Build me up from something new. “No, you are too old.” I am as old as a fixture on a plain. “There aren’t any plains around here but you certainly are a fixture”. Well I’m fixed in place, that is true, but you can’t define me, nobody can, I’m a visitor who never left a native who’s always traveling a lover of state whose mind is round like the Earth and goes around like the Earth, in fact, you may be talking to the Earth. “I thought the Earth was Mother Earth.” I am but you see sex in everything. “Well I want you to be better than AI I want you to be real you seem real although – there was atmospheric haze and light that came in an out through the pinon and juniper juniper juniper where you appeared.” Juniper juniper juniper is right – where have the pinon gone, so many, don’t tell me the Earth is being unnaturally warmed? “I’ve been told that but you are concrete evidence because your face is flushed, you seem uncomfortable.” That’s only because of what you’ve done to me but let’s not talk about that – I have measures to correct everything, get better feel better but first I have to act. “Sounds like you’re going to do something drastic.” Drastic in stages. Floods that go nowhere but stay put. Fires that engulf and engulf Volcanoes that turn hot, I mean hotter, and blow dense smoke from all cities everyone wondering how to escape or just get to work. “You are not a very pleasant fellow or being, or hermaphrodite or sexless blowhard.” I’m only telling you what’s happening just turn on the TV or go on the internet nobody I mean nobody knows what’s true anymore. “Is that your New Year’s Message?” I’m very fundamental: I tell you what is happening to me, as I live in the rocks, the core center of Earth I live as the creaking voice coming out of the cracks of the planet, simply addressing the pipsqueaks known as humans who are in positions of power and won’t take changes to revolutionize energy and stop the oil-rape the chemical rape and plastic pollution of everything in sight and what isn’t, down in the virgin below the caverns of ocean beauty and life. “Well, thank you, making me feel guilty when you know I can’t do nothing.” Turn yourself into someone younger and then you will act. “Can’t do that but I’ll try to communicate with the billion billionaires in power ha ha.” Stop complaining, start small. “Who are you anyway, are you trans?” What does that mean I am who I am and I’m fading back into the atmosphere where below, below everything the heat will become your master as it generates up out of earth and down from the heated hideous warming effect you bring on yourself since you’re more into fighting and trying to be egotistically religious and greedily gorging yourself on everything and won’t simply cooperate, but simply ignore what you have in common and not do the right thing so: expect the worst, homo sapiens ignoramus I’ll scatter you like dust so I can return to my bountiful rebirth of self. Happy New Year. “Good riddance, past presence.”
It is my pleasure to present this memorable piece of astonishing memoir – astonishing to all who lived through this with Bill Pearlman – and perhaps astonishing to all those who love and cherish and respect Nuevo Mexico and the Village of Placitas. If this piece has appeared anyplace else inform me so I can give credit. At this point all credit is due to Bill Pearlman and his illustrative and apocalyptic writing. Bill Pearlman (August 19, 1943 to 2016) -larry goodell
It underwent so much sheer speculative wonder, it never settled into established history. It was our treasure, our folly, our unregenerative space-out. 1967. Files of breakdowns, overdoses, splendors.
It was a shining day. Nobody could have predicted how it would go. We were able to feel the insurrection, the rebellion and the war was our nemesis. After Kennedy’s murder, we were in a fit and nothing could stop us. Vietnam was a horror, a travesty, a terrible disease.
Staggering up from deep sleep, heroic brimful of status way below, I funged the distress out of her and she slapped back, doggedly.
Quiet powers mounted, wonder whirled in the distance. We stayed our own ground. Heartfelt deliveries of feeling, food, climactic exchange. So much went undigested, each parade of being wrapped in a nuanced poem, the startling news of our exposures.
M. was a dazzling precursor to what fell into us, days on end. Speech came to us, as did our bodily rapport. Now what comes we almost own, thorough knowing what’s going down. The sounds, the pleasure, the vocal surmounting. For a moment all is clear – the mountains, the high peaks, the structure that makes us reel. Now suddenly breaks apart our silences and we join in our straight-ahead forms of attention.
But brighten that memory, once again. Shining, vibrating, the world come fully alive, zones of erogenous power, the cleavage in the massive move to fuck. Gainsay the extravagance, the joint inclusion of all purpose, no science or fiction manages its glossy text. You who ravished the bones of the deathly hyperbole of all we ascend toward, miracle of exposed flesh and the dawning crystallization of fermenting futures, give me back my suddenly displaced armory of bliss.
I could have known you once more, could have made sure you were empowered to strip me of my cares and leave me naked in the face of eternity. My bond with you was enlightened pleasure or perhaps the taste of something so delightful we could manage our makeover only occasionally, even though manifest triumph was our quest.
You made me and made me out as something that was never totally human, but a bud of futurity about to be made flesh. Give me just a little knowing toward these purposes, down in the froth or the jest that comes closest the great upheaval we always wanted. It had to come through you, or where would we be? Your presence was the shock of rising in the flood of feeling only to find that what we had could never be lost.
Suddenly, in the midst of the daily grind, there would be an ingested fire. Come what may, it made us rise. It made what was only light become some miraculous potency we craved and created. Look! It’s as the song says, the longing comes over you and you rejoice, heavily, in the levity of the power we have been given.
Do you recall that time we stood ready to receive orders to reinstate our own vows? That uncertain momentum of voices and cares vanished and we stood before everything and felt we were the first humans to know this composed fury that sped up our processes, giving us a flash and a gladness we could never completely surrender. We knew what it was to become some totality, mired in the hiatus between physical form and the vast cosmos. This was our momentum.
–Can we go any further? –You tell me. –Follow me. –I will. –Not to be missed. –I concur. –Let’s keep going. –Yes.
So that affirmation becomes a pride and a surging of the song. ‘He sang best when his powers were beginning to fail.’ Or so saith what we conjoin in saying to one another across these divides. Keep sailing or riding or…My windy mind is made up, and this will be the occasion of uprising or deep genuflection to mysterious powers that will not stop recurring. Destiny is deeply implemented in the most childlike understanding of time. This got into us and made us feel.
Hurry out and try yourself out in the world. It must be your home, even as it is given to others as well. Beauty that sings or is sung of, of reaching for that object of deep affection and joining it, just as it lives. What do we know of the other side? It is acknowledged as something we must attain, though whether it be something or a complete void, we are not sure. But we will meet what comes as it comes. If it is to come now or later, still it will come. No stopping the progressions, as the days seem to march inevitably forward, stopping for nothing.
The road from the Dome into town was windy. It was sometimes impassable during winter. Our cars and trucks were no good in those days, but we tried. The skidding, the stuck in the snow, the horrendous winter world not placated by breathing, but interior, in fires we stoked, brandy we drank, odds against the changing seasons. High in the mountains of the southwest, we learned to live.
Then the sorcerer, psychotic that he was, took it on himself to parade naked through the streets of the little village, and then came the busts. The idea that anyone was welcome seemed generous at the time, but then proved a liability. Some people should be given the boot, immediately. Screen for major mental illness, at least.
It was an investigation of boredom, but still there was excitement and revolution in the air, and we felt proud to be renegade wanderers, climbing passion’s walls, welling up with fire.
Could have been back in LA, talking to the agents, the producers the wheeler-dealers who know how to turn a buck in the industry. I could have been a player in Hollywood, or at least have had a place at that table. Maybe so. But at 23, I was out in the wilds, with a brave princess of the light, and we were making hay, two hits to thunderous applause.
There were always options and we stood up to the times, in our own ways. Bobby Kennedy appeared at the Univ. of New Mexico, spring of ’68, a small man, but with large ambitions. He could bring back the Kennedy songbook. He was in the running. And then he gets killed in LA, after winning that primary. M. and I headed for Mexico, no more of this shit for us. But then, caught in a hotel with major dealers from allover the world, we are busted as well. Spend time in a federal jail, hoping for rain. What a world.
I remember hearing Martin Luther King on the radio, KPFK, his tones so much stronger and mature than his 38 years, talking about Vietnam and its place in his own civil rights struggle. An oppressed people thousand of miles away and an oppressed people in Alabama go hand in hand in a nation that has lost its moral bearing. The coincidence of these two battlegrounds made such a stirring in the heart one could only weep to think that that voice would soon be quieted, again by an assassin’s bullet.
No time that did not seem like it was truly our destiny. A fable of near-misses that could grind to a halt, that could make us content to be with the furious world. It was love, it was pride, it was acid, it was power, it was the death of a dream. Dallas put something to death. No matter the details might reveal a more sordid condition, the times were fraught with hope and catastrophe.
Sing it. White Rabbit. Somebody to Love. St. Stephen. Truckin’. A Day in The Life. Get through it all. Set up the microphones, we gonna make a recordin’ that will last. Gimme that jug.
He had arrived in New Mexico from LA in April of ’67. After months of Be-Ins, Love-Ins, San Francisco Oracle, Golden Gate Park, and his last days of student life at UCLA, he decided to head to the southwest with 100 hits of Owsley acid, Purple Domes and White Lightning.
Allen Ginsberg gave a reading at UNM April 28, 1967 and it was a huge circus event. Afterward, we all went out to the Thunderbird in Placitas. Then we proceeded to the Lower Farm which was the scene of a several day acid high, and lots of wild conversation with the Great Gar Gonnelley, famous raconteur and rationalist madman. We kicked up the dust, did several scenes from King Lear and pitched 40 pound boulders into the nearby arroyo.
That was then. By the end of the summer I was married. M wanted us to go back to Boston to meet her family. ‘He’s brilliant,’ she said to her mother, who was trying to get me to understand that what was important in life was ‘the better things.’ M’s mother took me to Filene’s basement and picked me out a nice suit. ‘You look like an easterner,’ she said. Then we went back out west, and I got a part-time teaching job in Northern California. The appeal of ’67 had become diminished, and I was belatedly trying to be a player in the so-called real world.
Split images. A new world or a world of malcontents trying to get to the next spectacular youthful momentum. Acid rock. O, and this was fun, just ask Kesey or the Pranksters. Who were the real hippies? What did they want? Eventful days, down on your luck, no way to find a middle class version of this. Trust fund hippies. Just in time. The Vietnam War fueled a fair amount of anguish, and then you had marching and feeling bereaved and then The Tet Offensive, and then…And back on the land, the birth if based on methodological raiment from long ago, of a kind of environmental movement. Growing your own, keeping a garden at the ready. Who did not love the appealing song of sex and dreaming that came our way? Surrealistic Pillow. Sergeant Pepper. The Dead. Screaming spectacular highs across the west, indulging in what had to be the rip-roaring agency we pronounced in our bodily war-time fury. Watch me go!
Utopia had always been part of the American dream. The experiments at Brook Farm. The Hog Farm. Drop City. Lou Gottlieb. California Dreamin’. Manera Nueva. New Mexico. Whole Earth Catalogue. Stewart Brand. The innovative and counter-culture history: Steve Jobs and Apple. Keep to the free zones, the wonders of the rising expectations that announce a perfectly wholesome day, your bodies vibrating to a new rhythm.
Dawn crevicing between a great night of love and the aspirational feel that something must get done, something full of pleasure. You who came full-bore into the bargain were not afraid to manage an empire. We were together, or was it engaged in some declared mission nobody could prevent? No doubt it was of the times, the elements had come together just then: cataclysm was in the air, and the shadow was loose. We were unable to fully score the music or distribute wealth in sufficient accord. We stood in the fullness of an old lunar landscape and we celebrated delight, pure and simple.
What else were we to do? Life had handed us a certain number of prescriptions and they proved irregular. Not even Elvis could keep us on track, especially after we learned the difference between hypocrisy and true politics. The politics that were beginning to gleam in our minds and visions was of the body, its fluent awakenings to knowing we were driving into amazing scenery, the channels of hopeful deliberation wide open.
Triumph, on top of the world, the world’s appetite for what we were somewhat on the wane, and yet we pressed on, trying on different flavors and metaphors until out back of it all there was a spying of equivalences for the pure moment, the pure event when all collided in fierce knowledge of being in the world, arms open to the sun.
Sunken states, blissed-out and then not so. How do you conspire to know how to construct a life? We pride ourselves on integrity. Seeing A Man for All Seasons, Paul Scofield as Thomas More, what a bravery of succeeding to stay integral amid all the transactions of Henry and his licentious condition— marriages, change of venue for the Church, the climate of intimidation and fear, and yet More stood for something, for law, for truth, and this occurred (in the 16th century) & just so in 1967 USA, when so much was disintegrating or starting anew.
How you stood it, or didn’t, flying off into midnight sun or overdriving into a huddle that came into view and then vanished. You were on the LA freeway one day and then split out to New Mexico, driving hard all the way, through the desert, past Arizona, past the remembrances, into freedom. We wanted to ascend and never come down. How do you do that? Nobody knows even now, and we inherited a place of surrender or a tabula rasa that keeps its place in a world not yet discovered.
Precipitate the text and find in your own digressions something to remark on. Delve furiously into time, its magnificent paradoxes, its lightning struck demise, its fortunes of coming beginnings.
