Orson Welles interviews Edmund Conti (recovered from 2005)

Hello, this is ORSON WELLES.  We are here in Hell.  Figuratively, of course, Atlantic City, New Jersey.  The time -- one wonders.  Perhaps 1965.  I stand here, figuratively of course, on the famed Boardwalk.  Perhaps 2PM of a sunny day in summer.  To my left I see the famous Steel Pier stretch out into the salt sea.  I can just make out the famous diving horse preparing to plunge from a 200 foot high platform into a 15 foot high tank filled with water.  Before me are, even here in the afternoon, a few old fellows of the old sort sitting on benches and staring out into the meaningless waves and, perhaps, thinking of that time in 1922 when the horse they bet two dollars on won four dollars for them.

The last time they won anything.

Someone dressed as a Mr. Planters peanut is moving among the crowd.  Pigeons.  Youths.  And I am somewhere -- I forget where -- still alive.  That horrible period when I made commercials for inferior wines yet ahead of me.



But I am a spirit and here beside me is another spirit who will help me make this a heaven in Hell’s despite.  I am speaking of Edmund or Eddie or Ed or Edward or Eddy Conti -- which is it -- poet, wit, ransacker of the journals of Byron and great rival of Elizabeth Bishop!  Welcome, Mr. Conti.  I shall call you Edmund!  Oh, that is a great role.  Edmund the Bastard!



EDMUND
Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moon-shines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?
Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops,
Got 'tween asleep and wake? Well, then,
Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land:
Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund
As to the legitimate: fine word,--legitimate!
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top the legitimate. I grow; I prosper:
Now, gods, stand up for bastards!



Stand up for bastards!  Do you find that you do this often, Edmund?



EC:  First of all, may I say what a delight it is to meet you, Mr. Bean?  I mean Mr. Welles.  Maybe I should just call you Orson if that is OK with you.  You’re lucky, I bet no one ever calls you Edward.  I did stand up when you entered the room.  I mean, who wouldn’t?  And yes, I do stand up for bastards except, of course, for my evil twin brother, Edward.  He who is always taking credit for my work.  Although I notice he didn’t lay claim to the Ginsberg poem.



ORSON:  I love your poetry.  Let’s get this straight from the start.  In this discarnate spirit’s humble opinion so called Light Verse trivialized by those immensely serious fellows everywhere adrift in the cosmos without a sense of humor and a sense of the comedy of life, sans wit, sans playfulness, sans most of what by God has been loved throughout all time by the merry and sad and sad and merry is so often the Love Supreme.

There is a special room in the Mermaid tavern reserved for fellows like yourself.  May God bless you.  Aren’t you a bit of a bastard though?  Kicked out of poetry groups!  How do you live with yourself?



EC:  This seems to be developing into an urban myth.  Or maybe a suburban myth.  I just snuck out of QED.  My poems there attracted a feeding frenzy as the vultures gathered.  I left quietly in the night like the Baltimore Colts sneaking off to Indianapolis.  Found myself at Eratosphere where I was soon found out.  As in found wanting.  I can live with myself.  It’s Edward I can’t live with.  Ma always liked him best.


Meanwhile, I am quite happy at The Gazebo.  At least for the nonce.  They are still on probation.  One more “prosey” and things won’t be rosy.



ORSON:  When I said that we were figuratively in hell I wasn’t, strangely, only referring to the fact that we are in New Jersey.  I wanted to set the stage for the presentation of one of your little poems (though not the teeniest!)

I composed a poem about your poem.



Here it is.



On the Poem The Road to Hell Is Paved with Good Intentions by Edmund Conti



Eddie Conti

Edits Dante.



Here’s your poem.



The Road to Hell Is Paved with Good Intentions



Tried.

Fried.



ORSON: Wonderful!  So, tell me why are the cartoons in the New Yorker such glittering little things a lot of the time and the poems such dreary exercises in the SAME most of the time?  The New Yorker used to publish light verse.  Alas, no more.  A few questions.  Doesn”t this piss you off?  Why do you think light verse is scorned, relegated to as lesser realm?  Have you ever submitted to the New Yorker?  What does this state of affairs say about the state of literacy in our country.  Please, if you wish, rage bitterly or comically or both about this state of affairs.  You might also include an aside as to what you really would say if, oh unlikely possibility, you published a perfectly wonderful comic poem about a meeting with Ginsberg and someone suggested that it was a bit Prosey.  And, oh yes, -- I read you have written a few ONE WORD poems.  Can you give us one here?



EC:  I have hopes that The New Yorker will return to light verse some day.  In fact, I’ve seen a few examples there.  Notably from John Updike.  I think if you want your light verse published in the biggies, you need to establish a reputation as a serious writer.  Anyway (surprise!) I did have a poem published in The New Yorker.  OK, OK, it was in an ad from Light.  But even so.

One-word poems:  I sent this one to The Quarterly when it was still being published.

LOST IN TRANSLATION

perdu

What got actually published was the title and a blank page.  So I’ve had a no-word poem published.  The editor was Gordon Lish.  (You did want a Gordon Lish story, didn’t you?)

Here is a one-letter poem.

HAPPY FIRST BIRTHDAY

                  i

and a one-punctuation mark poem.

PERIOD PIECE

          .



ORSON:  I want to read this masterpiece.  Comment on it briefly.  Ask you about this and that and then do something rather horrible.  Ok?  Here is your fine poem:



ME AND BILLY COLLINS



The sun, low on the horizon,

is streaming through the window.

The northeast is suffering one

of its worst cold spells in years.

(They always say that, these

meteorologists with short memories.)

I’m cozy here and warm, the iMac

purring away, iTunes bringing me

Rosemary Clooney, her voice mellow,

years away from Come On A My

Houseâ I’m trying to write a poem.



And thinking of Billy Collins.

What would he make of my

little corner of the world?

Would he make more of it

if I had a small crate of oranges

nearby?  Or a book on Stalin...



Billy--can I call you that, Mr. Collins?--

and you can call me...  What?

Eddy?  Eddie?  Edmund?  Edward?

(I get a lot of that)  Tell you what--

call me Conti and I’ll call you Collins.

Just imagine, if I were a little younger

I could have sat behind you in grammar school.

We could have passed notes.  In verse!



Great poetry deserves great readers and, brother, let me tell you that this poem of yours ain’t going to find them just where it should.  First, let’s begin with the phenomena of Billy Collins.  Poem after poem delicately and sensitively remarking on all that passes, little tenderings to SIGNIFICANT MEANINGS, the literary allusion, the pop culture allusion delicately made from a world where the sun shines on the green awnings of the poet’s house as he smiles to himself in his study looking out onto a landscapes that is pleased with him, so pleased.  Ok, funny and charming once but again and again and then somehow parlaying it into the Poet Laureateship.  A nice guy but you have his number.   A perfect imitation of a Billy poem and so knowing and damn I think it reaches unthought of heights when you ask



Would he make more of it

if I had a small crate of oranges

nearby?  Or a book on Stalin...



ORSON:  Do the many realize how exactly right that crate of oranges and the book on Stalin is?  Just exactly the objects to mock, poke fun at, subvert and smile at what are finally the inevitable ways and funny pretensions of his poems.  And Rosemary Clooney!  Ha! And Ha!  Yes, all that is missing is, perhaps the Fragonard on the wall with the little girl on the swing and his glimpsing himself peeping from the woods behind her.  Ok, that’s just a thought I had.



So.  Do you remember writing this? What started it?  Reading a Billy poem?  And -- and I like to ask this since poets rarely get a chance. Can you please comment on what pleases you about this?  Maybe chortle over this and that specifically about the numerous felicities.  Also, if possible, what is your best poem?  The poem that right now pleases you the most and, if not posted here, could you post it?



EC: I guess the first thing to remark on is that the last few lines were cut off.  Mea culpa unless it’s your culpa.  We may have improved it.  And Orson! Orson!  Of course the the oranges and book on Stalin are a nice touch.  I lifted them directly from a Billy Collins poems.  I did look around the room to see if I had anything comparable.  But all I saw were my rocks and stones and a bunch of id badges from previous cross-word puzzle tournaments.  No Fantin-Latour moment.  What pleases me about it?  It does capture a moment for me and I was happy to get some imagery into the poem.  Something that I rarely do.

Here are a couple of my poems that I like today.  Check with me tomorrow on this.

LIFE

First you have your natal day
Then, later on, your fata day.

KAMIKAZE PILOT

When I got home
I didn’t get
a hero’s welcome.



ORSON:  See that lad of 16 years of age seated next to the old man staring at the meaningless sea?  That is the young Joe Green.  A poet here  -- a fellow of a certain age. How sad.  One might reasonably expect, given his homely features, the obvious fact that he is not invited to birthday parties (given that he is down in Atlantic city on a July afternoon and dressed in a pair of black Sears slacks and one of those horrible long sleeved plaid shirts available for three dollars from Penny’s and has a volume entitled Mental Magic in one hand as he stares at the sea just like the old man) that he would have departed this vale of tears about the time disco became popular.   But no.  He is living and here and pathetically has asked me to recite to you his own Billy Collins poem.  So:



Billy and the Poet Morons

Where are the poets
For the Poet Morons in cubes?
Give us a break:
Pretending to work
Listening to Werewolves of London
Twenty times a day.
At least.

Do you think that, say,
Mr. Billy Collins
Will write for us?

Hell, no.

Anytime he wants
Sliding outside from his home
To walk his dog.

This might be a poem,he thinks.

Tying up little Roger
His sweet little two year old Westie
As he slides into Starbucks for a Chai.
Sipping it later. “Look at the funny cloud, Roger my man
Yep, it’s a poem.

Never thinking about the poet morons
Knowing nothing about the bosses of Poet Morons!

A man from Oz walking around a sweet home Transylvania!

Safe.

Safe.

I want to be Billy.
I’d take care of it.
Write a little poem.

Dear Poet Morons.
You can all kiss my ass.

Billy

As I puffed out of Transylvania
On my moon powered Guggenheimer.
Which is more.
When you really think about it.
Then we deserve.



ORSON: I think that there is a shared sensibility.  Which leads me to ask you this.  How did it come about that you have become a damn fine poet and first class wit?  We would appreciate anything you could tell us of who you are, how you became who you are with special attention to the comic and revealing anecdote.



Wait:  I just want to recite another great little poem.



