Beginning

March 1960. I have just turned 21. I get off the Greyhound Bus in San Francisco wearing a black mohair coat from B. Forman's in Rochester and clunky brown shoes. I am an Ivy League drop-out, an East Coast intellectual wannabee. I am going to marry Walter Dusenbery.

I have dropped out of Cornell in the spring of 1959 and moved down to New York to "be a writer"—whatever that means. To me, it means being a Europe-focused intellectual with roots in academia.

As Gail Evelyn Sherrell, I have blazed to phenomenal academic success at Cornell (this early success becoming another source of subsequent identity problems), thanks to dexamyls which I start using fall semester 1958 to lose weight. They are very effective for focused late night study at Cornell. I also suffer from debilitating shyness and extreme social panic attacks.

Growing up in Webster, NY, I read the short stories of Guy de Maupassant, For Whom the Bell Tolls, George Viereck's My First Thousand Years; Magic Casements. Forever Amber. Gone with the Wind. Countless book club novels on my stepmother's shelves, bestsellers from Reader's Digest Condensed Books. I win first prize in a United Nations essay contest. The prize is a week at a Quaker youth camp in the Catskills. Frizzy-haired people, dark-skinned people, Jews, guitar players, old pacifists teach me to Speak Truth to Power, how to pronounce apartheid ("apart-hate"). A bookworm with uncontrollable hair—a misfit at Webster High School—fits in easily at the Quaker youth camp.

At Cornell I wait table in Clara Dickson Hall and Balch Hall to earn my board and attend Quaker meetings. The summer after my sophomore year I join a Quaker youth group, "Interns in Industry" in Chicago. We will spread the Quaker message of non-violence and the inner light into factories and industrial sites. I panic at the co-ed living arrangements at Hull House. Boys and girls share the same bunkroom. Boys stand around in underwear. When they talk to me, my face shakes. I rent a separate room at Hull House and find a job typing contracts for Brink's Armored Car Company. My junior year at Cornell, the tuition increases 300%. My scholarships no longer cover it, so I take out a loan.

Music is important. I teach myself Slaughter on Tenth Avenue and Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto in A Minor, using the practice rooms in the Music Building. I play the grand piano in the living room in Balch Hall. Tom Pynchon's girlfriend lives at Balch Hall. He sits on a sofa waiting for her, nodding approvingly at my thundering. I slip into Goldwyn Smith Hall to play the big concert grand in the darkened auditorium. Vladimir Nabokov lectures here and sometimes arrives early—always with his wife—and offers words of encouragement.

I read Thoreau, Emerson, the Transcendentalists, Madame Blavatsky, Yeats, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden. Most important is D. H. Lawrence. I am certain I am a writer, although I have no clear path as to what I want to write. I write everything—poems, short stories. Tom Pynchon and Dick Farina are the stars in my fall 1958 writing seminar. I start a novel about an intense young man, Bernie, who plays the piano, a friend, Vincent (based on my Quaker friend, Dick Taylor), and a woman, Marian, who is alternately me and Miriam from Sons and Lovers. Of course I am also Bernie which complicates the plot line.

I have my first real love affair in the spring of 1959. Cornell does not allow women students to spend nights away from the dormitories. I withdraw from Cornell, move to an apartment on Mitchell Street, and type fast and furiously, listening to Chopin and Mozart's Don Giovanni on a cheap record player. The love affair further complicates the novel, as the Vincent character morphs into an individual more like my new lover, George Fletcher. I am accepted into a summer program at Oxford University in England. Deborah Heller's parents drive us down to New York City. Our plan is to take Icelandic Airlines to Europe. I find I am pregnant.

I argue with my lover over long-distance telephone, Manhattan to Los Angeles. I call him from subway stations, putting in the quarter to initiate the call. We talk and talk and talk. "How do I know it's mine?" he asks in one brutal conversation. "What about my career?" he asks, so plaintively, "Can you see yourself as a faculty wife?" When I hang up, the operator calls back. I owe a lot of money. The ringing phone is drowned out by the screech of the arriving subway cars and I bound back up the stairs to the street. In late June, a Creole gynecologist in Brooklyn performs a $150 abortion.

That summer I sublet an apartment from an aging opera singer at 302 East 27th Street, just off Second Avenue. My plans to study at Oxford University are off. I have no money except the refunded fees from Oxford. I eat stale pancake mix, found in the opera singer's cupboard, powdered milk, & water. I hunt for a job. With my untamed hair, homemade black dress, sneakers, I am absolutely not right for Harry Abrams' upscale art publishing office. George sends a check for $75—and I have my hair straightened. I buy a cheap Stella guitar at a pawn shop and learn E-minor, E-major, G, C, D. I work on my novel and on poems which I send out to the Hudson Review, the New Yorker, the Partisan Review. My refuge is the 5-cent ferry ride to Staten Island. The wind blows off the harbor, I leave the oily grime of lower Manhattan. The Statue of Liberty at the mouth of the Hudson seems to be a beacon of—hope? some promise for the future? for my future? I eat a cheap New York pretzel. The images haunt me for many years as in this poem from in The Bhangra Dance 1970.

HORN-GIRL
To swing on into it, to write, to say something of the seagulls against the
        Manhattan skyline,
the cold waves in the harbor, orange peels, bananas and burned-out cigarettes,
        rising and falling, in the waves, the oil slick on the water,
the East River, the hospitals,
but above all this,
        HORN-GIRL
part Negro, part white,
        with a star-spangled banner
brown eyes twinkling like postage stamps.
"And I ain't even high yet." There's a phone call coming through from the
        higher ups.
                       Admiring the play of wind, O Diogenes,
                       sitting in a bathtub,
                       searcher. searcher. Can it be admitted
                       that we seek?
The learning process
has a 4-D lattice shape,
               can we admit that we desire it?

In mid-August Oliver St. John Kraus of Cambridge University Press calls offering me a job, managing its Tenth Anniversary Warehouse Sale. He is impressed I can spell "Caesar"—getting the "a" before the "e." The pay is $200/month. A friend from Cornell, Sonja Frankel, tells me about a rent-controlled studio at 521 East Fifth Street Apt. 1-C. The rent is $41.25/month. There is a small stove and refrigerator; an alcove serves for a bedroom. I hang a bedspread with yellow, red and green sunflowers on the alcove to hide the mattress on the floor. A plywood door on two sawhorses becomes a desk. With a new job, a new apartment, and a reliable income, I am ready for New York.

My Cornell friends recommend a German tome by Jakob Wassermann, The World's Illusion. Thanks to the character Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums, Gary Snyder's poems are popular. I buy Riprap and Myths and Texts. I am also reading Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Hemingway. I continue sending poems and short stories off, using the name G. E. Sherrell. The rejection slips pile up.

In October 1959 two Californians move in down the hall. Twenty-year-old Walter Dusenbery has completed his first voyage to Japan in the Merchant Marine. He has come to New York to study modern dance. Jim Magnuson is a twenty-seven-year-old painter who will study art. I introduce Walter to the joys of the 5-cent Staten Island Ferry. He buys a membership at the Museum of Modern Art and gives me a spousal membership card made out to "Mrs. Walter Dusenbery." Walter was in the Berkeley High School class of 1957 with Carol Moscrip, Luis Garcia, Martin Singer, Belle Randall. Walter has also trained with the San Francisco Ballet. He is more knowledgeable than I am about avant-garde art. Walter visits Stephen Crane's home in Brooklyn; soon the newcomer is telling me about New York City. I quit Cambridge University Press in early December to explore New York with him.

In January Walter ships out again as an ordinary seaman. He will return in April. We will get married in upstate New York, then move to California. I take a halftime job as the night desk clerk at Cooper Union Library $1 an hour. It is hard to live on $20/week from Cooper Union. When I turn 21 on March 9, I inherit $3000 from my mother. I turn my apartment over to Ruth and Kendall Allphin, pack my books in boxes, and go upstate to collect my inheritance. Thus it is that on March 14 after 4 nights on a Greyhound bus, I come stumbling off into the brilliant sunshine of San Francisco in the spring. Walter is there to meet me.

Berkeley 1960-1964

We rent a basement apartment at 2520 California Street at Dwight Way for $55/month. Walter's Aunt Catherine (McIlrath) gives me a little outfit from Joseph Magnin—a plaid blouse with a Peter Pan collar, beige poplin skirt. I detest this preppy "good girl" look but it is successful at the UC Berkeley interview. I am offered a fulltime job in the Catalog Department at UC Library as a Senior Typist-Clerk making $325/month.

