Robert Hershon BROOKLYN, NY Forty years of editing poetry have left me insanely optimistic except during my waking hours. Thursday: 02.22.07 | Permalink | Comments (10)

Poets who have just started submitting their work to magazines are often tortured by the big questions. White envelope or tan? Flag stamps or commemoratives? Fold the paper in half or in thirds? Should I tell the editor how much I love to ski or just give the ages of my children?

Against that background, we are very pleased to present the transcript of our recent telephone interview with one of the legends of literary publishing, Ichabod “Pat” Stazer, long-time poetry editor of The Journal of All Thought, who agreed to provide some insights into the workings of the editorial process.

RH: Good morning, sir. How are things at the Baltimore School of Dentistry?

IS: Beats me. We’re not there anymore.

RH: You’ve moved again?

IS: Yes, we’re now at the Staten Island College of Refrigeration Studies, as part of their new MFA program.

RH: Isn’t this your ninth move in 11 years?

IS: Eleventh move in nine years, actually, but this is a very exciting new program and we’re thrilled to be part of it. The offer was irresistible—no classes until 2011, 72 student interns, unlimited photocopying, a 20 percent discount at Denny’s, good every day but Sunday—I could go on.

RH: It sounds as though the program has come together very fast, indeed. What about faculty?

IS: Ah, wonderful people—Carl Sandburg, Sara Teasdale, William Cullen Bryant, Edgar Guest, Adelaide Crapsey—

RH: Excuse me, but aren’t they all dead?

IS: Oh, I don’t mean the originals. These names have all been franchised. When you look at the ads for summer workshops in Poets & Writers magazine and see the same 20 names listed everywhere from Palo Alto to Prague, you don’t think they’re all the originals, do you?

RH: I’ve been naïve, I guess. I hope the magazine will thrive in its new surroundings. I wonder if you would be willing to give us some insights into your guiding editorial philosophy, the artistic convictions that drive the magazine forward even during periods of heavy packing and unpacking?

IS: Oh, sure, that’s easy. About three times a year, we sit down and write fawning letters to the 10 most famous poets named John, begging them to send us any scrap or scribble that will allow us to use their picture on the cover. We throw in an occasional Ann or Alice. So far, so good.

RH: But what about the unsolicited manuscripts?

IS: What the hell are they?

RH: You know, the poems from not yet discovered new writers, bursting with talent and fresh thinking, eager to lead poetry in vibrant new directions and take their place as leaders of tomorrow’s literary cosmos.

IS: Oh, yeah, that crap. All those chubby envelopes. We use to steam the stamps off and use the rest to stuff mattresses.

RH: You can’t be serious!

IS: Well, not entirely. People started mailing small dead animals to us, so we finally realized we had to pay some attention to them. For instance, we had an office competition to see who could hold an envelope of poems the longest without actually losing it.

RH: What was the record?

IS: Four and a half years. We had a nice note from the guy’s widow.

RH: But what about reading them?

IS: Come on, do you think I have nothing but time? Actually, we came up with an alternative that we’re pretty proud of.

RH: An alternative to reading?

IS: Exactly. We’ve developed a set of guidelines that allows us to make judgments based on criteria other than the manuscripts. That way, we can reject things quickly and just send them right to the To Be Aged drawer.

RH: Like what?

IS: Well, there’s a long list. A return label with a smiley face—automatic rejection. An SASE on which the writer addresses himself as Mr. Anything written in calligraphy. Anything printed out in imitation calligraphy. A cover letterhead with daisies on it or teddy bears or the name of their law firm. A cover letter which says John Doe, Professional Writer. A six-line poem that says “approximately 47 words” in the upper right-hand corner. A faint photocopy listing the 500 unspeakably awful magazines the writer has appeared in since 2005. An offer to send a huge book manuscript which we could publish and the author would give us 20 percent of the proceeds. An ungrammatical letter of praise from a teacher we never heard of. Anything from South Florida—

RH: Whoa, that’s harsh! Anything from South Florida?

IS: Yeah, you can have your prejudices. I’m entitled to mine. Life and publishing ain’t fair.

RH: Is that the whole list?

IS: Enough to give you the flavor. We get new ideas all the time. Like anything sent certified mail or FedEx. Any envelope with more than a pound of Scotch tape.

RH: Doctor, I must say this is all very disillusioning to me, not at all what I expected. Don’t you have any encouraging advice for all those poets out there?

IS: You mean besides finishing up that accounting degree? Okay. You’d better really be thrilled just to be writing poems because nobody’s gonna give you nothin’ and, in a world almost entirely populated by people with MFA degrees, the odds are you ain’t gonna get the book, the job, the respect or more than 62 dollars a year. The Journal of All Thought is merely the first stile to jump over. It gets worse. (You’ll notice I’m using vernacular, babe, to show I’m really a friend of the people.)

