Gary Snyder by Geoff Gossett

Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, Gary Snyder. (Counterpoint Press) $12.95

Counterpoint’s re-print of Snyder’s first book of poems, Riprap, published forty-five years ago by Origin Press, is accompanied by his early translations of Chinese poet’s Han-Shan’s Cold Mountain Poems, from the sixth issue of the Evergreen Review. Snyder’s early clarity of vision, in response to ” the poetry of twentieth-century coolness, its hard edges and resilient elitism,” has only come to greater fruition over the course of his career. These poems mark the beginning of Snyder’s journey, and they reflect what’s best about his poems. They’re moral without didacticism or religiosity, more Hass than hippie, spare but not spacey.

an excerpt from Han Shan’s Cold Mountain Poems:

XXX2

In a tangle of cliffs I chose a place—
Bird-paths, but no trails for men.
What’s beyond the yard?
White clouds clinging to vague rocks.
Now I’ve lived here—how many years—
Again and again, spring and winter pass.
Go tell families with silverware and cars
“What’s the use of all that noise and money?”

The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, ed. Bill Morgan. (Counterpoint Press) $16.95

An aesthetic chronicle of two related but distinct poets, their letters are mostly free of artifice and seem to reflect their authors’ true personalities. Correspondences are often too full of allusion to be meaningful to the casual reader, but these buck that trend. Snyder writes generous epistles that contain a wilder lucidity than his poems, his love for Ginsberg, Nanao Sakaki, and other contemporaries is made obvious by their discussion of the everyday, their constant planning for reunions. His introduction to a letter sent from San Francisco to New York in spring of 1969 reflects the letters’ character well:

Dear Allen,
I had a few glasses of wine last night and called you, but talked to Peter pleasantly instead, you were in New York he said. He sounds on the phone like “Wolfman Jack” the celebrated Los Angeles disk jockey (whom we picked up on the Jap transistor in the depths of Baja California desert wilderness).

An interesting companion to Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, The Selected Letters is a portrait of Snyder from another angle. A test, perhaps, of the veracity of his character, this view proves Snyder as meditative, elegant, and wise as his poems suggest.

DS

Twilight Saga: New Moon’s Robert Pattinson, does his take on the Young Hollywood actor’s diet as Vanity Fair gives Rob the Beatnick poets, photographic treatment on the weathered steps of a paint-bare cottage. 

Image by Robert Pattinson. Words by Allen Ginsberg follow: 

Poem: A Supermarket in California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the
streets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit
supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles
full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! — and you,
Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the
meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price
bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and
followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting
artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does
your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel
absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to
shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in
driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you
have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and
stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe? 

[Source: Vanity Fair and Poem Hunter]

~Posted by Horiwood.Com, Hollywood California USA, 11.27.09~

The weekend is nearly here… time to give the mind back to the body. And what better way to begin the process, than dipping into the Mind Writing Slogans of Allen Ginsberg. So if you are in need of rebalancing the engine, here’s a few words to live by:

Notice what you notice

Catch yourself thinking 

Observe what’s vivid

Vividness is self-selecting

                                                              – Allen Ginsberg

What did we learn from Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg?

By Aram Saroyan
Poetry Media Service

It’s been more than a decade since the death of Allen Ginsberg, but in the interim I’ve found that he’s stayed with me as an informing, tempering, guardian-like presence of a stature equaled only by my late father. He looked me up and down and looked me in the face, taking my measure for good or ill, and then informed me, on several critical occasions, where I had gotten it right or wrong.

As a teenager in Manhattan, I turned to poetry because I couldn’t understand what life was about and thought I might uncover some clues in such writing. Howl, which I found during high school, was like an encyclopedia of the emotional and psychic life that had been driven under in me, with the result that I felt restless and bored a lot of the time. Life is big, it said. It has a lot of colors. It’s serious. It’s funny. It’s full of suffering that is also like bread, nurture, on a journey of the soul.

Allen called me from Naropa one year, trying to track down a photograph of Kerouac that I’d used in Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch and the Beat Generation. My father had died recently, and Allen told me a story about his father, the late poet Louis Ginsberg, who had been a high school teacher in New Jersey. When he’d visited his father in the hospital during his last illness, Allen said Louis told him that as a little boy he’d lived near a magnificent building, a great tower with chimneys from which, at certain hours of the day, huge plumes of smoke billowed. Louis had dreamed of this building and wondered what went on inside it.

“Do you know what it was, Allen? That great tower that set me dreaming?”

“What, Pop?”

“It was a glue factory.”

During the same call Allen lightened my spirits by telling me how much he liked Genesis Angels, which had received mixed reviews.

During the ’60s, in my minimalist phase as a poet, I ran into Allen one afternoon on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street in New York. I’d just purchased some bell-bottoms and a hippie shirt, thinking I’d take the plunge into my generation’s attire, and Allen looked me over seriously.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“Well, I think the clothes are beautiful, so why not wear them?”

He nodded and made no further comment about it, and we got to discussing my one-word poems.

“Are you lazy, or what?” It was the sort of comment that could have come only from Allen or from my father.

“No,” I said.

Ten years later, Allen attended a reading I gave. Afterward, he commented to me that a poem I’d read took an “us-and-them” stance that he considered incorrect. This was priceless information, not about the quality of the poem so much as about how it is one continues to write. It was, as I see it today, part of the higher literary physics that he and Kerouac reinstated, so to speak. The moral example of literature wasn’t judgment, that is, but empathy, which is why Shakespeare is our greatest exemplar. Allen was telling me, in his way, that I had turned down a cul-de-sac.

* * *

The Paris Review interview with Jack Kerouac was the brainchild of Ted Berrigan at a time when, hard as it is to believe, Kerouac was an almost forgotten man. It was a few months before the fabled Summer of Love, 1967, and Ted invited me to accompany him up to Lowell to interview Kerouac. I accepted the invitation on impulse—at that moment of the ’60s I’d very nearly forgotten Kerouac myself.

Ted’s impromptu choreography: Jack had loved my dad’s work, Ted knew, and he also knew I’d be reluctant to come as the ambassador of William Saroyan, as it were, and made his invitation spontaneously casual—and off we went.

