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Poets on the Line 01
P O E T S on the line
volume one, number one -- february 1995
Poets
on
the
line
is a
continuing
poetry
anthology
edited by
Robert Bove
Andrew Gettler
& Linda Lerner
Special thanks to John Fowler, without whose generous help Poets
on the line would not have been possible.
(c) 1995 by Poets on the line.
All work herein published by permission of the authors.
All rights remain with authors.
*****************************************************************
CONTENTS
The First Time................Karl Shapiro...............3
Lilith........................Enid Dame..................4
Four Songs....................Charles Plymell............6
Grey Staten...................Martha King................7
The Human Condition in Brighton Beach...Donald Lev.......8
Fall and Winter
(a Russian Novel)..........Donald Lev.................9
Played Jazz Violin Like
an Out of Town Junkie......Linda Lerner..............10
Jamming with the Angels--
Town Hall & Elsewhere .....Linda Lerner..............11
Liquid Jesuit.................Andrew Gettler............12
Widower.......................Deborah C. La Veglia......15
the beating of the
body's blood...............Tony Moffeit..............16
a blues rain a jazz rain......Tony Moffeit..............17
Tarot Card III. The Empress...Grace Cavalieri...........18
An Ambassador to
the Next Century...........Robert Bove...............19
At a Little Remove............Robert Bove...............20
Brioche: Visit with
Betty Rose and Ray.........Betsy Robin Schwartz......21
Ball..........................Jim Heck..................23
Pretas' Light.................Jim Heck..................24
Ode to Karl Shapiro...........Leo Connellan.............25
Interview with
Charles Plymell............Dave Sellitto.............28
***********************************************************
The First Time
by Karl Shapiro
Behind shut doors, in shadowy quarentine,
There shines the lamp of iodine and rose
That stains all love with its medicinal bloom.
This boy, who is no more than seventeen,
Not knowing what to do, takes off his clothes
As one might in a doctor's anteroom.
Then in a cross-draft of fear and shame
Feels love hysterically burn away,
A candle swimming down to nothingness
Put out by its own wetted gusts of flame,
And he stands smooth as uncarved ivory
Heavily curved for some expert caress.
And finally sees the always open door
That is invisible till the time has come,
And half falls through as through a rotten wall
To where chairs twist with dragons from the floor
And the great bed drugged with its own perfume
Spreads its carnivorous flower-mouth for all.
The girl is sitting with her back to him;
She wears a black thing and she rakes her hair,
Hauling her round face upward like moonrise;
She is younger than he, her angled arms are slim
And like a country girl her feet are bare.
She watches him behind her with old eyes,
Transfixing him in space like some grotesque,
Far, far from her where he is still alone
And being here is more and more untrue.
Then she turns round, as one turns at a desk,
And looks at him, too naked and too soon,
And almost gently asks: Are you a Jew?
***********************************************************
Lilith
by Enid Dame
kicked myself out of paradise
left a hole in the morning
no note no goodbyeÔ
was patient and hairy
he cared for the animals
worked late at night
planting vegetables
under the moon
sometimes he'd hold me
our long hair tangled
he kept me from rolling
off the planet
it was
always safe there
but safety
wasn't enough. I kept nagging
pointing out flaws
in his logic
he carried a god
around in his pocket
consulted it like
a watch or an almanac
it always proved
I was wrong
two against one
isn't fair! I cried
and stormed out of Eden
into history:
the Middle Ages
were sort of fun
they called me a witch
I kept dropping
in and out
of people's sexual fantasies
now
I work in New Jersey
take art lessons
live with a cabdriver
he says; baby
what I like about you
is your sense of humor
sometimes
I cry in the bathroom
remembering Eden
and the man and the god
**********************************************************
Four Songs
by Charles Plymell
1.
Press "one" if you want to be right
Press "two" if you understand life
Press "dos" if you speak Spanish
Remain on hold if you want to commit suicide
2.
For every unmatched star that
breeds and dies along its beads
there is a creature in the woods
there is the season of my ancestor
who found the ancient turtle
by the rocks along the Mohawk
3.
