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?
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