Drove up to Beacon Sunday with Sharon Gilbert to see Dia: Beacon, the
new museum of Minimalism. Andy Warhol's Shadows had their gallery
there, largely because Dia helped set up the Warhol Museum in
Pittsburgh; and the two museums have the same architect. And Flavin,
Beuys, Judd, and Palermo had their galleries. A docent was leading a
tour as we sat in the Irwin gardens. Sharon said she thought the
light on the Flavin was inappropriate. The docent said each gallery
was set up with the active co-operation of each artist. We refrained
from asking how Judd, Palermo, Warhol, Beuys and Flavin managed that,
being dead.
Rainy spring. Noah and the ark jokes are so common it's as if Noah
drowned and the funeral was last week.
Ted Joans has died. He wrote "I, Black Surrealist" for Unmuzzled OX
22. In Paris he was a friend of Andre Breton and the late Charles
Henri Ford, who guest-edited Unmuzzled OX 22. I saw Ted a number of
times in New York and he invariably said he lived in Timbucktoo. He
died in Vancouver. When his friend Charlie Parker died, Ted took to
scrawling "Bird Lives" in chalk on the streets. It became a fad. He
was a Black beat like Baraka. Ted wanted to set up a relation with
Unmuzzled OX like that of Gregory Corso; but there was a market for
signed editions of Gregory's work, and I don't think there ever was
for Ted's. Anyway, one Gregory in my life was certainly enough.
Ted's widow asks that people who know his work find some chalk and
write somewhere Ted Joans Lives.
The International Hockey Hall of Fame is in Kingston, Ontario; fame
lasts fifteen minutes in New York. I have to drive back and forth, so
I sometimes stay overnight in Cooperstown, the seat of Baseball Hall
of Fame. Cooperstown is upscale and cutesy-pie and memorabilia-
happy; and it has the added pleasant resonance of James Fenimore
Cooper. Except during the Viet tumult, I've always followed baseball.
In Studying the Ground for Holes, my first perfect-bound book of
poetry, I alluded to a story (or canned anecdote) about Shoeless Joe
Jackson, the best player for the 1919 White Sox. He was accused with
7 others of throwing the World Series. The story: A boy came up to
Joe after the trial and said, "Say it ain't so, Joe, say it ain't
so." And Joe wouldn't say. To my pleasure an unliterary friend proved
he read the book by citing that allusion--by, as it were, alluding to
the allusion.
Say it ain't Sosa
At the moment I'm trying to brush up on my German, but Pascal and
La Rochefoucauld in theory are my favorite foreign authors. In theory
I like maxim and apothegm. Of course so did Polonius. I did recently
in fact read La Princesse de Cleves by LaRochefoucauld's friend
Mme de Lafayette. But, before that, I read and enjoyed Rostand's
Cyrano de Bergerac. I missed Steve Martin's movie version but I do
remember Jose Ferrer as Cyrano. It was just very curious to read the
French original. It seemed like great literature until Act Five.
French has fewer words than English. The French are precise. As Andy
is quoted as saying to an inquiring mind: And these few precepts in
thy memory/Look thou character: I like boring things; in the
future/everyone will be famous/for fifteen minutes; etc.
Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar.
After praising the artist Sari Dienes in the Village Voice, Erika and
I were invited to a party at Sari's house in the country. She shared
some ten acres with other artists in a compound organized by David
Tudor and John Cage. Here Cage had become an expert on mushrooms. We
drove to Sari's in our Volkswagen bug, and in the driveway when we
arrived there were three other bugs, four Rabbits and one long black
limousine the motor running and an English chauffeur lying on the
front seat. John Lennon was talking to Noguchi. Julian Lennon was
there and Yoko and a baby in diapers--Sean Lennon. Richard Hayman
after a bit said we all must go to the pool which turned out to be a
basin in a mountain stream. John joined us. Julian watched. John and
I had never skinnydipped in mixed company; Erika had. Later we stood
in a circle and smoked a joint. John looked about suspiciously; he
had finally obtained his green card. "I hope the F.B.I. aren't
watching," he said.
Thanks for informing us, Michael.
Richard was something of a father figure to some of us.
I sent this to one of Richard's close Aussie friends. She's into
textiles design, so I thought it was most appropriate...
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stiched with its color.
-- W.S. Merwin
Did Richard Morris die?
W
____________________________________________________________________________
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Warren D. Woessner, Ph.D., J.D.
Schwegman, Lundberg, Woessner & Kluth, P.A.
121 S. 8th Street (1600)
Minneapolis, MN 55402
Phone: 612 373-6903
Fax: 612 339-3061
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Hi Michael---I am sorry to hear that. I knew Richard mostly from the days
when he was Executive Director of COSMEP--then really lost touch with him.
Of course, I will also remember him as another scientist/creative
writer....He certainly deserves a place in the 'Small Press Revolution"
section of hippy heaven
Warren
-----Original Message-----
From: mandreox [mailto:no_reply@yahoogroups.com]
Sent: Saturday, August 30, 2003 4:19 AM
To: unmuzzledox@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Unmuzzled Ox] Richard
Richard Morris died in his sleep early Thursday morning in San
Francisco.
