C'mon people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now .... Yes, surely the pop/rock canon is wide enough to accommodate mystics and rockers. Van Morrison almost bridged that divide for a while before he noodled off into the Ulster distance. Fugs rarely get listened to now surely for all their grit and grumble. Incredible String Band's jigs I loved especially Grumbling Old Men on Liquid Acrobat but that Likky voice was a trial and Mike Heron's meanders didn't always sit well for me with Robin Williamson's strings. Give me, instead, Richard Thompson's Crazy Man Michael from his Fairport days. 

Bill

> On 3 Apr 2014, at 9:00 pm, Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> You may never have heard The Fugs having at Donovan during their shows back
> in 1968. They referred to him as "Donovan Puke Freak." And it got better
> from there. Hell, Donovan was simply singing a sweet vision of life. Or a
> mystical one. Guinevere in the Royal Court of Arthur. (I thought the Royal
> Court was a theater in London.) As for The Fugs, the grosser the better. I
> guess everything has its place. They were crass fun. But for Ed Sanders, the
> whole world was the gross-out world of turned over dustbins, and bodily
> fluid transfers in apartments on East 9th Street on Lower East Side. That
> was fun, but it wasn't all there was, for Godsake. Gentleness and beauty
> were in there too.
> 
> There seemed to be rock "camps" in the late Sixties. Mystical, like the
> Incredible String Band (I adored them), and rock blasters.
> 
> Ken
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of Bill Wootton
> Sent: Wednesday, April 2, 2014 5:50 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Snap Ken: La Cauchemar
> 
> Ah, Donovan, so maligned by the Bobster in Don't Look Back, as he unleashed
> It's all over now, zbaby Blue.
> 
> When I look out my window
> What do you think I see?
> And when I look in my window
> So many different people to be
> It's strange
> Sure is strange
> 
> You got to pick up every stitch
> 
> Ken,
> 
> In dreams, things unstitch for me. Responsibilities don't so much begin as
> unravel and echo. So many different people I might have been but will never
> be. Demons? But maybe you are right: stitches become available for picking
> up and reincorporating somehow.
> 
> Bill
> 
>> On 3 Apr 2014, at 8:24 am, Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> 
>> Schwartz's was a courtship story, his father dating his mother. It's 
>> something to do with him witnessing it as in a theater and crying out 
>> in horror not to go through with it because of what's coming. 
>> Mine...more like losing everything, the Donovan song "Season of the 
>> Witch." If you lose it, tough, you still have to find it because you 
>> own the bits and pieces of your life, even if they dropped stitches. 
>> So back I went in dreams to an aborted teaching career, some of it 
>> realized but then ruined. One of the worst night's sleep I've had in 
>> ages. But--I lived anyway. Tough shit to the demons in my head. One day
> they may claim me, but not for a while yet.
>> 
>> Ken
>> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
>> On Behalf Of Bill Wootton
>> Sent: Wednesday, April 2, 2014 8:16 AM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: Snap Ken: La Cauchemar
>> 
>> Things lost I get too in dreams, Ken but more often ways lost, being 
>> diverted so I am late and getting later for some appointment, often a 
>> teaching appointment but the more I try to get on track, the farther I 
>> wander. And a dawning acceptance of knowing I won't make it. Papers 
>> not written or not submitted I get too. Remembered hallways are only 
>> half-remembered and what's at either end of the hallway changes, even 
>> the side walls bulge or become intangible. Like the sides of a Murakami
> well.
>> 
>> Responsibilities. Calling out in the picture theatre is the bit that 
>> stayed with me in the Schwartz story. And being evicted and so missing 
>> some of the story of his parents' courtship wasn't it? But being 
>> returned too and having to pick it up. And the awful inevitabilities.
>> 
>> I like your poem for its chase. 
>> 
>> Bill
>> 
>>>> On 2 Apr 2014, at 10:20 pm, Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]>
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Come to in my office chair
>>> 
>>> 2:40 in the morning
>>> 
>>> After a dream of failed tasks
>>> 
>>> exams not given
>>> 
>>> classes untaught
>>> 
>>> oh that was a baddie.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Fall into bed and the dream
>>> 
>>> is not through with me yet.
>>> 
>>> It is proctoring an exam in
>>> 
>>> the cafeteria of my elementary school
>>> 
>>> papers ungraded
>>> 
>>> Mr. Wolman what are we to do?
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> I do not know I remember
>>> 
>>> my own work left undone
>>> 
>>> a dissertation unwritten
>>> 
>>> chapters to be handed in
>>> 
>>> I cannot do this
>>> 
>>> I cannot answer for what I fear
>>> 
>>> or what I am supposed to do
>>> 
>>> for them or for myself.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> The same dream, things dropped
>>> 
>>> cannot be found
>>> 
>>> cannot be recaptured
>>> 
>>> a dream of things lost
>>> 
>>> things that cannot be found
>>> 
>>> chasing in remembered hallways.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Ken
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Truly awful dream. Delmore Schwartz was right: in dreams begin 
>>> responsibilities. Horrible. I've not had a "losing dream"-my 
>>> standard-in years, it came back last night. It took me a few minutes 
>>> to collect myself and realize my only call is to myself, from myself.
>>> Unrevised except to fix Outlook's habit of capitalizing first lines 
>>> of
>> everything.
>