Whenever
I meet a new artist of any sort one of the first things I ask is how
they pay the rent. The reason why I ask this question is because I
think that in American capitalist society one of the key existential
difficulties or collisions for any artist is when it comes to what they
do for money. As you can tell from watching TV for 15 minutes,
America still defines social class and status basically by money.
The rich are clean, the poor are dirty. It is difficult being rich
in America because you get exposed firsthand to the profound banal
emptiness of the wheeze and whine of money and conspicuous consumption:
in the end it doesn't do much to assuage what the British poet Philip
Larkin in his poem "Aubade" called our "furnace-fear"
of death. And it is tough being poor because poverty is an endless
progression of accumulating difficulties like bills spilled across the
kitchen table. And hey, it's even tough being middle-class
because, well, hell, life's tough in general! But one can always
learn a lot about a poet by their physical material circumstances:
how old is he, what does he do for a living, is he gay or straight,
where does he live, how is his health, etc.
We tend to forget the firmness of the link between physical
life-circumstances and how a poet's poem looks and feels. In his
late book "Ecce Homo," written when he was semi-mad,
Nietzsche ascribed the strength of his German prose style to his diet
and digestion. His point was to try to tie style back to the body,
to the most basic unromantic things, as opposed to such fuzzy things as
"inspiration" or "spirit." The
body of the poet - the bodily context, the body as site inscribed by the
difficulties of the world - may well be the basic source of a poet's
style.
And few things impact on the body like the difficulties of work, jobs,
material subsistence, bringing home bread. This is true whether
the job you struggle through each day is blue-collar or white-collar,
factory floor or office cubicle. This was noted by American poet Edward
Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) in his poem The Clerks:
I did not think that I should find them there
When I came back again; but there they stood,
As in the days they dreamed of when young blood
Was in their cheeks and women called them fair.
Be sure, they met me with an ancient air,-
And yes, there was a shop-worn brotherhood
About them; but the men were just as good,
And just as human as they ever were.
And you that ache so much to be sublime,
And you that feed yourselves with your descent,
What comes of all your visions and your fears?
Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time,
Tiering the same dull webs of discontent,
Clipping the same sad alnage of the years.
("Alnage" means cloth, as in a roll of cloth that a
clerk at a fabric store might cut a length of for the customer to use
for sewing). Robinson was a poet who struggled all his life to
find jobs and pay the rent. He was well-aware of the killing
boredom and quiet corruption of clerical office jobs, the slow rust of
the American service economy, for those who must work in it.
Emily Dickinson didn't have to work a job. But she did have to
endure the long slow drudgeries of living at home, aging, alone, doing
the daily chores, making the bread for the family, watching the time go
by. She had a sense of the creeping desolation that daily habit
can bring, as reflected in this poem with a tonality very similar to
Robinson's:
Crumbling is not an instant's Act
A fundamental pause
Dilapidation's processes
Are organized Decays.
'Tis first a Cobweb on the Soul
A Cuticle of Dust
A Borer in the Axis
An Elemental Rust--
Ruin is formal--Devils work
Consecutive and slow--
Fail in an instant, no man did
Slipping--is Crash's law.
(Poem 997, 1865).
These
are hardships, endurances, which anyone must face. Getting through
a day. Surviving. Resisting the small accumulating rusts and
corruptions and deathlinesses that agglomerate from the dehumanizing
repetitions and emptyings of meaning associated with the American
economic machine, the daily grind, on the macro scale, and one's own
body as machine, the daily grind of your own molars, on the micro scale.
Think of the extent to which Bukowski's voice was formed by his
experience working a steady, tough post office job for many years.
Think of how much his voice was formed out of the pressures of
misfortune and economic solitude, alone and poor in an unknown
city. This is a cultural area accessed by "underground"
poets. I put the word in quotation marks because from what I can
tell the so-called "underground" poets are actually
living in the real above-ground, overground zone where the overwhelming
majority of folks in this world live: poor, day-to-day, workin'
for the man, leaky roof, no running water, maybe dying of cholera on a
Siberian steppe, maybe pulling a long white parasite worm out of your
leg in a hovel in a swamp village in Uganda - or maybe doing a little
better than that, like Ron Androla who has held down a factory job in
Erie, Pennsylvania. He has worked steady 3rd shift in a factory as
a custom molding press operator. Is this a hard job, a tough
job? Depends on your context. He's doing better than our
friends in Siberia or Uganda whom I mentioned. But is he doing as
well as Billy Collins? I mean, Billy Collins has a sweet academic
teaching job at Lehman College, CUNY, he has his own agent
( -they also represent Louise Gluck, Robert Pinsky and other
poetryworld heavy hitters), he has a kewl-looking website,
he even got to be U.S. Poet Laureate!
But
it's tough being a poet like Billy Collins. You're not "underground."
You're a public figure. In some ways where Collins is can be a
tougher context to write good poems out of than the "underground."
An "underground" poet has juicy stuff he can write about like
the fucking factory floor, maybe the booze if he's drinkin' booze, maybe
the women if he's hittin' on women - he doesn't have to worry about
political correctness or how it might look to the sensitive civilized
people who read the New York Times Book Review - this was one of
Bukowski's key insights.
If
you're Billy Collins, you can't write about the fucking factory
bullshit, because you're not in a factory. I suppose you could
write about English Department faculty meetings. But does that
really sound as interesting? You sure can't write about fucking
around or boozing or shooting up, because if you did, you'd get fired
from your Poet Laureate job, Congress would impeach you from it or
something.
It helps to know a poet's biography and background, what he does to pay
the rent, when you are getting into his poems. Ron Androla was
asked by an interviewer over at The
Hold "What do you do for a living?" and this is
what he had to say:
"I work steady 3rd shift in a plastics reinforced fiberglass
factory as a press operator. I've worked thru amerika's factories since
age 18...going on 30 years...it's always been the same stupid, ignorant
fucks I no longer tolerate with empathy. The amerikan factory worker is
a piece of shit."
Immediately
you can see here a whole sort of rhetoric that is off limits,
inaccessible to the standard poet working not underground but above,
inside the academy, the university teaching setting, the book-tour
tenure-committee poetry world. A poet who is trying to get tenure
in the English Department at a university probably can't get away with
saying he works with "stupid, ignorant fucks."
