Orson Welles/Joe Green
ANNOUNCER
Ladies and gentlemen, the director of the Mercury Theatre 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!
This is ORSON WELLES.
Our interview tonight is with Joe Green, poet and Shakespearean
scholar. On this particular evening the Crosley service estimates that
thirty-seven billion creatures, mortal and immortal, are listening to
us on their Zenith Trans-Cosmic radios. Ratings are up, I see.
Before we begin the interview
Here’s a word from our sponsor: the Jeunesse Doree!
THE LONLIEST RANGER: Hello, this is the Lonliest Ranger and welcometo the fourth in the series of blithe interviews conducted by Orson Welles– discarnate spirit, creator of Citizen Kane, the best movie even made, reader for "The March of Time" news series, and the famed first voice
of "The Shadow" in the celebrated crime series, and of course, Harry
Lyme, The Third Man.
ORSON WELLES: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The
Shadow knows!” But, as always, no one else cares. Alas.
The LONLIEST RANGER: Thank you Mr. Welles. Tonight we have a show I think you will enjoy. Poet and great actor/artist sit before the fire in the reconstructed redwood cabin nestled deep in the Carmel Valley
hills under the famous Owl Oak, orgiastic abode of the muse. Outside
an ill wind is blowing nobody good, but herein, where warmth an
camaraderie hold sway along with John Powers and Johnny Walker, we are
blessed with anticipatory frissions and make no bones about it. So
make yourself comfortable with your favorite psychic aid and be
prepared to be amazed.
While we are waiting. Let me ask you this. Is the same old horse
shit getting you down? Are the nattering nabobs of the internet eroding
your finely tuned senses and turning your ear to tin? Are you ready to
rediscover the joy and pathos of the ethereal riff, to pluck the bon
mot from the hands of the goddess herself? If so, you owe it to
yourself to join us here, at this hallowed sad but merry museoreum, the
Juenesse Doree of the Forbidden Story.
I, the Lonliest Ranger, Black Irish Catholic Jew, resplendent in my
buckskins and silver, stand like Lady Liberty herself, my six shooter
held high and say to you as she would, "Welcome!" Here, we eats cold
eels and think distant thoughts. Perhaps you could too. Complimentary
champagne for our new members!
And now… Mr. Orson Welles!
ORSON: Thank, you Lonliest. Mr. Green, or should I refer to you by
another of your many monikers? Joe?
JG: Joe. Just Joe.
ORSON: Kevin Killian wrote: "Joe Green’s poetry has a savage wit anda plaintive, enchanting innocence, like some of Joe Brainard’s drawings."
Who is Joe Brainard?
JG: See here www.joebrainard.org/
Some nut.
ORSON: You've had an interesting life haven't you? I wonder if you could tell us a bit about those experiences that
most shaped your weltanschauung? Who were your formative influences and
why?
JG: I went to Catholic schools in a doomed mill town that was haunted and at the same time I had access through books and, heartbreakingly, mostly through insights arrived at too late into supernal beauty. At six, my first day at St. Cecilia's I asked "Who signed me up for this?" We were mostly doomed and had no idea what to do about it but there were moments of grace and immortal spirits in the "wanting them to be immortal spirits sense" who now exist in my memory. I want them to be remembered in my poesy but mostly can't even get close to what I would like to do. Only a few somehow exist as more than markers for a certain sense of rage and bafflement that my poesy now and then is lucky enough to express. I got out of there -- the US Army took me away. Man.
I was reading Spinoza at ten. Absolutely true. Of course, I didn't understand a damn thing but the point was something else. Somehow -- please tell me if I am wrong here Orson -- I got the idea there was a class system here in the good old USA and that the place was run mostly by madmen who contrived to also be very boring. Also I got the idea that they owned me. But I had nary an inkling that I could in fact ever know just how they got me or what I could do about it. The bigotry of low expectations. I also somehow developed a complete indifference to and a lack of interest in getting along -- although I got along in the sense that I am still here. Most anyone I knew from there who had anything like an inkling to escape were ruined in all the usual ways. Escaped to the Army and death, drugs...blah blah. I knew a man -- a boy ok -- for example who was a good artist. But -- just incidentally believed he just might be John Lennon who went to NYC to become a junkie and then while finding refuge on various street corners stayed awake nights as much as he could drawing miniature street scenes on cardboard (scenes oh you have never seen) and somehow recovered enough to bring it all back home. Where arrested and taken to the local prison promised he would escape -- beaten still made that promise, beaten more (and I have this account from others there -- others whom I met ten years ago and almost passed in the street since who knew that the bums with no teeth were my old friends) just laughed. "You assholes, " he said. "Can't you tell I'm kidding?"
That's poetry by the way.
They all laughed about it and then went into a long riff about how there aren't any cops around like the old cops and how much they missed them. So, Kevin got out and somehow stopped shooting heroin (is that phrase antiquated?) and kept drawing and who knows if he finally stopped but died. Not before someone noticed those drawings and in time for a "show" at a shippier town and another friend a few years ago called up and told me "We lost Kevin" and this struck me as such an odd want to be genteel and lost way to put it and this phrase came back to me as I in a half hour and just about this time last year wrote a poem on my father's dying.
Last Night
Last night I was watching 'Panic in Needle Park"
1971 with Al Pacino playing a junkie
And what’s her name Kitty Winn playing his girlfriend
A sweet girl but then, inevitably, a junkie and then a whore.
He betrays her and then she turns him in when she gets in trouble.
Nothing personal really and when he gets out of jail
And sees her... a perfect ending. He says "You comin?"
Junkies in New York. I knew this one and that one.
All dead now and I remember John calling me
"I have bad news we lost Kevin." "Lost?"
This one and that one and I would remember if I could.
But instead I feel desperate for 1971 to see what's left
What will be left which is a certain slur of colors
There out on the streets and this is what will be left:
The movie. Need a dime to make a call. Yes.
The VW the narcs drive now looking so strange.
But at the end a slur of color. And I am grateful even for this.
Today my father is dying. Went in won't come out.
"Failure to thrive" Which means he won't eat. Doesn't want to eat.
Just two weeks ago not all there then he still
Asked me if I could go home and get his razor.
The good one. And pointed at the tree outside his window.
And said something. But now my brother says even
That whatever is gone him gone except for the part
That worries about how he's going to pay for all this.
Which I am grateful for. I remember the old lady
in the Williams' poem on her last ride seeing trees
A blur asking "What are those?" "Trees"
"I'm tired of them too." So much is left behind.
Which is the easy thing to say but not right.
Or at least you know that this one and that one
Is gone and there was a certain look.
Tired then I remember of the bullshit of, for example, war
And then tired of the bullshit about the bullshit of war
And then not even tired or now so what but
I would remember if I could. I'd remember my father if I could.
2AM stomach pains. He called my brother to take him.
Chinese doctor in the emergency room and my father asks
"Are you Jewish?" The doctor laughs. And my father says.
"Why are you laughing? It's not funny. I need a professional here."
That particular poem is invulnerable. (and later on we can discuss how annoying claims like this made by me are) and the wanting that is there and the bitterness and the joking is, for example, illustrated in the prison anecdote before it.
But my way out(although I never got out) was books. Contrast me, Orson, with Samson who at the age of 17 heard a neighbor playing a flamenco record said yes and was on his way to Spain in an instant to learn to do just that. What a moron I was. I remember riding on a train to Philly seeing some cadets from Valley Forge Military Academy (exactly where Holden Caulfield escaped from) and longing to, at least, even be there. But -- books and so years of bellycrawling through stacks in libraries and somehow still back in Warrensville that was enough since I was cursed with an imagination that monstered everything there with significance and a sense of the transcendent.
In other words early on I stopped looking at the usual reality and made up my own movie. Is this a bad thing? You would know.
But I had all those books and let's be honest here. By the time I was 17 I had read -- with a bit of the right sort of attention -- most of the deathless poesy in English and there was bliss and I always had that and withal always had an unfortunate but needed distance from this our vale of tears. And then -- being asked to leave a certain Jesuit university -- I was lucky enough to be enrolled in Lincoln University where I was taught English Lit the good old way and loved it. All professors there being odd fellows and exiles. And then -- lets pass years and years -- I was damn lucky to do a doctoral program at the place where Berryman jumped -- professors my friends equally in love with all that is there. The tales I could tell. And in any case -- although practical success doomed – there was a sense of the sacredness and absolute importance of scholarship (as in getting off your lazy ass and discovering something other than yourself and wanting truth) that was deepened which, along with a contempt for the pretense that kills that I got from growing up peculiar in a doomed mill town and a healthy hatred of systems of oppression embodied by the trivial and designed to protect them has brought me to your attention -- perhaps the greatest artistic failure of the 20th century though you be imaginary and tra la la to that. As you understand.
ORSON: Of course. We'll skip over the rest I guess. The railroads, the Asian nights, the semi-furnished rooms, the carnival. What would you say your primary motivators are now at nearly 57 years of age?
JG:I don't know. I have always been desperate and confused and expect to continue being desperate and confused. No doubt and if I am lucky all will be revealed a moment or two before death. I am not a knower of myself or, perhaps, don't want to know. Of course I am desperate to stop time or, if that concession can't be made, to have enough time. Really, it's all in "The Tempest" although I would like my wife along with my daughter on that island along with a few boon companions. My wife and daughter would have no problems with Caliban -- both know much more than I ever will. So, no problem there...and I could fiddle about as I do and everyone would be safe.
But that won't happen.
I'll probably muddle along pretending it has. Anent poetry -- it would be nice to have it occur as it once occurred.
