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Morton Marcus: Good afternoon, everybody. This is Mort Marcus and the July 9th edition of the Poetry Show. Today we have with us a man who was very much influenced by the saxophonist you are hearing in the background now, and that is the

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great Art Pepper who passed away in 1982. We'll be learning more about Art, but more, we'll be learning an enormous amount about today's guest, Richard Maxwell. And before we begin the program, I'd like to thank Plaza Books on Pacific Avenue for

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donations that helped make this hour possible. And I still want to keep some of this wonderful jazz going in the background, so let's listen to a few more seconds of Art Pepper. Well, as I said, today's guest is a man very influenced by the

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work of Art Pepper, and his name is Richard Maxwell. And Dick, welcome to the Poetry Show. Richard Maxwell: Thank you, Mort. It's good to be here. Morton Marcus: Dick, just what influence has Pepper had on your

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work? Richard Maxwell: My relationship with Art Pepper began when I was still in high school back in the early fifties. And Art Pepper was a very young, very bad boy, very exciting. He was my James

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Dean, I suppose. I always had the feeling, as I said in the poem that you've seen, about elegia, the elegy for Art Pepper, that somehow I had the feeling of if my own insides could take shape in the air, it would sound like Art Pepper.

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And- and that was from very, very early on and it continued until his death in 1982. Morton Marcus: That's very interesting. I know that you've written several poems on Art Pepper, and the conjunction of

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jazz and poetry has also had something to do with your work hasn't it? You've actually done some readings to jazz. Richard Maxwell: Well, I did that for quite a while, yes. We had- were fortunate enough to have a colleague at Foothill

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College where I worked named Denny Berthiaume, formerly of Solar Plexus, out of Santa Cruz. And Denny got together a quartet and we did three jazz concerts: two in Palo Alto, and one at San Jose State as part of their fall series in 1983, I believe it

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was. Morton Marcus: Dick, before we start, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself: where you're from, and what you do. I should introduce him myself just very formally, or informally, as

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a man I've known and liked now for several years and met as the director for the very successful and very different Foothill Writers Conference, which is very much sort of like a family affair, both students and writers who come there just sort

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of get swept into this very, very intimate, and I think, very creative mood, which I would hope that more writing conferences would have but usually don't. And he's also the author of two books of poems, "Self-Inflicted Ideas," and,

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"Palestine, Illinois," both of which, unfortunately, are unavailable. So, with that in mind, fill in the rest, Dick. Richard Maxwell: Fill in the rest of what, Morton? Morton Marcus: Of your life and what you think might be

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important to a hearing of your poems and getting to know you by our listeners? Richard Maxwell: Well, as someone once said, I was born in 1936 and then everything went blank, you know? It has been

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sort of like that. I spent most of my life growing up in Southern California from parents who came from Palestine, Illinois, which was the title of that first chapbook that you mentioned. I escaped Southern California in 1958, when I was

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chasing a girl all the way to Stanford, but I couldn't get into Stanford, so I went to San Jose State, which was as close as I could get. When I finished at San Jose State, I suddenly decided I was an English major, and they gave me my degree, and

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I went off happily to teach in Hawaii for a while, and then appeared at Foothill in 1965 and I've been there ever since, just now twenty-one years. Morton Marcus: And you are about to do something very exciting.

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Why don't just- Richard Maxwell: Oh, yes! About to do something very exciting, I'm about to go to China to teach next year, the People's Republic of China, where I will be a foreign expert at Jinan

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University in Guangzhou, which is Canton in the West. I will be teaching senior undergraduate majors in English. Morton Marcus: Right, wonderful. Well, that is our guest for the day. And Dick, I would like you to read some poems, and since

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we've been talking about Art Pepper, and I know that the tune that we heard that opened the show has something to do with the first poem you're going to read, so why don't you tell us about that and then read the poem?

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Richard Maxwell: When I hear that tune, I always hear this poem because this is one of the pieces that Denny arranged for the jazz poetry concerts that we did in Palo Alto. And the tune, excuse me, the poem is called, "Help." And if you can imagine

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the music that we just heard, as the background to this one, it's called: HELP He's old, hairy, hoary, horny, and as a friend of his remarked

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last Friday, portly. And I travel sort of with this fossil. I'm trapped in him, in his disgusting body. Believe me, is there anyone out there who can still feel? It is hell in here. I don't trust this man. His eyes are dull, variegated like a

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roadmap of Marin or the south of France. I want, I need. This old man I'm in repulses, I'm Richard in here, remember? Can't you hear me? Let me out of here, who loves, who is like a boy-scout, who loves you as himself, who is youthfully and dynamically

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charming, who is sweet and kind, full of promise, whom all mothers love, who loves their daughters as sisters, who is not like this old man who leers out skulking, painful as a boil, who is eternally swollen and does not have but is an erection that

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says pain. Hold me if you you think you can. I'm not him, I'm sweet Richard. I'm me, disregard the old fart. I'm in here and I want you. I hope you can say old fart on the radio, I don't know.

