Poetry

[Detective_Winslow]

pugetopolis
is a hermaphrodite whore
just making ends meet

[madupont]

http://www.rooknet.com/beatpage/gallery/img_gen_group_04.jpg

[pugetopolis]

Miss Ashbery



Read the article in today's NYTimes about mtvU choosing Ashbery as their "poet laureate." All very nice and so on, but absolutely no mention that Miss Ashbery is queer. The closest they get is a reference to her start 1950s "bohemia."

Well, my dears, aren't those folks at mtvU and the NYTimes ever so circumspect? One has to wonder how complicit Miss Ashbery was in this little -- what? -- lavender wash? I have no clue who the target audience is for mtvU, though I assume its largely the same or wants to be the same as MTV generally. So, I think it's irresponsible, if not immoral, for Miss Ashbery to let this bit of closetry occur.
 
Of course, the article also troops out Ashbery's now rather famous quip about not wanting to be named the national poet laureate. Of course, we all know that there is only one requirement for U.S. poet laureate: no gays.

As recent recipients have apply demonstrated, talent and achievement have nothing to do with that honor. That's why Ashbery's quip is sadly fatuitous: it fails to state why he will never be offered the position in the first place.
 
Ah well, Auden is still right: poetry changes nothing—especially when it doesn't even try.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/27/books/27laur.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
 

[madupont]

http://www.rooknet.com/beatpage/gallery/img_rexroth_01.jpg

http://www.rooknet.com/beatpage/gallery/img_rexroth_02.jpg

For instance, here is an example of a non-gay Poet. He may not have been Poet Laureate, but that had nothing to do with which sex he was nor was it because he maintained a friendship  with W.H. Auden as they both had something to talk about re: Poetry.  And both of them wrote works beyond your ken,  if you pardon the pun, but it brings to mind that you would have to take that in every sense both as understanding what they wrote and having the capacity to write something of the kind.

[pugetopolis]

miss ashbery

—for john ashbery

schmoozing with miss ashbery
the future poet laureate—
of the sinking empire of neo…
just ask the nytimes about it,
they know everything about
everybody anyway don’t they?
just ask mr. david kermani—
miss ashbery’s business manager
about the future of beltway
glory and muse deification.
arranged  by chance of course—
by pulitzer prize committee
plus harpercollins inc.
we’re meeting this morning
the nobel prize queens say—
the announcement is imminent.
it’s written in the stars above,
you can run but you can’t hide.
the macarthur foundation
certainly agrees: you and i are
suddenly giddy with possibility—
that what walt whitman was
trying to tell us is true:
merely being here now, dears,
means something; that soon
we may touch, love each other,
even get married for gawd’s sake.
no more don’t ask don’t tell—
no more jerry fartwell shit and
such buffoonery surrounded by.
a poetry already filled with style,
a style thru which emerges—
art deco weimar renaissance;
pandora’s box opening up once
again in a new puzzling light.
just ask fritz kortner or
louise brooks, my dear…

[madupont]

http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2007/04/sean_penn_tops.html

[madupont]

Old news but reminiscient.

Published on Thursday, February 6, 2003 by the Associated Press 
U.S. Poet Laureate Opposes War with Iraq 
by Hillel Italie
 
NEW YORK - The threatened war with Iraq has politicized the nation's poets, starting at the very top.

In comments rarely heard from a sitting U.S. poet laureate, Billy Collins has publicly declared his opposition to war and says he finds it increasingly difficult to keep politics out of his official job as literary advocate.

While at least three of Collins' predecessors also have stated their opposition to war, an incumbent laureate usually sticks to art for art's sake. Poets laureate are not political appointees; the selection is made by the Librarian of Congress, a post currently held by James H. Billington. Collins, who receives an annual stipend of $35,000, is serving his second one-year term.

A spokeswoman for the Library of Congress said Tuesday that "Mr. Collins is free to express his own opinions on any subject."

Collins, whose books include "Questions About Angels" and "Nine Horses," is a mostly introspective poet who doesn't have a history of political activism. But he defended anti-war poets who last week caused the White House to postpone a symposium sponsored by first lady Laura Bush.

