''There are so many poets it's hard to see the trees''
- Tom Clark in a letter to Clark Coolidge, 1970
1.
In the fall of 1969, with his marriage to Anne Waldman essentially over,
Lewis Warsh lit out west from New York City. He stayed for a while in
Ann Arbor, where Ted Berrigan was teaching, and in Iowa City, then made
his way to San Francisco. At the urging of Tom Clark, Warsh settled in at
Bolinas, staying initially with the Clarks, then with the Beckmans, and later
at the Doss house.
For Lewis Warsh, as for many of the poets who were to live there,
Bolinas was a transitional place. Having been so deeply involved in the east
side poetry scene in New York, editing the magazine Angel Hair and
publishing a series of Angel Hair books with Waldman, Warsh often felt out
of synch in California. He was never sure that he wanted to stay in Bolinas,
but didn't really know where else he could go. He spent most of his time
with Tom Clark. The two wrote several collaborations, notably a set of
poems that was published under the title Chicago – which was the first
Angel Hair Book out of Bolinas, and was printed by Andrew Hoyem in San
Francisco in 1969.
During this time Warsh was writing letters, sometimes daily, to Bill
Berkson in New York. These letters form an interesting real time
commentary on life in Bolinas:
Everyone here works very hard during the day, building houses, that
seems like the big male trip everyone's on, though the consciousness
behind it can't be put down, it just isn't mine. Left with long hours to
fill pleasurably with Tom, Joanne & myself (Jack, J's husband, is one
of the house-builders mentioned above) [ . . . ] Life at Tom's very
quiet. Play with the baby, eat home made Angelica cookies, radio,
TV, records, lots of dope. The Bolinas social scene as I see it consists
of lots of people who for various reasons wish to be here in Bolinas at
this moment in time & that's what brings them together, that's their
base. What they do in real life is another thing altogether. I haven't
gone into it very deeply but both Tom & Joanne are involved with
''it''—have to live with it—to various degrees. A very weird sort of
community & definitely a scene, though traveling has made me
realize that there are millions of different scenes going on all over
every minute with dope & music & one hopes poetry moving in
circles around the center which is everyone's inter relations.
(Letter to Bill Berkson
November 3 Monday [1969])
Much of Warsh's book Part of My History (Coach House Press 1971)
deals with his time in Bolinas. Once piece in this book, in particular,
evokes a day in the Bolinasian life - entitled ''California Diary,1969'', the
piece describes a typical day, wandering about the mesa, dropping acid,
meeting people, listening to music, writing poetry, drinking wine and
smoking grass.
Joanne Kyger had separated from Jack Boyce during the winter of 1969-
1970.
Warsh and Kyger had a brief romance and lived together in a house on the
mesa above Agate Beach from March until August of 1970. In his book
Long Distance (Ferry Press, 1971), Lewis Warsh asks the particularly
Bolinasian question ''Can poets live together?'' :
. . . To break down the walls
which separate each other's houses. To open the doors
of the rooms in which we sit, privately, contemplating
our works, each other's works, the works of the gods of
the past, present & future, to exist as if there were
only one room & fill it with all the poets you like
Warsh sees it as ''just another typical domestic scene'' only with a
difference that lends a ''fragility to our acts, as if we were participants in a /
softer sense of ourselves.''
. . . If I resemble
you, well, that's an accident - I didn't mean to be
mistaken
for anyone, not even myself.
2.
Bill Berkson first visited Bolinas briefly during Christmas and New
Year, 1969-70. Gordon Baldwin was out of town at the time, and Tom Clark
and Lewis Warsh had arranged for Berkson to stay at Baldwin's apartment.
Also visiting over the holidays was Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley. There
was a group reading on the mesa at Mary Coleman's house—a house where,
as local legend has it, Isadora Duncan had danced. The reading included
Berkson, Berrigan, Ebbe Borregaard, Tom Clark, Joanne Kyger, John
Thorpe and Lewis Warsh.
Berkson remembers being greatly impressed, ''bowled over, really'', by
the coastal landscape and the ''dramatic scale human relations seemed to
take on within it''. He returned to New York, but by the early spring of
1970 had decided to pack up and move to California.
