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Mark Jarman: Involves market after surfing till noon. We stand in wet trunks, shivering as ice dissolves off our sweet rolls inside the heat-blued counter oven. When they appear on his portable TV riding a floater chiffon is frothy as the

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peeling curl of a wave. The parade emcee talks up their hits and their new houses outside of Detroit, an old Ball clicks his tongue. Gloved up to their elbows, their hands raised toward his palm out they sing, "Stop, in the Name of Love," and

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don't stop but slip into the lower foreground. Every day of a summer can turn from one moment into a single day. I saw Diana Ross in her first film play a brief scene by the Pacific and that was the summer it brought back. Mornings we paddled out,

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the waves would be little more than embellishments, layth work and spunned glass, gray green with cold but flawless. When the sun burned through the light fog, they would warm and swell, windscale and ragged, and radios up and down the beach would

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burst on with her voice. She must remember that summer somewhat differently. And so must the two who sang with her in long matching gowns, standing a step back on her left and right as the camera tracked them into our eyes in Balls Market.

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But what could we know, tanned white boys wiping sugar and salt from our mouth and leaning forward to feel their song, not much, except to feel it ravel us up like a wave in the silk of whitewater, simply, sweetly, repeatedly, and just as quickly,

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let go. We didn't stop either, which is how we vanished, too, a parting like spray, Balls Market, my friends and I. Dredges ruin the waves, those continuous dawned perfections, and Ball sold high to the high rises cresting over them. His

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flight out of LA heading for Vegas would have banked above the wavering lines of surf. He may have seen them, I have, leaving again for points north and east, glancing down as the plane turns from that height they still look frail and

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frozen, full of simple sweetness and repetition. Morton Marcus: That was Mark Jarman, the poet who teaches at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and who is a graduate of UCSC, and who is back here this week to give a

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series of readings, one of which is in Santa Cruz and at UCSC, which occurred last night actually, and he is our guest tonight at the Poetry Show. Mark Jarman is the author of three books of poetry: "North

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Sea," put out by Cleveland State University Press, "The Rote Walker," put out by Carnegie Mellon, and "Far and Away," also put out by Carnegie Mellon. He has won two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Breadloaf Fellowship, a Sotheby

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International Poetry Prize, and California's prestigious Joseph Henry Jackson Award. Since 1981, he has co-edited "The Reaper" magazine and is also on the editorial board of Storyline Press with his friend and fellow editor, Robert McDowell, who has

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been on this program within the last two months. So, welcome, Mark Jarman, back home actually. Mark Jarman: I'm delighted to be here. I'm always delighted to come back home.

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Morton Marcus: But you also feel like something of an exile, don't you? And if so, explain how that is. Mark Jarman: It's hard not to live in the place about which you write most of your work. And it's hard to be as far away from

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it as I am in Tennessee. And I think, I believe Yeats said this once about living in Ireland, that you have to live among your own folk, and whenever I come back to California I feel I'm not only among my own folk but in a landscape, a geography that

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I understand. Well, and living in the South, though my children are growing up as Southerners, I usually feel like a stranger. Morton Marcus: Now, that's very interesting that most of your poems are still being written about California. Are there any

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plans of coming back or is the job situation just keeping you east of the Mississippi? Mark Jarman: The job situation is keeping me east of the Mississippi.

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Morton Marcus: You picked up that line perfectly. Let us hear some of this wonderful poetry of yours and poetry that is about California. And let me just turn this over to you, just read what you want.

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Mark Jarman: Well, of my three books, my most recent book, "Far and Away," is mainly about poems set in Southern California. And it was written in an attempt to recapture the experience I had growing up here. The third poem in this book is a poem about a

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friend of mine, who worked in the cottage industry of building, making surfboards when he was we were teenagers. This is called THE FACE OF THE WAVE

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I had a friend in that cottage industry, or my home listed to shore among the kelp snarl of alleys. One of the boys who sculpted surfboards, stoned on fumes of catalyzed resin by late afternoon, painting brain cells blind, knocking off on works

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skewed from his hands. To him the wave was only a human horror, abstract and heartless, the cross just as it broke, like the breathtaking pelican. A minor plane of gray shifting-glass might hollow out building, a wall in one breath,

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as he rose folding himself into the wave, so I rose. As simple as that, the friendship that moved us, collapsing at last as he did, balance and speech slurred, he would slip, a leg go down to the knee, keeling away face and his surfboard kicked

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its rail into his groin. He used the comms to lie still. Our last morning together, fire in the Santa Monicas reached an arm of smoke toward the bay and sprinkled the beach with ashes. He nodded asleep in the water. The last word between us as

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friends was a groan of recognition. Our wave rode out from under us. Afterwards, he leaned this way and that on a crooked staff of driftwood along the Esplanade, or poked among tide pools, his sun-whitened hair and leathery tan

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misleading, aged at only at sixteen. And when he came back from that death, at first I didn't know him, the fresh young witnessing class whose tongue God freed so it swelled with Old Testament damnations and the film-me mercy of the new. He was

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pale but still surfing and his hands, it was said, always folded on desk or Bible, could heal. We had much to say to one another and never said it. In my yearbook, the words of a rope scripture and his name signed below, curved smoothly with

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their good news. I read them and remember one day when I crouched at a tide pool where I could see him, light plumbed the lining of mouths and shields and stroked fish trapped beneath there, stirring the atmosphere, doubling and troubled. Sea

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anemones flinched and retracted. The tide would return the scoop out the fish. But that day I saw my friend's talent circling and cramped in its hollow as I now see his escape, the transforming rescue as I believe he must see it from such things as troubled

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people who think waves break like the heart. Morton Marcus: Okay, another one. Mark Jarman: Well, in the high school where I went to school in Redondo Beach, which was part of Greater Los Angeles, the sort of

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problems that occurred- the racial problems that occurred were mainly between brown and white. Where I live now, of course, in Nashville, they're black and white. This is another kind of thing and then I tried to write a poem that would be

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something like a ballad in which there would be not heroic, but mock-heroic characters involved in something that was in no way heroic. This sort of thing that the great old border ballads of England might have aggrandized that I tried to show in its two

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dimensions. This is called: LONG-STEMMED ROSES. Mist clings tonight, and the hiss of passing cars just like the release of pressure as pressure builds. As Jodi Portios

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Riviera trails his entourage into the gym parking lot, his first name laced in the rear window. Everyone was dancing, our girls wore their orchids, the purple spotted horns on their breasts. And Jodi's Car Club and their dates held roses

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in locked hands, pumping a locomotion into the red pedals. Noise of rock, an outside muffled hammer, shattered glass and the Pacific Ocean breathed its fog. Everyone was dancing, sheen of black hair and blonde, smell of over-fragrant colognes

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with song-like and brutal names. Albums embalmed such nights, and this one, too, scroll by cop light on parchment carbon had kept. The girl standing apart brown and white doused in the sulfur glare of the street lamps. And the football team

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huddled incongruously, breaking with a bright shout, and the Car Club ready. I remember the scent of low tide. Jodi Portio nicked under the left nipple, and the first string center in the thigh and feel the thorn on the stock, leaving back to such blossoms of

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memory when we were young. Morton Marcus: Mark, there are, of course, in the first several poems, strong elements of narrative but that last one was almost all narrative. And when I talk to you and I talk about

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Reaper and I talk about Storyline Press, it is inescapable that we talk about the narrative. Now, Bob McDowell was here, as I said, two months ago, and I'm sure a lot of people out there heard Bob's ideas on the narrative and of

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course, listened to his poems from his new book, "Quiet Money," which I hope everyone has gone out and bought. But you said before the show that you also believe in the narrative, but your beliefs differ from Bob's. How do they differ?

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Mark Jarman: My beliefs differ in this way: I think Robert is much more of a realist in the sense that he believes that the narrative is best represented by a sequence of cause and effect, of action and consequence, and I'm more interested in the form

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itself. That is, the narrative form itself as a form of meaning, just as a metaphor or simile as a form of meaning. And I could read you a poem from this book that will give a sense of what interests me about narrative. It's a poem called,

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"To the Reader," in which I try to take the form of the narrative and tell it backwards. Morton Marcus: Okay, great. Yes, let's definitely do that and then we may have some questions after that.

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Mark Jarman: All right, but what I was interested in is that famous moment near- which we believe exists near death, and some people have experienced, in which your whole life flashes before your eyes. What happens? And I thought, well, if the

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narrative is actually a form, then perhaps you might best understand it if we look at it backwards. I lived in Italy for a year, and came back from the town where I lived with a map. And the legend on the map - the map was a map of the city I

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lived in, from the 18th century, though the town was very much intact - has a legend, and the legend is a title, "A Chi Legge," "To the Reader." And so some of the information in this poem is based on information that explains that town. What I

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tried to do was write a poem in the persona or voice of another person who is remembering his life backwards to the point of- that point of non-existence, which precedes existence, rather than the one that follows it. This is called:

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TO THE READER Today, having turned 83, I turned back in my coma. I see my last moment awake, erect. Sun fills the empty piazza, crenelated by shadows of towers. There is the first step of the

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flight to the blank face of the Duomo and the sound of Sunday mumbling amplified by open doors. If I step forward I am here, jangled, drifting, and stilled with a flashback of ambulance bells, a huddle of nursing nuns, faint Italian

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farewells, so I step back and find the reversal, ironically clear, dustless, rhythmical. My clothes difficult, all those years of old age turned smooth, slipping on thoughtlessly like my own face in the mirror, and my wife's appearing beside it.

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We have our whole past ahead of us. Our children re-attach and like us grow younger, but more rapidly, they shrink back to their births. What is it like to lose them so? Affection intensifies inversely to their departures, soon so small they

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hide within their baby blankets. Then birth is reversed. My wife swallows their pain and hers and that pain and affection are gone and we continue. I understand the room-building of marriage now, as if the Baroque could be picked apart, broken arches

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rejoined, rounded, and then uninvented. As we built, we could separate, work all day out of thought of each other. Finally, we are alone in one room. The sexual sweetness is almost too much, then she vanishes. How quick was our

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courtship? How brief adolescent loneliness that has seemed endless? My childhood knots up again, all of its strings and in twinings just as enigmatic and boweled with codes, insinuations, untying one by one. Flat characters who are

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siblings zip off like meteors, then parents. I see four hands knitting this carefully to make a clear thing. But reader, within the heel of this city where I am dying are vaults of an ancient people. They undermine the city. A framework

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of steel has been built for support, water flooding the vaults rusts the steel, more is added. The eye beams bristle inside the hollow crown. The city stands on its brittle base, a wall sinks, a tile courtyard cracks. We have reached a steady

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state of support and collapse like the human face. Not this ball of entanglements, they gather me up and I am lost, and it is not to death. Morton Marcus: Very nice, there are though - this is a sort of a

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play with time in many ways - and there are things like that in Bob's book. I remember the painter who painted those paintings, and it's very elliptically told. And there are several poems in Bob's work which really don't operate in

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cause and effect in a chronological manner, but do play with a form of the narrative. So this is merely reversing the form of the narrative to make clear what you're attempting to do. Why don't you read another one,

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which you can think of it offhand, does something in the narrative that might be different from, let's say what Bob does, and then maybe we can talk about that? Mark Jarman: Well, all right.

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Morton Marcus: Yeah, you can take your time, Mark, just 35,000 people listening to us. But it's totally okay, especially since you know, I'm putting you on the spot. I just- Mark Jarman: What I'm saying is that, to me, the narrative is a

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form that represents time, and time not necessarily in an alpha to omega relationship. It could be in a number of relationships, but they're all included. This is a poem called, "The Shrine and the Burning Wheel," it's read- and it's not in my books.

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It's a new poem. And it includes trying to remember, or realizing that I remember a number of things that happened at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, and it is an attempt to represent simultaneity at the moment of remembering but

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realizing that these things have happened at different times. I think some of the names, most of the names that I mention in this poem will be recognizable. There are two names that will not be and they are the names of my mother and my grandmother. This

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is called THE SHRINE AND THE BURNING WHEEL. On the way to the evening reading, stopped at a quick stop for cigarettes, I saw as did everyone else parked there or

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passing, a gang of boys, local boys probably, burning the front wheel of a ten-speed. The bicycle turned upside down, stood on the dumpster-side of the store and one boy glanced from the corner through the front window. Transcendence,

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that's what it means to want to be gone as turning the eye's corner to the sudden glare of fire the local terrorist stares in your face. I got the hell out of there and kept the spidery and tally of the one, their look-out peeping into the store

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window at, it must have been the boy who won the bicycle, in his clerk smock, making change from the safe. At the evening reading as the poet was introduced at length, she rested her head on the heel of her left hand, full hair falling to the propped

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elbow. And as the prologue ran on, trickled little dandruff from her hair. And what I saw was no longer her gesture but the memory of Nora and Bodie Foster and the crowd at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles long ago, listening to

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Renascence and a Few Figs From Thistles and one that rhymed, Striped Pants and Paris, France. Bodie remembers how this Huxley went on and on introducing her, Edna Millay shook the dandruff from her hair. Transcendence is not going back to feel the

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texture of the past like the velvet nap of the loges in the shrine, it is wanting to be anywhere else. Clearly, I don't understand. The wheel spins, it is not hard to ignite the hard, lean tire with lighter fluid, it flashes and a around of smiles

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breaks in the dismal circle of the boy-pack from the apartment complexes. In their striped pants they opened doors of sedans to men and maroon fezzes but they are men themselves, nobles, and wear ruby rings set with diamonds and symbols.

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Search-lights mortar the clear night. Thank you, noble, says one man helping his wife to the curb. She, white as Ephesus tassel and the grandchildren will see a Chinese girl prodigy at the piano, jugglers on unicycles, and the reason

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they've come Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, aging and never to age. Here at the Shrine with its swag-tent ceiling in Arabic signs, hands of the crowd grip in ways that cannot be revealed, but now the amps are on. Big Brother and the Holding

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Company are on, the rapid fire of strobes, cuts, cuts, but that's too much, too soon. Instead is the boy scout expo. Let it be calm for a while as it would be at a state fair inside a great pavilion. Here are the scouts displaying their skill at

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fly-casting, the ark ends in a splash, fly blue or fly green, it hits the pool among the crowd, under the roof of the Shrine Hall there is quiet, then a cheer. Now the speakers start up. Janis Joplin, shapeless and small, and the loose madras

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fabric of her dress flares and thrashes in the wind, her body makes to the music, cut and cut and cut by the strobe lights across her hair. Transcendence is what she wants, or not what she wants, to live in the world, or out of it, to be anywhere

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else or here. As a studied voice says it's poetry of heaven and earth and meshed with it, hidden, a wheel of history turns, and the boys burn the wheel. To me the narrative project in poetry is tied very much to a

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return to realism that we haven't seen in poetry for a very long time but that has been perhaps exhausted in fiction. It is, strangely very close to another strain in American literature, which is transcendentalism. But a

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division has to be made between it and transcendentalism, which has informed American lyric poetry, that the sense that the world that we live in represents a greater ideal, or points, say, to the world of nature, which is very important in this area,

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points to a larger and more perfect world or possibility is one that I believe narrative poets, by and large, I have to say, reject that. Narrative poetry and its association with realism is very much an existential project that the

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fact of the matter is what we have at hand and what we have experienced. And one of these things is the daily following of time and as time is represented to us in the mind. And these things get mixed up together and I think the kind of poem I'm

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trying to write recognizes both and tries to recognize their reality without wishing for something that exists beyond them, and more perfect than them, that would be an escape from them.

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Morton Marcus: Well, that was eloquent and I think explained- went a long way to explain what you were talking about. It is the half hour and we usually take a break at this time. Could you read one more short poem and then we will take a musical-

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Mark Jarman: Let me read a little short poem from my first book that I liked very much. I spent part of my childhood in Scotland, and this is a poem of simultaneity. It's called HEMISPHERES. I left Southern California to live in

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Scotland as a child for a number of years and this is a poem in which I tried to take both worlds and put them together, hemispheres as it were. It's about my father. He lifts me above a wave or a crowd, bracing my back and head

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like a baby's and laughs. In California, the sun draws sweat from his forehead. In Scotland, the crowd surges like Pacific shallows. It propels us against surf like shoulders, people like caps of foam. At its stillest, a thin net of ocean climbs so

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slowly, the beach leans like a mountain grade, the whole swath clings by him. The Queen of England mounts the platform. I can see clearly from my father's arms to applause the North Sea tilted behind her and the sand goes dark and the sand becomes

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pale again. Pre- almost pre-literate times up through the greatest myth maker of our era, Sigmund Freud. Now this is an attempt to - this particular poem - to take myth and out of a simple,

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contemporary commonplace occurrence and suggest that it might have meaning without completely understanding it. The poem is called: TESTIMONY AND POSTSCRIPT.

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Once I was someone coming out of the dark, out of somebody's past to greet him again, and once I have myself been greeted like that, out of the dark, my past, by someone I too had forgotten. All of this is quite literal. I stood in my college quad

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watching a dance one night, this was in California, the music had begun suddenly in a dormitory window and grown as the sun went down behind hills, louder as the dim quad lights hidden in ivy lit paths into the surrounding buildings. We were silhouettes,

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many danced by themselves, and I was looking for a girl I hardly knew and spotted her dancing alone, her arms scissoring the private space I was too timid to claim. I watched her, the leotard smooth shadow of her, and from a bunch of shadows

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nearby, a voice came saying my name and then he stood there. His beard, black as a watch band and that hairline that joined his eyebrows in a single cloud made me remember him. And his voice, as timid as my distance from that girl, I couldn't tell

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you how long ago I had known him. He had sailed to Mexico and above Acapulco, the ship or boat, I couldn't quite picture it, had broken up in a storm along the shore at dawn so that the sun rising behind it made a serrated line of peaks look

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volcanic. He swam in shallow water for his life, so sick with adrenaline when he washed up, he vomited for sheer joy repeatedly. His voice trembling, afraid of its own shadow, told me all this in a few strange seconds. He said that he would

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sell his story, he hoped, to National Geographic or Reader's Digest. The girl I wanted to fall in love with had disappeared completely while he spoke and as if he knew he had only half my attention, he was gone too, saying, "See you

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around." And I had said that once, one night at the door of a girl I wanted to surprise in Pasadena. "See you around," I had said after she hugged me mechanically, puzzled that on a rainy night after her boyfriend had charged away on his Honda,

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this forgotten person she had met at youth camp should appear at her door. He must have been nearby watching her kiss her boyfriend good night. How strange it was. He told his future where it was taking him and asked her hers, which she

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admitted was going to be here in Pasadena. And then, "See you around," he said, and got in a van parked up the street full of people, his friends perhaps, and drove out of her life, her half of a memory he would never know the worth of, if it had one. But

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this is not enough to convince you. I have met the man I saw once in the bus depot in San Francisco. He walked back and forth, looming, and in clown-sized, worn-out shoes under the cruddy light as most of us waited. A man and a neat

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suit tried to talk to him. He tried to remind him that they knew each other, but when the walker understood, he broke his pattern and walked out into the street, the same little questioner calling after him. I knew I would never forget their

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faces, especially the madman's like a gray lamp pointed down at the one he wouldn't talk to. I recognize him again, years later elsewhere, it doesn't matter. What does is that he remembered that year, and how he walked and walked until he remembered his

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life, broke down and looked for home. He wasn't sure, but he thought the other man had been his brother. Morton Marcus: We were talking during the break about- you were defining- your difference between you and Robert was that

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you felt Robert was concerned with telling stories and you were concerned with time, how it passes, how we fill it, and how you really did not want to escape into any sense of wish or life hereafter or never-neverlands that might be

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up in some religious heavens or something like that, but really wanted to talk about our life down here and all the different aspects of it. Mark Jarman: I wouldn't say that that was a difference between

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us. What I was trying to explain was, my interest is in the form of narrative more in an abstract sense than Robert McDowell's is, where that- so that he appears to be more interested in telling a story at its fullest and to its end, following the surprises

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as he goes along, whereas, I seem to be more interested in the form itself. The irony of this is that in being interested in the form itself, it makes me in danger of being drawn to those very things that I would like to avoid which is an

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interest in form, an interest in ideals, that is, an interest in a place or a reality in which those ideals are eternal, and I fight against it. The poem I want to read now is an attempt to take a famous classical myth, the myth that compels me the

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most, which is the story of The Rape of Persephone. Growing up in Southern California, there were two seasons: wet and dry. Living where I live now there are four that correspond more to the European seasons on which this myth is based. That

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Persephone, abducted by Hades, is responsible in her mother's grief for creating the Four Seasons as we know them. Morton Marcus: Right, before that the world was eternally- Mark Jarman: Eternally spring like. I knew this myth when I

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was growing up in Southern California, but I didn't appreciate it fully until I lived in a part of the country where indeed there were seasons, not as we know them on the West Coast. The other thing I wanted to write about was one of those

00:35:20.890 - 00:35:38.290

experiences which we look back on from our adolescence, and know that by the grace of God, we haven't gone that way. There's a line by John Berryman in his wonderful book, a wonderful forgotten book, "Love and Fame," in which he says, "It

00:35:38.290 - 00:35:47.800

is supernal what a youth can take and barely notice or be bothered by, which to him older would work ruin," and this is what this poem is about. This is called: THE BLACK RIVIERA

00:35:50.860 - 00:36:11.590

There they are again, it's after dark. The rain begins its sober comedy, slicking down their hair as they wait under a weeping willow or eucalyptus, Larry Dietz, Luis Gonzalez, the Fitzgerald brothers, and Jarman. Hidden from the cop car sleeking

00:36:11.620 - 00:36:30.700

innocently past, stoned they giggle a little, with money ready to pay for more, waiting in the rain. They buy from the black Riviera that silently appears as if risen, the apotheosis of wet asphalt and smeary silvery glare and plush

00:36:30.730 - 00:36:49.090

inner untouchability. A hand takes money and withdraws, another extends a sack of plastic, short, too dramatic to be questioned. What they buy is light, rolled in a wave. They send the money off in a long car God himself could steal a girl

00:36:49.090 - 00:37:09.040

in, clothing its metal sheen in the spectrum of bars and discos and restaurants, and they are left dripping rain under their melancholy tree and see time knocked to kilter sort of funny, but slowing down strangely, too. So what did they dream? They

00:37:09.040 - 00:37:24.760

might dream that they are in love and wake to find they are, that outside their own pumping arteries, which they can cargo with happiness as they sink in their little Bathyspheres, somebody else's body pressures theirs with kisses, like bursts

00:37:24.760 - 00:37:45.760

of bloody oxygen until stunned they're dragged up, drawn from drowning, saved. In fact, some of us woke up that way. It has to do with how desire takes shape, tapered, encapsulated, engineered to navigate an illusion of deep water, its

00:37:45.760 - 00:38:01.750

beauty has the dark roots of a girl skipping down a high school corridor selling Seconal from a bag, or a black car colliding close to the road top, so insular, so quiet it enters the earth.

00:38:11.560 - 00:38:26.680

Morton Marcus: No, I'm just waiting for the next poem. Well- I mean, that one worked very well, and really had a lot of mythic resonance to it.

00:38:28.240 - 00:38:53.500

Mark Jarman: Well, I- This is a poem that is about another sort of experience from adolescence. It's sort of a simple loss of innocence poem in which it seems to me there are a number of uses of the narrative.

00:38:53.890 - 00:39:09.400

And one of the uses of the narrative is quite a traditional use of it. There's the form by which we apprehend experiences we finally understood. This is the only shape the experience can take, it has to be integrated, it can't be

00:39:09.400 - 00:39:26.290

fragmented, this has to have a shape. Whether the experience had the shape or not, is irrelevant. We present it in this way. This is the way ballads were presented. This is the way so many narrative poems are presented. And we seem to be

00:39:26.290 - 00:39:44.530

living at a time in which readers have lost their poetry because poetry has done two things: it has become ultra-personal, and it has become smashed into tiny particles like the inner space of the atom. And though we

00:39:44.530 - 00:40:00.790

recognize and respect the reality of that, still we have lost that sense that experience as we represent it to others around us has to have a whole shape. This is the way we tell anecdotes, the way we tell jokes, the way we tell things

00:40:00.790 - 00:40:17.770

that happened to us in our lives, and poetry has, I think until recently, lost that wholeness. This is a poem called SAND. I think it will be recognizable, I don't make any special claims for it other than the ones I

00:40:17.770 - 00:40:35.020

just tried to describe. My friend's father could make it outside of his garden, a yard of sand and succulents that the light passed through as it skimmed the back alleys to the beach and there he sipped from

00:40:35.020 - 00:40:55.210

his oxygen. Even the particles of fog, the salt suspended in the sea air that rusted the window screens, and the twilight of the house riddled with the gem shine of dust, weighed in his lungs like sand. His wife at work, his son at work or at

00:40:55.210 - 00:41:11.380

school, or at work or out early to ride the surf debris, the free spray, he would attach the portable tank and rest in his wooden chair in the dim alley. Wait for the sun between the back walls of apartments. Brace for the shortcutting

00:41:11.380 - 00:41:29.890

motorcycles' roar, and one day, having written his note about pain and uselessness, stopped feeling either. Sacks of sand, I remember that breathing, and the day my friend's mother stopped me outside their front door. "Gary's got real bad times

00:41:29.890 - 00:41:49.930

today." The words seem to bend her, the woman a woman the wind could scatter. I turned down the alley back to the sleek avenue where the shop windows, the mannequins wore panes of boiled sand, asked how anyone in such a wealth of sunlight could be and

00:41:49.930 - 00:42:07.630

die poor. If they stood at the end of the pier where the world stopped and let them go on a little ways, their polls crowded against the stained, used-up sky and ate the sand with the fish, chewing it finer. Nothing despite the platitudes would

00:42:07.630 - 00:42:25.990

change it to pearls. Gary showed me this when I saw him later at the beach, eating lunch under gulls that jagged and jabbered for crumbs he tossed in the air. "We'll stay where we are, mother and me. It's all the same with him gone except having to think

00:42:25.990 - 00:42:45.160

of him in his chair and the blood on the sand. It's all the same, though he's free, and now so are we." I have a beat truck stuttered in crevice with agate the size of a fist. That makes me remember how as he spoke Gary made a fist, cupping a hand

00:42:45.160 - 00:43:03.190

below it for a stream of sand. Simply a thoughtless act of thoughtfulness, and no more than anyone might do. Lying full length on the ripples of a dry beach, finding one hand full of grains of quartz, the other empty.

00:43:06.550 - 00:43:19.900

Morton Marcus: Very nice, very nice. Again, I don't know what questions to ask. I think you really answered all the ones that I was thinking about that have to do with a narrative. And I would, well, we're getting towards the end, God, we're

00:43:19.900 - 00:43:36.010

getting towards the end of the show already, I don't believe it. Why don't you read one or two more? Mark Jarman: All right, well, I'll read some more poems here that have to do with experience in Southern California. That

00:43:36.010 - 00:43:59.110

seems to be the landscape I'm most comfortable with. And try to say that when Robert McDowell and I started "The Reaper" seven years ago, we were just mad. We were just basically disgruntled with contemporary poetry and the scene and that we wanted to say

00:43:59.110 - 00:44:18.580

what was on our mind. I don't think we knew exactly what it was. But within a couple of issues of writing about poetry, we began to understand that the form that American poetry had sort of had a clandestine affair with over the years was the

00:44:18.580 - 00:44:38.740

narrative, that the lyric was still the form, even with the advent of modernism that most poets worked in, and that our own interest was in breaking new ground for poetry, especially a ground that would signify the end of modernism. And that's

00:44:38.740 - 00:45:00.940

what "The Reaper" is now. And out of "The Reaper" as you know, because Robert's been on the show before, grew Storyline Press and our interest in in that press - this name reflects it - in publishing narrative poetry, but also in fiction. And

00:45:01.150 - 00:45:18.670

various things have come about, the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, which we're giving for a first book of poetry. Morton Marcus: Could you- could you speak to that and- Mark Jarman: I could say that the deadline for the competition

00:45:18.670 - 00:45:41.710

is October 15th. We're giving a prize of $2,000 for a first book of poetry. And despite our own cranky, obstreperousness about narrative poetry, we're looking for good first book of poetry. Then we're giving a prize that really exceeds any other prizes

00:45:41.710 - 00:46:00.970

given for poetry now. And the winner will be published by the press, will receive a prize of $2,000 and will read at the Nicholas Roerich Museum, which is a very beautiful place in New York City. But all of this has grown out of two people who

00:46:00.970 - 00:46:17.950

found themselves in the Mid South in 1980, and decided that they weren't going to be forgotten, and would have their say about contemporary poetry. And seven years later we find ourselves sitting in the studio at KUSP, which is sort of

00:46:17.950 - 00:46:25.900

extraordinary. Morton Marcus: There's a quiet irony there. Mark Jarman: Was it quiet? A loud irony, it depends on how loud this microphone is on.

00:46:29.410 - 00:46:45.550

Anyway, I'll finish with one more poem. It's a poem you- I believe when you were talking with Robert, he read a poem, a wonderful poem called, "In the Photograph You See," and you mentioned that the tailor seemed to you something of a guru or a

00:46:45.550 - 00:46:57.760

teacher. This is a poem about a man who was something of that to me, but something in an ironic way. This poem is called, "The Mystic," and I think it will cover the time adequately I hope.

00:47:02.590 - 00:47:19.930

This poem, to preface it more, I find that the country is large, or the country we live in is so large, and despite the tissue of the media, our regions still don't understand one another. And I am constantly trying to explain what California is like

00:47:20.200 - 00:47:30.580

to people who have very strong ideas about it and have never been here. THE MYSTIC It just doesn't occur to you, where there are only skinny

00:47:30.580 - 00:47:47.860

palms and sunburned pink houses and wide avenues and the aluminum plane of the Pacific that anything is secret. Where are the vaulted elms, the brick age-like wine, the dreary weather to plaster elm leaves on aged brick. Yet I knew a mystic

00:47:48.280 - 00:48:04.420

there. He worked out of the sun, his one black suit showing the stitch of dandruff white as his face and turned his gaze obliquely to words as true as he could say them. He worked, but it didn't matter. Standing in the lobby of his movie house

00:48:04.420 - 00:48:19.990

beside the little harbor, he lived as he would say, outside the flesh. Up in his office at the top of the double staircase, he crept through texts, gathering evidence like a seine net, odd fish mixed with phosphor. He believed there were

00:48:19.990 - 00:48:36.190

men whose offered palms produced at a shrug bread or even gold, that all light in the universe, all that we see begins in the self, there is no outer light and believing he lived another life, "Believe it," he said, "there is more." What is

00:48:36.190 - 00:48:51.400

extraordinary knowledge but fingers adhering to a talisman, essential as their own charm, or what a gaze fixes on in the corner of the ceiling. Take the TV set he owned, it's gray green bulging face that when the picture filled it like a

00:48:51.400 - 00:49:08.320

speechless, readable expression, dangled the sooty web over the heads of the colorless actors. You saw it, it was part of the picture just over their heads, calligraphy of another world, encroaching and sending us messages. After World War II he

00:49:08.320 - 00:49:22.000

said he walked past houses, wondering how the people in them woke and went to bed and in between went on with life. That was the beginning. Now he knew the hidden was like a parent, thinking she must this second turn off the light in her

00:49:22.000 - 00:49:38.650

child's room late, the TV telling us sick jokes, and when she entered, finding the two year old ill on her pillow. The occult greets its initiates. That's how I think of him in this world, where the engine block cracks on the snowy

00:49:38.650 - 00:49:55.150

interstate and the life it held searing true escape for the hiss. He stands to the side letting me ask him questions as the light brooms in, straw-gold, tinged with all it's touched in the harbor. The tourist boats and chum tanks and the

00:49:55.480 - 00:50:14.530

breakwater's combs of seaweed. We stand in the movie house lobby, ante room to the dark, the muttering auditorium where on a sunstroked afternoon only a few sit harmless. I asked about Jacob's Ladder, the language dolphins exchange. He knows. And

00:50:14.530 - 00:50:32.440

here's the secret: he knows that there's a secret pursuit, the questioning and answering. Under the chains biting the ice and the tow truck delivering the day and the bill, there is another road. A former day fumes outside, and inside its light

00:50:32.440 - 00:50:45.610

lies at our feet. The ocean seeps under the building, and the pier rats throw their shadows against the screen, and one patron, furious from the darkness, won't believe our disbelief.

00:50:48.010 - 00:50:57.070

Morton Marcus: Thank you very much Mark. It was a delight to see you again and a delight to have you here and give you some hard questions which you answered beautifully. Mark Jarman: Well, thank you very much for having me.

00:50:57.130 - 00:51:04.600

Morton Marcus: I hope to see you here much more often and real soon, that is in California. I imagine how this place can be missed. Mark Jarman: Yes indeed.

00:51:04.810 - 00:51:19.600

Morton Marcus: Let me add something to what he was talking about. If you want to send poems to "The Reaper," the address is the same for the Roerich First Book Award of $2,000 as it is for the review, you can send to either one. The address is 325

00:51:19.630 - 00:51:39.520

Ocean View Avenue if you want more information on the contest, 325 Ocean View Avenue, Santa Cruz, California 95062. It's 325 Ocean View Avenue, Santa Cruz, California 95062. Next week, Joe will be back and he will be celebrating Theodore Roethke's

00:51:39.520 - 00:51:53.890

birthday. Roethke will be reading and Joe will be reading some of his poems too, Roethke on record, Mark is looking at me very, very shocked, since unfortunately, he is no longer singing with us anymore. And I would like you people who I'm

00:51:53.890 - 00:52:05.260

sure are wondering why we've gone over to stay tuned for Tim Folger and "Things Ain't What They Used To Be." This is Mort Marcus, I will see you in about two weeks. Take care out there.