o_190rdufvh17l119a81ci61qo68hta.pdf

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