I.

In physics terms, the poetry world is underground “all the way down,” so Influence lurks in each sea cave like a bastard eel, recharging in darkness, awaiting his next dinner with flickering impatience and slaverous hunger. Will the clownfish from the children’s mystery drift unsuspectingly by, or will it be the kaleidoscopic bluegill on his morning constitutional, a glittering mininova carapaced with his own blinding innocence? The sidling ghost of a ponytailed pirate or a more perfect sillhouette just out of reach, liquid shadow thrown upon the cave walls, some antideluvian Kokopelli dancing in the tidewaste? But despite his eternal hunger, the nature of the eel is merely to wait in the gloom; fangs and electricity, brooding and dreaming.

The more one thinks about capital-I Influence, the less it seems to matter. Grandfather anago hangs up his guns and withdraws, pledging himself to a more sustainable diet. And with the importance of ur-Influence go too the heroes on either balance-end of the actual work: the photos of Richard Hell and Patti Smith are unpinned from the dumpstered bookshelf and not replaced; the local show fliers silkscreened with kill-yr-idols idealism are untaped from the walls and filed away.

Sometimes it seems like there are more important things than debating influences, especially against oneself. The apocalyptic sunset; the fog-cloaked dawn; the paying of rent, and hustling of healthcare. The searching out of any solution for your phone’s dying battery while you’re consoling a friend thousands of miles away. The yawning windtunnel of lowrange deserts; the severe writer’s block; and death, and loss.

in the highest high of whirlwinds,
way beyond the spinning dust devils,
Yahweh clenched His starry fist,

His beard flashed, His brows met in a line of fire:
You must never corrupt My Name, he muttered,
if a single letter should be deformed

bury My Word in the desert
as if you were laying to rest the dead
body of a beloved.

And so it happened, said the scribe,
that someone’s brush slipped…

from “Said The Scribe”

II.

At face value, the most surprising thing about the Seminary Bookstore is that it still exists. After all it’s certainly not the most viable decade in history to operate an independent bookshop solely accessible through the lobby of a theological seminary, hidden behind a barely marked door and all-the-way-down a rickety staircase feathered with show fliers and outdated announcements for faculty talks. But the world’s finest purveyor of esoteric academic texts and forgotten tomes of theory endures, actually thrives, nonetheless. And the warehouse rows of the University of Chicago student library (at least as of a few years ago when I visited) remain mortared with circulation-grade bindings and the landscaped grounds remain traversed by gangly physics postdocs and chainsmoking philosophy grad students, careers arguably as blown-out as the leaf husks they trample underfoot but perhaps just as arguably overwhelmingly successful, securing an institution to study at, an apartment to sleep in, and manically intelligent colleagues with whom to set off on long walks in the apocalyptic winter stormlight.

“O all the phenomenal world / thickened with omens then— / the dead fish on the beach, the motherless / seal in the windbreak. . . .” (from “Earthquake Weather”)

And soon more examples crystallize of this universe of breathless debates in department lounges, paneshadowed mathematics libraries and three-deep raw wooden bookshelves imploding in Durango, CO. A stuffed mailer of zines collecting dust in a philosophy department mailbox at McGill, the TA long gone across the Atlantic for the summer. Enormous leafpiles of Analytic or Continental philosophy, Aristotle or Adorno, a hoary Eastern institution with medieval gardens or an observatory fortress among the redwoods.

A rusted insectoid truck still traverses the long coastal highways of California, sandblasted by saltspray and piloted by a skinny girl with glassy eyes and an elaborately tattooed boy with braided hair and a beard woven from Placitas tumbleweeds. He drifts in and out of sleep on his bed of paperbacks, whispering: this world still exists, and isn’t lost forever at all.

At the first light of spring, I bring you narcissi,
their delicate pale heads drooping, drugged
with the breath of their own perfume.

How clear your stone is after all this time,
more than a decade since some unknown carver
was paid to drill your name in polished granite

& decades more since our youngest child was hurled
weeping into this same light of March.
Now your body that was once my body too

is nothing but a rag for spiders spinning

from “March 13, 2004: Sunset View”

III.

