Don't Muzzle the Ghazal

"The Road Goes Ever On"

Tolkien and Kerouac? Why not: the 1960s generation of college students and hippies made The Lord of the Rings a major phenomenon by devouring the illicit Ace edition. A few years before, their elder siblings were reading Kerouac. Tolkien's Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are both major road novels, leading to dangers, exploits, and exultations that Kerouac's late 1940s characters couldn't know.

R. W. Watkins posted a short comment on "On the Electronic Road" and mentioned is piece on Kerouac on "Outside Writers."  He gives a good discussion of some of the less-known aspects of Kerouac's influence, achievements, and lapses. Rob mentions  Kerouac's right-wing attitude toward the end of his life. That's implicit as early as On the Road, where he rails against Communism. I believe it was William Buckley who listed Keroauc along with T. S. Eliot and others as conservative writers. Those ideological boxes are too confining, of course, for any reasonably good writer.

Would Frodo or Bilbo have hopped freight with Jack? Only if it moved them closer to completing their missions. Kerouac's mission was of a different order.

Rob and some of his commenters mention Kerouac's poetry. Against a strong wind of opinion (including Denise Levertov, whose poetry I admire greatly), I really like Kerouac's poetry, from Mexico City Blues through the various other collections that have surfaced. There's a lightness, a zaniness, a freedom in what he does that continues to appeal to me. He also has a sharp eye for the telling detail.

And that's not mentioning his skill with haiku or the haibun embedded in some of his novels.

At the end, I don't care about labels such as "beat," "hippy," "great writer," "right-winger," "left-winger," and all the other notations of the sorry mind. If you don't like anything Kerouac wrote, adore his every scribble, or simply don't care, literary reputations wax and wine, are completely lost and rediscovered by happenstance. Life's too short to fight the battles many of us choose.

I like Tolkien's poetry too.

On the Electronic Road: 50 Years of Kerouac

My idea is to post here at least once a week, but it's been two weeks. I plead business, but then that's not a very good excuse, really, for not doing an hour's work. (Not work: these entries are a privilege and a pleasure, not a task, not a chore.) I was having some trouble coming up with a topic, all I could think of were things I couldn't yet write about. And then . . .

. . . then I picked up the new Library of America volume of Jack Kerouac's "road" novels. This fall, as you may well know, is the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road. The volume, Road Novels 19757-1960 includes On the Road, The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, Tristessa, Lonesome Traveler, and selections from Kerouac's journals, 1949-1954. The first three of these books I read when they were first published, and read, and read, and reread. Talked about, fantasized around, and shared with friends.

Kerouac despised the commercial trivialization of the beats, the term "beatnik," and the simple-minded criticism he received. He refused to be the spokesman for a generation of hoodlums (paraphrased from my leaky memory). Yet his writing had an enormous effect on many people, including me. I was in high school when On the Road was published. I doubt I did anything subsequently that I wouldn't have done without Kerouac's book, but I did it in a different context, with a different attitude. His writing encouraged my developing interest in Buddhism, jazz, and poetry.

A grove of locust trees in November in east-central Kansas. (Honey locust trees, with long sharp thorns but a good firm bed of leaves under them. A moonlight night, a night filled with stars. The boy under the trees, stiffly cross-legged, can recognize Orion, the dippers. He's come here fresh from reading Dharma Bums, ready to meditate. Enlightenment escapes him, as it has ever after. On returning to the lit and warm house, he does, however, scribble some verses. Kerouac has focused for him an excitement that is coded somewhere in his constitution. A pattern, a direction otherwise unavailable in rural Kansas.

I found Dharma Bums in a wonderful bookstore in Topeka, the state capitol. I don't remember the name of the store, but it was of a kind that hardly exists any more. Not a chain, not large, but crowded with books, fiction by Borges, issues of The Evergreen Review. My journeys on the road were to the closest cities of any size — Topeka, Manhattan, Emporia — seeking literary and aesthetic stimulation that the small towns ("pop. 600") just didn't have.

Well, I've wandered, and been unfair to those small small towns. In those days, I bought Plato, Thoreau, and Bertrand Russell from revolving racks in drugstores where they were displayed with romances, cowboy stories, and detective novels. Something for another entry, I guess.

I'm slowly reading On the Road. Kerouac's enthusiasm for America is delightful, his descriptions blaze with colors just like the roman candles he so famously mentioned. This novel is very well-written.

Louis Menand wrote a fine piece on Kerouac, "Drive, He Wrote," in the October 1, 2007 issue of The New Yorker. (Yes, his title riffs on Robert Creeley's best-known poem.) I recommend this piece.

Who Said That?

Voice and persona are related issues: in a poem, who is speaking? Is it the poet? Is the poet speaking as him or her self? That is, is the poem autobiographical?

I leave fiction aside for this post, although the same points apply to fiction and even to much nonfiction.

This topic comes up now because of the poem that opens the October issue of The Ghazal Page "After Persian Ghazals Are Explained to an Arab Poetaster." This poem satirizes two attitudes: the person who dogmatically asserts that the Persian ghazal is the "only" ghazal form and the Arab poetaster (dabbler in verse) who can't believe that attitude yet produces a Persian ghazal to refute it. Ever since I first read this poem, I assumed David Jalajel is speaking as the Arab poetaster, but he tells me that he identifies more with the proponent of the Persian form.

Satire is tough — not so much if the satirist doesn't care what the target of the satire feels. Neither David nor I, though, want to offend anyone who is an advocate of the strict Persian form, nor do we want to start a feud between the two approaches to the ghazal. (That raises the question of how many approaches there are — I hope we see many!)

Ezra Pound was one of the early modern proponents of the persona in poetry, one of his early volumes being titled Personae. The confessional poets (Robert Lowell, John Berryman, others) and the Beats (notably Allen Ginsburg) resisted the domination of the persona idea, that the poet spoke through a mask, a fictional self, rather than as his or her self.

I prefer to invite numerous possibilities: the ghazal is a form fit for both the distanced, more intellectual persona poem, and the more immediate, personal confessional or Beat poem. (Among the many possibilities.)

"Who said that?" Who, indeed?