Sex, Drugs, Rock n’ Roll, and Mystical Poets

“God gave rock n’ roll to you, put it in the soul of everyone.”

–Kiss, singing in the sequel to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,
Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.

HOW TO (SAY) FUCK AND MEAN IT
Beth Bachmann

The most rock n’ roll part of your body is your middle finger.

N.W.A.: “Fuck the police.”
E.M.A.: “Fuck California.”
Chino Grande/Glasses Malone: “Life’s a bitch. Watch me fuck it.”

Fuck the man. Fuck the state. Fuck it. Fuck it all. So much poetry resides here, too, in subversion, and sex, and surrender.

Let’s start with surrender.

Rock n’ roll can kill you. What’s more rock n’ roll than that? We lost him to it, we say when someone is consumed by his art, or the erasure or excess or addiction that accompanies the art. You’ve got to let go, if you want to get to the other side. It is a hazard of the job.

Blake, Yeats, Duncan are among many poets we call mystics.

Blake had visions, starting when he was a boy when he first saw God put his head to the window. He notes that many of his poems are dictated by angels or devils. Here’s one explanatory note that accompanies The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

Note: This Angel, who is now become a Devil is my particular friend; we often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense which the world shall have if they behave well.

Yeats loved Blake and was deeply interested in mysticism and the occult. He joined the paranormal club, The Ghost Club, and called the mystical life “the centre of all that I do.” In “The Magi,” he describes the birth of Christ as “the uncontrollable mystery / on the bestial floor.”

Robert Duncan studied all things occult, from Cathars and Gnostics to Plato, Tarot, Freud and Oz and Alice. In The Truth and Life of Myth Duncan writes, “Myth is the story of what cannot be told, as mystery is the scene of what cannot be revealed, and the mystic gnosis the thing known that cannot be known.”

Do you know where the fuck you are? You’re in the jungle, baby.

There are some places you can only go alone. LA rapper Dumbfoundead asks, “you don’t know who Korean Jesus is?… Fuck Criss Angel.” Prayer is like dying: you’ve got to go there by yourself.

Blake writes, “If the doors of perception are cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

I think of Hendrix playing his guitar with his teeth. What’s the connection of Hendrix to prayer? “Fly on, my sweet angel.” The feather in his hat.

The infinite happens in a mystical poem when there’s lift; the poem rides on a breath over a breath. The poem exists briefly outside the body before entering another body, the words spoken aloud or heard in the mind. Here’s Duncan:

I want to compose a poetry with the meaning entirely occult, that is—with the meaning contained not as a jewel is contained in a box, but as the inside of a box is contained in a box.

Poetry can kill you, too. It’s harder to kill a poem, a good poem, a poem that rocks, reverberates, rides its high, makes you stand up, raise up your hand and light a fire.

Poetry and rock n’ roll, like fucking, are best when you are not alone. When Billy Idol sings, “Dancing with Myself” (a sort of anthem for poetic solitude), he sings it to a packed house. We want to hear music live because we want to hear it together. At the reading, we nod our heads, we low hum, we shout, amen! Poems want what we all want: to be seen, known, held, remembered… till the next great song, anyway.

Surrender, sex, subversion. One way to fuck the system, in a song or in a poem, is to fuck with its vital language. El Vez, known to his fans as the Mexican Elvis, does more than just cover Elvis on Graciasland. In “It’s Now or Never,” he sings, “mañana will be too late.” Carpe diem for the old poets meant come to bed with me now (think of Andrew Marvell’s “then worms shall try that long preserved virginity” as a 17th-century pickup line), but carpe diem is also the heart of the protest poem: “people are dying,” El Vez sings, “it’s now or never.”

Part of sex is sexism, in poetry, in rock n’ roll. Sometimes, fuck the “man,” is specific. No talk on rock n’ roll is complete without Joan Jett, “Hello daddy; hello mom; I’m your cherry bomb.” Sometimes the man is not just a man, but also your father. “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” No talk on rock n’ roll poets is complete without Plath.

Say fuck and mean it. Earl Sweatshirt, rapper, son of South African poet and activist Keorapetse Kgositsile, says fuck you to his father for abandoning him while also saying, I miss you. It’s harder to fuck and mean it without, also, love.

