Allen on Poetry

Part 1

In high school school, we would be required to read the classic poems of earlier periods. I liked a few Robert Frost pieces but none of those instances impacted me enough to where I was interested in reading or writing poetry.

After high school, I enrolled at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA. (Currently the California College of the Arts - CCA.) My dad was a frustrated artist and wanted to nurture my budding talent, so he pushed for me to attend CCAC.

College was culture shock for sure, but I met two friends who guided me through the confusing times of college life.* Close to 400 new freshmen were registered that year. In less than a month, the count was estimated to be around 60 who remained. This was big boy school. Learn art, be able to create it or go home.

Freshmen students had to take all the basic classes including Humanities. The first Tuesday of classes in our freshmen year, we reported to a bedroom-size room in an old house on campus. About 20 students were packed inside. Entered Michael McClure, Beat Poet. None of us knew who he was. He was older so we assumed he was our professor.

As we edged along, in McClure’s concept of an English class, we started our learning process of beat poetry or free verse as some called it. I had never heard that term before in high school. We learned to write one-word poems from the short edge of 3 x 5 cards. We were all reading the works of various poets and absorbing their styles. I took a liking to Dylan Thomas and once I learned that I was allowed to write without rhyming (free verse), I became interested in some forms of poetry, but I wasn’t charmed by the raw feel of the beat poet words, cadence or images.

One day I was parked in my car awaiting the next class. (Parking was near non-existent on the streets around the school, so we all tried to get there early to find a parking spot and sit in our car until class started). A poem came to me and I wrote it down word for word. I used the hood of my car as a desk. The poem was titled My Corroding Days. I sent it in to an anthology publication (Young Publications) and it was accepted, I received a small check in payment.

~~~~

My Corroding Days

Rust Corrodes the metal

as love pollutes the mind.

Weary soldiers marching home,

never think of dying.

Fireplace with a red, warm fire

always leaves a marking.

Silk, lace and sheets of linen

will wrinkle under passionate lovers.

Lights of time

throw shadows through windows.

Food for thought isn’t

always consumed.

~~~~

I was very young compared to most college students when I wrote the poem – my first. In the next 2 weeks I wrote 2 more poems, sent them in to different magazines and they were accepted. It felt easy. After that I hit a dry spell but was not discouraged. Yet, I was mixed up about the kind of poems I wanted to write. In some cases, I didn’t know what I was writing.

May 1966, Glenn Yarbrough released an album titled: The Lonely Things of Rod McKuen poems and songs. I was in my car, listing to the radio, when the DJ played a cut off that album, The Word Before Goodbye. I listened to the DJ say the name of the album and I went to a record store and bought it. I played it over and over. On the back of the album, there was a note indicating that poems on the album were from book titled: Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows by Rod McKuen.

Most McKuen fans know the story by now, but for those who do not, it is as follows. When Glenn and RCA were creating the album, the RCA AR man called Rod and asked Rod where the poems came from. Without thinking things out, he quickly blurted out that the poems were from a book titled: Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows. RCA put that information on the back of the record, along with Rod’s Los Angeles PO Box number. But there was a problem. No such book even existed, and Rod had no immediate plans to write one. All of sudden book orders were coming in upon the record’s release, so Rod wrote the book as quickly as possible – every night after work. Rod had been dating a lady by the name of Ellen and Stanyan Street was the street on which she lived.

When SSAOS came out, I bought 2 signed and numbered copies. Without checking my notes, my recall was I received one book numbered in the #30 range and one book in the #60 range. I eventually I gave them to girls I dated and never saw the girls or the books again. (I still miss the books, not so much the girls! 🤣!). Seriously, I hope they cashed in on those books if they sold them. I bought another book for myself as the girls faded into a haze.

Upon reading the book and still listening to The Lonely Things album, I knew McKuen’s brand of simple relationships was the kind of poetry I wanted to write. I started to move away from the writing of obtuse beat poetry.

By this time, I had a summer job at local amusement park, Frontier Village. I was working long hours and I barely had enough time to sleep – little time to write poems or letters.

In February 1967, Rod McKuen and Anita Kerr created The Sea album. I bought a copy and when I heard it, I felt that some of the poems had been written at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, where I, on occasion, spent time writing. I wrote to Rod and asked him if that fact was true. (my first letter to him.)

On March 10, 1967, he send back a one-word card that said, “Yes!” (He later wrote to me and apologized for the terse card, as he was overwhelmed with the SSAOS book requests. (He and his adopted brother, Edward Habib sold 60,000 copies of the book out of his car - A Mustang.) Rod and I then I became pen pals and shortly thereafter friends.

The Sea album cemented my desire to write McKuen type relationship type poems, to which Michael McClure did not take a liking to. (I have two handwritten letters from McClure to me about the technical art of writing of poetry.)

From those moments on, I started to simplify my style. This type of writing calmed me down and I felt comfortable in my own skin, so to speak. By the early ‘70s I had already been published in over sixty different magazines, including the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine.

By about 1980 or so, I was pretty much locked into my own brand of poetry. McKuen wrote me a long letter in early 1980, telling me that I had my own style and unique voice, answerable to no one – which took some writing pressure off of me.

Part 2

After writing my first poem in my college freshmen year, words just seem to flow from me. I often would get a nugget of thought without notice. In most cases, the poetry writing is easy.

While still attending CCAC, in the weekday evenings, I would go into the “college section” of Berkeley and sit in a coffee shop called The Forum; drink cappuccino and write 50 to 75 poems a night. Most were so poor; they would not survive the trip home on the weekends. I estimate that over the 2 years I attended CCAC, I penned 10,980 poems – most did not survive to this day, but I gained a great deal of experience. I gave many of the poems away to Co-Eds who watched me write in a dark corner of The Form. I burned through a lot of note pads.

