About Steve Kowit

Wednesday was April 1st, known to us all as April Fools' Day. It's the same day that commences the start of National Poetry Month, a four-week span selected because of the famous T.S. Eliot's line from "The Waste Land" that "… April is the cruelest month…" Thursday, April 2nd was the day Steve Kowit, a great poet, a genuinely principled moralist, a quick-witted spirit of irrepressible good humor and no one's fool by any means, died. The irony of how a day dedicated to practical jokes, a commemorative poetry month selected for a line written by a reactionary, racist, dour by nonetheless brilliant poet, and the passing of one of the most jubilant poets and exuberant personalities collided the way they did is inescapable, I suppose. But rather than inspecting and interpreting too closely. 

It's better, more appropriate, more helpful to remember Steve Kowit as a man of many gifts, interests, passions, commitments, from his work in which he superbly fused the vernacular of street rhythm with the careful and skillfully off-center ear of a jazz improviser, his genius as a teacher where he combined that rarest thing, honest and productive criticism intended to make a poet a better writer. As a writer, he was loquacious who favored long lines, unexpected examples of what he was talking, odd turns of thought and colorful phrase-making and high-octane similes; for all is the love of chatter, though, there was cultivation, a genius for getting to the point in the seemingly effortless rhythm of a musician as he ad-libbed fine musical phrases and elegant filigrees over either the most accelerated or most relaxed of tempos. 

He made what he did sound simple, easy to do, but as any with a love of music and perhaps has even achieved a level of fluidity on an instrument, the aspect of effortlessness comes with practice, practice, practice. To that end, Steve was always practicing his craft, poetry, constantly honing his chops. I had always thought of Steve's poems as perhaps the best example of someone achieving the effect of someone musing out loud, thinking out loud, taking a topic sentence, a chance remark about something he had seen, heard, caught, and taking us through the dancing and delicately spun perorations of his thought as he came finally to rest, halt, at that place where there is a pause and Steve takes a deep breath and reveals how his experience of the world was altered by the event, the conversation, the book, the thing he heard or saw and thought remarkable.

 Remark he did, and for me, he was the most intimate of poets, a writer to whom someone is being addressed, spoken to, confided in.  Even if it were merely a matter of Steve loving the sound of his writing being resounded with the city cadences of his speaking voice, there was still the feeling that he was someone talking to you from across the table or leaning in closer to add an insight or a joke or some confidence that were for your ears alone. But for all the seeming effortlessness of making it seem as though he was talking seamlessly and without boundaries, off the cuff and unbound, Steve's writing did not, in large part, drift or wander lost in abstraction or confused association. In his workshops and the countless readings he'd given and in personal conversation, Steve talked about craft, rewriting, honing each poem until it was the most perfect expression it could be. Steve was constantly rewriting lyrics and would often introduce his poems as ones he'd been working on for months, even years. All this sounded incredible to me, a poet who was habitually writing fast and perhaps doing some minor tweaking; at first glance, all that revising seemed contrary to spontaneous expression. Later, I realized why there are so many poems that are so good. That feeling of effortlessness in his poems was the result of hard work. Steve loved poetry too much to put his least worthy efforts into the public conversation. 

Steve was a grand champion of other poets. He had an unfailing interest in others. He was the man we needed to have around when others spoke in code, euphemism, and fuzzy equivocation, Steve told his mind and cut to the chase. Likewise, he said his truth, as the saying goes these days. After a pause, the conversation would begin again, invigorated by Steve's skill at pulling the covers off those things --racism, exploitation, sexual inequality, militarism--that were obscured by babble and can. He taught his students to read a great variety of poets, learn a great many techniques honed by tradition, expand their notion of what poems can speak to, and find within the styles assimilated. The techniques mastered one's own voice as a writer who may tackle the subject with wit, originality, honesty, and great beauty.

