Whitman in Vegas by Jim Cohn

Whitman In Vegas

 

In my dream, I see Whitman in Vegas,

Scarlet caped, pulling up in a long

Black limousine, telling the crowd “I always win,

Walking deeper into that field you have made of yourself,

Unmoved by the wind––

Its famines and pestilence, upheavals crowded into months––

Knowing the peak has been revealed,

The summit of the peak right under you,

That’s surely no other peak, that’s no peak at all.”

  

Boulder, Colorado

8 August 2008

 

––Jim Cohn, from his forthcoming collection, Treasures of Heaven

photo by Scott Cohn 

The Sound of Nature in David Cope's Invisible Keys by Hong Sun

The Invisible Keys: New and Selected Poems covers the poems of David Cope from 1975 to 2017, chosen both from his six previously published books, and from those written more recently.  From these poems of diversified subjects three underpinning traits stand out, i.e., a sense of history, an import of humanity, and a sensibility of nature.

First of all, to quote Wordsworth, “The earliest poets of all nations generally wrote from passion excited by real events.”  Cope’s poems collected here present a panorama of over two millennia of world history.  They run the gamut of dramatic events from ancient Greece, through 15th-century Inca, to the world of our own century.  In “American Pewter with Burroughs II:  Green is a Man / To Fill is a Boy,” for instance, “Greek warriors lean together, . . . fierce eyes intent on the battle to come, another battle.  /Sappho lamented such beauty one sees in faces like these, marching to war, full of high phrases, valorous tongues, /arms bristling with arms, killers with the faces of angels—/Sappho, who cried out to Anaktoria that her footstep, the light /in her eyes set her heart thrumming more strongly than all /armed killers others might sing” (p. 80).  Anaktoria is the name of a woman mentioned by Sappho as a lover of hers in her Fragment 16, often referred to by the title “To an Army Wife, in Sardis.”  In “Tender Petals for Calm Crossing,” “stone masons”—the talented Indian artist-workers that constructed Machu Picchu in mid-15th century Inca—fell victim to the conquistadors, “warriors cut down like corn on a day as crisp /as this, eyes turning skyward one last time, up to the light /as their blood gushes out on fertile ground, shining path /where arms & legs of the dead clutch & kick at heaven, /vanishing dreams of hungry ghosts” (p. 62).  In “Antietam” Cope sees, through the vision of his wife Sue, the battle in Antietam, Maryland on September 17, 1862 during the Civil War, with 22,717 casualties for both sides—the bloodiest single day of fighting in American history.  Crossing time and space, the poet combines the battle scene with the experience of Sue’s father, who was machine gunned in the Battle of the Bulge (16 December 1944-25 January 1945), the last major German offensive campaign in its western theater during World War II.  As a survivor, he would “wake up sweating— /wild eyes in the night— /the German officer he had to shoot, point blank— /those eyes, that cringe, /night after night” (p. 16). 

An ironic note resounds through “A Quiet Life,” which concerns a Vietnamese refugee family that the poet sponsored in the mid-1970s for immigration to the US. The titular quietness connotes a sense of Tantalus’ quest.  The way for the family to get out of Vietnam over the stormy sea is a narrow escape from death—“four people die,” even “in good weather.” The protagonist’s name Minh means “light,” but he sinks into darkness upon coming to the US for, among other things, “the Texans treated him badly” (p.3).  How could those home-bound Texans understand the kind of ordeal folks in Vietnam, as well as their fellow American G.I.s there, had gone through?  In “The Train:  Howl in Chicago,” written when Cope took the train to Chicago to teach Howl to his daughter Jane’s high school class four decades later, the poet recalls the memorable scene in in November 1969, with “Allen reading to overflow crowd, /Hill Auditorium, Moratorium Day, Howl singing thru the horror /of those days, bringing so many to tears at last after /friends dead in Nam, others come home with hell in their own minds” (p.106). Just as Larry Abrams, a friend of mine in St. Louis, shared with me his experience in Vietnam:  “I may have been shot by mortar attacks any day, but never knew when.  I destroyed all the photos I took in Vietnam as I never wanted to be reminded of it once I got home.  I lost a good friend before I arrived.  He was in the Army and was killed in combat.  I found out once I got home on leave before I went to Vietnam.  I asked the Red Cross to assist me in extending my leave before I went to Vietnam so I could attend his funeral as a pall bearer.  My leave was extended about two weeks and it was during that two week extension that Ben Hoa got hit during the Tet Offensive in February 1966.  I missed the attack because I was home, still on leave.  Ironically, the death of my friend saved me from being on base during that attack.  It was during that attack that many members of the unit I was eventually assigned to were killed.  Ironic.  The death of my friend may have actually saved my life” (12 January, 2017).   In “Party Talk,” Cope portrays “the severed Vietnamese fingers” (p.14), a reference that reminds me of the description by Dan Roland, a Vietnam War veteran and, two decades later, a classmate in my first doctoral program, of how some South Korean soldiers “would cut off the tongue from the corpse of the Vietnamese to hang on their buttonhole as a trophy of valor” (April 1990).  Similar cruelty and inhumanity are seen in “Emile at the Crossroad,” dream sequence involving a young man forced by Nazis to bury his friends, recently shot down by Nazi gunners, “his eyes now bulging in daily nightmare— /the helmeted gunner, machine gun spraying near-naked /bodies, writhing, wrapped in blood mists jugular spray /as they fall, corpses bulldozed into ditches eyes wide /in death, & he, standing along a ditch—he, spared to /finish the work—he, looking into the blue faces /open mouths disappearing beneath a wave of sand, /neighbors, lovers . . .” (p. 67).

It is with passion, honesty, a commitment to history, and an investment to be understood not only by his contemporaries but by generations to come, that Cope effortlessly pulls the reader in with his descriptive language on this journey with him through history.  In his correspondence with a reader whose nation had been victimized by one of those events, he wrote, “I hope my poem does at least some justice to the victims of the tragedy.  Some of the images (in the accompanying set of photos) are familiar to me, but some—those that are most horrifying—were quite new, as they didn’t get out to us.  Peace to you and to your nation in these latter days” (5 June, 2017).  In Cope’s words to the reader, “Those poems are, in my estimation, among the most tender and heart-broken pieces I’ve written” (6 June, 2017).  In “Fireball in the Clouds,” a poem written on the first days of the Gulf War, January 1990, “soldiers at briefings /describe mass murder in surgical /terms” (p. 38).  The poem juxtaposes two worlds which are distant yet close to each other:   the battlefield of human slaughter where “gassed Kurds & blasted Iraqis /mingle in the silent screams,” and the natural realm of the “tender springtime’s /sleeping buds” (p. 38).  Man can impose his superficial order on nature, but can never share the latter’s tranquil mystery.  Standing aloof from him, nature maintains its solemnity that takes a poet like Cope to decipher for us.  Just as Lao Tzu puts it in The Tao Te Ching, or The Book of the Way, “Nature says few words.”

Even peaceful time is not all that peaceful in Cope’s poetry as well as in reality.  “Ann Arbor” (p.9) is a poetic rendition of the student anti-war riots in Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1970.  “In Silence” is a poem written for Cope’s cousin Dr. Ann Barber, who served in Emergency ward at St. Vincent’s Hospital, one of those hospitals put on 24 hour shifts after the 9-11 incident.  The tragedy is perceived through the eyes of doctors and nurses in the Emergency ward: “hour after hour /they waited in the ER, . . . /thru the open door, /beyond the shrieks & sighs /& the endless roar” (p. 66).

“Sierra Madre & North to Oregon” opens with a female narrator’s fantasy of the line of mountains on west coast of the US:  “imagine . . . the mountains beyond— /white smog’s too thick for us to see,” while she addresses the people in the future:  “you unborn /generations curled in liquid dream, I hear /your diapered squalls & aging sighs even now /here where my feet walk & yours will walk” (p.39).

