Yes, I can be on one side or the other of the fringe. I’ve been on both. And there still are those, I think many, who don’t even know or realize that the fringe exists. Well, eventually…

I already told you that I’m not just light weight.

There are contests which announce a theme and everyone is invited to write and submit. A Stoogism Anthology was in the works, the word went out, and I took the bait. Contests can be fun, and this one was. I sent in my entry, got a letter from the editor, saying something like Whaaaat? He wanted me to explain what I had written, and I am almost embarrassed to say that I shoveled the rhetoric. What I said was correct, but I sort of overdid it. I explained how the poem addresses and reveals the dark underside of stoogism as the human condition, how we are bound to pace the earth, but when we look to the heavens for help, for a release, we get a pie in the face as a cosmic joke as an answer. So of course they loved it and it appeared, short as it is and written in pure stooge in Stoogism Anthology, Scarecrow Books, 1977.

AN AH AWLSO SLEEUPS ON BUNAYHNUZ

Ahm de Stoog
Ahm de Stoog
An Ah wauk aroun
Wid mah feets on de groun
An Ah looks at de skies
An gets pies in mah eies

Stoogism Anthology, Scarecrow Books, 1977

They put it on page 100 with a photo of the Stooges with the pie in the face. I’m so pleased when people are so good to me.

Edgy, yes. Around the edges of the fringe, if the fringe has edges.

And then there was that bit of fringe in Expresso Tilt #6, Summer 1987, a magazine which announced itself as truly on the edge or beyond.

the appetite of Porcupines
is preciously selective
their rancher
has his problems
how
to satisfy
his beasts
soothe
their crises
of identity
keep
them from huddling
too frequently
the Armadillos

Expresso Tilt #6, Summer 1987

Fringy enough for you?

And now that I’m thinking fringe, I find that I have more to say, more to share.

The 1950s were a time of fringe before the explosion of the ‘60s. Those were my high school years. I was shy, socially inept, something of a loner because I didn’t have a car or even a driver’s license until later than my peers. At home we didn’t have a television when everyone else in the world was the audience of the tube and common culture didn’t include me. We had a record player/radio, but listened almost exclusively to classical music, so I wasn’t immersed in the music popular at the time. We did buy records and loved Gerard Hoffnung and his Interplanetary Music Festival. We collected into the ‘60s, The Harvard Lampoon, then Beyond the Fringe and then Peter Schickele and his P.D.Q. Bach, all fringe or beyond. I mention this because just today my daughter and I were thinking back and singing the take off on Bob Dylan, “Seventeen Miles from Waukegan My Cantaloupe Died.” Classic Harvard Lampoon. Speaking of which, I think back to the ’70s when I played that record to my fifth grade class at Longfellow Elementary. A neighboring teacher waited until lunchtime to confront me and asked, “What kind of music are you playing to your students??” I answered, “The Harvard Lampoon. It’s a wonderful series of satires and parodies of the popular music they hear at home and gets them to think about and reevaluate their place in the culture of the times, to broaden their horizons…” That was answer enough to shut the mouth of any criticism.

But going back to high school and the fringe. This was the time of the Beat Generation, when it was fashionable to question, to practice counter-culture. New York was the generative Mother Center of a kind of cultural revolution, and Los Angeles/Hollywood/Venice tied with Berkeley, San Francisco and the Bay Area as a close second. Avant-garde appeared in bookstores and theaters and coffee shops. Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset suddenly had innovation and comedy clubs that started careers to feed the circuit. Young people everywhere were drawn in to alternatives before the drug revolution in the ‘60s went beyond pot in the hands of a cynical government which subverted and destroyed the civil rights movement and a whole generation.

My friends helped me to become aware of what was going on around us. I got used to seeing people going barefoot. I had my core of academic friends, but I also fell in with a couple of admitted fringies, partly I suppose because they had a car and we could get around, partly because I was non-judgmental and didn’t reject them, and I was easy company. Glenda was a slightly hefty girl who overlapped the academic crowd because she took some of the same classes, went barefoot, and worked on the school magazine which I worked on as well. Her friend but not boyfriend, I forget his name so I’ll call him Bill, was slender, openly but not ostentatiously gay, and palled around with Glenda and they admitted me into a trio like a fringe on the fringe and we would go to movies and sit in the audience and try to be not too loudly disrespectful. We drove down Main Street in Alhambra and passed a beautiful mortuary with a lovely garden and Bill said, “That’s where I’d like to live.” We questioned him and he said, “I like the architecture.”

One time at the movies when I was sitting between them and Glenda on my right was leaning in to me to show her interest and I wished she was better looking so we could be more than friends and I was nervously trying to keep a distance, her eyes got speculative and turned across me and asked Bill, “What do guys do together?” He began to give her graphic details, all news to me, she had a far away look and said, “Yes, I guess that could work.” I thought, “I shouldn’t be here,” and “this is too much fringe for me.”

But we were three musketeers and when they found out more about the Beat Generation and Beats and Hippies, they planned an expedition to one of the iconic gathering places, a famous comedy club on the Strip which was a hang-out for Beatniks. They advertised poetry readings. I was to be their ticket in. They dressed me in a black turtle neck, put a beret on my head, and drew a moustache and goatee on me with an eyeliner. Looked pretty good but not real. We drove to Hollywood and parked. I was supposed to be the gate crasher who looked like he belonged as part of the scene and they were my entourage. They were disappointed when no one stopped us at the door. We walked right in to the café on the ground floor and took the stairs to the upper level where the poetry readings were held. We passed through a room with bookshelves lining the walls, a bookstore with the latest Beat literature and we were encouraged to browse and buy. I wanted to stay and try out some of the books, but they pushed me ahead into the next room set up with chairs filled with an audience for the poetry reading which hadn’t started yet. There were no empty seats. A few heads in the audience turned to us, showed no interest, and turned back toward the podium at the front of the room. My two friends decided they had done it, broke the barrier and joined the scene, and they pulled me to leave. I wanted to stay and look at the books, but I wasn’t driving and had to leave with them. No one noticed or cared when we left. I thought to myself, that’s it? I got home and washed the eye liner off my face.

I thought, well, that wasn’t much. I tried to find books with examples of beat literature. I knew that if we had stayed to hear the poetry reading, I would have had a better assessment of what didn’t really seem like a “movement.” I thought everybody must know more about all this than I did, but I was aware that there was a fringe, that I had approached and touched it, and though briefly I had even almost been a part of it.

In the intervening years I’ve become more fringe conscious. I see political fringes, and fringes of culture in art, music, literature, dance. Some of it I like, some not. I see how people like Frost’s “road less traveled by,” but I see so many not taking that road. I see a mainstream which sweeps everything along. I see a System that isn’t right and needs changes. I see the fringes of society draw the center outward in new and sometimes good directions. I see my conservative core of democracy and community is not at odds with the experimental and the new. I see each new generation seems always on the fringes of the old. I’ve never left or outgrown that new generation of enthusiasm and hope.

And I keep on writing. I can write a lot in form and rhyme, end and internal, but I can break away and learn more new. So it doesn’t jar my ear to have written something fairly fringy like the poem in Oyez Review, Number 20, 1992.

I GET BY

High steppin’ down
elastic pavement
past the bongo walls
electric sky
flyin’ signs
and people with real life
in them
rhino cars
green skinned girls
with long eyes
chewing shreds of men between
their sharp and pointed teeth

Oyez Review, Number 20, 1992