I almost feel like applauding myself.
[LAUGHTER]
Actually, it's funny.
You read that poem, which is from,
I guess early '80s or something.
We were living in a house in the woods in Western Massachusetts.
And I could see--
I just could instantly see my desk
and the window and the trees.
And I was amazed at how much about the philosophy of poetry
it was, how much about [INAUDIBLE] of poetics,
if you will.
I generally don't think of my work
as being that consistently talking about the subject.
But obviously, I have.
And it's kind of great to have.
I always thought it would be great, that--
I think poets should read other people's poetry aloud--
I mean, obviously the great old writers,
but also contemporaries.
And somehow it never really happens that much.
Bernadette Mayer and I used to talk about it.
We'd be excited about something by Melville.
Or we sort of pretended.
She pretended she was Hawthorne, and I pretended I was Melville.
Of course, we were living right in that area of the Berkshire
Hills where they got together in the mid-1860s.
But we'd sometimes read to each other.
And then we'd say--
or other people that we were excited about.
And we thought, why can't it be organized so people can--
I mean, it'd been a few things.
Like, there was a great Gertrude Stein marathon
once at St. Mark's in the Bowery in New York,
a 24-hour reading of Stein.
Not just one work, I think there's some gallery they do.
They read the whole Making of Americans.
But this was whatever anybody wanted to read.
And it went on for a day.
And I remember Allen Ginsberg coming and reading
parts of the Making of Americans and using
that repetition like a mantra, the way he would think
of his repetitions.
It was all fascinating to see how
they would read the people that they
loved and were influenced by.
So what do you think about having
to read your own work, being forced by the crowd here today?
Well, of course, I want to do that.
But, I mean, I don't want to eliminate personal readings.
But it just occurs to me.
Listening to you read that poem of mine from so many years ago,
it makes me think about myself in a different way.
I didn't realize what I was doing then,
which I maybe have forgotten, because so much has
happened in between.
And I think of my work as more disjunct than that usually.
Although, there are some pretty weird corners
and crevices and stuff.
Lyn Hejinian, who's been a friend of mine for a while,
said the other day-- she was reading the big book, the book
beginning.
And she said, you really are into philosophy.
And she knows that I've always rejected that.
I mean, so if somebody said that, I'd say, no, I'm not.
And then I know poets who really get off
on reading Adorno and Earl Aponte
and people like Hegel and [INAUDIBLE].
And it generates work.
I mean, I'm thinking of Michael Palmer.
He's somebody that writes very carefully and slowly
and makes notebooks full of notations
from what he's reading, Walter Benjamin, whatever.
And I would always say, even though we're
close friends in three years, that isn't my impulse.
I get lost in that, what I would call, abstract language.
I mean, I know I'm called an abstract poet.
But to me, that's abstract, the sort
of general term and conceptual language.
That kind of disappears in my head.
I can't hold onto it.
Not to focus too much on the poem
that I just read, but you do use language like monad in that.
So when you're reading language from whatever source--
and I know that you're often sort
of repurposing or rethinking what
you're actually reading into the work that you're making.
When you're reading other works, when you're reading other
things-- whether it's philosophy, geology,
what have you--
how do you go about focusing on what that extractive mechanism
will be of something like taking monad out of Leibniz?
That makes it sound much too concerted.
I mean, not to trash what you're saying.
I think of writing poems as not that kind of process.
I remember a friend of mine who was having trouble writing.
He came to visit, and he brought a hundred pages of single lines
that he had written down in a notebook.
And he kind of threw them at me and said,
see if you can make a poem out that.
And I said, man, that's yours.
I mean, I can't-- but then it occurred to me to tell him,
if I write things in a notebook, they usually don't get
into poems.
They stay in the notebook.
And I know that might not be true--
I know it's not true for everybody.
But in my case, if I use a word like monad, I mean,
that might have come to my mind weeks before or even earlier.
And something I'm doing generated
this spark and the little trails in the nervous system.
It brings that work back.
I mean, I'm fascinated with that whole process, which
is more than the process of saying,
I read this thing about the word monad,
so I want to use the word monad.
