Alice Notley
[On Philip Whalen
An Interview by Norman Fischer
Transcribed 9/8/16 by Barbara Byrum
Alice = A Norman = N
N: Okay, now it’s recording. And now this one is recording, so we’re on with both machines.
A: Oh, okay. Let’s figure out if we can say anything.
N: I have questions. But we can start anywhere you want to start.
A: I haven’t given it a moment’s thought.
N: How about starting with: when did you first meet Philip? How did that all work out?
A: I was living in the Bay Area with Ted in 1971. I first connected with him . . . but I don’t think I met him at that point. But I heard him read Scenes of Life at the Capital.
N: So by 1971 you knew Phil’s work?
A: I guess I must have gotten to know the work when I got to know Ted. Ted had all of Phil’s books up to that point. He left all his books at Iowa City in this room – what was the name of that building – EPB — maybe his office there.
N : EPB, right.
A: He left all his books at the EPB in his room, and he gave me the key, and I would go into his room and get all his books and read them. I read Philip that way.
N: That was when you were introduced to Philip?
A: I think so. And then I got a copy of On Bear’s Head in New York subsequently. When Ted and I were separated. I read On Bear’s Head. Then when we went to San Francisco in ’71, and we lived with Lewis Warsh, and Phil gave a reading with Allen. Allen read first for 45 minutes, there was a break, and then Phil read all Scenes of Life at the Capital. All of it. A lot of people walked out. But I was just amazed by it. I loved the whole thing. I was impressed.
N: Yeah it is pretty impressive.
N: And then that fall we moved to Bolinas…
N: Phil was there too.
A: Living in Bolinas, and I had some conversations with him. He was very nice. But I really got to know him when he came to Chicago in maybe March of ’72? February, March, or was it earlier? No, it was late ’72. He came after Anselm was born and stayed in our house for a week.
N: That must have been great. This was during a visit to the University?
A: He was just about to become a Buddhist monk. He was just doing the stuff, and I had seen him with his hair, and I think at that point, he might still have had his hair at that point. He was learning to sew his robes, and he told us everything he was doing. I went to all of his readings. He read all over the city. We became very close quite quickly.
N: In that week?
A: In that week. He and Ted had already connected.
N: Do you remember how Ted connected with him, or what Ted saw in his work, or how they met?
A: Ted was quite influenced by him. You know, I could show you the poems. They’re poems after Tambourine Life, but they have asterisks in them. The poems in which he makes the mind jumps that Phil makes. But they are terser, because Ted was from New England. But it’s the same use of space, you know. You say a thing, and then you give yourself permission to go over here, and then more time goes by, and then you give yourself permission to go over there. And you say something that seems irrelevant, and then finally you say something that pulls it all together.
N: Yes That was Phil’s characteristic method and invention.
A: That was Phil. Ted saw what Phil was doing and used it. I kind of took the same lesson myself. But I took another lesson too, which was from Scenes of Life at the Capital, where I learned how to write…I think I learned how to write a long poem from that poem. But I didn’t really use it for years and years. I kept sort of trying… not having it happen. Then it finally happened. But what he does is so seamless. The way he…there are no transitions in it. It’s kind of an amazing long poem in that way, and he doesn’t do the space trip.
N: In that poem, right, he doesn’t do that, it just chugs along.
A: Space as continuous substance. And at the end he makes a point.
N: You mean that all the works you’ve been writing, for I don’t know how many years now, twenty some years, the long semi-narrative works, were inspired by Scenes of Life?
A: No, I don’t mean anything like that. I had so many inspirations, so many people inspired me. I am only inspired by myself now. It's been that way for a long time, but I learned something essential from Phil, particularly from that poem.
N: So, yes, what are the lessons, what are the things you took away from Phil, for your own work.
A: I took away a lot from Phil. I took away the sound of the western voice. Although he was from the Northwest, and I was from the Southwest, we were both westerners. Our approach to speech was similar, and our approach to how you could present it on the page, and how you could make it be in a poem was similar. In the east they tend to speak more in complete sentences. Phil and I opened out our sentences. We both did that kind of thing.
N: That was an issue in those days. I remember that too. It impressed me. The east and the west. Gary and Phil were very self-consciously westerners and wanted to write out of that spirit, which they saw as different from the east where most of the writing had been coming from. Allen and Kerouac were both easterners.
A: I don’t think Phil could have helped it, could have done anything else. Allen was somehow both. Allen and Kerouac were both coasts at the same time, although Allen was always a New York, New Jersey Jew, but he was just so big. Kerouac would confuse the two coasts, like he did in The Subterraneans, where he set what happened in New York in San Francisco, and he would make the jumping from coast to coast into this thing.
N: And what else: western voice and what else?
A: Making the page be beautiful, if possible. Having fun, although Ted had a lot of fun. Putting down whatever you wanted to on the page. The problem with being influenced by Phil was it was obvious. A lot of the early work I did that was influenced by him has never been published, because it was too imitative. I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn't want it to be so obvious.
N: When I first read Phil, I was pretty thunderstruck. I had never seen anybody give themselves that much permission to be free in a poem. I had been struggling to write and failing miserably and suddenly I saw I didn’t have to struggle, push so much. His work was instant liberation for me. It seemed like you could do anything.
A: But he was also very disciplined. And he...everybody always accused him of being...what was that? Self-indulgent. He was always accused of being self-indulgent, and every single person on both coasts said he was, but he was actually very disciplined. He was very disciplined musically. He was always following musical paces, keeping musical scores in his head. And the music of the spaces in his poems is often quite strict as well. I think I responded to that too, because I had some musical training. I could hear it, although I didn't know how to talk about it very well.
N: What about his Buddhism? Did he talk to you about that over the years, and what did you think about that in relation to his work?
A: I never thought about it. We never talked about it. We had one conversation once, right after Ted died, where I told him I needed to take a vow to go on. I asked him if there was a vow to go on, and he said there was only one vow in Zen, the Bodhisattva vow, and he told me what it was, and I kind of took that vow in my head.
N: Somehow I remember this. How do I know this? He told us? He wrote about it?
A: I told it to you, I told it to David Schneider maybe. Somebody's written it down.
N: Yes now I remember. You told me at David and Carol’s place in San Francisco after Ted died. I remember I was listening to a Beethoven quartet on the radio in the car when I came to see you. I remember I said something really stupid and not very consoling. Somebody’s written it down somewhere.
A: I don't know where. It's the only thing I remember, the only contact with Phil having to do with Buddhism.
N: Yes typically he wasn't talking about Buddhism a lot. I don’t talk about it too much either.
A: We weren't interested in talking about Buddhism. We talked about food. We talked about gossip. We talked about the kids. We did a lot of gossip.
N: Talked about poetry?
A: Probably, but I don't remember him telling me anything. It was more like we were really friends, and so we didn't have to do anything but hang out. I had no curiosity about his Buddhism. I went out to dinner with him and Joanne and some other people, and they were all Buddhists. I was in San Francisco about a month after Ted died. That's when all that stuff happened, where I talked to him about the vow. Somebody said that Ted was in the Bardo. I was so annoyed. [Laughter] I knew he wasn't in any fucking bardo!
N: Where was he?
A: I don’t know!
N: But not there.
A: He wasn't in some place they could name and know. I still remember that with some annoyance, even though I loved all the people. Phil and I never talked about that kind of thing. We talked about food and recipes.
N: People talk now about mentors — an older person, in an older generation, I don't know what they are supposed to do for you, but somehow they do something. Does that make any sense to you? Was Philip in that relation to you? He was just a friend, like a million other friends that were important to you? Or was there some mentoring element to the friendship.
A: No, I used him as a different kind of spiritual mentor. There was a time when I was totally anguished. I had a very severe post-partum depression. I was having a lot of problems handling it, although Ted knew about it, and I talked to Ted about it all the time. He told me to write to Phil. And I wrote to Phil, and he wrote me back. This really wonderful letter.
