Word: oneness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...One good whiff hinted another way in which the reading was going to depart from Robert Lowell's format. There were about three parts of grass vapor to one part of oxygen in the room, and after a few deep breaths we had caught up to everyone else...
...poems he read were from The Spring Hill Mine Disaster Versus the Pill or Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan's two major collections. Most of the poems hadn't been published. Few were longer than three or four lines. One poem, with a complex/compound sentence as its title, was one word long...
...read them in quick succession with an urgent, almost feminine sing-song. He stepped back from the mike for just a second after each one, flashing a sly twinkle or a sheepish shrug as the poem demanded. The crowd loved the shrugs: each one said, What the hell, sounds good, don't it? The boyishness of his manner-you got the idea that the whole role of the Coming Poet strikes him as outrageously funny-endeared him to the audience. They liked him because he is profound, but they loved him be he thinks he's one...
...connoisseur might claim that "true" poetry relies on a lot more than visceral communion with your audience. "Poetry," one might say, has to be less mortal, more enduring than Brautigan's verbal hand grenades...
After forty minutes, Brautigan said goodbye and sat down. Nobody moved. The crowd stared at Brautigan. Brautigan stared at the crowd. Both laughed. After it was clear that no one was going anywhere, Brautigan sat down to get good and smashed while some of his friends read poems (his and theirs). Brautigan came back to the mike every now and then to lead the festivities. The same poem was read by about twenty people for an experiment in sound, and five or six distinct poems, not twenty, was the result...