God gave rock n’ roll to you, put it in the soul of everyone. Who are we? Sometimes fathers get the last word. Here’s Kgositsile, summing it all up in one rock n’ roll anthem of a poem:

mirror of my pain and purpose
this blood we demand
is the flow of life
we must bleed yes
there is no birth without blood
if they call us insane let them
words will not kill us
if they say we are not poets let them
our poetry will be the simple act
the blood we bleed
moulded by pain and purpose
into a simple
do not fuck with me
your shit is going up in flames
here and now.

I want to end with one of my own poems about sex on the beach paired with The Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” Specifically, these lyrics:

Happy times together we’ve been spending.
I wish that every kiss was never ending.

Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray
It might come true… & then we’d be happy.

It’s that last phrase, & then, the realm of the IF where the mystical exists: a doorway to the other side.

bone ash blue

rub the sand into every part of your skin ‘til it glows into glass I break to make your bones a china plate I lick clean the snake shakes its carcass gold sunshine give me all your money I don’t remember selling my soul but each morning each morning you ring when I flick my finger held up to the flame everyone can see the shadow of my nails moving on your spine the water carved a body out of the bank where we used our hands to dig a rivulet men kill for sand mining it for bridge after bridge bones spit along the beach hair sweating like a thick bottle fistful by fistful arch dome whole islands bit by bit inside other islands the nest right now still flowers quaking in the skull’s birdsong

ROCK & ROLL SUICIDE or, THIS IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING
Nick Flynn

Beth seems to have nailed the sex part, so I guess I’ll focus on the drugs.

I’ll start by riffing off the Duncan she quoted (here it is again):

I want to compose a poetry with the meaning entirely occult, that is—with the meaning contained not as a jewel is contained in a box, but as the inside of a box is contained in a box.

—meaning contained not as a jewel is contained in a box,
but as the inside of a box is contained in a box—

To me this sounds like a zen koan, the idea that it is the emptiness of the bowl that makes the bowl, that without the emptiness there is no bowl, the idea that the self is only made up of non-self elements (no flower without rain, sunshine, dirt, worms, clouds, etc).

But how does this connect to poetry? Poetry deals with white space, it contains (or attempts to contain) the tension of all that is unsaid, it pushes against the unknown . . .

Duncan again: “I want to compose a poetry with the meaning entirely occult . . .”

Here is a definition of the occult (from wikipedia]:

The occult (from the Latin word occultus “clandestine, hidden, secret”) is “knowledge of the hidden”. In common English usage, occult refers to “knowledge of the paranormal”, as opposed to “knowledge of the measurable”, usually referred to as science.

Knowledge of the hidden: Duncan wanted to not simply push against the unknown, but to access, through poetry, knowledge of the hidden. Knowledge of the hidden does seem to be in the basic job description when applying to be a poet, but for me, I have to be careful: the hidden is a place to visit, but I have no desire to pack my bags and move there—I need to always keep one hand on the earth, to remind myself I exist.

As for knowledge of the measurable: any good scientist will admit that our knowledge of the measurable represents only a tiny sliver of the universe—nearly everything, still, is unknown . . .

But how does all this connect to sex and drugs and rock ’n roll?

If I heard correctly (we’re not actually even in the same room at this moment, so I have no ears), Beth said that sex and poetry and rock ‘n roll need repetition, but I’d argue that, if you’re someone like me, when you apply the concept of repetition to drugs, bad things happen. This is when someone like me enters the shadow realm, which has its own importance (transgression, the doors of perception, all that) but in the end it always seems to become mindnumbingly repetitive.

In the end, like mission creep, it reveals its lack.

In the end, even John Lennon wailed: hate my rock ‘n roll (I’m lonely, wanna die).       

(In the room, Beth says, love, love, love; love is all you need; all you need is love).

*

Rock ‘n roll is, like drugs, essentially, about disruption—this is the good part. Think of Greil Marcus’s extended riff on the Sex Pistols, Lipstick Traces—subtitled A Secret History of the 20th Century—it hopscotches across the art movements of the last hundred years that destroyed everything that came before, from Nijinsky’s Rites of Spring to Dada to The Situationists to punk rock.

