Isle of Wight, 1970. Michael Putland / Getty
“ALL THE ANSWERS ARE HERE”
MM: Let me turn to this quote attributed to you: “I don’t think of myself being a writer, a singer or whatever, the occupation of being a man is so much more.”
LC: Yeah, I remember I did say that. When did I say that? A while ago?
MM: Well, your last interview, as far as I know, was about a year ago, so it was definitely more than a year ago.
LC: I don’t exactly know what I’m getting at, though I do recognise the first part of the statement that I don’t… I don’t assault myself with those kinds of description of my activities when I get up… I mean, at my work I consider myself that kind of worker. I think what I was trying to say is that it is hard enough to keep life and limb together these days without burdening yourself with a particular description of who you are. But in a sense we are amateurs and dilettantes, and this notion of getting by and having to examine all possibilities, rather than meet every situation as a singer, as a writer, as a poet.
MM: I took it to mean, when you said “the occupation of being a man”, what in Yiddish is called: a mentch.
LC: Oh that’s right. That’s a good one. That’s a good way to look at it, I think maybe I meant that. I don’t remember what I meant. I know I was trying to press home some sort of point at the time.
MM: Just to clarify, what means a mentch to you? A moral human being? A decent man?
LC: I have tremendous resistance describing ideal archetypes. I think there are so many different ways of getting by and I wouldn’t like to contribute to any of the tyrannies by adding my own version of what excellent behaviour might constitute…
MM: I meant it in terms of the personal, not in the definitive or abstract general.
LC: I don’t know. That activity has been somewhat unconscious for me. I somehow… I think… I’m convinced that I’m a man. And I’m not quite sure what a manly position on the things I confront is. You know… I trust that my activities could be described as manly.
MM: Returning to Slaves, did you really feel that you were dying… as a poet, as an artist, when you wrote Slaves?
LC: I don’t know. I don’t speak of these things outside of the work. Whatever is there is in the voice and… I really have no interest in being my own footnote.
MM: There is so much bitterness in Slaves and the tone of voice is almost like a fallen idol.
LC: Well, I’m trying to treat all the experiences that I know, and maybe when the stuff is finished, and there’s a lot of work to look into, maybe one will be able to find all the various aspects represented. As I say, I take the material that is offered me. I don’t sit down and plan, “I’m going to write a bitter book. I’m going to write a lyric song.” You take the material that is at hand, if it’s your habit to work this way. See, look at all that pile of stuff. I don’t know what the tone of that book that is emerging out of that pile of manuscript – I don’t know what the tone is right now. I’m not even interested in what the tone is. I’d like to be surprised by whatever emerges, will represent my condition at the moment. It’s not like an astrological chart, you know.
MM: Before your book The Energy Of Slaves was published, I read somewhere that you had some apprehensions of publishing it.
LC: Sure. I always have some reservations about my work. I’m never sure, you know, whether it’s worthwhile putting it on the marketplace. I go from the feeling that this book shouldn’t be published to the feeling that it’s absolutely required reading for everyone.
[Shuffles papers, flips pages]
Listen to this:
Oh take this longing from my tongue
Whatever useless things these hands have done
Let me see your beauty broken down
Like you would do for one you love
Your body like a searchlight my poverty revealed
I would like to try your charity
Until you cry, now you must try my greed
And everything depends upon how near you sleep to me
Just take this longing from my tongue
All the lonely things my hands have done
That song was begun in 1966 and was finished in ’74. Here are all the versions of it, different. [Shuffles paper]… But this is the first version of it, here…
No, wait. It was in here. This notebook here. Here’s a picture of me in 1968, Athens.
MM: You look different now. More handsome.
LC: [Flips pages] And this draft was written in New York City at the Chelsea Hotel.
This was written at the Grand Bretagne in Athens. A change in my material condition.
There’s a girl in Montreal in 1969…
[All the while shuffling through papers]
There’s a projected list of titles last winter before it had become the record.
Here are various versions that I thought would be in it but never did arrive at the song. Different versions.
Let’s see, 1966 to 1972 is six years. 1974 is eight years. This song’s been on my mind for eight years. Here, last summer, the last version, “For all the longing on my tongue”. There it is. I’m glad to get rid of that song. I even had a file made on that song.
MM: Once you finish a song or a poem do you sometimes feel like doing it over?
LC: If I didn’t abandon that song, I would keep on repairing it over and over again. It’s just endless jiggling. [Flips pages]
I could not trade you for a nightingale.
