Musings of a Performance Poet - reading between the airlines
During my stay in Santa Cruz, I stayed in with an old, teacher-friend of mine who was living in a mobile home park. We talked about poetry and philosophy in between eating pancakes and doing laundry. Some days I'd go for long walks. I kept hoping I might get a reading or two, but after a few weeks waiting for the phone to ring, I gave up. Later, I attended some extremely depressing readings by Ferlinghetti (who is still lost in a gone world) and Robert Creeley (who uses "etc. etc." now instead of words). A dignified retreat was in order.
When California becomes too much to bear, there is always London, which offers antidotes to just about everything, including life.
No trip to London is complete without a pilgrimage to Pound's former digs at 10 Church Walk, High Street, Kensington. The place hasn't changed all that much. The incessant church bells that so infuriated the sensitive young poet still toll the hour, but one is far enough removed from the traffic on High Street that one imagines being in a small village in the midst of some unseen bucolic landscape.
Pound lived on the top floor, in the same room where Laurie Lee would later write Cider with Rosie, and where D.H. Lawrence crashed in a drunken heap after missing his train one night. The place is now owned by a psychotherapist, a thoroughly charming woman who coincidentally specializes in writers with writer's block. She caught me looking at the place and invited me in for tea. "What brings you here?" she asked. "Mediocrity," I replied. She knew what I meant. She had a daughter who lived in Australia. She wondered if maybe I couldn't use a session or two, but I declined.
At a reading at the Torriano Community Centre in Kentish Town, the star attraction was a rather mummified-looking John Heath-Stubbs, who managed to snooze through most of the readers, bar a woman who, in honor of his presence, read one of his poems.
The ancient bard came to life, intermittently, offering an explanatory note here, correcting a mispronunciation there; and, finally, before the poor woman was done, a seemingly sonambulant, mostly inaudible musing on his boyhood home where Edward the Second - the subject of the poem - was allegedly poisoned. Then back to sleep, his huge, white head resting on wrinkled paws perched imperially atop his walking stick.
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