DiMAGGIOS IN THE OUTFIELD



Fungos

and fongools



Did I pronounce fongools correctly?



EC:  Did I spell fongools correctly?

My life so far.  I was born in 1929 (Maestro, 76 trombones!) in Providence, Rhode Island.  I should have gone to Classical High, our equivalent to Boston Latin.  I would have whizzed through Brown University and be having this interview in Poetry Magazine.  (No offense.)  Instead I went to the local high school, to be with my friends, mostly Italians and Armenians.  I discovered Edgar Allan Poe there and thought, I could do that, write those verses.  It took me a long time to get good at it so I missed a lot of great opportunities to be published in Look, The Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, The American Legion Magazine, all wonderful and good paying outlets for light verse.  They are all gone now.

I did finally go to Brown where I struggled.  I think I graduated but I have this recurring dream where I way behind in my calculus homework.

ORSON:  We seem to be suspended in time.  At least the horse hasn’t jumped yet.  Right here I would like to have a little Edmund Conti festival and try to do justice to a few of your poems:



Button, Button



When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation),sleep, eating, and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse. from Byron’s Journals



Just ask the poet, life’s a dumb thing.

Button, button, eating, swilling.

Life isn’t much but, still, it’s something.



Existence is a rule-of-thumb thing.

Buying now with later billing.

Just ask the poet, life’s a dumb thing.



To dream, to sleep, a ho-and-hum thing.

Boring, boring, mulling, milling.

Life isn’t much but, still, it’s something.



Mums the word, the word’s a mum thing.

Button lips and no bean spilling.

Just ask the poet, life’s a dumb thing.



Life, of course the known-outcome thing.

Death and taxes.  God is willing.

Life isn’t much but, still, it’s something.



Life is short, a bit-of-crumb thing.

Dormouse summer, daddies grilling.

Just ask the poet, life’s a dumb thing.

Life isn;t much but, still, it’s something.



Previously published in Light.



Felicific Calculus



I figured out

This happy fact:

I'm not devout

But still intact.



From Ed C. Scrolls, published by The Runaway Spoon Press.



In the Beginning Was the F-Word



And God said

Be fruitful

and multiply

but don't

talk about it.



From Ed C. Scrolls, published by The Runaway Spoon Press.



ORSON:  Button, Button is really beautiful.  Tender, amusing, literate (how many other poems are motivated by reading in Byron’s journals) and, you know, and very frankly, making meaning in the best way – a way apparently not available to many authors of serious verse.  And one is so cheered up by the display of virtuosity.  The other poems also show your signature wit.  Knowing when to deny the expected rhyme, knowing when to give it.  So, what poets do you like?  What comic poets especially?  And I hesitate to ask this … what is the story behind your intense rivalry with Elizabeth Bishop?



EC: First, a word about Liz.  We both had this thing for Robert Lowell but he wasn’t for us.  He was for the Union Dead.  So I said, Liz, forget him, let’s see who can publish the most poems.  She aimed high and I aimed low.  So she got more rejections.  Plus, she kept forgetting to include an SASE.

Wish I could say I was motivated by Byron’s journals or even read them.  The quote was furnished by John Mella for a competition for Light.  I got an honorable mention.  (Darn!)

Poets I like besides Billy Collins.  E. E. Cummings.  Frank OHara.  Ogden Nash.  Richard Armour.



ORSON: I will now read the poem for which you were awarded a prize of $1,000!



A COUPLE OF GUYS CALLED BEN AND DON



You have heard of Ben and Jerry

And their ice cream full of fat

And you think their life is merry

With elan, pizzazz, eclat.

And you wish so very, very

Much your life were not so flat.

Oh, to be like Ben and Jerry

That would be a super stat.



Or to be like Tom and Jerry

(There's a happy cat and mouse)

Neither one is the equerry

Neither one's the nagging spouse.

Or to be like Frank and Regis

Each of them with Kathy Lee.

You wouldn't even need an aegis

To protect you.  No sirree.



But I know a winsome twosome

Whose exploits are worth a chat

Scary, memorable and gruesome

It's a life magnificat.

They've done overs, they've done unders

They have docked at Ararat.

Let me introduce these wonders:

Ben There and Don That.







They have done moon exploration

They have hobnobbed with the stars

And they're thinking spring vacation

On the beaches up on Mars.

They have done the Riviera

Fully clothed and au nat

They've played catch with Yogi Berra:

Ben There and Don That.



They've refurbished a small lighthouse

(Martha Stewart thinks they're clever)

They've been bedded at the White House

Right between Bill and whomever.

They have almost eaten fugu

(Well, they fed it to the cat)

They have been to Boogoo-Boogoo:

Ben There and Don That.



They have seen the Stone at Mecca

They have chatted with the Pope

Had a platinum with Decca

And went on the road with Hope.

They have wrestled (each of them) with God

And they took Him to the mat.

They've walked upon hot coals unshod:

Ben There and Don That.



They have Peace Corps'd in Bolivia,

They have hunted where it's leopard-y

They have mastered so much trivia

That they won three times on Jeopardy!

They have wiped themselves on Everest

There's no place they haven't shat.

On the go-go-go; they never rest:

Ben There and Don That.




Edmund Conti of Summit, New Jersey, won the annual Willard R. Espy Award for his poem "A Couple of Guys Called Ben and Don." He received $1,000. John Mella and Robert Phillips judged. The award is given for light verse.
Willard R. Espy Literary Foundation, Willard R. Espy Award, Department of English, University of Washington, Box 354330, Seattle, WA 98195-4330. (360) 665-5220. Shawn Wong, Contact. espyfoundation.org



ORSON:  You know I was paging through the Best American Poetry 2004 and only find one poem of any worth  an almost comic poem by my old buddy John Hollander.  Mostly, one hopes, selected for its playful rhymes.  Yours is better.  Your rhymes are fantastic.  In fact, if you should condescend, I know fellows here who are willing to engage in a battle of witty rhymes the like of which this world will likely never see again?  Interested?



But the Ben There Don that returnings and endings! Ararat!  Glory!  Glory.

Cole Porter and you.  What’s the lowdown?

Do you cheat and use a rhyming dictionary?

Who was Willard Espy, who are John Mella and Robert Phillips and is Shawn Wong an actual name?  (Oh, I am horrible).  And also please tell us… how much work on this poem?  We would like to figure out your hourly rate.

EC: I used Willard Espy’s rhyming dictionary.  I wouldn’t call that cheating.  The alternative is to go through your head thusly--at, bat, cat, fat, gat, etc.  John Mella is the editor of Light Quarterly, where most of my recent poems have been published.  Robert Phillips is a fairly well-know poet with good taste in light verse.  Willard, a very elegant gentleman, was a light versifier and wordsmith extraordinaire.  He was a member of our Light Verse group.  There really is a Shawn Wong.  He called me to tell me I won.  Knocked my socks off.

Once I had the idea, I’m sure I dashed off the poem in a couple of hours.  Sent it to Light.  Mella said no, too long.  That was lucky.  Since it had to be unpublished to be eligible for the Espy prize.  I remember posting it at Eratosphere.  It got a couple of yawns so I just put it away and forgot it.

ORSON:  Over 500 poems published.  What is your typical day like?  (Perhaps you could describe it in verse)?



EC:  What I don’t do is get up at 5 am, brew a cup of coffee and look out the kitchen window at the ice breaking up in the river and ponder that.  There is no river for one thing, so I stay in bed until I can wake up and smell the coffee.  (Thank you, Marilyn.)  I can’t imagine sitting down and saying, I will now write a poem.  But things do come to me while I’m watching TV.  Watching mostly, since I’m hard of hearing, especially hearing TV dialog.  So my mind wanders and poems happen.

If I described that in verse
It could only be worse.
It’s better in prose.
Or so I suppose.

ORSON:  Ever try writing poems as if you were a famous animal hero?  Look at Rin Tin Tin’s interview here on the JD.  You share a bewilderment in re the matter of Billy Collins and I think you could succeed in this very difficult genre.  Ever write any comic stories?  Also, although you have mastered the sestina, I see no examples of that most difficult form: the limerick.  Why not?  Are you afraid?  And you don’t appear to be Irish.  Is that something you forever regret thinking that access to certain eternal forms is forever beyond you?

EC:  Do you mind if I skip the animal question?  It’s giving me a headache. But let me see if I can find some limericks.  Meanwhile here is

A LIMERICK ABOUT NEWARK NEW JERSEY

There once

Ah, here are a couple from a set called Little Rhody Limericks.

There was a wise gal from Chepachet
Who desperately needed a hatchet.
When a fellow named Max
Tossed her a small axe
She declined, with great wisdom, to catch it.

and

The story is William F. Cody
Remarked when he visited Rhody,
”This is such a great thrill!”
”Oh, Buffalo Bill,”
Exclaimed Annie Oakley, “You toady!”



ORSON:  What is it about New Jersey that produces such fine poets?  I’m thinking of yourself and Walt Whitman and Williams and Springsteen.  Also, have you ever hunted for the Jersey devil?  An epic poem about that quest would be a fine thing. Oh, is Amiri Baraka originally from Jersey?  He appears to be quite mad now.  Is this true?

EC:  Hey, don’t forget Pulitzer Prize winners, Stephen Dunn, Robert Pinsky and that Irish guy from Princeton.  Amiri Baraka was born LeRoi Jones in Newark.  Remembered as part of the New York School with Frank O’Hara.  Is he quite mad?  I don’t know but he does seem pissed off.  I have my own devils to contend with.

ORSON:  A few here at the Jeunesse Doree have read their poems to an adoring public.  As you have.  Any stories that, as fellow poets, we might chuckle over pointing to either the bizarreness of the poetry audience or our own hopefulness and foolishness or our nobility or idiocy in deciding to have a good time anyway?

EC:  I like reading in public.  I could never do this (address a large audience) until I had my first poetry reading.  Instant laughs and the end of stage fright.  Sometimes I feel I’m cheating when I reading with oh-so-serious poets.  The audience is always receptive to humor--especially those who were dragged there.  I take advantage of that.  I’d love to be X.J. Kennedy, being flown around the country at someone else’s expense to give readings.


