So that's a great way to perhaps open it up
to others, this question of resistance in [INAUDIBLE].
Ooh.
I want to say, just go back to the Dolphy thing,
and mention one thing about that,
and then ask a question that may not have anything
to do with it or it might.
So that's this great one, more recent.
So when music is over, it's gone in the air,
you can never capture it again.
And so it's very moving.
And then you think, oh, shit, they captured it.
It's on tape.
And then you think, oh, it's on a thing called last date.
And that's the last thing that you ever
hear from before he dies.
Right.
So that feels really important, that.
Right.
So let's put that up on the wall and bring it in or not.
But I wanted to ask you, so what's
the value of improvisatory work for you?
And I don't mean it at all as a hostile question, but as
one that's very sympathetic.
So what is that about?
And why is improvisation important to you as a musician
or as a writer?
Because it's the unknown.
You want to find something that you couldn't decide to do.
But when you find it, you know that you wanted to find it.
[LAUGHTER]
It's hard.
It's circular in a way, so hard to describe.
But I get in a mood where I think
all art must have some of that in it if it's really great art.
That even the painter--
when I was friendly with Guston, Phil Guston,
I got so-- we used to talk about what image came
and after what image.
He had these huge canvases, finally,
that had many, many heads, and shoes, and all, kinds of,
stuff that was around the studio, spikes, and brushes,
and all.
And I finally got so I could pretty much
tell that he did this and then he did that.
I don't mean just, I could see this
was painted on top of that.
But that often was true.
And he would paint out a lot.
He would paint out whole canvases.
We would go for 10 hours and I think
fill it up, take a few hours sleep, come back
and, no, he'd say it didn't hold up.
The paint didn't hold on the surface.
I had to paint it all out.
That was part of the process.
But I remember at one point, he used
to call me up about every six months and say--
because I lived about an hour and a 1/2 drive
from where he was in Woodstock, New York.
And he said, I got a bunch of new pictures; come over.
And I would come over.
And we would have dinner.
And he would take a long time.
He would resist going out to the studio.
It was a separate building.
And he would talk about it.
He'd say, I did this thing and I'm-- as you'll see later
in the studio.
And I'm going, it's like 10:00 o'clock.
That's--
[LAUGHTER]
But after a while, I knew the process.
And probably about 10:30-11:00, he'd say, all right,
let's go out.
Take another drink and go out.
And we both smoked thingies in those days.
And we'd stay up for most of the night looking
at these pictures, a lot of which were wet.
There were 30 or 40 huge, wet canvases.
And I remember one time, I told him, I said,
that, put that last.
And he said, how the fuck did you know--
And we really got into how you really-- when you get familiar
with the vocabulary of some artist, you really can tell.
And we'd start talking about painting as a time art.
And also, we'd be talking about art in such a way
that it didn't matter if it was words, or paint, or notes.
It was that thing behind everything
that whatever the fuck it is, you're trying to get to it.
And you could say, you did it there.
I think you did it.
Or I think you got close.
I don't know.
Did I?
[LAUGHTER]
It was all like, did you make it?
That was a New York School thing.
So I don't know if that answered it.
[INAUDIBLE]
But that's why I try.
John, here's--
[SNEEZING]
Yes.
Just to follow-up on that a little bit
with what you were talking about earlier.
When you are doing improvisation as a musician,
it comes out in the song.
And the song continues.
And unless it's recorded, you don't have that for future.
But when it comes to words, one has the opportunity
to go back to whatever you've improvised and revise that.
So do you find that you paint over your canvases,
so to speak, to come up with something new
or maybe paint out certain words?
Do you go through a process of revision?
Or is it simply improvisation and that's what stays?
I revise very little.
I usually go on and write something--
I don't know, write more.
And if it doesn't work, I know right away.
I discard it.
I know a line of Ashbery.
He said-- it always cracked me up.
He goes, it's funny, but it's also true.
A friend of mine, Jeffrey Young, who
published a lot of books, and we were at a party at John's, I
think, house in New York.