This rhetoric we see in Androla's statements indicates an area of
textual or tonal freedom specific to his socioeconomic position. A
poet like Androla or Bukowski can write about dumbfucks, beershits,
cheap thrills and sucky gigs. A poet like Billy Collins or Louise
Gluck cannot. It is perhaps not so much that one zone is better
than the other, rather, it is that each zone has its own freedoms and
limits. Let's listen to a little more of the Androla
interview. Here are a couple more of the interviewer's questions
and Androla's answers:
Q: Who are your favorite artists?
A: kerouac, magritte, fuck, favorite artists abound left
& right! well, favorite ART abounds, in any case. then again, nobody
& nothing really impresses me -- who fucking cares about ART when
millions of former humans are rotting a few feet under the surface of
planet earth.
Q: What influences you to write about/how you do?
A: I've been writing for decades & the process is
not pretty nor easily & readily accessible in being defined. fuck, i
hate fuckers who are so fucking self-absorbed & it's all "i, i,
i" with every fucking thought uttered. poets love talking about
themselves & it's a goddamn shame. my fingers talk -- i don't know
what else to say."
Now, let's compare Androla's answer to the second question above, what
his influences are, to Billy Collins' answer to a similar question:
Alexandra
van de Kamp: You mention Coleridge. In other interviews, you've talked
about how reading Keats played a pivotal role in the maturation of your
poetic style and how the Beats were an important influence earlier in
your career. Could you talk a little bit about these influences and who
you are reading now?
Billy Collins: Influence is always a looming question for me.
Danilo Kis said that when we ask a writer about his influences, we are
treating him like an infant in a basket abandoned on the front steps of
a convent. We want to know who his parents are. I think if any writer
was aware of all of his influences, he would be like the centipede who
fell over when he started thinking about how his hundred legs were able
to move at the same time. The knowledge would be paralyzing. Also, talk
of influences tends to be unreliable, because we tend to invent our
influences, just as we invent our parents at some point in our lives.
Our entire past.
But there are moments. I was a most impressionable teenager back in
the days of Beatnik glory, so I responded fully to Kerouac, Ginsberg,
Ferlinghetti's "Coney Island of the Mind"-still a good
title-Gregory Corso and others. I was in Paris for a summer in the early
sixties and hung self-consciously around the corners of the scene on the
Boul Mich, as they called it. I sat at the same table with Corso and
others, and I even hung around with an American girl named Ann Campbell,
whom Realities magazine had called "The Queen of the
Beatniks." (Let's see...what did that make me??) But mostly I was a
Catholic high school boy in the suburbs who fantasized about stealing a
car and driving non-stop to Denver. I probably would have done it, but I
didn't have access to those special driving pills Neal Cassady had.
Plus, there was always a test to study for, or band practice.
A more helpful influence came in the form of a little Penguin
paperback-which I still have-called The New Poetry. It was edited by A.
Alvarez and was my first exposure to poets like Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes,
Philip Larkin, Charles Tomlinson and others. I carried this book with me
everywhere I went in high school. I loved the clarity and the irony and
the mostly simple language. Lines like:
The wind blew all
my wedding-day,
And my wedding
night was the night of the high wind
I didn't know if Larkin was kidding or not, and that's just the way I
wanted to keep it. I would say something like that is the ideal tone for
me in my poems, a tone that would be perfectly balanced between feeling
and irony. Very difficult to do. Because it's so easy to fall into one
extreme or the other and write a poem that is sappy or too cute or
hard-boiled. In that same little book was Lowell's naked poetry, and
Thom Gunn, who wrote poems about bikers and Elvis Presley. I was
listening to Elvis around the clock, but I never knew you could write
poems about him. I was the prisoner of an older decorum, and these poets
showed me the way out.
The question of influence leads into everything eventually. I could go
on. But when I am asked if there is a Biggest Influence, I have gotten
into the habit of just saying "Coleridge." Why not? Most of us
first encounter Coleridge through the "mystery poems," those
dream-like poems where we are taken on a journey ("The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner") or we get a tour of a dream-like landscape (as in
"Kubla Khan"). One reason why Coleridge was fond of the dream
state was that it allowed him to focus entirely on one thing at a time.
He said that in dreams he never felt as though he were thinking of one
thing while looking at something else as he almost always did while
conscious.
But the poems I mean are the so-called "conversation poems" of
Coleridge, like "Frost at Midnight," "The Aeolian
Harp," and-my favorite-"This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison."
These poems contain some amazing moves as his meditation shifts from the
outside landscape (or room-scape) into the self, then back through
memory, then off into some zones of wild speculation. The extended lyric
was a perfect form to accommodate such musings. I learned from them how
to write longer, more capacious poems and how to trust the movings of my
own mind. Richard Hugo talks about this-about trusting your next thought
simply because it is your next thought and nobody else's. Trust the
sequence. Here comes a thought. Write it down. These Coleridge poems
have a very casual feel in the beginning, but they rise smoothly into
the lofty. They seem to exemplify a piece of advice from Stephen Dobyns:
that is, if you get the reader to accept something simple in the
beginning of the poem, he will be more inclined to accept something
difficult later on. I find I have little tolerance for poems that begin
with some extremely complicated chord. Better to begin like "Hot
Cross Buns" and end like Debussy.
Of course, at some point, you start consciously picking your influences.
You read knowing that you want to be influenced. Right now, I am reading
Max Jacob. He was Picasso's roommate for a while-imagine saying,
"I'd like you to meet my roommate, Pablo"-and was killed by
the Nazis, or they let him die of pneumonia at a way-station. I read him
with the intention of getting under his influence. Or of just stealing
his moves. Translating his language into my language.
(from: Terra
Incognita)
Compare
the answers of Androla and Collins to basically the same question, i.e.,
tell us about your influences. Androla's answer is brief,
funny, a little desperate, kicking with obscenity, black-humored.
He cusses and disses:
"A
slave has this power. You see it in old african-american blues
songs, in Robert Johnson lyrics. You see it in some of the
statements of a poor jewish peasant-class wandering parable-poet, this
dude named Jesus. Someone who is underground, disenfranchised, can
speak truthfully, rawly and freely with no regard for polite
conventions, because he has no franchise to lose."