During the interview Jack, perhaps intrigued that the son of one of his first literary influences was now looking to him, asked me to repeat after him, line by line, the words of a poem of his from Mexico City Blues:

KEROUAC: Delicate conceptions of kneecaps. Say that, Saroyan.

SAROYAN: Delicate conceptions of kneecaps.

Concluding:

KEROUAC: Like kissing my kitten in the belly

SAROYAN: Like kissing my kitten in the belly

KEROUAC: The softness of our reward

SAROYAN: The softness of our reward

I stumbled once or twice—there were some complicated lines—but a thick-skinned, hardheaded 23-year-old writer was getting some basic training, not in literature per se, but in repeating the words of a master. That is the correct existential posture in the lineage of mystery—surrendering to it—that the Beats revived. So, my young friend, it was as if Kerouac was saying, Let’s appreciate it together; even though I wrote it, it’s both of ours now. When I’d completed this exercise, Jack rewarded me with a modest encomium that has traveled with me down the years and that I’ve tried my best to be worthy of. “You’ll do, Saroyan,” he said.

Aram Saroyan’s Door to the River: Essays and Reviews from the 1960s into the Digital Age will be published in March 2010 by Black Sparrow/Godine. This article first appeared at www.poetryfoundation.org. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation.

© 2009 by Aram Saroyan. All rights reserved.

 “Vi a las mejores mentes de mi generación destruidas por la locura, hambrientas histéricas desnudas, arrastrándose por las calles de los negros al amanecer en busca de un colérico pinchazo,”, dicen los primeros versos de Aullido (traducción de Rodrigo Olavarría), poema emblemático del pontífice beatnik Allen Ginsberg. Una de esas mentes destruidas fue la de Jim Morrison (1943-1971), el último sex symbol, el último poeta, el ultimo chamán, el Rey Lagarto (the lizard King), el último bardo, el último Dionisio en pantalones de cuero, líder y vocalista de The doors (1965-1971).

Awake, shake dreams from your hair my little sweetheart. Choose the day, choose the sign of your day. The day’s divinity. Ver The doors (1991) de Oliver Stone es sacudir polvo de sueños que amenazan con destronar a la divinidad del día. De cualquier día. Vista en su momento de estreno resultó toda una experiencia sensorial. Verla ahora, con más calma, es poner a un documento visual donde debe de estar: es un homenaje sentido a un grupo emblemático de los sesenta, sobre todo a su líder James Douglas Morrison.

La entrada de The Rolling Stone Enciclopedya of rock and roll  (2003), en la página 278, tiene el siguiente preámbulo en las dos páginas dedicadas al grupo californiano: “Sexo, muerte, reptiles, carisma y una variante única de blues eléctrico dio a The Doors un aura de profundidad que no solo sobrevivió sino que ha durado más de treinta años después de la muerte de su vocalista. Las letras de Morrison se leían como delirios adolescentes pero muy cargados de sexualidad deliberada. El seco órgano de Manzarek y la guitarra jazzística de Robby Krieger se convirtieron en una leyenda poderosa con una música que era casi una invocación chamanística a fuerzas familiares y al mismo tiempo demoníacas, y en el caso de Morrison una obsesión por el exceso y por ende con la muerte”.

Nunca mejor dicho. Bien resumida el alma de este grupo paradigmático. Las letras de Morrison eran verdaderos poemas en un estilo simbolista que recordaba a Rimbaud y William Blake. De este último tomaron el nombre del grupo. En Matrimonio entre el cielo y la tierra Blake pregonaba que “si las puertas de la percepción se abrieran, cada cosa aparecería ante los ojos del hombre como son, infinitas. Pero el hombre se encerrado sobre sí mismo hasta que logre ver las cosas a través de las estrechas fisuras de su caverna” (traducción de Marcelo Báez).

El encargado de la biopic  (biographical picture) de The doors es Oliver Stone, ex veterano de la guerra de Vietnam, terrorista por naturaleza, subversivo del lenguaje cinematográfico. Un experto en crear escándalos, un provocador profesional, eso es para algunos este cineasta de apellido de piedra. Su disección del asesinato de  JFK (1991) fue piropeado como “una relato político contado por Costa Gavras y montado por Eisenstein”. Su Peloton (1986) fue galardonada con cuatro Oscars de la Academia (lo que sea que eso signifique ya que dicho premio no es precisamente un honor en estas épocas). Fundamentales en su filmografía son Wall Street  (1987) con Michael Douglas y también Salvador (1986), con James Woods.

Asesinos por naturaleza (1995), escrita por Quentin Tarantino, fue celebrada como una narrativa alucinógena y una crítica acérrima a los mass media, sobre todo a los reality y talk shows.

Después de estos seis filmes (The doors incluido) la carrera de Stone ha ido cada vez más en picada con filmes insulsos carentes de la fuerza inicial de su carrera.

Revisada después de dieciocho años, el filme de Stone sigue siendo una apología no tanto del grupo sino de su vocalista de quien se incluyen poemas en el metraje. Se interpolan, además, imágenes surrealistas y realmente sugestivas. Loable el intento de aunar la lírica de Morrison con la poesía visual de Stone. El problema con esta biopic es el concentrarlo todo en el joven vocalista que siguió el precepto de James Dean: “Live fast, die young”. Comienza en las playas de California donde conoció a Manzarek (ambos eran estudiantes de cine de la UCLA) y termina en París, con aguacero, para ser enterrado en esa versión francesa del Olimpo que es Pére-Lachaise. La intención es darle al personaje esa aureola mítica pero el abuso resulta poco soportable después de casi veinte años de haberla visto. Hay cosas que realmente sobran como la apología de la satiriasis de Morrison. La responsabilidad mayor del filme recae en Val Kilmer (nominado al MTV award por este rol) quien se arriesga a cantar con voz propia algunos de los temas musicales. Igual sigue siendo el único filme de ficción, hasta la fecha, sobre el grupo que ahora tiene nuevo vocalista. Destacan Meg Ryan en el rol de Pamela, la esposa del cantante y Kyle McLahlan como Ray Manzarek. Vale.

