Thomas Lowe Taylor -- LETTER

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Sept 29.90

Dear Paul,

I am just now sitting down to answer your very kind, more-than-a-simple-"thankyou" letter of Sept 9.90. Monday we (Bill Spencer) and I put Vincent on the plane. I was left with a sense of separation for a few hours and then worked to get back into my mundane life, especially intense as the school term was just beginning, with it's details. I hope you will take all the following as tokens of friendship and purpose, rather than career moves.

On the detail front, as concerns your publication of OSO, let me say this. In the interests of creating the book you want, and with me getting what I want out of it too, I would be more than happy at some point down the line to make some material contributions to the project, in the form of money. So we'll have to talk about that, the costs of one "paragraph" per page and including some, perhaps 5 black and white photographs--though one would be all right; and perhaps one color plate [a reproduction of a water color, I think]. It is your press, of course, I just offer that. And secondly, if we are into 1992, perhaps I can visit you in England (and kiss each book, as I said to Vincent), and perhaps Vincent will be there too. But let's get to that.

I got your letter the day after Vincent arrived, and we read it together and it got into our talks. He will be sending you copies of the plays when he receives his copy of this letter; making you the distributor in England (and Europe, too?) of his books is something he may be interested in--I can't speak to that. I have a few copies, perhaps 50-75 of PISCES:EAGLE and in the course of our readings, we left copies of Vincent's books on consignment in a bookstore in Portland and one on Walla Walla, Washington. We found Charlie Potts much as you did.

Vincent and I, in his two weeks visit, read together four times, at a bookstore: a sermon to 15 poetry loyalists, which they will not forget; at night to 5-6 of the locals holding an open reading in a semi-dark park in Portland, with beers and conversation at a local pub afterwards; in a bar full (50-60) of people who were there for us, [tape & texts enclosed] as I had spent three months working on it; and at the so-called Walla Walla Poetry Party, truly a gig in the hinterlands. I am trying now to get my copy of a videotape they made, which I hope I can get to you before too long. All of it led to some speculation between us on the state of the art in America as well as what is ahead for us. We are standing on the shoulders of giants, trying to peer into the approaching darkness, as "external" global events would seem to indicate. Photographs were taken, and I will be sending you one, we talked about writing together, and didn't, but didn't rule out the possibility; we drove fifty miles an hour, very slow, up the main freeway along the Columbia Gorge, along the slow-moving Columbia River, talking about third millennium poetry and cosmic poetry, our common topic over these 22 years. It is nice to have a friend in him, not a master.

At the end of things, it seemed appropriate to talk about me going back to Gloucester next summer with my wife, perhaps to read with him in Boston and maybe New York; and inevitably, we talked as friends would, about coming to England to meet you, and perhaps for some readings, to publicize Vincent and for me to try to make friends in England and maybe even talk about readings in Europe the next summer. Vincent did say, by the way, that he has two manuscripts looking for a publisher, if that gets your attention. On an international scale, we are both a little wet behind the ears, and I am more convinced than ever that I have a unique poetry am getting over the shaky part about going out and reading. Performance is not out of the question, I am working on that.

When we were in Walla Walla, meeting cowboy poets, old timers, young timers, up-and-comers, wannabees, near beens and has beens, we mourned the absence of the real thing, without arrogance I hope, and reflected on the state of the art. Midway I recalled a lesson I got in Santa Barbara about ten years ago. A lady and I became friends, as she is a writer, and we went to visit her mother in the hills behind the city. The mother has had an intellectual career working on the demographics of revolution. It didn't mean much to me in terms of poetry, but it was a good lesson, telling me that the size of age groups, in terms of available supply of such goodies as food and knowledge, varies from year to year now, and that has something to do with cultural change. So ten years later we're chewing it over in Walla Walla and I realize that what we are talking about, the dissolution of content, has finally taken hold in poetry. When you look at the calendar magazine "Poetry Flash" from the San Francisco area, the entire Bay Area, as it is called, there is a lot going on, readings left and right by hundreds and hundreds of poets, as they call themselves. And I suspect that this is going on all over America, or so I am told. There is a numerical explosion because there's more people for one thing, and we are in a culture in decline, for another, a time when people all lift their heads to find out "what is the meaning of meaning," and things like that. And I heard through the grapevine, that poetry really began happening again in England three or four years ago, with many people attending readings. So what is going on here, anything any different? And all these poets, what kinds of information are they acting out, what is their underpinning, what is their sense of poetry, the history of poetry, the mission, as it were, of the craft they are plying?

