The Web Shakes Proud To Present American Classic:
Max Blagg's “Autobio A Gogo”
Last fall, I was hosting a benefit for Elena Alexander's stellar and quiet NYC reading series, Mad Alex Presents. It was one of those amazing events: poets' fave dancers Douglas Dunn and Grazie della Terza did amazing swoops and banjo yodels, Eileen Myles read her Chelsea Hotel lesbian bondage story (this after I'd convinced Steve Zeitlin of City Lore to bring his teenagers, who enjoyed the piece enormously), Lucy Obst did great s&m c&w boho cable-ready schtick. Sekou Sundiata (who is currently recuperating from a bad car wreck) gave one of the most exquisite readings I've ever heard -- an audience that wanted to applaud each poem literally couldn't, so seamless was his performance. (Pick up his just-out CD, longstoryshort - you can listen to cuts from it at this link to Borders.com - and do it now, and write poems for Sekou and send them here.)
Max Blagg also read. This was the premiere of his still in-progress New York City praise'n'bitch poem, “Autobio A Gogo,” which is this week's About.com Poetry feature and which we hope to update and “correct” as Max plows through this incredible work, because it is simply the most remarkable poem about New York since Walt Whitman crossed Brooklyn Ferry, since Frank O'Hara did Second Avenue. “Autobio A Gogo” may be written to one of Beckett's tramps, but it's for all of us. Blagg the boho raconteur is a Brit expat who understands revolution and cynicism are equal emotions, and that poetry's blood is the richest delight.
--Bob Holman
Landed at Kennedy with the rest of the immigrants
declared myself and 2 cartons of Chesterfields unfiltered
more American than Marlboro even
the customs man looked hard
at my platform boots and dopey sideburns
his watery eyes flickering
reptilian in the fluorescent light
then he waved me through
With a homosexual smile
Outside the terminal I took a bite
out of that blue September sky
stepped inside a sun yellow cab
And rode into town bold as Clint Eastwood
Arriving in Coogan's Bluff
Holly Golightly gazing into Tiffany's window
the Babylonian towers
locked their shiny arms above my head
a steely embrace of concrete and glass
later for 42nd Street
downtown was my spirit level
I was the boy, I was here,
I was ready to suffer.
Ditched my baggage in Ziggy's loft
Paid a month's rent with English pills
Then split one with myself and
stepped into the new world
garment trucks clogged Spring and Mercer
the street signs ordered me to
walk don't walk walk don't walk
pencil thin junkies weaved through the crowds
planning deli holdups
tiny minds singing spinning singing
(Music Over: it's a white philosophy student dropout daydreaming this ditty as he goes to get his methadone on Lafayette Street)
deli holdup deli holdup
grab the grocer grab the grocer
give it up man give it up man
gimmee dat cashbox gimmefuckin cashbox
come across man don't play hero
wait a second grocer's packing
got a gun man and he's firing
lead is flying
shit he hit me
crazy fucker shot me
sucking chest wound musta been a magnum
now I'm dying in a deli
that's my blood there on the freezer
looks like jello but its my Ono negativo
windows dark and the shelves are waving
his trigger finger wrote my ending
its so very jean paul sartre
it's so deli existential
no more deli
no more deli holdup
(the singer disappears like a ferret
into the roaring morning)
women blossomed from subway entrances,
gleaming like diamonds among the trash and the filth,
A dream of nipples sweet as sugar melting in my mouth,
hardening in my hand
rotating beauty a wheel in space between infirmities,
between infirmaries
Bellevue Beekman Beth Israel
walking wounded
Wailing in the corridors
Fire trucks fire escapes felt air seized throat
Throat chilled by coke snot
Tumbling through the sinus desert
Sweet birds of paradise and youth
graced the pavements high strung
instruments of power and bliss
At a bus stop on Sixth Avenue
a dancer in a headband
stopped me in my tracks,
the sullen beauty of her dreaming stance
as she smoked a cigarette cool as Juliette Greco
stroking Miles Davis in a Parisian bistro
working on her inner life
kegel muscles hard at play
years later I saw her dancing at the Joyce
working the remnants of her beauty
with a Lithuanian grace
dovetail the detail o memory
shave the feathery edges
These sharp-edged, feral citizens had
all the personality of a runaway train,
they could either carry you away or
feed you to the furnace that spun the steel wheels
someone said a peasant arriving in the city
does one of two things
he finds himself or he gets lost
I walked for miles and never disappeared
between the lines
the solid grid of First and 1st
Sixth and 3rd all the way down Bowery
