I am an improvisationalist. Whaaa'z that? Like what comes is what's real. Jesus, now I'm more confused. I'm talkin' to myself. See how it works? I learned it from Gertrude Stein, not that she taught it to me, she simply wrote books and I simply read them. The complications came when I started trying to write like Gertie. I should have been learning from Faulkner, more my style really in terms of culture, but, no, I didn't like reading Faulkner, except for Mosquitos and that book kicked me in my young ass and moved me to move to New Orleans and there to go down to the Bourbon House on Rue Bourbon and sit in the same seat Willie Faulkner sat in when he was writing Mosquitos and I sat there all one summer...and the only thing that came of it was I started reading Gertrude Stein and the first story I wrote like Gertrude almost made it into the Southern Review the LSU literary review--the small press of my neophyte days, but was beat out by a writer from up North named Joyce Carol Oates, whose work I came to definitely biasly despise, though, "Joyce, sweet Joyce, I did try to read your stuff and I can certainly see why your story, your academically perfectly written story--damn, Joyce, you were an English teacher--beat mine out for that special appearance back those many moons"--and the Southern Review was a highly reviewed starting point for young writers in those days because of its historical connection to the Southern Agrarian poets movement and one of its main members, Robert Penn Warren, who founded the Southern Review. All the King's Men is a great novel! I think, otherwise RPW's kind'a boring, like most of the Southern Agrarian poets, though you just have to love reading old crazy Allen Tate:
Mr. Pope
When Alexander Pope strolled in the city
Strict was the glint of pearl and gold sedans.
Ladies leaned out more out of fear than pity
For Pope's tight back was rather a goat's than man's
Often one thinks the urn should have more bones
Than skeletons provide for speedy dust,
The urn gets hollow, cobwebs brittle as stones
Weave to the funeral shell a frivolous rust.
And he who dribbled couplets like a snake
Coiled to a lithe precision in the sun
Is missing. The jar is empty; you may break
It only to find that Mr. Pope is gone.
What requisitions of a verity
Prompted the wit and rage between his teeth
One cannot say. Around a crooked tree
A moral climbs whose name should be a wreath.
Now, come on, folks, if you didn't know a crazy white Southern fugitive privileged kid out of Vanderbilt U (for rich white boys) poet intellectually mourning the Confederacy's demise wrote that, you'd have to say that's a cool poem and fits old Alex Pope to a tee--doesn't it?
I'm such an anglophobe--and don't get me started on PBS currently doing a has-been, comeback show of old Brit bands, like the juvenile Animals, the extra-juvenile Procol Harem--all this music so Brit teenage and stupid with no syncopation, just church-mode sentimentalism, no swing--God, help me, I gotta go eat a baby elk raw!
I'm such an anglophobe that I refrain from reading much Brit poetry, with the exception of Pope, who I used to find cynically contrary and nonconformist to my liking and I found that Pope fit me like good shoes. OK, so you might catch me reading Coleridge sometimes, too, Cowper (he lived on Long Island for awhile), too--OK, OK--Siegfried Sassoon, too--Damn, I used to love reading Sassoon.
OK, yes, I did like Vaughn-Williams's Antarctica Symphony and William Walton's Facade. But other than those--OK, Turner, I dig Turner like I dig Monet. That's it, though. It's Katy bar the door to the rest of the Brits. Oh shit, I forgot, I dig Somerset Maugham.
It is ironic that PBS at the same time they are running this Brit has-been comeback show they are also running a Jerry Lee Lewis working with the Brit stars comeback show, which is also ironic since the Brits treated Jerry Lee like dogshit when he went there back in his heyday and they never invited Elvis to come there and that asshole Elvis Costello, that talentless boob, had the nerve to say American r and b and rockers were nobodies and boring--yes, that nerd asshole did say that and now he's running around acting like he understands jazz better than Americans, too, and, you know something, the only thing this little pipsqueak knows about jazz is what is a figment of holy imagination in his peabrained mind, I don't give a shit if he's married to Tony Bennett--oh, I'm sorry, he's married to some chick piano playing singer--there's so many of them, they're usually Brazilian, I can't keep up with them all--none of them are worth a half a Nina Simone or Carmen McRae--and why aren't Elvis's jazz idols black I wonder? I'm sorry, it's ironies that are drivin' me mad.
All of this because of Gertrude Stein's writing and her sense of the continual present, an idea she got listening to her big poodle, Basquet, lapping up his water one day while she was writing on the porch of her house that overlooked a French countryside that was a French countryside like the French countrysides he had read about in all those books scattered about that big oak table that sat by the window on that dusty street in West Texas when windstorms rattled the windows and howled like a poet spieling into the faces of an imaginary audience with the hot wind of his advanced as in advancing emissions.
That is what an improvisationalist is.
An improvisationalist also believes that there is art in all of us and we should let it come out any way it wants to come out, from a sonata form to a water color or an essay on writing essays when essays were unknown.
An essay on an essay; I like that concept. "Was rather a goat's than man's"--ah, Allen Tate, sitting out there in that moss-draped old South cemetery philosophizin' over old Zeb Tate's grave--god bless that southern boy who got his balls shot off by a poetry-spouting Yankee boy so scared he pissed in his pants when he saw the southern boy double-up in morbid agonizing pain.
With grubby little dancing feet
On a pallet of bloody ribs,
The flesh torn off them for easy eatin',
The varmints feast with glee
While those not dead
Cry, "Eat me next! Please, eat me next!"
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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