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This is KZSU Stanford.
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions.
Last week we aired a two-part show on the American road
and this week before we aired a prologue to it.
But we're not done with that theme yet.
Not quite yet.
We're not ready to leave the American road behind and move on to other psychog geographies.
Because there's a poet out there within KZSU earshot,
Lawrence Fairlingetti, who recently published a sprawling epic about America's
Westward Journey in time and space.
And today I would like to pay special homage to him,
especially since he turned 100 years old this past March.
March 24 to be exact.
Lawrence Fairlingetti, poet, activist, S.A.S., painter and publisher
insists that he was never himself a beat poet.
Yet he's the one who published Alan Ginsburg's Howl, Gregory Corso's gasoline,
and many other beat classics.
And he was close friends with most of the legendary beat figures
who are safely under the Earth's lid now.
Fairlingetti was born in New York in 1919,
and in the late 40s he made his way to the western edge of the continental
United States, where this program is coming to you from.
If he makes it to 101, and there's no reason to suspect he won't,
since he's still very much alive and body and spirit,
I'll try to get him on this program next year to speak to us in his own living voice.
But meanwhile, what I'll offer you today is a reading of some passages
from Fairlingetti's long poem published in 2012,
when he was 93 years old, called Time of Useful Consciousness.
I came across Time of Useful Consciousness a few years ago at City Lights,
the legendary bookstore in San Francisco,
which Fairlingetti co-founded back in 1953,
leaving through the book a few verses in particular jumped out at me from page 20.
I quote, "Life sweeping on, the blasts and spins of chance splitting people up,
walking or running or standing still, ever toward or away from each other,
further and further away as old age advances, old friends or lovers once so close,
now stick figures in the distance, disappearing over the horizon, waving back.
Goodbye. Goodbye."
I was so struck by the imagery of these lines that I could see and feel and hear those stick figures in the distance.
William Burrows, Jack Kerouac, Neil Cassidy, Caroline Cassidy,
Edie Parker, Alan Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, Ken Keezy,
Eddie Jones, and all the other old friends and lovers turning back to wave goodbye to us,
before disappearing over the horizon of living memory,
like the wand moon setting beyond the white wave.
My plan today is to read portions of the poem not to comment on it,
but before I begin, let me mention that Fairlingetti describes Time of Useful Consciousness,
as I quote, "a fragmented recording of the American stream of consciousness,
always westward streaming, a people's poetic history in the tradition of William Carlos Williams's
Patterson, Charles Olson's Maximus, Alan Ginsburg's Fall of America,
and Ed Sanders America History and Verse."
His poem flows like the Mississippi River, which looms large in its pages,
rushing on with a self-generated kinetic force that makes it more of a river of consciousness poem,
rather than a stream of consciousness writing.
It's a poem in which America's cultural history can be seen taking shape and fast forward.
A word about the title "Time of Useful Consciousness,"
that's an aeronautical term denoting the time between when one loses oxygen
and when one passes out the brief time in which some life-saving action is possible.
It's clear that Fairlingetti back in 2012 believed that this nation had already entered such a time,
whether that time has run out on us or not some seven years later, is an open question.
The poem is in nine parts and it begins as follows.
In that internation that stretches westward from Manhattan,
autumn finds the people restless.
Across the Iron Cities, cement planes and silted rivers,
across Appalachia, across Ohio, first Western frontier,
and down into the down, into middle America, into America by great lakes yearning,
by firelands burning, red brick mansions moldering down the wooded streets of a hundred winded towns,
under the huge sugar maples down the canyons of dying leaves,
each a hand letting go in the full catastrophe, the full miracle of life.
Homer heard it by the Aegean long ago by the oceans long with drawing roar,
the cry of the Voyager always outbound outward over bright horizons to new worlds.
And then seeking home again, steering toward democracy, even as they plundered everywhere and took slaves wherever,
and we had our own town, Criars, Whitman, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Thomas Payne and Mark Twain,
and Thomas Wolf with his destiny that leads to the soft stone smile of an angel in lives,
haunted by a Georgia slattern because a London cut purse went unhonged.
