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Keeping Afloat in New York (1974-1999)

To do what has not been done, in several domains, and in the course of that adventure to discover new possibilities in art, in writing and in myself.

I resolved at fourteen to become a writer, a serious writer, very much in the mold of my first idol, Sinclair Lewis, and at nineteen resolved never, if I could help it, to be a fulltime employee; and neither of these resolutions has been forgotten. I wrote for my high school newspaper and my college newspaper, contributed to both the undergraduate literary magazine and the dissident off-campus journal, and began publishing in national journals while a graduate student, mostly with reviews of new books, sometimes doing longer critical articles on literature. By l966, I had written myself out of graduate school and have since been, nearly always, a fulltime independent who has continued writing reviews and articles, including long profiles of artists and intellectuals, cultural exposés, surveys of American art and literature, monographic criticism, even travelogues, that have been published in both mass magazines (that everyone reads) and cultural journals (that only my colleagues read), in addition to:

editing anthologies of art, literature, criticism, and social thought;

writing books about American, mostly avant-garde, literature, and art;

organizing documentary monographs on John Cage and Moholy-Nagy;

publishing poems, fictions and experimental prose in literary magazines and anthologies around the world and collecting some of each into several books wholly mine;

guest-curating exhibitions of language art and then writing the catalogue texts;

cofounding an annual of "otherwise unpublishable creative work" (Assembling) and Assembling Press, a small publisher of comparable "unacceptable" works--two institutions that functioned for a dozen years under my direction (and, thankfully, now continue to survive without me);

lecturing about the work of myself and others at universities, art museums and comparable institutions;

delivering radio talks, mostly about recent American writing, and organizing "American Writing Today," a series of fifty programs, for Voice of America;

writing and narrating a television feature, Poetry To See & Poetry To Hear for Camera Three (CBS Network);

refusing offers I did not like, because I was never a "free-lance," which my dictionary defines as a writer for hire--someone to do someone else's work for a persuasive price;

composing hörspiele, which is German for imaginative ear-plays (aka "Audio Art"), initially for European radio stations, but also for rebroadcast over public stations around the world;

making books that consist entirely of abstract drawings (which develop in systemic sequence and thus become a kind of visual fiction) and another book consisting entirely of photographs;

producing videotapes, films and holograms, all of which are based upon language or literary materials;

publishing my poetry and fiction in such alternative forms as silkscreened prints, a looseleaf book, an accordion book, an adding machine tape, a double-front book, a tabloid-sized newspaper, etc.;

founding a second, smaller publishing house, Future Press, which has been devoted exclusively to radically alternative materials for books and alternative distribution media for literary materials (audio, video, film, etc.);

writing texts for theatrical performances that have so far taken place only on college campuses;

earning bit moneys from "consulting" about this and that;

selling copies of books of mine ("RK/Archae Editions") that have gone out of print;

making proposals to put my visual poems and visual fictions in public spaces--not just on the walls but also on the floors and ceilings (becoming one of three finalists in a single competition);

servicing more friends, colleagues, and pseudo-friends than anyone needs;

winning an adjudicative competition, sponsored by a Canadian art museum, for a work of art to grace a full page in the local Sunday newspaper;

accepting invitations I did not expect, and exploiting opportunities I would not have previously imagined for myself;

no doubt doing other jobs I have forgotten about (probably for good reason);

organizing Wordsand (l978), a traveling exhibition of my work with words, numbers, and lines, in several media;

composing an hour-long audiotape symposium about the 1960s as "A Special Time"--a pilot towards a radio series that still may occur;

collaborating with a West Berlin filmmaker on a prize-winning documentary about pre-WWII Berlin, as reflected in the great Jewish cemetery of Berlin, with six original soundtracks, wholly different in content, in six different languages;

receiving grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) and several private foundations--over two dozen awards whose total proceeds, to be frank, have been less than a distinguished professor nowadays receives in a single year;

writing the book Autobiographies (l98l) that consists not of a single sustained narrative--the conventional form--but over forty parts, some written recently, others long ago, some even contributed by others, the assumption being that a mosaic can be more truthful about diversified activity;

leading a life I could have scarcely imagined for myself four decades ago;

trying as hard as I can to keep my eye on the most consequential of the many balls that are bouncing in front of my nose.

No work of mine has been "successful" in worldly terms, yet I live off this activity and always have. I estimate that roughly ninety percent of the work I do now is not immediately remunerative--it is too experimental, too "noncommerial," etc.--but in that ninety percent is the foundation for the remunerative ten percent on which I thankfully survive. In a fundamental economic sense, I live off a reputation it has taken me thirty-five years to build; I have, in economic essence, become my own sugar daddy. One reason why I have survived so long as a fulltime, noncommercial whatever is that I have been doing it all my adult life; I never did anything else. The writers/artists who quit their fulltime jobs for "freedom" invariably have a lot to discover--not only about their art but about the prerequisites for survival.

I say "nearly always" because, I confess with embarrassment, I twice succumbed to the principal temptation that, until recently, afflicted all independents--teaching (teaching)! For one full academic year, a decade and one-half ago, I spent one night a week at John Jay College in New York, and for another semester, a decade ago, was a fulltime Visiting Professor of American Studies and English at the University of Texas at Austin. I took these jobs because I was desperately needy and those universities made me offers I could not refuse. Both jobs were for a specified term, and there were no regrets when the contract ended. However, as the academic job market has since closed shut, even for those with sufficient terminal degrees, I do not expect presently to be surprised with another offer I cannot refuse.

I have by now evolved for myself a plural situation that permits me to do any one or another of several things, depending upon what is asked of me or what I feel most inspired to do; but since I need to make a living and am often inspired as well, there are not enough minutes in the hour or days in the week. So, when I need to get a lot of work done, I get up just before noon, work into the evening, take a nap after dinner and then do another full work load by early morning. This schedule is easier to follow in the winter than in the sunny summer, when I want most of all to go to the beach. Mine is not the sort of life I would recommend to anyone, even myself, with so much work to do and so many projects unfinished--illness is the least of the luxuries I cannot afford; but then it is not for nothing that I have no students, that my regime has no imitators.