"Reunions", Harry Northrup

This is another book of poetry from Cahuenga Press, the same press that published my former teacher Jim Cushing's poems, a press founded and funded by the team of poets. In the poetry creative writing class I took with Doc Cushing this book was my group's book, and we had to do a presentation on different parts of it.

When I got my hands on it, I was sure I recognized Harry Northrup from the cover. Then Doc Cushing said he had spent time working as an actor, and some people might know him from some of his roles. That was it! For sure...I recognized him alright. I was going to put a frame of him on this post, but then I couldn't find my copy of this particular DVD.

If you've seen the movie, you might recognize him from a bit part in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. He was a fellow cabbie, trying to make a buck doing anything, particularly trying to sell DeNiro's Travis Bickle a piece of bathtub reportedly from the Errol Flynn teenage-girl tryst.

On to the poems. My group at the time had a hard time realizing the depth of Harry's poetry. Everything is written in lower case, which has no bearing on the content, but the poems themselves at first glance seem mundane and cover some of the everyday minutiae that an actor/poet living in LA or travelling to the Philippines might encounter.

We actually got lectured by Doc Cushing for missing the true beauty of Harry's work, for not using our imagination enough to embrace the poems. Um...okay. I just don't think sophisticated but still impressionable poetry fans can be expected to fully feel what Harry Northrup's dealing with and the way in which he deals with it. We were just too young for the full effect at that time.

Now, being somewhat older, I can at least understand better what he was trying to do. Do I like it much better now?

"Steve Allen' Bop Fables"

I may be a little too young to remember when Steve Allen was an important television personality, but seeing this little book "for kids" sheds a little light on what kind of personality that was.

"Bop" and "be-bop" were the catch phrases of his time, and taking a look at the names of the stories here gives an appropriate lesson in history:

1. Goldilocks and the Three Cool Bears
2. Three Mixed-Up Little Pigs
3. Crazy Red Riding Hood
4. Jack and the Real Flip Beanstalk

The history lesson here is in "coolness". What coolness is how certain folks (Steve Allen, Elvis Presley, Keith Richards, Jimmy Page, et al) took the speech patters, music, and style of the black Americans and made it acceptable for other white folks to mimic. That's the essence of "cool"--copying black people.

And while this book may not be a milestone, it is a piece of very real history, and a history that I plan on sharing my own kids, whenever they show up.

"Whose Names are Unknown", Sanora Babb

Sanora Babb came of age before the Depression, and when the Dust Bowl came and swept the folks of the great plains west, she was among them hearing their story and recording it. She published a few books much later as non-fiction histories of the times. If the subject matter sounds familiar, then chances are good you've heard of The Grapes of Wrath.

Steinbeck and Babb didn't work together, and maybe Steinbeck's people can show he did his own research and didn't crib hers, but The Grapes of Wrath and Whose Names are Unknown were set to be published nearly simultaneously, but Grapes... got to the market first, and then exploded. Babb's publisher decided the country couldn't handle two novels covering the same subject. Can you imagine that today? Once one thing is successful, there are hundreds of impostors almost immediately.

In any case, an act of literary injustice was committed when they shelved Sanora's work for 70-80 years. This book was just published in the last few years, and I wouldn't have heard about it if it hadn't been requested as a Decemberween present.

The title comes from bank eviction notices on foreclosed upon farms: "The Residents, whose names are unknown, are hereby evicted."

Reclaiming some American history...who says the ladies can't join the Okie exodus and take notes and write a novel about it...