Collins is balanced, secure in affect, a little long-winded but also
wittily self-effacing - he has the leisure time, the comfort, the
material and political support and confidence, institutional validation,
from which to promulgate his considered, civil answer. He touches
upon numerous influences, other poets living and dead, no doubt in doing
so revealing his own political locus and network inside the academy, the
poetry aboveground. His friends include Richard Hugo and Stephen
Dobyns, it would seem. His answer is well-rounded and gives us
some insights, some interesting literary references. It has
content. It is not a bad answer. I am not dissing it.
But I am pointing out the very profound gap or difference between the
two rhetorics here - Collins' rhetoric of the balanced/perhaps a little
bland aboveground poet, and Androla's rhetoric of the unbalanced/perhaps
a little extreme underground poet.
Now let's look at one of Androla's poems from his new e-book, Life:
the sides of the road aren't
supposed to be so brown, so bare,
barren, dead & pressed down; there
ought to be green somewhere,
where's a stray pine,
a slash of cucumber like
paint like my own fluorescent
cum shines in our black
bedroom
last night
how BLACK the night was
in our bed
the street-light must be out
or the vapor-lamp on the side
of the adjacent apartment-
building is busted
it's never been so dark
in the bedroom
& my cock is richie
havens
my cock is richie
havens
southern gal
shut that mouth
upon this pole
of peace
of peacefulness
of a dream
maybe
i am richie
havens
my entire
6 foot
body is
cock
or a sheer
snake of
sperm
nodules
shimmering
hissing
the road
goes on
but erie
is the furthest
interstate
79 can go
then it's
just fresh
water
40 miles
across
canada
(interstate 79).
Androla
begins immediately with a tone that is consistent with what we saw in
the interview. He is not hiding or holding back. He has
consistency, unity of tone, between the way he writes extrapoetically
(outside the poem) and the way he writes in the poem. His
discourse, his overall text of language, is in that sense unified,
unfractured across his life - even if what the discourse shows is a
tissue of rough, somewhat fractured lived experiences, like images out
of an old blues song, updated to postmodernity. Consider the
opening image:
the sides of the road aren't
supposed to be so brown, so bare,
barren, dead & pressed down; there
ought to be green somewhere . . .
Any observation, description, saying, invocation, of external landscape,
by a poet, will simultaneously be a revelation of internal landscape,
interior psyche. You can tell as much about a speaker's
personality by how he describes a tree, as you can tell about the
tree. Consider this by Thomas
Hardy, from Neutral Tones.
We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
--They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
Clearly, the speaker here is on a major bummer downer trip, he could
probably use a Paxil for sure. Likewise, the flash of landscape in
Androla's poem tells us enough to intuit the inner state of his
poem-persona, his speaker:
the sides of the road aren't
supposed to be so brown, so bare,
barren, dead & pressed down; there
ought to be green somewhere . . .
This fellow is observant; he pays attention to how the road looks when
he's out driving around; he's healthy in that sense - in the sense of
clarity of seeing, sensing, of clear observation - but he's also got the
blues, clearly - he is characterizing the roadside landscape as bare,
barren, dead, pressed down, oppressed. Then the poem leaps from
that first landscape-image into this progression, as if the voice is
driven along by a running spiky slightly desperate energy:
where's a stray pine,
a slash of cucumber like
paint like my own fluorescent
cum shines in our black
bedroom
last night
how BLACK the night was
in our bed
the street-light must be out
or the vapor-lamp on the side
of the adjacent apartment-
building is busted
it's never been so dark
in the bedroom
He has now leapt from the initial flash of roadside dull brown brush,
into a bedroom sex scene, into documentary reality of the apartment, the
busted streetlight. Notice how in going to the image of the cum,
he suffers no tonal rupture, hesitation, embarrassment or
wavering: again, the key health to his writing is his unified
tone, his ability to say all of life's freaks, frills, fucks and
fractures in a level tone of voice. Where so many other poets
would self-censor or veer into sublimated image or cut off the train of
thought, he just wades right in there, holds up a splot of his cum,
sniffs it and waves it in the reader's face. Why not? There
is nothing obscene about this. And nothing to be shy about.
We have all been there. We've all been in bed, we've all been
naked. He is not saying anything hidden from my or your own
experiential reality. This is a freedom. This is his zone to
speak from, along the grand lines initiated at least as early as
Ginsberg and maybe even by Whitman, although Walt does lapse into cutesy
symbol now and again. This is a healthy zone of exterior
description and interior revelation for American underground
poetry. Moreover is goes to show the paradox about what we call
"underground" - you know, it's really not underground at
all. It's common. It's life. (Hey, that's the name of
his book!).
In the next part of the poem, Androla plunges down the page in a
vertiginous verticality of phrase:
& my cock is richie
havens
my cock is richie
havens
southern gal
shut that mouth
upon this pole
of peace
of peacefulness
of a dream
maybe
i am richie
havens
my entire
6 foot
body is
cock
or a sheer
snake of
sperm
nodules
shimmering
hissing
the road
goes on
but erie
is the furthest
interstate
79 can go
then it's
just fresh
water
40 miles
across
canada
By
verticality I literally mean the very short one- or two-word lines that
drop the reader's eye quickly down the page as if your eye suddenly fell
off a cliff. What we have here stylistically is extreme enjambment
or run-on linebreaks. There is a massive encroachment of silence
from the right margin. The text is falling, reaching, spraying
downward, like water running down a street. There is a slightly
desperate jettison-sense to it, like jissom spurted with all the
exposure and possible guilt that act entails. He is working at the
margin of himself, the limit of his feel for the words to try to get
somewhere. Wittgenstein says in his book
Tractatus Logico Philosophicus,
Routledge Classics, at
statement 5.6, "The limits of my language are the limits of my
world," and there is a sense here that Androla is pressing right at
those limits to locate an insight, a connection, just as sperm is a
connection from old to new life.
In working at the limit of language, the poet must risk every sort of
foolishness. In the introduction to his book, Wittgenstein says
that:
"[T]he aim of the book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather-not to
thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to
draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit
thinkable (i.e;., we should have to be able to think what cannot be
thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can
be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be
nonsense."
