Ron, I was born in 1960 so I recall the 60s mostly from watching it develop in
front of me via a black and white television. You on the other hand were a
teenager then. Besides Kennedy being shot, which is the one event that really
stands out to you and how may it have later shaped the rest of your life? Also I
know that you have done a ton of interviews but I am wondering if anyone ever
asked you "who killed Kennedy?" before and do you have a reflection on that
perhaps?
That's three questions in the old math that we learned post-Sputnik.
Probably the most outstanding event of the 1960s for me personally was losing my
virginity, a momentous occasion for any boy. It was in the office of Jerry
Rubin, then organizing the Vietnam Day teach-in, and the young lady in question
was a volunteer secretary. At different points we were on the desk itself and on
a couch that I recall as being a very dark green. It was exciting & terrifying
all at once, and I vowed to repeat the experience again & again.
When I was a senior in high school, maybe 15 months early than that, I
"defended" Lee Oswald in a moot court we held in the senior civics class. I
argued that it was physically impossible to get three rounds off in the time
that is clearly articulated in the Zapruder film and brought a Mannlicher
Carcano rifle, the same model found in the School Book Depository, to class
(sans bullets) and challenged any student to try and get three "shots" off in
that time. I had borrowed the rifle from an English teacher — life was
definitely different in those days. So my Oswald got acquitted, and the School
Board eventually had to apologize to the City Council, noting that I had been "a
resourceful student."
In the 1970s, I was part of a project that recorded several hundred parole board
hearings in California, including one for Sirhan Sirhan where all the parole
board members did, throughout the entire hearing, was to ask him repeatedly who
his accomplices had been, and who had sent him.
I think that it's virtually impossible to have secrets in the contemporary
world. We know the identity of Deep Throat, we know what kind of sex Bill
Clinton had with Monica Lewinsky, we know the location of the "secret" CIA
prisons overseas. About the only thing we don't know is where the body of Jimmy
Hoffa is. The fact that we don't have anyone who has as yet come forward
vis-a-vis JFK does suggest that it may have been Oswald alone. But I think
historians will be arguing over than for another century. And the people who
have attempted to clean up the magic bullet theory ballistically are certainly
irrelevant.
Ron, one of the memories I have of the 60s was
watching The Beatles on the Ed
Sullivan Show, the news coming in at all times of the day about the latest
happenings in Viet Nam and also watching a lot of American Bandstand. How do you feel
about Dick Clark still showing up on the Rocking Eve party since he had the
stroke? Do you feel that entertainers should
know when to leave the public light?
Well, the hidden question there (or maybe not so hidden) is do I know when to
leave the public light? That's a question for any poet, given how rare it is for
a poet to be good at what they're doing for an extended period of time.
Regardless of how long their careers might be, most poets seem to have about a
ten-year peak. For Olson it was the 1950s, for Robert Duncan from, say, 1964
through 1974, you will find poets who argue that Creeley should have stopped
with For Love, while others will tell you (and I'm one) that it's the
decade that begins with Words that defines his transformative
contribution to American poetry. Denise Levertov's best work was in the 1950s
and early '60s, yet her Selected Poems barely notices that decade. For a
long time, the same was true with William Carlos Williams – when I began reading
him in the 1960s, it was the work from the 1940s & early '50s that everyone
focused on. It wasn't until the Frontier Press edition of Spring & All
that people went back to the work of the 1920s & '30s & came to the
understanding that this was the great work of his career.
What about myself, or my own generation? At one level it's something I feel
far too immersed in to get the necessary perspective. Sure, there are a few
poets whose work has been cut short by tragedy, such as Dan Davidson or Jerry
Estrin, or muted by drugs or alcohol – Darrell Gray was killed by it – but in
contrast with the poets of the 1950s we've largely been a healthy bunch. Much
more meditation, much less in the way of bad habits. And we're not doing the
same things now in the 21st century that occupied us in the 1970s,
when most of my cohort came of age. I don't think it's an accident that projects
like my blog or the Grand Piano are fundamentally critical in their
orientation. And if a number of my peers are teaching now, it's worth noting
that this isn't something that they waltzed into while still in their
mid-twenties.
It's also worth noting that there are poets in my age cohort – Rae Armantrout
is an excellent example – who are doing their very best writing right now. It
does occur to me that as the population as a whole ages over the next 25 or so
years that we may very well see a poetry of later life emerge such as we have
not previously experienced. What does it mean that Rae Armantrout & John Ashbery
(to pick poets from different generations) are both writing more now than ever
before? Perhaps we should all take the example of Willem de Kooning, Carl Rakosi
or Stanley Kunitz & not get off the stage until we are dragged away kicking &
screaming.