Pete seat mate
has hat head on backwards
He becomes a sigh ballon
that jazzmen silence
when the uptake pump jumps
He struggles with a plug
and watches the fly fly away
As the shoreline struggles
against the pull, the
geometry of a solar journey
outlines the grizzly cracks
that crush against the sunrise
4.
I've travelled around these states
like a migrant bird, a prehistoric
whooping crane just over the highway,
over again trying to keep its
brain light for flight
It can't afford the weight of memory
I'd trade my memory for flight
and jettison my files and bank
for a little riff like Charley Parker
a new song for not carrying the drag
an old refrain here or there
gospel thoughts gathered
like plantation cotten
************************************************************
Grey Staten
by Martha King
Rats had drowned in the storm.
We stepped over the line.
You said don't look but I did.
They were bloated, opal, pale.
You looked too.
Mauve tongues, soaked bellies, mouths open.
We stepped past as pewter light streamed above our heads.
We stepped across on sand like soft cement.
Soaked.
Sky.
Ocean.
Post.
Coital.
************************************************************
The Human Condition in Brighton Beach
by Donald Lev
Did you see the salt shaker?
It has been carried away.
And the onion that lay in slices on this very table only
yesterday
is likewise mysteriously vanished.
And the lace curtains that moved so gracefully in that window
are gone also.
And the porcelein pitcher from Mexico, I'd never think to
miss it,
but I see it's not in its usual place on the book shelf.
What has happened to the independent clutter about me?
What tricks are occurring, and why?
There was a third left to that stick of butter only just a
moment ago.
Where is it now?
It's not madness. I am sure of that. I am sure of that.
Madness is such an oldfashioned idea and it would never apply
to me.
My friends would have told me by now. They hold nothing back
from me.
I think I'd better go for a walk. I'll take an umbrella.
I'll walk over to the beach to have a look at the sea,
or I'll go up to Coney Island Avenue and buy a knish.
A kasha knish, maybe, with a cup of very light coffee.
Then I'll go to the post office and buy some stamps.
Just so I can stand on the line and grumble together
with everybody else and watch how the wily Russians
sneak to the front of the line. But what did I do with my
key?
This is beginning to get to me. I can't leave the house
without my key.
And obviously, if I stay here I'll go crazy.
*************************************************************
Fall and Winter (a Russian Novel)
by Donald Lev
zetsov was only thirty versts from
putzov, but i refused to walk.
anatoly! i implore you to drive me
to zetsov. i'll give you four
rubles.
anatoly spit contemptuously. "six"
he replied.
but i only have four. for the love of
God, anatoly!
he signalled me to climb up into the
wagon beside him.
grechunka was away in the forest feeding her wolves.
or so nikolai, her father's half-brother and her slave,
would have led me to believe.
but i did not believe, i could not believe!
so i set forth for the quarter called svetlaya,
a haven for gypsies pimps and poles,
searching for my grechunka, to repay
her the thirty rubles i had cheated
out of her worthless uncle prince pitkin.
but she was nowhere about.
let her feed her wolves! i shouted,
and ordered more vodka
my head was spinning as they led me away.
********************************************************
by Linda Lerner
He played down to the nerve
twisting himself in sound;
played from his gut; dead screams
rumbling underground
speared into trees;
he played to free himself,
played with the soul of his mind
of his flesh,
in the sweltering night
licking ice cream crowd
he played like he had no time left
like a junkie, using his bow like his sex;
the Man supplying his own fix.
Arching, hips foward
desire without object
he curved high around each note;
hitting bottom
played like he had no skin;
like no cool New Yorker ever would.
********************************************************
Jamming with the Angels---Town Hall & Elsewhere (5/19/94)
for Andrew
by Linda Lerner
A four day beat revival
of your own to mark 50
your day
happening
to be theirs
took us
to Town Hall/wake-
ning of Jack's spirit
in shirt & tie worn pals
squeezing into old jive sounds
in you burst
thru twenty years restraints/
ordering of days...
always had an edge, though,
never quite fit
suit you wore
ripped off at last, asÔ
With a swinging chick
you stumbled on in me
one night,
blasted on jazz on wine on sex
mostly
high on you
hit a road
swerved off in reckless youth;
four days warned anyone who'd listen
of a second coming.