What he is saying here is important: if you are really up at the
limit, you cannot know what is on the other side. The other side,
the outside, the great beyond that begins after you reach your limit of
language, is unknown, until it is brought inside of language. If
you try to bring it in or see it or know it without truly making it into
words in a real way, then all you have is "nonsense,"
precisely because it is still outside the limit - you might have thought
that you brought it in, but you were mistaken. The poet is
traditionally associated with the insane and with the fool for this
reason. Insanity is a breakdown of communication: someone
who is insane has crossed over the limit but is unable to bring anything
back in words that sane people can hear. Someone who is dumb,
foolish, idiot, stupid, crosses the limit but only returns with what
everyone else says is "nonsense."
The poet must play the
insane person sometimes, play the fool sometimes, in order to risk being
a poet. No poet can cross the limit and bring back new lucidities,
new poems, with a 100% success rate. Poets are limit-workers in
this way, and there is a sense in which evidence that a poet has strayed
in and out of what society calls insanity or what society calls folly
is, in itself, a sort of proof that he is heading the right direction.
I think this is what Blake meant by the road of excess leading to the
palace of wisdom. If the poet wants to work at the limit he needs
to risk craziness and idiocy. Of course, what he really needs to
do is fine-tune his direction just enough to bring back only poems,
never craziness or idiocy, from his limit-expeditions - but this is
almost impossible to do. Because only inside the limit is there
control. The outside is radical chaos until known. Poetry
tries to say the outside with language. Radical poetry tries to
say it without infringing upon its unknowable aspects. Radical
poetry is beautiful and impossible in this way: it says the
unsayable; it would show us the unknown without infringing upon the
unknowableness of the unknown. Poetry is slave to mystery in this
way. But mystery is hope. Isn't that what Keats meant in his
letter to his brothers dated 1817 describing the need for mystery and
"negative capability"?:
". . . several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck
me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in
Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously-- I mean
Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after
fact and reason-- Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine
isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from
being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued
through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a
great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or
rather obliterates all consideration."
Hmm, what did he mean by "penetralium of mystery"? I
don't know, except that it sounds like some sort of mysterious limit,
some sort of verge which poets must approach.
Let's go back to the notion of influence. In another interview
available on the net,
Androla goes into more detail about things that have influenced him:
Dave: Well, since I'm young, and so are many of my readers, would you
tell us about the social climate in which you came of age as a poet, and
how it influenced your outlook?
Ron: the social climate was the late 60's, early 70's, which is pretty
infamous & well-documented & known. i was 15 i think when
Woodstock (the original!) happened, & the youth of amerika were
something magical then. tho tribal, we were massive & the majority
-- but it wasn't until i went to college in '72 that I found poetry as
my prime intellectual communication of awareness. i was lucky to have a
very hip creative writing professor, Dr. Sam Sipe, who sincerely reacted
to my writing with a sort of respect. the stuff was all dark &
dangerous & wild pandemonium imagery influenced by my discovery of
the beats (somewhat) & guys like William Carlos Williams, Robert
Creeley, Whitman, Bly, W.S. Merwin...plus Winburne & Greek tragedy,
Sylvia Plath. I read NAKED LUNCH by William Burroughs in high-school,
& that certainly tipped me over. by college I was waking in the
night with lines in my head & I'd have to write the shit down.
needless to say, college in 1972 was not what college is today. rock
music influenced everybody. I wanted to write Hendrix lyrics. anyways,
the social climate of one's time is of course important & relevant,
but I don't think I really started writing anything of significance
until I got out of college (I switched from point park in Pittsburgh to
Franconia college in New Hampshire since dr. Sipe set me down & said
listen Ron you got talent as a writer why in the hell are you a business
major here? my poetry professor was Bob Grenier. Franconia was very
avant-garde & revolutionary. Grenier was 27. the college president
was 30 & was actually on the Johnny Carson show for being the
youngest college president in amerika! Franconia was my impetus. i met
poets like the language poet Larry Eigner, carried on correspondences,
imitated styles. like I said, Franconia was hallucinatory. the coolest
artistic kids in the mountains of new Hampshire...well, it was a time of
sex drugs & rock & roll, & freedom. I met Ann there. Grenier
suggested i do an independent study program for the practice of
discipline ("a writer WRITES") & I ended up alone on the
island of Corsica reading Ezra Pound & Charles Olson & old
classics & very much immersed myself in that & wrote thru the
hours, just wrote (typed) & wrote non-stop. it didn't matter WHAT I was writing. after college tho it was the "real world" &
driving a jitney in a factory -- & THAT's when I became a
writer/poet. I've never stopped. it's a life-long process with rewards
of karmic proportion such as my nephew interviewing me in 1998 about
this long strange trip of artistic expression. yes Dave, let it be known
I'm 44. I've also been boxed in factories for 20-some years, so what
social climate existed was fairly irrelevant except in the case of
secret hipness & things like the murder of Lennon & the brutal
ugly 1980's. it's a fact, one's environment influences art, tho not
necessarily. of course being utterly crazy with the craziness of time
helps no matter where we are or what the goddamn media feeds us. Nietzsche
frees moral strictures. we might be absorbed by
"society", but it's ok to pull from it & damn it with
intellect. or revenge. just so we widen further than consumerist
moldings of people. watching tv is watching the innocent enemy! oh,
& of course there was the whole Vietnam experience & Nixon's shit.
amerika was splitting like the crust of some volcano, & these
days are what was spewed into the universe.
It is interesting to hear he studied under Grenier. Robert Grenier
is one of the well-known L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets, superficially at the
other end of the spectrum from Androla. Androla's surface form is
almost prosaic in terms of avoiding radical distortions of the verbal
surface: like Bukowski he prefers clear presentation of images and
acts without a lot of disruption. Grenier, by contrast, does lots
of weird things with his verbal-textural surface. See for example,
Jacket
Magazine or EPC.
For more about other analogous poets see Ron Silliman's excellent blog.
The Androla interview excerpt I quoted above gives you a really good
picture of the cultural context or matrix from which Androla is working.
Just like in his speaking style, in his poems he says the facts of his
life in a way that is fraught to some extent by the painful difficulties
of his existential situation, but at the same time is unsure of the
efficacy of any transcendental intervention. His mind is
demythologized. He struggles with nihilism. He has mixed
feelings. His source of hope appears to be the text, the poem
itself. However, he is unwilling to play too much with the verbal
surface like a L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poet: he wants clarity and is willing to
risk prosaic effect:
middle-aged
i'm guzzling
a longneck 12
horse ale
at 4 in the after
fuckingnoon
& it tastes
delicious
like william
carlos williams'
plums
a dollar cheaper
than rolling rock
(from bart smoking camel reds).
