No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story.
The American Beat writers circled back into fashion in the UK during the late 1980s / early 1990s. Their resurgence coincided with a spike in the counterculture that was perhaps a reaction to the grind of over a decade of conservative leadership and Thatcher-ism.
I remember lovely sunny October day: last year of medical school. Field trip to the leper colony 100 km outside of Moscow, town of Zagorsk. That is how lepers live: small apartments in one-story barracks, thick cabbage soup, cabbage from the nearby village, thick smell of the slow-smoldering life as you enter the porch of the dwelling.
The only Asian hobo in Vicetown sits cross-legged on the street corner with a Jesus figurine for company. Emblem of patience, thin hair telling you the direction of the wind, bare feet black as soot. Nothing underneath his unbuttoned linen shirt, back rounded like a curled-up centipede. A red rubber band collects his beard like a bouquet of flowers.
Nine Street Women subtitles Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art. Those 5 names are icons, foundational to our modernity. In their early days, they were women with balls. What they all had in common was a drive to overcome any social, gender, personal or political obstacles that were put in their path, and there were plenty. They struggled, and picked themselves off the floor more than once, but never did any of them give up. They refused to fail.
First the devil must convince us
our dreams are real.
Marina: I saw history the day I decided to go back to Virginia. I came out of the farmacia, where some women in their black hose, long-sleeved dresses, and scarves, like my mother-in-law, circled around its door and talked only to each other. Once through the small crowd, I looked down Grand across the river to New York; its spikes snagged the clouds. I told myself, Marina, it’s time to go, the war’s on.