from "The Burial of the Count of Orgaz and Other Poems," Pablo Picasso

26 April 43

TO THE SALMON-PINK CARESSES OF THE LEAF a thousand times half-opened and fixed detached offered as music to the fires and long trains of spangles
waved and crazy so said and splashed in glory and rockets screamed and
painted to the pearly distinct braids to the solitudes seen all mixed up
with the caressing burned distillations to the branches and to the raised
hangings to the sordid little secrets and to the unfortunate discoveries in
digestions and prayers vomited from a point into far enamored sumptuous
arabesques and ritornellos of the decompositions and tears to the spattered
and festooned arcs labors torn in perfumes and in crowns and diabolic sated
processions  to the tendernesses prepared disappeared and undone so late of
each long trajectory revolted enveloped stretched in the woods to hooked and
shredded trances in meat and bone unfolded into veils and vellums oars smack
raised in flames and good-byes rigorously projected as bait to the crowd of
mirrors aping the drained apparition at the bottom of the raised lakes of
the sun with large brush strokes painting three quarters of the sideboard
buried in the mess of hairs of the fur caulking with cotton waste the belly
open to the light with large strokes of the icy roof of the stretched sheet
of the water armor screamed at the window with all the strength of the gay
bouquet in plucked apparel to all chance and risk imagined.

(Translated from the French by Pierre Joris)

In 1935, at age 54, an emotional crisis caused Picasso to stop painting and devote himself entirely to poetry. Even after resuming his visual work, Picasso continued to write, in a characteristic torrent, until 1959, leaving a body of prose poems that Andre Breton praised as "an intimate journal, both of the feelings and the senses, such as has never been kept before." Near the end of his life, Picasso himself was quoted as having "told a friend that long after his death his writing would gain recognition and encyclopedias would say: 'Picasso, Pablo Ruiz--Spanish poet who dabbled in painting, drawing and sculpture.'" Burial of the Count of Orgaz and Other Poems (Exact Change, 2004) is a collaboration of translators coordinated by poets Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, a project to translate the majority of this writing into English for the first time. Working from Picasso's original Spanish and French (he wrote in both languages), they enlisted the help of over a dozen contemporary poets in order to mark, as they note in their introduction, "Picasso's entry into our own time." Pierre Joris' blog, Nomadics, is worth a browse in its own right.

What do writers listen to when they write?

What do writers listen to when they write? In these media-saturated days that doesn't seem like such a far-fetched question for an interview any longer, but it remains unasked most of the time. Even more rare is the chance for an author to write about the music that inspired an idea or enhanced the form of a story.

Perhaps it seems more appropriate to ask a writer simply if he turns the music off or on when he sits down to write. To many, music is only a distraction. But it turns out that many contemporary authors find music forms a soundtrack to their writing. And for some authors, music can help find a way into a story.

The Largehearted boy site has a regular feature, Book Notes, which asks writers to comment on music they listened to while they worked on their books. Thaisa Frank writes about her first novel Heidegger's Glasses, a story of World War II, that the music of Beethoven was her first choice while conceiving the story. But there were other inspirations as well: California rain on skylights, and an iPod shuffle that included Cat Power, Bob Marley, and The Cranberries.

Frank decided early in framing her characters that the camp Commandant would be listening to Beethoven's Symphony No. 6, the "Pastoral." But she changed her mind: "after listening to the Pastoral, I decided the dissonance was heavy-handed and remembered Mozart's Piano Concerto in C, which my boyfriend gave me in college. It joined my iPod shuffle. The Commandant played it, too."

...Since I studied piano perhaps it's not surprising that I chose the Concerto or made the one of the characters a pianist, although at the time I didn't give it much thought. Nor did I give it much thought at first when she played Scarlatti sonatas. Then I listened to Scarlatti and remembered how much I loved playing his sonatas and the sense of a clean, well-ordered world. I found as many Scarlatti piano sonatas as I could and they also joined the iPod shuffle.

At some point -- perhaps toward the middle of the novel -- I began to watch documentaries about WWII, documentaries in which Germany's national anthem at the time was played again and again. I heard this anthem in a curious way -- distancing myself, trying not to hear it. Perhaps I listened the way people who were threatened by, or unsympathetic to the Nazi Party listened.

