Introduction by Florence Wetzel
October in Bayonne, a bus and I don't know where I'm going but I get there. A stop at an old-fashioned New Jersey bakery, cream soda and a brownie with M&Ms inside and I like it. Walk to Hersch's house, him unsure at first, what does he have to say, but actually he has plenty to say and it's all good, words you can use to sing other words. There are people in this world whose fine sensory way of living and speaking point to gentle stars. There are people who sell candy, and there are people who write poetry. Please welcome Hersch Silverman.


FW: When you were younger, how did your poems come, and how do they come now?

HS: What do you mean by "come"?

FW: Was it the kind of thing where you sat down every day and said, "Okay, I'm going to write poetry", or more that phrases came to you?

HS: Different ways. I guess things I wrote about occupied my daily life and inspired me to write, not the business-facts, but the feelings that occurred that remained vivid enough to demand being written about, captured. Also, later on, taking part in 'open readings', or doing featured readings, pressured me to have something new to read, not to be boring and read the same pieces over and over. I started when I was very young, wanting to express myself. Influenced by a fifth grade teacher's reading a story to the class, and by voraciously reading library books. I was a Yankee baseball fan and read the sports pages and listened when I could to baseball games on the radio. I wrote a poem for Joe DiMaggio and sent it to the Yankee announcer and received a nice letter from him. I had a strong desire to write stories. Was turned off to poetry by the school insistence on learning poetry by heart for tests. Also, the poetry offered seemed of another world, not the everyday world of my reality. I wrote some short stories, then in sixth or seventh grade I wrote what I thought was a novel - it was 16-17 pages in one of those black and white composition books, a detective story. Eventually I wrote little stories in high school that a teacher liked. Then in high school, I took a journalism course, and a creative writing course, and joined the creative writing club in which I wrote a story which was published in the yearbook. From high school I went into the Navy, WWII, wrote a lot of letters, and a few short stories while in the Navy, and became company correspondent for the Navy newsletter in boot camp. Got married and busy with the need to make a living and raise a family. The desire to write was always there, gnawing at me, but there wasn't enough time or patience to sit with long involved things, so I came to the conclusion to write in a condensed manner, in short, to write the essence of a story which turned out to be free-verse. I thought of it as a new kind of poetry, but I guess a lot of it was just ranting, while trying to put life in some kind of order. I slowly realized it was poetry, but not the kind I had learned about in school, so I began to look into what was doing in the modern world of poetry. I went to the 92nd Street YMHA Poetry Center in New York City and enrolled in a workshop run by Walker Gibson, a disciple of Robert Frost. We were given quite a few Shakespearean sonnets to emulate. It helped me to think more deeply on an intellectual level, but I had a difficult time with the strict form and my work was inventive, creative, but I was labeled in a nice way as the 'wild man' of the class. I attended many of the readings at the Y, by the notable poets of the time, including Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, Auden, the Sitwells, and others. I was impressed by these people, but what they were doing wasn't my thing. Eventually I found readings down in the Lower East Side which was in 1956 or 57. And I discovered "Howl" in the Evergreen issue #2, the famous San Francisco scene issue. I realized that writing, specifically poetry, could be different from the old masters, and those academically-celebrated present-day masters. I began writing crazy stuff. Eventually I sent some to Allen Ginsberg, and he got a little excited over a couple things, and the next thing I knew there was mail from Anthony Linnick, a west coast editor of a magazine called Nomad asking for work. Another from an editor-publisher