KEROUAC'S BIRTHDAY(--BIRTHDAY?

On the 21st October, anniversary of Kerouac's birthday (--birthday? --his death day dammit! though any of us who've known deep loss begin at some time to confuse the birth & death dates-- a memorial conflation, both happy & sad, forever fused),  I'm reading Lee Kofman's article Muses on Fire, excerpted from Kill Your Darlings magazine, reprinted in The Victorian Writer, April '15 issue, which I'd missed having been back home in England when it arrived and not seen till now. The iconic photograph of Cassady & Kerouac on full facing page catches my eye, apt even synchronous that it should crop up at this moment what with our HOWL 60th event of the 10th October still buzzing! Nothing like an anniversary to twig period, person, place. At every switched-on turn right now there's Ginsberg, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti et al. On Dave Moore's Jack Kerouac group's Facebook page I see Duane Potosky's drawing of Neal, no hands cigarette between his lips. There's Kerouac too, and on the artist's page sketches of his own stars of film, music, literature. Reading Lee Kofman and  thinking of Karl Gallagher, who's been in my mind since Dave Ellison rang to tell me that our friend, painter, poet, on-line publisher of Fitzroy Dreaming, is in hospital, bearing up, in a good frame of mind he says, being well looked after. I mean to say, Karl Gallagher! --first candidate for what we've named the D M, that zone of heaven & earth where the desperate mystics disport, --desperate only as Lee Kofman has quoted Kerouac, "the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn like fabulous yellow candles…" --this "now legendary sentence" she calls it…

Digress here (--as though all or any of this isn't! --this hold-all prose --parenthetical --dervish-turning to reach the essence of the impulse to begin --and begin one must-- starting out with a few accessories, literary equivalents of apple, chocolate, pen-knife --thanks Boy's Own Dad for that! --thus Kerouac, Kofman, Gallagher shoring up the expedition) : found an email from Paul & Ann Smith recording same news of Karl plus a phone-number to call, which I do today, 24th October, reporting to H.Q., touching base. Kerouac's birthday I say, not yet aware of my mistake. Is it? he says. Fancy that. And how was the Howl reading? Kerouac running around with the jugs of wine, did you do that? Hah! Helped ourselves! And who read Howl? Several poets, I say, male & female voices reprising & renovating the original. Organised by George Mouratides, who's one of the four younger scholars who edited the Scroll version of On the Road --I suggested or recruited a few readers, David Pepperell, Ken Trimble, Larry Schwartz. I was Mr Rexroth as MC, joking & kindly growling --and Ken Trimble… Ah, he's the real thing isn't he, Karl says… he read the McClure poems, I said --he's off on his world tour next year with new book of poems --Melbourne, Kyneton, & New Mexico with… Begin to pronounce "Joe Bottone" but swallow what could have spun into another Beat/God saga, though every reason to extol Joe's new poems, billowing sumptuous as the refrain of the Nick Cave song Into My Arms, which Ken's current poems coincidentally chime, and judging from his Facebook, Merton & Bede fulsomely in the wings… Image in mind now of Joe's monastery, Camaldoli, often quoted by Ken following his visit to Big Sur, and of Father Bede's Shantivanam, similarly experienced --also, sudden glinting, Bede Griffiths' Prinknash Abbey in Gloucestershire preceding Dom Sylvester Houedard --hah! hardly believe it! --comes to me out of the blue --sad to say out of the nowhere the British counter-culture's largely consigned to --Dom Sylvester as various as Merton, monk & poet of that era, Sixties & Seventies increasingly incredible as one's own momentum turns full circle effecting belated consideration & remembering… And then of image of Meherabad as shown me over the years by Dave Elison, but most recently illustrating one of Paul Smith's verse memoirs from his own New Humanity Books,  inscribed in my mind from Karl's postings of his pilgrimages, with Phil Motherwell too, among fellow Baba lovers, amidst less Indian cliche dust & petals than fertile Maharashtra lawn & grove…

