While it would be nearly
impossible (for me, anyway) to track down specifically what this poem is
referring to, it doesn’t matter. The clues in the text lay out a narrative:
Poem published, critical attack, Henry succumbs, lies down in a grave while the
critical dogs of the world bay at his corpse and pee on his headstone.
Something like that.
Doggedly one writes on. He did it.
I’m doing it. But I’m awash in reservations today. I’m going to quote from a
review of a collection of critical essays, from one of his former students, which
captures my misgivings, for this day, over this whole project I jumped into. I
swing back and forth. This is a “back” day, feeling fed up with narcissism in
all its guises. To quote: “After decades of living with him, so to speak, I
have come to regard him as a spoiled brat.” He came to class drunk and smoking,
shivering and sweating, having been shepherded there from the rehab hospital by
a caretaker, who would escort him straight back. He bullied his students,
celebrated the bullies and narcissists and near-criminals in the class,
ignoring or ridiculing the others. This report was toward the end, the
professor having been eviscerated by decades of relentless substance abuse. In
spite of it all, when he got on a roll, he was electric.
In this poem, he looks to be
getting all maudlin and drama-boy about one of his poems that got criticized,
and you know, jerk he could be, if he “published his girl’s bottom” in the
staid pages of an old weekly—and, wait, excuse me, published his girl’s bottom? What does that even mean? The
potential for a misogynistic reading of that line is almost breathtaking, but
there it is, and if there’s a resultant criticism of the atavistic jerkitude such
a statement seems to be exposing, well go figure, huh? DS 113, another reviewer
claims, is a record of one of his early classroom encounters with feminism. I
didn’t pick that up, but no one else does either. But, maybe the drunken old
boys of literary fame’s first rank from back in the day, of which he was a card-carrying
member of the club, found all that incipient feminism a bit disconcerting. When revolution starts building
pressure, the status quo power usually attempts to screw down the lid. If women
are in the next stage of saying “enough!”, then humiliation of them has utility
as a counter-force. Publish them girls’
bottoms, go ahead. That’ll teach her.
This gets under my skin today.
My intention in this blog, really
out of sheer ignorance, was to pull these poems and my responses to them in my
direction—like, it’s my blog. I’ve done some and I’ll do more of that. But I’m
aware today that there’s a kind of sordid magnificence to The Dream Songs in the aggregate that I was completely innocent of,
but that has its own horrible draw and power and is difficult to overcome. But
they’re still sordid. This sickens me some. The only thing that saves them at
all is that they’re frankly sordid.
On one level there’s a “screw you if you don’t like it” ethic, but at the same
time there’s this disgraceful groveling in response to criticism, which folds
right back in to the “screw you” and leavens it further, so that disgrace is
held out as a challenge and a tormented virtue. “You think that’s disgraceful?
Just watch this, fucker.” That kind
of thing. Geez. As long as you write about
it, anything goes. And what weirds it all beyond belief is that this is not
just all floating out there some fiction in language and in print. It’s lived. It’s embodied in the person, it’s
the foundation for the poetry. The art feeds the living madness, which feeds the
art, and it takes on an emergent form like a tornado. There is no life for its
own sake. That got shot early. The poet’s life matters most in abject
subjection to the art.
The other thing that saves it is
that life and the 60s have some pretty sordid details. Do we wallow in it? I’ve
tried three times to read Naked Lunch because
of its infamy, and because I wanted to read the scene that inspired Steely Dan’s
name, the best damn musical act of the 70s (along with Joni Mitchell, for
different reasons). I never made it to Steely Dan because the nausea of that
novel overwhelms me every time I stick my nose in it. I understand that it
matters as a novel because the record of the sickened, ruined, magnificent
imagination of the heroin addict is compelling, and there are apparently enough
readers out there with the stomach to endure the thing. Not me. I came up short,
and I have no intention of trying Naked
Lunch a fourth time. Now, I’m getting the connection between Naked Lunch and The Dream Songs, the life-record of the brilliant, devastated
alcoholic destroying himself who nevertheless maintains windows of feverish
clarity where he lays it all out there. DS 46 stands out as among the great
poems in English, I think. Many of the others meld into a long, stifling
recording of the squirmings of a self-abusive, narcissistic, misogynistic,
demonic Peter Pan. But you know what? We have a world full of these people, don’t
we? Biography, history, literature, and philosophy, I have this dopey
expectation that they ennoble us. Sometimes instead they get dragged right down
into the mud and the horse dung. Whether they ennoble the dung or not, I’m not
ready yet to say, but I got a nose full of it. One last thing: Apparently, when
B. finally jumped from a bridge, his final poetic gesture, the autopsy revealed
that the fall wasn’t what killed him. He suffocated from his face buried in the
mud. Figures. Reading that detail today is what triggered this whole rant. Now, I’m glad that’s off my chest. Time to go
somewhere and breathe. It’s spring out there, after all.
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