Incorporating Writing Issue Vol 5

Issue 3 Vol 5 AMERICAN BEAT TRAIL

Incorporating Writing is an imprint of The Incwriters

Society (UK). The magazine is managed by an editorial team independent of The Society’s Constitution. Nothing in this magazine may be reproduced in whole or part without permission of the publishers. We cannot accept responsi-bility for unsolicited manuscripts, reproduction of articles, photographs or content. Incorporating Writing has endeav-oured to ensure that all information inside the magazine is correct, however prices and details are subject to change. Individual contributors indemnify Incorporating Writing, The Incwriters Society (UK) against copyright claims, monetary claims, tax payments / NI contributions, or any other claims. This magazine is produced in the UK. © The Incwriters Society (UK) 2005

Editorial Team

Managing Editor Andrew Oldham Guest Editor Chaz Brenchley Articles Editor Fiona Ferguson Interviews Editor TBA Reviews Editor G.P.Kennedy Columnists

Dan McTiernan, Andrew O’Donnell, Dave Wood, Sharon Sadle

Contributors

Bruce Barnes, Sarah Dunnett, Alexander Laurence, Cath Nichols, William Park, Kate Parrinder, Clare Reddaway, Ronnie. Cover Art Gavin Joynt Design Marsh Thomas Contact Details http://www.incwriters.com [email protected]

Editorial

American Beat Trail

3

Andrew Oldham bids farewell to an end of era and the year.

Interviews

Black Listed Beat

13

Ronnie talks to the black listed

Final Greetings

16

Alexander Laurence gets to grip with Ginsberg.

Articles

The Beats – Counter Culture?

7

Sarah Dunnett looks at the legacy of the counter culture generation

It seems that...

33

Bruce Barnes looks at the new counter culture of San Francisco.

Columns

When T-Rex Met The King

11

Dan McTiernan enters a strange world.

Cubicle Escapee

25

Sharon Sadle drifts down the greatest river of all.

Artwork

Perfect Eye

29

Cover artist, Gavin Joynt exhibits some of his work.

Reviews

36

News and Opportunities

48

American Beat Trail

Editorial by Andrew Oldham

Another year draws to a close and the with it the end of an era. Over three years ago Bixby Monk, Samantha Morton and I set up a fledgling magazine, in that early test issue we ran mainly open

letters; I remember one from Rennie Parker whose vitriolic attack on poetry competitions spurned a myriad of responses from both poets, publishers and competition judges. In away we nailed our colours to the mast that day, stating that we would not withdraw or run for the hills on topics that most magazines wouldn’t touch. If is could be summed up in one word, the magazine has always been CRITICAL. This has been shown in the way that journalists, editors and publishers have flocked to us over the last three years. That, and our

readership went from a handful of poets and publishers to over 100,000+ a year. Thanked mainly be our change from live editions to a printable format that could be archived. Now with the start of the ice and the falling snow, we too must call it a day and bid farewell to Incwriters. We are not closing shop though, it would be dumb of us to leave the stage now, when

we are most needed. When criticism is mired by the need to please publishers, when reviewers are forced into a house style rather than an honest critical voice, when writers, poets, journalists are unable to publish articles because they may rock the boat, we will step in and publish and be damned. I know that is a bit OTT but it is an emotional time here. We all know at the magazine that there is a happy medium between publishers and critics, readers and writers. We know in the present clinate that money means all, even before the reader and writer. Yet does it mean that we have to dumb down? Well, we won’t.

“We know in the present

clinate that money means

all, even before the reader

and writer. Yet does it

mean that we have to

dumb down?”

We willincrease readership and bring our faithful readers new features, interviews and articles at our new home

www.incorporatingwriting.co.uk.

There we will publish our present issue and all archived issues will still be housed at Incwriters. We are still one of their imprints but now we are being allowed to stand on our own.

I want to give a big thank you to Bixby Monk, this is his last issue - he has given over three years of his time, advice and opinions to these pages. Without him and Samantha Morton there would be no Incorporating Writing. From 2007, I will

be taking the reins of Managing Editor and the editorial team will grow further as we establish new posts in London and an Freelance Pool for writers who want to cut their teeth in this publication. Over the last three issues we have developed a new style, a new publication and new wayt of setting things out. This has had nothing but positive feedback from

readers and publishers. Without the fore we wouldn’t have grown, continue to support us and forward this magazine to friends and colleagues.

The last live issue at Incwriters celebrates the American way of life, before Iraq and before Kyoto, America had a voice that was untainted by the lies and hypocrisy of the Bush Adminstration and Right Wing Christian ethos. So, here we dig up two of the great Americans of the twentieth century, the black listed and censored journalist, Al Aronowitz and the Gay Beat Poet, Allen Ginsberg - showing that things haven’t really changed, they just have a new spin. Sarah Dunnett looks at the legacy of the Beats, Bruce Barnes visits the new face of San Francisco Literature. Dan McTiernan replaces George Wallace as our new columnist for 2007. Artwork is by the talented photographer, Gavin

Joynt, as he takes us on a quick fire tour of the American West and the reviews just flow in on the latest from Cinnamon Press and Faber & Faber.

Thanks to everyone who has made the last three years just fly by and those who have joined us in the last years, these are the people who have made this magazine grow and take on a life of it’s own.

Andrew Oldham is the Managing Editor for

Incorporating Writing, he is freelance writer for television, film, the stage and the page. He lectures at Edge Hill University. More can be viewed of his work at www.andrewoldham.co.uk

CALL FOR WRITERS

Incorporating Writing will go quarterly in 2007. Themes for 2007 include ADAPTATION (January), TRAVEL (April), REGIONAL REVOLUTION (July) and FOOD

(October). Guidelines can be obtained from the editors below

All enquiries and deadline details are available from:

Andrew Oldham (Managing Editor) [email protected]

Fiona Ferguson (Articles Editor) [email protected] G.P. Kennedy (Reviews Editor) [email protected]

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The Beats – Counter Culture?

Article by Sarah Dunnett Photos by Andrew Oldham

The American Beats have long been upheld as the inspiration for the cultural and sexual revolution of the 1950s and 60s America. Their non-conformity

popularly branded them a counter-culture generation; breaking all moulds, all rules and all protocol. Certainly stylistically, the Beat writers were a new breed;

pioneering spontaneity and open-form composition, but, aside from literary technique, how counter-cultural actually were they? Perhaps, on closer inspection, not as much as has been commonly believed.

I first came across the Beats when I was in my late teens; about to start a

Comparative American Studies degree at Warwick University. After 4 years of Bronte and Shakespeare, Kerouac’s spontaneous, Benzedrine-influenced prose was a little disconcerting; and

certainly counter to my conventional academic literary culture! Studying the Beat movement as part of an America in

the Fifties course I have to admit I was

the only person in that class that wasn’t all that taken with Howl and did not gushingly rave about On the Road. It generally wasn’t – and still isn’t- a

fashionable view to sneakingly agree, in part, with Norman Podhoretz’s damning condemnation of the Beats in his article

The Know Nothing Bohemians, so I found

myself to be counter to popular culture in my more ambivalent opinion of the Beats. Ten years on and I am re-reading Howl,

The Dharma Bums and On the Road,

armed, perhaps, with greater

understanding of my own prejudices however. I still do not ‘like’ Howl, but now do not immediately write it off as the poisonous ramblings of a madman. I

have greater understanding of his anger – his raging against the giant paranoid American machine, Moloch, intent on destroying anything ‘different’ and the establishment that puts the ‘best minds of my generation’ in psychiatric hospitals rather than appreciate their boundaryless creativity. I find myself caught up in the galloping energy of Part I and even like the fact that I do not really understand most of it – the way Ginsberg seemingly strings random words together is now fascinating rather than ‘try too hard’.