The worst thing is to step on the toes of persons that you meet. Some professionals relish it with a kind of macho, but individually all I've met are excellent people, warm and friendly, non-competitive and decent. So you hurt their feelings when you come out and say, "well, it's all very nice, what you're doing, but it falls a little short." When you tell me that we are working the same turf (the cosmic, I hope), then I feel I can come out a little bit with you.

So what I am seeing as I am coming out is the legacy of the sixties borne into the nineties and verging on the next century, a traditionless tradition, an entertainment of bumper-sticker one-liners, slogans of consciousness strung non-syntactically onto a uniform, flat surface, nothing distended out of a necessary importance, no sense of depth-of-field, as the photographers put it. We either hear self-indulgent self talk, interrupted prose, or, in one case, staccato word-barks from a MFA graduate with 12 chapbooks under his belt, a man we both felt was mentally ill, masquerading his psychobabble as "poetry". Or we hear art-styles from art-lives, and the more times you copy something over and over on the copy machine, the more blurred it finally becomes. You have to know the rules before you can break them.

And what is poetry for us, you ask: It is organized language, with song and rhythm creating a hypnotic cosmic trance-dance in consciousness, centers of feeling and perception are awakened in the depths of the listener (or reader) which are external to his commonplace being. The particular energy and hypnotic use of effects makes the person feel even perhaps against his will. Barriers are bypassed by the power of the images (perhaps by their archetypal nature, or by their symbolic force [a naked man carrying a child across a stream through the warm rain, walking through water and having the rain cover him with water at the same time]); images, tones, rhythms, valuations of composition, all of which actually change the listener as he listens to them, as chants, as something from below perceptual layers. My "broken sentences" as Vincent calls them, create a level of expectation, as one waits for completion of the syntax, and then that anticipation is used to open receipt to the next or newer idea to complete the syntax or the form as one idea blends into the next. A door is opened and then you step through.

Now, Vincent works in his own style, but we do share the same preoccupations with certain mystical teachings and try to elaborate them and transmit them, such concepts as "the passing beyond", "the hiding one", "jumping" are ones that come to mind right now, and when we first met, we talked playfully about something called "psychohermetics" as a school of thought. That's too much like packaging, which is not what we are about, we are about the transmission of cosmic knowledge to transform people one at a time, as they read the poem or hear the poem in the body and feel the poem in their own body. And that's not a fantasy, it's an organic, experiential kind of knowing: as you feel the poem in your body you become the poem in your body and finally become the poem in the universe. [the delayed time of fiction's "willng suspension of disbelief" which is a little like pornography.] Such a deal. To forget your own death for a second, then you can relax and let another thought come up.

What we find is the legacy of the sixties. Apart from a few, it was a failed, reactionary poetry, and the visionary poetry explosion of the sixties faded into careers in the academy, voices changing into stillness, individuals with promise who stayed with what they did well until it lost its vibrancy. And above all, poets with a personal message, an "I am" poetry, which is finally kind of childlike in its youth and innocence, but which does not become a middle-aged demography. And now, here, we have young people with talent being taught by a generation of failed poets who have (to "get a job") secured themselves in the academy. Maybe it's an old story, but poetry is important in the culture of a world, it is a unifying message which brings the future into us. It is not psychological self indulgence which prevents the person under way from growing into his fullness.

So, what I am about is visionary poetry. In 1972 in Montana, I went on the vision quest I learned about from reading and about which I was instructed in the sweatlodge by the shaman, the chief, and the singer of the Indian tribe who lived there. It was not slight stuff, either, I lived there four years before I went into the sweatlodge with them, and I sang with my own voice, and afterwards I put my feet into the coals; three days later I went into the mountains. I've written about that time. Soon I go back to the boxes, to root out the theoretical writings and get them into form I hope to hear from you, and I am waiting for your package.

cc:VF/encls.