Román Leão

Tag: Beats

  • The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings—Lew Welch

    Scanning the used books over at the wonderful Book Passage in Corte Madera, I came across several faded paperbacks by Beat writer Lew Welch. One of the lesser-known Beats, Welch is probably best known as the other hopeless drunk in Jack Kerouac’s majestically depressing Big Sur.

    Flipping through his work, however, I found Welch to be a gifted poet with a value system more in line with the nascent hippie movement that was emerging in the mid-to-late-’60s. That Welch disappeared into the woods around Nevada City with his 30-30 after writing a goodbye note only adds to the mystery of this important writer I had somehow missed during my fascination with all things Beat.

    Welch’s brief, lyrical chapbook The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings, originally published in 1969, and reprinted with three additional poems by Berkeley’s Sand Dollar in 1970, features a stunning wrap-around scratch board illustration of the Marin Headlands with a slightly more provincial San Francisco peeking (peaking?) over the hills.

    The title poem, the first in a pair of bookends that feature the mountain, intones the mantra: This is the last Place. There is nowhere else to go, as Welch boils down the western movement of humankind. Centuries and hordes of us, from every quarter of the earth, now piling up, and each wave going back to get some more. Buddy, you have no idea.

    The last poem, Song of the Turkey Buzzard, looks deeper into a riddle posed in a triptych of Zen-like koans (complete with commentary by Welsh’s literary alter−ego, the Red Monk): If you spend as much time on the Mountain as you should, She will always give you a Sentient Being to ride… What do you ride? (There is one right answer for every person, and only that person can really know what it is)

    Of course Welch, like anyone would, wishes for a cool totem animal like a mountain lion, but the mountain has other ideas: Praises, Tamalpais, Perfect in Wisdom and Beauty, She of the Wheeling Birds. Throughout the course of the poem, the mountain throws some pretty clear hints at him until in the second canto, he finally acquiesces, and given his final act two scant years later, it begs one to wonder if he hadn’t been planning it all along.

    With proper ceremony disembowel what I no longer need, that it might more quickly rot and tempt my new form NOT THE BRONZE CASKET BUT THE BRAZEN WING SOARING FOREVER ABOVE THEE O PERFECT O SWEETEST WATER O GLORIOUS WHEELING BIRD

    Sand Dollar

  • Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch & the Beat Generation—Aram Saroyan

    At the behest of poet Ted Berrigan, a young Aram Saroyan interviewed a becalmed and nearly forgotten Jack Kerouac in 1967 for the Paris Review. Saroyan describes this meeting much later in an article for The Poetry Foundation. It is a watershed moment, one generation testing the next, and Saroyan walks away with Jack’s benediction, “You’ll do, Saroyan.”

    I doubt that Kerouac had in mind for the young writer to go forth and pen the History of the Beats, but 12 years later, Saroyan attempted just that. Perhaps the tired Kerouac recognized a comrade-in-arms, as Saroyan’s sensibilities would have fit right in with the tea-loving, electrified wordslingers of the past. His official biography for his collected papers at the University of Connecticut Libraries reads, “In the late 1960s Saroyan experimented with marijuana and began to develop a career as a poet.” Sounds about right; let’s go!

    Genesis Angels is no straight-ahead biography, but a long prose poem in its own right. Saroyan attempts to capture the feeling of the era, the mad rush toward an uncertain future and away from a stifling mid-century American mindset that had all but disappeared by the time he started his journey.

    Saroyan identifies the Eisenhower years with the monster movies that were throwing their own existential warnings up on the screens of the ’50s and early ’60s. “We were being condemned to endure a complete rescheduling of human experience: our routines no longer in any relation to the planet or the landscape or our neighbors. We had willingly locked ourselves up with comfort and convenience and suffered an immediate transformation. It was we ourselves who had become The Thing, The Blob, inside our private Houses of Wax.”

    The degree that Saroyan is successful in capturing the Beat gestalt, from the far remove of 1979, depends on how susceptible you are to that particular brand of amphetamine-driven patter. Me? I can’t get enough.