(not bad for a mortal)
candle lit you blew
all the Pall Mall burnt
stale air you could cough up
blew half century
rebellion
into
orbit.
******************************************************
Liquid Jesuit
by Andrew Gettler
i ll tell you when to listen
don t want you
coming to my poem
finishing my poem
journey has always been
not to
but through
everyone i have no patience
you are either out or in
back table or
uncomfortably up front
i ll tell you when to listen
i am tired of
rounding out your corners
showing you the edge
go ahead:
dance above that safe slope
when falling s not the only choice
balance is a clown showÔ
roughness, to be
awkward again & uncertain
not
to be so sure
i know what you want me
to convince you of
i ll tell you when to listen
listen: here s how it is
of all the people in this room
i m the only one who knows
who he is
i have no warring factions
anymore
which is not to say
treaties haven t
cost me plenty
i am Irish: should i revere Yeats?
I am Czech: should i memorize a map of Praha?
listen:
christ was into a stone thing but
crucifiction is an idiot s game
stammering into history
anemic as a poem
Carruth can be Jesus on a wagon-tongue;
why not i as well, astride a barstool,
arrogant with suffering?
come to this poem
finish this poem
words Myshkinized me:
thinking Saviour,
i cried,
Come!
to my horror,
some did;
worse,
some listened;
you d think
nine hundred years of guilt
clinging to the tactile sense
would put me off...Ô
worse,
touched others;
worst of all,
wrote that touching into
touching back;
still want to
come to this poem?
finish this poem?
listen:
looking up
i am surprised there is still a down and
further still to fall and faster than i
thought and no strength and...
Damn!
all MY Dead
have made it home
before me
listen:
come...
finish...
****************************************************
Widower
by Deborah C. La Veglia
This man
is unaffected
by the smell,
the smell of stale,
sweet carnations
in a room,
large,
but too small
for him
not to see
the woman, the mother, the wife.
And the delicate roses,
pink, rosary shaped,
are pretty there
pinned to the quilted satin top.
waiting for him
to move on
to move away
from the mother-wife
that was there
for thirty-eight years
and then not,
there and then gone.
And this man,
uninvolved
in the bits
of conversation,
not talking,
but moving through the words,
will do his waking later,
not in the smoke filled waiting room,
not in the crowded parlor,
but in the quiet of their room,
now his,
when talk is done
and visits stop,
in his room,
filled with things:
hair in brush,
make-up in a bag,
clothes hanging
in a closet.
*****************************************************
the beating of the body's blood
by Tony Moffeit
it was a time of threes: deaths traffic accidents
a friend who died in her sleep another attached to
a machine another in a traffic accident when a young
woman for one instant crossed the median to meet my
friend headon then my collisions three of them glass
shattering metal crashing the reverberations riddling
the body like an earthquake the deaths of my friends
my own colliding that was the time i learned of the
stonefly and his built-in drum they come in threes
so they say deaths traffic accidents three dancers
i met and the stonefly beating mating rhythms with
his built-in drum the crashing of metal and glass
the breath leaving the body the dancers with their
turns their glide their flight the stonefly drumming
his blues his mating refrain his tom-tom rhythmÔ
other side of the light three dancers making the
darkness shine thighs glowing in the night it was
then i learned of the stonefly the jungle of his
moves the drumming of his blues like the silence
of the dancers and their screaming moves they come
in threes so they say the dancers i met the crash of
metal and glass the turns and slides the glide and
the flight the spins it was then i learned of the
stonefly and his built-in drum his mating rhythm
the dancers thighs glowing in the night the
shattered glass thrown like diamond dice on the
highway the built-in tom-tom of the stonefly and his
blues call they come in threes so they say death by
sleep death by machine death by the dice of the
instant of crossing the median line kill line
chance controlled by the throw of the dice the body
immortalized in a dance the beating of the body's
drum they come in threes so they say the deaths
the dance the traffic accidents the dice of the glass
flying like diamond dust the love the lust the word
the blood the drum the internal jungle of the
stonefly the inner jungle of his drum his tom-tom
the beating of the body's blood the breath that can
be lost in an instant turning over in your sleep or
a car that crosses the median line colliding headon
the stonefly drumming the dancers with their thighs
lighting the night the dream the lust the blood all
intertwined the last breath the laugh of a child
********************************************************
a blues rain a jazz rain
