Orson Welles Interviews Samson Shillitoe

Orson Welles Interviews Samson Shillitoe

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Orson:
As we all know, Samson Shillitoe is perhaps the most mysterious figure at the Jeunesse Doree, Tonight, he and I sit atop Robinson Jeffers great tower of stone near Tor House in Carmel, California. We are only a mile or so from Samson’s own ark shaped home in the lupine covered hills and look out on the Pacific. Great constellations wheel overhead. Is that Point Lobos to my right, Samson? May I call you Samson??


SS
Actually, Orson, its Pebble Beach, the fabled 18th Fairway to your right. Pt. Lobos, "the greatest meeting place of land and sea" as Edward Weston said, is on your left, just there across the fog-shawled bay. And, by all means, Samson will suffice.

Orson:
Samson Shillitoe: Longshoreman, poet, guitarista, world traveler, certified Sufi numerologist, Lothario, wit, yachtsman and sailor… and more, of course. I recall once that when asked to describe myself I refused the usual – great actor and director and so on – and described myself simply as an adventurer. How would you describe yourself Samson?


SS
Yes Orson, I can understand the resistance to such endeavors, yet simply I would say I am 'the most dreadful dilettante'. Not that I never drink deeply at any font, for god knows I've stayed over long at many a party, but rather that my hunger for that mysterium tremendum rather more quickly gets the better of me and so I'm off again in pursuit of it! My parents named me Timothy—one who is god-fearing timo/theos. And in more ways than I care to admit, it is true, and certainly accounts for the approach/avoidance dance I've done with life.

I will mention that my nom de plume is borrowed from Eliot Baker's wonderful book "A Fine Madness" which was made into a film starring Sean Connery and Joanne Woodward.

Orson:
I hope you don’t mind if I read rather more of your poetry that is usual in these interviews. So much seems to be lost – your natural modesty perhaps.


Here’s an early poem of yours:


The Archer-1985

The season's pale archer draws back the great bow,
flings westward the weak shaft.

Thin thread of gold in a quicksilver sky as
faint rush of feather creases the icy air.

Beneath brief flight, the crystal globe
spins its angled day.
Heartwood cleaves in cold remorse; red alder
weeping by the slow river.

Westward now, low above the rocky slopes
where glaciers glint a hint of arrows.
Long shadows devour the day, huddle in the canyons.
In the deep rock heart, the water's clock stops.

Far out upon the creamchurned sea and
blue wool wet against the wind
the world's last sailor drowns the sky-wounding sun.

At the edge of the angled night, the archer refits,
flings westward the weak shaft.


This is a very quiet poem and very fine and I think entirely yours. Can you tell us a bit about it? What interests me is the fine balance between exact observation and artifice. You do know that it is rare for this sort of thing to be attempted? It’s very classical it seems to me.



SS
Nature is THE theme for my work, I see that same fearsome god in all of nature's many faces. As well, my own heartwood cleaves easily so you have the internal aspect at work as well. Thinking back on this, it was most informed by visions of back country in Oregon, where I lived during the '70s. The images are of that 'many-rivered land', but the influence of the time was most clearly DT, with his nouns acting out of control. In this last regard, it is not entirely mine, yet the tone attempts to capture something of the clear and silent solitudes of winter, and the arc of the low December sun.

Orson:

And now let me read this:

www.nuggie.com/lifting/images/sailor1.mov

Sailor Dreams

The flood tide laps on barnacled legs
and hawsers grow tight in the rising wind.
Halyards sing against gray, weathr'd masts
And the moss-bearded rudder swings slow on her pins.
In the water-front bar, their wet coats on pegs,
The patrons are laughing, swilling their gin
And spilling out tales of thier sea-faring pasts.

The grizzled old mate with his sea-faring eyes
Is smoking his hand-carved, whalebone pipe.
The bar maid moping and mopping the floor
On her hands and knees, her breasts hanging ripe.
The mate turns his head, looks out at the sky,
"Tis a nor'easter lads, I know the type."
Downs the last of his drinkl, and goes to the door.

