 |
1996 Backstage
photo of David Cope at Hill Auditorium. Photo by Allen Ginsberg
|
Kirpal
Gordon: David, my heartiest congratulations on your new manuscript, Transcript: Correspondence, David Cope &
Allen Ginsberg, 1976-1996, soon to be submitted for publication. Talk about
its genesis and the value you see it offering the literary community and world.
David Cope: I had
known that eighteen years of my letters to Allen were in his archive at
Stanford, and was even able to identify which boxes they’d be found in, but
didn’t feel a pressing need to retrieve them—so many other projects lined up
before this one, and even in “retirement” from my teaching career, I found
myself working a full day with writing, editing, and research—my Dante Project
took over a full year and involved tracking and reading most of the major
criticism of his work from 1321 to the present, developing a huge bibliography
and writing two of my best essays in critical appreciation, one on Beatrice and
one involving “my journey with Dante.”
After that, it was the continuous editing and revisions of my selected
poems and a book of newer poems, and the long haul of trying to find a
publisher after over a decade of relative indifference to that aspect of my
writing career. I’ve also been involved
with Bridges Across the Pacific: Chinese and American Empathy Poems, with
editor and translator Zhang Ziqing and my blood brother, Jim Cohn—that project
inching toward completion. Beyond that,
there is the annual publication of my Big
Scream magazine, still a combination of new poets and poets who have been
friends and co-conspirators for decades.
What geared me toward finally retrieving my letters to Allen
was the publication of his “Poem,” which I had long ago nicknamed “the postcard
poem”—script of a postcard that Allen had sent to me from China on November 11,
1984, and which I published as a poem in Big
Scream 20. The poem reappeared in
Allen’s recent Wait Till I’m Dead: Uncollected Poems, edited by Bill Morgan,
and that spurred me to ask Stanford’s Tim Noakes, curator of the Allen Ginsberg
Papers in their Special Collections Library, if there might be some way for
them to send me my letters. Mr. Noakes
was generous and sent all 300+ pages of mostly hand-written letters, postcard
scripts and manuscripts of my poems to me via pdf, and I searched out the
postcard poem and my letter asking if I could publish it as a poem in the next
issue of my Big Scream. Allen’s letter responding to the request
is missing, but mine of January 24, 1985 thanks him for the “final form of your
postcard poem which I’ll place in BS 20.”
The poem was published there, and in subsequent discussion
with my translator, Zhang Ziqing of the Institute of Foreign Literature at
Nanjing University, I learned that Zhang had seen it in my magazine, likely
when he was at Allen’s place in New York; he translated it into Chinese, and it
will appear in his forthcoming three volume study of 20th Century
American poetry, to be published in Beijing.
At this point, I was planning to place my letters in my
archive, The David Cope Papers at the University of Michigan Special
Collections Library, to be added to the original manuscripts of Allen’s letters
to me. This would complete a major
thread in my correspondence. I figured
that this would give future scholars the whole picture of our correspondence
which, though perhaps a minor part of Allen’s great pattern of writing letters
to friends, could be a niche of some importance in that they do initially track
a kind of bildungsroman between a great poet-mentor and a young poet eager to
find his way—a pattern quite different from the letters with Kerouac, Snyder,
or Ferlinghetti. I did not consider
trying to publish them, as my interest was in how the relationship might
contribute to future scholarship and complete a major arc in my life as a poet.
As I perused the letters, however, I found far too many that
were misdated by someone in Allen’s office, largely a result of the fact that I
had neglected to place dates on many of the letters, and the fact that some of
them were dated via pure guess. Many
letters from the early 80s were placed in a 1988-1989 file, for example, and
this could have led to scholars’ inability to piece together the
correspondence. One was a particularly
egregious example—the December 1980 letter,
which began with an elegy and prose in memoriam for John Lennon, and
included mention of my recent reading hosted by Allen Pearlman at the UM
Residential College in Ann Arbor. That
reading took place on the 9th of December, 1980, and was
particularly memorable for me, as it was difficult to read when I was
overloaded with so many intense, contradictory emotions.
At this point, it occurred to me that I could place the
dates of the letters most effectively by integrating them with Allen’s—my own
memory and the contextualizing evidence in the letters would give me the time
period, if not an absolute date, when they would fit, and it would also give me
the precise interaction between the two of us over the 18 year—and later 20
year—period of our correspondence.
