america adrift

In Jack Kerouac’s novel Dharma Bums the protagonist, alter-ego of Kerouac, named Ray Smith, encounters ‘the number one Dharma Bum of them all’, Japhy Ryder, who instantly decides that Ray is a great Buddhist sage, possibly a reincarnation of Avalokitesvara, the Great Compassion Bodhisattva (more likely, though, a reincarnation of Goat or Mudface, Ryder teases Smith later on), and when they enter a San Francisco bar together and their friends inquire where they have met, Ryder gleefully announces: “I always meet my Bodhisattvas in the street!”

This sets the tone for the whole novel, which is perhaps even more celebratory of its culture hero than On the Road was in its beatification of Neal Cassady, alias Dean Moriarty. The two protagonists share a relationship of mutual respect and growth - again with Smith as the more passive learner and Ryder as the master woodsman, wilderness survivor, mountain climber, haiku improviser, Zen riddler and seducer of young women into the practice of yabyum (Tantric sex…)

Ryder’s real life model was of course Gary Snyder, the great Zen practitioner among the Beats - a poet who was also a student and scholar of oriental languages and texts, and later among the first poets instrumental in writing from a non-anthropocentric point of view, expressing a deep-ecology ethos and an eco-critical practise. Snyder has often warned that people should not take everything in Dharma Bums as complete truth, but he does acknowledge that Kerouac’s description of his lifestyle is correct in most respects.

In the course of the novel Kerouac paints a very sympathetic portrait of Ryder, and unlike Moriarty in On the Road, this new Buddhist culture hero does not end up betraying the protagonist. Rather it is the Ray Smith figure who at the end abstains from following the hard path to enlightenment that Ryder has helped him embark on, and he decides to literally come down from the pinnacles after a season as a fire lookout on Mount Sourdough’s Desolation Peak and once more rejoin the human community with all its temptations of the flesh. Still Smith misses Ryder who has gone off to Japan to live in a monastery and realizes what a strong, serious scholar Ryder will become.

Again, there are clear parallels between the novel and the real life of Gary Snyder. Snyder was born in San Francisco, but his family moved to the Pacific Northwest, where Snyder’s father began working in the logging industry. Snyder developed a love of the land from an early age on, and acquired forest and mountain craft through interacting with his environment. He studied anthropology in Portland at Reed College and left there with a BA in 1951. Later he pursued graduate studies at Berkeley, switching from anthropology to Oriental languages, to further his understanding of both Oriental poetry and Buddhist scriptures. Snyder has written a mini-autobiography for Modern Haiku and in there he begins:

I was from a proud, somewhat educated farming and working family. After finishing college I went back to work. I went into the National Forests to be an isolated fire lookout living in a tiny cabin on the top of a peak. I worked as a summertime firefighter and wilderness ranger, and then spent winters in San Francisco to be closer to a community of writers.

This mixture of manual and intellectual pursuits came to mark Snyder’s outlook in profound ways and is also one of the reasons behind the frequent comparison with Henry David Thoreau:

“If Ginsberg is the Beat movement’s Walt Whitman, Gary Snyder is the Henry David Thoreau. “– Bruce Cook

This and Snyder’s riposte to the Thoreau comparison, along with a great number of other Snyder quotes can be found here. Whereas Thoreau had his Walden Pond, Snyder had his Pacific Northwest - an altogether more rugged and demanding terrain. Already from Snyder’s first collection of poetry, the sense of place was one of the most striking features of his poems. His programmatic meta-poem “Riprap” (the title poem of that collection) perfectly illustrates the fusion of poetical practice and hard manual labour. The poem can be found in its entirety on-line here and here. The speaker’s absolute certainty of the equal value of building a path up a mountain and composing a poem never ceases to amaze me: each stone and each word matters equally, and the “Solidity of bark, leaf or wall/riprap of things” leads straight out onto the “Cobble of milky way/straying planets” putting us in our place in the Cosmos (this line echoes with Ginsberg’s “ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo [...] of night”, but has no urban angst built into it). Snyder then draws us inward: “In the thin loam, each rock a word/a creek-washed stone/Granite: ingrained/with torment of fire and weight/Crystal and sediment linked hot/all change, in thoughts,/As well as things” - reminding us of the connection between thought and matter and the fiery origins of both. Fire is, in fact, Snyder’s favourite element of change, signalling as much rebirth and life as destruction.

