History of My Reading: Cummington Summer 1970

BK at Cummington 1970.  Photo by James Baker Hall

 "What you remember saves you.  To remember/Is not to rehearse, but to hear what never/Has fallen silent..."  W.S. Merwin

“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming/We’re finally on our own/This summer I hear the drumming/Four dead in Ohio…” Neil Young:“Ohio” May 1970

 In June 1970, weeks after the protest occupation, I left Galesburg, Illinois and Knox College. They had been one center of my life since 1964. Except for a brief visit in the 1980s, I never returned.

 While in Galesburg I was staying with Carol Hartman, who was finishing her third year as a student.  She and three friends were planning to spend the summer in Boston.  Since I had been accepted for the eight week summer session at the Cummington Community of the Arts in western Massachusetts, I decided to join them.

Jane Langer and Carol at Knox

 By then of course it was more than that.  Carol and I had been friends since her first year at Knox, when I was a senior. A mutual attraction was evident from the start.  But I was more of an older confidant then.  Carol and her close friends—among them Jane Langer, Judy Bowker, Jan Byrne, and Steve Phillips—more or less adopted me.  For awhile, Judy was “the Little Kid” and I was “the Big Kid.”  I won’t say it was foremost in my mind, but I did remember how important my relationships with older students were in my first and second years.

  Our attraction led to a romance that flowered in that spring of 1970 when we were both free of other such active relationships.  The summer together—before and after Cummington-- was to be the next step. 

Carol passed away in August 2020.  Partly in deference to those who were an active part of her life in recent years, and partly because I’m not sure I’ve come to terms with this, I haven’t shared memories before.  There were decades when our contacts lapsed. She got back in touch with me by 2000, and I have a Christmas card from 2001. At some point a couple of my emails went unanswered.  After that I had news of her mostly through the Knox alumni magazine. In a recent year I emailed her birthday greetings out of the blue—it might even have been in January 2020. 

  To do more than describe the Carol I knew in the 1970s would be presumptuous. So I can’t even attempt a full portrait or tribute. But with the discretion appropriate to circumstances—including the purpose of these posts—I can allude to what I know from that time.

 We stopped in Chicago first.  While Carol visited her parents, I stayed with Knox alum Howard Partner at his apartment in the city. It was in a then-funky neighborhood at Dickens and Fremont.  My first night there I listened to the second Poco album, unable to sleep. (So I recorded in a notebook, which otherwise has the usual and frustrating lack of details about that time, but is filled instead with notes on writing projects, memories and bits of verse. Though I did record impressions of a free concert in Lincoln Park, and a noisy voyage on the L to meet Carol at the Carson Pirie Scott department store, where I was still getting hostile stares for my long hair.) 

At Howard’s I picked a book off his shelf I’d meant to read: Joy: Expanding Human Awareness by William C. Schultz.  Turns out, he said later, that it was my book that he’d borrowed.  So I got it back, and I have it still. Most of it was derived from the Human Potentials Movement, encounter groups and so on.  But one thing jumped out at me then (or so I noted): the relationship between the body (and its ills or health) and the mind or emotions. Pretty standard now, it was largely disregarded in the conventional medicine of 1970.

 Schultz’s book begins with a description of his infant son, his innocent absorption in his surroundings, his joy in discovery, learning and experience. It wasn’t just that his son was often joyful: “Ethan is joy,” he writes.  But typically this does not last. “Where does the joy go?”  Reading this now, I realize that a version of this question—what happens to this kind of innocence, why is it destroyed, and how can some of it be recovered—was the active subtext of my twenties.

 Meanwhile Carol was having some conflicts with her parents, particularly concerning her reluctance to return to Knox for another year.  But they also were skeptical about me, though we never met.  They (meaning her mother mostly) referred to me as “the Polish poet.” Carol said (fondly) that her parents had strange nicknames for her, including "Miss Pasadena" and "Zookie."

