The following interview with Michael Rumaker, conducted by Ammiel Alcalay and Megan Paslawski, appeared in the City Lights Books edition of Rumaker’s Robert Duncan in San Francisco. Appended to the interview is a note Alcalay wrote for Rumaker’s Memorial service last year.
AA: What initially prompted you to write about this period and focus on Robert Duncan?
MR: After I graduated from Black Mountain in 1955, I lived in Philadelphia, and I decided, since several Black Mountain College students had gone on to San Francisco, that I wanted to do that. I ended up hitchhiking across country and got to San Francisco in five or six days and loved the city like everybody does, I think it’s America’s favorite city, immediately.
But then, searching feverishly for a job, I got to see what was going on, the number of police that were walking around like storm troopers. Even though there was that marvelous sense of openness, not only about the atmosphere, the climate, that wonderful sense of a peninsular city, being by the sea with open light and the openness of people’s attitudes· and everyone being so friendly, a lot of artists, writers, musicians, and jazz …that there was this undercurrent of fear and homophobia, the police were doing very much what they were doing in New York City, especially then, they were raiding gay bars and raiding gay pads, and putting people in jail.
AA: There’s a line in a letter to Duncan, where you write: “you’re the richest man in San Francisco” and then you write that San Francisco is “Robert’s City.” With everything that has gone on in San Francisco, I never heard it put like that.
MR: He was all over the place, his spirit. I don’ know about today but certainly then. Very actively involved, and just his presence, and the groups of writers, participating in Joe Dunn’s Sunday gatherings when we’d all get together and pass the hat for a gallon of wine, and read poems.
AA: You also have that image of how important the home was, that wall against the world, and in a way that’s what he established in the city, the idea of domestic space.
MR: He could live openly and closed. Closed and open, very much like the city itself. Yes, as I was describing it, that sense of openness and closedness. We were talking about African Americans and Jews having the family as a refuge, the home, the same certainly was very true for gay people, especially, and gay people living as a couple, two guys living together, as lovers, in a marriage, really, at that time in the 1950s was a pretty scary and brave thing to do. So when I was arrested and dragged into jail, and had to go to court, that was part of the fabric. of the whole book, the whole thing of what Duncan was able to avoid, I didn’t have that kind of refuge or protection.
AA: Right after that incident, you describe trying to tell the story to John Wieners, and there is a striking passage where you say there was no ground of solidarity to even talk about it.
MR: I was the only one of a group of 20 or 25 men who told Judge Horn, when they asked us to stand and say how we pleaded, I was the only one who stood up and said “Not guilty.” And Horn, the judge who dealt with the Howl case with Allen Ginsberg, had the sense to say: “case dismissed.” The rest all wanted a trial. Now maybe they wanted to air the grievance of being picked up off the street and just arbitrarily arrested for nothing. But that was the dosed and oppressive part of the city. Especially for gay people, straight people have no idea, I mean still to this day when they hear about things like that, they can’t believe that it happened.
AA: Were there things that you didn’t go into that you felt might be too sensitive for Duncan or Jess?
MR: I don’t think so. My feeling, as always in my writing, is that when I get squirmy about something, about art, do I dare do this, my good sense says, yeah, you have to, you should, because if it makes you squirm maybe there’s a truth there that you need to face, or a fact there that you have to deal with. So I try not to avoid anything, without being sensational.
AA: More of an emotional truth.
MR: Absolutely. You have to really bare yourself; I don’t mean you need to bleed at the public wall or something, but you have to be honest to be a writer. It’s not the only thing you have to be, like talent helps [laughs], and love of language, the complexities of language—but you do have to be honest, otherwise forget it…you can spot dishonesty, don’t you think there’s a lot of it these days?
AA: How did Duncan react to it?
