EDITORIAL

Welcome to Issue Nine. Nine, as everyone knows, is three times three, and, since three is the number of numbers, nine must be the number of the number of numbers.  According to my bible, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, "Each world - Heaven, Earth and Hell - is symbolised by the ternary figure of a triangle. Nine is the totality of the three worlds." Of course, there are nine muses - and therefore nine poets in this issue. Nine is also the number of months a baby takes to be born, there are nine planets and nine is the number which multiplied by any number you like always adds up to itself and therefore, on death, is always reborn in the sum. "Demeter wandered the world for nine days in search of her daughter Persephone", who had been abducted by Hades. So once again, nine is the number of death and rebirth. For a long time, Demeter has lain her curse on the world and caused nothing to grow (at least on the surface), but new shoots are appearing and it just so happens that their appearance coincides with Issue Nine of Ol' Chanty. (Perhaps it is also not insignificant that Occupy Wall Street began in the ninth month of 2011.) Anyway, whatever happens in 2012, whether it's the end of the world, or the beginning of a new cycle, a death and rebirth, nine is the number of the number of numbers.

This issue has a few writers and poets which it hasn't published before - and a few that it has. A long novel-excerpt which seems almost as finished as a short story - a perfectly excellent piece, in fact, that, with the rest of the novel, was published in November. (Details after the excerpt.) There is also a short poem by one of the poets which other magazines have considered not fit to publish. He wrote: "this poem just won't go.....a question of taste and decency...I've sent it out and it keeps coming back...oh no they say!"  Well, this is after all Britain, which always seems to want to regress to the time when table-legs had to be covered. It's no joke either. "Back to basics" someone once called it, by which he didn't mean back to the Paleolithic, but back to Victorian standards of decency.

Finally, it has been pointed out to me that Ol' Chanty would benefit from a smaller type-face and no justification. As for the former, a smaller type-face means more space between lines, and that makes it easier to read, so I've decided to give it a go, but I have too much nostalgia for old books and magazines not to use a justified format. Nonetheless, I'm not completely closed to suggestion and it might be good to hear people's opinions on that.

CONTENTS


POEM
John Bennett

POEM
Doug Draime
                                                                                                                                        
NOVEL-EXCERPT
Donald O'Donovan

 POEM
Brad Hamlin

QUOTE
Mark Hartenbach

POEM
David Waddilove

POEM
Louise Landes-Levi

ESSAY
Richard Livermore

POEM
Eric Chaet

POEMS
Paul Murphy

POEMS
Don Young

QUOTE
Lawrence Durrell

POEM
Christopher Barnes

JOKE

REVIEW
Richard Livermore

POEM   -   John Bennett



          Legit

        There is
        no legitimate
        outlet no
        legitimate
        affirmation
        confirmation
        sentient recognition.

        Everything is
        preordained
        pigeon-holed
        flat-line
        in a
        shriveled
        state of
        reduction.

        Yes I'm
        talking
        history
        philosophy
        science
        literature
        religion
        all the
        ways we
        try to
        contain what 
        contains us.

        Step out
        of the
        box &
        be blown
        thru the
        galaxies.








POEM   -   Doug Draime


Sometimes

sometimes it points to the sky
of blue pointing like a bird
dog. sometimes it buries itself
deep in the nothingness
of political thinking. sometimes
it screams through the black
black lies once told by you
and I. sometimes it just sits
there like J.Edgar Hoover
with a cheap tape recorder
plotting your death. sometimes
it spends years adding up numbers
in an attempt to round off
infinity. sometimes it hides
in the couch with change
from 100’s of pockets.
sometimes it burns and burns
the trees we can’t see the
forest for. sometimes
it runs like a out of control
driver less locomotive down a
steep mountain pass.
sometimes it stands trendy poets
up against the wall of
timeless literature and shoots them.
sometimes it lances boils on the
butts of opossums. sometimes it checks 
into motels under the names of
Curly, Moe and Larry. sometimes it
loves beauty for the right reasons.
sometimes it can name every
painting in the Chicago Art Museum
blindfolded. sometimes it is impossible
to decode with extra sensory perception
or any other kind of perception.
sometimes it breaks your heart. sometimes
it plans wars on planets in
distant galaxies. sometimes it
whittles exquisite little angels
out of cherry wood. sometimes it stands on
its head and imitates Erica Jong.
sometimes it captures butterflies 
then sets them free in the Pope’s
bedroom. sometimes it goes into
tirades over the absurdity of
collective consciousness. sometimes it
teaches law students at Harvard how to make
tiny gas chambers. sometimes it stumbles around
in Dante’s Inferno selling copies of
Milton’s Paradise Lost. sometimes it poses
as P.T. Barnum standing behind 
a billboard trying to explain the difference
between propaganda and advertising.
sometimes it wishes on a star. sometimes
it pretends to be a tug boat on the
Mississippi in 1859. sometimes it’s
a relief. sometimes it surfaces
in London claiming it never knew
the gun was loaded. sometimes it
whirls like a ballet
dancer in the middle of
a completely empty Times
Square. sometimes it simply
is not there regardless of what
blind faith may say. sometimes
it counts all the hairs on your
head then splits them. sometimes
it can be caught adjusting the
color control on the telescope at
the Griffith Observatory.
sometimes it
peters out before you do. sometimes
it gets solar activity
to disrupt tv transmissions. 
it resembles a dove
flying above. sometimes it shoots out
street lights.
sometimes it never never stands
in a certain place overlooking
the Hudson river. sometimes it
has no remorse. sometimes it shines!
sometimes it rolls around in history.
sometimes it’s as lonely as a
grave. sometimes it sky drives in
the Grand Canyon. sometimes it
can be heard giving a testimony on true
love at the Taj Mahal. sometimes it takes
pictures of fat men eating. sometimes
it fastens itself on the
back of poor judgment. sometimes it holds to
truths that are self evident. sometimes it wanders
around in the wilderness for 40 years missing
the way out repeatedly. sometimes it’s out of
focus. sometimes it has no reason
for being. sometimes it foams at the
mouth then spits up into oblivion. sometimes
it hammers invisible nails into
smog, sometimes it simply is! sometimes it
sets a course for Easter Island. sometimes
it walks the floors at Graceland. sometimes
it has a way of fooling the wisest of men.
sometimes it leaks information to
expired newspapers. sometimes it
has no way of coping. sometimes it
circles the covered wagons. sometimes it knows no
limits. sometimes it climbs mountains
dressed in a tuxedo. sometimes it
is released from bondage. sometimes it is
functional for a few minutes.
sometimes it divides nations,
sometimes it 
shimmers on the moonlit water. sometimes it runs a
race with stolen shoes. sometimes it pauses
for applause. sometimes it deals cards
from the bottom of the deck. sometimes it alters
events for diabolical purposes. sometimes it is
your friend. sometimes it jumps like a
jack rabbit into the red moon. sometimes it moves
around the bases like a 90 year old Babe Ruth.








