Yevteshenko - anything City Lights published would show up
on that rack. It was al contemporary, al poetry, al incendiary,
al revolutionary, each book a Molotov cocktail. I'd be down
and the owners would point me to something, and I'd be up
and they’d point me to something else. It was a whole world
of books that I never dreamed could be so close to me, to
where I was physical y on the planet: this horrible, awful, stupid
suburb. The store was owned and run by two adults, Stan and
Phyl is Pogran, who were not trying to get between you and
the books; they brought you right to the trough and let you
drink. You could read the books in the store (there were no
chairs in bookstores back then); you didn’t have to buy and I
rarely could, although any money I had went to buy books or
music, which is stil the case. I had never met adults like Stan
and Phyllis. Later they separated and divorced, but I swear
they kept me alive and kicking: I never had a mood I couldn’t
find on their shelves.
There was never a book they tried to hide from you. At the
same time, they weren’t trying to use you - you weren’t the
day’s kick for them; they were the opposite of the pedophilic
teacher. They let me talk to them about books and about
being a writer and they talked right back about books and
writing. Amid the vulgarity of the shopping mall, with its
caged birds and fountains, its gushing-over department stores
and restaurants, there was this one island of insanity, since the
rest passed for normal. You could get close to any poet you
wanted and they, the booksellers, didn’t enforce the law on
you: they didn’t bayonet your guts until al the poetry had
spilled out, al the desire for poetry had been bled to death, al
the music in your heart had been lanced, al your dreams
trounced on and ripped to pieces. I found James Baldwin there
and read everything he had writ en; I breathed with him. I
found Mailer and Gore Vidal. I found Tennessee Williams and
Edward Albee. I’d walk over from my house in any spare time
I had - “I’m going to the mall, Ma” had its own legitimacy, a
reassuring, implicit conformity - and I’d haunt the shelves and
I’d find the world outside the world in which I was living.
I’d find a world of beauty and ideas. Corso liked Shel ey, so
I read Shelley and from him Byron and Keats. I read Joyce
and Miller and Homer and Euripides and Hemingway and
Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. They were al there, in this one
