To Live Outside The Law-With The Outlaw
Poet Slade Martin In Mind
By Bart Webber
No way in Slade Martin’s sweet young
life in 1965 did he ever expect, ever want to turn into an outlaw poet, a poet
out of Villon, Verlaine, and of late the “beat” gangster street poet Gregory
Corso hanging around Allan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Billy Burroughs, all
sainted poets in their own right although getting passed as beat got beat but
the commercial code, got itself onto televisions out in the heartlands-the kiss
of death for any off-beat movement. No way did he think, did he want to be a
gunsel poet, a guy living outside the law writing his poetry on the run,
waiting in some cloven corner for the civil war in his head to wrap around the
idea that he was doomed by the times and by the actuarial tables for outlaw
anything including poets.
Figure it out for yourselves, Slade a product of
Weston, out in the endlessly leafy suburbs of Boston did not project as some
project kid with a dictionary in one hand and a gun in all the others. Not a
big scholar beyond his from childhood love of language (had to go to summer
school twice for math to give you an idea of his focus) but in the college
track if for no other reason that he was excellent athlete, an excellent
football player, a quarterback who would be heavily recruited by the smaller
elite colleges like Williams, Lafayette or Amherst on the way to stockbroker
heaven or a place in some daughter’s father’s company. Sweet.
But Slade Martin had a problem, really
two problems, one was that he really was mad for words, for English words (and
later in high school Spanish palabras after reading Frederico Garcia Lorca to
ragged pages), for poetry and no amount of kidding by his fellow football
players and assorted jocks around the leafy suburban school, no amount of
teasing from the bevy of young women who followed him around Monday morning
after he had thrown for three touchdowns say and could have given a goddam
about poetry but rather dreamed of silky sheets (we are in the suburbs remember
where even the kids had silk this and silk that including bedding) could turn
him from his love of language. The other problem was that in order to really be
a poet, to be a poet not in the mold of say T.S. Eliot who was all the square
rage just then just because he was dubbed a modernist poet who spoke, mostly,
of modern themes of alienations and anguishes he knew he had to break out of
the mold intended for him, intended to keep him to that stockbroker road that
seemed to float around his destiny.
But a kid like Slade who grew up on the
streets of Weston unlike a kid who grew up on the streets of Lowell, Paterson,
or Brooklyn did not instinctively have the wherewithal to figure out that he
was going to have to live outside the law, to live out his life like some
latter day Villon who became a hero once he discovered him by accident in an
anthology of world poetry at the town library. (Villon who had no country that
he would recognize, was a classic drifter and grifter almost any modern would
recognize and had some pretty unsavory company inflamed Slade’s imagination
although his poetry with few exceptions left him cold.) So Slade had to learn
his outlaw trade by stealth, by figuring out that he had to go his own course.
Funny before 1965 he expected to ply his trade, his love of language wrapped up
for him via some academic training and then using whatever influences his
father had in the publishing business to get his foot in the door.
Then Slade heard a song, a folk song, a
genre he was not that familiar with but would later find a niche in, by a guy
named Dylan (who was born with a different last name he had heard but had taken
the last name Dylan in honor of the drunken poet Dylan Thomas who was raging
against the dying of the light somewhere) where he made a big point out of
having a reputation as an outlaw, saying that to be honest and Slade took this
to mean honest in his poetry he must live outside the law. And so Slade,
haltingly and inexpertly, turned himself into the outlaw poet that kids still
read today when they read poetry in the elite schools although more usually
they would sneak into the back alleys of the local library and read him there
with a math book or something as cover and try to figure out what the fuck to
do to speak their harried words to an indifferent world.
Naturally Slade had to blow off Weston,
get the leaves out of his ears, to blow off college too, to forget that
application to Amherst who wanted that arm of his not for writing but beating
Williams in their annual gridiron battles. So at sixteen almost seventeen Slade
grabbed half a hundred dollars loose change sitting around his mother’s
pocketbook and one night headed for Cambridge with an idea of some kind of
adventure to be able to put some truthful words together instead of the prickly
pear words that had to be coaxed out of him by a very sympathetic teacher (who
nevertheless wanted him to go to Amherst, his alma mater). He took the Peter
Pan bus into Boston and then the Redline subway to Harvard Square where when he
emerged he found himself running up the steps to be face to face with the
entrance to the fabled Hayes-Bickford. The Hayes the place where any midnight
you could see the literate refugees from the night (and other more besotted
refugees as well) holding forth for their fellows. Cups of steaming coffee
armed and ready.
That mother larceny night was the night
he met Freddy Fallon who would guide him through the world of petty
gangster-dom and a lifelong outlaw habit that he could never, would never and
did not want to break even when he became famous (or infamous depending on your
viewpoint) in the underground circles where his poetry was lapped up by hungry
acolytes and devotees. Funny thinking back on it Slade would laugh at how
easily he, a raw egg kid from the evergreen suburbs fell so hard and quickly
for Freddy’s urban highway bullshit line of patter. Maybe after all he just
looking for that excuse to break out and see what that break did to his words.
He did not have long to wait since Freddy conned (and Slade would later agree
that that word was appropriate) him into his first midnight creep that very
night on the basis that if he needed a place to stay he could stay with Freddy
as long as he went on the caper with him. In the event the job was a piece of
cake-a robbery (unarmed this time since a gun was not necessary) of a famous
Harvard professor’s house over on Francis Street which was like grabbing low
hanging fruit (Slade would use that very term when he wrote a poem, The Midnight Creep, dedicated to Freddy,
about the escapade a few days which New Directions would publish in an
anthology of young poets the next year). They grabbed a few thousand dollars’
worth of silver and other trinkets and just as Freddy called it the professor
never even called the cops and so they were able to get way with that caper.
The classic Slade poem The Last Go-Round
would also much later be the product of that night’s work as would a number of
other poems created after a lawless spree.
(Some of Slade’s best poems were
written in prison on those occasions when he and Freddy were not as lucky as
with that embarrassed professor on that first night. He would be nominated and
short-listed for Solace Sunset his
first long lyric poem dedicated to Villon, or better the ghost of Villon who
was the subject matter of the piece about the dignity of living outside the
walls of respectable society if you had the cajones to do so which he believed
was still in some high school English classroom anthologies.)
They, they meaning a few professors who
came to his cell to have an interview with him about his concept of the outlaw
poet, had asked Slade the last time he was incarcerated before he passed away a
few years back why he left the grandeur of the leafy suburbs to pursue a career
on the lower depths of society, to give up what would have been a promising
straight life career as a poet. He looked at the collective gathering with a
sneer and sideward glances and after along harangue about the death ship
suburbs and the bullshit academic poetry which nobody gave a fuck about, a
longer harangue about how only authentic words should touch paper and pen and a
few words about his underground following being more worthwhile to communicate
with than sitting in cold cellars reading awful mishmash poems to fellow poets
and their girlfriend and boyfriends.
He finished up with some words of
wisdom which the late Freddy Fallon (killed several years before in a shoot-out
with a couple of bank guards who thought the bank’s dough was their own money
and who also paid with their lives for that belief) had imparted to him that very
first night when he had gone on that Harvard caper. To live outside the law you
must be honest. Of course like almost everything that Freddy said or did he
stole it from Bob Dylan one night when Bob was around Cambridge and around the
Hayes putting some finishing touches on a song he was writing. But the idea was
right, and Slade said when they big book was written against his name they
would know that his words were not all bullshit but honest, honest as the pure
driven wind.
