January 7, 1980: Poetic Apprentice
January 7, 1980: Met Ginsberg for the first time at noon today. He opened the front door himself, puffy looking, stooped, tired. He was cleanshaven, a bit distracted, quiet, nervous, had been ill, had just been told he had hypertension, just quit smoking. It was obvious he wasn’t expecting me but it wasn’t awkward. I explained my visit briefly and he nodded and said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah” like it was something HE had forgotten. He asked me in and when I was inside he walked into the kitchen to fix tea while I felt dizzy, in a large living room with a wooden floor and a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf, an important-looking library of dusty, tattered, faded poetry books. A large dark painting over the piano of Shelley, he told me later, painted by Gregory Corso. He clanked dishes and called out from the kitchen. I was too shy to follow him and didn’t know whether to sit down or stand or walk into the kitchen so I just stood near the door trying not to be too self-conscious about the poetry manuscript and apprenticeship “resume” I had in my hand. He asked if I wanted green tea or some other kind of tea, if I wanted honey or sugar or lemon or milk, and I never really drink tea so I didn’t know the right answers were. He came out with a teapot on a tray and two china teacups. He mixed his tea with honey from a plastic bear that he squeezed to make the honey come out of the bear’s hat. He fussed with it and I sipped mine. I sat on his sofa/bed; he sat at a small brown wooden writing desk, facing a window that looked out onto a green house next door, and we kind of had a conversation half-turned toward each other and half-turned away. I answered his questions mostly into the floor, painfully dismissive about my talents, my poetry, what I was doing there. I didn’t want to bother him or stick him with this situation, this pointless voiceless pained conversation with someone so painfully shy. His floor and the rest of the house were dingy but very clean. I handed him my “resume.” He was sorry, he said, but he had already chosen his six apprentices — I told him there was no hurry; I’d be here for 2 to 3 years and he visibly relaxed, as if he expected me to argue with him, quitting my job and moving my family 2000 miles because of some bureaucratic mix-up. He said he hadn’t even checked with Naropa since he got back so he didn’t know how Peter [Hurst, the registrar] could say he “had my name.” I felt very comfortable even when he yelled at me. He poured me another cup of tea and distractedly got up several times while asking questions quietly, sometimes so quietly I had to guess at what he’d asked. Talked about [my favorite poet, James] Scully whom he claimed to remember from an anti-Vietnam War reading they’d both been part of in the early seventies. He said he had a similar experience listening to [William Carlos] Williams read at the Museum of Modern Art and the poem was about the imagination and it ended with a gesture and he realized WCW was “just talking.” And I said, “Yes, but beautiful talk” meaning MAGIC talk or POWERFUL talk but AG thought I meant PRETTY talk and yelled “No, no, you missed the whole point!” I thought about explaining what I meant but I kept quiet instead. Some more conversation about the apprenticeship: “Well, we read and transcribe and I fuck some of them.” After an awkward silence I stood up and said, “Well, I won’t be taking any more of your time,” and I shook his hand and said goodbye. After this first anxious meeting everything else will be fine.
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