ORSON:  I have discovered that you are also a crosswordist of the first rank.  Of course.  One sees your love of words open whole worlds to you.   In any do you even do well in crossword puzzles not of the old sort?  I do them myself but find myself baffled by many references to the trivia of entertainment of the last 30 years.  I speak as if I lived in 2005 by the way.  Where are the good old crosswords?  And  some of your favorite words (crossword words or not).  Mine are “chryselephantine, vorstellung and phantasie.

EC:  Correction.  I’m a crosswordist (cruciverbalist is the word you want) of the fourth rank.  In the bottom third consistently at the annual crossword puzzle tournament in Stamford CT.  The top of the bottom third, I should add.  I could also say that I am the 350th best in the country but I doubt that.  I like your words.  They sound Orsonesque.  I note that constructors insist on defining these words as poetic words een, ere, neath, eterne, oer.  Funny, I’ve never seen one in a Billy Collins poems.  Of course, I would use them, if I needed a rhyme.



ORSON:  You seem to have gathered a group of stout yeoman champions about you.  One thinks of Christopher George who called you to my attention.  And one imagines others who, as we like to say here, eat cold eels and think distant thoughts.  Who are they? Oh, we would like to interview others like you!  And perhaps this is only phantasie  but there may be and you may know of a world of fellows who like comic verse, publish it and so on.  Is there?  Where?  Who are they?  Where may we read them?

EC: We call ourselves the Bards Buffet and we meet four times a year in New York.  Me, Bob McKenty, Maureen Cannon, Robert Schechter, Richard Nickson, Ned Pastor, Bruce Newling, Louis Phillips.  We have all been published in Light.  Several of us were featured poets there.  Former members, now in Poetry Heaven, include Alma Denny, Bill Cole and Willard Espy.  We are meeting again in June.  Probably on the 23d.  Come join us and find out.



ORSON: It strikes me that you probably have written witty songs with blissome rhymes.  Here’s an attempt by someone here:



Mind of Winter etc.



You say Papagayo and I say Papageno.
I don't mean to defy you. We're both singing in the rain.
Or I don't want to deny you but I think that in the main

Oh, Whitetree!
It all goes down accordingly.

I say Leporella. You say Cinderella.
I sing "Willow Willow." You sing "Willa Willa."
Poor old Don Giovanni was one unlucky fellow
Singing down to Hell. He is singing "Follow, Follow"

Oh, Whitetree!
What ever will be, will be.

You say "Cleopatra and the burning barge she sat in."
I say "Jean Paul Sartre in a brothel in Manhattan."
You say Frank Sinatra. I say Lord Mountbatten.

Fiddle-dee.
On the marges of the wine-dark sea.

You drink Cosmopolitans. I need several shots of Dewars.
I demand that certain charlatans by scutted up to skewers
of Harlequin reviews quite like the Pleasantest Reviewer's

Oh, Whitetree!
It all goes down accordingly.

When you are a poem approval is quite tacit.
But then there's other poems that need a strong carbolic acid
For all them years with Britney Spears on a nude beach off  Narragansett.

Oh, Whitetree!
What ever will be, will be.

ORSON:  Does the insidious power of song ever overcome you so that you engage in this sort of thing?  If so, give us a song!  If not, what deep rhythms do you hear?  Ever try ballads and so on?



EC:  I did write a poem,”Pas de deux” to the tune of Dancing on the Ceiling.  But basically I am musically challenged.  Too bad about that since my ambitions are to sing, play the piano and tap dance.  I do like the lyrics of Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin and Lorenz Hart.





ORSON:  Ah, I hear the Chimes at Midnight.  I can’t even see the horse suspended in time anymore and I think we should stroll down the boardwalk and buy some Salt Water Taffy and, if you are willing, two boogie boards.  And...the sea awaits.  Are you willing?



Oh, I should mention that an anthology of comic poetry into which I hope by God that all will post their comic poems will be named after you.  Damn  your poetry is great and it’s been a pleasure.  Now, the only questions remaining to be answered (and you may append your answer after felicitations, closing thoughts and so on) is -- will you boogie board with the GREATEST DIRECTOR EVER?  Let’s go, go go!

EC: Uh oh, I can see it now.  The Edward Conti Comic Anthology.  That would be ironic, but not funny.  Not to me anyway.

Orson, Sir, the pleasure has been mine.  I’m sorry you’re dead.  We might have been great buddies, you with your booming deep voice, me with my funny New England accent with Rhode Island overtones.  Now let us boogie.  Will you lead or direct?

Orson Welles Interviews Candice Ward

ANNOUNCER

Ladies and gentlemen, the director of the Mercury Theater and star of these broadcasts, Orson Welles.

ORSON WELLES:

Hello, the Jeunesse Doree and all the ships at sea and in the maelstromed starry welkin!

Hello, this is ORSON WELLES!

Who knows what poetry lurks in the hearts of men?
The Shadow knows!

Tonight I stand here on the heath of the Spirit Planet Wolf 767. . I believe I see great spirit whales a leeward and what are those strange constellations wheeling overhead? And I am expecting the poet and wit Candice Ward to be translated here momentarily by the infernal engines of Mr. Blake. Who is a sponsor of this show. And may I offer some words about his fine establishment?

"Blake's Satanic Mills. Visit us at our new Factory Outlet!

Mr. Blake begs leave to inform the public that two products of his manufacture will be available to the Ladies and Gentlemen for the first time at low, low prices:

THE LINEAMENT OF GRATIFIED DESIRE! Sovereign remedy whose superior excellence and utility is attested by all Major Poets.

ETERNITY, the perfume in love with the productions of time!

Mr. Blake's establishment also stocks many other items of his manufacture too numerous to attempt a description of -- all at low, low prices.

Also -- see the Tygers of Wrath that are Wiser than the Horses of Instruction! On display here for the first time and seen very recently by HER MAJESTY, THE FAERIE QUEEN.

Orson: Yes, I am back. I am here. And, tonight, I am with -- here on the heath -- the immortal poet, Candice Ward. Candice…may I call you Candice?

Candice Ward: Why certainly, er, Orson. Or should I call you George? My, isn’t the heath wind bracing!

Orson: Yes, George is my first name, isn’t it? I also named my first daughter Christopher. Your planet is most strange. In any case…

Splendid. Will you, just to get started, join me in singing this wonderful ballad?

Candice Ward: My pleasure. I love all manner of silkie ballads. (“I am a man upo-on the land / I am a silkie o-on the sea…”).

They sing:

The silkie be a creature strange
He rises from the sea to change
Into a man, a weird one he,
When home it is in Skule Skerrie.

When he be man, he takes a wife,
When he be beast, he takes her life.
Ladies, beware of him who be -
A silkie come from Skule Skerrie.

His love they willingly accept,
But after they have loved and slept,
Who is the monster that they see?
'Tis "Silkie" come from Skule Skerrie.

A maiden from the Orkney Isles,
A target for his charm, his smiles,
Eager for love, no fool was she,
She knew the secret of Skule Skerrie.

And so, while Silkie kissed the lass,
She rubbed his neck with Orkney grass,
This had the magic power, you see -
To slay the beast from Skule Skerrie.

Orson: And bad cess to him wherever he may be. Candice, I was shocked, after reading your transcendent book, The Moon Sees the One, to read that it had been thirty long years since you had published a poem. A “hiatus” you call it. Why? What were you doing? Why is it that you denied me the pleasure of your verse while I yet lived? If indeed I lived thirty years ago -- one tends to forget.

Candice: Oh yes, you lived until 1985, and I stopped publishing in the 70s. I continued to write, off and on, all that time, but I’d become sick of the emphasis on publication in my MFA program (UMASS, Amherst) and feared that I was beginning to write for publication. It was enormously liberating then to write in utter solitude.

Orson: Yes. "We will sell no wine before its time" and may I add that Carlsburg lager is "Probably the best lager in the world"

Well, all that is over. Your book is at hand. Here’s one poem

Ballad Child

(for my daughter, Alexandra)

lean your head over
and list’ to the wind
(“The Connemara Cradle Song”)


scrimshow through the window
on the deep roiling braes, on
currachs a’sailing over the furze,
as rues the shad the rose is blown

we never fished for flying glass,
yet chad did happen nonetheless
(we cannot get o’er the Whitewater
business either); really, sulks the lily,

must we list’ to the brass
or heed the windrose?
come by our glenglass,
there go our Windows!

Chorus: lean your head over
the side of the bowl,
bog down, bog down
Lady Isabel, take cover

if herring is silver, then sour
the cream, as slivers of heather
do sharpen the Tweed

so too may the chains of Old Ireland
bind you
no overlooked clover ever to
find you

when the wind drags the corn
by her silk from the field,
and your hair smells of beer
shorn from the barley,

then shall you have the story,
child, as it was told to me


Orson: I love this, of course. The joke in the title … “Ballad Child” the turn on Child’s Ballads and, then of course, the what? “faerie” humor throughout, all the various shiftings and allusion to the ancient ballads, the medieval, the matter of all that -- humorous in a way I have not found anywhere else and then, finally, very affecting. So many beauties there: “silver” in one line and then “sliver” in the next. So, I think this is only possible, that is writing this is only possible, if one is, first of all, transformed and delighted and, yes, transformed by the old ballads. So, how do you think you came to write like this? All beings will want to know because one can then be immensely cheered. Oh, and by the way, please point out a few of the abounding felicities.

Candice: Thank you, Orson. I spent many weeks several years ago (sorry! I forgot that time must mean nothing to you now) reading and listening to ballads at two websites, one called The Contemplator and the other The Mudcat Café. It was as delightful and transformative as you’ve suggested. All that reading and listening came to the fore when I began to write “Ballad Child,” which reflects the silliness of many ballads as well as their capacity to affect one. But in part of that silliness often lies a code for a ballad’s political matter, so I had to have a couple of political references of my own, “chad,” for example, and “Whitewater” (remember “the water is wide / we cannot get o’er”?). One of my favorite ballads, “The Connemara Cradle Song,” became the basis for the chorus, except for “Lady Isabel,” who comes from “The Grene Elf.” Maybe because I am Irish and rather passionate about Irish politics, I was most attracted to the ballads of Ireland generally, so out of that came the stanza about the hold of “Old Ireland” on me.

Orson: And what is the story as it was told to you? You may tell me. My hair has the scent of beer shorn from the barley. I discovered that essence for my “Macbeth.”