I mean, even if it was to use it in a different way,
I can't imagine myself doing that,
going through that process.
So it would have to come up--
it would have to survive my mind.
[LAUGHTER]
survive my memory, at least,
and come back into a pattern.
Because poetry is very present tense to me.
It's that old phrase, in the moment.
I mean, it really is, which I get I think,
from years of playing improvised music.
And now I'm made to realize everything
is recorded and probably online in five minutes.
But I always liked the phrase--
the alto saxophonist Eric Dolphy once
said, "music when it's played, it's gone."
It goes into the air, and it's gone.
And it sounds like a horrible despairing thing.
But on the other hand, that is what it is.
There were these wonderful moments when you were there.
It's not so much that somebody else wasn't.
So imagine you were there and somebody else wasn't.
And even if that was recorded-- and this happened to me
a number of times-- and then you listen to it later,
it's not the same.
In fact, it fascinates me why it's not the same.
I don't really know.
I mean, there can be sonic differences, obviously,
certain frequencies being picked up and not others.
But you can have that experience of going to a concert.
You thought it was the greatest thing of all time.
And then you hear the record, and somehow it didn't--
jeez, is that the one?
It must be the wrong recording, or the opposite--
which just proves, I think, what I'm saying,
that it's that momentary connection that you make.
It's all of it.
That's your chance at it.
And then it goes into your brain,
and whatever your brain does with it.
And then you may be able to retrieve it later
or you may not be able to.
Right.
It's that moment of improvisation
where you've taken in all of this stuff, ambient noises,
words--
Exactly.
--the monad.
And then it gets processed through this moment
of improvisation, which happens on the paper.
And it's just that one moment where
those things can come together, just
that moment, only that moment.
So the question then is what do you
do with the text in the sense of do you imagine
the text as a recording of that improvisation in the same way
that there's that recording of the concert that maybe wasn't
as-- when you were recording?
In a way.
Except obviously a book does not have that sign.
I think probably that would be good for poetry books
to have a recording with them in the book.
And if the book has--
I mean, there are poets who don't present you
with anything new when you hear them read, and some do.
And I'm sort of amazed to realize some that don't.
I mean, for instance, John Ashbery--
some of you have probably heard him read.
He's a very competent reader.
But to me, he doesn't give anything extra.
He kind of reads in a monotone, perfectly clear--
those lines.
I love his work.
But I've never felt that I got an extra cue
from hearing the sonic side, while some other people you
totally do.
Jack Kerouac, I mean, he was my original inspiration
to be a writer at all.
Somebody handed me On the Road in college.
In 1957 it was on the bestseller list for a few months.
And this guy had a book club that his parents gave him.
It was something he would just automatically hand me
all the books [INAUDIBLE].
I can't even imagine that I was about to--
I was flunking out of school.
I mean, I was about to leave.
Then suddenly I'm presented with this great book about leaving,
about going.
And I had never been to the West Coast.
And this was in--
I was at Brown.
I was in Providence.
I grew up in Providence.
So I did that.
I hitched and got rides to the West Coast.
And that was the beginning.
But the thing is, Kerouac, I saw instantly
that when he started his line--
and I think of his work as a long line.
He didn't know what words were coming.
He didn't know where he was going.
And that was what got him going.
And I thought, I can do that because I play jazz.
And I know that that's the state of mind you're in.
And why couldn't it be that way with writing?
Because my education had always said, no, no.
You have some image of somebody like Hemingway standing up
sharpening his pencil in the morning,
and taking two hours about an adjective,
or day-- writing one sentence a day;
being totally defeated by that idea.
I'm thinking, oh, I don't want to do that.
It's too hard.
That's like school.
[LAUGHTER]
I can't quite believe that Hemingway really
did write that way.
And I think that doesn't sound like writing to me.
Sounds like a new business proposal.
[INAUDIBLE]
Making you write a resume or something.
But at the same time you and I have
talked about the precision between words and something
like polaroid, where you're thinking
about the polarities of words--
so putting one word next to another word
and concentrating very closely on how those words affect
each other and how they kind of create polar opposites,
as you've described to me.