In one documentary, however, I found a song that became emblematic -- a song I then listened to again and again. This was from Lotte Leyna's German recording of The Three Penny Opera. It is called "Solomon" in English, "Saloman" in German. I first heard it on a documentary about Leni Riefenstahl. While Riefenstahl insisted that she didn't know about the concentration camps it was played over and over, like a dirge. The song sounded less ironic in German than it does in English. It sounded mournful. The rhythm is insistent and relentless. It washes over Riefenstahl's denials like waves.

Thaisa Frank

I also listened to Cat Power, blues piano by Jimmy Yancey, and The Cranberries. Each piece of music felt close to the novel or the act of writing it. The Cranberries and Cat Power are close to the feelings of love and betrayal that persisted in Germany during WWII. And Jimmy Yancey's piano seemed closest to the way I seemed to disappear when the writing went well. His blues are deceptively simple--as though the piano is a guitar and he is picking out tunes. I always see him at an old upright late at night in a smoky Chicago bar. There's a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and he's playing as if no one is listening. ...

The music of the blues and the reality of German concentration camps in World War II make an unlikely pairing, but that was Frank's way of "disappearing" into the story and letting the story tell itself. Most writers, if pressed, would have a difficult time explaining where their inspiration comes from. It seems that an author's music playlist is one small facet that can make the mystery of creativity a little clearer, even as the connection between source and inspiration remains as inexplicable as ever.

Writing it all down: for the Beats, too much was never enough

Bill Morris at The Millions has had enough. His post Will you Beat Hagiographers Please Be Quiet Please (with its intentional double please), about the ongoing parade of films and books lionizing the beat generation, contains some valid points about the myth-making and the saint-making machinery of American popular culture. He notes, as well, the increasing trend toward what Joyce Carol Oates has called "pathography" -- that the facts of a creative individual's life are as important as his art, with an emphasis on dysfunctional detail -- in literary biography.

It's ironic that Morris would find this abundance of lurid, personal psychology unwarranted in the biographies of beat figures like Kerouac and Burroughs -- writers who seemingly suffered from logorrhea so much more than most in letters and journals and scribbled diaries and, finally, in books. Many of them wrote everything down and some, it seems, were impatient waiting for the ink to dry before turning their lives into literature.

Their personal lives, and the stories they fashioned from them, form a carnival ground of (in Oates's phrase) “dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfalls, failed marriages and failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct.” With the beats, it's all there on the blotted page, with the "artifice" of fiction very nearly removed from the "art" of the story. But learning more about a writer's life, Morris writes, doesn't count for nearly as much as the books themselves:

... Since we live in an age that’s obsessed with personalities and celebrities, it’s not surprising that so few readers are satisfied with loving a book and so many insist on knowing as much as possible about the person who wrote it. While this appetite has inspired literary biographers to produce a long shelf of pathographies and other monstrosities – does the world really need Norman Sherry’s three-volume biography of Graham Greene? – it has also resulted in some well researched and finely written literary biographies that did what such exercises do at their best: they led readers back to the subject’s books.

Among these I would include Blake Bailey’s recent biographies of Richard Yates and John Cheever and, strangely enough, Ann Charters’s thorough and balanced 1973 bio of Kerouac. In her introduction, Charters wrote insightfully, if a bit clunkily: “The value of Kerouac’s life is what he did, how he acted. And what he did, was that he wrote. I tried to arrange the incidents of his life to show that he was a writer first, and a mythologized figure afterward. Kerouac’s writing counts as much as his life.”

I would argue that his writing counts more than his life, much more. Eventually Charters seemed to come around to my way of thinking. In 1995, after she’d edited two fat volumes, Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940-1956 and The Portable Jack Kerouac, I interviewed her for a newspaper article. “I wanted (the book of letters) to be a biography in Jack’s own words,” she told me. “His life is in his books, but on the other hand the most essential thing is missing from those novels. What he tells you in the letters is that the most important thing in his life is writing.”

At the time The Gap was using Kerouac’s image – and images of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe and other ’50s icons – to sell its khaki pants. In the face of such shameless hucksterism, Charters’s insistence on the importance of Kerouac’s writing seemed both quaint and heroic to me. It still does today, as the hagiographers keep bombarding us with abominations like One Fast Move or I’m Gone and Howl and A Man Within. ...

