After the Louisville Conference, with COVID numbers in decline, Carla and I headed west for a week on the coast. The trip was not simply restorative but repurposing, reconnecting with friends and family in real time, face to face. And so we saw them, in each instance redefining both time and events that have come between. These friends and family, of long standing and more recent acquaintance, are prime numbers, so to speak, in a series that has many twists and turns. Life histories and practices of art coincide with them, for which they are primes. As we know, a coastline is a fractal, as in the thumbnail sketches below:
Monday, February 28
Delta DTW > SFO
> San Francisco/Stinson Beach
Megan Adams/Camille Roy
Our first stop after arrival at SFO was with New Narrative author Megan Adams/Camille Roy, celebrating her just published collection of stories Honey Mine. We admired the art, light, rooms, and overgrown garden of her working-class mansion across from the thronged Daniel Webster School playground, where I first taught Poetry in the Schools. We then walked the streets of Potrero Hill, with its monuments to the history of Language writing still preserved at 235 Missouri Street, 326 Connecticut Street, and the public gym and soccer field at the top of the hill, where the competitive drives of young poets were at play. Just so, New Narrative and Language writing conjoin.
> Stinson Beach
Wednesday, March 2
Randolph Starn
Randolph Starn is an eminent historian of the Italian Renaissance and its arts, a member of the original group of scholars at Representations, which I served in the manner of Bob Dylan for nearly a decade. Both Randy and I see ourselves as outsiders, but in different frames. Randy has historicized, in a double sense, the work of Representations itself from those early days, in “Historicizing Representation: A Formal Exercise.” Over lunch with Carla at the Parkside Café, we touched on his son Orin’s anthropology of Amazon.com; the politics of Fearless Speech in postcommunist Hungary (see the exhibition Fearless at the Open Society Archive); and the continuing saga of my own Bad History, which owes much to the work of Berkeley historicists.
Thursday, March 3
Lyn Hejinian
Larry Ochs
Lyn and Larry agreed to drive the winding road to Stinson Beach to visit and hike on the first available day, Thursday it turned out. The weather was predicted to turn damp if not turbulent, so we kept our para coats in reserve. Lyn and Larry entered like the rock stars they are; it was thrilling to see them. I recalled to Larry my liking of his group’s name “What We Live,” which led to the “Distressed Present” in my paper at Louisville. He said yeah, we used a bunch of titles like that in performances: “What We Think,” “What We Eat,” “What We Did.” After another excellent lunch at the Parkside Café, we headed up Highway 1 to the Audubon Ranch with its egrets to find it was closed due to COVID. So we took a short hike up a hill until the trail ran out, we returned, and they drove home.
Friday, March 4
> Bolinas
Stephen Ratcliffe
Stephen Ratcliffe has been engaged in a decades-long conceptual poetic project of recording in text and image the micropoetics of passing time. It had taken me almost as long to comprehend the vast dimensions of his project, which continuous posting on Facebook and Instagram has made palpable. The changing light over Stinson Beach would indeed be a caption. The week we visited the surf was up, as Stephen noted: “the swell is pumping,” feeding energy to support the splinters of board he and his teenage son ride the waves on. It was physically challenging to get to his place, under pelting rain, fifty mile an hour gusts, and a hail of eucalyptus seeds (and possibly a loose branch or two). I landed in Bolinas in the early 70s and it all came back; Stephen and Shao/John Thorpe are, to my knowledge, the poets from that time still there. We walked the long and rocky beach, with many fallen trees, around the corner to Smiley’s, where I used to encounter Robert Creeley among the crowd at the bar. A time.
Saturday, March 5
> San Francisco/Berkeley/Alameda
Robert Glück
Rob Halpern
David Lau
[Name here]
Chris Watten
Jan Watten
Emilie Watten
Steve Nakashima
Barbara Johnstone
Michael Pappas
In case anyone missed it, “I Met” is about sociality, and what it means to be “social.” In the eighteenth century “society” meant one thing, in the nineteenth century another. An optimal, postmillennial sense would be that “social” means to connect with people socially, and then imagine “society” as the consequence of that—after Occupy, this may be the best post-crisis meaning of utopian community. While Carla was being treated to gourmet cooking and vigorous walks by her friends Bob and Rob, I raided City Lights Books for works of Michael McClure and Joanne Kyger, on whose legacy I intend to write. In Emeryville, poet and editor David Lau met me for beers as we continued our post-Marxist literary conversation, as we do roughly once a month on Zoom. I had hoped to see [name here] as well, to share notes on the post-Occupy decade, but he could not get free. In North Berkeley, I visited with my sister Chris to catch up on the enduring meaning of experience, the common share of the loved. As so it is with my family, extended now and continuing to thrive, returning to our histories and looking farther ahead. After two years of sequestration, we were all there and accounted for; there is much to be said for that.
Sunday, March 6
> Berkeley/Muir Beach/Stinson Beach
George Lakoff
Kathleen Frumkin
Bob Perelman
Norman Fischer
Kathie Fischer
To reconnect after COVID: that was the idea. Returning to Berkeley, with linguist George Lakoff and artist Kathleen Frumkin for take-out brunch from Saul’s, where the maskless were beginning to swarm, we learned we were the first visitors to their home since when. The deep connection between George’s work in cognitive linguistics and Language writing goes back decades, to our exchanges around frame semantics and prototype theory as basic to the avant-garde but also to George’s real-time defense of our work in the contretemps of Poetry Flash. A recent literary history points to his early understanding of poetics as an anti-authoritarian strategy, and Language writing’s critique of both romantic subjectivity and the “word to world” theory of meaning. We recalled George’s study with Roman Jakobson, who once let him teach his course on poetics when he was out of town, then my Jakobsonian intervention in the Linguistics Department with an early reading of Larry Eigner’s work. Kathleen had been Larry’s caretaker for a decade, and the conversation turned to recent critical work on his poetry and much else besides. While Carla walked the hills with Kathleen, I took a break for beer with Bob Perelman at Cesar’s, where we were able to catch up and Bob gave me a signed copy of his post-lyric masterpiece Jack and Jill in Troy, with its “odd conjunctions of ancient and modern.” So it is we inhabit two times, at least, and so it was with this visit. Later, as Creeley would say, we were back on the road to Muir Beach, to find Norman and Kathie Fischer in the same place, only later. I once described Norman in an introduction as a “master of temporality, but not of time–because no one can be a master of time.” He had just finished a one-week sesshin and has published a Selected Poems. Kathie and Carla shared the limelight and were dancing on our way out, in celebration of many decades passing with no mind. The rest of the journey took about one half hour on the windy road back to Stinson Beach and packing.
Monday, March 7
> San Francisco
Megan Adams/Camille Roy
We exited perfectly, up the winding road and over the bridge, through the dystopic Tenderloin to Highway 280 and Potrero Hill, where we breakfasted with Megan/Camille. The war was much on our minds; we discussed scenarios that could lead to World War III, recalling the Cuban Missile Crisis and its inscription in memory and desire. I want to record that on that day we addressed that topic, which may alter the current of history in unknown ways.
Delta SFO > DTW
Links and notes
[T/k]