to Chinatown gobbling pork buns and listening
with envy and delight to
the moans of passion from the loft below
the days went by in a blur of bedrooms
and apartments small and large,
everyone had a room of their own
they undressed, slowly and sometimes fast
in sunlight and the shadow cast
on aging hardwood floors
by embroidered panties hanging on a line
the line bisecting the Chrysler building
that filled the window,
The silver bowl of oranges and lemons
On a scratched wooden table
Still life in breathing primary colors
frozen in clinical detail
As the eel-like contours of the body on the bed
Continue to recede into the
Cluttered archives of the medulla
Oblongata crowded as the tiny bathrooms
Of railroad flats on Avenue A
Bleecker Street tenements with grandiose views
And always the shiny steel spire of Empire
my beacon and my guide,
figurehead of this stately ship of state
the rock in the waters Manhattan
laughing all the way to the banquet
The mind expands and the body
becomes attuned, tuned up a tuning fork
wired into the city's centrifugal hum
its essential Elmslian motor disturbance,
acceding to the voluptuous grip of this autumn rhythm
The play of light triggered a tantric dance
Psychedelic vaudevillians scuttling across Avenue B
still wide awake as the sun came up
with a bareknuckle radiance
the velvet margins tainted and tawdry
in the rich raw daylight that
stained New York with message and meaning
ghost voices whispering “only connect”
the lords of the lingam floated through
the misty October evenings
conniving gods and sacred monsters
responding to my invocations
the promise of a rich sequence of flaming creatures
eager beavers hot as the pistils of exotic flowers
sacred perfume sweeter than apples
scenting the autumn air.
This constant search for bedding left me pure,
drained of envy and malice aforethought,
the energy of sex igniting internal combustion,
those first faltering steps through the ruined streets
replaced by a confident stride
blood cavorting in spasms of arterial delight
as Desoxyn doubled the volume
pouring through the ventricles
of a heart cranked to seizure alert
caverna corpus indelictus
in flagrante adeste fideles.
O lente, lente currite noctis equi
my priestly mutterings clearing the sidewalk
as I attempted to comprehend
and navigate this fuguefilled city
this wondrous dumbstruck state
*
last week my doctor disconnected
the power on my meds
“life is a series of breathtaking events”
he said, quoting Castaneda
“and you need to feel the edge.
do you remember Castaneda?”
the doctor's an artist he knows about the edge
like my dry cleaner is a poet who has translated
Ezra Pound into Turkish
And my florist is an ex-biker
Who can still kick serious ass
“o wondrous city that hath such creatures in it!”
How could I forget the Castaneda experiments
Conjuring the double in those
bleak North London bedsitters
trying to fly through walls
to go south from that dreary life
to regions of light and beauty
far from that spirit peeling damp
that coiled around my soul
the soul as soiled as Lorenzo's in the play
one of the few plays I read
and only because de Musset loved George Sand
the spiritual decay discoloring his face
fit the description of my passport photo
Face gone yellow around the edges from
Too much funky business mummy's
golden boy turned brown.
The pills were no answer then and these other
eunuch specials that recently
kept me down on the farm
merely blunted the edge of the disaster of my life
they took away my poetic license
and all the juicy pain of each brief day
we must remain connected to the brightness
unshielded by chemicals
easy to say this when I'm not at the bottom of the shaft
when my head is out of the bag
out of these chickenliver manmade blues
and I can walk by Electric Ladyland
with my head held high
it's still on Eighth Street among the acres of
cheap shoes I never could afford
on sweaty summer nights
certain steely notes would manifest
in the dense blueness of July air
The sound of Jimi hydroplaning through the canopy
Of the plane trees and the honey locusts
in a gaucho hat and mirror studded vest
commanding us to add new tributes and lipstick
to his everlasting meat glory
to smash this puny existence
animate the wretched carcass
into ecstatic Attic figures
paddle thicklipped down the delta
to kneel at the confluence of
the Tigris and the Euphrates
and worship at the holy crease
like a lion at the spring
and I'm with you Jimi in Washington Square
Where the sky resembles Africa at twilight
an enormous purple haze
shadows stretching all the way to Timbuktu
where your wandering spirit occasionally
takes up residence
in the guitar of Ali Farka Toure
*
Velvet paws and long curved claws
The bear awakes in the dark Platonic cave
