He Changed My Life: Thirty Years With Bob Dylan (Part 1)

I.

Zen people talk sometimes about sudden awakening. That’s awakening as in enlightenment. When the whole deal, the true nature of everything, is revealed to you in a flash like fireworks over Tokyo. There was one guy who became enlightened on the subway, not even a monk. I can’t remember who the hell it was but I know I read about him somewhere.

That’s the way it was with Bob Dylan and me. Bam, the whole midnight mental world I’d been living in since my breakdown of the year before lit up like high noon. I could see and I could understand. Before Dylan I’d been dying of sadness and confusion because I thought nobody loved me and nobody else could see how ugly everything had become. This all sounds crazy. Maybe it is. But it’s the truth at least and before I heard Dylan I don’t think I’d ever heard the truth.

The album was “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” I bought it one day in Wellingborough because I had some money in my pocket and I was looking to try a new thing; I’d read Dylan’s name once in a biography of Clint Eastwood (seriously) and I knew he’d written “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right,” which Elvis Presley had covered. There was also this weird connection I made between him and Guy Clark. He was wearing a denim shirt on the album cover like Guy wore on the cover of “Old Number One.” Back when singers were all wearing jackets with padded shoulders, gold lame suits and shiny trousers, a denim shirt really meant something. If Dylan was half as great as Guy Clark I knew he’d be all right.

It happened on the second track, “The Ballad of Hollis Brown.” Do you know the song? I guess if you’re reading about Dylan you probably do. But just in case there are some newcomers out there, it’s the story of a starving farmer who kills his wife, his children and then himself. They didn’t say anything like that on "Top of the Pops." I’d never heard it in the country songs I loved either. They were dark sometimes, but this was brutal. And nestling right in the middle of this terrible tale of human suffering were lines that hit a penniless, lonely, fucked-up kid like a punch in the stomach:

You prayed to the Lord above
Oh please send you a friend
Your empty pockets tell you
That you ain't a-got no friend

Like I said, the truth. That was how it was. Your worth as a human being was measured in the kind of shoes you had on your feet, and if you couldn’t make it in the world on those terms, you might as well go and kill yourself.

Now, you may be asking yourself what possible consolation I could have found in this. I’d been hurting for a long time, largely because of a college love affair that didn’t work out the way it wanted to; and that seems insignificant now – or if not insignificant, then definitely less than it was. Then it was everything. I’d withdrawn to my bedroom at my mother’s house, dropped out of college and become completely severed from the world. How was it helping to find a singer who would sit with me in my room and say, effectively, “You’re right, it’s all shit?”

The answer is that by identifying the shit, especially in such excoriating tones, you can expose it and make it go away. Like Blake, who I hadn’t read at that point, says, “This I shall do by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal." I’d had a lifetime of people smoothing things over, hiding the pain, pretending it was all ok when it wasn’t. My parents did it when their marriage was in trouble. My teachers did it at school when other kids beat the shit out of me and nothing ever happened about it. And they did it in society, where people were living like dogs under the misrule of Margaret Thatcher but every time you turned the tv on there she was, or there one of her minions was, telling you everything was going fine and everyone except the crazies was having the party of the century, freed now from the constraints of socialism.

A new world opened up for me the day I heard that album. I didn’t know who I was (or even what I was) before “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” beat me out of my daydream, but pretty soon after that I had decided I was going to be a poet and a writer, and that’s what I’ve been for thirty years now. So in a sense Dylan gave me my life. I would have had another one if I hadn’t come across him, but I can’t imagine doing anything other than writing. Whether I’m any good at it or not history will have to decide, but it’s all I’ve ever loved (if you take my lover, my friends, peanut butter, coffee, and rock and roll out of the picture). Bob made writing look like the only game in town by being smarter, more stylish and more honest than everybody else. He could make me weep and nobody else could even make me feel. And I made a thousand different connections through him that have enriched my experience beyond measure.

