Randy Roark came to Boulder in November 1979 to apprentice with the poet Allen Ginsberg as he assembled his Collected Poems, and continued to work in various capacities with the poet until Ginsberg’s death in 1997. He has published over 40 volumes of original prose and poetry and art criticism under his Laocoon Press imprint. See http://randyroark.com/. This interview began in March, 2009, and continued for several months.

Jim Cohn: As a child growing up in a small town in Connecticut, did you have some kind of idea early on that you would have a passion for the arts?

Randy Roark: I didn’t really have much exposure to the arts when I was a child. I do remember seeing a photograph of a garden sculpture by David Smith in an issue of The Weekly Reader when I was probably in 3^rd or 4^th grade that moved me enough that I cut it out and hung it over my desk. It was entitled something like “Reclining Woman” and it was a metal sculpture of loops and curves longer than it was high. First I looked for and found the shape of a reclining woman, and I was feeling pretty pleased with myself because it was definitely abstract, but then suddenly something happened and the sculpture kind of disappeared and I was looking at the sky and the clouds behind it. Then my vision would flicker back and forth—I’d see the sculpture, then I would see the suggestion of a woman reclining, and then it would disappear and I’d see the sky and clouds. There was this “leap” that I’ve associated with art ever since. That’s one of the reasons I still go to museums—to change my way of seeing, to experience that leap from looking at something to suddenly seeing something else, something that was hidden, something that didn’t exist a moment before. I find that experience most often when I’m reading a book or in art museums or at rock shows. I think the experience of seeing in that way must release endorphins or something because it’s a kind of high that persists even when I look away from the painting. I can feel a definitely altered state of consciousness come over me after a couple of hours in a museum—I begin to slow down, my awareness changes, not only about the art but about everything—I become hyper-aware of the light in the room, the silence, the people around me; what they’re wearing, the way they stand and walk and talk to each other. I kind of disappear. I remember once in the Denver Art Museum they had a temporary exhibit including one of Cezanne’s paintings of Mt. Ste. Victoire and in this altered state of mind I saw for the first time how cold colors receded and hot colors advanced, and for a moment the painting became three-dimensional—it sort of reassembled in the air between the painting and my eyes and I got so dizzy I had to sit on the floor until I could stand up again. I had a similar experience after an Impressionist exhibition at the same museum—when I left the museum it was dark and everything was covered in silvery snow and the streetlights were diffused through the fog and there were swirling crystals forming in the air like thousands of diamonds and I felt like I was walking in an Impressionist painting.

As for literature, I was fascinated with long novels, especially the historical novels of Kenneth Roberts, as soon as I could read them. I enjoyed opening a book and entering a world that I could get lost in. I also bought poetry books from the Scholastic Book Services in grammar school. I don’t know why I started reading poetry or kept reading it because I didn’t really understand many of the poems and I can’t remember poetry even being taught until fifth grade, but I would buy these anthologies and read them all the way through just for the pleasure of the sounds of the words themselves. They were like brief pieces of music whose structure was a measured line, and they usually rhymed which was also fun. And they would keep this forward-moving rhythm going on until they reached a full stop, usually ending with a surprising rhyme so the last word would hit with a loud thump followed by this weird, portentous reverberation. It was a different kind of experience than when I was reading novels where I felt like I was living inside the story. There was hardly ever any sensory imagery associated for me in reading poems—they were more like overhearing someone talking in a fancy language that I didn’t really understand but I knew it meant something to someone. I almost knew what was going on, but I didn’t know how I knew. I’m also a little bit dyslexic so poetry was easier for me to read because it was usually one poem on a page with a lot of white space surrounding it. There was something pleasurable in that as well, which is why I also bought a lot of books with jokes in them. Jokes were also usually printed on a page that was mostly white, and they were square, and they ended with a thud and a little surprise too, just like poems. The only time since then that I’ve had that strong of a visceral reaction to reading was when I got home as a teenager and read Gregory Corso’s Gasoline, and realized I’d been carrying a bomb in my pocket all day long, just waiting to explode.

So there were two different experiences that I read for—one was to lose myself in a story, and the other was more for the sound of the words.

Then one day while I was reading an anthology of Metaphysical poetry—poetry that said almost nothing to me at the time—and I read John Donne’s poem, “The Flea,” and almost immediately I could hear that specific narrative voice I’d always associated with prose, and I could understand exactly what he was saying, and he was trying to convince a woman into action, and he was imploring her, so she was in the poem as well. It was like a little scene in a play, and by reading it the characters came back to life, and they were living right there in the room with me, and I was in there somehow too. And I was aware of how he’d crafted his thought into lines with a very specific rhythm so the emphasis would fall on the convincing words, and how the lines carried over into the next line with a strong forward motion, like impatience, and how the sound of the words themselves created the musical structure on which the meaning was carried, and how it told a little story, a little vignette that only lasted as long as the poem did, like the 45s I was listening to at the time, like “Eleanor Rigby” and “Paperback Writer.”

What Donne was saying was that he wanted to be a flea so he could crawl under his lover’s clothes and walk along her skin. And although I don’t know how—I was only ten or eleven at the time—I knew in an immediate and personal way what he really wanted because I wanted it too.  It wasn’t to be a flea, really—so there was this leap and I understood metaphor. And for the first time the experience of reading a poem jumped from being something outside of me to something that was happening inside of me, and in that moment both of my reasons for reading combined—there was the sound, and there was the little world that opened and then closed.

The part of me where I understood what he was saying was a funny place that was not really thought, or memory, or anything I could really recognize as me yet. It was just this sense of certainty—of knowing. I didn’t know what it was, really, but I knew I wanted to be in contact with a woman’s warm flesh in that way too, even though I hadn’t yet, and it opened this ache in me or touched a place in me or something in me woke up. That experience of words leaping off the page and at the same time hearing them in some mysterious way inside of me, of having them open something up inside me—some understanding or insight or even an ache or a longing—was something I began to seek out and to associate with poetry and songs on the radio more than prose.

As for writing my own lyrics, that began sometime when I was walking to grammar school. When I left the house I would continue to sing whatever song was playing on the radio, and the lyrics would get boring pretty quickly and it was a long walk to school, so I began to make up my own lyrics. I knew it had to rhyme, but I didn’t really know anything about meter and rhythm. Even so every once in a while the whole line would fall into place—the phrasing, the meter, the rhyme, and it would be the way I’d really say it if I really meant it. And when it was an emotion that I could really identify with—like intense anger or intense longing—the words came on their own if I concentrated on the feeling itself. It was as if I was letting someone speak through me, that I had opened a valve, and singing became a means to get all of this emotion out of me. And when I could really feel the emotion I was singing about, and if it was something I’d like to say in real life, I could fill the words with air, I could stretch them out, I could fill them with all of the emotion I was feeling.

Later, probably in fifth grade or so, I began to write long loosely rhymed poems in imitation of the kind of poems that I was studying in school—so they were full of allusions and extended metaphors, and I would call my friends on the telephone and explain all of their hidden meanings for hours.

I was considered enough of a poet in seventh grade that I was asked by one of the nuns in my Catholic junior high to write a poem to read at the school assembly when our principal retired. My poem was entitled “The Principles of a Principal.” The only thing I can remember is that people told me afterward that I read so quietly that only the first few rows could hear. Two years later I published my first poem in my high school magazine, The Sabre. It was rhymed and in meter and was meant to be funny, and it was about how I enjoyed looking at women getting dressed. The next time I read my own poetry in public was in 1980. I had written a poem called “Why I’ve Never Read in Public” for Ted Berrigan’s class at Naropa and he asked me if that was true and when I said it was he set up a reading series and had me open for Rachel Peters on the final night. I think he intentionally gave me time to prepare and learn from the more experienced students before I had to get up and read myself.

JC: You were a student at the Kerouac School in the late 1970s, in the school’s first decade and a teaching assistant to Allen Ginsberg. What were you doing in the years immediately preceding your involvement at Naropa that led up to your focus on poetics rather than any of the other arts that were of interest to you?

RR: I dropped out of college after my freshman year, in 1972, when I was eighteen. I got a job in the emergency room in Willimantic, Connecticut, and moved in with my girlfriend, whom I would marry when I was twenty-one. One day one of the women I was working with at the hospital was photocopying some poems, and I was stunned when she said her husband was a poet, because I kind of assumed that poets didn’t exist anymore. I specifically remember her saying that her husband was a poet, not that he taught poetry. He turned out to be Sandy Taylor, who was just beginning Curbstone Press in his basement in Willimantic with a large format camera and a dark room and an old drum press. He was teaching poetry and prose at Eastern Connecticut State College and I began auditing his classes, studying Yeats and Eliot and Frost and the modern novels, including On the Road, which I hated at the time. I was living with a radical feminist and read Ms. magazine every month, so the way Kerouac treated women in the book was reprehensible to me. I actually threw the book across the room at one point when they leave the wife in Utah, stuck with the hotel bill. It’s funny but when I re-read the book ten years later, I thought it was terrific and the way it treated women didn’t bother me at all. It wasn’t a manual on proper gender relations. It was about something else entirely.

Then about this time I got a second job running the used book section of a bookstore across from the university, and when the owners built an arts center they gave me the job of running the reading series. The first poet to read was Jim Scully, who had just published Santiago Poems, which was written during his first visit to Chile in the days immediately following the Allende coup. It was the first poetry reading I’d ever been to so I’d set up the room all wrong with the chairs around a conference table as if we were at a meeting and Jim read from the head of the table only a few feet away from me.

The poems were about the horror of arriving in Chile as a literature professor prepared to collect indigenous Quechuan poetry and finding a country in political lockdown, with swollen bodies floating down the river and littering the streets. But the scariest part was his voice—it was flat and unemotional, like the living dead, like something from beyond the grave. I could see his fingers tremble as he turned the pages. There were long moments when I literally stopped breathing, listening to him read.

He read a poem about how the soldiers chopped off the hands of the poet Victor Jara for singing “Venceremos” to the prisoners who filled the Santiago soccer stadium—“where torture became a national sport”—and jeered at him, “Now, sing!” And when he continued to sing, “they killed him / they couldn’t kill him enough.”

Then he read a poem about his visit to Neruda’s wife of nearly fifty years who he found sitting in the darkness by an open window, with a letter in her hand telling her that her husband had died of cancer while still in exile. Then he read a poem about looking out of his fancy hotel window at young men walking down the center of the street with their hands over their heads, and women risking their lives to gather eggs for their families in the morning, and the blackened bodies he stepped over on his way to the national library.

It was through Sandy that I was also introduced to the Eastern Connecticut poetry scene, which was made up of people who talked intelligently about art and film and poetry and politics—things I really cared about but had no one to talk to about. But most importantly I got to work with Sandy in his basement, and I’d spend each Sunday late into the evening learning how to work his old drum press and how to shoot and develop pages, clothespinning the wet sheets on a laundry line, and collating and saddlestiching his first books by hand, all the while asking him endless questions about poetry. It wasn’t until I was working for Allen that I realized that a lot of the people I met at the time had national reputations—including Sandy, who was later very involved with Allen and Ernesto Cardinal and Anne Waldman and Joe Richey and others when the Sandinistas were in power in Nicaragua in the early Eighties. And also people like George Butterick, who Allen had me write to for a copy of Ed Sanders’ Fuck You, a Magazine of the Arts for a class of his on “The Literary History of the Beat Generation.” It turned out George had gathered the best collection of Beat and Black Mountain and New York School publications in the world as the director of the rare books department at the University of Connecticut. And then later, when I began a reading group to study Charles Olson after I graduated from Naropa, I realized that George was also the guy who wrote those huge annotated books on Olson’s poetry. And then in 1982, I wrote to Ann Charters—the first biographer of Jack Kerouac and wife of music producer and jazz historian Sam Charters—to encourage her to be part of the Kerouac Conference, and I was shocked when I wrote her address on the envelope—it turns out she lived across the street from me in Mansfield Center, this tiny town in Connecticut where I was living when I worked with Sandy. It later turned out that John Clellon Holmes was living less than three miles away from me in Old Saybrook when I was living in Mystic, right before I moved to Boulder. But I knew nothing about them at the time.

Then sometime in the fall of 1976, I picked up a copy of People magazine in the emergency room where I was working and there was an article about Anne Waldman that mentioned Naropa, and it talked about Allen Ginsberg’s apprenticeship program. So I applied without much hope and was surprised to be accepted. I finally arrived to Boulder with my wife and our cats in November 1979. The plan was to apprentice with Allen for a semester and get my BFA from Naropa and the University of Colorado in two years, and then return to Connecticut. But I’ve never left Boulder, not even when Allen moved back to New York City in the early eighties.

JC: You were both a student and assistant to Allen Ginsberg while at Naropa. You were close to Philip Whalen at the end of his life and remain in touch with Diane di Prima and Anne Waldman, to name four significant American poets that passed through Naropa. Can you address what it was you found in yourself from having been informed, on many levels perhaps, by these writers?

RR: That’s an interesting way to put it—what I found in myself from being informed by others. It seems like those would be two very distinct things—being informed by someone, or finding something in yourself. But I know what you mean—it’s that jump I was talking about. The image I always use of the apprenticeship is of Allen talking to a very deep place in me and once I learned how to answer out of that place, he gave me my self.

As an apprentice, I would go over to Allen’s house on Bluff Street at least once a week and help him work on whatever he was working on—mostly his Collected Poems—more or less as his secretary, and in return he would look at my poems and tell me how terrible they were, which they were. I was 25 and basically an under-educated and under-read kid who wanted to be a poet. I asked him much later why he’d accepted me as an apprentice when my poetry was so bad, and he said it was because I was a good typist. And that I had been a medical transcriptionist and he wanted some of his lectures transcribed. And that I had proven I could get things done. But mostly he said it was because I was sincere, and there was more hope in teaching a bad poet with sincerity than there was in trying to teach a good poet without it.

I would usually spend the entire day there and deal with whatever came up. My main job when I wasn’t working at his house was to transcribe his journals and cull out any poems or anything interesting that I found there. I would also run errands, answer the phone, open his mail, help him prepare for his classes, drive him around, and deal with a lot of the bureaucratic stuff related to his schoolwork. If I stayed through dinner, Peter or Allen would cook, and afterward we’d listen to Ma Rainey records or Harry Smith’s anthology or Dylan or Bach or Vivaldi. Once I brought him a new Rolling Stones record and we listened to it over and over again.

Occasionally Allen would recite poetry to me from memory, kind of acting them out so I would get what excited him most about them. That’s something Sandy did as well—in class Sandy would enact Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan,” for instance, slapping his hands to startle us on “a sudden blow,” waving his arms in the air for “the … great … wings … beat … ing … still,” staggering to “above the stag-ger-ing girl.” And at our first meeting, Allen acted out seeing Williams reading at the Met in the late forties, and at the end of “The Clouds” he leapt up and shouted “lunging upon a pismire, a conflagration, a….”—and he waved his finger in the air, as if lost for words, and looked down at me and said, “And I realized he was talking. Just talking.” At other times Allen would quote from something from Whitman or Blake to comment on what was happening in the New York Times. And when he wanted me to understand what he expected from my poetry, he would read to me from Reznikoff and Williams. Then, when the apprenticeship was over, I continued to work with him, first on a project to transcribe and edit all of his lectures on Blake, and then as his teaching assistant and an assistant in the poetics department.

But the poets at Naropa who had the most influence on my writing were Ted Berrigan and Anselm Hollo. I still feel like I’m only just beginning to understand everything Ted taught me about poetry. One time in a class during the Kerouac Conference he described the poet’s awareness as something like a helmet surrounding your head. It’s bigger than your thought or sense impressions—it’s aware of all that, but it’s something larger. And poetry comes from that place—the space that’s slightly outside and around your head—and you just have to write it down. You’re not in control, you just have to listen. If you can really capture that voice, that’s enough for any poem.

Anselm introduced me to Dada, and the writings of Marcel Duchamp, and some of the very best poetry written in other languages, and he encouraged a voice in me that I didn’t even recognize as my own. He would winnow out the false voice in my work by highlighting certain lines and images or sentiments or even phrases that had escaped my attempts to obscure and over-intellectualize them, and he ignored what was false in my poetry, believing that it would fall away on its own.

But the comment Anselm made that changed my whole relationship to writing was when he said that it was really all just one long poem. Once I truly understood that, it changed the way I wrote and collected and presented my poetry. Now it’s not about individual poems—it’s about being honest to my changing consciousness through a series of writings. And that a poet is aware of all the white space around the poem itself, and hears in the silence between the poems everything that’s unwritten. And that it’s in what’s unwritten that most of the poetry occurs.

On the other hand Allen and Diane were actually more like surrogate parents to me. They kind of took me under their wings. Allen and Diane and I rarely talked about poetry. We talked about our lives, about who was in jail or broke and what we could do about it, about my love life. I confided in them and they listened and gave me useful advice. And, quite frankly, I needed surrogate parents more at the time than I needed poetry teachers, and it was very important for me to meet people I admired who accepted me as I was and saw through my awkwardness into who I really was and sincerely cared about me. Whatever social skills I have, I learned from them.

Anne Waldman and Philip Whalen have always been more like embodied muses to me—I’ve known Anne for almost thirty years, but I don’t feel I have a real connection with her personally the way I did with Allen and Diane, any more than one would have with the muse. She’s more like an electrical storm—I can’t really have a relationship with a force of energy like that, I can only define myself in relation to it. Often a poem or prose piece will form in my head as if it’s one half of a conversation with her—as if the very highest state of awareness in me at the moment is talking directly to the inspired awareness that I attribute to her.

Another important part of my education occurred in a series of classes I took at the University of Colorado to fulfill requirements for my bachelor’s degree at Naropa. I took classes there that weren’t offered at Naropa—classes in composition and music history and journalism, and two semesters of the “Great Books” with Professor Dennis Gilkey, who had a real passion for ancient languages and literature. It was through him that I got a chance to hear Homer, Dante, Virgil, Catullus, Ovid, Petrarch, Sappho, and Chaucer enthusiastically read in their original languages. Ironically, the next time I saw him was years later when I was working in the emergency room and he was delivering The Denver Post for a living, having been laid off at the university.

I also studied with a woman at the university whose name I can’t remember who taught the plays of Shakespeare by first having us read the text, and then we’d discuss it in class as literature, and then we’d see a performance of the play, and then we talked about what we learned from watching it onstage. After all that, we had to write something original about the play, and she would write comments on our papers, asking us to expand on certain ideas. Up until then, I was taught literature as something that one studies in order to comprehend or create it, but she taught that both the text and performance were things that I could respond to with my own creative intelligence, and that I could have a conversation with it that was more important than what it “said” or “was.” It was a conversation aware of what the play said and was, but it was about more than that. Since then, if a painting interests me, I’ll read everything I can about the artist and the movement and the time, and then go back and try to see it again through the lens of all of that information. Then I can see not only what’s on the canvas, but also something of what the artist saw when they painted it, and what they wanted me to see. Then I stand an arm’s length away, as close as the artist was when they painted it, so that I can see the individual brushstrokes and sometimes even the sequence of brushstrokes. It’s obvious that however great it is, a human being made it, just like me.

I know this is not a very popular idea with many of my friends—they want to experience the painting solely as what it is as a visual phenomenon without projecting a lot of information onto it, but for me it’s often a lot like “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” where the backstory makes the great work of art even more interesting. It’s like that with almost everything I get interested in as well, whether it’s a poem or a play or a playwright or a film or a piece of music or even a specific time period. I assemble everything I can about it and try to create a work of art out of what I’ve learned, because I always forget most of what I read or hear if I don’t write it down.

Take Picasso’s “Guernica” for example. There’s lots of ways it can be seen—first as a painting, but you can also learn to appreciate its technique of being painted on that scale and in black and white, or as an imitation of the newspaper photographs by which Picasso and all of Paris first learned of the horrors of the bombing of Guernica, the first modern terrorist attack. You can try to understand Picasso’s symbols and images, and where they came from. You can even get interested in the painting’s history, and what it meant to other artists and critics over time, including that great story of a Gestapo agent searching Picasso’s studio and, coming upon a postcard of “Guernica,” pointed to it and said, “Did you do that?” And Picasso replied, “No, you did.” And you can learn to see it both as a singular document of a specific moment in time and at the same time as a piece of the larger story of the artist’s trajectory from beginning to end. For a practicing artist, to appreciate that is to get in tune with the process of creativity itself, not confusing it with the creation of objects, or approaching it only as a student or critic. As a poet I want to see myself looking at the painting too, or listening to the music along with everything I know—I want to see them as if from the inside rather than as an object separate from me. And I keep going until I understand how it was made and then I get completely bored with it, and never want to think about it again.

