PRESSURE PRESS ARCHIVE

THE GOOD LIFE professor robert grenier at franconia college new hampshire in 1976 wrote on my final report after i returned from corsica where i was trying to write & failing badly "years anyways, & the mind for it," meaning me as a poet, i was then 22. it's been 16 years & i see grenier's name pop up in avant-garde, intellectual magazines. he's a "language" poet, berkeley-oriented, harvard-educated, robert lowell was his professor, & at the time he was fast friends with creeley, who once came to read & who, in retrospect, bored me, but this was THE robert creeley. i wasn't one of the group of students who stood with him. larry eigner came too. looking back, he was incredible, & i was too hung-over to try to talk to him, but later wrote him often & he was very generous. in my mind eigner is THE ONLY TRUE LANGUAGE POET EVER, any other creator is minor, except, perhaps clark coolidge. but coolidge didn't goddamn laugh either, tho joel oppenheimer sure did & at a phrase in one of my poor poems. he wore a floppy, purple hat. i wasn't one in the crowd of students to get high with him. grenier got stoned with charles olson once, noting olson's enormous consumption of cocaine & wine sitting like a huge, non-stop talking king. i wld hope this isn't slander, but that was the 60's & black mountain. who today wld go see ezra pound in the nut-house talking poetry, arriving at judgements, feeling valid? & writing such heaviness into communication, expecting studious literacy, like pound. o maximus maximized. my girlfriend ann was reading doris lessing & talking about synchronicity in our souls, i'd be typing terrible olson-like shit at my desk, & she'd secretly undress her dream body, slide around me, eat my ear like i loved. when i returned from my last semester spent alone in corsica, i got a direct feeling grenier had fucked her, or she him, something happened. something wasn't right. ann didn't want me anymore. she hooked with other people & i was a ghost. i came home & got a job driving jitney for minimum wage. my poetry didn't care about grenier, or eigner, or ezra pound, i was finally myself, smoking dope on lunch-breaks, drinking at "oak grove inn" above the creek, testing pcp, speed, raising hell in glorious redneck country. tomiann cured me of ann, she cld beat me at pool, she was a tough, illiterate, happy & older girl, 2 false front teeth. she eventually wrote me poems, & eventually our ways waned when she was fired from our factory, lisa appeared, & kathy, well, i was writing a lot of love poems until my sperm coagulated in a wrong place & i had to run. sandy graciously hugged me in college park, maryland, i was writing & writing but not working much. we loved each other & i fucked up giving in to the french girl across the hall. but i found a bookstore carrying small press, underground magazines & books, bought a few somehow, collected material, & submitted what poems were then accepted & published. the rest is history, yes, here i sit typing in my house in erie, 13 years i've been here with my wife diane, now with 2 children, laid-off from an insane 12 year factory job, 16 years from grenier's prediction.