Cool black night thru redwoods
cars parked outside in shade
behind the gate, stars dim above
the ravine, a fire burning by the side
porch and a few tired souls hunched over
in black leather jackets. In the huge
wooden house, a yellow chandelier
at 3 A.M. the blast of loudspeakers
hi-fi Rolling Stones Ray Charles Beatles
Jumping Joe Jackson and twenty youths
dancing to the vibration thru the floor,
a little weed in the bathroom, girls in scarlet
tights, one muscular smooth skinned man
sweating dancing for hours, beer cans
bent littering the yard, a hanged man
sculpture dangling from a high creek branch,
children sleeping softly in their bedroom bunks.
And 4 police cars parked outside the painted
gate, red lights revolving in the leaves.

Το ποιήμα αυτό τιτλοφορείται First Party At Ken Kesey’s With Hell’s Angels και γράφτηκε από τον Allen Ginsberg το Δεκέμβριο του 1965.

Ο Ken Kesey οργάνωνε συχνά πάρτυ τα οποία ονόμαζε «Acid Tests». Πάρτυ, με μουσική (κυρίως με το αγαπημένο του συγκρότημα, The Warlocks, οι οποίοι γίνανε αργότερα διάσημοι ως Grateful Dead), ψυχεδελικά εφέ(black lights κ.α.) και, φυσικά, LSD. Ο Kesey φημολογείται ότι πειραματίστηκε με το LSD παρέα με το Ringo Star, προετοιμάζοντας το έδαφος για τις εμφανίσεις του στη Βρετανία με τους Beatles.

Ο Kesey γνώρισε τα ναρκώτικά στο Stanford, όπου συμμετείχε εθελοντικά σε μια έρευνα της CIA για την επίδραση της λήψης ψυχοδραστικών ουσιών όπως LSD, μεσκαλίνη, κοκαΐνη κ.α. Έπειτα συνέχισε να πειραματίζεται μόνος του…

Ο Kesey στα τέλη της δεκαετίας του ’50 δούλευε νυχτερινή βάρδια σε ένα νοσοκομείο βετεράνων. Εκεί συζητούσε με τους ασθενείς, συχνά υπό την επήρεια παραισθησιογόνων. Ο Kesey δεν θεωρούσε πως οι τρόφιμοι ήταν τρελοί, αλλά ότι μπήκαν στο περιθώριο επειδή δεν συμπεριφέρονταν σύμφωνα με τα συμβατικά κοινωνικά στερεότυπα.

Έτσι,μια μέρα του 1959, υπό την επήρεια οκτώ φυτών peyote, όπως ο ίδιος ισχυριζόταν, έγραψε τις τρεις πρώτες σελίδες του βιβλίου που τον έκανε ευρύτερα γνωστό…

WHAT IF ALLEN GINSBERG WAS A FILIPINO?
Or how I syncopated the essence of “Hadda be Playin’ on the Jukebox”

Hadda be flashing like the Philippine Daily Inquirer
Hadda be playing on Wowowee
Hadda be loudmouthed on The Buzz!
Hadda be announced over loud speakers
The military and the Abu Sayyaf are in cahoots
Hadda be said in socialite language
Hadda be said in Pinoy headlines
Aguinaldo, Magsaysay, and Aquino stretched and smiled and got doublecrossed by low life international goons & agents
Gay bankers with criminal connections
Dope pushers in NBI working with dope pushers from China working with big time syndicate Parañaque City
Hadda be said with a big mouth
Hadda be moaned over factory foghorns
Hadda be chattered on barber shop news broadcast
Hadda be screamed in a rural slaughterhouse
Hadda be yelled in the plazas where young lovers are petting it out
Hadda be howled on the streets by newsboys to jeepney barkers
Hadda be foghorned into Pásig River
Hadda echo under hard hats
Hadda turn up the volume in cheeky high school proms
Hadda be written on unused library books, footnoted
Hadda be in headlines of Sagad, Hataw, and Toro
Hadda be barked over TV
Hadda be heard in side alleys thru KTV bars
Hadda be sent via SMS
Hadda be cellphones ringing, comedians stopped dead in the middle of a comedy bar joke in Las Piñas,
Hadda be GMA, NEDA Neri, Mayor Atienza, and COMELEC Ábalos golfing together weekends or whenever/wherever –
As reported by almost all dailies across the islands
Hadda be the Freemasons and the neocolonialists together
Started war on Mindanáo, poison on Recto, assassination of Luna and Aquino
Hadda be dope cops and the kidnap-for-ransom crooks
Kidnapped all those filthy-rich scions in Chinatown
Hadda be the NBI and the military working together in cahoots against the leftists
Let Lucky Manzano campaign for both mommy and daddy… family relations, party fidelities, political madness
Hadda be religious goons bribing cross-eyed officials with vote-rich members, singing gospel gobbledygook, praising money and recruitment
Hadda be heard inside the classrooms:
Nationwide brainwashing by UP professors
Hadda be the police, and organized crime, and the military together
Bigger than Gloria, bigger than ZTE-NBN!!!
Hadda be a gorged throat full of murder
Hadda be mouth and ass a solid mass of rage
A red hot head, a scream in the back of the throat
Hadda be in Obama’s brain
Hadda be in Clinton’s mouth
Hadda be the Pinoy language committe, pidginizing our tongue,
erasing our identity, forgetting who we are, what we were…
The Palace, the military, the billionaire cronies, the police, UP historians teaching the leyenda negra,
Protestants and Freemasons,
Dope pushers and sadists,
One big set of criminal gangs working together in cahoots
Hitmen, murderers everywhere, outraged, on the make
Secret drunk brutal dirty rich
On top of a heap of slovenly prisons, industrial cancer, burned plastic bags, garbage cities, Hollywood movies, Erap’s resentments
Hadda be the rulers, wanted law and order they got rich on
Wanted protection, status quo, wanted junkies for poll watchers, wanted influence, wanted Magsaysay to die in an air crash, wanted war over the Spratlys for oil to feed their diamond-laced cats
Hadda be the police and organized crime and the military and Gary V.
Multinational capitalists’ strong arms squads,
Private detective agencies for the very rich
And their armies, navies, and air force bombing rival political clans and their hapless supporters.
Hadda be neocolonialism, the vortex of this RAGE
This “gobbleization”
Man to man
Nation to nation
Hayden to Katrina
Horses’ heads in the haciendero’s bed, Luisita turf and farmers’ rallies, hit men, gang wars across political landscapes,
Bombing Basilan with “firecrackers” will not settle the score (because they never wanted to settle the score for hunger for funds)
Joma’s red democracy bumped off with the Palace’s pots and pans, a warning to rural local governments
Secret armies embraced for decades, the military and the Palace keep each other’s secrets, the Freemasons and the anti-Catholics/Protestants never hit their own,
The KKK and Ku Klux Klan are one mind
Brute force and full of enmity
One mind, brute force, and full of enmity!
One mind, brute force, and full of enmity!
One mind, brute force, and full of enmity!
One mind, brute force, and full of enmity!
It hadda be rich, it hadda be powerful,
Hadda hire history from US universities
Hadda murder in Indonesia — 500,000
Hadda murder in Indochina — 2,000,000
Hadda murder in Czechoslovakia
Hadda murder in Chile
Hadda murder in Russia…
Hadda murder kids over 10 in Sámar
Hadda murder in the Philippines — 1,250,000