    On Jack Kerouac meeting Neal Cassidy: “Now this is where it did combust because what happened was Jack saw Neal and listened to his wild, never-get-a-word-in-edgewise, spontaneous patte… this man was a rapid, word chasing man chasing word chasing man chasing time chasing space—lookout! just like his driving—saved by exposure and the rare posture of ecstatic brotherhood.”

    On Allen Ginsburg: “Allen had the conceptual center of the universe in his belly and breath… so that then he could inhale and exhale planets, and snow storms, windows, and paper towels, Mickey Mouse and Hollywood, tits, and cocks, ambushes, and semesters, toothbrushes, and Coca-Cola—the whole litterbug earth with Indians and business man and women giving birth, inside his nature, and available.”

    Strangely absent from this cluttered stage is Welch himself. Whether outshined by the titanic personalities around him, or just a quiet guy whose poems did the speaking for him, I didn’t come away with any better sense of the man than when I started. This isn’t a deficit in research; the University of Connecticut’s Saroyan collection contains a recorded interview with Welch and David Meltzer from 1969, and Saroyan himself interviewed poet Joanne Kryger about Welch in 1977, presumably while doing research for the book.

    Perhaps the problem is that—like a total eclipse, or some other natural rarity—Welch began disappearing as soon as he appeared. You have to catch these things when they happen or you’re out of luck. Until next time.

    Saroyan best captures Welch’s spirit in a few throw away lines describing the importance of becoming a poet:

    Be a poet and save the world forever.
    And don’t forget to take a sweater.
    Put this flower in the peanut bottle with some cold water.
    It’ll be here when you get home.
    That’s the way the universe works.

  • Poetry as Insurgent Art—Lawrence Ferlinghetti

    If any man alive can be still held responsible for the Beat movement and/or the poetry renaissance of the ’50s and ’60s, it is San Francisco poet and City Lights Booksellers & Publishers co-founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He was there from the very beginning, helping to create a scene in the Italian North Beach neighborhood that reverberated to this day.

    It was the publishing arm of City Lights that propelled East Coast writers such as Allen Ginsburg and Gregory Corso, as well as San Franciscans like Kenneth Rexroth and Ferlinghetti himself, into the national spotlight. The landmark Howl obscenity trial, sparked after San Francisco police seized the City Lights paperback, won more notoriety for what Ginsburg and friends were up to than any lame spot-the-beatnik tours could have ever brought to bear.

    The bibliographical note to this slim volume, Ferlinghetti’s own Ars Poetica, marks it as an on-going work in progress starting as a KPFA broadcast in the late ’50s. The main body of Poetry as Insurgent Art reads almost like a collection of daily affirmations, ranging from practical advice to writers, “If you call yourself a poet, don’t just sit there. Poetry is not a sedentary occupation, not a ‘take your seat’ practice. Stand up and let them have it,” to more philosophical and sensual musings such as, “Be a dark barker before the tents of existence,” and “Instead of trying to escape reality, plunge into the flesh of the world.”

    Some of Ferlinghetti’s aphorisms seem antithetical to a movement that worshiped the idea of Jack Kerouac spontaneously writing On the Road on a continuous roll of Teletype paper. Advice like, “Cultivate dissidence and critical thinking. First thought may be worst thought,” places him outside of the spur-of-the-moment crowd.

    Of course, Ferlinghetti always argued that he was never a “Beat,” but was rather a bohemian, sort of a proto-Beat, if you will. In her 2004 book, Bohemian Manifesto: A Field Guide to Living on the Edge, Laren Stover breaks down the evolution of bohemianism into five branches: Nouveau, Gypsy, Beat, Zen, and Dandy, any number and combination of which can still be found slouching around the City wherever hipsters congregate, leading to possibly my favorite of his bits of wisdom, “Stash your sell-phone and be here now.”

