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I note that it's been almost a week since I've updated this blog. The primary reason for this, I guess, is that I've been doing very little reading in the past few days. I've been distracted by trying to follow the uprising in Egypt via the internet and television. I've been distracted also by keeping an eye on the succession of winter storms which have been rolling across the map. Some of these have been record-breaking; but, thankfully, not right here.
The final reason that I haven't been posting is that I've been writing an unusually large number of poems lately, which composition has taken up most of the early-morning time that I routinely consign to blogging. A couple of these poems can be read as posts below. A couple more of them are available by clicking their links on the "Rodak's Writings" sidebar to the left of this page. But to read the bulk of them, you would need to become my "friend" on Facebook. (Please, send me a request.)
The latest of these new poems, entitled "Sounds Like..." was inspired by my readings in the poetry collection, Giant Night, by Anne Waldman. She was in her early 20s when she wrote the poems in this collection. It was the late 1960s. She was married to her art and living in, or near, Greenwich Village, had just travelled to Europe, and was digging the Rolling Stones.
Giant Night reminds me--for all of those reasons--of Patti Smith's recent memoir, Just Kids; except that Giant Night is current reportage, while Just Kids is pure recollection. I was there, too, for most of it. Both women get it right.
Pray for spring.
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Showing posts with label Patti Smith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Patti Smith. Show all posts
Friday, February 4, 2011
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Readings: Just Beautiful
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I have taken great pleasure over the past week in reading Patti Smith’s memoir of her early days in New York City, Just Kids. Much of my enjoyment in reading this book has been the discovery of many parallels between Patti Smith’s experience of those years in the late 1960s and the 1970s and my own. She listened to much of the same music, read many of the same books, and visited many of the same places that defined my experience of that era. I will use excerpts from her book to provide examples of just a few of the many such correspondences which so affected me as I read.
Patti Smith is just a few months older than I am. She left her home in south Jersey to move to New York City in 1967, a few years before I left Ann Arbor for Brooklyn. Patti Smith also charted her first course for Brooklyn, and the neighborhood of the Pratt Institute; the very neighborhood in which is to be found my first Brooklyn address, 109 Greene Avenue. Here, she describes the same subway route that I would be taking to travel from my job in Manhattan to my Brooklyn apartment:
xxxAt twenty years old, I boarded the bus. I wore my dungarees, black turtleneck, and the old gray raincoat I had bought in Camden. My small suitcase, yellow-and-red plaid, held some drawing pencils, a notebook, Illuminations, a few pieces of clothing, and pictures of my siblings. I was superstitious. Today was a Monday; I was born on Monday. It was a good day to arrive in New York City. No one expected me. Everything awaited me.
xxxI immediately took the subway from Port Authority to Jay Street and Borough Hall, then to Hoyt-Schermerhorn and DeKalb Avenue.
I was also carrying a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations when I arrived in Brooklyn. Patti was almost certainly carrying the same paperback edition that I still have on my shelf to this day:
Compare Patti’s dream of Arthur Rimbaud as she depicts it here to my poem “Song for Rimbaud (on my 29th Birthday)”, written in 1976:
xxxOne afternoon I fell asleep on the floor amid my piles of books and papers, reentering the familiar terrain of a recurring apocalyptic dream. Tanks were draped in spangled cloth and hung with camel bells. Muslim and Christian angels were at one another’s throats, their feathers littering the surface of the shifting dunes. I plowed through revolution and despair and found, rooted in the treachery of the withered trees, a rolled leather case. And in that deteriorating case, in his own hand, the great lost work of Arthur Rimbaud.
xxxOne could imagine him strolling the banana gardens, ruminating in the language of science. In the hellhole of Harar, he manned the coffee fields and scaled the high Abyssinian plateau on horseback. In the deep night he lay beneath a moon perfectly ringed, like a majestic eye that saw him and presided over his sleep.
After Robert Mapplethorpe had acquired a male patron/lover and Patti had moved on to other men, they visited again:
On the surface, Robert [Mapplethorpe] seemed to have everything he had wished for. One after noon we sat in his loft, surrounded by the proofs of his burgeoning success. …He was now a man; yet in his presence I still felt like a girl. He gave me a length of Indian linen, a notebook, and a papier-mâché crow. The small things he had gathered during our long separation. We tried to fill in the spaces: “I played Tim Hardin songs for my lovers and told them of you. I took photographs for a translation of Season in Hell for you.”
I purchased that very edition of Season in Hell, on a whim, from a mail order house, some years ago. It now represents for me something like the completion of a circle.
I have taken great pleasure over the past week in reading Patti Smith’s memoir of her early days in New York City, Just Kids. Much of my enjoyment in reading this book has been the discovery of many parallels between Patti Smith’s experience of those years in the late 1960s and the 1970s and my own. She listened to much of the same music, read many of the same books, and visited many of the same places that defined my experience of that era. I will use excerpts from her book to provide examples of just a few of the many such correspondences which so affected me as I read.
Patti Smith is just a few months older than I am. She left her home in south Jersey to move to New York City in 1967, a few years before I left Ann Arbor for Brooklyn. Patti Smith also charted her first course for Brooklyn, and the neighborhood of the Pratt Institute; the very neighborhood in which is to be found my first Brooklyn address, 109 Greene Avenue. Here, she describes the same subway route that I would be taking to travel from my job in Manhattan to my Brooklyn apartment:
xxxAt twenty years old, I boarded the bus. I wore my dungarees, black turtleneck, and the old gray raincoat I had bought in Camden. My small suitcase, yellow-and-red plaid, held some drawing pencils, a notebook, Illuminations, a few pieces of clothing, and pictures of my siblings. I was superstitious. Today was a Monday; I was born on Monday. It was a good day to arrive in New York City. No one expected me. Everything awaited me.
xxxI immediately took the subway from Port Authority to Jay Street and Borough Hall, then to Hoyt-Schermerhorn and DeKalb Avenue.
