I'll Tell You a Story Says Al Simmons to The Panda

The Baseball Fan

The memory
Of her funeral
Hangs by the window.

I look out at the sad,
Gray day
And I am remindful.

I lit a candle to commemorate
Her death
Three years ago, on
September 29, 2004,
A full moon night.

The moon is an urn
Of our ancestor’s ashes.

My mother died on the morning of Rosh Hashanah,
The holiest day of
The Jewish calendar year.

My mother was not religious,
And never celebrated holy days,
But, she was a Jew,
And proud
To be so.

She was also a life long Chicago Cub fan,
And held on
Until the Cubs
Dropped out of the pennant race.

Three years have passed and
Rosh Hashanah came two weeks earlier this year,
And the full moon
Rose
On September 26,
Not the 29th.

The Cubs
Continued to break hearts.

But the question is
Which day
Do I commemorate?
Which calendar?

I thought about it
And bought her a candle
That burned
For two weeks.

That way I covered all her bases.
She would have liked that.

*


Letter to the New York Times, June 5, 2009, 30 Years Later: Poetry As A Literary Sporting Event

When I graduated from Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago in 1971, there were no poetry reading series in Chicago. None. And there hadn’t been one since Sherwood Anderson held readings in his living room in the 1930s and 40s, so any talk about Chicago being a “poetry town” since the turn of the 20th Century are dead wrong. The Blue Store Reading Series, which began in 1971, and hosted by myself, Terry Jacobson, Henry Kanabus, Stephen Pantos and Patrick McPhee, in a basement of an antique store on Wellington Avenue in New Town, began what is now seen as a literary renaissance in Chicago. Prior to the Blue Store Readings if you wanted to hear poetry read on a regular basis you had to travel to NYC. Six months after the birth of the Blue Store Reading Series, The Body Politic Readings began on Lincoln Avenue, and after that readings began sprouting up all over town and have been a growing phenomena since.

In 1979, I was poet-in-residence for the City of Chicago Council On Fine Arts. One early autumn night I was standing at the bar in Oxford Pub on Lincoln Avenue, when a reading that was taking place in a storefront next door spilled out into the street. Jerome Sala, a popular young local poet at the time, was giving a reading, when Jim Desmond, of the Jim Desmond Blues Band, was sitting in the audience and decided he didn’t like what he was hearing so Desmond picked up a chair and went after Sala. Somehow, they both ended up in front of me at the bar and I suggested, and they agreed, to put them in a boxing ring and let them beat shit out of each other, metaphorically speaking. I supply the rules and winner takes all. Thus was born the World Heavyweight Poetry Championship Fights.

Five years later, Marc Smith came up with an open reading format of the fights he named the Poetry Slam. Marc Smith has apparently added a name since then. I wonder if he got married? Smith deserves a lot of credit for what he has accomplished. To run a Sunday night reading series for 25 years is no small feat. But, I still retain my bragging rights. And to that end I will challenge Marc Kelly Smith to a one on one heavyweight poetry bout anywhere, anytime, as long as it takes place in a major population center somewhere on or near the Interstate 80 corridor.

Al Simmons, Commissioner WPA
(World Poetry Association)

*



I had a long conversation with a dove yesterday. I was washing dishes when the dove flew onto my deck by mistake. Their new nest is in the rafters outside my dining room window. She might have flown into the patio door screen, but she landed on a potted plant and seemed ok, but she didn't move so I walked over to take a look. My presence at the door didn't seem to alarm her so I slid open the door and said hello. Then I slid open the screen door. Still she didn't fly off. She just stood there, shifting around, trying to focus her eyes on me. So we stood there for a while. She was molting. She was gray with some round markings on her wings. Then she whistled quietly, like she was talking to herself, a yoo-hoo. So I you-hood her back. She was amazed and got really excited and began turning around in circles. I waited for her to whistle again and then repeated her call again. She got so excited she rustled her feathers and called to me again. This went on for some time. Then we ran out of things to say and she flew off and I went back to the dishes. A minute later the dove landed on my windowsill above the kitchen sink, tapped her beak on the glass and whistled to me. I whistled back. It was the most memorable conversation I had yesterday.

*

“For me there will always be an underground.” Al Simmons Speaks with Green Panda Press


Bree: u’ve met and mingled with so many respected poets—got any good remnants?


Al: I just remembered how I met Jack Michelin. It was 1982. I was new in SF and staying with friends. One day I was hanging out and ducked into a gallery opening for a free glass of wine and a piece of cheese and ended up buying a small stone sculpture from Jack Michelin. It was the face of a woman cut out of soapstone. I recognized Jack from a reading. I told him I liked his work but the last thing I needed at the moment was another rock to weigh me down. I didn't have a place to stay let alone hang his art. But he talked me into it. I wrapped it in a towel and hid it in the back seat of my car until I found a place to settle into. I used to hang it on a big weeping willow tree in the backyard. Now it's in a box. I just remembered where I got it. I wonder if it's worth any money?


B: take it out of that box! any j-hole will buy that from u—i think they’d buy his old dirty socks! but u still got a tree, i’d bet. well, so is there a particular contemporary poem or collection that u revere/left its mark on u?


