Showing posts with label modern culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label modern culture. Show all posts

Sunday, October 20, 2019

For Ti Jean Kerouac On The 50th Anniversary Of His Death And The “Assistant King Of The Beats” Allan Ginsberg-Hard Rain’s A Going To Fall With Kudos To Bob Dylan “King Of The Folkies"- Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"- The Film- A Guest Review


For Ti Jean Kerouac On The 50th Anniversary Of His Death And The “Assistant King Of The Beats” Allan Ginsberg-Hard Rain’s A Going To Fall With Kudos To Bob Dylan “King Of The Folkies"

By Lance Lawrence

[In the interest of today’s endless pursue of transparency which in many cases covers up the real deal with a few fake pieces of fluff I admit that I knew Jack Kerouac’s daughter, Janet always called me and those I knew Jan now late daughter (she died in 1996)  whom he never really recognized as his despite the absolute likeness and later testing for whatever cramped reason and which took its toll on her with like her father an early death, met out in Todo el Mundo south of Big Sur off the famous Pacific Coast Highway. We, a group of us from the Boston area who had been told by some guys from North Adamsville, about forty miles south of Boston who we met through Pete Markin* who I went to Boston University with before he dropped out in the Summer of Love, 1967 about Todo and how it was a cooler place down the road from Big Sur which had become inundated with holy goofs and tourists and a rip off. That s is still true today although the rip-off part is submerged since it in no longer a hippie Garden of Eden except among those who were so stoned that couldn’t find their ways out of the hills above the ocean and have wound up staying there as models for what the 1960s were all about (and what I remember hearing a few parents tell their children to avoid at all costs-oh, to be very young-then)

We had been staying at a cabin owned by the writer Steven Levin (mostly novels and essays for publications like City Lights and Blue Dial Press and regional literary journals) when one Saturday night we held a party and in walked Jan then maybe seventeen or eighteen, nice and who wanted to be a writer like her dad. The hook for me to meet her was the Boston-Lowell connection (one of the few times being from Boston did me any good). We became friendly the few days she stayed at the cabin (at my request) and I saw her a few times later. I was having my own troubles just then and as the world knows now she had a basketful from that crass rejection by her father and frustrations at not being taken seriously as a writer always following in her father’s two-million-word shadows. Funny it did not take any DNA testing for me to see that she was pure Kerouac in features and frankly from what I read of his style that too.    


I also knew Allan Ginsburg in his om-ish days when we fired up more than one blunt (marijuana cigarette for those who are clueless or use another term for the stick) to see what we could see out in the National Mall where he would do his sleek Buddha Zen mad monk thing and later Greenwich Village night where he did serious readings to the Village literary set. I was just a little too young to have appreciated his Howl which along with the elegant Kaddish (for his troubled late mother) fully since the former in particular was something like the Beat anthem to Kerouac’s On The Road bible. He had kind of moved on from beat and was moving on from hippie a bit as well and it would not be until later when the dust settled that he would go back to the later 1940s and early 1950s to explain to a candid audience including me over grass and some wine what it was all about, what drove the startlingly images and weird noises of that former poem. (Which I have read and re-read several times as well as through the beauty of YouTube has him reading forming background while I am working on the computer. 


This piece first appeared in Poetry Today shortly after Allan Ginsburg’s Father Death death without accordion and caused a great deal of confusion among the readers, a younger group according to the demographics provided to me by the advertising department when I was trying to figure out where the thing got lost in the fog, why these younger folk missed some terms I took for granted with which every reader was at least vaguely familiar. Some readers thought because I mentioned the word “cat” I was paying homage to T.S. Eliot generally recognized in pre-Beat times as the ultimate modernist poet. Meaning for Eliot aficionados the stuff that Broadway used to make a hit musical out of although it would have been better if they, either the confused young or the Broadway producers had counted their lives in coffee spoons. That cat reference of mine actually referred to “hep cats” as in a slang expression from the 1940s and 1950s before Beat went into high gear not a cat, the family pet.

