I have visited dead poets in famous cemeteries and found them at work. In the Protestant cemetery in Rome John Keats lies under a tombstone that does not bear his name. “This grave contains all that was mortal of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET who on his death bed in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, Desired These Words to be Engraven on his Tombstone: Here Lies One Whose Name is Writ in Water. February 24th 1821.” A lyre-shaped tree shadows the grave and shelters the cats of Rome, who love these grounds. Walt Whitman planned his monument, which rests in Camden, New Jersey, in a circular grove of oaks. The tomb cost Whitman more than his house. On the grave of Guillaume Apollinaire in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris there is a poem in the shape of an upside-down heart made from the words: MON COEUR PAREIL A UNE FLAMME RENVERSÉE (My Heart Like an Upside-Down Flame).
Tombstones are essential tools of poetry. I am not speaking only of the tombstones of poets, which are of course professional tools, but all tombstones. New Orleans cemeteries are among the most poetic I have ever visited. They are a mother lode for poets, and I have taken my students to them on many an occasion. Cemeteries bring out the storytellers in people. My friend James Nolan, a New Orleans—born poet who lived for many years in Spain and San Francisco, returned here and began writing stories about his family tomb. In New Orleans, he told me, the dead lead an active afterlife. They are invoked frequently, remembered often, and sometimes seen. More important, they speak to the living and aren’t really shy about it.
The voodoo religion, which is a mix of African worship and Catholic rite, takes the dead very seriously. Offerings are made at gravesites, and the dead are addressed with the greatest respect. The tomb of Marie Laveau, the so-called Voodoo Queen who popularized this practice in the late nineteenth century, is often festooned with charred bones, half- empty glasses of rum, cigars that have been a little smoked, coins, feathers, and prayer-poems. In the French Quarter courtyard of one of my friends, a stone voodoo shrine is mysteriously attended every full moon. The worshippers leave behind offerings, but my friend has never been able to see them, though he has waited and watched.
It is important that one get to one’s final resting place in vivid and memorable fashion. In New Orleans, the jazz funerals of important members of the black community are shining models of respect and remembrance. The deceased is seen off by musical bands, followed by dancing friends, acquaintances, and strangers. The throng sways under twirling yellow and black umbrellas, accompanying the deceased as near to the next world as it is possible for the living. Surely, by showing their affection in this way, they now have a friend in the next world. I once followed such a procession, without a clue as to who the departed was, and when we got to the cemetery, a man told us, “You have one trumpet on your side when you go.” It turned out the man was a trumpeteer. I don’t have my own waiter at Antoine’s, but I have a trumpet in heaven.
Another Autumn
Niciodata nu fu toamna mai frumoasa sufletului nostru doritor de moarte.
Autumn was never this splendid to our death-thirsty soul.
—Tudor Arghezi
Here it is, the rich golden light that announces for the umpteenth time that it’s autumn in the world, with its smell of apples and chalk. A new urgency grips the young, an old guilt spurs on the lassitude-heavy bodies of summer. We are all hurtling toward the millennium, resolved to make a difference, to make sense, to produce something. This autumn we will invent something greater than the spork—though it’s hard to imagine anything greater than that. Will we say, “We have come to a spork in the road?” or, “He was born with a silver spork in his mouth?” Probably not, but our new inventions will certainly attempt it. After the losses of each year, there seems to be more room in the world, there are voids everywhere.
Nineteen ninety-seven was a particularly grievous year. Many giants of American poetry are gone: Ginsberg, Burroughs, Jim Gustafson, Gerald Bums. Gone too are many mad children of the sixties, Heaven’s Gaters all, led like a flock of psychedelic geese by Timothy Leary, destination Comet Hale-Bopp. And closely behind them in the luminous void, the young British princess and the saint of lepers, all of them swept up by the ill winds of 1997. I remember only one year worse than that one, the year 1977, when some of my dearest friends were plucked in the flower of their youth. Is there something about seven, that number Europeans cross at the waist with a line, as if cancelling something? Is there something about the summers of years with the number seven in them? Numerologists may know something, but all I know is that fall narrows like a wind tunnel and the end of the year is in sight. If we come out of it, we should meet the new exigencies of the future, their faces veiled, their shapes unknown, their mysteries more promising and terrifying than ever. The future always lies in the womb of autumn—the inevitable fruit of loss and promise. But hard like a seed in the flesh of it is the bitterness of this year. And it was bitter.
