Pharoah Sanders live!

Caught the Pharoah Sanders show at the August Wilson Center last week (Nov. 13), and how really great it was. I was surprised firstly by how bop-focused it was. While my sense of Sanders is overwhelmingly tied to his late 60s and early 70s free-jazz work on Impulse! (and also from his intense free stuff with Coltrane in the mid-60s), his bop sensibility on the night was impeccable. I know this is not news to anyone who has followed his post-Impulse! career. That’s not my favorite period of his career, but this performance maybe made me rethink Sanders a little bit. Pharoah’s band, consisting of his touring pianist William Henderson along with the Pittsburgh rhythm section of Dwayne Dolphin (bass), Roger Humphries (drums) and George Jones (congas), held it down solid, and I suspect their own bop sensibilities at least fed into (if not drove) the vibe. I say this partly because, in the advance article in the City Paper, Pharoah suggested that he would go with the flow of his band: “We’ll just get together and start playing....I might just call a key: F-sharp minor, and that’s it. Everybody just blows. It’ll always be right.” So I initially expected the set to be freer, more spontaneous. Instead it was very directed and very much in the bop mode, and it only makes sense that Sanders would play to the band’s strengths.

I was surprised secondly also by how Coltrane-centric this set was (again, I probably shouldn’t have been, since Sanders has recorded late-period tributes to Coltrane). The band opened with a marathon version of “My Favorite Things” (at one point, I thought, incorporating the theme of Coltrane’s “Afro Blue,” which resembles it in a way) and finally closed, as an encore, with “Giant Steps.” Henderson’s piano-playing was often reminiscent of McCoy Tyner, utilizing his signature block chords throughout most of the evening. That said, there were also some quite original progressions on his part, Monk-like in their mathematicality, but in what I guess I should call even a Henderson-like mode. Broadly speaking, though, this was very Coltrane Quartet of the early 60s — bop structures but with free, exploratory solos.

Pharoah himself was not quite as guttural or shrieking as in his earlier days. But the tone of his tenor is so uniquely his own, and that in itself was what was revelatory about the show, to hear it live, in front of you, rather than the ultra-intense bursts of energy contained on albums such as Tauhid, Jewels of Thought, Izipho Zam, Black Unity, or Village of the Pharoahs. Those bursts were still there in this set, however, from time to time. Pharoah would occasionally toss them out, or alternatively work up to a certain level, where, it seemed to me because he is so immensely talented and skilled, he can just let go and let the spirit move him (so to speak) to heights of beauty. Equally beautiful were those rare moments of squawk or overblown notes. Pharoah has always been so good at playing overblown notes that he can even play them melodically. At a couple of points in the set, also, he stopped blowing into his horn but continued to work the keys, allowing the air that was inside to be moved around by them, finally producing a quiet but unmistakable feedback-like sound. It was an inspired stroke, almost as if he was saying that he himself was but a vehicle for something else, the music, which is in the breath of life, existing on another level, actually outside of the person, occasionally allowing itself to be directed, though, and brought out into our world.

At age 70, Pharoah seemed to tire at times and would wander off-stage to take a break while the band did their thing(s). Well, who can fault him? But it was always a great moment of anticipation fulfilled when he’d walk back out, tenor at the ready, to renewed applause from the audience, and begin playing again. While the backing band was great, it was Pharoah we had all come to see. In the second half of the set, he once or twice stopped playing to dance around and dig his musicians, and the crowd would urge him on, some yelling, “Go Pharoah, go Pharoah!” And then he’d move back to his spot and blow some more. This was what it was like to hear and to see the greatest living tenor player. Perhaps Archie Shepp is a close second, but that accolade has to go to Pharoah Sanders now, and this show was proof.

Begnal Poem at Dark Sky

I have a poem titled “Dear _____,” online at the site of Dark Sky Magazine and Books. I really like this journal/publisher/blog and so am very pleased to appear there. Many thanks to them. And do go check it out, maybe leave a comment, etc.

David Stone, The Bloodhound Works

I’ve written a lot about David Stone’s work already (see here, here, and here), but I just received his newest chapbook in the mail, and it is another great installment in the corpus of one of our most original poets. The Bloodhound Works (published by Propaganda Press/Alternating Current) is subtitled “Selected Poems 2009,” and marks Stone’s response the present economic upheaval the world seems to be undergoing. While his bio at the end of this 4¼ x 5½” pamphlet states that Stone “lives on some scraps from the financial crisis,” many of the poems themselves evoke it: “Bus passengers/ crashed in orbit./ Marauders and pirates/ scanned the premises of hell./ The bloodhound/ found the trail/ of body parts/ and blood/ in lit streets/ and open fields/ and demanded food/ on the diner/ parking lot” (“The Bloodhound’s Work”).

“Dithyramb”

A poem of mine titled “Dithyramb” now appears at Todd Swift’s online journal/blog site Eyewear. Read it here.

Coltrane

Today is John Coltrane’s birthday —

we mythologize and love our heroes
and propagate their images,
quantum leaps of evolution —

The best musicians, writers, artists for me are the ones who, either steadily over time but perhaps in radical bursts, change their style or approach, each work in part an attempt to surpass the previous. If you’re just going to be content to repeat the same old thing over and over, what’s the point.

For me, Coltrane exemplifies the artist who strives to surpass himself. It was no accident that one of his albums was titled Giant Steps. Call it arrogance, or call it the truth. In actuality, Coltrane from what I can tell was greatly humbled before the gift of his own talent, and felt it was his duty to explore it to the furthest extent possible. Sometimes that meant disappointing or exasperating fans, but for those who were willing or able to go along with him....

Coltrane, in this regard, has an analogue in Joyce — each of his works was a radical advance on what came before — each great in its own right, but compare the style of Dubliners to Finnegans Wake. Compare Blue Train to A Love Supreme to Live in Seattle — each great, but representative of the time and of the artist at a particular stage in his development. The only constant is change, and in that regard the art reflects life.

There are some who see staying the same as some kind of virtue, wanting to remain the same as long as possible, who therefore look to the past and wish to live in the past as a refuge. While I think there must always be some kind of core sense of who one is which is carried forward (and yes there are also great artists who do one thing all the time and do it really well, such as the Ramones or Charles Bukowski), the inability to evolve to me means a kind of death.

Death means things are fixed finally in time and that there are no more possibilities, no hope of the future. Coltrane is dead, but what he and his art represent — life and its concomitant change, the possibility of striking away what is stale and stultifying and taking up new and further explorations, the progression of the same artist only in a different form —

2 Poems in Poets for Living Waters

Poets for Living Waters, edited by Amy King and Heidi Lynn Staples, is “a poetry action in response to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico begun on April 20, 2010, one of the most profound human-made ecological catastrophes in history.” Its site states that, beyond its current Web existence, a print anthology is also planned.

I am pleased to have two poems now online as part of this very worthwhile project. The poems are titled “Yellow Wave” and “The Black Gulf.” I was also asked to contribute a “Statement,” which came out as a third poem of sorts, a short, manifesto-like prose-poem perhaps.