In the weeks after I bought “The Times They Are A-Changin’” I stayed up to watch all four hours of his “Renaldo and Clara." That was back when British tv had the guts to show such things uncut; and in that I’d seen Allen Ginsberg reading a long mad poem about (or so it seemed) his mother’s vagina in front of an audience of what looked like affronted Jewish matriarchs. With his long black beard and his unapologetic geekiness Allen embodied everything that I had formerly rejected in myself. I knew I wasn’t like everybody else, but I tried to be. Allen didn’t even try (he had done once, of course, but I didn’t know that then). In my favourite scene in the movie Dylan and Ginsberg are in the graveyard in Lowell where Jack Kerouac is buried. Ginsberg points at one grave – it may even be Jack’s, I can’t remember – and says, “So, that’s what’s gonna happen to you?”

It was another, lesser awakening. How could anybody be that flippant about another man’s death? But then, on the other hand, why shouldn’t he be? We all know we’re going to die. Why be grave about it (ho ho). And Dylan wasn’t ruffled by Ginsberg’s comment, not at all (although Ginsberg had offered him a beseeching chuckle, as if to say, “No offence, Gregory would get it”). Bob just answered calmly, matter-of-factly, “No, I wanna be in an unmarked grave.” Which he might have meant sincerely at the time, but I can’t see it happening.

Once I’d seen “Renaldo and Clara” I went away and bought Ginsberg’s Collected Poems as well; and once I’d read that I bought “On The Road” and “The Dharma Bums,” all of Corso, William Blake. And I tracked down a Woody Guthrie album because I kept hearing that Bob was inspired by Woody. I didn’t like him as much as all the others at first, for some reason. It took me a few years after I first encountered Bob to get into Woody properly. Something silly to do with the fact that he looked a little like my grandfather. I don’t know, even saying it sounds ridiculous. But Bob’s political songs had also helped me to understand how the systems of oppression that our society was groaning under worked and as a consequence I’d gone into street level political activity: handing out leaflets, collecting for striking miners and ambulance workers, going on marches. When I did that and started hearing the stories of suffering people from out of their own mouths instead of a poet's, that’s when I got Woody Guthrie. I still haven’t finished “Bound for Glory” though.


This essay, part two of which will appear at the weekend, was written last year for a big book about Dylan's impact on admirers around the world. Sadly the project foundered for reasons too complex to go into here, so rather than waste a good piece of writing, I'm sharing it with "Suffolk Punch" readers.

Kill Your Darlings

Kill Your Darlings (d. John Krokidas) is the latest of three or four movies to gather most of my heroes together and tell a story about them. Like all of the preceding efforts—except Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan pic I’m Not There, which was fabulous—it’s a partial success if you choose to take the film one way, and a great success if you take it another way.

Jack Kerouac’s On The Road in particular cast much too long a shadow over contemporary culture for any attempt at filming it to be universally applauded. As Allen Ginsberg said, through the influence of himself and more significantly Dylan, Kerouac’s seminal work probably changed Western history. Predictably, when the movie version was finally made, almost everybody familiar with the book was half-pleased (because it was there) and half disappointed.

The mistake that director Walter Salles made, probably, was trying to film the novel. That decision only encouraged comparisons that were always going to be unfavourable—especially since he left significant moments of the book out. I’m aware that I say this as a book lover first and a film buff second, but the novel is always going to be better than the movie. It has advantages of length and narrative that films can only approximate with intrusive devices and annoying trickery. Salles, in filming On The Road, should have found another angle; I don’t know what, but a straight (if selective) transfer from page to screen was doomed from the start.

Howl’s angle was good. Dramatising court transcripts and contemporaneous interviews with Ginsberg and then intercutting them with animated readings of the poem worked wonderfully. What let the film down for me, and probably for most viewers with a knowledge of literary history and the Beat Generation, was that everything was structured to reach a climax—Ferlinghetti’s acquittal—which I knew was coming. I was also bothered by the casting of James Franco as Ginsberg. Franco is a brilliant actor, but would some of Ginsberg’s early emotional traumas, his search for love and a sense of identity, have been more believable in someone a little less handsome? Perhaps.

