From “Abandon the Creeping Meatball: An Anarcho-Spiritual Treatise”

I’d like to think of this essay as an opportunity to peer into some rooms that are for me essential to my life as a poet. I’ll call these rooms sacred places, and I will create a definition for the sacred, which maybe will keep people from running away from it. I’ll define the sacred for our purposes here as the impulses that connect us to life, the impulses that connect us to communities, human and creaturely communities. And I’ll define the sacred also as the impulse that connects us to ancestors. The title of this essay is borrowed from Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and the Yippie Manifesto of 1968. But it’s also inspired by a dialogue I had with my friend Sarah Sohn, who suggested that I might want to wonder about the creative potential of being in a pickle, of being in a tight place. That was her phrase, “being in a tight place.” So what we might want to wonder about here are the generative things that can happen when we find ourselves in tight spots. Maybe we can imagine creative resistance as a series of secret passages around the margins of the dominant culture, around the margins of the things that feel suffocating to us.

Beginning with the advice of the Yippies to “rise up and abandon the creeping meatball,” I am going to also resist framing what I do as a poet as “work.” Let’s try to get rid of that from the beginning. Let’s just get rid of any talk about poetry and careers altogether. In that, I’ll invoke Louis Zukofsky and his line “The words are my life.” I want to imagine in this space not a way of “working,” but a way of living: a way of resistance to that which doesn’t give life and a way of being open to the revelations that do connect us to life and to others. So I’m going to hold two ideas in mind in relation to the subtitle of this talk: the “anarcho-spiritual” part of it. Let’s talk about creative practices that resist “accomplishment,” and let’s talk about creative practices that in their resistance reveal the world in a new light.

The first room is not just a room but also a book. The room is in a house on the north side of Buffalo in the late eighties. The book is The H.D. Book by Robert Duncan. The house, at 67 Englewood Avenue, housed an anarchist collective, or at least we, the inhabitants, imagined ourselves that way. There were usually about ten of us living in that house at a time, in our late teens and early twenties, mostly students. I’ve been trying to remember what drew us all together there. Our scene was a little bit queer, it was very much to the left of center, and I think we were mostly coming from tight places, economically, within our families of origin. We were mostly of the first generation in our families to go to college. Two instincts were very alive in that moment, in that house: first, a fierce resistance to the culture around us; to the educational culture, to the social expectations, to the state, to religion. And we did identify as anarchists with a capital  A: we were very clear that anarchy never meant “helter-skelter” chaos, but that it meant listening for more organic alternatives to the inscribed laws around us. We were looking for natural orders of community. And that resistance to the culture made room for a lot of revelation about potential alternatives.

In my room in that house there was a teapot, an orange and white cat, a typewriter, a record player, and a Lenny Bruce album that began with the skit “Lima, Ohio”:

I worked at a place called Lima, Ohio.... When you travel in these towns there’s nothing to do during the day. They’re very boring. The first day you go through the five-and-ten. The next day you go to the park. You see the cannon and you’ve had it.... The lending library and the drugstore.... Yeah, it doesn’t make it.

It’s funny to think I would find that album at all. It was released about 1962 and Lenny Bruce died a year before I was born. But what I responded to in that opening little skit on that album was that Lima, Ohio, was a tight place. I know now that part of the reason I was steered toward a poetics of resistance and revelation is that I had come out of a similarly tight place. I was thinking about how in the south towns of Buffalo there were only so many places you could go, and only so many times you could swing on the clothing racks at the Hens & Kelly department store before you got terribly bored. I’m really thankful for it at this point, for my cow town of Derby, New York, and for the ancestral cow towns of my people on the outskirts of places like Ryńsk and Kraków. There’s a mystery for me in the Polish Catholic great-grand-parents who were literally from towns with cows, and then the grandparents who didn’t go beyond an eighth-grade education and were working at the Bethlehem Steel Plant and working on the railroad lines around it and of course going to church every Sunday at Saint  Joachim’s and Saint Hyacinth’s. So if you know Lenny Bruce, you know the rest of that album I was listening to was configured around this beautiful fantasy of the Pope as closet Jewish homosexual who oversees a Madison Avenue corporation called Religions, Inc. Between Lima, Ohio, and Religions, Inc., Lenny Bruce had described the prevailing winds of my whole childhood scene. He was halfway between my grandparents’ generation and my parents’ generation, and he was impatiently taking apart all aspects of their sacred culture, from the five-and-ten to the Church, which I obviously had my doubts about too. I don’t think I would have become a poet without that tension in the double ancestral line: of coming from that tight place of the cow-town ancestors and then finding a way to revel in a critique of what ailed them via Lenny Bruce and Abbie Hoffman and others. Thank God for all of them, that they gave me the latitude to wander out of their little cow towns into the life that I have.