One could argue with Steve about his passionate arguments against deliberately tricky poems. He considered the worst habits of late literary modernism--I adore my Eliot, cherish my Ashbery, I am invigorated by the rigor of Silliman, Armantrout, and Perelman-- but Steve made his case with the same sort of lyricism he brought to his poems. Steve felt that beauty was the expression of experience in ways that did not obscure the event and the memory; neither theory nor sentimentality would interfere with the sweet language he used to present the travails and noise and significant and minor frustrations of existence. Steve's best writing, which was prodigious, was about love, justice, lust, philosophical ironies that reduced, for the moment, the insurmountable hackery of what life in the city throws at you. Clarity of expression was Steve Kowit's genius--as wild as his poems became, as beautifully strung out as they could get on a metaphor or a pile-up of "then-what-happened?" that had the makings of an exceptionally hirsute shaggy dog story, Steve was in control of his instrument. He hated obscurantism and overly literary self-referencing and insisted that poetry is about the writer's engagement with the world they lived in, worked in, made love in, laughed and cried in, and not be a receptacle of meditations on its form. In conversation with him when I attended a workshop he conducted at San Diego State in the early eighties, I recall saying that he wasn't opposed to abstraction in poetry altogether. Not at all. What bothered him was the kind of writing that lay there, thick and more or less dormant, daring the reader to make sense of tangled syntax, private jokes and artlessly inserted intrusions from areas that offer more murk, not clarity. Poems either created the passion within the reader to think harder and deeper into the experience of their lives, or the poets failed in their Poetry was about the ear, not the footnote, not the end note. Poets needed to be in the world perfecting their craft, not in the study writing obscurities shared with only other obscure poets. Steve Kowit seemed like a force of nature, and even now, it's difficult to imagine a world without him.

I can still hear his voice each time we meet. I can still see him smiling, leaning in close, asking me if I was still "dry," even twenty-five years since my last drink. Likewise, I can still hear him telling me to proofread my poems and prose better. I can still remember him asking me to put a volume of my work together and send stuff out to the publishers for the love of God. Life is rewarded by the energy one puts into it. "Live" is a verb, after all, and Steve's message to anyone was to for those of us with things they want to do to get out there and live a little, take a stand, start a love affair, write a poem for your parents, get a job you actually like. Good things come if you work for them.  My glancing friendship with Steve Kowit was one of my best years as a San Diego poet.

With Great Power Comes Liabilities

New Powers, New 'Do,' 'Big Secret' in SUPERMAN #41 | Newsarama.com: 

Superman has a new buzz cut in yet the latest re-imagining of the Man of  Steel. The tonsorial  alternation that works for me. His dark blue spit curl was fine through the fifties and the Sixties and most decades since, but it was an anachronism begging to be taken to the attic.The original idea, I suppose , was to have Superman retain a genuine purity one could ascribe to strong farm boys from Kansas in o our grandest Norman Rockwell fantasies. Lately, though, the hair has fallen prey to the artist's whim. Artist Jim Lee gave him a weed-whacker shaping that made him look like a Ken doll in a tight blue suit and a red cape. From what's been revealed, the new hair cut is short, spikey, the sort of  of  styled brevity that combat veterans when they resume their civilian existence. The image above indicates a Superman who gets convincingly pissed and is ready to rattle the skyline if  gets annoyed by evil doers or bad phone reception. 

The other matter of  Superman that 's been chewing up the bandwidth on comic book fan sites is his new power, the "Super Flare". An apparent extension of his already existing heat vision, this so called power has Superman, under great duress, expending all the solar energy stored in all of his cells at the same time. The downside, from what we've seen so far, is that results in the complete incineration of  everything around it ,and it leaves  Superman without powers.  Kal El is human, all too human for twenty four hours until he recharges and regains his abilities. We need to ask this question, though, all comic book fans in general and DC Comics partisans in particular: Is that super flare capacity really a "power" or is it a malady, something that flares up (pun intended) when stress becomes too intense? 