in Pennsylvania, Charles Hanna, who was publishing a magazine called Damascus Road. My pieces, "Ode to Laugh" and "Jazz" were accepted for future publication. This was in 1959. About this time I was sending a lot of information, books, magazines, news clips to a young pen pal in Israel who was interested in American poetry. I had hooked up with him through a family friend who had retired to Israel and had put an ad for a pen pal in The Jerusalem Post. After the young man graduated high school in Israel, he went "on the road" to South Africa and Europe. In London he met Anselm Hollo and showed Hollo his poetry and stories written in a very awkward English, and a story I had written using the rough translation of the Israeli original story. Hollo liked what he saw, took my version, the Hebrew, and translated my English into German and sent the three versions to a magazine called Rhinozerus in Germany where they published all three versions along with work by Gunter Grass, William Burroughs, Lawrence Durrell, Jean Cocteau, Robert Creeley and others. I wasn't writing a lot, but what I wrote I struggled with, I had to rewrite I don't know how many times, instead of letting it go like I should of - you know, let it be wild, let it flow like Kerouac. On and off I read and published over the years, I just kept going. I took several workshops with Bernadette Mayer, who I consider the consummate Poetry Workshop leader. Each workshop was enlightening. Her lists of experiments was of great value as I tried most of them and began to realize I had been doing most of these experiments for years on my own, but thinking them "crazy" either threw them away or "corrected" to make them understandable. She also strongly suggested making use of several different dictionaries, and to bolster her suggestion she frequently performed the given project along with the attendees, experimental writing making use of dictionaries as important tools of the writer's trade. Most of all, she gave me confidence to go my own way; she seemed to throw her whole being into each session, drawing out the participant's energy to create. She also gave a name to a form I was developing. I had read a lot of reviews in which when the review author quoted from a text, they used slash marks for each line in order to, I guess, save space, but there was something wrong to my ear with that as the spacing was important to the poem's meaning and reduced the total effect. Also I began to write short lines, breath-lines and continuous lineage, the slashes were line-breaks. I hadn't thought of any name for this until Bernadette named them Slash-poems. I now have many of these, even a finished manuscript which is supposed to be published in the near future under the title Slash Poems. Bernadette influenced, encouraged many writers in those workshops and still continues, and as her books are being published her influence will be important for the enlightenment of experimental writers of the future. One of the amazing things about her work is her willingness to go on to new forms instead of sticking with a successful status quo, an important example to those who have a wide scope of mind and wish to create a series of writing and go on to develop in other avenues. Otherwise - I know one summer I must have written a hundred poems, I went on a spree, and all of a sudden nothing for a while and it wasn't until I guess nine years ago I really, really had the time and the energy to pursue it, and I really started writing a lot and publishing a lot, reading a lot. It took quite a while till I was free to do it. I went up to Lowell, Massachusetts for the Kerouac celebration, I did stuff at NYU at the music theater with musicians from Hoboken, we called it "Channel 9" - and before that someone asked me to send stuff to a magazine called Make Room for Dada, they took it and they said this is a guy that we need to be a co-editor, so I became co-editor of a couple issues and got people published. After four issues it folded… And the old Beehive Press stuff I've done - I put out a magazine, Beehive Magazine, that was a long time ago, it must have been about fifteen years ago. My idea was just to get poets from New Jersey, people who lived, worked or were born here. And I gathered up a lot of material.