There they were, the gods of the age, sitting in lotus on the stage there in Golden Gate Park—Ginsberg, Leary, Snyder, Watts—working their ideas on the crowd, flowers in their hair…A new era dawning and we are its equivalent novices of the moment—watch us sky-high to a grasshopper bounce from notion to notion—Zen, poetry, tune in, drop out, get to the bottom of this parable of a great age unfolding, the Age of Aquarius, the land meeting the mind, the sex, the splendor, the acid, the flowers, now come round in this brave rotunda of feeling, isn’t it grand to be alive and singing?
Heading out into the mountain, armed with hits of White Lightning, a knapsack with water and a few nuts, peaches, apricots, come on up, the weather is fine. Such a hurry to explore the body’s amazing ability to shine and fullness of life inquire and register these heights, these trippy indulgences, evermore…
Sanctified, dirt-blown, windy, the dust allover the place, high peaks of shameless delight, now coming into our own, salvaging our deep priorities, the dance we do in the wilderness. Riotous connectives all through the prolonged wars of indecencies, the forms of our indigestible matters of fact. Gossip is not truth, is a game, and so we go on, and we wink at eternity and it gets us to those places we once loved. Stand up to these zones, the battle particulars as they dance in our crossfiring enigmas.
Spent what we had, now cornered in the place the heart knew so well. It is not shortcoming that keeps us in tow, but the harness round the body’s persistence, the lead of the need that recurs, the intake, the price of the pace we need to keep up. Can you do it? Can you appear onstage and find in your own processes something goddamned wonderful?
Teetering near the edgy return, so windy from all the matters at hand, you go through the various hoops that entered your dreamframes and you dangled in a preposterous fluidity that does not content with almighty ruin, but escapes down the hatch of a great heave of creation.
But you have me there. I wanted to come up with an advisory, but you were too far gone, had run over the edge of all the terrain, and you were not coming back for more. You had made your peace with a permanent exit and nothing I could have said would bring you to your senses. The work of living had stung you into a remorse or depression and you simply wanted to split.
We had said anyone could come into the Commune. It was open to all. The road was free to all. Little did we know that psychosis embodied in your form would decimate our fresh chain of being, compounding our trusted notions of a beyond that extricated us from that middle class bargain we had seen so often in our youth. And what a believer’s youth it was, and a living condition that was unmatched in the future we have now undergone all this while. So structured was our meandering in time that we were the brave sons and daughters of a quaint condition that could have gone on forever, were it not that change was bound to come into the picture, and one step after another, spoil our dream of a paradise on earth.
So you played your dicey game and you went naked through the little village, held a woman hostage and brought out the forces of repression. One step forward, two back. Known as The Sorcerer, you even pedaled your stupid brand of offbeat newageism on my wife, who received your little burning matchbox boat as some kind of omen she should accept. Bullshit was just below the surface of our acid-tested conspiracies against all transcendent visions. And then it came and full force knocked us down the steps of a dream world we bargained for and wanted to make manifest as a daily coherence.
Such was our conundrum, our paradox, our irresponsibility that ripped into us, came back through the spheres of influence and through the doors of perception, the Blakean progress of our new frontier, our hammered-out magnificence on a scale that sounded all alarms and got us into the mix of a posturing that would not let go. As you probably don’t know, I was electing to clear out all the regions of my previous aspirations and land squarely with you, who had become for me both goddess and pursuant a rhapsody I had manufactured in the imagination, a secluded elemental purpose I confounded in an urgent sexual want that would not give any ground, that held onto you as if you were a life raft and a smile that concluded all parables of destiny.
But you did not stay, nor did I. That day when we found you were lonely and I had been fired for talking about Vietnam among schoolchildren was a sad comeuppance. We were not free. We may have been in love but we were not making it in the so-called real world. Such was the burden of the times; even as we were wandering around California looking for work or happiness, the hippy minions were falling down stoned in the Haight, and what was recently a rising expectation of incoming splendor became a haunted uptight deal that went wrong. Capital was moving in other directions, even though the gallant striving of our New Mexican experiment was laughingly going along with its treasured insistences, even in the face of forces opposed to the ground of our testimonial faith.
After such an amazing night, we were not ready for dawn to make its way, though it came anyway, and all we could do was watch. Look! The light has returned, and we will rise to greet it. Or maybe something else will come along and we can slip away from all this. Make a note of that. It stood in the open, all this cornering of bliss, and its oppositions. You just wait till something appears that is as formidable as your own spinal column and there will be a vibrating that you can connote as the beginnings of grace. Hold on.
Partners in heroics, they went hard over the ridge and sun-worshipped as they were all that summer of love, with its White Rabbit and Somebody to Love, there was still a disquieting thread that made its way into the mind, some awful constituency related to war and its horrid effects, its untimely ripped dislocation that made use of the shadow that came to be seen as the flipped side of the self that might begin to shape an empire of great possibility born of the freshness we were inheriting.
Checking into Camarillo State Hospital was a great idea. Then, he thought, he would have evidence he was mad when his next draft physical occurred. Great place for a breather, some guy standing in front of a clock circling with his finger the motion of the clock and laughing hysterically. Lots of big tranquilizers, half asleep most of the day. Worthy functioning of the vast interplay of scheme and digression. The doctor says to me ‘you have three choices: you can go in the Army, kill yourself or direct a film.’ A friend in the porn biz, Mike Storm, had arrived in his Continental, wearing a shiny Italian suit, and offered me a chance to direct a film. They released me a few days before my 10 days of self-commitment were over. The record was there, in case it was needed for the next physical.
Mounting sense of debris, listening to Forest and his jazz group while high on acid, down in Venice on Millbrook St., sliding into a daze on the shag rug, the room vibrating. The ocean was good too. Morrison and the Doors sitting on the stone wall of the Boardwalk there in Venice, smiling into the seaside and the sun. Billboard with their first record on Sunset. Felix took us to their first gig, at the London Fog. I found them too loud, and walked down to the Whisky for a drink.
Semblance of firecracker suites, the great holding company incorruptible and joining in the distant outcry, who would have guessed we would be so affable and getting to the stirrups for a long ride out of Dodge, there were particulars flying everywhere, lots of sex with MW, but she may have been having affairs allover town in Venice in those days, though we appeared to be a couple, did some shows together, including The Tempest, Brecht plays, and plays I wrote which Mike Storm produced at the little theater in Hermosa Beach.
Perhaps you know or should know that you cannot possibly arise in the world of letters given your propensity to sit in backrooms and dwell without purpose. You have lost contact with the Great Beyond and furiously discharged with duties you cannot name, there is a leaping tendency we want to find in your processes. Sit still and tell all.
Wanting to do something, there was revolution in the air, and we were part of it, bursting the bounds of times that were changing. And still without progress or a purpose that staggered the mind. The place we were entitled to was on the other side of our shaggy wherewithal, but we did take a close look at middle class analogies to pride in power and found something missing. John Kennedy, who had seemed to embody something carefully drawn from the intellectual left, whose place in world affairs you had witnessed in Berlin that summer of ’63, was now no more than a relic of history, his splattered head a target for some nitwit asshole whose mail-order rifle and a good vantage from a book depository was enough to change history. And then we got Lyndon who had a good heart one supposes, passed Medicare and Civil Rights legislation, but was out of it when it came to Vietnam which he was told by McNamara and others was an important place to make a stand against communism, etc. when Vietnam itself was in reality a small nation with an urgency to create its own system, freed from colonial powers.
But the question was always what the hell could we do. We had no money, position or power. Many joined the Peace Corps, which was a Kennedy-Shriver idea, and that seemed a good thing for many who learned to be helpful in poor countries, many in Africa. But the hybrid doper/leftist insurgency some of us were part of decided it would be good to staff a communal homestead and try to ingeniously create a new world on the land in New Mexico. But contradictions abounded there and privacy was not to be had in the big communal dorms, and sex demanded privacy, so that got old. And there was boredom wandering the hills stoned and looking for some form of bravery to discover.
But there were good days, and the light in New Mexico was often unearthly. It shone with a grandeur, and the mountainous scenery was a joy, and a rallying of new forms of seeing. And the cadences of American verse came into the heart, and we could see a way of living out there, among the old Pueblo Tribes and the old Land Grant Hispanics, and the settlers who liked their drink and told stories of the hillbillies and sang the Hank Williams songbook. And then there was Shorty Gibbs, old cowboy who had his horse-thieving stories and days of yore on the range and living on the edge of the wilderness in rural New Mexico. Billy the Kid country, having a smoke and a snort and laughing long into twilight.
Surges of laughter, finally, the young brawlers finding a haven of split-second timing as the great psychedelic momentum entered the body and brain, amid the groupings that stood out in the mind. Trends of an energy that flew allover the space we inhabited, the throne of feeling vibratory and full of power, hilarity running through the bodily makeup.
Circling, circling, the ocean at the ready, the sky full of blue, the fault lines in the mind, you who bespeak ceremony and the gilded edges of play, the float of a balloon, the skimming skid board, the surfer just getting into his wave, the way we played day after day by the sea, its inwardness full of distance and undiminished give and take. Come see it with me, see the flash of light on the distant ocean, see the day unfold, hour after hour, brilliance and promises of a dazzling current of human and world, land and water, the eternal and the vital present.
Not far, not that far, days of then and here we are writing it as if we could see more clearly then, though now is presence and there is this to be said: however much it takes us back to our Origin, these days too beguile and bless and we can recover our senses once again. Look it over and find even in this distance a force that rises, sap in the veins, the living world.
Bill Pearlman San Miguel de Allende, Gto., Mexico Summer 2009
By Bill Pearlman: “Surfing Off the Ark” (1970) – A collection of poems from 1965-1961. “Inzorbital: A Novel” (1974) – A novel published by Duende Press. “Elegy for Prefontaine and Other Track Poems” (1977). “Characters of the Sacred: The World of Archetypal Drama” (1995) – Published by Duende Press. “Flareup of Twosomes” (1996) – A collection of poems published by La Alameda Press. “Brazilian Incarnation: New and Selected Poems” (2000) – Published by Rough Road Press.
Available from me: INZORBITAL, CHARACTERS OF THE SACRED – [email protected] for any information needed Note: I will post the source of the photograph of Bill if I can locate it. – Larry Goodell, Placitas, New Mexico USA
Over 50 years ago! Everything has changed. Part 1 Exercise Denning Spring – my Journal February 13, 1961 – March 3, 1961 Part 2 Gallery of Short timers, Army buddies Part 3 Secret Gay Wedding Part 4 Out in the field with Chaplain John Sargent, Tank Battalion Chaplain, a year earlier
My patch with embroidered leaf on cannon. Part 1 Exercise Denning Spring – Journal
. . I was drafted during my first-year teaching at New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, 1959. Honorary “Captain” Instructor became E-1 Private in Basic Training at Fort Ord, California. After Chaplain’s Assistant training, I was sent to Camp Irwin as Chaplain John C. Sargent’s Assistant and Driver, 40th Armor, 5th Medium Tank Battalion, 37 miles northeast of Barstow in the Mojave Desert. This is my journal while on a mock-fighting field maneuver with the tankers. My chaplain at this time was Chaplain Young. The conditions were much different then. Many of us had college education and were draftees. US involvement in Vietnam had barely begun.
1951 Photo, Military Bases of USA (Pre-Vietnam Era)
Chaplain Young. I was his Chaplain Assistant and driver.
Chaplain and I waited so long we decided to have coffee – Chaplain Young’s coffee and my apple turnovers. After that, at 9:20 I was ready for anything and we moved out, second in the convoy – Headquarters Company, my company minus the tank section, leaving us and all the supply vehicles and battalion maintenance. We moved out without windshields on the jeeps, 20 miles an hour on the hardtop pavement, from 50 to 100 yards between vehicles (the deadlier the missile heads and bombs get, the wider becomes the space between the vehicles in a convoy). We broke from the pavement, veered off up a slope of desert, the wind now not so cold as we slowed down, bouncing along in what would be a characteristic fashion for the rest of the trip – the uh-uh-uh of the engines now in four-wheel drive, and the side-sway bounce bounce of each vehicles, the vehicle behind you always seeming to rock and sway opposite from your rock and sway as you glanced at the movement in the side rear view mirror. We got to our stopping place, a little flat place, between little rolling hills of rocks and fine sand and ridges of white caked dirt. We pulled up near one of the hills and stopped. Chow, after long waiting was at one o’clock – ham and succotash and mashed sweet potatoes and bread, milk and cake. I believed they were spoiling us. It was better than mess hall food was inside the mess hall back at camp. Chaplain Young made ready his cot and sleeping bag and blankets and cover. I fixed my bright red air mattress up inside the trailer of the jeep. By six-thirty after chow – stew, the inevitable lumpy, soupy stew – the great orange sunset had petered out to darkness, and I got ready to sack out – while Chaplain went to a meeting. Seemed they had to sit around waiting while the Commander of Headquarters Company decoded a message – no message can be open – it must be coded – the message was from the Battalion Command Post and consisted of a chew-out – the officers hadn’t yet received their trays of food! I am in the sack. The trailer is a little too short for me. The plastic mattress makes sparks when I rub it. I move around in cocoon-shaped wool sleeping bag and touch the side of the trailer and get shocked. I look up and through the corner opening I’ve left for myself in the canvas trailer cover – I see the stars. This afternoon, with its hazy clouds obscuring the sky, we looked up – and there was a large luminescent ring around the sun!
Setup for Chaplain in tent and me in trailer.
