I was the younger of two brothers in a family that was firebombed by the alcoholism of my parents. I was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1942 and my life was one of dark secrets, fears and the inability to understand why my parents acted the way they did. Every waking hour my older brother and I operated out of a fear-based reality.
During our most formative years we were placed in a children's home in the Spokane Valley in Eastern Washington. I was the youngest and smallest of the 20 boys who lived in our "Cottage." I survived by always maintaining a secret inner life filled with dreams of the way things should be and how I would discover the world via a fantastical, chivalrous quest for the Holy Grail of The Meaning of Life. Inwardly, I was terrified and repressed. Perhaps I was somehow the cause of all the confusion and loneliness that life consisted of. Perhaps by some super-human effort I could experience some kind of goodness or normalcy that kids from the "outside" with families had. Outwardly I was always on the offensive, verbally fending off the bullying by the boys above me in the pecking order. Language became my special weapon.
The night of high school graduation I drank my first two beers and dived into the Spokane River at midnight, a little light-headed. I was a 17 year old virgin and was ignorant of racism, drugs and sexuality. Spokane was devoid of art and literature. The only liberating thing we had was rock and roll.
One summer I worked at Glacier National Park in Montana and met a girl who, over the course of a very short time, ignited my journey to San Francisco in 1962. She was the first person I had met that exhibited a complete obeisance and belief in the transformative power of Art. I had hung out with a tiny group of writers at Whitworth College near Spokane. One of the most gifted writers there was on his way to enroll in the S.F. State Creative Writing Program and he continually advised me to do the same. Knowing that my Guinevere was already there sealed the deal.
I was so green, so astounded by San Francisco that every day was like being struck by lightning. Teachers like Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Mark Harris, Jack Sheedy and Clancy Sigal nuked my consciousness. When a rube pulled up to the pump at S.F. State in those days, popped the top of his head open and said "Filler up, please", they gave you high octane and "topped it off." The City was on fire with the San Francisco Renaissance—poets, writers, artists and musicians were screaming their joy and their doom. Many of the Beat poets were there and openly available to young poets at their readings, informal seminars, bars, cafes and in their own homes. Snyder, Whalen, Welch, Joanne Kyger, Rexroth, Duncan, Spicer, Blaser, McClure, Charlie Plymell, Ferlinghetti and the elusive Bob Kaufmann lived in or near the city. Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and others in Allen's entourage would also show up in S.F. sometime each year. They read anywhere and everywhere to large crowds—sometimes several hundreds or more.
I plunged into living my dream of becoming a poet. I was writing every day, reading like a drunken glutton and drinking red wine, smoking grass and dropping dexamyls. Later, experiences with LSD, peyote, morning glory seeds and even belladonna broke down my repressed self enough to write in a more doubt-free way. Almost every evening groups of young poets would get together and drink and declaim their poems to one another. There were so many poets in this wild melee of those times that it would be impossible for me to remember them all but of the 32 poets in the Peace & Gladness anthology published in 1965 I had met all of them at one time or another and a number of them came to have a life-long influence and soul-bonding that still lives over 40 years later. Without question the deepest friendships I had as a young poet were with Doug Palmer, Dave Hazelton, Dave Sandberg and a little later on with Gail Dusenbery. Reb Barker was already too far gone to be close to but he had an undeniable influence, especially in his somewhat erratic publishing efforts. Even though I was not tight with Luis Garcia, he probably was, for a long time, the most singular influence on my way of seeing and hearing the language of poetry.
In 1963 I met Diane Moran. I began experiencing feelings that were new to me. These were feelings that I did not know existed for me. It was like going to a foreign country for the first time, discovering a secret wish had come true or the joy you might feel after finding yourself the only survivor after some mad accident. In church I'd listened to stories of miracles since childhood but falling in love was the truth. To my own amazement I was still conflicted; I lacked the simple recognition of the reality of what was happening. I was still on my sweeping crusade for what—the Meaning of Life? The chalice of Art? There are many Zen stories characterizing the Seeker as someone whose delusion consists of going around looking for something he thinks is lost or that he doesn't have, finally to discover that he was in possession of it the whole time. But being in love with someone, being in love with Diane, opened my eyes to the primacy of love, sex, union and the merging of soul and body in the expression of Poetry. It is the core. I saw in the writings of Tagore and Rumi the expression of images of God as the beloved and the unwavering desire of the supplicant/lover to give himself over to the beloved completely. Diane and I were together and apart until 1966. At the time of the Berkeley Poetry Conference I was writing many poems "under the influence" of my feelings for her.