Hadda milk us more till we fall apart…

11/24/09

A SUPERMARKET IN CALIFORNIA

by Allen Ginsberg

              What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
              In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
              What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!–and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?

              I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
              I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
              I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
              We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

              Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in
an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
              (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
              Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The
trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be
lonely.

              Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
              Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) managed to become a well known and recognized poet – a feat not accomplished by most poets today. Best known for his poem “Howl,” Ginsberg was at the center of the beat generation in the 1950s, a group that rejected mainstream American values and was at the forefront of the political and cultural changes that shifted the face of this country.

Editor’s Note: Okay, so I’m not exactly introducing you to Allen Ginsberg, if you are a human being living in the world today. But I do think that a poem that takes place in a supermarket is an appropriate selection for Thanksgiving, and I hope you will think of Walt Whitman as you peruse the aisles of Whole Foods searching for the perfect organic potato and pondering the benefits of Tofurkey vs. free range non-hormone-injected meat.

This is one of my favorite Ginsberg poems, exploring everything from consumerism to homosexuality to the relationship between poets and the generations that came before and inspired them. I highly recommend listening to Ginsberg himself read “A Supermarket in California,” aloud. You can download the mp3 for $0.99 at Amazon.com. You won’t regret it.

Want to read more by and about Allen Ginsberg?
Poets.org
The Poetry Archive
PBS – “American Masters”

photo credit: Abbe Arenson

Poetry night November 2009

thought it might be good to roost on college campus
for poetry night,
the night of the new moon,
listening to fresh voices for inspiration
something to assault my elder brain with key words
to give my dulled senses new food
I was hungry to write again

about thirty students and their professor assembled
I was the oldest one in that room
absorbing their ages and innocence
watching their squirming angst as
the professor told them to come up and read,
read something they wrote,
read something by someone else,
he began the evening by reading his own work
I don’t remember one word

the first young man stood right up
macho, tanned, firm arms ablaze with colored inks
and clingy shirt to compliment,
he reminded me of Michael Fitzsimmons
in “Peggy Sue Got Married” -  his words curt and forceful,
trying for hardedge reflection,
the girls whispered and smiled
this was the one Peggy Sue would crave

the white girls came up one by one
shiny haired, nervous and generic
despair, depression, break ups, near  suicides,
the pattern was set for every designer jeaned one of them
except for one who mumbled something at a Nascar pace
about trying to understand her two year old cousin,
while a petite blond peeped in a high overture to
Dickinson’s, “I heard a Fly Buzz”

Then a beaded and braided, “player” swaggered to the mike
silky smooth in his Barry White delivey
the voice overrode what he was saying
he will be a DJ or radio host
the velvety voice will net its’ lions’ share
of female prey

I do remember the bespectacled student
I do remember his serious rap, his ramrod vibe
his righteous tangent on hope and God
and Jesus being the light – the way
he spoke with clarity and passion,
I pictured a stern mother
delivering  Biblical justice with a firm hand

my eyes wandered through the herd
scoped out  ‘boys’ through ‘cougar’  eyes,
I liked the dirty blond with goatee -
found myself still  drawn to the same ‘type’
that appealed to me in high school  4 decades ago,
my mind buzzed back to days of mad crushes,
learning what the word cunnilingus meant,
French kissing and copping feels  under bleachers and
of course rejection
ah, the ‘60’s, the best times ever,
but back to poetry

the rest of the poems seemed like fine silicate
loose words slipping off pages
kids read, then were rewarded with light, polite clapping for all,
one woman in her forties held worn sheets of paper,
pieces  about cancer, death and killing
I would call it melancholy “schmaltz”  at best
go look it up, gentiles

when time finally lapsed between readers
the Professor got up and read another of his poems
which was funny to the ear
as the young crowd all laughed at the staged lines,
but I heard the undertones ,
of wanting fame and reverence for self
for wishing that swooning college females would hive
at his honeyed words and experience,
it was obvious  mid-life was imploding,
the balding pate, the soft body looked computer chained
the humor was truth doused in itching powder
tickling him without mercy
about all that had been denied

when he finished, the professor looked around-
was about to call it a night
when from the back stood a skinny, dark haired guy ,
looked about twenty,
he slinked up to the podium on tall khaki legs
standing silent for a moment-
no notes, no books, no laptop in attendance
we waited as he took in a breath
and began to recite
and recite he did,
stanza after compelling stanza
a poem not his own, but so impacting in its’ delivery
it should have been,
the subject was about going back to rehab,
it cut gashes into my psyche
my blood took to splashing hard against the arteries,
he made me shiver in his sincerity,
I saw scenery and visions raped by knowledge too sage
for one so young to know,
but he spoke with eloquence -
with the fullness of living behind thick shadows,
of speaking a churchyard elegy to a corpse still alive
this was the moment worth waiting for,
this was ‘The One’ worth hearing,
the one who was calm, yet dangerous,
the one reeking of undigested fumaroles waiting for a shunt
the audience silenced by his chainsaw reality -
the poet he memorized should sweat him

there was silence for a second or two after he finished -
words like scorching rain were still wetting
and burning the audience
and then came the clapping
hands reddened by hard smacking
for the savior of poetry night, the true artist among us,
or rather a true actor who walked past all of us
walked right out of the room before the accolades finished -
more of an exile than an exit

the veneer of the night finally peeled  -
I left having hope that poetry was still strong,
not lost and diluted like cheap internet
poetry anthology submissions
that publish anything for a few bucks -
I walked out to my truck under the dark new moon,
slipped the key into the ignition
but didn’t turn it,
I closed my eyes
waiting for the moment of impact…

