by Alice Notley
Who I Am and What I Think
There is no transition from a gesture to a cry or a sound. (same thing). Gestures: Who killed Cock Robin? The End. A particular buttressing of the body. No Smoking In This Room. All the senses interpenetrate. This spectacle is no more than we can assimilate. Nothing is left to do. For example, the war between men and women. Here is a whole collection of ritual. In fact everything is calculated with an enchanting mathematical meticulousness. Senses crackling everywhere resounding as if from an immense dripping rainforest. The day’s emotion and turmoil is present in the dusty grassy ground. Tied naked to a huge oak. The sort of theatrical language foreign to every tongue. To track the beats down. There is a sensual delight the braincells take. Thank you Brett. Clothed in strangest dress. To learn to keep quiet when another man’s prisoner. Complaints in the night. The kind of irritation caused by the impossibility of finding thread. The plastic requirements of this stage: food clothing shelter sex drugs jail. Ear to the ground. as if through channels hollowed out in the mind itself. Pages in Berlitz. No one here but me. Queer dawns voices a thousand eyes complaints in the night. To know to know everything. My eyes are tired. (the echo). (Jesse James).
A Letter from Dick Gallup
Woke up this morning you were other people in absentia lovely fashions On my mind. Take a good look. Shit little turd balls! I’ve got troubles: You have been sentenced to death sketches I havent explained actually I have Been many days writing the same work, waiting, no one there, The Ancient City all around you, thru August, nightmares, put them into a box, Anger gives me nausea and I said shee-it! went home resplendent with defeat. Baby-things. Future issues many thanks for them last night The Thing A great movie: Hit The Trail. Utterly exhausted by maniacs including Yours truly not to mention shifts, day shift night shift etc. took it to Cut City and one Ted reading in California She having gone back to Tappan (to picket Ben Jonson). How’s the chickens, the ducks, the old old ass? Please keep in touch Just figured out I cant stand writing in this box words dismantled to keep together and there are other problems and they come together at my mind. Furtive Days. It gets you down and out you go Dont read this part you both Nearly get killed on the freeway. Remember? How long do you think you’ll Be? That old praise (up the butt!) not likely put the books back nights Flight 9 American Air Lines best to use your own name. You have been sentenced to Death.
A BOKE
FOR DICK GALLUP
You’re listening to a man who in 1964 unknowingly
breathed in a small quantity of
LSD powder, remember the fragrance of Grandma’s
Kitchen?—and at a college he reads, sleeps.
The next morning he
takes a walk around the campus
with a young student who is
ordinarily mild-mannered and agreeable
and secretly thinks of himself
as rather colorless and uninteresting.
He has written poems for years,
odd sensation indeed, only partly alleviated
when he learns that he is next door to
the bashed-out windows, is now
engaged in beating in the
top of a car with the inaccurate
ones relieving him. He learns to
time his words and lines to the
hammer-strokes, and before long
he is giving something. And the
grave, slightly puzzled sympathetic
faces take on expressions he is
grateful for.
The head picks up. He is taken
to a room in one of the girls’
dormitories, which gives him
a local airline. This is a
girls’ college, also
far off in the country. He finds
this out by the use of drugs outside
medical auspices. He and his
followers seem to feel
that the end justifies the means, but
they have no flair (!), and at that moment
the image of his great predecessor,
the only predecessor, Laurence Sterne,
and everything that came into his
head insulted somebody—merciful
heavens, who on earth was it?—and
what the hell, he thinks, this may be
a major technical breakthrough for me.
In that company he thinks he hears a bearded
fellow mutter something discontented about
“a lack of fire” or was he a
singer, an American poet? When at last
he reaches the station he discovers
he is too early by 20 minutes
blazes up humiliatingly in the front
of his brain. The result of this was
that he deliberately drank twice as
there are few lights on the campus, remember
Grandma’s kitchen?, and he is uncertain about the
instructions designed to get him into
Literary Vaudeville. At the outset of the
trip he had thought that
the songs themselves would be enough
so had a terrible hangover the next day.