And he used to have a Christmas party.
And we were full of the idea of publishing
his uncollected works and things that have been in magazines.
And a friend of mine had collected a list
and presented it to him.
And he said, no.
And we went, why?
And then he said, there are reasons
why those weren't published.
[LAUGHTER]
But then later, actually, the thing
at the line I was really thinking
was, he was asked if he revised.
And he said, in the early days, he did.
But he said, now I've learned not to write the poems that
need to be revised.
[LAUGHTER]
That's the-- [INAUDIBLE].
But in a way, you do.
You learn not to waste your time.
Right.
And yet, I know poets-- and--
I was talking about Michael Palmer, very slow,
very methodical, revised a lot.
And I can't tell, looking at the poems, that happened.
But that's the way he works, with a lot of reading
of things, philosophy of things.
So it's different.
Sam.
I wanted to talk a little bit about your process.
And you talked a lot about Kerouac and that inspiration
in reading.
And I understand he wrote On the Road
in six weeks, some very short period of time, in a frenzy,
just in this very focused place.
So in your process in the improvisation
and that immediacy, do you give yourself
a delineated period of time?
Or do you find that you--
well, can you talk a little bit about your process
in the writing or how's that changed?
Hmm.
Well, I don't think I've ever given myself a limit in time.
I think the work proposes it itself.
And in terms of, as I just said, if it doesn't work,
usually, you know right away and then move on.
Of course, Kerouac, actually, the final version
of On the Road that we have was written very short.
But he actually had written earlier versions
of that book years before.
He tried.
He couldn't quite get it.
And then he put it aside and he'd write something else.
So that was a revision, in a way.
Although, he always claimed that he didn't believe in revisions.
But I think he actually did drop a few words here and there.
[LAUGHTER]
We all do.
Maybe, we don't want to talk about it.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah.
During class last week, we took a little-- cut
a few pieces of your work.
And we looked at it.
And we read it.
We tried to read it silently to ourselves.
And then a lot of people in my class in particular,
we could not be able to read it because we weren't used to how
which I was proposed.
For example, I remember one part was from,
you took the phrase from time to time
and you jumbled it up just ever so slightly as, I timed to
from time, for example.
And human beings have a natural tendency
to associate phrases with certain feelings.
And when we were reading your work,
we automatically tried to reassemble
what was supposed to be said.
I feel like, is that a certain resistance
against that language?
Or is that part of your input improvisation?
This is against emotional language or things that are--
Yes.
I don't think so.
Because when I look back at works,
I think in the heat of writing them,
you're not thinking of that thing.
But later, I can look back and I can
see that there's some phrase or some section is
related to some pretty strong, emotional moment of my life.
And I don't mean just a huge cataclysm, but something that's
memorable as, that moment felt like that,
where something happened between me and somebody or--
I don't reject that.
I just don't.
My mind wants to go on to see what, then, I
can jump to from that, what that could be associated to,
instead of lengthily writing out some emotional experience.
But I don't think I'm even capable of doing it adequately.
I wonder if anyone is, really.
You can spark off something, a little phrase
or a great phrase, and hit somebody in their mind.
And they all have an emotional experience with it.
I don't go for that.
I don't think you can.
I think that happens--
that's a plus.
[LAUGHTER]
If you can get it.
I guess there are some poems I've
written that are more cogent in that way, where I get stuck
on one image or something.
And it was good enough to keep it.
I don't have any real proposal.
I tried to do everything I could think of.
[LAUGHTER]
So I don't have a poetics in that sense.
At least, it's a multiple one.
I've been influenced by everybody.
And when I started out, I tried to write like Kerouac, and then
like Williams and Creeley, and moved on
to Ashbery and those guys.
And you do have to imitate, I think,
to get the shape of other people's work.
And eventually, though, you find that you're doing, I guess,
what you're supposed to do.
But I don't know who's going to tell me I'm supposed to do it--
[LAUGHTER]
--instead of me.
As Ted Berrigan said, a little guy in the back of your head
takes care of things like that.
