NOTES

photo by Ben Friedlander

Thanks to Lee Ann Brown for reminding me this morning of Peter Culley’s death last April. I liked Peter, and what I read and saw of his work over the years; though we met at most only three or four times. Anyone who takes the trouble to click on these links will realise our loss. Here’s a quote from him more than a decade ago:

“I discovered Lenny Bruce in my late twenties – just out of grad school & dirt-poor in Seattle, I read How to Talk Dirty & Influence People with a growing realization that Bruce was my century’s Whitman, a poet who took democracy seriously. I’ve since had the opportunity to listen to recordings of Bruce in performance & my initial reaction is confirmed: Lenny Bruce was our first performance poet. He’s ahead of David Antin & Patti Smith. Whitman broke through, Bruce broke through. Neither spared himself embarrassment. I think, for myself, after a decade of intimidation by language poets on one side & new freaking formalists on the other, I may have found my way forward in this particular lineage. I won’t call it a tradition. There is a radical middle in American poetry (& politics, by the way) that often is confused with middle-of-the-road, but the confusion is a symptom of sloppy thinking (& political manipulation): pray you avoid it. The dominant culture is busy turning the radical – or its images – into the mainstream; it has to be the business of artists to resist the process & to reinvent the images when they have been drained of their juice & pulse. What Whitman called urge. What Lenny Bruce called truth.”