If you’re looking under the covers for the spirit of New York City, 2004, look no further than Turning to Fiction, Donna Masini’s stunning new collection. Street scenes from the museum to three-card monte, phone sex and poetry books, there’s a real life here, and it is real life. As the anatomy of a love affair, this book maps the geography of the heart, an anguished diary of existence, a sophisticated flight towards joy.
I’ve been cycling through three new Ron Padgett books: Oklahoma Tough: My Father the King of the Tulsa Bootleggers (University of Oklahoma Press), Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard (Coffee House), and Poems I Guess I Wrote (Kuz Editions, Richard Hell’s press) -- all great reads because Ron, folks, is the writer’s writer. Clarity and purpose shine in every line. When Ron retired from Teachers & Writers a few years ago I couldn’t believe it -– now I see what he was up to. His productivity is extraordinary, the writing exquisite. I was able to hear Ron read at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project a few weeks ago, a reading dedicated to Joe, accompanied by slides of his pal’s paintings and family snapshots. Brainard was a wonderful, odd, sensible, brilliant artist, and Ron’s memoir gets all the edges right. He’s a great researcher, with a deft and human approach to all his characters. And he still has room to publish a book of “who write this?” weirdo poems left over in his notebooks. I tip a hat to Ron, who knows the life of the artist is a straightforward operation. Live like him!
And live like Ed Sanders, too, who not only refuses to be burnt out but continues as a model of creativity. Volume Three of America: A History in Verse (Black Sparrow, and it’s fantastic that the new owners keep up their support of Ed) came out last year, chronicling the 60’s, which of course were the years Ed was traveling with the Fugs. His human’s-eye view of history, thoroughly investigated and poetically transmitted, is definitive. And his new CD just out, Thirsting for Peace, is vintage Ed, which is to say, Ed at the Moment. Recorded in his studio barn in Woodstock, using his hand-cranked Microlyre, his own creation, a 32 note-to-the-octave electronic instrument. Back to “The Wild Women of East Tenth Street,” forth to his cantata, “Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century,” he pays homage to Corso (“Final Section of Bomb”) and Ginsberg (the extraordinary “Song for Allen”). Ed’s angelic warbling has never been purer. And catch the Goddess Miriam’s photos in the booklet, particularly one of her deer at play with the Microlyre!
~Bob Holman
