SALON 25: the point is how much can you eat, drink, smoke & write before check out time?

Last summer I stood in a sunhat and sunglasses in the doorway of an outdoor storage unit in the New Mexico Desert, sorting through writer memorabilia.

You know the kind: the envelopes and folders and stacks of your writer history you saved because some mentor along the way said that if you ever "made it" you could sell all that to a university museum for their archives.

Especially if you had an incriminating letter in there from another poet who became more famous than you.

(Aye right.)

Old poetry reading posters from a Milwaukee bookstore circa 1973.

Poetry drafts, actually TYPED on a MANUAL typewriter! Many of them on the backs of interoffice memos from your day job.

Bits of verse scribbled on happy hour napkins from hotel bars. When all you could afford was happy hour watered-down cocktails and free pigs-in-a-blanket.

Rejection slips which devastated you at the time. Now those literary magazines have long since folded and that junior editor is probably on a sofa somewhere watching reality TV.

Acceptance letters. Now those literary magazines have long since folded and that junior editor is probably on a sofa somewhere watching reality TV.

Anyway, while sifting through all that, I found this photograph of a dead typewriter in a landfill near Santa Fe.

And this bit of coffee-stained typing from an Art Heaven weekend spent at the old De Vargas Hotel in Santa Fe in 1982 with two other performance poets - Mark Funk and Raymond Sipe.

We three former performance poets have gone onto other things.

I won’t say "better" or "worse" other things. Just..."other things".

I hope you enjoy this bit of reminiscing and that it makes you think of some of your own romantic visions along your creative path and share them with us, be they pre-war, pre-revolution or pre-computer.

This is what the typing said:


the structure of your face changed i can't explain what i mean
no it wasn't just a mood change or a moment of unfamiliarity
more than you slipped into a foreign language
i can't explain it i could sit here all day and tell you but
i wouldn't be able to explain it not really
she takes this hint of herself she doesn't understand it
but she takes it as valuable puts it away somewhere to take it out
look at it at moments when she seeks definition
doesn't know what his eyes see but knows some version of truth

clear vision: a characteristic of the fluid that lines his eyes

moving moving coffee truck stops good piece of pecan pie
smells of tanking up smells of early coffee pine juniper sage
waiting for morning sun to firm up the roadside colors
it never does it's just your eyes get sharper as the day goes

look at the shadows the sculptures form on the wall behind
just as she said it the shadows deepend, defined sharper lines
a sign a new dimension that breaking of gravity laws we all wait for
we all are not surprised by we wait breathless constantly for that
but it was just her friend moving closer to see the shadows, his head
blocking the light bulb in such a way as to sharpen the shadows she'd pointed out
don't keep saying "just" he told her. you constantly undermine downplay
the events of your life. there is no "just". no "just reality" or "just a dream".
your friend's head, his blue cap changing the light to deepen the shadows just at the
moment when you were ready to really see them
that was no "just"

the splitting up of space. we came here, three, to share a room and write. write together, write apart. permission to stare out the window. permission to browse the local phone book, find old names we'd misplaced, make nostalgic phone calls. all the movements toward the typing: buying film to photograph ourselves at windows, at typewriters, buying souvenir ashtrays (none in hotel room). buying art paper to try the new japanese ink set. buying italian bread, wine, imported beer, smoked oysters, london strawberry preserves. buying white chocolate, black chocolate in pyramid shapes. visit the artist, inhale his activity. back to hotel. unpack. food on steamheat altar. pry open the veranda door. plug in coffee. arrange cups. separate typing spaces, divide ashtrays, match books. all these rituals performed as three. then the separation. she goes to her novel, rewriting those bits. how to tie in the man on the bus with the broken window on the 3rd floor. he goes to the veranda, notepaper, pen, writes careful sketches of ducks, manikin heads, empty birdcages in storage windows across the street. the other stands at the window, staring down don gaspar, seeing ghosts, sits on the chenille spread and writes it, makes the phantom affair real with words. separate spaces, cocoons built around each moving into private word places. then restless. how to conmbine the novel, the ghosts, the window ducks.

funk moves in and out of tense. all the windows open moving cigarette fumes if we could see them, a certain infared light, our fingers typing would cut the fuzzy smoke film wrapping everything. you lift a coffee cup, a hollow sits waiting, ghost of its shape formed by cigarette fumes

the economics of art heaven:
$3 roses marked down to 50 cents
$6 wine, 1/3 drunk, the rest left floating cork wrapped carefully overnight in bathroom towel like european waiter
99 cent souvenir ashtray: we could have bought one for 79 cents but this one had new mexico indians and balloon fiesta on it and since we're not from omaha we had to have it
$10 on film to photograph ourselves flinging ponchos against hallway shadows of sunset ivy, smoking different brands of cigarettes, watching tourists below with moody poet eyes

funk says let's crash at midnight. sipe falls asleep his nose in gideon. miller sticks her finger in her ear against trucks, snores, radio, crunches against pillow. funk comes in from the cold porch, "anyone want to go for a walk?" now he's awake. miller wakes later, funk and sipe giggling on the floral carpet at sounds of drunk down the hall throwing up, neurotic woman tap tap tapping on the bathroom door

it's cold like we wanted. it could be late september. it could be seattle. in the bakery a woman in hot pink and black wipes her eyes and blows her nose. her croissants arrive. she rips them hungrily. we can't see her male companion from here. he isn't eating. we can see his hands. they sit still next to his coffee cup. as if she is alone, eating alone.

the point is how much can you eat, drink, smoke and write before check out time? write 30 lines by 10:45, it doesn't have to be good, it doesn't have to be english we'll perform it later, yell words on top of each other, no one will know

sipe got up at 6, went out to find us croissants, cappucino, the new york times. bakery wasn't open yet, the only out-of-town paper was the Albuqueqrue Journal. He drank solitary juice at La Fonda and came back. With the Albuquerque Journal.

Miller rewrote one poem seven times since last night. first in the personna of a child. then in her own voice. kept changing the "me" to "us" and "we". Did not want to accept responsibility for her vision. I see you. we see you. you see me. you see us.

details on habitat:

1. bedsheets have holes in them. miller noticed hers before she slept. sipe noticed his in the morning. funk won't say.
2. no bulb in one night light
3. generic towels, no devargas imprint souvenir
4. no tv. funk paces at 2 a.m.
5. large closet. no hangers
6. three bars soap, three towels, three rags
7.


Michelle Miller (c) 1982


As ever, as always, DO WHAT YOU LOVE AND LOVE WHAT YOU DO!


Michelle Miller Allen
http://www.greenphoenixproductions.com