RH: I’ve got just a few dozen more questions.

IS: Sorry, kid. It’s Mexican Fiesta Day at Denny’s and I want to get my regular table. That really pumps you up, you know, having a regular table.

I moved to San Francisco 50 years ago. It wasn’t for the poetry.

In 1957, I had a degree in journalism from New York University and two years’ experience as a copy boy and editorial assistant with the New York Herald Tribune. I was ready to take my place in the dashing, hard-drinking world of reporters. All that Hildy Johnson/The Front Page stuff had been conscientiously debunked at NYU, but at the Trib, the financial copy desk always had a bottle of Scotch on the table and Al Laney, the old hockey writer, always wore his fedora in the office. That did it for me.

I wanted to write news, race deadlines, get scoops, hang out in bars. I lived at home, in Queens, while I was in school—it’s hard to believe that NYU, the monster that has swallowed lower Manhattan, had no dorms in those days—and I was eager to get as far away from New York as I could.

Tom Eagan, schoolmate and fellow copy boy—copy boys on major metropolitan dailies are not boys; they often have master’s degrees—had moved to San Francisco a year before and kept writing me letters about the wonder of it all. I didn’t need a lot of convincing. I flew out there in September, 1957, thinking I’d stay a few months maybe (but that turned into five years, which is very Californian.) I arrived on the opening day of the “Howl” obscenity trial. Of course, it didn’t mean a thing to me. My total lifetime poetry experience at that point centered on having to memorize “Miniver Cheevy” and a part of “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” in high school where my English teachers otherwise did a very effective job of passing on their own terror and hatred of poetry. I imagine there must have been a few others, but . . .

Eagan’s small apartment happened to be on Filbert Street and Grant Avenue, right in the middle of North Beach. I thought I’d sleep on his sofa for a week or so, but that turned into six months. Tom was working as a reporter for the Examiner, in their Oakland office, and didn’t like it. I had $500. So he quit his job and we had a good time until the money ran out and we were living on mayonnaise sandwiches. Tom was one of those people who never adjust to the cool, damp San Francisco weather. There was a built-in gas heater in the apartment and he kept it on high. Every night, as the gas ate up the air, I’d conk out at 10 o’clock, thinking, What an early town San Francisco is.

Tom had ended up in North Beach by accident and wasn’t much interested in the neighborhood, but once I figured out that it was the gas heat not the city, I began venturing forth. The neighborhood seemed just right to me; every other storefront was a bar—The Place, The Black Cat, the Anxious Asp, Frank’s, Gino & Carlo’s, The Cellar, XII Adler Place, the Vesuvio Café, Mister Otis, the Coffee Gallery, the Bagel Shop, the Green Valley. I’m telescoping a few years together here, but there were always a lot more bars than grocery stores. And in North Beach, everything happened in bars. If you were getting married in the evening or being awarded the Nobel Prize or having your gall bladder removed, first you would meet up with all your friends in a bar.

At this time, the Chronicle seemed full of Beat this and Beat that. I didn’t hear this as literary, just the popular press’s tag for the current mode of bohemianism. Soon Herb Caen, the columnist everyone read every morning although everyone denied it, invented the much-hated word “Beatnik”—Beat plus Sputnik. That kind of lurid publicity brought more and more tourists to Grant Avenue, but it also built up a defensive solidarity among the North Beachers. The neighborhood, at the foot of Telegraph Hill, was quite small, but some people never left it.

Jack Goodwin, North Beach’s resident composer, wrote an opera with an aria entitled “He has a full-time, daytime job,” which was sung in tones of awe. I finally got one of those, reporting for a chain of commercial newspapers. My office was on Market Street, but as soon as I left work, I headed right back to the Beach. It rarely occurred to me to do otherwise. I lived a block up Telegraph Hill, three good-sized, unheated rooms for $75 a month. That sounds ludicrously cheap, but as a reporter I made $75 a week.

in 1959 my apartment in north beach
had split-rattan blinds and kandisky
posters scotch-taped to the walls
and a table made from a door
and a bricks-and-boards bookcase
and a mattress on the foor
and almost everything was painted
flat black except for the little yellow
desk I bought from good will
and I wrote my first poems sitting there
watching headlights curve down
the lombard street hill

(excerpt from “Poster,” How to Ride on the Woodlawn Express, SUN, 1986)

(That’s how it still looked in 1961, when I started writing poems, although I had not yet discovered upper case.)

