This is a part of what I’d love to say to you, in this my last lecture. There are a multitude of avenues through which to arrive at a meaningful life: setting and achieving professional goals, undertaking physical and/or mental challenges, forsaking the material for the spiritual, enacting change at the local, state, or national level, predicting problems in the future and working on solutions to them now, nurturing the young and old, and continually learning new things (languages, programs, flora and fauna, dance moves). I’ve journeyed down many of these avenues, yet looking back on this occasion, I see one I did not expect would lead me to this moment, to you: reading and writing the world.
Reading saved my life. No hyperbole. When I was thrashing away, at 17, I discovered poetry and literary fiction. Reading slowed my swirling mind, sharpened my sight. When I was 18, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, along with Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, were de rigueur, books to be read with religious fervor.
Barely graduating from high school, with no plans to go to college, I did not know how to make a living nor how to shape a life worth living. Reading and writing helped move me forward. Little did I know then reading and writing would lead to a long-term career—I’m in my 21st year as an educator. Tonight I will walk with you through six paradigm-shifting books: two novels, three books of poetry, and one memoir. This reading marked who I was, what I was looking for, and more importantly pointed where I was heading. I offer this lecture as a map to you.
Often things that have the most meaning for us are stumbled across, found when we are looking elsewhere or perhaps not even looking at all. Yet we are instantly ready for them as if we have been waiting for them all the time.
I went to the bookstore to look for a book of poetry featured in an article about contemporary poetry, What Thou Lovest Well Remains American by Richard Hugo. To my delight, the bookstore had the Hugo book. There were other books of poetry on the display table, including Howl by Allen Ginsberg, a small, square, unassuming book. I splurged—or my mother splurged (I can’t remember if she was there; she always bought any book I wanted to read)—and bought all four, perhaps the only four books of poetry in the entire bookstore.
I have not viewed the world the same since reading Howl. Before, I loved poetry about nature, especially Robert Frost—my father called me Nature Boy. Ginsberg’s Howl, from the first line, proved poetry could be much more than I imagined, its language could be vulnerable, spare, and ugly, and it could embody taboo subjects like drug use, sex, and insanity. Howl ripped my face off. Here’s the opening (remember, Howl was published in 1956, the mythical halcyon years of the Cleaver family):
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall…
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares…
This was no quaint, hermetic lyric poem about nature; this was huge, boundless. Heretofore I believed literature was about personal fulfillment. Now I knew it could also be a weapon hurled at complacency, at hypocrisy. Like the Big Bang, Howl, expansive in its force, propelled my thinking into significantly reconstituted spaces.
As a teenager in the 1970s, I was mad for the madness of the Beats — Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Phillip Whalen, and, of course, the king of the pantheon, Jack Kerouac. Beat writing fed both my displeasure at what humans have done to each other and my pleasure in the natural world.
As a hitchhiker on Wisconsin ‘s blue highways, I packed a change of clothes, a notebook, always a notebook, and Kerouac’s On the Road, which I carried from Madison to Seattle, my first road trip. Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty opened their veins and arteries to the country, to its small towns and big cities, its people, rural and urbane, virtually without judgment—even states like Iowa we now fly over or fly through as quickly as possible wrought magic on Sal when he first entered them.
Kerouac had a Whitmanesque embrace of the American landscape that comes through in this passage from Chapter 3:
The wind from Lake Michigan, bop at the loop, long walks around South Halsted and North Clark, and one long walk after midnight into the jungles, where a cruising car followed me as a suspicious character. At this time, 1947, bop was going like mad all over America. The fellows at the Loop blew, but with a tired air... And as I sat there listening to that sound of the night which bop had come to represent for all of us, I thought of all my friends from one end of the country to the other and how they were really all in the same vast backyard doing something so frantic and rushing-about. And for the first time in my life, the following afternoon, I went into the West…
My first ride was a dynamite truck with a red flag, about thirty miles into great green Illinois, the truckdriver pointing out the place where Route 6, which we were on, intersects Route 66 before they shoot west for incredible distances. Along about three in the afternoon, after an apple pie and ice cream in a road-side stand, a woman stopped for me in a little coupe…[She]wanted somebody to help her drive to Iowa... Iowa! Not so far from Denver, and once I got to Denver I could relax. She drove the first few hours…and then I took over the wheel and, though I’m not much of a driver, drove clear through the rest of Illinois to Davenport, Iowa, via Rock Island. And here for the first time in my life I saw my beloved Mississippi River, dry in the summer haze, low water, with its big rank smell that smells like the raw body of America itself because it washes it up. Rock Island—railroad tracks, shacks, small downtown section; and over the bridge to Davenport, same kind of town, all smelling of sawdust in the warm Midwest sun…”
Some say the American road trip has become cliché. I’d argue it’s holding its own as a rite of passage, no matter what heightened or debased form it takes, journeying into the Other to come out the other side with a firmer sense of our nation’s cultural and geographical diversity. I’m hard pressed to find a student at WSU who hasn’t rocketed off in a car or bus with no concrete plans to points east, west, north, and south.
