Fellas, Alex says, I’d like you to meet—if you have not yet met—Claudio and Stanley, two criminal toughs of my recent acquaintance with a burgeoning interest in art and poetry and other fine things. It falls to us, gentlemen, to see that these lads are not lost to the felonious abyss.
A voice from the corner: Maybe these two can save the rest of us from art and poetry, it says. Make us into honest crooks.
It’s Charlie. Stanley almost doesn’t recognize him: he looks sober, or nearly so. He’s giving them a tight smile and a narrow knowing glare, but it’s not convincing. It’s a look that says I had the goods on you, buddy, but then I forgot. Stanley plays it cool, laughs a little at Charlie’s joke. Nobody else does.
Clockwise from left, Alex says, meet Bob, Bruce, Milton, Saul, Maurice, Jimmy, Charlie, Stuart whom you know, and Tony, our doorman. Now take your friend’s jacket, Stanley, and come with me.
In the bedroom—sheets haphazard on the bare mattress, drooping indecipherable paintings tacked to the walls—Alex takes the jackets and hands Stanley a wad of bills. Count it, he says, and Stanley does: one-fifty. He nods, and Alex whisks him back to the main room.
Stuart and a couple of other guys have restarted what seems to be a favorite argument. One of the new faces—fleshy, fake-professorial, probably queer, sipping red wine from a coffeemug—has the floor now. Of course poems should be like paintings! the guy’s saying. Why wouldn’t they be? I mean, ut pictura poesis, man: that’s the whole history of the form in a phrase. It’s right there in Horace—and Horace was just quoting Simonides. The instant impact of the image, the negative space of the blank page, the depth of potential detail. That’s what we all want, right?
I’m not sold on that, the colored guy—Milton—says. How many of the poets in this room are painters, too? Just about all, unless I’m mistaken. If you’re satisfied with one, why bother with the other?
Tony, still standing by the door, motions Alex over, speaks quietly in his ear. He keeps looking at Stanley and Claudio, unhappy about something. Stanley can’t hear what he’s saying.
Stuart’s arguing with the tubby professor. You missed the scene at the Coastlines reading, Bruce, he says. If you’d caught it, there’s no way you’d still be trying to shovel this shit. Ginsberg ain’t no painter, man. You take the most massive painting you can think of—take the Sistine Chapel ceiling, for chrissakes—and you’re still nowhere near the thing he read. You’re hung up on some kind of museum-academy trip, man. You’re filling little jars with formaldehyde. I love paintings, but they don’t exist in time. Poems don’t happen on the page. They’re made from living breath.
Ginsberg? somebody says. He’s the striptease star, right?
—just theater, someone else mutters under his breath.
So what’s the matter with theater? Stuart says. Poetry needs more theater! It needs more music! Get it off the page, man, and onto the stage! Get some red blood pumping in those paper veins!
Oh, christ, Bruce says, refilling his cup from a gallon jug on the floor. Here we go again with the jazz canto jive.
Across the room, Alex has an avuncular hand on Tony’s shoulder, a raised finger in his face. Tony isn’t talking anymore.
Poets and painters gotta quit shadowboxing each other, Stuart says, and start aping jazz. Free up the forms! Smash the phony barriers between art and life! That’s how we’ll reach people, man. It’s guerrilla warfare. Nowadays everybody’s an image junkie, everybody’s hypnotized. The frontal attack is no good. You gotta get in through the ear, you gotta communicate with the inner eye, the eye that won’t be tricked by some subliminal projection.
Charlie speaks up, his voice a little too loud in the small room. Whoa, Trigger! he says. Now you’ve got me confused. Are we talking about poetry or advertising?
Stuart and Bruce shoot glares at him, exasperated, at a loss, knocked off their rhythm. In the sudden quiet, Tony’s low voice comes through the room: on top of being dope-peddling JDs, he says, they’re an illegal sex, to boot.
Let me let you guys in on a little trade secret, Charlie says. This is my area of expertise, dig? You know what’s even better than subliminal projections for selling stuff? Super-liminal projections, man! Just put it out there! You guys talk about people like they’re sheep, like they can’t think for themselves, like if they weren’t all such saps they’d be right here at the oceanfront with us, painting pictures, writing poems, sleeping on the sand, living off horsemeat from the pet shop. Truth is, they love to be fooled. They want to be told what to do, what to want, what to like. They love their illusions. Just like us, right? But we think our illusions are better. If you guys want to change the world, start paying attention to your Starch Ratings. Just like we used to say around the office: you can’t sell a man who isn’t listening!