Both films, though, are more successful if you try to forget what you know, if you resist the temptation to compare them with original texts or biographical factors (like Franco’s face versus Allen’s) and roll with the movie as a separate work of art, something that exists by itself with no referents. Which is probably true of every movie made from a book.

The need to cast other details from your mind is even more significant in Kill Your Darlings because Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) is playing Allen Ginsberg. He looks nothing like him, and Jack Huston looks nothing like Jack Kerouac, although he sounds like him, and at first sight Ben Foster looks alarmingly like Griff Rhys Jones, not William Burroughs—although when you consult pictures of Burroughs as a younger man you see very little of the spectral menace of the later man, so familiar from television documentaries and his guest appearance in Drugstore Cowboy.

That, of course, is the thing to remember anyway. None of the characters in Kill Your Darlings is the great iconic writer he would become. The movie is, in fact, the story of how Ginsberg did become the world-renowned poet and activist we think of today; and accordingly—and logically—Radcliffe makes no apparent effort to represent him at all. His Ginsberg is just an intelligent, adventurous, rebellious young Jewish teenager with a shock of curly black hair and an understated American East Coast accent which (my partner said) slipped into Harry Potter from time to time.

The tabula rasa that this young Ginsberg is gets written on by the handsome, charismatic and clearly rather deranged Lucien Carr (Dane Dehaan), who acts as Allen’s Mephistophelean guide into the creative underground of 1940s New York. There Ginsberg finds prolific drug abuse and sexual freedom—it takes him a while, and a tortured infatuation with Carr, to get to the latter. There he also makes his first venture in the literary avant-garde, joining Carr in the proposal of a movement called A New Vision, so named after the text by Yeats. The purpose or guiding principles of this movement are a little unclear; a manifesto is written before any art is created. But these are kids. Precociously clever kids. When I was 18 I wrote a poem that began with the words “I am the next in a noble line” and ended with the words “Are you ready for me?” The editor of the magazine I sent it to returned it with the words “Not quite” written at the bottom.. We’ve all thought we could bite the head of the world off when we were teenagers.

Some reviews have mentioned the youth of the characters in Kill Your Darlings. The drift of at least one review I read was a slightly sniffy suggestion that the Beats were being rebranded and diluted; their literary significance diminished by the effort the movie seems to make to present them as handsome, larking young kids. Well, I don’t think the movie does do that, but even if it does, the popular image of the Beats has never had very much to do with the truth. Everybody loved On The Road in the 80s too, when I was in my twenties, but very few of those admirers knew Kerouac was a mother-tied alcoholic, a Republican who denounced all his old friends and died long before he should have. It doesn’t matter if there’s a media perception running alongside the actual truth because anyone who’s interested will be able to jump across the track and find out what really happened just by going to a bookshop, or—(uh)—buying a kindle.

I first read about Lucien Carr’s murder of Dave Kammerer many years ago. It’s a big part of Kerouac’s late novel Vanity of Duluoz. I’d always had the impression that Kammerer almost brought the killing on himself by pushing Carr beyond the limits of his endurance. Whether that’s the case or not, Kill Your Darlings suggests it’s much more complicated, with Carr using Kammerer and exploiting him but simultaneously loathing him for his weakness (and, also, as the embodiment of Carr’s own repressed homosexuality and mental vulnerability);. Ginsberg takes Kammerer’s place as Carr’s victim ultimately, but exacts an inadvertently fatal revenge by sending Kammerer to his death.

It occurs to me that the movie is an odd mirror to Stephen Frears’ Prick Up Your Ears, which is about the life and violent death of British playwright Joe Orton. Joe, as many of you will know, had his brains beaten out by his jealous failure of a lover, Kenneth Halliwell, at a time when homosexuality was illegal in the UK. Carr only served eighteen months for the murder of Kammerer because he presented himself to the court as a straight man who’d been the victim of a homosexual assault. Halliwell died the night he killed Orton; in a weird way there was almost no malice in him—he was just too disturbed to be in the world, and he knew, so he left it. But I wonder how different the conditions for Ginsberg, Carr and Kammerer—for Orton and Halliwell—would have been if the countries in which they lived hadn’t enforced insanely prejudicial laws against their kind? Homosexuality is no more of a choice than heterosexuality, or preferring Stella Artois to Carlsberg for that matter. The sooner everybody gets that through their thick heads the better.

