For Immediate Release - November, 2001

This is another section of the introduction to Allen Ginsberg on William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, unpublished, edited by Randy Roark. The material is pieced together from lectures he gave on Blake from 1974 until 1983.

William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience were titled "Songs of Innocence and of Experience," but they are not very often taught as songs. We know that Blake himself intended them to be songs because his first biographer, family friend Alexander Gilchrist, recorded that Blake used to go to his friends' parlors and sing the songs unaccompanied or with the instruments of the time, but scholar professors who heard him sing unfortunately didn't notate the tunes.

So he was out there singing, which is why I try to restore some of the vocalization to them as songs. They're a lot easier to understand sung. The music and rhythm of them gets subtler when you sing it. I've supplied melodies that would be similar to melodies of the 18th century Methodist hymns by Isaac Watts, which Blake himself sang, and the words of which he sometimes paralleled. The language and rhythms are very similar to the Wesleyan hymns of his day. It's the same kind of song form that Emily Dickinson used for her little lyric poems; hymnals.

I think I got the idea to set Blake to music from Ed Sanders, who with the Fugs had already set "How Sweet I Roam'd From Field To Field" to music. The mantras I was chanting from 1964 to 1968 led into singing the Blake. I began perfecting one chord, and then I began setting Blake with one chord. I saw Blake as sacred music like mantra. It finally came together when I added mantric choruses to the end of Blake's songs in performance, like "Spring" and the "Nurse's Song."

If you read or sing The Songs of Innocence and of Experience aloud you have to remember how it would sound if he were actually talking to get the rhythm correctly. And if you want to derive tunes out of them, you have to figure what the vocal tones would be like, going up and down, if you were talking it. In order to say it so it makes sense, you'll find yourself pronouncing different tones. In order to interpret it or give significance to it syllable by syllable, you actually have to hear it as spoken intelligence. And you also have to have some idea what the breathing should be, according to Blake. Blake has given indications for the breathing by periods and commas. He was conscious enough of song and speech to notate where you'd stop to take a breath as you were reading. So if you use a combination of his suggestions for the breathing and your common sense to figure out how each line would sound if someone were saying it to make some sense rather than just saying it to talk poetry, it's possible to reconstruct some graph of the vocal tones possible and some sense of the time involved.

For example, in the "Introduction"

Piping down the valleys wild
Piping songs of pleasant glee
On a cloud I saw a child
And he laughing said to me.

If you wanted to make any sense out of that you would have to say, "And HE, laughing, said to me." So there's a certain amount of rhythm and syncopation and subtlety in the pronunciation provided just by trying to make sense of it when you pronounce it aloud: It isn't "AND he LAUGH-ing SAID to ME."

In Blake's "Lamb" there's the lines

Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Little Lamb God bless thee
Little Lamb God bless thee

The meter doesn't fit right to pronounce it, because you've got to swallow "God." You don't have time to say "God" much less "bless thee" until you slow it down to "Little Lamb ¼ God BLESS thee/Little Lamb ¼ GOD BLESS THEE." If you were going to say it, with emphasis, you couldn't say, "LIT-tle LAMB god BLESS thee." You'd have to figure out another way. There is the metronomic base to it, but if you ignore the metronomic meter, how would you pronounce it as if you wanted to make sense out of it? You might say, "Little Lamb, God Bless THEE," to really get it. If you work from that principle in reading it, if you're really into getting into it rather than just skimming the eye, you have to break out of the metronomic, automatic meter, which we're all taught. If you do that you'll find that he's got a fantastically subtle ear. You still have the iron base of the meter but on top of that you have an extra syncopation from speech. It can sometimes be magical. It wasn't just a sing-song jingle to him.

When I was setting Blake to music I began realizing that you've got to go back to the original texts and see where his commas and his periods were to find out where to take a breath. You have to go back to Blake's own illustrations to find the original punctuation as he engraved them on the plates that he and his wife would then color.

If you get a chance, one of the best ways to read Blake is to get to a library in a major city, like New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., to the Huntington Library, the New York Public Library, or the Morgan Library in New York.

There are only 27 copies of Songs of Innocence. There's only one copy engraved and colored of his last major work extant, Jerusalem, and its in the Library of Congress. But a lot of these books have been reprinted in paperback, and a number of these reprints have color illustrations.

For instance, in the illustration for "The Tyger," sometimes it's a little cuddly friendly human-faced tiger and sometimes it's a really wrathful Tibetan tiger. Sometimes it's a smudgy faced tiger. Blake's touched up each illustration with a pen and then painted each slightly differently, and his wife painted and colored some of them and touched them up, too. If you get into Blake it's a total delight to go get something done by his own hand and look at what he did physically.

In "Holy Thursday," there's a line: "Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among." That's practically a jazz rhythm. Or "Beneath them sit the aged men wise guardians of the poor." That's almost scat singing. In order to make sense of it, it becomes a funny kind of jazz, because it's totally syncopated.

I don't think anybody at the time had as varied rhythms as Blake did, because he was one of the few people who actually sang. Everybody else was writing books. Song had declined somewhat, and there had been poets like Alexander Pope and John Dryden, who had reduced everything to rhymed couplets in iambic pentameter. And then when people tried to break out of that you had the Romantics—like Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and William Wordsworth—who reduced it to the spoken word. Wordsworth was a contemporary of Blake's and knew "Mad Blake," as he was known at the time. Wordsworth wrote songs and lyrical ballads but they weren't meant for singing. As a vocal songster, Blake had a much more subtle sense of ear and a much subtler sense of rhythm. Blake knew Greek and Latin and there are definite tones, as well as some element of vowel-length in his work.

But the main thing is not so much that you know all that, but that you become mindful of the auditory qualities of the poems. They're not just things on the page and they're not just singsong, but there's an infinite variety and liveliness and human vocalization, tonal music, and syncopation built into the poems.

A terrific example of that is "Night" from "Songs of Innocence."

The moon, like a flower,
In heavens high bower;
With silent delight,
Sits and smiles on the night.

But sometimes if you don't check out the original illustration, you can get confused by the versions that they print into anthologies. For instance,

And there the lions ruddy eyes,
Shall flow with tears of gold:
And pitying the tender cries,
And walking round the fold:

Saying: wrath by his meekness
And by his health, sickness,
Is driven away,
From our immortal day.

But what you have to read it as is: "by his health, sickness is driven away," which makes a fantastic syncopation. But they have a comma here, after "sickness." In the original engraving that Blake's made it's not a comma; it's some kind of funny period.

