BOB RIXON
HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAVID
Dave Cope is lovely poet from
We made a memorable journey to Asbury Park together in the 80's, 6 crammed into
poet Jim Ruggia's Volks
Beetle on a hot day, Parkway traffic jams, declining to pay beach fees for sand
hardly anyone wanted to use. Dave wasn't especially surprised or disappointed
by the desperate condition of that place; he saw right through it to the former
splendor, & to the evil allliance of local
government & organized crime that was sucking remaining life out of it. The
town was also a bastion of rock & roll anthemic
traditionalism (it was never "punk") in the growing Springsteen
mythos.
Dave just turned 60. He's featured in a new Wikipedia entry, Postbeat
Poets. I have some quibbles with the idea of "Postbeat."
Jack Kerouac was born in 1922, Allen Ginsberg in 1926. I consider myself two
generations removed from the Beat writers, with Ed Sanders (b. 1939) & Anne
Waldman (b. 1945) more direct successors. The poets in the article that emerged
in the 70's are, as I sort them out, post-postbeat,
& have a more than coincidental connection with "punk" rock. I
think this is especially true of poets from the Detroit & New York City
areas, which generated proto-punk scenes in the late 60's & early 70's that
were not about peace, love & wearing flowers in your hair. Dave was not a
hippie dreamer or a coffeehouse philosopher. Many of his earlier poems came
literally out of a public school boiler room, where he worked for some years.
But it doesn't matter. The absence of these "postbeat
poets" as national voices is one reason why poetry doesn't count for shit
in