If you are an Alice Notley fan, then you will have to have the brand-new. From the Beginning (The Owl Press) is darkness imbedded in The Book: “…this cartoon of reality, but the evil is real”… “all spaces stand for pain”… “the certitude that you are insane” … “the world’s form is untruth.” This is a devastating, hallucinogenic, bloody book. If you don’t know Alice’s work, go to The Descent of Alette.
Jean Valentine’s Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965 - 2003 (Wesleyan) just won the National Book Award. It is poetry chockfull, it is an unGooglable encyclopedia, and of course a breathing thing. Coltrane, Jung, Mandelstam: these are snapshots of history, personal poems on a universal plate.
Eric Andersen’s The Street Was Always There (Appleseed) is a new collection of tunes by Eric, Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, Tim Hardin -– evocative and powerful, full-throttle Greenwich Village, culminating with Ochs himself speaking straight from and to the heart. A must-have is last year’s Beat Avenue (Appleseed) -– a twenty-five minute epic talking poem that takes place on November 22, 1964:
Allen stood and read
all nerve and breath
olive-wreathed
paper in his hand
his words spit rage
he sang of dharma boomerangs
and karmic kickback
of open graves
and worms crawling out of
assholes
of dead presidents
in a haunted room of silhouettes
we were perched along the void.
You hear Mzwakhe Mbuli and you hear South Africa’s Linton Kwesi Johnson: basso profundo, poetry profound. His new album Mbulism (CDCCP Records/EMI) is uplifting, God-filled, and poetry full. Also on our list is Mbuli’s Greatest Hits, Born Free But Always in Chains.
I’m imagining a collaboration between Michael McClure and Terry Riley. It’s called I Like Your Eyes Liberty (Sri Moonshine) and imagine is all I can do alas because I got a dud copy aieee! and I had waited till now to report on it.... Now I’ve called Michael -– he’s topping off a 37-page poem he’s been working on for here years! Hurrah! and he’s sending me a new CD, which I shall report on then and when!