California is a whole new world. Telegraph Avenue is a frequent destination, with its leafy trees and interesting stores. We see movies at the Cinema Guild and Studio, have espressos at the Mediterranean, and hunt for used books in Creed's on the corner of Telegraph and Dwight. The uncle of a friend of Walter's owns the Continental Art Store. He sells brass Buddhas, six-armed Shivas, tasteful art objects. A Lesbian sandal maker, Thalia, on Telegraph makes my first pair of sandals. We drive across the Bay Bridge to see foreign films at the Surf Theatre in the Sunset District. Of the $3000 inheritance, $900 is left. Most paid off the student loan from Cornell. Walter takes me to an stringed instrument dealer on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. I buy an old Washburn ladies' guitar with a rosewood body, mother-of-pearl inlay, and an ebony neck for $100. Walter buys a Heathkit stereo kit and builds us a sound system.

Our friends are Frank and Maija English, Raymond Rice and Richard Hagelberger, both gay, Ralph and Judy Guertin. Walter scores pot—matchboxes for $5 and lids for $20—from Terry Kelly or his slight, scruffy, unwashed friend, David. Sandra Allen works with me in the library and becomes our friend. There are excursions to Botts Ice Cream on College Avenue for pumpkin ice cream in the fall, to North Beach to look for beatniks at The Place or for famous writers in the basement of City Lights. On Broadway we find the Walter Keane posters of children and pets with enormous eyes.

My goal is to complete my degree at the University of California, to learn foreign languages and travel to Europe. I take German in summer school. But California yanks me in whole new ways. Europe is less important; Mexico and Asia more important. Zen Buddhism is important. Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, Zen and the Art of Archery. At Cornell I learned to examine a work, a book, a thesis, for its flaws. Where can it be criticized? Here it's the opposite—one tries to understand how a piece of art can work. Sunshine, versus depression. Optimism, versus negativity. There is light everywhere.

There is light, but there is also pot, peyote, LSD, and the little dexedrines.

Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger sing, "Can you sew me a fine cambric shirt, without a stitch of needlework?" inspiring me to sew a linen shirt for Walter by hand. I make a skirt out of a bedspread from India Imports on Telegraph, a black leotard top, Thalia's handmade sandals. On our new Heathkit stereo, we listen to the Brandenberg Concertos, Wanda Landowska's The Well-Tempered Clavier, medieval French songs. We visit Frank and Maija's Victorian cottage on Ward Street. Frank hangs a blue light bulb in a Japanese lantern and plays Thelonius Monk, Charlie Parker, Ali Akbar Khan. In August we drive Walter's old brown DeSoto to Olympic National Park and climb Bogachiel Peak. We spend the night in a fire look-out cabin and in the morning I make my way down a foggy meadow to fill our water bottles from a melting glacier. Tiny wildflowers glow through the mist. I am happy. I have never been in a more beautiful place. I am living the life Gary Snyder writes about in his poems.

We create a love closet in the California Street apartment, hanging the walls with Indian bedspreads, a mirror, a big fur pillow. We smoke an occasional joint in there and listen to Indian music. In the fall of 1960, Walter ships out again. I find I am pregnant. So much for the diaphragm. Walter returns but he is not prepared to support a family. We are both 21 years old. Someone tells me about a Japanese doctor in Seattle who does abortions.

In March 1961 Frank and Maija split up. Maija takes our apartment on California Street and we move to 1811-1/2 Ward Street.

One Friday night, July 29, 1961—the day of my General Botany field trip—Walter prepares green peyote "milkshakes." Walter, Arthur Kessner, Sandra Allen, Joel—round face, dark hair, stocky body—and myself partake. The back porch with its deep utility sink is the "vomatorium"; each person makes several pilgrimages to this essential location. Arthur writhes in a fetal position. The rubber tree casts eerie leaf-shape shadows in the living room as Thelonius Monk plays the plangent, metallic single notes of the opening of Brilliant Corners. The next day we all drive up into Tilden Park and watch the sunset in our own personal beatitudes.

Although Walter and I have been "married" since March 1960, we are worried about the draft. Married men are less likely to be called up, but our marriage is not legal. On October 4, 1961, Reverend Masami Fujitani marries us at the Berkeley Buddhist Church with Jim Magnuson and Ruth Allphin as witnesses. Walter wears his homemade linen shirt; I make a Jackie Kennedy-type sheath dress of purple fabric from India Imports.

The Friday after Thanksgiving, November 24, 1961, we experiment with a second peyote trip. Walter grinds dried buttons and pours the powder into gelatin capsules. Sandra Allen and her new boyfriend, Walter and I ingest several capsules at a house in San Francisco. We go out to San Francisco's Ocean Beach, across from Playland, down the hill from the Cliff House and Sutro's Baths. We gaze at the stormy whitecaps under the darkening night sky. Sandra announces she will cross this Pacific Ocean and find out what is on the other side. We end up at a house in Oakland with a grand piano. Sandra does an astounding, electrifying performance of Rachmaninoff from memory.

Three days later I walk home around 9PM. Someone runs up behind me and drags me into the bushes. Recalling the anti-HUAC demonstrators as the Chronicle photographed them, being dragged down the steps of San Francisco's City Hall, their passive resistance, I go limp. The man takes his hand off my mouth, I scream. He jumps up. I chase him, but he runs fast with long loping steps. I am convinced someone wants to kill me. I hang bedspreads, sheets, over all the windows on Ward Street. A few nights later Walter and I have an argument. Walter hits me and pulls my hair. I rush out of the house and seek refuge next door. Our neighbors are black. Faced with a hysterical white woman in their living room at 1AM, they call the police who take me to Highland Hospital in Oakland. The week I spend there is frightening, bizarre, scary.

In January 1962 I leave Walter and move into a loft above Fraser's furniture store at 2409 Telegraph Avenue. I enter UC Berkeley as an English major, taking English 100 with Thom Gunn, Chaucer from Charles Muscatine. Mary Haydn Webb, whom I've known from Cornell, is Muscatine's reader. She grades hard. "What about tone?" she writes. "So what about tone," I think to myself. I support myself with a halftime job at the Space Sciences Laboratory located in an old brown-shingle building on North Campus. During coffee breaks at the Northside on Hearst, I memorize Garcia Lorca's "Empieza el lloro de la guitarra," written in large handscript on the back wall. Evenings I study at the Mediterranean. I teach myself to smoke Black Sobranie cigarettes with the gold tips. I read Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea. Djuna Barnes' Nightwood. I hope I look "interesting." Although I think of myself as a writer, I do not actually write anything but term papers. I am pleased when Thom Gunn says my term paper on To The Lighthouse demonstrates "a continuous luminous intelligence."

June 1962 Walter and I reconcile and move into a second-floor flat on Wheeler Street During the summer I take Intermediate German, Stanley Fish's course in Milton, continue halftime at Space Sciences. Walter studies with Marguerite Wildenhain at Pond Farm Pottery up in Guerneville. He is Marguerite's star student. Our friends are Ruth Elcan, Marty Wenglinsky, Jim Magnuson, Hank Sultan. We have play readings—The Balcony, A Streetcar Named Desire. Sandra Allen leaves to wait table at Grossinger's in the Catskills.

In the fall I take my old job back at the UC Library. I take Shakespeare with Stephen Orgel, and Contemporary Authors with Mark Schorer. The contemporary author is D. H. Lawrence. Mark Schorer says of my term paper: "This is the best, the most intelligent, essay on Kangaroo that I have ever read." I listen over and over to Brahm's 4th Symphony. It seems to promise something, while telling of something else that has already happened. Sandra herself stops through in December. She is catching a tramp steamer from San Francisco to Singapore, embarking on the around-the-world tour she had foreseen a year earlier at Ocean Beach.

Spring semester 1963 things fall apart. I buy a hardbound copy of Tom Pynchon's "V" at Sather Gate Book Store in March but have trouble getting through it. I take life drawing, Homer and Vergil, Theory of Knowledge, 19th Century French Literature, getting Cs in everything except French. I simply stop attending and I get an F. Despite this currently poor academic performance, I am nominated for a Woodrow Wilson and named an Alternate. I win the Elizabeth Mills Crothers Short Story Award for $125 ("The Proposal") and graduate with an AB on July 26, 1963. I use my prize money to study at Pond Farm Pottery. I am Marguerite's least-favorite student. She uses my pots as examples of how not to make pottery.

