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Number 73 

Summer 2014 

£4.50 

Lew Welch 

John Wieners 

Billy Burroughs 

Jack Kerouac 

Allen Ginsberg 

Robinson Jeffers 

Douglas Woolf 

Robert Duncan 

Joyce Johnson on 

Jack Kerouac’s 

Half-American Life 

.......... 

Allen Ginsberg on 

Kerouac

John Clellon Holmes (pictured here in 1949) died 

in 1988. Novelist and essayist, he was a great New 

Yor 

ork friend of Jack Ker 

erouac, a writer and companion 

that Kerouac stuck with perhaps the longest of all his 

friends. 

Clellon Holmes published novels such as Go, Get 

Home Free, The Horn and also a series of essays in 

various collections through the Univ 

niversity of 

Arkansas Press. His Ker 

erouac eulogy, Gone in October 

John Clellon Holmes (pictured here in 1949) died 

is widely regarded as one of the very best Kerouac 

inJohn Clellon Holmes (pictured here in 1949) died 

tributes. Ann and Sam Charters published a 


biography of Holmes 

Brother Souls in 2010. Liz Von 

Yor 



Vogt, John 

ohn’s s younger sister, , is also a novelist. 


friends. 




niversity of 

Arkansas Press. His Ker 

erouac eulogy, Gone in October 



biography of Holmes Brother Souls in 2010. Liz Von 

Vogt, John 

ohn’s s younger sister, , is also a novelist. 1988. Novelist and essayist, he was a great New 

Yor 




friends. 




niversity of 

Arkansas Press. ess. His is Ker 

erouac eulogy, Gone one in October 




Vogt, John 

ohn’s s younger sister, , is also a novelist.J 

elist.John Clellon Holmes (pictured ed here e in 1949) 

died 


Yor 

ork k friend of Jack Ker 



friends. 




niversity of 

Arkansas Press. ess. His is Ker 

erouac eulogy, Gone one in October 




on 

Vogt, John 

ohn’s s younger sister, , is also a novelist.

Number 73 

Summer 2014 

Editor 

ditor...Kevin Ring 

Deputy Editor 

ditor...Jim Burns 

Beat Scene in America... 

Richard Miller, 1801 D Spruce 

Street, Berkeley, California 

94709, USA. 

Resear 

esearch 

ch...Pauline Reeves & Erin 

Ring 

Layout...Scarlet Letters 

Contributors this issue 

Eric Baizer, Jim Burns, Colin 

Cooper, William Corbett, Brian 

Dalton, Reywas Divad, Lee 

Harwood, Joyce Johnson, Carl 

Landauer, Kevin L. Mills, Richard 

Peabody, Dawn Swoop, Stephen 

Vincent, Eddie Woods, Edwin 

Forrest Ward, Lewis Warsh, John 

Wieners 

FIRST WORDS 

Looking at a photograph of Lewis 

Warsh, Bill Corbett, Lee Harwood 

and John Wieners in the fairly 

recent issue of Mimeo/Mimeo - 

taken in 1972 on a winter day at 

Walden Pond, I got intrigued. 

Wanted to know more. Through 

Jim Burns I managed to contact 

Lee Harwood and Bill Corbett. 

And then Lewis Warsh. There are 

little stories, history at every turn. 

The kind of history I enjoy and 

hopefully you do too. Certainly, if 

I pressed them there would be 

untold history with them all. 

Naturally the aim is to bring you 

fresh aspects, but the back stories 

exist and wait to be uncovered. So 

many crossroads to go to at 

midnight, so many connections. 

Enjoy this issue. A special edition 

next time. More on that in due 

course. As ever, tell your friends. 

Kevin Ring 

Beat Scene, 27 Court Leet, 

Binley Woods, Near Coventry, 

England CV3 2JQ 

Telephone 02476-543604 

Email 

kev@beatscene.freeserve.co.uk 

Front cover image of Jack Kerouac 

taken in 1963. Back cover image 

Joyce Johnson’s In the Night Cafe, a 

novel published in 1989 by 

Washington Square Press. 

- For Beat Souls, Dharma Bums, everywhere - 

4....Boston Eagles...John Wieners, Lee Harwood, Lewis Warsh, Bill 

Corbett...a photograph, Walden Pond, 1972 

6...Gesamthunstw 

esamthunstwer 

erk in a Vitrine 

itrine...Robert Duncan, Jess and Friends 

by Carl Landauer 

11...Bill Burr 

urroughs in Amsterdam 

by Eddie Woods 

14...A Half-American 

Writer 

...Joyce Johnson - a personal take on 

Kerouac’s sometimes alienation in America 

20...Really Lost Books ...Fade Out by Douglas 

Woolf 

oolf...by Kevin 

Ring 

22...The Blowtop...an Early Beat book? by Jim Burns 

24...Jeffers Is s My God 

....Kevin L. Mills looks at one of Bukowski’s 

big influences 

28...Ginsberg on Ker 

erouac 

ouac...an interview by Richard Peabody, Reywas 

Divad and Eric Baizer 

34...Le 

Lew Welch: A Journal of Remembrance 

by Stephen Vincent 

42...Write rite A Madder Letter if You ou Can...Jack Kerouac and Ed White 

the letters - by Kevin Ring 

47...Billy illy Burr 

urroughs 

oughs’ ’ Prediction 

....a curious remembrance by Edwin 

Forrest Ward 

50...The Beat eat Scene Revie 

eview w Section 

ection...Robert Creeley, Jack Kerouac, 

Amiri Baraka, Ed Dorn, Jim Burns, Neeli Cherkovski, Boxed Beats, 

the Garden of Eros 

William Burroughs.... 

Eddie Woods provides a 

first hand account of him 

in Amsterdam. Burroughs 

obviously thought a lot of 

Europe, living in London 

for prolonged periods, the 

Beat Hotel in Paris, his 

regular and hugely 

popular readings in 

Germany, Netherlands - 

there is nothing better 

than a personal, close up 

account. A young 

Burroughs here - Woods 

encounters him in the last 

days. Is this the face of a 

sheep killing dog?

Boston Eagles 

John Wieners, Lee Harwood, 

Lewis Warsh, William Corbett 

interviews by Kevin Ring 

With the help of writer Iain Sinclair I was able 

to contact English poet Lee Harwood who lives on 

England’s South Coast. I wanted to ask Lee about a 

photograph I’d seen in The Lewis Warsh issue of the 

American small press magazine Mimeo/Mimeo, 

published by James Birmingham and Kyle Schlesinger. 

The photo dates from 1972 and features Lee 

Harwood, Lewis Warsh, Bill Corbett and the late John 

Wieners. As you can see, it captures Wieners in a 

seemingly positive frame of mind. The picture is 

taken at Walden Pond. It is a winter’s day, I’m led to 

believe. Intrigued, I asked Lee Harwood about his 

recollections of the day the picture was taken by 

Judith Walker. (Lee Harwood’s second wife). But, let 

Lee Harwood relate his recollections, “It was in the 

winter of 1972/73. From left to right it’s John 

Wieners, me, Lewis Warsh and William Corbett. 

We’re standing by a frozen Walden Pond, Massachusetts. 

I remember John W had a gold lame jacket. At 

that time Warsh, Corbett and I edited a “little mag” 

called THE BOSTON EAGLE and included quite a 

bit of John Wieners’ poetry in it. We were all living in 

Boston then. 

Lewis and I used to go round and visit John at 

his apartment at 44 Joy Street, Boston. He served us 

with champagne and chocolate peppermint cremes on 

one occasion! He was a very dear and gentle man, but 

also subject to bouts of distressing mental illness. 

When he came out of hospital he was fine, but then 

he used to slowly go downhill. He organised some 

really good things, such as a sort of free open university 

at the Stone Soup Gallery where various people, 

mainly poets, such as Warsh and me, gave talks and 

readings of poets like O’Hara, Ashbery, etc. I think 

John W talked about Olson. He also co-edited, with 

Jack Powers, in 1973 an anthology/magazine titled 

Stone Soup Poetry. The gallery was what you might now 

call “left wing,” though at that time there was a lot of 

radical thinking and demonstrations going on in the 

USA. 

That early (Wieners) book, The Hotel Wentley 

Poems, just bowled me over when I first read it and 

still does. The power and emotion and tenderness of 

those poems is, for me, quite exceptional when 

compared with a lot of the Beat poets.” 

Talking to Lee Harwood let me to both 

William Corbett and Lewis Warsh. Both remembered 

the time well and gave me a few of their memories. 

Bill Corbett: Here’s the photo I have on my 

wall. There is at least one other with John resting his 

arm against a tree and me in the background. 

Were the photo in color you would see that the light 

patches on John’s jacket are gold lame. There must be 

an accent there! I don’t remember why we settled on 

Walden Pond except that it’s such an obvious literary 

landmark. It was an unremarkable afternoon but for 

the photo. 

I asked Bill Corbett why were all four of you 

together that day by the pond? 

Bill Corbett: Lee, Lewis and I had started the mimeo 

magazine The Boston Eagle. One of our reasons was to 

feature John’s work. We wanted a photo of the editors 

and John for the back cover thus the trip to Walden 

Pond. The magazine was the first, and one of a very 

few, mimeo mags published in Boston. Lewis, who 

had come from NYC to live in Cambridge, came up 

with the idea. The magazine lasted three issues. I 

doubt that I have a single copy. 

From Bill Corbett, I spoke to Lewis Warsh, 

with whom I’ve had fleeting contact with in the past. 

He features on the front cover of Beat Scene 51 with 

Anne Waldman. I asked him - Lee Harwood talks of 

you and he going to Joy Street. Peppermint cremes 

and champagne. Stone Soup Gallery, The Boston 

Eagle, etc. What can you recall of the photo? 

Lewis Warsh: Lee Harwood and I first met in 

the mid-1960s in New York, and Angel Hair Books, 

which I was co-editing with Anne Waldman, published 

his book The Man With Blue Eyes in 1967. In 

4

fall 1972 I moved from California to Cambridge, 

Ma. with Mushka Kochan, my partner at the time. 

Soon after I arrived, I met John Wieners for a drink 

in a bar near Harvard Square. I had also known John 

in the late 60s, and had worked on publishing two of 

his books, Asylum Poems and Hotels. It was at the bar 

that I first met Bill Corbett, and he told me that Lee 

was in Boston. Lee and I connected soon after and we 

all had dinner at Bill and Beverly Corbett’s big house 

at 9 Columbus Square. It wasn’t long after that we 

decided to edit a magazine together, The Boston Eagle. 

The first issue was just the four of us: Bill, Lee, John 

and myself. I think we must have gone out to Walden 

Pond with the idea of taking a photo for the magazine—it 

appeared on the back cover of the first issue. 

Jude Walker was the photographer. We went on to 

publish three issues of the magazine, before we 

dispersed: I went to New York, and Lee, I believe, 

back to England. 

○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ 

Lewis Warsh, speaking a few years ago 

remembered Sun & Moon Press, Los Angeles 

publishing The Journal of John Wieners is to be called 

707 Scott Street for Billie Holiday 1959. ‘ln 1972, 

William Corbett and I visited John in his apartment 

at 44 Joy Street in Boston with the hope of getting 

poems from him for our new magazine (edited with 

Lee Harwood), The Boston Eagle. I remember John 

opening a trunk filled with ledger-sized journals with 

old-fashioned marble covers. “I’d love to read them 

someday,” I said, thinking out loud, but Wieners 

caught the genuine interest in my tone and presented 

one to me. [. . .] 

When I was finished [transcribing] I had 77 

manuscript pages, a book. On the inside cover of the 

ledger there was the title: 707 Scott Street, for Billie 

Holliday. I published a few pages of the journal in an 

issue of The World, the literary magazine of the Poetry 

Project (an issue devoted to autobiographical writing 

which I was guest-editing); then, for almost twenty 

years, the transcript of the journal disappeared. It was 

the interest of the poet Peter Gizzi who had heard 

that such a journal existed, that made me go 

searching for it. I never presented John with a 

finished copy of the transcript, though I do 

remember visiting him again and returning the 

original, not that it would have mattered (or so he led 

me to believe) whether I’d kept it or not.’ 

A few extracts from Wieners’ diaries were 

published....... 

26 July 1958 

‘On the road again. America 

does not change. Nor do we, 

Olson says. We only reveal 

more of ourselves. Riding in 

the car with all the windows 

open. How can I rise to the 

events of our lives. I am a 

shrew and nagging bitch as 

my mother was. I am filled 

with doubt and too passive. I 

go where I am told. 

Anywhere. Take pleasure in 

doing what I am told. There is 

no comfort in Nature or God 

except for the weak. It is my 

fellow men that deliver me 

my life. Otherwise I wrap up 

in myself like an evening 

primrose in the sun. Nature 

is good for analogy. We think 

we learn lessons from her 

but she deserts us at the 

moment of action. That is 

why we remain savages. 

Underneath. And our civilization remains a jungle. Live it at 

night and see. 

But traveling on the road to Sausalito, San Francisco 

then Big Sur, I see how much the earth still surrounds us. 

Willow Road juts out in my memory. Mission San Rafael 

Archangel. Redwood Highway. Where man is going now, who 

knows. The earth no longer need be his home. Maybe this 

means the end of the old world. And man, on the minutest of 

planets may and can range thru all of space. To the very 

frontiers, limits, barriers of outer worlds. Lucky Drive. End 

construction project. With what frightening speed we move 

ahead. This must be necessary: Paradise Drive. The children 

are quieting down now. The witch drives her old Chevrolet, her 

long black hair blowing out the window.’ 

5

Gesamtkunstwerk 

in a Vitrine 

Robert Duncan, Jess, 

and Friends 

by Carl Landauer 

T 

he exhibition, An Opening of the Field: Jess, 

Robert Duncan and Their Circle, curated by Michael 

Duncan and Christopher Wagstaff, includes a film 

that tours Jess and Duncan’s Victorian home at 3267 

Twentieth Street in San Francisco, starting with the 

entry hall and winding through all the rooms until you 

get to the third storey marked by the sloped roof of 

the house. The tour is essentially a microcosm of the 

exhibition because it encapsulates their artistic lives 

and so many of the people close to them. The front 

parlor with its stained glass includes a pen drawing by 

Jess, a profile drawing of Wallace Berman (the 

assemblage and collagist who published Semina, which 

would include visual and literary work by Philip 

Lamantia, Michael McClure, and Artaud in addition 

to Duncan and Jess), a piece of folded dollar bills by 

Dean Stockwell coiling more like one of Berman’s 

kabala letters than a snake, and a whole corner 

devoted to George Herms, one of the central figures 

of California assemblage. The music room, with the 

couple’s classical collection, is also full of the art of 

friends, including a wonderful baguette and coffee-pot 

painting by Lyn Brockway, one of the standouts of the 

show and an artist who should get more attention, as 

well as art that simply made an impact on them, 

including a print by the great art nouveau poster 

designer Alphonse Mucha and a William Blake 

reproduction. The hallway and the stairwell include a 

fantastic gray oil painting by Edward Corbett, Jess’s 

teacher at the California School of Fine Arts (now the 

San Francisco Art Institute) and one of the leading 

figures of the San Francisco Abstract Expressionism 

that exploded out of the school, along with a couple 

of Bruce Conner works, and a colorful painting by 

their friend, Jack Boyce. 

Jess’s studio resonates with the iconography 

of his “Paste-Ups,” his famous collages, with files of 

sorted images cut out of magazines and scientific 

books and carefully labeled, so that one box lists 

“Forms” and then subsections on “spheroid,” 

balloon,” “sphere,” “knob,” “egg,” an “lens.” Another 

includes “bigot,” “police – prison – execution,” 

“rebel-terrorist,” and “militarist.” And, significantly, 

there is the “working board” for his multi-decade 

collage, Narkissos. Their bedroom is full of works Jess 

and Duncan loved, including a dramatic, primitive 

sculpture of a head by their friend Miriam Hoffman, 

whose works dominate the first exhibition at the King 

Ubu Gallery that the couple opened for a year with 

their friend Harry Jacobus. 

The top floor includes the “Gertrude Stein 

Room,” the “French Room,” and Duncan’s office 

with its tacked-up iconic photos of Sigmund Freud, 

Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, as well as poets Charles 

Olson, Robert Creeley, and Jack Spicer (Spicer 

despite their decades-long quarrel). There are books 

throughout, including camera pans of the collection 

of original L. Frank Baum books, whose Oz series 

6

Robert Duncan, Jess, and Friends 

Duncan and Jess loved to read and re-read, and the 

large letters “H.D.” stick out in the pan of the 

bookcase in the Gertrude Stein Room simply because 

of the size of the lettering and reminds us of Duncan’s 

long, never-completed book on HD. For this we can 

turn to Lisa Jarnot’s biography of Duncan, which 

gives a tour of the couple’s library including the 

science books with its substantial collection of books 

by and about Darwin; a room full of books by a range 

of classical authors, like Ovid and Homer, as well as a 

Freud collection and books by a favorite philosopher, 

Alfred North Whitehead; a wide range 

of children’s books; the large collection 

of Joyce and Gertrude Stein in 

Gertrude Stein Room, and the 

foreign-language books of the central 

kabalistic text, the Zohar, in the 

“French Room.” It is well known that 

Duncan’s letters, interviews, and 

lectures – along with his conversation 

– are packed with a vast array of 

authors. There’s little surprise about 

his in-depth reading of the Western 

tradition, as well as his twentiethcentury 

forebears, such as Yeats, 

Pound, Williams, Louis Zukofsky, 

Rexroth, Patchen, D.H. Lawrence, 

H.D., Anaïs Nin, Dylan Thomas, and 

Henry Miller, only the way he read 

them and the obsessiveness with 

which he read and wrote about some 

like H.D. There is also his long 

reading of anarchist writers, so that early letters to 

Pauline Kael include lists of anarchist books he was 

trying to obtain. There are also endless references to 

philosophers and social scientists from Emile 

Durkheim to Arnold Toynbee, and from the 

philosopher Ernst Cassirer to Herbert Marcuse, who’s 

Eros and Civilization was part of the background 

reading on the Narcissus myth for Jess’s enormous 

collage project. And we are often told about Jess and 

Duncan’s shared love of fairy-tales and children’s 

literature, endlessly reading the fairy-tale writings of 

George MacDonald, the science fiction of J.L. Lloyd, 

C.S. Lewis, and J.R. Tolkien along with constant 

frame of the Oz books. But of particular interest was 

the oft-cited fact that Jess and Duncan – before they 

met each other – became intense readers not just of 

James Joyce but in particular of Joyce’s nearly 

unreadable Finnegan’s Wake with its non-stop allusions 

and puns, and puns making illusions. Finnegans Wake 

is just one, but perhaps a particularly illuminating 

touchstone for the work of both men. 

Similarly, Duncan was deeply invested in the 

visual artistic background of Jess’s work and not only 

by having given Jess an original copy of Max Ernst’s 

Surrealist collage book, Une semaine de bonté, as a 

birthday present in 1952, which became so important 

to the aesthetics of Jess’s “Paste-Ups.” He traces Jess’s 

work in a “tradition” leading back to Hieronymous 

Bosch, and including artists like Henry Fuseli, 

William Blake, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Odilon 

Redon. Even Jess’s teachers from the California 

School of Fine Arts, Edward Corbett and Hassel 

Smith, make appearances in Duncan’s poetry. It was, 

indeed, the immense impact of Clyfford Still’s show 

at the artist-run Metart Gallery in 1950 that Duncan 

attributed to his not following through with plans to 

go to Europe but rather to stay in San Francisco, 

where obviously important things were happening. 

At the core of An Opening of the Field is an 

interdisciplinary collaboration. That collaboration 

only starts with the pairing of Jess’s illustrations for 

Duncan’s poetry, as in the Duncan’s book of poems, 

Caesar’s Gate in 1955. Jess illustrated a children’s 

book written by Duncan, The Cat and the Blackbird, 

in the 1950s published by White Rabbit Press in 

1967, as well as illustrations for Michael McClure’s 

children’s book for his daughter, The Boobus and the 

Bunnyduck, in 1958. And Jess created cover art for 

numerous friends’ books, like Michael Davidson’s The 

Mutabilities & Fould Papers and Lynn Lonidier’s A 

Lesbian Estate: Poems 1970-1973. Significantly, he 

contributed art reproduced in a wide range of little 

magazines by friends of the couple, such as a comic 

7 

Robert Duncan by Jess


for Jack Spicer’s mimeographed J, and a cover for the 

mimeographed Floating Bear created by Diane di 

Prima and LeRoi Jones. Even Duncan got into the 

part, writing text in his own hand in Jess’s work and 

even creating the cartoonish colophon bunny rabbit 

used for the White Rabbit Press – as well as writing 

numerous essays for exhibitions for Jess, Herms, 

Berman and others. And it was Berman’s photograph 

of McClure with a lion mane and fur glued to his face 

that graced the cover of Ghost Tantras. These 

collaborations in their original versions are exactly the 

sorts of ephemera that fill the vitrine space of the 

exhibition. But the exhibition, the accompanying 

catalog, and the two men’s lives – along with those of 

their friends – is filled with a much more important 

form of collaboration, an important interdisciplinary 

symbiosis, or rather multibiosis, of art forms and 

media. 

Film was also a critical part of this 

multibiosis. Pauline Kael – best known for her 

decades as the doyenne of film criticism at The New 

Yorker – was a close friend of Duncan’s starting as an 

undergraduate at Berkeley. In 1955 she introduced 

European films as well as pairing unlikely films at the 

Cinema Guild and Studio on Berkeley’s Telegraph 

Avenue, and it was natural that Jess produced posters 

and flyers, such as, for her showings of Jean Cocteau’s 

Orpheus and Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach. One of 

the key elements in the development of the art film in 

the San Francisco Bay Area was the creation in 1946 

of the Art in Cinema series at the San Francisco 

Museum (which would last for nine years) by Frank 

Stauffacher under the museum’s pioneering director, 

Grace McCann Morley, who organized the first solo 

museum shows to numerous Abstract Expressionists 

from San Francisco (Jess’s teachers) and New York, 

including Jackson Pollock. So it is very much part of 

the Jess-Duncan story that James Broughton, the poet 

and filmmaker (also Pauline Kael’s lover who had a 

child with her) met with Duncan, Jess, Madeline 

Gleason, Even Triem, and Helen Adam in an ongoing 

poetry group as the selfproclaimed 

“Maidens,” 

had the premier of his 

short film made with 

painter/photographer 

Sidney Peterson The 

Potted Palm in the first 

year of the Art in 

Cinema series. If Jess 

and Duncan rented 

Broughton’s house while 

he was away from San 

Francisco, the 

experimental filmmaker 

Stan Brakhage lived 

briefly in the basement 

of Jess and Duncan’s 

house, just as 

Brakhage’s high-school 

friend from Denver, the 

filmmaker Lawrence 

Jordan, lived with 

Michael and Joanna McClure. With Bruce Conner, 

who worked in a multitude of media, including film, 

and became one of the stars of California assemblage, 

Jordan started Camera Obscura, a film society, as 

well as a theater devoted to 16 mm films, simply 

called the Movie. And Jordan collaborated with a 

number of the Jess and Duncan crowd, as well as 

collaborating directly with Jess on a film using Jess’s 

collages, Heavy Water, or The 40 & 1 Nights, or Jess’s 

Didactic Nickelodeon in the 1960s. 

Perhaps at the center of the story of the 

multibiosis around Jess and Duncan should be their 

creation, along with Jess’s classmate, Harry Jacobus, 

of the former garage turned into a gallery space and 

named by them the King Ubu Gallery after the 1896 

play by that forerunner of Dada and Surrealism, 

Alfred Jarry (copies of the New Directions translation 

with Jarry’s drawings can be found in the Dada- 

Surrealist bookcase across from the City Lights cash 

register for impulse buying like gum and candy at a 

supermarket checkout counter). King Ubu showed a 

Artworks by Jess and photo of Duncan 

& Jess © The Jess Collins Trust. 

8


range of artists, many from the California School of 

Fine Arts, and, as Christopher Wagstaff noted in an 

exhibition just on the gallery, artists were often paired 

who would contradict each other. And for the 

opening show, in addition to the uneven hanging of 

the artwork and murals painted on the walls creating 

a Dr. Cagliari imbalance, Miriam Hoffman’s 

sculptures created further dimensionality. And Jess 

later displayed a number of “Necrofacts,” 

assemblages of “real junk off the rubbish pile” in the 

gallery. But the gallery was also the venue for poetry 

readings for the likes of Jack Spicer, Philip Lamantia, 

Kenneth Rexroth, and Weldon Kees (who worked in a 

wide range of arts and music). Stan Brakhage’s first 

two films were played at the King Ubu. And Duncan 

put on Gertrude Stein’s The Five Georges complete 

with crayon-drawing backdrops by Duncan, of which 

King George III is in the current exhibition. One 

almost wishes that the exhibition could create the 

atmosphere of the King Ubu for the performance – 

because, after all, Duncan, Jess, and their friends 

were engaged in their own form of Wagnerian 

Gesamtkunstwerk – a combination of all the arts. It 

would be in the Six Gallery, which took over the 

space of King Ubu after its one-year run, that Allen 

Ginsberg first read his Howl (while Duncan and Jess 

were in Majorca) and Duncan put on his play Faust 

Foutu with Lawrence Jordan as the poet Faust, Jess 

playing his mother, and Michael McClure, Jack 

Spicer and other friends in various roles. It’s not that 

San Francisco with Jess and Duncan’s interlocking 

group of friends were alone in amalgamating the arts. 

Black Mountain College – where Duncan taught in 

the last year of its existence and put on plays (many of 

his final cast coming back to San Francisco with him) 

– offered a wide range of arts, with a faculty that 

included Josef Albers, modern dancer Merce 

Cunnningham, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, and 

Charles Olson. It’s just that the amalgamation of the 

arts were particularly important in San Francisco. 

Duncan himself remarked that poetry – before 

Ginsberg’s reading – was particularly a performative 

art in San Francisco. Although he was talking about 

the performance of the reading, Duncan notably 

wrote Medieval Scenes in 1947 in ten nightly sessions 

in a séance-like atmosphere with his poet friends 

around him – he wrote as performance. The art 

exhibition could also be a “happening” avant la lettre, 

such as Wallace Berman’s Semina Gallery exhibitions 

that lasted typically for a single night on a houseboat, 

which followed his friend George Herms’s “Secret 

Exhibition” in Southern California. 

Arguably, Jess is best known for his collages 

– with the multi-decade Narkissos at the apex. Jess 

himself claimed in an interview published as an 

appendix to An Opening of the Field: “I first thought 

of collage when I visited Brockway’s mother in 

Naples, near [Alamitos Bay] in Southern California, 

not far from where I grew up . . . and she said, ‘Look 

at he collage I’ve just done.’ She had cut pictures of 

flowers from magazines, and it was at that moment I 

saw collage for the first time.” Never mind that 

Brockway’s mother knew the term “collage.” Never 

mind the long tradition of collage in modern art by 

the likes of artists like Picasso and Braque. In fact, 

collage and assemblage – and I think they should be 

seen as two-and three-dimensional siblings, or rather 

of a piece – seemed to generate in both northern and 

southern California. If one writer on Jess dismissed 

as a joke the 1949 “Museum of Unknown and Little 

Known Objects” by the California School of Fine 

Arts teacher Clay Spohn – the same man who urged 

Calder to use wire – that is simply to forget that 

humor is quite a serious tool in art. Similarly, Hassel 

Smith, an important teacher of Jess, had done his 

own assemblages and held a party in the late 1940s 

where he asked his each of his guests to bring a Dada 

object. As Richard Diebenkorn noted about the late 

1940s, “Assemblage was just in the air” – as were 

various forms of collage. So Jess’s collage did not 

spring full-bodied like Athena out of the head of 

Brockway’s mother. 

More important, however, is to recognize 

that both collage and assemblage are by themselves a 

form of the multibiosis around Jess and Duncan for 

the very reason that they take their elements from all 

parts of life, past, present, future, as well as the 

esoteric and the mythological, and pull them together 

in concert and disconcert. In Jess’s log for the 

creation of Narkissos, he delves – and Duncan would 

partner in this research – deeply into the Narcissus 

myth as well as its offshoots, various echoes, such as 

in Chaucer as well as the flower. And his large collage 

is full of images reflecting each other as well as 

integrating large numbers of popular culture elements, 

such as a Krazy Kat cartoon, Chicago’s Monadnock 

building, and a frame from Fritz Lang’s film 

Metropolis. So too would his The Chariot: Tarot VII 

(1962) cram an enormous number of images, only 

starting with ancient Eastern and Western sculpture 

(including Dionysus with grapes), umbrellas, old cars, 

train engines, owls, a fox, lobster claws, the hull of an 

ancient boat, and various eyes. In fact, the various 

eyes – and eyelike images – looking from various 

perspectives (even upside down) and in various 

9


directions – that add one of the elements that pull the 

viewer’s eye within the collage. With the Oakland 

Museum’s important Pop Art U.S.A. show in 1963, 

Jess was added as an important predecessor but felt 

the fit wasn’t right and offered: “I’m afraid I’m too 

romantic, and perhaps worse yet, sentimental.” But 

more than that, Jess’s work had much greater depth 

and cultural layering than Pop Art. He might have 

turned a feminine hygiene advertisement “Modess . . 

