by Amiri Baraka
The understanding that there were several different “schools” of new writers excited me. As an editor I thought that all the different relevant new schools should get published. Yet in this admirable “catholicism” a bug was sewn up in my rug that had to eat its way clear before too long was over. Zazen 4 saw the picking up on the Black Mountain people, also my new social relationships. The issue had a black cover with white abstraction by Fee Dawson. It was striking and the whole issue much more professionally done — Varityped instead of the old IBM, not as many of the weird little paste-ins and collages. The lineup was Olson, Orlovsky, O’Hara, Finstein, Dawson, A.B., Bremser, Marshall, Oppenheimer, Crews, Snyder, Kerouac, Wieners, Creeley, Corso, Jones, Sorrentino, Mason Jordan Mason. Mason was supposedly black but actually it turned out he was really Judson Crews. Crews had several noms de plume and several personalities. Mason Jordan Mason was his “black” personality. But interestingly enough the M.J.M. poems were better than the Judson Crews ones, because in “being” black Crews assumed a simplicity and directness that made the work more forceful. The Crews poems were too full of literary allusion and stuffy syntax.
The black cover on one hand does represent to me the coming into full force, or full consciousness, of one circle, at a relatively high literary level. But there is only one black writer, LeRoi Jones. (At the time I might have thought it was two!) Ernie, Ed, Steve, Tim, Bobb Hamilton, Allen Polite, Tom Postell are not there. But I was not with them socially either. (Though around that time I had had to get Tim out of Bellevue, where one of his drinking bouts had taken him right into the nut ward. I had to testify to his sanity and become his guardian.) I was “open” to all schools within the circle of white poets of all faiths and flags. But what had happened to the blacks? What had happened to me? How is it that there’s only the one colored guy?
But I answered that the same way the National Book Award committee answered inquiries to it in the ’80s about why there were no minorities or women among their nominees. “We were looking for quality literature and that is what we got.” Amen.
So obviously my social focus had gotten much whiter. White wife, coeditor. The weekend hollering and drinking trysts were hooked to the same social focus; they were it, actually. Our first child, a daughter, Kellie, was born. I had come back from reading poetry somewhere, with a couple other poets, and we came back to the hospital and squatted outside, until I got to go in. That was the high point of my life, another mystery uncovered. I was a father at twenty-four and a half years old.
Nellie and I never hassled each other, in the main. Though she had a bright pixie quality, like a child insisting it be allowed to celebrate. She had had to come to terms with the marriage in her own way. I can only guess what whites who think they belong in the mainstream of U.S. — American Dream — society think when they find out for some reason (in this case an exploding black penis) that they will not be allowed in that stream. She had that quality that marks survivors, a dogged will that haunted her twinkling eyes. A strength to her laughter that made it richer. Yet for these reasons a kind of lonely atmosphere accompanied her no matter how she tried to mount it or quiet it.
She liked the weekend bashes we had because it cast her in another light. We were, in some repects, at the center of a particular grouping of folks. The magazine both created that circle and connected people to us that we didn’t even know. Nellie had not been such a popular kid, she’d told me many times. She was unpretty, she’d said, in a pretty world. Unglamorous in a world ruled by glamour. So she loved the attention that even such a modest circle as our drunken, adulterous poets provided. The fortuitous link with Sectarian gave her a look at two worlds.
The world we were in was off to the side of the one she’d prepared for. Nellie was always laughing, scolding our house guests, or rollicking with the bashes, and she must have been drawn, as was I, into its values and mores.
When we heard first about why Fy had to leave Brooklyn (and then he was with us), he and Paul were rubbing shoulders. Then we learned (she first from Rene) that Rene Meisler and Mark Fine were a number. Mark lived with them in the Bronx and when John went off to his printing gig, they had at it. When Paul went off to his gig, Fy and Ceeny did it. CD stood at the side of people swirling in a larger party and wept (months later) in confession to Paul that he’d been jamming his lady. Why he picked a party to put on such a drama I will not speculate upon. During this period I myself had an affair of sorts with one of the campfollowers Gil brought over from Brooklyn. That was the first in a long series of affairs and liaisons, mostly with white women.