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T H E P E A R L Y G A T E S
HUMPHREY BOGART stands before the Pearly Gates. A CHOIR OF ANGELS is
singing somewhere. They sound terrible.
Slowly, the Pearly Gates open, revealing St. Peter, who is PETER
LORRE.
PETER LORRE: I bet you have more respect for me now.
Slowly and majestically, God strides forward. God is SIDNEY
GREENSTREET. The CHOIR OF ANGELS is singing His praises. God starts
to say something, but He can't make himself heard; the ANGELS are
making too much noise. God motions to them to be quiet, then he
turns back to BOGART.
SIDNEY GREENSTREET: This isn`t what you expected, is it,
motherfucker?
P R O M E T H E U S B O U N D
PROMETHEUS lies on his back, chained down in a leaky canoe. In the
water around him, there are turds floating everywhere. A VULTURE
circles overhead, eyeing PROMETHEUS' liver.
PROMETHEUS is up shit creek without a paddle.
--Richard Morris 1939-2003
Hi---How are you doing? Pudding House Press published a 12 poem chapbook of
my "Greatest Hits"---this is nearly purely archival, as I do not know who
would review it (or buy it, except at a reading). I sent you a copy at 105
Hudson. My poet-friend Dave Hilton (who you met a few times in NYC) is not
doing well--his prostate cancer has spread.
Stay well
Warren
-----Original Message-----
From: mandreox [mailto:no_reply@yahoogroups.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2003 7:31 AM
To: unmuzzledox@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Unmuzzled Ox] hello
Where is the president & what is he doing? The civil war there, the
Congress here. Weather. Sports. And this message.
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The series by Pudding House is a good idea. Your twelve poems are not
just good; they're knockouts. The League of Canadian Poets had a
similar series; I was scheduled to be, say, 173; but the series
collapsed at 169. Squabbling over royalties seemed to consume every
Annual General Meeting. Executive directors came and went; but every
new one felt his first duty was to impose his aesthetic taste on the
series. The books were underpriced to appeal to high schools.
Government grants came and went--and finally went.
You've affixed Alaska to the US Midwest to make a sensible world. I
was very annoyed at you for leaving New York after only three years
but, with the new book at hand, I can't recall a single line of your
poetry that rings of Manhattan.
Images beget desire or loathing. The static representations in
paintingt beget both; television only inflames desire. After midnight
Tuesday Real Sex played against Blame it on Rio. Wednesday morning I
was substantially worse for the experience. Movies employ a visual
shorthand for cultural values; they ponder the ultimate, ponder but
do not decide. It's drama with elements of the sermon. But a
remote
which moves a thousand stations can vitiate movie moralizing. Samuel
Pepys in his diary reviews the Sunday sermon just as we, today, pass
judgment on a Saturday night movie.
Orfreo is a 35-minute-long chamber opera sung by countertenor,
soprano, bass and mezzo-soprano accompanied by a neo-baroque
orchestra of harpsichord, oboe, flute, string quartet and contrabass.
There are over 200 pieces based on the myth of Orpheus. This time,
the moment when Orpheus begins to wade across the Lethe in search of
Eurydice evokes the mysterious moment of the voluntary death by
drowning of Ray Johnson, the witty playful conceptualist who invented
mail art. Ray`s humor seeps into the lyrics and the characters.
Besides Orfreo, and Ray's Cat, and Lethe, a Crow shift-shapes into
Persephone, and Eurydice, and Beatrice. If Eurydice is Beatrice,
Orfreo must be Dante. This interplay of characters and archetypes
attempts to represent the forces at play at the moment of Ray
Johnson's suicide. The suicide is a step into a new life. Durkheim
rewrites Ovid.
The music sets the lyrics dramatically yet tunefully; the style is
post-minimalist within, so to speak, a neo-baroque context. The
musical mood of the piece, unexpectedly, considering the dark nature
of the subject, is quite varied, evolving rapidly from somber to
anxious to tender to triumphant. In the beginning the lyrics are
stretched then repeated, and broken into long syllables; after
Orfreo's aria, the sections tighten and shorten moving towards
Persephone's climactic aria; and finish in an exuberant finale as
Orfreo frees the two women from Hell. Neither is Beatrice; or are
they Beatrice all and the composer too?
Let Bea be finale of seem
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
The premiere is scheduled for June 2, 2004, at New York's Merkin
Hall. Elaine Camparone, harpsichordist, will lead the Queen's
Chamber Band. Marshall Coid, countertenor, will sing the role of
Orfreo. Words are by Michael Andre, music by Elodie Lauten.
Why are we in Iraq? "Saddam even tried to kill my Dad," the
President
has said.
Poet and painter and politician wield their power differently. Men in
my family occasionally win small-potatoes elections in Ontario,
Canada; but these men are really business men. I know Eugene McCarthy
and have published him in Unmuzzled OX; but McCarthy's really a
poet.