Kathleen Dow, curator of my archive at Michigan, and Jim Cohn were both
quick to let me know that often the misdating and misfiling of letters makes research
difficult for scholars, that it’s a common problem for both authors who were
diligent keepers of their papers and those who were shoddy in this
respect. Allen, of course, was as
diligent as anyone I have known, but his work was so vast that often he had to
rely on folk with far less grasp of what they were looking at. Ultimately, of course, the fault is mine—not
properly dating all of them.
The task was arduous but fulfilling in that the lineaments
of the evolving relationship began to come clear, and as my own pleasure in the
task grew, friends began asking me if I planned to publish them. I wasn’t sure of their value to the larger
world of publication, especially given my initial motivation of providing a
guide to future scholars, should they pursue this strand of my work or of
Allen’s correspondence with younger poets.
The early letters—particularly those in the 70s—have some alternatively
brash, silly, pompous or ridiculous thoughts on my part, but there is also a
strong thread of an evolving relationship in them. The 80s began and became a time of intense
work together on projects we both valued, and the 90s continued that theme, in
the final years rising to an intense finale and coda. At this point, I’m of two minds about
publication, but I will say that the task itself has developed as a good guide
to anyone researching Allen’s papers at Stanford for his work at Naropa and
Brooklyn College as well as the major poems of his later period, and especially
for an understanding of his mentoring relationship with one of the many younger
poets whom he took a shine to. In my
case, the letters are a record of my growth as a poet and thinker, and
documentation of the many projects I initiated or was a part of during the 70s
through the 90s, and a record of my evolving friendship with Allen.
 |
1973 National Poetry Festival. Allendale, Mi.
Allen Ginsberg,
courtesy of the Grand Rapids Public Library. |
Kirpal
Gordon: Reading your exchanges with him, the man’s real character shows
through unmistakably. I think you speak for many of us who knew him as you
describe him: a warm-hearted, one-of-a-kind
thinker, poet & teacher certainly with citizenship on other planets but not
nearly the one-note Beat Generation marketer or predictable madman of media
fame. You celebrate the big, liberating quality he radiated: a compassion; in
short, he walked his talk. What do you make of the difference between the real
and the imagined Allen?
David Cope: Allen was
already a living legend when I first heard of him, and the first times I saw
him in person, I observed him silently, not sure what to say and yet trying to
grasp his presence as a person. Once I’d
sent him my Stars chapbook, our
friendship grew out of my desire to meet and publish the poets of my generation
in my indie mag, Big Scream, but also
in the fact that we both shared an intense love of literary traditions, new
poets and old, and of reveling in the words themselves. Still, the human touch, the humble and ordinary love of bargains, the ability
to yakk with anybody about damn near anything were what gave me a sense of the
man behind the mask that I’d constructed from the legend.
Many tales come to mind, perhaps most centrally his love of
shopping at second-hand stores and garage sales. I first discovered this, I think, during one
of my visits to Naropa—I arrived a few days before the weeklong sessions were
to begin, and Allen enlisted me along with his teaching assistants and other
early arrivals, going to Goodwill and similar shops in the Boulder area. The poets were going to stay in the Marine
Street townhouses, and they’d need plates and glasses, pots, pans, and silverware
for the kitchens—so we scoured the shops and brought back heaps of these things
for the apartments. It was enormous fun,
loading them up and sorting them for each apartment, yakking and carrying on
together. In a later visit to Grand
Rapids Community College (where I worked), Allen would purchase a fine suit,
several white shirts and ties at the local downtown Goodwill, marveling over
the bargains he’d gotten even as I drove him to the Bed and Breakfast he’d stay
at for his reading and lectures.
