Weird, man. Berryman's very late "conversion experience" happened a few years before my own "spiritual Jordan". Bracketed by that dark cold December night, on the bridge over the Mississippi - the bridge my mother could see from her bedroom window in my grandfather's house. Weird, Henry.

& what was it that set me gallivanting through the wild West & East, like a holy fool "Henry Hankovitch, con geat"? - some personal experience of a power which seems to carry moral authority with it. (cf. below)

Maybe the most concise literary image of those days is this.

other Famous Rock Stars I've met:

Mick Taylor (bar in Kensington. friendly, very cool. told me how to contact the Stones about the lead guitar job).

Jerry Garcia (backstage at that famous club in SF. friendly. Apologetic, unable to help me get my cheap guitar back from the Hell's Angel who had swiped it, after his 300-lb. tattooed bald colleague from NYC whacked me upside the head with his ring-spiked arm).

Duke Robillard (famous around here, anyway). (took some guitar lessons with him. friendly, very nice.)

I don't know what came over me yesterday. Henry Gould is not 70s Jesus-freak Hank Williams. No, no. Henry Gould is Poet Laureate of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, yes, yes.

But I haven't done a thing. I'm the cautious elder brother. My redhead younger siblings rode the rails, jumped off bridges, started a chicken farm in Texas, put out forest fires.

They had their music bands, too. Bill & Mike had a band called Rendered Useless. They opened once for Prince in Mpls. Bill's band later, Run Like A Girl, had songs on the radio in Colorado.

They can't play harmonica like me, though, ha ha. I'm the oldest.

I hitchiked once from Denver to NYC with 35 cents in my pocket. I had been living there for a few weeks with an old high school friend (keyboard player in our little band of those days), & working in a Taco Bell. But I left one day because he was drunk all the time, the music was going nowhere.

In the mountains I got picked up by a couple of tough guys, who had just stolen the car we were in. I talked to them about Jesus, it was all right. They didn't take my guitar.

In London I lived in a closet in Earl's Court. I worked for some royalty types who ran a flower-rental & ex-import hobby business. I told them I had grown up on a farm, & they hired me under the table. They were friends with the Who, & offered to introduce me to them. They liked the Who, didn't understand why I wanted to join the Rolling Stones. "Oh the Stones - they're only in it for the money." I told them the Who weren't hiring. I did odd jobs for them, they were very kind. Once I mowed their neighbor Cat Stevens' lawn. While I was there, some very portly fellows in colorful dashikis or turbans & robes dropped by. Hugs all around. Cat Stevens hated his other neighbors, the orphanage. The little Caribbean girls would climb up on the brick wall & call out, "Cat Steeeevens! Cat Steeeevens!" all day long. I believe his home recording studio was soundproofed, though.

Keith Richard bounced on the balls of his feet the whole time we talked. He was very pale & thin. I suggested he read the Bible; he said I should read William Blake. Carl Perkins was there; he said he & his brother had seen a UFO in Arizona once. (Carl didn't get the job either.)

There is no connection between Stone & the Rolling Stones, as far as I know. Stone was published in 1979, some years after I spoke with Keith Richards (at his rehearsal studio in Richmond, outside London) about the Mick Taylor replacement job. To my knowledge I have never been a member of that band. If you see me on any of their albums, consider it some kind of pirated edition.

Come to think of it, considering the fact that I have walked talked & diddled in near proximity to this library ("the Rock") for nigh on 30 years, with only a few interruptions, you might say that the essentialist core of my identity consists in being a non-rolling stone.

I'm on a roll today.

I was in Hahvahd Squirrel Saturday night, after the reading. There was a 4-pc street band playing 60s music. I had me E harp with me, which is not as useful as you might think, but they started playing "Sympathy for the Devil" so I went up to the mike & joined right in. Of course they were a bit miffed to have the devil actually join them (but what's confusing you, is the nature of my game. . .). We had something of a mini-Altamont moment, though no limbs or instruments were broken. How could they know I was just coming down from a poetry reading. . .

Happy to notice Allen's early interest in Robert Benchley. Yes, he could have a big influence on poetry. Robert Benchley was my absolute favorite writer & hero when I was about 12. I wanted to write like him & I tried. (Started an independent school paper just so I could do Benchley-like routines on the weekly happenings around the old prison yard.)