On the rain swept, salt-spray quay he stands
And checks the glass on the wharfingers shed.
He wipes the steam from his spectacle lens
Then slowly turns with a shake of his head.
Adjusting his cap with his sailor's hands
He mutters, "I know I'll soon be dead.
Sure the time grows near this long voyage ends."

Then the thunder rolled, and the ships' bells tolled
And from out of the lowering, sea-gray sky
Sailed a schooner grand, with all her hands
Turned out to the gun'ales and standing by
With a cargo of gold in her groaning hold
To put a gleam in any seaman's eye,
And to carry him off to far-away lands.

Then a snaking line all around him twined
As they heaved and they hauled his body aboard
And they showed him back to the captain's berth
Where they treated him like an Admiralty Lord.
There he had high tea as the ship's clock chimed
And the Captain ordered the course changed toward
The star that marks the top of the earth.

So the sails were trimmed and reefed on spars
That glowed in the heaven's spangl'd light.,
And the captain spoke of the waterless sea
Where the schooner sailed through the depths of night
Past celestial storms and maelstroms of stars
'Till at last, at the still point, the ship came right
And ran down till dawn raised the Pleiades.

And there in the sign of the raging Bull,
They anchored at last in the May-warm sky.
And the old mate marvelled at the ancient gods
Whose many ships plied the waves nearby.
Then when his heart was blessed and full,
The late stars' lights filled his grateful eyes
And mate's gray head gave a final nod.

And the bar maid found him there in his chair
With his whalebone pipe burned dottle down.
His sea-gray eyes, held that secret light
And a smile creased his face of weather'd brown.
So they buried him out in the salt-sea air
In a ship-shape coffin on the hill above town
Where he watches his schooner sail the oceans of night.

Your fellow poet, Joe Green said: “This is a marvelous poem, not afraid of the old forms. I’d kill an ox just for “dottle down” and the damn thing is so playful and so well done throughout… but what I enjoy most of all is the storybook vision and the gentle distance…”

He then raved on. I love it because so many necessary and joyful words that are not used anymore just as they should be are used so forthrightly: “May-warm” with “Pleiades” and “blessed and full” and so on. Not usually used because they seem so dangerous and unfashionable. A beautiful and necessary poem and I would love to see a book – wonderful paintings beside the verses…but I’m dreaming.

When did you write this poem? And well…does it do what you wanted it to do?

SS
Kind of Joe to say so, his encouragement has meant a great deal to me over the years as I do not see myself as a particularly
well versed in 'poetics'. I think I have a lyrical spirit, the Celt in me, and that spirit sees in the greens and blues of this earth, its
completing and comforting colors.

The poem is an 'adult' fairytale, meant to gentle one in moments of loss and passage. Written in the '80s sometime when Joe and I were first hanging out on the Plato system, he at CDC and I helping undereducated GI's at Ft. Ord pass their BSEP and GED tests. Needless to say it was a grim time financially, since, like Eliot at the bank, I was making a clerks wage (pretty good for philosophy majors)and being forced to
pay my own social security taxes as well as a 'contractor'. I worked for idiots and was surrounded by them. The interchanges across the ether with Joe were stimulating, soul-saving and funny as hell. We've remained good friends since.

Over the years, I've reworked it a bit, but the basic tale is there and the elements have remained constant. I still have hopes of finding an illustrator for it some day. Lastly, you ask does it do what I wanted it to. Exactly, thanks.


Orson:
This sort of painterly vision really means a lot to me as I read your poetry but I am also often struck by your sense of place – living as you do in one of the most beautiful places on earth and surrounded by majestic forms. Just where Jeffers lived.

Let me read another of your poems.



