Table Of ContentOTHER TITLES BY JOHN SKOYLES
POETRY
A Little Faith
Permanent Change
Definition of the Soul
The Situation
PROSE
Generous Strangers
Secret Frequencies: A New York Education
a MOVEABLE FAMINE
John Skoyles
A Moveable Famine is an autobiographical novel. While the narrative follows the timeline of my life, it is not an
exact record of events. I have collapsed several characters into composites, and have created others from my
imagination. Where I have related stories concerning known persons, I have used their real names because the
incidents described are as I recall them.
Copyright © 2014 by John Skoyles
All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the
inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.
For information, address:
The Permanent Press
4170 Noyac Road
Sag Harbor, NY 11963
www.thepermanentpress.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Skoyles, John.
A moveable famine / John Skoyles.
pages; cm
ISBN 978-1-57962-358-6
1. Authorship—Fiction. 2. Identity (Philosophical concept)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.K6564M68 2014
813’.54—dc23 2014006118
Printed in the United States of America
PREFACE
We were hell-bent to become poets and all poets stood in our way. We had been outcasts
in high school, stars in college and had graduated from finishing school in the art of
verse. We drank and smoked and fucked as much as we could while bemoaning our middle-
class upbringing and the wasted lives of everyone who did not see the world through the lens
of poetry, a lens cloudy with the jizm of jerking off in furnished rooms, which we called
suffering.
We contemplated suicide when our thoughts were ineffable. We contemplated suicide when
we transformed our thoughts into bitter poems. We contemplated suicide when the world
ignored our poems, and we committed suicide when we were ignored by the world of poetry.
With women, we were sensitive, bearing the burden of witnessing our nation’s militarism,
the savage effect of the Dow Jones on the poor, the illusion of the comfort offered by religion.
We pitied our parents, our siblings’ scrounging existences and two-week vacations. We pitied
their ignorance of the human heart and their refusal to rake the bottom depths of the soul.
And in those depths, we forged friendships with poets who loved our poetry. Poets with
whom we would tap, knock, bang, and finally demolish the doors of poetry’s academies,
societies and foundations.
We were hell-bent to become poets and all poets stood in our way.
CHAPTER ONE
POEM IN THE BATHTUB—WORD POWER—GREENWICH VILLAGE—FRANK
O’HARA—MATER CHRISTI—THE CHIEF PROSECUTOR OF GALILEO
My mother recited the same poem every night when she gave me a bath—the ballad
Oscar Wilde wrote while imprisoned for sodomy, a poem in which he envies a fellow
inmate, a murderer sentenced to hang, for having the passion to commit a real crime. Part of
the long narrative of “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” goes like this:
Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.
The bells of the Good Humor truck, children shouting and occasional police sirens drifted into
our Queens railroad flat. By the end of each week, I learned a new stanza. Although I didn’t
understand it, it intrigued me. There were knives and wine and blood, just as in our church,
Saint Bartholomew’s, named for the martyr who had been flayed alive. Led by nuns, we
paraded single file under a statue of that saint who held a blade in one hand and his skin over
his arm like a suit. My mother, Olga Bertolotti, grew up in that same neighborhood in a large
Italian family. Her sisters became nurses and secretaries and her brothers joined the transit
authority and fire department. The men on our block prized close haircuts and shaves; their
wives wore heavy foundation garments. Every sofa and armchair was fitted with a plastic
cover. My mother graduated from Newtown High, whose most famous alumnus was Don
Rickles, where she won a contest for putting the words of the school anthem, “Sing with a Will
for Newtown,” to the tune of “Glow little glowworm.” The prize was a poetry anthology, A
Quarto of Modern Verse.
The summer I was twelve, I found that book on the knick-knack shelf next to Hummel
figurines of girls swinging baskets of daisies, but ignored it in favor of my father’s
paperbacks, Increase Your Word Power and Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary. My
father didn’t finish eighth grade, but had gotten a job as an envelope salesman and wanted to
keep it. The office manager gave him these books and told him to read the New York Times.
He became the sole white-collar worker on a block of policemen, longshoremen and
steamfitters. His story imbued the books with a magical promise—they had power in the title,
the power to transform a man.
When I did pick up the quarto, I found the words of Wilde I’d memorized, the poem printed
across from a photograph of the flamboyant poet with cape and cane. Kipling held a pipe
under his brush mustache. Poe scowled next to the outlawish Stephen Crane. I hid the
surname of dapper John Masefield with my pinkie and imagined my own name there. If I read
a poem twice, I had it memorized.