I met Ramsey Clark through Daniel Berrigan but Dan's a poet and
priest, yes, but really Dan's an activist.
In the art world however there's the interesting case of the
painter
Alex Katz and his son, the writer Vincent Katz. Over the years
I've
written art criticism for the Village Voice, Art in America and ART
News. I interviewed MaCarthy and Berigan and W.H. Auden and Allen
Ginsberg and oh yeah Andy Warhol. I love art but at the moment the
analogy between the politics of the art and poetry world and that
larger
politics of the whole world concern me and inform my view of George
Bush.
Poets have worked as art critics for the last two hundred years,
from Baudelaire and Apollinaire in France to Peter Schjeldahl and
John Ashbery today in New York.
At the urging of a painter and art dealer who were in fact supplying
the labor and money Unmuzzled OX hosted a Vincent Katz reading at
the dealer's gallery. Because of his father, art world
celebrities
flocked to the event. The dealer and the painter regarded the event
as a great success. A year later Jeff Wright's Cover sponsored
me
and Vincent reading at a different gallery. The painter who
originally urged me to sponsor the first reading came up to me after
the second reading and bitterly summed up Vincent as untalented,
unpleasant and very successful. This painter, as you might expect,
shortly afterwards gave up painting altogether and left New York.
I think Vincent Katz is in fact quite talented but I had to admit
that I found Vincent and his father unpleasant and rude. We had just
met, but they seemed to dislike me. Why? Could it be--art world
politics?
Perhaps it stems this passage from a poem rewriting Aesop which was
printed a number of times in the 1970s and has had an odd tendancy to
pop up in literary discussions:
"Yuh, that's the same ox,"
Said the crab, in whose mouth
Appeared a toothpick.
"Started to lose weight.
The farmer has a mean dog
Who likes to sleep in the manger
And whenever the ox
Goes to eat
He growls and snaps and won't let him.''
"What a selfish beast!" said Robin
"He can't eat oats and yet
Won't let those eat who can.
What's this dog's name?"
"Ashbery," answered the crab.
"Oh Ashbery," said Robin
"He's given me a lot of trouble too.
I used to visit the grape arbor
With the intention of repast
And Ashbery would bark
And I'd have to run off, hungry.
But I now believe those grapes are sour."
"Things always work out," said the crab.
"Uh hun, uh hun," said Robin.
Calling John Ashbery a dog-in-the-manger in 1976 may have been a bad
politico-literary move. Ashbery had stood me up for an interview and
I thought that was a witty way of expressing my displeasure.
I had done something like this in 1971. I was a grad student and
Ashbery read in a poetry series I ran. In a poem I joshed that his
work was difficult, then said I was being "snarky." Someone
must have
shown Ashbery the poem, because the next time he read in my series he
requested that a Tenniel illustration for The Hunting of the Snark be
used for the poster.
I think he didn't find it so funny the second time. Wouldn't
you
rather be a cat than a dog in the manger? Or maybe folks no longer
wage wars the way Pope and Swift did in the days of The Dunciad.
Despite some evidence of other activities, it seems to me that John
Ashbery has spent the last thirty years quietly revenging himself.
Indeed, a well-known poet, editor and novelist recently asked
me, "Why does John Ashbery hate you so very much?"
Watch who you badmouth in poems or the poems may bite you back.
Ashbery is an arbiter of taste. He has declared Aklex Katz one of the
great living painters. Do you think maybe my name came up in
conversations between John and Alex? "He even called my Man a
dog,"
Alex would then say, if so, to his son.
Craig Highberger's Superstar in a Housedress, a biography of
Jackie
Curtis, opened Wednesday at the Film Forum. Unlike all previous
documentaries, I was in it. Yes, I can now say I was in a film
with Taylor Mead and Holly Woodlawn.
At the premiere, sitting behind two 6-foot-tall 300-pound
transvestites, my friend Colette whispered, "Gee, Michael,
I'll bet
you're the only heterosexual in the movie." In fact I was
too
serious, too intellectual, too somber. Craig follows my bit with
Jackie's death.
I'm too camera-shy to be a decent ham. But I am an admirer of
camp--around long before Susan Sontag's famous essay--found,
for
instance, full-blown in Charles Henri Ford's The Young and the
Evil
from the 1930s.
Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson were at the premiere. The rights
to "Walk on the Wild Side" had been too expensive, I expect,
for
Craig's budget.
Jackie is just speeding away.
Thought he was James Dean for a Day.
I am sitting in Science North in Sudbury, Ontario. I am 1500 miles
from my laptop with its assorted postable pensees. But Yahoo threatens
to drop this group if no message is posted. And therefore this I must
say: Hi! Wish you were here!
I'm from Kingston, Ontario, site of the 1976 sailing Olympics. Those
games were mostly at the Stade Olympique in Montreal. That stadium
now houses the Montreal Expos, and it's cursed. That summer the
Democrats nominated Jimmy Carter. I saw him campaigning in New York
and liked his smile.
