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.

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. ....

"Palm Leaves" [Charles Bukowski]

"Palm Leaves"


at exactly twelve o’clock midnight
1973-74
Los Angeles
it began to rain on the
palm leaves outside my window
the horns and firecrackers
went off
and it thundered.
I’d gone to bed at 9 p.m.
turned out the lights
pulled up the covers–
their gaiety, their happiness
their screams, their paper hats,
their automobiles, their women,
their amateur drunks…
New Year’s Eve always terrifies
me
life knows nothing of years.
now the horns have stopped and
the firecrackers and the thunder…
it’s all over in five minutes…
all I hear is the rain
on the palm leaves,
and I think,
I will never understand men,
but I have lived
it through.


–Charles Bukowski   

 

"Wintering Dakota Territory, 1884" - Shara Lessley



"Wintering
Dakota Territory, 1884"
(Shara Lessley)

Already, winter makes a corpse of things.
Snow reshapes what ice has taken. You've lost

interest in letters. So let sunrise come.
Let smoke grow darker by the light of day—

what I could spare of you I've burned already.
The fencepost needs repair. Let sunrise come.

Let panels of light make thirsty the ice-
caked stump of oak. Let the sky go empty

as December's intimations, when in snow
we  fashioned ourselves side by side as fallen

angels: yours, the greater wingspan; my outline
barely reaching. Daybreak. I lay my body down

in powder. Roots torque up through the chest's
blankness, snarl of knots unloosed. What comes,

on parting you insisted, will come. Ice splits,
in the distance. What breaks will break. Let it.

 "Wintering" by Shara Lessley was originally posted on the Slow Muse site. The season doesn't hold its old thrall here in the South with its modern comforts: when it does snow -- as long as the power stays on -- the effect can be beautiful rather than harsh. In Georgia, snowfall is a seasonal palimpsest with its implied message to begin anew. At the end of another year the message in its clarity is unmistakable: make it new, as Pound instructed. [photo: Athens, Georgia, January 2011.]

"Visions & Affiliations": 65 years of Bay Area poetry

 

At the San Francisco Chronicle, Evan Karp writes about a book covering sixty-five years of Bay Area poets and poetry. The resulting lavish and entertaining two-volume chronology is just part one of a continuing timeline being compiled by Jack Foley, who in the article says he and his wife Adelle struggled to find the right way to tell the history.

 

As he told Karp about fashioning history from so many creative strands, Foley said, "That's the problem with multiplicity: How do you find a form that will express it, but which is not totally chaotic. The right kind of chaos rather than the wrong kind."

The force of creative chaos that runs through the Bay Area history from 1940 to 2005 is less an organizing principle than, in Foley's words, a human response that defined character: "As circumstances arise we discover/invent selves to deal with them. In story, our lives tend to take on a coherence and purpose which they may well have lacked in actuality." Here's a brief excerpt from Karp's SF Gate article:

Jack Foley, 71, took a decade to write his 1,300-page book, Visions and Affiliations, which offers a timeline of poetic and social events from the years 1940 to 2005.

 

If Jack Foley were a book, he’d be a 1,300-page chrono-encyclopedia of Bay Area poets and poetry that spans 65 years and is written in the present tense. But that’s just the latest chapter in the rich and ongoing story of the Oakland poet and critic.

 

Foley, 71, describes both himself and the book, “Visions and Affiliations” (Pantograph Press), which he has spent over a decade composing, with the same statement: “In story, our lives tend to take on a coherence and purpose which they may well have lacked in actuality. As circumstances arise we discover/invent selves to deal with them. And the circumstances change in response to those selves.”

In the house in the Maxwell Park neighborhood that he has occupied with his wife, Adelle, since 1974, Foley laughs, “That means I’m crazy, right?” 

“The problem with unity,” he continues, “is that in order to achieve it, you leave all these things out that might glitter around it and contradict it. So you don’t want unity, because it simplifies. What you want is to have something like the feeling of the complexity of life as it is.” ...

 

As Adelle Foley noted in a follow-up letter to the SF Gate article further explaining the book's wide focus: while Bay Area poetry is covered extensively the book is broadly about California poetry and features, among many others, such Angelean luminaries as “Tommy the Commie” (Thomas McGrath), Philomene Long, William Pillen, Amy Gerstler, and David St. John.