Carol and her mother

 After exploring other options, Carol and I simply used half-fare cards (mine borrowed) to fly to Boston, with what we could carry.  Carol’s older brother Raymond was attending M.I.T. (or Harvard, or both.)  She and her friends were to stay at his Fairwood Circle apartment in Cambridge, before a summer sublet was available that probably Raymond arranged.  After a few days there on the floor, I was off to western Massachusetts and the Cummington Community of the Arts. 

My actual memories of Cummington are like snapshots, loosely related.  I also haven’t found manuscripts or notebooks that I can attribute specifically to my time there, which turned out to be only about four weeks.  But I do have a few relevant documents. And I have many letters (remember them?) that Carol wrote to me as well as letters I wrote to her, beginning in 1968 and including while we were separated that summer.  Some of the contents provide  details and a few prods—or even corrections—to memories of Cummington. 

I also have a supplement to memory that’s unique in my experience: a published novel written about the Cummington Community and partially about that summer.  Music From a Broken Piano by James Baker Hall was published in 1982 by the Fiction Collective—the outfit founded by the previously mentioned novelist Ronald Sukenick, among others.  I remember James Baker Hall being there in Cummington that summer of 1970—though I was introduced to him as a photographer, not a writer.

  Some of the characters, a few events and relationships, and even some words spoken, I recall from that summer. But the novel is actually set in the summer of 1969, when this arts community was formed (called “Farmington” in the novel.)  Some, perhaps many people were there for both summers.  The novel seems highly fictionalized, and is somewhat cleverly confusing in that he gives the names of a couple of actual people to characters not based on them but (it seemed to me) on someone else I recognized.  Some of the novel’s events may have in some sense happened in 1969.  That summer did feature (according to a subsequent newsletter), for example, the presentation of “3 Pieces for Broken Piano.”

 Of course I first paged through this novel to see if there was a character based on me.  When I was pretty sure there wasn’t, I lost interest for awhile. Though reading it recently I recognize an imaginative story of those times, it’s useful in this context mostly for ambiance, description of the places, which seem accurate to my recollections.  The ambiance included frequent seemingly important discussions and rapid interpersonal events and impressions, most of which I've forgotten, but even if I remembered them, Baker Hall's novel would convince me to ignore most of them. 

 James Baker Hall was indeed known for his photographs as well as his writing, principally poetry, and was much honored as a poet and teacher in his native Kentucky, where he was the state's Poet Laureate. 

The Cummington Community of the Arts was located on some 150 acres of woods and fields, between Northampton and Pittsfield in western Massachusetts.   It was centered on what had been a working farm, though not in cultivation for decades, perhaps generations. Beginning in the 1922 when it was called The Music Box (which apparently was a summer theatre), Cummington had hosted a succession of arts schools and summer workshops.  A number of famous people had participated at one time or another, including poets Marianne Moore and Archibald MacLeish, artists Willem de Kooning and Helen Frankenthaler, and photographer Diane Arbus.

 The Cummington area was best known for another sprawling fallow farm, the former residence of the poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant.  Though I don’t think I knew it at the time, we also weren’t very far from the farm where Herman Melville lived when he was writing Moby Dick, and occasionally dining and telling tall tales at the neighboring farm of the Nathaniel Hawthornes.

 Partly because of all this, and the presence of teachers and students from prestigious New England universities, I was perhaps dimly if not consciously aware that I was swimming in different waters, closer to traditional centers of power, past and future.  It wasn’t western Pennsylvania or the Midwest anymore. 

cover of brochure with photo from 1969

This Cummington spread had been reconstituted as a self-organizing Community of the Arts just the year before—that is, the summer of 1969 that Baker Hall had novelized.  Evidently one of the poetry readings I attended at Yale when I was in Stony Creek the previous winter had included a few Cummington attendees showing a film and making a pitch for the community.  I wrote to the address they gave and applied for this summer.  I was invited to attend, pretty much cost-free.  The invitation followed me to Buffalo.