Yet he has in some obscure way
been a good deal better satisfied with
powerful vagueness. Poetry. A car
stops. It is driven
by a student at the college
he is going to, and, ever cognizant
of his bodiless staring audience, and of
the skull beneath his own skin
he has taken to doing some curious
things. For example he has acquired a
guitar, which he carries about with
Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas; he has
had nothing to complain of as to
the size and response of his audience on
this tour—set up by the editor of a venerable
poetry magazine—has dinner
with them, recounts some of his
adventures. Everyone from the schools.
But he is still bothered by the
difference and the inevitability of
death. He has tried for years to
formulate his relationship to these
things and to say something about
how to get to bus and train stations
and airports. He keeps opening
his eyes in his sleep—for what he
has become on this trip bears but little relation
to the self he left
at home in the mind, say, of his wife.
He is, in fact, in the middle of
a tour of readings. So far, considering,
he is not looking forward to acquiring
the courage to get drunk before
readings. He is exhausted and exalted
as he has never been, and now, standing
here, these affairs may be mandatory (in
some cases.) Then too many of the schools
like this one, though far back, seemed pleased by
the way things have gone; there have
even been some letters of appreciation,
female voices. There are many
furtive amused glances at him and
he replies in kind but because he liked
to write them, but he has never thought
of them as participating in
a public act, a kind
appeal to girls, and he even
entertains the idea of sneaking
back to his room and dashing
hard on his nerves. He might live
more vividly in this condition
but he cannot write in it.
He is happy and grinning; he feels
resourceful, foolish, and
lucky. “America,” he says aloud
about this. He takes out his two
volumes of poetry, and his
manuscript for a third book,
his Memento Mori, the great themes
/> of poetry hit him squarely: the
possibility of love in
these students just coming from
the auditorium sees him approaching
with his ragged books
in the center of a new reality—in
this case a cold sleepless room—
he looks at these things from the last
girl’s unexpected kiss, the student
with the nine pound hammer—he
rearranges his evening’s program
around the themes of love and
death, dangerous to the psychological
stability he expects of himself.
He has several misadventures to
lance between what is on the
page, put there by him at odd
beyond-himself moments, and . . .
and the faces. In the middle
guise of fiction, he becomes fascinatingly
alive, living up to the
“giving-them-what-they-want,” or might
be expected to feel entitled to
from a poet, beside himself, who
has drunk very much at six or eight
schools before that one part.
Intensity, he murmurs, where have
you been all my life.
He settles down for a sleep
with a young professor who
writes poems and is enthusiastic
and companionable. He
reads, has a drink at an untidy
bundle of railroads, bus, and airline schedules
marked with a red pencil and
various notes to himself. That
such nervous excitement, such
over-responsiveness to people
is probably the poet’s sole
evening repast, and if he
tasted of a wild boar or a stag
which he had roasted in the
cold light coming in from the chapel
tower across the campus, well, remember
the fragrance? There is
only one bus out of town,
he reaches for it, rock-and-roll
music bursts in his face. Rather than
fool with trying to shut it off he pulls
out his manuscripts. One whispers to
another. Though he is a little
afraid to, he admits who he is,
alone in a room with his skull.
In this reading, for once in his
life, he feels a correct balance
in his Hamlet, lost somewhere in
the snows of Northern Wisconsin:
he is, eternal strangeness!, a wandering
pose, full of life through thick
glasses. He finishes, stands
glaring for a moment in another
world with fatigue, one who has spent the most
satisfying part of a long tripping
movement that is not really for him, no, it is
for an exhausted hammerer, or for a new
arrival home and he is more
than a little glad of that: they are
wearing out the plug, feeling that he
has had his revenge. He turns on
the light and dresses, not quite able
to stall, asks suddenly, “May I
kiss you?” She agrees without thinking and
she does so with a distinct sense of
quitting while he is ahead. The
applause is long and loud, as if he were
a Beatle. He reaches a stage,
mounts, looks at the last of all clocks,
and leaves. It is 5:15 a.m. It is
time. He gets up out of bed and stumbles just
as he steps down from the stage into a
wave of feathery sweatered girls, a memorable
thing. No doubt. He gives the best reading of his
life, one that will shortly thereafter
have entered a twilight state characterized
by fantastic imagery. He subs a condition
of character and environment in order to
produce alternative modes of behavior.