. because” into Goddess Because Is Is Falling Asleep 

(1954) but the collage is hardly a one-liner. His work 

brings in much more. Similarly, Duncan famously 

described his own poetry as a “grand collage” made 

up of so many found pieces and allusions. In an 

interview Duncan stated that he did not have “any 

style” and ventured more broadly that, in fact, “the 

American style is polyglot assemblage” because 

“Americans have no history.” 

Duncan wrote for an exhibition of Jess’s 

“Translation” series: 

The set of Translations and their Imagist 

Texts as they are presented in this show in 

this complex game of associations, in which 

the paintings are cards, the arcana of an 

individual Tarot, a game of initiations, of 

evocations, speculations, exorcisms, may be 

related to the field of dream and magic in art 

which we inherit in the tradition of the 

Surrealists. A play at once sinister and 

rightful, like Lewis’s Carroll’s play with 

words, but here, a play with the properties of 

paints and picturing. 

Just as Jess’s Abstract Expressionist 

teachers tended not to give titles to their paintings 

because they didn’t want to limit their meaning, Jess 

often gave his “Translations” titles starting with “Fig.” 

or “Ex.,” suggesting, as Ingrid Schaffner has 

observed, that they were figures or examples of 

something outside the painting - in essence, an 

invisible text led them. And just as Jess’s art was a 

constant playing with meanings, so Duncan called his 

own poetry “multiphasic.” In addition to Jess and 

Duncan’s shared love of Finnegan’s Wake, Duncan 

offered that “[i]n the archeologist’s sense, the OED 

had opened up the layers of language, and the OED is 

another one of the complicating factors at every step 

of writing, because that gives me the layers of very 

single English word through its layers of time. . . .” 

In fact, he asserted: “After all, Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake 

is drawing directly on the OED all the time.” One of 

his problems with Milton’s Paradise Lost is that 

Milton “has an outline” and poetry should not – for 

that reason, he points to Williams’s Paterson as 

coming to an end and Williams discovering that it 

had not ended yet. And Duncan was fond of 

McClure’s beast language because it was a way of 

“using sound to disturb language.” Duncan and Jess 

and many around them were deeply involved in 

various esoteric traditions but they were particularly 

fond of the Zohar (David Meltzer’s introduction to 

kabala came when Duncan burst out of a restroom in 

the store where Meltzer worked, indignant that a 

library copy of Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in 

Jewish Mysticism had been left there). Duncan would 

talk about the world being made of letters in the 

kabalistic tradition – and, in a sense, that is symbolic 

for the range of artists around Duncan and Jess. 

Duncan, Jess and their friends were all, in a sense, 

engaged in a world made of symbols and letters and 

symbols and letters made up of the world. 

Notes 

“An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their 

Circle,” exhibition organized by the Crocker Art Museum 

and curated by Michael Duncan and Christopher Wagstaff. 

Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, June 9 – September 1, 

2013 

Grey Art Gallery, New York University, January 14, March 

29, 2014 

Katzen Arts Center, American University, April 26 – August 

17, 2014 

Pasadena Museum of California Art, Sept. 14, 2014 – Jan. 

11, 2015 

Michael Duncan and Christopher Wagstaff, An Opening of 

the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle (Pomegranate 

Communications, Inc., 2013) 

Lisa Jarnot, Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus: A 

Biography (Univ. of California Press, 2012) 

Christopher Wagstaff, ed., A Poet’s Mind: Collected Interviews 

with Robert Duncan, 1960-1985 (North Atlantic Books, 

2012) 

Michael Duncan, ed., Jess: O! Tricky Cad & Other Jessoterica 

(Siglio, 2012) 

10

BILL BURROUGHS 

IN AMSTERDAM 

by Eddie 

Woods 

William S. Burroughs and I performed at 

the same major Amsterdam literary event back in 

1978, Soyo Benn Posset’s first One World Poetry 

festival, P78. Whose closing night, where WSB and I 

took to the big stage separately, I wrote about in a 

long rapid-fire prose poem entitled “Poetry & the 

Punks: An Apocalyptic Confrontation” which was 

published in P78 Anthology. But that’s not when I got 

to meet the author of Naked Lunch, Junkie, and Queer 

up close and personal. Same as with Bill’s friend and 

partner in experimental cut-ups crime Brion Gysin, 

that would come later. In the case of William it was 

the following year, when Benn again brought Bill to 

Holland, and not for the last time either. On this 

occasion Benn asked the Dutch poet Harry 

Hoogstraten to organize a special reading at the 

Melkweg multi-media center for Burroughs and other 

outlaws. Those others being Jules Deelder (aka ‘the 

night mayor of Rotterdam’), shamanic legend Simon 

Vinkenoog, the rock star Herman Brood, and of 

course Harry. While to emcee this extraordinary 

happening Harry chose me. 

The day of the evening reading began with 

an afternoon dinner on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, a 

mere stone’s throw from the red-light district. With 

some of the attendees (albeit not William) gathering 

beforehand in the bar next door for nerves-settling 

drinks. Among whom was Brood, front man of the 

hugely popular band Wild Romance. Onstage, 

Herman (who in 2001 ended his life by flamboyantly 

leaping from the roof of the Amsterdam Hilton) was 

confidently outrageous. Yet in person he could often 

be incredibly shy. A trait I encountered whenever we 

bumped into one another and chatted at Padrino’s, a 

gangster restaurant near the Melkweg that didn’t start 

serving meals until midnight (and was also one of 

Soyo Benn’s favorite eateries). And who was Herman 

Brood’s junkie hero? You guessed it, Bill Burroughs. 

So much so that Herman, a talented artist as well as 

an accomplished singer/songwriter, had produced a 

series of comic strips for various underground music 

‘zines with the unnamed Burroughs as a main 

character. (Where are they today, these strips? God 

alone knows.) Now suddenly they were performing on 

the same program. And even sooner, Herman could 

connect one-on-one with his idol over dinner. Alas, it 

never happened. Nor did they get to exchange even a 

word. Shy Herman bottled, pure and simple. 

“Time to go eat,” I said to Herman in the 

bar. 

“Sorry, man, I gotta go get me some 

Angels. See you at the gig.” 

And off he sped to the nearby Hell’s Angels 

HQ, high on shots of speed and natural adrenalin. 

It was a narrow restaurant with a single 

long table accommodating a couple of dozen (mostly 

Dutch) writers and visiting firemen. William sat at 

the head, his back to the door. ‘Brave,’ I thought. ‘He 

must be packing a rod.’ (A love of guns was 

something Bill and I had in common.) I was at his 

left, Harry to his right. Benn had discreetly placed 

himself down at the end. William ate in silence, as 

did I. The rest blathered away, but not in our 

direction. Coffee and digestifs quickly segued into 

several writers coming forth to present Bill with 

books. Books in Dutch, a language Bill couldn’t read. 

Always the gentleman, Bill politely growled his thanks. 

That parade over and done with, I turned to Bill and 

11

Bill Burroughs in Amsterdam 

said: “I’m afraid I don’t have a book for you, but I do 

have this.” Whereupon I popped a gram ball of 

opium into the palm of his hand. 

“Oh, I know what this is,” he said, 

dividing the ball in two and immediately swallowing a 

half. 

“Say,” he then said, “allow me to return 

the favor.” 

And reaching into his jacket pocket, he 

withdrew a slim plastic container full of little pink 

pills and handed it to me saying: “Here, this is for 

you. I scored them in Paris, but have more at the 

hotel.” 

They were codeine, a drug I wasn’t much 

familiar with. 

“Much obliged,” said I. “But ah, how 

many should I take?” 

I’m a thin chap. In those days with 

particularly gaunt facial features. And so my question 

somewhat startled William. 

“How many? Dunno. Ten, maybe twelve. 

Hell, take as many as you like, you’re an old veteran!” 

Haha, Bill Burroughs reckoned I was a 

fellow junkie! 

There was still plenty of time to kill before 

the reading, and everyone headed to the Melkweg by 

William Burroughs, possibly Herbert Huncke’s 

pal Louis Cartwright took the picture 

12 

varied means, some individually, others in small 

groups. By then Bill and I had gotten into conversing, 

and so found ourselves walking together at a slow 

pace far behind the rest. We discussed heroin (“How 

much does it go for here?” Bill queried); guns (“In 

New York if you’re carrying and shoot someone in 

self-defense, no one will bother you,” he insisted, 

much to this New Yorker’s surprise); his son Billy, 

who was less than two years away from dying at age 

33; Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the founder of 

Naropa University and Allen Ginsberg’s guru 

(“He definitely has powers,” William stated 

unreservedly, adding he saw that clearly 

when Trungpa visited Billy in hospital). That 

and all sorts of groovy stuff, with me doing 

most of the asking and listening. 

The event itself was a blast. With 

the packed-house Fonteinzaal audience 

paying rapt attention throughout. Deelder 

rapped rhythmic Chicago-style jazz poetry; 

Vinkenoog machinegun-delivered his usual 

high-powered mixture of psychedelic magic; 

Harry recited poems in English (the language 

he’d adopted for his writings during a 

lengthy stay in Ireland); William gravelyvoiced 

read a number of short tracts, 

including “Bugger the Queen” (that I 

eventually arranged for International Times in 

London to publish); with me reeling out my 

own verses in between making the 

introductions. Herman, who was nowhere in 

sight until I caught a glimpse of him up in 

the balcony sound room, I’d decided to save 

for last. And now it was time. 

“Ladies and gentlemen,” I called out, “let’s 

give an uproariously warm welcome to the one and 

only Herman Brood.” 

“I told you to wait, fucker!” screamed 

Herman from God knows where. (He hadn’t told me, 

but never mind.) 

“Seems Herman’s not quite ready, folks,” I 

laughed into the microphone. “So while he’s 

powdering his nose [more discreet than saying 

‘shooting up,’ eh], I’ll read a poem by Ira Cohen that 

I’m sure Herman will especially appreciate hearing. 

It’s entitled ‘A Brickbat for Herman Brood or P78 

Meets Wild Romance in Paradiso.’” 

I’ve no idea if Herman bothered to listen, 

but the crowd was stunned as I belted out lines like 

‘Let the bread stay in the breadbox, Herman’ and

Bill Burroughs in Amsterdam 

‘Patti Smith queens your pawn - Anarchy prevails - It 

is poetry which breaks the bars of jails!’ 

No sooner had I finished than a 

thoroughly stoned Herman comes strolling towards 

the stage, his face beaming with a broad smile. 

“Alles okay, baba? I ask. 

“I’m fine, man, just fine,” he drawls. 

Followed by, “I brought some friends with me.” 

The friends were half a dozen wellseasoned 

Hell’s Angels, each of them holding a large 

bottle of beer. Herman would be knocking out 

poems, not singing songs. And minus his band, these 

dudes were his backup boys. 

They accompanied his 

recitations by stomping their 

feet in cadence to his words. It 

was a perfect performance that 

saw the audience cheering and 

howling for more. They got 

more, though not from Herman. 

He’d disappeared with all but 

one of the Angels, the tallest of 

the lot. Who then approached 

me and politely asked if he could 

recite a poem. I said sure, 

introduced him, he stepped up 

to the mike, pulled a tiny slip of 

paper from his jeans’ bicycle-key pocket, and 

“In New York if 

you’re carrying 

and shoot someone 

in self- 

defense, no one 

will bother 

you.” 

William 

Burroughs to 

Eddie Woods 

proceeded to recite an unbelievably sweet love poem. 

A pin-drop silence gave way to a round of applause. 

Bringing the reading to a close, I made a 

point of thanking William for the many hours of 

reading pleasure he’d afforded me over the years. 

“Pleasure?” Simon snarled loudly. “He’s 

trying to stick a knife in your heart!” 

“And if I get a kick out of that,” I snapped 

back, “what’s it to you?” 

The audience filed out...to the main hall, 

the café, the bar, the house dealer’s counter, wherever. 

We participants, sans Herman, adjourned to the 

Melkweg office, with the Angels tagging along. 

“Where’s Jack?” Angel Jack demanded to 

know from William. 

“He’s wherever you care to find him,” Bill 

responded, in his mind meaning Kerouac. 

“I’m Jack,” said Jack, stabbing at his own 

chest with a forefinger. 

“Oh, yes, I know what you mean,” Bill 

replied with a wise nod of the head. “It’s all in the 

Tibetan Book of the Dead.” 

“Eddie, get those guys out of here,” Soyo 

Benn pleaded with me, “before they drive William 

nuts.” 

I forget how exactly, but I got them to 

leave without a fuss. 

William made his exit shortly afterwards. 

We shook hands. Then referring to the remainder of 

the opium he’d already gulped down, he said: “Thank 

you, Eddie, I’m well away.” 

William and I next saw each other in 1985 

when he and his manager James Grauerholz, in 

company with Benn, visited Ins & Outs Press for a 

long afternoon into early evening. 

Plus we spoke on a live telephone 

hookup (that the audience could 

hear) during a 1993 Soyo Bennorganized 

Burroughs Tribute at the 

Melkweg that I co-emceed. And I 

had Bill affirm that I was not the 

Eddie Woods who witnessed him 

accidently shooting and killing his 

wife Joan Vollmer Burroughs in 

Mexico. (Literary Outlaw, Ted 

Morgan’s biography of William, had 

many people seriously believing it 

was me.) 

“No, Eddie,” Bill said 

dryly, “it wasn’t you.” And went on to describe my 

infamous namesake. Red hair, short, a good nine 

years younger than I, et cetera. I wrote about all of 

this in the essay “Thank God You’re Not Eddie 

Woods” that I delivered at the William Burroughs 

conference Naked Lunch@50 in Paris, 2009, and was 

subsequently published in Beat Scene. 

Btw, I was only half-joking when I said that 

Burroughs and Gysin were partners in cut-up crime. 

1) I don’t much care for the technique. (Neither did 

Gregory Corso, who collaborated on Minutes to Go 

only reluctantly); 2) To the extent it has any validity, I 

consider Harold Norse to be its real master. As 

exemplified in his ground-breaking novella Beat Hotel; 

3) I by far prefer Burroughs’ straighter writings to any 

of the cut-ups. None of which negates Norman 

Mailer’s 1962 appraisal of Burroughs as “the only 

American novelist living today who may conceivably 

be possessed by genius.” Hear, hear. That’s my Bill 

Burroughs, all right. 

© 2014 by Eddie Woods 

EDDIE WOODS is at http://eddiewoods.nl/ 

13

A “Half-American” 

Writer 

Joyce ce Johnson 

I 

t is possible to know someone and not know them, 

especially when you are twenty-one and in love, and when 

there are painful things the other person never talks about. 

For about two years, starting one January night in 

1957, nine months before the publication of On the Road, 

Jack Kerouac came and went in my life. I knew, of course, 

that he was of French Canadian extraction, had a mother 

he called Memere, who spoke to him in French, that he was 

very fond of French cooking and that he still held on to his 

old dream of going to live someday in Paris, a dream he 

would never realize. In the spring of that first year I knew 

him, he finally did pass through there, completely broke as 

usual—but Paris, like nearly all his dreamed of destinations, 

was a disappointment. “It didn’t seem to want me,” was 

how he put it. (Perhaps part of the problem was that 

Parisians didn’t think much of the way Jack spoke French.) 

Before that he’d been in London, where he’d made a point 

of looking up his family’s Breton coat of arms in the British 

Museum Library. There he’d found the motto, Aimer, 

travailler, soufrir. Which he felt was the perfect summation 

of his life, as he told me when he was back in New York. 

I often heard him speaking in a low voice to my grey 

cat, to whom he’d given a French Canadian name, Tigris. 

He would feed Tigris in a way that never failed to charm 

me. Like a small boy, he’d lie flat on his belly with his chin 

against the rim of the cat’s bowl, murmuring encouraging 

words, half in French, half in English. Many years later 

when I read Vision of Gerard, the eerie significance of these 

little scenes dawned on me for the first time when I came to 

the lines: When the little kitty is given his milk, I imitate 

Gerard and get down on my stomach…”You happy, Ti Pou? – 

your nice lala.” I realized then that without knowing it I had 

witnessed a secret sacrament, heard Jack Kerouac calling up 

his dead nine-year-old Franco American brother, who was in 

some ways the submerged half of himself. 

Jack never explained to me that when he was a kid in 

Lowell, Massachusetts, he had only spoken the French 

Canadian language in his household and that he had not 

been a fluid English speaker until his late teens. I would 

have been astonished to learn that all his life, to one degree 

or another, he had been translating the French words in 

which he dreamed and thought into their English 

equivalents. Like most people who read On the Road when 

it came out six years after Jack had written it, I would 

certainly never have thought of Jack Kerouac as a bilingual 

writer, for I could think of no contemporary novelist who 

seemed so completely in the American grain and my ear did 

not pick up the French overtones in Sal Paradise’s voice, 

which was one of the things, I now realize, that gave Jack’s 

first-person prose such a distinctive quality. That first 

person voice seemed so natural and effortless, in fact, that I 

did not realize it had taken Jack ten years and piles of 

discarded manuscripts to finally arrive at it — or that it was 

a voice he’d kept suppressing in his writing, until, in the 

spring of 1951, he’d finally embraced and accepted its 

power, and written On the Road in the now legendary 21 

days of concentrated effort in one long typed paragraph on 

a 120-foot scroll of paper. Jack did not mention Franco 

Americans in the book I first read in its much edited version, 

although its narrator, Sal Paradise, apparently Italian 

American, expressed powerful feelings of identification with 

black and Hispanic people. 

14

A Half-American 

Writer 

During the period I was involved with Jack, his 

publisher, Viking Press, despite the huge recent success of 

On the Road, turned down his first Lowell novel, Dr. Sax, 

which dealt with his Franco American childhood and 

opened with the blatantly French-sounding sentence, “In 

Centralville I was born.” It did not occur to me that the 

book’s ethnic subject matter may have been one of the 

reasons for this rejection and for the Viking editors’ lack of 

interest in any novel about Jack’s boyhood, though he was 

encouraged to write Dharma Bums as a followup to On the 

Road. Now that I’ve written my Kerouac biography, I am 

sometimes amazed by how much I didn’t understand 

during the time I knew Jack. 

Until it was possible for me to 

read Jack’s journals in the Kerouac 

archive at the New York Public 

Library, I had never seen this 

revelatory passage he wrote at 23 

shortly after the war had ended, just 

after he taken a walk through his 

neighborhood in Queens: 

Today, Labor Day, a clear sunny 

day with the tender blue char in the sky 

hinting of October. I felt a resurgence of 

the old feeling, the old Faustian urge to 

understand the whole in one sweep and 

to express it in one magnificent work— 

mainly America and American life. 

Bunting, flying leaves, families 

drinking beer in their own backyard, 

cars filling the highways…Children 

tanned and ready for school, the smell of 

roasts coming from the cottages on the 

leafy street, the whole rich American life 

in one panorama. I had the feeling 

that I was alien to all this…that all this could never be mine, 

only to express…All of this America, not for my likes, never. It’s 

strange, since I’m aware that I understand all this far more than 

the people who do have the American richness in 

them.”Acknowledging the fact that because of the Breton 

bleakness in his soul, he would always feel like an outsider in 

this country, Jack called himself only half-American. Six 

years later, when it came time to write a novel that would 

sweep its readers westward across the American landscape, 

that novel would be written with the passion of an outsider. 

All this America, not for my likes, never. Doesn’t that line 

sound directly translated from the French? And isn’t that 

feeling of not entirely belonging here very American itself? 

In the fall of 1940, the incoming freshman John L. 

Kerouac arrived at Columbia on a football scholarship after 

spending two terms at the Horace Mann prep school 

where he had been sent to make up some courses. This was a 

milestone in Jack’s American journey. His entry into a 

university was the goal he had set himself by the time he 

started high school, already knowing he wanted to be a 

writer, already aware there was no way he could use the 

French Canadian language for the books he dreamed of 

writing and that he would have to find a way of leaving 

Lowell, Massachusetts where he had grown up in one of the 

insular French-speaking communities that could be found 

throughout New England. In his sophomore year, however, 

he would disappoint his family by walking away from his 

opportunity to get a college education. Football practice had 

left him little time for his studies 

and no time to write and he had 

fallen under the spell of Thomas 

Wolfe. He took a bus southward, 

then changed his mind and went 

north. He found a job in a garage 

in Hartford, rented a small room 

and an Underwood typewriter, 

wrote one story after another and 

experienced hunger for the first 

time. 

Not even the barrier of 

language could extinguish Jack’s 

inborn need to write. From the 

time he was eleven, he began 

working to make himself fluent 

in English—a process that 

continued into his adult life— 

and wrote a little novel, Jack 

Kerouac Explores the Merrimack, 

heavily influenced by 

Huckleberry Finn. His juvenilia 

includes some remarkable handprinted newspapers, inspired 

by the racing papers, his father constantly consulted for tips 

on horses. Calling himself Jack Lewis, Jack imagined himself 

its publisher, its chief reporter, a celebrated jockey and the 

owner of a prizewinning horse named Repulsion—he 

evidently loved the forceful sound of that word without 

knowing it meant the opposite of what he intended. 

Making a similar mistake, he made up a wizard named Dr. 

Malodorous—MaloDORus was probably how he 

pronounced it –he considered this the most beautiful word 

he knew. At seventeen, when Jack was trying to write like 

William Saroyan, he papered the walls of his room with lists 

of words he’d found in the dictionary. At twenty-two, in 

what he called his ne-Rimbaudean period, he was still 

working at increasing his vocabulary, writing the definitions 

of calescent, ectogenic, dysphasia and surah into his notebook, 

15 

above, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir by Joyce Johnson, 

which originally appeared in 1983, published by Houghton 

Miflin. Note Joyce standing in the shadows of love behind 

Jack Kerouac.


Writer 

in case he should ever need to use them. “Smooth as surah” 

he wrote years later in Visions of Gerard, describing the skin 

of a character named Mr. Groscorp. 

In Lowell, Jack had begun his education at the 

neighborhood parochial school, St. Louis de France. 

There the morning classes were taught in French and the 

afternoon classes were taught in English. The students 

pledged allegiance to la race Canadienne as well as the 

American flag. The huge redbrick mills along the 

Merrimack River pointed to the fate that awaited many 

of Jack’s classmates and that Jack would become determined 

to escape. Very few young Franco Americans in Jack’s day 

left the communities they had been raised in or succeeded in 

going to college; very few attempted the kind of lonely 

journey Jack would take into the American mainstream. (“I 

don’t even look like a 

writer,” Jack would later 

confess to his journal. “I 

look like a lumberjack.”) 

There was still tremendous 

prejudice against Jack’s 

people, with most 

Americans believing they 

were backward. Up where 

Jack came from they were 

called “white niggers” of 

“the Chinese of New 

England.” “Dumb 

Canuck” was a common epithet that I even heard used 

teasingly by one of Jack’s friends. But even in the 1950’s, 

Franco Americans still kept to themselves for other reasons: 

the almost mystical belief that they must uphold the old 

ideals and customs of what they called la survivance and 

continue to speak their distinctive language, which was so 

woven into their religion. 

Lowell, the birthplace of the American industrial 

revolution, was a melting pot, where people from various 

ethnic groups—Irish Catholic, Greek, Syrian, as well as a 

sprinkling of Jews—had come in the last decades of the 19 th 

century to make their living in the mills, and where the 

French Canadians, escaping from starvation on their 

hardscrabble potato farms in Quebec, had been willing to 

take the worst jobs. People from these different groups 

mingled in the mills and the bustling downtown streets and 

went home to their separate neighborhoods; their children 

met each other in Lowell’s public schools and on the 

baseball fields. There were handsome pubic buildings in 

Lowell, such as the Public Library and the Atheneum that 

had been built by wealthy New England mill owners; there 

were also neighborhoods of wooden tenements where there 

were frequent fires and epidemics of cholera and meningitis 

and where many of the workers in the textile mills, where 

the windows were nailed shut, suffered from emphysema 

and tuberculosis. The deaths of children were not at all 

uncommon in Lowell. Jack’s mother had grown up in the 

nearby town of Nashua and gone to work in a shoe factory 

at the age of fifteen; she could write English quite fluently 

but never learned to speak it well. Jack’s. Father, Leo 

Kerouac, was bright and enterprising, and his command of 

English was unusually good. He was a reader, who believed 

that nothing compared to French culture, and worshipped 

Balzac and Victor Hugo. Until he lost it during 

the Depression, when the Kerouac’s became poor, Leo had 

his own small printing business, which did not confine itself 

to the Franco American community. Compared to most 

French kids, Jack’s early years were relatively privileged, 

although they were 

darkened by the death of 

his nine-year-old brother 

Gerard—a traumatic event 

that haunted Jack his entire 

life... 

Jack picked up his 

first words in English from 

the only Irish Catholic boy 

in his French-speaking 

kindergarten. He learned 

more from the half days of 

instruction in his parish 

school, St. Louis de France, but he undoubtedly would 

have continued his French education through high school, 

if the rezoning of his French Catholic middle school had not 

forced him to transfer to Bartlett Junior High School in 

Seventh Grade. If this had not happened, his grasp of 

English might have remained uncertain and handicapped 

his writing. His parents registered him at Bartlett as a 

commercial student. 

Embarrassed by his accent, one of the contributing factors 

to his lifelong shyness, he rarely spoke in his classes. 

Fortunately a discerning English teacher noticed how 

surprisingly well Jackie Kerouac could write. She advised 

him to start going to the Public Library and recommended 

that he read Longfellow and Twain. Every Saturday he took 

home an armload of books. He was a book-hungry kid, 

who read indiscriminately and ravenously—everything from 

The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come to the novels of 

Jack London, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle. At 

sixteen, when he was cutting school to spend days at the 

library, he would discover Goethe, who had a lasting 

influence on his thinking. He was also addicted to pulp 

fiction, absorbing the American vernacular from The Shadow 

series, as well as from comics, sports novels and westerns. 

A happy Jack Kerouac 

16


Writer 

Another important factor in Jack’s Americanization were the 

movies he saw every Saturday from the balcony of Lowell’s 

Royal Theater. There he watched cowboys gallop across the 

screen, heard the twang of W.C. Fields and the New Yorkese 

of Groucho Marx. His novels would be filled with cinematic 

references. 

Jack later admitted that the more he set himself to 

master English, the more he felt he lost some of his French. 

“I have no language of my own,” he would tell Yvonne 

LeMaitre, who had reviewed his first novel, The Town and 

the City for a Franco-American newspaper. It would take 

Jack a long time before he instinctively made the transition 

from one language to another. A note in his 1945 journals 

shows that it was still a process accompanied by a very 

conscious shifting of gears. First Jack had to remind himself 

that he was not writing in French; then he had to figure out 

how to capture his “simultaneous impressions” in English. 

Then, because he was aiming at what he called “sense 

thinking,” he had to take care not to fall into the English 

literary tradition of reporting on what the writer was feeling. 

Jack’s father believed that his son could rescue the 

family from poverty by becoming a football star. In his 

estimation, writers and artists were parasites. “There’s no one 

with a name like Kerouac in the writing game,” he told Jack, 

convinced that only a Frenchman like Victor Hugo with a 

mastery of classical French could become a writer. The 

French Canadian language, as it was spoken in Lowell, was 

not the French spoken in Paris, or the French spoken in 

Montreal, where it was called joual. It was a richly expressive 

oral language that varied from place to place and, even in 

the early 20 th century lacked fixed spellings. Joual had 

developed from the regional dialects the French settlers 

brought to Canada in the 17 th and 18 th centuries, plus an 

accumulation of words picked up the Iroquois and the 

English. The Parisians said pommes de terres for potatoes; the 

Quebecois said patates. Jack’s mother said mue for me; Victor 

Hugo said moi. Even as he was preparing himself to leave it 

behind, Jack was proud of the richness of his native 

language. “The language called Canadian French is the 

strongest in the world when it comes to words of power,” he 

wrote at nineteen. “It is too bad that one cannot study it in 

college, for it is one of the language languages in the 

world…it is the language of the tongue and not of the 

pen…it is a terrific, a huge language.” In his thirties, he 

would defiantly begin to write passages in that language in 

his novels. 

In 1941, just as Jack began his second year at 

Columbia, he read Look Homeward Angel by Thomas 

Wolfe—a writer with whom he felt an immediate 

psychological affinity and whose depictions of small town 

and urban America and richly lyrical, maximalist prose style 

would have a tremendous influence upon the fiction Jack 

would attempt to write himself, as he worked toward 

producing his own Great American Novel. All through his 

years of apprenticeship, Jack started many novels that he 

would decide to put aside, only completing three of them, 

the most important of which was The Town and the City, 

published in 1950. All of them were novels with an 

autobiographical base in which Jack heavily fictionalized his 

own experiences; all of the protagonists were given typical 

American names, and in none of these books did Jack deal 

with his Franco American identity. Envisioning The Town 

and the City as a “universal American story,” Jack deliberately 

avoided emphasizing the Martin family’s half Franco- 

American background and their devout Catholicism. “Isn’t it 

true,” he wrote to Yvonne LeMaitre, who had astutely raised 

questions about these issues, “that French Canadians 

everywhere tend to hide their real sources?” They were able 

to do that, Jack thought, because unlike other minorities, 

such as Jews or Italians, they could pass as “Anglo Saxon.” A 

fiction writer today, in our multi-culturally minded era, 

would make the most of his hyphenated background and in 

fact would probably consider it an asset. But sixty years 

ago, the label “Franco America” would have been a liability 

for an ambitious novelist. 

