Sunday, March 14, 2004
Having grown up in a small town, Roselle Park, I've applied a small towner's experience to everywhere I've lived. It puzzles me, though, that all the time I spent in Atlantic City as an adolescent didn't toughen me up some, make me more dispassionate in this regard. Maybe it did - I'm comfortable in cities. We all know people for whom a trip from suburbia to the nearest large city is a rare thing, & never taken casually just for being there & wandering around.
I know a lot of people who live in Jersey City & Brooklyn, moved there from elsewhere; few of them are especially attached to those places - beyond the diverse & urban culture one can find there, & the close proximity to Manhattan. It's as if one lived in, oh, Brick NJ, so one could visit the ocean a few times each week, & the bay every day. One doesn't have to make oneself of the place where one resides. In fact, ever since leaving Roselle Park at age 19, I've carried who I am around with me - the music, books, art - because I don't find these in the places I live - I'd have to live in Jersey City or Brooklyn to replace these items with their live equivalents of concerts, literary readings, art galleries & museums, & to have the daily company of like-minded people. That's what made me move to New Brunswick NJ in 1971 - a university city with lots of musicians, poets & artists in it, & bars & coffeehouses where one found them hanging out. New Brunswick became too limited, & quickly. It was a dangerous city, too, as I learned when guns were pointed at my head a few times. When I heard there was a concentration of young New York-oriented teachers at Ramapo College, a new state college far up in north Jersey of all places, I left New Brunswick & went there for a couple of years, & it turned out to be the key educational experience of my youth, the one that reoriented me away from provincialism & made it possible to become a truly portable artist. That "portability" has been an important component of my creative aesthetic ever since. Although I draw material from experiencing & observating specific places - finding the "universal in the local" - this is standard poet method now - & I adapt to the conditions of place, I do not allow a place or the people in it to impose creative constraints. If I did that, I would be an entirely different kind of artist, & not the artist I try to be.
Some people who think they know me - younger ones mostly - ought to remember - if they don't already know - that I was a rock n roller at 17, a Vietnam War conscientious objector at 20, at Woodstock in '69, a student of poet joel oppenheimer, influenced as a young man by Amiri Baraka, John Cage, Paul Goodman & Mary Caroline Richards & Paul Tillich. These teachers are indicative of my era, & their art & ideas (Goodman's especially) still have a capacity make people in the cultural, political & religious mainstreams squirm. You have two anarcho-communitarian Jewish poet/writers, a German Lutheran existentialist theologian, a black socialist poet/activist from Jersey, a potter influenced by zen & Rudolph Steiner, & an experimental composer who changed the course of American art. Three of the five were associated with Black Mountain College, a small alternative school in North Carolina that went out of business fifty years ago. My education resembles the kind offered there, & I got the transcripts to prove it. One also ought to remember that when I joined the staff of WFMU in 1981, it was both literally & figuratively an underground radio station run on a shoestring, & most of the DJs were considered lunatics by nearly everyone who had an opinion about the medium of radio, other than our own small community of faithful listeners The only college station whose purpose did not include training students for a career in commercial broadcasting. One came to WFMU to learn & do the WFMU way. WFMU did not reach a reasonably safe harbor until twenty years after Vin Scelsa, Lou "The Duck" D'Antonio & their minions subverted it into freeform.
Kids who drove through university, knocking off credits like so many mileposts on the Jersey Turnpike, their eyes fixed on some "career," graduating as pretty much the same persons they were in high school - that wasn't my experience. I spent those years being baffled, dazed, confused & delighted by ideas I hadn't even imagined existed, driven to it, unconsciously at first, by the stifling intellectual & creative terrain of the middle of middle class New Jersey, & the way those with "authority" gave my neck a yank whenever I simply asked for a longer leash.. Add YOUR comments here
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
I know a lot of people who live in Jersey City & Brooklyn, moved there from elsewhere; few of them are especially attached to those places - beyond the diverse & urban culture one can find there, & the close proximity to Manhattan. It's as if one lived in, oh, Brick NJ, so one could visit the ocean a few times each week, & the bay every day. One doesn't have to make oneself of the place where one resides. In fact, ever since leaving Roselle Park at age 19, I've carried who I am around with me - the music, books, art - because I don't find these in the places I live - I'd have to live in Jersey City or Brooklyn to replace these items with their live equivalents of concerts, literary readings, art galleries & museums, & to have the daily company of like-minded people. That's what made me move to New Brunswick NJ in 1971 - a university city with lots of musicians, poets & artists in it, & bars & coffeehouses where one found them hanging out. New Brunswick became too limited, & quickly. It was a dangerous city, too, as I learned when guns were pointed at my head a few times. When I heard there was a concentration of young New York-oriented teachers at Ramapo College, a new state college far up in north Jersey of all places, I left New Brunswick & went there for a couple of years, & it turned out to be the key educational experience of my youth, the one that reoriented me away from provincialism & made it possible to become a truly portable artist. That "portability" has been an important component of my creative aesthetic ever since. Although I draw material from experiencing & observating specific places - finding the "universal in the local" - this is standard poet method now - & I adapt to the conditions of place, I do not allow a place or the people in it to impose creative constraints. If I did that, I would be an entirely different kind of artist, & not the artist I try to be.
Some people who think they know me - younger ones mostly - ought to remember - if they don't already know - that I was a rock n roller at 17, a Vietnam War conscientious objector at 20, at Woodstock in '69, a student of poet joel oppenheimer, influenced as a young man by Amiri Baraka, John Cage, Paul Goodman & Mary Caroline Richards & Paul Tillich. These teachers are indicative of my era, & their art & ideas (Goodman's especially) still have a capacity make people in the cultural, political & religious mainstreams squirm. You have two anarcho-communitarian Jewish poet/writers, a German Lutheran existentialist theologian, a black socialist poet/activist from Jersey, a potter influenced by zen & Rudolph Steiner, & an experimental composer who changed the course of American art. Three of the five were associated with Black Mountain College, a small alternative school in North Carolina that went out of business fifty years ago. My education resembles the kind offered there, & I got the transcripts to prove it. One also ought to remember that when I joined the staff of WFMU in 1981, it was both literally & figuratively an underground radio station run on a shoestring, & most of the DJs were considered lunatics by nearly everyone who had an opinion about the medium of radio, other than our own small community of faithful listeners The only college station whose purpose did not include training students for a career in commercial broadcasting. One came to WFMU to learn & do the WFMU way. WFMU did not reach a reasonably safe harbor until twenty years after Vin Scelsa, Lou "The Duck" D'Antonio & their minions subverted it into freeform.
Kids who drove through university, knocking off credits like so many mileposts on the Jersey Turnpike, their eyes fixed on some "career," graduating as pretty much the same persons they were in high school - that wasn't my experience. I spent those years being baffled, dazed, confused & delighted by ideas I hadn't even imagined existed, driven to it, unconsciously at first, by the stifling intellectual & creative terrain of the middle of middle class New Jersey, & the way those with "authority" gave my neck a yank whenever I simply asked for a longer leash.. Add YOUR comments here