Kill Your Darlings

"Kill Your Darlings" makes it to Shoe Town's indie(ish) cinema The Forum in the middle of next week, so you can expect to see my thoughts on it soon afterwards. Like most of my creative friends I'm not sure any of the attempts to put the Beats on screen have been completely successful so far--"Big Sur" looks like the most promising one, although I haven't seen it yet myself.

I'm not a fan of big CGI movie franchises, so when I heard that Daniel Radcliffe, of all people, would be playing Allen Ginsberg in "Kill Your Darlings" I was vaguely horrified. He has no charisma, I shuddered. Ginsberg had more than most rock stars. Snob, people replied. Just give him a chance. So yes, we'll give him a chance. And in the long run, who cares if he's not totally convincing? or if the film fails to capture accurately the spirit of that wild, decadent, curiously innocent gang of boys? At least the existence of "Kill Your Darlings" and the participation of Daniel Radcliffe will keep people talking about the Beats for one more generation.

Someone out there might even have the same thrill I did thirty years ago, coming out of the cinema next week and pulling a book down from a friend's or brother's shelf; they might open the first pages of "On The Road" or "Howl" and trip off on a journey that changes them forever.

Merlin's Return: When Ken Kesey Toured Britain with the Merry Pranksters (Part 2)

"I'm not proselytising for LSD anymore. There's not enough of the good stuff to go around" - Ken Kesey, 1999.

I was working in a care home in Kettering when the Pranksters came. I remember reading about their imminent trip in a newspaper; it must have been The Guardian because I didn’t go near any of the others. I’d read Cuckoo’s Nest years ago and at the time I was in the middle of another one, I think it was The Last Go-Round, the under-rated novel that Kesey wrote with Babbs. Somehow, although I was aware of the continuing existence of most of my heroes—Ginsberg had died two years before, but a great many were still with us—the fact that they were all in America made them as remote as death anyway. But Kesey was coming here, onto my streets, to breathe my air. That was, indeed, like being told Merlin had been seen in a peaked hat and a velvet cape dancing a jig on Montague Street.

I sat in the park in Kettering one day writing or sketching in my journal (it’s always one or the other even now), and I remember looking up thinking how marvellous it would be if I saw the Pranksters’ bus pulling uphill along the road that ran beside the park. Now that would be something, I thought. I might just do what Dylan does in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, take off my apron, hand my clipboard to the nearest boy and go off in search of outlaws. But I didn’t see the bus. I don’t remember what I saw, although I’m certain my eyes would have passed quickly over the gloomy gothic horror of the corner building down the hill, where the evil dentist Mr. Hargreaves used to ply his wicked trade in the 1970s. I’d been there as a boy and experienced such pain and fear I still thought of Hargreaves as a cross between Ian Brady and Vincent Price.

If I’d had the internet then I might have been able to work out the Pranksters’ schedule. But the internet was barely on my radar in those days. So I just kept watching the roads, watching and hoping, for at least the first two weeks of the month they were supposed to be here. Then some other fancy took my thwarted attention away--probably just the horrendous schedule of night shifts I’d put myself on to stay away from an unhappy home situation--and I forgot about it.

The Pranksters, meanwhile, had arrived in the country and were heading south. That’s what the websites I’ve found tell me anyway. The information on them is conflicting, but that’s the way it should be. Talk and cross-talk, stories over a campfire. Poems being written. Each giving its own version of what happened and when. If this account is wrong in some details so much the better. We are speaking of Merlin, after all.

The idea was to travel through the high roads and low roads of the country stopping in different towns to do shows and meet the people. Then, on August 11th at 11.11am, the precise time of the last solar eclipse before the millennium, the Pranksters would perform their pageant “The Knights of the Not So Round Table” at the Minack Theatre in Cornwall.

