NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

Yusuke Keida's BLUE BEAT JACKET has been publishing Beat and neo-Beat writing for the past 10 years. This modest-looking pamphlet marks the magazine's resurrection after a year's hiatus and it offers a good selection of work from Sam Hamil, Hillel Wright, Gerald Nicosia, Herschel Silverman, and others.

Michael Basinski provides reviews (that skate dangerously close to being puffs) of the Academic neo-Beat/Meat school writer Gerald Locklin in the magazine's back pages.

The lion’s share of BLUE BEAT JACKET, however, is devoted to two retrospective essays on the San Francisco scene. Hugh Fox writes of the connection between Charles Bukowski and A. D. Winans, poet and publisher of SECOND COMING MAGAZINE, in his THE BUKOWSKI/WINANS LINK. A.D. Winans himself treats us to a tour of the "third wave" of the San Francisco avant-garde in his TRACING THE WEST COAST BEAT MOVEMENT. Both essays, while drawing attention to literary figures who were somehow muscled aside by the first wave of the Beats, and later by the phenomenon known as Charles Bukowski, also strike us as extended exercises in self-pity and sour grapes. God knows A.D. Winans deserves attention for his publishing activities and his devotion to his work, but Hugh Fox's presentation of Winans at sixty-one years of age as lost, mournful (albeit secretly an errant knight), and speaking out against injustices that he really does not want fixed, is — frankly — unattractive, no matter how true it may be. Instead of the larger-than-life, tragic figure that Fox seems to want to hold up for our admiration, we see a man and a writer who has simply given up hope and is writing work that reflects, in spare, minimal lines, his backward-turning gaze. After reading Fox's version of Winans, we want to tell Winans (and Fox) to try something new. Write a new kind of poem, man. Create some joyful thing under the sun. Stop being a ghost before you're dead. And stop measuring shrouds for the living.

On the other hand, Winans in his own, largely up-beat essay, manages to escape the coffin that Fox has constructed for him with a breezy trip around North Beach c.1958-1974, which is, in the main, enjoyable and informative except for near the end of the essay when he dredges up a controversy about a long-gone organization of little magazines, and grants conferred and grants denied by a nascent NEA, including cynical insights provided by Charles Plymell, a fine poet and novelist in his own right who also hasn't gotten his just due. The tone of the piece drops at this point, and we are once again wearing black armbands against our will and forced to march in some funky funeral cortege. And once again we ask, what's the point? Why draw up battle lines for events that are now ancient history in the year of our lord 2000, when the NEA itself has entered eclipse? Griping about those palmy days when the money was beginning to flow and the big free-expression Wheel was starting to turn sounds too much like Adam complaining about the mole on Eve's brow. To Winans' credit, however, he does return to a more generous reckoning by the end of the piece.

BLUE BEAT JACKET is a phenomenal publication, appearing as it does from the mountains of Niigata like the strangest of Yeti Yawps, a howl from the outposts of the English language worth listening for, if only once a year. Expect good things from this quarter of the world in the future. Yusuke Keida's selection of poetry and critical writing is always worth a look before trekking outside to hit the open road.

This issue is dominated by an interview with Allen Ginsberg shortly after being nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1985. The interview is done by Hillel Wright on Cortez Island, BC Canada and Allen Ginsberg takes a while to warm to the interview, perhaps not realising he's not a household name in Canada, he is initially irritated by the interviewer's asking him about the origin of the Beats. Once going, Allen Ginsberg covers influences, peers, the FBI, the porn industry, Cosa Nostra, Black Panthers and feminists. The interview is complimented by Hillel Wright's poem DREAMING OF ALLEN GINSBERG, which ends:

	I listened for his parting words
	      but all I heard was the rush-hour traffic
	      and the rush of the current below the bridge
	      and the rush of hurrying angel wingbeats
	      in the lonely midnight sky.

	Our poets are musicians now,
	our arts are disintegrating.
	They merge, join together,
	no more solo Beats.

	We all hail progress.
	I want poetry to be valid again.
	I want something that isn't
	pity or
	admiration; for my attempts
	to relive 'The Dead Art'

	Where's Bob Dylan, the music merger.
	He's writing, giving us 2 in 1.
	That's what we want: accessibility
	not to have to flick between channels.

	you're part of the all star cast
	of Thunder's Mouth press's
	Outlaw Bible of Poetry
	now in its second printing
	but the $20 contributor fee
	is a joke on me
	it's hell being the only cowboy
	in the county without
	a bounty

Real Poetry in order to have a lasting relevance must incorporate the music of its time creatively offered by a poet who is attuned to the current sound of his/ her universe and is able to convey that sound as the music of his/ her being to be universally received, historically, rhythmically, informationally, to penetrate thru the sophistry of one's society

Saying this, since the voice of Allen Ginsberg's hypnotic reading, I haven't heard anyone come thru as sincerely, and with such personal symbolic surreality as Steve Dalachinsky... This CD is not only about one man's poetry, but about his innerness, being connected to the people he loves and respects and who reside in the space he chooses to occupy. His voice at times is almost biblical jazzy..

BLUE BEAT JACKET is worth checking out. I'm not a great fan of the Beats, but I found myself reading on with interest and most of the poems stand alone without readers having to pick up references to enjoy them.

This issue of BLUE BEAT JACKET is dedicated to the memory of Gregory Corso, the last of the original Beat Generation, who died on 17 January 2001. It starts with some of Corso's unpublished poems, very charming, considering the Beats' reputation. For example, from "HUMANITY:"

          What simple profundities
          What profound simplicities
          To sit down among the trees
          and breathe with them
          in murmur brool and breeze

          Mother, I weep for you
          as I watch the child
          weeping for his moter

Nearly all of the remaining pages are devoted to tributes to and reminiscences of Corso, mostly by poets who knew him well. Steve Dalachinsky asks: "pray for me/as if the prayer you are praying was the quirkiest blues ever intoned," while Herschel Silverman recalls in capitals:

          O SEER KNOWING THAT LIFE MAY BE ONLY A JOKE
          A STANCE TO TAKE
          AS YOU BECAME THE SERIOUS CLOWN-PRINCE OF POETRY

          Sometimes I wondered how so many people
          could love you
          as surely as they did
          but every so often just the sheer energy
          you manifested
          for days on end
          with little sleep
          would amaze me like the atom bomb
          you wrote so explosively
          and I realized people had to acknowledge you
          as a phenomenon
          if nothing else.

I found the magazine excellent throughout, being both moving and informative, serious without being solemn. For those interested in the Beats in general and Corso in particular, this issue of BLUE BEAT JACKET will be indispensable.