Interview #26b: Mark Terrill

Rock and the Beat Generation was delighted to publish poet Mark Terrill’s interview with MALCOLM PAUL in recent days. The California-born, now Hamburg-based writer had a few more answers up his sleeve as he responded to some follow-up questions.

So, below, a gathering of bonus thoughts from this Beat successor regarding his parents’ expectations of him, the wars in South East Asia and his own presence at the 1969 festival at Altamont…

Malcolm Paul: Your father really didn’t want to be drafted for the Korean War but unfortunately ended up there. How was he when he got back? The experience must have changed him in significant ways. He didn’t settle down to a quiet suburban American normalcy but went on to do all the radical things you describe in the interview. How did that play out?

Mark Terrill: I don’t think my father’s experience in the Korean was particularly traumatizing. Most of the anecdotes and stories he told about his experience in the war were mostly humorous, foregrounding the ridiculousness and absurdity of it all. He was anyway already launched on his own particular esoteric/philosophical trajectory and I think his experiences in Korea and Japan just became more grist to the mill. 

MP: Your parents were both academics and had professional jobs. How did they feel when you dropped ouT of school? Did they think you should persevere and maybe find a path Later that allowed you to be free thinker-spirit but one with an academic qualification to back you up? My own parents’ reaction by the way. Perhaps it was hard for them to accept, not in a unpleasant way, but difficult perhaps nonetheless. Did they understood your choices? Do have thoughts about that time?

MT: Certainly my parents were somewhat disappointed that I didn’t follow in their academic footsteps, but then they shouldn’t have been surprised, considering all the ideas they were responsible for exposing me to as a kid. There was always talk about ‘my career’, even more so when I got older, especially coming from my father.

Despite all his open-mindedness and philosophical insights he seemed to harbor some kind of old-fashioned, conservative ideas and expectations which he probably picked up while growing up in Illinois. I had the feeling he was always judging me in terms of how I failed to live up to those expectations, which drove a bit of wedge between us.

But they were really my parents’ projections and certainly not mine. My main ambition was to get by in life without striving for and getting entangled in any kind of career while maintaining my status as a nonparticipant observer without becoming a burden on my family or society. Seen in those terms, I guess I was relatively successful. I think my parents finally came to realize that before they passed on.

Pictured above: Terrill’s collaborative novel Ultrazone now in a new edition  

MP: A friend said he’d be tempted to ask you about Altamont. It’s a big cultural/social turning point in the history of the the sixties, a pivotal point like ‘the dream is over’. Is it possible other people weren’t aware of what was going on at the front of the stage and were blissfully getting stoned and digging the music?

And all ‘bad vibes’ everyone talked about at Altamont was projected post-event – obviously the killing of Meridith Hunter. I mean Bill Graham never liked the place from day one apparently and refused to produce it. Just we don’t hear much from the concert here most probably because not a lot of Brits were there, except the Stones and they left in a hurry…

MT: I think there has been too much emphasis put on the Altamont concert in terms of its role in the cultural turn that was taking place at the end of the 60s. Obviously Altamont turned out to be much more dystopian than utopian, but much of that was due to organizational and logistical shortsightedness and not so much ‘the times’ in general.

You have to bear in mind that just prior to Altamont we had the grisly doings of Charles Manson and his ‘Family’, the events of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam had just recently come to the surface, Nixon had been elected president (with Watergate waiting in the wings), and many other cultural turning points that signified a change in the weather.

I think that was best summed up in the 1969 film Easy Rider, where near the end, in a contemplative campfire-side moment, Billy (Peter Fonda) says to Wyatt (Dennis Hopper), ‘We blew it.’ Obviously, he wasn’t just talking about the two of them and their ill-fated venture, he was speaking for all of us who were involved in the rise and fall of the 60s ideals. Altamont was just another whistle-stop along the way. Nonetheless, I’m glad I had the opportunity to be there and witness it firsthand. 

MP: I didn’t ask you much about the poetry of, say, your contemporaries in New York or the NY scene in general. In England we have a long held belief that there is some kind of cultural/ artistic rivalry – schism even – between the artists coming out of California and the New York scene: it’s indoctrination from the media and the press along the lines of you can’t dig the Velvet Underground and be into the Grateful Dead. We have a North/ South divide in England with London the centre of all things artistic…

MT: As I mentioned previously, I never paid much attention to the various groupings and divisions among the various ‘schools’ of poetry in the US, as most of those categories seemed to be quite arbitrary, as was the case with the divisions in Donald Allen’s poetry anthology, The New American Poetry 1945-1960.

There was so much cross-pollination between the east and west coasts, between Black Mountain and Bolinas, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights in San Francisco, James Laughlin’s New Directions in New York, both publishing many of the same poets. For me it was first the poets and their poetry, then their regional and/or aesthetic associations.

MP: Do you think the counterculture is still relevant today?

MT: I think that as long as there is culture there will be a counterculture. The question is, how successful can any kind of protest or rebellion be in the post-fact, post-truth world we now find ourselves in? The internet, which originally looked as though it might serve to bring people together, has done exactly the opposite, fragmenting public opinion into infinite factions with no real consensus.

So, while the motivation and reasons for protesting or rebelling are certainly there, the means by which to do so have definitely been challenged by the new digital world order. 

See also: ‘Interview #26: Mark Terrill’, September 27th, 2024