[LAUGHTER]
Oh, yeah?
You got one of those, Ted?
I don't know.
[LAUGHTER]
Where do I get to sign one of those up?
[LAUGHTER]
A question over here for you.
Yeah?
Given the improvisatory nature of your work,
do you think that there are, nevertheless,
any themes, any ideas, any concepts
that prevail or predominate across the board
with the things that you've done?
Or do you think that they are really all
just truly in the moment and reflecting whatever,
to use your word, Professor, whatever ambience?
I think there's almost too many, I think would be the problem
or could be the problem.
There's obviously subjects that I'm totally
immersed in, like geology, certain music, certain movies,
certain literature.
It's all reflected in there.
Maybe I'm not going to sit down and--
I did do that one book where I talked about jazz.
And so I fool myself into doing that by using letters
that I had written to my friend David Meltzer when we
lived on the opposite coasts.
And we would exchange tapes and talk about the same music.
So I was able to use that.
I find it very hard to conservatively sit down
and say, OK, I'm not going to say what I think about,
Charlie Parker or something.
It's just too claustrophobic or something.
I almost have to fool myself into popping off something.
When I think I'm doing something else,
I fool myself into not being so strict.
And I don't think a great phrase has
come from being strict anyway.
There's a lot of bad books that have
been written about jazz, so.
[LAUGHTER]
So it grew up in a different relationship
to attention, in a way.
Oh, yeah.
So attention is always over there,
just outside of that thing that you seem
to be focusing on in some way.
Yeah, I want to be in that.
I don't want to figure out some way to talk about it,
even though that might be good, in a way, for something.
I feel like I want it far from--
good question.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't have--
I don't know.
It's very hard to say, because I don't
know what I'm really doing when I'm listening back to my work.
I'm not looking at it the way you would, because I wrote it.
And I don't really remember writing it.
That moment, that's a drawback of the moment, momentary work,
is you can't recreate the all of that moment.
You know you wrote it.
But there's a familiarity about that.
But I couldn't--
I'm somehow, like I said, that openness,
it was that poem that he read, I was
amazed that there was so much poetic comment
in that poem about, actually, ways of writing, the position
I was in when I wrote this, and looking out the window.
It almost seemed like a romantic stanza
with asides about writing a romantic stanza, which
I don't think of myself as someone who writes that.
So I'm more various than I even think I am.
[LAUGHTER]
I can't really answer your question.
[LAUGHTER]
But I've had all those thoughts.
And a lot of that stuff is in there, believe me.
And I don't necessarily mean you to get it either.
I may want you to get the result of it, which is, to me, much
more interesting, is the flash and combination of a lot
of these things that, when they're put together,
it's as if or that have not been together.
That seems like a major distinction between something
like Kerouac's method and your own, in that I feel,
and I could be wrong about this, that there is a part of Kerouac
which is entirely about the reader
getting it, being in that moment,
caught up in a verisimilitude of his own excitement.
Whereas, as you say, that we're not always asked to get it,
whatever that it is, whether it's simply
a figure, or a representation, or something
like that in your own work.
What do you think--
why do you feel like you're different in that way?
There's that more resistance to a representational system
in your work as opposed to Kerouac.
Well-- yeah, Kerouac had several kinds of work that he did,
and the most famous one being those trips.
And books about trips and books about people
were his heroes, Cassidy, and Gary Snyder,
and people like that.
And then he wrote it in his poetry,
or what is called poetry, like short lines.
Or certainly, in a work like "Old Angel Midnight,"
it's very--
it's quite close to what I do.
I was really glad to see him doing that.
It was really inspiring, that he--
and that work has been totally trashed by everybody.
All the critics hate it; they don't get that.
They want the sociological view of Kerouac.
He was a figure of that time.
And he suffered terribly from it.
But that's his tragedy.
But I don't read--
there's a wonderful description of him writing.
I don't know how many people ever saw him actually writing.
But Philip Whalen, in an interview,
in a book of interviews with Phil,
described Jack sitting at a typewriter with notebooks
on the desk to his left, which were sketched
in pencil on these trips.