A day or two days before they reached the Minack site, the Pranksters visited Stonehenge. Merlin would, wouldn’t he? Kesey, according to some stories, was disappointed by the ancient druid site. Perhaps he could still feel the vibes from the Battle of Beanfield twelve years before when, on Margaret Thatcher’s orders, hundreds of cops had brutally attacked the rainbow travellers assembling there for the summer solstice. Maybe the kingdom had picked up its bags and gone somewhere else after that. Things had changed for Kesey too. The last time he was here, his companions included Jerry Garcia and the Hell’s Angels. Things happened after dark, he intimated, that wouldn’t be going on in broad daylight with cameras and spectators surrounding them.

“Merlin isn’t here,” said Prankster John Swan (not buying into my thesis), “but I know we’ll see him before the eclipse.”

After Stonehenge it was on to the Minack Theatre. I’ve been to the Minack. It’s an incredible open air playhouse built out of the rocks overlooking the sea. When I was there it was mid-September and the wind and lashing rain blowing across the cliffs was so intense and cold my enjoyment of the amateur production of “Fiddler on the Roof” I’d gone to see was ruined utterly. Accounts of the Pranksters’ performance are sketchy--all I can find is a comment about the play being panned in the local paper--but the weather looks fabulous in the pictures Kesey’s son Zane sent to me recently. I wouldn’t want anybody to go through the suffering I did perched high on the cliffside with the elements doing their best to destroy me. (The local press, by the way, were never going to get what the Pranksters were about. Half of the smart, cynical mainstream press wasn’t either. Kesey and his friends didn’t give a shit about them, though. They knew they had a smarter constituency.)

One of that smart constituency was/is my friend Graham Scott. Being less of a dope than me, Graham found out where the Pranksters were going to be on their tour and went to see them with his “fellow traveller” Helen. Their rendezvous with history happened in Liverpool ten days after the eclipse. Graham’s vivid memories of that day take us inside the tour in a way that other accounts I’ve found don’t quite manage to do:

The top of the show saw Kesey read his account of coming to London and hanging out at the Apple Building with the Beatles. He was wearing a fisherman's smock and held the stage in his hand. A deliberate reader with perfect cadence; an ancient American bard. Then there was their play: Where's Merlin - a great ramshackling Arthurian affair with Pranksters n japes n mistakes n fun and which culminated in a jalopy jam of Dead tunes.

We hung out outside after the show. Kesey and Babbs came and sat on the back of the bus and shook everyone's hands and exchanged smiles. No doubt I had my legend filters in but Kesey had a golden hue, something other, and serene, about him. At one point a girl, maybe sixteen and beautiful, made her way through the crowd and beheld Ken, and Ken beheld the girl and they hugged like you've never seen. Everyone watched, quiet. Bong!

We got talking to Carolyn Adams-Garcia who i'd been in love with ever since reading Tom Wolfe when I was a teenager. Mountain Girl asked us what we thought of the show, and "Didn't you think it was kinda chaotic?" "We love chaos," we laughed. She pulled us in to her chest, a breast each, and held us there exclaiming "My children!" I'm still reeling.

During the Dead jam Kesey had mentioned "John Cassady" on guitar. I made a point of waiting for Mr John Cassady to exit the stage door and had a great chat with him. How mad this evening was. He told me about his dad bringing home Jerry Garcia to teach him guitar... A lovely bloke, worked in a tyre shop somewhere in the States...

Maybe I’m still the starstruck kid who picked up a copy of On The Road and fell madly in love with the whole mythology of the American counter-culture, but I can’t even begin to tell you how much I envy Graham that experience.

As for the Search for Merlin . . . well, as I’ve indicated, Merlin was there all the time, like happiness is always (or usually) at home. If Kesey wasn’t a charismatic shapeshifting wizard giving counsel (however unheeded, by kings at least) about the fate of nations, who was? And if, soon, he was to be imprisoned for the ages by death, the legend, like Merlin’s, will continue for as long as there are people intelligent enough to look outside their door at what’s going on in the streets and know something isn’t right. Kesey offers an answer. But it’s not in drugs, although that might be one way, for some. It’s in freedom. Like Ken once said to a reporter (I paraphrase), “Everyone should be free to be as large as he feels he has it in him to be.” As large, or as small. Because that’s large too when it’s rooted in happiness and arrival and a refusal to hurt anyone. Whatever your trip might be, take it, in other words; and if it’s not fun try something else. Life, as that other great philosopher my mum would say, is too bloody short.