In 1980, without job prospects, never having lived in a city larger than 150,000, $450 to my name, I rode 52 hours on a Greyhound bus from Madison to San Francisco to gorge on the manic energy of the Beats, or whatever was left of it, to pursue their lifestyle, or what I imagined it to be, staying up all night rushing toward ecstasy or insanity.
Attending a poetry reading at the Grand Piano coffeehouse on Haight Street the very night I arrived, I knew I made the right move. I heard as many poets as I could over the next two years, including Beat legends Gregory Corso, Bob Kaufman, Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and I haunted the basement of City Lights where poetries large and small bulged from shelves and magazine racks. Tables and chairs were so homey I often stayed and read for hours.
My knowledge of poetry expanded exponentially. As it grew, I soured on Beat writing. Their poems now seemed clumsy, obvious, self-centered; they no longer crackled with urgency. One evening I stormed out of a Corso and Kaufman reading at the Art Institute. Mugging for the audience’s adulation, Corso trivialized his poetry, and Kaufman’s mumbling irked me.
Within a year, in an issue of Soup, I stumbled upon a poetry that radically shifted my view of writing again. The eclectic second issue included an odd poem, “China,” by Bob Perelman. I was perplexed, having never read anything like it before. It resisted paraphrase and exploded the notion of coherence as I thought I knew it (or as I thought I needed it in poetry). I wanted to write plain yet elusive lines like the following:
We live on the third world from the sun. Number three. Nobody tells us what to do.
The people who taught us to count were being very kind.
It’s always time to leave.
If it rains, you either have your umbrella or you don’t.
The wind blows your hat off.
Poetry in San Francisco was in the midst of a revolution equal to if not greater than the Beat literary renaissance of the 1950s. Everyone seemed to be talking about Language poetry. People loved it, grabbed onto the movement’s coattails, or hated it, objecting to its obscurity, accusing it of stripping poetry of its humanity. Prolific essay writers, the Language poets relentlessly critiqued the conventions and clichés of contemporary poetry. As if overnight, now looking at the dynamics of written language under an electron microscope, my writing morphed. Writer of expressive lyric poems (ten to twenty line poems hitting on emotional or political issues), I began to enlist other ways to whelp words around thought, around the world.
Where Ginsberg and Kerouac gave me scale, Ron Silliman’s Tjanting, a book-length prose poem, demonstrated how a poem can be constructed one discrete sentence at a time (no sentence required adjacent sentences to add to its meaning), mixing details mundane and extraordinary. Silliman’s choice to employ the Fibonacci sequence (each number the sum of the preceding two numbers, 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21 ...) to organize sentences was intriguing, but the inclusiveness of his sentences particularly appealed to me. Silliman wrote about everything: “A pile of old clothes discarded in the weeds of a vacant lot....In the plastic blue dish sat old soap slivers...An odor specific to porn shops....”
I realized there weren’t anointed subjects for poems – roses, bones, dawn, death of father, etc. The minutia of our lives also resounds with meaning. No longer reified, poetry descended to earth, mingling with the teeming Bay Area. I read Tjanting everywhere—on MUNI, BART, in coffeehouses and city parks—because it resonated, resided—in all these sites.
Here are the first seven paragraphs:
Not this.
What then?
I started over & over. Not this.
Last week I wrote “the muscles in my palm so sore from halving the rump roast I cld barely grip the pen.” What then? This morning my lip is blisterd.
Of about to within which. Again & again I began. The gray light of day fills the yellow room in a way wch is somber. Not this. Hot grease had spilld on the stove top.
Nor that either. Last week I wrote “the muscle at thumb’s root so taut from carving that beef I thought it wld cramp.” Not so. What then? Wld I begin? This morning my lip is tender, disfigurd. I sat in an old chair out behind the anise. I cld have gone about this some other way.
Wld it be different with a different pen? Of about to within which what. Poppies grew out of the pile of old broken-up cement. I began again & again. These clouds are not apt to burn off. The yellow room has a sober hue. Each sentence accounts for its place. Not this. Old chairs in the back yard rotting from winter. Grease on the stove top sizzled & spat. It’s the same, only different. Ammonia’s odor hangs in the air. Not not this.
Conventional poems have one entry point: you read line one closely or you have little chance to understand line 12. Tjanting has as many entry points as it has sentences. The slow, halting opening, the poem taking one step forward and two steps back, gives way in later paragraphs to a seaswell of observed fact interspersed with commentary on the process of the poem’s composition itself. There are many ways for the reader to engage with Tjanting, the reader co-creating the meaning with the writer. I now demand poetry that expects me as a reader to make the poem.