So Aftermath is an elegy for no epoch at all, nor an analysis of any specific ancestry. It’s an elegy for Gilbert’s late partner the mathematician David Gale, as both the title and dedication make almost confusingly clear. It’s an elegy for Gilbert’s husband Elliot Gilbert who died years before; it’s an elegy for a child, “hurled weeping” from this world. It’s more than one hundred pages of elegy to add to Gilbert’s anthology of elegies which she edited, and two nonfiction books about grief which she authored. It is, overwhelmingly, a book of grieving.

But in addition to the intense windstorms of emotion that Aftermath relates, the collection also amazes because of the rich span of Gilbert’s imagery and the palpable analytical rigor leveraged to bend each of her very intense experiences into poems. The work is uniformly strong, even (especially?) when the reader can sense the poet herself unraveling alongside the characters in her work:

You, poet, watch his dreams
you aren’t in them but you
write them down,

& you write that down too.
And the breakers
speak their snarl of sentences

while great fish pace beneath
the glimmering surface,
& hawks loop above the pines

at the edge of the beach.

from “The Lost One”

Besides commanding a well known catalog of poems and a distinguished tenure in academia, Gilbert is first and foremost a superstar of Literary Theory. Her CV boasts countless highly-regarded works and one stone-cold classic in The Madwoman In the Attic, a book of feminist literary criticism published with Susan Gubar in the eighties that catapulted both professors to international fame and Harold Bloom-status acclaim, a book famous and powerful enough to warrant inclusion in that unassailable top bracket of criticism alongside Frye’s Fearful Symmetry and Bloom’s own The Anxiety of Influence.

But Aftermath turns out not to be about this context, per se. But this also doesn’t really matter.

Gilbert brings the pain with this collection, literally and figuratively, and strangely enough I found that unpacking the text with my own half-baked ideas about her philosophical influences or structural choices ended up only making the poems more rich, if slightly more opaque and mysterious. In other words, I tried to approach Aftermath with a satchel of conceptual lockpicks, but the text preemptively kicked through its own front door with crossed arms and asked me what the hell I thought I was doing on its property.

I think that you should read Aftermath. For the theory, for the exceptionally strong stanzas, and most of all for the vivid conveyance of grief and loss, but I would recommend knocking, or possibly ringing the doorbell, before attempting to enter on your own.

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The practice of contemporary poetry is sometimes indistinguishable from performance art, with the writer attempting to choke down the sum total of his experiences and then frantically diagram them for the audience before passing out from the strain.

The concentrated “experience” of the artist is often expressed by his or her worldly origins. Jay Electronica and Lil Wayne shout out their hometown not just by name but by ward number and intersection, by sports team and housing project. Jay: “You either build or destroy. Where you come from? / The Magnolia Projects in the 3rd Ward / slum.” Wayne: “And I ride for / Hollygrove 1-7 Eagle Street / and I’m higher than an eagle’s feet / but I believe in me. / Apple is the cross street / I am just an offspring / born in the ghetto / that’s why I can’t let go,” and “If I had one guess / then I guess I’m just New Orleans.”

Other performances focus on the journey between origins and present day. A relationship, in James L. White: “It’s dark. / You exhale a fist of memory. / I love you like weathering wood / in a room of empty pianos.” A pressing decision, in Keetje Kuipers: “…And who’s to count / how many have gone under some dream’s stiff / wheel and turned the soil or taken root in / ruts carved there? We are, none of us, native / to the earth, not born in the dirt of her / cupped palm, though yes, we go back to it.” And lean years lived on the streets, in Jay Electronica: “ When I was sleeping on the train / sleeping on Meserole Ave. out in the rain / without even a single slice of pizza to my name; / too proud to beg for change / mastering the pain.”

Rane Arroyo is best known for his poetry, but his roots lie firmly in the performing arts. So while reading White as Silver, his excellent new poetry collection, I often found myself wondering: was this poem an “origin” poem, like Wayne’s paeans to New Orleans, or was it a “journey” piece, narrating some stop along Arroyo’s long trip from his Midwestern roots to his role as a nationally recognized poet and teacher?

If these pieces of writing are, in some sense, also pieces of Rane Arroyo… then who was Rane Arroyo? From “Love Songs & Chicago”:

We were drunk, riding the El,
when I started singing: Goodbye
Yellow Brick Road. I didn’t
want to become a brooding
poet. Strangers joined us,
and the conductor broke up
our harmonies. The train
raced towards certain darkness.