The difference is that a super power is an ability that the hero can control and use at will when the need arises; what's been shown so far for the power is that it is incredibly destructive when it is used (or goes off, rather) potentially laying waste to lives and property, and that it leaves Superman bereft of powers, vulnerable . We cannot assume that the super flare would always vanquish his foes. So the question becomes as to what practical use this trait is and whether it is something that Big Blue can learn to control and employ appropriately with less catastrophic results. I suspect that we've just opened the door for yet another Superman weakness, as if limitless amounts of kryptonite and undifferentiated brands of magic weren't enough. Superman too powerful? Set off the flare and lets see how he fends as a mortal. This can become a go-to device too easily. I'm interested to see what they do with the super flare, but it wouldn't be surprising that they've shot their wad.

Slate arts wonk has a fit over "Boyhood" not getting Oscar Best Picture

Oscars best picture winner Birdman: Boyhood snub is the Academy’s worst mistake in 20 years.:

'via Blog this'

This bit of sour grapes is unseemly and written in what can only be called a snit fit. The result are grandiose claims that are supported only fairly pedestrian and hastily stated opinions. Kois operates from the assumption that "Boyhood" is a masterpiece, certified, no questions asked. It's not a masterpiece, as it lags and lumbers and and is at times near narcoleptic torpor as it goes on and on to create a saga about the small things that otherwise ordinary citizens confront over a period of time. It is, or course, daring, at times engaging, but never enthralling, in my view. It is an admirable piece of work,  but awards should not be awarded merely because film makers were adventurous; the point of the Oscars , we are told, is to celebrate and make note of the best of what was written, filmed, acted, directed, scored, edited from the previous year. Movies that achieved their ambitions.  "Apocalypse Now" was an absolute mess of a film, a   beautiful mess in many ways, but a train wreck for coherence and sequencing. It was a horribly botched narrative, a string of grand standing scenes. I've watched it many times over the intervening years and enjoyed it, but over time I think the Academy used good judgement in denying it a Best Picture Oscar.  I think it suffices to say that the film makers of 'Birdman" had solid ideas of their concept and created the means with which the layered meta-narrative can be brought to the screen. There is a control of the material and an elegant, innovative execution of ideas that "Boyhood" did not have, and "Apocalpyse Now" as well. What we had last night was that rare Oscar instance, the rewarding of  high quality work. Kois can disagree with the decision, but using his platform to claim that this was the worst decision in the last twenty years of Oscar ceremonies just makes him sound hysterical, silly, trivial in his insight. This gives me no reason to read him again. As a public service, I reprint my  initial review of "Birdman" below  (also, I am too lazy to write about this film again).

This film is a about as meta-textual as it gets, concerning a actor named Riggan who, best known for portraying the cartoon super hero Birdman in three live action films, is attempting a comeback on broadway with a stage adaptation of a collection of Raymond Carver short stories, 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love".

The first inside joke, of course, is that star Michael Keaton was the first Batman in two Tim Burton versions of the DC icon, who had the oft circulated take away line "I'm Batman" when the Dark Knight introduces himself to the Gotham crime element. Keaton's character in this new film has a mind that is subdivided with conflict, a string of unresolved issues that force him to hallucinate greatly, not the least of which is a voice that rasps only to him "YOU'RE BIRDMAN", and which harshly chastises him for abandoning the super hero for the delusion that he could become part of the New York arts crowd.

That's all a bunch of shit, the voice insists, and intrudes on the actor's private moments with more berating and demands that he give up this Broadway charade and reclaim his one true calling , the man who is the definitive Birdman. The film, though, is quite a bit more than that, as it brings around a provocative stream of old associations, like an estranged daughter, an estranged daughter he's only recently reconciled with (if imperfectly), acting rivals , all of whom , between hallucinations, have wonderfully nuanced confrontations with Riggan and with each other on the irony latent in the countless attempts we make to rid ourselves of masks and present our true selves to things that matter most , such as marriage, rearing children, authentically gratifying work, only to realize that even the true self presented as evidence of no disguise is itself a mask, a disguise.

