The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church in the Bowery was home to our feverish production of poetry in little mimeograph magazines published the day we wrote them. Still living there was the world-famous Allen Ginsberg, who wrote “Howl,” the poem that unsettled America. I first saw him taking chicken soup from the Second Avenue Deli to his partner Peter Orlovski, who had a cold. Nina became his friend right away, as did I. He called her his “Eastern European cousin.” This slice of lower Manhattan was a nursery that in a short time grew some of America’s most highly valued poets, artists and musicians known to the whole world today. When Ted died on July 4th 1983, he was married to Alice Notley, a young poet like us, who became in time one of the world’s greatest. She moved to Paris where her second husband, the British poet Douglas Oliver, worked for the BBC. Nina was living there too, and she and Nina became great friends and conspirators. She interviewed Alice Notley shortly before she died on May 19, 2025. Nina interviewed Allen Ginsberg shortly before he died, On April 5, 1997. As she says in her letter to me, she was then interested in his friendship with Bob Dylan. Recently we grieve so many of our poet friends, it is hard to keep track. Nina Zivancevic’s interviews are brilliant flares lit moments before they left us.

About herself Nina writes “After an archeological excavation, we found pieces of Nina Zivancevic in Paris where she continues writing poetry in three languages while curating readings cum performances at the MOTTO bookstore and gallery near le Place de la Republique, the square which still belongs to many fighters against social injustice. Still accompanied by Pierre Merejkowski, who people foolishly take for the grandson of divine Dimitri Merej and Zinaida Hippius, although Piotr himself created such confusion as he said that he ‘accompanies her because she resembles his grandma, a famous poet’.”

Interview with Allen Ginsberg conducted by Nina Zivancevic in New York City, April, 1991

This conversation with Allen Ginsberg, one of the founders of Beat Generation, was recorded in New York’s Lower East Side restaurant Christina’s on a sunny April morning in 1991. The theme of the interview took the prophetic dimension as he spoke mainly of his friendship and a long artistic collaboration with Bob Dylan. I worked closely with Allen for almost ten years prior to this interview and he often used to call me his “Eastern European intellectual cousin”. However, I often felt standing on a fragile ground while talking to him and discussing literary issues but there were moments when I felt safe to ask him specific questions which other people dared not raise. He was simply my great American uncle and my parental coach who was guiding me through the troubled waters of the American underground culture. In this interview we shared one of those intimate moments.

Question: Can you tell us something about your relationship with music: was it initiated by your long-lasting friendship with Bob Dylan?

AG: No, it was not initiated by Dylan; it was rather inspired by Jack Kerouac and his capacity to hear the rhythm of the spoken words, as testified by his Mexico City Blues, also by his innate knowledge of the vocals, his clear hearing of the consonants. Bob Dylan used to say that Mexico City Blues was the first literary work which inspired him to read poetry.

Question: So, would you say that Dylan is a product of an era which combined jazz with poetry, the way Kerouac used to combine them in his work?

AG: No, I did not say that, I’ve only said that Dylan’s poetics is greatly related to a period in which Kerouac used to write…

Question: How did you and Dylan meet?

AG: It happened after I returned from India in 1963; I was in San Francisco and a journalist, a friend of mine who was writing about the Beat Generation in 1959 decided to organize a party for both of us. I was accompanied with Kerouac and Michael McClure and Dylan had just arrived fresh from a meeting of the Social Liberty Committee where he’d got an award for his overall social endeavors. However, in his acceptance speech while thanking the Committee for the Award, Dylan did not fail to mention that as an individual artist he refused the responsibility which his role might have imposed on him.

Question: Would that mean, in fact, that he was unwilling to fight for any social cause?

AG: Yes, in fact, in a certain manner of speaking. See, he did not like other people to tell him for which cause he was supposed to fight.

Question: Had Dylan already known of you and your own work at the time when you met at the party?

AG: Oh yes, but I think at that time at that particular party it was our real meeting of two minds, it was the moment of our real bonding as we chatted for hours and got to know one another quite well.

Question: Have you ever tried to work together in the realm(s) of poetry and music?

AG: Yes, on various occasions and in various ways. In 1971 we met in a recording studio and he had simply told me “hey, let us improvise something”. He really liked the spirit of improvisation. We recorded a demo album and we also made a song together, Holy soul, jelly roll which later figured on my first album, First Blues, produced by John Hammond. He was the man who discovered Dylan and who took him to the CBS. At that time I took a bunch of books to Bob so that he could read William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Rimbaud, all the books which are worth reading in a lifetime.

Question: And what sort of gift would you give him for his birthday today?

AG: Oh, I would give him lots of those precious books today, bunch of books to read.

Question: You two have always had a lot of things in common, it’s just that you’ve been paying more attention to words and Dylan has been paying more attention to music or, say, sounds.

AG: It seems that Bob Dylan is, above all other things, a poet.

Question: Many years ago you were saying at the Naropa Institute “Bob Dylan is one of the best 20^th century poets”; and your students were really impressed with your statement – but some of them did not believe your words.

AG: I don’t think that they reacted to my statement in a negative way, I’d rather say that they liked my idea.

Question: Mixing poetry with music, then considering Dylan above all ‘a poet’ – all these actions have opened a new field in arts, the field of so called poetry performance. This expressive mode of poetry had become really popular during the 1970s and 1980s, exemplified by the respective work of John Giorno or Laurie Anderson; would it be too bold to say that you chose this specific path much earlier that the rest of your colleagues?

AG: In fact I started performing poetry in the middle of 1950s and mainly during longer readings of my work.

Question: What were these readings like? Would you just jump on stage and start reading your poetry against tonal, musical background?

AG: Oh no, not at all!!In those days we did not perform in theatres or on stage, we read only in private places, in the apartments, galleries, cafes…

Question: The scene is very different today. Poets like to perform in theatres and they expect to be paid for their readings.

AG: I don’t believe it entirely. There are a lot of places in New York where many poets read their work but they know that they will never become famous. In earlier epochs it did not happen that a poet would just jump up the stage and improvise his work in a cool and relaxed manner, had he mustered courage to even read his work in public; at any rate the poetry was being written in a classical manner. Unlike those poets, Kerouac wrote in an intimate idiom which he used in describing daily ordinary situations. The rhythm here was of great importance to him, he was working on developing new poetic language, the idiom which was extremely important for the American poetry. In those days the American poets were largely influenced by the European Dadaist and Surrealist poetry; also by the 19^th century Romantics. Before the arrival of the Beat Generation, our scene shared the experience of Robert Duncan’s work and the poetic experience of the group San Francisco Renaissance. All these influences nourished the anarcho-Buddhist approach to writing.

Question: And how did Bob Dylan fit into this whole experience?

AG: I happened to organize poetry readings in the mid-‘50s together with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Jack Kerouac. All of us got closer to music – we used to combine it with poetry, especially jazz music; we also included poets such as Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen and Ferlinghetti. There also came a moment when we included the traditional music into our experiment, namely Afro-American blues and folk music as performed by Woodie Guthrie, we added the experience of the radical left to it, notions of social justice, pacifism, sometimes also the ideas of anticommunism (laughter). These things were quite new and essential to Bob. He got greatly inspired by an anthology of folk music which came out in 1952, the anthology in which Harry Smith classified all folk poets. Dylan got even interested in a literary and psychedelic experience advertised by the Beat Generation, their free improvisation and their love of Blues. I’d often used to say “first thought – best thought”; so Dylan would rush to a recording studio where he would land with a fixed idea of a composition and would then come out of it with a totally different product. He used to compose music on the spot. This was the reason that we started working together in ’71.

Question: When did you actually start working with music and musicians?

AG: In the late 1950s I felt very shy, but as I was also working with my spiritual teacher, the Tibetan Lama Chögyam Trungpa at that time, in the end I was able to overcome my timidity. I started chanting mantras aloud and in the 1960s I set William Blake’s verse to music. I made some attempts at writing folk music scores, however, Dylan has turned me onto Blues. That’s how I started paying attention to Blues and its basic structure, I really dug that genre.

Question: What can you tell us about your various collaborations with different bands?

AG: In 1975 I was touring with Dylan’s legendary Rolling Thunder Revue. I was reading poetry and getting highly amused. I liked it. However, the truth is that I’m really very shy… I don’t know how to present myself to large public; I don’t know how to modulate my voice. Dylan had helped me a great deal with my general public appearance. I worked on my album The Lion for Real almost for the entire last year and it came out by John Giorno’s Poetry Systems. And more recently an album came out with Blake’s poetry, then The First Blues, Howl and Kaddish. Last year I also worked on a poetry and jazz album with the musicians from the Knitting Factory and I also performed with the musicians from Tom Waits’ band and with Marianne Faithful as well. I’ve often collaborated with Don Cherry, Elvin Jones and David Amram. I recited mantras even for Charles Mingus for his birthday! Finally, I have worked with Philip Glass for his opera which was performed at the Brooklyn Academy of music last week.

Question: In what ways Dylan influenced American popular culture?

AG: He was inviting people to open up and study themselves. He made them think about words; he also made them study and appreciate language in an entirely new, crazy manner as exemplified by his famous line “if you wanna live outside the law you’ve got to be honest”. In 1969 I asked him which line of his, according to him, he considered being the best, and he answered that it was the one that I’ve just quoted. Once I spoke about poetry with Robert Creeley who told me “you see a sign of genius in a single phrase, a verse that only that particular poet could have written, the line which has an ending, the line with a riddle and a surprise,” and this rule can be applied to the majority of poets.

(the interview was originally published in Italian paper L’Unita in May, 1991).

Here is Nina’s interview with Notley from 2022:

The spontaneous interview with ALICE NOTLEY

Alice Notley, one of the best living American poets, has recently published “For the Ride”. As a longtime friend and a former student of hers, I found her in the Parisian park Tuileries, where I asked her a couple of questions while eating a refreshing ice-cream.

Nina Zivancevic: Here are a couple of questions that I’ve always meant to ask you, but they impose themselves on me especially in this book which comes out. After some serious seminal and experimental writing of yours which you had already started in “Negativity’s Kiss” (2014) and in “Manhattan Luck” and then in “Eurynome’s Sandals” more recently (2019) -- but this new one is more visual and disseminated, restructured if you will, than those that I’ve mentioned? I know you’re a visual artist as well but you haven’t included your visuals in your previous books?

ALICE NOTLEY: Oh, actually, I don’t remember how I started “For the Ride”, but it deals with questions I’ve been always interested in: like what is the beginning of everything? What is the end of anything? I’m always interested to figure out how language started but I’ve been dealing for quite a while with the idea, with my knowledge of the environmental catastrophe..

NZ: You dedicated it to ANYONE; in the preface you say that the book is going to be “about the journey to another dimension to save Words from their demise”, save words, language from a future Apocalypse?

AN: I talked about the catastrophe in some other books as well, but I decided to think here about the idea of after-the-catastrophe-if-everything-is-dead, so what is THAT? One is just there, inside this glyph, a piece of language which was already there…

NZ: In your book the survivors from catastrophe have an anthology of poetry with them -- you say, only poems can deal with the inexplicable. The characters in it finally become poems. Are these the ones who can save whatever’s left of the world? I mean, can poetry save the world? I remember that in the film Alphaville by Godard -- he said that “the only thing that could save the world, the post-apocalyptic world, was poetry”.

AN: I’ve never seen Alphaville, although I was very aware of it, but anywhere that I was at that time, I kept on missing the screenings of that one, although (laughter), I’ve seen all other films where Ana Karina was in!

NZ: That’s perhaps his most profound, philosophical and poetical film, as he has this old man in it who is the only one in this post-world who cries and speaks poetry, everyone else in Alphaville forgot how to cry so they have to visit the old man to teach them how to cry… Let us go to the beginning of your “For the Ride”: you dedicated it to “Anyone” and in the very first section “The Glyph of Chaos with Willows” you say that “One is not in time but in Chaos”. Are we living in an era which is englobed out of time which you call “beautiful chaos”? How do you conceive that era of “beautiful chaos”?

AN: I think that our reality is chaos, but the chaos in old epics is not chaotic, it is unformed and by describing our senses and out of the things that we see, we try to make something out of chaos, but the chaos is always there underneath us, we are chaos! And in that poem we return to chaos; that’s what happens in a lot of my work, it’s a return to chaos!

NZ: Would you refer to the deconstruction of language also as some form of chaos?

AN: Oh, WE ARE CHAOS! We have been taught to see order everywhere but…

NZ: Were you indicating in the book that there was some kind of ‘truth’ hidden in the old forgotten languages which we are no longer able to read; some old truth has been repeating itself through centuries but we haven’t figured it out?

