The lovely heroes rode together—vanished down the highway then the highway vanished as well—truth went down a wishing well & came back all wet & refreshed—the important moments bookshelved the torrent—the music as usual carried the day—life became livable during the flash—hi jinks—proud dancers—unafraid to stand & deliver—(as a highwayman would say)—my make-up has shifted—hope (I’m not dying but I’m not as charged up in the old places—maps & origins thrilled me once—gatherings of heroes—who I mostly see now not as truth tellers but as easy riders)—that’s fine but what still matters are the songs—& their ability to mesmerize—levitate—that scene where the young woman weeps after the show—& Sam Shepherd talks about the inspiration that was passed on—“a feeling of exhilaration…of being alive” —(he says “sounds corny but it’s true”) –the poets practice precise verbal alchemy—the musicians—not the sidelong glances but the full-eyed performances—Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues read on his grave—Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish read at a Mah Jong parlor—Bob Dylan’s songs as rocking declaimed poetry in that lineage–Patti Smith’s punk rock in rhythmic language—Joni Mitchell’s soaring moment in the film steals the show then gives it back—Coyote —she studies her own newly written words—then, the story of Hurricane Carter–the audiences turning out young & vulnerable—where is that assembly of like-minded listeners today? –after metal & mush-mouthed rock—the masks save us from the performer’s ego—which today engulfs every possibly similar discourse—Ginsberg talks about “the poets & artists working alone” as Dylan the shooting star explodes in a fountain of light—then,

“You, who saw it all, or who saw flashes and fragments, take from us some example, try and get yourselves together, clean up your act, find your community, pick up on some kind of redemption of your own consciousness, become mindful of your own friends, your own work, your own proper meditation, your own art, your own beauty, go out and make it for your own Eternity”  —Allen Ginsberg’s message at the close of The Rolling Thunder Revue—A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese.

 

[track is peter case with stan ridgway, “Let’s Turn This Thong Around,” available on the Alive/Naturalsound LP/CD  “The Case Files]

From the other side of the world the country the city the street the room the far corner of my mind. when was the last time I drew a breath, capsized, trusted in my marksmanship. toed a line that colored outside my time zone? while the restauranteur—gamely offers menus  & shakes hands on our exit—while I grab the waiters hand—the janitor’s un-proffered mitt—calloused—his hands my heart—too many angles repeated every sunset—the repetition of mechanical sounds—also my orders to my self: “go down—sign up—sign in—before you sign off”—bad writing a succession of cheap shots at myself and the same old stories again & the same old fifteen-minute relationship—mean time on the screen—the paper—the airwaves—phone signals trumpet disaster—division—and we can’t escape—caught in the cycle of victimization & torture & limited spectrum culture—“round up the usual bums”—and age is not a number but a series of days stuck—paralyzed—by our own attitudes—and aches & pains—coming on from offstage—on in the bar, wafting in over the baffles—the dividers & predictable “find the exit” pleas.

check tour dates: upcoming Pacidic Northwest Tour, UK Tour with Sid Griffin, Tour of Spain, SF House Concert, etc…  www.petercase.com/gigs

by Jack Kerouac

The secret of Shakespeare: two parts: one, he wrote costume poetry for the state — There’s your fortune — Had (amongst his Ovids and Montaignes) a copy of Plutarch’s Lives and a book about Kings of England, and set the scene like a

Hollywood Historical Costume Picture (think what he would have done with DeMille equipments on the Redcoats of Canada, the court of Catherine the Great, Napoleon and the whiff of grapeshot) — Made dandies, couriers, ladies, fools and generals and emperors talk with yapping mouths — a bwa a bwa a bwa BOOM! the eannon offstage. This is poetry, dramatic poetry. The vision of life, in which he was swilled like a pearl in a pigsty, a gloriously magnificent singer. “In peace,” he says to the nobles in the boxes, “there’s nothing so becomes a man/as modest stillness and humility;/When the blast of war blows in our ears,/then imitate the action of the tiger.” — This is like Krishna’s advice to the melancholy prince in Bhagavad-Gita. It’s given by King Henry V with scaling-ladder in hand, at Walls of Harfleur Act Ill Sc I, and for reason  “. .you noblest English/Whose blood is fet from fathers of warproof!” — Then our Immortal Bard played the Gallery with Nym — And played a form of Tao (Chinese No-Action) with “Boy”:

BOY: — Would I were in an alehouse in London! I would give all my fame for a pot of ale and safety.

Shakespeare’s real Gimmick Poetry is in Nym. Boy, Ariel, Clown, Pistol, Fool, the Gravedigger etc. — then, to unfold the story, his monologues and soliloquies unfold the plain explana-tion concerning the backgrounds of the play. It’s just a shining technique in the darkness, and goes out only when the stars go out. Face, if you will, Gentlemen, the stars never mind.