It is with his poetic sagacity that David Cope sees what mise-en-scène in literary classics is sadly missing in the paleness of our own era.  His awareness of history in “Midsummer Night” triggers my memory of some of the observations that I shared with the graduate students taking my course “Shakespeare Studies,” while I perused with them A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  For instance, Hermia, caught in a romantic accident in the Athenian forest, “flails at Helena” (3.2: 298).  To describe Hermia swinging her arm at her childhood friend with the image of “flail,” an instrument for thrashing grain commonly used in the agricultural age, would be unthinkable in this postindustrial era.  But in his poem, Cope miraculously juxtaposes “vast yellow wheatfields & green corn stretching /beyond treelines at the horizon” with “nuclear power lines” humming “in forcefields from /tower to tower,” not forgetting to add to both with a master touch that “farmers herd cows” (p. 49) through such fields of yellow wheat and green corn under the nuclear power lines.  In “Chinese Calligraphy: T’ang Yin,” the poet brings out the drastic contrast between the dim reality and the idyllic past presented in the work of art by T’ang Yin (1470-1524), an artist and poet in the Ming Dynasty.  On the one hand, David Cope writes, “Dreaming of Immortality in a Thatched Cottage— /a man surrounded by the immensity of trees, mountains & sky” (p. 11).  On the other hand, “coming in here:  /car horns, a small boy tried to strangle a pigeon, /throngs sat in the shade, wiping their brows, /taxis slammed on their brakes” (p. 11).  The same jarring clamor recurs in “Modern Art” while, ironically, “an old bum scratches his back beneath his coat, . . . /watching the furious drivers curse each other /in the cool, bright morning” (p. 15).

Such pieces capturing moments in history are reminiscent of those in the Confucian canon, Book of Poetry, for instance, “Yellow Birds” (Huang Niao), which is related to a brief entry in Chunqiu, or The Spring and Autumn Annals.  Confucius records tersely in that canon the event in the pre-imperial state Qin, the death of Duke Mu in 621 BC.  As elaborated by Zuo zhuan, or The Commentary of Zuo, another ancient classic, “Duke Mu had decreed that the three sons of the Ziche family, i.e., Yanxi, Zhonghang, and Qianhu be buried alive with him.  Sorrowful for the three men of virtue, Qin people chanted ‘Yellow Birds.’”  Confucius edited the dirge into this poem with three stanzas, beginning with Qin people’s grief for Yanxi:

They flit about, the yellow birds,

And rest upon the jujube trees.

Who followed Duke Mu to the grave?

Ziche Yanxi.

And this Yanxi,

Was a man above a hundred.

When he came to the grave,

He looked terrified and trembled.

The two subsequent stanzas lament Zhonghang and Qianhu respectively.  Each stanza winds up with a four-line refrain bemoaning the tragic end of the three virtuous court officials.

Thou azure Heaven there!

Thou art destroying our good men.

Could he have been redeemed,

We should have given a hundred lives for him.

In addition to its historical perspective, the Confucian piece demonstrates a keen import of humanity, which also pervades David Cope’s poetry.  The concept of humanity (人文) first appeared in I Ching or The Book of Changes.  As a set of divinatory symbols in the book has it, “What civilization rests in is humanity. . . .  By observation, it is revealed that humanity constitutes the world.”  The idea is that the human forms a pair of couples, and thus enters into the family, the country, and the world at large which, in the last analysis, is the humanity, i.e. the culture.  In “Rainy Dawn,” for instance, Cope asks, “why think more of living, dying, /this rainy morn, & dream,” while “invisible sun & stars spin beyond /these clouds” (p.31).  But, ironically, all the time the poet is concerned about the human well-being, their “living, dying.”  In “Jane Marie,” he witnesses at close range the birth of his second child, Jane, by Caesarean section.  While his wife “Sue looks up— /the doctors cut /thru flesh wall, /fat layer— /still deeper— /their gloves redden /with her blood” (p. 32).  Thus the poet celebrates the miraculous creation of a new life:  “& now the doctor’s /hand enters her /abdomen, /the aide pushes, /pushes, /a blue head appears /wrinkled, angrily /drawing breath— /a howl /as the whole /blue body appears /cut & clamp, /weigh & check /& suck out nostrils, /hand her to /the father, me, /who sits amazed /as blue flesh turns /slowly pink” (p. 33).

In “The Rhododendron,” Cope quests for the gist of humanity, “who can say /what love is?  you take a friend /in hand & roar down blind road after blind road /wandering thru private rooms /in each other’s hearts, sailing thru whole histories /of pain & rage to find a quiet morning, /dew on the laurel leaves” (p.55).  On the other hand, in “Fran,” the poet records his early experience of bereavement at six: “Aunt Fran’s /husband & son Dutch, my older cousin . . . , a genius at 13, killed, /accident in the Rockies . . . /my first /memory of lives, faces swept away from my life” (p. 58).  The title of another poem “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?” is a refrain in one portion of François Villon’s Le Testament, rendered in English as “but where are the snows of yesteryear?”  The poet takes off from the famous line, in a similar refrain fashion, to backtrack the life of his mother, persistently asking, “what became of the girl . . . ,” from “the sixth grader who skipped on sidewalks to French lessons /with Miss Meloche” to “the girl chosen from her dorm to speak to reporters /after Pearl Harbor, summoning words to guess the pain /that lay ahead” (p.72).  In “Last Look,” sitting with his mother’s corpse, Cope laments, “the room is silent, empty but /for the bier.  she lies, sheet /draped over her body— / she is so small in death— / the head tilted back, eyelids, /aquiline nose, cupid’s bow lips, skin /translucent, alabaster /yet still lovely” (p. 73).  In “Flight to Phoenix,” an elegy for his father, the poet chants: “in seat staring out window at clouds, /I look into my empty hands— /think of his face, my own a mirror /thru which I can see him /& in his, the pattern of my being” (p. 74).  It can’t be a coincidence that the word “empty” appears in the very beginning of both of these elegies, specifically, the first line in the former and the second line in the latter, but a master touch with which the poet brings out the bereavement.  For when our parents pass away, a substantial part of our life phases out, leaving with us an indescribable inner emptiness, an aching void in our heart that can never be filled up.  In “Crystal Lake to Beulah,” Cope recalls, “last week, I kayaked at dawn /on my childhood river, /spreading rose petals across /the water three years after /we spread my mother’s ashes, /below the spot where she /sat alone, to collect herself /beyond the wash of sorrows, /job & family needs—here /to hear herself in treetop /winds, in owls calling /tree to tree in the dark” (p. 94).  Furthermore, “In My Father’s House” is a poem with which Cope traces back, from fond memories of his father, to the remote pedigree of the family, “the mirror casts backward thru ancestors /toiling land, turning lathes, scripture ever in their hands” (p. 75).

Cope’s tender feelings are not restricted to his relatives; his heart goes out to his fellow poets likewise.  The book includes Cope’s lamentation of the demise of Kenneth Rexroth, whom he refers to as “another of my fathers” (p. 12).  In “Rexroth Gone,” he pours out his feelings to the dear departed predecessor:  “if I sit tonight in shadows, /the moon’ll be full, the crickets sing /sweet lament.  tenderly now, /this faint gentle breath to you, /Kenneth” (p. 12).  The title “‘the weight of the world is love’” (100) is the opening line of an early poem by Allen Ginsberg, whom Cope calls “my mentor.”  The elegy “for allen” recalls five shared memories, including meeting Allen Ginsberg after the latter’s public poetry reading:  “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” (p. 51).  In “For Anne at 70,” a birthday salute to Anne Waldman, Cope bares his heart to the senior poet, “now seven decades on, now /the wise elder shepherd to flocks of /crazed poets, dreamers with fists of angst” (p. 98).  The phrase “crazed poets” is an allusion to a comparison made by the Athenian Duke Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream, “The lunatic, the lover and the poet /Are of imagination all compact: . . . /The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling, /Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; /And as imagination bodies forth /The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen /Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing /A local habitation and a name” (5.1: 8-18).  

