For the Artists: Critical Writing, Volume 2

Sublime

Introduction

While For the Artists, Volume 1, issued earlier this year, focused on visual artists, this second volume gathers together a number of reviews and essays I've written for various publications and websites critiquing books and music.

I'm indebted to the many editors with whom I've worked over the past few decades. Jeff Wright, editor of Cover magazine, was most generous in being open to my pitches. I was delighted to have my articles among Cover's pages and am grateful to Jeff for his stewardship of that publication. Beyond his prolific music and fiction writing, Howard Mandel has been the indefatigable president of the Jazz Journalists Association (JJA) for two decades. Many of my music pieces originally found a home on the JJA website, jazzhouse.org and my joy in being included shines on brightly. Thanks too to Michael Ricci, who has been running All About Jazz since 1995, where several of my music pieces were welcomed.

Thank you, editors and celebrators of the highest achievement for sharing my passion for exploring what it is we love about the arts and why it matters.

My thanks as well to photographer Barry Kornbluh for the cover image as well as a shot inside, Michael Strong for his beautiful book design and to Dan Kaplan for his exacting copy editing.

Some pieces are debuting here for the first time and some were written originally for classwork at The Graduate Center, New York. Worth preserving and sharing, I hope. — Greg Masters, July 2014

Age of Mimeo

The age of the mimeo book in New York City lasted approximately from the mid-1960s until the Xerox machine became widely available in the early 1980s. Weekly readings and workshops brought poets together at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church at 10th Street and 2nd Avenue. Some made use of the Project's Gestet-ner mimeo machine to produce 8½ x 11 and 8½ x 14 stapled books, in editions most often ranging from 150 to 350 copies.

Larry Fagin ran off his Adventures in Poetry books throughout the 1970s. In 1978-79, he produced the journal Un Poco Loco. Lewis Warsh and Anne Waldman produced dozens of Angel Hair books and magazines from 1966 through 1978. Lewis Warsh and Bernadette Mayer began issuing United Artists magazine in 1977 and saw it through 17 issues to 1983. Warsh continues issuing United Artists books. In the mid-70s, a younger generation coalesced around Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley's workshops at The Poetry Project. These poets were represented in small presses, like Bob Rosenthal and Rochelle Kraut's Frontward Books, Tom Weigel's Andrea Doria press and Tangerine magazine, Steve Levine and Barbara Barg's Remember I Did This For You/A Power Mad Book and Greg Masters' Crony Books. Mimeo magazines — like Simon Schuchat's 432 Review (mid-70s), Tom Savage's Gandhabba (mid-80s) and Gary Lenhart, Greg Masters and Michael Schol-nick's Mag City (14 issues from 1976 through 1983) - provided the poetry community centered at the Poetry Project with a focus. The Poetry Project's own Poetry Project Newsletter and World magazine regularly issued from the mimeo. A community was bound together by the need to help in production. Collating parties were a social opportunity, as well as a production necessity.

Heeding Allen Ginsberg's warning in Howl to not succumb to the spiritual piracy of mass consumerism, most of these poets made a conscious choice to move away from the fetishistic material excess of post-WWII America. The East Village of Manhattan had been a neighborhood of immigrants and working-class peoples for a hundred years. In the 1960s and 70s, rents were low. Artists, musicians, dancers and poets who were willing to sacrifice middle-class comforts got in exchange the freedom from wage labor this neighborhood provided. The storefront markets — where you'd hear Polish, Ukrainian and Italian — provided an exotic old world charm, a humane scale that was comfortable. Part-time jobs were sufficient to pay bills. Work a few months, take off a few months. We didn't think about owning cars or homes or accumulating possessions. To live as a poet meant experiencing life to its fullest extremes and having as much fun as possible. Rather than save, the priority was to squander for the moment's sensation. It was essential to be out in bars every night. To be doing drugs: speed, LSD, mushrooms, diet pills, cocaine. And, of course, alcohol.

Our work was to write poems, give readings, perform in each other's plays. And read voraciously so we'd know how to write better poems and stories. We were on fire with desire: Desire for each other's bodies and for what each of us could tell. Desire to be satiated with sensation and knowledge. Desire to find an identity as an artist. Desire to feed on the essence of a moment's peculiarities, whether gathered drinking coffee and beer listening to a ballgame on the radio or being pounded with rock 'n' roll late at night amidst the twinkling lights or reading Keats solitary. We were clear in our desire to avoid the regularity of a modified life.

It wasn't just the proliferation of the Xerox copier that ended the age of mimeo. By the mid-80s, the cost of living had risen considerably in New York City. The East Village, which had been an enclave ignored by real estate developers, suddenly found itself a mecca for art galleries. Owing to the refusal by Mayor Ed Koch to set limits for increases in commercial rents, once the art market bottomed out and the galleries shifted to more conventional neighborhoods or died off, the East Village was left ravaged by greedy developers who had discovered a new exploitable neighborhood. It became harder for young artists to move here. The poets who'd nurtured each other through the preceding decades were now older and working full-time to sustain themselves. Many had families and/or had relocated. Some had died and some had burnt out.

These mimeo books are, for the most part, evidence of a specific poetic community. There's often a casualness in these small books, as if the authors couldn't anticipate an audience larger than the hundred or so to whom they'd hand copies. Often, the work seems written to entertain and amuse poet friends close at hand. Some of the work is meager in ambition. But most contains at least a modicum of delight, a bemusement with life that comes through in even the quickest, least crafted, most spontaneous language. The poets, moved with a bravura learned from the Abstract Expressionist painters, threw down words like de Kooning and Pollock flung paint.