JC: To see “from the inside rather than as an object separate” sounds like a good description of what Steve Silberman calls “activist scholarship.”

RR: I haven’t read Steve on “activist scholarship,” but I do know that I’m interested in studying anything that’s of use to me as a writer or as a human being. For instance, you and I could go out tonight and see Chaplin’s Modern Times, and we could enjoy it as a funny movie, which it is. But if you look into it a little bit further, its significance changes. The film was made during the Great Depression, and in the first years of the assembly line and modernization. If you know that, then you can better appreciate the film for what it was when it was released, and the predicament when Chaplin finds himself as a tramp. For instance, there’s a scene of him trying to keep up with a steadily accelerating assembly line, and there’s a scene where the owners of the factory design a machine that can feed workers while they continue working so they won’t have to take lunch breaks. And then, if you want, you can go on and learn that films—especially comedies—up until that time were mostly escapist fantasies. Chaplin’s previous film, for instance, was The Gold Rush—a fantasy, more or less, about a distant place and time. So for a comedian of Chaplin’s stature to make an entertaining satire that led people to re-examine their own lives and the inequities of the present social system was a revolutionary act—right down to the title of the film: this film was about modern times, about their actual lives. As time has gone on, that aspect of the film has faded, but you can learn to appreciate it as well if you want to.

Now, you don’t need to know all of that or even be interested at all in all that extra-textual information in order to enjoy the film … or any work of art. Like I say, I have friends who militantly object to the idea of studying a work of art outside of the artwork itself. But as a practicing artist you can also learn a lot by studying how other artists lived their lives and how they made their art. I’ve even worked with filmmakers like Stan Brakhage and photographers like Kai Sibley and spent time with artists like Sarah Chesnutt and Amy Hayes and David Treff and Tree Bernstein and musicians like Jeff Grove and Layne Redmond and Tamra Spivey and Ronnie Pontiac to better understand the way they see the world. Without that, my appreciation for film and photography and art and music would mostly be passive or intellectual. For instance, before I began working with filmmakers, I would see a film mostly in terms of its story. I’m still primarily interested in a film’s story, but now I also watch it as something constructed by the director, the writers, the director of photography, the actors, even the set designer—the film is the product of specific choices and imaginations and skills. I’m still caught up in the story, but I’m also aware of the camera angles and the framing and the lighting and the set design and how music is being used to create a specific mood, and the choices the editors and actors and director are making. Now, I’m not saying it’s better to be aware of all of that, but it’s something that just sort of happens to you as you become more experienced.

I began writing LIT as my attempt to rewrite the Norton anthologies. I felt there was more wisdom in the Norton anthologies than in any bible—that most of what you need to know in order to be fully human is included in the Norton anthologies—but no one reads them any more. They’ve got more about the experience of impermanence than Buddhism, they’ve got more on the different seasons of life than Ecclesiastes or the Tao, they have all you need to know about loss and rebirth and love or anything really important in human life. The experience of trying to rewrite the great poets, one by one, was like becoming part of a conversation with some of the smartest and most articulate people of all time. Western literature would be more interesting if it included more women’s and slave’s voices of course, but I found plenty of anthologies that were filled with the voices of all cultures and times.

By reading the Norton anthologies I also began to get a sense of what survives as literature, and why. Literature survives because it’s saying something really important. Learning what’s really important—and what’s been written about what’s really important—is a poet’s true education in their art. Like Pound said, “Why rewrite in mediocre verse what’s already been written to perfection?” Well, I decided that it was important for me to learn what’s been written to perfection. Now when I begin to write, it’s out of a context of at least being aware of the extent of what’s already been accomplished, not out of ignorance of it. My reading is the foundation I stand on, and it’s from what’s become part of my experience that I stand and look out at the horizon. I can’t help it. It’s just a fact.

There’s also a transformative experience in reading all of the great poetry from every recorded culture throughout time—it’s what they used to call a humanist education or “the liberal arts.” I think of it as the minimum information necessary to become fully human. I can almost separate my friends into political camps based on whether they’ve read The Grapes of Wrath or not.

And it’s not only about what the work is saying, but sometimes a work survives because of what it is. On the Road remains important because it’s about something important, written in an authentic voice that is completely understandable now, but was attacked not only for what it said but how it said it in its time. But the relationship to his life and the mode of experience that Kerouac captured in On the Road remains a possibility for others to discover for themselves because it was actually lived and not just imagined. It’s true. Likewise, when Ulysses was first published, even the most literate readers couldn’t understand what it was saying, because they weren’t aware of their own interior monologues. Now writing from the point of view of the interior monologue is standard in most novels since, say, World War II. In a way Joyce introduced the human race to their own innermost consciousness in Ulysses—as Kerouac did in his own way too—and that’s influenced everyone, whether they’ve read the books or not.

So that’s one real possibility for writing—to change the experience of what it is to be human. Or in the visual arts, to change the way we see. Educated art critics literally couldn’t identify the subjects of Impressionist paintings when they were first exhibited, but now the Impressionists are probably the most popular and influential art movement in history. But it’s even stranger than that. What we now consider the Impressionists’ pretty pictures were actually revolutionary subjects at the time—train stations and prostitutes and barmaids and beggars and drug addicts and alcoholics. One of the early reviewers even spat at one of the paintings. The “Impressionists” was originally meant as a derogatory term, describing their paintings as unfinished, as no more than sketches. They were the first to paint in plein air solely because tubes of paint were invented in their lifetimes. While they were painting some of their best known works, most of Paris was eating rats and straw because they had just lost a war with the Prussians, and what followed was the Commune, which was even worse. Renoir grew up in a slum and his family was made homeless when Napoleon III tore up his neighborhood to build the Champs Elysees. “Old Paris” was literally disappearing and “Modern Paris” was being born around them as they walked to their studios and cafes over makeshift wooden planks. Everything that is old to us now was once new, and if it’s lasted long enough to become quaint, it was probably revolutionary in its time. Andy Warhol was often considered a non-artist when he was alive, but now his style is probably the most imitated in the world. Last week alone I saw grids of the same photograph silkscreened in different colors in a Chinese restaurant, a travel advertisement, and a film made in modern India.

What becomes immediately clear in the study of art history is that the artist discovers the truly new work of art only in the process of creating it—it can’t be something you already know before you begin painting, because it doesn’t exist yet. Another thing you learn is that if you make art in the hope that it will make you happy, that’s a bad bet, but if you make art because it makes you happy, then you can’t lose.

Another thing you learn is that the best artists have a capacity to turn adversity into passion. In fact, I have a theory that the best art—like early Wordsworth, or the paintings of Van Gogh, or the first few Velvet Underground albums—were created in an atmosphere of outright hostility, and that friction with your audience files away all but the strongest parts of your work, the way a grindstone sharpens a knife. And if the culture isn’t receptive, it’s more likely that you’ll end up talking to eternity. It’s when Whitman began writing to poets a hundred years hence that he became eternal. That’s us, literally, that’s our generation. For others it’s more like Joseph Campbell’s idea of the Hero’s Journey, where the artist is banished from his home town for being “different,” and wanders through the unknown and discovers something while in exile that the town needs, and when he returns he brings the knowledge necessary to heal the whole tribe. And for others it’s more like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where you go in search of something and discover too late that you’re in the wrong place for the wrong reasons at the wrong time.

Emerson thought that the universal mark of genius is being misunderstood. He traces it back through not only the arts but in science and philosophy and religion as well, including Socrates and Jesus and Copernicus and Galileo. Sometimes when I get discouraged with my own work, or begin to think that it’s mostly nonsense, I’ll remember that it’s not whether anyone picks up on what I’m doing while I’m still alive or if I’ve really done anything at all. It’s that this is what I’ve decided to do with my life. At the same time it’s clear to me that I am no more in control of my work than I am in control of my life, and that one comes directly from the other. It’s like what Burroughs said about Kerouac: he was a writer because he wrote. It’s not a judgment, it’s a fact.

JC: It’s well known to anyone with knowledge of Kerouac School history that you transcribed over 28,000 pages of Allen Ginsberg lectures from his years at Naropa. Recently (July 3, 2009––ed.), you were invited to give a talk at an Allen Ginsberg Memorial in which you reflected upon eight pillars of Allen’s teachings. As the person perhaps best qualified to comment on Allen Ginsberg as a teacher, from the perspective of activist scholarship, would you elaborate on that meditation you presented?

RR: I spoke on Allen Ginsberg as a teacher, about what I called his “Eight Pillars of Poetics.” The first pillar was complete honesty. Complete honesty is something much deeper and more complex than what people usually mean by being honest—it’s about an uncompromising look beyond the surface of what you would like to believe is true to the deeper truth beneath it, which is usually something that you are hiding from, something that only strikes you when your defense mechanisms have broken down, usually through extreme forms of emotion, like love or grief. In order to persevere to get to that point, you have to be uncommonly dedicated to the truth, or beaten down to it.

The second pillar was a belief in the ability of poetry to transmit actual states of consciousness. In Allen’s case, those were primarily the states of consciousness he experienced in Buddhist meditation. If you’re not aware of that aspect of Allen’s writing, you’re missing an essential element in his poetry, especially the poems written in the second half of his life. In fact, he believed that poetry honestly written while experiencing any genuine emotion would automatically result in a text that transmitted that experience to others, mostly through the specific breathing patterns that are characteristic of certain strong emotions such as ecstasy and despair—preserved mostly through punctuation and line breaks and white space.

The third pillar was a belief in the power of spontaneous utterance—that the most powerful poetry was spoken in complete alignment with the emotional, physical, and intellectual experience of the moment, including an awareness of the audience and an historical sense of all that has gone before, as well as the moment’s deepest significance and possibilities. As such it brings the whole room’s focus into the present moment and place rather than taking it somewhere else, which is what most poetry does. It’s not that every poem has to be that, it’s just that that happens to be the most powerful form of utterance, and anything you say will be measured against that.

The fourth pillar was his belief that to divorce poetry from music was a big mistake, and that Zukofsky was right when he said that poetry’s lower limit was speech and its upper limit was music. That’s why Allen loved to play the songs of Richard Rabbit Brown and Bessie Smith in his poetry classes. In the same way he taught that much of the poetry of the past was actually written as lyrics to music that is now forgotten—like Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience or the Child ballads or the poems of Campion and Marlowe, or he’d compare a Shakespeare lyric to a Dylan song without the music.

The fifth pillar was Allen’s respect for the poetry preserved in the “Norton Anthology of Poetry”—especially pre-19^th-century poetry. For most of his time as a poetry teacher, Allen chose to teach out of the Norton Anthology of English Poetry—and not only that, but out of the first half of it, in order to concentrate on the craft of poetry. He taught that it was necessary to understand the history of poetry because modern poetry was written out of that tradition, and that if you don’t know Shakespeare as thoroughly as Kerouac did you can’t really understand Kerouac, or you would appreciate him for the wrong reasons. In the same way if you didn’t know Shelley, you couldn’t really appreciate Gregory Corso. Each semester he would begin with a survey of the various meters—like the iamb and spondee and dactyl—and then would have us write poems in our own language in classic forms like Sapphics and iambic pentameter and hendecasyllables and 12-bar blues and English hymns and ballads. What that practice does is it begins to shape your thought into musical meters and forms, and you develop an elegance of thought.

The sixth pillar was that a lot of important poetry was written in other languages and in other cultures and times, and if you’re only familiar with the poetry of your own language or era you’re missing some of the greatest poetry ever written, and the inspiration for poets such as Yeats and Eliot and Pound. When Allen put together his anthology of “Expansive Poetry,” four-fifths of it was from other languages and cultures. And he himself occasionally wrote in forms he borrowed from other cultures and times, including Elizabethan lyrics, Tibetan, Chinese, and Japanese forms, rap lyrics, calypso, the blues of course, and some forms he learned from Australian Aborigines.

The seventh pillar was that poetry actually had a medicinal value, and that a poet could heal social and psychological ills by writing and performing poetry. He also believed that the poet had a social function as well as a literary one—that there was a community of poets throughout time, and this community included your elders and your peers and the next generation as well, and that you especially needed to take care of those who couldn’t take care of themselves because they might be the most important poets of all.

The final pillar was something I re-learned when I was traveling with the percussionist Layne Redmond to Cyprus in 2009. She also brought Mary Rockford Lane, who has written books on shamanism, and Nathan Ells, the lead singer of a “shred” band called The Human Abstract, another rock and roll band with a name from William Blake. Layne was there to return ancient drumming practices to the Cypriot women, and late one night we four Americans got carried away, making plans to return the Eleusinian Mysteries to the Greeks in a cave on the island on Tinos, and the audacity of the idea was so huge that we were a little bit embarrassed, until Nathan shouted out “Go big or go home!” Living so close to Allen, I had to forget how important he was. But, looking back, I can see how he chose to “live large,” in both his writing and his life. And he took on the poets in the Norton anthologies and rose to their level of intensity by pitching his voice there. In a broader social and cultural sense he became one of Shelley’s unacknowledged legislators of the human race—he took on governments and institutions with his voice alone, and by his example moved others to live lives that were more humane and just.

JC: Having absorbed any number of poetic traditions, what poems have you written that both carry forward the poetics you found useful and also strike you as significant works of art in their own right? Of particular interest to me, in light of your mentioning Ginsberg’s interest in the Norton Anthology, is your recent book of poems LIT.

RR: There are basically three different threads that I’ve been working on in my writing. The first began in 1980 when I was talking with Ted Berrigan and told him that Dylan had written “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” out of the first lines of all the songs he didn’t think he’d have the time to write before he died, and Ted suggested I do something similar with my own work—take the best lines in all of my unsuccessful poems and paste them together into new poems. That began a project that lasted almost two years that has become part of my process ever since. I go through my old poems and delete everything except what still interests me. Later I re-read those pages of stray lines and begin to craft poems out of them. I was never happy with just randomly arranging them into 14-line sonnets like Ted suggested, but I began to see poems in them, or I’d see things I’d like to say but had never thought of before. I developed a process I call “over-writing,” which is to writing what Max Ernst called “fromage,” where he’d put a plank of wood under a canvas and run a black crayon over it and then paint over whatever design resulted. I start with pages of bits of my own writing and sometimes the writings from others and rewrite them until they no longer resemble the originals at all.

The first thing I learned by working in this way was that the poems I assembled randomly from stray lines were a lot more mysterious and interesting than the poems that came directly from my intellect, and to read one of them in public was a very different experience. It was often like reading a poem written by someone else. This freed me from identifying with my work, so the poem wasn’t about me, it was a separate object. I would work on it until it became a meaningful dramatic monologue from a character who was not me, and it freed the dramatist in me, and writing and performing became interesting to me again. I wasn’t satisfied until the poem sounded like “a real poem” and made literal sense, but they were less dry than when I tried writing out of my intellect—there was a lot more room in them, a lot more space. That’s something I’ve written about as “ending the tyranny of the I.”

The biggest part of that is merely temperament, certainly. In order for me to be happy, I have to be involved in something that I don’t control, because otherwise I get bored too easily. Duchamp got bored with making art too, and quit painting at barely thirty. What if art is something that’s happening around you all the time and to grab at one moment and spend months trying to recreate it in a studio so you can put your name on the bottom is to miss out on all the others? Duchamp became a chess player and played the game as a sculpture that moved through time, and he was good enough to become a member of the French national team. At the end of his life he would light a fire in his studio and sit in front of it all day, and said he would only begin to make art again if he could create something as interesting as fire.

It was in working in this way that I began to be able to concentrate for long periods of time in order to create bigger and bigger works, and I found a way where I could work for hours every night, night after night, rather than waiting to become inspired with some upsurge of feeling or thought. And what’s really ironic is that it’s only when I began to work with collage and montage and pastiche and fromage and incorporate overheard conversations and quotations from my reading and became more aware of the room I was reading in and thought less about me that I found my self onstage.

Another thing I learned from this process happened when I started getting interested in why I kept certain lines or phrases or images and not others. When I looked over the lines I had chosen to keep, it quickly became clear that they roughly fell into the categories that Pound identified as the three elements of poetry—phanopoeia, or the casting of images upon the mind’s eye; melopoeia, or the melodic phrase; and logopoeia, or the dance of intellect among words. I ended up with nine categories altogether, but they could all be more or less subsumed under those three. And this sensitivity to what was memorable about language made me begin to notice it more often—certain strings of words had an inherent musical quality in them, or I could “see” what they meant, or they were the kind of witty comments that I copied down in my notebook. And I just had to capture them, I didn’t have to conjure them up. It was something I could actually do. I couldn’t write novels, a good poem was a rare thing, but I could turn it into a craft. I had plenty of time. The art comes from making, as Yeats put it, “an hour’s work seem a moment’s thought.”

So that’s the first thread—beginning to think of poetry as something constructed and created, not something necessarily written. One of the unexpected benefits of this change was that I began to write less autobiographical poetry, and began to put all of that emotion and passion into my real life, which is where it belongs.

The attitude toward writing as something constructed and not necessarily written directly led to the next step, which was to continue working with my own words in this way but at the same to incorporate words I read or overheard. That began in 1990, when I went to Europe for the first time. I had just finished my last three MFA credits in Dorf Tirol, Italy, studying the work of Ezra Pound with his daughter Mary de Rachewiltz and her mother—and Pound’s long-time mistress—Olga Rudge, at Brunnenberg Castle, where a lot of Pound’s handmade furniture and tennis rackets and papers and library have been preserved. I sat at his writing desk and looked through the red 20-volume leather-bound French history of China from which he wrote the Chinese Cantos, with Pound’s delicate penciled references written in orderly columns in the endpapers, and opened his jacketless blue presentation copy of the first printing of Ulysses with Joyce’s tiny handwritten dedication to Pound on the title page.

Anyway, when my studies were over, I continued traveling through Europe for another six months alone. And at one point during this trip I went to stay on the Isle of Iona, off the western coast of England, because that was where the Western tradition had been preserved during the Viking invasions. By the time the Vikings arrived on Iona, the monks had constructed these tall stone towers with one door at the top, and they stored as much water and food and supplies as they could and rolled up the rope ladders when the Vikings landed and lowered them after they’d left. It’s because of those monks that most of the western tradition was preserved—much of Aristotle and Plato and the Greek playwrights, Cicero and the Latin poets, plus the illuminated bibles of the monks themselves. And I found it charming that the monks were instructed by their Orders to preach the word of God, but who would they preach to, since they were all monks? Well, they’d row out on Sunday mornings and preach to the seals sunning themselves on the rocks in the harbor near Fingal’s Cave.

So I made a pilgrimage to Iona to honor those monks. But—after I took a boat out to visit the descendants of the seals the monks preached to, and explored the ruins of the stone towers and the churches and the monk’s quarters, and walked through the graveyards and took photos of the Celtic crosses—there was very little to do on the island. There were a few books in the church’s gift shop, but none that interested me until I came across a book called “The Myths and Legends of the Irish Race,” which was published in 1904 or so. Later that night I began to read it, and quickly realized that it wasn’t very interesting at all, but I had nothing else to do so I continued reading and occasionally I’d read an odd phrase or construction or image that intrigued me and I began to underline them, without really knowing why, much like what I had done with my own work. Later, when I got home, I unpacked the book and began reading through the underlined phrases and they were interesting enough that I typed them up and began to work the lone phrases into a series of short poems called “The Myth of the Irish Race.” That began a process that I still use today that I call “collapsing” a text. The title poem of Mona Lisa’s Veil—my history of art—came from that process, as did the three collections that appear in Map of the World—one a collection of poems written from my study of alchemy, one from my study of dreams, and one from my study of shamanism. LIT came largely from that “collapsing” process as well. With Mona Lisa’s Veil, I collapsed an art textbook and also attempted to mimic the evolution of the history of art in the form of the poem itself. And in my first published book—a book-length poem called “Awakening Osiris”—I attempted to create an incantation modeled on the rites of Isis described by Apuleius in The Golden Ass, where each spring the tribe gathers at night and attempts to recite the 1001 names of the Goddess. It’s a bit like hunting Easter eggs—you have to be able to recognize the face of the Goddess underneath her 1001 disguises. And if you’re successful—and they usually were—the Great Goddess Herself would appear at sunrise. Most of the information in that poem came from collapsing a Jungian text on the Great Mother archetype by Erich Naumann published by Bollingen in the forties or fifties.

