Just received in the mail: a masterly bilingual edition in English and German of Slow Newsreel of Man Riding Train by Robert Nichols. (The title in German: Langsame Wochenschau Eines Bahnreisenden.) It is the latest in Stadtlichter Presse’s bilingual Heartbeats series devoted to American poets of the Beat generation.
Slow Newsreel of Man Riding Train was originally published in 1962 as No. 15 in the City Lights Books’ Pocket Poet Series. It has been out of print for decades. Why City Lights hasn’t reprinted it is a mystery to me. Nichols’s book is one of the best in that series. Maybe it’s a matter of literary rights? Or maybe it’s simply been unappreciated and overlooked. I think the latter. Here are the opening lines of the first poem:
Beginning when I was six I became my father's accomplice
in his affair with trains.
The wheels of the night train
are thundering over the Portland Street trestle.
We are crouched below, momentarily wrapped in steam.
At a country crossing the Express passes us
and disappears in the snow.
The long freight train disappears
jumbled behind the government buildings.
Rain is falling over all the freight yards of the city.
A bell clangs. Over the canal
the drawbridge swings shut.
The diesel starts its long haul
hoisting its load of flatcars reefers & empty gondolas
into the mauve distance which begins here.
Our job was to mark the passage
of all trains going North South & West of Wayne Jtn ME.
as the ornithologists notes the flyways of birds.
We knew the names of all trains
even the secret ones.
I can’t help wondering what Jack Kerouac made of Nichols’s railroad poems. I don’t think he ever commented on them.
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