Sorority rip The Poetry and Life
of Allen Ginsberg:
a narrative poem
by Edward Sanders
Overlook, 2000, 2009

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Ed Sanders was a follower of Allen Ginsberg, and later a close friend, and he’s in a nice position to sketch what amounts to a fast-reading highlight-reel of the poet’s “blizzard fame,” The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg. Sanders has done a number of histories and biographies in verse, and this one follows their form: his crooked lines wind democratically down the center of the page (as with speed readers, who track their eyes down the center of the page alone). It makes for a fleet, often eerily contemporary story. The problems of Allen’s world are also ours:

Over his shoulder the bard heard the iron clacks
of Reagan’s stern-wheel’d chariot.

Reagan showed the kind of robotic persistence
that democrats often lack:

He tried in ‘68, ping!
He tried in ‘72, ping!
He tried in ‘76, ping!
and then in 1980, he won the nomination!

Carter swung to the right on domestic issues
He refused to support Senator Edward Kennedy’s

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This is harder to do than it looks; Sanders is strict with himself. And after reading so many poets who demand the reader suborn and second-guess himself, I found it a pleasure to spend a few hours with an ex-beatnik, still living the dream, who wants to communicate surely and unpretentiously. Sanders makes his verse with a mind to light his subject and not his style (but style is there — that “swung” keeps the lines dancing).

Ginsberg’s grandfather fled the pogroms for Newark in the 1880s, and there gave birth to the well-regarded poet Louis. Louis later married Naomi Livergant, a revolutionary and a lunatic who looms as large in her son Allen’s life as any figure, real or poetical. As Naomi moved into and out of sanatoriums, her son “The slender & nervous sixteen-year-old / took the ferry from Hoboken to Manhattan,” where he met, “young Republican Jack Kerouac,” and down “by th’ / west side docks, / they caressed one another.” Burroughs shambles onto the scene, but those mythic post-Columbia, pre-San Francisco years pass in a few pages and Ginsberg writes Howl and finds fame (”He was interested in experimenting in W.C. Williams’ / triadic line / or indented tercets / combined with Jack Kerouac’s long-breathed lines”), and by now we are only up to page 31. Though Ginsberg would continue to write interesting stuff — and though he didn’t lack for talent — the literary man becomes fast entangled with the political activist/celebrity/publicist (There he is with the Dalai Lama! Now he’s purring on John Lennon’s lap! Now he’s founding a Buddhist University! Bob Dylan’s his hero, they’re touring together!)

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To Ginsburg’s credit, he used his platform almost entirely for good, and he always helped his friends — getting their books published, finding them grants, cooking them dinner — and if some of the causes he embraced late in life were not thought-out, at least he was honest about what mattered, even at the end.

He was lucky in Sanders’ friendship, and while this long poem is far from a definitive biography (or poetical analysis), it’s a thoughtful, fun, and admirably loving book.

– John Cotter

Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits
Barney Hoskyns
Broadway Books, 2009

In a ‘98 New Yorker article, Richard Ford wrote:

Everyone knows the story of the good man who works like a demon, never stints, stays true to a calling, suffers setbacks, endures wounds that would demoralize others, eventually hits bottom. And yet he pulls his socks up, turns the page, recovers himself, finds new resolve, after which his luck changes, all his schemes work out, strangers love and praise him, everything he touches goes platinum, whereupon he turns into a fearsome asshole, ignores his old friends, begins hanging out with movie stars, and everybody who ever knew him feels sorry they did.

The above well describes the Tom Waits who emerges from Barney Hoskyns new biography, Lowside of the Road. Hoskyns is a big fan and goes on at great length about the inspiration and construction of the songs and albums. For those with an interest in how the aural sausage is made, every ingredient is examined with microscopic care. What’s troubling about the book (in a sense, no fault of Hoskyns’) is the man himself.

Biographies of the non-dead are a tricky business, and Waits has only made this one trickier by forbidding his family and close associates from engaging in any communication with Hoskyns. As a result, much of our day-to-day picture of Waits is formed by bitter ex-collegues (ex-producer Bones Howe, ex-saxophonist Ralph Carney) who can’t get their calls returned. Thus, the surly, secretive, ungrateful side of Waits is the most exposed.