 So on Sunday, June 20 I arrived for the session that was to end August 15. Part way up a hill was the center of the Cummington spread: a large building with kitchen and dining hall, a large barn that served as a dormitory and another barn-like structure with art studios and darkroom.  One of Cummington’s selling points was that it could accommodate several families, and they were housed mostly in cabins further up the hill. There were also buildings down the hill that I don’t think I ever visited, but as it turned out, that’s where the cool people wound up. There were some 45 people there at Cummington in 1970, somewhat straining its capacity.

 As a solo, a newbie and a freebie, I was housed in the big barn.  Baker Hall described it well: I was to live in “more of a stall than a room, with four walls and a door but no ceiling.”  There was no privacy based on sound.  I had a bed and a table for a desk. The nearest bathroom and source of hot water was in the main building next to the barn.  My first letter back to Carol mentioned the cold (later it would be the heat), the weak light (I requested and got a decent reading lamp), and the incessant sound of an oboe player relentlessly practicing his scales. As I was soon to discover, close to half of the “community” were classical musicians and music students, many from Yale.  It was as if a busload of them got lost on their way to Tanglewood. 

One of the C. structures (not THE barn)

Though I was impressed by the country silence and the skyful of stars, the first group meal didn’t suggest that this was going to be a community experience for me (or so I wrote to Carol.)  What I was hoping for I suppose was something like the Black Mountain College experience of the 1930s through the 1950s, that Robert Creeley was part of and talked about—cutting-edge artists and students in various arts (and in Black Mountain’s case, sciences) in an environment of experimentation and cross-fertilization. 

 Apart from high expectations, my hopes were doomed (as I think I knew then) by another imperative: the overriding political issues of the moment.  We were less than two months past Cambodia and Kent State. The Vietnam War was still expanding. It was supposed to be the summer we’d hear the drumming.  But all I was hearing was the oboe, and the vast silence of the country. 

Harvard spring 1970

 Not that there was much drumming elsewhere.  We arrived in Cambridge in time to witness and participate in an antiwar march through Harvard Square, but it clearly was nothing like what we heard had happened there that spring.  It turned out to be the last such demonstration I ever saw there.  For one thing, the students had taken their drums and gone home. That had happened everywhere.  And though political ferment was not over, it had turned sullen on the war, and fractured into separate and sometimes hostile movements.  Women’s lib, for instance, and Black Power. But I was still experiencing those emotions from the spring, including the anger I had suppressed so as not to endanger others during the Knox occupation.  That didn’t make me a happy camper.

 Plus my own diffidence in an unfamiliar situation with people I didn’t quite get.  The only time Cummington is mentioned in a surviving notebook is to quote some unnamed person after I’d evidently held forth on something or other.  “Gee, I didn’t know you could talk like that,” this person said.  “I didn’t know you talked at all.” 

Though I probably read fiction and poetry as well as journalism and so on, the most characteristic reading I did at Cummington—and the only thing I specifically recall—was the Black Panther Party newspaper.  I was constructing a play out of fragments, quotes from its articles as well as other elements, a series of voices.  I never finished it, but the reading helped me see things from another perspective, as I began to more deeply understand what was and is called institutional and structural racism.  Some of this amplified the personal point of view I first found in James Baldwin’s essays, as far back as high school.  This time I did get caught in the rhetoric (revolutionary and otherwise) of the Panthers political engagement and analysis, though not the imagery of violence. Mostly I learned a little more of what it was like to be Black in America.

 The Black Panthers were known in the media for their aggressive rhetoric in favor of violent revolution, which owed some of its intellectual basis to Marxism.  But as their newspaper chronicled, they pioneered social services directed to the Black community.  The best known of these was the free breakfast program, in which the Panthers organization fed more children in the Oakland area particularly, than did the state of California.  The federal public school free breakfast program didn’t exist then, and may well have been inspired by the success of their efforts.  But all levels of government in those years felt free to harass, arrest and at least in the case of Fred Hampton, murder people because they were Black Panthers.