And I would like a cabin in a bee loud glade -- a great advantage there in Innisfree is that one can at times escape from the constant knowledge that one has to go through all these things twice. Samson is also a fellow of a certain age and knows what I mean.
No place for bad art in any case.
ORSON: Now I know you've been recently translated into Russian and
that the prestigious if impecunious poet's at Fulcrum magazine admire
your work. But lets begin with something from your past, The Insect
Clerks of Neiman Marcus. Here is a recording from your original
Parapark Tapes with Samson Shillitoe, whom we hope to have visit us
here one day.
The Insect Clerks of Neiman Marcus
Lo! The Gods and Goddesses of the new mythology.
The Godesses are crocodiles in communion dresses!
They wear Adolf of Dachau designer jeans!
They wear necklaces of bird skeletons!
The Gods wear shrouds of petroleum jelly!
They brilliantine their hair.
They turn their mild, Belsen eyes on you
"May I help you sir?" O do not stare!
At secret luncheons they devour lark's hearts.
They devour the intestines of mummys.
They prefer larks three to one.
Three to one.
They have never murdered a baby
Who didn't deserve it.
Listen O listen!
Hear the twitching of their delicate attennae!
Haie! They come! They come!
Dragging their long
and swelling abdomens!
The insect clerks of Neiman Marcus!
The insect clerks of Neiman Marcus!
The insect clerks of Neiman Marcus!
Beware their dread ovipositors!
Beware their dread ovipositors!
Beware their dread ovipositors!
The insect clerks have come.
There are trapdoors in Cosmetics!
There are trapdoors in Lingerie!
There are trapdoors in Men's Accessories!
There is a secret button in the elevator.
Nightly they descend into vast catacombs.
Buffy! Meagan! Tom! Wesley!
They hang upside down!
They copulate like bats!
They whisper to each others in the languages
Of prehistoric fungi!
And, like Gods everywhere,
They are always hungry.
O Holy Mother!
The store is closing!
They know who you are!
Run! O RUN!
There is a trapdoor in Customer Service.
Down you go
down
down
down
They carry you effortlessly through the tunnels.
They carry you past rooms.
Rooms where small blue clouds weep!
Rooms full of angel guts!
Rooms full of bearded foetuses in bronze caskets.
Rooms where your wife makes love to eels!
(Your wife has a certain eel sex appeal)
Rooms where sores run naked on chandeliers!
Rooms where sewage rats read poetry
In pink peignoirs!
O what is this big room?
It is the Mad Queen's chamber.
It is the throneroom of hearts.
It looks. It looks.
The inside of your brain.
The indifferent mandibles let you drop
To the marble floor.
They quietly suck out your eyes.
And then
Ah! Then!
The Mad Queen comes.
Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!
The dread ovipositer.
You lay paralyzed.
You look out into the "Crevices of Night."
After 80,000 years
your tears
turn to pearls.
Oh, those were pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him but doth suffer…
Just remarkable, Mr. Green. I invited C.G. Jung to join us to discuss
this seminal work, but he was unable, being called away to answer
Freud's claim that he was a mere occultist. Please sir, what is this
'new mythology' of which you speak and how does the poem embody it?
JG: I have no idea, Orson. A vile paraphrase ( and there's no avoiding that) would say this and that but really what happens is that everything happens at once and that phrase allows or creates or whatever the "small, blue clouds" weeping or the "indifferent mandibles" and the rest and there is nothing like it. Really. I know. It has a certain comic sense that is unique, its a hell of a lot of fun to read aloud and I had a hell of a lot of fun doing so while Samson does just what is right with the bongos and we are back in that cabin at Owl Oak having a lot of fun. It's a kind of instance, a flash of merriment with withal sadness and wanting. It is just the sort of poem that unintelligent fellows who have no sense of poetry abhor as they drone on about surrealism or abhor the Beat Poets or natter on about nothing at all and so voila it is all about them. Damn Insect Clerks.
I noticed that when I said "I know" there was flash of merriment on your own immortal features. I suppose this is one of my many irritating qualities. That is, I know what a good poem is. It doesn't matter at all to me whether I write it or someone else just because it seems very odd in the most important way to even talk about an "I." Anyone who has ever written a good poem is completely unable to tell you how the poem was made. How could they -- they have no damn idea. Too bad. So, occasionally, damn you, someone comes along who gets lucky once in a while a writes a good poem (not a great one) and can tell when a poem works and when it doesn't and is, yes, right.
Doesn't happen that often and it is a curse. The poor fellow cursed this way is doomed to exile. Exactly because he also sees how damn dull most "poetry" is. That, for example, there is somehow nothing worthwhile in the Best American Poetry 2004. At the same time this fellow reads here and there and is sent now and then poems that are real poems. And so the maddening fact that the Awful thrives always is, perhaps, in a merry way also a point of this poem.
ORSON: Jung told me that this was one of his favorite poems—that it accomplished what he was attempting to do with his ideas of 'active imagination', that is, the manifesting of archetypal images and their
energies by allowing one's psyche to emerge from behind the super-ego's
judgments. He was particularly fond of your choice of names for the
psychopomps— Buffy, Meghan et. al. Can you say a bit about why those
names were chosen and what you hoped to accomplish there? Is Jung
right that this what you intended?
JG: I wrote this in the eighties but I continually renew my acquaintance with these psychpomps.
ORSON: Let’s turn to a more recent work. Of Bell, Book and Candle,
one reviewer wrote: "He has one poem about Kim Novak and James Stewart in
Bell, Book and Candle that perfectly expressed the Technicolor genius
of Richard Quine, that film’s unsung genius director." Now, as a
cinematic soul myself, I can see this. But, and of course you may
disagree, what does this have to do with your particular genius? How
does the cinematic image affect what you do as an artist? And what of
the little colophon?
Here is the poem:
I always liked Kim Novak
In “Bell Book and Candle”
Curled up on that couch
Which you would describe as
Immensely red but you are wrong
For the colors that show best by candlelight
Are (she tells you) white, carnation and
And a kind of sea water green
And Pyewacket that lucky cat
Curled up next to you green eyes
And a sardonic glance
And you reach for the silver cigarette lighter
Man, you are as shaky as Jimmy Stewart
And it is Christmas! Christmas!
And you know she is a witch and
You want to ask her
Why she well.. has a tree…Let the room
Abound in light especially
Colored and varied
Or something like that. Witch? Christmas?
And she gets up and is on
Tiptoes placing the ornament just so
(“oes and spangs as they are of no great cost”)
On the tree and she knows what you are
Looking at. She knows.
Christmas? But if you ask she’ll say
Something like“The best art is general”
Which, really, you haven’t heard before
And she turns and the doors to the balcony
Open and snow swirls you out and you
Are both on the balcony. Manhattan!
And you know that Gene Kelly is
There somewhere feeling just a bit blue
But will anyway dance his way into
Someone’s heart tonight and snow is
Steepling on the Chrysler Building and
There is giant impossible yellow moon
And she is there and you
Know this poem ain’t going to end the way
You want it to.
JG: Yes, there you are in the dark gazing at a flickering image and somehow your eye must go there and then there, pull back, close up, and so on and before it was done in the movies it was done in poetry but who gets this really? I know you did and -- we can talk about this later -- that you know that Shakespeare invented the movies (oh, along with Marlowe and Cyril Tourneur and the rest). It's all of a piece and I noticed this and wrote about it, half understanding, when I wrote about all those speeches in the Bard's plays that are little narratives within the larger narrative. And somehow this is something I can somehow sometimes do. One of the blisses of this poem about movies (and masques and revels -- the knowing reader will find a way to see this -- allusion again and used in a merry way) is that it works like a movie. Close up to Jimmy's silver cigarette lighter and his shaky hand, the witch hangs an ornament on the tree and she knows she knows what you are looking at, last shot -- snow steepling the Chrysler building and that impossible movie moon all framed just so, music swells and then... Ha!
And ..have you asked about my masterpiece?. I have one even as the most neglected poet as recognized by the great souls of the Russian steppes and wedding cake academies must have one. It's "The Diamond at the End of Time" in all its splendid not anything like it a hell of a lot of fun and worlds there yes glory and it is one hell of a movie. Cuts, fades, swirling images, sailing aways, Fairbanks and Flynn and a damned fine fight scene.
So, yes, it's all about the movies.
ORSON: Cats figure prominently in your work, Joe. From Pyewacket
Tallpockets padding through halls, to the creations of Hitler's Cat,
you've created your own feline fantasies. It's been said that cats are
images of the unity of opposites—loyalty and independence, affection &
aggression, playfulness & dignity, curiosity & indifference, earthy
sensuality and an otherworldliness. Is this search for wholeness or
reunification a theme in your life and work?
JG: Thanks, Orson
Glad you reminded me. I need to pick up some Friskies Hairball Control cat food tonight. I "have" two cats. I've "had"...let me see if I can remember
Puddytat
Joey
Abe
Mean Man
Foo Foo
Iggy
Sarah
Sparkle
Didn't name any of them. Puddy lived to be 20. Joey died young -- about 8. Feline leukemia. Abe too -- died in my arms. Iggy -- killed by a car. Mean Man wandered away. Foo Foo (saved from Texas gypsy palm readers) was doing ok until my ex wife moved to West Texas and he was killed by a rodeo dog. Sarah and Sparkle both still with us.
But you're right about me and cats. As long as the cat come home. And cats have a sense of humor. I think there's a mannerism of solemnity that is pervasive in contemporary poetry that people mistake for gravitas. Somebody said that. Cat's won't put up with that.
