Before there was an internet, I transcribed this conversation and sent it around to some of the people I knew at the time. Through my friendship with Linda Parker I had stayed at what had been Olson's place in Gloucester, MA so in my minds-eye I could picture the stairs up and door opening to the small kitchen. A deck had been added with ocean view and drying sea weed but the sparse domestic environment remained. It is probably an irreverent thought but somewhat a generational thing that I think of the Marvel Comics universe where it was always a big deal with heroes met and the famous "Battle Issues" where hero fought hero (usually due to a stupid misunderstanding) were especially prized. As my transcript of the conversation with Glover goes, the facts of this meeting entered the mythical realm but I believe in its essense as reported here.
Alan Casline: What we are after, from my point-of-view, is an accurate documentation of what actually
happened and we can’t really do that...
Albert Glover: I don’t know what actually happened…
A.C. : Right, I saying we can’t really do that but that is what we should get as close to as we can and it is
going to be a story. It has already moved beyond the historical picture.
A.G. : I never even heard the story from Ronnie…
A.C. : Right, It’s a story at this point - but we know Olson told this story. In fact we know it is true
because enough other people have witnessed it in the sense that they are saying “Yes, I was there
and I saw it happen.”
A.G. : No, nobody saw this happen. Someone heard it happen and I got the story from Jack Clarke. Who
had a better version of it that I do. He is nearer to the source of the story.
A.C. : Well, we could go from here to there.
A.G.: What happen was that Olson was back at Fort Square. He’s in that place and there is concern in Buffalo that he can’t cope with the stuff. I have the letters that he had written to me about at this time. He wanted me to take all of his stuff. I have his letters. In fact, he said “Do you want to be in charge?” I was going to be the archives and I’m panicked then because I don’t want to end up being Charles Olson’s secretary but I also – because Pound had been Yeats’ secretary and I’m thinking of it this way – and he’s thinking how can I get out from under all this stuff. But in any case in order to help him cope with the Fort Square thing and his own mounting fame and power, a girl from Buffalo named Ronnie Goldfarb was talked into going and living in the apartment next door to the Fort Square one.
There are two on that top floor and she is going to live in the other one and be his housekeeper. I don’t know what that entailed. So she goes in there. She decides she’ll do this. She’s the one that was the witness to this story. The story the way I heard it, which was really from Clarke – which is the way he told it from her was that there was a night – and I’m not sure of the season. It seems to me it was late fall. Maybe it was this time of the year but I’m not sure. It seems to me it was late fall. Maybe it was this time of year but I’m not sure. Kerouac shows up outside Olson’s apartment. It is late at night, One o’clock, two in the morning? - that’s my sense of it. He is standing on the street yelling up to the window for Olson to come on down on the street and they are going to have it out right there, sort of a gun fight. He’s calling him out into the street. Charles was all in a dither inside. He’s inside.
See there’s not much record of he and Kerouac really being - but you know that Melville is Kerouac’s teacher and there is also a lot of similarity in Kerouac’s life - I mean there is all that new England business. So they are going to have this meeting and Charles is all in a dither inside while this guy is outside yelling and also won’t go out, he won’t go out. The Kerouac apparently decides he is going to go in so he starts around the building and up those back steps to come in. He is just going to come in.
Charles to greet him and thinking that he is going to lay out a kind of red carpet. He’s trying to prepare this welcome for him. Takes the Boston Globe and puts it all out on the floor as a kind of carpeting for Jack Kerouac to walk upon. So Kerouac gets to the door and Olson lets him in. Kerouac is really shouting and hollering and being abusive – that Olson is this kind of son-of-a-bitch professor, calling him a bastard. But apparently Charles isn’t being abusive back. He is sort of hearing it but still trying to provide this welcome. He opens the door and Kerouac walks in on those papers and confronts him. Charles in order to indicate his affection, really, non-animosity - is pointing at the floor as if to say look at what I have done. I have spread this carpet for you and Kerouac looks down at the floor and he is standing on this bad book review – I mean the book was not well received and then he gets even more furious because he thinks Charles is pointing at this review of his book and what a failure he’s been and then lunges for Olson and throws him up against the kitchen wall. There is a direct physical assault on Olson. It is hard to believe anyone could do that. It is like…charge Charles, He was huge. I mean he was huge. And Ronnie who’s been listening, she’s on the other side of the wall – then reports this kind of situation of oddly crash banging as they have some kind of a fight and end up convivial. The evening is then passed in some type of embrace. They have crashed that barrio and then they have this evening together. It is the only record I know of the two ever confronting each other.
