The Great San Francisco Poetry Wars by Jerry Ratch (popular books of all time TXT) 📕

Prologue


I lived for a time on Red Square in Berkeley. You may have heard of it. It was run by Von Rotten (that’s just plain Von), who was considered the Vladimir Lenin of the Foul Language Movement of Poetry (FLMP, pronounced “Flimp,” sometimes “Flump,” though never “Flamp!”) They even went so far as to have a statue of him erected on the waterfront in Berkeley, where he could be seen in thick fog and thin, lecturing to the poetic masses. But the truth is Von Rotten was really more of a Stalinist. Behind his back we used to refer to him as The Stalinista. More on that later. All you need to know for now is that I was in direct competition with Von Rotten for the heart of Penelope Martin, the Helen of our poetry world at that time. Penny, for short, who taught clairvoyant classes part-time, and modeled in the nude for art professors at the University of California the rest of the time. And that was where my problems began, though some wouldn’t exactly consider them problems.
And how exactly, and why, should that concern you? Well, we wouldn’t have half the poetry we have come to know and love today if it had not been for the outcome of the Great San Francisco Poetry Wars. Now, I invite you to consider just how different our world would be without all the Foul Language Poetry (sometimes referred to as FLIP) which, for instance, that young snot-nosed cousin of yours in Weehawken is known for in the East Coast branch of your family. No way could he or she have written half that stuff without the influence of said clan of poets running the world at poetic programs throughout the country today.
And I defy you to find one iota of “meaning” in that stuff. That’s because “meaning” was efficiently stomped out of all verse that was written at Red Square University (RSU, also known as old Rusty U.) It was essential to act and to speak like a Good Foul Language Comrade (GLC, pronounced “Glick”) at all times there. If one of them began to smell something even approaching meaning, or worse, EMOTION! – it was to be smashed to smithereens instantly and the bad poet taken out back and thrashed to within an inch of his or her poetic life. “Down with meaning!” was shouted in their whiny faces all through this procedure, and they were then squirted with a cold garden hose to drive home the non-point.
And Von Rotten cracked the whip over the Red Baby Diaper Factory there, as well, located on the infamous Red Square, which was how we survived in those days. There was simply no other work to be had, until the Rotten minions took over complete control of the academy throughout the country, with an eye toward spreading their influence even further and conquering the Known World of Poetry (KWP, pronounced “quip.”) The diapers at that factory were dyed with a mixture of beets and salamander juice. Salamander juice for reasons known only to Von Rotten personally. He would not relent on the reason why, even to Penny. He was quite anal in that way. I do know that salamanders were once plentiful in the Berkeley area and made a habit of overrunning every crawl space and basement in town. It used to rain a lot around there before the great drought of the 1970’s. Our stain was irremovable, and quite striking, though to my eye just a touch on the side of purple as much as red. But “red” was a popular term in those days among the young mothers stamped out of the mold of the University of California at Berkeley.
I’m going to go ahead and warn you right now that I’m a little bit fond of the technical term “in those days.” You can just tune it out whenever you encounter it, if you are so inclined.
Von Rotten had the chiseled features of a finely-honed weasel. He stood perfectly erect with his ass muscles drawn in as if he’d been raised on a flagpole, or as the misdiagnosed second-born twin of a drum majorette. They would have left him in the womb if his mother had not immediately started to complain of having a giant tummy ache after giving birth to his twin sister. It may have been luckier for us all if he’d simply been left in there to rot in the elder Mrs. Rotten, but unluckily he made his way to the door of the world and somehow kicked his Rotten self into existence.
Penny met Von Rotten when he decided to take a life-drawing class at the University when he was a student there, after one of his English Department professors told him he had to broaden his education and he had already run through every linguistics class at the University, as well as French. Now, Penny had a body, make no mistake. She was skinny with sharply pointed breasts and huge wine-dark nipples that could honestly make any man’s mouth water just looking at them. They swayed deliciously when she moved. It would just drive you to distraction. Nobody could concentrate when she moved through a classroom, before disrobing in front of the class. It took a while for the men to gather their thoughts. She really did put you in mind of Helen of Troy. Men would willingly ride the seas and fight pitched battles over her. I know. I was one, I was one.
I came out to San Francisco in a Pepsi van that was red, white and blue. We drove that van out of the great Midwest, our hungry souls looking for life at the edge of the continent. To escape the enormous and vacant soul that inhabited the White House in the form of King Richard Nixon and that also inhabited and ate away at the enormous bloated body of the Midwestern mentality that had voted this man into office. How could they have done that? We fled the Midwest to the edges of the continent, hoping to find solace and comfort among like souls who lived and breathed poetry from their every pore, day upon living day and night after night. We thought we would be saved from the savages in the Midwest who had nearly throttled us with their flat and even and straight-forward minds and hearts. The ultimate chicken pot-pie of everything that was there.
In those days everyone ate poetry for lunch. It was considered essential for your good up-bringing and mental health. We would skip a meal in order to satisfy our hunger for words. To hell with a meal. To hell with dirty politics and meaningless wars on other continents, it was enough to feed upon the poetic battles of the moment, and who wrote what and who read what at last night’s reading at the bookstores and cafés, and who went home with whom after the inevitable late night parties that followed. It was the beginning of the end and we all lived as if we knew it was going to end any minute, which was why we found it so hard to keep it while we had it. It was that lust for life that was crucial to the Great San Francisco Poetry Wars. It has been said of us: For a small glassful of laughter we would kill. Yes, kill. And it was all true. Every word of it delicious and dirty and true.


