Differing Freak Wonder

A close friend of Frank O’Hara and Duane Allman, and present at both the Berkeley Poetry Conference and Monterey Pop Festival, the poet Jim Brodey is the unacknowledged legislator of the aesthetic vortex where the New American Poetry meets the electrified counterculture of the 1960s. John Godfrey has called Brodey “a voracious post-lysergic romantic,” an accurate measure of Brodey’s emergence from the scenes of sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, and poetics that nurtured his own “differing freak wonder,” as Brodey writes in Identikit (1967). While poets such as Patti Smith, Ed Sanders, Richard Hell, and Jim Carroll remade their careers by taking the stage as musicians, Brodey became the poet-rock critic of his generation. He wrote articles for Crawdaddy! and other new music magazines, interviewed Jimi Hendrix for San Diego Free Press and Captain Beefheart for Rolling Stone, and even lived with The Band in Woodstock in the early 1970s as their official scribe. The poems Brodey published in C: A Journal of Poetry, The World, and his own little magazine Clothesline amplified a surreal rock resonance, as in “Breathlahem”: “lately I’ve come to think / of the typewriter as a symphonic instrument // on which / I pound-out vast insect music.”

In the preface to Brodey’s Blues of the Egyptian Kings (1975), Clark Coolidge calls him “one of the last wordmen to gear up to write the endless babbleflow,” a Beat-tinged barbaric yawp spawned as much from Jack Kerouac as Janis Joplin. First introduced to music as a teenager at Alan Freed’s iconic early rock-and-roll shows at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater, Brodey studied with Louise Bogan at New York University before getting turned on to the avant-garde in courses with O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, and Amiri Baraka (then named LeRoi Jones) at The New School. “I was really ready for all the enormous verbiage and energy of the New York School,” Brodey recalls in his wildly animated memoir “Cotton-Mouth Whirlpool,” published in 1976 in the mimeo magazine 432 Review. Brodey had a knack for merging pop culture literary flair with erudite music chops. (He once called the editors of the San Francisco-based rock fanzine Mojo Navigator “the Robert Mitchum and the Mayakovsky of rock criticism.”) In a review of Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde for the underground newspaper The East Village Other, published a little over a month after O’Hara’s death in 1966, Brodey writes, “When I played ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ for the late poet, Frank O’Hara, he said that it had such ‘sweet Rimbaud lyricism.’” Brodey’s literary imagination was hitched to the music scene the way his New York School peers were poised on the ekphrastic edge of the visual art world. Only Brodey could deliver this kind of aesthetic news.

O’Hara also appreciated Brodey’s own lyricism, writing to the artist Jasper Johns in April of 1963 “today I read a beautiful poem out loud by James Brodey.” However, when O’Hara’s poem containing that line appeared in the posthumous The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (1971), no reference to Brodey survived. O’Hara had crossed out “by James Brodey” from the manuscript, a minor edit that anticipated the slow fade of Brodey’s poetry into what scholar Libbie Rifkin calls “the hazy canon of 1960s experimental poetry.” Despite Brodey’s counterculture highs and the intoxicating verve of his poetry, seemingly no scholarship exists on his work. David Shapiro describes Brodey’s exclusion from the history of the New American Poetry as “a disappeared chapter, like a bad writing of Cubism without Braque or Gris.” Though he published eight books with iconic small presses such as Angel Hair, Big Sky, and United Artists, and though he outlived many of his heroes and friends, including O’Hara, Allman, Ted Berrigan, and Joseph Ceravolo, the tragic last years of Brodey’s life—defined by isolation and substance abuse—set off a complicated series of persistent erasures. In the late 1980s, a crack addiction destabilized him. “His life got shapeless,” Godfrey writes, as “he lost his home and belongings, and landed up living in Tompkins Square Park.”

Brodey was also diagnosed with AIDS. Bob Holman remembers inviting him to sleep on the second floor of the Nuyorican Poets Café, an arrangement that lasted until Brodey left New York City for the Bay Area in 1991. There he got sober and temporarily reestablished himself, serving as a volunteer counselor for hospitalized AIDS patients in San Francisco. “But by then,” Godfrey writes, “the disease began dictation.” Just over 30 years after O’Hara had professed the beauty of his poetry, Brodey died in July of 1993, at age 50, from complications related to AIDS. His obituary is tragically spare of detail, and concludes: “He has no known survivors. No services were held.”