Rane Arroyo’s artistic career began in the underground art galleries and ephemeral performance spaces of 1980’s Chicago. He also wrote poetry, and as the 80’s burned into the 90’s he began to stack poetry publications, first in magazines and then as full collections. The pace of his artistic production continuously accelerated, and by 2010 Arroyo had published more than ten books of poetry, a large crop of plays and short stories, and had won dozens of national awards. He also found time to earn his Ph.D in English and Cultural Studies from the University of Pittsburgh, direct the creative writing program at the University of Toledo, chair conferences, perform public readings, and serve on the board of directors of the AWP.

By any measure, Arroyo was an extremely productive artist. The Books and Awards sections of his Wikipedia page dwarf the remainder of the entry, even though they only list samples of his work. The sheer number of words he published is staggering, and it was the first thing I noticed when I began researching him: to continually produce poetry at such a fast clip and high caliber is extremely difficult, and even more extremely rare.

And in 2010, Arroyo was still just getting started. According to his MySpace page, he was simultaneously working on a set of memoirs, a new book of poems, new plays and a novel, in addition to his teaching and administrative duties.

His last status update on MySpace is dated May 1, 2010. It reads: “Still heere–paying attention to site and redoing it now that summer starts for me. Tough year can lead to creativity. Rane” Six days later, Arroyo passed away in the early morning hours of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was only 55.

A call to pray for Aaron who
is brittle with his bitterness
after seeing his buddy turn
into a bursting chandelier in

a desert darker than thought.
Next– a friend who hides needles
in his eyeglass case. Why, it’s
emptiness, that old flood without

an ark to thumb down. Karma
isn’t a Christian bandage, Carlos.
Next, next and then the next call.
Each story is a run-on sentence.

When an artist dies before his time, the narrative of his future work must be extrapolated from his past. The reflection in his eyes in a cryptic Polaroid; a simulacral album recorded in the basement of a tiny art gallery; a slim volume of selected works, discovered on some shelf of a dusty “Poetry & Criticism” section. And sometimes not even anything as concrete as these things; so many artists of each generation are gone before any publications and before any accolades. Before their photo is snapped or portrait sketched.

Others pass away unexpectedly at a creative inflection point or zenith, leaving behind as many questions as cryptically radiant pages or groundbreaking shows. Robert Mapplethorpe, Alexander McQueen, Warhol, Basquiat, Keats, Hendrix, J. Dilla, James L. White.

Arroyo belongs firmly to this latter list, with the unbelievable amount of work he’d already produced at a young age making his death all the more tragic. A truly gifted and incredibly hardworking poet, it’s certain that he would have continued to create, and touch the lives of thousands more students and readers.

It’s supposed to get easier: post-
earthquake, the wrong messiah,
someone moving out who leaves
only shadows behind. Then why

am I crossing bridges at midnight
as if a twenty-year-old again who
wants to parachute off Miss Liberty?
My America isn’t on a staid map.

Once, politics fell off me when
my clothes did. There are more
empty diary pages than days that
will fill them with flotsam

So, who was Rane Arroyo?

As far as I can gather, he was a traveling son of Chicago’s hardscrabble arts tradition. He was openly and proudly gay, proudly Puerto Rican, and incredibly hardworking. He believed in teaching and exploring, and in consciously building the perilous and beautiful life experiences that he wrote about. His character shines through in the amazing White as Silver collection, and will be clarified continuously as his vast trove of unpublished work begins to come to light.

The last public reading Arroyo gave was on March 31 at SUNY Brockport, with the final moments captured on video here. He ends, appropriately, by dancing to a Lady Gaga song; because terror is important to his work, but joy is more important; because the hardness of life is outshined by the beauty he experienced and created.

Mid-dance, as the last gesture of his performance, he exclaims a few words to the audience: “Live! Then write.”

Song lyrics quoted from:
Jay Electronica – “Exhibit C”
Lil Wayne – “Love Me Or Hate Me”
Drake ft. Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Eminem – “Forever”
James L. White – “Lying in Sadness”
Keetje Kuipers- “After the Ruins of an Oregon Homestead”

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The other day I was on the bus after a long day at work and I found a seat near the front. I put my bag on the plastic scoop next to me and turned up the Weakling album playing through my huge headphones. The bus ran past my neighborhood and further south to where I was meeting some friends at a tiny bar. The night was freezing but I had my huge black hoodie on, and I felt ready to shake off the eight-hour fatigue, to walk on the empty streets from bar to bar mysteriously unaffected by the smoking ban and crammed with kids sitting on pool tables or smashed against the doors to bathrooms or cases of pinball machines or deep and springless couches covered in dog hair. My body felt ready, and as the drums pounded in time with my heart, a hundred bass beats for every shudder of it, and the deep guitars and howls of the singer of that band long gone from the Bay and their true testament howled to the night through my earphones, I felt the burning wires in my arms, the electricity of them, the grasping and hard readiness, and then I knew that Beautiful in the Mouth was not just a good poetry collection, but one that I would remember for a great many nights to come.

