Review: Diane di Prima's The Poetry Deal

As the back cover states, "The Poetry Deal is the first volume of new poetry in decades from legendary Beat poet, Diane di Prima." I've had this book on the shelf for review for a few months, and picked it up last night after reading her Memoirs of a Beatnik cover-to-cover in one sitting. After that pornographic - and I mean that in the best possible way - read, I was compelled to read her latest poetry. I wasn't disappointed.

The Poetry Deal is 56 poems sandwiched between two prose statements, the first an homage to her adopted city of San Francisco and the last a tribute to poetry. The latter was unnecessary as di Prima's poems themselves are tributes. Tributes to the lost, tributes to San Francisco, tributes to City Lights, tributes to environmental consciousness. She is in fine form here and especially with pieces like "Haiti, Chile, Tibet," in which she puts forth eight beautiful suggestions for changing the social contract and saving this "rather small rock" populated by a "handful of tribes."

can you call it looting when anyone breaks plate glass
              comes out with radios       medicine
              camping supplies              whatever is needed
is that looting or just plain sanity?               keeping a family, keeping each other, alive

In this social media world, she longs for real connection in "Where Are You?"

stay in touch means you touch each other, lovers or
                                                                                 not

Some of her poems are untitled and short and light:

my dream of last night
has been lying in wait all day
in the folds of my pillow

Others, like "Zoron, Your Death," span several pages and take up heart-wrenching subjects like a friend dying of AIDS:

next morning I got the call:
                                             you had died
before Yeshe got there

                                               but I knew
in yr armchair the day before
when I was with you
looking together into that
                    small patch of sky

you had somehow taken refuge
in all of Space

You owe it to yourself to get a copy of The Poetry Deal from City Lights. This is the kind of poetry book that one comes back to over time, gleaning new insights and making fresh connections. The poems are real, they are significant, and they are well-crafted: as one would expect from the Poet Laureate of San Francisco.

P.S. I also recommend Memoirs of a Beatnik. Readers of this blog looking for a Kerouac fix won't be disappointed as di Prima spends most of one chapter recounting, in graphic detail, a group sexual encounter with Jack and Allen Ginsberg and two of her New York friends. Critics will point out that this was a piece of erotica she wrote for money, and thus the sexual escapades are likely exaggerated. Thus, one could get a superficial impression of the Beats from Memoirs, but at the same time it does give one an insider's view of what it was like in the 1950s/60s for a woman to live in a way that women weren't supposed to live. I found it engaging and well-written. Poetic, in fact. And di Prima knows how to write about sex - that is for sure.

New book about Gregory Corso

Rick Schober recently finished compiling and editing his first book, The Whole Shot: Collected Interviews with Gregory Corso, and has set up a Kickstarter campaign to help raise funds to defray some of the costs associated with self-publishing it. The book is a collection of 13 interviews with Corso conducted between 1955 and 1982. Dick Brukenfeld, publisher of Corso's The Vestal Lady on Brattle and Other Poems (1955), wrote the introduction, which has some great anecdotes about Corso's early days in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and as a "stowaway" on the Harvard University campus.

Here's a link to the Kickstarter campaign: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1860098210/the-whole-shot-interviews-with-beat-poet-gregory-c

Corso is an important figure in the Beat world and I think this is definitely a worthwhile endeavor. Please consider supporting it!

Calling All Poets

The other day on Facebook there was a question about whether Lucien Carr was a poet (if you don't know who that is, do some research - it's required knowledge for a Kerouac fan). I asked for a definition of "poet" because I often struggle with understanding that label. I have posted a lot of poems on my other blog, Words Are My Drug of Choice. Does that make me a poet? Does one have to be published to be a poet? Does self-publishing count? Does posting on a blog count as being published? What about being published in an obscure little print ? Once. Does that make you a poet? Does reading your original poems at an event make you a poet? Or does having a poetic spirit make one a poet, despite written output and public performances?

I often see poems in the newspaper's Thursday supplement and more often than not I think to myself: I've written poems that good! But, hey, dude: that's just like, uh, my opinion, man.

Bottom line: I don't know what makes someone a poet and I sure don't know if I am one. I know my friend, Charlie James, is a poet. It's an unassailable fact. Why? A number of reasons, but not the least being that he writes amazing poems. And his self-published book of poems won first place in the 18th Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Award in the poetry category.

Anyway, for all "poets" near enough to make a trip to Waterville, Maine in April, check out this call for original poems by Maine Poetry Express (an initiative of Maine Poet Laureate Wesley McNair): click here.

I sent three along just for kicks (and joy and darkness). And to feed my fantasy that I'm a poet.

Whatever that word means....

The Grammy Awards and Jack Kerouac

Since the Grammy Awards are trending, I got to thinking about Kerouac and the Grammys. Some quick Internet research reveals that the CD, "Readings by Jack Kerouac on The Beat Generation," reissued by Verve Records in 1997, was nominated for a Grammy in 1999 for Best Recording Package.

So there you have it: a Kerouac-Grammy connection.