Se você curte a geração beat, ou tem um mínimo interesse pela turba de poetas e escritores viajantes e marginais, deve ter percebido que faltava um livro no mercado que sistematizasse a jogada toda, contextualizando e indicando outras leituras. Faltava. Agora, felizmente é fácil encontrar nas livrarias o título Geração Beat, de Claudio Willer, pequena pedrada-pocket da coleção encyclopaedia da editora L&PM.

Willer é um grande estudioso do assunto, e já verteu para o português vários  poemas de Allen Ginsberg, sempre com riqueza de notas explicativas e textos adicionais. Em “Geração Beat”, ele revela um texto impecavelmente conciso e organizado, e muito agradável de ler – as linhas simplesmente se desmancham frente aos nossos olhos e lá estamos nós ao lado de Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac e William Burroughs.

Longe de ser um tratado sobre o assunto, este é um livro introdutório para quem começa  a se aventurar nesta imensa praia de girassóis, assim como presta uma louvável função de discutir e organizar um pouco dessa  loucura toda para aqueles que já a apreciam. Mais dois outros méritos do título são: a preocupação de Willer em trazer nomes que se ligam de alguma forma ao movimento aqui no Brasil e na América Latina – há inclusive um capítulo que trata apenas de como se difundiu a beat no Brasil, e a discussão de como estes tortos caminhos percorridos por esta geração iriam desmbocar na contracultura.

Texto: Alexandre Lucchese

]]> http://grahamnunn.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/cool-man-in-a-golden-age/ Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:56:26 +0000 gnunn http://grahamnunn.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/cool-man-in-a-golden-age/

For film buffs and lovers of Beat Culture, this release of legendary American independent filmmaker, Alfred Leslie’s work is long overdue. I was first switched on to Leslie’s work, through the Kerouac narrated, Pull My Daisy, which features Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg & Peter Orlovsky. Pull My Daisy is a ramshackled retelling of an incident in the lives of Neal and Carolyn Cassady, and charts the weirdness that ensues when a Bishop is invited over for dinner, crashed by a bunch of bohemians. The film captures the heady Beat life and has the same improvised feel that much of the great literature from this time embraced.

If you haven’t seen it, here’s a few links to the making of the film (interviews with David Amram & Alfred Leslie) including excerpts from the original.

Pull My Daisy pt. 1

Pull My Daisy pt. 2

Pull My Daisy pt. 3

Alongside Pull My Daisy this release also features, Birth of a Nation, A Stranger Calls at Midnight and Leslie’s visionary collaboration with Frank O’Hara, The Last Clean Shirt. Olivier Brossard has written a stunning essay (published in Jacket) on The Last Clean Shirt that is well worth the read.

The final film included as part of the release is USA: Poetry – Frank O’Hara. USA Poetry was a 12-part series produced in 1965-66, showcasing the works of Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Philip Whalen, Ed Sanders and many others. You can view clips from Frank O’Hara’s segment of the release on his website.

And if that’s not quite enough to peak your interest, head on over to Alfred Leslie’s homepage where you can read his textual exploration of Cool Man in a Golden Age.

Painter, Filmmaker, Photographer, Writer… most definitely a Cool Man in any age.

this kindof says it all…

i walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and
sat down under the huge shade of a southern
pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the
box house hills and cry.
jack kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron
pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts
of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,
surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of
machinery.
the oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun
sank on top of final frisco peaks, no fish in that
stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves
rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums
on the riverbank, tired and wily.
look at the sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray
shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting
dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust–
–i rushed up enchanted–it was my first sunflower,
memories of blake–my visions–harlem
and hells of the eastern rivers, bridges clanking joes
greasy sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black
treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the
poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel
knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck
and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the
past–
and the gray sunflower poised against the sunset,
crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog
and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye–
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like
a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,
soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays
obliterated on its hairy head like a dried
wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures
from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster
fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower o
my soul, i loved you then!
the grime was no man’s grime but death and human
locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad
skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black
mis’ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance
of artificial worse-than-dirt–industrial–
modern–all that civilization spotting your
crazy golden crown–
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless
eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the
home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar
bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards
of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely
tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what
more could i name, the smoked ashes of some
cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the
milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs
& sphincters of dynamos–all these
entangled in your mummied roots–and you there
standing before me in the sunset, all your glory
in your form!
a perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent
lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye
to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited
grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden
monthly breeze!
how many flies buzzed round you innocent of your
grime, while you cursed the heavens of the
railroad and your flower soul?
poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a
flower? when did you look at your skin and
decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?
the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and
shade of a once powerful mad american locomotive?
you were never no locomotive, sunflower, you were a
sunflower!
and you locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me
not!
so i grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck
it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and jack’s soul
too, and anyone who’ll listen,
–we’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread
bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re all
beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re blessed
by our own seed & golden hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black
formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our
eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
riverbank sunset frisco hilly tincan evening
sitdown vision.

the flaming lips / allen ginsberg

music by Tom Waits.

Allen Ginsberg

AMERICA

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.
I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I’m sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I’m trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I’m not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.
I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.
I’d better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they’re all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don’re really want to go to war.
America it’s them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I’d better get right down to the job.
It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Allen Ginsberg helped dispose of a body?  Will this be portrayed in the movie starring James Franco?

Lit.

• A.V. Club reviews Philip Roth’s The Humbling.

• Village Voice go back to 1966 to hang out with Ed Saunders.  Fug, and “Fuck You” publisher.

• The Daily Beast takes a look at the best of British literature.

• Stephen King’s Under the Dome has “the scope and flavor of literary Americana” says the New York Times.