Then there's different voices too, as well as different syncopations. In the "Nurse's Song," the Nurse is there, singing:

When the voices of the children are heard on the green
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast
And every thing else is still

Then come home my children, the sun is gone down
And the dews of night arise
Come come leave off play, and let us away
Till the morning appears in the skies

Then, the children's voices come in:

No no let us play, for it is yet day
And we cannot go to sleep
Besides in the sky, the little birds fly
And the hills are all coverd with sheep

There's not just one single statement. There's a dialogue. In "Infant Joy" there's even a dialogue between an elder and a babe.

In the "Introduction" to Songs of Experience, there's another example of Blake's consciousness and mindfulness of this quickening of speech:

Hear the voice of the Bard! Who Present, Past, & Future sees Whose ears have heard, The Holy Word, That walk'd among the ancient trees.

You realize why he had "walk'd" with an apostrophe: because he wanted it to be a fast "walkt."

And in "Night":

Turn away no more:
Why wilt thou turn away
The starry floor
The watry shore

He's got "watry." It's in those subtle pieces of adjustment in the phrasing that made me pay attention to what he was doing in order to get the full intelligence and speech of it, and the tune and rhythm of it.

He's a fantastic study for a poet. He's the most mindful, conscious poet I know, except for Ezra Pound. In the Songs of Innocence and of Experience the area is so small that he's been able to note even small movements like changing "watery" into "watry"—that's a big mind jump. It's something that can really turn you on, to think that you could pay attention to language that closely.

If you're interested in the texture of poetry and interested in improving your own ear and your own mindfulness of how precise you can get, in Blake it gets so precise that in these songs every syllable has a different tone and you can derive a tune from every single syllable if you follow his instructions optically on the page. You can deduce, like Sherlock Holmes, what it could sound like if it was sounded aloud. If you had to lift it off the page and make it into a voice in the air, and then make it beyond a voice into song, he's given you enough information. He's arranged it mindfully and acutely enough that you can actually get there, if you want.

XIII.

Country Joe MacDonald told Rolling Stone how the war in Afghanistan has affected his life: "I wake up some mornings crying, cook the kids breakfast, the wife goes off to work, I mop the floor, do some shopping, eventually I stop crying, and then I get stoned. Left, right, left, right. The whole fucking thing puts me uptight."

we find ourselves
at war
a state in which acrostics
can bring one under suspicion

D as in destruction
A as in America
S as in Sam
'll land you in jail
these days

"Why are you here?" "To kill you."

fear is the brother of death

"Someone's got to do the things no one else wants to do."

Sonny Rollins lives seven blocks away from the World Trade Center: "I heard this plane driving very low, then I heard it dive bomb, like in a World War II movie, and pow!" He went out to the store, and was standing in front of his building when the first tower fell. "It was a real madhouse. It was like a Godzilla movie where the people are running through the streets screaming." He lost his power and his telephone service at five. When he awoke on Wednesday to find that the electricity had not yet been restored, he played his saxophone for two hours. The apartment filled with the smell of it. Later that day, they were evacuated by the National Guard. "Four of us made the 39-story flight down. As we got around the fifth floor, the smoke began getting strong. When I finally got the wherewithal to get to the bus, they were closing it; it was filled. I was sort of paranoid. I thought the guy was just not letting me on. So I just sat there by the curb, waiting, and it was complete bedlam."

POLICE IN PORTLAND REJECT F.B.I.'s REQUEST
TO INTERVIEW MEN FROM THE MIDEAST

Constitutional issues aside
            Oregon Revised Statute 181.75
                        enacted in 1981
            clearly states that police officers in the region cannot
                        "collect or maintain information about
                        the political, religious or social views,
                        associations or activities" of a person
            without "reasonable grounds to suspect
                        that the subject of the information
                                    is or may be involved
                                                in criminal conduct"

On Nov. 20 Assistant Police Chief Andrew Kirkland
            told a reporter from the New York Times
            that he remembered being racially profiled
            on the streets of Detroit as a youth:

"I hated the police with a passion."

"I didn't have to think too long about it. We're not going to do it."

Following the attacks, Brooklyn schoolteacher Khuram Hussain could not grab a slice of pizza without listening to trash talk: "We should hang that guy by his balls. And kill all those people. All the fucking Arabs are alike! If I see an Arab right now, I'm going to kill him. Dead. Right now."

Richard Rosenblum
of Coral Springs, Florida
            lost his son Joshua,
            an assistant trader
            at Cantor Fitzgerald:

"I felt we should take Afghanistan and turn it into a parking lot. . . . But one shouldn't think like that. We have to stop this hate. Nothing is going to bring back Joshua. If we bomb everybody he still won't come back. Joshua was murdered. To murder somebody else to seek revenge is not the answer. I don't know what the answer is."

Dylan's "Love and Theft"
considered by some to be his best in years
was released on September 11
and contains lyrics that feel so relevant
that seekers look to him once again for answers

"Art imposes order on life,
                        but how much more art will there be?
            We don't really know.
            There's a secret sanctity of nature.
            The rational mind's way of thinking
            wouldn't really explain what's happened.
            It is time now for great men to come forward.
            Things will have to change.
            And one of these things that will have to change:
            People will have to change their internal world."

XIV.

the ballad of a quiet kid from Marin County

"In the U.S. I feel alone. Here I feel comfortable and at home."

they say he was a sweet, quiet, loud, normal kid
"from the heart of hot-tub country"
named after John Lennon and
            Chief Justice John Marshall
                        he played the flute
            and hoped to help the poor
            when he grew up

John Philip Walker Lindh
a.ka. Suleyman al-Faris
a.k.a. Abdul Hamid
a.ka. John Walker
born in 1981

they say at 14 he became interested in hip-hop
and referred to himself as "doodoo"

John converted to Islam
after reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X
a book that has undoubtedly changed many lives
and took to wearing a white robe and pillbox hat

later traveled to Yemen
to study Arabic
because the version spoken in that region
was closest to the holy language
of the Prophet

happy to be free of things
yet he told friends that the Islam practiced there
was not pure enough to satisfy him

who are you John Walker?

after he was captured
two CIA agents interrogated him
although he refused to speak
the questioning was videotaped

Spann: "What's your name? Who brought you here? Wake up! Who brought you here to Afghanistan? How did you get here?"

