Summer before last year at Bennington where I’d been editing SILO magazine under tutelage of printer-poet Claude Fredericks, studying literature and poetry with Howard Nemerov and other literary and creative faculty, I was encouraged by Jonathan Cott — comrade I’d known since high school — to visit radical Berkeley and check out the poetry convention. It was certainly going to be more experimental than what I was exposed to at Bennington. A few students had been making queries about why no one taught Williams, Pound or Gertrude Stein, let alone H.D. I was trying to get the school to invite Allen Ginsberg to read. Jon and I had been exchanging work, he’d sent copies of Ted Berrigan’s C magazine jamming my little rustic p.o. box. He’d known Ron Padgett at Columbia University. We were on to the New American Poetryand the poetry net was widening, inviting.
My mother’s connection to poet Anghelos Sikelianos — he was her father-in-law over a decade — had decidedly informed my upbringing and aspirations to poetry. Frances was part of the utopian Delphic Ideal community in Greece in the 1930s spearheaded by Eva Palmer Sikelianos with links to Isadora Duncan, Jose Clemente Orozco, others, that had a humanistic brave notion that art, and Greek drama in particular, could ‘save mankind.’ There was encouragement in our bohemian household towards any act of poetry.
I wrote stories and plays and e.e. cummingsesque poems in high school, and sent them uneventfully off to The Village Voice and The Evergreen Review, to which I loyally subscribed. The night Lewis and I took lysergic acid diethylamide at a friend’s apartment on Nob Hill, first time, I hallucinated a lineage tree, an arbor vitae (prevalent archetypal ‘acid’ icon) — resonant with what you visualize in particular Buddhist practices — that included all the people I’d ever known: family, friends, their families, friends. Also heroes, heroines, cultural figures, saints, poets, ballplayers, actors, movie stars, singers, many others — bad guys, enemies even. Animals, trees, plants, lakes, mountains, and so on. All gathered in my brain in witness motif, gazing at one another and then up at the sky waiting for an impulse to get something ‘going.’ Or make use of their precious time ‘on earth.’ Of course all these folk were already busy, that wasn’t the point. It was my yearning to be part of it all, a blueprint for community, for sacre conversatione. More like a fifties Sci Fi movie? And yet the desire to belong, and to ‘lead’ had a naive, albeit egotistical, purity.
Back on the relative level, clearly Lewis and I were bonded and destined to ‘do something’ together. Certainly meeting on the West Coast and having a sense of those poetry communities helped define or keep expansive the aesthetic of our magazine and press. Also the perspective of an alternative to the official verse culture so clearly manifest at Berkeley was appealing. We were already drawn to underground ‘autonomous zones,’ tender beauties of small press production. White Rabbit books were sacred objects Lewis turned me towards. Later Locus Solus, Art & Literature, The Floating Bear and Ed Sanders Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts were also galvanizing for their intimacy and immediacy.
I had met Diane di Prima in 1963 when she was in situ at the Albert Hotel with children and entourage and books on alchemy. Back in Vermont I’d been working on SILO with printer Ronnie Ballou, who printed grocery lists and menus for livelihood. He was a taciturn New Englander, rarely smiled, but pleased with the new venture. This was not fine letterpress printing but a modest and cheaper substitute. |
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