I generally despise I-95 & there’s nothing about the Memorial Day Weekend that is apt to make me love it any more deeply. As it happened, I had to view the aftermath of what appeared to be a fatal accident near Aberdeen, Maryland, on my way back from Falls Church, VA, where I had stayed with Lynne Dreyer & her family after my reading at Bridge Street Books. As soon as I could, I headed off 95 & took a route along two-lane roads from Darlington, Maryland up through Parkesburg, Pennsylvania, before cutting over to the 30-Bypass & 202 for the last leg home. In both directions, Saturday and Monday, I listened to a “radio play” recording of Doctor Sax and the Great World Snake that Krishna gave me as a present for Christmas.

As an audio-book, Doctor Sax is a hoot & a half, as a number of readers work their through a screenplay Kerouac wrote based on his novel, accompanied by an occasional sound-effect (balls scattering on a pool table, etc.) and a reasonably decent score by John Medeski. Of the 14 voices heard on this 2-CD affair, two have considerably more than half of all the air time – the narrator, spoken by the late Robert Creeley, the one role in this project that demands (and gets) a fair amount of quiet subtlety, & a variety of characters all given voice by poet-rock star Jim Carroll, who generally does a good job distinguishing between his roles & pulls off an utterly spooky Peter Lorre imitation in the process. Doctor Sax is spoken by Grateful Dead lyricist & poet Robert Hunter, who frankly sounds too healthy for a character that seems to have been based in part on Kerouac’s roommate during the penning of Sax, William S. Burroughs. The wizard Faustus is portrayed by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who plays the role as tho he were the old character actor Gabby Hayes. All the players appear to be having a blast & the pleasure is contagious. I was able to listen to the entire project straight through twice with only one day between sessions & never once suffered a moment’s boredom.

Sax is a novel that was published, like so much of Kerouac’s writing, to mixed reviews. This is especially true for those books that focus not on Kerouac’s life as an wandering anti-authoritarian minstrel & wastrel but his childhood. But in some sense, Sax is to Kerouac’s understanding of himself what The Prelude was to Wordsworth. This is really the tale of the growth of a poet’s mind, but as a troubled kid (and one who doesn’t get it that he’s troubled). Functionally, the story operates as a series of concentric tales, each more extreme (and disturbed) than the one before. In the first, Jacky Duluoz is a kid who plays hooky in order to stay home and play fantasy games of horse racing using marbles & ball-bearings. In the second, Jacky is both detective & miscreant in a mystery to catch The Black Thief,. a neighborhood criminal who specializes in stealing the toys of Duluoz’ friends. The Black Thief’s undoing comes as a result of leaving his taunting notes behind on the same orange paper that young Duluoz uses to practice his writing skills, literally trying to verbally sketch out commonplace physical elements of the neighborhood (50-plus years later, this is recognizable as a classic writing exercise, but it’s fascinating to see Kerouac suggest that he was compulsively working at his skills at depiction at what must have been no more than the age of ten). The third tale is Duluoz’ interactions with the realms of the unknown, represented by Faustus, Count Condu, Doctor Sax, various vamps & wizard wives, and of course the Great World Snake that comes to threaten the world until it is carried off by a giant bird

SURROUNDED BY MY DOVES! MY DOVES, MY YOUNG AND SILLY DOVES!...... BIRDS OF PARADISE COMING TO SAVE MANKIND!

As Sax puts it. Kerouac’s mythology here is a mashup avant le lettre of Catholicism, Central European ghost stories & some over-the-top Freudian remnants that work precisely because they are such a motley combination. This is intermingled with some extraordinary instances of description, most of which comes through Creeley’s role, and a great ear for dialog. For example, what makes the above passage work is precisely the word “silly” in a context that seems so very jarring.