It never occurred to me that poetry was still being written until one afternoon, sitting in
front of the TV eating chocolate snaps, I watched Art Linkletter hold a microphone to Big Eric,
a bearded beatnik tapping a bongo drum and reciting in a Greenwich Village coffee house.
Women with straight hair and black leotards clicked their fingers in applause. I asked my
parents to take me to Bleecker Street. Surrounded by Le Figaro Café’s dark mahogany, men
smoked pipes and played chess. I ordered a Himbersaft for the strangeness of the name. It
turned out to be a simple raspberry soda, but I savored it because a Himbersaft in Le Figaro
Café was different from a Coke at Woolworth’s.
Most weekends I sat on the lip of the fountain in Washington Square Park listening to
folksingers. On Eighth Street I bought a print of wide-eyed children behind a torn chicken-
wire fence. I associated these waifs of Walter Keane with the Beats simply because they
showed emotion. I listened to anyone who wore a beard and swayed under a tree declaiming
from a sheaf, and one afternoon I stood before a toothless old man who lisped a long litany,
every line of which began, “Hear my heart.” I found a discarded Village Voice on the Number
7 train to high school. The front page printed a poem by Frank O’Hara called “To the
Harbormaster,” and I placed it in the frame of my bedroom mirror. Searching for more of his
work, I learned he died that week in 1966, the poem surrounded by a black border of
mourning. Poet Ed Sanders ran the Peace Eye Bookstore, a former kosher butcher shop, with
hand-printed signs on the shelves that called for the legalization of pot and cunnilingus. On
my first visit I left with a mandrake root and a copy of Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts.
I saw poems by O’Hara in an issue of the Evergreen Review at my neighborhood
newsstand, Admiration Cigar. The cover showed a naked woman jogging through the autumn
woods. I paid the dollar and eased it into my book bag, walking home carrying a forest where
girls ran nude.
Mater Christi, my high school, three stories tall, was shaped like a horseshoe and divided
down the middle into male and female. The genders mingled only in the center of each floor:
gym, cafeteria, and the library, where my two desires fused—books and girls. Leafing through
magazines, I watched the plaid skirts, knee socks and blouses tied at the neck by bows, and
met no one. In the stacks I found The New American Poetry, with Kerouac’s dizzying line,
“Love’s multitudinous boneyard of decay.” Jack Spicer’s biography said to write him at THE
PLACE in San Francisco. I sent a letter, waited months, and then I learned he was dead. I
revered a photograph of Ezra Pound’s lined cheeks and pointed goatee. I stared at his ancient
face and imitated “The Cantos,” asking the gods of poetry to send Pound’s ghost, the powerful
voice of antiquity, into my soul. Then I learned he was alive.
Many of the poets met friends and lovers at college. Gary Snyder roomed with Lew Welch
and Philip Whalen, so college became a path to poetry. No one in my family had gone beyond
high school, and my investigations discovered poet Richard Wilbur at Wesleyan. Bard College
interested me because the cover of its literary magazine showed a biker on a Harley kissing a
bikini-clad girl in a jungle. My application essay, cribbed from How to Be Accepted by the
College of your Choice, began, “Our small family has always been a happy one.” I took a
guidance counselor’s advice to apply to the all-male Jesuit college he called a safe bet. I
enrolled at Fairfield University of Saint Robert Bellarmine, whose mascot was the stag and
whose namesake was the chief prosecutor of Galileo.
Four years later, I entered the master’s program in English at the University of Iowa, which
I found in the college rankings of U.S. News & World Report. My parents had the same
response as everyone in my apartment building: “Couldn’t you get in anywhere around here?”
My Aunt Linda called to congratulate me, but before she hung up, she said, “By the way, John,
I think it’s pronounced Ohio.”
CHAPTER TWO
ADVISING APPOINTMENT—THE GANGBANGER OF IOWA CITY—MEETING
McPEAK—SMOKE RINGS—ALLEN GINSBERG—“RIBBLE”—PAYMENT IN THE
LOW TWO FIGURES
Idrove a ten-year-old Mercury Comet to Iowa City. The four-story Iowa Bank and Trust
building, the tallest in town, flashed the temperature: 101 degrees. In the Daily Iowan
classifieds I found a cheap furnished basement apartment with a wall so thin I woke to my
neighbor’s spoon scraping her cereal bowl. I lived on money from a summer job at the Associated
Press, and had a budget of twenty dollars a month for food. I ate mostly hot dogs and drank
powdered milk from the Royal Market where the aisles were stacked with products still in their
cartons.
