dragod

REVOLUTION (for Aoife)

I should like to call for a radical redistribution of wealth and property inside the
United States. I should liike to call for the Judicial, Leglislative and Executive
branches of the US Government to disband, until we can resecure them as
seperate but equal branches of governement. I should like the Supreme Court as most recently constituted to disband. I should like the President and Vice President to resign. I should like this process to continue until we get somewhere down to about the level of Dennis Kosinnich (sp). I li ve in contempt and disgust for religious fundamentalists, the ones that now control our own governement, and the ones that are running the Jihad throughout the world. I don't see the big big difference between them. I like American culture ok, but then I am also fascinated by Arab culture as well. What I hate is this mad fundamentalism which honestly would rather see dead that which it does not undertand. I also think, finally, that soon the dominating influences currently at work on American Culture are going to be looking for new targets to exploit to win more new converts, and that an organizations like ours is obviously already known to these folk, and undoubtedly on the list. I think WE have work to do, and many of us can only choose to remain "bored by politics" at our own damn risk, and those of our kid sisters and brothers, and children yet to come. This all requires further thinking of my part, and perhaps on yours as well.

*

Like everyone in the world, it sometimes seems, I would vote for Fatality for
President. I would vote for her even more enthusiastically for next store neighbor and best friend. Someone accused me recently of being a "collector." Well, get used to it. Everybody I list as a friend in my little box is either already really a friend, as close to me as if I had sisters, or somebody I hope is heading in that direction. (The fact that I have four brothers, and one son, is probably reason why I consider that basket closer to full. Mike and Billy are great pals here however)/ I based this on actual communications. If people don't communicate, I just assume we can still be friendly, but I do not keep them on my list as friends. I have been wrong about that, and found myself going back to people I cut to tell them I was an ass the first time around. Some of them have come back. To those friends in particular I am grateful.

But that does not include Fatality. I think I said to her let us have a big ass important correspondence at least 10 months ago, and, in spite of certain interruptions for travel and the like, we have had a wonderful time of it ever since. This is very long winded way, even for me, to reintroduce the figure of Robert Creeley. Bob was about to teach near Fatality before he died last year, and we have been talking about him ever since. I saw a movie yesterday which brought his memory back to me powerfully, and a thus a note from Ms Fatalism this morning was right on time.

The movie was/is the new Terence Malick's The New Land. I though it very
special. It brought me back to my first small press, the Turtle Island Foundation, which I don't know if any of you know anything about, and how
that press grew out of the mentoring Eileen and I received from three of the
great Black Mountain College poets: Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and our especially deep and intimate and once drug swilling pal, Edward Dorn.

For me the network started to form when I followed a class mate of mine, when I was still in college at San Francisco State, to visit the guest instructor
hired for that semester, Robert Creeley. I am sure I have else where written of the shock I recieved after waiting a half an hour in line in the corridor, to turn into his office only to see this six foot thinish man with jet black raven hair
down to his ass, only one good eye in his head, the other like a hawk had had at it, wearing a cheap ass army and navy jacket, with a huge purple
button on his lapel saying YIPPIE. Well, Yippie it was. He took one look at
Dick and me, and our respective lion's mane of hair, and said, bluntly enough. "Either you guys holding?" Well surprise surprise some of the biggest rock stars in the area bought their pot from Dick. His stuff was that good. The two of us, plus Creeley, were all getting loaded under a pine tree
on campus no more than fifteen minutes later.

And that's how these epic years in my life started. Bob invited us out to Bolinas to his house that weekend, and before terribly long we had met Allen
Ginsberg, and Phil Whalen, and Gary Synder, and Gregory Corso, and Michael McClure, and David Meltzer, and Diane DiPrimma, and the whole Beat, and Black Mountain and New York School gang of poets as they wandered across America like Kerouac back and forth to Bolinas on their rounds from one campus town, and the few readings they could find, after another. You have to be a poet twenty four hours a day, was the popular
statement. And so I became. And so did Eileen.

Creely was my man because he was, in my ear, in part the voice of New England. I could hear the Atlantic in his voice, and also the kitchen in my
own Irish house. His nanny had been Irish, and from her he found out he
had distant Irish ancestors which thrilled him. He loved to talk to me about
that, and about Irish poets like Patrick Kavanagh, whom he adored. He also
would listen to me ask him questions about my favorite poet, who had been his best friend, but had passed by then, Charles Olson. Only Yeats has
ever blown me away as much as Olson did, and to a very great extent when
it comes to HUGE MIND Olson still hangs over my world like a huge sun and
moon combined to this day. And the correspondence between Bob and Charles, last time I checked, has by now filled at least four volumes of letters.

Olson has been the great American Space, American history poet of his
generation, and history has always been my leading subject. "We use history," Edward Dorn commonly said, "to put the present in relief." I don't
think I could understand anything about the present if I didn't use the past to
build into it, and that of course includes myself, and the nature of the therapies I have used to understand both me, and the world. Olson was at
least that hip, more, and made gorgeous new mythologies out of these
coincidents, and wrote poems that seemed like fragments from the most ancient Greek even when -- especially when -- he was only talking about the
daily rounds of some mailmin in his native Gloucster Massachusetts, or his
love for Men like Creeley. It was sheer genius stuff, as far as I am concerned, and ultimately led me to the figure of Dr. Carl Ortwin Sauer, who
I will save for another journal soon.

The New World, let's break it, and remake it, ok. I would live my last years
among a family of women -- for yours is the brightest, and the fairest of sexes. Like stars. But I am a man who also loves men. And now, right now, we need the whole god damn army. Collect that, children. Put my name on it
for me, would you? BC

Next Journal: The New Land and Carl Sauer