blyth, whose
first volume is almost entirely devoted to
commentaries and great revelations about Zen. And
the writings of D.T. Suzuki. And so, of course, the
next thing that happened was that we started
reading the essays of Zen Buddhism . And that
converted me, I think, pretty much into the idea
that Buddhism was more free, and certainly Zen, was
a much more free and unbent kind of operation where
it was an individual number. And that one could
live in the mountains and be crazy and be fine.
Nobody would care. So I thought that was a swell
program. Of course misunderstanding the whole
point.
But anyhow, we were all sort of trying to sit
around that time. And the next thing is we met, out
in Mill Valley, mutual friends of ours that were
friends of Albert Saijo, and Albert showed us how
to sit. And so he kind of set up a funny Zendo in
an unfinished house up there on the hill. And he'd
show us how to sit with pillows on us, how to chant
the Heart Sutra in Japanese, and how to drink tea.
So that was very helpful and made me feel like
something was happening.
So that you actually sat down and did zazen, and
then you go outside and do some fast-walking up and
down through the brush and timber out there and
come back and sit down some more. And just blew
away a lot of the theoretical stuff that I had
read, but in general it seemed to work; I meant it
did something for you. It changed your mind a
little bit about things, and I thought that was a
good idea. 'Cause I had, apparently, I learned that
I had a great many thoughts I could jettison, start
jettisoning, and I still have too many. Anyway, it
was interesting, and Albert Saijo was very helpful,
and was a very creative guy. He wrote, he
eventually wrote, this funny little book about
hiking. I forget the name of it.
He made that trip with Lew and Jack back to New
York and they put together that little book called
Trip Trap. Anyway, the next big bop was when
Gary was leaving for Japan and had that monumental
party at a place in Mill Valley which Jack wrote
about in Dharma Bums. What was entertaining,
to me, about all that was, to see, to actually see
what he was writing about, and who was there, and
what I thought was happening, what I thought it was
all about, and then Jack's version in writing about
it, which was extremely carefully selected. I
thought it was really terrific how he had boiled so
much nonsense away and kept a particular track
through the midst of all this confusion and hoopla
and blah-blah. He could make a sequence of stuff
and people and so forth out of it, that held still
on the page, and yet it was lively. I thought that
was quite a great accomplishment.
And so Gary went off to Japan. And then the next
year, Joanne went over, and they got married. Then
he got that big grant--which one was it? Oh, what
was that publisher that Paul Mellon supported for
years?
DM: The Bollingen Foundation.
PW: Yeah, Gary got the Bollingen
Prize, and so he and Joanne got to go to Vietnam
and to Ceylon and up into Northern India where they
connected up with Allen and Peter up in Delhi on
New Year's Day of 1963, I think it was. And
together they all went visiting celebrated Lamas.
The Dalai Lama and endless other marvelous
creatures up there.
DM: Joanne has written about that trek
in a very…
PW: It's a very nice book; a very
funny book. Well. Anyhow, it ended up that I liked
the Japanese aesthetic very much. I enjoyed living
in Japanese houses in Japan and walking around
through Kyoto and through the old temples and
shrines and things. I miss it. It's really a
wonderful place. I think I like it better than
Paris. Maybe Rome has a lot of stuff that I would
still like to poke at and look at. Still, as a
living continuous tradition, since the year seven
hundred and something, here it is. And it's
wonderful to be there and read The Tale of
Genji on the spot as it were. And Lady Murasaki
had a real eye for the look of things and for
weather. Her accounts of what it smelled like and
felt like and looked like were really
marvelous.
DM: In interviewing Gary, we talked
about the experiences in Japan, especially the hard
work of Zen. I asked him what were some of the
things he found so useful? And he said, "One of the
great lessons was manners."
PW: Yeah. Oh yeah. Japanese
buildings feel good, and smell good, and then there
are other out of doors smells in morning. People
are grilling dried fish, and there are black fumes
and stuff floating around, or they're setting fire
to one of those big briquette things that they put
inside of the heating.… But they have to set
fire to it out of doors because the starter has all
sorts of vile chemical mess hooked up to it.
DM: When you were there were you
studying Zen as well?
PW: No. I was reading stuff, and I
was visiting all those lovely temples. I started
sitting seriously when I returned there in '68.