• The guy that put out The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History, gets the Book Notes treatment over at Largehearted Boy.

• Miami New Times talks to Jonathan Lethem.

CNN has one less A-hole on their payroll.

• Lou Dobbs says “peace out” in his own Dobbsy way.
  

• Gawker makes odds on what the next move of Mr. Dobbs will be.

Hilarious.

• Neil Hamburger is on tour.

Music

• Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend is thankful for Contra.

• Atlas Sound gives us more free music.

Brooklyn

• Williamsburg bookseller, Spoonbill and Sugartown turned ten years old. Somebody took pictures of the celebration.

• New York buys back Coney Island.  Sorta.

• The geeks shall inherent the earth.  Thank god.

San Francisco has always been a community that has been in the forefront of art and culture, this morning I received a startling email from the Beat Museum in North Beach stating its current financial turmoil, and possible closing.  In case you have been living under a rock the Beat Generation was a movement in the 1950’s, which created a culture of beatnik’s, including famed artist such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Neal Cassady.  San Francisco became their playground, and three years ago The Beat Museum opened its doors to educate the community on all the magic that came with this time.  If your a fan of On the Road, or simply have no clue what in the world I am talking about, head on over to North Beach, and check it out for yourself, and help keep the memories of a famed generation alive. Located on 540 Broadway and open everyday from 10-7, go and help support a museum worth keeping its doors open. Cheers!

]]> http://frederiqueauteure.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/ma-dream-team-litteraire/ Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:41:49 +0000 frederiqueauteure http://frederiqueauteure.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/ma-dream-team-litteraire/

J’ai eu l’occasion de lire l’ouvrage d’Hansen et Allen Le millionnaire minute. Ca a marché ? Bah, non la preuve… Mais bientôt le bestseller, même si, avouons-le, les bestsellers ne sont pas forcément les romans de la meilleure facture littéraire. Mais qui c’est cette fille, pas foutue de nous pondre un roman, qui se permet de critiquer ceux qui vivent plus que très bien de leurs productions littéraires ?!

Je me souviens cependant, d’un exercice amusant proposé dans le livre. Comme je ne le citerai pas “texto” parce que j’ai prêté l’ouvrage à une amie, future millionnaire ? je reproduis donc le contenu de l’exo, comme je l’ai en mémoire.

Le truc, c’était : “De qui vous entoureriez-vous pour faire marcher un projet (i.e pour devenir millionnaire, me semble-t-il ?). Et il fallait donner le nom de 10 personnes (de n’importe quelle époque, même inacessibles et célébrissimes).

Je crois d’ailleurs que le but suivant était d’essayer de les approcher, mais je ne vous parierai pas les royalties de mon premier roman pour autant…

Alors, ma dream team littéraire, c’est qui ?

1-Albert Cohen (même si j’ai overdosé BDS, Belle du Seigneur pour les très-très intimes, renoncé à écrire une thèse dessus, il m’arrive encore de sourire béatement sur le port d’Antibes devant un bateau appelé Solal et de me dire que quand même ce bouquin…). Et il m’apporterait quoi Cohen dans ma dream team ? Il me dirait peut-être : “Dicte tes  textes à ton homme, achète-toi une robe de chambre et un chapelet d’ambre pour mieux écrire. Et surtout, n’oublie jamais que tout roman doit parler d’amour.”

2-Emily Dickinson (Ah ses poèmes, pourquoi je les aime ? No idea). Et elle m’apporterait quoi, Emily ? Elle me dirait : “Isole-toi pour écrire, quelques heures ou quelques jours seulement. Ecrire c’est une vie, c’est un mode de vie, n’en déplaise à ceux qui n’ont rien compris…”

3-Allen Ginsberg (Je lui dois deux 18 à la fac et une lecture publique de America dans l’amphi de la fac, pour un exposé. Je lui dois un poème griffonné en anglais et à l’arrache dans le métro, quand j’avais 19 ans.) Et il me dirait quoi, Allen ? : “Tu peux aller aussi loin que tu veux, n’aie pas peur de choquer, de tout assumer, qui tu sembles être et qui tu es vraiment, qui tu voudrais être et qui tu pourras être. Et chante, car tu es comme moi, je sais que tu aimes ça.”

4-Angela Sommer-Bodenburg (J’ai lu Le petit vampire quand j’étais petite et j’étais accro, euh, à crocs, c’est plus juste ; je viens de relire ses nouvelles Je frissonne, tu frissonnes, bien qu’elles soient pour enfants, elles marchent très bien aussi sur un adulte). Et elle me dis quoi, Angela ? “N’aie pas peur d’écrire sur la mort car elle est inhérente à toute fiction. N’aie pas peur de rire et de faire rire à son sujet.”

5-Angela Carter (Ah ! Les Angela… Celle-là, on la surnommait : the high priestess of postgraduate porn*.  J’ai lu The Passion of the New Eve et quelques autres textes et récemment appris qu’elle avait enseigné à l’université d’East Anglia). Et elle me dirait quoi, Angela C ? “Ne censure pas l’écriture du corps, de ses pulsions, ni de ses sécrétions. L’écriture est organique, orgamisque.”

*la grande prêtresse du porno pour étudiants (titulaires d’une licence au moins)