I could not grasp any particular sailing race, but my family and I
enjoyed the crowds and the buzz. Uncomfortably hot and humid outside
today in New York, the Olympics play soundlessly inside on NBC. Who
needs to hear TV commentary? Telemundo offers different events and,
when I need them, appropriately foreign commentators. The banners in
Athens seem to be all in English.
I love baseball on the radio. Sometimes only a baseball game can put
me to sleep. I can always see in my mind's eye a single to left. But
the last time I actually played hardball I was 12, and I would like
to observe that a baseball is hard to catch, hard to hit, and moves
with frightening speed. I have similar problems with basketball,
football and hockey.
But how often have we seen synchronized diving or beach volleyball?
Numbers seem to give sports their significance. For the record, I'm
now on page 344 of Martin Chuzzlewitt. Not long ago I read all of
Byron's Don Juan for the first time. When I finish Martin, I'd like
to read not merely particular cantos but the entire Faerie Queen.
The last book I read by a living writer was Eileen Myles' quirky
fictive autobiography Cool for You. It turns out this spring Eileen
and I both had operas produced. How do you measure their success?
The scoring of Olympic gymnastics is so complex that the judges
awarded a gold medal to the wrong man, Paul Hamm. Sport numbers are
invariably complicated. I remember being dragooned into the scorer's
chair for one of my son's basketaball games. I didn't know what I
was doing. I kept saying that it wasn't like this in hockey, and why
weren't the boys given sticks and blades so they could harm each
other?
In the reading Olympics, the London Review of Books has a nice
survey of recent Christopher Marlowe literature. I've been using one
of the books in the review, Mark Thorton Burnett's edition of the
complete plays (Everyman). Finally I have read Edward II. "St John
the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always to his
bosom," said Marlowe, according to the LRB: "he used him as the
sinners of Sodoma." This Everyman Marlowe is a physically pleasant
and completely readable text.
The type's tiny in my old Oxford Standard Authors edition of the
Poems of Spenser. The Fairie Queen has ten stanzas per page. But the
larger new Penguin edition of The Faerie Queen fills me with hope,
there are only four stanzas per page. The reading Olympics ever begin
anew. Bill C., George W. and I celebrate our birthday this month.
This month we three turn 58. I hope at the Beijing Olympics in 2008
the president will be three years older than me. And in Mr Carter's
party.
Thank you.
I was recently having lunch with a group of associates and started
talking about the parallels between Iraq and Viet Nam. I know that this
is nothing new to many of us, but I suddenly realized that the oldest
person at the table apart from me was 39. These folks have no memory of
what the Viet Nam years were like. (For the record, when my student
deferment was cancelled I was close to 26, which was the maximum age of
men being drafted. I was called for a physical, but then was told I
didn't need to show up). Bush also avoided service, but apparently did
not learn any of the following lessons (or is learning them now, the
hard way):
1. You can't win the "hearts and minds" of the people by killing them.
Inevitably, the US ground forces are killing and imprisoning innocent
civilians. This is just the lack of discrimination between "friendlies"
and "hostiles" that helped turn the Vietnamese people (and the rest of
the world) against our efforts.
2. You can't defeat a determined guerilla resistance with conventional
forces unless you are willing to use overwhelming force. This kind of
force is relatively rare in Western culture (thank goodness). In WWII,
if a sniper fired on a German patrol from a French village, the Germans
might line up all the men in the village and shoot every other one. The
US edged toward this sort of brutality in Viet Nam when our forces
burned villages to the ground for this sort of resistance, but the
public reaction stopped this sort of activity (when it was revealed).
The Iraqi prison scandals have also provoked this sort of reaction. The
U.S. will never have enough troops on the ground, with the kind of
license to kill required to defeat the multi-level resistance we are
encountering in Iraq.
3. When you are losing, you have no friends. Even though our goals in
Viet Nam were global, at least on paper (prevent SE Asia from "going
Communist") almost none of our allies contributed anything in Viet Nam
(I seem to recall some effort by Australia; the Paris peace talks
failed). A variation of this is "You break it, you own it". Kerry may
have a better chance of re-engaging our allies and the UN in Iraq but it
seems like a long shot. Bush has been openly scornful of the
non-coalition allies, and punished them by withholding reconstruction
contracts. (Of course there is no real coalition--for example, the
Japanese troops - about 500 storng - have yet to fire a shot).
4. You can't stabilize a region politically with a puppet government. In
Viet Nam, the CIA overthrew the semi-populist Diem regime in 1965, I
think. The US backed "Presidents" that followed never were able to build
support or consensus among the populace (or even among other political
leaders). Bush has pronounced it his calling to bring freedom to Iraq,
but the people of Iraq are not going to accept our version of freedom
(which is not grounded in their religion, culture or history).
Well, I had to get it down, and I hope particularly that you
"youngsters" find it of some interest.
Peace,
Warren
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Christo will be more famous than Andy Warhol until next Sunday when
his Gates in Central Park come down. "This is so stupid," my 14-year-
old son Ben said as I took him through the Gates the night before
their saffron fabric was unfurled. "This is a stupid waste."