It’s satisfying to note the high quality of the other work appearing on the site as well, most of which is cutting-edge, progressive, and veers away from the maudlin or hysterical hand-wringing that one might perhaps expect from lesser editors. Not that people shouldn’t be angry about the spill itself (they should), but what I mean is that there’s some really good, and often experimental, poetry here.

Poem in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A poem of mine titled “Submerged Town Reappears” is published in today’s edition of Pittsburgh’s newspaper of record, the Post-Gazette. It appears in both the print and online versions of the paper.

Harmony Korine, Trash Humpers

Harmony Korine’s latest film, Trash Humpers (2009), is one of his best, and is his most experimental and non-linear work yet. Its setting is similar to that of his earlier film Gummo (1997) — American waste — but is even more extreme and crazier. I suppose “setting” is a questionable term in this case, as Trash Humpers is barely scripted if at all (apparently some segments were loosely scripted, but most of it was improvised). The filming took place in Korine’s native Nashville, in its back alleys and abandoned parking lots, highway service roads and overgrown backyards. It depicts three people, sometimes four, two to three men and a woman, in old-people’s masks or make-up, who go around doing just what the film’s title implies — simulating sex with garbage cans, dumpsters, and other objects, sometimes fellating tree branches or plants. When not involved in this, they smash objects like cinder blocks, tv sets, and fluorescent lights while drinking bottles of cheap wine. But don’t make the mistake of looking for a “story.” There is none. Part of Korine’s brilliance is his having freed himself from the tyranny of linear narrative. There are recurring elements, motifs, but thankfully no story (not that story can’t be done well, but here it would inevitably be hokey). In this regard, Trash Humpers as an abstract film evokes life more faithfully than any conventional film can. It is a series of unrelated events connected by nothing more than the chronology in which they have occurred. From what I have read, the scenes as we see them are presented in the order they were filmed. Perhaps, though, the mere presentation of these random scenes can be said to create a kind of narrative in itself. If so, so be it. At least it is organic and, dare I use this word, real.

Certain scenes verge on disturbing. The characters take a hammer to a baby doll’s face, repeatedly, or drag it behind a bicycle. It sounds innocuous enough, tacky even, but through the repetition of these scenes an odd sense of pathos begins to develop for the doll, which is heightened by the later introduction of a real human baby. In another scene, shot in a room of a house, a kidnapped man is killed in a very realistic-looking manner. These are not necessarily nice people (nor were the kids in Gummo). But in their seeming nihilism, there is meaning to be found. I hesitate to make this an essay on the meaning of the film, because I think the meaning is supposed to be, at least according to Korine, secondary to his filmic concerns. As with the films of David Lynch (who also tends to deny any underlying meaning in his work), though, it is there. It has to do with being an outsider in American society, being excluded from it, as one of the characters articulates towards the end of the film, asserting that most people would envy the freedom their lifestyle bestows because their own lives are mundane and predictable. (Ironically, ironically, however, the character who posits this is wearing a Confederate flag t-shirt.) In all this Trash Humpers is vaguely reminiscent of John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972) and Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (1998), both of which also depict small but tightly-knit groups of people who reject societal mores by acting in their own particularly bizarre ways — but who are ultimately seen to be flawed people.

Korine himself has said the following about the characters in Trash Humpers: “It’s kind of like an ode to vandalism. There can be a creative beauty in their mayhem and destruction. You could say these characters are poets or mystics of mayhem and murder, bubbling up to the surface. They do horrible things, but I never viewed them as sad characters. They’re comedic, with a vaudevillian horror element to what they do. They dance as they smash things and set them on fire. They’re having a great time.” And it’s true. There’s a great and satisfying sound when the fluorescent bulbs explode, when the cinder blocks hit the tarmac, when the firecrackers are set off. There’s a visceral, unsettling effect to the shrieks added to the soundtrack, to the roughly-cut videotape on which the film was made. Korine’s medium here, video, is a critical element. Obviously, this wouldn’t be the film that it is if it wasn’t filmed/cut on video. In many ways it has the feel of contemporary home-shot video escapades made famous by tv shows such as Jackass. But beyond that, the video itself adds an aesthetic aspect that takes Trash Humpers to a whole other, lyrical level. Just as Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) was deliberately shot on expired film stock, Korine’s medium here is crucial. Streetlights burn their light into the videotape like midnight suns. The strange flowing water in an industrial yard reflects clouds and sky in an unexpectedly heightened dream-like manner that almost seems counter to the cold, clear expectations that video implies.

Well, let me get to the point. As a statement, this is one of the best avant-garde films of our era, and possibly all time. Korine is our most ambitious director, our most experimental. Lynch has to be considered here too. But what sets him apart — this point John Menesini recently made to me — is that Korine is the quintessential American director. Not quintessentially American in the sense of Walt Whitman, but I would suggest more in the sense of William Carlos William (“The pure products of America/ go crazy—”). In the conversation with Menesini, I countered by saying, But Lynch’s themes are also quintessentially American. John said, Yeah but there’s something European in his technique; and I guess he’s right; Lynch is a descendent of surrealism. I love surrealism, but okay, that gives him a European influence. Nothing wrong with that (and maybe there’s even a kind of surrealism in Trash Humpers too?), but it leaves Korine as the one who is probably more naturally immersed in the American idiom. Korine’s America, though, is (almost) at a dead end. These characters are people with nothing much that is positive or generative to offer (the real baby that appears later in the film is stolen/kidnapped; old people humping trashcans is the antithesis of sex). Where Williams ultimately sees some kind of ongoing potential in the American people, Korine seems to be suggesting that America has become the wasteland (to continue the poetic metaphor, the wasteland of T. S. Eliot) that Williams rejected (in, for example, “Spring and All”). But Korine is not his characters, and I think the ultimate statement of Trash Humpers is that there is unexpected beauty and art in the overlooked back places of America, and that it takes a filmmaker like to Korine (or a poet like Williams) to find it. And is there not something generative and life-affirming in the act, in the improvisation? In a kind of filmic destruction which has imbedded in it the potential for subsequent new creation?

Jandek (Pittsburgh Thursday)

On Thursday, August 5th, Jandek played a show in Pittsburgh at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. It was a good venue for a show — an outdoor patio enclosed by a tent-like structure. I have now seen Jandek twice (and have written about the other show here). For an ostensibly reclusive musician, he actually plays out relatively often now. I suppose he has had to wrestle with the opposing concerns of maintaining his personal privacy and getting his music out to a live audience. I think it is possible to strike that balance, and from what I could tell the Pittsburgh crowd mostly left him alone. When he finally exited the stage after playing for two-and-a-half hours, there were no autograph hounds, no groupies rushing up to meet him. The kind of person who would go to see Jandek knows what he is like, and hopefully respects the fact that he doesn’t want to be bothered.

But I am getting ahead of myself here. Before the music started, I was in line to buy drink tickets and overheard one local fan remark to another, “I never thought this day would come.” There was real appreciation of this show. There was also a something of a “scene” element to the crowd — every “outsider” music fan in Pittsburgh must have been in attendance — still, there was a range of different people there too, including also poets, aging revolutionaries, a couple of children, parents, fellow musicians, artists (one woman, wearing a large bow tie, was later to be observed sketching the band as they performed), and perhaps a few curious onlookers. All of this being said, it was not quite a capacity crowd, which meant that there was a comfortable lack of jostling or jockeying for position closer to the stage.

