The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete and Uncensored History of the Beat Generation, by Bill Morgan, Free Press, 2010, 250 pages

In honor of the New Hampshire slam poets’ marathon, why not look back on the poets who started it all? The poetic pedigree of today’s slammers is the Beats, and Bill Morgan knows a thing or two about the Beats. A librarian by trade, he was the bibliographer of most of them, including Allen Ginsberg, who was his friend. In fact, Morgan is pretty much the Beat historian, having written or edited dozens of books on the Beats.
The Typewriter is Holy is an early comprehensive history of the formation of the Beats, from their early friendships to their cultural impact to their deaths.
In his introduction, Morgan makes the connection between the beat circle of Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady and others to the transcendental movement of the 1840s with Emerson, Thoreau and their crew. It’s an apt connection.
But to Morgan, whereas Emerson was just one of many transcendentalists of the time, Ginsberg is crux of the Beat Generation. “The Transcendental movement wouldn’t have been as tasty without Emerson,” Morgan writes, “but the Beat Generation never would have existed with Ginsberg.”
And so it goes, with Ginsberg the center of this ever circulating wheel, constantly pulling and pushing poets, writers and thinkers into and around this circle.
The point of the book is to give a basic history of some of the writers who created the hippie movement, drug experimentation, slam poetry and youth culture in this country. It’s well annotated and informed. It’s not anything terribly new, however. Plus, because Morgan is so close to the subjects, much of the drug abuse and crimes committed by these folks are either ignored or simply waved off as the foibles of smart guys creating art.
If you are just beginning to explore the Beat Generation, this is a fine book to begin your journey. If you’re looking for a deeper, more complex look at this very complex movement, keep looking.

FLASHBACK: Wislawa Szymborska (1923- ), View with a Grain of Sand, Harcourt Brace, 1995, 214 words

This week, we look back on great works by poets little known in the United States, but widely acknowledged as literary giants elsewhere.
This magnificent collection from Polish essayist and poet Wislawa Szymborska likely contributed to her winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. View with a Grain of Sand, a selection of her work spanning 1957-1993, hits most of the highpoints that made this poet one of the most popular in Europe.
Her fame as a poet is even more amazing considering her poetic output is fairly slim, about 250 poems total to date.
View with a Grain of Sand captures selections from seven previous volumes, though the focus is on later work such as The End and the Beginning (1993) and A Large Number (1972).
If there is any one theme of Szymborska's poetry, it's the grandness of life's small moments. She best known for employing literary devices like irony and understatement to illuminate great philosophical obsessions, and this collection does a fine job of providing a reader unfamiliar with this poet a window into those major themes.
The title poem, from her collection The People on the Bridge (1986), is an ideal example of both Szymborska's use of irony and her existential focus on the everyday. In it, the narrator explains that nature - sand, lakes, sky - are connected to us only through our own experience, that nature itself has only the interest or concern for us as we apply to it. She writes of a grain of sand: "Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it. / it doesn't feel itself seen or touched. / And that it fell on the windowsill / is only our experience, not its."
The reader can also come away understanding Szymborska's amazing growth as a poet. Her early work is tentative and immature. In Calling Out to Yeti (1957) Szymborska is too careful, stumbling over her metaphors. In "Nothing Twice," a poem about fleeting life, she forces clumsy rhymes: "It's in its nature not to stay: / Today is always gone tomorrow."
The volume does leave out any mention of her two earliest collections, no doubt to avoid any controversy among the Nobel Committee considering her for the reward the following year. She was a loyal Stalinist in Poland in the early 1950s. And though she walked away from her Socialist ideology and renounced her early political work, a complete picture of this poet would have included her poems dedicated to Lenin and the glories of industrial construction.
For the reader interested in the human condition, Szymborska has been around long enough to know what she's talking about. View with a Grain of Sand is a worthy collection from one of Europe's most popular poets.

On Purpose, Nick Laird, Norton, 2010, 65 pages

Nick Laird’s poetry is like a Robert Parker novel: spare and raw, but dignified. Like an old boxer who still has a wicked right. On Purpose is fast and merciless. It works, mostly on adrenaline, and that’s ok.
In “Hunting is a Hole Occupation” the Irish poet offers a flurry of images from squatting toads to being beaten in the forest and finishes his machine gun diatribe with, “I’ve come alone and naked, aching / liking my hands after eating, waiting / to learn if God exists, I hate him.” Read that out loud and listen to the matching of aching and waiting. It’s perfect timing.
Most of this slim volume works at that level with short, powerful punched that the reader rarely see coming. Sometimes, it backfires, but mostly the punches land.
B+

Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs, by Ron Koertge, Candlewick Press, 2010, 170 pages

Here’s the conceit; teenage Kevin Boland like baseball, poetry and his girlfriend Mira. Then he meets Amy at a poetry reading and likes her to. What’s a tween to do? Why write in his story in his poetry notebook of course in a series of sonnets, prose and quatrains.
And just like the first book in the series, Shakespeare Bats Cleanup, Ron Koertge makes it work. A little cheesy, sure, but it’s nice to find a smart young adult book that isn’t about vampires or wizards. Koertge’s story is direct, his protagonist appears realistic, and for a teenager who likes poetry, Kevin Boland is decent role model. There’s also emails between teachers and Kevin to move the story and provide some poetry lessons.
If you’re looking for a way to get your sports obsessed kid into poetry, this may be it.
B+

The Waiting Room Reader, by the editors of CavanKerry Press, 2010, 87 pages

I like CavenKerry Press. I review their books often, because they know poetry, they respect it and they are one of the few publishers printing and promoting new poets’ works. I generally stay away from compilations, however. It’s too risky to take a stand on most compilations given the typical wide variety of styles, themes and poets. Usually there’s something for everyone, and something everyone will dislike as well.
That’s true of The Waiting Room Reader, but I decided to mention it because it comes from a press doing good work, and I’m a sucker for CavenKerry.
This is really a collection of CavenKerry poets disguised behind the conceit, literally, of a waiting room collection. We spend a lot of time sitting around hospital and doctors’ waiting rooms. So, instead of reading bad, outdated magazines, why not browse through a collection of, generally, uplifting poems of all different styles and forms. There’s no overriding theme, just a bunch of poems divided into categories like Food and Home and Daughters and Sons. Some of it’s good, some is not, but the presentation is pleasant and the idea is sound.
It’s all part of CavenKerry’s GiftBooks outreach program and copies of The Waiting Room Reader are given out to underfunded hospitals. You can buy one as well, and you should if you are interested in a decent cause. If not, at least ask your doctor to stock it instead of US magazine.
Unrated but A for idea