Biography:
 
GENE FOWLER was born at 1:35 am on Monday, October, 5, 1931 in Oakland, California, on the western coast of the North American continent. From that place and time, he has ventured forth on this globe in a journey that has taken him through loves and exiles, through adventures and cafes, and through the many strata of existence inherent in human experience.
      The true landmark events are undated – even within his own notice – and referenced for the biographer only in quick glimpses within the poems. The moment when a human face was something definite and on its way to being a human face...and the later moment when a human soul shone through the now familiar human face to be observed. Or the afternoon or evening or morning when the stubborn, fibrous stuff of a handful of phonemes bent to his will...and a meaningful word was carved out of air by tongue and lips, cheek and jaw and throat. These things formed the man who loved and who threaded a way through exiles and traps, the man who noted and reflected on things and events and responded to those things and events, the man who drafted these gathered poems.
      The external history? – full of common-places and exotic events and, finally, no explanation at all for the poems we have in hand. Born into the home of a self-educated professional man (chemical engineer) and a quiet woman who spent her time reading, perhaps dreaming, and finally sculpting in clay: Donel and Janice La France. The oldest of three children. A sister, Anna, three years younger than himself; a brother, Thomas, three years younger than Anna. These two the children of Donel, though our biographee was from a brief and annulled marriage to a wandering and sullen laborer, Jack Fowler. Into the public schools at the Kindergarten level and out at the end of twelve years, or grades, in June, 1949. A stint as a (by special permit) night club comedian and special materials writer overlapping the last school years.     

He enlisted in the U.S. Army – when "we were being pushed off the Korean peninsula." Three years in the Army, 27 months of it on Okinawa. Trained to operate a message center, he was, on his arrival on Okinawa, metamorphosed in an hour to a demolitions expert and a teacher of mine warfare policy and technique.

He was very useful, being competent, and exploited this to "go AWOL when steam built up, to wander in the jungle, go out at 4:00 in the morning with 'native' fishermen, and drink potato saki through the night." He was returned to the U.S. and released in late 1953. A whirlwind existence. By early 1954, he'd been a gas station attendant, a bell-hop, a college freshman, and an armed robber up and down the length of the state...and was in San Quentin Prison. He served four years and nine months – and the middle half of his "twenties" – in prison and came out to another three years and three months on "parole." Various jobs, mostly filing one thing or another, a semester at a community college, a time filing reprints at the U.C. Berkeley Stat Lab, but sneakily learning to program the big computer and doing other people's work rather than his own; another time presumably "editing" manuals for the Department of Criminology, but in fact, "designing and writing" them.
      Finally, in December of 1963, he "just walked out" on all that. He was prepared to "sit in the bars and starve to death" as alternative to futility and the inner wheel-spinning of a mentality nobody'd pay him to use. Hilary Ayer, poet and folksinger, daughter of artist Richard Ayer, convinced him to sit, instead, in coffee houses...and to write poems, thereby applying his mentality – and the rest of himself – in a field the academic hustlers and commercial realms had little interest in. So...he became an "outlaw poet" – quite a different turning than that of a decade earlier, when he became an "outlaw" proper!
      The rest is a history, rough and varied, acted out in public and this biographer must assume the reader knows something of it. It leads from the first chapbook, Field Studies, in 1965 that sold an unprecedented 3,000 copies. Three printings! It winds its way with his riding of the crest of the "mimeo revolution" (in literature) in the sixties and on into the seventies and his FIRES: Selected Poems 1963-1976 in 1976. It comes into a busy and a full 1981, what with marriage to April Corioso in May, the publication of Return of the Shaman in July and The Quiet Poems in December. And it has seen the writing and self-publishing (for the spring of 1982) of an amazing document: Waking the Poet. This book is a textbook – on the presumably unteachable. A "how to" for acquiring those deep craft skills everyone has left black-box and called "talents" or "gifts" of "the Muse." But this, of course, is the culmination of that other history I spoke of in the beginning. The one without dates or places.