When Kesey died a couple of years later, I remembered the opportunity I’d had to say hello to him or catch one of the shows in ’99 and wished I’d tried a little harder. I can be a real idiot. In 2005, though, I started a poetry magazine called Blue Fred's Kitchen; and having discovered a complete fearlessness about knocking on the doors of the famous or the mythical, I sent an email to Ken Babbs asking if he’d like to contribute a poem to it. He did, and for some reason--maybe because of everything I’d read about him and the times he lived in--I wasn’t too surprised. Others were. “How’d you get Babbs?” another editor, Joe Speer, wrote. “Asked him,” I replied. That’s the way it always was with the Pranksters.

In writing this piece I am incredibly grateful for the support of Zane Kesey at http://www.key-z.com, Ken Babbs, and Graham Scott for his brilliant first-hand account of a meeting with the Pranksters. All pictures here are copyright of Zane Kesey. Please approach him for permission before you use them.

My Mother, Books And Me

Seventeen years ago in the early hours of July 1st, my mother Sylvia died. The details of her death and her life are for another time and place, but I’ve been thinking today about the influence she had on me as a reader of books.

If you’d looked at her bookshelves you might have thought her influence was a little tenuous. Musically we were cut from a very similar cloth (if that isn’t a mixed metaphor). But I don’t think I ever read one of her novels while she was alive.

Mum liked Agatha Christie, Ellis Peters; and she could devour a Dick Francis book in a day. I tried to read one of his on a train journey to Glasgow with my then-girlfriend once but I was bored to death before we reached the next stop. Perhaps the fact that we were going to watch the Rolling Stones had put me in too much of a rock and roll mood for a story about jockeys.

Long before I developed my own literary tastes, however, Mum had instilled in me a reverence for books as objects that I’ve never lost. Sometimes she would put her more expensive ones inside protective covers. When she was young, she explained, they couldn’t afford many books; so they learned to think of them as precious.

As a kid I had read a lot of pulp Westerns: the Edge series by George G. Gilman, and the Herne the Hunter books. In my late teens, though, I met Bob Dylan on the Road to Damascus and decided to become a poet. Researching him drove me to the Beat Generation.

I didn’t have a lot of money at the time, having dropped out of college. So the books of my new heroes were well beyond my reach unless located on market stalls and in charity shops. But Mum, wanting to nurture my interest, bought a beautiful hardback edition of On The Road for me; and inside—on a piece of paper, so as not to deface the book—wrote a little poem she said she’d heard on the radio. It has served me ever since as a kind of Guide to Life:

When I die

I hope it’s said

His sins were scarlet

But his books were read.

How many mothers would be fantastic enough to offer their son that sort of advice?

She bought me several books that year, as I forged a new understanding of myself as a writer. Usually they were things I’d expressed an interest in but couldn’t afford, like Joe Orton’s The Orton Diaries. There was only one occasion when she came home with something by an author I’d never heard of. She said her father-in-law had been an admirer and she thought I would like him too.

The author was Christopher Isherwood and the book was a quietly staggering novel called Goodbye to Berlin. It’s about the Nazi takeover of Germany just before World War II, the horror of which is summed up in what I consider the best last line in English literature:

“Even now I can’t altogether believe that any of this has really happened . . .”

I hope nobody will think I’m being tasteless or self-indulgent when I say that seventeen years on, I still feel that way about my mother’s death.

Gimme Jack, With All The Trimmings: How Money Made A Turkey Of Kerouac.

According to the Allen Ginsberg blog, a collection of 59 letters and postcards sent by Jack Kerouac to his friend Ed White are going on sale in New York for an asking price of $1.25 million. The seller is book dealer Glenn Horovitz which handles literary artefacts by Ezra Pound and Sylvia Plath too, among others.

