I find it interesting that we need permission for
certain things. We all carry within us a set of borders, a sense of boundaries,
limits of what is acceptable and what is unacceptable, and a frontier, a terra
incognita. The borders are for decorum, for social acceptance. The frontier - the
wilderness, the open sea, the uncharted and unnamed - is
for exploration, for artistic endeavor, for crossing our internal, cognitive
borders and arriving in the open, in a mental domain where knowledge and reason
are less empirical, less certain, less established and the aperture of our
consciousness dilates to allow more exotic feelings and perceptions to illumine
our nerves and open our eyes and ears. For me, that wilderness, that realm of
the exotic, has always been poetry.
My first attempts to write poetry were hesitant and
timid, tethered to a solid body of fixed ideas concerning the world,
encompassing the parameters of reality, and adhering to what institutionally
was considered admirable and good. This pertained especially to poetry. Carl
Sandburg and Robert Frost were the literary giants on American shores at the
time, the early 60s. But they didn’t interest me much. Their poetry was full of
saws and precepts and the imagery was tame and rural, all about goats and
apples and building stone walls and accruing wisdom. I did not want to accrue
wisdom. I wanted a passport for places unknown. I wanted permission to leave
the walls of the city and enter the forest of words with nothing but a song and
a sandwich.
That permission came from Bob Dylan. He was
primordial. He was my first exposure to the kind of wild imagery and weird
associations that inspired my deep interest in writing to begin with. Bob
Dylan, however, was a rock star. The medium of rock and the medium of the
written word, be it poetry or prose, were two separate worlds. Separate, but
not far apart. Evidence that the two worlds had conjoined, at least for a brief
time, was found in Larry Keenan’s series of photographs of Bob Dylan, Michael
McClure, Allen Ginsberg and Robbie Robertson standing in front of the legendary
City Lights bookstore. This fusion of pop music and poetry testified to a time
when the audience for both - for the world of rock and the world of
poetry -
was far more literate than it is today. In the early days of Greenwich
Village, the musicians were brought on stage to clear the room for the poets.
It was the poets who were the real draw.
It would be a few years after I’d begun writing
before I discovered Larry Keenan’s photographs. In the meantime, at about age
18, when I boarded a train for the University of North Dakota in the winter of
1966, poetry was a feeling for which I had not yet found the words.
Like most discoveries, my progress was slow. I
didn’t know where to begin. Where would I find a correlative to Bob Dylan’s
wild lyrics in books? I didn’t play a guitar. I didn’t play the drums. I had no
musical talent whatever. I knew from a very early age (I began my first novel
at age nine) that I wanted to be a writer. Deep down, I also knew what kind of
writing appealed to me. I sensed a capacity in language for endless invention,
for creating worlds of extraordinary dimension whose flora and fauna did not
correlate with the so-called real world. There was great freedom there, great
exhilaration. But I needed sanction. I needed permission. I had permission to
visit these places, but if I brought back treasures, would the world recognize
their value? Did that matter? Yes, absolutely. Recognition was as vital to me
then as it is now.
Gertrude Stein simplified matters greatly when she
said “I write for myself and strangers.” But I seemed to crave the kind of
sanction that Miss Stein gleefully dismissed. Perhaps because I was young.
Perhaps because I had hopes that my writing might earn an income. Whatever
impediments, primarily social, inhibited my progress as an artist, craved the
blessing of an established author. They didn’t need to be a stadium-filling
name like T.S. Eliot. They didn’t need to be a white-haired dignitary reading
their poetry at a presidential inauguration à la Robert Frost. They just needed
to have one or two books out. Words in print. A spine and a title.
I envy poets who write purely for the joy of writing
and for whom publication and recognition are of no importance. Bill Knotts, for
instance, has stated (wisely, I think) that anyone looking for fame in poetry
is crazy. It’s a waste of time, and not at all what poetry is all about.
Fame, recognition, acceptance, are all chimeras.
They don’t exist. Poetry is entirely subjective. Language is universal. Poetry
is universal. But everyone needs language. No one can function without
language. Poetry, which is language on steroids, is utterly unnecessary. Who
can say what the true value of any particular poem happens to be? If language
is a living body, then poetry is the virus inhabiting that body and driving a
fever that results in parables and ghosts.
Which means that the permission I was seeking was
the permission to not require permission.
In the summer of 1966, I hit pay dirt. A friend took
me to visit a professor at San José City College at his home. I’d taken one of
his classes the previous spring, a composition course which he’d kicked off by
playing Bob Dylan’s “Hey Tambourine Man” and the Beatles’s “Eleanor Rigby.” He
was a graduate of Harvard and his knowledge of literature was extensive and
global. He was the man to ask. I expressed my frustration at not being able to
find poetry written in the manner of Dylan’s songs. Ginsberg’s “Howl” was as
close as I’d come, and as much as I loved “Howl,” it remained heavily rooted in
empirical reality. The imagery was sometimes wild, but referred to the
recognizable squalor and ugly beauty of planet earth, its terrors and
ecstasies, its dreary unemployment offices and hotel rooms full of steamheat
and opium, people desperate and passionate and raw who enacted “suicidal dramas
on the cliffbanks of the Hudson,” flashed “buttocks under barns and naked in
the lake,” rocked “cunt and come eluding the last gyzm of consciousness,” “danced
on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic 1930’s
German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the dirty toilet,” “or
were run down by the drunken taxicabs of reality.” The poem is earthy, at times
rapturous amid the madness and squalor, and unflinchingly honest, full of the
wreckage and recreant agitations of an alienated world. There is a boundless
exhilaration to its splenetic, exquisitely detailed representation of the
bleakness of modern urban life. It came close to what I was looking for, but was
not quite it. What I was looking for was an even greater intensity, a language
so hot and molten it flamed new worlds into existence, bizarre hybrids of
syllable and skin, clairvoyance and chrome.