Returning to Lee Kofman --she's keenly aware of brilliance's terrible other half, I say to Karl --exemplary of Neal Cassady & June Miller in the article : "while 'burning people' have the gift for making those around them feel fully alive by rendering the everyday into a glittering fairytale, in the process they often burn themselves out".  I'm wary of imposing too long with this hospital phone-call. Though he's been up for it he eventually says he'll probably hang up, but not before hailing Cassady & Kerouac. You know, he says, spiritual guys would go to San Quentin to talk to the prisoners, and they'd sometimes see Cassady, at the back, and he'd be glowing…Yes, and Kerouac, --the hopeless alcoholic, Karl says matter-of-fact.You were onto him quite young too? Yes, heard of him before I first read him… Dropped out of College, '64, desperate for deliverance from the cultureless town, poet & artist I assumed I was, --looking for any way out of it --escape to Paris? --quashed --Wales then, great in some respects but fell out with the mate I'd gone with-- hung out at the wonderful Southampton Art Gallery and the amazing upstairs Reference section of the Central Library --my 'further education'! --found Ihab Hassan writing on the post WW2 Americans, describing Charles Olson, for example, as the 'Dean of the Beats', --the Beats! Read about them, took notes in little fold-over letter-pad --but the first Kerouac I actually read was Big Sur, which was one of the numerous paperbacks I was selling in tiny kiosque aboard Sitmar Line'sFairstar late '65, the job I'd been demoted to after failing to cut it in the big shop according to my managers, --obliged to wear northern waters' blues and tropical whites past the Equator but evidently not really presentable to the passengers, aside from my atrocious attempts tying products in the hold for hoisting up to the main deck! --they were glad to hide me behind that little hatch, selling cigarettes, confectionary, & paperbacks! --and one day I picked it out, BIG SUR : "The story of the crack up of the King of the Beats" --and disbelievingly opened it --but the impact of that first line : "The church is blowing a sad windblown "Kathleen" on the bells in the skid row slums as I wake up all woebegone and goopy, groaning from another drinking bout and groaning most of all because I'd ruined my 'secret return' to San Francisco by getting silly drunk" & et cetera has remained with me these fifty years --I was his boy, once & for all!  Quick thoughts in my head about autobiography as history, and the chronicle poems of my friend Philip Kanlides, and, quite a propos, the celebrated Pi O whose epic, Fitzroy, was launched a week ago. Karl says, Kerouac kills a mouse and he's guilty & sad forever. Reading Kerouac, Karl says, I was knocked out by his honesty… I never heard someone talk about God so openly, he says. We share taking-it-all-in chuckles. Boys or old men, no where else to go.



[--fin, 25th October, '15
Westgarth, Oz--]

THE MERRY CREAK : POEMS & PIECES, #27, July 21st, 2013

 C. D. BARRON

THE DELPHI METHOD

  The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination
Blake

We may already be there …
imagination breeds us faster than we know …
the hyperdelphi has us streaming over
democratic pebbles to where
clod love and the shekhinah
call to us like ancient birds

The vapours seem so clear now
we lift devices to our ears
& click our fingers faster
to make more frenzy
of the numen-night

But that fellow selling ethylene
bottles it so sweet
with a label reading Real-time …
we willingly take a shot …
for the maban is taciturn
and sleeps in his cave

I can't remember your name
names change so fast these days
i've given up on them ...
now Beulah's moony shades are strangling
where her eyes sprout figs


[5/1/12
 NOTES :
'the delphi method' is a communication system developed in europe mainly in 70's around an idea of forecasting/e-democracy with the emphasis on structure in decision making but with anonymity of participants important (to minimise "bandwagon effect")   - Realtime Delphi is an online project of 100 experts worldwide to forecast breakthroughs in science and technology
Maurizio Bolognini - particularly of interest in this … he was asked to work on delphi method - his installation work partic. interactive v. interesting  - studio
hyperdelphi is Bolognini's website name .. From interactivity to democracy Towards a post-digital generative art   Ethics, Aesthetics & Techno-communication:  The Future of Meaning   (symposium  @ Bibliotheque Nationale de France 2008) MB in manifesto says he's interested in post-digital artistic practices  At the symposium MB quotes NAUM GABO'S Manifesto of Realism (1920)  "Above the tempest of our Weekdays" etc. Public generative art: from interactivity to democracy  (wonder where Stephen Jones is?)
the poem is caught in time warp between what's now and what prophecy was   the prophetic blake   the maban aboriginal wizard   the orig. greek delphi   merge and are available and unavailable  commercialisation/  politicisation   in a way none of it new   and effective?   do we believe in it?   blake hopefully holds it together  (remember his painting of virgil & history @ Tate 2000 …. deep u'standing of history)