We move to 2609 Fulton Street in August 1963. I paint the kitchen squash yellow and the bathroom citron green, following Richard Hagelberger's suggestion to use Pratt-Lambert paints because these paints have the best pigments. We have an apricot tree and a plum tree in our backyard. I make apricot sauce, plum jam. I work fulltime at the library; Walter and I plan to go to Europe in the spring. Sandra sends letters from India, musk from Cairo. Our friends are Ralph and Judy Guertin, Bob Lakativa, Cliff Ghames, Raymond Rice, Frank English, Jim Magnuson, Ruth Allphin, Bobbi Gisella, Pat Surry. I browse the book racks at Cody's on Telegraph, drink coffee at the Med and the Forum. Ernie Rimerman rents the front room from us.

In the fall Richard Hagelberger hosts a big party at his elegant Victorian on Haste Street above Telegraph. Walter introduces me to Luis Garcia, whom he knows from high school. Luis is tall, wiry, thin, nervous, neurasthenic, sexy, with long hair and a handlebar mustache. He is back from a year in Chile and has just published The Calculated Lion. Luis is indeed lionized at this party. Richard Hagelberger introduces him to everyone. The rooms are packed with bodies. The house hums.

I get pregnant again and have a miscarriage in November. For the next three months, I don't work. From my journal: "December 1963-February 1964: did nothing for 2-3 months." I start rolling joints on my own. I read Alexandra David-Neel, Evans-Wentz, the 100,000 Songs of Milarepa. I buy patchouli, frankincense, myrrh at the Nature's Herb Company at 281 Ellis Street in San Francisco. Sandra sends a pack of Tarot cards from Paris and writes Paris , the City of Light, is the most beautiful city she has ever seen. I get a letter from Richard Taylor, the Quaker I had been in love with at Cornell. He has returned from an American Friends Service Committee mission in Guatemala. He would like to see me. I answer in a lofty manner that I am no longer the person he remembers and see no need to meet. Cliff Ghames lives with us some of this time.

Walter finds a job at UC Extension. He gets a promotion. For some reason this means we cannot go to Europe in the spring. Walter becomes friends with Dick Baker. Dicks tells him about a group who meets in an old Victorian synagogue in San Francisco to practice Zen meditation. The Zen master is a Reverend Suzuki. Not "D. T. Suzuki" who has made Zen so popular, but "Shunryo Suzuki" who teaches Soto Zen, not Rinzai Zen which Gary Snyder practices. I am disappointed. Soto Zen seems a lesser Zen, but we start sitting zazen in San Francisco mornings at 5:30AM.

Spring 1964 Walter takes a course from the painter, Bruce McGaw, at the California College of Arts and Crafts. Bruce introduces us to Michael McClure who also teaches there. Standing up in Cody's Bookstore, I read Stan Persky's Open Space Magazine with poems by Lew Welch, Philip Whalen, Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder. Gary Snyder returns from eight years in Japan and gives a poetry reading on campus in May 1964. It is the most exciting event I have ever attended. I am blown away with the power of his voice, his vowels.

During the fall 1964 I assign myself writing exercises. I am also writing poetry. Meanwhile the Free Speech Movement rattles the UC campus. Mario Savio shouts on top of a police car in Sproul Plaza; students jam the steps in a massive sit-down strike. It is electrifying to be on campus. I am working fulltime at the library. I know I am on the side of the students.

It has been over two years since I experimented with psychedelics, but Frank English is taking LSD and, in his charismatic way, convinces us it is much safer than peyote, with all those unknown aldehydes. At Thanksgiving Walter and I take LSD and visit the potter, Jack Sears, at his hillside cave studio in Calistoga. We meet Gordon Beam. Frank English and his new girlfriend, Meredith Redmond Moss, come with us. The stars explode in the black Napa Valley sky. Meredith points out the constellation of Orion, and Cassiopeia. I see a message flashing in the universe, "EAT, OR BE EATEN." I have powerful flashbacks of feeling threatened by Walter or the unnamed "murderer" from two years earlier. I commit myself to Napa Hospital.

[From the July 5, 1965 journal looking back at the past year]: Okay. LSD in the winter, but that cracked things open, made them more fluid and loose-running and it led to poetry which was clearly and unmistakably the best thing I had come to do for five or six years. Before then, the terrible fall, with those terrible arguments with Sandra and Raymond; and the summer, during which I had been very very high, some kind of sun goddess I fancied myself, always lying in the sun, absorbing up the sun, drinking it in, turning the same color as it, craving it as being more-than-love. Reading the Tibetan books, introduction to the Zen Center, first introductions to San Francisco poetry via Bruce McGaw—which takes us back to Gary Snyder's reading in May, that bright sparkly starry dark night in which Walter and Bob Lakativa and Judy and I walked up to that happy poetry reading, which turned me on much (I was turned on so much already that evening, feeling that I was pretty and very very high and very very happy to be anticipating seeing the real Snyder whose poems I had so long lived in; and then the reading and the person were all better than I had anticipated, soberer, a kind of plain joy, which I hadn't anticipated, closer to the ground; but then with that poem to the great magic city of San Francisco, and Snyder adding, "It is magic, you know!" I really began to find my eyes open! That Snyder really did see and believe in the magic, the way no English professor or even Thom Gunn seemed to. No one since John Senior had seemed so much alive to me!

I am aware that my life bores me. I want more.

Becoming a Poet 1965

In January 1965 I enroll in the graduate program in English at San Francisco State with the vague idea of getting a teaching credential—but the courses in the English Department are dull as dust.  My adviser suggests I try English 204 Advanced Poetry, given by Robert Duncan. The class is crowded. Robert Duncan has an odd gaze. His eyes do not track together. He is nonetheless amazing—all thoughts of the teaching credential fly out the window. He tells us to read Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, then Lorca, Cocteau, Neruda, Rimbaud, Breton. And we should make a list of the people we wish we'd never read at all! We are to submit 1-3 poems a week to him. I take notes in a small, cramped handwriting in an old flexible black 3-ring binder.

Robert talks about "learning how to play the language." He suggests we play with vowel sounds, patterns, stress patterns. Work on a list of all the possible vowel sounds. Work around in the sounds. Recognize the poem form when you start writing-but do not force the poem into a form.

Read Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading, Section 1. Take notes. Analyze what you feel goes into the music of a poem. Add the skin—the outrageous. Practice with blocks of words—let the sounds dominate; make lists. Also with dreams: use dream tones, dream symbols. Robert speaks of "bardic qualities"—how well a poem is remembered, and how well it is projected. He mentions "the Vates" or the fates, as the god-voice; inspired. Poetics, from the Greek "to make," means "the made poem." Use variable spelling, or misspellings. How does that change what's going on in the poem? Measurements in poetry are relations of volume & length; proportions.

Go over your poems looking for concrete objects realized in your poems. Look at the world your poem furnishes—what do you put in it? Immerse yourself in the world that appears in your poems. Become more familiar with it. How far can it become real? If you keep writing about saints and angels, find out what or who they are.

Robert's reading list: Dante. Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice; Pound's The Spirit of Romance; De Vulgari Eloquentia; St. John Perse, Èloges; Corbin (Bollingen) Avicenna; Gwendolyn Bays, The Orphic Vision: Seer Poets from Novalis to Rimbaud. He recommends The Golden Lotus; Eros Denied (Grove Press); La Vita Nuova in either Italian or English; Coomaraswamy, Transformation of Nature into Art (Dover Press); Thomas Merten, Child Bomb.

Meanwhile Gary Snyder is giving his own poetry seminar at UC Berkeley. Robert Duncan suggests I sit in on that. I meet Lowell Levant, Eileen Adams, Gene Fowler, Hilary Ayer.

Saturday, February 27, 1965: Snyder's at the center. I think about those fantastically beautiful poems of his youth—"But deathless are those who have fed/ At the breasts of the Mother of the Universe" and the one about the plum blossoms falling/ The whole world drifting north . . . Where did that voice come from? At his worst, slightly radio announcerish. Low and rotund with the full liquid syllables, a hushed gurgling waterfall, sometimes full volume, constantly being turned up and turned down … Reading the Cantos, they're very closely sounded, and the images come hard & fast on top of the other. Sometimes pretty showy, hard to read, hard to follow—quite a take-off from Homer, who used the repeat and had sonority working for him. Lots of humor, self-laughing, in the Cantos. A very groovy box within the box scene. Gives insight into Snyder's intellectual techniques. Long dream about Gary Snyder teaching in a poetry camp. Concludes with:

Can't trust myself to open my mouth . . . when I open my mouth: hoots, scratches, stick-in-the-throats, a loud fuzzy voice; resonant—over-resonant, but sloppy & loose, with lisped s's and garbled words run into each other. My thought takes a turn and yanks the sentence after it. Ask Snyder how he learned that control of his voice.

