Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown

The Passing of Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown whose home was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, died not fromt he Hurricane but of a broken heart. A little bit of the soul of music passes with him.

The Charnal Origami and The Chemical Make-Up of Glass

(for Ivan Arguelles)


As part of the window
We are foreign to the glass
The wood, the nail and the latch
Are all an opposition to the view
Neither can see


- Chris Mansel

I Read a Book on SElf-DEmand Amputation

What do you say when all is said, when speaking brings you to tears, when writing brings you to the point of screaming in anguish, when there is no point? Why do you subject others to your pathetic suffering when you know they have their own?

There are no heavenly bodies just those that are there when you awake or so the dreams you have seem to suggest. Using the word symmetry when describing the contents of your mind is like throwing yourself off a bridge into a ravine knowing full well if you would have walked a few feet more down the bridge you would have hit the water easily.

The epilogue is always sown into the skin and doesn’t distinguish from the beginning to the end unless you take into account, which insects arrive first. The ash of a religious ceremony never shows the blood or whether or not the snake slithered away alive or dead. From the cradle of exposed skin to the hounding of the door nailed shut, the sounds and motions of life are going to get in one way or another.

If you ever hope to lighten your load you’ve got to learn to leave me by the side of the road.


- Chris Mansel

Clonazepam 0.5 MG Tablet, Round Yellow

Dead in the brine, golden-yellow
A country road is the godhead personified
Leading to a cave where horses give birth out of the reach
Of those sympathetic to the western pantheon
Deserted traveler meeting across the shadow of the steeple
The wandering Albion, cooked meat on the bone
The smell wafting into the cave where newborns
Meet the sacrifice head on


- Chris Mansel

When Hair Remains With The Body

The right moment illustrates the end. A man is never enough and his faults are what give the courage to fall into his own trap of equilibrium. A prisoner is a great source for protection since his life is dependent upon the controlled atmosphere he is within. A victim is to the attacker what the sun is to the rain, rarely, but sometimes they co-exist to cover what together they have joined together to create; they can give and they can take away.
Fear is never an adversary. A cornered animal in the deep snow owes as much to his mistakes as he does his advantage of his white fur. His wounds bleed into the snow and his scent is carried on each snowflake that drifts by. His death a mix of darkness and words, the attacker whose hunger betrayed by thirst at once discovered the internment of organs felt the need of a heartbeat in withered flesh.
The excess of the key generate the obesity of the door. Trepanning of the human skull reveals what every lover cannot caption, the freedom of the mind set loose under the door. The reflection of the light in a blinding sun like starvation to a pair of teeth forced into a curb of concrete in a traffic accident, belittles the contribution of the skull to its last gasp. The image seen through the blinds, the image that would be hidden by doors is the sensation of light on a open wound. The key, a purveyor of the opening shrouds the lock of the weakened eye blinking wordlessly.

- Chris Mansel


“I love she who hates me more.” - Poe

R.I.P.

I am still having trouble accepting that he is really gone.

I miss you Hunter.

Vile Therapeutic

Only death will appear in the long grass
the teeth bared, the movement silent
and as if representing itself it whispers
…mankind is a profanity.

- Chris Mansel

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blowBetween the crosses, row on rowThat mark our place; and in the skyThe larks, still bravely singing, flyScarce heard amid the guns below.We are the Dead. Short days agoWe lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,Loved and were loved, and now we lieIn Flanders fields.Take up our quarrel with the foe:To you from failing hands we throwThe torch; be yours to hold it high.If ye break faith with us who dieWe shall not sleep, though poppies growIn Flanders fields.

John McCrae, 1915

Stable of the Old Medicine Vial

There’s an old joke told around the forensics community that goes like this, “What is the difference between two completely different bones? The skin that was wrapped around it before I got a hold of it.” While it ma be legal for a forensic scientist to cannibalize the truth of a body in evidence it however illegal for the victim to protest from the grave to the photographs taken in decomposition. If a picture is worth a thousand words then imagine the conversation over your body in the morgue. Poetry is non-conformity when approached by the incestuous lengths the business of medicine will go to utilize the corpse in their own manner.
Another old joke is from a funeral home. The director of the funeral home approaches a grief stricken man and informs him that the burial of his wife will cost about seven thousand dollars or fifty bucks if the staff of the funeral home can have sex with the man’s wife. Salt into the wound take the guise of coins.
Appearing at the end of a barrel is the bullet fired in anger. The body reacts by tearing away. The mind is conditioned to react to the environment of healing. What happens in-between is anybody’s guess.