In 1946, while writing the opening chapters of The 

Town and the City, Jack had an idea for a road novel that he 

had to put aside for the time being. It would be a book in 

which a lone traveler, recovering from a serious illness, would 

take a journey across America encountering a series of 

symbolic characters. Jack had yet to meet Neal Cassady, who 

would inspire the character Dean Moriarty (the all-American 

alter ego of the secretly French Sal Paradise). When Jack 

returned to this idea two years later, after finishing The Town 

and the City, he found himself unable to get the novel off to 

a good start and had to discard one manuscript after 

another, which is certainly the most brutal form of revision. 

He planned to make the story, with its all American cast of 

characters, even more elaborately fictionalized than the one 

in his first novel. But he seemed unable to find the right 

voice in which to write it. He still deliberately avoided using 

the first person and clung to the Wolfean third-person 

omniscient narration he had been using before. 

In 1950, following the disappointing reception of 

his first novel, the issue of obscuring his ethnic identity in 

his writing began to torment him. In May of that year, guilt 

Jack had not previously acknowledged rose to the surface. 

He recorded in his journal a dreamlike visitation from a 

Franco American older brother, who scolded him for trying 

to defrench himself. “He hinted I should go to Lowell, or 

Canada, or France, and become a Frenchman again and 

write in French and shut up. He keeps telling me to shut 

17


Writer 

up. When I can’t sleep because my mind is ringing with 

gongs of English thought and sentences, he says, Pense en 

Francais, knowing I will calm down and go to sleep in 

simplicity.” Jack saw this older brother as “my original self 

returning after all the years since I was a child trying to 

become un Anglais in Lowell from shame of being a 

‘Canuck.” He wrote that it was actually the first time he 

understood that he had “undergone the same feelings any 

Jew, Negro or Italian feels in America, so cleverly had I 

concealed them, even from myself, and with such talented, 

sullen aplomb for a kid.” 

Jack spent that summer in Mexico City, a place that 

in many ways reminded him of Lowell with its poverty and 

its many Catholic churches. There he continued to struggle 

with the road novel that was giving him so much trouble. 

After his mother forwarded him Yvonne LeMaitre’s review 

of the The Town and the City, in which she praised his 

writing but called his novel a tree without roots, he 

immediately started on a new book called Gone on the Road 

about a 15-year-old Franco American kid from New 

Hampshire called Freddie Boncoeur, who hitchhikes across 

America with an older and wiser cousin in search of 

Freddie’s lost father. This novel too he put aside after 

returning to New York in the fall and resuming his 

frustrating attempts to write his road novel with American 

characters. It was a wonder the Jack didn’t completely wear 

out his material or his desire to write On the Road. 

In December, however, something very important 

happened that immediately opened up a new direction for 

his work. Jack received a 40-page confessional letter from 

Neal Cassady that immediately made him decide to 

renounce both “fiction and fear.” Energized by the power 

and fluency of working directly from memory, Jack 

responded to Neal with a series of memoirlike letters about 

his Lowell childhood and the death of his brother Gerard. 

It was the most stunning writing Jack had ever done, and he 

could feel it. “The Voice is all!” he wrote Neal triumphantly. 

He was finally starting to use the richly evocative first-person 

voice he had been suppressing in his fiction. 

In March of 1951, Jack went even further— 

experimenting for the first time in writing entirely in 

French. His first experiment was the opening section of a 

projected novel called “Sur la Route” in an awkward French 

literary style he apparently had difficulty sustaining. His 

second experiment, La Nuit Est ma Femme, which he also 

called Les Travaux de Michel Bretagne (Michel Bretagne’s Jobs) 

was far more successful—in fact, it’s a wonderful piece of 

writing that has never been transcribed from his notebook, 

and needs to be carefully translated and published so that 

everyone can read it. Written in a strong, direct, 

conversational first-person voice, with great immediacy and 

intimacy, it tells the story of an unsuccessful Franco 

American writer who has sacrificed everything to his creative 

work and feels the need to account for himself. 

In this manuscript, Jack wrote about his lifelong 

dilemma—the conflict between what a man had to do in 

order to survive and the dreams of immortality that kept 

him an artist child, preventing him from making the 

compromises others made out of necessity and causing him 

to walk away from one demeaning job after another. He 

wrote about the mill whistles he used to hear in Lowell and 

his fear that he could end up as one of the workers trudging 

toward the factories that made him get a scholarship and 

start writing, and how the die was cast once he’d discovered 

the classic American writers, Twain, Melville, Thoreau and 

Wolfe, who wrote what he called “unknown, unsoundable 

books.” Jack translated one important passage from this 

book into English: “I wanted to write in a large form which 

was free and magnificent like that, a form which would give 

me a chance to go out the window and not stay in the room 

all the time with old ladies like Henry James and his 

European sisters.” 

He wrote the sixty pages of La Nuit Est Ma Femme in 

mid-March. In mid-April, when he sat down to write On 

the Road he would keep the ingenuous-sounding 

forthrightness of the Michel Bretagne voice as well as the 

overtones of its cadences and the tinge of melancholy that 

washes through it even when its energies seem highest. The 

voice he gave his first-person narrator would seem to Jack’s 

future readers as American as apple pie, but it had been 

born in French. But very soon after finishing On the Road, 

Jack felt dissatisfied with it. He knew he had still not been 

really truthful in the way he portrayed the protagonist he’d 

based on himself, even though he’d called him Jack 

Kerouac, for he had only dealt with the question of his 

ethnicity between the lines—notably in a rueful passage 

about having “white ambitions,” which could only have 

been written by someone who did not feel “white,” with 

the privileged status that that word implied. 

In Kerouac’s third novel, Visions of Cody, Jack would 

finally openly inhabit his Franco American identity and 

never conceal it again, and he would boldly and deliberately 

include passages and expressions in the French Canadian 

language. The Jack Duluoz of Cody would be a further 

exploration of that melancholy, half-American outsider 

Michel Bretagne of La Nuit Est Ma Femme.“ 

The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac by Joyce 

Johnson - was published in recent times by the Viking Press. 

18

CONVERSATIONS 

with KEN KESEY 

edited by Scott F. . Par 

arker 

(University Press of Mississippi) 

Seventeen interviews from a man who 

apparently didn’t enjoy them much at all. They stretch 

from the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital in 1959, with 

Kesey having taken LSD, to his last interview in 1999 

with Mike Finioa. As editor Scott Parker points out, 

there is an air of regret that can be traced in Kesey, 

throughout these interviews, a regret that his extracurricular 

activities took him away from a fuller 

writing life. Put simply, he wished he had written 

more books. 

Kesey was more than a novelist of course. An 

iconic trailblazing figure, an integral personality at the 

head of this thing loosely called the ‘Sixties Revolution.’ 

Furthur was his bus and 

his aim. His Paris Review 

interview in 1993 highlights his 

ambitions after graduating from 

the famous Wallace Stegner 

writing program at Stanford 

University. A course that also 

included Robert Stone, Wendell 

Berry and Larry McMurtry. 

Stegner and Kesey clashed over 

the direction Kesey took after 

the course. Kesey theorised that 

Stegner contented himself with 

Jack Daniels and Kesey opted 

for LSD. 

To some, Kesey remains 

a one hit wonder. That wonder 

being One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s 

Nest. The big advantage that 

epic novel had was being filmed 

and given widespread promotion 

with Jack Nicholson in the key role of Randell P. 

McMurphy. That film fixed the book in a wider 

consciousness and cemented Kesey’s reputation. Yet it 

was a big thing to live up to. There are many who cite 

Sometimes a Great Notion as a better book. Again that 

book was turned into a film, with Paul Newman 

involved. Somehow it never quite captured the 

imagination in the same fashion. The film royalties 

must have provided a cushion financially for Kesey, 

perhaps taking away the urgency to write. Certainly 

there were issues he had with the film of Cuckoo’s 

Nest. In an interview with Allan Balliett for Beat Scene 

(not included in this collection) some years go, Kesey 

talks of not being invited to the film premiere. 

Kesey has any number of gripes, but he gripes in a 

good natured way, he seems to be a man without a 

malicious bone in his body. Talking to Terry Gross in 

1989 he discusses the Tom Wolfe depiction of him in 

The Electric Kool Aid Test book, a work which fixed 

Kesey’s image firmly in a much wider public view. 

Kesey is at pains to point out his admiration for 

Wolfe, who, he says, didn’t have a tape recorder with 

him, he simply possessed a keen, observant nature. 

However, he stresses that Wolfe 

only relayed part of who Kesey was 

in his book. The picture is incomplete. 

What is evident from these 

intriguing interviews is that like 

Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey was a 

thorn in the side of right wing, 

repressive factions inside the 

American government. He was 

adept at exposing CIA funded 

initiatives - supposedly innocent 

organisations, that the covert 

government departments utilised to 

infiltrate everyday American life. It 

might have taken Ginsberg and 

Kesey, who was initially sceptical of 

Ginsberg’s CIA allegations, twenty 

years or more to expose the covert 

CIA operations, but they were both 

dogged individuals. Ken Kesey may 

have written but a few books but they all made their 

mark. These interviews reveal a man of high ideals. 

ISBN 978-1-61703-982-9 - Paperback $25 

University Press of Mississippi, 3825 Ridgewood 

Road, Jackson, MS 39211-6492, USA 

www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1666 

Colin Cooper 

19

Really Lost Books 

Fade Out 

Douglas Woolf 

(Penguin) 

by Kevin Ring 

It took twelve years for Douglas Woolf to see 

his 1959 novel Fade Out get publication in England as 

a mass market paperback. It had limited circulation 

through Weidenfeld and Nicholson in England in 

1968. The paperback copy I have here on the table 

was issued in 1971 in this country. He’s been locked 

in my memory banks for a considerable time. His 

name cropped up first in New 

American Story back in 1965, issued 

“Was born 

in 1956 in 

an Arizona 

ghost town, 

where I 

wrote most 

of Fade 

Out...” 

in the USA by Barney Rosset’s Grove 

Press. Again Penguin got that book 

out in England in 1971. Douglas 

Woolf maybe felt 1971 was going to 

be his breakthrough year in Europe. 

My copy of New American Story was 

found in a used bookstore about 

1978, the previous owner’s name 

‘Mark Vallance’ is inscribed neatly 

inside and he’s dated it 1972. This is 

where Woolf comes in for me. Edited 

by Donald Allen, he of Grey Fox Press 

fame and Robert Creeley, the 

anthology collects work by such names 

as William Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr., Ed Dorn, 

John Rechy, William Eastlake, Leroi Jones, Michael 

Rumaker and Jack Kerouac. And Douglas Woolf. I 

wondered where Woolf fitted in that picture? He 

doesn’t seem to have mixed with the Beats. There are 

no photos of him with Creeley, or Dorn. He seems a 

maverick in a true sense. 

The Woolf stories in New American Story 

are The Flyman and The Cat. It is illuminating to read 

what I assume is Woolf’s self penned mini biography 

at the rear of that book, “Began in Lower Manhattan 

in 1922, and at a tender age was taken to the foot of 

Rockingstone Hill, in the suburbs. Moved back and 

forth until I went to Massachusetts for school and 

Harvard. Left childhood scenes for three years in AFS 

and AAF, as ambulance driver and airplane navigator, 

and have seldom returned except for short visits. Tried 

L.A., Denver, Miami, Chicago, joined by my wife on 

the way. Two daughters followed, and a degree from the 

University of New Mexico. Was born in 

1951 in a lookout tower on Cibola 

National Forest, and returned next two 

summers, during the last and best of 

which I wrote the Hypocritic Days in 

three sleepless months sitting on a ruptured 

disc. Have since moved through most of 

the far and southwest states as itinerant 

worker in ballparks, coliseums, icecream 

trucks, beanfields, etc, etc, settling for as 

long as a year at a time. Was born in 1956 

in an Arizona ghost town, where I wrote 

most of Fade Out. Was born in an 

Arizona copper town in 1958, and wrote 

Wall to Wall. Born in an Idaho lead and 

zinc town, 1960 and in San Isabel Forest, 

1962, but it gets harder every time. Died Spokane in 

1964, when John – Juan was born.” 

His name crops in the recently published 

Selected Letters of Robert Creeley. Woolf is mentioned 

by Creeley in passing in a note to Ed Dorn in 

September 1960, it is possibly in connection with 

New American Story. The mention is fleeting. By 

January 1961 Creeley is recommending Woolf ’s work 

to English poet and magazine editor Tom Raworth, 

listing Woolf’s address as Box 4321, Spokane 31, 

Washington. Raworth is looking for writers to fill the 

pages of his Outburst magazine. Woolf is in good 

20

company alongside Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, 

Denise Levertov, Michael Rumaker, Edward 

Dahlberg and William Eastlake. Creeley seems to rate 

Woolf. By August 1963 Creeley, in a letter to Paul 

Blackburn, describes Woolf as ‘…an exceptional man 

in all senses.’ 

The year moves on and in November 

Creeley is corresponding with another English poet 

and small press publisher Andrew Crozier. Here 

Creeley mentions The Moderns. That book is 

published by Corinth and edited by Leroi Jones. 

Creeley lists Kerouac, Dorm, Burroughs, Selby 

alongside Douglas Woolf. 

Fade Out isn’t in any sense a ‘Beat’ novel, far 

from it. Yet it deals with the afflictions of 1950s 

America in a subtle unassuming 

manner. The chief character is a Mr. 

Dick Twombly. A man of seventy 

four years old. He is a retired bank 

worker from Baltimore and he finds 

himself living with his daughter Kate 

and her less than lovable husband 

and daughter. Henry Miller might 

have called it an ‘air-conditioned 

nightmare.’ Mr. Twombly is a kindly, 

reflective man and he tolerates being 

patronized by his family with good 

grace, they watch his every move. 

Mr. Twombly has a friend, an elderly 

retired ex boxer, Behemoth Brown, 

who lives in similar circumstances 

with his own family. After being 

falsely accused of abducting two 

young children Mr. Twombly’s family 

pack him off to a residential home. Somehow he and 

Behemoth escape, they actually do have to escape, 

and then begins a series of adventures as they 

hitchhike to Phoenix in Arizona. Twombly really 

looks forward to the sun in Phoenix. 

The escapades of Midnight Cowboy spring to 

mind and the blurb on the back of my paperback 

actually mentions ‘Ratso,’ from that 1970s film. The 

innocence of Fade Out certainly echoes that of Dustin 

Hoffman and John Voight in their quest to the big 

city. Ed Dorn labels him “the nicest ironist since 

Swift.” (John Latta – Isola di Rifiuti – 2010) 

The Village Voice said of Fade Out, ‘….the 

comic masterpiece of one of contemporary America’s long 

neglected geniuses.” And the book, on the surface a 

simple tale of escape is doubly a satire on the 

consumerism of 1950s America. Easy to lampoon 

now from a distance of sixty or more years, but then 

a state of mind that held a stranglehold over a country 

hellbent on that new fridge was rampant. And the way 

ahead to luxury. 

Ed Dorn said of the book, “A very exciting 

work, and touching, but full of the cruelty of seeming 

casual life. You hold your breath in the reading.” 

Obviously the link with Creeley was strong; Creeley’s 

Divers Press had originally published Woolf ’s 

Hypocritic Days in 1955. Woolf also appears in Black 

Mountain Review No 2. So the pair had history as 

they say. 

There was another Woolf story, Bank Day, in 

The New Writing in the USA edited by Creeley and 

Allen and issued by Penguin in 1967. Again he was in 

the company of Kerouac, Snyder, Olson, and many 

others familiar to readers of Beat 

Scene. And there are references to 

him in the Ed Dorn and Amiri 

Baraka letters from New Mexico 

University Press. 

Fade Out is partially a tale 

of growing old in an America that is 

fixated on youth and money. Dick 

Twombly and Behemoth Brown 

escape the clutches of that 

materialistic nightmare and set out 

for a free life with dignity. America 

may have still had segregation in 

many states back then, but there also 

existed the ignominy of growing old 

in a country that didn’t have any 

time for it. Creeley said, “Woolf’s 

hero is a Don Quixote, who even 

when defeated still hears the echoes of 

his transforming dreams.” 

Woolf dedicated Fade Out to Creeley. The 

book remains in print, it was released by John 

Martin’s Black Sparrow Press in 1995. I understand it 

is that edition still. Woolf has been rediscovered any 

number of times over the years. His talents are 

regularly recognized by his peers, respected, praised 

and he certainly found a level of commercial and 

critical success without ever achieving the profile of 

the company he kept in New American Story or The 

Moderns. Fade Out is a little gem in Post war 

American writing. Douglas Woolf died in 1992 aged 

70. 

Notes 

John Latta’s comments can be found at...http://isola-dirifiuti.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/ed-dorns-douglas-woolf.html 

The cover shown here is the 1971 Penguin copy I have on my 

shelf here. 

Thanks to Jim Burns for input. 

21

THE BLOWTOP 

An early Beat Book? 

by Jim Burns 

Alvin Schwartz’s The Blowtop was published 

in 1948 and has sometimes been described as an 

early Beat novel, a claim that might be disputed by 

historians of the movement. But it does have some 

aspects that, if not necessarily placing it alongside 

books like John Clellon Holmes’s Go and Jack 

Kerouac’s The Town and the City, do put it in a 

tradition that if analysed openly can be seen to 

include Schwartz and Holmes and Kerouac. If a label 

is needed perhaps “Bohemian” might be the most 

useful one. 

When the story starts Archie, one of the 

central characters, has wandered into the 16 Bar, 

described as the “smallest of the motley row of night 

spots wedged within the one-block area between 

Sheridan Square and Barrow Street” in Greenwich 

Village. Archie is an aspiring novelist, though hasn’t 

managed to produce anything of consequence and has 

been reduced to acting as a ghost writer for someone 

else. He hasn’t been in the 16 Bar more than a few 

minutes when someone taps him on the shoulder and 

he turns to see Phil White, “a local hanger-on and 

occasional peddler of marijuana, from whom Archie 

had sometimes purchased reefers.” Phil collapses and 

when he’s picked up it’s discovered that he’s been 

shot. 

Archie shares accommodation with Fred, his 

collaborator on the book (“an elementary science 

text”) they’re supposed to be ghost writing, though 

neither of them can raise much enthusiasm for the 

project. Archie at one point remarks that if he “had 

some Benzedrine” he might be able to apply himself 

to the job. Before Archie had encountered Phil in the 

16 Bar he and Fred had been visited by Giordano, an 

artist who clearly has mental problems and is angry 

because he claims that Phil had cheated him in a drug 

deal. Archie and Fred discover that a gun they own 

illegally has disappeared from their apartment and 

that Giordano knew they had it. It doesn’t take them 

long to realise that Giordano is a prime suspect for 

Phil’s murder and that they’re likely to be visited by 

the police who have possession of Phil’s address book 

with details of his contacts and customers. The police 

are indeed beginning to call on people, and as the 

Inspector in charge of the case remarks: “Some 

blowtop pulled this, all right. And the Village is full of 

blowtops.” 

The story as I’ve outlined it so far may give 

the impression of it just being a crime novel with a 

Greenwich Village background, but it is, in fact, 

more than that. Without taking up too much space 

with a page-by-page account of what happens (and I 

don’t think it’s giving anything away to say that it was 

Giordano who shot Phil) the novel details how events 

have an effect on the various people involved. Archie 

and Fred react in different ways to being questioned 

by the police and to the suggestion that by owning a 

gun that wasn’t registered with the authorities, and 

allowing Giordano to obtain it, they have left 

themselves open to a charge of aiding and abetting a 

criminal and could be imprisoned. Archie and Fred 

fight, Fred’s girlfriend, Sylvia, falls out with him and 

decides that Sydney, an instructor at Columbia 

University, is a safer bet than the feckless Fred who 

seems to have little ambition and is evasive about 

committing himself in any way to Sylvia. And Archie 

visits Giordano, smokes marijuana with him, and 

comes to some sort of understanding about what the 

artist is aiming at with his abstract paintings. Some 

commentators have seen a kind of link to what the 

22

abstract expressionist painters were doing in the 

1940s in the descriptions of Giordano’s ideas. Even 

the detective involved appears to have been affected 

by his encounters with people like Archie and 

Giordano, though he does finally remark, “You 

fellows sure lead a queer life over there in the 

Village.” 

There are in certain of the discussions that 

take place between characters in The Blowtop 

interesting ideas raised about the nature of art, the 

relationship between criminals and the police, and the 

role of bohemians in society. When the detective calls 

on Giordano and notes that 

the painter is “high as a kite,” 

Giordano responds with a 

speech defending drug use: 

“You see me as a drug fiend, 

a man shorn of his senses and 

consequently an enemy of 

society. Arrest me then. Put 

me away. Shield your timid 

world from the devastating 

visions of my Olympian 

scorn. But remember – you 

cannot kill us all. There will 

be others to take my place.” 

It sounds not unlike some of 

the arguments put forward by 

certain of the Beats to justify 

their use of stimulants. 

As I remarked 

earlier, describing The Blowtop as an early Beat novel 

may be an exaggeration, but it can certainly be 

located within a category best referred to as a 

“Greenwich Village novel,” or a novel of Bohemia, if 

that’s preferred. There are little asides which provide 

descriptions of bohemian life, such as the broken 

chair and worn-out fridge in Archie and Fred’s 

apartment, the scene in Giordano’s studio, and the 

atmosphere in the 16 Bar. And both Archie and Fred 

may be seen as the kind of would-be writers 

frequently found in bohemian circles who aren’t ever 

likely to do more than leave behind some fragmentary 

records of their existence. 

So, who was Alvin Schwartz? He was born in 

1916 in New York, and worked at various jobs while 

attending night classes at C.C.N.Y. and publishing a 

little magazine. He also contributed poems and 

reviews to other little magazines. And he admitted to 

doing hack writing, like Archie and Fred, to make 

money. The Blowtop, his first novel, was published by 

the Dial Press, New York, in 1948. When it was 

published in France it became a best-seller, possibly 

because it was seen as having links to ideas about 

existentialism. In the early 1950s he had several 

other books published, one of which, a novel called 

Sword of Desire, under the name Robert W. Tracey, 

dealt with aspects of Wilhelm Reich’s theories which 

were fashionable among some bohemians in the late- 

1940s and early-1950s. Later, however, Schwartz 

became better-known for his involvements with 

comic-book versions of Batman and 

Superman. And he moved into 

corporate research development. He 

died in 2011. He should not, 

incidentally, be confused with another 

Alvin Schwartz who was a noted 

writer of books for children. 

Before leaving the subject of 

what the police in the book refer to as 

“blowtops,” and its general use in the 

1940s, it might be interesting to look 

at a song that Dinah Washington 

made popular in 1945. Entitled 

“Blowtop Blues,” and originally 

recorded by Etta Jones in December, 

1944, it was written by Leonard 

Feather, an Englishman who moved to 

New York in the late-1930s and 

composed songs, organised recording 

sessions, and wrote about jazz. He 

was never one to miss an opportunity to promote his 

own work and was involved in the 1944 date when 

Etta Jones sang “Blowtop Blues,” and again in the 

1945 date when Dinah Washington recorded it. It 

will perhaps give a flavour of the lyrics if I quote just 

a few lines of the song: “When someone turned the 

lights on me,/It like to drove me blind./I woke up in 

Bellevue,/but I left my mind behind./Last night I was 

five feet tall,/today I’m eight feet ten,/and every time 

I fall downstairs, I float back up again.” 

Should anyone be interested in listening to 

the complete lyrics of “Blowtop Blues,” they can be 

found on the Etta Jones version on Greenwich Village 

Sound (Pickwick CD PJFD 15005) or on the Dinah 

Washington version on Dinah Washington: The Queen 

Sings (Properbox 43). Her version proved to be the 

more popular of the two, though the Etta Jones 

recording is not without interest, her rather plaintive 

singing suiting the nature of the lyrics. 

23

Jeffers is my God 

“Jeffers, I suppose, is my god – the only man since Shakey to write the long narrative poem that does 

not put one to sleep...Jeffers is...darker, more...modern and mad.” 

Charles Bukowski - in a letter to Jory Sherman, April 1st, 1960 

from Screams From the Balcony (Black Sparrow Press, 1993) 

by Kevin L. Mills 

○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ 

Bukowski knew what he was talking about. It’s 

a telling letter. The modern madness he saw in Jeffers’ 

poetry was something Bukowski could easily relate to. 

That Bukowski refers to Jeffers as his ‘god’ - 

as well as being a generous compliment- it is also 

indicative of his sensitivity and self-awareness, that he 

saw in Jeffers poetry a kindred spirit; of the two 

bards walking the same paths. At this point in his 

nascent career as a poet, Bukowski was still quite 

obscure. But in his letters at this time he almost 

always mentioned how much he admired Jeffers 

work. During much of the 1960s, for example, he 

peppered his letters to Ezra Pounds erstwhile muse, 

Sheri Martinelli, with numerous references, and 

exhortations, to read Jeffers. (Beerspit Night and 

Cursing – the correspondence of Charles Bukowski and 

Sheri Martinelli 1960 – 1967, Black Sparrow 2001). 

Thirty years later, Bukowski demonstrated 

his abiding respect for his one-time god in a poem 

entitled simply Jeffers in Septuagenarian Stew – Stories 

& Poems (Black Sparrow 1990). In this mature and 

elegant poem, Bukowski tells us 

‘his voice was dark 

A rock-slab pronouncement 

A voice not distracted by 

the ordinary forces of 

greed, cunning and need’ 

John Robinson Jeffers was born in Pittsburgh 

in 1887, the son of a respected theologian, who 

taught him Greek and Latin at a young age. He was 

sent to a string of European boarding schools where 

he studied French, German and Italian. In 1903 his 

family moved to California, where Robinson enrolled 

at the University of Southern California. It was here 

he met a married woman, Una Custer, and he fell in 

love. Una was three years older than Jeffers, and she 

was married to a prominent LA attorney. But Jeffers 

found in Una intellectual and emotional stimulation, 

and it deepened their mutual attraction. Una divorced 

her husband and Jeffers married her, which made The 

Los Angeles Times, March 1 st 1913, under the 

sensational headline, ‘Two Points of the Eternal 

Triangle’. Big news indeed. 

The newly-weds moved to the coastal town of 

Carmel, and here Jeffers built –with his own handsthe 

house they were to live in, Tor House, just fifty 

yards from the crashing ocean. He was a man of the 

elements. 

Carmel had a rich heritage of artistic and 

bohemian characters. Robert Louis Stevenson had 

lived in the area; the beaches of Carmel gave him the 

ideal setting of Treasure Island. In 1905 the poet 

George Stirling was there, the protégé of Ambrose 

Bierce. Stirling was at the centre of an artistic colony 

that included, for various lengths of time, a number 

of distinguished writers, including Jack London and 

Upton Sinclair, and the tragic poet Nora May Finch, 

who committed suicide after a soured love affair. But 

it took a good few years for Jeffers work to really 

ignite. His first published volume of poetry, Flagons 

and Apples (1912) was self-financed, and failed to 

attract much of a readership. And soon after it 

arrived from the printer he lost almost complete 

24


interest in it. He was painfully aware that he had not 

written anything of lasting value. However, his 

second book appeared in October 1916, published 

commercially by Macmillan; still Jeffers was not 

satisfied with the poems it contained. But with the 

publication of Tamar and Other Poems in 1924, Jeffers 

began to be lauded as a great American original, and 

critical acclaim was fulsom indeed. The following 

year, Boni & Liveright brought out an expanded 

edition which included the epic Roan Stallion – a 

poem, almost conversational in style, brimming with 

what was rapidly becoming Jeffers key imagery: 

falcons, incest, blood and madness. 

Jeffers words are bare 

bones stripped of all pretention, 

revealing the often stark and ugly 

truth beneath. Life is seen 

cosmically, from the nebulous 

beginnings through apocalypse. 

In this sense he is prophetic; his 

treatment of humanity bordering 

on the misanthropic. His entire 

poetic universe is uneasy, 

brooding and disdainful. He does 

not talk about the modern world, 

because he knows that 

civilizations come and go, and 

nothing is permanent. 

That Jeffers inspired 

Bukowski there is no doubt. 

Hank actually took a line from Jeffers poem 

Hellenistics for the title It Catches My Heart in its 

Hands, which was published in 1963 by the Loujon 

Press. For the still-obscure Charles Bukowski there 

was much in Robinson Jeffers that he could get to 

grips with. Bukowski was an outsider, as was Jeffers; 

and neither thought very much of humanity. It 

seemed to let them down time and again. Yet there 

was an iron determination in both poets to succeed, 

despite the loneliness and disappointments they went 

through. 

When his wife died in 1950, Jeffers 

contemplated suicide. He began to drink heavily, but 

it could never ease his pain. Of course, Bukowski had 

his own pain, and you could say he spent a life-time 

diluting it. The ritualistic beatings he took from his 

father permanently scarred a childhood that was 

deprived and lonesome. How can anyone come out of 

that unmarked? Yet, as a mature writer, Bukowski 

seemed to leave any lingering bitterness behind him, 

for an increasing clarity in his poetry. And this is 

where Jeffers influence seems most prominent, in 

Bukowski’s later verse. 

In a December 21, 1960 letter to Sheri Martinelli, 

Bukowski writes: 

“Do especially read Roan Stallion. 

Robinson Jeffers. If you haven’t. Please do this for 

me...” 

And again to Martinelli in January 1961: 

“I SAID, I COMMAND THEE: 

READ ROAN STALLION.” 