The conflicted Riggan is jerked about emotionally and has several instances where the hallucinations, the warring desires, take over and the film is transformed into yet another space, a surreal terrain of tall buildings, floating, spectacles that then dissipate as the conflicted hero emerges from his melodrama and attempts to finish what he's begun, the afore said adaptation for the screen. A fine cast of characters abound here, and a superlative roster of actors to bring their quirks and vulnerabilities to the screen; Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts are sublime and each of them have solidly written, deftly directed roles.

punk rock

Thinking about God's version of the Draft Board:

 RAPTURE

The mailman drops his parcels and falls to his knees in the middle of the street as a light comes through the clouds and makes the commotions of the city radiate   gold tones like the frozen poses of ancient photographs found under the stairs of every parent’s house that aging children have to close.  You see the mailman on his knees and wonder why he’s praying, hardly aware of the increase in light or the music that blares all the big band music of  trumpets and saxophones that disguise the grind of passing cars, it’s such a shame that religious fanatics are hired to deliver the mail, you think, so much depends  on what comes through the System, envelopes full of  what’s owed and what’s not covered by any plan  that can be written down; you run the water in the sink, you wonder where did the clouds go?  There is no rain anywhere,  says the radio announcer, and the light is tremendous all over the globe, there is not a dark corner in any corner or nook on the earth, And then the radio gives out to static, and the TV releases itself to snow, the music in the street is very loud and swinging hard to the left and the right and then right down the   middle as all the notes scurry brilliantly through the hedges  and up the driveways, into the homes with each reed instrument improvising disembodied melodies that form their own sheet music, That is a very loud set of speakers in that passing car, you think. and the radio announcer cuts through the music and says something you hear as that millions of people all over the world have just vanished in lain site under bright light and big bang music, gone in a wisp and puff of smoke,  You look at your watch and note that it’s time for lunch, the clouds have fallen over the city again, the sky darkens, the shapes of the neighborhood take on their deep hues again, saddened with history, dense in dumb witness to what never ends, You stop, look out the window; you turn off the water you ran, in the middle of the street, by itself, flat on the cement,  The mailman’s bag and his clothes,  topped by his hat, kissed by a cool breeze.

Shadows in the Night--Bob Dylan

The so-called Great American Song Book was written specifically for singers who had better than average singing voices. One needed to not only be able to "carry a tune," but have a pleasant/intriguing/personable/tonally expressive quality to their singing that would make the blend of singer and song a memorable one, or at least one that entertained. Bob Dylan, from this standpoint, is an awful singer; his genius as a vocalist was constructed on the fact that he blended his influences--rock and roll, blues, country, old-timey folk--and wrote his own songs. He created the opposite effect than the ones regarding TGASB, which was rather than melodically nuanced songs being joined with musically suave vocalists, Dylan's mirror image was that of a ruffian, a street visionary, a man with shamanistic qualities who was in touch with the wild spirit of poetry, especially the surrealist sort, and sought to capture his visions in a neo-primitive format. Smartly simple song structures and Dylan's bracing nasal sneer made it clear that he didn't carry his tunes as forced them on you.


He couldn't sing well, but he could dramatize. So we have this paradox with "Shadows in the Night," a lousy singer from a technical viewpoint taking on songs that, from a technical standpoint, are sophisticated to the extent that expectations demand a vocalist who can actually hit the notes correctly and do something stylish with them. The result here is an awful, painful album to listen to. It's that simple. I am sure there are subtly argued defenses of what's been done here. I don't buy the apologies. I think less of what's been accomplished with this record and more of what's been committed, as in sin, a crime, a horrible insult to the brain. It's one thing for rock, and pop singers noted for singing styles that even the most uninterested among our company can admit to having tuneful voices to attempt the classic songs of Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Rosemary Clooney, or a Tony Bennett. It's been enjoyable, if not always rewarding, to hear vocalists as diverse in approach and grit as Linda Ronstadt (good) to Rod Stewart (awful) to Pat Benatar (middling) try and wrap the gritty edge of their usual approach to a song around the sumptuous curves and segues of pieces that beguiled radio and ballroom audiences in World War 2. It's become a career stunt for old rock and rollers to dig into the vaults and revive the songs their parents were listening to, something that no longer intrigues.

