"Highgate Cemetery," by Aelred Down : a poem for Halloween season

The tombs are packed in and tiled

by mosses; smothered in ivy. By law,

there were no trees planted here

and yet the place is wild with them.

Over run. Near forested. They have

brought themselves in to this cold,

more fertile soil; leaning at angles

their roots split and lift the great, raw

tonnage of the sepulchers; the piled-

on generations piled on generations:

the vacancy of the real; the ruin and

stubbed out ends of days extinguished.

Upturned torches cast on heavy doors.

There are no spirits here. No memory

or doubt. No truth or honesty. And I

am unsure how I feel.

Our tour guide has

been in the profession for thirty years,

man and boy. His speeches hymn a

dry and brittle song that occasionally

reaches down inside into a dirty mirth

that has the echo of confession. He

has lived in hat-tipped silence for too

long. He points to facts and to then

to rumours; to the broken humour and

final pages of exhaled none too distant

ages. We stop and examine the fallen.

Jadis et naguere. Broken branches

spell the Cedar of Lebanon in its own

runes while Tommy Sayers the bare

knuckle boxer, the world's first heavy-

weight, who walked in a stove pipe

hat with gloves and cane, lies there.

He once fought The Tipton Slasher

for sixty one rounds. The Little Wonder

they called him then: 'The blows came

as from a catapult.' His mastiff, Lion,

in marmoreal calmness, guards him still.

They are but shadows now, of dry

stone on foliage; of broken steps

and pilgrimage. They are but dust

and clay and we, the ghosts of the

dead, eternal optimists, circle the

unlikely trees, the rings within them

measuring marriage of earth to that

beneath, and, emerging in to the white

noise of the day, we breathe. Exist.

Aelred Down lives in Gloucestershire, England, where he is currently working on his first poetry collection. "Highgate Cemetery" originally appeared at the Literary Kicks website.

"Altman: The Oral Biography," by Mitchell Zuckoff (2009)

Robert Altman now has a well deserved biography by Mitchell Zuckoff, in which the director's associates and friends get to speak their piece about working with one of Hollywood's most visionary (if cantankerous) directors.

Altman: The Oral Biography (Knopf) resembles one of Altman's own films in its crowded, overlapping, conversational style and layered points of view, a tale-telling device that enhances Altman's own public and private image -- the book's press release uses words "eccentric" and "rollicking," but it would be difficult not to see that many of his associates thought of Altman as a meticulous craftsman with a mercurial temper, to put it mildly. Producer Richard Zanuck recalls a discussion with Altman about shooting on location:

"When he was gearing up he came in and said, 'I want to go scout Korea.' I said, 'Why? We're not going to Korea. We're going to the studio ranch in Malibu.' He said, 'This is ridiculous.' I said, 'Go out and look. I'll show you pictures of mountains in Korea. They match perfectly with what's out at the studio ranch.' It was probably more Korea than had we gone to Korea. Nobody knows what Korea looks like, anyway. That's what I said to him and he got very angry.

He said, 'We're going to shoot that golf scene in Tokyo.' I said, 'No we're not. We're going across the street to Rancho Park. There's a golf course. All you have to do is get a couple of Japanese girls and dress them up and they're caddies.' One golf course looks like another. Why would we ever do that?

In those exchanges, Bob was a guy who didn't like authority. He was a real rebel. I always felt that underneath that anger there was kind of a playboy. I would see the way he would dress, in the Paris airport, with the hat, the flashy white suit. I think there was a rogue element about that."

The unexpected commercial success of M*A*S*H made the 46-year-old director appear like an industry newcomer, but he already had years of series television work (Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Bonanza, Route 66, Maverick). He abandoned linear storytelling -- television's hourlong episode with the tidy ending -- for movies that seemed more like a vision of real life: confounding, with seemingly wandering plots and often morally ambiguous characters.

Sometimes the approach backfired: the follow-up to M*A*S*H was Brewster McCloud, a zany fable featuring Bud Cort. It was gamble that he would not repeat but the movie featured actors who would work with Altman through the years: Michael Murphy, Sally Kellerman, Rene Auberjonois, Shelly Duvall.

The cast of familiar faces became legion. If his movies became more episodic and seemingly disjointed, the troupe of recurring names in an Altman film became a directorial trademark. It was a neat twist on his years of serial television work: the same actors appeared in film after film, just as in a television series, but the characters they played were always different, with a new set of challenges. It was a riff on the 1950s-variety TV dramas that he had characterized, dismissively, as "cheese."

Making films, he found, bruised his ego even more. Hollywood, for its part, resisted almost to the end. "I don't like what you do," Jack Warner told him before the success of M*A*S*H. His abrasive, hard-drinking reputation only made Altman's ego more of an issue in an industry becoming increasingly corporate. And if the studio heads were confounded by his personal style, actors were equally mystified by his directorial techniques. Michael Murphy gets quoted as saying that the director's standard speech, after an evening of heavy drinking, was to declare that "no one in this room knows what this movie is about except me."