And Woody Guthrie and Dylan and Pete Seager and Johnny Cash and Paul Robinson singing Joe Hill,
the true popular poets of America, their voices moving everyone,
more than the poets and books, the printing press having made them so silent.
But all of them singing or silent, reading between the lines,
reading between the lives of America, packs of players facing west,
the jacks and queens of hearts, the Mercator maps of America, the black-eyed ones,
who see always the one with the eye of a horse, the one with the light in his eye,
the one with his eye on the star named Nova, the one for ones with no one to lead them,
the one whose day has just begun, the one with the star in his cap, the cat with future feet,
looking like a jack of hearts.
Mystic Jack, Zen Jack with crazy cones, Vegas Jack who rolls the bones, the high roller behind the dealer,
the one who will shake them, the one who will shake the ones unshaken, the fearless one,
the one without bullshit, the stud with the straightest answer, the one with blazing words for guns,
the straight distance runner with the word to pass, the night rider with the urgent message,
the man from La Mancha riding bareback, the one who bears the great tradition and breaks it,
the mysterious stranger who comes and goes, the jack or queen of hearts who speaks out,
the fast-speaking woman and the slow-speaking woman, the one who digs the mystery and stands in the corner smiling.
So that sailing westward from the chronilated old world of over age come on bare Europe, millions washing up on virgin shores bright with promise,
awake and sing ye who dwell in the dust.
Ideas, alphabets, fornications, transmigrations, Roman noses blown in Sephardic profiles,
Arab lips praising Al-Ain Alabama, prayer rugs traded for status symbols in Cincinnati, baseballs lost among the playad,
quote la mantia, "Boris and Bessie, Tomafeshki, born Yiddish in the Ukraine, spawning the genius maestro, MTT.
You're not in the stethol anymore, baby."
And birth certificates for the first born of immigrant families, inscribed with names like America's Dalisandro.
And not all pure heroes as various villains show up to at various homegrown bourgeois fascists and defacers of the Statue of Liberty,
don't give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and they shipped out, Russian-born Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman back to where they came from.
America, America's stranger than paradise to a Hungarian immigrant named Jarmesh, who win his amazement made a film about it.
And old hunchback Tony Tanori, Genevieve's fisherman, smelling of garlic and pippa-roni, catching crayfish in the Bronx River off Parkway Road Bronxville, where he lived in a hut by the railroad tracks where sometimes could be heard.
The sweet, sad sound of the mandolin.
And Gregorio Nuncio Corso, born Calabresi Orphan on Bleeker Street, who became a poet in prison, mouthing mad mouthfuls of new American lingo.
And French Kannuk, Jack Kerouac, growing up American in Lowell, Massachusetts, a red-socks fan in his lumberjack shirt-speaking Juhal with Mmer, his quibic quas,
Mother, and Delia Davine fled to America from the last great Irish potato famine, ending up as a housekeeper in a fine mansion in Westchester, still speaking her rough Irish brogue and a sharp tongue she had, and fast on the uptake she was with the wit of her public and father,
Downing his fifth pint.
Where millions of blacks uprooted out of Africa deprived of homes and names enslaved in the deep south, finally escaped to a larger America to make a name for themselves.
While W.E.B. Du Bois born in Great Barrington Mass by a Dutch African mother, and a father descended from West African slaves, grew up to write the souls of black folk.
Striking like a thunderclap on the ears of those who didn't want to hear it.
And Catholic Jack Powers in Boston, who never would go west, born black Irish and rock-sperry projects, fed the poor from throwaways at the public market, and made poetry out of stone, soup, and beer all those years, and then lost babbling in a psychodroom in Mass General.
Where now, brother poet.
He was an American, he was an American boy, he read the reader's digest from cover to cover, and noted the close identification of America and the promised land.
He read the want ads daily, looking for a stone, a leaf, an unfound door.
He wandered lonely as a cloud, he heard the sound of summer in the rain.
