In Which The Elements of Disbelief Are Very Strong In The Morning

The following remembrances of Frank O'Hara appear in Homage to Frank O'Hara, edited by Joe LeSueur and Bill Berkson. You can purchase that volume here.

Memories of Frank

with grace hartigan Larry Rivers

I began doing portraits of Frank in the fall of '52. That was after I'd slit my wrists over something. I phoned Frank, who happened to be in, and he came over and bandaged me up. Then we began seeing a lot more of each other and it was natural for me to use him as a model. Sex we got into later, when I'd already started drawing and painting him. There was always a dialogue going on during our working sessions. He gave me feedback and made me feel like what I was doing mattered, and after a while I found I needed him for my work. He was a great model. For one thing, he liked to model; he even felt complimented that you asked him to, and you ended up wanting him to like you. He had blazing blue eyes, so if you were stuck you could always put a little blue to make the work more interesting. His widow's peak gave you a place to anchor the picture, and his broken nose was dramatic and easy to get. At the time, I had no idea I was making so many pictures of him; I think I must have made a dozen portraits, and that's not counting drawings or paintings like "The Studio" and "Athlete's Dream" he appeared in. I always felt I was close to getting him but I never did, so I kept on trying.

in front of larry rivers' house in southamptonTed Berrigan

Frank O'Hara

Winter in the country, Southampton, pale horse
as the soot rises, then settles, over the pictures
The birds that were singing this morning have shut up
I thought I saw a couple, kissing, but Larry said no
It's a strange bird. He should know. & I think now
"Grandmother divided by monkey equals outer space." Ron
put me in that picture. In another picture, a good-
looking poet is thinking it over; nevertheless, he will
never speak of that it. But, his face is open, his eyes
are clear, and, leaning lightly on an elbow, fist below
his ear, he will never be less than perfectly frank,
listening, completely interested in whatever there may
be to hear. Attentive to me alone here. Between friends,
nothing would seem stranger to me than true intimacy.
What seems genuine, truly real, is thinking of you, how
that makes me feel. You are dead. And you'll never
write again about the country, that's true.
But the people in the sky really love
to have dinner & to talk a walk with you.

cambridge 1950 by jane freilicher Jane Freilicher

It is really a sketch painted from memory as he appeared characteristically in those days (1950, or 51) with his dark fuzzy shetland sweater, no shirt, chino pants & tennis shoes - Ivy League but rather exotic & chic in the N.Y. art world in those days. Frank was very well put together physically, the scale of his body, the delicate but irregular features of his face remind somewhat of the drawings of ideal male proportions by Dürer. He was so very pleasing to look at & I sometimes wonder if this attractiveness was one of the reasons so many painters enjoyed knowing him.

However, my painting was just an attempt to capture a fleeting sense of his physical presence as he seemed, often, to be standing in a doorway of a room, one arm bent up at the elbow, his weight poised on the balls of his feet, maybe saying something funny or charming, proffering a drink or listening attentively, alert & delightful.

Anne Waldman

April Dream

I'm with Frank O'Hara, Kenward Elmslie & Kenneth Koch visiting Donald Hall's studio or lab (live ivy league fraternity digs) in "Old Ann Arbor." Lots of drink and chit chat about latest long poems & how do we all rate with Shakespeare. Don is taking himself very seriously & nervously as grand host conducting us about the place. It's sort of a class reunion atmosphere, campus history (Harvard) & business to be discussed. German mugs, wooden knick knacks, prints, postcards decorate the room, Kenward making snappy cracks to me about every little detial. We notice huge panels of Frank O'Hara poems on several walls and Kenneth reads aloud: "a child means BONG" from Biotherm. We notice more panels with O'Hara works, white on red - very prettily shellacked - translated by Ted Berrigan. Slogan-like lines, "THERE'S NOBODY AT THE CONTROLS!" "NO MORE DYING." Frank is very modest about this and not altogether present (ghost). Then Don unveils a huge series of panels again printed on wood that's he's collecting for a huge anthology for which Frank O'Hara is writing the catalogue. Seems to be copies of Old Master, plus Cubists, Abstract Expressionists, Joe Brainards & George Schneeman nudes. Frank has already compiled the list or "key" but we're all supposed to guess what the "source" of each one is like a parlour game. The panels are hinged & like a scroll covered with soft copper which peels back.

I wonder what I am doing with this crowd of older men playing a guessing game. None of us are guessing properly the "sources," Kenneth the most agitated about this.

Then the "key" is revealed and the first 2 on it are:

I. Du Boucheron

II. Jean du Jeanne Jeanne le (wine glass)

"I knew it! I knew it!" shouts Kenneth.

We are abruptly distracted from the game by children chorusing, "da da da du DA LA" over & over again, very guileless & sweet. We all go to a large bay window which looks over a gradeschool courtyard. Frank says, "Our youth."

April 17, 1977

with elaine de kooningTerry Southern

Once I asked Larry Rivers about Frank's closest friends, who did he think was Frank's best friend, and so on.

"Oh my God," he said, "there were so many people who thought they were his best friend. I mean, he had this thing about making each person feel he was his best friend. I guess it was because he cared so much, about everybody."

Yes, I guess it was. Anyway, I know there are people who were better acquainted with Frank than I, but I'm certain there are none who enjoyed him more fully, think of him more often, or more fondly.

john ashbery’s photograph of frank o’hara, grace hartigan, allan kaprow, joe hazan, jane freilicher at george segal’s house in New Jersey, 1955

Barbara Guest

Frank and I happened to be in Paris at the same time in the summer of 1960. I was staying there with my family and had been very busy with the Guide Bleu looking at every placard on every building I could find. and I had located the"bateau lavoir" where Picasso and Max Jacob had first lived and where they had held all those studio parties with Apollinaire and Marie Laurencin. And across the street was a very good restaurant. I suggested that we have lunch there, our party included Grace Hartigan and her husband at the time, Robert Keene. We had a "marvelous" lunch, much wine and talk and we all congratulated ourselves on being in Paris and moreover being in Paris at the same time - a continuation of the Cedar St. Bar where we had formerly and consistently gathered. After lunch I suggested that we cross the street to the "bateau lavoir," a discovery of mine and one I thought would intrigue Frank. Not at all. He did go across the street, but he didn't bother to go into the building. "Barbara," he said, "that was their history and it doesn't interest me. What does interest me is ours, and we're making it now."

with allen ginsbergA Note on Frank O'Hara In The Early Fifties

by KENNETH KOCH

The first thing of Frank O'Hara's I ever read was a story in the Harvard Advocate in 1948. It was about some people drunkenly going up stairs. During the next year, when I was living in New York, John Ashbery told me that Frank had started to write poems and that they were very good. I forget if I met Frank before or after John told me he had started writing poems. Actually, as I later found out, Frank had started writing poetry a long time before, and prose was only a temporary deviation for him.

