I wrote Time Being while on a trip from Portland to Baja California while on a hiatus from college. I traveled with a family friend, Gary De Young. Gary had bought a British Land Rover with the steering wheel on the right side. We visited friends down through California to Mexico. We ended up with car problems at Bay Concepcion in Baja. We thought about leaving the car to be repaired and hitchhiking down to Cabo San Lucan but I wanted to get back to college so we stuck with the land rover. Money got tight and we subsisted on refried beans and tortillas. They never tasted better. Once the car was repaired we zig zagged our way back up Baja and California to Oregon, stopping at friends places.
The poetry is something I did during college. I make no pretentions of it being musical. I cant sing Happy Birthday. My greatest influence was Jack Kerouac. Jack tried to sketch his surrounding with words. Also sometimes he considered writing to be something like playing blues on a musical instrument. But though I may use words like song and tune in my poetry, I really never considered my poetry songs. Neither are they rap. I wrote my poetry before rap got off the ground. They are even better called pages of poetry than poems per se. Time Being is bracketed by the structure of the journey to Baja with Gary. The poetry tends to run from one book to another. I don’t write poetry any more, switching to prose.