Due to his admiration for Walt Whitman, a latter-day successor to Shakespeare, Cope deliberately took service as a janitor in schools in poor neighborhoods for many years, largely in imitation of Whitman’s determination to be one of the nondescript people.  In “At the Croyden,” as well as the poem’s companion “The Invisible Keys,” old John was a reclusive widower that, over time, David Cope came to know and befriended when the poet would come to his building for weekend work.  Cope was serving as a janitor at an elementary school at the time—cleaning and maintaining the building—and that job wouldn’t quite cover his bills.  Thus, on weekends, he would supplement his income by working at The Croyden, an old apartment building in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city.  He was cleaning apartments and stairs for the landlord so that he could pay his own bills and save money to complete his education.  John was a lonely old man at the end of his life, and he got to know Cope by stepping out of his apartment to talk when the latter was working there.  The poet was a lover of blues and jazz music, and old John had actually played in some famous bands back when he was younger.  As Cope puts it in “At the Croyden”:  “he played everywhere, all these big joints downtown, /an’ he played Detroit, & up in Canada, too. . . . /he looks at his hands, palms down, fingers spread, /& looks back up into my eyes /& I see the invisible keys” (p. 20).  Turning his hands down, as he would to play piano, was old John’s expressive way of sharing both his love of the piano and his sorrow that he could no longer play.  “The Invisible Keys,” Cope’s elegy for him, celebrates his gift of helping people through their troubles, even if only for an evening.  Thus the poet’s lament rises from the piano to a guitar crescendo:

that guitar

out front all alone

burning away sadness & anger, unpaid bills

& careless loves,

burning a bright new fire     

to get them all to that coming dawn,

burning all desire

away,

leaving them

quiet,

breathing

softly

   together

at last.  (p. 25)

The whole section beginning with “leaving them” is heavily indented, the idea being, according to  David Cope, to create the open space, the “step-down” from the “sadness & anger, unpaid bills /& careless loves” to return to the quiet breathing that brings the audience back to its sanity, its sense of quieting the mind.  In our dialogue about such significance of the poem, he explains to me, “I’m pretty certain that I didn’t think of the space after ‘away’ as a stanza break—note that it isn’t as full a spacing as occurs after ‘his funeral’ at the end of the first section or before ‘somewhere’ in the third section; rather, this space indicates the opening to hearing one’s own breath.”  The poet stresses, furthermore, “The comma after ‘away’ and the space before ‘leaving them’ is a spacing indicator, and the entire ‘leaving them’ sequence is a clause dependent on the sentence preceding it.  The entire effect of the stanza (with single line break as part of it) should be music that gives voice to the storms inside the audience, so that they may be left with or reach the point of calm beyond their sorrows” (27 March, 2017).

The storm here and elsewhere, such as in “A Quiet Life,” “Two Hearted River,” and “For Antler, after the storm,” is typical of a keen sensibility of nature that David Cope’s poetry manifests.  Canoeing down the Two Hearted River, for instance, he exclaims, “even the heart /cannot fathom what stillness /rests in this plunge, why men /sing together like choirboys & /stop the gunnel rush & /lay the paddles down in the /whipping breeze where scarred pines bend /thru storm & sigh & rainbow’s end” (p. 56).  As the poet recalls, Hemingway’s stories were really instinctive for him—most of the Nick Adams stories took place in Petoskey and thereabouts, an area not far from his mother’s birthplace in Charlevoix, and as a teenage boy they spoke to him as being from his own world and the peculiar sexual rituals between young men and women.  As an adult, he canoed the Two-Hearted River in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan all the way to the place where it empties into Lake Superior, though the geography of “Big Two-Hearted River” is more in keeping with the Fox River, which is the only river that flows within an afternoon’s walk from Seney, the town featured in the story.  “Yoopers”—the unofficial title that folk from the Upper Peninsula call themselves—like to say that Hemingway was hiding his fishing spots on the Fox by putting the story on the Two-Hearted River.

The “sound of nature,” in the words of the 4th century B.C. philosopher Chuang Tzu, is the highest realm of music. To apply to literary criticism the term coined by the Sage in his great Taoist canon Chuang Tzu originally in his comment on music, I find that David Cope is likewise touched by the sound of nature.  For instance, he is thrilled by the opening of the golden gate of a new day in “So the day begins.”  He is literarily a worshipper of such a glorious moment, “I sit, breathing in quiet rhythm, awaiting /the day's fire, the rising winds, /the waves slashing the breakwater, /thunderous, /gulls still above riding the winds, /searching, searching. /I stand & turn on my heel, /bowing in the four directions” (p. 105).  In “Alba:  The Sailors,” the poet employs the genre of old Provençal lyric poetry, which describes the longing of lovers who, having passed a night together, find that the hour has come to separate.  In fact, “alba” means “sunrise” in the Provençal language.  The poet is awe-stricken by morning’s solemn approaching:  “still no sun yet already the dawn waves fill far out with sails /headed out & away . . . /leaning to the window, he looks down at his /stirring companion, dark eyes & lips opening to caresses in first /light, & yet he is at once far away, looking backward at the /receding shore, bright day already rising /to meet dawn’s first rolling breakers” (p. 53).  In “Catching Nothing,” during his camping with Anne, his eldest child, Cope dreams of his paternal grandmother, Helen Cope, and then his father, waking up to “the morning after,” which “is calm, cloudy” (p. 47).  It is here that David Cope describes the glorious morning created by what Shakespeare calls the “sovereign eye,” a miraculous sight that the poet witnesses with Anne:  “the silent heron is still. . . . /even /our hearts beat like /hammers now, sending out waves of sound /over & over— /the breath /is a wind that /stirs up all the world” (p. 47).  In “Early Spring Morn Milwaukee,” Cope portrays “the eagle that flew low over Sue’s head /in Betsie River sunshine” (p. 89).  The poet’s description of the moment of daybreak is in a similar fashion as the canonical approach two thousand years ago in “The Morning Breeze” (Chen Feng) in The Book of Poetry:  “Swift flying birds in the morning breeze, /Lush and thick that northern wood” (鴥彼晨风，郁彼北林).  The Book of Poetry, as the earliest existing collection of Chinese poems likely composed in the 5th century BC, is one of the four ancient Chinese classics edited by Confucius, the other three being Book of History, Book of Rites, and Book of Changes.  In addition, the Sage himself wrote a history book, The Spring and Autumn Annals.  These constitute the five canons of Confucianism.  As Confucius said, “In The Book of Poetry are three hundred pieces, but the design of them all may be embraced in one sentence—‘Having no depraved thoughts.’”  Confucius’ succinct summary also fits Cope’s poetry.  In fact, all the images in his poems discussed above serve the general purpose of creating such immaculateness, for it is through their pursuit of integrity and uprightness that Cope’s poems, like their predecessors in the Confucian canon, have produced the pure and the beautiful out of a cosmos of complexity and confusion.

To be exact, The Book of Poetry has 311 pieces. Cope’s current volume of 78 poems, though a quarter of the size of the canon, with its chronicle of history, concern for humanity, and consonance with nature, is likewise without depraved thoughts, and can be well expected to be as burgeoning and enduring as its millennia-old predecessor in the past and in the future.

 

Sun Hong Bio Note

Dr. Sun Hong is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Renmin University of China

and, since 2002, a Professor of Literature at The Beijing Center for Chinese Studies, an extension

of Loyola University, Chicago.  He has won many awards for the excellence of his academic

research studies, and has compiled an extensive list of books, translations of books with

commentaries, and essays in respected journals.  In recent years, he has taught Shakespearean 

Studies; Willa Cather’s Fiction; British and American Fiction; Modern English Prose; Modern

Chinese Fiction; Ezra Pound and Chinese Culture; Regionalism in American and Chinese 

Literatures.

Gathering Eggs: An Interview with Poet Randy Roark by Kirpal Gordon, Part 1

Randy Roark, photograph by Kai Sibley, 2015

 

Kirpal Gordon:  I want to ask first how you conceptualize poetry as a prelude to the work. Your books of poems—Awakening Osiris (1996), Mona Lisa’s Veil (2001), LIT (2008)—and your notebooks of travel writing and poems—The Convalescence Notebook (2008), Map of the World (2007), What Have I Become (2007)—and your online travel-reportage-with-poems in Newtopia (2011-2014) not only turn prose into poetry and back into shimmering prose, they read like manifestations of a larger life project, one that includes intensive research into poets and movements as well as actual pilgrimages to ancient, spiritual, and literary locales all over the world.

 

Randy Roark: Yeah, a little over ten years ago I began to wonder if I had the time and vision for one big work, what would it be? That became The Illustrated Decalogue: A Decade of Removal. I made a list of places I wanted to visit before I died and there was about twenty, and I decided I’d take two trips a year over a decade and write my way through the experience. I thought that’d be something I’d be happy about when I was on my deathbed, that I spent at least a decade of my life exploring what I enjoyed most.