Do you find Hitler's cat in a poetry workshop or lecturing at this and that conference by the sea? No -- too much respect for himself and a sense of the absurd that prevents it. You know -- there are a lot of questions contemporary poets should ask themselves and one is "What would Mehitabel do?"
Would Mehitabel reprehend a comic persona as the silly fellows so serious do? No.
And, Jesus, Orson you were a great actor. What do you make of legions of "creative" people who never assume a role, never act, don't know what to do with, for example, the gifts Rin Tin Tin offers just as an example? Or -- this leads to bigger questions. Why the hell is it that almost all contemporary poetry is devoid of humor and manages, at the same time, not to be serious?
Then all the twee poems of the many others that burst into light in the end.
What little joy and what can be done about it? The universe is bursting with giant forms and this is what we get? Or the absurd and unlikely and blissome ridiculous is everywhere offering an escape from the dwimmer of the dreary -- and they can't find it?
A certain sort of "seriousness" is imitated everywhere. Sadly, when a comic poem is attempted the "poem" part is missed. That is, the comic poem lets slip the surly bounds of ordinary comedy also -- there is a move to touch on a higher mirth, an uncommon wit, something free and of itself.
Hell, you know that. You understood Falstaff.
I sense some inkling of the comic and poetic in the lower realm of internet poetry. Some role playing -- with, mostly, nothing of the divine and blushful Hippocrene. The higher one ascends though the spheres of contemporary poetry the less chance there is of any glimmer of comic stardust. A cat won't put up with that.
ORSON: We haven't spoken much of your Doctoral project. Its not often
that an academician wanders the road less taken as you have.
How would you characterize your love of The Bard and your academic
interest in his works, and how does that square with your creative
opus?
JG: Orson, you loved Shakespeare above all and above all characters loved Falstaff so you already know that there is more of beauty and terror and wonder and freedom in Shakespeare than anywhere else. Others abide the question etc. He's the most mortal of poets -- simply because his immortal longings make the strongest claim ever but are forever denied. So, attention must be paid. Well of English must be kept undefiled and all that.
It's probably a secret that only a minority in most English departments actually give a rip about poetry. It's been that way since the beginning. There are so many other ways (all the loathsome schools of criticism) to make one's way. And only a remnant in any case anywhere have a feeling for poetry. So, for example Professor Donald Foster 12 or so years ago alleged that his computer study (word frequency etc) revealed that Shakespeare was the author of a certain Funeral Ode.
It was impossible to believe this if you had a sense for poetry. The fact that under the hideous Stephen Greenblatt the ode was admitted to the Norton is a tragicomic tale. But there it is.
Now, of course, Wallace admits a hideous mistake. But back in the beginning I was there with others of the remnant bashing him on the head. We finally got through. Jesus H Christ. And Greenblatt is the author of a best selling "Life" of the Bard. The point is that if Shakespeare needs protection from the barbarians at the gate we are all in danger. And I've met the best guardians in academia -- sneaking a smoke in their office, hiding from the department chairman, worrying if Milton really saw Shakespeare, spending their lives to establish a better text of "King Lear," dying in mysterious fires or -- when the gods are with them -- establishing their own departments in which they are the only member. Regents Professors at last!
Look -- the Lonliest ranger has recently been what is taken to be a little harsh with someone who bloviated about what Keats' "Negative Capability" meant and corrected him simply by pointing the fellow to the actual text. I don't have to guess. I know. This is dismissed as nitpicking -- and so the dreary round of untruth continues and everything is just what serves. Shit. Damn. That is exactly the system that enslaves the spirit -- not a trivial instance at all but another symptom and in a world of intellectual laziness and lies is just what is expected.
More or less this. I've known people who have given their lives over to a real quest for truth and for some flash of real poetry transmitted through them so... And the real mortal stakes are, sadly, elsewhere and lives are crushed every day by this sort of getting along. Poetry is whatever gets said in spite of systems of tyranny that seek to prevent the saying. Real academicians do what they can to speak through these systems and point to what is there.
Besides, they are my best audience for layers of wild and comic allusion. And somebody has to make them, for a second, kind of happy.
ORSON: When I was working on Citizen Kane, I often found myself
staying up late and reading Yeats to settle me down. As a fellow
Irishman, what do you and Yeats have in common?
JG: The colder eye.
ORSON: What is it about Keats' work that moves you so. After all, heseems so, well....dated and, if I may risk alienating you and fans ofhis, prissy. How does such a clearly masculine fellow as you yourself are
find this kind of maudlin treacle satisfying?
JG: No more manly poet, Orson. Perhaps I'll write about this.
ORSON: As we're nearly out of time here, I want to say how grateful I
am to have had this opportunity to chat blithely with you, Joe. You
are, as promised, as they say in the vernacular..a piece of work. What
are you working on now, and when can we expect more from you?
JG: Of course I want to do more to deserve my reputation as America's most neglected poet. However, with this and that offer coming in it will be difficult. But I have managed to screw most everything else up before and I do feel that I can do it again.
ORSON: Ah, I hear the chimes at midnight! I hope we can speak together again. Anything you want to add..or want to ask me before we indulge in these two bubbling glasses of Muscatel?
JG: I hope you enjoy your time with Samson. Ask him to get out his guitar and play some flamenco. And, I think it would be a fine thing to do more of these. Perhaps with two poets at once chatting about what they chat about, glorying in each others work, having a sad and merry time!
ORSON: Thank you, Mr. Green, may your god go with you.
The Lonliest Ranger: And that concludes another exhilarating
confrontation of Mr. Orson Welles and the finest minds of today's poetry.We here at the Jeunesse Doree are pleased to have had you as our guests and look forward to seeing you again.
And please remember to investigate the brilliant, tragi-comic
adventures of the lost souls of the JD. Goodnight and have a pleasant tomorrow.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
ORSON WELLES INTERVIEWS RIN TIN TIN
ORSON WELLES INTERVIEWS RIN TIN TIN
ANNOUNCER
Ladies and gentlemen, the director of the Mercury Theatre 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!
This is ORSON WELLES.
Our interview tonight is with Rin Tin Tin The Great. renowned actor (said to be the greatest Hamlet of his generation), author of The Dark Bark, Djangoiste and raccoonteur extraordinaire. On this particular evening the Crosley service estimates that thirty-seven point 239 billion creatures, mortal and immortal, are listening to us on their Zenith Trans-Cosmic radios. Zut alors!
ORSON: Mr. Tin Tin, or should I use Rin Tin Tin, or Rinty or...?
RTT: Call me anything. Just don’t call me late for dinner. Ah, Orson…Rinty…just call me Rinty.
ORSON: We share a great many things in common Rinty; we are men of the world, masters of our various crafts, romantics at heart, and, above all else, lovers of the fine beautiful. You once loved Lady Day, Billie Holiday, I once loved Judy Holiday. Despite your TV work, you were essentially a noiriste. The synchronicity of it! Will you tell us how you came to who you were? Lets begin with your dam and sire, shall we?
RTT:I never knew them, Orson. I'm an orphan and I am an American, Chicago born. I guess my real name is Moishe Herzog, Junior. Yeah, I'm a dog but I never even saw a dog until I saw Hettie in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show when it came to town. I was already seven years old! In fact I thought "dog" was my name. My owner was Moishe Herzog and I grew up in the back of his pawnshop. "Here, dog," he would say whenever he wanted to show me something in the Torah or more often to go down into the basement and get him a book or to bring up one of the lariats he would use to practice his rope tricks.. He was a strange guy. And, of course, so was I. All I knew was the pawnshop, the Torah, the Hebrew Spinoza and a variety of rope tricks. Though Moise would kill me for not saying "lariat." He was a great fan of the Wild West.
Here’s how it all started.
Picture this my friend. It's round midnight in Chicago and snowing -- I could see the flakes softly falling through the pawnshop window, no cars then so it's quiet, a hush. I am trying to sleep and not to sleep -- every night I had to go into the basement and bring up an old horse blanket and spread it right beneath the window. "Watch the shop, dog," Moishe would say as he left -- so this is how I thought I was to do it. Every night I tried to stay awake to watch the shop. Of course, I couldn't so when Moishe would come in the next morning and ask "Did you watch the shop last night, dog?" and I gave a little yap indicating, I guess, that I had, I felt incredibly guilty. He never seemed to notice that I was lying but I still felt guilty as hell.
Well, that night I was determined to stay awake and tried everything.
I was determined to memorize the Bible and was at all the "begats" and I thought that would keep me awake. The "begats" is one of the harder parts. The Book of Job? That's easy. But the "begats?" Oy veh! Suddenly there was a clatter and I was scared at hell because what I saw was this. Moishe in the fireplace (yes, we had one -- an old building --used to be the Marley Hotel I understand -- no gas, no coal furnace) -- but all dressed up in a red and white suit and cursing!
"Where the hell, am I?" Moishe asked.
I knew then it wasn't Moishe and, of course, what I should have done was, well, at least bark at him. But I didn't have time because -- get this -- there wasn't, for that instant (if that makes sense) any such thing as Time. I was frozen in that eternal instant and awake and watching what seemed to me to be a Santa Claus who had, perhaps, put too much rum in his eggnog. In other words I was caught in an eternal timeless instant watching God. Yes. Yes! Yes! Oh, it still affects me so.
Santa seemed confused. He didn't pay any attention to me at all. Just put down a sack he was carrying and looked around with a pissed off look on his face.
Suddenly, the door opened. It was locked and the door opened! and an elf came in.
Santa turned on the elf. "Did you screw up again? Isn't this supposed to be 19 Remington Avenue, Coatesville, Pa, 1958? Well, it looks a lot like a Pawnshop in 1917 to me!"