AN: No, what I meant was my idea that we have to communicate, we have to learn how to communicate -- communication is everything and even the molecules are communicating with one another, and atoms in nature as well…they are all talking to each other, like we do, and probably when we are dead we are in the state of communicating too; that’s what it is; however, I am always trying to find something as ‘the original language’, one that is older than “the old languages” and now I’m working in that area again, I am trying to find something that I call “THE old language” contained in our cells or what our cells are…

NZ: I got it. In terms of that you come close to the visuals, to the visual expression of what is essential to the glyph or a “sign”. It marked me when you said “One makes the truth”, like every man, everyone makes his/her own truth and you indicate that he/she is doing it through language. I’d say this is the most “language” poetry book of yours, though I’ve never thought of you as a “Language poet”. I’ve considered you a “Language being” as you’re also dealing with different languages on a daily basis…you incorporate different languages in your writing as you’ve just done it here -- I mean, you incorporated French in your poetry…

AN: I know, I wouldn’t have written this book if I hadn’t lived in a different language; well, I’ve had that experience (on dealing with different languages on a daily basis), many people have had it, we embody so many different cultures and languages in one body, and somehow it works, doesn’t it? (laughter) I am deliriously amused at…what’s going on all the time!

NZ: What I appreciated, what I loved about this book is that once you found the key for every chapter than you could enter it; like everyone has to find his own key for it, in a way. You don’t give us the sort of key which is something like “go and find the key and you would enter it”!

AN: I did not know what the keys were here, I sort of had to find them myself in order to enter it and I was hoping that everyone else would do it too, as I did not know it, ever, what was going to happen in this book..

NZ: Here you said “One is composed of Words like one makes in the beginning, chaotically”. Do you see the words as our essential elements and the only creative elements that have power to propel our imagination?

AN: We are all, each of us very unique, we are individuals, yes, we have souls, but perhaps we should say…we have poems…

NZ: You said this “had painted a lovely clasp singing in the head”. Impossible mental structures! Are the words more powerful than other tools, artistic or physical, more powerful than colors, visual images, etc? What can they express more or better than other human “tools”?

AN: Oh, I have a lot of lines like that one. I don’t know if these ‘tools’ are better, but I think they are ‘truer’, I don’t know if they are more powerful, and I love the visual arts, and I try to have vision and music in my poems, I don’t have any visual training in arts, I have musical training. I’ve never had any training in visual arts; I’ve fell in the Second generation of New York School, I’ve fell in with Ted and Joe (Brainard) and George Schneeman and they did collages and collaborations but I did it with myself, I felt that I should collaborate with myself, and what I’ve done in this book is a little bit like that.. I collaborated with myself, but I have the whole body of artwork that’s connected to words. I’ve just started talking about it, because I’ve never thought of myself as being a good artist. (laughter) But, I’m going to have an Art book come out this Fall…I have an Instagram account, and I bought an Apple pen and started doing these cool drawings and you can take pictures instantly and post them and there’s a guy who wants to print a book with them.

NZ: Waiiit a minute.. I’ve always thought of you as a great visual artist.. I saw something of yours a while ago…those stockings, like pop-art work?

AN: No, those were George Schneeman’s drawings and I supplied words; but yes, he’s a great artist. My drawings could be found in some poetry magazines, like a year ago, my collages are collected by the University of California in San Diego.

NZ: Let’s go back to your book “For the Ride” and to the notion of the Art of Writing: As you see the words as the subliminal ‘tools’ here, you are expressing a certain hesitation here towards the so-called tenses, as denominators of time, or time-categories which were imposed on us by history, or the notion of historical periods which were further imposed on us by the conventional education system. Can you elaborate on that, like tenses vs time?

AN: You know, part of it happened on this block, right here, down the Starbucks corner, there was a hairdresser where I used to go and where I started writing this book and there came a certain point where I had to decide about the tenses; well, a Cambodian woman was cutting my hair and we had this conversation about the Cambodian language and the Cambodian tenses, apparently, the Cambodian language has only present tense, I mean, you can get tense by using ADVERBS and that’s what I’ve done. Then I tried to get some information about the Cambodian language but there wasn’t much and luckily I did not need any additional information, I sort of figured it out how you can construct tenses in a totally new way by using these adverbs! The Cambodian hairdresser really explained it to me, she knew a lot about the languages, and then I went home and put it into my book.

NZ: So, is this system of education (of times, tenses, periods in history) robbing us of “personhood” as you put it?

AN: Oh yes, but you know, we are shaping the culture as much as the culture is making us; it is not to say that there are “other people” who are to be blamed and that there is us who are the victims, we’re all doing it in a way.

NZ: For many years, centuries, English-speaking authors would slip in French words into their writing to appear stylish, well-educated, refined or pompous. I don’t find it in your “For the Ride”. You’ve been living in Paris for almost thirty years -- has the French idiom finally penetrated your thinking, as it seems to grow organically, naturally in this book?

AN: Yes, the language is there. I think that being in this language (French) has changed me a lot, changed my poetic line, changed my ear, changed my meter, that sort of thing. There are other languages in the poem, there’s Spanish which I learned as a child and studied in a high-school a little bit, but the French took its place so today I don’t know it as I used to. I grew up near the Mexican border so people around me always spoke Spanish, but also there’s Latin in my poem, perhaps German somewhere as well -- these are all the languages I have a little bit to do with, they’re in my head, you know… But since the 19^th century there has been this notion that you had to know French as a cultivated person, it has been a class thing.

NZ: However, in this particular book of yours, I don’t see that effort on your side to “appear cultivated”, as some journalists of the Guardian often make, you insert French words somewhat naturally, so my question here is – and I risk to appear quite redundant here – is your new writing a kind of, say, Joycean deconstruction, dissemination of “la parole” which finds home in your book? You two have had a somewhat similar ‘expatriate’s path’ of existence…

AN: Oh, I never think of Joyce! Simply: never. Well, when I was young I read his “Ulysses”, and I read parts of his “Finnegan’s Wake”- I liked them a lot, but it was forty years ago! (laughter) Yeah, I don’t think much about Joyce, there are other people who do this type of work but their names don’t come to my mind right now.

NZ: Ok, tell us something else -- could the real subtitle of your chapter “Save the Words” read like your line “one is not even French, One’s like dead”? I read this chapter as a severe critique of the French immigration and “acclimation” policies. How does it feel to be an immigrant cum writer, intellectual here? However, I see this book as an extension of Joyce’s, Stein’s or Beckett’s work accomplished here in Paris -- any comment?

AN: Actually, the book is “Eurynome’s Sandals”; it has to do more with the immigration than this one. I wrote it in 2006 or 2007 and it did not come out for a long time because there were ..two chunks in it that I really couldn’t figure out how to put them together; but in that book there is a section of shorter poems which talk about my experience of being an immigrant. However, if I say “I’m an immigrant” it is not the same experience as of those people who come from all sorts of other countries- it’s very difficult to talk about this subject and in that book I refer all the time to the experiences of all other immigrants. There is a long poem in there called “Eurynome’s Sandals” which is about the goddess who created the world by dancing into existence, and there’s a cosmic snake which surrounds her as she’s dancing, and then they have some children... Anyways, it’s the first myth in Robert Graves’ book on myths. They became these characters: there’s a woman, Eurynome, a creative goddess, then there is a filmmaker and he is Time, and she is divinity; they are all held to communication but there are lots of the immigrants around them and there’s this catastrophe and there’s an instant call for people and people are always wandering around telling stories about Eurynome and the filmmaker as they are these mythical beings… Well, that book is difficult to describe, but that book was published two years ago here (in France) in the French translation and by a University Press.

NZ: I don’t have a problem with your universal “I”, because when I was a student, in your workshop, it was a very liberating thing for me to hear you saying that “I is just a word”… And it was not the “I, I and I , and me, me and me, Alice Notley,” but simply the fact that “I” is just a word!

AN: Which workshop was that? I mean, what year?

NZ: Well, it was either 1984, 1985 or 1986 at the St Mark’s Church Poetry Project. I’m forgetting all these years and periods. There’s someone thinking that I was crazy as I couldn’t remember what year I was with Allen in Amsterdam for that One Word Poetry festival!

AN: It was probably 1985. The year of the workshop... And why would you remember all these years, indeed? I remember very clearly, well I don’t remember if it was the 1980s or 1990s, ha, but the use of “I” was sort of forbidden in the university milieu…

NZ: Here’s one last question “For the Ride” -- how does one save Words, from themselves? Is it through a new language, through a sort of “bricolage”? Through a Dada experiment? Is it a technical, formal process, or is it more an aesthetic, an anesthetized yearning for the meaning of the Wor(l)d?

AN: How to save Words? Hmm.. You have to be absolutely true to yourself, without knowing what that is, of course, and you have to be absolutely true to what the world needs…and you don’t allow yourself to think anything that anyone has told you is true; you have to examine every single thing…but you also have to have fun…and nowadays nobody has any f---ing fun…

NZ: Seems we are deep… in the 21^st century!

AN: No, but I’m totally serious -- look, I mean: when you’re doing things with words you have to be in the pleasure place, YOU can’t tell the TRUTH…unless you’re enjoying the words!

NZ: Ha, you are now like a doctor diagnosing the Corona, COVID patient! Everybody lost the sense of fun, and that is the whole problem!

AN: Yeah! OK, like viruses are the characters in some of my poetry; there is a virus or a bacteria that makes a speech once or twice in Eurynome’s Sandals, and I also have a play which I wrote a couple of years ago and it has twenty-six characters and one of them is a virus, but the virus is dead, because everyone in the play is dead. So the virus there talks about how it is to be the virus… They are also held together by communication.

NZ: But can you give us some guidance, what’s Arc for you, in the book? And what is One? And who is France? Should one go the Biblical references?

NZ: Oh, the Arc is a ship, it’s just a clipper ship. I actually went to a store where you can buy models for sampling of model ships on rue de Louvre and I bought a model ship and I put it together -- and it collapsed! But I bought a model so that I can draw a ship, it’s been made to exist out of chaos, so it was correct that it fell apart in my room, it’s correct that it is so ambiguous as to what it is…

AN: France though, is a character. France is someone I dreamed of while I was writing I dreamed of this Vietnamese woman who had been murdered in a hotel room in Vietnam, and she was wrapped up in blankets and carried out of her room, and she had a retarded son, and they became characters in a poem, so they came straight from a dream to my poem… France is a dead Vietnamese woman.

NZ: Should one go to the Biblical references and old Poets in order to comprehend the split language and characters in the book? For instance, you say (page 46) “…One means something else but what is it? That One’s in and is of, émetteur/ Or the sound of it”? Basically, if Words/language is the sound, how do we master it?

You asked some essential questions in this book, not only regarding poetry, but regarding the construction of language itself… And how do we live in a gray area of language with no reference?

AN: We probably make a new culture. And that’s probably what people were doing, but One absorbs them all, because One knows all their characters and One knows that he’s dead. One goes to the City of the Dead and walks around, talks to the dead and they tell him things about language. I mean over the last couple of years we’ve been taught that language is rather simple -- and it is not, that’s another thing: it must be unbelieved that language is a simple thing, and that one can understand what it is -- one does not understand what it is…

NZ: Yes, come to think of it…it seems that the old Poets or old Masters (in any arts) have been giving us instructions all along – like we listen to them but we don’t really hear them; do you remember the old myth of Orpheus and Eyridice? Orpheus is that legendary sound-maker and he is going to bring that original language (Eyridice) back to life, but there’s only one request: that he does not turn back! He has to go ahead, and he does not do it! He turns back and starts tending to the old language, tending to grammar, structure etc., so he’s king of stuck in that old structure.

AN: Yeah, but poetry flows and floats, the words float, you keep on supplying them but they float! It (the book) works on different levels, you don’t need to understand all the parts and all the characters – for different people it could mean different things, it’s a-tonal, it’s like atonal music…

ALICE NOTLEY was with NINA ZIVANCEVIC in Paris
July 20, 2020

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Johnny: Hey Alice, how’d you like the play?

Alice: What play?

Johnny: The one we just saw. At LaMama.

Alice: I was thinking about something else.

Johnny: Me?

Alice: Why don’t you call Elinor and ask her to come over for a drink.

Johnny: I liked the impenetrable deep eyes of all the characters.

Alice: They were wearing masks, Johnny.

Snap fingers! Beer appears!

Alice: By all means come to Paris, we’d love to see you. We are currently hoping that at least some of our visitors will elect to stay at least part-time in the cheap hotel around the corner. You and Elinor of course have the right to sleep right between us since you’ve obviously had your own sex life disrupted from time to time by The Tall One.

Johnny: I haven’t left Manhattan in 40 years and I’m not about to start now.

Alice: My mother is trying to locate a guy with a missing outer ear who’s good with safes -- her floor safe won’t open. I can’t remember what’s in it or why she wants, at this point, to open it.

Johnny: This is my last appearance as an industry.

Another voila finger-snap & more beer appears.

Alice: So my gynecologist retired, I messed up my appointment with a new woman because I forgot something they considered essential, and I had to make another appointment. She had no appointments until May --this is at a clinic -- and there were no appointments with any woman gynecologist until May. What about with a man? I asked over the phone. Much better, the voice said, I can give you one tomorrow. He gave me an appointment with a Professor Zorn, I looked him up online, he was born in 1937. I was seeing an 85-year-old gynecologist, male! Can you believe it? He is the head of the gynecology service so is a Professor, which is above a Doctor.

Johnny: Did you see him?