The Dry Wake of Orchestrated Illuminated Rounds

The steam of morning is threatened by an insect flying from one branch to another, the ground pauses as a human finger flips the safety off on his weapon. The flick of the safety sounds like waves crashing against a distant shore in the silence. The silence is deafening until the jungle erupts in gunfire and screams. From the trees snake recoils back to a higher branch as bits of human bone is torn from under the skin littering the blood soaked ground. In the distance insects bend a leaf in order to capture the nectar of a flower growing wild. The insects used to the sound of gunfire go about their routine always aware of the movement nearby. Leaves that had an hour ago turned themselves upside down to drink from the light rainfall that fell are now imperceptibly moving ever so slowly unseen by human eye to their original position before being torn to shreds by bullets from a North Vietnamese soldiers weapon as he falls back to the ground after being shot in the neck by a ricochet.

- Chris Mansel

The Iraqi Book of Living and Dying

O son of noble family
Burnt Iraqi children
Separated bone from skin
The American process of democracy moves slowly
As you move through the bardo
Hold close to your soul
As it may soon depart leaving your skin to endure
The acts of degenerates
And commissioned officers

O son of noble family
If you are re-born and are recruited by your children
To join the assault of the free world
Heed the teachings of the Buddha
And not the passions of your heart

O son of noble family
There is love for you on the soil of the United States
If you look for it


- Chris Mansel

The Political Philosophy of a Vengeful Society

Spilt an anthill down the middle and the ants will run downhill both ways. Wipe away the anthill completely with one swipe and they run in all directions on a level plain. Now an anthill may be small to you but to an ant it’s his home. It’s a high rise. What can an ant do to you? Lie down by that anthill and every one of those ants will show you. I never saw the whole as a bunch of ants but then again, I understand the mentality to seek revenge, and I don’t run in any direction, I don’t even notice when my world is swept away. Like that ant I’ll be waiting for you to come back or I’ll bring my anthill to you. Either way, destruction is change and change in this life is but a brief glimpse at the next.

- Chris Mansel

Papacy: The Chemical Wedding

Bearing witness, chronic illness after madness
A voice asking, “What shall you be called..”
Standing vigil, prison fatigues
Blood coursing through a single vein
Inebriants, stimulants, chemically based psychotics
You have become a loose-based orpheum, the voice said
You shall be called polemic, and shall serve on the steps of
The poor and shall disrupt nations with your views

A puff of white smoke followed black
And I began as I ended, a lamb to slaughter
My fur becoming death, my flesh offered as life
Heralding from the windowsill the holy day of Pharmacopoeias

- Chris Mansel

Passing

An epic of transition is death. The body is a vessel of incarceration. There are horrors in the skies that dissent to us a web of illness we are drawn to even as we attempt escape. The disease on the ground, the emaciation of the air draws us inside and therefore closes and seals the process of death. Somewhere between the skies and the earth, somewhere in the bardo do we appear as we really are, clear thoughts amidst a solution of matter both gray and dark. Death always reminds us of where we are going and then we start to think of where we have been. Georges Bataille wrote, “There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image.” Either way you look at it death is a continuing process that if captured in a display of DNA would be a round strand that circles endlessly in a poetic path, tragic and ethereal.
- Chris Mansel

From There Outward (for Philip Lamantia and Robert Creeley, liberated)

There was a time
many years ago,
when I was a young child,
I did not write poetry.

In those days
my imagination lived me –
it overtook my body
and shaped it to every delightful and
mysterious purpose it could create.

I was imagination’s living form.
I had no mind, no self
I was motionless
until imagination stirred
some portion to song
(and every word was singing)
or dance
(and every movement was a dance).

Then I felt compelled
to make words.
So I wrote a poem,
then another and another
and people laughed or made pleasant remarks.
And the girls were pleased
when I wrote for them –
those were kisses worth the poems.

But I recognized that
words failed imagination.
They were so carefully
reigned by books and teachers.
I had become imagination’s loss.

So I destroyed myself
and freed the constricted words.
I liberated them to
imagination’s tongue
and they once again
took their natural form
like a tree, or a sun, or a boy.
And people were confused.
they were afraid and turned away.
and I became serious,
a solid man.

I had to destroy myself
again and again
to liberate the words.

and speech was singing
and movement was dancing.

And today,
I hear the great poet’s death
and I think how lucky he is
to be nothing but
free imagination again,
to become pure poetry,
without a world of fools
that make us work
for what we already are.

- Jake Berry 3.30.05,

Jake Berry graciously allowed me to feature this unpublished work and he alone retains the copyright.

Robert Creeley

Prominent poet Robert White Creeley dead at 78
The Associated Press

Robert White Creeley, a longtime university professor in Buffalo regarded as one of the great American poets of the last half-century, died Wednesday. He was 78.
Creeley, who was associated with the Beat generation, died of pneumonia at a hospital in Odessa, Texas, where he was a writer-in-residence, a Buffalo newspaper reported Wednesday.
Creeley taught English at the State University of New York at Buffalo for 37 years before leaving in 2003 to take a post at Brown University in Rhode Island.
He wrote more than 60 books of poetry and earned many honors, including the Bollingen Prize, of which past winners include e.e. cummings and Robert Frost. Creeley was named New York state´s poet laureate in 1989.
A native of Arlington, Mass., Creeley lost his left eye in a childhood accident. He later attended Harvard University but struggled academically and dropped out. In 1955, he received his degree from Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he was one of the founders of the Black Mountain school of poetry that promoted an anti-academic writing form.
He befriended several of the best-known Beat writers, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Creeley also became friends with painter Jackson Pollack but not until after the pair nearly came to blows in a New York City tavern.
"His place in American poetry is enormous," said Charles Bernstein, a poet and former University of Buffalo colleague now at the University of Pennsylvania.
He will be laid to rest in the Cambridge, Mass., cemetery where fellow poets Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are buried.