In any case, the first time I read some of Frank's poems was in the summer of 1950, just before I left for France on a Fulbright grant. John Ashbery had mailed them to me and had described them enthusiastically. I didn't like them very much. I wrote back to John that Frank was not as good as we were, and then gave a few reasons why.

These poems by Frank were somehow packed in one of my suitcases when I went abroad, and I happened to read them again when I was in Aix-en-Provence. This time they seemed to me marvellous; I was very excited about them. Also very intimidated. I believe I liked them for the same reasons I had not liked them before - i.e. because they were sassy, colloquial, and full of realistic detail.

It was not till the summer of 1952 (after coming back from Europe, I had gone to California for a year) that I got to know Frank well. Know is not really the right word since it suggests something fairly calm and intellectual. This was something much more emotional and wild. Frank in his first two years in New York was having this kind of explosive effect on a lot of people that he met. Larry Rivers laters said that Frank had a way of making you feel you were terribly important and that this was very inspiring, which is true, but it was more than that.

His presence and his poetry made things go on around him which could not have happened in the same way if he hadn't been there. I know this is true of my poetry, and I would guess it was true also of the poetry of James Schuyler and John Ashbery, and of the painting of Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, Mike Goldberg, Grace Hartigan and other painters too.

One of the most startling things about Frank in the period when I first knew him was his ability to write a poem when other people were talking, or even to get up in the middle of a conversation, get his typewriter, and write a poem, sometimes participating in the conversation while doing so. This may sound affected when I describe it, but it wasn't so at all. The poems he wrote in this way were usually very good poems. I was electrified by his ability to do this at once tried to do it myself - (with considerably less success).

Frank and I collaborated on a birthday poem for Nina Castelli (summer 1952), a sestina. This was the first time I had written a poem with somebody else and also the first time I had been able to write a good sestina (my earlier attempts had always bogged down in mystery or symbolism). Artistic collaboration, like writing a poem in a crowded room, is something that seemed to be a natural part of Frank's talent. I put this in the past tense not because these things are not part of Frank's talent now, but for the sake of history - since I believe that, as far as American poetry is concerned, he started something.

Something about Frank that impressed me during the composition of the sestina was his feeling that the silliest idea actually in his head was better than the most profound idea in somebody's else head - which seems obvious once you know it, but how many poetrs have lived how many total years without finding it out?

This Nina Sestina collaboration occurred during one of the weekends in the summer of 1952 when Frank and I, Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, and various other writers and painters were in Easthampton. Jane and Frank were sporadically engaged in being in a movie which was being made out there by John Larouche.

Frank's most famous poem during the summer was "Hatred," a rather long poem which he had typed up on a very long piece of paper which had been part of a roll. Another of his works which burst on us all like bomb then was "Easter,"  a wonderful, energetic and rather obscene poem of four or five pages, which consisted mainly of a procession of various bodily parts and other objects across a vast landscape. It was like Lorca and Whitman in some ways, but very original.

I remember two things about it which were new: one was the phrase "the roses of Pennsylvania," and the other was the line in the middle of the poem which began "It is Easter!" (Easter, though it was the title, had not been mentioned before in the poem and apparently had nothing to do with it.) What I saw in these lines was 1) inspired irrelevance which turns out to be relevant (once Frank had said, "It is Easter!" the whole poem was obviously about death and resurrection); 2) the use of movie techniques in poetry (in this case coming down hard on the title in the middle of the work); 3) the detachment of beautiful words from traditional contexts and putting them in curious new American ones ("roses of Pennsylvania").

He also mentioned a lot of things just because he liked them - for example, jujubes. Some of these things had not appeared before in poetry. His poetry contained aspirin tablets, Good Teeth buttons, and water pistols. His poems were full of passion and life; they weren't trivial because small things were called in them by name.

Frank and I both wrote long poems in 1953 (Second Avenue and When the Sun Tries To Go On). I had no clear intention of writing a 2400-line poem (which it turned out to be) before Frank said to me, on seeing the first 72 lines - which I regarded as a poem by itself - "Why don't you go on with it as long as you can?" Frank at this time decided to write a long poem too; I can't remember how much his decision to write such a poem had to do with his suggestion to me to write mine.

While we were writing out long poems, we would read each other the results daily over the telephone. This seemed to inspire us a great deal.

Frank was very polite and also very competitive. Sometimes he gave other people his own best ideas, but he was quick and resourceful enough to use them himself as well. It was almost as though he wanted to give his friends a head start and was competitive partly to make up for this generosity. One day I told Frank I wanted to write a play, and he suggested that I, like no other writer living, could write a great drama about the conquest of Mexico. I thought about this, but not for too long, since within 3 or 4 days Frank had written his play Awake in Spain, which seemed to me to cover the subject rather thoroughly.

Something Frank had that none of the other artists and writers I know had to the same degree was a way of feeling and acting as thought being an artist were the most natural thing in the world. Compared to him everyone else seemed a little self-conscious, abashed, or megalomaniacal. This naturalness I think was really quite strange in New York in 1952. Frank's poetry had and has this same kind of ease about the fact that it exists that is so astonishing.

April 1964

Poet Among Painters

by JAMES SCHUYLER

I first met Frank O'Hara at a party at John Myers' after a Larry Rivers opening: de Kooning and Nell Blaine were there, arguing about whether it is deleterious for an artist to do commercial work. I was most impressed by the company I was suddenly keeping.

A very young-looking man came up and introduced himself (I had already read a poem by Frank in Accent, the exquisitely witty "Three Penny Opera," written either at Harvard or at Michigan.) He asked me if I had read Janet Flanner that week in the New Yorker, who had just disclosed the scandal of Gide's wife burning all his letters to her. "I never liked Gide," Frank said, "but I didn't realize he was a complete shit."

This was rich stuff, and we talked a long time; or rather, as was so often the case, he talked and I listened. His conversation was self-propelling and one idea, or anecdote, or bon mot was fuel to his own fire, inspiring him verbally to blaze ahead, that curious voice rising and falling, full of invisible italics, the strong pianist's hands gesturing with the invariable cigarette.

