Anonymous,1969

"Poetry: Combatting Society With Surreallsm"
Anonymous
Time, vol. 93, no. 4, 24 Jan. 1969, pp. 72-76.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

WILLIAM FAULKNER once remarked: "An artist is a creature driven by demons. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies." It is an attitude shared by all who have discovered just how difficult it is to write one superlative poem and what bitter battles must be waged to keep poetry vital and relevant in an age when so much else seems more important.

One such battle began after World War II and during the 1950s, when the so-called Beat poets rebelled against both society and the academic, formalist mode of poetry. Three schools of revolutionary poets were founded: the San Francisco school of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder; the Black Mountain school of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley; and the New York school of Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery. Basically, the San Francisco school represented a fresh imagism combined with oriental influences; the Black Mountain group leaned toward an intellectual eclecticism typical of Ezra Pound's Cantos; and the New York school was surreal and Dadaistic, or more adamantly colloquial and hortative, as in Ginsberg's "Howl." But these distinctions tended to blur as the groups began influencing one another. Behind them, unifying them, were the established voices of Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, William Carlos Williams, and even old Walt Whitman, whose emotional, plain-speaking idiom came to be idolized by many of the new poets.

Seeking Identity. What was important was not the schools but the changing attitudes toward poetry, the breaking down of old poetic forms in an effort to initiate a fresh dialogue between the poet and his audience. What has emerged in the U.S. is a crop of poets who cannot be pigeonholed in schools or academies, whether they are writing in free verse or with a conscious debt to form. Among them, James Dickey and John Berryman have become the most prominent, while Robert Lowell continues to be the most profound force among the more formal American poets.

If there is a trend, it is toward the personal voice—the poet not only seeking his own identity but combatting society with that identity, the poet engaging the real world with more or less surreal imagery and ideas. Joined in that combat today are both well-known poets and those whose voices are just beginning to be heard.

[Reviews His Toy, His Dream, His Rest by John Berryman]

[Reviews White-Haired Lover by Karl Shapiro]

The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster by Richard Brautigan. 108 Seasons Foundation. $1.95

In this book of selected poems (1957-1968), Brautigan is Harlequin on a tight-wire, poised between Earth and Heaven, simultaneously mocking the passions of the populace below and his own frail fumblings toward the stars. Though his vision sometimes expresses only itself, it often fully exposes man's foibles and feelings. His poems are, by turns, brutally realistic or surrealistically witty. Brautigan, a West Coast poet, needs but three lines to puncture "Man":

"With his hat on
he's about five inches taller
than a taxicab."

The poet's concerns, for the most part, trick the reader into seeing life afresh, as when he remarks that his nose is growing old.

"I wonder if girls
will want me with an
old nose.

"I can hear them now
the heartless bitches!

"'He's cute
but his nose
is old.'"

Occasionally Brautigan fails, tumbling from his poetic perch, but the dare is worth every one of the falls.

[Reviews The Body by Michael Benedikt]

[Reviews Shall We Gather at the River by James Wright]

[Reviews Breaking Camp by Marge Piercy]

[Reviews Coming Closer by Helen Chasm]

[Reviews The Residual Years by William Everson]

[Reviews Bending the Bow by Robert Duncan]

[Reviews The Back Country by Gary Snyder]

[Reviews Incarnations: Poems, 1966-1968 by Robert Penn Warren]

[Reviews Cables to the Ace by Thomas Merton]

While poets are finding fresh and forceful ways to address their times, and an increasing number of literary journals are devoting themselves to poetry, the folk-rock singers and lyricists have pre-empted a sizable share of the primary poetic audience—the young. It may be that youth finds it easier to grapple with the social commentary found in Simon & Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" or in the political-protest songs of Bob Dylan than with the more complicated work of poets like Berryman. Or it may be that the poem as ballad is simply coming back into its own. In any case, the music world is experimenting with a revolutionary surrealism, and contemporary songwriters and poets are apparently enriching one another's work. Many folk-rock lyrics stand up as poems, and some poets—Michael Benedikt and Canada's Leonard Cohen among them—are devoting part of their energy to writing songs. Meanwhile, a modern music has entered into and enlivened the poem, giving Faulkner's demon-driven creatures new voices for their poetic torments.

