Dedicated by -- or to -- the Beats

There's nothing quite like a good book dedication, that brush with mystique which you encounter, if you're lucky, opening a new book. And yet, for all the times you come across book lovers exalting the smell of books, the feel of books (I did recently spot one new and genial appreciation of the pleasure of books -- "They don't catch on my braces!"), you rarely encounter celebrations of the well-written dedication. Which, I might point out, is even more valuable for being an attribute any book may boast, no matter its form: print, electronic, or even read aloud.

I've made it a tradition to post, every year, the standouts among the dedications I've discovered at the library over the previous twelve months. They've included one to a typewriter (noir, of course, both the novel being dedicated and the typewriter it was dedicated to) and one to absinthe drinkers, and the authors who composed them have ranged from Edward Gorey to JD Salinger, not forgetting Hunter S Thompson.

There's a Beat theme to this year's finds -- wholly unplanned, I hasten to say, as befits the Beats.

Here they are:

1.  From  Visions of Cody by Jack Kerouac

   Dedicated to America, whatever that is

Reading On the Road when I was a teenager rates as one of the most exciting reading experiences of my life, but I'd never tried Visions of Cody, Kerouac's later, posthumously published hymn to Neal Cassady and to those days on the road when the highs were still coming easy, until this year, following a slow, appreciative read of Big Sur. I skipped large swathes which I found too intemperate (who changed more? Jack? me? probably me), but the last 50 pages held, and did they hold.

The Penguin edition I found at the library also includes wonderful, sad, notes provided by Allen Ginsberg, where he calls the book "a dirge for America... for the American Hope that Jack (& his hero Neal) carried so valiantly through the land after Whitman..."

Kerouac himself suggests in his foreword, "This feeling may soon be obsolete as America enters its High Civilization period and no one will get sentimental or poetic any more about trains and dew on fences at dawn in Missouri."

Not yet, though, Jack, not yet!

My sentimental snap of Beat wheels by the Mississippi River
Hannibal, Missouri, 2012

2.  From These are my rivers by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The owner of the fabled City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, the publisher who gave us Howl, the poet who sang of the pennycandy store beyond the El, 95 years old this year, prefaced a collection of almost 40 years of his poetry with these lines:

For 

various brothers & lovers

eternally present

The book's title, These are my rivers, is taken from a bittersweet and nostalgic poem by the Italian modernist poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, Questi sono i miei fiumi, in which he evokes the phases of his life by naming the rivers which flowed through them, the Serchio of his ancestral home in Lucca, the Nile of his childhood, the Seine of his youth, and the Isonzo, the river which runs through the devastated Carso where Italian troops, Ungaretti among them, had fought a series of terrible battles against the Austrians during World War One.

Ferlinghetti quotes the poem in his book's epigraph:

Ho ripassato
le epoche
della mia vita

Questi sono
i miei fiumi...

[I have revisited
the ages
of my life

These are
my rivers...]

(You can read the whole of Ungaretti's poem here.)


3. From Odysseus in Woolloomooloo by Bob Orr

   to the mysteries

Just three words on the otherwise all white third page of this fine new poetry collection, just out this year. 

Bob Orr is the most beat of New Zealand poets, and if you don't believe me, check out this picture.

Bob Orr's Odysseus in Woolloomooloo in the window of  the City Lights Bookstore

The year I moved to New Zealand, I came across Bob Orr's own "The Names of Rivers" in The NZ Listener. I ripped it out (no, it wasn't a library copy) and still have it, over ten years later. Read it and you'll see why.

The Names of Rivers

The names of rivers
suggest them:
The Nile weaving its scaly blue coolness
serpent like from Africa's hot heart.
The Mississippi each syllable a broadening
of its passage to the ocean.
The Amazon hallucinogenic as the zircon flight
of butterflies above its jewelled rain forest.
Those are the big rivers
the ones we all were taught about
but I would like to take you
to a small creek
whose taste I still recall --
a slight rustiness on the tongue
like old steel or blood. The Mangawara.
I would like to be able to say
that this creek runs through my life
runs through my poems. In fact until
the age of twelve it did.
not a river so much as water.
Not water so much as something as simple as time
perhaps even timelessness. Where I live now
the water is salty and it's blue and huge beyond belief
and you would drink of it only to stop

something from within yourself from bleeding.

Bob Orr has a wonderful poem about panel beating Neal Cassady's car, which ends,

Tomorrow with the tiny hammers of a typewriter
I'll make this poem cool again
As if it were a car once stolen in America by Neal Cassady

-- I think it's that one I found in a parking lot along the Mississippi River, panel beaten roof and all.