I have to get Sarah at the train station in a few minutes, a bit rushed here. But feeling warm & happy about Cambridge reading yesterday, courtesy of the mysterious Jim Behrle. Happy to meet Allen Bramhall & Beth, and hear him read his [afraid to use conventional adjective] poetry, which I enjoyed a great deal.

A fine thing today to see Allen had been reading my poems in Stone (written 30 yrs ago) & liking something he read.

About the photo : it was taken on Houston St, in my high school friend Chris Kraemer's loft looking over at the World Trade Center, in 1975. Chris was a promising photographer in NY, who made a living as a builder (he is an archetypal Finn from MN, whose dad ran a hardware store there). He knew some bigshot artists at the time, Vito Acconci, Susan Acolella(? - don't know who I'm talking about). Also a whacky Russian sculptor named Ernst Niesvestny. When Stone was published, Chris arranged a little party at his studio someplace in Williamsburg. I remember sitting on a huge wooden crucifix sculpture he had laid out on the floor, being toasted with vodka. The title Stone, of course, was an imitation of Mandelstam's first book, Kamen ("Stone") - an acronym of akme ("acmeism"). So this party felt appropriate. Chris married a New Zealand clothing designer so she could get a green card, & they ended up staying together & having kids. He lives out in the Bay Area now. That's his typewriter & cot (I use a Sears Constellation myself). I was living with them for a few months in NY, helping Chris on interior painting jobs etc, before going over to London to try to take Mick Taylor's place in the Rolling Stones.


(p.s. Monday morning : through Denny Moers, a former student of Robert Creeley & studio assistant to Aaron Siskind, I was able to get an actual Siskind photo for the cover of Stone - some sections of Inca wall in Cuzco. The Inca/stone/Mandelstam/Vallejo configuration shows up 25 yrs later in the penultimate sections of Forth of July. Yesterday was the traditional anniversary, by the way, not only of the death of John the Baptist, but of the execution of Atahualpa, the last Inca ruler.)

Most of the time I have about 3-4 writing projects in mind, for which I'm jotting down notes.

When I actually start writing poetry, it usually feels like a release from the burden of all those plans, & has nothing to do with them.

Something similar with music : I often do better when I haven't played or practiced for a while.

Is this because I'm left-handed? A gemini? Lazy? All of the above?

Bemsha quotes an interesting email from a high school teacher in Spain.

I bought an old 2nd-hand copy of the Cantos once.  Inside the cover, when I got home, I found what seems to be a little original photo of Ez in old age, sitting with his white cane, looking druid-like.  It's up on the bulletin board by my desk; he's keeping a hawkish eye on my long poems.

Walking through bookstore on errand for library, pass the poetry shelf, see Beowulf.  Recall that poetry is sort of distillation/projection of one's experience of beauty.  Recurrent memory:  high school, leaning barefoot on back porch reading anthology of French poets.   Luxe, calme et volupte.

Distillation, charter, code. 

He's back at the Hotel. 
 
Latta on Loons.
 
The loon is the poet of that gloomy solitary different (sometimes beautifully bright & clear) landscape (north woods).
 
I've entered loon call contests in Ely, MN & Minneapolis.  With no more success  than the poetry contests, aw shucks.

Busy working on a novel these days. Mother is the invention of necessity. Don't really want to go back to the library, mine exquisite golden cage. & haven't, or haven't applied, any other socially-useful skills lately (like teaching). Wish to write myself out of a hole, or try. It's silly & hopeless, but heck, I can't think of anything else at the moment.

Tempted to talk about it, but afraid to give away secrets of the craft. A story is a gizmo.

Still thinking on millionaire Mel & his Mad-Max Jesus.

I guess my irritation stems in part from a sense of identification. Gibson's "Passion" is his own; this vast expense of expensive spirit stems, as passions will (as Dante knew) from a listening, hearing, reading experience; somewhere in his (or his strange father's) biography there was a response to, & some kind of identification with, the Biblical Word.

In the summer of 1973 I was working on a ranch, haybaling, with my brother, in a remote & beautiful part of Wyoming (Cora, WY, pop. 3). After work, in the bunkhouse, with Jim & the rancher's cocky 14-yr-old son, who wore a cowboy hat & liked to shoot gophers with his .22, & liked to bug Jim & me with his sarcastic comments on whatever we mature 19-21 yr olds talked about, with his twangy "well, wowzee-wowzee-woo-woo!"), I lay there reading the Revised Standard Version from beginning to end.

