\L.

/
!
,r

\
I
I

John Wig"ners
called
.:,

,,i

ji- _ll_., ,F ' forBrLLrE Holroev

l-

rg59

$,.

"*q\'

"ffi,rryol
707 SCOTT STREET

lJr,fuispers
707

scorr,fll*HEr
rg59

called

SUN fd MOON PRESS LOS ANGELES

rggb

Sun
a

&Moon

Press

A Progrm ofThe Contemporary Arts Educational Project, Inc.

nonprofit corporation
6oz5 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 9oo35

This bookws 6rst published by Sun &Moon Press in 1996

tog876543zr
rrnsr eolrroN
Cme

1996

@1995 byJohn Wieners

'HmThis

Book

to Be Two Short

Historic'

@ :995 by Lewis

Wush and Fanny Howe

Some of this work pmiously appearc d in o-bEk and the Emct Changc Yearbook tg96 Biographical material @1996 by Sun &Moon Press

HowThis Book Came to Be: Two Short Histories

7oZ Scott Street, thejournal of John Wieners, dates from 1958-59, the years when Wieners 'uras comp osing The Ho-

All rights reserved

This bookws made possiblc, in part, through a metching grant from the National Endowment for the Arts

NATIONAL
ENDOWMENT

FoR!rTHE

ARTS
and through contributions to The Contmporary Arts Educational Prcject, Inc., a nonprofit corporation Cover: Louis Faurcr, Untitled, ct. rg48 Design: Katie Messbom

Tlpography: Guy Bennett

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING
Tlte

tel Wentley Poems, as well as many of the great lyrical poems included inhis Selected Poems (Black Sparrow, 1986). The journal contains versions of some of these poems as well as others that have never been published anywhere. "I must forget how to rvriter" he states on the opening page. "I must unlearn what has been taught me." And then later, a bit less portentously: "I must learn how not to write. I must \^/atch with my 5 senses." \Mieners 'was twenty-four, still grasping for the ineffable "other" thatwould somehow
DATA

IN PUBLICATION

Wieners,John ft9341

Jotnal

ofJohn Wieners / is to be mlled / 7o7 Scott Stree t (Sun &Moon Classics: ro6) p. cm

tstN:

t-5577r3-z5z-6

r.

Tide. rr. Serie. rrr. Transletor

8rr'.54tczo
Printed in the Unitcd States ofAmerica on acid-free paper.

connect his various selves and give his life meaning, yet he was already fully formed (in many ways) as a poet. The question'was how to define the "otherr" how to get there through invocation, so(, poetry, drugs and magic. He knows he has his "whole life" ahead of him, but what does that matter? Conversations transcribed on the spot (easy to picture poet in corner of crowded room 'rvith journal open), dream narratives, a list ofpotential contributors to a new

Without limiting thc rights under copyright resered here, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retriaal rystem, or transmitted, in any fom or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otheruise), without the prior witten permission of both the copyight mer
and the above publisher ofthe boolc

issue of his magazine Measure, quotes from reading (Wittgenstein, Jung): eyerything's permitted, nothing's

excluded, poetry and prose passages alternate, while the emotional pitch centers around loss of love, frustration, love's inaccessibility, the transience of every encounter. There's a lot of ovedy self-conscious romanticism, always redeemed byWieners'innate ability to step back from and enter into o<perience simultaneously, as if it were possible to be totally hot and cold at the same time. The journal conveys the sweep of a whole life lived in this way.

manuscript pages,

book. On the inside cover of the led-

ger there was the title: 7o7 Scott Street, for Billie Holliday. I published a few pages of the journal in an issue of Tbe

t972, William Corbett and I visited John in his apartment at 44|oy Street in Boston with the hope of getting poems from him for our new magazine (edited with Lee Harwood), Tlte Boston Eagle.I rememberJohn opening a trunk filled with ledger-sized journals with old-fashioned marble covers. "I'd love to read them someday," I said, thinking out loud, but Wieners caught the genuine interest in my tone and presented one to me. I was initially shocked that he would simply hand over one of his intimate journals to someone he didnt knowwell (casually, as ifhe were offering me a taste from a box ofbonbons), and without even looking through it, but I accepted the gesture as an act of trust, a gift, an offering. Sometimes giving and taking and accepting is frightening but this moment seemed perfecdyclear and untfueatening. My next memory is sitting at a desk on the top foor ofBill's house in downtown Boston; it's the Watergate summer, Bill and his family are in Vermont, and I m listening to the hearings on the radio and transcribing John's words on my portable Smith-Corona electric. When I was finished I had 77

ln

World,the literary magairne of the Poetry Project ( an isto autobiographicalwritingwhich I was guest* editing); then, for almost twenty years, the transcript of thejournal disappeared. It was the interest ofthe poet Peter Gizz|who had heard that such a journal oristed, that made me go searching for it. I never presented John with a finished copy of the transcript, though I do remember visiting him again and returning the original, not that itwould have mattered (or so he led me to believe) whether I'd kept it or not.
sue devoted

_LEWIS

.lMARSH

Aprilr99z

ln

ry72 Bill Corbett and Lewis Warsh visitedJohn Wieners at 44Joy Street in Boston where he still lives.John pressed

this manuscript, handwritten, on Lewis who proceeded to type it up at Bill's house at 9 Columbus Square in the South End. It was summer. The manuscript, c aLled 7o7 Scott Street,
was

written between 1958 and

1959, and

includes references

to Boston ("colored paper rose, blue spots, ink spots Bostor.,tg4g, the sound of cellophane") although it was composed in San Francisco.lnrygz the typed manuscript resurfaced and attracted the attention of Peter Giz.zi,apoet now about the age that Bill and Lewis were when they

visitedJohn inry7z.

During the summer of r99z,I arranged to meetJohn outside the branch of the Boston Public Library nearest Joy Street, because I had dedicated my most recent collection of poems to him, and I hadnt actually spoken to him for several years. My oldest daughter, also a poet, was with me. John was wearing a coat though it was very hot, and despite the torn orpression of his face, he looked almost robust. Always courteous, his way of paying attention to us was to whid our remadc into spirals of poetic speech. Struck, for instance, by *y sayrng that my daughter was

on her way to London, he "remembered" a girl standing on the Salt and Pepper Bridge over the Charles Riverl she was, he said, "stuck with her back to the Hyatt Regency and couldntgo to London untilThe Highwaywas built." He also said to her that his mother had told him to get job, a but he had refused, because a job would prevent him from writing poems. And then he added two very precise

if to reassure me: "I look around-and there arostrum-in Bostonnoets in the limelighbut I dont see them anymore." And again to me, quite specifically: "For you and me it's better to be unknownto do our work" In 7o7 Scott Street he writes, "and ifl cannot speak in poetry it is because poetry is reality to me, and not the poetry we read, but find revealed in the estates of being
remarks as
used tobe

THE JOURNAL OF JOHN WIENERS

707 SCOTT STREET

around us."John's poetryhas always been the closest thing possible to a new form ofspeech, one that narrows the gap between longing and calling. These pages from the fifties live in that "estate" as much as his spoken words to others do now.
Estates of being o<ist as streets, seasons, people, songr and while the placement of his poetics could be cordoned

offby a pcriod in "the limbo of contemporary Americd that has passed-a poetics that predates post-modern rhetoric and the strange fixation with an Otherness that he would not recognizrhis unembittered position as an
uunknown"
across

witness of the dispossessed is absolutely present

time'

_FANNY HOWE

Saturday, March 8, 1958

r:3o PM

The sun shines. Miss Kids is across asleep on the couch. She wakes and says "I dreamt I just put on..." I cant hear the rest. She goes back to sleep. Dana is asleep in the bedroom beside this one where the sun fills three windows. Miss Kids' dark glasses sound/crack on the foor.

must forget how to write.

must unlearn what has

been taught me.

Last night I dreamed Alan appeared in a hallwaywhere I leaned against a lintel; there were open doors on all sides and he presented me with a doll, his doll, the country onc
whose dress he ironed 3ooo miles awzy.He was smiling, a great smile and I still see his white teeth and the black beard on his face. She was dressed in black, the doll, and her long thick hair was tied back the way I had left it. He had put it on top of one of those innumerable chests he had around his house. And I take it as a sign that all is well, I am and he is, today with the doll handed between us, he wanted me to have what he named was his. It is only Miss Kids and Dana who have hangovers. I must not let them hang me up.

13

She awakes again and asks "Is it cloudy outside yet?" say "No" and an automobile horn busts our ears and the

There is not enough sound in the air. Miss Kids and Dana have headaches from last night.

Chinese kids overhead beat and stomp on the foor. These days shall be my poems, these words what I leave behind as mine, my record up against time. It is all very sad that we have to fight it. Possibly I may come to love time and its taking of my days.

I must stop being wise. Miss Kids wakes and "Is it latel"
oAlmost uAnother

says

two."

day ruined." She stretches her long wa:( arms

"It well

may

be,I do not think I would."

Right now, it is very fine. The cable car track shuttles in right inside the street and they empty the mail-box. A motor-scooter or motorcycle guns its motor and what bright flesh runs on Leavenworth Street. The 8o bus stops. Miss Kids has the Mohawk blanket that we (Dana and I) bought in the Morgan Memorial up to her eyes and her hair, her yellow hair is all over the pillow and her shut eyelids. The cable car conductor rings the bell twice. It also stops. Only man and time move. And the space we are given to inhabit, so fast it is thru our fingers.

(parafin) on the mohair couch. "I feel fine now, Kids."The sun puts gold on her nose. "Kids, theyte after me." I tell her "Kids, you look like a fucked Alice-in-Wonderland. And your hands are swollen,"
She looks at them. "Dana did

it,"

Sunday March 9

8eu I make this veryvery short otherwise it would last forever. I have walked all dawn, all night. Without control. I am forced to stop what I am doing if I want to survive. I came home and there is a strange man-boy in the bed. Dana must have brought him home although he has never befor-and where is Dana. Whatever, I am tired and my arm aches too much to write. Detectives again tonight but why and later I shall tell what they look like.
He does not snore.

I must learn how not

senses.

to write.

must watch with my

"the 5 perfections that are the 5 hindrances" and I must nail down thosc who would, all that would hang me up.

The 8o bus going the other way, to Market Street, sounds its squashed beep, peculiar to San Francisco, where
they are afraid any loud noise would start another earthquake. And yet we all go around screaming.

r4

15

3:r5 PM

5.9-59

Does anyone knowwho the person was who got stabbed at Big Eric's Place? Irene Taverner said in the room and others Present areJoanne Kyger, Tom Field, James Kity, Mrs. Nemi Frost-Hansen, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Joe Dunn, Mrs. Carolyn Dunn, George Stanley andTommy Albright andoh yes-Ebbe Borregaard is sitting between Nemi FrostHansen and Jack Spicer. Dana is having breakfast out in the kitchen and we are all here for poetry that no one is reading.

What do I need the street for? Ray Charles on piano. One half of one room is where I live. Love? Fills the window with light every morning. But I do not see it. Today I do. Last night I saw Greta Garbo one instant.

All I am interested in is charting the progress of my soul. And therefore all men's souls. What the soul is I dont know. But that it is contained in every blood nerve and brain cell I do. And what its name is I do not. yHvH.
And when man rides with demon on horseback it is only his own soul. Or sees Greta Garbo on Fifth Avenue. All actions we thrust on others whether out of enry or disgust are only operations of our own psyche working. And we contain the souls of our ancestors. That the soul is transmitted to us at birth. And that it is this chart that we follow for life, is our life, what determines what we will be and are. And I am interested only in unraveling this, showing the snags and syndromes, so that other men may have some ease in doing theirs.