I could not trade you for a hammered golden bird.
You took away my music.
You sent me here with blunted tongue to listen only.
Someone is playing a grand piano with two hands.
Someone is whispering to her shepherd.
I never got to wear my high leather boots.
I never became a sign for everything that is high and nervous.
You entered me into a quarrel with a woman and you said,
This is your voice. I never got to build the barn.
Only once did I ride with Kid Marley.
The band ran down like an unwound music box, too slow and too sweet.
A fungus became attached to the spirit of song and high pretensions infected the gift of words.
I believe what they said about me.
Someone has begun to squeeze the old accordion.
I am forbidden to murder him.
You are not listening to me.
You are fiddling in your pocket.
Someone is performing the national dance.
The patriots have gathered round.
Thank you, sir. Bless you, sir.
You were so beautiful as a woman.
You were so beautiful as a song.
You are so ugly as a god.
MM: Oh, God… I’m not familiar with… What is it you were reading to me?
LC: I don’t know. I’m reading to you from something I wrote last winter. It seems better to read to you in response to questions than to manufacture my own. Now, you can ask me any question now, and I will be able to answer it from this book.
MM: Alright, I’ll gladly pick up your challenge and roll with it. How do you write?
LC: Let me think.
MM: You’re thinking, Leonard, the mind is at work.
LC: I mean, let me search through these pages… There is an answer here. What was the question again? How I write?
MM: Yes.
LC: You ask me how I write. This is how I write. I get rid of the lizard. I eschew the philosopher’s stone. I bury my girlfriend. I remove my personality from the line so that I am permitted to use the word “I” as many times as I want without offending my appetite for modesty. Then I resign. I do errands for my mother, or someone like her. I eat too much. I blame those closest to me for ruining my talent. Then you come to me. The joyous news is mine.
The answers are all here… You see?… You can ask me any question, and I will be able to answer it from this book.
MM: Okay, let me see if I can come up with something that demands a straight mundane answer rather than sublime poetry. Like, are you married, Leonard?
LC: No, but I have a wife.
MM: How is that?
LC: Hurry to your dinner.
Hurry to your food.
Finish feeble prayer, stonework, golem duties toward the woman being born.
Hurry to the thigh in your plate and the cloudy city.
Lean over your round world.
Cut off rusty talk with the unfucked woman, the unconvinced friend,
The countless uncertain universes, avoid diplomacy with them.
Hurry to your appetite.
Hurry to your birthright and the night of long knives and grease.
Hurry, worker in the realms of song.
Hurry, angel, covered spirit, minstrel of my greasy pilgrimage.
And hurry back to the warm bed where she is sleeping, where it is dark, her face turned away,
And you meet in half sleep, kind to each other as if newly met.
Sleep against her back, your arm across her waist, your hand under her breast.
Until she thrashes in her sleep.
The flies walk over your face.
She does not know how to make you comfortable.
She never has.
Hurry to sleep.
Find a way to get upstairs.
The bells have rung, the faithful are breathing frankincense.
In a crack of the wood shutters the morning has begun.
Hurry to your stretched-out nakedness and to lightly touch yourself
As will some time the woman being born.
Jiggle your knees, mind worker, hurry through your testament.
Invent your song.
Invent your power.
Hurry to be born in the bed beside her.
Hurry to the fish hook swimmer.
Hurry to your destiny.
Hurry to your cunt.
Hurry to your vision of God.
Time is like an arrow.
Hurry to the bank.
Hurry to your unborn children.
Hurry to your thin body and your suntan.
Then the slugs will dance, the pure night sky will not mock you.
Hurry to your discipline and your bland regime.
Move faster than the stain, the fat, the disappointed heart.
Hurry to the peanut butter and the cool summer drink.
Hurry to your miracle.
Hurry to the empty stomach, the victory fast, the unbuilt temple.
Wake her up and quarrel in your bed.
Eat together through the dark.
Seize the round world and stop it from struggling and plant your mouth in the burnt skin.
I am your dead voice.
MM: Oh, that’s powerful, great!
LC: This is really great… Ask me any question…
MM: Is this for your next book?
LC: Don’t know what will become of this. Seems to go on. This is a good way to answer questions.
MM: I notice that this is very clean. Is this the first draft?
LC: Yes, this is just the first draft. Something I had no idea what this is, or what it’s meant to become. I just lock myself in a room for a few hours every day, and produce this… This is good. This is really wonderful. All the answers are here.