The Kerouac-Olson meeting - as told to Alan Casline by Albert Glover on 10/15/83
GARY LAWLESS: A QUICK VISIT
It was a too quick visit with Gary Lawless at Gulf of Maine Bookstore in Brunswick, Maine on May 3, 2009. As usual I left him a stack of Benevolent Bird publications to give to friends and some for sale. Bought some books too. Gary was in the back eating and was soon to be off to visit his 92 year-old mother. He and Beth Leonard were leaving for France in a few days with trip focus on getting close to animal paintings on cave walls. He was looking forward to his art exploration and I expect something to be written of what he can glean of the motivation behind those who crawled deep inside rock to leave images of the hoofed and clawed painted by light from flickering flame. It is all spectulation as to why? he reminded me a couple of times. Franz Boas in Primative Art writes of both symbolic representation and representation by means of perspective. In North American northwest coast art the whole animal form is presented as an assembly of disconnected symbols. A beaver is adequately represented by a large head with two pairs of large incisors and a squamous tail. It is in the painting of later paleolithic found in the caves of southern France and of Spain that Boas finds perspective realism "fully developed" Interestingly, Boas does not find perspective of groups in these paintings but rather of the single figure. Much has been analyzed and discovered since Boas wrote in 1927 and so I bet many more cave painting images are available for study. Perhaps Gary can let us know if he sees the herd and pack represented in the cave art he sees and also if he thinks the artist is actually creating a picture of a specific animal and not a symbolic representation of the animal kind?
I got to talk about the reactions of some poets to his poem Lynx Liberation Communiqué. Art Willis had told me he had seen a mountain lion near his property close to here in the Normanskill watershed. That got us talking about different wild cats and I mentioned Gary's poem which I then sent to Art and a handful of others. A few of the comments were interesting and I thought worth running by Gary. Starting with Albany poet Dan Wilcox who commented "Nobody votes, they just eat each other" Gary thought that was a good comment. He said he wasn't trying to imply anything having to do with democracy or even the standard political process which wasn't working for the benefit of the lynx at all. Two Republican Senators and a Democratic Governor had not resisted Federal actions during the years of George W. Bush that offered no protection for the lynx forest habitat in the entire, every square mile of the State of Maine. It was the political power of the land developers (former lumber companies) that put the lynx in a bad situation. At least Gary was able to tell me that the Obama administration had changed course and that now a sizeable territory of the northern Maine forest was protected. For the lynx and other animals, Gary said it was presumptuous to think you could take their side and speak for them and yet by undertaking that poetic voice you could gain consciousness and something of a different species view on important matters. I shared my response to Dan Wilcox.
Democrary in the Wild
2 legs + 2 hands = 1 vote
4 paws =1 vote
2 wings + 2 claws = 1 vote
I never did like snakes
4/27/09
"No backbone no franchise to vote", Gary said. And also on the whole democracy question "They vote by their diet."
The other comment on on Gary's Lynx Liberation Communiqué was from fellow bioregional poet Stephen Lewandowski, who wrote "wishful thinking." I wrote back to Stephen "Gary Lawless has that quality. Chanting the words. I'm sure not naiveté but in the face. Hey "wishful thinking" you already said that." Gary went though almost the same circle of thought to arrive back at Yes, wishful thinking. He agreed that his poetry is wishful thinking, magic words. He originates his poetry in traditional shaman song and storyteller form. The realized imagination shared with all gathered. Speaking from a world that has been lost but not destroyed or disappeared. Check out another poem of his in Big Powwow, I still talk to the animals.