FW: And who were some of the people you had in there?

HS: I had Ted Enslin because he'd worked in Hoboken and Bayonne schools, and Jonathan London was there, and Jana Harris - one of her books was later nominated for a Pulitzer, and Bill Higginson, Joel Lewis, and a woman I gave a lot of space to, Miriam Halladay. And I put out a lot of chapbooks for people, which I gave them forty or fifty copies for themselves.

FW: Do you still do that?

HS: Yes - the last ones I did for Joe Weil, and David Roskos, and Craig Ellis who was co-editor of my first book The Krishna Poems (1970) which he claimed was a classic. His book Sparrow in the Supermarket was chosen by the Small Press Review as their pick for the summer in 1997. My latest chapbook publication is Incomplete Directions by Steven Dalachinsky. I do it all here, I make them with my copy machine, paper cutter, spiral binder, etc. It's a lot of fun.

FW: I want to go back to something you said, how at the YMHA your poems had a wildness…

HS: No, it wasn't a wildness, they thought that I was unstructured. I was trying to conform to what they were showing us, and I had a hard time, it became very difficult to do what they wanted me to do.

FW: But can you trace where this different conception of language came from?

HS: I guess it came out of life experiences. I didn't have a structured life growing up without a real family - no mother, no father, no siblings, something like that. There were interruptions and adjustments and probably hidden emotions that weren't expressed. I probably had to find a way to express - what it really is with me is expression, expression and communicating. You have to find your own voice; sometimes it takes years and years. You read and then you imitate other people - everyone did that, Kerouac and Ginsberg were doing that, doing a lot of straight writing according to what you were shown in school. Also there were jazz influences. As a teenager I was intrigued by jazz-swing-black music. At age fourteen I worked one summer in Harlem, 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, in an optical manufacturing company as a delivery boy picking up glasses to be repaired from optometrists, and when not enroute washed and polished lens oil residue from newly manufactured glasses. Music blared from record stores, people hung around storefronts listening, and I enjoyed it. Later, a cousin gave me some old jazz records and I really turned on. I began to go sporadically to the same jazz clubs in New York as Kerouac as I later realized while reading his Lonesome Traveler. I was greatly influenced by Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker and many others. Then, jumping ahead, in the mid-eighties I became friends with clarinetist Perry Robinson, whom I've collaborated with many times, and later in the nineties with David Plakke, with whom I've learned a lot about performing my poetry with music.

FW: Can you talk about your relationship with Allen Ginsberg - how it started, how he influenced your poetry and life?

HS: There was an early Paterson connection which I learned about later. I had a first cousin much older than me who lived in Paterson, her husband was a doctor also a writer, and they were friends with the Ginsbergs. And a daughter, who was my age, went to school with Allen, and she told me that Allen was very brilliant and very inhibited at that point, I guess because what was going on at home with the mother. So there was sort of a connection - they had a writers' group with William Carlos Williams, Allen's father Louis, my cousin and others. I first learned about Allen from Harvey Breit's article in The New York Times on rucksack poets, about Allen carrying everyone's manuscripts with him when he came in from the West Coast. He did all this stuff, he'd visit people and give them his father's address in Paterson. I wrote to him and said, "Hey, I'm a poet, I'm in this candy store, come on over." That's when he wrote, "Yeah, we'll come over when we have a chance, and we'll get drunk on your malteds." So that was the beginning. And then he went to Paris and lived in what came to be called The Beat Hotel. Burroughs ended up there, Brion Gysin, Corso was there in a little room, I've heard it referred to as a mop closet. Allen and I wrote back and forth several times, then he came back to New York in '58 I guess - that's when I got a letter asking for poems because young editors went over to see Allen, and he had become semi-famous, and they wanted to talk with him and ask his opinions, recommendations, like that. One guy was the editor of something called Damascus Road as I told you about previously, who was an ex-marine, he went to college on the G.I. Bill and somebody turned him on to modern literature. That's how it works with a lot of these poets. And the other guy was from Culver City, California, they were putting out a great magazine called Nomad. It folded up after about twelve, fourteen issues - I have one here from 1963. I finally got it signed by Allen, Amiri Baraka and myself, we were all in this issue. And these poems I published in Northeast #1, 1963 - some poems that somebody else had asked for and they finally published in their first issue with a statement that they "considered me a new and significant voice in poetry." I still wasn't happy with my poems - I kept changing words. Years later I'd go back and say, "It doesn't sound right," but at the time I guess it sounded okay. I never really was satisfied. But that was an early triumph; I wasn't writing a lot but what I did I did it well enough that they took it. Some of these people became famous, professors and God knows what. I didn't meet Allen in person until the NYU reading he did with Denise Levertov. I guess it was early '59.

FW: And what was that like, what was your impression when you finally met him?

HS: I tell you for years I was just imagining him, I had no idea - I'd walk around the Village and say, "Oh, maybe that could be Allen." Then I met him, and he was just dynamic. Baraka was at that reading, and he was giving out copies of Yugen magazine. It's a real famous series that he and Hettie Jones - who was Hettie Cohen at the time - co-edited. They published some beautiful poetry of Kerouac's among other things; Kerouac did a poetic biography of Rimbaud, really well written. They published many of the Beat people. Baraka really had that touch and the knowledge and the feeling of what was good and what was coming - he still has it.

FW: What would you say you learned from Allen about poetry?