And it's almost like he's a musician.
And these are the chord changes of a tune
that he's improvising.
And he'll type like mad, so fast.
Phil said, all you hear was the bell going ding,
ding, ding, ding, ding.
It was just so fast.
And then he would stop.
And then he would cross something out on the notebook
or skip a page and then take off on another one.
He was using a structure, obviously, the trip, which
had a time, and a duration, and something
happened after something.
But everything else, it was like he was playing an instrument.
He'd be playing so--
Phil said, he was writing so fast,
I don't know how he had time to even think of the words.
I thought, well, Charlie Parker.
Something to be aspired to.
Yeah?
Or--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Oh, I'm sorry.
Oh, yeah?
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
When you're talking about Kerouac,
words seem to sit on top of a rhythm.
And I think, as you know, rhythm pushing in that way.
But then inside of my head, it's flipping around,
this definition of poetry as syllables juxtaposed in beauty.
And what I think Creeley really liked to say sometimes
about the American language as being
primarily or overwhelmingly, the words are one-syllable words.
Oh.
So I wonder if you feel any tension
between the push of a rhythm and the dwelling on the syllable
as though the syllables make the rhythm as they go?
Oh, certainly.
And is this even a legitimate question?
I've never heard Bob say that.
Is that in print?
Or is [INAUDIBLE]?
I think it is somewhere, maybe, in The Collected Essays.
But I might be remembering him saying it live too.
I've heard him several times.
It's a wonderful thing to think about.
I know--
Yeah, when he talked about it, because
of the one-syllable thing, it could turn anywhere.
It could turn on a dime.
But the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon strains in English,
they're more one-syllable.
Yes.
Yeah.
Definitely, yeah.
Those are the real engine, I think, of the English.
And those single syllable, you can really
hit with them, just amazing.
Just a--
I asked Bob, he, Creeley, he had jazz in his life.
And I was always trying to get him
to write about that for all people,
to tell Bob Creeley to sit down and write
an essay about remembering when he lived in New Hampshire early
on, the chicken ranch or what it was.
And he'd come out of Boston.
This would be late '40s, early '50s, I guess.
And he would go to the jazz clubs.
And he heard Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis,
and all these guys.
And he's mentioned them in poems that
are in passing and essays, and talking
about how Miles-- the famous one is how Miles was
able to make it sound like the music slowed down by the way he
phrased or speed it up.
But actually, the four-four bars were going right
at the same tempo.
He was able-- and that's a wonderful thing
to say about jazz.
And this place, this solo by Sonny Rollins,
I could show you what--
it just seems like he's going twice as fast.
And all of a sudden, he's going--
really, this tempo has slowed.
And it isn't.
It's just the way he's phrased it.
It's just magic.
But Bob dug that.
And I always thought, I want to know about--
because he did it.
He's older than me.
And it was the generation before that saw those jazz clubs.
If I started going to those jazz clubs, I was in Providence.
And I would go to Boston, and go to Storyville, and the Stable,
and those places in the mid '50s.
That was my illumination.
But I didn't see Charlie Parker.
And I didn't see Miles in that early time.
And a lot of the musicians that played with him then,
you could have seen.
And there's a drummer, Roy Haynes,
one of the great drummers who's still alive, still
playing in his '90s or something [INAUDIBLE]..
He can't hardly talk.
He talks, and he repeats, and he gets into memory holes.
But when he plays, it's just magnificent.
But Bob probably saw him playing behind Bird
in one of those little dives in Boston.
And I always thought, he's a guy who was there.
He's a poet.
And if I'd see him and somebody came up again
to talk to me about it.
But maybe, he really couldn't remember a lot.
But I know I've lost a lot of the stuff.
If somebody asked me to describe something
I saw back in Boston in those days,
I'd probably be mumbling something about how great
it was.
[LAUGHTER]
But it's really--
I can't get rid of their experience.
Yeah?
We had the opportunity to go to lunch before.