Dave: "The problem is he needs to decide if he wants to live or die, and die here. If he don't want to die here, he's gonna die here. We're just going to leave him, and he's going to fucking sit in prison the rest of his fucking short life. It's his decision, man."

they want to know
how he managed the transition
"from hip-hop to holy war"

on December 2, Robert Young Pelton
interviewed John Walker in the hospital
their conversation was later broadcast on CNN:

"I didn't know any Americans. We walked by foot maybe 100 miles. I was very sick for the whole period. Until we came to Mazar-e Sharif, I was still sick. The Taliban have the Afghans, and they have the non-Afghans. I was with the separate branch. It's called Ansar. It means the helpers. I've been speaking Arabic. I have been living overseas for about two years or so. It is exactly what I thought it would be. Of course I made friends. Definitely. My heart became attached to them. It is considered a major sin to break a contract. Some of the brothers were very tense. They thought that maybe we had deceived them or something like this. We spent the night under the basement. They would search each one of us. Then they tied us up, and they put us out on the lawn. Missiles. Grenades. They had shot us with all types of guns, poured gas on us and burned us. When they poured the water into the basement . . . the basement was filled with the stench of bodies, and we didn't have anymore weapons. They said, 'Look, we're going to die either way. If we surrender, then they'll kill us.' Is it better to be killed? It is the goal of every Muslim. every single one of us was 100 percent sure that we would be all be [inaudible] martyred, but you know, Allah chooses to take a person's life when he chooses. [Inaudible] is with us now. I'd like to give it some thought to actually what I'd say. Yourself a Muslim? You have an Internet connection?"

the Justice Department is disgusted
            with the "American Taliban"
            they say he committed treason
            they say he is a traitor
            his parents insist that he is good boy
            they say he lost his way

no bail for John Walker
John Walker is a flight risk
who are you John Walker?
what's your story, man?

XV.

Here I am, New York expatriate in the PNW. Beautiful country, if a bit wet. Just keep looking at those gorgeous trees—just like upstate NY. New to town. Few job prospects. Mispronouncing everything. Oregon has the highest number of unemployed workers in the nation. Ken Kesey has died. Loggers. Overalls. Boots. Crank, they say. Interstate 5. Drive-thru espresso. An expensive habit. Here I am Eye-talian. Stared at constantly. Am I being profiled? Do they think I am a terrorist? My brother Dan and I have often been mistaken for members of several different ethnic groups. After a few weeks, I am embarrassed to realize that they glare at me with hate because of my wool Yankee hat and not my beard nor my darker than pale skin. Furthermore, as Dahnn explains, they stare at everyone. (January 2002)

In 1999, a committee of wise men warned:

"Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers."

who stands to benefit from
the destruction of the World Trade Center?
                        the Bush administration
                        the military industrial complex
                        the CIA
                        the FBI
                        the oil industry

He notes that war manifests itself as group intoxication and barbarian hysteria.

GREAT AMERICAN SAVINGS ON OUR HUGE SELECTION OF FUTONS

"Americans only care about their own dead."

freedom itself was

stuck in a moment

freedom is not free

"I came here to teach you people a lesson."

Bodies have come home draped in flags.

            obesity, emotionality, self-centeredness
                        seemingly infinite visibility
                        he fell asleep on the subway

"I remember looking up.
It was a marvel to me how tall it was."

8:44 on the elevator
a rose tattoo on her ankle
the first plane hit
"snapped with a towel"
smoke filled the atrium

a piece the size of an alarm clock
a piece the size of a desk
dozens of shoes
            high heels
            strap-ons
            penny loafers
            business shoes

bodies, luggage, torsos

"I didn't know they were people. This was really ugly."

finally out
and on the street
a flaming arrow
had pierced the building

"There is air! There is air! Go north!
The smoke is coming this way!"

No more Twin Towers yo.
They got our building.

"We couldn't do this.
It was an incredible operation
that was pulled off perfectly.
We were caught so flatfooted."

signs that the day of reckoning is near?

"America is the problem that lies behind all the other problems."

Rev. Jesse Jackson, recently exposed as a human being just like the rest of us: "I knew that it was the wrong thing to do, morally and strategically. Morally they should not rejoice in the killing of innocent people. Strategically, they were putting the noose around their own necks."

America is the problem
omnipresent evil requires
that all well-meaning citizens
"engage in the mess of stuff
that you engage in the valleys and shadows of death"

early 2002 in New York,
as in Seattle and Genoa,
a battle of images took place
this time at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel

"a potentially scary scene, promised by nasty little twits"

in the streets once again
demanding democracy,
free expression,
economic justice

Esther Kaplan of the Village Voice interviews a young anarchist named Warcry: "I don't want to live my whole life for the system. . . . The American dream is dead. But there are certain American ideals—freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to dissent—these are things I believe in and would like to make real."

the protestors were monitored
by cameras mounted on the roof of the hotel
and a police helicopter
the cops were stationed in front of the Gap and Starbucks
enforcing a law from 1845 that prohibited groups of more than three
from wearing hoods or masks This is America. God Bless America.

in the streets again
taking on the "corporate death machine"
transforming the "psychogeographic landscape"
because "they believe in the possibility of progress"

Ben, 21-year-old NYU dropout and volunteer: "Some of the drunkest kids I have ever seen are now going to Food Not Bombs meetings and taking responsibility. Once they find a place where they're not on the bottom rung, where they can take some initiative, they do it. They start out listening to a Subhuman song and they end up reading Noam Chomsky."

Afghan prisoners whose
mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, children
were obliterated by U.S. bombs
            for their perceived role
            in "acts of war" against the U.S.
have been moved to Camp X-Ray
            Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
a debate ensues over whether or not they
deserve the status of "prisoners of war"
as outlined in the Geneva convention
war rules designed to ensure that nations
destroy one another in a civilized manner
Orwellian doublespeak abounds
            after months of warfare, wartalk
Bush and Rumsfeld insist that these men
cannot be classified as prisoners of war

"When they found out what had happened, they knew that it is Islamically wrong. In general, they are either informed, misinformed, or not informed."

a group calling itself
the Hiroshima Flame Interfaith Peace Walk
passes through Castle Rock, Washington
two weeks into a five-month prayer across America
to promote nonviolence and nuclear disarmament

Jun Yasuda, 53, a Japanese Buddhist monk of the Nipponzan Myohoji order: "If people keep fighting, this planet will be finished."

XVI.

O my son! Evil is
not overcome with
evil. Set off two
fires and see if you
can put out one
with the other.
Evil is overcome
with good, like fire
is put out with
water.

