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Loading Mercury With a Pitchfork

by Terry Link?

Seven hundred people went trout fishing in here [in San Francisco], but the wily Richard Brautigan eluded them by means of a deep skin-dive into his poetry.

"I have a feeling this whole audience is prose writers," he said several times to the crowd filling the First Unitarian Church Thursday night [San Francisco, 7 May 1970]. "For a while I thought I was reading in a mortuary. I guess a church is the same thing."

But the reading was sponsored by the S.F. State College Poetry Center and although the most applause he received all night was when he announced a forthcoming collection of short stories which would include two chapters left out of Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan steadfastly refused to stray from his "short, flat, funky poems" which "lie like mush on the page."

He also rejected a suggestion from someone in the audience (who demanded to be "turned on" for his $2 admission) that he try free association. "I'm not an improvisational actor, I'm a poet," he replied.

So forget all those lengths of used trout stream stacked in back at the Cleveland Wrecking Yard?. Never mind Shorty still pedalling down the freeway to San Jose at a quarter mile per hour in his wheelchair. Don't give another thought to the Mayor of the Twentieth Century. And if you see any first graders with Trout Fishing in America chalked on their backs, just dust them off.

Once this adjustment was made, it was a fine evening with one of our very best poets.

Brautigan appeared shortly before eight PM dressed in blue denim, a blue vest and a long blue scarf, almost like a priest's stole, considering the location.

Where the sanctuary would be in most churches, the Unitarians had a raised oval stage, with a pulpit on each side and oriental rugs on the floor. Against the back wall were three ceremonial thrones and where a crucifix might have hung was a modernistic metal frame reaching nearly to the ceiling to hold candles.

He quickly poured a glass of white wine from a half-gallon jug he carried in a paper bag and set the glass on the edge of the pulpit to the audience's right, the bag with the jug at his feet. As people came up to say hello, he would sip from the glass and then offer it to whomever he was talking. From time to time, he would walk across the platform, swinging his arms and do a few knee squats, like an athlete warming up.

When the church was nearly filled, he began reading poems written within the past few weeks, including some that morning. They had titles like "Voluntary Quicksand," "Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork," and "Your Love" (the last in its entirety: "Your love/Somebody else needs it/I don't).

Commenting that he doesn't "think the purpose of a poet is to write good poems" but rather "to work out the possibilities of language and the human condition," Brautigan also read some of his rejects.

"I'm shameless to read this stuff," he said. After about an hour of reading in a style he described as "bang, bang, bang, bang" and "pausing afterward to feel what you were feeling and I wasn't feeling anything," Brautigan began answering questions from the audience.

To a suggestion that he "talk politics," he responded by holding up his two forefingers in the form of a cross. "I know you're not a warlock, but I just thought I'd make sure," he told the person making the suggestion.

The discussion kept coming back to the lack of interaction of poet and audience, but in between Brautigan said:

  • Poetry may be defined as "language and spiritual mercury."
  • At 17, he "grew bored with the response" of warm-blooded creatures when a lead missle blows a hole in them, so he traded in his guns and "had a lot of dental work done."
  • He played Shostakovitch's Fifth Symphony continuously "maybe 400 times" while writing A Confederate General from Big Sur.
  • He accepted from someone in the audience a medallion from the 1924 Texas Cotton Exposition held in Waco.

"God, it happened so long ago," he replied when asked how he got started writing poetry. "Maybe I fell out of a tree on my head." By now, "it's a physical thing like eating or breathing . . . it's organic, it's part of my metabolism."

Towards the end, someone asked if Brautigan was going to pass the jug around. Brautigan invited him up for a drink and then asked if he wanted to read a poem. The guy did—one of own—much to Brautigan's delight.


Rolling Stone?
June 11, 1970: 26.