Neal Cassady: The Denver Years & Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill: Athair

A couple of items of interest: a new public television special, Neal Cassady: The Denver Years and a reading of Athair (Father) by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.   Enjoy.

my father saw
this same damn mountain...
winter seclusion

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don

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Neal Cassady: Issa's Sunday Service, #108

This is at least the fourth time Neal Cassady has made an appearance on Issa's Sunday Service (previously here, here, and here) and that says boatloads about lots of things (he also got a mention on the Sunday Service here, though the song wasn't about him).

For the second week in a row, I'm featuring a song by a group I hadn't known 10 days before. Weather Underground I somehow stumbled on, possibly on youtube, but how I couldn't say. They are obscure enough to not even have a bio on allmusic, just some cursory info on their self-released discs, When I Was a Soldier and Psalms & Shanties, the last being where "Neal Cassady" comes from.

I particularly like the pacing of this song. Which got me to thinking about the musical approach of each of the bands to their enigmatic subject - is their any relation between Aztec Two-Step, King Crimson, the Grateful Dead, and The Weather Underground, musically, in how they portray Mr. C.?

Here they are all together:

And, because serendipity is the grease that works the wheel of magic, after putting this together, I stumbled across this article in The Guardian about a famous photo which I was familiar with but had no idea was of Cassady.

Photo by Lawrence Schiller

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This week's featured poem comes from Lilliput Review #83, November 1996. Dream on.

for Melanie
   I called to confirm the calling dream,
   the dream, the dream, the calling dream.

            Kyle Christopher

(While typing this poem, this song came on the random mix of, oh, 14,000 or so songs.  Never get in the way of a runaway train ...)












calling down--
from deep in the well
an answer

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

- Don

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Send a single haiku for the Wednesday Haiku feature.  Here's how.

Go to the LitRock web site for a list of all 107 songs

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Issa's Sunday Service, #52: "Cassidy"

It's week 52, a full year's worth of music with direct literary influences (LitRock) from Issa's Sunday Service. What better way to celebrate than with the Grateful Dead and their wonderful live cut, "Cassidy"?

The story behind "Cassidy" and it's odd spelling may be found here: Cassidy's Tale. Besides Neal Cassady, there is another Cassidy to which the song refers.

There you go.

It's hard to believe this is the first appearance by the Dead on the Sunday Service (though it isn't Neal Cassady's) - a few weeks back they did some backup up for the Reverend Gary Davis, but this is the first time as a headliner. The reason it seems appropriate to celebrate with a Dead song is their generosity over the years with their fans. Music as a shared, communal experience speaks volumes.

It's been an interesting year. Most of the 52 songs, with the exception of a few, can be heard on the Jukebox on the sidebar or at the Issa's Sunday Service homepage. The full list as they originally appeared may be found here. I had an interesting experience with one song; if you'd like to know the details, I'll be happy to supply them. Though you can hear it here, anytime. All I'll say is it's a good thing that the work of William Butler Yeats is out of copyright in the U.S. so this artist no longer will be accused of stealing and profiting, by violating copyright, as happened in the past (page down for details beginning with the 6th paragraph, especially the juicy bit about how said artist brags that his lyrics are better than Yeats).

I'm just saying.

To accompany the above tune, here's another live version of "Cassidy" from the Dead.

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This week's feature poem comes from issue#78, March 1996 and is by Deloris Selinsky. Other poems from this issue were featured in two past posts.

make-up
heavily applied...
disguise on disguise

Deloris Selinsky

a face
like everyone else's...
the snail

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

Issa's Sunday Service, #6

Today's LitRock entry is "Neal and Jack and Me" from art rock masters, King Crimson. This is the second reference to Kerouac in only the 6th sermon from Issa's Sunday Service, so I'll try to be a little more varied in the future.

Of course, suggestions for literature influenced rock cuts are always welcomed.

Paying forward, we arrive at Lilliput Review #8, from December 1989. Here's a surreal bit of goodness rarely found in more recent issues:

Spiroman

she wondered how large the man
standing beside the person
clipping hairs from walls
would ever have to be
to cover the shortest curve
of the last strand
while still being able to see himself
fit any crevice
without knocking her cold

Stacey Sollfrey

And, finally, word:

persimmon leaves--
once they turn crimson
game over

Issa
translated by David Lanoue

best,
Don

Issa's Sunday Service, #4

This week's segment of the ongoing Issa's Sunday Service features the LitRock song The Persecution and Resurrection of Dean Moriarty by the fine folk rock duo, Aztec Two-Step. Here's the poem from which they took their name:


See
----it was like this when
----------------------we waltz into this place
a couple of Papish cats
-----------------------is doing an Aztec two-step
And I says
-------------Dad let's cut it
but then this dame
-----------------comes up behind me see
------------------------------and says
-------------------You and me could really exist
Wow I says
---------------Only the next day
-------------------she has bad teeth
---------------------------and really hates
-----------------------------------------------poetry

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

This particular tune has a unique POV, the speaker being very suspicious and seemingly hateful of Jack Kerouac's god of the road, Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassady. One word of warning though: listen to this song 3 times and you won't be able to stop. The cut comes from their great debut album, which is available to purchase direct from the band.