“We were just a bunch of

guys who were out to get

laid”

I suppose this appreciation and change in attitude is partly due to a greater

understanding and questioning of

globalisation and Western interventionist action. What is poignant is that Part II could still describe the United States (and indeed the UK) today. I must emphasise that I am by no means a US- or

establishment-hater, but ‘Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!’ chimes as unpleasantly true today in 2006 as in 1956. Ginsberg may have railed here against a culture that he

observed 50 years ago; but it would seem that Ginsberg’s urge to warn the world fell on deaf ears, therefore, as, in many ways, the culture has not been

‘countered’, the moulds have not been broken, and although Ginsberg may have helped to legitimise the railing

anti-establishment voice, the Moloch machine has ground ever onwards.

The anti-establishment voice is, of course, what has been historically considered as characterising the Beats;

the shaking up of the old order and bringing in a new generation. But were the Beats ever really that bothered about changing the world? Ginsberg could have been, but after reading On the Road and

The Dharma Bums, I’m not sure that

Kerouac was as concerned. Kerouac and Cassady’s road trips seem more of an ecstasy of self-indulgence, with Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty) just rushing from one ‘experience’ to the next, rather than any kind of rage against the

machine. I cannot imagine that he would have cared too much about the best minds being destroyed so long as he could get his next fix, drive somewhere very fast or get laid. Kerouac too seems to be on a quest for self-fulfilment rather than anything more altruistic; a self-conscious desire to scratch his own itch rather than to change or make a

statement to the world. In the 1960’s, when asked whether he identified with hippies, Kerouac said, ‘I wasn’t trying to create any kind of new consciousness or anything like that. We didn’t have a whole lot of heavy abstract thoughts. We were just a bunch of guys who were out to get laid.’

It seems that the Beat generation’s anti-consumerism is also rather hypocritical. In 1950’s America, material security was craved in the post-war period. Household appliances and cars, for example, became available on a mass scale. Writers such as Gary Snyder- Japhy Ryder in The

Dharma Bums- prided themselves on

owning only the bare essentials. But wasn’t their lust for sex, drugs and alcohol and the next ‘experience’ the other side of the cravings coin? Is wanting a new TV or washing machine any worse than craving the next fix? It seems to me that the Beats were

consumers through and through; albeit a different type of consumerism to the

material appetite of conventional, post-war American culture. Their appetites were equally, if not even more, insatiable than that of the culture around them, from whom they were attempting to break away and set themselves apart. The attitude of the Beat generation towards women is again distinctly somewhat less than non-conformist or counter-culture. In the 1950’s, the role of woman as homemaker was glorified and idealised, and women who had worked to aid the war effort were once more placed firmly back in the home. Women did not go to college to get a degree but to find a husband. The male Beat writers seem to have bought into the view that a woman’s only role was to service men; in bed or the kitchen. The character of Christine in The Dharma

Bums is first and foremost described as ‘a

beautiful young honey-haired girl, her hair falling way down over her shoulders who wandered around the house and yard barefooted hanging up washing and

baking her own bread and cookies.’ There is no sense of irony in Kerouac’s

description. She was gorgeous looking and baked – what more could a man need? At no point does Kerouac or any of the other male characters in the book suggest that she, or any other female character, join them on any of their expeditions. In fact the only mention or purpose of all the other female characters seems to be as people to have sex with. The idea that the men go out and have all the fun whilst the women wait for them at home or in bed also pervades On the

Road. Hardly a cry for a new world order

or cultural revolution, you have to admit! So perhaps it is truly more a matter of style rather than content or concept in which the Beats were counter-culture, and it is in their style that their ingenuity

and flair comes through. The spontaneity of the prose is irresistible and I did find myself being sucked in by the pastoral idyll of the novel of The Dharma Bums and carried along on the magnetic energy of On The Road. The former moves at a slower, more contemplative pace than the latter, and Kerouac’s descriptions of the scenery on his walks with Japhy Ryder are beautifully evocative. However, there are elements of childishness about his style and the lack of responsibility. What was it all exactly for? Was he racing about America trying to counter the repressive culture? Was he pursuing Buddhism as a means to counteract the consumerism and paranoid anti-communism of the US, or was it all simply something to pass the time? Probably the point was that there was no point. He was a non-conformist Bohemian not a target-driven conformist like myself.

Sarah Dunnett spent 4 years at the University

of Warwick studying Comparative American Studies; focussing on the Beat Generation during her final year. Ten years later she spends most of her time clearing up at home after small children, although retains an active interest in American culture, history and literature.

again distinctly somewhat less

than non-conformist or

counter-culture”

When T-Rex Met The King

Column by Dan McTiernan

When Elvis put me in an odorous headlock and started to sing Love Me

Tender, I knew I was dead.

Oh, to pick one’s own fate: Torture by Karaoke, faux-celebrity rape,

dismemberment and the ignominy of being fed to Elvis’ abusive children, circling like buck-toothed sharks in the pool out back. This was not in my ‘top-ten ways to go out with a bang’.

Friends warned me to reacquaint myself with Deliverance before setting out for a summer of door-to-door bookselling in Appalachian Virginia. I sensed an

almighty piggy-squeal rising from my gut. It’d been like this, minus the impending death, all summer. I’d spout the same ineffectual sales spiel, eliciting the same response:

“Hi, I’m Dan from England. Yes, sir, that is near Paris and London. I’m here

enjoying your humidity, confederate flag ownership and Christian hospitality to make you aware of the South-Western Study Guides available to you, sir, in your

dilapidated shack with your fifteen

children and your rabbit-in-the-headlights wife, for a mere $400.”

“What are they...? Oh, just Dinosaurs, you know, Velociraptors, Triceratops, evolution and all that? Oh, you’re a Creationist, silly me, I’ll just be on my way. Thanks so much for your time…” And that was the perpetual stumbling block; trying to sell books about evolution to people who wouldn’t acknowledge its existence. This was four years before Bush started bombing people back into the Stone Age but America had already sermonised Bible-Belters back into their own insular Old Testament.

“At night I’d be sloshed

awake as he sat

bolt-upright in the pink water

bed we were forced to

share, traumatised from

the latest nightmare about

being ‘Saved’”

None of us did very well that summer. I rounded a corner one day to find my friend crying in our car. We’d purchased it in the vain hope that it would be

necessary to deliver tons of sold books. It was a brown 1976 four and a half litre Buick LeSabre called Homer. He was

listening numbly to GOD FM after another zero day.

At night I’d be sloshed awake as he sat bolt-upright in the pink water bed we

were forced to share, traumatised from the latest nightmare about being ‘Saved’. We’d smoke and listen to the radio news about Princess Di’s death through the night to cheer us up.

