Educational Babble by larry goodell

Educational Babble and

“All nature is so full . . .” Ditto & Mimeo Handouts from the Early 70's

(part of the last page of as 8 ½ by 14 mimeo handout)

larry goodell

duende digital book(let) 2011 po box 571 placitas, new mexico 87043 usa larrygood@comcast.net

Educational Autobiography of Larry Goodell According to Dr. Harold Taylor

Harold Taylor (1915-1993) creative educator, president of Sarah Lawrence College at age 30, banished grades and report cards. "The whole educational system has become one massive quiz program, with the prizes going to the most enterprising, most repulsively well-informed person . . .â&#x20AC;? Author of How to Change Colleges: Notes on Radical Reform (1971) and Students Without Teachers: The Crisis in the University (1969). I took a graduate seminar with Mr. Taylor at the University of New Mexico: he asked us to do a short educational autobiography . . . lg

To see is to re-form all speech. ~Louis Zukofsky

jj 23Feb70 Placitas, New Mexico

EDUCATIONAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LARRY GOODELL ACCORDING TO DR. HAROLD TAYLOR East Side School, Mark Howell School (elementary schools in Roswell, New Mexico, & I remember most my 3rd Grade teacher, a tall bull dike, man type clothes, Miss Fisher, she sat on her desk & ate baby food & drank cokes, she taught me stamp collecting) Roswell Junior High School — the science teacher told me I had a future in making scientific drawings, I learned the stages of the chicken egg Roswell Senior High School — two great teachers, Miss Nole taught a fantastic course dissecting earthworms & frogs, & Mr Gaddis who encouraged me to write a musical CLUB PROGRESSIONS & wrote the words to the songs. “Gertrude Stein” whispered to me thru Gaddis & my English teacher Dennis [Mrs.] Bromberg (stationed at Walker Air Force Base near Roswell where the Enola Gay took off from & did in Japan [actually came to WAFB sometime after]) jazz pianist, teacher, introduced me to Bud Powell's piano (context: retarded tail-end of the swing era with ‘western music’ addition) real teachers were Getz, Miles Davis, Brubeck, Shearing, Charlie Parker, Stravinsky, Schönberg's PIERROT LUNAIRE, Woody Herman, Stan Kenton j USC — Exhibit A: football rooting cap. dead independent death of academia. even more than hischool the football hero social order (fake militants) non-fraternity loneliness (the bells of hell go TINGALINGALING for you & not for me) Shrine Auditorium concerts. opera GERTRUDE GROB-PRANDEL in TRISTAN & ISOLDE after taking her sex potion, waving her silk handkerchief & the inevitable CLUMSY embrace Shorty Rogers live. Marilyn Monroe live. Mr First Twelve-Tone Composition (& I cdnt even hear intervals correctly when Halsey Stevens played them on the piano, like minor & major sixths etc. )– Mabel Prune (old & wrinkled in tight knit dress) told me in HARMONY & SOLFEGGIO CLASS that I had no voice at all) Richard Condon fresh from Harvard swung ‘modern poetry` at me & changed me into ‘English major` maybe this was a mistake, Bruce McElderry, Jr. 2 semesters of American Lit. Frank Baxter & TV Shakespeare. UCLA kept cutting Tommy Trojan's -1-