N: You have that somewhere probably?
A: No, I kept it for years, and then it started to fall apart, and then I realized that I didn't need it anymore. I sold it. I could just ask him in a straightforward way what to do about feeling a certain way, and he would write back to me and tell me what his experience was of this. It had nothing to do with poetry or Buddhism.
N: And it helped.
A: It helped. It helped, yes.
N:I think it was in David's book that I learned —because I hadn’t known this — that Phil served as that kind of friend to a lot of his friends, a lot of his contemporaries. He was the confessor and the forgiver, or whatever you want to call it. Somebody that they would go to in that kind of situation.
A: Yes, though Philip was in anguish all the time himself!
N: Right. Even though he was in anguish all the time, still he served in that function for several people.
A: He was...I don't know...there was a community of lights, and he was one of the lights. I became one of the lights and Ted was. So if we were together, we were kind of lit up together. Nothing bad happened. At the end of Ted's life, he was kind of having troubles; he was kind of a pariah.
N: Ted was?
A: Ted was.
N: Why was that?
A: That would be too complicated.
N: Okay. Some things happened...
A: People didn't know how, in what kind of shape he was. And Phil came to town, and he just came over, and he sat down, and Ted sat down, and I was sitting over here watching. It was just all light.
N: It took away the pain? My experience is that there is something unusual or special about poets recognizing one another, and supporting each other, that your emotion in saying what you just said, makes me think of that, that there was something...there really is light, lights.
A: Yes. There were some people who were being really, really mean.
N: Yes, that, of course, happens too...
A: Really, really mean people in the community all the time.
N: There is always that. But there are also lights.
A: There are lights.
N: There are people who love each other, despite not even seeing each other that often. There is a connection that Phil had...
A: He was one of the people we could always make the connection with. Eddy talks about this sometimes, because he was used to people like Anselm Hollo, who he might not see for two years, and suddenly it was all right there.
N: Yes, Anselm was always jolly and bright. It was always a joy to be with him.
A: Yes, suddenly there aren’t that many people, it doesn't feel like light, anymore; a lot of people have died.
N: Do you think this light we’re talking about is not as much a part of the community as it once was? Who knows? We can't tell, really. But what do you think? Has the community changed?
A: Yes I think this isn’t there anymore. Because of the way poets are formed at the moment. They aren’t formed through their own writing and what happens to them, so that they arrive at a place of light. Out of suffering, usually. Now they're formed by schools. It's not correct.
N: Yes, it's a bad word, but it's almost like there is a spiritual connection, or the approach to poetry itself is spiritual. Spiritual isn’t the word. But careerism is the opposite of whatever it is we’re talking about.
A: I am so influenced by this book (Alice points to copy on the table) Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head, which I read about fifteen times! But I wouldn't know how to talk about it.
N: It’s a roman a clef, like You Didn’t Even Try.
A: Well his characters are composites of people that he knew. In this one, Clifford is more or less Gary, Then Roy who seems...
N: Roy is Phillip, it seems.
A: But, but Philip is actually basing Roy on Robert Duncan. So when I read it, it is straight Philip to me. But he's projecting Duncan onto himself in some way. It's like... I mean, he said it was. The Joanne character is Joanne.
N: What did you get out of this one that was important?
A: I don't know. Pleasure. Just pleasure.
N: I love the novels. People don't read them anymore.
A: No, no. David told me he didn't like them very much.
N: I read them recently. Laynie Browne asked me to write an essay on poets' prose, and I chose those two novels and re-read them and wrote a long essay. I loved reading them again. They were great.
A: This book is sheer pleasure. I think this is one of the things you get from Phil's poetry as well, that sense of pleasure. That's all you need from poetry, but that it's really hard to give it.
N: It is.
A: I think it's the hardest thing to give to the reader.
N: It is. It is. It seems to me that now a lot of poets feel an obligation to reflect the pain of the world all around us, so you read their work, and you feel that, rather than the pleasure and the transcendence that you could feel from a poem, even if it does reflect the world’s pain. Because your poetry certainly does contain a world of pain, yet it's a pleasure to read. It doesn't make you despairing over how fucked up the world is. It makes you feel lifted up.
A: The words...
N: Themselves...
A: Themselves, make it good, and the language, it comes out of my body, and...
N: And to me there's redemption in the language itself, when you get that deeply into the language. You feel lifted out of it as you write, it seems, and the reader feels that too.
A: Phil was always putting it down on the page with those pens. It's kind of a double, triple pleasure that he got out of it.
N: That's right.
A: By doing that.
N: That's right. And once...we lived together, Philip and I, at Tassajara. We were there with our kids when he was there. And one time — I can't remember which book it was of his — but I helped him put together one of his books. I was amazed by the way he did it. He would snip pages out of his journals, and he spread them all over the floor, and he would say, "This goes with that, and that goes with this," so he actually wasn't writing those things that..the jumps were actually jumps, because they were often written in wildly different time frames and moods.
A: I mean the long ones. But in the short ones.
N: The long ones.
A: But sometimes in the short ones, too, he would date the little snippets...
N: The little snippets.
A: Yeah. I saw Anne and Ted together once, when I was very young. They wrote...I don't know if you know the collaboration Memorial Day?
N: I am aware of it, but I have not read it, actually.
A: It's a longish poem. It's kind of like a Philip...they were both influenced by Philip at the time. 1971. It's in Ted's collected poems. He was very fond of it.
N: I have that.
A: They wrote these pieces, and then they got down on the floor together and just constructed it. I watched them.
N: That’s a Philip thing.
N: There was a real sense of "No, this doesn't go here." It wasn't random, or...
A: No, no.
N: “Let's put a bunch of these here.”
A: Sometimes it was "there is that word," and then "there is that word." And all of it connects up.
N: A sense of shape and music.
A: Superficial connections often work really well.
N: I'm still thinking about this connection between poets, the light. It seems so important.
A: It's what the French call it, the 18th century French philosophers called Les Lumieres.
N: That's the word they used for poets?
A: No, they used it for philosophers, for that particular group of philosophers. The guys in the 17th century... the 18th century, the 1700’s.
N: Right, the Enlightenment guys.
A: Yes. The Enlightenment guys, Les Lumieres. Descartes was also une lumiere, I pulled the word out of that part of my brain, but I was actually seeing Ted and Phil, with their faces lit up, talking to each other. We had a little cat, and it was sitting on Phil’s lap and he was stroking this cat.
N: The light. Yes, I mean just to take you three as an example: you, Ted, and Phil, the three of you have enormous commitment to poetry as a way of life, right? Not doing anything else, even though Phil was doing Buddhism, really I think Buddhism was his way of being a poet. He didn't have a career as a Buddhist. He was still being Phil the poet.
A: Yes, but he did stop writing, when he lost his eyesight.
N: He lost his eyesight. But I often wonder whether his stopping writing had to do with losing the anguish, that pressured him into writing before.
A: No, I think he still had it. He just lost his eyesight.
N: His poems did become quieter, though, even before he lost his eyesight. That long, tremendous outpouring of stuff...
A: I heard him give a reading, later after he lost his eyesight. He couldn't read. We read together, with a couple of other people, in the big hall at St. Mark's for a symposium. I think that he brought the wrong pages or something. He had to read these pages he hadn't prepared. He couldn't see the words. He couldn't get the words out. The audience was very puzzled, but...
N: When he couldn’t see well enough to read anymore people wanted to read to him. But he never enjoyed people reading to him.
A: He gave the greatest readings. And to hear him not be able to read was quite sad. Leslie told me that he told her she wasn't reading me right.
N: When she was reading your books to him.
A: Yes, she was reading my books to him.
N: She would read them like Leslie.
A: She did everything like Leslie.
N: Yes she certainly did.
A: She only thought like Leslie.
N: There was no other way to think, right? But, anyway, just to get back to the thought of a poet who is committed to poetry as a way of life, and the importance of others with that same commitment as lights for one another. Does that thought make any sense to you?