So from March 15 2005 until May 3 2015, I traveled each spring and fall to some destination on my list: Morocco, southern Africa, a couple of trips to India, China, Tibet, Nepal, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, Peru, the Amazon River basin, a trip up the Rhine from Vienna to Holland, La Routa Maya through four countries in Central America, several trips to Amsterdam, Greece, and Cyprus. And places in the U.S. as well—Chicago and Washington D.C. and San Francisco and L.A. and New York City.

Most of my work since my first trip to Europe in 1990 has been what I’ve called “research” works. A study of the history of art, of alchemy, of shamanism, of celtic mythology, surrealism, dada. When I want to learn something, I use the model of Pound’s Chinese and Adams cantos—I shut up and let the works speak through me. I call these “history” poems, and also distillations.

 

My first solo traveling writing was done on that 1990-1991 trip, which resulted in DODO, which I published through my Laocoon Press. I’ve just rediscovered some of that writing and even then I was erasing the narrator as much as possible, focusing on my senses, trying to become aware of as much of the important raw data of my actual experience as possible. And I learned that what I wrote about I remembered, because I noted it, then I translated it into words, and later I typed up my notebooks and then read the transcript and edited it and read it many more times until it was published. That imprinted what I wanted to remember pretty firmly in my brain. I also discovered that focusing on just what actually happened rather than what it “meant” to me resulted in more variety and ambiguity in the writing, which was especially pleasurable to me as the book got longer over a decade of writing and editing and rewriting.

Since The San Francisco Notebook in 2002, I’ve been aware that I’m at my best when I’m alone and working on my writing five-six hours every evening. I like the rhythm of it, the focus. I’ve worked on something almost every evening after dinner until it was time for bed since at least 2005.

 

That rhythm and focus intensified in 2011-2014, when I published forty-two columns from the Decalogue material in Newtopia magazine. Each month I’d send in 5000 words and about a dozen photographs, based on trips to Morocco, southern Africa, India, Nepal, China and Tibet.

 

The next period in my life—where I’m about to take off to Europe for at least three years and not return to Boulder for at least five—is an attempt to recreate that period of my life by crafting at least one 5000-word piece each month, and then moving on to the next one. I have plans to also write a daily series of mini art essays and a book about what happens over the five years, like what I created for The Decalogue.

 

The common denominator of all of my “projects” is that I decided decades ago to follow the advice that was carved over the entrance into Apollo’s temple in Delphi: Know thyself. Every trip has eventually become a journey deeper into myself.

What I’ve learned over all these years is that I’m a roamer, not a settler. I’ve learned that—paraphrasing Oliver Sachs—I will always have problems bonding, belonging, and believing. And that’s okay, no matter what anyone thinks. I know that I’m most alive when I’m a stranger on my own in an unfamiliar place, especially when I don’t speak the language. I also know that I like to settle for an extended stay rather than moving around, and that I prefer to be in a walkable city with a lot of culture and history rather than being “on retreat.” And I’ve found that traveling is—for me—the safest and sanest and most productive way to experience that state of continual newness I’m most excited about in an extended and focused way. I also like the way I can be anyone I choose to be when no one knows who I am—and I like who I choose to be in most situations.

 

So, knowing myself, I’ve designed a future that played to my strengths and interests. For the next five years I will be a wandering art pilgrim. These are going to be my Henry Miller years, where I focus on my life and my writing. I don’t need any more money—more money isn’t going to substantially change my life. But I only have so much time, and I’ve also learned how much time art takes.

 

So when I realized I had an opportunity to get out of the workforce and wander for the next five years, I was ready and I jumped. Even the part about it being for five years is perfect. I wouldn’t have been able to do it if I thought I’d have nothing to come back to.

In addition to finalizing the bulk of The Decalogue, I’m taking my journals and my collected correspondence—which go back to when I was 20, five years before I left Connecticut to apprentice with Allen Ginsberg—and all of my slides and photos with me when I leave on October 31. I’m also bringing along my saved e-mails and my published work, and I’m going to see if can craft some kind of memoir out of them.

 

KG: So what about your concept of living/writing your life in a kind of classical sequence, reminiscent of T.S. Eliot or Dante Allighieri?

 

RR: My model for The Decalogue was John Bunyan’s 17-century book-length Christian allegorical poem The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come; Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream. That’s where I got the name for my column in Newtopia—“A Poet’s Progress”—because the organizing principle of the Decalogue is that I’m testing Bunyan’s theory that each individual life has meaning and that there’s an extra-personal dimension to every life. In other words, for Bunyan, there is a God and there’s a heaven and hell, and every human being has a soul, and the days from their birth to death are filled with challenges, and how they behave during these tests determine the eternal fate of their souls. I no longer believe in heaven and hell, but that still leaves a lot of questions: What’s the most accurate way to understand my life and my relationship with others? Is there a purpose to my joys and suffering? Is each individual life a test, or does “deserve” have no meaning here? Is there an extra-personal or personal path or map or plan I’m following? Is there a portion of my story that’s archetypal—that existed before I was born and will continue to affect others long after I'm gone? Is there a God or a higher power, and are there angels among us? What should I be doing with my time? And the big question, of course, why?

 

Part of it is probably that I’m getting older and want to be sure I’m making the right decisions for the right reasons. I don’t want to feel at the end of my life that I missed the opportunities I was given, or that I failed to make the right “bigger picture” decisions. I want to feel that I lived my life as fully as I could and missed as few opportunities as possible to learn or to do better. There are some things I've done that I'd like to do over, and I'd like to have as few missed opportunities as possible in my future. 

 

And it was important to me to write my investigation of the possible meaning of my life going forward, not in retrospect. Most of the books that make claims about the meaning of life are written looking backward from a pause on the path. I don’t trust that kind of hindsight. I see my job as focusing on the trees—I’ll leave the forest up to anyone who can find one.

 

KG: Regarding the urge to living vitally, I quote your opening poem in Map of the World (2007):

 

            The Erotic Heaven

        This is the point at which all alchemists

begin, half on water, half on land,

first as pilgrims, then as pilots—

to find everything Other within us,

to know all we are and deny nothing—

as sunlight—mixed with moisture—

flowed into darkness, awakened

flesh from dark matter—that

all mortal and immortal things

arrive in the realm of the visible

subtle and fiery—atoms vibrating

between one state and another.

 

What a way to open a book of poems! It rolls off the tongue like a prayer, as if what you are observing is none other than the poem’s invocation come to life, its alliteration and economy of language calling me back to read it again.

 

RR:  “The Alchemy Poems” was mostly written on a trip back to Connecticut for my father’s funeral. I had transcribed Diane di Prima’s lectures on “The Language of Alchemy” years earlier, and I still didn’t understand it. Diane and her students were obviously having a conversation about some kind of reality they shared, but I couldn’t follow it. It didn’t describe any reality I’d ever been a part of.

 

Then, as I was packing to return home for my father’s funeral, I impulsively threw a copy of Hermeticism and Alchemy into my bag. It’s a series of alphabetical encyclopedic entries about alchemy, and when I returned to my hotel after supper each evening, I would continue reading the book, making the notes that grew into “The Alchemy Poems.”

 

It actually wasn’t until much later that I returned to the poems and finally understood what they were about. They were about what dies and what doesn’t. They were about what’s worth saving and what’s best left behind. They were about how change is a transformative process and one thing ceases to be by being transformed into another. For instance, my body will die, but my flesh will continue to live on as soil until I get picked up by a root and become part of a lettuce leaf or something. And then that leaf might get eaten by a rabbit and the rabbit gets eaten and becomes part of another living thing while pieces of it are returned to the earth for another trip.

 

So if you start to look at things that way, everything that seems so solid, so real—even a mountain or a tree—has been many things before and will be many more things in the future. So which one is the real one? If I identify with my body, I’m going to cease to exist when I die. But if I identify with the continuous story, I’ll be free to know that I can’t help but live forever, in some shape of form, but only once during a few years as this particular person.

So “The Erotic Heaven” was the first poem from my notes, trying to imagine all of the possible permutations of matter I’ve gone through in order to arrive as a human body, and how I might possibly be transforming in the future. It’s an attempt to redefine who I am in a way, to reimagine “me.”