sword off (extras in the Student Union basement) or painting him blue & yellow (but he was sprayed with plastic). /// FRANCIS CHRISTENSEN, a quiet flaming linguist, got me into Paul Roberts & I made first inroads into linguistic science. All those writing/literature teachers kept me from the San Francisco Renaissance — I discovered this years later, much resentment, hung up in the Eliot /Faulkner/Thomas ‘modernity` — the extremes of the freeze that set in around Eliot (& Robert Bly thinks the freeze has now set in around Olson). I was star Academe, PHI BETA KRAPPA & honors (farmed out) 1957===========================+ AB UNeMa – still unturned-on 'teachers' (to lead a horse to no water) — into the extreme of academic rot — Wasteland of Lit/Crit/Shit — 'English' profs HATE POETRY (few exceptions) obviously trying to stifle it with tons of stupid papers nobody REALLY wants to read even once, let alone a year from now — what excitement of earlier years fell off — extreme incompetence dealing with lit/critters — more warmth from friends in mathematics, anthropology than these seminar tadpoles — I came to HATE explication de texte — from here I went into teaching at Nine Million Masturbating Idiots (NMMI in Roswell), honorary captain, I was saluting incorrectly, faced with a room full of bruisers, football stars etc. I was insignificant up against the COMBINED TONNAGE of that room. I became one of the unholy three (3 teachers, we cd talk to each other). FRATERNIZING with students talking about injustices there. US ARMY. MOJAVE DESERT. CAMP IRWIN CALIFORNIA. Chaplain’s Assistant. UNM AGAIN. INTERRUPTED BY CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS & FORT POLK, LA. I GOT OUT FOR NEXT SEMESTER. Robert Creeley. 1962. I was 27. |BREAK0 THRU| EDUCATIONAL BABBLE THE TOWER DOESNT FALL DOWN BUT IS AN ERECTION ON ITSELF ¹definition of FAKE Gödel’s theory (go outside the system to see the system) brings me to any COUNTERPOINT to this class I can manage shall we saw this seminar table in two? the PARTICULARS of what we're doing in this room are lost in muzziness because the rhetoric is 'institutional' — the referents are exhausted rather than something constantly renewing – I appeal to the Earth in all her particulars & will peel back the carpet & blast thru the floor to get to her THE UNIVERSITY — parallel erections of closed systems — NOW fake, fake, fake. j

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so, '62, tapes of readings, etc. I began to hear my voice & consequently others more, speech, clearly (fuzz-muzz lifting under scrutiny of whatever thing got into a specific energy) I taught a couple years at the Academy for Boys, 8th to 10th grade, teaching me thru Paul Roberts’ English Sentences & enthusiastic kids devouring paperbacks (advantage of private schools) .SUMMER OF '63 VANCOUVER POETRY SESSION — Charles Olson, Creeley, Robert Duncan, Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Denise Levertov & numerous younger — this was indeed ‘a walking grove of trees` — this session compressed world energies together & I took it — hand to hand — go to the man & ask him how he does it, you do it how you do it, people will FIND the Great Man because that's where the lines of energy lead & we’ve got to, American history is the ONLY history now that significant horizontal movement came to a ST0P (the Pacific) & now goes vertical which is the HIGH ´peyote & spaceman³ and the return to the Earth as our only ‘local` God/dess. I came back to New Mexico and edited & published DUENDE. a series of [mimeo] books of contemporary American poetry by R. Bayes, F. Franklyn, R. Watson. K. Irby, M. Randall, L. Eigner, R. Kelly, W. Dodd, F. Ward, W. Harris, D. Franks, & a couple small anthologies of New Mexico poets, & a book of my own — CYCLES /’66/ in Placitas, caretaker of a fantastic terraced place, OJO DEL ORNO, since 1963. j Berkeley Poetry Series in 1965 — again a whopper — backwash of energies felt all over the country "Words are value, instruction, action. And they've got to become political action. The radicalism lies from our words, alone. And if they're not right—and I'm not talking Mr. Williams’ republic of words, I'm talking ourselves here this week, the poets of America. And I don't mean America."/from Olson's 'reading' at Berkeley, '65 “... the private is public and the public is where you behave...” j ‘67 on — Native American Church Easter Peyote Meeting in Tesuque. Drop City Joy Festival in Trinidad. Tarot. Iching. Summer Solstice in Golden Gate Park. Fillmore Totality. Acid & Immediately A NEW LAND a 'novel'. Jack Spicer. Manera Nueva. Steve Katona. New Buffalo. Max Finstein. Calligraphy. Notebooks. Kell Robertson. New Mexico. Zingdap. My Reading of Divine Brandy at Rodey Theatre Descent into the Orchestra Pit & Resurrection in the Arms of Six Chicks. Acid as Revelation Brother. “Wherever She Blows.” Oriental Blue Streak. Event Poems. Marriage Hymns. Magic in Act. Bird Visions. Lenore. Meg Randall. Ann Quin. Daily Life of the Aztecs. Peyotl. Messages. Eater of Filth. Old Chinese Graphics. Gino Brenda Krishna Cornflake. Marriage. SHE'S BEEN THERE ALL THE TIME................................................ -3-