"Oh for the days of Marie Laurencirl'

zt41

PM

Sunday March r7

It is poetry day again. I have just finished toast and coffee. Miss Kids arrived at noon and we went uP California Avenue picking church daisies and ivy which now stick out of a water-filled glass at my left hand. There are purple blue and fowers. And miniature bell blossoms that Miss Kids does not know the name of. I am worn down today. Ebbe Borregaard and George Stanley. "This is the last meeting." Also on the left is Michael McClure. Across from me is Joanne. And beside her is John Ryan. We all sit around chatting amiably. George Stanley's hands tremble holding the wine. At my feet is a bronze planter I transplanted marigolds and ivy into. They are thriving.
Jack Spicer has arrived.

Or at least
Work out thy salvation with diligence. Tonight they're dancing the dance ofdeath
all over America
ballerinas in their little spike shoes

16

17

and boys

with painted eyes Hold tltat tiger

Godi Curse Man when it is night, look for the light And when it turns bright, mourn the moon's fight.

have blackjacks for hands.

How can we pass there.

We all know how death travels these days.

On horseback
Shou, me his face.

5.ro.5g

Look in the mirror.

I want to hear his breath in my ear.

Hold it to the ground. Watch his waves rush in on thc shore.
You think you have seen it all. I'11 show you morc. In the faces oflittle girls. Who carries flowers not thru the fields.

Man when it is night, look for the light and when it be bright, mourn the moon's fight. The human voice
is blue.

Fast as I can write it down I will The list of the living gone'over to the

How can

see

him with

dl

these faces

Gone PorterTuck, Shela Pl"rr, gorr.lt"d' Rita and Rubio, gone gone gone

gathered here. From my life and the pictures in my heart he gathers.

Right out of their heads their hearts stop beating.

Mark thcm down.

Chalk them up.

say nothing new about death

except that the living enter

it for
a new

All I

life.

am interested in is charting the progress of my own

soul. And my poetics consist of marking dourn how each

And the living sigh thru the rooms,

drug addicts, locked in single fats, find one of them,

action unrolls. Without my will. poetic.

It

moves. So that each man has his own

fixing for paradise.

Qballah.

r8

t9

too.

who

cares

Mark me down.

for the details, only the dance

makes

A Marksman, making
time for death. this desire.

it

What am I in all this space, man says. I, a speck of dust in time. Who will light
my night?

The fault of the "poerri' here is

are.

And time always night where we

that

lose sight of the original emotion,

tbe

& the original

TheWoman rn me

bilk of home. Rather I go offand write a poem about an old lover. Which landscape contains no real objects nor actions but all heightened, glamourized, even,
object
at the end, abstracted.
So what starts
a

It is a simple

song:

offas potentially simple lyric with possibly

to long, for home and Dana lounging there under the moon. Who is Dana, what is he that he should mean so much to me? Is it love, or grass stains on your shirt? Is it night, or the sight of flesh lying on its side in the Pine Grove Groove of memory overgrown with
weed & speedballs. Is it movie houses, or blowjobs in the kitchen Is it hate or blood or the food of seed running down yr. leg Basements, ballrooms, back alleys,

new

form
winds up
as a

trashy romantic unreal self exploration.

Nothing is sacred, but to sacrifice a real event even if out of

the past for theatrical effect, afFect, is second rate and trashy. Also the poem on previous page rhapsodizes rather than match my emotional
language

line
imdge the weight of death. There is no sense of a breakthrough into a new place as there is a hint ofit in this essay. So all
serves well.

black masquerade, who can say

The Man

Cover over the rooo nights

to this place:

rourla

It is so simple. Not I mean to say wasting life

over love.

KnightTernplar of the Holy Grail, holy oil on my head.

I light

candles.

I follow
Here
never her. I am

&I

sack the place.

phantoms down the street. They are

Do up the altar, black mechanics.

The flashing of silver spikes in the night. The strapping ofbelts and cooking ofevil fires.
Spoons and eyedroppers, slapping of flesh, sucking of blood, hitting vcins with

Who will in my bones, and crooked joint. Who will crawl under the covers and join
have me,

head to head, secret plot, the sacred spot. So that there will be no face before yours in the mirror.

dirty needles. What a way to start the day. After this long journey. To stop here and knovr I go no more.
There is no god powerful enough to end this deadend, this
place of pure rapture.

Who is she and what is she

to me that I should hunger silendy at the moon, thin cunt in the sky apple of my eye, that god be delivered in the dawn, surrender his daughter to this crippled son.

Oh country of hunchbacls,I
walk with my shoulders to the wall. Green lead in my pencil.

June rr

Think of the hundred hotels with nothing in them

but a radio and opium pipes

23

Listen to a Chinese voice sing in the night and Read Confucius. Later write in a green pencil what you learned
today.

II
Miss Lollipop sits up in bed all night, playing and smoking pot. She lights candles and listens to jazz
a

NewYork hippy

she says what is

it now

book of poems for Miss Lollipop ofToledo I want it to be the bookJohnlvrote in his prison cell in Toledo. ForToledo and yet entombed in the burning wall of his soul. Surounded by the plant and fowers of the valley, blown in the night by ocean wind, behind glass, with sweet incense drifting under the doors, and yet locked out, in of it all. Beautiful women pass before him, putting on lipstick, their swains zipper their coats. Foreign voices ride in on the radio, pluck invisible guitars and leave the, let sun fash in his eyes for an instant.
a

about the shadow on the wall, an oyster, a blue heron, tell me what it is now the late, late show the man on the radio

says It aint nece'ssarily so

What do you now,litde Miss Cheracol, what do you do when the horse runs out, who do you
to get

it

She combs her hair with a pink comb by the edge of this bed. Her legs $May to the Mexican whistles, she stands on one leg. Do not stop 6xing your red hair

go to and how far to make it yeah just one more time. strapped up, down

In the night with Miss Lollipop

to the last vein in her leg. Oh
year, walk now,

Sheri
of the night. The trumpets blare your exit.
sweet song and

step to vrhat

happyboy. Bobby Short

24

25

June 14

III
Miss Lollipop is not here. She has
gorre away, is home, is not my muse, is me sitting here swaying to Red Fred's piano. She

Rejection of all other than the Real Substance is a deity. Therefore, do not adulterate truth with falsehood. The "where" and the "how" are open mysteries: Dispense, therefore, with them both. SUFI

woke up feeling ill this morning. And remains hidden from me all day.

He who accepts among men His uttered word shall receive permission to speak among men. SUFI
See to it that you do not deny that which you cannot understand of the secrets.

June

16

Occupy yourself with the divine revelations and forget

material assistance. Like water let your taste be both fresh and cool On the tortured belly of every friend. But for the tears and suffering oflovers, Need for water and fire among men would have been greatl

SUFI MAXIM The spirit is a delicate organism composed of radiant

substances:

All fire takes its spark from their sighs,

A1l water f.ows from their tears.

It
Ifyou were a heavenly chair, or a throne, or a garden Or fire or heavenly bodies running their course, And if of the Whole you were a coPy
And knew this to be
a

is customary in classical Arabic poetry of love to refer to the object of a man's passion in the masculine.

Will

realiry

the fames of love ever be quenched? Where and when shall union with the beloved take place?

Why then should you abide in your debasement, With those who are prisoners? Is not your turn come
that you
should go home?
S

Contemplation: The man of gnosis was drowned and thus became unconscious of o<istence; he was annihilated through the object of contemplation away from contempla-

UFI

tion itself

z6

27

Contemplation: As the gnostic rejoiced in the blessings of mystic knowledge, his sleevecuffs yielded perfume which spread throughout the world.

from the Maxims ofllluminations The reality of love is 6re which consumes the livers, an agony that swells and increases. If ever they disclose the secret, they pay for it with their
lives.

I hid myself fromTime behind

his wing

So that my eye sees Time while he sees me not. Ask the days of me, they know me not;

Such is the punishment of those who divulge. Sketch: The greatest love is one that settles in the heart immediately and distorts all onet feeling without giving notice.

Of mywhereabouts they know not either.

Manifestation (zuhur) comes to men by acceptance and perfection. Thoughts are the stars of mind's heaven.

Tiue love is an obligatory magnetic force. Conjuration of the treasured talisman (fath tilsan al-Kazaz)
Take the letters of the human talisman (al-tilsam al-insana)

The removal ofjudgement takes place through enlightenment and resumption of belief in predestination (tagdir) When Providence comes, it
immediately. Nature is the house where lies the time of the echo;
causes judgement to vanish

and extract from them the spiritual name (al-ism al-

ruhami), then

what ever you say in it, it will resound to you; it is revealing what is in you.

mirror

affix to it your signature and carry it as an amulet while you

go on your path.

For you might consider the mountains on which you look stationary whereas they travel with the speed of the clouds. SUFI

John Wieners al-ism al-ruthami

Decipherment: The saint who is beloved of Allah is the treasury of secrets and mysteries; the Night of Power, magnificent in consequences; the Name that is heart by

Allah; the Letter of Action.

zB

29

Decipherment Ponder the letters of the alphabet. And recite: Not

..

Outside of your essence, I have no ambition, a picture to capture, not a glance to gleam.

I found my mark ' . ' My sign. My sig nature. It is on my arm. Mainline. It is the four
pointed star. The sleepwalker's eye that never closes, points to the four corners of the universe. Not square
Lasdy, you may say that annihilation is complete consecra-

Regulation: The saint is one who smiles if saluted; in conversation he is pleasant;when asked he shall give; should you trespass in his presence, he utters not a malignity; when others divulge secrets, he concealsl of princes he knows he is not proud, and the poor he does not disdain; nothing shall mar the radiance of his face; the nort world he does not sell for the present.

But compassing all points

North
East-West House of the planets South
Pole,

Arctic rndZenith,up and

down the stairs, the ladders Talisman: Usually conjuration does not occur without a key; the key is the great man; therefore, when the fruits of humanity are obtained, the talisman of the universe shall be conjured and shall yield the realities, the miror-treasure. Talisman: Said the Messenger of Allah, Allah bless and keep him, Allah, the Exalted, says: i4, seryant continues to draw near unto me through his supererogatoryworks till I
love him, and once I have loved him I become to him a hearing, an eyesight, a hand and a support."

tion to the light of manifestation.

S

UFI

And my roommate carries offmy sins, I send him down the primrose path, stick him fulIof needles, knowing that every day carries him closer to oblivion, his

I do not try to help him, I let him

die before mybody a,ery day I have the blues and they are lifted from me to land on the back of little boy blue across the room. Oh their shoulders

3o

3t

June

18

v
Miss Lollipop is full of pain this morning. Her wing bone in the back. Her legs are black and blue. She ran her hands over me showing me where the pain is. We sat up all night listening to jazz and then at dawn, rock and roll. Her history as far as I know it consists of
8 arrests, of the narcotics bureau in was chief 4 husbands. Her father Sacramento. She lives in the Broadway Hotel with an Armenian piano player. She bends her neck as one of her boys rubs his hands into her. She wears a black bra. She

thought how pretty) she was carrying z ampules of methedrine, the new miracle drug and one joint of marijuana which she stashed in the back seat of the police car. She cannot lay down to sleep because of the pain (Richard calls her blue all over)
"She's sick,"

"She is sick."

but cannot go to hospital because ofclaustrophobia and feels she needs a rest first and to "get the rent all cool, I guess."

A poem In the Car with Freude Let this be the poem of v, written on that page in the green book.
To accept all revelations of
the letter next to last one ofthe alphabet, z5rt/t of a century the language of numbers,

does not complain.