And in a hand-written p.s. to that 

same letter: 

“-there was 

‘communication’ between horse 

and woman (other than spiritual) 

in Roan Stallion. Gd. Damn u, 

Sheri, why don’t you READ this 

book!” 

And that said 

‘communication’ is of an erotic 

nature; not bestial, but rather 

celestial. The heroine of the 

poem, California, is a mystic; she 

falls in love with the stallion and 

regards it as Divine. 

(I don’t want to elaborate 

on this poem too much; I don’t 

want to spoil anyone’s fun – and it’s more than fun 

when you discover it yourself). 

I think Bukowski loved Robinson Jeffers 

mainly for the elder poet’s direct, non-lyrical 

approach to verse. It’s encouraging to read heavy 

themes that anyone can understand. And it is the best 

way into Jeffers’ personal philosophy –Inhumanism. 

Herein Jeffers takes his cue from Whitman and 

Nietzsche, though he was criticized for being 

misanthropic. He wished to leave the human world 

behind and embrace nature to the limits of 

experience. The intensity of his vision made him a 

prophet, which nourished his isolation from the 

human race. 

And this is where Bukowski found the 

darkness and insanity in Jeffers’ work. In 

“Mockingbird Wish Me Luck” (Black Sparrow, 

1972), Charles published the poem ‘he wrote in 

lonely blood’: 

25 

above...Robinson Jeffers


Sitting here 

Typing 

At a friend’s house 

I find a black book by the typer: 

Jeffers’: Be Angry at the Sun. 

I think of Jeffers often, 

Of his rocks and his hawks and his 

Isolation. 

Jeffers was a real loner. 

Yes, he had to write. 

I try to think of loners who don’t break out 

At all 

In any fashion, 

And I think, no, that’s not strong, 

Somehow, that’s dead. 

Jeffers was alive and a loner and 

He made his statements. 

His rocks and his hawks and his isolation 

Counted. 

He wrote on lonely blood 

A man trapped in a corner 

But what a corner 

Fighting down to the last mark. 

“I’ve built my rock,” he sent the message to 

The lovely girl who came to his door, 

“you go build yours,” 

This was the same girl who had screwed Ezra, 

And she wrote me that Jeffers sent her away like that, 

BE ANGRY AT THE SUN, 

Jeffers was a rock who was not dead, 

His book sits to my left now as I type, 

I think of all of his people crashing down 

Hanging themselves, shooting themselves, 

Taking poisons... 

Locked away against an unbearable humanity, 

Jeffers was like his people: 

He demanded perfection and beauty 

And it was not there 

In human form, he found it in non-human 

Forms, I’ve run out of non-human forms, 

I’m angry at Jeffers. No, 

I’m not, and if the girl comes to my door 

I’ll send her away too, after all, 

Who wants to follow old 

Ez? 

Talk about hitting the nail on the head! One 

of the many splendours of Charles Bukowski is his 

ability to tell it like it is, and this marvellous poem 

really does the job beautifully. Name-checking Jeffers 

volume, Be Angry At the Sun (Random House, 1941), 

Bukowski does what he does best, almost effortlessly, 

writing poetry that could be taken as a homage to his 

revered ‘god’. He faces Jeffers’ apocalypse head-on, 

one loner to another. Yet Bukowski recognises the 

loners that ‘don’t break out at all, in any fashion’, the 

same kind of people he’d known for years in the bluecollar 

world of rough jobs and tough breaks. And he’s 

scared and angry at that world, and just glad to be out 

of it, because he knew all along that that world meant 

death, suicide or madness. 

And these were themes that Bukowski knew 

well and which he saw and responded to in the older 

poets work. He seems to pinpoint Jeffers’ main 

imagery, the rocks and the hawks, and indeed the 

sheer isolation of living in such austerity, that Buk 

could recognise himself there very easily while living a 

very different life. For at the time he wrote the above 

poem Buk was becoming famous and gaining a cult 

following on the reading circuit, he would never 

forget where he was from, nor the factory floors he’d 

had to shuffle across through seemingly endless, backbreaking 

years. And it is really from these years of 

working the 9 – 5 jobs that Bukowski developed as a 

poet; the poet as outsider. And it is from the mindnumbing, 

day-in, day-out; grind of the working 

world; of the relief through alcohol and sex and 

writing, that Buk came across that kindred something 

in Robinson Jeffers. 

Then Sheri Martinelli crops up again in the 

poem; ‘the same girl who had screwed Ezra’. As she 

explains in a letter to Bukowski from December 28 th , 

1960, “Jeffers is in the bowels of life & so on but I’ll 

go to him again”. There is a certain ambiguity here, 

yet its plain Jeffers wasn’t too impressed with Sheri, 

for whatever reason. Probably because she popped up 

with Pound in tow, and the two American originals 

appraised each other through gritted eyeballs. 

From the previously quoted poem from 1992, 

Bukowski’s Jeffers, he informs us about his hero: 

“he would never be a popular 

Creator: people need to be 

26

Cajoled 

Not notified of ancient 

Curses 

Still true for our 

Untuned 

Actuality”. 

And Bukowski is bang on the money again; 

that Jeffers is not a poet who spoon-fed his readers is 

quite correct. The more thought the reader puts 

into reading, the deeper the rewards. Robinson 

Jeffers aesthetic universe could be variously described 

as anything from Gothic to Beat; Gothic because of 

the obvious blood-red imagery, and Beat due to the 

fact that Jeffers was an archetypal individualist, at 

odds with society, and wrote with a certain cosmic 

exhaustion. He could almost qualify as a hip 

existentialist, and the overall mood of his verse is 

down-beat, hermetic yet prophetic. So Bukowski 

certainly was in tune with Jeffers modern madness in 

the early 1960s. 

Turning once more to Bukowski’s “he wrote 

in lonely blood”, 

“I think of all his people crashing down 

Hanging themselves, shooting themselves, 

Taking poisons... 

Locked away against an unbearable humanity” 

Bukowski here describes what could be seen 

as an almost unbearable nightmare world, harsh and 

austere in the extreme. Jeffers quest was for some 

kind of eternal Truth which was often painful, and as 

he tells us in his poem Cassandra from the volume 

The Double Axe (Random House, 1948): 

“Truly men hate the truth, they’d 

Liefer 

Meet a tiger on the road. 

Therefore the poets honey their truth with lying...” 

And the truth is that human beings cannot 

accept much truth and usually keep their senses 

dulled with a provincialism bordering on the inane. 

Like Robinson Jeffers, Charles Bukowski dared to 

face the truth head-on, and this brings with it a level 

of awareness that is almost psychic in its intensity. 

On a day to day basis, human beings rarely, if ever, 

contemplate their lives with such stark insight. And 

that is why we need the poets to remind us of the 

abyss beneath us, because they are the unofficial 

legislators of the world. In a thousand years’ time, 

when capitalism has finally crumbled, and the petty 

politicians have dried up for good, poetry will still 

exist in all it’s glory. 

When Jeffers died on January 20 th , 1962, 

there was a minimum of fuss; there wasn’t even a 

funeral or a memorial service. He was cremated, his 

ashes now with Una’s, buried beneath a yew tree. But 

Jeffers left more than ashes: his granite-like verse will 

endure for many, many years to come –as will 

Bukowski’s. To show us, beneath an already vanishing 

world, what really went on in those small, haunted 

places? Bukowski will forever live with stars bursting 

through his soul, while Jeffers cold appraisal will leave 

the phonies standing. 

Bibliography: 

And all without a safety-net. 


Robinson Jeffers –Poet of California by James Karman (1987) 

Chronicle Books 

Robinson Jeffers –A Portrait by Louis Adamic (1929) 

Kessinger Legacy Reprints 

Against Oblivion by Ian Hamilton (2002) Penguin Books. 

Charles Bukowski by Barry Miles (2005) Virgin Books 

Charles Bukowski – Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life by 

Howard Sounes (1998) Rebel Inc. 

Hank – the Life of Charles Bukowski by Neeli Cherkovski 

(1991) Random House 

The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (2001) edited by Tim 

Hunt, Stanford University Press 

Beer Spit Night and Cursing –the correspondence of Charles 

Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli 1960 – 1967 (2001) edited 

by Steven Moore, Black Sparrow Press 

Septuagenarian Stew –stories & poems by Charles Bukowski 

(1990) Black Sparrow Press 

Mockingbird Wish Me Luck by Charles Bukowski (1972) 

Black Sparrow Press 

27

Ginsberg 

on Kerouac ... 

An Interview 

by Eric Baiz 

aizer 

er, , Reywas Div 

ivad, and Richard Peabody 

Back in 1978 Eric Baizer, Rick Peabody and Reywas Divad spoke to Allen Ginsberg about Jack Kerouac, 

who had died nine years earlier. At that point Kerouac’s reputation was beginning to recover from the 

critical battering he’d suffered during the 1960s and in the immediate years after his death. 

Ginsberg outlines the Kerouac landscape of the late 1970s for them. The interview appeared originally in 

Peabody’s tremendous literary journal Gargoyle. Big thanks to him for allowing Beat Scene to republish it 

here. 

Interviewers: When going over the media of the 

time it appears to me that Jack Kerouac was one of 

the most slandered and libeled writers of recent 

times. 

Ginsberg: It’s very interesting that you say that, I read 

an essay on that last night. There are two large books 

on Kerouac coming out, a biography by Dennis 

McNally of Random House, a considerable 

biography; and a big book, from St. Martin’s Press in 

New York. archived (by Barry Gifford) documents 

and interviews with everybody who knew Kerouac. 

The thing that the McNally biography is great at is 

accounting and itemization of all the reviews that 

Kerouac got for all the different books, and it’s one of 

the most vicious things I’ve ever seen what they did to 

him. 

Interviewers: It really was. 

Ginsberg: And some of it, incidentally, by CIAfunded 

literary magazines like Encounter, by the way. 

Not that the CIA had a plug in Kerouac. They had 

that kind of mentality that would take Kerouac’s open 

wit, Whitmanic beauty and honesty of person and 

find that creepy and subjective and egotistical or 

irresponsible. It’s a conservative, stupid party line. 

Inter 

ntervie 

viewers: 

ers: Though countless people have e read 

and like his work, it seems that to this day he is 

still regar 

egarded as a second class writer. The word 

“Literature” is rarely applied to Big Sur or 

Desolation Angels 

or Scripture e of the Golden Eter 

ternity 

nity. 

You have e consistently defended him over the years. 

Looking back at it now, , what kind of place will 

Kerouac take in literature? Is he still treated 

unfairly by critics? What should his reputation be? 

Ginsberg: There’s a guy, Anatole Broyard, of the N. 

Y. Times Book Review, who’s still chasing Kerouac’s 

corpse with a stiletto. Even posthumously denouncing 

Visions of Cody, which I think was Kerouac’s great 

prose creation. Full of beautiful cadenzas and 

exquisite sketches of cafeterias and subways and els 

(elevated lines). I still would say that Kerouac was one 

of the most beautiful composers of vowels and 

consonants, one of the most mindfully conscious 

writers dealing with sounds. As Warren Tallman the 

essayist pointed out in his great essay in the late 

fifties, “Kerouac’s Sound,” Kerouac had a fantastic 

ear and a tremendous appreciation of modern black 

music and black tongue and Okie tongue and 

provincial speech, and his rhythms and sentences are 

organized after the models of excited conversation, 

probably rhapsody. . . exclamatory delight, you find 

that built into his prose. He was an athletic prose 

writer and he was tremendously honest. He gave 

himself to his art and I think he was one of the great 

prose writers in America. Perhaps in America, itself, 

the single greatest in the twentieth century. His 

breakthrough to a realization of spontaneous mind 

and the enormous inventive perceptive capacity of 

raw mind—”first thought is best thought-is something 

so noble that only a few great Buddhist poets have 

achieved that. Chogyarn Trungpa, who’s my 

meditation teacher, a Tibetan lama, thinks that 

Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues book of poems is “a great 

exposition of mind,” spontaeous mind, and good 

28

Ginsberg on Kerouac 

Buddhism, too, as Gary Snyder, the trained Buddhist, 

thinks. 

All of my poetic practice is founded on 

Kerouac’s notion of non-revising, “spit forth 

intelligence at the moment.” It’s in the tradition of 

twentieth century thought, actually, Western thought. 

From Heisenberg who said if you stop to observe a 

wave you impede its function: Einstein who said if 

you want to know the shape of the Universe, you had 

to examine the measuring instrument. So what 

Kerouac was doing was examining his own mind. The 

thoughts of the mind as they proceeded, rising 

“unborn” in the mind. He was able to notate on the 

page and it created a great 

extraordinary poetic panoply of 

what comes up from the naked 

mind, what the naked mind is 

capable of when it’s not trying 

to sneak over an arty, 

academic, shamed, revised 

version of reality. 

What does the mind 

really think? What is the poetry 

of pure mind? And he was the 

first person to have that great 

breakthrough of consciousness 

in art. Well, not the first, it is a 

tradition. Gertrude Stein was 

into that. It actually was a 

main tradition in American 

letters from Whitman on. 

When Whitman said, “We 

don’t have to pay the 

immensely overpaid accounts 

on the Battle of Troy anymore. 

The muse is here in America. 

She’s here installed amidst the 

kitchenware, that’s “ordinary 

mind.” 

Williams relied on ordinary speech in his 

practice of imagism. Gertrude Stein explored the 

ordinary mind moment by moment in her vast 

experiment with The Making of Americans in writing 

creation and composition. Stein is, in a sense, the 

innovator. 

But Kerouac applied that ordinary mind 

rhapsody—that is to say, the unimpeded flow of 

intelligence—in prose, to telling a narrative story, and 

there was something monumental about that. I would 

say he created a monumental “artwork,” despite the 

hostility of academia, despite sneering journalistic 

jealousy. Despite the smog of the secret police which 

29 

scared him, too, and made him withdraw from public 

front. Despite my own incomprehension and the 

incomprehension of his friends who sometimes didn’t 

understand how far he was goin,. ‘cause my first 

reaction to Visions of Cody was of shock—Where was 

this? Where was this coming from? It wasn’t like a 

novel I’d ever heard of. Despite his publisher’s 

money-grubbing boorishness in not publishing his 

novels when they were written, in not publishing 

them in the right order and leaving many to be 

published posthumously. Despite repression from his 

family. Despite an attack in the media that was so 

vast it looks like organized psychosis when you look 

back on it—friends like Kenneth Rexroth saying that 

he couldn’t write 

poetry; Norman 

Podhoretz 

attacking him as a 

juvenile 

delinquent, instead 

of seeing him as an 

artist. Despite all 

that, one single, 

lonely tearful guy 

created this 

masterpiece against 

everything. He had 

to follow his heart, 

and that’s pure art. 

His intelligence 

was extraordinary 

that way. ‘Cause he 

read, he was very 

learned. He had 

read Shakespeare, 

a lot of Sir Thomas 

Browne, read all 

through Rabelais 

and Celine, 

listened to Bach’s 

B-Minor Mass night 

after night, and St. 

Matthew’s Passion. The amazing thing is that even in 

his illness in the sixties when he was drinking too 

much, he created a body of work at a time when he 

was supposed to be in “decline,” a phase that people 

still insult, this fantastic record of his own breakdown 

and degeneration from alcohol in Big Sur in 1961. He 

went on to complete the second part of Desolation 

Angels, which was a great retrospective of his situation 

with fame and with “the San Francisco Renaissance” 

with all the poets (Whalen, Snyder, McClure, 

Lamantia, Duncan, etc.) 

Inter 

ntervie 

viewers: 

ers: Those books are e both out of print 

here in the U.S. 

Kerouac, Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Lafcadio 

Orlovsky and Gregory Corso. Mexico, 1956. 

Photographer unknown.


Ginsberg: They’ll be in print now soon. Actually, 

almost everything’s now in print, or will be soon. 

That’s coming out actually, Desolation Angels and 

Vanity of Dulouz. Desolation Angels filled in the story 

in the late fifties as well as The Dharma Bums, that is, 

the story proceeding from the forties up to the late 

fifties. Then the capstone of all that, the great arch, is 

Big Sur, where he tells of his own breakdown. Then 

after Big Sur he wrote Desolation Angels Part II, 

finished that book. Then he did a retrospective view 

of his own romantic idealistic illusory follies, sort of 

outside the great Dulouz legend, outside the great 

panorama. He looked back as in old age, in a book 

which is so loose and free and funny in its prose, The 

Vanity of Dulouz, (The Vanity of Kerouac), that it’s 

actually a revelation on his early style, and a change, 

in enormous growth, and new depth. Literarily it’s 

curious because the tone developed from Herman 

Melville’s poems John Marr and Other Sailors, in 

which Melville in his old age writing poetry is taking 

on the persona of John Marr, an old retired sailor 

sitting with his pipe of bohee tobacco talking to his 

wife saying “Well Wifey, let me tell you about 

Bridegroom Dick when we were back there, 

Bridegroom Dick the Sailor he’ll not come by no 

more . . .” and they’re beautiful poems, retrospective, 

love poems to all the old sailor friends he sailed 

around the south seas with. 

So people don’t recognize that cultivation. 

They think it’s just sloppy Kerouac talking to his wife 

or something, not realizing he finally came down to 

home nitty-gritty as Melville did; and he read 

Melville’s “John Marr,” we used to talk about it all the 

time. So then after that he united both his youths: he 

had written a short book called Pic. Then he did 

Satori in Paris, which was a completely funny, 

drunken comedy on himself, a brief vignette of going 

to Paris to find his ancestors’ names and 

backgrounds. Then he did the last chapter of Pic 

which was about a little picaninny, a little black boy 

coming from the south which he’d written before, and 

he put on a last chapter which was “hitch-hiking 

north,” whom does he run into on the road but Neal 

Cassady (Dean Moriarty)! But his mother didn’t like 

it, or his wife didn’t like it, so he put on another little 

ending and it was published with that other ending, 

but there is in his manuscripts a very funny little 

thing where he reunites his early springtime youthful 

Pic book with a retrospective view of the young kid 

meeting the Heroes in his youth. In addition, 

McNally in his biography says he wrote all the time 

so he’s got innumerable notebooks, poems, God 

knows what, that nobody knows about. 

Inter 

ntervie 

viewers: ers: Aren 

en’t t legal battles with his heirs 

holding up publication of some of his manuscripts? 

Ginsberg: No not quite. I’ll explain that. What is 

really interesting is that on the day he died, 10:30 in 

the morning, he was looking at television with a 

notebook open on his lap still writing and he got up, 

laid the notebook aside, his wife wanted to fix him 

some tuna fish or some lunch, he said no. He opened 

a can of tuna fish, ate it, went into the bathroom, 

started vomiting, called “I’m hemorrhaging, I’m 

hemorrhaging, help!” His wife came in and took him 

to the hospital and he died. So he was writing on the 

very moment of his death. Kerouac has always been 

pointed to as “ degenerating, “ “ he failed, “he “didn’t 

do anything,” he “wasted his last years.” But he 

produced a body of work in the sixties that rivals 

anybody’s. He wrote more than I did. And also work 

that was seasoned, disillusioned and interesting; you 

know like his retrospective, puncturing all the 

balloons and follies of youth. So there is still a terrific 

study to come. And all of the dream books and 

notebooks and haikus and poems and journals that he 

kept, all through the sixties and fifties and forties are 

still unpublished. We still don’t know the extent of his 

art. 

The legal problem is: his wife, Stella, has a 

lot of manuscripts left or in the bank, or up in Lowell 

with the family. She won’t let anybody see them. 

What’s known of them is Some of the Dharma, a long 

series of essays and haikus and poems he wrote on 

Buddhist subjects when he was studying that which he 

kept for maybe eight years. You know, writing for 

Gary Snyder’s ear and for mine. The San Francisco 

Blues (1954), written in a rocking chair from flop 

house hotel Mission Street, Third Street. There’s a 

great notebook that he kept while writing On The 

Road which is in the University of Texas, a journal of 

writing On The Road which is in perfect fat print, 

very legible, and Andy Brown of Gotham Book Mart 

wants to publish a facsimile copy but he can’t get 

permission from the family. Stella, his wife and 

widow, her view is “aaah leave something for Ph.D. 

scholars in another ten years. He’s got enough out 

already.” They still haven’t republished yet all his 

books that are already in print. What’s coming out 

now—Viking, I believe is bringing out something, I 

forget. I got the advance proofs about a half year ago. 

Vanity of Dulouz is in reprint, Desolation Angels in 

reprint, I think Tristessa and Maggie Cassidy, two other 

books hard to get are coming out McGraw-Hill or 

something like that. So I think by the end of the year 

every single published work will be back in print. 

Which is amazing, actually, because it’s about 

nineteen books. They’ll all be available finally again 

30


after being in and out. That was his publisher’s 

stupidity and his agents’. The problem was he wrote 

On the Road, that was a big experimental thing after 

publishing his first book The Town and the City. It was 

turned down by everybody, Louis Simpson, John Hall 

Wheelock who just died the other day. Malcolm 

Cowley had to fight for years to get it published by 

Viking. So it wasn’t published, he wrote it in ’51 and 

it wasn’t published until ’57 or ’58. Jack was broke all 

this time. He had to work and had to be dependent 

on his mother. Even after all these things were 

published he didn’t have any money. A $1,000 

advance for On the Road or something, $2,000. He 

never got any money. $7, 000 for 

Tristessa. But that’s a high school 

teacher’s income, half a college 

instructor’s income, and he’s 

supposed to live on that. Finally 

he was going to sign a contract 

toward the end of his life to 

deliver a novel and I said “Don’t 

do that, don’t indenture yourself 

like that, sell my letters.” So 

instead of signing a contract for 

$7 1/2 thousand, he sold my 

letters to Texas and had a few 

years of like, a little cash to buy a 

house for his mother. 

What they should have 

done was first published On the 

Road, and then they should have 

followed that with Visions of Cody, 

and they should have followed it 

up with The Subterraneans, and 

they should have followed it up 

with Maggie Cassidy, and they 

should have followed it up with Doctor Sax, and they 

should have followed it up with Tristessa, and they 

should have followed it up with Mexico City Blues . . . 

Then he wrote The Dharma Bums after On 

the Road was published because they said, “Why don’t 

you write something simple to explain what all these 

people are about?” So he should have had everything 

published in a readable order just as he wrote them 

so people could follow the development of his mind 

and not confuse them. There was a publishers’ 

boorishness, that’s why I said “publishers’ moneygrubbing 

boorishness.” They didn’t realize they had a 

great prose artist on their hands and they were just 

looking at him as a social phenomenon or money or 

something. 

Inter 

ntervie 

viewers: 

ers: What do you think of Ann Charters 

ters’ 

biography? 

Ginsberg: The problem with the Charters’ book is: 

because of a contract that Aaron Latham the “official 

biographer” had gotten with Random House which 

shared the money with the family, Ann Charters’ 

book was “unofficial” and she was not given access to 

his original manuscripts, nor given permission to 

quote directly from anything in his estate. She had 

written the book without knowing this, or without 

thinking seriously that they could have dared do a 

thing like that to literary material. So at the last 

minute the proofs of the book was in the hands of 

Straight Arrow Press, she was having a baby, went to 

Sweden, and the quotations were made into 

paraphrases by secretaries at 

Straight Arrow Press sort of 

like with a meat axe. So that 

what was once somewhat 

delicate in her book was 

transformed into a long 

narrative basically Kerouac’s 

own words which were made 

into paraphrase, and it sounds 

like she is “kvetching” or 

coming on superior to Kerouac 

and he sounds depressing, when 

actually the long narrative 

passages are his own humor 

and wit and intelligence 

criticizing himself in a rueful 

burlesque manner. 

For instance, there is a 

section that begins “Kerouac 

came up from Big Sur and all 

that he could see were nasty 

American housewives staring at 

him through the windows of 

their cars and looking the other way as if he were an 

axe murderer. . .” Well, that’s Kerouac saying “I got 

up on the road and all I could see were these nasty 

American housewives looking at me as if I were an 

axe murderer or something. . .” So it was Charters 

without quotation marks saying “all he could see were 

nasty American housewives. . .” So it makes him 

seem like a depressing fool instead of a witty fellow. 

So the phrase I use for that is “he’s not given credit 

for his own intelligence” in that book. And the 

biographer seems “superior” to him in moral 

perception, whereas she’s relying on his own moral 

and psychological perceptions of himself, and long 

passages in her book are deceptive to the reader 

because the reader thinks it’s her accounting of him 

in writing biography, whereas it’s him telling what 

happened to himself very truthfully, very honestly. So 

the whole book’s out of focus. One gets the 

impression that he’s a depressed case, whereas 

31


actually it’s the depressing case of American 

commercialism getting a text screwed up. 

Interviewers: Do you have any comment on the 

Jar 

arvis book, Visions of Ker 

erouac 

ouac? 

Ginsberg: Well, Jarvis is kind of funny. It’s a lot of 

local gossip. Kerouac kept patiently answering foolish 

questions by Jarvis who’s a prurient questioner. So it’s 

a kind of funny book. It’s useful for you know that 

phase of Kerouac when he talked to local Charlie. 

Charlie’s very shocked about my sleeping with Jack; 

he says he doesn’t believe it or something. It’s kind of 

naive. But it’s useful source material. The new book 

by McNally I think is the best 

account of his life. That’ll be coming 

out in a year or so. 

Inter 

ntervie 

viewers: ers: Music is fascinating 

with some of your poems. When I 

read things I put on music in the 

background. Do you write much 

with music going on, or are you 

consciously aware e that you 

ou’re 

putting music on at all, no matter 

what kind it is? 

Ginsberg: Well following the example 

of Hart Crane who wrote “The 

Bridge” with a lot of Bessie Smith 

records on or jazz or Bach, I used to 

do that, but I find it interrupts my own rhythm. I get 

a lot of influence through Kerouac by music, 

particularly for that long breath saxophone cry that 

you might get out of Lester Young, solos of Coleman 

Hawkins, Charlie Parker’s long bird-flighted tunes 

that begin and end finally at the end of a sentence- 

MAWP! So the long breath, which is derived 

somewhat from Black American speech and which 

has been the inspiration to poets in America for the 

last fifty years. Lately I’ve been working with 

musicians. Well, not lately—I’ve been working with 

Don Cherry since 68-69-70. We recorded together. I 

set Blake’s “Songs of Innocence” to music. And I’m 

still working on it. This past month I’ve been working 

on Blake’s “Tiger” to get that together. It’s a 

heartbeat. “Ti-ger, Tiger, burn-ing boom-boom, 

boom-boom. . .” (chants part of the poem). And I’ve 

been working with Bob Dylan who’s been teaching me 

chords. So I’ve been singing blues and I put out a 

book called First Blues and I worked with John 

Hammond, Sr., who recorded Billie Holiday and 

some Bessie Smith and Dylan and I made two 

records of First Blues. And this last long poem I 

have (The Rune) has a four chord rhapsody. Mostly 

with music I’ve been working on rhymed matter. I 

don’t know how to handle the long line with music, as 

in -Howl-. I could in sort of Hebraic-Indian form “I 

saw the best minds of my generation. . . .” (chants 

“I get a lot of 

influence through 

Kerouac by music, 

particularly for 

that long breath 

saxophone cry that 

you might get out 

of Lester 

Young....” 

32 

first couple of lines from “Howl” in C chord). But I 

don’t know ... could get something going that way, I’d 

like to. 

Lately what I’m into through the influence of 

Ed Sanders—he being a classics specialist—is digging 

the tremendous dance music rhythms of Greek 

prosody, where they had feet that went BA-DAM 

BAM BAH . . . BA-DAM BAM BAH. Ionic meters, 

they’re called. Or DUN DA-DUN DA ... DUN DA- 

DUN DA. “Moloch” was built that way. “Mo-loch 

whose eyes are a thou-sand blind win-dows.” The long 

feet, which are basically ancient Greek dance 

rhythms. I didn’t know that—I just got my own ear. 

But Sanders is making me more and 

more conscious of that. He said that 

he read “Howl” in Kansas City and 

he’d been studying classics and 

recognized old Greek dithyrambic 

rhythms and that was his specialty. So 

we’ve been working on that and he 

may teach that at Naropa. So I’ve 

been influenced by both irregular 

asymmetrical rhythmical run-on bop 

and the symmetrical meters of the 

Greeks, as well as Poe and things like 

that. 

One other thing. We’ve been 

talking about rhythm. Now tone, 

notes. The big discovery I had in 

putting Blake together, I realized that when I 

pronounce my poetry I try to follow William Carlos 

Williams, try to use the whole gamut of what does a 

normal voice talk like. How many different tones do 

we use? In his preface to Basil Bunting’s poems back 

in the fifties, Pound wrote a poet should “follow the 

tone leading of the vowels.” One vowel leads to 

another in different tones and those tones are 

emotional tones, for emphasis. We don’t in America 

have a study of the vowel lengths like classical 

prosody. The traditional measure of the line is accent, 

rather than the length of the vowels which Pound 

returned to American practice, emphasizing 

particularly the tone leading of the vowels. So when I 

began putting Blake to music I tried to figure out how 

you’d go about saying it if you had to say it “Ti-ger, 

Ti-ger,” high-low, high-low. So actually if you’ve got a 

really good poem and you pronounce it as you would 

speak it, you’ll get the different tones of the vowels 

and you can actually make melody or you can 

extrapolate it or project it into melody or into tunes 

real easy but you gotta first be able to pronounce it 

natural, because if you pronounce it like poetry it all 

runs out to monotone—there’s no variation. If you 

say “Ti-ger, ti-ger,” you’ll get a different tone and 

you’ll be able to get a melody out of it.