Bokinsky,1980

"Richard Brautigan"
Caroline J. Bokinsky
Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 5: American Poets Since World War II. Edited by Donald J. Greiner. Gale Research Company, 1980, pp. 96-99.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington, the son of Bernard F. and Lula Mary Keho Braurigan. He married Virginia Dionne Adler, from whom he is now divorced, on 8 June 1957, and he has a daughter, Ianthe. He moved to San Francisco in 1958 and there befriended such poets as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Duncan, Phillip Whalen, and Michael McClure. He is often categorized as one of the San Francisco Poets. Brautigan was poet-in-residence at California Institute of Technology in 1967 and received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1968-1969. He maintains no single place of residence, claiming San Francisco, Montana, and Tokyo as homes. He lives a secluded life, despite his wide-spread popularity, often retreating to his home in Montana.

He began his writing career as a poet, gained most of his acclaim from his novels, and became a cult hero with Trout Fishing in America (1967). One of his few published comments on writing is recorded in David Meltzer's The San Francisco Poets (1971): "I wrote poetry for seven years to learn how to write a sentence because I really wanted to write novels and I figured that I couldn't write a novel until I could write a sentence. I used poetry as a lover but I never made her my old lady." By experimenting with poetry, he developed his skills with language. Many readers consider him a master of the simile and metaphor because he is able to link seemingly unrelated ideas and concepts.

In precise, lucid words, Brautigan encourages the reader neither to pry deeply nor to overinterpret. As Robert Kern notes, Brautigan's style is like that of William Carlos Williams, with a "Poetics of Primitivism" that "does not look like literature and is not meant to." This primitive, pure form of writing is almost "preliterary," according to Kern, because it is based on no historical traditions but instead is invented "out of the daily events and objects of [the poet's] immediate physical locality." Brautigan's primitivism, according to Kern, lies in the intentional naivete of his poems as the poet draws attention to himself in the act of articulating his emotional responses and observations of the world. Tony Tanner, although focusing more on Brautigan's novels than his poetry, finds Brautigan's achievement in his "magically delicate verbal ephemera."

What appears as nonliterary in Brautigan's work is more an attempt to start anew. Deliberately using poetry as a stimulating "lover," he experiments with his sensations, tests his emotions, and observes external reality, with the ulterior motive of grasping language at its most elementary level and recording his gut responses. His creative imagination is constantly at work as he looks at life in terms of analogies; one form of experience, or one particular observation, is like something else. The poet imposes his unique order on the world's chaos as he sees life in a new way, giving meaning to the meaningless. The reader must strip himself of expectations and conventions in order to approach and accept Brautigan's poetry as a refreshing new version of experience. Despite his concern for the new, Brautigan has been influenced by the Imagists, the Japanese, and the French Symbolists. From the Imagists and the Japanese he inherits a concern for the precision of words, while the Symbolist influence is apparent in his references to Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud and in his use of synesthesia, in which one type of sensation stimulates a different sense, or a mental stimulus elicits a physical response, or vice versa.

Brautigan's earliest published poem, The Return of the Rivers (1957), is an observation of the external world as a surreal, romanticized setting in which the cycle of life is exemplified in the river, sea, rain, and ocean. He demonstrates the creative power of the poet's imagination to an even greater degree in The Galilee Hitch-Hiker (1958). The book consists of nine separate poems in which the speaker describes his encounters with Baudelaire, who appears in a different pose in each section. Terence Malley considers the collection "one of Brautigan's finest achievements" and suggests that Baudelaire is a symbol of "the artist who can transform anything into anything else."