1


“Write it, Bancroft!” Greg Penn was yelling from under the kitchen table. “Exactly as I said it. Go ahead and put it on the sucker’s paper, will you? Chrissakes, just write it! Write it!”
Steve Bancroft was holding his head in his hands with his elbows on the table, where there were stacks of student papers scattered in disorderly piles. “Okay, what?” he asked. “What? Go ahead and repeat it, would you? ‘At first… At first I thought…’”
“Okay. You’re ready now? Jesus, you pussy! ‘At first I thought you were putting your foot in either my mouth or yours. Now I realize you were using both feet.’ Write it. It’s perfect. Perfect!”
“You can’t go putting that on somebody’s precious little essay about their childhood,” Steve complained.
“Just write it, you little turd.”
We walked into the kitchen. From his outlook under the kitchen table, Greg Penn could probably only see so many feet. He was on all fours, all six and a half foot of him, bumping up against the underside of the table like a Shetland pony. These were my two best students at Whitebread College. They were grading papers for me while my assistant Allison Sheffield and I went out drinking at Jack’s Bar on the town square, because tomorrow’s big inquisition was coming fast and I didn’t really care anymore what was going to happen to me. And both of them, Greg Penn and Steve Bancroft, were completely soused on two six-packs of beer I’d left for them as payment for grading my students’ papers, which I simply could not bring myself to do anymore. My short-lived career around that town and that precious little college was all but over.
“Who is that? Janov, that you? How many feet do you have now? We’re out of beer, by the way. Who in hell’s that with you? Sheffield? Sheffield, is that you?”
“What exactly are you doing under the table, Greg?” Allison asked.
Greg snorted, then let out with a massive, long otherworldly belch. “I’m up to my elbows in vomit and oblivion,” he said, and belched. “Obviously.”
Just before going back out to Berkeley, I was teaching at this small college in the midst of the cornfields of Illinois. It was late in the spring of 1971, near the end of the semester, and it was the perfect end to the idealistic Sixties deep in the cornfields of central Illinois at a liberal arts college known for the fact that its students ran the entire campus except, of course, for the teaching and the administration. That was left for dummies like us.
The town had an actual town square, around which a shell-shock case from World War II named John Fox still walked every day. Around and around the square he walked since returning home from the landing at Normandy Beach. And running the only bar on the square, Jack’s Bar, was a man with an enormous nose who was the exact spitting image of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who’d been hounded out of office by our protests to the war in Vietnam. Everyone called him Jack. It was very spooky and very weird to have the ex-president of the United States asking what you wanted to drink. He had the extraordinary habit of staying focused on you, probably to establish that you were old enough to be ordering a drink. His nose was so red and enormous, he looked like he should be sitting on a stoop with his shoelaces untied in the Village in New York, chomping on a cigar butt and feeding pigeons out of a paper bag.
I was drinking myself into oblivion, as much as you can do that sort of thing, trying to forget exactly where I was while still trying to make a living of sorts, at the same time trying to keep from getting fired for neglecting to show up for my 8 a.m. class and holding the class at my house at 8 p.m. instead. Every one of my students showed up at the night class at