To: James Grauerholz
Jim McCrary
Dear Ones:
Pass the word to WILLIAM that there is a huge hole on this prison-planet now that he’s joined his friends on the next level. My condolences to you. I imagine you’ll be swamped with memorials & regrets for the next year so I won’t make this too long. One thing’s for sure: William Burroughs won’t go to any Christian outfit. He’s straight up in the Buddha-place with Ginzy & Jack.
Andrei Codrescu
New Orleans
August 2, 1997
To: Allen Ginsberg
Naropa Institute
Boulder, Colorado
November 1, 1993
Dear Allen,
I have been pursuing your fleet form through lo these many months through many lands because we need you desperately! We (Exquisite Corpse staff) are going to publish an anthology called American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century.4 We need your long or short goodbye for our book. The book would be nothing without your goodbye because you are the poet of half this century. I am hoping that you can apply yourself to a millennial meditation for us. This is a call for poems, so naturally, we would prefer something composed in your incomparable first thought key. Failing that, we will take the work short or long that you think is most thematically appropriate. This will be a great book: we have asked one hundred or so of our most distinguished practitioners and they’ve all said yes. Our deadline is January 1, 1994. Please FAX back: 504-899-4608, to set our uneasy minds at ease. Say yes. The book will be published in the Fall of 1994 by Four Walls/Eight Windows in collaboration with Exquisite Corpse. It will be a hefty, rich and inclusive collection that will see the century off with the music it deserves.
I hope that you are happy.
Millennially Yours, With Love,
The Exquisite Corpse Editor
Andrei Codrescu
Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg, old courage teacher, is gone. I met Allen in 1966 when I was nineteen years old, fresh out of Romania. I knocked on his door in the Lower East Side in New York and brashly presented my baby-dissident credentials to the President of Poetry. Far from being startled, the poet gave generously of his time and welcomed me to the language, the country, and New York. We spoke French because my English was nonexistent, and he loaded me with books of poetry he thought I should read and study. Always the teacher, always generous, Allen Ginsberg was not only the most famous poet in the world, but the kindest as well. Over the years, it was always a privilege to bask in his light, to revel in the privilege of knowing him, to follow his passions. He was beloved of four generations of American poets, beginning with the one he founded and promoted, right down to the youngest of the young, children my son’s age, who love his work more than any other poet’s. He inspired rebellion and backed it with the wisdom of the age and the genius of a pacifist, benign, and visionary spirit. He brought us all into a family of great souls that included the Buddhist writers of the sutras, William Blake, and his twin soul, Walt Whitman. Allen Ginsberg was America’s best ambassador for the kind of dem
ocracy Walt Whitman extolled, and he deplored, cursed, and lamented the failings of public men to live up to that ideal. He lashed out against the wrongheaded war in Vietnam, he deplored the stupid official drug policies of the government, and he lobbied for sexual liberty. He defended the powerless at every turn, and, at the same time, he showed us all how to live without fear, and with joy and courage. Ginsberg believed in the power of poetry and served as mentor and protector of poets outside the mainstream. He founded the Jack Kerouac Institute of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, as an antidote to the establishment that belatedly honored him but denied his comrades and his heirs. He led the charge magnificently, a warm and intimate human being who understood the deep spirituality of the everyday and the long vision of who we are. I am sorry that he did not see the end of a century whose spirit he embodied, but his job is far from done. As long as Allen Ginsberg was alive, we were all sort of immortal. Now we can put away such foolishness, and get on with the poem.
Hello, Cosmos!