There are many such stories, all of them jewels tucked in my
memory, some spilling out in poems, as in my elegy “for allen”:
that summer in the mansion on the hill:
you & Peter in spacious kitchen
fretting over chicken soup,
seaweed, Tibetan tea,
the nightly readings—Chris Ide & I
dashing thru
halls & rooms upstairs in our underwear,
chasing each other
giggling rowdies rolling across beds
or wandering in the basement perusing huge
library,
singing old Kerouacky Catullus Kit Smart
& Shakespeare’s sonnets aloud together—
you
upstairs all night answering mail yakking long
distance scribbling surprised by visitors
as
I lay in the next room & watched the million stars
fill the night over the
flatirons, singing myself to sleep—
or that time in your apartment twelfth street
I come
to
read in your Brooklyn series—
racing to work to class to plane Laguardia
taxi-dash
downtown in bright springtime exhausted—Steve
showing
videos
you at wailing wall & old Reznikoff
our shared love introduced by
George Oppen,
steely-voiced compassion my reentry
into New York—gefilte fish, Peter & the Wolf
after everybody cleared out, you & I soft
reunion,
both drained in crazed worklives, both sleeping
20 hours, waking together Saturday evening
going out
bite to eat at Christine’s: NY
Times, cabbage soup,
chocolate cake—a Danish family recognized
you,
sent their kid over for autograph, you
yakking
& drawing elaborate skull & stars & flowers personal
greeting with final pen flourish for their
bright eyes—
friendly, welcoming the parents their first
time in America—
or that summer where you’d injured thigh, lay
naked
on
floor your apartment Boulder as
young girl massaged pain spots, relaxed
nerves
& we sprawled around you,
singing Campion & Dowland,
Steve as director who
gave us parts bass baritone tenor singing
again & again crooning to
find
the shared voices in
the dream—
poets coming & going, staying a time,
always singing, singing deep into the
Elizabethan night
as Boulder’s sirens shrieked
& traffic flashed
beyond—
& in later years, both too busy, yet your
call sped me to
buddhist retreat Yankee Springs
only 20 minutes from my home—
two afternoons scribbling notes together in
lodge
as
Gelek spun the word thru Gun Lake sunset—
or meeting backstage after Howl & Kaddish
Ann Arbor,
too tired to speak, no need to yakk,
comfortable merely to sit an hour
in
each other’s silent presence as
stage hands gathered props &
instruments—
your kiss disappearing into the night your
hand waving
pulling away—
& now, calling each of us before the
press releases go out
generous gesture even dying
passing burden & light from Walt thru
Williams you & Jack
thru those who remain
to new nippled generations
struggling even now to be born.
 |
March 15, 1983 Allen and David at the 67th Street YMCA, NYC, unofficial book launch
for my Quiet Lives (foreword by Allen Ginsberg). Photo by Sharon Guynup.
|
Kirpal
Gordon: Yeah, well said. He had classic, old school NYC bohemian style
and helped young poets get their social game on by creating a community around shared
artistic values. In that context, what is refreshing in the letters is that you
say and do all the dumb shit we all said and did around Allen until we learned
to take the paper bag off his head—talk about starting with him at such an
early age.
David Cope: It’s
probably important here to note that I built this collection with two very
different perspectives: the youthful
“me” interacting with Allen in the letters, and the notes (pages 111-121) where
the 68 year old “me” responds to the letters, with clarifying evidence in some
cases, and with my critique of some of the foolishness especially inherent in
the letters written in the 1970s. Allen
was, of course, endlessly patient with me.
In those early days, some of my peers had a far more
sophisticated grasp of the entire poetry scene than I did, especially those who
grew up involved in major scenes (e.g. New York or San
Francisco).
I had attended a few readings in Ann Arbor, won two local contests in
Grand Rapids, and studied under the great Robert Hayden, but otherwise
everything I knew about the beats and other famed poets came to me through the
words or through public appearances, such as Allen and Dick Gregory leading
protestors away from the police riot in Grant Park, 1968. In addition, I was abnormally shy when first
approaching others—covering it with a brash mouthiness, strangely enough—and
deeply wounded by my father’s walking out on our family when I was eleven. It was difficult for me to trust adult
males. At the 1973 National Poetry Festival,
it took me the entire week of the conference to build up the courage to ask him
for his address, believing as I did that one day I’d have poems worthy of a
book I could publish.
I’d spent three years in the factory by 1973, and saw how
working class folk were driven to their deaths by their jobs, living in the
horrible thunder of factory fans and noises, breathing fumes ranging from hi-lo
exhaust to toluene, acetone and methanol, shouting bosses and workers made
angry by the work itself and by the company’s deceptions—regularly speeding up
the line before workers arrived, only to have the line shut down when the union
reps. timed it and saw what had been done.