This lack of access leaves a number of questions unanswered, foremost of which is what the hell happened to Tom Waits in 1981? Prior to Swordfishtrombones, the San Diego born singer produced jazzy lounge music; after the release (and a record label swap, and a marriage) Waits’ music turned exotic: Latin beats appeared, tracks became dissonant, Brechtian, calamitous. Obviously, his new wife and co-writer Kathleen Brennan made a huge difference to his art, but because she and her kin and kith are so tight-lipped, Hoskyns isn’t able to tell us much about her, the way she and her husband collaborate; just name, rank, and serial number (we don’t even know what she looks like … we have one blurry snap).

Some of the stories in Lowside of the Road are fun to read (mostly the carousing stuff in late ’70s LA with boozeaholic scenester Chuck E. Weiss), but much of the information here would have been better served in a coffee table book (with a page or two, say, for each album). Hoskyns is obviously an enthusiastic and frustrated fan, but to write a biography lite or unreliable on the real life of its subject is to write no biography at all.

– John Cotter

Each of the editors of Open Letters Ocean’s Twelve release has a fairly herculean labor to perform. Fiction Editor Sam Sacks has to contend with a general populace that reads mostly talk show-endorsed pap when it gets around to reading anything at all; London Editor Bryn Haworth has a city of 14 million souls to sort out; Political Editor Greg Waldmann writes to a world that’s more politically polarized than ever in its history. But even so, perhaps none of that editorial company has a harder task before him than Poetry Editor John Cotter, who must be wary not only of the worst excesses of his craft’s practitioners but also the peculiar contortions of that craft’s so-called critics.

Those contortions have long been a source of sport for the TLS’’s J.C. in the NB column, and the squib in the 24 April issue is delightful enough to quote in full:

Poetry babble is a tool of measurement used to gauge the relations between poetry as it appears on the page and the critical comments on the back of the book. In certain cases, the gulf separating the two can be wide indeed. Classical babbleologists point to Lisa Jarnot’s book Ring of Fire, which includes many lines like “ding dong/ dug dirt/ ditch dib/ chimp chore”, and others such as “Anomalous circus events in the great outer planets”. Readers wondering if they should read Ring of Fire pondered Patrick Pritchett’s endorsement: “Rising on wave after wave of near endless iteration, like a linguistic Mandelbrot set, they arrive in the long moment after loss as the signature and enactment of an initiation”.

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Few precedents are as clear, but John Goodby’s uncaged sea

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(Waterloo Press), which has seventy-four pages of verse like this -

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stimulates John Hartley Williams to emulate Mr Pritchett: “What can one say of such a ‘tusked ramshackling’ work? All I could say after reading it was: ‘like dramatic sea I hve been a ball of lakes’”. Nothing could be more certain of a place in the annals of babbleology. Experts are also fascinated by the case of Brian Teare, author of Sight Map (University of California). His four-page poem “To Be Two” proceeds as follows:

I ask the barometer falling, Fahrenheit as it

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charts [    ] disappearing: what fact

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is [

]. [                ]

Having memorized those last two lines, we turned to Jane Mead for illumination: “In many cases spoken from a Cartesian epistemological ground zero, these poems reach with urgency and passion toward a knowledge both impossible and necessary”. Ms Mead and Mr Williams have been invited to the NB Poetry Babble Conference. Anthropologists will have a chance to study them to see if their speech bears any relation to their writing.

Cotter would no doubt read that passage with a good-natured smile of resignation – such poets are asking to be misunderstood, after all, and such critics might not quite be aware of the nonsense they’re writing. Those of us who’ve been fortunate enough to experience John’s devotion to preaching the gospel of poetry know that it isn’t shaken by such silliness. Instead, he pulls down a volume (or, as often as not, simply recites from memory) and pulls listeners into the wonder and the unsettling coercion of the world’s most personal art.

And more to the point where rascals like J.C. are concerned, he also writes poetry criticism entirely free of nonsense. So take a pass on the Poetry Babble Conference this year and instead read Cotter here, here, and here. If he doesn’t slip right past your school-taught reservations about poetry and get you wanting to read it all afresh, then your yheart must be made of [             ].