Inter 

ntervie 

viewers: ers: Semantic structur 

ucture, but it’s s natural. 

Ginsberg: Right, it’s structural and it’s natural as all 

good structures are, or enduring structures are. 

Inter 

ntervie 

viewers: 

ers: You are e one of the only poets in the 

U.S., and I would imagine in the history of the 

world, who has been able to survive financially 

from reading and writing poetry. . A lot of us would 

like to know if you have any advice for anybody 

else. 

Ginsberg: Write good poetry. . .Now wait a minute, I 

want to put a little clip into that. First of all, I didn’t 

anticipate this, I got pushed into this situation when 

the customs seized my book and the vice squad 

descended on Howl and put it through a trial so 

notorious that people started buying it because they 

thought it was a dirty book. Normally, when Howl 

was printed in a thousand copies by City Lights like 

any other book of poetry, that’s all they expected to 

sell. 

So it’s just an accident that I got pushed by the 

government into this situation. Before that, I made 

my living washing dishes in Bickford’s or mopping 

the floor of the May Company or vacuum cleaning, 

or working as a welder in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, or 

I had a year’s time on the ocean as a merchant 

seaman. I have several years’ time in market research. 

So I had whole different kinds of careers as a day 

laborer, night laborer, blue collar worker, white collar 

worker, and I always figured that I’d have to make my 

living some other way beside teaching or writing 

poetry. I think people should figure on that because 

there aren’t so many poets that can make it. And I 

don’t make enough money writing poetry and 

publishing it to support myself really—if I live real 

cheap, which I do, I live in penury, not poverty. Like 

the suit I’m wearing which is beautiful is Salvation 

Army, $12, including the alterations to make it look 

distinguished so I can wear my National Institute 

medal with it. But it’s all Salvation Army. I live on the 

lower East Side of New York in a real terrible slum 

rat street where the garbage is all over the street and 

I’ve been mugged and shot at with B.B. guns. So I’m 

not exactly living the life of luxury. But all I get from 

City Lights (which is my main publisher) is probably 

$7,000 a year. See I don’t make a lot of money. For 

years I used to read free. From 1955-65 I made it a 

business of reading for free and supporting myself by 

sailing in merchant ships up under the DEW line. 

Cause I didn’t think poetry and gold should mix. 

Particularly in that kind of America, where everybody 

was competing for gold, things would get too mixed 

up, I thought poetry should be something outside the 

system. I read now for money and I try to recycle the 

money to other poetic projects like this reading I’m 

doing in Washington. I get some money for reading 

when I’m broke and strapped and I have to pay off 

my debts. Cause I get extravagant like $200 phone 

bills and call Ann Arbor, call Ira Lowe* in 

Washington, call Ed Sanders, call Marty Lee of the 

Assassination Information Bureau here. You know to 

get it all together, call Princeton and get FBI Cointel- 

Program, Xeroxes from The Princetonian, call back 

to Ann Arbor to the Daily Michigan. “Have you got 

your story out, can you send me a copy so I can send 

it to the Assassination Information Bureau?” So I’ve 

got phone bills, and taxi bills and plane bills. My 

actual living expenses are pretty cheap. So I wouldn’t 

suggest anybody anticipate making money on poetry. 

Your college prof makes anywhere between $15,000 

and $25,000-$30,000, and the super college prof, 

$35,000 . . .Vonnegut or Schlesinger . . . special 

chair at CCNY. I could do that if I wanted but I’d 

rather be at Naropa Institute where I get $1,000 for 

the whole summer. Because there’s a live scene there 

with student meditators and great teachers and Zen 

masters and Tibetan lamas. Kerouac didn’t make any 

money. In his biography I saw some years he had 

nothing. A thousand dollar check from his agent, two 

thousand. He had to sell my letters to move to 

Florida. William Burroughs doesn’t have any money, 

now, for instance. Burroughs, with all his books. He 

has money you know like a high school teacher, he 

doesn’t have a lot. 

Inter 

ntervie 

viewers: ers: Didn 

idn’t t he get anything for the film 

rights to Junky 

unky? 

Ginsberg: He got I think twenty grand, which 

stretched over a two-year period, which is about 

$10,000 a year, which is what? A grant from the NEA 

gets that, Guggenheim, or something. Gregory Corso 

has no money and he’s a productive poet. He’s a 

world figure, sort of, but he gets what? I think his 

royalties from New Directions are a couple thousand, 

if that. From City Lights maybe $500, $400, $300 a 

year. He has to live by his wits. So I would suggest 

poets learn to live by their wits. Or best like Gary 

Snyder, get some kind of honest labor job, carpentry, 

something planting trees, something involving 

reforestation. Or applying for grants, maybe that’s the 

way to do it. 

*Ira Lowe, a lawyer engaged in extracting the author’s 

dossiers from FBI, CIA and Secret Service files. 

Editors Note: Dennis McNally’s biography is entitled 

Desolate Angel. The Warren Tallman essay on “Kerouac’s 

Sound” is available in Open Letter, Third Series, No, 6, 

Coach House Press, 401 (rear) Huron St., Toronto, Ontario. 

Rick Peabody is the editor of A Different Beat: Writings by 

Women of the Beat Generation. Published by Serpent’s Tail. 

he can be found at www.gargoylemagazine.com 

33

Lew Welch – 

A Journal of 

Remembrance 

Stephen Vincent 

March 1, 1971 

Dear Lew, 

I’m in the beginning of teaching a course 

at the Art Institute that I’m calling BAY AREA ART 

& POETRY since WWII. (I come out of the poetry 

end of it and am learning a lot about the art). Anyhow 

we started down around Point Lobos with Jeffers, 

moved over into the Valley with early Everson, then 

up into the mountains with Rexroth & going north 

with the earlier Snyder and Roethke. Coordinating 

poets, painters and photographers where possible 

(Weston, Morris, Graves , Toby). Anyway, in a couple 

of weeks, we’ll be coming down the coast to finally 

get into the City. 

Here’s where I’m hoping we can get together. I’ll be 

having the class read ON OUT, and The Song Mnt. 

Tamalpais Sings. What I want to propose is bringing 

the class over to Marin County, say either the Muir 

Beach or somewhere on the Mountain and spend a 

morning with you reading and rapping about the 

poems, anyway you would like to handle it. I’d like to 

suggest Monday, March 22. About ten in the 

morning. Some students have studio classes in the 

afternoon, so I don’t want to cut them out, case the 

thing should extend into the afternoon… 

Sincerely 

Stephen Vincent 

3/20/71 

Dear Stephen 

Unfortunately I’ll be in the state of 

Washington till April 1 st or maybe 15 th . The class 

sounds really great & I regret to have to miss it. 

I’ll phone you when I return to S.F. Is it possible to 

do my part in April? Ginsberg will be in town at the 

end of April, too. 

I can be reached c/o Wm. Yardes, 606 Englebert Rd., 

Woodland, Wash., till April 1 st . 

I’ll be talking to you soon. 

II 

WOBBLY ROCK RE-FELT 

Wobbly Rock 

1. 

for Gary Snyder 

“I think I’ll be the Buddha of this place” 

and sat himself 

down 

It’s a real rock 

(believe this first) 

Resting on actual sand at the surf’s edge: 

Muir Beach, California 

Lew Welch 

(like everything else I have 

somebody showed it to me and I found it by myself) 

Hard common stone 

Size of the largest haystack 

It moves when hit by waves 

Actually shudders 

(even a good gust of wind will do it 

if you sit real still and keep your mouth shut) 

Notched to certain center it 

Yields and then comes back to it: 

Wobbly tons 

34

----------- 

It’s Monday morning. All weekend I’ve been 

looking for Lew Welch. A month ago we exchanged 

letters, tentatively agreeing that he will meet the class. 

However, we have lost touch. I fail to get a letter off 

to him in time to his temporary address in 

Washington. The letter I leave at Serendipity 

Bookshop gets rightly forwarded to Gary Snyder’s 

place above Nevada City while I’m off to New York 

at Easter, but apparently doesn’t get back to him. 

Back in the Bay Area, I work on a 

few leads. Jack Shoemaker, at the 

Bookshop, says to try the No Name 

bar in Sausalito. A week ago I start. 

One day one bartender says he saw 

him on Saturday. But that he’s gone 

to Nevada City. A couple of days 

later another bartender says he saw 

him last night. I leave a message for 

him to call. No luck. On Friday 

night I hear Allen Ginsberg has 

come to town. Lew mentioned that 

in his letter. Perhaps they’re together. 

Ginsberg must be going to the Peace 

March. On Saturday at the Polo 

Grounds, I look all over for Allen, 

half expecting him to be leading 

chants in the middle of somewhere. 

No luck. Just people, people, people. 

I call City Lights and get a clue that 

he might be staying up at the 

publishing office, up on Grant. 

On Sunday afternoon, I go to the 

door, but no one is there. I go to the 

store. Ask the clerk who knows 

nothing. I write a note. While I’m at 

it, a short olive complexioned guy 

with a girl who has a woolen cap 

pulled tough style over her head, 

come in. The guy, happy smile on 

his face ups to the counter and says, 

“Have you seen Allen,” as if he were 

getting ready to put his hands on a 

gift. The young oriental clerk with 

shoulder length black hair, says, 

“No.” The guy, almost taking a 

dance step back, says, “Is he staying over the 

publishing office?” 

The clerk, honest, says “I don’t know. I just 

heard he got into town.” 

And I’m flashing, maybe I’m gonna pin this 

note on the wrong door, if Ginsberg is upstairs. So, I 

say to the guy, “Say, I’m trying to get a note to Allen. 

Did you say that place is upstairs?” 

The guy, continuing to back out the door, puts 

a slow smile on his face, as if he were courtier to the 

now secret guest, says, “I’m afraid I can’t tell you 

that.” Smack. 

“Elitist.” The word comes flash out of my 

mouth. Bam. He backs out the door where his hard 

chick is waiting. “Elitist,” she repeats, as if trying to 

disown the accusation. But it’s only re-enforced when 

it bumbles out of her mouth. They split. 

Lew Welch used to speak a lot about only 

writing what is ‘accurate.’ That made me feel foul 

after. 

I leave the note on the front door, asking Allen 

to please call, if he can help in the search. I get home 

and wait. Nothing happens. I give the No Name one 

more call. Yes he was in Saturday night. No, they 

don’t know where he’s staying. I simply give up, 

saddened by the failure of the whole process. 

---------- 

Lew Welch 

About ten students show. We all decide to go 

anyway. We’ll go to Muir Beach and find Wobbly 

Rock. Four cars and we’re over there by ten o’clock. 

35

Lew Welch 

Don, one of the students, brings out a big bottle of 

Red Gallo, and between us we have homemade bread, 

oranges and apples. It’s an overcast day, what the 

radio calls, ‘high clouds,’ but not too cold. I’ve been 

told that the rock is at the south end of the beach, so 

I figure we can find it from the evidence within the 

poem. (Charles Olson, I hear, thought Wobbly Rock 

was Lew’s best thing.) So off we go across the curve 

of sand, then into rocks, until we come to a large 

rock that stands on the edge of water, below the dirt 

cliff, at the beginning of the beaches inward curve. I 

look around its base. Sure enough the rock is wedged 

into a crater of several rocks. And yes, before this 

bare trunk got wedged between the high rock and the 

crater must have rocked back and forth from the 

pressure of the waves, at least when they began to lap 

hard against it, during high tide. 

“This is it. This must be it,” I announce, as if I 

just discovered a lost landmark, or an old gold mine. 

Suddenly I’m self conscious in the role of teacher. The 

first section of the poem says, “Shut up.” And here I 

am talking about it, a little like the morning, after 

sleeping in the temple of Athena at Delphi. I woke to 

find an Encyclopedia of Britanica filming crew 

making a film of the grounds, the members of the 

crew mimicking the different gods they remembered 

from school, but that I thought still inhabited the 

place. I was still too afraid to tell them to ‘Shut Up.’ 

But even now, at the Rock, with Lew’s books in hand, 

I still feel like the uptight French tourist being led 

around by his Guide Bleu. 

Anyway I don’t feel right about it. It is comic 

that the Rock in the book wobbles, and the one here 

doesn’t. And I want to read the poem. And it’s a 

jarring contrast. The poem suddenly feels very 

innocent. But I work my way through it, speaking as 

loud as I can, giving language space there on the 

rocks and ledges that surround the stone. Here and 

there I stop to give explanation as best I can of a Zen 

means of perception. But it still doesn’t feel right and 

I wish to hell Lew were here to justify this situation 

I’ve put myself in. Something is all wrong. Instead of 

getting right away into the reading of the poem, we 

should have climbed around, and got a literal feel and 

respect for the place. 

I’m doing all this standing up with my back 

against a shelf of rock that faces Wobbly. Some 

students are standing, others have sat down on 

different stones, or on the log up close to the cliff. To 

try and make my sense of relationship to the poem 

more human, I finish this part of the morning by 

reading part of a little thing I wrote on Lew’s book, 

ON OUT, a few weeks back: 

…in Jeffers (Robinson) the plea is to enter 

nature, become divorced from human kind. Nobility 

is the vital identification with energies that emanate 

from natural and non-human forces. Man’s presence 

is most often viewed as evil, plunging the planet into 

failure. The tone is pessimistic, excessively 

individualistic, isolationist. Welch comes close to 

Jeffers when he views how man exploits the 

environment, turning the planet to smoke. However 

he sees a community of possibility. When people are 

free, i.e., relate to nature unselfconsciously, there is a 

balanced achieved, man becomes an implicit and 

beneficial element of nature. The sea within becomes 

the sea without. A harmonious intercourse. A bliss 

achieved. 

Much of ON OUT is designed to explore 

perception. How, or what is the right way to view the 

world, the immediate location of our existence. What 

is accurate. Notably he rejects artificial impositions, 

things that get in the way. Obviously he would be 

against surrealism, closer to a ‘rose is a rose is a 

rose.’ Again, the rose within yields to the rose 

without. 

Then it relies on oriental meditative stance. 

Exhaust all excess materials out of the head. 

Make the moment of contact with reality purest by 

not thinking of all that other shit, past tenses and 

wishes. 

The word is purity. 

So I shut up. We bring out the bread, wine, apples 

and cheese. And people begin to feel the place out. 

I sit watching and eating, trying to chew the 

rhetoric off my tongue, and just get a sense of being 

there. The grey above begins to break and sun comes 

casually through on the waves and rocks. I sense the 

ocean more and the light sharpens the white color of 

the foam on the waves, as the tide begins to lap in. 

But, good academic soul, I keep running into irony. 

In section four of the poem, it begins: 

Yesterday the weather was nice there were lots 

of people. Today it rains, the only other figure is far 

up the beach. 

(by the curve of his body I know he leans 

against the tug of his fishingline: there is no 

separation) 

Below the flat rock where the wine and food 

sit, I reach down and pull up the broken handle of a 

fishing rod. Craig, looking between two other rocks, 

finds the split and shredded yellow-white bamboo of a 

complete rod. We give a weird chuckle at what seems 

like another break in the poem. While Jim and 

Donna are up climbing around the edge of Wobbly, 

36

they discover a dead seal and say, “God, it stinks!” 

Later Jim comes from another sandy part of the 

beach with little pieces of plastic, from bottles and 

such, that he says he keeps finding all over the place. 

Jeff and Ken, both from New York, lean against a 

boulder and talk about New York. Only Wen, a 

Chinese girl from Hong Kong, who rarely ever 

speaks, appears content. She is wearing an orange 

sweater and brown corduroys. She sits on the rough 

shaped stones and, first, juggles two oval shaped 

stones back and forth in little loops in the air. I ask 

her if she knows how to juggle. She says no and stops 

and begins to build what looks like one dimensional 

pagodas beside her knees. It’s nice to watch as Don, 

the large photographer and I talk about sailing and 

photography, and how photographers can be 

exploitive and sadistic. He tells me a story of how his 

class came out to this same place a month ago with 

three models. And how one must have really been 

loaded on something, the way she kept moving 

around all afternoon, jumping across and diving into 

the surf. The models were all nude and this one 

scratched herself horribly, scraping herself bloody 

against the rocks. But how she was the best one, the 

way she got into it and kept moving. 

----------------- 

“It sounds horrible,” I say. 

“It was.” 

And now all the students come back, except 

Wen who’d wandered by herself down the beach. The 

sun is out full now and she’s picking up rocks and 

going through the slow motions of discus thrower. I 

pick up Lew’s most recent book, THE SONG MNT. 

TAMALPAIS SINGS, and between the stanzas, as I 

again read out loud, I occasionally look down the 

beach at the orange and brown figure going through 

the careful smooth motions of throwing the rocks. 

There is such a disciplined, quiet grace about her 

whole sense of movement. 

From the book I take, “SONG OF THE 

TURKEY BUZZARD.” I read the poem strong. The 

fresh air has finally filled and relaxed my lungs, so I 

feel deeply into the making of each phrase. 

Everything in it feels tangible: 

I hit one once, with a .22 

heard the “flak” and a feather flew off, he 

flapped his wings just once and 

went on sailing. 

Bronze 

(when seen from above) 

as I have seen them. All day sitting 

on a cliff so steep they 

circled below me, in the up-draught 

passed so close I could see his 

eye. 

However, as I tell the class, the completion of the 

poem really disturbs me; 

II 

Praises Gentle Tamalpais 

Perfect in Wisdom and Beauty of the 

sweetest water 

and the soaring birds 

great seas at the feet of thy cliffs 

Hear my last Will and testament: 

Among my friends there shall always be 

one with proper instructions 

for my continuance. 

Let no one grieve, 

I shall have used it all up 

used up every bit of it. 

What an extravagance! 

What a relief! 

On a marked rock, following his orders, 

place my meat. 

All care must be taken not to 

frighten the natives of this 

barbarous land, who 

will not let us die, even, 

as we wish. 

With proper ceremony disembowel what I 

no longer need, that it might more quickly rot and 

tempt 

my new form 

NOT THE BRONZE CASKET BUT THE BRAZEN 

WING 

SOARING FOREVER ABOVE THE O PERFECT 

O SWEETEST WATER O GLORIOUS 

WHEELING 

BIRD 

------------------------------------- 

Lew Welch 

37

Lew Welch 

And I read to the class what I had written in 

response: 

………..Lew’s tone changes here, Religious, priester 

taken his vows, no more questioning, but into that 

Jeffers thing so deep that the world is beyond human 

repair, because of basic, human flaw (i.e., witness 

what we have done to the planet). Only the vultures, 

again as in Jeffers, are pure, clean. Though he doesn’t 

reject what has been joy in his own life, the negative 

thrust is there; the only dignity that remains is owned 

by those birds who turn human garbage into the 

beauty of their own flight. Though I think the poem 

stands on a language of its own, I don’t see the point 

of view as terribly different from Jeffer’s poem, 

Vulture: 

… how beautiful he looked, veering away in 

the sea – light over the precipice. I tell you solemnly 

That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be 

eaten by that beak and become part of him, to share 

those wings and those eyes – 

What a sublime end of one’s body, what an 

enskyment; 

What a life after death. 

But the class disagrees when I say the poem 

comes off to me as weird death wish that I can’t 

understand. Welch is still in his forties, and seems to 

me as strange time for a man to be making a last will 

and testament. When I ask what people feel about the 

poem, and if they agree with my sense of it, several 

people shake their heads, as if my viewpoint is too 

narrow. Paul seems to sum up the objection quickly. 

“As I see it,” he says, “the poem is just one more 

acceptance of Death,” and the poem, from his 

hearing of it was, “more just an acceptance of the 

cycle of Death and it was liberating to listen to 

because it didn’t try to reject Death as part of the 

cycle of things.” The way he paints it is that both Lew 

and the poem are at just one point in a large pattern 

that is only partly visible to us. And the act of the 

poem is just preparation and acceptance of the next 

step. 

Suddenly the poem becomes Oriental again. 

Bigger than I had ever been willing to accept it or see 

it. My original response now was coming off as the 

thin, Western humanist. That is, operating out of a 

concern for daily and secular obligation. (Maybe 

that’s the answer that lies behind Lew’s refrain, ‘What 

are we gonna today/today, today, today’). In any case, 

in a funny way, Paul’s response brought me out of the 

bind I felt myself in when I brought my class down to 

the rock in the first place. That is, my weird 

consciousness of having to perform some academic 

pedagogic duty, or, literally do something to the stone 

to make it valid. But now gradually I was getting to a 

point where I could see things in a way that wasn’t 

always ironical (the rock that wouldn’t rock, etc). Of 

course Wen had already begun to locate me there, to 

make the event literal, as opposed to literary. 

So, since all ears feel open, I finish by reading 

all of the HERMIT POEMS. Then I get up and really 

begin to enjoy the place, the feel of wind, the sun. I 

climb up the side of Wobbly, check out the smell of 

the seal, its skin rotting in the crevice of the crator. 

Everybody is climbing all over the place now, up the 

cliff, the other shelves of rock. I climb up one shelf, 

sit Yogi style, and figure this is the one the poem was 

meditated upon. A full view of the beach, the rock, 

and the way the ocean ripples across the stone 

boulders that appear planted in the sand: 

2 

… 

…. 

Sitting here you look below to other rocks 

Precisely placed as rocks of Ryoanji: 

Foam like swept stones 

My mind flashed back to Wen building the 

little rock houses. Lew is right. They do look like 

photographs I’ve seen of boulders in Buddhist rock 

gardens: 

Or think of the monks who made it 4 hundred 

and 50 years ago 

Lugged the boulders from the sea 

Swept to foam original gravel stone from sea 

(and saw it, even then, when finally they 

all looked up the 

instant after it was made) 

And there is a beautiful flash that takes place 

in my head and body when I suddenly equate the fact 

of the poem with the glazed water and foam drifting 

between the black boulders and sand. It’s so rare to 

find. I hear the word ‘legitimate.’ Any how. 

After a while, it feels like ‘time to go.’ I turn 

around and look up the cliff. Ken, the New Yorker, is 

up in a tall, shallow cave. His elbows are at his sides 

with his hands up in the air, looking like the tucked 

in wings of a vulture. Everybody else is climbing 

around the beach playing with stones, or just 

watching the movement of the ocean. Nobody has a 

watch when I ask what time it is. Somebody says, 

“How does a mountain or a rock tell time.” Then I 

say, Wouldn’t it be surreal to put a watch around a 

mountain.” And somebody says, “we better go.” 

38

We pick up all our garbage and split, several of 

us saying it would be better if we had all our classes 

……………………. 

III 

Outside 

The Monday after the visit to Wobbly Rock, I 

get a telephone call in the middle of the class. It’s 

Lew. His voice sounds flat and distant. It’s difficult 

for me to talk because we are in the middle of an 

hour with Jack Gilbert who is talking about his sense 

of the fifties. Lew wants to know if he can still come 

to the class. I have to tell him it’s too late. David 

Meltzer is scheduled 

to come the next 

week, and there are 

no classes after that 

one. Actually it’s more 

complicated. In truth 

I’m telling him he can’t 

come because we 

already spent two 

weeks on his work, 

and we have three or 

four more poets to 

cover. A history of 

local literature in 

miniature that, at one 

time, he could have 

parodied (as in, “A 

Round of English” for 

Philip Whalen in ON OUT). At the same time I feel 

guilty because I’m telling a human voice that I value 

that he can’t, even if he wants to, come up with his 

goods anymore. I tell him we went to Muir Beach last 

week and I wrote something on it and would he like 

it, if I sent it to him? He says sure and to send it in 

care of Don Allen, his editor. I complete the call by 

saying we’ll get him a reading this fall at the Art 

Institute to which he seems interested. Then I get 

back to the class and Jack Gilbert. 

That was the first Monday of May and the last 

time I ever spoke to him. Three weeks later, on May 

28, the San Francisco Chronicle reported his 

disappearance: 

BAY POET MISSING – BIG SEARCH 

Sheriff’s deputies and a band of Bay Area friends 

searched the rugged hills above Nevada City 

yesterday for Beat Generation poet Lew Welch, who 

was reported missing last Sunday night…. 

Early in April, when I first tried to get in 

touch with Lew and had been reading his works as 

closely as I could, I had this dream: 

It’s not a happy dream. Actually cold. I’m on a 

beach that I’ve never seen. A blankness, an 

unkempt quality about it. It is an era of desolation. 

I’m waiting there for no particular reason. Like 

there is nothing else to do. I’m with a couple of 

friends but our friendship does not even seem to be 

particularly significant. Then Lew shows up. 

He’s dressed only in his trunks. A tall, slender 

figure, tanned by the sun. His head is higher than 

mine, and his neck is craned back like that of a 

horse permanently broken by unkind reins. It is 

impossible to establish any sense of personal 

location with him. His face will not receive the 

personal or, any longer, reciprocate with such. He 

does not say a word. 

So I am still lonely on the beach. He’s merely a new 

figure on the beach for me to watch. He knows 

what he wants to do. There is a low platform made 

out of white driftwood. It’s on the upper – edge of 

the beach facing the horizon. It’s early afternoon. 

He walks over and out to the platform where he lies 

down with his knees bent up in the air. 

It’s the end of his part in the dream. It’s as if he’s 

waiting to be carried across the sea in some ancient 

rite. There’s no use talking anymore. It’s only time 

to wait, to bake in the sun, before taking that 

ultimate journey. 

I lose interest in watching. There is a fence across 

the beach. On the other side is the beautiful wife of 

an ex-friend. She is smiling that I come to her. 

When I go around the fence, we take hands and 

begin to dance, like spiders, back and forth across 

the hot sand. Lew’s muse. She must be, Lew’s 

muse. He has left her. I pursue her in love. She is 

black. The dream dissolves in dance. 

------------------------------------------- 

In May, and over the summer, there are 

reports in the newspaper and by word of mouth that 

Lew has re-appeared. That he was seen in Nevada 

City, that he was in Sausalito, that people had talked 

to him, etc. By September, it’s obvious to most, that 

he’s never coming back. 

---------------------------- 

Lew Welch 

39

Lew Welch 

How did we get here? How did we get to this 

voice? Why Lew Welch? Why should he be important 

to me, to us? 

For me it goes back. To 1965. I was in the 

City, just beginning to hear my own voice, in my own 

poems. I was just 24 and had two poems published. 

A very tenuous entrance into the world of poets. I 

and my friends had given a couple of readings at the 

Blue Unicorn, a coffee shop on the edge of the 

Haight, where I and my girlfriend also lived. None of 

us know where we are going. I was in the writing 

program at State, but that was coming to an end. In 

the world there was the war, the draft, the question of 

what to do. My body refused to 

continue to go to school. In 

music there was Dylan, Coltrane. 

But they were far away. Local 

examples seemed remote. Spicer, 

Loewinsohn, Meltzer, Snyder, 

Whalen. They all seemed large 

and unapproachable. Especially 

to those of us still in school. 

Actually I only met and 

talked to Lew once in my life. I 

shouldn’t say talked. I really 

listened, but maybe it was the 

first time I learned I could get 

high listening to someone, just 

through rhythm and voice. It was in April of ’65. I 

had just heard him read and sing in the Gallery 

Lounge at the College. It was a benefit for Dizzie 

Gillespie for President campaign. There, I had loved 

it, the phrasing of his line, a cross between song and 

natural voice. Plus, what he was using in terms of 

content, related a lot to the feel I got from living in 

the City. The language was airy and salted, from 

somebody who really liked to relate to the public life 

of the street. It had a clean, liberated feeling about it. 

Plus there were also poems about driving cab which I 

was also doing at the time. Like the poem “IN 

ANSWER TO A QUESTION FROM P.W.,” how it 

ends: 

------------------------------------ 

Like the sign over the urinal: “You hold your future 

in your hand.” 

Or what the giant negro whore once said, in the back 

of my cab: 

Man, you sure do love diggin’ at my 

titties, now stop that. We get where 

we going you can milk me like a Holstein, 

but I gotta see your money first. 

“I had just heard him 

read and sing in the 

Gallery Lounge at the 

College. It was a 

benefit for Dizzie 

Gillespie for 

President 

campaign....” 

Lew was someone who actually had dug and 

given form to what I was digging, listening to all those 

40 

stories out of the back of the cab, while I was doing it 

for a living. 

So one night when I and Margaret (my girl 

friend at the time), and Tom Schmidt and Maria and 

Bill Howard, three other friends, were in the Juke 

Box, a bar on the corner of Haight and Ashbury, 

when I saw Lew up at the bar, it was about ten 

o’clock, I naturally went up and invited him to come 

back and sit and talk with us. When I got to the bar, I 

had to wait a minute. The Juke Box was on, 

something by Dinah Washington, and he was busy 

describing to Harry, the black bartender, how Dinah’s 

voice was sounding just like a trumpet at this one 

point in the song. It was obvious that 

he not only loved music, but lived in 

relationship to it like a warm coat that 

kept his feelings alive and intact. The 

pleasure he took in depicting the 

quality of her voice, made the music 

seem like a nipple that he sucked with 

precise and everchanging delight. 