A: Sort of, but I live in a state of total isolation now, so it doesn't make the same kind of sense to me that it used to. It used to be something I perceived a lot.
N: In people you met.
A: Yes. I don't see it much now. I don't feel focused on the poetry community. I'm focused on the world.
N: And your own work, I guess.
A: Yes, but my own work goes out to all these people that will never read it.
N: What do you mean?
A: It's for them. I write for everybody, and a lot of them are never going to read my work, but I always have the feeling that it's influencing them anyway.
N: Yes, I understand what you are saying. And you say this in the works themselves. I hear you say that.
A: Yes, but it's a kind of message I perhaps got from Phil, but it may be something you feel, being that kind of poet that you were describing.
N: Anyway, that for me, that's a very important reality.
A: That's Phil, though.
N: And that's why, like I say, you could feel that if you don't have other people you respect, who feel that way, I guess you could feel a little crazy, even though you continue. But you do have people who feel that way. You know them. Even if you don't hang out with them now, you know them...
A: Yes..
N: So that's always there, right?
A: Yes. I went into the bookstore, where I buy my newspapers, today. There is only one person here that I see every day. He's the man who sells me the newspapers. I know his name is Monsieur Abdoulaly. I don't think he knows my name. We know things about each other, and we communicate on this level where we don't say very much. He was looking at a fan magazine, like a movie magazine. I asked him what was so interesting. He paused for a long moment. Then he put his finger on this word. I saw that the word was the name of the guy in the photo. The guy in the photo - -this is a complex anecdote. The guy in the photo was the son of a man who lived in my neighborhood who was a philosopher. He was the neighborhood philosopher, although he was known throughout Paris. He died last November. He was buried on the day of the November 13th terrorist attacks. The photo was of his son, whose name is, perhaps, Leo? He was dating a known actress! [laughs] That's why his picture was there, and that's why Monsieur Abdoulaly was looking at it! He knew his father as the philosophe who came into the bookstore. I would see him walking around in the neighborhood. It was very, very sweet. It's a very, very nice thing. He wasn't just reading a movie magazine! He was following the progress of the son of a philosopher!
N: So, you don't talk to people? You don't have people you see regularly and speak to?
A: Not anymore. There just aren't that many people who come through. I don't seem to have made any close friendships in the French poetry world. I don't seem to have any friends, any close friends.
N: When I read these great works of yours of the last ten or fifteen years, i think of you sitting alone writing all day long, day after day.
A: Like anyone else, I can only write for about an hour a day.
N: Is that right?
A: Yeah. Today I wrote for about an hour and a half. I have been writing things that seem to require more time. I seem to write every single day now. I'm afraid I'm writing too much, but I can't not write.
N: That does become a problem, because you begin to be in competition with yourself. They can't read the last book of yours, because the new one just came out. That happens. I have too many things going on, and you feel a little embarrassed — at least I do. Oh, another book came out. That's embarrassing. [Laughter]
A: I don't know what to say about it. That book, Culture of One...
N: What year was that written?
A: It was written in 2007, I think.
N: 2007.
A: Yes.
N: Seven years ago...Eight years ago.
A: It was written...eight years ago. I think that's correct. I think it may have taken about a year, but I'm not sure anymore.
N: I enjoyed it. It’s fabulous. It's written in a very lucid and easy style, so you can read right along. It does read like a novel, even though you don't know what's going on.
A: It's meant to be like a novel, but then I didn't plan it, or anything like that. There was no plan. There was this thing that always happens to me, but it's not going to happen anymore, where I would write about Needles, and everything would become really clear. It would be like it was taking place in desert light. Ted kind of identified that quality for me. I had some poems early on...these desert poems. Words just came out differently, a kind of light. That happened with Culture of One. I was always in that light while I was writing.
N: Was the character Marie an actual person? I had the idea she was.
A: Marie is a real person, but the things she does are like me, rather than like...There was a real person, Marie. She lived at the dump. She had a lot of dogs, and she would go into town. The dump was here. (gestures) Then you had to walk past the cemetery, and then you would go to Leroy's store...
N: Leroy was a real person?
A: Leroy was real. He really was a pathological liar. …. so she’d walk past the cemetery then she would go and get stuff from Leroy. And his wife was real. Ruby was real. When I was little, I would see Marie walking around with her dogs. There are a couple of poems where I talk about my mother and her friend Bernice, and the things they told me about Marie when I was writing the book. I wanted to do...
N: While you were writing the book...
A: While I was writing the book...they told me, because I remembered things about her. Bernice used to give her rides, and she told Bernice that she was happy being who she was. That was the new information. That was really new information! I thought she was like a bag lady. I wasn't sure. I was really happy to find that out. Leroy's children are still alive, and I'm always afraid they'll read this book. Leroy and Marie never slept together. That was completely invented! The rock star Eve Love is actually based on Charles Schultz the cartoonist! He lived in Needles once for a couple of years.
N: When you were a kid?
A: No, it was way before that, when he was a kid. He went to the 8th grade in Needles. I don't know if you ever read Peanuts.
N: A little bit.
A: There's a dog who lives in Needles whose cousin is Snoopy. So Needles is in the comic strip. Charles Schultz is the most famous person ever to have passed through Needles. When my mother was working at the Needles' Museum…At a certain point they formed a Needles Museum. I got from my editor at Penguin Schultz's address. They wrote to Schultz, and they got this cartoon frame. You know, they made this contact.
N: It's hard to see Eve Love as Charles Schultz, but I'll take your word for it.
A: She's a punk singer, like this one who is playing (music playing in cafe as we record), whoever the fuck this is.
N: This thought of being a culture of one, being complete yourself, in your work, in your world, in the face of a really crazy and destructive world, that it is pretty much intolerable – I can relate to that. That's what I found essential about the book.
A: How do you like my portrayal of Tara?
N: Yeah, I noticed that. And that was partly why I asked you about Phil and Phil's Buddhism. That was important.
A: That was his Tara poem.
N: David did a beautiful calligraphy of it.
A: It's called "Tara." « This goddess., this something…”
N: I can't remember how it goes, but David...there is a beautiful calligraphy, that for years hung on the Zen Center's wall. A broadside...no, no it wasn't David. It was Phil's own calligraphy reproduced. But, yeah, I was impressed by your portrayal of Tara. It was interesting, because the goddess of mercy, with all of her arms, appears and intervenes, but isn't a savior. She doesn't save anybody, can't save everybody.
A: No, no. She just takes on everybody, and then Tara just gets sick of it. It's disgusting.
N: Yeah, but she keeps taking it on.
A: She goes away first, though. She goes away. She leaves after the dog dies. She leaves her statue. She wanders and then she comes back.
N: But she is not the heroine by any means. Yet she's there providing mercy, and she takes in an enormous amount of suffering.
A: I go to the Musee Guimet here a lot. They did have, but I have not seen it up for years and years, this very famous statue of Kwan Yin, I think. I think the statue has a Chinese name. Many arms. It's a feat making all the arms stay attached to the torso. I thought about that statue a lot while I was writing this book.
N: There was one line in there like, "Buddha can't help," or "He's incapable of helping." Or something like that. I wrote down a lot of phrases and stanzas from the poem that I thought were, just all by themselves, eloquently expressive of some of the things I feel. Yeah, I loved it. It was good. Unfortunately, I was reading it in fits and starts. I wasn't able to have continuity with it the way I wanted.
A: You don't necessarily need that.
N: No, I figured that. With all the other narrative poems, I found a strong narrative line, yet they’re improvised. There ’s no resolution. There's no climax and denouement. It was interesting that in The Descent of Alette there is a very unusual, yet classical, confrontation with the bad guy. Not in a fight. I remember something about a garden. She disappears into a garden and becomes a plant?
A: He becomes a plant. She kills him. I'm coming to San Francisco to read it all.
N: I didn't know that. When are you coming.
A: In November. I am going to read it over two nights...
