After meeting Gerald Hausman as a fellow poet and colleague in the Poet-in-the-Schools program in Massachusetts in the early 1970s, I soon admired his poetry. The work seemed to me a fresh incarnation of a tradition I identified with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. Uniquely, looking into those early chapbooks today, the work continues to hold its charge. Over the years, while we stayed in touch and exchanged books, it was only recently, with the publication of two new books, Little Miracles and Mystic Times with Noel Coward in Jamaica, both of which might be characterized as nonfiction novels, that I recognized he’d in the meantime emerged in a way I never could have imagined. In his prose the same ease and accuracy remain, and a deceptive modesty in the tone, but the explorations have expanded and magnified in all directions. I haven’t read anything that has affected me so powerfully in years. A.S.
A.S.
I remember meeting you in the early 1970s when we were part of the Poet-in-the-Schools program in Massachusetts, which was headed up by the poet Ruth Whitman. We were both in our twenties, and the meetings included elders like Alan Dugan, Paul Metcalf, Ruth and others, a distinguished cohort. In retrospect, half a century later, how do you remember that period?
G.H.
I remember it like you do, I think. It was a huge honor to be part of that group, but also part of the school system of Pittsfield, Massachusetts where I was sort of stationed as poet for roughly seven years. Things like this don’t happen any more. I mean, the beauty of having a prominent and wise poet like Ruth running a poetry program, and then there was my regional supervisor, Louise Bielski. She was so wise and always enthusiastic. And then, on a very local level, the supervisor of schools Norman Najimy, who loved poetry and was thrilled to have a practicing poet going in and out of schools every week and turning kids on to words, language, books. Schools don’t do that anymore, and if they do it’s academic. The idea that writing is FUN was the whole schematic we lived by and preached, if you will. I remember this period of the late sixties and early 1970s as being sort of revolutionary. Last note: the National Endowment on the Arts paid us well. We could write poetry, teach poetry and EAT
A.S.
We were both fans and friends of Philip Whalen, the west coast poet about 20 years older than us. It was during that time that he published a novel, quite suddenly it seemed to me. I remember reading it and also a Richard Brautigan novel with a lot of pleasure, and thinking maybe I could expand into prose. Were there similar inciting incidents for you to expand your writing into different genres?
G.H.
Phil was a great teacher, a zen practitioner of the best kind. He stuck by me in a number of ways, as I did with him – I taught his book ON BEAR’S HEAD for years and some of my “old” students today remember how Whalen’s loosey-goosey style of putting thoughts on paper – and in calligraphy, I might add – and this craft had an enormous impact on me … still does. I love the calligraphic pen. There were of course others from Whalen’s time who helped to introduce me to a larger poetry audience. In particular, Gary Snyder, and you, Aram. The different genres you mention came a little later for me when I discovered that one could write poetry as prose, not self-consciously, but with an easy feeling of bringing the two together as one. Again, I looked up to the way you did this in magazines. It was new journalism, I think. Off the cuff, sincere, personal, hard-hitting. Also, let’s not forget, funny. While I am thinking about it, the most important thing Phil ever said to me: “The day you win the Pulitzer and the Nobel, all your friends will be out to lunch and will miss the news.” That was my zen guide telling me to keep working, don’t look back, and laugh a lot while you write.
A.S.
You have always had an interest in Native American culture and various Black traditions and cross-cultural interactions, with as well a strong ecological emphasis. This new book, Mystic Times with Noel Coward in Jamaica, is a fascinating nonfiction novel about the conjunction between British artistic aristocracy and the Jamaican Rastafarian scene, patois, and mysticism. That book, among others by you, including Little Miracles, is quite unique. A pleasure cruise into nowhere I’ve been myself. Who are the antecedents of this writing? At times, it reminded me of Carlos Castaneda, say A Separate Reality, but without the menace. Is there a connection there?
G.H.
My inspiration in this area of study and writing was, in fact, Castaneda. I got him through the Jamaican connection – a former professor and anthropologist named Michael Gleeson. Mike team-taught a course at U. of California with Carlos and he showed me how it was possible to be erudite and at the same time unstuffy and real in my writing. He used to tell me that Carlos would come to class dressed as the exotic actor from the 1940s, Turhan Bey. Mike was an encyclopedia of curious knowledge on backwoods Jamaican culture. He was part owner of Blue Harbour, the guest lodge where my wife Lorry and I ran our writing program for roughly 13 years. Mike was a huge influence, an interpreter of Castaneda’s offbeat anthropology, a perfect speaker of Jamaican patois. I went in deep with Mike on this, and was on an airplane one time when Mike read the first chapters of Mystical Times. There were only three or four of us on that plane and Mike was laughing all the way to La Guardia. He said, “Gerry, Carlos would love this book.” Sadly, Carlos was gone long before I finished writing it. That story took me many years to write and a number of times I quit writing it because it was so weird. Lorry used to say, “No one’s going to believe this hanging out with Sir Noel in the jungle!”
A.S.
You and your wife Lorry are at home in environments with animal species—sea and land varieties—that would make me uneasy at best, and yet you bring it alive and even make it enjoyable, at least on the page. Any advice?
G.H.
We live now with a Blue-Fronted Amazon Parrot named George and a Husky dog with one blue eye and one brown. My mother was a student of Ernest Thompson Seton and he taught her how to talk to birds using their own vocalizations. So as a kind of familial echo I made a practice of trying my best to imitate my mother’s bird whistles. I once saw her put out her index finger on a gorgeous spring morning and a bluejay landed on it. I am not there yet … but still trying. I talk to towhees and house finches here in New Mexico. The thing is, if you love animals you have to approach communicating with them slowly and with great patience. Seton once said to my mom, “With birds you have to do their beats. If the beats are right, the bird will answer back.” I believe what he meant was – Do not try to imitate exactly. Try to do the call in your own way, but with the correct rhythm. If the beat is right, the bird will answer. My dad, on the other hand, was a dog whisperer, and I wrote about this in Little Miracles, how a neighbor’s eccentric dog came to our house once a day because my dad talked to him in a certain soft-voice way; they actually conversed. I like to think that animals are easy, it’s humans who are difficult.
A.S.
I gather that the Black Bible referred to in With Noel Coward, a part that was excised from the King James version of the Bible, brings life and death into a kind of continuum, so that the dead remain alive and a potent force in daily life among the living. For me this rings true although not as vividly as in your book. Why was that part of the Bible suppressed?
G.H.
The dead versus live dichotomy in our culture proves we do not fully understand either. In Jamaica, “a dead” as they put it, can be live, and can quite literally dream you. In “white” culture as a rule, we dream the dead, they don’t dream us. It is the opposite in the old ways of mystic Jamaica. Duppies or ghosts, spirits of the dead, are often present in living human affairs. I interviewed dozens of “old believers” and they all said the same thing: The dead are always there, if they want to be. And we are there to receive them in some way, if we want to.
As for the redactors who were were somewhat incensed with The Kebra Nagast, they kicked it out because they couldn’t find a way to kick it in. By that I mean this book is a vast resource of Black lore. The Solomonic line is an immersion into Coptic as well as Arabic and Hebrew culture. One claim of The Kebra Nagast is that God favored and loved the people of Ethiopia because they did not reject the Son of Man when he walked on earth. The strongest and most mystical claim is that the Ark Of The Covenant still resides in Ethiopia. In short, The Kebra Nagast is a collection of ancient revisions and translations going back to the 6th Century C.E. The King James redactors were quite simply nonplussed and in looking at it closely, they felt, deep down, that this was not a Christian compilation.