This week's featured poem comes from Lilliput Review #5, from August 1989, which was the first broadside issue. The broadside consisted of 9 poems by small press poetry legend, Lyn Lifshin. Here's a little take on the ol' bait and switch:

Madonna Who Throws So Many
Intimate Details Out Fast

to camouflage
or distract
like pick
pockets who
work in pairs
a shove to
get you off
balance as
she moves in
to lift your
heart

Lyn Lifshin

the tea smoke
and the willow
dance partners

Issa
translated by David Lanoue

best,
Don

Elizabeth Bishop & Neal Cassady

Sunday, February 8th, was the shared anniversaries of the births of Elizabeth Bishop and Neal Cassady. Each, in their own way, was a formidable figure of 20th century American literature.

Elizabeth Bishop is one of our finest poets, a poet's poet, as the saying goes. At the same time, her work, though not talked about generally as much as one would expect, is regularly anthologized. I've found it is appreciated by folks in the lifelong learning sessions on introductory poetry I've taught over the past few years; I'm planning to use the following in this year's session, coming up this April:

Filling Station

Oh, but it is dirty!
─this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!

Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it’s a family filling station)
all quite thoroughly dirty.

Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Some comic books provide
the only note of color─
of certain color. they lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.

Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet)

Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO—so—so—so
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.

This poem was published in one of her four collections, A Question of Travel. The other three collections are North & South, A Cold Spring, and Geography III and, with the naming of the later, it is right to speculate that two of the former might be considered Geography I and Geography II (and I'm betting from the titles you can guess which ones). Nomadic all her life, much of her work centers on landscape and travel and, as in "Filling Station," the question of home. I love the way the traveler who pulls in for gas is at first apprehensive and, indeed, perhaps even frightened, but when she begins to look about and question what she sees, an unexpected realization is made. As with much of the work of Billy Collins (which I've been reading quite a bit of over the last month in preparation for a poetry program), the poem itself is something of a journey and the irony is not hard to gather here. Her use of the word "doily" seems transcendent; one hears echoes of the words that came before, so this almost seems a portmanteau construction from "dirty" and "oily."

But I fell in love when I hit "ESSO—so—so—so."

Her work has recently and deservedly received the imprimatur of the Library of America.


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Neal Cassady, the amazing prototype for Jack Kerouac's Dean Moriarty in On The Road and driver of Ken Kesey's infamous bus, Further, lived an amazing, desolate, tragic and wondrous 20th century life.

Here's an excerpt from a letter by Neal from jail to his wife Carolyn, published in Grace Beats Karma: Letters from Prison. 1958-1960, which gives just a taste of what Kerouac was trying to capture in his portrait of him.

10/31/1958

Dearest daft dove deliberately doubling deft devotion despite despair dripping dumbly down delicately dim decolletage deserving diametrically different dissectional dressing—drenched daily in daddy's deepest dedication—to you, Lady of the Gardenias, Carolyn, wife dearest; Just as little as did the Druids in Gaul 22 Centuries ago suspect their annual late autumn blood & harvest gleaning sacrifice to Shaiman, God of the Dead, would eventually degenerate into tonites small fry trick or treating hollow culmination, did, I'll wager, you guess when writing it that "Hallelujah, the Pope is dead" would nigh make you a byword here synonymous to the opposite of your true character by exciting, without excepting P. Donovan's two negro friends, every convict who saw it to comment in admiration as misunderstood as it was genuine, "Jeez, what a tough (means great) broad", "Man,what a swingin' chick ya got", & the topper, from an older felon absolutely bugeyed in disbelief, "Where's she doin' time?" Anyway, I, not having fully forgotten Cayce, knew how you meant that already almost classic final line—say, just this second, as I wrote "classic", a faint recollection struck of some famous Prince or King in history dashing into the castle's great hall proclaiming "Hallelujah, the Pope is dead"; no doubt the "cons", you & I were all standing there thunderstricken—& was altogether proud of your performance, so amusingly mistaken by them, still it is true, as my initial letter this month stated, that I did feel a foolish twinge at Pius XII's passing, somewhat, perhaps, because of two detailed biographies I read, but mostly, due, I think, to heightened sensitivity toward anything familiar that jailing always produces in one, because my priest Godfather had talked with him 3 times rather recently & this closeness by proxy had somehow helped impress on me his true saintliness—of course, at 82 practically anyone can assume that aura, note Churchill, now 84, or Elinor, 76.

And it goes on, building and building, referencing Simone Weil and the Catholic Church complicity with Nazism and the installation of John XXIII. While the above captures the brezzy hipster conversational style Kerouac perfectly mimicked in On The Road, there is a density of reference here that belies the man who spent a great deal of his early years in and out of reform schools, receiving very little formal education. Many claim Cassady was himself the inception of the Beats; it's hard from this excerpt to doubt it and so realize how very lucky Kerouac and Ginsberg and all were to call him friend.

darting to the beat
of the downpour...
a swallow

Issa
translated by David Lanoue

best,
Don