Doggerel pervades
As data on the screen
Streak like abstract raindrops
A flat approximation
Of the raging storm outside
Amused by our own reflection
We Twitter our organs
And mouth blackboard profanities
Deliberately designed to distract
The passive population
It’s time to conjure the critic!
A single dissonant note
Conspires against the meme
Overrides faulty logics
This is the price of personhood
I feel … no, that’s not true; I feel nothing
Done with flowers, cards, and soft whispering
Like you, I devolve into primal need
I am cold, animal cold, and hungry
Hungry again for what I cannot kick
There’s a picture of you that I can’t shake
Poorly lit and a little off-center
Your taut, naked haunch glows golden yellow
Like treasure dug up and left on the bed
For anyone to wander by and take
There are two paths now left to me: the fool
The cuckold, the failed romantic shamble
And that of the callused heart, the hard cock
Perhaps I’ll play the mercenary part
While my heart, not made for this, starts to break
If any man alive can be still held responsible for the Beat movement and/or the poetry renaissance of the ’50s and ’60s, it is San Francisco poet and City Lights Booksellers & Publishers co-founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He was there from the very beginning, helping to create a scene in the Italian North Beach neighborhood that reverberates to this day.
It was the publishing arm of City Lights that propelled East Coast writers such as Allen Ginsburg and Gregory Corso, as well as San Franciscans like Kenneth Rexroth and Ferlinghetti himself, into the national spotlight. The landmark Howl obscenity trial, sparked after San Francisco police seized the City Lights paperback, won more notoriety for what Ginsburg, et al, were up to than any lame spot-the-beatnik tours could have ever brought to bear.
The bibliographical note to this slim volume, Ferlinghetti’s own Ars Poetica, marks it as an on-going work in progress starting as a KPFA broadcast in the late ’50s. The main body of Poetry as Insurgent Art reads almost like a collection of daily affirmations, ranging from practical advice to writers—If you call yourself a poet, don’t just sit there. Poetry is not a sedentary occupation, not a “take your seat” practice. Stand up and let them have it—to more philosophical and sensual musings such as—Be a dark barker before the tents of existence—and—Instead of trying to escape reality, plunge into the flesh of the world.
Some of Ferlinghetti’s aphorisms seem antithetical to a movement that worshiped the idea of Jack Kerouac spontaneously writing On the Road on a continuous roll of teletype paper. Advice like—Cultivate dissidence and critical thinking. First thought may be worst thought—seems to place him outside of the spur-of-the-moment crowd.
Of course, Ferlinghetti always argued that he was never a “Beat,” but was rather a bohemian, sort of a proto-Beat, if you will. In her 2004 book, Bohemian Manifesto: A Field Guide to Living on the Edge, Laren Stover breaks down the evolution of bohemianism into five branches: Nouveau, Gypsy, Beat, Zen, and Dandy, any number and combination of which can still be found slouching around the City wherever hipsters congregate, leading to possibly my favorite of his bits of wisdom—Stash your sell-phone and be here now.
The book veers into more abstract attempts to answer the burning question of What is Poetry? some of which bear the brand of the modern world, such as—Poems are e-mails from the unknown beyond cyberspace. ’Erm, … why do I get the feeling that one may not make the cut in a future edition? Others are timeless—It is private solitude made public—psychedelic—Poetry is Van Gogh’s ear echoing with all the blood of the world—religious—It is the street talk of angels and devils—It is made by dissolving halos in oceans of sound—and political—The idea of poetry as an arm of class war disturbs the sleep of those who do not wish to be disturbed in the pursuit of happiness.
It takes him a while to get around to it, but toward the end of the book lies possibly the best definition of poetry I have ever read—Poetry is making something out of nothing, and it can be about nothing and still mean something. Ferlinghetti certainly knows what he’s talking about, and we’re truly lucky to still have him around.
She gets a text while sitting across from me
Her device buzzes like a doorbell and demands
“Ask him if he’s hungry enough to be a poet”
Am I willing to commit to the last, best hope?
That’s what we are going to address …
While anointed apostles, solemn and monkish on the outside
Are spiritually saturated with triviality?
