August is Jack’s birth month (a lion in one calendar, a dragon in another). He turned 78 years old on August 9th. 2018 also marks thirty years at KPFA: his first show was in 1988; it featured poet Dale Jensen—still a dear friend. He writes,
What kind of summary is possible? What can one say about 78 years on this much loved, glorious, brilliant, benighted, tragic, comic planet?
What follows from all those years?
I find myself returning to the notion of the power of the bald-faced lie: the positive, emphatic assertion of something as “true”—something we know simultaneously and absolutely to be false. When a politician does this, it is appalling—an attempt to capture us in an alternative reality ruled entirely by the politician. When an artist does this, it is liberating: the assertion of a contradiction which allows us to maintain ourselves in a state in which bothelements of the contradiction are true. We can call this contradiction “fiction”—we know a fiction is, precisely, fictive yet we give it a kind of belief—or “Imagination,” that “dread power” of which Wordsworth wrote:
Imagination—lifting up itself
Before the eye and progress of my song
Like an unfathered vapour….
Before the eye and progress of my song
Like an unfathered vapour….
In 1955, when I wrote my first poem in ecstatic response to Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” as now, the intent of my poetry was not to “express myself” but to return to that original ur-state, that state of “fiction,” the consciousness that emerged from my first deep experience of poetry.
The notion of a person as multiple—as at least two—is a fundamental aspect of my work and comes from there. If poetry were to express what consciousness was like, it had to be multiple—even at times moving into a state of chaos. My friend, poet Jake Berry described one of my choral poems as “seducing the listener into the willing participation in chaos,” though the chaos he and I have in mind is somewhat different from the “chaos is come again” of Christianity and Shakespeare. Working with a woman—first, my late wife Adelle, more recently, Sangye Land—gave the poems an androgynous aspect, something that might express the Jungian notion of anima and animus, the female portion of a man’s mind, the male portion of a woman’s. Further: I saw such techniques as connected to my father’s profession of vaudeville, which often featured two people in an act: my father’s Foley and Girard, Weber and Fields, Burns and Allen, Buck and Bubbles, Fred Astaire and his sister, Adele—an act which, after Adele’s departure, led to Fred’s continual search for a “partner.” This notion of a partner with whom one tended to merge extended to my life as well: Adelle was my wife as well as my performance partner; we were married for nearly fifty-five years, and we performed together for over thirty of those fifty-five years. Grief of the depth I felt at her death was not something one “got over” but a transformative event that altered one’s very structure. You become—whatever else you are—a man of sorrow. Since Adelle’s death, however, I have fallen in love with a young woman, Sangye Land, and she has become my performance partner as well. Eros—the great god—has its way with us, even when one of the lovers is thirty three and the other is seventy seven. Even when one sees the constant dying of dear friends.
What is it like to be 78? I can’t tell you. I recently heard a poet, two years younger than I, complaining about old age. I certainly don’t feel that way.
KPFA / 1988 – 2018
thirty years
doing the same thing
doing something different
speaking
talking to others
letting my life through
to the “microphone”
“small sound”
made large
to listeners
listeners
over the years
over the busy years
seeking to instruct
to distract
to play
upon the ears
of others
to speak to their minds
through all the strangely
flowering years
*
the strangeness of ashes
that hold nothing but memory
what’s left of the dear thing
whose hand you once held
and who held yours
the strangeness
that what had been so solid
and lodged in the heart
should vanish
this is the word “evanescence”
these are the wings, the river, the wind
this is the sound of my voice
“on the air”
Part One of Two