                                  NOVEL EXCERPT 

Señor Lucky 
by
Donald O'Donovan
from
Highway

                                                                          
        “The jungle is dark but full of diamonds, Willy,” Doyle Junghammer proclaimed as we hoisted beers at the Angels Camp Tavern one night after our workout. “Remember? You remember what Ben said in Death of a Salesman?  When I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by God I was rich!”
      Before we left for South America Doyle gave me his estranged wife’s address and phone number—just in case “something happened”—and I gave Doyle Aunt Mizpah’s number in Brandon. We drove to Key West, sold Doyle's car, caught a Colombian freighter to Rio and a plane to our jumping-off point, Brasilia, a city of fizzing potassium street lights. Quickly, we found a cheap hotel and set about the task of buying the necessary gear, machetes, an ax, hammocks, mosquito netting, shovels, picks, a two-man sluice-box and other mining equipment. In less than a day we had everything we needed, according to Doyle's calculations, and at an excellent price. It had all gone swimmingly. Flushed with confidence, we decided to take a week to get our bearings, study the maps, and have a little fun. 
      There was another reason for our stopover in Brasilia which I won't dwell on but I mention it because it’s significant in the light of what later developed. Doyle, since our two-week voyage on the Colombian freighter, had been having stomach problems, and he wanted to take time out to see a doctor, and also to “get adjusted to the climate and the food.” All in all we were two weeks in the bars and brothels of Brasilia. I should have taken this stomach business of Doyle's as an early omen that our venture was shot in the ass but I was caught up in the excitement of it and also I was perhaps too young to believe in omens.
      We made the next leg of our journey on a riverboat carrying a cargo of kapok, tapir skulls, black balls of smoked rubber and half-cured caiman skins. Loaded with Indians, smiling children, dogs, pigs, pink orchids and mountains of mangoes, papayas and green bananas, the craft looked like a floating fruit salad. For a hundred miles we sailed the Araguaia River, a tributary of the Amazon, hugging the edge of the Mato Grosso, while flying fish vaulted out of the swirling chocolate water and flopped on deck.
      In Maraba we found a guide, Lucien, a personable young Indian with a bataloa, a thirty-foot boat, and we were off again without delay, navigating the Xingu, the Tapajos, the Madeira, the Purus, and then the great Amazon itself.
      We reached another stopping point some three weeks later near the confluence of the Rio Branco, the Rio Diablo and the Rio Negro, about 150 miles west of Manaus. There was a clearing in the jungle and a savoropanco, a thatched hut built by Indians that served as a shelter for fishermen and travelers. The gold fields, Lucien informed us, were now only a few miles distant.
      Since the savoropanco was unoccupied, we decided to take a few days to sort through our gear, make plans and swim in the clear, slow-moving water.  We spread out our gear in the savoropanco and strung up our hammocks. Lucien caught some large crayfish; the tails, when broiled, were every bit as good as lobster. Some Indian girls drifted out of the forest. They were curious, but shy at first. They brought us fruit; we gave them some rapadura and gaseosas, soft drinks. Before long they were sharing our hammocks. Making love for them was apparently as casual and natural a matter as shaking hands. At night we set out trotlines. One morning Doyle discovered that something had straightened one of his hooks. A paiche, Lucien informed us, or a pirarucu. The latter, he said, could easily reach the size of the bataloa. Intrigued, Doyle and I beefed up our tackle—stronger lines, bigger hooks, and we baited with a whole catfish. We were determined to catch one of these monsters.
      All told it was a delightful idyll at the savoropanco with the girls, the fresh-caught fish, and the lazy days spent swimming and dozing on the praia, the riverbank. I was happy and Doyle was ecstatic. “The jungle is dark but full of diamonds, Willy,” he kept repeating triumphantly.
      As I looked back over our adventure I realized that the clichés I'd heard all my life about South America had recently become real and palpable, the slumbering volcanoes, the peaks wrapped in mist, the quicksand, the vampire bats, the rotting rope bridges, the crocodiles, the shrunken heads, the soldier ants, the snakes that suck women's milk at night, the lost temples, the fabulous black orchids, the bandeirantes... Yet, somehow, none of this—the harshness of it, I mean, the danger—had touched us. Thus far we'd carried it all off with ridiculous ease. We had traversed the Mato Grosso, the White Man's Grave, without incident. And now the gold fields were within striking distance. Once again, as I had during our sojourn in Brasilia, I experienced a premature sense of accomplishment. I thought of the cruel Spaniards who came to these lands to find El Dorado and to carry off Atahualpa's Treasure. They died as they had lived, by the sword, the jungle swallowed them up, and the lost treasure cities remained unfound. Could it be then that Doyle and I would succeed where men such as Francisco Pizarro and Hernando de Soto had failed?
       One evening after a few tots of rum Doyle and I decided to spend the night on the bataloa, which Doyle had re-christened the “Queen Midas,” leaving Lucien in the savoropanco to guard the equipment and supplies. Drunk as we were, Doyle and I dutifully set out our baited lines, as we’d done on previous nights, then we retired. From the deck as I closed my eyes I could see the flickering light of Lucien's fire up at the savoropanco. Several hours later I awoke, feeling the river rushing beneath me. Something had changed. In the jungle you hear tales of rivers that rise overnight. Could this have been the case? I blinked my eyes. The twinkling light of Lucien's fire was gone, as was the familiar silhouette of the savoropanco. In the brilliant moonlight I saw a much narrower river. And we were moving. I reached for the mooring rope and pulled it in, with a clump of cana brava—wrenched up by the roots—attached. I shook Doyle awake. Then I noticed that one of our trotlines was taut and stretched well out in front of the bataloa. I grabbed the line and pulled. It felt as if we were hooked into a submarine. Then, as Doyle reached my side, we both saw a gigantic silvery flash as a great fish rolled some 300 feet in front of us in the moonlight.
       “Pirarucu,” Doyle whispered hoarsely. “Christ, that thing must weigh 500 pounds.”
      I unsheathed my machete and cut the line. Our forward motion slowed, but not by much since we were headed downstream, drifting with a swift-moving current. I grabbed a pole and tried to steer us in to shore while Doyle attempted to start the engine. The river was becoming shallower by the minute. I was afraid we were going to hit a rock. Ahead was a waterfall. I heard the engine cough but it was too late. I yelled at Doyle to jump, then I went over the side. There was a tremendous crunching sound of shattering timbers as the Queen Midas ran aground. I swam for the praia. Looking back I saw the Queen Midas balanced on top of a rushing waterfall less than thirty feet high, her propeller clean out of the water. Doyle, who had ridden out the crash, was unhurt. He waved at me from the cabin, killed the engine and gave me a sardonic smile: “Ain't this some shit?”
      The Queen Midas was gutted. We salvaged what few items we could, then started out on foot, following the river upstream, the object being to get back to the savoropanco, where our cache of supplies was stored. Since the river was constantly branching off into new tributaries, we had no way of knowing if we were even on the right river.
      As night began to fall at the end of our third day's march we spotted a blue light up ahead in a little clearing. Thinking we’d run upon an Indian campsite, we cautiously approached, Doyle with his gun drawn. But there was no one. The strange blue light, which illuminated the whole grotto, emanated from a fungus that grew at the base of an enormous dead tree. Exhausted, we flung ourselves down in this eerie yet somehow friendly spot and fell dead asleep.
      Hours later I was jolted awake by some instinct. An Indian was standing a few feet away from us, the blue light of the grotto glinting on his crossed cartridge belts.
      “Acu!” I began (the standard jungle greeting and the only Indian word I knew).
      “What does he want?” Doyle had awakened and had his gun out. The Indian, I noticed, had not drawn his.
      “Tenho fome, Capitão.”
      “He wants to eat,” I told Doyle.
      “Christ!” Doyle hissed, peering at his watch. “Can't he see it's three o'clock in the morning?”
      After breakfast I had a confab with the Indian. Although my Portuguese was very limited I managed to learn his name—Manolo—and that he wished to offer his services as our guide. There was a village, he assured me, a few days distant.
     Doyle, however, was not convinced that we should put ourselves in Manolo's hands. “What if it's a trick? What if there are more of them up ahead in this so-called village? And what about food? We've barely got enough for ourselves. And now we'll have to feed this motherfucker.”
      Over coffee we assessed our supplies. We had three pounds of flour, a pound of rice, two pounds of beans, half a pound of coffee, four cans of evaporated milk for our café com leite, some water purification tablets, sulfa and quinine, several bars of rapadura, some dried apricots, a few boxes of raisins, two quarts of whiskey, and our money cache—3,000,000 cruzeiros and nine 100-dollar bills American.
      Finally Doyle grudgingly agreed that our chances of surviving were better with Manolo than without him.
     “I guess we'll just have to trust him. Do you think he's on the level? Can this guy actually get us to this village or whatever it is?”
     As though he had grasped the import of Doyle's question, Manolo smiled faintly and muttered, “Se Deus quize, Capitão...”
      During the days that followed it became increasingly apparent, as Doyle and I agreed, that our decision had been a fortunate one. Although we didn't seem to be getting any closer to the village our diet greatly improved. The forest was teeming with animals, fish and birds, and Manolo knew which ones to eat and how to get them. Wild turkeys, pigs and iguanas he furnished in abundance, as well as veados, a tiny forest deer, very wary, absolutely delicious, and more than once he came up with a clutch of turtle eggs which were wonderful hard-boiled, creamy and very filling. Our survival now seemed so assured that I for one stopped worrying about getting to the village and enjoyed our day-to-day existence to the hilt for the adventure of it and for the wonders we encountered on our way—a transparent glass frog whose skeleton and beating heart were clearly visible, a praying mantis that perfectly imitated a leaf, a large lizard that tried to elude us by mimicking not only the color but the texture of the forest floor (we ate him). 
