History of My Reading: Iowa City Blues

Illustration made in the 1960s depicting the Beatles as old men.
I cut it out of a magazine and tacked it to my inside apartment
door on Brown Street in Iowa City.  It scared me.

By the end of my senior year at Knox College, I was accepted into both the fiction and poetry writing programs at the Iowa Writers Workshop--one of only a handful to be in both, I was told. So I visited Iowa City several times in the spring and summer of 1968.  The first time I met George Starbuck, the Workshop's director.  I believe I had dinner at his house.  He wanted me as a graduate student, and was looking for ways to make it happen.

On one of my trips I found a way.  I talked to a university official who boasted that the Workshop used to get away with giving scholarships to whoever they wanted, but no longer.  You had to qualify by university standards.  At the moment I didn't because I was without a B.A. degree.  Probably on that same trip however I read through the rules and regulations in the administration office, and found a favorable loophole in the fine print: I could be admitted as a graduate student without a B.A. if I could take the courses necessary to obtain one by the end of my first year.  Technically that was possible.

George Starbuck with Paul Engle, who'd started
the Workshop. Photo taken some time in the 60s.

It took several more trips to gather the financing.  George Starbuck kindly arranged for a fellowship through the Workshop office, and I eventually obtained a government education loan to cover housing and so on.  So by early fall I was back, looking for a place to live.

 Knox classmate Barbara Cottral was at Iowa that summer and fall.  She was starting to spend a lot of time with an older student named John Bean (and eventually married him), who was either in the Workshop or knew people who were.  It was probably through them that I was told of a place that rented to a lot of Workshop and other grad students.

  I believe they referred to it as Brown's, but in any case my address was 414 Brown Street.  There was a large complex of inexpensive housing, and a major part of it, as I recall it, was comprised of old World War II era Quonset huts.  I remember walking down an unpaved avenue on a wet evening, with these high-arching metal huts one after the other on both sides.  I was taken inside one, and it looked pretty much like a metal-covered tent, housing several scruffy students.  It was indistinguishable from an army camp, without guns or uniforms but probably as much pot and booze.

I was looking for a cheap single room, and was shown one in a large, once noble but now ramshackle house.  The space was actually a porch added to the house and walled up to make a long narrow room.  One wall was of exposed brick--so envied and fashionable in more recent years, but the bed was against it and the wall was cold.  It was in fact the brick wall of the outside of the house.  But there was an extra mattress in the room which I propped up against the wall for some protection against cold and damp.

 There was just one other tenant in a nearby room, and otherwise it offered complete privacy. The bathroom with its pathetic shower splashing reluctantly onto dark concrete was at the foot of the indoor stairs.  Besides the bed, the room was furnished with a threadbare but comfortable old red chair at the long window, with a decent lamp.  A desk and chair were near the door.  I moved in, with my guitar, my portable typewriter, a Sears stereo record player, a reel to reel tape recorder made mostly of plastic, and at least a few books and records.  Classes began in late September.

As I've noted elsewhere, during these months I was preoccupied with my upcoming pre-induction draft physical, and then my induction/appeal physical. This involved anxious ruminations and inescapable decisions about my beliefs and my future.  Country Joe and the Fish set the stage:

Come on all of you big strong men
Uncle Sam needs your help again
He's got himself in a terrible jam
Way down yonder in Vietnam
So put down your books, pick up a gun--
Gonna have a whole lot of fun... 

Also as noted before, I somewhat helplessly split my time this fall and winter among Iowa City, Galesburg and Chicago, including a trip there when Joni--on a teaching semester in a Chicago public school-- was recovering from illness and (relatively minor) surgery.  As a result of these and other factors, some to be explored here, I was in a kind of perpetual fog.  That must be part of the reason that I have a few sharp memories but little more, of my time in Iowa City.

So I remember specifically very few books I read, or even had with me, in this Brown Street room.  Surviving letters home reveal I requested two books that I'd left behind: my Portable Thoreau and the first collection of poems by John Ashbery I bought, The Tennis Court Oath.  

Apart from periodicals (joined by now by Rolling Stone), I can conjure up some reading of this general period that were influencing my own poetic and fictional aspirations. The previous March, during my senior year at Knox College, I spotted a book in the Knox Bookstore titled The Liverpool Scene, which I bought (and entered the date.)  In the 1960s possibly the only reason a student in the American Midwest would know about Liverpool was as the original home of the Beatles.  Their success brought international attention to the Liverpool music scene, where working class bands were both a rebellion and an expression of the local culture.  I came from a working class culture in a provincial town in western Pennsylvania, not much like Liverpool but more like it than, say, London or Manhattan.