Doing it every morning in my place no matter what.
"No matter how late, no matter how drunk, get up
and do it."
DM: What time in the morning?
PW: Oh, it wasn't very early. It
was probably about seven or so. I would get up and
sit, and then I would take a trolley over to this
coffee shop that I liked across the street from
Kyoto University, and eat croissants and drink
coffee, the delicious coffee that they make in
small quantities. It's great.
That was when I was doing a lot of writing. I
would write every morning. I would go out, after I
had been sitting, I would go out to the coffee
shop, take a notebook with me and start doing
stuff. What I was doing at that time was
Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head, which
somehow got published.
DM: Yeah, it's a wonderful book. So
much of your work is generated out of notebooks, is
that right?
PW: Well, sometimes it's lifted.
Maybe very small changes, or large cuts. It was
very hard to start writing in a notebook. I used to
try and do it, and would get hung up about trying
to…with the lines on the paper… It wasn't
until Bob LaVigne turned me on to, some kind of
artist pad thing, book thing, that had blank pages.
You get 'em down at Patrick & Co., or some such
place. He used them because they would take ink,
paint, color, whatever. And so I used those for a
long time. And then in Japan, the stationers had
these marvelous bound books that were very cheap,
but the paper was very good. It could take much,
'cause it was fun working with these blank books.
The ones that LaVigne turned me on to were bound.
They were books about yay thick and had a heavy
binding, so it was a little hard to open at first,
but anyway, the paper was very good right away. And
so that was something that had a great effect on
everything, LaVigne's blank book business. 'Cause I
had been using small notebooks, and that didn't
work as well, although I filled up a lot of them.
And, as I say, in Kyoto you had all these papers
and books, blank books, and then also Pentel
pencils, colored stuff to play with.
DM: You also have that calligraphic
style that you learned at Reed and which was
dependent on having good fountain pens, as I
recall. I was interested in the notion of writing
by hand. It's so much different than working on the
keyboard. I wondered if you have any thoughts on
that.
PW: Yeah, and the idea what the
page, what the whole page would look like, and the
spacing, how much space to use here and there, or
adding stuff on the side or what not.
DM: I mean your pages would be filled
with various sizes of script, blasts of all caps,
and drawings, all part of an interesting process of
thought unfolding.
PW: Well, it was fun to do
them.…It was entertaining to me, and sometimes
people thought it was nice. The thing is, that I
think…let's see…one poem that's in, I
think it's the last one in Memoirs of an
Interglacial Age, I dictated to McClure, who
typed it, and it came out all right. Now, what was
it called? It was called "A Press Release" 'cause
Elsa Dorfman was rigging up these series of
readings for Mike and me back east, and she wanted
a press release, she said on the telephone. And so
he says, "C'mon you have to write."
"I don't have anything to say. I don't know
anything about it."
"I'll go write it on the typewriter."
"Then alright." So I started talking. And there
seems like there were some bits and pieces that I
actually wrote on the typewriter but very, very
few.
DM: So in your process, you take
material out of the notebook, and then type
it?
PW: Yeah. And at one point McClure
told me, he says, "You shouldn't do that. You
should get 'em to print it the way you wrote it,
because it's beautiful."
"That's very kind of you." But it's
impracticable, apparently.
DM: Well there was a book of yours
that was published.
PW: Yes. It was called
Highgrade, which was all short poems and
doodles and stuff. That was one of the books Coyote
Press published. Zoe Brown did a very good job on
the cover and the layout and stuff, and the
insides.
DM: She also typed up some of the
books that Don Allen did.
PW: She typed up You Didn't
Even Try, which came out while I was in Kyoto,
the first year I was there. And she had to write
queries. Every once in a while she would write, and
she would say, "On page so-and-so there's this
sentence..." And I would look at it and think, "Oh
brother. what have I done? It's made of mush." So I
would have to think what it was and recast it and
ship it back to her. And she would be pleased. And
then she would find another totally impossible
piece of writing that I had to simply redo because
it didn't make any sense, on any level.
DM: An important absence, who is a
presence throughout all these interviews, is Allen.
Any words in lieu of the presence of that absence
that you'd like to address?