Is it not obvious by now that in secret moments
They are dreaming of ravishing magnificent pumpkins?
We can discuss whether or not I’ve got the juice …
But to our right, there is an army of bleach-haired women
Scheming behind a six-foot wall of shrill dissonance
Their deadened eyes reflect the same old news
While hidden from the live-stream, a fire creeps across the horizon
Why not ask if I’m hungry enough …
To boil an oil oligarch while achieving viral visibility?
Or to cook the books to mine own liking—pink in the middle and a little crispy?
Without this rapacity, I would be busy dancing
And following the scent of burning money
All the way to the bank, laughing
An overturned water glass catches white
Smoke from the prick of a pin driven through
The thick cardboard of an album cover
Any old Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin,
Or BÖC will do—Hurry! Hurry!
It’s burning and you don’t want to waste it
Hours spent stalking the used bins for gold
The pervading smell of mold and incense
Belies the dreams of rock glory hidden
Within torn paper sleeves printed with ads
For music you’ve never heard of—a trail
Of dead clues leading back to the ’60s
It’s the little things that can’t be captured
By ones and zeros—by on and not on
Nature prefers an encompassing arc
The devil’s in the details and he floats
Between the absolutes—Listen! Listen!
He’s talking and you don’t want to miss it
At the behest of poet Ted Berrigan, a young Aram Saroyan interviewed a becalmed and nearly forgotten Jack Kerouac in 1967 for the Paris Review. Saroyan describes this meeting much later in an article for The Poetry Foundation. It is a watershed moment, one generation testing the next, and Saroyan walks away with Jack’s benediction, “You’ll do, Saroyan.”
I doubt that Kerouac had in mind for the young writer to go forth and pen the History of the Beats, but 12 years later, Saroyan attempted just that. Perhaps the tired Kerouac recognized a comrade-in-arms, as Saroyan’s sensibilities would have fit right in with the tea-loving, electrified word slingers of the past. His official biography for his collected papers at the University of Connecticut Libraries reads, “In the late 1960s Saroyan experimented with marijuana and began to develop a career as a poet.” Sounds about right; let’s go!
Genesis Angles is no straight-ahead biography, but a long prose poem in its own right. Saroyan attempts to capture the feeling of the era, the mad rush toward an uncertain future and away from a stifling mid-century American mindset that had all but disappeared by the time he started his journey.
Saroyan identifies the Eisenhower years with the monster movies that were throwing their own existential warnings up on the screens of the ’50s and early ’60s. “We were being condemned to endure a complete rescheduling of human experience: our routines no longer in any relation to the planet or the landscape or our neighbors. We had willingly locked ourselves up with comfort and convenience and suffered an immediate transformation. It was we ourselves who had become The Thing, The Blob, inside our private Houses of Wax.”
The degree that Saroyan is successful in capturing the Beat gestalt, from the far remove of 1979, depends on how susceptible you are to that particular brand of amphetamine-driven patter. Me? I can’t get enough.
On Jack Kerouac meeting Neal Cassidy: “Now this is where it did combust because what happened was Jack saw Neal and listened to his wild, never-get-a-word-in-edgewise, spontaneous patter … this man was a rapid, word chasing man chasing word chasing man chasing time chasing space—lookout! just like his driving—saved by exposure and the rare posture of ecstatic brotherhood.”
On Allen Ginsburg: “Allen had the conceptual center of the universe in his belly and breath … so that then he could inhale and exhale planets, and snow storms, windows, and paper towels, Mickey Mouse and Hollywood, tits, and cocks, ambushes, and semesters, toothbrushes, and Coca-Cola—the whole litterbug earth with Indians and business man and women giving birth, inside his nature, and available.”
Strangely absent from this cluttered stage is Welch himself. Whether outshined by the titanic personalities around him, or just a quiet guy whose poems did the speaking for him, I didn’t come away with any better sense of the man than when I started. This isn’t a deficit in research; the University of Connecticut’s Saroyan collection contains a recorded interview with Welch and David Meltzer from 1969, and Saroyan himself interviewed poet Joanne Kryger about Welch in 1977, presumably while doing research for the book.
Perhaps the problem is that—like a total eclipse, or some other natural rarity—Welch began disappearing as soon as he appeared. You have to catch these things when they happen or you’re out of luck. Until next time.
Saroyan best captures Welch’s spirit in a few throw away lines describing the importance of becoming a poet:
“Be a poet and save the world forever.
And don’t forget to take a sweater.
Put this flower in the peanut bottle with some cold water.
It’ll be here when you get home.
That’s the way the universe works.”
If by borrowed nature you were to pounce
And claim a sorry bird with tooth and claw
Learning the hard way of its hollow self
Both of you surprised and you unfulfilled
I would stand here flightless and marrow-boned
Within your grasp as you nap like a cat
Patiently waiting to be devoured
Poet Jack Gilbert was 80 years old when he published this collection of poems in 2005. That’s a long time to observe how life works and Gilbert has spent much of it in introspection. He was there in San Francisco during the first flowering of the Beats, yet he never really became one of the gang. To read Gilbert is to realize that he is a man who relishes his space; many of the poems in Refusing Heaven paint a picture of self-imposed exile, whether physically, as in a remote Greek island, or spiritually—hence the title.
This tendency to separate himself from his peers does not reveal him to be a curmudgeon; quite the opposite is true. It seems that Gilbert appreciates the contrast between company and isolation so that each might stand out more clearly in relief.
In the Buddhist-inflected poem, Happening Apart From What’s Happening Around It, Gilbert starts out by giving practical examples of his philosophy.
There is a vividness to eleven years of love
because it is over. A clarity of Greece now
because I live in Manhattan or New England.
Later in the poem he observes a spiritual aspect to this clarity.
… When I was walking
in the mountains with the Japanese man and began
to hear the water, he said, “What is the sound
of the waterfall?” “Silence,” he finally told me.
The stillness I did not notice until the sound
of water falling made apparent the silence I had
been hearing long before.
After absorbing this bit of enlightenment, Gilbert then gets to the crux of the matter by positing one of the greatest questions of all time.
… I ask myself what
is the sound of women? What is the word for
that still thing I have hunted inside them
for so long? …
In the poem, Moreover, Gilbert finally reveals what he suspects that transitory and elusive thing to be.
We are given the trees so we can know
what God looks like. And rivers
so we might understand Him. We are allowed
women so we can get into bed with the Lord,
however partial and momentary that is.
Perhaps it is only with the wisdom that 80 years affords that one can strive to understand women one moment while deftly distilling poetry’s worth and reason down to its essence the next.
We lose everything, but make harvest
of the consequence it was to us. Memory
builds this kingdom from the fragments
and approximation. We are gleaners who fill
the barn for the winter that comes on.
Refusing Heaven is a rare chance to experience a poet still in bold command of his powers looking back at what was a long life full of achievement and adversity in equal measure. In the sublime, Failing and Flying, he reminds us that although we tend to focus on the cautionary aspect of the Icarus myth, we forget that he actually did fly quite well. For awhile. Gilbert seems to be summing up his feelings about his own looming mortality when he writes:
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
… and then one morning I awoke and it
was the end of everything that had come
before. The countless leaves down from the knurled
sycamore try their hardest to hide the
evidence that we walked there together.
Under my pale skin there is a fire,
while inside, the hearth lay cold and empty
but for where rain finds its way in and lies
puddled on brick the color of dried blood.
This month is an ax: leaden gray, and sharp.
The shattered granite banks of the Klamath
have been rounded by time—more time than I
can imagine, though I try—and water.
If the salmon would show themselves and were
in a talkative mood, they would tell me
something about patience, although perhaps
through their absence, they are still trying to teach.
This, I have down. I could stand in this cold
current all day, all year, forever; what
else could be this perfect? As an eagle
flies overhead and a pair of black bears
roam the shore; all I am missing are those
things that don’t matter, and you. Where are you?
How could things be so sublime and confused?
I have a lot to learn from this river.
The sharp edges of where whole escarpments
have sheared off from my heart have yet to be
smoothed over. Landslides unheard by others
in the night, but devastating in their
weight, await the healing touch of water.
Meanwhile, the cold stars are my confessors.