In fact, Christo makes contemporary landscape art in the tradition of
Cadillac Ranch, Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, and Walter de
Maria's Lightening Rods and Earth Room. Christo quotes Bronowski in a
1979 Unmuzzled OX:
"Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him
unique among the animals: so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in
the landscape--he is a shaper of the landscape. In body and mind he
is the explorer of nature, the ubiquitous animal, who did not find
but made his home on every continent."
New York was Christo's last continent. Unlike Smithson and, say,
Michael Heizer, Christo's landscape art is temporary and often urban.
He covered the Pont Neuf and the Reichstag and set up umbrellas in
California and Japan. My friend David Bourdon wrote his last book on
Christo, and Christo wrapped copies in brown paper, and David gave
them away to friends. I've never opened mine.
Right now today Christo is the rage. New York's just mad about
saffron. Everybody seems to have dug out a saffron scarf or jacket or
even sleeping bag. The saffron of The Gates oddly matches the color
of Jeanne-Claude's hair. Isaac Mizrahi seems to have bought a swath
from the dynamic couple: it's in his window in TriBeCa. Christo also
cited this Bronowski passage in OX:
"[Man's] imagination, his reason, his emotional subtlety and
toughness, make it possible for him not to accept the environment but
to change it. And that series of inventions, by which man from age to
age has remade his environment, is a different kind of evolution--not
biological, but cultural evolution. I call that brilliant sequence of
cultural peaks `The Ascent of Man.'"
Today is the feast of St George, the patron saint of England. St.
George is the Knight of the Red Crosse in the first book of Edmund
Spenser's Fairie Qveene. Armed with Jung and Kinsey, I wrote about
Spenser in college. Spenser in the Oxford Standard Authors edition has
painfully small type, but I recently bought a Penguin edition of Fairie
Qveene more appropriate for my fading eyesight. It's the first long
classic poem I've read since Byron's Don Juan. "Once more unto the
breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our English
dead," says Shakespeare's Henry V:
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot.
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry "God for Harry, England, and Saint George!"
New York's Small Press Center has attempted to catch the buzz
of "Indie Films" by repositioning itself as the Center for
Independent Publishing. The Small Press Center was founded in 1984.
They are best known for their annual Book Fairs. After 21 years the
buzz you mostly hear at the SPC is like unto the buzz of flies
circling the dead. Indie poets?
Some months ago I was invited to chair a panel on independent
publishing at the Center. I hemmed and hawed and eventually accepted.
There would be a small honorarium. But I then asked him why he
selected me.
"I thought of you to moderate because I was familiar with your column
in the Small Press Review in which you are a veteran observer of the
Small Press Scene. (Also, in a more mercenary move, I thought it
might help foster a closer relationship between Len F's operation and
the Small Press Center.)"
The parenthetical ulterior motive made me, of course, cancel my
appearance. But I told them I could not appear because the Small
Press Center, at least for this conference, seemed to favor the
commercial over the literary. I received this email back from the
SPC executive director Karin Taylor:
"The Small Press Center embraces all types of small presses, and
especially the values of non-commercial press, I am somewhat
surprised that you have decided to define our mission for us."
How dare I?! But if it seems to you that the SPC correspondence may
be a tad casual, let me point out that the advertising for the SPC
Book Fair generally features grotesquely amateurish drawings of
writers. In a brochure the SPC states:
"Publishers charging the author the full cost of production and
selling books back to the author in a `vanity' arrangement are
ineligible."
Yet the Center itself seems to be a vanity project of a gentleman I
have met once or twice named Whitney North Seymour. I have been
reliably informed that the SPC's terrible drawings are by his
daughter. The last time I was at the SPC the only New York event they
thought worth advertising was a talk on Edna St Vincent Millay by one
Samuel Whitney Seymour. At the top of the flyer was Millay rendered
by that SPC's own classically untalented amateur.
Once upon a time and for twelve years there was a real annual New
York Small Press Book Fair. It danced along the line between the
slick and sold-out and the dumb and dreary. I was slightly involved
but not as much as my ex-wife and friends. At one point a New York
company offered the Fair a free billboard. As an art critic, I was
asked to find someone who could do that job. I asked Andy Warhol. He
agreed. And then, classically, they rejected Andy as too slick and
sold-out.
When the SPC started their Book Fair, I was relieved that the ex-wife
was uninvolved, and happily exhibited. A number of times Fair
organizers approached me and asked me if I could get celebrity
authors to read for them, presumably, for free. These are people
born into New York society who never grasp the difference between
mere pedigree and actual achievement. The current president of the
United States, in this regard, also leaps to mind.
At one SPC Fair, Whitney North Seymour himself stopped by my table
and told me he was going to arrange for someone to write an article
about my little magazine, Unmuzzled OX. He never got around to it. I
hate writing negative articles. The Small Press Book Fair occurs the
first weekend in December. Check it out yourself at
Smallpress.org.
"I was very straight at the time, and the whole junkie mentality
really turned me off. The whole death mystique is so strong
with hard-core junkies." -- Lawrence Ferlinghetti quoted in
Ferlinghetti:the Artist in his Time by Barry Silesky (Warner
Books; 1990; page 96)
I'm reading Barry Miles' Beat Hotel and enjoying it
immensely. Miles
quotes from an interview with Gregory Corso in Writings from OX. The
Times quotes another passage from that interview in Corso's
obituary.