Alice: I saw him. He was a head shorter than me and pretty old and wearing a blue bow tie. In France there is no garment to wear for the examination, and for my previous doctor, I took off all my clothes and walked around naked. With this guy, I guess because he was a man, I took off -- he told me what to do -- my bottom clothes while he turned his back, then he gave me the pelvic. Then I put them back on and took off the top clothes. Then I turned to face him with my two operated-on breasts and he threw his arms up in the air and smiled! Joyously! He said Oh!! or Ah!!

Johnny [in a Groucho Marx manner]: Ohh!

Alice: I think it was because the surgery was so good. Then he examined my breasts and pronounced them healthy. He was slow, meticulous, old. It was a curiously peaceful experience. But I then remembered that guy Elinor and I used to see in New Jersey. Was his name Bruce? He was the last male gynecologist I had seen. No one sees a man for some reason, and I didn’t particularly want to then, but I intend to from now on because it’s easier to get an appointment. But I don’t think Professor Zorn will be available much longer.

Johnny: I miss Ted and Doug and everyone, and our life that was supposed to always be our life.

Alice: I found out a few years ago that everyone knew about the postcards and my correspondence with Joe about them and then later other matters during his illness. Everything is on record, and people know that Joe gave me money etc.

Johnny: What a strange life that everyone knows everything but doesn’t have a clue how it really was.

Alice: There was a Frank O’Hara special event at the Poetry Project and I read in it and so did Larry Rivers. I bumped into him the next day and we told each other we liked our readings, then he said to me, Nobody knows what it was really like.

The End

Performed for “At Night the States: a Memorial Celebration for Alice Notley,” at the Poetry Project, November 19, 2025. Cast: Edmund Berrigan, Bob Holman, Rochelle Kraut, Elinor Nauen, O’Malley, Johnny Stanton.

For the full memorial, including the play above:

Ed. Note: Alice Notley (1945-2025) is a great poet. We don’t say that lightly, because if we did we’d never hear the end of it from the gods. Prolific, savant, funny and tough, she could be devastating personally and esthetically. We wrote here about the shock of her death, but had no idea how many friends she had, until the above mentioned memorial where Elinor’s play was performed. This play does what poets do all their life: play. This play acknowledges no death, a world Alice conversed with and from with the ease of crossing the border from France (where she lived and died) and New York where she (mostly) lived. She’s talking with me now, believe it. Just a minute, Alice, I’m holding an idea by the tail. Thank you.

Alice and Elinor were/are peas in a twisted and loving pea-pod. If you enjoyed the play, here are some of Elinor’s poems.

ELINOR NAUEN

Naps I Have Known

The best nap is the opera nap. The music & scenery are glorious & you fall into it, you’re wrapped in bright sound & spectacle, in a deep velvet seat. You’re not asleep, you’re taking it in, you’re asleep, taking it in.

The sermon doze: a blank stare, unrelaxing but irresistible, a word that sifts in without context. You don’t want to be seen slumped, the lights are bright, people know who falls out.

Three high-school friends sharing a rented condo in Idaho, 40 years after high school. We all drifted off at the same time. Is that what cemented our new/old friendship?

Once in Madrid, my friends & I lay down in a public park, with no fear for our stuff or our lives. Trust, comfort, 40 winks.

And in Toledo with Mercè, tea & hot chocolate in the highest spot in the city, the library’s snack bar, dusty afternoon quiet of new & dusk, after so much walking, a siesta as serene as if we’d slipped off in our beds.

The Shabbat afternoon nap, when you’ve made it through 3 hours of services & a sugary beige half-meal. Underwear, under the covers, between the cool sheets.

The nod nap, you’re here & over there at the same time.

In kindergarten I resisted, but when I discovered that we got up off our rugs to tiny cartons of milk, I lay down.

After sleeping through every educational film strip in high school, it took me 20 years to stay awake in a movie.

Airplane shuteye, my main anticipation of an international flight is sleeping like a monk in my window seat.

I used to think I’d sleep the night before my execution.

Tiny Instructive Poem

Between the cat & the fat

the claws & the jaws

all my clothes

are full of holes

Country Hit

I thought about

you

3 times

tonight

from 7:30 to 8:30

from 8:30 to 9

& from 9 till I got home

when I started

to think

about you

again

Domestic Life

I. 
For those who don’t cook,
            is sex domestic?
One puts away one’s shoes
She saved her contact lenses
            in wet toilet paper
And went home in the morning

A snore, a fart, crockery, light
The emptiest house has these
And a vase of zinnias or a bowl
            of cheerios

            My head is my home

He wakes up at least once
Every day & she smiles
At least twice & the sun

Is their son & the cat
Junior


II.

Her hair shiny
Because dirty
No miracle product

Shoes              underwear                 cans
Snowflakes the outward drift
Queen Bee in a wooden cabinet
            under a shelf of souvenirs
“We had no family photographs”

Leash, papyrus, a small carved scotty dog she pocketed from her brother, a pin of membership in the School Safety Patrol (Lieutenant), stationery with buttercups

Now everyone knows
            tulips from buttercups
            economy from Italian disarray
            bloody
            fish

 
III. 

Can I be Frank with you?
            Do you know my middle name?
Have you swallowed anything
            I dished out?

Nothing makes me feel more married
            than sending you out for a vanilla bean

Domesticity arises
from time
not affection

 
IV.

Domestic bliss: good pens 
                            frozen dinners
                            bread (toast)

Why is toast so much better than bread?
Toast means
someone has been part of your meal:
it stopped on the way to the table
 
Domestic bliss: 1 blink = a marriage

A bra in his drawer
            from too long ago
            to matter
& too many betrayals to add to
            
The real betrayal

Is


V.

Running
            into people
            you have
            n’t seen 

            about as
            domestic
            as can be

My name in her mouth or his
Is a November pie
In sultry cloud-laced sunshine


VI. 

How many books do you own

Did you count
Or are you using the same number
As someone who seems like you
In some book-acquiring way

Does it count
            if you have 3 copies of the same book
Or many copies of your own books

Does it count if your books aren’t as great as they could be
Did you forget to be a genius

I’m a seafarer, the young Dutch woman said

Mother Sky is in my lap

My home is my mind

 
VII.

Johnny enters the poem
I couldn’t keep him out

He is the center & frame of my domestic life
            (poor Johnny)

Yeah, no, I don’t cook. You heard me eating 
not stirring

I wouldn’t know
where to buy an apron

So Late into the Night
Was an ironic title
Because I’ve never been awake
Past 10 p.m.

I like to lie in bed
With my coldest feet
On his warmest places
And I like to drink coffee 
While I slowly hatch into my day

My love is in my house
And my house is in my head

 
VIII.

They speak to me with a tenderness


IX.

aluminum                              tissue paper                           feathers
satin                                       cotton                                     glass (not sea glass)
steel                                        leather
cotton laces                           cotton panties                       cotton t-shirt
paper                                      paper (books)                       paper (napkins)
paper (cereal box)                paper                                      cat litter

sand/sea/sky/cloud/leaf/cat

 
X.

 
“It is always / Christmas /From the air / At night”
                                                                                                  ~ Louis Zukofsky, from “Light”

But the planes are grounded
& the snow showers ungrounded

“such lyric weather” 

 
XI.

Remorse

 
XII.

My real books
Are being written
By someone else

 
XIII. 

As easy as rolling over

He boomed & bellowed

And we all married him

 
XIV.

November & sandwiches
            or toast & Ted

Wantonnesse

Till I know where I am
I don’t know what I know

 
XV.

If I had 6 sides
            like a snowflake
My house would be tidy
            & clean

 
XVI. 

          
A domestic plane is taking me to Budapest
I read sitting up
There are no comforts in my home
Instant mashed potatoes as civilized as you get
Those are all names with spouses & affairs & diapers
He’s not the king
This is my face
You are my sword
Fight your own fight

 
XVII.

 
Moby Money
In our bed in our head
That was too much beer or a test
Of discounts. Only
young people can chew gum. 
The old folks don’t want
To lose their teeth. 
 
Teeth come at the end of a 

DOMESTIC LIFE

Elinor Nauen has been everywhere, seen everything, slept with everybody (except you)

Or a regular bio:

Elinor Nauen’s most recent book is CARS, an annotated republication of the title poem of her first book CARS & Other Poems; other books include American Guys, So Late into the Night, My Marriage A to Z, Snowbound, Now That I Know Where I’m Going, The Alphabet’s Dilemma, and, as editor, Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend: Women writers on baseball and Ladies, Start Your Engines: Women writers on cars & the road. Along with Maureen Owen, she edits the poetry zine Julebord, which regularly features her translations from Norwegian.

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Chapter One

Whenever Lynnea sends me the herb prescription, it says it came from . . .

Doctor Chrono!

Who is this Dr. Chrono? muttered Professor Mesmer, before applying the rubber nipple to her nose. Each of her nostrils inhaled a bitter drop. A pleasant feeling suffused her. She was ready for poetry class.

She entered the room in her ten inch heels. A timi…

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I wrote the sentence above in Romanian, and the idea of it intrigued me so much I kept on writing. I was exploring this idea as fast as I could type. It was a complex thought cascading into words. I called a temporary stop when the idea seemed (temporarily) exhausted. I read what I wrote and saw the weirdest thing: the first sentence was in Romanian, but the rest was in English. I had intended to write the whole thing in Romanian. I hadn’t even noticed when it slipped into English. What makes this interesting to me and, possibly, to neurologists, is that the idea in question was part of an introduction to a chapter of my collected poetry written directly in Romanian. I have two bodies of work in Romanian, 1962-1973, and 1992-2019. From 1973 to 1992 I wrote exclusively in English. I recovered my native language beginning in December 1989, when I “covered” the collapse of the Ceausescu dictatorship for NPR and ABC News. I started writing Romanian “coherently” in 1992. The parentheses around “covered” and “coherently” are intentional (another story). In any case, I am bilingual in an odd way, with a nearly four-decade gap between my native and my adopted languages.

1962 marked my first appearance in print when M.R. Paraschivescu, a Romanian poet and critic, cited two of my verses in his column “Posta Redacției” (The Editorial Post) in the weekly literary magazine “Luceafărul” (The Evening Star). All the Romanian literary journals of that time had a charming column responding to submissions from poets around the country. This one, written by the eminent Paraschivescu, was particularly desirable to young poets because “Luceafărul” was one of the rare publications testing the waters of censorship in the post-stalinist era. I was in High School in Sibiu, a provincial town with an illustrious but dead past, and I wasn’t doing well in school. I seemed to have a knack for poetry. It turned out to be my way out of school, provincialism, and a future of guaranteed boredom. In his response, M.R. Paraschivescu said:

Luceafărul, Anul V, Nr. 7 (90), 1 Aprilie 1962, p. 8.

Poşta redacţiei

Andrei Permuter: Se simte o încordare plină de promisiuni , dar deocamdată multe versuri sînt încă legate de expresii tip; prea mult abuz de „flăcări”, „lumini” etc. Chiar în cele mai reuşite poezii îşi fac loc aceste expresii deficitare, de care ar trebui să te ţii cît mai departe, deoarece întunecă unele imagini virtual interesante. Astfel, în „Şantier” este un decalaj vădit între început şi final:

„Păduri de vuiete şi foc
ridică pulberea din loc
Şi la căldura razelor de soare
Îi dă putere, formă şi culoare.”

Luceafărul, Year V, Nr. 7 (90), April 1 1962, p.8

Andrei Permuter: “A tension filled with promise is felt, but the poetry still abuses phrases like “flames,” “lights,” etc. These defficient tropes find their way even in the most accomplished poems, and you must stay away from them, because they obscure some virtually interesting images. In the Poem “Santier” (Construction Site) there is an obvious gap between the beginning and the end:

“Roaring and fiery woods
Raise up dust from their floors
That heated by the sun
Gains force, form, and color.”

Paraschivescu’s was an intoxicating response in 1962. The misspelling of my name was a consistent prediction of all my future names. “Permuter” was a phonetic and nativized transcription of my original name, “Perlmutter.” Whether Romanized for an antisemitic public, simplified for print, or just a typo, the act of misspelling followed me in the future like that “obvious gap” between the beginning and the end of my poem. One can barely imagine today M.R. Paraschivescu’s daring poetic agenda in this answer: in condemning socialist-realist cliches like “fiery,” “sun,” “force,” the columnist was condemning an entire corpus of Communist Party-mandated writing. In calling for enforced optimism, Stalin had introduced a body of false metaphors into the poetry of all Soviet fiefdoms. This doctrine was particularly egregious to Romanians, whose poetry had risen to lyric intensity in the pre-war era because of its profound insight into the futility of human existence. Our greatest pre-communist poets had pulverized ideology by either the worship of nature or the howl of protest. Romanian poetry had been raped by an alien lyric body. A badly educated high-school student like myself, who had read mainly the journals of the time, and a few (very few) poets of the interwar era, would take the communist imagery for granted. 1962 was not yet the anno mirabilis 1965, which represented for poets a genuine liberation from socialist-realism, and a return to its true poetry, but the “tension” which Paraschivescu granted my poems was the first tremor what would become the earthquake of 1965.

