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LOVE, CALIFORNIA STYLE By Gerald Nicosia
l2 Gauge Press, P. O. Box 60ll
San Clemente, CA 92574
80 pages $l2.99
Gerry Nicosia is best known for writing the magnum opus Jack Kerouac biography, Memory Babe. That book provided an in-depth chronicle of the famous "beat" writer's life, and it also presented a primer on the tasks of contesting the elusive muse that all creative artists face.
I thought after reading Memory Babe that had I written it I would quit writing and bask in the celebrity of the book's success. It seems far more attractive to lecture university professors and campus coeds about "on the road" adventures, rather than continue pressing new and uncharted literary territory.
Weighing the poetry in Love, California Style, I found much kinship with poet-bard Nicosia. We both identify with the subjects of mountains, ex-wives, and mothers as the stuff for serious and solid verse making.
In his poem "you too can be a Zen master," Gerry captures the lonely solitude that both poets and mountain climbers hold in common.
watch several shades of grey and silver clouds
blowing east over the rain-soaked greenery
of lone mountain.
Think of all your friends who will die
And trust that they'll always live
In the thought of those who read
The poem about them which you write
While watching several shades of grey and silver clouds
Vanishing like unanswered koans
Over the spiky evergreen illusions
On a hillside of the lone mind.
I believe that the only thing more painful then divorce is 'maybe' death. In the poem Marcy, this one's for you, Nicosia describes the emotional wounds of his marriage's breakup.
I wanted only to make you happy
I kept wondering why we weren't back in the hills
Above Big Sur, or up in Gualala
I knew we'd get trapped
In some courthouse logbook
Our misery and contention, 'irreconcilable differences,'
Documented for eternity
And there we are now, where future bored historians
Or dullard law students in need of a "corpus delicti"
Can find the footprints of everything that went wrong
But the things that went right have not died either
They've only gone underground
I kept trying to tell you that love
Has nothing to do with the law.
The familiar adage "a boy's best friend is his mother," is well founded. Gerry's "poem for my mom" provides a warm literary tribute to his mother and a moving finish to the collection of poems in Love, California Style.
reading her newspaper and circling the horoscopes
even watching her endless soap operas
but she's in the cold, cold ground
in Illinois, where she was born
and I'm here in cold and sunny California
remembering the power of her love
to transcend time and space
what power that woman had
to make bad in to good,
to turn the world in the right direction
to make me remember
the things that really count
and she, by God, was
always one of them
God rest you,
Mother.
Upon finishing this book, I suddenly remembered the lines of the popular ballad "Seven-Year Ache" sung by Roseann Cash. The song's powerful refrain brings to mind Nicosia's powerful lines, and could cause some poets to wonder, when's he going to give us some room? And yet the soft delicacy displayed in many of Gerry's poems surely must cause admirers to ask, is he coming back again soon?
In my years as a bard-smith, I have never read a good poem using the word alabaster in it, nor can I recall reading an uninteresting verse about Antonioni. In Gerry Nicosia's Love, California Style, the word alabaster is appropriately missing and he has a fine poem about Antonioni.
t. kilgore splake
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