by Tony Moffeit
it rained in new orleans
a blues rain a jazz rain
it rained in the streets
a mojo rain a voodoo rain
while the musicians played
jug and guitar and washboard
it rained in new orleans
while a wild wild woman
on a french balcony
danced and threw roses
it rained in the streets
a blues rain a jazz rain
while the musicians played
jug and guitar and washboardÔ
and i shouted at the top
of my lungs: hey hey hey hey
a blues rain a jazz rain
and a wild wild woman
threw roses from a
french quarter balcony
it rained in new orleans
a mojo rain a voodoo rain
and i was like a hobo
waiting for a train
as a siren sounded
through the streets
it rained in new orleans
a blues rain a jazz rain
Tarot Card III. The Empress
by Grace Cavalieri
This slender hand of grass -
this slender white hand...
this old hand
moving drunkenly
across the page...
Passing through this hand
there is a door,
a garden you wouldn't have known
where willows grew upward
some days, where the river ran blue.
This pen has a face of its own
It looks like a courtesan
who was merry once,
a fool who danced
until she cried.
Now she is the mistress of herself
and her own small story.
**************************************************
An Ambassador to the Next Century
by Rober Bove
Ivy-educated white architect, 45-ish, who lived
precariously in group house on M St. is an emissary
we're sending into the future
who kept a pig's head in the frig to photograph
until he found a female model to hold it
naked at her crotch
who was, himself, curious why he had
the impulse in the first place;
excitedly fingered a couple books
he'd been assigned at school years ago and
found the rationale somwhere between
Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm
(amazing he read a complete sentence anywhere, really, since
all he read were the top three newsweeklies, plus Life and
Vanity Fair--and only the picture captions--
his main activity being--when he's not working silently,
suspiciously, imperiously, or drinking in bars too loud to
carry on a real conversation--mainiacally grazing
images from 50 cable stations).
Made a cross-country trip, he did,
to "take in America"
and came back with some good photos
and a journal where he described mountains as "majestic,'
deserts as "flat and lifeless," rivers as
"muddy gashes between tree-lined banks," and
"highways disappearing into the horizon."
When he moved off M St., he left at the curb a pile of
garbage, neglected during a year of garbage days, that would
have filled an efficiency apt. floor to ceiling--
a pile of garbage still rotting in tropical sun weeks later,
oozing fetid to the gutter, but providing amusement
as we tell incredulous euramerican visitors to the
neighborhood the pile was not left by aframericans,
was designed and built, in fact, by a well-paid corp.
architect who had spent 540 moons on the planet leaving
such business cards the world over, whose lack of ironic
sensibility is, itself, a monument at once
majestic, flat, and lifeless.
*********************************************************
At a Little Remove
by Robert Bove
park bench
her breeze-mussed chestnut
hair
glinting in sun
set well against
creamy complexion.
She munches rapidly
through a straw
licking lips and fingers
after
each bite, each drink
and with a little effort i am
that food
that drink
i am
that accomodating bench
***********************************************************
Brioche: Visit with Betty Rose and Ray
by Betsy Robin Schwartz
You know, I just retired, he said
Just a couple of weeks, she said
But, I'm just as busy as can be, he said
I baked my first yeast bread
One of those french things, she said
can I get you all something
we got those fancy crackers
have some cheese
some fruit
Oh, it's lovely, he said
you knead the dough
place it in a pan
set it in a warm
environmentÔ
quietly
He set it down near the dishwater, she said
while it was going
I almost tripped over it
I said Ray
what in the blue blazes you got that
there on the floor for
And, if you've done it just right, he said
not just about right
but real right
with the right
ingredients
it moves
lovely
It moved alright, she said
scared me near to death
see that thing on the floor
moving like that
but then
Then, it comes alive, he said
it grows plush
and beautiful
like well like
like
You want some more coffee, she said
he's just gets too too
well too
you know that bread
was pretty good too
what you call that Ray
I can't think of the name
french bread
brioche
not bad
yes brioche
pretty good buttered
pretty good bread
Now Betty Rose, I'm looking for words, he said
please don't interrupt me, darling
I'm trying to describe it
how can I describe it
yes yes oh yes
that's right
it moves
it moves
just pure
and perfect
and warm like
making love
to the right woman
*******************************************************
Ball
by Jim Heck
Bought in Vietnam in 1964,
this small plastic
red and blue ball,
is orphan as my woe.
