Sheer fortitude Oct. 16, 1985

 

Michael ages slowly. At 26, he looks 16, clinging to youth like a leaf to a tree.

The woman in the eye glass store seemed puzzled by the disparity of how he looks and how he sounds, a boy spouting intellectual hypothesis like a fountain.

But he’s a Beat-like intellectual, mop top hair more ragged than the Beatles ever intended, acting out what he calls action poems, sometimes herking and jerking on the dance floor to the remnants of Punk, as fascinated with Joey Ramone as Joey was John Lennon. The Sex Pistols flows through his veins like a drug.

Down in Hoboken at the Beat’n Path, he shocked the local poetry scene with an action poem that involved his kicking over a chair.   

He has calmed down since then, refocusing his energy through more positive artistic channels.

These days he has a rock band as well as our zine, yet still carries the attitude of what is good is good and quality is self-evident. For this reason, he gets depressed when he gets rejection slips.

“I’ve done everything right,” he told me the other night. “These poems are perfect for that magazine.”

He makes unfortunate assumptions like an ancient shaman, assuming that if he does the right incantations and like a good bureaucrat puts everything in the right form, the poems will automatically appear in print.

He leaves out the human element, the petty jealousies, the intellectual power trips, the egotistic buttering up of known names by editors seeking their own fame.

Publishing is also about paying one’s dues. Even if you are as great as Michael is, you have to suffer a little before anyone will accept you – something Michael refuses to do.

He also leaves out the fact that his attitude has sometimes offended the literary elite – much as Edgar Allen Poe did and has his name on a black list. Word like that gets around. People who know people are people who tell people about things like this.

Lewis and Reardon, giants on campus, did their due diligence on the St. Marks circuit, Lewis buttering up the right literary giants, while Reardon impressed them with his dedication to craft. They got to know literary big wigs on a first name basis.

Michael is too impatient for that – and rather than kiss the ass of the literary elite, he wants to lock horns with it, challenging the very foundations upon which their literary power is based. This is his way of learning, of sharing idea, extremely sophomoric in scene that does not want to be threatened by an upstart. Instead of becoming their apprentice, Michael wants to be their equal.

So, naturally, he got cast out, and kept out, regardless of his countless efforts to worm his way in.

Michael – like the wolf with the sour grapes – has since convinced himself that he doesn’t want to be influenced by these people anyway, their phony pretentions, their focus more on fame than on creating good literature.

Still, he sends his poems out, getting rejected for the most part, but not always, building his fame one brick at a time, while still looking at the whole house with envy, often sending back to the same places that rejected him, as if to impress them with his fortitude and to eventually win them over by sheer will.

I admire him and sincerely hopes he achieves his dreams.

 

 1985 Menu


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