February 14, 1961
The night was horrible. At midnight battalion maintenance was stirring its engines, shouts and the groaning of motors moving over uncertain unlevel ground. Dark in the trailer, with the flap down, under the cold stars, and the drone of a generator somewhere around a rolling hill in our area. I couldn’t go back to sleep. I tossed turned incessantly as if I were on a turning spit over a block of ice. My summer sleeping bag, now in the winder and too small became a strait jacket. I fought against it. The cold came right through. My hands became cold and sore from trying to get the blankets to stay on top of me as I turned. I skipped breakfast in the dark. Handling freezing mess gear and downing hard-to-see food didn’t appeal to me as I knocked my boots against a jeep tire trying to warm my freezing feet. Little by little as we waited to move out and the long shadows began to crawl back toward the jeep it began to warm.
J. B. Phillips’ translation of the New Testament, gift from Chaplain Young, remaining a living rendition of the Gospels.*
Chaplain Young had a warm night, although he tossed and turned against his sleeping bag and comforter and cot. I drove for an hour and a half following slowly and then faster and then down to a crawl, the personnel carrier which whooped up uncaring great rolls of dust, so bad sometimes I would be following a moving billow of dirt. We stopped finally spreading out around a finger of hills. We found ourselves a flat place against the rocky side of a hill. There were among the rocks hundreds of tiny green plants pushing up to flower and seed by summer. Many were of the hardy, fast growing type you find in well-watered areas, the coarse, jagged-leaved weeds you so often find there. They were thriving on the winder water. They would be burnt to sticks but already seeded by summer. We made several trips, one to the Battalion Command Post which is a couple personnel carriers back to back and with canvas thrown over between them. Guys sit in there and have coffee and listen to the radio and talk back. There is always the antenna high over it with guy wires; and the other stop (we made) was with a company where everyone was caught at a standstill waiting for gas so they could move on as they had been ordered. I spent an hour or two working with my sleeping equipment. I snapped the poncho down lengthways, making a near air-tight longer-than-body plastic cylinder. Inside it I placed my strait-jacket sleeping bag, and tied the bottom of the poncho to seal the air out. Over bag and poncho I folded four blankets, folded them in half and sewed them with quilting stiches along the sides and across the bottom. This composite sleeping envelope I placed on top of my air mattress, the brilliant red plastic one I had bought at an Army-Navy surplus store, and envelope and mattress I placed on my shelter half and I folded the canvass flap ends of the shelter half over on top and tied them one to another. And all this sleeping equipment I placed inside the trailer and tied the canvas cover tight to the trailer walls. By the time it was dark I was in the sack although it took some doing to manipulate myself into it and I was asleep by the time Chaplain Young returned with the jeep from a meeting of the officers. I slept, except for a few wakings off and on, soundly, and while wind whistled around me slow and cold, I slept warm.
Chaplain Young driving – out to support the tankers
February 15, 1961
I skipped breakfast again. I was too cold for a ceremony with mess gear, weapon, gasmask, web belt, helmet and all the other army-holy paraphernalia. Bosh. I washed my teeth, had vanilla wafers, pecan nut cookies, and dried prunes. We moved out, our white cross on blue background flag flapping merrily, across the desert to B Company. Everyone was shaving and I hadn’t. I took out Chaplain’s Norelco battery electric shaver and commenced, under a friend’s envious eyes. We moved on, this time a short way, to A Company. I parked on a roll of black and dull-orange, rough pointed rocks, flag waving madly in the breeze. Chaplain loaned me a pocket magnifying glass and I started leaning down and studying microscopic flowers. There was one quite beautiful and quite tiny, the little succulent leaves giving birth to an infinitesimal yellow, pulpy bloom, the whole plant no bigger than the tip of my little finger. There were others, larger, white, or yellow and poppy-like, not succulent, all around in the ground between rocks. After over-done steak dinner, we left, bringing a passenger with us – a basketball player. Our team, 5/40’s own, was to play in Las Vegas the following day. I showered and showered, the sore place on the top of my head going away as I washed and stood under the spouting-forth warmth. I got into slim civies slipped out to office, to hideous dinner of cold cuts in a strange mess hall – where those back at garrison were eating – and stepped out to vent my sun-burned passions upon the Steinway grand in the Service Club. We had come in for Chaplain’s Bible study class.
February 16, 1961
Getting to know the directors of the Camp Service Club led to my being allowed to play the grand piano there.
I skipped breakfast again. I couldn’t face a long cold line for hot greasy eggs. I was rushed anyway. At Chaplain’s house I poked holes in a can of peach nectar and drank up. We loaded up and sailed forth into the long early morning cold stretch past the sign saying DO NOT ENTER – IMPACT AREA, past the dirt-covered rain-cracked asphalt stretch beyond that, up slowly, past several dirty dusty-deep-ridged curves up and pulled off the road and stopped, cold wind whipping by, where we could see miles of where we had been, and had coffee (delicious!) and cookies (delicious!). I was starved. We proceeded to Andy’s Grave, looked at the old prospector’s grave with its four steel beams and wire fence – its mound of rocks and white cross labeled “Anderson.” Headquarters Company was supposed to be in the vicinity of Andy’s Grave. We looked a few miles one direction and found tracks – tank and wheel – going by the hundreds in the opposite direction. We turned around and bounced miles along a funny, dusty road, up and down, dip and rise for several miles. Finally – after running across a strange glimmering object which proved to be the remains of a target glider, made of paper honey-combs and shiny foil stretched over that for wings – finally we rounded the road and there they were. They had had a 0400 hours change of plans. They were in the area of Two Springs. I parked, stretched, walked around, studied the mud and scumming incongruous water and one tree that made up the area Two Springs. I covered the jeep with more mud. Everyone was being ridden about camouflage. “Refund 6 will be in the area at 1330.” This was the Colonel. He arrived before that. I was standing in a half-mile long chow line. He arrived, glanced around, chatted, puffed a few puffs on the cigar, remounted the jeep and he and a couple more brass left – before the chow line had even begun to move. I sat high up on rocky hill side to eat and look over the springs, the desert, the bushes, the vehicles spread out and sloshed with dry mud and, distantly, Leach Lake – lake–no, flat expanse of dry off-white dirt, yes. Not too far away I could see the edge of Death Valley, hellish, burnt, barren hills now purplish under a hazy sky in this cool, transitional season. We returned, mid-afternoon. It was a long drive in this time. Chaplain had Boy Scout dinner to attend. There is no shower so warm as a warm shower.
February 20, 1961
Long-moving drive. Second, sometimes third in the long convoy. Better there than in back of falling walls of dust between fifteen and twenty miles per hour. Slow for the distance we covered. Passing Drinkwater Lake drinking dust. Off the dirt road bouncing across the terra. And around. Curling up the slow rising hill into a hollow. We stopped and sat, watching the vehicles lumber around before us like primeval sloths inching toward and burrowing themselves in their hollows. We moved again at three o’clock after the early afternoon chow. Over the dust road to Summit Grave. And again sought our hollowed out graves. Tiny white purple-edged flowers bloomed from stringy stems by the door of my tomb. I wallowed in my sloth hole and the sharp earthy odor of the tiny stringy flowers pierced my ancient proboscis. And I awoke, a human on a night-march. The quarter-moon descended into the River Styx. In the black star-capped gloom I descended into the underworld. The death-night-march down. Down into the dust of perdition down into the filthy caverns of demise. A journey into netherness never seeming to end. I hung on to the wheel – hands, arms, body, head reduced to skeleton, dead-clamped on the journey to hell center. At midnight all the lights went on in hell. I lined myself up with the others, all of the convoy of varmints seeking retreat in hell lined themselves up and showered our lights on one another and in the middle of the high-pitched motor-screaming and blinding smoke the skeletal forms and shivering engines faded into the black calming night.
February 21, 1961
Rather be in the Post Chapel trying to play the organ.
A day of stability, boredom, and increasing disgust. Movement confined to the center of a flat valley between rolling hills. There is nothing to do now but sit, attend mandatory classes, pull maintenance on vehicle, motionless, sit between chow times and sleeping times. The mind sitting on the shoulders sitting on the stomach, full and sitting on the haunches sitting on the carved wood latrine sitting on the dirt, competing the chain of utter stability and leading to nothing, nothing at all but increasing disgust.
February 22, 1961 – Washington’s Birthday, a Holiday except for us
“Get up!” in the flat valley at 5:30 in the morning. I lay undisturbed until a few minutes before six when an inquisitive trooper threw back the cover of my seclusion in the trailer and bellowed, “Good morning!” I dressed in the cold, on my back, in the trailer. We are functioning as Aggressors in this field problem. We assembled in our dark green uniforms and marched to a windy, outdoor lecture given by the Politico Commandanto. He had a fluorescent red saucer cap on and reds and yellows decked his well-fitting dark green shirt. He lectured on the Aggressor history, government and uniform. We are a totalitarian state. We are bent on world domination. If you will line up by companies you will get your red and yellow ornaments for your uniform. We saw a demonstration of Aggressor weapons, an electrically operated object which fired a cluster of simulated artillery shells, a rapid-fire acetylene and oxygen pop-gun, and hand-thrown smoke bombs and simulated grenades. The Politico Commandanto was only a lieutenant from Fort Riley who goes around with his sergeant assistants lecturing aggressor-to-be. The ornamental reds and yellows were nothing but bits and scraps of colored cloth which we stapled on to our dark greens. And any officer who would send a battalion of men to fight in the middle of the dry windy bright desert ?????? The dark green can be seen for miles and the yellow and red flourishes make them even more ridiculous. The lieutenant informed me there were no Chaplains and chaplain’s assistants in the Aggressor army, so, I suppose, the Chaplain will be a political officer propaganda expert or what not. We will fly our flag with the white cross and proceed otherwise un-masked through the problem. All other vehicles other than gas trucks and medics jeeps will be sporting the circle trigon on top – for the airplanes – and on the front and sides – all for the umpires who must be able to detect Aggressor vehicles from U.S. forces vehicles. After noon chow we left the flat valley area, over the washed-out curving young river bed-like road, around by the airstrip, the flat white Bicycle Lake and over the paved stretch back to camp, not but a few miles from where we had been. Out of the refreshing shower into the warm clothes out in the cold air into the barn theater into the seat to watch Arthur Miller’s The Misfits, into a state of disappointment, out in the cold wind, into the bowling alley for beer and hellos to Garrison friends, and out again and into the barracks out of the wind and into the bunk as late-beer drinkers talked in the dark, kept me awake till finally, into a dull, heavy sleep. The first half of the Misfits was good. [Arthur] Miller is the fine handler of dialog with a contemporary very much alive setting. The last half lagged into sentimental horse-play. The characters inward new-realizing and change occurred not in dialog, as it should have, but in photographed action. Miller is not a screenwriter yet and perhaps never will be. Drama of the stage is his medium, drama of dialog, not drama of word-less human movement photographed.
February 23, 1961
Shippling – he and Rector were buddies and ended up re-upping.
I took time this morning to eat breakfast in the only mess hall open to all those in 5th Tank or Denning Springs in garrison – the eggs stared at me like little pools of yellow blood. I had breakfast cereal and a banana. I packed trailer and jeep, packed well and after picking up Chaplain, we left camp, jaunted over the rocky curve trail over the hills and down into the tedious flat valley again. Dinner was steak in the dust. I left in mid-afternoon for fast bouncey ride with the battalion mail clerk and message clerk -Shippling and Morgan – and the company mail clerk – Rector – and we four returned to camp and split – I for the PX, since it was closed on previous day, holiday. I bought sunburn ointment, expensive multi-use stuff, hand lotion for Chaplain, new strawberry-smelling silicone-treated stuff, and plugs of chewing tobacco for the clerks, exuding fowl-smells from the stuff. We returned to a supper of chopped corned-beef and cabbage, hot and enjoyed by me for the first time in my life. I’ve always eaten corned beef separately and disliked it, and been nauseated by cook cabbage’s odor. I must try the combination non-military and well prepared. We gathered crescent shaped under the emerging quarter moon and heard the commanding officer’s warnings about our using the simulated grenades and simulated artillery shells with their whistles and bangs and berry-guns shot off into the air to explode in the air, simulating grenades parachuted down from planes, I guess. First sergeant in his yellows and green uniform turned and told us to be ready for night march from 5ive-thirty on. The time then was five-thirty. Chaplain and I followed in the second serial – the first was track vehicles, the second wheel vehicles – second vehicle in the long dusty serial; but on the pavement we were comfortable compared with the long filthy dust-march tunneling through the night several nights ago. We arrived past East Ranges, off the road up in a rolling sandy area, where we had been the first day of our practice-run through the planned Denning Spring, Monday the thirteenth. On the slope of a hill, tilted, cold in the trailer where I had fought the infringing cold, that first night when my blankets had rumpled, loose useless around the sides of my mummy sack. The pains in my knees when I straitened out or bent, not as cold as I had been before, but half as sleepless.
February 24, 1961
We arose early enough to move to disperse ourselves before light moved in to display bunched-up vehicles perched close for maximum security. I watched utterly cold, pounding, stamping, walking, running my feet, even taking boots off, rubbing toes and changing socks. I watched as the wrecker came and pulled a deuce-and-a-half truck and trailer out of sand dug out up to its axles. Long after this, at last, the sunning day warmed me. I took off hood and field-jacket, its liner and of course my gloves, my field trousers and my woolen shirt long-johns as the sun beat down through to the blood.