He leaned and drunk and doorways, he heard America singing in the yellow pages, where one could never tell the soul has its rages.
And all he had known was sewn inside him, and morphed in memories of dreams.
All those immigrants melded into one new man, a new brand of man.
The old guy in short sleeves with arm bands, on vacation back in the old country, his first time back in 30 years, and he looks around days, and the Polish lady on 5th Avenue, parking her Mercedes and a private garage, and the kid in short pants on his skateboard, and the old Dame, wiping the counter of the diner in South Side Chicago, and the old cauldron baggy pants, playing chests in Washington Square, and the prom queen from the south.
About to enter Columbia College and major in men, and the cabinet maker and Connecticut, who just lost his wife to cancer, screaming in the dark.
Even as Bebet Deutsch tells her class at Columbia, "How can we write the great Russian novel while life goes on so untarably?"
And so on and on around the bend of our river, steering toward democracy, to write the history of the future in the sweep of history's broken broom, as history goes on repeating itself, and every war, and every execution, a defeat for the people, and Saco and Van Zettie, rocking the nation as they fried and wooden electric chairs.
With other immigrants creating caustic critiques of the American way of life, like Norm Chomsky, with a father from the Ukraine and a mother from Belarus, or Howard Zinn rewriting history and her story, with a father from Austria-Hungary and a mother from Siberia.
For Hitler had shaken the tree, and the full fruit of Eurobrains fell on America, barson and other polyglots at Columbia U, Einstein walking with gojal down Princeton's leafy lanes, French surrealist refugees conning Manhattan Galeristas and Easterners listening to Mahler's fatal foreboding and Westerners to country Western folk music and overdrive.
Back when Heartland America was still all small towns, with small town life, the only life, before the Iron Horse came on shining rails, steering toward democracy and linked them all together, possibly as a nation.
I move on here to part three.
Dark mine, Dark Soul, Dark Age, a man made of steel on a horse of gold, and the horse hitched to a prairie wagon.
East of Santa Fe, you can still see from a small plane the old wagon tracks in the earth, ruts a mile wide.
You can almost hear the cracks of whips over horses, the cries of drivers in the dust, and the barren highlands, the desert barons, where nothing moves, when the west wind blows, not even the cactus, except for the tumbleweeds, like rootless men rolling along whichever way the wind blows.
The white dawns bursting over mesas and table lands, onward by any wheel or horse or rail, any car by buggy by stagecoach, walking, riding hooves, pounding the great planes, caravans in the night.
Go west young man and grow up with the country.
The great trek west, a sea of people on the move, steering toward democracy, horses, mules and oxen, covered wagons, buggies, carts filled with all ages yearning for a homestead, a home, to grow a family to grow enough to eat in the hard land, in the hard winters and the frozen wastes, with sickness and death on root.
Doldrums, dreams, hallucinations, conscience and consciousness of a newborn nation, half mumbled in sleep, rocking restless to the last horizon.
Trains in the night, shuttles, freight, box cars, box cars, box cars.
The first iron horses hooting lonely in the great dark, across still open prairies, connecting isolate towns, connecting everyone for the first time.
The first time, sprawled across the continent.
The forward rush of time and history, and of this poem, into what future blessed or blasted history and history, made of the lies of the victors, written in blood and water and rivers and railroads and highways, in rearview mirrors in which the past disappeared faster and faster, like train tracks behind a train speeding up the river.
Life sweeping on, the blasts and spins of chance, splitting people up, walking or running or standing still, ever toward or away from each other, further and further away as old age advances.
Old friends or lovers once so close, now stick figures in the distance, disappearing over the horizon, waving back, goodbye, goodbye.
Initials and cement in a sidewalk, enclosed in a heart or in the bark of an ancient tree.
Skipping now to part five, while Alexis de Tocqueville saw the Indians crossing the river on their trail of tears out of the old south, men, women and children with white priests explaining hell to the savages.
At Mark Twain, emoting, the basin of the Mississippi is the body of the nation as a dwelling place for civilized man by far the first upon our globe.
