radiogenesis
poems 1986-2006 by
Thomas Rain CroweISBN 13: 978-1-59948-082-4
84 pages, $12About the Author / Introduction / Comments / Sample
Introduction by Jack Hirschman
When I first met Thomas Rain Crowe, in the North Beach section of San Francisco in the mid-Seventies, he was a.k.a. Tom Dawson, a young poet who had come from the Carolinas fueled by images of the Beat generation in that city. I got to know him rather well in the cafes of North Beach. Though he was from rural North Carolina, he revealed sophistication with respect to poetry that even some of the more urban and urbane young poets of those days lacked. For one thing, he had an intuitive sense of the class struggle, and in what is perhaps his most memorable poem of that period, "I Wash Your Dishes, America", he reveals a strong sense of justice with respect to workers oppressed in their jobs, their wages, and at a time of the war and post-war Vietnam days. In another respect as well, Tom was, like myself, involved with the cultural arsenal of translating other poets. He understood, as many of the "Beat opportunists" would not, that the translation of poets from other countries was an important part of street activity; and when he edited an issue of the important street magazine, Beatitude, he made sure to include a number of translations, his own included, to give the street an international air. On another occasion he joined myself and Luke Breit on a journey to the maximum security section of Folsom Prison where he participated in a poetry workshop led by the Nicaraguan poet, Pancho Aguila.
It was during those years in North Beach that Tom also began to be influenced by surrealist notation. There were some poets on the Beach in those days who were influenced by Philip Lamantia, and Tom was aware of them; indeed he became friends with the likes of the late Ken Wainio. This surrealist element is important in understanding Crowe because, for example, in the very first line of the title and in effect dedicatory poem of this volume, Radiogenesis, he writes:
"The mind is a car radio. The body is Cocteau's Orpheus."
Anyone who has seen Cocteau's Orphee, that masterpiece of a film made a few years after the end of WW2, will know what Crowe is referencing: the car radio in the film pours out a surrealist poetry in what is one of the most visionary and inspiring mixed-media events in modern cinema. That scene has had a lasting influence on many poets and visual artists. I recall having many conversations with Wallace Berman-the brilliant foto-montagist and "Cocteau" of the hip scene in Los Angeles in the '60' and '70s, about that event.
The poetry that poured out of the radio was a cascade of metaphors and mysteries of the magic of metaphor.
In a way, Radiogenesis is an extension and refinement of that Cocteau event. Because Crowe has cleared a lot of his youthful surrealist murkiness from his lines, he gives us here a series of what are in effect Orphic love poems. The figure of Eurydice is never far from the evoked feminine forms. But there is also this:
One of the dynamics of that radio event in the Cocteau film is that poetry strikes the sensibility as if it itself were received and in the service of some higher, even more mysterious, power. That is what textures the event with its particularly unique coloring.
In many of the poems in Radiogenesis, Crowe arrives at such texturing, even when he is clearly threading his lines, or grounding them, in more declarative and even philosophical yearnings. And there is yet another aspect to this book that both reverberates with the Cocteau event and yet shows Crowe at his original best: in the Cocteau film, the words come from the radio with an immediacy and even an urgency in their invention. An aspect of that is received in such a manner because, with the development of modern technology, our sense of immediacy has been replaced-for better or worse-by the instrumentalities of our own invention. Thus, for many today, television is their real immediacy.
For Crowe, immediacy and urgency are manifested in an ample use of the imperative tense. In many poems, the individual or-even-the collective, reader, is urged to "do" something.
What?
Herein lies one of the delightful mysteries of this book. The poet-in many of the poems-evokes the Kiss. Behind many of the imperatives he uses is the journey to the Kiss. Because this is above all a book of love poems. The glorification of the woman and through her of the feminine depths of all things is the sea in which Crowe breast-strokes with both ease and anguish. And with no little of the magical realism that manifests as a romantic display. A line like
"My body was made from the moisture on her mouth."
is clearly a fusion of both orphic and biological vividness. And it should not be overlooked that, throughout this book, there is a play on both surrealist and realist imagery. Crowe is not wired to some catalog of exquisite tropes of an "imagination-is-all" sloganing. He does indeed abandon himself to the lyrical metaphor, under the strong influence as well of Dylan Thomas, and to that alchemy of the Word that redounds to Rimbaud. But there is a strong realist tension in this book, and such realism gives the sur in surrealism a grounding drive toward love that provides the clearing that illuminates the paths of his imagery with the honest feelings that surrealism often shrinks from or covers up.
It is in that clearing that these poems most profoundly sing.
--Jack Hirschman
San Francisco
August, 2006
RADIOGENESIS
(poem for synthesizer & voice)
The mind is a car radio. The body is Cocteau's Orpheus.
The sexual attraction in toward the car. The car as Delphic lover.
The love is for the radio, which is the spirit of the lover.
The love-act between radio and Poet is radiogenesis.God is universal mind. Space-time is thought.
