George Wallace is neither a spy per se—maybe in the satirical style of Austin Powers or a high-end James Bond—nor is he mysterious. He’s not the black comedian of the same moniker. And nothing like the racist Alabama governor/presidential candidate who was shot five times by some lone gun-wielding nut job. What’s in a name? The George Wallace I’m talking about is a poet; he started late but became a powerhouse heavy hitter. A leading poet and performer, contributing to the NYC literary scene and beyond. Eventually, traveling around the world to spread the word of the poetry gospel. A goodwill ambassador of the written and spoken word, bearing witness to scenes in modern cultural history that unfold within all levels of poetic realms.
His accolades and awards are longer than my arm. They portray a man who’s not only an excellent poet but also a citizen of the world. The exotic exploits and wild adventures add to the well-seasoned driving force behind his success. Traveling the globe, sharing poetry along the way. He’s writer-in-residence at Walt Whitman’s house in Huntington, NY, and publishing Editor of Poetry Bay Productions. He also co-organizes readings in NYC at the Parkside Lounge for The Great Weather for Media series, inspired by Hurricane Sandy. Wallace has authored 39 chapbooks of poetry and a multitude of news articles and commentary. In 2022, he edited the critically acclaimed NYC From the Inside, an anthology of NYC poets. Also, last year, he published another book of poems, Blowing Through Secaucus, leading to this year’s recording on vinyl of the same title and a new book, Resurrection Songs. And the radio station Radio Poetique is in syndication on the airwaves.
Tom DiVenti: I imagine you hanging out with beatniks long ago.
George Wallace: No, my sister was a beatnik. She was one of those high school kids who would go down to Jack's (Kerouac's) house in Northport, NY, and throw rocks at his window to get him to come out and go drinking and screwing around.
TD: When did you start getting into poetry, and was the Whitman birthplace house residency part of that process?
GW: The Whitman House was a major point along the way in my establishment of the interconnectedness between the local and global. A unique position to be in. I was able to represent a global figure who was from Huntington, New York. To represent his legacy to the world and locally as well. It wasn’t intentional, but it was a wonderful strategic landing in that my interest in international experience and globalization goes back to my cross-cultural training, my anthropological studies in school, and my travels. You could travel for $5 a day in Europe, Istanbul to Kabul. The world was a proving ground for young travelers.
More than the cost, it was the motivation for how to communicate with people. To be able to sit in a café in Copenhagen and spend an hour chatting up a girl, or in Italy drinking coffee with an old man. With very limited linguistic skills in Danish or Italian. You have to discover nonverbal ways of communicating. Beyond what is obvious or intrinsic to what you live and grow with.
It was important for me. I don’t know why, but it was magic. It was an endorphin rush to accomplish that richness of the world is beyond the language we have at hand. If you’re in the jungle and there are all sorts of things you can eat, but you don’t know what to eat, you just eat the tomatoes. You don’t know that there are breadfruits or bananas. So, you have to find out how big it is. To explore and experiment. Try all the fruits. It’s criminally negligent. The development of the human soul, to extend it as far and meaningfully as possible. We only have so many trips left in life. The quality of human stupidity hasn’t substantially changed, for better or for worse, in the past 3000 years. Today's news really isn’t that much different from the news from Galilee. It’s just a different day and a different paper. I don’t know how to process the idea that we live in a real world and imagined worlds simultaneously. That’s an important thing worth thinking about. Some kind of Superman world, which is a completely manufactured perception of the world, and some fictional characterizations of the way things work. These are intellectual concepts that some fictional person came up with from comic books or science fiction.
TD: Would it be like where people are up in arms about AI stealing their personality. The whole writers' strike. It’s like a copyright infringement or technological molestation, stealing people's souls and identities.
GW: Also, like Yossarian, Huck Finn and Candide are models for how to look at the world, and they’re fictional as well, with capitulations. I don’t feel threatened by the interface between real experience and the 100 percent real actions of others. Humans that are preceded by the fictionalization of what they’re capable of. Think about pre-photography, when if you wanted to create something you had to sculpt, draw, or paint it and photography came along. It was a certain degree of taking away the perception because the chops are different. We have great photographers and bad photographers; it's just two different mediums. There is AI art, and writers and artists collaborating with AI technology together have mastered it and not been mastered by it, so simply because some say it can steal your creative capabilities, that's like giving up. That’s the wrong attitude. I see that every day. I'm afraid of AI. I'm afraid of AI! My point is that it would be like saying you're afraid of typewriters. Alright, you have to write with a quill. If you don't write with the quill, at a certain speed, the typewriter changes the outcome. Remember what Capote said about Kerouac? That's not writing, that's typewriting. I disagree with these people who have a knee-jerk fear of AI. Isn’t the idea of writing something down and getting it published and then getting it into a book which is in a library. Isn’t that preserving your image after you're gone?