With his next book, Lay the Marble Tea (1959), Brautigan's exploration of language extends to similes and metaphors with humorous twists as suggested by such titles as "Feel Free to Marry Emily Dickinson" or "Twenty Eight Cents for My Old Age." His experiments with the simile include strange analogies in which "a dish of ice cream" looks "like Kafka's hat," or in "In a Cafe":

"I watched a man in a cafe fold a slice of
bread as if he were folding a birth certificate
or looking at the photograph of a dead lover."

Brautigan's imaginative reconstructions of reality also include such recollections of his youth as "The Chinese Checkers Players" and "A Childhood Spent in Tacoma."

The Octopus Frontier (1960) continues Brautigan's creation of order and meaning from objects in the literal world by using them to construct a fantasy world within his own imagination. In many of the poems the speaker leads the reader through the maze of Brautigan's imagination, as in "Private Eye Lettuce," an attempt to show how man's imagination makes connections, no matter how extraneous, and gives significance to "objects of this world." While "Private Eye Lettuce" makes logical associations, in "The Wheel" the poet assumes a child's view of the world where the analogies are more fanciful. "The Winos on Potrero Hill," however, relies more on realistic detail and precision. The poet acts as a painter, in a meticulous step-by-step process, putting each object in a specific place to create a painting. "The Postman" creates its effect by allusion because although the poet never says what "The smell / of vegetables / on a cold day" elicits, the accumulation of similes causes a synesthetic response. The sensation of smell suggests the taste of fresh summer vegetables. The taste in turn stimulates the feel of a warm summer day. All sensations merge in the imagination, and even those that are illusions appear real for a moment.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (1967) provides a transition to the collection that was to become his most popular and was to establish his position as a poet, The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968). Recalling the romanticism of The Return of the Rivers while looking forward to the humor that characterizes The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, the long poem, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, presents a vision of an ideal world where man and nature exist in harmony, "where mammals and computers / live together in mutually / programming harmony," and where the perfect world is "all watched over / by machines of loving grace."

The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster includes most of the poems that appeared in previous volumes and new poems that confirm his magical power of transforming an image into something else. The title poem, most often mentioned by critics, is a Brautigan classic. A sudden revelation, which flashes into the poet's head as an insignificant moment, becomes an analogy with greater proportions. Robert Kern praises "Haiku Ambulance," a brief poem often casually dismissed as pointless, and links it to William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow." In some of the poems Brautigan's extravagant metaphors become farfetched. Such poems as "The Harbor" "The Horse That Had a Flat Tire," or "Death is a Beautiful Parked Car Only" verge on the incomprehensible. Yet in "The Garlic Meat Lady" he is absorbed in the elemental delights of life. He identifies passion with Marcia preparing dinner:

"She takes
each piece of meat like a lover
and rubs it gently with garlic.
I've never seen anything like this
before. Each orifice
of the meat is explored, caressed
relentlessly with garlic."

Brautigan continues his experiments with similes and metaphors in the next volume, Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt (1970), but his poetry also begins to move into social commentary. Some pages are blank, with only titles at the top, as if poems were intended to be there but were never created. Along with the humor, he takes a verbal stab at critics, alludes to Robert Kennedy's death, suggests the economic plight of the country, and depicts the lack of communication between husband and wife. In "Jules Verne Zucchini," he hits hard at the discrepancy between scientific progress—man walking on the moon—and people starving on the earth. "Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt" suggests the futility of war, the cycle of history, and dead heroes forgotten by the passage of time. A momentous occasion, like Rommel's penetration into Egypt, is meaningless to someone seeing the news account (the title of the poem is an old newspaper headline) years after the event.

A new tone emerges in Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork (1976). Brautigan's terse messages and witty similes are overshadowed by a blacker humor and a darker, more pensive mood. The poems are more personal; the reader even glimpses the poet in the process of writing. The blacker poems include references to Captain Martin who is lost at sea and to "a freshly-dug grave," "a blind lighthouse," or "a poorly-designed angel." An awareness of growing old is a key subject, as in "The Last Surprise":

"The last surprise is when you come
gradually to realize that nothing
surprises you anymore."