At the time it was thoroughly miserable. But now, five years into the War On

Terror, I see that student job as a gift; a

unique window into the souls of Middle America and perversely, Middle England.

“The entire house was

covered floor to ceiling in

photographs of Elvis”

We like to josh over here about dumb Yanks and their ignorant world view, but how many of us cultured ‘Old Europeans’ would be any different if we lived in South Virginia, in a country as vast and diverse as Europe and unified only by its star-spangled banner and obsessive national pride? Half of us would be marrying our sisters and lynching foreigners in a flash given the licence to. (Oh, whoops, you already are.) It’s human nature to be tribe-centric and jingoistic and it’s only because we live on a piddling little raft of an island and have to look to others outside for help that we assume the mantle of gracious internationalists. Why are there 2.4million copies of the Daily

Mail sold each day if we’re so removed

from our kissing-cousins across the Pond? In many respects I have more sympathy for those who chose not to buy my books. At least they’re isolated by their

government and media and sold the lie of ‘Universe America’. We should know

bloody better.

Of course, as Love Me Tender ended and Elvis replaced the microphone,

international politics was somewhat down

the priority list. Looking anywhere but at him I noticed, apart from his spread-eagled wife on the kitchen table necking a bottle of Smirnoff, that the entire house was covered floor to ceiling in

photographs of Elvis, in garb, at Elvis events. The piggy-squeal was nearly on my lips. This was it, Abu Ghraib style… And then he let go, invited me to a ‘party’ with his wife and a few friends later on, which I assured him I’d attend - although stopped short of asking if it was a bring-your-own-body-bag do.

After reassuring me that he was a ‘f***ing millionaire’ by holding out his hand bedecked with plastic-diamond rings, and that he was only not buying my books because he didn’t believe in ‘God Damn Dinosaurs’, he sent me on my thankful way.

The kids snapped their prehistoric jaws from the pool edge as I scurried off to find solace in the nearest Burger King.

Writer, magazine editor, film maker and film lecturer, Dan McTiernan schizophrenically wanders through his well travelled working life safe in the knowledge that underneath the media façade, he’s really an eco-builder and smallholder.

Al Aronowitz passed away Monday August 1st, 2005 from cancer. He was a pioneer of rock journalism and also introduced Bob Dylan to the Beatles. This interview is reprinted here with permission of Ear Candy http://www.earcandymag.com/. It has never been published in the UK

before.

I was really nervous at first about interviewing Al Aronowitz. No, he is not a big-time musical superstar. No, you won’t see him featured on one of those VH1 “Behind the Music” episodes. But Aronowitz’ life has been no less fascinating than some of the most colorful rock stars - he was hanging out with the Beatles and Dylan in the ’60s; he was at Woodstock and The Isle of Wight festival; and he has hung out with

George Harrison and many other rock stars for the last three decades following the ‘swinging sixties’.

But a so-called “hanger-on” does not a legend make. And Aronowitz is a legend -not for who he hung out with, but what he did to rock journalism. Known as both the “Blacklisted Journalist” and “the godfather of rock journalism”, he was instrumental in forcing the world to take rock journalism serious.

After reading his book, BOB DYLAN AND THE BEATLES, I had tons of questions to ask. But what does a non-professional and untrained “journalist” such as myself ask a journalistic legend? I simply ended up picking questions that his book

brought to my mind – and hoped he

Black Listed Beat

Interview by Ronnie

didn’t find them too…boring!

While your book is a collection of some of your various manuscripts, when put

together it reads very well as a

continuous story. And your writing comes off as factual reminisces instead of a “tell-all” or “gossip” book. Is this just due to your writing style or was it a conscious effort?

“I wrote the pieces at different times without any forethought that I might collect them into a book”.

“I run into a lot of envious

assholes.”

After reading about the summit meeting between the Beatles and Dylan that YOU orchestrated, I tried to think of any other such meeting that had such historic ramifications. Sure, the Beatles finally met Elvis in ’65, but that was a huge let-down (for both parties); Lennon met Elton John & David Bowie in the ’70s (and some hit singles resulted) - I simply could not recall any other meeting which

carried the weight of the Dylan/Beatles meeting of 1964. How long did it take you to realize that something special had happened? Did you ever have any indications that such creative sparks would eventually fly?

“From the very beginning, I considered Dylan and the Beatles as immortals and I just wanted to cop a little immortality for myself. I fully expected what happened afterwards to happen as it did”.

I love your boast that, “The ’60s wouldn’t have been the same without me.” Do you ever fun into people that strongly

disagree?

“I run into a lot of envious assholes.” Speaking of the long reaching effects of

the Dylan/Beatles meeting - you suggest that the psychedelic movement in music was one result. What about the other bands of 1966, which had what you could call “psychedelic” music? Or do you mean that Sgt. Pepper single-handedly

“popularized” psychedelia, while Dylan’s influence was more subtle (like his

influence on the Byrds - on of the bands that went psychedelic in 1966)?

“All the copycats went to great lengths to come up with gimmicks that would allow them to claim originality, but they all were influenced by the originals. With even so original a band as then Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia told me the idea of his band was inspired by the Beatles, Dylan and the Beat Generation, a nexus for which I claim to be the invisible link”. As for psychedelia - there has been a lot of interest in the recent Brian Wilson unveiling of 1966’s lost psychedelic Beach Boys album SMiLE (played for the first time in February of 2004). Do you think that the Beach Boys SMiLE album would have been as influential as Sgt. Pepper if it had been released (as originally

planned) in January of 1967?

“As great as the Beach Boys were—and they giants, too—and as great as SMILE was, that they were overshadowed by Dylan and the Beatles is a matter of history”.

You seemed to find Lennon as the most fascinating Beatle, yet you seemed to be closest to Harrison. What were your impressions of McCartney & Starr?

“Ringo is the only one of the Beatles who doesn’t collect copyright royalties, yet he was an essential part of the Beatles

magic. As were press officer Derek Taylor, manager Brian Epstein, assistant road manager Malcolm Evans and especially road manager Neil Aspinall, who is now the Managing director of Apple Records as

well as the acknowledged Fifth Beatle (acknowledged by the other four—

including Lennon and Harrison, who said as much before their deaths). From the start, Ringo was a favorite of fans, many of whom were delighted to be compare him to Harpo Marx, whose memory still delights. McCartney was the hardest for me to get to know. Was that because of his snootiness? I still hope to get to know him”.

The story of the recording of Bobby Neuwirth’s solo album almost reads like Lennon’s “lost weekend” and his

recording with Phil Spector. Was that just the modus operandi of behavior of rock stars recording in the ’70s? Have there been any other memorable recording sessions that come to mind?

“Neuwirth was a great seminal figure of the ’60s. He has since tried to live down his antics of the ’60s. But he was an original. Most musicians got drunk or stoned in order to achieve epiphanies. I found alcohol to be more deleterious than marijuana—alcohol proved to be as

deadly as heroin”.

Your book is a fascinating analysis of the psyche of Bob Dylan. You paint him as both a brilliant, yet sometimes ruthless person (almost a textbook example of the eccentric genius). You say in the book that Bob “still infects my psyche” - just what is it about Dylan that has this “hold” on you? Is it the power (and originality) of his words? His personality?