Another signature event that triggered crucial and ongoing friendships and, for me, becoming part of a community of poets, was meeting Doug Palmer and Dave Hazelton in a poetry class at S.F. State taught by Mark Linenthal. The class was either in Spring or Fall of 1964. I believe it was a Modern Poetry class, although the reading of poems aloud seemed to involve a lot of time—interspersed throughout whatever lectures or discussions Linenthal gave. It seemed to us young, unbridled riff-raff of poets that the whole conduct of the class was a mirror reflection of the times—the stultifying effect of the Academe and the classroom on the actual experience of poetry. Ludicrously, the most important thing the entire term was whether or not we could arrange our chairs in a semi-circle so we could see and freely talk to each other or whether the class would take place with the desks in the traditional, authoritarian manner where we could simply look at the back of someone else's head for an entire hour each day. Doug Palmer and Dave Hazelton were in the class and we became fast friends. Linenthal didn't care to talk about poets that weren't dead or in the so-called "canon" of modern poetry so our desire to discuss the Beat poets was dismissed. To counter this, Doug, Dave and I would spontaneously stand up during class and read our own poems aloud—often interrupting his lectures. Palmer was the most sincere, down-to-earth, salt-of-the-earth guy that has ever walked. He believed he should only work with his hands and never for money—only barter. He had an ancient pickup truck, super-wife Ruth and his young son Tad, and lived in Berkeley. His penchant for "found objects" meant that he spent hours picking up string, coins, bottles, cans and almost anything you can think of from the sidewalks and "saving" it for other uses. Hazelton had gone to Oberlin in voice class and met and married Jeanne Lee there. She won the Downbeat Jazz Singer Poll in '63 and we used to go to some of her concerts. She was the real deal. They had a daughter named Naima.
About the same time Palmer was out on the streets writing poetry in exchange for food, candy or whatever you wanted to give him—he wore that immortal sign around his neck that began: I WILL TRADE/ WITH YOU — A/POEM/I WILL WRITE TO YOU… They arrested him on Market St. for "begging" and the story became a "cause celebre" in the S.F. Chronicle. Shig, from City Lights, cut a deal where poets could write free poetry in front on the sidewalk in front of the store. At first I wasn't too interested but he got me to try it and it was fun—basically to go out there and free-associate; improvise. Hazelton did it too and we took the "street names" of Facino (Doug), Flambeau (me), and Cinzano (Dave). David Sandberg had just come to town with Phoebe (she's still around) and soon became part of our group. Hazelton was publishing a mimeo mag, "Synapse" and Sandberg was doing the same—
his mag was "Or" or "Oar".
We lost the battle with Linenthal over chair arrangement but he sponsored us for student readings at the Student's Union during the noon hour. The first S.F. Poetry Center Readings were going down and I remember hearing Snyder, James Wright and Leroi Jones around then. Doug, Dave and I all eventually dropped out of the class and began having a lot of "face time" with the various poets around town who were open to mentoring us. The most available ones were Snyder, Welch, Whalen, Blaser, Duncan, George Stanley, Jack Spicer, Michael McClure, Rexroth, and Ginsberg when he was in town. Basically, sexual politics made it easier to pick a mentor. For some reason Duncan, who mentored so many wonderful poets, was not as available in S.F. as he was in Berkeley—which was like going to a foreign country to me at the time. Spicer (he was helpful as long as you stayed on the fringe), and Ginsberg were definitely out. Snyder, Welch and Whalen were the poets we most gravitated toward. Snyder, by far and away was the best. His poetics (if he had any) were all-inclusive. He saw poets as contributing members to the community like carpenters or electricians would be. He still was an I.W.W. member and went to their leadership to establish a new worker's "category"—a Poet's Union. He got the paperwork done and we all signed up as card-carrying I.W.W. "Wobbly Poets." We each had a little red membership card. Beyond that we then could use the Wobbly Hall (on Minna St.) for regular poetry readings and the use of their mimeo on which we duplicated hundreds of poems to pass out on the streets. Besides the Wobbly Hall readings, Snyder had an informal seminar-class we dropped by. It was his and Palmer's idea for the Peace & Gladness Anthology—which took more hard core work than anyone could have believed at the time. Even better, Gary went to the organizers of the Berkeley Poetry Conference in '65 and created a "New Poets" reading selecting nine poets from among our commonly known group. Apparently that was the first time I had heard Gail Dusenbery or met her. We later became friends, arguing poetry and magic when she lived at 1360 Fell St.