The elf just looked embarrassed.
"Pull the sled up out front. I'm not going up a chimney if I don't have to."
This is getting a little long.
Well Orson, Santa left. Time was again. I was changed forever. That little encounter with the Eternal changed me forever. I knew who I was and what I wanted to do. Santa left the sack behind and I took out what was in it: a banjo, a unicycle, A Charlie McCarthy doll and the Big/Little Book of English Poetry. Some kid in 1958 wasn't going to have a very nice Christmas. I got a rope from the basement, packed everything in the sack but the unicycle, tied the sack to my back got on the unicycle and hit the road. The rest is show biz history. Somehow I knew where I had to go. I got as far as the old Schubert theatre and cycled right in where some guys were practicing their act. Dec 25, 1917 7AM. Those guys were the Marx brothers. They were a bit surprised.
"I shot an elephant in my pajamas," I said (those were my first English words!)
"How he got in my pajamas I'll never know," Groucho replied. And we both laughed and eyed each other warily. Yes, always that...
My first act: I rode a unicycle and played the banjo while reciting scenes from Shakespeare in Yiddish. This is what I feel formed my sensibility. In other words – I performed America. I was a lousy ventriloquist.
ORSON: Of all your artistic endeavors; films, poetry, music, set and wardrobe design, and on the list goes, which gets most under your fur and why?
RTT: Yes, I did it all. And this will seem strange to you, Orson --after all I am being interviewed because of my work as a poet!-- but what I loved above everything else was Flamenco dancing. As I told you, I didn't know my parents but I love myself for the gypsy soul in me. This is funny. You want to know how I learned flamenco? This is the truth. I learned it with the help of Maria Ouspenskaya when we were making one of those Werewolf movies. I played the wolf -- see him briefly in the moonlight -- that lurks about wanting the soul of the werewolf. Or something! I forget.
Christ, it might even have been "Abbot and Costello meet the Wolfman." But one night Maria took me out to a bar in L.A. I had never been to before. ( I didn't think there were any): the "Ola Harpo!" and there I drank Sangria and saw flamenco dancing for the first time.
I'm sorry. I'm not very good as an audience and suddenly I was across from a very attractive young gypsy lad with a rose in my teeth. It just came naturally. Oh, how they smiled and applauded as I danced and I was overcome then by the duende. A flash of the tragic divine and I wanted it always and could get it yes I could of nights when the wolfbane bloomed and the moon was large and full and I was dancing with my gypsy friends!
I tried to teach it, off an on, to my Hollywood friends. None of them were any good. But we had a lot of laughs. Bogie almost got it. We would be on his boat with Bacall she laughing as Bogie tried to give himself over to those lunar rhythms and then gave up and he would grab me and bring me close and we would end up doing a tango there on his boat on the sea. A questioning but, perhaps, knowing look on Bacall's face as she watched us and sensed my discomfort. No, I am not implying anything of the usual here. It was the failure to attain the duende she sensed and my kindness when I covered it up with what was, of course, a COMIC tango. Poor Bogie. Bacall has a new movie I understand.
ORSON: Fascinating, and if we had time, there is much there to be pursued. Yet let us turn, if we may, to your early poems. Here is one I am fond of:
What a Little Moonlight Can Do
Three days after Bastille day
Behind the shut up café
In a broke down car
(Hard to gas yourself
If the car won’t start)
In Cross Plains, Texas
Thinking I saw nothing
More than myself
Reflected in my Les Paul
Black Beauty that night
I step out of my 1971
Ford Maverick the
Door operated courtesy
Light snicking on and
Look up at the sky
At all the tired animals
Stars bluewhitelonely
Thinking of that night
At the Three Deuces so
Long Ago and playing at
The Famous Door
The night Billy died
Errol Garner, Me, Oscar
Pettiford, Errol saying
You better than Django
But nobody will ever say it.
Not knowing Billy was dead
I was happy. Looking up
I say at the skyey animals
The old dog in the moon
Ending like this
Saying to the drunks
In the cowboy bar
This riff is based on Les Negres
By Jean Genet laughing
At myself really and now
Wanting it to end but
The car won’t start. Looking
Up I remember I told Billy
Radiance is the dealbreaker
And heard, radio definably off
Her singing “What a Little
Moonlight Can Do” and
That was the last time
I was truly happy and
I was there knowing
I would never try
To find the music again
Tired.
Pancake
Levelland
Mule Shoe
Sonora
Meadow
What vistas of hidden forgetfulness
Exhaustively at hand!
This is absolutely splendid, Rinty! The poem crosses so many lines, is inclusive in the way it brings the pathos of the great artist into sharp focus with its carefully chosen images. Bastille Day, of course! One feels the poem begins with the afterparty let down when freedom fails to live up to its promise. And then the emptiness: images of lonely, skywalking animals, brokedown cars behind honkytonk bars. The lacquered cruelty of the Les Paul reflecting it all back at you. And your love dead, unbeknownst to you. And the choppy, riff driven rhythm. Please tell us more!
RTT: Well, it's not exactly an early poem. There were all those poems I wrote with Don Marquis and those horrible "philosophical" poems I wrote after I read Heidegger but this lovely poem ( and it does everything you say it does and more!) was written around 1985.
The events took place in 1971.
Look, the Bastille day reference is there for several reason. It was the day Lady died and is described just that way in a poem of Frank O'Hara's.
A damn fine poem. Now we go all darkling. Orson, you know I killed O'Hara. Ran him down accidentally while I was drunk and driving a dune buggy on the beach on Fire Island. I recognized him and shouted "O! Frank O'Hara! Look out!" Which,since it follows his style and were the last words he heard, should have been his epitaph.
Why was I drunk and driving a dune buggy at night on Fire Island?
I warn you, Orson we will get into the strange and the very strange as we continue...but let's leave it alone for now.
The events in this poem really happened. This was one of the low points of a long life. I was playing country guitar -- not as Rin Tin Tin but as Merle Shepherd. I wore jeans, cowboy hat, a shirt with little sheep on it, and dark glasses and very uncomfortable Tony Lama Ostrich hide boots and had an act doing Hank Williams covers. I felt I needed to be lost -- I WAS lost. Sometimes I would get paid. Sometimes not. I even robbed a Dry Goods store in Fairy, Texas once when I was hungry and needed gas. Sometimes I couldn't help it and would play solid gone jazz and sneer at my audience and do an old Lenny Bruce schtick. I slept in my car and there was oblivion and I drank. I'll tell you why later. I get the idea you will know what to ask. But, yeah, I had the hose hooked up through the window and I was going to poison myself and then the damn car wouldn't start and the radio was off and I anyway heard Billy again there behind the cafe singing that song. And I remembered her for that instant and she was dead but -- and the stars bluewhiteand lonely, the tied animals...we are all so tired when these is death and I realized I shoudn't give myself to death but just go on...
"I was there knowing
I would never try
To find the music again
Tired.
Pancake
Levelland
Mule Shoe
Sonora
Meadow
What vistas of hidden forgetfulness
Exhaustively at hand!"
RTT: To sleep, perchance to dream, but in that dream...
So it went. But I did try to find that music again. As this poems shows...as this poem shows.
ORSON: How did you and Billie meet? Where you ever addicted to heroin?
RTT: No, I never had anything to do with the big H. Even when playing Jazz guitar. It killed so many of my friends. And my greatest love. I had a problem with the booze but not until after a certain day in November 1963.
Billy and I met in the late forties at a little Jazz club in Harlem. You should know, Orson. You went there thinking you were still loved after your production of the Blank Macbeth. I was playing. She came out and sang from --I don't know -- backstage or Eternity. We fell instantly in love as she and I became one song as she sang "Strange Fruit."
I guess just the title of that song describes our relationship...
Excuse me for a second, (weeps).
ORSON: When she died on July 17, 1959 you went to Cuba. You wrote this, you told me, looking over the Malecon from your hotel window after going to mass at the Iglesia de San Francisco de Asis over which portal is inscribed non est in toto sanctior orbe locus—no holier place on earth. Castro had just come to power and you wrote:
1953
1953 was a hard year for me.
Sad. I don’t know why.
I had work. Me and Bob Mitchum
Were friends at last. After all
Those misunderstandings. “You want to
Break out?” I asked him. “Then forget
All this crap about being a natural actor.”
I took his drink away. Got his attention.
“Acting is a craft. Don’t scowl at me.
You know I’m right. You’ll never
Do Shakespeare unless…” He eyed me warily.
“Yo, Rinty,” he said. “You have Billy”
( I had told him) “What do I have?”
He fired up another Chesterfield.
Squinted through the smoke.
“Nothing happens anyway.”
Nothing happens?
I knew what he meant.
I was getting there.
He grinned. “How the Hell did you
Do that to McCarthy?”
I gave him back his drink.
“Told him I was a commie, that’s how.
“I’m an American Icon, Bob. It was too much for him.
Goodbye Tailgunner Joe.”
Bob laughed but he didn’t believe me.
He was really quite a charming man
Guys who don’t believe in anything often are.
So he could be a gentleman to Rita Hayworth
Down in Mexico, her mind gone. But…
A bastard to everyone else.
Nothing in his eyes.
And I was sad there.
It was New York. September 13, 1953.
Another dive, Another gig.
Bob left with a blonde before I began to play.
I started to play but just walked out.
It was the night Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey had
Finally gotten together again.
They kept playing while I put down my guitar.
They never forgave me.
“A” train to Harlem.
Got in Billy’s DeSota and drove.
In a few hours
Lost in Pennsylvania.
Stopped. Don’t know why.