From “Santeria for the City: Blackout, Summer 2003”:

As the body is a home,
as the city is a body,
as circuitry runs the lengths
of my arms, these streets—we are a flash
in the fuse box, a blown kiss
into blackness, the perfect thrill
of your last departure
orbiting its small plane inside you.

Keetje Kuipers is a poet who uses “old-school” techniques and subject matter to create striking and viscerally contemporary poems. Although the poems in her new collection, Beautiful in the Mouth, are made up of typical literary building-blocks, they nonetheless left deep handprints in my ideas of themes like Aging, Nature VS The City, Death and Memory. Kuipers is also a “traditional poet” with respect to her unwavering focus on craft; the engine powering her verse is tight word choice that simultaneously conjures up tangible, living objects and powerful emotional resonance.

Nature is a big part of the Kuipers’ aesthetic, which is always somewhat dangerous. It is so “natural” for a poet to write about the beauty of the wilderness that it could be an obvious cliché, but Kuipers’ skillful writing renders her lines about nature original and intriguing. Any poet can rhapsodize about a salmon swimming upstream; Kuipers throws down a description so vivid that it gives you chills. From “River Sonnet”:

.. … the large head scarred,
flanks those of a barnacled ship: she rose
from shallow water, a calcified shard
bearing time’s white etchings, and one dark eye—

There many poems with lines like these in Beautiful in the Mouth, that is, pitch-perfect poems about topics that are expected in a poetry collection, but that are crafted so well that they transcend cliché to flower into these plainly beautiful chunks of text. In other words, when I turned the page to the above poem, a voice in my head said “Okay, do I really need to read another poem with a title like “River Sonnet”’ ? And after reading this one for the fourth time, the same voice answered “Yes, apparently.”

Images like the “calcified shard” or “time’s white etchings” are also scattered throughout the collection’s more narrative poems, providing little bursts of light like bright strokes that lead a museum-goer’s eyes back and forth across a canvas. In “Memory, Eight Years Old,” for example, we read a simple story marked with a spoon that (who?) “bends at the neck,” and dead leaves that “fly like sparks under my heels.”

Lines like these also appear in the poems about less natural or spiritual subjects, like an argument with a lover. These didn’t grab me as quickly as the more traditional poems, at least thematically, but the metaphors woven into the narratives of “normal” life were just as beautiful and elegant as those in the traditional poems. In “To the Bear Who Ate a Ten-Pound Bag of Sunflower Seeds in My Front Yard This Morning,” a man stealing some groceries becomes an indelible image as the canned goods drop from his pockets into the snow, “making neat little shafts / where the light shone only dimly on their / aluminum tops–”.

The poet/speaker’s deep roots in the rural tradition are plain in “Between Dreams of My Country.” The two “dreams” of the U.S.A. are the opposite idealizations that she holds of America: in the first stanza, the somewhat simplistic and not-fully-formed idea of her “American city,” and in the second, the effortlessly complete and folkloricly beautiful idea of her American wilderness.

Kuipers populates New York with images like “tall buildings,” “rats behind / my walls” and “bright graffiti” – all somewhat surface-level and easily-recognizable aspects of the city. In other poems too, many of the images characterizing New York read like the poems were written not by a native or even a longtime resident, but rather by a visitor or an artist who read about NYC in books. Beautiful, but also exploring well-trodden neighborhoods of the poetry canon.

But then the reader is hit with the poet’s memories of “the prairie.” In contrast to the images in the first stanza, the images of the second smash into us with violent specificity and magic.

And what I’ve left behind: the star-smoked
skies, a pint of red beer floating
in my hand, and me wanting to shatter
something without the sound of breaking glass.