From dreams of salmon
Stolen from his den by eagles
fat drained from his cavities
he walks upright into the snarling spring
something there is torrential
in his lack of team spirit his arrogant attitude
this manic phase lasts clear through till summer
when the thermometer sewed into his fur
registers 92 in the shade
and he runs amok on Fifth Avenue,
tearing up the tourists staring into Bergdorfs”
boiling brain fanned by a Harmattan wind
blowing nuclear particles in from Jersey
*
I was moved something was moving me along
I was the man I was there
when an audience of two
Threw chairs at Al Suicide at the Mercer Arts Center
And the golden hair of Eric Emerson
Glittered in that same space
Even though his ears were made of tin
He radiated the essence of 1972
Before he OD'ed and was left for dead on
Hudson Street
By his lowdown junkie friends
When the Dolls played New Years at the Mercer
Too drunk to dance
I lost both platform heels
And fell down stairs
Maria took me home
my upstairs neighbor Santa Maria
of the white Rolls Royce the holiest doper on
East Tenth
The untouchable electric white woman
She who sleeps with the paddy boxer
and may not be approached
by any living skell neither by day nor night
nor any time the moon is in his house
nor by the honeyskinned Rican boys
I thought I would be cool if
I ate the mofungo and the rice & beans
but they still wanted to cut my white ass
into pretty ribbons
New York stole the island heat
from their bones and replaced it
with cold and cunning knives and guns
live ammo on the nightmare streets running off
Avenue C
my approach was too anthropological
the same way Jim P. blew it with those amazing whores
in Marseilles “ou est votre cahier?” they snarled
and waved us off we didn't have
francs to spare for that expense in any case
but how they shimmered in the southern night
pyrotechnic devices signalling utopia
on the streets of Marseilles
Maria drove me home and put me to bed,
avoiding the spew of regurgitated chemicals
refusing to let me get killed
“Not for nothing”, she was gutty as the Greeks
Who filled the ships at Mylae
Amazons fighting side by side with Ulysses
I worship her motherly courage today
I was there, I didn't suffer
I wasn't conscious
*
At West 4th Street
the mirror on the vending machine
reflects a face dour as my dad's
digging into Yorkshire pudding
On a Sunday lunchtime paying
no attention to the howling
Of his children except to emit the occasional
Disciplinary bark good for ten minutes of silence
his bark was worse than his bite
and I'm looking for Queens' Plaza
on the map of Manhattan that's in my head
inscribed there by the first pages of Naked Lunch
My father disapproved of that book
he didn't understand it
just knew it was dangerous
“take this back to the library boy
exchange it for some Jack London”
“but listen to this dad”
“heat flare out from a broom closet high on ammonia
too many levels stay away from Queens' Plaza son”
but that world no longer existed any more than “Lexington 125/
feel sick and dirty more dead than alive”
no I didn't want to be Lou Reed
the Long Island intellectual junkie
Even though his boom boom couplets
Inspired me to pursue my own antic research
Put jelly on your shoulder
Lie down upon the carpet
That from which you recoil
It can still make yr eyes moist
*
I didn't want to be Lou Reed
I wanted to be John Cale screaming at houseplants
or Pierre Clementi in Belle de Jour
moloko-chugging Alex in A Clockwork Orange
An indefinite article cruising the mean streets in eye makeup
and my aunt Nellie's walking stick
looking for something to eat or fuck
or snort anything but heroin
Johnny Thunders straightening out a needle
with a pair of pliers on Tenth Street
didn't seem very glamorous
though the French groupies were beautiful
the men were mostly cool jerks
cooing like the pigeons on the window ledge
as the morphine iced them down
on those overheated July afternoons
I didn't go down that slide instead
enraged that such beauty loved the junkies
I wrote a whole anti-smack pamphlet poem
while speeding on crank
Told the judge it didn't count
That I was also eating grams of opium
it was a Coleridge thing
to infuse these tiny chunks
of thinking man's chocolate
into a cup of bitter tea
and take long walks through
the magnetic fields of the lower east side
senses in perfect derangement
oxidized and anointed
endowed with the capacity
to discern the tiniest
particle of body heat
deconstructing the odors of doorknobs and bicycle seats
locating the fragmented scent of a female hand
minutes after it had fed coin into a parking meter
oh lovely maiden let me count thy quarters
and quicken thy queynte (OE)
with these muscular fingers
I coulda been a piano player momma
Why didn't you make me do my lessons?
