People who actually care about what happens to the world, to include the many that pretend they do; and the many that pretend they don’t, are constantly bitching about how much the news media has sold its principles down the river. What they’re really complaining about is how homogenized the news has become in the face of media consolidation…but what’s being consolidated is the same old propaganda, lies and manipulation that have always been present in the media. The difference is that the news media, mainstream and otherwise, used to be a competitive gig…political and cultural friction when media magnates went head to head could produce the turdulets which allowed the weeds like social reform and business regulation to plant some roots in vast fields of manure. In that sense, today’s news media alarmists aren’t wrong to be concerned, but the romanticizing of the field’s past is a hollow distortion.

Poets like Vladimir Mayakovsky and Ezra Pound knew this and wrote about it, both of them stating the poetry is real news…news that matters and news that lasts through time. Florida poet (currently) Michael Grover also knows this, and his endeavor to chronicle a brief period of time in the life of a homeless man living in his local park, The Man That Lives In the Park (Covert Press, 2008) engages his subject in much the manner of an old school journalist with genuine principles (they did actually exist back in the day.)

The majority of Grover’s poems functions as a portrait of an encounter with his homeless friend living in a pavilion near the edge of a river, whose voice sometimes sneaks in between the slices of life presented by the author:

“Visitor today.
We sit at the edge
Of the water and talk.
I don’t talk much anymore.
Except to myself.
Hair grows longer.
Beard grows longer.
I am stranded
On this desert island.
Far away from the mainland
Of society.
The president can’t see me.
Congress can’t see me.
The media can’t see me.
Businessmen can’t see me.
america does not see me.”

- Vignette 14

Indeed, that is the progression of the little story that is created when Grover puts his 39 mini-poems together to create, not just one big poem, but a micro or flash novel even, of a man whose is growing more and more invisible by the day, until even the author can’t see him anymore. Grover could have stopped this manuscript after his twenty second “chapter” and The Man Who Lives In The Park would have had a nice, tidy ending.

But that’s not how real life works and Grover, particularly since he works in the medium of plain narrative (even more stripped down with even simpler details than “plainsong”) captures the feeling of old fashioned news features, or what passed for one of the finer forms of the non-fiction genre over 50 years ago.

“A visitor today.
He sits in the shade
His back turned to him.
The café owner walks by
He waves and calls her name.
She keeps walking.”

- Vignette 24

The author himself says he doesn’t feel much removed from his subject matter, having drifted much in his own life and having his own set of hard times…again, in the true journalistic tradition or dialectic, reminiscent of George Orwell’s Down and Out In Paris and London (Public Domain, available at http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/books/downandout.htm) where the author is not just a chronicler but a participant in the underbelly of the supposed “great societies.”

Grover’s story would be the perfect document to pick up one hundred years from now to see what it was like to be a homeless person in the suburban USA today. Since The Man Who Lives In The Park is in print it will have a chance to make it that far, though we can’t much say the same for the human species.

Bruce Issacson and MK Chavez could teach slam poets a thing or two about content.

Issacson is the main man at Zeitgeist Press, the legendary indie that has published Julia Vinograd, David Lerner, MK Chavez and a host of other legends (Danielle Willis, Joie Cook.)

Last night at the Poetry and Pizza series at Escape From New York (in San Francisco of course.) Chavez (nee: Maria Kaylib)read from her new book “Virgin Eyes” along with a host of newly written poems, and the good Mr. Isaacson read from his new tome, “Dumbstruck At The Lights,” perhaps indicative of his residence in the forever neon oasis/hell known as Las Vegas.

Issacson has a way of making poems about his father and his son sound edgy, while a passion about Rimbaud gives the old commune peripheral scalawag a “holy” sort of feel. Like a slam poet, he keeps his notes firmly in hand without ever really looking at them, subtly displaying his comfort and familiarity with his own material, but unlike a slam poet, not spending a lot of his alloted performance time trying to prove his cred or his mad skills or his alienated uniqueness…truth is, he’s just too grown up for all that. And it’s entertaining as hell to hear in poesy.

Chavez is too grown up for the young slammers too, not in terms of content but in terms of emotional maturity:

I’m in bed with the wrong man.

but it’s so human.

The poetry & pizza series at Escape from New York is a seriously hot SF reading, and always packs a full house which is an impressive accomplishment on a Friday Night in the Financial District for an establishment that is not a bar. Good on them for featuring two heavy hitting Zeitgeist poets last night.

Links:

http://littlebrownsparrow.com/

http://www.zeitgeist-press.com/