'31 on 37th

Unexpected pleasures around the corner. Parked on 37th Avenue in Jackson Heights this weekend, a pristine 1931 Model A Ford. I thought it had to be a kit but the more I looked the more authentic it appeared. Admiring the car, an older woman who grew up on 82nd Street recalled a Rolls Royce that sometimes appeared in the neighborhood. "We kids would chase after it screaming out, 'The Car!' 'The  Car!'"

The Great Lost Bob Creeley Bluegrass Record

Back in the mid-1990s, my work took me all over New York State. One bright winter day, driving through Altamont, I had the radio tuned to the University of Albany station. A folk show. The signal flickered in and out as the DJ came on mike to "back-announce" the set he'd played. "That was kah-kah Bob-kah-Creeley-kah-kah Bluegrass Band...." Had I heard correctly? There was no way to call the station. Internet playlists didn't exist yet. And I returned to Providence wondering if Robert Creeley had made a bluegrass record.

Five Rivers Environmental Center, Albany County
(Courtesy: New York State DEP)

Was this is before or after I found the "I Saw Delight (Homage to Hank Williams)" bumpersticker? Can't remember. In any case, I've never found any evidence that Creeley made a bluegrass record. Except that, tantalizingly, according to Tom Clark's Robert Creeley and the Genius of the American Common Place, as a child he did want to play banjo and eventually studied mandolin and violin.

When you look at some of the poems, though, especially those titled "Song," you begin to think, damned if he didn't take apart a country song and put it back together as a Robert Creeley poem. Take this one, for instance, from For Love. It's not hard to put the image of a window opening and a door closing comes (back) into a country song, nor the refrain: "See the sun but won't look back."

Song

How simply
     for another
pace the virtues,
     peace and goodwill.

Sing pleasure,
     the window's opening,
unseen back of it
    the door closes.

How peace, how happiness,
    locked as insistence,
force weather, see sun,
    and won't look back.

Sticker Shock #3 (Delight)

I first saw this bumpersticker almost 20 years ago in the Hay Library at Brown University, in Providence, R.I. In those days I would spend some lunch hours looking up broadsides and limited editions of books by Paul Blackburn, Robert Creeley, and other poets. When I saw a Creeley item titled "I Saw Delight," and labeled as a bumpersticker!, I had to see it. And now you can too:

Robert Creeley, "I Saw Delight" (An Alternative Press Bumper Sticker)

In the design by Ann Mikolowski, the outline of the lightbulb is created by the text "Homage to Hank Williams" repeated three times. I didn't see another until this summer when I found two (one signed by RC) in the Alternative Press archives in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. I wasn't able to photograph either of those; I do have permission from Catherine Halley of the Poetry Foundation to use a photo from her visit to Ken Mikolowski in Ann Arbor. For a PF audio story about the Alternative Press, which includes a phone interview with Ken, go here.

Sticker Shock #2 (God)

An Alternative Press Bumppersicker by Diane di Prima

A second bumpersticker from the Alternative Press archives, this one by Diane di Prima. Ken Mikolowski, co-founder with his wife Ann, tells me the bumperstickers were meant to be "functional poetry," but doubts this one was "put on any pickup trucks in Alabama."

di Prima is probably best known for her unflinching Memoirs of a Beatnik. Here's an excerpt from her earlier book of prose, Dinners and Nightmares (1961), that begins with a moment of Bohemian life in the East Village in the early 60s:

What Morning Is

First you wake up and it is daylight but wrong with some hood honking a
horn in the street and again till you think you'll go out of your mind and
you're not quite awake so you think rocks yes a rock at his head smash his
face the bastard and then awake with eyes open and Freddie at the
window standing all floppy in silly pajamas saying some people are rude
and you think rude's not the word smash his face, and you say Good
Morning Baby and then you sit up.

Sticker Shock #1 (Money)

We've covered a lot of ground in this series, appropriately enough. One form that might seem too constricting, even for poetry, is the bumper sticker. But why should it be? After all, the name itself is a poem. Scans perfectly.