Some would take massive doses of company-provided aspirins in order to
kill their pain, others died relatively young of heart attacks induced by job
stress, and some would angrily toss parts into the “redo” box just to keep up
with the massive influx of parts coming down the lines. I read Whitman and kept to myself, waiting
for something better but feeling trapped in “Amerika,” even as friends were
killed in Vietnam and the
death count and politicians’ lies continued to mount up, month by month.
Between 1973-1976, it took me three years to find my own
voice—in the voices and lives of those around me—and to complete a basic
education in world poetics, though that process continues to this day. During that time, I took the cue left by
Charles Reznikoff and developed poems that told the tale of my peers at the
factory, and later the tales of working folk and neighborhoods seen during my
years as a school custodian. By then, I
had also begun editing and publishing my little magazine, Big Scream, and during that time I learned enough of editing to
write two chapbooks that I felt worthy of sharing with Allen, and I sent him my
latest, The Stars, not expecting any
reply but hoping he’d notice. This is
where the letters begin, and all through the correspondence in the 70s, I was
trying to come to terms with the other-world legend that was Allen Ginsberg,
putting out feelers to see what he valued, occasionally being a pompous ass or
admitting my own uncertainties when assessing how to approach him.
For example, my critique of Mind Breaths is a bit of pompous prattle in the February 10, 1977 letter, as is the assessment
of The Dharma Bums, which gravely
misreads the tragic elements of the book and neglects the “mountain zen lesson”
that ultimately gives the book its center.
The letter that follows it, in May of 1977, apologizes for my overblown
rhetoric, saying that it “lacked clarity.”
This letter also questions my own ambitions: “not sure how to deal with all my thoughts,
it’s a complex of feelings still too new to be clear about, but I’ll try to
elaborate. . . . finding myself after all these years of working talking to you, one of the great
mythical heroes of my childhood, who helped me thru so many crises of
understanding, I find myself a bit confused, maybe as you must have been
getting to know Dr. Williams—I sense that a little in the letters in Paterson.” There’s also the
thin-skinned retort that I sent Ferlinghetti, alluded to in the June 8, 1978
letter, where I took Ferlinghetti’s “Adieu à Charlot” in City Lights Journal #4 as an insult to my generation—totally
missing the point of this great poem, likely because it somehow reactivated my
anger at elder males. Later, as I point
out in the notes (per my letter and note of June 8, 1978), Lawrence “graciously
sent me a short card asking me what he should do with the manuscript I had sent; I apologized and asked him to recycle it.”
There are other instances where I now wonder what I was
thinking, but at least two bits of youthful wisdom do pop out: first, the hope
ending the February 10 letter, noting how mentor-mentee relationships usually
break down in alienation, with the desire to “be careful to make it a lasting friendship.”
Finally, there’s the insistence that my generation’s work would
ultimately be different from Allen’s (see the letter postmarked Sept. 25,
1979). Though my reading of our
generation’s task is unnecessarily narrow (e.g. “recording the great and small
events of our times”), it does point to the need to learn from our elders and
“make it new,” as Pound once recommended.
Looking over the letters from this period, I can’t help but
be amazed at Allen’s patience with me, as though he recognized something in my
writing and editing activities, and perhaps in our discussions of world
traditions, important poets and poems, that was worthy of continuing the
correspondence. I think that once I
began coming to Naropa (1980, 1882 and after) and working with poets and students, and certainly after Humana
published my Quiet Lives with Allen’s
Foreword, I began to mature, found my place in a developing poetic community,
and grew to deeply value the friendships of peers, many of whom I’d met through
Allen’s good offices.
 |
| 4th of July trail, 1994. Antler, Jim Cohn, David
Cope. Photo by Jeff Poniewaz. |
Kirpal
Gordon: Perhaps he also recognized himself in you, a kindred spirit/hard
worker in a mean and unpoetic world. Unlike the many Han Shans of our
generation wandering the outback far from the Emperor/center, you two created
conferences, published books, gave readings and teach-ins. How did he put it: “—and
what’s the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.”
