Max Blagg: Brit Poet Finds Yank Voice
In a 1922 letter to Ezra Pound written right after T.S. Eliot's landmark poem, "The Waste Land," was published, William Carlos Williams wrote: "I distrust that bastard more than any writer I know in the world today. He can write, granted, but it's like walking into a church, to my mind. I can't do it without a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach."
Max Blagg, a 43-year-old British poet and performance artist, might well have written those words. He came to America in 1971 much as the American-born Eliot had emigrated to England in 1914, to flee a musty aesthetic - walking out of the church of English poetry with, as it were, a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach.
"There's a place for Eliot and the British poets, but I am riveted by the American idiom," he said during a recent interview in his Bridgehampton farmhouse. His pronounced British accent is mellowed by an easy way with American slang and deletable expletives, and by a self-deprecating, rather headlong sense of humor.
Bruce And The Beats
"At age 14 I came across a Grove Press paperback of the works of Lenny Bruce that knocked me out," he went on. "Then an American friend introduced me to the poetry of Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, and the Beat writers, and that was it."
"They had the freedom to say whatever they wanted, and that's what I wanted, too."
Mr. Blagg has published five volumes of poems and appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, including Bomb, Elle, Mirabella, and Verbal Abuse.
He reads his work regularly at a wide variety of New York venues such as the Kitchen, Nuyorican Poets' Cafe, Performing Garage, the Drawing Center, and the St. Mark's Poetry Project, the last a casual forum that has "more influence on poets than the Academy of American Poets," according to Allen Ginsberg.
The New York Voice
Of his attraction to the American vernacular and its street-talk cadences, Mr. Blagg said English speech patterns just didn't inspire him: "I never felt the creative thing in London, where there were one or two very academic poetry readings a year as opposed to one every night here."
"In the '60s, Allen Ginsberg tried to promote the funky, working-class, Beatles sound of the Mersey River poets in Liverpool, but I was never drawn to it," the poet recalled. "The New York voice was much stronger, and England was this cold, dark place with no visible means of support."
Mr. Blagg was born in 1953 in a Midlands village, the youngest of 12 children. His father was a plumber. While not especially brilliant in school, he was taken up by a teacher who encouraged his writing, and published his first poem in the school magazine when he was 15.
Discovering Burroughs
Serendipitously, the teacher also introduced him to another seminal American writer. "I've just read the most disgusting book," he told his student, "'Naked Lunch,' by William Burroughs."
Of course the budding poet raced to his local library, found the book on a back shelf, and took it home. "It was so disgusting I couldn't believe it," he said. "But the humor, like Lenny Bruce's, was thrillingly different. I knew at once that I had to get out of my hometown."
While attending the University of London with the help of Government grants, he set off at age 16 on a pilgrimage following in Mr. Burroughs's and Paul Bowles's drug-dazed footsteps. Hitchhiking through North Africa, he religiously dropped acid, smoked hash, popped Ritalin, and snorted crystal meth, a clothbound copy of "Naked Lunch" enshrined in his knapsack.
Hallucinatory Pilgrimage
This hallucinatory trek is documented in "A Monkey Wrench in the Garden of Allah," an outrageous little Bildungsroman published by the magazine Appearances. It has been presented in mixed-media versions at various New York spots, and was performed a cappella at Canio's Books in 1990.
In 1971, hopelessly in love with America, Mr. Blagg scraped up the money for a plane ticket to New York. "Frank O'Hara was the main reason I came, and the city has never disappointed me," he said. "My life began the day I landed."
He moved in with friends, to a huge loft on Spring Street.
"You actually live here?" he gasped when he saw it.
"After those little London bed-sitters, I couldn't believe how free it felt. England is so crushing."
Westward Ho
Working as a carpenter, Mr. Blagg was further liberated by the "rough and readiness" of American craftsmanship: whacking 2-by-4s together and slapping on Sheetrock was a lot quicker than toiling over the dovetailed timbers of British building sites, and seemed more practical, too.
"The U.S. really is the land of opportunity," he said. "Anybody can say he's a carpenter, or a bartender, or a cabdriver, and get a job and make money. England's been a closed shop for generations."
In 1975 Mr. Blagg embarked on another pilgrimage, this time a recreation of Jack Kerouac's wild rides across America immortalized in "On the Road" and "Dharma Bums."