But he was happy to come back 

with me to the table. He was terribly 

high from teaching. He had just come 

from the Medical Center where he was 

giving a course on Gertrude Stein. It 

was the sound of a voice of a man in 

love. It was ten o’clock and for the next three hours 

he rapped on everything imaginable. Starting with 

Gertrude, moving to music, then relating to poets, he 

talked of people, things he had done. Much of it I 

guess was preachment. He was asserting a way to live. 

Definitely not like his mother, gripping his hand out 

in front of us, “She wanted us to be clean as a bar of 

soap. She’d even say that!” How he was in awe of 

John Handy, the alto – saxophonist, who knew so 

much about the history of jazz, that he was still afraid 

to approach him. And how poets could be like jazz 

musicians around younger artists, cooking as hard as 

they could to keep the younger ones out of the circle. 

Six years later now it’s hard to recapture content. I 

just know and remember how well it felt to listen. 

Our questions and remarks were like drum beats 

behind the musical pictures they helped provoke him 

to draw. 

I felt great for at least three days after. Energy 

coming out of every pore. Completely free from all 

that City Paranioa. He’d given us all a good start. 

We got to literally see each other a few days later. At 

that time Doug Palmer and Gary Snyder had started 

an IWW local for poets and other artists. On that 

Saturday, down in a Second St. alley loft, we had a 

benefit to pay the rent, I was one of several people 

scheduled to read, Lew and Gary were the top

eaders. Since I was driving taxi, I could only come 

in for an hour in which I could read and listen some. 

I read at Nine – thirty and Lew was there. I read for 

ten minutes as well as I could, or perhaps the best I 

had ever done. When I finished, there was a good 

applause and I felt pleased, in fact proud. Lew was by 

one wall with a couple of people. Instead of walking 

over to him, I just looked across the room and smiled 

hello, half way imagining that he’d walk over to me 

and say what he thought. He didn’t. He just raised his 

eyes, with a tight lipped grin hello. He looked 

pleased. But I still didn’t go over. My own pride 

holding me and turning me to talk to a friend. 

I remember that. Anyway, I soon left the City. 

The Peace Corps as my out. Two years in Africa, 

Nigeria, I shared ON OUT with anybody I thought 

liked poetry, often telling my friends of that night in 

the Juke Box. 

Coming back to the City, however, in 1968, 

the relationship stopped feeling the same. Though I 

heard through other poets Lew was not writing any 

new stuff, the bottle was overtaking him, I still held 

him in the same kind of awe that I believe he held for 

John Handy. I was afraid to get close, because I felt 

he knew so much, and I wanted to know more before 

I approached him again. I didn’t want to be in the 

position of disciple. At the same time, the city and 

the country were going through heavy changes. The 

Panthers, the Strike at State, the dissolution of the 

Haight-Ashbury, changes from acid to speed, 

everything going at collision force, as both political 

and artistic off-spring from the revolutionary 

prophecies of the late fifties and early sixties, it was 

getting terribly difficult to keep our heads above 

water. In getting away from poetry, Lew had gotten 

into visionary prose. It was always beautiful to read, 

the few pieces that I saw in the Digger papers and the 

Oracle. He had become a cross between an urban 

anthropologist and ecologist. I remember he read one 

of them at an event in the Nourse auditorium. The 

passage always sticks in my mind where he talks of 

walking through the Mission with Philip Whalen and 

he goes into a bar to take a leak and his shoes are an 

inch deep in piss on the john floor. It was his 

metaphor for decline and fall, the erosion of San 

Francisco. But everything he was writing was going in 

that direction. Out from the City. Long hairs, in new 

families and tribes, leaving for the country, to create 

new and decent lives, while the cities destroyed 

themselves. On the surface, the vision of survival was 

optimistic. It was still as if the holiness of the vision 

that takes place in Wobbly Rock could come to pass. 

But underneath it was despair. It might have been 

deeply personal, but in rejecting the City, he was also 

rejecting the source of his music, and the source of 

his language. The voices and sounds that fed him 

were from the City, and he no longer felt he could be 

fed. 

And I was, and continue, to try to hold on in 

the City. And the visions, no matter how accurate in 

description, now failed to pull me. I wanted to hear 

the old voice singing a more personal song. If the 

social whole was quite literally falling apart, 

revolutionary energy aside, I wanted to hear a local, 

an immediate voice help get us through, at least, one 

to one. But in 1969, I hadn’t even got that far yet, I 

was, in consciousness, somewhere between the 

Panthers, the State Strike and People’s Park, I had 

stopped writing. The answers for me had become 

urban and collective. I wasn’t heading for any woods. 

Then I didn’t hear of him for a long time. By 

Nixon year II, energies on a social level had really 

begun to collapse. Collective visions had become a set 

of fictions, or, at most, commercially opted. I had 

begun writing again. Quiet exile in Berkeley and 

Oakland after a heavy house rip off in the City. My 

despair. 

Then, out of nowhere, it happened. An 

ecology benefit that was given in the Pauley Ballroom 

in November of 1970. It was probably the best poetry 

reading to a large audience (at least a 1,000), that has 

been given in the Bay Area in some time, Gary 

Snyder, Howard McCord, David Meltzer, Mary 

Korte, Keith Lampe and Richard Brautigan. There, 

Lew read much of THE SONG MNT TAMALPAIS 

SINGS. It was an incredibly beautiful performance. 

The voice sounding pure and full, so that you could 

sense the audience rising, falling and moving in the 

direction of the line, language being the hypnotic 

master of the event. He took us up the mountain and 

made it speak in such a way you could hear the wind 

touch the shapes and crevices of the rock: 

… 

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go. 

Once again we celebrate the great Spring Tides. 

Beaches are strewn again with Jasper, 

Agate and Jade. 

The Mussel-rocks stand clear. 


Once again we celebrate the 

Headland’s huge, cairn-studded fall 

into the Sea 

Lew Welch 


41

Lew Welch 

For we have walked the jeweled beache 

at the foot of the final cliffs 

of all man’s wanderings. 

This is the last place. 

There is nowhere else we need to go. 

……….. 

There was something convincingly Holy about 

the experience which now makes his final despair, no 

matter what might have been his personal problems, 

be very legitimate. When you have found the Altar, 

and through the Altar, you hear such pure, life giving 

sounds, it must be next to impossible to acknowledge 

and live with forces that you are convinced are going 

to completely wipe out that Altar, or what has become 

the singular source of your life. 

IV 

The ecological awareness must have worked 

heavily to destroy him. The other forces are more 

clearly viewable in the interview with David Meltzer. 

But, it appears, I’m having trouble ending this. What 

did he mean to me? Why do I feel like I’ve grown 

away from the first offering? Why do I still want to 

stand back? 

I hope this comes off as praise. What he 

uncovered and opened up, the energy there gave me 

my first genuine lift into the whole act and love of 

poetry, not as a diversion - but an on-going statement 

of life. It’s just that the statement finally got too 

narrow for me. In a sense Lew became his own 

mountain, high and removed from the world of the 

City, the language of his which first attracted me to 

both the man and his work. Indeed he was deadly 

accurate about the forces of erosion, those who would 

eliminate the possibility of what is gentle and pure 

and only act in terms of greed and destruction, the 

vision or the place of the vision simply got too 

narrow. Not that he lost consciousness of the world, 

but he lost that urge to participate, to try and become 

at one with us in participation in that world. In short, 

we no longer need the voice of the teacher (and God 

knows we’ve had too many martyrs). We need, if I 

can preach, voices that can listen to each other and, 

again, make possible survival here. 

But let me end this in praise. Praise for a 

voice, a mountain of a voice. I loved to hear. 

January 15, 1972 

This essay first appeared in Earth Geography Booklet No 4, an 

edition of Io magazine edited by Richard Grossinger in 1973 

HARRY’S HOUSE 

Vol II (Fast Speaking Music) 

A label driven, I think, by a fast speaking woman. 

Anne Waldman is a figure central to the Naropa 

School in Colorado. (That’s her on the cover with 

Harry Smith). It’s still called ‘The Jack Kerouac 

School of Disembodied 

Poetics.’ Harry’s House? 

Well Harry Smith lived in 

a place on the campus. You 

might recall Harry, 

musicologist, irascible 

figure on the Allen 

Ginsberg scene in NY. 

Harry passed on. And in 

recent times his place has 

been converted to a 

recording studio. So, if 

you enjoy an eclectic mix 

of poets and sounds, you 

might be in the right place 

here. I wish someone 

would tell me what Amiri 

Baraka was doing in later 

years, all this apparent provocative anti semitic stuff? 

But here he’s brilliant with I Liked It Better. It’s regret 

42 

for a time when he says you knew your enemies. He’s 

talking about the god awful Klan. Now, he says, 

they’ve tucked their robes into their executive briefcases. 

There’s Ginsberg’s old guitarist Steven Taylor 

riffing on Ezra Pound. A song 

by Anne Waldman, Bardo 

Corridor, performed by Junior 

Burke. Joanne Kyger, a straight 

uncluttered poem. NY school 

poet Bill Berkson (who’s been ill 

lately). Eileen Myles, Ron 

Silliman, Reed Bye, Jack 

Collom, Thurston Moore. 

These are the more familiar 

names to me. Often poets are 

backed by sympathetic music. It 

adds dimensions. Tracks range 

from the personal poetics to the 

highly political, with more than 

a couple of experiments with 

sound. 

www.fastspeakingmusic.com 

Michael Kearns

Write a 

Madder 

Letter 

if You Can 

by Kevin Ring 

This little essay is so late. It should have been 

written, done and dusted and featured in Beat Scene 

well before now. I’d heard through Beat Scene friend 

Richard Miller that the upmarket USA bookseller 

Glenn Horowitz Inc were handling the sale of sixty 

three letters and postcards from Jack Kerouac to his 

old Columbia University and Denver friend Ed 

White. The correspondence from Jack lasted from 

July 15, in 1947 through to May 12, 1969. They were 

a mixture of letters and postcards, the majority 

written in the later 1940s and early to mid 1950s. 

Keen observers will know that Ed White is 

something of an inspirational figure in the Jack 

Kerouac story, for it was White who suggested to Jack 

that he ‘sketch’ while writing. By that he meant, write 

spontaneously on the spot, as an artist might do 

preliminary sketches in preparation for a big 

painting. It would be no understatement to say that 

White’s suggestion, borne out of his artistic 

background, changed Jack Kerouac’s future. In a 

letter dated August 7, 1961 Kerouac reminded Ed 

White about his thoughtful comments, “Did you know 

you were the one who gave me the idea about my new 

prose? Just sketch, ‘from memory’ etc…’ 

In fact Kerouac knew and fully realized 

White’s prophetic words even later on and had 

recalled the exact moment, as he was inclined to do, 

that’s the beauty of Jack Kerouac, when, in a March 

1, 1965 letter he again reminded White, “To think 

that all that crazy stuff I’ve written since 1951 in a way 

started when you casually suggested, in a Chinese 

restaurant on Amsterdam and 124 th , remember? To try 

“sketching,” which I did, and it led to discovery of 

modern spontaneous prose.” 

Kerouac took time - sat and typed Ed a letter 

explaining this and thanking him again for the 

direction White set him off on. To me, it seems that 

White never really got enough credit. Kerouac was 

struggling with his writing; he knew what he wanted 

to say, but how to say it? White was the catalyst for 

his new style. And, it must be noted, Kerouac seems 

fully aware that ‘the discovery of modern spontaneous 

prose,’ (as Jack framed it) - has a moment in history, 

it is something and Kerouac is proud of the fact. But 

he never forgets White’s place in the big scheme of 

his things. 

What I have here in front of me, on the 

desk, is a nicely done bookseller catalogue aimed at 

43

Write a Madder Letter if You Can 

prospective purchasers of this sizeable collection of 

letters from Kerouac to White. There are extracts 

from every single one of them, they are carefully 

annotated, dated, documented and then they all have 

a commentary note from White. With White 

explaining what he wrote to Jack that might have 

prompted a certain response from him. Ed White 

kept Jack up to date on his network of friends and 

associates in Colorado, especially Denver. Of course 

Denver was Neal Cassady’s hometown and a place 

Jack gravitated to as a young 

man in his twenties. It was a 

landscape in drastic contrast to 

the one he was familiar with on 

America’s East Coast. The 

region inspired his imagination 

and quickly made it into his 

writing. 

Architecture had 

become White’s career 

eventually, after considering 

painting and teaching. It seems, 

from John Leland’s introduction, 

that both Kerouac and White 

suffered bouts of depression, 

they refer to it in their letters. 

But they had originally 

connected while both students at 

Columbia University in 1946. 

Kerouac never finished his 

degree but White followed it through to the end. It 

was where the Denver connection began for Kerouac, 

with White connecting with Hal Chase, Bob Burford 

and others. It was a fortuitous meeting for the 

budding writer from Lowell. 

John Leland, in his introduction, gets close 

to nailing Kerouac’s character, listen to this, “He was 

a celebrated traveler who needed to live at home with his 

mother; a rule breaker with a reverence for tradition; a 

slacker with a mad work ethic; an experimental writer 

with a dim view of modernism.” Leland is in tune with 

the capricious mind of Jack Kerouac, alive to the 

pulls and tugs going on inside him, the inner turmoil 

and debate. These letters to Ed White were a therapy, 

a working out, tilling over of ideas and argument. 

White and Kerouac were up for it. There is a raw 

honesty being played out over the decades. And 

White was no passive recipient of manna from 

Kerouac’s mountain. He was no backslapper content 

to tell Kerouac how wonderful he was, listen to this 

advice from White in a letter in 1948, “….you are 

concerned with personalities, which is exactly the right 

way to be, provided you set aside some small part of your 

mind for objective appraisal – a small portion whose task 

it is to look for weaknesses and limitations as well as 

strength and greatness. It is there that you will 

distinguish between the trivial and the essential…” 

Ed White became ‘Tim Gray’ in On the 

Road, a personality in that lively Denver crowd that 

also included Neal Cassady. It has become evident 

over the years that White, Hal 

Chase and others, while they 

knew and sometimes mixed with 

Cassady, were something 

different. White and his crowd 

were law abiding, career minded 

young people who steered clear 

of Cassady’s car stealing 

hedonist direction. Kerouac was 

torn between the faction around 

Cassady and Ed White’s group, 

it all returns to John Leland’s 

observations about Kerouac’s 

personality doesn’t it? 

White, as early as 1948 

is exhorting Kerouac to come 

over to France to be with him in 

his adventures there. Kerouac, 

the man who penned On the 

Road, the vagabond, hobo, 

sainted traveler, is reluctant to leave America. There 

are all kinds of reasons why he can’t join White in 

Europe. Kerouac admitted the situation and felt he 

was ‘a little bird that you have to put salt on…’ 

Kerouac saw White having adventures in Europe 

while he was at home writing ‘…sad letters…’ Of 

course this was 1948. Kerouac was all of 26. We now 

know the next few years would see him step into the 

big wide world. 

As Kerouac moved towards 1957 and the 

onset of a published writing life that was to make his 

name and probably kill him, White was still stretching 

out his hand to provide a safe haven for a beleaguered 

Kerouac. In late 1957 just as On the Road was about 

to fill the bookstores, White invited Jack out to stay 

in a property close to the White family home, “I 

remained in New York until July, 1955 when I returned 

to Denver because of my father’s terminal illness. In early 

August Anne Waring and I were married, in Moose, 

Wyoming, where the Warings were on vacation. After 

44

Write a Madder Letter if You Can 

honeymooning in Wyoming and California, we moved 

into the Waring summer house south of Denver, where 

our first son Ted was born two years later, on September 

28, 1957. Jack was invited to come and stay in the 

studio on the “farm’ property, but he was distraught and 

ill at that time, and unfortunately didn’t recognize that 

this offered an opportunity for a quiet, restful country 

retreat in which he could have gathered together his 

deteriorating life.” 

This would have been the time when the 

media spotlight was fully trained on Kerouac in the 

curious event that partially stemmed from old 

friendships when Neal Cassady and girlfriend turned 

up at the White household in the spring of 1968. 

White got home from an architect’s meeting to find 

an unknown car parked outside his house. But let 

him take up the story, this, in part, a commentary on 

one of Jack’s late in the day missives, “In the spring of 

1968 I returned home from a meeting with the Garland 

School Board on the design of the new Foundation 

building to find an incredibly dilapidated Pontiac Sedan 

parked in front of the garage door. It was completely 

“But since (childhood) I have learned that the really great man is someone like Wm. Blake, in whose time there 

was nothing heard from him, but silence. All the Carlyle heroes (…) were ‘men of silence and darkness.’ But in 

this age of noontime and noise (revolving doors, advertising agencies, blurbs, traffic, small talk) such men are 

not even wanted. and are laughed at. I like to think of Mark Twain as the one truly great mediator between 

silence and darkness (…) I derive my life from the existence of a Twain and not from the existence of the 

psychological fact that he who wants to be a great man suffers from delusions of inferiority within. What 

difference does it make after a Huck Finn, a Journey to the End of the Night, a Song of Innocence is 

written? Those works are foremost; the ‘great man’ is but a victim of universal mortal limits, after all.” 

Jack Kerouac – excerpt from a letter to Ed White on March 5, 1950. 

wake of On the Road being published. Those close to 

the events, such as Joyce Johnson, have commented 

that Jack was finding solace in drinking ever more 

heavily and that this essentially shy, quiet man was 

having big trouble coping with all the attention. Joyce 

Johnson speaks of Jack not turning up for 

promotional events, lying on her floor in a kind of 

stage fright. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but a 

quiet refuge in Denver might have been just the 

ticket for him at that stage. 

This and the many other commentaries from 

White make this paperback an unlikely valuable 

source of insight into Kerouac’s life. Ed White was a 

relatively conventional friend for Kerouac. He went 

on to be a prominent figure in Denver, responsible 

for some crucial work in designing how the city 

looked. Others like Burroughs, Cassady, Ginsberg 

enjoy the close focus and scrutiny; yet it is refreshing 

to read of other friends and allegiances. Not enough 

work is done in this area. I’m certain it would 

provide fresh perspective on Kerouac. Put simply, it 

is another slant on Kerouac; it prods us into 

rethinking who he was. 

The notes back and forth diminish and 

become briefer with the passage of time. There is one 

filled with what appeared to be bags of laundry. I 

hurried into the house, and Anne told me Neal Cassady 

was upstairs taking a shower in the boys’ bathroom, and 

his girl companion was in the master bathroom. I think 

our boys, then 10 and 8, were in their bedrooms. With 

the experience I had from Neal’s past visits to other 

friends, it was apparent he hoped to move in for a 

while.” 

White goes on to describe how Neal had two 

different boots on. Neal explains it by telling the story 

of another vengeful girlfriend and of his hopes for the 

immediate future. It involved much travelling. It is 

plainly obvious that while White and Cassady went 

back a long way, the prospect of Neal Cassady, wired 

as he was at that late point in his life, and a girlfriend 

staying in his house was not an option. And who 

could blame him? 

White concludes his remembrance by 

commenting, “Luckily, to, we were able to get Cassady 

and his friend back on their way before they could 

unpack all their belongings.” 

There are many warm letters between Ed 

White and Jack Kerouac. Naturally the emphasis here 

is on Jack’s letters; however White’s contribution is an 

invaluable aspect of it all. He pushes and prods 

45

Kerouac, is witness to his changing 

moods, the roads not taken, the 

yawning inevitability of Kerouac’s 

decline and the fleeting victories, 

fresh books, renewed optimisms. Yet 

at the conclusion, Kerouac being 47 

and White 44, it fades away into a 

kind of paranoia on Jack’s part. Bob 

Burford and Robert Lax are at 

White’s house, White wants to reunite 

Jack with old friends and phones him, 

but Burford is drunk and it descends 

into chaos. Jack tells White to make 

sure he doesn’t give out his phone 

number or home address to anyone. 

White feels the distance in Jack’s 

voice. 

Being from a sober working 

background, pillar of the community 

is a phrase that springs readily to 

mind here, it is debatable whether 

White ever composed that ‘madder 

letter’ to his friend Kerouac. What is 

evident is that White was a loyal ally 

for Kerouac. White was quite capable 

of flights of imagination that spurred 

Kerouac on, especially in their 

younger days, when in reality White 

was the footloose traveller in Europe 

and Kerouac, to an extent was the 

stay at home. Though of course 

Kerouac was subjecting himself to a 

writerly discipline and taking 

enormous pride in his daily word 

count of writing amassed. 

A very warm collection of 

letters from both men. It would be an 

absolute bonus if this little paperback 

sparked fresh interest in the friends of 

Kerouac who went to the nine to five 

jobs. There’s a mountain there, new 

revelations about Kerouac to be 

uncovered. It doesn’t all have to be 

Beat. 

The letters are on sale for one and a 

quarter million dollars. I don’t know 

yet if they have found a buyer. 

info@glennhorowitz.com 

RUTH WEISS 

Make Waves 

(Edition Exil) 

Released in 2013 at Temple studios in her town of Albion in California. 

Ruth Weiss, a pocket dynamo. She’s an inspiration, a survivor. A 

plethora of books in recent years, more often than not published in 

Europe, have raised her profile after ‘swinging in the shadows’ as 

Wallace Berman once talked of poets and artists languishing. This 

compact disc might be a surefire way to get a handle on Weiss. She’s 

an enthusiastic poetry with jazz exponent. Others may have abandoned 

the form but Weiss embraces it, luxuriates over her words. She 

reads the very first poem she ever wrote. She draws upon her Desert 

Journal work, some of her best writing in my view. She blends well 

with the band, a sax, a flute, acoustic bass, percussion. It is a subtle 

blend. Weiss and the band would have made an apt house band for the 

Walter Salles film adaptation of On the Road methinks. A lot more 

appropriate. She’s fluid, fluent, expressive, as she chuckles at the 

conclusion of her poems, she’s having fun. It all sounds very ‘live’ to 

these ears, no studio trickery here. There is no diminishing in her 

delivery, you might expect being 80 years old she’d be struggling, 

there’s no sign of that. In some respects what you have here are the 

sounds you might have encountered descending the stairs in some 

smoky cellar bar in North Beach, San Francisco back in 1956, as the 

San Francisco poetry renaissance was in full swing. I can’t think of a 

better compliment. It’s just so......authentic. 

Running time approximately 40 minutes. 

www.editionexil.at 

BEAT SCENE SUBSCRIPTIONS 

A 4 issue subscription to Beat Scene in the UK is £25 

Payable either by cheque to M.Ring or by Paypal (a link can be sent 

to you if it helps). 

A 4 issue subscription to Beat Scene in Europe is £35 either by 

Paypal or by cheque in UK funds and on a UK bank & made payable 

to M.Ring. Moneygram is also a safe option. 

A 4 issue subscription anywhere else is 

$70 (USA). Either by Paypal to the Beat 

Scene email 

kev@beatscene.freeserve.co.uk (a link 

can be sent if it helps) OR by US 

cheque payable to R. Miller at 1801 D 

Spruce Street, Berkeley, California 

94709, USA. 

Single copies can, of course, be bought 

at any time. 

Beat Scene is at 27 Court Leet, Binley 

Woods, Coventry, England CV3 2JQ 

There are very limited back issue 

copies left now. 

Recent numbers 71a and 72 are sold out. 

46

Billy 

Burroughs’ 

Prediction 

by Edwin Forr 

orrest 

est War 

ard 

We meet, Billy Burroughs and I, at Steve 

Tilson and Larry Lake’s BOWERY BOOKS on Old 

South Pearl Street in Denver. 

I am hanging out with Larry even though 

conflict between journeyman and apprentice flavors 

our friendship. As there is in the world, there is 

tension in our relationship for many reasons. The 

Seventies have ended. The Beats have been lionized, 

canonized and beatified while Hippies have been 

written off as “children who stayed too long at the 

party.” In the world that hasn’t tuned in, turned on, 

and dropped out, greed grows like a weed in the 

garden that once was America. 

Larry and I are discussing the literary merit 

of his Nineteen Seventy-one small press magazine 

forte Mano-Mano 2 which lies open to pages thirteen 

and fourteen on the glass counter top of his display 

case. We’re both rereading the printed facsimile of the 

Neal Cassady to Justin Brierly letter wherein the 

incarcerated Neal writes from the Colorado State 

Reformatory in Buena Vista to his former probation 

officer and friend in Denver and asks Justin to pay a 

small overdue bar tab at a Platte Street saloon. 

Currently the home of Brothers Bar, the site 

is one of the better hot spots serving food to waiters 

and waitresses getting off work late night in Denver. 

Hence, my familiarity with the place. Legendary and 

rightly so are the jalapeno cheeseburgers served there. 

As it so happens, Brothers Bar is one of numerous 

establishments from which Larry Lake, himself, is 

currently eighty-six-ed, mostly for reasons of art and 

alcohol, anger and disrespect. Larry once lived across 

Fifteenth Street, catty corner from Brothers, where he 

transformed an empty warehouse loft into a noteworthy 

second story walk-up art gallery and bohemian 

crib. The grand opening of his Bowery Gallery is the 

subject of an early Seventies’ independent film, 

entitled The Bowery Gallery. Despite Larry’s artistic 

infamy and fame, and his dogged ability to attract 

media attention, for more than one reason, all 

unknown to me, Larry and the two brothers who own 

Brothers Bar, they had a tumble of mythic proportions 

some time back, the facts and fictions of which I only 

know as rumor. Its odd-ball ironic that a page torn 

from Larry’s magazine, to this day, lends notoriety to a 

place Larry’s not allowed to enter! Next to the pay 

phone in the back hangs page twelve from Larry’s 

Mano-Mano 2, a shard of beat debris, something the 

brothers who banished Larry cherish. 

I am confessing to Larry that I’m mostly 

ignorant of Neal’s stature and importance in the 

literary world. Because Jack Kerouac and the antics of 

his anti-hero, Dean Moriarty, were neither part of my 

Jesuit high school curriculum nor on the reading lists 

of generously loaning, book buying friends, I only 

know of Neal Cassady as the driver of the bus 

FURTHER in Ken Kesey’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid 

Test, a text my old girlfriend M laid on me. Believe it 

or not, just as I’m saying the words Neal Cassady, into 

the storefront bookshop walk two of Neal Cassady’s 

real life existential pals: his own legendary partner in 

beatitude and pop culture myth, the eminent poet, 

Allen Ginsberg, (who, as it turns out, happens to be 

William S. Burroughs Jr.’s not so unlikely godfather); 

47

Billy Burroughs’ Prediction 

and the author of Speed and Kentucky Ham, himself, 

William S. Burroughs Jr., Billy B. As a gesture of 

goodwill and friendship towards and kinship with 

Larry and Steve, Allen has come to Bowery Books to 

autograph some first editions thereby increasing the 

value of Bowery Books’ Beat literature collection, and 

Allen is giving Billy, who has moved here to Denver, 

Allen’s version of the Poetry Tour of Denver. 

When Allen Ginsberg introduces William S. 

Burroughs, Jr. to Larry Lake and me, the reader/ 

writer/junkie in Larry immediately recognizes the 

reader/writer/junkie in Billy, and, thus, the proprietor 

of Bowery Books and the publisher of Bowery Press, 

Larry Lake, he turns on the charm for his celebrated 

guests. For the next hour Larry and Allen banter and 

gossip tales of mutual friends: Stuart Zane Perkoff and 

James Ryan Morris, Diane Di Prima and Robert 

Creeley, Tony Scibella and David Meltzer, while Billy 

B and I, we mostly listen. 

And naturally, or as this story will demonstrate, 

preternaturally, Billy likewise recognizes the 

kindredness between himself and Larry; and when 

Larry suggests that Billy should sometime read 

something from his novels at Café Nepenthes, the 

poetry reading that Marcia and I host in lower 

downtown Denver, Billy, who is known to demand big 

bucks for a reading, accepts, all without discussing 

payment. I figure he’s hoping to score in terms of 

reading material, turn-ons and connections. 

Over the course of the next year or so I 

pursue a friendship with the creature that is Billy 

Burroughs. I say creature, because not unlike Frankenstein, 

Billy B, he’s come back from the dead. 

Another’s liver keeps him alive, that of a woman 

named Virginia whose brain failed at about the same 

time that Billy’s original liver did. 

Billy lives at the Oxford Arms, one of a pair of 

sixteen-plex apartments just south of University 

Hospital on the east side of Colorado Boulevard. On 

Number Sixteen, his door, is a handwritten announcement 

that emphatically states “If you’re not from 

Boulder, you’re NOT WELCOME. Go Home. This 

means YOU!” When I read the admonition for the 

first time, I’m annoyed, wondering if I’m to be 

dismissed as not from Boulder, for from what I’ve 

learned from my study of modern American poetics, 

Denver, my adopted hometown, is, in fact, the 

birthplace of beat sensibility. I even have an unredacted 

copy of a letter to Ed White that I got from 

Larry in which Jack Kerouac, himself, does declare 

the rank of Denver’s own Neal Cassady’s writing to be 

among the greatest of America and modern Europe. 

Billy’s furnished apartment is as messy and 

muddled as is his health. A couch lines the south wall 

out of the center of which sticks the non-business end 

of a bayonet, the blade buried to the hilt in the cotton 

stuffing with its tip in the wall behind. Above the 

couch is an assemblage of magazine photo cutouts. 

