I remember how excited he was when I told him the news of an interview he'd done a while back with Louis Bourgeois and Zachary Bush would be published in The Toronto Quarterly-Issue Three. He sent along six poems, all of which he thought would go well with the interview and suggested I use them all if I liked.(smile) He was deeply supportive of small print literary journals like mine, having run Juice with his wife Judy for years, he knew that world well and he often told me, "keep going and don't listen to the critics, never give up, you're doing great things, and we need journals like yours around."
I miss reading Stephen's almost daily posts on my facebook wall, usually it was a new poem he'd just written or advice he wanted to give fellow poets on how to write better poetry. He deeply cared about his art and the people involved in it. He was an intense family man as well and it showed in his writing. We miss you more every day, Stephen.
My condolences go out to Stephen's wife, Judy and his family and friends.
In honour of Stephen's passing I'd like to post his interview as it appeared in the pages of TTQ3. Enjoy everyone!
THE LAST AMERICAN BEAT:
AN INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN MORSE
BY LOUIS E. BOURGEOIS AND ZACHARY BUSH
Q- I understand you were born and raised in Oakland, California in the mid 40’s; if you wouldn’t mind, could you please expound upon some of your early memories of growing up in the Bay area at that time and how, if in any way, they influenced your early poetry?
SM- It’s true. I was born in the Oakland Naval Hospital while my father (Herbert Spaulding Morse Jr.) was away fighting the Japanese in January of 1945. I was about 5 when he returned to the states, moved us out to the suburbs. It would take a psychoanalyst to fully explain my father’s influence on who I became and what I write. There are two definite tones in my writing, a very clear-cut dark and light, anger and romantic. Though I am not bipolar, my poetry is. My father’s anger – sudden and unexplainable – and his charm as a storyteller echo about in much of my poetry.
Q- Who were some of your earliest influences?
SM- Early on I was very taken with Mother Goose nursery rhymes, and Stevenson’s ‘Garden of Verses’, The Grimm Brothers’, red and blue book of fairy tales were amazing, and I recall at 5 reading, The Odyssey. My father taught me to read at 5 and made me read the classics, and write a book report on what I had read. I wasn’t fond of the book reports, but I loved the reading. I very early had a solid grounding in traditional classical juvenile literature. By 7, I was writing stories of my own with not-so-heroic squirrels as the protagonists, surviving on their wits by stealing from stores. And finally, at around age 10, I discovered Sci-Fi and read every piece of Sci-Fi in the local library that included 1984, Brave New World, and other actual pieces of literature that just happened to be categorized in the library as Sci-Fi.
I learned to look at things differently, to actually look and see beyond the ordinary words used to describe them. The earth became a planet in a solar system with certain unique characteristics. It wasn’t just where I happened to be.
Those were the main literary influences pretty much until I was 17, graduated from high school and went to the University of Oregon. What those blurbs about me that are scattered around the web don’t tell you is that my father bought a cattle ranch in Oregon when I was about 11, and I spent the next 6 years as a sort of cheap hired hand, the resident wood chopper, fence fixing, tractor driving, hay crew foreman and all around cowboy working for my dad for a $5.00 per week “allowance.”
The ranch was 5 miles from the nearest town by gravel roads. I’d bus to and from school 5 days a week, come home and do chores, and had little or no social life beyond school. I played football, and ran the mile on the track team mostly so I could get some time away from the ranch. I say all this because, ‘The Ranch,’ has appeared in much of my work, and it’s most often the dark part. Alone, and in constant fear of my father’s quick and violent temper with nothing much around to buffer it, some dark strains got their start in those wet and unruly Oregon woods.
Q- When explaining my lifestyle or inner-workings as a poet, I sometimes explain a point where I crossed an invisible line, and considered myself a poet (publications or not), a point in which I could not ‘turn off’ the process of either editing or composing poetry. Can you relate to this in any way and, if so, when did you ‘cross the line,’ find yourself unable to ‘turn off’ your creative processes? The question is, I suppose, when did you begin to consider yourself a true poet?
SM- I remember at about age 16 vowing that if I ever discovered a way to travel back in time that I would go back and tell my 16 year-old-self what it is that I had become. I had this terrible gut ache of a feeling that there was something I was supposed to be doing. I just couldn’t identify it. It wasn’t until about 5 years later, after I had moved back on my own to the San Francisco Bay Area and was majoring in English at California State University, Hayward that I discovered what it was that I am. I took a creative writing class to satisfy an upper division-writing requirement (I didn’t want to write any more research papers).