Frank told me that he had taken a job at the Museum of Modern Art, working in the lobby at the front desk, in order to see Alfred Barr's monumental retrospective of Matisse. Frank had idols (many) and if Matisse was one, so was Alfred Barr, and remained so during all of Frank's years of association with the museum. The first time I dropped by to see him, I found him in the admissions booth, waiting to sell tickets to visitors and, meanwhile, writing a poem on a yellow lined pad (one called "It's the Blue!").

He also had besides him a translation of Andre Breton's Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares (although he made translations from the French - Reverdy, Baudelaire - his French was really nothing much). Soon we were sharing an apartment on East 49th Street, a cold water flat five flights up with splendid views.

Frank O'Hara was the most elegant person I ever met, and I don't mean in the sense of dressy, for which he never had either the time or the money. He was of medium height, lithe and slender (to quote Elaine de Kooning, when she painted him, "hipless as a snake"), with a massive Irish head, hair receding from a widow's peak, and a broken, Napoleonic nose: broken in what childhood scuffle, I forget. He walked lightly on the balls of his feet, like a dancer or someone about to dive in the waves. How he loved to swim! In the heaviest surf on the south shore of Long Island, often to the alarm of his friends, and even at night when he was drunk and turn waspish. That was both unpleasant and alarming, since he would say whatever came into his head, giving his victim a devastating character analysis, as with a scalpel.

Frank's friends! They came from all the arts, in all troops. As John Ashbery has written in his introduction to The Collected Poems (nearly seven hundred pages of them): "The nightmares, delights and paradoxes of life in this city went into Frank's style, as did the many passionate friendships he kept going simultaneously (to the point where it was almost impossible for anyone to see him alone - there were so many people whose love demanded attention, and there was so little time and so many other things to do, like work and, when there was a free moment, poetry.)"

Then there were the events. Frank was in love with all the arts: painting and music and poetry, almost all movies, the opera and particularly, the ballet. Then there were the parties and the dinners and old movies on late night TV. When did the poems get written?

with franz kline at the cedar tavern in 1959
One Saturday noon I was having coffee with Frank and Joe LeSueur (the writer with whom Frank shared various apartments over the years), and Joe and I began to twit him about his ability to write a poem at any time. Frank gave us a look - both hot and cold - got up, went into his bedroom, and wrote "Sleeping on the Wing," a beauty, in a matter of minutes.

Then, his book Lunch Poems is literally that. Frank became a permanent member of the International Program at the Museum of Modern Art at the behest of the then-director, Porter A. McCray. I later wended my way into the same department and had ample opportunity to observe Frank in action.

He would steam in, good and late and smelling strongly of the night before (in his later years, his breakfast included vodka in the orange juice, to kill the hangover and get him started). He read his mail, the circulating folders, made and received phone calls (Frank suffered a chronic case of "black ear": I once called him at the museum and the operator said, "Good God!"; but she put me through). Then it was time for lunch, usually taken at Larré's with friends. When he got back to his office, he rolled a sheet of paper into his typewriter and wrote a poem, then got down to serious business. Of course this didn't happen every day, but often, very often.

with patsy southgate & kenneth koch It has been suggested that the museum took too much of so gifted a poet's time. Not really: Frank needed a job, and he was in love with the museum and brooked no criticism of it. At times, of course, he became impatient with the endless and often seemingly petty paperwork connected with assembling an exhibition, and I have seen him come from an acquisitions meeting with smoke coming out of his ears (he never divulged a word of what passed at these highly confidential affairs). But Frank had the rare gift of empathy for the art of any artist he worked with; he understood both intention and significance. And he was highly organized, with a phenomenal memory. When I say, "he got down to work," I mean it; he worked, and he worked really hard.

James Schuyler died in 1991. You can purchase Homage to Frank O'Hara here.

with helen frankenthaler

"Why I Am Not A Painter" - Frank O'Hara (mp3)

"Ave Maria" - Frank O'Hara (mp3)

"Having a Coke With You" - Frank O'Hara (mp3)

"Poem/Poem" - Frank O'Hara (mp3)

at the club  I loved him very much so quickly I wish as I'm sure everyone else does who had ever known him that we hadn't lost him.

Charles Olson

In Which The Beat Generation Was A Good Idea In Case Nothing Else Was Happening

The Jew & The Goy

by ALEX CARNEVALE

As for all your latest Mayan discoveries and poems, I want to hear every word of it if you want to transmit, or tell when we meet, but don't expect me to get excited by anything anymore.

The cultish obsession over Jack Kerouac, and to a lesser extent, Allen Ginsberg, has always been somewhat repulsive to me. Along with their revolting friend William Burroughs, the two shared an undeniable talent for writing, however unshapen and maladrous it was at times. Although Burroughs was the most talented of the three, they all wrote important but flawed works that undeniably captivated a great number of people.

The recently released letters of Kerouac and Ginsberg, edited in a spare and mysterious fashion by Bill Morgan and David Stanford, only reinforce this view. For many writers, the details of their biographies end up overshadowing the work itself. Since the work of Jack Kerouac consisted of a lengthy exaggeration of his real life that cast it in a more appealing light, this was never much of a problem. The fact that he ignored his biological daughter and every wife he had, drank himself to death, and was largely detested by many of the people he considered his friends moves out of focus.

Yet there is a redemptive quality about two men so desperate to become famous or rich through their writing that they would resort to any kind of behavior. As their letters make clear, much of the time Ginsberg and Kerouac were repairing conflict caused by carelessness or lack of sobriety. They often set friends against each other. Once Kerouac intentionally told William Burroughs that Allen wanted him to move to San Francisco and live with him, when that was the last thing Ginsberg wanted. He did such things out of malice and he did them often.

After getting discharged from the Navy for basically making an ass of himself, Kerouac married a rich girl, Edie Parker, because she could afford to bail him out of prison. He had been arrested for his role as an accessory to Lucien Carr's murder of his psychotic former gym teacher David Kammerer (Kammerer had once tried to hang Kerouac's cat). Parker was only one of the people who could tolerate his abusive, drunken phone calls, and she received them long into Jack's golden years after their marriage was annulled in 1952. Onward spiralled Kerouac's vagabond life, for he never was very good at holding a regular job despite how often his friends endeavored to secure paying work for him.