I struggle with the assignments in Duncan's seminar.

Monday, March 8, 1965: I thought first to myself that I was not a poet. I was not a poet because I could not write poetry for Duncan's class and could not bring myself to read poetry in Snyder's class. I was not a poet because I felt the whole weight of five years between myself (a "do-nothing") and those kids in the class. I was not a poet because my poems were not good. My poems were not good because I could not make my mind concentrate. My mind was so unused to concentrating or else so naturally incapable of it, that when it occasionally overcame its characteristic impulsiveness and did actually concentrate, it overrated the importance of the thing it was concentrating on. In short, my mind lacked sweep, it lacked a large, closely-concentrated-upon, overall view of things.

But was it necessary to be a poet? In addition to the foregoing, I was not a poet because I did not read poetry. Occasionally I would turn to it for concentration and consolation. Apart from these times when I had been pushed by events outside myself into a kind of desperation and solitude, I did not consult with poetry. Did I want to read more poetry? I was not able to bring myself to it. I did not like poetry. How about the whole body of the English language, did I want to become more familiar with it? No, I found I did not like poetry, any poetry. What could it meant then to think of one's self as a "poet," to want to write "poetry"?

Well, I felt that left to my own devices, I saw strange lights in things, strange relations and meanings; and these absorbed me, held all of my attention; and occasionally my involvement with these lights and meanings burst all bounds—and then I had to write a "poem" or write something.

Duncan said, Why in god's name should anyone who wanted to be a poet or thought of himself as a poet, want to have anything to do with a "poetry workshop"! He snorted with contempt! Well, of course. Of course I can't do assignments. That is the most antithetical scene possible to the one in which I actually see my lights and hear my voices.

There is something I expect of myself which at the same time I do not want to do. That is, I want to be a "little somebody," and I am upset with my life because it has not made me a little somebody . . . .But at the same time I dislike doing all the things which might some day make me a little somebody. I dislike them morally, and because I am lazy. But even if I could see the contradiction between being a poet (existing in a state of mind in which I see lights and meanings) and being a little somebody, I would still have to take steps against my laziness.

Robert Duncan takes the occult very seriously and uses it in his poems. He may also believe in it. The following notes give some sense of what Duncan had to teach about the occult.

Monday, March 15, 1965:
              O great themes of life & death—
              — does it make your hair stand on end?
              god of the waxing year; god of the waning year
              the weird or rival or prince of the air
              the tall spectre, lean, dark-faced
              who tries to drag the dreamer out of the window
              sow, mare, bitch,
              vixen, she-ass, weasel, serpent, owl,
              tigress, mermaid, or loathsome hag

              O great survivors
              deathly pale, with lips red as
              rune berries; and startlingly blue eyes
              mother, birds, & layer-out ? 8-fold goddess
              the ancient power of fright and lust
              when owls hoot, trees sway together;
              a peal of bells in frosty weather

Friday, April 2, 1965: Meditating on Rilke's poems pulls me together. There are layers and layers of life—some lie very near the top, and do not reach down into anything. One must not connect to these layers: they are the place at which all I can write are allusions to "flotsam and jetsam" and "streaming." There are other depths—spaces—which can be inhabited by the mind; and must be. Rilke opens these up, he must have spent most of his time in those spaces. Even thinking about the flotsam layers is value-less. Any attempt to deal with those layers is a mistake: they seize control of your mind, especially control of the unpracticed, immature mind. Better to be a bum like Jack Spicer, with a pure, clear, independent mind, than a librarian.

Tuesday, April 6, 1965: "Aren't they ready, my finished poems? Shouldn't I just send them off and wait?

Thursday April 15, 1965: A way of going about things which is honest, careful and serious—very far-seeing. This is a shaky period I am passing through, working fulltime, and utmost "dedication to perfect self-hood" is required. I think I can write good poetry, after a lot of training and meditation and work. If I listen to Duncan now, he will probably tell me my poetry is terrible or some such thing.

Gordon Beam has become a constant presence in our household. He and Walter are creating raku pottery—the hand-formed cups used in the Japanese tea ceremony. By April I have fallen in love with Gordon. I do not share this realization with Walter who is making plans to ship out again. I go with Walter as he makes his ship calls and skip Duncan's class. Walter hits me for reasons not clear. Undated May entry: " . . . all topsy-turvy with the imminent always imminent departure of Walter." Walter ships out the first week of May 1965 for six or eight weeks.

Wednesday, May 5, 1965: I'm tired, stoned; I've been writing a lot of bad verse lately. Why so weak and sloppy? Because verse is true experience—requires a real honesty of mind.

The coolness born of some pain,
some knowledge which had cut to the bone,
about the non-existence of the I,
then freed them for their greater work—
their goal was no longer confirmation of their "picture" of themselves,
but some highly abstract and complete design
which their movements made.

Undated: Duncan praised the poem today I had written solely for Gordon.

To my surprise Robert Duncan likes my poems and asks my permission to send them to Poetry (Chicago). Gary holds a party for his class on Saturday June 12th out at Stimson Beach on Highway 1 past the grocery store and "Dall's pines." "Be there by 6PM." I take Gordon Beam to this party.

When Walter returns, I move out of 2609 Fulton Street. I rent an apartment—two rooms separated by a sliding door—somewhere in Berkeley. I have no record of the address.

Sunday, June 27, 1965: The Magicians are Here, and so are the Worldly Schemers, the Sharks and Fins of Poetry: Toad, Pig, Muddled Mr. Worldly-Otherworldly . . . . It takes me away from poetry, to see the politics and intrigue. And Walter is fascinated with it — even more than he is with me! The Magicians are Here! The Magicians are Here! Remember that last cell in the maze? The days following that remarkable noon when I read Gary's description of how to do it and bought Duncan's Opening of the Field; and bought and saw what there was in Roots and Branches: The development, in another personality, of my own poems, the maze, the mother, the madrone mother, incredible . . .

Dick Baker is organizing the Berkeley Poetry Conference with Robert Duncan, Tom Parkinson, and Donald Allen and arranges for me to receive the Grove Press Scholarship. This is a "work" scholarship; I sit at the door of California Hall and collect registrations in exchange for tuition. The first week is very intense. Robert Duncan tells us:

There are things which grow and produce, and lead into a life in the poem. You can't go out into a realm of ideas you don't feel. You can't not be with it yourself, and then ask your audience to be with it in your place. There are the long gathering periods you must go through, before things come up. Waiting to begin is boring as hell. You have to take the poem as it is. Poems are not simply statements of feeling, they must evolve toward their own form. If a word is bringing up other words, while you're working, then I'd say the word is operating. Look for the elements that begin to produce other elements in the poem. Harmonies and immediacies emerge from the material. When I write a poem, I like to know what it says. I'd like to know what I am saying. It's a dilemma. What am I saying, as I am writing it?

If you don't feel it, you won't be able to work at your best. When you don't work your best, you're bored. Poems are a feeling-experience of language. Let's keep the experiences where they are—not all experiences occur in language. You think, I've had this experience—why can't I write a poem? Well, it wasn't a feeling-experience of language. Do not deny the poem you have written—you put your total self into the fascination of what is happening—you put yourself completely in the hands of god.

Raymond Radiguet said: "You can never do it any better than you do it." I could destroy Heavenly City, Earthly City, which makes me uncomfortable, but I keep the uncomfortableness. Yes, I wrote that. Charles Olson wrote in 1952, "Duncan is always bigger or littler than he is." I was dismayed. "Why can't I be the size that I am?" Then I realized, "Well—I just better explore the way I am and be bigger and littler." Proust had a friend who said, Your sentences are too long. A professor of Gertrude Stein's told her, You better learn how to punctuate. Stuart Perkoff: "Man, if your sound is a drone, then drone!"

Take a person with you, as Dante took Vergil. Counterpoint is so fascinating. One form can haunt another. Alfred North Whitehead believed behind the universe is a dream universe. Paris and London consist of layers of dreams of cities. Magicians sell maps showing how to cast spells in these cities.

When I write a poem, I wait for a certain body-tone to start. I avoid when I have a muddled mind. Little shadows, little secrets—not things that I know, that you don't know, but things about myself which I don't know. Put down or avoid anything which takes you away from your own activity. He says, I'm not particularly interested in health. If health were a good thing, then novels would have to take care to always keep their characters healthy. But they're always having diseases and accidents and being shoved under choo-choo trains.