And we talked a little bit about your early meeting
with Bernadette Mayer, and encouraging her to write.
When I think about folks writing in the '60s and '70s in an
experimental strain, I think about the women of that time
who made a long run of it, [INAUDIBLE],, [INAUDIBLE] Pino,
Diane di Prima, [INAUDIBLE],, Mayer.
I run out of names after that.
And I guess I wonder a little bit if you can think about,
what was it like--
we also talked about scenes developing out
of networks of affiliation and [INAUDIBLE] guys hanging out.
And what was it like for women in the '60s and '70s
trying to write?
It was tough.
It was very tough.
And she was a tough person.
I mean that in the best way, Bernadette Mayer.
I think I was telling you before that the first time
I met her was at a reading series, which Ted Berrigan had
in 1966 at the Folklore Center in New York City, which
was the first reading I ever gave in public.
And he came, of course, with this incredibly beautiful
young girl on his arm.
And she never said a word.
And that was Bernadette.
That was the first time I ever laid eyes on her.
And then I didn't see her again for a couple of years.
And I was living in California.
And she was with her boyfriend Ed Bose, who was a filmmaker.
And they drove a sports car to California and came to see me.
And then she was the Bernadette Mayer.
We'd never stopped talking to each other, just--
but I know she had a lot of trouble
in the New York scene, which was largely male.
But she liked to be what she called rude.
She loved the word rude.
And that meant getting in the face
of some of these motherfuckers.
[LAUGHTER]
They say something to you.
They want to get you in bed or they
want you to put up with some shit, tell them.
She would.
And she'd blow smoke in their face, pull out this cigarette
and stamp on it.
That was Bernadette.
Wow.
[LAUGHTER]
Incredible.
So she found a way.
I suppose she found a way to enjoy
those difficulties in a way.
And there were some guys that deserved it.
They were getting away with murder.
But her mind, I think I was talking about
how, when I first met her then, she
was more involved with politics and a hippie idealism.
This is like, wait, '60s, early '70s.
And I had actually published some
of her work in Joglars magazine five or so years earlier.
And I said, you've got to write.
This is genius.
And I think I had some small part in getting
her back on the track.
And obviously, she was somebody who was going to write.
There was no doubt about it.
But it helps, maybe, to have some guy say too,
who didn't have any other motives, and just say,
this is great work.
Go on.
I want to see it.
That's all it takes.
Yeah?
Earlier, you mentioned about how,
when we were talking about things of value at a general--
you didn't really have a general theme.
Most of it was improv on the fly.
You couldn't get that emotion, it would fly away.
And I saw that as you're aspiring to music.
But once you hear music, it's done.
Do you feel like improvisation is
like aspiring to a condition in music, in the sense
that it's living up to that condition of art?
Yeah, I do.
Or at least, I hope.
I've devoted a lot of time to that hope.
I don't believe there's one way to do anything.
But that's been my way because of the combination
of the impulses of education or exposure that I had.
Like I say, I started with music.
And I didn't really write anything until I was 19 or 20.
And then I didn't--
and Kerouac got me on the road.
But I didn't really write much of it.
I probably scribbled in a notebook.
And it was all really imitated.
But I didn't really conservatively write
until a few years later.
When you're overwhelmed with a million influences
and you're thinking, you despair of ever getting anything out
from under that.
You do if you keep it up.
I was saying to somebody earlier that the idea of--
that if you do this writing, which is pushing the edge,
you really have to do a lot of it.
And it has a--
and I thought of the word practice,
in the sense not of practicing the piano, but--
in a way.
But I'm saying more like a Buddhist practice of meditation
or activity to free your mind and move into a certain area.
And I think you have to do that.
Actually, Phil Whalen once said that in an interview about me.
I was glad to see you.
He said, Coolidge writes a lot.
And you have to.
[LAUGHTER]
That's great.
So--
Well, I think that's actually a really good spot to end.
Clark's going to be hanging around for a bit.
So if you feel like coming and talking to him,
we're all just going to be gathering here.
So thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]