Jandek suddenly took the stage, walking through the crowd, at about 8:15 PM. Whereas he played guitar when I saw him last year, this time he played keyboards. The backing band consisted of Pittsburgh musicians Dean Cercone on guitar and percussion, Spat Cannon on upright bass, and Andrew McKeon on drums. The quartet opened with an instrumental, and there seemed to be some concern about whether Jandek would sing or not. After this intro, though, Jandek intoned lyrics to every piece. He does not sing per se, but rather reads in an idiosyncratic manner over (and in complement to) the music. The subject matter seemed largely to deal with the ways in which people alienate and are alienated from each other in contemporary society.

Musically, I would describe this performance as ambient, but not in an electronic sense. Yes, Jandek’s keyboards occasionally had a synthesizer sound, but mostly they sounded like an analog piano or sometimes an electric organ. Spat Cannon’s bass, as previously mentioned, was the big old-fashioned upright instrument and hinted at jazz. McKeon used brushes (and their wooden nub-ends) on the drums. Cercone’s guitar playing — often executed with a drumstick — reminded me at times of Thurston Moore’s, though this is possibly a superficial observation. The sound was generally atonal — the band seemed to play in response to each other rather than together (which I do not mean as a criticism), but occasionally there were convergences. At one brilliant point, Cercone suddenly matched the note of Jandek’s held, off-kilter vocal with his guitar. Cannon occasionally fell into a hypnotic, rhythmic bass figure, which Jandek would briefly entrain with. But overall the sound was jagged and disjointed, which accorded well with Jandek’s words. After a whole two-and-a-half hours of such improvisations, Jandek unceremoniously began to pack up his things and walked off the stage, back out through the crowd, to the musicians’ rooms somewhere downstairs in the Arts Center building.

The show was organized by the novelist, poet, and publisher of Six Gallery Press, Che Elias. Pulling off the unwieldy event was a small triumph on his part, and at one point, not long into the set, while there was still some daylight and before the colored lanterns hanging from the ceiling of the tent were turned on, I observed this image: The sun had started to go down and hung low on the horizon; it had suddenly become visible (but for only a few minutes) at a long angle through a window flap to my left, bright red-orange so low you could look upon it and not have to avert your eyes in pain or blindness; it was this brilliant bright glowing pre-twilight red orb, glowing right above Che’s head as he stood there momentarily rapt in this music of Jandek which he had helped to bring to this place and point in time. For me, the image sums up the feeling of the night.

Philip Lamantia

Above, a poem by Philip Lamantia. “Memoria,” from Semina 3, 1958. Source: http://writing.upenn.edu/library/images/semina/index.html

Lamantia’s selected poems is Bed of Sphinxes: New & Selected Poems, 1943-1993 (City Lights, 1997).

Some more Lamantia poems here, and some other writings (including poems) here. But his very best poems (at least the best ones in my opinion) don’t seem to be online.

Lamantia is commonly categorized as both a Beat and a Surrealist, with good reason (published in View and by André Breton in VVV at age 16; took part in the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco in 1955). But these categories don’t matter so much as whether his poems are any good, and what they’re like, and what it’s like to read them. Titles of Lamantia poems can perhaps suggest what he’s like: “Man Is in Pain,” “In a Grove,” “Hypodermic Light,” “The Ancients Have Returned Among Us,” “Interior Suck of the Night,” “Isn’t Poetry the Dream of Weapons?” Isn’t it?

Begnal in London’s Poetry Library

My poem “Silver Ghosts” is Poem of the Week at the site of Britain’s Poetry Library/Southbank Centre in London. That poem and two others are archived in the Poetry Library (“free access site to the full-text digital library of 20th and 21st century UK poetry magazines from the Poetry Library collection”) with the journal Iota. The poem is linked right on their homepage through Sunday. It can also be accessed directly here. Check it out....

Blue Canary 17

Blue Canary 17, possibly the last issue of the Blue Canary, is out now. It is a tribute issue to James Liddy, the great Irish and Milwaukeean poet who died in late 2008. Editor Jeff Becker explains, partly humorously, that he published this issue for the fun of proving James wrong (James had told him, “When I’m gone, there won’t be any more Blue Canarys”). The front cover features a photo of Liddy (very similar to the one shown here) on Kilpatrick Strand, Co. Wexford, 1996. The back cover has one of him a child, circa 1944, and there are a couple other interesting photos in there as well. But of course it is the poetry and the prose reminiscences that make this essential for anyone who knew Liddy or who has read his work. The editor has arranged these pieces quite interestingly, I see, so that there seems to a progression or a linking of themes throughout the issue. For example, a poem by Liddy himself notes that “Jesus’s commands bring up the question: seduction and conversion merge” — and then several pages later in the magazine there is a cartoon by Bill Meyer depicting Jesus and James in bed together in heaven, post-coitus (yes, really). Fr. Ronald Crewe’s religiously-minded piece notes that Liddy, though a Catholic, “was not perfect,” and then immediately following is Paul Vogel’s portrait of Liddy’s less-than-perfect side (which I will only say is hilarious reading). It is editorial acumen like this that makes this Blue Canary so good. If it were merely a drab, respectful encomium, then it would really not do Liddy justice. (None of which is to say that any one contribution undermines the other, as Liddy was a multi-faceted person, as most of us are.) The journal, like James himself, will be missed. To obtain a copy, I recommend contacting Woodland Pattern Bookstore in Milwaukee.

The Stooges (some thoughts on three recent releases)

The question of which band is the greatest rock’n’roll band of all time has perplexed humankind almost since the invention of the form itself. While a quite convincing case could be made for the Rolling Stones, for me there has never been any doubt — the Stooges are the greatest rock’n’roll band of all time. For many years, though, they have existed strictly as an underground phenomenon (the original group having disbanded in 1971, and the reformed group in 1974), despite Iggy Pop’s later fame. So in a way it’s been weird to see all the recent Stooges activity, the reunion, the re-releases, the demos and live shows being given the official treatment, their acceptance into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Weird, but good for them, and good for Stooges fans that more of their work has been made available.

The 2010 Rhino Handmade Collector’s Edition of the first album, The Stooges (1969), is notable primarily for the inclusion of the track “Asthma Attack,” which has never been available up to now. It brilliantly exemplifies the Stooges’ free jazz side, which came to the fore on their next album, Fun House (1970). In fact it is very similar to “L.A. Blues.” Some may see the noise jam as an inferior form, a throwaway cut on an album, but I think “Asthma Attack” is a great piece of music, and while it sets a tone for things to come, it also harks to what the band sounded like before they got a record contract and decided to write some actual songs. The vocals on “Asthma Attack” consist of the word “Tonight” sung several times, followed by a coughing evocation of a real asthma attack, followed at various points later by Iggy improvising (he always was an amazing improviser of lyrics). At times toward the second half of the piece, Ron Asheton’s guitar recalls Sonny Sharrock, who played on Pharoah Sanders’s Tauhid album, which Iggy has noted as an influence on the group. It would have been really interesting if The Stooges included “Asthma Attack” as its closing track, à la the sequencing of Fun House.

