This is the second of two shows in which Jack celebrates his 78th birthday and his thirty years at KPFA. (His first show was broadcast in 1988.) He writes,I was born in 1940, so I’m pretty much the last generation to have grown up with the Golden Age of Radio. Wikipedia: “[The Golden Age of Radio] began with the birth of commercial radio broadcasting in the early 1920s and lasted through the 1950s, while television gradually superseded radio as the medium of choice for scripted programming, variety and dramatic shows. There were few U.S. network attempts at major scripted radio dramas after the end of several long-running dramatic series in 1962.” It was the Golden Age of Radio that gave me a sense of voices in the air—of vastly dissimilar, assertive, often accented, disembodied voices. Where did they come from? They seemed to be addressing me directly and giving me important pieces of information. Did they—as many people say—“force me to use my imagination,” by which people usually mean their power to “see” things with their mind’s “eye”?
I don’t think so. I think that notion comes from the privileging of the visual in our culture. What radio gave me was something different from that. It was structured sound, voices. “Sound,” writes Erwin W. Strauss, “is somewhere between thing and no-thing. It does not belong to the category of objects which we can handle. In hearing, we have already heard. We cannot escape from a sound in the manner by which we escape from visible things at their distant place; we lend our ear to the words which come toward us and claim us. A voice calls and orders. No wonder, therefore, that, in many languages—in Greek and Latin, Hebrew, French and German, and Russian—the words “hearing” and “obeying” are derived from the same root. English makes no exception: for the verb “to obey” stems from the Latin obaudire (literally, to listen from below), a relation more clearly preserved in the noun “obedience.” Struck by the irresistible power of voices, the schizophrenic feels no need to test the reality of his experience.”
It was “the irresistible power of voices” that drew me to the voices in the little box in the living room. In a sense, perhaps, radio turns us all into schizophrenics. When Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and Suspense were finally canceled in 1962, radio retained something of the power of voices but it abandoned the imaginative pull that could locate us anywhere, that—via the voice—encouraged fantasy. “Tired of the everyday grind?” William Conrad used to ask in a world-weary voice. “Ever dream of a life of romantic adventure? Wanna get away from it all? We offer you…Escape.” After 1962, radio became almost entirely a disseminator of information, a medium of discussion, of argument and commentary, as well as a presenter of music. But the dramas were all gone.
I came into KPFA trailing clouds of the Golden Age of Radio. Where had those voices—William Conrad, Howard Duff, Lorene Tuttle, Cathy Lewis, Agnes Morehead, Brace Beemer, Orson Welles—gone?
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What I found and continue to find at KPFA was a chance to explore and test certain ideas I had about the history of poetry—ideas centering in the relationship between the oral and the written. Much current poetry struck me as simultaneously page-bound—silent before the page—and egocentric, arising out of a false notion of selfhood centering in the I, in the “individual.” It seemed to me that one of the primary insights of the not so lamented twentieth century was that some parts of the mind don’t know what other parts of the mind are doing—that the mind is multiple. This condition cannot be expressed by an I, and, importantly, if the poem is genuine, it will manifest even when the poet believes that he or she is expressing their “individuality.” The task was to test the poems that came to me daily, almost hourly, to see whether what I thought was true while at the same time to open up the works to consideration on their own terms, in their own language. Poets have said to me, “You’ve made me see my work in a new way.” I also believed that the people who created Modernism—people like James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, H.D., William Carlos Williams, many others—were not averse to reading their poetry aloud, were in fact interested in orality. Many of them, like Pound, Yeats and Dylan Thomas took to the radio. My CD collection, Poetpourri—put together for KPFA—was a demonstration of that. Other such collections exist. The poets were interested in sound. But the literary critics who made these poets famous were not interested in sound, did not raise questions of the tension between the oral and the written. What better place to raise such questions than a poetry show about books?
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AT SEVENTY EIGHT…
Is getting well ever an art,
Or art a way of getting well?
—Robert Lowell
At seventy eight you begin to believe in magic
Hold your hands out
Not in the crude sense—not that you believe it’s true
Look at them
Or that the heaven stories are waiting for you
They have been yours for so many years
Not that rabbits will appear from hats
Consider your eyes
(Though rabbits do appear from hats
What companions they’ve been
As well as from other rabbits)
Over all this time
It’s that everything seems bizarre and
And your legs, propelling you
Despite theories of causation
From one strange place
Unreasonable. You begin to feel a strangeness
To another.
At the heart of things
At the heart of the universe
Working its way into everything you have experienced
Is a quality we recognize with age
You may call this strangeness magic
The young need to believe
“A category in western culture distinct from science and religion”
In the comforting rationality of things
It interrupts
The old know (or believe they know)
Everything we know
It’s nothing but Tarot
And makes it seem
And the hanged man, the moon, the death card
Unlikely, unfathomable.
May show at any time.
With Sangye Land