SALUTATION by Bouvard Pécuchet

Richard Denner is not a reincarnation of Fernando Pessoa. They are separate emanations of the multi-faced God that sneezes in the cosmic air of creativity. Pessoa deconstructed himself in an age before the philosophy of deconstructualism; Denner is reconstructing himself in a post-post-post modern age, where philosophy and culture are rapidly disintegrating.
  Pessoa lived a quiet life, perhaps creating his "heteronyms" to make his life interesting. Denner has been living a full life. He has married three times and has children by his different wives, who in turn have presented him with grandchildren. He lived in Berkeley during the fairytale 60s, where he was the Poet of the Berkeley Barb. He fled Berkeley when the teargas began to fall and traveled to Alaska where he lived in a cabin in the woods, hunting and fishing for survival. He has worked at a wide variety of professions—cowboy, tree planter, bookseller, carpenter, printer. He has drawn his metaphors from his life experience and written about what he discovered in the world, and he has developed an elaborate inner life and written from the heart.
  As a boy, Richard was charmed by the shenanigans of Frank Demara, known to the public in the 1950s as The Great Imposter. Richard saw him interviewed live on The Jack Parr Show. Demara was able to create different personas and find employment in a vast number of posts—everything from being a medical doctor in the military to a Latin teacher in a private school. Demara said that when he picked up a scalpel, it was as though he had used it before. Denner found an explanation for this, as a freshman at Cal, reading the works of Plato, where it is said that we know everything but forget it all at birth, that knowledge is the process of remembering what we have forgotten. Later, when Denner rediscovered the Dharma of Gotama Buddha, he had a similar understanding. It is not the Self that is the problem but the incomplete Self. One solution to the problem of Self is to discover there is no Self—no Self, no problem. Another solution is the integration of the various "selves" by allowing them full play—integration, like a drama with a cast, not the conflicting, schizophrenic isolation of the parts of the personality but an association of the members of the cast in the play of consciousness, each with their lines, each in character.   In one of Rychard's terse, large-lettered poems, all/over/all/all, I find the Poundian components, logopoeia, melopoeia, and panopoeia. The poem can be read as temporal all over and as local all over, as a point of view, over all, and visually, with the word all being place over itself. There is formal structure, yet an innovative playfulness is evident.
  There are ontologically questioning poems by Doug O, the "O" suggesting nothingness or infinite space. There are the "Sensationalist" poems of Jubal Dolan:
                        no thinking, here
                            just looking
and the romantic-pastoral mode of Luiz Mee ("Luiz" perhaps a tip of the hat to Luis Garcia, Richard's long-time friend and mentor). We have the thinker, the worker, the lover poets, with their different hats, pets and facial tics. As Rychard once said, "Everything is everywhere, and God is gift horse, a kind of cornucopia with teeth."
  It is difficult to say exactly when the personalities first emerged. Most likely it was part of a 9/11 meltdown. However, I am certain that before our author discovered the works of Fernando Pessoa & Co. in June of 2003, I, Bouvard Pécuchet, had already begun writing reviews of books that didn't exist, and the scattered Buddhist poems of Jampa Dorje had been collected under one cover. There was the forgery, Another Artaud, as well as works by Rychard from the Berkeley 60s. The drama was well underway, needing only a bit more prompting by the Muse. Rychard is here, and we have been joined by Jubal Dolan, Luiz Mee, and Doug O.
  Welcome!

DOUG O: LOST FAVORS OF SISTER MEAN

JUBAL DOLAN: WHAT THE            THUNDER SAID

Jubal Dolan was born in 1939 in Island Park, New York, to teenage immigrant parents. When he was 16, his parents were killed in an auto accident, and Jubal ran away from a foster care home and headed west. He found his way to Berkeley, California, where he met Jack Spicer, who took him under his wing. One of the "translations" in After Lorca is dedicated to Jubal.

HAND IN EMPTY HAND
            A translation for Jubal

In the early morning,
   empty, empty, empty.
A gypsy walks the streets
   holding a guitar as a banner
early in the morning.
   Empty, Empty, Empty.

An enfant terrible, he was scheduled to read at the Six Gallery, in 1955, an event which launched the Beat Generation. At the last moment, he opted to seal his poems in an envelope on which he inscribed, "Not to be opened & read until 2003!" and thus the venue had six poets instead of seven. His experiments with sex and fast driving led to his early demise, in 1970.

DA DA DA

Nothing exists—Beyond ruin, death dies
and Time is defeated

RYCHARD’S CAFÉ POEMS & LINOLEUM NUDES

  The Café Poems are poems that Rychard wrote on the street or in the cafés along Telegraph Avenue. He would inscribe them on someone’s arm or leg with four color markers, held between his fingers, creating a rainbow of letters. Sometimes he would write on paper and sell a poem for a few pennies, which he would put toward another cup of espresso.
  The poems printed in the large type format were the original books printed at D Press and are now out of print. Rychard writes,

I began D Press in an attic apartment in 1967 after finding an old Kelsey handpress and several fonts of worn type and hauling the lot away for $50. Days I worked in the backshop of the Ketchikan Daily News doing layout, burning plates, and assisting run a 3-unit Goss webpress. At night, I set type and hung my prints to dry on lines nailed to the angle of the attic roof. Grant Risdon showed me how to cut linolium blocks, which enabled me to disguise some of the irregularities in my printing and add a dash of color to compliment all the big, bold words now showing through. Given a 4X6 inch type case, how much poem can be printed with 60 point Bodoni Bold!?

  The y in Rychard's name has raised questions. He says it is an Old French spelling of his name. It is to be noted that his sister, Lynda, spells her name with a y, and at the time of the name change, his father had been appointed a "Y-man" in the reformation of State Farm Insurance, where he was an executive, the "y" meaning there were three branches of leadership. It might, also, have symbolized a fork in the life path Rychard was following, moving away from the study of medicine towards becoming a student of the world.


in every molecu-
le
in every second
big &
small






sent
i men
tall
y yours

truly,

I am trapped
in my
thought


a glance
becomes
a gaze

does love hurt?
—yes, it hurts


my cup—

enough or
too much?

enough
& more than enough


Place is
another

word

for God


here
there
where

on
at
in


all
over
all
over
all