—Luqman the Wise

Boots Riley of the Coup, a self-described "proletarian funkadelic parliamentarian," explains the controversial cover art for Party Music? (released September 4, 2001): "We did the cover in May, finished it in June. It was supposed to symbolize or be a metaphor for destroying capitalism. It wasn't something that was saying, 'Oh, this would be cool if this happened.' It was supposed to be that the music was making the World Trade Center blow up. Pam has two conductor wands and I have a guitar tuner, which also doubles as a detonator. The fact that it is a guitar tuner may go over people's heads if they aren't involved in music."

soon after revealing his hard on for war
to the American people in his State of the Union address
George W. Bush put on an Air Force bomber jacket
and announced his $2.128 trillion budget proposal
for the 2003 fiscal year

including $37.7 billion for homeland security:
$5.9 billion to safeguard the public from biological attacks
            (up from $1.4 billion)
$3.5 billion for police and firefighters
            (up from $291 million)
$4.8 billion for aviation security
            (up from $1.5 billion)
$2 billion for the Justice Department's counterterrorism budget,
            an increase of 144 percent

"It should be noted that a great number of atrocities have been committed by the U.S. government and its corporate backers over the last few decades—many of which have caused a far greater loss of life than the recent bombings of New York and Washington, D.C. The modus operandi of the United States is to commit terrorist acts around the world. For instance, the U.S. was found guilty by the World Court of killing 30,000 innocent civilians in Nicaragua in order to overthrow a democratically elected government. They were ordered by the World Court to pay $19 billion in reparations, to which the United States just said, 'We're not adhering to the findings of the World Court.' If that's not terrorism, I don't know what is."

and the fucking CIA
who failed utterly
receive an increase
estimated to be between
$1.5 and $2 billion

"the idea that there's hope that we can change the system"

if divided into stacks of dollar bills
2.128 trillion would measure nearly 144, 419 miles
two-thirds of the distance to the moon

PENTAGON SAYS $48 BILLION MORE STILL NOT ENOUGH

the president promised to spend more than $2 trillion
on the military over the next five years
            increasing the Pentagon's budget to $379 billion
            $19 billion for the "war on terrorism"
            $70 billion for procurement spending
            (up from $61 billion, and expected
                        to increase to $99 billion by 2007)
            $1 billion on unpiloted aircraft
                        (including $158 million for
                                    Predator surveillance drones)

the military has already been given $17.5 billion
for the war, of which it has spent $10 billion
                        a billion a day they say

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: "We cannot continue to defer procurement as we did over the last decade. . . . We must accelerate the replacement of aging systems if we are to sustain our capability to meet near-term challenges and all of our 21st-Century commitments."

where do these trillions come from?
you mean to say that we can pull billions of dollars
out of our asses to blow up shit
            and the greatest nation in the world
            can't feed, clothe, and house its own?
                        don't believe it for a second
I'm no economist
but something don't add up
I'm here to say
don't believe the motherfuckers

Solitaire

The bitter taste of granite
in my mouth
the wash of snow over
the palette of my tongue

loneliness

our bodies climbing along
each other in the night.

I go down to the frozen
river,
step out onto the bridge railing,
gaze at its sleek imperturbable
face.

At home
the cat with its black fur
and four white paws
cannot relieve me,
nor can my husband
a mountain of smooth, naked flesh
huddled away
from me in bed.

Tranquilizers do not mute
the brilliant crystal
of my solitariness

I step into that prismatic
world
and see myself from all
four sides,
the eyes
full of the dirt from fresh graves
old stones overturned
in the vapid air

The Husband

We meet in the kitchen, my husband and I,
Sometimes we kiss, hug;
I breathe in his odor of wind, sun, sweat,
Squeeze him tightly.

But many times
I chop
the string beans hard,
my lips pressed together,
as he yells at me for throwing out blackened
pots, pans, cookie tins he hasn't used
since college.
I shout, Shut up.

Don't speak about the territory of love,
of marriage,
of exquisite pain,
sharpened, polished
like a jewel. Don't speak, remember

my father's splintering
our living room coffee table
with his fist,
shouting at my mother,
"Get the hell out of here!"
while Navy planes took off,
shook, rattled
the windows of our bungalow.

I don't know how
to love, to give
of myself. Mostly
I remain guarded
around people who love,
people who demand
love. I stay cautiously out
of their way.

You know,
you can only go to a shrink so many times
before you have to figure out the
whole
damned
mess
for yourself.

To enter this territory of pain, my marriage,
you must accompany me wearing chain mail,
or a black mask. It's dominance
and submission at issue here.
Him grabbing
my breasts, mashing
them together,
pushing them
down.
Him grinding
his heel into my crotch, laughing—

At six or seven I wandered
into my parents' bedroom...
My father on top,
his naked back glistening,
thrashing around, howling.
My mother somewhere
beneath
the sheets.
She made little
whimpering sounds.

Don't make me think
about relationships. I don't think.
I don't analyze. If I do
they might
disappear.

My first rule of survival: Get out
Before he hurts you, goes off
with a woman half his age,
like my father did
after 17 years of marriage.

At a friend's 50th birthday party a woman, younger than me,
touched my husband's chest,
"Has anybody ever told you you look like Wally Shawn?"
she said.
"Oh yeah?" answered my husband;
his eyes light up
with boyish delight.

He says he loves me.
Maybe he still does,
the slender, high-breasted version,
wearing that tight yellow dress,
those black leather boots,
with the three-inch stilettos.

My husband lets me burrow my head
into his warm
chest and belly,
he holds me in his arms, gently,
but firmly.
I love him for that,

although it's embedded
in my memory,
my instinct to fight off the suffocation
of closeness,
my determination to be alive
even though I have this disease
which rings my eyeballs
with this mad sheen.

I am a madwoman.
My husband is
living
with a madwoman.
Think of how much strength
that takes.
Think of it
from the other point of view.
Then
sock it to him. Complain about his
cooking
the way he complains about yours.
Let's face it gang, you'll never
be as good
as his mother.

You cannot let them
jerk you around under the guise
of love.
You have to be brave,
tough and fierce
like the survivor you are—

I walk through the streets in the harsh
light,
bright as a flashlight used to peer
into defective eyes,
and wonder
how many experiments in pain
are going on
behind other peoples' curtained
windows?

Chrysalis

The dark marble vein of grief
Thrusts its way up into my life
Like a chrysalis
The butterfly that emerges
Is laden with rain,
Drops pour into my eyes, mouth;
Sightless and tasteless I walk down
Narrow paths; dig in the soil
For memories black
And severe.

Flowers shatter
Over the ground,
I drop a fistful of rain—
Inside my brain the space
Is grey
Veins extending like spiderwebs,
A net of anguish,
That dark angel
Who sleeps with me every night.

The Things We Don't Talk About

I had this analyst, Dr. Steen, who loved me, as a father to a daughter, or as a lover; I don't really know. He was in his sixties; I was in my teens. He adopted me. His Mexican wife, Elena, taught me kitchen Spanish: cocina, pastel, te. I don't think she knew how he loved me. I don't think I knew.

When we ended a session, sometimes, he'd say, "Take this coward's hand." I'd take it, and he'd lead me to the door of his study. He never did anything improper, except stroke my hair as I was on my way out, which made me cringe.