Candice: Ah, that would be telling! It’s a story of lost love, the kind so many ballads tell, and fit only for my daughter’s ears someday. What a magnificently tortured Macbeth you must have been. That’s my favorite Shakespeare play, by the way. I do so love a good murder and am addicted to British mysteries.

Orson: What is your relationship with the Bard? Mine was vexed yet transcendent.

Candice: I’m not sure I have a relationship with him in the sense that you did, as an actor and director. But I’ve certainly been influenced by the poetry and plays, sometimes in odd ways. For instance, I’ll find myself ruminating about Troilus and Cressida: Why did she do it? Cressida’s act of betrayal is, unlike Macbeth’s, unmotivated, as Shakespeare presents it. Of course, I hardly need to tell you that such mysteries are at the heart of life as well as literature.

Orson: You speak Anglo-Saxon I am told. To whom do you speak it?

Candice: My dear Orson, you epitomize the verb blawan with all its windy and phallic connotations. There now, I’m speaking it to you.

Orson: Would you be astounded if I told you that your poems remind me of the poesy of James Merrill? I mean the sheer mastery of technique. Let me read this:

Vertigo under Mistletoe

I’m at a place called Vertigo
It’s everything I wish I didn’t know
(U2,“Vertigo”)


all-heal by the garland flaunted
above the rushes-o punt! what betideth
these yuleclouds magellanic?

O natal star say our
yongling ycomen

littel childe myrrh is mine

its bitter perfume
its babel sound

O hush ye men of strife!

it’s kisses kisses
then into egypt with him

crisscross the rubicon
sun askance the snow
where it lies dinged
by deer on the run

so infant limbs do
blanch to lose their
outdoor color and

touch my robe!

O babe be not
affrighted

desire of nations
mark my step
my good page

holly mistletoe red berries ivy
turkeys geese game poultry brawn pigs sausages oysters
pies puddings fruit punch all instantly

vanish


Orson: The “matter” is wonderful. But, may we, just for the moment look into the matter of technique. I mean the assonance and the half rhymes and all of that. How do you do it? Or…how did this poem come together…all at once or slowly adding this and that…?

Candice: It started out as an e-mail Christmas card called simply “Mistletoe,” made up of bits of carols and the last part from Dickens, of course—his ingredients in my arrangement. Gradually, the poem acquired more of my “matter,” becoming less Christmasy and more vertiginous. At least, it makes me dizzy, which led to its present title, as did the quote from the U2 song. So I owe much of the aural technique you describe to song lyrics, one way or another—one kind or another.

Orson: Now, if we may, we will -- angels and saints -- ( I always want to say “angels and saints forfend us” but somehow that’s wrong…if we may we will look at your great work-in-progress. A poem you have been working on for years. Could you, perhaps, select some passages, comment on them and then chat a bit about the whole? The poem seems to encompass, well, the history of all poetry in English.


Candice: I don’t know about “the history of all poetry in English,” but “Rendezvous (Refrain)” probably constitutes the history of all my poetry in English! I’ve been working on it, off and on, between poems that I finished, since the mid-70s. It was a three-page poem called “Rendezvous” in my MFA thesis (Hound of an Empty Heaven), which now stretches to eleven pages. At the time, James Tate, my thesis director, called it a “metaphysical” poem, but it’s since become more of an alchemical one, based loosely on the work of the sixteenth-century alchemist and physician who called himself Paracelsus. It’s also acquired a number of graphics, which can’t be reproduced here (alas). These represent an attempt to get beyond language in a poem, however futile and perverse such an ambition is. Here are a few sample passages from the text that, hopefully, give a sense of the poem’s flavor:

into the lightcut
of manner born to
dissolution distill!

sublime & cropped
for want of cereal
eviction
cue the tattoo

let shepherd tend his dinner
let lamb be led to sweater

we’ll have all 9 yds
with our taste for
fabrication:

pontic
stiptic
werish

all in the Manor of Arcanumskulduggery:

lapisophistry
pyramidiocy
gnomeopathy


her metabolism et passim
tomorrow’s arrow grows
lonesome at such speeds

sangfroid in the shade
this sunny neutrino sings
soprano abandonado

Miss Fortune serenading
her shipwrecked sailors

help is but a step a cheap
skate away over the laws
of northern metaphysics:

ICE
seeks no ECHO
ECHO
strikes no VOICE
VOICE
cuts no ICE

remember the almanac!

lest punctuation be forgotten
in vehemence hazardous
as if this vile drizzle is
not enough as it is

or so it seems
do you hear chimes
god the irony

next will be symmetry
so unnecessary or worse

Matthew Arnold back to
bring that eternal note in
again ill-gotten away from the window
untimely as was

it must be space
this passive voice


Orson: What is all this talk about wanting to get “beyond language?” What is there that poetry cannot do? Despite your inevitable protestations, and equally inevitable disappointment, poetry cannot be expected to make any attempt to describe, in words, the sound of the Elhanan Q. Hackenback Memorial Grand Pipe Organ in the Basilica of St. Gladys de la Croix on Washington Heights as I played it one wintry midnight in 1939. What say you?

Candice: It’s a poetic challenge I set myself all those years ago, that is, to try to capture the sort of dispossession my character, Sylph, experiences in the poem through her loss of language as she’s transmuted following the death of her corporeal self. That character, whom I call Glyph, goes back to the earth, and Sylph (the sidereal self) must take her leave of Glyph before rising to a higher plane:

but say what snatched purse
you clutch for heart now

Glyph of my Self/Same

Salami, will it hear me &
beat to my step / though it be
earth / in an earthy bed?

O hear me, dusty, & gather
trembling for gardening
together again, for the
world’s so woodsy
sharp in tree & deep
to the foot planted

in memory of
in memory of

afoot?

ahead!

. . . .

husht wisht on a star she’s pastry
no more your once pufft (my gone my gone
why hast thou
& so on

2 feet
few words
for whoso slurs
her surrey gets singed up top

what’s due is done the morning
no you never heard no crying

truth to tell
blood will out

walk me out


Candice: Ultimately, Sylph progresses so far upward and northward that there is nothing left of her but the sound of an impossible song hanging in the air. Even her subjectivity is shed before the end of the poem:

WE sing of THEE



the illicit Passion of Ice for Echo
with its scandalous solo

The Rendezvous Duet

opera is like that
yes it is
grand
yes it is

. . . .

ICE & ECHO azygos
sing la dolce prospettiva

NOLO CONTENDERE

it is so cold here
yes it is winter
we must go on now
no it is too cold

(refrain)

NOLO PROSEQUI

here is winter
on we go
so cold now
must we too

(refrain)


Orson: Magnificent! You were awa. That is tho the river is wide and we can’t get o’er neither have we wings to fly you decided, for many years, to leave the poetry world behind so that you could compose in solitude. I hope this is right. Don’t you feel that you missed the poets? Those mad, bad and dangerous to know. Did you (do you) miss their fine madness?

Candice: Oh, I didn’t leave the world of poetry, but rather began working for my PhD. in medieval literature: Chaucer, Langland, the Gawain poet, the mystery and morality plays, the Old English charms and riddles, and, of course, Beowulf—all poetry. In fact, I was so stunned by the experience of reading Beowulf in the original, realizing how important it is historically, that I didn’t write another poem for several years. Everything I tried to write seemed so trivial by comparison, not that I was trying to write epics, mind you.

Orson: I recall a poet I met here in what may be called the Spirit World. He was always impressive. Not just when sneering and swiving in the Vampire Brothels of Paris, and not simply because he betrayed the King when the poor fellow tried to escape during the Revolution just (as he once told me) to see what would happen, and not only because I once saw him cut down 30 of the Cardinal's men while conducting a conversation about the origin of the Tarantella with the Countess Borgia whom he was just then abducting... but there was something inhuman and alien about him always -- and he always dressed well. Are there any poets like this alive in your reality?

Candice: Not many I know dress well, but that alien air is very familiar. It may be that, to write great poetry, one must cast a cold eye on the world, even squeeze the life out of it. Whatever, it’s probably the poet’s intense engagement with language that disengages him or her from the living, to some extent. The novelist Thomas Berger says that “all writing is about language; everything else is a lie.” I tend to agree with that, “Rendezvous (Refrain)” notwithstanding.

Orson: Mad Ireland hurt John Barrymore into poetry. Did something similar happen to you?

Candice: To the extent that I was cursed (or blessed) with mad Irish parents, yes. Reading anything and everything I could get my hands on was my escape, as writing also came to be by the age of ten. Perversely enough, my parents were proud of my writing and often said they hoped I’d “do something with it” someday. But I think they meant sell it, which rarely happens with poetry. I was astonished to receive a $72 payment for a poem from a magazine last year!

Orson: Oh,well, you know I am friends with Robert Bly and he tells the story of Japanese poets ascending a pass to a towering black rock and there carving haiku on the stone: poems about the view – the wind, the hawks, the sky, the moon. But then ah then, the poet BASHO ascended, looked about, and then wrote a poem about the wind FROM the black rock. Nothing like anything the others did -- and Bob Bly looked at me (as I looked at him in his old reindeer sweater) and said, “See! See! Wind from Black Rock! That’s what poetry is!” How do you get the wind FROM the black rock into a poem?

Candice: That’s the eternal challenge, to find that crevice, even to recognize that it must be there in the first place. Basho was, of course, a poet of the first rank. Most of us would look out and away from the rock without ever noticing what we’re standing on as the source of the maelstrom around us. (I mean this planet, in our case.)

Orson: You have to have a sleepover with Ezra Pound or Vladimir Nabokov. Who would you choose?

Candice: I should choose Nabokov, as the more hoity-toity one, but I’d be too intimidated even to try to make conversation with him. Pound would no doubt rattle on and never let me get a word in edgewise—but what exhilarating talk it would be! I would be happy if he spent the night talking only about his alchemical poetry, from which I’ve learned so much.

Orson: Which of my movies do you love most?

Candice: The Magnificent Ambersons. I’m a sucker for family dramas, and yours is the classic American one, as Wuthering Heights—novel and film—is the English classic. (Did you ever see the Monty Python “Semaphore Wuthering Heights”? Now, there was a classic!)


Orson: And, just asking, so there – out there – are billions and billions of stars yet there is more of woe and wonder in a science fiction story of the forties than in many poems today – that seem so, well, earthbound. Do you know of any poetry that transcends this – just in a way a movie might, a pulp novel even. Damn. Are there any poets anymore that take on the cosmos?