N: Do you know the date? I'll write it down.
A: It will happen November 14th and 15th.
N: I am going to write that down.
N: In this one — to get back to the Culture of One …there’s a confrontation with the satanist girl.
A: There is a satanist girl, but she's not bad. But the other girls are bad. I hung out with some girls like that once. It's based on my own high school experience. I had a dog that was killed by someone feeding glass to it, like in the book. When I was very, very young, we had a dog who was killed that way.
N: Terrible! Let me see if I have anything else I might have had burning questions about.
A: Somehow we have covered a lot in not a lot of time.
N: It didn't take as long as I thought it would take.
A: We both know Phil.
N: We know Phil. I always feel like knowing Phil and having him be important to us is a point of connection, which I also felt with Leslie, who felt the same way about Phil. I am not aware that there are others.
A: David Schneider. I'm connected with David.
N: I mean people who are functioning mostly as poets.
A: Steve Carey. Steve Carey was connected. And Keith Abbott. And Pat Nolan. I have a connection with Michael McClure that wouldn't exist if it weren't for Phil. Every once in a while I connect with him. He's a very shy person. He did once come and hear me read. He talked to me, and the reason he talked to me was because he was worried about Phil.
N: Philip was sick.
A: It was toward the beginning of the bedridden period. Nobody knew if he was going to get up again. Michael was really worried, and he needed to see somebody else who had the Phil connection. He was really worried.
N: Phil is very present in my life. A lot of times I will be writing, and a phrase, or his name will come into the poem, as if he were talking to me, or as if he was there in some way.
A: There was a time he went to...he came to New York, gave a few readings, and he did something at Stevens Tech, and that was when Ed met him. Ed Foster. There is a photo that Ed took of me and Phil and Simon Pettet.
[The photo is reproduced at the end of this interview.]
Simon Pettet was kind of part of the circle of people close to Phil, but not totally close to Phil, but part of the the back and forth, you know. Anne...Anne had an early connection to him that was quite profound. Anne Waldman.
N: For me, of course, the Buddhism part was important. Because there is no question in my mind that I would never have been able to be at Zen Center if it weren't for Philip.
A: What year did you go there? When did you meet Phil?
N: At Iowa, although I was in the fiction department, I hung out with the poets and was enormously influenced by Ted. But it was actually one of my fiction teachers who gave me On Bear’s Head.
A: Who was that?
N: Robert Boles, an African American novelist.
A: I remember him.
N: I don't know what happened to him. I haven't heard a thing about him.
A: I can't remember much about my time there. I went there as a fiction writer.
N: So did I.
A: Did you change? I changed.
N: No, I didn't change.
A: I changed, and I got a double degree. My degree is in fiction and poetry.
N: Really? I didn't know that. I stayed in fiction, though I was more influenced by the poets than the fiction writers. My social world was the poets. The fiction scene was horrible. I was confused by it. I had no connection,it was totally commercialized, everyone looking for an agent. I was interested in an idealistic writing community, which I thought I’d find at Iowa, so the fiction guys were completely not my cup of tea. But the poets were.
A: Yes, it was all about having an agent. What happened to me was that the first month I was there, I met these poets. It had never occurred to me to be a poet, and I saw then that was what I was. But I was still writing stories, and I have this story writer’s imagination...
N: Yeah, that comes out in these poems.
A: All my best stories were about Needles.
N: Anyway Robert Boles gave me On Bear’s Head and I was thunderstruck by it. I had never read anything remotely like it. Phil became my total hero. I read it over and over and over again. And then one day in the early '70's, maybe 1971, or something like that, I knocked on the door of the Zen Center.
A: You were in San Francisco?
N: I was in San Francisco. I moved to San Francisco after Iowa in the spring of 1970. I knocked on the door of the Zen Center, and Philip opened the door. I knew completely who he was, because...
A: He’s unmistakable.
N ...his books always featured a big photo, with his big, red-haired beard and all that, so his look was unmistakable...
A: He still had...
N: He still had the beard, yeah. So when he opened the door, I knew immediately who he was, and I was totally shocked and amazed. And then we had a lot to do with each other over those years. He got ordained, and when I saw him, I thought, "Well..." because I was interested in the practice, the meditation, but the last thing in the world I would have thought to do would be to become a member of the community and do all the things that were mandated by the community. But when I saw him doing it, I thought...
A: If he could do it.
N: I thought if he could do it, I could do it, but I never would have done it in a million years otherwise. But then, Baker, more or less, required me to be ordained as a priest. Because Phil had preceded me in that, I went ahead and did it, and I figured I could still be a poet as he was. So that was enormously important to me. The Buddhism in his poetry was really really important, in the way that the two combined and made sense together.
A: "We seldom treat ourselves right." That's the last line...
N: Yes, that's the last line of the Tara poem. His poems often express a simple kindness in the end. There is a lot of chaos and pain, and then Why don't we treat ourselves better? Why don't we just love one another?
A: I really liked...I was very influenced by those garbage-y poems.
N: Do you mean the ones with everything and anything in them?
A: Yeah. One was my favorite, and I can't remember the name anymore. It is sort of around in here “Monday in the Evening.” Ted liked “Monday in the Evening” a lot. "The Best of It." Steve...
N: "The Best of It” is my favorite… “Worry walk/No thought appears” something like that.
A: "My Songs Induce Prophetic Visions,” which I read aloud and sent to San Francisco to be played as a tape for a reading celebration. It was his and Michael McClure's birthday. I guess they both have the same birth date. There was a big reading for them.
N: In March, I think.
A: No, October. He's October 20th.
N: October, that's right. Something was in March. I don't remember.
A: It's this poem which is full of all these lists, menus, quotations about Yeats and stuff like that. It just sums up by saying, Well, this is what I'm like. This is how it is to be a poet. But it's so much fun! I just had so much fun.
N: Yes, that’s it. Just exiting and having some fun. Some of the poems are very clearly that, he's sort of crashing around somebody's house where he’s house-sitting, and he's going out to get something to eat and reading some books and listening to opera.
A: “ ‘Just exactly how much damage have you suffered?’ is an example of a perfect English alexandrine”
N: That's from...
A: An example of a perfect alexandrine. "Just exactly how much damage have you suffered?" Every once in a while, that line goes through my head, and I pause and say it.
N: "Just exactly how much damage have you suffered?" [laughter]
A: He was very...he loved Anselm and Edmund, and he referred to them as "the young gentlemen.” He came and stayed with us again in Chicago in 1974 or 1975. Anselm was a little boy, and he would shave his skull. Anselm would go and watch him. Watch him shave. When we moved to New York, we took Anselm to a barber for his first official haircut. The barber said, "How would you like your hair cut?" He said, "Like Philip Whalen."
N: Did the barber do it?
A: No. I said, "No you don't. You don't want that." He said, "I want that!"
N: He was wonderful with our kids too. He liked kids, even though he didn't have much patience for them. In small doses, I think, he did love them.
A: He liked families. He was wistful that he wasn't in one.
N: He was, but I think that was never going to be the case with him. He too much needed to be on his own.
A: His own family was blasted apart when he was young. His mother died when he was twelve. His father was a traveling salesman. Somehow they weren't cohesive.
N: He doted on his mother...
A: He loved his mother. He had Platonic love affairs with all of us women. because he missed his Mom.
N: I think so. He seemed to be very, more than most of the male poets, who couldn't have decent relationships with women, he seemed to have really nice relationships with a lot of younger women poets.
N: Shall we stop?
A: Yes, let's stop. Joanne.
N: Joanne, of course — more than Platonic, or aspiring to that. And Anne and Leslie and you. Somehow I think he made you feel respected because he really did respect you, he wasn’t patronizing, as was usually not the case with older male poets.
A: With the older poets…it was very difficult with them.
N: So he was unusual in that respect. What else?
A: What else? That may be it. I think it has a nice shape.
N: Yeah, good. Probably a certain amount of extraneous stuff, but we'll see.