Some readers, and I really was scratching my head over this one since this was published in a poetry magazine for aficionados and not for some dinky survey freshman college English class, that because I mentioned the word “homosexual” and some jargon associated with that sexual orientation when everybody was “in the closet” except maybe Allan Ginsburg and his Peter although they were in friendlier Frisco mainly thought I was referring W.H. Auden. There had been some coded words for the sexual acts associated with homosexually then, and maybe in some older sets still in use  Jesus, Auden, a great poet no question if not a brave one slinking off to America when things got too hot in his beloved England in September 1939 and a self-confessed homosexual in the days when that was dangerous to declare in late Victorian public morality England especially after what happened to Oscar Wilde when they pulled down the hammer was hardly the only homosexual possibility. That despite his game of claiming every good-looking guy for what he called the “Homintern.” Frankly I didn’t personally think anybody even read Auden anymore once the Beats be-bopped.

There were a few others who were presented as candidates as the person I was championing. James Lawson because some of his exploits were similar to the ones I described but those events were hardly rare in the burned over 1950s down in the mud of society. Jack Weir because of some West Coast references. Jeffery Stein, the poet of the new age shtetl because of the dope. All wrong. That poet had a name an honored name Allan Ginsburg who howled in the night at the oddness and injustice of the world after saying Kaddish to his mother’s memory and not be confused with this bag of bones rough crowd who refused to learn from the silly bastard. This piece was, is for ALLAN GINSBURG who wrote for Carl Solomon in his hours of sorrow just before he went under the knife in some stone- cold crazy asylum and I now for him when he went under the ground. Lance Lawrence]

*(We have, those of us who knew Markin back in the 1960s when he hung around the Cambridge coffeehouses with his cheap date girlfriends (he was a scholarship boy who had no money, came from some slack family house so coffeehouses, the ones with no admission charges and cheap coffee to maintain a seat), have often wondered whether Markin and Kerouac would have gotten along if they had been of the same generation. That generation born in the 1920s, his parents’ generation if not lifestyle. From Markin’s end would Jack have been the searched for father he had never known. From Jack’s end whether the two-million question Markin would have clashed or meshed with the two-million- word Kerouac. I know as early as in the 1980s when I was dating an English Literature graduate student from Cornell that Jack was in bad odor as a literary figure to emulate and subsequently anybody who wanted to be “school of Kerouac found hard sledding getting published. This is probably worthy of a separate monogram in this 50th anniversary year of the passing of Kerouac ) 

***********

I have seen the best poet of the generation before mine declare that he had seen that the best minds of his generation had turned to mush, turned out in the barren wilderness from which no one returned except for quick stays in safe haven mental asylums. Saw the same Negro streets he saw around Blue Hill Avenue and Dudley Street blank and wasted in the sweated fetid humid Thunderbird-lushed night (and every hobo, vagrant, escapee, drifter and grafter yelling out in unison “what is the word-Thunderbird-what is the price forty twice” and ready to jackroll some senior citizen lady for the price-ready to commit mayhem at Park Street subway stations for their “boy,” to be tamped by girl but I will be discrete since the Feds might raid the place sometime looking for the ghost of Trigger Burke who eluded them for a very long time. Thought that those angel-headed hipsters, those hep cats hanging around Times, Lafayette, Dupont, Harvard squares crying in pools of blood coming out of the wolves-stained sewers around the black corner would never stop bleating for their liquor, stop until they got popular and headed for the sallow lights of Harvard Square where they hustled young college students, young impressionable college students whose parents had had their best minds, those hallowed students, wasted in the turbid streets of south Long Island (not the West Egg of Gatsby’s dream of conquering everything in sight like any other poor-boy arriviste with too much money and not enough imagination and not East Egg of the fervid elites but anytown, Levitttown of those who would escape to Boston or Wisconsin to face the angel of death up front and say no go, pass, under luminous moons which light up sparks and say to that candid world which could have given a fuck hard times please come again no more.