When I was putting together the manuscript for the book called  Black Dog Songs with my editor at Flood Editions, Devin Johnston, we got around to the idea of looking at early poems that had never made it into a book, poems that were part of that initial moment of coming into a vocation. There’s a little piece we included that ended up with the title “Triptych,” three poems that seemed linked to each other that definitely were written in that room with the typewriter and the orange and white cat and the Lenny Bruce album. The first part of that triptych sequence really stands out to me now as the beginning of my own understanding of revelation in poetry. It was one of the first poems I think that I created simply by listening for and receiving material for the poem rather than trying to make something happen. I think now that this is where I became a poet “for real,” when I stopped trying to “GO SOMEWHERE” with the poem and instead I let the poem occur:

occurs a curve of
sound or sign

occurs a curve
of sound design waiting

awaiting occurs
a curve of sound design

Well that was very different than what I had been doing early on in imitations of Beat poetry. Because that first instinct for me as a poet had been that I really wanted to SAY SOMETHING, DO SOMETHING, and GO SOMEWHERE! to get at the empathy I had for the world and to pour out my own feeling states. That’s what at some point I started to describe to students as “the dead grandmother poem,” the really urgent need to say something about one’s personal experience that was sometimes not so interesting. When I look at this poem now, “occurs a curve of sound or sign” is a phrase that is really a good description of how my process as a poet works. Because usually what occurs first is a sound that might be a phrase lingering, from waking life, or from a dream, or possibly from something heard or misheard in a public space—a little piece of revelation. And other times that impulse for the poem is a sign that comes first: a shadow on a sidewalk, something neon, or a particular glow in a field from a train window. Light. And sometimes there’s a nonspecific longing that sparks the poem: a waiting or awaiting, as the poem says, that sparks the first syllable of the event of the poem.

So I wondered in that moment in that room if this was in fact a “real” poem because it seemed to not be going anywhere or doing anything. It was not about what I was trying to make the poem say but about what the poem was trying to make me say. But I knew also that I was on the right track because of the place I had come to through being engaged in Robert Duncan’s poetry and poetics. His was the first thinking I read about the spiritual mystery of poetry. And I’m again just going to invoke the sacred language here because at this point as a poet-pastor it’s how my work is configured in my mind, and probably always was even when I was at my most secular atheistic. So, that thinking was fed by Robert Duncan’s essays on poetics, collected in Fictive Certainties, published by New Directions in the mid-eighties, made up of talks Duncan had given around the country during the sixties and seventies where he was really at his peak of expounding on what a poetics was for him, and where he very clearly claimed poetry as a divine impulse. Duncan says, “Words send me,” much like Zukofsky says, “The words are my life.”

At that moment, among the poets I knew, there was a conversation going on about another book of Duncan’s which was not yet a book, but was a rumor of a book, called The H.D. Book, and it was often spoken of as if it were a portal to another universe. It was a multidecade critical project that Duncan began writing in the early sixties, through which he was going to tell the “secrets” he knew about Modernist poetry, occult practices, and the intersections of occult practices and poetry. He had titled it The H.D. Book as an homage to his poetical ancestral mother, the poet H.D., or Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961), whose work he had first encountered in high school in the thirties. Duncan privately described the The H.D. Book as a tribute to the women in his life. It was a tribute to two ancestral lineages: to writers like H.D. and Gertrude Stein and Laura Riding and to the women in the family he had been adopted into: his mother, grandmother, and particularly his Aunt Faye who had been an ardent occultist and a devotee of the works of Shakespeare. Those of you who know Duncan know that he had been raised in a hermetic brotherhood, which was a little bit Rosicrucian, and a little bit wacky West Coast Masonic lodge culture from the turn of the century. But part of the attraction for him of H.D.’s work and person was that H.D. had been raised in the Moravian Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Her family was ancestrally spiritually connected to Count Zinzendorf who had founded the Moravian sect as a secret brotherhood. And part of the reason that I was so eager to get my hands on The H.D. Book manuscript is that Duncan claimed that in a meeting with H.D. she had revealed to him that while she was living in England during the Second World War she had been initiated into a Roman Mithras cult. That sounded very extraordinary to me, even though I didn’t know then and still am not sure what a Roman Mithras cult is. Whatever The H.D. Book was, we poets suspected there was a reason that it hadn’t seen the light of day, or at least had only circulated to a chosen few of Duncan’s friends.