He was six feet, with white hair, and his body shook from an Army injury. He wore a green cashmere cardigan. His wife told me he got tired of the sweater, threw it out, and she rescued it from the trash, cleaned it, and gave it back to him. He began wearing it again, as if they had never been parted.

He introduced me to Graham Greene's books; let me borrow them. I loved Graham Greene, he spoke to me, with his novels about women and men, caught in sexually obsessive triangles. I called Dr. Steen from college when I was upset, and I was often upset in those days. I would say, "Can I see you today?" and he'd always say, "Yes."

And I'd go in from college by train, biting my lips, tears pouring down my face, oblivious to everyone, everything except my own pain, I'd walk from Grand Central to the Upper West Side, about two and a half miles, and even that didn't calm me. I'd arrive at his office with a runny nose and red rimmed eyes.

The paintings on his walls soothed me. We talked about the artists. My favorite, John Hultberg, painted a scene from inside a plane, from the cockpit you saw outlines of houses on fire. I used to fantasize that it was a combat fighter aircraft, that John Hultberg, like Dr. Steen, was a veteran.

I used to get furious when he suggested I go to my father for money. Because I knew my father would never give me a dime. He'd met my mother, and called her "a courageous little lady," which made me jealous. My mother was beautiful. Every man fell in love with her. I emulated her when I was in my 20s, but I am really a one-man woman, a woman who goes best with a spiritual twin, and doesn't like breaking hearts. Once, Dr. Steen told me, "Someday, you're going to look back and say, 'That old man loved me.'"

That old man is the reason I learned foreign languages, the reason I read about the Holocaust, the reason I paid so much attention to art, and poetry. He told me to go to the 42nd Street Library every Saturday for a few hours and sit in the reading room and write. So I would learn the discipline of being a writer. I remember he thought I was a genius, which embarrassed me, because I knew I wasn't.

The last time I saw him, about five or six years ago, his hands shook badly from that Army injury, but he was still tall, still strong; We, my family, went to him, though I had stopped seeing him for many years, because we needed someone we trusted to prescribe medication for me. I said to him, "Please, can't you get some deadly substance and kill me with it? I can't take these Mossad hit men chasing me anymore." He quietly wrote out a prescription for Thorazine, a drug rarely used nowadays. But it saved me from going into a hospital.

Not long ago I talked to him on the phone. I called him up, asked him how he was, and promptly burst into tears. I always cried when I was talking to him. I said, "I was afraid to call you because I thought you might be dead." He said, "Poor Ali, everyone gets taken away from her." Which made me cry harder because he understood me to the core. "You must learn to live with your loneliness," he added, as he had so many times before.

Randy Roark: Can you remember deciding to be a poet? Was it a decision?

Anne Waldman: I wrote from an early age. It was a human, natural circumstance. Later it was necessary to assert the position. It was also a way of life—marginal, subterranean— maybe there was a decision there—that I'd never "sell out." I took a vow at the famous Olson reading-debacle at Berkeley in 1965 to never give up on poetry or on the community—to serve as a votary to this high and rebellious art.

RR: I have a whole bunch of questions about how to begin. Like, what was your scholastic preparation for becoming a poet? Did your parents encourage you? Did your teachers, contemporaries? Anyone in particular as a mentor? Anyone discourage you? Who were the first poets you met and what was their influence on you?

AW: My parents were extraordinarily encouraging from a tender age. They were both readers and writers. I grew up among books, many of them poetry. I had some inspiring English teachers—Jon Bech Shank in particular in Junior High—a poet himself who was an afficianado of Wallace Stevens's work and used to read him to us out loud. With a passion. Tremendous gratitude to my best friend in High School—Jonathan Cott—the critic, poet, essayist -- who shared my desire "to be a poet"—who read my early work—who turned me onto Rilke and others. In college both Howard Nemerov and novelist Bernard Malamud were acutely encouraging. They were professional role models in some sense. But as a female I always felt I could only absorb some of their story. Ted Berrigan, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, other contemporaries were important allies. There's interesting history in those "mentor" friendships. But I always felt equal to their challenge.

RR: Can you remember much of your first readings?

AW: I remember an early (second reading?) at the St. Marks Church In-the-Bowery parish hall circa 1966/1967. I was nervous. I was seated at a wooden table. I wore a yellow and blue striped dress and my head was bent over my "works," hair probably in my face. I remember hearing my young woman—more like a girl—voice and thinking "This isn't the real voice." The real voice was deep inside in my hara—and it was a deeper, more seasoned and musical voice—an ageless voice. I realized I would eventually have to find the words to match it—the words would have to grow up to the voice and the wisdom of that voice. This is maybe my life's work. It's not that I have to "find my voice"—it's already there waiting for me.

RR: That reminds me of Allen Ginsberg's story about hearing what he thought was Blake's voice and decades later realizing it was actually his own mature reading voice.

AW: I became confident as I continued to read and "perform" more and more. And I felt in a way once I was speaking the words and making these sounds they no longer were mine. My body was a receptacle. My voice was everywoman's cri de coeur. I've always been on the track of the wizened hag's voice, the tough tongue of the crone free of vanity and conditioning. She's terrifying, liberating at the same instant. She's exhausted her hope and fear.

RR: I imagine that in 1967 there wasn't much of a context for the kind of poetry this voice of yours needed in order to express itself.

AW: It was a smaller more sedate scene in the beginning, not that poets weren't outrageous in how they presented themselves at times, but there's always been the "boring" stigma attached to the poetry reading as event. The self-absorbed poet who dully mumbles obscure musings way beyond the appropriate time frame ¼ much of that's changed for the better. I always like the monotony of a John Ashbey reading, but he's a brilliant poet, after all. He doesn't need to strain. When I read at a festival in India—in Bhopal, in fact, 1985—I was the only woman and one of two Americans—the Indian poets all asked, Is this the fashion? Is this what poets are doing in America? Is this acceptable? They had never seen a woman so "out there." I summoned the Hindu tantric deities as I sang the chant poem "Skin, Meat, Bones." ("The jackals came/this was in India/to collect the meat of my father's forefingers.") I sounded the hag. I felt on "home" soil. India is a frequent grown for dreams, musings, the "other" landscape in my life and work. An old scarecrow mumbling mantras over desiccated corpses is one past-life image that comes ups. Very glamorous.

RR: Charles Bukowski said he was glad he began publishing late, that poets who receive too much recognition early in their life are encouraged to become "writers" rather than real people. How did early recognition affect your life?

AW: In a positive way. I was encouraged, inspired by an early response to my work. The young work seems distant now, insubstantially naive, yet I learned a great deal publishing early and I feel my poet's lifestream has moved consistently, gathering momentum, since it was in my "blood" then and now. The making of it is always double-edged, painful. But the interest of others is a great boon. I'm grateful. It was harder for women getting started then.