Miss Lollipop has one of the most rare diseases known to medical history. A form of low grade bacteria that causes her shape to change every day. One day Pregnant and full of gas, the nort shapely. As she puts it, "I?e had a lot of trouble with my insides." She now laments the loss of her car, a"totaf'(wreck in the 3 car collision). Actually cries
over

it.

my age. They're making a new kind of car with glass as the floor mats, she says, so when you run over somebody, you can look down and see what you done with them. When she was arrested for the hit & run (they claim someone else was driving, a young man, who ur, told them was Paul Martinelli because she could not remember the accident at all only saw the headlights coming out of the night and

MafiaMurder,
the letter

u
My

Me and you, far out prince ofthe spheres

who reveals to the servant in the tunnel

32

33

this secret x

&y.

Read

A book of poems on a piece ofpaper that has no end. O

glory. Hosanna.

Of the Felicity and Sweetness of God's Love:

And of the Nightingale's Song: and Prayer for Perseverance

ofTiue Ghostly song that Worldly Lovers have not.

O radix cordis mei

My mother's name. She sits in the heavens sets them all in motion whirling thru the universe discharging at night
fash and spike of
the golden rod, road

O my heart's rose
perfeccio

-"ioy"
"Lezveyr."
Piles in tlte West

uray.Wxy
7.r7.59

Dec z3'Pennsylvania Hotel Washington D.C.

1959

For the boisterous and fleshly soul is not ravished into contemplation of the Godhead unless all fleshly lettings be wasted away by ghostly meditation.

A poem at the Equinox

Beyond grie{, beyond pain at the universet unending turning, we move, still spectres of another race, our hands to our mouths, sailing out to some beach beyond oblivion.

RICHARD ROLLE
The Fire ofLove

Delectable heat is also in the loving heart, that has devoured heavy griefin the fire ofburning love.

Move on

I wrote at Black Mountain, to that higher order where the angels are, residing in
the heavybreasts of men'

No dice. Move now

34

35

through chambers where there are walls, the

doors with names, and the names no faces,

Erroll Garner's underwater playing Dreamy! After Midnight Ella Fitz

Singing A Tisket A Tasket
20 years ago one

trying to pierce
the magic box that sings in the middle ofeach forehead
Godhead

playing with the atomic chains of hair

around each wrist

generation, away
beloved toys of my parents, ignored adored
1939

linking what is lare

to all there is

by
6.2r.59

byme

Hipsters' Corner. The Zenda

June z7

allroom. Wally

erman.

July +
Characters

Miss Lollipop

Lord Hydrogen Lady Helium

June z8

Jimmy Dorsey Dee Parker vocal:

Im GladThere's

You

I thank thee Lord, Le Diable, for sending me these thy gifts: Miss Lollipop home from the hospital on a a4 hour leave. Her "sister" died for the third time. They gave her 4 seconals to calm her. A lad also is here asleep on the bed. I feel his warmth at my feet, curled up on the other half of this cot. Miss Lollipop sits on the other bed which is on the foor with Richard. On the floor is Jimmy Carter who has been here all day eating chicken and ham, smoking por, reading The Circle of Knoaiedge. Does the night ever endl It has to as I have to go with it.My shadow on the wall needed in the scheme of things. WithJimmy andJohn Davidson on the foor. Sherri

36

37

Monday (in the jungle

My room. Elise drunk at the end of the bed. I watch like withJim Beam in her hand. She holds it high to the male guests who ignore her. Keith has the needle in his left hand. They are shoota hawk as she staggers from bed to table

I wanted to say they are attacking me now. Elise screams I dont have balls. Every time I see you. But like I dont need them. Cry I know. I wont cry and I wont shed a tear. Now they are woven in here now. Keith watches Aaron make it. Richard: that represents the art of: Aaron. Buffoonery. Elise has the whiskey botde in her hand
Aaron
says.

ing sleepers. Elise talks of Gertrude Lawrence singing

When my Ship Comes In and Lotte Lenya of a different ship that comes in to do the whole town in. She fexes her
muscles. Aaron on the floor: I once knew a mattress wringer in Dubuque. The radio: Great Western Furniture Store. Elise says this is the last time I'm gonna clean up for anybody else. Mopping up the whiskey Aaron spilled on the floor. Keith sits under the light cleaning out the clogged spear of the needle, Harry sleeps at the foot of the bed, with a pink flower dying in his lapel. Richard is in his sickbed, with a high fever. There is only one light and the window is open. Red drapes blow in the wind. The door bell rings. We are thrown into a mild hysteria. Elise again, goes down to !eak." Aaron is snapping his knuckles to the rock and roll. It was somebody for Wally. Elise is swiggrng from the bottle. Keith is wheeling his arm in the air. Aaron ties him up. Elise rolls over on the foor. Hiding her face. Her fists are clenched above her head. Aaron says: you'Il be patient with me, wort't you, there it goes. Don't wanna do wrong, dont wanna do right. Keith has given his 6x to Aaron. You don't mind do you Keith. They are fighting. He rings a bell in the closet. Elise is looking at me, Aaron wheels his arm in the air. He stands as he does. Now kneels to drink his whiskey. What school did you attend, Elise he says as he puts the needle in his arm. My father's love and my mother's womb, Go baby go

and her head sags on her shoulder. Can I sit on the foot of your bed. He touches with a cold hand my ankle. There you go I remember the first time I missed and it spread like a great big beautiful sunburst. His arm is raised above I hear the needle squirt. He says look give me luck. Help me put it in there. It's a tribute he says to what you're working
against.

Hit!

Mexico How can I write

where

about there neverbeen. Tell the frog

to jump out of its garden or the

garden to grow

with god.Tell him

to lay down his law. Without words

or for
a

a place

behind them.

A front
back.

Home in Indiana.
Massachusetts is the place for me.

38

39

From ajournal July

13

the stars creeping up the hill and thought ofsex in the dark, catching him surprised coming around some corner, cradling his cock in his hands. Hard it was

The long night spent in slack hours. When the hand is too heavy to lift to the machine. Almost. Rather slip over into oblivion. The eyes sink into the head and the mind pulled down into
a scene of its own, when conscious

on me to lay there

thot

with only the ground under me. Bits of it stuck to my coat. Let it go I think; Rise up from this waste. There is no lover in the dark. No nightmare stallion
turning into
a tree to see you; are alone. I rose and went out by the street bush I came in.

stops. But the action of this creation

brings me back, the charge that catapults me to take action, for its own sake, the cause unknown, of no interest, only the web of the words, like the days of a life form an image which is a construct against and of time, erected out of space, in the space of this hour, this night, this drifting with one hand over our mouths and the other to our belly. I speak in plural for that is who I am possessed by The tonight. discharge.

(for nc

Blaze Starr

r)

A silver

tassel hangs from the edge ofher

tit.

King

Solomonls

Magnetic Quiz

And when I went to the woods

I heard the whispering of lovers

ages ago. Was

it

Green leaves grow out of her hands, she is Daphne in a diaphanous gown. Earl Long's old lady. See her on the roof of the world. Hands of goodies for the King.

lights or my eyes playr.g tricks on me? The trees were forms, was rain dropping on the ground like feet, fog and my own game at hand.

On my back I saw
4t 40

2)

A silver

tassel hangs

from the edge of her tit. Green leaves grow out of her hands, roll in the afternoon
her legs and arms alabaster, her hands shape secret codes.
She is Daphne in a

We awake to chaos & desire. It chokes our throats. Puts tears in our eyes. Masters of the beat, withheld from the in6dels. Dope does not replace it. The Men who.
practice

it our gods, our families. The mind the final test. It is an

aristocracy. Envy for the titled holders of the crown. Problems. Pushed to the

diaphanous gown. Earl Long's old lady. Oh la la

limit each time we try it. Try it

and see.

The slim books our heritage. Wise men of the world. And
Bourbon Street. A belly fi.rll of goodies for the Bayou King. And jelly rolls all afternoon.
the way our

mind works the way

the poem reveals
self.

it
with no food in my
stomach,

I
July r7

can count on countless years before me

writing out history in some dark room, doing my bit towards creating
rrvr

a new structure

from love.
For the poet what else is there but poems. Let the jazz organ pump in the afternoon. Let the dope fiends sell their asses in the street and the'discjockeys spin their records, advertise wares, we are the creators, coiners ofthe new word, line tempo time held to a measure. We become what we create. Call down the entire universe into
one syllable.

It can only be that. For my other

to nurture all
these years.

motive we fail. And love is a

sParse

thing

42

43

July

q
is

Discharge. Manifesting the process of

A Glimpse
There is a knot in the middle of my head that will never be untied. Two monkeys sit there one on the right turned towards me, the other crouched and turned
away.

it life? Or the action between this and

non-action? Letbargy
as. Violence.

For to take up arms against the void is attack, and the price ofwar is high. Millions of syllables shed over the falls of our saliva, millions of teardrops
eyes. Giant screams echo through the halls of our houses at night. We do not wish it. It is so. By the action we are engaged in. Hundreds of days, months have to go by before the spirits descend and the right word rolls out sharp and full of fire air earth and water offthe tips of our tongue. And one ch,nnot avoid the days. They have to parade by in all their carnage. The events of them like

roll out of our

They

have red hair and do not play

with their chains. But sit on a ledge above Venice? Anyway a city with canals painted by Breughel,I see them in a mirror when I look for my own face.

images on a shield, we carry thru the streets

of

the town

A poem does not have to be a major thing. Or a statement? I am allowed to ask many things because it has been given me the means to plunge into the depths and come up with answers? No. Poems, which are my salvation alone. The reader can do with them what he likes. I feel right now even the reading of poems to an unknown
large? public is a shallow arl, unless the reading be given for the

later on our way to the poetry reading. Drunk or

doped before that wild horde who presses in to get a pick at the bloody hero. And is hei You bet.

July zo
A poemfor a marriage

fact of clarity. The different tecbne

a man uses to make his salvation.

That is why poetry

even tho

it

does deal

with langue is no more ltoly act

than, say shitting.

sit facing out to sea waiting for the woman to cook supper and her daughter beside her chewing on a chicken bone.

44
45

Flamenco musrc
on the machine, the

rv drifts out
from the bedroom

bits ofcolored glass recovered from the

Green, blue,

sea.

where the boy sits in the sun, watching. Which star on its fullcircle set on a hill. A bird drops by overhead out the open door

stones,

red paint droppings and rust.

Hollow indentations
where the stones dropped out. r foot by z feet,

the sky is very blue.

z) She sits now in this room, her legs on a table gold sandals around her ankles. A Weigh it. Why not. This day is no different from any other. A neighbor comes calling.

The wind blows thru slats on the porch, fishing rods

hang over the sea, it washes under me. I see it green with white light from the sky carried on its surface to the shore. Swish against the pilings of this house.

Down Catfish Row, and the

am a worm in the house. They are in this room. All four of them. The avalanche of humanity stimulates me. Their lives inbound with mine. The last light leaves a gold glow behind the spires of far trees. They bring me my drugs. I am patronized and supported by the'uromen of the world. They keep life between them

We are built out

over the sea.

girl

says,

4)

And the sky shall be beneficent to us. Despite its rumble

so that the women run out and say what is it?

I dont

A train? know. Some response to my word. Unsaid in

bright river. The

sea

runs a deeper blue.

I
3)

the cries of flamenco dancers, heralding the dark. Full moon rising in some unseen place. But we know it. The woman and holding out, onto the wings ofwhat bird roaring to the east. Phoenix.

