Ron Whitehead Reviews

RON WHITEHEAD
THE THIRD TESTAMENT
(Published in Heaven Books)

Of course Ron Whitehead takes his 'published in heaven' lead from one Jack Kerouac. But, thankfully, Whitehead's books are also available down here on earth for anyone who wants to tap into his radically outspoken way of writing and communicating, as one observer of his work commented '...spontaneous transcription emerging in a tumultuous rush...' that pretty well captures the energy of Whitehead. Whitehead is a rabble rouser, strident, rarely compromising, inflamed by events he takes personally. Only when tipping his hat to mentors like Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, friends he has known well over the years, is he in any way calmer, more reflective. Like so many of the Beats, Whitehead seems forever in motion and there is no question his perpetual motion translates to his poetry, he has the street urgency of Jack Micheline, the travelogue mind of Allen Ginsberg, almost compulsively recording things as they speed past the car window, the train window, a cast of thousands. His prodigious output reveals a man on a mission, an organiser, a poetry networker, an aetheist and a believer, God and family are always there. But the powerhouse poem for me, and this is probably because I've heard Whitehead's Kentucky reading of it, is always I WILL NOT BOW DOWN. Instead of the oath of allegiance this is something the schoolkids should examine. Whitehead loves America, he just hates what the men in suits are doing to it. Powerful. --Kevin Ring, BEAT SCENE, England


PERSONAL JOURNALISM FROM A HUMAN FIRE FIERCE GLOWING
Review of Ron Whitehead's
The Third Testament: Three Gospels of Peace (Published in Heaven Books)
& Closing Time (Published in Heaven Audio)

And in the red clouds rose a Wonder over the Atlantic sea:
Intense! naked! a Human fire fierce glowing, as the wedge
Of iron heated in the furnace; his terrible limbs were fire
With myriads of cloudy terrors banners dark & towers
Surrounded; heat but not light went thro the murky atmosphere
The King of England looking westward trembles at the vision

--Blake , America

Hunter S. Thompson is dead.

            Hardly are those words out when a vast image out of America's eye comes spinning open Vertigo-like to reveal an unguarded coastline and an unprotected sky.   We have lost him.  The last great American word warrior is dead and the land stiffens with fear too weak to loathe.  He was dedicated to pulling aside the unreasoning American robot mask to reveal the machinery, all its oily cogs of politics and wheels of rot.  There was one thing always to be said about Thompson's writing: he gave it to you straight.  He gave it to you straight, no chaser, no training wheels, no water, and no mercy.  It was hallucinatory or poetry mad prose but it was always straight.  Thompson's instructions for Reading Gonzo Journalism:

*Half-pint, 10-inch hypo-needle (the kind used for spinal taps & inoculating bulls)
* Fill this full of rum, tequila or Wild Turkey & shoot the entire contents straight into the stomach, thru the navel. This will induce a fantastic rush much like a ¾ hour amyl high plenty of time to read the whole saga.

            He gave it to you straight, straight and pure like Menken and Hemingway, Kerouac and Ginsberg. It was strong medicine for a sick patient. But now the Doctor is out and we are left to our national infections, our own empire diseases, our own America. The last great word warrior in American letters is gone.

            Thompson wrote about the things he loved: America , politics, excess, sports, shooting guns (but I always fired into the nearest hill or, failing that, into blackness.  I meant no harm; I just liked the explosions).  Thompson wrote about the things he hated: lies and liars.  His work is in the tradition of Rabelais and Swift, Arthur Miller and William S. Burroughs.   He wrote a diabolical prose leading down the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire of the American dream.  Thompson never pulled a word-punch in his life.  He was incapable of lying and he could not abide liars.  Thompson once spent an hour driving across New Hampshire in the back of Nixon's limo with the man himself.  He was granted this exclusive encounter on the condition that he speak about "nothing except football." "Whatever else might be said about Nixon, and there is still serious doubt in my mind that he could pass for Human, he is a goddamn stone fanatic on every facet of pro football."  When Nixon died Thompson gave no quarter because he respected the hatred he had for his enemy.   And he respected his enemy for changing his writing:
 
                            Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are
                            wrong for Objective Journalism, which is true, but they miss
                            the point.  It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective
                            rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White
                            House in the first place.   He looked so good on paper that you
                            could almost vote for him sight unseen.  He seemed so all-American,
                            so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through
                            the cracks of Objective Journalism.  You had to get Subjective
                            to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often
                            painful. 
 