“Dylan spoke a lot about “psychic power.” Psychic power is what charisma is made of. The ability to sway, to have an effect on, to influence an audience. Dylan no longer has the “hold” on me that he once had. But he still haunts my dreams”. In addition to your portrayal of the many sides of Bob Dylan - the ultimate mystery

of your book remains your banishment from his “inner circle”. The reader finds himself analyzing each Dylan section of the book to come up with the reason. Yet the book ends without you yourself

knowing the real reason. Does this still gnaw at you? And more importantly, after all these years would you welcome a one-on-one with Dylan? (Although after

reading your book, I doubt he would ever give you a truthful meaning as to just “why”!)

“I wouldn’t know what to say to him. And I certainly wouldn’t be inclined to believe anything he might say to me. But, yes, I would welcome a meeting with him just as I would welcome reconciliation with anyone who has abused me”.

You mentioned that you have more stories to tell than you have years left in your life in which to tell them all - does that mean that we can expect more books?

“I am readying many more books that are not necessarily about Dylan. He was not the only giant I walked with in my

however troubled career as a journalist”.

Do you have a passion for music? Can you trans-late this passion into words? If so, we might want

you to write for us! EAR CANDY is an eclectic, internet-only music magazine of articles, reviews

and interviews of bands and music that WE like and think ought to be heard. While our main love

is rock and roll (whether it is punk, heavy metal, psychedelic, hard rock, garage rock, blues, oldies or “alternative”), we have also covered Celtic and Native American music. And, we are always be on the lookout for new music, whatever the genre!

I met with Allen Ginsberg on his book tour for Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986-1992 (HarperCollins). I was

accompanied by George Scrivani who was an editor, who created Hanuman Books with Raymond Foye and Francesco

Clemente. I didn’t get along so well with Allen Ginsberg as is evident in the

following. I interrupted him every time he launched into a soundbite about the

importance of theBeats.

He often questioned me about my

questions. In the interview, I stressed the importance of obscure Beats including Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Bob Kaufman, Ray Bremser, and Irving Rosenthal In fact, my mention of Sheeper being the best work of the Beat Generation, seemed to annoy Ginsberg. Later that day, Ginsberg read “Hum

Bom!” at Candlestick Park and was booed by the apolitical and conservative

baseball fans. Ginsberg died in 1997. Cosmopolitan Greetings is your new book of poems which collects your most recent work: 1986-1992. Your poetry seems to have changed stylistically, especially in your delicate attention to language; I think of your earliest poems, such as

Howl, possessing a complex use of

language, utilizing many adjectives, and being influenced by Surrealism, yet the new writing is much more transparent, direct and simplified.

“More or less, with the occasional touches of a surreal sequence of images. There are a number of poems in here and in White Shroud which are examples of complicated language or complicated dream situations. Within some simple poems are some surreal word chains, particularly “I Went To The Movie of Life,” “Grandma Earth’s Song,” and in the Jacob Rabinowitz poem: ‘Put me down now for not hearing your teenage heartbeat, / think back were you serious offering to kidnap me / to Philadelphia, Cleveland, Baltimore, Miami, God / knows, rescued from boring fame & Academic fortune, / Rimbaud Verlaine lovers starved together in boondocks houseflat / stockyard

furnished rooms eating pea soup reading E. A. Poe?’ I want to have lucid clear pictures in my poetry rather than jump-cut, cut-up, chaotic flashes. I want my poetry to be like a cinematic movie. The magic comes not from the speed up of the words, but the magic comes from the fact that it’s an imaginary dream vision.

“The New York Poets: we all

went to bed together.”

The prototype of that is Shelley’s ‘Triumph of Life.’”

But has your use of language become more simplified?

“It’s become more lucid. Yeah. I’ve become interested in very clear one sentence poems. Like a snapshot. ‘I can still see Neal’s 23-year-old corpse when I come in my hand.’ (American

Sentences).”

“There was a lot of gay

literature. It wasn’t the

internalization of

homosexuality but the

official repression by the

police and the Mafia, who

had a vested interested in it

staying black market.”

You grew up in a Marxist, Jewish, leftist background. How did this influence your sexuality and politics?

“I wasn’t bar mitzvahed. I lived across the street from a synagogue. My family was Jewish but they were all communists and socialists and atheists. They hated the orthodox rabbis. My great grandfather was an orthodox. There a poem called “Yiddishe Kopf” that directly answers the question about politics. How it influenced my sexuality I don’t know, but coming from a bohemian Jewish background, that including free thinking, free love,

1920s modernist idealism; those were the ideas circulating at the time.”

How do feel about the idea that sexuality is related to writing?

“A lot of my writing is to attract lovers, like in “Personals Ad.” There are a number of poems in here that are directly

intended to make a homunculus picture of a young boy that I want to make out with. It rarely works out, but eventually the whole body of my work is a big personals ad. That’s a big motivation, to make myself open and candid.”

Do you prefer pre-Stonewall

homosexuality, repressed and closeted or ....

“No way!”

Is the gay revolution of the 1970s the best thing that happened?

“No. It was a good thing that happened. But the best thing that happened? Come on! Why do you treat it as a stereotype?” I just wanted you to talk about pre-Stonewall activity.

“There were a large mass of people who were gay and who knew each other, and then there was police repression. The clubs and the gay bars were owned by the Mafia who paid off the police.

Stonewall didn’t pay off the police. Police corruption was really at the bottom of it all. For the mass of people it was a gay riot. It was a political action lead by the transvestites, they were the pioneers who fought the police. I don’t think that there was that much psychological difference before and after Stonewall. Burroughs, Genet, Christopher Isherwood, and Gore Vidal had all written gay novels before then. There was a lot of gay literature. It wasn’t the internalization of

homosexuality but the official repression by the police and the Mafia, who had a vested interested in it staying black market.”

Are you going to attend the 25th

anniversary celebration of Stonewall in New York?

“I don’t know where I’m going to be. If I’m in New York, I will be marching with

continued page 21...

NAMBLA.”

I wanted you to talk about political activism. My feeling is that it is based around single issue politics. This sort of activism is usually a reaction of “a society of the spectacle” scenario...

“I don’t know what all this language and references mean. I don’t know the

relationship between single issue activism and spectacle. That is the language of the Situationists. I don’t understand what logical link you are making”.

How has you view of Walt Whitman changed over the years?

“Is that the same question?”

No I changed it. I skipped that question. “Why don’t you clarify. Can you give me a clear idea of what you mean?”

Definitely!

“So can you say it in more simple language? I don’t mind answering the question if I can understand it, but I can’t.”

First, there is an activity called “Political Activism.” This is a very popular activity in San Francisco. All over.

“Gay activism?”

That as well. It seems that...

“Which type are you talking about?” Activism surrounding the Rodney King Trial, The Iraq War, and Act-Up for instance.

“There were anti-Iraq War demonstrations here in San Francisco?”

Yeah, it was big. But television distorted it. Yeah. The way media is structured now, most debates focus on single issue politics while ignoring the larger picture,

“Why don’t you clarify.

Can you give me a clear

idea of what you

F

or further information email:

[email protected]

which resembles a model set up by the Situationists, in Guy Debord’s The Society of The Spectacle. Debord criticizes the fascination of the spectacle.