My literary satori was a boat, not a taxicab. My
professor friend handed me a heavy Norton anthology of world poetry with the
book open at Arthur Rimbaud’s “Le bateau ivre,” “The Drunken Boat.” This was
it: the answer to my question. Here was a poem that had it all: passion, ecstasy,
wild phantasmagoric imagery, attitude, scorn, delirium.
The poem begins on a violent note: the haulers of
barges, men who labored hard to pull barges of coal and lumber up and down the
rivers, are tied to poles by North American Indians and shot full of arrows.
What Europe knew of the Native Americans in 1871 was the stereotype of savages
utterly misconceived and presented on TV in the 50s and 60s. Rimbaud uses this
violence as a symbol for ruptured daily reality. After the haulers are savagely
murdered, the narrator, who is aboard the barge freighted with Flemish wheat
and English cotton (a symbol for European industrialism), is abruptly set loose
from the asphyxiating workaday world in which people are numbed by fatigue and
boredom and set adrift on the open sea, where the poet is awakened by tempest.
“Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves / That one calls eternal rollers of
victims / Ten nights, without regretting the stupid eye of the lanterns!”
The quotidian becomes delirium. Delirium frees the
poet of the restraints of logic and permits excesses of all variety, a taste of
the ineffable, experiences that cannot be tagged or named or catalogued. Language,
which is a naming machine, is disrupted and goes haywire. The imagery becomes
gloriously chaotic:
Plus douce qu’aux
enfants la chair des pommes sures,
L’eau verte pénétra ma
coque de sapin
Et des taches de vins
bleus et des vomissures
Me lava, dispersant
gourvernail et grappin.
Et dès lors, je me
suis baigné dans le Poème
De la Mer, infuse d’astres,
et lactescent,
Dévorant les azurs
verts; où, flottaison blême
Et ravie, un noyé
pensif parfois descend;
Où, teignant tout à
coup les bleuités, délires
Et rhythmes lents sous
les rutilements du jour,
Plus fortes que
l’alcool, plus vastes que nos lyres,
Fermentent les
rousseurs amères de l’amour!
*
* * * *
* * *
* * * *
Sweeter than the
bitter flesh of apples to children,
The green water
penetrated my hull of pine
And blue wine stains
and vomitings
Washed over me,
dispersing rudder and grappling hook.
And from then on, I
was bathed in The Poem
Of the Sea, infused
with stars, and lactescent,
All-consuming greenish
azures; where, pale with buoyancy
And enraptured, a
pensive drowned man descends;
Where, staining all at
once the bluishnesses, delirous
And slowly rhythmic
under the resplendence of the day,
Stronger than alcohol,
more vast than our lyres,
Ferment the bitter
freckles of love!
The
power of “The Drunken Boat” carried me further out to sea. It gave me
permission to write as crazily, as nuttily, as eccentrically as I wanted. There
was a precedent. I had license. I had my papers. I was now a first class
seaman.
Of
course, no one really requires permission to write however and whatever they
want. A poem, irresponsibly set loose on
the world, is not going to injure anyone. But deep down, admit it or not, we
all want recognition. We all want validation. And if “The Drunken Boat” had
found its way into a Norton anthology, than there was the possibility of
acceptance among the institutions that conferred degrees and awards and
respect.
When
Rimbaud first read his poem publically at a little café on La Rue Férou, near
Saint Sulpice, he set literary Paris on fire. He rose meteorically among the
ranks of serious writers and, still an adolescent, acquired legendary status as
a rebellious, swashbuckling delinquent. And, still in his early twenties,
disillusioned by the corruptions and vanities of the literary world, he would
stop writing altogether and find himself working for an import/export company
in Ethiopia and Yemen. He experimented with photography briefly, but for the
most part, wrote letters home complaining about the miserable conditions he had
to endure, and requesting books on metallurgy and candle-making and mining. Still
intellectually restless, he craved books, so long as there was nothing remotely
literary about them. And he craved acceptance by the world, by the standards,
such as they existed, in nineteenth century Europe. Ironically, that would not
happen. His fame would rest entirely on his success as a flamboyant, outlaw
poet. He would become an icon for artists such as Bob Dylan, Michael McClure,
and Jim Morrison.
All
one hundred lines of his poem “Le Bateau ivre” now encompass the entire wall on
La rue Férou. I would pass it on my way to go running in Le Jardin du
Luxembourg, “Le bateau ivre” towering over me in the Paris morning air like a
continuing sanction, a final permission to live as fully as possible.
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