j learning as specific day-to-day sense (how do you build a root cellar?) is more intensely real than the abstract hogwash broken up arbitrarily into 'class' time, science makes sense as discipline here but something stronger is going on outside this system coming back into this environment (buried in cement) reveals that VERY LITTLE HAS HAPPENED (that was guaranteed by the Secretary of Defense) — I shdnt be surprised – speaking here primarily of the ‘English Department` (that meaningless designation has to be dropped — & why not drop the entire department) "What do you care about Western Civilization — as a friend has lately written, 'How big a piece of it do you own...how much would you miss it if it disappeared tomorrow?' /Phil Whalen in THE BEST OF IT j the so-called MOVEMENT (as I see it in powerful fragments) is intense in New Mexico & the university draws nothing from its energy which again & again is its problem — * THE RHETORIC IS STILL EDUCATIONALESE & FAKE *except Steve Baer (ZOMES) now teaching in the Architecture Dept. . . I'm not interested in 'education' Lenore & I are interested in HOW WE CAN GET FOOD THAT ISNT POISONED (our baby getting significant doses of DDT from her breast milk) I take this as central fact of where I am now. we've just ordered organic seeds, enlarging our garden, will move soon where we can have more land to ourselves, animals, yes. I am ‘in school` I thot to finish a master's (to be able to teach & make some money) & that's ruled out, so floating on the GI Bill till the land deal becomes possible. I take some ‘farming’ as central to any meaningful change in the Universe City (that is, making firm oneself with the land) that — farming, herding, the land dealt fruitfully with is the only focus I find meaningful (when the core is rotten, exhausted you find something which as focal point/center constantly renews itself) j I am drawing from this source — a ceremonial calender — for my family — beginning each year with the winter solstice — around each peak time will gather songs, feasts, ____ ‘Have pushed thru the words to the objects (that is, some words, some objects). & now will the actual movement, dance, ceremony SPEAK? To not just TALK the ceremony etc., the dance, but to have it?` -4-

"What is your platform? Ressurexion Renaissance Total Paradise I put down programmatical funk. speaking, now, absolutely off the record - my business isn't really to put anything down - I want a new life I say RISE AND FLOURISH for all you're worth {it is all you're worth?} SHINE, Radiate, Joy bliss and whoopee vibrations! {The night air!} {The weather!}

EXQUISITE What did you say the message was?” /Philip Whalen in EVERY DAY, 1964

(the above was on 3 smudgy purple ditto pages) please see my “Six Broadsides from the 70's” on Scribd http://scr.bi/hWURhQ (the following is on 3 legal sized mimeographed pages)

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“All nature is so full . . .”

1st of 3 pages

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all nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined /Gilbert White, THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE But when the Place is brought forward fully in form conceived entirely by the activation of a man who is under its spell it is a resurrection for us and the investigation even is not extractable. And it is then the only real thing. /Ed Dorn in WHAT I SEE IN THE MAXIMUS POEMS It is his body that is his answer, his body intact and fought for, the absolute of his organism in its simplest terms, this structure evolved by nature, repeated in each act of birth, the animal man; the house he is, this house that moves, breathes, acts, this house where his life is, where he dwells against the enemy, against the beast. Or the fraud. /Charles Olson in THE RESISTANCE History is a literal story, the activity of evidence. ... The most insistent concern I find in Olson's writing is the intent to gain the particular experience of any possibility in life, so that no abstraction intervenes. /Robert Creeley in the introduction to OLSON/SELECTED WRITINGS The lies of Johnson and his regime are terms of the language of a grand psychopathology of daily political life that belongs to their refusal to face the facts of what they are doing. The actual terms of the Geneva agreements on Vietnam, the actual nature of the National Liberation Front and of the various governments of Saigon, the actual destruction of the country that is being 'liberated' â&#x20AC;&#x201D;these facts are censored from all considerations of the reality of the war, and the specter of Communism raised in the hallucinatory obsession that is American foreign policy, a ::over-image projected as by a magic-lantern upon the cloud of hostile intentions the liberator does not acknowledge, lures the American forces on to shoot down actual men in the streets, to all the fearful violence that we are familiar with in studies of the psychopathology of individual cases. From this history of a war has emerged a sentence in which the dream-content is brilliantly clear: 'In order to save the village it was necessary to destroy it.' The language of this history is to be read as the language of a psychotic episode in which there is no recognition of the madness, where with pious regret and considered deliberation the President can write in Vietnam his history in terror and suffering. /Robert Duncan in MAN'S FULFILLMENT IN ORDER AND STRIFE -7-