 This was within the more general context of the times.  The Vietnam War period of the 1960s and 1970s was an intense dance of the apocalyptic and utopian. As poet W.S. Merwin described it:  “Wild aspiration and vertiginous despair existed not alternately but at once, and at times we may have clung to visionary hopes not so much because they were really credible as because we felt it would be not only mean-spirited but fatal to abandon them.  We knew a kind of willful desperation.” And I would add, a kind of willed innocence.

W.S. Merwin. Photo by James Baker Hall

 It may be hard to remember and difficult to explain in today’s context, just how different this period was, and how it nevertheless still echoes. “We know that age to be utterly beyond our reach now, irretrievably past, a period whose distance we already feel as though it had stretched into centuries,” Merwin continues (in the preface to his 1992 collection The Second Four Books of Poems), “and yet it appears to us to be not only recent but present, still with us not as a memory but as a part of our unfinished days, a ground or backdrop before which we live.  It could be said that we are haunted by it, which would suggest that that time was not done with in us, that what we saw and felt then is still part of our incompleteness and our choices.”

Cummington was not untouched by countercultural concerns, and some of it founding members probably wanted to integrate them into its communal experience.  But I didn’t sense much awareness around me there of the political ideas and ferment going on then.  The place seemed to be divided among oblivious academics, spaced-out hippie artists and frightened music students.   I felt isolated.

 Later in the summer I came to some empathetic understanding of at least the frightened music students.  On a trip to town or somewhere with a few Cummington people, I found myself at a coffee shop table across from a quiet young woman I hadn’t really talked with before.  She was a music student at Yale. Our somewhat stilted conversation seemed to be loosening up until I said something about the war. She became quiet as I babbled on, until her eyes filled with tears. “I just want to study music,” she finally said.  So I saw that her life, too, was being deformed by the war.   

 By then my isolation had already been dramatized. Since I was getting a largely free ride at Cummington based on my work, I felt obligated to share it, so I gave a poetry reading after a couple of weeks.  However, some discussion the previous day infuriated me so much that I stayed up all night writing a long discursive and often angry poem which ended with the words, “Cummington, you are up against yourselves.”  It was the last thing I read, and I sat down to a complete and lasting silence.  Oddly, I hadn’t expected that.

   However, I was to have one more public performance with a different outcome, before I left halfway through the scheduled eight weeks.

 I had other moments of alienation, as when many were talking about (and participating in) an “environmental art” project, which essentially was digging a big ditch. To me it was the opposite of “environmental” in the sense of ecological, since it was basically an act of needless  (and to me, worse than pointless) destruction of the environment—and as such, a demonstration of human ego that was a principal cause of our depleted planet.  I don’t think anyone else got my point.

  On the other hand there was one event I recall that gave me a Black Mountain College community vibe. Someone organized a performance of Erik Satie’s “Vexations,” which is comprised of a short musical passage to be played 840 times. A complete performance could take from 18 to 36 hours. 

New York premiere of Vexations: John Cage
(standing) with one of the pianists, John Cale
(later of the Velvet Underground.) Seated is
the only audience member to witness the 
entire 18 hour performance.

Though the eccentric and influential composer in late nineteenth/ early twentieth century Paris is now known for several haunting piano works, this Satie piece was not published or performed in his lifetime.  In fact it was not commercially published in the U.S. until 1969.  John Cage (who incidentally had participated in Black Mountain College) discovered the manuscript, and later organized the first concert, in New York City in 1963, in which a dozen pianists played the repeated motif continuously for just over 18 hours.  

 The same basic format was followed at Cummington, which may well have been the second performance anywhere of this piece (most of the documented performances seem actually to have been in the last decade or so.)