A poet who once saw life in pleasant, whimsical analogies is now filled with foreboding and pessimism. His sensations are no longer so acute. In "Fresh Paint" the speaker expresses perplexity over his associations of the sight of funeral parlors, the smell of fresh paint, and the sensation in his stomach. He retreats to a private wilderness in "Montana/1973" to reexperience life in nature, to rediscover his true essence, and to get back in touch with his own sensations, with the world, and with the cosmos. He concludes the volume with an existential pose, convincing himself that retreating to Montana is an action with some value:

"Nobody knows what the experience is worth
but it's better than sitting on your hands,
I keep telling myself."

In June 30th, June 30th (1978) Brautigan comes to terms with an important moment in his youth: the death of his uncle in 1942, which was indirectly caused by a head wound from bomb fragments during the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. He died a year later from a fall that Brautigan felt would have been avoided had he not been injured. In the introduction to the poems, Brautigan states that after going through a period of hatred for the Japanese, "the war slipped back into memory." When he discovered their art and their humanity, he could forgive the Japanese and was eventually drawn to the country, where he confronted his animosity during a visit that lasted from 13 May to 30 June 1976. Leaving Japan on the evening of 30 June, he crossed the international date line in mid-Pacific and landed in the United States at the beginning of a second 30 June, feeling that part of himself was left behind in Japan. The book's title signifies the divided self, while also implying the poet's coming to terms with his other self.

Brautigan calls the poems a diary: critics have referred to them collectively as one poem. June 30th, June 30th is the most unified of Brautigan's volumes not only because the poems pertain to a single experience but because the speaker of all the poems is Brautigan himself examining his reactions to this experience. For the first time, Brautigan is a confessional poet, lost and alone in a strange land, unable to communicate. There is a barrier separating him not only from those who do not speak English, as "The Silence of Language" and "Talking" indicate, but also from those who speak his own language. He effectively conveys to the reader this greater lack of communication in "On the Elevator Going Down." He is just one individual among the millions in Tokyo in "The 12,000,000" and "Japanese Children," and he discovers that Tokyo is no different from any other city. His observations of a sleeping cat, a fly, or dreams could have been made anywhere else in the world. In "A Study in Roads," he comments that with "All the possibilities of life, / all roads led here," expressing the feeling that he has been a sporadic wanderer. Although he is well known, "Ego Orgy on a Rainy Night in Tokyo with Nobody to Make Love to" ends with a despairing tone: "I will sleep alone tonight in Tokyo."

As Brautigan told Meltzer in 1971, "I love writing poetry but it's taken time, like a difficult courtship that leads to a good marriage, for us to get to know each other." June 30th, June 30th is the transition from a lifelong courtship of poetry into a commitment whereby he gives himself to poetry, making her his "old lady."

Warsh,1970

"Out of Sight"
Lewis Warsh
Poetry Mar. 1970, pp. 440-446.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

In the last few years poetry has become incredibly accessible. The increase in the number of books, magazines, and anthologies published as well as the opportunity given poets to read their works has created an audience which in turn creates the demand for more poetry. John Giorno's Dial-a-Poem—you can dial ten numbers and hear ten different tapes of poets reading their works—has received (as of April 1969) approximately one million calls! Even those poets who work best in isolation are realizing that the people interested in poetry have grown less identifiable as a group, as the group grows larger.

Feeling perhaps that the "straight" method of reading—the poet gets up, is introduced, then reads his work—was too rigid, or that the audience needed more to hold its attention, poets—in New York and elsewhere—have begun experiments with tapes, lights, films, and the various means of communication that have now become so available. The poet, however, remains a human being, and ultimately—for me—it's his personality, the way he delivers his works, that's most interesting. Of the readings I've attended that make use of technological equipment I've been excited by very few if only because nothing of the poet himself as a person comes across to me through the wires. When asked for his opinion of the Beatles in a recent interview in Singout! Bob Dylan stated: "...they work much more with the studio equipment, they take advantage of the new sound inventions of the past year or so. Whereas I don't know anything about it. I just do the songs, and sing them and that's all." Dylan and the Beatles are proof that both the personal and the technological, when executed well, are valid means of presenting and expressing one's poems.