Hank Lazer Writes About His Friend, Robert Creeley

Robert Creeley (1926-2005)

Absolutely exemplary. Certainly these last ten years or so, a quality of sweetness, pleasure, and generosity. A life lived in and of words with absolute integrity. For me, personally, no more important poet, no one better able to show ways in words to make manifest the grace, pleasure, complexity, cadences, and play of mind at work.

I met Bob in the late 1970s, at a Black Mountain College celebration at Warren Wilson College. We spent a couple of days in conversation; I interviewed Bob; I listened to him read. Much of our time together I asked him for information on the three-line stanzas that he developed, and what relationship his writing had to similar modes in Williams. Great fun witnessing a packed auditorium at his reading, only to have Bob tell stories and follow out a range of thoughts for forty-five minutes to an hour before he read the first poem. Many left before he read. They missed a superb reading, one that was absolutely continuous with the talking that preceded it.

Yes, quite simply one of the greatest conversationalists of all time …

At the time of that Black Mountain event, I knew only parts of what Creeley had written – mainly Words and For Love. From then until now, I have grown more and more familiar with the range of his writing – the poetry, yes, but also the essays. In fact, when I got news of Bob’s declining health, I was reading a new essay of his on Whitman’s poetry of old age (in a special issue of Virginia Quarterly Review celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of the first Leaves of Grass).
In the mid-1990s, I gave a reading at Buffalo. Bob attended, and I had the pleasure of reading new poems (which became the book Days) which were very much based in what I had learned from his work. We spent the next morning, over pastry and coffee, sitting and talking, along with my good friend Yunte Huang. Bob’s generosity to Yunte is another story, but typical of Bob’s kindness to so many younger writers…

Here, at Alabama, I had the pleasure of hosting Bob for a reading a couple of years ago. Again, a packed house. A superb reading, though Bob had to sit for most of the reading, as he did for the conversation/discussion the following day. That particular visit enhanced by the presence of Donald Revell (in residence for the semester), another poet deeply steeped in Bob’s life and writing. And again, Bob made time for a morning of coffee, pastry, and conversation.

Last saw Bob at the Louis Zukofsky Centennial at Columbia this past fall. Some familiar anecdotes, and some unfamiliar.

I’ve been quite moved by the increasingly emotionally open work of Bob’s last couple of books – Life & Death and If I were writing this. He seemed able to circle back, to realize the importance and vitality of late 19th century verse – a family tradition of popular poetry – in his own practice. Or, to make of Keats’ work such a central thing.

We corresponded sporadically via e-mail. I would often send Bob a few poems, and his remarks were always appreciative. He blurbed a book of mine – an extended chapbook called As It Is (published by Mark Scroggins) – and was always supportive of my writing.

What Bob showed was the pleasure and work of making one’s way in a writing life. It is rather amazing to think of how many of us have learned from his example.

Yesterday, the day of Bob’s death, at the end of the day, I went with my son, Alan (16 years old), to Beulah Baptist Church – a black church on a hillside on the way home, a place that I’d often admired but where I’d never stopped. A modest graveyard with a cement angel of Memory leading the way up the dry, red clay hill. At the top of the hill, we walked around for a bit, sun streaming through the clouds. The wisteria now in bloom, we looked at the tombstones, stood beside one for “Pa Pa” Jones, and I read aloud several of Bob’s poems from Life & Death.

Earlier in the day I’d been in touch with several others to whom Bob had been so important – Charles Bernstein, Yunte Huang, Joel Kuszai, Don Revell, Claudia Keelan, Norman Fischer, Tyrone Williams. Even at the time of Bob’s death, it’s hard not to bear in mind his favorite closing in correspondence: “Onward.” Without Bob here to be the figure of Onward, we must take what we have learned from him and be, in our writing and friendship and conversation and correspondence, that no longer singular figure of Onward.

