I grew up in a tiny town called Stroudsburg in northeastern Pennsylvania along the Delaware River, where there was only one small bookstore. I used to go in now and then, and one day I dragged home a book of poems by Allen Ginsberg. I had seen him on television with an activist named Tom Hayden. They were uproariously funny. My mom told me they were dangerous. They were on something called the Dick Cavett Show, and Ginsberg advised everyone to take LSD and see God. Who were they? The book was called Reality Sandwiches, and it had cockroaches in the sandwiches. This was a far cry from the Romantic poems we had been taught in the local high school. I liked it. I showed it to my mom, and she said these were the worst poems ever, and I should stay away from this kind of poetry. My mom was from a small town in Iowa. She had married a local athlete named Arne Olson, who had been involved in the army, had gotten an education through the GI Bill, and was now a local physical education professor. My father didn’t read fiction or poetry at all, but only watched sports and listened to right-wing radio. My mother was unaware of almost everything current, but there were books around by writers such as Herman Wouk. My parents’ world seemed dead. I ended up taking LSD, reading through Allen Ginsberg’s entire oeuvre, losing and regaining my mind in the process, and then going to study with these writers at the Naropa Institute.
I studied with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Ed Dorn, Phil Whalen, Joanne Kyger, Clark Coolidge, and took mime classes and lessons in drumming from Derek Walcott of the band Oregon. How have I ended up having almost an entire life now involved in avant-garde literature? How did I end up with a PhD in literature, which entitled me to move back to the Delaware River area, and to teach literature and philosophy at a small local college after a few years of teaching in Finland? Besides that precocious purchase of Reality Sandwiches, where else did it begin?
I had known of the artistic avant-garde even in high school. Not only did I follow obscure rock music like Captain Beefheart and Ten Years After, but I also liked Shakespeare and often, during my high school years, I went down to the city to see the museums, taking buses.
I took drumming lessons and followed obscure rock music like Captain Beefheart and Ten Years After.
I would also browse in Hacker’s Art Books, and then hop over to Gotham Book Mart, and sit and study people. I was only about sixteen. I remember one such scene—
The women were elegant if no longer nubile. I was a teen seated across from them in the Museum of Modern Art cafeteria. It was 1973 and I was a high school junior. The café was jammed, so they had asked to share my table. They were coiffed and resembled Alex Katz’s wife Ada. They were thin with gold earrings. The one on the left had a sequin jacket, the other wore a form-fitting green cardigan with pearl buttons from Celine’s.
“Do you think Dad will come out of the coma?”, the cardigan asked.
The sequin jacket sipped coffee with equanimity.
Her response might come as I crunched the pickle. I was afraid I wouldn’t hear it. I had a half-eaten egg-salad sandwich and didn’t even want to take the toothpick out of the remaining half, for fear the slithering sound would drown out her response. I liked how the toothpick tilted like a Tinguely.
The sequin jacket was immaculate. I saw my face and t-shirt reflected in the hundreds of tessellated scales across its breast.
In the garden were fake plants and mist from a waterfall. Nearby was a standing red and green Ellsworth Kelly sculpture. I thought of King Lear’s daughters. These two were Goneril and Regan. Neither was Cordelia. They were cornered not with filial piety, but with finance.
“The hospital says we have no legal right to disconnect. We need his signature”.
One popped a tomato, the other crunched a cucumber. Ethics pushed against science. Pebbles sat in the waterfall. The erratic surface of the pebbles was softened by their smooth exterior to create beauty like the toothpick still in the sandwich half.
I glanced at my Timex. It was time to catch my bus. I never wanted things to be determined by costs. I wanted higher matters to be the determining factors.
I was mostly alone with such preoccupations. In my high school, I only had one friend who knew anything about art, but she was always busy with her boyfriends, and although we were all involved in drugs, nobody else seemed interested in religions. I had studied Buddhism and Sikhism and had read through Gurdjieff. I continued to go to church. Another friend had an older brother who had given me books of poems by Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Rexroth. He had been a painter. He, however, was on bad terms with most of the poets and artists because, to make ends meet, he had stolen a painting from a poet millionaire named Kenward Elmslie and had tried to fence it. There were many factions in the New York scene. I couldn’t keep them all straight.
I have always had a taste for adventure, so when I finished high school, I wanted to go on a long trip. I ended up in Washington State, at an alternative school named Evergreen State College. I got my degree there along with comic artists such as Lynda Barry and Matt Groening (there were many others who didn’t become famous, often through lack of application or a viewpoint so strange that it found no takers). One day in the student union at Evergreen, in the spring of 1977, I found a pamphlet advertising a new poetry college in Boulder, Colorado. It was called The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. It had Allen Ginsberg, and Tom Clark, Philip Whalen, and many others I had read, as professors. I called my mom and told her it would cost about $2,000 for the summer. I didn’t tell her these were the lunatics we had seen on Dick Cavett, so she encouraged me to go.
I decided to take a train with a private compartment down to Boulder from Seattle. A friend of mine, Mark H. Smith, who later became a well-known novelist and screenwriter, took me to downtown Olympia, Washington, and I got on the train. About eighteen hours later, the train pulled into Boulder, Colorado, and I took a cab to the apartment that was reserved for me, but the apartment wasn’t ready yet. As I got out of the cab, I recognized William S. Burroughs feeding a squirrel underneath a tree. He had on a gray suit and wore a grey hat. Even then, most men were no longer wearing hats.