HS: At the time I guess I was just overwhelmed with it and I said, "Hey, I've been doing something like this," but I wasn't able to use the language the way he was using it, and I didn't have the intellectual knowledge and experience that he had. Here was a guy who grew up with poetry, and his father's talking to him about it and reading it to him at home and then whatever he got in school. What I got from him was a tremendous energy, that for poetry to exist beyond the present it had to have this energy, dynamic, with a lot of alliteration which was like invigorating your spirit - according to the person, of course, some people are laid back inside and they don't have the drive or the necessity to communicate with dynamic words or spiritual enlightenment. I guess for Allen some of that came from the Bible and Whitman, too, but he kind of wedded it together and raised it to new levels. It was kind of beyond my lifestyle, my life; it opened up ideas for me. I didn't know that Zen even existed, or anything about Buddhism or all these things he mentions. So you start to think, oh, there's something beyond what I know of in my little hole here, so he opened up a lot of ideas, willingness to experiment, to seek further from the ordinary thing that you're doing - and yet he always wanted me to write about my life in Bayonne. I was so tied up with it, and this was my thing that I had to stick with, so I wanted to go beyond that and get out somewhere and I guess poetry was one means of escape or seeing the world differently from the world I was in. He opened up a lot for me. The breakthrough "Howl"; some of the surreal stuff, like the "Magic Psalms", I though they were the highest things, the closest a person could express themselves to get to God - it was incredible. Then came "Kaddish", and that was really amazing, what a knock-out poem. Even people who weren't into poetry or into Allen, when they heard or read it they were floored by it. It's an amazing piece of work. And it was ordinary talk, but he seems to raise ordinary speech to something higher and more fuller - another dimension, spiritual, he had this spiritual stuff going on. And of course some's going to lose a lot in years to come, I think, just on the page, because once you've heard him read his work, it was amazing. He could read the phone book and make it sound like the greatest poetry. So a lot of that, the best stuff will last and I think some of the CDs and video-things will last. You look at "Birdbrain" or some other things that don't seem to be really poetry, but when you heard him reading it it's a whole other story. The voice, the inflections are important. And on further reflection I'd add Allen's "Sunflower", and "Wichita Vortex Sutra", plus so many other poems that will stand with the best poems of the 20th century. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I mostly appreciate Allen's fifties, sixties work more than the recent things. Early on I remember writing to him about politics, about starting a grassroots movement, but he didn't want anything to do with that, and I said, "What are you doing singing and performing these songs, you're a poet, why don't you stick with the poetry?" Later on I realized he was reaching a lot more people by doing things with music, with the harmonium. He did many big readings during the Vietnam War, and in '69 Allen read at Jersey City State College. He had the harmonium, I guess he had recently come back from India. Carl Solomon shared this reading and I think Peter Orlovksy and his brother Julius were there. Corso was in the back of the auditorium heckling. Some people got up and left when Allen started with his chanting and playing the harmonium, but I felt like it was blowing the top of my head off, blowing any mental resistance, opening the mind. Some of these people couldn't take it I guess; the chairman of the English department made a strange statement that they weren't responsible for anything said there. I think they were afraid of Allen's open language and that the college was not sanctioning obscenity, but he was riding so high that they had to bring him there. It was a really exciting time. We hung out at Roy's Restaurant later, we sat at a large table in the back room, Allen buying hamburgers, the short order cook called Allen by his first name as if he knew him for years. A young woman was talking to Allen and taking notes, I think she was Jane Kramer who was doing a huge interesting article on Allen for The New Yorker magazine; the articles were later expanded for her book Allen Ginsberg in America. Allen introduced me to her, but I'm not sure I caught her name at the time. Corso was there in Roy's, as was Peter Orlovsky and some Jersey City State students - it was a cool night. But his dynamic…he could make the ordinary into something much bigger, sublime.

FW: And this changed your work, or influenced you?