I watch night come down. Or we turn into it. A piece of

driftwood holding down this Page,
plaster ofparis on its face

46

47

July zr
Subjects to write about that interest me: I. Stars, Les Etoiles. 2. The Spectrum. The Exact and

erra

Feel. Her rosa vulva,

guarded by the fesh of her legs. OhJoanne you let me know your secrets and I love you for it.

in-

4. The Tarot Deck. I pick one every day and it is the

day.

o<act, what Olson told the mathematician tae catbe. When the door blows open in the middle of the night, I want to write it down.

Sets the tone. Unleashes a chain of events

I know what stirs the heart of man. I know how

to win him to my side. By letting my beart spring forth. As the wind. A poet only writes poems. That is all he should have to do. Unless he encompasses more and
we do. Universes. 3. A sleeping woman. My fear of them. Not their cunts but their souls. We do not have to speak at high pitch. We only have to use the instant, in whatever form it appears. High tide or low, below this house

that I love on, off. Capricorn. The land and sea. The narcotic and natural. Man and all the generalities. I was going to say Woman The Womb. That secret Place. She has the [cobalt bomb in her womb. Francesa. Madam La Farge. The Flower Girl with giant nasturtiums spread out over her giant breasts and thighs. Cunt that I could smell in the car. Sitting on her lap. Singing to me: You must have been a beautiful baby. Joanne with her two beside her sleeps and laughs in the big bed. Oh house what enchantment have I wandered into. The poem progresses of my own life, and pulls

it washes.
The
sea. Senses, how they are dulled.

Do drugs

[*"
along with

because they stimulate when they wear

off

it.When man cannot write in a

leave one down, needing the drug to rise to what next presents itself Yet it has been over two years since I began a steady use of them. And I feel my writing my being fows out and in from the universe with more give

I do now write myself out but renew myself daily. I am in accord with the word of my time. What my space is I do not
fknow. These two continuums are unknown to me. Not like my flesh. I am learning that. It is my key into all wisdom, is wisdom as the

IPlace he leaves that place.

and take, that there is a parabola in us, hollow places where we foat into the abyss, knowing the shape of all things around us.

Contour.

48

49

man who wrote'AgainstWisdom as Such," says My master. Who reveals so much to me, and

who acknowledges me, was the first to recognize and save me from the self condemnation I [practiced

Let me know the chambers of my soul. Even tho

he would never acknowledge my using those words. Medieval, he said of the heart.

One can practice the pure poem in Life:wz. monks and nuns, saints John Kelly and virgins, whores, all who are led by forces that are not their own. Giving themselves over to the white, contemplation, making art a religion and the pursuit of the soul their guide. Dante thru Hell, hungering after Beatrice. But in the Poem, there has to be the black, the whole process
gone thru, trans

mutation.

We have to be post-modern. Or
more.

Mutate or die Duncan said

over the table eating radioactive lettuce.

The Stars. Etoila. It's enough writing. the night makes me stop.

do not and dol practice compulsions.

July

zr

3 rivr

The blonde girl comes out on the porch. I say Hi Sweetie. She smiles down on me like the angel from heaven she is. She's followed by her brother who says: Hi Mr. Giant. What joy to see Kelly pull in a polka dot dress the Kangaroo truck and say: This is our baby. Larry says: It's a lit up trolley car. He says: Jack, do you want to play with this, you can be ghost." I say "I'm playrng already."There is no pain in this so I know it is not a poem. A poem comes from a pitch beyond
man's reach.

On the back deck behind the room which she said is % witch's casde." Only a choice ofwords. It is a casde, we know that. lnywbere h eoeryrutbere.The universe orpanding as we do daily. But why this talk of cosmos. Where will it take usl To the mountains against our will. We always have to go against that. To stand erect. Do what we dont want to do, but know that is where the richness is. In the skies. Enough of this poetry Remove yourself from them. For it is here at a distance that we gain sight/insight. That is not the practice of claritas, nor perspective as they usbd to say. But peace. Within yourself Moving with the spheres which whirl in
such abundance and

That is why impossible for r r u to ever turn all men into robots.
There being at times ro or 50 poets in every rZ5, ooo, ooo men. Practicing a process which produces pure gold; The poem which contains enough joy and pain to illuminate men at times over a time of thousands ofyears. Pushing on to eternity. Who knows where our words go. But it is an immortal art of man. Practiced by him alone in absolute silence in the middle of noisy bars and restaurants, on the back porches of houses from Gloucester to San
Francisco.

I imagine velocity. Setting right the

rites.

5o

5r

"Make it Neu

vegetable organic renewing as well as psychic."

I tell her
my dream, how they
Istole the bike and I think some clothes because they gave us cigarette papers to redeem them. Red Sharpe's car and when I got my clothes back they had someone elset name sewn on the label. An old name I will not reveal,

July zz
She has brought her treasures out into the sun and

I spring

to write them down. 4 stills of Charlie Chaplin, "2by z" walking on the road then rNo, spread out in a circle on top of the table,l/z an orange rind, the top of a crystal water jar, a sugar tin, drifnvood, green stones thrushes, my head is still heavy with sleep, the brain cells not open from the dream. Of night and the junkies stealing my bicycle and books. I love them because they are the boys of my childhood who would chase me home from school and leave this same terror.

rnr

asldo
the contents of table. The black circle drawn around the hole in the center, the clinking of pewter as she moves the objects around, the wash of the waves under us.

luly

zz

So that even here by the sea,

the objects of my life return, from another life that never dies.

Fish bones, a pin

She brings me in

another tin charcoal burnt newspaper.

Late afternoon with the sun at about 7 o'clock in the July sky. The moon is on the wane. Tide pulled into shore. How to survive in the city. A desperate act. To make it there on one's own terms. And seek sustenance from the street. How a man does that is interesting moreso than from the country. We know his means. Give and take the peculiarities of each place. But the city is a fabled labyrinth, and sustenance there is subterranean. Life on the surface regiment, ordered mechanized the people move as robots, displaying neither love nor fear: Sophistication and of course the infinite variety of individual acts made to break the stereotype. How can it be done?

At nightwhen
there is only one eye and the police prowl as roaches thru every layer. Searching like poets every face, gait, manner

52

53

of dress. Under the street lights only the eccentric stands out garbed in the costume of his game. Streetwalkers,
showgirls, perverts, late business men, clerks, schoolboys, tourists, from the healthy country (these really belong here in this panorama) poets with pale faces, girls dressed in black beside them. All parade by on silent errands. There is seldom laughter except in the neighborhood and negro districts. Here all is flash and glamour. The Best in tbe West the signs sing. Cars circle here too, constant for some piece of prey. Cats with no homes but pads. Closets, garages, lofts. These persons hold on and try to erect poles to place the syndrome. How long? Two years at it and I am worn out. My teeth half gone at 25. A racking cough all night. Litde fqod and sour stomach in the morning unless drugs, not to deaden one, but open doors for the fantasy world. Sur-real is the only way to endure the real we find heaped up in our cities. And across most of the country. Are we to survive at all? Attempt is being made by a few to withstand the heaps. To crawl out on all fours, hands & knees, for retreat. If only a week. To restore the devastation of absolute poverty which America, not our laziness which is inherent in all and everyman, has to fight against, forces us to practice. For every scrap of bread is worked for. Each crumb from the master table of 1959. A prosperity peak. When the man who wants to create on his own level has to resort to crime to do it. Petty or not, it is theft and we are held responsible for it. In the eyes of the law which are waiting to pounce on us. Not many survive to report on it in even this form. The jails are filled with saints and heads who believe in Jesus Christ, his acts as a man. And at the beginning what support can one a(pect o(cept from the

gods. Do not doubt it. Myvery existence to this day depends on their beneficence. Chance. Which treats me kindly. Knock on wood. Why the drop in the line because I feel the forces gathering that makes a poem. By mention of them rush in of what powers, old ghosts my mother and sister whispering their prayers in padded cells.

Echoing thru the blood of my body, the power of the sun. Maximum at this instant like the clapping of hands and distant hurahs
heard on the beaches ofthis land.

There is no consistency in me.

change as the sky, blue, aqua

marine, orange gold and deep purple. Radio spires what I erect in this spectrum to detect the changes. A bird's tweet, a piano by the sea where green and royal blue meet, not mid way but constant-

lymix
mudpies in the slry.

Of my eye.

54

55

Rose

white pale red, black

bogs ofcloud bunched to begin the new night.

I would rather live my dreams at night than dream them out to 611 the morning with pain.

Over
7/zz/59

I think but the melody lingers. I am too

taken away

It has to do,,wth jaz,z. This dark symphony brought to birth by brothers, to Hell, to junk. There is a reason for the vocabulary we use. The demon means we use to extend our life on whatever terms we can make. An infinite extension. Hold on, fond wanderer, when you come to this to whatever you are involved in, with every atom ofyour body, for this is eternity. And cannot be turned away from, at peril of your death. The voice comes out from the microphone megaphone
zoth century r.

by sense/impulses fying me off

anywhere.

But

so

it is and here I go again

taking a chance

On love.
Its gende barges drift me up a hundred new channels. Clanging out a jungle dance
man makes under the moon

in whatever clearing he can. Sun burnt on my back. Bearing

I'll remember April and the way it turns in the night the town
to snow. See the streets banked high and the men
midgets between them. Howwe walked, under the trees and lights laid down in the ice and made love. No more. This is a city of the sun. Nocturnal dreams are out of place, the acts we no longer live return to haunt us in our dreams.
56

her crescent on his breast. Walking over the land like hands beating out a rhythm

Listen. It is Morse code from the goddess, And jingle bells in the

do not understand'

ju"gl..
Mambah.

s7

Jaly zz

And so now I sit alone in the house with the lights on and
Lex Ba,xter beating his drums
on the phonograph. and the z children asleep on the porch The woman covered in blankets.

Picks up speed the tide does with the rising of the waning/ moon.

July

z3

Night I thinkwith wild cries

and a cymbal clashes somewhere in the jupgle.

He thought: What next to do? He wanted to stay in the house beside her, her spirit moving thru the
rooms; the door was open to the porch and the waves were there. The boy was crying, rather whining in the next room. He would stop. He was bored. He was not stirred by the rising of the waves. They would roar for aeons on this beach after him. Who would be here to hear them. The boy had been sent outside. He came back in sobbing to the bathroom, and the gid was sucking a honey dew melon. Motor boat roared in the bay. It was July and the dog days. He thought what's a poet doing writing prose? Where are the phantoms he had called down with night. Gone with the night. Writing he knew was an agony. From what source it sprang he did not know. That the gods were not with him now he knew. But he felt that the recording of that fact was important. The cqnng on the doorstep had begun again. And the girl came in calling: Mommy do you uant to see a sailboat? | am a silent man, he thought. How can I ever amuse a woman? Fill her life with a structure that would support her and prop her for the life they had left together. The wind is a woman, he thought, but he knew that was not true. And that this compulsive writing not a productive act for the house. But the house is a woman, he thought and so he went outside.

An uptown beat.
Tempo. Try to maintain control of the tempo, dont fy like the evening star Venus from the sea.

off

How red she is tonight Love descends on the land. The record
ends.

With

no other words but hers

in the night. Two tin cans

take over this poem. A skin stretched over bamboo blows out Cuban blues in the night like Chicago. East in the city I dont wanna go no more. I wanta be free as the breeze that blows the waves onto the shore.

58

59

He sat in the big green chair overlooking the sea. He had changed pens from a ball point one to a fountain. He had taken offhis shirt and there were grapes in his l6ft
hand.

