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Damn Fine Letters 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
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Number 73 Summer 2014 £4.50 Lew We
Page 3 and 4: Number 73 Summer 2014 Editor ditor.
Page 5 and 6: fall 1972 I moved from California t
Page 7 and 8: Robert Duncan, Jess, and Friends Du
Page 9 and 10: Robert Duncan, Jess, and Friends ra
Page 11 and 12: BILL BURROUGHS IN AMSTERDAM by Eddi
Page 13 and 14: Bill Burroughs in Amsterdam ‘Patt
Page 15 and 16: A Half-American Writer During the p
Page 17 and 18: A Half-American Writer Another impo
Page 19 and 20: CONVERSATIONS with KEN KESEY edited
Page 21 and 22: company alongside Charles Olson, Ro
Page 23 and 24: abstract expressionist painters wer
Page 25 and 26: Jeffers is my God interest in it. H
Page 27 and 28: Cajoled Not notified of ancient Cur
Page 29 and 30: Ginsberg on Kerouac Buddhism, too,
Page 31 and 32: Ginsberg on Kerouac after being in
Page 33 and 34: Ginsberg on Kerouac Inter ntervie v
Page 35 and 36: ----------- It’s Monday morning.
Page 37 and 38: they discover a dead seal and say,
Page 39 and 40: We pick up all our garbage and spli
Page 41 and 42: eaders. Since I was driving taxi, I
Page 43 and 44: Write a Madder Letter if You Can by
Page 45 and 46: Write a Madder Letter if You Can ho
Page 47 and 48: Billy Burroughs’ Prediction by Ed
Page 49 and 50: Billy Burroughs’ Prediction Despi
Page 51 and 52: THE BEAT SCENE REVIEW SECTION Dexte
Page 53: Damn Fine Letters work but he reall
Page 57 and 58: The Haunted Life talk on porches, l
Page 59 and 60: Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn The Coll
Page 61 and 62: Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn happens
Page 63: Diane di Prima having her long hair
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