I knew where the many various threads of The H.D. Book manuscript were to be found, at the University at Buffalo’s Poetry Collection, my place of employment. What makes the story all the more intriguing is the appearance in Buffalo at that time, somewhere around the spring of 1988, of a  John the Baptist–like figure whose name was Harvey Brown. Harvey was in his early fifties when I met him. The urban myth of the tall, golden-locked, bronze-skinned Harvey Huntington Brown III was that he was a descendant of the abolitionist John Brown and that he was part of an inner (or at least outer) circle around Peter Tosh and Bob Marley whom he had met while running drugs from Jamaica to Belize in a canoe with a voodoo priestess. He was an old friend of my professor Jack Clarke, so the dodgy aspects of his story, which Jack neither confirmed nor denied, simply lingered in the air. The Jamaican reggae part of Harvey’s life remains unconfirmed, but as for the John Brown lineage, that was not true. Harvey in fact came from a long line of Cleveland industrialists who had made their fortune around the steel industry on the Great Lakes, and he had come into an inheritance as a young person, courtesy of the Brown Hoisting and Conveying Machine Company of Cleveland, Ohio. He had had a long history by the time I met him of using his money to support poets including Charles Olson and John Wieners and to publish books of poetry and plays and fiction, great Americana works: Sherwood Anderson, William Carlos Williams, etc., that had either been overlooked, lapsed out of print, or in some cases had never been published. Harvey felt very strongly about these things, always with the thought that there was something at stake on a metaphysical level in bringing poetry to the light. Particularly a manuscript of poems of H.D.’s called Hermetic Definition fell into this category for Harvey. It was very clear that H.D.’s literary executor was holding some of her work from view, and in an act of resistance and revelation, Harvey smuggled the manuscript out of the Beinecke Library at Yale and published it as a very beautiful book in 1971 under his imprint Frontier Press.

The atmosphere around Harvey was so delightful. He was a thorn in the side of all progress-driven people. It turned out Harvey had his own ideas about The H.D. Book, one that intersected with mine (that it was a sacred text) and one that hadn’t occurred to me (that it should be found, gathered, and published immediately). In Harvey’s mind, that work was being kept out of view, again, by a literary executor. A little group of anarcho-spiritualist poets who already worked at the Poetry Collection eagerly volunteered to carry out a reconnaissance mission to dig through Duncan’s then unsorted papers and liberate the various pieces of the manuscript from the library, chapter by chapter, to hand over to Harvey for publication as a Frontier Press book. Harvey was never able to publish it. He died of cancer two years later. But the bootleg version of The H.D. Book would circulate for another twenty-five years, first as a bound paper manuscript, then as a floppy disk that showed up mysteriously in my mailbox one day around 1993, then as an online offering, and finally as an official publication through the University of California Press, one of its coeditors having been a coconspirator in the original bootlegging crew.

The H.D. Book became the single most important influence on my understanding of a poetics. And not a single page of it disappointed. It was a place where an ethos of poetry emerged that demanded both an openness to the potential forms of the universe and a rejection of the status quo. It was absolutely an anarcho-spiritual treatise of resistance and revelation. I keep thinking of Duncan’s line in a miscellaneous lecture; I suspect it was at New College of California when he was in his last semester of teaching and was quite ill and was determined to pass down everything he knew about H.D.’s work. He said, “One-half of the world is looking for something nasty and one-half of the world is looking for something gnostic.” The gnostic impulse at that moment in Buffalo in the eighties held great sway. I think it gave us all a sense of belonging in that small, strange community of poet-seekers. It opened up the possibility of reclaiming texts from academia and academic discourse. Creative works were not commodities in an education racket and books of poems were not the property of literary executors or libraries. Harvey’s message through his work with Frontier Press and Duncan’s message in The H.D. Book were that there was a value in reclaiming sacred connections, communities, and ancestors, those nets and lines of association as Duncan called them. I learned not only to write poems through Duncan’s influence but how to read texts: to find the interior light in a work. It was never about being able to understand and summarize; it was about being sent by the text. In the opening pages of The H.D. Book, Duncan describes reading James Joyce with two female classmates out on the lawn of the campus at Berkeley. He writes:

The poet ... is a worker, for the language ... belongs to the productive orders and means in which the communal good lies. All that is unjust, all that has been taken over for private exploitation from the commune, leaves us restless with time, divorced from the eternal. If I had come under the orders of poetry, I saw too that those orders would come into their full volition only when poetry was no longer taken to be a profession and when the poet would be seen to share in the daily labor toward the common need.