 

For an excerpt from Visions and Affiliations: A California Literary Timeline 1940-2005 there is more at Jack and Adelle Foley's web page.

"Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy," Thomas Lux

"Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy"
(Thomas Lux)


For some semitropical reason   
when the rains fall   
relentlessly they fall

into swimming pools, these otherwise   
bright and scary
arachnids. They can swim
a little, but not for long

and they can’t climb the ladder out.
They usually drown—but   
if you want their favor,
if you believe there is justice,   
a reward for not loving

the death of ugly
and even dangerous (the eel, hog snake,   
rats) creatures, if

you believe these things, then   
you would leave a lifebuoy
or two in your swimming pool at night.

And in the morning   
you would haul ashore
the huddled, hairy survivors

and escort them
back to the bush, and know,
be assured that at least these saved,   
as individuals, would not turn up

again someday
in your hat, drawer,
or the tangled underworld

of your socks, and that even—
when your belief in justice
merges with your belief in dreams—
they may tell the others

in a sign language   
four times as subtle
and complicated as man’s

that you are good,   
that you love them,
that you would save them again.

"Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy" by Thomas Lux appears in New and Selected Poems 1975-1995. Lux lives in Atlanta, a town that knows a thing or two about hot-rainy-weather spiders and other crawly things. He is the Bourne Professor of Poetry and director of the McEver Visiting Writers program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Lux also directs the Poetry at Tech program. In a recent interview he downplayed the idea of surrealism apparent in his work, but commented that "Sometimes there are lucky accidents though I think they’re more likely to happen if one has sweat a little blood." His recent collections are Child Made of Sand (2012) and God Particles (2008).

Ginsberg and Howard Finster, 1988: '..the door to the other world is to step through your shadow'

Ginsberg at Paradise Garden, 1988

 

Although Allen Ginsberg and Howard Finster made something very personal of their respective art, they both found a path to larger truths made of the small things. The charming photograph of Ginsberg at Howard Finster's Paradise Garden, above, reveals a great conjoining of art and the soul.

 

At the Allen Ginsberg Project there's a nice remembrance of their 1988 meeting in Pennville, Georgia. Ginsberg was quick to see Finster's personal universe in creative terms, but thought Howard's vision was constricted. As he later told interviewer John Turner, Ginsberg was puzzled "how the grander scope of his visionary insight became solidified to the more limited notion of  Christ, Heaven and Hell."

 

Allen told Turner that he liked Howard's artistic consciousness and confidence as an artist, "like Blake had with those imaginative projections ... For example, the phrasing on his one particular tower ("Castle of Words") has  '..the door to the other world is to step through your shadow'. That is somewhat Blake-ian." But ultimately, Ginsberg tells Turner, " ... there is an old Buddhist phrase, 'If you see something powerful, don't cling to it. If you see something beautiful, don't cling to it.' Emptiness is the grand palace. There is no Heaven and Hell. Howard seems to be clinging to his visions, so there is an element of the shadow of evil."

 

There's lots more in the post at the Ginsberg Project page, including art, photos, and links to an exhibit for a Finster centennial celebration at the Taubman Museum in Roanoke, VA that runs until February 2017.

Here's an included excerpt at the Project page from John Turner's 2009 article in Raw Vision magazine, "When Allen Ginsberg Met Howard Finster":  

JT: I curated a retrospective on the work of the Reverend Howard Finster for the Museum of American Folk Art in 1989. The poet Allen Ginsberg came to a pre-opening party of the exhibition for a "meet and greet" with the artist. He told me that he had been down to Paradise Garden in Georgia a few years earlier, but that Howard wasn't giving sermons to visitors that day, He said that he enjoyed seeing the artwork in the Garden, took many photographs and bought a Finster cut-out in the gift shop. He asked me if I could introduce him to Howard and I said, "Sure, my pleasure". He then motioned me to the side of the room, where we continued our conversation. He said, "I want you to introduce me as a homosexual. Tell him that I was born that way". He went on to tell me that several of is friends who were familiar with Finster's work thought that he was anti-gay and that in some of  his paintings he had written that AIDS was God's revenge for homosexuals. Now the stage was set in a way that I hadn't anticipated and potential trouble was brewing - it was up to Finster to give a good or bad "performance".