MR: If you’re going to tell the truth, you have to tell the truth about yourself, you really have to be honest about you. You can’t just be honest for others. But you also have to be honest about the people you’re writing about, and some of it’s flattering and some of it’s not. And I was very concerned with Robert, knowing his ego, all of us had ego—let’s face it—but some had it more than others, and Robert had it in spades. I’ll tell you, I mean he was really quite a peacock sometimes. So I was concerned about how he’d take it. It’s like treading on someone’s story—you have your inner narrative, what you see, what you think is your story, and you don’t like it when other people write about you, and as a writer you have to get toughened to that because critics are not going to always be sweetness and light with you in your work. I don’t mind attacks on my writing; we don’t like them of course, but I don’t like personal attacks. I don’t really know how people really respond to the book. I know one critic wrote that the book, unfortunately, is more about Rumaker than Robert Duncan.
MP: But did you have any more specific indication of how he felt?
MR: Editor Robert Bertholf who, as you know, first published a version of Robert Duncan in San Francisco in Credences 5/6 (March 1978), was aware of my concern, told me, when he first showed Robert the piece, “Robert only laughed” quite a lot when he read it. That could be taken several ways, of course, but I chose to believe Robert enjoyed it, at least, and that probable rationalization assuaged my worry, even though Robert never told me directly what he thought of it, yea or nay. As I recall, I wrote to Robert, expressing my uneasiness, but he never responded, which I took to mean he wasn’t all that pleased. I believe, from that first publication of RD in SF in Credences, that I never had any further communication from Duncan. As the old saw goes, silence speaks volumes, and that whatever he had to say about RD in SF might only be found in his correspondence with others. Don Allen’s Grey Fox Press edition, published in 1996, eight years after Duncan’s death, and Don’s and my work on that, never evoked from Don, again as I recall, any comments he had heard from Robert on Bertholf’s first-version publication.
AA: Have your feelings or your understanding of Duncan changed over the years?
MR: No. Obviously he really is a truly great American poet, I have high respect for that certainly . . . on the personal side, which to me was only interesting because it rounded out the picture, we all have our flaws, and I certainly wrote about mine, in Black Mountain Days, or other books, but the main thing is what he accomplished in spite of all that stuff. I respected him not only for his genius, and what he did with it, but for his courage at that particular time. He was like one of those beacons, someone to really look forward to, look to and say, well if he can do this so can I. I mean he fed my own gumption to not be destroyed by these homophobes.
That’s putting it too bluntly, too simply. Not only as a homosexual but as a writer, as all those things that you were, or are. Duncan didn’t get sucked down by that, he didn’t get trapped by that. And Olson was certainly another example of the same thing, Olson didn’t care what you thought [laughs], it was his vision, and like Duncan’s vision, that was the all-important thing, and come hell or high water, they were going to achieve that vision in their own work, and obviously they did, certainly Duncan did, certainly Olson did, Creeley, Denise Levertov….
MP: There’s a passage where Duncan shows you this picture of himself, young and handsome. Your first reaction is to feel pity and only afterwards you realize this was the most arrogant emotion you could possibly feel for someone who needed to still be seen as this handsome boy.
MR: Yes. He was very beautiful as a young man, and he wasn’t ugly or monstrous later, but he wasn’t that old when he said that, I think he was in his mid-thirties. You know, it takes time to understand others, one’s parents, for instance, or any number of people that you’ve been close to.
AA: It’s an extraordinary passage because as you record your own feelings and respond to the situation, you immediately have to start thinking about what’s going through Duncan’s mind.
MR: That’s what a writer needs to do. If we learn anything from Shakespeare as writers it’s to put yourself in the other guy’s shoes, the other gal’s shoes, that empathy, that ability to transfer. That’s a great lesson that needs to be learned, for any human being.
AA: You begin a letter to Duncan that seems to end as a draft of your piece “The Use of the Unconscious.” You and Olson were very involved in thinking about dreams, and I wonder if that ever came up with Duncan. It struck me because the image would be: Rumaker the realist and Olson the historian, and you would think questions of the unconscious and myth would be tailor-made for Duncan.
