__ Literature is so vast, and I’m so green.__

O Ron, O Ron, what would my matchstick be without your carborundum?

Ron mentioned in his blog yesterday his intial critical reaction to reading Lyn’s _My Life_: “Lushness for its own sake.”

He said he’d had the same reaction upon first reading Clark Coolidge’s work (although I’m guessing he was not talking about _The Maintains_).

My brain starts playing a game of Jeopardy:

What is a jungle?

What is hair? or hips? or lips?

What is “sake”?

I suppose I have had the same feeling about pieces of writing at times. When I encounter “lush” writing that lacks what I earlier called “urgency” (or necessity, or evident motivation, or vibrancy — maybe all these are “sake”), that is, when it is too enamored of its own mannerism (Christian Bök — AND HIS BIG AWARD! How sour can grapes get?— comes to mind. Also perhaps Andrea Brady, Lisa Robertson, and a few others. But then, I’m one to talk.), I admit to feeling annoyed.

Yet I do hear in Ron’s reaction a condemnation of sensuous plenitude and detail; it’s everything I can do to keep from essentializing it.

No one ever says, “Sparseness (or austerity or conciseness, even) for its own sake.” Although it seems to me an equally possible reaction. One that I have on reading, say, Oppen or Williams. Maybe Barbara Guest, too. But not, oddly, Creeley. And certainly not on reading Ron!

I feel a bit like a Pomeranian nipping at his heels. I honestly mean no disrespect. He was a very important early influence on me. An example, many paragraphs down, will follow.

I first encountered Ron’s writing (and Lyn’s, and Stephen’s, and Barry’s, and Carla’s, and everyone else’s) when I was an undergrad at SF State in the Creative Writing program.

My mother had moved me, in 1979, to 40th and San Pablo in Oakland, at that time not the loveliest of neighborhoods, so that we could live in a dreadful little duplex across the street from her guru’s (Swami Muktananda’s) ashram. I went from living in semi-bucolic marijuana-infused lalaland to the ghetto, where my principal form of entertainment (when I wasn’t making collages out of old Nat’l Geographics or taking drugs or watching 50s reruns on TV and figuring out how to replicate the characters’ outfits) was riding the 72 San Pablo bus towards downtown Oakland, to the seediest part of the boulevard. There were so many prostitutes around there at that time, and I realize now that many of them may have been transsexuals, as they tended to be, for women, unusually tall. They were always well turned-out, I recall, in de rigeur hotpants. Down at the end of San Pablo was a St. Vincent de Paul thrift store that yielded magical finds, none of which I can now remember. But I do remember that I, a scarlet-haired punkette of fifteen, had no qualms about adventuring into what was no doubt the scariest part of town. I continued to be very active (if that’s the word for it) in the punk scene, and it was only a couple of traumatic events (which for once I suppose I will keep private — not that they’re any big deal, though), along with my mother’s urging, that led me back to junior college in 1980.

I remember taking some short-story writing classes at Merritt College and getting a lot of positive feedback on my stories. My stories had started out as quite normal, little emotional melodramas, and these were the ones that people liked, but the more I wrote the stranger and more dreamlike my stories became. They were even, dare I say it?, a little bit disjunctive — not in syntax but narratively. I was just beginning to sense a disconnect between the kind of music and pictures I liked (Kandinsky, I remember, was my favorite. And I loved loved loved Duchamp.) and the kind of writing I was doing. I had been writing poetry since I was little, and I’d been keeping notebooks since I was 12, so when it came time, when I was 18, to move out and really go to college, I decided on the Creative Writing program at SF State, figuring I wouldn’t be any good at anything else. Or at least as deeply interested in anything else to stay motivated. I flirted with the idea of studying music, but I didn’t have the proper background.

Creative Writing 101. 1982. My teacher was a very handsome blond man with a mellifluous speaking voice and an attitude much more coolly cultured than I could ever hope to cultivate. And he was a poet: Stephen Rodefer, whose _Four Lectures_, would later, while I was working at the SF State Poetry Center as a workstudy student under the supervision of Carla Harryman, win the Poetry Center annual book prize. Stephen was sometimes very encouraging, commenting about one of my poems, “You have more than just the knack.” Other times he could wither with his disdain. What was I doing wrong?