How does mother Mississippi flow through time?
Listen, says the river within you, listen to the voices of America, the voices of the people of America, of the middle mind of middle America, away along a river run all the way down, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, all flooded down, all washed down in heartland America.
The river exists for coal, the river made of coal, waste deep in the big muddy, the people mired in it, and the further south you go, the muddier it gets, with the other big rivers muddying into it, the Missouri, the Illinois, the Ohio.
All night, myriad barges filled with great hills of coal, the mud, the ancient epochs pushed by huge smoking tugs, steaming down river and endless coal trains, night and day, trundling forever up and down old miss.
All night they trundle hundreds of cars long up and down along the river, their lonely horns echoing in darkness, iron horses hooting far off, lost voices of America carrying dirty coal from the great coal basket of America.
From part six now, dark mind, dark soul, dark age, the peasant leads his horse through blackberry kingdoms and comes out on a highway in the American West, so that he, the hero with a thousand facets, a walking storehouse of the past, appeared in his own dream and spake in his inner ear.
I, Maximus, primo bullshitter, I push on to the end, life a real dream, a pilgrimage, a labyrinth, a labby rev, the street is dark, I shall stumble in the empty ways of night.
Oh, he had seen it all, heard it all, heard coyotes in their dying call, dingoes wailing at the Western Wall, Jesuits praying in a dobi, tolling the iron mission bell, sank to sank to sank to life is holy.
The 19th century ends and turns into highway 66, the road of flight, the myth haunts us prairie scooners into pullmans, and the rutting continues, the night of the horse is over, it is the dawn after dreaming, and in the middle of the journey we come upon ourselves on a dark road and recognize ourselves for the first time.
The lights come on, the country is electrified, the world lights up like a ferris wheel, all the machines begin to hum almost as it were in unison.
Civilization beats out aerois and post-perishes, goge escapes to Tahiti as tisto beak perished forever, a crowd flows over London bridge, westward, stick figures in the world's end out of Jacometti.
From Part 7, an adobe sun paints route 66, easy riders over the asphalt, roar stoned into the sunset, past Kelle Robertson, beat cowboy, poet drifter with his beat up guitar and his weather beat songs and his horse call desperation.
And the search for meaning leads through the dreaming, saying Tom Russell in the borderlands, with a settler tale to tell, quote, "an American primitive man in an American primitive land, heard the sound of Indian drums, heard the bugles blow before they rewrote history into a wild west show."
Gather around you people, listen here and now, if you please, this land of yours was settled by bastard drunks and thieves.
And all those New York carpet-bagger poets, angel-headed in tight pants, hard-ons showing, heading westward on their road to Denver, San Francisco and Mexico, leaving behind all those Manhattan Knights who would never cross the Hudson,
seeing still the New Yorker map of America, a great slaw west of the Hudson reaching all the way across to palm trees on the Pacific, and never never land and celluloid with chaplain and garbo and herald Lloyd.
And Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer's hero, leading the only free life, and on the last page of Huckleberry Finn, their hero Huck disappears forever from their horizon, but lives on in the west in a thousand photocopies, like Neil Cassidy becoming Carouac's Huck, the river turned into their road, their souped-up car, their raft, cruising America, like cowboy anti-heroes of American Phil,
the Eternal Outsider, the hot rod, his horse, hipster replacing liberated slave high on freedom.
And then T. Jean Carouac, stone on a rooftop in Mexico City, finding himself alone and lost, and hip sociologists claiming that his road was the true tale of the loss of American innocence.
So that Cassidy then became Ken Keezy's Huck and Keezy, the Paul Bunyan of the Beets, becomes Tom Wolf's Huck.
Voice of the other America out there, the deep soul of America, lost in video game, arcades, and pinball machines in suburban malls where lived the lives of the middle mind of America, in Legion Hall,
breakfasts, living room, Catholic clutches, prairie primaries and church suppers, America, America, the first hope and the final despair, reading between the lives.