Got out. Looked up. Falling star.
Not me. Something from forever.
Finally found a town.
Asked a little guy outside a hospital for directions.
“We just had a baby girl,” he said.
I drove back to my life.
It seems to me that several important things are happening here. On the poetic level, there is a kind of hyper-realism, a cinematic use of hard focus and quick cuts to close ups, then a pulling away all within the context of a 'dialogue' between you and Mitchum. This severity dissolves toward the end in sadness and loss, and a bone to Creeley, perhaps "driving back to my life".
We are carried along perhaps a bit like a star-struck visitor to Schwabs reading Silver Screen and gaping at celebrity diners. I may be barking up the wrong tree here, but I think there's a deeper movement here. Perhaps it was just the rum?
RTT: There is so much here, Orson. So much strange. Remember those gifts from Santa I picked up in 1917 in that pawnshop in Chicago? The gifts that were to be delivered to a certain address in 1958 in Pennsylvania? Well, those gifts were intended for the young Joe Green! Yes, the poet right here. After my death I communicated through him as a kind of way to make up for the loss of the banjo and unicycle and Charlie McCarthy ventriloquist’s dummy and we are and have been cosmically and mythopoetically linked. The last lines in that poem -- well September 13, 1953 is his wife's birthday and the little guy I met outside of the hospital in Pennsylvania was her father and it was that new and blessed and splendid little life that brought me hope again.
The rest -- yes, I brought down McCarthy. If Rin Tin Tin was a communist then nothing meant anything. He never recovered. This is a poem about hope, Orson and damn fine it is that you notice all the slidings and blisses. Thank you.
ORSON:Eventually, you were forced to flea Cuba. What happened with you and Fidel that forced your return to the States
RTT: Do I sense a pun on “flee?” The first time I left Cuba I was sent. We’ll get into that. The second time was …here..here’s the poem:
Los Marielitos
You know Elmore Leonard
got a lot of his Florida schtick from me
when I was sobering up down in Miami.
I guess it was inevitable that I would
get involved with the mob after I fled Cuba
but it didn't start out that way.
May, 1980. They called us Los Marielitos.
I was one of 123,000 new Cuban refugees
that came to the USA in a short five months,
including about 5,000 of us who
were said to be hard-core criminals.
They crossed the ocean on a prayer.
On crowded, unsafe fishing boats.
On rafts held together by tires.
In search of a myth. Carrying only the
clothes on their backs, a passport, and a
crumbled piece of paper with a relative's phone number in the US.
I knew better.
The myth was over for me long ago.
I had Lassie's phone number but of course I would never call it.
She was probably dead and it was a whole new generation and
here I was, the icon of a previous generation, puking half
digested red beans over the side of a raft.
Back in the USA. Back in the USA
done in by the hype back then and by,
yes, my own yen to do serious theatre
Fidel expelled me because I was a drunk, because I was better than he was and he knew it, because he owed me BIG TIME, because he trid to kill me but failed and a voodoo curse was placed on his hairy ass that he could only avoid by getting me out of Cuba. The pretext was thatI was doing street theatre as Trotsky.
ORSON: We have this from that early period by in New York. I understand you did your own swordplay?
No, I Am Not Prince Hamlet Nor Was Meant To Be
You humans are so predictable.
In fact for years most dogs
were convinced that you were utterly
without self consciousness -- without Mind.
After all, we present a stimulus to you
and we ALWAYS get a predictable response.
The fact is we have such a horror
of the fact
that we can NOT be sincere
that we do whatever we can
to make it stop.
Yeah, a dog will pant
and bark and bring the
damn ball back again and again and again
-- we do it to keep from going mad,
to hope to experience
just for an instant unmediated
unironic consciousness, to --for just one instant
-- be THERE, be in the moment.
It never works.
Never.
That's why we die so young
and it is also why I was,
on a foggy evening OFF OFF Broadway
in a little theatre in the year 1959,
I was, simply put,
the best Hamlet of my generation.
ORSON: Obviously, you were in a philosophical mood here. The poem is quite different than the previous offering. Thoughts are heaved over the transom of regret to drag the depths of your dog nature. Images of Sisyphus and his rock, Skinnerian behavioral psychology, and Buddhist meditation are all brought together in a stunning denouement. Hamlets self-disillusionment is palpable here, yet it doesn't matter that you were "Off Off Broadway" does it? Humans, you seem to be saying, just don't get it. What are we missing?
RTT: This is a poem about consciousness. The first line-- changed at the end by the fact that I was Hamlet -- is Eliot's and is a deliberate deepening of his poem. It gives the facts. Dogs die young because they despair. I saw the eternal so most times I was able to overcome doggy consciousness. See yourself -- humanity -- from a dog's point of view. But I was never one to succumb to the dark.
I did all my own stunts. Always.
ORSON: In 'Road Kill' you seem to have come to some kind of crossroads. Perhaps the intimations of mortality were stronger. We all return to our roots as our time grows short. Here, unlike your other early works, you recognize something of your animal nature:
Road Kill
I ignore them.
The possum squashed on the macadam.
The unprophetic groundhog, in Texas
A holocaust of Armadillos, the skunk
“Skunk. God!” you say.
Driving on, a snake absolutely flat on the road.
There is no heaven of animals
A rabbit. A black and white cat.
A small dog stinking in the sun.
You see them and you make up a story.
The dog setting out to warn us all:
Fire, fire in the forest! The turtle there
100 years old!... what thoughts there, Rinty?
And what innocence for all of them.
I’m glad one of us knows the signs
To find our home.
We're all hoping to fine our way home in the end. Did your succeed here in saying what needed to be said?
RTT: This is a poem of divided consciousness. It’s again about that despairing time in Texas. There are two Rintys here. One of us can find the way home and that way is the way I knew I had to follow. I wanted to rescue what IS from death. Knew I couldn’t so wanted the poem to say “Seize the Day.”
ORSON: This may come as a surprise to you, but we have something quite special now. Would you read this for us please and comment on the wonderful artwork that accompanies it?
RinTinTology
I never met Django
Never really wanted too, I guess
We would have “eyed each other warily”
Like the time I met Senator Jack Kennedy
Was it 57?
In the Cozy Cole me playing there
Jack with Sammy
Sammy told me he was nervous.
Jack working on his charisma thing
And me.. height of my fame
Billy there Jack wanting her to come to his table
Her not noticing and me looking at her
Playing “Vous et Moi”
Sammy said “Man, come on down see who’s here.”
So afterwards I sit down next to the Senator
He in black glasses smoking a Kool
Undercover or something
Billie came over. She said she liked the man
Afterwards, knew his Daddy… called him
Mr. Death. “That boy has troubles”
She said. “He was just nervous meeting me”
I told her. She could see that.
Anybody could. “He eyed you warily
Behind those shades” We laughed.
Forgot about it. I had something he wanted.
And he had something…something…
Held back… connection to.. as if he knew
About us, about me and Billy,
Something he said. Joking about Howard Hughes.
Sammy told me Jack laughed afterwards.
“Said he was nervous. Something strange. Didn’t
Know why.”
In 63 in August Castro “eyed me warily.”
A little moonlight, bourbon on his breath,
Backstage, the little moon a paper one
For “Midsummers Night Dream” A wood near
Athens and I had transformed it, a bit of Brecht,
All of Shakespeare, Theseus nervous knowing
That Quince knew, Flute knew, Bottom breaking
the frame, declaring the revolution and me as Puck
Leaping, flying off that stage, like Peter Pan
TO FIDEL he standing up, smiling,
Me kneeling with the flowers but he
Afterwards backstage distant and cold wondering I thought
If the applause was for him or me.
Che was very nice, however.
Speaking one word… one word.
And I was in Dallas next was in Dallas then.
If I could play great jazz guitar
No hand…only paws.
Why couldn’t I
Slowly, hold breath, there he is
Pull the trigger
Of a Manlicher-Carcano 6.5mm rifle?
RTT: When I first came to Cuba I founded a wonderful proletarian theatre and our first play was a version of the Dream. Theseus and the rest of the ruling class are shot offstage at the end. I played Puck. This wonderful drawing shows me presenting flowers to Castro.
Castro feared my popularity. Ok. I’ll say it. You saw the Manchurian Candidate? That’s what those bastards did to me – they programmed me so that a certain word would trigger what it did. A few days after that I was in Dallas. I shot the president. I hope you will post all my poems in the JD right after that so that the story can be followed with that insight.
The artwork was, I think, part of the plot. It was done by the guy who played Flute in our performance.
I killed JFK. No wonder I was drunk and playing country guitar all those years. The word was “Rosebud.”
ORSON: When I was working on Citizen Kane, I often found myself staying up late and reading Yeats to settle me down. Do you have favorite poets that you turn to? If so, would you share a favorite with us?
RTT: Yeats, Auden, Eliot, the Bard. God bless all poets!
ORSON: Ah, I hear the chimes at midnight! Before we go, however, we must discuss the triad of works that marks
your greatness even as you prepared to leave this world. Lets begin with this remarkable view drawing on Homer's
great exposition of life's inevitable arc.
Letter from a Dog Before Troy
Dear Penelope,
It's windy here. Nine years in a tent on the beach.
Ulysses says they know what they're doing.
Right.
Nine years and for what?
What’s nine years to them?
Most of my life.
I’m tired. Don’t even ask me about the gods.
There’s a limit to loyalty.
But you already know that.
I know about the puppies.
You should have told me.
She told me, of course.
I don’t care.
Just get them out of Ithaca.
By the time you read this
I’ll be gone. I have..what..four more years?
Going to someplace where there are no men.