Tom Clark and Richard Brautigan are aware that this audience exists, but their way of giving, like Dylan, is confined to the human voice reading the poem or to the printed page—where someone reads it. I've seen Clark read several times. He's very cool, letting the poems speak for themselves. He doesn't talk to the audience or tell anecdotes between poems, nor does he attempt to persuade the audience to like him, in any way but through the pleasure they derive from hearing his poems. I've seen Brautigan read only once, at St. Mark's In-the-Bowery Church, in New York, and after each poem he paced slowly around the front of the church, standing in a different place, in a different relationship to the audience, every time he started to read. Both Clark and Brautigan reveal a definite sense of themselves while reading, giving to their work a perspective where as human beings they appear as real people dealing with the world they know directly and honestly.

[Text deleted pertaining to Tom Clark and his poetry . . .]

Richard Brautigan also lives on, and is from, the West Coast—a fact which is relevant to understanding the ninety-eight poems in his book. Brautigan writes poems whenever an interesting thought or phrase strikes him, or when something occurs that he feels needs to be celebrated or described. His poems are easy to read, which is a pleasure in itself, and there is very little literary feedback—that is, you're startled by what's being set down, or by a single twist either in content or in image, or by the honesty with which the poet is expressing himself, and then you continue, turning the page, without having to look back. Instant understanding is possible if you can get through Brautigan's tone, and this is where being from the West seems important, as the tone that directs these works is straightforward throughout, like a cowboy who tells a good story, only it's a new type of cowboy whose understanding of his landscape involves a mixture of peace and pleasure in everything that passes in front of his eyes. What struck me most was that there was no pressure at all to write any of the works in the book except for the knowledge and feeling that the poet could do it. Brautigan has learned from Jack Spicer about the limits and the possibilities of humor, of how far you can go in your own head while still remaining in control of the poem. The delicateness of this balance leads to an intensity which, when successful, overshadows the sometimes self-indulgent choice of subject matter. Both Tom Clark and Richard Brautigan are dealing with the direct transformation of life into art, if art in the simplest sense be the writing of words on paper:

"I lie here in a strange girl's apartment.
She has poison oak, a bad sunburn
and is unhappy.
She moves about the place
like distant gestures of solemn glass.

"She opens and closes things.
She turns the water on,
and she turns the water off.

"All the sounds she makes are faraway.
They could be in a different city.

"It is dusk and people are staring
out the windows of that city.
Their eyes are filled with the sounds
of what she is doing.

The readability of Brautigan's poems makes me not want to think about them too hard; they exist to give pleasure to anyone who wants to go along.

"Reduce intellectual and emotional noise / until you arrive at the silence of yourself / and listen to it" is a section from Brautigan's poem "Karma Repair Kit" and perhaps best identifies, in the poet's own words, the place from which he is writing. In his poems and novels (In Watermelon Sugar is the third novel published so far) the pace—whether you're in the poet's mind or in the minds of his characters—is incredibly slow, almost listless: most of the activity seems the cause of something happening outside the persons involved. In Watermelon Sugar takes place in a type of commune called iDEATH, and much of the narrator's life is taken up eating, sleeping, and in conversation with members of the commune. He also has two girl friends between whom there is some conflict, and he is writing a book, presumably In Watermelon Sugar.

Like Brautigan's other novels, this one is written in very short sections, so that a single consecutive activity like getting out of bed and going to have breakfast often takes several sections; and this is where the possibilities of transition or pacing take control of the book, for it's just as much how you read—how fast or slow—as what has actually been written that is important, how you let the weight of that simplicity stay in your head. One entire chapter, Hands, is quotable, and reads like the poems: "We walked back to iDEATH, holding hands. Hands are very nice things, especially after they have traveled back from making love."