In fact, it would also have been interesting if the album had used the full uncut versions of the songs, some of which are included here, instead of the more familiar shortened and faded-out versions. “Ann,” for example, continues for about twice as long as the faded-out version on the original album. There’s a version of “We Will Fall” here which also continues on a bit further, with some extra flourishes of John Cale’s guest viola, and other nice tidbits such as outtakes of “Real Cool Time” and “Little Doll.” But all of that said, this Rhino package leaves something to be desired. For example, the versions of the John Cale mixes are slow. For some inexplicable reason, Rhino decided not to speed-correct these tracks, as they did do for the ones included on their 2005 re-release, and that is a serious mistake. I’m not a huge fan of the Cale mixes (the guitars are too low, and while the echo on Iggy’s vocals is interesting, it all comes off as Cale’s attempt to make the band sound more arty and less brutal), but not rendering them at the proper speed makes their inclusion here almost worthless. The vinyl 7” version of “Asthma Attack” is a nice touch, but since the track had to be split onto two sides, who’s going to actually listen to it over the intact CD version? This is still a must-have because of “Asthma Attack,” but something of a lost opportunity in other respects.

Last year, Easy Action released You Want My Action, which contains the only known recordings of the Stooges in 1971. These four very similar live shows (including the two now-famous Electric Circus shows in New York City) display some of their best material ever, in my opinion, and it makes the fact that they were dropped by Elektra Records before they could make a studio album of it all the more a travesty, and a tragedy. The 1971 version of the band is truly a missing link, including both Ron Asheton and James Williamson on dual guitars. The set’s opening song, “I Got a Right,” was later recorded as a demo when the reformed band was rehearsing for the Raw Power album in 1972. But these 1971 songs sound amazing. They are violent and aggressive like all of their material, but also have some of the groove of Fun House. “You Don’t Want My Name” and “Fresh Rag” are mid-tempo songs and with a garage-rock feel over which Ron and James lay down some blistering guitar solos. “Dead Body/Who Do You Love?” is somewhat slower and is perhaps reminiscent of the song “Dirt,” being based on a single repeated bass riff. “Big Time Bum” takes it back to a faster metallic vibe, and then the band moves into “Do You Want My Love?” which, with its intensity of guitar playing and feedback, almost achieves something of an industrial feel — but with a chugging rock’n’roll beat underneath it.

Because of the extremely low-fi nature of these 1971 recordings I have found that the best way to listen to them is turned up loud on computer speakers, with your head right between the two speakers. This almost makes it seem like you are there and somehow gives more separation between the two guitars. The vocals are, unfortunately, often less audible and buried in sludge. Still another reminder of the loss, the fact that these songs were not properly recorded before the band imploded right after this tour. The album that they could have made in 1971, and which I envision in my mind, would have been a masterpiece. You Want My Action at least gives a big hint at what could have been.

This year, Legacy Recordings released a repackaging of Raw Power (1973) which brings the album back to its original David Bowie mix, after the debacle of Iggy Pop’s 1997 remix (which I think pretty much sucked, and buried Williamson’s leads). That is Disc One. Disc Two is a live show from October 1973 recorded in Atlanta, here titled Georgia Peaches. There are lots of live recordings from 1973-74 out there, but this is indeed one of the better ones, both in terms of sound quality and playing. The opener, “Raw Power,” comes in sounding almost like a raw Velvet Underground track or something, and then the band plays “Head On” which was always one of my favorite Stooges songs from this era. Here it almost seems as if Scott Asheton is playing an all-snare-drum shuffle through the main riff (but I think it might actually be some kind of hiss that gives this impression), and Scott Thurston’s boogie-woogie piano adds a crazy aspect to it. Ron Asheton on bass drives everything forward, and Williamson’s guitar sounds heavy. Iggy is full of rage, and at the end of the song a girl in the audience is heard to say, “I don’t think he likes us!” Then we hear Iggy shouting at someone, “Hey you wanna get your little fucking face punched out, little cracker boy? Come up here! Come up here little [word unclear, ‘bitty’?] boy, I’m sick of your shit!” It’s similar to the atmosphere on Metallic K.O., but here there’s more of a sense of musical cohesion. One of Iggy’s improvised lyrics in “Gimme Danger” goes, “And if I gotta live in danger, just to live a real way, then I’ll break the law and die tomorrow, but I’ll live my way today.” This pretty much sums up the Stooges’ attitude, from day one on through to the end.

The bonus tracks on Disc Two are “Doojiman” (an outtake from the Raw Power sessions and essentially a single blues riff propelled by “1969”-like tom-toms and Iggy’s screaming and scatting), and a rehearsal tape of “Head On.” There is a deluxe version of the Raw Power package which includes a further disc of rarities, outtakes, and songs recorded only live or in rehearsals. I didn’t get the deluxe version, but I have much of the material on other discs, and it is worth having. Like the 1971 collection, it makes you wonder at what might have been. It’s too bad the Stooges weren’t able to record a follow-up to Raw Power before they broke up in early 1974. Their new material was great stuff, as this package demonstrates. The post-Stooges Iggy Pop and James Williamson album Kill City, which I hear is slated for its own re-release treatment soon, is great in its own way, but it’s not the album that could have been made with the Asheton brothers in 1973 or ’4.

Post-script: A couple of nights ago I sat in Kelly’s Bar drinking pints of beer (and at one point a Pimm’s Cup), and suddenly the bartender went over to his iPod and switched the song to the Stooges’ “1970” (from Fun House). Then immediately after hearing those initial Ron Asheton guitar chords, he turned it up some more, and it was loud. And it sounded good, the bass thick and heavy, the drums piercing. And “1970” is the song in which Steve MacKay’s tenor saxophone first appears, when his soloing starts and Iggy keeps yelling “Blow!” and things on the album suddenly get even crazier. It filled the bar, and it felt good to drink beer to, and I was reminded once again that listening to the Stooges is a good thing. It is always a good thing. And aren’t these moments what justify living?

“‘To Be an Irishman Too’: Jack Kerouac’s Irish Connection” in JSTOR

My article on Jack Kerouac and Ireland — “‘To Be an Irishman Too’: Jack Kerouac’s Irish Connection” — from the journal Studies, Vol. 92, No. 368 (Winter 2003), is available through the JSTOR academic database here.

An abstract from the Studies site describes the piece like this:

Jack Kerouac’s assumption into the literary canon in America may have taken longer, because he tended to be regarded as some sort of all-American rebel-without-a-cause. But the “all-American” epithet is simpliste. French-Canadian, Kerouac had Breton ancestors; these in turn hailed from another Celtic stronghold, Cornwall — and traced their own distant forebears to Ireland. (“Kerouac” may be a synonym of “Kerwick” or “Kervick” — Ó Ciarmhaic: “dark son”). The Celtic oral tradition (speculates one biographer) may have something to do with his natural storytelling ability and extraordinary powers of memory.

As one of the working-class settlers south of the Canadian border, Kerouac knew what it was to be marginalised and discriminated against — and any Irish heartstrings in him were struck by the similar plight of the U.S. descendants of Ireland's post-Famine immigrants. (He also identified with Mexicans and black Americans — experiencing themselves as an underclass).

