An Army of Poets

An Army of Lovers is an army of many things, mainly metaphors and long sentences. But it also seems to be actings as a novel-length analysis of what poetry is, why the hell we make it, and what makes poetry good. Are you trying to be political, beautiful, or both? Can you fit every kind of sound in there are have it be music, or will it create a cacophonous mess? Is poetry weighed down by capitalism, or sex? And of course, none of these questions have one answer. But, poetry grows on poets, like a nipple-sized tick bite on your side, or blisters on your forehead. It leaks and stings until it is turned into ink on paper.

What immediately caught my attention in this novel was the descriptions of Koki and Demented Panda's notebook carrying habits. Demented Panda had a tiny notebook that could fit into a shirt pocket and was so small that you could hardly write in it if you wanted to. Koki carried a large notebook and a book with her in a backpack at all times. Immediately, I saw my own poetic habits in Koki. As much as I fancy myself a novelist, the black book I keep in my backpack at all times is littered with shitty lines of poetry from high school until the present. Not very political, not very pretty, but poetry nonetheless.

Koki and Demented Panda both spend a lot of time lamenting the fact that they don't get anything done together, despite setting out everyday to write poetry. This is not uncommon. Most writers spend more time not writing or thinking about writing than they do actually doing it. While the tininess of one notebook might hold you back, so might the pressure of a large blank page. In the end, the page size doesn't matter, the content doesn't matter, none of it matters. What matters is that you are creating the art you want to create.

Both the characters in this book go through some strange personal journeys– homeopathically, mentally, and poetically. And at the end, the only thing that really mattered was being together. Not everyone can write a fantastic poem, but anyone can experience things worth writing about. I wonder, are the authors of this book trying to tell us something about the human condition, about writing, or something else entirely? Are we supposed to go off and write poems now, or lay in the grass next to a friend and be alright with not getting anything done?

Punks, Beats and Reclaiming the Streets

A large portion of this course has centered around the artistic, counter cultural movement against the corporatization of San Francisco. This understanding of the struggle to defend a city from an encroaching army of ‘yuppies,’ has provoked me to contemplate further; the similar situation occurring within my hometown-London. As a city that has been a global center for commerce and industry for many centuries, London has been tirelessly fighting a losing battle to maintain an authentic, homegrown, artistic identity. Unfortunately, I fear it’s a battle that may now be well and truly lost. Increased presence and power of banking and advertising offices in Canary Wharf, combined with the recent electoral victory for a Conservative government that demonizes the poor and dishes out tax breaks for corporations, pretty much spells out despair for young people hoping to live and create in the Capital. With a population of nearly 8.5 million, lower-middle and working class citizens are forced to live in the surrounding suburbs, whilst millionaire foreign bankers and businessman buy homes in prime, central locations and only live in them for six months of the year, killing off any sense of community and cultural vibrancy that previously existed.

In a previous post, Joanna drew attention to the connection between the Punk scene of the 70’s and the Beat movement of a few decades prior. I too would like to make a connection between the Beats and a punk band that helped to shape my understanding of the unjust, exploitative societal structure we live under. The King Blues were a folk/punk band from London who really localized issues of disparity that are evident all over the western world through their songs and spoken word. Attached below is an example of the latter- a poem that emphasizes the importance of Punk in reclaiming the City from the hands of the corporate elite, much like the SF Beats of the 1950’s. In the poem, lead singer Johnny ‘Itch’ Fox, envisages a place ‘just outside of Clapham (South London),’ where Punk never happened. It’s a place where the rich and the powerful have been given free rein to live and exploit as they please, due to the ‘hippie grunge reality, where the buildings are crumbling down with apathy.’ The end of the poem cites the importance of punk in encouraging people to harness the ‘the love and the rage that you feel in your gut’ as a means of reclaiming the streets from a tyrannical establishment.

The King Blues, like many punk bands from the same circuit, were also heavily involved in the Squatters Rights movement, with Itch Fox having grown up homeless, periodically living in the squats of London and Brighton. This also presents another example of the way in which Punk aligns itself with a reclamation of the streets that echoes the sentiment of the San Francisco Beats.     

  

To evade or embrace chaos in An Army of Lovers

Oh, Koki and Demented Panda. Your self-determined mediocrity makes me smile perhaps more than it should. And I like your names, and I like the way you confront ugly societal and personal issues by spraying feces all over them and calling it performance art. You go, Demented Panda. You know how ludicrous you sound but you also know that my mind works in a similar, non sequitur tenor. But you, Demented Panda, you know how to meditate the shit out of your self-doubt, even if its endpoint is nothingness. Your approach to examining the metaphysical implications of being present in a particular time and space is hilariously disturbing.

