Magic in Loss

 

Hard to read Stan Persky's Wrestling the Angel (1978) without thinking of Jean Genet, and then suddenly (why so sudden if he's already on my mind?) -- there he is! "(Genet whispers to me./ 'It is not enough to watch one's heroes & pity them. We have to take/ on their sins & submit to their consequences &) '..."

The Genet quote appears in"Soldier/Sailor", one of a number of works from (the chapbook?) Journal of a Mexican Boy, which Persky writes was written (or published, too?) in 1959, five years before Genet's Journal de voleur (1949) was published (by Grove) in English-- if indeed Journal de voleur was the source of the quote (Genet first appeared in English in 1949), which is beside the point if Genet did "whisper" those words to Persky, for Genet was alive in '59.

Say what you want about Millennial writers -- they cite everything (relations being what they are). Persky's generation -- his "kind" (after Isherwood) -- take (took?) a more singular approach. Poet Be Like God (1998) is a book about the San Francisco Renaissance set -- Duncan, Blaser, and in particular, Spicer -- with whom Persky was aligned and, being younger, fed grapes to.

Years ago Persky told me he wrote poetry, but stopped (or, like the late Brian Fawcett, stopped publishing it, I can't recall). The poems in Wrestling the Angel (the title is derived from the tension -- dialectic? -- between the Muse of "humanism" and that of "historical materialism") are rhetorically buoyant but lack fissure, frisson. They are simply balanced and as such lack tension, traction. I'm fine with that, but many aren't. There's just too much magic in loss these days.