Explicitly, Kerouac accords recognition to his Irish heritage in the matter of literary influence. He renders homage to Joyce — and (among the novels) actual instances are to be found of experimental wordplay, as well as of multiplicity of authorial voices. He also alludes to Yeats’s isle of Innisfree — casting Ireland in the role of a fount of creativity. (The hero of one of the novels applies similes from the Irish landscape to the girl he loves — a landscape which, in real life, Kerouac had only managed to admire from a passing ship).

Meeting him in New York, Brendan Behan had no doubt that here was a soul-mate. Kerouac's influence is felt in the work of contemporary Irish writer Colum McCann, and is openly acknowledged by Cathal Ó Searcaigh. James Liddy quotes Patrick Kavanagh as saying that “the only people in America that are alive are men like Jack Kerouac” — and comments: “Both Kavanagh and Kerouac have in their language the sparkle of epiphany”... So Kerouac would seem not only to have picked up some Irish echo from “way back”, but to have made it resonate anew in Irish sensibilities.

Hunger (2008)

Steve McQueen’s film Hunger (2008) touches on some of the wider issues surrounding the hunger strikes by Irish republican prisoners of war in the H-Blocks in 1981, but focuses primarily on the figure of Bobby Sands, who was the C.O. on the blocks there, and who became one of the central figures in modern Irish republicanism. A brief recap of history is given at the beginning of the film. Republican prisoners are protesting for recognition of their political status and thus refuse to wear prison uniforms or do prison work like common criminals. McQueen employs excerpts of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s public proclamations that “crime is crime is crime” and so forth, and succeeds in making her sound ridiculous simply by letting her speak for herself, in her arrogant, slightly sarcastic tone. Ultimately it is Thatcher who stands behind all of the misery and the horror inflicted on the prisoners. She is like the ghost in the machine, the voice that informs the brutality of the H-Blocks, although it is the screws, the prison guards, who enact her will. It is this will that Bobby Sands will finally have to confront. Though he ended up dead, and Thatcher still lives, Sands has emerged in history as the true victor. And while McQueen is concerned to portray the common humanity of everyone involved in this conflict, he also clearly sees Sands as the film’s hero.

McQueen cleverly takes his time before we encounter Sands (played by Michael Fassbender). It is a non-linear approach (which made me think of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line somewhat). The opening scenes are of a screw (a prison guard) suffering the negative repercussions of the oppressor in an oppressing situation. He wants to pretend his life is normal — there is a scene of a breakfast, in painstakingly slow detail. But there is no conversation between the man and his wife, who serves him. Instead, in a moment of brilliance on McQueen’s part, our view is suddenly below the table (yes, we are now viewing the situation from the beneath the dining room table) where we witness some crumbs falling on the man’s lap. The clarity of the shot is shocking. Our perspective is off-kilter but clear. How else are we to view such a fucked-up situation? Something is not quite right here. The house is like a morgue, a dead environment; there is nothing to say. The action that occurs is below the level of human communication; crumbs fall silently. Upon leaving for “work,” the guard checks under his car for explosive devices, as many had to do at that time in the fractured society of the North of Ireland, Belfast, circa 1981. The wife looks worryingly from the window as he gets in and drives off to another day of torturing. Yet these people too are human beings — human beings in a society in conflict, who have consciously taken a side and a role in that conflict.

After the guard enters the Maze Prison (the H-Blocks), the point of view changes. Now we observe a republican prisoner by the name of Gillen being checked into the Maze. He is made to strip naked as two or three screws eye him almost, no not almost, salaciously. The process of undressing is painfully slow and deliberate. McQueen does not let us hurry through this. Being a prisoner of war, the man refuses to wear the uniform of a common criminal so is branded a “non-conforming” prisoner, is given a blanket (which will be his sole garment), and joins the no-wash blanket protest presently underway in the jail. The one and only moment of the film that seems a little off occurs when Gillen meets his cellmate, a long-haired, blanket-clad, fellow IRA man. For some reason, he is cold towards Gillen, when he probably would have been glad for the comradeship. And when the man speaks in Irish, Gillen seems confused, as if he’d never heard the language before. In actuality, even if he didn’t speak Irish fluently, he’d have been well aware of it from his school days and from the numerous Irish-speakers in the republican movement and the wider nationalist community. He would also have been well aware that the prisoners in the Maze spoke it as often as possible (and even conducted classes in it for those POWs who were still learning).

We can easily forgive McQueen this brief lapse. The bleak reality of life as an Irish republican prisoner throughout Hunger is portrayed with precision and a keen aesthetic sense. With few other means at their disposal, the prisoners in rebellion smear their cell walls with shit; inedible food is dumped in a corner and becomes a spawning ground for maggots. The piss from the prisoners’ slop buckets is poured under the door and out into the halls. Someone’s job is to clean it up, and McQueen again tests the viewer’s comfort level by showing this process from start to finish — a prison worker suited head to toe puts down some cleanser, scrubs with a type of broom, inevitably pushes the urine and chemical mixture back under the cell doors. Meanwhile prisoners are routinely beaten, given forced baths with harsh detergents, forced haircuts, and are anally raped under the guise of “strip searches.” The amount of abuse is incredible, but the prisoners, intensely politically motivated, resist. They endure subhuman conditions with nothing but a blanket to wear, they pour urine out their cell doors, they smear their shit on the walls, they smuggle communications written on cigarette paper in and out of the jail, they speak the Irish language, all at great risk to themselves. The amount of physical pain they are willing to endure in their struggle is incredible. The British administration and the screws cannot stop them. This is the crux of it — the British prison system cannot control the POWs’ minds, so they attempt to control their bodies. In the H-Blocks, the body itself becomes the site of the struggle. Ultimately, with no further recourse, this situation will lead to the hunger strike.