POUR LES 5 AUTRES MEMBRES DE MA DREAM TEAM, JE VOUS INVITE A DECOUVRIR MA PROCHAINE NOTE…

Widziałem najlepsze umysły mego pokolenia zniszczone szaleństwem,
głodne histeryczne nagie, włóczące się o świcie po murzyńskich dzielnicach w poszukiwaniu wściekłej dawki haszu
(…)
których wylano z uczelni za obłęd i obsceniczne ody rozlepiane w oknach czaszki
(…)
którzy łykali ogień w hotelach wypacykowanych farbą albo pili terpentynę w Paradise Alley, marli lub noc w noc umartwiali swe torsy przy pomocy snów, haszu, budzących zmór, wódy, chuja, i nieustających jebań, niezrównanie  ślepych ulic drżącego obłoku i błyskawicy umysłu skaczącej ku biegunom Kanady i Paterson, rozświetlającej cały zamarły świat z Czasem pośrodku, trójwymiarowych wizji gmachów po zażyciu peyotlu, świtów podwórzowych zielonych drzew cmentarza, opilstwa winem na szczytach dachów, narkotycznych przejażdżek przez dzielnice witryn wśród migającej sygnalizacji, słońca, księżyca i wibracji drzew, przez grzmiący zimowy zmierzch Brooklynu, łoskot kubłów na śmieci i łagodne światło duszy, którzy przytwierdzali się do kolejek metra by jeździć bez końca na amfetaminie od Battery do świętego Bronksu dopóki hałas kół i dzieciarni nie zagnał ich drżących ze spieczonymi ustami zmaltretowanych z mózgiem wyzutym z jasności w posępne światło zoo
(…)
którzy wypalali sobie papierosami dziury w ramionach w proteście przeciw
narkotyczno-nikotynowemu otumanieniu Kapitalizmu
(…)
którzy w ekstazie i nienasyceniu kopulowali z butelką piwa, z kochanką, pudełkiem po papierosach, ze świecą, wypadali z łóżka, kontynuowali na podłodze i w przedpokoju i kończyli omdlewając na ścianie z wizją ostatecznej cipy wydając resztkę spermy świadomości
(…)
którzy chodzili całą noc w butach pełnych krwi po śnieżnych nasypach doków czekając aż w East River otworzą się drzwi do pokoju pełnego ciepłej pary i opium
(…)
którzy gotowali zgniłe zwierzęta płuco racice ogon barszcz i placki kukurydziane marząc o czystym królestwie warzyw
(…)
którzy jechali przez kraj siedemdziesiąt dwie godziny by stwierdzić czy ja miałem widzenie czy ty miałeś widzenie czy on miał widzenie, by odszukać Wieczność
(…)
którzy obrzucali sałatką z kartofli wykładowców dadaizmu w City College NY a potem zjawiali się na granitowych schodach domu wariatów z wygolonymi głowami i arlekinadą o samobójstwie, żądając natychmiastowej lobotomii, i którym zamiast tego dostała się betonowa próżnia insuliny metrasolu elektryczności hydroterapii psychoterapii terapii wychowawczej ping-ponga i amnezji
(…)
z wyciętym z ich własnych ciał absolutnym sercem poematu życia godnym spożywania nawet przez lat tysiąc.

The following is an excerpt from a chapbook I made and distributed in ‘05. Printed in very limited quantities, and receiving even less critical acclaim, a friend of mine recently suggested that I re-read this. It’s been nearly four years since I last read it, and even with that distance, I found that I still liked it. Without further ado, I present the Introduction to an out-of-print chapbook called, “Sudden Beat Inspirations.”

I recently came to grips with the realization that I will never be, nor be considered, a Beat Writer. Never a Beat Poet, a Beat anything really. There’s that whole time issue, which I’m really not oblivious to, but more importantly is the voice issue. No matter whose name (and many people will disagree with me on this point) is on what’s traditionally accepted as Beat Literature, there is a very distinct voice— the voice of the Beat. I recently came to grips with the realization that the Beat voice is not my voice.

There is one story which is not included in this collection. Right now, I couldn’t even tell you the name of the story. It was the first story I ever wrote and it was about William S. Burroughs’ funeral. Really, from what I remember, the funeral was more of a backdrop to what was really going on. Gary Snyder was giving the eulogy, and some young boy walked up and spit onto the casket. When reprimanded by Mr. Snyder, the nameless boy replied that he meant no disrespect, but that the “seed” needed moisture to grow another one like him. Then the boy, whose description many people would recognize as a young Kerouac, stuck out his thumb and hitched a ride away from the funeral. The idea of the story is more pertinent to this collection than the story itself. Not only was it the first story I ever wrote, for no other reason than I felt like writing, but its significance would take me a long time to shake.

In one of my first English courses in college, I was granted a full pardon from writing anything for the entire semester. Not that I had supernatural writing skills which no one else possessed, much less comprehended, but because my professor recognized that I didn’t belong. Failing to complete (really, I never even started them) my first couple of assignments, I went out on a limb and showed him a copy of the aforementioned story about Burroughs’ funeral. He wasn’t impressed with what I wrote, but he was intrigued with what I chose to write about. He asked me about my topic choice, as it had nothing to do with any of the assignments, and as I began to stutter something, he cut me off and told me that he had someplace to be. As he walked away from me, he told me not to worry about coming to class for the rest of the week, but that he expected an answer e-mailed to him by noon, Friday. Being the eternal procrastinator (as I would prove time and again throughout the remainder of my college career) I ran to the campus computer lab around 11:30am on Friday and frantically began typing some gibberish about why I hadn’t written him sooner and how I’d just read Dharma Bums for the second time in a week (like I thought he might care) and how I suspected that my girlfriend was sleeping with this old lawyer guy she and I both knew (which was more annoying than heartbreaking) and that I just wanted to be able to live what I considered a Beat existence (whatever that means) and not have to worry about any of that shit because it was all about experience and that I wanted desperately to believe all that and just live my life like free-form verse, not concerning myself with rules or stanzas. Something I said worked, I was granted a full pardon from writing anything else for the entire semester.

Having written about the Beats so persuasively, I counted myself as part of their company. This belief lasted the better part of ten years. Not as productive as I would have liked, but entirely necessary.

College as a whole seemed to be a waste of time. Not that I wanted to enter the workforce, but I seriously contemplated following one of Kerouac’s routes of either joining the Merchant Marine (even though I had recently gotten out of the Navy), or traveling around the country, staying with friends and writing about my experiences. I had several dreams about hanging out with Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg, Snyder and a bunch of other guys who acted out the parts of their pseudonyms from the books and poetry of my literary heroes. A group of three of those dreams actually happened in sequence over a two week period. As difficult as it is to resume a dream, I did it twice, and all three dreams were centered around me hanging out with and talking to Kerouac. There were many peculiarities about this series of dreams, but the most poignant was Kerouac and I walking towards a crowd of cheering people on a hilltop and him reading to me, from a small back notebook, some line about a hawk in my house. I told him that all those people were waiting for him and he replied that they were not waiting for him. When I turned to him to ask what he meant, he had disappeared and I was engulfed by the crowd. I have had, and been told, many interpretations for that portion of the dream. At best, my own interpretations are arrogant. Other’s interpretations aren’t as flattering. Somewhere in the middle is way off target.