Al: Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger is still the best poem of the 20th century. Something a lot of people don’t know, Ed Dorn wrote books 3 & 4 of Gunslinger in Chicago. I was studying with him during those two years. Ed published each book separately as he wrote them. Book Three, The Cycle broke the 5 x 7 format of books one and two by publishing book three in 10 x 12 inch size pages in bold print and full color. There was a character introduced in book three called Al, who looked a lot like me then. He had a belt buckle with the name AL printed on it. From Gunslinger: The Cycle, The I.D. Runs the Actual Furnishings, verse 19:


Below his right ear is the brand
The cuneiform form of Man and God
And these were the signs of his predicament.


I told Ed I thought that mark was a birthmark. But the truth is it was a hickey I was given by Rhea Hoffman who was 13 years old. I was 12. And it never went away, so maybe I was kissed by a goddess? She looked like a goddess at the time.

Studying with Ed Dorn was quite an initiation. I asked Ed why he made the print of the Cycle (first edition) so large? He said, so I could read it. He was a funny guy. He told me this in his kitchen, at the old 911 Club, the original 911 Club, 911 Diversey Avenue in Chicago, where Ed and Jenny lived while Ed presided over the writing program at Northeastern Illinois University on the northwest side of Chicago, where I was enrolled as an undergrad.

Being a named character in the greatest poem of the 20th Century is a nice credit. There were only four characters in Gunslinger who were introduced under cloak of their own names; Howard Hughes, Rupert Murdoch, Tonto Pronto, and me. Book Four of Gunslinger, The Winter Book was originally titled The Slaukowski Sausage Factory. In retrospect those years turned out to be Ed Dorn’s most productive.


B: i'd like to emphasize that you catalyzed the poetry bouts and poetry fights--you told me the story when we were in Berkeley, and its kind of in yr NYT letter---by the by the poem you sent me in the mail is so killer. it is so wholly your voice--i think that is what makes a poem good; if it is totally the voice of the poet, it cld be on microwaving frozen french fries, or crossing the rubicon, whatever. it is the voice that matters most. voice carries pov, and this is what we find useful in eachother.


Al: Thank you. There was an intellectual framework surrounding the fights. Let me tell you what the world of poetics looked like back in the early 1970s. When Ed Dorn left NEI for a job at Kent State, he replaced himself as poet-in-residence with Ted Berrigan, who at the time was head of the New York School of Poetry. So, I got to be student aide and faculty assistant for Ted Berrigan.

I’ll tell you a story. Ted didn’t know I was on the university payroll for being both his student aid and faculty assistant, and I didn’t tell him until one day after class several months into the semester Ted and I were sitting at the corner bar having a shot and a beer and I confessed. I applied to be Ted’s assistants because I knew he didn’t need any. He gave no assignments, did no research. That was pretty smart, Ted decided, and added, you can buy the next round. And then Ted borrowed $5. Ted always paid you back on payday when he cashed his check.

I guess you can say I was lucky, first to study with Ed Dorn and then Ted Berrigan, two of the top three poets of the second half of the 20th Century. You can say I had my share of rarified air. Ted Berrigan was 36 years old when Dorn brought him in to Chicago. Ted died young, at age 47. But, during the ten years that I knew Ted we became good friends, and I got to watch Ted develop from the head of the NY School of Poetry into a Master Poet. Ted grew larger than the scene. Hanging out with Ted was like seeing your best friend turn into Socrates. I was a man of great fortune and witness.

There were basically four schools of poetry being practiced in the 50s thru the turn of the century, and beyond. There were the academics, The Black Mountain School, The New York School and The Beats. I wasn’t interested in 15th century Italian sonnets so I passed on the academics. The Black Mountain School was Charles Olson, who invented Projective Verse and open field poetry as a meter into free verse. He gathered the teachings of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and brought them a step further. Teaching at Black Mountain with Olson was Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. Ed Dorn was Olson’s student, favorite son, and 20 years later I studied with Dorn.

The Beats were mostly criminals, drug addicts, thieves, sexual predators and perverts. William Burroughs was a junky, a pedophile, and a murderer. He killed his wife. He shot her between the eyes with a rifle attempting to shoot an apple off the top of her head. Gregory Corso spent the better half of his youth incarcerated. Neal Cassidy was a car thief and a speed freak. Ginsburg was a pervert and Jack Kerouac was a bum, the Dharma Bum, who loved speed, beer, and chasing women and good times. Jack Kerouac was the writer. As Gregory Corso put it, “Kerouac made us all.” The Beats were bohemians and cultural revolutionists and are credited for a lot of bad poetry and starting the sexual revolution.

The New York School was somewhere in between. They were constructionists, though some called them de-constructivists. Ted’s favorite topic for lecturing was how he wrote poetry. I spent years listening to how Ted “made” poems. The NYS were better dressed than the Beats. They had Masters degrees, came from middle class families. But, to me they were all Beats. They all experimented with the same American idiom. Dorn ran with Kerouac. Berrigan introduced me to Anselm Hollo, Alice Notley, of course, Ted's wife, Allen Ginsburg, Phil Whalen. Everyone knew and supported everyone else...for the most part. Writers are and have always been competitive. Each had their own distinctive voice and style and that was the key, being your own person and having your own presence and style.