(to be continued)

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In 2004 I was happy to see my poet friends, Vincent Farnsworth and Gwen Albert, come to read their poetry in New Orleans. Times weren’t rosy back then, either, but they seem idyllic in retrospect. In 2004 Vincent and Gwen, American expats, lived in Prague, the most beautiful city of autumn. In 2004 I wrote:

Gwen and Vincent came to New Orleans and had culture shock. It started with language. At the airport they were told that one of their bags was “topheavy.” They didn’t know what that meant. At a coffee shop they heard a teenager say, “people don’t do that,” meaning, they surmised, that something was too much. After an adventure with an ATM machine, they watched TV and heard someone call the actor a “spinner,” whatever that was.

The poets were greeted by local fans dressed Mardi-Gras style, wearing Viking helmets and waving home-made flags. Plans were made to introduce the visitors to Louisiana before their reading. There, in the middle of the swamp outside New Orleans, the family of a local poet lived under the Spanish moss of old oaks, with peacocks, blue deer, pigs, and ducks, in a tenuous relationship with poisonous snakes, alligators, and nutria.

After the bread-pudding deserts the visiting poets were taken to meet neighbors, the Kleiberts, who managed an alligator farm, a hatchery where thousands of these reptiles lived in a swampy lake, anxiously watching their eggs. Every noon the Kleiberts threw them frozen Miss Goldie’s chickens to gulp whole in their toothless maws. In addition to the alligators, who had survived unchanged for millions of years, there were pits full of venomous snakes the Kleiberts raised for research. The alligators are very good diggers and tended to get out from under the flimsy fences around the ponds. The vipers owned the range, which once a wilderness, was a nice suburban neighborhood of worried commuters from the city in 2004.

But lest the civilized European poets might take us for rubes, we took them to visit a grand plantation home along the Mississippi where the gentry of yore ate all the animals mentioned above, and cooked them with French sophistication. In the 19th century dinner was brought to them on silver platters to cypress-beamed dining rooms by slaves who carried these platters whistling, The reason they whistled was so the overseers would know that they weren’t eating it. This shady romantic plantation, where men and women kept nature at bay, still carried around it the stink of slavery like a permanent fog, but in 2004 the current owners had only a (white) cook to make a fine seafood gumbo for us.

Well, Europe had centuries to eat all its animals, and up on the East Coast there wasn’t one edible animal anywhere outside of a plastic package. Our poets, when finished with their tour of Louisiana, would return to Prague; they would have no trouble choosing where to live.

And that was the case. In 2025, they still live in Prague.

For all its exotic charm and delightful food, the country surrounding New Orleans in 2004 was closer to 1804. In 2025 it is even closer to 1804 than it was in 2004. The clock of history runs backward in some places. The math of history is hard. In 2025 the poets might have been grabbed by ICE at the airport, under suspicion of coming from a place that had socialized medicine. They might have never made it to their welcoming hosts.

two poems by Gwendolyn Albert

america

countertop winces
with sad promise
margarine	papertowel

	Hallmark card

two more words who
forgot what they mean

fresh (and)
golden

DEMOCRACY

you can’t
hear yourself 
think   so
you give
your voice
to someone
else

the choice of
choices avoiding
its self
	evident
		truths

but GOOD LUCK!
surviving 
the banks of
wasted effort

on which 
this flag
can be seen
to wave

it stands for you so
you stand for it as

through the night sky
through the sea and
under the earth
people murder
in your name

just a little something you can
call your own 	yes

you stand for this and
you stand that

then it’s 
time

to vote

poem by Vincent Farnsworth

remember me 
(dreams: June 2025)


my family on a roadtrip 
left me behind at a stop
but I wasn’t worried 
I knew they’d remember me
because I was the one doing the experiments.
still I dialed and dialed
until the happy animal dropped 
out of the tree, full of love, 
wanting a new home in my arms
away from its spiny, fanged kin.

the planet with giant wolves
that never stop running
so their giant paws fly by
also had the species of perfect rabbit
as opposed to the other rabbits.

the alluring woman doing experiments in
transparent people
agreed on a reunion
as pretext.

with each wave of new humanity
which new era really matters?
was there any generation of heroes 
if offered the choice
not to ultimately opt for joy?

and yet all the ancestors 
who could not choose.

awaking with the conviction 
you’re not alive in 
any other parallel universe
only in this one 
only

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Few people remember that in the last three decades of the 20th Century, "Futurist" was a well-paying gig. Top futurist writers like Buckminster Fuller, Marshall MacLuhan and Robert Anton Wilson commanded large fees for speaking at conferences and corporate events. Situated somewhere between fortune-tellers and philosophers, these prognosticators included tech in their visions. The computer was the new deck of Tarot cards. The future that they foresaw was, of course, accurate. We are living in it. For my money, Robert Anton Wilson was the most charismatic of them all. He had a sense of humor and a grasp of absurdity that transcended even the most profound, but sadly serious, visions of the others. These qualities multiplied his appeal hundreds of times and were, as a result, generative almost immediately of many tributaries (The Church of the Subgenius, to name but one). More importantly now for us, people of the future, is the dire need for humor and understanding of the absurd. This collection of essays is a manual for yielding those things, maybe even acquiring them. Wilson was an optimist, not because he saw the coming sci-fi world as particularly wonderful, but because he was unafraid to see us still wallow between contradiction and awe like the proverbial cat caught in the door between Einstein and Heisenberg. Wilson was an encyclopedic scholar of human folly, or maybe simply the folly of being human. Great tonic read!

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My good friend, James Nolan, died last week. Jimmy was a true New Orleans aristocrat, who could trace his Creole Catholic family from its origins to its multi-leveled tomb in St. Louis 3 Cemetery. He was a superb story-teller whose books are alive with the events of his adventurous life. While still an adolescent, he frequented one of the only integrated places in the American South, the French Quarter bars where Blacks, bohemians and gay sailors mixed and drank. Still in his youth, he also lived in the redwood forest in Sonoma County, in one of the first settlements in the age of Communes. He was part of San Francisco's radical street theater of the Angels of Light. He taught English in China during Mao's Cultural revolution, lived in Spain during the Franco regime, and was back in San Francisco in time for a literary renaissance.

Each of these places found themselves in his fiction and essays. Threaded through them was always a civilised, erudite and welcoming New Orleans accent. Like the multi-cultural city he returned to after his travels, his prose emanated the ineffable quality of the city, like the sweet olive that blooms unexpectedly behind the St. Louis Cathedral. Jimmy translated Pablo Neruda into English, and wrote highly regarded essays in Spain's best literary journals and newspapers. In San Francisco he had an apartment under a freeway that was the only place in that city that resembled a New Orleans house, with a courtyard and a balcony.

Each of his adventures found another life in the stories he told his friends. We spent many magical hours in the French Quarter, at Molly's on the Market, regaling each other, or anyone who would listen, with our stories. We once discussed all the places we lived in, and decided that ours was the best of them. We wrote a song, titled "There is no Molly's in Tibet," an anthem meaning that even the most exotic locations in the world could not compare with our hangout in New Orleans.

Jimmy was also a superb cook. He lived in an early 19th century house where one could easily imagine John James Audobon and Lafcadio Hearn talking late into the quiet night. An evening meal of shrimp etoufeé and fine wine on a breezy Fall evening on the balcony of Jimmy's French Quarter apartment was a memorable event.

When the mayor ordered the evacuation of the city during Hurricane Katrina, Jimmy was one of the last to leave. Bored National Guard soldiers from five states often gathered under his balcony to drink and holler all night in the empty city. Jimmy retaliated by playing Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" at high volume. The soldiers moved. When electricity was cut, Jimmy lived a time with candle light, which perfectly suited the house and his own taste. It was only when the city shut off water that he left, in the unique style of a true native of the city. Gathered in the lobby of the Monteleone Hotel, where Tennessee Williams often stayed, was a group of tourists waiting patiently for a bus that the Monteleone manager promised would take them to safety. During the longer and longer wait, a yellow school bus requisitioned by a concerned citizen stopped in front of the hotel. "Ten bucks will get you to Baton Rouge!" announced the driver. Jimmy and some locals, including a famous musician, boarded instantly. They were taken out of the city to the safe dry Baton Rouge airport. The hotel bus never came.

Our friendship included mutual admiration for each other's writing. Jimmy's last book was "Between Dying and Not Dying, I Chose the Guitar: the Pandemic Years In New Orleans” (University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press). He had the good fortune of seeing it in print just before he died. On the back cover, I wrote: "This journal of the plague years beginning in 2020 declares itself crisply on the side of poetry. Even as James Nolan documents, with the flair of the great storyteller he is, the details of his life in a city where life-loving citizens have been sentenced to solitary confinement, he finds the courage and humor to survive. The mix of prescience, sobri­ety, satire, and curiosity that are the trademarks of his writing shine here. I have no doubt that Between Dying and Not Dying, I Chose the Guitar will take its place alongside Pepys, Defoe, and Camus among the great plague chronicles.” All true, yet every blurb is an obituary. His body didn't have a choice, but his guitar will play a long time for us.

Pat Nolan is one of my oldest and best friends. We met in the redwoods, in Monte Rio, Sonoma County, California, in the early 1970s. In fact, I moved there after I paid him a visit. I was awed by the giant redwoods capable of seeding their own clouds to make it rain, the Russian River flowing into the Pacific Ocean only a few miles away, and Pat's incredible knowledge of French poetry. Our writing was very different, but we had my Romanian-French-New York avantgarde and his Bay Area-French-New York School avantgarde in common: our territory stretched from Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars to Ted Berrigan, Philip Whalen and Diane di Prima.

We were already, in our 20s, veterans of poetries that made the 20th century our playground and battleground. We collaborated and played, but there was nothing frivolous about it. We were serious. Proof of it, if any of it is needed, is that we are still poets after more than half a century, and still prize poetry over money. We've worked in many different genres, essay, fiction, criticism, etc, but poetry was always the foundation of our work, and the chief activity of our lives. In the last two years, Pat had a sudden and major following in China and ...in Romania, my country of birth. I had nothing to do with this last jolt of popularity, but his novels, excerpted below, were translated, pirated and sold like a NYT bestseller (without the royalties). An anonymous critic proclaimed Nolan King of Nouvelle Noir, a cross between Dashiel Hammett and Charles Bukowski. We have recently hired a detective to find out who the pirates are, maybe we'll make them pay up. So far these literate hooligans are still hidden on the internet.

Pat's short official bio reads as follows, but trust me, there is more to the guy than meets the eye: the author of three novels as well as numerous poetry selections. His writing has been published in The Paris Review, Rolling Stone, Exquisite Corpse, Brooklyn Rail, Posit, Otoliths, and the Hurricane Review. His work has also appeared in various anthologies, including Up Late, American Poetry Since 1970, Poems for the Millenium, and Saints Of Hysteria. He is the publisher of Nualláin House Publishers. He has also curated a number of blogs featuring his poetry, prose, and criticism, most recently Dime Pulp, A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine, and Parole, blog of The New Black Bart Poetry Society. He lives in the redwood wilds along the Russian River in Northern California.

from Week

On The Use of Euphemisms

by Pat Nolan

Wendt took note that the swim consisted of a lot of information about the proportions of oxygen to hydrogen, and a lot of that information consisted of lists, of coincidences, of lists of coincidences, and that he was doing the Australian crawl when he wasn’t doing his favorite, the breast stroke.

His finger was poised to depress the doorbell over which a brass plate bore the name R. Granahan. Professor emeritus Richard Granahan had a duplex over in the Saint Anne’s neighborhood. At that moment the dingy white door with a large dusty square of pebbled glass taking up the top half opened and Marguerite Sayrah emerged, blinking twice before realizing who was standing there. Then she made an unpleasant face and brushed passed him with a grunt of disapproval. She was followed by a short round man with an orange billed Giants ball cap and a patchy black beard. He was dressed entirely in black, except for his orange Converse sneakers. He kept his head down to avoid looking directly at Wendt.

Wendt shrugged and let himself in. He followed the hallway down to Dick’s bedroom. Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the old man was given six months to live. That had been nine months ago. Dick Granahan, prize winning poet, scholar, and infamous lothario, had been Wendt’s faculty advisor at State during his ill-fated attempt at a post-graduate degree. As Dick was also fond of a hearty brew, they often went for a drink at The Rustic Union, a pub within walking distance of campus. Granahan’s graduate level Advanced Poetry Seminar met there on occasion. What he called his “meet the masters” class. He would invite well-known literary figures to dinner and drinks in the company of his students. He discontinued it after a while because, as he said, “there was just too much disappointment.”

Then there was what became known as the “Grannyhand” scandal. Apparently, RG, as some people referred to him, had offered extra credit to some of the female students in his undergraduate Advanced Poetry class in exchange for the rendering of a particular sexual favor. Grannyhand seemed to say it all.

Close to retirement, Dick quietly resigned his position at State and the University just as quietly swept it under the rug. Not long afterwards, Granahan was offered the position as head of the writing department at New Arts Inc., the chain of liberal arts diploma mills with campuses in most big American cities. At New Arts Inc., Frisco, or NAIF, sexual relations between staff and students were not unheard of or particularly frowned upon.