HS: I often wonder whether it was for the better or the worst. When I was developing the stuff he recommended that was accepted, I wasn't writing like him, and later I probably tried to write like him, but I didn't have that background, with his knowledge. I feel that I didn't waste my time - when you're writing you're writing, it's good - but I don't think I was doing what I should have been doing. I should have been pursuing my own voice and I did find out it was musical, a lot of musical rhythms and stuff like that, but it was mine, and I didn't use all these long words that he could manipulate and tie up with other long words and make it work - it just doesn't happen for me, it's too much like a lecture or an essay. There was a woman named Marguerite Harris who was running a lot of readings; she was kind of a bridge between her older generation and my generation, and she kept urging me to write shorter lines. So I did, and I combined it with things that Ted Enslin was doing. I tried to meld all that, thinking this is where I really want to be, Allen's dynamism and Ted's more studied but classical musical tones. Ted studied with Nadia Boulanger, the greatest teacher of musical composition in this century, so he's very classical oriented; he also did a lot of word play which really influenced me, he's got whole books that are nothing but working with words - incredible stuff. One thing, I think, is a masterpiece, it's called "Chromatic Fantasy". I was up visiting him at his farm in Maine and we walked along and he's showing me the house here, and down there the ocean and his thoughts about these different places, and you would never know it but that's what inspired him, and he incorporated.

FW: How did you first meet him?

HS: Through the young editor of Damascus Road, Charles Hanna. We were hanging out in the old Cedar Tavern and he said I had to wait around a while, he said Ted Enslin's coming - and there was something magical about the name, I don't know why, and Ted came along and we were introduced and I really liked him. He was the most natural looking, sounding, acting person in the world. At that time he had one of those huge beards and wore beads and he was evidently not a city boy but he was living in the city for a while. It was the early 60s, many writers and artists were gathering in the East Village. It was very cheap living, there was a whole community going on, Ted came down and many other people too. Later on Ted and I hung out with Paul Blackburn and Robert Kelly and Diane-

FW: DiPrima?

HS: No, I met her there later…she was one of the Beats, these were more post-objectivists. Diane Wakowski, and Susan Sherman, whom I'm still friendly with, and so many more. They used to have gatherings, and you'd hang out in people's lofts. Ted was living with Mark Heddon, an archaeologist. They lived in 15 Avenue A, top floor, it was an old Fox movietone studio. They brought up a tree, they wanted nature up there; they were all hanging out and they had lots of gatherings, that's what it was all about. And they were doing things in the Judson Church, which was very art-oriented, they had dance groups going - I remember I saw Hettie Cohen rehearsing - and then they started the Judson poets group. They started a magazine, I still have the first issue. The Katzman twins were involved, and Allen Katzman later became editor of EVO, the East Village Other, it was an early competitor to The Village Voice. They had good stuff in there, like John Keyes, a "crazy" poet - not really crazy, but far out at the time. Now he would be considered like a hundred other poets, doing outrageous readings, but at that time it was a breakthrough, it was a period of breakthrough in a lot of areas. A lot of great artists were living down there, I saw stuff hanging for a couple hundred bucks that you would now pay a couple hundred thousand dollars.

FW: So you had your domestic life here, married with your children and your candy store, and you also had your life there, and was it compatible? Your wife was very-

HS: She was okay with it. I didn't spend much time over there in New York, actually. It's the images that have remained in my head, though, and turned into another lifestyle later on in life which was very important, but all the things that I was doing day to day to earn a living, I just buried them somewhere; that was the past, and it didn't assume any great importance. There's millions of people that have small businesses, so what? But thirty-five, forty years ago there were not too many writing modern Beat poetry or even interested in that.

FW: So that part of your life seemed more vivid?

HS: Well sure, very vivid. And it was just sporadic, so each little magazine, publication, reading that I would attend, maybe once a month, that remained. What I did every day was just repetition. A bread and butter necessity to support my family.

FW: With Ted Enslin, you talked a little about what you learned from him - is there anything else?