So the poet hasn’t “left behind” the prairie and the magical night of rural America behind at all. “When do I get to call you home?” she asks, referring to the streets of New York, knowing that the answer is certainly “Never.” After a couple reads of this poem, it becomes clear to the reader that the poet isn’t really “Between” dreams of her Country at all. Across the terrain of her imagination, the tenements and bustle of her imagined New York struggle only weakly against the real inspiration drawn from the night rivers and the midnight grasslands and the “golden boat” of the prairie.

The same contrast occurs in “I Arrive in Paris on the First Day of Montana’s Fishing Season.” The images of Paris are simple and surface-level: glassy streets and Dior coats. The images of Montana could not possibly be any more opposite in their specificity. Many artists could conceivably characterize Paris with coats from a house of high fashion; considerably fewer could characterize fly fishing in Montana with “caddis patterns” and “skwala nymphs.” Just as she does in “Between Dreams of My Country,” the poet uses these contrasting types of images to paint a picture of meaning through her own eyes and paradigm.

In a questionably related aside, if you Google Image Search “Dior Coats” you won’t get a great visual representation of Paris, but if you Google Image Search “skwala nymph” you do get kind of a good depiction of Montana river fishing.

But most important in establishing Kuipers as an important artist are her poems that grapple with huge themes through the concise natural images she knows so well. Her poems deal with rail yards, trailer parks, great bare ridgelines that hug green and empty valleys like the collarbones of a skeleton. Rivers quiet except for the chirping of birds, prairie skies empty except for the pinpricks of a million stars, crumbling houses and, over and over again, moths drawn into the fire of a lantern, bugs drawn towards some nightlight’s burning.

And the poet herself somewhere in the wilderness; somewhere in the city. Somewhere along the trajectory of her artistic dream: towards love? Towards solitude and quiet in the forests? Towards the clamor of the city, only to return to the country seeking out her memories? Or just towards that porch lantern, wings burning up in it, something set free in the flames.

Read “I Will Away,” a new poem from Keetje Kuipers, in Rumpus Original Poems.

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“Old woman, my mother / let’s do the world again you and me” (from “Naming”)

After reading The Salt Ecstasies by James L. White, I felt like I knew the author intimately, like a favorite professor or an older collaborator on an art installation, and that I had spent an afternoon, evening, and long, clear night discussing his life and what he had learned as an artist, lover, and boy growing up through constant tangles of sadness and beauty and doggedly scoring and molding the pieces and scraps of romantic/aesthetic clay that made up both of our lives, his coming to an end and mine to continue on into the nights to come, but now with the knowledge and love from our friendship and conversation. The Salt Ecstasies is really just a beautiful book of poetry, filled with blindingly fierce imagery and destructively skillful writing, but it’s most importantly an honest book, its poems written straight from White’s heart and from his gut, teaching the reader a whole lot about the experience of living in this world.

The collection is comprised of twenty-three poems and a few pages of autobiographical prose, and reads like a transcription of James White’s daydreams and thoughts as he neared the end of his life, made quickly more poignant by White’s death at age 45, just before the book was actually published. The writer of these poems and prose is old, he’s a romantic and he’s alone, and he’s searching through his memories like old photo albums, considering and laughing and crying weakly onto the faded images, and struggling hard to decide whether his life, in the final romantic and artistic reckoning, has meant anything at all, struggling to decide whether or not the few moments of delirious pleasure and all-destructive love and flooring beauty in his past are enough to overcome the aches of regret, loneliness, and unquenchable desire to return to the past and his past friends and lovers that he currently feels as he writes and remembers.

In the first poem in the collection, “An Ordinary Composure,” White searches not for images to translate from his mind to the paper but for a few words to approximate or vaguely outline what he’s done and accomplished in his life and writing, for a few lines to figure out whether writing the poem at all is worthwhile. He and everyone he knows has already watched the sun slowly set on their collective youth and vigor, relationships come and gone, decay, but White desperately writes to focus on the image of a “White Horse” carved from marble, something pure and fierce and ageless, he seeks to be enveloped in the idea of it, burned up in it, left to disappear in the white marble horse of Art and Beauty instead of lying around decaying in his “shabby” apartments, his old body, his tired and worn out mind.