The third thread in my work is my attempt to break down the barriers between the different forms of writing in order to create something that is more like life as it’s actually lived. You can’t fit all of life into a collection of poems, or a collection of letters, or essays and interviews, but what if I mixed them all together?

This began as something of a surprise when I was typing up my journals from that first trip to Europe. I transcribed the writings exactly as they appeared so there would be a poem and then a prose piece and then a letter and then an essay and then a journal entry and then a dream and then a quote from something from my reading and then a set piece and then a snippet from an overheard conversation, all collected over a very diverse period of time. And there was one particular section from my time in England when I was simultaneously studying several different subjects at the same time, including the letters of Heloise and Abelard, the relationship between Edward Burne-Jones and the other Pre-Raphaelites and their lovers and wives, the poet Emmy Hennings and her husband Hugo Ball, and following traces of the Beatles in Liverpool and London. As I was typing up my notes, I decided I would do the organizing later, but when I read the transcript I was surprised by how the interweaving of these distinct stories suggested several real or possible comparisons, heightened by the jumping back and forth between stories. It was definitely more interesting than separating out the individual pieces of reportage that it was made from. And this added significance was created solely by chance, not by my conscious mind, and it was much smarter than my conscious mind, which wasn’t even aware of what I was really writing at the time. I eventually took this section out of the manuscript and published it separately with all of the art and photography it described as Ekphrasis and Cathexis in 1991.

But this mixing up of the arts didn’t stop there. After I published DODO—which was the complete notebooks from my European travels except for Ekphrasis and Cathexis—I decided to retire from poetry, for a variety of reasons. But then in 1995, Tom Peters caught me off-guard by asking me to read at Penny Lane, and I impulsively said yes, and then panicked because I quickly realized I had nothing to read. The only piece I had that I wanted to read was Ekphrasis and Cathexis but I couldn’t imagine how it could be performed because so much of it relied on being able to see the photographs and paintings as I described them. Then one day while I was out running I had an idea—I had recently been part of a hospital relief mission to rebuild an orphanage in Mante, Mexico, and take medicine into the mountains, which was the kind of thing I wanted to concentrate on after I’d retired from writing. There I met Kai Sibley, who was with a church group from Boulder to help with the rebuilding, and she mentioned that she had been an art photographer when she was in college and wanted to get back to it. After saying goodbye to her, probably forever, in a Boulder parking lot, I was happy a couple of days later to have a reason to call her, and I asked if she could shoot slides of some paintings and photographs and project them while I read. Taking those slides turned out to be a lot more complicated than I realized, but she had a macro lens and a projector and a friend who knew American Sign Language—Barbara Jean Slopey—so at my reading I set up a chair with a booklight on the right front of the stage, and Kai projected her slides on a screen at the back of the stage, and Barbara Jean signed the text live from the left of the stage. Wagner writes a lot about the gesamtkunstwerk, or the total work of art. He envisioned his operas as weaving together the best possible music, poetry, drama, painting, and dance into a single experience. We didn’t go that far, but it was the most fun I’d ever had onstage. It turned out that I could really ham it up as long as people weren’t staring at me.

Then I began working for about five years with Kai, creating more than two dozen of these slide-and-text performances, and at the same time I began Dangerous And Difficult Art Productions in order to create public collaborative experiences with other writers and musicians and artists, and restarted FRICTION (magazine––ed.) and Laocoon Press, and began the monthly on-line mag for immediate release with NYC poet Jackie Sheeler to give us some outlets. The next five years are far and away my most public and productive years. Creating art with others and then performing it together was a lot more fun than sitting in my living room working on a piece of writing. Plus having to read forced me to finish things, or to create new things to fit the theme of the event.

Around this time Richard Wilmarth saw a performance of Hymns—one of my collaborations with Kai—and asked if he could publish it. He had limited funds, and I wanted to publish it with Kai’s photographs or not at all, so I took over the production and handed the design over to the artist Amy Hayes, so that book is really a collaboration between Kai, Amy, and myself. And then I gave Tree Bernstein a poem I’d written called “one night” and she turned it into something that was as much a work of art as a book.

It was at the end of this period that I met Katie Bowler and we began a series of spontaneous collaborative writings that became Over Large Stars. One version of that manuscript even includes our e-mails, letters, artwork, non-collaborative poems, photographs, postcards, matchbooks, brochures from our travels, and whatever else we collected during our time together that could be represented on the page. That was probably the closest I’ve ever come to creating a gesamtkunstwerk. And it was the excitement of creating something with that level of multiplicity that completely killed what little interest I still had in creating collections of poetry.

But that was more or less the end of my collaborative phase for some reason. Much later, Tree Bernstein came up with the idea for us to write a series of ghazals via the internet as she traveled around the world, which we published as Away.

In 2002, I was invited to read at Philip Whalen’s memorial in San Francisco, which I turned into a mini art vacation, and I came home with the text of San Francisco Notebook. What’s ironic is that I’d decided not to bring any books or do any writing while I was there. I was going to leave my addictions to reading and writing at home and just be where I really was for once, but on the way to the airport I found an empty pocket notebook at the bus stop and had the funny idea that I could write a book in it while I was in San Francisco. It was a funny idea because I hadn’t written enough to fill a notebook of that size in the twelve years since I’d gotten back from Europe. But it was the first time I carried a pocket notebook at all times and I found I wrote a lot more when I could just easily jot something down without trying to turn it into a poem. By the time I returned, I’d filled almost the entire notebook, and I typed it up in chronological order, so like DODO a poem would be followed by a piece of prose or a letter and a journal piece and a mini-essay, broken up with quotes from my readings at the time, which were mostly from the poems of Rilke.

But somewhere in the middle of this process of typing them up I also began to experiment with taking the poems that didn’t quite make it and turning them into prose by erasing the linebreaks, or keeping the kind of linebreaks that are forced on prose when you’re writing in a notebook so it looked like a poem. Or I’d float a bit of poetry in the middle of an essay, or continue the form of the poem through a long section of prose so the form would be in conflict with the content, or I’d go quickly back and forth between poetry and prose until you weren’t sure if you were reading a prose piece interrupted by a poem or the other way around.

It’s about this time that I also began to reuse lines or images whenever I repeated myself in my notes. At one point in that collection I describe the same incident in a poem, a letter, and a journal piece. I thought I’d choose the best one and take out the repetitions in the editing process, but in re-reading the transcript they were like the reappearance of motifs and themes in music, and I could understand what Gertrude Stein meant when she said there is no such thing as repetition—that by the time you get to the third rose in “a rose is a rose is a rose” it’s no longer the same rose.

And for the first time I began to write pieces in other voices. I wrote an autobiographical piece in the voice of Rilke, and a poem in the voice of Ellsworth Kelly, and a series of poems in the voice of Yoko Ono, who had a full floor at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art at the time. Once that collection was published by Andy Hoffmann’s Elik Books, I thought of it pretty much as a one-time thing, but as I continued to travel these “notebook” works started to accumulate. In 2008, I published a collection of them as What Have I Become, and at the same time I published a collection of whatever stray works I had left over as Happiness, which will probably be my last non-notebook collection of work.

For the last ten years or so I mostly write only when I travel, so I refer to most of my collections as my “travel notebooks.” But on March 15^th 2007, I began a year-long project that had its name before I’d even written a word: A Year in Remove. I was flirting with going to Europe for a year, transitioning out of my job into something I could do as I traveled, and mentally preparing to empty my house and rent it out, leaving everything behind. Since I wanted to scale back on my traveling until then, I decided to create a project I could do without traveling. I live within 40 minutes of the Rocky Mountain National Park and I decided that I would drive there once a week and between visits I would read books about the park—books about the geology or the Ute Indians or accounts by the early settlers or guidebooks on the wildlife and wildflowers. That project only lasted until the tourists showed up in mid-June, and very little of that early writing survives in the final manuscript, but the idea of writing for a year had taken hold, so I continued until March 15^th 2008, and was surprised to find that I’d written a book by the end of the year. So I immediately began another one, and that’s continued right up until the present moment, where I’m almost finished with my third year-long collection, and I already see it as a four- or five-year project, if not longer. At some point during that process I also began to study the history of art and poetry in as many cultures and museums as I could, and that’s become the focus of the series now—what I wrote during this particular time while I studied world poetry and art and whatever else happened to me during that time.

I think it’s important to say that none of this evolution in my writing was planned. I would just get interested in something and pursue it, without really knowing where I was going. Looking back, there are definitely precedents. Lots of people have used cut-ups—from William Burroughs to John Cage to Ted Berrigan—and there have been others who made poems out of other texts—including Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky and John Ashbery. But I was never comfortable passing off another’s work as my own. So, if it’s worth quoting, I put it in quotes and source it. I’ve done a lot of thinking about this, observing what I was comfortable with and what I wasn’t when using the written works of others, and I realized there was a huge difference between taking somebody’s words and taking their ideas. If I take some of their words—say the title “The Myths and Legends of the Irish Race”—and change them to “The Myth of the Irish Race,” I feel the meaning has been altered enough to create a new idea, and most of my work is a lot more changed than that. That’s something Ted impressed upon me too. He once wrote a poem out of words he cut out of an essay in the New York Times by James Dickey. He said he knew there was a poem in there somewhere but Dickey hadn’t captured it. But, Ted insisted, you had to end up with something that even the original author wouldn’t recognize as their own work. I didn’t quite believe that was possible until I wrote a poem from the words of a local art critic and gave him a copy, telling him where I’d gotten the words, and he refused to believe me because he didn’t agree with anything the poem said. So, now, if a reader finds the original text I’m writing from, and I sincerely hope they do, they’ll better understand what I’m getting at and will uncover the invisible poem that exists somewhere between the original and what I’ve made from it. But I publish knowing that almost no one ever will, so if it doesn’t stand on its own, or if it doesn’t make any sense, or if it’s too hermetic, or if there’s no pleasure in it at all without knowledge of what I’m writing from, then I take it out.

The idea of reproducing the random contents of a notebook as a poem probably begins with Philip Whalen’s “Sourdough Mountain Lookout.” But I think more important to me as a model for writing poetry is his statement in New American Poetry that his poetry is “a graph of the mind moving.” That hooked in with Allen’s defense of Ezra Pound—that his writings are a chart of the evolution of his obsessions over time. That hooks into Anselm Hollo’s comment about it all being one poem. So now I see my writings as the record of my mind moving over time, including my studies and whatever I’m thinking about and seeing and doing at the time.

And as I’ve gotten older I’ve also noticed that what I write about is what I remember. It’s like photographs—I end up remembering not the actual moment I was trying to capture, but the photo itself. Once I realized that what I wrote about is what I remember, I began to write about what I wanted to remember. A poem in that way is one particular moment that becomes crystallized into an object that would otherwise disappear.

But the real explanation for any evolution in my writing was best summed up by the poet Mark DuCharme when I asked him what he was up to and he said, “Trying to find new reasons for writing.” That’s it, really. It’s mostly a matter of trying to stay interested in writing because writing and rewriting is so exhausting and time-consuming. I must have retired from writing half a dozen times because I don’t want to spend my life alone at a computer, writing. It’s like what Dylan said about writing his autobiography—when you’re writing about your life you’re not living it. But the fact is that if I’m not writing, I’m not happy.

You were the one who gave me the final piece. You said that people like us don’t really understand our lives except through the process of writing. The act of translating the events of our lives into words helps us to come to understand our lives a little, which are otherwise chaotic and unfinished and unplanned. By arranging and shaping our feelings and experiences on the page, they become part of the process we use to make sense of our lives—making what the neuroscientist Dan Siegel describes as “coherent” rather than an “incoherent” narratives. A poem is a point of focus that suggests coherence. It’s what I mean when I say “the poem is elsewhere.” Even this interview is a narrative created by selecting and attributing significance to certain elements and ignoring vast amounts of contradictory information into a story that aspires toward coherence. But it’s not life as it’s actually lived.

JC: The thing I always love about a poetry interview is how the poet always goes back to specific poems that are the real knowing eye of an explication on whatever the subject is. I really failed you in this by not encouraging more mention of specific poems that may illustrate your discussion by showing as a poet how you may have expressed the same thing as a poem. Isn’t that the reverse test in a way?

RR: Well, that’s probably my fault, mostly. I tend to shy away from talking about specific poems, except in a general way. Once I read a poem by Lee Ann Brown in The World Anthology and I told her that it was my favorite poem of all time, and she thought I’d enjoy knowing how it was made. It came from a class assignment where she was asked to focus on one particular sense in each line, and then add a sixth line that didn’t come from her senses but commented on them instead. When I reread the poem with that information, it completely ruined it for me. It’s like the opposite of my wanting to know everything about the works of art and artists that interest me. Anyway, I’m afraid to do that with one of my own poems. In a general way I’ve already talked about how some of my poems—like “Myths of the Irish Race” and the poems in LIT and Maps and Awakening Osiris—were created, but I can include one poem that’s both an example of my process and an explanation of it at the same time. It answers your question without my having to comment on the poem at all.

About a decade ago you wrote a letter to tell me that you were bewildered and disappointed by my current poetry, that you no longer understood what I was trying to say or do in my work. I took that as a challenge and decided to answer your question by writing a poem that explained what I was doing and at the same time was an example of what I was doing.  So the poem includes assemblage, montage, collage, pastiche, cut-up, fromage, bits of overheard conversations, and notes from what I was reading and listening to at the time. I won’t assassinate the poem for you, but I will insert it here. It’s called “Deus Ex Camera,” or “God is in the room,” which is the name of a medieval theological argument that God is present in the here and now, not removed from us in heaven or wherever—and that we can’t find Him or Her because we’re looking in the wrong direction.

Deus Ex Camera (for Jim Cohn)

The death of a child by fire
like Brueghel’s Icarus the boy falling
into the sea, and there’s a ship and
anxiety and the thin veil of the real
here, the place, the coordinates of
everything I’ve counted on,
all of these things
until I no longer know
where I am—
and wonder if
behind these veils
are monsters,
and the black hole of all
my fears and
operative chance, too.
This.

For people who are
not heavenly bent
the fabric of reality
is big but it’s still
not enough—but
there’s the logic
of dream and music,
or to move along as melody
with no particular need
to go anywhere specific
but to delight in sudden
appearances and
disappearances
—indirection somehow.

Or how poems have in mind
suggestions, but the extent of
one’s particular language creates the
picture or suggestion—while music is
happy to be no one—to have
nothing to answer.

How can anyone imagine
a poem like that and then
add all the other words—

all the other lines
that fill the page with
how it might go—

a perception translated into language
one can get lost in,
but instead
you just go on.

How the limits aren’t in
the statement or even its
themes but the limits are
in the words themselves,
okay?

Do you see that
as a way of writing,
going into and out of abstraction—
a completely ordinary sentence
but not the whole sentence?

Of course the weather continues—
the same weather every day
and so cold now it just continues—
the same weather every day
returning, and going on about that.

How the symphonic draws figures
aimlessly within the possibilities of
limitless gesture and the vanity
of everything, and how it happens
quick—how the sound—the tone of it
—changes the meaning—tremors
and a kind of nervousness in the voice—

or sometimes too fast—a fault
in the reading, the sense of passing
mind—snowflake fashion—how none of it
adds up but arrives and continues
moving.

Or more silence than you’re
accustomed to. Or sometimes a little
inner laugh—sly humor or eye humor.

But it’s pathetic, getting up and not
feeling that way—even when everyone
laughs or even when you laugh.

Or Auden—how over-irony-ized
irony is a way of not shooting straight—
of indirection somehow, lack of direction, lost direction.

And then the other thing, others being too
present in the writing while writing—
a multiplicity of readers and their sense of it—

or the sense of oneself, myself, anyone
like Frank O’Hara or whomever
against the corporate self—or that

“distant” you or we or I that we have
here—and sometimes a them or a he
that’s a multiple he.

Someone who can write a poem like that—
all of the various hes and shes and theys of it.

Or the words all frontal until you’re
conscious only of reading words, and
sometimes they’re sentences and
sometimes they’re syntax and sometimes
they’re rhetoric and sometimes they’re
ordinary prose—all these long, long
What are they? Associations?
all these things you know and I know
in common, where words are words
first with emphasis upon them—
or where words are physical in the sense of
physics and have weight and shape and
their own values—and then in this—
in this—in this–to include
what we know as human.
A place for it.

A voice that says even this much
in this way of continually speaking
to oneself while elsewhere—as if
one can think of it and it will be here—

Can you hear me over all this machine noise?
Lick, lack, luck, lock, lake, black
Latin roots, rare and archaic words are
monsters in a way.
Or rhetoric—what is it?

Or how always thinking
about thinking adds a
feeling of sadness or
danger in the sense
of what if you get
lost inside it
or don’t know
where you are or
how it’s gotten so
scattered—

all these things
in all this
as some way of
What? Disappointment?

Or where the poem comes from—
the source—where the energy is—
how persuasive the voice. The
emotional light of Pindar,
or even the voice in Eliot—
in the “Four Quartets” or whatever—
the character—and that there are
people speaking who are
still more Eliot than not—

or a sense of who you’re talking to or who’s talking or
Valery who thought about poems for 20 years,
not writing poems and then
not writing poems written by
anyone other than their author—

or the “other” in the sense of
oracle or medium through whom
these words come, refusing to say
specific things in order
to give the rational mind
something to chew on
designed to destroy it.

Or something oracular in the way of
intention, of incantation—
But then what’s left?

And all I had was music and
no sense of how to make it music, but
That these poems were beautiful—
That they shimmered and shimmied—
That they leapt fearlessly in that direction.

Jeffrey Side has had poetry published in various magazines such as Poetry Salzburg Review, and on poetry web sites such as Poethia, nthposition, eratio, Ancient Heart, Blazevox, P.F.S. Post, hutt, ken*again, and CybpherAnthology. He has reviewed poetry for New Hope International, Stride, Acumen, and Shearsman. From 1996 to 2000, he was the assistant editor of The Argotist magazine.

JS: How did you come to be Allen Ginsberg’s assistant at the Naropa Institute?

RR: In the late 1970s, I was living in a rural town in Connecticut, and I came across a magazine article about Naropa Institute. It said that Allen Ginsberg was accepting apprentices, and I applied, never expecting to get accepted. But I was, and flew out to Boulder, Colorado in November 1979, when I was 25 years old. I’ve written about that experience in an article published by the Naropa Bulletin in 1981 (“The Object Is to See Clearly”), and I’ll post that article on my website, for anyone interested (www.randyroark.com).

When the apprenticeship was over, I worked for Ginsberg for a couple of years as one of his teaching assistants, helping him to prepare for his classes and recording them, and transcribing and editing his lectures on William Blake. I also worked as an administrative assistant for the Poetics Department at Naropa while he was running the program. Then I worked with him on the first three years of the Naropa Summer Writing Program, leaving in 1985.

At that time I had a severe falling out with the Naropa Poetics Department, and took off for several years. I returned in the late 1980s to get my MFA in Poetics and Prose, and began working with Allen on several projects. In 1991, Allen asked me to transcribe and edit a lecture of his on William Blake for the New Censorship magazine, and that led to a plan to transcribe all of his poetry lectures. I worked on that project from 1991 until he died in 1997, transcribing, editing, and annotating over 28,000 pages of his lectures. I also transcribed and edited the material used in the book that accompanied his 4CD set for Rhino Records, Holy Soul, Jelly Roll. By the time he died I had finished editing a manuscript from his work on William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, which he never got a chance to finish, and had begun assembling material for a book chronicling his 1995 trip to China, including photographs, poems, and lecture transcriptions. After his death, I also edited a set called First Thought, Best Thought for Sounds True, an audio book publisher, including recordings of lectures on writing by Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Anne Waldman, and Diane di Prima.