THIS FROM MY JOURNAL IN 1997:
The word is Tim Leary is going to kill himself “live” on the Internet, sometime during the next two weeks. You can turn on, tune in, and watch Tim drop out, in real time. You can download his last breath, catch his soul exit his body, witness the passage, all in color if you have a good computer. I’m not sure how I feel about it, but as an artist I can certainly commend him for this first-of-its-kind performance. The new art of Public Self-Snuff is now born, sure to be followed by the Internet Self-Snuff of many lesser luminaries, to be followed in time by public mass suicides. The avant-garde, as we know, always ends up at Wal-Mart sooner or later.
A while ago, I proposed the idea of the Net as an afterlife, which, I theorized, was nature’s way of thinning the affluent (who don’t die fast enough) with the help of their own toys. There are already cemeteries in cyberspace: now there will be live suicides and burials, too. (The poor will always die like they have, from poverty, diseases, and anonymity.)
Public death is, of course, nothing new. Executions were once public, the favorite entertainment of the rabble. People used to lift children on their shoulders to watch people die. What’s new is the potentially vast audience of voyeurs, assisting in the act. Move over, Kevorkian. We can now all be Kevorkians, ready to assist and abet. It will be a grand party. Some people will, doubtlessly, drop acid and make love, hoping to conceive at the very moment of Tim Leary’s death, for a chance his soul will enter the baby. Tim II may arrive before Tim I is properly eulogized.
Whatever Tim’s last words, I stand in awe. I remember trying once to read his Psychedelic Prayers, in a heightened state. I found them quite humorous. But now, before this great gesture, I stand in awe. Whatever Tim’s last words, ’tis pity we’ll hear no more his Irish charm and verve. Surely he will make a splendid saint in the Great Bardo. Go, Tim.
April 26, 1996
Timothy Leary did not die live on the Internet, but his head has been cryogenically preserved.
Week of the Dead
Jim Gustafson wrote this in his book of poetry, Virtue and Annihilation: “Oh, the dances we have done! The Ballet Diabolique, / The Wonderland One-Step, / The Dipso Calypso … / Everywhere we went … and we went everywhere / we danced. / Danced until the cows came home / and left / appalled. / We danced to keep from dreaming. / danced to keep from dying / but mostly / we just danced.”
On Sunday I went to Jim’s funeral in Detroit. My friend Jim Gustafson had danced his last. Jim was a poet and a novelist, bon vivant, raconteur, and legend. He was also my walking pal in San Francisco many years ago: We walked up and down hills, full of youth, poetry, life, and a terrible unfocused hunger for the world. We had no money at all, but we always contrived to find someone willing to buy us drinks. We were a spectacle, aerialists of the spirit. You had to be filled with wonder just to know how to watch us. The world was fresh then, all bud and sap. The sorrow and the dying that would soon overtake so many of our friends had not yet arrived. After San Francisco, Jim lived in Bolinas, Baltimore, and New York, before returning to Detroit, his beloved and scary city about which he once wrote: “Detroit lies there / like the head of a pig on a platter.” He called Detroit “Discount City” in one of his novels, and explained his return thus: “He’d run out of faith, explanations, workable teeth, traveler’s checks, cohesion, copulating partners and locomotion simultaneously.” Still, he found a core of adoring friends at the heart of Motor City, poets, artists, bartenders, and waitresses, who indulged him, admired his wit, and took, sighing, his late-night calls to listen to his latest poem.
Jim would have liked his wake: We told stories and read his new poems. We read his newest new poems which were eerily prescient in describing both the manner and the timing of his death. But then, good poets always know. César Vallejo, the Peruvian, knew that he would die on a rainy day in autumn in Paris. Jim Gustafson, the Detroiter, knew that his own brain would overtake him because it teemed with ideas and was never still. He even named the explosion in a poem: aneurysm. And he spelled it right.
