On the occasion of Neal Cassady’s Assumption to the Celestial Hall of the Metaphysical Poets
For Blaise Cendars
“You don’t look for the Blues -that’s just stupid.”
– John Sinclair, in conversation
i.
THE METAPHYSICAL POETS could upset you to waking sleep
Set you to moanin’ all night long
Secret Catholic and Anti-Catholic messages
All in the service of love
Flighty ruminants that found God’s presence in each element
And pinched the girl’s behind
It was a loose group in 17th-century England
The Metaphysical Poets got the dub
Which was meant as parlor humor put-down
From Johnson and Dryden and the later boys in the coffee haus gangs
The badge stuck like Punk
Which was not an entirely favorable cloak
Let’s admit
Like Punk band,
Metaphysical Poet was a put-down but
It turned into a flower
Marvell,
Donne,
Herbert and the crew
Glowed between heaven and earth
Low priests of English intoning in colored tin foil in spats
With tough lines of Sex and Death and Concentrated Thought
Later unearthed when T.S. Elliot found their
Pennant in the playing field
He championed the school for mixing the day and the dream
And being Oblique unto making you think
In school I studied Elliot and Donne
In evenings, Dylan and Kerouac
And cloudy chains of American images.
ii.
NEMO THROUGH THE DEEP Going through a car wash
As a boy a mystery
The men were the machine the process and stages
And me with Dad in the Plymouth
Submariners coursing the nether reaches
Through soapy spraying but Visible
Mostly black fellows going about the tasks
But one white guy with a goatee and grey sweatshirt
Also fully involved. Could this be a beatnik?
The goatee I knew as a sign of a beatnik from religiously devouring
Henry Luce’s Time and rollicking watching Max Shulman’s Dobie Gillis
TV Beatniks didn’t work
Is a beatnik a bum?
I asked my father
No - He could be incredible on some topics.
They are fellows who work just enough to live.
Not far from Jack Kerouac’s response to Paris Review
Beats run around the country looking for odd jobs
Now Kerouac preached the Beat of swing and bop
And blues and beatific too.
This was the map for the road
Be open to Life
Sing to high heaven
Don’t get hung up on jobs
Dig jazz
Get coffee and what else you can score
Beat is golden cloud way to the after here.
As with the Metaphysicals and the punks
Beat and beatnik
A put down.
How do you reckon?
iii.
AN EXERCISE IN EXPLORATION will introduce the writer
to the character Neal Cassady
The mission to put him upon a pedestal impossible to topple
to stand then to book no ironic derision
Neal’s simple assumption came in a dream of Denver
Around the poolhalls of Denver
during World War II a strange looking boy
began to be noticeable to the characters
who frequented the places afternoon and night
Yea, and Copper Dust come to Denver on lonesome vespers
That make the whole scene henna
Bits of time microscopically oscillating to the imagined song
Of a red-haired dancing girl
Denver was the font of the Beats as
Spontaneous prose arose from Cassady’s letters to Kerouac
Fast, mad, confessional, completely serious, all detailed
Drawn in bas relief in Visions of Cody
Visions of Cody draw me to go
Bar to bar and along the alleys the fences the streets
Of the city under the Empty Sky
To the home of Neal Cassady’s few family days
Walking the way to the schoolyard with
Its invisible specter of raucous recess
Not looking for the blues
But seeing it in red dust
And seeing it in the places
The Beat Fathers described
That Ann Charters faithfully mapped
But looking for the home -the happy one
Before the car thefts before reform school
Making a guess at where
And imaging the skip-walk of the kid to school.
The butter and egg store first view along the way
On Champa Street
To Ebbets school
The school and the school yard where kids
Like cherubs
Darted
Each
To reach
Their own conclusion
Mine it came in a dream
Cody raised by Poussin angels to clouds
Over the Butter and Egg Man of Denver
On the plain alofted by little hipster munchkins
In our Lady of the Assumption’s Halls of Heaven
While down here below
In My Brother’s Bar the whiskey is warm
And the people roll in on Friday at Four
There’s a letter from Neal framed on the wall
Asking someone to pay his past tab
The bop radio has static
It could be scat
A bigger
Jay-do
Go up a bagel
Oh jiggity doh
knock a bug do
Jingle do wan
Kang
Blam
And in the Celestial Hall of the Metaphysicals
Where Marvell and Kerouac
Head bob
A happy nod
A tab paid
A poet made
His home in
The Hall of Great Assumption. - Jack Vaughan, 2021
Somethings related
https://www.usask.ca/english/prufrock/meta.htm
http://www.tomchristopher.com/beat-generation-2/drinking-in-denver/
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