A: Probably not very much.
An Interview by Norman Fischer
Transcribed 9/8/16 by Barbara Byrum
Alice = A Norman = N
N: Okay, now it’s recording. And now this one is recording, so we’re on with both machines.
A: Oh, okay. Let’s figure out if we can say anything.
N: I have questions. But we can start anywhere you want to start.
A: I haven’t given it a moment’s thought.
N: How about starting with: when did you first meet Philip? How did that all work out?
A: I was living in the Bay Area with Ted in 1971. I first connected with him . . . but I don’t think I met him at that point. But I heard him read Scenes of Life at the Capital.
N: So by 1971 you knew Phil’s work?
A: I guess I must have gotten to know the work when I got to know Ted. Ted had all of Phil’s books up to that point. He left all his books at Iowa City in this room – what was the name of that building – EPB — maybe his office there.
N : EPB, right.
A: He left all his books at the EPB in his room, and he gave me the key, and I would go into his room and get all his books and read them. I read Philip that way.
N: That was when you were introduced to Philip?
A: I think so. And then I got a copy of On Bear’s Head in New York subsequently. When Ted and I were separated. I read On Bear’s Head. Then when we went to San Francisco in ’71, and we lived with Lewis Warsh, and Phil gave a reading with Allen. Allen read first for 45 minutes, there was a break, and then Phil read all Scenes of Life at the Capital. All of it. A lot of people walked out. But I was just amazed by it. I loved the whole thing. I was impressed.
N: Yeah it is pretty impressive.
N: And then that fall we moved to Bolinas…
N: Phil was there too.
A: Living in Bolinas, and I had some conversations with him. He was very nice. But I really got to know him when he came to Chicago in maybe March of ’72? February, March, or was it earlier? No, it was late ’72. He came after Anselm was born and stayed in our house for a week.
N: That must have been great. This was during a visit to the University?
A: He was just about to become a Buddhist monk. He was just doing the stuff, and I had seen him with his hair, and I think at that point, he might still have had his hair at that point. He was learning to sew his robes, and he told us everything he was doing. I went to all of his readings. He read all over the city. We became very close quite quickly.
N: In that week?
A: In that week. He and Ted had already connected.
N: Do you remember how Ted connected with him, or what Ted saw in his work, or how they met?
A: Ted was quite influenced by him. You know, I could show you the poems. They’re poems after Tambourine Life, but they have asterisks in them. The poems in which he makes the mind jumps that Phil makes. But they are terser, because Ted was from New England. But it’s the same use of space, you know. You say a thing, and then you give yourself permission to go over here, and then more time goes by, and then you give yourself permission to go over there. And you say something that seems irrelevant, and then finally you say something that pulls it all together.
N: Yes That was Phil’s characteristic method and invention.
A: That was Phil. Ted saw what Phil was doing and used it. I kind of took the same lesson myself. But I took another lesson too, which was from Scenes of Life at the Capital, where I learned how to write…I think I learned how to write a long poem from that poem. But I didn’t really use it for years and years. I kept sort of trying… not having it happen. Then it finally happened. But what he does is so seamless. The way he…there are no transitions in it. It’s kind of an amazing long poem in that way, and he doesn’t do the space trip.
N: In that poem, right, he doesn’t do that, it just chugs along.
A: Space as continuous substance. And at the end he makes a point.
N: You mean that all the works you’ve been writing, for I don’t know how many years now, twenty some years, the long semi-narrative works, were inspired by Scenes of Life?
A: No, I don’t mean anything like that. I had so many inspirations, so many people inspired me. I am only inspired by myself now. It's been that way for a long time, but I learned something essential from Phil, particularly from that poem.
N: So, yes, what are the lessons, what are the things you took away from Phil, for your own work.
A: I took away a lot from Phil. I took away the sound of the western voice. Although he was from the Northwest, and I was from the Southwest, we were both westerners. Our approach to speech was similar, and our approach to how you could present it on the page, and how you could make it be in a poem was similar. In the east they tend to speak more in complete sentences. Phil and I opened out our sentences. We both did that kind of thing.
N: That was an issue in those days. I remember that too. It impressed me. The east and the west. Gary and Phil were very self-consciously westerners and wanted to write out of that spirit, which they saw as different from the east where most of the writing had been coming from. Allen and Kerouac were both easterners.
A: I don’t think Phil could have helped it, could have done anything else. Allen was somehow both. Allen and Kerouac were both coasts at the same time, although Allen was always a New York, New Jersey Jew, but he was just so big. Kerouac would confuse the two coasts, like he did in The Subterraneans, where he set what happened in New York in San Francisco, and he would make the jumping from coast to coast into this thing.
N: And what else: western voice and what else?
A: Making the page be beautiful, if possible. Having fun, although Ted had a lot of fun. Putting down whatever you wanted to on the page. The problem with being influenced by Phil was it was obvious. A lot of the early work I did that was influenced by him has never been published, because it was too imitative. I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn't want it to be so obvious.
N: When I first read Phil, I was pretty thunderstruck. I had never seen anybody give themselves that much permission to be free in a poem. I had been struggling to write and failing miserably and suddenly I saw I didn’t have to struggle, push so much. His work was instant liberation for me. It seemed like you could do anything.
A: But he was also very disciplined. And he...everybody always accused him of being...what was that? Self-indulgent. He was always accused of being self-indulgent, and every single person on both coasts said he was, but he was actually very disciplined. He was very disciplined musically. He was always following musical paces, keeping musical scores in his head. And the music of the spaces in his poems is often quite strict as well. I think I responded to that too, because I had some musical training. I could hear it, although I didn't know how to talk about it very well.
N: What about his Buddhism? Did he talk to you about that over the years, and what did you think about that in relation to his work?
A: I never thought about it. We never talked about it. We had one conversation once, right after Ted died, where I told him I needed to take a vow to go on. I asked him if there was a vow to go on, and he said there was only one vow in Zen, the Bodhisattva vow, and he told me what it was, and I kind of took that vow in my head.
N: Somehow I remember this. How do I know this? He told us? He wrote about it?
A: I told it to you, I told it to David Schneider maybe. Somebody's written it down.
N: Yes now I remember. You told me at David and Carol’s place in San Francisco after Ted died. I remember I was listening to a Beethoven quartet on the radio in the car when I came to see you. I remember I said something really stupid and not very consoling. Somebody’s written it down somewhere.
A: I don't know where. It's the only thing I remember, the only contact with Phil having to do with Buddhism.
N: Yes typically he wasn't talking about Buddhism a lot. I don’t talk about it too much either.
A: We weren't interested in talking about Buddhism. We talked about food. We talked about gossip. We talked about the kids. We did a lot of gossip.
N: Talked about poetry?
A: Probably, but I don't remember him telling me anything. It was more like we were really friends, and so we didn't have to do anything but hang out. I had no curiosity about his Buddhism. I went out to dinner with him and Joanne and some other people, and they were all Buddhists. I was in San Francisco about a month after Ted died. That's when all that stuff happened, where I talked to him about the vow. Somebody said that Ted was in the Bardo. I was so annoyed. [Laughter] I knew he wasn't in any fucking bardo!
N: Where was he?
A: I don’t know!
N: But not there.
A: He wasn't in some place they could name and know. I still remember that with some annoyance, even though I loved all the people. Phil and I never talked about that kind of thing. We talked about food and recipes.
N: People talk now about mentors — an older person, in an older generation, I don't know what they are supposed to do for you, but somehow they do something. Does that make any sense to you? Was Philip in that relation to you? He was just a friend, like a million other friends that were important to you? Or was there some mentoring element to the friendship.
A: No, I used him as a different kind of spiritual mentor. There was a time when I was totally anguished. I had a very severe post-partum depression. I was having a lot of problems handling it, although Ted knew about it, and I talked to Ted about it all the time. He told me to write to Phil. And I wrote to Phil, and he wrote me back. This really wonderful letter.
N: You have that somewhere probably?
