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three | ly tle shaw Presence in the Poets’ Polis Hippie Phenomenology in Bolinas [. . .] I address Bolinas as if it were a condition to be occupied as if it Arose not after Frisco that monsoon of lights but rather the unclaimed silt beach of phonepoles, bridges, houses, shoes—a last outpost takes out here, and the rest of the world a wake of minor shocks not for a moment to be received as history —John Thorpe (The Cargo Cult n.p.) the word bolinas produces a knowing look in poets who lived through the 1960s. But like the writing we associate with the town whose road sign on Highway One has long been a tradition for residents to remove, the look seems to indicate a state of unrecoverable experience , a “condition/to be occupied” and thus a spatio-temporal engagement in a here-and-now that by definition cannot be communicated. As such, Bolinas might be considered, within poetry history, a kind of synecdoche for the utopian 1960s, the 1960s of hippies, communes, consciousness—a set of aspirations that often seem to disqualify themselves , to fall into caricature, before they open up for analysis. Considering the uneven reception of 1960s and 70s countercultures, artist Mike Kelley puts his finger directly on this problem. How does the relationship of the French Situationists to their culture compare to the Yippies’ relationship to American culture? What’s 68 | ly tle shaw the difference between Malcolm McLaren’s hip capitalism and Frank Zappa’s “selling out” jokes? How does the Clash’s role as a “political” band compare to that of the MC5? You’ll never know. Because all the Americans I’ve just mentioned are categorized as hippies, not artists. (145) But rather than clear the Bolinas poets from the charge that they were hippies, I want instead to take seriously the implications both of their individual artistic practices and of their larger social aspirations, especially the proposition that Bolinas itself might take on a new, exemplary function as the poets’ polis, the one town in the United States explicitly organized around the possibilities of poetry as a collectively pursued enterprise, with poet-citizens not as a marginal subculture, but as dominant public figures—school board representatives, press, lawmakers. This possibility gets registered frequently in the poetry of the period, as, for instance, in Philip Whalen’s 1971 poem: “Too busy to see anybody in New York/A few French paintings, shoeshine/New tweed English pants two pounds real Camembert cheese/Who is there to see in New York anyway/Everybody’s moved to Bolinas” (Scenes of a Life at the Capital 9). One measure of this poet population shift was the 1971 On the Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing, published by City Lights. Robert Creeley, Joanne Kyger, Lewis Warsh, Ebbe Borregaard , Bill Berkson, David Meltzer, and Tom Clark (along with nine poets less remembered by literary history) all appear in the anthology.1 We also know from poems and memoirs that many other poets arrived, passed through, and sometimes remained within Bolinas, including Joe Brainard, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Philip Whalen, Andrei Codrescu, and later Robert Grenier. From the beginning of their migration, poets were prominent and visible in the town—population approximately 500—and often played an active role in town politics. And we should hear the still unsettled possibility of a poets’ town in the many references to Bolinas in late 1960s and early 1970s American poetry: would it be just another backdrop for poet superstars (now under the rubric of the guru), or would it actually achieve a more horizontal, democratic social organization? Could the negated real neighbors of Williams’s and Olson’s largely imaginary polises—the Marcia Nardis and Vincent Presence in the Poets’ Polis | 69 Ferrinis—finally make contact with the more established poets sifting through the cultural residue of their towns, or was keeping them at arm’s length the sacrifice necessary to demonstrate that one did not accept the contingent as the utopian, the person next door as the ideal addressee? Poetry of this period charges the word Bolinas with a broad array of meanings. Still, we see repeated ambitions and fantasy structures: escape from the “unlivable” cities; connection with non-Western knowledge and daily life; establishment of local political autonomy; total involvement in non-deferred pleasure among a closely knit group of friends—in an infinitely absorbing “now” that offers itself as a kind of hippie phenomenology. Despite the obvious differences between the...

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