“The critique was that everything was reduced to unrelated theater. I don’t know if the left or anyone has a unified field of activism. I’m not sure if the

situation is so far out of control that there is any solution. One problem is over-population and another is

hyper-technology, which are ruining the planet. Technology is ruining the planet, so the answer is “less power” but that’s unlikely to happen. Does anybody disagree with a dark vision of the future? All pop culture is based on it”.

Everyone my age believes that they are inheriting several of these problems such as toxicity....

“And overpopulation. We have this

privilege. We’re all dependent on technology because we use electricity, even a cute magazine like Cups is dependent. Everyone in the West is complicit.”

There’s not much cynicism in your work. You don’t value that position about the world?

“That’s a stupid young person’s reaction towards the world. That’s a person who doesn’t sense their own value or worth. Given a situation like this, the most practical approach is creating some relationship to mass suffering. It’s the difference between living with AIDS and dying with AIDS.”

How do you feel that the poets associated with The Berkeley Renaissance, such as Spicer and Duncan, and poets now referred to as The New York School of

Sappho has been

performed. The

minstrels. Pound and

Yeats always stressed

reading poetry aloud”

Poets, Ashbery, Koch, and O’Hara, differed from the Beat poets?

“The Beat Poets were close stylistically to The Berkeley Renaissance, but the

Berkeley people were a little more literary, in a sense that they drew on a more elite literary tradition and language, derived from Neo-Platonic studies of the renaissance. As far as The New York Poets: we all went to bed together. O’Hara was a close friend. We wrote poems to each other. O’Hara put the

stamp of approval in New York, which was very important in those days, on John Wieners, and on Gregory Corso. Spicer and Duncan didn’t care for some of the Beat Poets, but they respected Kerouac. Duncan had been a gay pioneer when writing an essay in the 1940s about being gay as a political act. They thought that the Beat Poets took away some of the praise. We had certainly gotten a lot of publicity. I wrote to Duncan “In unity there is strength.” But he never joined us for any readings. Spicer always thought that there was some vulgarity involved, that Gary Snyder’s work was too

intentional, and that I wasn’t sufficiently learned.”

In what I’ve read, you painted the history of poetry as cyclical and continuous, but a poet like Jack Spicer doesn’t seem to fit in to the traditions that you talk about. ”He fits in. He wanted to be totally

individual. He even fought with Duncan: certain metaphysical arguments.

What do you think of the poets on MTV and performance poetry in

general?

“Poetry since Homer and Sappho has been performed. The minstrels. Pound and Yeats always stressed reading poetry aloud. They thought it was important. Pound’s daughter said that her father always thought that the proper way to

present poetry was through

performance. It all depends on how sophisticated the is text on the page. If it looks good on the page it should sound good in the air. A lot of it is shit on the page and good in the air. A lot of it is shit on the page and shit in the air. And some of it is great on the page and great in the air”.

How do you feel the gay homosexual imagination has contributed to 20th century poetry and how much have you contributed to this?

“My part has been minor. What I have done is to take gay, homosexual love and give it a dimension of ordinariness. So it’s not a big deal. Are you gay?”

Alexander Laurence is a writer who lives in Los

Angeles. He has interviewed over 100 novelists, many of which are accessible through the

Internet. His book reviews have appeared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, American Book Review, East Bay Express, LA Reader, Bay Guardian, and American Book Jam.

Cubicle Escapee

Column by Sharon Sadle

From the wide waters of the

Mississippi river, a gigantic concrete cross stands on a cliff above the first glimpse of Kentucky. I was ready to praise

something as we left Illinois behind and entered a new state, this one marking the convergence of the Ohio River with the Mississippi. After a brief excited frenzy on board with some hopping around and picture taking, marking the momentous entrance to the lower

Mississippi and mile marker, we settled back down to listening to the motor churn and chug.

Memphis came and went with events I could never recall with enough detail. A few days later we met a marooned shipwreck survivor looking guy that had been homesteading (and growing a beard) along the Mississippi river for the last 9 years. We camped with him and listened to his slur of stories: hobo camping, train hopping, mental hospital residing, and hurricane riding. He

caravanned with us for a day then had to see a man about a boat. He told us to burn a fire that night so he could find us.

I watched a little breeze blow the fire for a long time and though 3 of us dreamed he found us, he never came.

A new excitement took hold as the last leg of the trip was calculated and

recalculated. We still had to walk in to town to fill our 14 gas containers (no marinas below St. Louis-at all), there were still mud up to our knees days but the end is was in sight, the full moon was gorgeous and I finally got a barge to toot one night when I morse-coded “Hi” with a flashlight. Small pleasures. Shaking hand bets with locals, ridiculous arguments about the colour of dried fruit, goofy attempts on the harmonica, sharing everything and hating it, sharing nothing and feeling guilty. The absolute grind in absolutely beautiful country. I wanted to absorb and appreciate every smell, every feeling and all the wild scenery, but my senses were reduced to some kind of basic survival mode and I was counting the days to the end.

Just below Baton Rouge, we began to encounter ocean-going ships which

dwarfed all previous barges, dwarfed the waves, dwarfed the sky as they towered closer, absolutely without a sound.

Massive cables wrapped around

permanent anchors held these ships in place while specks of men rushed around, working enormous cranes that plucked and placed and worked the cargo. Hour after hour the traffic thickened, like driving through sprawl into a metropolis. I had hoped all along to end my trip in New Orleans, though the official word was that there was no legal place to

give a car ferry dock I saw on the map a try. We might be able to pull over and if I had a chance I was going to be ready so I raced to pack. We were pulling up to the Algiers ferry landing and I stood by my pile of stuff, ready. I saw my little chance and while we bumped against the

landing, I threw my stuff onto the platform. I didn’t look around, I didn’t give hugs, I didn’t say bye, I just climbed up the wall on my knees and when I turned around, the boat had already made a bubbling wake away.

I stood there, alone. Kind of stunned. I walked a block before I realised I still had my life jacket on. I grabbed the first cab and paid him very well to take me to the warm embrace of the Astor Plaza Crème de la Lovely, white-sheeted, air-condi-tioned, marble-floored, mine-only-mine, hotel room. And that was the grubby, impromptu end of the grinding, en-chanted, disdainful, expensive, hell of that adventure. 34 days, 1805 miles, millions of details omitted. Feelings, fears, rage, aching beauty, small animal noises at night, thrillingly large barges lighting up the still night river, fossil finds, the tiny frustrations of living communally with slobs. Those little details are jogged by the hundreds of photos I’m still sorting through, coming slowly to mind as I get used to being done with another thing I’ve always wanted to do.

Sharon Sadle escaped her cubicle on september 22, 2005. she’s been traveling away from her hometown in florida by car, north and west, ever since. from the road, sharon writes about coffee with strikers, darts with bartenders, forays into abandoned factories and contemplative discompo-sure along the byways of the united states. her stash of socks totals 44 pairs.

19 Abercromby Square Liverpool, L69 7ZG

[email protected] www.thereader.co.uk Website includes news, events, shop, blog, podcasts.

First published in 1997, The Reader has always been a platform for passionate responses to literature. If you love read-ing, you’ll be delighted to find The

Reader, the literary magazine written with you in mind. The Reader organisation also delivers a variety of innovative liter-ary events and community projects in the North West.

