Rick's book has gotten some reviews, including this one by Paul Stevens in
SCR:
http://shitcreek.auszine.com/issue13...3index/huncke/
And there should be one in the
Raintown soon, but as is often the case, Establishment silence has been almost deafening. Which in no way detracts from the ingenuity of the poem. Here's something I wrote about
Huncke and posted to Amazon a while back:
Quite simply, Huncke kicks the crap out of its competition, not only in the metrical poetry world, but in the American poetry scene in general. By my reckoning, it is simply the best poem written by an American in a very long time. It has ambition, scope, intelligence, seriousness, and playfulness in roughly equal measure, but manages to come across as almost effortless--no mean feat in a poem that hops from the darkest days of the War of Independence to Mickey Mouse masterminding the political rise of Rudy Giuliani in the space of a few pages.
The basic framing device for the poem is a memorial reading held for Huncke at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. In Mullin's semi-fictional account:
The poet Morton from the Open Mic
invited me on Facebook to a bar.
A night of poetry. It meant a hike
down Bowery, but it wasn't all that far--
he'd organized the reading, and I like
the guy, despite the skulls on his guitar
and his "Memorial for Herbert Huncke,"
the prototype for William Burroughs' Junkie.
The framing device of a reading is significant. After all, the poetry reading has become a key site for the consumption of literature (not to mention the sale of it) in recent years. And, indeed, for all the versified gripes about the po-biz that one sees in print, Mullin may well be the first poet to acknowledge the social network site-based favor swapping that has become part of many a poet's life in recent years. ("Well, Penny Pentameter did sign on as a fan of both me and my book, and I'm free on Friday, so I should at least RSVP `maybe' for her feature....") But Mullin's setting of the framing device for the poem also places the poem firmly in public, and from the beginning, his evocations of New York City are keen and marked by a tongue-in-cheek humor:
...And this is Houston Street
and Bowery-- "Bumland!" (Lots of kids from Jersey
smoking cigarettes outside effete
cafés and bars). I feel I'm at the mercy
of nostalgia, marching to the beat
of hand-me-down catastrophes and hearsay
revolutions in the spoken word
toward some theater of the absurd ...
But the poem does not merely dwell on a reading populated by the likes of Patti Smith and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, but brings in characters, both from the time (Abstract Expressionist painters, the Beats, Dr. Alfred Kinsey) and from other eras of history (such as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Joseph Priestley), blending them together into a convoluted semi-narrative that turns out not to be about Huncke, or even Huncke's milieu, but branches out from there to talk about the United States itself. Following a Kerouac quote, "Somewhere a cop is beating up a kid," Mullin declares:
...And I'll be there! Oh, I should act my age.
For now, I'll leave you with the picture of
that fallen sheet of paper on the stage.
Regard its blankness, whiter than a dove.
But don't forget the fire in its cage!
It isn't garbage that I'm thinking of,
but energy, potential, under stress.
I owe it to America, I guess.
But despite the sheer number of references, the deviations from strict realism (the poem's main villain is, after all, Mickey Mouse in cahoots with Rudolph Guiliani), and a text that hops from the Battle of Trenton to contemporary suburban New Jersey in the space of a stanza, Mullin is not engaging in some postmodern pastiche. Rather, despite the narrator's initial skepticism, the poem presents the reader with a remarkably coherent picture of the United States--its origins, its suburbs and hinterlands, its greatest city, and the tawdriness of its mass culture. In the end, the narrator, who had originally only decided to go because "...I'd sent/out invitations to my own event..." has experienced the sort of epiphany one is not supposed to have anymore:
And up on Bowery, ghosts and angels play
the networks of America at night.
This city on its rivers leans toward day
again. Is Brooklyn hinting at the light?
From the electric street, it's hard to say.
I dog it to the corner, turning right,
engaged with memory and dreams. The poem.
I'm mumbling in the shadows headed home.
So why is it that Mullin can pull off this sort of poem when very few "major" poets in the United States would attempt a project of this magnitude, or, in the style of Jorie Graham in the pretentious, marginally readable, and generally execrable Sea Change, produce something that is perhaps impressive from a certain point of view, but... well... sucks as an aesthetically pleasurable experience? It probably has something to do with the nature of a great poem.
To put it bluntly, two ingredients are necessary for a poem to hit the threshold of really counting, in addition to the author having the chops to actually write the thing. In the first place, the willingness to reach for greatness, with the understanding that failure in such a case can be catastrophic. But there's also the matter of inspiration. One gets the sense that Mullin was not necessarily expecting to write a poem of this magnitude, but that to get his idea for the poem into shape, he had to write a masterpiece. As the narrator notes in the second canto:
For that's the nature of the pilgrim's tale,
and certainly the Poet Morton's night
of ardent readings in memorial
is also one of pilgrims and their plight
and plaintiff maunderings. A setting sail
across America's agenda. Right?
I don't think we can put a timer on it.
This isn't going to be another sonnet.
It wasn't as if Mullin merely sought out a poem like Huncke--the poem demanded something, too, and he had the odd but necessary combination of ambition and humility to be equal to the challenge. And to do so in a form that pays homage to Byron's equally aggressively digressive Don Juan without ever seeming derivative of it. (Indeed, Mullin recognizes the antecedent at the end of the first canto, when he declares, "If Byron needs a hero, so do I!")
Like Byron's Don Juan, though, Herbert Huncke essentially provides a focal point for a wandering through a rich mental universe framed by the specifics of Mullin's Americanness, but also his wide-ranging knowledge, giving the poem a depth that most long metrical poems of late, with their emphasis on straight, novelistic narrative, have lacked. Mullin's Huncke, almost magnet-like, attracts things to himself, which the Byronesque structure of the piece facilitates. And while Mullin's view of the America that clumps around his central figure is open-eyed--we have addiction, madness, artists starving in garrets, war, gentrification, and the like--it is never nihilistic and is always marked by a sense of exhilaration and wonder.
Readers of American poetry should seek out this book at the first opportunity, and the poetry Establishments, if not too far up their own rear ends to notice a book published by an independent Irish press, should throw every award available at it. As for American poets, this book should serve notice that even now, one can create something wonderful, and that a fiftysomething poet from New Jersey without an MFA is presently ahead of the lot of us.
Rick Mullin's Huncke
Hybrid Mode