Candice: My late teacher, Larry Levis, took on the cosmos throughout his career, and nowhere more so than in his last, posthumously published collection, Elegy. It is all about death, as if he saw it coming and imagined it in various forms, such as a boy in an arcade. His poems always reached beyond the intimate and the personal, though. In an early collection called Winter Stars, for example, he took up the subject of our parents’ deaths cosmically.

The British poet J.H. Prynne also addresses the cosmic in specialized vocabularies such as the neurobiological. Although it may seem as if most poets, especially the lyric ones, are intensely inward-looking, the best are always stretching for the vastness outside themselves.


Orson: “Wish I was Bob Dylan," Robert Creeley wrote. You seem to wish you were Tom Waits. What is it about his songs that appeals to you -- a medievalist, solitary and someone whose sensibility seems to combine the sensibilities of Dorothy Parker and the last troubadour of the fading West?

Candice: That’s a pretty good description of Waits’s sensibility in fact. The wit is there throughout his lyrics, but so is the busker in his freewheeling music. He’s an extraordinary performer as well as a lyricist and composer—all roles informed by his great intelligence. It’s as if he were Brecht, Weill, and Lotte Lenya all rolled into one. (If you can, wherever you are, try to see his New Year’s Eve concert video of many years ago.)

I’ve also learned a lot about writing for the ear from Leonard Cohen, another master of lyric, music, and performance. And I love the recent songs that poet Paul Muldoon has been writing for his rock band Rackett (see under “Recordings” at Rackett.org). Then there are the rhymed, comic poems of Joe Green—poems that are songs in their own right, to my ear anyway.

Orson: You were recently given a quite wonderful review in “Overcoat.” http://jacketmagazine.com/34/dickinson-ward.shtml by Mark Dickinson.
Your chapbook described this way by this fine fellow. “Candice Ward’s chapbook is one of those beautifully glittering rarities that seldom surface, but when they do, it seems they do so stealthy (in keeping with a mysterious art) half lit & partially obscured.” Do you intend to storm the poetry world somewhat soon so that we fellows do not have to search through long long nights for your work?

Candice: No, I expect to creep along as usual at a pace of 2-to-3 poems a year. Appreciate your interest, though, Orson, and will keep you posted.

Orson: Let me read this from the review: “The deft delivery, the delight in the dance of words draws favourable comparisons I think with the likes of Swinburne, cummings, Laura (Riding) Jackson and more contemporary figures like Denise Riley. This dance allows for a very accessible poetry not overburdened with intellectual idealism, it also has a wonderful mysterious quality that is altogether gnomic.” Exactly right though I might have expressed this myself less eloquently. I would say “damn fine poems” and then I might mutter about the mystery of where they come from. Bob Dylan received his songs from the Commander. Where do your poems come from? Yes, tell us. Do. Yes, where do you feel they come from? And what is this intellectual idealism that you are not overburdened with?

Candice: Beats me, on both counts. My poems have been coming upon me since childhood, but from where I really can’t imagine. As for “intellectual idealism,” who knows? It sounds vaguely Hegelian, doesn’t it? And far too uptown for me!

Orson: Delightful. And now, one final question. Did you know that after Germany had been defeated, a selection of military personnel and scientists had fled the fatherland as Allied troops swept across mainland Europe and that these followers of Hitler established themselves at a base on Antarctica from where they continued to develop advanced aircraft based on extraterrestrial technologies? And that only the Shadow might defeat them? Will you join me as I tell this tale?

But, first, a word from Blue Coal!

Don't let a few days of mild weather fool you. You'll need a fire for a while -- six to eight weeks. most likely. So, folks, in order to continue efficient firing right down to the last day give your furnace a cleaning now. And here's what I mean. Get the fly ash off the heating surfaces where it's been accumulating all season. That's the main thing. You know, fly ash gradually coats the heating surfaces and acts as an insulator -- even better than asbestos. So get rid of all fly ash. It's the simplest thing in the world to do. Don't disturb the fire. Just open the clean out door. With a wire brush or scraper give the heating surfaces a light going over. Make sure you brush or scrape off all the fly ash that's accumulated …that's all you have to do. Cleaning your furnace is a small job but it pays off big. Because with a clean furnace you'll get more heat from less coal for the rest of the season. I thank you."

Goodnight, Candice Ward and may you thrive ever and ever!. This is Orson Welles.

Orson Welles Interviews Poet Dick Bakken,

Burning Bright

Orson Welles Interviews Poet Dick Bakken,
Copper Queen Hotel Saloon, Bisbee, Arizona,
Labor Day, September 5, 2005




Dick Bakken at home in Bisbee, Arizona on June 26, 1989, anniversary of
Custer’s 7th Cavalry discovered massacred. Photo by Andreas Rentsch


ORSON: In another interview, in inimitable style, the interviewer asks, “Where does the Dick Bakken story begin?” You reply, “In Montana wild horse country. I got arrested in Helena when I was seven for riding a man killer bareback.” That is how a lot of great stories of the West might begin. But . . . really? Where did you grow up and what was it like?

DB: It was just like that, there yet swirled in the mists of the old West. In 1948 on the outermost edge of Helena, the last house against the surrounding hillsides full of pines, caves, one mountain lion, and a clobbered jail breaker dragged back down through our yard—I was seven. Custer’s Last Stand was only 100 miles and 65 years away. The valleys from there to where I waited in camp with the women cooking beans for the men to whoop over the rise with their roundup were yet running with the offspring of Crazy Horse’s mustangs. Downstairs below us lived a real bronc buster, Rex, with his wife Dotty and cowboy sons Toby and Star. Rex’s white stud—his share of the annual wild horse roundup—bucked in the corral just out our back door. It scraped me off with the pine branch that overhung its corral. But this wasn’t the killer that had already trampled two men. I came upon that one out in the hills tethered to a log, where owners believed isolation from people assured. I didn’t know it had sprung from the gore of Medusa.

I was born in 1941 in Custer County, Montana, grew rapidly there in Miles City, then Glendive, Bozeman, Helena—swirled in the myth of the wild West—but from eight years old on, I evolved more leisurely in that valley west of Spokane, Washington, steeped in the myth of archetypal farmland, backdrop for my poem “Learning to Drive,” propelled by plunging energy I’d inhaled headlong back in Helena wild horse and gold fever country.

ORSON: I’m asking only because somewhere down the line, if beauty wins out, people who love poetry will want to know, for the usual reasons. I want to know. Your poetry is unique. There is nothing like it. I hope I can say this so that it makes some sense. After reading—specifically the poems in your Greatest Hits—other poetry makes me feel like, for a while anyway, Dracula watching old Dracula movies. You speak elsewhere of the vehicle for your poetry—energy, imagery, and voice. You say, “I don’t think my poems up. They aren’t a message or a viewpoint or an idea. I’m working in another realm.” Right. And you’ll leave saying what that is—to the critics. So, I’ve looked at what they say and mostly it doesn’t get at what’s there and not there in your poems.

DB: My whole mortal job is to receive the poems, not to explain them or how or why they work.

ORSON: However, talking of receiving poems you write, “I’m here—

—but in open partnership with a god, a force, a Muse,
whatever you want to call it. It may just be the breathable,
inspiriting possibilities of language and words and sound.

So who is the god, what the force, what inspiriting possibilities? I’d say, whatever god, force, or possibilities rise above a suffered world into a realm I can compare only to that accessed by fairy tale—the realm of folktales. Hans Christian Andersen territory.

DB: I feel the echo of “What immortal hand or eye . . . What the hand . . . and what art . . . In what furnace . . .” Yes, William Blake’s “The Tyger” in his Songs of Innocence and Experience is a perfect touchstone for your questions about source, fairytale, the realm of innocence co-existing with what is fierce and dark.

ORSON: Your poems make me entirely happy because I experience unique beauty, of the sort that somehow finds its way pointing to a strange star that, for the instant, absorbs the viewer with its own aura that has nothing to do with this world—in that moment feels truer. Ah, the god. More later. But—instead of telling us what your poems mean, can you tell us what makes you happy with your poetry and, yes, can you maybe look into what I am saying and tell me what I am trying to get at? I’m a reader—maybe beholder is better. Your poems have affected me this way. Talk to me.

DB: When I speak of that god, a force we call the Muse—I am making literal reference. She exists. Not if you open from your head. Only if, like a child, you open from your heart—to the realm of invisible friends, monsters under the bed, and magical incantation. When you grow up into and profess from your head, you lose that burning brightness, the truest poetry.

ORSON: OK, one day in 1970 you just walk away from your professorship—life tenure, years of MFA sagacity, department meetings, the official poetry world. They require a resignation letter but you give them an incantation that blazes from another world. You exit to become that poet. So, how did you know this was the way? You were reacting against university corporate complicity in the horrors back then but also going on the road towards something and that was years ago. What did you feel you were moving toward and are you happy how it turned out?

DB: I was so young and ignorant—not yet 28—and foolish. Thank goodness that killer let me ride, even after I sprawled off under its hooves! Fairytales say it is always the untried child, that one laughed at, a foolish innocent, who steps right into the dark forest—after two worldly brothers have failed—and one day rides back out, lips ashine, showing that he raised the grail.

ORSON: I love how you talk about poetry—so much usually confused clarified—especially a reminder, apropos to titling your weekly poetry column, that a poem isn’t the words on paper:

I don’t feel that poetry is just words on paper, that it’s movable type, that it’s just books. I feel that what’s on paper is simply the notation. We never get that reality confused in music. We know that the score, the sheet music, is just the notation, that the music is something other. But for some reason, everyone thinks that the poem is the ink that’s on the paper, that it is the page. It’s been only 500 years since Gutenberg. For thousands and thousands and thousands of years there was no movable type, no printing, no books like there are now—and poetry was a magical force and not an object. One of the panoramas that the image “Ink that Echoes” flashes to me is that, yes, there’s print, the way we do it now, but print is in actuality a translation of the more fluid luminous streaking of a handwritten stream of ink, that echoes a deeper tradition, a more primal source. Poetry still reverberates that torrid orchestra of the original star-raining creation. It’s not simply dried ink on paper. The ink is just one more tool.

