Guard the Mysteries

by Cedar Sigo

  In a piece of memoir Joanne wrote on Robert Creeley, she quotes the poet-editor Tom Clark: “It’s not what you say as a poet but how you live as a poet.” Her work often shows that these concerns are one and the same, how to adapt and get through this particular day, with all of its doubts, its weather, its chores, its glory or paranoia. Her explicit dating of the poetry (often down to the minute) allows for further investment in the life of the poet. She shows us ways in which poetry can be returned to classical forms while still marking our place in the present moment. This poem was written shortly after her arrival in Japan:

  It is lonely

  I must draw water from the well 75 buckets for the bath

  I mix a drink—gin, fizz water, lemon juice, a spoonful

  of strawberry jam

  And place it in a champagne glass—it is hard work

  to make the bath

  And my winter clothes are dusty and should be put away

  In storage. Have I lost all values I wonder

  the world is slippery to hold on to

  When you begin to deny it.

  Outside outside are the crickets and frogs in the rice fields

  Large black butterflies like birds.

  While assembling the final edit of There You Are I knew I would be forced to condense several facets of Joanne’s life story and that the poetry included in this book would have to be emblematic of her timeline. For instance, I chose to set two poems written in Japan against a set of her journal entries that detailed the Indian part of the trip. The sheer amount of documentation of their trip is boggling. In addition to Snyder’s book-length letter, we also have Joanne’s photography, Allen Ginsberg’s journals and his photos (with charming handwritten captions), as well as recently published writings by Peter Orlovsky, the kind of mythic edges that can be gained only through retelling and a chorus of voices. I tend to see all four poets trudging along as action figures (when reading Snyder’s book especially). I’m kind of shocked their journey hasn’t been optioned by a Hollywood producer yet. I reentered their trip recently while reading this poem from Joanne’s 2015 collection, On Time:

  BELONGS TO EVERYONE

  Just read through my entire four years in the Japan Journal

  It took about twenty minutes

  And the incident I hope to find was never written down

  “What color robes shall I wear?”

  “Oh something to match your hair.”

  “Always now”

  enjoying the moment

  waiting for rain

  which has already arrived

  October 27, 2010

  Thinking about Ko-san

  (Morinaga Roshi)

  I love how Joanne toys with the memory and so-called permanence of her journal here, how four formative years can be reduced to twenty minutes, how even the recording of an incident may be misremembered. If the question of the color of her robes has not been written down, she writes it now. Journals can allow us to step back into the moment, remembering waiting for rain in Kyoto back then. Looking up and out to see the rain drops in present-day Bolinas. The poem leaves the door open between the edge of past and present, recounting the adventure of the self and which parts are “accidentally” left out. It is charming to realize that the form of this poem is a portal. It feels wonderful to use it now.

  ■ ■ ■

  Joanne parted from Snyder and sailed home from Japan in 1964. The last entry of The Japan and India Journals tells us that Philip Whalen was the only one waiting for her when the boat docked back in San Francisco.

  I come back to San Francisco in January of 1964, after four years of living in Kyoto, Japan. It’s fantastic, four dimensional, I can understand what is being said, everyone speaks English, the Beatles in the air for the first time, a great colorful buzz.

  Soon after she had returned, the poet Lew Welch introduced Joanne to painter and all-around woodsman Jack Boyce. They would marry in 1965. In February of 1966, the couple went to Europe for nine months. They would visit the Uffizi, the Louvre, and other venerable museums filled with paintings from the old masters. They also managed to meet up with other poets during this trip, including Larry Fagin and Tom Clark, in Paris. At this time, Joanne and Jack were also collaborating on their own series of paintings and poems titled The Imaginary Apparitions. Lines from her poems were sometimes written on the back of his paintings. Joanne would later include her half of this sequence in the book Places to Go, which can be read as a symbolic and dreamlike retelling of this long trip through Europe. Joanne once mentioned that she saw this as a counterbalance to her four years spent in Japan. When I asked how they could afford to stay for so long and keep moving around, she stressed the importance of keeping a budget and of cooking meals at home and after that maybe going for a drink.

  Joanne and Jack had decided to move to New York City immediately following their time in Europe. Joanne wrote of this period in a piece of memoir concerning her friendship with Anne Waldman, titled “The Early Years…1965–1970”:

  And this was where the “art” was happening, or had happened. I remember Jack helped make frames for a show of Morandi’s work. But I never saw much Art in New York City at that time. We had just come from 9 months of looking at the history of western art in Europe as outlined in one of Jack’s classes. It was a focused and thorough trip. After some hunting we found a loft on the corner of Grand and Green in the garret district. Jack partitioned it off with giant timbers and put in a woodburning, coal stove and sleeping loft. We spent almost a year there. Jack Smith, the crazed underground filmmaker, lived upstairs, and he called us the rabbits. We were timid and quiet. Living a “California Lifestyle” someone commented once.

  The couple makes a brief cameo in Ted Berrigan’s classic poem “Many Happy Returns”:

  Who on earth would kill

  for love? (Who wouldn’t?)