The other half of the first Snyder collection was made up of his translations of the Cold Mountain poems by Han Shan, a 9th century Chinese hermit poet, who took his name after the place in which he lived. Snyder’s congenial translations indicate the strong identification between the young aspiring poet and the old master. Here is Snyder’s translation of “Clambering up the Cold Mountain Path“. The poem ends with a question reminiscent of a koan, or Zen riddle: “Who can leap the world’s ties/And sit with me among the white clouds?” No doubt this reflects what Snyder desired to do…

Cover image from Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems

Snyder describes his years in Japan in the following terms:

I first arrived in Japan in May of 1956. Exposure to Buddhist scholars and translators soon brought me to the Zenrinkushû, that remarkable anthology of bits and pieces of Chinese poetry plus a number of folk proverbs as they became used within the Zen world as part of the training dialog. If one was looking at the possibilities of “short poems” the Zenrinkushû practice of breaking up Chinese poems would certainly have to be included. R.H. Blyth famously said “The Zenrinkushû is Chinese poetry on its way to becoming haiku.” Maybe it is that somebody — one of the old Zen monk editors — realized that practically all poems are too long and that they’d be better if they were cut up. So he cut up hundreds of Chinese poems and came out with new, shorter poems! I now know I was extremely fortunate to have been exposed to the elegant “Zen culture” aspects of Kyoto. But as I traveled around Japan I came to thoroughly appreciate popular culture, ordinary people’s lives, and the brave irreverent progressive vitality of postwar Japanese life. I realized that the spirit of haiku comes as much from that daily-life spirit as it does from “high culture” — and still, haiku is totally refined.

The practice of haiku was already introduced to the American readers by scholarly translations of Basho and other masters of the form, but a much more efficient boost of cultural transfer was performed by the characters of Dharma Bums who trade off spontaneous haikus during a climb of Mount Matterhorn in California like a couple of jazz-men trading riffs and licks. Smith teaches Japhy to be spontaneous, Japhy teaches Ray the discipline of mind required for the haiku to have an enlightening effect. Kerouac has published many of these so-called western haikus (they don’t conform to the syllable structure (3 lines of 5-7-5 syllables, respectively) that Japanese haiku poetry always follows) in books such as Pomes All Sizes, Scattered Poems and Some of the Dharma. Read more about Kerouac’s western haiku practice on this page.

Before going to Japan, Snyder had also been hitchhiking extensively up and down the West Coast, sometimes accompanied by Ginsberg, who had become friends with him after both men had participated in the legendary Six Gallery reading in late 1955. Here is a recent interview where Snyder recalls their reading at Reed College - a tape of which, containing the earliest known reading of “Howl”, has just surfaced.

Snyder had also spent several summers working as a fire lookout for the Forest Service. He recommended Kerouac for the job, and the summer of Snyder’s leaving for Japan, Kerouac manned the small look-out cabin on Sourdough Mountain in the North Cascades. An excellent volume commemorating the stays of Snyder, Kerouac and Philip Whalen on Sourdough has been produced by the very same person who unearthed the “Howl”-tape, John Suiter. His Poets on the Peaks site has sublime photography showing us the things these young men may have seen in the 1950s summers they spent up there in splendid and sometimes terrifying isolation. Kerouac wrote about this experience in two novels, Dharma Bums (somewhat romanticized) and Desolation Angels (with more of an emphasis on the terrors of the void)…

I think Snyder’s work as a fire lookout was directly instrumental in his choosing Smokey the Bear as yet another avatar of the Great Sun Buddha. In what is the funniest Snyder poem I have ever read, “Smokey the Bear Sutra”, the friendly figure known to every child in America becomes both holy, sublime and hilarious in the best “Zen Lunatic” tradition. You can read the poem here (although Snyder graciously allows us all to “reproduce it free forever”, it is a bit long to quote in full here…)

Suffice it to say that Snyder lets his readers participate in a hitherto unheard of non-human centered audience given as “a Discourse to all the assembled elements and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings, the flying beings, and the sitting beings — even grasses, to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a seed, assembled there.” This message is about the Future of Turtle Island (perhaps better known to the white man as America), where trouble is brewing: “The human race in that era will get into troubles all over its head, and practically wreck everything in spite of its own strong intelligent Buddha-nature…” Only the figure of Smokey will emerge to put out the uncontrollable wildfires and other destructions that mankind has unleashed on the earth:

With a halo of smoke and flame behind, the forest fires of the kali-yuga, fires caused by the stupidity of those who think things can be gained and lost whereas in truth all is contained vast and free in the Blue Sky and Green Earth of One Mind; Round-bellied to show his kind nature and that the great earth has food enough for everyone who loves her and trusts her; Trampling underfoot wasteful freeways and needless suburbs; smashing the worms of capitalism and totalitarianism; Indicating the Task: his followers, becoming free of cars, houses, canned foods, universities, and shoes; master the Three Mysteries of their own Body, Speech, and Mind; and fearlessly chop down the rotten trees and prune out the sick limbs of this country America and then burn the leftover trash.

This figure of trust and ancient wisdom - but also the bearer of a cleansing fire - will herald a new age for “Those who love woods and rivers, Gods and animals, hobos and madmen, prisoners and sick people, musicians, playful women, and hopeful children”, who, chanting Smokey’s mantra: “DROWN THEIR BUTTS - CRUSH THEIR BUTTS”, will make the world safe, so we will all have “ripe blackberries to eat and a sunny spot under a pine tree to sit at. AND IN THE END WILL WIN HIGHEST PERFECT ENLIGHTENMENT.” Amen!

With this radical turn into eco-critical poetry the mature Snyder tone is established. In my session this week I spoke about Snyder’s poetics and its heritage from Transcendentalism and the American Romantic age, esp. in its belief in a chain of beings and a transmission of the divine through all beings, the poet being but a conduit. You can learn more from my agenda for analysis for Snyder which suggests his techniques, themes and some contexts for his work.