The production and direction of the entire project at the hands of Kerouac’s nephew Jim Sampas is rough, but serviceable. When Sampas first started taking active control of Kerouac’s archive I recall worrying that Sampas wasn’t going to get it and that he would want simply beatify his uncle whose very flaws – such as the deeply creepy sentimentalism toward Kerouac’s mother – really prove to be driving forces for Kerouac, even if what they drove him to was his much too young death from alcoholism. But in fact Sampas seems to be in touch with both the Kerouac who is appallingly crude & the one who is, for better or worse, the Jimi Hendrix of fictional prose. Under Sampas' direction, you can hear this troupe of friends making it up as they go along. In this early stages, for example, different characters pronounce Duluoz quite differently. For Creeley it is Də-looz, for Carrol it is Do-loo-ǎz, with the short a pronounced as in cats. But over the course of the recording most everyone comes to settle on Də-loo-ahz with the stress on the second syllable. This is the sort of detail that a professional would have gotten down before committing a moment to tape, but professionalism was not Kerouac’s claim to writing – quite the opposite – and its absence here makes for texture, not problems.

Allen Ginsberg

Gone ten years today

Scenes from Allen’s
Last Three Days on Earth
as a Spirit
by Jonas Mekas
1997

(Photo by Larry Keenan)

I’ll wager that I knew who Hettie Jones was as an editor, and as a presence on the New York City poetry scene, before I was 20 years old. So I find myself amazed to admit that it has actually taken me now 40 years to read a book of her poetry, the quite lively Doing 70, published by the redoubtable Hanging Loose Press. It’s like discovering a whole new New American poet. And with my roots and interests as a poet, that’s a considerable gift.

It’s not like the emergence not so long ago of Landis Everson, who was a marginal enough member of the Berkeley renaissance a half century back, but who has returned now in his later years as more postmodern writer, full of subtle shadings nobody would even have noticed back in the early 1950s. Nor is it like the big belated book, A Tall, Serious Girl by George Stanley, a long overdue selected poems by a major writer of the Spicer circle who was largely out-of-print in the U.S. after having moved to Canada some 40 years ago. No, Hettie Jones is writing what are patently New American poems today almost in the same way that Michael McClure or Gary Snyder could be said to be doing the same, carrying forward that aesthetic from the 1950s to the present unbroken:

Here Is


a woman who know
what here is, through

long years of being
here

by a window that offers
others, there



here then is
this woman

ten thirty pm
on April seven

a struggling spring
in two thousand six

These are clean, simple poems, never trying too hard, but not written out of any nostalgia for the “beat scene” of Jones’ fabled youth either. When she says, in an interview given to Nancy Grace, that “I was much too logical and much too old fashioned and much too linear” to be a language poet, she’s not putting them or herself down, simply placing herself in the larger universe of literary possibilities. But this doesn’t mean that she’s not capable of complex statements, done with both great precision & notable grace, as in the poem “About Face”:

In Ghana, in August, in
the Golden Tulip’s
Demba Lounge

Nat Cole sings
“Merry Christmas”

as lone white men
on cell phones listen,
some with evident
nostalgia, to a black man
singing of home

Some remind me actually of the short lyrics of the late Carl Rakosi, ringing out changes, that, while completely predictable, can be quite satisfying simply for the precision involved, as in “Shades”:

black for the season
blue for oh how I need

this gray afternoon
when the drummer at the green
subway kiosk
is
red hot

Many of the poems are explicit in their feminism – an attitude that I suspect would have made The Boys of 1955 & thereabouts more than a little anxious & perhaps even dismissive – but it isn’t the simplistic finger-wagging of a Denise Levertov that Jones is after (tho one could argue that that was needed some three dozen years ago). Rather, what one notes about its presence in Jones’ work is the absolute variety of possibilities that come up with this as a subtext, ranging from the utterly grim, such as a poem about a Turkish woman stoned to the edge of death for “having sex / or being raped, same shame” who hangs for three months before dying, or of a female soldier killed in one of Bush’s wars, to poems that are simply, or not so simply, celebrations.