That was another time when
We knew there were other worlds
On May 22, 2009 Gary e-mailed me a Postscript that said in my poems, I am not sure where the line between wishful thinking and prayer can be found.
To read about Gary Lawless and cave paintings & William Blake check out his own post Cave art in the Dordogne written after the journey at http://mygrations.blogspot.com/
NOTE: illustrations from Primitive Art by Franz Boas. Top: beaver from Haida and from Tlingti cultures. Bottom: Paleolithic bison painting
---- Alan Casline
BIOREGIONAL NOTE FROM ALAN CASLINE
NORMANSKILL NOTES by Alan Casline
The Normanskill watershed is a near perfect example of how political boundaries divide and obscure natural systems. While it doesn’t appear to me these divisions are insurmountable, they do leave watershed concerns without an obvious policy structure or forum with which to focus attention. In some parts of the world, there are river systems shared by different countries. There are also rivers that serve as boundaries or move water from one country or state to another. The Normanskill does neither. The Normanskill is found entirely in New York State. As a major tributary, the watershed receives recognition as important to advocates and friends of the Hudson River. Not crossing national or state boundaries is an advantage to political management and a few less layers of government hopefully simplifies land-use planning and the watershed protector’s landscape. There are still global and bio-regional concerns which should be on the Normanskill watch list but these concerns reflect local problems and solutions with the harm and benefits to be derived locally as well.
The political divisions of Counties, Towns, City and Villages are the divisions that largely remove the bio-regional view of this 170 square mile territory from the local population’s concerns and the local planning agency’s priorities. Which is not to say there are not concerned citizens, workers, and officials with a green environmental, open space, natural resource awareness, smart planning perspective; who recognize the importance of understanding and sustaining the whole living system they live in.
I see two major divides of this river system. One is the Watervliet Reservoir. The watershed above the dam has interested parties concerned with water quality and by extension development, drainage, and pollution control. A second major biological divide is the estuary at the river’s confluence with the Hudson River near the Port of Albany. The landscape there is industrialized and like much of the Albany shore filled, dredged, and drowned to the point that its natural and human history is difficult to discern. Castle Island is no more, now you have a fill enlarged peninsula with obscured historical boundaries. From the Watervielt Reservoir downstream through Towns of Guilderland and Bethlehem the Normanskill and tributaries drain a mixed urban and suburbanized area. Maybe because my own property drains off onto this part of the watershed, I here find more permutations and interesting areas to still explore—from the recognized uniqueness of the Pine Bush Barrens; the availability of a surprising amount of green space due mostly to steep banked riversides, the Hunger Kill and the other small urban streams that move through the City of Albany and on to major malls and the campus of SUNY Albany. I see this portion of the river as our “European Watershed.” Common sense says over a hundred years of industrializations, denser human habitation, and major levels of pollution have made the health of this part of the river irretrievable. That is unless the cultural and societal change of the next hundred years decides differently.
What is the Rootdrinker Institute’s agenda for the Normanskill Watershed?
First I would say to celebrate what we already have. A resource guide should be developed, eco-tourism encouraged, a sense of place, nature, seasonal activities; all to be encouraged. The publication NORMANSKILL can continue to be an anthology that networks and explores the depth of our bio-regional identity. Next would be preservation, eco-system enhancement, renewable “green Industries, increased food production, sustainable forestry, locally marketed locally produced products and crafts. No new ideas here but as a friend said recently, “We don’t need ideas. We need action.” I think there is a lot going on in these areas already. We need a catalog for access to what is available, perhaps included in the larger resource guide. On the political and planning level getting away from the “Big Pipe” mentality and seriously implementing water quality conscious decisions that involve different (and proven) technologies. Unless you live on a mountain peak, everyone is downstream from someone else.
I don’t really know that much about the Normanskill. Despite that fact, some people are already saying I’m an expert on it. Far from it. I do have an interest in the place and I’m working on networking among people with that shared interest.
Alan Casline