His breakthrough came with On the Road, a novel whose style he pretty much stole from one piece by Neal Cassady. These letters point out how ironic this is, because both Ginsberg and Kerouac, but especially Kerouac, are paranoid about other writers thefting their ideas. This was a problem only in the sense that they made it one. A sense of Jack's incredible ego is present in this early letter to Ginsberg:

August 17th, 1945

Mon garcon,

Yes, my friend, I long to be a proud possessor of a yiddishe kopfe's head. There is a head which senses the only true values: Returning from the summer camp last week, I had occasion to sit next to a gentleman of Yiddishe kopfe material. He was about fifty. I was reading The Counterfeiters — (it was a gesture, I must confess) — when my companion reached over and took the book out of my hands. Needless to say I was pleased by his informality. "Ah very good book!" he said, prodding me with his finger. "Ah very valuable book!"

"Yes? You like it?"

Nodding, he thereupon opened the book (whilst I relaxed in anticipation of a treatise on the choicer scenes) and removed the jacket. The jacket he examined very carefully, smoothing it lovingly with his sensual fingers. Then he bent the book back until the binding groaned, and examined that for a while. Finally, he turned the book upside down and peered like a watchmaker at the cover, at the gold paint, and then at the very pages themselves! These he felt between his fingers, and sighed. I said, "Do you want to read it? If you like you can. I've some other books here in my bag."

"Oh," he said, "you sell books."

"No — but I have some with me." I reached down and produced Plato's Republic. He immediately took it from my hand and presto!, with quick unerring judgment, with yiddishe kopfe foresight, with a sad, yet somehow shrewd smile — he handed it back to me. He tapped the book as it lay in my hand and shook his head. "Not so good, not so good."

So I went on with Plato while he, perhaps improperly, but certainly without conscious reprehensibility, continued to sigh over, and fondle, our good friend André Gide.

Bill in town. "Surrender night" found us reunited. We went out with Jack and Eileen. Bill and I didn't talk much. There was much drinking and charming madness, though I'm sure it didn't charm Bill. In the end he and I were alone trying to pick up women. He was wearing a Panama hat and something about his appearance must surely have had something to do with our failure to find women... As he stood on Times Square, one had the feeling that he surveyed not a sea of heads but a vast field of poppies "as far as the eye can see." Or maybe he looked like Lucifer's emissary, charge d'affaire de l'Enfer himself, and passer-by women caught a flash of red lining inside his coat. This is all nonsense of course. It was a night for servicemen, not for a Marijuana Tycoon, sober, and a hoodlum, drunk. After Bill went home, I went to Eileen's and laid her while Jack slumbered beside us.

Bill is going to join you at Sheepshead! You may not abandon your strenuous efforts to adjust yourself, for Bill is going to approach you and cry, "SNOOPY! When did you get out? DID YOU BEAT THAT INDECENT EXPOSE RAP IN CHI??"

I suggested he approach you and say, "SNICKERS! How CHARMING! WHERE have you been, YOU ELUSIVE THING!" — But Bill decided it wouldn't be in the best interests of either one of you.

I'll see Bill tomorrow and hope to talk things over with him.

When you write letters to me, try not to be sophomoric and moribund about your criticism of Jean et son weltanshauung. A little more finesse, please, or if possible, a dash of humour. Some of the cracks you make at PM-ish if anything; and you know, not at all in keeping with one's laborious tendings towards perfect Lucienism. He would be satirical, mon ami, but never ponderous and paranoiac. You "question the consciousness and validity of gestures." Never would you subscribe to "Thomas Wolfish fiery rejection and romantic disapproval." It pains me, my friend, it pains me. Perhaps you judge me too harshly, especially with reference to my latest goyesha kopfe "fiery rejection" at the summer camp, for you see, I was a busboy, and busboys live on tips, and tips must be substantial in order to provide for the livelihood of goyesha kopfe busboys who read Thomas Wolfe, only, you see mon vieux, in this melancholy instance, the guests at the camp were 100% middleclass yiddish kopfe, and after all, one has to make a living you know, so, with romantic disapproval, I sallied forth from there, and came away with Byronic dignity — a gesture, I fear, that meets with your unromantic disapproval, but which was, after all, grounded in the strictest urgency of reality, unless it be that I flatter myself, in which case I certainly deserve all the mild censure, the pity, and the sympathy which you have always held in reserve for me at crucial moments.

Happy cauchemars!

Your affectionate monster,

Jean

When they first met, Ginsberg confessed his crush on Jack, and the older man groaned — how often he had to tolerate the tiresome advances of young Columbia students!

Above all, the two thought they themselves twice the writers that they were in reality. What they really managed to be was prolific. Kerouac produced manuscripts of unending length that no editor was prepared to tolerate. His early manuscripts are so bad it is astonishing that they were published even after he had become famous. In comparison, young Ginsberg comes across far better, his life redemptive only because of the utter callousness of his former associates. He could be destructive, though, simply a note less destructive than his friend. He had sex with a woman for the first time at the age of twenty-four, when he penned the following abridged American Psycho-esque recap of the incident to his correspondent.

July 8, 1950

Dearest Jack:

If you are in any ennui or doldrums, lift up your heart, there IS something new under the sun. I have started into a new season, choosing women as my theme. I love Helen Parker, and she loves me, as far as the feeble efforts to understanding of three days spent with her in Provincetown can discover. Many of my fears and imaginations and dun rags fell from me after the first night I slept with her, when we understood that we wanted each other and began a love affair, with all trimmings of Eros and memory and nearly impossible transportation problems.

She is very great, every way — at last a beautiful, intelligent woman who has been around and bears the scars of every type of knowledge and yet struggles with the serpent knowing full well the loneliness of being left with the apple of knowledge and the snake only. We talk and talk, I entertain her in a grand manner with my best groomed Hungarian manner, and I play Levinsky-on-the-trollycar, or mad hipster with cosmic vibrations, and then, O wonder, I am like myself, and we talk on seriously and intimately without irony about all sorts of subjects, from the most obscure metaphysical through a gamut to the natural self; then we screw, and I am all man and full of love, and then we smoke and talk some more, and sleep, and get up and eat, etc.

The first days after I lost my cherry — does everybody feel like that? I wandered around in the most benign and courteous stupor of delight at the perfection of nature; I felt the ease and relief of knowledge that all the maddening walls of Heaven were finally down, that all my olden awking corridors were traveled out of, that all my queerness was a camp, unnecessary, morbid, so lacking in completion and sharing of love as to be almost as bad as impotence and celibacy, which it practically was, anyway. And the fantasies I began having about all sorts of girls, for the first time freely and with the knowledge that they were satisfiable.