In my session I also suggested that Snyder was a catalyst for the meeting of East Coast Beats and West Coast poets (often discussed as the San Francisco Renaissance), but more than that he helped seed the central Beat figures with a more Orientalist outlook, turning them on to Buddhist beliefs and ancient poetry of the East, and furthermore I see him as setting Ginsberg on the course that made him a lynch-pin between the Beat Generation and the 1960s multifaceted Counterculture - a movement Snyder also enthusiastically joined upon returning to the US in the late 60s.

I want to close with a clip from one of the few documentary films on Snyder. It can be found in four instalments on YouTube. Here I embed the first bit and after that you’ll see links to the other three…

Episodes 2, 3, and 4

Here is the Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry and Translations 1952 - 1998 which will give you 600 pages of poetry, essays, interviews etc. to peruse… It contains good selections of poetry from Regarding Wave, Turtle Island, Axe Handles, and Mountains and Rivers Without End, as well as prose from Earth House Hold, A Place in Space, The Real Work and The Practice of the Wild.

Snyder is also well represented in the Buddhist Beat reader, Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation, ed. by Carole Tonkinson (out of print, but available second-hand)

Here is a more recent picture of Gary Snyder:

Minnesota Public Radio has audio files featuring Snyder…

Snyder is very much still with us, dwelling among the species that surround us. His most recent book of essays came out in paperback a month ago: Back on the Fire. Most recent poetry collection was Danger on Peaks (2004).

Long may he remind us of our place in space!

Photo: Anne Braaten
View of Hozomeen Peak from Desolation

To follow up on yesterday’s post on “The American Scream” - Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” - the recently discovered first recording of Ginsberg reading Part I of the poem (the famous 6 Gallery reading in October ‘55 was not recorded) has now been made available to the general public…

To listen, go to the Reed College - a Portland, OR undergraduate college - Multimedia website. After you hear the readings, look at John Suiter’s fascinating account (wonderfully illustrated on 6 HTML-pages)(this link opens the article as a PDF-file if you just want text - but the photos should not be missed) of finding the tape and describing the events in February 1956 when Gary Snyder and Ginsberg came to Reed and gave poetry readings to a small student audience…Suiter’s story begins:

In a plain gray archival box in the basement of Reed’s Hauser Library there lies a single reel of audiotape that captures a moment in the early life of one of the anthemic poems of the 20th century. The aging brown acetate clarifies an author’s voice, hints at a spirit, adds to the myth of two poets, and tells of a part Reed College played in the early days of the Beat Generation—before it was Beat, or yet a generation.

Later in the piece Suiter quotes Ginsberg’s introductory remarks before launching into the incomplete version of “Howl”:

Ginsberg pauses to briefly prime his listeners for what’s to come. “The line length,” he says. “You’ll notice that they’re all built on bop— You might think of them as built on a bop refrain—chorus after chorus after chorus—the ideal being, say, Lester Young in Kansas City in 1938, blowing 72 choruses of ‘The Man I Love’ ’til everyone in the hall was out of his head—and Young was also…” (This was pure Kerouac, straight from the prefatory note to Mexico City Blues, wherein Kerouac states his notion of the poet as jazz saxophonist, “blowing” his poetic ideas in breath lines “from chorus to chorus.”)

John Suiter has his own interesting website for his “Poets on the Peaks” project…

This week’s class in The Beat Generation Revisted course was an introduction to the life and works of Allen Ginsberg, whose famous poem “Howl” inspired the title of Jonah Raskin’s 2004 book (subtitled “Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation”) and gave me the title of this blog entry. American Scream is an examination of the cultural roots of Ginsberg’s great outpouring in poetry of what made his generation unique in its maladaptation to an American conformity. As a communication studies professor Raskin’s primary interest is not in “Howl” as a literary work, but more in the effect of the poem on its contemporary society, as well as the personal development Ginsberg underwent before he could gather his ideas in this compendium of anecdotes about life as “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…” Raskin has, as the first scholar ever, had access to some unique background sources, such as psychiatric reports on Ginsberg, interviews with his psychoanalyst and extracts from the poet’s journals:

American Scream shows how “Howl” brought Ginsberg and the world out of the closet of a repressive society. It also gives the first full accounting of the literary figures–Eliot, Rimbaud, and Whitman–who influenced “Howl”, definitively placing it in the tradition of twentieth-century American poetry for the first time. As he follows the genesis and the evolution of “Howl”, Jonah Raskin constructs a vivid picture of a poet and an era. He illuminates the development of Beat poetry in New York and San Francisco in the 1950s–focusing on historic occasions such as the first reading of “Howl” at Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955 and the obscenity trial over the poem’s publication. He looks closely at Ginsberg’s life, including his relationships with his parents, friends, and mentors, while he was writing the poem and uses this material to illuminate the themes of madness, nakedness, and secrecy that pervade “Howl”.

