Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Laureate of the Berkeley Poetry Renaissance

To arc back to the beginning of this journal, I recall my first encounter with a luminary of Berkeley's rarefied realm of Poetry...

On my third day in California, I arranged for a solo outing. The brother with whom I was staying in nearby Contra Costa county took me into Berkeley in the morning with a plan to rendezvous after his work day was over. I began the day in the Telegraph Avenue area taking in an assortment of its offerings--in the form of capucino cafes, record shops, a Japanese lunch spot, and most of all various bookstores.
It was a dim day in early January, yet it was ravishing to me a few days after the frozen New England I'd just left. Only the year before, 1978, a blizzard had left so much snow private automobile travel was banned for six days--it was sort of heavenly though. Trains and buses were running and I traveled sixty miles to explore the streets of Boston and Cambridge, bustling with foot traffic alone.

Winter can get old and wearying in Massachusetts, and I had twenty-five of them under my belt by then. Here in California the growing grass was green and some flowers were actually in bloom. In a text book style store on Bancroft Way, I found books on separate shelves devoted to individual publishers. I gravitated to the New Directions shelf and encountered some interesting titles for the first time, ones I had only seen listed in the back-lists included on the end pages of beloved books--Rimbaud, Borges, Bob Kaufman.

Upon leaving the store I crossed over to the UC student union building . Within minutes I observed something that fulfilled my most naive notions of stepping into scenes from a Kerouac novel the minute I got here. It was a person famous in the world of obscure poetry browsing around the student stores-- Robert Duncan, a name synonymous with the Berkeley Poetry Renaissance. He was a forebear of the Beats and a real high-artifice poet of an even older type. He had an expansive forehead with long white sideburns and wore a coat with a built-in rain cape. His "frontispiece" included a jeweled art-nouveau bolo tie on a flowered shirt, anachronistic even then. His eyes were remarkable and are much-noted--they were as large and sensitive as can be imagined; moreover, one eye was slightly lazy and seemed to look off into the poetic marvelous at all times.
He in fact was a mystic of sorts descended from California theosophists. His florid early poetry was celebrated and he was indulged from an early age as someone profound beyond his years. Young Robert Duncan put in his mandatory Rimbaud phase, finding his way to New York city as a desperate young poet. He published an early crie-de-coeur entitled "The Homosexual in Society" that was a milestone in the queer rights movement. It alone would entitle him to a place in cultural history. He quickly established relations of one sort or another with all the poets and poets manques of his time--Pound, Patchen, Anais Nin. Avant-garde poetry was and is a quite small pond.
Eventually, he returned to Berkeley where he became the biggest fish of his school rivaled only by Jack Spicer (who actually emerged as more of a group leader after he had decamped to San Francisco.) I had become interested him along with the rest of poets identified with the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance which followed and flowed into what became known as the Beat generation. Two other well-known poets of this group were Mary Fabilli and William Everson a.k.a. Brother Antoninus. (I will devote a future entry to Mary with whom I became friends.)
Most of the best-known Beat poets were also Berkeley dwellers including Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, and Jack Kerouac who even moved his supportive mother here for a period.

Duncan's poetry was elegant, classical in ways, reflective of European modernism and somewhat old-fashioned because of that. His work is like California Surrealist painting somehow. And his life partner Jess could be roughly described as belonging to that movement.
Diane diPrima had called Duncan the greatest living poet at a reading of hers I attended at the Smith College library in 1975. (People smoked a big joint of gold Columbian at that reading without any conflict---ah, those were the days). I had been reading more of him following that and had even bought a rare book of his by mail order from City Lights books in San Francisco. It was his Selected Poems one of the more scarce volumes in the Pocket Poets Series from 1959. The series had made a considerable seismic waves the previous year with Ginsberg's volume Howl & other poems. I was collecting them, interested in every forgotten copy of any underground poetry press I could find.

I thought immediately of the tried and true method for graceful meetings with authors one esteems. And I recalled that the New Directions rack I had just examined had included one of his best books, The Opening of the Field. Before hailing him, I dashed over to obtain a copy of it to ask him to sign it. He seems almost startled to be recognized by a young person out of the passing stream. This was despite the large number of his books and papers in the Bancroft library a stone's throw away, despite his prominent role in local literary history.
To be a success at poetry is like being a failure at any thing else, I once heard a perspiring acolyte of Duncan's admit. This particular poetry maven has Duncan's old hat on his old hat-rack by the front door of his home today.
As a young poetry hustler myself I naturally had my own self-published chapbook to press on Duncan. He may have even had me sign it to him, though it seems doubtful in retrospect. We spoke for a while, a conversation now lost in time, and bid a friendly adieu. He said perhaps he see more of me in the poetry scene.

And he did. Following what was reputed to be a reclusive period, he seemed to be making a lot of appearances in the following year. There was even talk of forthcoming new books from him, something he had declined to publish since the Viet Nam war. I was at the majority of these events--generally with an estimable old book. He signed them usually with some drawing and noted seeing me again in the inscription. I saw him give an art lecture at the Oakland museum; I attended a reading by him at the UC Alumnus hall, and before long we became acquainted.
This was until the afternoon I was talking to him and a few other poets at the Berkeley Art Museum (now UAM). The event was a Wallace Berman retrospective. Berman's Semina artwork/magazine had published Duncan, as well as diPrima and Michael McClure who were all there to read and talk about him.
An anthology of English language Surrealist poetry that included Duncan's work had been published by Penquin. It also had the work of my poetry professor and friend of a few years earlier, James Tate. Tate had always disowned the identification of his work as Surrealist yet had agreed to be included. I wondered how Robert felt about the designation, adding that I hadn't thought of him as a Surrealist. This possibly did not sit very well with he who is Poet in all Poetry.