Ah, Jack, I always said that I would be a great lover some day. I am, I am at last. My lady is so fine that none compare. And how can she resist me? I'm old, I'm full of love, when I'm aroused I'm like a veritable bull of tenderness; I have no pride of heart, I know all about all worlds, I''m antipoetic, I'm a labor leader, I'm a madman, I'm a man, I'm a man, I've got a cock. And I have no illusions, and like a virgin I have all of them, I'm wise, I'm simple. And she, she's a great old woman with a beautiful face and a perfect fair body that everybody in the neighborhood calls a whore. She's so sharp, and she never makes me shudder. She doesn't want war, she wants love.

Apparently I have quite respectable precedents — she was engaged to Dos Passos for over a year, he took her and kids to Cuba then, she lunched with Hemingway, knows all kinds of literary people. She was also engaged awhile and helped midwife Thomas Heggen with Mister Roberts; he later suicided (he-he!) But none, she says, compare to me. That's what a woman is for, to make you feel good, and vice versa.

Then her children, they are the most knocked out pair of flaming red haired angelic, wise young boys (age 5 and 10) I ever saw. They need a father, which alas (this is the crux of practical problems) I am sure I cannot be, for financial and other unhappy reasons, such as not wanting to get stuck permanently with the situation.

Allen

As wanderlust possessed both of them at different times, Ginsberg wrote his friend faithfully even when Jack's letters were slow in coming or gruff in their nature of reply. The two constantly apologized to each other like constant verbal make-up sex, a situation borne of Ginsberg's need for reassurance and Jack's world record self-centeredness. Kerouac's letter here is along those lines.

January 13th, 1950

Dear Allen:

Tonight while walking on the waterfront in the angelic streets I suddenly wanted to tell you how wonderful I think you are. Please don't dislike me. What is the mystery of the world? Nobody knows they're angels. God's angels are ravishing and fooling me. I saw a whore and an old man in a lunchcart, and God — their faces! I wondered what God was up to. In the subway I almost jumped up to yell, "What was that for? What's going on up there? What do you mean by that?" Jesus, Allen, life ain't worth the candle, we all know it, and almost everything is wrong, but there's nothing we can do about it, and living is heaven.

Well, here we are in heaven. This is what heaven is like. Also in the subway I suddenly shuddered, for a crack had opened, like cracks open in the ground when there's an earthquake, only this crack opened in the air, and I saw pits. I was suddenly no longer an angel, but a shuddering devil.

Mainly, I wanted to tell you how dearly I regard your soul, and value your existence, and wish for your recognition of my heart's desire, in short, I admire and love you and consider you a great man always. Let me boast a moment in order to give value to this, for what good is regard from a dunce, a spook, an elephant or a chocolate drop: My English editor, (ain't met him yet) sent G. [Giroux] a postcard showing picture of the antique Counting House in their firm, and said, "Place looks exactly like it did when we published Goldsmith & Johnson. Please tell Kerouac is in good company, and what is more, is worthy of it."

A beat American kid from a milltown, me, is now side by side with Goldsmith & Johnson. Isn't it strange historically? if not actually? Let us get on with the mystery of the world.

For instance, why do I write you this note in spite of the fact that I'll see you tomorrow night? – and live in the same city with you. Why is everybody like Sebastian [Sampas] in the record, stammering, stumbling at the end, fainter and fainter with all the scratching, saying, "So long, Jack old boy ... take it easy, please ... goodbye ... old friend ... see you soon, I guess ... goodbye ... take care of yourself, now ... farewell ... I guess ... 'bye ... so long ... goodbye old man." Most people spend their lives saying that to their best friends; they're always putting on their coats and leaving, and saying goodnight, and going down the street, and turning to wave a last time... Where they go?

Let me tell you what the Archangel is going to do. At a big Walter Adams party, or a Cannastra party, the Archangel is suddenly going to appear in a blinding flash of white light, among actual waterfalls of honey-light also, and everybody will keep still while the Archangel, with its voice, speaks. We will see, hear, and shudder. Behind the archangel we will see that Einstein is all wrong about enclosed space ... there will be endless space, infinities of Celestial Vine, and all the gores of the mires below, and the joyful singing of angels mingling with the shudders of devils. We'll see that everything exists. For the first time we'll realize that it's all alive, like baby turtles, and moves in the middle of the night at a party ... and the archangel is going to tell us off. Then clouds of cherubs will fall, mingled with satyrs and whatnots and spooks. If we were not haunted by the mystery of the world, we wouldn't realize nothing.

Jack

They were both great at making each other feel like a genius, and Ginsberg didn't reserve this authorial ability for his pal Jack only. Moreover, he was either hopeless politic about his friend's misadventures or willing to overlook them for love. In this abridged November 1950 letter to Neal Cassady that recounts Jack at his improvisatory worst, Ginsberg reveals a lot about how these artists view everyone else, especially women.

Dear Neal:

I got home today from Jack's wedding to a girl named Joan Haverty, which took place last night at 6 followed by a big party at Cannastra's pad which she leased and Jack is now master of — a big quiet party which began around 7, with the arrival of the wedding party from the Judge's apartment, several blocks away, where the ceremonies took place. Claude and I stood as best men, fumbled around in our waistcoats for the ring, kissed the bride, who's a tall dumb dark-haired girl just made for Jack. Not dumb, really, since she's "sensitive," and troubled (trying to be on own from family in big city at age 20) and has had men (Cannastra, once for a short season), but full of a kind of self-effacing naivete, makes dresses as vocation; but I don't know her well, but in my opinion (strictly between you and me as I am on hands off policy as regards interference with process of other's free cherce) she can't compare with Jack in largeness of spirit and so I don't know what she can give him except stability of sex life, housekeeping, and silent, probably sympathetic company while he's sitting around, and children.

He has been strangely out of town the last several months, in retirement and brooding on T alone, and when he rejoined N.Y. society he seemed to me to be more settled in reality, more sober. He talked in a more disillusioned way — not making a fetish of it as I do — but like a post 20's survivor. F. Scott Fitzgerald after the party of ego was over. Wondering what to do in the real world of men and women who were also alive and facing same problems and just as deserving of grace from above as he, tho there is no grace accorded anyone special. So, he seemed come down more than ever.