  The grand piano was moved in front of the fireplace in the main building, with candles around it.  Seats were provided, and audience members came and went over the hours. There were enough pianists to perform it in relays, though probably they had more than one shift.  I went to listen three times—at the beginning, at some point late at night, and for the finish.  I stayed long enough each time to feel the hypnotic effect, which fatigue and a few tokes tended to enhance. 

 I was not entirely solitary or even misanthropic at Cummington.  I participated in community discussions and some events, did my turns in the kitchen, played volleyball and spent sociable hours usually inflected with wine and dope.  On one of the first days I was part of a group that piled into a car to see the Beatles movie Let It Be at a Northampton theatre, much to the consternation of Chris Horton, an artist and the person in charge of the community, who wanted everyone to focus on Cummington.  But people came and went all summer anyway.  (As for the movie, it played as the dour prequel to the recent breakup of the Beatles, but on the evidence of the recent Get Back cuts of the same 1969 footage, seems more like a reflection of the original director’s offended ego.)

 I also observed (as apparently did James Baker Hall) some of the sexual and interpersonal dynamics of an idealistic group of high achievers isolated together.  I’d already heard of a summer in which four young male philosophers and their wives lived together in one house to “do” philosophy together, and all four marriages collapsed before fall.  At least one marriage openly lapsed at Cummington: a blond wife, the most glamorously attractive woman there, took up with the most strikingly attractive young man.  There were also racial dynamics too complex to get into (though Baker Hall gives it a try, with limited success in my view.)  

Heather McHugh in 1981

One of the first people I met at Cummington was a young poet named Heather McHugh, 22 at the time, who was assigned a room (or stall) near mine on the barn’s second floor.  She visited my room, read some of my poems and declared that I might become as famous as she would be.  Then she reclined on my bed.  I was frozen at my desk for a little too long, so by the time I could move she had already left. 

 In memory, that was about the last I saw of her, though letters to Carol indicate we were casually friendly throughout. Carol even met her a couple of times.  Heather did quickly disappear from the barn, however, becoming associated with the residents of a cabin elsewhere—visual artists or ceramicists and filmmakers, I think.  Anyway, they were what I thought of as the Cool Kids of the community.  She moved down there. 

 And Heather McHugh indeed became famous, at least in poetry and academic circles, with prize-winning poetry collections, much-praised translations and literary essays, as well as teaching.  She’s a literary eminence now.

 I had other casually friendly relationships with people whose names I unfortunately no longer remember, including the slightly older man, also a writer, with whom I got roaring drunk one night. When he tried to drive us in his big old Buick up the rutted hill to his family cabin, it slid into a ditch and we were suddenly pitched at an angle looking up at the stars, laughing hysterically. 

Rhea Ormond at C. 1970. BK photo

I made one friend, an artist and photographer named Rhea Ormond.  She lived in the smaller barnlike building some yards from the big barn, with an enormous studio and a darkroom.  Rhea was enthusiastic, open-hearted, astute and generous.  She got me to collaborate on an oil painting with her, and she also showed me how to develop photos.  I believe she had been at Cummington the summer before, and returned at least one more year.  We exchanged infrequent letters for several years, and met at least once more. Rhea eventually settled in rural North Carolina and specializes in murals and large canvases, while also teaching at a community college.  She’s a valued artist and respected member of her community.

 After awhile I met a guitarist, Alan Jaffe, who lived on the ground floor of the barn.  The “stalls” that Baker Hall described pertained mostly to the second floor, which was on the level of a hayloft.  At least some of the first floor stalls had ceilings and full-length walls, so they were fully enclosed rooms.  Alan lived in one of these.  I’m not sure how we met.  Perhaps I heard him playing jazz on his electric guitar, or maybe Rhea introduced us. In any case, we wound up collaborating on a set of my songs, working them out in relaxed sessions in his large room over a couple of weeks.