All other men's worlds are the poet's chaos. /Coleridge The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell. /Confucius Insight is always in sight: an action, not a report. /Cid Corman in a review of Larry Eignerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ANOTHER TIME IN FRAGMENTS Education begins with poetry, is strengthened thru proper conduct (self-discipline) & consummated thru music. /Confucius All that the rest forget in order to make their life possible, we are always bent on discovering, on magnifying even; it is we who are the real awakeners of our monsters, to which we are not hostile enough to become their conquerors; for in a certain sense we are at one with thorn; it is they, the monsters, that hold the surplus strength which is indispensable to those that must surpass themselves. /Rilke in a letter to M?, Nov 1920 Interval & recurrence make the dance. Tho dance is round, but not to say it comes to an end & begins again. When the dancer comes to the place he was, he is changed, he is another place. She is another place. Interval & recurrence make the dance. I have not imposed a rhythm. Since the dance is the body's dance, it moves as the body will. Or must. /Robert Kelly in introduction to ROUND DANCES* Poetry if anything has a sense for everything. /Louis Zukofsky I agree that our M.A. program does not fit your talents, just as your commonplace book demonstrates. Yet we do not have facilities now for giving you what you would like to get. You want more writing, more 'creative,' imaginative emphasis â&#x20AC;&#x201D; less of the standard academic. Our major commitment, however, goes to the incipient Ph.D. 's and the secondary school teachers. We serve them rather than you, and I don't see any alternative with our money and our staff. We cant serve everyone. /Prof. Zavadil, acting head of the English Department, in a letter to Larry Goodell /l2Feb1970 -8-

Let a man take time enough for the most trivial deed, though it be but the paring of his nails. /Thoreau in A WEEK ON THE CONCORD & MERRIMACK RIVERS In the poem this very lighted room is dark, and the dark alight with love's intentions. It is striving to come into existence in these things, or, all striving to come into existence is It — in this realm of men’s languages a poetry of all poetries, grand collage, I name It, having only the immediate event of words to speak for It. In the room we, aware or unaware, are the event of ourselves in It. The gnostics and magicians claim to know or would know Its real nature, which they believe to be mis-written or cryptically written in the text of the actual world. But Williams is right in his no ideas but in things; for It has only the actual universe in which to realize Itself. We ourselves in our actuality, as the poem in its actuality, its thingness, are facts, factors, in which It makes Itself real. Having only these actual words, these actual imaginations that come to us as we work. ... Every particular is an immediate happening of meaning at large.... /Robert Duncan Introduction to BENDING THE BOW The STATE has a sacred physical body and her sacred physical body is the earth and for all men is the equal right to the use of the earth; and something more you made clear to me, harder to phrase, deep as the blood— a patriotism born of unbroken communion with the sun, with the planets, witii the dark nights and the stars through the trees of one's own landscape. /from HENRY GEORGE, 1913, by Haniel Long We are now gathering all the threads of history together and linking modern science to the primitive and archaic sources. /Gary Snyder in POETRY AND THE PRIMITIVE /Godel's/ theorem states that it is impossible to prove that a logical system at least as complicated as arithmetic contains no concealed contradictions by using only theorems which are derivable within the system. ...To prove mathematics free from potential contradiction one must use principles outside mathematics, and then to prove that these new principles do net conceal contradiction one must use new principles beyond them. The regress has no end — one has languages .and metalanguages without limit. /P.W.Bridgman in THE WAY THINGS ARE (1959) -9-

It is impossible to write of what one has written or lived, except as the day is, out the window, now, explicit. /Ken Lrby in a 'biog. sketch' for THE ROADRUNNER POEM I am always trying to tell this thing that a space of time is a natural thing for an American to always have inside them as something in which they are continuously moving. Think of anything, of cowboys, of movies, of detective stories, of anybody who goes anywhere or stays at home and is an American and you will realize that it is something strictly American to conceive a space that is filled with moving, a space of time that is filled always filled with moving and my first real effort to express this thing which is an American thing began in writing The Making of Americans. /Gertrude Stein in THE GRADUAL MAKING OF THE MAKING OF AMERICANS I want something more than this dull yearly Christmas-Easter invasion of my inner spirit. I'm doubtful about the pseudo-Indian, paranoid about it, can be freaked out by visions (that peyote trip with Ann & Lenore for instance, with the demons of Mexico hot on our trail). But I know mostly when I'm on that line between trust & risk, when I'm not defaming, or acting, when I'm in fact on tne ground — exactly as when I'm writing a poem & whatever it is carries it thru. It was that identical feeling I trusted to those nights—in that what I made with my hands seemed to ride the contact pure with the very rhythm & necessity of this earth. The fantastic realization that I am not an Indian, and can be as proud, and do have a brother, which is my participation in some life vision. The Gemini thing but more than that, the longing for the man, the feeling of ugly incompetence possibly moving/growing out into some full flesh of man. Aztec statues of Xipe Totec, the priest wearing the skin of the sacrificed victim, the hands dangling at the wrists of the priest, his lips protruding thru the victim-flesh lips. *** But the felt presence of this teacher figure, elder brother, found as an archetype in Jung, becomes even the wise old man. That there is in the reestablisnment of the orders of the earth, some learning to be done. I don’t know the guru, the Indian, yet this slow, ever so slow communication from the 'brother' does exist. /from a letter I wrote In December '69 I have ‘studied` in Roswell, New Mexico, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Camp Irwin, Calif., Vancouver, B.C., Placitas, Berkeley, Placitas —

