I’m really pleased to announce that Masako’s Story by Kikuko Otake has gotten a great write-up by Susan Salter Reynolds on her “Discoveries” page for Sunday’s edition. The link is here. Thanks so much, L.A. Times! We love ya!
Sometimes projects seem to hang fire, so I’d like to update everyone on what’s happening. The long-anticipated Smithers and Watson books should be printed and bound by tomorrow and I should be able able to pick them up this week. The long-delayed Stater, Skillman and Croggin e-chapbooks are in progress. Bruce Stater’s Labyrinths (I’m more than happy to say) should be up on the ahadada site within a day or two. Skillman and Croggin’s e-chapbooks are in preparation. Once they are finished that will mark the end of our first round of e-chapbooks and the beginning of a new system of e-publication that is faster and less-stressful for everyone involved. The Kojiki, by Yoko Danno has made considerable progress but is still short of being finished by about 60 pages of proofing, if I gauge correctly on this rainy last day of September in Japan. Jesse
What Happened To Kerouac; an Investigation Of the King of the Beat Generation
Directed by Richard Lerner & Lewis MacAdams, 1986.
Shout DVD
I slipped this 1986 production in my DVD player a couple of nights ago after the wife and kids had fallen asleep, and while the trains to and from Tokyo roared by a hop skip and a jump away, and things were high-rise and pretty much all about the future outside my midnight window, I took a trip back in time to c. 1959 America. The first major point I want to make about this DVD is that it contains a young, electrifyingly handsome Kerouac doing his famous reading from On the Road. If this DVD contained only that clip, it would be worth the price. In fact, as the show proceeded, I found myself wishing that this clip was the only thing on the DVD, with options on speeding it up, slowing it down, listening only to the audio, perhaps having it simultaneously translated into Japanese (for friends who might drop by), French, Italian, and–what the heck–Mandarin too. The rest of the DVD outside of cameo appearances by a well-embalmed Huncke, an articulate Ann Charters, a righteous Diane di Prima, a super sound-byte by Creeley, an impressive Carolyn Cassady, a spookily laconic Burroughs, and a prim discussion by Snyder, was rather depressing. We see Neal Cassady a tick after his prime saying little but saying it quickly, a post-stroke Allen Ginsberg getting sly revenge on Jack’s mother, and the trickster antics of Gregory Corso, gumming his words like an old drunk in your home-town bar, holding forth like (see previous), urged on to greater mental triangulations by the off-screen producer, and finally making a weird kind of sense. Joyce Johnson reminisces about Jack on the eve of his On The Road fame. One of Jack’s wives tells it like it was (she couldn’t deal with dirty bathtubs, so she went home), and the secret star of the show–Jack’s wonderfully charismatic daughter Jan–also a writer–and beautiful–but doomed to die young–tells about comparing hand sizes with her pixilated dad while he watched the Beverly Hillbillies on television. Which brings up the painful parts of the video–almost as painful to me as watching a drunk Bukowski trying to kick his girlfriend in another DVD I saw recently–Jack being stupid on the William F. Buckley show, and Buckley egging him on, complete with snaky asides while a young, earnest Ed Sanders sits like an angel two seats down and is never really allowed to say much of anything. Jack comes across as a bully reeking of sweat and urine, hopeless, a soon-to-die wreck of what he was in the other clip. Gregory Corso at last fills the screen like the Fool in King Lear, however–wiser than his masters and mistresses–to really spell it out: success got Kerouac. All those people who wanted to tear off a piece of him for a souvenir, or buy him a gun to shoot himself with so they could say they’d done the deed later in case the camera crews came around, or buy him a drink, which was essentially the same thing as a gun–to kill his already gone beauty even more than it had been done in much hard-living, drugs and many toasts to the moon. Yes, I was mighty depressed approx. 90 minutes later when the credits started to roll and Thelonious Monk (who also died young) began to play. But this was Japan in the year 2007, and out the window the Future was winking red and blue lights.
Donne; The Reformed Soul
by John Stubbs
Penguin, 2006.
Now that the cheaper paperbook edition has come out, there’s no excuse not to get this book and devour it like a great ice cream. Not only is the subject wonderful, the history fascinating, but Stubbs’ writing is a joy. Here’s a particularly memorable passage I’d like to share with you from pages 30–31:
“[Donne’s] writing was not ‘poetic’, in the schoolroom sense of that word as something airy and removed from actuality. In Donne’s early poems, matters of the heart became matter. They could be touched, felt, lost, broken. He thought so much about a girl that her face became imprinted in him. Her face was minted on his heart like a monarch’s profile on a penny: it brought value to a random, even base scrap of metal. He put it on a chain around his lover’s neck. She carried his heart away like a trinket, and he became her medal. He discovered the way lovers end up belonging together: they leave their stuff, and bits of themselves, with each other. They possess each other’s souls, but as everyday items, like keys, small change or cheap jewelry, things with functional or sentimental value: the things that go missing most easily, and stop life in its tracks until they are recovered.”