In June of 1970 Berkson rented a car and drove cross country with Jim
Carroll and Devereaux Carson (Carroll's then girlfriend). On the way they
stopped at Allen Ginsberg's farm in Cherry Valley, and then at Niagara
Falls. In Mount Gilead, Ohio, they picked up their friend Jayne Nodland
who accompanied them on the rest of the trip. The rental car died at Arroyo
Hondo, New Mexico, where they visited poet Harris Schiff, who was living
in a commune there. They got a replacement rental car in Santa Fe and
drove headlong to California. Carroll was sick with heroin withdrawal and
complained constantly so they drove nonstop from New Mexico to San
Francisco, where they stayed for a night in a Portrero Hill house shared by
the Lewis and Phoebe MacAdams and Bill and Nancy Presson. The next
day Berkson, Carroll and Carson drove up to Bolinas. The junk-sick
version of the cross country trip can be found in Carroll's poem
''Withdrawal Letter'' in his book Living at the Movies (Grossman, 1973).
Berkson began to make arrangements to stay indefinitely in Bolinas,
while Carroll, still sick, was all too eager to hop a plane and get back to
New York. Carroll wasn't impressed by Bolinas, as Berkson recalls he said
it was ''too white''. His ''California Poem'', also printed in Living at the
Movies, would seem to summarize his impression of Bolinas. It ends with
the following lines:
and out here poets sleep beaches all day
with fears of Japan where bronze children
start landslides on their brains
The week that Berkson relocated he was surprised to find out that he was
to take part in a reading of ''Nine Bolinas Poets'' organized by Andrew
Hoyem at the San Francisco Museum of Art. The nine poets included
Joanne Kyger, John Thorpe, Tom Clark, Lewis Warsh, Ebbe Borregaard,
Lawrence Kearney and Michael Bond.
Berkson initially stayed with Warsh in the house near Agate Beach.
There was some jealousy and uneasiness on Kyger's part regarding
Berkson's arrival, but once that was resolved (in what Berkson describes as
a ''memorable meeting'' in a driveway in town), the two became close
friends and soon rented the Waring House on Wharf Road in downtown
Bolinas.
Warsh left Bolinas in September for a brief trip to New York. He
returned to California in the spring of 1971, staying in San Francisco until
the summer when he moved to Stinson Beach, sharing a house with
underground cartoonist Greg Irons and his wife Evan, just down the street
from where poet Tom Veitch and his wife Martha were living.
Berkson and Kyger eventually shared the Waring house, later to be
known as the Grand Hotel, with Peter Warshall (who initially came to
Bolinas to visit the Creeleys who lived down the street) and Keith Lampe (a
former Yippie, who went by the name Ponderosa Pine). The house
became a kind of social center, a place where primarily poets would drop
by, and hang out, and where many parties and readings took place. When
the property was sold in 1971, Kyger and Berkson each bought a house on
the mesa, within a block of each other.
3.
After dealing with the draft board in Texas, Lewis MacAdams and his
wife Phoebe eventually made their way to San Francisco in 1968. Although
they had visited several times, the couple didn't have any interest in moving
to Bolinas at the time. ''It just seemed too far in the country,'' MacAdams
said. They moved back to New York and didn't return to California until
1970. This time their destination was Bolinas.
They moved into ''this incredible, funky house'', just down the road
from Tom Clark's house on the mesa overlooking Duxbury Reef and the
vast Pacific. ''I had never lived outside a city in my life,'' MacAdams said,
''and it was like, oh, God, I was hypnotized. We were having a baby, and
having this disastrous emotional life, and all I really wanted to do was just
sit and stare out the window - which I did a lot, actually''
4
In late 1970, poet Robert Creeley, who had just landed a visiting
professor's position at San Francisco State University, moved his wife, the
writer Bobbie Louise Hawkins, and their daughters, out to Bolinas. He
chose Bolinas because of the friends that were living there—Arthur
Okamura and Joanne Kyger, in particular. The Creeley's lived at first in
the Dowd House on Brighton Ave, then moved to a big New England style
house on Terrace Avenue.
Creeley was widely respected by a number of the poets in Bolinas and
his arrival was eagerly anticipated.
