Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

We have concentrated so long on the spiritual casualties of the Viet Nam war (those veterans who testified at the Winter Soldier investigations , for instance) that we tend to forget the war in Korea left similar casualties behind. Wantling, presumably a ‘normal’ product of red-necked Illinois, joined the US Marines at 17, applied for combat duty the following year, and eventually ended up in a Korean field hospital with severe burns. They gave him morphine. “It killed the pain. It was beautiful. Five years later I was in San Quentin on narcotics,” having been dishonourably discharged from the army in 1955.

     The poet, but not the boy from Illinois, emerged 5 1/2 years later. Amidst a life of petty crime and psychic disturbances, he made a name for himself as one of the most respected poets of the underground, writing dierctly out of his experience. He was Kerouac’s hipster saint incarnate. Appropriately, poetically, what had let in the light for him originally was to kill him in the end. He died of an overdose at the age of 41.

     Wantling has said of himself that his was “probably a basically addictive personality.” Like compulsive drug-takers I have known, he was colourful but given to self-indulgence, boring and melodramatic at times, qualities which show through in his poetry. He was also shallow, something the true mystic, who comes to his vision out of his own resources, never is.

     When Wantling, enmeshed in a dark night of the soul, speaks of his own experiences the brutishness, the self-pity and disgust come through with great force, as they are meant to. But when he turns to possible remedies for the horror of the things which drive him to degradation he can give us no more than a handful of borrowed and fashionable slogans, a spew of empty words. Love, yes, but this is easier advocated than put into practice, as his own writing demonstrates only too well; the pitiful contacts of ‘Initiation’ and ‘Poets are sensitive’ are not the answer, as he is honest enough to realise. “I haven’t learned much in thirty-seven years,” he writes, except that “all governments are eventually appalling ; pain hurts ; to eat meat is murder , to be without love is inexcusable ; to love is the most difficult of all.”

     That the hipster journies, the junkie hassles, the violence Wantling describes should remind us of the key writings of the Beat era is no surprise. On his discharge from the army he made his way to California in the year of the famous San Francisco poetry reading over which Kenneth Rexroth presided and which marked the beginning of the ‘West Coast renaissance.’ It was this that Kerouac described in ‘On the Road’; there, too, he met Gary Snyder, the Japhy Ryder of ‘The Dharma Bums’. The ideas being generated at the time were prophetic of the way America was going and of the type of person Wantling was to become. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Mailer, all glorified madness or derangement. Dean Moriarty of ‘On the Road’ and Carl Solomon, dedicatee of ‘Howl’, are holy madmen. The ravings of ‘The Naked Lunch’, written out of heroin addiction, twist reality - but probably less than we think; Wantling’s far more direct approach helps us to see that. He is Mailer’s ‘White Negro’, the violent product of intolerable times and conditions whose unrestrained reaction against them will ultimately destroy the state of directed violence we call by the name of civilisation.

     Much of Wantling’s poetry shows him in full flight from pain of one sort or another, and that it cannot be avoided. Almost every route he takes seems to lead back to pain. At the very least he shares with Kerouac the vision that at the height of enjoyment the hollowness and sadness of the human condition are perceived. It is in the bitterness of this realisation that the poetry comes through and because of this that it is precisely at his grimmest that he writes of poetry and poetics.

     “Fuck poetry, being happy is where it’s at” he writes to a West Coast poet in ‘The Amenities involves in Stasis’ during a short-lived idyll on a farm. In another poem he describes seeing his dog run over, tries to escape the memory on LSD and then other drugs, only to have even worse hallucinations and break down altogether. Looking back, he comments,

I never wanted to be a poet anyway
I’d carry a lunchbox like everyone else
if only the muttering would stop.
                                  (‘it was Tuesday morning’)

     Such slender clues to his attitude to poetry lead back to the earlier ‘Poetry’ in which he argues that one must abandon aesthetic considerations in writing in order to “get/ down on paper the real and the true! which we call life”. This is in the same spirit as Wilfred Owen’s preface to his own poems: -

Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
My subject is War and the pity of War.
The poetry is in the pity.

Yet these elegies are to this generation in
no sense consolatory. They may be to the next.
All a poet can do today is warn.
That is why true Poets must be truthful.

Read pain for pity and a wider definition of war, and this might be Wantling’s own credo.

     Wantling’s reaction is to withdraw from the terrible vision of reality through the medium of drugs, only to find that they sharpen the vision, exacerbate the disease. For him the truth does not make free, it is a destroyer. And ranged against him are the agencies of civilisation whose task is to conceal the truth and destroy all those who see things as they are with an eye clear of prior conceptions.

     Trapped between the two as he was, it was perhaps this very harrasment which prevented him from realising the final irony (perceived by Burroughs) that the function of these agencies and of drugs is ultimately the same. Wantling is not interested in metaphysics, it is enough to proclaim the truth as he sees it and in his own terms:

Mostly I want you to see we are all in San Quentin.

                         (“But see how cunningly the trap is baited”)