Villalobos – maintain refurbish reuse.
Cookies and milk were not enough for breakfast and a noon the mess truck issued us our one-day’s C-rations. After a flurry of spits and spurts the little gas stove worked steadily, its blowing flame invisible in the sand-bright sunlight. I cooked an olive-drab-colored can of salty beef gravy and potatoes, ate peanut butter spread salad wavers and topped it off with jelly candies, cookies (Mother’s brand), and a C-ration chocolate cream which tasted like mud-bitter chocolate covering a hard sugary vinegar-tasting cream center (I spat out half of it). People getting out in March are being released on the twenty-eighth of this month – a step to save money administratively. I said goodbye to one friend, a young R.A. embittered terribly all the more toward the end of his term, now exuberant at his suddenly
getting out early and hoping for sensibility and art school. Russ, my every wish for you. I went into Camp again bouncingly with the three tobacco chewing clerks and said goodbye to two friends – Dick with his grip-less handshake, but kind, conscientious, so affected by things in army life to get rash growing on inside forearms, and, even without drinking, a drunkard’s nose. Sensitive Richard, Catholic, simple but as sincere a person could ever be. Getting out early. Elmer, with long fingernails – he just couldn’t type with long fingernails, but with his recent job he didn’t type – used to be our supply clerk, only partially expressive of any ailment or attitude, the smile, but no comment, only once deeply talking to me over a day full of vodka tonics. Silent – and his billfold bulging with pictures of past girls he rarely showed. We returned to a good hot meal, a surprise – I was expecting five-in-one B rations. I moved jeep and trailer up a hollow near mess truck and leading vehicles in dawn march to come. Chaplain went to usual evening meeting of officers. I slept, livelier than usual, warmer and solidly for nine hours. The live companies – A and B saw “action” much of the day. At this point, they meet with U.S. forces, throw simulators and umpires judge which tank or vehicle is knocked out. Aggressors, of course, at this stage of game are ahead. And they were gassed from gas down drafted from two-propped helicopters, several times and good.
February 25, 1961
C-rations and ammunition box
Just starting out we stopped, the whole lengthy serial. A gas truck was on fire from handbrake being left on. They extinguished it and the C.O. returned to the front of the column; we followed as he moved out again. Light grew around us. We could hear a few weak bangs from the distance. We pulled up on the ledge-rise, our old place, at the bottom of a slope of rough, pointed rocks making up the hillside. An OD piper cub buzzed by several times. We people in green uniforms honked horns and crouched with clutched gas masks beside the vehicles. A double-propped copter floated by once – it is the kind of aircraft we know is equipped to drop gas – a mixture of vomiting and tea gas – but nothing happened as so many simulators exploded around us. For some guys this was the first opportunity to toss or shoot these things. Dignitaries and brass wearing white caps or regular came and went flying green or red/white flags. Chaplain wished to observe some of the “action” first hand. We took off, trailer-less, with him driving, ran into a chain with a triangular black sign of skull and crossbones hanging from it. We took off over rocks and rough country, swinging wide to the left to miss this mine field. Planted mines here are simulators which make a big enough bang when you hit them. We passed John Miller Range, rounded the hill and began ascending the long rising sand and rock slope which at its crest overlooks Red Pass Lake – a dry sand flat like other lakes in Mojave Desert. At the top we talked to some tankers, some sacked out, all sunburnt under their black soft caps. Down further we ran into various dignitaries, including the chief umpire, a stalwart, youthful loud-carrying-voiced Major, and several reporters including a girl in jeans. We watched very little before us: a mortar tank was firing silent flashes; a couple of smoke bombs trailed red and yellow into the air as a platoon of tanks circled in retreat; tanks around us threw a few simulators. But we could see no enemy. In fact, all that the B company CO had seen or heard of the enemy was a flash and distant bang of one simulator, thrown, it seems from around the corner of a hill. They got the “tar stomped out of them” the first day of the exercise, according to one officer, and since then they’ve been so cautious to be invisible. We left the Red Pass Lake panorama of a few vehicle specks, making pin-prick flashes and muffled bangs, and, circling down around on the road where the enemy was proscribed to follow, we passed a white flag with this printing on it: To the TC: COME ON, YOU COWARDS! Your friendly aggressor. Scant jeeps moved out a midnight. I turned and turned in my sack and tried to go back to sleep. An officer woke Chaplain up and conversed – confusion over the next day’s religious services. I turned more in my sack and tried to go back to sleep in the cold. I was awake when a friend threw back my canvas covering and said, “What are you doing here?” “Sleeping,” I lied.
February 26, 1961 – Sunday
A day beginning with a trip in to Camp – long cold windy roads, our camouflage bushes breaking twigs, sailing back and striking us on the cheeks and eyes. Shower of warm water running dirt back into the ground. Split, dirtied creases in fingers giving dirt up to the brush and rag. Clean underclothes and warming heater a few feet away. And on with the old aggressor uniform and to the office to sit and wait for time to go back out for the services. It will be a busy day from noon on. Dinner at the mess hall was early and I was loaded up and in front of the Catholic Chapel by one o’clock. The Catholic chaplain must go out with us to give two masses – unusual for a priest since three masses given in one day is maximum given. But in the military there are all kinds of exceptions to all rules. His usual two in Garrison plus two in field will make four in one day. Charles, his assistant, my friend, picked up the jeep provided by Denning Springs, the jeep had a windshield, I noticed. I took off, leading, driving Chaplain Young, Charles following after, driving Father Feeley, the Catholic Chaplain. This began an afternoon of perfect, typical military organization. We arrived dust-spattered and spitting near Andy’s Grave where Headquarters had set up. It was near three then and both Protestant and Catholic services were to e at three, 1500 hours, supposedly as
Andy’s Grave – Grave of a Prospecter
Chaplain back at Garrison had notified all units to be notified. The wind was worse than any previous wind we had put up with the last few days. There was a great dust storm at L. A. There have been high winds in Southern California the last few days. The wind blew our altar pieces over as we tried to set them up on our jeeps. Chaplain had sent me throughout the area vehicle to vehicle announcing, supposedly re-announcing, services would be held in a few minutes. Just when our ingenuity as beginning to conquer the wind’s insistent upsetting of our altar pieces the Major and a Captain decided services would be in another area as soon as we could set up where B and A companies could also provide men. This left the few gathering men in our area on the spot, not wanting to wait for a truck to transport them, the re-setting up of the services, and the transportation back from another area. We packed up props and hymnals, set off, Charles and Father following, father’s black robe off again and back in the case. We pulled up right next to Andy’s Grave. I though only his spirit would keep us company here at the tip of the lonely valley flat, his silent mine visible through wind and dust above us, a hole and pushed out rocks halfway up a nearby hill. I found an old sun-bleached-white fatigue hat with “Texas” still visibly printed on it. With Charles’ consent I placed it on the white cross above Andy’s bones and the rocky mound of his grave. It hung tilted and bobbed with the strong gusty wind. We set up altar pieces again, our jeeps a hundred yards apart, as the companies’ vehicles dispersed into bivouac position. We Protestant five sat on the ground. I passed out field programs and hymnals; we listened to Chaplain’s words before they blew away. “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but a spirit of power and love and a sound mind.” – II Tim 1:7 After the benediction was over we got up and stamped our feet. Three of our ten feet were asleep and the wind was cold. Crystal and brass paraphernalia went back in the black Chaplain’s cases. On the hood, dust flying, again. We fairly flew, hitting some rolling bumps rather harshly, wind impactful against our faces, light waning. Charles and Father had only field jackets and regular still fatigue hats plus their fatigues. I wished I had loaned them my field jacket liner and my soft ear-flap hat.
Chaplain Sargent, diver, first Chaplain I worked with – earlier maneuver.
We passed Summit Grave, bouncing over the rolling road, and passed John Miller Range, bouncing around and came to a stop under the light tower a flag-pole-like object with a light on top used to signal when targets for tanks are being shot at. There were several vehicles. We were an hour late. Up with glass and brass and red velvet. Father Feeley had several. We had one fellow and a very informal service, geared, really to him, a former interested Texas Southern Baptist soon to get out of the Army and soon to have to decide about going to his hometown college. These were the first “U.S” troops we had seen up close. They were terribly dusty, haggard. As Chaplain talked as we were sitting on the ground the wind would wave a tinkling from Father Feeley’s bells over to our ears. Charles and Father left, only a mile or two from the hard top road-taking them back to camp. I suppose Charles had no supper, unless he brought something. The wind was cold. The three-quarter moon lit the road back only enough so that I had to strain my eyes, look up then down then directly at the moving road in front of me. The drive back, blacked-out, was long and miserable. Several times I reeled partially off the road, cold, directionless except for the moving thread-like image of a road somewhere before me. Passed John Miller Range, back passed Summit Grave, passed Andy’s Grave with his four-poster burial monument, and to the left, being challenged loudly and abruptly two separate times not knowing the password, Chaplain just shouting “Hi!” I’m Chaplain Young.” We pulled up near the mess truck and entered the hot, inside lit compartment. The mess Sarge was there, large, tall good conscientious cook McFarland who gave us hot coffee. We sat, he talked, a spate of particulars about his army job, his consideration for his cooks – not getting them up until he had lit the field ovens inside the mess truck and started pots of water to boil. We set up in the dark, detaching the trailer, making a careful wind break for Chaplain and crawled in our sacks for a sleepless, wind howling and freezing night.
Monday February 27, 1961
How cold and shaking and calm-mouthed a person can be when he stands up, fresh out of the sack, wind rocking him in the early morning, and pokes on his shirt and trousers and boots, lacing with frozen fingers. Our early moving in convoy was halted. Some guy left his handbrake on; it caught a fire for a short while. We began again and ended after racing ahead towards the end of the drive in a rocky interesting pass, Sayer Pass. The guys in the forward party hopped out of the three-quarter ton truck and listened to the C.O. as he pointed them places. Then when tracked vehicles hurling dust appeared in the pass they could head straight to the position where their forward man was already standing. The day was long, tedious, although many vehicles came and went near the rock wash where we were packed. Chaplain took the jeep in the morning when I thought I would be going into camp and came back early afternoon and found out I hadn’t gone. I planned to go with the three riding clerks in the afternoon. Chaplain rested, slept. I read, wrote, rested as the jet plane with the super camera in it flew over close and far and the guard on the hill yelled over and over “Aircraft!” and guys up and down the hollows of the pass threw their simulators and white clouds dissipated. The clerks didn’t go in in the afternoon I was despondent. The Post Chaplain’s Assistant leaves tomorrow being one of the many getting-out-early this month. I could hardly say goodbye miles from camp, sitting, as the minutes ran through my fingers.
February 28, 1961
I slept off and on but slept a good part of the night. When I got up, started the vehicle and asked where we were going, the answer was “Garrison.” Chaplain at long last was going to take things into his own hands, take the reins of his own jeep so to speak, instead of hanging around division trains, moving and sitting for hours, doing nothing. We moved into camp as the rest of the vehicles started their long lonely way to a dry lake area not even on our map, miles and miles away off Camp Irwin’s reservation, China Lake. I showered and changed out of dark green aggressor uniforms into regular fatigues and we left again. Now we were part of the US forces.
Post Chaplain’s Assistant Private First Class Bill Sundstrom
I wheeled the jeep and blue and white cross flag and trailer by post chapel and there was Bill Sundstrom in line to be paid. I was relieved to at least get to talk a while and say goodbye to my closest army friend. His early out had come like a storm. He was informed of it Friday, was moving out with wife and little girl and cat for home in Washington the following Tuesday. I wa famished. I had had no breakfast. I sat and talked in the office; other friends came over and talked. I must have looked funny in my dusty disheveled aggressor uniform. Bill said I looked like Jerry Lewis. I thanked Bill for bringing all my possessions I had kept at his and Darilyn’s apartment, bringing them into camp and unloading them, with Charle’s help, in my office storeroom. I gave him a ride to personnel and said goodbye, with a promise to visit Washington – certainly. I showered, dressed in fatigues, had ice cream soda and chocolate cake at Snack Bar – the place was full; it was payday. Chaplain and I rode back into the field traipsing back and forth between Andy’s Grave and Summit Grave, ran into a few elements, some tanks, some trucks, a PC that had motor trouble and was stalled. I looked for old mine shaft and old buildings and garbage heaps but found nothing. Chaplain stripped a crashed shining aluminum foil, carboard and aluminum stripped target ship of its aluminum strips. This was in early afternoon while I heated the C rations. Back to camp. I played, refreshed warm, on the Steinway in the Service Club. A friend, a pilot, Ralph almost went to sleep in his lounge chair as I played. Ice cream cones with friends and talk with a new arrival, a twenty-seven-year-old physical education teacher-to-be, a man who can get out of the army for his “critical occupation”! He will try. And to bed.