      Manolo was an excellent companion, cheerful and considerate, more than willing to carry his portion of the load, always ready with our café com leite in the morning. It didn't seem to matter to him how many miles we made in a day or whether we were in fact “getting anywhere.” Due to the lack of a common language I was able to learn very little of his background except that his home village was “far away” and that he had a wife and small children. Also, in the jungles of Brazil, one does not press men one meets on the trail for details of their personal lives. One of the first things I noticed about Manolo was that he squatted to urinate, like a woman. Later he informed me that a piranha had eaten his penis.
      One day after Manolo had shot a monkey and we'd put away a delicious meal, Doyle said to me: “Ask him where we can get some girls. Anything! I don't care what they look like. Tell him we'll pay.”
     It was strange... Here were three men in a trackless jungle with only a handful of words between us—I didn't even know how to say “woman” in Portuguese—yet in seconds I was able to convey Doyle's request to Manolo. He grinned, then squatted and began scratching in the mud with a stick. Curiously, what he drew was not a map but rather something like an ideogram—houses, an airplane, and a crude human figure with pendulous breasts. 
      “I will take you to Las Casas, Capitão.”
      After studying his stick drawing for a bit longer Manolo stood up, turned halfway around and pointed at the bush. And off we went, into the thickest stuff I've ever seen—massive trees linked by networks of strangling vines and rank undergrowth bristling with stinging nettles and punishing thorns. After an hour or so of this madness we reached a spot near a riverbank very much like the spot where Manolo had made his drawing—in fact, I would almost be willing to swear it was the same spot. Here, following Manolo's lead, we secured the guns in our packs, took off our boots and plunged into the shallow river. We were headed downstream now and with the current behind us we walked with loping, weightless steps. I felt elated. We were moving with the jungle now instead of fighting it.
      As night began to fall Manolo led us out of the river. We walked a short distance through the bush—the trees had thinned out—then Manolo paused, apparently listening intently to a sound only he could hear. He smiled and nodded at us encouragingly, then we resumed walking. A little farther on, same performance. Again, I could hear nothing at all. We went on. A third pause. This time I heard it—music, very faint, but it was unmistakably music—with a samba beat. We continued on. Now we could see a glow of pulsing lights. There was a clearing up ahead in the jungle. The music was louder now. I saw barbed wire, a gate, and a guard with a gun.
      “We have arrived, Capitão.”
      At the gate we got a shake from the guards. The man took Doyle's Ruger 357 and Manolo's 38 special. I wasn't carrying anything except my machete and a Buck knife but the guy took them too.
      Once we were inside the dancehall the strangeness began to wear off. It was just like any whorehouse in Mexico except that the bouncers were packing guns and the girls—Indian maidens in halters and miniskirts—spoke Portuguese.
      After a few cervejas I selected a girl. She said her name was Daniela. The price was amazingly cheap. I think it was 2,400 cruzeiros. The rooms were outside, in a courtyard. Chickens pecked in the red dust and a tapir sniffed at our toes as we made our way past the rows of stalls to our cuarto.
      Back at the bar, I waited for Doyle to return, which he soon did, looking rumpled and flushed, and we ordered more cervejas.
      At the bar we met Dr. Siquieros, who came from Madrid and spoke excellent Castilian but no English, a bright and articulate man with whom I sensed an immediate rapport. Dr. Siquieros filled me in on some of the background of “Las Casas,” the jungle whorehouse. It was owned by an American, Charles W. Lockheed, a mechanical engineer who'd made a fortune developing some sort of a fitting for an oil-drilling bit and had come to South America to build an empire in the jungle and live out his fantasies. Las Casas was famous throughout Brazil, Dr. Siquieros explained, and although most of the patrons were gold miners, smugglers and bandeirantes, it was also popular with tourists, who called the place “Señor Lucky's.” “Señor Lucky,” he went on, was a corruption of “Señor Lockheed.” That is, when “Lockheed” is pronounced by a Spanish or Portuguese speaker, it comes out, “Lucky.”
      It was strange, I reflected, with a glance at Doyle who stood at the bar listening vaguely to Dr. Siquieros (Doyle didn't understand Spanish) as he surveyed the lineup of Indian girls, strange, but wasn't it Doyle's dream exactly that Señor Lucky was living out? Señor Lucky had made a bundle and he had built an empire in the jungle, a fantasy kingdom in which he could orchestrate his experiences as he wished, without the nagging bit and bridle that society puts in a man's mouth. It was Doyle's dream exactly—except that Señor Lucky had already realized his dream.
      The old man—he was now past seventy, Dr. Siquieros said—had been a football star at Syracuse University, and as a part of his recreational fantasy Señor Lucky retained at his estate at the other end of the compound a number of young Indian girls outfitted in actual Syracuse University cheerleaders' uniforms—orange-and-black sweaters, pleated skirts, bobby socks and white shoes with pom-poms. 
      “When the mood comes over him he takes the little cheerleaders into his bedroom—sometimes five or six, sometimes ten—even twelve—an entire squad! Señor Lucky is a man of—how do you say—prodigious appetites.”
       I asked Dr. Siquieros if it would not be possible for Doyle and myself to meet Señor Lucky.
     “Of course! If you will excuse me for a bit I will see if I can arrange it. Once he learns that you are Americans he will undoubtedly invite you to stay on for at least a week or two.”
       After Doyle had gone to the room with another girl and returned I filled him in on my conversation with Dr. Siquieros. A few minutes later the jungle doctor came back and led us outside into the compound.
       We walked past an airstrip where a small plane was tethered, past a large loamy garden, clusters of huts, a watering trough, and finally a spacious lawn replete with croquet posts and wickets. Up ahead was a swimming pool and Jacuzzi and beyond that a stately mansion built in the Antebellum style of the American South.
      Señor Lucky received us in his study. Although Dr. Siquieros had informed me that his age was seventy-nine, the lord of this jungle empire looked no more than fifty. A formidable man, large, dynamic, wearing an editor's green eyeshade, he sat at a drafting desk cluttered with ceramic pots filled with pens, pencils, erasers, X-acto knives and the like.
       “Welcome,” he said. “I don't get many Americans here.”
      There was a tapping at the door and a smashing Indian girl entered, wearing an orange-and-black sweater, a short pleated skirt and white bunny-puffs. We were served iced drinks, Planter's Punch. Then Señor Lucky led us on a tour of the place. Everywhere you looked you saw the cheerleaders, just as Dr. Siquieros had said, vacuuming, dusting, polishing, busying silently about the great house.
      “You look like you've played a little ball,” Señor Lucky said suddenly, clapping me on the shoulder as we paused on the verandah. His manner was disarmingly affable, like that of a big friendly bear. At the same time his keen blue eyes were carefully sizing me up. I could hear his breath hissing through his hairy nostrils as he pulled me in close to his ponderous body.
      “Yes, sir! Fullback, University of Miami,” I blurted out, and quickly changed the subject. I'd never played football a day in my life and didn't know a touchdown from a hockey puck.
      Señor Lucky showed us his gym. It was posh. Mirrored walls, red carpets, state-of-the-art exercise machines and free weights. One of the cheerleaders who was polishing a mirror gave a little gasp as Doyle peeled off his shirt, revealing his segmented torso. Doyle and I hadn't touched a weight in months but we decided to hoist a few just to keep our hand in. The results were shocking. My bench press had dropped to 325 and Doyle struggled with 350. The jungle had done its work. 
        Using a set of straps, Señor Lucky did a few shoulder shrugs with a heavy bar he picked off a squat rack. Apparently he excelled at this movement, which works mainly the trapezius. I smelled the sour sweat from his armpits as he glowered at us, making insolent little clucking sounds in his throat. Neither Doyle nor I could touch the weight Señor Lucky had used, even with the straps, and notwithstanding the fact that the man was more than fifty years our senior. 
     It was right after this that Doyle collapsed—apparently a recurrence of the stomach problem he'd experienced in Brasilia, only this time it was accompanied by dizziness and a sudden, high fever.
       “Better get him right to bed,” Señor Lucky said. “This sort of thing happens in the jungle. It comes over you quickly. It's a good thing I have an excellent doctor on the premises. He's the chap who brought you to me, in fact. Dr. Siquieros. Unfortunately, he speaks no English. But perhaps you—”
       “Yes, of course. I'll take care of it.”
      After we'd gotten Doyle settled in a room under the care of Dr. Siquieros, Señor Lucky showed me to my room. It was spacious, clean, and there was a real bed. I felt elated.
      It was now quite late and I was exhausted. It had been an eventful day and the bed with its crisp clean sheets looked wonderfully inviting. I went to check on Doyle and learned from Dr. Siquieros that his fever had fallen and he was resting comfortably. Also that a room had been found for Manolo in the servants' quarters.
      I'd just gotten undressed when there came a knock at the door. It was Señor Lucky, with three of the cheerleaders in tow, and insisting that I permit the trio to spend the night with me. He wouldn't take no for an answer. The girls were giggly, full of fun, and utterly without inhibitions. It was a delightful night and nothing could have been further from the notion of “sin.”
      The days that followed were among the happiest of my life. I had everything a man could want: excellent quarters, good food, good companionship and good conversation (I mean Dr. Siquieros), and the attentions of the sweet cheerleaders. The gymnasium and pool were of course at my disposal, and if I felt like a stroll along a jungle trail, Manolo was always ready to accompany me.
      Doyle remained in bed under the care of Dr. Siquieros who drew numerous blood samples in an effort to determine just what sort of bug Doyle had in his system. I was happy to get away from Doyle for a while. Aside from lifting weights and now our concerted struggle to survive in the jungle we had no interests in common. I was even more pleased when Señor Lucky began visiting Doyle daily to discuss the standings of the college and professional football teams, a subject about which I knew nothing whatever.
