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[MUSIC PLAYING] DIANE WAKOSKI: Technology was here to stay and that it had substantially changed our lives. Many, many, many different realizations came, and they all dovetailed to make a lot of things exciting. But art was certainly one of them.

NANCY FUSHAN: Poet Diane Wakoski describing the 1960s. I'm Nancy Fushan, and tonight, Mixed Media looks at that turbulent time through the eyes of two poets. What made the '60s an exciting period for the arts and what legacy was left to the present? That and more on Mixed Media.

ROBERT CREELEY: Loving someone or ways in which the particular fact of being person, let's say a Black mountain, North Carolina, or Boston, Massachusetts, or Minneapolis, Minnesota, the fact of being in a particular life at a particular time, in a particular place, with particular verbal habits and emotional patterns, we felt that writing presumably could actuate that much more intensively and literally than the modes that the otherwise attitudes toward the art of poetry had seemingly presumed.

NANCY FUSHAN: Another poet, Robert Creeley, talking about one of the characteristics of the Black Mountain School of poets, which has had a wide influence on writing in the last 15 years. Creeley's poetry is tight, specific, and helps us see a common experience anew.

During a recent visit to the Twin Cities, Creeley told Bill Siemering how his writing has changed since he lived at the Black Mountain College in the early 1960s.

ROBERT CREELEY: The emotional field of the poems has changed quite decisively. Just that taking as first instance, let's say, a collection for love, which is the first sizable collection of poems I ever had published.

Friends subsequently very generously said, that book was a real information for us as young men, just that it so spoke of so many things we felt as confusion or hope or dismay in living lives in a very real sense with people that we loved.

It seemed to not anticipate, but it seemed to find words for a lot of the stress and strain we then felt. So I think it's a classic young man's book, at least of this time and place. And I love it because it's now 20 years or more since most of the poems were written. And it now has an objective reality in that respect for me that then, of course, it couldn't have.

The poems that I'm presently writing are-- I want to say that they're more relaxed. I feel more at home in the world now than I did then. I've come to trust it a lot more and hopefully it trusts me also. Relations with people do not have-- they have happy intensity, but they're not so fraught with does they still like me or will be mind that I say or do this. It's not so fearful.

And also a poet that's really attracted me very much in the last, say six months, is a sadly dead, beautiful Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, who writes in no talking down sense but writes with such a direct commonness of human circumstance that it's absolutely attractive. And always that Irish tone of words is such a pleasure. No doubt sentimentalize it, but it's a lovely speech.

And I've been charmed to get that quality of direct tone into what I'm trying to write as, say, a poet. I have much more fun writing now. I don't-- I've written recently poems that homage for various friends I dearly respect like Basil Bunting. And it's a lot of fun to write them.

They're not fraught with extraordinary emotional tensions. They're just-- and yet I love them as poems. I don't feel that they're less significant because they're not screaming with anguish. So in that respect, I think my poems have changed. I don't think that the basic, let's say, economy of the poems is necessarily changed much at all. It still seems to me most comfortable to have the thing said be as particular and as concise as possibility allows.

I do ramble. Obviously, I'm rambling now, but I love the sense of something's moving and words following upon other words and shifting and changing feeling and context as they go. So that really hasn't changed at all. I love this wonder. You start to say something and there it goes. It begins to discover a whole possibility. A world begins to occur in the words that once saying.

BILL SIEMERING: Poetry is a distillation or a concentrate, isn't it?

ROBERT CREELEY: Yeah. Well, again, I've been reading recently a very common range of several penguin selections of Chinese poetry. And I love the ability to capture the intense moment of significance, whether it be a leaf, a person's gesture, the feel of the air, the sun, I'm fascinated by that.

So that it is a distillation of that consciousness or that perception, perhaps more accurately, because I don't even know that one necessarily is conscious of it. But you feel it, as they say.

BILL SIEMERING: But the board helps all of us feel more human in that sense. And it's so easy to live life on the surface and not experience the leaf and the feeling of the room and the atmospherics.

