4/18/22

"The soft parade has now begun..." ( )

I first bought a copy of this book in 1982 and still had pages marked with cut up strips of post-it notes. I went looking for this book the other day and I could not find it anywhere. It was weird that a book that I carried abound the military in with several moves suddenly was gone. I ordered another copy and re-read it for the first time in several years. Perhaps knowing more about poetry than I did then might change what I thought about this book.

The Lords I read with new interest. The themes are easily recognizable. There is the city and its grittiness. Different rings of death, the city create different vices. There is sophisticated disease in the outer rings of the suburbs and the hard and unkind vices of the inner city. The thoughts of sex being the center ring of death makes sense in the most biological and evolutionary sense of our existence.

The main theme is the camera and cinema. The camera manages to catch the perfect form of the object or subject while the eye is imperfect. The must rely on the brain to save the image, and the brain remembers things as we want to see them rather than they actually existed. What we see is as the prisoners in Plato's Cave Allegory see. The camera captures the true form and keeps it. Instead of Plato's Cave, Morrison uses alchemy. Alchemy is not the father of chemistry he insists, but the search for pureness and the true nature of things. It is an interesting analogy that seems to capture the mysticism Morrison enjoyed.

The New Creatures is dedicated to Pamela Susan Courson, Morrison's partner and common-law wife. It starts as a tribute and devolves to primitive man and finally to animals. The themes are not as obvious, but the work is more poetic in its form and style.

This is an interesting collection in several ways. The poems are not titles and use the pages to keep them separate. Poems that are longer use Roman numerals at the start of the verse to let the reader know the poem is a continuation. It is not always obvious. This is perhaps the first collection of poetry, outside of independent presses, that has no introduction or biography of the author. The back cover simply states:

Jim Morrison was the lead singer, composer, and lyricist for the Doors until his death in 1971.

A nice collection, if not a bit eccentric. Perhaps it is a bit dated when referring to cinema and photography in this age of photoshop and CGI movies. Morrison did have a degree from the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and that did have an influence on his work. ( )

Originally self-published as two separate volumes in 1969 (The Lords/Notes on Vision, which Morrison described as "a thesis on film aesthetics," and The New Creatures, a surreal portrait of modern existence), the late singer's first published volume of poetry gives a revealing glimpse of an era and the man whose songs and savage performances have left an indelible impression on our culture. This collection, born out of the tumultuous social and political landscape of the late sixties, is as intense, sensual, and compelling as Jim Morrison's persona was during the Doors' peak. His fast life and mysterious death remain controversial more than forty years later.

Eternal and Powerfully Visionary

I think that Jim Morrison had an approach to poetry that was not unlike the ancient Oriental method described by Wei T'ai in the 11th century; "Poetry presents the thing in order to covey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects with the thing the feeling shows in words; this is how poetry enters deeply into us. If the poet presents directly feelings which overwhelm him, and keeps nothing back to linger as an aftertaste, he stirs us superficially; he cannot start the hands and feet involuntarily waving and tapping in time, far less strengthen morality and refine culture, set heaven and earth in motion and call up spirits!"

Morrison mentions this of poetry in an interview; "Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything, it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you.. . . and that's why poetry appeals to me so much - because it's so eternal. As long as there are people, they can remember words and combinations of words. Nothing else can survive a holocaust but poetry and songs. No one can remember an entire novel. No one can describe a film, a piece of sculpture, a painting, but so long as there are human beings, songs and poetry can continue.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, It's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel."

Morrison has remained an influence on my work for over 20 years now-I remember classes in Graduate school in which his poems or name would come up and it was always in a disregarding fashion, yet his books of poetry have been among the highest sellers of all time in that genre (and continue to be). Morrison was Blakean in poetic sensibility and Nietzschian in philosophy which is a terrifying combination if you think about it-he sought to be rid of the 'Mind Forged Manacles' that Blake spoke of and also desired a 'World as a will to power and nothing more' as Nietzsche mentions.
There is something of the eternal and the powerfully visionary about Morrison's work that remains- he was and also is a controversial figure, a poet that attempted to re-create the theater of Artaud in a way that would inform later performers like Alice Cooper and Marilyn Manson. I think that Morrison's contribution to modern poetry was much more significant than he is currently being given credit for in the Academy.
* Notes about Morrison regarding his poetry by the Poet Michael McClure; " One of the things I like about this biography is that it shows that Jim knew himself to be a poet. That was the basis of my friendship and brotherhood with him,-I know of no better poet of Jim's generation. Few poets have been such public figures or entertainers (perhaps Mayakovsky in Russia in the twenties and thirties) and none have had so brief or so powerful a career."