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Morton Marcus: Do I have to put any disclaimers or warnings out to the audience, like, you say things so I'll say it right now: the poetry you may hear may offend some people. Therefore, we would suggest that those people not listen, but I hope

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everyone listens. That last poem of yours is a great introduction to Richard Maxwell as well. And is a poem that I have been trying to write for years, Dicks. You beat me to it, very, very powerful and funny. And especially that idea of an

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erection being pain and all that, very, very nice, some more? Richard Maxwell: Well, Mort, you've talked about the- the elegy poem for Art Pepper. Mort mentions that because we happen

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to appear side by side in Al Young and Ishmael Reed's, "Quilt Number Four." And this was a poem I wrote after listening on the radio to a classical station where the very stuffy announcer announced the death of Art Pepper in a hospital. And

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immediately I went home and started writing this poem. Art Pepper published one of the most exciting books and one of the most terrifying books I've ever read called, "Straight Life," his autobiography. In his late years after serving several

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years in prison for various kinds of narcotics charges and so on, he went through Synanon and married, met and later married a woman named Pepper, named Laurie. And one of Lauries projects in helping to straighten him out in the end

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part of his life was to get him talking into the tape recorder and he published this story of his life called, "Straight Life." And because the double, two-edged kind of title, it is straight, undiluted life that he lived and it's also what he

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considered to be a straight life, his innocence of ordinary. There's a passage at the end of the book where he describes a night playing at the Blackhawk in San Francisco. One of his former wives or earlier wives had threatened and actually

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tried to commit suicide that night in their hotel room. He was strung out, he had needle marks all over his arms, he knew the narcs were inside the club when he was playing, he was drunk in addition. He had left as his wife threatened to kill

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herself up in his room. He went down to play the gig he had that night and Sonny Stitt walked in and for a cutting session, so they started playing. And apparently Sonny Stitt played for about forty-five choruses or something, and when he finished,

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he sort of just nodded and looked over at Pepper and says, "Hey, dude, white boy, see what you can do with that." And this is what Pepper said in his book, he said, "I forgot everything, and everything came out. I played way over my head. I

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searched and found my own way. The people were screaming. I looked at Sonny, but I just kind of nodded, and he went, all right. And that was it. That's what it's all about." And the epigraph in this poem, which is called, "Elegy: Last Song for

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Art," is, "You could just feel it, man." This is very much the way Art Pepper talked into this book. Now, I guess the poem: ELEGY: LAST SONG FOR ART Aspiration, you can just feel it. It has to do with air,

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breath, the way we take in and expel the world, laughing, talking, kissing, raging and our size, all are this. A man's ass is slapped at birth and he sucks in his first breath and let's it out, his first protest against the sting of the world. He is

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breathing now. All the rest of his natural life, in comes the good air, out goes the bad, the air he can't use anymore. This is his life. This processing of air. There is no air left in you, Art, who inhaled the LA smog and blew it out, beautiful

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most of your life. Now, you have endured what you will, have felt what you were going to feel, and have returned to the atmosphere, the last love, the last pain, the last song, the last curse and outrage, you're now in earth's lungs we'll ever know.

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You called it straight life, what you lived through: the booze, the women, the dirty needles, the nodding, the slammer, the endless withdrawals. You thought you'd been straight, but no one could have loved you enough. Nothing

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could get you high enough. If you ever knew desolation as yours, but Lord, man, what music. Lyrical on old show tunes, raspy and angry when it was right to be angry. Prison, hard time will do that to you. They said you played black,

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angry, and you did, a tortured breath but always swinging. Air, Art, air, and now the absence of air, a vacuum, that's what you are now. I'd expected a blowout, a sudden apocalyptic cessation of the tune that was your life, your breathing. The man on the

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radio announces your stroke and coma in flat tones, like a slow leak. He doesn't know what he's announcing. The trip is over. I always felt the air you pushed through your Selmer was my own breath. It was like my own pulse, like hearing my own

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voice. Oh, sweet singer, sad, bad swinger, expeller of my own sweet, foul breath. It is for both of us I mourn. I listened hard into the reaches of this sad night and hear a cacophonous silence, a spirited, grading, mournful jamming. It is the

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sound of our two ghosts expiring, trading force. Morton Marcus: What I love about that poem is not only the way you metaphorically talk about breath, but to me, it seems a really great poem about the relationship of audience to

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artists. And how when the artist goes, some of us go because he really carries our life into a future. And it twines these ideas and a lot of other ideas together. I think it's a wonderful, wonderful poem, Dick.

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Richard Maxwell: Thank you, Mort. You know, one of the things that has influenced me more probably than music in the last ten years or so has been our mutual friend, John Logan. And I think John, in talking about the the notion of the

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anonymous lover on the other side of- out there someplace who makes contact with the poem, then the whole notion of the poem as a kind of dance or something, I think there's something very important in that. And one of the things I

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have been trying to do in the last ten years is to get a certain degree of kind of straightforwardness and honesty and kind of absence of decorative and say, philosophical kinds of things. Going more for the poem that is

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more like a direct expression, more jazz-like, I suppose- Morton Marcus: Well, your phrasing is tremendously crisp and really perfected and that certainly helps it but there are a lot of ideas in here. I mean, there are ideas about breath,

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and not just metaphors, and I just, I mean it just really. again, as now just a little part of that poem, it takes you back and really makes you think of something you're doing all the time: inhaling and exhaling. And it just takes on cosmic

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importance. It's a poem that when I first read it, as I told you, in, "Quilt Four," just knocked me out and just continues to do that. It's good to hear it in your voice finally. Well, let's go on, more poems.

