a taste for castration? or, what would bob kaufman do?
photo by Chester Kessler, 1954
The golden age of poetic castration is always well behind us. Even Swinburne was faking it, like in his appropriately titled verse play Chastelard (1865):
They say men dying remember, with sharp joy
And rapid reluctation of desire,
Some old thing, some swift breath of wind, some word,
Some sea-blossom stripped to the sun and burned
At naked ebb…
The fact is poetry is a genital game, one way or another (Whitman: “these poems drooping shy and unseen that all men carry”; Sappho: “Come now, my heavenly tortoise shell: become a speaking instrument”). Pound claimed “The mind is an up-spurt of sperm.” You get the idea. Poets want to fuck the world, a fantastic teacher of mine once said. Truer words were never spoken about such a long great lie with so many co-conspirators. Celebrity culture is predicated on a blithe and silly version of this promise as well.
Which brings me to the today’s poet, Bob Kaufman, Beat poet-radical, like last week’s Alice Dunbar-Nelson, born in New Orleans. He lived most of his life in San Francisco, after early years in the Merchant Marine and as a student at NYC’s New School. He met William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg in New York, and through them, hooked up with Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and so on in SF.
He cultivated degeneracy, like many of his contemporaries, perhaps going a bit further than the average beatnik poser. He was a speedfreak, a bum, a madman, a criminal, and a mystic, and many other things beside. In 1963, he took a vow of silence, appalled at the assasination of JFK, and only spoke again for the first time in 1975, at the close of the Vietnam War. He said “I want to be anonymous… my ambition is to be completely forgotten.” An extreme, self-castrating discipline for a poet. His first words were a poem of his, “All Those Ships that Never Sailed”:
All those ships that never sailed
The ones with their seacocks open
That were scuttled in their stalls…
Today I bring them back
Huge and transitory
And let them sail
Forever.
You can find the rest of the poem here. It’s dark and strange and flamboyantly alienated, as I think one has to be to want to cut a cucumber from a vine.
This has been a ball-chopping week at the Avant.
I think this might be the guy Andrei talked about once, that when he stopped being silent, he started speaking exclusively in verse. Would that make castration worth it?
Life is about choices?
I think that when a desire (to speak, to fuck, whatever), grips you and you don’t give into it, there’s that energy that goes along with it and just because you’ve mentally given up the desire, that energy is still there, waiting. And it needs to go out, one way or another.