He died 17 January 2001 aged 70 years.
Interviewing and publishing Gregory was an adventure. He'd visit
me
with a few pages he wanted published and a burning need for money for
heroin. I managed through Gregory to meet a certain sampling of
Manhattan pushers. Gregory avoided only The Times Square area. I
suspect there were people there he did not want to meet; I bet he
stiffed more than one of the very bad guys who used to hang out
there.
Gregory was secretive and occasionally embarrassed by this drug
problem. He got angry at me when I discussed it once pseudonymously;
he had no problem seeing through my pseudonym. The wrong reputation
would detract from his poetry. Of course, he also spent three years
in prison as a young man. The wrong publicity could lead to a return
visit.
Gregory was a wonderful poet. Put off by his wastrel ways, people
would say, me included, that he'd wasted his talent. They'd
say, like
Robert Wilson in his new memoir Seeing Shelley Plain, that Gasoline,
Gregory's first book, was his best.
Though I am partial to The Japanese Notebook OX and Writings from
OX, I'm generally of the opinion that The Happy Birthday of
Death is
the most characteristic of his genius.
It's the first publication of his best
poem, "Marriage." "Army," "Police,"
"Power" utterly master the
scale of "The Wasteland" or "Howl." Such work gave
me the idea for
The Poets' Encyclopedia. There is an easy mastery of a comic
French
Surrealist idiom. "Under Peyote" confesses his druggie ways.
"Hair,"
too, is there; the poem seemed weirdly prophetic in the `60s; and
the
play, Hair, by no coincidence, has just been revived at City
Center. "Bomb," an unfolding centerfold, forecasts the
quasi-Blakean
union of the visual and the poetic seen in his later illustrated
texts, particularly his undervalued novel, The American Express, and
The Japanese Notebook OX.
I don't know what to say about Gregory now that he's dead.
The last
fifteen years of his life, when I saw him, I'd think -- how
unfair!
Gregory takes every chance, main bad or
good. But look at me, a timid little bird; and are we equally alive?
He was somehow moreso.
John Gay and the invention of gin, Robert Burns and Scotch whiskey,
Charles Baudelaire and the need for drunkeness, Arthur Rimbaud and
the derangement of the senses, W.B. Yeats and les poetes maudites --
there's a tradition of poets playing around with substances. The
work
of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Corso encouraged experimentation with
drugs.
Corso did not just experiment. He was a junkie. When Gregory tied up
his arm on our living room couch, cooked heroin on the stove, then
casually shot up, my first wife called me into the bedroom. "Get
him
out of here," she said. Years later, after our divorce, she had
Corso's Earth Egg (and other Unmuzzled OX) thrown into a
dumpster.
I read a letter years ago in the Columbia rare book room from Allen
Ginsberg about an evening with Gregory at Peggy Guggenheim's in
Venice. She didn't like them. She prefers, Allen wrote, "high
teacup"
poets whereas they prefer to present an image "more
Chaplinesque."
But did Gregory Corso die of a heroin overdose? Or did one of the
many pushers he stiffed finally catch up to him and kill him? Or
perhaps one of the patrons of the arts who, against their will,
supported his drug habit -- did someone finally call the law and have
him incarcerated? Or did he get AIDS from the many needles he
happily shared? None of the above. He died from prostate cancer,
surrounded by family, friends and admirers.
Not only that but the Italian government has consented to have his
remains flown to Rome and buried next to
Shelley.
As an editor I got to know certain graduates of the prison system.
Gregory Corso, the poet, was imprisoned for robbing a gas station. The
judge was angry because Gregory and his friends used walkie talkies,
and, despite Gregory's youth, sentenced him to three years. As a kid
Gregory was entangled in classic New York gangs with names like Tiny
Tims and Lucky Gents. He was a junkie all the time I knew him. Malcolm
Morley, the painter, spent time in prison in England for burglary;
Malcolm was messianic and a law unto himself and in the U.S. invented
Photo-realism. Daniel Berrigan, priest, poet, and activist, still
regularly goes to jail for Thoreauvian civil disobedience. Dan is also
a quirky sneak-thief.
emily harvey: a life in fluxus
By Matthew Rose
In one of the last conversations I had with Emily Harvey she talked about salt.
"I'm still fighting the salt, but I'm winning," she said on the phone from New
York when
she began chemotherapy treatments. It was May 2003, and Emily was referring to
the
renovation of the apartments in Venice that would form the basis of her
Foundation. Emily
was battling back the briny waters around Venice as they attacked her artist
studios, and
battling to stay alive for long enough to take me on a promised "special tour"
of Venice,
such as Angelo, her third husband, had given her to show her the effect of salt
on the
friezes he had studied as an art student and followed as they decayed.