Steve Donoghue

At least two names that cropped up in today’s Sunday New York Times for artistic examination will be familiar to attentive readers of Open Letters: in the Book Review, Kate Christensen reviews Arthur Phillips’ new novel The Song is You, and in the New York Times Magazine, Wyatt Mason turns in a profile of the American poet Frederick Seidel.

Christensen, author of several quite good novels, is surprisingly opaque regarding Phillips’ book – on the one hand, she says it’s tough to put down, but on the other, she compares its author to a dolphin. She opines: “The Song Is You shares with its predecessors Phillips’s smart, sly inquiries into the scope and possibilities of storytelling, but this novel is tenderer and more visceral than the first three,” and I’m not sure even the brightest member of the tursiops clan could explain (using clicks and whistles, naturally) what that all means. After all, making inquiries into the scope and possibilities of storytelling sounds suspiciously like a novelist’s basic job description, and “tenderer” isn’t the most bestest of adjectives.

Open Letters’  Fiction Editor Sam Sacks tackles The Song Is You in our current issue, avoiding all mention of sea mammals as he weighs in: “At the heart of The Song is You is a wise and clear-eyed exploration of the ways that the enchantments of youth turn stale – how gravity, in the mantle of heartbreak, imposes itself on even the most blessed of lives.” You can read the rest of his thoughts on the subject here

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and then make your own judgements about Phillips’ place in the natural kingdom.

In the Times Magazine, Mason, celebrated recent translator of Rimbaud, talks with Seidel in restaurants and in his gorgeous apartment

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, eliciting a string of anecdotes that share a common theme: the heroic poet quickly and assuredly outgrowing things (St. Louis, Judaism, Harvard, Ezra Pound, and Heaven knows what else). True, Seidel gets in some wonderful quips (when Mason, looking around the aforementioned gorgeous apartment, asks him, “So this is where you write?” he says, “My boy, this is where I live”), and true, Mason assembles some emphatic quotes from well-wishers who try to explain Seidel’s lack of wider renown (after a 50 year career, he only just made it into the Oxford Anthology of American Poetry, and he still isn’t in the Norton), but you can’t read the profile without wondering if there might not be a more basic reason why universal acclaim has thus far eluded Seidel.

Way back in August 2007, Open Letters Poetry Editor John Cotter reviewed one of Seidel’s more recent volumes, Ooga-Booga, and was generally underwhelmed with the poet. Underwhelmed and at times (in a rare turn for the normally-genial Cotter) quietly withering: “… as the pages turn the reader begins to suspect there is a bit too much pure jive and not enough substance to these poems. They seem not only uncategorizable but dispensable.”

Where to place your trust in all these conflicting and counter-crossing opinions, especially if you don’t have time to delve deeply into the works themselves? Despite her (Times-required?) occasional wandering ambiguity, and despite his (Times-expected?) occasional hagiography, both Christensen and Mason are worthy writers and passionate critics, not the usual phylum of Automaton Transfusion download

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specious dunderheads who

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sometimes come in for a much-deserved drubbing (all eyes tactfully avert from the most recent bloodied corpse…). Their agreements – and even more so their disagreements – with our own writers on the books and authors in question can’t help but be a good thing for everybody, I’m thinking.

-Steve Donoghue

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A Mercy
Toni Morrison
Knopf, 2008

One of the great lies about America is that it was ever homogeneous, a white city on a hill, or that it could be. In fact, the Pilgrims were late to the game; a whole miniseries worth of tribulation befell the French, Dutch, Africans, and Spanish before the first huge-buckled shoe plashed ashore. And of the separate waves of overland Asians arriving 13,000 years ahead of the new invaders, a large number of very different survivors continued to shape and be shaped by the mixed society being born.

That world was governed by different moral ideas of humanity — and ownership — than we enjoy today, and Toni Morrison paints that world vividly in her latest and best novel, A Mercy: a lyrical and impossibly condensed vision of the eerily familiar — and darkly strange — East Coast of the late 1600s.

Here we encounter Florens, a young girl conceived in Africa by a slave-trader father (himself African), sold once to a decadent Spanish planter, then traded to relieve a debt, as much currency as the coin her name recalls.