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Richard Maxwell: More poems, you have any druthers? A couple more Pepper poems. Morton Marcus: Great. Richard Maxwell: We'll go and put that aside and go on and do-

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Morton Marcus: Sounds good. Richard Maxwell: Something else, realer or maybe different. This was the first one of these poems that, in a way, kind of harkens back to the time when I was going to junior college and like

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my father, who was an, I'll tell you more about that, was an an aviator. And he had rented a- the thermal airport way out in the middle of the desert. Everyone knows a thermal is the hottest place in the universe or something and that's where we

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were living. That's where I was living. I would come down from school on weekends and room upstairs in this old wooden hangar, deserted naval hangar from World War II, creaky and quiet and eerily quiet out there. And I had a little voice

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of music, portable record player, and an Art Pepper album that I would turn on, and then I would walk two-hundred-twenty feet upstairs in this creaky old building, down the stairs to go to the john, and I would have this music on and I would hear

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it ghosting through this monstrous old hangar. And I still have the recording and I still listen to it, you know, very frequently. But there are allusions to that whole business in this poem, and it's called:

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AMONG FRIENDS Why boys can't talk without saxophones in their mouths, listening to Art Pepper, and then, thinking of how a friend of mine who died in 1979, then, tentatively, I walked down

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creaking, ghost-ridden passages. You played funky, raspy, plaintive, bottled-up, dutiful tunes, and I never knew what you really wanted to blow. But I felt it in the desert air I lived in, so like the moon. This was twenty-two years ago, Art.

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Where were we then? You were junked out, I, stumbling down dusty corridors of World War II, an old hangar my father bequeathed me to live in, though I was alive and thriving. So, I wandered those shrunk halls up and down in search of your song,

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better than all available or dreamable flesh. The fat, round bell of your perfection, the saxophone of your pain. What I didn't know then, how men cry and sing. There's the line in there, the saxophone of your pain, which I

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found in a textbook about metaphors saying that it was absurd to say the saxophone sang of your pain. So I thought, no it's not at all. Morton Marcus: I'll just say it.

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Richard Maxwell: And there it is. Morton Marcus: Well, it's another thing since you mentioned the word saxophone anyway, an instrument that I'm sure to you and I, who were born the same year, really means

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jazz. And yet, to many, many young people out there in the audience, it's sort of an antique instrument because their whole lives have been centered on guitars. Richard Maxwell: Well, my sons, though, have now discovered the

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saxophone. Morton Marcus: Aha! Richard Maxwell: Yeah, they like it in the rock and roll tunes when they have the saxophone, there's something coming back

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that I think people have missed. Morton Marcus: Great. Yeah, I think so too. Wonderful, sensual, and at times, raucous instrument. Richard Maxwell: Truly, wonderful.

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Morton Marcus: More Art Pepper? Richard Maxwell: No, I just mentioned my aviator father and I wanted- Morton Marcus: Oh, that sounds great.

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Richard Maxwell: An elegy for him. He died in February. And this is like new stuff that I think has never been heard by anybody before. I was very fortunate, a year and a half ago to have a sabbatical leave, during which time I edited a

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bunch of- a huge pile of manuscript actually that my father had written after an earlier heart attack, he started writing about his life. And I was able to find time to edit that and have it put together and my sisters and I published

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a, I guess a hundred copies of the book, his book called, "I Couldn't See the Weeds." And what he's talking about in there is that the epigraph to this poem is from his book. He's describing when he is about eleven years old in Illinois in

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about 1920, or '21, something like that, the first time he flew in an airplane, and this was for him the ultimate experience and what he has to say is, I'll read this in a second. The poem is called, "Testimony for a Pilot," and

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here's my dad speaking: "I watched in awe as the ground faded away, and I got that first exhilarating feel of flight. It was everything I had dreamed of and more. I hadn't counted on the fact that you couldn't see the weeds. "

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He was from Southern Illinois and was already out, his mother had died like when he was about two. So he was a full fledged farmer at age about eleven, and he knew weeds very well and all the rest of his life, and a whole lot of where I come from,

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comes from this notion. He spent telling me that all you have to do is get away from things and look at them from the distance and put things into perspective, that perspective he learned from the altitude of flying in a plane. He'd look down and say,

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look at the little ants down there scurrying around, and he would say, "I don't know where in the hell that is, but whoever it is down there thinks that's the center of the universe," and he would stand back and chuckle and look at it, and that was his

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whole philosophy towards life. Anyway: TESTIMONY FOR A PILOT (this one is in sections too) I knew a man who was my father, who sprang sunward and never got killed until he started dying the way he tried all his life,

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not to live to do. As a sad question mark on his rounded back in an adjustable bed, on the ground and in a hospital, broken, an organ failing, a nurse on hand, his family looking on, the avionic man of legend come all the way to

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Earth, grown feebly down to an infant. Two You were tall and handsome as my sons when you were young as my sons. When you didn't fly the plane anymore, I watched you

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become old for decades, your days bending you until all you saw were your feet. Then one of your eyes gutted out like a dead candle. I thought it was because I was growing up, you were becoming mortal. For the boy I was, you had always been old.

