John
the cosmep reading was after i left, i got my cosmep catalog in 1969, while cheri and theo and i were out in deep bay, and i had just started d-press, and i considered taking out an ad or at least registering something, my smudgy chapbooks with lineoleum nudes, but it all seemed so far away, the woods at my door, my wife and kid bundled up against the arctic wind, printing by lamplight and hanging the pages to dry over the yukon stove, cosmep seemed way too organized for my anarchist tastes, so i rejected the idea of establishing myself as a publisher, and now i see how it goes, and i wonder if you would tell me about that cosmep thing . . . Richard

Richard . . .
your email is like an embryo of what I think you're out to do; it's an exciting and challenging embryo, I think you will fashion something handsome and worthwhile and valuable, but as you obliquely implied (and I agree), the reality (i.e., illusion) I moved thru in that time does not coincide with the illusion (i.e., reality) you were moving thru . . .

So, I doubt I have anything germane to contribute to your worthwhile project, as, most likely, the poets I mentioned also would not. I could go on about the COSMEP Conference, but to tell you the truth that has no meaning for me anymore, if it ever did; basically COSMEP was a cage for the songbird of the spirit. . .
So . . . . good luck!
John

John, i came across your name in pott's -valga krusa- do you remember that scene?

Richard . . . . don't have a recollection of that . . . . don't have a recollection of a lot of things since these operations . . . . but wld be curious to know what charlie had to say... recently ran across a published letter from bukowski to neeli cherkowski, written back in the 70s, where Bukowski said a shitload of flatout, disparaging lies about me . . .it was the period of time where he thought i was trying to fuck linda king, and he said a lot of stuff . . . i should have gone and done it when i had the chance! she was a hot number back then . . . . John

John
at the end of the chapter called cosmep rising, which is in the first section of valga krusa, called the yellow christ, potts writes

"I decided to go ahead with it, and went over to Richards. (ed. that's Richard Krech) Andy (Clausen) as usual had the floor. Joel (Waldman) and Paul X were there. I didn't stay long, just went in, had a few hits, and went home to try to get some sleep. There was Hiatt, and a couple people who had been lost around the readings, somebody introduced as John Bennett, from New Orleans and the magazine 'Vagabond,' could they crash there. I was too tired to deny anyone anything at that point. Joel came in all aglo, he had given a great reading, as had Jon Grube. Judy was with Joel, his new girl friend. I tried to interest them in listening to the songs I had written, Joel said that he liked the poems better."

and so it runs, catching, i think, a lot of the nuances of the time and place, but what interest me is weaving these threads, like a navajo weaver, leaving a little space for the spirits to come and go Richard

To: Richard Denner
From: John Bennett

LISTS
John Bennett

Throw the carriage, ring the bell, change the ribbon--the hieroglyphic gone world of the manual typewriter. Now I have a computer with a word-processing program, mucho gigabytes like sticks of dynamite strapped around my waist, and a DSL web connection. I have email lists, a hardcore list and a family list, a list of friends and a list of enemies, a political list of mysterious disappearances, a hometown list and a list of drunks. I bob along in a wide ocean of technological grief. The rain falls in a drizzle. Sharks circle. I send an S.O.S. to my lists and hire a list consultant.

The consultant says I'm going about it all wrong. He tells me about blogs, MySpace, YouTube and chat rooms. "That," he says, "is where the action is." He says I'm invading people's privacy with my lists, their right to choose, their this, their that and their other thing. "Who," he says, suddenly angry, "the fuck," he exclaims, "in hell," he blurts out, "do you think you are?" He says I've wasted my time and money hiring him.

I take him to court to get my money back, but the case gets thrown out and I walk out of the courthouse into a pack of dated reporters with flash cameras and note pads. They're all talking at once and want to know if I have anything to say for myself. "As a matter of fact," I say, and then fall down the steps, blinded by flashbulbs.

I wake up in intensive care. There's a foot-long incision down my abdomen and I'm strung out on morphine. A nurse says that they cut my guts out. "That was your problem," she says, "not the lists. You'll feel better now with your guts gone."

Late that night, while the night nurse is nodding off at her station, I get dressed and slip out the door, flag a cab and drive straight to the airport.

So much has changed since they took my typewriter away. I unstitch the ballpoint I'd hidden in my shirt hem and begin writing small in the margins of my flight plan. It feels strange having my guts gone, but my heart still pounds like a kettle drum. I'll leave the message folded in the pages of the travel mag in the seat pouch when I get off the plane. There's a slim chance that someone will read it.

To: John Bennett
From: Richard Denner

On my flight to a Love Generation reunion in Timbuktu, I noticed a travel mag in the seat pouch in front of me, so I plugged in my earphone to my iPod, set the microwave clock to 26 minutes, then sipped tea from the robotic food panel, as there are no cups allowed after that last clever bomb plot with plastic containers, and I was crusing well into a swell story about Bedford County, Virginia, where my sister lives, a slip of paper fell out of the mag with these words written on it: So much has changed since they took my typewriter away. I unstitch the ballpoint I'd hidden in my shirt hem and begin writing small in the margins of my flight plan.