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K. J. BISHOP

THE CRONE MEETS HER SON (ON A BATTLEFIELD)

The revolution, this time, was 'to actualise the marvellous'.
   The gunslinger

enlisted, far from sure of his part, for his weapons fired only
   common lead,

not multicoloured lights or waves of kundalini. But he had,
   in his dreams,

dived to the bottom of the ocean and seen the carcass of a
   whale, with hagfish

at it all around like mad sperm around a dead egg, devouring
   the infertile germ,

and felt his private share of responsibility, like a new organ
   in his body, a harmonica,

maybe. He had always been around the edges, among the
   listeners, tapping a foot,

but if he really was a boar leaping out of the sea, he wanted
   to know that furious joy.

There was no commander as such to give orders, so he found
   a place on the left flank

with the giraffes, and an old woman who had a tray of
   buttons and a thermos

of black coffee, infinitely replenishing, which she shared
   around like a suave host.

With gratitude he drank the unsweet brew in the tin cup and
   remembered how, as a boy,

he'd loved the tubes of buttons in the haberdasher's shop,
   like lasting candy,

kaleidoscopes, or magic money for buying magic things
   from magicians.

Perhaps, he mused, that was where his longtime love of
   finery budded in tulip-stripes.

Looking back, said the woman, it's all ravines and tempests.
   You're cold, have my coat,

he said, stripping down to waistcoat and watch-chain. It's
   bulletproof, and keeps the rain out.

Well, I like rain, but thank you, and here, choose some
   buttons, son. The pearl is smart,

but please yourself. Thank you, ma'am, and in the yellow
   dawn he chose plastic sections of Jupiter

and brass wafers for the charity of the poor, and pearl for the
   whale and the egg,

and fake tortoiseshell for the giraffes, and fuchsia velvet
   domes for sex and love

and loaded them in his old shotgun, and grinned like a fox
   sucking shit through a sieve

because that's how it's done, and he followed the old woman,
   who followed no one,

cocking her leg at every pillar, eating out of garbage cans,
   sniffing bums in trousers,

her jubilant howl assuring him this wasn't desertion at all.


[Note : The quote in The Crone Meet Her Son is from Franklin Rosemont's text 'Freedom of the Marvelous' (Catalogue of the World Surrealist Exhibition, 1976); "To overcome the contradiction between these marvellous moments and the everyday, to actualise the Marvelous in everyday life - that is the surrealist project."
First published in Electric Velocopede, 3 13, 2007, ]


-----------------------------------------------------------------------


PAUL HARPER

SUBLIME ENCOUNTERS

with the truth of pablo cycling as sky & water produce a mutual
disappearing trick in an accidental marathon with local thespians
pablo turns a sly profit of five dollars thirty pamela fainting pamela
preparing to go home pamela greets her father pamela & lady
devers pablo in a green room with a diva of inscrutable countenance
bus blocked by fire engine bus blocked by fire engine pablo pamela
& the leader of her majesties loyal opposition pablo a rubbish bin
full of snails & a flash of positive thinking pamela loves her ute serenity
pools is quite a promise a mechanism or vat or a head or everyones
with tubes ballooooooooooooons then slowly slowly novel furniture
knitting is scrupulously avoided & lived in shiny rectangles like stand
with babies in front of weatherboard boxes ahead of their time & drove
vehicles with sodden carpets in a shoebox proved surprisingly
problematic & driving daddies nice new car up the fairway proved no
cure for somehow peace happened & had a beer with a celebrity
acquaintance & embraced their inner geek & the season celebrated
with sunshine had a beer with their nemesis & walked home to various
players gradually deflates it earlier still a new housemate test cricket
in the other shoebox receding in the wake of an invisible glacier reveals
eighteen cakes of used soap but rare & unexpected sightings of embroidered
merop & spinifex grass wren we find to be what little we know of the epistle
persuades us two tubs of powdered chemicals a kitchen during a party
a trick knee tiny policeman a single highly polished green apple
& problems with a procedure known only as a drop are in the category
quite likely while overstated seems too weak or carbon group seventeen
seems unaware of the others existence but both believe a symphony
of uncertainty necessary yet somehow problematic with the eyes
of the ruling class fixed on them they did strange things many years ago
amid streams of & mountains in the forest of violins & their incompatible
yet finely articulated theories concerning flight they have an office to run
mail to sort people & things to administer & a seemingly permanent
vacancy next door in a house too ghastly to describe includes a gold
rush re-enactment village the phrase history a drift of pollen the usual
suspects in the hallway & a plastic bucket approaching egg yolk we
expect the mountain with a mouthful of base metals to sail through
with flying colours & with any luck that small room behind the walk
in pantry will remain firmly locked at the derelict science park we fail
to anticipate they wait we wait they leave shoeless in a blue bus


