Lew Welch - How I Work As A Poet and Other Essays

LEW WELCH

HOW I WORK AS A POET &

OTHER ESSAYS

Edited by Donald Allen

Grey Fox Press San Francisco

Copyright 1961, 1964, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1973, 1983 by Donald Allen, Literary Executor of the Estate of Lew Welch

All rights reserved- Except for short excerpts cited in critical articles, no part of this book may be reproduced by any means, including information storage & retrieval or photocopying equipment, without the written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 0-912516-07-0 ISBN 0-912516-06-2 (pbk.)

Library of Congress catalog card number: 73-84119 Revised edition 1983.

Cover photograph of Lew Welch in 1965 by John W. Doss.

Grey Fox books are distributed by Subco, PO Box 10233, Eugene, OR 97440

Contents

Editors Note vii

Manifesto: Bread vs. Mozarts Watch 3 A Moving Target Is Hard to Hit 6 Greed 8

Final City /Tap City: A Crack at the Bottom of It 14 Brautigans Moth Balanced on an Apple 22 Philip Whalen as Yellowstone National Park 25 Language Is Speech 2

How I Work as a Poet, the title piece of this collection, is a talk Lew Welch gave at Reed College on 30 March 1971a few weeks before he disappeared in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

It is the latest and fullest of several attempts at a statement of his poetics to have survived. Another attempt, which overlaps slightly, is Language Is Speech, a start on a textbook for a course in poetry; it grew out of his experiences teaching the University of California Extension Poetry Workshop between 1965 and 1970.

To this new edition I have added another attempt which Ive titled The Basic Tool Is Speech. It may have been written as early as 1960 for a textbook James Wilson was compiling or perhaps was composed later in the decade.

Manifesto: Bread vs. Mozart's Watch was written for Ralph Gleasons San Francisco Chronicle column on the occasion of the big Free Way Reading Welch gave with Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen on 11 June 1964, in the old Longshoremens Hall. In 1967 and 1968, at the height of the Haight-Ashbury period, he contributed A Moving Target Is Hard to Hit to the Communication Company;, and Greed and Final City /Tap City to the San Francisco Oracle.

Then, later in 1968, when Paul Krassner of The Realist wanted to include the latter essay in The Digger Papers, Welch rewrote it retaining only the first section from the earlier version. The reviews of books by Richard Brautigan and Philip Whalen were written for William Hogan and the San Francisco Chronicle.

*

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Reed College for permission to print How I Work as a Poet, to Dan Mathews for

alerting me to the fact that this lecture had been taped, and to Zoe Brown for her faithful transcription. I am also indebted to Richard Brautigan, Magda Cregg, Norman Davis, Valerie Estes, Joanne Kyger, Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen for valuable assistance.

Acknowledgment is also made to the following for permission to reprint work they first published: The Communication Company, Oer, The Realist, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Oracle.

Donald Allen

I dont think there ever really was a war between the Hip and the Square, and if there is, I wont fight in it. I am a Poet. My job is writing poems, reading them out loud, getting them printed, studying, learning how to become the kind of man who has something of worth to say. Its a great job.

Naturally Im starving to death. Naturally? No, man, it just does not make sense.

(Look, baby, you want to pay your bills, go out and get a job.)

Ive got a job. Im a Poet. Why should I do somebody elses job, too? You want me to be a carpenter? Im a lousy carpenter. Does anybody ask a carpenter to write my poems?

But there I am, working 20 hours a day in a salmon and crab boat (a beautiful job in its own right, but another story, just as why l didnt make it that way either, is another story). And suddenly I realize I havent made a poem in eight months. Too tired. And I still couldnt pay my bills, $125 a month in 1962 San Francisco, frugality being one of the tricks of the Poet Trade.

Meanwhile publishers (sorry, theres no money for the Poets) were printing my poems big Readings got read (all Benefits, no bread) etc., etc., etc.

So I cracked up. My brain, literally, snapped under the weirdness of being a Poet, a successful one and being BECAUSE OF MY JOB (which all agree is noble and good and all that) an outcast.

PLEASE NOTE: None of this has anything to do with

the Beat Generation, America, Hipness and Squareness its as old as Mozart. I see the basic con as: Bread vs. Mozarts Watch (dont pay the guy, that would be too vulgar a return for work so priceless. Give him a watch. Make sure the watch is engraved with a message that prevents him from pawning it.)

So as I say, I cracked up. I took myself to the woods for almost two years. I sat in a CCC shack 400 miles north of here, and did my homework. Spring water. Big beautiful Salmon River. No bills. Help from home.

Last November I returned to this city, mostly healed. Many poems. Some new answers.

I learned a great many things up there but one of the strangest.is: the plight of the Poet (in fact, the whole Mozart/Watch con) is partly our fault. THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE REALLY DO DIG OUR WORTH AND OUR WORK. THEY REALLY WANT TO HELP AND THEY DONT KNOW HOW!