I never got to take the tour with Emily, but our conversations about both her
foundation
and her fight with pancreatic cancer found their way into The New York Times in
July,
2003, something she thanked me for. She wanted to tell the world. Simply and
directly.
And again, I learned what a true character Emily Harvey was. I imagine I wasn't
alone.
There were the Venetian roof carpenters - "they use cork chips and cement" -
whom she
educated about the re-roofing of the Cloisters. There were the Venetian mattress
replacement experts who patiently emptied her mattress of its wool, combed it
and refilled
it as Emily studied them. She giggled in delight once the bed was reset back on
the frame.
"It was a beautiful, comfortable mattress again! For fifty bucks!" The local
specialists, who
restored the 300-year old terrazzo floor by scraping up the existing mixture of
ox's blood,
red brick dust and wax, must have certainly enjoyed this perky American art
dealer. Totally
hip Emily (in her signature pigtails) let them know everything there was to know
about it.
"It feels velvety to walk on...barefoot…so luxurious," she cooed. "The floor was
so
gorgeous."
In early Spring 2003, when I first heard that Emily was sick, I called her in
New York. I was
nervous and didn't know what to expect. She said, calmly, "The doctors gave me
three
months to live --11 months with chemo." She told me about the foundation she was
putting together and urged me to get in contact with her husband Davidson, and a
dozen
other close friends and artists who would fill me in on the project, and the
history of her
gallery.
I first met Emily Harvey in the late 1980s, visiting her gallery at 537
Broadway, interested,
as both artist and writer, in the Fluxus phenomenon as it manifested years after
its birth
and a decade after its reported demise. She routinely exhibited what most in the
art would
termed "marginal," but I was continually intrigued by whatever she would put on
her walls,
or floors, and most by the people who regularly showed up there. I discovered
books split
in half by Buzz Spector. There were video installations by Nam June Paik. I
wandered
through the ephemera, hanging in mid-air, of A.M. Fine: drawings of spoons, and
obsessive typewritten notes on nickel postcards. I saw the "Brown Paintings" by
Dick
Higgins, witnessed a lecture and video of a plastic surgery "intervention" by
French artist
Orlan, and a discussion of globalization by Ben Vautier. It was the most lively,
engaging
gallery I'd found in New York. It was less a showroom for expensive objects,
than a kind of
art house, with cats and cups of coffee, and a cast of characters that helped
define - for
me - art in the latter the 20th century. And, from Emily, I gleaned what was
really
important in making and looking at art: experiencing it. I wrote an essay on
Fluxus in
America for the Lund Art Journal, and another piece, focusing mainly on Emily's
gallery
and her role in George Maciunas's irreverent and often conceptual art movement
for
Connoisseur in the early 1990s.
It was apparent that Fluxus suited her. She was irreverent, fun and extremely
social. In
every contact with Emily and the gallery over the years, I was aware of her
generosity, her
down to earth presence, and her energy. Casually dressed in a denim frock, Emily
was
more den mother than art dealer. She told me to call Ay-O to take a tour in the
dark
labyrinth in the basement of 537 Broadway. "You must do this!" she told me. Ay-O
took
me through the darkened, winding corridors of the building -"Watch your head!"-
to his
biggest "finger box" installation. It was a literally a hidden jewel, using the
building as a
"box." "Wasn't it great?," she enthused when I'd surfaced an hour later.
Most people who came to the gallery were surprised, I think. Carolee Schneemann
told me
Emily once abruptly left a conversation in mid-sentence with an art collector to
fetch a
band-aid for someone who caught a splinter in his finger. Another collector she
left
standing in the gallery to have a rather engaging chat with the UPS man who'd
just arrived.
She was often wielding a hammer, or making spaghetti.
Emily's gallery was a home to probably hundreds of artists and friends, who
undoubtedly
felt they'd come to the right place at the right time. She gave to her visitors
and
acquaintances and friends what the high-tone galleries on West Broadway and
Uptown
could never offer: herself. And she gave an unmatched enthusiasm for her
artists, whom
she treated as family. They in turn, adored her.
"Her gallery was the only one in New York not connected with money but with the
idea of
having people express themselves," said Christian Xatrec, her second husband.
"Emily
showed artists like Dick Higgins," he said. "Nobody else would show him."
Christian came
to my house in Paris and told me how Emily maxed out her credit cards to acquire
the
estate of AM Fine from the artist's mother, and used her corporate art sales job
as a
source of ready cash for edgy Fluxus exhibitions.
Christian cross-referenced stories of many artists I knew of, and some I had
met, with
stories told to me by Emily. These were the people - Ray Johnson, John Cage,
Daniel
Spoerri, Francesco Conz, Henry Flynt, Jean Dupuy, Allison Knowles, Charlotte
Moorman,
Ben Patterson, Jackson MacLow, Robert Watts, Geoffrey Hendricks (Cloudsmith),
Eric
Andersen, Ben Vautier, George Brecht, Olga Adorno, Robert Filliou, Ken Friedman,
Christer
Hennix, Joe Jones, Takako Saito, Yoshi Wada, Emmett Williams, La Monte Young,
Marian
Zazeela, Lance Fung and Yoko Ono among others - who added in their wonderfully
unique
way to the vaulting spirit of the former loft of George Maciunas. They were the
life injected
into the spaces Emily inhabited and opened to the world.