[Text deleted pertaining to Fernando Alegria's poem "Instructions for Undressing the Human Race" . . .]

Williams,1971

"Strolling across the Bridge"
Hugo Williams
London Magazine, no. 10, Feb. 1971, pp. 81-84.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

[Material deleted . . .]

Of all these poets, the best promoted—cheap music being what it is—has been Richard Brautigan. Though much has been made of his years in the wilderness, it has fallen to him, as far as his poetry is concerned, to be the popularizer of other men's work. Somewhere in his book you will find hidden the sweetened and simplified faces of Frank O'Hara, James Wright, Robert Creeley, Dudley Fitts, not to mention Buddy Holly, Walt Whitman and all. He is the author of two original and poetic prose works called In Watermelon Sugar and Trout Fishing in America which have become something of a cult on the West Coast. Short, visionary inscapes on the American nightmare, they might indeed have required some kind of exile to complete. There is even one poem in this collection which might have been written in the same seriousness:

"July 19, a dog has been run over by an
     airplane
an act that brings into the world the energy
that transforms vultures into beautiful
     black race horses."

The rest, however, seem written in a lower, left-handed key than his prose, either hopelessly late at night to prise apart over-sentimental pairs of thighs:

"Dance toward me please, as
if you were a star
with light years piled
on top of your hair,
     smiling"

or on a bad post-coital morning as an excuse for getting out of bed:

"I feel horrible. She doesn't
love me and I wander round
the house like a sewing machine
that's just finished sewing
a turd to a garbage lid."

Sugary, predigested and schoolgirlish, his naiveté is actually cynical it is so accurately researched to touch the dewy and vulgar adolescent heart. With his own heart safely given over to justified lines he has been able without a qualm to write down as low as needs be to reach that smiling majority who are always waiting. Roughly speaking the recipe is a follows: one layer of half-baked sponge cake spread with a little pastel-coloured icing sugar and topped with a single word (in this case "African") in chocolate, to personalize it:

"Your necklace is leaking
and blue light drips
from your beads to cover
your beautiful breasts
with a clear African dawn."

Lynch,1976

"The Poetry of Richard Brautigan"
Lynch, Dennis Daley
Towers no. 47, Northern Illinois University, Fall 1976, pp. 49-52
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Poetic imagery takes a tremendous slap in the face from the author of TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA. Richard Brautigan combines positive and negative esthetcis in a fast-paced collection to produce a series of moments functional, emotional, and totally immediate.

There is something wrong with this poem. Can you find it?

Richard Brautigan, "Critical Can Opener"

While the major publishing houses are cutting back on the amount of poetry published each year, and while young poets are struggling to get enough money together to privately print chapbooks, Richard Brautigan is proving that a poet can be commercially successful in the seventies. Both Rommel Drives On Deep Into Egypt and The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster have gone through multiple hard cover printing; copies from the gigantic paperback runs can be found not only in bookstores throughout the land but also in places which are generally considered anathema to poetry, such as supermarkets, train stations, and head shops.

After perusing the jacket blurbs ("His poems are, by turns, brutally realistic or surrealistically witty," -Time; " ... [Y]ou're startled by what's being set down, or by a single twist either in content or in image, or by the honesty with which the poet is expressing himself ... " -Poetry], the reader who has enjoyed Brautigan's novels may also expect to find the poetry just as aesthetically pleasing; but Brautigan continually confounds expectations: Trout Fishing in America and A Confederate General from Big Sur challenge traditional notions about both the American Dream and novelistic structure; In Watermelon Sugar and The Abortion parody the romance; The Hawkline Monster is subtitled "a gothic western," just as Willard and His Bowling Trophies is subtitled "a perverse mystery." Each of Brautigan's novels is an imaginative and largely successful experiment with form. His experimentations in the poetic genre, on the other hand, are almost complete artistic failures. When the reader finishes Rommel Drives or The Pill he feels as if he has just finished a notebook of random jottings instead of a volume of poetry. Few poems run more than ten lines; many have fewer than ten words. We can thank the Japanese poets for teaching us about word economy, but I wonder if Jisso would appreciate the succinctness of "Nice Ass" ("There is so much lost/ and so much gained in I these words.") or "Melting Ice Cream at the Edge of Your Final Thought" ("Oh well, call it a/ life.") Less is not always more.

