I was too busy running the Jabberwock to be more than remotely aware of the Berkeley Poetry Festival, though it took place only a few blocks away. I remember customers bringing excited reports, but I had no sense of belonging to a poetry community in those days. In 1965 there was no "Poetry Flash." Readings were rare, apart from big names, "poetry festivals" unheard of—I, at least, had never heard of them. Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov would come to mean a lot to me. A few years later, both Luis Garcia—a poet of the streets—and Donald Davie, my advisor at Stanford, would urge Charles Olson enthusiastically upon me, but in 1965 I had yet to discover the Black Mountain poets, organic form and projective verse. Writing formal poems exclusively, I felt isolated among my contemporaries—and not without reason. I recall James Tate, conducting a workshop, initiating discussion of one of my poems, "Poor Belle—." I mention this to show how intense feelings ran. Choosing to write free verse or formal was a matter of taking sides, an assumption which now, thank heavens, has somewhat abated.

Yes, poor Belle. Three of my poems had appeared in Poetry, July 1961, when I was still a student in Thom Gunn's poetry writing class. I was anxious to replicate my success, but didn't know how. Now that I was no longer a schoolgirl writing to please my teacher, I couldn't seem to get a handle on poetry. Now that I was a divorcee, the victim of my own ambivalence, I wrote very little and revised over much. Revising was a form of self-punishment in those days. I never knew how much was enough. But somehow I did manage to write a couple of poems I'm still pleased with.

"A Wind Among the Singing Trees" is very sixties. With Thom's recommendation, it was published in 1963 in Organ, an (otherwise) outrageous and sometimes raunchy underground Haight Ashbury newspaper.

A Wind Among The Singing Trees

My father was a Cherokee,
Among his people called Shoo-shon,
A warrior name which means: You Fool,
Any name you Call Me By Is Wrong.

My mother, Laughing In Their Faces, was
So beautiful she never needed mirrors,
But even in her fever had a beauty
Such as white men hope to put in words

And sometimes find in music. Look,
She cried, these beds with stainless rungs
Gleam and jangle like old bones. Tonight
When Rubber Gloves removes one of my lungs,

I told him I would like more space to die in.
Instead, he brings more magazines—
But Death and I, though very old,
Will thrive among new-fangled things.

Next morning Laughing In Their Faces died.
Among five fingers there is one
Which stands apart and is alone: to us,
A grieving man is like a thumb.

My father turned and walked through everyone.
Oh father, when I walk down corridors
Of public buildings late at night, or peek
Inside the new museum's doors

To where, in rooms as white as wards,
Statues file in endless rows
Like amputees from long forgotten wars,
Sometimes I glimpse the way it snows

Across the prairies of The Holding Breath
Where every man is named Shoo-shon
And laughing in their faces sings
Any name you call me by is wrong.

The widely publicized rumor of Paul McCartney's disappearance provided the initial inspiration for the following poem:

The Confirmation of Our Inscrutable Friend

Into the chambers of the Buddha's ear
He speaks, who when the phone rings does not answer.
All morning long his door is locked, whose gaze
  Is fixed on Buddha Nature.

The open I Ching by his sunlit plate
At tea portends arrival's imminent.
Though friends, inviting us to wait, did not
  Divine which way he went,

A stick of musk still glowing in its jar
At dusk suggests he's stepped outside and strolls
The twilight boulevards below, behind
  Dark glasses and a rose.

Escorted past his rooms as darkness falls,
We glimpse his monogram on velvet towels,
And pausing in the moonlit drive observe
  His silent, waiting Rolls.

And so it goes—the ticket for a train
That leaves, distinguished by a vacant seat;
The wife, producing signatures, who hasn't
  Seen him for a week;

The dragon-headed walking stick; the ornate
Letterhead; the gold initialed ring;
The rooms in which we find his character
  Engraved on everything;

The thousand certain clues which lead us to
A garden where an ancient Bo tree grows,
And leave us feeling for the body in
  A heap of empty clothes.