He makes me, as reader,
take a look at my own life, from the standpoint of how honest I am about
my life and how well I deal with suffering. There are many happy Mormons
- but they so often seem to have traded in intellectual
integrity for the happiness of a dumb cult. There are
happy-seeming public figures, celebrities, politicians - of course their
images are evasive, corroded by fame and its hypocrisies. Yeah, so
Ron drinks beer. That is a weakness, right? But what about
you, huh? How do you deal with pain, doubt, negation, the daily
grind, of the system, of your molars? What is your way out?
Or are you a saint or something? That is the self-reflective
meditational focus reading his poems tends to instill in the reader.
I have seen similar verticality of structure in another poet: Paul Celan
, the German Jew concentration-camp survivor who wrote the famous Death Fugue early in his career and went on to drown himself
in the Seine in his 40s. In Celan's later poems the text spills
down the page in narrower and narrower verticalities, reflecting, I
think, some of the same questing desperation I sense in Ron's poems.
Consider this poem from Celan:
No one moulds us again out of earth and clay,
no one conjures our dust.
No one.
Praised be your name, no one.
For your sake
we shall flower.
Towards
you,
A nothing
we were, are, shall
remain, flowering:
the nothing-, the
no one's rose.
With
our pistil soul-bright,
with our stamen heaven-ravaged,
our corolla red
with the crimson word which we sang
over, O over
the thorn.
(Paul Celan: Psalm).
There is a sense of spiritual extremity in
the recurrent very short lines. There is none of the fat happy
horizontality of, say, an Elizabethan sonnet. There is none of the
thick assurance of Milton's blank verse. Silence presses in from
the right. Silence presses the linebreak. The linebreak is
the final primal form of control the poet has over his text when
everything else gets emptied out - the last formal tool separating free
verse from prose. The poet chopping off his lines after a word or
two is as if pressed by silence, white space, nothingness, nihilism
drifting in from the right side of the page. Consider another poem
by Celan:
Arnica, eyebright, the
draft from the well with the
star-crowned die above it,
in the
hut,
the line
-- whose name did the book
register before mine? --,
the line inscribed
in that book about
a hope, today,
of a thinking man's
coming
word
in the heart,
woodland sward, unleveled,
orchid and orchid, single,
coarse stuff, later, clear
in passing,
he who drives us, the man,
who listens in,
the half-
trodden fascine
walks over the high moors,
dampness,
much.
(Paul Celan: Todtnauberg).
Now, the severity of the verticality of
the poem is becoming coupled with a dissolution of meaning. The
poet is throwing us what seem like disconnected asides and images.
There is a stress of silence, wordlessness, lack, not just from the
right margin now, but as it were welling up inside of the significations
of the words. Let me give you one more Celan poem:
The poles
are inside us,
insurmountable
when we're awake,
we sleep across, up to the Gate
of Mercy,
I lose you to you, that
is my snowy comfort,
say that Jerusalem is,
say it, as though I were this
your whiteness,
as though you
were mine,
as though without us we could be we,
I open your leaves, for ever,
you pray, you bed
us free.
(Paul Celan: The Poles).
There is definite spiritual extremity
here, definite indicia of fraught striving, of uncertainty, of something
essential which may or may not be. I think we also see some of
this tonality, this gist, in Androla's poems where the line implodes
into shortness. In this respect, Androla also calls to mind
Bukowski, who suggested his own bleak lucidities and black humor with
the short line:
lonely as a dry and used orchard
spread over the earth
for use and surrender.
shot down like an ex-pug selling
dailies on the corner.
taken by tears like
an aging chorus girl
who has gotten her last check.
a hanky is in order your lord your
worship.
the blackbirds are rough today
like
ingrown toenails
in an overnight
jail--
wine wine whine,
the blackbirds run around and
fly around
harping about
Spanish melodies and bones.
and everywhere is
nowhere--
the dream is as bad as
flapjacks and flat tires:
why do we go on
with our minds and
pockets full of
dust
like a bad boy just out of
school--
you tell
me,
you who were a hero in some
revolution
you who teach children
you who drink with calmness
you who own large homes
and walk in gardens
you who have killed a man and own a
beautiful wife
you tell me
why I am on fire like old dry
garbage.
we might surely have some interesting
correspondence.
it will keep the mailman busy.
and the butterflies and ants and bridges and
cemeteries
the rocket-makers and dogs and garage mechanics
will still go on a
while
until we run out of stamps
and/or
ideas.
don't be ashamed of
anything; I guess God meant it all
like
locks on
doors.
(Charles Bukowski: The Blackbirds Are Rough Today).
With Bukowski you get the sense of a short line used to
enforce an exposure, at the level of personal statement: His is a
machismo of showing the warts and all, working in the free zone uniquely
accessible to the poet who is working outside the literary academy and
who does not need to censor his disenfranchised word. Bukowski's
approach is to present a speaking persona who says things, reveals
sights and unveils disclosures that "normal civilized people"
would not do. His attitude toward the reader is ambiguous.
Generally he seems to think that no one else is as bedrock honest as he
is; he ridicules what he sees as sentimentalized ideals and wimpy
concealments. Almost any time he brings in the figure of another
writer or poet or artist in one of his poems, it is only to diss them.
In
his view, most poets are hopelessly shrouded in preciousness,
self-delusion, squeamishness, mutual back-patting and false beliefs in
Art, God and Good. His view has the self-protective tunnel-vision
of fellow alcoholic Faulkner's: Faulkner thought of himself as the
only living novelist of any worth, and Bukowski seems in many poems to
think of himself as the only living poet. But every writer has two
sides like that. You take the good with the gross.
Like Bukowski, Androla is master of utter exposure, "good"
and "bad," "pretty" and "ugly"
things thrown all in the poem together:
i smell under ann's
arm
her ass-
hole
special
places of
us
what
we
flesh
we
accept as unity
look how
reality is
a linear
line from
baby-dribble
to alzheimer's-drool . . .
(from What I Smell).
