Reading Through the Summer of Love 40 Years On

It has been 40 years since the "Summer of Love" in 1967 when a cultural focus turned to the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco and words like hippies and tie-dye entered the vocabulary.

The music of the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe & the Fish, Janis Joplin and others became associated with that place too.

Scott McKenzie sang that, "If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear a flower in your hair."

I was only 13 that summer. My dad had been sick for four years at that point and California seemed very far away, but very appealing.

There was a Time cover story, and I recall looking at photo spreads in Life magazine. Maybe that was signaling the explosion of general consciousness in America - or it was the beginning of the end already. In March 1966 Life's cover article was on this new psychedelic drug called LSD. It would be by that October.

The Gray Line bus company started "Hippie Hop" tours - "If you look to your right, you can see 710 Ashbury, home to Jerry Garcia & The Grateful Dead."

I didn't make it there until I had doubled my age and my wife and I did a Tijuana, Mexico to Wine Country journey through California. I don't recall much about the Haight which was pretty rundown at that point - at least locals were telling us it wasn't a place to really walk around as tourists at night. There were panhandlers and ex-hippies (or pretenders) who had seen much better days. I did the obligatory tour to see City Lights Books and Golden Gate Park.

I went again with a co-worker in 2002 when we were at a tech conference in Silicon Valley. We also did Alcatraz - a nice contrast.

We walked past the mural done by Charles Lobdell on the side of the Methodist Church on Belvedere. It's a huh blend of hippies around a tree and the faces of Martin Luther King, Jr., JFK, Harry Truman (huh?), and Julie, Linc & Pete from TV's The Mod Squad.

The San Francisco Gate did a piece on all this and spoke to a few poets of the time & place. Here's Lawrence Ferlinghetti.


"Before, up through the Human Be-In, the Haight was really sort of innocent, clean. I remember the early Jefferson Airplane, which was very lyrical. I was going to Fillmore quite a bit. (Poet) Andre Voznesensky and I performed in between sets of the Jefferson Airplane at the old Fillmore. Bill Graham generously offered us the stage. I was reading translations of Andre's poems. He was doing them in Russian. There was a light show going on.
I was onstage right next to Allen Ginsberg at the Human Be-In. I had an autoharp, which I was playing in those days. Luckily, they never allowed me to perform because it would've been a disaster. There was a sea of 10,000 faces. Don't know how many they actually counted. I remember, in the sunset, this lone parachutist descended on the crowd."

Billy Collins writes in The Trouble With Poetry

as a cold wave swirled around my feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
which is an image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti --
to be perfectly honest for a moment --

the bicycling poet of San Francisco
whose little amusement park of a book
I carried in a side pocket of my uniform
up and down the treacherous halls of high school.

(read the full poem at edutopia.org)

In the late 1950's as Billy wandered those high school hallways, I can imagine him with his paperback of A Coney Island of the Mind. I like the image of the book as an amusement park (again, stolen from the poet himself) that might help a uniformed kid escape high school and the 1950's.

I didn't really discover poetry until college, so I was probably carrying a novel for protection (Salinger, Hesse, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Updike or Vonnegut would be a good guess).

January 1967 was that Human Be-In. It was one of the "Gatherings of the Tribes" (see The Byrds, "Tribal Gathering"). That particular one was in the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park and brought together more than 10,000 people for music, poetry & Buddhist chants. Woodstock before Woodstock. No rain. The Hells Angels took care of lost children. (Pre-Altamont) Dr. Timothy Leary decreed the famous "turn on, tune in and drop out" and you listened. The guy was a professor from Harvard.

Another poet, Michael McClure: "I was sitting onstage next to Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder. Timothy Leary was up there, and Lenore Kandel. I sang one of my poems, "The God I Worship Is a Lion.'' It was the first great congregation of the young seeker people, known as the counterculture, who were drawing together to create their own huge family, and to celebrate it in their own huge tribe, and to celebrate it with music and dance and song and psychedelics and some real good political things."

Levi Asher has some great pages online about the Beat poets and that period. Reading it reminded me of a backpack full of books I read back then.

