January 8, 1980: Poetic Apprentice
January 8: Today my first poetry class at Naropa — Literary Criticism with Stanley Fefferman. I showed up on time to any empty room. Finally, a little after 2, another student showed up — Sue Rhynhart. It was her first poetry class too and she was excited and nervous and scared all at the same time. She has a funny way of talking in that she talks on the in-breath as if she’s a balloon FILLING UP with air as she talks, rather than the other way around. We were the only two people in the room until almost 15 minutes after the hour. We both thought we were in the wrong place — we both imagined there would be dozens and dozens of students in class. Stanley finally showed up and two other students. There were five of us sitting around a small table, face-to-face. We talked, he didn’t lecture. He sat back in his chair smoking a dark cone-shaped cigarette called a “bidi” from India, I think, which smells like burning carpet. He’d lean forward and ask one of us a very intense question and then lean back, grinning broadly. Then he’d begin another question and turn to face the person he was addressing halfway through the question which kept us all off-guard, not knowing whom he would turn to next — suddenly you were looking into this very dark face which you had never seen before and trying listen to the question at the same time. His eyes sparkled like he was infinitely amused at something in my face and asked me “Do you believe in the . . . Muse?” Then he grinned until I could see his teeth and leaned back into his chair, laughing, drawing on his bidi. I told him no, I didn’t see things that way. I thought that poetry came when inspiration came, which was maybe the same thing, or when the mind was receptive to some undercurrent of reality, like negative space, which wasn’t obvious but just as real — like the moment you realize the shadow in the woods is actually a deer. He thought I meant something which happened in the brain but I said that I thought the mind wasn’t in the brain, per se, but that the mind was actually an awareness, like the globe of light around a candleflame. Then he asked me, very seriously, “But what is outside of this ‘mind’ to see?” and I suddenly realized that “no, nothing is,” and I was saying it out loud as I was thinking it for the first time, and I felt that the answer was actually born out of his questioning, that in a way it was the questioning that had created the answer inside my own head. I got a feeling that he doesn’t like me although we waved goodbye.
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