Take what you need from other writers. I take on the clothes, the words, of Gertrude Stein, to see how they fit, because I love her & wants to be close to what I love. If the coat fits, put it on; if it doesn't fit, no amount of care will make it work.

My notes from Gary Snyder's seminar on July 12, 1965:

Focus out over the mountain peaks, and in on the grain in granite. Take vows of silence ("Mouna"). Form is not solid; form is all there is. The universe is like a fountain; when the flow stops, there is no fountain. What is long equals what is short. If you change the scheme, what was long is short. The universe is energy, in constant motion; & it was not created in time; it is created NOW. This sense of the NOW is the thing that has to be activated. "Very little has to be studied if the NOW is understood." In the west the creation of the universe is a chore; it tires God to do it—he has to rest afterward. Shiva creates the universe and it is fun; he's simply dancing—he's not creating it for a purpose.

A poet must be thoroughly acquainted with all of literature and literary theories—from classical Greek theories all the way up to the latest little periodical.

You must be in a state of complete oneness with what you're doing at the time. The trouble is, doing more than one thing at one time—this is the muddle and the indigestion. "You don't have to know the truth to be a good poet; you don't even have to be a good person. But poetry makes contact with the cool, straight & accurate level of mind; it happens despite the personality & beliefs of the man who writes it." "I don't try to make a distinction anymore between being wise and being silly; the mystical state is the outcome of experience—you don't always have to be at a high peak of intensity, on the edge of a WOW—you can be down, and stupid, and that's okay, too. It really used to bother me if several months went by without writing poetry, but now I just say, the ground is foul; it will come up later." Work as hard as hell but don't strain for it and it will fall into your hand when it is ripe. You don't learn anything except by taking risks. All you can do is fulfill your Karma.

Don't strain for abstract individualism, for possibilities that are not your possibilities. You don't need a pleasing & teasing surface, if there's something going on beneath the surface. Project the images of the poem like a movie, in front of you, see it; & then put that into English. "The inferior man embellishes his mistakes"—Confucius. Abandon a lose early in the game.

The universe is an experience which is neither outer nor inner. Mind permeates everything. Consciousness is everywhere. hsin - chin "heart; mind" Where is it? A Japanese sumi wrestler walks from his belly. He slaps his belly. Put your mind in your belly. Stage fright—take 2 or 3 deep diaphragm breaths. A gathering is a con-spiracy, a gathering together is a "breathing together." Breath prosody is belly prosody, based on the way you breathe. A poet's style is the rhythm of his body. His mind is in his belly. Japanese & Chinese locate the center of consciousness in the BELLY. (Gary quotes Charles Olson, T. S. Eliot's poetry is all head poetry, exciting as chess or mathematics.)

SARASVATI is the lute-goddess. Goddess of poetry & music. Consort of Brahmin. VOICE = vocal cords; breath; throat. LANGUAGE = tongue & lips. VAC (goddess who is voice) is married to MANAS (mind/intellect) the outcome is Dharma (truth). SOUND in the pure sense of reverberation. Base tone provided by the drone = OM the base sound of the universe AOM. Sanskrit poetry falls into 2 classes: each vowel sound: a name, a power, a potentiality, a color; an incantation - the Mantra - a sound used for its own magic. Influences for Gary are D. H. Lawrence, Chinese poetry, Robinson Jeffers, Whitman. Han Shan's Cold Mountain poems.

Meanwhile, with my "work" scholarship, I am shoved and hassled at the door. It is a mob scene every morning. People are angry that they should have to pay to attend the conference. They give me a hard time for demanding to see their registrations. I wave in my friends from Gary's seminar—Gene Fowler, Hilary Ayer—and finally stop asking to see any registrations. Not long after this Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan announce the Berkeley Poetry Conference is free.

I go to a party and hesitate at the door. Bobbie Creeley lifts her large leg, blocking the door so I can't enter. She turns her head away from me. I insist, I'm not crashing, I've been invited. She drops her leg. I enter. My debilitating shyness kicks in. I don't have a good time. Most evenings, exhausted, I go home to my "dowdy, Shakespearean" apartment. The conference is too intense. I eat, walk around Berkeley, smoke a jay, try to write down the lessons of the day.

Saturday, July 17, 1965: The poetry conference has thrown me into a muddle. Too much is happening. I just can't accept it. I see all that is happening … Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley, closely talking, whispered excitement of their joint magic, watching it work, fail to work, taking note, comparing notes. They are two great hooded magicians, in hooded pointed caps; old skin; time-bitten. When you look at the old, what scares you is the subtraction taken out by time; you see their death hooked through their flesh. Allen and Robert seem kindly. They are well ahead of me in the maze; but what I want to know is, what do they know? and can they teach it to me? in the lessons of their presence? Is it teachable? seeable? . . .

Gary Snyder organizes a reading of poets from his class for the last day of the conference, Sunday, July 25, 1965—"Young Poets of the Bay Area." This is my first reading. I wonder if I will be able to read my poems in California Hall auditorium. To combat my enormous shyness, I take a small amount of LSD and spend the afternoon in bed with Steve Worldie. Then I drive to Berkeley and give the reading. I am trembling with a sort of defiant sexual energy. The reading is a success.

Saturday, July 31, 1965: Tom Shiels grins in the sun, speaks softly, sun on his face and bare feet, dirty toenails. "Sensei sent Steve home. Sent me over to see how he was doing. You know, he's been bum-tripping the past three or four days." Sesshin all day today, Tom Shiels says, "You ought to make it over." He also tells me, very politely, Jim Thurber told him I was a real good poetess.

1360 Fell Street San Francisco

Pulled by "the goddess San Francisco," at the beginning of August I move across the Bay to 1360 Fell Street. Although I've saved some money to go to Paris, those savings are spent by the end of August.

Who is sleeping with whom? Everyone is sleeping with everybody. The sexual currents flow through, in and around Berkeley, San Francisco, and the Bay Area. Women have disconcerting new freedoms. Men have always been expected to sow their wild oats. Since 1961 birth control pills have been available. Now women can sow their own wild oats, and sow their wild rye, their wild wheat, and their amaranth as well.

That summer I sleep with several more people. In January 1965 I had slept with only three men. By December 1965 that record is increased by quite a number. This is a time of "free love." Men say of women who will not sleep with them, "She's frigid." "She's inhibited." "She's up tight." No hip woman wants to be frigid. Inhibited. Up tight. She wants to be flowing. Free.

In a poetry reading, Joanne Kyger explains why her marriage to Gary Snyder ended. "He was always telling me he wanted to try on other bodies for size." Trying on bodies for size is a large part of the scene in 1965-1966.

In August I become friends with the poet Jim Thurber. Jim had been part of Gary's seminar at Berkeley and he sits zazen at the Bush Street temple. Jim is always playing a harmonica or a flute. His friend, Doug Palmer, is Facino who runs around North Beach with a signboard: "I will write you a poem." Jim is Flambeau, Facino's sidekick. Jim lives in a few blocks away in "the Spaceship" on Golden Gate Avenue. His roommates are Silas Hoadley, who is active in Zen Center. Tom Shiels. Duane and Nia.

Jim introduces me to Norman Stubbs, the manager of an old Victorian apartment building at 1360 Fell Street. There is a vacancy on the first floor of 1360 Fell Street—Room No. 5. It is a single room for $35/month with a shared bathroom down the hall. I take it.

Jim has just written his "Moon Poems." Everyone is talking about them. They get published in Stephen Mindel's Cow Magazine. I also have a poem in Cow. Jim introduces me to Diane Moran. Diane's thick blonde hair falls down to her waist. The relationship between Jim and Diane is on-again, off-again.

Gary Snyder invites me to visit him at his apartment in North Beach, to talk about poetry, or perhaps to talk about my poems.  Gary serves tea.  We haven't talked very long, before the doorbell rings, and it is Allen Ginsberg, dropping by.  Allen says there is a lot of energy left over from the Berkeley Poetry Conference, and he is interested in staying on in the Bay Area longer— maybe a couple of months.  These days he is driving around in a VW bus with Peter Orlovsky, taking LSD and dictating into a handheld mike. I mention an apartment for rent where I am living.  The rent is low.  I am surprised that Allen is interested.  He asks, how could he see it?   I tell him I'm driving back there—we can go look at it right now.  I'll give him a ride over in my VW bug. Norman Stubbs shows him the apartment which consists of two rooms on the first floor, on the west side of the hallway.  The rent is maybe $55/month. Allen rents it on the spot, but he has another commitment, and will return in September.  Allen pays him all the rent then and there—two or three months rent—to hold it.

