City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology Book

I bought this swanky little collection in the mecca that is the City Lights bookstore in Frisco back in 2003 and while I have dipped into it through the years I chose a rainy weekend for the exercise of reading it cover to cover. It was an exhilarating experience and I will be inevitably returning to certain poets from hereon in and for the necessary third, fourth, fifth read.

It's actually the big Beat names that affected me the least- the Ginsberg stuff I already knew and his work probably takes up more pages than any other single poet. It feels a little like the Greatest Hits of the Beats with Allen as lead. Maybe he was the hit-maker because he was so prolific? Other "names" include Denise Levertov, Pablo Picasso, William Carlos Williams and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the dream team of backing singers. As for Kerouac- 'On The Road' swore me off him but several of his poems in this collection have changed my mind, or at least opened it back up to his possibilities. Top ten smash for Kerouac.

Some of the poems were not my thing- I found them exercises in articulating little, or so it seemed to me. But for every piece I decided pretentious there were others that knocked the air out of me, while simultaneously filtering in a bit of sense. Harold Norse, Ernesto Cardenal, Philip Lamantia, Alberto Blanco, Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, Stefan Brecht- many of them new names to me- gave me a jolt or two. It was also powerful reading Malcolm Lowry poems the week he was back in the news with his 'lost' novel being published- the poem 'After Publication of Under the Volcano,' which starts, 'Success is like some horrible disaster' is quietly devastating given his history.

It was the two extracts (From Part 1 [The machines waited for me.] and Part XIII [Ungag our souls!] from Antler's long poem 'Factory' that hit me hardest. Powerful poetry that details the inevitable, authoritarian pull of the factory for (one of) the masses.

(From Part 1)

The green machines of the factory,
the noise of the miraculous machines of the factory,
Waited for me to laugh so many times,
to fall asleep and rise awake so many times,
to see as a child all the people I did not want to be

The exultant extract from Part XIII needs to be found in a book and read aloud, preferably in the middle of an environmental revolution with plenty of currency burning.

Antler certainly deserves his Whitman credentials and, for the discovery of him alone, this book is worth every penny, every mis-step. But this pocket poets collection is a good testament to City Lights, all in all, with the beat wheat outweighing the chaff.