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Then I too, one by bloody one, began to feel my faculties fading. The eyes, the teeth, the eagerness of the groin. I have started making jokes about these things, and I too feel myself falling. My sons rising beyond me, they, reaching down from a

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great height to hold me up. I really thought we would go on forever. Three The day they called to say you were dying, seven astronauts

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were incinerated off the coast of Florida in a blast, a blaze of unearthly fire we saw over and over on TV. We were stunned and thrilled, never felt more alive, such martyrdom, what spectacular glory, such theater. I wish you'd been with them, en

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route to whatever is or isn't out there when the sure and sudden fire came, beyond the weeds and roses, farther away from the troublesome women, the petty men, the too-dull routine, this life, this ground, than you ever really got to. Yet would

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have been a tragedy, a grand finale, you're coming down as you always wished, in flames. We are next. We know that. We know what that means now, something you never knew. This is the way we die. This earth we tread on is all too real. There just

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aren't enough balls of flame to go around. Morton Marcus: Moving, and much more. What I do on the show is that I sort of bring things up in poems, Dick, so don't be embarrassed or annoyed with what I do. One of the ways that poems

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work are through connections and connections that have to be apt and that have to in some way relate not only to the readers life, but to show him connections that he's never seen before. So in this poem on your father with great images like

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the eye guttering out like an old candle, the old aviator suddenly, because the day he dies is the day of another great flight, you come in and to you, it was probably very logical to make the connection, but this is to me the great poetic

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connection. And the definition of genius, up until around a hundred, hundred-fifty years ago, was the man who connects what seemed to be totally unconnected things in other people's psyche, and other people's intelligence. And so,

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suddenly you bring in a historical moment, but it is totally apt in its relationship to your father and his death, and of course, becomes metaphorical in the idea of the great spectacular ending, the good [unidentified], almost the

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Viking ends, you know, of something being sent off to sea in flames. And then out of that metaphor, of course, show that now, you know, most of us just die very ordinary lives. And it's that kind of connection - people ask me, you know, well,

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what makes a poem - it's that kind of connection that starts to show what the poetic sensibility is, taking the very, very different chaotic things in our lives and saying, look, if I take this and I take that, I've got connections, I've given you

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a sense of order. So, I just wanted to mention that. It's a beautiful poem. Richard Maxwell: Oh, well, thank you, Morton. Morton Marcus: Especially Part Two and Part Three, the

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connections between yourself and the past, the present, and then going on to your children in the future. Richard Maxwell: But it's kind of interesting when you try to say something in- by way of elegy. I discovered a long time

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ago as a student, and then of course as a teacher, that all the great elegiac poems in the world are really about the poet and not about the the poor person who was dying. And I wanted to say something really directly to or for my father

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there, but inevitably things squirmed around and became a poem about the hard lessons that the living have to learn afterwards. Morton Marcus: Right. And it is the pain of dying on other

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people I think that the death of a loved one is really most hard on. We've got time for one short poem. Do you have any short poems before we take our famous half-hour break? Richard Maxwell: Okay. For my friends in Palo Alto and at

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Foothill College, I got in a Li Po mood one night and decided to write a poem in that manner as the poet goes into exile in a foreign land and- or something of that sort. And it's called something very like that:

00:32:37.380 - 00:33:02.520

IN OLD AGE, THE POET IS SENT IN EXILE TO A DISTANT LAND It is a Tang night in Palo Alto; the tall tree and I, whose name means lionhearted, am an old man with a gray beard. The moon outside is an almond sliver in the clear black sky. Soon, I

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must leave my modest poet's home and journey far beyond Tu Fu's three gorges, far to the north of Baiyun Shan, White Cloud Mountain, far from my laughing home and the poets here with fine songs to sing and good wine to drink who befriend me. Who

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knows if anyone by the Li River will lift his eyes to greet me, a broken man with the gray beard and sober. Perhaps one of the poets of Palo Alto will take my thin arm and lead me on a night with no moon, at least as far as hilly San Francisco [cut-off].

00:36:28.220 - 00:36:44.960

Morton Marcus: This is the Poetry Show, Mort Marcus once more, half-hour break here. You are listening to Art Pepper playing, "The Trip." And our guest today, who is very much connected with the life and art of Art Pepper, is Dick Maxwell,

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who has been reading his poems. And we will continue with that in one moment. But first I want to make some announcements. First of all, tonight at Sweet Williams at 538 Seabright Avenue, the only continuous reading in Santa Cruz County,

00:37:01.970 - 00:37:23.270

David Swanger, Barbara Bloom, and Robert McDowell will be reading and that, my friends, is a humdinger of a reading. Bob McDowell is sending a lot of new ideas concerning narrative poetry throughout the United States. He is the editor of The

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Reaper, and he also writes many, many critical articles and his first book will be out this coming year from Holt Rinehart, I believe. David Swanger also has several books out, a wonderful poet, very witty and very, very poignant at other

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times. And Barbara Bloom, well, many of you know her poetry, very, very original unique and musical examinations of the female psyche. So, do try to make that over, 7:30 tonight, 7:30 to 9:30 at Sweet Williams, 538 Seabright Avenue, an

00:37:59.870 - 00:38:15.200

exceptional reading. In Celebration of the Muse ladies is looking for three to five poems or pages of prose from those people who would like to be in Celebration of the Muse Readings Number Six, that's right, the sixth year, but time

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is running out. Submissions deadline is July 15th, 1986. For more, well, just send them to Post Office Box 971, that's Post Office Box 971, Felton 95018. Or call Pat Ver- Vecchione at 462-1176, that's 462-1176, or Amber Coverdale

00:38:41.540 - 00:39:06.530

Sumrall at 335-4084. That's Amber Coverdale Sumrall at 335-4084. And, last but not least, are you revving up to submit your poetry to the county fair, and the county fair? Prizes, friends, in case you don't know, are one hundred

00:39:06.530 - 00:39:22.370

smackers for the winner and fifteen and twenty-five. So, I would definitely consider all of you hot shot poets, sending some of your stuff to it. There are thirty-two line limit for many adults for the adult poems, and they're also youth categories.

