James Broughton, Packing Up for Paradise:
Selected Poems 1946 - 1996
Black Sparrow Press
Jack Foley
I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life but that great consciousness of life.... —Jack Kerouac, November 1951
I can't escape [the cross's] mysterious penetration into all this brutality. I just simply SEE it all the time, even the Greek cross sometimes. I hope it will all turn out to be true. —Jack Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz (1968)
A new book by poet/filmmaker James Broughton is always good news, and Broughton fans will want to thank Black Sparrow Press for making one available. Packing Up for Paradise: Selected Poems 1946-1996 is a large, generous helping of some of the most interesting and most optimistic poems of the twentieth century—this "century of horrors," as Broughton's friend, Kenneth Rexroth called it.
The optimism is by no means simple-minded. There is a keen intelligence and an awareness of pain throughout this book. Rexroth observed that Broughton "lives in a very special world and is an expert at pulling his audience into it...Or perhaps he lives in the same world as everybody else but sees it from a special Fourth Dimensional vista and can happily lend you his binoculars."
Happiness is the key. Born in 1913, Broughton has lived his life as an essentially happy man, and the self created in his poetry has been a reflection of that happiness. Jonathan Williams named him "Big Joy," and the name has stuck. There have been plenty of dark moments in Broughton's life—at one point he contemplated suicide—but the joy has remained constant. It is rooted in a deeply erotic body-awareness—an awareness which at times crosses over into mysticism and which has carried on into his old age: "every day Old I and New I / collide and crash in Me."
Packing Up for Paradise is not Broughton's first selected poems. A Long Undressing: Collected Poems 1949-1969 appeared from the Jargon Society in 1971, and Special Deliveriesappeared from Broken Moon Press in 1990. Packing Up for Paradise, edited by Jim Cory, follows in their line: it contains poems written since 1990 as well as a selection from the earlier work. There are, however, some suprising omissions. Foremost among these is "Shaman Psalm," with its eloquent and famous concluding stanza:
Listen Brothers Listen
The alarms are too late
This is the hour for
amorous revolt
Dare to take hold
Dare to take over
Be heroes of harmony
in bedfellow bliss
Man must love man
or war is forever
Outnumber the hawks
Outdistance the angels
Love one another
or die
For the first time, each of the poems in the book is dated—and that is a
great service to anyone wishing to trace Broughton's development.
Surprisingly, however, Cory does not seem to believe that Broughton has
developed. Acknowledging that "there is nothing like [Broughton's voice] in
American poetry," Cory goes on to assert that "it's consistent. The tone,
rhythm and imagery of ‘Mad Jenny' (1948) differ hardly at all from the wistful
meditations on aging and mortality (On the Way to the Exit) which lead off
this volume"—poems written in the 1980s and 90s.
If there is a sense in which what Cory says is true, there is also a sense in
which it is not, and the sections into which he divides the book do nothing to
clarify the matter. "Lauds" has work from 1968 to 1993 while "Glees" has work
from 1968 to 1996 and "Occasional Odes" from 1957 to 1995. Despite the dating
of the poems, whatever chronological development might be at work here is
effectively obscured by such groupings.
It would take more space than I have to chart Broughton's progress. I tried
to suggest something of what happened in "Full, Frontal Mystery," an essay
published by the San Francisco Cinematheque in Broughton at 80: A Celebration.
It's true that Broughton returns often to certain tones established very early
on in his work, and so the work is "consistent" in that sense. But there are
sharp breaks in the process—moments which Cory's groupings do nothing to
illuminate.
In the early work—films as well as poetry—mother, childhood and death
(especially a landscape of death) come together in a horrific constellation.
Together they thrust the struggling artist into a tremendous impasse: "so are
we stalled, in our labyrinths," "to spend one more night here is unbearable."
