Free Speech (cont'd)

Q: When did you start reading Bukowski?

A: 1971. When I became a writer.

I read his poems and stories in the NOLA Express. I checked Post Office out of the New Orleans Public Library.

The King of the Hard-Mouthed Poets.

Q: And now you're the King of Daily Typewriting.

A: The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.

Q: That's 35 years ago.

A: On August 31. I started writing September 1, 1971.

Q: What time?

A: Brenda rode her bicycle to work.

I made a second pot of coffee in the yellow enamel French-drip pot, put a jazz record on the stereo, rolled a sheet of bond paper, a sheet of carbon paper, and a yellow second-sheet into my Olympia portable typewriter, and started writing.

Q: Have you written every day since?

A: Or thought about the writing if I couldn't write.

I held a job. I entertained relatives on holidays.

I had deadlines, I had social obligations.

Q: What did you write?

A: Books. Series of related books. Each book is related to the one before it and the one after it.

Q: What genre were they?

A: Fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction. Drama.

Q: In turn?

A: All together. In the same book.

Q: How many books is it now?

A: 274. 275 in progress.

Q: A collected works. Uncollected.

A: Suppressed. By New York.

Q: What have they suppressed?

A: The entire oeuvre.

Q: Has any of it been published?

A: Nine book-length books. By independent presses, or by myself.

172 pamphlets, chapbooks, fliers, and four-page sheets.

I serialized 110 books online, daily, as I wrote them, on the worldwide web.

Q: Damn, son.

A: Anything you have to do, you have to go on and do yourself, Rahsaan Roland Kirk said.

Q: What would you call an event featuring Mark Doty, Ann Douglas, Margo Jefferson, Philip Lopate, Rick Moody, and Jason Shinder, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Howl?

A: Pharisaical.

I'd call them Pharisees.

They're trying to neutralize Allen Ginsberg with acceptance.

And they sneer at anyone who's not a member of their clique.

A contemporary Howl would never make it past them.

They'd be expert witnesses against it. Because it would be a reproach to them and everything they stand for.

Q: That's just sour grapes.

A: I'm just a sore loser. Knocking my betters.

Q: Do you believe that?

A: If I did I would have quit, sold out, or turned bitter. A long time ago.

I'm onto something.

If I can see it, others will.

Q: Did Bukowski ever see your work?

A: John Bennett, who published Screed, knew Bukowski. He sent him a copy.

"Nicely done," Bukowski said. "He rolls on."

Bukowski's translator, Carl Weissner, said,

Nothing studied about this one. He just knows. And does. It hangs together, flows together, makes a lot of sense. Cooking like a Tasmanian Dervish. All I can do is tip my hat.

Q: Did Bukowski make you want to be a writer?

A: I wanted to be a writer long before I read Bukowski. In fact, I was putting it off, until I felt like I had my ducks in a row.

I didn't want to try. I wanted to do. I was afraid I would come in half-stepping. I wanted to go all out.

Q: What nudged you over the edge? Gave you the impetus to start?

A: I had a three-year fellowship in anthropology. I saw I wasn't going to get the PhD. I went for it.

I stole the last year of my fellowship to teach myself to write.

I signed up for Thesis, to draw my stipend, stayed at home, and wrote.

I came out hooking, like Smokin' Joe Frazier.

In the year I gave myself I wrote two books and started a third.

I found my sea legs. My seat.

Q: What did you do when your money ran out?

A: Took a job as a laborer. For five years.

Brenda was at home, raising babies.

Finally, I got a job as a technical writer. I worked my way up.

I had time to write, at work, money to buy books, and postage to send things out. I had an International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses, which told me names and addresses of people in the small press scene. Who was looking for what.

I bought and read everything Bukowski had in print. The novels, the collections of poems, the short stuff in Open City and the L. A. Free Press. Some of it nonfiction, or autobiographical fiction that might as well have been nonfiction. Might as well have been memoir.

I saw that he was coming at the same small handful of events in his life, now in this genre, now in that, and then the pieces were assembled, by genre, the poems into collections of poems, the stories into collections of stories, and published by genre.

I saw that I was doing the same thing.

Only instead of grouping the pieces by genre I concatenated them in order of composition, numbered the pages, threw in beginnings, middles, and ends, and called book-length sections books. I left the letters I was writing to editors, the replies to rejection slips, and the letters I wrote to Larry and Hazel about what I was trying to do, and how I felt about what happened to my work, in.

Q: What did you call the new, multi-genre form you had invented?

A: My chronicle, after Céline's remark that he didn't have time to answer the gazettes, he had his chronicle to finish, his endless, or enormous debts to pay.

I answered the gazettes in my chronicle.

Later, I called what I was doing Ten-Year Run, after Clement Greenberg's comment that Jackson Pollock had some ten-year run.

Ten-Year Run became The Great American 10,000-Page Novel, The Great American 20,000-Page Novel, and 40-Year Run.

And my chronicle became enema vérité.

This blurs the distinction between artifact and process. Form and content. The form affects the content, and the content affects the form.

It's just me, writing.

What results results. Books.

If I am an innovator, that's my innovation.

Daily typewriting yields a stack, or series of related books. A life's-work. Like Jack Kerouac's Duluoz saga.

Q: I imagine it's hard to get a stack published. While you're alive.

A: That's the plot.

How do you do the best work you are capable of doing in a world that's hostile or indifferent to your best.

How do you follow your vision where it leads if you can't sell your books because of what you have to say, and the way you say it. The language you say it in.

You are on your own. With the help of friends.

The support of your wife and kids.

It's you and your coterie of steadfast readers against the establishment. The imitators. The people who write to someone else's formula.

Bless their little hearts.

Q: Good luck.

A: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Q: You're going to need it.

A: No shit Dick Tracy.