In 1970, such ostensibly technical and mundane insights didn’t seem like something I could transform into poetry, while chewing the cosmic and/or human scenery did. Too bad. If I’d pursued some of the practical messages that episode tried to deliver to (or was it from?) my teeming brain, I might have produced a piece of readable writing. Even if I hadn’t, working the practicalities would have given me more peace of mind than my lofty visions of the sea and stars did. For years after this disaster, you see, I felt badly about ruining the Uher even though, to his credit, Schafer himself had been more amused than angry when I told him what I’d done. It’s possible that he already understood how much more valuable insight and innovation are than state-of-the-art technology. Still, I don’t recall him sending me on any more missions that risked valuable equipment. Maybe he decided that the only insights I was capable of appropriating then were the kind I was recording in my poems.

There was more. A few weeks later Schafer, Davis and I did use what I brought back from Pacena Bay for our quadraphonic composition. We dubbed my quarter-inch half track tape, and then delayed the two dubbed tracks a half second each to create a harmonized wave roll in glorious quadraphonic sound. This time, I did get the implicit lesson: It is what people accept as authentic that matters, not how the authenticity is produced.

Too bad it didn’t occur to me to apply this to writing poetry or to my personal life, because it pointed straight at my best talents as a writer and as a human being: I was and remain a late-in-the-game fabricator of apparently inappropriate and disparate materials, a rectifier--partially and perhaps inexactly--of major foul-ups, fuck-ups, errors-in-judgment, slapstick mistakes, and so forth. I don’t foresee the future any better than John Naismith, Charles Olson, or NORAD and CNN, but then art and artists are with us to let us know what’s on the end of those forks we’re putting in our mouths, not to predict the future. What art--alone of all the human mental crafts--does well is what I managed to do that day: read a messy situation and act on it accurately enough to bring some small part of it, alive, laughing and whole, through to the other side of the ongoing fuck-up called the human condition. For posterity, or for itself, or for the sheer joy of the human dance. Doesn’t matter.

* * *

So, if I was, in my late 20s, too self-involved to write competent poetry, and in my late 30s not resourceful enough to solve the compositional and philosophical weaknesses that made my nominally accomplished lyric verse embarrassing to me, why am I now, in my 50s, digging through this musty bone-yard and trying to repress a sense of regret and loss? In turning my back on verse and the poetry subculture "Biz" around it, did I give up the essential tools of poetry–or anything else that is useful to understanding the world?

I can’t seem to come up with easy answers to those questions. They aren’t rhetorical. They’re so alive and permeable, in fact, that it’s pointless to approach them frontally. So, let’s go back to the magazine editor’s questions that touched this off and see if they offer an environment I can think in. These were his questions: Do I see writing differently than I did in 1970? If I do, what are the important differences?