How Far Polys Have Come?

I was touched last weekend when a friend of mine, in the process of becoming a Unitarian Universalist minister, told me she had officiated recently at a ceremony of union for a poly family.  She and I had talked, many years ago, about polyamory and our local support group.  Then she had moved out of the area and eventually begun studying for the ministry.  Since then she has returned, but we have not had the opportunity to discuss polyamory.  I don’t know what ins and outs she has experienced in her own life.  But I was touched when she told me about this ceremony, which she had to create largely on her own, being unable to find much appropriate material elsewhere.

How far we’ve come!  I told her I had seen ceremonies of blessing and commitment for poly families.  Still, they are not readily available, as she discovered.  Perhaps we can change that.

I grew up probably naturally inclined to polyness, not understanding how unusual and how socially unacceptable this was.  Even now, after almost twenty years of facilitating South Bay Polys, I realize that most people in our society think of polyamory as sinful, or irresponsible, or a joke.  Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say that most people have never even heard of polyamory.  Yet we are probably more visible than we have ever been.

Well, let’s do what we can for each other.  Love is love, support is support—and it does help to know that there are people like us, here and everywhere.  Some environments are safer for us than others, some places more accepting.  And know that we have friends who support us—like my friend the Unitarian Universalist, and others.

Reflections on U.S. Election Day

We haven’t done too badly.  Things could have been a lot worse.  With the exception of what a certain area of the country used to call “The Late Unpleasantness” (ie. The Civil War), we’ve avoided major upheavals.  We could have had multiple civil wars, or military dictatorships.  And things in general could have worked out quite differently.

We could have had multiple presidential impeachments.  Instead, it took almost eighty years to arrive at our first one, and another hundred and thirty roughly to arrive at our second one (although you really should also count Nixon, who would have been impeached if he hadn’t resigned).

We could have had frequent tie votes in the Electoral College, throwing presidential elections into the House of Representatives.  I’ve read that this is actually what many framers of the Constitution actually expected to happen.  And, of course, some people might prefer this; it more approximates a parliamentary system where you can’t have the Presidency and Congress controlled by different parties.

Or we might have had (as some founders hoped) a system without political parties.  That I can’t even begin to wrap my brain around!  We still might one day develop major alternatives to the “two party system”—which would also probably make us more like a parliamentary system.  But would any of this be better?

We may someday abolish the Electoral College.  Many people want to.  Apparently it was introduced at the very end of the constitutional deliberations as being better than the alternatives.  Was it?  I can just barely begin to imagine Presidential campaigns if we simply used the popular vote. 

But, whenever we face strife and gridlock, I remember that the alternative to the politics of a democracy is simply going at one another with pitchforks or bazookas.  I’ve read about Germany in the early 1930s, the Spanish Civil War, the Russian Revolution, the Latin American military dictatorships (many supported by the U.S., incidentally), the Lebanese Civil War.

We’ve had one bloody Civil War, the long Jim Crow period, the era of lynchings, the Civil Rights struggles, and much else.  But it could have been a lot worse. It was—in a lot of other places.

Afterword and Poem for "Gang of Souls"

I was thinking about that “look” I mentioned, that Lydia Lunch would sometimes throw at the camera in the documentary, after she ended her reading or recitation or performance or whatever; the same look that came out of Gregory Corso sometimes.

There’s something about Corso that has always annoyed me, beyond the fact that in other documentaries he’s complained about how people always think of the other Beats first—Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs—not him—when they think of “Beat Writers.”

So I was thinking “What was that look?—The look I saw in the documentary?

Now I realize it’s related to something I see in videos of William S. Burroughs—an exceedingly odd individual, responsible for the fable novel Naked Lunch, which I am now about 40% of the way through reading.  “The Look” has something to do with delivering unwanted opinion, unappreciated points of view, perhaps; delivering the Bitter Truth to people who, we believe, certainly don’t want to hear it; delivering that truth, perhaps, with secret enjoyment.  Maybe not actually enjoying it, per se—but determined to Spit Out The Bad News anyway!

So here’s a poem I wrote about that.

“Tentative Interpretation of Gregory Corso and Lydia Lunch”

The performance poet Lydia Lunch has been called “confrontational.”

Gregory Corso, the Beat poet, and Lydia Lunch—what bothers me about them?

“Confrontational?”

As in the following, which is what I feel like they’re saying:

“Here’s the deal:

We don’t care what you think.

We don’t care if we offend you.

Maybe we intend to offend you,

To confront you,

To be ‘in your face.’”

(And maybe they don’t care whether you understand them or not.

Maybe they aren’t trying to explain—or communicate!

Maybe they’re just expressing themselves—

And you happen to be the person just now

In front of them. 

Maybe it isn’t personal.

But there it is anyway.

So there

<grin?>).

Review: “Gang of Souls: A Generation of Beat Poets” (1989)

An interesting film—though maybe not particularly for the right reasons.  Possibly first shown on television (non-commercial?), this DVD runs almost exactly one hour—a bit short to show in a theater.  Perhaps it was made for some sort of film festival?

The point of the film is to show how the original Beat writers influenced following generations.  Made twenty years after the death of Jack Kerouac, he obviously isn’t interviewed.  We do, however, hear from Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, the other two Beat Writers extraordinaire, as well as from Gregory Corse and Diane Di Prima.  We do not hear from Lawrence Ferlinghetti (who didn’t consider himself a “beat” anyway, but who was friends with the others and famously published Ginsberg’s seminal (!?) poem “Howl.”).  Nor do we hear from John Clellon Holmes, whose novel Go is widely considered the first Beat novel.  Either he died before he could be interviewed (the film appeared the year after his death) or he was consciously excluded.

But we hear from many poets who followed in these writers’ footsteps.  I’d heard of some of them; others were completely new to me.  I recognized Ed Sanders (who appeared on the William F. Buckley show Firing Line along with Jack Kerouac)—I’d thought of him as an activist, not a poet.  I’d heard of Anne Waldman, though wasn’t familiar with her poems.  I knew Marianne Faithfull as a singer but not her connection with the Naropa Institute (and Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics) in Colorado.  John Giorno looked familiar, though I suspect he reminds me of someone with a similar face.  The others were a complete surprise:  Richard Hell, Lydia Lunch, Henry Rollins, and Jim Carroll.

  I’ve watched this DVD three times now.  That surprises me, because the first time through I found I didn’t know quite what to make of it.  In fact, after the first viewing, I said to my daughter, “I feel a lot more normal and well-adjusted now, after watching these people.”  That was true.  But less true after three viewings.  I do read less extravagantly than the people in this video—but still more extravagantly than most people I know.

And—quotes from this video stick with me now.  “You want to be a writer, shut up and write” (Rollins).  “The opposite of poetry is hypocrisy” (Corso).  “I’m a filling man; I fill in empty space” (Rolliins).  “Everything I have to say, I say in my books” (Burroughs).

Most of all, this DVD is experiential.  I remember the way Corso talks, the way Lunch talks, Giorno’s musical delivery.  I remember Waldman’s spirited delivery.  And I remember the presence; the way Corso speaks and then looks right at you; the way Lydia Lunch smiles and smirks and spits out her truth and then stops and just looks right at you.  

Sanders says that performers have to believe in every word they speak, everything they do.  I’ll remember that now, at open mics (though I think I’ve always known that).  So Corso and Lunch hurl their visions at you then give you this “look” that seems to say:  “Yep, I said that; that’s how I see it.  Don’t like it?  Then take it or leave it.  Yeah.”