 

I’m really proud of the three long poems in that book. It was a very special time for me and everything came together in a very iconic way. I had just been discharged from the hospital after having broken my neck. I was alone in a hospital overnight, unable to move my left arm, expecting to have spinal surgery at any moment. But the surgical orders never made it to the floor and I wasn’t prepped when the neurosurgeon arrived the next afternoon. It was impossible to get a second crew in on a Sunday for a non-emergency, so his assistant re-examined me and determined I was no longer a “candidate” for surgery, and they discharged me that afternoon, even though I could barely stand.

 

In the days after I returned home, after I stopped taking pain medications and my head cleared up, I found a pile of unpublished manuscripts and began to re-read and re-edit them. That’s when my daily writing practice began in earnest, in 2005. It took me about two years to get everything “finalized,” and I ended up with enough material for five books, and one them was Map of the World. I just so happened to have three long unpublished poems that seemed to fit together quite nicely under that title—the alchemy poems, the shaman poems, and poems written in dream language. Each was like a different map of the world.

 

It was also after being discharged from the hospital that I walked into my basement and saw all of my books as crackling with energy. That’s when I began to sell my library and use the money to travel, while I still could. The books meant nothing to me at that point, and life meant everything.

 

KG: “The Erotic Heaven” is also a fine example of the poetry side of what you’ve described elsewhere as creative non-fiction or unreach-prune back-simplify. Here’s a much different but equally evocative example from Mona Lisa’s Veil (2001):

 

The Body Is the Boundary

 

In the graveyard

shift emergency room

where I undress

the slender 24-year-old,

her body glowing,

turning blue,

the heroin

saturating her

heart, or the

19-year-old who

drove her Blazer

through a light pole,

smashing her skull

into moonlight,

or the mother whose

14-year-old thought it

would be fun

to toss live bullets

into a fire, until

one entered her

scalp through that

tiny blue hole there,

ricocheting through her

brain until it found

that purple

wound there,

where her shoulder

joins the neck.

 

A very sobering poem. It sounds like you are making excellent use of your day job as an opportunity to use real life events to move us in literary ways.

 

RR: Yeah, the instructions I give myself when I feel I’m reaching a bit to create or heighten the significance of a piece of writing is to “unreach”—to prune back, to simplify. 

 

I remember that beautiful young girl turning blue. I remember waking up that mother with a middle-of-the-night phonecall that she had to get to the emergency room as quickly as possible. I remember the ambulance crew telling us that there were no skidmarks where that college freshman had driven into the only lightpole on that side of the road for miles. That was all one very long weekend.

 

I wrote very few poems about my emergency room work because it’s all so loaded, for me and for anyone confronted with a poem like that. Those are all real people, precise nights of my life. Working in the emergency room isn’t all like that, so those big deaths touch me too. And no matter how much I talk about the ultimate reality being alchemy and nothing really dies, the point of that poem is that people do die, every day. And I don’t care if they come back as a lettuce leaf. I don’t care if Layne is in the wind now, I want her body back. The living body is the boundary between being and nothingness for the only ones who remain.

 

KG: It seems important to you that you “tell it like it is,” even if the truth carries less revelation than metaphor; i.e., fiction.

 

RR: I keep going back to one particular memory. I was 16 in 1970 and a junior at St. Bernard’s Boys High School, run by the Christian Brothers. I loved my Catholic high school, by the way. I am as much a result of my education there as anything else. I feel like they taught me how to think, not what to think. That’s where I discovered Gandhi and Thoreau and Teilhard de Chardin. My senior paper was “Nietzsche, Kafka, and Hesse: The Man Who Imagined the World, the Man Crushed by the World, the Man Who Escaped the World.” That was the level of discourse that was expected.

It was also the time of the Vietnam War and they would encourage us to attend anti-war demonstrations. One time they bussed us to New York City where I stood twenty feet from John Lennon and Yoko Ono, both in military fatigues and berets, black leather fists in the air, “Power to the people!” “Right on! Right on!” But first we had to bring in a consent form signed by our parents. I smoked hash with one of my teachers at his house on the Long Island Sound and listened to the cast album of “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris” and “Jesus Christ Superstar” and the first Leonard Cohen album and “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and the album “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” That’s what we did when we got high—we talked through the night about art and life. It was a complement to the education we were getting during the day.  

 

But the memory I keep returning to happened during my junior year, in the Spring of 1970. Several of my friends had gone to NYC for a long weekend organized by something called the Encounter Movement. I was no longer a practicing Catholic and had a very conflicted relationship with the Church, but I liked the effect the weekend had on my friends and I decided to check it out. It turned out to be a mixture of Gestalt Therapy, Esalen, and a 3-day rap session, but with a lot of talk about Jesus and The New Testament. It was a kind of Liberation Theology turned inward.

 

On day two, one of the presenters—the one everyone liked best; the jovial, down-to-earth guy—gave a talk after lunch. This was probably the third or fourth session of the weekend. He started with something like, “You know, I’ve been listening to everyone talk about their faith and love and desire for a life of Christian compassion over the last two days, and I think I can summarize what I’ve been hearing in a single word.” And he held up a sheet of paper that said, “Bullshit!”

That was a moment of revelation for me at that point in my life because, if I was honest—and even at 16 I had learned not to be—when I heard people talk, I heard two things: I could sense who they were, which was perfectly clear, and then there was what they were saying, which was often confused or opaque, and some times in conflict with what I sensed were their actual beliefs. It was as if everyone was using words to distract others from what they were really feeling.

 

I was pretty confused too, but not enough to say what I didn’t believe in order to deceive people, so I usually—and still do—kept my mouth shut. There were times where I wondered if this is what growing up was all about, to learn the proper opinions and repeat them, whether or not you personally believed them or could live up to them.

But when I saw and heard the word “bullshit” in that moment, I knew I’d be committing myself to the truth. It was a born-again moment—something changed inside of me. I became certain in a way I never felt before, because I was always surrounded by people who had made me doubt my own feelings and perceptions. But I saw in that moment that when we disagreed, it could be because they were bullshitting! And my intuition, my feelings, my  “vision” could be right! That moment changed everything.

Of course, when we broke into small groups, everyone was furious! “How dare he!” “We are not bullshitters!” “Who does he think he is? He’s the bullshitter!” I kept quiet until things slowed down a bit and said, “I kind of agree with him.” And there was a palpable shift of energy in the group, turning their anger toward me.

 

At some point someone agreed with me, and then slowly, one-by-one, people kind of grudgingly changed positions. But people—it seemed to me—were changing their opinion because the tide had turned, not because they thought or felt differently. Everything was still about the outside, about what’s “right,” what’s acceptable, instead of what’s “true.”

 

It was through that experience that I changed from someone who always doubted himself when there was a conflict, to someone who took it for granted that when we disagreed that I could be right and everyone else could be bullshitting. I also realized it was okay if people thought I was wrong. And it was clear to me even then that often disagreements won’t be solved until years after all the principles are dead, but that the truth would win out in the end.

 

So my life and my writing became an attempt at uncovering the truth, and looking for it inside and not outside of me. And once I chose telling the truth over being accepted, I began to enjoy telling my truths in difficult situations, even when I got the same response the guy from the Encounter Movement got—“What an asshole!” Being an outsider is actually the easiest path for me, as someone who has trouble believing, bonding, and belonging in the first place.

 

Years later, I was living with my wife in Mystic, Connecticut, near the Eugene O’Neill Theater of the Deaf. It wasn’t unusual for their students to attend local parties and I liked to sit with the deaf kids—often teenage urban African-Americans, the first chance I got to meet any in rural Connecticut. I never tried learning sign language, but they could lip read, which means I had to face them and talk slowly and clearly. I was too impolite to stare at their mouths, so I would look them in the eyes when they talked. It was a little awkward at first because I felt so exposed, but I began to really like it, and it began to seem weird to talk to anyone I wasn’t looking in the eye.

 

One night I was talking to a deaf kid at a Christmas party when a married couple arrived. When they came through the door they were smiling and shouting “Hey,” “Hello,” and “Good to see you!” but when they stopped smiling and turned away from the party, I could see the strain and anger in their faces. It was obvious to me that they had been arguing in the car, and that they were using conversation to hide what was really going on. And I saw people respond to what they were saying, instead of what they were feeling. It was like everyone was actively avoiding seeing through the false words to what was really going on, as if that would be impolite.

