History of My Reading: Spring Things 1967

First we read, then we write.  I did most of my writing in 1966-67, my third year at Knox College, on a white enameled metal kitchen table, the only suitable surface in my two rented rooms.  I wrote my academic papers there--the table otherwise piled with books and notes-- and my fiction, poems and plays, which were often likewise assembled from notes, handwritten pages with prior draft paragraphs stapled in place.  I typed them all on my gray portable typewriter, something very much like this Smith-Corona.

This was the first year, not only of college but of my life, that I lived alone.  My two room apartment was in a shabby wood frame building, and there was that questionable dip in the linoleum-covered kitchen floor, as well as the bathroom downstairs shared with scary old ladies.  But otherwise I enjoyed the place.

I still had my food service number at school so I ate there a lot, dinners and lunches, as well as patty melts in the Gizmo.  But I made coffee and tea in that kitchen, and got cereal and so on for breakfast, as well as Pecan Sandies and Chips Ahoy cookies, and possibly something as exotic as English Muffins (which were actually hard to find in a place like Galesburg.)  I probably did most of my grocery shopping at Higgins Diary.

 The bedroom was comfortable, with a double bed--the first time I had that at college: there's a certain luxury in a double bed all your own. I could spread out papers and books, and read and write there, as well as stretch myself sleeping.  There was at least one window in the bedroom near the bed, and the enduring image I have of that apartment is sitting on the bed, with a lacy curtain over the window open to spring air and light, sipping tea I'd made, with my little stereo playing "Retired Writer in the Sun" from the Donovan Mellow Yellow album.

I listened to music a lot.  Besides LPs I also had some 45 rpm records, like Beatles singles not yet on an album ( in the spring that would have included "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever.")  The 45 I remember playing repeatedly that spring was "Pretty Ballerina" by the Left Banke.  Many years later, I would spend an evening with the member of that short-lived band who wrote it.

And of course I played my guitar, learning songs, writing songs.  I had occasional guests, especially early that fall, with some memorable if sometimes strange and poignant moments throughout the year.  But mostly it was a haven, my fortress of solitude.  Occasionally I would spend an entire day and night there without leaving, usually on a Sunday when there were no classes and the school dinners were notoriously skimpy.  The one thing I knew how to cook was spaghetti.  My grandmother had advised me on which ready-made sauces in jars were acceptable.

The deep 60s were beginning that school year, with their three most prominent characteristics: the music, Vietnam war protests, and the substance we called grass.

Audience for the spring 1967 antiwar event.  I may be hidden behind Bill
Thompson in the foreground right.  Leonard Borden photo.

The music I'll get into in more detail in a later post, but I do recall the dance tunes at parties that spring included the Stones "Let's Spend the Night Together" and "Ruby Tuesday." Other songs we heard a lot--on the Gizmo Jukebox and elsewhere that spring-- were the Buffalo Springfield "For What It's Worth,"  Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love" and the Turtles "Happy Together."

Wendy Saul reading. L. Borden photo.

There was an anti-war reading that spring in front of Old Main, with people sitting on the grass to hear.  Leonard Borden remembers that it was organized by Steve Goldberg, who had returned from Vietnam where he'd been posted with the International Volunteer Service.  Leonard figures it was late April or early May. He took a number of photos of the event.  They show Sam Moon, Wendy Saul, Dennis Stepanek and Goldberg reading, and Rick Clinebell singing.  Many others are visible in the crowd, including professors Howard Wilson, John Stipp and Miki Hane.  I read a poem, "Things To Do Instead of the Army," dedicated to Valjean.  More about that later.

As for grass, I probably would have caught on sooner to the increasingly open--if nevertheless furtive--smoking of the weed had I not been in an isolated apartment, but I was only becoming aware of it on campus (as opposed to the publicized use elsewhere) in the spring.

In late May, the second Siwasher of the year came out (it's the one with the psychedelic poster cover by James Campbell) that included a story I'd written, "the continuing adventures of the incredible hairyman." The story included an account of a series of "heightened perceptions" which the narrator claimed was "not like a drug."  But readers knew better.  Clearly I was a "head," and had probably dropped LSD.

