by Alice Notley
I completed my reconnaissance and reached our flank regiment just before dawn. There I found its distinguished colonel, Frank McCoy, and its gallant chaplain, Father Duffy, just returned from burying the poet Sergeant Joyce Kilmer beside the stump of one of those trees he had immortalized.
A Letter
TO JOHN GIORNO
When Wyn & Sally and the twins went to Minnesota to visit Wyn’s father last August, Wyn discovered marijuana growing wild all over the Minnesota countryside. He brought back a suitcase full and said to me, “How would you like to go out and harvest some?” So in the middle of September, when the moon was right just before the first frost, we flew out to Minneapolis at 10:30 in the morning with five large suitcases and a trunk. I was dressed in an old Brooks Brothers suit and a vest. We arrived in Minneapolis at 2, were met by a white Hertz rent-a-car and drove 2 hours to Red Wing. All along the side of the road and in front of every farmhouse were these 12 foot high clusters. Wyn said they’re so dumb out there they think that marijuana comes from Mexico. We cased this sand pit and it looked OK. Then we emptied the 5 suitcases and the trunk which were filled with the costumes from “Conquest of the Universe” into a garbage dump and drove to Frontenac where Mark Twain spent his summers. We bought 2 bathing suits and went for a swim in the Mississippi. It was terrific. Then we drove to Lake City which is this 1930’s Bonnie & Clyde town and we sat in this 1930’s soda-fountain cafe waiting for it to get dark. We telephoned Sally and told her everything was going great. Then we drove back to the sand pit and parked the car behind a falling down shed of an abandoned turkey farm and sat watching how many cars passed on the road. When it got dark, we changed into dungarees and went to work. I cut the plants and Wyn cut them into small pieces and stuffed them into plastic bags. There was this jungle of pot plants that looked like giant Christmas Trees and moonlight and dew, and the dew and resin got all over my skin and I was stoned. About 3 A.M. we changed back into the straight clothes and drove to Minneapolis. We didn’t take any amphetamine because I thought we’d look suspicious if we looked like speed freaks at 6 in the morning. I was so tired I just went up to the ticket counter and said to the guy, “Here!” We flew back to NY with 70 pounds of wet grass. It dried down to 24 pounds.
Che Guevara’s Cigars
Guevara had noticed me smoking, and had remarked that of course I would never dare smoke Cuban cigars. I told him that I would love to smoke Cuban cigars but that Americans couldn’t get them. The next day, a large polished-mahogany box hand-inlaid with the Cuban seal and amid swirling patterns in the national colors, flying a tiny Cuban flag from a brass key, and crammed with the finest Havanas arrived at my room. With it was a typewritten note from Guevara, reading in Spanish, “Since I have no greeting card, I have to write. Since to write to an enemy is difficult, I limit myself to extending my hand.” (I took the box, the cigars untouched, back to Washington and showed it to President Kennedy. He opened it and asked, “Are they good?” “They’re the best,” I said, whereupon he took one out of the box, lit it, and took a few puffs. Then he looked up at me suddenly and said, “You should have smoked the first one.”)
Frank O’Hara’s Question
from “Writers and Issues”
by John Ashbery
what sky
out there is between the ailanthuses
a 17th century prison an aardvark
a photograph of Mussolini and
a personal letter from Isaak Dinesen
written after eating
can be succeeded by a calm evaluation
of the “intense inane” that surrounds
him:
it is cool
I am high
and happy
as it turns
on the earth
tangles me
in the air
and between these two passages (from
the long poem “Biotherm”) occurs a mediating
line which might stand to characterize
all of Mr. O’Hara’s art:
I am guarding it from mess and message.
Entrance
FOR ED DORN
10 years of boot
Take it away
& it’s off
Under the table
2
& I’m hovering
I’m above American Language
one foot
is expressing itself as continuum
the other, sock
groan I am dog
tired from cake
walking
to here. That is,
An Entrance.
March 17th, 1970
Someone who loves me calls me
& I just sit, listening
Someone who likes me wires me,
to do something. I’ll do it
Tomorrow.
Someone who wants to do me harm
is after me
& finds me.
I need to kill someone
And that’s what it’s all about.
Right Now.
“In Three Parts”
blank mind part
Sounds pretty sane to me!
never thought of that!
Part two
Excursions across the ice
Confusions of the cloth
bread & butter
bread & butter
kiss kiss
Part Three
LOVE
Addenda: Sleep
Oh, hello, Ted!
Epithalamion
Pussy put her paw into the pail of paint.