    The book veers into more abstract attempts to answer the burning question of What is Poetry? some of which bear the brand of the modern world, such as, “Poems are e-mails from the unknown beyond cyberspace.” ’Erm… why do I get the feeling that one may not make the cut in a future edition? Others are timeless, “It is private solitude made public,” psychedelic, “Poetry is Van Gogh’s ear echoing with all the blood of the world,” religious, “It is the street talk of angels and devils—It is made by dissolving halos in oceans of sound,” and, last-but-not-least, political, “The idea of poetry as an arm of class war disturbs the sleep of those who do not wish to be disturbed in the pursuit of happiness.”

    It takes him a while to get around to it, but toward the end of the book lies possibly the best definition of poetry I have ever read. “Poetry is making something out of nothing, and it can be about nothing and still mean something.”

    Ferlinghetti certainly knows what he’s talking about, and although the man is gone now, we’re truly lucky to still have his words around.

    New Directions

  • Downstream from Trout Fishing in America—Keith Abbott

    At one time, Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America held as prominent a place in the hearts and back pockets of America’s hipsters as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, or Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over a Cuckoo’s Nest. At least that’s how I imagine it.

    Of the four iconic writers, only Brautigan imparted a sense of innocence that may have doomed his work to become a forgotten artifact of a time that has undergone a Gaussian blur in the social consciousness. America forgets at her own peril.

    Writer and Brautigan confidant Keith Abbott paints a beautiful picture of a halcyon era in San Francisco just before everything exploded. “1966 recalls the wet touch of early morning fog and the perfume of eucalyptus,” he writes, “and I see again the smiling people in bright clothes who drifted around the Panhandle, nodding at the world so reassuringly. Such an aura of confidence, grace and mystery lasted only into 1967, but the communal sense of breaking through to a better world was there, and it was exhilarating.”

    Fellow oddball Abbott met Richard Brautigan in the Haight-Ashbury district in March of that year. Even though, at the time, eccentricity was quickly becoming the coin of the realm, Brautigan still managed to stand out from the crowd. Abbott describes the man who was to become an unwitting “voice of the counterculture” as a cross between Mark Twain and a heron.”

    At a notable six-foot-four, Abbott describes a man who seems to be eternally unfolding himself, sometimes physically, sometimes emotionally. “Despite his shyness,” Abbott writes, “Richard did have a great capacity to let people into his life. His fiercest allegiance was to the imagination. One he felt you shared that with him, then his loyalty was final.”

    Once Abbott was brought under wing, sharing hijinks and adventures with Brautigan and Price Dunn—the prototype for Lee Mellon, the hero of Brautigan’s A Confederate General in Big Sur—he was to quickly discern that his friend’s easy-going humor belied a deep sense of craftsmanship and self-actualization.

    “Because [his] fiction seemed to be simple fantasy, I assumed at first that his personality reflected this, too,” Abbott writes. “Richard was probably the most psychologically complicated and most willful person I’ve ever met. Even in his whimsical moments, he pursued his fantasies with determination.”

    As a writing professor at Naropa University, Abbott has had the benefit of time as well as the inclination to view his friend’s work with a critical eye. He lauds the comic timing that seemed to come naturally to Brautigan’s writing.

    “To give a realistic base for his fiction, Brautigan often started with mundane social situations and built from there, carefully placing one rhythmically neutral sentence on top of another. This lulls the reader into a false sense of security… a good first step for comic writing. Brautigan sensed the emotional vibrations that are inevitable in the simplest sentences, so he could then upset them and introduce the lovely sense of comic panic.”

    Abbott draws parallels between Brautigan’s fiction and that of Raymond Carver’s, with whom Brautigan shared a brutally hardscrabble upbringing in the Pacific Northwest. “The spare early stories … have always shown a strong connection, stylistically and culturally, to Brautigan’s first two novels and short stories. Both writers create a similar West Coast landscape of unemployed men, dreaming women, or failed artists trapped in domestic and economic limbos while attempting to maintain their distinctly Western myths of self-sufficient individuality.”

    Although by drawing on the lives of the underclass for material and inspiration is a traditional wellspring for American authors, Abbott noticed a fatal flaw in Brautigan’s ability, or willingness, to allow his characters to transcend their struggle with mainstream society.