An Alternative Press Bumpersticker by Edward Dorn

One group that didn't miss the poetic potential in the lowly bumper sticker is the Alternative Press of Michigan. TAP was the long-running (1969-99, more or less) project of Ken and Ann Mikolowski to unite poets and printers and artists. Ken and Ann collaborated with Edward Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, Diane Di Prima, Robert Creeley, Ted Berrigan, Ann Waldman, Tom Clark, and many, many others. IThey produced postcards, bookmarks, broadsheets, and bumper stickers. A typical issue of Alternative Press was a manilla envelope filled with such goodies. The subscription rate was $10 (eventually $15) a year. The Poetry Foundation has done a great job of documenting the AP; for a good overview go here.

The sticker poem above is from Edward Dorn's series Abhorrences, a poet's commentary on the Reagan's America. Another TAP sticker by Ed Sanders reads "DEFUND THE RIGHT," surrounded by stars and bars. Still relevant, alas.

Many of these pieces are now in rare book collections, like the Berg Collection of the NYPL (more about that later), or private collections, but Ken assures me many were displayed on the real bumpers that gave the form its name. I'd love to find one on the back of a VW microbus.

In the next few posts, I'll share a few more TAP stickers (and stories about the BTB correspondent who loves them.)

August Imaginations

Robert Adams, Longmont, Colorado (1979)

Back from the road. Back to work on our summer series, "Driver's Ed... For Poets," an exploration of the many-sided relationships of poets with cars and driving. I first encountered the Wallace Stevens poem, "Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination," on Tom Clark's blog. Tom paired the poem with fantastic photographs of the Nasr al Mulk mosque at Shiraz, Iran. I strongly recommend you head over there for the experience. As I said in my comments on Tom's post, Stevens offers us an extraordinary rendering of the experience of driving at night in summer. My own pairing, with a Robert Adams photograph from Summer Nights, is a more conventional one, but I think this poem lends itself to many re-imaginations.

Last Friday, in the big light of last Friday night,


We drove home from Cornwall to Hartford, late.


It was not a night blown at a glassworks in Vienna


Or Venice, motionless, gathering time and dust.


There was a crush of strength in a grinding going round,


Under the front of the westward evening star,


The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins,


As things emerged and moved and were dissolved,


Either in distance, change or nothingness,


The visible transformations of summer night,


An argentine abstraction approaching form


And suddenly denying itself away.


There was an insolid billowing of the solid.


Night’s moonlight lake was neither water nor air

(Another pairing: Thurber's couple headed home in "A Couple of Hamburgers." Thurber and his wife lived for many years in West Cornwall, Conn., next door to Wallace Stevens' starting place.)

Blog-Wagons

By Bill Griffith ("Zippy:)

News that Ben Stiller has directed, and starred in, a new film adaptation of James Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," put me in mind of another Thurber story: "A Couple of Hamburgers," from Let Your Mind Alone! (full text on archive.org). Here's the beginning:

IT HAD BEEN RAINING FOR A LONG TIME, A SLOW, COLD RAIN 
falling out of iron-colored clouds. They had been driving 
since morning and they still had a hundred and thirty miles 
to go. It was about three o'clock in the afternoon. "I'm getting 
hungry," she said. He took his eyes off the wet, winding road 
for a fraction of a second and said, "We'll stop at a dog- 
wagon." She shifted her position irritably. "I wish you 
wouldn't call them dog-wagons," she said. He pressed the 
klaxon button and went around a slow car. "That's what 
they are," he said. "Dog-wagons." She waited a few seconds. 
"Decent people call them diners? she told him, and added, 
"Even if you call them diners, I don't like them." He speeded 
up a hill. "They have better stuff than most restaurants," he 
said. "Anyway, I want to get home before dark and it takes 
too long in a restaurant. We can stay our stomachs with a 
couple hamburgers."

There have been a couple of dog wagons on this New England trip. The stand out so far is Ricky's in Bridgton, Maine.