The instructor was George Cuomo, a brilliant no-nonsense Italian writer who had a good personal relationship with some of the mainstream literary editors, including John Ciardi of The Saturday Review. There were 10 people in that class, 6 of whom – including myself – went on to be chosen for inclusion in an anthology of the best college writers in 1970. Our small group included more poets in that anthology than Stanford’s prestigious program for writers. We were a gifted group. I had already been published in the Saturday Review. My successes as a poet were early and came naturally for me. At 21, I knew I was a poet.
Q- I would assume that much of the art culture and artist’s perceptions of the world changed quite drastically from the mid ‘50’s to late ‘60’s, especially in the Bay Area. What was it like witnessing these major changes in society, in your own backyard, at ground-zero of the cultural revolution, if you could call it that? Please feel free to share any memories you have of this shift, as it related to you as a young writer.
SM- Oh, God, did they change? I was on a ranch in Oregon during the late ‘50’s and only heard rumors about the Beat movement, grossly distorted and filtered through television programs like Dobie Gillis. I used to attend lectures at the U of Oregon in Eugene just to get away and ended up studying a year’s worth of intro literature there before moving back to Oakland in 1963. It was a very solid intro that gave me a firm background in English and American Literature up to about Elliot. I wrote a few sonnets just to see if I could. They were melodramatic and angst-ridden crap.
Ginsberg was a bombshell and I got exposed to a world that I never dreamed existed when I moved back to Oakland, and started taking trips over to North Beach in San Francisco to explore. I still didn’t know who I was or what I wanted to do, but I knew it was over there.
Somewhere amongst, Coffee and Confusion (a folk coffee bar). The Hungry 1, the Off Broadway, City Lights, The Spaghetti Factory, somewhere amongst the comedians, folk singers, poets, artists, fortune-tellers. I knew it was a place to spend time, and I did. I first thought I wanted to be a folk artist traveling the coffee house circuit, but I was a fairly mediocre musician so that never went anywhere.
Somewhere around 1964 there was a huge cultural change. North Beach went from Folk singers like Phil Ochs, comedians like Lenny Bruce, and famous topless dancers like Carol Doda to a mecca for poets and characters like Ferlinghetti. Ginsberg, Kerouac, Michelene, Gary Snyder, Jack Hirschman, Richard Brautigan, Robert Creeley, Thom Gunn, Dianna Di Prima, AD Winans, Paul Foreman, Gene Fowler, and on and on. I was studying these people at Hayward and meeting them in San Francisco. I still didn’t think of myself as a writer, but I knew who they were and it was just fun to hang on the fringe of what I was really too young to be doing. Drugs, alcohol, sex, and anything decadent was good.
Q- How influential would the Beat poets be to your early career? I hear that you had a bit of a friendship with a few highly respected poets back in the late ‘60’s. Share with us some of these relationships, their dynamics, and any memories you have of that time. Did these relationships with some of the Beat poets inspire or fuel your early writing?
SM- I was in a bit of two worlds…the poetry as a craft atmosphere of Cal-State Hayward, lots of theory, and honing of pieces. We took poems apart and reverse-engineered the principles we found in them.
We were very aggressively stealing poetic techniques and using them as our own. Then there was a group of about 30 people, a mixed bag of actors, artists, writers, musicians, and groupies that would meet every weekend on a ranch in Hayward Hills. It was a gathering of a hip culture of the Oakland side, though many worked at San Francisco radio stations, Hollywood Studios, had their own presses, people like Ben Hiatt, Foreman, Winans, and who really knew because we were drinking wine, smoking various things, pot mostly, some opium, playing music all night long, reading poetry, arguing about what worked and what didn’t. I wasn’t much into labels, but some poets who have been loosely associated with the Beats, myself, Doug Blazek, Clifton Simms were there.
Then of course there were the official San Francisco Beats. I read with them at a San Francisco library a couple of times though I didn’t really think of my work at the time as being very oral. I liked the way it looked on the page; how that-look walked with the words in nice tight rhythms, the images conjured. My connections with the San Francisco side strengthened when I went to graduate school at San Francisco State University in the ‘70’s.