On the farm where Florens is enslaved we also meet Lina, a Native American woman, rescued from a plague-stricken village as a small girl and raised by stern Presbyterians, named Messilina for the luxurious Roman, another heathen, on the strong chance she’s been chosen for damnation. Lina would not likely know the European name for her tribe, if there ever was one, and cobbles together her own spiritual beliefs from half-remembered stories (new-age philosophy being not very new). Also at work on the farm are Sorrow, foundling daughter of a privateer, and Rebekka, sold by her English father to a Dutch planter as a mail-order bride. Like Scully and Willard, a pair of indentured servants from the neighboring farm, these people are all without full rights, fraternal but unequal, slaves of one sort or another. This doesn’t mean their lives are wholly joyless, but it does mean their wellbeing is limited, precarious, and thickly interwoven with that of their possessors.

Interestingly, the farm’s owner, Jacob Vaark, is not an evil man; ownership of souls is the way of this world. Morrison gives each of these characters one chapter to tell a part of their story (except for Florens, who, adventuring, gets a few), and as jagged bits of their lives come to light, the vast interconnectedness of this frontier society becomes more clear. Vaark, powerful on his small farm, is himself humbled by the wealthy planter with whom he does business. When that planter defaults on a loan, Vaark knows it would be worthless to take him to court — the wealthy man outranks the poor one and that is that.

Relative to his society, Vaark is a good man; but he wants to get rich. How else but though the surefire bet of his day, the rum trade? Not that he’s free of misgivings — he questions an expert, Downes, at a tavern: Doesn’t the trade eat up lives? Aren’t slaves lucky to survive for a year in Barbados?

“Not at all,” Downes smiled. “They ship in more. Like firewood, what burns to ash is refueled. And don’t forget, there are births. The place is a stew of mulattoes, creoles, zambos, mestizos, lobos, chinos, coyotes.” He touched his fingers with his thumb as he listed the types being produced in Barbados.

“Still the risk is high,” countered Jacob. “I’ve heard of whole estates cut down by disease. What will happen when labor dwindles and there is less and less to transport?”

“Why would it dwindle?” Downes spread his hands as if carrying the hull of a ship. “Africans are as interested in selling slaves to the Dutch as an English planter is in buying them. Rum rules, no matter who does the trading. Laws? What laws? Look,” he went on, “Massachusetts has already tried laws against rum selling and failed to stop one dram. The sale of molasses to northern colonies is brisker than ever. More steady profit in it than fur, tobacco, lumber, anything — except gold, I reckon. As long as the fuel is replenished, vats simmer and money heaps. Kill-devil, sugar — there will never by enough. A trade for lifetimes to come.”

Morrison is wonderful at evoking the danger and darkness of pre-industrial America, woods full of “boneless bears,” the constant risk that a knock on your door might be the devil’s knock: “The glittering eyes of an elk could easily be a demon, just as the howls of tortured souls might be the call of happy wolves.”

The Nobel committee has done something right. A Mercy packs more into 160 pages than most writers can pack in a shelf. If the Norton Anthology weren’t so averse to historical fiction, I’d expect to see it there whole; but a complementary supplement will do.

– John Cotter

Issue #4 of The Lifted Brow is out from far Australia, featuring four (4) Open Letters contributors in its roster. Poetry editor John Cotter, contributing editor Adam Golaski, and poets Jen Knox Transporter 2 release

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Blood Work movie full and Caren Beilin share new work alongside lions like Brian Evenson, Heidi Julavits, Rick Moody, and Jim Shepard. There are two CDs included in the $27 book, pressed with 40 pieces by 40 performers (including The Wrens, the eerie Dan Deacon, and a pop song by, of all people, Neil Gaiman).

Editor Ronnie Scott designed the book’s hundred-odd stories and songs around a real fake bookshelf which had previously distinguished a hairdresser called Control HQ in Brisbane, Queensland:

The fake bookshelf is a deep-looking piece of wood. It’s painted deeply black. But as you aproach, you realise that the pice of wood is flat, and the books are merely spines, which have been pruned from complete books and wrapped around lengths of foam.

The X Files release He copied down the unlikely titles on that shelf (titles like “Sound of Murder” and “The Pain of Winning” and “Portrait of Maud”) and assigned each to a different cartoonist, musician, or storywriter.