MR: Robert didn’t have any influence at that particular time about “The Use of the Unconscious.” I think it was finally the accumulation of all my experiences and discussions and listening to Charles talking about Jung and myth and all that big, great, wonderful stew, Melvillian stew, about the unconscious. I can’t remember discussing the unconscious or dreams with Duncan, though he would discuss some of his dreams. Charles had tremendous perception, he saw things that I didn’t see, mistakes usually, or misperceptions. So he was like a guide, very much like a guide in the dimness of the underworld. And he’s often, not lately, but he has for a long time constantly appeared in my dreams. He was always in that dim place. He always seemed to be seated somewhat like a king or on a throne. He’d probably find that funny, but I think it was all the symbology of the language, the night letters of the unconscious, in dreams, and of course, he would always be leaning over my shoulder, and to be dreaming that I’m writing and he’d point, like: this is shit.
[laughter] He wouldn’t say that in the dream but things like that, you know. He was always criticizing my writing, not always, sometimes they were very friendly dreams. But he was often in that place, it was always dim and it was like one of the visions of Homer’s underworld, where he sees his mother in the great swarm…This is heady stuff fascinating to me because it was like the idea of the many in the one that Charles certainly ascribed to, after he reheard it from Cornelia Williams, the cook at Black Mountain—I saw it as a very rich source, and the dreams were the budding of that. Your father is presented in the dream being carried on a catafalque, and your father is covered in a golden sheath, like a pharaoh. Where the fuck does that come from? [laughter] Not National Park, New Jersey. (laughter] So you have to pay attention to that, if someone is telling you that, maybe there’s something there that you need to see.
AA: In one of the letters you talk about meeting John Wieners at Black Mountain and then later, in San Francisco, and him giving you amphetamines, which you describe like two blue collar Catholics taking the wafer….
MP: With Duncan’s resentment lingering in the background [laughter], because he couldn’t connect to these Catholics. . .
AA: It’s also kind of obvious, but never really written about, that Olson’s “prize” students, you, Ed Dorn, and John Wieners were all working class people.
MR: Yes, Charles always, as you know, had a great empathy I mean he was working class. So he understood that. But as for John at Black Mountain, he was great fun to be around and he was just full of energy and just a lively guy and interested in everything. He and those other Boston cronies of his, Joe and Carolyn Dunn, they just devoured everything Olson threw their way, as we all did, but they really devoured it all. John especially. John also, like myself at Black Mountain, discovered once he got through his period of fire, of baptism of fire, that Charles was his mentor too, that he really was the man that he needed to turn to, and John’s life was changed, as my life was changed. I mean that was the extraordinary thing about Black Mountain because you could go there looking for what it is you couldn’t find anywhere else and if you found it, your life was changed. With John and myself, Olson was really the guy we needed to shake us up and shake us down and get the wax out of the ears … [laughter] and the cataracts out of the eyes. Charles never told you what you should do, he didn’t want you to write like him, he wanted you to get to the core of yourself. Charles was very good at stripping away all the crap that you came to Black Mountain with, all that you had learned before about writing and he got down to that person, who is you sitting down, and you are conversing with, you are talking, you’re talking to somebody, a friend, without all the pretenses of high-flown language and hyperbole … but to really get it down, to write as simply as possible, directly as possible, but not to leave out the complexities. So that kind of tightrope walking, that sense of balancing always, so that you get all sides in, to be like Shakespeare, both sides of the character, or many sides of the character, to not leave any thing out, to recognize the contradictions that we human beings are filled with, and to not have any ready answers because as the old saying goes—what did Gertrude Stein say? Somebody asked her what is the answer, and she said, “What is the question?”
MP: Despite the huge influence of Olson for you at Black Mountain, was there ever a point where you felt you couldn’t take his advice?
MR: Oh yes! Absolutely. What springs to mind immediately is Hart Crane was an anathema in Charles’ classes, he just thought Crane was too bound by the strictures of pentameter. But I loved Hart Crane, I still love Hart Crane, the richness of that language, how the hell he came up with those phrases and the words that suddenly shimmer on the page in a way that no other words do of other poets. That was one instance, and another was Carson McCullers, because he sneered while we were out cutting down the fucking kudzu and it just grows and it grows under your feet as you’re cutting it down. And he says, “What are you reading, Rumaker?” and I said, “A Carson McCullers novel,” and he said, “Saturday night.” [laughter] But I didn’t pay any attention to him. I understood what he said about Crane but there was no need for me to tell him about it. Because he probably wouldn’t have heard me anyway, he would just say “Well, Michael, someday you’ll see.”