But I had no idea that the Liverpool scene included poets, and that's what this book revealed.  Along with an introductory essay, photographs and snippets of interviews, it presented the work of a half dozen Liverpool poems, most prominently Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten.  What especially interested me was that these poems were performed, sometimes in the same clubs as the rock bands, and often with band accompaniment.  There was also an LP which I acquired later.

The poems were lyrical--sometimes close to actual song lyrics--and grounded in Liverpool, populated with pop culture figures (like Batman) along with quick literary references,and an incisive humor applied to underlying desperation.  They often dealt with concerns of the times, like the Bomb and Vietnam.  The book's photos included one of a dark-haired girl with haunting eyes.  I cut that page out and added it to the wall display.

The poems included a short one by Roger McGough that became my favorite lines of 1968:

My Johnny joined the army
Deserted me without a care
He got shot to ribbons
Now I wear him in my hair

The Liverpool Scene paid homage to the Beatles but also to Allen Ginsberg, who had visited with the poets in Liverpool, and provided them with an extravagant back cover quote: "Liverpool is at the present moment the center of the consciousness of the human universe."

Alerted by this book, I noticed Roger McGough's name on the cover of a Ballatine paperback, which contained his novella and a cycle of his poems.  McGough was a member of the Scaffold, a satirical theatre group, and a contributor to the British satire TV series, That Was The Week That Was.  In the many years since then, he became a media and literary eminence in England, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

But the Liverpool poet who spoke to me most directly was Brian Patten, the youngest, in his early 20s.  I ordered his collection, Little Johnny's Confession from the Knox Bookstore, probably with my last library prize credit.  Patten has also had a long poetic career since.

By 1968 as well, this trio of Henri, McGough and Patten had their own Penguin Modern Poets volume, and in 1969, Penguin included them in larger collection of around 50 poets entitled Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain. That book features a long Afterwords by Adrian Henri, one of the older Liverpool poets, who provided a comprehensive history.  As the endorsement by Ginsberg implied, these poets were inspired by the American Beat poets and later West Coast poets like Kenneth Patchen, and more generally by poets who read accompanied by jazz players, and by other poets Adrian named who emphasized public readings, as well as by the Liverpool scene.

 I had been greatly impressed at Knox by how differently Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder and Robert Bly read aloud, and yet all expressed the essence of their particular poetic approach.  I was attracted as well to the relationship with rock music, performance and the general milieu of the Beatles.  There was a certain McLuhan quality as well, the participatory nature of the oral and including contemporary cultural forms and references, popular and otherwise.  I was, after all, a fan of T.S. Eliot and the Bee Gees, the French New Wave and the Smothers Brothers.

By the fall of 1968, the new fiction I saw was in an experimental phase.  I was reading Donald Barthelme's stories in the New Yorker, and Robert Coover and John Barth in a fantastic new periodical, the New American Review, which was published as a paperback book.  They were all experimenting in different ways with myth and tales, popular culture and fractured narratives.

Another writer oddly influential at the time was the San Francisco author Richard Brautigan.  He applied a unique, deadpan yet lyrical style to the reportage of the unimportant.  Like the Liverpool poets, he impressed with unexpected similes and metaphors.  Mostly forgotten now, his book Trout Fishing in America was a late 1960s sensation.

What Barthelme, Brautigan, the Liverpool poets and even Ashbery had in common, at least superficially, was a kind of literary charm--a sly ebullience, a youthful mix of innocence and irony. Part of it came from successfully responding to Pound's dictim of "make it new" resonant with the times, and from that came energy and delight.  Now this work is no longer new and its connection to its times less accessible, but there is still some charm in the use of language, and its evocations of human experience and emotion.

 But to me in Iowa City, it all seemed so distant, so elusive. One of the first conversations I had with another student in the poetry workshop was with a young woman who had been there for at least a year.  It was before the school year started.  She told me that most Workshop students played the game of influence. The point was to get the most influential faculty writers to pave the way to publication, to write stellar recommendations and otherwise advance your career. That's what the Workshop was about, she said, the name of the game was Career.  She said it without bitterness, as a kind of wry report.  I guess she could see this would be news to me.

I don't recall having any choice in my workshop instructors.  The big noise in poetry that year was Ted Berrigan (in his only year teaching at Iowa.)  Anselm Hollo was another.  I drew Jon Silkin, a somewhat older British poet not very well known in the US.  In terms of the kind of poetry I was interested in writing, Berrigan or Hollo seemed a better fit, or at least so I thought at the time.

Robert Coover (far left) with Workshop students in 1967

As I recall, the big noise in the fiction workshop was Robert Coover, then being published regularly in the New American Review.  I'd met Richard Yates at Knox and admired his work, but I think he'd just left the Workshop.  In any case, I was assigned to a workshop run by a writer whose name I have forgotten--that's how unsuccessful that experience was for me.