Friday, August 13, 1965. . . . One weekday hot afternoon in Foster's downtown on Geary Street near Market, waiting for an appointment with the Legal Aid Society, I wrote and wrote in my Green Street Book about Robert Creeley's message. I felt tingly, all alive; much was happening . . . I dreamed of Mary Haydn Webb—remembering old Gertrude Atherton's modern dance recital, Cornell, in November or December 1957; and at that concert all my friends were there—my soul friends, since I knew none of them except by look: Tom Pynchon, John Senior, Richard Denner—always the dark haunted look, lean wraiths, with the reddish black beards and damp thick hair . . . In the dream, I passed her and we did not speak and then I turned back and called, Mary! Let me tell you some good news, I've had a poem published! And she was more than scornful, saying, Is that all? I've had so many published, we all have, those little magazines take anything.

I work on my poems, but I spend a lot of time smoking grass, taking LSD, and small amounts of amphetamine. I live on unemployment and temporary jobs through agencies like Kelly Girls and Olsten's. I spend time in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. It is summer, and the eucalyptus trees sway back and forth, very magically. I can almost understand what the birds are saying. It is clear they talk to one another about human activity in the Panhandle—and about me. I live only a few blocks from the Fillmore. Young black men roam through the Haight. They are tense, strong, possibly angry. I teach myself not to be scared of them. I look into bloodshot eyes with yellowed corneas without flinching. I smoke Marlboros because they are cheap. I also smoke Camels because Camels are cool, more 40s, more beatnik. Sometimes I treat myself to a pack of black Sobranies with the gold tips.

In September Apartment No. 9 on the north side of the second floor opens up, with a stove and a refrigerator. I take it. Pat Marks takes Room No. 5 on the first floor. Barbara Schlosser lives in the apartment next door to mine; we share a bathroom. Jaime Leopold has a room on the second floor on the south side. I spend a lot of time with Jim Thurber, arguing about poetry.

[undated] The green sign flashed LAUNDRY at the bottom of the Downey Street hill. The green sign flashed its neon unnatural greenness into the cavernous innards of the black car. Three poets raced down the street shouting of Miller and Durrell. Two inhabitants passed them on Waller and looked up, leering with curiosity. It was 2:30 in the morning. Golden Gate panhandle was dark. Venus or was it Mercury and I held out for Jupiter was a big gold globe in the eastern sky. The moon was a big gold glove half-shrouded in clouds. Mike [Hannon] beat back and forth between his friends, growling, grabbing, hunched over, low, snarling.

Friday, October 1, 1965: When I came in the apartment, the phone rang, and it was the girl from Olsten's with a day job for me, for Monday and Tuesday. I had once had my fortune divined by the Grant Lewi method. According to his calculations, I was possessed of great intelligence, nobility of character, and unusual luck. Lately I have begun to let the luck work for me, let it take its own course. "Work as hard as hell, but don't strain for it, and it will fall into your lap when it is ripe." I see Gary's flat, grinning, faintly diabolical brown face with the squinted eyes, as he stood in full-diaphragm-breathing aplomb during the poetry conference, delivering this oracle.

I give a poetry reading at the Blue Unicorn, 1927 Hayes Street Allen and Peter Orlovsky move into Fell Street around the beginning of October and live there for two or three months.

On a Friday night, October 8, 1965, Luis Garcia reads at the Buzz Gallery at 1711 Buchanan Street in Japantown. Jim Wehlage—whom I've met in Gary's poetry seminar—invites me to the reading. I wear my black leather coat. I have just had my ears pierced. Jim Wehlage admires the aluminum studs in my ears. I look very Bauhaus, nouveau, in this black leather coat and aluminum earrings.

The reading begins. A cone of light flares on a thin, nervous poet sitting on a high stool. He has a sheaf of onionskin papers. He starts reading. His voice squawks, rants, whispers, shouts, murmurs. His sound is nasal, loud, cutting, unforgettable. The gallery is electrified. The house cheers. We stomp on the floor, we clap. He has to do an encore. This is Luis Garcia, literary lion, poet of the moment. Jim Thurber is at the Buzz Gallery. I can hear Jim's wild, chortling glee. "Oh, man! That's where it's at, man! Listen to those sounds he makes! His voice is a saxophone!" Luis Garcia becomes the new standard to which we all must live up. Lu can do a poetry reading almost as good as Allen Ginsberg . . . . Allen is sonorous and deep-voiced and all holy man. Lu is pure jazz—thin—intense—nasal squawk. In his own way, more hip.

Lu invites some of us to his mother's house high in the Berkeley hills. We will have a glass of wine, smoke some pot, discuss poetry. His mother and father are out of town. The house on San Antonio Road is large and handsome. A huge living room—almost a drawing room—looks out over the lights of the Berkeley flatlands, the black water, the twinkling Golden Gate Bridge. There is a grand piano in the living room. Oriental rugs. Framed prints on the walls. Two large sofas are upholstered in gray satin stripes; large chairs. His mother's house is immaculately clean—a commodious, capable, comfortable home. There is too much smoking, too much wine drinking, it is too late. Lu suggests we all crash at his mother's. He offers me a room with a single bed, a white chenille bedspread. Wallpaper with thin pink-and-white stripes, roses and green leaves intertwined. A bedside table, a lamp. This becomes my refuge for the next three or four days.

I do not meet Lu's mother, but I absorb her spirit. I adore her house; it is the house I want for myself. Large rooms; solid furniture. Ceilings of a good height. The kitchen substantial in the same way. The pots and pans used, with a few dents, but of good quality. A big gas stove; a wide sink with a window looking up a wet green hillside with sword ferns and camellias

Richard Denner shows up. I have seen Richard at the Berkeley Poetry Conference, a handsome outlaw poet, with a tall black Stetson hat. Richard is always coming and going. He and Luis have a thing, a connection, a way of talking to one another which implies great affection. Lu may call Richard a whore. Richard agrees. Richard will agree with anything that's said about him. It's clear they like each other. They read one another's poems, write poems on the spot, smoke cigarettes and joints. Someone provides "window-pane." Coltrane, Horace Silver, Sonny Rollins, Thelonius Monk—Lu plays a lot of jazz, very loud. The stereo equipment is high quality. Jim Wehlage stays a day or two, maybe Saturday, Sunday. He may have a job he has to return to. Richard Denner keeps arriving and leaving. His persona is intense, moody. He has damp white lily-petal skin, long black hair. He exudes an exotic, morose, romantic fascination.

Luis is aristocratic, lean. He holds himself like one of Picasso's acrobats, an elegant Saltimbanque. Lu is a Spanish nobleman of the old school. Not one of Christopher Colombo's rampaging conquistador thugs. I am in awe of Lu and a bit guarded with him. His humor is a knife, nasal, sarcastic, very hip. He knows everyone, has done everything. Nothing escapes the cutting edge of his wit.

Poetry is written nonstop. Lu uses Elbe Spring Binders No. 37‐black snap binders—so his sheaf of onionskin poems can be sorted and resorted, shuffled, pages retrieved, eliminated, added, clamped shut. I obtain binders like this for my poems. Richard Denner is already using the black snap binders.

Lu is an enormous fan of Robert Creeley's short, spare lines. He is less interested in Robert Duncan. Really not at all interested in Allen Ginsberg or Gary Snyder. Lu's own literary influences flow from the South American surrealists and magic realists. Nicanor Parra. Pablo Neruda.

Lu's room is on the third floor at the top of the house. Everyone gets a turn through that room to make it with Lu. Kay Okrand comes back from a hitchhiking trip across the United States. Lu has a phone call; I go up to the third floor, I hear Kay Okrand and Lu getting it on, uh-uh-uh-uh-UNH!

Lu sees Marianne Baskin on Telegraph Avenue a few days after the party. Marianne is as beautiful as an Italian actress. She looks like Sophia Loren. Lu says to her, "I have been looking for this face all my life." They get married within 48 hours of meeting. Marianne's father has given her a red MG convertible. They are a hot couple, with Lu driving the red MG, beautiful Marianne alongside him.

Monday, October 11, 1965: Sitting in the white room, reading the Odyssey and Sappho, and high on frankincense . . . Ezra Pound about William Carlos Williams, he was a foreigner in America and so he was happy just to observe her as one observes any phenomena, the flora and the fauna. He did not feel impelled to act when he saw things he didn't like. He ruminated and any anger he felt found its place in the poetry . . .

