Reveiws by Basinski
june 2000

• 40th Century Man - Selected Verse: 1996 -1966 (no misprint) by Andy Clausen.
• Down and Out by Gerald Locklin, with illustrations by David Hernandez. Event Horizon Press,
  PO Box 2006, Palm Springs, Ca. 92263. 350 pp. $34.95.
• CokeFish Ing in Alpha Beat Soup: A Beat-Post Independent Poetry Broadsheet.
  May 2000. Published monthly. $10.00 a year. Buck a single copy. Contact:
  Alpha Beat Press: Ana and Dave Christy, 31B Waterloo Street, New Hope, PA 18938.
• Driver's Side Airbag No. 39.- P.O. Box 25760, Los Angeles, California 90025.
  Subscription is $10.00 a year for which you get 4 issues. See also web:
  www.dsazine.com and email: info@dsazine.com
• Gas Station by Joseph Torra. Zoland Books, 384 Huron Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
   02138. $11.95.

• 40th Century Man - Selected Verse: 1996-1966 (no misprint) by Andy Clausen.
  Autonomedia, Williamsburgh Station, Brooklyn, New York, 11211-0568 190pp.$8.00.

     Poet Andy Clausen finds his tradition in the wandering, exploring, growing American poets, like Kerouac. And Clausen's poetry has also a social consciousness. He knows that injustice hurts those most who cannot afford to purchase justice, the too silent American working class. Giving his life in pursuit of a poetry that records his maturation, insights, errors, ups and downs, turns, curves and backslides, Clausen, the son of immigrants, finds himself a perpetual outsider. He is the 40th century man, the alien in America, the Lone Ranger Poet in front of the runaway American LOCOmotive. He has chosen (or by fate was destined) to be an outsider. I mention this because Clausen's poetry is not the poetry of a rich brat experiencing (slumming) life for a few years only to return the wide green, chemically treated, upper class, suburban lawn life. From the outside of inner center privilege, Clausen is quite uniquely suited to chronicle the last thirty years. His poetry depends on an honest insight and an honest commitment. It is an honesty that he cannot and can never walk away from or dodge. He is honest. His life, via the poems, attests to this. His poetic realism is, therefore, in many ways uncomfortable. It is risky. In fact, poet and poetry risk everything for insight and clarity. Clausen pledged to be true to his own self. He pledges to record the world he encounters. He has and is. The poems are ordered from the most recently written (the continuous frank present) and march backward through time. He begins by insight, explores, and throughout his history, Clausen is looking and finding. Still, he is seeking. On the path, the road, on the journey thought life, Clausen proves, again and again, that poetry is essential.

 

• Down and Out by Gerald Locklin, with illustrations by David Hernandez.
  Event Horizon Press, PO Box 2006, Palm Springs, Ca. 92263. 350 pp. $34.95.

     Gerald Locklin writes narrative, semi-autobiographical poems of significant, practical, American insight and philosophy. As a poet, he's published more than 60 books. However, of late, he's branched into the realm of fiction. Now, he has published a big book, a novel, which he has titled Down and Out. The novel is fictional reportage. Locklin's fictional persona is Jimmy Abbey, English Professor, womanizer, and down and out, out and out, drunk.
     Composed of 69 chapters of various lengths, Locklin's Down and Out is cleanly written, and his unadorned prose is consistently entertaining. With only the slightest detail to arrange and order the world in which Abbey thrives, Locklin's realism is overwhelmingly convincing. While not being totally autobiographical, it certainly would seem that Locklin had more than some first hand knowledge of the drinking life.
     Set in the 1970s, Down and Out details the escapades of Jimmy Abbey on his own turf, Sand Beach, perhaps a loosely disguised Long Beach, California. Locklin has been Professor of English for more than three decades in Long Beach, California. And also part of the novel is set during a summer in London. The gregarious Abbey is a serious drinker and womanizer.
     While he is often successful as a womanizer, the womanizing seems to take second place to his hard drinking. Womanizing is simply a by-product of his thirst. And Abbey is one thirsty boy. Yet, when Abbey participates in the drinking sub-culture, he is neither bum nor pitiful slob. He is a drunk from the professional, professorial class. For this reason, Abbey is a unique creation. The professorial ranks harbor a good many drunks. Not often are they exposed in prose or in life.
     While a committed boozer, Abbey is able to function at his job and maintains a more or less stable domestic situation. He drinks, seemingly, for the pure, hedonistic pleasure and enjoyment of the sauce. He is not particularly pathological. He is not particularly macho. He mixes his vodka with Tang. Tangled in the boozing sub-culture, Locklin's Abbey is an American outsider, but he is neither a derelict or an antisocial figure like Bukowski's Hank Chinaski nor a bravado bulging Hemingway male. Both of these authors, obviously, are models for Locklin's prose. Abbey is neither a cynical figure nor a character ruled by dark and deep traumas. Abbey is a common alcoholic, an alcoholic Everyman. He is only slightly addicted, as are most Americans slightly addicted to something. In fact, Abbey seems more ordinary than ordinary. It is his everyday raunchy and secretive, sleaziness that makes him so believable an American character. He touches each of our own personal perversities.
     While Jimmy Abbey is at various points down, he is never really counted out. He regains his footing and, albeit stumbling and staggering, carries on. He touches bottom and optimistically bounces back to land on his feet. In one sense, Abbey gets his cake and drinks it too. Down and Out is subtitled a novel for adults, although, seemingly, not because of its content. Perhaps this subtitle is part of the novel's sarcasm. Hardly horrible or hard core, the novel portrays a naughty American adult. As any good populace fiction, movie, or TV program in our times, Down and Out concludes positively with these two words: happy ending.