RR: Who were the first poets you met and what was their influence on you?

AW: Howard Nemerov was a teacher of mine at Bennington College. I learned something about discipline from him—a love of Blake and Yeats—and something about crazy mind. He didn't have a lot of pretenses—he was very direct in fact. Sometimes outrageous. Frank O'Hara had that directness as well and much more exuberance. His work was most interesting to me for its personae. The consciousness was more alive or something. When I first saw Olson at Berkeley in 1965 I was overwhelmed. He was dancing and suffering at the same time. The general influence from these poets was "I'm just as crazy as they are. I can do this too!" Allen, of course, gave me tremendous encouragement by his example—his expansiveness and compassion. Meeting the poets always plunged me deeper into their work. I first met Diane di Prima, I think, when I was just out of high school—in the Albert Hotel in New York. I was impressed that she managed a household—an exotic one at that—with babies. It was inspiring to see her commitment as an artist.

RR: Can you list and discuss the history of your work with various artists and contemporaries? Is there any idea of you co-creating in a community of artists? Is this something new? Can you co-create as well with artists who are long dead? Do you feel yourself as part of a long tradition of artists who are in a sense co-existent despite their deaths?

AW: There have been so many important collaborations in my life with other poets, visual artists, dancers. Currently I've just completed a long poem with Susan Noel (an early summer student of mine at Naropa) entitled "Speak Gently In Her Bardo," in memoriam to a friend of ours who died in 1987. The friend, Judy Gallion, is very much a part of the poem as well. I recently completed Triptych: Madonnas and Poets with artist Red Grooms which includes portraits of Kerouac and his mother, W.C. Williams and his mother, and Marianne Moore and hers in Italian Madonna and babe styles. I wrote the "Legends" which appear in Gothic gold lettering. It's poignant, hilarious, really beautiful—and exquisitely carved. I enjoy Red's work—the wit of it—it was certainly an honor to work with him. "Her Story" a lavishly boxed item with poems and lithographs by Elizabeth Murray was recently published by Universal Arts Edition Ltd. Over the years I've worked with artists Joe Brainard and George Schneeman and Yvonne Jacquetti, Susan Hall (the Kulchur book Invention), with writers Ted Berrigan, Reed Bye, Eileen Myles, Denyse King, Bernadette Mayer. The work at St. Marks Poetry Project was community-based and inspired. I've co-edited publications with Lewis Warsh, Reed Bye, Ron Padgett and am now working on a new poetics anthology from Naropa with my Assistant Director Andrew Schelling. This interview we're doing is a collaboration, no?

I've worked with dancers Douglas Dunn, Yoshiko Chuma, Lisa Kraus, Helen Pelton, Marni Grant. I've worked with composer musician Steven Taylor, Elliot Greenspan. I feel that Allen Ginsberg and I have an ongoing collaboration beyond our lifetimes. I am inspired by Sappho's existence as a writer. Dante (I steal some of his lines), others. Translation is a kind of collaboration. I'm working with nun's songs from the Pali Canon, circa 80 B.C.

RR: In addition to that I know that you direct the Poetics Department at Naropa Institute. T.S. Eliot thought that having to work for a living—and I imagine a schedule like yours—forced him to concentrate harder during the time he had to write. He found that being otherwise occupied didn't stop his thinking about what he wanted to say and that the increased ratio of thought to writing prevented him from writing too much or thinking too much on paper.

AW: I believe W.C. Williams felt similarly. He spoke of the "tense state" in which the best work occurs, and he said it might be when you're most "fatigued"—presumably after a hard day's work—visiting sick folk and delivering babies. I know that tension—it's really an altered state—very exciting. And it doesn't, it's true, have a lot to do with "thinking." It's the direct connection to the poem.

RR: Yet Pound felt that an epic was no longer possible because distractions had intensified, outside stimulation had intensified and our powers of concentration had weakened from a kind of fatigue. Are our abilities to concentrate approaching the vanishing point? Is this a negative thing?

AW: Perhaps we have to work harder to concentrate. I have been working on an "epic" for five years which I am totally committed to. Therefore I disagree from a personal standpoint. But, yes, there are too many distractions—particularly, I would say, those manifesting the materialism of our world, which is distracting and disheartening, even when you don't buy into it. T.V. is a good example. Charles Olson, another poet who worked on epic most of his life, ranted against T.V. It's negative unless that mind power is utilized in an enlightened manner. It seems to be getting darker in our world.

RR: Well, it seems that in times of certainty, such as the European Middle Ages, seem to produce great works of art, like cathedrals, symphonies and epics, because they believed they'd had "Truth" revealed to them. In other times, the search and bickering over "Truth" consumes a great deal of energy. If these times are truly getting darker, how does this affect you as an artist?

AW: The Truth is always available even in an age of uncertainty. Truth is unconditional. But we, as a culture, don't seem to be looking for it at the present time. There is an inordinate amount of deception in our so-called "democracy," for example. It's a myth, in fact. The root of so much suffering is "ego" which manifests as a lack of compassion. Our government is cruel. Yet I find solace, joy, insight, great humor in the generosity of the work by many contemporary writers. Maybe these are not great "monuments" like those of the Middle Ages, but they are sustaining. I feel I write against the darkness, "straining against particles of light against a great darkness," Keats wrote. Also I frequently return to great texts of the recent and not so recent past—Sappho, Dante. They're still relevant. Olson, Duncan, O'Hara, Schuyler.

RR: There's a speech in The Third Man where the character played by Orson Welles recalls the turbulent history of Renaissance Italy—war, plague and the Borgia's—producing Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo, and compares it with Switzerland's hundred years of peace, wealth and brotherhood which produced the cuckoo clock. What about this implied correlation of strife with the creation of great works of art, and of complacency with the reverse?

AW: It has some substance. I always felt like a rebel. There are dark times. I strive to make sense of them in my work. It's not an easy time, fighting the lords of materialism. I don't know many complacent poets—it seems a contradiction.

RR: I've spent an incredible amount of time trying to determine where words come from—the words of our thoughts, the words that appear in our mouths during conversation. Do you know what I'm looking for?

AW: You're looking for the point—synapse?—perhaps where the magic occurs and how it gets translated. Even after analysis, speech remains a mystery. Words are sacred from some point of view. They emerge—when they aren't purely discursive—out of luminosity I believe. They are particles of light. They also come out of silence, if there is such a thing. We are communicating through out whole body as well, like illusory angels. Burroughs calls the word a "killer virus." It has that power as well. Look at the language used in weaponry. "Mantra" means "mind protection."

RR: Do you think in words? Do you think in associations or in chains of concepts? Do you think in musical phrases?