Friday, October 15, 1965. Here is a state I can record, because it is slightly messy and out-of-hand and characteristics—beautiful October clear day, bouffant, after the rain yesterday . . . The details of the table. Typewriter, typing paper on the hotplate, a jar of peanut butter, stubs of long brown cigarettes, a fucked-up address book, a clock, a transistor radio, a waterproof container of matches, a flat wallet, letters from the winter of 1963 from an old best friend, a box of pot seeds, can opener, bottle opener, green ballpoint pen, pencil, lid to a container (waterproof) for pot, a pocket-sized notebook with a red cover, written in with a red ballpoint pen, an emery board, another emery board, a box of incense, dozens of sheets of onionskin paper with my thought-turds all typed out impeccably, each typographical error beautiful erased and corrected . . . wish the same could be done to my mistakes in the other realms . . .

Toward the end of October, Walter moves into Apartment no. 9 with me. This is a period for us of ambivalence, reconciliations, separations, reconnections. Walter installs his small electric kiln for firing raku, mounting it on a few bricks so it will not set fire to the old wood Victorian structure.   He creates raku pots—hand-formed and fired at a low temperature—earthenware, not stoneware.

At Halloween there is a huge party at 1360 Fell Street. Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, the Fugs come. The building both upstairs and downstairs is so crowded no one can move. At some point in the evening, the word comes down, "Allen is taking off his clothes." This is something that has to happen at any event involving Allen Ginsburg socially. Peter Orlovsky and Neal Cassady come to my door. They invite me to go somewhere with them. I am still subject to the "shaking face." Their total ease and hip banter make me freeze with pathological shyness. They frighten me; I disappoint them. They move on.

I move away from Fell Street for a month and hitchhike down to Santa Cruz with Harry Monroe. I give a poetry reading at The Barn in Santa Cruz.

Tuesday, November 16, 1965. Enlightenment in a dirty furnished apartment on Page Street . . . Dynasty tea, instant coffee, marijuana, and a good typewriter. I've got to see the whole world-picture with nothing but cigarettes, keys, an address book and Wheat Thins. I want to read in here—the Scarlet A, and Katharine Mansfield; Virginia Woolf; Gurdhieff. Start reading again. Creeley said finally he saw no difference between reading and writing

I haven't thought about writers lately, being so caught up with lovers. My lovers. It has a less glamourous ring than it used to . . .

Saturday, November 20, 1965. Jim and I are both writing novels. I want to write some stories. I want to read The Scarlet A and the American novelists. It's our background. And Camus. Finish The Holy Sinner.

Sunday, November 21, 1965. A good poet follows the exact changes of his own emotion and does not put the picture first. A bad poet, me, is in love with the picture, or the sound, or the image, or any superficially attractive device.

Friday, December 24, 1965. Last night at Ruth's three things stood out. The eggnog, which was perfect, yellow and creamy and not too sweet, spiked with liquor; and Reverend Suzuki in a brown wool robe, smiling in the kitchen, while the Spanish-looking girl with the tapestry skirt said idiotic things to him about needlework, talking in a kind of baby talk which she imagined was all Reverend Suzuki could understand; and Steve's startled, pleased cry: "Gail!" So I think he loves me. Was his date the funny girl, blonde, in the bunchy World War II coat?

The questions teem out like a cloud, from each personality, his own view of things, with himself at the center. I tried to render that a long time ago, describing a little party at Fulton Street, with each of the thoughts of each of the people present. Virginia Woolf does that perfectly in her novels: how the question in each mind brushes the questions in the other minds. Intersects, or fails to intersect.

In December I hitchhike alone up Highway 1, the coast highway, to Mendocino. This is reckless, but I am learning to overcome my extreme shyness. I talk to complete strangers because I have no choice. This poem from The Mark is about that beautiful day.

                                    The wind blew through my hair,
                 I caught my own rides, I carried a colored string bag,
                             and when the Sausalito musicians stopped for
                                    oysters, down below Nick's Cove,
                             I walked out on the pier with Judy the floozy
                                    and Hal the saxophonist,
                             whose only comeback was a flat
                                    "I'm sorry about that!"
               The sun was setting over Tomales Bay, the boats rocked in the water,
                                    there was no one near, Hal smoked,
                      Judy dragged her feet, Hal made to
                                                  push her in,
                                the sun was grayish-gold, the hills were soft,
                                the pier was gray and ran back toward
                                      the land,
                         the hills were gray and green, folded in shadows,
                                no birds, no sound, a fading light
                                on water.
                                                                      It was as if a lyre,
                                       who was a human being I had known,
                                                  sang inside for days and days,
                                curlicues of joy flashed out of me toward sun
                                                and road,
                                                        tramping alone up the coast
                                 highway.

A few poems of mine appear in Wild Dog #19 and #20 edited by Drew and Terry Wagnon. They are students of Ed Dorn's.

Meanwhile, the occult which Duncan has invoked so often is becoming a baleful influence. I may have a good mind, but my sometimes pathological shyness, the hospitalizations, indicate profound unconfidence. Magicians. Mazes. Murders. Spells. Curses. Are these just "in the air"? "In the times?" Or mostly in myself? I tell myself that these are images to be used in poems. Yet at times I veer in a strange direction, slip into strange currents.

The astrologer Gavin Arthur has an apartment on Buchanan in the same building as the Buzz Gallery. Gavin Arthur does Walter's horoscope. Gavin sees three Grand Trines. This horoscope is so unusual in its scope, so majestic, so amazing, that Gavin Arthur doesn't even charge Walter. Gavin Arthur has never seen such an auspicious, such a magnificent horoscope.

With all this good fortune is flowing to Walter, I reason that even more wonderful fortune must be flowing to me. After all, are not my very first poems are coming out in Poetry Magazine? I approach Gavin Arthur and he draws up a horoscope. It is undistinguished, filled with the ordinary frustrations of an uninteresting life. I will never have to worry about money. I will always be surrounded by beautiful things. But I will never be loved. At least not until I am 72. Then I will be loved for a very brief period, after which I will die of something having to do with my stomach. Gavin Arthur writes me a bill for $50 for this bad news. I am deeply depressed.

Meanwhile I am friends with Jim Thurber, Jaime Leopold, Barbara Schlosser. Walter and I live together and don't. On Saturday night, January 8, 1966, I attend the Acid Test at the Fillmore Auditorium. Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters are there. The social paranoia, social panic, which I've been struggling with since I was 12, continues to haunt me. It's not always there. I hold jobs, I go to work, I give readings, I have friends. But the reason it is so scary is that I just can't predict when it will come on and disable me.

[Undated ~January 8, 1966] Okay, so why do I go to Acid Tests, and get freaked out, especially on a quarter cap of acid, although I can freak out that way, anytime, without warning, total self-doubt comes over me, like "Where am I?" "Am I doing anything that makes sense?" "This is horrible, to make so little sense, and to have this fear and terror showing." I wanted to stay and dig what it was that I was in fact so totally afraid of—I came up with, I am afraid of being looked at. And since anyone can throw a look, where does that leave you? If that's the one thing that frightens you? Jaime and Barbara want me to go when this happens to me. I tried to tell Jaime what I was feeling, but he pushed me away and said, in a loud voice, GO. LEAVE! I suppose Jaime is too young to understand . . . some funny weird trip of my own, feeling big and conspicuous in these public places (seventh grade art class or getting on the school bus, boys jeering "The Witch! The Witch!")

Up in Mendocino, Phil and Daisy Lewitt, are separating. Phil offers me a job house-sitting his farm out on the Comptche-Ukiah Road while he tours the Continent to get over his broken heart.

Monday, January 24, 1966: Phil Levitt's appearance Friday night—looking very drawn— Reading at Walden, lit the ceremonial beeswax candle Heidi gave me. Later, at the Trips Festival: Jack Sears, Mardi, and then Gordon, who really came on in a friendly spirit. Walter gave the guard 4 bucks to let us in. I wide awake, afterward, and Walter sleepy. I talked to Jaime, then washed all the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen, Friday night. Saturday slept until 12. Relaxed, Lu and Marianne stopped over. I made a Japanese dish; about 9PM we all split for the Trips Festival. Charlotte and Larry, Sam and Suzanne. Jaime's sugar cube—when it came on, my own wild dancing. Then Martine's party; the beach; stayed up all night. Sunday, very tired. Pancakes with Barbara and Sam. I went to bed about 4, up from 7 until 9—and now, Monday morning, cool sunny streets—about to split for Mendocino.