      It might be imagined that Señor Lucky's life as lord over his jungle fantasy kingdom was a continual round of pleasure but that was not so. His romps with the cheerleaders were reserved for special evenings. He liked having them around; he basked in the special erotic ambiance he had created for himself, and this ambiance acted as a spur to his work, which was far and away his foremost interest. Although the income from his patented inventions and the revenue from the bar and brothel were more than sufficient to maintain his baronial lifestyle, he continued to work at his drawing board. The tables in his study were stacked high with drawings and blueprints, and often when the great man was seated for dinner I noticed that he’d forgotten to remove his green eyeshade. Frequently during the course of the meal he made notes on the tablecloth at his elbow.
      Life at the great house, or fazenda, as the servants called it, followed a measured and stately rhythm. We began the day at six a.m. with café com leite, after which Señor Lucky went directly to his study. I was free to order a sumptuous breakfast if I chose but more often I’d content myself with coffee and fresh suco de maracujá, passion fruit juice. At noon I’d join Señor Lucky for lunch or sometimes I’d eat with the servants. In the afternoon, before dinner, drinks were served on the verandah by the delightful cheerleaders—tall frosty glasses of a delicious concoction which earlier I referred to as Planter's Punch, but which, as I learned, was actually caipirinha, the national drink of Brazil, made from cachaça, a jungle rum, crushed whole limes and sugar poured over cracked ice. Dinner itself was a leisurely affair and featured a varied menu expertly prepared by Alfredo Alcides de Alcazar, a hotel chef from Manaus who was paid a handsome salary to stay on at the jungle kingdom. Alfredo's matambre (literally, “kills hunger”), made with marinated tapir instead of the traditional flank steak, was incomparable, as were the vegetables from Señor Lucky's garden—spinach, carrots, onions and zucchini. Feijoa was, of course, a standby, as was a fragrant carne con frutas, pork stewed with apricots, raisins, almonds, cinnamon and orange juice. Sometimes a veado, a diminutive forest deer such as Manolo had shot for us, was substituted for pork, with excellent results. On one occasion we were served tender barbecued slivers of some kind of meat (it may have been turtle) wrapped in manioc leaves, which numbed the tongue like cocaine.
      After dinner I’d repair to the dancehall for a few cervejas and to continue my ongoing discussions with Dr. Siquieros. As I said earlier, Dr. Siquieros and I hit it off very well. Doyle, on the other hand, didn't like Dr. Siquieros, mainly because the jungle doctor failed to measure up to Doyle's rigid standards of ultra-masculinity, his special all-American brand of barbershop machismo. Doyle referred to Dr. Siquieros as “the Queer” and “the Fruit,” or “El Maricón,” the only word of Spanish Doyle knew. While Dr. Siquieros may have been, at least in appearance, a little swishy—he was slightly built with long eyelashes and a soft, drooping mustache—he had something Doyle never dreamed of having: a bright, inquisitive and expansive mind.
      Was Dr. Siquieros even a “real” doctor, that is, a medical doctor? I couldn't be sure. In Brazil every man who considers himself of any consequence at all bears the title of Doctor or Colonel. The man himself was vague about his status as well as about his reasons for being in the jungle. I didn't press him for details. He didn't appear to be a dangerous man, but in Brazil one can never tell. Although he spoke no English he seemed to know London fairly well, also New York and LA. He mentioned that he’d taught Spanish Literature at the University of Madrid, and I believed him because it seemed to fit his character. The best thing about Dr. Siquieros, as far as I was concerned, was that he seemed to have plenty of time for conversation, and that he apparently felt, as I did, that our discussions and the ideas we tossed around were at least as important as whatever it was we had come to the jungle to do.
      Dr. Siquieros's favorite topic for discussion was Señor Lucky—not in the sense of exchanging gossip about the man but rather Señor Lucky as a convenient and readily accessible archetype of the extraordinary man, an in-house model of the man of destiny.
     “The man has 115 children,” Dr. Siquieros told me one afternoon as we sat at our customary table in the dancehall with two saucy young Indian strumpets. “In these villages they call such children 'botos,' that is, children sired by river dolphins. Señor Lucky treats his Indians well. He is kind, but stern, like a good father. They look up to him as their leader, almost as a god. As I may have already told you, his privileges among them include the jus primus noctis. And this privilege is freely given. Señor Lucky is not troubled, you see, by the great ennui such as you Americans complain of. This is a self-determined man. He makes his own rules. And his rules are fair and just. He is a benevolent despot. Which, by the way, is the best form of government. But today we no longer believe in the divine right of kings. The world has been stripped of myth…”
       The next day Dr. Siquieros came to me with some grave news. Doyle's condition had worsened during the night.
       “We must get your friend to a hospital. I can do no more for him here.”
       “What about the plane?”
      “The plane. That is an interesting story. The plane is missing a part. Señor Lucky sent to Manaus for the part but they wrote back and said they had to send to São Paulo. They said it would take two months and already it has been three. That is the jungle.”
      Señor Lucky provided me with a company of six bearers who took turns carrying Doyle's litter, also with ample supplies of food and water for the journey to Iquitos, the nearest town of any size. With Manolo as our guide we started out through the jungle. I tried to share the burden of carrying Doyle, but since I was nearly a foot taller than the other men it was impossible. We made frequent stops to check Doyle's IV-bottle, which we kept suspended above his body lashed to a stick, and to make sure that the ropes with which we had secured him to the litter weren’t cutting off his circulation at any point. Doyle slept most of the time. When he did wake up he was delirious and seemed to have no grasp of the situation. 
      And so we proceeded, a forced march through the jungle, with the tiny Indians bearing the litter of the great white god who had come to plunder the earth of its diamonds and gold. Manolo led, and sometimes I walked in front with him, or again sometimes I would drop back to the rear of the caravan. The men needed no encouragement or supervision. They marched bravely and seemed entirely cognizant of the seriousness of their task.
      The march was uneventful until, on the morning of the third day, as we approached the confluence of the Ucayali and an unnamed river near Pucallpa and the trees thinned, I dropped back a considerable distance—I could see the entire party, which had halted—and Manolo also dropped back, and approached me solemnly.
      “Capitão...”
      “Qué cosa, mi hijo?”
      “Ele esta morto, Capitão.”
      Manolo and I walked slowly back to join the others. I was stunned. Ragged black urubus—vultures—were slowly circling, and green bottle flies had already laid eggs in the corners of Doyle's mouth. Doyle's death was incidental. There was nothing violent or dramatic about it. A single leaf had fallen from a tree and had become a part—not of death—but of the swarming, teeming life of the jungle, the life that is a fever, an infection, a contagion.
      I ordered the stretcher-bearers to dig and we buried Doyle there on the muddy praia of the Ucayali River. I recited “De La Muerte Oscura,” by Federico Garcia Lorca in Spanish and the Lord's Prayer in English, then we all stood for a few moments in silence around the grave.
      It was decided that the six bearers would go back to Las Casas and Manolo and I would continue on to Iquitos. Accordingly, we divided up the food supplies and parted.
      When we neared Iquitos I asked Manolo if he would care to stay in town for a few days at the Hotel Imperial Amazonas, as my guest. But he declined. Perhaps Manolo really was a fugitive, as Doyle and I had often conjectured, a murderer who wanders the forest making a living where he can, always afraid of being recognized. Or it may have been simply that he didn't feel comfortable anywhere except in the jungle.
      I gave Manolo my portion of the food, my machete, my Buck knife, and also Doyle's Ruger 357 which I'd been carrying since we left Las Casas. Then I handed him a lump of bills, 850,000 cruzeiros. He stuffed the wad of bills into his pocket without counting it. I shook his hand, then we embraced.
       “Goodbye, my friend. Muito obrigado.”
       Manolo's eyes filled with tears. “Go with God, Capitão.”
      In end-of-the-world Iquitos, a backwater town of washed-out gold miners, smugglers, mercenary soldiers and out-of-work riverboat captains, I sat at the bar of the Hotel Imperial Amazonas and felt for the first time in my life that famous ennui which soldiers sometimes experience after a war. Up until now I had been carried along by the stream of events. I’d been towed in a drunken boat by a giant fish down a legendary river into the very heart of darkness. As I looked back over it now, the hardships we’d endured—the hunger, the stinging insects, the parasites that burrow under the skin—all that somehow fell away, leaving only the high spots, as if it had all been a grand adventure, the shimmering panorama that opened before the prow of the bataloa, the comradeship of brave, uncomplaining men, the empire in the center of the jungle and the white man who transformed himself into a god.
      In the jungle there had been no time to reflect, to question, to be afraid. Whatever of fear I experienced was momentary, born of an instant. The night, for example, when I stepped out of the savoropanco on the praia of the Rio Branco and heard a jaguar cough, very near; the moment when I awoke in the blue grotto and saw Manolo, armed to the teeth. But now I felt a dull, oppressive, indefinable fear, the neurotic fear that paralyzes a man and makes him incapable of acting, incapable of living. I was not only bored, I was scared. If the jungle could kill a big strapping man like Doyle Junghammer it could kill me, too. 
Days went by. I didn't know what to do. I wanted to be out in the bush, hungry, exhausted, wet, uncertain, but alive. But the struggle to survive was over. I had won. It should have been a time of celebration. But under the circumstances... Dimly I realized that I was obligated to contact Doyle Junghammer's wife, to inform her that I had buried her husband in an unmarked grave at the confluence of the Rio Ucayali and an unknown river near Pucallpa in the wilds of South America.
      More days passed and I did nothing. I counted my money. I had two 100-dollar bills American, 300,000 cruzeiros and some chickenfeed—just enough for a plane ticket, as it turned out. A plane... Yes, of course. It was becoming clear to me now. I had to catch a plane. I had to get out of Iquitos... 