00:39:22.580 - 00:39:45.680

And I would suggest that you call 724-5671, 724-5671 and get your entries in. And my Hispanic friends out there, amigos, there are also two Spanish language poets, one for youths and one for adults and the prizes are the same. So, there is money out

00:39:45.680 - 00:40:07.010

there and recognition, and also you will have a reading that will take place on September the 10th for the winners. So, may I urge you to submit to the updated and modern county fair poetry contest. Okay, we are back here talking with Dick

00:40:07.010 - 00:40:25.460

Maxwell and I'd like to go back to his poems. We're going to see a Dick Maxwell of a different order, a different range, a different direction. And we will say goodbye to Mr. Pepper as we end, "The Trip." So, Dick, what are you going to read for us

00:40:25.460 - 00:40:33.190

now? Richard Maxwell: Well, I'll read one little short thing, and then a kind of a love poem. Morton Marcus: Okay, is this a poem on writing poetry? I mean

00:40:33.190 - 00:40:37.270

on teaching? Richard Maxwell: It's coming up. Morton Marcus: Oh, that's what we'll talk about that afterwards, okay, that sounds fine.

00:40:37.480 - 00:40:51.460

Richard Maxwell: Okay. This is one of these- it's a really a married person's poem is called: WHEN THE DISHES BANG LOUDER IN THE SINK You too have heard it, the palpable thick silence in the

00:40:51.460 - 00:41:08.620

next room, punctuated by determined footsteps, dishes slammed into the sink, the energetic rustling of newspapers, the song of the mockingbird out your window, the rat-a-tat of a woodpecker, the den of the traffic of the world

00:41:08.620 - 00:41:27.040

getting underway, the unwelcome light booming in on you and most loud, the directed silence of the one out there, who isn't speaking to you even though you aren't there yet, and she can't wait until you are so she can really not speak to you.

00:41:29.100 - 00:41:43.250

That's a married person's poem. You know what it is to sleep a little longer than the person you live with. And this was in a more meditative thing, it's called: SPRING IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE: THE ORANGE AND YOU. It is for

00:41:43.250 - 00:42:01.680

Sarah. The little epigraph I found from Gerard Manley Hopkins, I think is one of the most beautiful lines I've ever read. He said, "What is all this juice and all this joy." I've been sitting on this stone bench by the wall of this stone

00:42:01.680 - 00:42:20.850

shed, soaking in the warmth of the sun that has decided for reasons of its own this morning, it is spring. A finch is chittering in the fig tree, the bees are frantic in the plum blossoms, crocuses and dandelions are springing up

00:42:20.910 - 00:42:43.500

everywhere. Everything here this morning knows it is spring, rises to life. The sun is luxuriant, suspended in the true blue sky like an orange. I stopped writing a few minutes ago to peel an orange. I stripped it so the casing stood

00:42:43.500 - 00:43:06.180

intact, one piece, an empty, pungent shell of an orange, fragrant and bright in the citric spring morning air. To properly peel an orange is not as easy as it would appear. You carefully ease the thumb in just below the button where the stem

00:43:06.180 - 00:43:31.650

attaches and slide it steadily, carefully, easily whirling gently downward under the skin, taking care not to damage the delicate- to damage the delicate inner tissues. Voila, as in a dream, the pulp, the whole raw meat of the fruit stands naked,

00:43:32.010 - 00:43:53.010

its rind like a cloak, a bright discarded garment beside it. I just peeled off my sweater for the first time in more weeks than I'd like to think about and thought of you. I'll leave the voluptuous warmth of this spring morning, this stone bench, to

00:43:53.010 - 00:44:10.830

bring you my poem about spring and that fleshy orange and your shimmies will be on the floor beside you and one swift spontaneous love crafting moment, and I will taste the warm, tired sweet of you for it is spring.

00:44:14.760 - 00:44:31.890

Morton Marcus: Dick, we were talking during the break about a theme which probably concern the both of us and that is the idea of the poet as teacher. What do you think it does to a poet to be a teacher? But more important, what are some of your

00:44:31.890 - 00:44:47.530

ideas on the poet as teacher? Richard Maxwell: Some of my ideas on the poet as teacher, well I happen to be both. I think primarily I'm a teacher. I have not- I probably spent more money on poetry by a hundred

00:44:47.530 - 00:45:10.510

times over than I've ever made from it. I would have to say that I can't imagine giving up either one of them particularly. One thing I discovered about being a poet and a teacher is that the emphasis really is on the teaching part because the,

00:45:11.470 - 00:45:30.730

for myself, the compulsions to be a poet are largely an interest in things that come out of teaching, when I'm doing that. And I've had a poetry writing workshop at Foothill in alo Alto now for I think, ourteen years has gone

00:45:30.850 - 00:45:50.170

nbroken, three quarters per ear. During that time, an mmense amount of wonderful, alented people who live in that rea around Stanford, around ilicon Valley, and year after ear they just keep coming. And ne of the things that you have

00:45:50.170 - 00:46:05.350

o try to convince people of bout poetry, and I think anyone ho might be listening to a rogram like this would nderstand that, is that even if ou make it big as a poet, here's probably one person in a illion in the entire world that

00:46:05.350 - 00:46:23.950

now who you are. I mean, what s it really to be a poet? And hat I know are probably housands of people who write oems, all of whom are poets. nd I think we really have otten to the place in the world ow, where there's probably more

00:46:23.950 - 00:46:36.490

riters of poems than there are eaders of poems. And I think hat's okay, I know a lot of eople who worry about that ondition, what has happened to ur audiences? Well, we are our wn audiences.