One of the more interesting examples of this can be found in the title poem, a not-quite six page narrative of having one’s car break down on the way back from Boston¹, only to have the trucker from the AAA-plus card (which gets you towed back where you need to be, not just five miles to the nearest rip-off station) turn out to be an engaging boy (Jones guesses his age at 23) who’s been to New York City only a couple of times before. Of course Jones was doing 70 on the Mass Turnpike when her starter broke – and of course just turned seventy a few weeks before – so what ensues is a complete gender reversal of the dynamics I outlined awhile back in the Peter O’Toole flick Venus.

So this is a case of the New American poetry doing something, with a few notable exceptions, the New American poetry itself seldom did. And it’s a pleasure to see it, because it is so clearly not imitation anything.

I want to close with a poem of Jones’ that caught my eye, “Naming Hettie Slocum,” perhaps because the house right next to the monument to Joshua Slocum on Brier Island off the southwestern tip of Nova Scotia (where Slocum was born, tho he did much of his sailing from Olson’s Gloucester) belongs to Krishna’s cousin, Dan Hunt. Given that my own side of the family has its own sailing mythology (thanks to my maternal great grandfather telling everyone that his grandfather was Sir John Franklin, which was right only insofar as that was the grand-dad’s name, tho he was an illiterate fishmonger, not the arctic explorer), this seems too good a coincidence to let pass. But I don’t think this poem needs any further comment from me. Hettie Jones does just fine:

Hettie Slocum once went
halfway around the world and back
in a sailboat. Then she gave up
the nautical life for good
and took off to farm

leaving her husband, Captain Joshua,
the well-known navigator-storyteller,
to the heave and swell of that vast
and wily mother, the sea.

Hettie was a pretty seamstress,
twenty-four and fresh from Nova Scotia;
Slocum, a cousin, forty-two and lonely.
His first wife, love of his life, mother
of his sons, had died. It was 1886.

Hettie was game; she sewed Slocum’s sails
cruised with him and the boys
to Rio, bought a tall hat, survived
an epidemic. He wrote a book
about their adventures, called her

his wife, called her “brave enough to face
the worst storms” – but never once mentioned
her name. Let us then remember her: Hettie!

Hettie Slocum!

Now all is said and done.

 

¹ Carrying with her the correspondence, no less, of the late Helene Dorn, the literal purpose of this trip.

I’ve written on numerous occasions that the so-called San Francisco Renaissance was largely a fiction, perpetrated in part by Donald Allen in order to give The New American Poetry a section that acknowledged just how much of this phenomenon rose up out of the San Francisco Bay Area – a literary backwater prior to WW2, but now suddenly a primary locale for much that was new. The other part – and it’s not clear to me who, if anyone, could be said to have perpetrated this – was an allusion back to the earlier Berkeley Renaissance, which had been a decisive, thriving literary tendency in the late 1940s, early 1950s. If you look at Allen’s S.F. Renaissance grouping, you call still make out the vestiges of that earlier moment in the presence of Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer & Robin Blaser, the trio that had given rise to the Berkeley Renaissance while studying at the University of California, along with, I suppose, Helen Adam, who at the time of the anthology was something of a Duncan protégé. Yet there are also poets representing an older San Francisco scene, such as Madeline Gleason & James Broughton & even – tho it’s a stretch, given what a loner he was, at least when he wasn’t actively channeling Robinson Jeffers – Brother Antoninus (William Everson). Then there are a group of younger poets – Richard Duerden, Kirby Doyle, Ebbe Borregaard & Bruce Boyd – whom it’s harder to place aesthetically, a fact that is still true some 45 years after the book’s initial publication, as they’ve become its least published participants. That Allen placed Lawrence Ferlinghetti into this grouping, rather than with the Beats, suggests just how arbitrary these distinctions were.

