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PARTISAN REVIEW
Bruno Ultto-Johnno had named him; Bruno's real name was
Shumler- wore an undershirt and paint-stained white workman's
pants . He was playing drums - that was very stylish then, advanced,
primitive and advanced.
One of the things I'd told Johnno as we'd walked here was
about the depth, the validity of a present moment, even if it's only
named as a date, as 1956:
"It
is when whatever was real
was
real ,
and undivided, before you were separated from it, from the date ,
from the moment then, before you could lie about it entirely if you
wanted to ."
J ohnno had tried to tell me his version of that: which was that a
poem or a painting must have a real present tense in it : doing it has
to be real and present ; the artist's life at the moment of making the
thing has to be present. He called it The Moment of Action, the
blind , sensory,
prior
rush - prior to meaning - prior to the meaning
the work might have - and then the judgment:
yes, no, let it stand, do it
over .
. .
This is the quality that is perceived as
art,
he said . When there
is no such drama , when the thing is rehearsed and known from the
start, the thing is memoir, it is merely anecdotal then, it is without
value as art.
J ohnno can't stand Ora. And Ultto gets upset at the way she
refused him . She had dinner with Johnno and me, part of a dinner ,
and then she went home . She is not considered an artist , and I am .
WHY I AM AN ARTIST: Johnno said, "There is nothing you
can be but an artist, so relax and be it."
He meant sleep around, do as I like, despise everyone, develop
and display the full reach of my insolence .
I said, "I don't trust myself or what I know. "
A PARTIAL PORTRAIT OF JOHNNO:
He was a very good, very interesting poet of the second rank .
If
you add in his life and his concern for art , he was a poet of major
presence.
The thing of being a poet, he used all his time that way. He
worked for a salary, ate, slept, telephoned, talked, looked, read,
wrote as
a poet
and not as a man or human being or as a faun or boy,
either. He led a professional life .
It
had been self-consciously em–
barked on, self-consciously announced, self-consciously and expen–
sively carried out.
It
had a clear madness in it, what he did.
It was rooted in written speech, in words of a special kind , as
you might say someone cared about brushstrokes more than about