One poet who was long recognized as a Surrealist was the aforementioned Philip Lamantia. He was one of the models for what I wanted to pursue in poetry. I was influenced not only by his poetry but also by his essays and his association with the American Surrealist movement centered around Franklin Rosemont and Arsenal, The Journal of Surrealist Subversion out of Chicago. Lamantia had been an early associate of Duncan's but somewhere in the volatility of their storied lives, they had experienced a decisive split.
Philip was discussed in the introduction to that Surrealist poetry anthology, as both the perfect exemplar of its subject and also because of his pointed refusal to be published in it. The Surrealism he adhered to came with well-defined doctrines and a revolutionary ideology. These were not major concerns of this collection nor were they precepts owned by Duncan in his many essays and interviews. I will devote at least another entry to Philip who died in 2005.

In those days you really could hear and get to know many of the renowned Beat poets. The Bay Area poetry scene was still happening and a monthly Poetry Flash newletter listed readings galore. Gary Snyder's statement around then was that since the Six Gallery reading in 1955 there had not been a day here without a poetry reading of one sort or another, and it was true.
I got to know even the reclusive Lamantia and was once sitting next to him in City Lights basement, a rather close catacomb of books and odd chairs even a church pew. It matched the strange holy roller left-overs painted on the walls, "Remember Lot's wife!"
The event was an exceedingly rare reading by the legendary David Gascoyne, one of the greatest poets let alone Surrealist poets in the English language. After achieving high regard for his books in Britain, he had slipped into a depressive state. He was eventually living in a clinic without speaking. Then objective chance brought a woman to his clinic to read to the patients. Without knowing he was present, she read one of his poems aloud and it brought him back from his lost place. It was an unmistakable triumph of l'amour fou (mad love) that charged the occasion of this reading at which the woman, now his wife, was present.

Also present was another major visionary poet of the epoch, Robert Duncan who sitting a few feet away from us. Now, that he seemed somewhat disinclined to greet me a few years after our slight acquaintance was unremarkable to me. This was especially so since I was sitting with another person who seemed mutually disinclined to say hello to him. But that was what was illuminating to me to see-- how calmly these two poets well-known to each other for forty years could ignore each other. It was a lesson in the ways of poets for me that is now a familiar drill whenever it occurs. Harold Norse was there too, a good but I'd be reluctant to say visionary poet. A few other poets had turned out for this poet's poet who was almost completely unknown in this country, but rather few civilians. A couple sat in front and polished off a quart or so of the cheap wine on the house. They would occasionally ask him to repeat his name which Gascoyne, between exquisite dream-like poems, would do.

There are photos of Duncan with Lamantia from that day, and there is no unfriendliness implied by my description of their demeanor together. A few years later, Philip's wife and long-time City Lights second-in-command, Nancy Peters described to me the experience of flying to a poetry festival seated between the two. Both talked continuously, listening not to each other but each expecting her to hear himself in full. But she said that they were friends again if a little precariously so at times.

Since I quoted one San Francisco poetry scene-maker, mover and shaker, (without naming him) I will include an exchange with another. This was at Tosca on Columbus Avenue in North Beach, the customary poets' drink after yet another reading, that day at Canessa Park.
"Hey, Adam, is hell other people?"
"Hell is other poets."

Those last books of Duncan's came out in 1987. Groundwork: Poems Before the War, Vol. I and II, they were actually off-prints of his own type-scripts so no typo or spacial change could occur. Frankly, it rendered a typographic dullness on the page as a result. I went to a publication party for it at a bookstore in Berkeley. I brought my old hard bound first edition of Roots and Branches, one of my favorites, not expecting to be among the many people buying his new one that day myself. I was an old book collector--a few excerpts of Groundwork would suffice.
There was a nervous and expectant staff; there was a table of respectable victuals; there was a free letter-press broadside of a new poem; and there was not at that moment any other apparent attendees. Berkeley being what it was, people may have been en route and arrived soon after. We greeted him, got the broadsides signed somewhat solemnly, and had to cut out. I had made an prior agreement to just pass through the event. For my companion meeting Robert Duncan had even less of a thrill than it still held for me at that time.
A year or so later the obituaries for him ran. Poetry Flash devoted an issue to this pater familia of the scene, second only to Kenneth Rexroth for that title. At an event at Fort Mason cavalcade of poets read their work in homage to him. I made a table display of my collection of his books, obliging interested parties to handle only the sturdier editions. And in an adjourning room a videotape of Robert Duncan speaking played on to an empty chamber.

I continue to hold Duncan's poetry in high regard. An interesting biography of him expanded my reading. At one point I re-acquainted myself in order to give a tutorial on him to a student of diPrima's who wanted to impress the teacher. I am grateful for the fleeting access fate granted me to him and to his performance. As if by objective chance, other than family, the first face I knew in California was his.

"In sound and sense it is the music of inner relationships that moves me."
Robert Duncan

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