If you wanted to hang out with the giants you had to have your own voice. That was the rule. If you read a poem that sounded like someone else you either dedicated that poem or you would be called out and hauled off the stage. Maybe the hauling off the stage part was an early Chicago thing. What I was interested in back then was a Chicago sound, a Chicago School. Performance Art was a product of those early experiments in Chicago and we sometimes referred to Performance Art as Chicago School. By developing the poetry fights I captured a competitive spirit of the time and gave it a presence in literary form. I built the stage and wrote the rules. I was the Commissioner of the World Poetry Association and the World Poetry Bout Association, WPA/WPBA. Steve Rose, the world’s greatest ring announcer, introduced me as the intellectual godfather of the Taos Poetry Circus, in Taos, New Mexico, where we held the Main Event World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bouts every summer for 20 years, from 1982-2002. I began the show. Now they call it The Spoken Word Movement. I’m a footnote in history.

As Ed Dorn once wrote:

“Once I lost my keys
and couldn’t get in
Once I lost my knees
and couldn’t get down
Once I lost my face
and couldn’t frown
But I’ve never lost my place
and that’s why dig it
I’m still around.”

*


The Main Event, a ten round heavyweight championship poetry bout, was invitational, based on a traditional reading, two poets, an opening act and a featured poet, each reads for thirty minutes. The slam is a competitive literary event based on an open reading, whoever shows up. Somehow the slam morphed into more of a community event rather than an individual’s art, drifting away from rule #1, having one’s own voice. That’s the rap on the slam since the beginning, actually. I have no problem with the slam. It’s an open reading. As far as I’m concerned I’m happy the slam is held to any standard. And look at how the slam has proliferated? I understand slams are now being held in 80 cities across the country. On the other hand The Main Event features the best of the best, always had and always will. Anyone can write a poem, but how many people can write ten?


B: How many poems have you written this past year?

Al: About 300.

B: That’s a lot of poems.

Al: I had a good year.

B: Are your poems available?

Al: Yes. Memoirs Of The Man Who Slept His Life Away, new poems, Special Edition, Books I - IV, 252 pages, 35K words, $35.00, (includes tax and shipping). Send cash, money order or check to: Al Simmons, Simmonsink, 420 Whitehall Road, Unit F, Alameda, CA 94501. I can be emailed at alsimmons@sbcglobal.net.


B: hey, way to get a plug in! i’ll wrap us up with that goodie you mailed, and here’s hoping this one makes it in that collection.

*



Almost Never

I get lazier every day.
Doing nothing is the best.

Ok, there’s the ocean. I’ve
Seen it. Now what?
You tell me, cuz. Now
Nothing.

Lazy is good company.
Sunshine and enough
To eat helps.

Living off the land means
Fleecing those who graze.

Fleece or be fleeced.
Land of the fleeced,
Home of the flossed.

Other than my health
I’m fine.

I don’t know where I get
This stuff, but
For some reason I think
All I have to do
Is write a poem or two a day
And I’m good, I’m
A happy guy.

End of story.

888

Al Simmons catalyzed the poetry bouts (after he had himself an actual bout)---arguably the origin of Slam Poetry. he took me on a walk on a windy shore in Berkeley, CA where i saw for the first time red-winged blackbirds. it was late May 2008, and he thot my name was Bree 08 because that is how it appeared on the cover of a bittie broad i’d made. he’s…a happy guy.

* the integrity of line spacing was not kept by blogspot trans.


Books Available by Al Simmons:

Memoirs Of The Man Who Slept His Life Away, new poems, 161 poems, 252 pages, 35K words, $35, includes tax and delivery.

KING BLUE, Boogie Till The Roof Caves In, Stories of Chicago's Kingston Mines, the largest showcase blues club in the world, with photographs by D. Shigley. 129 pages, $20, includes tax and shipping.

"So lucid, fine, humorous and humane is Al Simmons' book, Boogie Till The Roof Caves In, that all one can say is: Thanks. And also wish that Mr. Simmons might write another book about more--if not all--of the scenes happening in our city." Paul Carroll, Publisher Big Table Press, Chicago Reader.

THE SUGAR AND OTIS CHRONICLES, People Pay A Lot Of Money For This KINKY STUFF, a pornographic novel, 275 pages, 75K words, $30, includes tax and delivery. "The most fun book I ever wrote, and the research was the best!"

Send cash, checks or money orders to Al Simmons, Simmonsink, 420 Whitehall Road, Unit F, Alameda, CA 94501.

THE EVERYMAN MAVERICK

THE EVERYMAN MAVERICK: A FEW MINITS WITH THE
MATCHLESS HUGH B. FOX

(i have to say, the man doesn't waste a chance at flattering his interviewer! this conversation took place March 28, 2009, in long-D fashion. Hugh Fox is considered a Godfather of the Underground Press. he Is a warm person who extends himself gladly. I am jealous and spurred on by his genius.)


BREE: WHAT KIND OF KID WERE YOU IN PRIMARY SCHOOL? GOODIE-GOODIE? A JOCK?