Here's a trivia question for Daily Beat readers: Did Jack ever write about the Grammy Awards? They started in 1959, so he definitely would have heard of them.

CaSsAdY. NeAl. YoU. BiRtHdAy. HaPpY!

On Facebook I've taken to wishing people a happy birthday as follows:

YoU. BiRtHdAy. HaPpY!

The phrase is something I saw somewhere along the line and I added the interspersed capital letters. I think the latter gives it a whimsical quality. The phrase itself reminds me of how my French Canadian friends talk, putting "you" in front of sentences where it's grammatically unnecessary. For example, they might (lovingly) say, "You. Fuck you."

Given that Jack Kerouac was of that heritage, I can imagine him using this phrasing.

But I digress. The point of this post is that today, Neal Cassady would have been 89 years old. He was perhaps most well-known as the real-life role model for Dean Moriarty in On the Road, Kerouac's most famous work. Here's a quote about Dean from the 1976 Penguin version:

Dean was the son of a wino, one of the most tottering bums of Larimer Street, and Dean had in fact been brought up generally on Larimer Street and thereabouts. He used to plead in court at the age of six to have his father set free. He used to beg in front of Larimer alleys and sneak the money back to his father, who waited among the broken bottles with an old buddy. Then when Dean grew up he began hanging around the Glenarm poolhalls; he set a Denver record for stealing cars and went to the reformatory. From the age of eleven to seventeen he was usually in reform school. His specialty was stealing cars, gunning for girls coming out of high school in the afteroon, driving them out to the mountains, making them, and coming back to sleep in any available hotel bathtub in town. (Kerouac, 1976, pp. 38-39)

On Thursday I asked my first year college class for some adjectives to describe Dean after having read this part of the book. The first student answered, "player." There was general agreement about that.

Was Neal Cassady a "player"? I guess that fits pretty well.

In any event, I was thinking about the Holy Goof today and thought I'd post a little something in his honor. There's a weekend-long Neal Cassady "birthday bash" going on in Denver right now, so if you're in those parts I hope you partake.

How do you think Neal would be celebrating his 89th if the fates hadn't intervened in Mexico in 1968?

Neal, we hardly knew ye....

Neal Cassady, member of the Beat Generation and Jack Kerouac muse, died this date in 1968, four days short of his 42nd birthday. Con man, driver extraordinaire, hyperkinetic, charmer, car thief, father, writer, Casanova, thinker, hustler, husband, railroad man -- whatever labels you may apply to him, Neal lived a lot in his time.

Yet, when it comes to people I've never met, I'm never sure if I really have an accurate sense of the person. Granted, between Kerouac's roman a clef fictional accounts, Neal's own letters (note the recent discovery of the missing Joan Anderson letter), biographies, etc., we can say we know a lot about the man. But who was he, really?

Just a Catholic boy on a search for God (as Kerouac described his On the Road character)?

In honor of the anniversary of Neal's too-young demise, your task is to read some Visions of Cody today (Neal is the title character, appearing as Cody Pomeray). Or, if you please, read some of Neal's autobiographical The First Third, or any of Kerouac's various novels where he appears (most famously as Dean Moriarty in On the Road).

Dion sang, "it seems the good they die young." So sometimes do the rascals, it would seem.

Happy Kerouacian New Year!

From the Lowell Sun Blog, Cctober 7, 2014

I haven't posted in over a month, not since the announcement came out about finding the Joan Anderson letter. Since then, of course, the legal wrangling has begun in earnest.

As expected, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.

Enough about that.

I seem to remember opining about having little left to say about Kerouac given my 1,100+ posts on the subject since 2008, and given that nothing I can possibly say hasn't already been said by someone, and given that anything "newsy" about Kerouac makes it to the Jack Kerouac Facebook page before I have a chance to post about it.

Not to mention that I am a dilettante where Kerouac is concerned. I have positioned myself at times as someone who knows a lot about the subject, but compared to the likes of Dave Moore, Gerry Nicosia, Paul Maher, Kurt Phaneuf, and others I have met in my Kerouacian travels, I am a supreme lightweight (at best).

Nothing, however, can take away from my absolute love affair with the man's words, and you can bet I will continue to read them and make pilgrimages to Lowell and stay abreast of the news (even when it's estate-related - ach!).

Speaking of which, the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac group just got a $10,000 donation from Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay (owner of the roll, scroll, whatever). That is very cool and it's always good to see dedication and perseverance to a great cause rewarded (he should have given them $100,000, but that is just my opinion).

Next, Mr. Irsay needs to fund Cat De Leon's traveling Kerouac exhibit. Check her out on Facebook here. That's her work at the top of this post. If you get a chance to see her exhibit, take it. I did not do so when I was in Lowell, and it's to my great regret.

But I ramble....

Here's hoping you had a great Christmas (or whatever you call the holiday - in the Kerouac world we defer to his Catholicism and call it Christmas, and if you don't like that, get off the airplane). Have a safe and Happy New Year (probably offended someone there, too) and don't do anything Jack wouldn't do!

MAY YOU USE THE DIAMONDCUTTER OF MERCY.

And dig the ride....