 I brought Allen up to the table where Howard was signing exhibition posters and motioned to him that I wanted him to meet someone. I knew Howard well enough by then (having written a biography on him) to know that he was impressed by celebrities (from wrestlers to politicians) even if he didn't know who they were.So I said, "Howard, this is a famous poet. He writes poetry, like you do. His name is Allen Ginsberg. He is a homosexual. He was born that way". Howard turned his head away very slowly and paused for what seemed an eternity and then looked directly at Ginsberg and said, "What is, is". 

A smile came over Ginsberg's face and he said, "I'm glad to make your acquaintance. Can I take a few pictures of you?" ...

"Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther"

 

"Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther"
(A.E. Stallings)

Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night,
The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes?
Does he hum them to while away the sad afternoons
And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night?


"Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther" by A.E. Stallings appeared in the April 2005 issue of Poetry. Her new verse translation of Lucretius is The Nature of Things. In a 2011 interview the poet explained her interest in the classics: " ... the classical authors were so contemporary—they were writing about contemporary situations, which, frankly, haven’t changed that much.   They seemed fresher and more modern than most of the contemporary poetry I was reading in journals in the late eighties and early nineties.  It was a revelation, for instance, that a poet like Catullus was writing about contemporary (and raunchy) things in contemporary Latin diction, but in tight, elegant metrical forms.  One shouldn’t confuse fusty, schoolmastery Victorian translation with the direct electrical jolt of the originals ... I grew up in Atlanta—well, the area around Emory was a suburb of Atlanta when I was growing up, but now is practically intown ...  My father taught at Georgia State University and my mother was a school librarian.... I took a scholarship to the University of Georgia in Athens GA, where I eventually found a home in the warm and welcoming Classics Department, then chaired by Richard LaFleur." Her three collections are Archaic Smile (1999), Hapax (2006), and Olives (2012).

"Who runs may read": Brion Gysin and The Thousand and One Nights, 1954

 

Who runs may read but few run fast enough. What are we here for? Does the great metaphysical nut revolve around that? Well, I'll crack it for you right now. What are we here for? We are here to go! (Brion Gysin)

In 1954 Brion Gysin operated The Thousand and One Nights, a Tangier restaurant, "in order to hear the musicians of Jajouka every night for the rest of my life." That bond remained even as Gysin went on to other things; eventually, in 1968, Gysin himself would introduce Brian Jones to the musicians and be involved in the recording of The Pipes of Pan at Jajouka, released in 1971 by the Rolling Stones.

 

According to a note from Paul Bowles included in One Night @ the 1001 he recalls bringing a tape recorder and capturing performances by the master musicians. Bowles writes: "Brion was wildly enthusiastic about the music, but he was not sure about my recording it" -- ironic, considering Gysin's later sound experiments and ever-present Uher tape-recorder. He must have had a change of heart: Ramuntcho Matta, the disc's producer writes in the liner notes that 'Brion gave me 23 reel-to-reel tapes that he recorded himself" before Gysin died in 1986.

 

Gysin's nature as an artist was quicksilver: he tried his hand at so many arts, and loved to cross disciplines, that he remained an elusive figure throughout his life. This two-disc set presents two aspects of Gysin's Tangier stay. The first disc is an edited hour-long recording of the master musicians. The performance is intimate and energetic, almost sounding like wild chamber-music for Tangier's international set.

 

This is not the 24-hour-long pipes of Pan -- but it is mysterious, sometimes frantic, and otherworldly, qualities enhanced by the obvious on-site recording. Presented here without titles or text, translation or lyrics, the music remains as inscrutable as Gysin would have wished, and just as mesmerizing.

 

"Dilaloo," Gysin's 1955 recitation inspired by the rites of Pan, is on the second disc. It is included here with an added, improvised musical accompaniment by producer Ramuntcho Matta. Gysin's poem recreates the ritual of initiation and transformation in the village of Jajouka.

 

His reading has moments of force and power, an incantation that mirrors the swirling rhythms on the first disc. It's also a fascinating attempt at putting the ineffable into words. While the music of Jajouka speaks for itself, on their own Gysin's words are as much an explanation as the listener could ask of this strange and powerful music.