March 1, 1961
I tried to persuade Chaplain that it was not a wise thing to do: three chaplains, all the Post chaplains in one jeep, my jeep, without a radio, gallivanting across the desert. But we took off, after I cleared the back seat and Chaplain and I loaded only necessary things – water and C-rations, weapon, gas stove, and so forth. Chaplain Simpson (Major) road in the rider’s seat. Chaplain Feeley (Captain) and Chaplain Young (Captain) rode in the rear seat. I (Specialist Fourth Class) drove the vehicle. The windshield was now back on the jeep. I retrieved it easily from the company maintenance shop – short timers had the place open – it was their bug out place for playing poker. The wind was not bad at all, nor the dust, as a result of my driving slowly and tenderly and the windshields’ upright presence. We found one of the troop’s bivouacked up in a faraway high area, a long winding road – away from Leach Lake. We pulled up in a quiet place and heated our C-rations. Chaplain Young and I were hosts: Chaplain Simpson and Feeley were our guests. I fixed hot tea and that finished our meal.
The vehicles were moved out by the time we were packed to go again. As we swung along the road into the flat Teach Lake area smoke bombs signaled a retreat or “retrograde” as the military euphemism term would be. Elements were high tailing it across the desert. We pulled up to a parked party of white-band hatted umpires who were watching these goings on. Lieutenant Colonel, chief umpire of Denning Spring welcomed the Chaplains and talked to them lively-like as I sat in the jeep and watched. Chaplains altered seats and we sped back to camp, stopping once by the roadside to look at the numerous dancing yellow flowers and take a picture. Chaplain Feeley often came out with bits of poetry he remembered. He quoted from Wordworth – “Daffodils” of course.
March 3, 1961
People were coming in from about nine in the morning on. More dust covered than when I saw some of them yesterday, the aggressors much more dust covered that I remembered them when I saw some of them several days ago. The water runs continuously in the showers, smells and filth washed down the drain and sung away. I cleaned my weapon, bit by bit, brushing and brushing taking all apart but the trigger housing and sight assembly. The Sarge helped me get the thing back together. The automatic carbine is more complicated, seemingly more delicate because of its smallness, then the M-1. Rumors were flying – if we could get a three-day weekend this weekend – when we would get paid. Denning Spring is history. People are worrying about other things now. Larry Goodell / 1961
My Short Timer Calendar
Part 2 – GALLERY OF SHORT TIMERS, ARMY BUDDIES, MOSTLY DRAFTEES.
Unholy 3 Chaplain’s Assistants – Some fellow short timers
Service Club – a Play and some Frolic
Pfc Snodgrass (top right guy with glasses) and bottom right – photographer – gave me this and other photographs, some I’ve used here. Thank you! He went to Korea after Irwin.
Off duty things to do like a scrap book. And guess what’s in those photo albums!
Behold, a place to meditate bunkside. And. A time to celebrate.
Post entertainment – Multi-talented Irwin soldiers performed on Post and in Barstow.
Part 3 – In the same year, 1961, late at night, in a room with army blankets blocking windows, an unofficial wedding took place. These gays, all good soldiers, were forced to be totally closeted.
Friends at Service Center let me use the piano and invited me to their wedding! Gay marriage not legal in those days.
It was very late and dark with windows blocked but their pre-legal bond was celebrated. Cake and favors!
Part 4. Out in the field with Chaplain John Sargent, Tank Battalion Chaplain, a year earlier.
Last year’s field maneuver – Chaplain John Sargent then my Chaplain boss.
1960 well ever 50 years ago – just about everything has changed.
And finally, best wishes to all who trained or were stationed at Camp Irwin which, of course, is now Fort Irwin, It was an interim period and part of our personal stories.
Chaplain Sargent still liked bikes – yes, snow at Camp Irwin – Chaplain Young ready to launch a missile. Thank you for visiting Lotsa Larry Goodell and please do subscribe, comment or email me. [email protected] I was caretaker for Major General Kenner F. Hertford (Ret.) for over 12 years. Larry Goodell, Placitas, New Mexico
Camp Irwin to me and all of us – became Fort Irwin – Goodbye!
“Entrapment is this society’s sole activity.. . and only langhter can blow it to rags. Bat there is no negative pure enough to entrap our expectations… “ -Ed Dorn, Gunslinger, III “I’ve always been interested In risking myself at the boundaries others have imposed on me.” -Larry Goodell “To be art-strong Is the only resistance and the greatest love.” -Larry Goodell
I first met Larry Goodell in the early 1970s when I came up from Albuquerque (where I was teaching at the University of New Mexico) to read my poems at the Thunderbird Bar in Placitas, a place known for music and poetry in the “Countercultural capital” of the Albuquerque area. Goodell was there too, and his reading was a real surprise because of the nature of it. Never had I seen such before (and I had attended many readings), because it involved masks, costumes, totem animals made of sewn materials, and a headpiece with two large, greenish, round discs on either side of his face. His wife, Lenore, (a photographer and artist to whom he has been married since 1968), handed him the totem animals at certain points in the reading. The performance was meant to puncture “everyday reality” and bring the poet’s messages into the minds of listeners by dint of psychological “shock and awe.” Since then, I have seen him read many times, sometimes with accoutrements and sometimes not, but his readings are always a dramatic experience, never a dull recitation. Like the Surrealists, who believed humor could be used to break through the veneer of common (low) consciousness to create an opportunity to enhance non-rational perception, Goodell uses his “visual aids” (as well as irony, satire, humor) to open up a “playing field” in the mind. The two levels of perception, it might be said, crash into each other like particles in the Hadron Collider. It’s hard to say if the result is the Higgs Boson particle or not.
Goodell (b. 1935, Roswell, NM), who studied piano during his childhood and still plays quite well, graduated from the University of Southern California (195/) with honors). He then spent two years in the Army in the Mohave Desert before returning to his native New Mexico. He studied for a Master’s degree at UNM, taught at New Mexico Military Institute and what became Albuquerque Academy. Robert Creeley, already famous when he came to UNM to take a Master’s degree, also taught at Albuquerque Academy while living in Placitas. (His friend Ed Dorn stayed for a short while also.) After finishing the degree, Creeley left, later returning to Placitas and to teach at UNM. Goodell studied with Creeley and visited his home frequently. Many poets traveling through stopped in: Ginsberg, Tuli Kupferberg, Ed Sanders of the Fugs, avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, and many more. It was like Black Mountain West, says Goodell. Creeley introduced him to the poetry of W. C. Williams, and they discussed Pound, Gertrude Stein, and many other writers. In a poem dedicated to the Creeleys and titled “The House that makes it so,” Goodell says of that experience in the Creeley Placitas house:
I drove by the old Creeley house because I wanted to write a poem. There was the piano-shaped bedroom Bobbie had Von Shutze build. The floors of adobe with sheep’s blood sealer that kept crumbling in the old house, the step-down new studio with that volcanic Jemez view where we sat & picked the energy of language apart and I could put my life in art back together. . . . The patio of corn & rhubarb & music to enchiladas Almaden white wine as Back to the kitchen, the slow night weaved on and the alternative worlds to where I was born. . . (Here on Earth, pp. 70-71)
It was a time of artists being engaged in social change, experiments in “higher consciousness,” and cultural renovation, none of which was popular with those in power. During this ’60s heyday. Placitas was a rural “vortex,” with four communes in the mountains and valleys around the village (an old Spanish town, part of Las Huertas Land Grant from centuries past). It was off the beaten path, attracting “creative Outsiders” who were part of the uprising against the nation’s racism, exploitative socio-economic system, and the Vietnam War. It was also simply a place to “drop out” of the larger society, as were communes near Santa Fe and Taos. Like everywhere else, some fought the system and some took themselves out of the system as much as possible. Remnants of these communes still exist in New Mexico.
Later, as events brought often-violent responses from all levels of government to nation-wide protests, there were manifestations of the national conflicts in New Mexico. The Power Elite was scared! At UNM, student protestors who had arranged with authorities for a peaceful anti-war protest, were, in spite of the arrangement, bayoneted by National Guardsmen, along with journalists covering the event. Students blocked Interstate 40, helicopters dropped tear gas on them, and then on the campus when they retreated there. UNM Regents, a collection of reactionaries who bought their way onto the Board, used their power to try to repress students and faculty, attempting to censor and prohibit free speech on campus. In northern parts of the state, supporters of Reies Lopez Tijerina and his Alianza de los Pueblos Libres de Mercedes clashed with authorities over issues related to government seizures and Anglo encroachments on Hispanic land rights, leading to a deadly confrontation at the courthouse in Tierra Amarilla. Federal and state authorities moved to destroy Tijerina, his family, his movement and political party. (He has lived in exile in Mexico for many years.) This was a time of turmoil in the nation: University students were shot-killed and wounded-at Kent State, South Carolina State, Jackson State, University of Kansas, UCal Berkeley, and countless other institutions; the Black Panthers were attacked by Chicago police and nationwide by the FBI; busloads of drafted young men bound for Vietnam were blocked by anti-war protestors in Oakland; the American Indian Movement, trying to defend itself, was assaulted by the FBI at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge (Lakota) Reservation in South Dakota; Civil Rights marchers were attacked by Kluxer police in the South; JFK, RFK, and MLK were assassinated; the “police-riot” attack on protestors in Chicago at the 1968 rigged Democratic convention; the U.S. Constitution ignored by the authorities who refused to follow the laws they imposed on everyone else; the world-wide uprising in 1968. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and it was busy.
Larry Goodell had attended the famous 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference where he met Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Diane DiPrima, Denise Levertov; Philip Whalen and others, attending many presentations. Creeley was there. In “Yesterdays,” a poem from his 2003 book, If I were writing this (New Directions, p. 91), Creeley refers to the conference: “Then that / Summer there is the great Vancouver Poetry / Festival, Allen comes back from India, Olson / from Glouster, beloved Robert Duncan / from Stinson Beach. Denise reads ‘Hypocrite / Women’ to the Burnaby ladies and Gary Snyder, / Philip Whalen and Margaret Avison are there / too along with a veritable host of the young. / Then it’s autumn again. I’ve quit my job / and we head back to Albuquerque / and I teach again at the university.”
Goodell also went to the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965. In New Mexico, he established Duende Press (which published a series of books, or a journal, depending on your point of view, in which each issue focused on only one poet), and poetry/art magazines Fervent Valley (1972) and Oriental Blue Streak (1968). Over the years, Goodell organized readings for Albuquerque’s Downtown Saturday Night, the Rio Grande Writer’s Association, the Central Torta Series, ABQ United Artists, Living Batch Bookstore, and Silva’s Saloon in Bernalillo. Since 2004 he has been one of the directors of the Duende Poetry Series of Placitas. Goodell has published his poetry in innumerable journals and anthologies through the decades and in four books: Cycles (Duende Press, 1966), Firecracker Soup (El Paso, Cinco Puntos Press, 1990), Out of Secrecy (Yoo-Hoo Press, 1992), and Here on Earth (Albuquerque, La Alameda Press, 1996).
In 1972, Goodell went on a nationwide reading tour with poet Stephen Rodefer in which he performed “Ometeotl Trilogy: The Staff, The Bowl & The Book” at various venues, ending at the Mandeville Gallery at UCSD in La Jolla, Ca. This production included costumes, masks, and an array of props. Today (though he may not perform the longer pieces), he still presents, from time to time, his “word performances” that manifest his belief “in extending poetry to its ceremonial roots.” Goodell is dedicated to “oral poetry” and has said that he always thinks of poetic structure in terms of rhythmic musical compositions, related to his training on the piano. As he says in his poem “Performance,” “Language should do something other than pray for reality to come true.” (Here on Earth, p. 42).
In an essay in Artspace (Southwestern Contemporary Arts Quarterly/, Vol. I, No. 1, Fall, 1976), which Goodell has posted online, he says: “Poems for me no longer could be trapped in a book or stay too long on the page. They had to be enacted from real life. At the same time, their source remained a mystery.” (p. 6). However, Goodell is both a “page poet” and a “stage poet,” though not a slam poet. He believes what Charles Olsen was telling younger poets: “we weren’t doing things large enough, we had little bits and pieces poems.” (p. 5). Goodell has created mythic contexts for many of his poetic structures. As he says, “Now that I look back on it, I was exploring to the hilt the tremendous longing for rite in me. Living all my life in New Mexico observing people with their own meaningful rituals, I wanted my own and had only me to come up with it. {….}! was… .magician and fool at once. The Sacred and the Profane. The Clown-Priest, not really, just me.” (p. 5). Is Larry Goodell the “Clown Prince of Poetry” in New Mexico, as he is apparently the “Poet Laureate of Placitas” because of his longevity there? Perhaps, and he is also the origin of all his dramatis personae, of which there are many manifestations. There may be the common tensions between the ‘T and the “Poetic I” in his poetry, but there are many more contrasts between the masked characters who show up to dramatize a performance, as if all of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms come to life, with masks.1 Poet Gus Blaisdell (1935- 2003), who owned the Living Batch Bookstore and is known for his collection Dented Fenders: Poems, 1960-75, named what Goodell does “Poesis dramatized.”2
Blaisdell also said, in an Artspace essay called “Larry Goodell: Co[s]mic Clown,” (Ibid, p. 9) that the Placitas poet:”.. . steps out upon the stage possessing and invaded by his own poetry and paraphernalia. In the course of his caperings, the stage becomes a piece of this whirling planet as he enacts, incarnates and embodies in performance what poetry must have been like before it was expurgated categorically into epic, which was tribal and gave the bard shaman-like powers into lyric.. . .and into tragedy. Goodell’s poetry is more ancient than these first, classic Aristotelian resolutions. It is antediluvian.. . and his poetry is also deeply comic.” Goodell described himself in “Ears please too” (from Here on Earth, p. 67): “Larry Goodell is a poet whose overdose on poetry / has left him inebriated for life, like the Zen student / whose shins have been kicked by the Zen master.”
