Allen Ginsberg would be proud. . .

. . .if Patrick McCauley's "Howling Back" included five additional pages of free verse.

Bolano and the Beats

"Roberto Bolano and the Beat Connection" appeared in The New Yorker earlier this month.

first thought, best thought

I've been reading about Allen Ginsberg's "first thought, best thought" ideas, which seem particularly suitable or relevant to contemporary studies of blogging--perhaps much more so than studies of poetry. In fact, according to American Scream, an easy to read book primarily about "Howl," Ginsberg's most famous poem was rigorously edited despite Jack Kerouac's insistence that Allen cut and revise as little as possible. In fact, at the time, it became apparent that "first thought, best thought" was much more Jack's idea than Allen's. This somewhat adds to the sad irony of Ginsberg living a full, marketed life that culminates with a decade's worth of professoring at Brooklyn College while Kerouac dies relatively young, relatively drunk, and of course, more or less living on his relative's (as in Mom's) couch and dime.

As to how "first thought, best thought" relates to this blog, I did in fact just revise a recent entry to make myself appear less cynical and perhaps more generous. (Yes, a kind soul who was only partly obsessed with how low his meager stock holdings would decline during the current revolution in Liberty Park--that is how posterity and the present should know L.U.S.K. Oh, how I wish I were one of those grain-fed affluent liberal-to-lefters who remains completely unaware for an entire lifetime that his or her retirement has primarily been secured by ample holdings of and dividends from Big Oil, Fat Retail, Large Car, Long Bomb, Private Money, Warren Insurance, Dessert Buffet, etc.) I'm sure this impulse to revise relates to the fact that this is a public blog, and so there is also the possibility that the usual censors--from peers to authorities to parents to potential employers could chance upon it, and consider whether or not it opines in an appropriate manner, treating each topic with the dignity it deserves.

Anyway, I also noticed I didn't revise out in the earlier entry the "And" at the start of four consecutive paragraphs.

OK. I'll post now and then come back to this later!

don riggs redux

I had an opportunity to ask Don Riggs, a contemporary poet and professor, for his take on Allen Ginsberg, and he wrote back, "Ginsberg was a major influence on me; his poem 'Howl' was described as the 'Waste Land' of that generation, and I wrote in a quasi-Beat style, in what I perceived to be the Ginsberg manner, in the mid-late-1970s." As part of his response, Don included a poem he wrote 30 years ago which he considers to be his "most successfully Ginsbergian poem." He wrote the poem at the end of the nineteen seventies, and I believe we can find in these lines that Ginsbergian awe in the face of America's fragmented beauty and banality, our shit and our soul intermingled, so to speak.


Please note that the line breaks of Don Rigg's "Those of us who" do have a function in the read-aloud rhythm of the poem but do not transfer into this online format.

Here then is Don Riggs's "Those of us who":

Those of us who
Those of us who live in the assholes of the city
leaking apartment roofs over gravel back alleys
Those of us who watch the trashmen trash themselves at 7am when we get up
Those of us who speak to them moneyless when we traverse our parking lot back yards
Those of us who gaze at the wide red sunset and the one black crooked tree
over the flat black rooftops
Those of us who hear the dumpsters who have been waiting all day
being visited by their dump truck lover at 3am rising graceful as whales
in his arms for their cleansing kiss
Those of us with late black coffee nights typing typing ceaselessly typing our lives
onto all too brief sheets of onionskin
Those of us who will never be President
Those of us with only $5 plastic ponchos for raincoats with rips in their sides from our
cats
Those of us who never get work done on time
Those of us who drop everything and run for two hours
whenever we think we’ve seen the Muse of Beauty disappear round a corner
And sleep exhausted and sweaty and unsuccessful and blissfully peaceful that night
And our dreams are Haydn’s lost symphonies cut into curling rolls by his wife
And those of us whose shoelaces tie in five places
And whose lawns are moss on the next roof
accessible through the window, soft down on the tarred gravel
We have not forgotten Sappho
or Ventadorn, or Van Gogh
Rembrandt’s poor uncle lives on the next hall
the floorboards of our rooms shift when he walks to the closet
We discussed Li Po with our neighbor the moon
We shouted koans to streetlights and discarded paint cans, the plants at the feet of our
stairs, we sang
and sing still of hidden roses, of verdant distances, of the mountain hut
of the imagination
rising invisible above the redbrick backs of buildings of downtown America.
-- Chapel Hill, 1979


For more Don Riggs, click here.