AA: And how did that work with Duncan, I mean, you didn’t have that close of a working relationship?
MR: No, but he was my outside examiner, and he did respect my work. In fact, he even liked my essays on Shakespeare, which surprised me, because I didn’t have much respect for them. But he said my writing reminded him of Gogol. And that knocked my socks off, I thought, well, that’s pretty good… you know, Gogol! [laughter] It was complex with Duncan because of the fact that I wouldn’t go to bed with him. He just didn’t appeal to me—it’s what D.H. Lawrence would call “a sin against the holy ghost.” [laughter] You know; if you fuck somebody you don’t care about. I think he could be very bitchy about that … but that was the personal again, it didn’t interfere at all with his great genius, and great ability to write wonderful, mystical poems, which touch you, and give you the sense of being taken somewhere that is very strange and really wonderful, where the mind suddenly is subsumed and the whole body of senses take over and you respond.
AA: Your writing is so natural, yet you’re always doing something different, so it’s very deceptive. It’s hard, I think, for a critic to measure that achievement, because you’re pushing boundaries constantly.
MR: Duncan called it the conversation with the ideal reader. Something that I learned at Black Mountain, and that Charles tried to pound in my head, or all of our heads, as writing students, is that writing was like a conversation. Emily Dickinson said it’s a love letter, her poems are like love letters to the world, and speaking of Valentine’s Day [laughter], those are the best kind, imagine getting a poem from Emily Dickinson . . . but it’s like you’re talking to someone, and you’re having a conversation but it’s not a conversation because you the writer are doing the talking, but it’s taking the reader, the listener into consideration, that you’re talking, as we are talking now, to get that sense into the writing, I think it really draws people in, as you’ve said, you feel drawn in. It’s getting back to Whitman again too, about “tear the door off the hinges.” I can’t get that quote right but you know the one I mean, that’s really what it is, tear down the barriers, expose yourself, be vulnerable.
AA: How did you feel when you saw “A Poem for Cocksuckers” that later appeared in The Hotel Wentley Poems by John Wieners?
MR: Oh, well, god, we shocked each other. [laughter] When I gave a reading at Black Mountain, I read “Exit Three” and John came up to me afterwards, in that way of his, in the soft buttery Bostonian voice, and said “Michael, how’d you have the nerve to write about this marine kissing the narrator in that story?” [laughter] And I thought that was kind of funny, I didn’t think the kiss was funny, I just thought John’s being so prissy about this baffled me and then when I saw ”A Poem for Cocksuckers” I think I saw it in typescript before it was published, I thought “Geez, this guy has really got some balls.” [laughterJ Well, because that word today is still verboten.
AA: And there’s a wonderful letter from Olson to Wieners when he’s outraged and writes, “What did they do to ’Cocksuckers’?!” because the word was censored in the first edition. And Wieners writes back and says, “Tm taking every single copy and I’m writing it in by hand.” Of course, in some sense, none of this would be possible without Duncan. It always astonishes me when people first encounter his article “The Homosexual in Society” and realize it was written in 1944, with its extraordinary courage and intelligence. When he writes “Where the Zionists of homosexuality have laid claim to a Palestine of their own, asserting in their miseries, their nationality,” he is so prescient.
MR: 1944, it’s astonishing.
AA: And you also mention all the women around Duncan, and he tells you how important they are to him.
MP: There’s that image when you’re laughing about this article in Life magazine, with these suburban matrons….
MR: Oh yes, garden club ladies.
MP: And Duncan has this moment of weird recognition of them in himself and it’s impossible for me to read his poetry now without thinking of that. His inner screaming suburban woman…
MR: Yes. His lady of the flowers. There was that sense I think that he had of the female spirit within him, along with the male spirit, that they were conjoined, and I think they are in the best of artists. They have to be, because each has its own strength and its own spirit that feed each other, and make one complete. Duncan had no qualms referring to that aspect of himself. Because what those garden ladies were involved in was the creation of something very beautiful … flowers, you know? Duncan’s poems very often just blossom before your eyes like that, like he’s also the garden club lady who in his poetry just blooms all over the fucking place:
AA: And he had such a recognition of women writers, he rewrites the whole history of modernism through women….