So may I read some luminous ink from your Greatest Hits? A really fine poem:


THE BLACK-RATSNAKE RITUAL

for Marge Piercy

Through her pampered beanyard
comes the well repairman snorting
in his overalls.
—Be careful of my beans!
He cuffs spider thread out of his way.
—Don’t hurt them!
He feels like throwing his toolbox—right
down her busted well—at the
four-foot snake hissing in that hole
full of bugs. The woman,
hair shooting out thick, black, jumps out
of her vines. She never lets him spray the bugs.
Because spiders in the well
eat them. The mice eat the spiders. The snake
eats the mice. She dumps beans
out of a paper bag,
glaring at his heavy boots and hammer.
—I don’t want you hurting my snake.
He tromps around the well bitching to himself,
sidestepping her beans, while she
disappears deep into the hole with his flashlight.
He slaps his overalls
when he hears her wooing and clucking
and rolls his eyes up at the sky.
There’s something like a kiss.
Then she’s up grinning with the furious snake
round and round in the paper bag.
Down goes the grumbling
repairman. Snorts and scuffs resonate up
through the well.
She keeps watch on his flash beam,
on his sniffing and clanking.
He feels her watching, feels bugs all over him,
curses, slams off the light to kick
at dusty gobs of webs.
—And don’t you hurt any of my mice either!
He sneezes, bumps his head hard.
—Son of a—
—What? she calls down, wanting to see, nearly
stepping on her beans. —What?
Hand on forehead, he blinks up dazed
through the long narrow dark, sees stars and stars . . .
around a black shape, a vine-haired woman
leaning far above, peering
down, holding a big lumpy bag.


ORSON: I promised I would get back to fairy tales and this is a prime example. Here is Jack and the Beanstalk inverted. You present a descent from the bean yard into a well where an abiding snake (with everything glittering and rich and ambiguous it represents) is safeguarded by that mythic silhouette, hallucinated by our hero as he looks up into light after conking his head deep in the well:

a vine-haired woman
leaning far above, peering
down, holding a big lumpy bag.


It’s hilarious and cool and would make Joseph Campbell so giddy. The action depicted is “ritual.” There is a zaniness and happiness, having fun and more with the poor guy in the well, that I haven’t found in other poets. And by “zany” I mean that attribute linked with the spiritual as suggested by Robert Bly. Discerning listeners will know what I mean. You said that this 1975 poem “was created in Allendale, Michigan, after a walk through a cemetery with Marge Piercy, who told me her true story there.” So, whatever that story was, you have transmuted it using and renewing those universal figures. Can you tell us how the original story became the poem?

DB: The universal is most powerfully present in the particular. I had just met Marge and we were fast becoming companions. She was a little goofy herself, fun-loving, and a strong feminist who tithed 10% of her earnings right back into the Movement. As she laughed that story of her busted well, infused with the outlandish particulars of her own character, I sidestepped new graves, flashing the symbolic confrontation between an ardent, outspoken woman and a good old-fashioned man. Of course, I shaped and embellished a bit. But I had such fun composing it, the joke of the seriousness of such collision, year after year, each time her well went haywire. Thus, a ritual. It was after I was getting all the hilarious particulars of caricature in place—which is what inspired and goosed the poem into being, such a wildly funny story—that I recognized deeper archetypal dimensions of well, snake, and lumpy bag.

So it is interesting that you mention Robert Bly. “The Black-Ratsnake Ritual” scared him silly. A couple years after creating this poem, I was driving Bly the half hour from Tacoma to Sea-Tac Airport when he asked what I was working on. I replied Origin of the Valentine, a book of poems about well-known women, each in dramatic confrontation with a male. Bly asked me to recite one. He was aghast, flashing a huge Freudian nightmare. The dark hole full of bugs, surrounded by vines, was vagina, that clutched lumpy bag, castrated testicles. Bly saw a horrid triumphant Medusa, poetry too intimate and invasive of non-posthumous personal character. He warned me how dangerous my project was—on the level of black magic—and demanded several times, “Don’t write one about me.” All that fun I had with the poem just made it more luridly terrifying to Bly, our contemporary poet champion of fairy tales and mythos.

I have found that any story with great particulars gives auto-manifestation of the archetypes, the pure foundation of fairytale, myth, my own life, and my poetry. All I have to do—more often than not, hard and longtime labor—is get the surface detail of the story as specific and concrete as possible, and the archetypal underworld surges up to meet it. I must set a foot in temporality—this mortal world of particulars that it is my job to present—and the other in eternity—that force world of the Muse and all archetypes—eager to meet me if I open.

ORSON: Is that how you got the finale? Mine eyes dazzle. All your poems have such a sense of ending as you avoid what is usual to go off just right. I’ll mention that your poem “What Is Sleep” flourishes so wonderfully. I know you work your poems for years. So what can you tell us about how you finish . . . when and why you are satisfied a poem does what you want it to do?

DB: While I was working out the details of this yearly drama between the wild-haired woman and well repairman, I flashed a factual phenomenon heard as child, that from deep in a well, you can see stars in daytime. By having our repairman bonk his head—which doubles the layers of stars—I put him into a dazed, alternate dimension of perception, and with him take the reader right out into eternity, where the confused woman and the dazed man are looking to each other across vastness, unable to clearly see, hear, or connect. This cosmic joke seemed emblematic of the comic male-female difficulty these two caricatures play out down in the carnal bean yard.

What I want a poem to do is not the secret. What does the poem want to do is what I must open to. Then the Muse will meet me with all her force. If I try to invent, to think up poetry out of my head, I will get Dracula watching old Dracula movies, the zombie art of our cerebral faculties endlessly looping their own obsessed synapses without any greater spark of true life, which jolts from a far deeper jugular. It is my function as poet, not to think up information or ideas, but to get the down-and-dirty details exact, tell the story in all its color, with all its sound, and while doing so discover what archetypes are present, for all of us, not by explaining or philosophizing them but by sharpening the detail, images, and sound that carry them. My job is to be receptive and to do the grunt work. The Muse—co-creator with me—breathes inspirational hints and clues into my receptivity. The grunt work consists of sorting out which are the gift bits from the god and which are my own ordinary head babble. What I am supposed to do is recognize and follow the true clues while jettisoning what is my own mere pedestrian invention. Thus step by step, clue by clue, revision by revision, gallop by gallop, I am following where the poem wants to go. The poem is wilder and wiser than I. I am thus coming upon the poem, not inventing or self-creating it, though it does take a poor dumb mortal like me to ride it into manifestation. So the Muse needs me too.

ORSON: And what does our lady have you working on now?

DB: Ahhh, the Robert Bly question. A quarter of a century later, I’m still laboring those Origin of the Valentine poems that he asked me to recite from. The first—Marge Piercy and the well repairman—is finished. The second—Diane Wakoski and the hitchhiker—is so close to finished. The third—Charleen Swansea and the brother—is finished. And the next five are underway, have been for over 25 years. I hope to finish at least two or three more before I am tramped into this earth. And of course I am also working on other poems started five, ten, twenty years ago.

ORSON: How can we keep up with what you are doing? Periodic cheery galumphs to Bisbee?

DB: You may not want to do that. I haven’t told you that this ten-poem sequence is a journey through Hell and out the other side. “The Black-Ratsnake Ritual” is its symbolic beginning—that descent down into darkness. It is innocent enough, with its comedy and good nature, that an audience might elect to join the damnable ride, rather than hang back like Bly. The second poem, “Hitchhiking on Halloween,” spills all critters, varmints, ghouls up out of the depths onto this plane at midnight, with as much caricature as the first poem, but far less humor. The third poem, “Three Snapshots Thirty Years Old,” is gut-punch sexless rape of a pubescent child by male ego—the under-darkness loose here in broad day of ordinary life. And the poems just go more and more horrific after that, until the last few gradually drop us on out the other side of Hell exhausted of torture and terror.

So Bly was onto something, though I’m not sure he stated it correctly. My own life was certainly going to Hell at the time. The third great romance of my heart had just imploded. And I’d taken that glorious old nosedive into a psychic black hole. These poems—each colliding a celebrated female with some archetypal male—were coming to me one after another. I knew they paralleled my own psychic predicament. I knew to come out the other side I had to plummet the flames of Hell. I felt it my job to manifest these poems to play out a full-hearted plunge and survival.

ORSON: Whoa! do you mean—

DB: Yes. I claimed earlier, archetype is foundation of fairytale, myth, my own life, and my poetry, that if I get surface detail of a drama particularized just so, fully concrete, an archetypal underworld surges up to meet it—and in this case, met me, my own life opera, my poetry so ferociously. But I have proof. I can document that such so-called pathetic fallacy actually occurred.

I was finally off the road—where most of these Origin of the Valentine poems were inspired—and living back in Portland, Oregon, where the poems, this whole project, the Hellish journey of my own failed life and loves, the magma within Mount St. Helens were welling up beyond the measly power of the Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima. I was on the wildest ride of my life, with the shakes, big flashback visions, unfathomable sobs, increasing breakdowns, rumblings from the deep earth bearing up that mountain only 50 miles away. I sat with Carolyn Forché in my car outside a party during one rain of ash, asking how to redirect an unworthy life into committed poetry, while the windshield dirtied over. I broke in half during a tremor, standing upon my bed weeping “The Bleeding” too loud while friends downstairs suffered me and my poem along with the quake. O I crumpled completely. Then miraculously I stood high upon a roof almost in the plume, chest booming that May 18, 1980, force of 500 atomic bombs.

Somehow I knew, as post-eruptions continued, that my own life story and its ritualistic poems—a set of ten in the tradition of Rainier Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Galway Kinnell’s Book of Nightmares—were in synchronicity with upsurges of headless St. Helens. My own psychic and bodily throbs and throes were biofeedback instrument more trusty than seismographic squiggles. So I slammed the whole psychotic marvel into 25 copies of a 24-page Xerox booklet—True History of the Eruption—along with prediction of an ensuing big St. Helens eruption, all raving writing-pasteup-stapling Hiroshima night, and by dawn August 7, 1980, dropped them at the downtown post office, addressed to Robert Bly—I think—and 24 others, including myself, so the day’s postmark would punch them with time and place just before explosion. Then I crashed.

I woke late afternoon to cries from the street down below my open windows. St. Helens was exploding ash eight miles into the sky—yes! hours and hours. This is all documented in the 25 postmarked copies of True History and Martha Bergman’s review of that book on 91 Northwest over KKSN-AM 910 from Portland on August 28, 1980. I possess a cassette of her broadcast.