So how does that sort of intense, really intense focus
on that micro sound of each word connect with the blowing
as Jack Kerouac sort of--
I mean, that book and The Maintains,
which were written back to back--
but Maintains first-- were really projects.
I mean, occasionally, I've had a project.
The beginning is a project where it's
sort of a general structure of the whole thing.
The Maintains I wanted to use the dictionary.
I wanted to just look at dictionary words
and use that as my source.
And I did that for a year.
Then I discovered that there was a kind
of syntax in the dictionary.
The definitions have a syntax.
I thought it was just a list of words.
In fact, there's a wonderful line
by the comic Steven Wright--
you probably know him--
where he said, "when I bought a dictionary first
and looked at it, I thought it was just
a poem about everything."
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah.
That's what I thought The Maintains was.
So I wanted to create something that would literally be that.
So then after I did that, I thought, well,
now that book ended up being heavy in nouns and adjectives
and verbs.
And I thought, I'll take all that out,
and I'll just use the connective tissue--
the prepositions and articles and pronouns.
And I started that way.
But then I realized it was beginning
to accumulate other words.
It almost had a kind of engine going
after a while that wouldn't just stay with that vocabulary.
It's sort of in three sections.
In the last section, I've allowed a certain amount
of that to come in.
It got very dense.
So in a way, it was kind of working its way back to it.
But the actual writing of those pages was really spontaneous.
The last section, as I remember, I started with a line
that I had written before.
And then I did what I thought I was variations
on that line for a page.
The page was a unit, and then another line,
and then variations on that for 30, 40 pages whatever.
So even within something you might
think of as encompassing the real structure and preparation
that I had also allowed myself the chance to improvise.
And it's somebody blowing on the changes of body and soul
in something, great songs that exist.
And you didn't write them.
But you're making variations.
So you have a kind of formal system
that allows for variation, allows for improvisation
within that movement or structure over time.
Sort of very similar to John Cage,
like structured improvisation in that sense.
Yeah, except he wants it to be totally not
his idea, which is very brave.
I mean, it's admirable in itself.
But I can't get myself out of it that much.
I'm not sure I want to.
I discovered that my mind is more interesting
than I thought it was.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't mean brilliant intellectually.
But there's more to it.
It's like a territory that I never get tired of exploring,
I think, so far.
Yeah.
But it's been a few years.
Could you tell us about thinking about the project?
Can you tell us about this project
and give everyone a better sense of its history and genesis?
It has a structure the piece.
And essentially it's two kinds of sections.
One is the subject matter section,
things that interest me-- like minerals and music
and movies, things like that.
Then I've done a kind of other section
that repeats, which is the author's [INAUDIBLE] and so on.
And there are sections then in between that
combine the writing of those two sections,
and then another section that keeps taking up
the slack of all three, so that finally it
just keeps containing and varying
everything that's going before.
That was the idea.
So I did that for, I think, 10 years.
And I finally-- it would've gone on forever.
I mean, it was an endless series in a way.
And so I just stopped it.
I put a section in, which is actually
a pretty autobiographical section,
'cause I slammed the door on it.
And that was the book.
Because I couldn't-- people were talking about it as being
1,000-page work.
We're waiting for Coolidge to write, to finish
his side of the paperwork.
I got bored.
[LAUGHTER]
Actually, one of the people saying that, hoping for that
was Ron Silliman, who wrote a 1,000 page book: The Alphabet.
It's been published So obviously he
did what he wanted to happen.
It wasn't me.
Although, I did give a reading of that
in San Francisco during the hot
Language School years, where I read every night for a week
for two hours, two sets with a break.
And I got about halfway through what
I had written at that point.
And that was kind of misconceived.
And they thought it was about the length.
[INAUDIBLE] duration.
Now I keep hearing this word duration that has come back,
like the durational poetry.
I gave a reading earlier this year in Albany, New York
with a very wonderful bass player
named Michael Bisio, who plays with Michael Shipp's Trio.