Maybe somebody with more knowledge about these things than Suffolk Punch can tell us where Glenn Horovitz got hold of the letters in the first place. From the White family? From the Kerouac estate? Surely the latter must have had some involvement in the sale, since the copyright on the writing is theirs. Right?

And if it was the Kerouac estate, have any preconditions been set on the sale? Will the letters, in their original form, simply disappear from view once whoever is rich enough to afford them gets his/her mitts on them? I believe the writing of any great author (or even any minor author) must be preserved for history, and in some kind of controlled way it should be accessible to scholars and admirers of the work. Archiving, in other words; not flogging off to some rich person to be used as an indicator of his social standing.

And although I’m not particularly elitist – I don’t think I am anyway – I don’t believe in using great writing as a business acquisition either. I hate what they’ve done to the On the Road manuscript. It’s treated like a prize turkey instead of a precious literary artefact. It's a three-legged boy in a Victorian sideshow, hauled out so people can stare at it for an entrance fee. And half of them probably haven't read it. You may laugh, but to my mind that’s an insult to Jack and the spirit of the novel. Whoever owned it previously should be committed.

I say we should have a central archive of Kerouac’s writing; that all this stuff should be brought back and placed securely together, maybe in a university. The commodification of the Beats, which has been encouraged by the respective Estates, is wrong, and counter-productive too. It contributes to the view of them, which exists beyond the fiercely devoted world of their admirers, as circus freaks; as fundamentally not serious. And whatever you think of his abilities, nobody was more serious than Kerouac.

Review: The Lowdown. A Literary Arts Annual.

                   
The Lowdown. Street Corner Press, USA. 236 pages. $23 incl. shipping, $35 (American) overseas. Send dollars, American cheques or money orders to: Robert M. Zoschke, P.O. Box 38, Ellison Bay, WI 54210.

                   "After-image" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, cover art for The Lowdown

As for Mr. D. knocking at the back door,

the poet’s not in,

so fuck you

for now

           (from “Mr. Death at the Back Door” by Norbert Blei)

I approach the idea of reviewing the literary arts annual The Lowdown with a sense of heavy responsibility in a way. As far as I know it was the last literary project Norbert Blei undertook, in partnership with poet Robert M. Zoschke, and that makes it significant, in literary terms. Norb was a heavyweight; his passing leaves a gap in the lives of a great many people who knew him in person, or on the page and the computer screen. When a light like that goes out, you want to write BIG enough to do it justice.

But leaving aside all that – I suspect Norb wouldn’t have much time for it anyway – The Lowdown, edited by Zoschke, is just a really superior book. Its 236 pages assemble many of the best poets working in the small press (which in general is the only press worth reading) from the last fifty years. d.a.levy is here; Steve Dalachinsky (who also provides some beautiful collages) is here; S.A. Griffin (plus collages) and t.kilgore splake (with poetry and photos) are here; Ralph Murre and Sharon Auberle are here; Scott Wannberg is here; Geoff Stevens is here (I once thought Geoff a kind of demon because he had the royal nerve to reject some of my poems [they were crap]); A.D.Winans and Catfish McDaris appear – Catfish offering, among other things, a poem called “My Magnum Opus” which my girlfriend read to me last night, making us both laugh out loud. I won’t quote it here, though. That would be like giving away the plot of a movie. And Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published “Howl” and to some extent kicked off the Beat Generation and all the small press/ underground waves that followed it, has furnished Zoschke with the painting for the cover.

The list above only covers a third of the contributors to the book. I will list all of them at the end of the review to give everybody fair exposure and eliminate the possibility that I am making The Lowdown seem less interesting with my own unconsciously prejudiced selections.

There are only three prose works in the annual: “Trespassing” and “Wild” by Sam Pickering, a new writer to me (according to the author bios in the final pages, that places me in a very small minority in the intelligent world); and “On the Road, the Movie?” in which Gerald Nicosia recounts the genesis of the recent Walter Salles movie, the story of his own involvement with the project and his feelings about the finished work. He seems to feel the way most of us do: it was a good stab at a novel that would always have been difficult to film, but with the talent Salles had personally and the people he had gathered in the crew, it could have been a whole lot better. Indeed.