Hank Lazer
March 31, 2005

*

Here’s the e-mail I sent to Bob on Monday, March 28, 2005:

Dear Bob,A gray cold day of spring break, giving way to sunny windy afternoon. I spoke with Joel Kuszai mid-day, and learned some of your health difficulties. And then heard from Charles Bernstein, a more optimistic version. I'm simply writing to let you know I'm thinking of you. And thinking with you. Got in today's mail the latest issue of Virginia Quarterly Review -- on Whitman, and your superb piece on Whitman's poetry of old age. When I read at the Walt Whitman Center in Camden (several years ago, back when Alicia Askenase was in charge of the reading series), I visited Walt Whitman's house, and recognize it in the last photos. For me, the determining feature of my early years of writing poetry was to have an especially close relationship with my four grandparents -- all Russian Jews, all living close to us. In the way that drugs & zen of the 1960s allowed it, I spent time with them, in their decay mental & physical, with a mixture of love, curiosity, and observation (rather than the disabling frustrations that I saw in my parents' relationship to their aging parents). My poems began with telling their stories, my grandparents, and with learning (or trying to learn) something of the phenomenology of aging. And thus, yes, a reading of Williams' later work and others, including, eventually Oppen.A rambling way, Bob, to say that you are on my mind these days, as your poetry and your essays and correspondence will always be.With much love,Hank
*

And a poem, from several years ago, very much with Creeley in mind, from an ongoing work, Portions.


YOU


so the old
cabin leans “sit
up” i said

as if to
someone i said
it to you

i always do
if there were
no one else

if there were
only you i
would say “sit

up” & think
someone heard such
is my sense

the old cabin
leans what is
never passes away


- Hank Lazer

2 poems

The Prophetic
How often does scared and sacred touch? When the rays of the sun reach the earth in the form of lightning? Concealed and mythic are the relations between scared and sacred that belief stumbles into the room unaware of its reason for being there. Faith is scared for lack of a better term and finds its way by fear. Trust is never sacred and therefore unrelenting in its frightening role as faiths widow. Perception is the first body to decompose in a mass grave of indignities. A mass grave where the onlookers are to scared to be sacred.


Mirrors in a Drop Of Alcohol

A rare form of slavery is the act of denial and love. Mixed together they can form a bond, a foundation that will crumble under its own weight as worry and lust overcome the more subtle acts of depravity and death. Locust will decimate everything it flies by, rape will scar the victim long after the victim seeks revenge and truth will be denied by every honest man in his dreams. Angels will get caught in the machinery of life here on earth and be swallowed up by the rationing of fear that operates the will of man. Love is an exodus of snakes abandoning their skin by traveling through rough terrain.

Interview with Hank Lazer

What is the earliest tender moment you experienced, and how did it change you?

The problem, of course, is with what we remember, or, what, to serve present purposes, we claim to remember. I can’t say that I have some particular intense first memory of tenderness. No doubt, like other infants, I must have early moments of tenderness – eating, caressing, fondling, eliminating, sucking, making eye contact, etc. The earliest kinds of tenderness that I experienced that in some way might have been idiosyncratic or somehow personally defining would be associated with my grandparents. I grew up living close – often on the same block, sometimes within a few blocks – to all four of my grandparents. They were not quintessentially “sweet” grandparents – particularly my mother’s parents, who were rather depressed, critical, and moderately paranoid. But they did spend a good bit of time with me; they indulged me; and, most importantly, since English was not their first language, I acquired some of their fascination with language. I learned, somewhat, to see and hear English through them. I remember them telling jokes – often turning on a simple pun. I remember their accents – their first languages were Russian and Yiddish. I remember their delight in humor – a complex quality of language acquisition. Especially from both sides of the family, I felt a deep respect of learning, of thinking, even a love of seemingly esoteric learning (for its own sake). I remember their pride in reading. Eventually, they became the first important subject for my poetry – rather conventional brief or extended narratives telling elements of their history. These early poems can be found in the first half, Book One: Facts and Figures of Doublespace: Poems 1971-1989 (New York: Segue, 1992). Having this desire to tell their stories proved to be very important, since from the outset my poetry was not particularly located in self-expression.

Chogyam Trungpa said, “Buddhism will come to the West as a psychology.” Do you think this is the case or has the true feeling of selflessness actually occurred in our culture?

Perhaps Buddhism will come – or has come – to the West as a psychology, or as a philosophy, or as poetry, or as a meditation discipline, or as a new hybrid sort of religion (as it has entered and met with our cultural conditions). The categories themselves blur. The particularities, the singularities of experience, come and go. That true feeling of selflessness itself comes and goes. As for the feeling of selflessness becoming a key value and revered accomplishment in our culture? Obviously not. The current war (in Iraq) shows how far away we are as a culture from anything like selflessness. It is a war based on arrogance – based on a narrow sense of “our” righteousness. Think how far the war expenditures could have gone toward ameliorating hunger, or poverty, or lousy education – here, in the US, or throughout the world. We have not – as a culture – learned how to give freely. Clearly, though, Buddhism has arrived in the US – particularly in the western US (including Hawaii). Purists may debate whether or not it is a “true” or “rigorous” Buddhism. So, again, the labels may be part of the problem. Something has arrived and developed – some collision and collusion, some generative interaction of Buddhism and elements of western culture. In the area of poetry, of course, there are many examples of the importance of Buddhist thinking in our writing – Gary Snyder, Norman Fischer, Jake Berry, Armand Schwerner, and many others. The writing of poetry itself can become a means – a site, a portal – for accessing and dwelling in (temporarily) that locale of selflessness. Certainly the language and its pre-existing specificities as well as the many traditions of writing are well beyond the doings of an individual “self.” Consider too the wonderful (and at times frustrating) way that the best writing often is not a matter of will but of receptivity, of knowing when and what to listen to, of learning when and how to follow the suggestions of a few words that are given to one…


What do you feel is the anatomy of a poet? What makes some write, and others not?

