Tapping My Own Phone: poems & stories
Ron Whitehead's CD Reviewed
by Bob Holman, New York City

Ron Whitehead's voice is Kentucky. A latter-day Beat, Whitehead is on a crusade of positivity for poetry -- his Insomniacathons, 24 - 48 hours of nonstop poetry, his publication of books and broadsides and CD's for Published in Heaven Press, and his own writings including Blood Filled Vessels Racing to the Heart, now all slide over to give room for that voice, the distilled essence of his own poetry. This cause for joy is his CD, Tapping My Own Phone: poems & stories, which evokes the myths and natures of Appalachia in all its lost-in-the-holler glory and the Beat zone of poesie in full utopian regalia. There are thirty poems here. Ron's voice, a combination of full drawl, magnolia sweet, and Wendell Berry's Mad Farmer's blue hot rage, drives the disc and vitally fashions a new post in the American ear.

The big stories are at the center. Meet Granddaddy Dick whose tales always seemed to tell more -- "They had a way of setting you to thinking. You find yourself inside the story, then the next thing you know you're adding stuff till it becomes real, and takes off down the road on its own, and you have to run to catch up or get left behind." Let him tell you about "Moxley and Irene," who've been off their swamp island but once and live on snakes, snapping turtle, possum and moonshine whiskey. Irene was a decent witch, but when she found that picture of an old woman in his pocket she threw it down and broke it. She'd never seen a mirror before.

From the front seat of the family car, watch Uncle "Jasper Joyce" hold services in a revival tent. Whitehead's language soars with the St. Vitus dancers writhing to the tune of glossolalia -- "swoopers become hoppers," and finally the snakes themselves are pulled out, rattlers and moccasins, and handled.

"The Coal Miner" is divided into two sections. In one, a hardscrabble man leaves us with his dream of finishing first or second in some kind of contest so he might take the family off to Panama City for his dream vacation. Part two begins in the midst of a rocking chair contest, days measured by noon sirens, the Coal Miner following the "slow gravitational pull of his life." Whitehead leaves a page turn in -- insistent anti-polish? Or his own rocking chair? Coal Miner's children pop the wash cloth on his face and counsel, "Stay awake, Daddy." The over-the-top ending is Whitehead's only attempt at Southern Gothic.

Ron Whitehead is best known for his rants, and he gives us all the classics: "GIMME BACK MY WIG: The Hound Dog Taylor Blues," "Tapping My Own Phone," "Shithouse Manifesto," "San Francisco, May 1993" (a paean to Ferlinghetti), "Asheville" (which bridges Ginsberg's death and a generation of poetry slammers), and most especially the narrative rant of "MUSIC SAVED MY LIFE and JESUS SAVED MY SOUL," the vision of Bone Man tension.

It's the hilarity and rawboned realism of "Mama" as she takes the children out to shoot a Christmas tree that's the true story of this CD's power, or the beautiful litany cum echo of the simple "How Many More Times" that'll stop you in your tracks. Ron leans into his angelic countertenor at times, and in "The Ending of Time" we find him fronting The Black Pig Liberation Front. There are a ton of tiny gems and surprises: a hallucinogenic trip with Burroughs ("Calling the Toads"), the hypermelodic "ah" in Buddha in the ethereal Louisville of "Listen."

This anthology is an encyclopedia, a handsome collection of the voices that drive the man who drives the poetry bus. Take a listen to Ron Whitehead's CD, Tapping My Own Phone. This is the edge that just may lead home.