Part two, the singing of “mellifluous and honey tongued Shakespeare”: — A teenage boy raped under an Avon apple tree by an older woman, married and then cuckolded via his older brother Edmund Shakespeare the Villain, on the road to London not roomed in the inn, in London holding the reins Of the horses outside the theater, is asked “Hey Willie can you come in here and carry a spear?” and later “Will, can you add some lines to that last act?” and finally “Ah Sweet Will, how can you ever top that?”

He stands by himself alone in Heaven as the greatest writer in any language in any country anytime in the history of the world: — “Mankind and this world have never been so sharply sifted or so sternly consoled, since Lucretius, as in Shakespeare’s tragedies” (Oliver Elton). — Compared to him Homer groaned, Dante too — Cervantes could not combine drama and poetry in concentrated spates individualized like Othello or Hamlet or King Henry V breaking your heart year after year — Tolstoy threw a fit — Goethe marveled and bit his lip — Nietzsche was driven wroth — Dostoevsky sighed— Blake and Smart smiled — The Japanese and Chinese poets would have covered their ears and run wondering from London — Burns quivered — Pound fell into unreasoning jealousy based on Provencal lilts — Donne and Vaughan and Herbert grinned — Chaucer sat up in his grave and glanced curiously that away — Balzac irritably sharpened his pen quill and tried again and marked his master — Villon stared inspired into the future — Moliere shrugged and concentrat-ed on mere mores — Dickens exulted — Carlyle glared furi-ously into the dark looking for such light — Masey, Dan Michel and Spenser mourned in their cloaks — Modern idiots like Apollinaire, Mayakovsky and Artaud simply spat at the stars in defiance of him — Johnson nodded — Pope bowed — Melville smiled over the bow — Whitman accept-ed — Emily Dickinson saying about flowers

Spiciest at fading, indicate

a habit Of a laureate

understood, and James Joyce leered to comprehend.

Because (and here I want to present a new theory that really should be looked into by proper technicians of Shakespeare Research), when Shakespeare says “Slaves as ragged as Lazarus in the painted cloth, where the glutton’s dog licked his sores,” or “Greasy Joan doth keel the pot, and birds sit brooding in the snow” (combining the thought as well as the SOUND of the ellipse of a Japanese haiku) or those awful lines conspired around “Tarquin’s ravishing strides,” or “and pat he comes like the catastrophe of the old comedy,” I always wonder “Where did he get that rhythmic sound?” and always think “That’s what I like about Shakespeare, where he Raves in the great world night like the wild wind through an old Cathedral” (the training of that). Condell and Heminge reported that his handwritten manuscripts were hardly blotted, if at all, as he apparently flowed in his writing and wrote in an inspired hurry what he immediately heard sound-wise while his steeltrap brain kept shutting down on the exigencies of plot and character in that sea of ravening English that came out of him. And my hunch is that in spite of the many ponderous double entendres that take some thinking, he did it all more out of intuition, than out of deliberateness and the craftiness Of that. My theory is that Joyce fully understood this, the first man to do so since 1615 with the possible exception of Laurence Sterne: — who refused to be austere and severe to cover up the glory of Shakespeare. The prose of Shakespeare, “the most natural and noble of his age,” as it appears in the plays, as apart from the verse, did not persist in English literature but languished with its “tendons and sinews of the language” under the avalanche of the “leisurely and amorous romance” Of “French influence and example” that became the rage at the time, and was followed by big heavy laborings designed to vigorously counteract so-called Elizabethan “Euphuism,” thus alack, the crasser part of English became known as “English prose,” on through Johnson, the mathematical cant-ing absurdities that followed, and the prose of the London (and New York) limes. Today they find cotton to stuff up one meager idea inside a huge pillow of a paragraph. This dullard’s guile is known as “bombast,” derived from the Middle French bombace, meaning cotton, the stuffing and padding of speech with highsounding words all inflated and fustian and turgid, the long arid clauses grimacing with supe-riority the useless adverbs deadening satiated verbs (“inerad-icably misinformed” or something) the “latters” and “form-ers” and “a prioris” and “per ses” and “presentlys” and “con-sequentlys” all told and only for the sake of using cuty-dried phrases a thousand times over without any definite meaning, like in politicians’ windbag talk, in a word, CANT. The rich natural hoarse singing, the ringing complaynt of the Bard and the very art of it was forgotten for favor of the pursy Drab, and the Pundit, and the very Grammarian.