PW: Yeah. Allen was just great,
you know? He was a brother, and he took endless
bother, and to some extent Jack also, to get my
stuff published. And when people would ask him for
poems, he would say, "Alright I'll give you some,
but you have to print something of Phil and Gary's
also." He was a very interesting person to be
around because his head was going five hundred
miles a minute. And he had huge quantities of
English poetry by memory, which he could quote if
he wanted to. And he and I had an endless argument
about how to pronounce the name of Shelley's poem,
I think called "Epipsychidion." Anyway, he had this
real wild passion for Blake and for various other
writers, and I remember when I first met him and
Jack, they were both pushing Melville's novel
Pierre, which I had never read. So then I
read it. And, of course, their big drive when they
were in college was Dostoyevsky, which I had read
and admired, but not to this passion that they had
for him and thinking of it as a model for
something. I always thought it was funny that
Dostoyevsky's model was Charles Dickens. Anyway,
Allen was into taking care of people and taking
care of things, and he was always helping me all
the time. And sometimes, you know, he would cook,
and we would have dinner together, and we'd go
running around North Beach together. He was
tremendously good company. He was seldom down,
crying, or moaning. He was usually operating. He
was too fucking smart to take time off to be sad.
He could be sad enough, being that he was by nature
a Russian, but he kept out of it as much as
possible. And he was always writing. All the time
he was writing and talking at the same time, and
telling about everything. But he was interested of
course, in painting, the New York painters and
various poets that he knew and he liked, and
various wonderful ethnic foods. And one time he
made up this lung stew, if you can imagine such a
thing. But it was quite good.
At the time we were running around together he
wasn't reading much. He was very hung up on
writing. The only time he really got suddenly
interested in reading something was when his mother
died, and he tried to get a minyan together to read
Kaddish for her. And he couldn't do it. He couldn't
find enough people. But he wanted to know how to do
it, and so he got a hold of all the literature, and
he bantered in everybody's ears from here to New
York trying to find out how to do it.
He had this endless string of applications to
him from various friends, old and new, about how
they were broke and needed money, and could they
please have $200 right away. Which he always
answered, always sent money. He had a real motherly
instinct. He was very tough also. He had a very
clear head and a very tough set of reasons and
rhymings and so forth, but went on. But he stuck to
it, and he had this very, very exact vision of
himself and about what it was he wanted to do. And
what he wanted to do was to be famous. If he was
famous then a whole lot of people would go to bed
with him. So that's what he did. He contrived to
become famous. And he contrived to go to bed with a
lot of people which amused him, and pleased him,
and made him happy, and so on. And then he had this
relationship with Peter which lasted on and on for
years. Which was sometimes very hard for him
because Peter had periods of total insanity and had
to be taken care of and was a mess. Later on, a few
years ago, Peter just got totally crackers, and
Allen paid to put him in some expensive sanitarium
in Wisconsin. And when he got out he was just fine
until he'd get a drink of liquor, and then he would
go bananas. It was terrible.
I don't think I ever met Allen's brother, who
was a lawyer. And I did meet his father, who was a
lively fella and whose conversation was entirely
made up of puns. Which was a little stressing. And
his step-mother, Edith, is a very pleasant person
who still lives in part of his apartment in New
York some of the time. She lives in New Jersey most
of the time, I guess. And he has…I think his
brother had two or three sons that he kept track of
and helped out in various ways.
But he knew so many people, and could tell
wonderful stories about all these famous people,
literary people and so on, and places that he went,
and things that he saw, and did, and smelled,
tasted and touched. And he could project so much
excitement and so much force and so much life, that
it was incredible. And it's funny though, 'cause
Jack had every bit as much talent, and could tell
you what he wanted, and could do things, but he was
so bottled up with that Catholic education, it just
absolutely squashed his personality or his mind or
something in some terrible way, that made it hard
for him to get out and do things. I mean he could,
but then he would also have to get drunk to get out
from under all that stuff. It was very hard because
he had a theory about how if you had just enough
alcohol, that you would feel good and be able to do
things. And if you waited until it was not too
late, you had just a little more, and then you
would get back to where you were at, and so on. Of
course later, there you are, plotz.
