A couple of people wrote to
suggest that my general list
of outsider poets was far too “inside.” Michael Helsem
notes that
Xexox Sutra
Editions (now Xexoxial Endarchy)
published several writers who must be considered bonafide
"outsiders", notably the artist/poet Malok
(who is now online); his drawings in particular bear comparison with anything
at Lausanne ...
Chris Sullivan, editor [if bricolage can be called editing] of the excellently weird zine, Journal of
Public Domain, comments:
Todays
discussion of "outsiders" got me to wonder [sic] if you are aware of the "song-poem" genre.
There's a website devoted to
it, and I'm forwarding a link to a page about Thomas Guygax
To which I would note that, yep, these guys are so
far outside that they need to carry
sun block. In general, the writers I listed were successful poets who, for
various reasons, live or lived pretty marginally, at least in economic or
social terms. But, since the original note from Jason Earls to which I was
responding invoked Henry Darger
as its example, the hospital janitor & pedophile painter/novelist whose work
would have been lost had not his landlord been an art-savvy professional
photographer who discovered the paintings & writing among Darger’s effects after this escapee from a “home for the
feeble minded” passed away, perhaps I should have been thinking further outside
the box.
These notes harkened me back to my work with the
Tenderloin Writers Workshop in San Francisco between 1979 & ’81, and some
of the writers there, especially Harley Kohler, a bearded (!) cross-dresser who
wrote generally obscene sonnets in a language given almost entirely over to
neologisms, or “Spider” James Taylor, a young man who penned long, obsessive
novels with a gritty comic-book realism. The Workshop – which had a “no guns in
class” rule that I made up on the spot one evening – included an amazing
diversity of inner-city perspectives, from drug-addicted street people to
senior women who would crochet while listening to the different readers, then
simply comment something like, “Well, I think all junkies should be shot,
present company excepted.” A few of the writers who participated in the
workshop – Mary Tall Mountain, Bob Harrison, Charles Bivins
– went on to publish quite successfully. But one of the strongest memories I
have of the group was an evening in which Bob Holman, traveling through San
Francisco , dropped by in time to
watch two of the writers, one from New
Orleans , the
other from the Caribbean ,
disagree on the nature of Santeria &, accordingly, cast curses upon one
another.
There were even writers in the Tenderloin in those
years whose lives proved so far outside that even the notably free-ranging
workshop was far too confining. One man, whose name I only knew as Douglas ,
would pen long, mostly unreadable texts in black magic marker on the
neighborhood’s few very scrawny trees.
One of the things I like most about Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery: Modern American
Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945 (Wisconsin, 1989) is
how Nelson constructs a panorama of the entire range of between-wars poetry
starting with one of its most “despised” subgenres, leftwing doggerel published
in “non-literary” political tabloids. The idea that the whole of writing might
be continuous may be something of a theoretical fiction – it’s much more like
overlapping tectonic plates – but Nelson’s tour-de-force
(the book is a single long prose meditation on the violence hidden in
canonization, while the footnotes, which consume half or more of almost every
page, constitute a history of one period of American letters as detailed as any
written) does demonstrate just how much further beyond the traditionally
conceived boundaries belle lettre truly extends.
Everywhere, people write. My experience of the
Tenderloin was that I got to see manuscripts from perhaps two percent of the
adult community in any given year. Extrapolate that out across the population
of the United States
& you get a number in the millions. Indeed, the 1,000 actively publishing
writers in the Philadelphia
region that Robin’s Book Store claims
to have in its database would, at that rate, represent only one percent of all
the local people who actually write.
Now, inner city communities with large populations of the retired as
well as the disabled may well prove to have more writers than the exurbs of
quiet desperation, simply because these segments of the population have that
rarest of commodities, surplus time, but the general principle itself still
stands.
Over the years, I’ve learned an enormous amount from
writers like Harley Kohler & Spider Taylor .
These writers don’t necessarily connect to poetry as a social practice, though
they do, it seems, very much rely on its role as a personal one.* They make it
possible for me to see, however fleetingly, just which presumptions I might be
making with regards to my own poetry. How publishing itself
is predicated on a long list of such presumptions. Should I count these people
in my roster of “outsider poets”? I think that may be a definitional question,
but I absolutely count them among my own significant influences.
*Kohler
in particular got to know some of the other poets in the Bay Area, such as Lyn
Hejinian. His partner at one point was a caretaker in the first
board-&-care home that Larry Eigner lived in when he first moved to Berkeley .