00:46:36.000 - 00:46:53.430

And the one thing I would have to say, and what I tell my students constantly is that there are good poems, and there are bad poems, there are a lot of things to learn about writing poems. My workshops don't have much to do with the whole

00:46:53.460 - 00:47:07.860

touchy-feely things and discovering the real self inside of you, and all of that sort of inspirational sort of thing. It is more a matter of looking at the language or a matter of trying somehow to find, as you said before, those combinations

00:47:07.860 - 00:47:25.710

that you might not have, of experiences that you might not have linked together in your mind, to find language that is inherently more interesting than what is there in your first draft. There used to be the kind of tagline behind informal

00:47:25.710 - 00:47:43.590

poetry groups, it was something like, that's a very nice poem, you're a very nice person. And we try to, of course, try to avoid that without putting on the fangs and so on at each other, but experience is experience and it can be said,

00:47:43.590 - 00:48:04.170

it can be dealt with in such a way that they can help you to live as a human being in two ways. One, in the fact that somehow giving words to vague feeling, somehow gives you the feeling so that you get to really experience it. I feel

00:48:04.170 - 00:48:22.410

that life is much fuller for people who somehow are able to name those elusive kinds of feelings that we have. The other way is the sense of having made something when you're finished; the fact that there it is on the page, and I made it. And

00:48:23.940 - 00:48:36.780

sometimes I can thrill over things that I know no reader in a hundred years would ever be able to see, but I know what struggle went in for a particular rhythm or something, and it pleases me in a very private kind of way to have

00:48:36.780 - 00:48:49.370

that, to have that there on the page. And I'm usually glad that I've done it when I'm finished. Well, I don't know whether that went anywhere or not. Morton Marcus: Oh, that was great. I was just thinking while

00:48:49.370 - 00:49:04.310

you were talking. This is the real definition as to why the Foothill Writers Conference has the atmosphere that it has and the success that it's had. And anyone out there who is interested in going to writers conferences, that is what was

00:49:04.310 - 00:49:20.180

going on at Foothill now, whether there will be a Foothill Writers Conference in the future is a moot point because Dick will be gone next year, and heaven knows what the administration of Foothill is contemplating. But let us hear

00:49:20.180 - 00:49:36.200

some poems about the- from the poet teacher. Richard Maxwell: Well, I got one here that came out of one of the few occasional kinds of things that I've ever written. There's a newsletter that some of your listeners may receive called,

00:49:36.200 - 00:49:57.810

"The Poetry Letter," up in Marin, run by something called the Lawrence Hart Institute for Modernist-Activist Literature. Morton Marcus: They've avoided me, thank heavens. Richard Maxwell: Keep it that way... I read- I've been dragged

00:49:57.810 - 00:50:14.100

now into this thing two or three times by responding to some outrageous thing they've written where somebody like Denise Levertov is accused of writing non-poetry. And there's some kind of an idea, a poem written maybe in 1912, probably by

00:50:14.100 - 00:50:29.910

either Ezra Pound or H.D. or something, are the only artifacts in the world that qualify as poems. And they say, is this a real poem? Is this a real poem and so on and so on. And one day, one of their critics, Jeanne McGahey, I guess

00:50:29.910 - 00:50:52.260

is one of the editors, was- had been reading some journals from teachers who were pleased with the metaphor-making capacities of their innocent children there in classes. And she listed these things and then she said, "Oh, these are wonderful, but please

00:50:52.260 - 00:51:08.790

don't call it poetry," and went into another one of her diatribes. And when she was finished, I wrote this poem. When I sent it to them, just as a kind of retort, as a response to what they had said, well, they took out the middle part of

00:51:08.790 - 00:51:22.800

the poem and left only the beginning and the end, making me appear kind of foolish in public. So, I don't mind making them look a little foolish today as a kind of second retaliation. This is called:

00:51:22.800 - 00:51:35.920

FIELD TRIP: THE RIGHT WAY, THE WRONG WAY And it's dedicated specifically for Jeanne McGahey and the Lawrence Hart Institute for Modernist-Activists Literature. Morton Marcus: Now, something tells me we might be hearing

00:51:35.920 - 00:51:45.630

from them now. Richard Maxwell: Okay, that sounds fine to me. I'll give you my number. The Critic says it is egregiously wrong that clouds

00:51:45.630 - 00:52:12.360

are always sheep, the trees always sentinels, that waves always pound, that the moon is silver and stars twinkle. They do, remember? They always do. And brooks do babble, butterflies flutter. The Critic says, quote, "These things are

00:52:12.390 - 00:52:32.020

images," end quote, you nascent Emilys and Ezras, you must make them new, must make them more than they really are. Two Okay, the clouds slog themselves across the modernist slate of

00:52:32.020 - 00:52:53.200

defeated sky, a beaten army dragging with rat(?) speed their hardware laboriously and slow over the blasted wasteland, and the tinsel whores of the coconut palms shed their fronds like veils upon the beach beyond Juan-les-Pins(?) making it all

