Kerouac Scroll at Barber Institute of Fine Arts
by Simon Warner
Words on the arrival of Kerouac Scroll at Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Bimingham, December 5th, 2008
Like Dead Sea diaries unfurled
Like Koran unrolled
Like Rosetta Stone re-tooled
Like Egyptian hieroglyphs brought back to cartoon life in C21st light….
The Kerouac teletype flies long and flat in air-conditioned glass in England for the first time
In gallery where Monets and Manets are hung, new master, cool master, dead master, joins Old Masters to crackle and gurgle of shellac jazz, gazed down upon by first editions, monochrome snapshots and period artworks
And poets and readers and the freshly curious take scopophilic delight in dense, block text, hard metal characters, Underwood etching, level and level of book-skyscraper rising into middle distance
How long that book, how long that road?
And what is hidden in the tough, clean coils that bookend this sunset strip?
At opening, glasses politely chink, no flasks of Thunderbird passed round the crowd
But Jack’s muse, and pearl of Dean, Carolyn and Brit Beat Blake bard Mike Horovitz give glimpse of times when On the Road was backpocket guide to some existential life-truth
Then new choral piece by one-time Ginsberg guitar man sees Taylor-made visions of Paradise echo through Deco halls
The playwright David Edgar says this long, lean screed of nouns and verbs reminds us of how hard it was to write before computers let us process words to cold, harsh hum of backlit screen
The poignant toil of finger crack on oyster keys is now just tap, tap, tap on board aligned with software mind
We are, he claims, all Kerouacs now
Yet this icon of fiction, a paperback unpeeled like Turin Shroud, that lies quietly, ghostly there, a shimmering, speckled river on-flowing in its plastic coffin, still has power to move and shake: the sharp, sheer cut of ribbon forever scarring paper with its carbon date
We are, he claims, all Kerouacs now.
But, oh and oh, to have been Kerouac then
January 26th, 2009 at 10:33 pm
Nice poem Simon. I’ve posted it to the subterraneansgroup@yahoogroups.com information exchange list where I’m sure it will be appreciated, all beat fans there! Seeing your poem jogged my memory, I’ll send you those magazines and the money I owe you in the next week or two. Al.
May 29th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Wow!
Scopophilic, ‘pearl of Dean’ – twaddle.
Sounds like something from Private Eye’s Great Bores of Today – ring any bells??
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