Given that he was improvising & fabricating in search of clustering principles in general, it’s curious that Allen completely missed one of the most interesting & useful formations among the New Americans, a western poetics that may have first revealed itself at Reed College in Portland, and which didn’t fully take flight until the mid- to late-1950s in San Francisco. Gary Snyder, Lew Welch & Phil Whalen in fact were just the first of a number of poets who came out of this aesthetic – one could probably put Duerden & Borregaard there as well, plus three other contributors to the Allen anthology, all of whom joined Snyder & Whalen in Allen’s curiously amorphous unaffiliated fifth grouping: Michael McClure, Ron Loewinsohn & David Meltzer. Beyond the Allen anthology itself, one might add Richard Brautigan, James Koller, Joanne Kyger, David Schaff, Bill Deemer, Drummond Hadley, Clifford Burke, David Gitin, John Oliver Simon, Lowell Levant, John Brandi, Gail Dusenberry & a host of others. In general, these poets were straight where the Duncan-Spicer axis was gay. Perhaps most importantly, this cluster really had no leaders as such. It was not as though some, such as Snyder or Whalen, might not have led by example, but that their personalities were not given to the constant marshalling of opinion that one could identify in such others as Olson, Duncan, Spicer, Ginsberg, O’Hara or even Creeley. This mode – lets call it New Western – perhaps reached its pinnacle of influence during the heyday of Jim Koller’s Coyote’s Journal during the mid-1960s. But without anything like a leader or a program, poised midway aesthetically between the Beats & Olson’s vision of Projectivist Verse, the phenomenon never gelled, never became A Thing & by the 1970s already was entering into an entropic period from which it has yet to re-emerge.

Just 23 when The New American Poetry hit the streets, Ron Loewinsohn & David Meltzer were the babies of that project (indeed, they’re just one year older than David Bromige & David Melnick & eight years younger than Hannah Weiner, all of whom would be associated more closely with language writing come the 1970s). Loewinsohn went on to become a literature professor & novelist, but Meltzer has hung in as a poet, with a few side forays into music, jazz writing & erotic fiction, all these decades. Now, with David’s Copy just out from Penguin, Meltzer seemed poised to get the attention his work is due.

Actually, considering just how many of the Beat poets were treated like rock stars while Meltzer, fronting Serpent Power with his late wife Tina (and drums by Clark Coolidge), actually had a rock band long before Jim Carroll or Patti Smith, it’s odd that Meltzer hasn’t become much more widely known, celebrated before this. David’s Copy is at least the fourth selected poems he’s published, the others being Tens, Arrows & The Name, and many of his earlier books were published by Black Sparrow, one of the rare small presses to have had some volumes – mostly those by Charles Bukowski – widely distributed through the big book chains.

There are, I suspect, multiple reasons for this. One is that New Western aesthetic never really broke through, even if a few of its practitioners – Whalen, Snyder, McClure – did. A second, more important aspect is that old bugaboo of so many poets – Meltzer’s not a compulsive self-promoter. As the youngest of the New Americans, his timing was just a little behind from a marketing perspective. Indeed, as Ginsberg et al became folk icons in the 1960s, Meltzer’s first books that decade were from small Bay Area fine presses like Auerhahn & Oyez – his one big trade publication prior to David’s Copy being an anthology he edited in 1971, The San Francisco Poets, a collection notably missing the Duncan/Spicer axis, including just Ferlinghetti, Rexroth, Welch, McClure, Brautigan & Everson. Meltzer’s first sizeable collection doesn’t appear until 1969, when he brings out Yesod with the British press, Trigram. It didn’t receive much distribution stateside. Black Sparrow releases his first large collection in the states, Luna, in 1970.

Part of this neglect may also be due to the fact that Meltzer is Jewish. It’s not that there were no Jews among the New Americans – Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Eigner all come instantly to mind. But the intersection between the New American poetry & the New Age approach to religious experience in the 1960s (Serpent Power?) tended to mute its presence in all but Ginsberg’s writing. Indeed, I wouldn’t be at all shocked to discover that many readers of Eigner were late to discover the heritage of the bard of Swampscott. In the 1960s, the Objectivists were only gradually coming back into print. And Jerome Rothenberg didn’t really begin making the space for an active presence for a Jewish space within American poetics until late in that decade, during that interregnum betwixt the New Americans & language poetry.

