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 Contextand 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 Spicerand 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 inFlowers 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 ...