A Diagrammatic Beat

Page 19 March–April 2009 Eason continued from page 15 poetry and here deranged, remains vital. Miller’s poems fill every inch of their new skin: In the ossuary the dusty nobles dream of water in the Moorish cistern// On BBC the men arrive at the gacaca singing in the back of a barred pickup// Easiest because I could replace her with a new addiction/ Dear X// I had to turn away/ her cane clicking against the polished shoes of rush-hour commuters/ the blended words, the crowd pushing to separate// Because God knows which legs supported which torso carried which skull// We always come to Lagos now/ It’s the quality of life//. Yet, perhaps in the end it’s not that easy to gloss the suture-virgules stitching Miller’s collection together. They do enact the stress of tearing, and they incise tough narratives. As gestures, they evoke multi-tradition, broad-identitied poets like Ntozake Shange and Sonia Sanchez (I’m thinking of Sanchez’s “Listening to Big Black at S.F. State” and Shange’s For Colored Girls [1975]).And, they mimic the raise of a scar, especially when one contrasts their fierce angles with the no-hips no-shoulders of Miller’s chosen form. Still, the poems have a peace about them that comes not from one cooler narrative winning out, or from some moralistic ending, or gimmick landing at dismount. These poems’ peace is anchored in the simple surety of their stocky form, and how the presented information reassembles so completely, scars included. Soon into Forever No Lo it is apparent that fragmentation is not the operating interest. The lava is cooled, and the slashes represent the swoop of new stone, not the cleft and hack of carnage. This is an additive, not reductive collection. But whatever the poetics, Miller’s Forever No Lo is a sleeper success—wide reaching and bold. New poems by Haines Eason will soon appear in Pleiades , Indiana Review (with D. A. Powell), American Letters & Commentary, Smartish Pace, Cutbank, and other places. He has book reviews in Smartish Pace and Rain Taxi. He is a finalist for this year’s Third Coast Poetry Award, and attends Washington University in St. Louis. If you are looking for And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks to complete a magic literary circle, get ready, instead, for a startling Venn diagram. The long-delayed publication of this 1945 pre-Beat Generation collaborative novel—between two authors writing as “William Lee and John Kerouac”—will not magically assume superlative stature alongside the later production of its literary superstars. In fact, it would be hard, despite the temptation , to judge this text as a lost Beat classic. In many ways, Hippos’s rambling style gains interest through the collaboration and its subject—a sensational murder!—but remains limited by the fragile overlap points between the literary fascinations that would respectively come to characterize the later writing of Burroughs and Kerouac, after they become Burroughs and Kerouac. The alternating chapters, written independently by Burroughs (“Will Dennison”) and Kerouac (“Mike Ryko”), trace a story familiar to almost anyone who salivates at the mention of such Beat objects as the “scroll” of Kerouac’s On the Road (1957): The group coalesced in the early 1940s through Burroughs’s relation with his old St. Louis friend Dave Kammerer. Kammerer had followed the younger supposed object of his infatuation, Lucien Carr, to New York City; Carr, a student at Columbia University, soon met Allen Ginsberg and introduced him to Burroughs. The rest, as they say, is hipster be-bop history. This ad hoc literary salon collapsed in August 1944 when Carr killed Kammerer with a Boy Scout knife and dumped his body in the Hudson River when the latter’s apparent sexual advances became unbearable for the younger man. Carr’s defense hinged upon his profession of heterosexuality, and the delight of Hippos—as well as editor James Grauerholz’s excellent afterword—stands in discovering the complications of this portrayal. Carr, Phillip Tourian in the novel, “is the kind of boy literary fags write sonnets to….” Perhaps most interesting to these links between literature, sexuality, and collaboration is the dynamic...