    “He was drawn to the failed dreamers simply because they showed the most imagination. To possess imagination is to be in ceaseless conflict with social and economic worlds,” Abbott writes. “When Brautigan imagines a genius at work in the modern world, he can only come up with a slightly bitter comedy about the commercial trivialization of talent.”

    This bitterness and feeling of paranoia began to severely impact Brautigan’s work and ability to conduct his life as the first intense rush of fame waned. His pathology—in the ’50s he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and clinical depression and treated with electroshock—was acerbated by alcoholism.

    “His attitudes were similar to those Mark Twain experienced late in his life,” Abbott relates. “Twain was enraged and disgusted with the state of society and with himself… until the death of his daughter shocked him back to reality.” Here, Abbott hits a tragic note, admitting, “I couldn’t imagine what shock could free Richard from his turmoil.”

    After reading Abbott’s memoir, Brautigan’s tragic suicide in 1984 seemed presaged by any number of details and anecdotes. Among the most telling was an odd piece of art that Brautigan had in his North Beach flat in the ’60s. A portrait of a stallion’s head surrounded by a lucky horseshoe and the words, “Fuck Death,” is, in retrospect, less of a quirky souvenir than a talisman to ward off the howling void.

    The genius of Brautigan’s imagination allowed him to create a world diametrically opposed to the one he grew up in—a world that, for a time, took on a physical manifestation larger than he, or mainstream America, could deal with. The person we recognize as Richard Brautigan was as much a product of his imagination as anything he constructed—and ultimately, just as doomed.

    “The curse and blessing of the imagination is that the mind wants to create an autonomous object, yet it can’t prevent itself from imagining that object’s eventual disintegration,” Abbott writes, “and it can’t fail to understand that by giving birth to something, that something’s death is assured.”

    In the end, it is Brautigan’s Kool-Aid Wino from Trout Fishing in America that provides the key to unlock his work, while providing a fitting eulogy at the same time:

    He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.

    Astrophil Press

  • Call Me Burroughs: A Life—Barry Miles

    The latest biography by counterculture chronicler Barry Miles is a very thorough account of one of the most interesting writers of the 20th century—not that William S. Burroughs’ writing was the most interesting, not at least at first. The nascent outsider icon eventually falls into the trade, as much of his first three books reworked from recollections in letters to reluctant paramour Allen Ginsberg.

    His best-known book, Naked Lunch, began as routines made up in an attempt to seduce Ginsberg as well as shock and entertain his constant cadre of artists, junkies, and fellow ne’er-do-wells surrounding him in Moroccan exile.

    Anyone with the most cursory interest in the Beats (a sobriquet he never would acknowledge) knows the defining act of Burroughs’ early life is the accidental murder of his wife Joan. It is the struggle to understand what led him to such a horrible moment that finally gives him the courage/derangement to abandon straightforward narrative and jump into the literary deep end.

    Although Miles does a good job of placing Burroughs’ cut-up experiments in context of the mid-century avant-garde art movements, he counts on readers having navigated those texts and doesn’t provide examples of what he struggles to describe.

    In many ways, Burroughs was ahead of his time and really presaged the post-digital revolutionary world in which we now find ourselves buried neck deep. These days, AI chews through reams of supplied texts, spitting out surprising combinations, juxtapositions, and a whole lot of bullshit at the push of a virtual button. Burroughs did it first. With scissors. Like a boss.

    Junkies are not interesting in and of themselves. Of course, it was not surprising to learn the only thing that meant more to Burroughs than writing (and chasing young Arab boys) was heroin. It becomes tiresome and somewhat sad to think of all the work that could have been accomplished had he not spent so much time getting hooked, getting clean, getting hooked, getting clean… etc. Rather than going the rock star route and making the life seem glamorous, Miles’ extensive examination makes a good cautionary tale.

    When all 600 pages were said and done, what really came through, and was surprising, was what a gentle, big heart Burroughs had underneath the ultra-cool exterior, barring his rampant misogyny. He often tried to do the right thing—other times did not and would later regret it—but in the end, the junk always won out.

    To quote Neil Young from an equally dark place, “He tried to do his best, but could not.”

    Twelve Books