Now the number of cigarette burn holes in the seat of 

the couch is alarming, given the number of people 

who live in this building. One generally doesn’t 

consider the possible carelessness of others when 

signing a lease, and the burn holes spell jeopardy and 

danger. On the stove sits a stew that never really runs 

out as Billy B adds to it whatever edibles he has on 

hand. When I lift the lid I am reminded more of 

slurry sludge than food. Whatever vegetables might 

have been in the mix have over time and reheating 

been reduced to mush. Even the remains of a hot dog 

that Billy claims to have added just yesterday seem 

about to liquefy. Needless to say, neither my ex Italian 

mother-in-law or my current German mother-in-law 

would be caught dead in Billy’s kitchen. Skieve!, Filth! 

would be their refrains. 

Billy and I, we do literary events together, and 

Billy, per the arrangement we made the day we met, 

does read at Café Nepenthes, my current Tuesday 

night Market Street gig. I collect twenty when I pass 

the hat and add thirty myself so Billy’s pay turns out to 

be a cool fifty bucks for a half hour’s reading. 

Better pay than my lawyer’s, I remark when I 

hand him the cash. 

Immediately after his feature reading, I take 

Billy home to his apartment as he has scant interest in 

the late night world I revel in, and he has no interest 

in the poets and poet tasters who attend. And, 

granted, my waiter’s hours are not sympatico with his 

pain relief schedule. I drive him in my Dodge Tradesman 

van a couple of times to Naropa Institute in 

Boulder to visit Allen Ginsberg and other visiting 

literary luminaries. He seems to enjoy the attention 

the Naropa-ites, students and teachers alike, shower 

upon him. After all, he is no literary slacker. He’s 

already had two novels published and sundry articles 

in national magazines including one in Time about the 

abusive superintendent of a juvenile facility in Florida. 

On subsequent visits to Billy’s apartment, he 

reads to me some very poignant and humorous short 

stories about his stay in the hospital post-surgery, 

about wandering the corridors and deep basements in 

the wee hours of hospital late shifts, running once into 

a wide-eyed, burned-black crispy corpse on an 

elevator gurney, and often into over-medicated 

maintenance staff in restricted areas. 

48


Despite the humor of his intellect as demonstrated 

in his writing, if truth be told, Billy is, for the 

most part, a sad sack. He knows the new lease on life 

he’s been given is a short-term lease, no matter the 

star status of his South African transplant of a transplant 

surgeon, Doctor Starzl. 

He is so medicated both from 

the morphine he injects for 

the pain of the arthritis that 

came with the transplant and 

from the excessive alcohol - 

Schmidt’s Malt Liquor, please 

- and from the steroids he 

takes to ward off organ 

rejection (Billy once told me: 

If I look at a cold, I catch it) . 

. . Billy is so medicated that 

he’s mostly a man on the nod. 

He spends much of his time in 

an overstuffed chair. Alice in 

Wonderland is the theme of a 

collage he has affixed to the 

wall opposite his chair. 

On a couple of 

occasions I accompany Billy to 

a an apartment north of 

University Hospital on the 

west side of Colorado where 

an assemblage of hospital 

junkies gathers to swap pills, 

drink beer, and generally 

banter with each other like 

addicts at an NA meeting 

telling drug stories, except 

these attendees are not on the 

wagon, are not taking thirteen 

steps towards sobriety and 

abstinence. In the middle of 

the living room, the lessees - 

Ernie and Ray, two Viet Nam 

veterans with serious problems 

related to the draft, their 

military service and exposure 

to Agent Orange - have placed 

a thirty gallon plastic trash 

can. It is filled with empty 

alcohol bottles, crushed cigarette packs, and the debris 

of fast food existence. Most attendees at the daily 

medication exchange rarely rise to pitch their empty 

long necks, Coors cans, and hamburger wrappers, 

into it, like basketballs into hoops, from their surrounding 

lawn chair seats The occasional marijuana 

contributed to the get-together is most welcome as 

cannabis is not something prescribed across the street 

at University Hospital, where the drugs being swapped 

originate. Of course, Billy does not offer to barter 

with his morphine, only some of the minor barbiturates 

he’s been prescribed. Around the circle I note 

some curious exchange rates: five Valium for one 

Thorazine, a carton of Camels for one Dilaudin. 

But there’s more to Billy B than drugs and 

despair, more than woe is pitiful me. For Billy B, he is 

a gentleman and a scholar. Billy B has died and been 

born again, not in a Born Again Christian sort of way, 

but rather in a born again beatnik sort of way. He 

writes beautiful poems on scarps of Safeway paper 

49 

Photo of Billy Burroughs in Lyons, 

Colorado in 1980 by Marcia Ward


bags, and he seems to possess a special gift, a heightened 

intuitive sense, that, as this story will demonstrate, 

is downright spooky. His harsh comments 

about the state of our great nation are painfully true. 

His discontent and disgust, his despair and disrespect, 

are based on experience, not politics. Yet hidden 

amongst the unkempt and sometimes bitter persona 

that Billy B shows the world, there resides a spirit 

more angelic than demonic. Perhaps Billy got more 

than just a liver from his donor, Virginia, for there are 

otherworldly qualities to Billy, as if all the pain and 

medication and fear have parted the veil betwixt now 

and forever. On occasion Billy sometimes sports a 

trickster smile in the shadow of his derby hat that 

even seems to enlighten the darkened corners of Ernie 

and Ray’s misaligned minds. 

Sooooo anyway, I throw a birthday dinner 

party for Billy, his thirty-third and last. In attendance 

at my house on South Pearl are Billy, his drug swap 

buddies, Ernie and Ray, Larry Lake and his new bride 

Barbara, entrepreneurial bakers Marie and Melvin 

Neumann (who bring beautifully braided rye and 

wheat loafs to the celebration), the artist Kelley 

Simms, best man at my wedding, Lenny Chernila, the 

poet Andy Clausen, myself and my wife Marcia. The 

menu is East Coast Italian: antipasto, Caesar salad, 

sausage and spaghetti with a scratch Marinara sauce. 

The birthday cake is an over the top, incredibly rich, 

New York cheesecake, (the secret recipe for which I 

received as a wedding present from friends of my first 

wife’s parents. In fact, when my first marriage hit the 

rocks, I jumped ship with only it, the secret recipe, to 

face the future with. I used to sell slices of it for a 

buck at street fairs, a price far below its value; and 

when satisfied customers, commenting on its superior 

qualities, would say that I ought to sell it for more, I’d 

make it known the secret recipe was available for ten; 

and I’d make a princely profit on the sale of Xerox-ed 

recipes.) 

Anyway, after Billy blows out the thirty-three 

candles that yin-yang atop his birthday cake, there are 

good wishes wished and toasts toasted to a future that 

proves shorter and bleaker than anyone but Billy 

might have guessed. And then, after a pause, Billy, 

with stoned eyes a sparkling, makes a prediction, 

prognosticating with a question directed at Marcia. 

“So when are you going to make your big 

announcement?” 

Marcia blushes a bit and stares at her 

questioner imploringly, as, apparently, she has no idea 

what Billy’s talking about, and says so. 

“Ah, come on, he continues, tell us about 

it.” 

“Tell you what? I don’t know what you’re 

talking about.” 

Billy sighs, smiles, and rephrases his request. 

“When are you going to tell us about the baby?” 

Somewhat alarmed, yet with a mixture of 

naughty delight and hopeful anticipation, while 

simultaneously defensive, Marcia soundly refutes the 

thrust of Billy’s innuendo. 

“I most certainly am not pregnant.” 

Billy sighs again, smiles again, and adds, “Ah 

yes, so you think, but nonetheless, you are. I would 

never kid about something like this. Being pregnant is 

not funny. Believe me. You are going to have a baby.” 

The next day, bothered yet excited by Billy’s 

prediction, Marcia buys an early pregnancy test, and 

sure enough: she’s pregnant. I guess we were not as 

careful as usual the night of Tommy Larkin’s marriage. 

Too much wine and too much passion will do that to 

young lovers at an Irish Catholic wedding. 

Sadly, the following March, some three weeks 

before the birth of my first son, Passion, Billy dies. 

The story I hear is that after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration 

in January of Nineteen Eighty-one, the new 

president’s first Presidential Directive, his first volley 

in his War on Drugs, is to forbid the use of morphine 

for out-patients, a directive that greatly affects Billy 

and his pain relief. Denied his out patient morphine 

regimen - one he’s grown totally addicted to - Billy 

opts to split Denver and return to Florida where he’d 

spent some happy days prior to his liver failure and 

transplant. The urban myth is that on the twenty-five 

hundred mile bus ride from Denver to Gainesville, 

Billy looks at a cold and catches it, a cold that, within 

short order, kills him, demonstrative proof that a mix 

of steroids and viruses can be lethal. 

Doing the backwards math, Marcia and I 

figure that she had been a mere thirteen days pregnant 

when Billy made his prediction, demonstrative proof 

of Billy’s special gift, of his intuitive ability to read 

others, their condition, and their future, a trait he 

once told me his grandmother had divined in him. 

Too bad Billy B never met my son, the proof of his 

prediction. 

Editor Note...Of possible interest...Cursed From Birth: The 

Short Unhappy Life of William S. Burroughs Jr, published by 

Soft Skull Press as a paperback in 2006. Still in print I 

understand. 

50

THE 

BEAT 

SCENE 

REVIEW 

SECTION 

Dexter Gordon: Dexter Blows Hot and Cool 

(Boplicity) 

CDB0PM 006 

Curtis Counce: Exploring the Future 

(Boplicity) 

CDB0PM 007 

West Coast Jazz. Think of Gerry Mulligan, Chet 

Baker, Dave Brubeck, Chico Hamilton. Lightly swinging 

sounds. Well, yes, but there was another side to what 

was going on in California, though it wasn’t much 

publicised at the time because it didn’t tie in with the 

“cool” image that record companies liked. And, it needs 

to be said, probably because it was mostly played by 

black musicians. I’m talking about the hard bop that 

came out of Los Angeles in the 1950s. 

Tenor-saxophonist Dexter Gordon’s career had 

slumped after his active role in the bop revolution of the 

1940s. Drug addiction had affected his reliability and he 

was in prison for a time. When he recorded for Dootone 

in 1955 he was in the process of sorting himself out, 

though it would be a few more years before he reestablished 

a place in the forefront of jazz. But he 

played well and his solos on numbers like “Silver 

Plated” and “Rhythm Mad” found him improvising at a 

consistently high level. Ballad performances such as 

“Cry Me a River” and “Don’t Worry About Me” 

showed him to be sensitive without sliding into 

sentimentality. 

Gordon was lucky to have strong support from 

pianist Carl Perkins, bassist Leroy Vinnegar, and 

drummer Chuck Thompson, who had recorded with him 

in the 1940s. Perkins was a talented bop stylist but 

succumbed to heroin addiction and died in 1958. Some 

of the tracks also feature Jimmy Robinson, a littleknown 

trumpeter. He was competent, but it’s Gordon 

and Perkins who really made music of lasting value. 

Another fine jazzman who was a victim of heroin was 

Elmo Hope, the pianist with bassist Curtis Counce’s 

group which recorded for Dootone in 1958. Critic Ted 

Through our Beat 

filter..... 

Robert Creeley, 

Jack Kerouac, Jim 

Burns, Amiri 

Baraka, Ed Dorn, 

The Garden of Eros, 

Boplicity, The 

Beat Generation 

boxed 

Gioia once claimed that Curtis had “one of the great 

neglected jazz bands of the 1950s,” and pointed to the 

fact that it never really ventured out of California for its 

lack of recognition. Touring on the East Coast, and 

especially appearing in clubs in New York, might have 

given it greater prominence and got it written about in 

leading jazz magazines. 

With tenor-saxophonist Harold Land, who had 

established a reputation for fine solo work with the 

Clifford Brown/Max Roach unit, and trumpeter Rolf 

Ericson in the front line, and drummer Frank Butler 

joining Hope and Counce in the rhythm section, the 

group played straight-ahead hard bop that never failed 

to swing. It could also perform in a relaxed way on tunes 

like “Angel Eyes” and “Someone to Watch Over Me.” 

Ericson was white, a Swedish musician who arrived in 

America in the early-1950s and soon found employment 

with Woody Herman and other big-bands. He was a 

decent soloist and easily fitted in with the general 

approach of the Counce band. 

It’s significant, I think, that these sessions were 

recorded for Dootone, a relatively small West Coast 

label that mainly specialised in rhythm’n’blues and 

other forms of music likely to appeal to a mainly black 

audience. And it’s good that the music, which has stood 

the test of time, is now available again. 

Boplicity CDs are available from Ace Records, 42-50 

Steele Road, London, NW10 7AS. 

Jim Burns 

51

Damn Fine Letters 

The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley 

edited by Rod Smith, Peter Baker 

aker, , and Kaplan 

Harris 

(University of California Press) 

Robert Creeley. Black Mountain, voluminous 

pile of letters, lots published, between him and 

mentor figure Charles Olson by John Martin’s Black 

Sparrow Press, Creeley’s own publishing venture in 

Mallorca, The Divers Press. Running off with Kenneth 

Rexroth’s wife Marthe, correspondent of William 

Carlos Williams, chicken farmer, sometimes wore a 

patch over eye damaged as a very young boy, 

connected with the Beats, Kerouac and Ginsberg and 

the others in San Francisco in the mid 1950s, not 

always a poet, as things like The Gold Diggers attest 

to. We know this much maybe, the casual observers 

amongst us, to varying degrees. 

With The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley 

edited by Rod Smith, Peter Baker, and Kaplan Harris 

we learn so much more. Creeley was a literary 

vagabond, moving around America and South 

America, searching for peace of mind, an escape 

from poverty as a struggling poet, his family in tow. 

The chicken farmer part is true and not something 

fanciful. He took it seriously. He also took his poetry 

very seriously, one can’t stress how utterly serious he 

was about it. 

In early letters to people like Charles Olson 

and William Carlos Williams and indeed, Ed Dorn, 

there are pages of deep thought and critical analysis 

of his work and the others. He is a committed 

student of poetic theory, dissecting each line 

meticulously, looking for weaknesses, seeking to 

improve himself. He questions his motivation, 

discards much writing which he later regrets. The 

back and forth between him and elder poets like 

Carlos Williams – a giant to Creeley – is invigorating. 

It would be marvellous to see their letters, the triggers 

to Creeley’s thought. These deep poetic discussions 

can become a little heavy and early on exchanges 

between Creeley and Olson evolve into something 

akin to Post War jivetalk, a brand of hip speak, 

codelike in character that the reader has to tread 

carefully and slowly through to decipher. And Creeley 

modifies his letter writing style to fit whoever he is 

writing to. To Ezra Pound is more formal, stiff even, 

recognisable as the kind of letter you or I might 

write. 

Creeley is a magazine publisher. He enjoys 

the organisation, the gathering of material for issues, 

the letter writing it entails asking for poems for the 

next issue of whatever he is doing. He worked on 

issues of Origin, whilst in Mallorca, for Cid Corman. 

Of course he is central to the publication of The Black 

Mountain Review, a short lived but so essential 

publication that played home to him, Charles Olson, 

Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, 

Robert Duncan and many many others whose names 

you will know. For many the collection will take on a 

new meaning with mid 1950s letters to Kerouac and 

Ginsberg. Creeley seems totally excited and enervated 

by meeting Kerouac, his letters are so open about 

this, excited by his encounters with him personally in 

San Francisco as the ‘poetry renaissance’ there gathers 

pace, the landmark Six Gallery reading, Howl, 

Kerouac’s explosion into the public sphere with On 

the Road, Creeley seems to take to Kerouac personally 

and artistically. He champions Kerouac at every turn, 

much as Ginsberg did for all his friends. Creeley 

wrote to Kerouac in late January, 1958, not for the 

first time, “Dear Jack, I’ve got some start into the 

Subterraneans, and yesterday On The Road came – so 

that’s it. Your style is pretty incredible, old friend, i.e., 

how you hold a thing, in a haze, then sharpen, then 

fade – I like it. To me – and it’s no simpleness – it means 

more than the content – or is the content, a disposition 

in itself. Or ‘all to be talked about’ a sharp, sliding web 

of consideration. So that again is it. Beats is for supper, 

otherwise – but you pick and I’ll read it, and feel very 

honoured in sd process. You are very damn good. Again, 

it’s what you can do, that makes me think about it 

all…” (Letter to Jack Kerouac, January 31,1958). 

In letters to William Carlos Williams, to 

Olson, Creeley is banging the drum, not just for 

Kerouac but William Burroughs and Naked Lunch. 

I’m taken aback by his positive words on Burroughs 

52


work but he really does admire his way with words. 

The subject matter may alarm him at points but the 

style, the methodology of Burroughs, impresses him 

and he tells his friends just that in letters. Burroughs 

and Creeley, an odd couple. And, of course, with 

Kerouac in San Francisco, they are embroiled 

together, Kerouac needlessly so, over Kenneth 

Rexroth’s wife. Creeley and Marthe Rexroth have an 

affair, it ends not so long after. So it is a point where 

Rexroth, long a champion and rallying point for the 

newly emergent Beat Generation, 

turns on them. Turns on Kerouac, 

who he sees as complicit in the 

marriage meddling. So there is 

much in Creeley’s letters about all 

this. Rexroth wouldn’t let go. It 

caused big problems. 

There are letters to 

England. A fascinating insight into 

how things got done in 1961 when 

Creeley replies to overtures from 

English poet Tom Raworth, then 

publishing his Outburst magazine. 

Raworth is keen to contact US poets 

and Creeley goes the extra mile for 

him with names and addresses of pretty well all the 

major Beat poets, Ginsberg, McClure, Olson, Robert 

Duncan, you name them and they are in his letter. 

Letters to Andrew Crozier, Alexander Trocchi. These 

tip offs would manifest themselves for years to come 

in the Transatlantic exchange of poetry. That results 

for Creeley with contact with publisher John Calder 

later on in England, with the publication of a number 

of books there. Though his relationship with Calder 

was to prove irksome for him. 

Creeley moves home a lot, New Mexico, San 

Francisco, Guatemala, Canada and various other 

locations. He and wife Bobbie have four daughters, 

one dies tragically aged five in an accident. It hits 

him hard. Yet he continues editing this magazine 

here, that one there. Small press, independent 

publications. Gets his poetry in at places like Yugen, 

run by Leroi Jones and Hettie Jones in New York, a 

focus for pretty well all the Beat writers. A constant 

stream of letters back and forth between him and Ed 

Dorn, Louis Zukofsky, Jerome Rothenberg, Kerouac, 

Ginsberg, Olson – with news of the death of Olson’s 

wife Betty, William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan, 

Alex Trocchi and others. All the time Creeley has a 

day job, teaching at universities. He’s very conscious 

of supporting his family. Guatemala is a curious place 

for him, very colonial, beautiful, generally a poor 

country where Creeley has no friends, so the letter is 

a big solace for him. New Mexico sees Creeley happy 

and sad. His mood swings on his sojourns there, 

teaching and bringing up a family, are wild ones. And 

Ed Dorn his most regular correspondent along with 

Olson, whom he seems to idolise. These are letters of 

longing to be with friends, free of the shackles of that 

day job, existing as a poet in the USA seems 

impossible financially for him. 

The letters seem to dwindle 

somewhat as the 1970s evolve, he’s 

preoccupied with teaching, supporting 

his family, and a little spark seems to go 

out in him at times. His marriage to 

Bobbie Louise Hawkins, they bring up 

four daughters, falters. There is much 

discussion between them, two, three 

years slip by and trial separations. The 

separation becomes permanent, but 

judging from the tone of the letters it is 

amicable. There is a hint at Creeley’s 

darker side in a letter to Bobbie, it 

seems he could be a Jekyll and Hyde 

character when drinking. 

Letters go out to Allen Ginsberg, Ed Sanders, 

Diane di Prima. Creeley seems to embrace the 

changing face of poetry in the 1970s, readings, 

performances of poetry. He’s pleased with the money, 

but the treadmill of it wears him down. And he’s 

forever mobile, moving, moving. In the mid 1970s he 

finds himself living above a store in Buffalo, a very 

nice apartment by the sounds of his notes. One of his 

grownup daughters lives close by. He’s at Buffalo 

University teaching, a lively place of course – with a 

magnificent library and you think from his tone that 

he’s settled. He’s fifty years old, the urge to party like 

it was San Francisco 1956, has largely left him – and 

yet he’s off again. New Zealand, Singapore, Australia, 

Europe, England and more. Never settling. 

One curious aspect of the book. Charles 

Olson dies in 1970 and save for a few stray lines as 

Creeley visits his sick bed, there is nothing. An 

almost total absence of correspondence relating to 

Olson’s going. What’s happening here? The man who 

inspired Creeley so much, surely Creeley spoke of 

him in letters to others, Duncan, Dorn? It is a puzzle. 

Possibly these letters will surface in another 

collection? It is to be hoped for, otherwise there exists 

a gaping dark hole. One death that does feature, 

though again it is a fleeting moment, is that of Jack 

53


Kerouac. Creeley is at his funeral in Lowell, 

Massachusetts, meets John Clellon Holmes, Allen 

Ginsberg, Gregory Corso. It is doubtful he had met 

Holmes prior to this and he remarks on this fact and 

praises the Holmes essay Gone In October as 

‘heartfelt.’ And good old England in 1977. He’s in 

London, as he writes to Robert Grenier, an old 

correspondent. And then to the north where he visits 

Basil Bunting, “We had a lovely visit with Basil Bunting 

whose wife had broken with him last winter in some 

dramatic fashion, took house etc. So he’s at Jonathon 

Wms’ (Williams) house in Dentdale, Sedburgh, 

Cumbria, extraordinarily lovely country, close to 

Briggflats – walking distance. He goes to the Quaker 

Meeting house there, est. by Geo. Fox. Anyhow Basil is 

what I’d like to be ‘when I grow up’ – so generous, 

uncomplaining, filled with explicit memories of people & 

places & acts. The conversation ranged over the whole 

literal world therefore.” 

Creeley likes England. Enjoys the company 

of Basil Bunting, Jonathan Williams, and he gets 

published and respected here. Why wouldn’t he enjoy 

it? Another writer who enjoyed England was Tom 

Clark. Resident at Cambridge in the early 1960s, 

studying. His Letters Home From Cambridge are a 

delight. And then a resident in Essex also, slumming 

it with Ed Dorn. Clark enters the Creeley orbit here 

in 1985, he’s consulting with Creeley about the 

biography of Charles Olson. Clark is gathering 

information, memories from Creeley about the big 

man and Creeley is rifling his memory banks for the 

times, the people, Black Mountain, his first wife Ann, 

Fielding Dawson. And this against a background of 

two young children Creeley has with third wife 

Penelope. It seems a pleasant home life for them all, 

despite the constant upheavals of moving. Clark went 

on to write a wonderful biography of Olson with the 

aid of Creeley’s recollections. In 1985 Creeley Also 

alludes to the death of Richard Brautigan in another 

letter to Tom Clark, “I’m trying to do some sort of note 

on Brautigan’s sad death. That’s so bleak about the ‘uses’ 

it’s instantly put to. I also couldn’t accept fact that no 

one, either Montana or Bolinas, had apparently asked 

where he was, i.e., no one to say goodbye, no one 

certainly to say hello.” (Letter to Tom Clark, January 9, 

1985) 

By September Creeley is in touch with poet 

Susan Howe from Finland. The journey never ends, it 

just goes on and on. He’s making the best of it. 

Family in tow, teaching and trying to be enthusiastic. 

Telling Howe his children are struggling to adjust. He 

likes the Fins but ultimately finds his year teaching 

there very mundane. A cloud comes over him with 

the news of the deaths of Robert Duncan, poet Joel 

Oppenheimer and editor George Butterick, all good 

friends of his. But the mood is improved by news he 

conveys to Allen Ginsberg in April 1989, Creeley tells 

Ginsberg he’s secured a position again at Buffalo 

University with a six figure salary, and the job fits in 

neatly with all his family obligations. Work drives him 

on and he’s heading for future times in Maine, 

Buffalo and Providence in Rhode Island. 

Back in Buffalo a madcap letter to poet/ 

editor friend Robert Grenier reveals a jocular side to 

Creeley that isn’t always apparent in the preceding 

years. Much wordplay, Hey Jude, Tom Clark, 

Heidigger, Pepsi, all themes of a buoyant note that 

ushers in his new position at Buffalo. That position 

seems to involve a degree of poetry politics, with 

Creeley advocating a position for friend Susan Howe. 

It’s a long way from the barrooms of San Francisco in 

1956 with Kerouac and co. Yet the Fax machine 

arrives and this is the first Selected Letters I’ve 

encountered that includes faxes and emails. Creeley 

maintains links with his Fifties past as he 

communicates with Allen Ginsberg in this new 

fangled cutting edge era. Ginsberg is seeking guidance 

on selling his archive. Creeley had recently let his go 

to Stanford University. The email age begins for 

Creeley – as far as this collection reveals – on 

October 12, 1993 with a note to Peter Gizzi. Creeley 

mentions his age, the infirmities of it, but with a 

humorous grace and twinkle – He writes to Kurt 

Vonnegut asking him to drop his daughter Hannah a 

line confirming she did really meet Vonnegut in the 

Creeley kitchen in Buffalo – with Ginsberg in 

attendance. Hannah’s high school friends don’t believe 

her. Vonnegut replies in a flash and Creeley’s daughter 

has her proof! 

Letters about the Vietnam war, references to 

liking Bob Dylan, the poetry scene as it emerges into 

the 1960s, the insights into his travels and travails, 

the domestic of it all. The sheer immersion in poetry, 

Creeley is totally submerged in poetry deeps, living 

and breathing it. From the 1940s to his death in 

2005, his fingers touching the new technological age, 

Creeley reveals his life in these ‘Damn Fine letters.’ 

As he was prone to utter in those early mailings to 

Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and William Carlos 

Williams. For the history of it all, a fabulous read and 

archive of American literary movement. 

ISBN 978-0-520-24160-2 

hardcover 

The University of California Press, 2120 Berkeley Way, 

Berkeley, California 94704-1012, USA 

www.ucpress.edu 

Kevin Ring 

54

Jack Kerouac 

The Haunted Life and 

Other Writings 

(De Capo Press) 

After years of the Kerouac vaults being locked 

we have been treated to a string of freshly published 

works, many dating from the younger Kerouac. Some 

observers are wary of this release of material, often 

billed as ‘lost,’ fearing it will not match the later 

period Kerouac, that it will damage his reputation 

even. Other critics simply opine that it isn’t up to 

scratch and should have been left alone. There are 

other camps, trains of thought. The fans, they come 

in ever fresh faced waves through the decades, drawn 

by his outsider appeal in the main, want to read 

everything he ever wrote. They dread the day the well 

runs dry. 

The Haunted Life and Other Stories was 

allegedly ‘lost’ in the back of a taxi cab in the 1940s 

in New York City. It makes you smile. The thought 

of Jack Kerouac, known for his frugality, catching a 

taxi cab makes me wonder. If he could save a few 

cents he would. And there was always the subway. Or 

maybe Allen Ginsberg or Stanley Gould, or John 

Clellon Holmes were picking up the fare? Did he 

know Stanley Gould then? But you see what I mean. 

Kerouac was like Dickens, he liked to walk. Shanks 

pony. 

The story goes that the lost manuscript was 

rediscovered in a cupboard in a room at Columbia 

university. It makes sense of course. Kerouac 

famously didn’t graduate from there but hung around 

to stop over with Ginsberg from time to time. And he 

frequented the bars around the university campus. 

The manuscript was eventually sold at auction at 

Sotheby’s in New York for in excess of $95,000 some 

years ago. Just imagine, ponder on it. What would 

that kind of money have meant to a largely down on 

his heels forty seven year old Kerouac in 1969? Even 

a tenth of that sum. He was basically writing begging 

letters to his agent Sterling Lord. The sad irony of it 

all. 

And so to the book. Me? I’m in the can’t get 

enough of Jack Kerouac camp. Never grown out of 

that stage. It’s easy to come to the conclusion that his 

early work quite naturally doesn’t have that apparent 

free flowing style that he so perfected as the 1950s 

broke and he listened to Ed White on sketching 

theory, that first thought best thought coffee and 

Benzedrine rush of writing that he would explode 

through and then revise later on. Of course he pushed 

the idea that he never revised and for a time we 

believed him, some with a raised questioning 

eyebrow. Until the academics got to his archives and 

made some discoveries. It was still spontaneous prose 

but he checked it out later on also. 

We’re talking mid 1940s here. Kerouac is what, 

twenty two? The Town and the City is years away from 

publication in 1950. An epic family saga of a book 

that was his first calling card but largely sank without 

a trace. Dismissed in the few reviews as heavily in 

debt to Kerouac’s hero Thomas Wolfe. It is pleasing 

to read in Todd Tietchen’s substantial and thoughtful 

introduction that he considers Kerouac’s first novel to 

have been unfairly relegated. To be honest my take on 

it was I wished he had written more in that vein. It is 

a substantial work that sorely needs reassessment. 

And mention of Thomas Wolfe, he of the soaring 

waves of words, never use ten words when you can 

employ a hundred approach, which is his way and has 

given us rapturous passages rarely equalled in 

American letters – brings in a mention by Tietchen of 

William Saroyan – that daring young writer and 

indeed playwright and another of Kerouac’s literary 

look to guys. Now Saroyan needs no introduction 

even today at a time when his books are mostly 

absent from bookstore shelves, he’s out of fashion no 

mistake – but another left leaning writer that Tietchen 

55

The Haunted Life 

re-introduces and it made me smile, make that beam, 

is Albert Halper. Now Halper possibly does need a 

little introduction here. It’s as though he never 

existed. Beat Scene, mostly through the efforts of Jim 

Burns, has attempted to bring him back from the 

dead – though it appears his works remain resolutely 

out of print. He was a socialist writer, mentioned in 

the same breath as Dos Passos. He wrote of the 

workplace, the workers, the downtrodden, he wrote 

of trade unions when America really had those 

organisations on a par with Communism. 