           
            You had to get Subjective.  Getting subjective was the key to it all, getting inside yourself to report on the world, going inward to go outward.  Thompson's greatest books are visionary tales of ripping apart himself to put the world together again.  (D. H. Lawrence on Poe: Man must be stripped even of himself.  And it is a painful, sometimes a ghastly process.)  His non-fiction is fiction and his fiction is non-fiction.  ( Lawrence : Art-speech is the only truth.  An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day.)  Just as every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints.  He was a volcano of American ingenuity and American humor.   He was a great American artist.  
            Thompson's writing is journalism, fiction, autobiography, travel writing, satire, carnival prose and a summation of American literature: it's Huck again with muddy feet lighting out for the territory and Melville's punch in the face of God called The Whale coupling with his Confidence Man passing out drunk with Old Rip blasted awake by ROCK AND ROLL! breeding The Searchers screened for Horatio Alger eating acid and vomiting up Whitman! Whitman! Whitman! who rips out the roots under Pound playing kangaroo tennis with young serious Hemingway slowly carving out words in a Paris garret as his hungry baby cries Kerouac! Kerouac! Kerouac! in search of his roots, his family, Kerouac in search of himself in Satori in Paris:
 
                        My manners, abominable at times, can be sweet. 
                   As I grew older I became a drunk.  Why?  Because
                 I like ecstasy of the mind.
                        I'm a Wretch.
                        But I love love.
 
            Ecstasy of the mind.  Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas .  Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism.  Kerouac's true-life novels are the keys to Thompson's kingdom.  You had to get Subjective.   Kerouac wrote speedy tortured deep binge hangover books about his life.  He gave it his all.  This was the Beat lesson that Thompson learned early and he gave it his all.  In a letter, Thompson responded to his publisher's questions about how to read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:  
 
Probably the first big breakthrough on this front was
Jack Kerouac's On the Road: a long rambling piece of
personal journalism that the publisher (Viking) called fiction
because if they said it was journalism no Literary Critic
would touch it. But the only thing new about it was the sudden
official sanction for novelists and poets to focus on the world we
were living in.       
 
            You had to get Subjective.  You had to burn for the story.  You had to burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles.  Thompson covered his life and times like a giant Wicker Man, flaming out across the story and into American consciousness.  He covered the story from the Kentucky Derby to his final writings on 9/11 for ESPN.com.  He covered the story of America .  He was a human fire fierce glowing, the corporal form gone now, turned to ashes and shot across his farm.  Dr. Thompson is dead but long live Gonzo! 
            Gonzo lives.  It lives in Thompson's books and in the new literary forms he created.  It lives in the movies and in the young readers who discover him each year, every year.  It lives in rock culture and gonzo porn and dictionaries (Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary: 1971): idiosyncratically subjective but engaging.  It lives in the work of Ron Whitehead, poet and promoter, publisher and gadfly, teacher and organizer, writer and rock and roller.  Whitehead is a fellow Kentuckian and a fellow honorary Kentucky Colonel (he was so named along with Thompson, Warren Zevon, Johnny Depp and David Amram by the Governor of Kentucky during a Thompson tribute Whitehead organized in 1996).  Whitehead's new book, The Third Testament: Three Gospels of Peace, is a collection of three books of poetry written over a decade.  And if it is a Gospel of Peace it is also a manifesto of Poetic Energy and Aesthetic Thunder.  Whitehead gives it his all: his native Kentucky, his Beat roots, his scholarly analysis of the power of poetry, his rock swagger, his politics, his spirit quest, his jokes, his fiery enthusiasm for the word, his personal journalism.  You had to be Subjective.  Ecstasy of the Mind.  
The sonic exuberance of Whitehead's poetry is fueled by his personal journalism, his covering of the story called Ron Whitehead.   The poem that opens the first volume, I Will Not Bow Down, is a travel poem, a travel poem to City Lights:
 