In my hand
this gift becomes warm,
embodies possibles.
Worth to you, love for me,
touched by you, chosen,
thought about,
makes your love concrete.
I can scrawl our names in it,
bounce it, carve it in a tree,
fall asleep in its arms.
This collage
I'm constructing of you,
kindergarten plaster hand printed project,
makes me have to wash my hands twice
before I hold my son
for fear of the heartache rubbling off.
This is all I will ever
have of you, papa,
silhouette of your ghost.
*******************************************************
Pretas' Light
by Jim Heck
Scholars dispute the color
red or yellow.
Stop or proceed with caution.
Red sky at night, rust never sleeps,
nickname was "rusty",
strawberry blond with a red beard.
Never saw the light,
taught to be a gluttonous savior.
Stop or proceed with caution.
Stopped to die in Ca Mau,
life leaked out of the bullet holes
thousands of miles from home,
hungry, abandoned, ignored
& forgotten you wander.
Stop or proceed with caution.
Stop crying, there is no time,
buried yet not mourned
in the silence of a tabooed war
you wander, unknown soldier.
Stop or proceed with caution.
Stopped fast for a yellow thought I saw a cop,
brake lights unseen
no third eye, hit from behind
bleeding crimson
in a flipped over jeep,
smelling gas.
I shook the hand
of the man that hit me.
Stop or proceed with caution.
Stopped the feelings of fear,
anger and greed that causes
man to die, kill, wander
eternal red light pretas.
*********************************************************
Ode to Karl Shapiro
by Leo Connellan
the lone heterosexual rides his last maiden
into her screaming dawn.
From now on she'll be known as all knowing
liberated woman who doesn't give anything to you,
and doesn't want anything.
Your size means nothing to her and
what you can do with it, nothing and
it means very little to her if she does it,
and very little if she doesn't.
The city of New York is cracked. Where the moon rises
Karl Shapiro lands at Idlewild. Along Broadway
Jack Dempsey's is become th' home of th' Whopper
and George M, Cohan finally looks ridiculous
in Pigeon expression.
From the jungles of the South Pacific pulling
detail on Pacific isles, came home Karl Shapiro
with Bill Mauldin and Ernie Pyle, everybody's
cartoonist, everybody's drinking buddy correspondent,
and a poet who was in a war.
Karl Shapiro home like the Lion of Judah on
the pages of the New Yorker, put a Pulitzer in
his pocket and to Chicago, edited, then
Japan, India, Germany, Nebraska...California.
Along the Hudson and Westchester the
highway broke apart and fell down on
pier scurrying thieves underneath.
The old west side trail crushed from
trucks, taxi cabs and motorists weaving
in and out in sudden death hurry.
Drenching the air in sweat and gas
while a thouseand shady deals cost lives
and it cost your life to try and stay alive.
In the dawn moon the lone heterosexual
rides his last maiden singing "Hi-Ho
Blonde Chick aw-waay!" and swinging Edsel
landed at Kennedy.
Karl Shapiro, I sing to you from my youth for
your great courage when you didn't have to and
it would have profited you more not to stand up
against the WASP and the FACIST.
But this will not be one-a' them revealing tributes,
in which I cry "This one, too, Karl, this one,
"Hey, Karl, bebbe, whachoo doin' down there
among th' Irish!?"
