Biography, Page 1
(1, 2)
I was
born in 1948, Baby Boom. I grew up in Marin County, California, which
means that I had my head turned, somewhere along the line, by an obscure
privilege which did not hold. I am descended on my mother’s side,
through Virginia tidewater gentry and English squires and lots of female
lines, from many European kings, including Charlemagne, and Alfred the
Great, and at least one Byzantine Emperor, and also from Guilluame de
Poitiers, the first Troubadour, and his granddaughter, Eleanor of
Aquitaine. (Richard the Lionhearted was an uncle; my direct descent,
regretfully, is from Bad King John, who as Prince Regent offered to give
away England to the Emir of Cordoba while the true King was fighting
Muslims in the Holy Land, thus making England a Muslim nation—that would
have gotten Richard’s goat!—but the Emir honorably declined.) Let Mark
Twain tell you how much all that blood is worth on the open market. Like
one of my great-grandfathers said, “Don’t be like a potato—the best
part of you under ground.” In modern times another ancestor, a
Baskerville, died a hero’s death in Iran, like Byron in Greece, fighting
with the Constitutionalist forces.
I was educated in Catholic school up through high
school, where I wrote my first poetry—which probably means I got a
better liberal arts education than many people get in college these days.
I attended U.C. Davis for a total of four days, then quit to take the Counterculture
Course, which was much more interesting to me, and to many, at that
particular time. Since there is no way to compare what you did do with
what you didn’t, there is no way to measure the effect of that choice.
God knows best.
1
And so I attended riots and demonstrations (Oakland
Induction Center; 1096 Democratic Convention), went to rock concerts,
protested the Vietnam War with Vietnam Summer (a nationwide student
antiwar project), hitchhiked around the country, rode freight trains, took
psychedelic drugs, wrote poetry, visited gurus, dabbled in yoga and
meditation, and delved into comparative religion and mythology. (I was
ineligible for the draft due to asthma and one bad eye.) During the time I
became a student of Beat Generation poet Lew Welch, through whom I met
Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen and Robert Duncan and
Lawrence Ferlinghetti. But the most significant people Lew introduced me
to were Samuel Lewis--(“Sufi Sam”) who was taking one of Lew’s
courses at U.C. Extension--and Carlos Castaneda. He did this in an attempt
to “initiate” me on a freelance basis, and actually came up with two
people who perfectly represented the two sides of my character: Samuel
Lewis my light side, my Sufism, and Carlos Castaneda my dark side, my
foolish tendency to dabble in magic and psychic powers.
Through the contacts provided by Lew Welch, I was
able to publish two books of poetry at the age of 19: Time Raid (my
juvenilia) through Don Allen’s Four Seasons Foundation, and Panic
Grass (my first epic) in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series. I read
the whole thing out loud (and I do mean loud) at a poetry reading in Glide
Memorial Church, and afterwards Lawrence Ferlinghetti came up and said,
“I want to publish that poem.” (Interestingly enough, a great
grandfather of mine had been Methodist pastor of the congregation that
later moved to Glide; that pulpit must have been in my blood.) In the
words of Lew Welch:
More people know you
Than you know
Fame.
So at 19 I was “the youngest member of the Beat
Generation” (a completely inaccurate characterization), with absolutely
nothing more to say. So I withdrew. I hid out. I never did a public
reading of Panic Grass after it was published. My poetry fell apart,
became corny or sentimental or eerily thin. I had no idea who I was or
what I was supposed to do with my life.
2
The 60’s were ending. Many were paying dearly for
the psychic inflation of that era. Culture heroes (like Janis Joplin and
Jimi Hendrix) were dropping like flies. Women were getting angry and
frustrated and desolately lonely. Men were turning into clowns and
puppets, losing their manhood. With my first live-in girlfriend I followed
the northward migration to Canada spearheaded by American draft resisters.
As soon as we got there, we split up. I was in an automobile accident and
totaled our van (unconscious suicide attempt?), and awoke with a serious
concussion. With my parents’ money I bought a piece of land in the far
North, with absolutely no idea what to do with it (except sell it later at
a profit). I hitchhiked and rode freights far into British Columbia, where
I went commune-hopping. I passed from one weird or sinister experience to
the next—the mini-hacienda of Frank the Sorcerer, a tough, tyrannical
little near-dwarf from Eastern Europe surrounded by dependent, sleepy
drones, in a tributary canyon to the Fraser River, deep in the wilderness,
a six-mile hike the only way in…the Valley of the Three Sisters in the
Okanagan, where hash-smoking hippies didn’t get their crops planted in
time, a stay that ended with a night of bad wine (I was told) attempted
rape…then back to Vancouver, where my parents sent me a newspaper
clipping about how Lew Welch had disappeared in the Sierras, but had
apparently been seen again…
On my way back to California I stopped at Gary
Snyder’s place, which had been Lew’s last base, and found that he
never had come back. He’d swapped his rifle for a revolver, and left a
cryptic suicide note. I would never see him again.
Back at my parents’ home, where I grew up, I found
my father dying of cancer. A few months after he passed away, our house
burned. I ended up living with my mother in a small apartment, and
drinking like a fish. During this time the consequences of my abuse of kundalini
yoga also began to show up; I had used it to rise above grief, and
ended by nearly losing my connection to my body and the earth. It took
years of effort, including freelance excursions into the world of sorcery
via the Castaneda techniques and more psychedelics, to reestablish that
connection, (which probably happened despite these “efforts” rather
than because of them). I continued my association with the San Francisco
Poetry Scene, and this led me, temporarily, in the direction of Tibetan
Buddhism, particularly that of Chögyam Trungpa of Naropa Institute, who
was guru t the more intellectual sector of two generations of American
Bohemia—Beat and Hippy—during the 1970’s. I became involved, as a
“skirmisher,” in the Great Naropa poetry Wars, which revolved around
certain scandals Trungpa was involved in (apparently the required
“initiation” for so many Eastern teachers when they come to the West),
and which were also an attempt on the part of my generation to resolve the
huge, half-conscious contradiction between our “progressive” social
myths and our attraction of traditional spiritual authority. I carried on
an epistolary debate with Allen Ginsberg around these issues, the text of
which was privately circulated.
At that lowest point of my life I met Jenny Doane
through mutual friends—a fellow-poet and a rare one, reputedly descended
from John Donne, whose poetry started out like a cross between Emily
Dickenson and Sylvia Plath, and later became more like that of Rumi or
Rabi’a. She was in flight from an abusive family situation in
Appalachian Kentucky. I had sold my Canada land and bought another (worse)
piece near John Day, Oregon; so with nothing to live on but a tiny check
from her mother and the proceeds of my land sale—I subsequently sold the
second piece too—we moved into a camping trailer. A year later we were
married, and living in a downscale apartment in Petaluma. I was drinking
more than ever. After two years of this, spurred by a dream-message from
my father, we moved into a one-bedroom house my grandmother used to live
in, a block from the house where I grew up. We live there still. It’s
been 23 years.
More...