Marcus quotes Pete Townsend in his intro:

When you listen to the Sex Pistols, to “Anarchy in the UK,” and “Bodies” and tracks like that, what immediately strikes you is that this is actually happening . . . .

This sort of distills Marcus’s argument for the whole book, that the destruction was necessary and came at moments when the dominant culture was dead and needed to be shocked back into life, so we could know—feel—again that this too is actually happening.

This, in the end, is the essence of Buddhism, isn’t it? Look around this room: This too is actually happening (even if it seems I’m not in the room with you).

*

Speaking of mission creep, after the Abu Ghraib photographs were leaked (by a whistleblower/hero named Joe Darby), it was revealed that the US Military (or the CIA), in a pamphlet or a memo or something, suggested using music as a form of torture—they blasted Britney Spears and Metallica, but found that country did the most damage—“Achy-Breaky Heart” (the Billy Ray Cyrus hit), turned out to be especially harmful, or effective, depending upon where you stood:

And if you tell my heart my achy breaky heart
He might blow up and kill this man . . . .

Or you can tell my eyes to watch out for my mind
It might be walking out on me today

Here’s a type of disruption: Tell my eyes to watch out for my mind. “Achy-Breaky Heart” reminds me of this passage from Hart Crane’s The Bridge:

The phonographs of hades in the brain
Are tunnels that re-wind themselves, and love
A burnt match skating in a urinal.

A turntable in hell caught in an endless loop, skipping (more repetition). At this moment in Crane’s poem we are, like in “Achy-Breaky Heart,” in some sort of psychic breakdown—it is night, we are underground, in a tunnel (the New York subway, to be exact)—this is where all poems come from, this is where poets live: nighttime, lowdown, duende, the Velvet Underground in our earbuds, riding a subway car with Eileen Myles, our reigning queen of sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll, walking with the devil.

It brings us straight back to Robert Johnson, “Me & the Devil Blues”:

Early this morning
When you knocked upon my door
And I said hello Satan
I believe it’s time to go

Hello Satan. I assumed when the Abu Ghraib photographs were released that it would be a disruption, violent, yes, but that America would eventually break open in some new, healthy way—but I was wrong. When ASCAP heard about Britney and Metallica and Billy Ray being used to torture detainees in Abu Ghraib, they tried to sue—not because they didn’t want the songs used to torture people, but for the royalties. The suit went nowhere—the Bush White House claimed state secrets.

After I heard that I wrote a poem where I imagine a US soldier playing Modest Mouse in Abu Ghraib—And we’ll all float on okay okay.

Here’s an excerpt from the poem, “Water”:

they scream my lieutenant he calls it a song
I want them to sing he says louder

I wish you could hear the soundtrack we play
for hours & naked they dance

I take out my camera I capture the sound
at first it was weird then it wasn’t

before there’s a song there’s a day it just isn’t
before there’s a photo it’s dark

& we’ll all float on okay okay
& we’ll all float on okay

*

ASCAP has, so far, not attempted to sue me.

*

Once I wrote one poem with Lou Reed in it, once I wrote a poem with Kurt Cobain in it, once I wrote a poem with David Bowie in it—they die and then I write a poem, I don’t know why I wait.

When I first started out I tried writing a poem with Iggy Pop in it, but I failed. It was a riff on “Lust for Life”—I’m worth a million in prizes, no more sleeping on the sidewalk, etc . . . my father was, as I tried to write it, not far from where I was writing, outside, sleeping on the sidewalk—so the lyrics contained a certain weird energy, a certain truth, for me.

I ran into Lou Reed once in New York after an Anne Carson reading—he was outside, on the sidewalk, waiting for Laurie Anderson. We stood next to each other for a moment but I was too whatever to say hi—I pretended (This too is actually happening) he was just like everyone else.

Once I published a poem with Al Green in it, at least I think I published it—I know I wrote it, but again, maybe it is simply one in the series of long failures. In the poem Al Green is alone in a studio, singing Tired of Being Alone, looking up because up, I figured, was his idea of heaven. The poem also had the first Apollo landing on the moon in it, and the riots in Attica, which in the poem all happened simultaneously—it was an ambitious poem, which is perhaps why it failed.