ROBERT CREELEY: Much devices to-- driving here is through-- coming into the city through the usual traffic, when I was being generously driven here, so I'm looking out the window at Minneapolis and people in cars adjacent.

And there was every reason why one does not want to be involved with that person sitting in that next car, whether they're weeping or laughing, or we've got our thing to do, we've got no time to consider. We have to be here and stuff.

Yet there's a very human impulse to say hello, or where are you going, or where did you come from, or where are we, not in some existential sense but you're obviously here too. One lovely thing as I get older, I find myself permitted by age to talk casually or on impulse to people, e.g waiting for buses or in stores where I am.

And it may sound grotesque, but I think you, and hopefully hearers as well, will understand me. One of the-- I've always been not confused but rather saddened by the usual provision, let's say, of male restrooms, the sense of standing in a line with other males relieving oneself into these peculiar containers. And it seems to me not undignified, but it seems to me a very kind of abstract and weird social situation.

So truly, last night, I was in that situation. And for the first time in my life, I simply said to the man standing next to me, this is an extraordinarily graceless situation to find oneself in. He said, god, I've always felt that too. But paradoxically, there's never anyone you can say it to.

And I thought terrific, because I thought maybe it was just me who felt this awkwardness humanly in this kind of weird provision. But obviously, the man standing next to me was having the same. Everyone's so private and yet it's such a public event. It's funny. Yeah.

BILL SIEMERING: I wonder if you might read some of your latest work to illustrate what you have been talking about.

ROBERT CREELEY: David Wilk, who generously invited me here, printed a poem. He'd asked if I might give him a poem for the occasion, and I did. And it's a poem using the rhythms of Kavanagh's poetry. It's a very meager approximation.

But in any case, this was written in Buffalo, actually sitting one day waiting for a class to start. I'd be teaching and looking down from this window to the sidewalk and seeing children apparently in a daycare center being taken somewhere. It was in winter, and Buffalo winters are certainly not simple. And so it's called the Children after Patrick Kavanagh.

Down on the sidewalk, recurrent children's forms, reds, greens walking along with the watching elders not their own. It's winter, grows colder and colder. How to play today without sun, will summer gone come again? Will I only grow older and older? Not wise enough yet to know you're only here at all as the wind blows now as the fire burns low.

It really should be red with a lovely Irish lilt. Now as the fire burns low. But I don't quite dare do it, but I can certainly hear it. And again, what charmed me in his poems was this lovely, easy, physical halt and question and rhythm that rode through all the words and gave them a human locus.

Because in poetry, it's as possible to be as abstract or as, quote, "objective" about the feeling of the words as one's hearing them or saying them as it is and say, filling out one's income tax forms, just as vague and just as abstract and just as not there. But I can't see any purpose to it.

NANCY FUSHAN: Poet Robert Creeley speaking with Bill Siemering , a new collection of his poetry titled Hello, will be published this month.

[SIMON & GARFUNKEL, "THE SOUND OF SILENCE"]

Hello darkness, my old friend. I've come to talk with you again. Because a vision softly creeping. Left its seeds while I was sleeping. And the vision that was planted in my brain still remains within the sound of silence.

In restless dreams I walked alone. Narrow streets of cobblestone.

NANCY FUSHAN: Diane Wakoski spent much of the 1960s in New York, a center for the burgeoning new poetry scene. Although an admirer of Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg, she preferred not to travel in their circles but follow her own path toward realizations that others reached during the decade as well.

The native Californian endured an unhappy childhood in the 1950s and discovered art as a way of dealing with her own personal problems and the problems of a technological society in the 1960s. While in the Twin Cities recently for a reading, Wakoski described how her early poems reflected the struggle against what she calls the ever increasing technocracy.

DIANE WAKOSKI: I think only in an incidental way in that I was obsessed with understanding and analyzing my identity as an individual. And a lot of my poetry is very much about self-definition. And I think that it was part of the ideology of the time that if we lived in a technocratic society where everything had great uniformity, there was even more stress on understanding and creating your own individuality.