JS: What sort of things did Ginsberg teach at Naropa?

RR: Allen taught there for 22 years so, of course, he taught a lot of things, especially since he rarely taught any texts or subjects twice. He taught a series of classes called “A Literary History of the Beat Generation.” He taught a couple of semesters of “Ecstatic Poetry” from every century and country, and he taught a class on William Carlos Williams. He taught Blake and Sapphics and blues and spontaneous poetry most of all, because they were each a combination of the elements he liked to talk about most—they were oral forms that were improvised within a particular form, and that they were a more proletarian poetry than the stilted, artificial poems that were being taught in most schools at the time. But, in 1980, he began teaching a class called “Basic Poetics” because he realized that you couldn’t talk to kids about Kerouac or Pound if they didn’t think at an educated and informed level. It was like the pendulum had swung too far—poets were showing up who only knew the Beats and not the lineage they were writing out of, and so he thought their work was being largely misunderstood or appreciated for the wrong reasons. So he began at the beginning of the Norton Anthology of Poetry and tried to work his way through the entire history of English poetics in a couple of semesters. Each year he’d set dramatic goals—like Gilgamesh to Blake—and each year he’d get hung up on an anonymous Victorian lyric or Shelley’s political poetry or the meter in Milton, and spend the rest of the term talking about it.

But, if I had to choose one class to sum up Allen’s interests, it would be a class he taught the first summer at Naropa on the poetry of William Carlos Williams that he taught that first summer at Naropa, called “Mind, Mouth, and Page.” “Mind” because he was interested in the mind as the crucible in which a poem was formed, or sometimes it’s a chemical reaction of experience and the poet’s mind. He was also interested in what “a poet’s mind” was and how it differed from a non-poet’s mind, and what value it had in the non-poetic world, and how that state of mind could be attained and intensified, and then how to pass an actual state of mind along to others, not just write another “poem.”

And the way Allen was interested in passing along those states of mind to others was through actually invoking them in his audience. And he found the best way to do that was through their breathing, which he had learned through his study of mantra and classic Tibetan Buddhist breathing techniques taught by Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. The idea is that when you are in an ecstatic state, or a meditative state, or a sad state or whatever, that there is a precise and distinctive physiology to that state, and the way you can access that state most easily is through your breathing. In other words, if you are in a heightened state of any form—anger, regret, whatever—then you will naturally fall into that emotion’s distinctive breathing pattern. And, of interest to poets, you will naturally write and speak in those rhythms as well. And it works in the reverse as well—if you breathe in the form of the emotion, then that emotion will appear in you. This change in breathing will actually invoke a real experience in you of the emotion invoked—especially elevated states like joy and ecstasy and rage and despair. And that’s why Allen was confused by so much modern poetry, especially student poetry, because not only was it written without an understanding of these natural rhythms so no actual emotion was invoked, but too often there was no emotion in the poem at all—or confused emotions. The poem Allen most often taught to beginners was Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” because he found that reciting that poem in choral form with an entire class would make this connection between breath and state of mind obvious to everyone, depending on their state of participation. Those who really breathed with the poem inevitably got high—or at least dizzy.

And, as an aside, Allen thought that one of the reasons poetry had devolved into this state was that poets too little loved themselves and their emotions—so they couldn’t celebrate them in their verse, or they celebrated them too little, and instead were always censoring themselves.

Allen also wanted to remind people how many of our classic poems were actually lyrics—like the lyrics to a Dylan song, but to songs now forgotten—like Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience or the lyrics of Andrew Marvell and Thomas Campion. He was also happy to discover that many of these poems were actually sold on the streets of London and Dublin over a one-hundred-year span, or that families passed on broadsides of poems that had hung in their living rooms for generations. That also explains Allen’s interests in Dylan and the modern troubadour method and pop music.

And “Page” because everything depended on what you read on the page and how you read it. But also because the poet was reduced to the page in modern culture, unless you’re Dylan, so if you don’t also make it something that could be enjoyed in a book, you wouldn’t make it into the anthologies, and your work would be lost. I also think it probably has something to do with the amount of reading a poet has to do in order to know their craft.

JS: Apart from Ginsberg you also knew other poets connected to the first wave of the Beat movement, such as Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Gregory Corso. You also knew poets Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman and others who came slightly later. This must have been a very formative period for your poetic development. Was it?

RR: I probably only have two stages of poetic development. The first was meeting the poet and teacher Sandy Taylor in Willimantic, Connecticut when I was 19 years old. I had dropped out of college the year previously, and Sandy was the first living poet I ever met. I was amazed to find someone else who wrote poetry! I audited Sandy’s classes on Yeats, Eliot, and Frost. I can still remember how he came into the classroom one day and slammed a pile of books on the table and said, “Today I’m going to sell you on Yeats.” Then he stood in the center of the room and mimed the events opening Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan”—”A sudden blow”—and he slapped his fist into his hand—’the … great … wings … beat … ing … still’—and he waved his arms above his head in rhythm to the words—’above the stag-ger-ing-girl,’ as he stumbled across the room. In that one moment, on a visceral level, I realized that poetry was more than just words on the page, but I had no idea and no skills on how to take it there.

Sandy was also a publisher and his Curbstone Press (with Judy Doyle) is still publishing international literature with political and, some would say, leftist concerns. He also introduced me to the social world of poets by hosting poets from other countries, working beside me in his basement with an old drum press, printing broadsides and chapbooks, involving me in poetry readings and events, and hanging out with a young kid and answering his endless questions and talking “shop.” It’s funny, but the unpolitical poetry Sandy dismissed with contempt is probably the poetry I write now. And the poet he ridiculed most often as over-rated—Ezra Pound—became one my favorite writers.

When I arrived at Naropa I knew almost nothing about modern poetry, but suddenly I was surrounded by poets from the previous generation—like Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, Clark Coolidge, Anselm Hollo, and Tom Pickard—as well as writers I considered my elders, like Ginsberg, Snyder, William Burroughs, Diane di Prima, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky. I didn’t realize at the time how special a time that was—but now I realize that if I had been born five years earlier or five years later, I would have … well, I have absolutely no idea what my life would look like now.

The poetry I write now is almost completely written via cut-ups or the collage method, and that’s certainly nothing I would have ever developed on my own. It started entering my work in 1980 or so, when I told Ted Berrigan that Dylan had composed the lyrics for “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” out of the first lines of songs he didn’t think he’d have time to write, and Ted suggested I do that with my own work—to go through poems I didn’t like, take out my favorite lines, and arbitrarily stitch them together. When I began working in this way, I immediately noticed a different voice in my poetry that I preferred to my own. It was also something that I could read in front of an audience with some sense of engagement, as if I were reading someone else’s poem. I also remember being somewhat puzzled and disappointed when Gary Snyder mentioned that he used file cards to copy down orphan lines of poetry that occurred to him during the day, and then rifled through them later when he needed something for a poem. Now I have post-it notes all over my computer with stray lines to scan when I’m assembling more than writing poems. Philip Whalen’s most famous poem—”Sourdough Mountain Lookout”—was the result of typing up his notebook one summer and realizing it was a kind of poem. And then when I “caught” Ted Berrigan making a poem out of someone else’s words, he taught me how to use someone else’s words to create a poem that the original author wouldn’t even recognize as their own words.

But the education I received at Naropa was more about how to live than it was about writing poetry. During my apprenticeship, Allen was less interested in my poetry than he was in asking me questions that I could only answer out of my heart, until I began to speak from my chest, not my forehead. This remains the most influential event in my life, both personally and as a poet. That and Anselm Hollo’s encouragement not to be afraid of my own mind. And there’s the day when I was at my lowest and Ted Berrigan stuck his thick yellow finger in my chest and said, “You’re a poet.” Or when Philip Whalen stopped me as I was fleeing a party, insisting that I should stay out of the social scene entirely—“They will only confuse you.”

Each of these elements is such an important event that just one of them would have been enough to set me off in a certain direction, but taken all together, they gave me the tools I needed to continue to explore language with limits so vague and all-inclusive that there is practically nothing my poetry cannot contain or at least explore. In addition, we had the yearly presence of the wit and gentleness of William Burroughs, and casual and technical conversations with Robert Creeley, Michael McClure, Ed Sanders, Carl Rakosi, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Carl Solomon, John Clellon Holmes, Bernadette Mayer, Joanne Kyger, Alice Notley, Marianne Faithfull, Philip Glass, Robert Frank, David Hockney, Karl Appel, Herbert Huncke and (before my time) Robert Duncan, Rambling Jack Eliot, John Ashbery, Helen Adam, and John Cage. And, of course, the year-round presence of Allen Ginsberg and all the excitement that brought to town. And the general insistence from all of them that I was looking in the wrong place—that it wasn’t so much about writing poems, but of living a poetic life—of being a poet. That if I could accomplish that, poems would fall naturally from me like leaves from a tree. If you add all that up somehow, that pretty much explains my poetic method.

The most interesting thing about Naropa poets, I think, is that they’re so dissimilar. Some followed Clark Coolidge into L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and work that is, for me, fairly opaque. Others, especially women, followed Anne Waldman into performance poetry and music and theater, some followed Allen’s messianic path, some Corso’s poete-maudit alcoholic dance, some wrote in the classical form of the great Buddhist poets, and there’s whatever I do. Maybe someone outside of Naropa can categorize a post-Naropa poet, but I don’t see it.

JS: Over the years, you’ve delivered a number of lectures combined with slide shows. You did one on Philip Whalen and one on William Blake. What stimulated you to combine lectures with slides?

RR: By late 1994, I had “retired” from poetry for a second time (the first being in 1985, when my marriage dissolved and I more or less retired from everything). By January 1995—when I was asked to give a 41^st birthday reading by Tom Peters—I had lost interest in writing and performing poetry entirely, and had gotten involved in other things. Poetry as a means of self-expression or of announcing my opinions or to express any private pleasures I experienced in language was no longer interesting to me, and I was having those needs satisfied in other ways. One of the things I got involved in was traveling to Mexico as part of a team bringing medicine and physicians to remote mountain communities and helping to rebuild an orphanage outside Mante, Mexico. At this time I was also working full-time in an emergency room as well as transcribing and editing and annotating several Ginsberg poetry lectures a month. I was also running a lot.

Seconds after agreeing to read as part of Tom’s series, I started to panic—what was I going to read? I went through my work and found only one piece that I was interested in reading, which was a prose piece that I assembled out of a notebook I’d kept while I was traveling solo through Europe and Egypt from July 1990 through January 1991. Like Philip Whalen’s “Sourdough Mountain Lookout,” I typed up my notebooks when I got back, and one particular section was rather startling in the way it was arranged, solely by chance. Because I was more or less studying something particular at the time while moving through England and France, my notes looped and were interrupted and returned and re-returned to previous themes which, by the end, included the pre-Raphaelite painters and their models and wives, medieval lovers Heloise and Abelard, the Beatles and Beatlemania, and Dadaists Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings. The problem I had was that most of it was written as private notes to myself about particular photographs and paintings, and so they didn’t attempt to describe them, but only noted what I wanted to remember about them.

But one day while I was out running, I had an interesting thought. On a relief mission to Mante in October 1994, I had met a woman photographer who lived in Boulder and I wanted to spend more time with her. This might solve both problems! I could have her shoot slides of the paintings and photographs, and have them projected while I read. Luckily she said yes and luckily she already had a macro lens, because taking slides of paintings and photographs turned out to be a lot more complicated (and expensive) than I thought. At that first performance (of “Ekphrasis and Cathexis”), I also had Barbara Jean Slopey simultaneously translating the text into American Sign Language. It was like a three-ring circus with better art. Plus, it was the perfect speed and stimulation level for kids who’d grown up on MTV and McDonald’s commercials. While the audience was looking at Kai [Sibley]’s beautiful slides of beautiful paintings and photographs, and Barbara Jean was signing the words with gestures that visually painted the words as a flowing movement, I was sitting behind a music stand with a booklight in the shadows at the corner of the stage. I found that I really enjoyed hamming it up when I wasn’t feeling dozens of eyes staring at me. I was certain this was what I was going to do for the rest of my life, and that’s more or less been the case, although Kai and I amicably parted ways before the Cocteau performance, and I ended up putting together the ones on Stan Brakhage and my travels through Turkey in 2003 by myself, using a laptop computer and an LCD projector.

When this first performance was over, I wanted to spend more time than ever with Kai and we began putting together and performing two dozen of these slide/text presentations over the next eight years. Some of them were constructed around original writing of mine, but most of them were designed as illustrated poetic lectures for various festivals and fund-raisers. We did one on the surrealists, two different ones on the Dadaists, one on the pre-revolutionary poets of Russia, one on Philip Whalen, one based on my notebooks as a student of Ginsberg, Snyder, Burroughs, Berrigan, etc, and ones on Lorca, Blake, Anne Waldman, and Cocteau. The one I like best—other than the first one—was the only one where Kai shot the photos first, and I had to write the text to go with them. That was actually published, with about a dozen photographs, as Hymns. That book ended up as a collaborative artwork, with the book design (by Amy Hayes), the photographs, and the poetry treated equally.

JS: You mention Stan Brakhage. What is it particularly that you like about his work?

RR: When Allen G. died (in April 1997), I was somewhat set adrift. For 17 years, more or less used Allen, the parasitic way a pilotfish uses a shark. Allen was the magnet that attracted all of the trappings of artistic success, and I hung around close enough that I could experience all of that excitement without having any real accomplishments or attention or responsibility of my own. It was through him that I met painters like Francesco Clemente and Karel Appel, musicians like Marianne Faithfull and Philip Glass, and I could sit in his apartment and eavesdrop on his “backstage” conversations with Robert Creeley, Paul McCartney, and Harry Smith. And it was through him that I got involved in high-profile projects, like his 4-CD retrospective set with Rhino Records, or creating manuscripts such as the one on Blake and the one from his travels in China. And by transcribing, editing, and annotating his poetry lectures, I continued my education, not only through his insight into poems and their components, but also in how his mind worked. By 1985, Allen had moved from Boulder back to New York City and I refused several offers from him to move there and work for him full-time, preferring to remain in Boulder and transcribe and edit his lectures from there, where I felt safe. Every time I called his office in New York, it seemed someone else had been shot or arrested. So in spite of all his protestations that the city was safe and that I was missing hanging out with Bob Dylan and Beck and Bono, I was happy to keep all of that excitement at a distance, and to reconnect with him when he visited Boulder twice a year.

Luckily for me, the filmmaker Stan Brakhage lived in Boulder, and I began hanging out with him shortly after Allen died. Stan was teaching film at the University of Colorado at the time, and every Sunday evening he would host a “salon” at the university, where he’d show a selection of short films, and afterwards retire to a conference room where he’d discuss the films and anything else that crossed his mind with anyone interested. It was another way for me to continue to experience the creative process and listen-in while an accomplished artist discussed their work and art in general.

Stan was, in my mind, the most important American “art” film creator. He is the “author” (I don’t think he’d be averse to that title) of over 300 finished films. By the time I met him, he had suffered both bladder cancer and cancer treatment, and it had mellowed him incredibly. In the early eighties, I was literally afraid of him—any seemingly innocuous statement could set him off on a tirade—but by the late nineties he didn’t have the energy for argument, or he was much more interested in being kind and supportive to people—especially younger artists like myself—in general. He also considered himself a frustrated poet, and for a time in the fifties lived with Robert Duncan and Jess in San Francisco, and he went out of his way to support me and my work as a poet, especially in those times when I was very uncertain of my own work. By enthusiastically encouraging me at those times, I came to accept, as I never did with Allen, that art is often created out of confusion, not certainty.

I’m not sure if you’re familiar with much of Stan’s work, but he quickly moved from creating films with a camera and lens, to creating films by painting and drawing directly on film stock or scratching, with an Exacto blade, on black leader. I still remember the revelatory feeling I had the first time I saw one of his films—I was listening closely to a lot of John Coltrane solos at the time and I actually “heard” the film’s movement as an ascending solo, much like one of Coltrane’s—which is interesting because I later learned that Stan considered these painted films examples of “visual music.” I also remember the first time I held a stretch of his film in my hand. He had taken an Exacto blade and sculpted a three-dimensional bas relief on a streak of black leader. In his later films, when he applied acrylic paint directly on the surface of film stock and then projected them in a darkened theater, it was like looking at a painting by Kandinsky or Kline, except that it moved through time, and accumulated “afterimages” in the mind’s eye. Even in his earlier films, made with a camera, Stan radically altered the film medium—instead of focusing on a visual image as a means to forward a narrative line, he brought the audience’s mind to the level of the act of perception itself. In film you’re stuck with a story form—since film moves through time and one image follows another—but Stan’s films refused to resolve or move forward. They just are. You have to learn how to see a Stan Brakhage film—at first I thought they moved too fast, but after seeing a half dozen or so I realized he was projecting them at just the right speed—it was my ability to perceive that had to get faster.

For almost six years, I soaked myself in film through Stan. By the time he died in 2003, I had arranged a two-night retrospective of his films in his adopted hometown of Boulder (which won that year’s “Art-Film Festival of the Year” award for the Denver area), put together a six-hour three-night celebration of his films on a local cable access television station (the first time he’d agreed to showing his films on television), and produced a 3-hour television interview with him and the filmmaker and musician Joel Haertling, and got the City of Boulder to declare his birthday “Stan Brakhage Day.” I also published a book (Dissolve: Screenplays to the Films of Stan Brakhage) which he received three months before his death that was written by transcribing, as closely as possible, my actual thoughts while watching a series of about 100 of his films at the Boulder Public Library over the course of a six-month period in 2002.

When Stan died, I feel my apprenticeship ended—I was no longer interested in attaching myself to any particular artist, and was drawn more and more into my own personal relationship to art, and my own writing experiments in particular.

JS:  You’ve written and lectured extensively on Bob Dylan, presented a 24-hour radio history program on him for KAIR in 1985, and taught about him at Naropa Institute. What it is about Bob Dylan that interests you so much?

 RR: The reason that Dylan has continued to inspire me is that he’s found a way to stay alive in the business of singing songs as a living better than anyone I know. Better than the Beatles, better than Presley, better even than the Rolling Stones, who are still going strong, but their range is pretty prosaic when compared to Dylan’s. I saw Dylan as recently as his last tour [2005], where he played piano half-turned away from the audience all night and didn’t address us until the very end of the show, when I think he introduced us to the members of his band. And I turned to a friend on the way out and told him that the best thing about seeing Dylan in concert is that he’s always teaching me what’s in store if I can grow old with grace and style, and with my wit and sense of humor intact.

The lucky part of being a Dylan fan—other than the great songs he continues to churn out—is that he has been able to precisely describe the path of his fierce intelligence as it moved through time and circumstance. I don’t know of any body of work that is as rich in illuminated detail seen in the light of a sometimes hyperkinetic and sometimes Zen-like mind like Dylan’s. Ginsberg had that quality too—of innocently and honestly reporting the events of his life in the moment, without the benefit of hindsight. Ginsberg, and Dylan too somewhat, continuously kept moving outward from the center, trying to discover where the living energy was. Ginsberg did this mostly by hanging around with kids, and by continuously trying to burn the “corpse of Ginsberg,” as he put it, after he returned from India in 1963. For Dylan it was more like the relative anonymity of it, trying to reinvent or improve upon some inherited, traditional form—like Dust Bowl Ballads, folk music, love songs, protest songs, and even trying to get his sound on AM radio. 

You can start to chart the transformative power of Dylan’s song lyrics with the political songs, which are unlike any other—”Only a Pawn in Their Game,” for example, where he points the finger away from the man who pulled the trigger, and focuses it on the ones who benefited from and instigated the murder and explained precisely why and how they did it. He pulled the listener’s eyes away from the social hypnosis, and showed them the projector of the film, in the Platonic sense. I heard Dylan sing “Masters of War” to a packed house at the Denver Coliseum on the weekend following the September 11^th disaster, and each line of the song was so precise in its detail and clearly enunciated that the audience shouted out the truth of every line. “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” is constructed as tightly as any Dashiel Hammett novel—complete with surprise ending. I can remember playing “Ballad of Hollis Brown” to my parents in an effort to get them to understand me—a story song that ends with an impoverished farmer shooting his family and himself because he can no longer face them starving a little bit more every day. And in “Who Killed Davey Moore” he enumerates the list of those who are really responsible when an entertainer dies in plain sight.