Lisha Aquino Rooney

He works on a range of commercial and creative projects and is currently employed through the Arts Council. www.gavinjoynt.co.uk email: [email protected]

It seems that everyone writes here

Article by Bruce Barnes Photo by Andrew Oldham

It’s the last day of a week-long stay in San Francisco/Berkeley. I’m stopping at the YMCA in Berkeley which has a fitness centre attached to it so what may have started out as a working holiday has developed into a fitness regime;

swimming in the pool, limbering up in the stretch room, and retiring eventually to the hot tub, such a civilised way of keeping trim, I reckon I have lost half a stone and I’m a good deal more flexible. About the working holiday; San Francisco and Berkeley has the most active

poetry scene on the West coast of

America. It continues where the Beats left off - although there are still a few of the old timers like Ferlinghetti and Ruth Weiss around- with bookshop and cafe readings, open mike slots, and workshops almost every night of the week. A Beat Museum http://

www.thebeatmusuemonwheels.com has recently opened, which could sound like the kiss of death for a literary movement but it’s clinging to its peripatetic roots by moving regularly; it’s currently at ‘The

Cannery at Fisherman’s Wharf 2801 Leavenworth Street San Francisco, CA 94133, and you can keep in touch with

their wanderings, gallery shows, and readings through their email newsletter. For those interested in the Beat era, the poet Kenneth Rexroth’s perceptive view of the San Francisco literary and music

scene can be found at http:// www.bopsecrets.org.

Poetry Flash, the webevents sheet -http://www.poetryflash.org - will give you an idea of the extent of poetry activity in the region; click on Northern California and there’s listings for readings and talks, open mike venues, workshops and

classes. During my brief stay, I have enjoyed reading at the regular Thursday nights at the Cafe Mediterraneum in

Berkeley with its visiting readers and an open mike spot, at the Sunday afternoon open mike session at Café Prague around the corner from City Lights Bookstore in North Beach, S.F, and at the Priya, an Indian restaurant in Berkeley that on Monday night combines open mike with evening meal; the pakoras are delicious.

“I think we don’t see

enough of the underbelly of

U.S poetry in Britain. We

may have the

top-of-the-range folk like Mark Doty,

Sharon Olds, and Billy

Collins reading at Poetry

International at the South

Bank Centre in London, or

other literary festivals, but

we miss out on the not so

well known”

It seems that everyone writes here. The pool attendant at the YMCA is a small press publisher; two hot-tub companions are poets who invited me to an open mike that they support. (It was rather like a scene out of a Beckett play; just heads above the swirling surface talking poetry.) So I’m here on an exploratory mission to check out the opportunities for a group of West Yorkshire poets to come and read here and to encourage SF poets who happen to be holidaying in Britain to consider visiting West Yorkshire and read at a venue or open mike slot in the

region. I think we don’t see enough of the underbelly of U.S poetry in Britain. We may have the top-of-the-range

folk like Mark Doty, Sharon Olds, and Billy Collins reading at Poetry International at

the South Bank Centre in London, or other literary festivals, but we miss out on the not so well known. The poetry that I have heard at the open mike readings have been at times confessional, at times the narratives of daily lives, at times pure anti-Bush tirades, but always there is an essential humanity to it and I have a hunch that an English audience might appreciate it. I have also heard some more experimental poetry, such as Alexandra Yurkovsky’s; maybe less accessible, but interesting for the

demands it makes. In a couple of weeks time, Geraldine Monk and Alan Halsey, two Sheffield-based, experimental poets who read at the Beehive last year are reading at Moe’s Bookstore in Berkeley, so it’s great to see that there’s some traffic already in the UK-US direction. If you are a member of ‘Book-Stores Anonymous’ and get itchy purse fingers within 100 yards of Waterstones, stay out of the area; the temptations are

appalling. Moe’s and Cody’s are where the sirens live and also at the Serendipity bookstore with its chaotic shelving system, which only encourages more book hunting.

So what else have I been doing here? Taking in other cultural sights, apart from the literary scene. There’s been trips to the Museum of Modern Art in San

Francisco where there’s a visiting

exhibition by Kiki Smith; an exceptional artist in all the mediums, who works around the theme of the human body. The Berkeley Museum of Modern Art has a small but eclectic mix of contemporary art including a Gerhard Richter, a

favourite artist of mine. I have been walking in the Berkeley suburbs looking at the wide range of domestic buildings from the 1920s; folk seem to have an affair with recent history, and townscapes as well as suburban dwellings are lovingly

preserved.

Yesterday a friend, John Fox, a poetry therapist from Palo Alto who gave a workshop in Bradford last year, drove me south along Highway 1 to Santa Cruz by some of the most spectacular coastal scenery I have seen; long sandy beaches with huge breakers and ad hoc driftwood sculptures; statuesque outcrops of rock some showing off their geology lessons of cynclines and inclines, trees shaped by the wind on headlands, and in Santa Cruz, dolphins splashed about by the pier. I am leaving with an abiding impression of people’s friendliness, kindness and laid-back nature. The communities here are sometimes described as ‘communities of conscience’ and I think if they had their way, they would have the San Andreas fault finish what it started, and set California adrift from a heartless land mass. The hatred for all things Bush is palpable but California has it own issues too; e.g. a growing street homeless population as the supply of affordable housing dries up, a lack of direction to Arnie’s administration after a period of responding to the demands of narrow interests groups, and sustaining a welfare programme and pensions for the growing older population, for example. Now, that doesn’t sound too far from home…

Bruce Barnes is a Bradford based poet, a

mem-ber of the Interchange performance poetry troupe and co-ordinates Bradford Poetry workshop. He travelled to San Francisco in January 2006, to perform and research opportunities for a poetic exchange between West Yorkshire and San Fran-cisco poets; with a particular interest in the American ‘underbelly’ of poetry. He has published two collections of poetry: ‘The lovelife of the absent-minded’ (Newbury:Phoenix Press 1993)-‘Somewhere Else’ (Bradford:Utistugu Press 2003). Both collections are available from Bruce at

Recommended Read

How to Marry the Dead, Francesca

McMahon, Cinnamon Press, 2006, £8.99, ISBN 095494335X, 250 pages

---Impossible Objects, Bill Greenwell,

Cinnamon Press, 2006, £7.99, ISBN 0954943333, 100 pages.

Sound of Mountain, Bruce Ackerley,

Cinnamon Press, 2006, £7.99, ISBN 0954943341, 102 pages. To my surprise I favoured the novel

over the two collections of poetry from Cinnamon Press. How to Marry the Dead is told mainly in the voice of Sue, a woman whose twelve-year-old daughter, Judith, has died of ‘cot’ death. The action takes place like a superlative sit-com: Mum likes to play at being Delia Smith with stale bread; surviving daughter Angela, obsessing over her verucca, is secretly pleased that her sister is gone; Dad is about to hear that his mistress feels too guilty to carry on their affair; and next door neighbour ‘Mrs Roast’ is soon to upset matters further.

A book about a child’s death does not sound as though it would be funny, but Sue’s delivery contains just the right degree of detachment to make her pain and fury readable. From being caught shoplifting (she chats to the store

manager about ear infections), through to stabbing her husband in the leg (he

allowed Mrs Roast to re-vamp Judith’s bedroom whilst Sue was away), the mother’s voice is brilliantly constructed. Black humour also emerges through ten-year-old Angela’s diary entries: ‘Today was J’s funeral. I was looking forward to it because I have never been to a funeral before and I thought it would be

something interesting to write about in my weekly news at school.’

