Bill Tremblay
As his first leap into genius, Allen turned on his accusers,
himself most insidiously, with the news that he was not evil in his homosexuality, showing the
rest of us whatever our persuasion that closets are killers of the human soul that leave those
inside them open to blackmail and self-loathing;
he howled in the voice of the pariah clown, shouting
confessions that turned into indictments through the personal alchemy of bebop and street-talk,
freeing us to hear him as not didactic, yet carrying in his often biblical chants and spells acts of
exorcism as well as eroticism and spiritual mercy, meditations, addresses to nations,
encouragement never to cease the mental fight for liberation from all dogma including his
own;
he wrote the book on how to survive the shame trips endemic
to puritanical societies and the murderous insanity they engender and thus wore an Uncle Sam
hat in the cheap seats of the 1968 Democratic Convention, becoming our pleading cousin in the
universe like William Blake, as angry senators pounded the speaker's rostrum, denouncing the
outcry for peace in the streets of Chicago;
he knew that just as language is the primary tool of the
witch-doctors of war and paranoia so too the poet's work is to use language to rename the world
so that the bleak and battered locomotive of the soul could be seen as the radiant sunflower it
really is and thus he inferred that things are symbols of themselves, not to be held in Platonic
contempt for existing in solid bodies but cherished as the carriers in their own flesh of a
transcendence which is at every moment here for those with eyes to see;
he put his queer shoulder to the wheel and fought the many
crucifixtions of growing up defeated into apathy by the zombies of Madison Avenue and
Pentagon and boardroom whose biggest lie is that they are America and he did so by embracing
Whitinan's injunction to loafe and invite the soul because he knew that was his real job;
he gave us the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out
of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years and there was never a question of what he had
done for us lately because a succession of twelve books issued from him over nearly five decades
of unstinting labor at the fiery furnaces of inspiration and the merciful Lord of Poetry, a
tough-minded and enduring refusal to give up on himself or us;
therefore we mourn, therefore we weep, not for hirn but for
ourselves if we forget to partake of the spiritual sustenance he gathered into the storehouse of his
poems because he was our friend, our support and comfort, our lover, the one who led by
example of courage and laughter to remind us that Mind is shapely, Art is shapely, and so we
say, Blest be He who leads all sorrow to Heaven!
Return to Top
©Copyright Bill Tremblay