The packet of information I received in New York told me to see my advisor, Serge Andreyev,
editor of the Ethical Literary Review. I walked to his office in EPB, the English Philosophy
Building. The Old Capitol, with its gold dome, presided over university buildings known as the
Pentacrest. Sandwich shops and barbershops stretched out before it, along with hardware stores
and department stores whose windows displayed cracked mannequins in floral housedresses.
Two Epstein’s Bookstores were a block apart: one used, one new, run by twin brothers, Harry
James Epstein and Glenn Miller Epstein. Farmers in overalls walked among sorority girls,
hippies, frat boys, school children and tweedy professors. There were bars on every block: The
Airliner, Donnelly’s, The Deadwood, The Mill and The Vine. George’s, The Brown Bottle and
Magoo’s. Each with its own clientele and some with a particular literary aesthetic.
Andreyev waved me in just as his phone rang. The building was cool, but sunlight entered his
office and warmed the spines of the Ethical Literary Reviews with the smell of burnt toast. A
heavy, bald man with a red face, he kept repeating into the receiver, “I’m on my way. I’m leaving
now.” When he hung up, he said, “That was my wife. We had ham last night and now she has
stomach pains. She’s sure it’s trichinosis, but it’s guilt. I’m taking the bone for testing.”
I asked if he would help me choose my courses.
“I really don’t know what to suggest,” he said. “You can’t go wrong. And I have to be off, as
you heard.” He lifted his briefcase, which contained, I guessed, the ham bone. On the way out, I
stopped at a framed print of men touching torches to tree branches and snaring birds with nets.
“Batfowling,” he said. “And over here.” He pointed to other prints, “Pike fishing and otter
hunting. Pursuits of the nineteenth-century common man.”
We took the elevator together in silence and, when we got out, he said, “Don’t worry. The
worst you can do is take a wrong step in the right direction.”
I went back to my apartment and opened the course list while my neighbor’s voice came
clearly through the wall as she phoned friends, telling them that her married boyfriend was
cheating on her with a high school girl. She spoke with a twang, and said she was going to call
her rival’s parents and reveal their daughter’s affair.
I chose Seminar: American Transcendentalism.
My neighbor’s friends counseled against her plan, but she insisted she could convince the
girl’s parents to keep her home. As she dialed, I found Poetry Workshop.
“Hello, sir,” she said. “You don’t know me, and I don’t know you, but I want to tell you, sir,
that your daughter is going out with a married man.” The father’s response encouraged her.
“Yes, I thought you would like to know.” They talked for a while, my neighbor upholding family
values, but adding at one point, “And, sir, I hope I can be frank and tell you your daughter is
known as ‘The Gang Banger of Iowa City.’ ” Even this did not put off the father and they talked
for another minute while I added “Chaucer” to my list. At four a.m. I woke to the roar of a
motorcycle, followed by bone-shaking thumps on my neighbor’s door. After the visitor drove off,
the girl ran to the window, lifted the metal venetian blinds, and moaned a long wavering moan.
In American Transcendentalism, I met the Thompson twins, Mandy and Sandy, from the tiny
town of Longleaf, Georgia. Sandy, rotund and blonde, full of giggles and good cheer, was the
opposite of her sister whose high cheekbones and dark hair, parted in the middle, gave her a
somber look. Elderly Alexander Kern held the class in his living room on Mayflower Heights, a
promontory overlooking the city. Deer nosed at feeders outside his glassed-in balcony. Twelve of
us sat in a row of folding chairs, six on a side. Kern, an elfin man at Iowa for forty years, sank
into an armchair at one end and blew smoke rings from his cigar down the center as he lectured.
Twelve heads followed each circle of smoke. On occasion, he reached the farthest student.
The Art of Poetry was taught by Frank Ridge, a second-year MFA candidate in the writers’
workshop. Ridge’s handsome but slightly pudgy face loomed above a football player’s body. He
shuffled through the halls, dragging his Wellingtons. We had Catholic, working-class
backgrounds in common and became friends.