McCarthyism saw to that. He 

was out on a limb. And Kerouac 

loved his work, he and Sebastian 

Sampas, his young Greek friend 

in Lowell who was killed in the 

Second World War, almost before 

he needed to shave. They read 

and digested his work as eagerly 

as they did Saroyan and Wolfe 

and others. Kerouac includes 

some initial thoughts on Halper 

in his book, “Peter read slowly, 

admiring the young Halper’s tragic 

sense of youth and lonesomeness.” 

Kerouac, through Peter Martin, 

imagines Albert Halper in 

Manhattan, daydreams of one 

day being like him. Discussing 

Peter’s room and listing Halper 

amongst the Russian novelists 

and Sherwood Anderson’s and the 

like, his favourite books. So it is gratifying that the 

forgotten Halper is remembered and maybe, just 

maybe, some enterprising publisher will resurrect him 

and bring him to new readers. 

The Haunted Life is very much a forerunner to 

The Town and the City. Peter Martin is here in 

embryonic shape alongside Garabed Tourian and 

Dick Sheffield – characters based on Sebastian and 

on another Lowell friend Billy Chandler. Sadly 

Chandler was another World War Two casualty. 

Imagine losing two of your best friends aged twenty 

something? And Joe Martin is heavily based on 

Kerouac’s father Leo, about whom Jack had mixed 

feelings. They clashed, let’s put it like that. Like 

Kerouac’s mother, his dad had some questionable 

beliefs. In fact the book commences with Joe Martin 

bemoaning the state of his America, it is a vicious 

Archie Bunker or Alf Garnett tirade that is evidently a 

regular feature in the Kerouac household – a what is 

the country coming to soliloquy. 

Handling his loss of Sebastian and Billy – they 

are both dead as Kerouac begins to memorialise them 

both - and faced with his father’s racist tirades 

Kerouac captures the changing times, Benny 

Goodman records over the radio heralding a new 

mood, a new deal in Roosevelt’s USA. That sense of a 

change is gonna come that Kerouac was so desperate 

to capture in his work. The idea that the awesome 

swathes of rural America were not immune to the 

coming of the new highways, the radio, with 

television just around the corner. Nowhere would 

remain untouched and 

this kid Kerouac is so 

aware for his tender 

years, in tune, listening 

to the pounding drums, 

the dustcloud in the 

distance as modernity 

approaches, he sees it all. 

And he’s just this kid. 

Can you believe it? And 

there’s shades of his 

beloved Dostoevsky and 

of Proust. It is one of the 

more successful early 

Kerouac works. Present 

are the vital excesses of 

his prose, Peter Martin 

listening to the sounds of 

Galloway through his 

open window in the cool 

of the evening, “Again 

the train…moving north to Montreal…howling long 

and hoarse, a mournful night sound… 

Silence now for a moment…and the river hush, and the 

trembling of tree leaves. Far across the field, over the 

tracks and over to the boulevard across the river, where 

the cars move endlessly back and forth from the city to 

the ice cream road stands, the fried clam restaurants, the 

pink-lit roadhouses all crowded with shuffling dancers, 

the faint beep of klaxons returns.” (page 42) 

He’s already an incurable romantic about the 

endless possibilities of America. Even at this tender 

age. He can’t possibly see and hear all these things 

lying on his bed in his room, can he, but he does. All 

the portents are there. The signals that – okay he’s in 

the full glare of Thomas Wolfe and overblown, 

sometimes like a dazzled rabbit in the headlights, but 

he’s on the verge of finding his voice. And you know 

the story is a remembrance and tribute to his lost 

friends Sebastian and Billy. Kerouac has an almost 

camera like movement between Lowell houses as they 

Jack Kerouac aged 20 

56

The Haunted Life 

talk on porches, listen to baseball games on radios, 

drink lemonade, talk plans for the future and with 

girls. The influence of a writer like Dostoevsky is so 

apparent here, families, brothers, awful tragedy. Even 

though Kerouac at points stresses his dislike of 

‘European decadence.’ And then before you know it 

Kerouac’s characters are left in mid thought. It’s 

abrupt, no doubt about it. You turn the page hoping 

for more. A work in preparation that was to result in 

The Town and the City in 1950, where the Martin 

family were created in his youthful imagination to 

include more brothers and sisters and the coming of 

war for America. And there is the portrait of his 

father, far from flattering and if the later in life 

Kerouac was chided for allegedly bowing to his 

mother’s influence, then this father character is no 

less a brute force on him. That war involvement 

changed the game plan for Kerouac, he got involved 

and saw a great big world outside Lowell – how could 

it not? Galloway, the sleepy town by the Merrimack, 

couldn’t hold him – and he stresses this in additional 

essays, questioning even why he is spending time on a 

novel about this small town. Maturity would bring 

Maggie Cassidy, Dr.Sax, Visions of Gerard, all Jack’s 

memories floating through the Lowell streets like 

morning fog. Never forgotten, just stored away. 

The Haunted Life is augmented with journal 

notes, speculative essays of preparation from 

Kerouac. He was totally committed to a writer’s life 

and passionately organised. These mini essays display 

how he was far from spontaneous, the mapping out of 

his novel was almost military like in the precision of 

it all. Of course his top pocket notebooks became 

almost a part of him and thankfully any number of 

them have been preserved. In addition there are 

letters, observers will be keen to read letters from his 

father to Jack and his sister Nin, who died so 

prematurely. This is Kerouac finding his way, before 

long he would be in New York, involved in seedy 

murder scenes, hastily married, involved with drugs, 

all the Big Apple could throw at him. He slips into 

philosophical mode at points and you wish he might 

ditch that and just tell the story Jack. There are 

sentimental portraits of his father, Jack seems to love 

him despite Leo’s scarily bigoted way. There are 

Kerouac diary entries from late summer 1945. 

Tellingly there is one entry which reads, “I was 

reminded today of a conversation in Greenwich Village 

last summer: Mimi West had asked me what I was 

looking for, in my writing that is, and I had told her, “A 

new method.” At this point, Lucien Carr had put in: “A 

new method!...and a new vision.” Well, he was wrong; 

the vision I do have, it’s the method I want….Someday 

I’ll express it. I’ve no doubt that I will.” (page 186). 

It seems a million miles away from the town 

of his youth, the all engulfing floods, the stygian 

darkness of his Doctor Sax rooftops, the overpowering 

Catholicism, but the method was just waiting for him 

a few years on. Lucien Carr was halfway through. 

Charlie Parker with his innovative progressions in 

Bebop, Ed White and his powerful sketching 

suggestions, the muse that was Neal Cassady, the ever 

unfolding road. All that and more was to come. 

Some might question the merits of bringing 

this almost juvenile work to the light. Better to leave 

it alone and celebrate his master works they may 

venture. There is an argument for that. And yet these 

unfinished works display a wonderfully observant eye 

and a talent for building characters that engage. And 

Tietchen, a professor at Massachusetts University in 

Lowell itself, how fitting is that. From the days when 

it used to be ‘Jack who?’ in Kerouac’s town more 

often than not, they now endorse his books and 

eulogise him – Tietchen pens a lyrical introduction. 

Hindsight is a wonderful thing – but Tietchen places 

Kerouac’s work beautifully in context, he has the 

luxury of what the years since 1969 have revealed to 

us. Of course he has had the advantage of access to 

the still largely unknown Kerouac archive. He might 

care to think of improved footnotes in subsequent 

editions. Any number of references are left 

untouched. Who was Mimi West, for instance? 

It is frustratingly brief. It is a tidying up of 

Jack Kerouac affairs for certain. There are hints at 

other, as yet, unpublished essays that may arrive at 

some point. ‘Galloway.’ A ‘Philip Tourian novel,’ are 

referenced. Kerouac was impressively prodigious in 

output and meticulous in archiving all his works 

(though he nearly lost this one). Some critics may 

sniff and dismiss it but for the thousands of devotees 

around the world it will be manna from heaven. And 

that’s so right for them, because all along Kerouac 

told everyone he was published in heaven anyway. 

57

ARTISTS, BEATS & COOL CATS 

Jim Burns 

(Penniless Press) 

It could very well be that Jim Burns has his tongue firmly in his 

cheek when speaking of ‘cool cats,’ in his new collection of essays. 

This enduring poet and essayist has never seemed in the slightest 

concerned with anything as trivial as ‘cool.’ A whole raft of essays 

here which, true to the title, span the artistic disciplines. Burns 

speaks a precise and simple language and gets to the essence of his 

fascinations very quickly. The previous three volumes have revealed 

him as a traveller down obscure lanes and roads. So, in this thick 

collection there is Jackson Pollock, Maggie Cassidy, Cid Corman’s 

Origin magazine, Jack Kerouac, The Village Voice, Black Mountain 

College, Edwin Brock, the Objectivists, Dorothy Parker, Bebop, 

West Coast jazz and much more besides. Obscure English painters 

and writers as well. What Jim Burns seems to do very well is dust off 

the years from forgotten figures, the 

neglected, the overlooked, even those 

who truly never reached any level of 

recognition. Burns sees in many of 

them qualities that have been missed. 

Sometimes a poet’s standing can be 

but a good review away from being 

restored or enhanced. The slings and 

arrows of outrageous fortune, and all 

that. 

The various essays span the decades. 

Some from as far back as 1976 and 

are culled from a diverse range of 

publications. His own 1970s magazine 

Palantir, the journals Iron, 

Ambit, the long running magazine 

run by Martin Bax and others. One 

thing that struck me was that as 

Burns edges towards 80 years old, his output shows signs of increasing 

and he has embraced the digital age to an extent, some of his 

work appearing on line. 

While Bebop and the Beats are key interests for him he is by no 

means limited in his outlook, with ‘Little magazines’ a particular 

favourite of his. He is a mine of information and it might be 

advisable to have a notepad handy to jot down some of his references. 

And, of course, with essays spanning almost forty years it is clear his 

style has evolved, there’s a slightly combative aspect to the Burns of 

the 1970s. He seemed on a mission to fight the mainstream, in his 

understated, but passionate way. His passions are always going to be 

largely obscure and we are better for it. These essays reveal worlds 

through doorways slightly ajar, his work beckons you in. 

Penniless Press 

www.pennilesspress.co.uk 

ISBN 978-1-291-85067-3 

Larger format paperback 

Colin Cooper 

THE BEAT GENERATION BOXED 

(Enlightenment) 

Rebooted for 2014. Five compact discs 

billed as the ‘Beat Generation Boxed.’ 

While it is very entertaining and 

impressive, all is not quite what it 

seems. What is a real bonus are the 

two disc set that includes Jack 

Kerouac’s three LPs, the recordings 

that he saw released in his lifetime. 

Bonus tracks added include a brief 

interview Kerouac did with the Italian 

journalist Fernanda Pivano in 1966, 

whilst on his crazy tour to Europe, 

which partly resulted in his 

posthumous short novel Pic. There’s 

also a fifteen minute interview Kerouac 

did with Ben Hecht. Good stuff. 

Beat Generation Jazz is a two disc set 

billed as ‘The music that inspired a 

Revolution.’ Now that’s a big claim – 

but if you are including Charlie Parker, 

Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Roy 

Eldridge, Lionel Hampton, Fats 

Navarro, Miles Davis, George 

Shearing (remember that point in On 

the Road, when Dean says George 

Shearing is God?), Thelonius Monk, 

Chet Baker, Bud Powell, Dexter 

Gordon, and others. Ken Nordine is a 

fascinating inclusion. You get the 

picture? And then for good measure 

various Kerouac recordings with Steve 

Allen, though there is some duplication 

going on, with tracks already heard on 

the Kerouac discs. But still, all good. 

The third separate collection is one a 

few of you will have on your shelves 

already. Reissued here, ‘Diggin’ the 

New Breed. This one originally 

appeared some years ago. You’ll hear 

the voices of Kerouac, Burroughs, 

Ginsberg, Snyder, Huncke, Lucien 

Carr, Ferlinghetti, Ed Sanders, 

Waldman, McClure. Somehow they 

spell Peter Orlovsky’s name incorrectly, 

as they do with Ann Charters, and 

Michael McClure. Surprising they 

didn’t put it right on reissue. Nearly six 

hours of listening here. And all for a 

mere ridiculous price of under £9. Not 

bad at all. 

www.chromedreams.co.uk 

Sophia Nitrate 

58

Amiri Baraka & 

Edward Dorn 

The Collected Letters 

(University of New Mexico Press) 

Edited by Claudia Moreno Pisano 

Reviewed by Jim Burns 

Exchanges of letters between writers can 

offer insights into the characters of the people 

concerned as well as into their work. And they can 

additionally throw light on particular periods of 

literary activity. Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn 

began to establish themselves as poets and prose 

writers at a time when 

American literature was 

widening its scope and the 

“New American Writing,” as it 

was often referred to, was 

starting to attract attention. 

This didn’t necessarily mean 

that people like Baraka and 

Dorn suddenly found it easy to 

break into print, nor did it lead 

to their being able to support 

themselves from their writing. 

But it may be interesting at this 

point to say something about 

them. Not everyone will 

necessarily be familiar with 

Baraka’s books, nor with 

Dorn’s. Some background 

information may be useful. 

Amiri Baraka, or Leroi 

Jones as he was called prior to 

his embracing black nationalism in the 1960s, was 

born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1934, and grew up 

in what has been described as a stable, working-class 

household. He seems to have done well at school and 

won a scholarship to Howard University in 

Washington. But he soon rebelled against what he saw 

as its bourgeois educational ethics and left. He then 

joined the Air Force, though he was quickly 

discharged because he was suspected of communist 

tendencies. This was at a time when McCarthyism 

was rampant and any sort of deviant behaviour was 

suspect. It would appear that copies of Partisan 

Review were found in Jones’s locker. There’s a 

humorous side to this, Partisan Review being anticommunist 

and even probably supported by the CIA 

as part of its cultural 

programme. But the fact of it 

being an intellectual publication, 

and not given to the kind of 

populist anti-communism that 

Senator McCarthy and his 

supporters favoured, would 

probably have been enough for 

Jones to attract unfavourable 

attention. He soon moved to 

Greenwich Village and became 

involved in the “bohemian 

poetry, theatre, and music 

scene.” Over the years he 

established himself as a poet, 

editor, playwright, jazz critic, 

and political activist. 

Edward Dorn was born 

in Illinois in 1929 and so grew 

up during the Depression, 

something that was reflected in 

a poem like “On the Debt My Mother Owed Sears 

Roebuck.” Dorn attended Black Mountain College in 

the 1950s and got acquainted with Charles Olson, 

Robert Creeley, Joel Oppenheimer, John Wieners, 

and others who would play a significant part in “The 

New American Writing” of the late-1950s and early- 

1960s. Dorn wrote prose as well as poetry, but was 

never able to earn a living from his writing alone. He 

took part-time teaching posts and in 1965 was offered 

59 

Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka)...photo by Chris Felver. 

Included in his book, THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING 

(Arena Editions) www.chrisfelver.com

Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn 

a position as a Fulbright lecturer at Essex University 

where he remained until 1970. When he returned to 

the USA he still found it necessary to teach part-time 

while trying to develop his poetry. In 1977 he was 

offered a teaching position at the University of 

Colorado and stayed there until he died in 1999. 

The initial contact between Jones (I’ll use the 

name he had during the main part of the time they 

corresponded) and Dorn was in 1959 when Jones was 

editing his little-magazine, Yugen, and wrote to Dorn 

to ask him to send some poems. Jones was publishing 

a wide selection of the new writers, including Beats 

like Kerouac, Corso, and Ginsberg, Black 

Mountaineers such as Fielding Dawson and Joel 

Oppenheimer, and Frank O’Hara who was linked to 

the New York School. Dorn was going 

to be in good company. There are 

notes about most of the people 

mentioned and it’s useful to have them. 

Kerouac and Ginsberg don’t need to be 

explained, but what about Max 

Finstein? Unless you’re a specialist with 

an interest in this period of American 

poetry it’s unlikely you’ll know anything 

about Finstein. His name does crop up 

here and there in the letters, not always 

in a complimentary way. But he’s not 

alone in that and I’ll say something 

later about how and why Jones and 

Dorn seem to feel it necessary to be 

derogatory about many other poets. 

And not just poets. Joyce Glassman 

(later known as Joyce Johnson) became a particular 

hate figure for Jones. Claudia Moreno Pisano says 

that Glassman “is the target of some of Jones’s more 

vicious misogynist vitriol,” probably because in her 

role as an editor at a commercial publisher she didn’t 

match up to his expectations of publication of Dorn’s 

work. 

The exchange of letters became regular once 

the initial contact had been established. Both poets 

were experiencing financial problems and they often 

compare notes on how much, or more likely how 

little, they’re likely to be paid for a reading or whether 

or not the money can be raised to publish a small 

book. Publishing their poems in little magazines 

wasn’t ever going to bring in payments of any 

consequence, or even any payments at all, most 

magazines struggling to stay alive. Jones’s own 

magazine, Yugen, had folded after eight issues, and a 

mimeographed publication, The Floating Bear, that 

he’d started with Diane di Prima, didn’t pay 

contributors. 

above...Ed Dorn 

60 

By 1961 Jones was becoming increasingly 

politicised and in September he wrote to Dorn to say 

that he’d been arrested and charged with “resisting 

arrest; inciting to riot; disorderly conduct.” He’d also 

attracted the attention of the right-wing Senator 

Eastland who described Jones as a “Beatnik poet, 

radical leftist racist agitator.” This led to an exchange 

of ideas about politics and to what degree poets 

should involve themselves in activism. Jones was 

obviously an advocate of poets getting involved, but 

Dorn had his doubts and tended to take the position 

that it was probably better to stay outside politics, at 

least in terms of the poet being caught up in direct 

action on the streets. He had a deep distrust of the 

State (any State, even a revolutionary one) and 

thought that they all should be treated with suspicion. 

As Jones became even more 

active and moved towards 

changing his name and 

abandoning his white friends 

and even his white wife and 

their children, they continued 

to disagree about political 

involvement. Claudia Moreno 

Pisano has an interesting 

quotation from Howard 

Brick’s Age of Contradiction: 

American Thought and Culture 

in the 1960s: “American 

thought and culture grew 

turbulent and rife with 

contention; the realm of ideas 

and arts became more subject 

to instability than the foundations of American social 

structure itself.” 

I mentioned earlier that throughout the 

letters there are frequent derogatory references to 

other writers. Philip Lamantia is described as “the 

fastest longest more boringest talker in the East or 

West,” and Michael McClure as “the hugest egotist of 

us all.” There’s a reference to “hayseed Kerouac,” and 

Robert Creeley as “simple-minded about sociopolitical 

matters.” Max Finstein and Marc Schleifer 

(connected with the magazine, Kulchur) are attacked, 

with Schleifer said to be “the world’s worst poet.” 

And women in particular seem to have angered Jones. 

Denise Levertov, Diane di Prima, Joyce Glassman, 

and Lita Hornick (who financed Kulchur), just to 

mention the better-known names, come in for 

criticism, often of a nasty kind. Dorn sometimes 

joins in, but I had the feeling that his heart may not 

have been in it and he was just reacting in a way that 

Jones expected. Perhaps I’m wrong? There are other 

dismissals, of course, often of established and/or 

academic poets. I suppose this was inevitable and it

Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn 

happens as any new group of poets starts to fight for a 

place in the sun. I’m not sure that it adds anything to 

our knowledge of the poets, new or old, though 

literary historians may thrive on such material. 

Dorn was mostly based in Pocatello, Idaho, 

during the years covered by the majority of the letters 

(roughly 1959 to 1965), whereas Jones was in New 

York and therefore in a position to meet a wide 

variety of poets. In a letter from March, 1963, Jones 

reports that several “Deep Imagists” had paid him a 

visit and names Rochelle Owens, George Economou, 

and Armand Schwerner. I can’t imagine that the Deep 

Image group will now mean much to many people, 

other than students of literary movements, but they 

were active for a time in the early 1960s. And as 

individuals the various poets carried on writing when 

the group label lost its relevance. I have to admit that 

I was never sure just what they represented in terms 

of their ideas about how to write poems. Jones’s brief 

report on their visit gives the impression that he 

wasn’t too keen on their work. It also gives him the 

opportunity to once again display his crude 

comments about one of the women in the group. 

Another letter, later in 1963, finds Jones sneering at 

Denise Levertov. The misogynistic strain in his 

thinking becomes so evident that the reader can’t help 

wondering just what his problem was. 

Jones was by 1963 beginning to establish a 

reputation as a poet, critic, and editor. He edited an 

excellent prose anthology, The Moderns, which 

featured some of Dorn’s work alongside Kerouac, 

Burroughs, Creeley, and others, and his jazz study, 

Blues People: Negro Music in White America, was 

published to critical acclaim. His early poems, 

collected in Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, 

showed him to be an adventurous and entertaining 

poet. Dorn, by contrast, was still largely limited to 

publishing in little magazines, though his collection, 

The Newly Fallen, had appeared in 1962. And that 

came about largely due to Jones’s interventions on his 

behalf. It wasn’t that Dorn’s work lacked substance or 

interest, but the fact of his being away from a major 

centre of literary activity like New York or San 

Francisco meant that he wasn’t in a position to make 

contacts and cultivate editors and publishers. He was 

lucky to have Jones as a friend who promoted his 

writing. 

A letter in 1964 has Jones admitting to “Jewbaiting” 

while he was “on some powder and drinking 

my head off,” and it perhaps is an indicator of how 

he would later write poems in which contained what 

Kenneth Rexroth referred to as “vicious anti-Semitic 

doggerel.” In 1965 Jones announced that he would in 

future be known as Amiri Baraka and he began to 

distance himself from his white family and friends. 

The letters more or less come to a halt, partly because 

of Jones’s new involvements but also because it was in 

1965 that Dorn decided to move to England and take 

up a position as a lecturer at Essex University. He 

remained there until 1970. Claudia Moreno Pisano 

mentions that Jones says that he and Dorn 

corresponded in the 1990s, but the letters haven’t yet 

come to light. 

I’ve admittedly moved around the letters and 

selected certain areas of them for comment. And it 

may be that in doing so I’ve overlooked some of their 

more interesting passages. Leaving aside the 

tendencies to belittle other poets and to often 

denigrate women, they do provide a great deal of 

valuable material for literary scholars. Obviously, 

much of the information relates to personal matters, 

such as families and finances (always a problem), and 

to the whereabouts and activities of mutual friends 

and fellow-poets. But there are also references to little 

magazines and small-press publishers. Jones’s 

involvements with Yugen and The Floating Bear, are 

discussed, and Dorn’s little magazine, Wild Dog, is 

also referred to. Jones recommends Yowl, a magazine 

edited by George Montgomery, and suggests that 

Dorn send some prose to Second Coming. It seems to 

me that information like this is useful to an 

understanding of the period concerned. Little 

magazines played an essential role in the rise of the 

new writing. There is, incidentally, a letter from 1960 

in which Dorn tells Jones that he’d sent a poem called 

“Pronouncement” to a Dr Gilbert Nieman in Puerto 

Rico but had heard nothing further about it. Nieman 

edited a magazine called Between Worlds from the 

Inter-American University in Puerto Rico and Dorn’s 

poem was published in the first issue which is dated 

Summer, 1960. 

Claudia Moreno Pisano has provided 

informative notes about many of the people referred 

to by Jones and Dorn and she efficiently fills in the 

gaps between letters. There is in, addition, a useful 

bibliography. This is an essential book for anyone 

with an interest in Jones/Baraka and Dorn or the 

wider field of the development of the “New American 

Writing” of the 1950s and 1960s. 

Hardcover at 248 pages. $59.95. 

ISBN 978-0-8263-5391-7 

61

THE GARDEN OF EROS 

The Stor 

tory of the Paris Expatriates and the Post-W 

ost-War Literary Scene 

John Calder 

(Alma) 

John Calder. The enduring English 

publisher. Who took chances, 

Burroughs, Beckett and others. 

Morphed into Calder and Boyars 

at one point. Apparently that 

fusion ended in acrimony. He’s 

been around the block a few times, 

paid his dues, has stories to tell 

and was in on so many events 

important in the alternative 

English publishing scene post war. 

So there are few better equipped 

to relate that ‘underground’ 

publishing story that takes in Paris, 

New York, Spain, London, and 

involves Grove Press, Maurice 

Girodias, the Olympia Press, 

Evergreen Review, Henry Miller, 

censorship battles, Alexander 

Trocchi and so much more 

besides. 

Nothing happens without a 

precedent and Calder outlines the 

stories and history that came 

before the turbulent 1950s and 

1960s. The factions at work in war 

torn Paris during the Second 

World War, the politics that 

divided the literary world, the 

resistors and the Nazi 

collaborators. The internecine 

struggles for cultural ascendancy. 

Calder paints a lively, stressful 

landscape. And then Paris is 

liberated and the city swings back 

into its previous life. Hemingway 

propping up a bar. Henry Miller 

like a deer frozen in the headlights 

at a court hearing to determine if 

he was an obscene writer or not. 

The French were forgiving and 

lenient and sometimes persistently 

draconian. 

George Plimpton and The 

Paris Review journal that emerged 

from the wreckage of the war and 

in influx of Americans into Paris – 

this gets the full spotlight from 

Calder. Naturally there is a 

revolving door of writers, editors, 

chancers, lovely young girls who 

worked at the Review, writers. Of 

course Calder speculates on the 

probability of The Paris Review 

being financed by the CIA. How 

else would it have survived so long? 

One figure stands out like a 

colossus in Calder’s book, that of 

Maurice Girodias. A renegade 

publisher if ever there was one. 

His Olympia Press a curious 

mixture of the avant-garde and the 

pornographic. For every Burroughs 

or Beckett there was a ‘db’ – a 

dirty book. Girodias published 

them endlessly and was chased 

through the courts incessantly for 

his brash nerve and cheek. The 

Calder portrait of Girodias, as he 

tracks and remembers him 

through the decades, is 

surprisingly affectionate, when you 

consider Girodias was a rogue, 

who was a slippery customer when 

it came to paying his bills. 

If you need to discover Maurice 

Girodias, you need look no further 

than Calder. Alexander Trocchi, 

another ‘character’ who charmed 

and conned his way through life 

and who ultimately succumbed to 

his drug addiction, he too receives 

the Calder spotlight. 

Grove Press, Barney Rosset, 

they went together like hand and 

glove. Calder, again, draws a 

picture of a shy, yet brash Rosset. 

A man who would not entertain 

any view other than his own, an 

individualist, risk taker. A man 

who – as is well documented – 

took on the censorship police and 

won. Calder does a good job. 

John Calder was there, an 

insider, consequently his 

recollections and thoughts are 

invaluable. He has an easy style, a 

little ‘old school.’ A rewarding 

book. 

Paperback by Alma Press 

ISBN 978-09574522-1-3 

Brian Dalton 

NEELI CHERKOVSKI 

Falling Light 

(Edition Baes) 

Back last year Edition Baes, the 

publishing house founded by Elias 

Schneitter, issued a lovingly presented 

hardcover containing the poetry of 

Neeli Cherkovski. Now Cherkovski has 

been something of an enduring 

presence on the San Francisco poetry 

landscape for a decade or two. Mostly 

published in small editions, firmly 

rooted in that old North Beach and 

Beat tradition of the 1950s. Sometimes 

I feel about him that he was born too 

late, instead he should have been part 

of that San Francisco poetry renaissance 

of the 1950s and mixed with Whalen, 

Welch, McClure, Snyder, Rexroth and 

all the others who made up that scene. 

Instead he has positioned himself in a 

place totally his own. He was a close 

friend of Charles Bukowski, which 

shows he has allegiance to no one, heck, 

they even started a short lived magazine 

together. Cherkovski also produced the 

first biography of Bukowski. Plus 

another biography of Lawrence 

Ferlinghetti. And he’s responsible for 

the excellent Whitman’s Wild Children, I 

fear that one is out of print. That’s a 

crime. 

Here in this new book are contemporary 

poems and some older ones. Poetry 

recalling Harold Norse, times in East 

Hollywood with Bukowski, for Ezra 

Pound, Coit Tower, of course an SF 

landmark. There is a melancholy that 

bathes everything he writes. 

Published in English with a German 

language text alongside. 

ISBN 9-78-3950-355970 

Hardcover 

Edition Baes www.edition-baes.at 

Dawn Swoop 

62

Diane di Prima having her long hair 

brushed by Shirley Berman at the 

Berman home at Crater Lane in 1962. 

Also in the picture is Tosh, the son of 

Shirley and Wallace Berman. Wallace 

Berman took the photo. In 1962 Di 

Prima had published her book The 

New Handbook of Heaven - issued by 

Dave Hasewood’s excellent and 

infuential Auerhahn Press in San 

Francisco. Di Prima was very much a 

believer in the small press way of doing 

things, bypassing the mainstream 

altogether. Later on she was to found 

her own press in New York City. In 

that she had much in common with 

Wallace and Shirley Berman and their 

Semina publications. In hindsight 

might this time have planted the seed 

of the future in Diane di Prima’s mind?

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