It wasn't true, yet.  The first time I smoked a joint was after the story came out.  I sat on the floor with Neil Gaston and Chuck Goodman in their apartment, as they separated the seeds and rolled it, an operation they conducted literally on a copy of the Siwasher with this story in it, which I could see was open to the page where my story began.

That's partly why I thought I was being put on.  Neil and Chuck began to act high, but I didn't feel a thing.  Later I understood that this sometimes happened the first time.

That issue of the Siwasher featured a story by J. Mark Brooks, who also wrote a column for the Student that year.  It includes poems by Leonard Borden, Nicholas Brockunier, James Campbell, Julia Fonda, Candi Lange, Alison McClure, W.R. Peterson, Gerry Roe, Wendy Saul, Dennis Stepanek and me.

Peter Overton and Erica Overberger. L. Borden photo

There were photos by Jack Herbig, and photos of artworks by Mary Borden, Jack Brown, Dorie Campbell, James Campbell, ceramics by the future famous Tom Collins, Don Hansen, Peter Overton, Jane Seamans and Susan Walsh.  Gerry Roe was the editor.

Late that spring, I ran into Geroe in the Oak Room.  He seemed hesitant but finally said he'd decided to name not one editor for the Siwasher for the following year, but two: me and Wendy Saul.  I said, great.  He seemed relieved.  My first editorial meeting with Wendy was equally brief and easy.  She asked how we were going to split the editorial work, apart from selecting manuscripts which was more of a team effort.  I said, you take the first issue and I'll take the second.  She said, great.  And though we were both involved in both issues, that's pretty much what we did.

As for my story in the spring 67 issue, at this remove it seems to me the best thing I published--and probably the best I wrote--that school year.  But I didn't feel that way then.  I remember Sam Moon approaching me to talk about it, but I dismissed it as an entertainment--not my serious writing. (Perhaps I'd heard of Graham Greene dividing his fiction that way.)

The story starts with the protagonist passing a music store, when a mail truck stops, delivers a package to him that turns out to be a bomb.  That is literally how the story started in life--I was passing Butz Music House in Greensburg, resisting the temptation to go in and buy sheet music I couldn't actually read, when I had that fantasy.

"The Incredible Hairyman" by Jack Herbig
scanned from the Siwasher Vol. 45 #2 The
photo title came after my story, though I'm
not sure how Jack knew about it before it
was published.

The rest of the story collects other events and fantasies, some of them set at Seton Hill College in Greensburg, where the "Scottish castles" were almost literally that, for several of the city's most wealthy citizens in the 19th century were Scots, and the main college building had been a castle-like home.  These buildings had an
air of the fantastic.

This section contains a line I'd wanted to get into a story for awhile--the observation of the view of a young woman walking away: "her closely hipped levis swinging him alternate winks."  I actually thought of it on that particular campus.  I don't know about "closely hipped," probably "tight" would do, but the "swinging him alternate winks" seemed something Updike would have liked.

The style of the story combines the artifacts I clung to for psychic survival at the time: certain music (the Beatles) and movies (again the Beatles, as well as--and especially--the British comedy "Morgan!": the first two lines of the song about the Putney duck more or less quote one of David Warner's lines in the movie) and superhero comic books, mostly Spiderman and Daredevil.

But now I see that the story is more than that. It expresses certain illusions and disillusions of the time.  The protagonist's interactions with a psychologist and his hospitalization at the end reflect both the protagonist of Morgan! (subtitled "A Suitable Case for Treatment") and an earlier iconic character, Holden Caulfield.  Though the protagonist's descriptions of the hospital at the end reflects some of my own experience being hospitalized the previous winter, his vocabulary suggests Holden, and it was meant to.  Morgan and Holden were two alienated guys, two disillusioned dudes.

I have a similar impression about my pieces published in the Knox Student.  My column that year was called "Revolver" (Beatles reference of course), and under that marque as well as otherwise, I wrote many earnest and serious expositions on student issues, while attempting to apply McLuhan to everything.  But the columns I like now are the more poetic ones, and especially the ones that employ my Joycean/Lennonesque word play.

