he was grasshopper slim with
very thin arms but
hit very hard. it went all ten and
the Jap got the verdict, another
ten followed. I drank a lot of
beer
kept leaving to piss and
when I came back one time it
was over: k.o.,
and I walked out to my car and
since I was downtown I
drove to where I worked in the
daylight
to see if maybe the place looked less
painful and
I looked through the window and
thought I saw Ralph the stockboy in
there
crawling around on his hands and his
knees. he was an odd one and
the secretaries were afraid of him
and I thought I should call the
police
but then I thought
I don’t care if he raids the
place or sets it on
fire. I got back into my car
and took the freeway back to my
apartment.
I drank a couple glasses of scotch,
set the clock for 6:30
ate a vitamin
thought about a whore in Glendale
checked the ball scores
pissed again
turned out the lights
got into bed (alone)
didn’t pray
thought of places like Japan and
Central Avenue
thought about the dead and
the famous
thought about dying
while the Thames went along without
me and the girls walked up and down the
sidewalks without me
and then I thought I wouldn’t mind
so much
and went to sleep and
slept good.
the seminar
(dedicated to my betters)
Wednesday, 24 July 1969; Morning Session (Robert Hansen
and Allen Truport):
discussed sure discussed
WORK HABITS. Bob ingests, ingests, ingests, so we get those
wonderfully turned—
Allen keeps large notebooks
wherein
he told us
he notes down EVERYTHING. a kind of spatial flowing
viewPOINT.
Allen says
he writes all the time as much as possible;
it’s like hanging a coat in a closet: you’ve
got to get in there. reasonableness may not be
enchanting, but said Allen, it is REWARDING.
a big notebook, he said, by God that’s the
THING!
like Genet on the sand
blowing cock!
Bob said:
what the primary interest is and should be is ingesting,
ingesting, a kind of pulmonary percussion indrawn, tightened and
then placed upon the paper, the marble in tight order of grip,
allowing the function to be the (possible) anguish rather than
any
MESSAGE or a) art-order
b) audience-relationship.
Allen: I want to write
ENOUGH POEMS
so that when I die
all the shit will be out of me, I mean the guff, the nonsense,
the turds yes, ah I mean—that I have expressed enough
ENOUGH you see to
free me.
R.H.—I realize the standard essence of all your POETRY;
I say content is an extension of form. we must barter
for a firmer divinity. the conduct of children,
for instance, is fairly free but
UNFORMED
and in the final
multiplication…useless.
I would say that the difference between
Hansen and Truport is that Hansen KNOWS
what he is
doing.
Evening Session (R.H. and A.T.)
Bob says priests should stick to their robes and leave
POETRY
to him.
I agree
with this.
Allen says political poetry or poetry dealing with immediate causes and reflections is
interesting, and interesting
goes well, badly written
or not, it appears IMPORTANT, is appears sympathetic
and the ONE THING I do not want to do is lose
my AUDIENCE.
Thursday, July 25th; no classes:
a dozen of us had gone over to Buchanan 106
for the hell of
it
to use the lecture room
anyhow
but we found some WOMEN in there
and they appeared HOSTILE when we walked in and
even MORE hostile when we began talking about
POETRY.
their hostility is perhaps understandable because we
DON’T
tend to them.
they’ll just have to WAIT until workshop
CLASSES to get a portion of our
attention.
but it was really something, all of us there together,
talking, TALKING,—Hansen, Truport, Missions, De Costro
Sevadov, and Starwort, all all
together
here in ONE room was
the heart of American POETRY
talking, my
god.
Friday, July 26th; Morning Session:
De Costro dominated the whole damned meeting. he has
big hands and many
IDEAS. Truport appears to be afraid
of De Costro. Hansen cools it. nobody gets along.
yet there is no
YELLING. these are only poets.
De Costro says the root of the thing is transferred to the tree
and the tree dies and
becomes HISTORY
and that
generally
history is pretty
disappointing, it’s easier to chop down a
tree than a poem, he says, history chops
YOU down.