After reinventing protest music—making it smart and sophisticated—he began to deconstruct his own persona in public. He wrote a song about how everything he had said so far was wrong—”My Back Pages.” He tore someone apart in “Like a Rolling Stone,” only to admit years later that he lost the ability to write such songs because he came to understand that the person he was angry at was himself.

But the most important lasting contribution of Dylan’s is, in my life, the objectification of certain mental states that I believe are at the root of what it is to be creative. The mind that can write “To live outside the law you must be honest,” or “She knows there’s no success like failure, and that failure’s no success at all” is a mind that is living, and writing, in the presence of that mystery.

JS: Yes, Dylan does seem to have a knack of writing songs that are forever relevant (your experience of his ‘Masters of War’ at the Denver Coliseum being one of them) and which can provoke in the listener personal significance. He does this, I think, by not telling the listener the whole story. He leaves something for you to fill in—or personalise. Most mainstream contemporary “poets” would call this lazy writing, but I call it genius. And you are right—his songs contain gems of wisdom such as the ones you quote (‘To live outside the law you must be honest’). This sort of thing is presumably frowned upon in contemporary poetic circles. But I think it is their loss. What mystifies me is when I see Dylan passed over for the Nobel Literature Prize, when a “poet” like Seamus Heaney (who basically writes descriptive prose) has been awarded it.

RR:  It’s interesting to me that you mention not telling the listener the whole story as creating a space for the listener to enter into the work. When I began using cut-cups, pastiches, and collages and was no longer interested in creating poems of personal significance—like the art I was taught to appreciate in high school and college before I attended Naropa, art that “said something”—I experienced something similar. When I wrote a poem that was designed by some sense of order outside of traditional narrative or had a lot of space in it, people began to come up to me after a reading or write me letters about how a poem of mine somehow read their minds, or they would tell me what a poem of mine meant, which was not what it “meant” to me at all. It reminds me of an experience I have while listening to jazz sometimes when a musician plays a series of notes where the final note is obvious and they don’t play it so instead I hear it in my head—and it’s not only sonically perfect, but, because I hear it in my head, it’s inside of me, instead of outside of me. Of course, who knows if everyone in the audience hears the same note? (laughs) I think something similar is possible in all forms of art. I have friends I discuss films with as well, and it’s interesting to me how we see ourselves and our concerns reflected in a film as well, as long as the filmmaker isn’t overly concerned with getting a message across.

So, for the artist, the question becomes—if this response is important to you—how do you create it in art? It seems to be a radical redefinition or vision of what the artist and art is about. I know when I first began thinking of poetry as a career, I thought my job was to create a body of work that was distinctly mine—that it involved knowing things and experiencing them for others and then writing about them. But now it seems to be more about a state of mind that I can transmit to others once I learn how to attain it. In other words, when listening to Dylan’s songs, what you actually experience is Dylan’s mind moving—or, as Philip Whalen described it, “a graph of the mind moving.” One of the few things I said to Allen Ginsberg about poetry that he found interesting was that sometimes I realized a thought I just had was the last line to a poem, and then I had to go back and precisely recreate the sequence of thoughts that led to it in order to capture the poem.

The way I see it now is that the task of at least one kind of artist is not so much the creation of art but rather the manifestation of a kind of mind. And I think this is where one kind of art appears—where instead of a painting coming out at you, so to speak, you can fall into it or project yourself into it. That movement—into a work of art as opposed to being confronted by it—has a particular sensation to it of expansion. I feel—quite literally—moved by it. It’s like falling into smoke and having the smoke enter you. Narrative art tends to have a harder surface, and you stand in relation to it. You remain intact. Because I’m always changing, what I thought yesterday is usually not that interesting to me. But when I write a poem that has a lot of ambiguity in it, sometimes I can continue to read it over time.

 JS:  That was an excellent answer and one that would make the basis for an interesting essay, should you ever want to do it. Another appealing thing about Dylan (although it’s not directly connected to the poetic) is his singing voice; in particular his unique phrasing and stressing of words that are not normally grammatically stressed. For me this, somehow, “opens-out” the particular word for more interpretation. I can’t think of an example off-hand, but I’m sure you know what I mean. Have you any thoughts on this?

RR: Well, one example of what you’re talking about would certainly be the changing sense of the word “blue” that he ends every chorus of in “Tangled Up in Blue.” Dylan’s ability to “open-out” the individual syllables of his lyrics is something that interested Allen Ginsberg as well, who knew his work mostly in performance, especially as one of the members of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue from 1975-1976. Allen often remarked on two important vocal qualities of Dylan’s performances—the first was that Dylan always enunciated every letter very clearly in performance—snapping the t’s at the end of a word, for instance, or elongating and delighting in the vowels inside of them. Allen thought this was the result of Dylan’s awareness that his lyrics had to be understood by those in the back rows of the venue through all of the electricity. The second thing Ginsberg noticed night after night was that Dylan used the syllables themselves as something like a sail that he would fill with air, not so much concentrating on their meaning as on their sound, as a jazz musician might. He thought that was one way that Dylan kept himself interested in playing the same songs night after night.

JS: What are you writing at the moment?

RR: Actually, my main writing and my greatest excitement about writing presently comes, oddly enough, from ghostwriting books for others. I feel this is very important in my writing practice, although I’m not exactly sure how. Part of it is just learning how to write a book, of how to construct a paragraph, and then a set of paragraphs that become a chapter, of learning what a good introduction is and what it does, how to best end a book, standards you should aim for in each of a book’s parts—that sort of thing. Working from someone else’s ideas and trying to write in another’s voice seems very much like an apprenticeship in a craft, of working with text and language without having to work directly from my own work.

I haven’t written anything much of my own since late July 2005, when a major relationship in my life ended, and something else ended for me as well, I’m not sure what. Since then, I have mostly been writing collaborations with poets such as Tree Bernstein, some of which were published as Away in 2005. I went through one intensive period of writing, from 2000 to 2003, where I wrote every night from 8 p.m. until I went to sleep, and that resulted in completing all of the projects I had envisioned up until that time, resulting in seven completed manuscripts—including rewriting the Norton Anthology of Poetry Volumes I and II; a book of “alternate maps of the world,” including works exploring shamanism, alchemy, and dreams; and a collection of travel writings. Those are sitting on my shelf, waiting for the right moment to publish them. When they begin getting published, I have a feeling my writing may also open up again. I’ve also written a book on the poet Louis Zukofsky that I promised to Elik Books several years ago, and the rough manuscript has sat on my desktop for almost two years now because I haven’t found the will or desire necessary to spend the dozen or so hours to bring it to completion. I have a feeling that I’m waiting for something, I’m not sure what, to complete it. On some level, I feel like my major work has been written, and that takes a lot of heat and pressure off any need to write more.

But in the past at some point I’ve always envisioned something that rises up from the darkness following a period of not writing anything much at all that appears as a complete surprise to me, and that may happen again, although when I’m “out” of writing it’s hard to imagine a way back in. I’ve been thinking for a couple of years now about writing another alternate map of the universe, featuring the language and visions of mystics, but nothing much has happened on that yet. But a vision of what turned into A Map of the World, a book-length poem written in the voice and language of alchemy, literally waited for over two years before I began to write it, and then it was written in a very short period of time—in two writing sessions lasting, at most, eight days over a period of about four months. So, who knows?

My writing “career” has been marked by “retirements” such as these in the past. I go through some kind of personal crisis and my personality dissolves in some essential way, and at some point in this process my next writing phase becomes a way of entering into or creating a new relationship between myself and writing, of writing myself back into being. I keep thinking about something the poet Jack Spicer once said, that one day you write a poem out of a voice that you don’t recognize as your own—usually out of a state of unknowing or crisis—of discovery—and then you sit back and look at it and you can recognize that this is something really different, this is a real poem. And then you decide to write another poem in the same style, and then another, and each one has a little less charge than the one before it. This seems true to my experience. How you can remain open to the next jolt turns out to be by letting go of the last one. You didn’t create the last one, why do you think that you could create the next one? It’s like opening a door and entering a dark room of mystery and discovery and I explore the room until I feel I come to understand it. And then there’s an enervating phase where I feel used up in a way. Then I turn my back on what had once been so all-encompassing for a period of time and I enter a long hallway where I don’t know where I am or where I’m going until I come to another door and I feel at first that it’s a kind of doorway out, and I explore it until I realize it’s not a door out but rather just a door into another room, and I go through the whole process all over again. I find the same process affects my studies as well—I’ll become interested in a writer or musician or an art movement and enter it and become obsessed with it for a period of time. And at some point, I instinctively realize that I’m done, and I lose all interest. This has happened with my studies of Thomas Pynchon and Louis Zukofsky, of myth, of Ezra Pound, of Joyce, of Dylan and the Dadaists and Surrealists. My bookshelves are a graveyard of my previous infatuations.

Tamra Spivey is lead singer of Lucid Nation, an ever-changing ensemble who most recently included drummer Patty Schemel of Hole and bassist Greta Brinkman of Moby’s band.

Tamra: I learned from your note about Kerouac and Ginsberg’s “practiced” improvisation, and felt less guilty about recording extra vocal tracks for tracks I felt needed them.

Randy: This is what I think is the essence of improvisation: It’s a form of practicing your instrument along with your mind/senses. Then later, even when you’re “revising” your work, you can re-write it or re-play it with that same spontaneous mind. Or you can make room for improvisation within a structure-like Miles Davis. What you can never do is go back to the deadness and dullness of something over-produced, or produced poorly. It’s like having a great cup of coffee and then trying to go back to instant. Yeats said it was “to make an hour’s work seem a moment’s thought.” Or as I say, it ultimately doesn’t matter whether it’s improvised or not, but the closer to the truth something seems, the more powerful it is experienced by an audience. Or, as Gregory Corso told Kerouac, “I don’t want to deny any part of mind, including the part that rereads a poem and knows why it sucks.”

Tamra: I’m with Corso, the rigidity of restricting improvisation to its “purest” definition usurps spontaneity.

Randy: It’s also important to remember that Allen and Jack were talking of a highly specialized kind of improvisation, like great jazz (which is what they listened to). But Kerouac had already written a million words (by Burroughs’ estimate) before he began writing The Town and the City. It’s not just improvisation and spontaneity-it’s skilled improvisation and spontaneity. Check out the new Dylan CD-reportedly (like with “Blonde on Blonde”) he’d write a song, teach it to the band, they’d run through it once, then he’d go write another song and the band would go back to playing cards. That’s what some people consider improvisation and spontaneity. When you’ve been successful working with spontaneity and improvisation a couple of times, you learn how to do it, and what works and what doesn’t … or you stop doing it. And if you like it, you get bored and embarrassed by anything else. It’s not real somehow, and you’re just repeating something-there’s no edge or liveliness to it. It’s dead and you’re dead because you’re the one who’s wasting your time doing it.

They were opening a tour a couple of years ago in Boulder and they’d booked two weeks of rehearsal. For the first time in 30 years of doing this, Fripp and the members of the band had absolutely nothing to show by the end of rehearsals. They had to open in front of an audience the next night and fourteen days of rehearsals had been a complete and total disaster. They didn’t have a rhythm, a melody, or even a structure to use. So they walked out on stage without anything in mind and this guy said it was the best performance he’d ever seen one of Fripp’s bands give-and he goes all the way back to the original King Crimson line-up.

Tamra: Yes, the million words, but another factor is native intelligence and appreciation of some form of technique. For example, our keyboardist on the sessions, Diane, only had piano lessons ten years ago, had never played with a band, and had never played synthesizer, but she played beautifully. She was easily able to enter that space we old whore musicians went, crafting in the moment. Being a big music fan of course helped, but so did her skills as a designer and her love for art history.

There’s a certain proportion or blend of “weights/waits” or elements, did the Taoists call it li? I forget. Whatever, it’s that common flow in all things: fire, fingerprint, agate. I think when you start to see/feel that, you can do remarkable things in arts you’re not as familiar with. Like Woody Guthrie’s paintings, that remind me of early Japanese Zen painting. Randy: “Fire, fingerprint, agate.” That’s a cool line. Interesting flight of mind. I’ll probably steal that one. Don’t be surprised if it turns up in one of my poems. In fact, I’ll make sure of it now. That’ll be the title. The dadaists actually insisted that no real artist could possibly restrict themselves to one means of expression. If you were a painter, well then who would compose more interesting music than a painter, and who could write a more interesting poem than a sculptor, etc. etc. It made for some really interesting art too. But very few artists were good enough to be taken seriously in more than one medium. Ginsberg and photos. Cocteau’s visual art and films (although his visual art’s reputation has suffered somewhat lately, it was once considered on par with Picasso’s), that Maine poet/painter who got famous for his paintings but is now known as much for his poetry, Michelangelo’s paintings and sculptures. I’m sure there are more, but most are like Ferlinghetti and painting, or Ginsberg and music.

Tamra: It’s very odd how our celebrity cult culture wants people to be famous for just one thing. I never knew about the Guthrie paintings till I saw the exhibit the Smithsonian put on at the museum in Tacoma, Washington.

Randy: That’s so cool about your keyboardist. When Bowie and Eno were recording what would become “Heroes,” Bowie had an extraordinary recording budget and didn’t want to work with very many musicians, so they spent all their money on studio time, and Eno would order all these new electronic instruments and throw the manuals away. Everything was new. The designers weren’t musicians, they were engineers and so all they could imagine was to make fake violin sounds and stuff-or what they thought fake violins would sound like. Well, the last thing a musician’s going to be interested in is something designed to sound like fake violins, so they’d fool around and find out what the instruments could sound like. Everything’s an instrument, I think Bowie said, you just have to figure out how to make music with it. Do you realize that (I just realized) Brian Eno’s name is an anagram of One Brain?

Tamra: That is so weird you mentioned that about Bowie because Diane read that story in an issue of “Q” during our sessions and it encouraged her!

Randy: Those kind of coincidences happen all the time in my life. In fact, I began reading an article on Las Vegas in the current issue of “National Geographic Traveler” magazine the moment I first heard you sing the words “Let’s go to Las Vegas.”

Tamra: I think of synchronicities as a sort of guidance system.

Randy: Yeah, but I can never figure out what they’re telling me. Like the Las Vegas thing. What, I’m supposed to go to Las Vegas? Not likely. They happen so frequently to me that I call them my “coincidences of the day.” I counted a string about two weeks ago in a series of e-mails to a friend and I ended up with about seven weird synchronicities in a five-hour period.

Tamra: When I do zines it’s amazing how often the right illustration or quote falls into my hands. There were times I felt I couldn’t open my eyes or reach for something without it belonging in the zine I was working on.

Randy: Yeah, that always happens in art, I think. In fact, if that isn’t happening, it usually isn’t art it’s advertising.

Tamra: Recording and mixing at Uptone went well. Many eerie September 11 foreshadowings in the lyrics. We finished mixing September 10 and were supposed to fly home September 11. Wound up in Tacoma for an extra week. Thirty-five out of 48 tracks got mixed: some shining moments, but it was all somehow awkward and gravitized, if you know what I mean.

Randy: Not really, unless you mean that you ended up with less than you thought you would. I think that’s always the case when you’re working with art that’s still being realized. You shoot for something and you end up somewhere interesting, but it’s not exactly what you hoped for. As Pound put it, there are two kinds of geniuses in the world: There are the ones who are curious about everything and their legacy is a mess made up of 100 half-finished projects and beginning explorations in several directions. And then there are those who come along later and bring things to perfection. They scavenge around, can identify the cool bits and put them all together in their perfect form and basically kill that line of exploration by bringing it to its end (Joyce with Ulysses and Eliot with “The Wasteland”). I think it’s important to know which kind you are and then live accordingly. And I’ve also learned to put something away until I’ve forgotten I’ve written it before I take it out and reread it. If you have that kind of room, that might be something to do. Or just put it out-I’m sure it’s fine.

Tamra: I’d like to be Pound’s finishing genius, but I definitely fall in the explorer category. I feel very helpless to direct my inspiration. It’s like a fever that comes over me. When it says paint, I can’t write a song!

Randy: Yeah, I keep relearning this. Do whatever interests you at the moment and don’t stop until it stops interesting you and then find out what interests you next. Believe me (being one) the explorer has much more fun, and less success, and less of the drag that follows success. They stay very fashionable and respected well past the point of the finishing geniuses because they keep moving and interesting themselves, whereas the others end up chewing themselves up and being, on the whole, completely miserable (in my experience).

Tamra: Yes, that makes sense. the explorer is dealing with the anxieties of beginnings and the finisher the doom of endings. I always wondered if it was both a melancholy and exhilarating feeling, completing a masterpiece. Anyway, we got enough that I feel it’s my first truly great record.

Randy: I always feel that way too! Every time I finish a new book I think this is the best thing I’ve ever written! Every time I give a reading I always end up reading the last thing I’ve finished, sometimes on the way to the gig or even in the audience waiting my turn. That’s why putting books out is such a drag, because that’s what people think of you and you’re somewhere else now. And being in a band you know what’s that like more than I do.

Tamra: I may go to New York City to start a new band. Randy: Wow. Now that’s courage. You’re gutsy.

Tamra: You think? I think the death-rebirth there, the historically unique (for the moment) penetration of American complacency … it seems to me the river of inspiration is going to flow fresh and fast there. I’d like to feel that, be a part of it. Plus stuff is cheap now!

Randy: Oh, yeah, I’m sure that’s true. Or … I wonder. I think the decades of New York City being a huge city are over. Like Beirut.

Tamra: But of course Beirut was not the world center New York City is. And New York City’s whole mythology is about having heart in the face of crisis. As an artist I just feel I need to see and smell and hear it for myself.

Randy: Well, I’m just glad we’ll have a poet reporting from the trenches.

Tamra: Also we have more fans and friends in New York City than L.A. L.A. has proven herself somewhat indifferent to experimental rock since the days the Velvet Underground ran aground here, leaving Jim Morrison’s acid-addled Gerard Malanga impersonation in their wake.

Randy: You know Gerard? That’s much more hip than either the VU or Morrison. I published some of Gerard’s photos in “FRICTION” magazine-his photo of the manuscript of On the Road was on the cover of the Jack Kerouac issue (1983). It’s the only issue that’s sold out, but I’m putting up a website now and the cover will definitely be on it. And he introduced me to Ira Cohen, who took the photo on the cover of the “Doctor Sardonicus” LP for Spirit-a sixties Southern California psychedelic band. One of Ira’s photos is going to be on the cover of my selected. Ira took some really cool photos of Hendrix shot onto Mylar (like the Spirit LP cover-that distorted effect).

Tamra: The only Warhol graduate I’ve met is Holly Woodlawn. The earliest trio version of Lucid Nation backed her up live and recorded with her once. We would play ethnic instruments, flutes, thumb pianos, maybe an acoustic guitar, while she would stream of consciousness about those days. Some of it was amazing. She was raving about the goddess Ishtar and we were coming on like a Babylonian harem band. But after when we listened back we realized none of it was usable because she so expertly insults everyone she mentions!

Randy: Do you have any tapes?!

Tamra: I have to dig up the masters.

Randy: I like Jim Morrison in moderation. He was definitely the start of something big-as big as Elvis. I just wish the songs (and LPs) were better. But I have dozens of live versions of “The End” and “When the Music’s Over” and each and every one is terrific and interesting. What he had was real. And I get the feeling from watching videos of his live shows what it must have been like staring at him as he was standing at the mike staring into the audience, wondering who you were and what this was all about and what the fuck were you doing at a Doors concert in 1969 anyway? How sometimes it seems like he’s just this transparent hologram on stage and he’s actually being beamed down from some other world, just visiting. That’d change you.

Tamra: He had a way with words, as Patricia Keneally Morrison told my guitarist Ronnie. Jim could pack a whole lot of meaning into very few words.