A machine whirred on the porch

next to theirs and the waves lapped at the pilings behind him. He ate a grape and spit the seed into the sea, crushing it first by accident between his teeth. It is terrible, he thought, to be a reporter of the instant. One has to be there all the time. He ate another. There was a hill behind the house, like a gargantuan guardian of the house. Its summit reaching a peak exactly in front of their front door, which opened onto a boardwalk which led to a piece of land not wider than 5 feet which ran between the hill and sea, along that little bay of houses which she called Cat Fisb Roru. Across the bay was another hill which she pointed out to him last night looked like an Egyptian mummy. He said Gulliver. She said what. He said Rip Van Winkle. And later, reminds me of a drawing by Blake, you know the old man with the long white beard. She went inside to 6x the rest of supper and he had smoked. Later she came and got him in the doorway. Sending waves of her being thru him as he stood in the doorway there, holding onto his wrist and causing his belly to bounce in that queer way, like he too was at high

tide.
a new day and he sat in the with only dungarees on and they too had a hole in the seat. He finished the grapes and threw the vine down. Then the last seed between his teeth, his

Now it was

green chair above the sea

fingers, he shot it out and it bounced back offthe wooden slats which fenced in the porch. Except where he sat which opened directly to the liquid quicksand ofwhat was called Pacific Ocean. The motor picked up speed next door. "Mommy''came drifting out from the house, soft and liquid as the sea. Women real7y are that, he thought. Even the young, and he would hate, he thought, to anger any one of them. That was why he was such a sibilant around them. Not really bothering them, but always on the lookout for what pleased them. Rather than himself which he reduced to a kind of helpmate around them. Help me God, he thought, to be a man and keep this woman and her brood. Of course it was her house and she brought the food. And he just sat in the sun and let the sweat roll down his thighs. But they were good together at night, she let him know that. And she was his first woman. And despite other lovers, she gladly came back to him, courted him and made him feel at home. Her and her friend Margo up the row. That was good for him, he thought, rubbing orange stains offhis belly and spitting his sinus mucous inro the sea, pulling part of his skin offhis back as he moved too quickly, stuck as he was somehow to the green chair! The sun made his eyes squint and the nasal cavities behind them to discharge their flow down the back of his throat. He liked the taste. That was one thing he got being by the sea, sinus. And a gull bounced on the waves before him. Another thing. Brown with black tail and black beak, turning to face him as he wrote that down. How a poet controls the universe, he thought. Had not his master taught him: He who controls rhythm, controls. There was a rumble behind him and he half turned but saw nothing so

6o

6t

came back again to his book. And the wind cooled him, as the jaz.zboys would say. And the land loved each new arrival that the wave dumped upon it. And the speedboat
across his ears further out than the cruiser, was a caress.

They are tears in my eyes,

Mists that lie along the land

to the west, gray blue specters that have no names, but play an enchanted game with our minds. Childhood stories, we never heard

Why not? Be a sensualist. Take the pleasures, richness

another master had said.

up

Damn the references to my lords, I must set myself absolute, and as he bent to write it, a black shadow of some winged thing passed over the white paper and the memory of it made him sit there for a long time rubbing his running nose.
as

till

now.

July z4

A Stately Pleasure Dome luly A poem for the storyteller

There are many here where
z3

And

so he crept away injected with heroin by the to hear a concert

sea

l;il ""* the ran*s of fabled dead, shadows

of the night.
Dogs barking, song of islands

fall

across this paper. Names. Cleopatra

of shore
out of sight incense drifting in other rooms.

lists her beloveds gone underground: Anthony: who is to me or I to him that I should name him courtier to that heavenly

tto*t'or
rrrn
life
come to me out of your graves, it is the day the dead shall rise and populate the skies.
6z

What to do now he thought with paradise on my hands, who can I bring it to. I will paint
a map of Africa and lay naked colors royal blue

63

running for the rivers and

orange Beachandland, orange Tangiers. Leave Ethiopia black but Egypt red.

Dreams reveal how much in danger we are, but across the room in the new blue light a little girl sits up, her eyes wide open staring at me, and

I know it
Vomit on the floor then swing to Popsy, a cool bass behind the waves What boat do I wait for,
easy

is your sign.

No matter what

disease gets caught

in my throat.
The waves wash in on the shore and I find my solace there. Comfort against the coming of the storm,

living

It\

easy

living when you're in love building up the scale like a roof

a

The trial
breath
arranged by our betrayers.

out ofleaves and grass, taking on your reed the end just right.

And nowhere in sight,

he says

OnH
running the most beautiful blue water in the sink

expecting to come down

any second.

Myboot
from the sky

vomiting strawberry and green.

July
z5

July

z5

I
O God of the dawn
birds protect me from the dangers of this world as I sit in the dark with the crab as my ashtray.

despair of love
ever throwing up

on the shores, enough ofa raft for me to ride out upon.

64

65

Great Britain

Russia

23

56
is

kaly 78g

America

ro tr

t2

Dreams, just dreams of long ago beams a face that we must know Summer's gone and life grows cold

still in dreams youte mine of old.

INA
JOB

July z6 is German forJew

Crauman

On the road again. America does not change. Nor do we, Olson says. We only reveal more of ourselves. Riding in the car with all the windows open. How can I rise to the events of our lives. I am a shrew and nagging bitch as my mother
am filled with doubt and too passive. I go where I am told. Anywhere. Take pleasure in doing what I am told. There is no comfort in Nature or God o(cept for the weak. It is my fellow men that deliver me my life. Otherwise I wrap up in myself like an evening primrose in the sun. Nature is good for analogy. We think we learn lessons from her but she deserts us at the moment of action. That is why we remain savages. Underneath. And our civilization remains a jungle. Live it at night and see.
was.

it could just

as

well be

BERMAN

theyr

57zr of the Jewish era begins at sunset on September zznd Gregorian Calendar

CalvertCafe

Hobart

z-9882

De-pression July
z5

And

so he sits at sunset listening to

Nora Bayes sing and now it is Caruso, shadows are falling, memories
when you were my own.

But traveling on the road to Sausalito, San Francisco then Big Sur, I see how much the earth still surrounds us. Willow Road juts out in my memory. Mission San Rafael Archangel. Redwood Highway. Where man is going now, who knows. The earth no longer need be his home. M"yb. this means the end of the old world. And man, on the minutest of planets may and can range thru all of space. To the very frontiers, limits, barriers of outer wodds. Luclcy Drive. End construction project. With what frightening

66

67

speed we move ahead.

This must be necessary: Paradise

Drive. The children are quieting down now. The witch drives her old Chevrolet, her long black hair blowing out the window.
J,aly z7

Locked out of the world, above a blanket of mist pierced here and there by notes from a bird, we are above the sea
so high the sun blinds our eyes and the birds rise to us,

wheat whirls in the wind.

Wrapped up in an Indian blanket with the mist falling on this paper

Read

Vachel Lindsay: Tbe Golden Wbales of California

Willa Cathet A?ril Tuilights

I could see miles out on the

but fog blocks up the view.

Pacific Ocean

What can I write about Willa Cather's book

rat eaten rain ruined beside me, found in Stone House on a mountain in California. Book of the prairies, book of love poems to SpanishJohnny (what rush when I wrote his name on a silver cup bought in Venice life is sweet together, birds in the branches, broken lines

to set my heart afire as the wood cut and burning in the stone place on my left. Here are no demons, only friends. Does the poem proceed out of pain
does the heart have to beat at a super

and unnatural speed for the word to be produced,like the gold

of alchemy,
transmuted.

There are no dreams

writing them under

a roof that opens

have not lived except for

to the sky, Woman of the prairies writing

on stone.

Out the windowWest and

the set sun.

Waiting.

In the window

a kerosene lamp

whose light I write by.

68

6g

To

*y

left the fire in the stone place

and 4 people before it, the woman, her daughter and z men, sit on the stone floor, talking of sun worship and fire worship, the cricket in the roofwhere the bats live, Still shows a lighter blue than the black
corners of this room, stone house with wooden

There is the woman that sleeps now and rises in the dawn
the note

that dances in the air

on ten toes.

Then silence. And shadows on the wall

that look like snakes.

doors on the side of a ridge that rises behind the house to a hill

No scheme. Only acts

fragments of the act that is my life and that of the fellows around me.

Out theWestWindow Out the windowWest and

the set sun.

My book is before me why dont my fingers move over it

In the window an oil lamp

July
July z7
z8

A cricket

sings in the morning

There is the fute that sings

What to do with the definite article. And prepositions. How to

connect

in the dead of the night. The word that writes itself only in the dark

without them. I want language to be taut

as

the rope

7o

7t

that hold a teapot over the fire for hot water. We pour it. Into the strainer

thru sweet

leaves

"The living spirit grows and even outgrows its earlier forms of expression; it freely chooses the men in whom it lives and who proclaim it. This living spirit is eternally renewed and pursues its goal in manifold and inconceivable ways
throughout the history of mankind. Measured against it,
the names and forms which men have given it mean little enough; they are only the changing leaves and blossoms on the stem of the eternal tree."Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, p. 244

It is an hour's climb from the road, so all supplies have to be brought in on one's back. There is a large stone fireplace to the right of the doorway which opens West. To the East the kitchen and backdoor. All doors are wood. A11 else is stone. Finely built and of careful craftsmanship. Except of course cabinets and table and stools, which are handmade from the woods which slope offfrom this ridge on three sides.
nights'sleep.

have trouble

with Mass Media

July

zB

The

sea rolls in the at rwilight do I have to write

slcy.

Why

This is a stone house built on a ridge in the Big Sur mountains of Southern California. If it were not for the mist which has suirounded us since we arrived, blocking out the sun but not its glare, we could see miles out on the Pacific Ocean. There is a garden built on ridges behind the house. The animals have eaten all the plants. I found two
sunflowers at the edge of an abyss, one ofwhich I propped up with pink scarf and stick. They face southwest, giant
servants to the sun. We stay in doors all. day, the mist being a bright gray glare that is like a wall around and below us. The house was built in r9r9 by a man named Lapler.It is

all the world dropping offthe West

July z9 Even my piss runs golden

in this time of plenty

all spring long one lovely flowering of my life, and now in summer I come to this mountain, this morning while below the mist rages. I range here clear in the secrets of my own being.

in good condition except for the roof which has been used over the years for firewood. We live primitive on a stone

foor, mattresses over wood

72

slabs which give an excellent

73

Let the peaks be blocked from view the woman walks thru the room and
brother and sister sit together on the step

ofthis stone house.

Lizard under the stone,
bees buzz around us

to score. And the bats return home to the roof of Stone House to sleep. And I was born then. And poets go to sleep then. Into a new birth. And we are lucky when we dream. Practicing containment. To adhere to the structures of my being. Itrhethr thqtfall away into the sea or not. Is I comin or is I goin is it somethin or is it nothin is I livin or is I dyin
is

in the morning the two trees fulI of canaries atd in the burnt grass
yellow poppies.
the air is alive with sound

all I want to know

is is

July 3o
xr.r565 the license number on the car aside us as we go the

shoreroad back from Gorda thru the Big Sur mountains to San Francisco. The Great Beast and his Book of the Law Liber al vel Legis. 56 revelations therein made to him, April 4?, r9o9. A thirty year time lag: E Pound r9z9 editing Exile brings MEASURE out 1959 with golden marigolds hanging offits ears and a white bone in my pocket from the fields telling me the way is of the jungle magic is tbe science of tbe jungle,lung says and the mountain cat becomes the spade cat prowling thru Killmore Street. Between midnight and dawn. Dont discount the dawn for at 6 au the junkies meet at the Hot Dog Palace

"...the demonic horses harnessed to the chariot ofour life, the conscious ego being only the driver. So that there is nothing for it but to resign onesel{, like Gathe's Egmont,'to hold fast the reins and to steer the wheels clear, now to the left, now to the right, here from a stone, there from a precipice."'