Morris is half right. Today's hot-house atmosphere of celebrity and promotion is a blurry mix of authenticity and the artificial. Some would argue rightly everything in ad-land is all packaging. But so what? Morris's own griping about the commercialization of Kerouac seems quaint itself this late in the advertising game -- the appropriation of Kerouac's image doesn't make what he wrote less "authentic," it only questions the decisions of his estate. If fans find this kind of legend-buffing intriguing, it may be that the link between beat writers and beat writing comes close to solving the mysterious alchemy between personality and page. And that leads readers back to the words themselves -- which is Morris's basic starting point.

For many readers the movement's legacy of writing-it-all-down is a key to finding the raw material of fiction in real life. For fans, too, beat literature can seem a kind of romantic ideal, opening the gates to self-expression and revelation. Then the trick, of course, is to find a public outlet, and the internet seems to be obliterating that hurdle more rapidly every day. We can all make messes of our lives, and we now have the means to tell everyone -- friends and complete strangers -- about it.

Making real and discernible art out of a messy and careening life takes perception and some amount of craft, however, and there a writer is on his own without a net. There is a simple way past the image-crafting and the cults of personality, the flood of films and the biographer's "pathography." Writers like Morris suggest it, if a bit over-wrought, in his essay: it used to be called "letting the words speak for themselves."

"The Complete Zap Comix: "is it possible for something to be too good?"

Got $500?  Here's a hefty 2014 collection from the Atomic Books site. You may have  to wait in line for a second edition, though -- the first run is already sold out. The Complete Zap Comix is designed by Victor Moscoso and edited by Eric Reynolds, and there are still copies available at the original price.

"Is it possible for something to be too good?  If so, this deluxe set of complete Zap Comix might just be it. This is the most important comics collection to be released in years - bringing together the complete run of the Robert Crumb-created underground comix version of MAD Magazine. It features comics by Crumb as well as S. Clay Wilson, Robert Williams, Gilbert Shelton, Spain Rodriguez, Rick Griffin and so many others. This set is worth every penny of its price tag."

Charles Olson, Paris Review 1970: "Until I'm beaten, I'm still boss"

 

 Charles Olson, (1910-1970)

Charles Olson, the six-foot-eight poetic volcano of the Black Mountain school in North Carolina, was not an interviewer's easy subject. He didn't sit still explaining an academic, historical, or linear approach to his creative work, and suffered any interviewer who tried to match fact with idea or theory with practice.  Olson died in January, 1970; his summer, 1970 Paris Review bout is a classic example of Olson's combative ring style with interviewers.

The poet's avoidance of the interview itself was a clue: for three days in April 1969 Olson posted notes on his back door in Annisquam, Massachusetts, offering assurances that the interview would definitely be arranged "if you could afford to see me again." Only a chance meeting on the fourth day ended the game of tag and found the interviewer unprepared. The conversation was an all-nighter, and in the morning the kitchen table was filled with beer cans, ashtrays, and correspondence.

By the end of nine rounds with the poet in top form, Gerard Malaga walks away as dazed as the reader attempting to understand Olson's poetic rope-a-dope replies. Malaga [Warhol associate, painter, and a poet himself] tries to keep punching with a line of academic questions but Olson circles him relentlessly ["God's with this boy" ... "yeah I heard you. Continue without repeating it." ... "that's a dumb sort of block historical question" ... ]. It's a glorious reminder that whatever else poetry may be, Olson made it more than a spectator sport --by the end of the bout there was always the possibility that some blood might be spilled.

It's also a comic masterpiece of creative misdirection. Here's an excerpt :

INTERVIEWER What constitutes a school of poetry? 

OLSON Total change, like the man said; one doesn’t look like boopeedeboop—of course. Carry on, destroy film, take another giant step backwards. Málaga. Take one step backwards. Now, ask me some decent questions. 

INTERVIEWER Is the function of a literary—

OLSON That sounds dirty as hell. Maybe we can take that to the Supreme Court. Yeah, I heard you. Continue without repeating it. 

INTERVIEWER Is the function of a— 

OLSON He’s already conditioned. It’s like a reflex. Atlantis will arise again. Go ahead. God’s with this boy. 

INTERVIEWER Is the function of a literary movement primarily to secure publication of the poets connected with that movement or doesn’t a literary movement or school present a different function or advantage? 

OLSON That’s a dumb sort of block historical question, if I may say so, and typical sort of a Columbia twentieth-century question. 

INTERVIEWER A school is a place where one can learn something. Can a school lose by giving away its knowledge? 