HUGH B. FOX:Well, I had polio when I was about four, got cured, wheelchair for a while, all kinds of Sister Kenny treatment hot massages, etc., and then when I could walk again my mother got me into dance class and mom and dad got me into starting violin lessons about age five or six. With composer-conductor P. Marinus Paulson, a guy who ought to be really known, but he’s not. All his manuscripts in libraries in Chicago.
So I’d practice the violin every day, and Paulson started me playing around with the piano keyboard, “Let’s try some C-Major chords, and then C-minor, try a little bass, hit those e- and b-flats for a while....” I should explain that my father was a frustrated, former violinist who had been put through med school by my secretary mother. So I was kind of fulfilling the dream he had to leave behind.
Was raised by Irish Catholic nuns at Saint Francis de Paulo. More piano lessons there. Mass every morning. Latin. Altar boy. Then my mother heard about Zerlina Muhlman Metzger and the All Childrens’ Grand opera and I started going to opera classes twice a week on the north side of Chicago. A long “L” ride. We’d sing songs in French, German, even English, “Ich liebe dich wie du liebst mich....” Mrs. Metzger (or “Madame Metzger,” as she called herself), was from Vienna. Her mother , Anna Muhlman, sang the lead role at the first performance of Das Lied Von der Der Erde in Vienna, with the composer, Gustave Mahler, leading the orchestra. I met her once.
The Metropolitan Opera didn’t bring kids with them when they put on opera performances in Chicago at the Civic Opera House, so we would do the children’s chorus in, say, Carmen. Sir Thomas Beecham on the podium, Gladys Swarthout as Carmen. Then we’d get involved with the choruses in operas like Boris Godunov, and I became pals with Mr. Nichols, the back-door guy/entrance manager, and he told me “Anything you want to see from back stage, come down and I’ll let you in.”
So I’d go to all the ballets and operas and whatever else was going on there, fell in love with Ruth Page’s and Maria Tallchief’s legs, saw all the major ballets ever performed....when my voice changed, our group put on Mozart’s The Magic Flute and I sang the role of Sarastro.
I remember going down to the Chicago Public Library downtown and getting the score of,say, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and putting on a record and reading the score, pretending I was the conductor.

I began to write my own music too. Even now, put me down in front of a piano anywhere (the bigger the better, preferably a huge concert grand in a huge auditorium) and off I’ll go.....improvise, improvise, improvise.....
My grandmother spoke Czech and I was always singing French and German and Italian, and in college I had Professor Le Blanc (from the Sorbonne) for French and Prof. Schwarzenberg (from Prague...the upper class Czechs spoke German, not Czech) for German, made my first trip to Europe at age twenty....
Never one football game, basketball, anything to do with sports...full time in the arts.
My parents even gave me a Life Membership at the Art Institute in Chicago and I’d hang around there a lot, studied art there...and in grammar school....



B: SO, WHAT WAS YR FIRST TASTE OF POETRY?


HBF: I was always encouraged to read, and while I was at Leo High School (the Christian Brothers of Ireland...again more Irish) I was immersed in poetry, but my first real fascination with poetry was when I got fascinated with T.S. Eliot.
I remember buying his complete works, then started reading Ezra Pound. And I’d always be reading writing by the saints and theological writers, like St. Augustine’s The Confessions.
When I was a senior in high school one of the brothers took me aside and said “Fox, we need a new editor for the high school newspaper, and I think you’re the only person I know who can handle the job.” So there I was, editor of The Leo News. Editorials and all.
The crazy thing was that when it was time for college I was thrust into pre-med at Loyola University in Chicago and Comparative Anatomy, Microbiology, Biochemistry and the like began.
I even went to one year of medical school and then dropped out, went back into undergraduate and got my B.A. in English and M.A. in English, courses like The History of English Literature, The History of American Literature....The English Novel....endless, encyclopedic reading. And on the side I’d always be reading Aldous Huxley’s novels, keeping notebooks of the words I didn’t know, trying to build up my vocabulary.
I wrote my M.A. Dissertation, "The Art Theory of Sir Joshua Reynolds". Then I went down to the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and got a Ph.D. in American Literature and wrote my dissertation on The Cosmological STRUCTURE in Poe’s EUREKA and before I knew it I was a professor of American Literature at Loyola University in Los Angeles where I suddenly got thrust into the film-world, had pals like William Peter Blatty, the guy who wrote The Exorcist, and lots of students like the actor Brian Avery...always going to film festivals at UCLA and there was one theater that showed nothing but old, old films...went to about one Japanese film a week.. started writing plays...and when Loyola University built a Communication Arts Center they inaugurated the opening of the building one night with a production of my play The Incast.
Always going to Hollywood parties. Like one day I was sitting next to this ancient lady and I introduced myself, “Hi, I’m Hugh Fox,” “I’m Anita Loos,” “Wait a second, that name rings a bell....,” “I wrote Gentleman Prefer Blondes.”

One day I was out at the Pickwick Book Store in Hollywood and I picked up a beautiful copy of Bukowski’s A Crucifix in a Deathhand, took it home and read it and loved it, wrote to the publishers, Loujon Press, and said I wanted to meet Bukowski and they told me to look him up in the L.A. /Hollywood phonebook, I did, called him, went to see him, told him I wanted to write a book about him and he gave me copies of everything he’d ever written...suitcases of books...and I wrote a critical study about it. I’d just written my first post-doc book on Henry James and all of a sudden here I was Bukowskiing it...a HUGE influence on my own work, out of academe into The Real World.


B: DID YOU TAKE TO RELIGION?


HBF: Well...although I was raised as a Catholic, my grandmother was Jewish and she had a tremendous influence on me, and my mother made a deathbed confession that her mother was Jewish, and I had already worked my way/read my way out of Catholicism (too many Fathers of the Church, seeing the church itself as a human rather than divine creation), so I went over to my local synagogue in Michigan (where I was teaching after I left Loyola--MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY) and didn’t have to “become” a Jew because with a Jewish grandmother I already was a Jew.