Anyway, I spent very little time in my pad. Sometimes I dropped into Frank’s Bar for a drink after work and didn’t get home for two days. Even when I was at low ebb, in the back of my mind I knew I was a regular, a guy who could run a tab, who always knew the bartender’s name, who could stand up to any obnoxious tourist, knowing Bad-Talking Charlie or Tiburon Don would back me up. And I quickly fell in love with the secret hip language. It’s hard to believe that in the Fifties, if you said, “Fall up to my pad, man, we can turn on and dig some sounds,” to the squares (good word “squares,” abandoned too early), you might as well have been speaking Estonian.

So who was in the bars? The usual population of artists and writers, drunks and cranks, drifters and grifters, brawlers and jokers, sax players and pool players, remittance men and Reed College alumnae. More Runyonesque names—Hube the Cube, Gene the Scrounge, Charlotte the Harlot, Linda Lovely, Ron the Inept Lecher, Pretty Anita (who wasn’t so pretty), and Ugly Anita (who wasn’t so ugly.) Some of the artists actually made art; some thought about it from time to time. And I started meeting poets, but let them wait a minute. Here are some of the people who made North Beach, North Beach.

JOHN AND KAY

John was going to return the borrowed books to Lulu. He’d thrown away the dust jackets.

She might be pissed about that, Kay said.

What?

The dust jackets. She might have wanted then.

Shit.

He started taking the dust jackets off other books, at random, and putting them on the borrowed books.

That’s no damned good, Kay said. Why the hell would she want them that way?

John turned red and threw the books down. What’s the fucking difference? If she wants dust jackets, these are dust jackets.

He left the books in the middle of the floor and went to Gino & Carlo’s and drank brandy and coffee. He bought an old Dodge from a man at the bar for fifty dollars and drove it to Stinson Beach.

A week later, he drove the car back. It ran out of gas and he left it on the sidewalk in front of I. Magnin and went home.

They enjoyed the party.

Kay painted herself blue for Halloween and decided she liked it, so she left herself that way for a while. She went to the Safeway with the baby in the stroller and she bought milk and cereal and avocados and burgundy and cookies and mayonnaise and she was painted blue.

She became less blue in stages. First her hands. Then her legs. Her back. Her face. If any blue parts remained, no one knew.

(How to Ride on the Woodlawn Express, SUN, 1986)

MAPES AND FRAKES

Mapes was taller. Frakes was wider. They were both taller and wider than almost anyone. They were also pretty smart, but they preferred to be big. That was a choice to be made.

Frakes was blacklisted for having been in the CP so he couldn’t ship out anymore, but Mapes still did. He’d become a sailor because he was a folksinger and it seemed a logical progression. The first night out, someone shouted “Fire in the hold!” and he leapt up from the table to do his part. When he got back, someone had eaten his rice pudding.

But Mapes still observed romantic tradition by breaking up bars and bystanders when he was on the beach. One time he had been roaring for six days and even his best friends were stepping behind trucks when they saw him. He’d left a clear trail of smashed jukeboxes and punched-out salesmen and the cops didn’t seem too eager to catch up with him, but they finally picked him up early one Sunday evening, just standing on the corner of Grant and Vallejo. He was finished and ready to rest, but when he found out that the cops thought he was Frakes, his feelings were hurt.

A few weeks later, he married his seventh wife. She got him a full-time job, had a baby, and made the whole family eat oatmeal every morning.

But Frakes was always there. He played chess, he drank beer, did a little this and that. He walked in the neighborhood and he was the strongest man in the world, with all the responsibilities thereunto appertaining. People were flattered when he remembered their names but hoped he wouldn’t slap them on the back. Sometimes he worked as a bouncer at Vesuvio, sending surly college boys soaring over the pavement of Columbus Avenue. Mt. Shasta, Muir Woods, the San Joaquin Valley, the strongest man in the world.

When there was almost no one around who even remembered Mapes anymore, Frakes grew older and slower and became silent. He sat in the bar of the San Gottardo Hotel and stared at his change. One day a young cab driver who lived upstairs was in the bar making a lot of noise. Frakes told him to shut up. The driver said go fuck yourself. Frakes walked over and forced the man’s jaws open and spit in his mouth. Once that would have been the end of it. This day, the driver went upstairs and got his knife.