OLSON Oh boy, that’s beautiful. That’s a lovely question. It’s really such a lovely question. Jesus God. I see it. Right through the solar plexus as the pantheon of Black Mountain pharaoh of the exile . . . We all went on to the other fields, other Bull Runs. It’s a marvelous question, though. 

INTERVIEWER Would you say Black Mountain College’s sole existence depended on the part of those artists who took part in the building of it? 

OLSON Oh no. I think, in fact, the man who built it wonderfully enough was not an artist at all, but a man from Charleston—a rare bird.

INTERVIEWER Is a school of poetry necessary in order to gain attention for a group of poets’ work or is it a handicap? 

OLSON I don’t think it’s relevant. 

INTERVIEWER I’m talking about schools of poetry in terms of such as the so-called New York school of poetry, if you’ll pardon the expression. 

OLSON All right, so name them. Poets have no reason to be in the marvelous ITT thing or Inter-World Aviation. 

INTERVIEWER Do you see the prospect of a definitive practical guide in the form of an anthology of the Black Mountain school of poets? 

OLSON Well, I certainly don’t. If the fuckers don’t get along down the trail I’ll kick their fucking asses for them. I’m an old trail man from the woods and if the goddamn stuff doesn’t come down the trail to my satisfaction, until I’m beaten, I’m still boss. ....

Michael Korda: "technology leaps ahead and people simply adapt to it"

 

 

The dire predictions that doom the future of the printed word seem to mount daily. Not to worry: book publishing will adapt in ways undreamed of, and with a quickness that will be astonishing.

 

That's the hopeful forecast in this interview with Michael Korda, author and former editor-in-chief of Simon and Schuster, who's well aware that the book business will respond to the commercial expectations of readers as it always has, even as the idea of "the book" itself changes. He thinks that the role of small-press publishers, always precarious, will benefit from technology in the next five years with "a media that's open to everybody ... how they'll make money, I don't know. But then, how do they make money now?'

 

Korda offers a future business model based on the recent history of the music industry: "Nobody would have guessed that people would be downloading individual songs onto their computers and that record stores would disappear. So, you know, a very similar thing is going to happen to reading." The complete online interview by Rob Couteau, excerpted here, is in Raintaxi.

RC: You were saying the form itself is not so important; it’s the book that’s important, and we can’t compare the book in its present form to an electronic book, like the Kindle, but we have to apply our imagination to it much further, in that it might become something that’s just beyond anything we can imagine today.

MK: Well, I think that that’s true. You know, you’re looking at the Model T Ford and trying to predict what road transportation will be like in 2010 . . . ultimately, it’ll still have four wheels, and some form of propulsion, and a steering wheel, but beyond that, you’re trying to imagine something which is beyond imagination, if you see what I mean.

Now, there are two important differences. One is that the speed of progress is now so rapid, and transition is so quick, that the next step in reading-technology will come very rapidly, rather than very slowly. So that there’s not going to be a long lag between its inception and its development, and any changes that take place. Already, the iPad is a huge step ahead of the Kindle. Although whether it’s a useful step ahead for readers remains to be seen. ... it’s a rather large and cumbersome device, which needs to be replaced with something altogether different. But that is going to happen with such incredible rapidity that we really can’t forecast what it will look like. ...my guess is that, in ten years time, it will be in place and that nobody will have a problem with it. It’s just amazing the degree to which things are changing rapidly.

RC: There are a lot of people who say, “Well, I would miss the feel of the book.” But if you really unleash your imagination, it’s actually quite easy to imagine how digital book producers could appeal to the tactile sense; it doesn’t have to be just a visual innovation.

MK: Yeah, no doubt. But you know, I don’t have a clue. The person to talk to about that is Steve Jobs. [Laughs] Because unless he dies first, he’ll probably be the one who will invent it. But it’ll be something quite different. But I don’t think that that’s in any case something that one should be afraid of. People react the same way about a whole variety of things, ranging from smoking cigarettes to using typewriters or fountain pens. But nevertheless, the technology leaps ahead and people simply adapt to it. ...

RC: But other things, other businesses, will be created.

MK: Right. ... The book will continue to be a major factor for as, certainly as long as I live, and maybe as long as you live. But eventually it’s going, in the form of something else.

RC: What about the future of publishing?

MK: It will have to be reinvented with that in mind. Already, I think it’s evident that the major publishers are looking to find a partner in Apple, (and it) will become, in effect, a kind of publishing house. How that will work remains to be seen. There isn’t anyone in the book publishing business who can tell you, because nobody knows at this point in time. But that’s what everybody is clearly attempting to move towards. ...

"Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste" (1968): Moses, the Mona Lisa, and Nirvana covers David Bowie

 

 

For whatever reason, some books just stay with you. Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste by Gillo Dorfles is one of those books.

 

It's long out of print, but ten years ago I found a second copy, "profusely illustrated with more appalling pictures than you can shake a stick at," as the New York Times reviews with typical understatement. Newsweek puts it more succinctly: "This compendium of corn is guaranteed to contain something to offend everyone." The familiar figure playing the violin on its cover demanded I pay her one-dollar price at a book sale.

It replaces a copy I left behind in college thirty-five years ago. This was the book I would turn to on rainy days to pass the time between classes, and in upstate New York there was a lot of bad weather. Mr. Dorfles and a wide-ranging group of art critics rack their brains (and twist ours) trying to describe what makes kitsch so appallingly bad. Some, like Herman Broch, are afraid they may pose more questions about bad art than they answer. But a ten-minute look inside at the kaleidoscope of images in Kitsch will open eyes to the avalanche of junk that makes up popular culture.

The titles in this collection of essays, photos, and illustrations, published in 1968, indicates, really, that bad taste knows no bounds. "Death," "Christian kitsch," "Tourism and nature," "Politics," and "Pornokitsch and morals" are just a few of the topics surveyed. The reader will also see more creative uses for the swastika of the Third Reich than one could imagine possible after 1945.

Also included is Clement Greenberg's essay "The Avant-Garde and Kitsch," published originally in 1939, tracing the rise of art in the service of totalitarian regimes. In this case, one photograph of Mussolini and Hitler at the Borghese gallery speaks volumes. The palpable disdain on their faces as they survey the half-nude reclining figure of Napoleon's sister on her couch makes it clear: Il Duce and Der Fuhrer will soon put an end to the decadence of the Little General's age of neo-classicism. Tomorrow the world.
Kitsch -- "trash" or "cheap finery" in German -- has become a universal term for much of the things consumers see, admire, or desire. Mass production has made kitsch an unavoidable part of contemporary culture; it's so pervasive that most of us see elements of kitsch everywhere, yet would have a difficult time separating the art from the artificial.

Let's face it, no one goes to Disney World expecting an adventure in high art, but now that Times Square in New York has been "imagineered" by Disney, who can say where the kitsch fantasy ends? Dorfles states that kitsch "threatens to become the most pervasive style of our times." Considering the book was written forty years ago, the relentless, artificial tide has only increased.

The book was first published in Italy and many of the photographs and illustrations are from European sources. Yet the sentimental and commercial pull of kitsch, with its tug at the heartstrings and purse-strings of millions, is universal. Anyone who thinks of The Lone Ranger or Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange when listening to "The William Tell Overture" by Rossini has been influenced by kitsch.

 

While the line separating art from kitsch is exceedingly fine, one man's trash is still saved from being another man's treasure by context, or more rightly kitsch's complete lack of it. Da Vinci's Mona Lisa appears much less inscrutable on a plastic shower curtain. Mass production has made the irony of "authentic reproduction" available on a grand scale.

Some of the academic essays have not aged well, even if the gently tortured Italian-into-English translation has its own charm: "And obviously before long (and even now in fact) we will witness the anti-family kitsch, the kitsch of hippies and long-haired youths, the kitsch of addicts and beatniks," writes Dorfles -- foretelling Nirvana's cover version of Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World" by a good 20 years.

 

Fascinating, funny, and full of hideously bad art, this book is a wonderland of the high-brow, the low-brow, and the no-brow of taste. In a pop-culture blender that makes no such distinctions, how else can you explain the success of ?

Thelonious Monk: "Always know! All ways know!"

Thelonious Monk is one of the enigmatic figures of jazz: the more one admires his playing, his composition, and his recorded work, the more puzzling and elusive the man himself becomes. At a time when the popularity of jazz was at its height in mid-century America, he made its success a springboard into a form of personal expression few had ever imagined possible. Then, just as his music was being discovered by a new generation of fans in the 1970s, he gave up recording and composing altogether. Monk died of a stroke on February 17, 1982 at the age of 64.

The mysterious nature of Monk's genius, it turns out, has its roots in a North Carolina boyhood and a family life that surprisingly seems very normal in many ways. Robin D.G. Kelley's Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of An American Original (Free Press, 2009) removes layers of myth-making and tale-spinning that seem to surround the monumental figure of the musician, whose life and aloof personality became a signpost for the difficult and cerebral form of jazz called bebop.