"If political protest is urgent, I don't think it needs to wait for an appropriate scene and setting and should be as disruptive as it wants to be," Collins said in a recent e-mail to The Associated Press .

"I have tried to keep the West Wing and the East Wing of the White House as separate as possible because I support what Mrs. Bush has done for the causes of literacy and reading. But as this country is being pushed into a violent confrontation, I find it increasingly difficult to maintain that separation."

Collins, Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, former U.S. poet laureate Richard Wilbur and about 40 other writers and artists signed an anti-war petition last month.

In England, meanwhile, poet laureate Andrew Motion has written an anti-war poem that cites "elections, money, empire, oil" as the motivation for war.

Concern about a possible war has also changed what had been a relatively positive relationship between Mrs. Bush and the literary community. A former librarian who has made teaching and early childhood development her signature issues, she has held a series of symposiums to salute America's authors.

She planned a Feb. 12 forum on "Poetry and the American Voice," featuring the works of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman. Through her spokeswoman, Noelia Rodriguez, Mrs. Bush said last Wednesday that it would be "inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum" and postponed the forum. It has not been rescheduled.

Former poets laureate Stanley Kunitz and Rita Dove were among those who refused to attend and Sam Hamill, a poet and editor of the highly regarded Copper Canyon Press, organized a protest to send anti-war poems and statements to the White House. So far, he has received more than 3,600, to be posted on a Web site. Contributors include Pulitzer Prize winners W.S. Merwin and Galway Kinnell and at least two state poet laureates: Connecticut's Marilyn Nelson and South Dakota's David Allen Evans.

"I'm not speaking as a representative of the state, I'm speaking as ... a poet and private individual," Evans said. "I know it's an ambivalent situation and I hesitated to contribute to the project, but I felt that I needed to say I wanted peace instead of war."

New Jersey poet laureate Amiri Baraka said he will send a statement to Hamill and is also working on a poem about impeaching President Bush.

"Of course, I see it as part of my job. The main task right now is stopping the war," said Baraka, whose poem implying Israel had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks led critics to call for his resignation.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0206-07.htm

Copyright © 2003 The Associated Press

###
 
 

[pugetopolis]

She babbled on...

[madupont]

http://www.litkicks.com/Texts/Bomb.html

[nnyhav]

http://www.litkicks.com/Texts/Bomb.html

Allen Ginsberg tried to explain what Corso was trying to express, and ended up calling the students a bunch of assholes.

*That* explains it then.

"I learned to stop worrying. Ask me how!"

[madupont]

Marriage                                             Gregory Corso

Should I get married? Should I be Good?
Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustaus hood?
Don't take her to movies but to cemeteries
tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets
then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries
and she going just so far and I understanding why
not getting angry saying You must feel! It's beautiful to feel!
Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone
and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky--

When she introduces me to her parents
back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie,
should I sit knees together on their 3rd degree sofa
and not ask Where's the bathroom?
How else to feel other than I am,
often thinking Flash Gordon soap--
O how terrible it must be for a young man
seated before a family and the family thinking
We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou!
After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a living?
Should I tell them? Would they like me then?
Say All right get married, we're losing a daughter
but we're gaining a son--
And should I then ask Where's the bathroom?

O God, and the wedding! All her family and her friends
and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded
just waiting to get at the drinks and food--
And the priest! He looking at me if I masturbated
asking me Do you take this woman for your lawful wedded wife?
And I trembling what to say say Pie Glue!
I kiss the bride all those corny men slapping me on the back
She's all yours, boy! Ha-ha-ha!
And in their eyes you could see some obscene honeymoon going on--

then all that absurd rice and clanky cans and shoes
Niagara Falls! Hordes of us! Husbands! Wives! Flowers! Chocolates!
All streaming into cozy hotels
All going to do the same thing tonight
The indifferent clerk he knowing what was going to happen
The lobby zombies they knowing what
The whistling elevator man he knowing
The winking bellboy knowing
Everybody knowing! I'd be almost inclined not to do anything!
Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye!
Screaming: I deny honeymoon! I deny honeymoon!
running rampant into those almost climatic suites
yelling Radio belly! Cat shovel!
O I'd live in Niagara forever! in a dark cave beneath the Falls
I'd sit there the Mad Honeymooner devising ways to break marriages, a scourge of bigamy a saint of divorce--