And I'd say that probably that's the major response in my poems. I'm obviously not writing about responding to technocracy or anything like that specifically, but the fact that the poems themselves, the body of work, is obsessed with self-definition and understanding the self as a unique individual is undoubtedly ideologically response to that group knowledge.

NANCY FUSHAN: Has your poetry changed now in the '70s?

DIANE WAKOSKI: No, I think that, I guess, I do have a combined linear view of history and a more open field view. And in the linear respect, I tend to think that we start-- we're born with a group of biological, genetic, and psychological problems and obsessions. And we evolve them in our lifetime so that they change and grow and take different shapes. Maybe the initial impulse is the same. So obviously, I will continue to be obsessed with defining myself.

NANCY FUSHAN: Well, then if, if many artists are seeking that self-definition and have been over the two decades, then, it would seem to me that's what you're saying is it's the audience that's making the difference between the two decades.

DIANE WAKOSKI: I think so. For instance-- well, audiences are people who are interested in being in on the ground floor. They want to hear the first time that somebody did something. Audiences are pretty cavalier groups of people. They're not-- they tend to be much more interested in novelty and innovation of what is different and new to the exclusion of what is good and enduring.

I think because so many things were exploding and coming into maturity in the '60s, American poetry really became a mature art. And we had a golden age of poetry.

NANCY FUSHAN: What do you feel were the benchmarks of poetry in the '60s that showed that maturity?

DIANE WAKOSKI: Well, I mentioned, if we can stretch that definition a little. Ginsberg's Kaddish was published in 1959, and I certainly think that was one of the important documents of the new poetry.

Well, I think that what he does is bring together a combination of the great American autobiographical tradition that comes through Emerson and Thoreau and Melville and Whitman and brings it together with the European surrealist tradition, and then does that great American thing of impose his own ethnicity upon it and using a Jewish form of him and combines language of the street with very ecstatic religious language.

In other words, it's bringing together many of the threads of world poetry of the 20th century and creating them as a unique American document. So one of the things that happened in the latter part of this century is we became aware of the fact that to be American meant a whole diversity of things.

NANCY FUSHAN: Would you select one of your poems that incorporates that kind of an idea, or at least some of the things that you've mentioned?

DIANE WAKOSKI: Yes. I'm trying to use the myth of-- the legend of George Washington as the benevolent father figure who created all the legends and myths of America and relate that to my own sense, being a girl who grew up without a father and therefore took on a cultural identity rather than a family identity.

The Father of My Country. If George Washington had not been the father of my country, it is doubtful that I would ever have found a father, father in my mouth, on my lips, in my tongue. Out of all my womanly fire. Father I have left in my steel filing cabinet as a name on my birth certificate.

Father I have left in the teeth pulled out at dentists offices and thrown into their garbage cans. Father living in my wide cheekbones and short feet. Father in my Polish tantrums and my American speech. Father not a holy name, not a name I cherish, but the name I bear. The name that makes me one of a kind in any phone book because you changed it and nobody but us has it.

Father who makes me dream in the dead of night of the falling cherry blossoms. Father who makes me know all men will leave me if I love them. Father who made me a maverick, a writer, a namer, name father, son father, moon father, bloody Mars father.

Other children said, my father is a doctor, or my father gave me this camera, or my father took me to the movies, or my father and I went swimming. But my father is coming in a letter once a month for a while, and my father sometimes came in a telegram. But mostly my father came to me in sleep.

My father, because I dreamed in one night that I dug through the ash heap in back of the pepper tree and found a diamond shaped like a dog. And my father called the dog and it came leaping over to him. And he walked away out of the yard down the road with the dog jumping and nipping at his heels.

My father was not in the telephone book in my city. My father was not sleeping with my mother at home. My father did not care if I studied the piano. My father did not care what I did. And I thought my father was handsome. And I loved him, and I wondered why he left me alone so much. So many years, in fact.