MR: Yes, absolutely. And I remember Anais Nin, she recognized that in him, and respected him for it. She also referred to him as a very beautiful young man. And he had great respect for her, she was a very strong woman, Anais, to hear her talk, you could hear the strength in her, very direct, very clear sighted, a very beautiful woman. I could see how Duncan would be attracted to her. But it wasn’t necessarily that, I think he saw something of the spirit of women that appealed to him and also fed him. And Robert moved very comfortably in his own skin. I think he really was comfortable, very open to life, and it came into him and went out from him.
AA: You have a great portrait of Duncan and Spicer and the respect they had for each other but, again, because you…
MR: Yes, he was crotchety … I really admired his poetry, I really did. But he could be a real son of a bitch. Also because he was really in love with Ebbe Borregaard, and I was screwing Ebbe Borregaard and Ebbe was not screwing Jack Spicer … Ebbe was not, I don’t think, gay in that sense so I think there was jealousy or something. Also he was an alcoholic. And with my own experiences as an alcoholic, you can be … a real negative son of a bitch. Of course they came up through the ranks, both at Berkeley together in the 1940s, so there was that close connection. And Duncan really respected him as a poet. And Spicer certainly respected Duncan.
MP: Because I’ve been reading through your letters, I wanted to ask about your “Notes from the Asylum.” Were they ever published?
MR: The only person who quoted from that was Terry [Leverett T.] Smith, in his book Eroticizing the Nation, when I talk about people wanting me to rewrite “The Pipe,” other writers and critics wanting me to do that kind of story over and over again. My response from the outhouse was that I had to be my own self, and I had to write, I couldn’t be so restricted, I wanted to try other things, take other chances, other risks, explore other grounds.
AA: In the introduction to a later edition of Gringos, Russell Banks writes about people catching up with the tradition in American storytelling that Michael Rumaker seemed so plugged into thirty or more years ago. I think that continues—like when I gave Megan To Kill a Cardinal.
MP: I feel like this was a book people were waiting for, if we’d only known. Something Banks said reminded me of what you wrote about Olson telling you, when he said that you were the only one interested in telling a story, everyone else was too “sophisticated” and there was no audience because the audience pretended to be sophisticated.
MR: One always must have in one’s writing life the welcome ambush. Where you’re going along and thinking—pretty good, I’m writing pretty hot stuff and BOOM, the ambush happens and it’s like “wait a minute, what just happened here?” You get thrown off track, you also get thrown out of the rut and are forced into another passage, another tributary, another way. Those ought to be welcome. We don’t like them because who likes to be thrown off balance. Anne Waldman has said the same thing, that writing is like shifting the ground. That’s not a good paraphrase, but that’s what she’s saying, and it is true. To learn to walk anew, learn to walk in other directions, in other ways, on ground that is never level.
MP: You seem to have blithely ignored the discrete eras of what people would have considered gay activism in your writing, something that might “date” the work. To Kill a Cardinal, for instance, seamlessly weds the spirit of 1970s gay lib and the AIDS activism of the 1980s and early ’90s so there is a sense you’re a part of the period but also capable of drawing on so much more, in terms of background, in terms of vision. I never felt that things are submerged by their time period as opposed to embracing aspects of it.
MR: l had great fun writing that book. I was asked in an interview why I wrote that book, and I said “pure wickedness.” [laughter from all] Because it takes on the Catholic Church. You know, as a former altar boy . . . and really having been a very devout believer as a child. I soon got over that in my teens, my early teens actually. But that whole world that you once felt supported in just came tumbling down. The whole business of using humor to get your point across, it’s an old trick. But you have fun and you hope the reader will have fun too. My mother who, for pennies a week, for years and years and years would pay the Prudential insurance man that came around with his big leather book of customers, collecting pennies, so you would get a policy, my mother would have policies on all of her children for the funeral in case they died, because if you didn’t have any money, where would you go? Bury you in a pauper’s grave or put you out with the trash or something … and so when she died these policies were cashed in by my oldest brother, and we each got three thousand or thirty-five hundred dollars, something like that, and that enabled me to publish To Kill a Cardinal … [laughter from all] Little did she know….
