I was a graduate student at Berkeley during the sixties. I knew about the Berkeley Poetry Conference, I'm sure, but I didn't attend any of it. I don't know why. Maybe I was out of town, maybe I was monstrously busy with graduate student business. Years later, I listened to tapes available at the Berkeley Language Lab. I had zero relation to the poetry scene of the 1960s, in Berkeley or anywhere else, though I had published some poems as an undergraduate…my basic relationship to the poetry scene at that time was alienation.

Here's a poem, written in the 60s while I worked at Ed Landberg's CinemaGuild Theater. Everyone was in the theater enjoying the film mightily and I was stuck outside in the ticket booth. Plus people had been at me for gaining weight.

THE SKELETON'S DEFENSE OF CARNALITY

Truly I lost weight, I have
lost weight,
grown lean in love's defense,
in love's defense grown grave.
It was concupiscence
that brought me to the state:
all bone and a bit of skin
to keep the bone within.
Flesh is no heavy burden
for one possessed of little
and accustomed to its loss.
I lean to love, which leaves me lean
till lean turn into lack.
A wanton bone, I sing my song
and travel where the bone is blown
and extricate true love from lust
as any man of wisdom must.
Then wherefore should I rage
against this pilgrimage
from gravel unto gravel?
Circuitous I travel
from love to lack
and lack to lack
from lean to lack
and back.

People have very odd conceptions of my biography. I have been on the scene for a little over twenty years but people seem to think I've been around forever. I was once introduced by someone who said I was an old North Beach poet, various other things. Not a single thing of what she said was true—not one! When a friend of mine asked a friend of his whether she had heard of me, she answered, "Oh, yes. He was one of the original beats, wasn't he." I told him to tell her, "Yes, Foley was anda one anda two."