 

• CokeFish Ing in Alpha Beat Soup: A Beat-Post Independent Poetry Broadsheet.
May 2000. Published monthly. $10.00 a year. Buck a single copy. Contact:
Alpha Beat Press: Ana and Dave Christy, 31B Waterloo Street, New Hope, PA 18938.

     Now this monthly broadside is dedicated to the small press and the way it used to be. That used to be what still is here: is IS the free and open expression of poetry as spiritual high from the individual soul crying, screaming, gut twisting, hula-hoop, poetry that knows no boundary of art, meaning, the isms and great walls of poetry that surrounds all us in the poetry, the camps and cramps the living poetry out of us. See. So Dave and Ana wanna poetry that is an all poetry. And committed they have not been co-opted or corrupted. I wish I were so clean. I wish. I wish. This iss/you has Antler, Joy Walsh, Belinda Subraman, Neeli Cherkovski, and more and more. I mean this is a one page thing. For Christ's sake, send them some bucks and maybe some poems and books.

 

• Driver's Side Airbag No. 39. P.O. Box 25760, Los Angeles, California 90025.
Subscription is $10.00 a year for which you get 4 issues. See also web:
www.dsazine.com and email: info@dsazine.com

     So, Driver's Side Airbag is one of those places where along the poetry path of life one stops for a beer, a smoke, a piece of greasy chicken, noodle salad, candy bar, urinate, and to check the map. Now the map is 60 pages fat with all you need to think about. It should be read so read: addresses and poems, and collages and advertisements from friends of the outsider family, and prose and prose and cartoons. A real bowkay! OK? OK! So who do you get: Robert W. Howlington, Blair Wilson, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Mike Diana, Malok. Just think of these artists out there in Wisconsin and Oregon and Dallas and New York and Florida. Wouldn't you rather be there, than watching the final season episode of Malcolm in the Middle? Well you can, if you weren't so lazy and cheap. If you have gotten this far make the leap of faith. Atta girl. Atta boy.

 

• Gas Station by Joseph Torra. Zoland Books, 384 Huron Avenue, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 02138. $11.95.

     If you have worked in a gas station, or hung out in a gas station, or know someone who did those things, or worked on a car, had a car towed, or are working class, or are Italian, Polish, Greek, Slav, some ethnic group not up there among thee so called real Americannibals, or were young and worked with/for your parents, fell in love, dreamed of sex and had it for the first time, once, and that was strange, or read Charles Bukowski - (particularly Post Office), John Fante, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, or any of and all of those clear shooting realists, or let's add Kerouac, or had a vision, or are someone whose life dosen't make it to the page too often, or the past is melding, or you are thinking or writing it down, or if you are into writing as art, or if you respect blurbs by Robert Creeley and Hubert Selby, Jr., or want something that won't bore you to tears and make you laugh and make you remember and that will inspire you to be yourself and worth it. Joe Torra is giving you the opportunity. Look. It is not often that there is really a really good book written. Here is one you can't do without. I will bet you a drink. No, I bet you two drinks.

Michael Basinski

Michael Basinski is the Assistant Curator of the Poetry/Rare Books Collection of the University Libraries, SUNY at Buffalo.

His poems, articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including: Proliferation, Terrible Work, Deluxe Rubber Chicken, Boxkite, The Mill Hunk Herald, Yellow Silk, The Village Voice, Object, Oblek, Score, Generator, Juxta, Poetic Briefs, Another Chicago Magazine, Sure: A Charles Bukowski Newsletter, Moody Street Irregulars: A Jack Kerouac Newsletter, Kiosk, Earth's Daughters, Atticus Review, Mallife, Taproot, Transmog, B-City, House Organ, First Intensity, Mirage No.4/Period(ical), Lower Limit Speech, Texture, R/IFT, Chain, Antenym, Bullhead, Poetry New York, First Offence, and many others. For more than twenty years he has performed his choral voice collages and sound texts with his intermedia performance ensemble: The Ebma, which has released two Lps: SEA and Enjambment. His books include: Idyll (Juxta Press, 1996), Heebee-jeebies (Meow Press, 1996), SleVep (Tailspin Press, 1995), Vessels (Texture Press, 1993), Cnyttan (Meow Press, 1993), Mooon Bok (Leave Books, 1992) and Red Rain Too (1992) and Flight to the Moon (1993) from Run Away Spoon Press.