In 1970 O’Bannon returned to the States, where each year the bookshop windows displayed a new collection of his poems. The Way of the Brave was followed by Untilled Land, The Burning Stairway of the Poem, Conversation with Jim O’Brady, Apples on the Stairs, The Stairway of Heaven and Hell, New York Revisited, The Best Poems of Jim O’Bannon, The Rivers and Other Poems, The Children of Jim O’Brady in the American Dawn, and so on.
He made a living giving lectures and readings all around the country. He was married and divorced four times, although he always said that the love of his life was Margaret Hogan. Time mollified his literary invective: there is a yawning gulf between the aggressive sarcasm of “Negative of John Brown” and the Olympian serenity of the ailing poet in “Homage to a Vine Street Dog.” He remained firm in his disdain for Jews and homosexuals to the end, although at the time of his death he was beginning, gradually, to accept African Americans.
RORY LONG
Pittsburgh, 1952–Laguna Beach, 2017
Rory’s father, the poet Marcus Long, was a friend and disciple of Charles Olson, who used to spend a few days each year at the Longs’ house in Aserradero, Arizona, near Phoenix (where Marcus was a professor of American literature); a brief, pleasant stay in the company of one of his cherished disciples. So it was in all probability the master himself (and the boy’s father, of course) who taught young Rory the right way to read a book of poetry, and gave him his first lessons in projective and non-projective verse. Alternative scenario: hiding under the porch, Rory listened to them talking, while the Arizona dusk settled into eternal fixity.
In any case, to summarize: non-projective verse conforms to traditional versification; it is personal, “closed” poetry, in which it is always possible to detect the self-regard of the citizen-poet, fondling his navel or his balls, complacently displaying his joys or woes; by contrast, projective verse, exemplified on occasion by the work of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, is “open,” the poetry of “displaced energy,” written according to a technique analogous to “composition by fields.” In a word, and to fall into the very same hole as Olson, projective verse is the opposite of non-projective verse.
Or that was how young Rory Long saw it, anyway. “Closed” poetry was Donne and Poe, Robert Browning and Archibald McLeish; “open” poetry was Pound and Williams (but not all of their poems). “Closed” poetry was personal: by the individual poet for the individual reader. “Open” poetry was impersonal: the hunter (the poet) tracking down the memory of his tribe for the recipient and constituent of that memory (the reader). And Rory Long supposed that the Bible was “open” poetry, and that the great multitudes moving or crawling in the shadow of the Book were ideal readers, hungry for the luminous Word. And this enormous, empty edifice was complete in his mind before he reached the age of seventeen. He was energetic then as ever and he set to work immediately. He had to populate and explore the edifice, so the first thing he did was to buy a Bible since he couldn’t find one in the house. And then he began to memorize passage after passage, and saw that the poetry spoke directly to his heart.
At twenty he became a preacher in the Church of the True Martyrs of America, and published a book of poetry that no one read, not even his father, who, being a true son of the Enlightenment, was ashamed to see his son crawling with the other crawlers in the shadow of the great Nomadic Book. But no failure could daunt Rory Long, who was already tearing through New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Utah and back to New Mexico, on a whirlwind, counter-clockwise tour. And that was more or less how Rory Long felt: in a whirl, inside out, guts and bones on display; disillusioned with Olson (but not with projective and non-projective verse), whose poems, when he finally read them (which he was slow do to—dazzled by the theory and his own ignorance), seemed almost fraudulent (after reading The Maximus Poems, he vomited for three hours); disillusioned with the Church of the True Martyrs of America, whose members could see the plains of the Book but not its centrifugal force, not the volcanoes and underground rivers; disillusioned with the times—the seventies, full of sad hippies and sad whores. He even considered killing himself! But instead he went on reading. And writing: letters, plays, songs, television scripts and movie screenplays, unfinished novels, stories, animal fables, comic-strip plots, biographies, economic and religious pamphlets, and above all poetry, in which he blended all the foregoing genres.