Ann
is his partner of many years. We see her again in this poem:
i've just returned from a rainy
afternoon trek in the jeep. mailed
some bills, picked up my prescription,
purchased five $1,000 a week for life
instant lottery tickets
because i thought of it
& thinking of it
is maybe a sign of luck?
of rainy day fantasy?
well, next i hit
the state store
since it's friday.
jim beam black
on sale even,
bottle in a big black
collector's tin too.
sits on the kitchen
table, uncrack'd,
awaiting
the calm flurry of
ann in an
hour.
i'm having coffee
now.
i'm biding
my time.
picture us
throwing back
shots
toasting the war,
toasting peace,
toasting toast,
toasting jim beam
black, toasting
the first day
of spring.
& yes,
later,
we'll
be very toasted;
yes,
twin pieces
of black
toast.
(Jim Beam Black).
The
poem does not on its surface reveal anything but an array of details.
The content of the details, the images, is part-dark, part-negative, at
least by conventional majority morality criteria: the poet-speaker
and his woman welcome the weekend in by going blotto. But the
analysis can be reversed. As Nietzsche said, madness is rare in
individuals, but common across societies, masses. The American
mass society likes to make war on small Mideast countries. The
mass is "toasting the war" with every Jessica Lynch TV
special and kewl special news report showing night-vision-green tracers
and target hits like a new videogame. The mass toasts the war
without irony - they endorse it! They like it, even! But the
mass says it is "good" and Androla the crazy poet is
"bad" because, you see, Androla and his woman get
crunked on Friday nite. Riiiiiigggghhhhtt.
Androla's
flat exposed reportage of his actual lifestyle, warts and all,
constitutes a running critique of the American mass society paranoia and
dark energies which make the poet's desperado position look no less
loony than that of the insane mass culture, however ostensibly rational
and sober they claim to be. This is a major point of the
underground's social critique of the aboveground social mores, and we
see it over and over again in the situations of writers like Baudelaire,
Rimbaud, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, etc.
Up
until a few months ago when I hit bottom and my folks let me come hole
up with them, I was in the same boat, for sure. Man, I would walk
out of the Raleigh ABC Store with my two fifths of Old Crow with no
fucking apologies at all, and if I still had some weed around the shack,
so much the better. I liked to drink and get fucked up and write.
I wrote my butt off. Then I would make up songs and record them.
Yeah, I was fucked-up and isolated. It's a common poetry lifestyle among
the underground. But I say, call them (us) the
underground-aboveground. Because from what I can tell, the
underground IS the aboveground, and what the culture mavens and identity
police and Rush Limbaugh's (well, when he's not in detox) call the real,
the true, the aboveground, is a fantasyworld. Last time I checked
the average person in this world right now was slowly pulling a worm out
of his shin sitting in a mud and reed hut in Uganda, or he was fighting
off a cough in Siberia. Or stuffing styro peanuts in boxes of TVs
in Singapore. Or selling spraypainted parakeets in Bangkok.
Or selling his daughter to the madam in Beirut. Or waiting in line
in Moscow. Or sitting here in your chair as you, reading this
review, which thank god for that, at least you got the time to do it,
and you weren't so beaten down that you chose to lose your soul in
People Magazine instead. But all the same, I believe that the very
best way to be underground-aboveground is to do it clean and sober if
you can. That's what I am trying to do nowadays. But there
is no way in hell I am going to judge any poet who is hitting on the
Beam. Beats hitting on the Bible or the Iraqis. Beats
avoiding to trouble of life with white lies. Truth is hard to
bear:
if i want
or if ann wants it more
either way
we can depart
consciousness
this state of gracelessness
& ingest
things
to stop the
heart more
than 4 minutes
eternally
it's slightly
comforting thinking
it's possible
not to think
at all
ever
again
consciousness:
god
death:
god
or not,
nothing
a ghost
world we
slither
between
atoms
& buckling
molecules
& winds of
quarks
or not
a dead brain
thing
blackens
shrivels
as lives
continue
all around
what we
were
& we're
rubbed
away
we
disappear
nobody
conscious
cares
generations
from
this
moment
earth
sours
yellow
disperses
us
disperse
us
(overdosing).
Every
weekday, Androla has had to go back to that job. What is that
like? I have never worked in a factory. I worked at the BK
Lounge for a while, various restaurant kitchens, but only part-time.
Aside from that, cheap office jobs and running the acrid-chemical
printing press for a while at a publisher. And then after law
school, I worked as a lawyer for 7 years. A sweet deal, compared
to the pre-law jobs, but the spiritual emptiness I got to see in the
plush lawyer conference rooms was fucked-up in its own way. But
think about the effect, day after day, of working a job that feels like
this:
"I'M
ON THE VERGE OF A MENTAL BREAKDOWN! I AM! THAT MACHINE IS GONNA KILL ME!"
Judy huffs. They've put the 300-ton injection-machine on full-automatic,
& the job is very manic & continuous & insane. "I'M
ON THE VERGE OF A MENTAL BREAKDOWN!" Judy screams at the
time-clock a couple minutes before 7 a.m., & Dan, all goof
sarcastic, eyes gleaming, smiling big, splurts out, Oh sure, Judy, you
get gravy every night! & Judy slaps his arm. "YOU JUST WATCH
IT. I'LL KNOCK YOU ONE GOOD!" & I have giggled into full
laughter & her old gray eyes shoot at me, "YOU TOO!" she
yells.
(from
Underground
Underground ((Beneath the Dust of Mars)).
It
brings back memories of the tougher interstices of my old jobs and who
knows, jobs someday I might have to work again. It is good prose,
reminiscent of Ham On Rye era Bukowski. Likewise, this excerpt
from Androla's prose brings back memories of my life outside of my lousy
job:
Yes, last year & years before I wld've popped some of Diane's pain
pills, washed them with beer or whiskey, turned Captain Beefheart up
loud in my writing-room, & dug the swirl of intoxicated revelation
& discovery, escaping from foreign sobriety. Drugs & drink
fueled my poetry, at times very shamelessly. Raw Soul like sirloin under
a 1,000-watt grow-light, glistening. I felt alive & wanted to die
too many times. The drugs & drink certainly contributed to my
eclectic depression, my low lows & bursts of long prose firing pipes
& slamming bourbon & 12-packs, eating old prescription narcotics
to really feel the fuzzy spin of Time & Space & Consequence. It
took years, but I learned to write when very drunk. Bravado, the critics
call it, Too Much Bravado.
.. . .