Q- While attending graduate school at San Francisco State University, you studied under the great one-eyed poet Robert Creeley, correct? I have read enough Creeley to know that I love his work, what was it like being instructed by him? Did you spend much time in his presence outside of classes? Please feel free to share any stories about this relationship. We are very interested in any connections that you might have had with Creeley and the other Beat writers of the Bay Area.
SM- Yes, I studied with Creeley. It was a semester class that met twice a week for a total of 5 hours a week. We met on campus the first class, and then agreed to hold class in an off campus apartment so we could drink wine and get away from the formality of the classroom environment. The class was fascinating because there were always extra people hanging around because Creeley was there. I remember one young blonde woman reciting a poem about a hooded snake that she was seducing with her language and touch, a pretty blatant pass at Creeley, about which he commented later, saying she was looking for a poet. There was very little theory discussed, it was mostly Creeley gossiping about poets that he knew and he seemed to know everyone. He told a funny story about Jack Hirschman who was always mad at Creeley, Ginsberg, and crowd, because he thought they had a secret for writing poetry that they were withholding from him. We could all relate to the story because people/students/young-poets were always looking for the formula that would produce great poetry. They were never very happy to hear that formula was simply paying attention.
I did go drinking with Creeley once outside of class. We went to a longshoreman’s bar down on the wharf, and it wasn’t long before Creeley aggravated this guy that looked like a linebacker for the Raiders. I was minding my own business, but I heard Creeley say, “yeah, I’m a poet, want to make something of it?” I’m not sure who swung first, but we were suddenly in the middle of a bar brawl. I don’t go out of my way to get into a fight, but I can take care of myself…anyway to make a long story short, the bartender who threatened to break us all into pieces if we didn’t get out saved us. We got out and Creeley thought it was funny. I wasn’t convinced. Later, I was told by one of his buddies that Creeley liked to get into bar brawls, he wanted to show that poetry wasn’t for sissies. Shades of Bukowski, but Creeley didn’t think much of Bukowski. Both he and Gary Snyder felt that Bukowski’s work was a lot like an onion, if you peel off a layer, there’s another layer just like it…onion to the core.
Q- I have seen it stated in various places that some of the older Beat writers embraced you as a poet and told you, more or less, that you could write in any fashion that you pleased? That is some pretty valuable advice. So, I am curious; who were some of these writers?
SM- That was pretty much what the consensus was amongst a lot of writers; learn the craft, and then forget it. I believe it was actually Thom Gunn that told me that poets are good in spite of what they think they know about poetry, not because of it.
Q- After reading your poetry, it would seem apparent, through most all of your work, that you pushed your poetry into the avant-garde and more experimental styles. How would you describe the type of poetry you write? Would you consider yourself to be an, ‘experimental’ poet?
SM- As I’ve implied previously, my poetry comes from experience and observation. So my life is so inextricably a part of anything I do. I get pleasure out of learning and playing with forms, like sonnets, sestina, villanelles, haiku, senryu, whatchamaku. But I always try to take them places they wouldn’t go in the hands of traditionalists. I’m infatuated with synchronicity, the notion that at any given moment there is a connection to all things in that moment, that if I can see the details and feel the emotions of the moment in the things around me, the ones that speak to men, then I am by extension tuning into all significant things of that moment.
That for example is how I read, W.C. Williams poem,
THE RED WHEELBARROW
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
Williams was trying to catch the essence of the situation that he was in, through the images around him. As you know, Williams was a pediatrician, made house calls, and was on this day attending to a sick young girl on a ranch outside of town. She had Scarlet Fever, and he had done all he could do. It was just a matter of waiting. He stood there, looking at the things, and thinking how much depended on the ideas in those things.
It was a form of imagism. I have taken it in a slightly different direction. I retain the focus on the feeling and the whole gestalt of the situation I’m trying to recreate through sound and language – the sense-me of the poem. I think that form becomes secondary if the sense-me is kept firmly in mind. I can put the poem in many forms/boxes and as long as the sense-me remains, the poem can function. It’s a seeing and a feeling.
Q- After writing for more than three decades, how many poems do you think you have composed?
SM- Thousands, a large percentage of which have just drifted away because for many of the years that I wrote, I deliberately emphasized the process and was not too concerned with the product. Being a poet is like being a singer; the magic is in the making and the sharing. Once it is written down, it becomes an artifact.