For those who would like to find out more about, or buy a copy of, Highway, the novel from which the above excerpt is taken, the link below should be helpful:-

http://www.amazon.com/Highway-ebook/dp/B00680YVAQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1325179616&sr=1-1 













POEM - Brad Hamlin


Bukowski’s Bones

Poets
read better
when they’re alive

once they’re dead
their words
fall flat

you can’t imagine
them out there
in the world
anymore

fighting the same
fight
as you

you look at their
boxing gloves
and wonder
why the hell
they even tried

John Martin
sold Bukowski’s bones
as soon as he could
and why not?

publishing dead
people
isn’t any more fun
than having to
get up at
four in the morning

writing these words
that will fade
like disappearing
ink.










QUOTE - Mark Hartenbach

"Mirrors cling to whatever is set before them..."










POEMS – David Waddilove


Bystander

the metal burnished by
memory grows new
rust and oxidation in the
open air of
                elements
wind sweeping dictates the
forms shapes sounds of
                                   the present
 
 
vessels
 
my boat rammed by
her empty vessel
                         sinking my
craft with blameless
attack (there is no
one to blame
 
              i protest the
              sinking not
                 drowning
                                  her
ship sailing untenanted
                               drifts
            in search of mariners
to fill the boat with
                   ghosts


nouvelle cuisine

confected rage she
prepared a side of
impersonation masks of
a consistent self
 
i had the salad

POEM - Louise Landes Levi


OMICIDIO DI STATO
STEFFANO CUCCHI
 1978-2009

 Torture
has been legitimized/ the
military state & the polizia are in
agreement:  murder, kill, maime – actions that

are paid for & covertly applauded, while the official line
follows the 10 commandments 
& 
if you don’t follow them you will be fucked by-the-fuckers, 

Pedofilia,
 punished: if  you are an

artist or a pervert but if you are a
president or a priest - your proclivities will be protected,
by the same press that supposedly reports on
the’affairs’ of state’. This is

the 21st. century.. 

Artists
are ‘dangerous ‘for
Artists & Free Thinkers’ I read the clausei
in the SS cell/ ‘on your own day your are NOT believed’
Cause Celebre or just another death/

& so we work in secret, 
‘secet death’ of Steffano Cucchi,
(I’m in Italy now)
 &
             so 
                              many
                                                   others,

Because it’s legal to kill & maime if you are a state
& it is illegal to protest,  if you are  poet,
at least 
       very 
                              threatening,
or so I learned, a year ago, imprisoned,
for wanting


               to
                            read 
                                      a 
                                                poem.