I was a heavy, daily drinker for many, many years, & that was fine
when getting drunk was celebration; later, the party turned lone
nightmare. Dry-heaves off warm zinfandel & percocet, fresh, resinous
marijuana bud, a ton of chain-smoked cigarettes in my little locked
room; almost airless, christmas lights strung across the ceiling &
poems written all over the walls, room stuffed to the gills with papers,
photographs, arrays of strange things & I nod insane in my chair in
the middle of this narcotic explosion dry-heaving into an empty
coffee-can, & I just wrote the end of my book, SPLATTERED IN ERIE, I
was done, gone, smoke & shit made me sick, 3 a.m., I got the words
of chaos out & I knew the book was complete, that a couple months
work was done via madness, booze, & fury. Dry-heaving painfully into
a coffee-can & 40-some years old & is it worth it. Full-blown
misery in every part of the mind. Mind as exposed by thought, saturated
with the depths of alcoholism & mental disease. I was sick, but I
finished my story & probably almost died that night. 200 copies were
produced by Smiling Dog Press into a fine chapbook.
(from
Underground
Underground ((Beneath the Dust of Mars)).
How
much of this lifestyle is choice, and how much is inflicted? How
much of it is infliction, and how much of it is cool Nietzschean
Hunter-S.-Thompson-ian dionysian release? It is always hard to
tell. Really, only the poet who is in that storm can send us an
accurate weather report, what it's like. It is how Richard
Brautigan lived, it is how Bukowski lived for long stretches, it is how
Rimbaud lived when he smoked hashish and guzzled absinthe, it is how
Kerouac lived when he took uppers and spouted out The Subterraneans.
It is one way to live, one way to write. I think it gets harder to
do as you get older. I never got quite as wild as Androla reports
here. Ethically speaking, we can debate all day about the right
and the wrong way to live, but poetically speaking, from the strict
standpoint of poetic method, it would be stupid to say Androla's
existential bravado-booze-and-drugs approach is "wrong" just
as it would be stupid to say that Emily Dickinson's teetotaler
clean-as-a-whistle approach is "right." Every poet is
stricken by their acuity of senses, at some point: every poet is
exposed. Every poet receives too much via sensory filters; every
poet is oversensitive. Every poet is drunk off the senses, whether
liquor-aided or not. Emily didn't drink, but she tells us she was
a "debauchee of dew." To each his or her own.
One of the things I think is healthiest about Androla's poems is the
sense that they give us that it is OK to feel weird as your normality.
His deepest insight of tone, to me, is that the askew weird feeling of
average life is communicable, it can be said, in the poem:
i think i'm 48 & a half
but i may be two thousand
years old. i vaguely
remember
childhood,
just a sense of infancy.
maybe i'm
a goddamn
clone, who knows
what
reality
exists behind
this current
realism.
aliens impregnated
my mother
in 1954
on lover's lane --
her memory
is blank
it ever happened.
something
seems a little
fishy,
something
has always
seemed a bit fishy
about
being
alive.
(from life).
You can also see the sense of the weirdness of
self, coupled with the breathless or desperado effect of the vertical
plunging short lines, here:
another person
is inside my body
another mind
is in my head
other words
drop from
my lips
& nothing i say
sticks.
well,
the
let's
go,
let's
go,
ready
for the
road
again.
(from bart smoking camel reds).
This
sense of questionable self goes hand in hand with his refusal to seek
after conventional methods of transcendence. Once normal
transcendence routes are deferred, a steady deconstruction of the self
ensues. Once you can no longer refer your issues of self over to
some vague all-embracing religious or other creed, the self starts to
look pretty weird. If the vast human network of language-tokens,
words, signs, does not at its fringes hook into what French theorists
call a "transcendental signified" - a final
transcendent meaning like Christ to the Christians or golf to
materialist corporate execs - well, what are we, then?
A
personal critique ensues. The meaning of everything gradually
begins to be called into question. The postmodern poet becomes
intimately aware of this struggle of meaning, this turbulence of
internal critique. One starts to go through Samuel Beckett-like
dissonances and contortions of value, of meaning. In the late
1800s Nietzsche predicted that this phenomenon would happen in
widespread fashion in western society once analytical vectors such as
Darwinism, Freud and Marx cut into the dominant christian ideology.
He called this phenomenon "western nihilism." I would
submit that Androla lives out nihilistic vectors in his self.
That, specifically, is what he suffers for poetry - yet it is also his
joy. Poetry's funny that way.
I want to give a few examples of Androla's ability with scene
description and simple clarity of image:
it's around noon on a strangely
warm 50-some degree pittsburgh
day early march, cloudy, sunny,
cloudy, sunny, it changes like
that every 30 seconds or so,
& i notice bart's patio,
shaded, is still filled
with ash-tipped mounds of
snow -- & the deadness of all
the trees & vines,
(from bart smoking camel reds).
Look
at the simple precision of sensory description here:
certainly mushroom
soup
yes absolutely
& the chunks of brown'd
beef, garlic, generously,
(from what i smell).
There
is a sense that with transcendental ideologies called into doubt, with
the self decentered and under critique for its weirdness, what we have
left to rely on, rest in, is the facticity of the physical world, and
the inner facticity of desire. Androla is minimalist in this way:
beyond basic reality of the good earth and the things in it, the
veracity of the senses, and of basic human want/need/love, he is a
skeptic. This was Hemingway's approach, as well, in stories such
as A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
- Hemingway's old man who
believes in nothing, "nada," is all the more able to
appreciate, believe, the pure silvery gleam of the metal coffeemaker,
and the black hot taste of the coffee.
i've been meaning to start
it up since we haven't been driving
the buick. jeep, instead, what with
snow & ice. single digit overnight
temperatures -- i don't want
the old buick's engine-block to crack;
so i try to run the thing
idle in the parkinglot.
(from the old buick).
You can see how he relies on the
basic existential facts of the sense, the suchness of phenomena, the
thingliness of things, as a way of being, of knowing existence, of
continuing. It is stripped-down, but it is also a way of seeing
things that are close to you, freshly. He notices, senses, the
world. He refuses, suspends, judgment, as in the close of this
passage here which references tragedy and comedy:
i want to phone
all my cousins
on both sides
of the family
just say
hi
how are
you
it's been
30 years
& not much
is new here
just life
& the various
tragedies
& overall comedy
(from cousins).