No gods.
Maybe a few rabbits.
Now you go on to treat the great themes of love, death and our position on the sacred wheel of time. There is bitterness here. God knows your life has not been an easy one, yet the loneliness of a world without men? What happened here?
RTT: Now you know. I changed history in a way I would never have wanted. Am I guilty or not. Somehow I can’t feel myself blameless.
Original sin.
ORSON: And yet you then can write:
All the Starry Animals
Looking up
I love them too --
All the starry animals.
Looking down
Or not.
Not saying anything.
Not saying nothing either.
There is a soul clearly in conflict here. Yet in the end there is acceptance. Is it merely what Eliot called
" the long looked forward to, long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity and the wisdom of age" or is there something canine at work here?
RTT: The want for the love that moves the sun and other stars is there.
ORSON: And then there is this:
Old Dog: A Villanelle
I am an old dog and am gently trying,
To meekly go to the difficult dark..
Alone, alone I am slowly dying.
The slow snow drifts down and no wind sighing.
Take out a Zippo and light up a Lark.
No regrets none. No who and no whying.
Sad ghosts outside I hear them all crying.
Mort Sahl’s on TV. Makes a funny remark.
No, thanks Time/Life I guess I’m not buying.
Death’s at the door. The bastard is lying.
“Hey, Rinty! It’s Lassie!” One small sad bark.
Wilder wind now. The snowflakes are flying.
Good Night has come. There is no denying.
Unknown is that country. Stark is the bark.
I am an old dog and am dying, dying.
And you, who haunt me forever sighing,
Crying my name in the difficult dark.
I am an old dog and am dying, dying.
I am alone and am dying, dying.
I am an old dog and am dying, dying.
I am an old dog and am dying, dying
Alone, alone I am slowly dying
I am alone and am dying, dying.
And here we have the only reference in your work to Lassie. Lassie, who was better known, better paid, and more highly thought of than you, if for all the wrong reasons. Beyond that there are echoes of Dylan Thomas' raging against the dying of the light. Clearly the end is at hand. How were you able to do this remarkable work so near to death?
RTT: I never even knew what a villanelle was when I wrote it. The difficult dark – yes! Exactly and here is my epitaph.
I bark at at the dark until the darkness yields.
As you go stark. Babbling of green fields.
Yours,
Rinty
Orson: And on that noble note, my old faithful friend, our duet is done and for now we must bid adieu. On behalf of our listeners and our sponsor, The Jeunesse Doree, I would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to you, Rinty and wish you Dogspeed!
The Lonliest Ranger: And that concludes another exhilarating confrontation of Mr. Orson Welles and the finest minds of today's poetry.
We here at the Jeunesse Doree are pleased to have had you as our guests and look forward to seeing you again.
And please remember to investigate the brilliant, tragi-comic
adventures of the lost souls of the JD. Goodnight and have a pleasant tomorrow.
RIN TIN TIN: ARF! ARF!
ANNOUNCER
Ladies and gentlemen, the director of the Mercury Theatre 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!
This is ORSON WELLES.
Our interview tonight is with Rin Tin Tin The Great. renowned actor (said to be the greatest Hamlet of his generation), author of The Dark Bark, Djangoiste and raccoonteur extraordinaire. On this particular evening the Crosley service estimates that thirty-seven point 239 billion creatures, mortal and immortal, are listening to us on their Zenith Trans-Cosmic radios. Zut alors!
ORSON: Mr. Tin Tin, or should I use Rin Tin Tin, or Rinty or...?
RTT: Call me anything. Just don’t call me late for dinner. Ah, Orson…Rinty…just call me Rinty.
ORSON: We share a great many things in common Rinty; we are men of the world, masters of our various crafts, romantics at heart, and, above all else, lovers of the fine beautiful. You once loved Lady Day, Billie Holiday, I once loved Judy Holiday. Despite your TV work, you were essentially a noiriste. The synchronicity of it! Will you tell us how you came to who you were? Lets begin with your dam and sire, shall we?
RTT:I never knew them, Orson. I'm an orphan and I am an American, Chicago born. I guess my real name is Moishe Herzog, Junior. Yeah, I'm a dog but I never even saw a dog until I saw Hettie in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show when it came to town. I was already seven years old! In fact I thought "dog" was my name. My owner was Moishe Herzog and I grew up in the back of his pawnshop. "Here, dog," he would say whenever he wanted to show me something in the Torah or more often to go down into the basement and get him a book or to bring up one of the lariats he would use to practice his rope tricks.. He was a strange guy. And, of course, so was I. All I knew was the pawnshop, the Torah, the Hebrew Spinoza and a variety of rope tricks. Though Moise would kill me for not saying "lariat." He was a great fan of the Wild West.
Here’s how it all started.
Picture this my friend. It's round midnight in Chicago and snowing -- I could see the flakes softly falling through the pawnshop window, no cars then so it's quiet, a hush. I am trying to sleep and not to sleep -- every night I had to go into the basement and bring up an old horse blanket and spread it right beneath the window. "Watch the shop, dog," Moishe would say as he left -- so this is how I thought I was to do it. Every night I tried to stay awake to watch the shop. Of course, I couldn't so when Moishe would come in the next morning and ask "Did you watch the shop last night, dog?" and I gave a little yap indicating, I guess, that I had, I felt incredibly guilty. He never seemed to notice that I was lying but I still felt guilty as hell.
Well, that night I was determined to stay awake and tried everything.
I was determined to memorize the Bible and was at all the "begats" and I thought that would keep me awake. The "begats" is one of the harder parts. The Book of Job? That's easy. But the "begats?" Oy veh! Suddenly there was a clatter and I was scared at hell because what I saw was this. Moishe in the fireplace (yes, we had one -- an old building --used to be the Marley Hotel I understand -- no gas, no coal furnace) -- but all dressed up in a red and white suit and cursing!
"Where the hell, am I?" Moishe asked.
I knew then it wasn't Moishe and, of course, what I should have done was, well, at least bark at him. But I didn't have time because -- get this -- there wasn't, for that instant (if that makes sense) any such thing as Time. I was frozen in that eternal instant and awake and watching what seemed to me to be a Santa Claus who had, perhaps, put too much rum in his eggnog. In other words I was caught in an eternal timeless instant watching God. Yes. Yes! Yes! Oh, it still affects me so.
Santa seemed confused. He didn't pay any attention to me at all. Just put down a sack he was carrying and looked around with a pissed off look on his face.
Suddenly, the door opened. It was locked and the door opened! and an elf came in.
Santa turned on the elf. "Did you screw up again? Isn't this supposed to be 19 Remington Avenue, Coatesville, Pa, 1958? Well, it looks a lot like a Pawnshop in 1917 to me!"
The elf just looked embarrassed.
"Pull the sled up out front. I'm not going up a chimney if I don't have to."
This is getting a little long.
Well Orson, Santa left. Time was again. I was changed forever. That little encounter with the Eternal changed me forever. I knew who I was and what I wanted to do. Santa left the sack behind and I took out what was in it: a banjo, a unicycle, A Charlie McCarthy doll and the Big/Little Book of English Poetry. Some kid in 1958 wasn't going to have a very nice Christmas. I got a rope from the basement, packed everything in the sack but the unicycle, tied the sack to my back got on the unicycle and hit the road. The rest is show biz history. Somehow I knew where I had to go. I got as far as the old Schubert theatre and cycled right in where some guys were practicing their act. Dec 25, 1917 7AM. Those guys were the Marx brothers. They were a bit surprised.
"I shot an elephant in my pajamas," I said (those were my first English words!)
"How he got in my pajamas I'll never know," Groucho replied. And we both laughed and eyed each other warily. Yes, always that...
My first act: I rode a unicycle and played the banjo while reciting scenes from Shakespeare in Yiddish. This is what I feel formed my sensibility. In other words – I performed America. I was a lousy ventriloquist.
ORSON: Of all your artistic endeavors; films, poetry, music, set and wardrobe design, and on the list goes, which gets most under your fur and why?
RTT: Yes, I did it all. And this will seem strange to you, Orson --after all I am being interviewed because of my work as a poet!-- but what I loved above everything else was Flamenco dancing. As I told you, I didn't know my parents but I love myself for the gypsy soul in me. This is funny. You want to know how I learned flamenco? This is the truth. I learned it with the help of Maria Ouspenskaya when we were making one of those Werewolf movies. I played the wolf -- see him briefly in the moonlight -- that lurks about wanting the soul of the werewolf. Or something! I forget.
Christ, it might even have been "Abbot and Costello meet the Wolfman." But one night Maria took me out to a bar in L.A. I had never been to before. ( I didn't think there were any): the "Ola Harpo!" and there I drank Sangria and saw flamenco dancing for the first time.
I'm sorry. I'm not very good as an audience and suddenly I was across from a very attractive young gypsy lad with a rose in my teeth. It just came naturally. Oh, how they smiled and applauded as I danced and I was overcome then by the duende. A flash of the tragic divine and I wanted it always and could get it yes I could of nights when the wolfbane bloomed and the moon was large and full and I was dancing with my gypsy friends!
I tried to teach it, off an on, to my Hollywood friends. None of them were any good. But we had a lot of laughs. Bogie almost got it. We would be on his boat with Bacall she laughing as Bogie tried to give himself over to those lunar rhythms and then gave up and he would grab me and bring me close and we would end up doing a tango there on his boat on the sea. A questioning but, perhaps, knowing look on Bacall's face as she watched us and sensed my discomfort. No, I am not implying anything of the usual here. It was the failure to attain the duende she sensed and my kindness when I covered it up with what was, of course, a COMIC tango. Poor Bogie. Bacall has a new movie I understand.