Meanwhile, he's seeing this Rayanna chick (who I had my hands on till I stepped out for Jack as she is too old for me) (but who I intend to see again unless I get attached before which I doubt), and she's sharp, a real N.Y. "on the town" pro type, but all of sudden appears on the horn this Joan, in C's pad, making a culturish shrine of it (on the pretext that they had been great lovers though he thought she was an insufferable prig), next door to Claude's on 21st St.

So, with Claude's encouragement, and prodding, I start moving in on her leaving notes at her door, making meets, etc in the hope of sleeping with her and ultimately taking over pad with her, also under impression she has money, which she hasn't. But when time comes, fuck up by being out of self-control, overbearing, and impatient with her sentimentalized version of self, not wanting anything but "friendship" with men folk wanting to be left alone and keep shrine and have big parties.

Anyway, I never figure her or myself out in relation to her, and return from field depressed. Next thing I know Jack ran into her, two weeks ago, slept and stayed on, decided to marry, and did yesterday. This is a very sketchy account, not even an outline, but I am just jotting down distorted recollections.

The main things I see is this increased wariness and caution in life of Jack, and this mad marriage, they hardly know each other. But maybe it will all work out for the rest of his life.

Allen

It is no particular surprise that the men who believed themselves part of the counterculture had the exact same attitudes towards women evident in the culture at large. Kerouac would leave his wife while she was pregnant, and it took eight years to get him to admit he had a daughter, and he ignored her after that. In same ways, their misogyny was even worse — for if they had learned anything for the expedient reading they pursued to accompany their art, it should have been a healthy respect for women. Kerouac's ex-wife Joan Haverty penned a 1961 article for Confidential magazine titled "My Ex-Husband, Jack Kerouac, Is An Ingrate."

joan haverty kerouacThen again, Ginsberg's 1952 letter to Neal Cassady shows he wasn't exactly an admirer of Ms. Eliot or Ms. Woolf. Naturally, it is all male:

So I have been reading a lot of things — Balzac (Goriot and Distinguished Provincial), Herman Hesse, Kafka's great diaries, Faulkner's Requiem and Soldier's Pay, Cummings' Enormous Room, W.C. Williams' autobiography, R. Lowell's poetry, Goethe's Werther, Lawrence's Plumed Serpent, Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Gogol's unknown novels, Stendhal's Charterhouse, Ansen's essays on Auden, Holmes' book, Genet's Miracle of the Rose etc. Genet is the most beautiful.

Rob Jeffries and Jeffrey Friedman's light ode to Ginsberg, Howl, hit theaters for a limited run last month. It is hagiography of the first order. The film's bizarre screensaver renditions of some of Ginsberg's most mediocre poetry are dreadfully dull. Jon Hamm plays Lawrence Ferlinghetti's lawyer and he does his entire character from 30 Rock for no discernible reason. The film actually does flashbacks in black and white. (Weirdly, it's only a flashback from about ten years earlier.) Scenes shot in Central Park practically include cell phones. At 85 minutes long, it's about as satisfying as the Shrek Christmas special. David Edelstein must have had his eyes closed.

Then again, James Franco's constant reading of "Howl" that occurs throughout the film draws attention to the poem for all the wrong reasons. Keroauc gave "Howl" its title, and the only good part of it. Completely unmusical, it is only tolerable in comparison to Keroauc's writing, the best of which is probably his rambling poetry. As Kenneth Rexroth once put it in a review of The Subterraneans, "This book is about jazz and Negroes, two things Jack knows nothing about."

It's obvious from the poem "Howl" if not the film that the period Ginsberg referred to is a fantasy. He pretended to mythologize it, but it remained in actuality full of many horrors. The romance of the pre-civil rights era is mostly illusory. At the end of it, you're just a fat poet with a beard with a lifetime to apologize for the person you nearly were. The real pleasures had to be the literary ones, for there existed no others.

Then again, it was actually better to be Kerouac, for he could never have repented for the man he was in life, but in death his evident downside is so effortlessly ignored.

March 4, 1955

Dear Allen:

Enclosed is a letter for Bill I want you to mail because I actually cannot afford overseas stamp and anyway write to him. Here is my itinerary:

1. At present in South, babysitting and washing dishes for family, writing great new book already half-finished, about Buddha. WAKE UP

2. In May go to N.Y. and pick up 100 pounds of manuscripts and mother and bring down to her, in truck (brother's)

3. In July hitch and freight hop to Texas with pack and sleeping bag and sutras, for uninterrupted Samadhis —

4. Two months in desert

5. S.P. Zipper to Frisco in September — Now for Krissakes don't leave before I get there

6. November back to South via freights

7. Xmas work for Paris and Tangiers $ (for brother-in-law) (for boat and Arab bread)

8. Europe in '56 (Africa...India bus...)

I wrote to Cowley. If everything you say is true about Rexroth, etc., please write by letters to Sterling Lord (my agent) and tell him score, I will hip him about you. Has he mailed you Sax yet? I told him to. (All this Cowley talk and never any loot.)

After Buddhist handbook now, I shall write a huge Visions of Bill next, like Visions of Neal (don't tell him, please remember not to tell him, it will spoil great spontaneous studies of him.)

No typewriter so that ends my big dharma letters for awhile. Some of the Dharma is now over 200 pages and taking shape as a great valuable took in itself. I haven't even started writing. Visions of Bill will be very wild and greater than Tristram Shandy. I intend to be the greatest writer in the world and then in the name of Buddha I shall convert thousands, maybe millions: "Ye shall be Buddhas, rejoice!"

I've realized something utterly strange and yet common, I think I've experienced the deep turning about. At present I am completely happy and feel completely free, I love everybody and intend to go on doing so, I know that I am an imaginary blossom and so is my literary life and my literary accomplishments are so many useless imaginary blossoms. Reality isn't images. But I do things anyhow because I am free from self, free from delusion, free from anger, I love everyone equally, as equally empty and equally coming Buddhas. I have been having long wild samadhis in the ink black woods at midnight on a bit of grass. There is no need for you to go on in a state of ignorant worry and greed for worldly pops,

Later

Jack

See you in Sept!

After he achieved notoriety, Kerouac immediately turned into a bitter old crank who despised whatever remained of a hippie generation and was  as negative towards the counterculture that followed On the Road as he was to the mainstream culture when it obstructed his aim of becoming rich and famous. He resisted the changing technologies of the period; unsurprisingly, he was unable to write outside of his time. During a bizarre appearance on William F. Buckley's Firing Line in which he was clearly plastered, Kerouac reveals himself.