After a lengthy, slightly unsettling and disjointed ramble about Demented Panda’s “spell,” the book reads, “The cash registers ca-chinging, the barking and the breaking, the whimpering, the crying, the screaming… With nothing holding them together, Demented Panda and Koki sat there in the raw sewage. All that was left was the feeling of sitting in raw sewage and knowing lostness deep inside” (pg. 38).

The non-linearity of this passage, as well as the entire book, seems so familiar to me. The way the characters fumble for something, anything, to grasp – a meaning, a way to dig deeper into the problems of society and crush them, or even a way out – elicits an incredibly palpable crisis for modern poets, hipsters, and other meanderers. It follows the stream of chaos that accompanies ever-changing technology and capitalist systems and how to utilize it without extending into a space of corporate greed. This issue is especially prominent for writers and artists; as machinery develops and re-develops, it becomes increasingly difficult to transform words and images in inimitable ways. In a 1965 interview between Nora Ephron, Susan Edmiston and Bob Dylan, Dylan disentangles himself from the negative connotation of chaos beautifully:

Q: You wrote on the back of one album, "I accept chaos, but does chaos accept me."

A: Chaos is a friend of mine. It's like I accept him, but does he accept me.

Q: Do you see the world as chaos?

A: Truth is chaos. Maybe beauty is chaos.

Q: Poets like Eliot and Yeats--

A:I haven't read Yeats.

Q: They saw the world as chaos, accepted it as chaos and attempted to bring order from it. Are you trying to do that?

A: No. It exists and that's all there is to it. It's been here longer than I have. What can I do about it? I don't know what the songs I write are. That's all I do is write songs, right? Write.

Although the interview took place long before this new age, Dylan’s simplistic response shows power in embracing the present and all it encompasses, regardless of haunting truths. In An Army of Lovers, Koki and the Demented Panda reflect the idea perfectly. 

Raices del Pocho-Che

The mission district is well known for its beautiful murals at balmy alley and its abundance of diverse culture from its Latino communities. However this neighborhood not only possesses this diverse culture, it is also home to a collective that formed through the passion of poetry, writing and political and social activism.The Pocho-Che collective gets its name from Pocho and Che Guevara. The word "Pocho" is often seen as derogatory term used by Mexican natives when identifying Chicanos. Ernesto "Che" Guevara was a revolutionist who played a significant role during the Cuban revolution and protested the exploitation of capitalism in Latin America by the United States. The blending of identity and social activism through these two wordshelps explain the purpose of the collective,which is to "use two disparate realms of political and cultural turmoil and potential collective power"(Herrera).

The breaking down of the word is important in understanding the purpose of the collective. Through poetry, writing and political concern a collective emerged.  Writing and poetry gave community members from the mission to express their concerns with what was going on in Latin America. The Pocho-che collective became an important community resource for the many Chicano/Latino residents of the mission. Through unofficial magazines, the collective transcended messages of the political unrest Latin America experiencing

El centro cultural de la mission (mission cultural center) became the Pocho-che's domain, and serves as a cultural and arts center in San Francisco.

 Balmy alley includes various murals with messages of indignity, oppression ,and privatization of natural resources.

This is one of the many issues that the Pocho-Che collective produced

Navigating Shores: Artist, Critic, Attendee

“The Artist” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti highlights the many roles Ferlinghetti plays in the North Beach poetic scene of San Francisco. The very act of writing the poem identifies him as an artist and therefore, at least, sympathetic to the artist portrayed in the poem. However, his position of curator, owner, critic, and docent of City Lights Bookstore also situates him on the other metaphorical shore he creates, removed from the artist, despite his apparent distaste for that particular group of people.

The poem contains slant rhymes in the second and third lines (cheese/be) as well as the fifth and sixth (openings/galleries). They show the potential of these spaces to be something, but instead miss the point. They are slotted on Thursday nights to save Friday and Saturday evenings for “real” parties and the attendees are more concerned with themselves and refreshments than art.

The following section begins with an alliteration (critics and crickets) followed by two couplets, both continuing the pattern of contrived alliteration:

                And the singles out to score

                And the docents of the donor classes

                Sheathed in silk & Christian Dior

                Holding long-stemmed glasses

In this moment, we see the groups Ferlinghetti condemns more than the casual party hoppers. He packages them in alliteration and couplets to show their confined thinking. The critics are crickets sounding in silence and making mere background noise, seemingly filling the void with opinion that no one seems to listen to as they appear at galleries to be seen rather than see.