Thematically the poems run the gamut from .anti-war ("'Star Spangled' Nails") to pro-fellatio ("I've Never Had It Done so Gently Before"); from the horrors of drugs ("Diet") to the wonders of penicillin ("Flowers for Those You Love"); from praise of a girl named Valerie (one poem in Rommel Drives) to praise of a girl named Marcia (fifteen poems in The Pill). Thomas McGuane, himself a young novelist of considerable talent, finds the style of Brautigan's poetry as hackneyed as its themes: "Apparently relaxed in their poetics, they are in fact strenuously a la mode. [1]" Though purportedly anti-poetry, the poems of Richard Brautigan, with their mixture of sex, San Francisco Zen, and strung-out metaphors, in fact follow rigidly the manner of the Padgett-McClure-McKuen-Cohen school.

Brautigan the novelist has often been accused of being a literary "Charlie Brown," innocently believing, as Johnathan Yardley has said, "happiness is a warm hippie [2]" and naively singing the praises of the organic millennium. I would take exception to this view; granted, each of Brautigan's novels is narrated by a rather shallow, idealistic nebbish. However, we must realize that the narrator is not Brautigan; that, instead, Brautigan's irony often catches his narrator as the main victim. In In Watermelon Sugar, for example, the narrator celebrates iDEATH as the new Eden. But the reader can see the truths and horrors behind the illusions; he can see the death lurking in iDEATH. The novelist Brautigan, by a subtle manipulation and reporting of events, can undercut the romantic excesses of the unreliable narrator who embraces the pastoral ideal.

" Yet the case for reading Brautigan's novels ironically is not helped by his poetry, which regretfully seldom exhibits any ironic element. While in his novels Brautigan is at pains to distinguish himself from the narrator (usually by appearing as a character himself), in his poetry he unabashedly speaks his own voice. As a result the poems are all too often personal to the point of being maudlin. The odes to Marcia which comprise such a large portion of The Pill are uniformly and effusively sentimental ("Pissing a few moments ago /I looked down at my penis I affectionately./ Knowing it has been inside I you twice today makes me I feel beautiful." - "The Beautiful Poem"; "Just because people love your mind, I doesn't mean they have to have your body, /too."-"Just Because"; "Do you think of me. as often as I think/ of you?"-"Please."). When one reads such poems as these he cannot help but feel the same way as if he had just read someone else's love letter: embarrassed. Surely the poems have been written with feeling, but the printed page is a harsh arbiter and can turn heartfelt emotion into banality.

When Brautigan's poems are not so sentimental and shallow, Hallmark cards of a counter culture, they are often so esoteric as to defy analysis. "Crab Cigar" reads, "I was watching a lot of crabs I eating in the tide pools I of the Pacific a few days ago. I When I say a lot: I mean I hundreds of crabs. They eat I like cigars." "Third Eye" reads, "There is a motorcycle/in New Mexico." Poems such as these may carry some significance for Brautigan, but they provide too little information to be meaningful to many others.