  •

  Joanne & Jack

  will feed you

  today

  because

  Anne & Lewis are

  “on the wing” as

  but not like

  always…

  Joanne had included poems by Lewis Warsh in Wild Dog 17, a mimeographed poetry magazine she had guest edited in 1965. This year in New York with Jack helped to reinforce her connection to the second-generation New York School who were then reading and teaching workshops at Saint Mark’s Church. She also published in The World, attended art openings at Ed Sanders’s infamous Peace Eye Bookstore. She threw a party at her loft for Robert Duncan during one of his many reading tours. This was a party at which Duncan was said to have left with John Ashbery. Joanne told me she was once confronted by poet and critic Rene Ricard at Max’s Kansas City. He angrily accused Joanne of indiscreetly sharing some bit of information about his behavior. She recalled Rene started out with, “I don’t know who you think you are…or where you came from…” Joanne confessed to me that she was confused by this. “Where I came from, we never referred to that kind of behavior as gossiping, it was just catching up.” Why am I so jealous of Joanne having been disciplined by Rene Ricard?

  I wanted to share a poem that sketches Joanne’s time in New York. Prose can sometimes feel dry when compared to the tones we can release through the compression of poetry. It’s a poem titled “The Fortune-Teller” by Alice Notley, written shortly after Joanne’s death:

  you have no body even when it hurts so much

  some matter has arranged to be you hasn’t it

  then you go to the fortune-teller I went to sev-

  eral when young one even had a membrane over

  her iris but they didn’t understand me as

  well as I did oh I was just curious Remember

  “signs” what remember I remember my imag-

  ination houses I visit nonexistent or a grotto no

  remember when Joanne got me to write a collaborative

  note with her and leave it in a tree for Donald Allen who

  was feeli
ng bad we rolled it up a scroll tied with ribbon

  mostly she made me shy at some point I re-

  alized, though, she liked human niceness more than I

  —the scroll—she liked surprise birthday parties

  what I liked was her voice I never knew what

  she and Bob Creeley were going on about I was 25

  later she said everyone in Bolinas loved me

  I know that isn’t true and Philip loved her so much

  did she really not know that? “batty inexor-

  able logic” I’ve said all these things before

  Like when suddenly her aesthetic was chang-

  ing from Duncanism and Ted wanted her

  for the New York School some part of her

  joined it remaining Joanne but I remember that

  moment when Ted, Bob, and Tom Clark all seemed

  to be courting her esthetically she had such

  brilliance and one wanted her to write like one

  she would always follow her voice—and Lewis Warsh

  “she’s becoming more autobiographical”—no she wasn’t

  she was doing mind/nature/voice partic-

  ular to person/life finds expression as “that flicker”

  bird as mind of no-god drifting coastal moment

  You were so beautiful and I’m remembering how

  right before Ted died he placed new books on shelf

  by bed, by Joanne, Joe Ceravolo, and Anselm Hollo and said

  “I have a generation” b. 1934 I’m sorry I’m just crying

  It seems that in the end, chronology is the only marker that Joanne could trust, and Ted placing her among these other poets born in 1934 feels as close to naming or allegiance as she could ever comfortably be. I love that the element Alice admits to loving most is her voice. She accuses Tom, Bob, and Ted of being possessive but then becomes possessive herself regarding what she thinks Joanne’s new work is accomplishing. After living in San Francisco for eighteen years I find Notley’s coining of the word “Duncanism” so refreshing, so therapeutic.

  I’m sure Joanne’s tight friendship with Philip Whalen was also of primary interest to the New York poets. In 1967, after deciding to move back to San Francisco, she receives a letter from Philip Whalen (then living in Kyoto) in which he encourages her to move back to the West Coast:

  NYC as a “center” went to pot when the Living Theater was busted…then Frank O’Hara died, and that really finished it…New York may make a comeback later. But like all cities, they have this drive on to throw out the poor people—no lofts, no slums, and no place for the scholar, the musician, painter or poet. So, all of us have got to figure out how to stay alive in the country. I’m very scared by the official reaction to the riots in America—the cops and the government are really scared, and so are all property owners. If they get scared enough, there’ll be a fascist revolution in the USA.

  In 1968, Joanne and Jack returned to San Francisco. The same year, Joanne would complete a residency at the National Center for Experiments in Television in San Francisco (NCET). This venture sounds oddly exotic today; collaborative videos and films were created between poets, painters, musicians, and filmmakers and shown on public television (KQED). Joanne’s project was Descartes, an eleven-minute black-and-white video based on her poem “Descartes and the Splendor Of—A Real Drama of Everyday Life. In Six Parts.” It is important to stress that this poem was written to be filmed. Her principal collaborators on this project were filmmaker Loren Sears and musician Richard Felciano.

  There is an interesting exchange in a 1974 interview from Occident in which Joanne hints at her objective in combining poetry, philosophy, film, and television:

  Well I was in television for a year, an experimental television program. And that was exciting, seeing that television could bring all these elements together. I wrote that Descartes piece in Places to Go for television. It was put into six sections and each section was acted out with all this fancy video treatment. You could see five or six eyes, or persons, simultaneously.

  …but does that distract from the content of the poetry?