The next three lines all rhyme with each other and invoke a sensation of anticipation, the pulling back of the tide before the wave hits. The line after the painter observes the guests (rising/apprising/uprising) rhymes with the previous section describing those guests, placing them on that “most distant shore.” As he ponders what he is “painting for,” the rhyme returns to situate his self-worth in direct correlation with the audience he garners. In response, he feels “adrift in this society” and “doth drink too much.” The final line rhyme once again with the “distant shore,” suggesting their reactions are what debilitates him.

It is interesting to think about figures such as Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs who struggle with alcoholism and drug addiction as they produced work. Kerouac became disenchanted with his own popularity and the uproar surrounding the Beat movement. Ferlinghetti himself never turned heavily to alcohol, but seems to sympathize with the plight of artists such as Kerouac. It is also interesting to note that Ferlinghetti acted as a docent and a critic by deciding who to publish and who to deny (Bob Dylan). Ferlinghetti seems to conflate himself with artist and critic and bashes the condition of the San Francisco art scene and the crowd it attracts while simultaneously praising the San Franciscan artist for producing and absolving the same artist for having the lackluster crowds affect him.

Back in February, I attended an installation/performance art exhibit called Fallen Cosmos held in a warehouse in the Dogpatch of San Francisco. It was an invitation-only event focusing on a painting depicting a pagan interpretation of Revelation in which Heaven an Hell would fight for the fate of Earth. Although the concept seemed interesting, I noticed the majority of the attendees were all sneaking in flasks, bragging about drugs they had taken, and asking if drinks or food would be served. I attended the show alone at the invitation of a friend of mine who was a performer. After the exhibit, they ushered us all into a large part of the venue where drinks were served (they were not complimentary).

I complimented my friend on the costumes, but felt the carnival-esque exhibits and final show "in Hell" left something to be wanted. She laughed and adjusted her golden robe. Her hands were stained from pomegranate seeds she had been feeding to guests and she smeared the juices on her garments. 

"This whole thing was just a pet project by Chicken John to get funding for other projects he'd rather invest more time in."

And, well, I couldn't help but laugh too. The artists counted on the patron circle-jerk. Everyone likes to feel pretentious sometimes - why not play to that, I s'pose?

The Irony of Defending Cultures

In section yesterday we talked a little bit about how America is a preserver of cultures. We pride ourselves on museums that showcase ancient Native American rituals and artifacts, yet it was America that is the reason that these artifacts and entire culture have to be preserved in the first place.

On a smaller scale, San Fransisco's Mission District prides itself on being the "oldest part" of the city. Mission is brimming with culture and a mishmash of political and social anxieties and stances. Yes, this community is old time San Fransisco, but it is changing.

As the cost of living in SF skyrockets, "older timer" Mission residents, who are comparatively poorer, are forced out of their longtime homes and being replaced with the wealthier entrepreneurs, namely "techies".

A really interesting article that I read in the SF Gate, it's really good! 

http://www.sfchronicle.com/the-mission/


We talked a lot about Nina Serrano's "Mission Story" that reflects on the old time Mission District as a center of poetry. I really enjoyed her poem "The Mission Story", which outlines her (and her daughters) arrival in Mission, when it was still raw and had any kind of tangible cultural roots.

Today, it seems that (not unlike the rest of the city), the Google and Internet boom has brought heavy gentrification of Mission. Instead of taquerias and small mom and pop produce shops, trendy cafes and luxury restaurants moved in and now occupy the district. Is this a good thing? Definitely not. But I'm not so sure that it is a bad thing either. The Mission districts is now a product of the time. Yes, it has lost a lot of what it was, its predominantly Mexican and Central American authenticity has been diluted with 10$ latte stores. Embarassing? Yes. But accurate nonetheless.

Photo of Mission Dolores in the early 1850's

Patti Smith

The Post Beat poet Patti Smith is the Poet Laureate of Punk Rock - a direct descendant of Ginsberg, Sappho, and Jesus.

Here she gives insight and inspiration to our generation of aspiring artists:

Patti Smith claims that the internet is giving power to the people and is opening up new opportunities for anyone to become an artist. Anyone can make something and put their work up, social revolutions and change are catalyzed by technology. However, technology also makes it difficult for artists to make any sort of compensating profit for their work. Because everything can be accessed freely, artists are forced to display their work freely; whose going to pay to listen to a new band or pay to check out someone's new poetry? I love the idea of spreading art freely, but I would also love to make a living, enough to pay for a small place to live and some food. The internet may make it MORE difficult for an artist to get by through the efforts of their art. What do you people think? [sic]