Q- I have heard you refer to yourself as an “American Poet”. Could you please explain exactly what you mean, outside of the obvious of being born in America? What, in your opinion, makes an “American Poet?” Do we have anymore left?
SM- I am an American Poet because the complexity of America is a part of my experience. I have been a cowboy, worked in a plywood mill, studied at Universities, been supported by wealthy patrons, met and published brilliant poets and scientists, including a Nobel Prize winner, hosted a television news show, produced commercials, ran retail stores, caught a 750 lb. Marlin, been the endorsed democratic candidate for the state house, taught college classes, nearly drowned in the Caribbean, skied some of the best mountains on the west coast, acted in local theatre, written a 3 act play that was produced locally and picketed, married a talented poet, Judy Brekke, raised a son, have a beautiful granddaughter, and much more…but the point is you write about what you know, feel, understand, do, and live. I think the American experience is a uniquely rich one, though it is currently being threatened by fear-mongers. There is a fierce independent streak and a willingness to explore new ways of seeing that is, I believe, unique to American Literature. We take what we want from the past.
Q- As a young poet, I am so humbled by the few writers who have not only been able to sustain and produce work decade after decade, but continue to grow into better writers’ year after year avoiding predictability and dullness. If you could, explain who or what has helped you progress as an artist over a span of three plus decades?
SM- I would not be writing as I do today if it weren’t for the close tie that Judy and I share that allows us to be honest about the work we do. It’s a mutual respect. We try our new works and ideas out on each other. We are each other’s ideal reader.
I also think that focus on the sense-me is a way of escaping typical ways of writing. Sometimes a successful poem traps you in to trying to respect the success. If you just look at how it’s assembled, then you end up building the same box over and over, but if you realize that it was a sense-me impulse that drove the poem, then you go back to living and experiencing, which is where the poetry is generated.
Q- I understand that outside of writing, editing, publishing poetry, you have also taught. Do you enjoy teaching poetry and writing?
SM- I have taught at Brown College in Minnesota for the last 19 years, and I have enjoyed it very much. I get to speak of things that interest me, and the students are obliged to listen.
Q- Who are some of your favorite modern-day writers, and why?
SM- This is a question best answered by reading Juice Magazine. I publish a lot of my favorite writers. It’s a bit like asking who my favorite musicians are. There are so many that move me that I don’t want to make an incomplete list.
Q- What are your opinions on the current state of poetry and what do you think will become of it in the future? Do you see any chance for future literary movements, such as the Surrealists or the Beats?
SM- Poetry in the United States is undervalued, misunderstood, and so scattered as to be nothing more than cultural dust on the furniture of the arts. This is largely an affect of the academics; they have emasculated poetry by trying to explain it. It needs to be read and felt. But since almost the only credibility that a poet gets is through academia’s stamp of approval, you have this vicious circle of effete politically correct cookie cutter poetry.
THESE TWO POEMS APPEARED ALONG WITH THE INTERVIEW, BOTH ARE WRITTEN BY STEPHEN MORSE.
CHICKEN SANDWICH FREUD AND SPEECH TEACHERS
It was 17 below 0 Fahrenheit degrees and I threw my keys into a foot of snow somewhere around my truck this a.m. Freud ought-a try sifting around in the snow at that temperature. One more strike against the kind of nonsense that says we do dumb things because we are trying to avoid some task or another. Dentists and public speaking classes usually get the rap in all the examples I read in undergraduate textbooks. Most people would rather wade around in deadly snow-banks than give a speech. Survey after survey documents that.
This morning I’m thinking I’d like to wring their woozy little necks. I mean those necks attached to speech teachers in bow ties and feminine sheer blouses with business-like skirts who revel in the fear that their course assignments create in the hearts of otherwise normal students. Did you ever notice how brightly they smile when issuing such unpleasant admonitions?
It’s not their fault of course. I wasn’t awake yet. There was snow all over the pickup. I needed to clear it off or it would blow up on my windshield and create an opaque film of snow gauze just about the time I hit the main road. Did I mention I get up early, so it’s dark. The damn headlights would simply blind me and make it impossible to see what little could be made out in the quasi darkness of a cold MN winter morning. It’s too cold to use the windshield wiper spray…unless you find that blue rivers enhance your vision.