FUCK ALL MEANING! Bob suddenly screams.
then, in softer voice:
we ought to discard.
we all agree that feeling is everything and
we go out for coffee
leaving three girls sitting
there with their dresses hiked-up around their
HIPS.
Monday, July 29th; Morning Session:
I saw all FIVE OF THEM!!!
around a desk
TOGETHER:
Hansen, Truport,
De Costro,
Starwort and
Phillip Maxwell.
Phillip didn’t ARGUE didn’t say much
and left before the meeting was OVER
but explained he’d wait
OUTSIDE for the free lunch. his books haven’t been
GOING well.
Starwort read his Man on a Streetcar Running Backwards
from Bent Lily #8.
I couldn’t really understand his
READING
but will have to see
the work in print before I make a
JUDGMENT.
v Maybe Allie Denby
will send me a
copy of the issue, tho, alas, I understand it is
now a RARE ITEM
going to $20 out of Fort Lauderdale.
the past can only take place in the PRESENT, if you
know what I mean, said
De Costro.
we all
nodded.
Truport said he was afraid of being BROKE. he was
lined up for one more session at the
U. of K.
but hadn’t heard much
more. of course, he’d been moving
around quite a bit, in TOUCH and
OUT OF TOUCH:
Paris, Cuba, the Congo, India, Moscow and Denver, Colorado.
we spoke of The Cantos.
Pound continually tries to find space
AREAS, ARENAS OF CONTOUR for his extra-cerebral
power-poetic
uningrained…uncontrived soul-mind…like a…like a
whip lashing against the sides of an old
BARN.
we want a COMPLETE EMERGENCE, said De Costro.
nothing half nothing wilted
we want the poetic Christ-thing walking out of
the barn
and Teaching—not from the TOP-down
but through and through and
THROUGH.
god damn it to hell, said Starwort. suddenly.
in taking my notes I could not fit it into
the
conversation.
First Workshop session with R.H.:
he seemed to say a lot that I didn’t understand but
the others seemed to understand
and the session went well.
Bob looked well. I had a
HANGOVER.
Wednesday, July 31st; Morning Session (most of us there):
there were again the old arguments about Vietnam,
Cleaver and the Panthers, all of which, I am afraid, I
no longer
understand.
I am AFRAID
I am getting tired
although the others appear very
energetic.
I need SECURITY, said Hansen. I need a perpetual FATHER
and a GOOD JOB or my work is
HINDERED.
Allen read some of his early stuff. I understand some of it
but FRANKLY, I think he tends to
holler and OVERSTAGE.
I left with a
HEADACHE.
Friday, August 2nd; Morning Session:
Allen spoke of some of the poetry he had seen in
the campus shithouses and said it was pretty
GOOD.
then Wm. Burroughs was discussed
his USE of timely and pertinent
news material that RELATED…
by clipping out words in the paper
and pasting them in DIFFERENT ORDER
A NEW ORDER
was established
and a neutralization of time and event
WAS
established.
THIS WAs imporTANT. YeS. I’ll sAY sO.
we all admitted we often read Time and
Pravda.
then Allen read
AGAIN
this time from UnpubliSHED
WoRk
dIrEcTly FrOM the JOuRnals
there were 250 people attending
and he read LOUDLY and I had another
HANGOVER.
he screamed for FORTYFIVE MINUTES! then became
TERRIBLY
exhausted, you couldn’t hear him, his voice BECAME
a monotonous drone and he asked the audience:
may I stop now?
they applauded LOUDLY.
Sunday, August 4th:
the janitor had locked all the doors on the campus so
we met at Hansen’s room and drank port wine. Denise and
Carol came up but they were SAFE
although everyone appeared a little sullen.
I think it was being LOCKED OUT like that.
later in the night Allen grew angry and slapped
Bob. then Allen read his poetry again, it was
good being there all together all of us.
I have tried to take notes and hope you have
APPRECIATED THEM.
next summer I am sure we will be
INVITED BACK
and I look forward
EAGERLY
to these great American poets
and their DISCUSSION of what makes POETRY GO, what it
iS!!
