Absence of the Hero (7 page)

All right:

The poets who are getting it done are David Pearson Etter, Irving Layton, Al Purdy, Larry Eigner, Genet.

The Ginsberg-Corso-Burroughs circle has been
swallowed by the big whale of adulation and they have
never quite recovered. But, alas, we have learned that the
difference between an artist and a
performer
is the difference
between God and a necktie salesman. Yet it is difficult
for most of us not to take the bait of
a
lifetime
erection. We are given the chance of dancing
easily in the lights before the fools or going back
to work as a dishwasher. Unfortunately, one can learn more
by washing dishes than one can by debating with James
Dickey, Jack Gilbert, Nemerov, and T. Weiss at 92nd St. and Lex Ave.

Poetry Chi
, once the thumper of the land with a young Ezra as European editor, has now diminished into the bones of its reputation; you can see one in any library, safely shining, saying nothing, heralding the same safe names. It is much like going to a Friday night concert: they open with the overture to
La Gazza Ladra
, follow with
L'Apr
è
s-midi d'un Faune
, slug them with Beethoven's 5th, and then send them home happy with some
Water Music
by good old Handel.

And now that I've buried
Poetry Chi
, let's move on. Another particular bone in the poetic throat is the work of Robert Creeley. I have been told by professors of English (those with “Dr.” appended to their names) that Robert Creeley is the miraculous confessor of all of our talents. Me, I have tried Creeley again and again. And it was always much like falling asleep at the beach the time I tried to read Steinbeck's
The Wayward Bus
. Try this for your insomnia.

But back to R.C. Usually as I return the books to the good
professors
with some such acidulous remark as: “It appears very thin. Nothing here.” Or: “What the hell are they trying to sell me?” I would always get the tender kindly smile through the beard, the hand-on-shoulder bit: “Oh, come now, he's not
that
bad!” Which all infers that
they
understand, they understand something which such a crude one as I does not. (The niceties, you know, the pure unadulterated phrasing, etc., etc.) But the bearded Dr.'s in Creeley-shadows are good souls after all: they will forgive everything but their own convictions.

And then too—I might be a bitter old man because I somehow get the feeling that they are
afraid
of Creeley. Why this should be, I do not know; but perhaps it is because I am closer to washing dishes than I am to teaching in any University.

Creeley is
just one of the horrors and outcroppings of the
poetry
-political
powerhouses: “The School.” But The Age of the Bomb has
taught us more than the mushroom; it has taught us
not to swallow pap. “School” is out. The days of
schools are over. Thank God, or whoever is up there.
It is kind of intensifying in a banal sort of
way to think back to the good old days when
the “Imagists” drew up their manifesto with blood-stained fingers. But
most schools are invented by the critics, or by photographers
from
Life
magazine. Or by stodgy old men teaching English
in Midwestern Universities while being driven mad by the knees
and thighs of 19-year-old girls who do not pull their
skirts down because they'd like to “make” a B in
English; and, of course, the talk about
Allen
Tate, Dr.
Williams, Wallace Stevens, Y. Winters, and John the Crow bores them.

The state
of American poetry? U.S. poetry? Well, I've named you 2
Canadians and a Frenchman as good workmen. . . . But maybe somewhere
on the farm there's a boy working over a calf
who might later do it for us with a hot
typewriter. Right now, U.S.-wise, there's about as much guts showing
as at a tea for the Retired
Ladies
of the
Auxiliary to Chase Phantoms out of the Closets of Dog
Catchers. Whatever that means. Ah, right now a beer and
a dose of salts. Chicago, where's your Sandburg? The brave
teeth and big hand of Mencken? Sandburg, where's your banjo? Christ, christ, we need some music!

We are in bed. I am reading the racing charts
and she is reading
Russian Icons from the 12th to
the 15th Century
. She turns a page.

—See the Saint?

No.

—See him?

Yes.

—If I could only be asleep.

What?

—Everything would be all right.

Why?

—I see pretty pictures. Don't you see pretty pictures when you dream?

No.

—The Ascensions . . . look, who went into Heaven?

Christ, I don't know.

—What does the door mission of the Virgin mean?

I don't know.

—Ooh . . . isn't she
pretty
? You don't like her?

No.

—You don't like her because she can see into your soul.

That's enough. Sometimes I think religion is a giant Sadism.

—See that?

Yes, it's a guy with a hole in his chest and another guy in the hole.

—
That's
the Virgin Mary and the infant Christ is represented by a medallion. Tretykov Gallery, Moscow. About 1200. It's a painting of the Yaroslav school which wasn't in Moscow.

I see, I see.

—I keep seeing pictures of people stealing babies. What does it mean?

I don't know.

—That's St. George and the dragon.

I see.

—Look at the tiny little legs; that's the Novgorod School. Late 14th century, kinda nice. That's a cute dragon.

Goodnight, dear.

—Oh, LOOK, there's God!

Goodnight.

—Plate 6. No, that's Elijah. I'm sorry, it isn't God.

Goodnight.

—Here's somebody in a red teddy-bear suit. Hey, look at those wigs!

The book sells for 95 cents, MQ 455, introduction by Victor Lasareff. Keep your wife away from it.

a kiss for a good and talented fucker

getting old and older

and only recognized by a few of the

living, and so

the closed eye in the sky

marks us for our words—

If you are lucky, you might see him, someday, if you hurry—this stocky myth, this
¼
immortal.