A: No, I kept it for years, and then it started to fall apart, and then I realized that I didn't need it anymore. I sold it. I could just ask him in a straightforward way what to do about feeling a certain way, and he would write back to me and tell me what his experience was of this. It had nothing to do with poetry or Buddhism.
N: And it helped.
A: It helped. It helped, yes.
N:I think it was in David's book that I learned —because I hadn’t known this — that Phil served as that kind of friend to a lot of his friends, a lot of his contemporaries. He was the confessor and the forgiver, or whatever you want to call it. Somebody that they would go to in that kind of situation.
A: Yes, though Philip was in anguish all the time himself!
N: Right. Even though he was in anguish all the time, still he served in that function for several people.
A: He was...I don't know...there was a community of lights, and he was one of the lights. I became one of the lights and Ted was. So if we were together, we were kind of lit up together. Nothing bad happened. At the end of Ted's life, he was kind of having troubles; he was kind of a pariah.
N: Ted was?
A: Ted was.
N: Why was that?
A: That would be too complicated.
N: Okay. Some things happened...
A: People didn't know how, in what kind of shape he was. And Phil came to town, and he just came over, and he sat down, and Ted sat down, and I was sitting over here watching. It was just all light.
N: It took away the pain? My experience is that there is something unusual or special about poets recognizing one another, and supporting each other, that your emotion in saying what you just said, makes me think of that, that there was something...there really is light, lights.
A: Yes. There were some people who were being really, really mean.
N: Yes, that, of course, happens too...
A: Really, really mean people in the community all the time.
N: There is always that. But there are also lights.
A: There are lights.
N: There are people who love each other, despite not even seeing each other that often. There is a connection that Phil had...
A: He was one of the people we could always make the connection with. Eddy talks about this sometimes, because he was used to people like Anselm Hollo, who he might not see for two years, and suddenly it was all right there.
N: Yes, Anselm was always jolly and bright. It was always a joy to be with him.
A: Yes, suddenly there aren’t that many people, it doesn't feel like light, anymore; a lot of people have died.
N: Do you think this light we’re talking about is not as much a part of the community as it once was? Who knows? We can't tell, really. But what do you think? Has the community changed?
A: Yes I think this isn’t there anymore. Because of the way poets are formed at the moment. They aren’t formed through their own writing and what happens to them, so that they arrive at a place of light. Out of suffering, usually. Now they're formed by schools. It's not correct.
N: Yes, it's a bad word, but it's almost like there is a spiritual connection, or the approach to poetry itself is spiritual. Spiritual isn’t the word. But careerism is the opposite of whatever it is we’re talking about.
A: I am so influenced by this book (Alice points to copy on the table) Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head, which I read about fifteen times! But I wouldn't know how to talk about it.
N: It’s a roman a clef, like You Didn’t Even Try.
A: Well his characters are composites of people that he knew. In this one, Clifford is more or less Gary, Then Roy who seems...
N: Roy is Phillip, it seems.
A: But, but Philip is actually basing Roy on Robert Duncan. So when I read it, it is straight Philip to me. But he's projecting Duncan onto himself in some way. It's like... I mean, he said it was. The Joanne character is Joanne.
N: What did you get out of this one that was important?
A: I don't know. Pleasure. Just pleasure.
N: I love the novels. People don't read them anymore.
A: No, no. David told me he didn't like them very much.
N: I read them recently. Laynie Browne asked me to write an essay on poets' prose, and I chose those two novels and re-read them and wrote a long essay. I loved reading them again. They were great.
A: This book is sheer pleasure. I think this is one of the things you get from Phil's poetry as well, that sense of pleasure. That's all you need from poetry, but that it's really hard to give it.
N: It is.
A: I think it's the hardest thing to give to the reader.
N: It is. It is. It seems to me that now a lot of poets feel an obligation to reflect the pain of the world all around us, so you read their work, and you feel that, rather than the pleasure and the transcendence that you could feel from a poem, even if it does reflect the world’s pain. Because your poetry certainly does contain a world of pain, yet it's a pleasure to read. It doesn't make you despairing over how fucked up the world is. It makes you feel lifted up.
A: The words...
N: Themselves...
A: Themselves, make it good, and the language, it comes out of my body, and...
N: And to me there's redemption in the language itself, when you get that deeply into the language. You feel lifted out of it as you write, it seems, and the reader feels that too.
A: Phil was always putting it down on the page with those pens. It's kind of a double, triple pleasure that he got out of it.
N: That's right.
A: By doing that.
N: That's right. And once...we lived together, Philip and I, at Tassajara. We were there with our kids when he was there. And one time — I can't remember which book it was of his — but I helped him put together one of his books. I was amazed by the way he did it. He would snip pages out of his journals, and he spread them all over the floor, and he would say, "This goes with that, and that goes with this," so he actually wasn't writing those things that..the jumps were actually jumps, because they were often written in wildly different time frames and moods.
A: I mean the long ones. But in the short ones.
N: The long ones.
A: But sometimes in the short ones, too, he would date the little snippets...
N: The little snippets.
A: Yeah. I saw Anne and Ted together once, when I was very young. They wrote...I don't know if you know the collaboration Memorial Day?
N: I am aware of it, but I have not read it, actually.
A: It's a longish poem. It's kind of like a Philip...they were both influenced by Philip at the time. 1971. It's in Ted's collected poems. He was very fond of it.
N: I have that.
A: They wrote these pieces, and then they got down on the floor together and just constructed it. I watched them.
N: That’s a Philip thing.
N: There was a real sense of "No, this doesn't go here." It wasn't random, or...
A: No, no.
N: “Let's put a bunch of these here.”
A: Sometimes it was "there is that word," and then "there is that word." And all of it connects up.
N: A sense of shape and music.
A: Superficial connections often work really well.
N: I'm still thinking about this connection between poets, the light. It seems so important.
A: It's what the French call it, the 18th century French philosophers called Les Lumieres.
N: That's the word they used for poets?
A: No, they used it for philosophers, for that particular group of philosophers. The guys in the 17th century... the 18th century, the 1700’s.
N: Right, the Enlightenment guys.
A: Yes. The Enlightenment guys, Les Lumieres. Descartes was also une lumiere, I pulled the word out of that part of my brain, but I was actually seeing Ted and Phil, with their faces lit up, talking to each other. We had a little cat, and it was sitting on Phil’s lap and he was stroking this cat.
N: The light. Yes, I mean just to take you three as an example: you, Ted, and Phil, the three of you have enormous commitment to poetry as a way of life, right? Not doing anything else, even though Phil was doing Buddhism, really I think Buddhism was his way of being a poet. He didn't have a career as a Buddhist. He was still being Phil the poet.
A: Yes, but he did stop writing, when he lost his eyesight.
N: He lost his eyesight. But I often wonder whether his stopping writing had to do with losing the anguish, that pressured him into writing before.
A: No, I think he still had it. He just lost his eyesight.
N: His poems did become quieter, though, even before he lost his eyesight. That long, tremendous outpouring of stuff...
A: I heard him give a reading, later after he lost his eyesight. He couldn't read. We read together, with a couple of other people, in the big hall at St. Mark's for a symposium. I think that he brought the wrong pages or something. He had to read these pages he hadn't prepared. He couldn't see the words. He couldn't get the words out. The audience was very puzzled, but...
N: When he couldn’t see well enough to read anymore people wanted to read to him. But he never enjoyed people reading to him.
A: He gave the greatest readings. And to hear him not be able to read was quite sad. Leslie told me that he told her she wasn't reading me right.
N: When she was reading your books to him.
A: Yes, she was reading my books to him.
N: She would read them like Leslie.
A: She did everything like Leslie.
N: Yes she certainly did.
A: She only thought like Leslie.
N: There was no other way to think, right? But, anyway, just to get back to the thought of a poet who is committed to poetry as a way of life, and the importance of others with that same commitment as lights for one another. Does that thought make any sense to you?
A: Sort of, but I live in a state of total isolation now, so it doesn't make the same kind of sense to me that it used to. It used to be something I perceived a lot.
N: In people you met.
A: Yes. I don't see it much now. I don't feel focused on the poetry community. I'm focused on the world.
N: And your own work, I guess.
A: Yes, but my own work goes out to all these people that will never read it.
N: What do you mean?
A: It's for them. I write for everybody, and a lot of them are never going to read my work, but I always have the feeling that it's influencing them anyway.
N: Yes, I understand what you are saying. And you say this in the works themselves. I hear you say that.
A: Yes, but it's a kind of message I perhaps got from Phil, but it may be something you feel, being that kind of poet that you were describing.
N: Anyway, that for me, that's a very important reality.
A: That's Phil, though.
N: And that's why, like I say, you could feel that if you don't have other people you respect, who feel that way, I guess you could feel a little crazy, even though you continue. But you do have people who feel that way. You know them. Even if you don't hang out with them now, you know them...
A: Yes..
N: So that's always there, right?
A: Yes. I went into the bookstore, where I buy my newspapers, today. There is only one person here that I see every day. He's the man who sells me the newspapers. I know his name is Monsieur Abdoulaly. I don't think he knows my name. We know things about each other, and we communicate on this level where we don't say very much. He was looking at a fan magazine, like a movie magazine. I asked him what was so interesting. He paused for a long moment. Then he put his finger on this word. I saw that the word was the name of the guy in the photo. The guy in the photo - -this is a complex anecdote. The guy in the photo was the son of a man who lived in my neighborhood who was a philosopher. He was the neighborhood philosopher, although he was known throughout Paris. He died last November. He was buried on the day of the November 13th terrorist attacks. The photo was of his son, whose name is, perhaps, Leo? He was dating a known actress! [laughs] That's why his picture was there, and that's why Monsieur Abdoulaly was looking at it! He knew his father as the philosophe who came into the bookstore. I would see him walking around in the neighborhood. It was very, very sweet. It's a very, very nice thing. He wasn't just reading a movie magazine! He was following the progress of the son of a philosopher!
N: So, you don't talk to people? You don't have people you see regularly and speak to?
A: Not anymore. There just aren't that many people who come through. I don't seem to have made any close friendships in the French poetry world. I don't seem to have any friends, any close friends.
N: When I read these great works of yours of the last ten or fifteen years, i think of you sitting alone writing all day long, day after day.
A: Like anyone else, I can only write for about an hour a day.
N: Is that right?
A: Yeah. Today I wrote for about an hour and a half. I have been writing things that seem to require more time. I seem to write every single day now. I'm afraid I'm writing too much, but I can't not write.
N: That does become a problem, because you begin to be in competition with yourself. They can't read the last book of yours, because the new one just came out. That happens. I have too many things going on, and you feel a little embarrassed — at least I do. Oh, another book came out. That's embarrassing. [Laughter]
A: I don't know what to say about it. That book, Culture of One...
N: What year was that written?
A: It was written in 2007, I think.
N: 2007.
A: Yes.
N: Seven years ago...Eight years ago.
A: It was written...eight years ago. I think that's correct. I think it may have taken about a year, but I'm not sure anymore.
N: I enjoyed it. It’s fabulous. It's written in a very lucid and easy style, so you can read right along. It does read like a novel, even though you don't know what's going on.
A: It's meant to be like a novel, but then I didn't plan it, or anything like that. There was no plan. There was this thing that always happens to me, but it's not going to happen anymore, where I would write about Needles, and everything would become really clear. It would be like it was taking place in desert light. Ted kind of identified that quality for me. I had some poems early on...these desert poems. Words just came out differently, a kind of light. That happened with Culture of One. I was always in that light while I was writing.
N: Was the character Marie an actual person? I had the idea she was.
A: Marie is a real person, but the things she does are like me, rather than like...There was a real person, Marie. She lived at the dump. She had a lot of dogs, and she would go into town. The dump was here. (gestures) Then you had to walk past the cemetery, and then you would go to Leroy's store...
N: Leroy was a real person?
A: Leroy was real. He really was a pathological liar. …. so she’d walk past the cemetery then she would go and get stuff from Leroy. And his wife was real. Ruby was real. When I was little, I would see Marie walking around with her dogs. There are a couple of poems where I talk about my mother and her friend Bernice, and the things they told me about Marie when I was writing the book. I wanted to do...
N: While you were writing the book...
A: While I was writing the book...they told me, because I remembered things about her. Bernice used to give her rides, and she told Bernice that she was happy being who she was. That was the new information. That was really new information! I thought she was like a bag lady. I wasn't sure. I was really happy to find that out. Leroy's children are still alive, and I'm always afraid they'll read this book. Leroy and Marie never slept together. That was completely invented! The rock star Eve Love is actually based on Charles Schultz the cartoonist! He lived in Needles once for a couple of years.
N: When you were a kid?
A: No, it was way before that, when he was a kid. He went to the 8th grade in Needles. I don't know if you ever read Peanuts.
N: A little bit.
A: There's a dog who lives in Needles whose cousin is Snoopy. So Needles is in the comic strip. Charles Schultz is the most famous person ever to have passed through Needles. When my mother was working at the Needles' Museum…At a certain point they formed a Needles Museum. I got from my editor at Penguin Schultz's address. They wrote to Schultz, and they got this cartoon frame. You know, they made this contact.
N: It's hard to see Eve Love as Charles Schultz, but I'll take your word for it.
A: She's a punk singer, like this one who is playing (music playing in cafe as we record), whoever the fuck this is.
N: This thought of being a culture of one, being complete yourself, in your work, in your world, in the face of a really crazy and destructive world, that it is pretty much intolerable – I can relate to that. That's what I found essential about the book.
A: How do you like my portrayal of Tara?
N: Yeah, I noticed that. And that was partly why I asked you about Phil and Phil's Buddhism. That was important.
A: That was his Tara poem.
N: David did a beautiful calligraphy of it.
A: It's called "Tara." « This goddess., this something…”
N: I can't remember how it goes, but David...there is a beautiful calligraphy, that for years hung on the Zen Center's wall. A broadside...no, no it wasn't David. It was Phil's own calligraphy reproduced. But, yeah, I was impressed by your portrayal of Tara. It was interesting, because the goddess of mercy, with all of her arms, appears and intervenes, but isn't a savior. She doesn't save anybody, can't save everybody.
A: No, no. She just takes on everybody, and then Tara just gets sick of it. It's disgusting.
N: Yeah, but she keeps taking it on.
A: She goes away first, though. She goes away. She leaves after the dog dies. She leaves her statue. She wanders and then she comes back.
N: But she is not the heroine by any means. Yet she's there providing mercy, and she takes in an enormous amount of suffering.
A: I go to the Musee Guimet here a lot. They did have, but I have not seen it up for years and years, this very famous statue of Kwan Yin, I think. I think the statue has a Chinese name. Many arms. It's a feat making all the arms stay attached to the torso. I thought about that statue a lot while I was writing this book.
N: There was one line in there like, "Buddha can't help," or "He's incapable of helping." Or something like that. I wrote down a lot of phrases and stanzas from the poem that I thought were, just all by themselves, eloquently expressive of some of the things I feel. Yeah, I loved it. It was good. Unfortunately, I was reading it in fits and starts. I wasn't able to have continuity with it the way I wanted.
A: You don't necessarily need that.
N: No, I figured that. With all the other narrative poems, I found a strong narrative line, yet they’re improvised. There ’s no resolution. There's no climax and denouement. It was interesting that in The Descent of Alette there is a very unusual, yet classical, confrontation with the bad guy. Not in a fight. I remember something about a garden. She disappears into a garden and becomes a plant?
A: He becomes a plant. She kills him. I'm coming to San Francisco to read it all.
N: I didn't know that. When are you coming.
A: In November. I am going to read it over two nights...
N: Do you know the date? I'll write it down.