HS: For quite a while I was writing sequences of poems, because he seemed to do long series and each one became a book and I desired to do the same - and I discovered in writing a poem that there's always more to it, that one can continue writing one poem expanding into further poems, and instead of just working words off words, one could work poems off poems until it becomes a much larger thing. All connected. Ted has a tremendous, deep intellect, a seemingly delicate, easy way to work, and such deep knowledge such command of detail it seems to me like - I don't know how he does it. One of his books became one of the the books of the sixties, Synthesis. His first big one, Forms, published in five hardcovered volumes was written while he lived in a pre-revolutionary house, a house that leaned and was in danger of falling apart in the terrible blizzards of mountainous Maine. He was cutting his own wood and living in a very primitive manner, barely surviving and writing this huge poem. He had studied classical music composition with Nadia Boulanger, the celebrated teacher of composition of Leonard Bernstein and Sarah Caldwell and others, so there was a classical music prominent in his poetry. He's not a public person and is not well-known in that area, but there are many knowledgeable, appreciative people who honor him. He still lives in Maine with his wife Alison who is an accomplished potter. Raises his own food. Buys fish straight off the boats and survives those horrible winters. I think Ted's work will live as long as Allen's if not longer. The voice in his poems is his real voice. Of course Allen's "Howl" and "Kaddish" and many other poems will survive on the page, but I think Allen himself realized the need to gift his readers with a live voice to bring more life into his poems, so the CDs and videos, movies, performances, will be capable of further survival. Ted's voice seems to me to come through well enough not to need any other means. Two different men, means, each in his own way, a lasting genius.

FW: So that's an interesting combination of influences.

HS: Isn't it? It really is.

FW: I know that you met Kerouac briefly on a few occasions-

HS: Very briefly

FW: And I was wondering if you could talk about that, just your impressions of him.

HS: I wasn't that impressed. I have to be honest - he was doing a lot of drinking. I felt badly for him.

FW: When was it?

HS: I think '59, but it was eight, nine years after he wrote On the Road, and he was definitely not the same person anymore, the relationships with Cassady and Ginsberg and all these other people were split - there were connections, but he was not in that same state of mind. But everybody know him as On the Road and they expected him to be the same guy, always hopping in the car and hitchhiking, and when I saw him in the Circle in the Square I think he was gone - he was emceeing this thing, but I don't think he was sober. Same thing in the Village Vanguard.

FW: He was reading both times?

HS: In the Circle in the Square he was emceeing. I have this [brings over a framed xerox of a poster announcing the Kerouac gig]. One of the first East Coast jazz-poetry performances. Philip Lamantia, a surrealist poet, Howard Hart, with David Amram accompanying on French horn, and Jack Kerouac emceeing. Recently David Amram gave this to me, this poster, signed it up in Lowell, MA where we were part of a Kerouac festival. It says 1957 - I thought it was a year or so later than that.

FW: And Kerouac was not coherent?

HS: Sure he was coherent, but he was - at the time of this reading seeming to have been drinking and was being heckled by the audience, a guy was heckling him about the cigar he was smoking, so Kerouac in a really sweet motion threw the cigar to the guy, not in anger or anything like that, but just a friendly gesture. I thought it was cool of Kerouac. The old Circle in the Square performances were encircled by the audience. It was a very late night in winter. Another time I caught Kerouac was in the Village Vanguard. On the Road was at the early height of popularity and Max Gordon the owner hired Kerouac to read from the novel a couple shows each night. Mostly to read with jazz. This time he also seemed to have been doing a lot of drinking. The audience was loud, smoky, not paying much attention to Kerouac, although some seemed to be there to partake in Kerouac's aura. I had found out about the reading through word of mouth. He was to receive, I think, $500 a week which at the time was a nice payday. He read solo that night, no jazz accompaniment. A bit slurred. I have some Rhino Kerouac tapes and he comes through so much better than I remember at the Vanguard. The audience that night was extremely rude and I felt bad for him. Here's a person who's really a talented and creative being, sharing his creation, and they're talking and drinking and smoking, only halfway paying attention to someone I felt was one of America's great writers. And to be honest, with his, I think, poor reading, and the distracting audience I didn't turn-on like I had envisioned doing. Here I was seeing him in person and having read the book and even had sold it in my candy store, Signet softcover, it was a hot item for a short time. The distributor had sent maybe fifteen or twenty copies and I had sold about a dozen, recommending it to some young teachers at the time I seem to remember. My God! It was only 95 cents!