In a memorial at The Poetry Project, Eileen Myles noted that “we all knew many great Jims,” an acknowledgement of the composite portrait—the Identikit, as an early book is titled—that Brodey constructed of himself. In one of his earliest published poems, “Two for Barbara Guest,” he describes his Janus-like quality as “my multitudes / rising, as if by violation, or a tremor,” a Whitmanic self-portrait with ominous undertones. Brodey was an outrageous and difficult friend with a tender but mercurial personality, Tony Towle remembers, describing the poet as “guarded and enigmatic, with a private, almost subterranean, sense of humor.” “He was brilliant and cantankerous,” says Holman, while Anne Waldman describes Brodey as a committed visionary who appeared and disappeared as if moving between “secret lives.” Godfrey, one of Brodey’s closest friends, writes that “he could be someone both inspiring and troubling,” a friend who displayed “piety one moment and profanation the next.”

Brodey’s excesses could be straining but also generative. Photographer James Hamilton, who worked alongside Brodey at Crawdaddy! and the alternative weekly The Herald, remembers him as “a fantasist and wild guy” ready for adventure. The two men once cooked up a plan to get out of wintry New York by convincing Esquire to send them to Los Angeles to write an article about musicians who were also visual artists. The piece was never published, but it did result in an afternoon photoshoot in Joni Mitchell’s backyard. An indefatigable storyteller and provocateur, Brodey had a reputation for mythologizing that could veer into untruths, though the distinction, in Brodey’s case, is as flexible as his chameleonic personality. His true stories were so unbelievable—living with The Band, talking with Hendrix about the Black Panthers, allegedly being cast as an extra in the 1969 Western-musical Paint Your Wagon—that fact and fiction naturally blurred.

What is true is that Brodey wrote and published capaciously, leaving behind an oeuvre that, though sometimes uneven, is audacious and moving. His poetry is as full of the warp and woof of relentless aesthetic experimentation as it is the ecstasy and agony of his vivid, too-brief life. “I / swallow / colored splinters / of straining language,” he writes in Identikit, ingesting psychedelic sonic tensions that reemerge as gorgeous, flared-out weirdness and spirit. Stunning lines about “spitting heart-broke tempura & glass marijuana,” from the long open field poem “Breathlahem,” or a scene in which “one begins to unwrap / the quilted geraniums born to alien speech,” from “Unemployed Tunes,” show the luscious surrealism of Brodey’s imagination. Fits of dissonance accumulate in incredible displays of fused lyricism, as at the end of Identikit: “I’m // washed up, fatal / brushstroke, breath-pedestals, heatcube, / and in facemask, blitz unshining / -correctives.” The spontaneous swerves between abstract music and imagistic momentum are one of the joys of Brodey’s work. “Listening to Joni Mitchell,” from Judyism (1980), begins clearly enough—“And I’m sitting up in a purple t-shirt, in New York City / In the most immediate dark my mind could conjure”—before tripping into increasingly otherworldly images of euphoria:

Still listening, a few thousand glowing angels
Illuminate my hair an instant, flying past me, sitting here
Stock-still as huge chunks of some larger world floats past
Quickly as some lesser Mercury roars into molten energy
And carries our message back to the stars.
 
Angels of purple lace pools dripping on lanolin beaches,
Slippery crevices crammed with lilac breeze fiber swaying,
And delicately shimmering so, bits of coconut and jade
Fleck into swollen foam dunes.
 
Layers & layers of translucent spilling chord:
To be whispered, to be hummed, to be heard.

The echo of William Blake’s Swedenborgian angels and Allen Ginsberg’s New York apartment visions, brought on by Mitchell’s dreamy folk textures, exemplify the spiritual and erotic post-Beat aesthetic that Brodey carried into the 1970s.

Following Ginsberg’s Kaddish, Brodey’s Jewish heritage reverberates in book titles such as Breathlahem, Blues of the Egyptian Kings, and Judyism, as well as in his posthumous collection Heart of the Breath, merging with a jazz-infused Buddhism that is part of Brodey’s mystical work of “splicing through disorganized / religious space.” This spiritualized ethos links Brodey to Kerouac’s beatified outsider and adopts Charles Olson’s well-known formula in “Projective Verse” that poetry operates from “the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE.” Like Ginsberg—as well as Ed Sanders and Diane di Prima—Brodey’s writing channels this bodily aesthetic presence into expressions of mystical sexual liberation. Brodey’s poetry amplifies the ephemeral ecstasy of “rubbing against a taut opium breeze,” as he writes in a poem from Piranha Yoga (1977). And though not directly political in the mold of Sanders and di Prima, a Brodey poem such as “I Jack-Off On the Government!”—which begins “I jacked-off on the government, last night, twisting / in dream-bed sheets of solid electricity lather”—makes its own indulgent visionary critique of power.