Raskin’s book is just one among many books focusing on Ginsberg as the chief poet of the Beat Generation and one of the key focal characters in the nascent counterculture from the mid-fifties and onwards. One can point to Barry Miles exhaustive biography of Ginsberg from 1989, Ginsberg - A Biography:

or Michael Schumacher’s critical biography from 1992 Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg which has more focus on analyses of the poems:

Apart from these bios, there is excellent information to be found in the facsimile version of “Howl”, edited by Barry Miles, in which one gets a full annotation of the poem by Ginsberg himself as well as background on the “Howl” obscenty trial, Ginsberg’s struggle to correct the contemporary image of the poem as a nihilistic protest, instead of a spiritual credo, and much other invaluable material. Of course one must also own a copy of the original black and white covered City Lights Pocket Poets series edition of Howl and Other Poems which is still a cool object to carry in one’s jacket or jeans pocket…

As for my lecture today I took my starting point in a clip from Bob Dylan’s 1978 film Renaldo and Clara, showing Dylan and Ginsberg together at Kerouac’s grave, discussing poetry, gesturing and walking about looking at the various mementi mori at the cemetery:

I thought it only appropriate to link back to last week’s talk about Kerouac and his untimely death in 1969 of alcoholism-related causes, but also to point forward to the great connection between the Beats and the counterculture of the 60s with Dylan as one of its less willing figureheads. This connection gave me an occasion to explore the great meetings in 1965 (recently commented on by Todd Haynes’ film I’m Not There) between Dylan, Ginsberg and The Beatles in London, where Ginsberg mediated as if he were a diplomat negotiating a peace treaty between two rival superpowers. Miles describes (p. 370) how Ginsberg managed to break the ice between the oversized egos of Lennon and Dylan by clowning around telling stories about William Blake, Jack Kerouac and the other Beats.

The relationship between Dylan and Ginsberg continued to be close, and Dylan helped Ginsberg take a step towards using music in connection with his poetry, teaching him a few chords on the guitar, and in general inspiring Ginsberg to approach other, more traditional forms, such as the blues - a popular form Ginsberg seems to have been unfamiliar with before meeting Dylan. In Don’t Look Back, D.A. Pennebaker’s well-known documentary of Dylan’s tour of England in ‘65, Ginsberg takes part in what has really become an independent music video of “Subterrenean Homesick Blues” (it was also used as the original trailer for the film). While Dylan holds up and discards cue cards with the song lyrics, (”don’t follow leaders, watch pawking metaws”) Ginsberg is seen in the background vigorously debating with another individual, waving his arms and a weird shepherd-like walking stick about. The action all takes place in the back alley from the hotel they were staying at. This was only the first of Ginsberg’s many cameo appearences with musicians over his career…

I went on to briefly mention some of Ginsberg’s other activities in 1965, including the visit to three Communist countries (Cuba, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovachia) and getting thrown out of all of them (although in Prague the students crowned him King of May). I also pointed to Ginsberg’s rapidly accumulating FBI-file, which didn’t seem to reflect that since Ginsberg was treated as a dissenter and a misfit everywhere he went, it made little sense for the Feds to think he was some sort of Communist infiltrator and spy…

After this excursion into Ginsberg’s ushering in of the 60s counterculture and passing the mantle of prophet and critic of America’s contradictions on to a new generation, I returned to the main works of the mid-fifties Ginsberg, discussing how Kerouac’s list of essentials for the production of spontaneous prose inspired Ginsberg during the writing of “Howl”. The other raw material for “Howl” was of course personal experience, both from Ginsberg’s childhood where he suffered greatly because of his mother’s mental illness and his own troubled sexuality, and the more recent experiences from his circle of friends in New York, both at Columbia and Times Square, and later on in California.

In the facsimile version of “Howl” Ginsberg actually provides a rather elaborate line-by-line key to the anecdotal evidence immortalised in phrases such as: “who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull” - references to Ginsberg writing on his dirty dorm window and getting suspended from Columbia for claiming that (Columbia President) “Butler has no balls”. Many other otherwise obscure lines refer to specific incidents involving friends of Ginsberg, such as Philip Lamantia, Herbert Huncke, Joan and William Burroughs, Kerouac, or Neal Cassady (who famously is “N.C. - secret hero of these poems”). There is also a reference to Bill Canastra who was a legendary bohemian on the outskirts of Ginsberg’s circle who decapitated himself by leaning out of a subway car while it was leaving the platform…

With regards to the structure of “Howl”, Ginsberg insists in a letter to the critic Richard Eberhart that the poem is built “like a brick shithouse”. By this he means that there is a solid, predictable construction of each of the 3 main segments and the so-called “Footnote to Howl”. Each of the sections of the poem has a “fixed base” and a repetition-fueled structure: The “catalogue” of section I contains the anecdotes I referred to earlier, and they are anchored by the relative pronoun “who” initiating each line. Part II is a condemnation of “Moloch” - Ginsberg’s name for the military-industrial complex which in Old Testament fashion demands a burnt offering of each citizen. This section ends with the speaker “abandoning” Moloch. This portion is the katabasis element of the poem, i.e. its descent into Hell. After that, part III features a statement of solidarity and brotherhood, where the direct address to “Carl Solomon!” is followed by the reassurance: “I’m with you in Rockland where…”, repeated as the beginning of each line. Finally, in the Footnote (which really is the poem’s part IV) we are back out of the mental hospital, and hear a list of all things holy, from the lowliest body part (”The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!”) to the highest aspiration of a man: “Holy the supernatural extra briliant intelligent kindness of the soul!” This portion opens with 15 times “Holy!” and after that every line opens with the same incantation. This structure can be summarised in terms of language functions: Lament, Curse, Praise, Incantation/Prayer…