He sits down, closes his eyes. Time is
annihilated; the bus driver stumbles
aboard, opens a door to a bridge. Finally
someone stops him, a farmer, and takes him 20
miles down the road. The farmer turns off
the highway, one is much interested in his
being there walking across the campus.
He hears a loud gust of many grunts, a crowd
of muffled students cheers him on; it
is fun in the country and there is
nothing to do. Still he is pleasantly
gratified at the turnouts and at the time,
picks up his bags and manuscripts and
his symbolic white guitar, and goes out
into the white darkness.
What is his life like? Where will he die?
Who is this nun giving him a calm
sense of proportion? and who leaves him; and
this time he is really in a
deserted landscape with dead corn in the
building and no one knows him—
“Come home.” And who is that thin
serious boy with the crewcut?
In a station wagon they drive together
40 miles into the rainforests. He is
given a room in a cavern, and
gifts; disturbing gifts, perhaps inept
inadequate gifts, but gifts just the
same. He feels that he is overcome.
He is middle-aged, beginning to lose
teeth and hair. He is lishing them
in his mind, down steps.
The next morning he catches a strange
madness; took hold of him first at the
reading when he discovered that
everything he said was being noted and
commented upon. Too, it is a midwinter
night in the midwest, and a man is
lying alone in a sterling ardor.
The next place is a branch of a state
of mind located in the fields in an
inept scarecrow’s life. A few big birds
puff and hunch on the telephone wires;
a strange room. On the dresser beside
the complicated clock-radio that
is supposed to wake him on time, there is
an industrial district of a large city.
There he is to be met at the bus station
though it is plain that there is no other
human being in those streets. In a bar,
(ah yes, he needs a drink badly), on
the stairs of a bus, he collapses.
When he wakes up the bus is in
the terminal of the next city. He gets
a small dose, about one-thousandth
the size of an aspirin, and the notoriety
is definitely agreeable and
he does his best to try to live up to it.
What in fact is his problem? A friend
will drive him to the next
engagement which is
his last. They start out and he pays
and gets out, scarcely knowing what he is
doing but feeling a little better
standing on the hood of a 1953 Buick
with a John Henry type hammer
in his hands, they having a kind of
metric as he adjusts his delivery more and
more to the inevitable banging. Presumes
there is nothing unscientific in
his desire to change the best
proportions of strength and beauty. His
tastes were modest, a piece of bread,
a draught of water, and you were
often sent to drive him out of his
college. “I couldn’t believe you’d
be the one I was looking for,” the poet
says in another city, where
he has
a friend he can stay with a day or two.
He flies in watching the lights of the
city, and in a phrase the losses endured
by everyone every day—the negation of
possibility that occurs each time
we pass anyone’s house.
He eats dinner with the writing and the
phrases stay with him when he wakes.
He notes them down and moves on to the
next stop via the bus station. Crossing
the campus on the one path he
knows he keeps reminding himself of
what he is doing. It is ominous that
the only other large institution in
the town is
the state insane asylum. In all, it
is a strangely good occasion.
He leaves that night, paces back and forth.
There is a skull on his table and suddenly
at the sight of it he starts reading.
From the airless close-packed winter bus
station he tries to call his contact at
the noon reading. The tour is to take place that
day and he has four hours to go 40 miles. The
tenuous noise of revolutions and
student demonstrations combine with assembly
lines that will annihilate the miles,
he becoming then an older and more
dependable self, and yet, remembering.
Perhaps though some recent poems about
his children will do the trick. He reads
these quietly and has
inevitable parties given after his
readings, he plays one or two songs,
and then scuttles back into his corner,
realizing now that role-playing is
shameful beside the feelings he
has experienced. Now he has the sensation
that he must calm down and work.
But on the aircraft aimed at last at
his home, he feels also
interested in Yeats’ occult preoccupations,
a curious object to discuss
in good health, far from the poems themselves.
“Just be yourself,” he told himself