FW: They would be worth so much now…

HS: And as a fool, what copies were left over, I returned for credit, probably seventy-eight or so cents. I even gave my own copy away, I think I sent it to that Israeli penpal. Who would think of these things as expensive collectors' items? I think once more I saw Kerouac at a loft party, but I was drinking a lot. It may have been the night I met Lamantia. I was with a buddy from Bayonne, and the party was in a house in back of a large apartment building, it must have been servant's quarters many years ago, and the host was an underground filmmaker/actor and poet named Piero Helizcer who attained some kind of fame. He had once lived in the Beat Hotel in Paris, and he was giving a big party in the East Village - I was invited by Charles Hanna. It was a mob scene, people milling around, drinking, and there was a young black dancer pouring a lot of vodka and gin into the punch, I was drinking and I got very high and then somehow we got hooked up with Lamantia, I can't remember how, I guess we struck him as someone to talk to. He was with a real hipster type of guy, hip-talking, who later on I thought was maybe Neal Cassady, but I can't swear to it at all, and he said, "Come on, I know of a great jazz pianist on Bleecker Street." It was upstairs over a restaurant or something, so the four of us went there, and this guy was pounding and beating on a piano and there was anger in the music and tremendous expression and it was Cecil Taylor, early on in this little place. Lamantia of course knew who he was or what his talent was, and through my alcoholic haze the music really got through to me. Then we drove Lamantia and his buddy somewhere up to the Upper East Side. That was the only time I saw or met Lamantia. Later on I found his work in a Penguin book with Bukowski and someone else - it really influenced me, I've got a drawer full of surrealist stuff I wrote after reading him. And recently I met Lamantia at his St. Marks reading, gave him a copy of my Jazz and the Changes book in which I have a poem on that night seeing Cecil Taylor. Kerouac - I thought he was there, but I can't swear to it.

FW: And what about Paul Blackburn? Did you hang out with him?

HS: Vaguely, a little. He was a friend of Ted's, and they both must have known, recognized the worth of the other. And he and Ted had both been recently divorced, that was another common thread they had. We went up to his place once, he lived over McSorley's Bar, East 7th Street. He smoked French cigarettes, I remember, had cats in his place, and a lot of tapes, he was doing a lot of tapes of the readings. Who knows where they are… When I first met him he had just come back from Spain, and he was reading in a place called Le Deux Magots, and people in the audience were shouting out poems for him to read. That doesn't happen too often, people asking for certain poems.

FW: Thinking about the East Village scene and about poetry, did the poetry come out of the scene or did the scene come out of the poetry?

HS: Both. It was a gravitation to the scene, and then the scene kind of encouraged poetry. And yet the poetry was probably working in individuals who had to come to a place and bring their talent and their experimentalism; a lot of them weren't doing the accepted thing, and they had to bring it to a place where there would be other people like themselves to share it, and to learn what was going on in the underground scene. Like Le Metro… Susan Sherman was one of the coordinators of the Monday night readings which became world famous. A cup of coffee was a quarter, and that became your admission. The World's Fair came along, and Esquire magazine and other magazines wrote it up and all the sudden there were crowds around the block trying to get in, and a lot of the regulars were pushed out. Then the license bureau came down and said, "This is entertainment, you've got to be licensed," and these poor guys are selling a cup of coffee for a quarter! And I think Allen was instrumental along with a young ACLU lawyer in championing the readings as art not entertainment, and they went to court and they won and it seemed that the readings proliferated from then on. Allen was really pushing poetry in any way he could, he was an incredible influence opening doors to poetry. So Susan was running these open readings in Le Metro Café along with Carol Berge and Allen Katzman and Paul Blackburn, they had five to six people in a set, then they'd have a break and they'd do it again. They went on and on, none of this nine o'clock and you have to be out. And I read in a set once with Ginsberg, Corso, Susan, Marguerite Harris and myself. It was cool. And there was another scene uptown, upstairs in a place near The Port Authority Bus Terminal, unknown to the world, all these great poets gathering there for all night readings. I met Ray Bremser, Allen, Diane DiPrima, Ted Joans, so many… They'd play jazz on the jukebox, served coffee and cake, they had sessions going on all Friday night and sessions Sunday where you could sit around comfortably, listen to jazz. A little hidden coffee house. The owner looked like a real tough longshoreman, but he was into modern poetry and jazz. Eventually when it closed down I heard that the owner went to work in an ammunitions factory! That was a great scene up there. I was kind of nervous, I wouldn't get up to read. I was intimidated.