Finally, Meltzer – and this I think is a sign of his youth relative, say, to Whalen or Snyder or Ginsberg or Olson or Duncan or O’Hara et al – lacked the kind of visible trademark of a differentiated literary style that one associates with all of the above, and even with someone closer to Meltzer’s age, like Michael McClure. Meltzer’s work has always been in the vicinity of New American poetics without ever being its own recognizable brand – as such, it would be difficult if not impossible for a younger poet to mimic. It’s not that Meltzer lacked the chops & more as though he never saw the need per se. In this sense, Meltzer’s situation is not unlike that, say, of a Jack Collom, another terrific poet of roughly the same generation who has never really gotten the recognition he deserves. In a sense, those who were a little further outside the New American circle – like poets in New York who were visibly not NY School, such as Rothenberg, Antin, Ed Sanders or Joel Oppenheimer – had an advantage because their circumstance forced them to define themselves in opposition even to poets whose work they cherished.

Indeed, if there is a defining element or signature device in Meltzer’s work, it’s that he alone among the New Westerns has an eye for the hard edges of pop culture, something one expects from the NY School. Often, as in this passage from “Hollywood Poems,” it’s accompanied by a tremendously agile ear:

                De Chirico without Cheracol
saw space where its dead echo opened up
a plain unbroken by the dancers.
Instead
a relic supermarket nobody shops at.
Plaster-of-Paris bust of Augustus
Claude Rains Caesar face-down beneath
a Keinholz table
whose top is blue with Shirley Temple’s saucers,
pitchers. Mickey Mouse
wind-up dolls in rows like Detroit.
All tilt out of the running without electricity.
Veils of history,
garments worn in movies, hung on
steel racks at Costume R.K.O.
R. Karo would’ve used the tower’s light.
He’d wear it as a cap to re-route lost energy.

So dense with details that it rides like a list (& sounds like a Clark Coolidge poem), this passage is actually a better depiction of a De Chirico landscape than those one finds in John Ashbery’s poetry. David’s Copy is filled with such moments, which makes it a terrific read.

One might squabble with the fact that the book is not strictly chronological, or that the first 25 years of his writing gets more weight (over 150 pages) than does the last 25 (roughly 100), tho I suspect that’s because more of the recent work is still in print. On the whole, such squabbles are few. Editor Michael Rothenberg had done a first-rate job here, smartly including bibliography & a decent two-page bio note from Meltzer & an excellent introduction from Jerry Rothenberg. Toward the end of the introduction, Rothenberg notes:

Elsewhere, in speaking about himself, he tells us that when he was very young, he wanted to write a long poem called The History of Everything. It was an ambition shared, maybe unknowingly, with a number of other young poets – the sense of what Clayton Eshleman called “a poetry that attempts to become responsible for all the poet knows about himself and his world.” Then as now it ran into a contrary directive: to think small or to write in ignorance of what had come before or in deference to critic-masters who were themselves, most often, nonpractitioners & nonseekers.

From my perspective, it’s a shame that project never took hold, but then I don’t think there’s any contradiction between such scale & the desire to “think small” (or, as I might put it, to write in the present) – that’s one lesson one takes from Zukofsky’s “A.” Throughout, there are works that evidence an impulse to “go long,” almost in the sense of a football quarterback, but most often they come back to the compilation of shorter works that one might expect to see from the likes of Whalen, Welch or Snyder. The whole of David’s Copy offers us a deeper link into that New Western poetics, even as it connects that world outward, toward the New York School & the poetics that would emerge in the 1970s & ‘80s in a journal like Sulfur. The key, as it is in New Western poetry in general, is precisely that desire to “think small” as Rothenberg puts it, to write in the complete present. Meltzer is less openly Zen-like than, say, Whalen or Joanne Kyger, but the pleasure can be every bit as deep.