But my father made me what I am, a lonely woman without a purpose. Just as I was a lonely child without any father, I walked with words, words and names, names. Father was not one of my words. Father was not one of my names. But now I say, George, you have become my father in his 20th century Naval uniform.

George Washington, I need your love. George, I want to call you father, father, my father, father of my country. That is me. And I say the name to chant it, to sing it, to lace it around me like weaving cloth, like a happy child on that shining afternoon in the palm tree sunset with her mother's trunk yielding treasures. I cry and cry, father, father, father, father have you really come home?

NANCY FUSHAN: Diane Wakoski reading a portion of her poem, The Father of My Country. Alfred Guzetti, his father, in fact, his entire family was an integral part of his artistic growth in the '50s and '60s. In the 1970s, his family became the basis of the filmmakers documentary Family Portrait Sittings.

Guzetti film traces the lives of his father's and grandfather's generations, the settling of an Italian immigrant family in America. Using old photographs and standard sound on film interviews, the Harvard film professor has also relied heavily on reels of Kodachrome home movies shot by his father during those yearly holiday and birthday rituals from the '40s through the 60s.

The result is much more than a film history of one man's family. It is Guzetti's personal statement and a gift to his own child. And it's often a pointed and poignant comment on all of our families. After a recent screening of the film in Minneapolis, the Boston filmmaker told me that counterpointing visual images of the '40s and '50s against the sound interviews of his family today presented a dilemma at times.

ALFRED GUZETTI: Two strands that have to be reconciled with one another. And in some ways they're in conflict because when people talk about their lives, they don't talk about them as a succession of birthdays and Christmases and summer vacations. Those things just mark out the passing of the years.

And I think that was the idea that made it possible for me to organize them, that I wouldn't try to illustrate the crucial events in people's lives, like finding a job or finding a profession, having a child or death, a funeral. There were no pictures of it because social rituals don't dictate taking pictures of those times.

NANCY FUSHAN: No, but the Kodachrome film certainly did evoke the surrounding activities, perhaps not the event itself.

ALFRED GUZETTI: But they only serve to date it in a way. What they do is locate things in time. And so I was satisfied to have this kind of ongoing collision between the image and the sound.

NANCY FUSHAN: The idea of something that may be dated as opposed to something more universal. Is it a difficult kind of thing to deal with?

ALFRED GUZETTI: It seems to me that the whole power of film, the image of film in particular, is to render particularity, that you just don't have a picture of childhood. You have a picture of a child dressed in a certain way, standing in a certain place, in a room that's decorated with a certain way. And that's the whole power of it.

And you want some kind of claim to universality. So that people can watch it so that they're in some particular relation to these details. But the power of the film comes from the details, it seems to me.

NANCY FUSHAN: And allowing the audience to go ahead and universalize on their own?

ALFRED GUZETTI: Yeah, Yeah. But I think it would not have been possible for me to make a film just out of Kodachrome, old Kodachrome movies because there has to be some mediation between those in the audience. You can't-- I don't think you can have an unmediated experience of seeing somebody else's snapshots or home movies because they don't mean anything to you. They have to be made to mean something.

NANCY FUSHAN: And how did you do that? How did you form the mediation?

ALFRED GUZETTI: Well, that's difficult. I think the voices are important in that you get through the voices. You just get to know the people.

NANCY FUSHAN: And as that filmmaker, you have to come up with some degree of objectivity so that you can decide what is going in and what is going out of that movie, and what that mediation will be. But with such a subjective kind of subject dealing with a family, how do you maintain that objectivity?

ALFRED GUZETTI: Well, fortunately, a movie takes a long time to make. And lot of times when you can reverse decisions, and so on. It's like writing a novel. And you can have readers of the novel the same way you can have people who look at the movie in progress friends. And they can give you a more objective reading.

And what I do, I think probably what a lot of people do who make films, is to save certain friends, that is, some of them you subject the footage to in an early stage, and then you hold out one or two people who haven't seen anything and you use them later on but before the movie goes to a composite print so that they can say, well, this whole section doesn't make any sense to me.

