Photo by Rochelle Kraut
To my knowledge, I never met Steve Carey, though you might think I would have. I borrowed the money to pay the minister for my first wedding in 1965 from Clifford Burke, who published Carey’s Smith Going Backward in 1968. Bill Berkson published Gentle Subsidy in 1975. Bernadette Mayer & Lewis Warsh published The California Papers in 1981, which includes as one of its sections a label from the Haight Street Pharmacy from May of 1966. That was where I went to have prescriptions filled that same summer.
Perhaps because he was published in journals like The World, Best & Company, The Paris Review, Angel Hair & Big Sky, I simply presumed that Carey was one of the younger poets – my age – who were part of the St. Marks scene, and perhaps for a while he was. But when his work stopped appearing in journals I read, I didn’t really notice.
I did not realize that Steve Carey had died in 1989 of a heart attack until I read it in The Selected Poems of Steve Carey, edited by Edmund Berrigan. Nor had I realized that he was at least as much a Californian as he ever had been a New Yorker, in spite of the fact that one of his books was entitled The California Papers, that both the Bay Area & what I take to be his hometown LA (he was born in DC in ’45) are palpable presences in the work & that Phil Whalen is as much an influence here as Ted Berrigan.
Edmund is in fact the second Berrigan to have edited Carey’s work (Ted did The Lily of St. Marks), and he’s done such a great job that I knew almost instantly that I had to read more. A couple of trips to Abebooks.com and I have both volumes of The California Papers (the second of which is entitled AP), Smith Going Backward & Gentle Subsidy. 20 Poems & The Lily of St. Marks are still en route. Steve Carey is for me The Big News of 2010.
Berrigan Sr. & Phil Whalen were both masters of the I-did-this, I-did-that poem as linked journal & what excites me most about Carey is the degree to which he’s seen that point of connection & expands it with his own very distinct energy. Where you see it most clearly in the Selected is in the excerpt from AP, the first two passages from a total of 32. Here is the 32nd section from the 1984 volume:
