A DREAM WITH MY FRIEND JEWELL ON THE SUBJECT OF LIFE & FAME

I know I told you long ago, but when I was 10-12 years old my father was giving serious consideration on moving the family to Phoenix. For a building contractor he heard it was a hot spot. We’d be loading up the wagon in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts and somehow making it to the southwest. It seemed impossible, it was impossible. I can easily imagine us though meeting, as if in a dream, in some bookshop a few years later in downtown Phoenix where you were busy growing up as a boy.

[ A bookshop corner, given light by only a shabby window.]

"Excuse me, do you like Oppen?"
"Huh? George Oppen? Yes. Yes I do!"
"Me too." Some silence, because we are 16.
"Do you like William Carlos Williams?"
"Absolutely."
The rest was easy.

Of course I'm giving ourselves pointers for knowing Oppen's work at 16, when I didn't, but I know we were both reading Pound, Stevens, Cummings, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Rexroth and Kerouac. Certainly Creeley, Levertov, Olson, Duncan, Reznikoff and Snyder. Though we’d be equally as excited when falling into the hands of Spicer, Eigner, Zukofsky, Corman, Niedecker, O’Hara, Baraka, Corso, Whalen — the gods of poetry list is very very long — and we haven’t even dipped a toe into Europe or parted Asia’s curtain. South America was where Rockefeller's son was eaten by cannibals, or so we thought, but it was really New Guinea. Head-hunters. Africa was Tarzan. Period.

It would have changed things for us both as poets; maybe we'd both work for my father and become builders. You thought of law school and your father, but you were being rebellious. The building trade fit right into our dreams of being independent of the Man. After all, it was the Sixties! We thought we would set off and start a commune up near Oracle.

We'd build all the buildings for everyone and everyone would come, including Ed Abbey who didn't like us one little bit and our hammering ways, but he liked all the silver girls who liked rugged poets with tools in their fists and Bonnard paintings on their walls.

Abbey would become most difficult and we'd end up in one of his essays on self-serving-commune-builder-poets-good-for-nothings. People would read this in the thousands and soon print a broadside manifesto out of it. It was posted on all college campuses. At public readings it was Abbey's highest request to read. He did so with glee, each time describing us worse and worse, until we couldn't even recognize the "Scabby white rich boys from Phoenix who I bet get weekly checks from their daddies. And their poetry sucks."

In fact we were once in the back row at one of these readings in Tucson, and we looked at one another getting angrier with each other by the second because it might be true. Abbey said so! The crowd was cheering. What a mess.

Bob Arnold often climbed Mt. Greylock with local cub and boy scout troops as a boy. Once he persuaded a few to leave the pack with him and venture into other parts & trails of the mountain. This caused panic with the troop leaders. One representative came to Bob’s house to speak to his parents. His older sister posed as a ‘parent’ and listened diligently to the scolding about Bob and saved him from further scolding by his parents. Nothing like teamwork.