Joel Lewis
SAM DOLGOFF, ANARCHO-SYNDACLIST (1902-1990)
The weary, low murmurs
of the exploited
must have hit him.
hard when young. From ages 12
to 65, a house painter, a paid-up
union stiff who wanted no part
of the contractor's lot or, worse,
becoming a baggy suit "labor misleader".
On weekends he took to
soap box & meeting-hall podiums shouting.
"IT'S A CRYIN' SHAME!" against disasters.
from Franco to the Vietnam War.
That anarchism proved less
than a possibility
in this managed world
of consumption didn't
faze him. Like his hero, Bakunin,
he continued to remain an impossible person.
"So long as those who are possible remain possible."
He called us "Young Comrades."
& you could see the topography of his life
in his strongman frame.
And what was this lifetime about?
"The equal right to be different" Sam
quipped. On another occasion, to a room
filled with his young comrades, he proclaimed:
"You always need a Left. And within the
Left, you need a left. And within the Left
of a Left, you need a Left. And in that
left you need a Left.
And that left is me!"
IMAGINARY ADVICE FROM TED BERRIGAN
Don’t clean it up, kid.
Leave the coffee ring on the penultimate line
Because that’s where the morning sat.
Write fast enough that your doubts
can’t put on fancy loafers.
And if you steal, steal obscurely
from yourself.
Go ahead, call it a poem when
it starts talking back.
Call it finished when you are bored
but still a little proud.
Remember, the day doesn’t care
much about you,
Which is totally great—
you’re freed-up to
tell it everything.
THE BLUE BAMBOULA*
I’m not here to knock
the other fellow’s merchandise.
It’s just that I have made too many
acclimations to all the “causes”:
Those “cures”. Strident campaigns.
The many sad eyed dogs.
“Think about the local pathetic grocery boys!”
--Ginsberg’s advice to the teenaged David Shapiro.
And I was there, too— pushing a line
of club foot carts in between
highlighting the Selected Kropotkin
and writing cinquains intended
for secret cashier crushes.
And I still have blue screen dreams set
against that rutted asphalt lot puddled
by a summer’s evening spritz.
And to that worn over-notated copy
of Donald Allen’s New American Poetry
-- a sheynes Dank/ a beautiful thank you
for making me what I am today:
Illegible, swerving and stubborn.
*“Blue Bamboula” is a 1980 piano piece by the High Modernist composer Charles Wourinen (1938-2020). Carla Bley: “To me, the piece the Blue Bamboula, with Garrick Ohlssen playing it, is the best piece of piano music in the world.”
WATCHING ZOOT SIMS PUTTING DIMES IN THE JUKEBOX AT CHUMLEY’S (1978)
for William Matthews, in memoriam
He doesn’t hurry,
Each dime gets a pause,
as if listening ahead of time
for what it will remember.
The rainbow swirl of a Rockola bubbler
illumes the faux-speakeasy interior
while Anita O’Day leans
out of the speakers,
easy as a dream
her set list knowing more
than we do.
Someone is laughing, but brought cold stop
as if scolded in swingtime by
the “Jezebel of jazz”.
Zoot steps back, satisfied
not proud, but accurate—
and the room tilts a bit
the way it sometimes does
when music decides to stay.
THE WIZARD
after Basil Bunting
“I am not the Anti-Christ!
I am a family man.”
- Ozzy Osbourne
Mizzle across the Second City
and an amp-crackle sonata
emits from a Hadrian Wall
of stacked Marshalls
Ozzy stutters
and the Brummies await
the possibility
of a brown bat hors d’oeuvre
Ozzy’s eyes are old farthings
as he sings in that particular high howl
of an infidel burned at the stake
Not poetry, but voltage.
Not evanescent grace, but grim charm.
His madrigals of mishigas
scored in Newcastle Brown Ale
& pitched feedback.
Stand up Osbourne.
Stand up!
You are more than
that “swearing bloke
on the telly.”
You were always closer to
an Orpheus up
from Wolverhampton
than any silly tenured bard.
Rut thuds the rim.
TROUBLE IN MIND
And what does the rain say
in the Hoboken night
while Horace Parlan’s piano
nudges Archie Shepp’s battered tenor
through my Air Pods?
The rain’s million-needled wave
paradiddles this bus shelter’s roof
while I remain on the clock, doing a job
one prefers to leave to one’s stars.
Joel Lewis is a poet based in Hoboken,NJ. He has published seven collections of poetry, most recent being "Well You Needn't" (Hanging Loose). He edited a volume of contemporary NJ poetry for Rutgers University Press and a selected poems of Walter Lowenfels (Talisman House). His prose writings range from a recent interview with Clark Coolidge to a visit to the Whiffle Ball Factory in Wilton, CT.