It was my pleasure to introduce Walt Whitman Birthplace’s 2013-14
poet in residence, Palestinian-American author Naomi Shihab Nye, in West
Hills LI this weekend. Despite flying in from San Francisco and putting
on a full-length master class, Nye, drawing on a seemingly
inexhaustible reservoir of empathic charm and purposefulness — not to
mention some terrific poetry — earned a rare standing ovation after her
Saturday afternoon reading.
The setting — and the post as writer in residence at the Good Gray Poet’s birth home — was appropriate to Nye and her message.
Walt Whitman celebrated the twin-mantra of individuality and adhesive
love, and saluted the people and nations of the world, expansively
declaring “Each of us inevitable/Each of us limitless/Each of us
with his or her right upon the earth,/Each of us allowed the eternal
purports of the earth/Each of us here as divinely as any is here…“
Naomi Shihab Nye proves to be a true child of Whitman, a poet who says “We start out as little disconnected bits of dust” and offers herself — through her work — as a kind of Human Bridge, “brokering empathy among cultures and understanding among nations.”
Those are the words of critic Samina Najmi, of Fresno State. Offering
a smile or smiling back when smiled at. Whether it is making eye
contact with someone at a cross-walk, or bonding with a baby she’s been
asked to hold on an airplane; whether it is between pointing out the
connections and commonalities between cultures or between individuals;
Nye’s act of bridging puts into practice Walt’s dictum. She points the
way for us to live a larger life than that offered through the mere
exercise of consumption and self-interest.
To be fully individual and yet adhere to others.
How does she do this? Through what Najmi aptly describes as an
Aesthetics of Smallness, focusing on kindness in a sometimes harsh and
lonely world, brokering empathy, and invoking people to use our time
well.
”I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.”
Nye’s poetry, says Najmi, stresses human connections through
attention to the small and ordinary — as opposed to the aesthetics of
the sublime and the grandiose, or the aesthetics of sensationalism,
which underlies the ideology of headline news. These, as we all well
know, are Mammon’s children.
Nye’s choice is a 21st century restatement of Walt’s adhesiveness — a
connectedness and a universality recognizable in lifelong family
associations and in momentary interactions, and in the workings of the
natural world around us, right down to “the small toad that lives in cool mud at the base of the zinnias.”
Najmi calls it for what it is — a poetry which “articulates a countersublime of universal human connectivity for our times.”
At the heart of Nye’s ethos is a deep, deep human issue — Kindness, and how to BE kind in the world which confronts us. “I am looking for the human who admits his flaws/Who shocks the adversary/By being kinder not stronger,” she writes.
Nye’s is not the off-handed or easy kindness of someone in their
comfort zone, someone who has not felt pain — it is a call to kindness
among people who have suffered. “Before you know what kindness
really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth,” she writes.
Nye’s prescription is to learn to swim in the eyes of kindness when
they gaze in your direction, as she notes in a poem about a boy who “did not want to see the deep pools of his kind teacher’s eyes and fall into them. He didn’t know how to swim.”
“Pain and anguish are everywhere anyway. Might as well put them to good use,” she shrugs. “If we aren’t fragile, we don’t deserve the world.”
Through the natural act of kindness despite pain, she suggests, we may truly restore our capacity to hope. “Skin has hope, that’s what skin does. Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.”
Naomi Shihab Nye is a writer who wears her poetry, like her heart, on
her sleeve. Intensely observant poetry which confronts us with
inescapable recognitions of human connectedness.
Poetry, which she insists is a best mechanism for the exercise of Whitman‘s adhesiveness, because it “slows us down — it teaches us to cherish small details. “
For the readers of a poem, they are offered the opportunity to drop their troubles “into the lap of the storyteller,” were they become someone else’s troubles.
And for those of us who write poetry, the people who ‘hear the words under the words‘? Nye tells us quite clearly — we are obliged to answer those words. “Otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges, difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.”
In the end, Nye urges each of us to exercise our curiosity, cherish
our connections, use our time wisely and outrace the loneliness which
surrounds us — like the boy in another of her poems who believes that if
he roller skates fast enough loneliness can’t catch up with him.
A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.”
The darkness around us is deep, says William Stafford — a
mentor to Nye, and former poet in residence at the Whitman Birthplace.
How is it we dare to even contemplate defiance such as this?
Because skin has hope.
Because Humanity is the only Holy Land. And our best revenge.
Because the exercise of adhesiveness can overcome terrible loneliness
in a society that pushes us toward obsessive self-absorption in the
name of individuality.
Because the best kind of famous is the kind where, if a sticky child
in a grocery line or a shuffling old man at a crosswalk smiles at you,
you smile back.
Naomi Shihab Nye is the award winning Palestinian American author
and/or editor of more than 30 volumes. A self-described “wandering
poet,” she has spent 37 years traveling the country and the world to
lead writing workshops and inspiring students of all ages. Nye was born
to a Palestinian father and an American mother and grew up in St. Louis,
Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Drawing on her family heritage, the
cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her experiences traveling
in Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico, Central and South America and the
Middle East, Nye uses her writing to attest to our shared humanity.
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Sunday, December 30, 2012
ADUPWE, Jayne Cortez
Adupwe: Yoruba for ‘we are grateful to god’
With the death of Jayne Cortez as 2012 comes to an end, I find it my place to bid a fond Adupwe to an impassioned leader in a field of American culture which has not yet gotten its day in the sun as an American art form -- the world of jazz and the spoken word.
Her passing is a big loss.
Cortez (1936-2012), a native of Arizona and LA before becoming a NYC transplant, advanced a singularly authentic aesthetic tradition -- that of the spoken word/musical artist. It was a role that grew naturally from her experiences -- marriage to Ornette Coleman in the 1950s, central place in the Black Arts Movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and cultural ambassadorship to her own nation in later years, as a dual resident of New York and Senegal.
Hers was a voice of witness, praise and above all power. Her favorite targets? Racism, inequality, imperialism. Oppression, misogyny, corruption and the waste of human potential.
‘The ruling class’, she wrote in “There It Is,’ ‘will tell you there is no ruling class as they organize their supporters into white supremacist Ku Klux klan gangs/organize their police into killer cops/organize their propaganda into a device to ossify us.’
My friend
they don’t care
if you’re an individualist
a leftist a rightist
a shithead or a snake
They will try to exploit you
absorb you confine you
disconnect you isolate you
or kill you
And you will disappear into your own rage
into your own insanity
into your own poverty
into a word a phrase a slogan a cartoon
and then ashes
Cortez spoke out against co-optation, and the need for African-Americans to assert ownership of their own culture. In ’Taking the Blues Back Home,” a driving number she recorded with her group ‘The Firespitters,‘ she declared her intent to ‘take out of the mouth of the blues stealers, back to where the blues stealers won‘t go.’
And in ‘There It Is,’ she explained pointedly that enfranchisement in 21rst century America is something a whole lot more than jumping into the homogenized practices of a bland white bourgeoisie -- it also means retaining aspects of one’s own earned culture, forged in chains:
if we don't organize and unify and
get the power to control our own lives
Then we will wear
the exaggerated look of captivity
the stylized look of submission
the bizarre look of suicide
the dehumanized look of fear
and the decomposed look of repression
For all the seeming militancy of her work, Cortez was capable of expressing alarm at the potential for violence on both sides of the racial divide. Both the "bloodthirsty people/ brooding in North Dakota with grenades in their hands" and the disenfranchised impatient for equality, ‘brooding beyond the deadline’ and ready to flare into violence.
One of her strongest and most direct poems is on the subject of rape. ‘What was Inez Garcia supposed to do for the man who declared war on her body? The man who carved a combat zone between her breasts.' Cortez asked in the poem ‘Rape.’ ‘Was she supposed to lick crabs from his hairy ass? Kiss every pimple on his butt? Blow hot breath on his big toe? Draw back the corners of her vagina and heehaw like a California burro?'
Instead Inez did what the defense department of any nation would do in time of war-- she fought back. 'She stood with a rifle in her hand … pumped lead into his three hundred pounds of shaking flesh. Sent it flying to the virgin of Guadalupe then celebrated the death of the dead racist punk. And what the fuck else were we supposed to do?”
That's the straight stuff, no punches pulled.
There was plenty for Cortez to praise, too.
Praise for jazz, for example, its rebellious metronome, its infatuation of the ears, its ability to reach to 'the love seat in her bones.'
Praise for African traditions, too. In ‘Make Ifa’ she celebrated the spirituality of transplanted West African music/dance culture. Here she references widely, from more widely known forms like samba and conga to the more esoteric -- soca moca, jumbi, punti, ijubi -- all invoked as a way to connect to the Yoruba-based system of divination known as Ifa.
The dirt-poor matrix of Southern agricultural life was a touchstone to her, despite its failings -- as in this, from ‘In the Morning:’
disguised in my mouth as a swampland
nailed to my teeth like a rising sun
you come out in the middle of fish-scales
you bleed into gourds wrapped with red ants…
you touch brown nipples into knives
and somewhere stripped like a whirlwind
stripped for the shrine room
you sing to me through the side face of a black rooster
The duality of cities, New York City in particular, proved to be consistently fertile ground for Cortez. New York is a place of “blood, police and fried pies,’ “brown spit and soft tomatoes.” There is a resilient glamor to the rundown human denizens of the city, each the possessor of a ‘brain of hot sauce, tobacco teeth (and) mattress of bedbug tongue.’ A rude, bawdy and ingratiating creature, New York City calls seductively out for its people to join in: 'I am New York City,/ my skillet-head friend/my fat-bellied comrade/citizens, break wind with me!'
Harlem, she declares, is beautiful, despite the fact that it is “hidden by ravines of sweet oil/by temples of switch blades”
beautiful in your sound of fertility
beautiful in your turban of funeral crepe
beautiful in your camouflage of grief
in your solitude of bruises in
your arson of alert
beautiful
And in irrepressibly humorous fashion, she poked fun at the gritty pigeons of Manhattan, which “lounge on ledges and mutter profanity all day, will fight for fucking space in the mating season, shit on air conditioners and wipe their asses on windows while big cockroaches suck soukrats in the dark.”
As her place in the literary world became more firmly established, Cortez proved herself not averse to taking a few shots at the establishment in that world, too, railing against the anemic poetry of the academic elite -- little more than a stuffed bird in a tropical forest, she delared -- an art that “will not strike lightning through any convoy of chickens.‘
Whatever the subject of Jayne Cortez’ pen -- and whatever the style -- it was treated with an unflinching directness of language that was more than simply confrontational. It was a language grounded in the authenticity of a people who have knowingly or unknowingly heeded a dictum enunciated by Wm Burroughs, shown in the opening scene of the trailer to the Ornette Coleman bio-pic Made In America:
‘Immortality to the people, every man a god,' says Burroughs. 'But how do you get to be a god? Well to put it applepie country simple, by doing your job and doing it well.‘
Cortez had a knack for putting it applepie country simple -- and that was part of why she did her job and did it well. Her contribution to the use of common, earthy language rivals that of Sandburg in his day -- and as an artist steeped in musical culture, she was an adept practitioner of the musical aesthetics which informed 20th century artists as diverse as Charlie Parker, Jackson Pollock, Thomas Hart Benton and Jack Kerouac.
Flow. Contour. Dimensionality. Trajectory. Inflection. Sense of naturally spontaneous expression. Pure joy in the visceral exploration of sound.
Over the course of her productive years, Jayne Cortez spoke out forcefully against racism, injustice, co-optation and misogyny. She also sang out in praise of the great body of culture that has been produced as part of the African diaspora. That she had the ability to do so in a manner that was so down to earth and musically engaging only served to reinforce the validity of her witness. That she had the ability to command wry humor in her poetry served only to further authenticate her praise.
Hers was the power of the connected mind -- at once grounded in the gutteral originality of the language of the common man and woman, and elevated by the clarity of her vision and the fierceness of her heart.
As Mark Statman once noted, Jayne Cortez’s world view was full of complexities -- harsh, bitter, serious and sometimes sardonic descriptions of a broke down existence that, for all its corruptions, disappointments, chaotics and violations, remains beautiful.
“A natural response to what Cortez describes is to look away,” wrote Statman. “But Cortez demands the opposite: she wants us to look and to look hard.”
Sounds like he's talking about a carwreck. And where I come from, the natural response to a carwreck -- whether it is individuals on the highway or societies -- isn’t to look away, it’s to rubberneck.
Statman is nonetheless on point with his comment.
Cortez’ poetry has always called on her listeners to question ourselves -- our tendency to drive past society’s terrible wrecks with the smug detachment of complacent, voyeuristic Americans.
We ought to be looking, and looking hard. We ought to see, to feel and to understand.
Jayne Cortez reminded us of our social duty to do so, through a poetry of fierce honesty, directness of voice, impassioned performance, colorful personality and musical richness.
These few days after her passing I, for one, remain grateful to God -- and Jayne Cortez -- for that reminder.
Adupwe, Jayne Cortez.
With the death of Jayne Cortez as 2012 comes to an end, I find it my place to bid a fond Adupwe to an impassioned leader in a field of American culture which has not yet gotten its day in the sun as an American art form -- the world of jazz and the spoken word.
Her passing is a big loss.
Cortez (1936-2012), a native of Arizona and LA before becoming a NYC transplant, advanced a singularly authentic aesthetic tradition -- that of the spoken word/musical artist. It was a role that grew naturally from her experiences -- marriage to Ornette Coleman in the 1950s, central place in the Black Arts Movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and cultural ambassadorship to her own nation in later years, as a dual resident of New York and Senegal.
Hers was a voice of witness, praise and above all power. Her favorite targets? Racism, inequality, imperialism. Oppression, misogyny, corruption and the waste of human potential.
‘The ruling class’, she wrote in “There It Is,’ ‘will tell you there is no ruling class as they organize their supporters into white supremacist Ku Klux klan gangs/organize their police into killer cops/organize their propaganda into a device to ossify us.’
My friend
they don’t care
if you’re an individualist
a leftist a rightist
a shithead or a snake
They will try to exploit you
absorb you confine you
disconnect you isolate you
or kill you
And you will disappear into your own rage
into your own insanity
into your own poverty
into a word a phrase a slogan a cartoon
and then ashes
Cortez spoke out against co-optation, and the need for African-Americans to assert ownership of their own culture. In ’Taking the Blues Back Home,” a driving number she recorded with her group ‘The Firespitters,‘ she declared her intent to ‘take out of the mouth of the blues stealers, back to where the blues stealers won‘t go.’
And in ‘There It Is,’ she explained pointedly that enfranchisement in 21rst century America is something a whole lot more than jumping into the homogenized practices of a bland white bourgeoisie -- it also means retaining aspects of one’s own earned culture, forged in chains:
if we don't organize and unify and
get the power to control our own lives
Then we will wear
the exaggerated look of captivity
the stylized look of submission
the bizarre look of suicide
the dehumanized look of fear
and the decomposed look of repression
For all the seeming militancy of her work, Cortez was capable of expressing alarm at the potential for violence on both sides of the racial divide. Both the "bloodthirsty people/ brooding in North Dakota with grenades in their hands" and the disenfranchised impatient for equality, ‘brooding beyond the deadline’ and ready to flare into violence.
One of her strongest and most direct poems is on the subject of rape. ‘What was Inez Garcia supposed to do for the man who declared war on her body? The man who carved a combat zone between her breasts.' Cortez asked in the poem ‘Rape.’ ‘Was she supposed to lick crabs from his hairy ass? Kiss every pimple on his butt? Blow hot breath on his big toe? Draw back the corners of her vagina and heehaw like a California burro?'
Instead Inez did what the defense department of any nation would do in time of war-- she fought back. 'She stood with a rifle in her hand … pumped lead into his three hundred pounds of shaking flesh. Sent it flying to the virgin of Guadalupe then celebrated the death of the dead racist punk. And what the fuck else were we supposed to do?”
That's the straight stuff, no punches pulled.
There was plenty for Cortez to praise, too.
Praise for jazz, for example, its rebellious metronome, its infatuation of the ears, its ability to reach to 'the love seat in her bones.'
Praise for African traditions, too. In ‘Make Ifa’ she celebrated the spirituality of transplanted West African music/dance culture. Here she references widely, from more widely known forms like samba and conga to the more esoteric -- soca moca, jumbi, punti, ijubi -- all invoked as a way to connect to the Yoruba-based system of divination known as Ifa.
The dirt-poor matrix of Southern agricultural life was a touchstone to her, despite its failings -- as in this, from ‘In the Morning:’
disguised in my mouth as a swampland
nailed to my teeth like a rising sun
you come out in the middle of fish-scales
you bleed into gourds wrapped with red ants…
you touch brown nipples into knives
and somewhere stripped like a whirlwind
stripped for the shrine room
you sing to me through the side face of a black rooster
The duality of cities, New York City in particular, proved to be consistently fertile ground for Cortez. New York is a place of “blood, police and fried pies,’ “brown spit and soft tomatoes.” There is a resilient glamor to the rundown human denizens of the city, each the possessor of a ‘brain of hot sauce, tobacco teeth (and) mattress of bedbug tongue.’ A rude, bawdy and ingratiating creature, New York City calls seductively out for its people to join in: 'I am New York City,/ my skillet-head friend/my fat-bellied comrade/citizens, break wind with me!'
Harlem, she declares, is beautiful, despite the fact that it is “hidden by ravines of sweet oil/by temples of switch blades”
beautiful in your sound of fertility
beautiful in your turban of funeral crepe
beautiful in your camouflage of grief
in your solitude of bruises in
your arson of alert
beautiful
And in irrepressibly humorous fashion, she poked fun at the gritty pigeons of Manhattan, which “lounge on ledges and mutter profanity all day, will fight for fucking space in the mating season, shit on air conditioners and wipe their asses on windows while big cockroaches suck soukrats in the dark.”
As her place in the literary world became more firmly established, Cortez proved herself not averse to taking a few shots at the establishment in that world, too, railing against the anemic poetry of the academic elite -- little more than a stuffed bird in a tropical forest, she delared -- an art that “will not strike lightning through any convoy of chickens.‘
Whatever the subject of Jayne Cortez’ pen -- and whatever the style -- it was treated with an unflinching directness of language that was more than simply confrontational. It was a language grounded in the authenticity of a people who have knowingly or unknowingly heeded a dictum enunciated by Wm Burroughs, shown in the opening scene of the trailer to the Ornette Coleman bio-pic Made In America:
‘Immortality to the people, every man a god,' says Burroughs. 'But how do you get to be a god? Well to put it applepie country simple, by doing your job and doing it well.‘
Cortez had a knack for putting it applepie country simple -- and that was part of why she did her job and did it well. Her contribution to the use of common, earthy language rivals that of Sandburg in his day -- and as an artist steeped in musical culture, she was an adept practitioner of the musical aesthetics which informed 20th century artists as diverse as Charlie Parker, Jackson Pollock, Thomas Hart Benton and Jack Kerouac.
Flow. Contour. Dimensionality. Trajectory. Inflection. Sense of naturally spontaneous expression. Pure joy in the visceral exploration of sound.
Over the course of her productive years, Jayne Cortez spoke out forcefully against racism, injustice, co-optation and misogyny. She also sang out in praise of the great body of culture that has been produced as part of the African diaspora. That she had the ability to do so in a manner that was so down to earth and musically engaging only served to reinforce the validity of her witness. That she had the ability to command wry humor in her poetry served only to further authenticate her praise.
Hers was the power of the connected mind -- at once grounded in the gutteral originality of the language of the common man and woman, and elevated by the clarity of her vision and the fierceness of her heart.
As Mark Statman once noted, Jayne Cortez’s world view was full of complexities -- harsh, bitter, serious and sometimes sardonic descriptions of a broke down existence that, for all its corruptions, disappointments, chaotics and violations, remains beautiful.
“A natural response to what Cortez describes is to look away,” wrote Statman. “But Cortez demands the opposite: she wants us to look and to look hard.”
Sounds like he's talking about a carwreck. And where I come from, the natural response to a carwreck -- whether it is individuals on the highway or societies -- isn’t to look away, it’s to rubberneck.
Statman is nonetheless on point with his comment.
Cortez’ poetry has always called on her listeners to question ourselves -- our tendency to drive past society’s terrible wrecks with the smug detachment of complacent, voyeuristic Americans.
We ought to be looking, and looking hard. We ought to see, to feel and to understand.
Jayne Cortez reminded us of our social duty to do so, through a poetry of fierce honesty, directness of voice, impassioned performance, colorful personality and musical richness.
These few days after her passing I, for one, remain grateful to God -- and Jayne Cortez -- for that reminder.
Adupwe, Jayne Cortez.
Friday, October 26, 2012
POETS, KEEP ON CHIRPING
Three Rooms Press, which published Poppin Johnny for me two or three years ago, is at it again. Working with the fine translator Lina Sipitanou, they've come out with a bilingual collection of my poems, in Greek and English, entitled EOS: Abductor of Men
Here's a Youtube clip of me reading from the book, a poem 'Walk Into A Bakery Like It Is A Temple Of Gods,' at Le Poisson Rouge (formerly Village Gate) in Greenwich Village, last weekend.
Someone asked me to explain the book title. Eos is the Greek goddess of the dawn, and in certain versions of the legend, dawn steals young men away. The possible connotations of that are interesting enough. I was also intrigued with the legend of Eos and Tithonus, for its quite singular meaning to me as a person who has devoted a large part of my life to the pursuit of poetry. Here's that story, which I picked up on a Florida gardening blog online.
In
Greek mythology, Tithonus was a handsome mortal who fell
in love with Eos, the goddess of the dawn. Eos realized
that her beloved Tithonus was destined to age and die.
She begged Zeus to grant her lover immortal life.
Zeus was a jealous god,
prone to acts of deception in order to seduce beautiful
gods and mortals, and he was not pleased with Eos'
infatuation with a rival. In a classic Devil's Bargain,
he granted Eos's wish -- literally. He made Tithonus
immortal, but did not grant him eternal youth.
As Tithonus aged, he became increasingly debilitated and demented, eventually driving Eos to distraction with his constant babbling.
In despair, she turned Tithonus into a grasshopper. In Greek mythology, the grasshopper is immortal. This myth also explains why grasshoppers chirp ceaselessly, like demented old men.
As Tithonus aged, he became increasingly debilitated and demented, eventually driving Eos to distraction with his constant babbling.
In despair, she turned Tithonus into a grasshopper. In Greek mythology, the grasshopper is immortal. This myth also explains why grasshoppers chirp ceaselessly, like demented old men.
Hate to think of myself as a chirping old grasshopper poet. But those old Greeks were pretty smart. Guess I'll just keeping on chirping.
GW
Monday, August 27, 2012
A Broken Fiddle, A Broken Laugh & A Thousand Memories: Revisiting The Spoon River Anthology
In
my naivete I used to think that the course of human history, at least
during my lifetime, was more or less a straightline thing -- society
was getting better and better, humanity was growing more tolerant and
inclusive, we were leaving all the bad things behind, to be waved at
through the rear view mirror, we were moving toward a bright and better
future.
I thought America had made irreversible progress in protecting the rights and dignities of ordinary people -- workers, women, minorities, immigrants, the elderly and the infirm, all the downtrodden people who took it and took it hard in the 'bad old days.'
Whew! When I look at the politics of the day, and the pressures from the radical right to erode hard won achievements in human dignity, I'm increasingly struck by how little we have progressed, how much danger there is for hatred, ignorance, intolerance, greed and exploitation to return.
That and how much there is to learn from revisiting the literature of the muckrakers, activists and progressives of the early 1900s -- who fought the good fight against such things a century ago. People Like Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Frank Norris and Carl Sandburg. I mean they ought to be required reading for anyone presuming to hold the values of American citizenship dear.
And Edgar Lee Masters, whose Spoon River Anthology I recently picked up again after many years.
The man takes on some surprisingly contemporary issues head on. On page after page in the little midwestern town he created, we're confronted with unscrupulous bankers, influence-peddling politicians, rapacious corporations working hand in hand with judges, media moguls and flat-earth religious leaders to maintain the status quo of the 'Robber Baron" era -- ie, unharnessed economic and political domination by the rich and powerful. Coarse swaggering, abuse and corruption. Brutal subjugation of workers and the poor.
Masters gets mighty specific about it.
A woman is raped, and dies in a back alley abortion. Another women dies in childbirth because she's forced, against medical advice, to carry a baby to term.
Unregulated banks speculate wildly, ruining homeowners, businesses and small investors. Corporations buy or bully their way out of accidents in an unsafe workplace. Political, judicial and media institutions protect the interests of giant corporations and a tiny elite of the most wealthy people.
Sound familiar?
Interestingly, these themes come out in Spoon River Anthology through a patchwork kind of reading -- as if they are a series of 'depositions' to be matched up against each other.
Makes sense really. After all, Edgar Lee Masters was a career lawyer, and the son of a lawyer -- accustomed to taking depositions from witnesses, for all their lack of objectivity and self-serving nature -- and then stacking those depositions up against each other to see what patterns and truths emerge.
That's what I've been doing this week, examining the whole patchwork of dramatic monologues. It's startling to me how many of the issues Masters addresses are back in the national discourse -- the deleterious effects of materialism, capitalism, puritan zealotry, anti-rationalism, xenophobia and religious closemindedness.
Most of the characters in the collection are part victim and part perpetrator. That's a nuance which tends to confirm my sense that in an unhealthy society even the perpetrators are victims, forced by circumstances at least as much as their own weaknesses into becoming agents of its worst dynamics.
But some of the characters are unapologetic villains, like the banker Thomas Rhodes -- who even at death sneers at those he has ruled and rode over. The best he can offer the trampled down is an acknowledgement of how hard it is for 'small folk' to 'keep the soul from splitting.' Join the exploiters, he urges -- the ones who embrace corruption, 'seekers of earth's treasures, getters and hoarders of gold,' who are 'self contained, compact, harmonized, even to the end."
Masters does offer a glimpse of people who've managed to keep their souls together, however -- and who we might emulate. Like Lucinda Matlock, who is untouched by modern corruption and has conducted her life in accordance with a simpler and more innocent past. In her youth she went to dances, fell in love, married and had children. Over the course of her life, she spun, wove, kept house nursed the sick, made a garden, and for fun, she
rambled over the fields where sang the larks,
and by Spoon River gathered many a shell
and many a flower and medicinal weed--
shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.
At the age of 96, she'd live enough, that's all, and passed to a sweet repose.
Hard to emulate her. But then there's Fiddler Jones, who, through his focus on his art rather than possessions, manages to remain untouched by his lack of material success, and is therefore able to retain a Whitmanesque conception -- he sees Original Grace, and the transcendental hum, all around him, in all things. 'The earth keeps some vibration of joy," he declares, 'there in your hearts, and that is you.'
Because of his musical talent, he's called on to play so often for the people that he never has a chance to prosper or fail according to society's terms -- and it doesn't bother him one bit.
I ended up with a broken fiddle
and a broken laugh and a thousand memories
and not a single regret.
Finally, and almost as a call to arms, Masters tells us through the voice of Jim Brown that it's up to each individual to decide which side they're on. You're either 'for men or for money,' says Brown. You're either 'for the people or against them.'
I suppose my poetic temperament makes me more of a Fiddler Jones type, happy with a broken fiddle, a broken laugh and a thousand memories. But this week as the Republican Party prepares to offer its heart and soul to the very people who would return us to the dark ages of willful ignorance, unchecked capitalism, and back alley abortions, I'm thinking that for America in 2012, a healthy dose of 'which side are you on' progressivism may be just what the doctor ordered.
I thought America had made irreversible progress in protecting the rights and dignities of ordinary people -- workers, women, minorities, immigrants, the elderly and the infirm, all the downtrodden people who took it and took it hard in the 'bad old days.'
Whew! When I look at the politics of the day, and the pressures from the radical right to erode hard won achievements in human dignity, I'm increasingly struck by how little we have progressed, how much danger there is for hatred, ignorance, intolerance, greed and exploitation to return.
That and how much there is to learn from revisiting the literature of the muckrakers, activists and progressives of the early 1900s -- who fought the good fight against such things a century ago. People Like Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Frank Norris and Carl Sandburg. I mean they ought to be required reading for anyone presuming to hold the values of American citizenship dear.
And Edgar Lee Masters, whose Spoon River Anthology I recently picked up again after many years.
The man takes on some surprisingly contemporary issues head on. On page after page in the little midwestern town he created, we're confronted with unscrupulous bankers, influence-peddling politicians, rapacious corporations working hand in hand with judges, media moguls and flat-earth religious leaders to maintain the status quo of the 'Robber Baron" era -- ie, unharnessed economic and political domination by the rich and powerful. Coarse swaggering, abuse and corruption. Brutal subjugation of workers and the poor.
Masters gets mighty specific about it.
A woman is raped, and dies in a back alley abortion. Another women dies in childbirth because she's forced, against medical advice, to carry a baby to term.
Unregulated banks speculate wildly, ruining homeowners, businesses and small investors. Corporations buy or bully their way out of accidents in an unsafe workplace. Political, judicial and media institutions protect the interests of giant corporations and a tiny elite of the most wealthy people.
Sound familiar?
Interestingly, these themes come out in Spoon River Anthology through a patchwork kind of reading -- as if they are a series of 'depositions' to be matched up against each other.
Makes sense really. After all, Edgar Lee Masters was a career lawyer, and the son of a lawyer -- accustomed to taking depositions from witnesses, for all their lack of objectivity and self-serving nature -- and then stacking those depositions up against each other to see what patterns and truths emerge.
That's what I've been doing this week, examining the whole patchwork of dramatic monologues. It's startling to me how many of the issues Masters addresses are back in the national discourse -- the deleterious effects of materialism, capitalism, puritan zealotry, anti-rationalism, xenophobia and religious closemindedness.
Most of the characters in the collection are part victim and part perpetrator. That's a nuance which tends to confirm my sense that in an unhealthy society even the perpetrators are victims, forced by circumstances at least as much as their own weaknesses into becoming agents of its worst dynamics.
But some of the characters are unapologetic villains, like the banker Thomas Rhodes -- who even at death sneers at those he has ruled and rode over. The best he can offer the trampled down is an acknowledgement of how hard it is for 'small folk' to 'keep the soul from splitting.' Join the exploiters, he urges -- the ones who embrace corruption, 'seekers of earth's treasures, getters and hoarders of gold,' who are 'self contained, compact, harmonized, even to the end."
Masters does offer a glimpse of people who've managed to keep their souls together, however -- and who we might emulate. Like Lucinda Matlock, who is untouched by modern corruption and has conducted her life in accordance with a simpler and more innocent past. In her youth she went to dances, fell in love, married and had children. Over the course of her life, she spun, wove, kept house nursed the sick, made a garden, and for fun, she
rambled over the fields where sang the larks,
and by Spoon River gathered many a shell
and many a flower and medicinal weed--
shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.
At the age of 96, she'd live enough, that's all, and passed to a sweet repose.
Hard to emulate her. But then there's Fiddler Jones, who, through his focus on his art rather than possessions, manages to remain untouched by his lack of material success, and is therefore able to retain a Whitmanesque conception -- he sees Original Grace, and the transcendental hum, all around him, in all things. 'The earth keeps some vibration of joy," he declares, 'there in your hearts, and that is you.'
Because of his musical talent, he's called on to play so often for the people that he never has a chance to prosper or fail according to society's terms -- and it doesn't bother him one bit.
I ended up with a broken fiddle
and a broken laugh and a thousand memories
and not a single regret.
Finally, and almost as a call to arms, Masters tells us through the voice of Jim Brown that it's up to each individual to decide which side they're on. You're either 'for men or for money,' says Brown. You're either 'for the people or against them.'
I suppose my poetic temperament makes me more of a Fiddler Jones type, happy with a broken fiddle, a broken laugh and a thousand memories. But this week as the Republican Party prepares to offer its heart and soul to the very people who would return us to the dark ages of willful ignorance, unchecked capitalism, and back alley abortions, I'm thinking that for America in 2012, a healthy dose of 'which side are you on' progressivism may be just what the doctor ordered.
Friday, August 17, 2012
CONNECTING THE BOP: The How And The Why Of America's Heartland Music
Wow what a treat to visit with fellow poets and painters at the
Pollock-Krasner House in Springs, LI, to share a reading for Jackson
Pollock. No threat of rain or summer heat could slow us down or keep us
from sharing our Jackson Pollock related inspiration.
For me it was especially gratifying to ‘connect the bop‘ -- ie, relate the swirling circular and hugely energetic Pollock canvases to Whitman, to Charlie Parker and the KC vortex, to the bop prosodists of the 50s, and to my own work.
The KC vortex which produced bebop jazz. of course, but also Thomas Hart Benton, indisputably Pollock’s mentor and whose abstract ideas about rhythm on the canvas transcend the WPA figurative aspects of his work in a manner that profoundly inform his work .
Musically stated, there’s the structural thing -- improvising off and around and beyond and back to the core statement. Being able to jump into the conversation (musical or visual) from anywhere on the scale. Using your woodshed skills to blast out an extended and irrepressible improvisation which seems beyond deliberation, inspired, almost autonomic -- but at its core, is deeply schooled. Camouflaging the subject, circling around it and going tangentially away from and back to it with sculpted micro-flourishes, teasing it out of perceptual existence and back in again. A rhythmic and tonal explosion that never loses its deep reference to the form. And finding the resolution, the landing point. Getting it back there.
It’s the essential HOW of bop, whether its Parker, Pollock or the prosodic flights of Kerouac, O'Hara and the rest.
Then there's the WHY (as jazz musician Tony Scott, born Tony Sciacca in NJ testified, 'I studied the how AND the why' of bop).
The range of emotional statements that can be sustained is wide. Bending the voice of the man, through the plaintive protestations and sly subversions of blues and jazz musicians finding solace, kicks, competition and comradery in the midst of Jim Crow America. The frenzied search for articulation of Pollock. The vernacular longings and raw industrial energies and arguments of Thomas Hart Benton.
The rebelliousness of the Beats and the aesthetic nuancing of the New York School poets. Their playfulness too, and the joyousness and transcendental celebration of our own Walt.
That's right, Whitman -- who in 1879 visited the grass prairie of Kansas, confluence of cattlemen, homesteaders, and declared that a pure new and original American voice would emerge from it.
Whitman didn't mention the big muddy river rolling down from the north, or the irrepressible blues & jazz current that would sweep upstream from New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta. He couldn't know that there would be cross-country trains carrying car after car of popping bi-coastal swing musicians, cats overnighting in what amounted to a free-for-all laboratory at 18th and Vine; a place to stretch their wings in time and space, to experiment with their music, to transform it into something new.
Whitman didn't know it would be bop. But Whitman got it right. All those elements thrown into the hot crucible of America’s midsection added dimension and gave moment to an emergent American voice Whitman predicted would come.
Okay, a lot of it came to a head here in the Big Apple -- jazz clubs, juke joints, painters studios and writers' pads. And further on out, to Jackson Pollock's bucolic retreat in Springs, a shingled house beside the sheltered salt marshes of Gardiner's Bay.
But the roots go way deeper than that, deep into midwestern soil.
(Thanks to Tim Sullivan, Ros Brenner and Helen Harrison for organizing the poetry reading at Pollock-Krasner House, and to fellow poets Lucas Hunt, Michelle Whittaker, Max Wheat and Claire Schulman for adding their voices in)
For me it was especially gratifying to ‘connect the bop‘ -- ie, relate the swirling circular and hugely energetic Pollock canvases to Whitman, to Charlie Parker and the KC vortex, to the bop prosodists of the 50s, and to my own work.
The KC vortex which produced bebop jazz. of course, but also Thomas Hart Benton, indisputably Pollock’s mentor and whose abstract ideas about rhythm on the canvas transcend the WPA figurative aspects of his work in a manner that profoundly inform his work .
Musically stated, there’s the structural thing -- improvising off and around and beyond and back to the core statement. Being able to jump into the conversation (musical or visual) from anywhere on the scale. Using your woodshed skills to blast out an extended and irrepressible improvisation which seems beyond deliberation, inspired, almost autonomic -- but at its core, is deeply schooled. Camouflaging the subject, circling around it and going tangentially away from and back to it with sculpted micro-flourishes, teasing it out of perceptual existence and back in again. A rhythmic and tonal explosion that never loses its deep reference to the form. And finding the resolution, the landing point. Getting it back there.
It’s the essential HOW of bop, whether its Parker, Pollock or the prosodic flights of Kerouac, O'Hara and the rest.
Then there's the WHY (as jazz musician Tony Scott, born Tony Sciacca in NJ testified, 'I studied the how AND the why' of bop).
The range of emotional statements that can be sustained is wide. Bending the voice of the man, through the plaintive protestations and sly subversions of blues and jazz musicians finding solace, kicks, competition and comradery in the midst of Jim Crow America. The frenzied search for articulation of Pollock. The vernacular longings and raw industrial energies and arguments of Thomas Hart Benton.
The rebelliousness of the Beats and the aesthetic nuancing of the New York School poets. Their playfulness too, and the joyousness and transcendental celebration of our own Walt.
That's right, Whitman -- who in 1879 visited the grass prairie of Kansas, confluence of cattlemen, homesteaders, and declared that a pure new and original American voice would emerge from it.
Whitman didn't mention the big muddy river rolling down from the north, or the irrepressible blues & jazz current that would sweep upstream from New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta. He couldn't know that there would be cross-country trains carrying car after car of popping bi-coastal swing musicians, cats overnighting in what amounted to a free-for-all laboratory at 18th and Vine; a place to stretch their wings in time and space, to experiment with their music, to transform it into something new.
Whitman didn't know it would be bop. But Whitman got it right. All those elements thrown into the hot crucible of America’s midsection added dimension and gave moment to an emergent American voice Whitman predicted would come.
Okay, a lot of it came to a head here in the Big Apple -- jazz clubs, juke joints, painters studios and writers' pads. And further on out, to Jackson Pollock's bucolic retreat in Springs, a shingled house beside the sheltered salt marshes of Gardiner's Bay.
But the roots go way deeper than that, deep into midwestern soil.
(Thanks to Tim Sullivan, Ros Brenner and Helen Harrison for organizing the poetry reading at Pollock-Krasner House, and to fellow poets Lucas Hunt, Michelle Whittaker, Max Wheat and Claire Schulman for adding their voices in)
Saturday, July 28, 2012
READING WHITMAN: The Gordon Parks Dimension
There’s an intriguing cultural cross-fertilization between the flint
hills and prairies of eastern Kansas — a land of tallgrass prairie and
thin-soiled grazing land, with KC as its urban hub — and the eastern
seaboard, which Walt Whitman called home.
Oh it’s middle America out there all right, with its ball fields and ice cream fundraisers and shootings after midnight outside the local hamburger joint.
But consider these:
-Whitman visited the Kansas prairies and called them the future of American culture, in 1879.
-Teddy Roosevelt showed up at Osawatomie in 1911 to dedicate a park to the fiery abolitionist John Brown and kick off an attack on oligarchy and monopoly in America (one of the more electrifying speeches in American history, called ‘The New Nationalism.’)
-Politically, there’s the impact of midwestern progressivism embodied by Kansas journalists like William Allen White (Emporia Ks) and Julius Wayland (Girard Ks), whose overtly socialist paper “Appeal To Reason” published Eugene Debs, Mother Jones and Jack London — not to mention underwriting the undercover investigative journalism of Sinclair Lewis, which resulted in the great muckraker novel The Jungle.
-Then too there’s the activism of the radical coal miners of the Pittsburg area, commemorated by a sweeping mural at the Pittsburg Library with a depiction of the three day march of the “Army of the Amazons,’ thousands of minetown women rallying against strikebreakers during ‘three cold days in 1921.’ (http://www.joplinglobe.com/local/x333938028/VIDEO-Modern-day-women-rally-to-re-create-historic-Amazon-Army-march/print)
-Artistically, think Charlie Parker, Virgil Thomson, Langston Hughes, Ed Sanders — and Thomas Hart Benton, whose mentorship to Jackson Pollock has yet to befully recognized in the art world.
All of which provides context to the lifework of photographer Gordon Parks, who was reared in the slow-poking county-fair-going BBQ-eating 4H-club prairie town of Fort Scott, and his contribution to the KS-NY connection.
Park’s emergence on the scene in NYC as a photographer for Life was more than just an individual achievement — in fact, he assiduously created a body of work which placed him as a key mid-20th century artistic advocate for the dignity of the underclass and the oppressed.
Let me put it this way. My visit to the Woody Guthrie Festival and the Gordon Parks Museum this week, to bring Whitman’s message of transcendental ‘this is what you shall do’ acceptance of others, had multidimensional references and connotations I hardly realized until I made the scene and checked things out.
As in previous years, the Okemah festival for Woody was enormously gratifying, further illustrating the connectedness of America’s great dust bowl balladeer to the entire nation and beyond, and positively declaring the place of Oklahoma poets in celebrating that (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MauGYj7Kn3U&feature=youtu.be).
But in Fort Scott, flanked by iconic Parks photos of Harlem families, street gangs, South American orphans and the inestimable ‘American Gothic,’ the words of Whitman, Steinbeck, Guthrie, Sandburg, Hughes and Maya Angelou achieved a new dimensionality I hadn’t really anticipated.
A fine crowd in a beautiful space at the local community college, the numbers swelled in part by good press coverage locally (http://www.fstribune.com/story/1872764.html)) and folks who were in town for ‘family reunion week,’ a shout out to them.
This was also my first collaborative reading — and a very successful experiment, so a shout out too to traveling British poet Geraldine Green, who with her husband Geoff was also on a tour which included not only the Parks museum but the Woody Guthrie Festival and readings in Norman OK, Shawnee OK, Pittsburg KS and Kansas City.
In Fort Scott she and I fashioned a tandem reading of the Whitman and Beyond poets and additionally infused some Blake, Coleridge and Burns into the mix. A fabulous result, not least of which was how Geraldine brought down the house with Angelou’s ‘Still I Rise.’ I hope we’ll have a chance to reprise in future appearances.
Kudos and thanks to OK and KS poets who hosted us and read with us along the way, including Carol Hamilton, Dorothy Alexander, Nathan Brown, Carl Sennhein and Jim Spurr (OK); and Al Ortolani, JT Knoll and the good folks at Prospero’s Books in Kansas City (KS). And David Amram, ambassador of bop, who once again extemporized on piano behind two hours of Woody Guthrie lovin’ poets in Okemah.
Oh it’s middle America out there all right, with its ball fields and ice cream fundraisers and shootings after midnight outside the local hamburger joint.
But consider these:
-Whitman visited the Kansas prairies and called them the future of American culture, in 1879.
-Teddy Roosevelt showed up at Osawatomie in 1911 to dedicate a park to the fiery abolitionist John Brown and kick off an attack on oligarchy and monopoly in America (one of the more electrifying speeches in American history, called ‘The New Nationalism.’)
-Politically, there’s the impact of midwestern progressivism embodied by Kansas journalists like William Allen White (Emporia Ks) and Julius Wayland (Girard Ks), whose overtly socialist paper “Appeal To Reason” published Eugene Debs, Mother Jones and Jack London — not to mention underwriting the undercover investigative journalism of Sinclair Lewis, which resulted in the great muckraker novel The Jungle.
-Then too there’s the activism of the radical coal miners of the Pittsburg area, commemorated by a sweeping mural at the Pittsburg Library with a depiction of the three day march of the “Army of the Amazons,’ thousands of minetown women rallying against strikebreakers during ‘three cold days in 1921.’ (http://www.joplinglobe.com/local/x333938028/VIDEO-Modern-day-women-rally-to-re-create-historic-Amazon-Army-march/print)
-Artistically, think Charlie Parker, Virgil Thomson, Langston Hughes, Ed Sanders — and Thomas Hart Benton, whose mentorship to Jackson Pollock has yet to befully recognized in the art world.
All of which provides context to the lifework of photographer Gordon Parks, who was reared in the slow-poking county-fair-going BBQ-eating 4H-club prairie town of Fort Scott, and his contribution to the KS-NY connection.
Park’s emergence on the scene in NYC as a photographer for Life was more than just an individual achievement — in fact, he assiduously created a body of work which placed him as a key mid-20th century artistic advocate for the dignity of the underclass and the oppressed.
Let me put it this way. My visit to the Woody Guthrie Festival and the Gordon Parks Museum this week, to bring Whitman’s message of transcendental ‘this is what you shall do’ acceptance of others, had multidimensional references and connotations I hardly realized until I made the scene and checked things out.
As in previous years, the Okemah festival for Woody was enormously gratifying, further illustrating the connectedness of America’s great dust bowl balladeer to the entire nation and beyond, and positively declaring the place of Oklahoma poets in celebrating that (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MauGYj7Kn3U&feature=youtu.be).
But in Fort Scott, flanked by iconic Parks photos of Harlem families, street gangs, South American orphans and the inestimable ‘American Gothic,’ the words of Whitman, Steinbeck, Guthrie, Sandburg, Hughes and Maya Angelou achieved a new dimensionality I hadn’t really anticipated.
A fine crowd in a beautiful space at the local community college, the numbers swelled in part by good press coverage locally (http://www.fstribune.com/story/1872764.html)) and folks who were in town for ‘family reunion week,’ a shout out to them.
This was also my first collaborative reading — and a very successful experiment, so a shout out too to traveling British poet Geraldine Green, who with her husband Geoff was also on a tour which included not only the Parks museum but the Woody Guthrie Festival and readings in Norman OK, Shawnee OK, Pittsburg KS and Kansas City.
In Fort Scott she and I fashioned a tandem reading of the Whitman and Beyond poets and additionally infused some Blake, Coleridge and Burns into the mix. A fabulous result, not least of which was how Geraldine brought down the house with Angelou’s ‘Still I Rise.’ I hope we’ll have a chance to reprise in future appearances.
Kudos and thanks to OK and KS poets who hosted us and read with us along the way, including Carol Hamilton, Dorothy Alexander, Nathan Brown, Carl Sennhein and Jim Spurr (OK); and Al Ortolani, JT Knoll and the good folks at Prospero’s Books in Kansas City (KS). And David Amram, ambassador of bop, who once again extemporized on piano behind two hours of Woody Guthrie lovin’ poets in Okemah.
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
BEAT KANSAS: 'Pure Spring Water, Gathered In A Tower Where Florence Is Set On A Hill'
'Anybody can make Paris holy, but I can make Topeka holy.'
Jack Kerouac
Us bi-coastal types tend to focus on New York and San Francisco as the dual poles of the Beat Generation. It's a superficial view at best -- the circumstances and personalities of the movement were fundamentally national in scope... from Neal Cassady's Denver connection to Bill Burroughs' place in Texas, and in every crazy encounter on the road from Chicago to Butte and on to Tangiers and Benares and Katmandu.
Did I mention Kansas?
The reference points are everywhere. Neal Cassady’s 30,000 word lost letter to Kerouac, progenitor of bop prosody hand scrawled en route to Kansas City. Kerouac’s 'Kansas fields & night-cows in the secret wides, crackerbox towns with a sea at the end of every street.’ Old Bill Burroughs standing outside his home in Lawrence attempting to blow holes in some artwork with a handgun. Maryville KS's Michael McClure of Six Gallery fame, who in 1964 stood on the beach with Kerouac in Bixby Canyon and heard him recite the tone-poem which concludes Big Sur.
The central figures in the Beat generation are all connected to America’s heartland, Second generation Beat constellation figures too -- Moon Dog, the mysterious character who played his drum in NYC doorways; Zap cartoon’s S Clay Wilson and Charley Plymell. Dennis Hopper emerged on the Venice Beach scene in LA from Dodge City. The Fugs’ Ed Sanders shook things up in lower Manhattan, but got his start in Kansas City.
One has to mention too the KC jazz musicians-- Charlie Parker and Lester Young in particular -- whose aesthetic offered dimension and rootedness to Beat prosody, acknowledged in this well-known Kerouac passage from On The Road:
Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans; before him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy Eldridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and subtlety--leaning to it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world.
Then had come Charlie Parker, a kid in his mother's woodshed in Kansas City, blowing his taped-up alto among the logs, practicing on rainy days, coming out to watch the old swinging Basie and Benny Moten band that had Hot Lips Page and the rest Charlie Parker leaving home and coming to Harlem, and meeting mad Thelonious Monk and madder Gillespie--Charlie Parker in his early days when he was flipped and walked around in a circle while playing. Somewhat younger than Lester Young, also from KC, that gloomy, saintly goof in whom the history of jazz was wrapped; for when he held his horn high and horizontal from his mouth he blew the greatest; and as his hair grew longer and he got lazier and stretched-out, his horn came down halfway; till it finally fell all the way and today as he wears his thick-soled shoes so that he can't feel the sidewalks of life his horn is held weakly against his chest, and he blows cool and easy getout phrases. Here were the children of the American bop night.
Historian Doug Brinkley's quoted as saying that Kerouac's writing was a 'Valentine to America,' but I like to think the relationship between those who love the world in each of its particulars, with a transcendental vision, gets a valentine back.
Meaning it's not Kerouac who makes Topeka holy, or Topeka that makes Kerouac holy. It's the mutuality between particulars, place and person. It's the vision thing.
Sure seems that's the kind of mutuality -- the vision thing -- that happened to Allen Ginsberg as he raced across the great plains of America in the back of a Volkswagon bus in 1966, with a tape machine in his lap and Peter Orlovsky driving.
That's how Ginsberg gathered the material which later became the poem Wichita City Sutra, of particular power for me and in my opinion a worthy companion to the more well known Sunflower Sutra. Climaxing below a watertower ’where Florence is set on a hill’ as he and Orlovsky stop for tea & gas, the poem firmly demonstrates that the visionary transcendental moment can occur anywhere -- in this case, in the lonely dark Kansas night.
Here's an extract:
Meaning it's not Kerouac who makes Topeka holy, or Topeka that makes Kerouac holy. It's the mutuality between particulars, place and person. It's the vision thing.
Sure seems that's the kind of mutuality -- the vision thing -- that happened to Allen Ginsberg as he raced across the great plains of America in the back of a Volkswagon bus in 1966, with a tape machine in his lap and Peter Orlovsky driving.
That's how Ginsberg gathered the material which later became the poem Wichita City Sutra, of particular power for me and in my opinion a worthy companion to the more well known Sunflower Sutra. Climaxing below a watertower ’where Florence is set on a hill’ as he and Orlovsky stop for tea & gas, the poem firmly demonstrates that the visionary transcendental moment can occur anywhere -- in this case, in the lonely dark Kansas night.
Here's an extract:
Allen Ginsberg
Fr WICHITA CITY SUTRA
I'm an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas
but not afraid
to speak my lonesomeness in a car,
because not only my lonesomeness
it's Ours, all over America,
O tender fellows--
& spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy
in the moon 100 years ago or in
the middle of Kansas now.
It's not the vast plains mute our mouths
that fill at midnite with ecstatic language
Not the empty sky that hides
the feeling from our faces
It's not a God that bore us that forbid
our Being, like a sunny rose
all red with naked joy
between our eyes & bellies, yes
All we do is for this frightened thing
we call Love, want and lack --
fear that we aren't the one whose body could be
beloved of all the brides of Kansas City,
kissed all over by every boy of Wichita--
O but how many in their solitude weep aloud like me--
On the bridge over the Republican River
almost in tears to know
how to speak the right language --
on the frosty broad road
uphill between highway embankments
I search for the language
that is also yours--
almost all our language has been taxed by war.
Radio antennae high tension
wires ranging from Junction City across the plains--
highway cloverleaf sunk in a vast meadow
lanes curving past Abilene
to Denver filled with old
heroes of love--
Now, speeding along the empty plain,
no giant demon machine
visible on the horizon
but tiny human trees and wooden houses at the sky's edge
I claim my birthright!
reborn forever as long as Man
in Kansas or other universe--Joy
reborn after the vast sadness of War Gods!
A lone man talking to myself, no house in the brown vastness to hear,
imaging the throng of Selves
that make this nation one body of Prophecy
languaged by Declaration as
Happiness!
I call all Powers of imagination
to my side in this auto to make Prophecy
I lift my voice aloud,
make Mantra of American language now,
I here declare the end of the War!
Ancient days' Illusion!
and pronounce words beginning my own millennium.
Let the States tremble,
let the Nation weep,
let Congress legislate it own delight
let the President execute his own desire--
this Act done by my own voice,
nameless Mystery--
published to my own senses,
blissfully received by my own form
approved with pleasure by my sensations
accomplished in my own imagination
60 miles from Wichita
near El Dorado,
The Golden One,
in chill earthly mist
houseless brown farmland plains rolling heavenward
in every direction
Sound good to you? Does to me. Good enough to figure that this month, as I travel through Oklahoma and Kansas,
I'll pay a visit to Florence myself!
AG NOTE: "In 1965 I ran into Bob Dylan in SF and asked him for money to buy a
tape machine. He gave me enough money to buy a small portable. I drove across
country with the tape machine in the back of a Volkswagen bus from January on
through March ‘ 66. Peter Orlovsky at the wheel and a little table in the Volkswagen
camper in the back where I sat looking at the landscape and made a recorded time
capsule collage of sensory imagery -- the landscape, broadcasts from the car radio,
conversations in the car tags, newspaper headlines, ruminations, the seeds of my own
convictions in the back seat all alone."
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