 

This was not a term the musicians themselves favored, but which became a convenient tag by which the public could identify the players. It was as though they were members on a team, rather than being seen as individuals; for this musical style of ensemble playing and stellar, one-of-a-kind solos, the idea must have seemed a supreme irony and one that Monk might have appreciated:

"He got a kick out of fooling people, particularly those whom he thought were too lazy or afraid to think for themselves. One of his favorite pranks was to stare intensely at a spot on the ceiling or in the sky, either in a crowded room or on a street corner. Invariably, several people would look up with him, searching for whatever elusive object apparently fascinated him. It was an experiment in mass psychology that brought him great amusement."

As Monk's life takes on the familiar contours of a young student, husband to Nellie, and a father to their two children "Toot" (Thelonious Jr.) and "BooBoo" (Barbara), there are the intriguing glimpses into life with Monk that seem in no way typical. Kelley delights in family stories that reveal the "almost carnivalesque" aspects of this very unique life with father. Monk's niece, Benetta, nicknamed Teeny, got told not to bang on the piano and later gets her sly revenge on Monk, the one-time Julliard student, as he tries to show off:

"Monk's piano was notorious for its clutter. It occupied a significant portion of the kitchen and extended into the front room. The lid remained closed, since it doubled as a temporary storage space for music, miscellaneous papers, magazines, folded laundry, dishes, and any number of stray kitchen items.

 

Teeny thumbed through the pages of the Chopin book, then turned to her uncle and asked, 'What are you doing with that on the piano? I thought you couldn't read music? You can read that?' The challenge was on. In response, Monk sat down at the piano, turned to a very difficult piece, and started playing it at breakneck speed.

'His hands were a blur,' she recalled decades later. 'Then after he was through, he jumped up from the piano and just started grinning. So then I said, 'You didn't play that right.'

 

'Whaaaa? What are you talking about? I played it ten times faster than anyone could!'

 

Teeny sassed back, 'It is supposed to be played adagio and you played it allegro.'"

In the hot-house environment of New York's jazz scene Monk was a stand-out, not only for his music but for his uninhibited performance. The music seemed cerebral, difficult and almost mathematical, yet Monk was sincerely interested in reaching an audience, even if it turned out to be an audience of one. He performed popular tunes with the same force of personality as his original compositions. As his music gained exposure and his compositions deepened into their angular and singular forms, Monk's personal life becomes a retreat from the public and its very perception of him.

He himself seemed to create the myth, just as he professed to be disinterested in living up to an image -- and then, on February 28, 1964, he was featured in a Time cover story, and suddenly his was the face of jazz for a majority of Americans, who found the "new" jazz music mysterious and almost beyond comprehension; the Beatles had appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, three weeks earlier.

Kelley's book is not a critical biography of Monk's music, but it is an intensely personal look at how life and art intersect. Monk's wife Nellie becomes a central character to her increasingly insular husband, lovingly keeping Thelonious away from distraction or being taken advantage of by managers and booking agents. In his later life, as Monk inexplicably gives up performance and composing altogether, Nellie seems a force of nature herself for having been a lifelong companion to the puzzling nature of Monk's genius.

"One of his favorite mantras was 'Always Know,' adding that the word 'Know' was Monk spelled backward with the 'W' inverted. He often illustrated the point with a huge custom-made ring that had 'MONK' emblazoned across the top in diamonds, turning it upside down in case you didn't get it. 'Always Know!" All Ways Know!'"

Monk's seventy compositions have titles describing the familiar ("BooBoo's Birthday," "'Round Midnight") and the oblique ("Epistrophy," "Rhythm-a-ning") and are among the most recorded in jazz. His music is always there for those with an ear to discover for themselves. Like his music, Monk's life is still a mystery that may not need explaining -- one of his albums took as its title one of his compositions, "Misterioso" -- and so he remains. In Monk's biography, Kelley does a great service by demonstrating that the force of creativity itself may, ultimately, be beyond knowing.

National Poetry Month: Philip Levine

 

"Baby Villon" - Philip Levine

He tells me in Bangkok he’s robbed

Because he’s white; in London because he’s black;   

In Barcelona, Jew; in Paris, Arab:

Everywhere and at all times, and he fights back.

