anyone
who was not a Mormon was in the counter culture. So
the counter culture consisted of Catholics and
Anglicans as well as gays and lesbians and
communists and poets--anyone who was not part of
the Mormon establishment--so there I met all these
bohemians, that's the general term " bohemian
types," but isn't that paradoxical! I met them
not in New York or San Francisco where I was born,
but in Salt Lake City. So there I published some
poems in a literary mag we started at the
University of Utah which was called Context and then I stopped writing again. I
went into the army and when I was in Mammoth Spring
Arkansas living on separate rations in sort of like
an auto court by the river working as an assistant
poultry inspector--I was very lonely. I started
writing poetry again there. But each of those three
Arial I stopped ... but then again I didn't stop
because I was always writing some and then I came
back to San Francisco after I was out of the army
and I went to the University of California Berkeley
and I had an old friend named Gerry MacKenzie from
Salt Lake City and he was living in San Francisco
at the time, so we got together and went out to a
bar--Vesuvios bar--this is 1956, late 56 in North
Beach and while we were in there we met another man
whose name I forget. I think it was Stanley
McNail--I don't quite have that name, and he said
to us, "do you want to go to a real bohemian bar?"
So we went with him up Grant Avenue to a place
called The Place and it was either that night or
the next night or the next week when I went back
again that I met Jack Spicer there. I remember
having my first conversation with Spicer; it was about Emerson and Thoreau and I
met Joe Dunn there along with Spicer and Knute Stiles and a couple of other
people, and at some point I had shown a poem to
somebody and I went over to Joe Dunn's house on Bay
Street. Spicer was there--and he liked the poem I
showed him which was "Pablito" the first poem in Flowers and I remember
walking back down to Spicer's house or towards
where he lived down Polk Street in the middle of
the night and him telling me I should join his
workshop in poetry, and I eventually did that and I
dropped out of university and spent the next eleven
years of my life in North Beach, except for a year
in Greenwich Village, which was the same place,
writing poetry so that's how all that
started.
B: Ned Doyle did
something to your curiosity in terms of going past
California Street.
G: Well to go north
of California Street meant to break away from my
family.
B: And once you do
that, of course, at that age, most young writers
have to find the teachers or connections.
G: Yes, so I found
the teacher--Spicer.
B: I remember
reading that he had a pretty odd and sophisticated
test before a student could take his poetry
workshop.
G: Ya, he did and I
don't remember much about it; it's all in some of that Spicer
material. It was a test made up of questions about
literature, history, and philosophy and I met him
later after the workshop had started. I got into
the workshop without taking the test, but later on
I saw a copy of the test and--I was very much of
a-- shall I say, an academic kind of intellectual
kid and I would have answered the test quite
straightforwardly and to display my....
B: Erudition?
G: My erudition, ya,
and if that had happened then I would not have
gotten into the workshop because the test was to
screen out people who could pass it [laughter] or
who would take it seriously or if you were so
...
|