I don’t think there really is such a thing as “the anatomy of a poet” other than the fairly obvious notion that a poet is someone with a particular fascination with words, someone who has experienced the peculiar depth and mystery of language (and its intimate relationship to human consciousness). As for what makes some write and others not – I think that it must remain a mystery. I tell myself – I try to learn it – that from appearances – say, looking at a line of people in a restaurant or at a sporting event – I know nothing about them. Poets may tend toward a certain seeming casualness (or understated melancholy) of dress, but then there might be a Wallace Stevens, or an Emily Dickinson, or there goes Dr. Williams. Or, there goes John Coltrane, playing amazing sax in his coat and tie. Plenty of people do dabble in poetry – and I think that’s a good thing. Why shouldn’t art-making be an accessible activity? But the more perplexing mystery is trying to determine who might persist at the activity (and why). I remember from the first poetry writing course I took in graduate school (at University of Virginia, taught by a Robert Lowell disciple), we were nearly all students in our early to mid-twenties. One student had, at age 21, published poems in Poetry magazine, and the teacher seemed to worship this student. A few years later, this person was no longer writing poetry. I think back to that class of fifteen students. Who writes today has nothing to do with the quality of writing done then (thirty some years ago). I’m not even sure that the cliché is true: if you enjoy it, you’ll continue. Or that the severe version of the cliché is true: when asked by a young poet, “should I continue to write poetry?” Auden supposedly replied, “if you can quit, do. ”It’s not as simple or clear-cut as either of these extremes suggest. Personally, I am enamored of poets who have some stubborn, self-taught, non-institutional streak. But persistence – especially for those who receive little or no recognition for many years – is a tricky thing. An enemy of persistence: self-pity, a quality that often seizes the poet (as a kind of prolonged adolescent agony for recognition or approval). For me – and I did not publish a first book of poetry until I was 42 years old– the persistence comes from the fact that when I write certain poems, I am able to enter a space (like Robert Duncan’s “Often I am permitted to return to a meadow”) that has a palpable intensification to it, an emotional and intellectual power (simultaneously) that is addictive, that is a supreme pleasure, that feels like a temporary participation in something quite splendid (even if painful). I feel it as a full and best use of my being, so I continue to seek out that place, as a writer, but also most definitely as a reader too.


Could grace ever be achieved through a sudden impulse as opposed to re-writes and revision?

I think that grace can only be achieved through a sudden impulse – being and living within the intensified present of the moment of composition. Yes, a great deal of practice – writing, revising, reading, studying, thinking – may go into the developing of the skills and resources and concentration that maybe of use in that moment of composition, but the achievement (or, perhaps more accurately, the experience) of grace will inevitably occur suddenly. Such a conclusion, though, does not mean that all of our efforts in writing are wonderful. There is, of course, an absolute mode of revision – “yes” or “no” – that allows us to throw out poems that are not especially good. And I have had plenty of experience re-writing and revising poems, sometimes with beneficial results. But for the most part, I find it very difficult to re-enter the space or field of the poem after much time has elapsed. Eventually, the highly specific integrity of that moment – including the peculiar rhythms and sounds that one heard at that moment – gets lost. Perhaps over the span of several days, I am able to tinker with some individual word choices, make some deletions, and occasionally make some substantial changes. But for the most part, the poem itself is an embodiment of a highly specific (usually brief) duration of consciousness – its concentration, its intensification, its specific music (i.e., the music of that specific thinking).I was relieved a couple of months ago to hear Robert Creeley, in an informal discussion, articulating a remarkably similar view. Such a viewpoint aligns poetic composition with jazz improvisation – an informed composition in the present. It does not necessarily mean that “first thought best thought” always turns out to be the case, but it does mean that the present – the specific duration of composition – will be honored to the utmost, the poem, among other things, being a record of attentive dwelling in that specific duration of time.


Should there be a specific role that spirituality should play in art?