Zimmer The King &the Corpse p.

zr

And so be done, be gone with it into some gentler night where winds ofennui are not so fierce
and fires from the void so drear.

One must remember that "The speech of birds" is the language of angelic communication.

-AKc

74

7s

Aug rst
decide today to strip my walls bare. For despite the labor I feel it necessary for my neur-creating psyche to see the fresh field rather than the souvenirs and fetishes ofsuch a recent past. Even tho that past may be lost because no poems made note of the events contained therein. And I am a needy and lonely wanderer clad in red with no memories (what a difficult law to live by) so it is I strip the walls of my room that I may have the fresh, the neq not the evocative image of friends of faces my soul knows from the past, but the old wide plain where man is alone, only the red guilt on his hands, of his own life, what he has and must use. I was going to say guilt for having stolen fire, or blood running down his hands, but these images we recognize. I mean the red that is his alone containing fire and blood, but more the gift, the

all over the page without will but a plan

a design of the

mind

not constructed out of agony but moving with the tides, I was going to say

wind.
Wbat does any of tbis do

but that is the voice of my demon, the corpse

that hangs upon the tree and wails! srnaNGE FRUrr
Tltis song raas writtenfor ne

Billie Holiday

says under the

baby spot light.

I aint trying

to be brilliant.

tongue of flames

tx:'.'"Yselrin'
As

PLAN FOR MEASURE

the writing is, when it is the man will show, this structure of change,

shifting but always revolving

upon itself. So that the way will widen as the land it moves over, does dip and valley volley home like a cannonball, not

Old-New r Book of the Earth City z Chades Olson's Descartes Newform : Tom Field's Notes on Form &Beauty New space 4 Ebbe Borregard'sJournal place 5 John Haines A Nice View Reminiscence 5 Sheri Martineli's stream Z Wm Fleming Night Piece decadence 8 David Meltzer Mechankions degenerate 9 John Wieners dope ro Michael McClure Notes hip rr Philip Lamantia City ofWeir
struggle

Magnum Opus

76

77

act LSD
surrealism revelation Flesh

t2
13

Duncan What do I know of the old lore

John Reed's
Capsule from Another World Allen Ginsberg's r,so Mad machine vision
Jess

typewriters hang in The Pawnshop Window; words go on. And their instruments with them. Today I am one of them and I dress in a red robe.
Sometimes it is only given to us a few words to speak and a litde time to say them in, in an old form: prose. And what is this new form that breaks thru? Is it pure? What shape does it have? Its contour on the page.

Love

Poems

Collin's Tiicky Lad Allister Crowleyt Liber al vel Legis (the woman) AnotherJournal or Photo ofJan
Ron Loewinsohn Ed Marshall John Wieners

And if man is not engaged in Mary Fiore

creating new form, what does he engage himself in? He does not die with each day. He says there is no death. For him there is no life either. It is the limbo of contemporary America. Yet even that too moves at its own gracefrrl and deadly speed-need, ease.

Persky's Cocteau Prose for Russell

Michael Rumaker's Letters

Two Indians fishing on the Bay of San Francisco

And who am I but a lonely

setter upper

Aug

ofoutworn creeds and

beliefs, brought into being by the needs of my ever-avaricious ever bright-full mind. Where do I dwell but in Hell stealing your secrets, o precious reader o not desert me,

We are playrng at little games and I am one of the children. Not insanity but how far are we from the time of ten years
ago.

And daily we re-enact their rites. Let us not take

ourselves too seriously. We return to the grave soon enough.

And the waves wash over us. What paltry beings we become if we complain that 28 years upon the planet is too
much. It appears that we are not needed as a rule any longer after that. Or we would remain. Like the tree does. Or the sun has these billion years. And so if the day dies and we too have to decline with it, we know that we come back tomorrow. Even tho all the pencils break and all the

without you I roam

alone. Shouting my words into the abyss where the Fool walks. We go bitten by what

78

79

beautiful bug, butterfly o

scorpion, you spur me on.

And if I cannot speak in poetry it is because poetry is reality to me, and not the poetry we read, but find revealed in the estates ofbeing around us.

But today is Friday and I know what's happening on the street. I would think it's a full moon for the high tides in my soul. The Perseids shower themselves thru the sky above me. Buddha sits in the dust. The poet works to undo the confusion around him. He should not add to it. Well the cycle moves and I with it. Wbat a dffirence a day made
the girl sings on

It is necessary for the poet to be ignorant of the true mystery and yet to contain it wrapped around him. Not aware that his slightest fash of eyelid is enough to set those offaround him into an ecstasy of awareness. To be dumb himself A mammoth vegetable, A. Richer says.

the radio. Oh those high mornings those nights when the boat
rocked with velvbt tides.

Aul7
Nothing today but the yen. For heroin. Snap my fingers. It does not appear. at the door. I am alone. As always. As all
men.

Must I pay forever

for those sweet rides thru the tunnel oflove.

With

a magnificent obsession.

Le Chiteau Merveil

have hunted,

have yearned

for you and now you

where

I undergo the trials

withhold yr. hands from me.

of desire

have to look for something to do.

use

What strange voices, what

hideous forms appear before me in the faces of my countrymen, my friends.

Now is not enough. There is no thinking about it. Put it away as one would do a lover.

8o

8r

They stalk me down. To try my soul? for pay every inch oflife (oy)

To guard against Pax John of the Wood. Sword in his hand, rocks

move thru, swept over by

it

forgetting it is not eternal.

That is the nature ofjoy

that one thin&s it will go on forever.
Pain is harder to bear. One forgets there too that this will end. No it sis not harder to bear.

in his head, beware maiden if you want to live chaste and mild. He will drive you wild. And your bed of crimson
joy, destroY.

Always looking for life or the passing of events to be enough. And they are not. We must see them as temporal. As passing manifestations thru the cosmos.
Even this, these words shall fade and'fall to shreds as the rest. But I erect them for they are my salvation. The eternal letters that spring from the mouths of men. Written to hold up the trembling structure.

The non life the vacuum

that is the thing

flee from.

The most. And where the solace is. In this the writing.

In the center of the chamber King Arthur sat upon a seat of green rushes over which was spread a covering of f.ame-colored satin. And a cushion of red
satin was under his elbow.

Dame Ragnell:
Sir, now shalt thou know what women desire most of high and low There is one thing in all our fantasy, and that now shall ye know: We desire of men above all manner of thing, to have the
sovereignty.

Rot What Ougltt Not Every day decay

goes on. The rose grows
a

green hardihood.

And there they made joy out of mind.

83

8z

Aug

Aug rr

My mind

keeps running over at its edges

A poem for Susan

like rays from the sun or the arms of a

spiral nebula.

Just the joy of her

Oh we

are galaxies unto ourselves.

And the Tarot Deck

to hear her move in the room,

there is no need to recount actions description not enough, is like
adjectives

is not enough to tell our fortune.

The earth shaped like

a pear

is the Adam's apple

of the universe Bobs up and down

every 2oo million years. Around the central which is bell button

but

she breathes

point

turning point
where action is transmuted. Am I wrong here? Does it matter that I shake in the wind like a cross atop the palm tree out my window. That I do it. Am the mover and the moved. Red drapes in the open window King Solomon and his magic wand

like a verb, folding clothes against her belly, brushing the arms of her coat.

Not a cat
but woman.

Hidden secret from me before I watch them unravel their world,

bending before the beloved objects in them.

The poem demands

a degree of attention that drugs,

because they slacken one, deter one from the poem.

At

least

I feel not at my maximum

po'wers. Although a breadth, a

dimension is given one that is almost, or not, but irresistible. Each action, object takes on a special meaning it did not have before.

8+
85

A woman's face.
same moment there is

But at the very

an
identical

Both sides of my nature come to the fore with such strength. The birds, first ones outside my window. The girl fishing in her purse, opening suitcases, and all this at dawn. A magic one I was born at this hour. And we share again the glow and first excitement of that movement, again here. Behind dope. The warmth of mother's womb, with all the hideous knowledge of the world thrown in our face, get wailing behind it.
Because

motion going on downward. Inward contemplation. Use of the unconscious. Dreams. Which are made up of the actions that went on before above. Come back to hunt us, so that in time they form a

it is the rush

right reason that comes from heaven, a partaking ofgrace left by our ancestors, but "the legacy" given to us at the moment of our birth. Each instant's gift. The result of the action we are engaging ourselves in, so that if we write, we have the powers of all who have written before, love the lovers of old. The
murderous thrust, what meaning do these sudden acts

of
life?

of

savagery have? Duncan asks in Lose.That they are what we are right now. Saints ifwe are saintly but for one second. A legacy we pass on, transmit to others after us and around us. Order in oneself. One's own kingdom consists in setting each instant king. Knowing that that instant, this, is

Aug rz
From the moment of our birth, we are placed midpoint of a sphere shaped like the figure eight. And the objects of the outside from then on draw us outward, further and further into space, wider and wider everyday in every way, this is the upward/motion...?

twofold. Partaking of the pen, and the mind which

has

made conscious use of the "pen" since the eye opening etc. ofbirth. From then to now. But back again from now to infinity where the first mind shone. We work our way back to that, on the bones ofour fathers, grave diggers that we are.

Action.

All

these things are an intrusion and at times called evil

in thru the senses. The Forward. Progressive? Progress. Man marches on.
because they are of this wodd, what comes
87

85

Aug
The wind is a guitar in the house tonight the dog barks just once at the non-existent moon.

r3

The maiden strums alone in golden light

lovers say goodbye and close their eyes on the rising sun.

and the spirit's rage, than I could see any living thing thus separated. For all lives. In that it partakes ofexistence. Whatever that is. I thought then: chance and change. But you see, akeady I am imposing a conscious order there which Gertrude had the genius not to do. She did not have to do it. As I do. You will allow me that reader, yourselves that. That you better do what you have to do or you shall partake ofdeath. Sbe shalt crush thy bead and thou shalt lie in

raaitfor And if one were to begin writing at the command ofwhat mysterious agent, what concentration could I distill from
the crashing moment, the confusion of thots that rush in on me, so that my mind can not practice automatic writing. He, it does not revolve on any one object that long. Lifting Bellyis a fiction. Is such a conscious construction of high genius intellect that it does not partake of that mysterious (again that word force which we call automatic, i.e. without will, on its own. Impelled by whatever order the mind imposes, on us now. Which is a creation of that we were before.

ber heel.

Oh heroine /// The words reveal themselves and place our

actions, reveal our actions by our words.

I will use the distractions of this world, and erect a structure from them that will be of the poem. No matter how know I go, how ruined, bombed by shit, they will rise, the word, in whatever form, but written what? On toilet paper heart. On sick arms, with no forms
but new ones.

Now does that make sense? I could clarify and rationalize. Make it clear. Shit. But something forbids it, in fact by dwelling on it I know I lose some powers of the present, allowing myself to doubt the authoriry. And if I were to try again.And stay away from subject matters. And be abstract. Deal with words as if they were hunks of letters without meaning. I can no more use them as dead things divorced from the blood ofour desire
88

2. A.w.Experiment#r And if the words come out

with no order or force, love is a shuck,

she does not want to get

off

at the end of the line. Do not anticipate your nerft move. But

89

move

with the passing of past events

of Cassandra's, your mind.

creation. Semina.

through the window;

of

Wally Berman. Thrown on the wind

of Spring,
he says, looking at his own picture. Narcissus, we are all, us. That boy

Bringing them
back again and again, remembering how poems under drugs sound so Poor on re-reading but so great when writing them.

looking in the mirror.

