I’m about halfway through Philip Whalen’s Overtime and finding more and more ties to those aspects of Beat poetry that I don’t find very endearing. At times I feel like I am trying to read a lifetime of entries for some guy’s blog in a week, including page-long rants in CAPITALS. I MEAN, HOW LONG CAN YOU SIT THERE LISTENING TO SOMEONE WHILE HE YELLS AT YOU ABOUT NOTHING? Now, it might have been great if I had read this over twenty years time, but this isn’t what I expect in a poetry book. Cut the CRAP, man. GET ON with the GOOD STUFF.
Here’s a SHORT example of the crap that, unfortunately, links Whalen to some of his friends:
A Penny for the Old Guy
FOR ARAM SAROYAN
nickel nickel dime
dime dime nickel quarter
(quarter two-bits)
quarter quarter four-bits
quarter quarter quarter six-bits
nickel nickel nickel fifteen cents
six bits & a quarter dollar buck
dollar dollar dollar dollar dollar fin
fin fin sawbuck
Double sawbuck twenty
5 times twenty is a bill
bill bill bill bill bill
YARD
bill bill bill bill bill
with much assistance from Lewis Welch
3:iv:6
Lord, how much “much assistance” can it take to write something like this?!! NOT MUCH, if you ask me. And this book had an EDITOR? I wonder what he was SMOKING ?
The trouble is that about the time I start to give up, start skiming pages, I find something I really like, something I wouldn’t have wanted to miss:
3 Days Ago
It quit raining and I could spend some time on the beach turning over pebbles, low tide and heavy surf, slow flashes of sun behind clouds. No translucent agates: jasper, a dark- jasper-flecked carnelian that’ll have to be cut and polished to explain why I picked it up.
I waste all this time proving the splendor of the world, everybody wants out of it or wants it ugly before they’ll believe it’s really here
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