I’LL BEGIN IN THE MIDDLE by Gary Allen
Illustrations by Amy Kohut
“Gary Allen is a Great Buddhist American Heart.”
-Allen Ginsburg
“I’ll Begin in the Middle is a fearsome and funny darshan with ‘ordinary mind,’ mind without preconceptions. Taking slabs of grotesque wit similar to that of William Burroughs, ‘all kinds of shit’ extrude from the darkness throughout the poem. The poem instructs, moves, amazes. This is a poetics of both verbal bluster and nuance, and nuanced feeling, fine shades of intention and repression, stepping into a coffin, ‘to catch lightning in my hand.’”
–Dennis Formento, author of Phaeton’s Wheels
I’LL BEGIN IN THE MIDDLE, a book-length poem, considers poets and poetry, wondering where both begin and end as they negotiate the treacherous in between. An Ars Poetica–”The Art of Poetry”–it aims to enact its poetics as it describes them. It contemplates the lives of world poets, invoking their slippery footholds in phenomenal reality and anguished, angelic expressions as spiritual lineage. It examines both what poetry may or may not be, and who may or may not be saying it. An open-ended inquiry into the act of tight-roping the poetic line without a net, which may be no different than anyone who feels, breathes, and suddenly catches a wildcat cyclone out the corner of their eye. I’LL BEGIN IN THE MIDDLE constitutes a “cock-eyed sequel” to another long poem by Gary Allen, “Maze of Birth & Death” in his previous book, Transmigration Suite.
Audio Excerpts
Yet
Snow descend
From darkness
From blue space
All the smashed bottles