Two months later as I drove south out of Portland to save my heart and mind and life, all my clothes and manuscripts jammed into my Volkswagen, everything other abandoned behind, I could hear reports on the FM that the mountain was going off again and again. In San Francisco the next mornings I was the one who knew what that was rained down all over our cars. As I continued looking for a home in the Southwest, where I’d never been, through Colorado, New Mexico, west Texas, I kept hearing staticky radio reports of the shaking volcano. On that day I arrived in Bisbee from El Paso—November 20, 1980—she ba-roomed a finale violent spew—for a couple years anyway—possibly as I sat down into this very chair at the Copper Queen Saloon.

ORSON: Ah, I hear the chimes at midnight. Anything you would care to add?

DB: That I twitch their echo. Each bewitching hour. But poetry is not black magic. It is also not pretty little moments apart from all the horrors of reality. Never forget that our winged steed of poetry sprang from spurting Medusa after Perseus scythed her snake-writhing head off. Poseidon fathered Pegasus on a Gorgon so ugly and fearsome that just a glance at her would jolt you to stone. That white ride so beloved of the Muses, with moon-shaped hooves releasing inspiriting fountains wherever they struck earth, was mothered by the most terrifying face in all history.

Thus you may want to ask yourself why, what this might possibly mean about poetry. Or you may, like me, just accept that poetry and its Muse are paradoxically fused with the worst ferocity imaginable. “Tyger, tyger, burning bright / in the forests of the night.” It is in such night, especially now at blackest hour, that our stars burn brightest.

And surely I should say—Pegasus was the constellation just breaking that Big Sky horizon the moment I was birthed back there in Montana 1941 wild ride country.



Dick Bakken, Copper Queen Hotel Saloon veranda, June 25, 1989, the 113th
anniversary of the slaughter of Custer and 7th Cavalry at the Little Big Horn in
Montana. Photos by Swiss photographer Andreas Rentsch.


Dick Bakken found his voice while living in Portland, Oregon, during the Summer of Love, 1967. Three years later—in the storm of Cambodia, Kent State, Jackson State—he resigned his tenured professorship at Portland State University with an incendiary poem on the official form, featured in his latest book, Dick Bakken: Greatest Hits (Pudding House Publications, 2005). Hits is available for $8.95 + $1.50 postage from www.puddinghouse.com in Columbus, Ohio, or for $10.00 postpaid and signed from the author at dickbakken@yahoo.com. From 1997 to 2000 Dick wrote a weekly poetry column, “Ink that Echoes,” for the Bisbee News, serving 17,500 readers in Cochise County, Arizona, where he has lived right on the Mexican border since the end of 1980. There he issued an audio stereo cassette, The Other Side: Dick Bakken Live / Selected Voicings 1978–84, (Brushfire Publications, 1986), available signed from the author postpaid for $10.00.

My Interview With Orson...Blue Tattoo (Tammy Turner Peaden)

My Interview With Orson...Blue Tattoo

---

Orson: “No one in film has ever had such talent, such energy, such innate depth. But he had made a film that ensured his career’s end, and he had done it all so that the films grim portrait of solitude would be fulfilled.”

Hello, this is Orson Welles. I was just reading one of my many biographies. Really… I don’t know if I believe that last sentence.

In any case…

(MUSIC: SPANISH THEME SONG ["NO MORE," A TANGO].. FADES)

Orson: We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man's, and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
With infinite complacence people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small, spinning fragment of solar driftwood which, by chance or design, man has inherited out of the dark mystery of Time and Space.

Which reminds me that we are here tonight to discuss poetry. Blue Tattoo, welcome.

Blue Tattoo (BT): Thank you, Mr. Welles. It's my great pleasure to be here.

Orson: Let me start with this poem.

What Frank Knew

She pauses on the rim
of the sleeping desert,
lights a sweet caporal
with a boot-struck match,
shadowed face floating behind
the arc of a blue diamond

and suddenly she's Ava,
backwoods beauty stolen
from an old movie, playing
a sultry scene in sweat-wet khaki
beneath a California moon,
swaying to forgotten strains

of silent music that tickles
my memory, tighten my senses
and now she turns-
turning to smile at me dark-haired
and dangerous and all at once
I recognize the pull, fall

under the hard draw
of a sucking tide and I am
swallowed, sluiced down a perfect
throat like the perfect shot and
I understand, same as Frank did,
the nature of certain addictions.



Let me tell you – this is perfect of its kind. Wonderful. How did you come to write it?

BT: Well, Mr. Welles, this poem is actually rooted in fact. Even though I reside nowhere near a desert, sleeping or otherwise, there IS a vacant lot behind the hospital I frequent that could pass for a desert; especially now that the streetlights that face it have been broken out and it's been put in the dark. Unless, of course, there's a moon hanging around...but, back to the facts. There's this ER doc that I was spooning a while ago, even though such pairings are strictly frowned upon (I'm a Paramedic, and we are NOT supposed to fraternize with the higher-ups), but I became enamored, actually, addicted is a much more apt term, and I managed to talk her into a couple or three smoke breaks in the aforementioned vacant lot. She carried pack matches from the commissary, and smoked Luckies, but the Blue Diamonds were easy enough to imagine...and my pop smoked Sweet Caporals; I still remember the heavy smell of them. This particular doc had long, very brunette hair and hooded eyes, and being from Mississippi, a drawl that could melt butter. Being a HUGE Ava fan (those lips, those ELBOWS), all it took was a strike and a turn.

Orson: I knew Ava, of course. Did you know that Rita Hayworth and I planned to build right there at Nepenthe down Highway 1 from Carmel? I mention this because, under the aspect of Eternity I saw, perhaps two of your mortal years ago, two of the fellows who are here at the Jeunesse Doree as they sat on the deck of the restaurant “Nepenthe” sipping fine ale and always reflecting on that name as great crows or ravens harried them trying to catch their attention just long enough to signify something. The crows or ravens failed. Instead they persisted in laughing over their own limericks. They were the Lonliest Ranger and Samson Shillitoe and Mr. Shillitoe, when you posted this poem a few days ago, gave the right and inevitable reaction.

I couldn’t have said it better. But (and I hope you agree with what Samson wrote) and looking at poem yourself…how do you think it works in this way, what happens in the poem to do just what Samson says it does? And please remember to not let modesty restrain you. The poem is there.

BT: Nepenthe...I know it well. The opiate's dream, Homer's remedy for grief; mecca of poets, artists, and vagabonds. Carved right out of the cliffs, isn't it? Lovely place, smelling of salt and redwood and oak. I have a friend who lives in Esalen; I visited the Henry Miller museum once. And of course, there is Big Sur; which I think has become woefully...well, commercialized. Full of re-habitants. I agree that the restaurant is a wonder; I had an ambrosia burger there in '74, back when I was younger and had a little change to spend. Their merlot is excellent, if I recall correctly.
But I do run on...back to your question. I was honored by Mr. Shilitoe's response, thrilled, actually. For me, it was that turning...it really DID push the sun away (had there been one; there wasn't). When she turned, her hands cupped around her match, it lit her face from beneath her chin; it pulled her aspect into something breathtaking...I hate that word, but in this case, it's apropos...and pulled me with it. That's the moment that my 'addiction' to this woman began; I could'nt get enough. Ava came almost immediately to mind; particularly Mogambo, which I had seen just the night before. What I think happens in this poem is strictly animal; that guttural attraction that can occur at certain moments, welcome or no. It's sensory, olfactory, visceral. Ask Frank, he'll tell you.

Orson: Look at the transition from the first to the second verse:

She pauses on the rim
of the sleeping desert,
lights a sweet caporal
with a boot-struck match,
shadowed face floating behind
the arc of a blue diamond

and suddenly she's Ava,

What a wonderful effect. Of a sudden the flame..and what I love about it is just how cinematic it is. The poem is incredibly visual with of course just what is also there in my movies: light and shadow and then blue diamond which is hot damn just what is needed as a star is born. What I mean is… you have a scene and somehow there is so much more there: the fineness of, of course, just that sort of cigarette, the scene sketched as if seen from some starry perspective as she pauses on the rim of the desert, the close up of the “boot-struck” match, the exact sense of the shadow with all of its implications and then that blue diamond (Blue Diamond matches, of course but the twin senses of star) and then the poem illuminated by a suddenness as the unnamed “she” becomes Ava – the humor and the throat catching revelation of the goddess all at once.

Yes. If you can… would you tell us what you think was happening just then when you wrote those lines?

BT: I can tell you exactly what was happening; again with the turning, the hooding of that face that by now, wasn't the doc's face at all...it was Ava. It physically tugged the muscles in my belly, made me as light-headed as a good dose of opium. I was literally 'rendered speechless'...I remember dropping my own smoke and how throaty her laughter was when she noticed my awkward behavior. I was instantly in love...an emotion uncommon to me...and though it faded as soon as the sodium lights of the parking lot hit us; l can still remember that turning....

I could spend the rest of our interview on this poem. Look …just this:

…I am
swallowed, sluiced down a perfect
throat like the perfect shot

with its perfect use of “sluiced with the exact shadowings and then the startling effect of “perfect” throat and the hammering of perfect yet again…

So, it’s inevitable… I want to know who you are. Who are you? Please feel free to make anything up. I did. It’s a mark of greatness. Although at times it did seem as if I really had been a bullfighter in Spain at 15.

BT: Who am I? Now there's a question. I guess, to quote a sailor man, I am what I am. I'm female, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool dyke, I abhor all those 'lipstick lezzies' that always smell like bubblegum. I ran away from my oh-so-genteel southern folks at 15 and joined the armed forces as a medic; in those days, women stayed pretty much in the MASH tents with little sight of actual combat...but I managed to land a gig on a medivac as a flight nurse. I miss it. My family disowned me when they found out I was gay; I was likewise excommunicated from their Catholic church; a thing I find really amusing in light of today's rampant collarly pedophilia.
I became a paramedic because I'm a trauma junkie; I live in a redneck, backwards town in the dismal swamps of Carolina, and I own three blue-tic hounds and a red-bone yard dog. I live alone, I hunt to relax, and I find censorship a crime punishable by death. My favorite album (yes, album) is Holiday's 'Jazz 'round midnight', and I'm secretly in love with Lenny Bruce. I'm a morphine junkie but I'm trying to quit...and I love chocolate necco wafers. And I write because I can't NOT write...if that makes sense to anyone but me.