The Grannyhand affair was not without its backlash or consequence, however. Dick’s wife, Jane, divorced him. His only son, Austin, refused to speak to him. And his daughter, Marla, possibly exhibiting some of her father’s predilections, became a lesbian porn queen. It had been a rough time for his old friend and Wendt was one of the few who stood by him. Through the odd coincidence of chance and habit, they would get together regularly on Tuesdays. Even so, it was not quite a month of Tuesdays since he’d dropped by. Watching his old friend die was not at all comfortable.

Richard Granahan was a profane little man with a slab of snow white hair slapped across a wide forehead and a nicotine stained cookie duster below the bloated and pocked bulb of broken blood vessels. When RG died, and that might be any day, they could roll him up, attach a handle to him, and he would be no larger than a moderate sized suitcase. But even now, bedridden, he seemed quite alive. At least his hand was, under the sheets. Pummeling? Or grabbing?

“That’s ok, Dick, you don’t have to give me a demo. I’m quite familiar with how it’s done.”

The shrunken old man startled, pulled as he was by two dissimilar impulses, surprise and ecstasy. Surprise won because it was more immediate. “Wendt, you crazy son of a bitch, you could have given me a heart attack!”

“Why don’t we just say that I saved you from another one of those little deaths?”

Dick, laughing now and relieved for the distraction, extended his hand in greeting.

“Hope you don’t mind if I pass,” Wendt said pulling a chair closer to bedside, “I know where that’s been.”

Dick’s face glowed red as the big smile that broke across his face rendered him speechless.

“So, been practicing long?”

“At my age, sex with anyone but myself would just be plain embarrassing. After you reach a certain place in life, your cock is your only friend. You and it against the world! To my amazement I can still get it up. Long enough to do the job!”

“Ow! Please, Dick! Too much information!”

“At one point I figured why not get that momentary pleasure that still puts a sparkle in my eye. I want to die with that sparkle in my eye. I work on it daily.”

“So that’s why you were rowing with one oar.”

“Right, yanking the crank.”

“Stretching the slinky.”

“Choking the doughboy.”

“I always heard it as choking the chicken.”

“Yes, that’s fairly common, as is pounding your pud.”

“Whatever a pud is.”

“I’ve heard that pud is the diminutive for pudding.”

“I guess that makes sense, in its own odd way. As much as baby batter makes sense.”

“On the other hand, it could very well be a shortened form of pudendum.”

“Pounding your pudendum? I can see why it was shortened. But I thought that pudendum applied to female genitalia.”

“It has come to be applied almost exclusively to the female but it applies to the male as well. Interesting that the Latin root for the word is the verb ‘to be ashamed.’ So you can see that self-gratification has a long history of disapproval.”

“Beating your meat, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphors, doesn’t beat around the bush.”

“Clearing the pipe is also quite graphic but quotidian.”

“I was always partial to flogging the log.”

“Well, yes, that does have a kind of assonant alliteration that is stock and trade in these kinds of euphemisms. Like buffing the banana or grappling the gremlin.”

“Lobbing a gob.”

“Collaring the cleric, testing the testicles, yes, like that.”

“Venting the ventricle, pumping the python.”

“Have you ever heard punishing Percy? That goes a ways back.”

“Right, like playing pocket pool.”

“And there are those that take on the attributes of labor like varnishing the flag pole or adjusting the antenna.”

“Basting the ham.”

“Painting the ceiling.”

“Warming up the engine, restarting the rotisserie.”

“Lubricating the lance. I imagine that has quite a provenance.” Granahan had started giggling, his eyes moist with delight.

“True, jollying the Johnson is more contemporary. As is jacking junior.”

“I believe that the British have it as wanking the willie, or just wanking which is rather pedestrian for a tribe that prides itself on its poetry, don’t you think?”

“Don’t they also say pulling the taffy?”

“Boffing the bishop.”

“How about fingering the skin flute?”

“No, I think flute refers to another feature of that nether anatomy.”

“I was thinking flute like something someone would blow.”

“Of course. Then there are the ones that refer to other species to aid in their subterfuge. Stroking the snake. Taming the shrew. Tugging the slug.”

“Wagging the walrus. Bending the badger might also be one.”

“Spanking the monkey.”

“Oiling the one-eyed eel.”

“That’s rather exotic but since we’re being aquatic, how about releasing the tadpole torpedoes?”

“Goosing the frog?”

“Hmm, that has a rather cross species perversity to it.”

“Opening a worm of cans.” Wendt smiled at the interpolation, but Dick didn’t seem to notice, intent as he was now on what had become a competition.

“Manhandling the midget, tenderizing the tube steak.”

“Stretching the meat sock.”

“Waxing the carrot.”

“Twanging your magic twanger.”

“Practicing the secret handshake. Also referred to as performing a sleight of hand.”

“Pulling the wool over old one-eye.”

“That’s only if you’re not circumcised.”

“Good point.”

“Then for the educated man there’s always erecting a singular proposition.”

“Oh, in that case, fleshing out the future.”

“Enabling the opposable advantage.”

“The precious thing hard to obtain.”

“What’s not hard? It’s available day and night.”

“It’s Jung. The infantile ego and all that crap.”

“Well, that takes all the fun out of it.”

“You asked.”

“Well, how about this: stealing fire.”

“Exactly what I was getting at.”

“Grasping the awful truth.”

“Dowsing the abyss. For the existentialist wanker.”

“Quickening the pulse.”

“Ordering the hors d’oeuvres, whisking the marinade.”

“Restocking the inventory. For the neo-Darwinians.”

“Slapping your pappy, mastering your domain.”

“Shaking hands with the master.”

“Now you’re getting down to the truth!” Granahan insisted, animated by the amusement of their word play.

“Grappling with the love vine.”

“That’s fine if you think you’re Tarzan. But then who doesn’t?”

“Owning up to your onanism.”

“Tagging the bed sheets.”

“Going blind on a date with yourself.”

The old man shook with a paroxysm of laughter, gasping for breath like a wicked rag doll.

“Shit, Granahan, you ok?”

Eyes watering, a smile full of yellow gnashers, Dick nodded. “It’s laughter you have to watch out for. It’ll kill ya.” He wheezed out a few more chuckles.

“So who were you wanking on?”

Granahan hesitated. “Who was I what?”

“Come on, Granahan, who did you have across your knees in the fold-out spread? Wait a minute! I ran into her on my way out!”

Granahan’s mug was the model of sheepishness. “Yeah, Marguerite Sayrah.”

“Ok, I’m beginning to see a pattern. Wasn’t Kay one of your students at State?”

“Yeah, fuck, Wendt, you’re on the right track. No need to spell it out.”

“A sister in the silly putty sorority of the grannyhand. I bet there’s even a blog devoted to the posting and discussion of their experiences, barbeques, bitch sessions, travels to Cancun where they seek out old retired English professors and fulfill the old farts’ fantasies. Though I’ll bet Kay doesn’t belong to that group or read their blog.”

“I’ve done some things I’m not very proud of. I’m ashamed of my anti-social transgressions.”

“Well, yes, you did teach creative writing.”

Granahan ignored him. “And that’s one chapter in my life I would do over if I could. I’m not going to get the chance. I feel bad enough about it. You don’t have to rub my face in it.”

Wendt pulled the half-pint bottle from his inside pocket and held it up to Dick. “Here, maybe this’ll give you a lift out of your self-pity. It’ll help with that mealy taste in your mouth.”

“Jesus, you really are trying to kill me, aren’t you?

Wendt shrugged and took a bite of firewater. “Headache cure.”

“Now that, on the other hand, is just unhealthy. Wendt, it’s not even noon!”

“I eat at noon. Now’s the time for a drink.”

“You on a tear? You look a little rumpled.”

Wendt told him the tale of his eviction from Dorian’s couch. “This is just going to be one of those days that’s longer than twenty four hours.”

“How is old Dorian these days?”

“Just like you, dying.”

“Yes, and the vultures are circling.”

“Speaking of which, what’s going on with Kay? She just renewing old attachments?”

“Who? Oh yes, Marguerite. Very funny.” Granahan sighed, “She’s under the illusion that she’s my literary executor.”

“Who was the little guy with her?”

“A poet, I can’t remember his name. He is quite technically adept. Which is why I might question his qualifications as a man of letters. They’re different realities, you know.”

“So like Igor to her Mary Frankenstein?”

“They want me to post my thoughts and poems on this blog they created for me. They didn’t like the name I came up with, but they weren’t going to get me to do it otherwise. It’s called With My Last Dying Blog.” Granahan dragged a swivel arm table with a laptop attached to it directly in front of him. “I’ve got this set up, see. It’s supposed to be some sort of cross media engagement of the arts. So I’m to type in some old poems or the couple of new ones, the ones that still dribble out. Or I recycle some of my old essays. Or lectures. I can say pretty much anything I damn well please. People can comment on what I say in this comment box, here.” He moved the arrow to point at the small rectangular window to one side of the page on the screen. “I call it the snark tank. Lot of mudslinging and mud wrestling goes on in there. But what do you expect? They’re just kids.”

“Ill-mannered children jockeying for status in the eyes of their elders,” Wendt volunteered.

The old man sighed, weary. “Some days I don’t feel like saying anything. Then I get a flood of queries asking me if I’m ok when in reality they’re wondering if that last post I put up was virtually the last one and am I now just a flat line.” Dick widened his eyes in mock disbelief. “And the sycophants! It’s like having a whole meadow of sheep lined up to kiss your ass with their bleating inane servility! The last couple of times I’ve posted I’ve been saying things like ‘Get a life!’ Or ‘fuck off!’ That’s why Marguerite and Igor were here. Because I was being uncooperative and ruining her expectations of me.”

“What’s the big deal? You get to ensure your legacy.”

Dick spat “Legacy” as if the word had a bad taste. “I’m a fossil.”

“So you’re immortal chalk. Why not lay down some tracks, let the future generations figure out what you’re all about?”

“I’d rather jerk off.” As soon as he spoke the words, Dick’s look of consternation and dread prompted Wendt to glance back over his shoulder. A tall shadow in a religious habit had materialized in the doorway. There was something very unfeminine in the angles of the face peeking out from the starched frame of the wimple.

“It’s ok, Sister, he’s a friend of mine,” Dick called anxiously as the nun’s shadow melted away.

“What happened to Paloma?” Paloma, a busy little Filipino woman, had been Dick’s hospice worker from the beginning.

“I don’t know. One day this nun shows up. And says she’s one of the volunteers at the Hospice Center and would be taking Paloma’s place until they found a replacement for her. Maybe she went back to Manila. It’s downright creepy. I went to Catholic schools growing up in Marquette. All my teachers were nuns. Do you have any idea what that does to you?”

“Maybe. I attended a nursery school and kindergarten run by two French nuns of an Irish order. The Sisters of Perpetual Redundancy. I learned to speak a little French and dislike the Irish.”

“You know the problem with having nuns as teachers? You fixate on saintly women and end up with one, and everybody knows you don’t want to live with a saint. Let me tell you, I know from experience. We used to fear and hate them. We had this joke. If penguins are flightless birds, what are nuns?”

Wendt shrugged, the bottle to his lips

“Fuckless chicks!”

The nun was having a cigarette leaning against the stucco balustrade of Granahan’s stoop. The nun was a man.

“Got a cigarette?”

The nun reached deep into his habit for a crumpled pack and shook one out.

Wendt accepted a light. “So what’s the story with the nun getup?”

The nun scoffed a laugh and told the story. Granahan’s hospice worker, Paloma, had complained to the parish priest that Dick was doing lewd things in front of her and she was worried that if Granahan kept at it, he would go to Hell. She liked her job and was fond of Mr. Dick, as she called him. She just wanted to know how she could get him to stop. Father Russo, the parish priest, knew the Granahans quite well. As a young family they often attended services together, and he had counseled Dick and Jane before their divorce so he was aware of a lot of the intimate details of their lives. He knew that Granahan had attended a parochial school run by nuns as a child. He decided to try and shame him by replacing Paloma with a nun, but he didn’t want to subject the good sisters to such wanton display. Father Russo knew that he was a performance artist who included a skit about a nun in his repertoire. The man owed the old priest a favor. So he garbed up and roamed the halls looking fearsome.

“Hasn’t helped, has it?”

“No, he’s still greasing the mongoose.”

“Getting rosin for the fiddle.”

from Week

Schools Of Poetry

Wendt met Andy Porter for lunch at Bebop Dim Sum Café on Clement. The place was run by a jazz lover from Taipei who still had not mastered his adopted tongue. The musical ambiance was Golden Age bebop. Whenever the owner saw Wendt he would shout “Bud Powell!” but unfortunately it came out sounding like “butt powwow!” Invariably heads would turn.

He had spent the morning being guilty and dithering over imaginary details. Sometimes his life, like the weather, sucked. Even though there were hints that spring would finally make an appearance, fog banks persisted. There was always sun in the Mission. Just ask those who lived there. Out in the Avenues, cold steel-gray wool clung to the belly of the sky.

