GENE FOWLER was born at 1:35 am on Monday, October, 5, 1931 in Oakland, California, on the western coast of the North American continent. From that place and time, he has ventured forth on this globe in a journey that has taken him through loves and exiles, through adventures and cafes, and through the many strata of existence inherent in human experience.

The true landmark events are undated — even within his own notice — and referenced for the biographer only in quick glimpses within the poems. The moment when a human face was something definite and on its way to being a human face . . . . and the later moment when a human soul shone through the now familiar human face to be observed. Or the afternoon or evening or morning when the stubborn, fibrous stuff of a handful of phonemes bent to his will . . . . and a meaningful word was carved out of air by tongue and lips, cheek and jaw and throat. These things formed the man who loved and who threaded a way through exiles and traps, the man who noted and reflected on things and events and responded to those things and events, the man who drafted these gathered poems.

The external history? — full of common-places and exotic events and, finally, no explanation at all for the poems we have in hand. Born into the home of a self-educated professional man (chemical engineer) and a quiet woman who spent her time reading, perhaps dreaming, and finally sculpting in clay: Donel and Janice La France. The oldest of three children. A sister, Anna, three years younger than himself; a brother, Thomas, three years younger than Anna. These two the children of Donel, though our biographee was from a brief and annulled marriage to a wandering and sullen laborer, Jack Fowler. Into the public schools at the Kindergarten level and out at the end of twelve years, or grades, in June, 1949. A stint as a (by special permit) night club comedian and special materials writer overlapping the last school years.

He enlisted in the U.S. Army — when "we were being pushed off the Korean peninsula." Three years in the Army, 27 months of it on Okinawa. Trained to operate a message center, he was, on his arrival on Okinawa, metamorphosed in an hour to a demolitions expert and a teacher of mine warfare policy and technique. He was very useful, being competent, and exploited this to "go AWOL when steam built up, to wander in the jungle, go out at 4:00 in the morning with 'native' fishermen, and drink potato saki through the night." He was returned to the U.S. and released in late 1953. A whirlwind existence. By early 1954, he'd been a gas station attendant, a bell-hop, a college freshman, and an armed robber up and down the length of the state . . . and was in San Quentin Prison. He served four years and nine months — and the middle half of his "twenties" — in prison and came out to another three years and three months on "parole." Various jobs, mostly filing one thing or another, a semester at a community college, a time filing reprints at the U.C. Berkeley Stat Lab, but sneakily learning to program the big computer and doing other people's work rather than his own; another time presumably "editing" manuals for the Department of Criminology, but in fact, "designing and writing" them.

Finally, in December of 1963, he "just walked out" on all that. He was prepared to "sit in the bars and starve to death" as alternative to futility and the inner wheel-spinning of a mentality nobody'd pay him to use. Hilary Ayer, poet and folksinger, daughter of artist Richard Ayer, convinced him to sit, instead, in coffee houses . . . . and to write poems, thereby applying his mentality — and the rest of himself — in a field the academic hustlers and commercial realms had little interest in. So . . . . he became an "outlaw poet" — quite a different turning than that of a decade earlier, when he became an "outlaw" proper!

The rest is a history, rough and varied, acted out in public and this biographer must assume the reader knows something of it. It leads from the first chapbook, Field Studies, in 1965 that sold an unprecedented 3,000 copies. Three printings! It winds its way with his riding of the crest of the "mimeo revolution" (in literature) in the sixties and on into the seventies and his FIRES: Selected Poems 1963-1976 in 1976. It comes into a busy and a full 1981, what with marriage to April Corioso in May, the publication of Return of the Shaman in July and The Quiet Poems in December. And it has seen the writing and self-publishing (for the spring of 1982) of an amazing document: Waking the Poet. This book is a textbook — on the presumably unteachable. A "how to" for acquiring those deep craft skills everyone has left black-box and called "talents" or "gifts" of "the Muse." But this, of course, is the culmination of that other history I spoke of in the beginning. The one without dates or places.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FIELD STUDIES - 1965
My first chapbook. Len Fulton, Andy Curry, Bob Fay and three others whose names I do not recall combined resources and started dust magazine. The first dustBOOKS were my Field Studies and The Deep In View - Len's interview of Alan Watts. Drawings by Richard Gaytom - including the portrait on my index page here on Big Bridge. http://home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/FS_TOC.htm

SHAMAN SONGS - 1967
A second dustBOOKS poetry chapbook. after some printing troubles on a first run, a lovely book with off-white and green paper and drawings by Richard Ayer. TOC

HER MAJESTY'S SHIP - 1969
From Ben Hiatt's Grande ronde Press which behan in Oregon and moved "down" to Scramento in California - or onto a mountain near Sacramento. Cover linoleum block by Hilary Ayer. I figured Pound's hugh Selwyn Mauberly was a big-band jazz of the twenties track, playing the London poetry scene into these riffs. . . . I laid down a fifties, sixties club- jazz track down on top of it, my riffs dealing with sxties San Francisco scene(s) I'd come into on my release from San Quentin (for armed robbery, back in 54). TOC

THE OCCASIONS - 1971
Harry Smith put out a 230 page anthology with just six of us. he asked us to name our chunks of the book as we might chapbooks. So, my 38 pages that opened The Smith Poets became, off the top of my head, The Occasions. This was the first non-broadside publication of Vivisection and everything else included. TOC

VIVISECTION - 1972
Paul Foreman'sThorp Springs Press brought the poem out as a chapbook with a powerful lithographic cover by Amelia Gianelli (all these covers are viewable on the links). A 1963 "return" to San Quentin, not in the fellow walking around on the yard, but whoever is living just behind him - self-dissecting alive. TOC

FELON's JOURNAL - 1975
Al Winan's Second Coming Press brought this out in 1975, though it too reaches back. Opens with a prose journal entry - sort of - on experiences in San quentin exploding my vision into something different. In Berkeley Daze context, read Credo to see my first play with "composition by field" (and what I found had to crack it open) and 305 Honda for "listening to the wind". TOC

FIRES: Selected Poems 1963 - 1976
Paul Foreman's Thorp Springs Press. In 1971, Paul printed a simpler Fires (also on my site) after Grove Press released it. Do Allen Suggested I send it, Krim accepted it and I even saw a tentative cover in Milwaukee when a sales rep walked into a bookstore friends owned. I got a fantastic night on the town from a New Yorker as lost in the heartland as I was. Anyway, Paul printed it. We kept thevtitle for this main book. All we could fit in affordable pages is in here. Vivisection, shaman Songs, and the "three walking poems": San Francisco Poem, Obsidian and Cosmic Language. TOC

RETURN OF THE SHAMN - 1981
Al Winans Second Coming Press brought out this square back perfect-bound paper book (now, a hyperperfect-bound hyperbook on the site). I pair this with the next, and last book in the list, calling this the "raw" and the other the "cooked" and these two sort of finished things up until we rolled over into the 21st century. . . . TOC

THE QUIET POMS - 1982
Judy Hogan's Carolina Wren Press brought this perfect-bound paper book out. Judson Crewes reviewed it in a single sentence: "We've too many quiet poems." Uhhhmmmm. He should have read to the book's epigraph (and beyond): "Not the quiet of the library, but of the trained assassin. TOC