Iain Sharp's favourite beat poem

Iain Sharp couldn't make it to our Day of the Dead Beat Poets, and although his presence was missed I have to say that part of me is glad, because of how he wrote these things down for me instead, meaning I could read them and then read them again, as you will also want to:


Hi Karen

It occurred to me after we spoke that my all-time favourite beat poem is an untitled little one by Lew Welch that goes like this:

Step out onto the planet.
Draw a circle 100 feet round.
Inside the circle are 300 things
nobody understands and,
maybe, nobody’s ever seen.

How many can you find?

Poor Lew Welch! He seems, at heart, to have been such a nice man, but he was plagued throughout his short life by mental problems as well as alcoholism. In May 1971, while staying with Gary Snyder in a remote part of northeast California, he walked into the woods one day with a 303 rifle and killed himself. His body was never found. He left behind a heartbreaking note:

"I never could make anything work out right and now I'm betraying my friends. I can't make anything out of it - never could. I had great visions but never could bring them together with reality. I used it all up. It's all gone. Don Allen is to be my literary executor- use MSS at Gary's and at Grove Press. I have $2,000 in Nevada City Bank of America - use it to cover my affairs and debts. I don't owe Allen G. anything yet nor my Mother. I went Southwest.
Goodbye. Lew Welch."

Another of my favourite beat poems is the elegy Snyder wrote a couple of years later:

For/From Lew

Lew Welch just turned up one day,
live as you and me. "Damn, Lew" I said,
"you didn't shoot yourself after all."
"Yes I did" he said,
and even then I felt the tingling down my back.
"Yes you did, too" I said—"I can feel it now."
"Yeah" he said,
"There's a basic fear between your world and
mine.  I don't know why.
What I came to say was,
teach the children about the cycles.
The life cycles.  All other cycles.
That's what it's all about, and it's all forgot."

A footnote: the birth name of Huey Lewis (of "Hip to be Square" fame) was Hugh Anthony Cregg. He changed his surname to Lewis as a tribute to the stepfather who helped raise him -- Lew Welch.

Cheers,
Iain

Day of the Dead Beat Poets

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness..."


Do you need a reason to celebrate the great Beat poets? Well no, but anyway we had one. It's 55 years since Allen Ginsberg gave his first impassioned public reading of "Howl", the poem which "knocked the sides out of things", in the words of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who was there to hear it and the first to publish it, the next year. Last week we honoured the occasion at Central Library with the first antipodean "Day of the Dead Beat Poets", an inebriating evening of readings from the work of the dead (and some still-living) Beat poets.

Besides us hip librarians, we had that born-to-be-a-beat poet Bob Orr who, in the vein of Dean Moriarty travelling 3000 miles just to see me, took the day off work to be able to come in and gave a transcendental reading which included his fabulous poem -- which I was going to read if he didn't -- about panel-beating Neal Cassady's car, we had Michele Leggott and Jack Ross, among the public we had an American who grew up across the river from Paterson NJ and gave us a poem full of Beats and William Carlos Williams who had once treated his father which blew us away, we had a truck-farmer from San Jose California, we had Mel with burgundy hair, we had a guerrilla poet. We even had a drifter, whom I thought we might have group-hallucinated into being, so much did his appearance suggest a down-at-heel Dennis Hopper (who, aficionados will know, used to hang out with Allen Ginsberg).

It would have made Allen Ginsberg happy to know he was the catalyst for such a great evening. In the build-up to the event I read a few of the many books which have been written about him, or the Beats in general, since his death; I can recommend I Celebrate Myself: the somewhat private life of Allen Ginsberg, a thick biography by Bill Morgan, who knew Ginsberg from having worked on his archives with him, Beat, by Christopher Felver - more style than content but fun to look through and also it's pleasurably brand-new and shiny -- and The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1957-1963 by Barry Miles, long-time chronicler of the Beats, which has a wonderful story about Ginsberg and Corso, stoned out of their minds, listening to a tape-recording of a performance by Antonin Artaud, the avant-garde actor/playwright/director, and being so deeply moved by its newness and strangeness they went to replay it, only to realise that they had been listening to it backwards, by mistake.

But my favourite of all the Ginsberg stories I read, the one which for me expresses the essence of the Ginsberg I love, comes from the website of Larry Keenan, a student of Michael McClure's who became a photo-documenter of the Beats. It goes like this:

"Once when I was visiting Allen in his apartment he asked me if I would like some coffee. Having said "Yes," he presented me with a metal bowl with coffee in it. The bowl seemed strange (like a dog dish) and I nursed the coffee to cool it down. Soon he started asking "Are you finished with that, man?" I would say "No, not yet" and after awhile I started to feel uncomfortable because the bowl seemed important to him. When I finally said "Yes," he grabbed the bowl away -- threw the remaining coffee in the sink and sat down with the bowl for his breakfast cereal. I was using his only bowl."

-- "Breakfast in his apartment" by Larry Keenan