‘I’ve sometimes been asked why he wasn’t as famous as Burroughs and Ginsberg, and the other celebrated Beat writers, and I’ve always said he needed a better press agent or a better strategy. Until he was taken up by San Francisco’s radical gay activists, he was strictly a literary man—which was not enough to vault him to fame. His poems, fine as they were, didn’t make headlines.’ — from the Prologue
Speaking of Poets
Szymborska Had Something to Say
‘Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves. They publicly confess to being poets only reluctantly, as if they were a little ashamed of it. But in our clamorous times it’s much easier to acknowledge your faults, at least if they’re attractively packaged, than to recognize your own merits, since these are hidden deeper and you never quite believe in them yourself…’ – Nobel Prize Laureate Wislawa Szymborska
A Poet Speaks of the Debacle of Our Lives
When I spoke of a church without a roof over its head
So that the heavens looked down upon it
Rained down upon it
And now of course
If I spoke of a ruin of a church in Odessa
I could be speaking of the future
That will soon be past
As my past will soon be over
The Phenomenon Called AOC
“How did Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an unknown bartender and activist, become the youngest woman to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives and one of its most talked-about figures? And what is her possible future?” Those are the two biggest questions to be posed to Lisa Miller, Rebecca Traister, and Michael Kazin at the Leon Levy Center for Biography.
What Would Freud Say About Current Conditions?
I have no idea. But you can’t read the last paragraph of “Civilization and Its Discontents” without believing he had written it only yesterday or without believing he had hope for the future. The fact that the book was written in 1929 does throw his hope into doubt, if it was intended as prognostication, which — to be frank — it was. But it’s still a great read.
Two Writers, Two Legacies
![Nelson Algren, 1962 [Photo: Steve Deutch]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Nelson-Algren-1962-Stephen-Deutch-copy-200x200.jpg)
Nelson Algren, as great a writer as ever came out of Chicago, was born on this day in 1909.
A Poet Recalls Odessa
No more crowding those Kiosks
That look like guard towers
Protected by hard currency
And the insect eyes peering out of them
Human eyes preying off their own kind
No more tram drivers drinking their coffee
While you wait for hours to get home to your child . . . — William Cody Maher
Slaughterhouse 6
‘The crows scream
and fly to town in whirring flight:
soon it will snow —
happy he who now still has a home!’ …
The world — a gate
to a thousand wastelands dumb and cold!
Whoever has lost
what you have lost, rests nowhere. … — Friedrich Nietzsche
That’s the Way to Travel
Jan Heller Levi & Marlies Pekarek
Thinking of rasPutin, we laughed when a friend joked about the availability of refurbished Geiger counters on Amazon. Gallows humor helps to ease the anxiety of current conditions. Here’s a serious kind of distraction: Moloko Print’s volume of selected poems, ‘That’s the Way to Travel,” by Jan Heller Levi, with illustrations by Marlies Pekarek. (Levi’s first book, “Once I Gazed at You in Wonder,” earned the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets.)
‘Dream’ by George Herms
Where does George Herms and his 1985 assemblage “Dream” fit in the continuum of American art? After reading “The Nature of Art” by Armand Marie Leroi and having a look at the Connect Vermeer website, I wondered whether a similar analysis could be done about Herms and “Dream.”
Vlad the Impaler
‘You’re occupiers. You are fascists. Why the fuck did you come here with your guns?’ Ukrainian woman confronting Russian soldiers in Henichesk, in southern Ukraine. ‘Take these seeds and put them in your pocket so, at least, sunflowers will grow on your graves.’ (Translated by Alex Abramovich)
‘Bells ring / silently the evening / rolls in its void’ — Paul Celan
‘A Poem for Patriots’ and ‘Upside the Morning’
Two books by Mark Terrill have arrived with ekphrastic poems of great appeal: “The Salvador-Dali-Lama Express” and “Great Balls of Doubt.” Here are two poems with images from daily life and the thoughts they arouse.
World of Trouble
New Folio from Cold Turkey Press
The epigraph (“I’ll do penance with farts and groans / Kneeling on my marrowbones”) comes from a poem by James Joyce. The folio includes four deformed sonnets (“Cursed,” “Her Days All Flee,” “World of Trouble,” “Mirage”) and a poem (“After Carl”).
A Documentation by Florian Vetsch
The Garden by Paul Bowles
Paul Bowles wrote a short story called “The Garden” in 1963. Three years later Joseph McPhillips asked him to dramatize the story for students at the American School of Tangier. Bowles, who was in Thailand at the time and about to leave for Morocco by ship, wrote scenes for the play on his way back and airmailed them to McPhillips, who immediately started rehearsals. Following Bowles’s advice, McPhillips involved artists and writers such as Marguerite McBey, Ira Belline, Brion Gysin, and John Hopkins. The play was staged in Tangier in April 1967, but was never published. This documentation offers the original text of the play (translated as well into German) with an evocative motherlode of illustrations that trace the play’s genesis from page to stage.
A Tale by Mohammed Mrabet
As Told to Paul Bowles and Transcribed by Mark Terrill
Mohammed Mrabet, a young Moroccan painter from Tangier, met the American ex-patriate composer and writer Paul Bowles in 1965. Bowles, who lived in Tangier for decades, taped many of Mrabet’s spontaneous stories and translated them into English, eventually resulting in the publication of more than a dozen books. Mark Terrill, himself an American ex-pat writer and poet, recalls that during a kif-fueled visit with the two of them, in 1985, Mrabet began “improvising some of his crazy tales while Paul simultaneously translated for my benefit, and I quickly jotted this one down.” Terrill bought several of Mrabet’s drawings, including the one that illustrates this newly printed poster from Cold Turkey Press.
Translator, Author, Cherished Friend
A Great One Died 10 Years Ago Today
Carl Weissner was a “little magazine” editor, a radio playwright, German translator of more than 100 books (but principally of Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs, Nelson Algren and J.G. Ballard, also of Frank Zappa and Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Charles Plymell, Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen), as well as a literary agent who spread the work of dissident writers even further. “Le Regard d’Autrui,” published posthumously in 2019, shows him to have been as magnetic a storyteller as any of the celebrated writers he translated.
Four Books That Recently Came Our Way
Poetry by Leia John, by William Cody Maher, by Ira Cohen, and a memoir by Theo Green. Have a look and please don’t take offense at the explicitness of John’s lines.
(Yesterday this blogpost disappeared from the site, inexplicably, so the staff has re-posted it. Apologies to all who clicked on it and were directed to a dead end.)