From the beginning of Part 8, where Farley and Gethi is probably speaking about himself, so that a certain young traveler arriving over land by train to the San Francisco and Barco deiro in the middle of the 20th century, shoulder-to-day sea bag and set foot upon what he saw as some temporarily lost Atlantis risen from the sea.
He saw the seven hills rising up in the early morning with small white building sparkling in first light.
The hills seemed to sing and his step was light as he started up Market Street, breathing the bright air, uncertain what direction to take.
And as he took in with hungry eyes the panorama of the city he saw as never before the panorama of his own life stretched before him with its unknowable possibilities unfathomable still hidden from him beyond the bright horizon.
And like his hero, Stefan Daedalus, he thought to himself, "Welcome, O life."
San Francisco, San Francisco, in that hinterland that stretches westward all the way from Athens, democracy, fighting through dark ages, medieval kingdoms, bloody kings and dictators to end up here at last, still an elite democracy with galley slaves and suits and skyscrapers.
And this truly the end of the line, the end of the long, long trail, a winding lands end the last frontier with no further west to go, the ideal place, the final home so long for over the great planes over the great divide.
After World War II, it was as if the whole continent tilted westward and the population shifted with it, and it took almost a decade for all the elements of a changed America to come together to coalesce in a radically new post-war culture, and it happened in San Francisco.
So that progressive San Francisco went on through the 1940s and 50s and 60s with the longshoremen tying up the port to protest Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, fascist intervention in Spain, Civil War, and South Africa's apartheid.
The city still an eccentric center of resistance with counterculture bookstores and newspapers, raising hell and K-PFA radio, founded by conscientious objectors and glide memorial church and the mission cultural center, an Italian anarchists and the bread and wine mission, and psychedelic poets and alcoholic figurative painters.
And utopian experiments and diggers providing free food and a commune that didn't use money and back to the land movements, tuning in, turning on and dropping out, and the weather underground, its pamphlets appearing mysteriously in bookstore basements, and Bob Dylan singing Masters of War on K-PFA.
It is 60s San Francisco. Don't call it Frisco, Mone, columnist, Herb Cain, because that's what riffraff sailors called it.
And the weight of the world, the weight of history lies lightly on San Francisco, and all day long, the light like early morning, that special San Francisco light.
In the Trieste Cafe, the original beat hangout, where Gert Rudstein never said to J. Kerouac, "You are all a beat generation."
It's a Saturday afternoon with Italian family opera, the Beldkanto, so sentimental, so antico, in a hungry world, Papa Jani singing his heart out in Grenada.
And poet Kenneth Patchen, an e.e. Cummings with an attitude, saw the lonely people of the world, even as he made love to Miriam, love of all his days, voice of the conscience of the world, defiant to the end of his bedridden days, the antihero in the suburbs, and Kenneth Rex Roth, the resident godfather of the poets, waxing Roth about capitalism, the enemy of democracy, and Martin Luther King, repeating,
"We are on the wrong side of the world revolution."
In this country where they assassinate their leaders, as barbaric as the Aztecs and their stars kill themselves, in San Francisco it's the summer of love and the sound of rock hits,
Bill Graham's Fillmore Auditorium, drowning out cool jazz, and then the last waltz of Dylan's band on the day that winterland closed forever.
Bringing the sixties to an end, sometime in the seventies, although VW buses painted with rainbows and signs, reading, further, still rocked on.
It was still high noon in America until a long came the digital revolution faded to destroy or ingest all the age-old cultures of the world in a worldwide web of globalization.
In an AIN-RAND projection of world domination.
I move on now to the ninth and final part of Time of Useful Consciousness.
The forest fires of the Kali Yuga about to consume us and smokey the bear in his broad park rangers hat, in his raging fury to save planet Earth, still swings his vadras shovel to douse the fires of greed and war, and still chance his great enlightened mantra.
But who hears it as it echoes in the wilderness?
With the force march of progress forcing all onward, technocracy versus the heart, the aristocracy of corporations versus the people, the pyramids lit up like cupcakes, capitalism, masquerading as democracy, with free speech only for those who have nothing to say, and caring within itself the seeds of its own destruction, and all the other cliches of the left.