Events are set in 1979 and in 1997; these periods are skilfully evoked, dreadful and charming by turns. The novel’s title refers to the finale where the now-separated family meet to marry off Judith. Terry has been having dreams in which an adult Judith asks him to arrange her wedding to a man she has met in the afterlife. Angela, now a successful poet, discovers that the Japanese create such marriage ceremonies for the dead, so - believing it will help lay Judith to rest - everyone agrees to take part.

Sue’s narrative is counter-pointed by letters: from school, Terry’s mistress, a

substitute agony aunt (‘I have enclosed my new recipe for boiled fruitcake… There is nothing like a spell in the kitchen to cure brooding.’), and the mad, alcoholic mother-in-law (her letters feature cutout words from newspapers, usually

requesting money). Extracts from self-help books also appear, as well as Sue’s 1997 list of Coping Strategies that include ‘Bang head on safety glass in loggia’ and ‘Recite poetry in head (not Angela’s)’.

“A book about a child’s

death does not sound as

though it would be funny,

but Sue’s delivery contains

just the right degree of

detachment to make her

pain and fury readable”

How to Marry the Dead is well written in

addition to being an amusing read. There are no flaccid parts and I did not resort to skim reading. McMahon is as narratively gripping and as textually satisfying as, say, Julian Barnes or Hilary Mantel (two authors I never skim). Whilst the book is 250 pages long it reads at such a crack-ing pace you’ll be through it in a day. In contrast, Impossible Objects, Bill

Greenwell’s poetry collection did not grip. He too describes a child’s death in White

Jigsaw. But lines like ‘Clare, the last thing

you said/ to me was/ Night Night Daddy’, don’t work as poetry. Unfortunately, the literal truth (which I take this to be) does not always sound truthful, or resonate correctly, in a poem.

Mostly though, Greenwell ploughs a hu-morous furrow. RPM uses the speed of records (16, 33, 45 and 78) to highlight the effects of growing (sexually?) older:

‘…At 45, the shebang is quicker. / Three minutes, however you practice, / and the flipside’s forgettable.’

The Invisible Man in Love, How to Kill Yourself (though Dorothy Parker did it

better) and Troubadours, are good po-ems. Gig is fine, but nothing can beat the cult-horror effect of the opening line, ‘On bleed guitar it’s Johnny.’

The Swizz is nostalgic fun: ‘In my day, we

had the swizz. / Most things could be blamed on it, / an absence of Mintoes, the rota/ for the washing up being al-tered’. The swizz is now extinct; in its place have come ‘the avocado, / pots of yoghurt’.

Greenwell fails when he plays to the gal-lery. At times his word play reminded me of poets such as Roger McGough, but I rarely felt he had anything to say.

Cleans-ing Fluids uses acronyms to head each

stanza: CTC, TCP, DDT... CTC’s stanza is strong: ‘my mother kept it/ at the back of the larder, in a snap-shut dark-green/ Gordon’s gin bottle’ and ‘It was tick-toxic. It was sweet. / I wondered/ how my fa-ther could drink the stuff.’ But the last stanza lets the poem down: ‘TLC…. It softens/ the ducts, pardons the pecca-dillo, and hugs/ one another in pale pink towels.’ Sentimental tosh.

Take the title poem Impossible Objects. Impossible things are listed – The East Pole, Wallace and Grizelda, weapons of mass disarmament - you get the picture. It concludes, ‘The sound of stars weep-ing. / Finding a hornet’s pulse. Not loving you.’ I imagine this gets a lovely ‘Ahhhh!’ in performance, but on the page it is toe curling

I doubted Greenwell’s observation, too, for example ‘There is sand between your

duchess/ who has mislaid her maid.’ (All

mist, no sea) If you have had sand between your toes, you will know that you cannot brush it away; it must be rubbed or picked out. ‘Brush’ is not the right verb here. If ‘brush’ is necessary to keep the woman’s actions duchess-like, then why not have her brush sand from the soles of her feet?

Annoying ‘poetry phrases’ stuck out in places: ‘the peal of inclement bells’

(Everything), and ‘to open/ the hymnal of our lives’ (Tumbledown House) - as

grating as well-known poetry-killers

‘shard’ and ‘gossamer’. His final sequence The Muse, runs for 15 pages; reducing me to screaming, ‘Why?!’

“Had the book been

reduced by a third I might

have seen more to admire”

Numerous poets praise Greenwell on the jacket blurb – Carol Rumens, Selima Hill, U.A. Fanthorpe and R.V. Bailey – and he was short-listed for this year’s Forward first collection prize, so my views may be in a minority. Yes, he’s clever and funny, but often he pushes the punchline (or the pun) too hard. Had the book been

reduced by a third I might have seen more to admire.

When Bruce Ackerley is good he beats Greenwell hands down. Again the book would benefit from being shorter. This might be the complaint of a seasoned poetry reader, but most collections are around 60-70 pages long; these

collections come in at around 100 pages. Something would be gained by a

weeding-out of weaker poems.

Ackerley’s title poem Sound of Mountain is lovely (quoted in full):

‘Me?

I like mountains. Cold Christs, white sails, rigged to the edge of vision; daily re-investing the heart’s sky, with the timeless.

Like saying their names – Marsco

Lhotse

Nanga Parbat

Love them. Each one

more than the sum of its vowels, but a mantra, a spell from the tongue.’

This poem also illustrates the poet’s love for language, the sound of words – and silence. And it reminds me that a poetry

collection needs to be more than the sum

of its parts. Ackerley manages this to greater effect than Greenwell. My only proviso is that a few of his poems strain for their effect. His poem Squid includes the lines ‘sixty/ feet of beached kelp and

the stench! / Putrid wreck grieving itself’,

and ‘ghosting your kingdom, killer/ and lover from the sunless deep.’ Hmm…. There are also poems that seem to be self-consciously deep, and require explanatory notes. But lines like, ‘Feel that you can’t, / that you won’t be tender. / Like Herzog’s priest -/ Skellig bound, boxed in/ by his own cold metaphysic’ (Heart of Glass) are not illuminated by the note that ‘Herzog is an extra-ordinary film-maker whose haunting imagery examines themes of the collective unconscious.’

it’s thankfully short: also a ‘dolorous bells’ moment (A Dream of Hagfish). Maybe I just have a thing against poets and bells?...Ackerely’s love poems share the direct approach of his mountain poems. Married Man, Boss, Paths to

Victory all display a hard-won

self-knowledge and wryness. Reflecting on longer-lasting (gay) relationships he acknowledges his own self-absorption whilst on holiday (Guilt Trip):

‘…A sleepless brace of

poems recalling our day on the beach; you –

sick as a dog, and me – neglecting the art of kindness.’

I liked the realism of this and the word play of the title, which is not as clunky as some of Greenwell’s puns.

Love, Love refers to a stasis in a

relationship, and again to his role as a writer:

…We’re just two/ more saps, standing/ in line, hands out/ for a blank slate –/ so don’t worry. / The pen’s been/ read the riot act, / there’s a laying/ off of soured lines.’

The descriptive detail in this collection is pleasing, too, ‘over Menai: Anglesey, quilting back through/ her green promise: patchwork, low-rise, talismanic.’

(Weekenders). Ackerley also manages the rare trick of writing about death with complexity: ‘guess I loved/ you once, but when we lowered// your husk down into its six-by-two/ clay pit, just what did I feel? Not enough.’

So, McMahon is entertaining and

believable; Greenwell is entertaining, and Ackerley is believable. Take your pick. Cath Nichols

White Magic and other

poems, Krzysztof Kamil

Baczyñski, trans. Bill

Johnston

Green Integer, 2006, £8.99, ISBN 1-931243-81-6, 187 pages I always find it mortifying to hear

someone described as a ‘nation’s

favourite writer’ when I’ve never heard of him or her. Krzysztof Kamil Baczyñski is one of the greatest Polish poets of the twentieth century, apparently, but he’d completely passed me by. In my defence, his work has rarely been translated - this is the first collection of his poems in English. The volume is a revelation, not least because of the tragedy of

Baczyñski’s short life.

Baczyñski was born in Poland in 1921, the son of intellectuals. His father was a

patriot and an anarchist who had fought for Polish independence, his mother was a children’s writer and lover of poetry. By the time he graduated at 18 Baczyñski had been writing poetry for years, but it was 1939, and a few months later Poland was occupied by the Nazis. Baczyñski continued to write poetry and study at the underground university where he met and fell in love with Barbara Drapczynska, whom he married in 1942. He was to write some of his most exquisite love poetry to her.

“The volume is a revelation”

In 1943 he joined the Armia Krajowa, the Polish resistance. On 4th _{August 1944, he}

was killed fighting in the Warsaw Uprising. A few days later Barbara his wife was also killed, without knowing of her husband’s death. His mother preserved his

manuscripts and they were published for the first time in 1961. In Poland he was recognised as the greatest poet of his generation.

The story of his life inevitably colours the poems whatever their subject matter. Even the fuzzy, brooding photograph on the cover seems to encapsulate the

glamour of doomed youth. The poems are arranged chronologically, which further leads them to be seen as autobiography. As I read, I travelled with Baczyñski as a young man – a teenager – experimenting with form and structure, to him falling in love, to writing patriotic battle hymns steeped in Catholicism, to his growing cynicism and horror of war, to his

resignation and preparation for death. It was a moving journey.

In Poland, Baczyñski is perhaps most popular for his love poems, and rightly so. Even in translation, the imagery is sensual and vivid. In White Magic he writes:

Barbara stands at the mirror/ of

silence, and her hands reach/ to her hair; in her body of glass/ she pours silver droplets of speech.

And then like a water pitcher/ she fills with light, and soon/ she has taken the stars within her/ and the pale white dust of the moon.

He finishes the poem:

So Barbara’s body is silver. / The ermine of silence within/ arches its white back soft/ at the touch of a hand unseen. He notes that the poem was written at 3 o’clock in the morning, on January 4th

1942. I could picture him in occupied Warsaw, watching her sleep in the light of the moon. The next year he writes, in an untitled poem, of how “I’ll open for you the golden sky,” and in a later verse: I’ll turn for you the unyielding land/ into the soft and gracious flight/ of

thistledown;

Where this might become rather sentimental, he ends the poem: Only from my eyes take out/ this stabbing shard of glass – the days’/

image, by which white skulls are brought/ over meadows of blood ablaze. / Only change the cripple’s time, cover/ the gravestones with a cloak of river, / the dust of battle wipe from my hair, / those angry years’/ black dust.

The war and his role in it underpin almost all the poems. He veers between

courage, disgust and terror. Prayer is a howl of horror at what he has done. He begs, ‘Let me at least die like a man’. This is an exceptional insight into what a young battle-weary man thinks and fears as he faces death.

“The story of his life

inevitably colours the

poems whatever their

subject matter. Even the

fuzzy, brooding photograph

on the cover seems to

encapsulate the glamour of

doomed youth”

The trajectory of his writing could be encapsulated by how he writes of the Polish landscape. At the beginning of the collection he finds solemn and carefully chosen words to describe its beauty, by the end it is draped with severed heads and, ‘underground, /bodies twisted like roots are crammed/alive beneath an unlit vault.’

This beautifully crafted collection, with the original Polish poems sitting side by side with their English translations, is a moving and worthwhile read. And I, for one, have a well-practiced sneer ready for anyone who doesn’t happen to know the name of Poland’s favourite poet.

Clare Reddaway

The Brooklyn Follies, Paul

Auster

Faber & Faber, 2006, £10.99, ISBN 0571224989, 304 pages Paul Auster is producing a book a year at the moment, which has fans of his work such as me, slavering with rabid

anticipation for the next.

Perhaps his recent work-rate is born of the urgency of middle age and recent reports of ill health or perhaps it’s a compulsion dictated solely by creative necessity. As Auster admits himself these days, ‘writing is no longer an act of free will’, for him ‘it’s a matter of survival’.

For his many readers, the answers - one is often led to believe - are there to be riddled out of the metaphysical and reflexive approach he takes to his work. Take for instance The Brooklyn Follies’ narrator, Nathan Glass, who, ‘Looking for a quiet place to die’, decides to head for Auster’s own stomping ground, Brooklyn. An impulsive decision influenced by the break up of his marriage and the looming threat of lung cancer.

This act of self-determination offers a partially wiped slate, allowing for the other key ingredient so prevalent in Austerian fiction: the occurrence of powerful chance events.

“Paul Auster is producing a

book a year at the moment,

which has fans of his work

such as me, slavering with

rabid anticipation for the

next”

Nathan bumps into his favourite nephew, Tom, whom he has not seen for years but had supposed would be a successful professor of literature working on his latest book. Instead he is overweight, single and working in a Brooklyn

bookshop to make ends meet following his own existential crisis at university. Colliding back into each other’s lives by accident, they set about the dangerous, painful and frequently amusing attempt to heal each other.

When Lucy, Tom’s mute niece, suddenly arrives unannounced on his doorstep minus her mother, both men quickly realise that there are others in serious

need of rescue too.

The Brooklyn Follies is a departure in

tone from the majority of Auster’s work. There is a gentle sense of retrospection throughout his latest offering that sits most comfortably with his earlier book of canine travails, Timbuktu. The desolate edge of some of his absolute classics such as The New York Trilogy or The

Book of Illusions is absent. However in

its persuasive difference of approach,

The Brooklyn Follies succeeds.

Everyone is trapped by his or her follies. But as Nathan writes down each of his own – a project he estimates will last the rest of his life – Auster allows atonement, resolution and redemption for most of his characters. And, unlike his darker work, one has the sense that everything, fingers crossed, is going to work out okay.

Dan McTiernan

Tundra Gap, Paul

Sutherland, Ed

.

Arts NK (North Kesteven) in association with Dream Catcher, 2006, ISBN 0-9545015-5-1, £5.99, 70 pages.

Tundra Gap is a collection of poems, one

piece of prose, artwork, and photographs, arising out of creative responses to the Whisby Nature Park, near Lincoln, where the editor, Paul Sutherland, was writer in residence. The aim of the project was to create a synthesis of visual images and the written word mainly through a significant degree of collaboration between writers and graphic designer Steve Wallhead.