00:52:53.200 - 00:53:16.480

for the moment new and the waves pant coherent epiphanies, aesthetic theory, in tremulous cadence slow upon the shore, they grind low, inexorable rhythms no one but the finest tuned poet can hear, the thrum beyond the ear of mortals who

00:53:16.480 - 00:53:35.890

hear only the pounding of the waves. They do not know the theories voiced here of the green vegetable moon on its silver serving platter above the black cutout silhouette of this dead landscape. The coherent brooks like arteries that feed

00:53:35.890 - 00:53:52.490

the bleak sea, or the boom of butterflies all day who climb and soar, pillage and plunder and assault the innocent open sexual organs of the heedless flowers. Three

00:53:52.670 - 00:54:14.180

Critic, you are dead wrong. The clouds today are in fact like sheep aimlessly roaming above the vigilant trees, sentinel against whatever might occur. And the waves do pound under the perfect silver serving platter of a moon, and what do the stars

00:54:14.180 - 00:54:30.650

do in this emblematic landscape? They twinkle and the brooks babble incoherently as ourselves, butterflies flutter too. So take that for what it's worth.

00:54:33.800 - 00:54:38.570

Morton Marcus: Okay, good. Richard Maxwell: Just keep reading poems? Morton Marcus: Sure. Richard Maxwell: Okay, different tone of voice.

00:54:38.570 - 00:54:45.020

TAKING A LEAK AT THE BOIS DE BOULOGNE CAMPGROUND IN PARIS, FRANCE How do you like that? Morton Marcus: That's a different tone.

00:54:47.880 - 00:55:04.620

Richard Maxwell: It is the small things traveling that strike you, not the monuments you packed dutifully into your day so you can say you've seen them. Not the Eiffel Tower, but the little mud-colored Algerian lady who's squeegeeing the mud into

00:55:04.620 - 00:55:26.520

the drains of the men's room at the camping Bois de Boulogne. She, single-minded, moves the mud the way Sarah sweeps the kitchen, paying no one no mind. I'm absent-mindedly tending to my business, abnormally citron this morning - I think, due to

00:55:26.520 - 00:55:45.600

those new vitamins Sarah says will perk me up some - at the urinal. I lift first my left foot for her, then the right as the mud lady slushes by, her entire body leaning into her work. "Pardon, Monsieur," she mumbles in blue rubber hip-boots

00:55:45.630 - 00:56:07.140

against the muck, directing it toward the drain. Her job is to clean the floor amongst the feet of pissing men. Her eyes are intent upon her work. It is like at home when I lift my heat for sweeping as I read the paper. No one ever notices who is attached

00:56:07.140 - 00:56:24.960

to the obstructed feet that are always in the damned way. "Bonjour, Madame," I say, zipping up myself and out into the ebullient sun of the new day of Paris; the world neat, scrupulous, scrubbed, and drained.

00:56:24.960 - 00:56:30.960

Morton Marcus: [Chuckles] Richard Maxwell: Just keep going? Morton Marcus: Yeah. Richard Maxwell: Okay.

00:56:30.990 - 00:56:39.510

Morton Marcus: Well, that I mean, there's no comment I can make on that one. Richard Maxwell: Okay, I hear you. WE THINK HIS NAME WAS LARRY, THIS DEFUNCT MAN

00:56:41.130 - 00:56:59.490

And he walked like a man treading water, slogging backwards it seemed, to town each day. And we wondered how he ever got there. And each day he'd come back, shuffling and inept in his slow moving, grubbing in his gummy pocket for

00:56:59.490 - 00:57:20.970

a dewdrop, a caramel, any sweetness he could buy to turn our day sweet as he thought ever they could be. He brought joy for us who laughed at him. And always he came to us backsliding on his precarious feet, to wherever his home, always to us

00:57:20.970 - 00:57:42.810

an old man who ate dog food to live, doggedly bringing [unidentified] rainbows from Walgreens. He whirred when he talked, like a child's mere toy, or a horry owl. He always went up wending his way to or from town to bring your glucose you

00:57:42.810 - 00:58:08.550

didn't know you needed until now no one sees him anymore. The pure joy, the sadness he brought to us. We expect miracles to go on. Why not? Still I taste the foolish caramels at that sweeter time, the hard rock candy of a nameless old man who we laughed

00:58:08.550 - 00:58:29.730

at when he was here and learn reluctantly now his bitter name. Not Larry, not the Candyman, but old age, death, numb solitude, and that grin one wears sweetening a world gone sour. Larry, my brother.

00:58:31.230 - 00:58:46.410

Morton Marcus: Very unexpected turn in that poem. Very nice. Richard Maxwell: I said a very similar kind of thing about walking around the streets of Palo Alto. This one I gave to my English 1B classes at Foothill as a final exam project where

00:58:47.790 - 00:58:56.750

they had to analyze the poem and do all that good stuff they usually do to Robert Penn Warren and people like that, Morton Marcus: Who did it to everybody else, so they deserve it.