But I did a Bar Mitzvah, and 30+ years later I still go every Friday night. In fact this week a poem of mine called “Shtehl” came out in Poetica and last night the Cantor at the synagogue read it after the sermon and everyone loved it so much that I couldn’t even sleep last night thinking about the mass, personal reaction:


SHTETL


Every Friday night he goes to Shabbt services
maniacally, seventy-four going on what feels
like a hundred and ten, Baruch Ata Adonai,
Blessed Art Thou, God, blessing the wine,
remembering the dead, praising the Power
that controls it all, and then the Oneg/Partytime/
Coffeehour, retired Colonel Saper (90), Mrs.
Stock-Market Whiz, Gussy (85), Dr. Wolf (Vet,
59) and Al, her car-parts whiz husband, Jack
Rackman, Mr. Stint, just dropped fifty pounds
(“ ‘ Or else!,’ as my cardiologist put it.”), a whole
peace-corps more of beloved faces, a little cheesecake,
grapes, cake, decaf coffee and the holocaust
never happened, no terrorists in any wings,
it’s all just career-memories, army-time in India,
stock-markets and the latest radiations, surgeries,
salves, pills, kids, grandkids, only an hour at most,
but it’s like the week never passed, it’s all one
pass-the-sugar/anecdote
continuum.

B: SO, WHEN DID YOU GET INTO ARCHAEOLOGY?


HBF: Well, I married the Peruvian poet, Lucia Ungaro, when I was at the University of Illinois, and then got totally involved with Spanish (which I had studied in high school), started getting Fulbright teaching jobs in Mexico (U. of Hermosillo), two years in Caracas (Instituto Pedagogico and the Universidad Católica), I spent a year studying at the University of Buenos Aires and I started visiting all the pre-Columbian ruins in North and South America and began to see things that no one had ever seen before -- like ancient Lebanese writing on the ruins and pottery of the Mochica Indians in Peru, writing from ancient Sumeria on the ruins at Lake Titicaca in Bolivia and slowly evolved a vision that Tiawanaku, Bolivia was the center of all ancient religious belief in the ancient world, the real Garden of Eden.....and discovered that the language of the Incas was a variation of Arabic....a whole stack of books published on the topic, and another one (Rediscovering America) out from World Audience in New York soon.



B: WANNA TALK ABOUT LIPSTICK?


HBF:Well, for a while, I was also Connie Fox. Hugh Fox, Connie Fox. My mother always wanting a girl and having me, all my immersion in ballet and the other arts....I discovered my Connie Self while in L.A. and started watching films about transsexuals like Cochinelle (who , sadly, died last year)....now, though, after an orchiectomy related to prostate cancer, I am Mr. Totally Sexless.


B: BESIDES LITERARY ONES, ANY HEROES?


HBF: Well, my biggest hero in the last few years has been Debussy. For the total multiple-originality of his work. And my wife, Dr. Maria-Bernadete, M.D. and great artist. And my daughters, Margaret (ex Harvard professor, now teaching kindergarden) and Alexandra (psychologist, artist, photographer)....my son Chris, Mr. Film. And you, Bree!


B: WOULD YOU RATHER WORK AS A MAYORAL AIDE, OR AD EXEC? (DON'T TELL ME YOU'VE BEEN BOTH!)


HBF: Neither.

B: !


B: WHAT MADE YOU PUT TOGETHER COSMEP? WHO WERE YOUR SUPPORTERS, AND WHO WERE YOUR DETRACTORS?


HBF: Well, the real force behind COSMEP at the beginning was Len Fulton (Small Press Review, Dustbooks). Big get-together out in Berkeley in 1968, everyone who was anyone there, and Fulton created COSMEP, put me on the first Board of Directors, and I stayed on as long as COSMEP existed. My best-buddy, Richard Morris (now -- sadly -- dead), actually did the running of the org for decades and we’d have annual get-togethers here , there and everywhere, conventions with all the small presses there, all the wild, off-the-wall poets there.....great, great, great.....


B: DID YOU EVER TASTE THE HOSTILITY BETWEEN CLEVELAND, MIDWESTERN POETS AND THE WEST-COAST CALIS?


HBF:Not really.In fact I was just invited to an anniversary celebration of the Berkeley Days (Berkeley Daze) last year....just did a book on four California poets, Angela Mankiewicz, Glenna Luschei, Karla Andersdatter and Ellaraine Lockie)...still have an old girlfriend of mine in Carlsbad, one of my ex-students at Loyola, now 81....to me it’s all the same thing. The same with Boston.
New York, though, I still see as a kind of local yokel bullshit regional CLUB instead of a real cultural heartland.


B: DO YOU THINK TODAY'S SMALL INDY PRESSES WOULD BENEFIT FROM A COSMEP?


HBF: Very much so. The small press is still very much alive. Writers like Bree, lots of great mags...but the publishing has gotten a lot rougher. Thousands of submissions to book publishers. Thousands of writing graduates, lots of publishers publishing just a few books a year. Imagine 5,000 submissions and five books. Money crisis, of course, and the computerification of everything. The whole sense of “underground wildness” has been turned into corporate get-aheadness.


B: WILL YOU PUBLISH MORE BOOKS BY NEW POETS?


HBF:I don’t do any more publishing now. My press, Ghost Dance, has been dead for years.


B: YOU STUDIED IN UNIVERSITY FOR A GOOD CHUNK OF YOUR LIFE. DID YOU FEEL AT HOME, OR LIKE AN INTERLOPER? IT IS HARD FOR THIS INTERVIEWER TO IMAGINE YOUR MEGAMALL SIZED PERSONALITY DIDN'T STAND OUT.