Apres le Deluge, Moi

I skitter and slide over downed limbs, needles, leaves, cones.
Power's out now and its as cold inside as out
heading sunward toward the sea in the late afternoon.
Wind down, surf up, roaring like beast out over the rocks,
swallowed in seafoam, creme over dark scones.
Bright like Lucy's eyes asparkle.

How I love this! How I always have.
And when I was young I'd take the Bhagavad Gita
out to the lonely lifeguard tower on the winter beach waiting
for that moment when the cosmic sea
would scatter its swirling treasures under rickety, wooden legs
holding me aloft.

Thirty six years gone now. Countless storms blowing
out of the western sky over Long Beach, Berkeley, Eugene,
Carmel. Storms seen out of windows in hotels far East
of these waters where the heavens crackle and
boom over vast seas of corn and wheat, Pennsylvania,
New Jersey, Illinois, Colorado.

Then long dry spells when the golden dust glitters aimlessly
in sun shafted afternoons, where, across the artificially green
lawns, children are playing unaware of being watched.
And lovers kisses hover just behind the tulip bed
blanketed on the grass beneath the canopy of blue and
green, forever young—but not forever blissful.

Now I pick my way carefully past a huge cypress limb lying
shattered in the street. Above, its body arcing in the late storm-light
whispering in pain. Wires dance and crackle on the wet stones
and the sound of chain saws revving up as the crews begin to clear.
And the sea roars on savagely, drowning out all but
the longing rhythm ringing in my ears marking the passage
from there to here. From that one, to this. Moi.


I love it all and especially the return in those last lines. The cypress, the sea, the rock and so on. Could you tell about just what living where you do has to do with your poetry? And, I think of old Jeffers. Could you contrast your vision with his?

SS
I am drawn to the sea, to its sounds, moods, smells, the look it has under clouds or sun, the bottom bright with sand turning it turquoise, or dark with kelp or coral; mystery below. I think, perhaps, that my Uncle Lyle, who was a surrogate father to me, is responsible for that. When I was about 10, I spent a summer working with him under the Henry Ford Bridge on Terminal Island near Long Beach. It was the most magical time for a young boy whose only desire was to feel loved by the divine masculine. Lyle was drunk every day by noon, but on we went, rowing through the back channels of the harbor to strange bars where blowsy barmaids poured beer and fixed burgers. I swam in the filthy waters off the copra terminal, climbed in the bediesled bilge after bolts, chased crabs over the rip rap rocks and generally felt completely fucking free.

So the sea, you see. And then here, by accident, chasing a woman landed me in Carmel where the quality of landscape and light have attracted so many with an artistic heart. The poem above was written after a walk to the beach on a stormy afternoon. The honeyed light streaming horizontally beneath the darkening skies, coating the cypresses with color the way a renaissance painter would build up color and texture with oils.

So I stayed and now its home as it was to RJ, but I couldn't be more different from Jeffers. I'm as soft as he was flinty, as lazy as he was industrious, and as needy as he was indifferent to others in all ways. At the same time, I detest much of what I see as greedy excess ruining the beauty of this place. That spirit informs the little poem "Come, Baby Fish" that Calicoe seemed to like so well.

Orson:

And now to the matter of Spain…or, more exactly, Andalusia. You play flamenco guitar and speak fluent Spanish. There is this fine poem on the great poet Fredrico Garcia Lorca.


Viznar

The gypsy wind from the canyon plays
A dry, green melody in the leaves.
Bleeding earth, clairvoyant light,
Surround the gnarled olive trees.
Lilies from the graves' mouths grow.
Death watches from the shaded grove.

When spring brought larks to the vega,
The carnation stood guard in the garden.
As you, Federico Garcia, watched wanly
From your window dreaming of
Prince Boabdilla and soaring vermillion towers.

The fountains of your youthful eyes
Solitary, dark and secret-filled
Watched while the breeze from the melting snows
Cooled the air and spun the mills,
Swept Africa away at noon,
Saw oranges ripen beneath the moon.