Of his lake, ofhis eyes,

let me sing.

have no obtigation or debt to reality that I need record it. The guitar can go on. I don't have to try to

The new order, the new poem, the new form,

keeping pace

DUPLICATB its melody, by *y lines, or song, full strains, save that for the birds.

with

space

not leaping ahead, but

This is the work

of the intellect Dante the intelligence manifesting itself thru nature, Lgaz.ziz. looking behind too.

Wouldnt you. I reveal nothing

here but

Am I right on my facts? A ridiculous self doubt that has no place in creation. This is how words are abstract here in the poem. Become image. Mean onlywhat they are used for in the poem. I use that word to mean any high peak point of

the wind is a guitar awave that washes against the shore

ofthis house,7o7
Scott Street.
Stoned.

9r

9o

Aug
ASP There is so much to watch. Around here. The matador
at sunset the cross across the crown the town on top. Rheims Dauphin on horse races to

19

head. There are other things to do I think than write this. Images fash again. Language gives way or is funneled to

the tongue there to dart out as a viper when the right fly lands before its eye. Colored paper rose, blue spots, ink spots Boston in ry49, the sound of cellophane. The sky is brought down. A black boat scudding in a purple fog. My life with all sails

a-fud, the small town left behind,

(the moon!

a new soul on the horizon.

nrr,l

4rd
APOGEE

Mark it, make

your own.

it

Leave at once get out at 3 pM. means "Greenwich is the initial

meridian"

Catch up with the colors, be extravagant. Spend all that you find Shimmy the horizon.

Augz4 Sunday
September Across the eye come images from another world. They slide on and offthe screen. Bits of tree, four fingers, a silver scissors. They twist and coil with a shape, a life of their
5

Saturday

own. Seaweed.
am a spy from another scene, sent here to steal your secrets. Do not speak them before me.

Labor DayWeekend

see

two leaves

Soon they are three. Who is the woodsman

that cuts down my treei

And what do I care what they say about me when itt you I hunger and pant for over the whole face of the world.
You and the night and the music is the song they send to me on the Divasadero.

The show's over now. The drug has entered our heads and there will be peace. Or the black magician rules over my
92

93

And of course I turn to my words when the rest of the world

runs out.

3)

Wipe clean the

glass.

They flee from me that some time did me seek. Careis what I work for. That no matter what

do

Fresh water. New smoke over the washed face of the white square Fill itwith a shaking line.

Idoit
with some measure of love and time. Take it
Temfo Duncan said over the heads of the
audience.
easy

qUOTE

The black tree on the wall spreads its ominous form thru my brain. I am in no rush, not looking for the universe
through binoculars,
see

the blonde girl bend over trvo Japanese dolls. Their black hair as straight and short as here. Their eyes roll and their arms and legs bend.
Le style est l'homtne.

His dedication to Guinevere, the long life with and without her, had so filled his being with the magnetisms of love that he was like a demon presence that set the mind astray. But he himself was likewise astray, under the spell of the singular passion that possessed him. One might say
that....

Section z) Be a thousand weeds be ink thrown under the hull, be a black sea. You are the

For fundamentally, in spite of the chivalric gear Sir Lancelot, this harrower of the kingdom of death, is a mythical savior. Instead of the "Two Worlds" of Life and Death we have, in his romance, feudal kingdoms and their quarrels, in the place ofthe dead we have abducted hostages; and as the supreme representative of the soul we have the queen.

rain of forms into white space that was nothing, is now abstract design, the blue boat black boat
gone.

Now

blue circle

the eye, that pops in and bounces among the weeds.

That supreme and cosmic adventure is precisely the typical one of the Divine Lovers ofAntiquity.The goddess Ishtar of the Babylonian mythology descended into the netherworld, passing through the seven successive gates, to rescue Tammuz (Adonis), her deceased lover, from the bondage of the hell-queen Ereshkigal. And now it is
95

94

Lancelot, the disguised rider in the cart, not Gawain, the unsullied horseman, who is to accomplish the terrible journey again" Like Christ, the divine adventurer who
descended into Hell and released from eternal death Adam and Eve and all the patriarchs and prophets, Sir Lancelot is to harrow and redeem the abyss.

QUOTE

The magic forest is always fulI of adventures. No one can enter it without losing his way. But the chosen one, the elect, who survives its deadly perils, is reborn and leaves it a changed man. The forest has always been a place of initiationl for there
.

...in the culminating image of the series, "The Dancing Horn-Aphrodite."The Soulwas the bride of the Lord; in the figure of the Hermaphrodite the two were one. The figure is immediately suggestive of the Dancing Shiva; Shiva unites in himself the female and the male. Such a bisexual symbol represents the embodiment in a single form ofall the pairs ofopposites, a transcendence ofthe contraries of phenomenability; and this incarnate Form of forms is then conceived of as the One whose dance is the created world. The candidate is to reahze and impersonate this attitude as the effective symbol of his supreme metaphysical
reahzatton.

the demonic presences, the ancestral spirits, and the forces of nature reveal themselves. There man meets his greater sel{ his totem animal. And thither the medicine man conducts the youths of the tribe in order that they may be born again through gruesome initiation rites, as warriors and men. The forest is the antithesis of ltouse and beartb village and field boundary where the household gods hold sway and where human laws and customs prevail. It holds the dark forbidden

things-secrets, terrors, which threaten the protected life of the ordered world of common day. In its terrifying abyss, fuIl
of strange forms and whispering voices, it contains the secret of the soul's adventure. Somewhere in this monstrous (mountainous) region, this seat of darkness, the casde of Merlin stands. Its coundess windows look out upon the secrets that lurk around it, the doors are open to travelers from every quarter ofthe globe, and paths lead from the casde into the farthest reaches of the world. The casde is the heart of darkness; its countless eyes see and know all, and it offers to each of the elect a different approach to the mystery.

Something similar would seem to be indicated by the divine bed of Sir Lancelot and the queen: the two lovers are one, and each is both. In their rea.lization of this identity they embody and make manifest the singular Form of forms which is beyond all space and time; their love play is the dance of that Cosmic Hermaphrodite; and their reunion in the Castle of Death is symbolic of the renewing moment that restores the life of the wodds.

The hero in those days was the maker of his own 'weapons, literally the "forger of his own fortune," and so his
power and prestige were in large measure bound up with his ability to forget a weapon that would not break in his hand.

Merlin dwells in the "enchanted forest" the "Valley of No Returrt''which is the hand of Death, the dark aspect of the world.

96

97

The dream of the Age of Stone to possess a magic missile which should return to the hand that threw it, like the hammer ofThor, or the thunderbolts of Zeus and Indra.
"seat

ride back to the Middle Ages, pre-Renaissance manEzra.

Pound.

come before the casde.

Monday Labor Day peilous" which was to remain free awaiting secret future happenings

The Round Table companion must array himself for the lonely quest of the supernatural.

Now is the only time to write, when No more to voice despair. And yet to voice it. To stop the flow. To be real. To fy to float. To reign in the throne of Egypt.To regain the right of my
ecstasy is upon me.

mind. Which benzedrine may have destroyed. Lost. Just another line link in the unending chain of uaNrt ros.
September 6 Simple. To return to self:ignorance. Be a dandy in a silk shirt but not know it. Wear black corduroy pants through the rooms of Hell. Other poets dwell here my God make room for me. Who wade thru these waters with his hip boots wet.

And

into the room on Sunday afternoon about two and started talking about screws. He
so Crystal and the man burst

opened the bureau drawer and answered her questions. For the real dope 6end there is nothing to do absolutely but the ritual of transmuting his dope into his blood and thereby his brain and then noting whatever lies around him, what comes into his ken, Darien, on a peak over the Pacific. He does not look for anything to do, contrary to most people, whatever he does is enough and right. The habit justifies anything. For the habit is a means into the heavenly kingdom. I have not tasted damnation yet. Nor will I. For once there it is eternal. And I dwell forever in higher pastures. Beware poet before you go poking about in the ashes of my life, making ruins out of casdes. Casdes of marijuana, facades of junk, heroin stairwells, benzedrine fushes, beware before putting a label on any of my garments, my kingdom for a horse. My horse for a cart and I

Wednesday Sept 9 "Woman, what have

do

with thee"

To those who cannot divest themselves again of mental consciousness and definite ideas, mentality and ideas are death, nails through their hands and feet. To tell the truth, ideas are the most
dangerous germs mankind has ever been injected with.

98

99

The Ideal is always

evil, no matter what ideal it be. No idea should ever be raised to a governing throne
: that an idea isjust the final concrete or registered result of living dynamic interchange and reactions: that no idea is ever perfectly expressed until its dynamic cause is finished and that to continue to put into dynamic efiect an already perfected idea means the nullification of all living activity, the substitution of mechanism, and all the resultant horrors of ennui, ecstasy, neurasthenia, and a collaps-

haste, without worldly ambitions, without vexation of spirit.

An inspiration is no more than a seed that must be planted

and nourished.

The canvas I began ro years ago I shall perhaps complete today or tomorrow: It has been ripening under the sunlight of the years that come and go.... It is a wise artist who knows when to cry halt in his composition, but it should be pondered over in his heart and worked out with prayer and
fasting."

The least of a man's original emanation is better than the best of a borowed thought.

ing psyche.

D.H. Lawrence, Fantasies of the

Unconscious

Friday Sept ro

A. Pinkham Ryder
He must

No thing but the song

paintHe must live to paint, not paint to live.

After great pain,

a formal feeling comes.

E. Dickinson

Diana on gilded leather The poet on Pegasus Entering the Realm of the Muses

we fall back in shadows.

I proceed in perverseness,
Winged Horse "The artist
mustb:ucl<7e

be

cause there is

nothing

else to do

himselfwith infinite patience.

His ears mustbe deaf to the clamor of insistent friends who would quicken his pace. His eyes muSt see naught but the vision beyond. He must await the season of fruitage without
roo

but die. And we are not allowed that. Let others fall down be fore us. Or bring down the
temple of my soul.

Igoa-

lone serving the gods within. Is not art a sacrifice and are not we bound

to rt. "gods" on solitary thrones. I move with pain. I wake and wash tears down my face. Who can say I should not walk in glory

Old leaves have got to fall, old forms must die. And if men must at certain periods fall into death in millions, why, so must leaves fall every single autumn. And dead leaves make good mould. And so dead men. Even dead men's souls.
D.H.L.

Sitting

as

when

do.

I contain my own kingdom.

"The deific principle in nature and the heroic principle in man" Move beyond that to what
place but here

When you go to sleep at night, you have to say: "Here dies the man I am and know myself to be." And when you rise (Here in the morning you have to say: rises an unknown quantity'which is still myself."

Without the night consummation we trees without roots.

But LovE is really blind.
We really have no will and no choice in the first place. It is our soul which acts within us, dayby day unfolding us according to our own nature.
Because we insist that even the sun depends for its heartbeat, its respiration, its pivotal motion, on the beating hearts of men and beast, on the dynamic of the soul-impulse

are

where the poet folds his green paper in the sunset and pads by in bare feet over the bare boards of this floor.