Dylan's approach might have been interesting had he done this album quite a long time ago when the raggedness of his singing still had a bit of a range, and Dylan was capable of remaining in pitch; one thinks that Dylan of the Seventies and the Eighties, with a voice that was more versatile than people like me, have admitted, could take the classic songs and truly and surely redefine their melodic and thematic essence. Dylan was not a great singer, but he had a genius as a vocalist, the same fleeting skill one regards Mick Jagger's work. He could cajole, announce, exclaim, insinuate, and fashion an effective, reedy croon to dramatize, characterize a lyric. But that is not to be, and one can only sigh over what might have been had Dylan attempted a project like this when he still had the equipment to make it credible. One can only wonder, and one is better off not suffering his dead, toneless rasp here.

2 notes: Rod McKuen, and lack of sympathy for characters one creates.

Sometime back in the  Seventies, Dick Cavett introduced the late Rod McKuen on his show by quoting a critic's left handed compliment regarding the writer's work, "The world's most understood poet."That was not intended as praise , and anyone in the business of writing  what's regard as serious poetry , whether a runny-nosed  Beat or a hardened Modernist , would take a the description of their work being accessible as an accolade. Poetry in the 20th century had become increasingly odd and without noticable rules, a development that marked the work of many a genius poet at the time,but the facts is that fewer people read poetry as consumers of printed books, and fewer still seemed to understand what the new scribes were going on about. 

And so, poetry became the new scripture and critics, in a sense , became the new priesthood, discoursing on texts that allow no conventional entry point in terms that were equally cryptic. McKuen dared to be direct , simple in language, easily understood, trafficking much of his writing  career in maudlin , mawkish, garish sentimentality. It worked, to be sure, as he went off to conquer the publishing world, motion pictures, the music industry. It worked and he built a huge audience that  did not read poetry nor had the slightest idea of of the medium's standards of quality might  happen to be on any  given day. He made a lot of money and in the making of his millions, he inspired young people, like myself, to become a writer myself. To be clear, it was a chorus of writers that got my fancy and stirred in me the desire to string words together and indulge in metaphor, not just the recently deceased McKuen. But McKuen was in the gallery of faces that had my attention . My tastes simply matured beyond  what he was capable of writing about. Honestly, I had a man crush on him,so to speak, as a sensitive mid teen desiring to express great things myself--he was part of the collective of Dylan, Ginsberg, Eliot and Paul Simon that made me want to say things that were significant in ways a reader wouldn't expect. 

McKuen did have a knack for slinging words--his much anthologized poem "Camera" is good at the plain-speak verse later adopted by the ever accessible likes of Billy Collins. The poem, though, was clean and lacking the sentimentalism that made McKuen a standing joke and, eventually, an overripe expression of every unconsidered emotion. I should clarify that I went the middle period Dylan/TS Eliot route in poetry and came to prefer a more surreal and harder edge verse. The change , of course, came around when I had some genuine emotional upheavals and realized that experiencing , processing and recollecting such events in the process of forming a real personality trying to engage he world wasn't as simple as McKuen's McPoems would have us think. Though I harbor a soft spot for him, I think his "poetry", such as it was, was indefensible on any grounds as verse. It scratched those places before you had an itch. I hate to seem harsh, but his writing was slick and it was awful. Now and again he could write a few lines that were acceptable because they weren't dripping with the goo of his onerously bathetic persona, but he'd soon enough lard up his line breaks with a defiantly defeatist attitude ---lost again at love, ah sigggghhhh)--and would have us believe that he spent decades turning up his collar and walking the San Francisco water front in the rain and fog, looking for bar to nurse his pain at. Though he was an influence on me as a writer, I consider his writing everything that's wrong with the idea of expression for its own sake.

