Book of Haikus - by Jack Kerouac
edited with an introduction by Regina Wienreich. 200 pages. Penguin Books. 2003. $13.00.
One wonders in this world of poems who will make it to 2050 (supposing society, culture, civilization still survives in some fragmented form - please let's hear it for evolution!). I wonder who will be the definitive voices of the poetry of my time, our time on earth, and our era. It seems, more and more, as I approach my winter that Kerouac will be among that small number. His work as a body of imagination looms larger, larger than ever, more important now than ever, more innovative and vaster than previously considered. He: the word master, Zen master, philosophical master thinker, master action and one of the very, very few who can claim that too often tossed about title: poet. Kerouac's still the best and the more unpublished works that come forward, reveal his literature to have profound depth and poignancy. Wow, I think - it took the world more than 30 years after his death to publish out of attics and archives and notebooks this collection of vital poems. Book of Haikus gives us again a real focus to see the splendid merger of poet, imagination, philosophy, life style and exploratory innovation that was/is Kerouac. What major writer can take this form, this form that is now the most populace of all poetic forms and make it unique, so unique that a real voice emerges from the 6 billion billion haiku everywhere. In these strange and troubled times, the notion of stepping back and listening becomes the only place to which the mind can retreat for sanity. In these poems, I hear cats and birds and I see again the simple places we might all have, in our tiny back yards, at the corner of the street, corner of the room, seeing an insect, being an insect? birds are poetry. You have to thank Regina Wienreich. Thank you. She makes this book have a context without imposing her own self upon Kerouac's poems. Yet, she orders them, polishes the places for them, provides a haven. As one lives life, washes its dishes, has death steel all the garden hoses, it is important to have guides along the path. "Kerouac," I think Willie Alexander and The Boom Boom Band once said and sang, "up on top of my shelf?" This is another book for that top.
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Pausal Sighs - by Gregory Keith Cole.
60 pages. Sterling House Publishers, Inc. 440 Friday Road, Pittsburgh PA 15209. $9.95.
Hey, but maybe contact the poet: Gregory.Cole@Newberry.edu.
And fan mail: Gregory Cole, 1730 Dominick Avenue, Newberry, SC 29108.
In between the words are spaces - see them - they are silences and emptiness and they are part of the each and every self - you and me. They are stops and halts and in thinking there are also these spaces. Spaces between the spaces. Here in this moment, this moment between the moments is where Cole's poems genesis and his poetry brings some words together to give shape, grant shape, be shape to this emptiness that is substance that magic that surrounds us. I think like powdered sugar draping a bit of energy - that line around/between love, death, hate, affection, infection, dreams, wishes? here is, here in, is where this poet makes his magic. Bridging the chasms of consciousness with poetry.
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Road Kill - by RD Armstrong.
64pages. 12 Gauge Press. PO Box 6011, San Clemente, CA. 92674. $9.99.
Road Kill presents the shape of mind and it is only a mature poet comfortable enough in world and imagination that has confidence in his bridge, road, to poetry, who can capture sculpt such curves of the mind art into words poem on the page. He do this here and it are magnificent. The form this poetry engages is a road trip - 3247 miles in 16 days - Long Beach California up the cost to Seattle and back. The obvious, yes, Kerouac, Ginsberg - but all of that is just a point of origin. Not derivative. I write, not derivative but vibrant, original, new poetry is this poem. Its place in time the days prior and after 9/11. And more than those many, many, now too many poems that made some form of comment upon that sad day, this work captures the actual working of the mind as an American during those strange days. As document then it, I think, the most important of works of art that postulate about that instant. That instant seems now far gone in the midst of Caesar Bush's rich kid oil war against the mineral rich middle. A reaction, reflection. But I must return to: the shape of thinking of mind and gentle and sometimes jutting shift of thinking and thought and reflective and reality, realities pushin in always. RD Armstrong has made a form here. Seek here and find this word: original.
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Office Coffee - by Alan Horvath.
Kirpan Press, P.O. Box 2943, Vancouver, WA. 98688-2943. $5.00 + $1.00 for postage. Check to Alan Horvath.
You seen a bunch of these poems in this here: The-hold.com. Now you have a chance to buy the book with lots of extra poems. I say: do it. It is a book of poems about work. Not romantic like the old school working in an auto factory, or on the line in industry to save America from Nazi violence. No, no, no. This is a book about good old meaningless American office work. The work I do. The work you do. And it is ironic and cynical and perhaps the best book of poems I read about work in a good, good long time. At lease since Bukowski's Post Office. I wish I could give Horvath a prize but all I can do is write about this book of poetry, his book; this book is a welcome ray of light in the blankness expression of now work. The work you were at (are you at work reading this?) today. Let's see? Ok it has been 35 years, yes 35 years ago I started work? and miles to go before I sleep. I needed this book. You need it. As I began to read Alan Horvath's book, I kept wanting to get up and run to the phone, or hop on the email, or rush to my office or summon my fellow workers of the world and tell them about this fine book poems about working in a huge machine of office bureaucracy, how Horvath has captured all the daily shit of business and office life and how somebody from way across the county, somehow knows about the shit we eat, is eating the same office bullshit we were/are eating and how that the experience of the poet in some office was/is our experience, and how everything that appeared stupid and nasty and ugly and meaningless was ? our universal business office, American, day to day, work experience, or united work life bull shit fucked up crap job. I wanted to be on a chair in the parking lot reading this book of poems to them in the AM. I might do this! Look for my name in the paper. I am sure I will be arrested. But arrested for this book, I can not imagine a better thing. And I just could not put this book of poems down. It is a long way away from the place where any of us had a really meaningful job - even those jobs with meaning suffer the indignation of a bureaucratic machine full of its grossness and insincerity. Go get Horvath's book - it is only fin. You should have it in your desk at work and you must know that even your tired, piece of shit job, is poetry. Horvath makes all our stupid like piss ant lives the poem. Don't show your boss and if you do or are the boss, then? there is of course, an endless line of bosses. If you work in today's America, read this book, read this book again and again. If you are thinking about your career in some wonderful business office, read this book. If you like your poems full of irony, read this book. Damn, if you are an office worker, read this book, read this book, please, read it.
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