See: Marsde n HartTey: Albert Pinkbam Ryder

The Seven Arts v. z May ryr7

in individual creatures.
3o8 W. r5th The artist should not sacrifice his ideals to a landlord and a costly studio. A rain-tight roof, frugal living, a box of colors

D.H. Law. Fantasia

and God's sunlight through clear windows keep the soul attuned and the body vigorous for one's daily work.
A.P.R.

r03

Something Eke

And he'll come up and into this room expect me to love him and I suppose I will, Why not with yellow flowers in
the holy water fount. Wait for his foot on the stair. Cars crash on the boulevard outside this room. It is a holy place where I create forms to dance across the ridges ofyour mind.

And in the night lovers come where there was no light before. They bring their animal groans.
They creak the bed and cause the dog to bark. At the moon. I will endure this solitude.

I will rise to a new

day.

There is a princess in the tower. And steps like inside the Statue of Liberty lead up to her. Wooden, with grass and sunlight upon them I could climb the stairs or stay
here in the poem

And it does not come. The long night stretches before you. O my soul, what will you do?
The

Monday

ervr

Stttf
for Chaucer

With no lover. The

fates

await you.

Saturday Night cannot have stars eyes all the time, at least let there be love. And night sky between us.

IfI

And it is time to begin school again just before Wally stops in to see us good morgen father you rise in the east green and all doors open by you,
you are the news cast, and the silver funnel on the Dunce's head, Daddy's here, have no fear.
I I

in my

+
H ORSE

r04

r05

For Ezra Pound

This page is not

The accent of

a coming foot the opening ofa door docr

uPPer

not a rose shirra hair shirt

and forever the burning

plate

with 5oo peyote buttons on

it.

WIT cH.
sometimes yes.

Put Doatn of Contemporary Poctry

Goodmorning the roses sing

In the green garden on

the
ranall

This page is for lovely a-

this is a tape-

lrie

stry. Dcstry rides ahead.

JohnJohn
theJoker's
son

Washington crossing the

Delaware. Kitchen pots and pans.

stole a pill and

away did run
so

f
Tbis ryage isfor

Billy

Dont turn away. I want you in my magic mirror forevcr.

Desire burns, becomes a rosc shirt for you to wear. Hcrc

t
a

w
a

I knit it
by myown hands.

ro5

ro7

that no one
could catch him
eve r.

Pound Guest, B.
Sept zo

Rimbaud's

Journals FromAbyssima

Kultur
collect her mss.

kant huite kwip

be lsviet

all

of

A poemfor trapped things.

You Yoa You

Oh God what have you given me that a black butter& lives in this room. This morning with a blue fame burning this thing wings its way in.
edges of my yellow being. Gasping for breath. Living for the next instant. Climbing up the black border of the window. Why do you urant out. I sit in pain A red robe amid debris. You bend and climb, oxtending antennae.

TheWizard of O.
Alice is one fabulous radio station that plays all night long. Loud and clear.
She thinks: can he

Wind shakes the

read me on the beach at Wakiki like an open book a loafofbread and thou beside me singing butternut wine

I know the butterfy is my soul gro\ rn weak from batde.

A giant fan on the back of
a beede.

in the wilderness.

A caterpillar, chrysalis that

Ma Khiam.I'm home
a new home apart

seeks

from this room.

ro8

ro9

And will disappear from sight at the pulling of invisible strings.

Yet so tenuous, so fine this thing is, I am sitting on the hard bed, we could vanish from sight like the puff off an invisible cigarette. Fured chest, ragged silk under wings beating against the glass no one will open.

Full Moon

The blue diamonds on your back are too beautiful to do

And new boys come into the room. They sit at the foot of his bed. They fold up into the lotus position listening to rain. The night with one far auto call over the unseen hill. Only the flesh of the beloved is before his eyes. And that too out of sight. Only strange bones sit before him, reading comic books and the latest pages of poetry from the renaissance. High buttoned shoes, high collared shirts, hoods and white cloaks hang in the closet. The street a swarm with the rusde of their silk through its gutters.The stretching of limbs under an Indian Army blanket. The rubber tires always in our ears. The reunion of the beloved boys there, hearing them unzip their fies in the night.

awaywith. I watch you all morning

long.

October

With my hand over my mouth.

Tbe Waning of tlte Haroest Moon

September

17

No fowers now to wear at Sunset. Autumn and rain. Dress in

blue. For the descent. Dogs bark at the gate. Go down daughter, my soul heavywith the memoryof heaven. Dogs bark in my ears. My man lost. My soul ajangle of lost connections. Who will play in the light at autumn,

await the phantom lover-the one who haunts all vromen, the one I dream of, who stands behind every man, with a finger and head shfing-"Not him, he is not the one." forbidding me each time ,o lTrr"i,

Nir,

when all men are alone.

Down. And further yet to go. Words gone from my mouth. Speechless in the tide.

Urania discovered the pole and the dance of the stars

of

heaven

Thalia the lots and good moral teaching of comedy

are done

dromena-the things that

For Helen

Thus the essential elements in the legend of Orpheus are sacred song, the other world and the ennobling of man by song and transcendence, by the mysteries and the divine suffering of their founder.

Her hair is woven of

million

Phanes

Protogonia

Orpheus Ericapaeus
Eros

Dionysius

strings, her blouse blows the shade ofdead grass, you better be there or what I am pulled back to is the one dead string tied to the middle of her skull. Who plugged in that center. Who weaves the waves? Sea weeds. Priapus of the harbor from the reeds bound wound a basket about her bones. Savage moulder from the underground.

Metis

He Will Neoer Come

5o4 Anonymous

Calliope discovered the art of heroic versel Clio the sweet music of the lyre which accompanies the dance Euterpe the sonorous voice of the tragic chorus Melpomene found for mortals the honeytoned barbitos Terpsichore gave us the artful flute Erato invented cheering hymns to the gods Polymnia the joys of the dance

I sit and pine for him To ride by in his bronze car.

Before the Muses, Eros he becomes. Day and night at the threshold ofthis door astride steel armor.

alone watch him work

up the sidewalk in this sun.

I13

Thomas E. Balas New London CountyJail

Bo:< 388

A poem for my goest

To
the young flush oflove spread on the faces of those I love is worth all the pain in my world.
see

Uncasville, Connecticut Take photograph ofhouse at Ellis &Prince on Ellis

4 porticos

The door opens.

My

eyes do.

At night. Lit.
and real
Sweet music soft and tender

They are there

light brings in the night'

ing stars
shine.

Sooth-

ing and slow. Grid foorbackn.z6 Annie the Cop born

CalTjader's Black Orcbid
Sunday afternoon
9.26

Flesh turned eternal

18

M;ay fi75

translucence.

Like Christ
come again toJerusalem room. Fires of hell aglow in his bones.

A shroud

has fallen

9.59

over my tlpewriter. The pencil in my hand

becomes lead

September and the harvest moon

aches.

mywrist

falls. The dead of the year. She is gone underground. u5

tt4

So soon.

My mother goes.
already.

I mourn

October

15

Grey hairs across the pillow.

Waitingfor tbe Prince

"a milestone in the history of logic"

Principia Mathematica
Russell &Whitehead

No more.
Blue smoke up the chimney.

It
Verily I say unto you, except a corn ofwheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.

is towers we build

in the dawn. And the pain

of
not loving you

With mywhole
means

John,n: z4
"My whole task consists in the explanation of the nature
the proposition."

body and soul! I go down the drain

of

with autumn.
Linger awhile
Before the guns go off.
Paradise

LJJ. Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein told me how the idea of language as picture of reality occurred to him. The way in which the parts of the proposition are combined-the structure of the proposition-depicts a possible combination of elements in reality, a possible state ofaffairs.
a

puts such dry leaves in the throat and your neck beloved queen ofthe heavens.

It

th"t ?ro?osit;oz serves as a licture

light I wear in the

is your

sunset.
tbe trenches

Written during First World War in

rr6

n7

Letters to the Citizens

of

What newgoddess
out of the tents of Babylon.
She

What countrywhere the green light blows Out through the realm of night
Squares crossing circles and avenues

steps into her shoes.

of

ForWallace.

Down labpinthine glooms. It's I dont want it to be hung up

beautiful cross November

z7

In the present tense. A crack

On the back of bamboo blinds. I want to be free Love in the dawn. And wo giant Steps up the front ofthis housc. United kingdom under The Fall. First Adam and Eve
ReSide in splendor. Here

PAN

A*y

Lily

Joli"

Ivy
Anders Tawn

Lowell Lang!ry Adams

Mil&ed Pearl Bailey

Black Green Red

Yalli-Waddig

Qreen

There e box returned

Received from

There is no p.left.

what old ladywith golden cyes. November 29,1959 November r

Johanna berg South Africa

rr8

II9

r45oqr95o Jargon Books

inverted arrow

40 NYT 50M 35 Ac
200
Y

HEAD
N

5oo
825

o T
1959

zoo 73 3 oo
tr4
98

food

drink

The Mystery
(forJake

Erlich

r.
our great ship ofstate JWAH JOSIAH JOELLS
JOY

of shadows, rock coast offMaine

beyond beaches, a star offthe eastern window, banks beyond

their court ofhigh yellow sunset.

Let peyote go
The vigil ends. Here

KISSIAH MC ARTHUR
BLVD

gods disappear. Sinla The Bona Venta sails

wHo
D

for me on the grass like Fifth Avenue. Demolished. Naked on the ground.

t20

Plant
Mercury and chestnuts to throw down upon the chest.
3.

Jarophagus graves mat burials

cby
stone copper (fishhooks

shcll
Stomp the graves of my fallen queen. fi.29
Silver finger rings copper bands

spearheads.

The Qreen draws an oasis for the dcsert.

Charlcs

Cagr"Rule of Kings"

shrine ofthe local god

Study
Origins of Blacfr. Mountain vlA SUMER

Date of Founding John Rich to thc

ttoarn

for dawn

puesi
hegemony

Fara--------

r23

the offal ofancestors

in the hands of

a scribe.

And the too strong grasping of it, when it is pressed together and condensed,
loses

Pressure yr. tribe.

it
are

This very thing you The night of December

Received z5 dollars

z5

rysg

How awe, night-rest and neighborhood can rot

on loan fromTiumbull Higgins Family z5oo N. Street

Washington

DC

pose you your question:

shall you uncover honey / where ma$gots are?

And what is the message? The message is a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time
is the birth of air, is the birth of water, is a state between the origin and the end, between birth and the beginning another fetid nest is change, presents no more than itself

I hunt among

stones

The mechanics of the consecutive order of events in any repeatable sequence

For 7rr

of

I may be anybody to you but youte still Miss King to me. On the top, planes fly dogs, bark at men.
Cry in the night, the girl
downstairs
sends her mother up to get me.

t24

125

Cuz somethin's on the fire. And

JOHN WIENERS
Wieners was born in Milton, Massachusetts in 1934, and, after receiving his ne from Boston College, studied at the now famed Black Mountain College under Charles Olson and Robert Duncan. From 1956 to 1958 Wieners lived in Boston, where he edited the literary magazine Measure, and had an

it

may be me. So

blow
out the blue smoke. Where all sound dies in the night. And boys

hitch their trousers at the moon. Move

through the under brushes.

bird heard out loud.

important impact on the Boston and Cambridge literary scenes. After a two-year stay in San Francisco, during which
time he wrote 7o7 Scott Streel, he returned to Boston, and has divided his time between Boston and NewYork since.

In the green shadow of the lamplight absolute reality is all I am interested in, the light shining on the silver edge of these keys, the magic formation of the letters in rows upon
the green field of thc paper,looking like the shadowed corner ofa garden, elaborating on none ofthis, entering into communion with it, picking up speed as I go further in, looking out that nothing disturbs me from it, this place, which cd. be called,

m"Br., but which

is not, is only

hercr7o7 Scott Street, San Francisco

n6