 

I also began to notice how few of the people in the room who weren’t deaf were actually looking at each other as they talked. It was like everyone else was creating big word balloons to hide behind. And in that moment I made another decision, that I would never use words to conceal what I was feeling, even if that meant mostly not saying anything at all.

 

I also have a very strong memory of the effect it had on me when my father began telling me, “I can see right through you.” The funny thing is that he was usually wrong. But I also feel I can see through people who are lying or exaggerating, or self-aggrandizing, or being manipulative and phony, or lying to themselves. When that happens I feel so embarrassed for them that I try to catch myself before I exaggerate or self-aggrandize or lie myself. But sometimes I get caught up in it too. I often have to get into trouble before I realize what I’m doing. It’s tricky.

 

So in my writing—especially my “creative non-fiction”—I always go over it in the editing and rewriting phases with an eye toward whether what I’m saying is “true.” And perhaps more important, is it honest? Because the “creative” part of creative non-fiction is making shit up. But I don’t make stuff up to mislead people—I make stuff up because I sense it, right under the surface. That’s why I feel an obligation to be very careful about what I write and how I write, but not about whether something actually happened, or if I found it originally in someone else’s work. I’m creating a mosaic, precisely as it comes to me, before I even understand it myself.

 

KG: Your notion that the truth is ever changing reveals how the teller is transformed by the experiences he is telling, which seems to be your point of departure. It reminds me of D.T. Suzuki’s idea that the arts—haiku, tea ceremony, landscape painting, calligraphy, ikebana—are the ideal place to express the inexpressible essence of Buddhism. In your "Journal Entry, Istanbul, December 1" in What I Have Become (2007) you write, as if in answer to this notion, “If you try to create in order to be a creator, you will never be satisfied, because a creation has limits—and you outgrow them once you accomplish them. But if you become the source of creation, then everything you see is transformed. Beauty loses its subjectivity—it’s not yours to give or take away. It isn’t a reflection and it isn’t personal. It’s a matter of seeing and being skilled enough in your medium to transfer your vision directly.” You’ve hung hard with Buddhists in your day job as a producer and editor for Sounds True. How has that experience shaped your point of view?

 

RR: I worked with a lot of people who woke up every morning and made a vow to save all sentient beings. If I was in a studio working with them, I was the only thing on the menu. But it’s a little like that story about how a pickpocket only sees a great teacher’s pockets. I was trying to get this thing done, trying to record the program, I wasn’t really there for spiritual enlightenment—I was there to do my job as a producer. Later, when I was editing the recording, it’s the same thing: does this make sense, is it clear, is it well organized?

 

But there are things I learned, sure. Not just from Buddhists. I think I learned at least one thing from every program I worked on, and I produced or edited over 300 programs in the 17 years I worked here.

 

When I’d prepare for a recording, I would usually work with the author ahead of time to plan and shape the content, and we’d create a program on—say—the Kabbalah one week, and then the next I’d be working with a Christian mystic, and then something on Buddhist psychology or neuroscience. After about fifteen minutes in the studio I’d realize, “Oh, we’re recording a program about what it’s like to be human.” And of course we were. What is a Kabbalist going to be talking about: a different universe than a Christian mystic, another reality than a Buddhist monk or a brain scientist? Most of the really good projects I worked on—it seems to me—were really saying the same things, using a very particular language and set of references. And if you join a particular group, most people spend a lot of time focused on learning that language and set of references as if the answers are there. But I had to learn how to work with everyone, so I learned something joiners don’t learn, which is that every path is more or less the same. And if one isn’t, watch out!

 

The main thing that interests me about the heavy-duty Buddhists is their humanity. Compassion isn’t just an American thing of course, but the American Buddhists are probably the best at this humble sense of shared humanity. And I hear it in our Buddhist poets too—Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, particularly.

What I mean by “humanity” is that they don’t claim to be any different from who they are. They get angry, they’re greedy, they gossip, they joke, they listen with their full attention, they can be emotionally intimate to a powerful degree. They’re pretty much totally themselves. Plus aware. So they can pretty quickly recognize their anger, and they drop it. They’re aware of their greediness, so when it bursts out, they acknowledge it and move on. I had one lama tell me after a tirade, “I’m sorry. That was my arrogance speaking.” But he didn’t collapse. He didn’t beat himself up. He didn’t try to defend his outburst or pretend it was anything other than what it was. He didn’t try to confuse me about what just happened or what was happening now. It was like a little dramatization of arrogance speaking. And in case I missed it, he explained what just happened. His main concern was that I might misunderstand and assume his response was somehow in response to something I had done. It was so clean. He didn’t hold onto anything—he just owned it, explained it, apologized for it, and moved on!

 

All I want is to be a human being—this human being—fully me, in this lifetime, while I’m alive. That’s all I’m after. Not to be a great poet or an acknowledged writer. And I’m not interested in powers or siddhis or enlightenment, any of that. It just seems to be a trap to me. I actually feel sorry for people I’ve met who believe they have to convince me they’re powerful and wise and special in order to feel “good enough.”

 

If my goal is being me, the truth is always right here, it’s never “out there.” It can’t be anywhere else. I ultimately can’t escape myself and although I’m in a constant state of refinement, I can never become anyone else, no matter how much I admire them. But I can always choose to be as big as I can imagine. That’s who I want to discover in this life—the biggest real me.

KG: Regarding your sense of the phony/authentic aspect of the Sounds True teachers you have worked with, what comes to mind is the old dialectic ‘tween philosophies that are actually systems of thought (e.g: Torah, Aristotle/Aquinas, Hegel, Sartre; Veda, Confucius; Islam) and philosophies that remind us that the system of thought has a gaping hole in its bucket (e.g: New Testament, Plato/Augustine, Marx, Kierkegaard; Buddha, Lao Tzu; Sufism). The systematizers say follow the map while the post-systematizers remind us that the map is not the territory. So in this scenario, the examples of Alan Watts’ prodigious scholarship on liberation “systems” along with Krishnamurti’s liberation from Theosophy’s “system” would be celebrated as whistle-blowing to those who would bow to a system instead of opening their hearts or minds. Is it too much to say that you are in the reminder school and that you are exercising-exorcising rites that reveal the limits of systemic thinking, hence your interest in not fictionalizing, pretending or faking it in your own writing, living, recording, witnessing?

 

RR: I wouldn’t use the word “phony” to describe Krishnamurti, but from what I learned in putting together Truth Is a Pathless Land from his audio archives, I think he quite possibly did some real damage with his hypocrisy; especially hiding his decades-long affair with his best friend’s wife while preaching against “the carnality of the body.” I also found his attacks on other belief systems—including some I’d had training in, like Transcendental Meditation and Christianity—were remarkably ignorant about what was actually being taught. I was also disturbed by his dismissive and repugnant attitudes toward women.

 

But that’s an interesting idea—that I’m working against the limits of systemic thinking. I’d never heard it expressed that way before, but what jumped out at me is that I do not like most of the works and authors in your “systemic thinking” category except for Sartre—who is a very important touchstone in my life—and I love almost everyone and everything on your “hole in the bucket” list. Sufism is probably my favorite religion, if I had any interest in joining a spiritual community, which I don’t.

I’m actually repulsed by Aristotle and very defensive about Plato. One night Jack Collom suggested we collaborate on a poem celebrating Aristotle’s appreciation of Nature, and attacking Plato and his creation of the Platonic Ideal (which Jack believed allowed people to trash anything in the natural world as not as important as the “ideal”). I shocked even myself by yelling: “I love Plato! I hate Aristotle! Aristotle is the kind of guy who would dissect a duck and pin him to a board. Yeah, but he can’t fly!”

I guess I bristle when someone suggests that they understand the true significance of anything, like Aristotle and Aquinas and Confucius. I find them almost bullies in a way. I don’t want to be presented with a closed system, even the right one. I want one that opens out to include me, that includes wonder and magic, where there’s room for everything I’ve experienced, including large areas of “I don’t know.” I prefer a system that I can step into, look around, see things in a new way, personalize it, and then step back out into the world, blinking. Each of the poems in Map of the World is a mirror that you can step through into a different world for a little while. Each of them returns you to the “world” at the end, where everything is slightly altered but exactly the same.

