David Meltzer - San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets

Talking with the Poets

Edited by David Meltzer

2001 by David Meltzer

Cover design: Stefan Gutermuth

Book design and typography: Small World Productions

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Meltzer, David.

San Francisco Beat: talking with the poets / David Meltzer

p. cm.

ISBN 0-87286-379-4

1. Poets--American--California--San Francisco--Interviews. 2. San Francisco (Calif.)--Intellectual life--20th century. 3. Beat generation--California--San Francisco. 4. Poets--American--20th century--Interviews. 5. San Francisco (Calif.)--In literature. I. Title.

PS285.S3 M45 2001

811' .5409979461--dc21

00-065640

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Nothing is hidden;

As of old

All is clear as daylight.

Anonymous haiku, 16th century

San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets reaches back to the late sixties, early seventies. And back up to the late nineties. Everything and nothing has happened.

Power continues more rapidly and digitally to concentrate its manna into fewer, fatter virtual and actual hands in the arcane splendor of bottom-line commerce. Many poets have died in obscurity while others are elevated to billboard magnitude. Myth and debunk dance together in the spectacle. Reality is fought for and against in virtual versus actual; spirituality is reclaimed as a bridge out of the tangle and sustains as it comforts.

History is not only written by the winners but also the survivors. The Ur text of the present bookThe San Francisco Poets, whose five interviews are included here, along with eight recent oneswas published in a period of immense social, political, and spiritual struggle. The war in Vietnam still had a couple of years to go but was, we were assured, winding downbut not before massive bombardment of North Vietnam the day after Christmas. Nixon was president, and William L. Calley Jr. was convicted of the premeditated murder of South Vietnamese civilians at Mai Lai. There was the Attica prison riot, where twenty-eight prisoners ands nine guards held hostage were killed in the onslaught of 1,500 state police in the air and on the ground. Rev. Philip F. Berrigan was indicted with five others for conspiring to kidnap Kissinger. The Weather Underground ignited a bomb in a restroom in the Senate wing of the Capitol. Thousands of antiwar demonstrators were arrested in Washington. Daniel Ellsberg made The Pentagon Papers available. Watergate was a year away. George Jackson was killed in San Quentin. Jim Morrison and Igor Stravinsky died. Charles Manson and his family were convicted of the 1969 murders of Sharon Tate and six others. And the Bollingen Prize for poetry, once awarded to Ezra Pound while he was incarcerated for treason in St. Elizabeths, was split between Richard Wilbur and Mona Van Duyn.

The San Francisco Poets was published as a mass-market paperback; it contained interviews with Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, William Everson, and Lew Welch. Richard Brautigan declined to be interviewed but submitted a statement about himself. Only two of the poets interviewedMcClure and Ferlinghettiare alive today. The others are gone. Two by suicide.

At the time of those interviews, I was thirty-three years old, married with three young daughters, and living on the margins. Today, three decades later, my daughters are middle-aged; a son was born in the interim and is in his early twenties; Im sixty-three and still living on the margins. Hows that for progress? All the poets interviewed for San Francisco Beat are like me, a step or two before or after Social Security kicks in. Not geezers, still creative and vigorous in their relation to the world around and beyond them, but now perceived and received as elders.

The reclamation and reinvention of the Beats and Beat literature in the nineties is an international phenomena that at once recognizes the dissident spirit of the Beats and removes it from historical complexity, makes it safe, and turns it into products and artifacts. The more removed from historys discomfort, the easier it is to imagine and consume history without taking on its weight. The books of that time recirculate in new hipper covers, along with all the dreadful accoutrements of the postwar middle-class suburban diaspora, the kitsch and crapola. Its the look that dot-commers yen to trophy their nouveaux pads with. Its more to do with style than bile. Fictive history can be owned and displayed as the fifties ultimate product: stuff. Both radically disruptive stuff and suburban kitsch are easily embraced by the neo-con techno-cart. The pervasive postwar advertising seduction of selling standardized goods to consumers as an act of claiming individuality and choice deeply insaturated itself into the American psyche.

Conformity is the rule, though the fantasy of individuality is the carrot. Your pubic goatee and antique shades complement your acquisitions (the vintage butterfly chair, free-form plywood coffee table, naugahyde-tufted home bar and bar stools) and all your amnesiac buddies can caw cool at your trophies that were wrested by the time machine from the great age of conformity-through-consuming. Todays rule of realm makes inevitable and desirable such words as chains and brands and branding. A voluntary slave class of consumers. For many of the new class, what seems familiar and inevitable is a kind of truth, what some folks call comfort food like Big Macs and Starbucks and Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com. A predictable and paternal corporate company whose zeal to standardize reality, realize unheard-of profits, reaches out across the globe, globalizes, plants the undeniable triumph of Coca-Cola over Dr. Pepper.

If the New Agers have their goddesses to worship, the pomo-techno boys club have the Beats and their writings: great sizzling prose of male flight and fraternitynot only running away from hearth-binding lives but often from immaterial materialism. In The San Francisco Poets there was very little talk about the fifties and the Beat but much talk about poetry as a life practice and of being a poet-citizen. In the intervening years, the Beat has taken on an independent and industrial life of its own, and, more than anything else, has become embraced by the academics at the same time they bear-hugged L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and the New York School.

Where the Beats and New Yorkers produced work in retaliation to the aridity of poetrys institutionalization by using a highly charged vernacular approach to express both visionary and ordinary moments in stylishly direct and often experimental writing, the Language cadres never truly left college. Theyve always been good students, and now theyre excellent teachers. The professionalization and rationalization of poetry in the academy took hold and routinized the teaching and writing of poetry, canopied under the assumption that poets who write the right stuff will be able teach it too. Almost all American colleges and universities have writing and poetry degree-track programs that adhere pretty well to the standard Ohio workshop model. On the other side of the poetry divide are the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa in Boulder, the New College poetics program in San Francisco, and the University of Buffalos graduate program in poetics.