I’ll go on telling Gustafson stories for years. Wherever I go there is usually someone who knew him and that is enough to make us light up and remember. Why, there was that time when we walked into the Coffee Gallery in San Francisco’s North Beach and signed up to read for the free wine. Trouble was we had no poems with us, so before our turn came we composed ten. And were the toast of the tavern. And then, there was that time when …
The Manners of the Unspeakable
We get older, people we love die, people we love are struck by disease, people we love draw closer in an ever-tightening circle of grief. Dying and illness have a sober set of requirements. How does one say what needs to be said, how does one say anything? No book can help you with this, because what you say to a dying friend must come from the heart and what’s in your heart is never in books, not even in the best ones.
I saw my friend and former student Matt Clark two nights before he died. He was hooked up to life supports in his own bed with his family around him. His breathing was labored. I couldn’t tell if he was conscious or not, but I like to think that he was, that he knew I was there. I kissed his forehead, held his hand, mumbled something about love. I couldn’t say, “it’s going to be all right,” because I knew that it wasn’t going to be, and I was no priest who might promise allrightness somewhere else. “Love,” it seems to me, is about the only word under the circumstances, but what an awkward word! Matt was young, thirty-two years old. He had worked for me one year, was a promising writer, a man with a sense of humor, and had an extraordinary ambition: He wanted to be a high-school teacher. He was sane, in the best sense of that word. I had certainly liked him, enjoyed his presence, was going to miss him. But “love” was there only in the end, a summary of all those feelings coming together in that single word-gush of sympathy and regret.
Matt was the youngest of those who died recently. The past two years have seen carnage among my contemporaries and my elders. Jim Gustafson. Kathy Acker, one of the bright lights of my young days in San Francisco. Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack Micheline, Timothy Leary—that generation, all gone at once, in a flock, the way they had often been perceived.
But death may not be the worst thing, after all. Worse than death is the knowledge that corruption has set in, that the creaking machinery of the body that had done so splendidly in love, is now menaced by sudden terrors. People have heart attacks, cancer stuns younger people, or, at least, so it seems from here. I hear this news and my first impulse is to run, to pretend that I didn’t hear. I don’t want to talk to them—probably because I fear contamination. Death is contagious and greedy. But, of course, I can’t. I have to do the grown-up thing, I have to call them, visit them, and assure them of my love, conscious too that I am assuaging my own guilty conscience and very little of their real pain.
Being a grown-up sucks, to coin a phrase.
How Do You Say Goodbye to the 20th C
entury?
ANOTHER QUESTION OF MANNERS
There are many ways to say goodbye to the twentieth century—at least as many as there are to leave your lover—and I will not enumerate all of them in all the languages I know. You know what happened in California when too many people said, “Have a nice day”—there was a four-year drought.
Most of us will say goodbye the way we said hello. In other words, we won’t say anything because we have no choice in the matter. It is usually the parents who say hello when a baby is born, not the other way around. The parents always say a big HELLO when a baby is born, but in the case of those of us, like myself, born just after World War II, our parents said a real BIG HELLO because the war was over. But it wasn’t an unambiguous HELLO, it was more like, HELLO, I HOPE YOU WON’T HAVE TO GO THROUGH THE SAME SHIT WE DID.
Well, we didn’t—we went through different shit.
Jack Skelley, a poet and reporter from Los Angeles, asked me, how do you say goodbye to the twentieth century, and I told him: You get two hundred poets to say it for you. Laura Rosenthal and I edited an anthology called American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century. We asked five hundred poets to write a poem saying goodbye to it: Three hundred of them didn’t want to. I don’t blame them. I’m superstitious myself and I wouldn’t want to say goodbye for fear that the century, in a bad mood, might say goodbye to me, before it was all over. In fact, it happened to several poets in our book: Charles Bukowski, Joe Cardarelli, Jim Gustafson, Gerald Burns, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Tom Dent. James Laughlin, who published the twentieth century, stayed out of it. He died before it was over, anyway. Others simply shied away from the whole idea because it was too portentous, maybe too pretentious. Others probably did not believe that there was such a thing as the twentieth century, an arbitrary division of time created for the convenience of historians and anthologizers.
The Devil Never Sleeps Page 5