He was forty-six years old, and he looks broken. This is the first iteration of "What Was The Hipster?": a conversation that should have taken place before the phenomenon in question ceased to exist. The world today would be a nightmare to men like Jack Kerouac, just as the world William F. Buckley lived in was to him full of nightmarish permissiveness. This new world is open and frank, as the counterculture requested — but the resulting American mood murdered the counterculture. This country's monomaniacal, single-minded theater of ideas may be difficult to tolerate, but it is a far lesser evil than a single-minded person.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about the Showtime series Dexter. He tumbls here and twitters here.

"Are You That Somebody?" - Aaliyah (mp3)

"Are You That Somebody? (remix)" - Aaliyah ft. Mad Skillz (mp3)

"Are You That Somebody? (instrumental)" - Aaliyah (mp3)

"Are You That Somebody? (acapella)" - Aaliyah (mp3)

"Are You That Somebody?" - The Gossip (mp3)

"Are You That Somebody? (Brenton Duvall remix)" - Aaliyah (mp3)

In Which They Fed And Clothed And Housed Me

"Goldberry Is Waiting"; or, P.W., His Magic Education as a Poet

by PHILIP WHALEN

When I was in high school I wrote for the fun and excitement of writing. Later on — after I learned that I couldn't go to college and learn medicine — I seriously tried to make myself into a writer, a professional novelist. I believed that I could write fairly correctly; I had learned a great deal about English grammar and composition by studying French and Latin and doing lots of translations, dramatic adaptations, parodies, poems, essays and stories. I supposed that the next thing I must do was to acquire a sparkling and witty style which the editors of magazines should find irresistible. I spent more time reading and working as an office boy than I did at writing, however.

Then I went into the Army Air Corps. While I sloppily soldiered along, I continued to write poems and stories. My comrades in arms (recruited from various colleges and universities) set me to reading Joyce, Faulkner, Proust, Huxley and Thomas Wolfe. Reading Wolfe encouraged me immensely. I, too, came from a poor family; we lived in the remote section of the country, far from the intellectual life of New York and Paris. And my family and their friends had a fine, salty way of speaking... I began writing page after page of romantic description and farm gossip and native folk speech.

whalen and ginsberg in 1971

I discovered I was a sensitive genius from the Oregon woods whose beautiful writings would bring immortal fame and lots of money.

I wrote lots of unfinished (and almost illegible) manuscripts, hundreds of letters to my family and friends, long intellectually searching journals and worries and recollections, but no novels. I wrote poems from time to time, using every technique I had seen other poets use. I played with words and experimented with them, trying to find out what they would do and what they would let me say. At this time (1943) a friend of mine sent me a copy of Gertrude Stein's Narration. Reading the book gave me great encouragement and pleasure. I read as many of her books as I could find.

I wanted style. I wanted a theory of writing. I wanted to be able to explain, to whoever asked me, how come I should be a writer and why writing was so important to me. I also wanted a completely believable philosophy of life. I was having trouble interpreting my religious feelings — if that's what they were; perhaps they were only some kind of Druid backlash from all my antique Irish genes, I didn't know.

I thought of myself as a "modern" agnostic rationalist: were not all religions merely a confection of superstitution and lies which were imposed upon the ignorant in order to make them obedient to authority? On the other hand, music and poetry and pictures and novels could move me profoundly. I would experience exaltations, "highs," and strange knowledges which seemed to correspond with what I had read about in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita.

After the war I met a number of people at Reed College who were interested in writing and who were producing the school literary magazine. They persuaded me that it was no longer possible for anyone to seriously write poetry. Yeats and Eliot, Rilke and Pound had said all there was to say, quite perfectly. There was no more poetry to be had. There was no more in the well.

I was, as I say, persuaded — but from time to time I'd forget my despair and sophistication and write a poem. I found that I could at least finish poems, whether they were any good or not, whereas I seemed unable to invent a solid prose style. (I was continuing to work at making myself into a novelist.) Professor Lloyd Reynolds was most encouraging. I took his classes in creative writing. He taught us by using great examples: Joyce, Blake & Williams — and by his great enthusiasm for good writing in every genre. He succeeded in changing my mind about the hopelessness of writing poems or anything else in this late and decadent period of the world; his encouragement and advice and friendship cut through all the fogs and megrims which I had contracted from reading the "New Criticism" and The Partisan Review.

PW & Anne Waldman

It was towards the end of this period that Williams Carlos Williams arrived — in person — to dispel what remained of those brumes and mists. He was interested in what we had to say. He made us feel like poets, not students any more; he talked to us as if we were his equals. It was at that point, I think, that I really could begin to take myself seriously as a writer.

Being an American, I imagined that life was a matter of owning things, having things. I wanted a family and a house and many books and musical instruments and cars and boats and a little place in the mountains and a small shack near the ocean. I suppose I was remembering all the Esquire magazines I had read back in 1937 and 1938. I thought that if I could just write a fine big novel and send it off to Harpers or Scribners in New York, they could not fail to accept it and print it and so my fortune (in the shape of this extravagant Esquire life) should be made.

Having all these illusions made it difficult for me to work at an ordinary job for any length of time. After working for a few months, I'd quit and spend perhaps a week buying books and squandering what money I had made, then I'd write for a few days but no novel came of it all. Soon I would be penniless and begging all my friends for help. I needed time to write. The time seemed only to be had for money. I had no money; therefore I couldn't write anything so I had better move out of my friend's attic (or basement or guest room or garage or backyard or living room) and get another job and make some money. There was usually someplace I wanted to go, someplace where I thought that I could live quietly alone and write... and there were usually some books I had to have very soon.

with ginsberg

If my friends had not helped me, I should have starved or gone, at last, to the nuthouse. They fed and clothed and housed me, arranged poetry readings for me, got my work published and reviewed, made other people buy my books, and now they faithfully write letters to me, which I answer promptly. These experiences made me realize that I didn't need money in order to write: what I needed was love and poetry and pictures and music in order to live.

This knowledge not only freed me from a lot of old hangups, it also changed my feeling towards poetry and all the other arts. I saw that poetry didn’t belong to me, it wasn’t my province; it was older and larger and more powerful than I, and it would exist beyond my life-span. And it was, in turn, only one of the means of communicating with those worlds of imagination and vision and magical and religious knowledge which all painters and musicians and inventors and saints and shamans and lunatics and yogis and dope fiends and novelists heard and saw and "tuned in" on. Poetry was not a communication from ME to ALL THOSE OTHERS, but from the invisible magical worlds to me... everybody else, ALL THOSE OTHERS, "my" audience, don’t need what I say; they already know.