Not really. I’d hate to be prescriptive – in regard to spirituality, or in regard to any important element in the making of poetry or art. I suppose that what I have tried to do with my own exploration of poetry (and spirituality) is to be phenomenal. That is, to be truthful to the inconstant, shifting experience of spirituality – as a kind of force, or vector, or pressure, or presence (and disappearance), or immanence, or contiguous relationship. To be truthful to the phenomena of that relationship. It seems to me that if one works at an adequately profound level of awareness of what’s at stake in art-making, spirituality will already be adequately woven into the fabric of the making. Over time, over many years of engaging in a mode of art-making, I think it’s important to embody or represent the elusive and inconstant nature of the spiritual. As I’ve experienced it, it simply isn’t something that’s available on demand. That’s part of why I’m suspicious of any kind of formulaic or axiomatic pronouncement about how spirituality “should” be present in art. Also, the nature and intensity of its location will be ever-changing. And like any other important or intense experience, the rhetoric or vocabulary of the spiritual may harden and become a merely repeated or second-hand, tired, received set of markers (that may actually stand in the way of a renewing experience).


Where do you suppose the self-destructiveness trait comes from that occurs in so many writers?

From frustration, as a consequence of marginalization, and from succumbing toa dangerous set of culturally romanticized stereotypes. First, the frustration and maginalization routes. A writer, particularly a poet, places himself in an odd position in relation to dominant cultural value. A poet decides to value certain kinds of somewhat aimless, impractical, non-money-making activities, and he decides to make room and time in his life for these activities. Furthermore, he’s apt to be pursuing a rather elusive mode of language – not necessarily the direct, communicative, “useful,” commercially manipulative kind of language skill that society readily appreciates and rewards (in advertising, in journalism, and in other modes of persuasive and/or manipulative writing). So, what he’s doing with his time is aberrant – hard to explain. And yet, if he is really engaged in a serious and profound relationship to poetry, he does have certain sporadic validating experiences – a sense of connection to a longstanding human enterprise of considerable wisdom, joy, and pleasure. The self-destructiveness may arise as a gesture of anger and frustration, arising from a sense that one’s primary life activity is not appreciated or understood or respected. The self-destructiveness becomes an act oddly complicit with that ignoring and marginalizing by the society at large, while it is also a somewhat desperate call for attention and significance. Society at large – at least here in the US – establishes an interestingly ambivalent role toward the poet/artist. Most of the time, it’s business as usual: scorn, neglect, derision, lack of value. But then there is the flip-side: a compensatory romantic larger-than-life version (preferably made for the movies) of The Artist. This Artist is one who is – big surprise – too sensitive and volatile for this world. It is, in my opinion, a very dangerous and seductive model, particularly dangerous for the artist/poet who buys into it. This intuitive, somewhat childish artist figure – who can’t help himself, who has to pursue the truth of his art at all costs (including family, personal health, etc.) – is exactly what the society at large needs to comfort itself. That is, some reassurance that being an artist is a big mistake, though a grand enough mistake – entertaining enough – that we can witness the story every couple of years in a big Hollywood production. And then we can return the rest of our days to ignoring such individuals in our midst. For the artist/poet, the self-destructiveness can be conformation to this cultural stereotype of the “crazy” artist. Since it’s already a bit crazy (in practical, capitalist America) to use your intelligence to pursue something like poetry, why not go all the way and become that “odd” figure as in the cinematic cliché? The result is an infantilizing identity: the artist/poet as intuitive creature severed from a penetrating cultural and practical intelligence. Personally, I find it hard enough to work with the nature and complexity of making poetry. No need to pursue additional clichéd personal drama (and self-destructiveness) just to make the story conform to a movie script. The real drama is one that can barely be seen: an internal drama, a drama of consciousness, the drama of wrestling with the issues, questions, and realizations of making the poem. You don’t see those moments dramatized in the movies. You see the scenes of drunken abuse; you don’t see the scenes of someone sitting in a chair, staring out the window, writing down three words.


If it is true that human beings are the only beings that can hate, then why are we the only species that feels a need for spirituality?

Perhaps to atone for our experience of hate? Perhaps, though, spirituality can be thought of as something intrinsic to us – not something “added” that we must seek. In the sense that Hebrew has no word for “religion” – since the experience of “religion” or of being “religious” is so integral to the (Biblical / Jewish) experience of being alive, that a separate word or concept does not occur. We begin by having some sort of consciousness. That consciousness is already a powerful, palpable, but utterly invisible element of our existence. Why wouldn’t we want to extend the realm of the invisible into something called “spirituality”? Why not develop concepts and modes of interaction with the spiritual?



What to you is required reading?

Increasingly, I find myself thinking about this – i.e., what is essential or crucial reading – in a couple of ways: when you go on a trip, and you can only take a few books with you, which ones do you pack? Or, honestly, which books/authors do you really return to again and again over the years? For me, the list includes: George Oppen, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan. I also think of listening to music as a kind of reading. Hence: John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk. Of course, there are many others – as the need and as circumstances dictate. And over the years, there have been many other writers I’ve learned from and who have been of great value to me. And I would give a different list if I were asked to recommend a basic reading list for someone else – and the list would depend on the person’s needs and circumstances. But for the time I have, and for my current needs, the list above is fine.