Why was I reading the Bible? I can't remember exactly when it started. But my biography was no less weird & eccentric than anyone else's. I think I was reading the Bible in an attempt to ground myself more securely, in a literary-historical sense, as a response to psychological shock. Because I really was in shock & mental torment at that time.

I had finished 3 years of college. I had written lots of adolescent poems, but had no concept of a practical future. I had played the fool in numberless ways trying to relate to my female compatriots. & I had read Shakespeare's Sonnets, & received the ineradicable impression that Mr. Shakespeare was addressing me, personally, from some extra-chronological dimension. This experience added to my deep fear & justified concern that I might be out of my mind, to put it euphemistically; ie. insane.

The Bible, basically, in a time of personal crisis, took me out of myself, into its epic & social & deeply practical/political/worldly-ironic atmosphere. It must have been that fusion of worldly knowledge and intense theological articulation - added to the fact that I had been brought up & confirmed in & fallen away from a church-oriented family - which utterly overpowered me.

Imagine a reading experience, at that age, which works steadily through the Mosaic books, the histories, the Psalms, the prophets, the wisdom books, the proverbs - this immense cultural epic - & concludes in the crosshairs of the "New Testament" : a kind of panopticon, or multimedia-dramatic grand finale to the consecutive narrative of the "Old Testament". You can't imagine this, actually, unless in some hidden or not-so-hidden corner of your experience you've been through it yourself, & heard the prophetic & not-so-prophetic messages.

So I do not need a filmic resume which dully & brutally pounds upon my head a literalist dogma about a deterministic scapegoat-atonement. I do not need Mel Gibson's version of "right reading". I've read the Word. It's alive, more than any film adaptation; & I'm still reading with it.

from this day 4 yrs ago, doing July:

         12    

                                  i.m. Tom Fleming*

  
         You would have been glad to be here today
 Fleming   to read the Sunday funnies
 Aaugh!  as Lucy lifts the 12-millionth football
 and Charlie Brown flips   for the 13th time   Bonk!

  
         a little sad too   the way the everlasting ends
 this evening   light   limping so slowly   only lent
 limpid   toward the vague rim of   tonight's Milky
 Way   Sparky's wavery quickness trembling

  
         only lent now   Good grief!   While it's raining the
 Doctor is [IN]   and   you are uncommonly
 weird   like a Red Baron's   flying mach-lemon
 in the mind of a pup   and the rain it raineth

  
         every day   like frogs pummeling our   foolish blind
 shopping carts   ah   for I am sick of love   he
 cried   running down the street in Lisbon
 that twines with a tiny pulse   a nub

  
         like the distant crown of   Shakespeare's head
 a curvature this   pause or sigh   this dome
 between waves or   salient   mud-caked
 seed so small   set adrift   (centuries

  
         surrounded with fire   your burning bones, Tom
 a greenish Copernican   flame in the marrow
 planted   amid the avarice of the pilots   the raw
 and envious violence of Ahab   a mote

  
         that will grow limpid)   you know   there are women
 limping with this   cenacle   (like myrrh   afloat
 upon tears)   (chambered   in the upper tiers)
 (up the stairs)   helical   of their wombs

  
         unknown to us   but only a promise
 when the last full measure is poured out
 beside the shores of great rivers   the trumpet
 sounds into   the depths of that prairie   siempre

       
                                            2.13.2000

*[Tom Fleming, old Minnesota pal since childhood, died of AIDS about 12 yrs ago.]

I met Joseph Brodsky once back in the early 80s, after a reading. I spoke to him about my interest in the Russians, and my tepid feeling about American poetry. His advice was, "Read Auden."

Now one can judge this the typical comment of a literary conservative. But I'm using it simply to underline (for emphasis) my previous post. In Auden, I think Brodsky recognized a literary professional in the Pushkinian/Petersburg mode.

John Latta's earthbound empiricism a healthy thing. But America has always been closer to Pascal than to Montaigne.

Remember flying home from college in early 70s after nervous breakdown, singing the mealtime hymn "Praise God from whom all blessings flow. . .", with my poor long-suffering father in the seat beside me. A woman came up after we landed & said "Thank you so much - I was nervous about flying too."

& flying back to Providence a few days later with a pistol & ammunition hidden in my suitcase (it went into the Providence River).

Desperate for God the Father. Jesus Freaks.

some of the Dream Songs were written in Rhode Island (like #61), when Berryman was at Brown.

When he died, Edwin Honig organized a memorial reading, & invited me (an infant freshman) to host the event.