Yes.
Do you live in the Bay?
What?
Do you live in the Bay?
San Francisco.
Do you live in the city?
Well I'm living-- I live in the city.
But I'm now contemplating moving into Santa Cruz.
In fact, I'm trying to buy some land down there,
and move out to the country.
But I've been in the city for a long time.
I did here-- I'm sort of guest voice at the University
of California Santa Cruz.
And I think I like it so much, I'm
thinking of moving down there.
Yes?
If you were not a poet, what would you do?
What would you desire to--
[LAUGHTER]
Well, I don't know.
I'm a sort of protean man of the art, that
is, I'm very fond of the visual arts.
And the fact that if--
apart from the fact that I can't draw,
and I have no acquired skills in it, I do a lot of prologue
and a lot of graphic and design work.
And I also worked in the theater for years.
I worked professionally, as an actor, for many years.
And but, I don't like the life of the theater, that's all.
The fact that you have to keep moving, and go from one company
to another.
It's not stable.
The employment conditions in the theater are not very good.
Unless you're very much at the top.
You can write your own things.
Yeah?
If that's so, what are employment conditions
as a poet?
Well, they're better.
They're getting better all the time.
[LAUGHTER]
Obviously the poet doesn't make any money in America
by selling poems.
And that's a fact.
But there is a good deal of interest
here in the universities, for readings,
and for guest lecture-ships, and things like that.
So that you can scrape by.
[LAUGHTER]
I mean, this is very nice.
As we say, it is a very nice gig, right here.
[LAUGHTER]
I've been here for three days.
Very pleasant.
They're paying me well.
They take care of me.
They feed me.
They got me a car.
And Friday I'm doing University of New Mexico, and Albuquerque,
and read there.
And I'm going home again.
Actually, a lot of the folks who are fairly good readers,
are now able to make a passable living giving
readings or holding workshops.
Two or three months out a year, around the country
at universities.
So, while it's not--
you don't get rich at it.
[LAUGHTER]
It's not bad.
Survival, anyway.
And that we get to talk to all you.
You know, which is fun.
Yeah?
We have the impression that a great deal of activity
has been for some time in Central Europe, and quite
simply Russia.
We can't get the chandelier.
The architecture.
How they had the football stadium.
Now most of this has the political-- most
of this poetry has a political influence.
You see the activity that has come
to the surface in the last, I don't know, in 1979.
Do you see this as being political?
Part of it is.
I would say, for example, that a large share of the following
that Lawrence Ferlinghetti, has that Allen has,
Ginsberg, that Gary Snyder has, in fact they get
tremendous crowds out, that a very good sized share of that,
it doesn't have very much to do with poetry, so much as it does
with their public stands on the issues.
That where they've taken a very leading position.
Gary Snyder on the whole question of ecology.
Allen Ginsberg on a whole number of issues.
[LAUGHTER]
Homosexuality.
Gulf War.
Everything.
[LAUGHTER]
And Ferlinghetti overtly political
from an anarchist point of view.
And I do think that there's been a lot of identification
between the poets of this generation,
or my generation, who are reading,
with the new student movement.
Although we don't necessarily subscribe
to any particular point of view still, we're part of it.
In that sense.
So I do think there has been--
that's part of the audience, which has been coming up.
Because we've been close relationships between most
of the poets, and at least the anti-war struggle,
and the libertarian struggle, and things like that.
What are your own views?
I'm just--
Well, I'm curious.
Do you think that--
about the role of public--
politics--
Well, the person to ask that is Robert Bly.
You know, he's really been combining them both.
Tremendously much more than I do.
I mean I'm not--
I can't write political poetry to order in the sense.
It doesn't work.
Once in a while I write political poems.
Just not usually.
But Robert has done an immense amount
of political propagandizing and poetry writing of a new type.
That frequently works very well in the last 10 years.
It was not a satisfactory answer, but I'm not
the person really ask because all I can give is my own--
You don't view it as-- you're not--
you don't feel uneasy about--
Well I don't feel--
no, I think that every poet, every artist,
has to take a stand in some way on the issues of the day.
I don't feel at all uneasy about it.
As long as we don't breed the type of mentality
that some people want, whereas everything's
got to be written to prescription.
I think it's quite natural.
And to be expected.
That we should write a certain amount of political poetry.
Why not?
It's part of American life.
If we start writing it according to propagandistic scriptures
or formula, then that's different.
Usually just appears as poetry.
But if we write about American life,
obviously we're going to write about some
of the major political problems that we face.
Certainly the question of the war.
How can we escape it?
And I don't feel upset about it at all.
Believe me.
I'm quite happy to write political poetry
when it comes to me.
Doesn't come to me very often because the quality
of my particular imagination doesn't really
lie in that direction.
But I do once in a while.
And I really respect those people
who can do it well, like Robert Bly.
I think he does very well.
By and large.
And I think Allen Ginsberg does it very well, too, frequently.
Yeah?