Yet the horror, real as it is, is only an aspect of the work's content. In
its form—its dizzying variety of modes, its wit, its dazzling shifts between
adult and child consciousness—the work is anything but "struggling" or
"stalled": it is energetic, bold, innovative. In effect, Broughton's form, his
medium, is an energetic and creative response to the sense of death which his
content nevertheless manifests everywhere. Later, Broughton was able to create
a figure, a "person" which also embodied such energy. He called the figure
"the Divine Androgyne," "the Ineffable Lollapalooza": it is at once Broughton
himself, a narcissistic projection of his own psyche into the world, and
something totally external to himself—the god Hermes, "the god of poets,
doctors and thieves...every man's pride, embarrassment and joy." The Divine
Androgyne is Affirmation with a capital a, but it is only by understanding the
depths of Broughton's despair that we can understand the affirmation. Indeed,
it is only by understanding the constant tendency of his life to slip into
despair that we can understand his life's central event: the appearance of his
lover/rescuer Joel Singer. Death remains a theme of the late poetry, but it is
no longer so much a horror as it is a companion, a "partner." In "Memento of
an Amorist," one of the finest of the late poems, an "ailing novelist" advises
a young journalist to "Learn to adore"; later, the novelist commits suicide.
The concluding lines of the poem are an eloquent statement of Broughton's
credo:
<pre> When he was later assigned the obituary
the journalist read in the suicide note:
I never learned to distinguish between
illusion and miracle. I didn't need to.
I trusted in love's confusing joy.
As the beauty of those lines suggests, three hundred and thirty pages of Broughton is not to be complained of. If there are old faves that never made it into this selection, there are plenty of wonderful poems that did—and Joel Singer's front and back covers alone would be worth the price of the book. Jim Cory is surely right when he asserts that "James Broughton gives us champagne fountains. He rolls out blueprints for gusto. He is the heartiest and most consistent celebrant since Whitman and his enthusiasms lend equal weight to eating, fornication, and the Almighty." What pleasure it is to come again upon "The Last Sermon of Gnarley Never," on the various "Songs for Anxious Children," on "Wrong Songs," "Gavin and the Green Uncle," "Feathers or Lead?," "Loony Tom's Song," "True & False Unicorn," on "Wondrous the Merge" and the other poems from Ecstasies, celebrations of Broughton's love and devotion to Singer. And the late poems, written in Broughton's seventies and eighties, are superb. Anyone in the least interested in poetry should know about this book—and he will probably commit sections of it to memory. Broughton's poems and phrases have a way of sticking in your head.
One final quibble, though: In his introductory essay, editor Jim Cory remarks upon "that passionate crackpot quality California writing sometimes has"—and cites Robinson Jeffers as an example! Surely no California writer would be likely to say something like that! Cory goes on to assert that Broughton "came out of that late '40s Renaissance which produced Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, but his writing is not a series of artistic experiments, like Duncan's or Spicer's. Broughton's poetry is about life first, language secondly."
Cory's distinction between "life" and "language" is questionable, but, even if you accept it, Cory still fails to realize that Broughton's playfulness is and has always been a mode of "artistic experiment": it can be found to some degree in Duncan and Spicer too. One has the sense that Cory is trying to "sell" Broughton to those people who read poetry but who do not read "experimental" poetry. In point of fact, that readership would be much more likely to read Galway Kinnell, not someone who writes lines like
Nipples and cocks
nipples and cocks
Nothing tickles the palate like
nipples and cocks
or
Said the Birds of America:
quak quek quark quark, hoo hoo
rarrp rarrp, gogogogock
feebee, cheep cheep, kakakaa
coo ahh, choo eee, coo coo!
That said, however, there is enough of the true Broughton in this book to
make it worth anyone's while. "What is burning in the deep?" he asks over and
over again, in every context imaginable:
What is burning in the deep
that churns the breakers with desire?
What new creature, what new city,
what new godhead is afire?/pre>
The echoes of Blake's "The Tyger" are deliberate. Even in age, Broughton's
fire still burns. Like Jack Kerouac—not a writer with whom he is usually
associated—Broughton longs for "life, and not only life but that great
consciousness of life." Like Kerouac—but without his fixation on
Catholicism—he too hopes "it will all turn out to be true."
Here is his commentary on the end of the century:
<pre> ON THE WAY TO THE EXIT
I am glad of one thing.
In my impending demise
I won't be going out alone.
For company I can count on
the passing of the twentieth century
the closing of the American mind
the lowering of the common denominator
the disappearance of the rain forest
the decay of individual morality
the disintegration of the social fabric
the deterioration of the economy
the decline of the West
the end of the age of Pisces
the collapse of civilization
and the termination of any number of
grandeurs follies and hopeless causes.
Some kind of cold comfort to know that
one will be lying about in the ruins
with Ozymandias Mussolini
and all the other residue of the millennium.
Jack Foley
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