MP: What did your family think?
MR: They don’t say anything, if they indeed read it. My sister-in-law, who was a nun, she read it, and thought it was a hoot. And she’s a very devout Catholic, but she has a sense of humor, thank goodness. So I don’t think my mother would have liked it at all, she had a sense of humor, but not that kind of sense of humor. (laughter from all) But you’re right, I meant it as a satire, and there is something delicious about using satirical writing, but satire is the refuge of the powerless, so you might as well have a good time using it because it’s the only power you have, to make fun of those authority figures that are stupid or pompous.
AA: You’ve never been fully recognized or embraced in what gets codified as gay writing; what do you think the root of that is?
MR: I was thinking that maybe it boils down to I just haven’t kissed enough ass. And also there’s an element of, do you do a lot of reviews, do you do the “one hand washes the other” kind of thing in the literary world….
AA: I also think it’s a bigger problem with prose writers, since so many of the great prose writers of your generation are hardly read—Douglas Woolf, even Hubert Selby. It seems as much of a formal issue as an identity issue, that a lot of people might just not understand where your writing is coming from. Speaking of ambushes, I was reading a letter you wrote to Joanne Kyger, where you talk about first meeting Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, after you’d written that critique of Howl that appeared in Black Mountain Review, and how Ginsberg actually appreciated the piece.
MR: You had to bring up Howl!
AA: You paint a pretty grim picture of the options: “university is out of the question, the other asylums state nut house reform school psycho wards grey hand of are won’t do not the necessary atmosphere.” [laughter]
MR: Oh my god … the voice of the past! It was 1957, that’s when I first met Allen and Peter. We were staying at Denise Levertov and Mitch Goodman’s place. Allen told me that when he read the review in The Black Mountain Review, over in Tangier with Peter, he spent a night arguing with me before he fell off to sleep. [laughter] Oh that poor guy, what I put him through! [laughter] That’s just terrible, you know. But he did say that I treated it fairly, he used some phrase that was mitigating. My experience with Allen was that he was fair, he sort of had a buoyancy about him, and we became very good friends and he didn’t hold grudges.
AA: You mention Denise Levertov again. In the correspondence between Duncan and Levertov, people tend to forget that when they talked about a “new book” in the 1950s it was often a carbon copy typescript making its way from friend to friend. In Black Mountain Days you describe the thrill of Olson getting a letter from Duncan with a new poem in it and reading it to the class.
MR: It was like the Russians, samizdat. That was really very, very exciting. To have letters, getting poems hot off the typewriter from Duncan or Creeley or any number of people. We didn’t have mimeograph machines, there were no computers, no copying machines … you just had carbon paper and things just circulated like that.
AA: Can you say something more about Levertov, there seems to have been a lot of kindness from her towards you during difficult times.
MR: Oh, absolutely, yes. Denise was dealing with my mother, my mother and father because I was just incapable of dealing with anything. I had no place to go when Donald Allen took me to the Psychiatric Institute in upper Manhattan. I needed to be some place where I was safe. And she was there, and Don was too. Don said later he was sorry he had ever gotten mixed up in it. It seemed like it was quite a burden, which I could certainly understand, and just made me feel so guilty. But there was nothing I could do. It was silly to blame myself, deep depression, clinical depression makes you helpless, you are up against walls that you can’t climb over, you can’t get through, you can’t do anything.
AA: Where did you first meet her?
MR: It had to be in Manhattan, and it had to be in the gatherings of poets and writers. Yes, because then I stayed, they invited me to stay at their apartment while they were off in Maine for several months. And I was in pretty bad shape then. She wasn’t very active socially. She was really annoyed when I think she met Ginsberg and Peter for the first time in somebody’s apartment, and the both of them took down their pants and pissed in the fireplace. [laughter] I mean, Don, he could be really nasty. He thought she was awfully priggish about that, I mean after all, you don’t mind, you wouldn’t mind if your guests came and pissed in your fireplace, would you? [laughter]
MP: I’ve had guests do similar … [laughter] And were you in touch with Levertov later as you became more activist oriented? There was a point where it seemed like there was some kind of anxiety with her not siding with Duncan over something.