DM: I remember seeing a letter that he
wrote to Don Allen, actually, outlining very
seriously his regimen for writing, which would
include methodically drinking so much, and then
taking half of a benny, and so on. And if you just
kept on, taking a little of this, and a little of
that, you could go on for days and days and days,
and write at this incredible speed. But I'm
thinking of an interview I read of yours; you
talked about how spontaneous bop prosody was not
necessarily as stated. That Jack actually had been,
as you, filling up notebooks, and that when it came
to writing, there was so much of the material that
was there that he could then extract it in the
process of translating it into type.
PW: And then the typewriter would
somehow make it possible for him to expand on the
notes and go to bop, maybe half a page. Or he would
make a mistake in typing, and say, "Oh," and it
would drive him another line or so.
DM: In one of your interviews, you
talk about the regard that you have for Kerouac as
a writer. So often that's overlooked. The fact that
he was writing very interesting, and in some cases,
very radical experimental writing. And so much of
this 'mytho-poeticizing' bypasses the fact that he
was a very serious and innovative writer.
PW: Right.
DM: I think Clark Coolidge is about
the only other poet I know that looks upon Kerouac
as this great feast of writing that instructs
him.
PW: You know Clark himself has
done remarkable stuff. I haven't seen any of his
stuff since he wrote the one called At
Egypt, which I thought was terrific, and I
don't [know] what he's done…
DM: He's prolific
PW: That's what you gotta be, you
know, to get anywhere. You gotta get a lot of words
on paper. Kerouac used to say that writing was like
having a dope habit. You just keep on doing it.
DM: I suppose it gives a sort of
clarity to the time you occupy. At least you know
that from this time to that time one writes,
regardless. You become addicted to the
process.
PW: And it feels good.
DM: And the pages stack up. It's like
Thomas Mann talking about writing two pages a day;
it's very elegant…
PW: One page.
DM: One page.
PW: Wearing this tourmaline ring
that his daughter gave him.
DM: And after a year, there's volume
one of Joseph in Egypt stacked up. I guess
we can talk, if you like, about some other absences
like Kenneth Rexroth?
PW: Hmmm. Well, he was, in my
opinion, a fascinating talker and very good poet.
The long poems that he did, like "The Phoenix and
The Tortoise," and "The Dragon and The Unicorn,"
and whatnot, are terrific and much neglected. And
then his shorter things are very beautiful, and I
don't know why people don't read them. He was
always very encouraging. He would have these
soirées at his [San Francisco]
apartment.
DM: Scott Street?
PW: Yeah…where all sorts of
visiting fireman would appear and be available for
talking. It was interesting. A few times we got to
see wonderful folks at Ruth Witt-Diamant's house.
Anyway, Kenneth was always very helpful. He tried
and tried to get New Directions to print me. And
they wouldn't do it. Didn't like it. I guess it was
too much like James Laughlin's own writing. Anyway,
he was instrumental in getting to print McClure and
Snyder, which is great, and because in any airport
or drugstore you'd find New Directions books there.
And his ideas in the long poems I thought were
always very interesting, and his interpretation of
the Genji story I think is wonderful, and some of
his other critical writings I think are very useful
and entertaining. And he wrote a great quantity of
stuff that is fairly high quality; I mean, it's as
tough and good as somebody like Maddox Ford or
something in his critical writing. And I never read
the autobiographical novels.
He was a great cook, and he would have me to
dinner sometimes. Then later on, when Snyder and I
were in Kyoto, he and what's her name showed
up.
DM: Carol [Tinker].
PW: Yeah. And were in town. We
sort of carted them around to see various treasures
and whatnot. He was very grumpy. "They nickel and
dime you to death!" Anyhow, he had a great
appreciation for Kyoto, for Japanese history, and
so on. He wrote this very interesting book that
nobody ever read. It's called Communalism or
American Communalism, or something like
that, which was all about these different utopia
communities. Funny, it's a kind of thing anybody
would get a Ph.D. for writing. And it was a great
book. Mainly, you know, you hear him; I can hear
his voice telling stories. Either edifying or
totally scandalous things would come out. He had a
great number about the Duke of Windsor and all this
other…
DM: [The American divorcée
Wallis] Simpson.
PW: Simpson, yes…wasn't
charitable in the least.
DM: Robert Duncan.
PW: I had a hard time with Robert
because I didn't very much appreciate the beauties
of his poetry somehow. It was interesting, what he
was doing, but it didn't gel for me somehow or
another. He had so many theories about everything.