I had been very worried about theories and philosophies and orthodoxies; I now perceived that I had had far too many; so many, that I had been separated from my own senses, my own real experience of the natural world. (It took a great deal of experimentation and study and thought to find out the true nature and function of my various senses and faculties.) The impulse to write had overthrown all my theories as well as the question of "Where does it come from?"

allen ginsberg, philip whalen & william burroughs

People tell me that it must be very difficult to write, to be a writer. I no longer argue the point with them. I can only say here that I like doing it. I also enjoy cutting and revising what I've written, for in the midst of those processes I often discover images and visions and ideas which I hadn’t been conscious of before, and these add thickness and depth and solidity to the final draft, not simply polish alone.

In the act of revision and complication and turmoil, a funky nowhere piece of writing can suddenly pick up and become an extraordinary, independent creature. It escapes from my too certain, too expert control. It frees itself not only from my grasp but also from my ego, my ambition, my megalomania... simultaneously, the liberation of a piece of writing liberates myself from these delusionary systems. Ideally, the writing will give the reader that same feeling of release, freedom and exaltation: a leap, a laugh, a high.

"How long does it take you to write a poem," people often ask. "How much revising do you go through before you consider a poem finished? How many drafts?" No matter how I answer these questions, the inquirers always look disappointed afterwards. It is impossible to describe how poems begin. Some are simply imagined immediately, are "heard," quite as if I were hearing a real voice speaking the words. Sometimes I "hear" a poem in this way and it is a complete statement, a complete verbal or literary entity. Sometimes the same imagination provides me with single lines or with a cluster of lines which is obviously incomplete. I write them down and put them away.

Maybe a few hours later I'll "receive" more lines. Perhaps they won’t arrive until weeks or months go by. Some of my long poems took years to come, and then it took a few days or weeks in which to revise and fit all their pieces together.

Some poems arrive as dreams. Others being from memories. Some start out of the middle of a conversation I’m involved in or words that I overhear other people speaking. An imagination of the life of some historical person may occur to me: I may suddenly suppose I understand what it felt like to be Johannes Brahms on a particular morning of his life.

A landscape, a cat, a relative, a friend, a letter (or the act of answering a letter), walking, the unexpected receipt of a new poetry magazine full of work by new young writers, the arrival of a new book of poems by a friend or somebody I don’t know personally; re-reading Shakespeare or reading Emily Dickinson on the streetcar and suddenly moved to tears; shopping for vegetables, making love, looking at pictures, taking dope, sitting still and looking at whatever is happening in front of me, getting haircut, being afraid of everybody and everything, hating everybody, playing music, going to parties, visiting relatives, riding in trains, buses, taxis, steamboats, riding horses, getting drunk, dancing, praying, practicing mediation, singing, rolling on the floor, losing my temper, looking for agates, arguing, washing sox, teaching, sweeping the floor, operating this typewriter right now (bought in Berkeley 12 years ago and wrote ten books on it) which the cicadas and taxis all sing in ravening hot Japanese summer 1967... all this is how to write, all this is where poems are to be found. Writing them is a delight.

People tell me, "Of course, writing prose is a great deal different, isn't it." I don't think so. I finally found the novel, You Didn't Even Try, while I was walking in the woods in Mill Valley. First I had a page of dialog between some man and his wife — they had no names then. For a number of weeks it went no further; I wasn't thinking of writing a novel; I was worried about too many other things.

Then one day as I walked along through the woods I recalled that scrap of imaginary conversation. I began to see who the speakers were, where they were, and I could see or feel what they would do, and I suddenly knew that it could be arranged in three sections, three blocks of prose. The "blocks of prose" would each have a specific weight and shape and color. I wrote many independent sections and paragraphs in the succeeding days. The book wasn't written in sequence: I didn't start with the first sentence and end with the final one. Instead I wrote a great deal of material and then fitted it together to form the first edition of the book. The same technique was used to write the other two sections. The whole manuscript was typed and revised, then I could do no more with it until it had to be preapred for the press. At that time, my friend, Zoe Brown went through the manuscript and pointed out places in which the language or sense appeared to break down. I repaired them as best I could. The result is, I think, not a very good book, but sort of an interesting one.

At one point a friend of mine read the incomplete manuscript and asked me a question about how did one of the characters find the money to do something. The result of this question was the invention of a new character and a couple new scenes for the book, none of which I had planned on, and I was surprised to find the character already there in my mind, I had no trouble writing about her or the scenes in which she appears.

ginsberg in india

The novel which I completed earlier this year, Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head, began to be written while I was sitting in a bar in Kyoto. The place has a large and powerful stereophonic phonograph on which they play recordings of new American jazz. I sat listening and feeling homesick and so I began writing about an American couple in a hotel room in London. They weren't feeling homesick, but they were having lots of other feelings. Later I began trying to figure out how they got to London and where they were going next and what was their life like before and after, and who did they know and how. I had no architectural plan this time, I didn't know how long it would take — either in time of composition or in number of pages of writing — to tell all about these people.

And I did want to tell all. And what, after all, did I really know. I had to invent London and Vienna and Katmandu and someplace in Ceylon and some places in Oregon and California and Massachusetts and Colorado, and that was difficult. But finally I wrote it all, then I typed and corrected it all, and then, to my horror, I found that I had to correct and retype it all again, although I very nearly couldn't, I hated typing and thinking and keeping the whole story in my head continuously. Maybe some day it will be printed.

Writing this present essay or message or cri de coeur began several weeks ago. On July 9th I began writing what has become 48 pages of longhand notes, in reply to the request of Mr. Donald M. Allen that I write something about writing. I selected and condensed some of this material into three and a half typewritten pages on the 17th of July, but this typewritten version only suggested more ideas, recollections and fancies. This morning, 23 July, I wrote the final longhand notes and then began this typescript, adding and cutting as I went along. The idea of telling about the novels and the writing of this present essay occurred to me after I had typed five and a half pages. I must correct all of this and recopy it. Did I say that I did it by asking myself, "How do you do it?"

Philip Whalen died in 2002.

"Invocation and Theophany" - Philip Whalen (mp3)

"Monday in the Evening" - Philip Whalen (mp3)

"Letter to Michael McClure" - Philip Whalen (mp3)

more PW at PennSound

at the edge of night all thoughts to place of love

all worries to this place of love

all gestures to the place of love

- Anne Waldman