Interview With Jake Berry

How is your health?

Physically, quite good, thank you. I’ve become a believer in exercise. Mentally, it varies; depression is a misnomer for a disease that seems to run in various kinds of cycles. But exercise is helpful there as well.



You told me once that if you thought someone would stage it you would write a play? If this could come about what would your play be about?

Recently Wayne Sides, hearing I was interested in writing a play, said if I’d write it he’d make sure it was performed. So I’ll begin work on that in earnest soon. I think the play will begin as an adaptation of scenes and characters from a piece Jon, my brother, has been writing. I’d like to do something character and dialog driven.




You are a self-proclaimed hermit, how has his affected your creativity?

For some reason unknown to me I have always been inclined toward a solitary existence. I regret this occasionally because it frustrates my friends. Still, one has to do what works best. Of course this means that I don’t do that much collaborating. I’d never make it as a film maker, I have, however, written collaborative poems through the main and e-mail and the Bare Knuckles recordings were very much a collaboration once we got into the studio, but this was in terms of production, the songs were already written. I also think that working alone might make one more inclined to go inward, and in my case the work became more visionary than it otherwise might have been.




At the Charles Olson festival in 1995 Vincent Ferrini stated that Olson lived his body as a poem. Do you think you have done this?

Well, one would like to reach a point where there is no longer any distinction between the poem and the poet. That would be the ultimate state of grace regardless of the emotional and mental complications. I’m not sure if I would say I live my body, perhaps my body lives me or that I am my body in this worlds, or that the word body could be a word that could be used to describe one’s traceable existence in whatever world and whatever form. I’m not surprised that Vincent would say that about Olson, it makes sense given the Olson wrote. It takes many years to get to the point where one vanishes into the work. I seem to be getting closer as I get older.





Speaking of Olson he has played quite a role in your writing, he appeared to you in a dream once. How have your dreams been lately?

Actually it wasn’t a dream. I was not asleep. If you’d been in the room I could have heard anything you’d said though I might not have been able to respond. It’s more one of those hypnogogic states. So Olson was actually there, that is to say, it was not an interior experience. Lately my dreams have been quite vivid and not always very pleasant. Nothing as profound as the Olson vision has happened recently, but poetry, at least in my case, so often proceeds from a condition that can not be said to be normal consciousness, whatever that might be.




When speaking of projective verse Charles Olson said, “ One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception”, do you think this can be said for any type of poetry?

Probably not, but that is the ideal condition. One room opens into another and so on. Poetry is so many things to so many different kinds of poets that it would be impossible to make any kind of blanket statement. I think it is definitely true of projective verse. That one essay covers so much ground it’s staggering. The first time I read it I was astonished that Olson had mapped it so well. I rarely mark in a book. I tend to copy quotes into a notebook, but I’ve got about half that essay highlighted.
Since we’re talking about him, Olson’s essay on Projective Verse, his Maximus and several of his shorter poems. “In Cold Hell, In Thicket” is a tremendous poem. One needs to go as far back as possible. I’ve read several translations of Gilgamesh, that’s a vital work, Homer is fundamental. Also the bible, especially the Old Testament. Of the Roman period Ovid is best, at least I enjoy him more than Virgil. For shorter poems Sappho is always great, and I like Catallus. The great spiritual books are important. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Mesopotamian songs to Inanna, the I Ching, the great Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist works.
Among those I love the Bhagavad-Gita, the Tibetan Books of the Dead and Great Liberation, and noting can take you to the threshold of oblivion better and the Diamond Sutra, Lao-Tzu is essential. There are tons of Chinese and Japanese poets I’ve been reading recently. Shinkichi Takahashi is extraordinary. I still read the Zohar quite often. Among more recent works I like Blake and Baudelaire, Dikinson, Rimbaud, Artaud, Apolinaire. Mallarme is delicious. Stein is in a class by herself. Samuel Beckett is always good. Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Yeats. Of course there are the Beats, I’m especially fond of Kerouac and McClure. There are also people I’d call essential that I am also very fortunate to know. Among them is Jack Foley, Ivan Arguelles, Hank Lazer, yourself, Dan Raphael, and I mentioned the book my brother is working on the takes on continental theory and goes it one better, I also like the novels of Paul Auster and the fiction as well as theory of Blanchot, the philosophy of Levinas, Heraclitus, Heidegger. The ancient writings of the alchemists. Well, it goes on forever obviously.




Do you think a school could be constructed today like Black Mountain College?

Absolutely. Though perhaps with better management. There needs to be schools like that all over the world. Jefferson had the notion that one should attend school until one felt one was educated then leave. Also a kind of master-student apprenticeship form of education, especially in the arts would be much better than most of the art schools we now have.




Sigmund Freud stated that, “A dream is the fulfillment of a wish.” Do you think in your case this is true?