ORSON: Fascinating, and if we had time, there is much there to be pursued. Yet let us turn, if we may, to your early poems. Here is one I am fond of:
What a Little Moonlight Can Do
Three days after Bastille day
Behind the shut up café
In a broke down car
(Hard to gas yourself
If the car won’t start)
In Cross Plains, Texas
Thinking I saw nothing
More than myself
Reflected in my Les Paul
Black Beauty that night
I step out of my 1971
Ford Maverick the
Door operated courtesy
Light snicking on and
Look up at the sky
At all the tired animals
Stars bluewhitelonely
Thinking of that night
At the Three Deuces so
Long Ago and playing at
The Famous Door
The night Billy died
Errol Garner, Me, Oscar
Pettiford, Errol saying
You better than Django
But nobody will ever say it.
Not knowing Billy was dead
I was happy. Looking up
I say at the skyey animals
The old dog in the moon
Ending like this
Saying to the drunks
In the cowboy bar
This riff is based on Les Negres
By Jean Genet laughing
At myself really and now
Wanting it to end but
The car won’t start. Looking
Up I remember I told Billy
Radiance is the dealbreaker
And heard, radio definably off
Her singing “What a Little
Moonlight Can Do” and
That was the last time
I was truly happy and
I was there knowing
I would never try
To find the music again
Tired.
Pancake
Levelland
Mule Shoe
Sonora
Meadow
What vistas of hidden forgetfulness
Exhaustively at hand!
This is absolutely splendid, Rinty! The poem crosses so many lines, is inclusive in the way it brings the pathos of the great artist into sharp focus with its carefully chosen images. Bastille Day, of course! One feels the poem begins with the afterparty let down when freedom fails to live up to its promise. And then the emptiness: images of lonely, skywalking animals, brokedown cars behind honkytonk bars. The lacquered cruelty of the Les Paul reflecting it all back at you. And your love dead, unbeknownst to you. And the choppy, riff driven rhythm. Please tell us more!
RTT: Well, it's not exactly an early poem. There were all those poems I wrote with Don Marquis and those horrible "philosophical" poems I wrote after I read Heidegger but this lovely poem ( and it does everything you say it does and more!) was written around 1985.
The events took place in 1971.
Look, the Bastille day reference is there for several reason. It was the day Lady died and is described just that way in a poem of Frank O'Hara's.
A damn fine poem. Now we go all darkling. Orson, you know I killed O'Hara. Ran him down accidentally while I was drunk and driving a dune buggy on the beach on Fire Island. I recognized him and shouted "O! Frank O'Hara! Look out!" Which,since it follows his style and were the last words he heard, should have been his epitaph.
Why was I drunk and driving a dune buggy at night on Fire Island?
I warn you, Orson we will get into the strange and the very strange as we continue...but let's leave it alone for now.
The events in this poem really happened. This was one of the low points of a long life. I was playing country guitar -- not as Rin Tin Tin but as Merle Shepherd. I wore jeans, cowboy hat, a shirt with little sheep on it, and dark glasses and very uncomfortable Tony Lama Ostrich hide boots and had an act doing Hank Williams covers. I felt I needed to be lost -- I WAS lost. Sometimes I would get paid. Sometimes not. I even robbed a Dry Goods store in Fairy, Texas once when I was hungry and needed gas. Sometimes I couldn't help it and would play solid gone jazz and sneer at my audience and do an old Lenny Bruce schtick. I slept in my car and there was oblivion and I drank. I'll tell you why later. I get the idea you will know what to ask. But, yeah, I had the hose hooked up through the window and I was going to poison myself and then the damn car wouldn't start and the radio was off and I anyway heard Billy again there behind the cafe singing that song. And I remembered her for that instant and she was dead but -- and the stars bluewhiteand lonely, the tied animals...we are all so tired when these is death and I realized I shoudn't give myself to death but just go on...
"I was there knowing
I would never try
To find the music again
Tired.
Pancake
Levelland
Mule Shoe
Sonora
Meadow
What vistas of hidden forgetfulness
Exhaustively at hand!"
RTT: To sleep, perchance to dream, but in that dream...
So it went. But I did try to find that music again. As this poems shows...as this poem shows.
ORSON: How did you and Billie meet? Where you ever addicted to heroin?
RTT: No, I never had anything to do with the big H. Even when playing Jazz guitar. It killed so many of my friends. And my greatest love. I had a problem with the booze but not until after a certain day in November 1963.
Billy and I met in the late forties at a little Jazz club in Harlem. You should know, Orson. You went there thinking you were still loved after your production of the Blank Macbeth. I was playing. She came out and sang from --I don't know -- backstage or Eternity. We fell instantly in love as she and I became one song as she sang "Strange Fruit."
I guess just the title of that song describes our relationship...
Excuse me for a second, (weeps).
ORSON: When she died on July 17, 1959 you went to Cuba. You wrote this, you told me, looking over the Malecon from your hotel window after going to mass at the Iglesia de San Francisco de Asis over which portal is inscribed non est in toto sanctior orbe locus—no holier place on earth. Castro had just come to power and you wrote:
1953
1953 was a hard year for me.
Sad. I don’t know why.
I had work. Me and Bob Mitchum
Were friends at last. After all
Those misunderstandings. “You want to
Break out?” I asked him. “Then forget
All this crap about being a natural actor.”
I took his drink away. Got his attention.
“Acting is a craft. Don’t scowl at me.
You know I’m right. You’ll never
Do Shakespeare unless…” He eyed me warily.
“Yo, Rinty,” he said. “You have Billy”
( I had told him) “What do I have?”
He fired up another Chesterfield.
Squinted through the smoke.
“Nothing happens anyway.”
Nothing happens?
I knew what he meant.
I was getting there.
He grinned. “How the Hell did you
Do that to McCarthy?”
I gave him back his drink.
“Told him I was a commie, that’s how.
“I’m an American Icon, Bob. It was too much for him.
Goodbye Tailgunner Joe.”
Bob laughed but he didn’t believe me.
He was really quite a charming man
Guys who don’t believe in anything often are.
So he could be a gentleman to Rita Hayworth
Down in Mexico, her mind gone. But…
A bastard to everyone else.
Nothing in his eyes.
And I was sad there.
It was New York. September 13, 1953.
Another dive, Another gig.
Bob left with a blonde before I began to play.
I started to play but just walked out.
It was the night Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey had
Finally gotten together again.
They kept playing while I put down my guitar.
They never forgave me.
“A” train to Harlem.
Got in Billy’s DeSota and drove.
In a few hours
Lost in Pennsylvania.
Stopped. Don’t know why.
Got out. Looked up. Falling star.
Not me. Something from forever.
Finally found a town.
Asked a little guy outside a hospital for directions.
“We just had a baby girl,” he said.
I drove back to my life.
It seems to me that several important things are happening here. On the poetic level, there is a kind of hyper-realism, a cinematic use of hard focus and quick cuts to close ups, then a pulling away all within the context of a 'dialogue' between you and Mitchum. This severity dissolves toward the end in sadness and loss, and a bone to Creeley, perhaps "driving back to my life".
We are carried along perhaps a bit like a star-struck visitor to Schwabs reading Silver Screen and gaping at celebrity diners. I may be barking up the wrong tree here, but I think there's a deeper movement here. Perhaps it was just the rum?
RTT: There is so much here, Orson. So much strange. Remember those gifts from Santa I picked up in 1917 in that pawnshop in Chicago? The gifts that were to be delivered to a certain address in 1958 in Pennsylvania? Well, those gifts were intended for the young Joe Green! Yes, the poet right here. After my death I communicated through him as a kind of way to make up for the loss of the banjo and unicycle and Charlie McCarthy ventriloquist’s dummy and we are and have been cosmically and mythopoetically linked. The last lines in that poem -- well September 13, 1953 is his wife's birthday and the little guy I met outside of the hospital in Pennsylvania was her father and it was that new and blessed and splendid little life that brought me hope again.
The rest -- yes, I brought down McCarthy. If Rin Tin Tin was a communist then nothing meant anything. He never recovered. This is a poem about hope, Orson and damn fine it is that you notice all the slidings and blisses. Thank you.
ORSON:Eventually, you were forced to flea Cuba. What happened with you and Fidel that forced your return to the States
RTT: Do I sense a pun on “flee?” The first time I left Cuba I was sent. We’ll get into that. The second time was …here..here’s the poem:
Los Marielitos
You know Elmore Leonard
got a lot of his Florida schtick from me
when I was sobering up down in Miami.
I guess it was inevitable that I would
get involved with the mob after I fled Cuba
but it didn't start out that way.
May, 1980. They called us Los Marielitos.
I was one of 123,000 new Cuban refugees
that came to the USA in a short five months,
including about 5,000 of us who
were said to be hard-core criminals.
They crossed the ocean on a prayer.
On crowded, unsafe fishing boats.
On rafts held together by tires.
In search of a myth. Carrying only the
clothes on their backs, a passport, and a
crumbled piece of paper with a relative's phone number in the US.
I knew better.
The myth was over for me long ago.
I had Lassie's phone number but of course I would never call it.
She was probably dead and it was a whole new generation and
here I was, the icon of a previous generation, puking half
digested red beans over the side of a raft.
Back in the USA. Back in the USA
done in by the hype back then and by,
yes, my own yen to do serious theatre
Fidel expelled me because I was a drunk, because I was better than he was and he knew it, because he owed me BIG TIME, because he trid to kill me but failed and a voodoo curse was placed on his hairy ass that he could only avoid by getting me out of Cuba. The pretext was thatI was doing street theatre as Trotsky.