But it doesn’t happen right away. An earlier but key moment of the film to my mind occurs when a prison guard, in head-to-toe protective suit and mask, enters a vacant cell to water-blast the shit off the walls. A circular design swirled in shit catches his eye, and he pauses to look at it. It seems to resemble something like a cave painting. The man even takes off his mask for a second to get a better look. Where he initially appears robotic, outfitted as he is, we suddenly get a glimpse of his common humanity. But then he pulls the mask back down and begins the cleaning. The circle design slowly disappears. It is an amazing scene, and one that is resonant with meaning. At the most basic level, McQueen seems to be saying, this is a conflict of the artist versus the machine. The prisoners, even in the most dire of circumstances, are still in their essences artists. Bobby Sands himself was a poet and writer, who smuggled his work out bit by bit on tiny pieces of paper. One of the books he wrote in prison, One Day in My Life, is in part the basis for this film. One thinks of other Irish republican leaders in this context. Pádraig Pearse and Thomas McDonagh, for example, leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, were also poets. Here the artistic urge is expressed in a form of painting, a primal design that alludes to our earliest ancestors. The prison worker seems to puzzle over it for a second, as if asking himself, “Me too?” But he chooses to suppress those feelings, puts the mask back down over his face, and starts spraying the water jets. The round swirl slowly fades as the emerging white wall blanks everything out. It is a destructive impulse, as opposed to the prisoners’ creative impulse.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating the point. For one, this scene forms the design of the movie poster and the DVD cover. The actual disc features the shit circle too, in full brown, as opposed to the poster/cover which shows it in the process of disappearing. A number of earlier reviews of the film criticized McQueen for supposedly aestheticizing the struggle. Similar accusations were made against Francis Ford Coppola when he released Apocalypse Now, that he was aestheticizing the Vietnam War. But I think Coppola’s response also applies here. Coppola noted that Vietnam was a television war, that it existed for many people as television images from the start. McQueen mentions in an interview included in the DVD’s special features that he remembers as a child seeing images of the hunger strikers and of Sands on television, and that this stuck with him (he also mentions that he innately sympathized with the hunger strikers). The hunger strikers knew full well the propaganda value of their almost Christ-like images. Not in any cynical way; they were people who were involved in a political struggle, who were doing everything they could to gain public support not only for the immediate cause of the prisoners, but for the aims of the republican movement on the wider scale (those aims being the defeat of the British government and unity of Ireland). They were conscious of aesthetics, partly for political reasons, but partly also because some were artists too. McQueen is not therefore “aestheticizing” the struggle in Hunger. He is saying that the struggle itself is aesthetic, that in some way it actually is a form of art (Kafka’s story “A Hunger Artist” comes to mind here). As awful and bleak and brutal as it often was (the initial prison guard character gets assassinated in front of his mother in a nursing home), the impulse to smear a spiral of shit on the wall represents something essential in all human beings. And the impulse to sacrifice oneself for the benefit of others, through the deliberate wasting away of one’s own body, as emblemized by Sands, is a tenderness beyond comprehension to most, including me.

The film’s pivotal scene is the no-cut 22-minute back-lit shot of a conversation between Sands and a priest named Fr. Moran (played by Liam Cunningham). A number of things stick in my mind about this scene. One of course is the length: 22 minutes (I’ve also read 17 minutes), with no cuts, of intense, incisive dialogue. This is when Sands announces his intention, and the intention of other prisoners, to go on hunger strike. Moran tries to argue him out of it on moral grounds, and a sort of battle of the wills ensues. The other aspects that resonate for me are what clinch the argument for Sands: How do we know Sands has the strength of will to carry this out? After all, other republican prisoners had recently attempted the same thing, and it ended in failure and disarray. Sands conveys his resolve to Moran through a parabolic story from his childhood, a story redolent of poetry. Bobby and some other Belfast lads go to Gaoth Dobhair, Co. Donegal, on a school trip. Off in the woods, they find a fawn stranded in a stream, near death, but still alive. They debate about what to do with it — put it out of its misery, attempt to rescue it? Bobby and the others go into the water. Just then, the priest arrives, orders them all back, and the boys are in trouble. Bobby, however, strangles the fawn to death before the priest’s very eyes and takes responsibility for the whole thing. He gets the priest’s wrath, but he is satisfied that he’s done right by the fawn. He has taken action. The story is conveyed solely through dialogue, yet the viewer feels as if he is watching it unfold. As the conversation comes to a climax, Sands makes himself unambiguously clear — the time now has also come for action, a purity of political action. There can be no more fence-sitting. The hunger strike is going to happen, and you are either with us or against us. In defeat, Moran lets it be known that he and Sands will not meet again, and that is that.

The rest of the film is an awe-inspiring display of both McQueen’s feel for poetic imagery and Fassbender’s intense act of body-modification (which I would venture to suggest surpasses even that of Robert DeNiro in Raging Bull — De Niro only had to put pounds on; Fassender loses them to the peril of his own health — and this further serves to raise the thought: what of the real Bobby Sands, and the physical torments he went through? — and Margaret Thatcher scoffed!).

Despite McQueen’s protestations (no doubt necessary in public interviews) that he explores the trauma endured on all sides of the conflict in the North of Ireland (and in fact he well depicts this in practice; we all know that the oppressor is affected in untold ways by his inflicting of oppression), this is not a film that anyone can be neutral about. As Sands himself says here in no uncertain terms, you cannot remain on the fence about this. You either support Sands and his fellow hunger strikers, or you support British occupation and oppression of Ireland. You either support Sands, or you support anal rape, beatings of prisoners, forced baths and haircuts, concentration camp conditions. You either support Sands, or you support the negation of art and poetry, the negation of humanity. You either see the greatness of this film, or you do not know film.

Review of The Lakes of Coma (2003) archived

The Galway, Ireland, free weekly paper, the Galway Advertiser, has recently archived their back issues. I’m there in a number of different contexts (reviews, letters, literary arguments), but here’s a link to a review of my first book, The Lakes of Coma, from 3 April 2003. It’s nice to see the actual (virtual) newsprint page, but I also reproduce the text here.

*

Exiled from Main Street

The Lakes of Coma by Michael S Begnal (Six Gallery Press, €9)

THE MEDIUM is the message in The Lakes of Coma, a new collection of poems by Galway-based writer Michael S Begnal.

The Lakes of Coma offers fractured images of American urban existence, a dislocated, displaced eye taking in the secret “terror and beauty” of an underbelly world of transvestites, seedy cafeterias, and cracked pavements: “American cities/ inhabited by beasts and grotesques.”

Begnal is a beast of a different kind, a “stray cat in a rolling field” he calls himself in “Let’s Love America”. He writes from a periphery where nobody belongs or welcomes, travelling incognito. “Why am I abandoned?” he asks, but the harsh self-reflexivity of the writing forbids pity. Even the exposed and exposing language in which he expresses himself is subject to defilement. Poetry is “the liar’s accomplice”, another form of disassociation and of measuring his distance from himself. The centre cannot hold. Begnal, aware of the fact, makes poetry of fleeting images and perceptions, the detritus of observed life that rises “furious/ and ephemerally” before his eyes.

Begnal’s poetry is a kind of violent music (he is also a musician). Several of the poems celebrate music and musicians. “Black Flag” describes the raw energy of a mosh pit during a punk gig, and for once a sense of communion: The music “moves you, the crowd flowing”. In “Our Tradition” he sets out his artistic manifesto, affirming a way of living and writing that owes nothing to the past but “continually renews/ itself in the singular now”. He quotes guitarist Sonny Sharrock in a poem of the same name: “I’ve been trying to find a way for the terror and the beauty to live together in one song,” said Sharrock, and Begnal’s improvised riffs, his unflinching notation of American life, is a bleak and darkly humorous look at the same terrible beauty.

Kieran Hayes

Alt i JSTOR / Article in JSTOR

Tá alt fúm féin ar fáil sa bhunachar sonraí acadúil JSTOR. Foilsíodh an píosa seo i gComhar, Iml. 60, Uimh. 12 (Nollaig 2000). Scríofa ag Alex Hijmans, déileáileann sé lena hoícheanta filíochta a bhíodh ag Apostasy Café faoi dheireadh na nóchaidí, agus leis an t-irisleabhar filíochta a bhunaigh mé in éineacht le Kevin Higgins, The Burning Bush. Má tá rochtain agat ar JSTOR, seo é an nasc atá uait.

An article about yours truly in the December 2000 issue of Irish-language magazine Comhar is available through the JSTOR academic database. This piece discusses the now long-gone Apostasy Café poetry scene in Galway and the early history of the magazine I co-founded with Kevin Higgins, The Burning Bush. If you have a JSTOR log-in, here is the link to this blast from the past.

