1967 Naropa speech

Fullerton delivered the following address to students and faculty of the Naropa Institute of Disembodied Poetics (now Naropa University) at the invitation of poet Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg was humoring outlaw beatnik Neal Cassady when he agreed to schedule the lecture. Fullerton dedicated his subsequent album, Om on the Range, to both of them.

Cassady talked Allen into inviting me here when they were hanging ten in Georgia overdrive at a sailor bar in San Diego, cranially osterized on Fleishman's whiskey and some cactus buttons I'd fed them that afternoon.

Allen didn't jump at the idea, initially. At various times he's referred to me as an unfrocked Buddhist, an unholy mackerel, and a whoopie cushion on the pew of enlightenment. But if you know Neal, you know he's a real badger. Not the cute cartoon kind of badger. More like an extinct prehistoric giant three-toed saber-tooth badger with Phyllis Diller fingernails.

So I've got to thank you, Allen, for following through, even though I know you were motivated at least in part by your well-honed instincts of sheer, naked self-preservation. Giant badgers are lethal when aroused.

I also realize that the Poetry Chair at Naropa you dangled in front of me to get me here doesn't exist. Other academic institutions have chairs. What you have here is more like the bleachers at midwestern university football stadium, the Big Game, standing room only, which is fine, because the benches are so sticky with beer and Pepsi that if you sat on one, you could cut up your pants and use the strips for fly paper. Poetry chair? At best - and it is the best - I'm just a cow puncher fixing to hang up his chaps and go see if he can find a not-to-sticky spot up in Row D-O.

Nonetheless, this invitation is the greatest honor I've received since Patsy Montana anointed me Laureate of the Lariat, and I thank you.

Allen wouldn't help me decide on a topic to talk about, so I asked Neal. He said, "Love poems. Love poems, love poems, love poems." Neal said no one writes 'em anymore, and it might be high time for a revival.

Love poems! A great idea. A great tradition! But I have to confess, even though I know a lot of poems - "Casey at the Bat," "The Charge of the Light Brigade," the first three or four lines of some Longfellow poems, the opening of "Howl," for which Allen should have gotten an Oscar, I only know one poem that has much to do with love.

I don't know who wrote it. I do know it's old. It goes:

Said the wife of the Vicar of Prue
to the Archbishop as he withdrew,
the Vicar is quicker and thicker and slicker,
and two inches longer than you.

Where I picked it up: I was in New York and ran into Jerry Jeff Walker, Buddy Guy, and Fontella Bass at the Village Vanguard. Buddy and Fontella had arrived together, and Buddy and Jerry Jeff  knew each other from the festival circuit. I'd just come out of the men's room and told them about a great little bit of repartee I'd seen scrawled on the door of my stall: "I like grils"...."That's girls, stupid"...."Hey, what about us grils?" Which started us talking about what the best barroom bathroom reading in Manhattan was. We decide to make a study of it, a field survey. Started with the White Horse Tavern, Dylan Thomas's old watering hole downtown, and made it up the island as far as Harlem.

Along way, one of the stops was the bar at the Algonquin Hotel, midtown, famed trough of such illustrious lushes as Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woolcott, and - why not? - Harpo Marx. We didn't expect much in the way of bathroom graffiti at such a classy joint, but Fontella found this thing about the wife of the Vicar of Prue in the women's room.

Jerry Jeff didn't think much of it. "Not enough raunch points," he said. But keep in mind this was the guy who sings: "The answer, my friend, is pissing in the sink." So I was inclined to dismiss the critique as Anglophobic redneck reverse corn-pone snobbery. The poem stuck with me like porridge to a Dickens urchin's ribs.

Now, I'd be lying if I said it choked me up. But there's enough going on there to keep a small conjugation of English majors up into the wee, wee hours dissecting it. A lot of lessons to learn. So let's pop it open.

Okay, so first order of business is that close read that poetry fans like so much. The wife is getting it on with her husband's boss. Who says the Church of England is boring? But if she's doing it willingly, which is probably but not entirely clear, she's not doing it passionately. Her heart - or some parcel of real estate upon her fruited plain - belongs to the vicar.

So what's the poor archbishop to do? Try just a little bit harder, as Janis Joplin, forever the laureate of my heart, says? Maybe he was just having an off day. Can't be easy being an archbishop. All those decisions, all those brown-nosers, all those ceremonial occasions. All those clothes. 

Henry Kissinger says power's an aphrodisiac, right? That guy, just a dumply little sawed-off psychotic, and it's a miracle he can get his shirt off, what with all those Washington socialites clamped on his arms. I don't know. Maybe he keeps his shirt on.

Likewise we see, in high ecclesiastical fashion, the archbishop using the vast power of his office to get sex, collecting it like rent, right?, and he's got to be figuring, who cares what the vicar's wife thinks?

Well, if he wants to be candid with himself, he does. Because this is not love-makiing, it's just flexing his power for the shear, mutha-lovin' hell of it. Like old Ed Hillary climbing Everest. Because it's there. And if it turns out he's not flexing so much power, after all, then who's in the catbird seat? She is. She and her vicar, who's waiting back stage after the poem.

But - it's just a limerick. Right? And here I am, this over-sized rodeo galloot, dignfying it with the name love poem? Why? you're wondering.

Why? Because we can imagine so clearly and instantly how much she loves her husband. Did I say it didn't choke me up? Okay, I was lying when I said I was lying. When I let it, it just slays me. She loves him so much that she's even willing to entertain his creepy boss. Lovelessly. Vicar's wives wear a lot of hats, and they're not all pillboxes - fundraiser, booster, charity leader, diplomat, scheduler, event organizer, homemaker - and one of their widest-brimmed hats is being the consummate hostess. And in this case, she's consummating with a vengeance. 