I no longer think anything valuable can come from the study of others or trying to learn a system of thought other than to understand it as an active part of my own reality. I think it’s all right here, inside me, and that looking “outside” is looking in the wrong direction. I want to understand myself and my experience before it’s all gone. Confirmation or conflict with my own experience based on my interactions with the outer world is not very useful for me. I even believe that accepting any ideas second-hand can contaminate what’s true about it. Lineage is like that too—you don’t choose your lineage, you come to understand it. You can’t recognize your lineage until you discover your place in it, and come to understand the whole idea of lineage as a priori, not ex facto. Like Burroughs said, you can’t learn anything you don’t already know, so you can’t really choose your lineage.

 

Or maybe lineage is how Ted Berrigan described it, that every poet is picking up the ball from another poet and trying to carry it forward a yard or two. He said Corso was looking back to Shelley, and Allen to Whitman. For Burroughs it was a friend and contemporary: Brion Gysin. And Ted said that he was continuing the poetry of Robert Creeley, who was still very much alive, and whose poetry couldn’t have been less like Creeley’s. Creeley’s was cramped, handwritten, gnarly, sharp. Ted’s was wild, spontaneous, typewritten. Creeley’s was folk art, it was home-spun, it was New England. Ted’s was urban, impatient, city-wise. But Ted swore his was the same sensibility as Creeley’s, a generation forward.

Anyway, I’ve thought a lot about my lineage, and I think in the first sense of lineage I’m probably closest to Goethe and Joyce and Tzara in my sensibility, and Ezra Pound in his curiosity (although not at all in Pound’s creativity and genius), and maybe Joan Miro in the sense of not wanting to repeat myself.

But in the second sense, I see myself as trying to carry forward the work of Yeats. I mean, who’s done that? Eliot, a little. Pound a little. But they were both using Yeats as a point of departure, and they’re both long dead now. I think in a way my work goes back to Yeats—as if everything in poetry since then has been a dead end—to pick up a thread and see how far I can carry it forward. What makes it a little less immodest is that I’m not competing with him head-to-head. I’m mostly doing his thing in prose.

 

My patron saint, though, the one I owe almost everything I am as a person is the one whom I probably identify with the least, poetically. That’s Allen Ginsberg. We disagreed about everything, but I loved him more than my father.

 

And the one I identify with the most as far as my sensibility is Duchamp. Coming upon his written work in Anselm Hollo’s 1981 Naropa class on dada was another lifechanger for me. It’s from Duchamp that I got the idea that the greatest creation of an artist is his life. It was via my study of Duchamp that I figured out my own way, which was to focus on two things—what is my actual experience pre-thought and conditioning; and how can I use language to say something specific and true? And the sentence from him that has helped me as an artist more than any other is “Sharpen the eye (a method of torture).”

 

KG: Perhaps Krishnamurti was rejecting what you are rejecting: entitlement, insincerity, elitism and the con game. In his case, that included the hierarchy not only of Theosophy, “advancement on the path” or the New Age racket (a symptom of the American illusion produced by greed that we can purchase satori with a credit card?) but of his own Indian tradition of lineage, succession, caste and religion. TM’s mantra yoga, a well respected practice, is about mind protection. He maybe was trying to get out of what you are trying to get into. In any case, the traditional Sanskrit reminder-response to “I’ve found the final enlightenment,” is “Neti, neti” (neither This, nor That).

 

RR: I think Krishnamurti was wrong to reject the Hindu practice of (and I’m paraphrasing) catching a child’s attention with a shiny toy. How are you going to lead people out of a lesser understanding to a greater one if you can’t convince them that it exists? First you find out what they are willing to work for and you use that as a lure.

 

I learned a lot about how to skillfully do this when I was trained as a meditation instructor with Deepak Chopra in 1995-1997. He used to teach a workshop called “Ageless Body, Timeless Mind,” and he’d start with, “I can teach you how to live forever.” (Very long pause.) “Plant a tree. Teach your children well. Change an unfair law, stand up for a politician you believe in, improve a life, work for a cause you believe in, preserve something beautiful and endangered.” He had another workshop called “Creating Abundance.” He’d start with, “I can teach you how to manifest a Porsche. But it’s not for everyone. You need focus and determination. Do you want me to tell you a foolproof way to manifest a Porsche, using nothing more than focus and determination? Okay, here’s how you do it: 1) Be determined to work as much and as hard as you can, and 2) Focus on saving your money. If you are able to remain focused and determined long enough, you will one day save enough to buy the Porsche. But think back to the last time you achieved a goal like that, something you bought because you thought it would change how you felt about your life. How long did that feeling last? Now think about the last time you achieved an interior goal—like learning meditation or becoming a genuinely more pleasant person to be around. Or imagine being caught acting heroically in a stranger’s benefit. If they sold that feeling at 7-11, the line would be down the street. In fact, that’s probably the feeling you’re trying to get with the Porsche. So let’s examine your goals first and then look closer at how to manifest them. What is this longing and what is it longing for?”

It’s bait and switch, but it’s like baiting them with a Porsche and giving them a shot at the happiness they’re really looking for. He’s pointing out that what they’re looking for is actually inside of them and can only be symbolized by a Porsche, or whatever. What they’re looking for can’t be found outside of the self and it’s always been inside of them and will always be inside them and it will always only be inside of them, because it has to be inside them in order for it to be real for them. So the Kingdom of Heaven really is inside you and will always be inside you and only inside you. Amen.

 

But I believe in spiritual practice. Emotions and feelings have arisen when I’ve been involved in spiritual practice that are central to how I see myself and others. Spiritual and psychological practices are really about learning who you truly are, and the deeper I come to understand myself, the better I can understand others. I know that my daily meditation practice has changed me, although I can’t point to how, because there’s nothing to compare it to. And the effects of a meditation are subtle and take place over decades. But I can say that it made me more sane and grounded. And it’s made me quieter and more appreciative, more aware. But it’s also made me more agitated at times, and this next five-year trip is really an attempt to escape people. I’m sixty-one, which is traditionally the time of life people in several Asian cultures are expected to retire from their worldly responsibilities and focus on their inner life. I can feel the desire to focus on my inner life tugging at me too. I have to take off. It’s time.

But back when I first started at 19 years old, meditation led me much deeper into life, into my interactions with others. The right answer at one point in your life becomes the exactly wrong thing at another. That’s a big part of it, too. You’ve got to keep your eyes and ears open until the end.  

 

I’ve studied mantra under various lineages and I’m not quite sure what “mind protection” means, but the way I see it, I plug my mantra into my otherwise continuous thought process so that my awareness can float free. The way I describe it is, I give my mind something to chew on designed to destroy it. I give my mind a shiny toy to keep it occupied, while I get out of the car and stretch my legs. There are also some teachers who claim that the sound of the mantra is designed to have a specific healing or orienting effect on the mind and body, and I know of no reason why this couldn’t be true. But a brief vacation from my boring repetitive judgmental thoughts is enough of a benefit for me.

 

I’m encouraged by the desire in human beings that brings them to spiritual practice. Of course that desire is not going to be purified before they start their practice. But the longing alone, I think, will continue to correct their path over the course of their lives, at least somewhat, if they continue to practice. And I think that once you practice, even a little, you do see more opportunities around you to sow peace, to alleviate at least a little suffering while you can. And often the first person’s suffering you need to address is your own.

 

I do see a difference between someone whose desire is to become enlightened and someone who is motivated by a desire to be a better person. But I support anything that lessens human suffering, and I believe that just about any spiritual practice and any motivation will do that, although with all the scandals in the spiritual communities over the years, it’s sometimes difficult to believe.

 

I have met teachers I consider phonies or toxic in my work, and I’ve heard too many stories about spiritual teachers who have behaved criminally. When I was in Myanmar, the Buddhists were killing the Muslims. But I do believe that for just about anyone, a daily spiritual practice will help people lessen their own and others’ suffering. I believe that any spiritual practice—no matter what bus we get on or what our original destination was—is better than no spiritual practice.