I thought Chaucer would be a festival of lewd stories, but Dr. Stabile believed Chaucer a
religious man who wrote bawdy tales to mock sinners. Stabile rode a girl’s thick Schwinn to
campus, his long red pony tail trailing down the back of the poplin suit he wore every day.
Doctoral students, marked by jackets and ties and the thermoses they carried to the library,
comprised the entire class, except for me and a member of the writers’ workshop, Mike McPeak,
who smelled of beer and missed every other class. Stabile flew into rages at contemporary moral
misconduct, condemning the workshop in particular for lecherous behavior. One day McPeak
muttered that it was no worse than any other department and I agreed. Stabile crowned his
argument against us by pointing his finger toward the ceiling and pronouncing, “May I let it be
known that when Philip Roth was here, he seduced the wife of our most prominent faculty
member!” After class, McPeak bought me a beer at The Deadwood, a bar with a western theme,
where workshop students gathered. Wanted posters of outlaws covered the pine paneling. A
gnarled piece of driftwood loomed over the bottles. Frank Ridge joined us and tried to guess the
cuckold’s identity. McPeak said the answer rested on whether “most prominent” meant the
English department or the entire university. “If it’s the whole school,” he said, “then it’s clearly
Van Allen of the Van Allen belt.”
From then on, McPeak pronounced words in Stabile’s class as double-entendres, saying,
“Really, do you think Chaucer wrote that scene just to save our souls?” But he drew out the last
two syllables, so it sounded like, assholes. In his research paper, he quoted a character’s
standard for a successful tale—“Mirth is All,” and wrote, “Chaucer puts his dictum into Harry
Bailey’s mouth.”
He tried to get me to join in, but I had already been through that at Fairfield with Father
Rogers, a sadistic priest who wiped the sweat from his forehead with his index finger and flung it
into our faces as we entered his class on Victorian prose. In his role as prefect in the Loyola
dorm, he forced students to strip publicly and take cold showers while he doused them with
buckets of water. Rogers seemed more comfortable with students like Monk Lawrence who hung
by his legs for hours from an isometric bar, and Tim “No Mind” Garahan, who died diving
headfirst into a rock in the Connecticut River. My roommate and I consulted Frank Harris’s My
Life and Loves, for its bizarre accounts of famous nineteenth-century writers. He pointed out
Tennyson’s “preferring dogs to niggers,” and that when a physician examined Thomas Carlyle’s
wife after twenty-five years of marriage, the doctor reported that she was a “virgo intacta.”
Rogers hotly insisted that biography was extraneous. My roommate’s climactic moment was
noting that John Ruskin became forever impotent on his wedding night, quoting Harris: “This art
historian who rhapsodized over the beauties of marble nymphs was shocked at the sight of a real
woman’s pubic hair.” At this remark, Rogers became so flustered he lost his place and kept
licking his finger as he whipped through English Prose of the Victorian Era, our two-thousand-
page tome of tissue-thin paper. I searched Harris for writers’ deaths, selecting the most absurd. I
noted that Matthew Arnold died jumping over a fence, and that only five people attended John
Stuart Mill’s funeral. After a while, I stopped consulting Harris altogether and simply invented
things. When Robert Browning died of a heart attack, it was after being chased across a field by
a goose. Christina Rossetti’s cancer was hastened by her shame at being glimpsed on the toilet
when an outhouse collapsed around her.
In college I had embraced the zing and pop of New York School poetry, thanks to the
thoughtfulness of Allen Ginsberg. Stirred by Howl, I had read all of Kerouac’s novels, seeking
him out in the guises of Irwin Garden, Carlo Marx and Alvah Goldbrook. I took the train from
Fairfield one night to see him read in New York. He wore jeans and a flannel shirt and not the
saint’s robe or sorcerer’s gown I imagined. He sang the poems of William Blake and played the
harmonium. A band performed afterward and, when Ginsberg joined the dancers, I introduced
myself. He took me by the hand and swung me through the crowd of swirling tie-dyed shirts and
kaleidoscopic body paint. A week later, I regretted not talking with him. I had met Ginsberg’s
friend, Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs, at the Peace Eye when I bought his book, 1001 Ways to Beat
the Draft. I called him and he gave me Ginsberg’s address in Cherry Valley, New York. I wrote a
letter that began, “I write to you with the same sincerity you once wrote to William Carlos
Williams.” He answered with a postcard.