(By amazing coincidence, my friend Gray from Washington just sent me a news item that a hitherto unknown tape recording of Ginsberg reading “Howl” has been discovered in a university library at Reed College in Portland, Oregon! The tape will be available from the college website soon…)

After this in-depth survey of “Howl” we briefly discussed and heard some other poems, including “America”, the funny tongue-in-cheek politics of which hinge on a parody of media stereotypes of “them bad Russians”. In “America” Ginsberg still signs into the American project, putting his “queer shoulder to the wheel”. The America outside his poem was less than forthcoming in accepting the help he offered.

We also discussed the role which some poetical predecessors have played as inspiration for Ginsberg. Here I singled out Walt Whitman, as the peripatetic American bard whom Ginsberg offered to follow early on: “Which way does your beard point tonight?” (”A Supermarket in California”) (this post discusses Whitman and Ginsberg and the American Dream); Wiliam Blake whose voice Ginsberg heard in a vision, and to whom his “Sunflower Sutra” pays homage; and finally Oriental traditions, both within religious thought and poetic practice (for instance the haiku).

In closing we heard Ginsberg perform his moving “Father Death” (taken from a 90s BBC program) where he plays the harmonium and sings this simple lyric about accepting and embracing the inevitability of death for all. Thus we started the day at Kerouac’s grave and ended with a celebration of both life and death. Ginsberg passed away in 1997…

Ginsberg at Academy of American Poets
Ginsberg at Levi Asher’s Literary Kicks
Ginsberg at Modern American Poets

Also check out the recent Allen Ginsberg movie…

My first class in the “Beat Generation Revisited” course was given in the true Beat spirit of spontaneous improvisation. I went in there to tell a few stories about the origin of the Beat Generation, about some of the key persons involved - then zooming in on Kerouac and his writings, covering his manifestos for spontaneous prose and On the Road. I reminded the students of Kerouac and Ginsberg’s belief in “first thought - best thought”, and also in Ginsberg’s re-enactment of a Dadaist approach to lecturing: if things get too boring feel free to take off your clothes and throw potato salad at the lecturer. Fortunately it didn’t come to that, probably because no-one had thought to actually bring potato salad…

To start the lecture off on a proper note I played a track from the Beat Generation CD-box that came out on Rhino Records in 1992: “The Beat Generation” by the pseudonymous band ‘Bob McFadden & Dor’. This track was originally the title song to one of several Beat-exploitation flicks of the late fifties and early sixties (this one starring Mamie Van Doren) - the most notorious of which may be the racially purified 1960 film based on Kerouac’s novel The Subterreneans, whose black love interest was miraculously turned into a white chick by Hollywood. The publicity for The Beat Generation film is typically stereotypical for the way deviance was sold to a mainstream audience: “The wild, weird, world of the Beatniks! …Sullen rebels, defiant chicks…searching for a life of their own! The pads…the jazz…the dives… those frantic “way-out” parties… beyond belief!” I made a point out of emphasizing that the course would explore those stereotypes and hopefully dig a bit deeper.

The performer actually hiding behind the faddish name of ‘McFadden’ is none other than Rod McKuen who went on to become one of the best selling poets of the late 60s and 70s, putting out more than a volume a year for a 20 year period from ‘67 to ‘86. In the liner notes to the CD-box he is dubbed the “poet laureate of the Silent Generation”, and it is suggested that his training as a “psychological warfare script-writer” for the US army during the Korean War came in handy for his undercover work as a Beatnik… McKuen’s poetry is somewhat mushy and lovey-dovey but had and continues to have a wide appeal, as the web-site linked to above indicates. The “Beat Generation” track has actually had an interesting afterlife in a later generation, when Richard Hell and the Voidoids recorded it under the title “Blank Generation” in the punk era of the late 1970s.

I won’t try to reproduce my literary history of the Beats, nor the account I gave of the Beats as a social rebellion against post WW II conformity - all that you can read about from my course website - esp. in the chapter from my PhD on the construction of the Beats as a literary generation. But I do want to especially draw your attention to the literary manifesto Kerouac produced when he broke through the publishing barrier he had encountered when trying to get publishers to ‘dig’ his strange scroll manuscript of On the Road (see previous post for more on the scroll). In the list of 30 pithy tenets titled, “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose” (accessible online from University of Pennsylvania), Kerouac espouses not only a prescriptive ideal for prose writing, but also gives good, concrete advice for living: “3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house”, perhaps less good, abstract advice: “6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind”, and purified Catholic, long-suffering wisdom: “19. Accept loss forever 20. Believe in the holy contour of life”. The point I wanted to make was that for Kerouac any distinction between life and the writing of that life was artificial. He desired more than anything to set his life in words, remembering it all: “17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself”, gaining insights and visions (”9. The unspeakable visions of the individual”) from the process, creating an uninhibited flow of words, as a jazzman blowing an interminable solo: “7. Blow as deep as you want to blow 8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind”.