Given the uncertainty of my tenure due to the draft, and the fragility of my psyche due to ditto, I decided to postpone any qualifying math, science or language course until the second semester, and took a film studies course instead.  I enjoyed it very much, when I attended.

There wasn't anything about the Workshop itself I enjoyed.  I didn't make a friend or even an acquaintance in either of my classes.  I don't even remember how many students there were or anything about any of them in my fiction workshop, and I recall only one student in my poetry workshop, mostly because he symbolized why I felt so out of place.  He was heavy, bearded, with short hair, wore tweed suits, smoked a pipe and never said a word or betrayed any emotion.  Likely in his 20s, he looked much older.

I don't recall a single moment of that fiction class.  All I remember is my first one-on-one meeting with its teacher.  I was supposed to bring 20 pages of fresh writing to it, which I did.  All I recall being said was that I should return next time with 20 more.  This is not a bad approach for instructing a young writer, but given my psychological state, that 20 pages had cost just about all I had.  Absent anything else to go on, I didn't see how to proceed.

In my poetry workshop I liked the teacher Jon Silkin, but I couldn't stand my basically comatose fellow students.  They seemed a staid and self-satisfied, wary, small-minded and highly traditional bunch.  If I had mentioned the Liverpool poets, I was sure, they would have only stared.  But then, that's all I ever saw them do anyway.

Silkin might actually have felt the same way about them. The only moment in class I recall was Silkin asking for a volunteer to read a particular poem aloud.  No one did.  Clearly annoyed, he slid the book across the table to me.  It felt like a challenge, like the coach throwing me the ball, daring me to sink the shot.

I don't remember the poet or the poem, though I do recall it had some French in it. Though it was by an established author,  I'd never read the poem before.  But I surprised no one more than myself by reading it perfectly, including the French.  "You read that with real feeling," Silkin said, with some wonder.  I was embarrassed because the feelings I may have expressed had little to do with the content of the poem.

But the moment that summarizes my Workshop experience came later, on the day when a group of my poems were going to be discussed by the class.  I had deliberately submitted my most daring verses, the craziest ones, including one that ran all over the page, rather than the ones I felt might be the best.  I arrived for that day's class a bit early, and stopped in the nearest men's room to gather myself for the battle.  That one particular fellow student, the bearded pipe-smoker, was also in the men's room.  I smiled at him reflexively.  He looked at me, said nothing, and left.

I proceeded to our assigned classroom, which I saw was empty.  I had somehow confused the start time.  In fact, the class was just over.  I had missed the discussion of my own poems.

Immediately I thought of the pipe-smoker, and how he must have thought I had been too scared to attend this class and had been hiding out in the men's room.  Yet, the worst of it was that he didn't say a word to me.  And all of that said everything to me about my experience at the Workshop.  I don't think I ever went back.

Kenney's bar, the historic Workshop hangout

When I first arrived in Iowa City, I was told the name and location of the bar favored by Workshop students. For decades it had been a place called Kenney's.  I don't think it was the bar I was directed to, though it could have been.  In any case, on my visits to this bar I did see people from the Workshop, including Ted Berrigan, looking like a member of Hell's Angels.  People typically drank beer, ordered in pitchers.  It was pretty lousy, watery beer.  "Born To Be Wild" played on the jukebox repeatedly.  It seemed to be the bar's theme song, expressing the hippie biker ambiance.

Most of the faculty and most of the students were male.  I am not given to a generalized condemnation of the gender I belong to, but it felt oppressive. In any case, for whatever reasons, I was steadily unhappy there.  My notebooks of this period contain almost nothing about my experiences with the Workshop or even in Iowa City--just endless notes for the fiction I wasn't writing.  But there is one scribbled note on a scrap of paper that has somehow survived.  I don't know when I wrote it, but it recorded a moment in that bar, with my glass of  tasteless beer sitting on the pinball machine, fighting off the feeling that I didn't like pinball, or the taste of this beer, or this bar.  "I stood there, with that layer of heat on my skin, trying to like it all."  I failed.

U of Iowa campus 1968

I remember the cold days--even though I was also there in a sunny fall, I remember Iowa City as cold and snow-covered-- going to campus, negotiating the winding pedestrian bridge, sitting with my coffee in the student union that connected buildings, and occasionally seeing one of the few people I knew.  I remember the coffee shop where I sat at the counter and had my pork tenderloin sandwich and coffee before a class, listening to the Moody Blues "Tuesday Afternoon" on the jukebox.  The only social occasion I recall was at Valjean McClenighan's apartment (after graduating Knox a year before me, she entered Iowa's theatre program), where she made me dinner, but which regrettably found me in my characteristic distracted graceless fog.