ORSON: We have this from that early period by in New York. I understand you did your own swordplay?
No, I Am Not Prince Hamlet Nor Was Meant To Be
You humans are so predictable.
In fact for years most dogs
were convinced that you were utterly
without self consciousness -- without Mind.
After all, we present a stimulus to you
and we ALWAYS get a predictable response.
The fact is we have such a horror
of the fact
that we can NOT be sincere
that we do whatever we can
to make it stop.
Yeah, a dog will pant
and bark and bring the
damn ball back again and again and again
-- we do it to keep from going mad,
to hope to experience
just for an instant unmediated
unironic consciousness, to --for just one instant
-- be THERE, be in the moment.
It never works.
Never.
That's why we die so young
and it is also why I was,
on a foggy evening OFF OFF Broadway
in a little theatre in the year 1959,
I was, simply put,
the best Hamlet of my generation.
ORSON: Obviously, you were in a philosophical mood here. The poem is quite different than the previous offering. Thoughts are heaved over the transom of regret to drag the depths of your dog nature. Images of Sisyphus and his rock, Skinnerian behavioral psychology, and Buddhist meditation are all brought together in a stunning denouement. Hamlets self-disillusionment is palpable here, yet it doesn't matter that you were "Off Off Broadway" does it? Humans, you seem to be saying, just don't get it. What are we missing?
RTT: This is a poem about consciousness. The first line-- changed at the end by the fact that I was Hamlet -- is Eliot's and is a deliberate deepening of his poem. It gives the facts. Dogs die young because they despair. I saw the eternal so most times I was able to overcome doggy consciousness. See yourself -- humanity -- from a dog's point of view. But I was never one to succumb to the dark.
I did all my own stunts. Always.
ORSON: In 'Road Kill' you seem to have come to some kind of crossroads. Perhaps the intimations of mortality were stronger. We all return to our roots as our time grows short. Here, unlike your other early works, you recognize something of your animal nature:
Road Kill
I ignore them.
The possum squashed on the macadam.
The unprophetic groundhog, in Texas
A holocaust of Armadillos, the skunk
“Skunk. God!” you say.
Driving on, a snake absolutely flat on the road.
There is no heaven of animals
A rabbit. A black and white cat.
A small dog stinking in the sun.
You see them and you make up a story.
The dog setting out to warn us all:
Fire, fire in the forest! The turtle there
100 years old!... what thoughts there, Rinty?
And what innocence for all of them.
I’m glad one of us knows the signs
To find our home.
We're all hoping to fine our way home in the end. Did your succeed here in saying what needed to be said?
RTT: This is a poem of divided consciousness. It’s again about that despairing time in Texas. There are two Rintys here. One of us can find the way home and that way is the way I knew I had to follow. I wanted to rescue what IS from death. Knew I couldn’t so wanted the poem to say “Seize the Day.”
ORSON: This may come as a surprise to you, but we have something quite special now. Would you read this for us please and comment on the wonderful artwork that accompanies it?
RinTinTology
I never met Django
Never really wanted too, I guess
We would have “eyed each other warily”
Like the time I met Senator Jack Kennedy
Was it 57?
In the Cozy Cole me playing there
Jack with Sammy
Sammy told me he was nervous.
Jack working on his charisma thing
And me.. height of my fame
Billy there Jack wanting her to come to his table
Her not noticing and me looking at her
Playing “Vous et Moi”
Sammy said “Man, come on down see who’s here.”
So afterwards I sit down next to the Senator
He in black glasses smoking a Kool
Undercover or something
Billie came over. She said she liked the man
Afterwards, knew his Daddy… called him
Mr. Death. “That boy has troubles”
She said. “He was just nervous meeting me”
I told her. She could see that.
Anybody could. “He eyed you warily
Behind those shades” We laughed.
Forgot about it. I had something he wanted.
And he had something…something…
Held back… connection to.. as if he knew
About us, about me and Billy,
Something he said. Joking about Howard Hughes.
Sammy told me Jack laughed afterwards.
“Said he was nervous. Something strange. Didn’t
Know why.”
In 63 in August Castro “eyed me warily.”
A little moonlight, bourbon on his breath,
Backstage, the little moon a paper one
For “Midsummers Night Dream” A wood near
Athens and I had transformed it, a bit of Brecht,
All of Shakespeare, Theseus nervous knowing
That Quince knew, Flute knew, Bottom breaking
the frame, declaring the revolution and me as Puck
Leaping, flying off that stage, like Peter Pan
TO FIDEL he standing up, smiling,
Me kneeling with the flowers but he
Afterwards backstage distant and cold wondering I thought
If the applause was for him or me.
Che was very nice, however.
Speaking one word… one word.
And I was in Dallas next was in Dallas then.
If I could play great jazz guitar
No hand…only paws.
Why couldn’t I
Slowly, hold breath, there he is
Pull the trigger
Of a Manlicher-Carcano 6.5mm rifle?
RTT: When I first came to Cuba I founded a wonderful proletarian theatre and our first play was a version of the Dream. Theseus and the rest of the ruling class are shot offstage at the end. I played Puck. This wonderful drawing shows me presenting flowers to Castro.
Castro feared my popularity. Ok. I’ll say it. You saw the Manchurian Candidate? That’s what those bastards did to me – they programmed me so that a certain word would trigger what it did. A few days after that I was in Dallas. I shot the president. I hope you will post all my poems in the JD right after that so that the story can be followed with that insight.
The artwork was, I think, part of the plot. It was done by the guy who played Flute in our performance.
I killed JFK. No wonder I was drunk and playing country guitar all those years. The word was “Rosebud.”
ORSON: When I was working on Citizen Kane, I often found myself staying up late and reading Yeats to settle me down. Do you have favorite poets that you turn to? If so, would you share a favorite with us?
RTT: Yeats, Auden, Eliot, the Bard. God bless all poets!
ORSON: Ah, I hear the chimes at midnight! Before we go, however, we must discuss the triad of works that marks
your greatness even as you prepared to leave this world. Lets begin with this remarkable view drawing on Homer's
great exposition of life's inevitable arc.
Letter from a Dog Before Troy
Dear Penelope,
It's windy here. Nine years in a tent on the beach.
Ulysses says they know what they're doing.
Right.
Nine years and for what?
What’s nine years to them?
Most of my life.
I’m tired. Don’t even ask me about the gods.
There’s a limit to loyalty.
But you already know that.
I know about the puppies.
You should have told me.
She told me, of course.
I don’t care.
Just get them out of Ithaca.
By the time you read this
I’ll be gone. I have..what..four more years?
Going to someplace where there are no men.
No gods.
Maybe a few rabbits.
Now you go on to treat the great themes of love, death and our position on the sacred wheel of time. There is bitterness here. God knows your life has not been an easy one, yet the loneliness of a world without men? What happened here?
RTT: Now you know. I changed history in a way I would never have wanted. Am I guilty or not. Somehow I can’t feel myself blameless.
Original sin.
ORSON: And yet you then can write:
All the Starry Animals
Looking up
I love them too --
All the starry animals.
Looking down
Or not.
Not saying anything.
Not saying nothing either.
There is a soul clearly in conflict here. Yet in the end there is acceptance. Is it merely what Eliot called
" the long looked forward to, long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity and the wisdom of age" or is there something canine at work here?
RTT: The want for the love that moves the sun and other stars is there.
ORSON: And then there is this:
Old Dog: A Villanelle
I am an old dog and am gently trying,
To meekly go to the difficult dark..
Alone, alone I am slowly dying.
The slow snow drifts down and no wind sighing.
Take out a Zippo and light up a Lark.
No regrets none. No who and no whying.
Sad ghosts outside I hear them all crying.
Mort Sahl’s on TV. Makes a funny remark.
No, thanks Time/Life I guess I’m not buying.
Death’s at the door. The bastard is lying.
“Hey, Rinty! It’s Lassie!” One small sad bark.
Wilder wind now. The snowflakes are flying.
Good Night has come. There is no denying.
Unknown is that country. Stark is the bark.
I am an old dog and am dying, dying.
And you, who haunt me forever sighing,
Crying my name in the difficult dark.
I am an old dog and am dying, dying.
I am alone and am dying, dying.
I am an old dog and am dying, dying.
I am an old dog and am dying, dying
Alone, alone I am slowly dying
I am alone and am dying, dying.
And here we have the only reference in your work to Lassie. Lassie, who was better known, better paid, and more highly thought of than you, if for all the wrong reasons. Beyond that there are echoes of Dylan Thomas' raging against the dying of the light. Clearly the end is at hand. How were you able to do this remarkable work so near to death?
RTT: I never even knew what a villanelle was when I wrote it. The difficult dark – yes! Exactly and here is my epitaph.
I bark at at the dark until the darkness yields.
As you go stark. Babbling of green fields.
Yours,
Rinty
Orson: And on that noble note, my old faithful friend, our duet is done and for now we must bid adieu. On behalf of our listeners and our sponsor, The Jeunesse Doree, I would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to you, Rinty and wish you Dogspeed!
The Lonliest Ranger: And that concludes another exhilarating confrontation of Mr. Orson Welles and the finest minds of today's poetry.
We here at the Jeunesse Doree are pleased to have had you as our guests and look forward to seeing you again.
And please remember to investigate the brilliant, tragi-comic
adventures of the lost souls of the JD. Goodnight and have a pleasant tomorrow.
RIN TIN TIN: ARF! ARF!
Orson Welles Interviews Samson Shillitoe
Orson Welles Interviews Samson Shillitoe
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
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
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