Working at the Poetry Center, I read all the books I could get my hands on. Stephen’s, for one. And _My Life_. And _Ketjak_. I can’t see the word “fellaheen” without thinking, “Ketjak”. Eager to please, and wanting to find a way out of the Norton Anthology-Sylvia Plath & Dylan Thomas- querulous personal lyric (which I suppose, sigh, in my way I’ve returned to, but not without having swept up a whole passel of influences on the way), I began, with all the energy of youth, to write imitations. I have a couple of files bursting with the writing I did around this time. The following excerpt of a piece, execrably titled “like a bad translation, hints, slightly”, is a hilarious adolescent hodgepodge of Ron, Lyn, and Stephen:

Although she felt flirtatiously deprived, she was glad not to be in Zimbabwe. A cask, no , a slug, no, a carafe of chablis, and then a walk up Sixth street. Then maybe she would weigh a testicle or two. Who knew? Ember ember lion boot belt. Lion, a sphinx is not particularly courageous. Oh I know you, I know you, and I love what I know. It was that element of playfulness and imprecision, turtle, gigolo. Defrocked, unlocked, oiled: firm determination. Orange plastic, orange bathrobe. Hats for idiots, orange, surrounding the accident. Hey look at that punk rocker! And metal crunched twice. Flipper glad to be waited on, glad to be thrown chunks of bread. A swarm of mosquitoes, not easily walked through. You should have seen the window, black and gooey. Beatle boots. Oh Edgar Allen Poe and her desire! She wasn’t going to censor it for anything. Turn your collar up, comme ca. The big question used to be who’s better, Michael Jackson or John Lennon? The great dane next door with long nipples. The miniature grand piano, painted gold, was also a music box. Really really wanting to take her wine out on someone. Jamaica. White cotton. Colt, a rhythmic exercise. Vroom! Vroom! Hey, that girl just wrote vroomvroom. A question of grace, of cool Tibetan drinks. I don’t “like” that. It’s minimal. An excuse. Grating, cheese or a gutter. Kind of nicey-nice, glockenspiel, all this hoopla. Bonkers, caca, souris, rats. One brick upon another. Get loud.

Eat a torpedo, then need gum to cover garlic. I’ll call you tonight, how about that? Cleavage. She be sayin’ let’s lay roun’ the house nekkid t’day but i din’ wan’ see her ass all stretched out on the couch. Offering it as a bridge or sacrament. What does lie beneath the connectives? I’m hearing you/ new piracy, blouson. I see, I hear. Laudamus. Obese fake hairy collar. Tam to hold dreads. Veneratum. God, I would never do something so obligatoire. Tinctures: why does love strike fear? Thou shalt itch, thou shalt bleed. Entirely tired, in entirety. Some important ploughing needs to be done. Take two round pieces of wood and clack them together. Very clever. Endeavor, belabour. Ho rumble drum. Only as fast as I can, only as fast as I can. What’s left of it? Superfreaky. Cigarettes, clove. Legwarmers. They can feel my beady eyes on them, crawling….almost as complex as a pomegranate….I know what she means when she says her heart flops over. You could practically sit in the poet’s lap. Literature is so vast, and I’m so green. Breast works squire. Mausoleum for clarity. That whole quality of visceral unease…

It’s cringe-y in parts, but there are a few lines I like, and it’s very interesting to me to note how I was becoming aware of notions like meta- and inter-textuality, heteroglossia, multi-lingualism, and what I will carelessly call “linguistic objectivism.” It also clearly came out of my sensibilities, not Ron’s or Lyn’s or Stephen’s, although the form is shamelessly aped.

They opened up my brain to the possibilities of what poems can be, contain, and look and sound like. From them I read backwards into NAP and the NY school, and learned to incorporate my interests in much earlier poetries (The Metaphysicals, the Romantics) into my own verse while still keeping it up-to-date and stylish. Thank you! Gracias! Arigatou! Yip! Yip! Arf!

I promise more memories of those fascinating and fractious SF days. But now I really must clean my house.