I recall John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy (boy raised by goats battles an evil computer system on a college campus) and The Magus - John Fowles (innocent collegiate Brit who is subjected to an elaborate demonstration of ancient mythological references on an isolated Greek island) and
Richard Farina's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me - loved the title and by the time I read it Farina had been killed in a motorcycle accident during a party celebrating the 21st birthday of his wife, folksinger Mimi Farina.

Asher mentions that a big book of 1966 was In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, who would famously mock Jack Kerouac's On The Road and his spontaneous writing technique - "That's not writing, that's typing". I couldn't get through either of those books. I also didn't have a copy of the little Quotations of Chairman Mao which was generally for wannabe revolutionaries. Revolution was appealing, but what Mao was doing to China was hardly Flower Power. Most people I knew who owned the book had never read it.

Michael McClure's The Beard and Lenore Kandel's The Love Book" were banned (sort of) books, but your mom might have been reading the "dirty" Valley of the Dolls" by Jacqueline Susann.

I did read and love Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes which was later made into the movie Charly and about ten years later I would teach the book and show the film to my own students wandering down their own treacherous halls.

The book I probably carried as my freak flag was Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing In America which I didn't totally understand, but really liked.

I had to read for college classes a few years later Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test which was what I knew about The Merry Pranksters and that scene as told by Tom Wolfe, Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House and Updike's Couples which I thought was a pretty hot book to have assigned (might have been the same class in 1973 where we read Jong's Fear of Flying). By the time I took the bus into New York City with some classmates to see Hair on Broadway it felt like the period was over and when the movie version came out in 1979, it seemed so old.

The free Summer of Love 40th party will be held September 2nd in Golden Gate Park. Performances include: Ray Manzarek (the Doors), Country Joe McDonald (Country Joe and the Fish), Canned Heat, Michael McClure, New Riders of the Purple Sage, and The Charlatans.

Supposedly it will be webcast too. Info at 2b1records.com

(Link suggested by commenter below)
Music from the Summer of Love

Dodge Poetry Festival 2008

I received a survey about a month ago about the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival and program. It seems that the funding for it was in doubt, and I had heard rumors that the usual location (Waterloo Village in Stanhope, NJ, USA) was not going to be available any more.

The survey was asking about how important I felt things like the teacher day, the student day, musical performers, ticket prices, locations (outdoors, indoors, at a college) etc. would be to my attendance.

I have always thought the festival is an incredible experience and a bargain (I might feel differently if I had to travel a long way to it), and I answered in that way (willing to pay a bit more, willing to have schools pay something, less music, another location).

Well, they sent out an email and it seems all seems well - though it troubles me that the Waterloo Village site seems to have been turned into an advertising launch page.

Thank you for taking the time to fill out and submit a Dodge Poetry
Festival email survey. The results of the survey were tabulated and
presented at the Dodge Foundation Board of Trustee meeting on June 12.
Responding teachers’ enthusiastic support for many features of High School
Student Day and Teacher Day as they are currently configured was an important
factor in the Board’s approval of a Dodge Poetry Festival at Waterloo Village
for September 25, 26, 27 and 28, 2008.

It was encouraging to hear from so many teachers who were enthusiastic supporters of the Festival, and to read so many articulate, often passionate testimonies to importance of the event for so many teachers and their students. Your words will provide much encouragement in the months ahead, just as your helpful suggestions,
recommendations and questions have given us much to consider as we work toward
mounting the 2008 Festival.

Have a rewarding and relaxing summer, and we look forward to seeing you at Waterloo in the fall of 2008.

Tales of Stubborn Children

For July, we are looking at Peter Murphy's poem "The Stubborn Child" from his book Stubborn Child which was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize. The poem has its inspiration in a fairy tale of the same name from the Brothers Grimm.

I never liked fairy tales as a kid. They scared me. I don't like them much now either. I still find them creepy, and I never felt they were stories well told. Someone gave my son a book of Grimm's tales when he was very small and I read a few looking for ones I might read him at night.

That was one of the few books in my life that I threw out. I didn't even want to give it to a used book sale.

Try reading this one to a kid before he goes to sleep. This is the Grimm Brothers' version of "The Stubborn Child."

Once upon a time there was a stubborn child who never did what his mother told him to do. The dear Lord, therefore, did not look kindly upon him and let him become sick.

No doctor could cure him, and in a short time, he lay on his deathbed.