Later I heard that Al Green’s girlfriend poured hot grits on him for fucking around and it scarred him bad—after that Al Green found God and became a preacher and for years I wanted to take a roadtrip to his church and just listen.

*

Hello Satan
I believe its time to go
Me and the Devil
Walking side by side
And I’m gonna see my woman
till I get satisfied

This is the updated Gil Scott Heron version of Robert Johnson, where he’s just gonna “see” his woman till he’s satisfied, rather than “beat” her till he’s satisfied, as in the original. Duende can be contain both dark and light, a life force or a death force, depending on how you look at it, or where you’re from . . .

Still, a sliver of this dark energy is somewhere in every good poem—poems are, after all nothing but a crossroads—each step, with word, a world of what-if.

But there is a price.

It saddens me to say that the last time I saw Johnnie Rotten, the post Sex Pistols PIL-version Rotten, he was—literally—falling-down drunk, staggering the stage, dressed in a clown suit. A clown suit? Sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll—it reminded me of Basquiat, how he started out painting himself as a king, as a crown, but once the heroin really took hold he began, more and more, to paint himself as a clown… and we all know about Gil Scott Heron’s final days, walking with the devil, a blowtorch by his side . . .

(In the room Beth sings, Send in the clowns; don’t bother; they’re here. Isn’t it rich? Are we a pair? Me here at last on the ground, you in mid-air?)

Here’s a poem about my blowtorch:

PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN

Last summer I found a small box stashed away in my apartment,
a box filled with enough Vicodin to kill me. I would have sworn
that I’d thrown it away years earlier, but apparently not. I stared
at the white pills blankly for a long while, I even took a picture of
them, before (finally, definitely) throwing them away. I’d been
sober (again) for some years when I found that box, but every
addict has one—a  little box, metaphorical or actual—hidden
away. Before I flushed them I held them in my palm, marveling
that at some point in the not-so-distant past it seemed a good
idea to keep a stash of pills on hand. For an emergency, I told
myself. What kind of emergency? What if I needed a root canal
on a Sunday night? This little box would see me through until
the dentist showed up for work the next morning. Half my
brain told me that, while the other half knew that looking into
that box was akin to seeing a photograph of myself standing on
the edge of a bridge, a bridge in the familiar dark neighborhood
of my mind, that comfortable place where I could somehow
believe that fuck it was an adequate response to life.

. . . . contained not as a jewel is contained in a box,
but as the inside of a box is contained in a box—

This too is actually happening.

Somehow, in the midst of this wreckage, this destruction, some of it life-giving, some of it just dumb, Bowie kept me—us—alive—Give me your hand, you’re wonderful, he told me.

Here’s the poem I began the day he died:

ROCK & ROLL SUICIDE

My girl
draws seven tulips along the

bottom of

a page &
above them a mist of

pollen & as the

pollen rises each
speck turns into a star & above

them a couple of

saturns (saturn’s the best—it has
rings) &

an astronaut—a cord

connects her to her spaceship
& other cords

radiate out from her

spacesuit, each
cord ties her to some sort of

pod, each of

which, my daughter tells me,
contains one of

everything she needs

to survive—she can
pull one in if she’s hungry,

another holds hoohoo-

haha (her stuffed
monkey, Ivy (her friend) lives

in another . . .
the radio is on, it says Bowie

just died—

You’re not alone, he sings,
softly, all day . . .

Beth Bachmann is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow in poetry and the author of two books from the Pitt Poetry Series: Temper, winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize and Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Do Not Rise, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. Each fall, she serves as Writer in Residence in the MFA program at Vanderbilt University. Recent work appears in The New Yorker and Guernica.

Nick Flynn has received fellowships and awards from, among other organizations, The Guggenheim Foundation, PEN, and The Library of Congress. Some of the venues his poems, essays and non-fiction have appeared in include The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and National Public Radio’s This American Life. In 2015 he published his ninth book, My Feelings (Graywolf), a collection of poems.