The philosophical poems, on the other hand, suffer from a simplemindedness which renders them too easily apprehended. While the Zen of "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" anticipated the ideology of Charles Reich and Robert Pririsig in its union of mechanism and humanism and technology and nature, other poems, such as "Deer Tracks," would find Kharma merely through "Beautiful, sobbing, high-geared fucking I and then to lie silently like deer tracks I in the freshly-fallen snow beside the one I you love. That's all. "

What poems remain in Brautigan' s canon are generally random thoughts which pose as poetry. "December 30" is typical: "At 1:03 in the morning a fart/ smells like a marriage between/ an avacado and a fish head. I I have .. to get out of bed I to write this down without I my glasses on." One wonders how much the cause of poetry would have suffered had Brautigan stayed in bed that fateful night. In a laudatory article in Poetry Lewis Warsh states that "Brautigan writes poems whenever an interesting thought or phase occurs to him. [3]" Yet Brautigan' s lack of selectivity is a problem; for one "interesting thought or phrase" ("Ah, I you're just a copy I of all the candy bars /I've every eaten."- "Xerox Candy Bar"; "He'd sell a rats' asshole I to a blindman for a wedding/ring."-"Negative Clank") does not in itself make a poem. If the term is to retain any validity we cannot accept Brautigan's notion (as implied in "Albion Breakfast" and "April 7, 1969") that anything a person writes is poetry.

Such random thoughts as found in "December 30" do liven up Brautigan's novels, however; but standing alone they are frail and shabby. Occasionally some of the absurd Brautigan humor can be found in his poetry, but too often he resorts to the cheap jokes of the "Negative Clank" variety, and, like a vaudevillian of old, Brautigan apparently subscribed to the dictum, "The more times you repeat a bad joke, the funnier it gets." Thus, the body of "A 48-Year-Old Burglar from San Diego" is a blank page (heh-heh), as is that of "8 Millimeter (mm)" (heh-heh-heh), "1891-1944" (heh- heh-heh-heh] and" '88' Poems (heh-heh-heh-heh-heh].

Only a few times does Brautigan' s truly humorous self shine through the clouds of comic cliche. "The Symbol" finds Moby Dick reincarnated as a Californian truck driver who thinks, "Hoffa is a lot better I to us whales than Captain Ahab ever was." The sequence of poems entitled "The Galilee Hitch-Hiker," one of Brautigan's earliest works, anticipates Trout Fishing in America (here Baudelaire sits in for Trout Fishing in America Shorty) in its synecdochical technique, its American theme, and its raucously absurd good humor. Hardly any of the serious poems can be labeled successful, but "Restaurant" works as well as any:

Fragile, fading 37,
she wears her wedding ring like a trance
and stares straight down at an empty coffee cup
as if she were looking into the mouth of a dead bird.
Dinner is over. Her husband has gone to the· toilet.
He will be back soon and then it will be her turn
to go to the toilet.

Here, for once, tone and imagery are tightly controlled and avoid excessive sentiment or obscure metaphors. The stark, flat language mirrors the bleakness and emptiness of a trapped life.

Yet most of Brautigan's poems fail; it is a gifted artist who in our time can achieve critical success both as a novelist and a poet (as have Dickey, Updike, and just a few others). Lewis Warsh has enthusiastically stated, "The readability of Brautigan's poems makes me not want to think too hard; they exist to give pleasure to anyone who wants to go along. [4]" but therein lies the deficiency of the poetry: it is less art than it is a substitute for valium. To those of us who treasure Brautigan's novels, his poetry will remain an embarrassment. In a revealing comment to Bruce Cook, Brautigan has admitted that he only began to write poetry so that he could learn to write sentences for his novels.5 Perhaps, the, Brautigan's poetry should be viewed as his minor league, his testing grounds, and we can be thankful that he was a wise enough novelist to discard the contorted constructions, the sentimentality, and the cliched counter culture worldview of his poetry. while retaining the flashes of whimsey and irony in order to produce works of subtlety and magic.

"I am a minor poet."
Richard Brautigan, "The Literary Life in California I 1964."

NOTES
1. Thomas McGuane, "Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, In Watermelon Sugar," New York Times Book Review, 15 Feb. 1970, p. 49.
2 Johnathan Yardley, "Still Roving," New Republic, 20 March 1971, p. 24.
3 Lewis Warsh, "Out of Sight," Poetry, (1970), 444.
4 Warsh, p. 445.
5 Bruce Cook, The Beat Generation (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971), p. 206