Filled with deep song of widows
Came voices on the wind;
Voices of murdered children, voices from ancient tombs.
Wasp-waisted death, on his pony,
Sang a song of the spur and the flesh.

In a passionate, heated, unforgettable voice
From the east you summoned the race's ghost,
Brought the pharaohs' ghosts to DeFalla's garden,
Hurled epithets at the artless hosts.
Your brilliance burned, drew others near
And illicit love drew the blinds in fear.

Fearful, enchanted and yearning,
On the world's blue shoulders you spun.
The cities opened their cellars
And you drank yet could not forget.
In the Saracen heart of the Casbah
The future lay mortally wounded.

When Spain, like a rotting carcass
Split and spilled her entrails beneath the sun,
In the face of the murderous Morrocan wind
To Granada you went, and refused to run.
In the night you awaited the knock on the door--
The annunciation of blood-mad war.

In the back of a truck they took you
Under the late stars of dawn
Past the vermillion towers
With their windows like eyes of dead swans.
Ayy, Federico Garcia! One of the cargo of souls!
From the dry green arms of the olive
Death watched as your heart filled with holes.


Wonderful! Viznar … some listeners might not know. Believe it or not there are some who would read it and not try to discover what DeFalla’s garden was. Could you speak a little of this poem..what it describes…what in fact all of this means to you?


SS
Yes, Viznar was the place where Lorca was executed by the fascists and buried in an unmarked grave. Of course it is a little history of him as I imagined him. Ian Gibson wrote a wonderful book on Lorca's life and death and stimulated the images/feelings that led to the poem. I came to Flamenco at 15 and at 18, knowing less than I thought I did, I bought a one way ticket to Spain on the HMS Himalaya. I lived in Sevilla for several months, drinking and soaking up the ambiente. In the end, I failed to achieve the great dream, but remained in love with the culture and music of Andalucia.

Some interesting things going on here that I'll point out as you requested. The red earth and unearthly light of Andalucia are legend. Just outside Granada, near Viznar, there are olive groves hundreds of years old. The first images are of them and a play on Lorca's famous "Arbole, Arbole seco y verde". Boabdilla was the last Moor to occupy the Alhambra. The Torre Bermeja, the vermillion tower is a feature of that incredible palace/fort. DeFalla's garden was the scene of the famous Concurso de Cante Jondo in 1922 where the great proponents of flamenco's 'deep song' came to compete and preserve their art of black sounds stemming from the 'pharoah's heart'. I would point our readers to the film Latcho Drom for a fascinating look at Gypsy history and music.

The fascists hated Lorca for being liberal and being openly gay. Franco's power base was consolodated in Morocco before the Civil War began, hence that reference. Lorca knew they were coming for him but, inexplicably, chose to remain in Granada and was betrayed unto death. These are the elements at work in the poem which has a kind of flamenco rhythm
in its verses and is structured the way 'coplas' or flamenco lyrics are.

I love poetry in Spanish, from Lorca and Machado, to Dario and Neruda. Octavio Paz in another favorite. But Lorca remains one of my guiding spirits. Who can resist this?

Jaca negra, luna grande
y aceitunas en mi alforja.
Aun que sepa los caminos
you nunca llegare en Cordoba.

Black pony, full moon
and olives in my saddle bag.
Even though I know the roads
I'll never make it to Cordoba.

Me either.

Orson:
Lorca forever. And Thomas Stearns Eliot too I am told. Joe Green has told me that when you first met he was astounded that you could recite almost all of Eliot, and then, ah, then entertained him with many of the Bard’s great speeches. Eliot! “Garlic and sapphires in the mud/Clot the bedded axle tree!” You loved the words, the wonderful sounds… And you are, he tells me, someone that might resent “Hurry up please. It’s time!” Someone too much in love with words to be hurried from the Mermaid tavern.

What does Old Possum’s poetry mean to you?