That the work is often tinged with humor and lightheartedness doesn't make it any less serious. Obviously, the poets were making a deliberate break from the dry, academic poetry we'd all been force fed in school. The casual, the conversational, the confessional, the whacky and cartoony became methods to bring a more direct impression to the reader, to make the poems more accessible, more digestible, more friendly and more fun. The poems offer an option to the ordinary.

(Catalog entry for A Secret Location on the Lower East Side, exhibition at the New York Public Library, Spring 1998)

Animal Logic

(I.R.S. Records)

This debut album has altered my expectations of a rock band's range. Their sound is richer than the wines to which I'm accustomed. Made up of Stewart Copeland, formerly drummer for The Police and Stanley Clarke, jazz fusion bassist extraordinaire, the third ingredient is Deborah Holland, a singer-songwriter from Clifton, N.J., who's been playing for the last decade in a succession of bands around Los Angeles. This is her big break, but all three are lucky to have found each other. The emphasis here is not on showing off virtuosity, but on a band sound.

The production (by Copeland and Clarke) is seamless. The lush, metallic guitar chords chime over synthesizer sounds drawn like stretching caramel. Copeland's clean drum work is a skeletal frame that animates the structure with a fervent pulse beat. Clarke's bass is subtle, stalwart and ever present, like being able to hear your subconscious. And riding on top of it all, Deborah Holland's smooth voice, serious and elegantly passionate, convincing as it pulls you into the mise-en-scene. Steve Howe (former Yes), Pete Haycock (former Climax Blues Band) and Michael Thompson contribute very tasty guitar work. L. Shankar, violin, and Freddie Hubbard, trumpet, guest on a track each adding to the production's marvelous orchestral weave.

Pulling in touches of country and Tin Pan Alley, the album rocks. Each cut pulls you into its narrative, uplifts and sends you floating. I've been walking around singing tunes from this record for weeks. It's not just that the melodies are so tasteful and catchy. They reach so far down and draw out some dormant mode to nudge you toward a joyous, triumphal feeling. They work on psychology levels at the same time as they drive the body with their crisp punch.

Finally, here are some rock lyrics for adults. We don't get the romantic, stereotype cliches we expect from pop songs. Holland writes about love, lack of love and yearning — issues songs have dealt with forever, but her lyrics are more immediate, as she has a poet's edge, an ability to reveal more and the confidence to express her vulnerability. She's recognized her pain and understood the value in sharing her contexts. After hearing these wails and pleadings and celebrations, you feel, Thanks, I needed that.

She writes about the chasm that exists between potential lovers. If only she could reach through. She proclaims the terrible emptiness at not having someone to share the domestic good life. She's got things under control, except she's calling out for the partner with whom to share it. There's a welcome sophistication in her confession, an assured awareness of the atmosphere around her, a grown-up summing-up of the state of her household. She just wants someone to sit on the sofa with, not a conquistador. When one of her choruses kicks in, you get a lift. They're as euphoric as a slow-motion film sequence, invigorating as running into someone you want to see, being on familiar ground after a rough trip.

All band members are thrilled with the result of their com- bined effort. Though Copeland was busy composing and mounting a full-scale opera that premiered in Cleveland last month and Clarke tours constantly with various lineups, they are all now concentrated on this band. The album/CD/cassette is available, tour dates are being finalized (Dec. 1 at The Ritz here in New York), the video is on VH-1, a date is penciled in for an appearance on Late Show with David Letterman (Nov. 10).

The industry indicators are good, says Holland, who already feels that the band's been a success. I'm already happy. I feel validated. Stewart and Stanley liking my songs enough to form a band has made me incredibly happy. If the band takes off, that'll just be icing on the cake.

Animal Logic is a terrific debut from three disparate elements able to merge their particular strengths into one tasty and provocative band. It's a working recipe.

(Cover, November 1989)

Bluestones and Salt Hay: An Anthology of Contemporary New Jersey Poets

edited by Joel Lewis, Rutgers University Press, 1990, 236 pages, $11.95, paper

More than an anthology that characterizes a particular region, this book is valuable and fun as a collection of new poetry the boundaries of which can't be contained within state lines. In attempting to represent the demographics of a geographical area that covers as much ground as New Jersey, the triumph of this book's editing is its inclusion of voices unrepresented before. The afternoon is ablaze with ordinary people, as Stephen Dunn of Port Republic puts it. To define a character for the Garden State, every layer of its panoramic fabric is exposed. The sweep is as all-inclusive as the state's most famous poem, Paterson. I'm not sure any clear personality emerges. What does come across is the great various-ness. There's the mix of the placid rural life — grandpa on the porch, crows and magnolia trees, bread cooling on the windowsill - and the more assaultive toxicity of the urban sprawl, as penned by James Ruggia:

Ruptured auto husks

shotgun sprayed, rot

under billboards

Though most of the poems touch on descriptions of the pastoral or urban New Jersey landscape, there's still plenty of room for these poets to stretch out.

The book opens with a warm, welcoming preface by Anne Waldman and a fine introductory essay by Joel Lewis, which despite a few grand sweeping proclamations that offset the finely tuned particulars of the essay – nicely establishes both the breadth of seriousness and tone of liveliness to follow. The poetry begins, alphabetically by author, with a barrage from Amiri Baraka. Any expectations of a tame read are immediately disrupted. We're engaged with the swiftness of Baraka's talk, a language so fast he speeds past closed parenthesis. The editor culls together a generous selection from Baraka's wide oeuvre — a hipster, a Kerouac-flavored poem, an African-American street talker and an address/attack to the establishment:

bourgeois poets yodel nonsense about boring absence they think up funny ways for letters to sit on the page concrete bullshit, arty bullshit

they are safe as old