Andy was cheerful, maybe a little more than usual. He was young, after all, hopeful, full of ambition, full of himself. This was different. He was bursting with what he wanted to say.

“Good news?” Wendt asked as the waitress placed the pot of green tea between them.

“I got the fellowship. I’m going to China!” Then he shared his excitement, in Chinese, with the waitress who giggled and moved quickly back to behind the service area. Andy liked to practice his Chinese on restaurant staff, often with hilarious results. Wendt was clueless but amused by Andy’s apparent discomfort.

“I think I just said, ‘a dog’s leg is bitter as ashes after sex.’” He shrugged, resuming his cheery demeanor. “I’ll be a year in Shanghai. I’m really looking forward to it. I don’t leave till late August, but I’m going to make an exploratory trip in June, just to get a feel for it.” Andy was beside himself, “It’s going to be really cool,” and blushed at his enthusiasm.

“That’s great, Andy.” Wendt poured the tea into both their cups. “Your girlfriend will be house sitting for you while you’re gone, I assume?” The wheels had begun their spin, tumblers rolling, in the slot machine behind his eyes. Andy lived in a studio apartment on Turk, a pied-à-terre owned by a relative or a friend of a relative.

“I don’t think so. She’s spending the summer with her parents in Rhode Island, and she’ll be gone as soon as her classes are over.” Andy made a fake sad face. “We’re kind of in the process of separating. She’s going to intern in DC, and I’ll be in China.” He turned over a hand, palm up, as if letting something go. “Why?”

Wendt explained his upcoming eviction from the Balboa address. He would need a temporary launch pad until he could find a more permanent situation. He mentioned that Nora was arranging a reading tour for him. He did not mention that nothing had been settled, and often Nora’s schemes resulted in miscommunications and the threat of lawsuits. So, ostensibly, he was assured, virtually, of a cash flow.

Andy agreed readily. And having Wendt look after his tiny apartment would be perfect for the month he was away on his recon mission to Shanghai.

Ka-ching! Wendt thought, which is not in itself a Chinese expression meaning jackpot. The perfect solution had presented itself, an archipelago of house sitting for his friends dotting the summer months while they vacationed in Big Sur or Yosemite, Paris or Athens, someone to collect the mail, stack the newspapers, water the plants, pet the gold fish. The wobble of his flight for the last couple of days stabilized, and his smug became a little more self-satisfied.

There was more to Andy’s show and tell. He handed over an issue of Autoclone, a literary magazine from Tasmania, for Wendt to page through.

“International, with a twist.”

“It’s the first time my own writing has appeared outside the country. That is if you don’t count the poems I published in Perverse Notions, an on-line magazine from Oslo.”

Wendt recited a list of his foreign publications. “Translated into Hungarian, Czech, Finnish, and Romanian. I have no idea if they even came close. I was in that French anthology and whoever translated those poems made me sound like a tight-assed academic.”

“Weren’t you in an Italian anthology?”

“Right, I was. Do you know that in Italian my poems rhyme? But then so do everyone else’s. It’s a wonderful lyrically rich language.”

He tried to remember the name of the anthology, but that had been years ago. Secret Ballot? Something like that. And that had been Sheila’s doing. One of the editors was a friend she made when she’d studied a year in Padua. He remembered how delighted he’d been at the thought of being read in Italian.

Interesting also that the French experience had turned out to be so phonetically askew. And his inclusion in that anthology had been with the help of Val Richards who was a lycee schoolmate of the publisher of the volume. He remembered the name of that anthology because of his original mishearing of the title, something that caused him additional consternation once he learned the truth. He had been told by Val, who had a habit of slurring her words when she took certain pills, that the anthology would be titled L’heure du temps which his rudimentary French told him was a typical Gallic redundancy but, loosely translated, was The Time Of Day. When he finally got his hands on the volume he read his mistake. The title was L’horreur du temps.

Andy passed a book the size of a small shoebox across the table. “Here’s that anthology I was telling you about.”

“Whenever I read an anthology I always think of all the poets whose poems are not represented, and that’s an anthology in itself.” Wendt scanned the columned gallery of names on the back cover. Not one signaled recognition. “Ok, here’s one, A.W. Porter. That’s you, right?”

A rosy glow colored Andy’s cheeks. “Yeah, but you know, the editor was a year ahead of me at Stanford. It helps if you know someone.”

“You’re telling me?” Wendt flipped the volume and read the cover. “Poets of a Later Latitude, A Geography of Poets Under 30. No wonder I didn’t recognize any names.” He set the large book on its spine and let the pages flop open at random. “And look at that, it opened right to your poems! Good placement. Do you have to pay extra for that?”

The noodles arrived and Wendt ordered a Tsing-tao. He was beginning to feel pretty. A significant worry had been alleviated. It made him feel a hundred pounds lighter, virile even. He felt like having fun, special fun, rather than his usual mundane day to day fun. A frenetic Charlie Parker solo punctuated his musings.

“I always like looking through the contributors notes, sometimes they’re more interesting than the poems.”

Andy chuckled his agreement.

“Let’s see now, here we go, Andrew Walter Porter. . . .”

“Walter’s my mother’s dad, my grandfather’s name.” And then as an afterthought, “Isn’t Walter your first name?”

“You are correct,” Wendt said considering his first taste of the old German recipe of his Chinese beer, “but, no offense, I didn’t want to be known as Wally so I go by my nomen, my middle name. It’s one syllable so it’s direct, to the point. Kind of like ‘shit’ or ‘fuck,’ both of which I’ve answered to, by the way.”

“What about Walt? That’s one syllable.”

Wendt feigned consideration with an impish grin, “A little too Whitmanesque, I’d think.” He referenced what he’d been reading with his finger on the page. “Anyway, your note says, born in Santa Barbara in, hmm, for some reason I thought you were older. Currently pursuing a post-graduate degree in Asian Studies at Stanford. Published in Yadda Yadda, This Then, and Contemporary Literature In Translation. So you’ve got some cred, that’s good.”

Wendt turned a page. “Who are these other clowns? Jesus, look at this guy, Ross Arbuckle, associate professor and he’s hardly a few years older than you. Two books of poems, too. You’ve got some catching up to do.

“Jerrold Lloyd, professor of Creative Writing, a string of books from presses I’ve never heard of, the recipient of the Golden Lyre and he’s barely twenty-nine. Ok. Laurel Hardy, also twenty-nine, lives in Vancouver, MFA from SFU, recent book, Special Agent from Scre-eming Lesbo Press.

“Barbara Keaton, professor of European Literature specializing in Beowulf. How can someone so young specialize in Beowulf? Baffling.” Wendt shook his head with mock consternation for Andy’s benefit. Andy, for his part, was enjoying the running commentary.

“You’re traveling in some pretty rarified company. And Darla Costello. A Steiner Fellow. How nice. She’s like a year younger than you and yet she has two books of poems, Don’t I Know You From The Microwave? from Platypus Press. . .must be an Australian publisher . . . .”

“I think that’s a misprint. It should be I Don’t Know You From The Microwave.”

“. . .and Last Warning, Poems of Self-Destruction and Resurrection. Her titles are intriguing.”

“Get this, the guy she studied with is the Buddhist poet who runs the monastery outside of Omaha.”

“Omaha. Perfect place for a Buddhist monastery. Om. . .Aha!”

“So essentially Costello studied with an abbot.”

“You know her?”

“Sure, she’s part of our gang, you know, the writers down in Palo Alto, the two Steves, Panke and Timey, Alfred Falva. Darla’s married to Ben Turpin.”

“The musician?”

“Right, the horn player. He’s been on Leno.”

“That’s some glamorous crowd you’re running with.” And referring to the book again, “How about Laurence Mot-Kerlit?”

Andy shrugged. “I’m like you, I haven’t heard of a lot of these clowns, either.”

“Professor of Abstract Languages at Buffalo. Now there’s a job for a poet, a buffalo job.”

The noodles had cooled to an edible heat though their spice ensured that they were enjoyed tentatively. Distracted, while they slurped and then inhaled big gulps of air through their mouths to cool their tongues, Wendt leafed through the paper brick.

“Ok, so explain to me what these guys are about. Are they any good? Besides you. I know you’ve got chops.”

Andy was bursting to please. “Well, there’s a real mish-mash in here because the editor wanted to be representative. A mistake, I think. Anyway, you’ve got your conpo. . . .”

“Whoa, whoa, your what?”

“Conpo, conceptual poetry. Or poets.”

“Alright, I can see poets as a concept. But I thought conpo would be more like the poetry my friend Deidre Davis, DeeDee the Destroyer we call her, for the number of marriages she’s torpedoed, taught to the inmates at San Quentin or here at juvenile hall.”

“Uh, no, it’s like when you say Ampo for American Poetry. Or Fopo for foreign poetry. And formal poetry too, I suppose.”

“I’ve heard of faux pas, never Fauxpo. But I can dig it. Pretend poetry. That could be what I write.”

“And there’s Fempo and Gaypo.”

“Is there a bipo, you know, for bisexual poets? Or would that stand for bipolar poets? Like Jimmy Schuyler. Or Ann Sexton.”

“That would probably be bipopo,” Andy said without cracking a smile. “And Avpo which stands for avant-garde, or average poetry.”

“Sometimes they’re the same.”

“Mopo for modern poetry.”

“Mopo sounds like one of those Japanese toys you keep on a key chain.”

“And there’s Autopo, Surpo, Clapo, NeoClapo, Pomopo.”

“Northern California Indian poetry?”

“No, Postmodern Poetry. Native American poetry would be Napo.”

“It’s like you’re naming off future generations of Marx Brothers. I mean, look at all the possibilities. Synpo, Cypo, Actpo, Poactpo, Slapo, Slangpo, Slampo, Slurpo, Minpo, Haipo, Gypo. . . no, wait, he really was a Marx brother.” Wendt pointed his faux porcelain spoon at Andy for emphasis. “So by what you’re saying, it sounds like schools of poetry are similar to vaudeville acts.”

“There is a Hypo. It stands for hybrid poetry.”

“Oh, I see, I was thinking of haiku poetry. Hybrid poetry, isn’t that a little redundant? On the other hand, hypo could also stand for hypothetical poetry. I’m pretty sure that’s what I write.”

“That would probably have to be hypopo. And I suppose you could have hypnotic poetry which would be hypnopo, and you’d have to have posthypnotic poetry and that would be pohypnopo.”

“Now you’re talking! We’re starting to sound Greek!”

The pot stickers and pork buns had arrived and both men fell to with a relish that belied the simple fare.

“Come on, Wendt, weren’t there schools of poetry in your day?”

Carl held the slug of beer in his mouth and raised an eyebrow. I’m continually being defined by my past, he mused.

“Oh, sure,” he said finally to ease the embarrassment that had set Andy’s ears aglow. “There was the Homunculus School of Poetry. Only cared about what went on in their heads, the body mattered not. Their poems had that hall of mirrors effect, you know, the repetition of an image ad infinitum. If they’d had any imagination they’d have called themselves The Infinite Regress School.”

Wendt turned his eyes upward and to the left as if he were scanning a script. “And there was the Heavy Metal School. Not to be mistaken for the Leaden School. They were mostly second gen New York School types though they were more into ‘rock mine off’ than Rachmaninoff. Working class kids who got the call. It was short lived. The working class has a built-in bullshit meter and it wasn’t long before they realized that the poetry scene was complete bullshit.”

Andy chortled and had the waitress bring another round of Tsing-taos. Wendt was going to tsing for his lunch.

“Then there were the Homo Poets. The name has nothing to do with sexual preference or orientation, and everything to do with sameness. Some of those people should have been working for the department of weights and measures! Their obsession with the anal perfection of the identical was maniacal.” Wendt stabbed at a pot sticker with a chopstick. “The Pointless School of Poets, they’re still around. The Iceberg School of Poetry, all below the surface, lying in wait for the Titanic of the unconscious. The Surrogate School of Poets and their exclusive magazine, Turret, Vince Clayborn, dreadnaught and editor. The Usurpers, anti-academic slammers who for all intents and purposes grabbed up all the academic posts and honors that they had once so vociferously trashed. OG’s, the Old Guard, and the Leaden School with their dense, turgid paperweight verse.

“Of course, my favorites of all time were the Anti-Gravity poets, floating above the fray, resisting the pull of gravity and it’s aura of authoritarian self-righteousness and inherent elitism. The California Pretenders, a band of wild and wooly poets, essentially neo-romantics, who are no more because romantics are well, lemmings, and so,” Wendt made a mime with his hand that depicted a leap off a cliff, “you know the rest. Defenestration. Did they jump or was they pushed?”

“I had a prof in a survey course as an undergrad who described the romantic poet as posed on a promontory, wind in hair, waves crashing below, an image that’s stuck with me.”

“Exactly! Poised to leap.” Wendt smiled with satisfaction that his point had been proven. “And then there’s the whole underground of secret poetry societies.”

“Really? Secret poetry societies? Who’s in them?”

“Nobody you’ll ever hear of. They’re mainly loose fits, not quite misfits, the lumpen poetariat collected under various acronyms like TANTRA, The Association of No Talent Rejected Artists, or POO, Poets of Outer Orbit, whose motto is Kerouac’s ‘Poetry is shit’.”