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The entire course of the Hopi Road of Life is unfolded every year in an annual cycle of nine great religious ceremonies that dramatize the universal laws of life. /Frank Waters in BOOK OF THE HOPI With the years the personal prescriptions for one's work recede, thankfully, before an interest that nature as creator had more of a hand in it than one was aware. The work then owns perhaps something of the look of found objects in late exhibits — which arrange themselves as it were, one object near another — roots that have become sculpture, wood that appears talisman, and so on: charms, amulets maybe, but never really such things since the struggles so to speak that made them do not seem to have been human trials and evils — they appear entirely natural. /from preface to FOUND OBJECTS by Louis Zukofsky, 1962 The Art of poetry will choose to be born by the agent of the greatest syntactical density in the language, which we naturally call the world. And there is no other responsible definition of the world. /Ed Dorn in a review of Creeley's PIECES *

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A UNIVERSE CITY LAID OUT IN THE 6 DIRECTIONS WITH THE LAND AS ORGANIZING ELEMENT * fields UP/High places birds/planes space travel songs

fields NORTH study of Barren Regions the poles/deserts/hunger/poverty the city war

WEST EAST Water day oceans/rivers/ â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;the unconsciousâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; birth/rebirth death ancestors wise men winter solstice summer solstice / the old priests creation of the universe Quetzalcoatl CENTER animals/plants/trees the poet plaza sculptors/painters huge area for dancing music/feasts/spectacle fire DOWN SOUTH Low places the Sun the earth/Coatlicue solar energy mining light jewelry tropical regions earthquakes fields Southern Hemisphere fields preColumbian people 'racial' conflict a g ri c u l t u r e adobe buildings, inexpensive dome buildings (portable or not) set up for the different areas of activity fields worked a family to each or communally houses in the periphery, separate families or communes close in or commutable distances away *

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â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Be neither too shy if you are a plant nor too bold if you are human for we are the same essence we work together to produce the life flesh almost obscured suicided suicided by desperate mechanical flights I will overload yr senses you wd never have thot there was so much it rains down in yr return the dancing sisters come the colors of corn grains even after the herdsman murdered the farmer you few dance to the butterfly maidens & make them bear as you build & plant again mud bricks laid water over the hands the universe galactic voices in & out meet water over the hands Life Flesh the garden you plant among the evil faces is the riches of youth they wd copy yr designs in backhand & kill you with them there is only the return & the Paradise you give from the sun that burns of its own unforced within you' /from part 9 of A NEW LAND by Larry Goodell

Walter Chappell

WOMB OF ALL MESSAGES (quotes not in the above papers but from a pencil written sheet, early 70's)

If this is dictation it is driving me wild. /Jack Spicer The temple is holy, because it is not for sale. /Ezra Pound Every one is a visionary, if you scratch him deep enough. /Yeats Rodin was solitary before fame came to him, and afterward he became perhaps still more solitary. For fame is ultimately but the summary of all misunderstandings that crystallize about a new name. /Rilke As far as I can go gives me life again on the page. /R. Duncan I think we have inherited the Satanic inner nature of the Protestant. /R. Duncan Love is the measure of the capacity for joy. /Charles Williams The automobile is the end of progress on earth. /Gertrude Stein in “Picasso” Are you “knocking any gods out?” /Charles Potts The powers work thru a moving focus. /Larry

j a thank you to Ken Irby for many letters which brought to my attention some of the quotations

Great White Brother writings in cloth wrapping (1970) !"