Poem in GRASP #3

I am happy to have a poem in the new issue (#3, Spring) of GRASP, which is an English-language literary and arts magazine published in Prague. If you live in that city, you can find it in the book shops. But for those who don’t, you can easily download the .pdf of the whole issue by going here (it’s your choice of the large or small file). A couple quick clicks, and there you have it....

The poetry section of this magazine is really very good, I have to say. Other contributors include Alan Jude Moore, Carrie Etter, Louis Armand, Heather Fowler, Sheila E. Murphy, and more, along with prose fiction, essays, photography, film reviews, etc. Very much worth the look. Further information can be found at the GRASP website.

Kerouac

It’s interesting to remind oneself that Jack Kerouac’s native language was Massachusetts-Québec French. In the recently (2007) discovered manuscript of Kerouac’s aborted 1951 autobiographical novel La nuit est ma femme, he writes, «Je suis Canadien Français, mis au monde à New England. Quand j’fâché j’sacre souvent en français. Quand j’rêve j’rêve souvent en français. Quand je braille j’braille toujours en français.» Following the online article of the newspaper where I first read about it, Le Devoir (5 septembre 2007), there are a number of comments, one of which (Lucien Francoeur) says, «le style révolutionnaire d’écriture pratiqué dans On the road n’est pas possible en français.... Kerouac...n’aurait pas été cet écrivain mondial s’il avait écrit en français ou en québécois.» While I can read a good amount of French, Kerouac’s dialect often tends to elude me, so I suppose I can’t say with any certainty based on this work whether or not he would have been as global (mondial) a writer in French as he became in English. Something rings true, though, about Francoeur’s comment, as much as I also assume the French work itself has got to be good — the reality is English has supplanted French as the dominant world language (with attendant pros and cons). In any case, all of this does highlight the double language consciousness that permeated Kerouac’s world-view and allows speculation about how much this could have informed his more well-known work in English. And certainly it must have been partly responsible for the way in which he situated himself in and against Anglo-American society.

To my mind, Kerouac remains one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. To me, he stands up there with Joyce, Nabokov, Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Flann O’Brien, Thomas Pynchon, Lawrence Durrell — of course this is a subjective list. Joyce’s influence on Kerouac’s work has been well documented by now. But it’s interesting to note that Kerouac praised Lolita: “Just read Nabokov’s Lolita which is one of the classics of world literature and ranks with Joyce, Proust, Mann and Genet in the divine solipsism of modern literature...My opinion of him, earlier formed by critics, was low...and so there you have our marvelously competent American critics” (Letter to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, June 15, 1962). Although these two writers were different in many regards, I like that Kerouac liked Nabokov. I have not been able to find out if this admiration was reciprocated in any way. Also noteworthy: Nabokov too began life speaking a language that was not the language he would become famous in as a writer.

For me Kerouac’s greatness lies not only in On the Road (though certainly it is located there), but also in works like Visions of Cody — a radical reinterpretation of the same On the Road material, his most experimental work, and probably his masterpiece. He was at the height of his powers when he wrote Cody, and the level of perception conveyed there is completely amazing. Reading the two books as in a way different versions of each other creates a further layer of insight, a sort of metafictional (Kerouac would no doubt hate me using that word to describe him) layer that exists in between the two. As well as that, in Cody Kerouac employs certain techniques that would now have to called postmodern — non-linear narrative, incorporation of tape-recorded conversations, drawings, references to writing itself (“...old Yeats will butler, he really was a cunt man that old Irish sod I love him and dig him, why paterson Williams the carlos poet, so carlos he makes a shroud out of a mill....”), the filmic, linguistic experiment after Finnegans Wake (including passages in French). It’s his most ambitious work, his greatest. Tim Hunt writes a lot about it in Kerouac’s Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction (1981).

I would further say that Doctor Sax and Maggie Cassidy are two more of Kerouac’s great novels. And that Mexico City Blues, Pomes All Sizes, “San Francisco Blues,” and others are among the best works of a certain school of mid-century American poetry, in the line of Williams Carlos Williams. However, there are other descendents of Williams, representatives of other schools, to whom Kerouac, the Beats, the San Francisco Renaissance poets and so forth did not seem like such a good thing. I’m thinking here of George Oppen (who I also like immensely, in a different way than I like Kerouac), who, in his essay “The Mind’s Own Place” (1963), sets up Beat writing (though he doesn’t specify it by name) as opposed to the imagist precision of the original flush of modernism: “Such an art [i.e. the modernist “skill of accuracy, of precision”] has always to be defended against a furious and bitter Bohemia whose passion it is to assist, in the highest of high spirits, at the razing of that art which is the last intrusion on an onanism which they believe to be artistic. In these circles is elaborated a mock-admiration of the artist as a sort of super-annuated infant...”

As much as I like and admire Oppen’s writing, I think his criticism here only serves to highlight a schism in poetry which still exists today — what I might term the schism between the “scientific” (as exemplified by Oppen and other Objectivist poets) and the “artistic” (a word which Oppen clearly uses pejoratively in his essay when linking it to the Bohemian). Both of these schools of American poetry, these poetic modes of being, however, can justifiably claim descent from Williams himself. Yet Kerouac, with his Beat associations, is seen by many as merely an ultra-Bohemian, “the King of the Beats,” drinking himself to death but not producing much of literary value — at best perhaps the spearhead of a fad with some sociological value, but more usually as someone who helped usher in the worst kind of confessional nonsense. In comments like Oppen’s, I hear the echoes of Truman Capote saying of Kerouac, “That’s not writing, it’s typing.” I am reminded of conservative critic Norman Podhoretz’s assertion that Kerouac’s motto was “Kill the intellectuals who can talk coherently....” Kerouac’s own champions oftentimes don’t do much to dispel these misconceptions. In a review of Kerouac’s posthumously published play Beat Generation (2005), I criticized A. M. Homes’ bombastic introduction for characterizing Kerouac’s style as “a literary atom bomb smashing everything,” as “everything and the kitchen sink too,” “a kind of demolition derby pileup.” Where Oppen means his portrayal of “a furious and bitter Bohemia” as an attack, Homes means her comments as complimentary! In my opinion, they are both wrong.

Kerouac was dedicated to the craft of writing. That is the first thing. His aesthetic is ultimately a matter of personal taste, a subjective thing. That he exhibited certain Bohemian tendencies, ultimately drinking himself to death, is neither here nor there, except inasmuch as it helps illuminate an evolution from life-affirmation to nihilism. I think that Oppen’s criticisms in “The Mind’s Own Place” are based more on his own subjective tastes in literature, and possibly the circumstances of his own life history. Oppen has decided that he does not want to lead a life of excess, and that is fair enough. But it seems to me that those who make a virtue out of criticizing those who may fall into the “Bohemian” camp usually do so because of their aversion to that sort of lifestyle, rather than on literary merit. Would they dismiss Rimbaud too? Should the artist be any less valorized than the carpenter? I find it wholly possible to embrace both Jack Kerouac and George Oppen, and the different kind of poetics they represent.