I heard the news today, "Oh boy."
Man too stupid and too greedy to save himself from eco-catastrophe.
In an Armageddon of autos and the city of angels, in downtown Denver in Chicago and Manhattan, Mexico City and Milan, Calcutta and Tokyo,
drowned down in the bad breath of machines.
The sun's wearing shades, the ozone layer breathing smog, the ecosystem is finally balanced as a mobile sculpture, a computer about to crash, a casino culture out of control, a hole in its ozone soul.
A sweepstakes winner take all, a shooting gallery for masters of war, a bull market with toria doors, a runaway juggernaut heading for not, a runaway robot,
bombing through cities, the hydraulic brakes, blown, internet gamblers and dot-com billionaires, coaked up in stretched limos and Martin Luther King saying, "It's now up to us to choose non-violence or non-existence."
The whole spinning world lights up tilt, a billion jackpots blow with a bang, Kingfisher's catchfire dragonflies draw flame, shoppers carried by escalators into the flames, skin deep civilization, gone in a flash of Samsura as the carbon air bursts into flame.
Rock a buy, baby, swing low, sweep chariot into the far future when nations and borders no longer exist, and a great swarming of the phyllahine horde sweeps the earth in search of food and shelter.
The leadsman takes his soundings and cries aloud, "Mark, twain, as the lead line plunges down, and so seek transit the glories of our century in our time of useful consciousness."
That's where Fairlingeti's poem technically comes to an end, but given that Fairlingeti considers himself a "with manian" type of American poet, he has a coder to the poem which ends on what we could call a quintessentially American hopefulness that our time of useful consciousness has some time left in it.
So I will read the final part of the poem, which begins with an asterisk.
"Enough, enough, enough of this loud lament of the discomfort, Camara, in some wasteland of our impoverished imagination.
Did not Martin Luther King have a dream and did he not opine that only when it's dark enough can you see the stars?
We still can cry, abandon all despair, for we still have our lyric escape.
Oh, let us see again with dreamy poet, Yeats, the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.
Oh, let us all crune at the moon in full denial.
"Bye-bye, blackbird, blackbird, blackbird, singing the blues all day.
Bye-bye, blackbird, why did you say there ain't going to be no sunshine no more?
Blackbird, blackbird, got to be on my way where there's sunshine all a day.
How lovely still the earth and all the creatures in it shining in eternity as the sun, the sun so bright, shakes out his golden hair of the sun.
And are there not still fireflies?
Are there not still four leaf clovers?
Is not our land still beautiful?
Our fields, not full of armed enemies, never occupied by iron armies, speaking iron tongues, are not our warrior still valiant, ready to defend us.
Are not our senators still wearing fine togas?
Are we not still a great people?
Is this not still a free country?
Are not our fields still ours?
Are gardens still full of flowers?
Are ships with full cargoes?
Is not Rome still Rome?
Is not Los Angeles still Los Angeles?
Are these really the last days of the Roman Empire?
Is not beauty still beauty and truth still truth?
Are there not still poets?
Are there not still lovers?
Are there not still mothers, sisters and brothers?
Does not a dawn every day still light up our land?
Is there not still a full moon?
Once a month, are not there still stars and night?
Can we not still see them in the bow of night signaling to us some far out be a tofic?
What about be a tofic destiny?
Walt Whitman, you should be living at this hour, optimist of humanity on mass, old, grey beard, old, Walt, stepping off Brooklyn Ferry into the heart of America,
you who contained multitudes, you who heard America singing, you who sounded your barbaric yup over the roofs of the world.
You who said, "I'll wimp her up no more," out of the closet endlessly rocking, you who struck up for a new world, solitary, singing in the West.
We're away now, dear poet, dear lover, eternal yay, seir.
The end.
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions.
We hope you enjoyed our reading from Lawrence Feddling Get These Time of Useful Consciousness.
Happy Birthday, Larry.
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