 

And I totally get the “neti, neti” thing—perhaps too much. The way it manifests in me is self-doubt. When I come to some conclusion, I immediately back away from it, begin to test it, doubt it. Like how I experienced Krishnamurti talking about sex as really creepy. But maybe it’s me who’s creeped out by the sex? They were consenting adults—why do I feel competent to judge them? Or to use the previous example of how I get annoyed by people who pretend to others that they have it all together, maybe it’s me, unable to accept the authority of anyone else? Maybe I’m resentful that it’s not me whom everyone’s treating like a genius? It just goes on and on like that. Sometimes it seems like all day, every day, my thoughts are just judging everything I see. I need an off-switch that stops my thinking, and I found one with mantra.

I’m with Krishnamurti in wanting to get rid of succession, of caste, and I’m not crazy about religion. But discovering you’re part of a lineage and learning what that lineage stands for has been very comforting for me. It’s my sangha, more or less, encompassing the Pre-Socratic philosophers and Plato and Yeats and Pound and Ginsberg and you too, Kirpal.

 

In a way I think I write in order to help explain and pass along my lineages, and I have several. I have my poetic lineage, my prose lineage, my memoir lineage, my artistic lineage, my spiritual lineage, my philosophical lineage, my traveling lineage, all mixed together. It’s not something that’s been imposed on me, it’s something I’ve discovered. And it’s something that I’m now consciously trying to pass on, to restore, to expand and explore and perhaps renew. To add my voice, my take, my version of it. To make it new, as Pound said.

KG: Regarding your eye to people who think they have it all together and who pose as your betters: what if the humility you express as not-having-it-all-together proved not only to be a universally true reality for all humans but also an effective way to access more truth? What if your “re-sent-ment” is a “re-act-ion” to an untruth that perpetrates the fraud that there are such things as one’s betters? Who would you bet on to be better at being you than you? Your writing reveals you’re a great-grandchild of Father Walt who could not abide any form of condescension. What if you’re revealing that the quest for better-dom is the disguise of the self-loathing? What if your poet-warrior heart is rightly wronged by a system(izer) that bullies, excludes, dominates and denies others’ humanity in the name of liberation? What I’m saying: at its most complimentary level perhaps, these two styles of system and reminder, for all their differences, may be holding hands under the table as both are selling a point of view based upon what’s missing in the other’s point of view. The “authentics” need the artifice of a system to amplify their reminders to be authentic and the “accountants” need the inherent anarchy in the reminder philosophy to validate their need for a system. Consider your poem from What I Have Become (2007):

 

                        What Wisdom Has Hidden From Us
 

                        The wise know how everything works

                        and they have all the answers,

                        and they know better than we do

                        where everything is headed.

 

                        In Central Park a boy is crying—

                        he sees monsters under the bridge.

                        Don’t be silly, his mother yells at him.

                        There are no monsters here at all.

                       

RR: Oh, I get it now. Yeah, that’s a really good point. Yes, I need someone to push against. But it’s very tricky. First of all, it’s very difficult to put myself in the line of fire because I get triggered so easily, having grown up in an abusive household—either I fall apart when attacked, or I put myself in danger if I think someone is being unfairly attacked. Especially when it’s a woman threatened by a man. Even as a pre-teen I would sometimes physically impose myself between my raging father and my two younger sisters.

 

Secondly, my experience is that when I think I’m right, I don’t learn anything. I’ve wasted a lot of time defending my opinion rather than expanding it to include new information.

 

KG: Continuing to probe how your thinking impacts your writing, your insistence on reportage reminded me of Charles Reznikoff and the work of the Objectivists who I am sure you know, yes?

 

RR: You know, I haven’t really thought of Reznikoff in a long time, but you’re absolutely right. You have this uncanny way of sensing the roots and influences that I’ve assimilated and completely forgotten about.

 

There’s a story about Allen Ginsberg reading Reznikoff to me on the last day of my apprenticeship that I used as the final passage of “The Object Is to See Clearly,” which was published in the “Naropa Bulletin” in 1981 when I was 27.

 

It was my first attempt to write a memoir, and it strikes me that even though I keep talking about how much of a discovery my experience of writing The Decalogue was, the entire memoir would fit quite comfortably alongside anything in it. It has no over-arching narration, it doesn’t try to be objective. It’s a collection of real-life events reported in chronological order without commentary, just like real life. [And I’m suddenly reminded rereading it almost 35 years later that I stole much of its style from Tom Pickard’s excellent account of his time apprenticeship with Basil Bunting that I read in an issue of “Peideuma” around this time.]

 

Our last meeting went long, trying to tie up all the loose ends, and I was burnt out and wanted to go home. But when we finished, Allen put his papers aside and said, with a great deal of enthusiasm, “Well, what did you bring today?” So we tinkered with my poems a bit and then he asked if I knew the work of Charles Reznikoff. I wasn’t very familiar. “I think he’d be a good model for you.”

He went to his bookshelf and pulled a chair beside mine in the dim light of the living room window. He flipped through the first few pages. Then he began to read, looking up occasionally as some line or image or word struck him as important. His voice was clear and his eyes were bright. He was using his speaking voice—the same voice he’d been using in our conversation only a moment ago—but now he was luxuriating on the vowels and chewing on the consonants, but still talking as naturally as any excited stranger might, striking up a conversation in a bar or at a bus stop.

I began to shiver a little. There was something very strange about this. I found I could lean into what he was saying, and when I did I could hear a voice coming from a dark apartment in turn-of-the-century New York City. It was sometimes a young man, sometimes an old man, writing alone at his kitchen table while the family slept. He wrote without hope that what he was writing would one day be read from one poet to another, in a future he never imagined.

When I closed my eyes and leaned forward, I began to feel bursts of energy in my chest and forehead that were unpleasant in the sense that I was afraid of being overwhelmed by them. So I’d lean into what he was reading and ride those waves until it got scary, and then I’d back off. Sometimes I’d be able to go quite deep; other times I wouldn’t get very far before having to back away.

Finally there was a moment when I decided to see how far I could go and I quickly realized I’d gone too far—I’d gone past the point where I could pull my body back under my conscious control, and I was afraid that Allen would notice my hands shaking and my heels tapping the floor, my head dropping forward, and the thought crossed my mind that I was in danger of falling onto the floor. But since Allen had pulled his chair so close to mine, I knew that if I fell it would be right into his lap.

And throughout it all there was the continuity of Allen’s voice and Reznikoff’s poetry of intense internal turmoil, recited in a quiet, understated, almost urban voice: stories of gray and off-white and deep, cracking black.

Allen read for about twenty minutes. During that time everything in the room was calm, clear, and very real: the color of the words, the wind that moved through Allen as he read, the coming darkness. Then he stopped and brought the covers of the book together. “Well,” he said, “that’s it.”

There’s one sentence in there where I realized I’ve already accomplished what I’ve been trying to achieve in The Decalogue: “During that time everything in the room was calm, clear, and very real: the color of the words, the wind that moved through Allen as he read, the coming darkness.” It’s very precise about things that are not at all precise: “the color of the words, the wind that moved through Allen as he read.”

 

And to counter your statement about fiction being better than non-fiction at revelation through metaphor, I’d hold up “the coming darkness” against anything in fiction. But in order to get there, I felt I had to ground it in reality or it’d just be bullshit. Sentimentality is a form of bullshit. And people only shout when they’re not sure themselves, as if shouting something would make it true.  

I haven’t really read Reznikoff in years, but you’re making me see how I’ve borrowed so much from his writing: his use of story as scaffolding rather than poetic forms, his focus on what’s human to the exclusion of all else, his sense of time passing inexorably toward a fast-approaching end, his commitment to understatement and concreteness as he reaches for the universal, his focus on looking out from “in.” I think I don’t read him more because I’m afraid I’ll realize that I’ll always be his inferior.

I’ve forgotten about all of these moments—“bullshit,” the deaf theater kids, my dad, and Reznikoff’s poetry—but these are the things—or some of the things—that have given me a vision of my limitations and interests as a writer—my “field” so to speak—much more than the famous poets I’ve studied with. Or the prose writers who have inspired me and shown me what’s possible. Even Flaubert, who taught me how to write a good sentence (the secret is to have three parts; like this one has).



Note: Part 2 of "Gathering Eggs" follows in the next blog post.