“Didn’t Genet say that, too?”

“Probably. It’s a French thing. Merde. Such a poetic word.” Wendt took a sip from his glass. “The AWWA, The Association of Waxed Wing Ascenders also known as The Icari. And of course the C Squared group, the Comic Cosmic poets.” He paused. “Maybe that’s the Cosmic Comic poets. Also known as The Holy Fools.

“Anyway, all this speaks to a factionalized regimented poetry world. There have always been poetry groups, exclusive societies of amateur writers who essentially snubbed anyone who wasn’t part of their crowd. And sometimes they affixed a name to their association, as a kind of shorthand for those in the know. It was Breton and his Surrealist who institutionalized the idea of a school of art or literature. Surrealist and Surrealism became brand names. And now everyone wants to brand themselves, literally and figuratively. I mean, look at the prevalence of tattoos. You can’t be a loner anymore. You can’t be unique. Or to be unique you have to be so extreme as to be the center of attraction that aligns everyone else like iron filings around a magnet. And then you’re just part of a group, a social network, a school. When anyone talks about outsider art, they’re just stating the obvious. All true artists want to be outsiders. But being an outsider, an eccentric is anti-social. Group poetry, by your designation, groupo, is in.”

“So like what are you, Carl? A ronin, a masterless poet?”

Wendt laughed. He liked Andy. Andy was a good poet on his way to becoming a university professor. He had a choice. Be a good poet or be a good professor. One invariably diluted the other. “That’s right, the I-Don’t-Belong School of Poetry that excludes everyone and includes no one.” Wendt drained the bottle into his glass and then looked up meaningfully at Andy. “Being a poet is not a club or association you belong to. Poetry is the leprous affliction of the exiled and shunned. It is not some kind of cult. It is the reaffirmation of a singularity.”

Andy had been down this road, or one like it, with Wendt before. He had an idea of what was coming. But that’s why he paid for lunch. Lunch with Carl Wendt was bound to be informative if not enlightening.

“The independent or non-aligned poet is relegated to the status of hobbyist by the professional cant of the academics who promote their own in a self-perpetuating literary daisy chain that includes big payoffs like inside track on hiring and fellowships. It has nothing to do with literature and everything to do with who is fucking who and who knows who is fucking who and how they can use it as leverage to keep the whole inane squirrel cage spinning. A bunch of no-talent hamsters.”

“Hey Carl, ease up, I’m going to be one of those academics, you know.”

“Not you, kid, you’ve got a head on your shoulders. Besides, you’re a scholar, not a professional poet.”

“Gee, who would that be?” Andy begged with mock innocence.

“Warren Pace, and just about everyone else in the Monotonous School of Poetry, is a perfect example. Also known as the monotones or the monos. Today I suppose they’d be monopo. And the Flatliners, an off-shoot that has lost most of its adherents to attrition or career changes.

“The collective under the banner of ‘school’ is the Trojan horse used to infiltrate the citadel of academe. The Monos created a cachet and marketed it through the exclusivity of social networking. Someone always had to be out, so that its members could be in. Poets United, whose initials says it all, a subset of more rigid intellectuals and poseurs, used exactly the same ploy. No effort is made to understand the undercurrent or the essence of the art, only the desire to make it different which only makes it, by its sheer novelty, self-cancelling.

“And what do they have to offer? Their awful middle class boredom, passing it off as profound intellectual angst. It never worked for me. Their focus on the technical aspects of poetry masks a deep misunderstanding of what poetry is. It’s not about technique. It’s not about how tight your pants fit. It’s about talent. It’s about undermining, not commodifying. But I suppose when you want to appeal to bourgeois taste, you have to think product, the aesthetic object that can be bought or bought into.” Wendt paused. He had to laugh at himself. His aesthetic critiques often degenerated into faux vitriol, amusing bluster of a Falstaffian cast, especially before a bemused audience such as Andy. He wasn’t about to take himself seriously. Not over lunch. But a few more points needed to be made.

“Once they’ve achieved the metaphorical high ground, they set themselves up as guardians of the velvet rope, id checkers, sniffers of social status, quantifiers of the quibble, bureaucrats of subtle hierarchy, enforcers of the status quo, crabs in a barrel, judge and jury.

“I had a guy come up to me after a reading some years back to tell me that he really liked my poems and admired the fact that I still kept at it. ‘This poetry racket is a hell of a hard one to break into,’ he told me. He knew. He’d tried. Eventually he gave it up, too many obstacles, too many tiny exclusive circles you had to run around in. Then he said to me, and I’ll never forget this, ‘they only know what they think and think only what they know. Everything else is unknown to them. The imagination is a primitive construct to mask what we really think about what we know, you know?’”

Sonny Stitt assaulted the bridge of Bopping A Riff, an old Bebop Boys standard from the forties with Bud on the piano comping in stride. How could music so old be so current? The chef was flashing him teeth and a thumbs-up from the entrance to the kitchen area. Wendt returned the teeth and the thumb.

Andy picked up the check and loaned him, in a manner of speaking, a twenty, the unspoken fee for mentoring.

Wendt grabbed a toothpick and a handful of peppermint candies by the register. “Have you heard anything about NAIF and Stoddard Leary?”

Andy made a face. “I don’t have much to do with that crowd, you know.” He tried to sound apologetic. “The last time I saw Stoddard was at Enrico’s, the night you were there.” Andy smiled as if remembering something pleasant. “You left with that redhead.”

“Ah, yes, Mac, the astral acrobat,” Wendt spoke cryptically.

“Anyway, Stoddard got increasingly drunk and boisterous, and at one point took off all his clothes, yelling ‘If Allen Ginsberg can do it, why can’t I?!’ Why?”

“Word is that his teaching position at NAIF is up for grabs.”

“Go for it, Wendt, you’d be awesome! I would even take your classes!”

“I’m sure I’ve told you this before, Andy,” Wendt said sucking on a mint, “I’ve done a lot of bad things in my day, but teaching creative writing is not going to be one of them.”

from Month

The Poetry Reading

Maybe the real reason Wendt had stopped giving readings was that they attracted all the same poetry deadbeats, dead heads, and brain dead. And the women who attended were mostly his age or older, usually the wives of his friends, fans, and or patrons. Not that that ever made the slightest difference. Or the occasional neurotic grad student with absolutely no social skills, and awkwardly sexual besides being an angry feminist covering for sexual timorousness, insistent that she be respected for her brain, not her pussy. The retort could have been “listen honey, I’d fuck your brain but my dick is too big to fit in your ear hole.” He wasn’t that crude or ever that drunk. Well, he’d never be Dashiell Hammett.

Wendt dreaded pushing open the auditorium door. Empty folding chairs in a cavernous space were always bad news. Slowly, as the evening progressed, the empty chairs would become emptier. For now there were clots of listeners scattered throughout to give it the air of being well attended. Fifty or more pairs of buns perched uncomfortably on metal ledges. Divided by the number of poets on the bill, it averaged out to about three and a quarter persons per poet. There was a stage and a podium, as might be expected, and most of the light in the cavernous acoustic nightmare was focused there. He stood at the back to let his eyes adjust. That’s where Irma found him.

“You’ve actually made it to a reading.” She hooked an arm through his. “That’s an event in itself.”

“When do you go on?” Wendt stared at the person at the podium trying to remember his name.

“I opted to get it over with early. That way I can listen to the poets without stressing about what I’m going to read.” She gave a pained smile. “Though I don’t know why I get the feeling that at large readings like this I’m committing public hari-kari.”

“Sorry I missed it. Self-evisceration can be quite a spectacle.”

“Carl, don’t try to be polite, it doesn’t suit you.”

In spite of himself, Wendt’s concentration focused on the reader. He wasn’t tuning Irma out. That would be impossible. She could be counted on to provide a running commentary of the reading and the readers.

The pace at which the poem being read, stately, metered, languid, sonorous with a clinical monotony as if it were being methodically inserted into the listener’s brain which required intense concentration from both the poet and the audience, was all too familiar. If he’d learned anything in his nearly forty year experience as a public reader of his own words, it was that the poem spoken is comprehended differently than read silently on the page. Sense wins out over meaning. Words passed without immediate understanding. Sometimes the pace and the rhythms were oceanic, hypnotic, leaving the listener comatose. On the other hand, the random soundscape of experiment was too often littered with the ponderous boulders of self drama. Some poets tried to read their poems with a tone approximating the neutrality of the page or with stentorian bombast brow beat the listener while others believed that approximating a hacksaw cutting through sheet metal was the best way to inculcate the masses. And yet still others, linguistic sadists, used words as turnbuckles. Fortunately every so often there were those who rose above the drone and caught the ear with their liquid colloquy, a honeyed speech being just that. Regrettably, the level of amateurishness was embarrassing. To an outside observer foolish enough to wander into such an event, there could be only one conclusion: they’d stumbled into a nest of losers.

The poet walked off the stage to a scattering of applause.

“Tom Rowley’s chatty poems are ok. They’re clever in a brain tweaky sort of way,” Irma opined, “but afterwards they always leave me feeling a little cheap between the ears.”

David Bloom, the MC, thanked the preceding poet and announced the next reader, a name Wendt was not unfamiliar with.

“Ugh,” Irma grunted, “Norma D’Monde! Her poems are so bad she’ll probably end up as the head of a writing program someday. And can you believe that dye job?”

It only took a few poems to prove Irma right, clearly writing program verse, anecdotal with barely a hint of music, labored wisdom, false epiphany, no chances taken, no surprises.

“That’s not poetry, that’s high fructose sentiment,” Irma’s snorted elegantly. “I was over at a friend’s apartment and I guess they ran out of cinderblocks because they were using Norma’s trilogy to prop up a corner of the bookshelves.”

“I’d read it as much as I’d read a cement brick” she answered to “Did you read it?”

And so it went, poet after poet, poem after poem: quasi-surreal cross-culture wake-up calls, declamatory lists accumulating momentum and achieving crescendo but then dropping off into bottomless illogic.

According to Irma, the next reader, Ann Tacit, author of Approval and soon to be published long poem entitled Earn, represented the catalog school of poets, which, as she explained, “contrary to what one might assume are not poets of compilation but poets who appear in slickly produced small press catalogs to create their own web of snobby literary assumptions. They’re also known as the California Cuisine School of Poetry—nice to look at but there’s not much there.”

“Ah,” Wendt breathed in comprehension, “overeducated middle class twits.”

There was never any quickness of mind. Some poems were like being stuck in a traffic jam of mirror images reflecting endlessly speculative details of what could have been done or was done or not. Woulda coulda shoulda as the old Indian chief used to say.

He knew Wallace Tambor from years before, still beating the drum of his associations in poems about meeting various famous poets and what he said to them, and they to him, most of them now dead and unable to contest his allegations. The halting sly wit of Ben Gunn’s dignified decrepitude and the desire to be present and accounted for overshadowing any regret. He was someone who reveled in anonymity and wrote a poetry to enforce it. Then Celia Thornbush, which, according to Irma, was an appropriate name for a feminist, and married to Bruce, a severe aesthete with a perpetually pained expression, but “should one wonder as he’s given his name to a woman who exemplifies, figuratively, the image of vagina dentata.”

It may have been a city ordinance that any multi-poet event had to include on its lineup a harangue with saxophone hipster staccato post-beat jive. Enrique Hermanos, aka KK, so his poem stated, offered the notion that music had returned to poetry in the form of a back beat. He was followed by Reggie Sides and some hip hop revolution poetry.

One of the readers, a woman rather elegantly attired but with the nervousness of a novice, read some surprisingly good poems which caused Irma to remark “she has a chin like a bottle opener.” Irma was never one to hold back from casting aspersions on the competition. One line unfortunately undermined all the poet’s good intentions. “The centrifugal force of the poetry whirl flings me to the periphery.”

“That’s not poetry,” Irma scoffed, “that’s just posturing.” And after Art Penn’s reading, “I know so many guys like that whose psychic turmoil makes for great poetry but really shitty lives.”

“It’s not a vocation for the insecure.”

“Yet they’re drawn to it. Moth, meet flame.”

“One does with what one has.”

“Who said it, the life of a poet, less than 2/3ds of a second?”

All the poets for the most part had that lean and hungry look of those who desired more than anything else to take their place in the spotlight and be the center of attention for even the slightest and most insignificant fraction of their allotted fifteen minutes of fame. He’d come to the conclusion that however well-intentioned, most poets belonged to the dissociative school, not that you could call it a school. More like a shark tank. “What was it William Carlos Williams said?” Irma asked, reading his mind, “There are a lot of bastards out there and most of them are writers.” Their factionalism and social ranking was tiresome. That was another problem with poets. They always want you to choose sides.

