BOOKS

This book is the death agony of American Poetry. As Frank O’Hara said; “. . . it may well be the death of literature as we know it. While I have certain regrets, I am still glad I got there before Alain Robbe-Grillet did. Poetry being quicker and surer than prose, it is only just that poetry finish literature off.” Gerard Malanga is carrying it out. Malanga, chic and dazzling, creates an obituary for poetry, but fuck, if the society is dead so is the art, and no matter what you do you can’t save it. A lot of people are trying to build an alternative culture; Malanga is singing the death chant of the old. Warhol has brilliantly expossed a dying culture from within by mechanically destroying the impact of an object or picture. Malanga achieves the same by assuming that the most indulgently personal and trivial material is poetic.

The more I think about it, the more sense this book makes, and I hate it. Only in movies is it easy to understand that bad work sometimes has more to say than good work, and Malanga knows movies. For instance, Niagra (1955, Marilyn Monroe & Joseph Cotton) is utterly fascinating because it so accurately reflects the madness and sickness of popular mass values of the fifties. It is seriously better than Rebel Without A Cause.