AW: Yes, I think in words, associations and musical phrases. All of the above. In "Fast Speaking Woman" there are obvious sound and associational moves.

RR: So where do these words come from as you're writing—from the scene, from the music (form) of the poem, from your mind, from looking at the outside world, outer space, god, etc.?

AW: All of the above! Every experience is a rune waiting to be unearthed, unlocked, revealed to its attendant music of language. Objects suggest words—quotidian reality provides language all the time—along with the visions of hag-dieties wrapped in tigerskins.

RR: The Greeks believed that poetry came from the muses—in fact, that one must empty their head before the muses could appear. Bob Dylan said that the songs he's written were "in the air" and came through him, perhaps, but always existed and he just happened to be the one who wrote them down. Do you write your poems?

AW: My "you" is just a conglomeration of tendencies. Some of those tendencies manifest in an articulate and refined poetic language, if you will. But I also feel the distinct meeting of my consciousness with a confirmation from the sun, the moon, stars who are my allies all. Muse is an energy. It is the reciprocation of the phenomenal world, as well as the body of light or enjoyment—the Sambhogakaja we say in Buddhism—that responds to the energy we put forth. My poems invite participation of that larger energy or connection. The Muse plugs you in. It's that direct. Electricity. It's always available, batteries not needed, but you have you see, magic keys or access to the illusory batteries which are needed and available. When you are genuinely ready and alert. Who's to say how or when or why this occurs. It's the reciprocity with "bigger mind." And it can involve other people. I get that hit-don't you too? In the poetry one loves.

RR: Actually, I kind of distrust poetry as a medium for truth. When Allen Ginsberg writes about politics or Buddhism, and his understanding changes as he does. I think everything unconsciously becomes our mirror. I tend to sift poems for the person there. The philosophy or otherworldliness I skip over. It was Catullus who thought that the poet was responsible for the poem. And that everything which occurred to the poet—even the most mundane facts of the poet's life—what he had for breakfast, his petty spites, disagreements and quarrels, the weather—was transformed by the poet into art, the way Midas turned common objects into gold. Ted Berrigan comes to mind as a modern example. Are these two ideas—the inspired and the created—oppositional?

AW: No, these ideas are not opposing. Of course I'm responsible for what I put down. I'm not simply a "channel." Those facts—the donuts, pepsi colas, peeves—are deities, muses, as well—they speak to me. Things are "symbols of themselves." "No ideas but in things," etc. Art belongs, needs to be part of ordinary, quotidian, daily common life. It's got to reflect the truth of the relative reality as well as its vision, desire, aspiration. Art is ugly from some point of view when it's shocking, uncompromising. It's also beautiful for these same reasons.

RR: In the Walt Whitman program of the PBS series "Voices and Visions" they talked about the difference between "blind" poets and "visionary" poets. Blind poets would be those who, like Poe, create out of their imagination or their unconscious. Whitman would be a "visionary" poet because he wrote poems of a particular time and a place that depends so heavily on the eye. Do you see yourself as a "blind poet" or a "visionary" poet?

AW: My work probably fits into the "visionary" category more readily, although much of the writing arises out of an oral yearning and attraction. I hear words before I "see" them, if you know what I mean. I "mouth" them before I see them. But imagination—the words appearing out of dreams, out of fantasy and out of imagined hells—also plays a part. Cut-up and certain experimental methods are interesting in light of this question. You can get a "phantasmic" construction butchering text, re-arranging phrases. Is this "blind" work?

RR: Well, John Ruskin, the great late 19th-century art critic, was disgusted by the state of art in his age because paintings were done in the studio, not in real light, and used as models contemplative notions of "the beautiful" as opposed to actual models. He thought that gothic churches were the last great works of art because they were made by hand, by a craftsman who was seeking to express, to personalize, his faith. Of course, there were rules you couldn't break except when you were carving gargoyles and such. You had to carve the Madonna within the tradition, for example. But Ruskin thought even these radiated the personality of the artist and his or her contact with the vibrancy of the real world. It was an individual vision. Pound, too, found it in San Zeno in Verona, with the signed capital where the artist carved in pride "I made this." Even in prehistory, its always the handprint, whether in the Neanderthal caves of France and the Canyon de Chelly, where the artist seems to assert his or her own existence. Yet, in "Post-Modern Art" the intention seems towards an effort at erasing all traces of the individual through these cut-ups, chance operations, or the hunting down of the "folly of intention."

AW: When Reed Bye and I saw the cave paintings at Font de Gaum in Le Eyzies we both felt the "hand" of the poet. And yet there was no meeting that individual who is eased, muted in time. So only the product of his/her exquisite muscle and heart and eye survives. It's sublime, authentic, unquestionably so, and in the cleanest sense. This "viewing" was a religious experience you might say. I felt something vibrating there-hand in motion, scoring lines which delineate the untamed beast in motion. We name it Cro-Magnon. Great art is "nowness" for lack of a better way to say it. This experience brought up an imagined reality of that past-hundreds of thousands of years ago. The paintings carry high talk and text and image with them which exists in fact because we have imagination. If we didn't see them what are they? They are secret teaching. They wait for us. And we were ready, or are we? It depends. We don't know what to do with our inheritances sometimes. Which is why ongoing wisdom traditions understand how to interpret and receive and preserve teaching. The images from the caves are like the Tibetan buddhist "terma," or found treasures. They are hieroglyphs, seed-syllables that unlock insight. Ruskin had a point of course, Pound too. You want the real thing, not the artifice, although artifice is an interesting style when combined with intellect and humor. Not by rote, endless stock similes. The real thing is a "luminous detail," like the rune or seed-syllable.

RR: What is the relationship of dreams and unconsciousness to your life and work?

AW: The relationship is active and useful, always. I pay attention to the messages, images, to synchronicity, auspicious coincidence, to the conjuries emanating from the unconscious—resonances, bizarre associations, etc. I had a dream recently entitled "Uncle Vanya" in which Allen Ginsberg and I were leaders of a large touring company that had settled into a western movie set. We were about to perform the play. I later re-read the Chekhov and realized there were a lot of interesting male figures in the play that shed light on my relationship to Allen, which is an intense and active one in my life. I'll try to write about it. "Interstices of Waves" came into a recent dream—I used it in the poem "Speak Gently In Her Bardo".

RR: Is there a difference in your work between common speech and poetic language?

AW: Often. I like to play with both. "Dialogue At Nine Thousand Feet" works in an elevated language, inspired, in part, by the altitude I was living at at the time. I'm working common speech into the many sections of "IOVIS OMNIA PLENA"—overheard conversations and the like. I have an ear for what people say—my 10-year-old and his friends talking about video games and basketball is just one example. But archness, artifice in speech excites me as well. Poetic language, perhaps. I don't work so much with the meaning or message but the tone and carriage of the wrods. Say it "slant" advised Emily Dickinson.

