FTLGTP: An Outlaw Posture

Stop #11: Cafe Metro

After the Café Les Deux Megots changed ownership, the poets migrated over to Cafe Metro, another East Village café, formerly located at 149 Second Avenue, where they continued their experimentation with spoken word poetry and other artistic expression including the mimeographed magazines. It was at the Metro that “poetry and a kind of outlaw posture verging on nihilism became apparent” (Kane, 195).

The examples of poetry and experimentation that was prominent at Café Les Deux Megots and later Café Metro show the strong connection between this new rule breaking poetry and the rule breaking punk rock that was starting to happen a little bit farther downtown.

Unfortunately I have no picture to share because I could not find any old pictures of the place and there isn’t really anything at 149 Second Avenue anymore. So it goes.

Up Next: CBGB’s

FTLGTP: Mimeographed Magazines

Stop #10: Les Deux Megots

The New York School poets continued to move their hangouts east and began spending time at a place called Café Les Deux Megots, at 64 East 7^th Street. Les Deux Megots is French for “two cigar butts” and is a play on words of a famous café on the Left Bank in Paris called Café Les Deux Magots, which was a popular hangout for many members of the Lost Generation expatriates that situated themselves in Paris during the first part of the 20^th century as well as many European artists and writers.

Le Deux Megots in the East Village became what many of the bars on MacDougal Street and in the West Village had been for artists before them. It was a place for collaboration and presentation. Regular poetry readings were conducted at the café and much of the work was published in mimeographed magazines that were distributed throughout the artistic community.

Mellilo describes the Café Les Duex Megots and later Café Metro as “seedy and drug infested places…that hosted poetry readings where poets new and old could gather, drink, and play” (61).

Dan Saxon, the poet who created the magazines showcasing the poetry from Les Deux Megots, used the mimeograph technique for publishing his magazines because he could “create quick and cheap publications that avoided the inhibiting codes of taste and unofficial censorship that guided mainstream publishing” (Melillo, 61). Other members of the East Village poetry movement who published mimeographed magazines included, Ted Berrigan, Amiri Baraka, Diane DiPrima, Ed Sanders, Bernadette Mayer, and Vito Acconci.

By avoiding the mainstream publishing industry, these poets continued to push the limits of poetry and experimentation. Much of their work was sexually charged and purposely hard to comprehend. One particular example that Melillo discusses is The Fugs member Ed Sanders’s Fuck You/a magazine of the Arts. The work that was featured in the magazine was particularly sexual in content and a very aggressive example of breaking the boundaries of poetics.

Up Next: Cafe Metro

FTLGTP: Moving across town

Stop #9: St. Marks on the Bowery

During the late 1960s, the Beats began moving over to the East Village and began to mix with some of the new New York School poets who were spending time on the other side of town. The East Village was also where the poetry scene started mixing with a new music scene and the genre of early Punk was being formed.

One way in particular that the new poets congregating in the East Village differed from their predecessors in the West Village was the focus on performance and theatricality. According to John Mellilo in his essay, “Secret Locations in the Lower East Side: Downtown Poetics 1960-1980” for Lost New York, “meaning became a process that was literally worked out—in the air, in the community, on the actual page, on the body. A swirling interdisciplinarity defined this era in New York as artists rejected any and all stable boundaries” (60).

One of the most important places in the history of early punk and the poetry that influenced it, as well as an important performance space for this new interdisciplinarity that Melillo speaks of, was St. Mark’s Church on the Bowery, at 131 East 10^th Street. The Church started a Poetry Project, which continues today, that brought beats like Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs over from the west side, as well as up and coming poets, musicians, and other pop artists like Andy Warhol.

This is where Patti Smith debuted her mix of poetry and music in 1971 when she opened for Gerard Melanga. The performance was a turning point in the connection between poetry and rock n’ roll. She read and sang her poems while Lenny Kaye played guitar behind her. It was the first incarnation of what would eventually become Patti Smith’s first album, Horses, which was released in 1975.

Philip Shaw, in his book Horses, explains how her music was new and different:

The idea of performing poetry to musical accompaniment is nothing new; it began with the Beats in the 1950s and was carried over, via Ginsberg and Dylan to the counter culture in the mid-1960s. But two things…(were) different. To begin with Smith intends to sing as well as read, and the backing is not free-jazz sax, or languid bongos, but an overdriven crudely thrashed guitar (8).

The Church continues to be a place for experimentation with art, poetry, and music. Several other punk artists performed their poetry here as well including members of the band Television.

Up Next: Two Cigarette Butts

E.E. Cummings Erotic Poetry and Drawings Revealed – The Daily Beast

Something just for Valentine’s Day from The Daily Beast!: E.E. Cummings Erotic Poetry and Drawings Revealed

In Honor of National Poetry Month:

Memorizing poetry seems tedious but Jim Holt makes it sound quite entertaining. I might start memorizing some just to see how it goes.

Essay – The Case for Memorizing Poetry – NYTimes.com.