The narratives of the poems span White’s entire life, starting in childhood and exploring his youth through his middle age. He begins life as a sad child, facing the truth that he and his family “were dying” as a very young boy on vacation in “Gatherings,” and it seems that his life only grew darker and greyer in a direct linear progression, everything from relationships to his body to his things growing worn out and old and “shabby.” He “grows up” into sadness, grows up into lovers he knows don’t need him the way he needs them (“Making Love to Myself”), and grows up into listlessness, overeating, aimlessness and then sadness upon looking back on his life.

The poems themselves vibrate with living images and the writing is incredibly deft and evocative. The poems often progress through ghostly landscapes – “Do you like the lice-ridden pigeons / cooing their terrible vision of the wino’s city?” (The Clay Dancer”), vividly evoking White’s memories. “Vinegar” has a particularly beautiful snippet of pure image, reading so true that it’s like hearing White describe something from the reader’s own past.

A car sounds somewhere and he wakes
nearly dreaming of a Black neighborhood
where a barber chair sits in a front yard,
and a train almost runs through someone’s house
by Estelle’s Café and Beauty Parlor.

In addition to descriptions of place, some of White’s sentences are simply so beautiful that they stun the reader, and I read many lines five or six times in a row before I could catch my breath and move on from their blinding glare or deafening music or tear-inducing sadness. In “Lying in Sadness” White describes a dinner with a man that, like many in his poems, he was deeply in love with long ago.

It’s dark.
You exhale a fist of memory.
I love you like weathering wood
in a room of empty pianos.

When you return to something you love,
it’s already beyond repair.
You wear it broken.

But the skillful writing is almost beside the point. In some way, the point is the author’s life, period. It’s a life riddled and spasming with furious longing and regret, sadness and loneliness, and each poem echoes the sentiment proclaimed in first few pages that the author “grew up” into sadness: “we’d grow right on up into wars and trains and deaths and loving people and leaving them and being left and being alone” (“An Ordinary Composure”) but, at the end of this poem, as at the end of the author’s life in the full reckoning of meaning and beauty, the decision is made, the most important thing is beauty, is his art, it is “these prayers at the waves, the white horse shimmering, bringing it toward us out of the coldest marble.” It’s impossible to read these lines without thinking of exactly this collection, The Salt Ecstasies, White’s truest poetical testament and ultimate art piece, that he knew would be soon published even as he died, and that he hoped and knew would burn flashing and shimmering throughout the long dark of history after his own life spark soon winked out.

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Just Kids is Smith’s memoir of her years writing and drawing and singing with the illustrator/sculptor/photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the 1970’s post-Warhol New York City art scene, and it’s unequivocally the saddest and most tender and best-written and most informative book I’ve read on both this period in art history and on the two main characters.

Before reading Just Kids, I already knew a fair amount about Smith’s art and career from books on “birth of punk”-era New York like Please Kill Me and From the Velvets to the Voidoids, and I also went through a phase last May where I listened to her musical masterpiece, the album Horses, on repeat for a matter of weeks and every poem and story I wrote somehow involved either the phrase “Patti Smith” or some kind of thinly-veiled reference to the lyrics of “Land.”  So I was already a huge Patti Smith fan, and generally pre-disposed to “love” her new book no matter how it turned out.  Needless to say at this point, Just Kids blew the doors off even my impossibly-high fanboy-status expectations for it.

Instead of over-romanticizing her past, Smith talks candidly about herself and Mapplethorpe setting out to self-consciously become “artists,” and recalls many conversations about not just practical considerations like where to set up studio space, how to pay their rent, and where to find free food in NYC, but also real abstract goal concerns, such as Robert’s lust for high-society acceptance of his artwork and Patti’s own dreams of becoming a sort of modern Rimbaud.  Hearing the artist herself talk about and analyze her own ambitions was rare and inspiring.

But the real subject of the book is definitely Mapplethorpe, from the constant battles in his mind between his conservative upbringing and his lust for discovery and danger through art, to his incredible physical beauty and conflicted sexuality, to his paradigm-wrecking work in sculpture, illustration, and finally his masterpieces in photography.  Smith was his closest friend for much of his life, and even after they both moved on to other relationships they still remained incredibly close, and her recollections of his short and tragic and ultimately exultantly triumphant art life are so illuminating and beautiful and fragile that they will definitely inspire and dumbfound anyone interested in artwork and youth and desire and beauty and transcendence in the warehouses and lonely hotelrooms and fire escapes of New York.  And maybe even drive you to real tears.