But I disagree that Kerouac, for example, lacks precision. If he seems to at times, it is in actuality part of a wider strategy. As Gerald Nicosia writes in his biography of Kerouac, Memory Babe (1983), in regard to prosody, “His one real advance beyond Williams was the apprehension that rhythm develops within the thought process rather than being created by thought. Albeit the distinction is subtle. Kerouac really was moving toward a more spontaneous literary form, one in which errors, malapropisms, babble, and all forms of verbal stumbling fit into a grander context.” Kerouac embraces irrationality as a method when it is called for. Some cannot embrace the irrational, for whatever reason their lives have set before them — another aspect of the aforementioned schism.

Interestingly, William Carlos Williams himself championed Beat Bohemianism, lauding Allen Ginsberg by including his letters in Books Four and Five of Paterson and writing in a March 11, 1952, letter to Robert Lowell that Ginsberg “is coming to personify the place [Paterson] for me” (qtd. in Paul Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked, 1981). Ginsberg seems to recapitulate in slightly wilder form what Williams himself has been asserting throughout the whole course of his epic poem, that “unless there is / a new mind there cannot be a new / line....” Ginsberg personifies the figure of the artist that Williams posits in Paterson, the future American poet who has finally broken free from old ways of thinking and writing, one who is freed from conventional morality. In 1957, Williams met with Ginsberg, Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky, and Nicosia notes that Williams “praised their writings.” Of course, Williams’ association with Oppen through the Objectivist Press and so forth implies praise for Oppen and his style of writing as well. There need be no mutual exclusivity here.

No, we would not be having this conversation if Kerouac had primarily written in his regional dialect of Québécois French. As it happens, though, he is considered by many as one of the greatest American novelists and poets of the 20th century because of his writing in English. That status is deserved — not particularly because of the literary movement he was associated with or its remaining appeal to those who do not identify with the dull monotony of established forms, both in literature specifically or in society more generally (though I will say there is even some merit in that). Instead it is deserved because of the particular works which he himself wrote, which are brilliant whether or not you take into consideration the particular arguments surrounding them in his time or ours. Jack Kerouac’s birthday is March 12. He would have been 88. At the risk of outing myself as a Bohemian, I raise my glass to him.

Maurice Scully, Humming

I’ve written about Scully’s work many times now, including some pieces that appear online here, here, here, and here. Let those serve as my introduction to Scully; this will be a more immediate, subjective, impressionistic review, if it really is a review at all. What strikes me most about Scully’s latest collection of poetry, Humming (Shearsman Books, 2009, 100 pp., ISBN 978-1-84861-059-0), is that it is his death collection, much more so than any of his others. It is dedicated to his brother Brian who died in 2004. References to other deaths inhabit this book as well, the father, the mother, and then: “Turn the beach upside-down, what do you see? It must be yr sister’s / anniversary? By forces too large for all of us she’s drawn into the cave.” But death cannot be the end for those who live on, until one’s own anyway. In the next stanza, “It must be yr brother’s anniversary. [....] go & do / what you do in life and do it thoroughly, one circle, then another, [....] die, and die well. Good.” Between each stanza of this poem (one of many titled “Ballad”) is a sort of refrain: “ha ha”.

It is an affirmation of life being put forward here, a view that is evident in other sections of this book as well. In another “Ballad,” an “Argument” is put forward: the speaker’s brother has died. This is presented matter-of-factly, almost dispassionately. It is a meditation on the reality of death and aging, our helplessness before it all: “I know the facts are rough. Goodbye.” The only “Response” to this (the second half of the poem), is poetry itself, the reassertion of the poet’s poetic life-vision (and here his form enhances his content):

to
    never
be
    still
des-
    pite
what
    you
might
    think
in
    all
this
    space
ever
    open
to
    light....

A recurring theme in Humming is the description of a Neanderthal grave from 60,000 years ago, a grave which included flowers of cornflower, hollyhock, ragwort, hyacinth, yarrow, and thistle (we know this because of their pollen deposits) — showing that a reverence for death and care for the dead are impulses that go back through eons of time and are present even in non-Homo sapiens human society. Those little grains of pollen float throughout this collection (sometimes as “dots”). In this, Scully simultaneously connects us (21st-century Western society) with the ancients and yet at the same time seems to be saying, So what, this has all been going on forever, we’re not so special.

The latter viewpoint seems to be confirmed in Scully’s scorn for poets who turn death, or something like it, into a career move: “If you dedicate your little book to Mammy and get / a prize — size matters — you know how it is — / a million years of isolation and neglect … as if you / deserve pampering as by right. Just write, right?” But, some wise guy or gal might ask, doesn’t Scully dedicate his own book to his brother? What’s the difference? The difference is Scully has long ago put aside (or maybe never had) any expectation of being acclaimed for it. I don’t think he cares whether or not anyone will be moved by such a dedication, or who can “relate.” In fact, he often seems to purposely frustrate (through his form, his poetic strategies, his frequent use of language that can sometimes seem more utilitarian than “poetic”) attempts on the part of the reader to relate in an emotional way. He just writes; that is enough.

So Scully rejects the “House of Prizes,” the cosy relationships of some sections of the Irish arts industry: “I am 52. How old are you? I’m old enough to take a knife / to any letter from the Arts Council for instance regretting, et cetera / because they know I think by now — now that I’m older than / they are & longer on the job — I know perhaps a fact or two of life.” He does seem to be making a point of this, drawing a line in the sand. The book includes a back-cover blurb from JCC Mays, which reads in part, “The poet is not pushed forward as a surrogate hero, an ideal fictionalised presence in whose identity we lose ourselves: he is, always, just (just!) a person making. We are offered a poetry of witness, not of personality and career-accomplishment.” If the point of life for Scully is just to live (until you die), then the point of being a poet is just to write (to make).

I think this is why a lot of Scully’s work is actually “about” writing itself: “hum of a small plane in the distance     hum of my pen / moving     hum of my half-mind following....” He is a very imagistic poet at times, but his images don’t stand still — they are often commented upon, exploded, turned inside out; they are a kinetic form of imagism rather than the pure imagism of early Pound: “to watch one leaf turn turn back my hand / yr palm whatever skill whatever lack a tapestry / of flowers in the mud unstitching the next step” (from one of several pieces deceptively titled “Sonnet”). But in all of this I wonder if there isn’t still something left of the poet as hero, despite Mays’s blurb comment. After all, Scully is here setting out a very particular point of view, inevitably as against those of others; he is asserting both a unique poetics and a worldview which must be defended against possibly hostile entities (e.g. the Arts Council, careerist poets, audiences who acclaim them) and all the shit of the world (“remember / that he knows that / & will remember it / & calculate / the times to use it / with care / against you / as praxis / to his advantage / meanly, always [....] the next / piece of shit / taken for truth. / Have a nice day.”). Though the poet personality is certainly deemphasized in Scully’s work, the speaker nonetheless suffers the slings and arrows, and despite the degree of human cynicism which creeps in here — it’s damn hard to avoid — he comes through it all to occasional states of ebullience (“I am hey! When clouds break / & sunlight floods on to bright // up-readying flowers beside you / & you look up & smile [buoyant- / ly] — ”), and ultimately to poetry: “Drop by drop, grain by / grain… / POEM”.