MM: When was the last time you looked at what you were just reading?
LC: In fact, I never looked at it. So I think this is maybe the first time I’ve ever read it. I think maybe I read it through once, shortly after I did it last winter.
MM: How do you feel about reading it now?
LC: It’s got all the answers in it, ask me any question and I will be able to answer it from this book.
MM: Okay, let’s see… Try to find something far out… What is utopia for you?
LC: I said, Because it is so horrible between us,
I will go and stop Egypt’s bullet.
Trumpets and a curtain of razor blades.
Organ music.
She said, That’s beautiful.
Then I can commit suicide and the child falls into strangers’ hands.
The radio said, He helped a lot of people but the good, they do die young,
I just looked around and he was gone.
I said. She said. The monstrosities of Lilith attack her.
Yug, yug, yug, she said.
What you did to me, she said.
What you did to me, I said.
The lonely, we said.
The nights of hands on ourselves.
Your unkindness, we said.
Your greed.
Your unkindness.
Your bitter tongue.
Give me time.
You never learn.
Your ancestors.
My ancestors.
Fuck you, I said.
You shit.
Stop screaming.
I can’t stand it.
You can’t stand anything.
Nobody can live like this.
In front of the child.
Let him learn.
This is no good.
You’re fuckin right, it’s no good.
This kitchen was once beautiful.
Oil lamps, order, the set table.
Sabbath observed.
That’s what I want.
You don’t want it.
You don’t know what I want.
You don’t know anything about me.
You never did.
Not in the beginning.
Not now.
In the realms, where this marriage was sealed, where the wedding feast goes on and on,
Where Adam and Eve face one another,
The foundations are faultless and secure,
Your beast’s hair flairs like black fire upward and your breasts, now in maidenhood,
Now in motherhood, draw down my face,
Our hunger blessed by sun and moon,
A ring of dancers round the house
Where within the room is hid,
Where within the bed is undone,
Whereupon the hunger’s joined,
Where within the one speaks himself expressions yet unknown.
MM: This is your take of utopia for the world? For society?
LC: This is the world.
MM: Do you make note of when you wrote it?
LC: Sure I do, but I would never tell you. Maybe it would pin me down.
MM: Oh no, I wasn’t thinking of it in this way.
LC: [Flipping pages]
MM: I think you’re surprised by these poems.
LC: I haven’t looked at these for a long time. I think it was only the other night that I went through them.
MM: What do you think of them?
LC: The blind man loves you with his eyes, the deaf man with his music.
The hospital, the battlefield, the torture room must serve you with numberless petitioners.
On this most ordinary night, so bearable, so plentiful in grave distractions,
Touch this worthless ink, this work of shame.
Inform me from the great height of your beauty.
This is the night of July 8, 1972.
[Strumming guitar]
MM: Leonard.
LC: Yes.
MM: I was trying to say the other day that you portray yourself in your work as ugly, yet I find you beautiful in real life.
LC: I find you beautiful too.
MM: You meant it metaphorically in ‘Chelsea Hotel’, or is it…
LC: [Sings]
You were famous, your heart was a legend
You told me again, you preferred handsome men
But for me you would make an exception
And clenching your fist for the ones like us
Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty
You fixed yourself
You said – well never mind, we are ugly but we have the music
And then you got away, didn’t you babe
You just turned your back on the crowd
But you got away
I never once heard you say
I need you, I don’t need you
I need you, I don’t need you
And all of that jiving around
MM: You know your song, ‘Lover Lover Lover’…
LC: Yes.
MM: I find it strange in a way that the verses are so hard and biting, and the refrain is so soft and inviting.
LC: That’s a poem you just made there.
MM: Do you believe in—
LC: [Sings] I believe in music. I believe in love.
MM: Do you?
LC: [Flipping pages]
How to speak poetry. Take the word “butterfly”. To use this word it is not necessary to make the voice weigh less than an ounce or equip it with small dusty wings. It is not necessary to invent a sunny day or a field of daffodils. It is not necessary to be in love, or to be in love with butterflies. The word butterfly is not a real butterfly. There is the word and there is the butterfly. If you confuse these two items, people have the right to laugh at you. Do not make so much of the word. Are you trying to suggest that you love butterflies more perfectly than anyone else, or really understand their nature? The word butterfly is merely data. It is not an opportunity for you to hover, soar, tremble, befriend flowers, symbolize beauty and frailty, or in any way impersonate a butterfly. Do not act out words. Never act out words. Never try to leave the floor when you talk about flying. Never close your eyes and jerk your head to one side when you speak about death. Do not fix your burning eyes on me when you speak about love. If you want to impress me when you speak about love put your hand in your pocket or under your dress and play with yourself. If ambition and the hunger for applause have driven you to speak about love you should learn how to do it without disgracing yourself or the material.