Numbing cold after a few seconds makes it impossible to feel the keys you had in your hand, and the few functioning brain cells forget their role of hanging on to them, and then suddenly in one of those epiphanies that are just literary words of oh shit, my keys, where are my keys strike fear into your heart. You have a vague memory of having them just before you started dealing with the snow. Did I mention I had two bags full of school paraphernalia that I had to make sure got in the truck before I began the clearing process. So I could have even dropped the keys in there.
That doesn’t help much because the last thing any sane person is inclined to do in MN winter is to take the time to clear out the Styrofoam coffee cups, various battery cables, and tools needed to make it from point a to point b when you live in a place where freezing to death is a matter of minutes. People can do it in their driveway cleaning out their vehicles. The pickup truck is cluttered with all of this stuff. My overhead light hasn’t worked for years and a flashlight just creates shadows everywhere when you’re trying to find small things in the serpentine and Styrofoam junkyard of the inside of even a small pickup truck.
Get the extra set of keys? Ha very funny. There isn’t an extra set. Never has been. Nope, you get a big trashcan, and pull the trash out carefully sifting as you go. Nothing, nada…it’s not in the truck. It’s somewhere in the snow. My son’s father-in-law has arrived by this point with some kind of fish net or pond cleaner and is sifting around aimlessly. I now feel like I am in a very bad movie that combines elements of deliverance with Jack London’s classic short story, ‘To Light a Fire,’ because all this moving around has knocked even more snow off the pine tree I am parked under.
Well none of us died. I got a lawn rake and found the keys. I really meant to go to school. I was already 2 hours late and it was a half hour drive at least, and the class was only 4 hours, but I thought better late than never. I thought that for at least 2 miles before I realized that my hands were burning in pain and I probably would have choked someone if they said anything about my being late, so I turned around and climbed back into my bed with my wife who said something about never getting any sleep.
It’s now 6:00pm and I have to go and close the chickens up for the night. I neglected to mention that I was up in the dark feeding and watering them just before losing my keys and my mind earlier today.
And I was unconsciously avoiding teaching today. Step a little closer, Freud. I have a little chicken shit and snow I’d like to introduce you to. Might even help you get rid of that cocaine habit you’re so fond of.
I’M NOBODY, JUST LIKE YOU.
It’s been there since 2002, colon cancer. Chopped out 6 inches of colon that year and it didn’t reveal itself again until 2007 - - Sprang in the bottom of the left lung. There it was; Jumped from nothing to stage 4. Been hiding out for 5 years. Intensive chemotherapy including some stuff extracted from rats killed the most of the upstart cells. Dr. Jaques, the surgeon went in and cut out the area where the cancer had lived, and found a new batch of cancer cells, lung cancer, a different gang trying to muscle in. It’s been breath-holding time since January waiting to see if the terrorist cancer cells had been wiped out. Latest lab results showed a spiking of CEA, which is a sign that one or both of them is still lurking there and about ready to muscle its way back into my life.
So for the next week, I get cat scans, bone scans, maybe a pet scan, more blood draws and a little psychological consultation at the end of the week. None of this is really simple because the treatments are often more damaging than the early symptoms of the cancer. I’ve already lost a great deal of my ability to create new memories, my feet are always numb, my hands feel like their waking up after frostbite; I’ve got a pain in my left leg that requires constant anti inflammatory pain relief of some sort.
So, here I am in 2009, fighting two cancers and my college to stay alive. Then people wonder why I get testy and show a little patience for those who moan about being forced into this world by way of some sort of birth canal squeeze chute. Some of them want to whack me with a cane. Others prefer to call me names; all of this because I tell them the truth about what I read in their work. Hell, people, it’s just my opinion. No need to get so damned priggish about it.
if you don’t like life
keep it to yourself or die
that’s what I’m doing
Let me tell you as I go that most of you have no sense of rhythm, sound, and your line lengths are arbitrary imitations of verse. You use
language like little logic sets and you don’t know what you’re talking about. There are a handful of good poets writing consistently and a little large lump of poets who occasionally make good poems…just like fabled monkeys and their infinite typewriters.
I get tired of people copping attitudes with me because they don’t live up to my expectations. Get over it. I’m nobody, just like you.
I am a Word Worker.
I make things out of words
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