mouseworks

I keep remembering The Poetry Project, still in existence, supported by people who are mostly poets, but then a recipient of a considerable chunk of Federal money. Most of the people there were in the early stages of their careers as poets. Berrigan was teaching at either Buffalo or Iowa. The other Tulsa boys -- Padgett, Brainard, Gallup -- were all in their twenties. Anne Waldman was just out of Bennington, married to Lew Warsh, a friend of Chip Delany from the Bronx High School of Science. Peter Schjeldahl was a poet. Time Magazine swooped down either the first year I was there or the next, and profiled the place, featuring Ted Berrigan. And Diane Wakoski, who I had heard of (I've met most of LeRoi Jone's Four Young Lady Poets by now; but Diane was the first) was sitting in the workshop room looking like her photographs. Her books were coming out from Doubleday: Inside the Blood Factory.

Rebecca Wright, the woman who is going with me to Nicaragua at the end of May, and I met some time shortly before a party at Ed Saunder's Peace Eye Bookstore. Anne Waldman passed my name to Maureen Owen, and I apparently introduced Rebecca to Maureen though I can't remember the details now. We were all in mimeograph magazines. Maureen was publishing Telephone. Anne Waldman was publishing The World.

Bill Zavatsky showed up in one or the other of the workshops. Daniella Gioseffi tried to impress us with her priors as a t.v. or radio personality. Anne's mother, Frances Waldman, was also there.

The thing is that what we got out of this wasn't encouragement in the usual sense of naff art teachers being in love with ART, or the usual displacement activity of teachers identifying with their students accomplishments. It was being serious about writing together, learning more things we needed to know, publishing work that came, from time to time, under the eyes of the senior poets like John Ashbery (O'Hara was dead before I moved to NYC), Kenneth Koch (who'd taught most of the Tulsa boys at Columbia), and Allen Ginsberg, who was with O'Hara, one of the ghosts who haunted the place, only he was alive and showed up from time to time. Burroughs was around, just not visible. John Giorno was setting up Dial-A-Poem. Larry Fagin came in to town to do Adventures in Poetry.

I've never been in an English Department with a similar flavor. The students were volunteers and there were no grades. If a poet didn't seem to have much to offer, there were other poets, other workshops, not all of them at St. Marks. Rebecca Wright took Bill Berkson's workshop at The New School.

There wasn't a division between the students in the workshops and the people giving the workshops. The closest I've seen to a university program like this was UPenn, where a freshman poet was invited to join the table at a dinner in honor of Bill Berkson, at Kelly Writer's House. The difference was that the student was in the presence of her teachers. We were in the presence of the people we wanted to be, and as volunteers. And what we learned wasn't just what was in the workshops but ways of being a poet, what did poets talk about when they weren't talking about poetry? What had they read? Did they drink tea or coffee (tea exclusively among the people who were in Wakoski's workshop. At that time in history, poetry looked like Ginsberg had been a leading edge, not the last full-time professional poet in US history since (and he ended up in academia at the end of his life).

Some people were in graduate school; some people would go back to graduate school.

We had kids coming down from Sarah Lawrence and in from Yale to take workshops: Cassia Berman, one of the editors of a Yale literary magazine, and kids who'd never gone to college, or who were going back (I ended up at Columbia University School of General Studies). The workshops were everything from traditional writing workshops to demonstrations to group exercises based on surrealist and Dada theory. At the end of the first year, four of the workshop attendees got a reading at St. Marks -- Daniella Gioseffi, me, and I can't remember the other two, one a guy, and I'm thinking maybe Rebecca Wright was the fourth. Wednesday nights were the arranged readings where the poets got paid and the readers included even some of the other guys: Robert Lowell and Ginsberg (but after my time) and Ginsberg and McClure, a wonderful jewel of a reading. Padgett brought in Stanley Kunitz, whose daughters feared the bohemian audience would make fun of the old man, but we all loved him.

The poets ran the place and chose who'd give workshops, who'd read.

I don't remember anyone getting encouraged in a top down way except when one poet was angling to seduce another one, but people knew who was better and who wasn't. Astonishing people was the best way to get attention. Nobody wanted to be bored. The people leading the workshops couldn't flunk anyone.

And even here, not everyone was equally good, and we'd hear from the cohort of poets around Wakowski's age that these young guys sounded all alike -- can you tell a Padgett from a Berrigan in the dark? Some of those people were people we'd read, too, so we learned about poets pummeling each other, jealousy, and that even poets I admire very much didn't always admire each other.

I never thought of this as equivalent of a graduate program in creative writing, but many MFA programs have less distinguished average faculty, and faculty which doesn't include students in other activities. Most of the St. Marks instructors are teaching in universities with full health benefits now. A few aren't. Some are teaching at Naropa.

George Alec Effinger said, of the Clarion he went to, was that what he'd got out of it were models for being a writer, the sense that this was do-able and I suspect that living with the students, going to their parties, or having them attend yours, is the big thing.

What do people who are successful at this kind of thing I want to be successful at do? What other interests feed into their writing, how do they feel about writing (Padgett admitted to thinking about giving up poetry; Wakoski didn't like writing poems much but enjoyed writing them), and how high were their SATs? How did they survive financially?

I never knew the answers to those questions from most academics. They often disappear to their own lives as soon as the school hour is over.