And I couldn't understand the theories, and so much
appreciation for people like Mary Butts, that I had
never read, and so I was just on a different
wavelength somehow. And he didn't like my attitude
very much, and I would tell him something about
writing, and I would say, "I manufactured this
piece the other day." And he would be annoyed at me
saying "manufactured?" But anyway, I rubbed him the
wrong way often, I think. And I never got around to
sitting at his feet 'cause I felt I was near his
own age and whatnot, and I didn't think it
was… He was an enormous influence apparently
with everybody, but I couldn't get at it. It was
interesting that he was into the Kabbalah at one
point and had gone to the trouble of collecting all
that commentary on it, and read it. It was
interesting, when I first got to know him, he and
Jess had been living in Majorca for some time, and
he'd come back after an absence of five years or so
in Europe. And he was in a fairly lively mood at
that time. He would allow me to be in the presence.
But that didn't last. I think he didn't like me.
But that's all right.
DM: What about Jack Spicer?
PW: Hopeless. It was a total
goodbye. I didn't like his work, and he was very
unpleasant to me all the time. It came to where I
would see him and would either say hello, or not.
And I thought it was very funny when he had this
scene going at Gino and Carlo's Bar in North Beach,
and these young people from New York were hanging
around trying to get him to talk about poetry. And
he told them about baseball, and about the pinball
machine, and I don't know what all. I thought that
was quite charming. But he felt I wasn't serious
enough [about] writing, I think, and about
poetry or the magic. As I say, I didn't feel like
going out and trying to hang on to him and get him
to tell me the secret of poetry, which I guess was
what he would have liked. But anyway, as an
acquaintanceship it didn't amount to much.
DM: Were there any poets of that
particular generation that you did find interesting
in terms of their work?
PW: Well, certainly
[Robert] Creeley. And then on another
generational bend, Gregory Corso, who I think is a
really inventive guy. Inventive in a different way,
but in the same league as Clark Coolidge. And then,
whenever I would see things of yours, they would
just seem to be getting better and better, and I
thought it was wonderful.
DM: Thank you.
PW: Ted Berrigan, I think had a
lot of marvels in it and really, again, inventive
number going there. So that when I got a copy of
The Sonnets I thought, "Wow. This is really
something this guy has going." Frank O'Hara was
always very nice to me, but I never could really
get excited about his writing somehow or another.
It's very good, I gather. I am totally unable to
read John Ashbery. Kenneth Koch is very funny, and
he hates to be funny.
DM: How 'bout Olson?
PW: Oh I thought [Charles]
Olson was a wonderful creature. He's a terrific
guy, and his way of handling a class in school, at
the poetry conference up at Vancouver when he had
his classes there and when he had his classes
someplace else was terrific. He would get people up
off their asses, and get them to try and do things,
and get going, and move. And this was, I thought, a
great talent. And his own work was very
interesting, how he wrote. And at the same time, I
felt that a lot of it was so parochial that it
didn't do much for me. It was all one happy ocean
full of great poetry and excitement and so forth.
He was a wonderful talker, and he would tell
stories and theorize endlessly. I have been told
that he had a great feud with Buckminster Fuller
because Buckminster Fuller could talk longer.
Charles would get tired at some point, and Fuller
would go on. But I thought that it was when Allen
and all of us were living in Berkeley, and I went
out with Allen one time, and we went to one of
those big magazine stores and found a copy of
Origin or some other magazine, that had a
poem of Charles's in it. I forget which. But it was
a very nice magazine, very beautifully printed. I
think it was "Death of Europe," a memorial poem to
the German poet Rainer M. Gerhardt… "O that
the Earth / had to be given to you / this way!"
Wow. He had a lot of steam.
David Meltzer teaches in the graduate Poetics
program at New College of California and in the
Writing and Consciousness MA program. Writing
Jazz--the companion anthology for Reading
Jazz--is scheduled for fall publication by
Mercury House. Station Hill Press recently reissued
The Secret Garden, an anthology of the
classical Kabbalah. Under, an agit-smut novel, was
published by Rhinoceros Books. Black Sparrow Press
in 2000 will publish the first book of The Beat
Thing. "Otherwise, have no future but am looking
forward."
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