                                    and searching for Lawrence Ferlinghetti
                                    I crawl through City Lights
                                    so many writers' writings
                                    and Lawrence Ferlinghetti is one
                                    and James Joyce is one
                                    and Williams Carlos Williams is one
                                    and William Butler Yeats is one
                                    and Walt Whitman is one
                                    and William Blake is one
                                    and Jack Kerouac      Allen Ginsberg
                                           Diane di Prima    Amiri Baraka
                                           John Holmes       Herbert Huncke
                                     Gregory Corso          Michael McClure
                                            Gary Snyder       Robert Creeley
                                          Philip Lamantia           William S. Burroughs
                                             David Amram           Anne Waldman
                                             Hunter S. Thompson          Ed Sanders         
                                             Bob Dylan       Tom Waits
                                             Nick Cave      Shane McGowan     Ron Whitehead
                                             Pomes Penyeach
                                            Pomes All Sizes
 
It is also a travel poem into his literary influences and the direct line of Beat power behind rock and roll.   It is a travel poem into himself.   In the middle of the second collection, Blood Filled Vessels Racing to the Heart, he travels like the microscopic scientists in Fantastic Voyage (Raquel Welch!) into his own book:
 
                      I move.  I feel my way.  In my first step I trip and fall into the chasm
                 and falling I see a book approaching but I am falling so fast all I can
                 see of the front cover before I hit it head first diving is part of the title
                 BLOOD FILLED and I quickly adjust my fall so I enter through the
                 opening in the first O.  Splat.  Now.  Intercalated.  Here I am.  I'm in.
 
Intercalated.  Personal journalism.  You had to be Subjective.  Ecstacy of the Mind. 
I'm in.
            Whitehead is in himself and in himself he discovers two selves: Brain and Bone.  Brain is the half that writes a dissertation entitled Quest For Self In The Ocean Of Consciousness: The Origins of Expressionism and Modernism.  Bone is the half that dances.  
 
 
                                                The Bone Man
 
                                    The bone man dances circles
                          round the subterranean gloom
                    paints pink and blue and purple
                                    until he fills the room
                                  with the smell of roses
                        and a pandemonium moon.
 
 
We have met the Bone Man before in Whitehead's white-heat engine of a Bildungsroman called Beaver Dam Rocking Chair Marathon.  Personal journalism.  Bone is also the rocker part of Whitehead, the poet who performs with rock bands and rocks the world with protest poems like Tapping My Own Phone and The Declaration of Independence this Time.  Whitehead's voice has to be heard to be felt.  His new CD, Closing Time, is a crystallization of his voice and his work: his family sings, his Beat roots sing, his personal journalism rocks.  Closing Time is an opening into himself, into the rock of his soul and the roll of his words.  Intercalated.
            Bone rocks and Brain writes: The Poet Prophet of Now approaches, encounters, and translates the mysterium tremendum, the numinous, by utilizing her or his own individualized, hybrid, secular, religious, spiritual, aesthetic, artistic alchemy.  You had to be Subjective.  This was the great lesson Whitehead has distilled from Thompson and the writers, artists, and thinkers who have provoked and shaped him.  Ecstasy of the Mind.
Thompson once called Whitehead's poetry, "a dazzling mix of folk wisdom and pure mathematics."  Bone and Brain.   Thompson is gone.  Whitehead is here to remind us of the power of his words and to set the day on fire with his own.  In a letter to a Vietcong colonel, Thompson introduced himself: I'm not an especially good typist, but I am one of the best writers currently using the English language as both a musical instrument and a political weapon.  Whitehead has picked up the word weapon and the Kings of Empire tremble at the vision. 
                       
--Dr. John Rocco, literary scholar, critic, professor of English at SUNY Maritime, New York.