And I thought, that's strange, I just gave my portable Remington to David Bromige, so he can type up his bit about the 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference, since he keeps losing what he writes on his computer. He needs a typewriter, not a computer. With his personal computer he could send a rocket into space, and all he wants to do is write his memoir about the poetry scene in the 60s. Good idea to write his memoirs. No one else is going to do it for him. Meanwhile, Gene Fowler sends a cd, very organized, and Joel Waldman sends a book, Fifty New Poems with a picture of him in cap and gown being dragged off the stage at Madison Square Garden because he wanted to deliver a poem at the CCVY commencement ceremony. And Potts is republishing Valga Krusa, and I still don't have the story from Bennett about his visit to the Fulton Street house, and while I was rummaging around in a closet in a back bedroom, I came across a time capsule I had left from 1965, when I took off for Alaska to get healthy outdoor lungs, that contained letters written to me at Box X, Talmage, which is where I had been committed in the Mendocino State Mental Facility, which has now in 2007 been converted a Buddhist in the Pure Land School, which is a school of thought that sees all things, sounds, minds as gods, and by this practice hopes to mingle its mindstream in the tigle of spontaneous accomplishment, and among those letters were poems from David Cole and Marianne Baskin, and David had recently told me that he had no poetry from that period because he had burned everything when he joined the Ramigiri Ashram near Petaluma, and Marianne I hadn't seen since she became a world-renown Flamenco dancer, but her poem was titled FOR RYCHARD, and the letter with it said that Doug Palmer had accepted it for his soon-to-be published anthology, Poems Read in the Spirit of Peace & Gladness, so I googled Amazon and found a copy for $1.94, been out-of-print since 1966, so a real bookseller's dream to find a fine copy at that price, and fuck if the book didn't arrive in a week, and I opened it up, and a slip of paper fell out...

Rychard...
I don't have the leisure to meander around in those gone days. My karma has other plans for me. Mostly what I saw in Berkeley that week were Jerry Burns and Len Fulton, with the best of misplaced intentions, planning the organized future of the renegade small-press world. And a lot of networking, various poetry factions and individuals jockeying for position and power, the smell of money in the air sprayed with the deodorant of lofty ideals, CCLM operatives weaving in and out of the scene, striking deals, wary of this upstart grassroots organization, the birth of COSMEP. Flesh out the acronyms if you want. [Committee of Small Magazines, Editors and Publishers]

Then there were the readings, someone taking off all his clothes as he read (big fucking deal, if he'd played Russian Roulette in a two-piece suit, I might have been impressed). And the Cleveland poets who were calling bullshit on the whole thing, the only people there I felt any affinity with/to . . .

Grant Bunch (a running buddy from early on and the guy I brainstormed Vagabond into existence with in a bar called Brownley's in D.C.) and I drank a lot of beer in some basement pub with Curt Johnson and some people I didn't know, mostly college-mag editors. I told a story, I don't remember what it was, but it had nothing to do with poetry and obviously did not set well within the parameters of the literary world which to this day I piss on from a considerable height (Celine). After that the people at the table (heavy wood, carved up with initials) made a point of pretending I wasn't there, what the fuck was I doing there in the first place, who the fuck was I? A friend of Curt's is who I was and still am to this day, he'd published my first published story in December when I was operating out of Munich, saying the story that makes the issue always comes in at the last minute, and I was in there with Raymond Carver who Curt would spend a good part of that weekend with in Palo Alto, away from the madding crowd, him and Carver and Gordon Lish of Esquire and a fox from CCLM who Curt put the charm on and landed some green for December Press.

I wound up one evening in a second-story pad, presumably the Fulton Street house you refer to. There was a large contingent of poets, up there, mostly Potts' people. We turned off the lights and gathered around a window to watch a girl/woman undress in front of a curtainless window in the house next-door, apparently she performed this coy little ritual pretty much on a nightly basis. We smoked some killer weed and with the lights still off I wound up sitting on a couch with Potts and getting into a strange exchange of one-liners, each one-liner topping the next. The exchange became the center of attention, people gathered around in the dark. It came to a point where I asked Potts a germane one-liner question, to which he responded, "I can't tell you that in the dark," to which I responded, "Can you tell me in the future?" and that somehow capped the exchange, and the room came alive with pot-saturated levity and amazement and the next day before the conference was over I hitched into San Fran and drank alone in the North Beach bars and eventually wound up on a plane back to New Orleans, feeling even less a part of things than when I drove out to Berkeley in a fit of serendipity with three French-Quarter crazies including Grant Bunch and a poor college kid whose car it was, who stepped out of the bright early-morning sun into the dark interior of the Seven Seas bar where we'd been drinking all night and were gunning along on Black Beauties and asked cheerily, "Is there anyone here who would like to share gas and drive to San Francisco?" We stuck him in the back seat where he sat in horror for most of that wild, speed-fueled non-stop trip, up through L.A. where we drank a night away with Bukowski and then pushed onward into the historic Berkeley Conference that fortuitously or otherwise dovetailed/overlapped/coincided with the trajectory of our live-hard/die young lives . . . Hope that helps some.
John

John, thanks for taking a moment to meander down memory lane with me, and i know your 'karma' is different, but 'karmas' overlap as well as interpenetrate, and your perspective on those particular events and your pissing on the preposterous pretentiousness of the cosmep conference and your allegiance to the cleveland poets is exactly what i need to keep the overview i'm trying to establish in balance, so thank you for your time and patience, dear friend, onward, Richard

richard..
glad it filled a niche...
john

Vagabond Press http://www.eburg.com/~vagabond/

Order Tire Grabbers, John Bennett's new novel, from Hcolom Press... http://hcolompress.com/mcart/index.cgi?code=3&cat=4