Otherwise, when I was in Iowa City, I was in my room.  I only remember two of the books I read there.  At the University bookstore I bought a just-published hardback, the first legitimate book about the Beatles, Hunter Davies' The Beatles: A Biography.

And when that wasn't enough to keep me in their world, I found cheap paperback novelizations of the Beatles' films, and sat in my chair by the window correcting the dialogue--penciling in the lines I memorized from the movies when they were different from those in the book.

Other than that, I recall listening endlessly to the new Bee Gees album, Idea.  The Bee Gees were an even more private obsession. Though they would eventually sell more records than any group in history, at the time and for years afterwards, they were dismissed and derided--at this time, as watered-down Beatles.  (Even in the 1970s, my fellow rock critics smiled indulgently at my aberrational appreciation of the Bee Gees.)  I bathed in their pure harmonies, playful melodies, strange arrangements, and ambiguous lyrics with private applications. At least until the Beatles finally released their double White Album just before Christmas.

On the inside of my door I posted a selection of nice things people had said about my writing in official letters and reviews, as encouragement.  But I also taped up that illustration of the Beatles as old men, my version of the skull on the desk I guess, a kind of memento mori, and expression of suspected futility.

University of Iowa Bookstore 1967

Looking back, I made some big mistakes.  I should have confided in George Starbuck, the head of the Workshop who had taken a personal interest in me.  I should have sought out Jon Silkin for private conversation (for I would have learned, as I did later, that he knew the Liverpool poets personally, and they respected him.)  I certainly should have spent more time with Valjean.  Once she brought me to meet some grad students and faculty in the theatre department, and they were friendlier, more interested and more welcoming to me than anyone at the Workshop.  One of the faculty even asked me to try out for a part in a Pinter play. That doing any of this never even occurred to me suggests the weight of my distractions.

Occasionally I would escape to Galesburg.  The first time I hitchhiked there I remember walking up a city street from the highway with my duffel bag, wondering what I was doing there, when I saw the first person I knew.  I'm pretty sure it was Harry Contompasis.  Anyway, somebody who seemed happy to see me.  That kind of welcome declined on subsequent visits, as I became a perhaps too frequent visitor with no real business being there.  But still, I had people to talk with and laugh with.  And I think I actually did some research in connection with my college novel.  My notebooks reveal, by the way, my one good idea: to start it with the JFK assassination in 1963 and end it with the RFK assassination in 1968.  But that idea somehow got lost in the growing complexity of its conception.

Galesburg was often a stop before Chicago, where I visited Joni at the Del Prado Hotel in Hyde Park, not far from the Lake.  At that time it was mostly a residential hotel for students.  My visits there were also an opportunity to explore downtown Chicago and the lakefront, even in the cold, sooty wind off the Lake in winter.  Once on the L, I daydreamed my way past my Hyde Park stop and woke up at Stony Avenue, which I had been warned was dangerous territory.  But for some reason I decided to hitchhike back, and got a ride from two young Black men in a sporty car, who were discussing Zeffirelli's new film version of Romeo and Juliet.

This is what the Beatles really looked like in 1968, in portraits
included in the White Album package

I remember listening to the White Album with Joni and her very patient roommates, and I remember on an earlier visit, watching election returns in the hotel bar, smoking a cigar, my cavalier pretense fading when Humphrey came up short and Nixon was elected.  The assassination of Robert Kennedy remained a bitter thing, and for the only time in my life I made the mistake of not accepting that one of the two party candidates was going to be president, either the lesser of two evils or the more evil, and that I needed to choose. Now it was over and I knew enough of Nixon to know the war would go on.  I've been disconsolate on many election nights since, but on this one I was trying to hide a broken heart, even from myself.

What inflected all of this with a patina of the surreal--from Iowa City to Galesburg and Chicago--was its irrelevance to the upcoming life-altering moments of draft induction, and the decisions they would force. Sometimes I felt that to others, having this confrontation in mind was like having a cold--people might recognize it and sympathize once, but then they'd forget it: it wasn't their cold, they weren't saddled with it every minute.

My pre-induction draft physical had been in October, and my induction/appeal physical had been scheduled for early December.  I got a postponement to finish my Iowa semester. Eventually I had my three day physical at Fort Des Moines, and I was finally found unfit for military service.  But I may have already packed up and left Iowa City, without a word to anyone except my near neighbor, who was the only friend I remember making.  Earlier my mother had observed in a letter that she'd heard about a lot of things I didn't want to do, but I didn't seem to know what I wanted to do.  She was right.