I'd written a few the year before--at first it was the way I recast familiar names that got attention.  But I refined the style each time, until several I published in 1967--one an account of a Student Affairs meeting (called the "prudent repairs comite"), the other on the Anderson House women's dorm controversy--I still find funny.   To come up with a more absurd name than Sharvey Umbeck was a challenge but I think I did okay with "Shafty Farfetch."  Though that was only one of his alternates (which included "Sharpy" and "Sharkey".)  I recast Valjean McLenighan as "palgeorge mccartneyism," which is funnier if you know who George Pal was (producer of some of the classic 1950s sci-fi movies like War of the Worlds and When Worlds Collide), and see immediately the McCartney/McCarthyism collision, which also reflects on McCartney's pal George.  Anyway, these columns make me laugh out loud (as opposed to cringing), a nice bonus after more than 50 years.

Bill Dean--relaxing after a performance?
Photo by Leonard Borden

The first production of a play I wrote happened in the Studio Theatre that spring. It was called By the Sea By the Sea By the Sea By the Sea  or The Samuel Morse Songbook.  Ric Newman directed it.  Unfortunately I can't find a program that tells me who else was involved in the production.  As I've written elsewhere, its high point was a pantomime scene--done to the entire Beatles song "The Word"--of a group of elderly demonstrators being arrested by a motorcycle cop, played by Bill Dean, who came into the theatre, up a ramp and onto the stage, riding his actual motorcycle.

"Sunshine Superman" by Jack Herbig. Scanned
from the Siwasher 1967.  The title refers to
a song by British invader Donovan.

The play reflected my major obsessions of the year: partially digested McLuhan, and the continuing British invasion of my heart.  I played with McLuhanish ideas on media and perception; for example, the characters suddenly break into a television interview.  But the British invasion stuff--Beatles, Morgan!, Beyond the Fringe etc. was embarrassingly prominent.  I couldn't seem to believe a line could be funny unless delivered with an English accent.  But then, I wasn't the only one at the time who was smitten.  The American culture--especially youth culture-- had been undergoing this for several years, and it was soon to get even more pronounced.  So the audience laughed, and seemed pleased by the play's good spirits and antic disposition (one of the characters was The Great Dane, also known, of course, as Hairyman.)

Spring brought with it the annual awards.  I took first in the Bookfellow Library Contest--and it's because I catalogued my books to enter it, and those pages survived, that I now can identify the books I had then.  And I won something at least in poetry, though the Student article on the matter isn't entirely clear.  Henry Rago, nearing his final year as editor of Poetry magazine in Chicago, was the judge.   I was reading more poetry and trying to assimilate it (I loved James Wright, and had books by Bly, Corso, Creeley, Ginsberg, Lorca, Levertov, Snyder, Lowell and Kenneth Patchen as well as Cummings, Hart Crane, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Stevens, Williams, Whitman,  D.H. Lawrence and Dylan Thomas) but I can't say much good about my poems in the Siwasher, except they're a bit better than the year before.  Maybe one good metaphor.

Sam Moon reading, Howard Wilson in
foreground.  Leonard Borden photo.

What wasn't reflected in those poems was my growing interest in spoken word poetry, partly influenced by McLuhan's suggestion of a return to sound and oral tradition, partly by the readings of poets who came to campus, especially the more dramatic readers like Robert Bly. That tendency would get even stronger in the coming year, when I discovered the Liverpool Poets who wrote their poems to be read before audiences at jazz and rock clubs.  But even that spring, public readings were becoming more frequent and pointed as part of protests.  I already had Bly's collection of A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War which he probably brought with him to Knox.

I combined these interests in the poem I read at the protest/teach-in on the Old Main lawn, called "Things To Do Instead of the Army."  The direct inspiration in a number of ways was Gary Snyder.  Among the work he read at Knox were several poems called Things to Do.  (He published three in Poetry magazine: "Things To Do in Seattle", "...in San Francisco," and "..on a Ship At Sea.")