SS
Other than Lorca, no one has influenced me so much if in such a different way. I still have my original copy of the Four Quartets from 1971. The note I wrote myself, sitting in a cafe in Berkeley alone on my birthday that year, is a testament to the enduring power of those works to affect me. Like Beethoven's late string quartets, which were his farewell to the world, the poems are said to be Eliot's farewell to poetry. But they were a beginning for me, a calling out of that daemonthat drives me in search of that place to which we shall return and know as if for the first time. Line after line, TSE summons the divine from behind the old stone wall, from the draughty, abandoned church, from the deck of the ocean liner, the river's bank or the sea's edge where one here's the clanging of eternity. Still gives me chills. Many think he was cold, Bly said he was "nobody's brother". Perhaps, but he speaks to me of the sacred as no other poet ever has.

Orson:
Which brings me to the topic of one of the greatest literary friendships of the last 100 years: your friendship with Joe Green. You do know that I intended to make a movie that John Huston made: “The Man Who Would be King.” Sean Connery and Michael Caine. He wanted to make it with Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart but they died before he could begin.

Samson, if I directed this movie and the two of you were to be my leading men… who would be Gable and who Bogart and why?



SS
Joe would be Bogart, he as a certain noir quality that is undeniable. I would be Gable, my father looked just like him with smaller ears.


Orson: I was told to ask this. Of the current crop of Internet poets whom do you admire and why?


SS
Sadly, Orson, I know so few and read very little. Here at the JD I've been impressed with Calicoe, though I rarely understand her. 21K has a wonder antic wit and imagination, Whitetree depth and skillful means, Blue Tattoo whacks one where it hurts, but a little of that goes a long way, Schaeffer's things are intriguing, Jenni has a future and a great eye, Joe well Joe is one of a kind, truly il miglior fabbro. But honestly, I have no business critiquing anything, I really don't know my ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to literary criticism. I know what I like, and that is so limited as to not be at all fair to many fine writers out there.

Thanks to a Calicoe posting, I now have Jack Gilbert's The Great Fires to hand. Marvelous! Wonderful!


Orson:
I have, of course, been reading in the Jeunesse Doree and I noticed that Bob Mitchum’s poems, his lost poems, were posted here. Let me read just two of these:


At Schwabs with Archerd

1:30 pm and I'm already hungry, even if
last night I had my cake and ate it too.
That’s why were here, on these too red
leatherette stools with their polished chrome
stands twisting reflections of silk seamed legs.
What burns me is this, everyone looks and looks
but nobody sees. Here and there eyes
are turning, orbiting in lovely sockets hooked
into empty minds yearning yearning yearning.
I know this empty desire, passion without heat,
cold desolate suns over distant palms, the
sands empty and fly ridden all the long afternoon.
And under the moon all trace of truth is veiled,
moist and febrile, they walk the star-strewn streets.
The young, the beautiful, the fair.
I could have them all, but who cares?

Out of the Past

These hills, that ocean out there, the sun
heating these roadstered streets at
noon where the young and the beautiful
pass me with their eyes empty of light
but filled with the darkness of longing.
Too often I've lost myself in them,
swallowed the dark draught and followed
them west, under the setting moon
to the edge of the world and oblivion
until the sun again ripples the air
above these roadstered streets
and dressed in someone else’s clothes
I rise to become whoever I may be today.




..and I am very impressed. The first poem anticipates the technique of Frank O’Hara in, for example “The Day Lady Died.” I suspect Rinty’s influence here. Notice the first few lines of “At Schwabs with Archerd”

1:30 pm and I'm already hungry, even if
last night I had my cake and ate it too.
That’s why were here, on these too red
leatherette stools with their polished chrome
stands twisting reflections of silk seamed legs.
What burns me is this,

rush you into the poem. We know exactly when, then the placing exactly there and then that voice, unmistakably the true voice of American poetry “What burns me is this.”

This is better than O’Hara – no prettiness, direct speech with no self-consciousness.
Exactly what we would expect from Mitchum. And the fine humor of distance…


But you wrote these – in a few minutes I am told – then you never bothered to keep them!


