Bo Diddley, Rest in Peace, and the New Gerald Stern

Just back after a week away from the computer. Life, however, went on and, so, sadly, came the news of the passing of Bo Diddley. There have been and will continue to be many arguments about the roots and origins of rock and roll. One thing is certain: without Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard, there would be no rock and roll. Of course, there are many others who can be cited but, together, these 3 broke down the barriers by storming the charts, bringing the sounds of African American rhythm and blues into the mainstream and changing the world. This early clip from 1955 captures a special moment in this transition.

Well, I've come back to a mountain of mail/email/orders, so I need to attend to that. The list of Near Perfect Books continues to expand, with three more titles added this morning. I've begun laying out the next two issues of Lillie, which are due out in July. Wish me luck with that, since I'm about 3 weeks behind!

During my time away, I plunged into the new Gerald Stern book, Save the Last Dance. It is the usual blend of stream-of-consciousness, Gerald Stern mythologizing (as opposed to mythologizing about Gerald Stern) and, as a bonus, contains the entire The Preacher, last year issued as a Quarternote Chapbook from Sarabande Books. Here's my take on The Preacher, posted back in February.

I'm not quite through the section of shorter poems, so I won't comment until I go back and read the whole thing through again except to say one poem leapt out at me: "Asphodel." Here is the opening, prototypical Stern, a couple of excerpts, and the close:


------------------------------------------------------------------------

He was dead so he was only a puff
of smoke at the most and I had to labor to see him
or just to hear and when we spoke it was as
if we were waiting in the rain together ...
----------and I forgot to say that
he was a veteran and he wore a green cap
that had Korea Veteran printed on the face ...
and I forgot to say his ears were large,
the way it sometimes happens in older men,
though he was dead ... and war
was what we talked about and what the flowers
were the way a poppy was the emblem
of World War One and we both laughed at how
there were no flowers for Korea nor any
poems for that matter though he was sad and although
he wore that hat he said it was a stupid
useless war, unlike Achilles Odysseus
talked to in Hell, who loved his war and treasured
the noses he severed and the livers he ruptured,
and picture them selling their aspholdel in front of
a supermarket or a neighborhood bank
and picture us waiting until our ears were long
just to hate just one of their dumb butcheries.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


More soon,
Don


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