Perhaps you are both living your dreams, co-creating a poetry loka in which the
invocation of certain sounds and the transmission of direct images has
consequences most favorable. Is this not a form of Grail Quest: he’s sharing
his poems with you as you share yours with him? Regarding the mentor/mentoree
limitation you mention, friendship is the soul mode but what of poetic
continuity and community? Is the whole notion of lineage in literature quaint
and obsolete in a you-&-me-tube-Insta-slam-email-smoke-signal-protological-telegram
that arrives before the event can even happen? Where is objectivism now? Have
the categories collapsed? Should we see lineage as susceptible to hybrid vigor
and tradition as a meeting and mating with infiltration? Isn’t Dylan, Kesey, Patti
Smith, Last Poets, Johnny Depp, Sapphire, Gil-Scott, Kathy Acker, Public Enemy,
Talking Heads, John Sinclair, Grateful Dead Postbeat?
David Cope: Lineage
and influence can be liberating to the younger poet; they can also be mere
marketing tags for a generation, and can be confining under some
circumstances. Carl Rakosi never liked
the term “objectivist,” which was invented to describe the style of Charles
Reznikoff’s poems; Carl wanted the freedom of the subjective in some of his
poems, and preferred the notion of “realism” to describe his work. On the other hand, such things can be useful
in trying to describe a poet’s work. We
are all influenced by the work we read and love—I think most American poets
would agree that we are all the children of Whitman and Dickinson, even if
obliquely so. In our generation, the
terms “objectivist” and “neo-objectivist” have dogged me for years (probably
because of my first two books, Quiet
Lives and On the Bridge), and
while I still occasionally employ that format in poems that fit best in it, I
have made a concerted effort throughout my career to expand my repertoire
beyond any poetic ideologies, finding ways to compose poems with the sort of
persona and techniques most appropriate to each subject in an intuitive choice
of format, rhythms, images and figures.
Lineage terms make sense in some ways—even now—as a key to
initial entry to a poet’s work, but the reader’s task is to transcend all that
in the encounter with the writer’s mind and approaches to content and
compositional styles. During the period
of the letters and throughout my career, my work has gone through an enormous
number of changes, involving sly allusions to classic poems, techniques
employed by Dante, Shakespeare, Catullus, and many others, styles as seemingly
remote from objectivism as my own idiosyncratic approaches to the
middle-eastern ghazal or ekphrasis as a take-off point for spontaneous riffing
on the subject itself.
Back to the letters themselves: there’s a big change from the letters of the
first four years to those from the 80s and early 90s, which show the engagement in the work we
shared—whether in the dual-voiced lecture and questions we did at the 1987
Objectivist Conference or my initial
idea of developing an eco-poetics
conference and work on the 1994 Beats and Other Rebel Angels Conference, both
at Naropa, but also our work on cultural diversity poetics as seen in courses
we taught at our respective schools.
They are, in a sense, “poetry business,” perhaps to some a bit mundane,
but I suggest that they form the nuts
and bolts of successful friendships—shared enthusiasms in the work itself,
giving one’s friend space and yet emerging when something important needs to be
said. They also document my “learning
curve” in observing how Allen handled the immense pressures that he lived
with—for example, his patience and genuine interest with an enormous variety of
people who wanted his signature on the new Collected
Poems or on a tattered copy of Howl
and Other Poems, carried in a back pocket for years as a treasured
manifesto of identity.
There are also those moments that are my own personal
favorites: the January 1977 “American
Airlines” letter, wherein Allen explains Blake’s system of Zoas in concise
detail and expands on his own recent and planned readings, or the note to the
March 27, 78 letter, in which he showed me the recently FOIA-obtained FBI
correspondence on antiwar radicals in Detroit and Ann Arbor (where I was active
in the anti-war movement); also the already noted December 1980 letters, with
my unpublished elegy and eulogy for John Lennon and Allen’s response, and
Allen’s Dec. 21, 1982 postcard from Charleville, Rimbaud’s apartment—“how sad
his dark old wooden steep stairway, + the toilet in his old flat!” Similarly, in the already-covered “postcard
poem” from China, the script was indeed a tightly written poem, ending on a
note of completing a life circle, finding Han Shan’s Cold Mountain Temple
“w/Gary Snyder who’d / heard its bell echo across years.”