That led us to a discussion of the language of Beat writing and later of Beatniks and Hipsters trying to live a Beat life-style. For that purpose I dug out another track from the Beat Generation box-set, namely “Basic Hip” by John Brent and Del Close (which you can access here as an mp3-file from the über-cool website that borrows its title from that very track). The track is a hilarious riff on how lingo and subcultural argot always is slippery and tautological to outsiders, such as the “professor” on the track who tries to get “Geets Romo”, the Beatnik, to define the key concept of “dig”…

Del Close as Romo

This gave us a good inroads into the thematic analysis of On the Road, which also draws on a limited set of key terms from the Beat lingo, all circularly defining one another: To ‘blow’, to ‘go’, to ‘dig’ - to be ‘hip’, to be ‘beat’, to be ‘gone’… All activities that one had to engage in while being on the quest for the mysterious ‘IT’ that Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty desire to find throughout the novel. ‘IT’ is at various times defined as their lost or dead fathers, the original Fellaheen peoples of the Earth, sex, jazz, God (”Don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear”), but mostly as all of the above rolled into one.

The controlling metaphor of the quest is the pearl: “Somewhere down the line the pearl would be handed to me”, Sal Paradise (Lost) muses at the onset of his life on the road. This pearl is eventually handed, not to him, but to Dean Moriarty, by an innocent Mexican girl on the plateau the questers cross to get to Mexico City. It now takes the form of the purest mountain crystal the size of a berry plucked especially for them by the Mexican child… I pointed out how the reference to the pearl is an oblique reference to the old chestnut “the world is my oyster” (as we all know oysters are mothers of pearl), which of course, as Kerouac well knew, is from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor: “Why, then the world’s mine oyster, Which I with sword will open. “(2.2.3-4, Pistol to Falstaff)… For anyone who thinks like Truman Capote about On the Road: “That’s not writing, that’s typing”, I recommend that you read the novel with Shakespeare and The Bible as companions because then you will then quickly get smarter than Capote was when he made his famous quip…

I closed the lecture with a few pictures of Kerouac to emphasize the several facets of his personality, which included not just the frenzied, drunken hep-cat of On the Road, but also more contemplative and homely personae. You can see some of those pictures here. BTW, should you have any Kerouac or Beat related collecting/shopping needs try this website…

I’d like to here also give the final word to Kerouac himself, whose distinct voice and diction gives new energy to the words of On the Road. Enjoy Jack riffing on themes from that book and Visions of Cody to Steve Allen’s piano accompaniment in the YouTube clip below…

My previous post introduced you to the Canadian poetry journal Studio, where a shorter version of the following piece has just appeared. Studio’s practice of only allowing 800-word reviews meant that my piece on prose poet Robert Gibbons had to be abridged considerably, but the wonderful world of blogging and the generous policy of Studio to allow reprints, permits me to bring it to you in full length:

“A burst of language following a collision with a large piece of furniture…”Robert Gibbons is one of the finest practitioners of prose poetry in the US today. His words flow with speed and grace across white pages or screen spaces, framing the emptiness of their own margins, being larger inside than their boundaries would suggest possible, folding back on themselves and spilling off the margins of the pages. As Charles Simic suggests in the quote I have taken as the title for this review, prose poetry always explodes out of a linguistic collision in the mind of the writer. Poems such as these that are created through the process Jacques Derrida has dubbed ‘double invagination’ possess so much energy within their folded boundaries that text alone threatens to be unable to contain it for long. Unfolding such an invagination can in fact also be dangerous both for the author and for the unwary reader, as the chiasmic relations concealed behind the double fold may turn out to be highly charged and potentially explosive.

The burst of language Gibbons creates in this recent suite of texts communicates with us in a rising and falling arc of signification. In these particular poems he seeks to move ‘Beyond Time’, as the title of the collection suggests. The textual space that he uses up in the effort is minimal and liminal at the same time. The 38 pieces making up the suite, or chapbook, use a mere 4.600 words to evoke multiple spaces and places and to generate a vast historical sweep. Yet the space of the poems is always tangible and concrete – one is tempted to say his poetic space is ‘real’ even on the occasions where it is clear that Gibbons is imagining his settings and locales. The page space that his online publisher, DeadDrunkDublin and other Imaginal Spaces, has given him shimmers around the few lines each screen contains, while Syrie Kovitz’s luminous photos in black and white occupy the left half of each page, sometimes commenting on the words of the poems, sometimes oddly contrasting with them. Mostly, everything is white, beyond limits of text, image and ultimately space and time.