When this nobody came to you, you who were everything
embraced me. I have only imagined poems,
you, Karl, have written them.
What it was to read your images! Freeing us
from Whitman long before Allen told us it was
all right to tongue somebody's ear out, you wrote
"Buick" and "Nigger" while Federico saw
butterflies in Walt's beard and, excited,
a youngster, I wrote
TO BEGIN WITH
But my years now
in half seconds each squeezed for the utmost.
Defeated House Invalid's complete ceasing.
Fire the Pilot Light in the furnace of myself
like one kneeling outdoors on a windy night
presses lips close to the new starting fire,
softly blows it to re-kindle where the spark had died.
And, swimming in my head your "Buick," Karl, I wrote, then,
STAY LOOSE
When the rent man comes frothing into your pig-sty
eyes throwing you out, and the rat you've been sharing with
tip-toes cross door ledge behind him refusing to spring
bite into his roast beef fed neck that his face justs off
like a constipated owl as his drool hangs at the crevice
where a chin, somewhere in the rolls of greasy flesh should be,
ask him back. Be a host who's too busy to see a sick friend,
while his look pops disbelief as he can't catch his breath.
Push him back in that hall an animal would go blind in.Ô
Gently slamming the door and bending, shove through
to his greedy little reach an envelope on which is scribbled,
small as a needle point...I'm moving...soon...soon.
Along the Hudson and Westchester
that road has broken off with us.
And downtown the chortling clowns
hustle us, Karl, out of our literature.
Second rate mediocrity arriving to read
what they call their "poems" on stages
like The New School, nasty mean people
always lugging knapsacks bent over like
the crawling things they are, struggling, not
about poetry but career, what will be bad
enough not threaten and so allowed.
There may be no Schliemann to find
the lost Troy of verse, Karl, and no
one who even knows Delmore Schwartz.
No one who reads Eberhart and Jarrell,
Allen's Kaddish or Federico
Watermelon poem or who ever
heard of the Naome Replansky.
But, Karl Shapiro, I sing to you for standing
for these people and these things. I sing
to you for myself because you gave me
myself in my art and you gave me yourself.
*******************************************************
Interview with Charles Plymell
by Dave Sellitto
Q: Because of the content of the writing that took place during
the Beat era, dealing with specific people and places, using
memoirs or odes, do you think that this aspect of the writing
will
affect its long-term security in the world of literature?
A: What you are asking is if the solipsistic raving the Beats,
especially Allen (Ginsberg - Plymell will refer to Ginsberg many
times during the interview) and the realities he's claimed for
himself, if that insight into a personality and privacy of those
he
designated as the angels of his magic circle; If all that will
what you're asking. The answer is yes.
There are two answers. First, no matter what most of them
do, it's far superior to the necrophilic literature of the
academe which re-constructs the dead page and tries to disguise
it once again for public palatability. Of course the
contemporary audience has been numbed or bewildered in the
process and has died along with it, so there is no contention
since critical awareness is non-existent, replaced by the few
patrons who have made a fetish of poetry and art. They became
the source of providing legitimacy mainly to untalented, clever
people who like to play the sensitive Bohemian and expect to be
rewarded, but the language is essentially dead, or trumped up to
fit passing fads or perceived inequities of favored ethnic and
gender groups.
They are also regional, with an emphasis on craft. Other
than the New Yorker, in my region the literati still read Cooper,
whose language is stilted, contrived, and pretentious, so those
we used to call artsy fartsy still flourish in quaint towns like
Cooperstown and support the local artists and intelligentsia who
are about as dated as James Fenimore himself. But that's the way
it is in locals all over the country, thanks to the State and
Federal Governments' reach for regionalism in the arts.
Of course it has nothing to do with finding a real voice out
there. It becomes what Carl Weissner, translator of Bukowski,
called "subsidized lint," as in belly button fuzz. One or two
lines from our state poet, Richard Howard, who was just awarded
$10,000 of your money should tip off any reader that there's
nothing happening.