Such certainty was guaranteed not to make him many industry friends, and for his part Altman didn't seem to mind the neglect. "We're not against each other. They sell shoes, and I make gloves," he once quipped about working in Hollywood. He found actors who respected his fierce independence, directing Warren Beatty, Paul Newman, Julie Christie. He kept working, and kept butting heads with writers, producers, studios. He felt he had been badly treated, was angered at studio interference, and balked at playing Hollywood games. (Altman was Warner's late and uncertain choice to direct M*A*S*H after producers realized that "Kubrick will probably turn you down.")

Although he was nominated five times by the Motion Picture Academy for best director, Altman never won -- a testament, perhaps, to his lifelong skirmishes with Hollywood. It's a distinction he shares with Alfred Hitchcock and Martin Scorsese. Finally, mellowing at 81, he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award, which he accepted with some grace considering his well-known battles. Zuckoff interviews Meryl Streep, Warren Beatty, Tim Robbins, Julianne Moore, Paul Newman, Julie Christie, Elliott Gould, Martin Scorsese, Robin Williams, and many others in his book, who speak frankly and with great affection.

Altman's films may have been shrouded with what Jack Warner called "fog on the lake" -- constantly-shifting dialogue and the ricochet of half-heard conversation -- but his movies are more about character than clarity. Altman: The Oral Biography is a fair and unblinking portrait of a director who carefully crafted his image as a tough guy, and offers as much clarity as those who remember him will allow. The rest is left up to the moviegoer. "To me, I've just made one long film," Altman said on receiving his Lifetime Achievement Oscar, in 2006. "I know some of you have liked some of these sections. And others, well, that's all right."

Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849

"Shall I ever forget the triple horror of that spectacle? Twenty-five or thirty human bodies, among whom were several females, lay scattered about between the counter and the galley in the last and most loathsome state of putrefaction. We plainly saw that not a soul lived in that fated vessel! Yet we could not help shouting to the dead for help! Yes, long and loudly did we beg, in the agony of the moment, that those silent and disgusting images would stay for us, would not abandon us to become like them, would receive us among their goodly company!"

(from "The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym," 1850)

Terry Southern once quipped that the Edgar Allan Poe tale "The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym" was never found in high school reading lists "by virtue of its extreme weirdness." It seems that the gothic overtones of Poe's own life (and death) continue to make his an American story of excess and a mythic, singular literary weirdness. Ed Pilkington, writing in today's The Guardian (UK) online, reports on the efforts of competing organizations to mark the mysteries of Poe's life, and this weekend's ceremonies to rectify Poe's nearly-forgotten burial one-hundred-sixty years ago this month in Baltimore. Pilkington writes:

By the standards of any age, it was a miserable way to go. Edgar Allan Poe, dark romantic writer and poet credited with inventing the genre of detective fiction, enjoyed a death far more Gothic and gloomy than any of his stories.

It began badly when he was found, aged 40, wandering the streets of Baltimore, penniless, raving unintelligibly, dressed in someone else's clothes, possibly having been beaten up. He died four days later, on October 7 1849, in hospital, having uttered the final words: "Lord, help my poor soul."

From there it only got worse. Although he was at the time probably the most famous writer in America, his cousin Neilson Poe omitted to tell anyone he had died, and so fewer than 10 people turned up for the funeral. The priest couldn't be bothered to give a sermon, and the entire ceremony lasted three minutes.

This Sunday, 160 years almost to the day since his sorry passing, Poe will finally be given the send off that his multitude of fans passionately believe he deserved. At 11.30 a.m., a life-size recreation of his body will be carried in a horse-drawn carriage from his Baltimore home in Amity Street, to the Westminster Burying Ground where not one, but two full-length ceremonies will be held in front of up to 700 admirers, some of whom will have travelled from as far away as Vietnam.

The ceremony is being held as part of a year-long series of events to mark the 200th year of Poe's birth. To the amusement of Poe experts, the double anniversary of the start and end of his life has led to an unseemly scramble between several US cities - notably Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, New York and Boston - to claim ownership of the writer.

Organisers of the Baltimore funeral are playing their ace card, exclaiming: "We have the body!"

"There's a somewhat symbolic struggle going on to claim him," said Stephen Rachman, president of the Poe Studies Association, speaking from an international Edgar Allan Poe conference that has just opened in Philadelphia.

Of all the great classical American writers of the 19th century - Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne to name but three - Poe had the most hapless existence. "Poor Edgar Allan Poe, of them all he was the poorest; his life was very precarious," Rachman said.

His papers reveal that he would regularly send begging letters to magazine editors asking for as little as $10 to pay the fare to Richmond or Baltimore.

But by his death he left an extraordinary legacy. His innovations in detective writing can be seen as the direct antecedent to Sherlock Holmes, for instance, or to the films of Alfred Hitchcock. His "Balloon Hoax" of 1844 - in which he wrote a newspaper article reporting as fact the fictitious crossing of the Atlantic in a hot-air balloon - cuts a straight path to Orson Welles's famous radio broadcast War of the Worlds 94 years later.