Orson: May we discuss this poem?

Blue on Blue

3:16 AM, emergency entrance, county general-
I was propped against the rear doors of a rig
parked in Bay 5, close to where the docs smoke
with cigarettes tucked behind their palms,
furtive anarchists flicking ash at the don't-do-that sign
while people shift back and forth around them
and I was thinking about this tweaker kid
we brought in on a dead run; skull a cracked vault,
his secrets betrayed on the floor beneath my boots

I was thinking about how he wouldn't
stop breathing; how the noise of anatomy
dogged collapsed lines in fibrillating waves

I was thinking about a girl in a dirty blue skirt
sitting on a curb with his blood on her knees,
how her face pulled away in the rear-view like a scream

I was thinking about how an intern
with two silver loops in his ear hummed 'Blue on Blue'
under his breath as we gave our report to a nurse

I thought about these things
I watched the guards watch me
I didn't clean any secrets from the rig
I did sit down on the step plate
I picked at the wick of my zippo
I whistled the intern's song

somewhere behind me
a girl with bloody knees sits on a curb
pulling threads from the hem of a cheap skirt.



Orson: So, I’m thinking that this poem is a poem about something that actually happened, or something written from this and that that actually happened. True?
Can you tell us about it? And what is a “tweaker?”

BT: Yes, it's true...this was an actual event. Just one of the many tweakers I pick up in the course of a shift; a tweaker being a methamphetamine addict. Meth labs are a HUGE problem in my area. This particular kid was about seventeen; he was cranked up on his buy and got himself run over by a car while attempting to cross a major highway. He was a mess, never had a chance; but we worked out on him anyway. The memory of that scene that is most clear was the girl; I happened to look up as my partner pulled away and she was sitting just like that on the curb. It struck me as inevitably sad. He would'nt die, never lost his rhythm while I had him...and he should have. He died later in the OR. The nurse whistled the entire time I was trying to give my report; he really did'nt give a shit and I was bothered that I did. I can't listen to 'Blue on Blue' anymore without thinking about that girl sitting on that curb; and sometimes I find myself humming it at inopportune moments. Funny, the things that stick.

Orson: It’s a fine poem. May we, for an instant, move away from the poem just there to where the poem came from? What I mean is this…every time I read poems by a certain sort of true poet (more or less every poet who remains somewhat within my ken…unlike Shakespeare or Dante for example who seem to create as God and who am I to try to
describe the universe?) I feel there are certain pressures or let’s say wants behind the poem…and I wish I could name them. What do you want your poems to do? What yearning is behind them? Or…what dark materials?

BT: I guess, Mr. Welles, I just want my poems to remember, to serve as some sort of marker for a whole lot of things I can't forget. It's nothing I can really pin down, and after all my years of sitting up with the dead, I find myself mostly numb. But every once in a while, a thing will jar me...like the girl on the curb. She was nothing; just another crack ho who's probably dead now herself, but in that frozen instant she was something indefinable, something incredibly important if only to me and the dead boy; something worthy of note. So I did, note it, that is...and I guess that's all I want my poems to do, just remember what most folks forget. The materials are nothing more than my life...I write only what I know.

Orson: Maybe this is the same as the question I just asked. What would you want your poetry to do that it doesn’t do? Which of your poems come closest to doing what you would like?

BT: Lets see...I would like my poems to be taken seriously. Let me explain that; almost everyone who reads my stuff dismisses it as 'shock' trash, poetry that's meant to awe people simply by way of the language I use and the subject matter entailed. But I don't do it on purpose; what most people never take the time to find out is that the language is MY language; the subjects are MY experiences; and it is troublesome to me when it's dismissed as nothing more than words meant to elicit response by some deliberate use of certain words and scenes. Maybe that's sort of vain, but it's a worry spot. My very favorite poem of my own (and I don't have many) has to be 'View From A Flying Jimmy'. It's the one that outlines the start of my every workday in precise and exact detail. It's almost like a diary entry...and because of that, I like it best.


Orson: Here’s another fine poem:

Olongapo Night

She lay still, taut on the bed,
and watched as a fat spider
with spindly legs like eyelashes,
danced at the end of an unseen line.

It hung from a topmost corner
of the raftered ceiling,
its slight, somehow lewd sway
cast eerie marionette shadows
that grew long and slunk away
along the muted eggshell walls.

She pulled the thin cover to her chin,
stared at it frightened, yet seduced.
A chill like a creeping fog spread through
the walls of her belly in thick layers.

The spider swung itself upon a beam,
and perched in an awful, knowing attitude.
It regarded her in silent anticipation,
seemed to wave in secret conspiracy.
It skittered in sudden decision across the wood,
then vanished off the edge of her perception.

She thought without effort of the Buso,
Mananangal of long forgotten nightmares,
and waited in puddles of cold sweat
for the sweet feast to begin.


Dear God, don’t you wish that the hypothetical intelligent reader were not hypothetical?.
Who has read this – did anyone ever tell you that they knew where Olongapo is or what the Buso or “Mananangal of long forgotten nightmares,” are?

BT: HaHa!! Almost everyone who has ever commented on this poem hates it. I've been told it doesn't ring true, that it's a made-up place, that it's all just fairy tale bullshit. One guy over at PFFA told me that it was long on adjectives and horribly short on form, whatever the hell THAT meant. The actual root of this piece is simple: my father was in the navy during WWII, and fought in the pacific theatre during the battle of Leyte. He was there when Mac Arthur announced "All the phillipines are now liberated". He spent many nights in the city of olongapo. He fell quite in love with the country as well as a Filipina girl named Corazon. When I became an adult and could wrap an adult's mind around his stories that I remembered from my childhood, I understood that had he been born in today's time, he would have left his family for his 'heart'; the phillipines and his much-lamented Corazon. It was from him that I learned of these quite nasty Filipino folk tales, he liked to scare the shit out of me with horrible visions of this flesh-eating monster when I was around eight...and this poem is kind of autobiographical; the girl in the piece is me.

Orson: Olongapo:

“They were the clubs and various entertainment-oriented businesses which welcomed American sailors and Marines to Olongapo City, Philippines. Despite the Navy's dire attempts at "OPSEC," every Filipina in every club and bar knew just when American naval vessels were due to arrive at the adjacent Subic Bay Naval Base. Banners hung over every club entrance with such greetings as "Welcome USS Pelilieu," "Welcome sailors and Marines, USS Blue Ridge."

A visit to Olongapo was special in many ways. To the sailors and Marines not stationed at Subic, it was a chance to get the hell off a ship, into some civies, and into the most exciting town in the Orient. For newbies, this was their chance to experience what had become legendary - a night in Olongapo. For returnees, it was an opportunity to visit old haunts and look for old friends (yes, usually Filipinas). For the bar owners it meant money, and lots of it. And for the Filipinas employed at the various clubs it meant not only income, but often the chance to meet the right guy and, if they were so disposed, to start the move eastward.

There was nothing quite like the excitement servicemen felt at liberty call the first night in Subic. While a few unlucky guys got stuck with Shore Patrol or some other duty, most of the sailors and Marines waited anxiously in line aboard ship for liberty to be sounded. When it happened, hundreds of hungry, thirsty, and incredibly bored men shot off the ship and toward the main gate.

Even before the servicemen made it off the base, Olongapo made its presence known by booming rock music over the gates. Even those new to the base were able to find the front gate by following the thunderous bass radiated by the nearby Playboy and Hot Lips clubs.

Once you made it past the guards at the front gate, you crossed a bridge which spanned a river known simply as the "Shit River." Not a pleasant name, but fairly appropriate given that raw sewage from the town was often dumped into it. Boys in little, flimsy boats beckoned from below the bridge, telling passers-by to throw pesos or centavos into the river. When a coin did get thrown, the boys would dive into the filth and somehow retrieve the coin. The navy eventually tried to discourage this practice by putting a fence along one side of the bridge.”

Does this sort of thing never end?

Now let’s see what else:

“Mananangal – The most feared Filipino creature; also known as wak-wak in the Bisayan dialect. Common people believe the wak-wak is always a woman. Between six or seven o’clock at night this creature finds a secret place near her home. She bends her body down while her legs remain rigid and straight; her hair becomes stiff and nails turn into long sharp claws; her eyes grow bigger and eerily glows; while large bat-like wings protrude from her body echoing the sound “wak-wak-wak” as it flies along. It preys on the livers of the sick and disobedient children who refuse to come indoors at twilight. They are especially fond of developing babies in their mother’s womb; whose blood is sucked by using its tongue as a threadlike proboscis which enters through the mother’s navel. Vigilant eyes, garlic and a pair of scissors or thorny branches should be kept beside a pregnant woman at all times. “

and the Buso another kind of monster.

I love this poem and now it might be illuminated somewhat. The girl waits for the monsters – who is she…just that Filipina who will be used in the usual ways by the usual monsters..

Did you ever explain this poem to anyone?


BT: I tried to explain to the idiot at PFFA, but he was'nt listening. No one else has ever asked for explanation; they have all simply dismissed it as a worthless crock of over-done imagery. I am very pleased, Mr. Welles, that you know of such places and things.


Orson: Damn that was fun. And what a poem…really. The descriptions exact and, again, shadowing so much.

So, let me close with this. Last of all, is there anything you would like to add?

BT: Yes, Mr. Welles, as a matter of fact there is. I would like to add that I have thoroughly enjoyed my time with you, and it has been my honor to have been the subject of your interest. May I request a tune of the orchestra? Please have them play 'La Comparista'...it reminds me of the wonderful Meridian Room where I first tasted champagne. Good night and adieu, Mr. Welles; and thank you for our time together.

Orson: And now this. As an immortal spirit I charge you to keep writing.
Starry night and you alive alive oh. Until we meet again.

Goodnight America.

In a few moments we will take you to the Princeton Observatory at Princeton, New Jersey.

We return you until then to the music of Ramón Raquello and his orchestra.
(MUSIC: "STARDUST" PLAYS FOR A WHILE, THEN QUICKLY FADES OUT )

We are ready now to take you to the Princeton Observatory at Princeton where Carl Phillips, our commentator, will interview Professor Richard Pierson, famous astronomer. We take you now to Princeton, New Jersey.
(ECHO CHAMBER. SOUND OF TICKING CLOCK.)