There is a commonality of such pathos from the book morgues
of the safe academic mainistream poets that sinks immediately to
cold bathos upon reading. All dead academic poetry sounds the
same, sometimes a little condensed milk is added as filler for
mainstream commercial New Yorker tastes, or a squirt of whipped
cream parlor humor confection. Academic poetry has imploded,
ruined an audience. Students no longer flock to these classes,
though they express a desire for poetry in almost a seminal
context.
Academics should be keepers and scholars of poetry on the
page and not attempt to mimic it. They have never figured out
how poetry lives both on and off the page. By contrast, even
Allen'sslobbery hyperbole of his famous lines from Howl has a
ring to them, a sound that transcends the time. You can sense
the same in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Blake, Whitman, everyone who
writes timeless poetry.
The "academics" in Shakespeare's day also tried to dismiss
his language as frivolous, instinctively trying to stamp out
anything that might outlive them. Even his most contrived lines
in the Sonnets break the cadence of typical Elizabethan trot and
could easily transcend to a line from one of Hank William's
songs. Then you begin to realize what makes a greater and more
sacred audience. But Shakespeare probably had abnormal brain
chemistry that allowed him to hear words that could resound, or
resonate through time on every possible level at once. TheÔ
what you call "security." That stretch, that ambiguity, which the
pompous academic so despises is one sign of life.
The other, in Allen's case, is that he tried to be where
history was in the making. To make the scene, as it was. This
helped keep his face in the news, but one also knew that history
was happening, and if one hung in with the scene, one could be a
part of it, like the Chicago riots; when else, or where else
could a political party show a clearer picture of hypocrisy to
the world? Where and when could one of France's greatest poets,
the convict Jean Genet, slip across the Canadian border and join
the great American icon, William Burroughs, while people were
clubbed, and even Dan Rather shoved around by goons? And if one
had the credentials of fame, one could raise a lot of hell and
not worry about jail time. We don't have revolutionary times
now, but to have been a part of it, like St. Petersburg, 1917, or
in Mexico with Pancho Villa or Zapata--that was poetry in action.
I remember sitting at a poetry reading in San Francisco State in
the 60s, you know, with a highly paid creative writing professor,
a half a dozen sycophants and a candle, when all of a sudden
glass started shattering and bottles were thrown. Finally one
poet aficionado rose to his feet and announced, "Hell, the poetry
is going on out here," and everybody ran outside to the campus
riot where Hiakawa grabbed the microphone and "fired" Kay Boyle.
Ezra Pound said, "Literature is news that stays news."
There is not a better definition, and the poet and his time knows
just how close those words come into being literal. Allen knew
that and writers of the Beat Generation sensed that, so there was
always a feeling of recording history as well as one's own
reality, even Ferlinghetti while sitting in Mike's Pool Hall. No
matter if it's bad writing, it retains some importance. And by
keeping the main players intact - Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg
and Corso - though protest poems die, Allen has made sure and
lobbied for the "body Beat" to be substantial enough and good
enough. Even though it is outside of what his detractors may
call lasting literature, it will survive. It is already in the
historical hopper, so the question is moot. Don't let poetry
professors give you that old "test of time" bullshit. They don't
know.
Q: Since you've been writing, has your disdain of the "Academe"
grown? Has it shrunk? Have you seen yourself assimilated at
all?
A: No, I don't play the game. I've seen enough distinguished
lecturers, celebrity visitors, wine and cheese, cocktail parties,
kitchen conversations groping for sex, sycophancy, unabashed
positioning for publication, awards, favors, honorariums, the
pecking order; it becomes the same game, the same party, so I
know what it is. I've had my 15 minutes of fame. I had a book
signing party for me at Gotham Book Mart in N.Y.C. upon the
publication of one of my books, which was very well attended, so
I've had my wine, my little taste of good bread and brie. After
I got out of Hopkins, I was offered a tenure-track position atÔ
became one of the creative writing industry centers like Iowa,
but the creative writing industry, whether it's in the tower or
from the street eventually takes a very energetic, motivated,
calculative, cold piranha with a dark mind to keep afloat in such
murky waters. I'm not saying I'm above it, I'm saying I didn't
join the game. I wasn't a bored member type.
-- end --
