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This month's artwork is by Kim Martin.
The wonderful poetry, stories, and essays within are by:
The final part of the Perfect Vision trilogy is now available and this feels like a good time to evaluate all these poetic adventures as a whole.
Killer Road (2016) is pre-trilogy, and is dedicated to the German poet Christa Päffgen. She is known in our culture as Nico. The introductory piece is a spoken word reminder of the tragic death of Christa on the road "waiting for you like a finger pointing in the night." The other eight pieces on the album are the poems of Christa performed as spoken word by Patti Smith with a unique musical background from Soundwalk Collective. For those familiar with Nico's work these pieces are unexpected and create the desire to pull out the Nico versions, which are more adventurous. Over time as these new versions become friends, it is easier to accept them as new art performances. "There is no witness to my anger / When it stabs until it dies / I am looking for the strangler / To help me, help me with my crime".
The next three albums were announced as a triptych entitled The Perfect Vision, with spoken word pieces assembled and inspired from the work of three French poets Antonin Artaud, Arthur Rimbaud, and René Daumal. The Soundwalk Collective traveled to three regions of the world in an attempt to discover an authentic background ambiance for the words of each writer.
The Peyote Dance (2019) Recorded in the northwestern region of Mexico, the musicians were looking for inspiration in the same manner Antonin Artaud did in 1936. "I am the man who has best charted his inmost self." Humility aside, Artaud did profess an aversion for the external life being led in Europe, Asia, and the United States, and hoped to find a life of simplicity among the indigenous peoples of Mexico. He recognized the many tribes, and spent time with Tarahumara. His written observations inspired the beat writers, and Ferlinghetti's City Lights keeps translations of Artaud's work in print.
Patti's emotional reading of Indian Culture gives the distinct impression that Artaud was not enthralled with every aspect of Mexico. This track is especially effective and provides a strong introduction to the poetry that follows. A few tracks later in The New Revelations Of Being the tone changes dramatically to an acceptance of the cuture "here where the mother eats her sons / power eats power / short of war"
Patti writes her own words to deepen the listener's understanding of the reality of Artaud in the poem Ivry:
Mummer Love (2020) Like Artaud, Arthur Rimbaud left France for a time to escape from "western stagnation". Rimbaud chose Africa and ended up in Harar, Ethiopia. The musicians followed his path and spent time with Sufi masters and practioners, recording their music and chants, and ambient sounds. Artaud is given space to speak to us through Patti's voice making this a true and effective collaborative effort. Soundwalk Collective has also made recordings of Rimbaud "Illuminations" which can be accessed on their podcasts page.
I admit partiality to the final cut and tend to repeat it every time the album plays because a magical feeling of truth comes alive in me as Patti reminds all life is dependent on each other living thing. This lesson is learned by killing an old rock rat, and the energy reminds me of the poetry of Donovan Leitch: "first there is a mountain / then there is no mountain / then there is." Why does the mind make these leaps? We'll never know. Patti Smith and Sound Collective are able to capture that inner kingdom quality we all need from time to time to maintain a sense of mental balance. "Hi-ho / to the mountains go / where all / the flowers grow."
If I ruled the world, my personal choice for a future Patti and the Collective would be a wild and raucous take on Daumal's Night of Serious Drinking.
The Perfect Vision triptych works beautifully as a night of aural exploration into spoken word poetry & spirituality. It was good to experience them one at a time as they were released, and now that they are available to experience as a unit I do believe that when I revisit the set, I'll listen to them in order, in the same manner as I listen to Killer Road in the same session with Nico's final albums.
It sure is great when a writer can help readers like me get through a difficult subject with humor, and Garrison manages to do this with four to five out-loud laughs per page. Since I am reviewing this for a literary magazine, I will also mention that the poetry Garrison included in this slim volume about our second favorite small town in America, Lake Wobegon, is great fun. (Of course, everyone's most favorite small town is the one they happen to be holed up in during this crazy year called 2020).
Born to Raise Hell
I got sick of this old town,
No excitement to be found
Now everybody’s telling stories
How I trashed the lavatories
When I walked by the fire barn
I saw the box with the steel arm
I broke the glass, I rang the bell
I raised hell.
You can see my writing on the wall
In every lavatory stall.
Set off sirens during Mass,
Threw a rock through the stained glass.
I done my job very well
I was born to raise hell.
Other poets are mentioned and even quoted from. What a blast it was to attend a funeral and hear William Cullen Bryant brilliantly excerpted.
You can't have a novel about a virus in 2020 without mentioning the President by name, and yes, even Donald J. Trump gets a mention in this book because - well, it's best if you read it yourself. His presence is another snorting-milk-(or beer)-through-your-nose moment that would take longer to tell you why it's funny than to simply let you read it yourself in context. It all has to do with Johnny Rogers, a singing poet, who wrote immortal lines like:
Birches and a big elm tree,
On a porch just you and me.
Tulips all thick and sweet,
Lonely neighbors on the street.
The whistle of a southbound train,
Summer night, feels like rain.
The folks and I don’t belong.
Nobody knows us in this town.
Nobody needs us, that is clear.
So where do we go from here?
Crickets murmur in the grass
The trains go through and the hours pass.
and
You look at me like I was giving off an odor,
You got your daughter in the car and started up the motor
And you closed the windows and locked up the doors
And I thought to myself: Up yours.
and
Proud of Who I Am
My beer’s gone flat and I lost my hat
and I’m getting fat, she tells me.
It’s all that steak ’n’ burgers with bacon
that’s makin’ this great big belly.
An’ I walk with a gimp and I feel like a simp
and my willie’s gone limp and I’m stuck in
A lower gear and I’m out of beer
but I’m here so I’ll keep on truckin’.
True Americana poetry!
There are literally about a dozen events happening on each page, and somehow all working together to visit every aspect of life on our planet in these approx 230 pages. For the readers here, who are also mostly writers, the best advice about the writing life is openly hidden in these pages, with our main character reminiscing about meeting F. Scott Fitzgerald. A wonderful & thoughtful scene - and I know I'll be looking at my own writing much differently every day thanks to this fortuitous meeting.
So there you have it - philosophy, humor, birth, death, sex, alcohol, dreams, and another Great American Novel from Garrison, who managed to sneak a micropoem into the mix:
I write these short lines
With fear in my heart that they
Will make a haiku
=:-)