I was also carrying a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations when I arrived in Brooklyn. Patti was almost certainly carrying the same paperback edition that I still have on my shelf to this day:
The next correspondence is not historical in nature. Keeping in mind that the greater context in each instance was a consideration of the nature of art, I was struck by this insight of Patti Smith’s as it parallels the ideas in my poem, “Adam,” which was written in the 1970s:
In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.
In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.
The next correspondence, as recalled by Patti Smith, is another historical one:
Gregory [Corso] took me to the St. Mark’s Poetry project, which was a poet’s collective at the historic church on East Tenth Street. When we went to listen to the poets read, Gregory would heckle them, punctuating the mundane with cries of Shit! No blood! Get a transfusion!
I, too, was taken to St. Mark’s to hear a poet read. My guide was the woman to whom I refer in this poem as “Leah.” The poet reading that night was Robert Lowell. And, yes, Gregory Corso was in attendance. And he heckled the great Lowell throughout the reading.
I, too, was taken to St. Mark’s to hear a poet read. My guide was the woman to whom I refer in this poem as “Leah.” The poet reading that night was Robert Lowell. And, yes, Gregory Corso was in attendance. And he heckled the great Lowell throughout the reading.
Compare Patti’s dream of Arthur Rimbaud as she depicts it here to my poem “Song for Rimbaud (on my 29th Birthday)”, written in 1976:
xxxOne afternoon I fell asleep on the floor amid my piles of books and papers, reentering the familiar terrain of a recurring apocalyptic dream. Tanks were draped in spangled cloth and hung with camel bells. Muslim and Christian angels were at one another’s throats, their feathers littering the surface of the shifting dunes. I plowed through revolution and despair and found, rooted in the treachery of the withered trees, a rolled leather case. And in that deteriorating case, in his own hand, the great lost work of Arthur Rimbaud.
xxxOne could imagine him strolling the banana gardens, ruminating in the language of science. In the hellhole of Harar, he manned the coffee fields and scaled the high Abyssinian plateau on horseback. In the deep night he lay beneath a moon perfectly ringed, like a majestic eye that saw him and presided over his sleep.
After Robert Mapplethorpe had acquired a male patron/lover and Patti had moved on to other men, they visited again:
On the surface, Robert [Mapplethorpe] seemed to have everything he had wished for. One after noon we sat in his loft, surrounded by the proofs of his burgeoning success. …He was now a man; yet in his presence I still felt like a girl. He gave me a length of Indian linen, a notebook, and a papier-mâché crow. The small things he had gathered during our long separation. We tried to fill in the spaces: “I played Tim Hardin songs for my lovers and told them of you. I took photographs for a translation of Season in Hell for you.”
I purchased that very edition of Season in Hell, on a whim, from a mail order house, some years ago. It now represents for me something like the completion of a circle.
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Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Quote du Jour: What Is Truth?
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It is my unsolicited testimonial that “Gloria”, written and sung by Van Morrison as the leader of the band Them in 1964, is a better little rocker than any of the Beatles’ little rockers. But don’t just take my word for it—ask Patti Smith.
That said, one must then give it serious consideration when Morrison is quoted in the March 9, 2009 issue of The New Yorker (Drive-By Dept. - “Listening Party”) as saying:
THE BEATLES WERE PERIPHERAL.
Hari Krishna, Batman! Revisionism? Or the truth at last?
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It is my unsolicited testimonial that “Gloria”, written and sung by Van Morrison as the leader of the band Them in 1964, is a better little rocker than any of the Beatles’ little rockers. But don’t just take my word for it—ask Patti Smith.
That said, one must then give it serious consideration when Morrison is quoted in the March 9, 2009 issue of The New Yorker (Drive-By Dept. - “Listening Party”) as saying:
THE BEATLES WERE PERIPHERAL.
Hari Krishna, Batman! Revisionism? Or the truth at last?
X
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Reflections: Boomer Gold
I went to the public library this morning to return a book (Cion) and came home with Annie Leibovitz’s coffee table book, American Music. In addition to the expected genius photography of many of the icons of blues, gospel, bluegrass, country, rock, hip-hop and jazz, this book also contains short essays on the music and its cyclical inspiration written by the musicians themselves. The first such mini-essay is by Patti Smith, a singer-songwriter of my generation whose music never fails to totally eviscerate me when I can muster the guts to listen to it.
I am going to quote below one paragraph from Patti’s essay. This paragraph provides a snapshot, as if made with a pin-hole camera, of the shared experience of every post-WWII kid who came to self-consciousness in the 1950s:
It was difficult reconciling the images of Hiroshima with the image I had of our country. When I questioned my father, he would say, “I did my duty, but the rest is man’s inhumanity to man.” He seldom talked about the war, but on Memorial Day he served in the color guard, and after the parade and a prayer for fallen soldiers we would celebrate in the field surrounding the Veterans Hall. Our mothers served hot dogs and potato salad. Our father played horseshoes. When the sun went down, we gathered around a bonfire, roasting marshmallows and singing. We sang of the railroad, the Dust Bowl, and the Erie Canal. We sang “Heart of My Heart” and “Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?” We sang about Jesus and Davy Crockett. It was the end of the fifties and everyone seemed happy.
Just in time for Memorial Day. Dig it.
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