HBF:I always felt and still feel at home in the universities. There are still tons of older undergrounders around in English departments and libraries and the like. Genius types like Peter Berg at Michigan State University, who just set me up for a university library reading last month. Great time. People in the audience like pianist Ralph Votapek. Check him out. But the universities are cutting out TENURE and RETIREMENT, so the whole sense of the university as HOME-ZONE is disappearing.
An idiot-tendency. For centuries universities were home-ground for geniuses, why destroy that? I go to a recital almost every day over at the Michigan State University College of music, everyone getting DMA’s (Doctors in Musical Art) in iano, violin, flute, you name it. Students from China, Korea, Russia, Bulgaria...scores and scores of them...and what happens to them next as everything shrinks and vanishes?


B: I HATE USING THE WORD UNDERGROUND TO DESCRIBE MY GREEN PANDA PRESS. ALTHO, PRESSES LIKE THE ONES KRYSS, AND THE LEVITES, AND POTTS WERE RUNNING DID TAKE MUCH HEAT FROM THE MAN, I OPERATE IN THE WORLD OF 'ONLINE SECURITY'-- I FEEL I COULD PRINT ANYTHING, AND GO UNPENALIZED. IS THERE A BLANKET TERM YOU THINK COULD COVER POETRY BENEATH THE MAJOR CURRENT, AT THIS TIME?


HBF: Let’s call it REAL-WORLD poetry, OUTSIDE THE NEW YORK ENCLAVE POETRY.


B: WILL YOU SETTLE DOWN, AS IF IT COULD EVER HAPPEN! WILL YOU SETTLE HERE, OR IN BRAZIL, OR WHERE? IF YOU CAN CHOOSE?


HBF: My Brazilian wife buys lottery tickets every week. If we would win thirty million dollars, we’d keep our houses in East Lansing (a short drive from the U. of Michigan in Ann Arbor, 20 minutes by plane from Chicago) and buy an apartment in Florianópolis, Brazil on the island of Santa Catarina, where her family lives. The arts are still alive, alive, alive there.....


B: WILL YOU LEAVE ME WITH A LIMERICK?


HBF: Let’s see what I can do.


A Fox fleeing from/to he knows not what,
But always feeling big kicks in the butt.
The winds always whispering “Get off your ass.”
The Fox always answering, “Let’s not be crass.”
Doing whatever he can to not get in a rut.


888

Pitching an Easy Ball: Interview with Russell Salamon

Bree: Russell, i liked your "definition" of what is poesy in Horvath's Clevelanders II. don't think about that!what is your definition of poetry?

Russell Salamon: I forgot what I said, but here is something.
Poetry in its basic form is communication between and among
people. When it starts to lift off into the field of Art--which in all
Art forms is really good emotional impact and great communication--
when it grabs you by your emotions and begins to slap you around,
and tear you up, when it moves you to tears, or exultation; when it
changes your life, then we call it capital "P" Poetry, or capital "L"
Literature. We have phrases for this, "knocks your socks off,"
"makes your hair stand on end," "makes you eat your oatmeal
left-handed," etc. Also in its upper ranges, it lives nearly forever
(Shakespeare and others), and keeps affecting future emotional lives.
It gives ways of life--it actually ruins your life. You take the oath of
poverty (poetry=poverty, same word) and all you want to do is
think up great things to say, which, lately, few people want
to hear because they are interested in their favorite disease.

B: why wld somebody stay in Cleve.?

RS: Love, home, worthwhile purpose, love of October leaves, family,
Cleveland Indians, Cuyahoga River Flats, bridges, steel mills, Erie Canal
locks, rivers, Lake Erie--the consent to be a group member of Northern
Ohio. Similar reasons apply to every city. One brings love to each place,
and loves it.

B: do u think soul need be in question?

RS: The word soul has had a hard time. You got burned at the stake
for your soul. You got enslaved by religious and secular empires for
your soul. The soul is you--the immortal being. But you do not feel
very immortal. You hang out in a vaguely diseased, fragile body and
you flinch when enemies of Man say, "Salute!" You, as basic truth,
have been attacked to the point of personal extinction, until you are
not sure that what I am saying is valid, but you like it. You hope it is
true. This is why we like d.a. levy. He knows he is a soul, that he has
lived before and that knowing about those things is one of the high
points of culture: knowingness of self. The word soul is Self, but
naturally, it had the living crap beat out if it, so that it is not sure about
its actuality or about its divine qualities--those too have been stolen.
So we are wounded in Cleveland and in Los Angeles and New York
and Detroit, Chicago, and mortally wounded in Washington D.C., etc.
Our highest freedoms--freedom of truth, freedom to contribute good
control, freedom of help, freedom of speech, freedom to support a
govenment designed and run for all the people; the right to one's own
life, the right to leave a game one does not wish to support, and all the
other civilizing freedoms--are having a tough time. You will note in the
above list how many points d.a. levy supported, and how many points
you support. I hope you recognize yourself as a civilizing agent. Thank
you for your work.

B: i appreciate that u gave us back "citi back." the real thing,
not gesticulations, which are necessary, but not always appealing
to the younger generation. what appeals to kids most is a true heart
and reason behind ANYthing. do u intend to reproduce other works
from circa mimeo? i ask becuz i hope u do.