And I didn't know him.
And we were brought together in this gallery.
And he started playing.
And he's one of these volcanically monstrous, strong
players.
Whenever I've led with musicians where
we haven't worked together, the musician usually
starts tentatively treading.
This guy just came out like fucking Moby Dick.
Well, all right.
Now we'll see [INAUDIBLE].
And we went on for an hour and a half.
So it was--
I hear that's available online somewhere.
And I think I'm gonna do more with him and Shipp
early next year.
Man, I love collaborating with musicians, particularly
the take-no-prisoners type, as long I can be heard.
As long as the sound mix is good.
They've had some problems with that.
And you're a musician yourself.
Could you talk more about your training as a musician?
Yeah, my father was a classical violinist.
And he had played with the Cincinnati under Reiner.
He played the New York Philharmonic
and studied in Vienna.
And then he came back and started the Music Department
at Brown University.
So I was a faculty brat.
And I grew up with string quartets in the living room,
instantly rejected all that at the time.
And I had took up jazz.
I mean, I was attracted to jazz right away.
And my father made me take piano lessons, like everybody does.
Now I totally regret having given it up
because that's my favorite instrument.
But all I really learned-- because I
had the wrong kind of teacher.
I have good ears.
And I should've been taught to play by ear.
But I was just taught training exercises.
And the teacher would say, OK, that's perfect.
Now, turn the page.
I mean, that's not music.
So all I really learned was how to read music.
But I quit that.
And my father said, OK, if you gotta study drums,
you gotta go and take lessons.
So I took lessons with a guy.
He was actually a great teacher.
He was the timpanist with the local orchestra.
And I had lessons with him for four or five years,
the old rudimental style of playing all different length
rolls and paradiddles and ratamacues and all
those wonderful names, playing with lead sticks on a rubber
pad, really working out, building up those muscles.
And I decided to play with bands.
Me and [INAUDIBLE], my oldest friend,
we met at the seventh grade band.
He played trombone.
We started bands.
We had a jazz band in high school.
We worked dance jobs and went into Brown.
They had a Dixieland band.
And this is how far back that is, 1956.
So they had Dixieland bands in all the Ivy League schools
that went all the way back to the '20s, like when
my father went to school.
And the next year, they went out because the rock and roll
generation came in.
And they didn't know from Dixieland.
And that was the end of that.
So by the time Alvin and I got to be in the Dixieland band,
we were into modern bands--
Stan Getz and things like that.
And we got into an aesthetic argument.
The leader was a trumpet player.
He was a terrible trumpet player.
He would always blow his lip out after the first set.
Dixieland is nowhere without a strong trumpet lead.
So I argued my way out of what turned out
to be a job on a boat going to Europe the next summer.
But Alvin went.
And that's how he got to Europe.
And he's been there ever since really.
He's an expatriate.
He lives in Rome and has a big career there, but not so
well known here.
But anyway, so I played all kinds of jobs,
I mean every kind of dance and marching bands
and Polish weddings and bar mitzvah,
and show and pit bands, and orchestral percussion.
In fact, I supported myself pretty much
for a number of years in Providence
as a kind of A-list guy that got called for whatever job,
mainly because I could read.
But my love was jazz.
And jazz was not something you were usually hired to do.
I mean, even though in some strange way
it was more popular, at least in college.
I remember I really, really loved
the early Dave Brubeck Quartet, the stuff
before Joe Morello joined.
Those long improvisations are standards
that are so miraculous.
And those records were popular in college in the Ivy League.
I mean, it was kind of like make out music.
Desmond's alto was really silky.
And they used it as background.
But to me it couldn't possibly be background.
[INAUDIBLE] power make out music?
[LAUGHTER]
I don't think so.
We never even became a dance band
in the sense of the ballroom bands in those days.
We played the Avalon and the Fillmore.
It was probably dope smoking music.
The only thing about that was that there was--
if you made a record in those days in San Francisco,
there had to be one long psychedelic track.
So ours was called Endless Tunnel.
David made it up.
"Riding that tunnel.