One of the nicest things about Androla is
that he seems able to leave more openness or vulnerability in his tone
than Bukowski often did. The poet who relies on honest exposure of
self runs into tensions that can incite him to clam up or go into
machismo behavior. This is endemic in Bukowski. It's how he
protects himself within his open self-exposure. Androla does not
lash out at fellow writers or at the reader like Bukowski tends to do.
He is able to endure the knowledge that he is showing his fragilities
and failures via his self-exposure; or, if he does need to react, the
negative force of the reaction is self-directed. He doesn't try to
hurt the reader or other writers. The effect, sometimes, is like
one of the ancient Zen writers from Asia who reveal their inner worries,
the fact that they're losing their teeth, growing older, bald, in a
plain manner that does not barb the statement to protect the speaker:
it's a toledo gray day,
drizzle or just wetness
in the shadowy air.
i'm going bald up on top
& behind my head, i
say look doc i'm losing
my hair he laughs
he grins big
says yeah
we all are . . .
(from first day of spring).
Or consider this efficiently
painted domesticity:
i'm bundled on our old recliner.
ann is snoring on the couch,
has been for many hours. television
merges into dreams. i mean
my eyes are shut but things
appear visually, audible
too; it's past midnight.
rain pelts the window over my
shoulder, across from my left
cheek. a black, wet, windy night.
(from last night).
It is interesting to watch how he
approaches death in a poem, since death is where all the senses and
things which he depends on for his self-sense, dissolve and drop away.
One feels that at the critical point of addressing death as a subject,
he will have to make a swing into metaphor, into the blatantly,
magically poetic; and he does:
you feel a dead person
spread thru you
altho they chill
in a morgue's
wall of vaults.
cold stone.
you blink, sway
with vision, frame
of focus shifts
on somewhat of a face.
you feel wet
with active biology,
electric brain
activity sizzle of thought,
of awe.
as if the dead
fly
up & become
air, they're here,
somewhere
close.
a burial
but the dead watch
from the trees
or in clouds
or over yr
shoulder.
after
some time,
natural morphine,
time,
things
become easier
& the dead
fade
with the rest
of memory --
a life ends.
all lives end.
suspend
from the thought
of eternity's
hook-like moon
kick back
be stars & the swirl of the milky way
the swirl of the milky way
(from a thing about death).
The closing purely poetic image
of the "hook-like moon" immediately brings to mind a similar
moon metaphor in the face of death from the close of Sylvia Plath's poem
Edge, which may have been one of the last poems she wrote
before killing herself:
The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.
She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.
Compare that existential desperation to this from Androla:
this late, gray afternoon
in eternity, rotating,
roasting in april rain-mist.
i don't even look like me anymore.
i'm someone else, almost
50, plump,
balding, jaded.
it's a sharp world out there
& when one spins from here
to there it's as if
time is a sloppy
lathe. . .
(from the beginning of this poem).
Notice the rare
metaphor, at the end of this passage. Because he uses metaphor
sparingly, each time he brings one in, it hits. He sounds like
more of a survivor than Plath. But he is clearly suffering. But I
think that his resistance to metaphor as a way of effacing the factual
source of suffering may be part of his gritty endurance; his ability to
state plainly his condition gives him a way to deal with it. He is
certainly quite aware of this poetics of exposure and decentered,
"weird" self:
you don't expect this poem,
this unveiling of actuality.
it isn't right,
exposing reality to the masses.
(from you).
And he is quite clear in his rejection of
traditional transcendence modalities:
there isn't much to say
about anything in particular
nor are there nails
tacking a grand statement banner
about eternity against the stars.
there really isn't a point
i'm trying to push
even if you feel pushed
down to this
next line
way
down
here.
sorry,
this poem
is uncalled for.
a poet must always
speak
& speak
well
because
language
is the tool
of truth
& poetry
is truth.
fuck that,
poets
are
loose-
lipp'd
fools
& truth
is more
momentary
than any
moment.
(from this is one of those poems).
There is much to be
learned from Androla. If you like his poems, go to his website
and drop him a line sometime; from what I have read I think he is
experiencing reality and loneliness as harshly as anybody could.
With the death of Bukowski, I would put him up there with Lifshin among
the middle-aged post-beat straight-talker outsider underground poets.
But it ain't an underground: it's underground-aboveground. I
will let him have the last word, with some more excerpts from one of his
interviews:
When
I started getting published it felt like a drug, I got hooked. Basically it's all simply personal history & how this shy kid from
Ellport ever became this underground poetry god of eternity. right. (to
anyone:) You want to be a poet? You want to be a writer? You want to be
a painter? You want to be a musician? Whatever you want to be, You gotta
do it & do it forever non-stop for decades & decades. simple as
that.
.. . .
EVERYTHING is a capable poem: I'm probably always inspired. There was a
time I needed to write it all down, but as age seeps over me, I need the
gentleness of letting poems go unwritten. No sense for panic. Ann
definitely inspires me. So does work. So do you. So does the sky &
august moon & music. I used to call "the muse" MUDDA
MOOSE. She really didn't mind but sometimes I'd get slapped hard into
zombie-reality. One thing about poetry is its intrinsic being in every
object, thought, & dream of man. hell, an apple can be
inspirational! it don't depend on Mudda Moose exclusively. A writer
writes.
.. . .
Read Wallace Stevens. Read Henry Miller. Kerouac. If you read Bukowski,
beware! I think it became very vogue to write like Bukowski not too many
years ago, but writing like Bukowski is also a natural way to write
regardless what Bukowski wrote, so it's a tricky area. Mostly the thing
to do is work for your own comfortable voice where we can write with peace
& a certain certainty. the old adage "everything's already been
said" isn't true! breaking on thru to the other side is an artist's
goal. creation of language in new ways makes us angelic demons, but not
really: in my case writing is normalcy. it's in me like blood. few men
or women pursue careers as underground poets longer than a couple years.
I am most in love with the life-long process, the long strange trip I record, or mirror.
I don't suggest anybody else follows the road. There
are no rewards inasmuch amerika defines reward.
.. . .
Young poets must realize there are some older poets out in the world
who've been writing non-stop for decades upon decades in wonderfully
free obscurity! & Ringo said it: "Ya gotta pay your dues if ya
wanna sing the blues..." -- that be it. pay & play!
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