RS: Oops, I hadn't thought of it. Alan Horvath is doing that and
Geoffrey Cook has mentioned bringing out his "In the Heart of the
Beast." I raised the reprinting money from about 18 friends of levy
mostly 100 dollar blocks for 12 books. S.A. Griffin contributed 200,
so did r.j.s. and Los Angeles poet, Shirley Windward. I wanted to
reprint levy's UKANHAVYRFUCKINCITI BAK. because I finally
read it from cover to cover, and was impressed by what a valuable
document it is for those days, and how brave were d.a. levy for
writing it, and r.j.s. and Tom Kryss and John Scott and others who
helped produce it. I wanted it to be available in a more affordable form.
I printed 400 copies. Anyone is free to reprint it again if needed. (I see
that I have not answered your question. I don't know, is the answer
for now.)

B: did u know mimeo is marked as misspelled by my computer,
which doesnt recognize it?

RS: The computer has no brain.Bree: how often do you walk?

RS: I do some walking for my "day job," but I try to go to the
mountains once or twice a week and walk at least one mile in
then back out. This works very well to clear the mind, loosens
up the spaces, so I can reach bigger spaces and bigger ideas.
Okay, I admit it, it opens up "the glorious future" and I tell my wife,
Susan, Don't talk to me, I am WORKING. I am 800 years in the
future and I don't want to hear anything about "real life." This does
not work, because she is a persistent sort and I have to change the
lightbulb, put in a new water bottle, take the garbage out, etc.

B: do u think more or less Now than u did when u were layin'
stacks of books on levy?

RS: These days I am doing a lot more looking than thinking. Also
a lot more demanding for production of poems and articles. I read
two books this week, Douglas Adams' Mostly Harmless, "the fifth in
the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Trilogy" and the sequel
to the Earthsea Trilogy by Unsula LeGuin, The Other Wind. What a
beautiful book. Also I am dipping into a poetry textbook which has
a lot of famous poems in it. Also dipping around in The Best of Beston,
naturalist writer, poet really, Henry Beston, as good as and maybe better
in some ways, than Henry David Thoreau. Also, I am about to re-read
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health by L. Ron Hubbard
which just got reissued with an abundant glossary for any difficult words.
In reserve is the most recent Harry Potter book, which I hope I can keep
my hands off until the flight to Cleveland in August.

B: u still try to wrote poems at cocktail parties?

RS: I do not attend cocktail parties, I do not drink alcohol, mostly
coffee and tea, but I do write poems in cofee shops, Burger King,
McDonald's, Carl's Junior. McDonalds on Lyon Road in Valencia,
CA, north of San Fernando Valley along Interstate 5 works very well.
It has an out-of-town feel with views of mountains.

B: do u practice or claim any religion?

RS: I am a Scientologist since 1964. In 1965 d.a. levy read The
Problems of Work and Fundamentals by Thought by L. Ron Hubbard
and he liked them. Scientology, briefly defined, is the study of knowing
how to get workable answers and then applying them to life in order to
change condtions for the better. The product of Scientology is changed
conditions; one of these is the ability to be at CAUSE over one's own
mind. When one can do that, he achieves what is called, the State of
Clear. Obviously, these few words are too fast, but books are available
everywhere. Scientology is controversial because your freedom is
controversial. All the wars were, and still are, about you, but the road
to total freedom must stay open.

B: why books?

RS: Books are beings. You are holding someone's mind in your hands,
and if the writer is an artist, you are immersed in the joy of that creation.
It is a joy of contribution too. You feel moved or smart or enlightened
or delighted by the musical or dramatic composition of it. People are
the most fun, even extensionally across the centuries through the pages.
Shakespeare is somewhere around the corner, probably producing a
TV series, or maybe he is taking a break. But J.K. Rowling is not
taking a break and is writing masterpieces with Harry Potter. Her evil
is so strong, and her magical stuff is magic. She suggests an early magical
universe, and there was such a thing, otherwise we would not get so
excited by the idea of it. Books leave the filling-in and expanding element--
the contribution--up to the reader; each reader gets an original masterpiece
as he reads: it is his trees, his rivers, his visions of the characters and of
emotions. The author writes the notes but the musical interpretation is
the reader's life. Books are ways to spread awareness and life experiences
in expanding circles among aware and willing minds. Besides, they scrape
rust and crud off one's own knowingness. Books make people smart with
their own brilliance. You know this. You were pitching me an easy ball.

Franke From The Coventry Reader

Chris Franke, that is. Poet of privilidge. Cleveland's unmasked mascot. A First in the So Called Undy Poets Getta Knowya postings there'll be here at Effits Undy.

This is an article written by Lewis LaCook Summer 1990, titled
Christopher Franke: Welcome to the Underground

It has been said often and truthfully,
that writing is lonely work. All of the writer's performances are private; from the hours he spends pounding his heart out on the typewriter to the time the reader's eyes pass buried in his pages, most of the real action takes place offstage. Unlike the visual artist and the public performer, whose work must be witnessed to be appreciated, the writer seems doomed to bide his life alone in musty rooms, never experiencing the immediacy and audience reaction painting and song elicit by their very nature.

Except, of course, for Christopher Franke.