James Joyce over 300 years later attempted to become “Shakespeare in a Dream” and succeeded. Finnegans Wake is pure raving Shakespeare below, beneath, all over “I no sooner seen a ghist of his frighteousness than I was bibbering with vear a few verset off fooling for fiorg for my fifth foot” — and this which is only the end of a long rant-sentence is pure Shakespeare Sound and Rhythm but with Irish long-winded specialties as dark as the peat in Yeats. “THERES SCARES KNUD IN THIS GNARLD WARLD A FULLY SO SVEND AS DILATES FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF OUR FOERSES OF NATURE BY YOUR VERY

AMPLE SOLVENT OF REFRACTING UPON ME LIKE IS BOESEN FIENND” — Your Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary and even your antique Stormonth Dictionary won’t help you here: “Pappaist! Gambanman! Take the cawraidd’s blow! Yia! Your partridge’s last.”— Smash! Crash! — Yah! — Cannon offstage, BOOM! — “and” (Shakespeare) “such as indeed were never soldiers, but dis-carded unjust serving-men, younger sons to younger broth-ers, revolted tapsters and ostlers trade-fallen, the cankers of a calm world and a long peace — ” (which passage proves

Shakespeare heard sound first then the words were there in his QUICK HEAD). “Well/To the end of fray and the beginning of a feast/ Fits a dull fighter and a keen guest” he adds— and everybody knows how folk sayings always seem to pop out of tongue-sounds instead of out of “thinks,” like in “It’s about to clabber up and rain all over” or, “Can’t pour piss out of a boot,” or even the old Medieval Quebecois saying, “Ya pus Plus faim qu’la mer a soif. ‘

For softer sounds, the divine punner listened to softer rains in his brain: Duke of Burgundy speaking about France:—“. . .her fallow leas/ The darnel, hemlock and rank fumitory/ Doth root upon, while that the coulter rusts/ That should deracinate such savagery:/The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth/ the freckled cowslip. . .” Or Hamlet on his father’s love of the Queen: ” . .so loving to my

mother/ That he might not beteem the winds Of heaven/ Visit her face too roughly” — (In a sonnet, there “Since first your eye I eyed”) — and in Lear the daughter mourns like a dove: —

.. to watch —poor

perdu ! —

With this thin helm?

“Every cove to his gentry mort,” Shakespeare might have added, and it was Joyce who wrote that last line, in Ulysses, mindful of how poetry is done by mouthings and brainwaves and wizardries of inwit and not necessarily always by slow measured inductive introspections sunk in anguished consultation about should and shouldnots.

But Joyce was never able to combine drama with such poetry, and treacherous plots with sighs like that, and cries, and be, ampngst all writers of all time, Divinest Thaumaturgist, Forever.

The companionship of Watching The River Flow, later Tangled Up In Blue, and others—Dignity I pulled the car over when I first heard it on the radio—Jokerman–I brought home and alone listening was transfixed—it was riveting—so alive—earlier I learned that white & black folk music go together—that the sound of the words is as important as anything—somehow it led me to Shakespeare—Kerouac also a part of this—the WORD—Eliot as a kid—Stevens—now Notley—that life is an adventure, an opportunity, is important.    Life—is holy—Death so powerful—the mystery—anima—the invisible world—the champions of civil rights—the dignity & value & stature he brought to rock & roll & folk—music etc—is no small thing—he made me want to live, to strive, to contend—wisdom of the street—the vision the powerful sweep & scope—Chimes of Freedom—It’s All Right, Ma—Baby Blue—he sang for freedom of the spirit & the soul—”the guardians and protectors of the mind”–“it is not he or she or them or it that you belong to”– ““an’ mine shall be a strong loneliness dissolvin’ deep/t’ the depths of my freedom/an’ that, then, shall/
remain my song”

–“don’t put on any airs when you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue”—“when you ain’t got nothing, you ain’t got nothing to lose” —“she’s got everything she needs she’s an artist, she don’t look back” —“she never stumbles, she’s got no place to fall”–  like Bob in ’64-’65—(“he never stumbled” said Penny)– when I was a teen—“somebody got lucky but it was an accident”–  “goin’ back to New York City I do believe I’ve had enough”– (marvelling at the chaos of life & New York.) The beauty of Girl From The North Country—Went To See The Gypsy hit me in my 1971 isolation—at my biker friend Rose’s Cadillac dealership, waiting in the parking lot for her to get off work– in the days before I left town for good—the last song that moved me like that for a while—’til Billy—which also I loved & identified with–Billy’s trouble as I was on the lam 70’s style—so vivid & finally got that great inscription in the pink lyrics book perused at the SF bookstore two thousand miles from my home—“to all those high on life—from all corners of the wild blue yonder.”

*  Long Time Gone, an early Dylan song, from my cd “HWY 62” on Omnivore Recordings, 2016.