After taking a bus to St. Louis, he hitchhiked west on Route 66. "It was right after the Charles Manson murders, and the country was crawling with hippies and Jesus freaks," he said. "With my long hair, I was scared to death of being shot by some deranged cowboy."
Acid Took A Toll
Luckily he got a ride-share back with an actress returning east to be in a revival of "Jesus Christ Superstar." After an X-rated cross-country romance, hilariously documented in a prose piece, "Five Days," he moved into her New York apartment and tried to concentrate on writing.
"I went to the St. Mark's readings of poets like Ted Berrigan, Michael Brownstein, and Larry Fagin," he remembered. "It was a vibrant scene, but the main man, Frank O'Hara, was missing. I was so murderously shy I only actually talked to these people years later."
His writing was also inhibited at first, by a mind he'd more or less blown with drugs, he said. "Acid puts a total crunch on creativity and makes you paranoid and insecure; it took me several years to shake off the effects."
Recovery
But recover he did, on his own, and began reading and publishing his work in avant-garde night spots and magazines. A paperback anthology called "Unbearables" contains an early prose memoir, "Feet."
"As the fisherman loves the sharp odor of the dawn sea, as the snurge adores the leathery contours of a well worn bicycle seat, as the epongeur relishes the fetid dampness of a subway restroom, so I have loved feet," the poet confides.
In the blurbs for the "Unbearables" writers, Camille Paglia enthuses that "they expand your imagination . . . they open up brain cells you didn't even know you had." Marguerite Duras says, "They laugh their own private laugh, malicious, inimitable; no one can figure out why."
Self-Confrontation
In subsequent poems, Mr. Blagg shifted into a free-wheeling lyricism incorporating the playful, fast-fade, jump-cut, chatty, cataloguing styles of O'Hara and other New York poets, particularly Mr. Ginsberg.
While these poems are not especially imitative, they do rejoice in the "I do this, I do that" panache the New York poets unfurled before their audiences in a glorious surge of self-proclamation, a mutiny against the solemn '50s.
Turning Outward
In this mode, Mr. Blagg went through the grim business of confronting himself, and got over himself, so to speak. Repetitions of lines like "Daddy the fun's gone, all the fun gone, and the well run dry," reflect not only the end of the drug high, but also of the sexual high, as both male and female friends began dying of AIDS.
His more recent poems seem to turn outward again, perhaps echoing Williams's dictum: "No ideas but in things."
Ribald As Ever
"No one thinks that poetry exists in his or her own life," Mr. Blagg said. "I believe the poet's purpose is to be a pair of eyes that shows people that it does; the universal lies in the particular."
Not that he's gone all high and mighty on us. These new poems are sharp and ribald as ever, charging ahead like Terry Southern on a roll, though with a gentler heart, and fired by a stunning, thesaurus-worthy vocabulary.
In one, the poet longs for that bright place
where words like "bejewelled"
are permitted, encouraged,
Thimble, gombril, Lantana
cyrillic, lanolin
sussuration, lapidary
they tumble from the tongue. . . .
He's left, of course, with
the bodies cooling in the funeral parlor
at Third Street
close by Tony's cafe deluxe
Where we began each day
guzzling scrambled eggs off the formica. . . .
Life seems to be made rich by these things, however, and full of what he calls "federal days . . . that bathe in this specific light."
Mr. Blagg shares his quota of "federal" and other days with his wife and collaborator of 14 years, Anita Madeira, a collagist and television commercial designer; with their daughter, Nell, 3, and with an adopted black cat named Kipper.
Solemnity Begone
He's working toward a November reading at St. Mark's.
"I used to add things to the performance, and not just stand there," he said. In collaboration with Ms. Madeira and other artists, he's incorporated montages of projected images, mixed-media improvisation, music, and even a back-up chorus of Girl Scouts into his presentations.
"It got to be style over content, however, and now I'm back to solo readings," he said. "But I'm still trying to puncture the solemnity of the words 'poetry reading.' "
" 'Hey!' I want to shout. 'Don't run away! It'll be entertaining, I swear!' "
He loped across the grass to meet his daughter running toward him. She looked quite confident that entertainment would, indeed, be forthcoming forthwith.