A few questions here. Why, for God’s sake are you so careless of your literary remains? How do you like these? And…I sense what matters to you is the joy in the moment. As I read the JD I find so many of these wonderful moments just tossed off so… am I right? How do you “place” your so many witty poems? So much ephemera..or…you tell me!



SS
The muse comes, she speaks, she leaves. I ain't got nuttin' to do with any of these little sprettzatura moments Joe mentioned in his interview. I am a sucker for the riff, and have always been. Something gets triggered, I start writing not knowing where its going, what scheme I'm using, what voice, tone or anything else. Something happens and there it is. Like I wrote in Clearing the Pond, something new is allowed the light. But I honestly don't have a lot of ownership in these little ditties. I'm more attached to other things that aren't nearly as good. Hahahahha.

Orson:
I want to read a poem that is just a sheer joy:


Going to Goodland

Frank Gum, from Ashfork Az
caught us sitting on the curb
outside an early morning bar
in Gallup NM in 1963 eating sardines
and saltines for breakfast after
driving all day and night from
Prescott.

Take me with you boys
he said, reeking of booze
with a lecherous grin in
his canyoned face.

Buy us some beer and we
will, said we. We gave
him a buck. He went
back in the bar and we
hauled-ass past the crumpled
bodies littering the gutters
and sidewalks.

Broken bottles, whores, run
down motels and at last the desert
with its long redoil roads and
thunderbird skys trailing lightening
and rain so hard we couldn't drive.

Wickenbug, Albuquerque,Tucumcari—

We sang

Tumcumcari more than one
so give us a couple of beers!

We left the route and headed more
north.

Dalhart, Cortez, Lamar, Eads, Cheyenne Wells

later we got to Kansas.

We knew it when we saw the corn.


What I love about this is the marvelous story, the lack of pretense and the humor. And a fine technique. You have a lot of these poems. What are some of your favorites and just by the by who are your favorite AMERICAN poets?


SS
Thanks Orson, its largely a true story based on a 'coming of age' trip that two buddies and I took while in high school, kind of a Nighthawks at the Diner meets On The Road. I have been influenced in these by the Beats (Ginsberg, Snyder, Whalen) of course so they are among my favorite American poets. Robert Penn Warren of course, like Jeffers with a heart. WC William's eye intrigues me, May Sarton, Amy Clampett (whose long poem My Cousin Muriel is a masterpiece) Plath & Sexton. And I'm probably forgetting many because the poetry shelf is downstairs and I'm too lazy to go remind myself.



Orson:
Oh, what a wonderful sky there is tonight! Here are two of your poems that I would like to consciously contrast. Then first poem is about your father’s death. The second…well, let’s see.


My Father's Photograph

One sun before my brother's birth,
some March ago, my father
was killed on a training flight.
Blown abruptly from the morning sky
the wreckage fell on desert hills.
Then the dark cars arrive. I'm left alone.

I sit here at my desk with his photograph
now three years older than he when he died
listening to spring's quarrelings in the air
and conjure our reunion at some airfield bar
where, I see in his eyes
a father's love and his own despair.

Not a single word is needed for
between us runs what's bred in the bone
these thirty-six years--still fertile with meaning
and stronger than death, yet somehow unattainable
as though sunk in a place that
is out of my depth.
Then the disembodied voices call his flight.

I am alone now, yet outside the bombers of his
wing roll slowly by. In the monster's great glass
eye, the engines loud, he is busy with a chart and
checks the heartbeat of the beast.
And my own heart thunders when
I stand watching as it rises, banks, and
its body is devoured by a cloud.

And now the light around me fails
as night comes on. My father, in full uniform,
stares out from an aging frame reminding
me that there are things
that time will never heal.
If he looks closely now he'll see his son
goddamn the loss he feels.