 

                                 Castel del Piano
                                          2009

                                        ESSAY


        NAIVE AND SENTIMENTAL POETRY REVISITED
                                Richard Livermore


In his book Naive And Sentimental Poetry, Friedrich Von Schiller, (1759-1805) claims that poets can be divided into two main categories - the Naive and the Sentimental.  There are a number of difficulties, of course, in dividing poets up in this way, not least deciding exactly which poets fit into which categories and also whether some poets might conceivably fit into and/or be mixtures of both. After all, it is poles like the North and the South Poles we are dealing with and the concept of North and South Poles only acquire meaning through each other and all the latitudes in between. They are ideal points, convenient to refer to, but having no more of a special connection with reality than purely arbitrary points in the Equatorial or Temperate zones, except in terms of what they mean to us - eg, they are both very inhospitable places to live! Despite this, Schiller's thesis may contain a element of truth which I would like to explore in this essay.

The terms "naive" and "sentimental" both have pejorative associations in English. A naive person is one who is 'childlike' and easy to dupe; a sentimental person is one who cries when drunk,  dotes on dogs and gushes at the innocence (naivety?) of children. I think we can assume that Schiller had neither of these meanings in mind when he coined the two terms to cover the two types of poetry. (Indeed, as far as the English word "sentimental" goes, it appears not to accurately convey the meaning of the  German "sentimentalisch" and some translators have replaced it with the word "reflective".) In brief, Schiller believes that Naive poets are poets who write in unselfconscious and spontaneous ways, not so much to express ideas as to express their response to the world around them and nature. "Nature" here does not refer to the external 'nature' supposedly studied by scientists, but inner necessity, the nature of ourselves, for example, which compels us to act in the ways that we do. It might also refer to sensuous reality, unmediated by thought, which we are in direct day to day contact with. Sentimental poets, on the other hand, tend to write to express ideas. Their relationship with the world and nature is therefore not so immediate. In Schiller's own words, their "feeling for nature is like the feeling of an invalid for health." Nature is something they lack, in other words, and wish to draw closer to. Where Naive poets already have a direct connection with nature, Sentimental poets have only an indirect, one could say alienated, connection with nature and the sensuous world. What this means for Schiller is that Naive poets create out of their own finitude and, by remaining within that finitude, may achieve some kind of perfection or completeness, while Sentimental poets strive after some kind of ideal and, because they are thus divided from themselves and nature in this pursuit, cannot achieve  the same kind of perfection. 

The problem with Schiller's categories is, I believe, that none of us can be said to be completely part of or confined to nature and the sensuous world in the way he believes is true of the Naive poet. Presumably, unlike wild children brought up by deer or wolves who have no language and can't even be taught it, poets know how to use words - even Naive poets. They are thus immersed in what Lacan would call the Symbolic Order, which severs a direct connection with nature and the sensuous world - at least while language is being used. Words after all are not things which can be touched, smelt, tasted, though, of course, they can be heard in their spoken form and seen in their written form. However, even in these forms, their primary function is a semantic one; they induct us into the realm of meaning in ways that sensations do not; and in as far as they do, they involve us in the realm of ideas rather than sensuous things. That, in a sense, is the curse of language which not even Naive poets can fully escape from. However, it may also be  true that some poets who have a closer non-verbal relation to nature and the world around them will, by extension, have a more directly sensuous relationship with words than other poets - in the sense that Mallarme meant when he said that poems are not made up of ideas, but words.  If that is what Schiller means when he speaks of the Naive poet being closer to nature and the sensuous realm, then I can go along with him, but only so far. Poets are still immersed in language, words and the Symbolic Order. The difference between the Naive and the Sentimental poets lies entirely in their relationship with language and words. The purely Naive poet in the sense Schiller had in mind is a fiction, a myth, though perhaps a necessary one. All poets are Sentimental; some are just more Sentimental than others, because they are more focussed on ideas and their contents than the sensuous qualities inherent in language and words. This, however, is only a 'more or less' distinction, not an absolute one. It has a certain validity only when considering tendencies within poetry. A Sentimental poet who was completely divorced from sensuous language would not be a poet at all; and a Naive poet who was completely divorced from ideas, would be better employed writing jingles for advertising agencies rather than poetry. If we make these qualifications, it might still be useful to talk in terms of Naive and Sentimental Poetry.

Schiller was not only a poet and dramatist writing in Germany during the  Romantic period, he was also something of a philosopher in aesthetic matters whose philosophical ideas owed a great deal to Romanticism. Like other German philosophers, he can use a highly abstract language which makes his ideas difficult to grasp. For this reason, I can't pretend to have grasped all the convolutions of his thinking in Naive and Sentimental Poetry, though I think I have caught the gist of them. His characterisation of the Naive poet as a child of nature unselfconsciously warbling his native woodnotes wild and creating from a spontaneous impulse betrays the Romantic influence on his thought and what it owes to Rousseau, whose ideas regarding Man in a State of Nature had a profound impact  on the thought of the era. It should be born in mind that Rousseau considered the arts part of the corruption of our artificial civilised life, which we had fallen into since leaving the state of nature. Schiller did not go as far as Rousseau in condemning civilised culture, and therefore, by extension, poetry, but the distinction he drew between Naive and Sentimental Poetry reflects Rousseau's influence. The Naive was the natural and the Sentimental the civilised. Both kinds of poetry had their weaknesses and strengths vis a vis one another and he recognised that both were necessary each in its own way to the culture of poetry as a whole. Indeed, he regarded himself as a Sentimental poet and so he would hardly be likely to condemn Sentimental Poetry from a fundamentalist Rousseauist perspective. 

For Schiller, Naive Poetry is best exemplified by the Greeks, beginning with Homer and ending with Aeschylus and Sophocles. This he would say was the age of Naive Poetry. Euripides begins the 'descent' (or 'ascent') into Sentimental Poetry in drama because he brings a new reflective element into dramatic poetry. Sentimental Poetry, however, finds its first real flowering in the poetry of the Roman era. Virgil, compared to Homer, was a Sentimental poet whose genius is at one remove from the more 'natural' genius of Homer and he exercises that genius in an attempt to emulate Homer's achievement in The Iliad. From this perspective, The Aeniad is the archetypal Sentimental poem because it did not arise out of an impulse to portray the agony and ecstasy of war in immediate ways, like The Iliad, but rather out of a desire to justify 'Eternal Rome' through some kind of foundational myth. In other words, there was a propagandistic impulse behind it, which is absent from The Iliad.  (Of course, The Iliad contains all sorts of taken for granted assumptions about the way society and people should be and behave, but its chief focus is on the more immediate impact of war on those who are engaged in it.) Milton had a similar objective to Virgil, although in his case, it was Protestant Christianity and the need to "justify the ways of God to man." Indeed, there is a certain irony in his invoking the Muse after the manner of Homer at the start of Paradise Lost, as, by doing so, he was almost acknowledging the second-hand nature of his poetic project, even though he thought that he was pursuing "things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme". I think, therefore, that part of the difference between Naive and Sentimental Poetry has something to do with the literary nature of the latter compared to the former.

For Schiller, the Naive poet par excellence in the 'modern' world was Shakespeare, who seems to have written so abundantly out of himself that he simply had no need to emulate anyone else.  Of course, Shakespeare borrowed material from elsewhere, since anything was grist to his mill, but the manner in which he did so was wholly his own.  He seems to exemplify the Naive Poet also in the purely finite objectives of his work, which, among other things, seem to have been to make money, acquire a coat of arms, retire to his house and garden at New Place in Stratford-on-Avon, where he could buy lots of land and do deals in the grain-trade.  