The various “schools” of poetry we related to were themselves all linked together by the ingenuous. They were a point of departure from the academic, from the Eliotic model of rhetoric, formalism, and dull iambics. Bullshit school poetry.
Under the broad banner of our objective and subjective “united front” of poetry, I characterized the various schools: the Jewish Apocalyptic, biblical, long crashing rhythms of spiritual song. “Howl” and “Kaddish” are the best examples. Kerouac’s “Spontaneous Bop Prosody” is an attempt to buy into the “heaven in the head” of religious apocalypse, which Ginsberg inherited from his rabbinical sources (and his historic models, Christopher Smart, Blake, Whitman). It is a hyped-up version of Joyce with a nod in blacks’ direction because of the heroic improvised character of African American music, especially the improvising soloist.
The wildest of the literary-social schools was the full-out bohemians of “turn on, drop out” fame. People in “pads” smoking pot, listening to “wild sounds.” But these were the most politically open of all the schools, the most radical and furthest removed from the university. These were the forerunners of the hippies and flower children. The “punks” of today.
The Black Mountain people linked me to a kind of Anglo-Germanic school, more accessible than the academics, but still favoring hard-edged, structured forms. Olson and Creeley were its twin prophets, but Olson had the broader sword, the most “prophetic” stance. His concerns went further and touched me deeper. Creeley was closer to the William Carlos Williams style — sparse and near-conversational, though much more stylized than Williams and influenced by someone like Mallarm, in the tendency toward using the language so precisely and literally it became at times “abstract.”
Olson shared Williams’ word usage but also was a Poundian (though opposing it seemed to me, Pound’s social pathology and worship of the European Renaissance as the beginning and end of all culture). Olson’s Maximus Poems, his major work, is a direct descendant of both the Cantos and Paterson.
If in one space of New York City you’d have neo-Ginsbergian poems all over the place, wander into the West 20th Street circle you’d have beaucoups Creeley poems and neo-Creeley poems every which where.
I met Frank O’Hara through Allen Ginsberg, like so many writers I met. Frank was assistant curator for the Museum of Modern Art. He was a close friend of the whole community of New York painters, abstract expressionist as well as the loony pre-pop figures like Larry Rivers, Alex Katz, and Bob Rauschenberg. Frank was one of the most incisive and knowledgeable critics of painting in New York at the time. The New York school was chiefly, to me, O’Hara. And if you were anywhere around Frank, as he launched into this subject or that, always on top, laughing, gesturing, exclaiming, being as broad as any topic, and the easy sense of sophistication which gave him an obvious “leadership,” you’d understand. (He’d turn red at such a suggestion. “Listen, my dear, you can take that leadership business and shove it!”)
Kenneth Koch, whose poetry I dug because it was almost always hilarious, especially the great “Fresh Air,” which single-handedly demolished the academic poets (even if they couldn’t dig it), and the later Pulitzer-National Book Award winner John Ashbery were the other chief practitioners of the New York school, so called because its writers not only lived there but — at least with Frank — expressed a sense of the high sophistication and motley ambience of the cit
y. This was (in O’Hara’s hands) a French(-Russian) surreal-tinged poetry. A poetry of expansiveness and high emotion. Sometimes a poetry of dazzling abstraction and shifting colorful surfaces. It was out of the Apollinaire of Zone but also close to Whitman and Mayakovsky.
Williams was a common denominator because he wanted American speech, a mixed foot, a variable measure. He knew American life had outdistanced the English rhythms and their formal meters. The language of this multinational land, of mixed ancestry, where war dance and salsa combine with country and western, all framed by African rhythm-and-blues confessional.