If you are lucky you might see him in the
streets of
Athens
, just after nightfall. He will be dressed
in an old trenchcoat with buckle undone, belt dangling like
a limp and lost elephant's cock—he will be prowling the streets, owl-eyed, in search of his necessaries

in search

of the ghost, the god, the way, the luck.

Harry Norse. Hal. American bum slipping through Europe, year after sad mangled year, slipping on through the shadows of dead cities. Cities bombed dead, rebuilt dead, lived dead. Dead cities, dead people, dead days, dead cats, dead volcanoes, living grief, living madness, living dullness, living butchery—all our lovely ladies grown old, roses shot to shit, the works. Hal. Writing poems and getting by. Just.

He sleeps on a bed 6 inches off the ground
and the fleas cry
hallelujah
as he waits for his
check from
Evergreen
or the invisible hand slipping off the
thighs of Mars. Meanwhile, he sleeps in fits and spurts,
living under a temporarily inactive volcano (the rent's cheaper there)
which one of the best Greek geologists claims is on
an eruption timetable of tomorrow morning. (You've met these Greeks
in steambaths; they are not entirely to be ignored.)

Sweet christ, you must know that a man will go further for any poem than for any woman ever born.

Harold Norse. He can punch it out quietly. In style. Upside down. In grit. In fire. On fire. Tooth on tooth, hard. The smell of our butts. The cock of our shame. Light. Rabbit dream. The whole Bomb inside the head whistling Dixie.

Norse. American bum:

overheard

on the bridge

trucks are speeding under angels

. . . . on the riverbank two people

are breaking laws with their hips

Most people, almost all people do not know how to write, say, including Shakespeare, who wrote such terrible stuff that he fooled the whole mob, top to bottom. Other bad writers who fooled nearly everybody were E.A. Poe, Ibsen, G.B. Shaw, William Faulkner,
Tolstoy
, and Gogol. Today they are fooled by Mailer and Pasternak. That men do not know how to write and not only get away with it but are also immortalized is no more surprising than the length of phonies who reach the top of the cream in all areas of life and enterprise. You can find them all the way from Washington to the back room of Sharkey's.

Hal can write. Umm. I once
called him a “pro” but he took it a little
wrong and spit back, “Jersey Joe.” That's an old fighter
of the past, that's Wolcott. And I'll always remember old
Jersey Joe with a touch of heart, too. The way
he could land the important one.

Sometimes you've got to take a
lot to land the important one. It's all an act
of Art. All good men have the act of Art
in them. They can be plumbers or pimps but you
can spot it soon enough. It's a matter of grace
and easiness and gut and Sight. I've met more good
men in jails, in drunk tanks, in factories, at racetracks
than I ever have in English classes, Art classes, or
other writers knocking upon my door.

Just because men work with the
art form, this does not necessarily justify them or purify
their gut. For the same reason, priests and dwarfs or
legless men and whores are not to be elevated needlessly.

When I call Norse a “pro” I only mean that he is

the right man in the right place

doing it more than properly

and that's done so little that it's enough to make a man cry.

We all exalt the cauliflower-ear belter. Norse. American bum:

dante lived here

& got kicked out

now he's worshipped

like a saint

Harold Norse: poet:

kick him in the nuts

until he leaps wildly

among the dancing couples

until he falls

unconscious

out of the dream.

Christ, have you ever been in a hospital as much as I have? as much as Norse has? Laugh with us, the bedpan mewk, the Trojan horse.

nurses/stealing my pens/&roses/snakebrained/nurses/with wrong

medicine/they laugh/slamming doors/while
fragile old/ladies gasp

for breath/tubes stuck in their throats

Perhaps it is a mistake to give you parts of these poems for if this bit is accepted, you might get these poems in total anyhow; I am simply trying to pinpoint for you how well, how simply, how like his honor old Hotshot Jersey Joe gets it across, like Braddock got it across, coming off the relief rolls, to one fat and cocky Max Baer one night many nights ago. You know. My god:

ah go on

bury your head

in the bug-infested blanket

let the fleas

bounce in yr crotch

there are no

fuhrers of

enlightenment

baby

and he's right, we take it on the way in or out, sleeping under volcanoes or on park benches, it's sweet stale shit, this poeming, and it isn't that poeming is asking for sense or a chance or righteousness or $$$; it isn't really that at all.

None of us knows what it is. It's like awakening in the morning with a boil on your back and it won't go away. To ask a Patchenesque donation upon the qualities of our Art would be chickenshit—there are too many other good men with bad backs or good Art. And some with worse backs, some with Better Art.

But there sure as hell aren't any fuhrers of enlightenment, baby. And sometimes it makes for long evenings, sharp razors, accidents while cleaning shotguns.

Good writing, without fucking relent, is nothing but g.d. trying to bust through a wall of steel, and we are just not going to make it. But when I see the fade-outs, the flake-outs, the sell-outs, the chicken-livered punks of our age sucking it up, it's good to see the old hard head—the pro, Jersey Joe, still bumming the European sideroads, missing the ski meets, the Olympic games, the rich sag-tit balloon-head broads, and still hammering hammering.

the word.

I am listening to something by Wagner tonight over the radio, which is all right, and my 20-month-old daughter is asleep in the other room—the woman left her here while she went to some kind of Trotskyite meeting. And my crazy drawings are all over the walls and I am not even drunk yet. So I guess I can safely say,

old Pro Norse

I think that with 5 or 6 less of you

I might not have made it this

long.

man o man, that's enough.

—Charles Bukowski

Los Angeles, 1966