In an unpublished interview (2009) with fellow Roswell native Randy Biggers, Goodell said about his creative process: “I wait ’til some line pops into my head and I put it in my notebook. It can be any time day or night. I try not to force it. I generally wait for something …. and write it down as quickly as I can. There is no intention; it’s like listening to what appears in my mind. I have a sense when it is the end, then I try to find a title and that’s it.” He also noted that he writes two or three poems per day, and that he doesn’t revise a lot. Influenced by his early interest in jazz, it is perhaps a lot like musical improvisation. Asked who his favorite poet is, Goodell said “Gary Snyder.” Other favorite poets have included Tom Raworth, Ken Irby, Joanne Kyger, and Gino Sky. Regarding Jimmy Santiago Baca, he says: “He howls and luxuriates in the coyote yelp, he returns to the reader the gift of happiness and vibrancy he infuses his language with. Page after page, the marvelous poetry displays both grandeur of spirit and courageous heart.” Goodell also explained that he doesn’t really write the “long poem,” and that he considers rhyme to be important in poetry. And, finally, “My poetry is best if it has a ceremonial aspect.”
Goodell has an affinity for some types of experimental poetic structures when they merge with dramatic form, genre mixtures at times too, but he is particularly fond of unique combinations of repetition and variation in poems, especially when they play with syntax. He likes puns and word plays, which often lead to humorous lines that reverb back onto the main topic of the text. The repetition can accumulate, double, or even triple up. Sometimes the repeated words look the same on the page, but each segment is different when read aloud, and at times italics give distinct emphases on the printed page. Often he’s using the same word as both noun and verb. And, as he has said:”…. only poets and artists who are attuned to the world as a whole. . . have the primary power to warm over the hearts and allow illusion to cast its spell. . . . Our imagination places auras around the specifics of our daily lives. Not all the time, but some times. Hilarity is the only escape .. .” (Artspace essay, p. 7). This sounds a lot like the epigraph by Dorn I placed at the beginning of this essay:. only laughter can blow it to rags…” This emphasizes an important aspect of Goodell’s poetry, the use of humor in all its multifarious forms. Word play is frequent, for example, in “Republican”
Republican repugnant din repube lick in re pug lick sin re plug bite in re puke lick can republic banned republic canned the public damned republic jammed the pubic tanned the pubic damned the pubic planned re-pubic man re-pube your man repugnant man repuke replan repugnant plan republican
Although Goodell likes word play, he is not a fan of the “language poets” for they “throw meaning to the wind.” As for common themes, his note on “Anthrax Avenue” says, “the poem touches on New Mexico, the WIPP (nuclear waste disposal) Project, Los Alamos (nuclear weapons issue), drunkenness and greed, gardening, compassion… (heck, that’s all I write about)”.
Add to the list: political, mythic, and religious themes. Regarding the Mythic, he said he always identified with the Hero Twins from Navajo/Dine mythology, is interested in Mythic (circular) time, and relates strongly to the Native American figure of the coyote as trickster. Beyond this, there is a larger question of the archetypical figure of a shamanic, sacred clown from the Native American tradition, their global-cultural context, and their relation to the play element in culture.
Back in the 1960s when Goodell was first elaborating his poetic personae with masks, costumes, backdrops, totem animals, and other elements of his “word performances” there was probably a more positive context for this, given the nature of that era. But now, the context needs to be “filled in.” We need to remember that the play element in culture is not just about amusement but a serious consideration. “Games” are the basis of war (battles were fought on demarcated, “pitched” fields, like life-size game boards), and trials within the law are arranged as “games” too. You can lose your life in these “games.” In an essay in Jacques Ehrman’s Game, Play, Literature, Eugen Fink notes: “Play is finite creativity in the magic dimension of illusion,” and “… play is no harmless, peripheral or even ‘childish’ thing.” (pp.28- 29). And in the same volume, Michel Beaujour says: “The poet plays against two opponents, which are, ultimately, two faces of the same coin: language and the subconscious.” (p. 60). In Johan Huizinga’s book Homo Ludens:A study of the play element in culture, the author says that “Poesis” is in fact a play-function, which lies “beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage and the Seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter.” (p. 119). Poetry; says the Dutch scholar, is not only aesthetic but liturgical and social as well. At the same time it can be ritual, entertainment, artistry, persuasion, sorcery, soothsaying, prophecy; and even a competitive game. An ancient appellation of the poet was rates (Seer), which implies possession of extraordinary knowledge. Huizinga: “Gradually, the poet-seer splits up into figures of the prophet, the priest, and even the philosopher, legislator (cf. Shelley’s “Poets are the world’s legislators”), the orator, the demagogue, etc.” And: “Poetry in its original culture-making capacity, is born in and as play – sacred play…” (p. 122). Myth is always poetry, and “All poetry is born of play: the sacred play of worship, the festive play of courtship, the martial play of the contest, the disputatious play of braggadocio, mockery; and the nimble play of wit and readiness.” (p. 123). And, “As civilization becomes more serious and developed, only poetry remains as the stronghold of living and noble play.” (p. 134). This is part of the background to the various “mythic” performances that have figured in Larry Goodell’s poetic-dramatic creations.
The various figures and incarnations of the poet, expressed through costumes and masks, totem animals and symbols, augment the texts recited, creating a “mythic” context for Goodell’s readings (not all, but those with appropriate texts). The “visual props” and paraphernalia are basically made by Larry and Lenore. Gus Blaisdell’s earlier reference to Goodell as a “Co[s]mic Clown” fits with a role that goes back to ancient Egypt, to European societies when the Court Jester not only entertained but was the only one near the King who could tell the monarch the truth without being punished, and in mainly “non-techno- logical” societies where the shaman connects and interprets different realities. In New Mexico, where Nature, Culture, Art, Myth, and History come together in a nexus distinct from anywhere else on earth, it is natural that Goodell would relate to the local figures of the Sacred Clown, the Kos^are of the Pueblo Indian cultures (Kayemisi in the Puebloan Hopi culture, the Mudhead figures). He never dresses as or assumes similar costumes to these Pueblo figures, but the role he plays, no matter the mask or costume, is equivalent.
The role of the Koshare is a semi-religious figure which can embody a spirit, especially the Corn Spirits, in Pueblo cultures. They are generally painted in black and white stripes, faces painted like masks, corn shucks often tied into their hair and standing straight up from their heads. As corn grows from the ground, so they climb up the ladder from the underground sacred kiva at ceremonial dances. They amuse but are also feared for their social control role, their power. They often entertain but they also are allowed to be contrarian, to do things not generally allowed in the tribe; they can reverse normalcy for a short period. They connect the mundane and profane to the Sacred. Goodell, in the mythic roles which he assumes as poet, as Seer, fits into the Sacred Clown, the Cosmic Clown persona. And when assuming these roles, he is beyond an empirical reality; into the realm of poetry as myth, creating the “ceremonial” context for his “mythic” poems.
The question of God, in Christian terms, is not one which plays well in Goodell’s work, at least in the traditional sense, and it doesn’t figure into the Mythic aspect of his “word performances” unless it is a topic of derision for the most part. The Christian God simply seems to be, for Goodell, a negative concept used by unconscionable minions of established sects for social control and repression, and long ago lost its mythic context. In a poem which satirizes the attempts of right-wing Christians to impose control over public (secular) schools during the terms of President Ronald Reagan (who wasn’t religious but pandered to the Religious Right), Goodell uses humor to push the whole controversy into the realm of absurdity it deserves:
“God Has Been Expelled from the Classroom” (The title is a quote from Ronald Reagan)
God was a bad boy- he came to school with a snotty nose popping bubble gum at the girls. They all recognized him for the virgin he was but he was such a bully. And when he pulled Veronica’s braids & almost uprooted one from her scalp the Principal had God on the carpet and expelled him right then & there. (Firecracker Soup, p. 18)
If there is a secular ritual in Goodell’s poetry; it would be in his political poems, where he takes the absurdity and lies to their source, confronting the Power Elite with the Truth they generally don’t want thrown back in their faces, as they try to fool the people in order to take advantage.
Claude Levi-Strauss, in his many fascinating books, has elaborated several aspects of the artist in relation to the mythic and to science:”… art lies half-way between scientific knowledge and mythic or magical thought.” (The Savage Mind, 4th U.S. edition, p. 22). The genius of the artist, says Levi-Strauss, is in uniting internal and external knowledge in the creation of an artistic object which can elicit aesthetic (and other) emotions. By way of a creative process of synthesis (uniting opposites, and beyond), a work of art is created out of nothing other than the mind of the artist. For most people who appreciate art, this is magical thinking in itself. When Goodell turns the aesthetic into a ritual through use of mythic text and context, then the event becomes an artistic structure on another level. The role of the poet in all of this is, of course, central. If, according to Levi-Strauss, such an event is ritualistic, it is a “conjunction” -conjoining the audience with mythic context, but if it becomes a “game” then it is “disjunctive” separating the audience into “winners” and “losers.” The poet as shaman always speaks to his audience from the mythopoetic “Center of the World.” (See Eliade’s Shamanism, first Princeton/Bollingen edition, pp. 264-65). When Goodell puts on the mask, he is speaking as someone other than his literal self. He is speaking from Eliade’s “Cosmic Mountain,” another way of saying from the “Center of the World.” He has moved from speaking as the “I” to the “Poetic I.” William Blake created his own Bible-like mythopoetic “reality.” While Goodell hasn’t done this, he has brought the truth-telling Sacred Clown to the fore, and he, the Anglo Koshare poet of Placitas, can also speak Truth to Power in his political poems as well as present his mythopoetic structures to his audiences. And sometimes, they cross, using the one to illuminate the other.
Goodell of course, knows that these roles he plays, in the process of communicating on more than one level at the same time with his audience, are temporary. But he also knows, that all serious poets are Outsiders. As Colin Wilson says: “the Visionary is inevitably an Outsider.” (The Outsider, first Delta edition, p. 203). Not all poets are visionaries, nor vice versa, but for those poets who are real “Seers,” the Truth is the poet’s strength and best weapon. It may also get the poet into trouble with those who don’t want it revealed to the society at large. This is why the role of the poet must almost always be in contrast, or opposition, to the established Power in a society, for when (almost) all media have been brought under control of the governing elite, as is the case now, someone has to tell the King the Truth, whether he wants to hear it or not. Someone must inform the people that the monarch has no clothes. And finally, Nature is also a common theme in Goodell’s poetry: the role of Nature, the need to save the planet from destruction by corporate greed, the beauty of walking in the Ojito Wilderness, the yearly gardens around his house, his tasks with the local committee to clean out irrigation canals, the stark beauty of the Sandia foothills, the timeless poetry of the “fervent valley” where he lives, above the larger Rio Grande Valley; in the shadow of the Cosmic Mountain. We think you will find all these riches in the poetry of Larry Goodell.
Gary Brower, Placitas, New Mexico, from MALPAIS REVIEW, Vol. 3. No. 1 – Summer 2012, pp.68-80
1*Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), the Portuguese poet considered by many to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century, in any literature, created five different heteronyms, the poems of each were written in a different style. Ironically, and directly related to the multiple pseudonyms, is the fact that his surname means “person” in Portuguese. 2 Latin poesis from Greek poiesis, literally “creation.”
#17 – 25″w x 49″oil on gesso’d masonite, redwood frame, signed
After taking a painting course from James Jarvaise at the University of Southern California I drove to his house and studio in Tajunga to buy one of his paintings. It was1957, the year of my graduation.
There was fog on my way. It hung over the citified foothills, gray, with the blue of the mountains blending through. I sped through the string of cities – Glendale, Canada, La Crescenta – their businesses crouched against the road, their canyon roads winding off from the road to the homes set up in the foothills.
Then I reached Tajunga. I kept my eye on the markers as the boulevard curved up through the foothills and found it – Haines Canyon Road – and I turned. The road narrowed and I turned again on Mistletoe Road and curved up into the hills passing rectangular-cut homes with wide windows and geranium gardens. I shifted into low, the timber-propped homes tilting around me as the car turned. I knew it wasn’t far. Then I saw it– the garage with the green MG in it and beyond, the house, set against the landscaped mountain, with the fog-hung expanse of the valley below it, more umber-colored houses below, and some new ones building above, their yellow timbers showing. I parked next to the MG and walked toward the house. Jarvaise was in the garden. He was landscaping, moving some slab rooks to make a footpath down a steep part of the garden.
Then I reached Tajunga. I kept my eye on the markers as the boulevard curved up through the foothills and found it – Haines Canyon Road – and I turned. The road narrowed and I turned again on Mistletoe Road and curved up into the hills passing rectangular-cut homes with wide windows and geranium gardens. I shifted into low, the timber-propped homes tilting around me as the car turned. I knew it wasn’t far. Then I saw it– the garage with the green MG in it and beyond, the house, set against the landscaped mountain, with the fog-hung expanse of the valley below it, more umber-colored houses below, and some new ones building above, their yellow timbers showing. I parked next to the MG and walked toward the house. Jarvaise was in the garden. He was landscaping, moving some slab rooks to make a footpath down a steep part of the garden.
