In 1965 I was twenty years old and had just arrived in San Francisco to study with the novelist Wright Morris at San Francisco State College (now University). Inspired by Ernest Hemingway as a teenager, I became Wright’s work-study assistant and was determined to write novels as plainspoken and American as his The Field of Vision, which had won a National Book Award in 1956.
My lower-middle-class immigrant upbringing didn’t point to what I saw as the rather esoteric, if not aristocratic, charms of poetry. But no matter how determined I was to write fiction, poetry intervened. Looking back, I blame this, and just about everything else, on the times.
The Sixties as we know them were just beginning midway through the decade. The pulse and thrust of the Beat Generation remained in the air at poetry readings and in the burgeoning protest movement. There were rumors of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs sightings at every rock concert. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti appeared at antiwar protests.
SF State had a big undergraduate creative writing department. Most writers taught part-time, and as many as 50 might be teaching or passing through. One could work with Kay Boyle, Jack Gilbert, John Logan, Philip Whalen, Herbert Wilner, and Richard Brautigan, or, in the cafeteria, run into Ken Kesey, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, or George Oppen.
The Poetry Center brought in poets as diverse and magical as Theodore Roethke, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, James Wright, and Adrienne Rich. There seemed to be a campus poetry reading every night. For me, the image of a young mesmerized James Tate literally sitting at the feet of James Wright will never fade.
With all the political and sexual turmoil going on, there was little patience for the convoluted demands of epic narratives when poetry, with its psychic and spiritual shorthand, offered the immediacy and spiritual diversion we craved.
So the Haight-Ashbury district, being in the exact middle of things, seemed the perfect place to launch a poetry reading. I approached the owner of the I and Thou Coffee House on a hunch, not knowing that the café was named after a classic book by the philosopher Martin Buber. I just liked the location on Haight Street near Golden Gate Park, and the long, narrow, poorly-lighted room seemed perfect for readings. It turned out that David Rothkop, a large-hearted San Franciscan with a passion for civil rights, was eager to be part of things by hosting poetry and folk events. Mondays were slow, so that’s when we started, with a few student poets and teachers from SF State.
All I wanted was pocket change and a few free meals; what David wanted was more mysterious. He wanted what Buber referred to as “the transformation of the unknown into an object.” The object was the spiritual essence of “meeting.” “All real living is meeting . . . true beings are living in the present, the life of objects is in the past.” A poetry reading was nothing if not a meeting in the present and a common ground of beliefs and affiliations. Perhaps the 1960s themselves amounted to a meeting of clashing ideologies and spiritual realms, inspired and embodied in music and poetry.
In any case, we put a sign in his window about the readings, and the response was amazing. Within a month lines stretched down Haight Street. Poets called me at all hours for auditions. We moved the readings to Friday night and started charging admission (with proceeds going to the poets). Because we had fewer than 100 seats, there were brawls and bribes. Kenneth Anger offered to put me in one of his films if I got him a seat. I was the emcee, bouncer, waiter, and referee.
It wasn’t unusual for someone who’d never read in public to find himself or herself reading to Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure, not known for their tolerance of the ungifted and pretentious. One nervous poet showed up on crutches, having fallen down a flight of stairs the night before. He vomited halfway through his first poem. To which Ginsberg quipped, “I didn’t like it either, but didn’t think it was that bad, man. Oooomm!”
The series lasted nearly two years. Everything changed rapidly during that time, including the poetry community. We were all refugees from the conventional, and much of the poetry being written seemed to have little to do with what I was reading in my English classes. Whitman, Dickinson, Blake, and Beowulf fit in, and maybe the wilder reaches of Shakespeare and Yeats, but anything refined (how awful a word!), tame, or slightly academic was suspect.
I still dreamed of being a novelist, but everyone I knew assumed I was a poet, so I began to think of myself as one, too. This was a curious and somewhat overwrought pursuit, but that just made it more appealing. Poetry is the language of sensibilities and thought processes that get lost in times of swift, uninhibited change. We were all attempting to define ourselves, and maybe even trying, when no one was watching, to understand our bizarre and occasionally splendid behavior. Many used drugs to enhance the understanding, others politics and sex. It was a gathering of imaginations and ideas and lines drawn in the sand, and poetry was the lingua franca of the times.
Often enough, we get the intrigue and history we deserve, even, maybe especially, when we appear to be going nowhere. Around us were the ever-rising, inglorious Vietnam War and streets crowded with outlaw idealists, squatters, and escapees from every kind of political and artistic asylum. They all came to be noticed and make their small poetic voices heard. As it turned out, mine was one of them.
Two poems by Philip Schultz
Failure
To pay for my father’s funeral
I borrowed money from people
he already owed money to.
One called him a nobody.
No, I said, he was a failure.
You can’t remember
a nobody’s name, that’s why
they’re called nobodies.
Failures are unforgettable.
The rabbi who read a stock eulogy
about a man who didn’t belong to
or believe in anything
was both a failure and a nobody.
He failed to imagine the son
and wife of the dead man
being shamed by each word.
To understand that not
believing in or belonging to
anything demanded a kind
of faith and buoyancy.
An uncle, counting on his fingers
my father’s business failures –
a parking lot that raised geese,
a motel that raffled honeymoons,
a bowling alley with roving mariachis –
failed to love and honor his brother,
who showed him how to whistle
under covers, steal apples
with his right or left hand. Indeed,
my father was comical.
His watches pinched, he tripped
on his pant cuffs and snored
loudly in movies, where
his weariness overcame him
finally. He didn’t believe in:
savings insurance newspapers
vegetables good or evil human
frailty history or God.
Our family avoided us,
fearing boils. I left town
but failed to get away.
Getting Along
My wife and I are getting along.
Right now, she’s listening
to Bruce Springsteen
in her studio, making out
of copper wire and pieces
of broken jewelry (plastic rats
and wedding rings) a cloud
of opalescent prescience.
Yesterday, she loved me,
she said, even though
sometimes I’m an asshole.
Grateful for the sometimes,
I said much of the time
I feel like one. Everyone
does, she said, except
the ones who really are.
They think fate is fucking
with them. When the color
of her eyes turns dark walnut,
it means: I loved you once;
or green: always, maybe.
Marriage is the hardest thing,
she thinks, harder than God,
childhood or childbirth.
When the I won’t stay
hidden inside the we,
forgets where it ends
and the we begins, a lush
green river of intimacy
smothers it (me). Unrequited,
it’s the point we’re always
trying to make, the hurt
buried inside the pride
hidden inside the pain.
Love is an accident of fate,
an idea of surprising elasticity,
she thinks I think. Once,
we said nothing on the phone
for one hour. Each syllable
we didn’t speak was visible,
each breath we swallowed
swallowed us, each unspoken
allegation a covenant of fidelity,
a razor our silence rubbed
us against. As if love were
a house of mirrors we can’t
stop wandering inside,
viewing every intention
from every side. As if
we’re stuck in hindsight,
every day an anniversary,
forever crossing a January
Monday morning to meet
for the first time, how she
wouldn’t look at me, as if
everything we meant to say,
feared, and longed to be,
was there, in the stark fierce
diction of her eyes, a story
of once, maybe, and always,
waiting for us (for we) to read.