Or at least teach me to
“Maintain flying speed” another aphorism
memorized at Lunch
sometimes it was a crippled B29
rapidly losing altitude
And sometimes it was the fastest jet in the sky
Buzzing the waterfront
As the River Elbe or was that the Hudson
burned out of control
Far below and the flak bleached air
Deodorized my widow shopping
Grooving on the wives of the dead
And the lovers of the living
Polar gusts icing my tongue
Freezing the meat on the hoof
*
Thought I heard someone say
“my marriage is in tears”
and they were right
for years I've damaged everything I touched
it has taken me this long to grasp your beauty
and how I almost burned it to the ground
I grooved so deep in my own quicksand
Lost my marbles in the mud
Can your love still wash me down
Extract the venom from my jaws
And let what remains of this run shaker life
Shine clear as a cut stone a spring stream
Tumbling downhill to feed the horses
In the long green meadow?
Affirmative says this note on the future
mapped out in the triangles
Incised by age and karma into my palm
I was born in high summer and
My goof grooves are open widest
When the sun rides the highest arc of sky
By December the light slides so low
It can barely make it under the door
Death loves this freezing season
Bodies cold before they're cold
My mother died in December the steam heat
Was banging in the pipes as I read the letter
From my sister that arrived a week after the funeral
Too nervous to use the phone
So in 19th century peasant style they wrote me a letter
And I had no ticket for an aeroplane
Twenty years have passed since that hammer to the heart
Twenty summers and twenty penniless Decembers
And look ma I'm all grown up and
Still crying my eyes out at the refugees
Crowding the evening news
The interchangeable victims in Chechnya Albania
The former Yugoslavia while here
in the capital safe as the Captain's milk
winter sunlight illuminates the subtle weave
Of the schoolgirls' tartan skirts.
Their innocence holds back the dark.
the older girl consumes a Mounds bar
With tigerish ferocity as the wind's edge feeds her appetite
And swirls her hair into childish shapes.
A gaudy nostalgia hangs solid in the air
Potent as mistletoe cut from the fork of an oak
The seasonal gleam of plastic holly
Adorns the bottles leering at me
From the windows of the liquor store
Strumming my consumer nerve
Asking “won't you take me out for dinner
Won't you let me fill your glass?”
let this liter of red be my bolster
Against that approaching day
When I'm no longer swoony and swivelhipped
Boasting about my small excesses
In a cold church basement
To an audience that has already heard
Every possible permutation on
The number of forks in the road to ruin
And then you can say you knew me when
I was the guzzler
I drank it all
And now I'm only interested in what
might prolong the rapture
Trees, flowers, women in their glory
The ephemeral but civilizing vision
Of strawberries in a dish
*
The essential atoms of apple flowed from the wood
As I split the logs the widow gave me
She had the tree cut down a week after the old man died
In the autumn the fallen fruit tripped her
when she went to hang her washing
and though the fragrance of the blossoms in the spring
imbued her laundry with the delicate aroma of apples
that odor failed to penetrate
the denseness of her peasant skull
So she chopped down the tree instead of moving
the line.
Months after amputation
the green and pungent limbs
were still alive unaware that
their saplines had been severed
I restacked them gently east to west
to let the living molecules make their
slow motion escape into other forms,
to reintegrate with the icy winter air.
What's left after you're gone
and what gets left alone?
My sister S. was torn apart with grief
When her husband died, painfully, of lung cancer
She wailed through the church behind his bier
A righteous holyrolling widow
“he was the best/he was the best”
all assembled were impressed
with her Baptist riffs
Oh how they had danced their whole lives together
And the garden he had built like a shrine to love
Hand dug the pond installed the waterfall
A few months later she was dancing
at the workingsmen's club
their other shrine their good time
their personal juke joint for twenty-five years
dancing with another working man
the backyard pond smooth with concrete
the waterfall silent.
One night the husband briefly returned
as a long wisp of black tobacco ash
flickering furiously like a dying man
trying to light a cigarette
then banging on the bed rail
the new guy almost swallowed his dentures in terror
but finally the ghost departed
as the wood will eventually burn
and phantom apples will ripen in the smoke
What was left after they were gone
The tree cut down the pond filled in
Their tiny works erased in days
They didn't leave a mark
*
Feet pummel the tarmac the dogs bark and
The caravan howls by lights spinning
illuminating the ragged blankets of
the deranged and the in valid
housed in doorways
we are all just a kiss away
a slip away from their grievous condition
Their tickets have been punched
“And the light no longer shines
through the perforations”
the drippy melancholy of a subway singer
echoes through the 4th Street station
driving me deeper underground
seeking the source of the steam
that rises through Con Ed's tin tubes
casually erected in the middle of the street
smoky totems of the electronic gods
fed by miles of tangled wires and cables
corroding far below the F train and the Q
the A the C the E
who is the ace that walks beside you?