AnD To haVE tHem rEaD thEiR OWN WORKS OnCe
AgAin.
—Howard Peter, University of L.
August 5, 1969
one for Ging, with klux top
I live among rats and roaches
but there is this high-rise apt., a new one
across from me, glimmering pool, lived in by very young
people with new cars, mostly red or white cars,
and I allow myself to look upon this scene as
some type of miracle world
not because it is possibly so
but because it is easier to think this way,
—why take more knives?—
so today I sat here and I saw one young man
sitting in his red car
sucking his thumb and waiting
as another young man, obviously his friend,
talked to a young woman dressed in kind of long slim short
pants, yes, and a black ill-fitting blouse,
and she had on some kind of high-pointed hat, rather
like the kukluxklan wear, and the other young man sucked, sat and
sucked his thumb
in the
red car and
behind them, through the glass door
the other young people sat and sat and sat and sat
around the blue pool,
and the young woman was angry
she was ugly anyhow and now she was very ugly
but she must have had something to interest the young man
and she said something violent and final
(I couldn’t hear any of it)
and walked off west, away from the young man and the building,
and the young man was flushed in the face, seemingly more stunned
than angry, and then they both sat in the car for a while,
and then the other young man took his thumb out of his
mouth, and started the red car, and then they were
gone.
and through my window and through the glass door
I could see the other young people
sitting sitting sitting
around the blue pool. my miracle crowd, my future
leaders.
to make it round out, I decided that the night before
the young man (not the one with the thumb) had tried
to screw the ugly girl in the pointed hat while they were both
drunk, and that the ugly girl in the pointed hat
felt—for some reason—that this was a damned dirty trick.
she acted bit parts in little theatre—was said to have talent—
had a fairly wealthy father, and her name was Gig or Ging or
something odd like that—and that was mainly why the boys wanted to
screw her: because her first name was Gig or Ging or Aszpupu,
and the boys wanted to say, very much wanted to say:
“I balled with Ging last night.”
all right, so having settled all that,
I put on some coffee and rolled myself something
calming.
communists
we ran the women in a straight line down to the river
clinging to the fear in their rice-stupid heads
clinging to their infants
mice-like sucklings breathing in the air at odds of
one thousand to one;
we shot the men as they kneeled in a circle,
and the death of the men held almost no death,
it was somehow like a movie film,
men of spider arms and legs and a hunk of cloth
to cover the sexual organ.
men hardly born could hardly be killed
and there they were down there now, finally dead,
the sun straining on their faces of weird
puzzlement.
some of the women could fire rifles. we left a small
detachment to decide upon
them. then we fired up the unburned huts and moved on
to
the next village.
family, family
I keep looking at the
kid
up
side
down,
and I am tickling
her sides
as her mother pins new
diapers
on,
and the kid doesn’t look like
me
—upsidedown
so I get ready to
kill them both
but
relent:
I don’t even
look like
myself—
rightsideup, so.
shit on it!
I tickle again, say
crazy
words, and and and and
hope
all the while
that this
very unappetizing
world
does not blow up
in all our
laughing
faces.
poem for the death of an American serviceman in Vietnam:
shot through a hole in the
bellybutton
9 miles wide—
out it came:
those Indian head pennies
those old dead whores
the sick sea walking like
pink
toast
past bottles of orange
children
dripping
drip
dry
barometer
lowering
while the guns elevated like
erections—
tossed the apple salad back
into the
sky.
(he died then, stuffing balloons with
marbles as the prince
laughed.)
guilt obsession behind a cloud of rockets:
genuinely traginew, dandy then, babe,
the age-old bile:
dummies stuffed with wax and
steel,
a deeper dark than any dark
we have ever
known—
I do not speak of such obvious things as
skin—
christ, it’s a bad
fix, ghostly true,
I might even say
off the top of the bottle
that I suffer more than
most, haha, but
The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills Page 9
