He was handsome, red-haired, feisty, ebullient, and clearly very bright. The friendship was immediate, though he was not at all sure that the new book of Denise Levertov I was clutching and showing off contained "real poems".We joined forces. And I became a mentor, just enough older for that relationship to work. We moved to New York and I worked at the famous 8th Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village, while he completed a BA degree at Columbia College. We spent a lot of time at the Cedar Bar on University Place with friends like Joel Oppenheimer, Franz Kline, Dan Rice, Fielding Dawson, Gilbert Sorrentino, Esteban Vicente, many of whom I'd known from my earlier days at Black Mountain College.
And we visited non-bar-type writers like William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky and Edward Dahlberg.I've always liked to play cicerone and to plan itineraries and rambles. In the summer of 1961, Johnson and I hiked the Appalachian Trail from Springer Mountain, Georgia, to the Hudson River in New York, some 1,447 miles. Perfect training for poets: learning to attend the names of birds and plants and stars and trees and stones. The summer of 1962 I was a writer-in-residence at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies in Colorado; and Johnson had his first culinary job, at the Copper Kettle Restaurant.
In the autumn of 1962 we headed for England and walked five weeks in the Lake District. On the Sunday of the weekend of the Cuban missile crisis the poets spent the day trying to locate the graves of Beatrix Potter in Near Sawrey and Kurt Schwitters in Ambleside - and found neither.We met the extraordinary writer and illustrator Barbara Jones, and rented a four-room flat in her house in Well Walk, Hampstead. (It was 12 guineas a week.) There were parties with friends of Jones's like Olivia Manning, Kay Dick and Stevie Smith. We met other London people through our bookseller friends John Sandoe, Arthur Uphill and Bernard Stone: Adrian Mitchell, Mervyn Peake, Christopher Middleton, John Wain, Michael Hamburger, Paul Potts, Anselm Hollo, Christopher Logue, Tom Raworth, Eric Mottram, Rayner Heppenstall, John Heath-Stubbs, R.B. Kitaj, Tom Phillips, Adrian Berg, Andrew Young, Jocelyn Brooke.Jones's pioneering book Follies and Grottoes (1953) led us all over England and beyond.