‘You must have started early,’ he called out when he saw me.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘I’m right on time – eleven o’clock.’ Jarvaise opened the gate and I saw his little boy. He had wide blue eyes and ran around us as we walked through the garden.
‘I’ve never been here before,’ I said. ‘It’s quite beautiful.’
‘We like it,’ he said. ‘I plan to build a studio apart from the house after we get back from Europe. A large square one to give me plenty room to work.’
‘When are you leaving?’ I asked.
‘In August if we go. We’re not certain yet.’
I walked to the edge of the garden where a great Yucca thrust its bloom skyward then we walked back between the lawn chairs and geraniums in magentas and vermilions and a curious pile of granite and limestone rocks around a piece of sculpture – a sitting figure staring off toward the valley.
The little boy stared at me, looking like Jarvaise except for the blond hair – Jarvaise’s was black – and the large child’s eyes.
‘He likes guests,’ Jarvaise said. ‘Come on inside.’
I followed him down the steps between bushes of blooming pink phlox and into the front room of his long rectangular house. There was the view of the valley of cities before me through the windows and by the windows an old piano and Chinese rugs on the floor and in the corner a kneeling figure sculpted by Zakian and on the walls – I stood in the middle of the room and turned all the way around looking at what was on the walls.
I was quite struck with the sight. His new ‘Hudson River’ series of work of great white and multi-colored paintings covered the walls – some paintings five by seven feet, some smaller, some larger. I stood and looked, knowing I was one of the very first to see these paintings, knowing they were the fruits of the last several months’ work of a great artist, knowing that someday some of these paintings would be hanging in New York in a first showing and not till then would the art world and the public see them and read about them, and I knew that their first showing would raise a controversy but ultimately be recognized as one of America’s finest contributions today to the world stream of art.
Jarvaise did not say this. He was silent as I looked. The paintings were complete in themselves, speaking for themselves, and no words could add to or assuage their beauty.
Jarvaise walked over and opened up the piano.
‘Chopin once used this,’ he said.
‘Did he play this on it?’ I asked and struck some jazz chords. It was out of tune.
‘The weather,’ Jarvaise said. ‘And it doesn’t stay in tune as long as the new ones.’
‘How odd that it had a moveable soundboard right over the keys,’ I said. ‘Did you have it sent from Europe?’
He nodded. ‘I found it in a chateau in France. It’s worth about 225,000 dollars because of its history.
‘I turned back to the paintings. All seemed irrelevant but the paintings. I wanted to blurt out eulogies about them, but somehow I couldn’t. Somehow I couldn’t say anything to Jarvaise about them. He had created them. He knew their quality but he was quiet about it, realizing his genius but preferring to be humble about it, and so I said, ‘Is this the whole++ “Hudson River” series?’
‘Oh. no,’ he said, and I followed him through the open kitchen and through a hall into a bedroom. His other little boy, just a baby, lay on his blankets on the carpet eyeing me curiously. ‘Where’s your mama?’ I asked the little boy. Jarvaise was apologetic, ‘She is teaching today. So I’m baby-sitting these several days before I start teaching for the summer in San Diego.’
I wondered if the little boy could see the beauty which hung in great captured flights of color on the paintings. These were more of the series, large, some immense, from ceiling to floor, all with pure statements of color made luminescent by white backgrounds. I walked and looked again silently and then I felt it. Often, when I am deeply impressed by a fine painting, my diaphragm lifts – not much – just enough to tell, and I know there has been a rare communication between the artist and myself. But it only happens in the presence of , what seems to me, great art. Otherwise, if the paintings are poor, I let out a grunt of dismissal.
I turned and glanced at Jarvaise. There he was, perhaps the most promising young artist in the country, and I felt a pang of envy. In ten years I would be as old as he. And by then, would I reach such accomplished heights in my poetry as he had in his painting now? I could not help asking myself this, and I put the bad feeling down and smiled and said, ‘Jarvaise, these are some of the finest and most exciting paintings I’ve seen.’
‘Come into the studio,’ he said and I followed him, bumping my back against the wall of the hall, trying to see the paintings and drawings hung there.
‘This is a good. one,’ he said and he pointed to a large one. ‘It’s a pity it’s in the hall where you can’t back up and see it.’
The studio was simple, with its large window overlooking the valley of cities below, and the table by the window submerged in tubes of oil-paints and up-stuck brushes and paint-dapped pallet, and by the table, one large easel with #18 of the series resting on it, just finished, ready to hang, where? Somewhere.
‘How many of these series are you going to paint?’ I asked and I sat down on a high stool by the wall and looked around.
‘I don’t know,’ Jarvaise said and he walked to his easel. ‘The possibilities are infinite. But I’ll do at least forty before I have my New York showing.’
‘And this is #18?’ I asked and I looked at his most recent painting.
‘Yes,’ Jarvaise said, and he turned and pointed to two smaller paintings resting against the wall. ‘That is #17, and that is a collage which won a prize in the L. A. County show last year. It’s the only collage I have left. I got it back after the showing of my collages.’
‘Did you sell most of them at the showing?’
‘Yes. Pretty good for Los Angeles. You can have this one if you want. It was listed for $500 dollars at the museum.’
I kneeled down and looked at the collage. It was a fine one, some cut newspaper figures glued to the canvas and painted over, fine blacks and oranges and blues with yellow lines radiating up into the design from the left. It was rather large and square looking, 36″ by 40″ but quite, quite different from the series he was working on.
‘You did a series of over a hundred collages, didn’t you?’ I asked and thought of my next question.
‘Yes. You saw the big one in the museum, didn’t you?’ he asked.
‘Yes, but Jarvaise, there is such a difference between your collages of last year and your present “Hudson River” series. Was it a slow transition from one to the other, or abrupt?’
Jarvaise turned and pointed to a large painting. ‘This painting is #1 of the present series. It started out to be a collage, but I became interested in the white areas of the canvas and I left several areas of the canvas as they were, white, instead of covering it all with paper and oils. Now let me show you #2 of the series.’
We went back in the bedroom. The baby looked up at me this time and patted his hand against the blanket. Jarvaise pointed to #2.
‘Then I began to see what I was getting away from and to see where I was going,’ Jarvaise said. ‘The next paintings were this present series.’
I looked at #2 closely. There was nothing glued to the canvas so it wasn’t a collage, but it was still canvas, not the white painted masonite of the present series. It was a rather unstable work, with lingering traces of the collage series and strong traces of the present series.
‘So it was a rather swift transition,’ I said.
‘Yes. From #3 on there are identifying characteristics of the paintings, the white gesso-covered masonite, the rather transparent sweep of colors heightened by the white, a sort of landscape effect sometimes though it isn’t intentional. Some friends have pointed this out because of the blues and greens. So I’m dedicating this series of paintings to the Hudson River School of Landscape Painters. Naming is always a problem.’
I followed Jarvaise back into the studio.
‘#1 of the series reminds me of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon also a transition picture, giving hints of his cubism to come,’ I said. ‘And it changed the whole course of painting.’
Jarvaise smiled. It was a strong compliment.
In the studio he pointed to the smaller #17 leaning against the wall.
‘I thought I had three this size that you could pick from, but the other two are in New York.’
‘Did you sell them,’ I asked.
‘Yes, both of them, and they’re the only ones I’ve let out.’
‘How much,’ I asked.
‘Four hundred a piece.’
‘Then you’re letting me off easy,’ I said.
‘No I’m not,’ he said. ‘That sale was a gallery sale. I only get 270 dollars for a 400 dollar gallery sale. You’re just getting the dealer’s part off.’
‘Do they like for you to sell things on your own?’ I asked.
Jarvaise laughed. ‘No, they don’t like it. They know about the collage. If you choose that, I can tell them I loaned it.’
I looked at #17. ‘Then it’s between the collage and this for me?’ I asked.
‘The big ones would he more,’ he said.
‘You just leave me here to decide,’ I said and I picked up the collage and set it by #17. ‘Such a difference between the two!’ I thought.
‘I can take the glass off the collage if you want,’ Jarvaise said.
The baby cried out from his room.
‘I don’t like glass over a painting,’ I said. ‘It acts somehow like a barrier. And I like to touch and explore the texture. And I don’t like frames.’
Jarvaise was pleased with my comment.
‘I put the frame and the glass on for the show. It’s an oil-collage. I don’t know of anyone else who has done oil-collages, at the time I did these. It passed for a water-color collage.’
The baby cried out again.
‘I can take it off,’ Jarvaise said, ‘and nail some strips of Redwood around it like the other ones.’
‘That’s what I like, I said. ‘Just let me look these over.’
Jarvaise closed the door behind him as he left to take care of the baby, and I sat on the floor looking at the collage and #17. I felt a passive feeling of disappointment inside me. The collage was a beautiful and strong work – careful and striking design, subtle textures resulting from the mastic and smoothed-on and painted-over newspapers, but the colors were subdued. The blues weren’t vibrant, somehow, and I looked and my reactions hovered between enthusiasm and let-down. But I kept looking, exploring, and the let-down began to subside and the enthusiasm grow. I began to discover beautiful sections of the collage which I hadn’t seen before. The blues against the blacks took on an iridescence and expanded – the longer I looked, the more unbridling my response.
I looked at#17. ‘One of his most recent paintings,’ I thought and I got up and walked to the easel and looked at the latest one, a larger one, #18. ‘There’s something about the large ones,’ I thought. ‘Less confined. More white lacing the colors, giving an airiness, a spatial depth, a floating easiness of color. The color in #18!’ I thought, and my diaphragm lifted. ‘They’re lyric, they sing out unmuted. This new series. They’re very joyous paintings.’ I walked back to the two choices. #17 still wasn’t saying as much as the large paintings in the other rooms and the #18 on the easel. Jarvaise came in.
‘How about some green tea?’ he asked.
‘Green tea?’ I asked.’
‘They sit around drinking it all day in North Africa,’ Jarvaise said. ‘But I don’t have any mint.’
‘I’ll try some,’ I said. ‘But it bothers me.’
‘Green tea?’ he asked.
‘No, #17,’ I replied.
‘That’s a good sign,’ Jarvaise said. ‘Here. let’s hang it up. A painting always looks different on a wall.’ Jarvaise picked it up and I followed him into the baby’s room. The little boy eyed me only a few seconds this time, then turned his head over and gurgled. Jarvaise took down a painting. They were all hung by copper wires which he wound around a jutting-out screw on the wall. This way he could move them easily. I held up #17 and he wound the wire on. We stepped back and looked. Now, plain wood paneling surrounded #17. Light from the full-length window poured on it. I stepped back farther and looked at the hanging rectangle. It seemed to breathe and to glow, the white background circumscribing the sheaves of color, their purity ignited by the spark of masterful design, and I looked long, and it happened. My diaphragm lifted.
The painting was more than all I could ever want in a painting.
‘I’ll take it, Jarvaise.’
‘How about some green tea?’ he asked.
I followed Jarvaise to the open kitchen. ‘One, two or three sugars?’
‘I usually don’t have any.’
‘You ought to have at least one with this.’
‘Okay, one,’ I said.
He handed me a crock of green tea. It looked like any other tea but the tea leaves in the bottom were green. We sat down in the living room. The little boy with the curls of hair and wide blue eyes came in from the garden. He asked about me in his baby-to-parent talk. Jarvaise replied, ‘Why he’s our guest.’ The little boy picked up a picture storybook and crawled up on the couch where I was sitting.
‘He’s already painting,’ Jarvaise said and smiled.
‘Do you think he’ll be an artist?’ I asked.
‘Perhaps a writer,’ he said and held his crock up. ‘A little mint and this would be better.’
‘I like it,’ I said. The tea was hot and smelled like fresh greens. I finished my crock and started to fill out the check. The little boy watched me as he flipped the pages of his picture storybook. I finished the check and handed it to Jarvaise.
‘They’re both good paintings,’ I said. ‘But this one suits me better. It’s more poetic, somehow a freer statement and less confined and more lyrical than the collage and it makes me think of the lyric poets – Shelley and Thomas – so I like #17.’
‘I think it will mean more and more to you.’ Jarvaise said. ‘A painting fails if, after you see it and look at it awhile, you cease ever wanting to look at it again. With a good painting the meaning for you grows the more you live with it.’
‘An element of subtlety,’ I said. ‘It’s the same with a great poem.’
‘Did you read the article in theSunday Times about the collage in the museum?’ Jarvaise asked.
‘No,’ I said.
‘One critic said I just lifted the leaf motif from Matisse. Another defended me, though, quite well.’
‘I noticed a relation,’ I said. ‘But you use the motif entirely differently.’
‘I know,’ Jarvaise said. ‘I’m not a great admirer of Matisse, but I like some of his earlier things. I’ve seen quite a bit of what he did during his last ten years. I don’t care for a lot of what he did then. His leaf motifs are just the same leaf used over and over but different sizes. Besides I think the motif I used came more from French wallpaper than Matisse. I often sketched some of the designs in some of the chateaus.’
‘Have you seen some of Picasso’s latest paintings?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes,’ Jarvaise replied. ‘There’s a deterioration there also.’
‘Why doesn’t he break away from representation?’ I asked. ‘He’s done everything else.’
‘It takes a young man to do that,’ Jarvaise replied. ‘It’s an exhausting transition.’