But let me fold back and begin again. Over the last couple of years I have been in the privileged situation of being the recipient of new poems from Robert via e-mail, at an amazing rate and in an almost constant flow. I therefore have known many of the Beyond Time poems ahead of time (of publication). I also know his previous book (ably reviewed here by our very own Camelia Elias) of prose poems, Body of Time, which is alluded to in the title of the new suite of poems, as a very much live body of work… Last summer I even had the joy of meeting Robert and his wife at a poetry conference in Scotland, an event which took Robert on a new journey of discovery in exotic locations such as Glasgow, Edinburgh and Bridge of Allan – places that are breathed into life in some of the pieces in Beyond Time. All this is to say that I do not read Robert’s poetry innocently (as if any reviewer ever does read a text innocently), but at the same time I do so with the greatest of sympathy, as a man might read dispatches from the frontline from a friend who has been in the campaigns for a long time: with a mixture of anxiety and excitement. In the pieces I recognize Robert himself, his references to life and work in Portland, Maine, to his travels, to his readings, to his wife and muse and special caregiver, Kathleen, as ‘real’, yet of more general interest than such references would have in a personal letter to me. This reading position is perhaps unique to me and a few other friends of Robert’s, but yet there is a candour and openheartedness in Robert’s work that invites other readers into an equally giving and generous relationship with his words. We are all seated in Robert’s great circle of friendship and community, and enriched thereby.

Similar to the best work of Frank O’Hara, Robert Lowell and Jack Kerouac, Gibbons confesses to us the trials and tribulations of the quotidian, but in doing so he does so much more by pointing to the constant struggle for transcendence – beyond ourselves and our time-bound existence – that we all engage in whether willy-nilly or by design. Robert is a seeker by nature, but one who lets serendipity do its subtle work and one who is unafraid to embrace and celebrate the results thereof. The design that he shapes in his life and texts in turn shapes him and his texts and life. Connection being all, Gibbons has graciously supplied another set of dots that we can study and begin to draw lines between in the small opening manifesto that prefaces the 38 poems. The arc of those poems spans the internal and the eternal, reaching from dream to memory. The connector here is the body as a living carrier of language – language not disembodied, but pulsating, rhythmic, fluid as blood. Gibbons’ practice is one of discovery (of trees, birds, books) and of “documenting experience”, or as he suggests, of living twice, once in the experience (or the dream thereof), and once again “as intense, or more so” in “the second life of writing”. The collection is thus suspended between the four points of the double Derridean chiasmus of dream, remembrance, discovery and writing: the invaginated X marking the spot.

His poetics, never disembodied or vapidly spiritual, suggests the tactile quality of language. Words caress you or may be caressed as bodies do and are. Words are therefore all we have and all we are, but they are never enough: “I’d film words like Godard, if I could, chant like Coltrane, if need be paint a sign like Kline,” Gibbons states. The poems bear this out in their flow of sounds and images referred to, described, alluded to, suggested, created anew. Other great improvisers also waft through the lines and emotions of the poems: Keith Jarrett on piano, O’Hara on museum stationary, Pollock dripping blood and paint on canvas… The burst of language in the prose is violent, flowing with great energy and speed as a molten lava mass from the core – only to end up a suspended, shimmering substance captured on the page or screen, inert, but upon reading, becoming unstuck in time again, speeding into the reader’s mind. “Speed of language counts. Prose speeds.” Gibbons is utterly committed to spontaneity, to the improvisation that knows not where it is going to end “until last tap at keyboard”. Again the spirit of Kerouac and Ginsberg lives on in such statements, as does the bravado of older prose writers such as Hemingway, tossing off great chunks of copy in little time (Gibbons: “I dropped off a couple manuscripts at the post office”(31)).

The arc that rises out of the “Anonymity of Time” (1), reaches an apex in “True Improvisation” (19) and descends into the long coda of “Beyond Time” (36) (with echoes of Proust’s (“old teahead of Time,” as Kerouac once called him) Time Regained), “Oracular Time” (37), and the vision in “I Saw Time” (38) takes the reader from the blank beginning line seeing Time as possessing a “grand anonymity”, expressed through absence of name, visible in the mass of “unmarked graves” of the unknown dead, to a final, perhaps not triumphant, but at least hopeful, look at Time beyond Death, peeking out more humanly, with a face perhaps, from “behind Death’s mask”. Time, which at first was an unknown and unknowable quantity (“I have never tried to write about Time”), is at the end of the dreaming and documenting another entity altogether, humanized and embodied: Time “danced in Flux with a body made of ethereal energy” – a friend, a familiar, a presence.

On the ride through the apex (“riding the same elliptical curve, as if sent from an unknown Time” (35)) towards the final gaze at Time “hover[ing] in the East, kindly, without intent” (38) the reader’s sense of gravity and linearity is happily challenged. The references along the way to world and biography as well as to texts, intertexts and fantasy sweep us off our feet, yet simultaneously keep us busy thinking, reaching for our encyclopaedia or our keyboard, inviting us as true hypertext navigators to download from YouTube Bill Evans I Do It for Your Love, Google Matisse’s The Three O’Clock Sitting, reference Pietro Aretino’s 16th century pornography, look up the good ship, Polar Adventure, in the shipping news, etc., etc. All of that we do for Robert, but also for ourselves, for what it’s worth, for what we might learn and be the richer for. Again my mind refers me to Kerouac as the last writer whose erudition and drive compelled me to pull down the roadmaps and follow him along every by-way of his ramblings.

