Another variant of micropublishing is the self-published chapbook intended solely to be distributed for free to friends. I’ve written in this blog before of the beautiful chaps done by David Gitin in Monterey & Jim McCrary in Kansas has likewise been doing such books for years, some with color covers & stitched binding, others simply saddle-stapled. There was a time when one needed a photocopy shop to produce such work, but nowadays even a halfway decent inkjet printer could put you in the poetry-as-potlatch business.
When I was in San Francisco, Tinker Greene, whom I hadn’t seen in years, handed me a copy of Man Going to His Doom: A Book of Pictures, which the verso notes was printed “on his computer in a flexible edition” in 2003. Tinker & I were roommates for awhile, over a quarter of a century ago. In those days, he was as much a translator as a poet, someone heavily influenced by surrealism & certain sides of the New York School. And indeed, he thanks Ron Padgett and “especially, Blaise Cendrars” among those poets “whose poems . . . influenced mine.” Yet Greene also thanks others, fellow travelers perhaps, but figuring a broader aesthetic than I’d noted back in the 1970s: Anselm Hollo, Joanne Kyger, Diane DiPrima and Bill Corbett.
What Greene didn’t like – felt was silly, perhaps, possibly even debasing to the fundamental act of writing for the sake of self-knowledge – was the hustle associated with putting oneself forward enough to publish. Being the peripatetic sort myself, I sometimes sensed a comradely disapproval on Greene’s part, a modest scrunching of the brow, at some of my own activities. Self-publishing is the perfect venue for someone who feels this way. &, if I look at it dispassionately, it’s as legitimate a path for the written art as any.
Illustrated on its cover with a drawing of a Day-of-the-Dead type skeleton in a black shroud, Man Going to His Doom is not the depressing work it might at first sound like, although this is poetry that is dealing with more than a few deaths – Greene’s brother, his son, poets, musicians, “a poodle / in heedless traffic.” That’s a heavy body count for a book printed on just four sheets of paper, a dozen poems (one of which, “What I Remember About 2002,” is a sequence of nine shorter works), a concentration of time – the poems are dated over a 15 month period – with a heavy emotional toll.
But the Tinker Greene of the 21st century isn’t a retro-surrealist of
the 1970s – these are more depictive, even narrative poems, showing more visibly the influences of Hollo, Kyger & Corbett than Cendrars. If anything, they remind me somewhat of another favorite poet of mine, Jack Collom. Here is the fifth piece from “What I Remember About 2002,” one of the longest in the book, a poem that strikes me as being perfectly written:
We dedicated a memorial grove in Big Basin Redwoods
State Park in 2002 to honor Billy
my son, who was killed in 2001.
It’s an unofficial spot. I can give you a map
if you’d like to go there. At various times
throughout the summer one or the other of us will
hike out there to water the seedlings we planted to hold Billy’s soul.
You drive south along the overcast coast
about an hour from San Francisco, park
at Waddell Beach, spend another hour walking in.
On weekday’s there’s hardly anyone there. The occasional
trail bike might rattle past. All summer it is gray
and slightly muggy, and you are alone with your thoughts,
your breathing. On one
such pilgrimage, with exquisite
gradualness, a sound of
unintelligible raving and shouting somewhere
ahead came into my consciousness as if
arising from deep in my brain. Up the trail
a couple of miles from the road I came to
a cluster of fundamentalist evangelists
standing in a circle with bowed heads
holding hands, speaking in tongues.
I’m not going to tell you how to contact Tinker Greene, since it’s not self-evident that he wants to be sending these poems out to dozens or hundreds of people. But this is an excellent, gentle, nuanced book & if you know the man, you should hit him up for a copy. It’s well worth the effort.