That notion of completing a life circle (per the final lines
of the “Postcard Poem”) underlies much of the purpose of this volume. In my case, I not only wanted to complete
one of the many life circles that emerge as one plunges onward in samsara—to see
the entire dialogue Allen and I engaged in over that two-decade curve, with the
perspective attained at last in my late 60s—but I also needed documentation of
my own work as editor and poet riding on the initial cusp of ecopoetics and
cultural diversity studies, and for literary historical items that have come up
in recent years. I’ll provide three of
the important passages as documented in detail here: the development of a generational anthology, Nada Poems; the now legendary 3-in-1
book being prepared for City Lights; and the documentation of my efforts to
promote an eco-conference. There are
several other such strands in this collection, of course.
Perhaps of initial importance is my desire to find the “best
minds” of my own generation, whose experiences were significantly different
from those of our elders. After Allen
realized that I was editing my own small press magazine, he began sending me
the work of my peers—those he felt had some original spark, as they turned up
at his readings or in the mail. He
mentions in a letter from October 8, 1976 that he has “seen clear + lovely work
by about 10 poets in recent years, a surprising harvest, some kinda wave of new
clarity + charm + energy” from across the nation. He began sharing them with me almost
immediately, beginning with Andy Clausen’s early chapbook, Shoe-Be-Do-Be-Ee-Op, presented in a letter of Jan. 10, 1977. This pattern of talking back and forth about
young “obscure genius” continued throughout our correspondence, and his nudge
probably spurred me to thinking of my generation’s work, experiences and values
as being in some ways quite different from his.
I was not only looking for poems that spoke to the deeper
and more troubling issues of my time, but the sort of poets that would form the
initial community that I was seeking.
The letters record this faithfully:
first, in the Nov. 16, 1982 letter, where I announced my plan for a “BIG
anthology of my generation’s poems/poets,” noting on May 14, 1983 that I had
completed such a manuscript of “14 poets my age,” all of whom would
eventually be represented in the Nada
Poems anthology. I worked on the
anthology on and off for the next 4 years of so, and it crops up again in the
March 25, 1988 letter, written after I had won the 1988 American Academy and
Institute of Arts and Letters Award for my second book, On the Bridge. With the
award money in hand, I now had the means to publish it properly. Jim Cohn traveled to Grand Rapids and we met
with two younger poets, Chris Ide and Joel Kuszai, traveling to Michigan State
University, where Joel’s professor father gave us a primer on how to work up an
anthology using the school’s Macs. We
spent an entire night putting the book together, and later hired a printer
outside of Ann Arbor to do layout and design for the cover, printing it in an
edition of 1500 copies. The book was in
print for about ten years, and poets sold it at their readings, gave it away,
and I used it as a free textbook for my creative writers during my first years
as a professor.
Second was the ill-fated “3-in-1” book which Allen edited
while nearly convincing Lawrence Ferlinghetti to publish it. I had forgotten about it until recently, when
it cropped up on pages 235-236, 238, 245-246, 248, and 255 of I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great
Career: The Selected Correspondence of
Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg 1955-1997, ed. Bill Morgan;
there’s also an oblique notice of Allen’s efforts on our behalf in Michael
Schumacher’s Dharma Lion (page 650), and
a description of the proposed book in Bill Morgan’s I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat
Private Life of Allen Ginsberg (523-524).
The book was supposed to feature around 48 pages of work by
each of us—Antler, Andy Clausen, and me—and the editing progress and eventual rejection
of the book are documented in these letters.
Allen was pushing me to send my chapbooks and poems to Ferlinghetti
quite early, and I did mail a 26 page manuscript to City Lights, as documented
in the anti-nuclear postcard letter of 1978 (page 28). There’s a further reference to the collection
in the September 25, 1979 letter, which accompanied a manuscript for the
“proposed anthology.” By February 18,
1980, Allen was explaining his approach to editing the book, noting the hard
work of my soon-to-be best friend and blood brother, Jim Cohn; Allen mentions
that Ferlinghetti “somewhat doubtfully” offered to do the book, and it later
became apparent that Lawrence was concerned that it wouldn’t sell. Although Bill Morgan notes in his biography of Allen that the compromise of
publishing all three of us in one book “didn’t please any of the poets” (524),
my letters reveal that I was quite excited about project and dutifully sent my
work in for consideration.