RR: What is your primary method of composition—typewriter/ notepad (handwrit/typewrit)?

AW: All of the above—handwritten in notebooks of all sizes, one yellow lined pads, on manual typewriters, now on computer.

RR: Do you find a difference in the finished work depending on its compositional situation/form? Where does editting/rewriting fit into your compositions?

AW: Yes, there's a difference in shape with the different size notepads and notebooks. Lately I'm training myself with the long poem ("IOVIS") to work on the computer. I edit on a print-out.

RR: Do you vary when you write prose or poetry?

AW: Prose is more natural on the computer. I like the simple white page in the old machine, however. That's where I'm still most comfortable. A hard but sweet habit to break.

RR: Will and Ariel Durant in their epic History of Civilization claim that poetry evolved out of the religious need for chants and hymns and that prose arose from the needs of merchants—i.e., that poetry derived from the imaginative faculties of the human psyche and that prose from the need for a more or less factual representation. As someone who's written in both prose and poetry, do you see any difference in the way each is used?

AW: Yes, I see this to some extent. Poetry operates frequently along a spiritual trajectory—a need to join heaven and earth—to "connect." But prose is telling stories—hagiographics—epics of creation and who begat whom begat who. Some native peoples see stories in the flames of a "campfire"—phantastic images of birth and death. Factual representation, of course, and the need for accounting come into this. This is also a human endeavor and very necessary. Those wonderful chapters on whaling data in Moby Dick....

RR: The Durants follow the above line of thought to the point where they see poetry as coming from the beginnings of civilization where the imaginative powers and needs overcome (or arose from) an inability to understand the world cognitively (or factually). For them it follows that prose is the mark of a fully developed culture whereas poetry comes more from the beginnings of a civilization.

AW: One is always writing the "first poem." Each time for me personally is regenerative. We are perhaps at the end of a civilization, and yet I'm always writing the first poem. How do you explain this? A fully developed culture needs to record itself—it's an intelligent survivalist move. I still dont' the world "factually" in spite of the magnificent data, and so I'm stuck with poetry. They need to exist simultaneously. We are now never more "fully developed," yet coming apart drastically and dramatically at this very instant.

RR: Lew Welch described the New York poetry scene in the 50's and 60's as "fierce" and the S.F. scene as "cool jazz." As you travel around the country do you get a geographical sense of the various poetry scenes? Do you think that there's a geographical influence on poets—for example, city versus rural, west coast versus east coast, etc.?

AW: Poets are more peripatetic these days, so many have lived on both coasts and in both city and rural settings. And are more commonly found by magazines, correspondence, tape cassettes. But friends in Bolinas and Kitkitdizze (Gary Snyder's area) are much ore cognizant of basics—where their energy comes from, etc. They are more ecology-minded than their city cousins who are often careless, negligent and not as frugal. This comes in thematically into some of the writing. NYC is still "fierce" but for different reasons than Welch intended back then. It's dangerous now. Depressing that our government is so outrageously corrupt and greedy—the poor get poorer, more crack babies all the time, the suffering amongst the homeless, the minorities—is endemic. It's quite a tangle when you look at the urban scene. Where to place the blame. A lot of poets ignore these realities. Some escape to safer waters. Every city and town I've traveled to has an interesting subtext of some kind. An alternative.

RR: Are there any poems you've written that you won't read in public, which you'd rather people would read in private, alone?

AW: "Both Other Self Neither". Parts of "Iovis".

RR: Do you ever utilize tone of voice to suggest ironies, etc. in your writings? How does this translate on the written page?

AW: In a piece entitled "Coup de Grace" I seem to be working with a distinctly ironic tone. It's an accusatory tone, and yet the language travels in myriad directions. I think this piece is most successful on the page. It's steady and doesn't strain. With other pieces my reading style may color or change the words. Perhaps the pieces are not as fixed.

RR: Some of your poems, "Battery" for example, read quite softer than how they're performed. Do you think you may be trapped into a certain performing style that subverts the poems themselves?

AW: Sometimes that's true. I'm pushing too hard, not letting the poem breathe. Perhaps it comes from frequent readings to larger audiences where I wonder can they hear me in the back?

RR: Sometimes your poems don't seem to progress forward as much as circle an idea or concept. But as you're writing do you feel the poem moves forward, do you discover things as you write the poem that you didn't know before?

AW: I usually feel I'm propelling forward, and yet aspects of the poem spiral back in and continue around. Discovery is the reward of the curiosity. I never know where I'm going, but I'm not interested particularly that the poem climax to a revelation at the end. The making of it, existing inside teh poem as it occurs (and as it re-occurs) is the point.

RR: Aristotle, Robert Frost and Marianne Moore said that the ability to make associations was the hallmark of a poet. Pound, George Grosz (the artist) and Marianne Moore suggested endless curiosity. What do you think are the abilities that create a great poet?

AW: Both a resonating mind plus vast curiosity I agree. Also quick and clear eyes, a good ear. Imagination. I would not be a very good poet, I think, without passion.

RR: Yet sometimes it seems the energy in your poems moves from thought as opposed to feeling.

AW: Yes. "I Digress..." is a good example. Most of my so-called meditative poems work that way, and yet it is an emotional thinking. There's passion in it.

RR: How much of your work is "first thought"?

AW: The root, the initial and sustaining "hit" is the first thought. The tinkering that comes later never feels major.

RR: Nabokov said that "Writing is rewriting." The argument against "First thought, best thought" could conceivably run like this: When the writing is initiated there is the primary experience of the poem or language. The writer at a later date rereads the poem from a fresh, more detached, distant perspective. This fresh mind is the mind of a new person, essentially, NOT the person who wrote the original "work". And rewriting is, or can be, Re-writing—as intuitive, inspired and fresh as the original writing. As Corso reportedly told Kerouac, "I don't want to ignore any part of my mind—including the part which cringes when I reread something I've written and knows how to improve it."

RR: I've been reading the mathematician L.E.J. Brouwer lately who wrote a book in 1905 called Life, Art and Mysticism. He talks about that limitlessness, that radiance as well. It's kind of difficult to summarize but he said that we began in isolation amongst nature without any concept of future. But when we began thinking the rational mind created a seemingly continuous world different from our actual experience of it—which is more like discrete moments interspersed with emptiness. One begins to dismantle this "world of causality and then to remain free, only then obtaining a definite Direction which it will follow freely, reversibly. The phenomena suc

	For Immediate Release
Volume II, Number 3 March 1, 2002