The joke - because limericks are always jokes, they can't help themselves - the joke is all about mores. In her role in her social sphere, she can't properly refuse the archbishop. But she can defuse him. It might not fit the mores of then or now, but it's exactly what she does. The vicar is quicker and thicker and slicker! Pow! Take that, 'bish! Like a hay-maker from Superman. In just five, count 'em, five lines. A subversive little tract!

You know, on my way up here, I was thinking I'd lay a great irony on you: that there's no word in the English language that rhymes with poem. But I was wrong. Because two days ago, hitching through Taos, the wildflowers were rampant after some spring rain, and I remembered a small bit of botany I learned topping redwoods in the sierras. And then yesterday, at a liquor store in Denver, I found myself gazing longingly, lovingly, and hopelessly at the biggest bottle of wine I'd ever seen. 

Now, the limerick is one of the few forms of poetry in the English language - maybe the only form - that's never been co-opted, taken over, appropriated, emasculated, constipated, deflowered, denatured, dressed up, dressed down, neutralized, sanitized, or homogenized by the intelligencia, the Shirking Class. It's always low-brow, no matter who wrote it or where it's told. And it's always subversive. Think about that: Sub. Verse. Subversive. It's verse, but it's beneath verse. In every sense. Which is how it subverts it.

Humble and obscure in its origins, born in Merrie Olde England in the days of quills and candles, thrown to the masses by Edward Lear (praise his name!), it is and always has been a classless, placeless poetic form, used and abused by rich and poor alike, not bound to any nation, region, creed, or dialect, always with us, never in danger of going the Darwinian route of the saber-toothed badger, never pretending to any throne, and never - never - a serious pursuit for serious poets. Which is one thing poets have in common with everyone else. Even old Ed Lear himself was probably kidding.

But I'd argue (I guess I am arguing) that it's those exact qualities that make it the ideal Buddhist poetic form - the rhyme circling back upon itself yin-yang-style, the counter-play of conflicting expressions yielding an inside-out, existential sense of completion, the snake at the end of the universe forever eating its tail. Circle. Hole. Wholeness. Holiness. 

Om OM om, om OM om, om OM,
om OM om, om OM om, om OM.
Om OM om, om OM,
om OM om, om OM,
om OM om, om OM om, om OM!

Or how about this one?

There once was a snake who said "Om"
forever and wouldn't go home.
Asked why he repeated,
it's said that he bleated:
"I love a one-syllable pome!"

Yeah. I know. Poem is a one-lunged bastard to rhyme, ain't it? More on that later.

But first, how about this?: A young seeker of enlightenment journeys to the east, walks into a monastery (it's already starting to sound like a joke, right?) and finds a little old man in rags mopping the floor. Y'all know the punchline: the old man turns out to be the big cheese of the whole operation. 

A great lesson, for sure. Heavy stuff. Leadership through humility. But to make the story perfect, what do we have the old guy do? He looks the traveler up and down, sticks his mop back in the bucket, girds his loincloth, lifts his chin, throws his arms wide, throws out his wizened little chest, and says: "There was a young man from the west...."

I'll let you finish that one.

Point is, there's no snobbery among limericists! Ever notice that? Far from it. Competition, yes, but a competition with no losers. A real-life poetry koan. Gleeful. Unabashed. Nothing but the steady expectation that the words really rhyme and the lines really scan - unless, for some reason, they don't. 

And in achieving the form, they achieve perfection. All of them, every limericking fool, over and over. Democratic! By the limerick's silly nature, no limerick can be more humble or more exalted, more absurd or more profound than another. The great poetic equalizer. Everyone wins. Everyone's a laureate. 

Try saying that about a quatrain! What more perfection can we hope for? Whitman couldn't have done any better. Or Dickinson. Or Hughes or Frost or Browning or Nash or Cummings. Allen, I love you, man, because you're smart and humble enough to know that you couldn't, either. 

Because it can't be done. (And it certainly can't be John Donne.) It's as perfect as - what? How about: as perfect as the love of a lovely vicar's wife for her presumably innocent and uninformed husband. She gives her body and keeps her soul. In a sonnet or, God help us all, verz leebray (oops, sorry, Allen), what chance would she have of parsing so nimbly the yang of a sordid commercial interlude with the yin of her true love for the vicar, her spirit so obviously unsullied by the groping and poking of the vicar's impure employer. His employer, but not his superior.

So in the subversive spirit of the limerick and this institute, I've taken those rhymes I mentioned earlier and composed and dedicate the following to Naropa, as a humble thank-you for the opportunity to speak before you this evening and to stay up past sunrise exploring the mysteries of creation - the Almighty's and our own:

There once was a scribe of the poem.
His words flowed like xylem and phloem.
When his genius would falter,
he'd retreat to his alter:
a fresh-opened, stout jeroboam.

Which I hope you'll join me in doing right now. Thank you all. Thank you. Now where do you keep the goddam corkscrews around here?

Ginsberg at Naropa

Naropa

Beatrice Filbert-Farthingay, wife of the Vicar of Prue

Rt. Rev. Eustace Filbert-Farthingay, Vicar of Prue

Saint Anne's Chapel, Prue

Phloem, xylem, and friends

Jeroboam and friend

Edward Lear

Naropa University

O is for Om

Limerick

Nantucket

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"There once was a guit-pickin' dude
who wrote tunes both wholesome and lewd.
He called himself Leon,
his name writ in neon,
and sang 'em both sober and stewed." Anonymous