I honestly don't know if Schiller is right in dividing poets up in this way, but I suspect that his thesis has a kernel of truth, if nothing else. It does appear that some poets write in a more natural way - or at least, the end-product gives that appearance - and that their work is more sensuous and because of that more finite in its objectives. Such a poetry draws attention more to the sensuous nature of the language being used than to the ideas being expressed. This doesn't mean to say that Naive poets are exclusively focused on the sensuous qualities of their poetry any more than Sentimental poets are exclusively focused on their ideas. As I have said, it's a more or less distinction.  We now live in the age of Sentimental Poetry, according to Schiller, an age in which criticism often flourishes at the expense of poetry itself. This is the age of reflection, rather than spontaneity, and therefore,  Naive poets don’t fare so well in it. “Poets of this Naive category are no longer at home in an artificial age. They are indeed scarcely even possible except they run wild in their own age and are preserved by some favourable destiny from its crippling influence."  This is one of the most important points raised by Schiller concerning the reflective culture of his time and, by extension, our own. It perhaps explains in part why some poets are taken less seriously than they ought and get relegated to some kind of critical limbo. Critics, after all, are, by and large, people of cultivated tastes and standards whose reflex loyalties are to this civilisation. Therefore, the more primordial aspects of Naive Poetry would probably be alien to them. It is, after all, much more difficult to talk about the more sensuous qualities of poetry than it is to talk about its more reflective aspects, which press more critical buttons. 

There is a certain truth in the belief that some poets are more poets of ideas than other poets. Some poets do seem to have a nucleus of interconnected conscious ideas that they want to express in their work, while others are more 'vacant' in that respect, and their response to ideas is more immediate and 'on the hoof', as it were. That is to say, although they may pick up ideas and drop them according to need, ideas don't lie at the heart of their work. If there is an overall unity to their work, it is a much more unconscious one. Hakim Bey has coined the term Immediatism, to cover this, I believe. Bey is  following in the footsteps of Rousseau in this respect, what with his ideas about the Return of the Primitive - which is somewhat akin to Freud's Return of the Repressed.  (It should not be confused with John Zerzon's Return to the Primitive.) The way Schiller describes the Naive poet seems to anticipate both Freud and Bey.  When he says of Naive poets, "From society they can never arise; but from outside it they still sometimes appear, but rather as strangers at whom one stares, and as uncouth sons of nature by whom one is irritated... By the critics, the true gamekeepers of taste, they are detested as trespassers whom one would prefer to suppress...", he seems to be describing a poet who is some kind of atavistic throwback, a poet who is not at home in a 'higher civilisation' like ours, which privileges critical thought and the idea of Literature which derives from it. 

Another way of looking at this is through the lense of a completely different tradition. The Hindu gods, Shiva and Vishnu apparently represent two different poles of awareness. Shiva symbolises unmediated consciousness, while Vishnu symbolises reflective or mediated consciousness, including self-consciousness.  Shiva presides over deep dreamless sleep, while Vishnu presides over dreams. Shiva is blind, while Vishnu sees. Perhaps that is why Shiva is associated with destruction and Vishnu with preservation. They belong to different poles in the human psyche - both equally necessary to the whole. The primitive, unconscious, destructive and chaotic energy of Shiva is blind, while the reflective activity of Vishnu, which stands above and directs it, knows much more what it is doing.  Both are essential to the creative act, which is why I say that the distinction between the Naive (Shiva) and the Sentimental (Vishnu) in poetry is a relative rather than absolute one. 

As long as we bear this in mind, I think Schiller's distinction has a lot more going for it than first meets the eye. It does seem to me that poets can  be divided up into the Naive and the Sentimental, between those who have a clear idea about what they are doing and do it in very self-conscious ways - even to the point of citing or invoking their precursors - and those who don't, since their basic approach to the writing of poetry is a largely unconscious one.  Some poets seem to come to poetry by default, as it were, not by design. Their chief inspiration isn't literary at all, but in a very real sense, 'natural'. That doesn't mean that they are children of nature devoid of art or technique, but that their art or technique is subsumed by the more immediate aspects of writing. In this sense, the Naive poet is naive in the original sense of the word - childlike, spontaneous, playful, but also impulsive and thoughtless, not to mention 'destructive' and 'irresponsible' - in a word untamed - and for that reason is persona non grata in a 'responsible', 'civilised' culture like ours. So, it does seem to me that, if we remove some of their romantic baggage, Schiller's ideas continue to resonate and that I think is what finally matters.











POEM - Eric Chaet



Plastic Santa

South Side, 1956 or ’57, I guess, Christmas time
plastic Santas given away with purchase
of washing machines or refrigerators
Polk Brothers crowded store on 63rd Street--
before malls, satellites, computers, smart phones--
they sponsored the Robin Hood show I watched on TV--
Robin was righteous, cunning, & skillful
the sheriff of Nottingham was betraying the people
as in Chicago Mayor Daley’s appointees--
cops, transit workers, street repair crews
guys you had to pay to enter or leave the world
take bets on horse races, sell liquor, pimp whores, etc.
& who went door to door at election time
to tell you who to vote for
like bullies at school--
no one even mentioned it or anything unjust or crazy
I had no idea what to do
& it hadn’t even occurred to me to control my anxiety.

One afternoon after school
trying to come up with a destination, destiny
I walked back & forth about a mile
California Boulevard to Kedzie Avenue
64th, 65th, 66th Street
& about half a mile back & forth
between 63rd & Marquette Boulevard
Richmond, Francisco, Mozart, Whipple, Albany, Troy--
hours—like a tiger in a cage--
Jesus! they use you to prop up what you tried to undo!--
dark early, little houses, dirty crusted snow
plastic Santas on porches
little red, green, spooky blue lights
like stars, I looked up but couldn’t see
sky covered with clouds, streetlamp bubble
cars coated with frozen grime along curbs.

When I gave up & went home--
nuclear family—each struggling forward alone--
my absence never mentioned, maybe never noticed.





POEMS - Paul Murphy



Yellow Christ

Elemental recesses
Lost imaginings
The immense circular
Wilderness, blue, noirish,
An inert diptych points to:

My Christ is pampered
Hung by his balls to the cross
To the ovulating light
To the unending womb
To the odious, hazy, Autumn.

To the Mother Superior's diaphragm
To every woman's sphincter
To muscular dystrophy
To madness in Muswell Hill
To chemicals sapping our collective will.

To my photo of Pol Pot
Fornicating on Uncle Joe Stalin.
To various homo-erotic scenes.
To contempt, to paltry things
To pathetic mice on You Tube.

To being so fucking politically correct
Why can't you shave Ireland!


Many Legged Winged Narcissus

You beat against my window
But I don't see you.
I've set the rhyme against you
Bleeds out of your body into

Chaos. You're repeated in time  
A form dripping acid into the room
Down the pipes, into the carpet's liver
Lambent like a jazz jelly roll

All spooned over the dessert dishes.
You're mad to be eaten by me
I'll snaffle you up like a sugared egg,
god's head or the limbs of Dionysus.







POEMS - Don Young


On the Passing of the Last Famous Member
of the Kennedy Family

Now as the band replays
the Kennedy funeral dirge
and the orators practice their art,
let us forget the endless gossip,
assassinations,
death by air or water,
the bloody futile war,
the endless wailing of widows.

Now lay the wreathe on the final tomb
and let the weeping offspring
embrace the family pride,
the family shame,
and let us all, for pity’s sake
be finally relieved
of pity and fear
for this deep dynastic tragedy.



Once By the Sea

The roiling waves never tire
of coming to our door.
We know the blinding glare of sand,
the awkward wiggling crabs,
the tiny birds on spindly legs
pecking at holes,
the dirty lazy gulls
drowsy in the sun.

The sea talks to itself
about the storm, the shrouding fog
and why it tossed back at us
huge stumps of oak,
barrels wrapped in wires
like birthday gifts,
the scarred mast of a ship
drowned in a forgotten war.