A: It will happen November 14th and 15th.
N: I am going to write that down.
N: In this one — to get back to the Culture of One …there’s a confrontation with the satanist girl.
A: There is a satanist girl, but she's not bad. But the other girls are bad. I hung out with some girls like that once. It's based on my own high school experience. I had a dog that was killed by someone feeding glass to it, like in the book. When I was very, very young, we had a dog who was killed that way.
N: Terrible! Let me see if I have anything else I might have had burning questions about.
A: Somehow we have covered a lot in not a lot of time.
N: It didn't take as long as I thought it would take.
A: We both know Phil.
N: We know Phil. I always feel like knowing Phil and having him be important to us is a point of connection, which I also felt with Leslie, who felt the same way about Phil. I am not aware that there are others.
A: David Schneider. I'm connected with David.
N: I mean people who are functioning mostly as poets.
A: Steve Carey. Steve Carey was connected. And Keith Abbott. And Pat Nolan. I have a connection with Michael McClure that wouldn't exist if it weren't for Phil. Every once in a while I connect with him. He's a very shy person. He did once come and hear me read. He talked to me, and the reason he talked to me was because he was worried about Phil.
N: Philip was sick.
A: It was toward the beginning of the bedridden period. Nobody knew if he was going to get up again. Michael was really worried, and he needed to see somebody else who had the Phil connection. He was really worried.
N: Phil is very present in my life. A lot of times I will be writing, and a phrase, or his name will come into the poem, as if he were talking to me, or as if he was there in some way.
A: There was a time he went to...he came to New York, gave a few readings, and he did something at Stevens Tech, and that was when Ed met him. Ed Foster. There is a photo that Ed took of me and Phil and Simon Pettet.
[The photo is reproduced at the end of this interview.]
Simon Pettet was kind of part of the circle of people close to Phil, but not totally close to Phil, but part of the the back and forth, you know. Anne...Anne had an early connection to him that was quite profound. Anne Waldman.
N: For me, of course, the Buddhism part was important. Because there is no question in my mind that I would never have been able to be at Zen Center if it weren't for Philip.
A: What year did you go there? When did you meet Phil?
N: At Iowa, although I was in the fiction department, I hung out with the poets and was enormously influenced by Ted. But it was actually one of my fiction teachers who gave me On Bear’s Head.
A: Who was that?
N: Robert Boles, an African American novelist.
A: I remember him.
N: I don't know what happened to him. I haven't heard a thing about him.
A: I can't remember much about my time there. I went there as a fiction writer.
N: So did I.
A: Did you change? I changed.
N: No, I didn't change.
A: I changed, and I got a double degree. My degree is in fiction and poetry.
N: Really? I didn't know that. I stayed in fiction, though I was more influenced by the poets than the fiction writers. My social world was the poets. The fiction scene was horrible. I was confused by it. I had no connection,it was totally commercialized, everyone looking for an agent. I was interested in an idealistic writing community, which I thought I’d find at Iowa, so the fiction guys were completely not my cup of tea. But the poets were.
A: Yes, it was all about having an agent. What happened to me was that the first month I was there, I met these poets. It had never occurred to me to be a poet, and I saw then that was what I was. But I was still writing stories, and I have this story writer’s imagination...
N: Yeah, that comes out in these poems.
A: All my best stories were about Needles.
N: Anyway Robert Boles gave me On Bear’s Head and I was thunderstruck by it. I had never read anything remotely like it. Phil became my total hero. I read it over and over and over again. And then one day in the early '70's, maybe 1971, or something like that, I knocked on the door of the Zen Center.
A: You were in San Francisco?
N: I was in San Francisco. I moved to San Francisco after Iowa in the spring of 1970. I knocked on the door of the Zen Center, and Philip opened the door. I knew completely who he was, because...
A: He’s unmistakable.
N ...his books always featured a big photo, with his big, red-haired beard and all that, so his look was unmistakable...
A: He still had...
N: He still had the beard, yeah. So when he opened the door, I knew immediately who he was, and I was totally shocked and amazed. And then we had a lot to do with each other over those years. He got ordained, and when I saw him, I thought, "Well..." because I was interested in the practice, the meditation, but the last thing in the world I would have thought to do would be to become a member of the community and do all the things that were mandated by the community. But when I saw him doing it, I thought...
A: If he could do it.
N: I thought if he could do it, I could do it, but I never would have done it in a million years otherwise. But then, Baker, more or less, required me to be ordained as a priest. Because Phil had preceded me in that, I went ahead and did it, and I figured I could still be a poet as he was. So that was enormously important to me. The Buddhism in his poetry was really really important, in the way that the two combined and made sense together.
A: "We seldom treat ourselves right." That's the last line...
N: Yes, that's the last line of the Tara poem. His poems often express a simple kindness in the end. There is a lot of chaos and pain, and then Why don't we treat ourselves better? Why don't we just love one another?
A: I really liked...I was very influenced by those garbage-y poems.
N: Do you mean the ones with everything and anything in them?
A: Yeah. One was my favorite, and I can't remember the name anymore. It is sort of around in here “Monday in the Evening.” Ted liked “Monday in the Evening” a lot. "The Best of It." Steve...
N: "The Best of It” is my favorite… “Worry walk/No thought appears” something like that.
A: "My Songs Induce Prophetic Visions,” which I read aloud and sent to San Francisco to be played as a tape for a reading celebration. It was his and Michael McClure's birthday. I guess they both have the same birth date. There was a big reading for them.
N: In March, I think.
A: No, October. He's October 20th.
N: October, that's right. Something was in March. I don't remember.
A: It's this poem which is full of all these lists, menus, quotations about Yeats and stuff like that. It just sums up by saying, Well, this is what I'm like. This is how it is to be a poet. But it's so much fun! I just had so much fun.
N: Yes, that’s it. Just exiting and having some fun. Some of the poems are very clearly that, he's sort of crashing around somebody's house where he’s house-sitting, and he's going out to get something to eat and reading some books and listening to opera.
A: “ ‘Just exactly how much damage have you suffered?’ is an example of a perfect English alexandrine”
N: That's from...
A: An example of a perfect alexandrine. "Just exactly how much damage have you suffered?" Every once in a while, that line goes through my head, and I pause and say it.
N: "Just exactly how much damage have you suffered?" [laughter]
A: He was very...he loved Anselm and Edmund, and he referred to them as "the young gentlemen.” He came and stayed with us again in Chicago in 1974 or 1975. Anselm was a little boy, and he would shave his skull. Anselm would go and watch him. Watch him shave. When we moved to New York, we took Anselm to a barber for his first official haircut. The barber said, "How would you like your hair cut?" He said, "Like Philip Whalen."
N: Did the barber do it?
A: No. I said, "No you don't. You don't want that." He said, "I want that!"
N: He was wonderful with our kids too. He liked kids, even though he didn't have much patience for them. In small doses, I think, he did love them.
A: He liked families. He was wistful that he wasn't in one.
N: He was, but I think that was never going to be the case with him. He too much needed to be on his own.
A: His own family was blasted apart when he was young. His mother died when he was twelve. His father was a traveling salesman. Somehow they weren't cohesive.
N: He doted on his mother...
A: He loved his mother. He had Platonic love affairs with all of us women. because he missed his Mom.
N: I think so. He seemed to be very, more than most of the male poets, who couldn't have decent relationships with women, he seemed to have really nice relationships with a lot of younger women poets.
N: Shall we stop?
A: Yes, let's stop. Joanne.
N: Joanne, of course — more than Platonic, or aspiring to that. And Anne and Leslie and you. Somehow I think he made you feel respected because he really did respect you, he wasn’t patronizing, as was usually not the case with older male poets.
A: With the older poets…it was very difficult with them.
N: So he was unusual in that respect. What else?
A: What else? That may be it. I think it has a nice shape.
N: Yeah, good. Probably a certain amount of extraneous stuff, but we'll see.
A: Probably not very much.