After Rumi

Out beyond the field of knowing and unknowing
There is a place.
Come, I'll meet you there.
And into the rustle of the dying grasses
We'll shout our sins.
Not that they may be forgiven, for
Forgiveness is a concept bound by time.
But that they be respected for their teaching
That, in truth, there is neither yours nor mine.
Out beyond the field of living and dying
There is a place.
Come, I'll meet you there.
And in that empty and enormous solitude
We'll learn to love what is.


Both poems exist together… something learned in one learned or unlearned in the other.

This is hard…I’d like you to tell us just what feelings and thoughts contrasting these two poems seems to bring out for you.



SS
Yeah, the first one was written in the early 80's when I realized on March 23, the day my father was killed, that I was now older than he when he died. Sobering moment. I've never been happy with the poem, I just can't get to go where it needs to to satisfy me. I've worked it over for years and it remains a failure for me.

After Rumi was written to work through forgiving my ex-wife for the painful growth our relationship caused me. I wanted to say to her that, before we divorced, I knew there was something there to be processed and released. It was like a death, but the kind of ego death that precedes a rebirth to something better, fuller and wiser. I know I need to learn to 'love what is'. Its my grail, but shit.....again and again I fail.



Orson:
Silver threads among the gold. Sigh, So what do you want to do with the time you have left? And, damn it, I know it’s NOT time.


SS
Make peace with myself. And learn how to make the perfect Margarita.

Orson
In my interview with Joe Green I was struck by his insistence on wanting his poetry to somehow bring back or sanctify the past, what was lost, those gone or who knows (he told us he wants what he can’t do) Do you want to do something like this? I read your fine Christmas story… Look we have both lived long and well though I be dead and you have more time as a mortal but this urge to rescue something from time seemed so strong in your story… Who, from back then, or what stories and so on from back then…back then being anywhen meant the most to you?





SS

Its a whole cloth deal, I think. The players are like the weft and warp of this thing I wrap around me and call life. I couldn't single out a strand and say this or that is most important. At the center, however, are always Mom and Steve, Aunt Dot and Peg and Forrey, just as in the story. There are, as Joe said, all the other things that one doesn't go into, the craziness, stupidity, banality etc. But despite this, there is a joy in recalling something with more mature eyes that can appreciate the rich and varied textures of what went before. Perhaps its just that, at 57, time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future....one needs to make sense of this to go more gently you know where.


Orson:
You have a vison for the Jeunesse Doree. What is it? Or am I being too serious?


SS
These interviews are a perfect example of what I've always wanted here. As Joe and I set out to make this place different, we failed to make that vision clear to earlier contributors who rightfully were offended when the hammer fell. I regret not having made it clear that the JD was not for workshopping poems, but as a kind of
museoreum where real creativity was rewarded by that which it stimulated, not by accolades or brickbats bestowed by the blind. I would not, however, change the fact that some needed to go elsewhere to do their thing. I think its a tough call, ultimately unjustifiable, but there it is. Capriole's Lyre's Club has a feel for this, no crits, just creativity.

Alas, since this was originally posted, more ugliness has arisen. I think I made it clear, however, that we here would like to see such nonsense ended, and to keep this place clear of it. So far, so good.

Perhaps the EZboard tragedy will point out the insignificance of all this: the ephemeral and ultimately transient nature of these dots on the screen and the foolish ego attachments we form with them. How silly to argue over electronic unrealities. Yet we remain vigilent that the usual is kept at bay. In fact, our publishers, Owl Oak Press, have adapted the motto of the Forbidden Story. A Bas l'Ennui!


Orson: Ah, the Chimes at Midnight. Is there anything else you would like to tell us?


SS
Thank you for the opportunity. Its been a joy. Here's something from Alexandria by Lawrence Durrell to close with:

And so we, learning to suffer and not condem,
can only wish you this great, pure wind,
which, turning inland like a helm
smokes the fires of man, spins weathercocks on farms
and catches the lover's at their quarrel in the sheets.
Or like a walker in the darkness might,
knocks and disturbs the artist at his papers