“Hip, hop, pip, pop, tip, top, pop-corn”.
The dipper tipped and the sirup dripped upon her apron.
Phillippa put the Parson’s parcel beside the Professor’s papers.
Bowser buried his bone inside a barrel.
The brown bear stole the bumblebee.
White snow whirled everywhere.
The able laborer objects to the bride.
Adam and Eve stumbled over the rubber tube.
Mama made a muffler and a muff for me.
My Mary’s asleep by the murmuring stream
The meadow-mouse uses the lamp for its moonbeam.
In Minneapolis, Minnesota there are many married men.
Many Americans are making money in Mexico.
Homecoming
I sit on fat
like
An old dog
Anxious to set. Across
the fields fruit
grows in
Another state. The map
Goes quietly dark. In the
corners white
jasmine blossoms begin
To radiate
Cold. In the sky the
Soft, loose
stars swarm.
Now
drops of blood squirt
Onto the stiff leaves.
Now I
breathe.
Poop
Nature makes my teeth “to hurt”
Each conviction lengthens the sentence
Women are interesting when I look at them
Art is medicine for imbeciles
Great Art is a Great Mistake
If it’s inspiration you want, drop your panties
If I fall in love with my friend’s wife, she’s fucked
alternates:
I’m fucked
he’s fucked
American Express
Cold rosy dawn in New York City
not for me
in Ron’s furlined Jim Bridger
(coat)
that I borrowed two years ago
had cleaned
but never returned, Thank god!
On 6th Street
Lunch poems burn
a hole is in my pocket
two donuts one paper bag
in hand
hair is in my face and in my head is
“cold rosy dawn in New York City”
I woke up this morning
it was night
you were on my mind
on the radio
And also there was a letter
and it’s to you
if “you” is Ron Padgett,
American express
shivering now in Paris
Oklahoma
two years before
buying a new coat for the long trip
back to New York City
that I’m wearing now
It is cold in here
for two
looking for the boll weevil
(looking for a home), one with pimples
one blonde, from Berkeley
who says, “Help!” and
“Hey, does Bobby Dylan come around here?”
“No, man,” I say,
“Too cold!”
& they walk off, trembling,
(as I do in L.A.)
so many tough guys, faggots, & dope addicts!
though I assure them
“Nothing like that in New York City!”
It’s all in California!
(the state state)
that shouldn’t be confused with
The balloon state
that I’m in now
hovering over the radio
following the breakfast of champions
& picking my curious way
from left to right
across my own white
expansiveness
MANHATTAN!
listen
The mist of May
is on the gloaming
& all the clouds
are halted, still
fleecey
& filled
with holes.
They are alight with borrowed warmth,
just like me.
February Air
FOR DONNA DENNIS
Can’t cut it (night)
in New York City
it’s alive
inside my tooth
on St. Mark’s Place
where exposed nerve
jangles
•
that light
isn’t on
for me
that’s it
though you are
right here.
•
It’s RED RIVER
time
on tv
and
Andy’s BRILLO BOX is on
the icebox is on High
too over St. Nazaire, the
Commando is poised
that means tonight’s raid
is “on”
The Monkey
at the typewriter
is turned on
(but the tooth hurts)
You’d Better Move On. . . .
You’d Better Move On
Black Power
It’s ritzy Thrift,
Horn & Hardart’s is
too, one
cup of coffee, black
away from it
& Generosity
though commingling with incontrovertible hard- (art)
headedness
does warm
& it keeps it up
e. g.
“Art is art & life is
Life.” Fairfield Porter said
that:
& That means
Coffee
Black as on
57th Street
The Hotel Buckingham (facade) is
looming over lunch poems & I
looming over coffeecup white two eyes
looming over Joe’s black & yellow polka-dots
(a tie)
that once belonged to Montgomery Clift:
It’s all mine now, is saved, knowing
That, & that happily being that
“the living is easy”
Tho the art is hard,
sometimes, to see
through so much looming:
More coffee may save me that.