rats as big as Labradors roam freely here
and mole people in suits of rags
cryptic victims of monkey meltdown
wander through the gloom accosting simple citizens
who only want to get home through the deadly maze
I'm down too deep I get cold feet
fording subterranean tributaries
where schools of albino fish navigate
the streams that cut through the bedrock --
Exit to Sixth Avenue surface by astral punch
up thru the concrete and steel
past the gangsters
buried in the foundations
of the towers whose hypnotic glow
continues to attract a feast of pilgrims
idiots and savants clutching their
foolish notions their great expectations
*
Twenty years have passed
and the black and orange cover
of Berrigan's sonnets still thrills me
like his tambourine life of Pepsi and speed
helped propel my own
nothing haunts you like poetry
once moved you stay moved
the Sonnets' fleshy petals
spray light across the morning
where the yin and the yang throb in impure unison
cooling the dull tumult
of the stomach's turbulent juices
and if we are indeed an army of linguistas
united in the struggle for
truth and beauty we should
always signal our intent and never pass
a fellow officer without the small arms fire of
recognition for each soldier's service
in the poetry wars the endless
struggle against ignorance and silence
the constant need to juggle words
and somehow nail them to the page --
this book had fed me
so many unacknowledged lines
helped me grasp that outer space
surrounding the constellation of
avenues and streets
where my innocence was
hammered into experience
and I gathered tattoos and bruises
and these talismanic volumes
shabby trophies of the word
they still nudge my heart today
o poetry your practitioners are so pathetic
such a dismal collection of self-centered
backstabbing mooches
and yet we continue to kiss your hem
and heap more flowers on your grave
hoping you'll reward us with some scrap
of obscure beauty perhaps a title as good as
underground with the oriole
Or wildflowers out of gas
Highway to the sky
the music of these books
still plays in the library
of the spirit and some collector's shelves
contain that copy of Organic Trains
bought for one dollar from Jim Carroll
hustling his work at the door
of the church on a rainy Wednesday night
The first month I arrived
Paul Blackburn had just died and
his memorial service had filled the hall
with artists and acolytes
saluting his memory
with whiskey and words of love
I was impressed at such
a glamorous sendoff
an appealing if not ideal occupation
and you didn't have to actually do much
steal books to buy pills
scribble a few sharp lines once in a while
that might appear in the smudged mimeo
of an 8 x 11 handstapled magazine
collated by a foreign legion of
dreamers and egomaniacs
scribblers and charlatans
who would stop at nothing to see their words in print
their names on the page.
My people. My tribe, my appalling family.
I embrace you at the end of the 20th century
You've got to leave your mark
And this is mine
--Max Blagg
NYC Jan-March 2000
Max Blagg was born in England and has lived in New York City since 1971. He is the author of several books, most recently Pink Instrument, a collection of poems with photographs by Ralph Gibson, published by Lumen Editions/Boston in June 1998. He is currently completing a novel, Diving for Blondes. He wrote the text for two recently published artists' books, Notations on a Trek, a book of drawings by noted artist Jerelyn Hanrahan (Verlag Ricco Bilger/Zurich, 1997) and New Poems/New Drawings, with James Brown (Picaron Editions/Paris, 1998). Blagg has collaborated with other artists including Richard Prince, Ken Tisa, Nan Goldin, Jorge Salazar, Glenn O'Brien and Anita Madeira. A pioneer of stand-up poetry, he has appeared regularly at a wide variety of venues, including The Kitchen, Nuyorican Poets' Cafe, Fez, The Pyramid Club, Performing Garage, The Drawing Center, St Mark's Church and Jackie 60. He was also featured on MTV's Unplugged/ Spoken Word Special. He writes a bi-monthly column, “Bohemian Veneer” for New York's Paper Magazine, a quirky personal take on a wide variety of urban themes. His work has been published in various other magazines including Details, Bomb, Elle, Mirabella, The Village Voice, Interview, Night, Semiotexte, Sensible Skin, Verbal Abuse and Zone, and anthologized in A Day in the Life, Instant Classics, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and the forthcoming Underground USA (Masquerade Books), among others. You can read Blagg's work on the Net:
Lacanian Ink #7, & he also contributed a drawing, “A Few of My Favorite Frogs,” to their Written/Spoken/Drawn exhibit.