Whitman and Williams and Pound and Apollinaire and the Surrealists were our prophets. Whitman, who broke away from England with his free verse. Williams, who carried that fight into our own century, seeing the universal in the agonizingly local. Pound, the scientist of poetry, the translator, the mover and shaker (and fascist)! Apollinaire, a whole tradition of French antixbourgeois openness and aesthetic grace. And the Surrealists, because they at least figured the shit had to be turned upside down! (This plus the improvised zeitgeist of black music!)
All these I responded to and saw as part of a whole anti-academic voice. So that the magazine and Nellie and I were at the vortex of this swirling explosion of new poetry. And I moved from one circle to the other, effortlessly, because I sincerely had no ax to grind but the whole of new poetry.
The Cedar Tavern would be bursting with the Black Mountaineers on one hand, maybe just come down the hill from West 20th Street. And the New York school people, Frank, Kenneth, would be holding court along with any number of painters (Larry Rivers, Mike Goldberg, and Norman Bluhm were special friends of Frank’s). A.G. and company were not too heavy on that scene. The Beats were more “pad” people or “On the Road” and more into bush smoking than boozing. Also they lived mostly on the Lower East Side and tended to hang there more regularly. The cold-water flats of East 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 9th, etc. The tenements of Eldridge Street, Clinton Street, Allen Street, East Broadway. The Lower East Side was still sparsely populated by arty or bohemian types in those days. It was poor — on the real side.
I started meeting Frank for lunch some afternoons at joints near our workplaces — Frank’s, the MOMA at 53rd Street, mine at 49th Street, Technoscopic Productions. We’d meet at some of those bar-restaurants on the Upper East Side and drink and bullshit, exchange rumors and gossip, and make plans and hear the latest about the greatest. Frank and I were friends. I admired his genuine sophistication, his complete knowledge of the New York creative scene. A mutual friend, editor Donald Allen, brought us together. Don was an early admirer and champion of Frank’s poetry. Don was an editor for the Grove Press at the time and the man who made Evergreen Review the standard of excellence it was at that time. He looked like the quintessential Roman aesthete, a haughtier John Gielgud, with the same impeccable diction. Don had been putting together an anthology of new poetry and new poets. He worked meticulously, and he went to great pains to investigate the poetic scene, inquiring after new poets, buying all the magazines, going to all the poetry readings and events manqué. (He had found me through Zazen.) Evergreen Review charts the late ’50s-early ’60s U.S. poetry explosion. The results of his work, the standard-setting The New American Poetry: 1945–60, is clearly one of the greatest anthologies of poetry in the American language.
Frank O’Hara was also part of the high-powered New York City homosexual scene in the arts and, as far as art was related to money, certain aspects of flashy jet-set society. It was Frank whom I first heard pronounce the word “camp.” “Oh, that campy bastard!” or “My dear, the production was entirely too campy.” Or he might just run someone down while tossing down a drink: “It was a trifle tacky, don’t you think?”
I found myself going to the ballet, to cocktail parties, “coming over for drinks,” to multiple gallery openings with Frank O’Hara and his shy but likable “roommate,” Joe LeSeur, who looked like a blond movie star of the ingenue type. With Frank O’Hara, one spun and darted through the New York art scene, meeting Balanchine or Merce Cunningham or John Cage or de Kooning or Larry Rivers. Frank, A.G., and I even had a few notable readings together at the old Living Theater, when it was on 14th Street and Sixth Avenue. Another at Princeton with Diane DiPrima. I had taken the day off to do the Princeton set, calling in sick. But when I came in the next day my picture, plus A.G.’s, Frank’s, and Diane’s was in the Daily News or Mirror, so that vice president peeped it and let me know it. Just before lunchtime he comes through and drops the paper on my desk. “Sick, huh?” was all he said and turned on his heel. But I didn’t get fired. That job did get a trifle complicated because the president’s daughter, a young woman my own age, was trying to become a dancer and working part time at the family business and living down on Thompson Street, near where Dolly lived. We hit it off and started lunching together occasionally and standing around being in the office. There was no romance (not that I would have minded) but our friendly comrades-in-the-arts manner ticked off a few of the science majors and the vice president’s eyes began burning holes in my back.