What is the expression which the age demands? The age demands no expression whatever. We have seen photographs of bereaved Asian mothers. We are not interested in the agony of your fumbled orgasm. There is nothing you can show on your face that can match the horror of this time. Do not even try. You will only hold yourself up to the scorn of those who have felt things deeply. We have seen newsreels of humans in the extremities of pain and dislocation. Everyone knows that you are eating well and are even being paid to stand up there. You are playing to people who have experienced a catastrophe. This should make you very quiet.
[Strums guitar]
Speak the words, convey the data, step aside. Everyone knows you are in pain. You cannot tell the audience everything you know about love in every line of love you speak. Step aside and they will know what you know because they know it already. You have nothing to teach them. You are not more beautiful than they are. You are not wiser. Do not shout at them. Do not force a dry entry. This is bad sex. If you show the lines of your genitals, then deliver what you promise. And remember that people do not really want an acrobat in bed. What is our need? To be close to the natural man, to be close to the natural woman. Do not pretend that you are a beloved singer with a vast loyal audience which has followed the ups and downs of your life up to this very moment. The bombs, the flame-throwers, and all the shit have destroyed more than just the trees and villages. They have also destroyed the stage. Did you think your profession would escape the general destruction? There is no more stage. There are no more footlights. You are among the people. Then be modest. Speak the words, convey the data, step aside. Be by yourself. Be in your own room. Do not put yourself on.
This is an interior landscape. It is inside. It is private. Respect the privacy of the material. These poems were written in silence. The courage of the play is to speak them. The discipline of the play is not to violate them. Let the audience feel your love of privacy. Be good whores. These poems are not slogans. They cannot advertise you. They cannot promote your reputation for sensitivity. You are not a stud. You are not a femme fatale. You are students of discipline. Do not act out the words. The words die when you act them out, they wither, and we are left with nothing but your ambition. Speak these words with the exact passion with which you would check out a laundry list. Do not become emotional about the lace blouse. Do not get a hard-on when you say panties. Do not get all shivery just because of the towel. The sheets should not provoke a dreamy expression around the eyes. There is no need to weep into the handkerchief. The socks are not there to remind you of strange and distant voyages. It is just your laundry. It is just your clothes. Don’t peep through them. Just wear them. This is a very difficult thing to do. The poems are nothing but information. They are the Constitution of the inner country. If you declaim them and blow them up with noble intentions and histrionics, then you are no better than the politicians whom you despise. You are just someone waving a flag and making the cheapest appeal to a kind of emotional patriotism. Think of the words as science, not as art. They are a report. You are speaking before a meeting of the Explorers’ Club or the National Geographic Society. These people know all about the risks of mountain climbing. They honor you by taking this for granted. If you rub their faces in it, this is an insult to their hospitality. Tell them the height of the mountain, the equipment you used, be specific about the surfaces and the time it took to scale it. Do not work the audience for gasps and sighs. If you are worthy of gasps and sighs it will not be from your appreciation of the event, but from theirs. It will be in the statistics and not in the trembling of the voice or the cutting of the air with your hands. It will be in the data and the quiet organization of your presence.
Avoid the flourish. Do not be afraid to be weak. Do not be ashamed to be tired. Do not be a bright thing on the stage. Read Hamlet’s speech to the players.
MM: Was ‘How To Speak Poetry’… was this in regard to the Sisters Of Mercy show?
LC: Yeah, that was something I wrote to the actors. But while I feel a lot of that was justified in terms of the kind of acting that was being done, I was also writing that to myself in terms of my own kinds of performances, both in ordinary living and on the stage.
MM: What do you think you’ll do in the future when you are really old?
LC: Well, I’d like to get a little chicken farm, maybe in South Dakota.
MM: [Laughs] Any projects of work, aside from raising chickens?
LC: I do have a lot of plans. But I found that the less you talk about your plans, the more chance you have of having them come into being.
[Flipping pages] This is great… Really wonderful… Ask me anything you want… All the answers to your questions are here… All the answers are here…