FW: Did you eventually become more comfortable?

HS: Not there, no. I got comfortable hanging out - I brought four or five guys from Bayonne that hung out in my store, and I got them involved a little bit in modern poetry and jazz, and we'd go up there and just hang out.

FW: You mentioned Gregory Corso…do you have any particular memories of him?

HS: I didn't have much personal contact with Gregory. We wrote back and forth when he was in Europe. I read a blurb in Danton Walker's N.Y. News column in 1958 about Gregory Corso the great American poet starving in Europe, so knowing the address of the Beat Hotel I sent some bucks a couple or three times and a friend of mine in Bayonne, a trombonist, playing the Paris and Brussels World Fair, stopped in to see Allen and Gregory and gave them bucks from me. My friend said they were okay but eating poorly. I have a letter that Gregory wrote:

"Dear Hersch thanks for your Hermes rainbow gift
had a choice to pay part of rent or buy lots of food
or go to a Champs Elysee movie
or buy some pot
but wondered awhile about your kindness
and decided to give half to rent
and half the rest to Allen
and with my part I bought a big cake
and lots of cherries
and two bottles of Vitel
and with the final 500 francs I bought some pot
and got myself Allen Bill and BJ high
and in the middle of our high we all mentioned our
love for a man in New Jersey who runs a candy store
and we decided that you were our neo-wizard
flowing with goodies
always with a smile
always protecting the good in life.
Allen sends his love
I send my love
And if ever I get back to America
India hovers over me like a necessary light
we shall met and you shall show me Bayonne
exchange poems
and perhaps in due time I can interest you to join me
to find Neptune's golden statue ten feet high that
the Trojans had and worshipped until Ulysses
came and took it away and drowned it somewhere
in the Aegean.
love
gregory

I was really excited when first encountering Gregory's book Gasoline. Some great images…a basic non-institutional, self-educated person, therefore original and funny, insightful, as Peter Orlovsky also was. I also saw Corso as Tinkerbell, a sort of conscience for Allen, helping to keep him on the truthful reality path rather than become overly literary sophisticate. And in Corso's book Long Live Man I found a poem in it titled to H.S. In the poem he refers to "my angel friend" and "the teacher is dead," "I wait for you." I immediately remembered years before writing to Gregory and sending him a book on the Dead Sea Scrolls and he had referred to me as his angel friend, and the book had talked about "The Teacher of Righteousness" who had been Christ's teacher with the Essenes. The poem of Corso's was dated about that time when Corso had invited me to come look for Ulysses' treasure. Putting all these things together, I assumed the poem was to me; my initials were the title. Later I thanked Corso for the poem and in his usual growling put-down he exclaimed that the poem was for some woman he knew.

FW: One last question: when did you close your candy store, or did someone take it over?

HS: I was gentrified, I guess you could call it. It was time, it really was; it was a blessing. It was summer of '86, and shortly after that my wife got sick so I was here to take care of her. I couldn't possibly have done that while in the store so in a way it worked out - then later I was able to pick up my writing life and by that time I was collecting early social security. I'd been in the store thirty-four years; people who were high school kids in the 50's were already bringing in their children and some even their grandchildren.

FW: So now you're retired, and you spend your time-

HS: Mostly writing, some editing, publishing, giving readings, spending time with my children and grandchildren, some backyard gardening, and there's always something to take care of in an old house…


Lucid Moon wishes to thank Florence Wetzel and Hersch Silverman for their kind permission to reprint this interview.