I asked Christian about her many husbands and he laughed. "Emily inspires in
both artists
and husbands a deep loyalty and love."
And that, deep loyalty and love, was - or better, is - true. It is the essence
of her gift.
When I was last in Venice in late May, 2003, I visited Emily's apartments on
Calle dei
Cinque, and the gallery, Archivio Harvey. Emily was not able to meet me. She was
in New
York, still undergoing treatments at Sloan Kettering. Henry Martin, Berty Skuber
and Ewa
Gorniak gave me the grand tour, taking me up to the roof, showing me the
terrazzo floors
and introducing me to Emily's cats. We walked late into the Venetian night, and
talked
about what Emily had done over the past 10 years in Venice - and was still doing
- when
all odds seemed against her. When most people would lay down and just die. She
was
hurrying to set up the Foundation. She wanted others to benefit from the
enormous
inheritance of love and fortune she'd been blessed with. And in that spirit, I
wanted to
leave her something. It was a little painted text work on wood in acid green and
psychedelic fuschia. The word was "PIU." In Italian, it means "more." I wanted
(and I think
we all wanted) "more" Emily.
I was happy to know Emily Harvey. I am changed because of her, and every time I
set foot
on a terrazzo floor or remember the message Dick Higgins once left on my
answering
machine concerning the nature of Fluxus - "It comes in waves…" - I think of her.
Emily Harvey died November 8, 2004.
Matthew Rose is an artist and writer based in Paris. E: mistahrose@...
The Emily Harvey Foundation: 537 Broadway, NYC, NY 10012
The Emily Harvey Foundation: S. Polo 322, I-30125 Venice, Italy Tel:
+39-041-522-6727
This article was in part, originally published in the New York Times, July 2003.
It was later
republished in a slightly different form in the memorial program for EH in NYC
in 2004. It
appears with photographs on the web site www.art-themagazine.com.
Michael, I heard that it was a department store that Gregory robbed.
This would have been in about 1944. Were there gas stations in NYC at
that time? I suppose there were, but I understood that he stole coats
out of department stores. Why would he need walkie-talkies though to
rob a gas station? I never quite understood the use of the
walkie-talkies.
There are many versions of this story. By the way, I am trying to
compile a list of Gregory Corso anecdotes for publication. I have
heard so many of them over the years. It seems that he knew almost
everybody in the art and poetry scenes in America.
When I wrote my book Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist (Southern
Illinois UP 2002), I retold some of them in the opening pages. I was
more interested in the theological implications of his writing. It
seems that someone should write a biography. His is such a colorful
life! So far in the last week since I've asked for anecdotes I've
gotten about 30 and hope to get at least ten times that number. I saw
yours that you put on the Silliman blog. May I use it? Does anybody
else on this list have any? If so, please send them to me at
olsonjk@...
The photograph that I put on the cover of my Corso book is also by
Ginsberg. He was an amazingly talented photographer, I think. The
one on my book features Corso looking up at an effigy of Christ which
is actually in Lowell and is in a grotto that Kerouac writes about.
Corso was asking why Jesus doesn't come down and talk to them. You
can see this photograph if you go into Amazon.com and look up my book.
I haven't heard from you in a long time. Where are you now? Are you
still in NYC?
I live in the Catskills and teach philosophy at a small branch of
SUNY. I am married and have three smallish kids. The last time we
communicated was a couple of decades ago when I lived in the Pocono
Mountains, I believe.
-- Kirby Olson
--- In unmuzzledox@yahoogroups.com, mandreox <no_reply@y...> wrote:
> As an editor I got to know certain graduates of the prison system.
> Gregory Corso, the poet, was imprisoned for robbing a gas station. The
> judge was angry because Gregory and his friends used walkie talkies,
> and, despite Gregory's youth, sentenced him to three years. As a kid
> Gregory was entangled in classic New York gangs with names like Tiny
> Tims and Lucky Gents. He was a junkie all the time I knew him. Malcolm
> Morley, the painter, spent time in prison in England for burglary;
> Malcolm was messianic and a law unto himself and in the U.S. invented
> Photo-realism. Daniel Berrigan, priest, poet, and activist, still
> regularly goes to jail for Thoreauvian civil disobedience. Dan is also
> a quirky sneak-thief.
Gas stations in Greenwich Village where Gregory Corso grew up have been
converted to boutiques and, in one case, a garden gazebo. I seem to
remember Gregory saying he stationed buddies on the corners with walkie-
talkies to warn of approaching fuzz. "Department store coats" sound a
little like the time Allen Ginsberg got pinched for holding a lot of
stolen goods "belonging" to Herbert Huncke. But junkies live a life of
crime. Gregory was a charmer. I introduced him to a fellow student at
Columbia, he moved in with her for two days, and then disappeared with
her typewriter. Gregory stole my friend Carolee's mother's ring. She
complained to Ginsberg. He laughed.
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