But I should get married I should be good
How nice it'd be to come home to her
and sit by the fireplace and she in the kitchen
aproned young and lovely wanting by baby
and so happy about me she burns the roast beef
and comes crying to me and I get up from my big papa chair
saying Christmas teeth! Radiant brains! Apple deaf!
God what a husband I'd make! Yes, I should get married!
So much to do! like sneaking into Mr Jones' house late at night
and cover his golf clubs with 1920 Norwegian books
Like hanging a picture of Rimbaud on the lawnmower
like pasting Tannu Tuva postage stamps all over the picket fence
like when Mrs Kindhead comes to collect for the Community Chest
grab her and tell her There are unfavorable omens in the sky!
And when the mayor comes to get my vote tell him
When are you going to stop people killing whales!
And when the milkman comes leave him a note in the bottle
Penguin dust, bring me penguin dust, I want penguin dust--

Yet if I should get married and it's Connecticut and snow
and she gives birth to a child and I am sleepless, worn,
up for nights, head bowed against a quiet window, the past behind me,
finding myself in the most common of situations a trembling man
knowledged with responsibility not twig-smear not Roman coin soup--
O what would that be like!
Surely I'd give it for a nipple a rubber Tacitus
For a rattle bag of broken Bach records
Tack Della Francesca all over its crib
Sew the Greek alphabet on its bib
And build for its playpen a roofless Parthenon

No, I doubt I'd be that kind of father
not rural not snow no quiet window
but hot smelly New York City
seven flights up, roaches and rats in the walls
a fat Reichian wife screeching over potatoes Get a job!
And five nose running brats in love with Batman
And the neighbors all toothless and dry haired
like those hag masses of the 18th century
all wanting to come in and watch TV
The landlord wants his rent
Grocery store Blue Cross Gas & Electric Knights of Columbus
Impossible to lie back and dream Telephone snow, ghost parking--
No! I should not get married and I should never get married!
But--imagine if I were to marry a beautiful sophisticated woman
tall and pale wearing an elegant black dress and long black gloves
holding a cigarette holder in one hand and highball in the other
and we lived high up a penthouse with a huge window
from which we could see all of New York and even farther on clearer days
No I can't imagine myself married to that pleasant prison dream--

O but what about love? I forget love
not that I am incapable of love
it's just that I see love as odd as wearing shoes--
I never wanted to marry a girl who was like my mother
And Ingrid Bergman was always impossible
And there maybe a girl now but she's already married
And I don't like men and--
but there's got to be somebody!
Because what if I'm 60 years old and not married,
all alone in furnished room with pee stains on my underwear
and everybody else is married! All in the universe married but me!

Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as I am possible
then marriage would be possible--
Like SHE in her lonely alien gaud waiting her Egyptian lover
so I wait--bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of life

[madupont]

The Whole Mess ... Almost

I ran up six flights of stairs
to my small furnished room
opened the window
and began throwing out
those things most important in life

First to go, Truth, squealing like a fink:
"Don't! I'll tell awful things about you!"
"Oh yeah? Well, I've nothing to hide ... OUT!"
Then went God, glowering & whimpering in amazement:
"It's not my fault! I'm not the cause of it all!" "OUT!"
Then Love, cooing bribes: "You'll never know impotency!
All the girls on Vogue covers, all yours!"
I pushed her fat ass out and screamed:
"You always end up a bummer!"
I picked up Faith Hope Charity
all three clinging together:
"Without us you'll surely die!"
"With you I'm going nuts! Goodbye!"

Then Beauty ... ah, Beauty --
As I led her to the window
I told her: "You I loved best in life
... but you're a killer; Beauty kills!"
Not really meaning to drop her
I immediately ran downstairs
getting there just in time to catch her
"You saved me!" she cried
I put her down and told her: "Move on."