Rick Clinebell singing, Steve Goldberg watching.
Leonard Borden photo.

At Knox he remarked that these poems were both particular and universal; they were his particular experiences, but they were the kind of things anyone could do and write about.  Though he may not have said so, they were also especially effective when read out loud to an audience.

The "Things To Do"--which is a kind of list that everybody makes, as well as a catalog of possible experiences, like a guidebook to having a good time somewhere--grabbed my imagination, especially as I was already thinking about the oral and even mythic dimensions of reading poetry in public.  It had that very McLuhanesque quality of participation, because the audience is part of it.

I said some of these things in a short Revolver column that appeared in the last Student issue of that spring.  I asserted that the "Things To Do" poem could be a legitimate poetic form, like the sonnet or lyric.  (For the record, Sam Moon disagreed with me, and curiously Snyder did not publish these poems in any of his books that I know, especially not in his Mountains and Rivers Without End sequence he announced them as being part of.  But since then, at least one other published poet has tried one: Dan Albergotti, whose poem "Things To Do in the Belly of the Whale" was featured in the Writers Almanac in 2015.)

The Beatles bicycling in Nassau in Help!

My column also included the first few lines and several of the last lines of "Things To Do Instead of the Army,"  maybe half of the poem I read.  Like previous Things To Do poems I'd written, it includes things I'd actually done, or someone else had, though this one sometimes reflected my experiences in ways I wasn't even conscious of.  (The first line is "bicycle riding in nassau," which I doubt I consciously associated with a scene in one of my touchstone movies.  Then again, maybe I did intend this.)

 But otherwise, through odd proposals it tries to imaginatively suggest that there are alternatives that make more sense that going to war, as something we're just supposed to do next.  It was one attempt to break out of the apparent logic of Vietnam and the draft that adherents repeated, often with undisguised condescension.

I'm not sure if I wrote that column because I'd caught wind of what else the Student was publishing in what appears to be a four page issue, but a goodly amount of its inside space was taken up with two attacks on a person never named.  That person was me.  I can imagine the bewilderment of readers who weren't on the inside of this reference, and had no idea of who was the subject of a fable about an imitator who went too far.  The shorter of the two pieces came right out and used the word "plagiarism."

The complaint stemmed not just from general observations, including the Things To Do poems I'd published, but a specific line in one of them. It was in "Things To Do in Iowa City," which was about the Gentle Tuesday event I attended, as did other Knox students and faculty, that featured Allen Ginsberg.  I referred to a "quaint and magical house."  I had in fact read that combination of words on a piece of paper posted on the bulletin board in the Seymour Union, advertising a house for rent.  I don't recall seeing any names attached to this paper.

David Warner in Morgan!

This was the era of the found poem, the pop pastiche, the collage. (I was later to use verbatim a promotional paragraph from American Chickle that appeared in my mailbox, in What's Happening, Baby Jesus.)  I did what writers have been doing forever: I repositioned those words--those anonymous words-- in another context.  (I hasten to add that I have more rigorous standards for non-fiction.)

Whether or not this use of these three words in a poem is in any sense plagiaristic, according to the mores of that time or any other, is debatable.  (I assume they weren't claiming copyright on "and.")
 Unfortunately the veiled accusations appeared in the last issue of the year, and couldn't be debated in its pages or anywhere else.  And by the next fall it was forgotten.  I note, however, that one of these pieces begins beside the ads for the local movie theaters.  Now (that is, then) playing at the West: Morgan!

So this quaint and magical year ended, but on a high note: in early June (as I've written about earlier) I spotted Bill Thompson turn the corner purposefully and head towards the record store in downtown Galesburg.  And I knew why.  The latest Beatles record must have just arrived, and so an hour later we were back at his rented house, listening to Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

(I might mention in this context that this particular record includes a song by John Lennon in which the lyrics are almost entirely taken from a circus poster on his wall.)

And so the summer began.  Before I left Knox, I once again had an assured place to live in the fall, and once again had my choice of summer jobs.  And once again, none of it happened.