It is often a bad idea for poets or writers to include their own work in something they edit. I never did when I was editing Beatnik, my weekly online poetry blog; I was always a poor judge of my own writing and I knew it. Robert Zoschke has taken the risk by including some of his in The Lowdown; but his gamble pays dividends to the reader. Rob was always a good poet, as his collection Made in America testified a few years ago. Now whatever he has been through in his life and because of all the hard nights he has spent at the writing desk, just working, (which is the only way), he has become a poet of real force and power. Very little I’ve read lately matches the kick-in-the-guts confessional honesty of poems like “noxious river”:

the divorce

that I never wanted

that has turned

my life

into a walking death

path

Pretty strong meat, eh? But I’ve been through the shit myself in the last year or two and I can take my meat strong, even though I’m a vegetarian. Rob’s telling the truth about where he’s been and what he’s felt along the way; no posturing in the literary manner and no pretending that he’s tough and doesn’t care either. “Write what you know,” instructors always tell poets. It’s remarkable how few take the advice and wind up filtering what they know through the voices of all the poets they have heard.

There’s a similar honesty in (as you might expect) A.D. Winans, who debunks the post-Bukowski myth that poverty is romantic in “Down and Out”:

…the smell of shit is still the smell of shit

The unifying themes of The Lowdown, if it can be said to have any, are art and life: the loveliness of both, the madness of both and the terrible pain that both can cause you if you turn your back for just a moment. That’s Rob’s wisdom as editor and the old intelligent eye of Norb, which watches over the book  now as it travels on its way across the country and with any luck, the world, to eager, receptive readers. The love Norb left behind is memorialised in poems by splake (“missing norbert blei/our father norbito” – “rest in peace”) and Ed Markowski in “Winter Wind”:

I Chant & Conjure

The Dead Poet’s Voice

Then Zoschke brings those of us who knew Norb to our knees with an epistolary poem to his departed cohort, imagining him among dead friends and heroes in some Chicago bar in Heaven (Norb was a Chicago native):

while all that long lost and now found again blessed tomfoolery

keeps you gloriously occupied until we see each other again

                        (from “In Memory of Norbert Blei”)

Ah, Zoschke, you swine, if you’re going to do things like that you should send out free handkerchiefs with each copy of the book! (Really, I read that out loud and it made me cry because I know that the poet means every single word.)

The Lowdown might seem a little expensive for some poetry aficionados when considered sight unseen (even after a glowing review); certainly some of my literary compatriots have told me they were interested, but felt they couldn’t afford it. But it’s so sumptuously decorated and presented, and its collection of poets and artists is so fine, it might be worth prioritising this over two or three other purchases in the literary field this year, if you can. You won’t find anything better in any of the book shops I know of, however much cash and supposed expertise the major publishing houses have behind them. And proceeds from sales of The Lowdown don’t go to stuffy, arrogant shits at Faber; they will fund a scholarship in the name of Karen Teskie, an artist featured in the annual who died tragically young in a car accident. That’s high motivation and deserves whatever reward we can give it.

The Lowdown Contributors List

Sharon Auberle, Daniel Barth, John Bennett, Norbert Blei, Sarah Elizabeth Burkey, Alan Catlin, Steve Dalachinsky, Christopher Felver, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jude Genereaux, S.A. Griffin, Harold Grutzmacher, Chad Horn, Emmett Johns, Jennifer Lee, D.A. Levy, Lyn Lifshin, Philomene Long, Ed Markowski, Ellen Maybe, Dean McClain, Joanna McClure, Catfish McDaris, Ralph Murre, Charlie Newman, Gerald Nicosia, Yuko Otomo, Sam Pickering, Marge Piercy, Charles Rossiter, Aram Saroyan, Catherine Serguson, Emily Rose Kahn-Sheahan, Herschel Silverman, Marjorie Simon, t.kilgore splake, Geoff Stevens, Karen Teskie, Rob Vogt, Scott Wannberg, A.D. Winans, Eddie Woods, Robert M. Zoschke