The radio is the mind. The mind of the Poet. The fertile egg.
The Poet whose dials are tuned to the right frequencies that
drink in cosmic milk. White knowledge.
Coming from the mind of God as sperm.
The union of sperm and fertile egg creates the star-burst chemistry of genesis.
Radiogenesis.
The process of translation of these electrical impulses in genetic.
Electro-genetic. And the result is words.
The writing of these words makes the Poem.
Hours, at all hours, spent in the garage.
In the passenger's seat of the car. With the radio on.
Searching the dial for a voice on the other side of static.
For an inspired paradoxical juxtaposition of spoken sounds.
For a metaphor for daily life as light.
Radiogenesis.
Or in attic rooms or dappleganged hotels listening
to the silence between screams for a sign of sanity.
Radiogenesis.
This is the Work. This is the stuff of a stuff better than sex.
The whore of Orpheus. The nightmare of Eurydice.
The thing invisible that becomes seen.
The King of the forgotten.
The siren Queen.
HARD WORK
If there is anything against nature,
it is writing.--Carlos Fuentes
It's like driving nails into the snow
to postpone the coming of spring.
The moon owning the mind like
the secret language of a laugh spoken by puppets who
pour knives into the trough of sleep.Here, the prophecy of the past is
melting from the flames.
Drowning on air as if only water were
the oxygen of wind. In a life documented by draught.
This dying. This army of green nails sex-starved
for skin hurts like being stoned with the silence of
unfriendly eyes. And me with only some six-gun of ink.Shots fired into the dark. Feet slipping through the ice.
Moon laughing as it disappears behind the giggles of daylight.
Arms dripping blood down onto the blank page of morning.
No sleep. Crows watching in the windows like peeping toms.
Nothing to eat. No thing soft nearby to
cuddle or kiss. Yet even with the lack of sunlight
this darkness is born to us as poem.
POEM FOR SYLVIA PLATH WITHOUT EVEN LIGHTING THE STOVE
Even if the gas had been gone,
the heat from your eyes
would have been enough to
set the whole place on fire.
One thousand degree words
charred from the spark of space.It was all in there--behind the iris.
Beyond the synapses of imagined pain.
Brown-eyed craters of moonlight
sun-starved from the food of love.
Even the what-ifs were not army enough
to stand against the dogs at the door.
The parade of children and husbands
standing in line. Waiting to get in.If only Herodotus had known
the length of Medusa's hair. Or
the dark color of Jesus' blood.
The sweet taste of your own flesh,
something to help put on weight
after months of drinking nothing but ink.Where was the death mask that had been hidden
in the lantern of your face?
Or in the tinfoil baking carrots and
small potatoes in the stove --No smoky veil or body part
can haul the ocean out of books.
They should have told you
there was no wine in this carafe!
No act of love in the sink.Bees are swarming in your memory,
now, decayed with grace.
Only prophets and bald boredom
are to blame.
The salty meat in the oven
is cooked and done.
It's juices, naked in our mouths,
tastes sweet.
Thomas Rain Crowe is an internationally recognized poet and translator whose work has been published in several languages. He is the author of twenty books of original works, translations, anthologies and recordings including The Laugharne Poems, written at the Dylan Thomas home in Laugharne, Wales and published by Welsh publisher Carreg Gwalch; Thomas Rain Crowe & The Boatrockers LIVE, which received praise by such poet-musicians as Joy Harjo and by Pete Townshend of The Who; and the multi-award winning book of nonfiction Zoro's Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods, published in 2005 by the Univ. of Georgia Press. As an editor, he has been an instrumental force behind such magazines as Beatitude, Katuah Journal and the Asheville Poetry Review. As a translator, he has translated collections by poets such as Hafiz and Yvan Goll. His archives have been purchased and are collected by the Duke University Special Collections Library. He lives in the Smoky Mountains of rural western North Carolina.
Crowe's is a new kind of literary voice in which both local and global perspectives are compatible, even requisite. His approach takes into account culture in the broadest sense--as the home in which we live. He has historical perspective and engages life in all its political, economic, and spiritual diversity. His work is part of a movement in American writing that is perhaps the most significant development since the emergence of the Beats and the New York School in the '50s.
Jim Wayne Miller
Thomas Rain Crowe's Radiogenesis is an extension and refinement of Cocteau's film masterpiece Orphee. These are Orphic love poems--received and in the service of some higher, more mystical power. One is reminded of the alchemies of Dylan Thomas and Rimbaud. Here, Crowe is at his original best.
Jack Hirschman
Poet Laureate of San Francisco
If you wanted to invent a character whose journeys took him through the main currents of contemporary American poetry, you'd come up with someone like Thomas Rain Crowe. As someone who has embraced the role of the heroic bard, native literatures and threatened languages, Crowe has an unusual ability to integrate Eastern and Western sensibilities.
Rob Neufeld
Book Reviewer/Asheville Citizen-Times