Dear John S --
Yes, can’t write -- gone north, hundreds of letters in a pile -- in NY check out
Wednesday nite readings at St. Marks in Bowerie Church & there poetess Anne Waldman
& others come weekly for company and reading -- see Village Voice listings -- Tom Veitch
young poet is good -- and spontaneous -- Yes, I still follow movements of my own mind &
keep notebook for Musings. Only raw mind creates surprises, not deliberate calculation --
What’s unknown more poetic than conscious known --
Allen Ginsberg
Anne Waldman wore silver bangles on her wrists and a full-length loose blue dress that
somehow seemed revealing. I faced her on the altar and felt as if I should genuflect as she told
me about the free poetry workshops and mentioned a poet I should meet. His name was Merrill,
and she tried to spot him in the audience.
“James Merrill?” I asked.
“No,” she said, vigorously shaking her head and looking beyond me. “That’s a much more
famous poet.”
“Merrill Moore?” I had found a book of his sonnets in the library.
“No,” she said. “Merrill Gilfillan.” I had lost the Merrill guessing game, and she stopped
trying to find him, pointing me to the schedule of classes posted in the sacristy. I signed up for
Dick Gallup, whose speech had an Oklahoman tinge which grew more pronounced when he used
phrases like “out to lunch.” Members of Andy Warhol’s Factory attended and, at the critique of
my first poem, Gerard Malanga, star of the fifty-minute film of a kiss, changed my phrase, “day
into dark,” to “daylight into darkness,” and as he said it, he curved his hand through the air like
a breaking wave, making it splendid. One evening everyone was late and Gallup and I sat alone
in the room. I asked him about the word “rrible” in his line, “In the quiet air of the rrible
morning.” He said he takes lines from poems that don’t work, cuts them out with a scissors, and
puts these phrases into a cigar box. When he gets stuck in the middle of a poem, he reaches in
and grabs a scrap. He said, “rrible” must have been part of “terrible,” or “horrible.” I started
calling my poems “works” because that’s what Gallup called them, saying, “We have some
interesting works to read tonight” and “I’ve been reading some of Ted’s latest works.” One poet,
Ray, called his poems “shirts.” This struck me as especially odd because he never wore a shirt,
just a vest with nothing under it. He’d distribute his pages, saying, “I’d like to hear what you
think of my new shirts,” as a large gold ankh banged against his chest. Gallup pronounced the
poems that pleased him “totally great.” My poems began to incorporate brand names such as
Pepsi, and the precise time of day, like “8:17,” and they were not totally great, but suddenly they
were totally contemporary.
Anne Waldman accepted three of my works for the World, the mimeographed magazine
published by the Poetry Project. They appeared next to Lou Reed’s “Andy Warhol’s Chest,” which
he recorded with the Velvet Underground. One of my poems began, “Those horses ate my lunch.”
Another ended, “The genitals are the faucets of the soul.”
In The Art of Poetry, Ridge criticized my work for lacking emotion. He quoted Pound—“Only
emotion endures”—and introduced me to Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and John Berryman who I
admired. I could see what Ridge meant, yet some workshop poets wore their hearts on their
sleeves in ways I wanted to avoid. I returned to John Wieners’s Hotel Wentley Poems for
mysterious lines like “We ride them/and Tingle-Tangle in the afternoon.” When I mentioned his
name in The Deadwood, he was disparaged as a lunatic, and a minor lunatic at that. After classes
one afternoon, I went to Epstein’s where I saw a poster for a reading by poets who called
themselves the actualists, poets whose literary extravaganzas included writing mile-long poems;
poems of words without vowels, like pygmy and rhythm; and typing poems blindfolded. They had
invited Robert Bly to town. Bly had called the writers’ workshop stagnant and “arthritic” in his
magazine, The Seventies, mainly because 90 percent of the current students had been taught at
their colleges by Iowa graduates.
Ridge said that Bly, an Iowa MFA himself, had come to his first workshop carrying a bag of
snakes and combing his hair with a fork. The reading was to take place in the basement of the
Unitarian church and I was curious, as the student poets in The Deadwood both praised and
damned Bly.
The Thompson twins invited me to their party for graduate students and Mandy made me
promise I’d come. Mild and childlike, she wore homemade clothes and brought baskets of pickles
and buttered cornbread to our seminar in transcendentalism. The party was the same night as
Bly’s reading, but I accepted Mandy’s invitation out of loneliness.
After several rounds of charades, we played “Killer,” a game in which the anonymous killer’s
