Whitehead: the beat goes on
By Frederick Smock
The Courier-Journal
May 24, 1998
Book Review
Beaver Dam
Rocking Chair
Marathon
Stories and
Poems
by Ron Whitehead
Tilt-a-Whirl Press
90 pp., $10
In the person of Ron Whitehead, the Beat goes on.
Some of the original Beat poets are still around: Gregory Corso and Diane di Prima, among others. But Whitehead represents a new generation of poetry hipsters, which will be of particular interest to those who thought the Beat movement a piece of history.
And he brings a real energy to the on-going literary rebellion. As an editor and organizer, through his organization Rant for the Literary Renaissance, he has published literally hundreds of chapbooks and posters and staged a multitude of readings. He is perhaps best known locally for his insomniacathons - all-night benefit performances of poetry and music.
Recently, he hosted the Hunter S. Thompson Tribute, and he is scheduled to produce the Jack Kerouac Beat Generation Insomniacathon next year in Mexico City.
Of course, no one, not even Kerouac, exactly fits a generalization like "Beat," which can mean everything from drugged-out (in its original coinage, by East Coast heroin addict Herbert Huncke) to beatific. And as early as 1958, the so-called "Beat Generation" had already died and been resurrected.
For Whitehead, the inspiration may be this: "There was something liberating about the Beats for me - 'casting off the anxiety of influence and making it new,' as Kerouac said. Everything hasn't been done," he remarked in a recent interview. "I've made it my mission to knock down all the walls I can."
He has his roots in Ohio County, Kentucky, a land of coal mines, farmers and Holy Rollers. His grandfather was a Pentecostal preacher, and the grandson would one day look upon all that ecstatic energy and think, "Rock 'n' roll!"
He worked for a time for both the infamous Peabody Coal Co. and Kentucky Land Reclamation. And there really was a Beaver Dam Rocking Chair Marathon, which the author won as a teenager after three days and nights of rocking - the old-fashioned way.
All that and more goes into this book, a coming-of-age story told in short fiction, poems, photographs, haiku, quoted Scripture and drawings. Some of the writing is experimental in a 1950s way, yet on the whole it achieves an urgency and oft-times an immediacy that is truly poetic.
He describes a crazy, weird Western Kentucky experience as perhaps only a native can. And he seems to seek some redemption from that lush, laid-waste land, as in this shard of memory:
Believe what you must
it does not matter...
For the white dove
has flown over my head
for miles as I drove my
tractor
cross a coal-barren
wilderness
His prose is notable for the way it captures the particular feel of the human landscape, as in this description of the first night of the Rocking Chair Marathon.
"After midnight the crowd dwindled, gawkers and carnival goers one by one, carload and truckload, went their separate ways home, home to Beaver Dam and Hartford, to homes scattered throughout the hundreds of lonely, desperate asphalt, gravel and dirt roads of Ohio County, the fifth largest county in Kentucky, and one of the poorest...
"Little by little, solitary whispered voices grew louder as rockers, like strangers gathered round a prairie fire for warmth in the middle of the lost night, began to share the facts of their lives."
His first volume of poems, "I Will Not Bow Down: Selected Poems 1990-1995," was published last year by Hozomeen Press, and he recently released a spoken-word CD, "Tapping My Own Phone."
The reviewer's book of poems, "Gardencourt," was published last year by Larkspur Press. He teaches at Bellarmine College in Louisville, and he is the editor of "The American Voice."