Poet John Clarke, who had spent time in Bolinas during the summer of
1968 and again during the summer of 1970, wrote an intriguing book that
dealt with Bolinas, and the impending arrival of Robert Creeley. The poets
of Bolinas were the principals in this book, a Blakean masque, that Clarke
wrote as part of the Curriculum of the Soul series. In 1968 Charles Olson
composed ''A Plan for a Curriculum of the Soul'' which was subsequently
published in The Magazine of Further Studies. After Olson's death in 1970,
Clarke assigned topics from Olson's plan to selected poets and these were
published as fascicles in the Curriculum of the Soul series. Clarke's own
assignment was:
''Poets as such, that is disciplined lives not
history or for any 'art' reasons example
Blake
the same, say, medicine man''
Taking Blake's life as ''order'', arranged in 21 movements, including
''textual and speech event as well as chronological sequence of his life'' ,
Clarke let the poets of Bolinas act it out, as he said, ''so that if they had not
'disciplined lives' in the Blake sense Olson means it individually, they
could have it all together, that is, collectively, each satisfying some aspect
of the whole 'form', and speaking the Blake quotes appropriate to that
progressive movement (interspersed with contemporary talk), which I then
thought could perhaps activate both ways, both Blake and Bolinas, through
play, life to the level of 'medicine'.''
Crucial then to the plot of this play was the anticipation of Creeley's
arrival in town. The climax of which was the transformation of Creeley as
Ulro into Eden - Blake's lowest to highest condition - corresponding to a
moment in Blake's prophetic poem, Jerusalem.
Published in 1973, John Clarke's Blake: A Mask (dedicated to Jack
Boyce) is a wildly ''visionary'' take on the poets of Bolinas, often very
funny, especially as the lofty Blakean prophetic language bumps up against
the colloquial, but also insightful in it's careful portrayal of the relationships
between the poets there.
5.
Darrel DeVore was a musician, composer and experimental instrument
maker. He was playing jazz piano in Missouri before moving to San
Francisco in the sixties and helping to form the psychedelic band The
Charlatans. The Charlatans recorded for Mercury Records but dissolved
soon after. DeVore meanwhile was offered a contract with a pop recording
label but walked out in the middle of negotiations. He'd had enough of the
commercial music scene and began to focus upon his own compositions and
the making of strange new experimental musical instruments, such as the
wind-wand, the bamboo xylophone and the circular violin. He married
Robert Creeley's daughter Kirsten, in a ceremony conducted by Lewis
MacAdams. ''He was a huge influence on my way of seeing and hearing
and doing,'' MacAdams said of DeVore, ''He was an inspired soul. I
learned a lot from him.''
DeVore promoted a kind of radical free music which he called Universal
Music . He described it as ''The fusing of primitive Aboriginal spirit with
modern technology and synthesis derived from all the world music cultures,
results in 'Universal Music.' '' It was in this spirit that DeVore and Tom
Veitch came up with the idea of the Poet's Orchestra.
The announcement for their first performance is vintage Bolinas:
ATTENTION, FOLKS
A most unusual occasion figures to be this coming Sunday, JANUARY 17
at the clock of 8:30 PM or thereabouts behind the restful doors of THE
BOLINAS COMMUNITY CENTER when strange blast of sunshine and
moon music be erupting for a couple of hours or so, strange love gut notes
of POEM and NOISE upon unusual and rare flame performance of
THE BOLINAS POETS ORCHESTRA
! ! !
To enter the magic dimension will cost a smear of coin, 35˘ or 50˘ at the
door to be exact. A few will be allowed to join the backhanded craziness if
they can by waving a little yellow flag and running up on the stage and
doing three eskimo handstands. Many FAMOUS POETS and MUSIC
DOCTORS will pe4m together for the first time in 2,000 years of Western
Sadness. I sat smoking a cigarette and watching out of the upper window as
the cops chased a nude girl through the park. Later I went to the doctor and
was alarmed to find out that my blood pressure was very low. I hope this
won't spoil my summer trip to pan for gold . . .
SPECIAL GUEST STARS: THE YELLOW MANDARIN and
THE GHOST OF ALBERT AYLER!
plus John Lennon, The Rolling Stones, and many more .
. .