Gary wasn't about critiquing people's poetry at all, nada. It was more about building a community that included esteem and respect for writer's and artists. He, Welch and Whalen shared a pad on Beaver St. (off the Mission?) and I remember going over there a few times. Doug developed a lasting friendship with Lew, but to me Welch was up and down a lot because of extremely hard drinking and possible life-long depression. It was an incalculable shock to me when he died—I never saw it coming the way those who were very close to him might have.
The street writing branched out into "road readings" where Sandberg, Barker, Norm Moser, I and others would go out to Santa Cruz and other small towns and churches and stage readings. One time we gave a reading and no one showed up. I dubbed it the "Ghost Reading," but out of boredom we developed a very effective technique that we would later use in several readings. Each one of the poets would go to a different corner of the stage or room and then all would begin reading to each other simultaneously. It was kind of a free jazz or audio "cutup" pre-Burroughs. It worked very well as each poet got into the other poet's rhythms.
The '64-65 time slot was our "15 minutes of fame." (Of course, many of the poets like Lu Garcia and others have kept on "keeping on" right up to the present.) I read someplace with Kyger, Welch & McClure (I think.) Of course, it was a big reading. Also the Longshoremen's Hall with Ginsberg, et al. after which the Lovin' Spoonful played live. Just to be around the Berkeley Poetry Conference was monumental to me. I thought Olson was a huge blowhard and he definitely lived up to his rep—was openly loaded on acid, speed, juice etc., and seemed to be in some kind of bisexual "phase" with some other poets/people he was embracing/swooning. He openly harangued lecturers from his seat and seemed to believe that he was the center of the universe concerning poetic theory. His final reading was one of the most spectacular "crash and burn" episodes of the times. It was also the first time I ever heard Wieners read—he wore lipstick, earrings, and mascara, and it was perceived as his big "coming out." Like Creeley (whom I also heard for the first time), John's reading was very low key—you had to strain to catch the words. It made it all the more dramatic as you could hear a pin drop and everyone was hanging on every word. It would be hard to overstate the influence of John Wieners on my perception of poetry as tone, phrasing—breath. It is completely inimitable. Wieners was like the "Prez" or Billie Holliday of poetry. There's only one.
After I started injecting speed regularly I was never a part of another big reading that I can remember. Sometime in '73-74 I read at Cody's with Bill Bathurst but it was an unbelievable nightmare best described elsewhere. I read at the Loading Zone another time where I blew on a harmonica to punctuate the poetry lines I was reading. We were always edging toward "performance" art to jazz up staid poetry readings. In 1966 I embarked on a journey with Susan Dornfeld that lasted for six haunted years, and I became the father of two children, a girl and a boy—a teacher and a musician. Those years could only be written about in a long memoir outside the scope of this project.
Andre Codrescu said "Poetry is the Art of being kidnapped by Circumstance." By the end of the '60s not only was I kidnapped and held hostage, but the ransom seemed impossibly high. Thinking to escape, I took a fork in the trail that led into impenetrable underbrush where I thrashed around for most of the next two decades. In the end, I was still that rube from the country at heart. I had been burned in the fire; tempered. But in the end it was not my character to travel the paths of Huncke, Burroughs, Wieners and so many others attracted forever to a fatal light. I didn't have the strength of character to surrender completely to such a vision of suffering, pain and love.
Again, in the days leading up to the Berkeley Conference, Gary's mentoring was subtle and self-effacing. Like the Bodhisattva's vow he stood aside patiently awaiting a whole new generation of poets to go before him. Here were all these poets you practically had to take a ticket for and (to me) there was too much sexual quid pro quo, so to speak. After all, we were in our early 20's, not knowing what we were doing and looking for some one to trust. Gary was a person you could trust unequivocally who gave off the vibes that we were all working in the fields together as equals. What's not to like about that?
I've lived in rural Oregon for 30 years while my friends have often complained that there just couldn't be any "culture" here. Wherever we are there is a "culture" in that place—specific to that place. Gary once said to draw a line in the sand right where you were. He'd tell the story about the couple who moved to the absolute wilderness up North and woke up the first day to the sound of the chain saws. There are tons of poets, musicians, writers and painters everywhere. Because of time and distance etc., we link up in different ways, different programs, and different cultural events. One of the best things is that they're always home-grown, grass roots stuff. We couldn't just snap our fingers and order up Allen Ginsberg for a local reading. I do have to say that Bill Stafford carried a hell of a lot of water for poetry in Oregon and like Snyder was a very accessible person, a wonderful guy. Oregon is filled with a generous, open-spirited community of poets and writers who have created many financially supportive venues and an exploding array of publishers and on-line 'zines.