What a great commentary on Donne’s poems, and a fine insight into the bower-bird instinct in humans involved in the courting game. I’m marking more passages in this rich text as I go and hope to present a few more in future postings. Jess
Chris Brownsward in the embodiment of Sheffield Langpo. I last saw him disappearing on a misty night after a reading at a local pub a couple years back, the light from his smile (reflection from the streetlamp/door light) diffused by the falling drops. I called farewell farewell after him thinking, there goes one whose name is writ, but am happy to report that I’ve been treated to several sets of Mr. Brownsward’s meditations on l=a=n=g=u=a=ge ever since, and they’re all rather similar to this:
Reek more pallid burn shot outwise into sky are
level stream fraught..low enough, the..often
trace of jasmine deep on breeze; held only for ex
-haustion’s touch. Blot if atrophied, pecks cloud
(from “(ecdysis)”)
Good for reading out loud over a pint of Old Speckled Hen (”watch it don’t scratch yer”), or at the Cambridge Festival for poetry, which is where Chris is likely to end up with his investigations. This booklet’s rather roughly put together and without price, but get a copy by writing to Chris at:
When I look back on the summer, I can only think that Ahadada Books and your humble correspondent was blessed by a summer full of wonderful women, beginning with a great exchange of letters with Anny Ballardini, the poet, translator, and editor of Fieralingual, and continuing through the publication of A-Jax by Mandy Laughtland’s Teeny Tiny Press, a wonderful correspondence with the amazing Gloria Oden, friend of Marianne Moore, Kenneth Rexroth, and Louise Bogan and author of a really fine book of poems titled Appearances (Saru, 2004), a continuing engagement with promoting Kikuko Otake’s Masako Story (so far two major reviews, one by a living legend), the publication of Yoko Danno’s Kojiki, and Elizabeth Smither’s long-overdue Ahadada Book (is at press even as we write), and the Hello Kitty! Renaissance brought about and continued by Catherine Daley and her witty Kiitty crew. (Catherine has opened up an office on the top floor of Ahadada Books, where she will remain as Muse-in-Residence for at least as long as it takes to edit and publish four special e-editions of interesting work of her own choosing. Dan and I agreed that we need a woman’s touch in our cyber-digs.) (Oh yes, and Eileen Tabios’ great book, reviewed below!) Moreover, my days were graced by my daughter and side-kick T-chan and our many speedy little trips around the city, primarily by bicycle. And finally–of course–a great thanks to my Better Half who proves again and again that she is indeed. Jess
“But,” said I, “is this Chinese romance one of their best?”
“By no means,” said Goethe; “the Chinese have thousands of them, and had when our forefathers were still living in the woods.
“I am more and more convinced,” he continued, “that poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of men. One makes it a little better than another, and swims on the surface a little longer than another–that is all. Herr von Mathisson must not think that he is the man, nor must I think that I am the man; but each must say to himself that the gift of poetry is by no means very rare, and that nobody need think very much of himself because he has written a good poem….”
Translated by John Oxenford. Northpoint Press, 1984. Page 133.
The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes; Our Autobiography
by Eileen R. Tabios
New York: Marsh Hawk Press, 2007.
Paperback. Perfect bound. 366 Pages plus notes.
The more I encounter Eileen Tabios’ writings–(and I mean that word “encounter” exactly as I wrote it, for to read Eileen Tabios is encounter her, no more, no less)–the more I’m convinced that she’s a force of nature instead of a mere scribbling mortal like the rest of us. I imagine Dr. Bucke must have felt the same way about Walt Whitman who time and again in his poems tells us that who touches his book touches him. (Of course his eventual encounter with the aging poet is a different matter.) Tabios manages to do the same thing with this book, and in fact even begins to talk in “we’s” instead of “I’s” toward the end of it. The big question is: how does she manage to pull this transfiguration off in a skeptical age when writing like this must be done with tongue firmly in cheek and a roll of the eyes to escape jeers and sneers? Well, first one must know exactly who one is to do it. Tabios is one of the most consistent personalities in contemporary women’s poetry. We know almost all there is to know about her, and if we don’t know it, a turn of the page or a click on one of her many website links will tell us! But isn’t this just a dazzling show of–narcissism? Absolutely not. Her seemingly artless style of writing draws one in and by the end of whatever it is we are reading we feel as if we were sitting in the living room of a gracious friend leaning near to tell us the story she needs to share with us at that particular moment. Often the tone is like that of a letter from your sister–you feel almost embarrassingly close to the writer. She addresses you as a “peep” and her team of readers as “peeps”! (I turn to the beat-up, jaded face in the mirror and giggle. “You are a peep” I say, feeling completely rejuvenated, but still managing to stick my tongue out just the same.) Moreover, she refers to herself over and over as “Moi”. Moi? So there is the sacred dichotomy in Tabios terms, or in other words, I and the Other. Yes, Tabios knows who she is–she is completely comfortable with her role as Other. But what exactly does that “Otherness” entail? First she is a Philippine-American writer and in her pages she displays the history, the culture, and the mind-set. Next she is a daughter who has lost her father, and we are allowed into the presence of the dead and given the opportunity to mourn with her, to over-hear her mother as she mummers to the body of the man she shared her life with, and to know the details of the mourning, the ritual and the burial. After that we move not only towards a revelation of the transfiguration of her father’s spirit, but a joyful openness and acceptance that takes the form of a series of collaborations with various poets and artists, and this arms-wide embracing of other Others and placing them between the same covers and in the same bindings–well, this is where she becomes larger than her readers and her boundaries drift off the page and assume the receding horizons of the world wide net. What energy! What charm! And this doesn’t even begin to address the many virtuoso forms she displays in her “warm” rather than “cool” experimentalism.
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