 

The "Dilaloo" lyrics -- incantations, really -- are included in the CD, and are also printed in full in Back in No Time: A Brion Gysin Reader, a 2002 anthology edited by Jason Weiss.

 

Like Gysin's novels, this re-issued CD set has slipped in-and-out-of-print over the years, a result of the artist's multifaceted legacy as a writer, performer, and artist. In a twist on the increasing popularity of other artists associated with the beat generation, Gysin's reputation remains as elusive as ever.

"Wait Till I'm Dead:" five decades of uncollected Ginsberg poetry

 

 

"Yesterday I was writing in Heaven or of Heaven ..."

Allen Ginsberg, Lima Peru, May 26, 1960

 

 

The poet has been in Heaven for 19 years now, sitting daily practice with Blake in his garden and asking if Rimbaud would like to join them for a while. Here on earth the inexhaustible supply of Ginsberg manuscripts and stray inscriptions has a new collection, with an apt title from Allen's own wit: you want more poems? Wait till I'm dead.

 

And so here it is. Wait Till I'm Dead, edited by longtime Ginsberg associate Bill Morgan, is a generous scoop of "uncollected poems" that appeared in small press magazines, book dedications, the Columbia University Jester, even "For School Kids in New Jersey" [" ... Don't grow up like me, you never get enough sleep!"]. The scope is broad - 50 years' worth of scribbled ideas, finished thoughts, 3 a.m. revelations, and political pokes is enough to empty out a couple of file cabinet drawers - but there's enough of interest to carry through, to keep the reader amused and turning the page.

 

Because Ginsberg's observational line is so sharp, much of the poetry is fact-heavy, dropping timely references known, and sometimes as obscure, as a newspaper headline from four decades ago. The book is helped along by Morgan's specific notes to many of the poems explaining context or historical reference. As the decades recede it is good to have a brief refresher on names, events, and influences mentioned fleetingly in the texts.

 

The real treasure is revealed in the continuing lives of the beats he includes in these poems: all the major players from five decades make appearances, flashing in and out of Ginsberg's orbit but never far away. There is a short meditation with Snyder, a New York collaboration with Ron Padgett, and a line-by-line composition with Kenneth Koch, "Popeye and William Blake Fight to the Death:"

 

Popeye sat upon his chair

Reading William Blake

Blake got up and screamed out there

"This seaman is a fake"....

 

Perhaps the most necessary reading in this collection is at the very end. "Last Conversation With Carl or In Memoriam" is a 1993 dialog poem, the last meeting between Allen and Carl Solomon. Solomon, a central figure in Howl, was dying of lung cancer in the VA hospital in the Bronx, and Ginsberg was gently interested in some big questions, asked in the poet's best reportorial style.

 

Allen: What do you think death is?

Carl: Death is a fading away --

which I'd like to go easily

like my mother ... imitate

my mother ... this last

year of grace has been

excessive -- I just want

to get it over with --

 

... Do you feel I did the wrong thing

putting the spotlight on you

by using your name in "Howl"?

Carl: You gave me my first

outlet in Neurotica -- for

some recognition ... I guess

it went to my head ...

Too bad if I was foolish,

it won't matter much much

longer. ...

After Solomon's death, Ginsberg recounts meeting him in a dream and asks two final questions:

"What's it like in the afterworld?"

"It's just like in the mental hospital.
You get along if you follow the rules."

"What are the rules?"

"The first rule is: remember you're dead.
The second rule is: Act like you're dead."

 

For those who know most of Ginsberg's personal and literary history, Wait Till I'm Dead is another file of interesting facts to sift through, some not inconsequential poetry ("New York to San Fran" is a nice plane ride with Ginsberg as seatmate) and even more evidence that Allen never, ever, threw anything out. And then he put the date on every scrap for his biographers. Such a nice boy.

 



The City Lights Pocket Poet Anthology at 60: "like a huge bottle of kerosene"



"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, 2015; 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 turned 97 this year, and his 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"). There's 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.

William Carlos Williams, born September 17, 1883

W.C.W. (1883-1963)

"Post-modern (after Williams)" 

M. Bromberg

So much depends 

upon

a red Mer- 

cedes 

glazed with paste 

wax

beside the white 

condos

Williams' famous introduction to Howl is at the Allen Ginsberg Project page. (Photo of W.C.W. by Constantin Joffe from wood s lot)