Dear Maxine and Kathy,

Saw the author Joyce Johnson at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's place, "City Lights Bookstore," last week...

I have to confess that I haven't read Kerouac in years.  My big phase, as I recall, was some time ago--most likely as an "antidote" to the stuffiness I felt I was getting in Gardner's Grad Fiction Workshop.  One day I mentioned that I found his vitality interesting, and he snorted, Yeah, I read him when I was a kid too..."

Yet, after hearing Ms. Johnson I did a little re-reading--a bit of Big Sur and Desolation Angels, as well as something that Robert Creeley put together a coupla years ago re: Unpublished writings...

(Now here is where the fun begins, as I could not help but notice a wee bit too much "similarity" in approach, let alone "material" (but not quite "style"--exhaled sigh of relief--).  The matter of course important is that I continue to be dogged by "the latest" in the good ole fas-shunned tarr and feathering of myself as a "plagiarist." Not only the Ralph Ellison claim from Invisible Man (already addressed in terms of my use of metaphor being more complex and profound) but too this irrational notion keeps rearing its polk-chop ugly dun-key head that somehow I'm not "entitled" to write--let alone speak, boy speak!--about what has finally been conceded to be "mine own" life experience (as a "white" person having lived and worked in a "black" world of 'hoods).  

Last night, as I sat, half-listening,  to a pair of "women poets" (as they were billed, in the "Barnes and Noble"  Bookstore where to find an author that you like these days you have to know the "cultural pedigree" to find where shelved), I found my attention wandering from Robert Fagles' translation of Homer's  Odyssey to the second reader's description of her work as "autobiographical." She jokingly described her life as a "resume" and read a poem as such.  Though she didn't give herself enough time between poems for us to "breath" (the audience was the silent type), she was working with some decent material.  Yet, though I made sure that my protocols were immaculate, I could not help but think that if a man had made use of identical material, he would not be given the "time of day"...

So, though we now have the horse before the cart (as opposed to vicie-versie!),  instead of a great steed drawing a war chariot we have a dun-key and a dung cart...

Why the Heaven bother with the matter at all anymore...

Ms. Johnson did talk about some interesting material that, in mine own humble experience, I've found to be true: a snide writing instructor at Barnard, I believe it was, who told the "women writers" in his class "not to bother" (or something like that).  The room full of what I felt to be "interesting-looking" females appreciatively sighed.  

A brief mention that, while I could not help but feel  "joy" at the sight and feel of women that I now remembered most fondly, too, a deep and curious sadness arose as well.  As the Trungpa has said--the third category of letting go is sadness and joy joined together [your heart becomes  all raw and bleeding in empathetic awareness ]...Here you develop sadness and joy at once.  You begin to feel tender...

One woman "whispered" that she'd read every word of my poetry on my webpage and was in "awe" of me...(Having read the superb account of "one man's attempt to deal with that Welsh Bard Dylan Thomas" during his American tour, I suppose I was "prepared" for this matter and found the correspondence between Ms. Johnson and Mr. Kerouac about the "Dylan Thomas-like girls descending upon Jack in Northpoint very touching, as a matter of fact).  Another--young, dressed in a "really hip and cool" style, not like a "bourgeois bohemian materialist," as Kerouac described--as some recent best-selling "yuppie author" heisted without credit (like his copyrighted "beat generation" that the sycophantic mouthpieces of Hollywood laughed off in never paying him--as these atrocities like "Reefer Madness" and Psycho Beatniks On Parade! (my paraphrase of those propaganda shows with a "womanizing" closet case raping and murdering housewives to have money for "more hop and wine, man," with his buddies, of course)...Yes, the "another" one, a sweet-faced barely-a-woman next to me reading Dr. Sax even asked Ms. Johnson, How do you define  a beat writer? (Or something akin, I groaning inwardly and praying that Heaven be kind, as Zeus was alleged to be for poor wanderers, as her face burned with angelic intensity and I think that she just wanted to give her an easy opening...Lo and behold, my prayer was answered! ...As not a single titter)

Had some more thoughts but they seem to have come and gone.  I did find myself later, in re-reading Jack, thinking my treatment of women a wee bit superior...But not in any "self-congratulatory" way, as the era, the era, must have been very "limiting" for anyone to "individuate" into some really "authentic male" with a clue "what to do" with that woman with eyes aglow with Heavenly Fire and sparkling right still...

Found myself a wee bit similar to Jack, as well, in my recent vow to say, Ah, man, I'm sick of it all: no more "poetry" for me--it's all Three Lords of Materialism anyway, and if like an oak you manage to stand forth from the Forrest why some shuffling little geek of a jester, in his brief moment of authority, gonna hammer you like a Japanese nail anyway...

I will "make the attempt" at the "Poetaster" business--from the "Internet" posting of the "hooked like a big-mouth bass" guy who (most likely) given Jonson's criticism of "poet apes" and their "lack of formal style" felt he'd hit the nail on the head all right! Oh boy! You betcha!

As if he were the absolute first...

As if nobody else ever fell for that winking from the grave "Augustus" Caesar and his "peculiar" habits--especially turning his "imperial scribes" into cop, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner all rolled into one big blob, yessiree!...

Truly, too,

Tom (Noonan)