NANCY FUSHAN: Did you show it to your family as well in that stage?

ALFRED GUZETTI: Yes, but I didn't expect them-- I expected the opposite from them. They would be the people least in the position to have any objectivity about it as a movie. They were in a worse position than I was even.

NANCY FUSHAN: What was their reaction? What has been their reaction?

ALFRED GUZETTI: Well, I think when they saw it before it was in its final form, they didn't see it as a movie at all. They just saw it as a kind of documentary replay of their lives. And they were just responding to it as a summary of what they had done in their lives.

And I think it was powerful for them for that reason. And they didn't see it as a movie at all until one or two times later, until it was finished, until they sat in an audience. And they were able to see it, I think through the audience. For example, when the audience would laugh, then they would see that something that they might have thought was funny that they were doing was actually funny.

NANCY FUSHAN: To get the kind of introspection that you got, particularly from your mother on the aging process, how did that come about? How did you make them feel at ease enough with the camera to go ahead and fully open up?

ALFRED GUZETTI: Well, a lot of it is them that they talk freely all the time, anyway. If they weren't like that, then I think there's nothing you could do that would make them feel at ease, particularly with a tape recorder and camera threatening kind of situation.

And I did a couple of things to try to ease that. I didn't bring the camera right away. I brought the tape recorder, which was less threatening because it's less apparatus. And then I thought I couldn't film with a crew. I couldn't bring strangers or even some friends of mine into our living room and expect them to talk to the camera as if that crew wasn't there. That's unreasonable. I couldn't do that, and I don't think anybody could.

I didn't want them to talk to the camera in a sense. I wanted them to talk to me. So one of the reasons the film looks the way it does is that I made a series of technical decisions that would make it possible for me not to have a crew, for just me to have a camera and tape recorder and a very simple setup and make a recording, turn it on and turn it off. And by waiting to bring in the camera, that helped too. I tried to use as much natural light as possible. I had the light, but to use that only as supplementary lighting.

NANCY FUSHAN: And to try to use yourself interjecting questions as little as possible?

ALFRED GUZETTI: Yeah, as little as possible. But that's their style anyway, that if you set them off, they'll talk for a long time. And that was all right. I depended on that. If I would bring up something, they would talk for a while and develop it themselves.

One of the important things, they felt a lot more relaxed together. I started out interviewing them individually. I didn't think of putting them together. And it was very difficult for them individually. But once they were together, in a certain sense, they were talking to each other and they were talking among the family rather than being interrogated by their son with a tape recorder. And that was a much more familiar situation. The family conversation, the two of them.

NANCY FUSHAN: Do you see a progression in the film and how would you describe the progression?

ALFRED GUZETTI: Sure. The progression is the first parts are very chronological and very anecdotal and reel 1. It's really about the distant past before I was born and then my sister was born, and that happens in reel 2. Reel 2 is about children growing up.

And then reel 3 is really about-- is not so much chronologically organized. It's about attitudes and values and what's important. And then about ideas. And it branches out into other kinds of ideas, political ideas, ideas about work.

And I thought that an important job of the film would be to work to insert these people, including myself, into society, unless the film worked toward that point and did that, restored them to their immediate social relations, showed them at work and outside the family and outside the home, and also rendered that in terms of their ideas then the film would work out. It's going toward that point right from shot 1.

NANCY FUSHAN: How long have you been showing this across the country?

ALFRED GUZETTI: The film was first shown in 1975.

NANCY FUSHAN: So it started showing before the whole roots phenomenon occurred in the country?

ALFRED GUZETTI: Yeah. When I was looking for a title of a film before roots came out, a friend of mine suggested I should call it-- I described the film to him and he said, well, you should call it roots. I thought that's a terrible title.

NANCY FUSHAN: Filmmaker Alfred Guzetti, who plans to carry on his project with two sequels, one documenting his own adult life, and a second, recording the growth of his four-year-old son. And that's our time for this evening. I'm Nancy Fushan. Our technical director has been Paul Kelly. Join us again next week for Mixed Media.

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