MR: Yes, about The Butterfly. Duncan, quite rightly, said the ending of The Butterfly, that novel of mine, was mawkish, sentimental, and he didn’t like it. And she defended The Butterfly. I went to see her read at St. Marks because I wanted to see her again, and when the reading was over I went up and talked with her. She too said she hated to do what she had to do about getting me into a mental hospital. And I just told her she shouldn’t have felt that way because I was glad that she helped. They all felt very guilty which made me feel extremely guilty that I caused everybody so much discomfort. How glibly I talk about that time in my life … when I think about it, somebody should write a biography of this guy. (laughter} I mean, when you think back, I’m sure both of you two, well, when you get to be eighty you think back on it, you say, “Jesus Christ how did I survive so much of this stuff?” And I just say that as a fact, just looking back at so many stupid things that I sort of got involved in: alcoholism, drug addiction, depression, schizophrenia, and oh, and then writing! [laughter] That’s what it takes, I guess.to be a writer.
Maybe that’s a rather romantic notion, but I think it does help. I think D.H. Lawrence was right, you know, you don’t know the tops unless you know the bottoms. I think we do need to have that full dimension of ourselves, of what it is to be human. It’s not all moonlight and roses and sunshine-y days. We can’t avoid the dark side. We have to look at that… that’s the most painful thing. So we earn our way, we earn our way, the right to words that speak the truth, hard earned truths…
MP: I was hoping you’d tell us a bit about your memories of the March on Washington in 1979.
MR: Do I talk about the buildings in Washington looking like mausoleums to me? And being amongst people who are not going to bop you over the head, or throw you in jail? It’s the way blacks feel amongst each other, the way LeRoi Jones, when he talked about how he loved and missed so much, the Negro baseball leagues and going to the games in Newark with his father. And being amongst black folk, all black folk.
MP: When I was sitting in the archive reading this I felt a surge of recognition. For the first time I was really in a crowd like that. …
MR: And it was joyous, it was celebratory like the Pride marches. I remember that letter to Don, and I think I felt very high, the good feeling that was generated by that march. That’s why public activism is really very important, once you go, once the private face becomes a public face it becomes a protest against an injustice, it’s very freeing. As you move towards the eccentric, from the eccentric to the centric, then you can see back into the centric and see what a bunch of bullshit a lot of it is. It’s to have those eyes. The oppressors are very blind to a lot of things that a lot of heterosexuals don’t see and that homosexuals see very clearly. You really learn to be alert, if anybody is coming after you. I was referring to homosexuals and women, and everybody who has been persecuted and oppressed, when somebody’s coming after you, you learn to see an awful lot about them, to get a sense of danger when you know they get too near: And very often you didn’t know who the hell your enemies were, you didn’t know who you were talking to, you didn’t know who was a homophobe, a very dangerous one, that could beat you up or kill you. So it was important to be alert and sharp and on your toes and know who was who and what was what. And to trust the gut.
AA: Here we are in 2012, and you’ve recently turned 80. You’ve been through all this, no matter how glibly you put it, l don’t think it’s very glib the way you’ve written it. What do you feel is most important to transmit, to convey now?
MR: I don’t know if I can really answer that. I do know that I felt a very strong conviction sitting on the steps of the Nyack Library, next door to where we had lunch today, one sunny morning, and thinking about my writing, and this had to be the early seventies, and deciding that I would henceforth try to write some things that might in a way help others not to go through what I went through. And I chose to write in the first person singular, to really just write, you know: not me, me—not really in an egoistic way. So the outcome was A Day and a Night at the Baths, and that was a freeing experience. That was something I wasn’t ready to do when I was transitioning from Black Mountain to San Francisco, when you could get thrown in jail and it was against the law to be queer. The poisons of the atmosphere, no matter where you went in America, there were always possible enemies who were out to get you…So the poisons are out there but as a result there’s also poison within you, within your own head. So writing, I don’t mean writing as therapy, but it certainly was a cleansing of the spirit. A burning away, a burning away of all that stuff that was poisoning me from within. And I thought then maybe if I write about this and honestly do that, openly—because sometimes you can read something and it sticks with you for life. Mary Fiore said that about Charles, that he’d say things that stuck to you like adhesive tape, that you didn’t understand at the time but only understood years later. “I would remember things that he said and I didn’t quite know what the hell he was talking about but they stuck with me.” And then later, you know, like decades later she’d say “Oh! Ta-da!” So it doesn’t matter when people get it, so long as you get it and then get it out.