The Poets Orchestra, which only performed a couple of times, was a
loose amalgam of musicians and poets, including Berkson, Kyger,
MacAdams, and Tom Clark, all of whom played or toyed with various
instruments ranging from guitars and saxes to assorted percussion ding-
dongs and pieces of kelp. While similar in spirit to Max Crosley's
''Rituals'', The Poets Orchestra was an exercise in free music, with virtually
no underlying structure at all. Tom Clark described the first performance in
a letter to Clark Coolidge as ''Periods of unison dotting huge seas of
cacophony!'' ''The idea was,'' Clark said later, ''to build up this din
wherein the individual faults and graces of the instrumentalists would never
be noticed.''
The Poets Orchestra performed at the Bolinas Community Center and at
the Hansen Fuller Gallery in San Francisco.
6.
One of the members of The Poets Orchestra was the poet and musician
David Meltzer. Meltzer was an accomplished guitarist, having played with
the group Serpent Power in the sixties. He had close ties to Wallace
Berman and his influential Beat underground magazine Semina and was a
force on the San Francisco poetry scene. Meltzer, his wife Tina and their
three daughters moved to Bolinas in 1969. Tina worked as a teacher at the
Bolinas school. Joanne Kyger remembers the warm, hospitable scene at the
Meltzer home, ''There were singing parties. David would play guitar and
Tina would sing. She had a beautiful voice.''
7.
Joel Weishaus, a poet who first visited Bolinas in early 1969, then later
that year stayed at the Doss house on Brighton, decided in 1970 that the
literary scene in Bolinas was so rich it deserved an anthology. He went
door to door, poet to poet, asking for manuscripts and soon had the makings
for a modest anthology. Since he was at that time working for an outfit in
San Francisco called The Company & Sons, an underground comics
publisher that was looking to branch out into publishing books, he first
thought that they could publish the anthology. Unfortunately, the owners of
The Company & Sons were, as Weishaus put it, ''so freaky and paranoid'',
that he became worried about the ''safety'' of the manuscript. He quit the
company, taking the manuscript with him and offered it to Lawrence
Ferlinghetti and City Lights. Ferlinghetti wasn't very enthusiastic about the
project, but Weishaus was persistent, and Ferlinghetti finally agreed to print
the book.
On the Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing was published in 1971 by
City Lights. The book included work by Michael Bond, David Meltzer,
Max Crosley, Robert Creeley, Ebbe Borregaard, Joanne Kyger, Tom Clark,
Bill Berkson, John Doss, Keith Lampe, Bill Brown, John Thorpe, Lawrence
Kearney, and Lewis Warsh, with a frontispiece drawn by Arthur Okamura
and including a drawing by Gordon Baldwin. A note on the back of the
book reads:
This is a gathering of poets and writers and artists living in or around
the mesa in Bolinas, California. Not so much a school of poets as a
meeting of those who happen to be at this geographical location at
this point in wobbly time, several divergent movements in American
poetry of the past 20 years (Black Mountain, San Francisco Beat,
''New York School'' of poets) have come together with new Western
and mystic elements at the unpaved crossroads of Bolinas.
While there were several magazines and journals that were devoted to
Bolinas writing, On the Mesa was the first, and only, anthology of Bolinas
writers.
Also printed on the back cover is this quote from poet Daniel Moore
(who had lived in Bolinas for a brief time in the late sixties):
Like those Rabelaisian characters who took to the mountaintops
during the plague and caroused and told stories completely unharmed
by the plague while the plague went on below them, like those in
Noah's boat who took to high ground during the flood, like those who
''hold back the edges of [their] gowns . . . for we are going through
Hell,'' so these poets have taken to the Bolinas Mesa, high ground,
while the world goes awash around them, practicing a little ''Black
Mountainery,'' a little ''New York Schoolery,'' and a little Tom
Foolery. All part of America's vital poetic machinery, high on the
Mesa.
Moore is somewhat over romantic here, but that sense of Bolinas as refuge
was very real.
''The first few years I lived in Bolinas I did not want to go into the
City,'' MacAdams said, ''I really wanted to root myself in Bolinas . . . I
didn't even like to look at San Francisco across the water!'' This sentiment
was shared not only by the poets but most people living in Bolinas. A
sentiment that was soon to become a cause in itself.