  Well the content is connected with all the other aspects. I know there was a feeling that poetry was needing a helping hand, especially when music was up.

  You mean rock and roll?

  Yeah. But I think poetry is strong enough. I don’t think some poets are adventuresome enough about the space they can make. It’s very tidy to stay in magazines and books the rest of your life.

  So you’d say yes to combining the mediums.

  But poetry is those mediums too—poetry is storytelling and it’s acting and it is music too and it’s theatre.

  There’s no definition of it before it happens.

  Right. Poetry’s gotten stuck on the page for an awfully long time, since whenever they invented printing.

  As I continued to spend time retracing Joanne’s life and work, I began to form new questions about her process. How did she begin to conceive of such a non-motivated sense of writing? A reality made of poetry?

  In a 1998 interview, Joanne is asked for her perspective on the act of composition:

  Accepting that the mind is OK as it is. I don’t have an official Buddhist teacher. I go through phases of practicing meditation on a daily scale and then not doing it for a long time and then going back to it. But you know it’s not practice that’s ultimately rejected—you just get out of the tempo of doing it. You find that when you finally sit or practice meditation everything about you slows down. Your “content” becomes more accessible and…it goes back to Trungpa’s dictum, “first thought best thought.” So what arises comes out. And then the next thing arises, and so you put that down. You trust that your mind is shapely and that existence has a flow of its own. It’s not trying to restructure your thinking to come to conclusions. A hierarchical sense of where you are starts to fade away. In its simplest focus, that’s how I see it.

  Of course, we can trace this position farther back than her involvement with Chögyam Trungpa and Naropa, etc. Her introduction to Buddhist philosophy goes all the way back to her study of philosophy at UC Santa Barbara with Paul Wienpahl in the mid-1950s:

  Then I went on to UC Santa Barbara, where I had some more excellent teachers: Hugh Kenner, who taught Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, and Paul Wienpahl, who taught Wittgenstein and Heidegger. He showed us how Heidegger’s “nothing” was the bridge into D. T. Suzuki’s Buddhist nothingness…D. T. Suzuki talks about “nothing” or “emptiness” as being really “something.”

  Joanne began a formal sitting practice in 1959 after moving into the East West House, a communal home in San Francisco set up for people interested in studying Buddhist texts, Japanese, and then actually visiting Japan. It was modeled after the California Institute of Asian Studies, which was founded by Alan Watts. As Joanne explains it:

  They had sort of loosened their constraints and allowed women and other non-Japan-directed people to live there, but by then I was planning to go to Japan. There was an overflow of people from East West House and so they started something called Hyphen House, which was the hyphen between East and West. That was a few blocks away in what is now Japantown. Close by there was the Soto Buddhist temple where Shunryu Suzuki was invited to come and be the priest for the Japanese community in the Spring of 1959. He started zazen practice in the morning, open to everyone. He became the catalyst for beginning the Zen Center of San Francisco. I learned to sit there, during the year I spent at the East West House before going to Japan.

  I was feeling bereft after Joanne’s death, and one day, scanning our bookshelves, found that my partner, Brian, owned Suzuki Roshi’s classic text on sitting zazen, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. I instinctively pulled out our one red meditation cushion before beginning to read. This worked out perfectly, as it is nearly impossible to read this book without setting Suzuki’s wisdom against your own meditation practice. What he describes more than anything is the necessi
ty of returning to a path, returning to a pattern of breathing when you become distracted.

  To stop your mind does not mean to stop the activities of mind. It means your mind pervades your whole body. With your full mind you form the mudra in your hands.

  There is no enlightenment without a practice that invites constant recalibration. As I continue reading, I have discovered that the best example of the equanimity that Suzuki describes is in fact Joanne’s Collected Poems. Reading Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, I was reminded of Joanne’s insistence that I had to get over whether this is a “good” poem or a “bad” poem…Just keep writing, she would say.

  The following two quotes are taken from Suzuki Roshi’s lectures, from “Right Understanding” and “Right Attitude”:

  For us there is no need to be bothered by calmness or activity, stillness or movement. When you do something, if you fix your mind on the activity with some confidence, the quality of your state of mind is the activity itself. When you are concentrated on the quality of your being, you are prepared for the activity. Movement is nothing but the quality of our being. When we do zazen, the quality of our calm, steady, serene sitting is the quality of the immense activity of being itself.

  If you lose the spirit of repetition it will become quite difficult, but it will not be difficult if you are full of strength and vitality. Anyway, we cannot keep still; we have to do something. So if you do something, you should be very observant, and careful, and alert. Our way is to put the dough in the oven and watch it carefully.

  These claims relate to the practice of poetry in the sense that a poet is always a poet (self-appointed or not) and will always be helpless to charting whatever they feel to be poetry. If you write something wonderful, don’t cling to it. Conversely, if you become disappointed with a composition, don’t cling to it. Part of this training seems to be acceptance of starting over, that there is no path to enlightenment without failure, constant recalibration, and the promise of honing the mind through patterns of breathing. We need only look at a few of Joanne’s book titles to realize her obsession with locating her “self” in time: About Now, Again, Just Space, All This Every Day, Going On, and As Ever.