Randy: I’ve heard Lucid Nation’s latest CD and it’s fucking terrific. Let me know when it’s about ready to come out for real and I’ll write a rave review for the Patti Smith list and also if you offer it on Amazon it could go there as well. I find that reviews are best when the object is available-if not, people look around and then forget about it by the time it’s finally out. If you want I’ll send the review to you early … it’s pretty much ready. It’ll take me half an hour or so to write it up from my notes. But I’d like to hear the other two first before I write something, so I have a wider base of information, which’ll probably take me two days or so. By the way, I looked up your site today and I heard your bass player when she toured with Moby two summers ago I think-she looks familiar anyway. That black net outfit and the way she plays the bass off her hip. Oh, by the way, it was so good to suddenly realize I was listening to “Heart of Darkness” after so long. It’s almost as if the Cleveland that David Thomas was singing about in 1977 is the world we’re all living in now.

Tamra: Yeah, that’s Greta! I actually prefer David’s original version with Peter Laughner’s Rocket from the Tomb.

Randy: See, that’s another one-I’m a huge Pere Ubu fan and yet I’d never heard of Rocket from the Tomb until last night when I was paging through a psych magazine I bought a couple of days ago because it had a CD with tracks by Bevis Frond and I’m a fan. And there was also a variety of psych artists from the sixties to the late nineties, including Japanese psych bands from the late sixties! I mean, imagine! I used to do a psychedelic radio show in the mid-eighties and I’m a real collector of that stuff and I had never heard of any of it. Anyway, when I bought the magazine the 18-year-old tattoed dyed-black-haired kid who called me “Sir” was caught off-guard when I asked if he had a vinyl copy of the Strokes LP and then handed him two White Stripes CDs and an Apples in Stereo CD. Anyway, he started and said, “Wow, we’ve had that magazine in the store for over two years now and it’s never sold.” So I was reading it last night and they had this really cool thing in the magazine-they had punch-out trading cards for “damaged guitar gods”-about fifty of them for people like Peter Green and Skip Spence. And I’m reading along and I come to the first guitarist for Pere Ubu (and Rocket from the Crypt). And what’s playing on the stereo? “Heart of Darkness”! And, in addition, I only gradually came to realize that that’s what you’re singing, like a camera coming into focus … like, “Wake up!” That’s what I mostly use those moments for now, because I can’t really figure them out. When I tell other people, they have all these explanations, but I still don’t understand any of it. I never get any hard information.

Tamra: I think of them as more a proof that your life is right where it should be. So you get magic sparkle synchronicities, cat treats.

Randy: By the way, you’re not suggesting with this improvisation thing that you’re improvising your lyrics, are you? Even if not, the performance is, obviously, improvised with the band. King Crimson during their 1973-1974 tour were the second rock band I know of to actually schedule improvisations in every show. Each night they’d trade off who’d begin and the others would fall in or not. And there’s at least one performance called “Trio” that’s absolutely amazing. The band had had a collective breakdown during a difficult tour and everyone thought that they were the only ones having problems. Drummer Bill Bruford was so depressed he sat out the whole song with his drumsticks crossed over his chest and the band essentially became a chamber trio-violin, guitar, and bass. Their recordings from this tour are very easily available, I think, if you like that sort of thing. “The Great Deceiver,” a 4CD set from this tour, is the best. If you can’t find them or want tapes let me know. Your band is very, very good and the CDs are very well engineered (especially the last one). The one with the cool shoes is my favorite thus far but I have to go back to the latest one again now that I’ve heard everything else. The latest one is so uncompromising and unrelenting and the sneakers one had the mixture of softer tracks that I’m more accustomed to. But I know I’ll prefer the new one in about two weeks. It’s got that halo around it.

Tamra: Let’s see, “Suburban Legends” is 100% improvised lyrics. Randy: That’s unfuckingbelievable. Why don’t you advertise that somewhere on the CD? Why aren’t you on the poetry circuit? Man, you need a manager! Tamra: We suck at self-promotion. Anyway, “Nonpoetic Rain,” the live on KXLU CD is about 2/3 improv. And on the newest recordings we did in Tacoma, Washington, any song with backing vocals was sketched out, a couple lines, a chorus, but all the rest are total improv.

Randy: Wow. I am so impressed. I do improv speeches but that’s a lot easier-you just get your thoughts together in public. So what’s the deal with “Heart of Darkness” and “Run through the Jungle”-they just popped into your head? There’s another cover I almost recognize-it’s an AC/DC song or something? I could be wrong.

Tamra: “Night Prowler” by AC/DC, the Richie Ramirez murder anthem. I’m always trying to redeem it. It started when I had a gig at PCH-Pacific Coast Highway Club in San Pedro, a tiny, scary all-ages space visible only by kids, in a bleak landscape of warehouses and train tracks. I went there to check it out a week before and freaked out in the car on the way home. I was just sure the car would stall, we would die, total anxiety. My guitarist Ronnie realized how closely this place resembled the place I was taken to and beaten after being abducted on my way to school in tenth grade. The resemblance triggered post-traumatic stress. He wanted to cancel but I wanted to face it, so for that gig we did a jam on “Night Prowler” and Sonic Youth’s predator song “Pacific Coast Highway.” I wore a black sweatshirt with hood up, on the back was written “terror worldwide” and when I sang “Night Prowler” I imagined it was me stalking the guy who abducted me. The catharsis was so intense people said I was glowing after. None of the scenester mod kids so proud of their indie credentials even knew Sonic Youth did a song called “Pacific Coast Highway,” standing in PCH Club. The roadie for Red Monkey won the free CD. Since then I’ve been really partial to the song.

Randy: I’m a father with a 17-year-old daughter. Your story sets off all my panic alarms … I started to cry. It’s like I told a friend about the difficulties I have at being a pacifist: If you push me around, fine. If you touch my girlfriend or my daughter I’ll fucking kill you. I heard a funny saying today: that being a pacifist except during wartime is like being a vegetarian between meals.

Tamra: Rape is epidemic in this country. It’s one of our biggest dirty secrets. And this country isn’t as bad as other parts of the world. Still, when a woman gets paid 75% less when she works late, then has to face the empty parking garage, that is a kind of terrorism.

Randy: I’ve produced some tapesets with Peter Levine on PTSD. We have tapes and such where he tries to get you to release it. Are you interested? It can get pretty intense. He also has a book about it called Waking the Tiger. He lives up in Lyons, a few miles from Boulder, but he travels a lot and has a useful website, if you want to look him up-there’s stuff on there for free. Peter believes that energy is stored in the body and you have to transform it via movement, not mental stuff. He talks about animals in the jungle, how they “shake off” fear-running in circles, jumping into the air-and how if you freeze it in the body it’ll remain there until you release it physically-that therapy will never get to that part of it. That seems true to my experience. Sounds like you instinctively tapped into that with “Night Prowler.”

Tamra: That’s why I’ve experienced so much transformation through yoga, then the martial arts.

Randy: About your lyrics: I especially liked the way the meaning of the words changed over time. It reminded me very much of Gertrude Stein from Lectures in America, the one about repetition-how if you say, jelly, jelly, jelly, jelly, jelly, jelly, jelly, jelly … that the eighth “jelly” is not the same as the first one, and the difference is that the eighth one is preceded by the other seven. It’s a form of insistence. It’s like you’re trying to get your dog to sit. Sit. Sit! SIT! SIT!!!! I also think there’s an element of incantation and shamanic magic in your form of repetition. You do that with “friends don’t let friends drive drunk” and something else, I’ve forgotten now. The first time I realized you were singing “friends don’t let friends drive drunk” was different from the next four times. It’s like a mini-novel, really. And it’s not in the words-you’ve stripped the words of meaning by repeating them and what people are listening to is you breathing through the words … do you know what I mean?

Tamra: Rimbaud’s derangement of the senses happens when you repeat a word. It’s the basis of all mantra.

Randy: I’ve had this weird experience where when I look at a word too long it looks weird too. Like “that.”

Tamra: First it shimmers with extra meanings, then it’s just a sound. Then it can be made to convey an opposite meaning with a different intonation.

Randy: But the sound is being made by someone, so it’s actually a different kind of language-not word language but beingness language. As if that’s the epitome of language, and when you’re trying to use language to get there you realize at a certain point that language itself is preventing you from reaching it. That’s why the dadaists said that it’d be healthier if language didn’t exist-or at least that life would be broader and more interesting without it. That’s what you’re doing with your band. I learned something similar hanging around deaf people. I grew up near the Eugene O’Neill Theatre of the Deaf so it wasn’t unusual to be at parties in conversation with a deaf person. They don’t get fooled by what you’re saying and you realize it’s because they’re actually reading your whole body, so it’s like waking up from a language dream. Some people start crying the first time they communicate like that. It’s ironic to me now that I used to argue with Allen [Ginsberg] when he used to read from his notebooks or be in one of his improvisational phases. I told him he was being self-indulgent. That this might be the only time some teenage kid in Nebraska gets to hear him and he should deliver the real transmission. Certain of Allen’s poems are undeniably liberating and have definite transmission power-thousands of people have testified to that-so Allen had a responsibility to change as many people as possible. Reading from his journals and his improvisations were fun in a classroom or perhaps in a small venue. But for a performance, people took the night off, they were excited. Maybe this was the only time they’d ever get to see Ginsberg-this would become their “Allen Ginsberg story.” But Allen argued that he had to keep himself interested, that he read more than 50 times a year all over the world. He said “I don’t want to think that the only poems I have worth reading were written thirty years ago. And if I’m not really there, if I’m only faking it, it’d be much worse. The people who can appreciate what I’m doing are appreciating what I’m doing. I can’t be responsible for everyone.”

Tamra: I have that discussion in a musical context. People say I need songs that crystalize my strong points and I need to play them over and over again for people because you can’t just make stuff up. They don’t get the whole Zen one stroke circle painting of it. We’re not just stupidly jamming. We’re experienced artists intently crafting in the moment a spiritual challenge. Yet I’m hearing more about the freestyle approach. I think it suits the internet.

Randy: Hmmm. But no matter, it’s what you’re interested in. You’re stuck with it now. If you believe in it 100%, it’s unarguable that it’ll be the best work that you can possibly do in this lifetime. And, all things being equal, wouldn’t that be great to look back on when you’re old and grey? Wouldn’t anything less be a loss? So we do it and who knows if it’s important or if it’ll last? But if you act like it is important and that it’ll last, that’s your best chance at getting there. Allen tape recorded himself every time he spoke in public for the last thirty years of his life. I saw how that made Allen choose his words very carefully, knowing that they’d probably last a long, long time.

Okay, here’s your poem:

fire, fingerprint, agate (for T)

the best work comes out of a belief in goodness
or other people-what in three years will be fashionable
can leave you just like that and be replaced
by its opposite-to avoid a belief in stability,
or in people who appear to be stable, or the need to
appear to be so-how I began to see it as
a kind of misunderstanding, that it was
something you could look at only inwardly—
what poetry does, for instance—
to be to language as a kind of encouragement,
to develop something new, something unstable,
and make it real, if only for a moment—
and that I did this deliberately,
and that this is how I did it,
and what I did is in these words.

Randy Roark: There’s lullaby-ish qualities to the songs themselves as a whole, as a unit, as a CD.

Jane Siberry: So there’s that too. That’s actually more of what I should probably say. You’re my first interview, Randy, so you’re going to have to bear with me while I actually try to remember the process. Why I came to certain things.

RR: I’m really excited about this CD. I’ve followed your career forever.

JS:  Well, what do you think of it? Or where it will stand or what it means?

RR: I think it’s my favorite CD of yours. I’ll tell you, there’s a personal reason why, as well. My father died the day after I got an advance copy of it.

JS:  I’m sorry to hear that.

RR:  As you probably know, the days after is a very difficult period, and I could only listen to two things. I could listen to your CD and I could listen to silence, but I couldn’t listen to anything else. As far as where this CD stands in my mind as a fan and a listener for years, I found it to be my most favorite album of yours as a listening experience. And the reason I think that’s true, for me, is that there’s a stripping away of everything except Jane Siberry in this, and so when you speak and sing through the songs—and it’s interesting because they’re not your songs—there’s a presence in the room of this person everyone who’s ever followed your career has always been charmed by, only now the concentration is solely on the presence of this human being as a spirit or a voice or a presence in the room. And I tell people, and I sincerely believe it, that it’s my favorite Jane Siberry album. And when I tell people that it is, and then I tell them that its songs are traditional, public domain songs—none of the songs are originally yours—they look at me as if I’m slightly insane, because what everyone has always been drawn to and charmed by in your records is that sense of getting to know Jane Siberry and how could that possibly be with these songs? However, as an artist, I find that often when I have to read someone else’s poem, I can often put parts of me into the voicing or phrasing of it in ways that I almost can’t support in my own work, without any kind of self-consciousness.

JS:  Very interesting.

RR: So did you find a sense…?

JS: I like the way you describe that. It is purer, more direct, I guess, contact with my essence than ever, just because of the nature of the arrangements, I guess. And that I’m out of the way in an odd way, making more room for other people.

RR:  Or the sound or the song itself, to be able to communicate the song. You say that you used as much of the traditional song as possible, but you did the choral arrangements, right?

JS:  All the arrangements are mine.

RR:  They are absolutely beautiful. The layering of voices and the honoring and almost celestial . . . I keep coming up with the word “angelic” around it.

JS:  Well, it was a luxury, really. It was a luxury because I love doing my own harmonies. I always have. And it’s an odd thing that happens when I start arranging. I don’t try to . . . when I try to arrange I can’t do it, but if I just listen to the song, they start to sort of descend like these beautiful mathematical equations. And then they fit together. And I don’t get a chance to do that very much, because I’ve found, in the past, for example, on “When I Was a Boy” where it . . . as soon as you heard more than one of my voices at the same time, the connection was not as direct with the listener, and I was going more for directness then. But now oddly I think because the context is correct on this record for a lot of me, that it hasn’t lost its intimacy.

RR:  Oh, not at all.

JS:  But I haven’t had this luxury for a long time, and so it was a joy for me to do this.

RR:  How did you choose the songs that you included on this CD?

JS:  Well, it was a bit of an adventure, pilgrimage. I wanted to do a collection of my favorite songs and I thought they were going to be mostly Celtic, but slowly they transformed . . . they started moving across the ocean to North America, and then became a mixture of Celtic and American spirituals, and then they sort of started to weave themselves together because, in fact, songs like “Shenandoah” are rooted in the British Isles. Or these songs came from people who migrated from the land of the Celts. So there was a connection that surprised me. And I also . . . there was a little girl called Rhona—there is a little girl called Rhona—R-H-O-N-A—who I spent quite a bit of time with in Scotland and she has Down’s Syndrome, but she loves music so I found if I sang the right song on piano, certain songs would just light her up, like a candle. Other songs would just sort of leave her blank. And so it became sort of a goal to create something that would make people really happy—not just her but a collection of songs that had that affect on people.

RR:  Did you learn anything from this process? What it would be in a song, say, that would light somebody up?

JS:  Good question. I don’t know, Randy. I guess I sort of . . . they’re all my favorite songs, too. I guess it was just whatever lights her up probably lights me up, except I just wasn’t looking at myself. But what is it about these songs? You know, when you hear the words “Swing Lo Sweet Chariot,” you just go, “Oh, I love that song.” The words are uplifting—even the sound of the words. Words like “sweet” and “chariot” and “home” and “carry me” and “abide” and “faith”—the words are uplifting, and then the music has a beauty to it; a poise and a balance in the thirds and fourths and sixths and sevenths moving around, and the resolutions all seem to . . . I’d say they’re gems. I don’t know how to describe it more than that but they feel good in my body anyway.

RR:  It seems like the real turnaround. In other words, when an artist is in the studio recording songs for their own ears, they’re listening for certain things and pleased by certain things. It seems like you took the experience of being with Rhona and cast your eye out to see what was happening—the focus of the attention became something outside of yourself. And in this case a very simple situation or a primal situation with Rhona. Did you find that that changed your orientation as a performer to looking at the audience?

JS:  Yes, it did. Because I was very careful in the arrangements to not exaggerate a part of myself that wants to interest my own ear. My goal was just to make . . . create something that was very easy for me to hear it—that wasn’t unusual or unique in any kind of way that would not feel soothing. So, yeah, I put on a bit of a different . . . I used a different filter system to make all my decisions. And at the end there were a lot of beautiful introductions—intros and outros—but I cut a lot of them right off. I felt it was a creeping in of more of Siberry-isms than . . . gee, you’re helping me crystallize my thoughts here. Anything that was too Siberry I kept out of it.

RR:  And then by that process, as a listener, you became more Siberry.

JS:  Oddly enough, that’s how it works, isn’t it?

RR:  I had an interesting experience of the same thing—I had to give two readings this week and I got rid of all my good poetry the first week, I thought, and so I had to give this other reading, so I read what I thought was secondary poetry, and people said it was the most beautiful reading I’d ever given, because I think that I realized that the poem wasn’t going to carry it, it was my presence that was going to carry the reading.

JS:  Oh. So you . . . I know that feeling. Yeah, so you…..

RR:  So maybe I said the words with a little more passion or I said the words with a little bit more clarity or the focus wasn’t on this cool poem that I’d written. The focus was on the emotion or the sadness or whatever it was that was behind it. So that in your situation with these songs it’d be what you connected with in the song that . . . the word “simplify” isn’t the right word but by highlighting, in a way, those words like “home”—what it meant to you or what it could mean to somebody else, so that the words themselves become powerfully charged with meaning.

JS:  Right. And all I had to work with was, you know, the song that someone else had written. Like you, I put . . . I made more with less.

RR:  And that’s the odd paradox I found about art is that almost the less the art takes the attention the more the person or the presence or the art of the moment of being human in that place with other humans communicates, so the attention is not “Oh, I’ve got to do this stuff to keep people entertained,” it’s that I will share this moment of being human with someone. However, that oddly becomes the most artistic moment—and powerful moment—for a listener as possible.

JS:  Yeah.

RR:  Which song on this would you like to hear most on the radio?

JS:  Oh, I don’t know. I don’t really think that way. Or I don’t have any thoughts that way.

RR:  Do you ever listen to the radio?

JS:  Yeah.

RR:  I kept imagining hearing certain songs like this mixed in with what I hear on the radio, and I think it would stop people in their tracks. I actually would love to hear this on the radio. It has a classic feel that I think will connect with a lot of people. I think it could be huge if enough people hear it. It’s pure, pristine.  When you credit on the album Frank Sinatra and Paul Robeson—especially Frank Sinatra—“Only the Lonely” or some of his classic albums, I think it would fit right into that mode. Why did you credit…?

JS:  Well, I credited him because of his version of  “Ol’ Man River,” and Jimmy Stewart because of his role in the movie “Shenandoah.”

RR:  Oh, right. And Paul Robeson because….

JS:  Many many reasons.

RR:  You had mentioned back around “When I Was a Boy” that it was very important for you, the idea of androgyny—that you wanted to incorporate the masculine parts and to embody them as well. And I’ve heard that along your recording career. This CD, though, strikes me as being almost transcendentally feminine. Did you have a similar experience?

JS:  I’m not sure. I think we would have to agree on what we mean by masculine and feminine, but I don’t know if I would agree with saying that this record my most overtly feminine.

RR:  Maybe it’s the lullaby aspect or the sense of singing to Rhona, a child, that comes through as this nurturing, almost maternal, loving that maybe I….

JS:  You associate with feminine. Yeah. And yet, how would you describe the masculine? What would you say masculine is?

RR:  I would say more insistence on presence, active role, less nurturing, but more powerful in a certain way. Is that clear at all?

JS:  Yeah, I guess I used a lot of masculine energy just making it happen because a lot of things were quite complex, and as I did the vocals and I would end up with so many vocals and I’d use a certain amount of time as free vocals, because that’s where certain things happen. But then when you have five tracks of a beautiful vocal that’s been created but there’s a few things that have to be cleaned up, it’s so . . . it can be mindboggling and stop you in your tracks and you have to really . . . you have to be really—what’s the word?—goal-oriented or you just can’t concentrate that long. So a lot of it took a lot of brain power.

RR:  I got a sense of that when I was listening to an early version of  “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and you just had the “coming for to carry me home” part . . .

JS:  Right.

RR:  . . . at that point. And I got the sense of the architecture of the song. Although it sounds simple, because it’s clear, the conception and the practical aspects of building it . . . it’s almost a solo record in many ways. You’ve constructed this cathedral of sound.

