Letter to Jack Grapes

Dear Jack,

I’m writing to you from India. Your ever-devoted student is sitting on the back porch of her spartan cottage in Goa, lap top on her guess-what, a few steps away from the Arabian Sea, reading Roberto Bolaño’s maddening The Savage Detectives, about a bunch of crazy poets. In the first third of the book I kept thinking about Henry Miller. In the middle of the book he took off in another direction; now I’m thinking Leo Tolstoy. He’s almost too intense, hard to read, but I can’t put the book down. Anyway, when I got to page 221, I jumped out of my seat. Hey, I shouted, this is straight out of Jack’s Poetry Collective Manuel, it’s Jack’s method! Is Jack a secret visceral realist?

I’m sure you already know this but since I want to refer to it again when I’m in need of a new exercise, I thought I’d write it out & send you a copy.

The poets’ group in the book is called the “visceral realists” & one of the characters, Rafael Barrios, reports their activities after its leaders have left…

“automatic writing, exquisite corpses, solo performances with no spectators, contraintes, two-handed writing, three-handed writing, masturbatory writing (we wrote with the right hand and masturbated with the left, or vice versa if we were left-handed), madrigals, poem-novels, sonnets always ending with the same word, three-word messages written on walls (“This is it,” “Laura, my love,” etc), outrageous diaries, mail-poetry, projective verse, conversational poetry, antipoetry, Brazilian concrete poetry (written in Portuguese cribbed from the dictionary), poems in hard-boiled prose (detective stories told with great economy, the last verse revealing the solution or not), parables, fables, theater of the absurd, pop art, haikus, epigrams (actually imitations of or variations on Catullus, almost all by Moctezuma Rodríguez) desperado poetry (Western ballads), Georgian poetry, poetry of experience, beat poetry, apocryphal poems by bpNichol, John Giorno, John Cage (A Year from Monday), Ted Berrigan, Brother Antoninus, Armand Schwerner (The Tablets), lettrist poetry, calligrams, electric poetry (Bulteau, Messagier), bloody poetry (three deaths at least), pornographic poetry (heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual, with no relation to the poet’s personal preference), apocryphal poems by the Colombian Nadaistas, Peruvian Horazerianos, Uruguayan Cataleptics, Ecuadorian Tzantzicos, Brazilian cannibals, Nô theater of the proletariat… We even put out a magazine… We kept moving…We kept moving… We did what we could… But nothing turned out right.”

Hope you enjoyed this as much as I did.

Love,

P.S. has anyone in the collective working on “poets” ever chosen Ted Berrigan or Brother Antoninus? .