_______________________
I'm not as interested in feeling sympathy for the character or having an emotional stake in their success as I am in whether the film makers keep me interested in how the activities and motivations converge to a satisfying end. Or at least one that makes sense in unexpected ways; to varying degrees both Nabokov and Updike accomplish this in their stronger novels--"Pale Fire", the "Rabbit" quartet, respectively-- and the inspection of how witless self-regarding imbeciles custom design their machinery of their own destruction is a difficult and rare hallmark for the truly subversive comedy. Coen brothers Joel and Ethan understand the need for the distance from the goings on of the chronic stupidity in "Burn After Reading" so that that their only agenda is imagine what echos in the deepest recess of any of these people's minds while they compound their ignoble fates with layers of strip-mall hubris. What the Coens do with unlikeable characters seeking their own glory isn't an easy thing to accomplish--Brian DePalma managed to turn Tom Wolf's crotchety (albeit readable) novel "The Bonfire of the Vanities" into a loose, baggy monster of a film (to paraphrase Henry James)that demonstrated no flair for comic rhythm. Had the Coens been in charge of that novel, we'd most likely be praising them as we had for their work in "No Country for Old Men", making note of their sharp eye for damning detail and skewed dialogue, and their effective use of an attentive if disengaged tone.

one or two thoughts on KIM FOWLEY, RIP

Robert Christgau said it back in 1969, reviewing his album “OUTRAGEOUS”:

 “…. Fowley is such a gargantuan shuck that he ought to be preserved in a time capsule. …” 

That line has stuck with me and characterized Fowley for decades, and now it comes full circle where we have an opportunity to examine how the Sixties counter culture produced marginal sorts who were happy to have a niche somewhere in the music greatness of others, and those like Charlie Manson who wanted to change the world into a larger version of their insane selves. It was a crap shoot either way, and lucky for us, Fowley wasn't as crazy as he pretended to be. It's always been my impression that Kim Fowley, who died January 15, 2015, preferred you spoke about him in the past tense when you were in his presence. One imagines he would have relished the chance to eaves drop on what was said at his own funeral.Only a fool too fast of tongue of slow to truth would argue that Fowley didn't have some kind of observable genius in the happenstance of his life. He was an Ezra Pond sort his era, someone with a smattering of talent themselves who had a more acute instinct for the large talent of others . It can be a tedious thing to hash through again, but it bears repeating that Fowley's greatest masterpiece was creating a series of performance oriented personas, all the extreme, gaudy, tacky, neurotic and, rather, desperate in their attempts to equal the art being produced by artists he was attracted too. 

Fowley was someone who, like thousands of others at the time, were trying to berserk themselves into genius who, despite hard work and an unblinking commitment to the mask he was wearing, never convinced anyone that there was anything there but an egocentricity that was oddly ingratiating Fowley , I suspect, knew that we were onto his game from the get go and let it remain as such. Fowley was someone who wanted to leave his mark on history and didn't quite much care what damage to his reputation he suffered in doing so. It wasn't damage at, I think he'd have explained to us, since this was a reputation he was reputation he was creating in place of one that didn't exist in the first place. What he wanted was to be known, to be creative, to be a part  of the throng at the higher creative plain. He wanted to leave his mark on history, not change it, not destroy it, not change to course of things to come. He desired to be in the perennial now of whatever was intense at the musical time and space, and to have a sufficient version of his cover story to accompany. He was man who lived his life in the present tense. 

What is remarkable is that he remained in the game as long as he did. Fowley was a fake, which was the source of authenticity. He decided to "act as if..." and never stopped acting.I regard Fowley's whole life as being something like Kafka's Hunger Artist; the man who refuses to eat draws a crowed around him, and it's that artist's job to keep the crowd distracted while maintaining his cover. Fowley kept the mask on but remained an approachable anomaly . No easy thing to do.