Unfortunately, Grey Wolf Press seems to be letting certain fine books go out of print. On Bread & Poetry captures the excitement of the San Francisco scene in 1964 and lets us listen in to a public conversation between Gary Snyder, Lew Welch and Philip Whalen.

Welch has the most interesting things to say about language of the three and even hails the beginnings of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E along with Whalen in a remakable passage on pg. 41:

Whalen: I mean the three of us are sitting here like we were embalmed or something–but I wanted to say. I made this list before I came…

Welch: OK.

Whalen:…to tell you all that we have successors, and this is very nice: that in New York there’s a magazine called C, edited by Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett, who are very inteersting young poets…

Welch: Good.

Whalen:…who don’t have that hard uptown sound. They’re doing a funny thing–they’re taking off from Gertrude Stein.

Welch: Yes, yes…

Whalen: Lorenzo Thomas is doing that.

Welch: That high wit thing…

***

Some other memorable bits:

Welch: Well, that’s the trouble there too. It takes me, really–well, it’s like gertrude Stein said, she said you may write only half an hour a day but you spend all day getting ready for that half hour….[Pg. 7]

Welch: And, you see, in our work, not just the three of us but there is a wonderfully large group of serious American poets now who are writing like we talk. And it’s nice how many people are delighted. They say, “Well, gee, that sounds just like the way you talk.”

Whalen: Other people say, “It isn’t a poem at all!”

Welch: And other people say: “It can’t be a poem–that sounds like talk.” This is what makes it exciting now from the standpoint of a literary movement and everything….[Pgs. 11-12]

***

Welch: Robert duncan gave me a very good phrase the other night. He said when you read a poem you “play the poem.” And this is very important to me. In a way, my style of reading out loud, performing a poem, is a very–is something I practice. I practice how I think the line should be played….You see, as you write the line you’re writing a movement, like a musician is writing a movement, or a dancer is dancing one….[Pg. 22]

***

Welch: but you see, I think. Well I know for a fact, just looking at Dryden or Pope, I know they were doing the same thing we are. It just, you know, the experience of writing for them was probably absolutely identical….They have something to say and they sit down and they sing it.

Snyder: Well, I think that Dryden and Pope are not very good examples for that.

Welch: I think Dryden is because his forms are very spon–uh, seem to me–there’s a nice roughness about some of his poetry that gives me the idea it was a very inspired work, that he really just blew like a jazz musician, like his “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day,” for example…

Whalen: Yeah…

Welch:…are just gorgeous things.

Whalen: And the “Secular Masque,” for instance, is great. [Pg. 25]

***

Welch: I feel–in my work, they’re very closely connected. The kind of music I naturally think in is jazz music. And so the music that comes in my poetry–I sometimes deliberately try to write a poem that moves around like Monk’s music, if the subject matter, you know, connected with that kind of rhythm.

***

Snyder: Well, sure. Jazz is one of the revolutionary things of this century. Like Confucious said, “When you change the modes of the music, the society changes.” [Pg. 37]

***

A great book to have in the library. Jesse