(How to Ride on the Woodlawn Express, SUN, 1986)

So I started meeting poets. Now, you didn’t walk into a bar and always find Ginsberg, Snyder, Whalen, McClure, and Corso all sitting there like a matched set, any more than you would have found Picasso, Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and McAlmon nailed into place for constant viewing. But there were some poets who were around. There was Bob Stock, who made sandwiches at the Bagel Shop and occasionally played bad trumpet. John Ryan tended bar at The Place and went off by himself into the mountain wilderness for weeks at a time. He’d been one of the six proprietors of the Six Gallery, site of the famous “Howl” reading. David Meltzer sold used books at the Discovery Bookstore. I saw Helen Adam standing on a wooden crate, talking to a street-corner crowd at a Grant Avenue Street Fair. From time to time, I found myself talking with Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Vesuvio, across the alley from City Lights.

There was one common denominator: I never ever thought of reading a poem by any of them.

I got to know Jack Spicer strictly as another guy who was always there, wearing his ratty suede jacket as he sat hunched at the bar. He was a serious and knowledgeable baseball fan and we watched quite a few Giant games together.

The San Francisco papers were always declaring some moron or other to be “King of the Beatniks.” If anyone could have lived up to that title, it was Bob Kaufman.

BOB KAUFMAN

I never called the police when I heard Bob Kaufman
getting beaten up in the alley behind the house in North Beach
since it always the police who were beating him.
They loved the way he bit and kicked and
scratched and never gave up.

We were neighbors in 1959—
until I came home one night and saw his place had
no door anymore. The cops had paid a call. The floor
was an inch thick with trash and needles, and taped
to the wall was a delivery bag that said: For All Your
Drug Needs, See Your Neighborhood Pharmacist

This was the Kaufman who circulated a petition
to get Henry Wallace’s name on the ballot in
West Virginia in 1948 and was arrested for jay-
walking or some such by a friendly deputy who,
as he threw him into the drunk tank, said
Hey boys—
I got a New York commie nigger kike for you.

Now the city of San Francisco has named a street
for him—an alley, indeed! —O this shameless old
whore of a city!

On the day after he died I read
a NY audience an old poem of mine in which he appeared
standing on a curb, afraid to step off.
A man came up to me afterward
to bemoan Bob’s untimely death. Untimely?
It’s the bloody miracle of the century that
Bob Kaufman lived till sixty. So many people
seemed to be against the idea.

(The German Lunatic, Hanging Loose Press, 2001)

By now it was 1960. I had quit my reporting job and was collecting $55 a week unemployment insurance, the highest in the country and enough to get me through the week if I was careful. I’d fallen into a comfortable routine: get up in late morning, read for a while, wander down to the Green Valley for a mid-day drink or two, go to see whatever Two Action Hits Daily were playing at the Times Theater, roam around the neighborhood until the bars closed, eat minestrone and shoot pool at Mike’s for an hour, in bed by four to rest up for another busy day.

I had occasionally been trying to chip off the rust and try my hand at writing stories again. It wasn’t going well. When I was nineteen, I had published a story in L. Rust Hills’ magazine Quixote and I thought fame was just days away. That turned out to be the only fiction I ever published.

Then, one afternoon—a little drum roll here, please—I had A Thought. It was a lively thought and it wouldn’t go away. I sat at my Royal portable and typed out a paragraph or so. What the hell is this? It’s not an idea for a story, it’s not a grocery list, it’s not a letter to Aunt Sally. But it’s sort of fun. And short. So I wrote another one. Mercifully, these first efforts disappeared long ago and I can’t remember much about them. Weather-related, I think.

I wrote about 15 of them that week and they almost instantly, without my really thinking about it much, stopped being paragraphs and started arranging themselves in lines. Then I did something incredibly stupid and brash: I took six or seven of the poems (for I had decided that’s what they were) and submitted them to a magazine called The San Francisco Review. They came back in a couple of weeks, but with a note: Try us again. I know the gods should have erased me from the planet for this sort of effrontery, but I have often wondered over the years what would have happened if I hadn’t gotten that note. Would I have just shrugged and moved on to something else? Something that actually paid the rent, say?

Instead, I sent some poems to The Nation and got a nice note from someone named Merwin. That night, at Gino & Carlo’s, I asked Jack Spicer if he’d ever heard of this Merwin. That was supposed to lead to some dialogue. Merwin is such and such, why do you ask? Well, actually, Jack, I’ve been writing some poems. Have you? I’d like to see them. Pause. Say, these are brilliant, etc., etc.

So I asked him, do you know someone named Merwin? Yeah, Spicer snapped, already walking away, he’s some fucking priest.

It was many years later, that it hit me; He thought I said Merton.

I wrote 60 poems that year, almost none of which have survived, thank heavens. Then Antioch Review took one and Epoch took another and I was a Published Poet. Forty-six years later, despite my balding pate and white beard, people I’ve been introduced to at parties still say, “Oh, have you published?” Would they ask a 70-year-old dentist if he’d ever filled a tooth?