Went back up those six flights
went to the money
there was no money to throw out.
The only thing left in the room was Death
hiding beneath the kitchen sink:
"I'm not real!" It cried
"I'm just a rumor spread by life ..."
Laughing I threw it out, kitchen sink and all
and suddenly realized Humor
was all that was left --
All I could do with Humor was to say:
"Out the window with the window!"


Gregory Corso

[pugetopolis]

"Went back up those six flights
went to the money
there was no money to throw out."
Gregory Corso

Corso was always hitting up Ginsberg for money. What a mooch.

Getting drunk and making an ass of himself.

Like that time at the London airport...

So many beats like Corso and Kerouac...drunks and losers.

All of them dead now...

[madupont]

Jack Powers talks to Doug Holder/ Lucid Moon interview

JP: I had Corso read for Stone Soup Poetry in the mid-70's in Boston. There was a great deal of interest in the BEATS then, and the audience was packed. It was two decades since the "pot started to boil," and some of the hip people were anxious to see him as well as the older poets from that era. I loved the natural music he had when reading his poetry.

DH: In Corso's poem, ELEGIAC FEELINGS AMERICA, he writes of his deceased friend Jack Kerouac,...O and when it's asked of you,/ What happened to America/has happened to him/ the two were inseparable/like the wind to the sky/is the voice to the word./ How do you think Corso linked Kerouac's fate with America, and the notions connected with it?

JP: Corso was writing that Kerouac was coming from the working class, with a "Joe six-pack mentality." Like many Blue Collars, he was essentially patriotic. He was buying into the life that America offered. The American dream of reinvention, limitless possibilities, hitting the road and starting all over again, died along with Kerouac. Kerouac died in his mother's house, a broken man. You can't marry your mother. What he believed America was, proved to be an illusion. Kerouac sought the geographical cure instead of the vertical one. Ginsberg told me if Kerouac learned to sit and meditate he would of still been alive. Kerouac bought into the material culture. He wore the badge of Eastern religion, but it didn't mean anything. In this poem Corso saw Kerouac tragically barking up the wrong tree.

DH: In 1954 , Corso lived in Cambridge,Ma. At the Harvard Library he poured over all the great works of poetry. In fact, his first published poems appeared in the Harvard Advocate. He even wrote a play that was produced by Harvard students, " In This Hung Up Age" Did your paths cross at this time? Was Cambridge and Boston a nurturing place for the struggling artist, in the 50's?

JP: It was not. That's why I started STONE SOUP, in reaction to this reality. I remember going into the Grolier Bookstore in Cambridge, and being treated like I literally stunk. The 50's were nuturing to the Yale Younger Poets, the academics, certainly not the struggling artist. I did not know that Corso was living in Cambridge at the time. This was a pre-HOWL, and not many folks heard of him and the others.



 

[madupont]

 Reply #96

There's one thing you are not getting here. Kerouac left some stash to minimal offspring as I'm reminded by Dzimas, which is how the topic came up in the first place. I left Dzimas some photos and coverage on the territory of their involvement, in the appropriate places like Meander,etc.

You've made indiscreetly obvious that with your background as it was that you know next to nothing about the literature of that period nor how it is seen and read in the rest of the world.

"Ginzie" had no offspring but he did have survivors to collect his stash.

Corso on the other hand has several offspring as the result of multiple marriages and along the way acquired some very wealthy friends who took care of his last wishes.  I wouldn't be surprised that if you keep it up,you find yourself in some kind of a suit, maybe not concrete or anything, if you don't get pounded first by some relative who takes it personally.

I'm not altogether surprised because if you can't get people to believe your false insinuations with blatant false charges on one of your issues, then you transform to another aspect of pretentiousness of somehow being the better writer by far than any who were your betters quite a time ago that you somehow missed out on.

The second reason that it is not surprising, I mentioned in the second paragraph. With your Southern Agrarian background you have the whole schoolyard genteel facetiousness that never accepted any really urbane or cosmopolitan lit-crit until you hit the streets of the bigger cities in which every one of these poets was accustommed to be and very likely about the same time that you made the scene. Now that you've got a chip on your shoulder, it occurs to me this latest rampage of tantrum throwing may have occurred in feeling that you were personally slighted or taken for granted or insulted by their presence and demeanor and following and skill.  Get over it. Post haste.