In the Cleveland literary and art world, Franke has always been an exception. Since his "birth' as a poet in the late 1960s, Franke's penchant for wry humor, scathing irony and caustic puns has earned him a spot as one of the literary underground's most prominent innovators. At every poetry event he pops up, carrying under his arm a sheaf of his latest work: sonnets, puns, love poems, metapoems, and, always, his collagepoetry, an offshoot breeding of concrete poetry and traditional collage in which Franke's trapeze approach to words and their meanings soars.

"I don't admire poets, I admire poems," Franke says of the iconoclastic style he's developed in his 21 years of "poeting". "What is impresses; what isn't, doesn't. The thought of being pinned, labeled, and boxed sets my wings to flapping. I demur making such a box."

Reading his work, the majority of which is self-published, makes one aware that Christopher Franke's wings are always flapping. His whole approach to the English language conjures up images of the gramma-wired poet getting perpetually drunk on dictionary ink. Franke does not simply twist words around, he reaches down into their gullets and turns them inside-out. Not even grammar, syntax, or context are safe from his eccentric muse. In "11," a selection from his chapbook "Title," (Cleveland State Poetry Center, 1975), Franke's manhandling of language becomes crystal clear:

He'll go to...
She'll, a conch.
It'll be nothing.
What'll be then?
I'll tell; you'll

Merry Xmas.
They'll not; we'll

Xopher

It was this same style of manhandling, twisting, and rearranging the English language that led Franke to the idea of collagepoetry.

"I don't recall a specific genealogy for my coming to the use of collage-in conjunction-with poem or collage-as-poetry. It just seems to have struck me one day as a 'neat' idea. A partial picture of how collage came into play begins with my idea of making a montage out of the literary rejections my poems had accumulated (Franke's Collage of Rejections was completed in December, 1970, and is currently hanging in CSU's Rhodes Tower, Room 415) and also with my previous investigations into concrete poetry, things visual, and whatever other attendant ilk play in this etiology."

Franke's collage-poems are a frantic blend of poetry and visual art. Newspaper and magazine headlines are cut out rearranged, and pasted into poetry for the eyes to devour. Every poems is a blur of typesets, art and quotations. The result is a work of art culled from the poetry-between-the-lines that hits our doorstep every morning. Pop art!

The method greatly resembles the cut-up technique that William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin pioneered in the early 1960s.

"It sometimes seems to me that the world is a collage, and that collagers dissemble pieces of it to resemble a semblance of a sense of it," Franke says. "Re-arranging the living room is a form of a collage. One takes what is there and puts it together differently. An old picture is taken down, or a new one is put up. Watch TV with the sound off: collage. Look at a page and see what glimmers with 'I'd rather be somewhere else'."

"I paint by writing with glue; collage is my sculpture, words are my stone. A poem is the art that is on exhibit."

Franke was given a chance to exhibit his art that past January when the William Busta Gallery (2021 Murray Hill) hosted a retrospective of his collagepoems entitled, "Christopher Franke: Words & Worded Images, 1969-1989." In addition to Franke's collagepoems, the show also featured a performance by the Endangered Specie Trio, Franke's music/poetry group featuring musicinas Robert Rericha and Loretta Smith. The group, which takes its name from a tatterred purple-and-yellow shirt of Franke's, has played sets at the Cleveland Public Theatre's Performance Art Festival and various area readings, as well as Junkstock, Daniel Thompson's music-and-poetry celebration (where they'll be appearing again this year).

"In the autumn of '87, at a poetry workshop, I ran into Robert Rericha and I expressed the thought that I'd give up my right big toe to have a poem of mine set to music," Franke recalls when describing the group's genesis. "Bob said, "Well, I'm a composer; show me some of your poems, and I'll see what I can do.' So I handed him a bunch of poem. After he'd had a chance to go over the material, he made some selections, and had me do a tape recording of those poems. From there he proceeded to come up with some music for flute and guitar to accompany their recitation."

Since the group has produced a cassette of their compositions, entitled, "Romantic Antics" (Available from Deciduous, 1456 West 54th St., Cleveland, Ohio 44102).
One would think, given Franke's originality and freshness, that finding suitable publication for his offbeat work would be a veritable breeze. Wrong! The small press magazines, where most of America's poets are hiding these days, have been slow to accept Franke's eccentric muse.

"Except for places where I may have some leverage, the favorable response rate on my submissions I would calculate at about 2%," he mourns. "That's $56.00 in postage to get two poems published in a couple magazines at some indeterminate place for some indeterminate audience. If I mailed out poem-collage-paste-ups, the postage would be considerably more, and they would be totally dog-eared before someone decided to favorably blow their nose on them."

"It's that that leads one to self-publishing. Distribution is 'out-of-hand.' I like the leaflet as format. In 1986 I started to produce 'poem-collage leaflets' that I call 'articals', punched for a three ring binder. An articals may be a poem, or a poem 'collage,' or some mixture of the preceding. Funds permitting, I prefer printing; failing that, 2.5 cents is an ecstasy at such copy shops."

Despite such hardships, Christopher Franke is convinced that good poetry will live forever.

"The press gets poetry it doesn't deserve, but poetry that deserves press does not necessarily get it. Welcome to the underground. If poetry didn't exist, it would have to be invented. It may thrive under a pseudonym: as the best of lyrics wrapped in a song, in a prose passage of utmost intensity, in the most concise little ad, and that person who wants to pour his heart onto a page into poetry's brief, if intense medium is not likely to disappear. And there may even be listeners."

(from Coventry Reader Vol. 3 No. 2 Summer 1990 foto by Jim Lang)