He tried to be impersonal: he wrote visitor’s guides to the Book and survival kits for explorers of the Book. He got two tattoos: a broken heart on his right arm, which symbolized his quest, and a book in flames on his left arm, which symbolized his calling. He experimented with oral poetry: not shouting or onomatopoeia, nor the wordplay of the zombies who seem to belong to a tribe parallel to, but different from, the people of the Book; not the whispers of a farmer remembering childhood and sweethearts, but a voice that spoke in warm, familiar tones, like a radio host at the ends of the earth. And he befriended radio hosts, to see if he could learn something from them, like how to recognize the impersonal voice roaming America’s radio waves. A tone at once colloquial and dramatic. The voice of the man-who-is-all-eyes wandering around until it finds the consciousness of the man-who-is-all-ears. And so, as the years went by, he moved from church to church and house to house, publishing nothing (unlike his peers), remaining obscure, but writing, submerging himself in the muddy waters of Olson’s theory and other theories, weary but open-eyed, worthy son and heir (in spite of himself) to the poet Marcus Long.
When he finally emerged from the underground, he seemed a different man. He was thinner (he measured six foot one and weighed 132 pounds) and older, but he had found the way or at least some short cuts that would soon lead him to the Great Way itself. He had begun preaching for the Texan Church of the Last Days, and his political ideas, which had been muddled in former times, were clear and coherent now. He believed in the necessity of an American resurrection. He believed he knew the quite unprecedented characteristics of that resurrection. He believed in the American family: its right to receive the manifold, true message, and its right not to be poisoned by Zionist messages or messages manipulated by the CIA. He believed in individuality and America’s need to resume the space race with renewed vigor. He believed that a large part of the Union’s body was infected with a mortal disease and that a surgical intervention was required. Having put Olson and his father, but not poetry, behind him (he published a successful collection of short stories, poems and “thoughts” entitled Noah’s Ark), he devoted himself to spreading his message in the Southwest. And in that he was successful too. The message spread. Via radio waves and video cassettes. It was that simple. And although the past was fading more and more quickly, sometimes he wondered how it could have been so hard to find the true way.
He grew fat (at one point he weighed 265 pounds) and rich, and soon he went where rich people go: California. There he founded the Charismatic Church of Californian Christians. And he had so many followers and it was so easy to spread the Message that he even had time to write sarcastic and humorous poems: texts that made him laugh, and his laughter transformed them into mirrors reflecting his face, unblemished, alone in some Texan room, or with strangers as fat as he was, who called themselves his friends, his biographers, his representatives, at charity dinners within other charity dinners. For example, he wrote a poem in which Leni Riefenstahl makes love with Ernst Jünger. A hundred-year-old man and a ninety-year-old woman. Bones and dead tissue bumping and grinding. God in heaven, said Rory in his big malodorous library, Old Ernst is riding her hard, showing no mercy, and the German whore is crying out for more, more, more. A good poem: the eyes of the elderly pair light up with an enviable brightness; they suck at each other so hard their old jaws creak, while they glance sidelong at the reader, hinting at the lesson. A lesson clear as water. It is time to put an end to democracy. Why are so many Nazis still alive? Take Hess, for example, who would have made it to a hundred if he hadn’t committed suicide. What makes
them live so long? What makes them almost immortal? The blood they spilled? The flight of the Book? A new level of consciousness? The Charismatic Church of California went underground. A labyrinth where Ernst and Leni went on fucking, unable to uncouple, like a pair of dogs on fire in a valley of sheep. In a valley of blind sheep? A valley of hypnotized sheep? My voice is hypnotizing them, thought Rory Long. But what is the secret of longevity? Purity. Searching, working, preparing for the millennium on various levels. And some nights he felt that he was touching the body of the New Man with the tips of his fingers. He lost a hundred pounds. Ernst and Leni were fucking in the sky for him. And he realized that this was no vulgar, if torrid, hypnotic therapy, but the veritable Host of Fire.
Then he went completely crazy and Cunning occupied every nook of his body. He had money, fame, and good lawyers. He had radio stations, newspapers, magazines, and television networks. And he had robust good health, until one midday in March 2017, when a young African-American man named Baldwin Rocha blew his head off.