AA: When Diane di Prima visited my class once, students were reading Recollections of My Life as a Woman and somebody asked, “How could you write such emotional things?” And she said, “This isn’t emotional, I wrote this to tell people, particularly young women, what I went through so that they might learn something. And not go through it themselves.”
MR: Yes, yes, absolutely. That’s the true usefulness of shared experience. And it may not save anyone, we can’t save anyone from their own experience, but if you’re having a lot of really poisonous trouble, maybe hearing something will start that cleansing process.
“Robert Duncan in San Francisco”. Copyright © 2013 by Michael Rumaker. Reprinted with the permission of City Lights Books, www.citylights.com
xxx
Musing on Michael
My encounter with Mike feels organic and layered in that I have early memories of people that he had memories of and wrote about with great intimacy and wisdom. Charles Olson, for one, whom I knew as a family friend in Gloucester from an early age until his death, when I was just about to turn 14. John Wieners is another, whom I first got to know as a teenager. But I had already read Mike by then, discovering Gringos & Other Stories on the shelves in our house, amongst issues of Black Mountain Review, Yugen, Big Table, and other goodies. I don’t remember the order exactly but it was around the time I read Crime and Punishment and Native Son, all-nighters under the covers with just enough light to see the print and make it seem like I was actually asleep.
While those were unforgettable reading experiences, it was Mike’s prose that got under my skin and stayed there, like the first time I heard Albert Ayler or Cecil Taylor: you mean, you can do that? When I moved to New York, there was a piece of writing I had given my then teacher Gilbert Sorrentino; he responded by saying he thought the piece was so powerful, it felt like a novel was needed around it. Finding that novel amongst my early writing took me almost thirty years, but I was always sure that the bedrock on which that quest was built emerged from my early experience of reading Mike.
Although I heard Mike read a number of times over the years, I didn’t develop a personal relationship with him until much later and I cannot even express how happy I am to have had the opportunity to get to know him. I also got to work with him, along with my partner in crime for those projects, Megan Paslawski, then a graduate student supposedly working under my guidance though, at times (as happens with great students), I often felt I was under her guidance. Megan produced the extraordinary collection of Mike’s letters published with Lost & Found, and then we worked on a co-edited edition of Mike’s memoir of Robert Duncan in San Francisco, along with an interview we conducted with Mike. We also stage-managed Mike’s reunion with his old friend Joanne Kyger, having done an edition of letters to and from Joanne, including some to and from Mike. To think that with these projects we might have helped bring Mike just even a tiny bit of the recognition he deserved also makes me very happy.
It is not at all a simple matter to aspire to and even achieve greatness as an artist in this country when going against the grain, to keep working even as the relentless tide of corruption and mediocrity thrown back by the gatekeepers continues to rise against you. There is a nobility to the perseverance and, indeed, courage, involved in the endeavor, and Mike Rumaker possessed both courage and nobility of a kind that is rare but feels more and more needed as we live through the flattening of the world around us and all that dares raise its head in it. In her edition of letters, Megan Paslawski wrote: “I feel inexpressible gratitude to Michael Rumaker for how graciously he shared his memories, letters, and self. His generosity with his life, which he invited us to treat as an open book, is unusual and precious.” And when I sent news of Mike’s passing to Duncan McNaughton, he wrote: “One beautiful man, he was kind to all of us, man and work, none sweeter nor more accomplished both ways.” I think of Mike often, I miss hearing his voice and seeing that particular sparkle in his eyes, and I wish I could be there with you, to share further memories…
— Ammiel Alcalay