|
On & for Jim Brodey
 Memorial Speech Given at St. Mark's Poetry Project, December 5, 1993One of the most memorable readings, at least from my point of view, occurred here in the 1970's. The place was jammed. The readers were Brodey and-I think I may have blocked out some of it-Ginsberg. Brodey I barely knew, but I had always found his poetry inspiring. There I was sitting on the floor with a lot of other latecomers, listening to this poet I admired, when I began to hear-"as in a dream"-this elaborate poem evolve about Brodey's having "Brunch at the Norths," along with Tony Towle, elegant drapery, crab meat "on green tissue," paté-which Tony proceeded to form into balls and throw out the window-and the two of us, Paula and me, in ballet slippers and leotards (I had surprisingly cute legs) dancing, nibbling, and making conversation in these elegant surroundings. No matter that we lived on Broadway, this was Uptown. Clark Coolidge, who recently sent me a copy of this poem, said it struck him as "sounds of acid dropping amidst a Henry James tea party." I think I was smiling, certainly nervously, as this long piece went along, somewhat flattered that we had been a part of Brodey's fantasy or dream or whatever, but really not knowing how to react, or how the rest of the big crowd would react, whether or not they knew us. * * *Another Brodey Reading memory I have is of the two of us reading together at the Blue Mountain Gallery in the 80's and Brodey prefacing his half by stating that his poems were in my head all the time. Now, he knew that I admired his work. When we talked before the reading he told me how much he liked my poems and how well he knew them, and I responded by saying that I knew some of his too. It wasn't only the distortion and exaggeration that got me, it was that he would come out and say what he had said. After all, I hadn't even begun my reading yet and here I was being presented as a disciple if not a worshipper! Actually, we did form a little mutual admiration society, one of a number he had with fellow poets. He once announced to me that I came "directly" out of O'Hara. There's some truth in that, but neither approaches the whole story. There's Schuyler in Brodey too; also, in different degrees and at different times, a lot of Ginsberg, Ceravolo, Berrigan, Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas (I think) and others. Even if you didn't know Jim well, you knew he was passionate about poetry and read tons of it, especially his contemporaries. He wrote often-possibly always-in response to the poetry he was reading. Sometimes you can spot Berrigan in a Brodey poem. In the early works like Identikit, there's a lot of Ceravolo, especially Fits of Dawn. Ginsberg seems to me to have been an abiding influence. Brodey's 300, or 400, or 1,000-depending on whom you hear it from-poems with people's names as titles are not only a poetic gimmick; they're testimony to his involvement, if sometimes from a distance, with others, especially his fellow poets. * * *Brodey always seemed to me to have an immense talent, a genuine lyrical gift, which would get derailed or misplaced, leaving too many stunning fragments or flashes of poetry somewhere in the midst of what became for him a kind of post-Beat/Bebop shtick. When his song lines are permitted to really take off, when they don't get mired in, for example, his own personal reveling in the body and its countless orifices and productions-fixation is another way of looking at it-the poems soar. Interestingly the O'Hara that came to mind when I was thinking about Jim was "To the Harbor Master": I wanted to be sure to reach you; In Brodey's poems there's an ongoing wish to leave and reach, to transcend physical limitation-often via drugs and jazz, but also a genuine spiritual craving, I think-that all goes hand in hand with his reveling in or obsession with his low-down, physical self. There's a conflict of thrusts: up and out; and also down and out, and down and in (which all sounds like football, another reveler in the high and the low). I also think of Williams' "Danse Russe" (and I find it significant that the poems which come to mind are beautiful and lyrical ones), dancing naked and grotesquely before his mirror and singing "I am lonely, lonely/ I was born to be lonely," I am best so!" while admiring all the parts of his body. Brodey was lonely and driven, at least that's what the poems I've seen appear to indicate, and he is always turning back to his physical self for grounding. He gets caught in his own moorings; he swims in his own body fluids. But this doesn't all sound too serious; his poetry isn't; and John [Godfrey] did ask me to try to say something about it. In Brodey at what I think is his best, homey details and language-a lot of which you just don't find in any one else's poems-anchor the word and image flights in a successful way. I don't eat many "vomburgers" myself, but somehow Brodey makes the word, at least, appealing in his poems. I love the fact that he can talk about lust and "tushies" in the same line. If this is all fixation, oral or anal or both, it's also immediate and fresh as kid's stuff and not kid's stuff, both. Brodey clearly knew how to make a Poem capitol P, as opposed to non-stop "juice and joy," but just as clearly he didn't care about making Poems a lot of the time, relying instead on strings of post-hipster phrases and language blips and riffs to take care of matters. I think he had a kind of ultimate faith in the power of Poetry-in what the unconscious, given little or no direction, can do on its own. Too often, at least in my view, he over-indulged, in the unconscious as well as vomburgers, though terrific word combos and interesting things pop out all over the place. There is also a kind of centrifugal energy to his lines such that at times they threaten to leave both the poem and the page. lingo 5
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