More difficult poems for me are commission or requested poems – most are for memorials. If I am commissioned to write a poem for a person or subject, that takes some effort to get started, but I always seem to finish the assignment to the requesting person’s satisfaction. By commission I mean the poem was requested. Most folks do not feel a poem is too tough to write and/or I should be doing it as a favor. Normally the deadline is very short.

Most poems can be written in less than 2 minutes. A few have taken 4 or 5 minutes. This does not include down-the-road editing. When I was younger, I seldom edited my poems. In my later years, I do a little more editing and playing with word choice. Still, 90% of the finished poem comes out in the first pass. (John Phillips of the Mamas and Papas wrote the song ‘Monday, Monday’ in its entirety in less than 20 minutes - the creative process can be very quick). I always carry a pocket notebook with me and at least 70% of my poems are written into my pocket notebook.

I would say that 20% to 30% of my poems come from (often small) life incidents. The rest are poems that have a single thought come to me and I finish the poem from there – letting it guide me more than I guide it. Feeding off the line or thought before. On occasion, someone can say a few innocent or unimportant words and I can get an idea for a poem. If I am wakened in the middle of the night with poem idea, I’ll force myself to get up to write it down. In that instance, I seldom get back to any kind of restful sleep. The poet’s real curse.

I have often said that poets have it tougher than novelists as poets get accused of writing every poem about a real person or lover, where the public considers a novelist to be writing about fictional characters in all instances.

As a thought occurs to me, I write the poems down on paper and when time permits, I type them up into a draft of my next year’s book. I have tried to write book a year since 1967 – there are some gaps. McKuen chewed my ass once that I do not need to write a book a year, but the river of words never stops. As you read these words, to date, I have created 122 books, many of them self-published and given to family and friends over the years at Christmas. I do have 8 books that I do sell.

Part 3

Just because one writes poetry doesn’t mean the poet has a lock on every human emotion or life condition. I believe that the fact that I am still searching and questioning life and mankind makes me a better poet. I believe there are many different layers and colors of love relationships, so one has to work hard to covet it, even if they never fully understand it. You reach one layer or color of love or friendship and that leads you to another. Time and wisdom lead you to more layers.

My poetry journey is a search in which those around me are, sometimes, an unwitting accomplice in the process by providing a tiny nugget that I turn into a poem – then or later. A poet’s job is to capture those moments or feelings so they can be meaningful to others.

Part 4

Prose Poem About Art College
(California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland)

Sitting across from him, he did not look like a poet; unsure what a poet looked like. Thinking he was an English Professor who wrote some poetry. That first class was in a room not much larger than a master bedroom; looked like an old office. We were lined up in chairs across the room; twenty students, tops. We switched classrooms many times that semester; finally settling on an old painting studio at the back of the campus. We did not know McClure from McKuen from Robert Frost. Freshmen, all, we were white-bread, middle income, aspiring art students. An unbelievable percentage of rookies washing out before the semester ended. A class of 400, down to 60 or so students in no time. High school art students, who were the cream of their school crop, withered away in flocks. Yet, one did not merely enroll at the CCAC and start painting. That is where we were.

Sitting in our GE English class with a moderately known ‘Beat’ poet, Michael McClure, studying Rilke, Dylan, and Ginsberg and writing one-word poems on 3 by 5 cards. We never bonded as a class; the dropout rate was too severe. There was an education to be had; one we did not fathom until years later. Those of us who survived, still speak of the entire ambience we absorbed. As weird and wild as McClure was, we did walk away with a new understanding of the written word, especially as spoken.

I recall gathering in the school’s tiny auditorium for English class, more than once, and listening to guest poets like Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. My most vivid memory is of Ferlinghetti reading a very long poem ending with repetition of the word “death.” It was equivalent to Sir Alec Guinness or Sean Connery visiting a high school drama class. We did not believe the experience to be anything special. Chalked it up to the variety and freedom of college. It did not even seem strange when we had life-drawing classes at UC Berkeley and ended up late to class because we were caught amid the smoke and gas of the Sproul Hall riots.

Between classes, I started writing obtuse poems. Becoming more confident as I got a few published, I shared some with McClure. I still have a few letters back and forth between us. They contain his words advising me to create depth within mine. Those hours and moments shaped us all, growing poets and artists, more than most. Though I enjoyed watercolor classes with George Post, drawing, and sculpture classes with Ronald Dahl, the times spent around McClure and his poet clan stands out as life changing. Cappuccino at the Forum coffee house, the break-out concert with Dylan going electric at the Berkeley Community Theater, endless hours in bookstores and record shops and soft evenings with girls from Mills College.

Life was not college then; it was a play. A surreal look into the growth process of minds. Forming memories that could only be appreciated by art students, now far removed and understood in prose poems of the disciples. Difficult to knock it if you were never there, even if only through these words. Much as Ferlinghetti cautioned, we never did contemplate death. It was, to us, a final word in a poem in English Class.

~ July 25, 1999

Part 5

Many people believe in the activity of a live reading of the written word (poems). I support the idea that poems should be read by the reader off the written page (or read to sight impaired persons by a professional reader). A poem can contain different meanings to each person. The Poet reading it aloud could alter the message the audience could personally pull from the words. Just as owners, buyers or viewers of art have a right to see what they wish to see, poetry lovers should not be pushed in a specific direction or meaning of a poem. And, honestly, many poets are not good public speakers as they often write in silence.

*The students that befriended Allen in his freshmen year were: David Alcorn who opened his own ad agency after college and designed The North Face clothing company logo. Michael Vanderbyl, internationally renown design artist, who also became Dean Of Design at CCAC.