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August 27, 2003
REARVIEW MIRROR
Somebody must have turned back the clock. The iconic image of Allen Ginsberg, recalling his "Pentagon Exorcism" days circa 1967 (stars-and-striped stovepipe hat, black-framed eyeglasses, full beard and riveting, innocent eyes), stares at me from corner newstands all over Manhattan. His face is on the cover of Time Out/New York, which dubs him "the spiritual muse" of the Howl! Festival, a weeklong celebration of the arts that just ended in the East Village.
The Fugs are back,
making a splash with "The Fugs final cd, (part
1)," their first release in 17 years. (
Meantime, Fugs leader Ed Sanders has an essay in Time Out (not online, unfortunately) recalling his Peace Eye bookstore on Manhattan's Lower East Side, an era when Life magazine put him on its cover because of his literary notoriety. In the early 1960s, he edited a mimeographed poetry journal called FUCK YOU / A Magazine of the Arts and wrote lyric poems that scandalized the literary world.
Here's the way Ed began "The Hairy Table," a story published in 1968 in a San Francisco little magazine I once edited, decades before the vernacular became acceptable in magazines like The New Yorker:
Her delicate tongue of flame slid into the crinkles of my ass, jabbing here like a sparrer, there sucking like a cuttlefish. ... I filled her snatch full of air and gently drew it out in funt-spurts, tasting the salmon moisture of the wheezes.
(The story drew the wrath of a Midwest congressman, who foamed about it on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives in one of the earliest battles against the National Endowment for the Arts.)
Paul Krassner, who staked his own claim to literary notoriety in the '60s, is about to launch a weekly column, "Zen Bastard," in the alternative weekly New York Press. Just this morning there's a review of a new book going over old ground by Henry the K in The New York Times (free registration required). And now Blue Wind Press has re-issued Ted Berrigan's "So Going Around Cities," a collection of poems from 1958 to 1979.
Some day future anthropologists will thank Berrigan for his poetry. A leading figure (the father figure, really) of the second-generation New York School Poets -- what I think of as the Kitchen Sink School -- Berrigan threw everything into his poems from the hair on his face to the amphetamines he took, from the ice cream he ate to the bedsheets he slept on, from the streets he walked to the all-night raps he talked, from the boredom he felt to the sex that excited him. He pretty much left nothing out.
I could cite many beautiful poems, like this one, excerpted from "The Sonnets NYC 1963":
Sweeter than sour apples flesh to boys
The brine of brackish water pierced my hulk
Cleansing me of rot-gut wine and puke
Sweeping away my anchor in its swell
And since then I've been bathing in the poem
Of the star-steeped milky flowing mystic sea
Devouring great sweeps of azure green and
Watching flotsam, dead men, float by me
Where, dyeing all the blue, the maddened flames
And stately rhythms of the sun, stronger
Than alcohol, more great than song,
Fermented the bright red bitterness of love
I've seen skies split with light, and night,
And surfs, currents, waterspouts; I know
What evening means, and doves, and I have seen
What other men sometimes have thought they've seen
But if nothing else in "So Going Around Cities" had made the Blue Wind collection worth re-issuing, this prose stanza from "Memorial Day 1971," a long poem Berrigan wrote with Anne Waldman, would have all by itself:
I asked Tuli Kupferberg once, "Did you really jump off of The Manhattan Bridge?" "Yeah," he said, "I really did." "How come?" I said. "I thought that I had lost the ability to love," Tuli said. "So, I figured I might as well be dead. So, I went one night to the top of The Manhattan Bridge, & after a few minutes, I jumped off." "That's amazing," I said. "Yeah," Tuli said, "but nothing happened. I landed in the water, & I wasn't dead. So I swam ashore, & went home, & took a bath, & went to bed. Nobody even noticed."
Berrigan was not the first poet to write about that. Ginsberg wrote about it much earlier in "Howl" (though he got the bridge wrong). He listed Kupferberg among "the best minds of my generation" as the unnamed jumper "who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer..."
Kupferberg, now in his 80s, was not one of Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project boys, but that does not exclude him from the genius club. He did write the Fugs song "Kill for Peace," after all, along with others such as "Supergirl," "Nothing" and "CIA Man." And he still makes eminent sense, or did six years ago.
POSTSCRIPT
A friend remembers that Sander's second magazine, after Fuck You went under, was called The Dick. Issue No. 1 had a headline: Ted Berrigan Teaches Parrot to Scarf Cock. If MacArthur "genius" awards had been around then, that headline alone should have earned one.
Posted by at August 27, 2003 11:44 AM