THE ARYAN BROTHERHOOD
THOMAS R. MURCHISON, alias THE TEXAN
Las Cruces (Texas), 1923–Walla Walla Prison (Oregon), 1979
Murchison’s life was marked from an early age by incarceration. Con-man, car thief, drug dealer and all-round opportunist, he dabbled in a broad range of delinquent activities without developing a particular specialty. It was not ideology that brought him into contact with the Aryan Brotherhood but his repeated prison spells and an implacable will to survive. Given his frail constitution and temperamental aversion to violence, his existence would not have been viable without the support of a group. Although never a leader, he had the honor of establishing the first literary magazine to serve as an organ for the Brotherhood, which he always referred to as “an order for knights of misfortune.” The first number of Literature Behind Bars, edited by Markus Patterson, Roger Tyler and Thomas R. Murchison, was printed in 1967 at the Crawford penitentiary in Virginia. As well as letters, and news from the prison and Crawford county, the magazine, made up of four tabloid pages, contained some poems (or song lyrics) and three stories. The stories, signed “The Texan,” were widely praised: burlesque and fantastic in tone, they portrayed members of the Brotherhood, prisoners or ex-prisoners, fighting the Forces of Evil, in the guise of corrupt politicians or aliens from outer space cunningly disguised as human beings.
The magazine was a success, and in spite of some official opposition set an example for prisoners in other institutions. Murchison’s protracted and largely hapless criminal career allowed him to contribute to most of the resulting publications, whether as an active editorial board member, or as a correspondent in another prison.
During his brief periods of freedom, he barely glanced at the newspaper and tried not to associate with ex-prisoners from the Brotherhood. In prison he read Western novels by Zane Grey and others. His favorite writer was Mark Twain. He once wrote that penitentiaries and jail cells had been his Mississippi. He died of pulmonary emphysema. His work, published piecemeal in magazines, consists of more than fifty short stories and a seventy-line poem dedicated to a weasel.
JOHN LEE BROOK
Napa, California, 1950–Los Angeles, 1997
Widely regarded as the best writer of the Aryan Brotherhood, and one of the best Californian poets of the late twentieth century, John Lee Brook learned to read and write in the cold classrooms of a prison at the age of eighteen. Up until then his life could be described as a series of misdemeanors without rhyme or reason: normal enough behavior for a poor, white, Californian teenager from a damaged family (father unknown, mother still a kid when she got pregnant, working in poorly paid jobs). Having acquired literacy skills, John Lee Brook became an entirely different kind of criminal: he got into drug dealing, pimping, stealing luxury cars, kidnapping and assassination. In 1990 he was accused of the murder of Jack Brooke and his two bodyguards. At the trial he began by proclaiming his innocence. But surprisingly, ten minutes after climbing into the witness box, he interrupted the attorney, admitted all the charges and declared himself guilty of four unsolved and by then all but forgotten murders. The victims were the pornographer Adolfo Pantoliano, the porn star Suzy Webster, the porn actor Dan Carmine, and the poet Arthur Crane. The first three had been killed four years before the trial; the fourth in 1989. Brook was condemned to death. After various appeals, supported by influential members of the Californian literary community, he was executed in April 1997. According to eye witnesses, he spent his last hours very calmly reading his own poems.
His body of work, which comprises five books, is soundly built; it echoes Whitman, makes abundant use of colloquialisms, and has strong affinities with the new narrative poetry, while remaining open to other North American schools and trends. His favorite themes, which recur with a sometimes obsessive frequency throughout his work, are the extreme poverty of certain sectors of the white population, African Americans and sexual abuse in the prison system, Mexicans (always portrayed as diminutive devils or mysterious cooks), the absence of women, motorcycle clubs considered the inheritors of the frontier spirit, gangster hierarchies on the streets and in prison, the decadence of America, and solitary warriors.