The Ten Greatest Books of the Year (1967)
Apollinaire Oeuvres Poetiques
Swami Sivananda, Waves of Bliss
James Joyce, Ulysses
Gerard Malanga & Andy Warhol, Screen Test/A Diary
The Collected Earlier Poems of William Carlos Williams
Helen Hathaway, What Your Voice Reveals
Jean Jacques Mayoux, Melville
Kay Ambrose, Ballet-Lovers Pocketbook
Roger Shattuck, Apollinaire
William Shakespeare, Cymbeline
Charlin’s Anglo-French Course 3rd Part
The Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms
Locus Solus No. 2
Compositions Property of Ted Berrigan
Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues
Ron Loewinsohn, L’Autre
Ted Berrigan, Clear the Range
Philip Whalen, Selfportrait from Another Direction
Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems
The Complete Sonnets Songs and Poems of William Shakespeare
Boswell’s Life of Johnson
The Collected Later Poems of William Carlos Williams
The Oxford Book of English Verse
Williams & Macy, Do You Know English Literature
Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America
Jim Carroll, Organic Trains
Stokely Carmichael, Toward Black Liberation
Ted Berrigan, The Sonnets
Ted Berrigan & Ron Padgett, Bean Spasms
Dick Gallup, The Lungs of Sophocles
Eduardo Paolozzi, Kex
Lawrence Campbell, Sills
Diter Rot, Buch
Ted Berrigan, Art Notes
Velversheen by Eagle-A
Ron Padgett, Tone Arm
Poetry Magazine May 1960
University Note Book
Jim Brodey, Clothesline
The Cantos of Ezra Pound CX–CXVI
Frank O’Hara, Meditations in an Emergency
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
David Henderson, Felix of the Silent Forest
Poets of the English Language Vol. III Milton to Goldsmith
Poets of the English Language Vol. I Langland to Spenser
Poets of the English Language Vol. V Tennyson to Yeats
Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts Vol. 6, No. 5
The World No. 7
William Burroughs, Time
Folder No. 2
Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show
“C” Comics
The Ten Greatest Books of the Year, 1968
The Collected Earlier Poems by William Carlos Williams
Selected Writings Charles Olson
Chicago Review One Dollar
Alkahest
New American Writing No. 1
THE RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
The Pocket Aristotle
After Dinner We Take a Drive into the Night by Tony Towle
Love Poems (Tentative Title) by Frank O’Hara
The Sky Pilot in No Man’s Land by Ralph Connors
Cosmic Consciousness by Dr. Richard Bucke
Meditations on the Signs of the Zodiac by John Jocelyn
In Public In Private by Edwin Denby
The World Number 1 Cover by Dan Clark
The World Number 2 Cover by Robert McMillan
The World Number 3 Cover by George Schneeman
The World Number 4 Cover by Donna Dennis
The World Number 5 Cover by Jack Boyce
The World Number 6 Cover by Fielding Dawson
The World Number 7 Cover by Bill Beckman
The World Number 8 Cover by George Schneeman
The World Number 9 Cover by Joe Brainard
The World Number 10 Cover by Larry Fagin
The World Number 11 Cover by Tom Clark
The World Number 12 Cover by George Schneeman
The World Number 13 Cover by Donna Dennis
The World Number 14 Cover by Joe Brainard
Waterloo Sunset
We ate lunch, remember? and I paid t
he check
Under trees in rain of false emotion and big bull
With folks going in and out putting words in our mouths that are
shouting, “Hurrah for Bristol Cream!” We threw a leave-sandwich
Into the sunlight—it greedily gobbled it up, and growing brighter
Emanating from their glasses came the little drinkies
Reflections of the magazine Grandma edits
On whose pages a bouquet is blossoming sort of. You bounced a check
Into years of lives down under the weather vane, barf!
The influence of alcohol rebounded 500 miles into Africa.
But a little drinkie never hurt nobody, except an African.
The Earth sops up liquids, I mean drinks,
And is tipsy as pinballs on the ocean
Wobbling on its axis. We turn a paleface shade of white
In the rain that pelts the doo-doo
That flies from the eyes’ blinds. It doesn’t matter though
on the sweet side
Of the moon. Don’t be a horrible sourpuss
Moon! Have a drink
Have an entire issue! Waves goodbye & reels, into sun
Of light dark light roll over Beethoven
Our shelter-half misses your shelter-half. There’s nothing left
of love
But we have checkerberry leaves
Mint, Juniper, tree-light
Elder-flowers, sweet goldenrod, bugspray & Juice.
And you are a pretty girl-boy
And I am a pretty man-woman
and we are here-there
In England and the food is absolutely cold-hot.
In the aromatic sundown, according to the magazine version
Or automatic sundown English words are a gas
Slurring the Earth’s one heaving angel turns in unison
& paddles your rear gently as befits one in love
with you & I
No change My face is all right
For us. We are bored through & we are through with you
With our professionalism (you have to become useless to drink).
All we ever wanted to do in the rosy sunlight was
In the first place was . . . was . . . was . . . uh
Run our fingers through your curly hair