There are monsters outside and it's getting darker."
And I'm trying to fight my way into the engineer's room.
He finally dies in the last chorus.
Where are we going?
I just tell myself, I don't know.
I'm just following the tracks.
And that track, there was a station in New York City--
this is when FM rock had just started,
so they could play longer tracks.
And there was one that--
to this day, I run into people that heard
that thing in New York City.
And it was always that track.
And there was never played in San Francisco.
It was just inexplicable.
I don't know.
Some jock who really loved it and played it enough, I guess.
So people got it.
So anyway, I've always played drums.
I mean, I've had periods where after the Serpent Power,
I felt kind of despondent about the possibility.
Because the Serpent Power became a free improvising band
after the record.
Everybody in that band quit.
We played the Fillmore on night with Janis and Country
Joe and those guys.
And everybody quit except me and David,
including his wife Tina, who hated
the whole psychedelic thing.
It turned out she wanted to be a jazz singer in a club,
like June Christy, a cool singer in a trio.
And she was up there with light shows and strobes.
So David and I got a whole new band together.
And it was all for improvising.
We did these songs called symphonies
where someone would start, and then someone would play,
do a duo with them.
And then the whole band would come in
until we had finished everybody doing that cycle.
It would often take an hour.
And we had a certain audience.
And we played [INAUDIBLE] in North Beach
for a number of months.
The record company wouldn't record it.
David had a two-record contract with Vanguard.
And a producer came in and said, no, we can't sell this.
So as a result, we have no record
really of the band, just great memories
and some wonderful moments.
Everybody was playing beyond what
they thought they could do.
That was the point.
So one last question before I open it up to everyone else
here and step off myself.
My question would be, so how do you see your improvisatory work
as a poet in relationship to that improvisatory work
as a jazz drummer?
I know it's quite a large question.
But what do you see about the connection
between being a drummer and person
interested in the sounds, these noisy sounds of percussion,
and organizing time, rhythm in relationship
to language sounds?
Well, the basic thing is rhythm.
I mean, I have a jazz rhythm going in my mind
most of the time, which was a 4/4 bebop kind of wind.
And I could hear that in back of Kerouac.
The minute I read his lines, I heard that--
and it's true.
He did hear that music.
And it was a basis for [INAUDIBLE]..
In fact, once you're aware of that, you can read his--
I've done it a number of times.
You can read Kerouac on top of a jazz band playing that rhythm,
and it works perfectly.
The phrases all fall in great.
It's like a great improvised solo.
I mean, I don't claim to be able to do that.
But I think of that, and I operate that way.
And so in a way, it's all--
what would you say?
I mean, it's something being played
on top of an invisible rhythm, which I can hear,
and maybe you can hear.
I don't know.
I mean, trying one of the records
that Kerouac came out with, those wonderful three albums,
then you could hear.
In fact, there's a track he did with two tenor players, which
was, I think, the best recorded poetry and jazz there is--
just two saxes and he alternating and playing
behind each other.
So that's true right away.
Other than that, it's just a difference
between music and words.
I mean, I get sort of fascinated lately with all those old
songs, the so-called great American songbook--
"Body and Soul" and "Stardust" and all that.
First of all, they're great songs.
But also the lyrics are not poetry.
They're lyrics.
I mean, it's sort of like that argument
that Dylan came out with.
Everybody said he's a poet.
And I think he said himself that he didn't think he was a poet.
And in fact, he's not, he's a lyricist.
But that's an incredible thing to be.
And to see the difference between lyrics that
fit perfectly, those melodies.
And melodies themselves are a great mystery.
Who comes up with those melodies that are memorable and then
fits perfect words to them?
And that's something, I think, a poet kind of doesn't do.
We do something else.
We try to aspire to it.
I mean, Zukofsky said something of--
poetry aspires of the upper limits of music.
And I agree with that.
I think music is the greatest art because it takes us
to a place that you can't use words for.
And in a way, I've been trying to use words to do that.
I mean, [INAUDIBLE] battering against it,
there has to be some resistance.
And some pretty good things happen sometimes.