The following poems merit special attention:
—“Vindication of John L. Brook,” the first of a series of torrential texts, all more than 500 lines long, which the author used to describe as “broken novels.” In the “Vindication” Brook is already fully formed as a poet, although he was only twenty when he wrote it. The poem is about the diseases of youth, and the only proper way to cure them.
—“Street without a Name,” a text in which quotations from MacLeish and Conrad Aiken are combined with the menus of the Orange County jail and the pederastic dreams of a literature professor who taught classes for the prisoners on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
—“Santino and Me,” fragments of conversations between the poet and his parole officer, Lou Santino, relating to sports (which is the most American sport?), whores, the lives of movie stars, and prison celebrities and their moral authority both inside and outside.
—“Charlie” (one such prison celebrity), a brief and “concrete” but nonetheless affectionate portrait of Charles Manson, whom the author met, it seems, in 1992.
—“Lady Companions,” an epiphany featuring psychopaths, serial killers, various mentally deranged individuals, bipolar sufferers obsessed with the American dream, sleepwalkers and stealthy hunters.
—“The Bad,” an insight into the world of natural born killers, portrayed by Brook as “Ignoble beings children possessed by will in an iron labyrinth or desert Vulnerable as pigs in a cage full of lionesses . . .”
This final poem, dated 1985 and published in his third book of poetry (Solitude, 1986), was the subject of two controversial studies in the Southern California Journal of Psychology and the Berkeley Psychology Magazine.
THE FABULOUS
SCHIAFFINO BOYS
ITALO SCHIAFFINO
Buenos Aires, 1948–Buenos Aires, 1982
It is probably true to say that no poet has ever been more diligent than Italo Schiaffino, not among his contemporaries in Buenos Aires at any rate, in spite of which was he was eventually overshadowed by the growing reputation of his younger brother, Argentino Schiaffino, also a poet.
The boys came from a humble family, and there were only two passions in Italo’s life: soccer and literature. At fifteen, two years after leaving school to work as an errand boy in Don Ercole Massantonio’s hardware store, he joined Enzo Raúl Castiglione’s gang, one of the many groups of Boca Juniors hooligans that existed at the time.
He soon made headway. In 1968, when Castiglione was imprisoned, Italo Schiaffino took over the leadership of the group and wrote his first poem (his first recorded poem, in any case) and his first manifesto. Entitled Cower, Hounds!, the poem is 300 lines long, and his friends from the gang could recite the highlights by heart. Basically, it is a war poem; in the words of Schiaffino, “a kind of Iliad
for the Boca boys.” A thousand copies were printed in 1969 with money raised by subscription. The edition contained a preface by Dr. Pérez Heredia in which he welcomed the new poet to the Argentinean Parnassus. The manifesto was a different matter. In five pages, Schiaffino outlined the situation of soccer in Argentina, lamented the crisis, identified the guilty parties (the Jewish plutocracy, which hadn’t produced a single good player, and the Red intelligentsia, responsible for the nation’s decadence). He indicated the danger and explained the ways to exorcize it. The manifesto was called The Time of Argentinean Youth, and in the words of Schiaffino it was “a kind of Latin American version of von Clausewitz, a wake-up call to the nation’s inquiring minds.” It soon became obligatory reading among the hard-line members of Castiglione’s old gang.
In 1971, Schiaffino visited the widow Mendiluce, but there are no records, photographic or written, of their meeting. In 1972, he published The Path to Glory, a series of forty-five poems, each one examining the life of a different Boca Juniors player. Like Cower, Hounds! the book included an obliging preface by Dr. Pérez Heredia and a nihil obstat issued by the vice-president of the soccer club. The publication was financed by the members of Schiaffino’s gang, who paid a subscription, and the remaining copies were sold in the vicinity of Boca’s Bombonera stadium on match days. This time the sportswriters paid him some attention: two magazines deemed The Path to Glory worthy of a review, and when Dr. Pestalozzi’s radio program 100% Soccer organized a round table on the critical state of the national game, Schiaffino was invited to participate. On the radio, in the company of well-known sports personalities, he was restrained.