oOo

SLIGHTLY ASYMMETRICAL INDICATES QUALITY

Ten years listening to the rain . Twenty years hard candy .
Eighteen months tying shoe laces . 700 reasons .  A very
good 5 minutes . If you ' re delusional press 7 . [ ] 3 visits
to the thatched hut . The crying room . Mateship with birds .
An insult to puddles . [ Gold stars for breathing . 130 hours
of I told you so . 33 sec [ ] onds of excellence . Pot 8 O ' s .
105 % of the vote . My meta data is clean . 304 [ ] [ ] ways
[ ] to subvert the bourgeoisie & feel sexy . Clive & let Clive .
Four weeks in the chim [ ] ney . 293 fun sexy ways to urge
Capitalism towards a classless utopia . 10 ways to pleas [  e
the urban proletariat . Complete your Five Year Plan [ ] [ ] [
in thirty m [ inutes or less . Why multiverse ? My life as milk
carton . Can you ever have to [ ] [ o many butterflies ? One
unicorn [ ] [ ] [ is five Sistine Chapels . 3 quarks a day . 138
kilowatts of sportiness . Delete [ ] stimming . From yello [ w
to [ ] [ ] [ fuck off . God ' s chosen puppet . The rhythm fish .
Groovin ' the moo . With lard the possibilities are endless . [
Cherry uses her body to fight the Mafia . [ Lisa likes to open
the vortex . [ ] [ ] [ Ok Josephine back into the time machine .
Two ate nine . Irrevocably twen [ ] [ ty seven . Your I - thing .
A 1 . C 620 . Sitting [ ] in Broadcast House in 1 [735 . Sturm
[ ] & dialysis . Show me a s [ ane man & I will cure him . Nine
alpha . A light year of lead . The seve [ ] n forty ones . Let ' s
try to be the biggest [ possible hat . 640 nano metres orange .





--------------------------------------------------------------------------





ED MYCUE


LONELY ROAD TO THE SAN FRANCISCO MINT


Seven miles north from the Seven Mile House
Into San Francisco to the Ferry Building while
East a central California valley morning Tule fog
Burned-off into a sun's golden angel rushing over
The clown face remembered as history westering
Above the City and out over the Pacific Ocean's
Far scattered Island kingdoms into the Asian Orient.

But first come back to San Francisco's Bay edge
To those flats where a pony express stopped and
Might have stayed overnight at seven Mile House.
It's still there since 1853 on Bayshore still a lonely
Boulevard at San Francisco's southern end where
Today Brisbane begins at Geneva Avenue. Go north
Seven Miles to the Ferry Building and Mission street.

Then go west up a mile to the Old San Francisco Mint
Where Wells-Fargo stagecoaches changed the payloads
Having first pawed and paused at seven Mile House
Maybe stayed the night, delivered the mail, exchanged
Passengers, fed and watered the hard-pressed horses
Setting-out again into a night or dawn hooves pounding
On that still lonely Bayshore road to San Francisco.

(2013)



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EDITOR'S NOTES
The only contributor not to have appeared in previous issues is K J Bishop. She has two books published; The Etched City (2003), and That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (2013), from which the poem, The Crone Meets Her Son, is taken. Her web site is,
www.kjbishop.net

Paul Harper's continue to be seen in Rumours magazine; Chris Barron, Phillip Kanlidis read &  write voraciously, like many of us beneath the mainstream radar; Ed Mycue's latest publication is Song of San Francisco : Ten Poems (Spectacular Diseases, UK, 2012). You can see & hear Ed reading on www.youtube.com/watch?v=qal9yS1xch4

oOo

Edited & finally typed by Kris Hemensley on the little Apple this Sunday, 21st July, 2013.