 Alan Jaffe was a Yale music student then, and has since become a notable jazz guitarist in New York.  I think he especially enjoyed playing the rock riffs and country licks he probably didn’t usually get to do otherwise.  He had both taste and touch as a guitarist, so these hours were easily among the best I experienced at Cummington. 

 Meanwhile, Carol and I were exchanging frequent letters and occasional phone calls. Soon she arrived for a few days visit. I found an unused room at the bottom of the barn—not really fit for ordinary habitation, but private, so we slept there.  At first Carol was wary, perhaps intimidated by the people at Cummington, and didn’t want to participate in much. But she warmed up to several, like Rhea, one at a time.  

Her visit definitely changed how people viewed me. They could now tell themselves my moodiness was a natural response to being separated from such a beautiful girlfriend. Women whose interest in me had gone nowhere now understood, and at least pretended to approve of, my faithfulness. When Carol left—hitching a ride with several community members driving to Boston, including Heather—I knew that I wasn’t going to spend the whole summer apart from her. 

   Though I was in some ways settling into Cummington life, taking afternoon baths in the main building, heating up water in the empty kitchen late at night for my instant espresso, I decided to go back to Cambridge early.  About halfway through the summer there was a kind of open house event, with community members giving recitals, showing their artwork and so on. Alan and I were going to perform my songs.  That seemed like the best time to leave. I worked out the plan with Carol, who somehow got the use of a vehicle large enough to bring her friends (including a driver) and haul me and my stuff back with them.

 My memory is that Alan and I were set to perform late in the afternoon, pretty much at the end of the schedule. Most of the strangers who I’d seen wandering around all day were already gone, so our audience was a good chunk of the Cummington community, plus Carol and her friends.

 I’ve managed to unearth the lyrics to the songs we did, and I have a tape. Songwriting for me was (and sometimes still is) a process of working with sounds, including the sounds of words, how they fit the rhythm, with rhymes at the end of the lines.  Interpreting them might come later, if at all. 

Alan Jaffe

Alan and I had worked out seven or eight songs, though I doubt we did them all that afternoon.  Alan played electric guitar, I played acoustic guitar, with a mike or pickup, and I sang.  We’d prepared two hard rockers, both which qualified as a possibly new genre of apocalyptic rock: “SST” (surreal imagery of ecological devastation) and “Baby, Are You Looking for Me Now?” which formed the same sort of lurid imagery into a relationship song.  I’m sure we did this one live, as it is the better song, very propulsive, with lines like “Snarls of bible ministers’ broken lives/death cry of the power mower wives…”

 We did a mid-tempo rocker called “It’s Right,” with a kind of John Fogerty Creedence Clearwater vocal line, though with a bit of structure copped from “Get Back.”

This was becoming the “personal is political” era, though these interpretations come after the fact of composition. "It's Right" starts with verses about personal relationships ("When I'm away love, your eyes are in my mind"), then moves to a wider source of meaning: “When love is winning/crying in the streets/ Everyone you meet is your tomorrow.” “To cast the numbers/against the darkened sky/all we know is why and we can be there.” Then it moves to action, if only marching in the street: “When light is moving/across the face of time/the moment’s changing rhyme becomes/the sound of happy feet and I know it’s right…”  A bit of self-mockery there with "happy feet"--a little Lennonesque.

We probably did my 50s-style rock and roll tribute to the Chuck Berry era, called “Berrybush,” which I must have written while I was a Knox student. We had a jazzy, neo-Dylan/Lennon rant, which never got a title better than “Dostoevsky and the Purple Voice,” but I doubt if we did this one live, as I couldn’t possibly remember all the words.  We must have done “His Blue Image,” a slower song with Alan’s choice licks as background to chilling imagery about President Nixon (“the king of ice/with his melted smile and his dagger dice”) and the war.  I notice now that I managed to shoehorn images from Blake (“the horses of instruction”) and James Joyce (“the cabman’s battered face”) in the same verse. The blue image is Nixon on so-called black and white TV.