But let us not forget that there is another fold, so let us begin again with the body which harbours these longings and desires and for which we really do all these things. The poems describe such longings, urges and fears of departure as can only be found in an old, battered but still desirous, great-hearted body. Not surprising then that the poems are home to a “she” who rapidly – more rapidly than Time – becomes personified and specific as a “Kathleen”, named only the one time, but with such a naming that one is not likely to forget: “the all-too-real phenomenon of Kathleen” (10). She permeates all of the poems, though, in her pronominal guise: as a “she” or as part of a “we”. Sometimes she speaks, having dreamed a pure transformational fairy-tale of 300 oysters’ potential of yielding 300 pearls, sometimes she handles more nurturing tasks: “She saw me off to work filled with coffee & autumnal root soup” (15), and sometimes she is away, but longed for with intensity: “Surely the new house isn’t the same without her” (21) (a longing that prompts the poet’s preoccupation with Aretino’s “how-to manual” – Gibbons’ “large piece of furniture” being a bed in this poem). Yet there is more return than departure (“She walked by in that classic summer dress of nothing” (27)), and she is the key to the poet’s dreams and joy in every sense: “We counted down the minutes toward the equinox […], then the seconds, as small as anchovy bones, making that much the most of summer, so that no time at all was lost” (31)

Many of Syrie Kovitz’s photographs, accompanying the poems, depict waif-like women, nude or scantily dressed, yet the photos, which are interesting in themselves with their range of ambiguously depicted phantasms, are often out-imaged by Gibbons’ texts in terms of substance and dream matter. One might argue that his poems need no photographic counterpoint, being themselves plurivocal, full of contradictions, full of sounds and images. Kovitz’s best work in this collection is that which accepts that it is placed in a framing function, and the title image (repeated of course with the title poem (36)) of a mantel shelf, adorned with many menorahs and other Jewish paraphernalia, upon which a Kovitz waif is seen balancing as well, only her bare feet and white flowing hemline visible, is certainly striking, haunting and beautifully mysterious.

DeadDrunkDublin has provided a fitting home for this chapbook sequence, being a worthwhile site that harbours many other fine poetry, prose and multimedia texts in well-designed and aesthetically pleasing and challenging lay-outs. Gibbons’ work has previously appeared online in both Exquisite Corpse and The Drunken Boat, so it’s nothing new to him to cavort (with or without Time) in dark and dangerous venues. Even so, the light of poems such as “I Saw Time” ultimately drives away any untoward demons lurking in dreams or memory.

Robert Gibbons’ forthcoming retrospective volume of poetry, which borrows part of its title from the online sequence I have discussed above, Beyond Time – New and Selected Work 1977 - 2007 promises to form a rare vantage point from which to discuss not only the themes of language and self, but also more political issues in his work. Over four decades Gibbons has remained an unincorporated, strongly political, and consistently dissident voice in the American landscape of little magazines and independent publication. Unaffiliated with any formal movement or coterie Gibbons has instead focused on developing his personal poetics of nonconformity, specializing in the hybrid form of the prose poem.

While being forced early on to depend on the acceptance of journal editors to find publication outlets, Gibbons has latterly begun utilizing internet and web-based publication options to a much larger extent. His spontaneous composition ideals make his output, which at times mimics forms such as the journal, the almanac and the blog, ideally suited for a quick turn-around in terms of publication. His confessions and reportage from a place-bound life on the streets of his favourite cities and among clean, well-lighted book-stacks balance carefully between the personal and the political, detailing the vagaries of having a compulsion to write for dear life while simultaneously being compelled to work for a living.

Parallel with his increasing utilization of ‘fast’ media, Gibbons has continued to work within more traditional little magazine outlets, such as The Evergreen Review, where recent poems have just appeared. The multiplication of publication outlets provided by the Web means that publication and gate-keeping in the arts have changed completely, and that whole new rules for peer, coterie and/or self-publication are now in place. Gibbons has navigated this new multifaceted field in a manner that could well be characterized as a celebration of ‘indefatigable privateness’, i.e. the visions of the individual – yet equally so as an indefatigable political commitment to a community, both local and global.

Robert has quite recently taken the full step and gone on-line with his very own website, which contains links to many of the people and publications mentioned above. It also hosts the most generous offering of his poetry I can imagine, in the shape of what Robert calls his log, where – on an almost daily basis – one can read a new prose poem by Robert, literally logging the movements in space and time of his body and mind. This generous outpouring of fresh work is in some ways becoming a Pepys-like diary in poems, but in keeping with the vocabulary of the medium it presents itself in, we should of course simply call it a blog of poetry. On one hand, I personally miss getting these poems one by one in my mailbox, but the archive now being created will in time come to stand as the most comprehensive one-man library of prose poetry available on-line. Robert Gibbons, thus, remains one of the finest practitioners of prose poetry, not just of today, but beyond time.

- Bent Sørensen,
Aalborg University