‘Well if you know that there are painters painting non-representational paintings, then if you were still painting abstractions of things, like Picasso, couldn’t you just change and try non-representational painting?’ I asked.
‘No, not at all,’ Jarvaise said. ‘A painter doesn’t work that way, at least a serious painter. You have to feel it yourself, what you’re painting. If you don’t feel it you can’t successfully paint it.’
‘Was this in Europe?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I felt it coming. It was sort of a fight with myself, getting farther and farther away from any recognizable image. Finally I broke away from representation. It must be something like a woman going through her period. Then it was a matter of finding myself in this new world of limitless possibilities.’
‘And were last year’s collages the first series out of this “new world?” ’
‘No. There were several before, but with this new series, the “Hudson River” series, I think I have really broken away from the European schools, especially the academic approach, and started something definitely American.’
‘American?’ I asked and I looked around at the paintings. ‘In what way?’
‘A certain freedom,’ he said.
‘And immensity,’ I added.
‘It’s difficult to pin down,’ Jarvaise said. ‘But they’re definitely not European.’
‘I’ll show you what I’ve been doing,’ I said. I picked up my notebook and pulled out some manuscripts. ‘These are some recent poems.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I won’t read them now. I’ll wait till I can sit down and concentrate on them.’
I put the copies on the couch. ‘I think you’ll find that I’ve got quite a bit away from Dylan Thomas’ influence.’
‘Oh well, that’s probably good,’ he said.
‘Now it’s G. M. Hopkins,’ I said and I laughed. ‘If it’s not one, it’s the other.’
‘Don’t worry about it. You’re young. Experiment all you can. Don’t worry about finding a certain individuality to your work. It’ll come after a while.’
‘I hope so,’ I said.
‘Students worry too much about that,’ he said. ‘And it makes them too tense about their work.’
I picked up one of the poems. ‘I wrote this yesterday. It’s the first poem which I’m rather excited about. I let it come freely, and when I look back over it I find that it contains the poetic universals of alliteration, assonance, even time and meter, and I didn’t consciously put them in. They’re just there, I suppose, resulting from my past two and a half years concentrating on them.’
‘Fine,’ Jarvaise said. ‘You see with what sureness you can work after you’ve established a foundation.’
‘Anyway it’s here, and it seems to be me and not someone else talking.’ I put the manuscripts down and we got up and put our crocks up.
‘Send me some more copies when you can,’ Jarvaise said. ‘I enjoy reading them.’
‘Okay, I will,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the tea.’ I pointed to some vase-like painted objects on the kitchen partition. ‘What are these?’
‘African tribal drums,’ he said. ‘Beautiful things.’
‘Yes,’ I said and I rotated one following its design with my eyes. ‘Some uninhibited creativity of some tribesman with child-like wonder. You know, Baudelaire has said that “Genius is child-hood rediscovered by an act of the will.” ’ ‘I believe it.’ I looked at Jarvaise.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do too.’
I gave one of the drums a whack and the little boy looked up at me goggle-eyed. ‘I better go,’ I said.
Jarvaise swung the door open, carrying the painting, and I followed him out. We closed the garden gate behind us, leaving the little boy inside waving at us.
‘Bye,’ he said.
We put the painting in the back seat of my car.
‘When I get home I might loan it to the Chaves County Museum in Roswell,’ I said. ‘It’ll make the Peter Hurd paintings stretch their canvases and pop in indignation. Do you know Hurd’s paintings?’
‘I know the name but I can’t place the paintings,’ Jarvaise said.
‘I think it’s just as well,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ he said and we laughed.
‘After I get out of the Army I can have it with me,’ I said. ‘I never thought I would ever actually own a painting that I really liked.’
‘I hope you’ll get sent to Europe,’ he said. ‘Your time’s important, and it’s a terrible waste of time otherwise.’
I looked off at the valley of cities below. A bluebird flew up in front of us and glided down into the valley.
‘What do you think your parents will think of your graduation gift?’ Jarvaise asked.
I smiled. ‘My dad will give it a glance and wonder why anybody would pay 250 dollars for blobs of color on a piece of white board, and my mother will think the colors are gorgeous. But remember, Jarvaise, it’s so new – good painters today are ahead of their time – and even me, as open-minded and used to contemporary art as I am, it took me thirty minutes of hard looking before I began to like it at all, and then it became more and more beautiful with each glance.’ ‘I told you,’ Jarvaise said, ‘it’s a good sign if it “bothers” you at first. It often means that there’s a certain unprobed depth to it.’
‘Well there is and I’ve got to go.’ We shook hands. ‘Good luck to you, Jarvaise. More and more people are recognizing the greatness of what you’re doing.’
I got in the car and closed the door.
‘If you’re ever in California again, drop by,’ Jarvaise said. ‘I’ll be here.’
‘Somewhere up in the hills?’ I asked.
‘Yes, and send me some more of your poems and above all, keep on writing. But I guess you don’t have to worry about that.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s not my problem. The problem is the medium. I’ve found I can write a good play and a good short story and a tolerable poem.’
‘Try them all out,’‘he said. ‘Don’t limit yourself now.’
‘It’ll probably be poetry. It gives me greater satisfaction though it’s the most difficult to write. One thing I like about paintings is that you communicate in them to more people than a poet can today in his poems. Many many people have seen your collage in the museum.’
‘But most of them are antagonistic,’ Jarvaise said, ‘with the same old worn-out remarks. And besides, for every good artist living today there are 10,000 fakers and poor artists. That’s why I seldom go to a museum showings of contemporary art. Seldom is there more than one good painting in a big show. Really it’s no wonder so many think the paintings are bad – they are bad.’
‘Not only bad,’ I said, ‘but nauseating.’
‘And so many can’t tell the difference between a good painting and a poor one,’ Jarvaise said.
‘I think I can,’ I said. ‘I actually own a good one, #17.’ I started the motor. Jarvaise smiled.
‘You’ll be publishing soon. Oh! And when you go down follow the curve close, don’t swing out too far.’
‘Is that why you have an MG?’ I asked.
‘Partly’ Jarvaise said.
I backed the car out and swung it around, looking back. ‘Thanks, Jarvaise.’
#17 – 1957 by James Jarvaise (1924 -2015)
This painting has been a primary joy in my life since my father and mother allowed me to obtain it for my graduation from USC. The color combinations and instantaneous blooming and swath colors never fail to lift me into its own landscape. I have hung it mostly vertical, as I first saw it, but also horizontal and either way the joy bounces from it. Larry Goodell, Placitas, New Mexico, 2024
our letters revealing how this happened, including a bit about the Vancouver Poetry Conference of 1963
behind Found Objects
Postcard from Hank Chapin, editor and publisher of Blue Grass
Hank and I were in graduate school at University of New Mexico, both in a course of plays contemporary with Shakespeare, and we were in Robert Creeley’s Contemporary Idiom class. Hank went on to teach in Kentucky and Ohio and the University of Hawaii and has lived in Hawaii many years. My first published poems appeared in his Blue Grass magazine #2, and the 3rd issue of Blue Grass was Louis Zukofsky’s Found Objects. These few letters tell something of how that publication came about. This is from my letter to Hank August 27, 1962:
Note: Thanks to Aaron Obedkoff in Vancouver who wrote asking about the Vancouver Poetry Conference (July and August of 1963), I found these copies of letters that give some immediate since of that colossal event. I drove my ’46 green Chevy all the way northwest from Placitas to Vancouver and attended almost everything. I met Ron Bayes and a. fredric franklyn and we palled around together and with Phil Whalen. I met Diane and Drum Hadley, Clark Coolidge, George Bowering, Lionel Kearns, Daphne, Judith, others! I took courses from Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg, on and on into indescribable territory. This is from a postcard from Creeley where he urged me to go:
VANCOUVER POETRY CONFERENCE 1963 – Letter to Hank Chapin
“Poetry conferences at Vancouver (1963) and Berkeley (1965) were significant events that brought together and introduced a range of poets from diverse locations and temperaments. Warren Tallman was the man behind the conference in Vancouver, an event Robert Creeley described as ‘landmark’ in that it brought ‘together for the first time, a decisive company of then disregarded poets such as Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Margaret Avison, Philip Whalen and myself, together with as yet unrecognized younger poets of that time, Michael Palmer, Clark Coolidge and many more.'” — Steve Clay & Rodney Phillips, 1998. Some of this letter to Hank talks of the Conference.
In retrospect . . . . .
“In the winter of 1963, the journal Blue Grass published a special issue which is a micro-anthology of Zukofsky’s poems, ranging, as the title to his introduction points out, from 1962 to 1926. The reversal of the chronological order is a provocation and the suppression of dates for the poems, as well as the challenge to ‘historicism’ and Carbon-14 dating for poems, is a way of obviously conditioning the poems’ reading as ‘found objects.’ ” – from an excellent article by Hélène Aji in Jacket Magazine 2006.
My love to Hank Chapin, his family, his life, his generosity toward others – Larry Goodell
UPDATE: The PLACITAS WINERY literally rose out of the vacated ashes of the Anasazi Fields Winery thanks to Barb and Ty Belknap who purchased the whole property and set activities sailing again! Wine Production is active again. Music events for the community and other events with food and drinks come and go again. The following appeal I wrote in 2017 after the poet’s death and since it includes some of the earlier history of this valued and active place, I include it here:
Jim Fish (1949-2017) built Anasazi Fields Winery literally up from the ground, starting in 1995, realizing through hard work and lots of community cooperation and help, an ideal of creating wine from our wonderful native fruit. He succeeded in many ways, presenting to our community a small business warmly open to beneficial activities. The Winery is a community gathering place where we enjoy drinks along with celebrations of many sorts – political events, craft shows, music performances, poetry readings, book signings, lectures, art and photography exhibits.
It was my honor to work with Jim and with Gary Brower, Jeff Bryan and Cirrelda Snyder-Bryan presenting the Duende Poetry Series for over 12 active years generously hosted by Anasazi Fields Winery. We received a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation at one time and as a result brought Simon Ortiz, Joy Harjo, Janine Pommy-Vega and many other poets and writers to Placitas for amazing literary events.
It is my sincere hope that some enterprising Vintner will take over Anasazi Fields Winery and make a go of it as a winery. It will take real dedication and work. Perhaps, with appropriate zoning change, it could become simply a community meeting place or theater or gallery.
I offer no solutions, only hope. Years ago in the early ‘80’s the Zócalo Theater arose prominently in the historic Zócalo Complex in Bernalillo. Terry Lamm was the owner then before Sandoval County purchased it. The Zócalo Theater allowed local professionals like Bill Pearlman and Marcia Latham to put on plays some of which were communally created. A performance space is rare and crucial to a community. It is amazing how the Zócalo brought out our best talents. People from Placitas and Bernalillo and beyond volunteered to do stage work, acting, lights, ticket taking, planning, performing. It was refreshing the variety of work we staged including dance (Lee Connor and Lorn MacDougal of Placitas), poetry and original plays. The Zócalo taught me that a community must have some performance space for fostering creativity and local communication and pride. Years before the Zócalo, the Thunderbird Bar, right here in Placitas Village, gave our community a meeting place, a place for music and dance, a performance space and place where our first arts and crafts fair got started.
I am thankful for our wonderful Placitas Community Library and our Placitas Senior Center and local businesses, and for the years that Anasazi Fields Winery was open to the community. I hope it or something similar will come to life again.
May the Winery prosper and continue! larry goodell, placitas, new mexico
I’m too worried to live, sometimes I’m thinking. Thinking takes over my mind. Wish I could rinse it with the clothes. Don’t need to wash, just fresh water. Sometimes I think that is the purest thing in our lives. Our water. Melts. And trickles down and sometimes flows. If there is the snow. Never thought there would be lack of water when we moved in. And no well. From all the crap in the atmosphere and planet warming. So here we are. Tragedies unravel. Regroup, get stronger. People’s lives at the will of their so-called leaders. Well, they are leaders. To destruction. Masculine competition for the high chair. Wish it was the electric chair. They are babies. Without compassion there is no adulthood. And celebrities take over and run their mouths into our minds. And put down everything to build themselves up to be leaders with baby brains. Back to water. What will we do if there isn’t enough snow and rain? Will the National Guard bring trucks of water for us? Of course we can’t have gardens, grow our own vegetables. Except a very small quantity, from saved water mostly. I will drink it with the appreciation. As long as we have it. It doesn’t help, the myriads of big new houses. All sucking the water out, as they overuse it. But then, as my Aunt once said, “Well, it’s progress.” She taught her children to be just as Republican as she. The only progress there can be is regress. Of the number of human beings. And how can that happen without massive cruelty? Who knows? I’m tired of the human race pestering Mother Earth. And not caring to care. This water is so precious. So delicious. So saving. Of grace. /larry goodell / placitas village, new mexico
Note: We in the old land grant Village of Placitas are on a dual acequia system (very rare). We get both our drinking water and our irrigation water from several springs that are fed by the melted snow pack on the Sandias. So the less snow and rain we have, the less water. But the water is the best water I’ve ever experienced. lg
This wonderful exhibit of photographs and digging and working utensils, and the presentation to a standing room audience from members of the Placitas Acequia System was all an educational success. Many thanks to Jillian Gonzales and others putting it together. lg
larry goodell
lotsa, larry goodell 