I have no idea. Freud seems to vacillate between brilliance and blindness. Of course a dream and a wish can be the same thing. What I’ve read of James Hillman seems to be more on the right track concerning dreams. Hmm, that statement is a conundrum to me.




You wrote in a poem entitled, Essay Empire Poets, “What a pitiful destiny, singing with your tongue cut out.” That’s an interesting line coming from someone who is both a singer and poet.

Yes, well, one comes up against the limitations of language very quickly, especially in poetry. And for that reason poetry is a very pitiful calling. Yet, one must make words do what they are not inclined to do by their own nature, or rather, one must restore words to their original nature which is an embodiment of phenomena or noumena by way of the tongue. And the tongue lives in the written character and makes the characters vital and sacred.




Harry Polkinhorn described you as the “preeminent experimentalist of your generation.” Hank Lazer called you “William Blake in Alabama.” Also, Bob Grumman put is best I think when he called you a “paleo-neurologist.” Are there words to describe your writing or is there any need at all?

These words are quiet accurate to what each of these writers were saying at the time. They make their point. And that is the use of terms like these. The problem arises when people take them too literally, as absolutes, or that these are goals that I have tried to achieve. That is the problem with categories, and Bob Grumman and I have argued about this through the years, that categories are too rigid and too legalistic to have anything other than transitory use, especially when applied to the arts.



The more experimental music you have recorded has its’ roots in many places. Have you been fascinated by some of the places it has taken you? Did you gain the same satisfaction when you performed this music as you did writing it?

Answering the first question: yes, I am fascinated by where it leads, that’s the beauty of it, the reason for it. Which leads to the second question: the music is written on the spot. We usually set a key or a scale but everything else is completely improvised. It’s ironic, performing a fully written piece isn’t very exciting. It’s almost a chore because you have to conform to the song enough to at least resemble the original. Yet, to perform while you compose, though it would seem to add pressure to the situation, I find it completely liberating. At any rate, it’s the creative moment that drives me. There’s not much joy in repeating yourself.





You mentioned that by working in a solitary work ethic you are inclined to work inward, in my own writing I have tried to limit myself to the human body, yet there is no limit there. There isn’t enough room there to move around and never explore it all. Have you ever considered publishing your journal or more personal writings?

You’re right about the human body. And you’re work is the best example I know of that kind of infinity. John M. Bennett does it too, but in a completely different way, so that’s apples and oranges. And the fact that the human body allows such breadth and depth is testimony to it’s richness. But no, I don’t think I’d care to publish my journals because they wouldn’t add anything significant. The work I publish is more personal than my journals and notebooks, and I often take sections from my notebooks and modify it somewhat for publication. If by personal you mean things one might write in a diary, I’ve never been able to do that, though I’ve tried many times. I think there are places in my songs that I touch on those emotions enough to allow them voice. Otherwise my personal life is of little consequence. After all, I am trying to live the poetry. There’s art and there’s love, everything else is just waiting.



One song of yours I especially wanted to ask about is Maggie’s Soldier/Tom Clark. This is in my opinion the most ambitious song you have written. Where did you draw the influence?

Tom Clark was a notorious outlaw in North Alabama and South Central Tennessee during the late Civil War early reconstruction period. When we began to write material for the first Bare Knuckles CD I thought it made sense to have a song about him. I liked around for a while, thinking that surely there was an old folk song about him, but nothing. So, I had to write one. I drew the song from a book called Bugger Saga by Wade Pruitt. The things that happen in the song actually happened. Then I wrote another song, “Maggie’s Soldier”, from the point of view of a young soldier on the battlefield discovering the girl he loved had been killed by outlaws and places it before “Tom Clark” to lend perspective to it.



Do the creative forces that drive you to create ever try and disable you to prevent you from writing something you should or shouldn’t? Is there a filter?

Oh, yes I argue with the muse all the time. Sometimes I don’t want to write something she is telling me, but she insists. Later, I usually discover what she was doing. There is a filter. I mean that the work is a kind of collaboration. Of course the line between muse and poet vanishes as one goes along. I heard Jean Cocteau say something recently in a documentary, that the muse or the god devours the poet. I thin he’s right about that.




Gerard Depardieu was asked why he became an actor and he replied that he had always had a need to communicate. Why did you become a writer, or did the writing become you?

When I first wrote poems, I think I was fourteen, I felt for the first time that I’d found something that I could do. It felt completely natural to me. So the choice was made. Poetry found me and I submitted gladly. I don’t think communication really entered into it because I had no concept at the time about publishing, or that anyone would see it. It was only much later, when I was twenty-one that someone asked me if I’d published and it seemed like something I should do. One wants to give the work away, to make the work available to anyone who might find something in it. One wants to contribute something to the world, something beautiful. Perhaps it is a very strange beauty, but given that mediocrity seems to be the rule, perhaps all genuine beauty is strange.