 We’d worked out two straight-ahead country songs, of the type common on the radio in those days, with simple structures that turned on the reversal of a phrase or image, like “Act Naturally” (which the Beatles copped from Buck Owens.)

  Of these, I’d written “Leaves That Are Green in the Winter” as a novelty number for my hometown group, the Crosscurrents. “No Down Payment,” came more recently, at Iowa.  It’s got a line that resonates with my memories of those months ostensibly at the Writers Workshop, in my narrow Iowa City room.  Several times the singer lists his possessions, which include: “and a bottle of red wine/a book of empty pages/and an awful lot of time,” before the chorus: “But fair is fair/and trade is trade/no complaining about the deal when the bargain’s made/my terms were loneliness for the freedom of a dove/and I’ve made no down payment on your love.” We probably performed this one.

 All of these songs were more or less heartfelt; none more than “We’re All Together Again,” which used the jaunty old ditty (“We’re all together again/we’re here, we’re here) that you can find sung by Berle Ives on the site devoted to Scout camp songs.  My version was slower, with the brilliant, mournful country-inflected backing Alan devised.  With the traditional chorus, it added verses that suggested an inventory of gently disappointed lives at a school reunion. 

 My cache of letters from friends contains many stories about the sad outcomes of clashes with the “real world” of jobs, the meaningless work, crazed or sterile work environments, the awful bosses, the mindless humiliation and boredom, and the accompanying crazed world-- the sense of imprisonment in a lunatic asylum. 

 These accounts began with summer jobs while we were still in college, but the stories—on and off such pages—became weightier after schooldays were over.  This song reflects these sentiments.

 Though the lyrics were completed some time before, letters from Carol this summer also included such stories, as she and her friends dealt with the job market.  Carol applied for an opening as a telephone operator, but was told she was too intelligent.  Her friend Julienne planned to apply the next day, but now knew to play dumb. Carol knew she could have almost any entry level job she wanted, but she kept backing off, as they all seemed so bleak.  

 Later in the summer, the Little Kid visited, and said she had to suppress her true answer to yet another erroneously arrogant boss asking why he should hire her: “Because I’m smarter than you.”

 My song included a verse loosely based on two people I had known, including a Knox student in the past: “Marcia dropped from college, and went into the city/Wrote ads for a bookstore, dressing very pretty/but the air in the city made Marcia blink and cry/She rented an apartment and stayed there till she died. But we’re all together again, we’re here, we’re here. We’re all together again, we’re here.”

 What I felt dying were dreams, hopes, integrity, innocence, changing who we were, and could be. This is not the last word on the eventual careers and achievements over a lifetime of people I knew, but these experiences and sentiments were prominent at that early stage, and at that historical time.

 As for Cummington audience reaction, apparently such sentiments were easier to swallow combined with a melody, a tasty guitar and bouncy lines familiar from youth, however ironically used.  The song went over well, as did the entire performance.  When it was over, a number of community members with big smiles congratulated me, and also stayed to say goodbye.  I even got a big embrace from the beautiful blond having the affair who hadn’t said three words to me all summer. 

 Then I grabbed my gear from the barn, and with Carol and her friends, left Cummington in the rear view mirror.  In three or four hours we were in Cambridge, where over the next years, life would change, more than once.   

Chair Rental

 

Very little was known about anything

 in the old time. It was as a vocalise

 is to a sonata, children in the limelight

 and water rushing over stones

 as though in a hurry to get somewhere.

 It’s possible to joke about it now

 that the trial period has lapsed.

 To not admit you’re miscast.

 America’s old churches were seen as a new

 philosophy of one-upmanship:

 playing, yet not part of the game.

 Thus many things endure, and no one 

gets very anxious about them: spots

 like coins from a tree that who the heck

 could have foreseen in its time anyway?

 Just stand here. Call me potatoes

 and soap. Call me soap and potatoes.

 My husband’s fiancé wished it otherwise.

 There you go. 

--John Ashbery

photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson