Guard the Mysteries
Page 4
I have been incredibly lucky stylistically, in that I haven’t had the constructs of academia hanging over my syntax in any way. I was home-schooled from eighth grade on. I told my parents that it was moving too slow for me, that I was bored, and they believed it. I was actually being gay bashed every day. Nothing physical, but “faggot” this and that. I had completed my last year of middle school, and I could just see it getting worse all over again in a new setting (totally maddening).
The other students seemed to know I was gay before I did. One doesn’t watch himself walk or hear himself talk. I didn’t feel much desire at that point anyway. My family used to rent out a house for two weeks in the summer at Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, over the Hood Canal Bridge. I remember wandering around a bookshop and stumbling on Allen Ginsberg’s book of photographs, Snapshot Poetics. I opened up to that amazing nude shot of him standing with a walking stick in front of the Sea of Japan. It loosened the expectation of having a “mainstream” heterosexual life. His openness was attractive to me. I didn’t buy the book, but about a year later I bought the Barry Miles biography of Ginsberg. I would take the ferry into Seattle from Winslow and take the bus up to the University District with my sister Lydia, basically to buy books. And drink coffee, eat out, go to the movies, the same patterns I seem to hold now. I first read Allen amidst reading Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Angela Davis, and Ed Sanders. I loved the Yip-pies who seemed to push the theater aspect of protest. They had a sense of humor, and the actual layout of their books, like Woodstock Nation and Do It!, was a form of visual poetry. I also had a weakness for Ed Sanders’s folk rock band, The Fugs, who turned me on to what are still my favorite war slogans, FUCK FOR PEACE and KILL FOR PEACE. Those may have come from his bandmate Tuli Kupferberg, who is also the man immortalized for jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge in Ginsberg’s Howl:
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer
Later I read the (collaborative) poem Memorial Day by Ted Berrigan and Anne Waldman. In one section Ted details the same jump but in the form of an actual dialog with Tuli:
I asked Tuli Kupferberg once, “Did you really
jump off of The Manhattan Bridge?” “Yeah,” he said,
“I really did.” “How come?” I said. “I thought that
I had lost the ability to love,” Tuli said. “So, I figured
I might as well be dead. So, I went one night to the top of The Manhattan Bridge, & after a few minutes, I jumped off.” “That’s amazing,” I said. “Yeah,” Tuli said, “but nothing happened. I landed in the water, & I wasn’t dead. So I swam ashore, & went home, & took a bath, & went to bed. Nobody even noticed.”
I love how the actual bridge changes depending on which poet is retelling the story.
Lydia and I also read heavily on the Black Panther Party, MOVE, and the American Indian Movement. We dabbled in communist rhetoric. I remember that my parents drove us over to hear Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver, who were doing a lecture tour together. I think it was at Shoreline College. This had to have been like 1994. We had them sign our copies of Seize the Time and Soul on Ice; both were written while the authors were imprisoned. So then reading more on Allen Ginsberg I saw how he crossed into all these militant circles and by the mid 1960s had become a kind of elder statesman of the underground. I really picked up on Allen’s proclamation, “Candor disarms paranoia!” I still latch on to it when I feel someone else’s aesthetic creeping up over my shoulder. This saying was especially useful back then as I was coming to realize that I was queer. I love when Eileen Myles writes about Allen Ginsberg because they seemed to get to know him from all angles. This is a bit from Myles’s essay “My Speech about Allen”:
Allen was more of a star than a homosexual. His great triumph was that you forgot he was gay. One of the ways we think about a human who is a star is that a variety of things, equally important, in the case of Allen say his poetry, his Buddhism, his homosexuality, his mother, his view of government, his capacity to eat at Christine’s, his taking pictures, his capacity to read the newspaper at a table full of young poets who wanted him to pay attention to them, his lips, his voice, all constellate to yield one thing only which was Allen Ginsberg, again and again, and so when you try to see him as gay, you only see him as Allen.
As I read further into the Barry Miles biography of Ginsberg, I encountered the Naropa Institute, a Buddhist-inspired school with a poetics program that Allen had founded with Anne Waldman and Diane di Prima in Boulder, Colorado, in 1974. This was all done under the teachings of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist tulku, who is also often referred to as a meditation master. He essentially left his monastery to share Vajrayana Buddhism with the West, which was a rather controversial decision. I was fascinated by the construct of Naropa while reading Ginsberg’s biography. It seemed somewhat like Black Mountain College, a tiny charming campus and one-on-one interactions, i.e., hanging out with your professors. I was sure it had died out along with other decadent dreams of the 1970s, but then a few months later, I saw a tiny ad for the Naropa Institute in the back pages of a magazine. It said, “Scholarships Available,” in very tiny type above the mailing address. I had begun to write in the style of Ginsberg, and was also reading a ton of Jack Kerouac, piling the line with as much description as I could, really driving it to its end and then starting all over with the next line. I managed to find Naropa’s mission statement written when the school was first established and wanted to share a piece of that here.
Though not all the poetry teachers are Buddhist, nor is it required of the teachers and students in this secular school to follow any specific meditative path, it is a happy accident of this century’s poetry history—especially since Gertrude Stein—that the quality of mind and mindfulness probed by Buddhist practice is similar to the probes and practices of poetry. There being no party line but mindfulness of thought and language itself, no conflict need arise between religion and poetry, and the marriage of two disciplines at Naropa is expected to flourish during the next hundred years.
I was also writing short fiction at this time. My mother had called the Writing and Poetics office and talked to the incredible Max Regan. I then sent a bunch of poems and stories off to Naropa and was awarded a scholarship to the summer writing program.
Looking through Ginsberg’s Collected Poems in preparation for this lecture felt like thumbing through old newspapers or a half-remembered dream journal from adolescence. I came across what I still think is my favorite Ginsberg poem, maybe because it’s a bit more spare than the style he has become known for. This is the last bit from “Transcription of Organ Music”:
The light socket is crudely attached to the ceiling, after the house was built, to receive a plug which sticks in it alright, and serves my phonograph now…
The closet door is open for me, where I left it, since I left it open, it has graciously stayed open.
The kitchen has no door, the hole there will admit me should I wish to enter the kitchen.
I remember when I first got laid, H.P. graciously took my cherry, I sat on the docks of Provincetown, age 23, joyful, elevated in hope with the Father, the door to the womb was open to admit me if I wished to enter.
There are unused electricity plugs all over my house if I ever needed them.
The kitchen window is open, to admit air…
The telephone—sad to relate—sits on the floor—I haven’t had the money to get it connected—
I want people to bow when they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the Creator.
And the Creator gave me a shot of his presence to gratify my wish, so as not to cheat me of my yearning for him.
Allen continues to be an example of “how to go on” in the sense that I have never settled for the space society has made for me as a queer or Native writer. I want to reach as many folks a
s is humanly possible and by any means necessary. This is when glamour and politics become all mixed together. We should try and live lives that poets of the future will daydream about. In twenty years, I hope to be writing poems that more closely match my imagination. I am never quite satisfied with my books by the time they are published. It’s all about the untyped poetry in my notebook. There are certain aspects of writing poetry that I suspect are permanent no matter how long it goes on. Poetry can sometimes equal a state of trance in its intensity. We can bend time within the arc of composition so that our poems really provide a true form of escape from practical, earthly matters. I wanted to end with a poem titled “Smoke Flowers,” which retraces much of this early autobiographical material. It even shoots off a little further into the future. I want you to hear it written out as poetry. Writing it as poetry allows us to leave the gaps intact, which strangely can provide for a more complete picture.
SMOKE FLOWERS
I stayed shut up in my room
A red wooden table took up most of it (and tools)
A black unlined journal filled my days
The dark of the woods breathing in through the window
My dad’s friends and all of their kids asleep everywhere our house would hold them
I moved to my mother’s for good at fourteen
I soon left school for dreams of the lyric (of building)
I lied and said the lessons moved too slowly
Caught the ferry back to Seattle
Dragging back my bags of books…Allen, Jack, John Wieners
I filled in a few blues songs to form a whole story
Couldn’t carry it. Marveled at the graveled voice of the devil
Sounded good, on pitch, rich, illiterate. Moved away to study
Stretched what little money there was (did not work)
I was mostly taught who to read…Robert Duncan, Creeley, Joanne
Burned out on college my third year, suddenly it seemed the Golden Fleece
When I only needed sex. I was driven across country in the manner of a dark prince
Still couldn’t write well, only trying. The filters on the words felt waterlogged and stuck
Flew out to San Francisco, penniless. Left a woman crying facedown in the Chelsea
Pulled myself up and lived a year with my bathroom down the hall. No buzzer
Moved down with the sun to a new life, found work. The long leaning tower of nights
Fell to mesh. I became a warrior surprised at what I still didn’t know, how to get started,
Move along, stay moving, how to fill the page all over.
NOT FREE FROM THE MEMORY OF OTHERS
A LECTURE ON JOANNE ELIZABETH KYGER
TRY
very hard. See
it wasn’t so hard
but soft and warm to chase
the dream get worn out
give up again hold this vision
into a heavenly shield
against fear a ‘wondrous
creativity’
against the bewildered
daytime mind find
teachings in many realms.
APRIL 12, 1999
In 2015 I began work on a book of interviews with the poet Joanne Kyger. The idea was to attempt to tell her life story through cutting and sequencing of old interviews and to “illustrate” this chronology with ephemera from her personal archive. Joanne became my instant collaborator on this project. She suggested I arrange the material chronologically rather than forcing it into sections. She would give me maddening assignments like transcribing her one (incomprehensible) letter from Charles Olson. She carefully went over our first set of proofs, and whenever she chose to correct something within the text, she always offered up a solution as well, graciously attempting to do the work for me. When Joanne realized how inlaid the pieces of ephemera would be she became excited by the new trajectories we could apply to her history. Sometimes the life of the poet is itself a kind of poem that must be orchestrated and arranged for impact (preferably by someone else). Neither Joanne nor I imagined that this would become a posthumously published book.
I sometimes worry that it will be taken as the final word on her practice when it is in fact a starting place that attempts to leave her voice active and open, “what words sound like in the actual air.” After the manuscript had been completed, I said to my editor, “I think we just made a book that points the reader toward several other tiny trembling ephemeral chapbooks.” I mention this exchange simply to point out how many gorgeous chapbooks are not represented, specifically Pátz-cuaro Journal, Phenomenological, Not Veracruz, God Never Dies, and Year of the Ram.
Joanne had shared the arc of her story with me in a scattershot style over the years, on the phone, through emails, over a million perfectly executed lunches at the home she kept with Donald Guravich in Bolinas, about an hour north, up the coast from San Francisco. If Joanne asked that we arrive at 11:30 for lunch and we got a late start or made a wrong turn driving over Mount Tamalpais, she wouldn’t let us off the hook immediately. She would always have ink pens, colored pencils, and clipboards set out for after-lunch collaborations. More than once when we had arrived late I would find a clipboard with paper displayed prominently, then gorgeous large black calligraphy stating, “11:50 still waiting”…sometimes there was even an additional withering line when we had kept her waiting past noon.
After my first year of research and conversation with Joanne it began to feel as though I were entering into the realm of detective work. I was uncovering unpublished stories and poems, traveling to old houses she had once rented in Salmon Creek. I felt I had to know all of the arcs of her story to see which ones I could get away with leaving out. We had been close friends for twenty years before any thought of this book had even surfaced, so our histories had become very casually mixed up together. And I think that conflation was interesting to my editors.
It was intense to attempt to untangle her early influences, her allegiances, as she had been pulled in several directions as a young poet in 1950s San Francisco. In an interview conducted in 1997, Joanne makes an important distinction between the aesthetics introduced within the Jack Spicer-Robert Duncan circle and the more inflammatory, “beat” tone of voice that emerged after Ginsberg’s first public reading of Howl in 1955.
And also the Beat writers at the time read at the Coffee Gallery, the Bread and Wine Mission. There’s still Beatitude that comes out, which was really a particularly politically inspired forum, but not very good poetry. My practice of writing was a lot stricter, coming from the energy of Spicer, and someone like Robert Duncan who was opposed to the tendency of Beat popular poetry writing—to let it all dribble out.
This may also explain why Joanne is just as often referred to as part of the “San Francisco Renaissance.” Here is an excerpt from “Communication Is Essential,” possibly her most straightforward piece of memoir regarding the Spicer-Duncan circle of 1957:
Joe Dunn and John Wieners nickname me “Miss Kids” because I call everyone “Kids” and invite me to the Sunday afternoon poetry group that Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan were “teaching.” They usually went like this: Jack and Robert would read whatever current work they were writing. Sometimes Robert would be writing a poem while Jack was reading. Most often, Jack’s poems would be addressed to someone there in the group, some of whom had been in his Magic Workshop class earlier that spring. Then the young writers would read whatever they had written. Jack was a serious listener and the poem would be read two or three times. Does it sound “true”?…These meetings were very lively with large amounts of red wine being consumed in whatever containers were available—jars, sauce pans, etc. Then I was told by George Stanley that “some people are just coming here and treating this like a party.” That was me and my friend Nemi. “You can take a girl out of Santa Barbara, but you can’t take Santa Barbara out of a girl,” Jack was always saying. These poetry occasions were not to be considered frivolously. If I was to par
ticipate, I would have to read my poems.
Joanne is enshrined as part of beat mythology, namely for her addictive, witty, and sometimes desolate Japan and India Journals (a book she began upon her arrival in Kyoto, 1960, three years after beginning study with Duncan and Spicer). My all-time favorite title for a poem is contained in Joanne’s last book, “I’m Very Busy Now So I Can’t Answer All Those Questions About Beat Women Poets.” She disliked being referred to as an official anything: Buddhist, beat. Mentor was another useless term to her. Tracing commonalities of style within a circle of artists always sells every one of them short, when often, outright individualism is the force drawing them together. It’s fun to read Gary Snyder’s account of the trip to India alongside Joanne’s journal. Snyder’s writings take the form of a letter to his sister, titled Passage Through India. Near the end of the book as they prepare to leave India and return home to Japan, Snyder writes:
We had stripped down all we could, but were still well loaded—Joanne had left her high heels far behind and was moving with sure and accustomed techniques through all the travel routines—it was a marvel how she managed every time we pulled up for a night to do a laundry, wash her hair, write in her notebook and study our next day’s sightseeing without a hitch—