Do you think that Pablo Neruda's later more or less
political poetry is imaginatively more
powerful than his earlier non-political poetry?
No.
No, I think Pablo Neruda's early poetry was better.
There's no doubt.
But then, I think that a great deal of Neruda's middle period
poetry, I think maybe getting out of a little now,
was written according to political formula.
And that he tended to suppress his earlier poetry,
simply because the Communist Party of Chile,
or his friends in the USSR, didn't approve of it.
And I think that's a great mistake.
And I think that, in the Neruda's case,
it led to a lot of poetry, which was where the politics came
first, the imagination second.
And I think that was not good.
I'm not in favor of that.
But that Neruda should be a communist or a radical in Latin
America seems the most natural thing in the world to me.
If I were in Latin America, I'd probably
be spending more time in politics
than I would be employed.
Who knows?
Your position is different than Robert Bly's,
who believes that as the Neruda began
to write political poetry, that he got stronger and stronger.
Wow, yeah.
If that's Robert's position, I never heard him talk on it,
but if that's his position, then my position is different.
And then the Neruda edition.
Yeah, I think the earlier Neruda is much better.
Well, I think the only one of those political poets who
really solved the question of the imagination in politics
very well, is César Vallejo.
And that's the point is that most of the politicians
can't understand what Vallejo is writing about anyway.
[LAUGHTER]
Even though he was a member of the Peruvian Communist Party,
and died in Paris as a great supporter
of the Spanish Republican army.
Yeah?
Who do you think are the most promising new young poets
for today?
Well, obviously the ones I coached.
[LAUGHTER]
So, oh, I don't know there a lot of them.
It's hard to say.
I mean, look at the Kayak, you see the ones that I think.
I think Dick Shelton here is a very promising young poet.
I hear he became acquainted with poetry
of Michael Kennedy over there.
I think is extremely good.
And there's poets all over the country
you know like Bill Knott and people like that.
We're extremely promising.
Anybody else?
You were connected to the theater.
Have you ever written any plays?
Yes.
I've written six or seven plays.
I've had a lot of plays produced.
One time, that was all I was writing.
Are any available?
Well they're in print.
In things like First Stage, because the scripts of--
the various magazines, not in book form.
I would very seriously write plays for a long time.
Mostly for production of the San Francisco Theater.
I had several of them go to the active workshop,
the workshop in San Francisco.
And then they've been done in a lot of university theaters.
I had a real good play in seven or eight theaters.
Yes?
So they are-- so badly I wanted to photograph this story,
if I can.
One of them is.
But most of them are satirical comedy.
I wrote Faust and things like that.
Yeah?
What do you think the dramatic backdrop,
thank you for calling, I know it's--
A lot, obviously.
I can sense it in your reading.
I think in the poetry too.
I think two things that I know, my dramatic background
and the impact of certain types of cinema unquestionably have--
I mean I find myself very, very simpatico or very
close to a lot of modern cinema.
But I think all of us have been affected by-- all of us are
right, I don't see how, for example you can go through
very--
I don't need to go through a single poem, maybe--
or anyone half a dozen, and people
like that without being affected by it.
There's been a great interplay between various forms
of the art with the cinematic technique.
And I really think, of course, I would probably
prefer to be a filmmaker than anything else
if I had the money and the background.
I Think it's the distinctive art form of this particular--
[AUDIENCE MEMBER COUGHS]
--method.
It's where a lot of the frontier is off.
But it takes a lot of money, it takes technique,
it takes cameras and things like that.
It's not for me.
But I'm unquestionably influenced by it.
Just as I've been influenced by Cocteau
and the political world.
And a lot of people in the field.
Yes?
Could you be specific about the film that
struck you as extraordinary.
Or a couple.
You mentioned Bergman.
Well, I mentioned Bergman.
I'm pretty Catholic in the films that I really liked,
but that inspire me politically.
I certainly think for years, of Orpheus
and the Blood of the Poet by Cocteau.
I certainly think of films like 8 1/2 of Fellini's.
And Luis Buñuel, the Viridiana.
Not this Belle Du Jour, so much.
But some of the earlier things.
And the surrealist ones he did about the Dog of Andalusia.
And the whole experimental film movement
which we're in contact with and we see a lot of them,
perhaps more than they do here.
And things like the last year of Maureen died.
Films of this type which where the impact of the French
and Spanish surrealism is really displayed visually.
The language is almost inescapable.
I don't say that they had a conscious effect on me,
because when I sit down to create a poem,
I'm not thinking about them at all.
I'm just saying they have certainly
gone into the shaping of my own culture,
and my own views a great deal.
I feel very much at home, not only in the theater,
but particularly in the theater of the miraculous.
The theater of magic.
The theater of poetry.
Rather than the theater of Arthur Miller's realism.
What have you.
That's the theatrical tradition of which I come.
And which, I'm sure, big impact on my poetry
and all my writing.
All right.
Good night.
[APPLAUSE]
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