[undated but most likely Thursday, February 3, 1966] The poem addressed to emptiness, this is the courage supreme. A muddy house, a messy place; garbage strewn in the back yard. Thursday. A dark day. Rain. Mists, rising like cold steam out of the valley, with the river invisible, at the bottom. Preparing for friends, for love, company. It's five after noon. That one dark reality, nose glowing, flesh, skin, close-grained, like some fine cheese glowing, Camembert face in the dark, has given way and faded sideways, softly out of the picture. And in from the right, the mist, the perpetual twilight of these rainy days, the opening of February. Where are we going? This part of the poem is a dark house. A cold house. Twilight music, lute notes, at noon, cold notes with the water in them. . . the dark land poem has not begun, is that the same saying, as meaning, that perhaps it has begun? It is beginning . . . ?

There was the great peace coming up in the car,
how the mountains lay around
with their close-cropped vineyards,
the dark purple stalks and vines
beneath the gray sky;
a warm wind, intermittent,
and at mid-day we stopped by the river,
I found the speckled stone.
There was love, like a river,
carrying, the body of love, the child of it,
the colors of it in the sky and water,
sad, sad, to be March's daughter.

Saturday, March 19, 1966. The squawking horn, Charlie Parker, coming out of the record player; Dave Helskie shopping wood with a small axe, kneeling down by the fireplace; the sight of my long cigarette on the saucer next to the typewriter, all the paraphernalia of the kitchen table: plate of margarine with the Tibetan Book of the Dead half stuck into it; sunglasses; spoons; papers; boxes of pipe cleaners, envelopes, tobacco, glue, a jar of honey. The light is a warm dull yellow, very dim, and without my glasses my eyesight is equally dim and blurry. Presences exist around the house, focal centers of energy, streaming from their corners out into space. Barbara on the piano bench, and Dave kneeling by the fireplace; Jim, unnaturally sprawled out on the brown sofa, crying, "Man, this is a beautiful cut," in a weak voice, unlike the usual hard-edged, twist-and-shout as you bring down the word-knife Thurber . . .

Return to Berkeley 1966-1967

Sometime in April I move out of Comptche-Ukiah Road and move with Walter back to the Fulton Street apartment in Berkeley. Some of my poems appear in Dave Sandberg's Oar Magazine which he publishes in Boulder Creek.

Monday May 9, 1966. Azaleas—are those the big showy pink flowers all in bloom on my way to work? Big bushes? Not the sort of flower I usually care for but so huge and proud and pink, with the rain falling on them. So bright, a bright splotch of pink against rain-soaked stucco houses. Hydrangeas—the blue and bluish-purple. I borrowed Farrell's Daily Cal. Farrell, with his old brushy reddish-gray mustache and bright little ferret eyes, saying "Good morning!" Old flesh. I went off and sat alone. I am too much enclosed in myself, I don't like talking to people. If I run into someone I know at breakfast, I am sorry. There we sit, across from one another, I responding with slightly insincere cheerfulness. I prefer sitting alone. Sitting alone is pleasant at 7:30AM in the morning, rain falling on the terrace outside. I walked back at 8AM but the house was still cold. I wanted cigarettes. I made a lot of phone calls, then walked back to the corner of Telegraph and Bancroft for cigaretellos. The sky over Telegraph was moist and heavy; the red brick hotel stained with rain. All the record shops, import shops, foreign food. Later in the morning now—about 9AM—a few students hurry along with umbrellas and books. A few of my sort, in no particular hurry, walk to a different tune. Old Telegraph Avenue types, all of them passing me by, in a faceless, indistinguishable blur, in the rain.

In mid-May I take a fulltime job as a secretary at Donner Laboratory on campus. Walter and I are making a renewed effort in our marriage. We buy a used Volkswagen Bug with a credit union loan. We visit Luis Garcia and Marianne frequently; they visit us. I also stay in touch with Diane Moran who has a new British boyfriend with a great accent.

Thursday, May 26, 1966: Jim Thurber came by. The young Jim Thurber, twenty-four. His forehead was sweaty. He stood, cocktail glass in hand, waiting in the kitchen, slightly round-shouldered, tense, smiling a smile of puzzlement, expectancy, and inner certainty. His grin irradiated the kitchen. He was there, standing on the kitchen floor, his two feet planted on the linoleum, and the floor heaved and rose and sank and shifted itself. He was an island of presence, smiling, and holding his glass of vermouth, with a thin slice of lemon floating in it.

[undated] Went out into the sun to get strings for my guitar, ran into Kay Okrand on the next block. Her hair was parted in the middle, falling in two brown loops over her ears; she had freckles. She introduced me to the man who was with her. John. Whom she was going to marry in the coming week. How happy she seemed. So when I got to Lundberg's guitar shop, I was very turned on. I was looking forward to the new live strings. Kay's boyfriend, fiancé, had smiled at me and suddenly yelled, "Hey!" I turned my head to see what he was yelling about, but he was just smiling as if he suddenly understood I was high. A little Spanish-looking man turned around when I came in. He had a white face, bony, like Richard Denner's, with enormous black eyebrows. A man pulled up in a chair was playing the guitar for a girl behind the counter, nineteen or twenty, blue jeans, brown hair, brown hands. The guy was playing to her and talking to her. Both stopped talking and stopped the music when I came in the door . . . Whirlpool moments. This moment in the whirlpool has no date.

Several poems are published in June 1966, in R.C. Lion #8 edited by David Bromige, Poems Read in the Spirit of Peace & Gladness, edited by Doug Palmer and Tove Neville; and four poems in Poetry (Chicago). During the spring and summer 1966 I also work on the manuscript of The Mark with Robert Hawley and Graham McIntosh.

Saturday, June 11, 1966: Haven't run into anyone I know in the past 24 hours. Been reading over all those old papers I've been holding since Cornell. I had a strange sophistication then, not based on much contact with the world outside myself; a sophisticated smoothness and surety which didn't ring true. High on dexedrine every day; otherwise square.

Friends play particular parts in the film—dashing Jim Thurber, at first small and Quaker nowhere; then coming out as Natty Bumppo in his coonskin cap, squirrel's tail; then suddenly the young, intense brooding, somewhat taller Jim Thurber, with his hands fixed behind his back, wearing a marked frown, bending forward sternly through the park; dreaming of cathedrals and church bells and high nuns in white caps, "Noon rang the hour as she died," walking the hilly pavements of Broderick and Golden Gate, over the crest of the city, mind-altering helicopter poised there in the sky, mechanical bug droning live-wire messages which Jim alone of all persons in the city heard that Tuesday noon, bells banging, St. Patrick's or St. Ignacio's, and Jaime lounging with a sulky face, sitting on the concrete-and-gravel front stoop of 1360; wiry-haired Barbara coming up slowly from Safeway as if undecided, her serious face, intent like a rabbit, burrowing away at some feeling which cleared . . .

Thursday, July 14, 1966. Last night in the city, meth and dex, one-half tablet of each; four or five tokes from the waterpipe, the two hand-rolled Heinies. Walter and I standing in the New Pisa. Oilcloth tablecloths with an Italian plaid, pink walls, smoke and steam, waitresses resting for a second while they took the order leaning on one hip. I drank two small bottles of wine. We walked over to City Light—Shig smiling in his enclosure which raises him up, a tiny partially enclosed stage on the first floor. Books, magazines, all my friends' poetry—Hilary Fowler's book, Pam Millward's. Buzzing with excitement. Berkeley has nothing. This pastel drab town filled with middle-aged people. Bourgeois.

During the fall I sing Bach's Magnificat with the UC Chorus. Richard has married and he and Cheri Denner live close by, on Ward Street. Walter paints a brilliant mural in their living room with huge floor-to-ceiling triangles in chartreuse, cobalt blue, magenta. Perhaps he is thinking of his Grand Trines? We hold a dinner party for our friends. Luis meets Diane Moran and falls in love with her and leaves Marianne.

I am working on The Mark. The poems in it have been written the previous year on Fulton Street and on Fell Street. It's sad to see so much confusion in my younger self, but the poems I write during that year are clearer than I am. It's as if my life is just a pot of stew, simmering, and every now and then something bubbles to the top, and it's a usable poem.

Poems from The Mark are subsequently anthologized in 31 New American Poets, Possibilities of Poetry, Denise Levertov's Out of the War Poems, Live Poetry, and many others. But even as Gail Dusenbery and The Mark gain some recognition, the person who has been Gail Dusenbery is disappearing.

In February 1967 Walter and I have our final split. I take an apartment at 2428 Bancroft Way and begin a three-year relationship with Jan Herman. In April 1968 Walter files for divorce in order to marry Janet Stayton. The divorce is finalized in 1969. Feeling there is one Mrs. Dusenbery too many littering the universe, I change my name to Gail Chiarrello.