JS:  Yes, that’s a lovely . . . you have so many great words. I hope you talk to Mark Riva before he does his press release because already I can hear more . . . a lot of strong soundbites. Or ways you’ve captured things.

RR:  Let’s talk about some of the songs, too.

JS:  Okay.

RR:  Starting with “Jacob’s Ladder.” I didn’t know this song. I know a lot of folk music….

JS:  You didn’t?

RR:  No, I did not. But I was playing it for two friends of mine who had grown up Baptist in a Baptist church and I put this CD on and they started singing along. They had known these songs from childhood. So where did you first hear these songs, such as “Jacob’s Ladder”?

JS:  In childhood. I’m not sure whether it was in church or not. I’m not a Baptist, but it was just part of my childhood soundscape. I don’t recall wherefore. But everyone knew them.

RR:  And you mention singing with your mother beside the piano.

JS:  Yeah.

RR:  On “All through the Night.”

JS:  Yeah, that was her father’s favorite hymn. He was Welsh. And that was the first piano duet that I learned and it was with her—she taught it to me. So she’d play the bottom hand, and I’d play the top hand.

RR: It’s a beautiful song. I don’t think I’d ever heard that one either.

JS:  No, it’s less well known, but there are many versions of the lyrics, but these ones I thought were particularly beautiful. Although, oddly enough, I was reading a book about hymns last week and . . . who was it, some famous hymn-writer—or was it a famous poet? Yeats?—had written a poem called “Hushabye My Child and Sleep,” which I think was a version of “All through the Night,” and although “All through the Night” is considered traditional, it may have come from this church hymn-writer. Or this poet. I can’t remember. Isn’t that interesting, too, Randy—I can’t remember the details, but all I’m saying, in short, is that I think might be from a very famous . . . the lyrics might be from a modification of a very famous writer’s song. Even though I listed it as traditional.

RR: The lyrics I find interesting because the beginning and ending are a lullaby, obviously and clearly, but the middle section seems to be singing to someone who has either just died or is in the process of dying.

JS:  I saw it as singing to someone as they go from birth to death.

RR:  That brings up the idea that listening to this is a very close experience of being in the presence of William Blake and his “Songs of Innocence and of Experience.” Are you familiar with Blake’s work?

JS:  No, although certainly I’ve heard of him and that.

RR:  I was wondering if you had . . . well, the idea that I heard in this collection is the idea of innocence and experience, or that opening up of the world that you can see in a child, and yet also the adult version of having to give these things up at the same time that they become conscious of them, and so you realize the value of your childhood when you look back at a child, but only from the position of not being a child any longer, but you have this other experience that now includes that holiness of being able to appreciate what your childhood really was. And it seems to me the songs that you’ve selected and collected here are an interesting mix of inspirational songs—of courage in a dark night, or tender songs that a mother might sing to a daughter—but there are also several songs of longing and loss and saying goodbye and that kind of bittersweet sadness. Did you want to balance these two forces in this, or are you aware of that?

JS:  It feels balanced to me so I don’t recall doing it on purpose but it does feel balanced. And as you were saying that, I thought where I am right now, and I’m not unaware that it’s just before the new millennium, or however you want to put it, and my life, my life has never been so stripped-down, on all levels—possessions, friendships, work, money, time—that to have this record be the right record to come through at this time seems significant somehow. That it’s a sort of a reduction of sorts. A reduction to the songs that have stood the test of time—a handful of gems. I don’t think I have many more favorites than what are on this record. So it’s a distillation itself. And then the arrangements.

RR:  And then the songs that you’ve selected actually speak to that exact . . . where you get to say at the very end, with “O Shenandoah”—it’s the feeling that the listener or I heard is that same sort of feeling—of maybe life is stripped down now but at the same time there’s a certain . . . what’s left standing is very powerful because of that. There’s less distractions, there’s more reality. No bullshit.

JS:  That’s right, yeah. These songs are what’s left standing. Yeah, that’s interesting.

RR:  And what I found really interesting to me as a listener is that you’ve somehow taken these songs from different times and different cultures and different histories and different parts of the world and yet you’ve made them all . . . you’ve found something in them that’s contemporaneous with each other—which is, it seems to me, to be a human presence in the world, looking at the world with a little bit of longing or sadness.

JS:  Yeah. It’s maybe also a distillation to what I think is important and what I guess has . . . you know, the most important things to people throughout time, and it hasn’t changed now.  Love, home, your connection with God at the end of your life, or whatever.

RR:  And children, and dying.

JS:  Yeah.

RR:  Or to go into the next stage of your life, the necessity for leaving behind one stage—whether it’s an Irish person going to New Orleans, or “Shenandoah.” The version of that [of “Shenandoah”] that you have is absolutely beautiful. It so captures that feeling of “I know I have to go, but the beauty that I’m leaving—the love of what I am leaving—is almost crippling. But still, I know I have to go.”

JS:  Oh, yeah. Thank you for saying that because that’s the nut of the human condition. And I had to change the words a bit because through the years there was so many verses added that it stopped making sense in a funny way—it was illogical. So one important change, so that I could sing it anyway, was to add the word “tho.” That simple thing made it make sense to me. “I long to see you, away, I’m bound away.” That didn’t make sense, so “I long to see you, tho I’m bound away.” And those two sentences are the most poignant, heartbreaking thing I think about the human condition.

RR: “The Streets of Laredo” was another song. I actually learned that—I’d heard it my whole life, of course, but at one time I was working with Allen Ginsberg and he was teaching that song in class and I was quite surprised. But what he loved about that song is that same touching . . . what he loved about it most was that it was, for him, obviously a man looking at a young man who has died too young, and acknowledging the heartfelt sympathy and sense of loss. And he found that so touching in a way. At this point he was quite elderly. And that same feeling of looking at someone—or a man looking at another man, say—and to find that in the Old West! But in that same way, that’s a similar situation of someone longing or leaving or looking at something that he or she has lost, and the tender feeling of “Beat the drum slowly.” He found that quite moving.

JS:  Yeah, and I’m not sure . . . a lot of the lyrics are quite different than what you hear there. There are probably about twenty verses that go on and on but I think for me the most moving thing is the melody, perhaps. The sound of the word “Laredo.” And then a man in his prime, like you say. No one likes to see something full of life . . . it’s almost more upsetting to us. It is more upsetting to us to lose something as vital as youth or something really beautiful.

RR:  Yeah, there seems to be an order in the world which is that children should see their parents die. There seems to be an order. When that order is stripped away some way in the way that it can be, it accentuates the pain or the loss or the “could have been.” And there’s that sense in “Ol’ Man River” as well.

JS:  I had heard Paul Robeson’s version, and that was a family classic, and a lot of people sing it in the showers, as I discovered, and that’s the only song that isn’t really old. But for me it was the song of my childhood, that’s why I included it.

RR:  The version of “False False Fly” that you’ve included….

JS:  I’m just reading your notes here. Oh, a ballad. I did a search on the internet and found something weird.

RR:  When I was working for Allen he was teaching ballads one year and I was his teaching assistant so I got very interested in a song called “The False Knight on the Road,” which is Child Ballad number 3, which is the same….

JS:  Oh, my goodness, look what you’ve got here.

RR:  It’s a great song, but the thing I find the most interesting about it is you said that you learned this song in Ireland, or this version of “False False Fly” in Ireland?

JS:  Yes.

RR:  Because Ewan Maccoll had a series of records that versions of this appear on. At that time, it was actually the sixties, it was very rare in the United States, and only in Nova Scotia was there a culture that had incorporated this tune. And so you had gone from Canada to Ireland to learn a song that was only popular in Nova Scotia.

JS:  Oh, isn’t that strange? That’s so fantastic. Yeah, well there you go.

RR:  How songs move.

JS:  And there’s a song called “She Is Like the Swallow,” which I did for Hector Zazou’s record . . .

RR:  Right.

JS:  . . . an Irish man told me that it was Irish and sang his version of it. So it came from Ireland originally.

RR: It’s like these songs have lives and histories like families do. And “Pontchartrain.” You said you learned that song in Ireland as well.

JS:  Yes.

RR:  Because I’ve always associated that song completely as a New Orleans . . . I don’t know the history of the song.

JS:  Oh. So you knew the song already?

RR:  Bob Dylan actually did a version of it in the seventies.

JS:  Really.

RR:  During live concerts. He never released it.

JS:  He didn’t release it.

RR:  No, it only appeared in concert.

JS:  Oh, I see.

RR:  In the New Orleans area, it’s a very . . . in their area it’s almost like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”; it’s just something that’s thought of as New Orleans. It also has my favorite line of all time in it that I hadn’t heard till I heard your version. “If it wasn’t for the alligators, I’d sleep here in the woods.”

JS:  Well, Randy, I have to tell you that that’s one of my favorite lines too because I’m very afraid of alligators so I would be very excited when I sang that line. And it was hard not to laugh, too, doing it, because it just really charged me up. But I agree.

RR:  I leapt right out at me. As a poet I hear words often and I was listening to the album as song and sound and all of a sudden there was like this incredibly startling, almost surreal line. It’s so absolutely true. I mean, if there’s alligators you wouldn’t sleep in the woods. But that somebody would say it and say it so plainly and simply and also incorporate it into a longer story where there’s not quite that sense of danger. It just startled me in a very pleasant way.

JS:  I almost didn’t do the song because of that line, because it jarred me at first, and then it became my favorite line. You can’t have that on a . . . you can’t talk about alligators on this record. And then it became . . . and now it gets my vote for best pick-up line. Most original pick-up line.

RR:  Yeah, “Do you have a place to stay? I’d sleep outside but there’s alligators.”

JS:  That’s right.

RR:  It’s original. And it could work, too. I mean, you can’t argue with it.

JS:  No.

RR:  Do you plan on touring behind this CD?

JS:  Not so far.

RR:  I’d love to see you tour, Jane. Really.

JS:  I don’t know why, but I’ve turned everything down. I don’t know what I’m making space for but that’s where I am right now.

RR:  Well, yeah. I hope that at some point you come again to a feeling that you would like to get out on the road again and meet people and sing not only these songs but other songs too. It seems like this is such a special, pristine recording. I would love to see how you would translate that—the experience of singing to Rhona only it’s a thousand unknown Rhonas sitting in your audience. To sing these songs to them. It would be difficult to get the choral arrangements, of course, in it somehow, but I had this vision of people falling in love with you totally having the courage to have done the work you have done to get to the point in your life and your career where you’ve collected these songs, recorded them in this way. It’s a real . . . it’s a landmark moment and it would be workable, I think, and a very charged experience if you did. I can understand that you’re not in the place where you want to do it.

JS:  Well, it may well be the perfect thing to do, Randy, but until energy starts coming toward me. Maybe when the record comes out it’ll start to dictate certain plans for me, but right now everything feels really quiet and I do feel like very solitary and when I introduced different musicians into the arrangements—I had worked with an uilliean pipe in Ireland when I was there, and a percussionist, and I didn’t feel right introducing other people’s energy to the record. I feel very solitary right now, in other words, and so I kept reducing the record back to mostly myself, and that’s how I feel right now, timewise. I don’t feel like being available onstage or working with other people right now. That might change.

RR:  Well, I’d say go with that feeling as long as you can and hopefully I’d like to . . . I hope some more work comes out of this. It would be amazing to document this time that you’re moving through.

JS:  Yeah, well, I think you have that . . . this is a special record for me too because . . . and I’m surprised at how thrilled I am with it because I’ve never had a record that I could hand to older people or certain people that I really love without apologizing for being me. You know what I mean?

RR:  Absolutely.

JS:  And so I have so much pleasure thinking that I can give this to the people in the old age home, because I guess I’ve never had something like this before, and I’m so thrilled, just for that simple reason. And I think that’s why I tried to keep myself out of it as much as possible. A certain part of myself. And as an aside, like you said, it pumped up more of another part of myself. I do think it’s a landmark record for me of sorts, and significant, although I haven’t put it into words like you have, but I really appreciate that.

RR:  I think as we’re going through the world together in a way and you’re slightly ahead of me, and in that sense I’m learning from you with the things that you record. So you’re experiencing things on the frontlines in many ways, and the burning away or the stripping away and the acknowledgement of what’s left and to find meaning and where it is that you find meaning and to be able to, like a jazz musician would say, “blow” on that is a real inspiration to me. I’d be interested to see what you do . . . where you go next. Do you have an idea of what’s up for you?

JS:  Not sure yet, but just sort of vague shapes around me, but I’m not sure. One thing I thought of was the arrangements on the record I was hoping to do a lot more elegant work with the strings, etc., but every time I tried to get too fancy, I felt false. So I ended up with things I’m not necessarily even that, as a musician . . . using string pads—I would have preferred to replace them with real strings more often, and yet as soon as I did that, they started to pull focus, and so I felt I had responsibility to use almost nondescript synth sounds, and ignore a part of me that felt they were a bit, what’s the word, “cheap” or whatever. So that the ear would not become interested in them and the focus in the painting, so to speak, would be the vocal arrangements.

RR:  And the emotions behind the words themselves, and the phrasing of them.

JS:  Yeah. It could have been a much more complex and elegant record in a certain way, and yet it would have lost so much, so that surprised me. And then vocally there’s very few places where there’s a single vocal. In an odd way, although I did . . . it was right to have a bed of just me, for some reason it seemed too intimate when there was just one of me, so I did a lot of doubling and tripling to create a mat that felt more correct for putting out on the common table.

RR:  And, if I remember right, “As I Roved Out,” I think, the first stanza is completely acapella. Do I have the right song?

JS:  I’m not sure. I think there’s a pad there.

RR:  Oh, maybe. But the single vocal is so forefront. I think your instincts were right in how you assembled this record. I have no complaints about the arrangements. There’s no arrangement that feels false or phony to me. There’s nothing that seems to be bringing my attention to a place that has less power and emotion than where you have decided to lie them, which is a mixture of the lyrics themselves, and also, I have to say, your voice sounds more angelic, especially the way that you have it layered here, than I’ve ever heard it, which I think is what people who have listened to you for years now are going to be humbled by. Just how beautiful you were able to make the human voice, traditional lyrics, and simple . . . the word “simple” doesn’t cover it. I think it’s appropriate arrangements. The way that you would say at a party listen to someone who played the piano, but it was real in that moment, and it was real in a way that no studio orchestra could ever capture—that same sense of immediacy and emotional content, that these arrangements . . . that you were able to capture.

JS:  Emotional-content wise, when I had a single voice, they become too emotional, oddly enough. That to get the right emotional amperage, I had to mask my voice a bit by doubling it or tripling it, because I had a solo version of “Shenandoah,” but it would make me . . . too much information was carried in my voice when you could hear it alone.

RR:  Maybe it softens it a bit when you have….

JS:  Yeah, it takes me out of it a bit. It takes . . . because these aren’t my songs, so it’s not really appropriate that I sing them too intimatel

RR:  I found that with a song that— “Water Is Wide,” I’m thinking of, which I’ve heard a lot of versions of—I’ve heard versions that literally make me cry from a sense of the person being broken down in their life in that moment and saying “I can’t make it on my own; I need a boat that’ll carry two.” And yet I found that with a lot of these songs, the lyrics are incredibly almost tragic and world weary, but you’re able somehow to soften that or heighten a more transcendent quality of that so that they don’t come across as tragic or sad, even—they come across as transcending that sadness or worldweariness to a realm of beauty. But I imagine that you connected with songs like “Water Is Wide” and “Shenandoah” because the lyrics are tragic, in a way, or sad.

JS:  Yeah, and they’re a distillation of people’s thought for many, many years, right? They’ve stood the test of time, so they’ve spoken to many, many people, and endured. So they must the nut of, you know, the human heart.

RR:  Yeah, those specific moments like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Like when my father died, you become a part of a world that has had to live with fathers dying for all time, and there’s certain emotions that you’ll experience only, and they’re very private, and yet, at the same time, if you’re able to capture them in a song, they can reach out and speak to somebody and touch them in that moment. And so these songs are more or less a collection of moments.

JS:  Yeah, distilled moments—exactly that. Of man’s journey. I’m sorry to hear about your father, Randy. I’m not saying I’m sorry to say he died, necessarily, but it’s always hard.

RR:  Thank you for saying that. Actually I listened to your CD off and on for those three days. It was the only thing I could really listen to. I guess I was Rhona at that moment. And I think that’s why I connected so deeply with it, because I was in one of those moments where the world outside stops in a way, just the way the cars pull on the side of the road to let a funeral cortege pass. I had to, in many ways, let a lot of things . . . I couldn’t touch a lot of things or be touched by a lot of things. I was in a place where I was watching a lot of things go by, and in that moment, in that series of moments of mystery and surprise and being carted away, I had your voice singing like angels to me. And as just one person out in the world, that’s why I’m so excited about . . . I want a lot of people to hear this, and I think that they can . . . that you . . . I’m so in awe, as an artist, as a practicing poet, I’m so in awe of an artist—another artist—who is able to capture the essence of what I’m working toward and all, I think, great artists work toward, and to have one person succeed in that becomes an inspiration for everybody else, and also a sort of hand-up in a way, you know? A little map. And I know that you had to go through this yourself, and that you created this, and I’m the beneficiary of it in many ways, and I just admire and appreciate what you’ve done.

JS:  How articulate you are. Thank you.

RR:  Is there anything that I haven’t covered that you would like to talk about, that you’re excited about, that maybe I missed?

JS:  Well, I wanted to say that actually, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” I was totally thinking of my father when I sang it, because he is I guess on his way out. Oddly enough that you would connect to that song. The mix—the sound of the record—worked very much to the way I like to hear things, which isn’t how an engineer normally works. I would be continually pushing all the vocals up. And I’d say, “No, it’s not a lead with two harmonies—it’s three-part singing.” And it has a totally different effect on the body and sometimes I had to sacrifice being able to track the melody, because the harmonies were up at the same level. But for some reason it felt the most pleasurable to me.

RR:  It becomes almost 3-D to the listener.

JS:  Yeah, that’s a good way…. I think so. I think it’s very pleasing to hear that scupltedness and quite dry a lot of the time—not always, but quite, quite in the face but, yeah.

RR:  Anything else?

JS:  Not that I can think of, Randy. But, anyway, you have a great eye and way with words, so I do hope you can sort of crystallize a few things and give them to Mark.

RR:  Okay. What I’ll do is I’ll hand this off to the transcriptionist, and they’ll transcribe it, and I’ll give a copy to Mark as soon as possible.

JS: Yeah, with your eye. It’d be great if you could sort of circle a few things.

RR:  Okay, I will.

JS:  I think what I think is important in that press release is the overview that you have. And that you used the word “landmark” and why in fact this is so, and that you used the word “pure.” Even though they’re not my songs, it is in fact, in an odd way, purer work than I’ve done before.

RR:  I think so.

JS:  Anyway, the way you put it was really great. So, there you go.

RR:  It’s been a pleasure talking with you, Jane.

JS:  Yeah, same here, Randy.

RR:  I really miss you. Why don’t you come back? Come back!

JS:  Come back where?

RR:  Boulder!

JS:  Oh, Boulder. I probably will, as we get rolling and get on track.

RR:  It’d be good to see you again.

JS:  I’m just starting to work with people there. It would make sense for me to come down again.

RR:  We’d like to see you. You have a lot of fans here.

JS:  And you could pick me up and tell me more stories on our long journey.

RR:  It’s a deal.

JS:  Okay.

RR:  Thanks, Jane.

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 succeed each other in time, bound by causality because your coloured view wants this regularlity, but right through the walls of causality “miracles” glide and flow continually, visible only to the free, the enlightened…. Intellect has made him forfeit the staggering independence and directness of each of his rambling images by connecting them to each other…. For example [the statement] ‘The structure of nature is so infinitely subtle and complex that your intellect will never fully grasp it and so you will never find there the stability you aim for.’ For those who relinquish the intellect, however, the world is anything but subtle or complex: it is immediately clear: it appears subtle only to the intellect that struggles laboriously and sees no end to its struggle…. Look at this world, full of wretched people, who imagine that they have possessions, afraid they might lose them, always hopefully toiling in an effort to acquire more…. Only he who recognizes that he has nothing, that he cannot possess anything, that absolute certainty is unattainable, who completely resigns himself and sacrifices all, who does not know anything, does not want anything and does not want to know anything, who abandons and neglects everything, he will receive all; to him the world of freedom opens, the world of painless contemplation and of — nothing.”