All night we made love,
and today we read the news--
how bombs blew up the twenty
diners in a hall,
how rough seas kept boats
from sucking up the oil spill,
how migrants with Christmas gifts
were stabbed, then robbed and raped.

My love in her morning loveliness,
indifferent to the news,
drinks in the salt perfume
and says the foam brings in
the message of Love
who came alive in the water
from the humbling of a god
onto the beach in Cyprus.

At night we drink our wine,
make love again
and after the coming ease
we hear the sailors hugging
their guitars and singing
to the beat of the sea
their dirges which they ded-
icate to death.

The stars, the moon are out
like a Christmas crèche
and in our sleep the sea
washes the world another time,
promising it will at the end
take us far out of the bay
to a harbor 
we little dream of.


Charles Dodgson and Alice

Charles and Alice, one “glorious day,”
glided smoothly on the river’s tide,
when Charles, living his wondrous tale,
took Alice down the rabbit hole.
A tall, thin man with dreamy eyes
he sang of a young girl’s joy,
her fears and dreams,
which once were his.
And so by going back into his past
he felt that Alice, in her prime,
would live with him in wonderland.


Virginia’s Fate

Her home in the early years
was like a deep cave, 
and often behind her blind
she’d hear the waves breaking
one, two, one, two,
which made her numb with grief.
And once, from her nursery window
she saw a flock of pigeons
settling in the blue morning,
and as she had the feeling
of everything ending,
the seeds of suicide
were planted in her mind.
Her manner, her niece reported,
was striding, never at rest
with shadowy temples over which
stretched transparent skin
showing threads of blue,
her bladed nose, like the breastbone
of a bird or wing of a bat,
showing the worn beauty of a hare’s paw.
Her moods would rise and plunge
as if she were walking on waves.
Writing had saved her and also
the gab of her neo-Pagans:
Eliot, her “American eunuch,”
Gide, defending the pederast,
Sackville-West with whom
she tried out “female love,”
Strachey, who in a highpitched voice
talked of sodomy all night,
affecting her as a symphony does
when all the violins are playing.
But as the August sun
blazed at its height,
making the grass transparent,
Leonard at his desk wrote down:
“Perhaps it’s a bad thing
to love somebody the way I love you.”
And Virginia in her studio wrote down:
“O death, I fling myself against you
unvanquished and  unyielding.”
But as the water haunted her, she said
“I’m sinking down,
I can’t face anymore
the horror of the rising waves
that swell about my heart
like the Ouse bursting its banks.
I hear now in my mind over and over
the chorus of birds chattering in Greek,
and so, weighed down with stones
I’m setting out across the garden
and going down deep in the Ouse
I’ll end up with my colors flying.”


A Tribute to Bob Dylan

His voice was like the scratching
of fingers on a board of slate,
but the gods, in a quirky mood,
gave him the gift of remembering
all the old songs of the balladeers,
as if, as a strolling troubadour,
he’d sung a courtly song for Eleanor –
“A love that’s pure...believes all things.”
He also sang as a feudal knight
who sang in Frederick’s armored hall –
“Take heed, take heed of the western wind,
Take heed of the stormy weather.
There’s something you can send to me –
Spanish boots of Spanish leather.”
He sang as if in a palace room
he sang his Lord Randall for the Queen –
“Oh where have you been, my blue-eyed son?...
Where have you been, my darling, young one?”
Then rounding out his master song for Woody 
he sang as if from the prairie grass –
“How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?”
No longer the rough, young kid
strumming his guitar in a smoky bar,
he sang as an aged, bearded bard
who’d gone through a life of trials,
which now he recalled
in bitter songs
his countrymen had never heard before.









QUOTE - Lawrence Durrell

"For the artist, I think, as for the public, no such thing as art exists; it only exists for the critics and those who live in the forebrain"








POEM - Christopher Barnes


Wank Splat!
 
You twitch what you are
and what you're far from.
Flirtation's fluffy,
a moonless sub-discipline
of blame-shifting.
 
You're short-cumming,
thin-skinned;
the upshot's emotomuscular,
in driblets offhanded to me;
you strain to be
a pardonable blob,
featherweight.
 
How shrinking you are
- sexiness should be your release.
In your palm stand-off lust
is a humble-spirited risk.
 




                                                         

JOKE

As the cabinet gathered round the deathbed of General Franco, they could hear the crowds outside.
'What is that noise?' said Franco.
'It is the people, my General.'
'What are they doing?'
'They are saying goodbye, my General.'
'Where are they going? Who said they could go?'












REVIEW





 PERILOUS PASSAGE 
Terry Wilson
Synergetic Press, 1 Bluebird Court, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
www.synergetic press.com
ISBN 978-0-907791-42-3
190 pp. $24.95 or £16.00

While reading Perilous Passage by Terry Wilson, I was also reading Iris Murdoch's rather tedious Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals and thinking to myself that Marx got it wrong. Philosophers have not tried to interpret the world or indeed change it; they have simply tried to control it. In contradistinction, the operative word in responding to Perilous Passage is not "interpret", "change" or "control", but "surrender", because there must be few works out there in which the author has surrendered to the movement of words in the manner evinced by this novel. If you are looking for such things as "character development" or a "coherent narrative" or the "authorial voice", you had better look elsewhere. On the other hand, if what you're after is a fast moving swirl of words with eddies and vortices to match, look no further. This novel's got it. Comparisons are rather inept. The nearest perhaps is William Burroughs, but Burroughs doesn't surrender in quite the way Wilson does. You can always lay hold of a character in Burroughs and trace its passage through some kind of narrative, for, despite the techniques of disruption he employs, Burroughs still remains boss. The personages who appear in Wilson's novel - you can't call them characters - have an almost hallucinatory aspect, as they appear out of the swirl and disappear back into it. Sometimes, they can be funny, like the two rather ambiguous young boys who hook up with the 'narrator', or the queen who tries to commiserate with him in a gay bar because 'she' thinks he's been stood up by his date. Nevertheless, they all seem to have this dissolving air of unreality about them. Terry Wilson definitely belongs to the same avant-garde as Burroughs, and frankly it's encouraging to know that such terms still have a meaning. 

So, what is Perilous Passage about? Is it about anything at all in fact, apart from the journey itself - the perilous passage? Well, suffice it to say that the work began as a response to the death of the author's mentor and 'guru', Brion Gysin, and became a way of working through his feelings of loss and despair. It has this autobiographical element in it, but it is also a fictional work focusing on the shamanic quest of the 'narrator' and all the 'enemy agents' in the world around him who stand in the way of his fulfilling his quest.

Brion Gysin was an artist of genius - he'd even been involved with the Surrealist movement in the thirties - before he was expelled by Andre Breton! (Who wasn't?) He was also a shamanic practicioner who, along with William Burroughs and others at the Beat Hotel in Paris in the 60s, developed the phenomenon which was known as The Third Mind. Furthermore, he collaborated with Burroughs and was the main influence behind the development of the cut-up technique which Burroughs used in his novels. From the Mid-Seventies onwards, Wilson became an apprentice to Gysin and also began his association with Burroughs. The present novel grew out of the author's disorientation at the death of his mentor. He has clearly absorbed the techniques developed by Gysin and Burroughs and in certain ways even surpasses them - especially in the direction of the dissociation which appears in his writing. The last section of the novel deals very vividly with the experience of taking ayahuasca with the shaman Don Roberto in the jungles of Peru as the culmination of his quest. 

It is not possible to do full justice to this remarkable novel in a short review such as this. One thing one can say, however, is that it represents a very worthy successor to the work of William Burroughs. The best way of responding to it is to lower your critical guard and simply surrender yourself to it in the way the author himself has surrendered to the shamanic quest of which the writing is an integral part rather than just an objectifying description. It is a unique achievement in which Terry Wilson, risking his sanity, embarks on a dangerous journey and returns from that journey intact.
                                                                                                                              Richard Livermore