Page 7 - January 2021

WESTERN

RAMBLINGS

OCTOGENARIAN ANTICS

At Cornell, armed with a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for me and a promise of
employment for my wife, Adelle, we made the decision to move West. I was to study at

the University of California at Berkeley and Adelle was to work in a well-paid position
in San Francisco in the Federal Reserve Bank of California.

It is difficult to tell how magical the notion of "The West" was for an East Coast boy
and girl--especially a boy who had played Cowboys and Indians as a child. If the East
was Europe and European-influenced culture, the West was wildness, openness,
space, and a proximity to the Far East. It was in Berkeley, and later Oakland, California,
that I took on the trappings of a Westerner. My poetry and my life thrived in these
spaces where I turned my back on the well-known publishers and literary culture of the
East Coast and pursued a different kind of life. The poet Michael McClure, born in
Kansas, instructed me: It was Kenneth Rexroth who taught us all how to be poets of
the West, taught us to remain Westerners in many of our cultural trappings--McClure
used to recite Chaucer at readings--but also to look to Eastern culture, to the Japanese

and Chinese; taught us of the spontaneity of haiku, for instance. We had our masters--
Robert Duncan, Phil Whalen, Diane di Prima, Ishmael Reed, many others--and we
didn't care very much about what was said in The New Yorker. Berkeley had been a
sleepy, tennis-oriented town until the sixties arrived, at which point it transformed
itself into a hotbed of contrarian sentiment, political awareness, and imaginative
sweep. That is perhaps what happened to me as well. I went to the university and
learned a few things, but my true university was the town, with its nearness to
sophisticated San Francisco. Though I was an adult when I reached here, I became a
child of the West. Wildness, openness, space, and a proximity to the Far East. Heaven!
Oz! I wrote to the wonderful Southern-California poet, Jerome Rothenberg, "Poetry is a
darkness, Jerry, / it is the site of no gnosis / until it is finished with us."

jack foley

Consulting Editor
1/9/21

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litterateur january 2021