AW: Brouwer sounds very Buddhist in what you just quoted. There is no goal. We are all “gonna die.” The practices and “concepts” in Buddhism are just stepping stones toward nothing. “Nothing” means that you don’t need to be grasping and territorial and self-perpetuating. There is no “self,” which is a very heretical notion. When you go to look for a solid self, a soul, something made of DNA, recognizable, this big “me” that will carry your identity for ever and ever, you can’t find it. And yet you are colorful, individual, only you will write that particular poem, only you manifest a very wonderful and particular vivid energy. Or you can be dark and wrathful, a terrorist. Only you suffer what you suffer. But you are still going to die and you can’t anything with you. You consciousness might return, some people experience that possibility, but you won’t ever be Randy Roark again. And I won’t be Anne Waldman. I find this “view” a tremendous relief. And it makes you feel more compassion towards other lifeforms as well. So perhaps a bit of your art remains that might encourage someone else. Great. You want to live to experience your own immortality? You want to imagine that? Is that the point of it all? I doubl it.

RR: The Moslem philosopher Avicenna claimed that the highest understanding, say spiritual love of God, is unavailable to all but the highest minds, so parables, such as stories of a physical paradise and bodily immortality, are to be used for the masses while the other purer knowledge is to be used with only the most advanced students. Do you ever code in language what you are afraid may be misunderstood?

AW: I’m working around many aspects, the public poetry being an important one. I’m not sure about the “coding.” Poetry is always a kind of code. My Tantric studies come into the work constantly. When it does, is it accessible? You tell me.

RR: Since I first heard of Keats idea of “negative capability” I’ve collected some notes on it. For instance, a diagnostic symptom of mental illness is “all-or-nothing” thinking where a person can’t contain contradictory ideas about a person, incident, or object — “I hate my mother and I love my mother” — instead it always has to be either “My mother is the devil” or “My mother is an angel.” This seems a corollary to Keats’s idea — “the ability to keep in mind contradictory ideas without an irritable searching after facts.” One also thinks of F. Scott Fitzgerald (“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”). Both Aristotle’s and Einstein’s definition of genius was “the ability to contain contradiction.” Whitman, of course: “Do I contradict myself? Very well! I am large, I contain multitudes.” But how precisely does this affect any concept of poetry or the poetic act?

AW: My friend and poet Andrew Schelling puts it well: “A poem is a mind that holds contraries.”

RR: Is esoteric Buddhism a key in deciphering some of your more intellectually complex poems? For example in the Vajradhatu Sun, a Buddhist publication, the reviewer writes of “Romance” that “‘She’ is wisdom abandoned and therefore found.” That seems unnecessarily obscure to me.

AW: Yes, it’s important to watch “buzzwords” or buzz-concepts. But, for example, to appreciate a poem, such as “I Digress …” it would be useful to know something about the Abhidharma, the Abhidharma in Buddhist philosophy.

RR: Yet when I first heard you read “I Digress …” I didn’t have the slightest idea it had anything to do with Abidharma. I still don’t know what Abidharma means. But I think it’s one of the most rigorous, uncompromisingly intelligent poems I’ve ever heard. Are you telling me any affection I have for the poem is mistaken?

AW: Not at all. But you might get interested in Abhidharma and that could further your appreciation of the poem. Abhidharma notices how the mind moves through “heaps” of experience which are at some point illusory. It’s a very precise description. It’s a footnote to the poem. You are an ideal, attentive reader. You “get” as much as you need and more. You love poetry, you love to crack the code. You are a serious student of Pound. How do you read the Cantos? Do you want the notes? Do they enhance the poem for you?

RR: It’s funny but I think of them as totally different activities. Reading Kenner on Pound makes me realize I don’t know what I don’t know. I assume I have all the information needed to read a poem. If it’s in English and I don’t understand it I think it’s because it doesn’t make sense rather than that I can’t make sense of it. But in the Cantos and in some of your work I bump against Greek or Sanskrit or Chinese and I know I’m missing something-there’s a big skip in the poem, I lose the continuity. Pound said that when you come across something you don’t understand in the Cantos, something in a foreign language for instance, don’t worry because it’ll be repeated in a form you do understand nearby. I think he’s wrong about that, but it doesn’t matter. What’s interesting is if a poem interests you enough you find out about it. With the Cantos or with Joyce or Pynchon or Eliot there’s plenty of secondary texts to expose the underpinnings of the work. Your situation is a little different in two ways: One is that you share your vocabulary with a select group of Buddhist practitioners and, two, there isn’t any significant secondary material. But what I like about poems I don’t totally understand is that you don’t have to believe it or argue with it because you’re interested in how the poet’s mind is working. You see the connections made in the poet’s head and you also begin to see the movement of electricity through the poet’s mind, even though you might arrange the energy in a different pattern. It’s Pound’s “rose in the steel dust.” And so I find in my scholarship a freedom, a loosening of my sense of self into a concept of time where I’m an insignificant speck totally circumscribed by my times. I know you as a scholar as well and wonder if you find inspiration in your studies. What exactly do you find yourself drawn to in your studies?

AW: I am drawn to the passion that manifests in other cultures’ ritual and oral traditions, to a study of how mind articulates its states of ecstasy and exploration. How art stretches the boundaries of logic. I’m interested in “ulatbamsi” — the “upsidedown language” you find in Kabir and in Tantric Buddhism. I am interested in how and where the synapse occurs that transmits through juxtaposition of semantics and sound. I listen to a lot of ethnic music which carries those messages. I am also a student of my own time and place which is circumscribed by poetry, and I work to forge a poetics which is close to my mind-grammar and body-mind vibration.

RR: The poet Basil Bunting, friend of Pound, wrote “Pens are too light/take a chisel to write.” Pound himself said that the most important tool for the writer was a very large garbage can. There’s the story of Allen Ginsberg’s mid-60′s reading in London with Bunting in the audience. Allen wanted to read his best work for Bunting so he read “Howl”, “Kaddish”, “Sunflower Sutra” — all his “greatest hits.” Afterwards he and Bunting were riding in a taxi and Allen was nervous because Bunting had said nothing about the reading. Finally Allen couldn’t take it any more and asked Bunting what he had thought of the reading. And Bunting said, “Too many words.” The traditions of compression in writing and more expansive works seem at odds. Who do you think sympathize with — writers who chisel at words or those who open a vein?

AW: Both. Both. I appreciate “condensare.” I return to Dickinson, Niedecker, Creeley with awe and inspiration. I love the succinct angular tension of Chinese and Japanese poetries. I myself tend to be more verbose, probably on the side of “too many words.” Not A Male Pseudonym is somewhere between the two. I need the lyricism extra syllables provide. I work with song, and need to manifest and explicate contradictory psychological states. Olson “opens a vein,” Robert Duncan, too. Does there have to be a choice?

RR:. How can you tell the difference between an acceptance of “both” which is a weakness, an inability to choose or an inability to take a stand, and some real understanding? Kerouac said “Until you assert yourself nothing ever happens to you.” In my own life it seems the real breakthroughs have happened when someone’s pushed me uncompromisingly until some raw primal energy came out screaming “I am!”

AW: I recognize that push too. But I’m talking about negative capability. I don’t feel compromised by my personal range. Heaven forbid I ever “find my own voice.” I’m not really searching, you know. Embarrassing. Creeley and Ginsberg can co-exist. I’ve always been excessive. I assert myself all the time. There’s no particular problem with that.

RR: You know, one of the things I’ve learned about you through this interview is you don’t intimidate easily. When you’re challenged you rise to the challenge. In fact, you even seek out the challenge. I think that may be a contributing factor to explain why you’ve been so successful.

AW: Thank you for the compliment. It’s enjoyable to talk about poetry. I’m always amazed that people aren’t more inquisitive, aren’t asking specific questions about particular poems. Poetry works out of ordinary mind as well as sacred speech and sound. It can be discussed. As a reader of poetry one wants the company of other readers as well. That’s one of the reasons we started a poetics school.

RR: Why have you chosen to incorporate non-verbal aspects such as video, music, dance, etc. into the performance of your poetry?

AW: I am interested in the contrast the non-verbal aspects provide in relation to the words — to the poetry. I enjoy collaboration. I learn a lot about color, body, non-syntactical form.

RR: Your poetry is very direct to the subject matter — whether it be a “take” on a political subject or an interior experience. Is this a conscious choice away from subtlety? Is there any sense of the personal, the private in your work as opposed to “the public.”

AW: Yes, certainly. I seem to be working in both directions, always, simultaneously. The “takes” feel necessary on current issues. It’s a way to understand where my mind is, relative to outside challenge, insanity (the war in the middle east), and how to empower myself in the miasma where one could otherwise dissolve into total chaos and despair. I can create a spell that says “I’ll make your semen dry up/Your genitalia will wither in the wind!” addressed to the “men of war,” the arbiters of our industrial-military-mafialike complex, and actually feel its potential efficacy. Other works such as “Science Times”, “Both Self Either Neither” are subtler, for the page primarily. “Pseudonym” is more private.

RR: There seems to be no negative capability in your political stand. You seem to feel a need for eternal vigilance because you see the government as a Machiavellian and almost demonic force, especially the U.S. government, which is out to destroy you and everything you believe in. But it seems to me your shrillness and inability to draw political distinctions makes you, politically at least, marginal and ineffectual. What is your feeling about political poems in general? For instance, I can’t imagine an overtly political Frank O’Hara poem.

AW: What, no capability in my political stand? How provocative of you! I disagree. True, I find the government-and most governments, not just ours-demonic. They are so rarely motivated, it would seem, by compassion, but rather by greed. The Scandinavian governments are perhaps an exception, and more humane, more involved with the welfare-the health-of their citizens. They seem wiser in matters concerning the environment, for example. What are the distinctions? Keep a sense of humor, see the inanity of some of our political figures, but don’t be naïve about how their decisions are affecting our reality and survival. The war in the Middle East was cruel, misguided. In spite of what a monster Saddam Hussein is, there’s a lot of blood on “our” hands. I can’t helping being shrill at times, although the song I wrote, “Tormento del Desierto,” about Operation Desert Storm is slow, sedate, almost dirge-like. I often appreciate the sentiments, the passion of a political poem but it has to work on outside levels as well — Amiri Baraka’s political poems shine in their vocal power, in their complex and engaged rhythms. You might not even agree with him on the semantic level. Frank O’Hara’s poems are humanly political. The consciousness of the persona he conjures is awake. He’s a good citizen.

RR: Many have said that an author’s works are their autobiography. I’m familiar with much of your work but very little of it is self-revealing, although this does not mean that it’s non-autobiographical. But am I wrong in thinking that there appears to be much more of the artist creating a work in your poetry as opposed to the artist leading the reader into an experience?

AW: Perhaps. Perhaps there is no “self” ultimately to be revealed. The “I” exists in so much as “other” and vivid phenomena exist. I don’t think you mean “confessional,” do you?

RR: I don’t know.

AW: I write to make up the world, it’s true. I live inside that “world” or universe. You’re welcome to come in as well. But it’s not all artifice either. I want you to get inside my eyes and heart.

RR: Kerouac said in Visions of Cody that “I am writing this because we’re all going to die.” Do you have a conscious, underlying reason that you write, a purpose to your writing? Is it only to make up a world?

AW: I feel close to Kerouac’s sentiment. “I’m here to disappear” I’ve said. The writing confirms the fragility and unbearable beauty of our existence. Its purpose isn’t immortality. It’s more complex and interesting than that. It’s discovering life at the edge of death, all the time.

RR: In ancient Greece the four arts (lyric poetry, song, instrumental music, and dance) were one art. It wasn’t until later that they became separate. It seems as if you’re trying to put the pieces back together.

AW: Yes, often I want to bring the pieces back into a comprehensive whole again so the efficacy, or whatever “good” or insight or energy comes through the work, can travel further into human psycho-physical streams so that the poetry has more of a “pulse.” I find music expands my own mental capacity. It triggers associations and imprints on me in a visceral way. Dance gesture is necessary to any ingesting of any knowledge or wisdom. And its rituals are exonerating. My inspiration comes out of a natural inclination to push boundaries which I deem artificial in the first place. The directions continue to be interesting. Sometimes in writing workshops I’ve encouraged a collaborative choral form, where everyone is contributing words, music, song, gesture, movement. Many directions. At the moment of performance, all arts are the same.

RR: Plato’s Academy was more or less a religious fraternity dedicated to the muses. Is there any feeling at Naropa of a religious or spiritual foundation, a concept of fraternity, or a dedication to something “other”?

AW: Well the “other” is not an external “other.” We honor our own innate wisdom and poetry at Naropa. That’s the purpose of bowing together to one another’s best effort, aspiration. There is a wonderful sense of comraderie based on the underlying understanding of go — that it ultimately “doesn’t work.” So there’s a lot of chaos and groundlessness as we say, but there’s also a great deal of an abundance, generosity, commitment. Naropa definitely presents an alternative to most educational institutions. The school really falls much more within the Shambhala tradition. Although it has the accomodation of Buddhist background it is a secular school interested in other traditions and points of view. It certainly acknowledges the outrageous “outrider” tradition in American poetry and poetics.

RR: One of my primary experiences in meditation is a state of mind which is virtually wordless. This experience must somewhat resemble a child’s experience when s/he has not yet begun to place names on objects, to literalize their experience and then experience this literalization as their primary “experience”. Does your experience of meditation affect not only your relationship to your mind (as preword) and its reaction with your “experience” but also your reentry in the land of words in your writing?

AW: I would say the experience you describe is sometimes accurate. But often when I meditate I am not in that “wordless” state at all. My projecting mind is racing with all kinds of thoughts that also are labeled “words.” I’ve learned about “gap” through meditation and also directly experienced “negative capability.” Sometimes the oral work develops as sound first, before word, concept, then the latter kicks in. But meditation makes you stop what you are doing. This is an interesting contrast to the rest of my daily life. “I” is not so reliable. Who is thinking, watching, etc? These are always interesting questions.

RR: St. Francis of Assisi said, “Who we are looking for is who is looking.”

AW: That’s the first step. Finding the “watcher.” But you can get beyond that. The watcher isn’t always so interesting.

RR: Actually, I think it’s very interesting. I think if you begin to examine “the watcher,” as you call him, there’s an interesting moment when you realize that if you’re observing the watcher, then who’s doing that? And if you can observe yourself observing the observer it begins to get very interesting. From that point it was clear that reality seemed to change as my perception of it changed, and my perceptions were disturbed by these weird filters. I keep trying to get out from behind these filters. So the question is, Who is this “I” I’m trying to get out from behind these filters? I see similarities to Pound’s point of the vortex or the point connecting Yeats’s two gyres where the maximum energy is. It’s the point of pure energy without manifestation. And I think it’s the point where words come through although I don’t know where they come from because that point has no depth, it doesn’t contain anything as far as I can tell. I don’t know what it is, really, because it’s not a thing. I can never really back it up against a wall. In fact, isn’t that where you observe our thoughts in meditation? Isn’t there a total identification with emptiness at that moment, the moment you, say, witness an attachment or observe your thoughts from the point of view of the “who” who is looking?

AW: That’s the point in meditation, and the watcher dissolves. It’s just experience at that point. No reference point back to the solid. “I.” As a writer that can be exciting because of the groundlessness. You are free to explore other states of mind, states of being. You can get inside the language. Down with the narrative, the autobiography, the “self,” the dull ownership of experience, tired emotion, semantics. Cut-up eliminates the “watcher” to some extent or it gets fractured, multi-headed, a more curious beast. But the organizer is still on the job.

RR: In many ways, words themselves continue to exist when the object they refer to no longer do. For example, William Carlos Williams’ red wheelbarrow probably no longer exists outside the poem itself. Plato suggests that words (ideas, abstractions) are the only eternals — that all the wheelbarrows in the world will cease to exist whereas the word “wheelbarrow” will continue to connote an idea even after all the wheelbarrows eventually disappear. This seems in contrast to WCW’s statement “No ideas but in things.” But it seems contradictory since there aren’t any objects in that statement. How do you see this very basic argument? Is it important in any way to you?

AW: Do you know Jack Spicer’s letter to Garcia Lorca where he says “I would like to make poems out of real objects” and “the imagination pictures the real”? He speaks of how the lemon he shellacs to the canvas will decay, develop a mold, become garbage. “Yes, but the garbage of the real still reaches out into the current world making its objects, in turn, visible — lemon calls to lemon, newspaper to newspaper, boy to boy. As things decay they bring their equivalents into being.” “Things do not connect: they correspond” he says. “No ideas but in things” does not say “no ideas,” so there’s a philosophical argument here. Words are things, however, as Gertrude Stein reminds us. The dialogue is always shifting in my head. My poetics is open, expansive. Words are very much things to me, personally, whatever they evoke semantically. But they carry communication, if you will, on many levels. I am not interested in a fixed position vis a vis words. Never.

RR: There seems to be a very definite line between poets who conceive of poetry as primarily language — the sound, the juxtaposition of words, the visual impact of the letters themselves where the meaning is secondary or contained in those qualities of sound, etc. or even non-existent — and those who think of poetry as primarily communication. Where do you fit in this dialogue?

AW: Probably with the former, in these sense of how I practice the art. Message poetry can be most tedious. You might communicate better by telephone, by an embrace, by sending your money to a worthy cause. But poetry will always communicate something however it’s “done.” It might be more complex than some people are used to. My poetry communicates my mind, my nervous system which rages with passion whatever the words “say.”

RR: The idea of relativity of experience came into disfavor as early as mid-period Greece. The position taken was that if all experience was relative than a sleeper’s, a drunken person’s or a maniac’s vision of reality would be as true as anyone else’s. They came to believe there must be an objective truth and so the question became is there a road or path to it?

AW: The relative and the absolute, sure. But the absolute, in a way, is beyond anyone’s version and description. In a way it is our own mind using the simile of the mirror, which simply reflects things as they come up with no attitude.

RR: In their History of Civilization, Will and Ariel Durant point out that the earliest dated printed language was the Diamond Sutra. In Sumer, the oldest western civilization which has left a record, archeologists have uncovered “shattered tablets (which) contain dirges of no mean power, and of significant literary form. Here at the outset appears the characteristic Near-Eastern trick of chanting repetition — many lines beginning in the same way, many clauses reiterating or illustrating the meaning of the clause before. Through these salvaged relics we see the religious origin of literature in the songs and lamentations of the priests. The first poems were not madrigals, but prayers.”

AW: This feels right. Prayers are a a yearning for confirmation. Their efficacy makes the world keep spinning, from some point of view.

RR: It has been said that during the Golden Age, arguably the height of Roman culture (circa 30 A.D.), poets ceased to mingle with people and of even speaking their language. (One thinks of a statement from Patricia Hempl’s review of Makeup on Empty Space: “The famous ‘difficulty’ of contemporary poetry is here, the surface angularity that confines poetry to a skimpy audience.”) Artificial (Greek) forms had become the model for poetry. Horace’s “profane crowd” preferred satires and “lower forms” of art, such as bar songs. This atmosphere co-existed with (or perhaps created) a ribald underculture which included, before his eventual banishment, Ovid. Ovid and his crowd (the poete maudits) set themselves up explictly in opposition to what they saw as the “piety” of Virgil and his imitators. Petrified versus lively; polite versus profane. Is this a continual flux? Do you find similar drives in your own “career”? Where do you fit in with “the profane crowd”?

AW: I take Virgil’s line “Iovis Omnia Plena” (All is full of Jove) as a title, and the joke is that it’s Jove’s sperm it’s full of. I tell the senators their semen will dry up, I write love poems to women, I scream “Mega Mega Mega death bomb — enlighten” while demonstrating at Rocky Flats. But some of the longer more meditative pieces sound more “polite,” and contained, perhaps, although ther’s a radical thinking going on inside them.

RR: What’s the longest period of time you have gone without writing a poem? Do you get a feeling of restlessness when you’re not producing?

AW: I’m crazy when I’m not writing. I’m sick. I have no purpose in life. Something like that.