Antler eventually withdrew his work from the book when it
became apparent that it would have to be printed sideways; Allen substituted
work by Robert Meyers, but he had to announce to me that “Ferlinghetti fudged
on the book” in his January 1981 letter.
Lawrence apparently wrote to me about it, because my letter to Allen at
about the same time says “Ferlinghetti said he had no money for the 3 man book
project” (c. Jan. 1981). I was not upset
about it, but rather sanguine in my estimation of the outcome, especially given
the Reagan recession that was currently a blight on jobs and income: “The publishing scene is undoubtedly as
depressed now as the rest of the economy, & I felt he was correct in
assessing possibilities of a new book getting somewhere”; in addition, I felt
that “the big printing may or may not come later,” that I was having a ball
getting to know the others, and that I still had a lot to learn.
Third is the documentation of my initial letters proposing
an ecolit conference at Naropa. I had
been working with sustainable ecology since the 1970 Earth Day conference at
Michigan, which made us all aware of the major issues facing the planet; Sue
and I used our home as a laboratory for growing our own food, developing an
ecosystem involving great variety, converting an old shed into a solar
greenhouse for growing seedlings and sustaining a variety of plants during all
but the hottest days of the summer. We
had also led anti-nuclear teach-ins at local colleges and high schools, and
during the final years of my time as a custodian at Grand Rapids Junior College (now Community College), I
developed a paper recycling system that still functions there to this day, and
wrote the college’s first by-law committing the school to sustainable action,
shepherding it through a Board of Trustees meeting to adoption. I also worked with the ecology office to
educate myself on the current state of the eco–movement, legislation affecting
environmental issues, and newer approaches to activism.
By 1988, I assembled two different lineups of speakers with approaches
to developing such a conference at Naropa; I sent the first line-up to Anne
Waldman in June of 1988 (pages 77-79), and included that message/lineup and a
more detailed lineup (pages 73-77) in my letter to Allen on September 12, 1988. Anne and others eventually picked up on the
idea, which was a fully developed conference when the Naropa summer session
presented it in 1990. The final
reference to the conference—in my July 14, 1990 letter to Allen—invoked my
pleasure in “working with Gary Snyder & Peter Warshall & Bill Devall,”
three of the stalwarts among the more than thirty poets, scientists, and
eco-activists who worked with me and Chris Funkhouser in revising and editing
the draft document of “The Declaration of Interdependence.” I had composed the
initial draft of this conference position paper, yet used it as a means to give
conference participants several opportunities to amend and extend the document,
which eventually appeared in Disembodied
Poetics: Annals of the Jack Kerouac
School (eds. Waldman and Schelling.
U of New Mexico, 1994),
There were many other threads such as these in the
correspondence, but these three suffice to show the documentation that I find
important to the completion of my own arc on my way toward the fabled sunset.
 |
| Allen at lunch, Naropa outdoor cafe, Boulder,
1987. Photo by Cope |
Kirpal
Gordon: I also much appreciate how reflective and insightful passages
are all rolled up together with practical and mundane details. They celebrate a
life in poesie from a rock star-like guy who could fill any size auditorium.
What happened to that energy at the national level, poetry as a call to
create/imagine a new way of interacting? Which way Eden in a world
ever more resembling the Moloch section of Howl?
Where has all the magic gone?
David Cope: Many
cultural and historical differences come to mind with this question, but the
most obvious answer to this is that Allen wrote a challenging and complex poem
at a time when youthful alienation and the deadened culture of the fifties led
to such desperate searches for meaning in the mechanistic mentality of the
time—a time when poetry still mattered in the national consciousness. It’s also clear that he had an enormous skill
set capable of responding to the horrors of both the fifties and sixties in a
very public way that even awed some of his own peers. Allen was a true maestro in many, many ways,
and I doubt we shall see his like again in this lifetime; I was fortunate to
know him well and to learn from him, to help sustain the community of visionary
poets that have graced my life, to continue publishing new authors in my small
press mag, finding ways to connect those who are in need, as I certainly was
when I first reached out to Allen.