After he was lowered into his grave and was covered over with earth, one of his little arms suddenly emerged and reached up into the air. They pushed it back down and covered the earth with fresh earth, but that did not help. The little arm kept popping out.

So the child’s mother had to go to the grave herself and smack the little arm with a switch. After she had done that, the arm withdrew, and then, for the first time, the child had peace beneath the earth.

from The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, Jack Zipes, translator, 1987

The puns on Grimm and grim are just too easy.

The Brothers Grimm began collecting folk tales around 1807 and produced a manuscript collection of several dozen tales, which they had recorded by inviting storytellers to their home and transcribing what they heard. It wasn't an academic undertaking and there has been some highly critical re-assessments about their sources and methods. That doesn't affect us in our reading. Actually, I like that their collecting was not so different from someone today collecting the campfire horror stories of kids. That's what some of the Grimm's tales seem like to me anyway.

Sometimes the title of this particular little tale is translated as the "willful" child. I realize that willful is basically the same obstinate child, but I think the Murphy poem might be the willful rather than just the stubborn child.

In his version, the child emerges from the grave, lives on and has a daughter to pray over and protect. He resurrects the willful child who is more than stubborn, and who still loves his mother who he knows loves him.

Of Peter's book, Stephen Dunn has said: "Stubborn Child unflinchingly enacts and examines his own painful childhood, then moves to the often damaged and compromised lives of the high school students he teaches. Like the best delineators of unhappiness, he also brings humor to his task, the dark humor of a survivor. And indeed this is a survivor's book, both transforming and transformative — in the end, Murphy the man able to love and affirm, Murphy the poet able to raise the unruly and the tawdry to the level of art."

Transformation is a key word for this prompt.

In an email to me about the poem's creation, Peter said:

"I had a deprived childhood in that I never read a fairy tale till I was in my late 30's, and when I did, I fell in love with the surreal, violent and familiar families portrayed by the Brothers Grimm. This was not Disney. This was Cinderella's evil stepsisters lopping off their heels to squeeze their fat feet into that impossibly tight glass slipper. Perverse entertainment till I came across "The Stubborn Child," perhaps the shortest Grimm tale. "Damn," I thought. "That's my childhood!" And it was, so I proceeded to write 40 or 50 drafts trying to get it right. Somewhere in this frenzy, I realized my own stubborn child was asleep in the next room, and that's when the poem found its ending and its shape, the transformation of the speaker from abused child to wounded father, trying, perhaps too hard, not to repeat the mistakes made on him.

Many stubborn children of all ages inhabit my book Stubborn Child as the poems branch away from my childhood and adolescence to the students who taught me for 30 years in Atlantic City, to other stubborn children, friends and family, who ghost the adult years of my life."

Murphy is not the first to try this self-imposed writing prompt of starting with a Grimm fairy tale. One popular anthology, The Poets' Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales, is an entire collection of these poems. The poets use the themes, motifs, and characters from Grimm. (poets include Anne Sexton, Carol Ann Duffy, Lucille Clifton, Galway Kinnell, Denise Duhamel, Randall Jarrell, Jane Yolen and Allen Tate. (Here is the table of contents)

Our prompt for this month is to take the story, characters, title, theme (as much as you need) from one of the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales and transform it for your own purposes. I would not be opposed to other fairy tales, but there's a lot of material in those strange tales from Jacob & Wilhelm.

If you want to try the prompt yourself, you can check a book of the tales, or Google a Grimm title that you know, but a good site to start with is SurLaLuneFairyTales.com. It includes tales that we are all familiar with like "Goldilocks and the 3 Bears", and ones I had never read, like "The Girl Without Hands". The tales there are all annotated, so you get some good background information that might well serve as your inspiration. There's a list of the Grimm tales on Wikipedia too.


Here are 2 links where you can read several other poems by Peter Murphy, and hear him reading online.

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Summer

Heading to California for mostly business; hopefully some pleasure.

Poets Online is still on vacation. At least, it says so on the prompt page now.

All is not lost. Hoping to work out a new prompt with Peter Murphy in the next few weeks for July.

There are a few new poems on the site from the rubaiyat prompt. By few, I mean 3. Not many more came in as responses to the Rumi prompt.

So maybe I am not the only one who has things other than poetry taking control of late.