00:58:57.440 - 00:59:11.810

Richard Maxwell: And the one thing they were not allowed to say in their papers was that "What was the poet trying to say?" Because I said this was a very competent poem and he knew exactly what he was trying to say and did it. This is called:

00:59:11.840 - 00:59:35.660

IN THE DARK, THE SNAILS. AFTER READING KAFKA, I WALKED THE DOG All night after the rain, they move in their fashion over the sidewalks like across the road chickens to get to the other side. If only they were a bit more nimble. The soil must be

00:59:35.660 - 00:59:57.770

browner, or the snail women more comely for them to slide like that, hordes of them, all night over the slick sidewalk. I quashed them with my blind indiscriminate feet. What carnage, their thin little shell-backs crackle and snap

00:59:57.800 - 01:00:24.350

like nachos underfoot as the snail-god walks his dog, or better, his dog walks him. He can feel sweetly flowing the liquefaction, the ooze of them under his divine footfalls. He doesn't know where to place his feet, but come down they must as

01:00:24.350 - 01:00:50.900

he follows his trotting dog through the firmament. Franz, it is easy to step into your world, difficult, to be exact, not to. Tonight, being pulled through a world of snails by my dog, I'm playing God, toying with despair. Will there be one under

01:00:50.900 - 01:01:09.410

my next step? The one after that? I too worry about beginnings and endings and the bright smears of the middles glimmer behind me in the moonlight, the luminous, slick trail of my going.

01:01:12.000 - 01:01:30.570

Morton Marcus: Very nice. Why don't you look for one, maybe two short poems, and we will go off with those poems and I will just say a few words now. I want to remind everybody that there is a wonderful reading tonight at Sweet Williams readings. That

01:01:30.570 - 01:01:48.930

is at 538 Seabright Avenue when David Swanger, Barbara Bloom, and Robert McDowell will be reading a really exceptional diversified reading. This is the last week, that is July 15th, 1986, is the deadline for any ladies out there who want to

01:01:48.930 - 01:02:09.150

turn in either prose or poems to the Celebration of the Muse reading. And I'll just give you one phone number again, call Patrice Vecchione for more information at 462-1176. This is the last week for that now. It has been a great pleasure to

01:02:09.150 - 01:02:30.360

have here, Dick Maxwell, who has been talking to us about his relationship to students, to the world, to Art Pepper, the great jazz saxophonist in particular, which reminds me that as Dick gets ready to read his last two poems, we have the great chef

01:02:30.360 - 01:02:49.380

himself, Leon Allen, about to come in here, cooking up some jazz in "The Jazz Kitchen" and maybe you saw him Sunday, cooking up some ribs and links and other things out at the very successful New Orleans music and dinner, Crawdad Feast that went

01:02:49.380 - 01:03:07.020

on at Aptos Park. For all you people who came out, KUSP says a big thank you, and for all you people that didn't come out, do it next time because it was a bash. Right now- and we will then sign off with more music by Art Pepper. And again, thank

01:03:07.020 - 01:03:25.050

you, Dick, for being here. Wonderful show, wonderful poems. I'm glad I finally got you on. The last poems by- for this edition of the show on the Poetry Show, Dick Maxwell. Next week, four days after the birthday of Pablo Neruda, we

01:03:25.050 - 01:03:40.590

will have a Pablo Neruda show, and four days before the birthday in 1304 of Francesco Petrarch. I may just, if I am having a few extra shots of wine, read you some Petrarchan sonnets.

01:03:41.070 - 01:03:53.090

Richard Maxwell: Oh no. Morton Marcus: Dick? Richard Maxwell: It's been fun, Mort, I'd like to thank you for having me on. I have just two short poems. One is another one

01:03:53.090 - 01:04:09.380

of these French mood pieces called: CAGNES-SUR-MER(?) IN WINTER Light, curving lanes, the upthrust walls, they've outlived the anonymous masons who stacked and cemented them, building up

01:04:09.380 - 01:04:30.890

before evening drinks the town, high above the mother sea swelling and riving below. A twisted oak has put down roots not far from the bell tower at the top of this place. The sun has rooted, probes this solid rock, and a throng of flowers,

01:04:31.670 - 01:04:55.040

jump-ups, bulbs, dandelions, junipers springs out, rises up, vines belly over the stone, skim, slink out, snaking their unctuous way over Cagnes-sur-Mer. Under dirt rides, seeks light, surges to be free, crumpling the place, their

01:04:55.040 - 01:05:16.580

rock, cracking at will the rigid mortar. The hillside bucks under the thrust and massive Cagnes-sur-Mer coming undone, choosing light, the drive of flowers eating stone. And last an Ars Poetica,

01:05:16.610 - 01:05:28.940

POEM ON A PHOTOGRAPH THAT WAS NEVER TAKEN This is a variation of the old assignment we always give people. The scene is just before or just after an event which, if it

01:05:28.940 - 01:05:49.880

takes or has already taken place, will or would transform all of us unalterably. We all wear astonishment as I see it on our faces, wrapped anticipation that the picture is before the event and we are in fact, waiting for this something to

01:05:49.880 - 01:06:12.080

happen; innocence or boredom, if we are not. Everyone is there, even all the aunts and uncles, which in itself is worth this picture because we never are all together all there. The camera now has frozen mother by the icebox, and her expression is,

01:06:12.080 - 01:06:33.230

as always, that of someone who has left for some far-distant place: the South Seas, Borneo, Amazonia. The befuddled uncles squirm, the aunts too are uncomfortable, caught in mid-twitch. Father is good, old father, his head screwed on

01:06:33.230 - 01:06:53.510

straight as his back. My sisters are bovine, chewing, willing to accept anything that would or could happen in a family like this one. These pictures, what we can hold in memory, in imagination, the realities we freeze forever that never were

01:06:53.510 - 01:07:02.720

and never could be, so much depends upon these things and we are all still all forever waiting.