Alice Cooper and other exotic 1970s pop performers would arguably not have existed without Poe's elaboration of the Gothic. And Dan Brown's huge success with The Da Vinci Code would have been impossible without his "The Gold-Bug," in which Poe incorporated ciphers as part of the story.

That cultural and literary debt will be repaid in part on Sunday, in what organisers hope will be a happier event than its predecessor 160 years ago.

Ferlinghetti at 90: "The City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology" (2008)

"Don't use the telephone.
People are never ready to answer it.
Use poetry."
(Jack Kerouac to Edward Dahlberg)

The City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology (City Lights Books, 2008; originally published in 1997) is a neat little square brick of a book that reminds readers how words can (and did) spark a revolution, not just in poetry but in the culture as a whole. Jonathan Williams, the North Carolina publisher of the Jargon Society, said he turned down the original manuscript of "Howl" -- it would have sold 500 copies at his tiny press, he said, and that would have been the end of it. Literary history, it seems, had other plans.

Poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti turns 90 this year, and City Lights Press continues to thrive. His little books were portable enough to be taken everywhere, freewheeling enough to include poets from William Carlos Williams to Andrei Voznesensky ("like a huge bottle of kerosene" -- words as Molotov cocktails), and, eventually, threatening enough to bring a challenge to American obscenity laws. In the bare-knuckle brawl of the commercialized internet, the idea of poetry as a force this powerful seems like a miracle.

It was. And although the movement soon acquired a name, the resulting beat generation wasn't as unified as either its detractors or supporters claimed. There certainly were urban scenes that attracted the disaffected and the romantic, the seekers of soul, and left-leaning artists who congregated in like-misery. Yet it's striking to see the variety of expression represented here, from the apparently spontaneous combustion of Ginsberg's "Howl," to Robert Duncan ("Sleep is a Deep and Many Voiced Flood"), to Malcolm Lowry's near-painterly Joseph Conrad and "his coiled work:" Lowry's meditation on Conrad is far from the template of beat poetry or its hallmarks, but it's filled with the movement's twisting tension and energy, if not its imagery:

Yet some mariner's ferment in his blood

-- Though truant heat will hear the iron trevail

And song of ships that ride their easting down --

Sustains him to subdue or be subdued.

In sleep all night he grapples with a sail!

But words beyond the life of ships dream on.

From the beginning, Ferlinghetti writes in the introduction, his aim was "to publish across the board ... and not just publishing (that pitfall of the little press) just 'our gang.'" In a short span City Lights published Ponsot, Levertov, Corso, Ginsberg, Duncan. Beat's most enduring, emotional and romantic notion was that the personal was poetic, meeting injustice with righteous anger, confronting conformity with the individual vision. ("I have just realized that the stakes are myself / I have no other / ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life," from Diane DiPrima's "Revolutionary Letter No. 1.") All of these ideas, today, are so familiar as to seem obvious, if not second-hand. But the best poems here share an immediacy and sharpness of observation that remains in the mind's eye, like Ferlinghetti's

the El

with its flyhung fans

and its signs reading

SPITTING IS FORBIDDEN

Critics and readers have argued that the failure of beat poetry has been one of scale -- the personal somehow erasing the universal -- as if readers are waiting for a return of some idea of "the proper uses" of poetry. Yet there isn't a universal idea left untouched in the City Lights anthology. War and love and death and daily life have never been more topical, or dealt with more directly.

Near the end of an extremely important discourse

the great man of state stumbling

on a beautiful hollow phrase

falls over it

and undone with gaping mouth

gasping

shows his teeth

and the dental decay of his peaceful reasoning

exposes the nerve of war

the delicate question of money

(Jacques Prevert, "The Discourse on Peace," translated by Ferlinghetti)

More to the critics' point, beat poetry was an immediate reaction to the post-war politics of fear and annihilation; Kerouac's often-quoted observation, "first thought, best thought," was an acknowledgement that there may be no time left for second thoughts before the human slate gets wiped clean.

Consider the cold-war politics of the Cuban missile crisis against the Swiftian suggestion of Kerouac's "Poem" (1962): "I demand that the human race / cease multiplying its kind / and bow out / I advise it / And as punishment & reward / for making this plea I know / I'll be reborn / the last human / Everybody else dead and I'm / an old woman roaming the earth / groaning in caves / sleeping on mats ...."

Ferlinghetti at 90th birthday celebration, March 2009
(photo by Christina Koci Hernandez)

Ferlinghetti's selection is chronological, so that the poems can be read in their City Lights context; Corso and Kaufman, Patchen and Rexroth, plus a variety of poems by Yevtushenko and Garcia Lorca and Mayakovsky, frame a great deal of work by Ginsberg and Kerouac, of course. Any omissions are due to Ferlinghetti's own "ignorance, inattention, ill-timing, or bad luck," he slyly writes in the introduction -- fans will note this essential poem gone missing, or that one -- but there are surprises enough, though it's assumed that the anthology is meant for the general reader. And, wonder of wonders in this oversized and overstuffed age, it's a collection still compact enough to carry around with you.