The next reader was Savannah George, real name Christine but Savannah was revealed to her during a trance. This was only after she had married the university economics professor whose last name she took. She held touchy feely writing seminars for women. Her own writing, homily laced pseudo-epiphany and gratuitous portraiture of women in history, was pedestrian at best. She was, on the other hand, one of the nicest people, saintly in some respects, with a wide-eyed intransigent innocence, nice and warm like the glow of coals but barely a flame above a flicker. Still, people like Savannah made him uncomfortable. They were like lampreys, psyche suckers. She was followed by a handsome young gay man. Funny how, among poets, it was the gay men who were physically appealing, the women mostly homely and severe, Irma and Val being among the few exceptions. His prancing O’Hara-esque faux camp preceded Taz Stevens (not to be confused with Cat or Wallace), an old snake oil salesman who crooned, with deep English sonority, signifying a pulpit gravity, the laments and lessons of an intemperate man.

“Yuk!” Irma exclaimed, “Flypaper poetry!”

Wendt had been thinking of when and where he’d first run into old Taz. Probably at the Blue Unicorn open readings back when any of them had to shave only a couple times a week and were still wet between the ears. Hadn’t changed his tune much since then. “Say again? Fly what?”

“Flypaper poetry. And poets. You know, the feel-sorry-for-my-sensitive-soul, pleas-for-attention school. Crass manipulation of emotions, sticky self-serving self-satisfied cloying sentimentality. Nothing is more boring than a poet left over from an era people have already forgotten.”

Wendt laughed. “Don’t hold back now, let it all out.”

“Did you know his wife ran off with one of her former kindergarten pupils? She’s like twenty five years younger than her!”

“Alright, now you’re just going to make me feel sorry for him.”

from Year

Fogged In Frisco

All women are crazy some of the time. Some women are crazy all of the time, but not all women are crazy all of the time. The old Orphic trick to avoid being ripped to shreds is to know how to identify some of those women and stay well away from them. It’s not always that easy. I tell myself that I’m done with cheap meaningless sex, but when it comes right down to it, I can never bring myself to pass up a bargain. Women by being penetrable are impenetrable. You can have your cake and eat it too but it’s very expensive. Culture does not so easily overcome biology’s overriding purpose.

Angie had dragged me to an art gallery opening on Market, of all places. This was around the time she was shopping for suitable seed with which to become impregnated. Maybe I was showing off. I’d said it before, and it mostly got a laugh. “Forget the sperm bank, I’m a walking ATM.” Third time was not a charm. I’ll never forget what I saw in her eyes at that moment: rage, disgust, disappointment, betrayal. Don’t shoot the messenger I wanted to say. But I’d been on a roll, and the transformation from ham to ass was almost inevitable. Besides who else is there to shoot or decapitate besides the sperm delivering messenger? The purpose of the Orphic is to stir up female frenzy before the mass fuck fest where the sacrificial victim, some old goat, always a male, is torn limb from limb.

That had come up in the discussion of The English Letter by M. Portmanteau in which the Brits were accused of ruining American literature. I’d been chatting with Lily Mao and her partner, Ann Toenin, the Russian author of Art Ode, a long poem consisting of exclamatory expressions such as Oh! Wow! Eeew!! Ugh! Hunh? Wha? Yuk! Bing! Bang! Boom! Arrgh! and Awk!

I was holding forth as usual and unwisely described the nature of women as concentric. Linda “Whore” Eisen gave me a narrow look. I was being serious. By concentric I meant round, full, centered in consensus. My first mistake was not following the golden rule of mixed company conversation. Such generalities are often viewed as mansplaining in the delicate negotiations of cross-gender communications and can leave you out on the proverbial limb.

“Cuntcentric? Did I hear you say women were cunt-centric?!” Linda wasn’t going to hide her disdain.

That wasn’t what I said, but since the opportunity had arisen, I thought I would see how much more of my foot I could fit into my mouth by espousing the minority opinion on the etymological origins of the word. Cunt comes from the ancient Akkadian khnt which denoted priestess in the temple of the Goddess Inanna, and was once a positive term to describe women. With the denigration of ancient cults by usurper religions, the word had accrued negative connotation. I don’t know why I thought that would cut me some slack.

She didn’t mince words. “None of what you say changes the fact that you are a condescending dickhead, Dickhead.”

Nothing can prepare you for the irrational self-righteous bitch or the crazed homicidal maniac, each tainted by their own hormonal destiny and hijacked by the ruthless almond shaped pea-brain.

Men may be idiots but women are lunatic.

It was Halloween and the following morning of dia de los muertos should have found me dead. That was when I came to hate her. It was then I understood Mac to be the most perfect example of feminine impermeability in all existence.

We’d spent the long day together in the Castro as the colorful and often risqué carnivalesque swirl erupted from bars with drunken hoots and shrieks, parading down the streets in high, very high, fashion. And with hardly any chance to talk, to catch up, jollying and jostling with old friends and new acquaintances, my own celebrity but mostly her credit card keeping us well watered. It was an evening destined for excess.

“Listen grapenuts, I’d be gay but I can’t do the snappy finger thing.” And like a broken record, much to her chagrin I’m sure, “Some of my best friends are cocksuckers.” Someone in the group jammed a powder blue wig on my head and shouted in my face, “You’re just an old queen!”

Eventually we found ourselves on the terrace at Enrico’s, a table overlooking Broadway, costumed freaks and partiers parading by, the default costume being do-it-yourself zombie, smeared catsup on face and clothing and moving like imagined reanimated corpses might walk. A few chollos in their best orange and black ambling behind their pit bulls followed by a bevy of transvestites dressed like they had just come from partying with the Sun King or returning from Cinderella’s Ball. Feathered nymphs and bare breasted goddesses exhibited themselves followed by a pack of male supplicants and slaves in leather. Teen couples drinking Jello shots or sucking on alcohol laced sno-cones ventured into the orange neon haze and the shadow black of night dressed as adults, indistinguishable from adults, all history and all mythology exhibiting the seven deadly sins.

On the street directly in front of our table, a man of about fifty, drawn cheeks no makeup could affect, gray stubble swathing his jaw, had stopped to stare at us, holding by the hand a small boy dressed in outsized clothes, and carrying on his arm another small child held to his shoulder. He was a transient, maybe even homeless. The children’s rags were not costumes. Maybe he had taken them out to relieve the horrible monotony of their uncertainty and poverty. It wasn’t on my powder blue wig he had fixed his gaze, perhaps even wonderment, but at Mac’s purplish glowing light-reflecting red satin low cut dress that left nothing to the imagination. That and the pair of little red horns topping the liquid curls of her carrot tresses. The wicked smile was not part of the costume but it fit the occasion.

Song writers say that pleasure ennobles the soul and softens the heart. The song was wrong that evening as far as I was concerned. Even as I was touched by the haunting eyes of such desperation, I felt ashamed for the drinks we hoisted, too big for our britches. I turned to her, to catch her attention and convey a shared empathy. I looked into those green eyes, home of caprice and governed by the moon, as she said, “Those people give me the creeps.” And summoning the waiter, “Can’t someone do something about them?” So maybe hate is too specific a word for what I felt. Certainly disappointment.

For an instant I entertained the notion that I was looking at myself but in the past, and that those children were ours, and I had finally found her after she had abandoned our marriage, and left me penniless and caring for the kids. And it chilled me, that her disdain came so casually, so callously, that she didn’t realize that I was just a step away from them.

When I came back from the can, there were strangers at the table. I snagged a waiter and he remembered Mac leaving with a couple of guys, headed up in the direction of Columbus. The sidewalks were packed with revelers and I had to weave my way through them. I thought I caught a glimpse of her heading up Columbus toward Green St. but I couldn’t be sure. There was more than one devil afoot that night. Then I lost them.

I heard my name called. I didn’t recognize Wendy at first, in her ladybug outfit of black leotards, a black turtleneck, and vest that supported the black polka dot red carapace on her back. She was wearing a white sequined mask around her eyes. On her head two ping pong balls at the tip of wires bobbed independently when she talked.

Every time I ran into Wendy, it was the same thing. She had become a stalker, at first moonstruck and then completely batshit obsessed. And each time I had to explain that I wasn’t avoiding her even though I was, and that I didn’t get back to the old neighborhood much anymore since Angie sold the house, that I spent most of my time making sure I had a place to sleep and enough to eat so I was pretty much occupied with my day to day survival. I had tried not to hurt her feelings, cowardly avoiding the inevitable confrontation. But that night, fed up with Mac and probably myself, I told her, cruelly perhaps, that she had to stop thinking we were in a relationship. Her face contorted in confusion. “You mean I’m not your girlfriend?” Likely it was impolitic of me to point out “We had sex, exchanged bodily fluids. Don’t make it any more than it is” but at the time it seemed a necessity.

I walked away up Green St. leaving behind a ladybug weeping on a corner crowded with superheroes, witches, fairy princes, and hockey masks. I thought I caught sight of the devil going into Giancarlo’s.

If a bar is a hole in the wall with bad lighting then Giancarlo’s is a bar. I had been 86’d from there a number of times, probably the only one ever banned for non-criminal behavior. I could be just that obnoxious. It was a hangout for the Aether crowd, adherents of the questionable poetics of Jack Spicer. And drinking among them was like feeding time at a zoo, every little crumb of a comment was taken with defensive exception. The more outrageous the observation, the more it roiled the self-righteous indignation. So many buttons to push, it was often too irresistible.

That night the big attraction was Rex Coprophilius, King Shit, crowned with a large white spotted red Aminita Muscaria-like Phrygian cap. He was a traditional figure in North Beach at Halloween, dressed entirely in various layers and rolls of newsprint, phonebooks, and streamers, led through the throng so that people might tear at his attire to propitiate the gods and monsters abroad that night, the torn scraps known as “pieces of shit.” He’d started off with twenty pounds of headlines stapled to his chest. By the time I followed him into Giancarlo’s he was down to his yellow pages.

And there was Mac at the bar talking to this little fireplug of a guy in a suit that was definitely not a costume. He was with two other guys in suits and neatly barbered hair. I immediately thought “cops” but couldn’t understand what the law would want with her. Not that it mattered. I walked right up. I said something. Derisive disappointment. Fascinated disgust at her selfish callow evil. She threw her drink in my face.

What words had I used? They hide from me in memory, skipped over like a needle in a groove to the part where the red pissed off face of some guy is insisting that I couldn’t say such things to a lady. I didn’t deign to even look at him. “Get this clown out of my face.” One of my talents is to be a complete arrogant ass.

The bartender, busy as he was, threw a thumb toward the entrance. “Ok, Wendt, you’re out!”

“But I just got reinstated.”

The bartender made a face. “Do you want me to have Jo-jo explain it to you?” Jo-jo was the bouncer, an Albanian giant who didn’t have the reputation for being gentle. I caught the drift and sauntered out to the sidewalk terrace of my own volition. I lit up a cigarette. I should have known it would come to this.

“Snort it,” she’d said. We were in a room at the Hotel Rexroth. She was naked and shiny. I was showing my age. She’d ground up the blue pill in the ashtray. I looked at the blue powder, “snort it?” “Yes, snort it!” Then her phone rang and she answered it. “When?” She stared at me. “Thanks, Nicole, I owe you one.” And then to me, “My husband is in the lobby with a couple of his Fremont cop buddies. They’re on their way up.” And as if she had to say, “You better leave.”

Clutching my suit coat and holding up my pants in the hallway, I heard the elevator ding arriving at the floor. I did an about face and headed for the door with the red exit sign above it. I heard the voices and the knocking as the door closed behind me. My unwieldy lumber jutted out from my briefs constantly in peril of snagging the iron pipe railing of the stairwell in my frantic descent. That had been a close call. It was apparent that Mac’s marriage was not as open as she claimed.

I was leaning on the wrought iron barrier to the terrace out in front of Giancarlo’s mulling the replay when I spotted Wendy coming toward me with a look of agonized determination. I stepped on my cigarette and turned to leave. The fireplug who had been talking to Mac was blocking my exit.

“You can’t talk to her like that.”

“Why, was it your turn?”

“She’s my wife,” arrived at about the same time as his fist to my jaw. Then the rain of blows coming from all directions sank me to my knees. I tried to squirm away on the sidewalk, absorbing the kicks to the gut, shielding my head with my arms, curling up to make myself smaller, more compact, and then the intense bolt of pain as a shoe crushed my shin against the edge of the curb, hearing as well as feeling the snap of bone with my entire body. I screamed, gasping for breath, an anguished naked roar. The gunshots, now that I realize that’s what they were, not the sounds of my rendering, accomplished a pause in the attack. I tried to crawl away, desperately seeking to leave the scene as well as find an equilibrium that might make sense of the searing heat in my mangled leg. What I finally managed was vomiting and lapsing into unconsciousness.

I don’t know if “lousy poet” was actually part of the beating. Maybe I just imagined it. Come to find out it was Mac’s hubby and his cop pals, practiced in the take down. Nothing ever came of it or I never heard that it did. Cops stick together, a fraternity, unlike poets, unaffiliated, cults of one. I’d heard that someone described the incident as “They were beating the hell out of a guy wearing a powder blue wig.”

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MINA LOY AND THE MILLENNIUM

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An Op-Ed of sorts, this section will give space to views that might raise the hackles of the editor. We begin with a poem by Mark Sargent, whose new book, “Fuck Death” is on its way to the publishers.

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