My standard hangout was the Cedar Tavern. Jazz at the Wagon, a joint down on Sullivan and Bleecker, had opened with the music, and cokes, but that was doomed. But I met Leroy McLucas, the photographer, who was manager of the joint while it lasted. The Five Spot was on the rise and in the third issue of Zazen we had a Five Spot ad: “Home of Thelonious Monk — Home of Jazz-Poetry — Home of America’s Leading Painters, Sculptors, Composers, Actors, Poets, PEOPLE.” They had jazz and poetry every Monday night at 9:30. The Terminis who ran the joint, Iggy, the quiet one, and Joe, the big extrovert, were two of the nicest guys in the business. It was a real drag when they got out.
I had gotten a small offset press and was now trying to do the magazine on it but failing, though a little guy named Chuck Irving ran some of the magazine for me and some other things. I managed to do a couple of small-run pamphlets. We decided to put out books, to start a small publishing operation, which I called, for some reason (maybe I was reading Jung at the time), Totem Press. I met Lucia DiBella through Ginsberg. She lived over on East Houston Street, pregnant with her first child. The guy who fathered the baby she would constantly make reference to as a square. I’d gone to see her to get work for Zazen and she gave us a couple short stories and some poetry.
Lucia was an ultra-Poundian when I first met her, with as much communications-for-poetry energy as A.G., but being a woman, and a pregnant one at that, she was more restricted. Lucia was toying at the time with the gay scene, and the black poet Audre Lorde was an old friend. But even as she talked theoretically about the gay life, she was always relating to one man (even some gay ones) or the other in some aggressive redhaired way. Later, we became lovers and still later coeditors of another publication, The Fleeting Bear.
Lucia was publishing her first book, This Kind of Bird Flies Backward. She sent it to Ferlinghetti and he sent a weak little “caveat emptor” as an introduction. We included this in our Totem series. Ron Loewinsohn’s Watermelons, with introductions by William Carlos Williams and A.G., was the second of our publications. This was 1959, the civil rights movement was rising with every headline, and for the last few months I had been fascinated by the headlines from Cuba. I had been raised on Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood and the endless hero-actors fighting against injustice and leading the people to victory over tyrants. The Cuban thing seemed a case of classic Hollywood proportions.
So I proposed that we come out with a little pamphlet in honor of Fidel Castro, when the barbudos finally burst into Havana and sent Batista flying. Fee Dawson suggested we call the quick little pamphlets “blue plates,” as in the great American blue-plate special. Fee was a great one for Americana. He was the All American Boy gone haywire and turned to adultery, sly panhandling, and drink.
The reactions to my proposal were interesting. Sorrentino, always the classic debunker of the political in favor of the high aesthetic, said, “I hate guys in
uniforms.” Alas, he should have told it to Ezra Pound. But he gave us a poem. I remember there was a rather sharp discussion during our weekend bashes of my poem in that “blue plate” where it ends up saying, “Sunday mornings, after we have won.” The general line being that poets and politics ain’t cohabiting. That was my line, had been the words coming out of my mouth. Yet perhaps the intensification of the civil rights movement, the daily atrocities which fat sheriffs in Dumbbell, Georgia, could run on blacks, began to piss me off much more deeply than I thought. I rejected Martin Luther King’s philosophy. I was not nonviolent. I had written a poem about this time that ended:
We have awaited the coming of a natural
phenomenon. Mystics and romantics, knowledgeable
workers
of the land.
But none has come.
(Repeat)
But none has come.
Will the machine gunners please step forward?
I was not entirely sure what it meant myself. But I knew I rejected King’s tactics. I would not get beat in my head. I would fight, but what was I doing? The poem had asked earlier:
What
industry do I practice? A slick
colored boy, 12 miles from his
home. I practice no industry.
I am no longer a credit