Jennifer L. Knox makes “All Her Dreams” about the magical illusions of a crappy intervention … Caren Beilin turns “Wherever Lynn Goes” into a weird waterscape of, among other implements, “a giant sculpture of scissors, which is padded with the area’s endemic, electric moss, its blades dripping with damp life, the green hairs of waves” … In Adam Golaski’s gentle “A Rainbow Summer,” a lonely boy is told the story of Noah’s Ark, whose builder, surprisingly, does not tire of eating fish … and John Cotter draws “Cristobel,” and invents of it the history of a Mexican zombie film which is neither a zombie film, nor Mexican … Sideways dvdrip It’s a packed, portable, and very pretty book, and Open Letters offers its warm congratulations to all its makers. You can get yours here~ Untamed Heart on dvd Blink ipod The Born Losers film The Thirty Nine Steps ipod

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It can take a while for British books to travel across the Atlantic, and the reverse is true as well. So it is that Martin Schifino looks (In Brief) at Clayton Eshleman’s one-volume translation of César Vallejo’s poetry.

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Can Vallejo’s poems travel? He was, and remains, a difficult writer…Anyone translating Vallejo is bound to fall short in some area, and no one has surmounted the challenge as well as Eshleman…It is difficult to imagine how it could be superceded.

John Cotter, OLM’s Poetry Editor, reviewed the same volume in depth all the way back in June of 2007. He and Schifino come to similar conclusions.

Thwarted and inherited loves, inspiring patriotism, a resentful standoff with God, the dream of perfect socialism, and a loving, brutal fuck with language lace his poems like loaded coils. These are not poems to be measured at first glance. These are poems to live with. Vallejo’s clustered poems want unpacking, then revisiting…

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No one else has done so much, posthumously, for Vallejo, and his passion radiates through the work. Plenty of other editions deserve our time, but Eshleman’s is a much-needed milestone and what his individual translations occasionally lack in accuracy, they make up for in courage. This is as it should be. Vallejo, as a poet, was more courageous than his time allowed.

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Thumbing the 11 July 2008 issue of the TLS Ice Princess film you might have seen Marjorie Perloff’s review of August Kleinzahler’s new poetry collection, Sleeping It Off In Rapid City The Invasion release .

Perloff’s objections to Kleinzahler’s work outweigh her accolades. For instance, after quoting from a piece in which the poet caustically writes about the inhabitants of a San Francisco used bookshop, Perloff goes for the grand dismissal:

What this catalogue lacks is the particularity that makes poems like Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” (whose middle section, like Kleinzahler’s, is a tour of bookshops, each image and action subtly anticipating the final revelation of Billie Holiday’s death) so arresting. To call the bookshop’s clientele “dowdy” and “ferrety”, or its proprietess a “swollen arachnid”, to remark on a girl’s bad skin and a man’s tic – such dismissive gestures are themselves tics.

Even when she praises, she picks nits:

Kleinzahler’s facility – for example, his carefully wrought staircase stanza and use of chemical vocabulary in “4-phenylcylcohexane” – is impressive, but in such realistic poetry the devil must be in the details, and the details here are largely cliches.

Jack and Old Mac hd The precise meaning of such turns of phrase is perhaps a trifle opaque for non-affectionados to penetrate. Such individuals are encouraged to click on over to the May2008 issue of Open Letters, where our Poetry Editor John Cotter gives the same book a thorough – and thoroughly enjoyable review of his own, full of his signature sylistic beauties.

The joke is that in Kleinzahler’s own poetry, although a random snowflake may well represent a glimmer of the universal mystery, it would never be expected to power a whole poem, or even more than a line. Within a moment or two of its appearance, a “good pee,” a “night train to Milan,” and “kinetic snapshots of trees and light” appear and disappear. The poem may return to that snowflake or it may not. The world spends all day hurling discordant details at its residents, and Kleinzahler’s poetical mission is the re-stitching of those fragments into something musical, intriguing, and occasionally moving. His poems often return (in the way haiku return) to their themes

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only after some divergence in the world of particulars. We stop thinking about what a Kleinzahler poem is about soon after we begin to read it, in the same way we quit thinking about whatever errand we’re be running on a crowded street. We just get caught up.

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You won’t be disappointed.

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