Few people believe (most don’t seem to care) that these dreams occurred a month before I picked up, or even heard of Kerouac’s Scripture of the Golden Eternity. Poem #22 ends with the lines: A hummingbird can come into a house and a hawk will not: so rest and be assured. While looking for the light, you may suddenly be devoured by the darkness and find the true light. (Which I later learned was a reference to Henry Miller’s  story, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, which without being too ironizing, is a strange coincidence itself.)

One thing that Beat literature really opened my eyes to was the fact that there is significance in the mundane. Up until the point when I first read On the Road, literature seemed guilty of bypassing the mundane, or at best, treating it merely as a transition to the next sub-plot. Life to me wasn’t like that. The mundane was very real, very beautiful, worthy of significance, but in my youthful naivete, I never thought to damn the world and apply it myself. I had falsely assumed that since it wasn’t mentioned, the mundane was nothing more than mundane. Beat literature, and the lives I read about of the Beats, awakened me to Rilke’s advice to a young poet: If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place. I was the young poet— I still am. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Snyder, all of them were my Rilke; all of their poetry, all of their literature was a letter to me— it still is.

A lot of people in the academic world are experts at unearthing poetry from the mundane—  as long as it is somewhere else. Discovering the poetry in one’s day to day affairs is much more difficult; in fact, it would seem damn near impossible from an academic standpoint. Finding fault with another is much easier to swallow than strict self criticism.

That’s not where I want to go. Aside from being guilty of the same thing (that’s the reason I am leaving that paragraph), it’s simply not the direction I envisioned, but it did serve as a good resting point. If my mind will allow— back on track.

I had this other professor, well, I didn’t actually take his class, I only went to see him about switching my major to English Literature— so he was a potential advisor, if anything. I had several poems I had written to a lot of girls who would never see them, a couple of lyrics to heart wrenching songs about why those girls would never see them, and my story about the funeral. I went to meet him with my snazzy little portfolio. My definition of “snazzy” was markedly different from his, a point he was very vocal about. Following his sermon, he handed me a book of his poetry, which he had recently published, and instructed that I learn to write like him if I ever wanted to make it as a poet. As I was leaving, I was told to photocopy “ten or so of [my] favorites and return the book promptly.” I left the book on his desk along with my decision to become an English Lit major. I kept my desire to write, but I let the haughty s.o.b. beat me— I trashed all of my poems. He may have been right about them, but I acted rashly, thinking I would just start a new slate. I still wish I had them just to see from where I came. I have been ridiculed to my face for things I have written since then, but I still have them. What I learned above all else was perseverance.

Beaten but not defeated was my obnoxious battle cry. With time, I began to understand what he was telling me: There are a lot of people out there who write; not all of them will get published. Some will. There is something to be learned from those who do, namely, how to get published. The how-to market is flooded with experts on the field of how to get published. If you can’t publish a book, why not publish a book on how to get published? There is some logic in there which temporarily escapes me. The real meat on board this train is that, as a beginning writer, you should find something similar to yours that has been published and go from there. I drew more similarities than were actually there, but if nothing else, I was inspired by Beat literature. Not only by the literature, but by the Beats themselves. It takes a hell of a talent to make hobo-ing sound appealing. Fortunately, I never followed the path that far, but I did recognize the sheer power of the people behind the literature.

I hoped that in learning about them, I would learn to be more like them. If I could do it without being the hobo, wandering, starving artist, so much the better! There is something to be said about one’s literary voice, and it is this: No matter how well you hone your impersonation skills, you will never be who you are not. For me, this marks my departure.

Not that I’ve given up trying to write like those who inspired me to put words together in an artistic way to say something that everyone knows but not everyone realizes. What I have given up is trying to be a Beat. I am not. I didn’t experience the disillusionment of the mediocrity which befell America after winning the second world war. I didn’t contribute to the creation of a literary genre that would not only define a generation but would serve as a model and influence generations for years to come. I could go on like this for some time, defining who the Beats are and who I am not, but that is not why I write, I’ve found. What I have found is that I am not a Beat anything. Much of my artistic make-up is heavily influenced by people who are, but I am someone else entirely. I was born in a different era from which most of the Beats came, I grew up experiencing situations that didn’t make sense to me, to those around me, and certainly wouldn’t register to the Beats, being that realistically they are, by and large, from my grandparent’s generation and have backgrounds representative of that era. Not only have I been blessed with the opportunity to read their works, but I have also been able to read those who came before them, and those who have been inspired by them since.

This collection can be read as a tribute to those who inspired me, as a childish quest to be something I am not, or, and I believe most accurately, the ambitious beginnings of an aspiring writer. Any of the above contexts will do, but the important thing to note is to acknowledge where you came from, but never lose sight of where you are going.

© 2005, n09XI—Furious Poet Press & Vagabond Lit

“Dear Allen:

After speaking to you on the phone about how nice the black-white thing is in mountain villages in Fiji, I walked downstairs to the school courtyard, where a little-known black brother looks at me, takes my hand gently, we do some old-world Lower East Side finger tricks, and he peacefully kisses the back of my hand—I do the same for his hand. I told him about our brief talk, and he says, “I must have felt the vibes.”

Michael Weiner”

.

La edad endureciéndome las uñas de los pies
El azúcar tapándome los nervios, a los músculos
De mis piernas les falta sangre, rodillas flojas
Corazón insuficiente, una pared-válvula tapada,
Me falta el aliento, dos kilos y medio pura agua
De sobrepeso-
Hígado, intestino y pulmón cortados- levantado a las 4 a.m.
Leyendo Shakespeare.

.
Allen Ginsberg
Ricardo III
.

Here’s a video I put together because I think it sounds awesome. Combining a reading of ‘Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg (not the entire thing obviously) with a cover of ‘Knights of Cydonia’ by a group called Kings of Lounge (look them up on YouTube) that I called ‘Howling Knights’ (for want of something better).

There is no actual video, just sound. Visuals aren’t needed, just listen.

Hope you enjoy