 

He holds up seven thick little fingers

To show me he’s rated seventh in the world,   

And there’s no passion in his voice, no anger   

In the flat brown eyes flecked with blood.

 

He asks me to tell all I can remember

Of my father, his uncle; he talks of the war   

In North Africa and what came after.

The loss of his father, the loss of his brother,

 

The windows of the bakery smashed and the fresh bread   

Dusted with glass, the warm smell of rye

So strong he ate till his mouth filled with blood.

“Here they live, here they live and not die,”

 

And he points down at his black head ridged   

With black kinks of hair. He touches my hair,   

Tells me I should never disparage

The stiff bristles that guard the head of the fighter.

 

Sadly his fingers wander over my face

And he says how fair I am, how smooth.   

We stand to end this first and last visit.   

Stiff, 116 pounds, five feet two,

 

No bigger than a girl, he holds my shoulders,   

Kisses my lips, his eyes still open,

My imaginary brother, my cousin,

Myself made otherwise by all his pain.

 

 

 

Philip Levine started to work in car manufacturing plants at the age of 14. He went to college at Wayne University in Detroit, where he began to write poetry, encouraged by his mother, to whom he dedicated the book of poems, The Mercy. In his 1988 Paris Review interview Levine commented on his early work: "Rhythm is deep and it touches us in ways that we don’t understand. We know that language used rhythmically has some kind of power to delight, to upset, to exalt, and it was that kind of rhythmic language that first excited me. But I didn’t encounter it first in poetry . . . perhaps simply in speech, in prayer, preaching. That made me want to create it. My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself. I spoke them and I memorized them. I constantly changed them. I would go out and work on my rain poem and improve it. ... Rain was my first, and I guess, a constant theme. But things like wind in the winter, the trees, and my sense of relationship with them. You could actually see the stars, we were on the outskirts of Detroit, there were no factories around. So you could see the stars and, oh the world is, you know, a cosmos, is immense."

Philip Levine died in 2015 at the age of 87. His final collection, published in 2016, was The Last Shift.

National Poetry Month: Charley Seagraves



"Somebody With a Gun" - Charley Seagraves

Somebody with a gun
walked into a convenience store
just outside of Charlotte,
pulled on a stocking mask,
pointed a .44 Magnum
in the clerk's face,
and that began his fall from grace,
and now he's on the run,
somebody with a gun.

Somebody with a gun,
in a drive-by with an A-K
just outside of Atlanta,
accidentally hit a 7-year-old
who died in the emergency room--
he didn't mean to kill that kid,
but he did,
and now he's on the run,
somebody with a gun.

Somebody with a gun
got into an argument with her spouse
just outside of Topeka,
reached into her purse
and pulled out a 9mm Glock--
he ended up dead,
a single shot through his head,
and now she's on the run,
somebody with a gun.

Somebody with a gun
is knocking on the door of despair
just outside of your hometown,
oh lord, it's a jungle out there,
and their life is slowly coming undone
and it's somebody's daughter
and it's somebody's son
and soon they too will be on the run,
somebody with a gun.

Photo of Charley Seagraves at The Globe, Athens, Georgia, by David Noah [2014].

National Poetry Month: Warren Zevon

 



"My Shit's Fucked Up" - Warren Zevon

 

Well, I went to the doctor
I said, "I'm feeling kind of rough"
He said "I'll break it to you, son,
Your shit's fucked up."
I said "my shit's fucked up?
Well, I don't see how."
He said, "The shit that used to work
It won't work now."

I had a dream
Ah, shucks, oh, well
Now it's all fucked up
It's shot to hell

Yeah, yeah, my shit's fucked up
It has to happen to the best of us
The rich folks suffer like the rest of us
It'll happen to you

That amazing grace
Sort of passed you by
You wake up every day
And you start to cry
Yeah, you want to die
But you just can't quit
Let me break it on down:
It's the fucked up shit

 

Warren Zevon  was an occasional visitor to the home of  Ivor Stravinsky, where he briefly studied modern classical music. When he was 16 years old he quit high school and moved from Los Angeles to New York City to become a folk singer. In 1992 he told an Australian interviewer: “My advice to starting-out songwriters – not that I ever get the opportunity to say this to them – is that all those songs you’ve written have probably got a couple good lines in ‘em. Throw out everything but those and start over. Then build those up on a couple songs – then combine the two. That’s it. Be ruthless.” He died of cancer in 2003.