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• Molly O’Brien: The Last Book I Loved, White Teeth

The full poem is online in the January 2010 issue of The Collagist, where you can also access an audio file of Betts reading the piece.

Augusta Correctional Center is a prison in Virginia. Betts spent much of his youth in custody after being tried and convicted as an adult for a multiple-felony carjacking at the age of 16. “Dear Augusta” is a kind of letter from Betts, filled with commands, stories, testimony meant for the jail’s walls and rooms, and ending with a question posed to the institution: “Dear Augusta, what do / names mean?”

The language is harsh and mystical. The inmates are described like mythical figures, their crimes and actions rendered as supernatural acts, ghost deeds.

One afternoon Rashad
broke the collar of midnight,
streaks of a Norfolk street
running down
his face.

The mythology is rich with fear but also beauty, with years of time done rendered as tattoos on a man’s arms, as decades until the end of time when “the parking lot will fill with trees.” The cold walls of a cell are also “a breastbone / he laid his head upon.”

Betts names the figures with their real names and not prison-system numbers. He lists the names themselves. “Dear Augusta, what do / names mean?” All of them imprisoned as youths, “all juveniles” and “young men,” all ripped out of everyday life by the specter of violence, crime, myth and death in the long Virginia night.

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• The Last Poem I Loved: “somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond” by E. E. Cummings

On the Lower Frequencies spans a wide-ranging grip of topics, including organizing and playing in illegal punk shows in the Mission, marching in the city-shutting-down protest against the war, and a hilarious and terrifying account of the donut shop that was the “epicenter of crime” of San Francisco, which readers might recognize from Lyle’s reading on NPR. The author is friends with many political organizers and activists, and writes about his and their experiences working on mayoral campaigns, needle exchanges, and homeless outreach programs.  He is also plugged into the underground art scene, notably interviewing bay area artist Zara Thustra (Google: Sara Thustra) multiple times in the book, revealing some rad perspectives on the intersections of art and personal/political change.

One particularly interesting aspect of the book is the frontiers to which Lyle and his friends push the well-known punk/DIY ideal of repurposing unused objects and public space.  San Francisco residents see street art every day, like the recent “Gold Miner Store” pieces on Market Street and the massive city-sanctioned murals in the Tenderloin.  What many may not wonder about, however, is the extension of these art statements to the reclaiming of actual unused public buildings.  The possible center of Lyle’s narrative, which is organized loosely since it is excerpted from multiple sources and contains interviews and letters, is the story of the 949 Market squat, wherein Lyle and his crew discover a massive abandoned building, build it into a sustainable punk paradise, and then use it to organize huge shows, host free dinners, and provide living spaces for friends.  I found this story fascinating, not just for the specifics of how they found and occupied such a huge space for so long (see book for details) but also because it forces us as readers to consider what “vacant space” means in the city, especially when we walk past huge, boarded up buildings every day on Market Street while dozens of people struggle to stay warm outside the padlocked doors.

The more personal sections of the book are written very poetically, from summers in the city with old friends and new bands, to Lyle’s first nights in San Francisco spent exploring every street on foot, to listening to a Dead Moon record alone, far from home, desperately worried about a friend.  Even without considering the cultural and political essays, On the Lower Frequencies captures the underground/punk moment in an elegant, beautiful and extremely informative way that I think would be of interest to anyone within or without any particular group or scene.

A final cool aspect of this book is that, despite many of the businesses mentioned having closed down and many of the events chronicled taking place a few years ago, the people and bands and artists and activists working in Lyle’s stories are for the most part still working right now.  You can stop by Clarion Alley in the Mission to check out a Zara Thustra mural, you can read new articles by Lyle (latest one on Art Basel, Miami) in the SF Bay Guardian, and you can stroll down to Needles and Pens on 16^th street and pick up the latest issue of Scam.  The DIY-culture energy is still very much alive in San Francisco today, and reading On the Lower Frequencies is a great way to learn about both the history of the phenomenon and the current outlets for political activism and non-consumer creativity.

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• Lydia Melby: The Last Book I Loved, The Cat’s Table
• Molly McArdle: The Last Book I Loved, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
• Sarah Simpson: The Last Book I Loved, The Subterraneans
• Rimas Uzgiris: The Last Book of Poetry I Loved, The Living Fire
• Molly O’Brien: The Last Book I Loved, White Teeth