Saw hipsters cadging wine drinks from sullen co-eds staying out too late in the Harvard Square night who turned out to be slumming from some plebian colleges across the river maybe good Irish girls from frail Catholic parishes with rosaries in their fair-skinned hands and a novena book between their knees who nevertheless has Protestant lusts in their pallid hearts but unrequited (here’s how-they would arrive at the Café Lana with ten bucks and their virginity and leave with both and some guy with dreams of salty sucking blowjobs walking out the backdoor and doing the whack job behind the dumpster –a waste of precious fluids and according to Norman Mailer world-historic fucks which would product the best minds of the next generation all dribbled away). Maybe tasty Jewish girls from the shtetl in not East or West Egg who flocked to the other side of the river and gave Irish guys who previously had dribbled their spunk behind dumpsters after losing out to ten bucks and virginity in tack tickey-tack Catholic girls who refused to give that head that would have brought some of the best minds some freaking relief (better not say fucking relief because that would be oxymoronic). Maybe some sullen fair-skinned and blonded Protestant girls who spouted something about one god and no trinities, no god and no trinities and just feel good stuff. All three varieties and yes there were more but who knew of Quakers, Mennonites, lusty Amish girls run away from home, Tantic card-wheelers, and fresh- faced red light district sluts who at least played the game straight-played the cash nexus for pure pleasure and maybe to even up some scores. All-Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, yeah, Quakers (fakirs, fakers and Shakers included), the sluts, Mennonites and yes those lusty red-faced Amish runaways all coming together after midnight far from the negro streets but not far from the all night hustlers and dime store hipsters with their cigar store rings and cheap Irish whiskeys bought on the installment plan who converged around the Hayes-Bickford just a seven league jump from the old end of the line dead of night Redline subway stop in order to keep the angel of death at arms’ length. There to listen until dawn to homosexuality- affixed hungry for the keyhole blast or the running sperm fakir poets and slamming singsters fresh out of cheapjack coffeehouses where three chords and two- line rhymes got you all the action you wanted although maybe a little light on the breadbasket sent around to show that you were appreciated. Yeah, now that I think about the matter more closely hard times please come again no more.                    

Saw the angel of death make her appearance one night at the Café Lana and then backstopped the Club Nana to fetch one young thing who warbled like heaven’s own angel. Some Norman Mailer white hipster turned her on to a little sister and then some boy and she no longer warbled but did sweet candy cane tricks for high-end businessmen with homely wives or fruitless ones who had given up that sort of “thing” after the third junior had been born and who were ready to make her his mistress if she would just stop singing kumbaya after every fuck like she was still a freaking warbler, a freaking virgin or something instead of “used” goods or maybe good for schoolboys whose older brothers took them to her for their first fling at going around the world, welcome to the brotherhood or maybe some old fart who just wanted to relive his dreams before the booze, the three wives and parcel of kids did him in and then the hustler sent her back to the Club Nana to “score” from the club owner who was connected with Nick the dream doper man, the Christ who would get him- and her well –on those mean angel-abandoned death watch streets but who knew that one night at the Hayes (everybody called it just that after they had been there one night), one after midnight night where they had that first cup of weak-kneed coffee replenished to keep a place in the scoreboarded night where hari-kara poets dreamed toke dreams and some Mister dreamed of fresh-faced singer girls looking for kicks. So please, please, hard times come again no more.              

I have seen frosted lemon trees jammed against the ferrous night, the night of silly foolish childhood dreams and misunderstanding about the world, the world that that poet spoke of in a teenage dream of indefinite duration about who was to have who was to have not once those minds were de-melted and made hip  to the tragedies of life, the close call with the mental house that awaits us all.




In Honor Of The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road"  Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"- The Film- A Guest Review




Click on the headline to link to a Boston Sunday Globe article, dated September 26, 2010, concerning a review of Howl, a film adaptation of Allen Ginsberg's famous poem.

http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2010/09/26/howl_marches_to_the_beat_of_ginsbergs_drummer/

Markin comment:

Needless to say this little cinematic effort to put the sense of Allen Ginsberg’s seminal modernist poem, Howl, on the screen is more than welcome in this space. As I have repeatedly emphasized on previous occasions any poem that starts of like this one is going to get my attention and keep it every time:

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night . . .’’

I have also of late made note of the influence of the “beats” in my own youthful political and social development. A prima facie case can be made by me, and has recently in this space, that Ginsberg’s Howl is his search for the blue-pink great American West night that animated my youth and that I have been ranting on about.

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Poet's Corner- T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men"- A Poem For Our Hard Times-The World Ends With A Bang, The Bang Of Revolution, Not A Whimper Though

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for poet T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men.

Click below to link to an On Point  NPR show on the very modern Mister Eliot


http://onpoint.wbur.org/2015/12/15/ts-eliot-modern-poetry-waste-land

Markin comment:

Praise be that Marxists take no particular notice of preferences in literature(or poetry, music, art, and other cultural tastes) except as literary figures are active counter-revolutionaries, etc., of course otherwise I would be in deep trouble here. T.S. Eliot "spoke" to me with The Hollow Men in high school and still does in these troubled times.
*******

The Hollow Men
T. S. Eliot

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Online text © 1998-2011 Poetry X. All rights reserved.
From The Hollow Men | 1925

Wednesday, June 02, 2010