Brodey was bisexual; among his lovers were O’Hara and other well-known poets. He made no qualms about documenting his exploits and fantasies in poetry. It is possible that his poems digress too often into sexual fixations, which sometimes feel excessive and misogynistic in the style of cartoon depictions of sex in underground comix. At the same time, Brodey’s brash celebration of bodily pleasures—and pains (the thoroughly gross, over-the-top ode “To My Hemorrhoids” is a case in point)—are a formative tension in his work, especially when portrayed as eroding more stabilizing metaphysical desires. Brodey’s early poetry revels in Rimbaud-like blazes of sensual derangement, the “churning Artaud Void” of Identikit that carries forward into the “nominating WANT” imperative in “Breathlahem.” At Brodey’s memorial, Charles North described this impulse as Brodey’s “ongoing wish to leave and reach, to transcend physical limitation, often via drugs and jazz, but also a genuine spiritual craving, I think, that all goes hand-in-hand with his reveling in or obsession with his low-down physical self.” Though doused in pleasure, there is an ominous intensity baked into Brodey’s poems that often comes through in flashes of self-portraiture, as in “Rosewood Vision”: “clobbered yellow / of functioning material,” Brodey writes about himself, “I’m called ‘The Collision.’”

By the mid-1970s, this personal wreckage had started to pile up. Brodey’s marriage to Tandy Martin—who had been Jim Morrison’s high school girlfriend—ended. His poetry began to reflect a more melancholic self-awareness. “Unless,” for example, presents a discursive narrative, written “[i]n the fucking weird-ass dark” while living in the mountains in upstate New York, that uses the repeated conjunction “unless” to stage multiple futures for Brodey’s plans for the evening. Initially, the choice is between whether to “stay here writing all night” or “go[ing] down to Woodstock and have a few beers, / Which’ll get me sick.” The disadvantages of doing anything other than writing poetry continue to accumulate:

                                                                        So,
                                                                                    probably I won’t
Get drunk tonight. Unless I stay here writing all night, I’ll probably
Go see Paul, and see if he has any new grass to smoke. But smoking it
I’d do too much, envision vast ant battles in the garden and ultimately
Say something quite strange, or otherwise offend someone and get booted           out
Of there pronto. Paul is always getting loaded earlier in the day and would
Be pasted [sic] out anyhow. But his wife has certain unknown rules, and            the guys
Around there can never seem to understand exactly the way I mean things

Brodey’s lucidity about his potential excesses temper his desires. At the same time, his anticipation of being shunned and the loss of social contact leave him increasingly alienated. Though he claims that “here I am not suffering, just bored,” a deep sadness pervades the poem even as it fulfills Brodey’s commitment to write over anything else.

                                                                                        nothing to say
A few good books to read within reach, my record collection to aspire to,
Postcards from people I know and who know me and whom I love and            who care
All tacked up on the wall above the writing table, a little flickering candle
There too, the machine humming in this great vast darkness of my life, a
Faint smile on my puss, and an idiotic flare for images reeling through
My mind which absolutely no one R E A L L Y cares about anyhow, and            I’m sorta
Happy on top of all this, though alone, more alone than I’ve ever been
But not exactly crying about it, and writing.

Like Kenneth Koch’s elegiac “The Circus,” the despair of confronting one’s shortcomings, combined with doubt about the value of one’s writing, leave Brodey entangled between sober though unreliable contentment and blunt loneliness. It is notable that the word “love” repeats six times in the poem’s last seven lines, emphasizing not only its absence but Brodey’s reliance on the love of absent friends whose correspondence adorns his desk. The poem is striking in its departure from the fragmentation of his earlier work, what he refers to self-deprecatingly as the filmic “flare for images reeling through / My mind.” While he would not return again to the exact register of “Unless,” it is the culmination of a shift in Brodey’s career, a poem that mediates excess and elegy with a new level of intimacy.

Leading up to this poetic shift, Brodey moved throughout the Southwest and along the West Coast until settling in Hollywood for an attempt at scriptwriting. At the end of this itinerant period, he published Blues of the Egyptian Kings (which he called “my first real book”) with Bill Berkson’s Big Sky Books. It is also Brodey’s longest and best book, collecting poems written between 1962 and 1975 that are presented in chronological order. Ranging from “Mswaki,” composed in a faux-exotic nonsense language with interruptions of comic legibility (“vacess akiniomba, grip the huwa, pull it under, iwspo”), to long open field poems like “Cement States” that balance linguistic excess with lucid spontaneity, Blues of the Egyptian Kings is full of Brodey’s “psychedelic rev,” as Godfrey describes it in a review for The Poetry Project Newsletter. This section from the end of “Cement States” anticipates the mellow writerly introspection of “Unless” but retains the bent abstraction of Brodey’s wilder style:

                                                these tiny balm inlets of Speech
                                                            guiding our eyes
                                                                        here
                                                                          to
                                                                               this sunken temple, where, late-at-night
            amidst my tropheys of a life (“insane”) I dottle
 
                              trying to type
                              trying to hold back the flesh-flashes
 
                                    the images
                                      do not croak
                                                            but seem to blunder in
                                                                                                 from some, as yet, at once
                                                jerky Outside
                                                       & genuine Other Place
 
                                                                           left for humans to travel
 
                        across the spaces within themselves
 
                                   to to rejoin
                                    some “better half”
                                    they’ve lost
                                                            or let
                                                            slip away

Again, the tension between writing and the distracting pleasure of “flesh-flashes” provokes a cosmic inwardness where a fractured self, what is “lost / or let / slip away,” haunts the poet’s choices. The achievement of Blues is that Brodey allows the strangeness coming from the “jerky Outside / & genuine Other Place,” which recalls the ghostly frequencies of Jack Spicer’s language-dictating Outside, to fold into different levels of perceptual stability. Likewise, poems such as “Reverdy” retain a “grit spasm”—Brodey’s hectic intensities—that jolt up against moments of clarifying subtlety, as in this lyrical distillation of the continuity between Pierre Bonnard’s Post-Impressionistic brightness and Alex Katz’s Pop-inflected conviviality:

            landscape, of an even more stiff
                                                            yellow, of
                        Bonnard (to the south), or Alex Katz
                               (in the winter, to the east), everything
                                    brought down to its quiet
                                                                        multiple edge:
 
            the channel of dirt-swirl,
                               the empty volcanic shell, the
                        astral ditch
                                    of dancing hydrogen &
            a coat filled with perfect sunlight.

The levity of Brodey’s ekphrastic vision pulses throughout Blues, stitching together the raucous weirdness of “Life: / sprawling / vommed-upon      and singular,” from “Bonita Panda,” with a rare peace. “[H]appiness is much like this,” he writes in “In Mexico & For Ted Berrigan,” “Events / like orchids.”

Nevertheless, a persistent melancholy lingers alongside the joys in Brodey’s work, a sadness and distance that finds him consistently meditating on questions of belonging. In “Homeward Bound” he asks, “where in darkness can I wander from, to be homeward- / returning the poet, impolite among iambics.” Brodey activates this rude music, actually some of his most delicate, as the poem measures the acuteness of his grief: “mark off my despair (audible) among the blurs / of lossoed sonatas in static air.” Similar uncertainties, mixed with an iambic expression of gratitude, surface in “Homeplate (Bolinas)”: “the hunt / the quest / where will it all end? // & me / back in Bolinas // refueling on the warmth of many friends.” The mythic adventure of Brodey’s life dogged him with fears of displacement and abandonment. Out of luck or on the edge, access to his support network, whether close, far away, or even partly imagined, made a difference in keeping him alive, and keeping him writing. This is nowhere more apparent than in “For John and Judy” in Judyism: “Sometimes, when you get a peek / At how much it means to other people / To have you around, well, it changes / The exact way the strongest urge / One has to disappear.”

And Brodey did not disappear—not yet. By late 1976 he had moved back to New York City, taking an apartment at 437 E. 12th Street in the East Village, the infamous “Poet’s Building” where Ginsberg, Godfrey, Greg Masters, Richard Hell, and a host of other writers lived. Fully enmeshed in the city’s poetry scene, Brodey led a series of writing workshops at The Poetry Project, hosted a reading series at Zu on 24th Street, and started the small press Jim Brodey Books, publishing his own Piranha Yoga alongside books by Tom Savage and Didi Susan Dubelyew, as well as Eileen Myles’s first book The Irony of the Leash. The reviews that Brodey regularly published in The Poetry Project Newsletter during this time are a testament to his idiosyncratic aesthetic interests and humorous extravagance. “Jackson Browne and Philip Whalen both are ardent Carey addicts,” he writes about Steve Carey’s Gentle Subsidy (1975), a book that Brodey notes is peppered with “a little background music Milton.” Heavy praise is reserved for Ted Berrigan’s Nothing for You (1977): “Nine-hundred pound angels do not ignore him.”

Brodey’s energy was relentless. He compiled a never-published manuscript for an anthology of the poets living at 437 E. 12th, constantly collaborated on poems with his friends, staged a performance of Ginsberg’s “Howl” at which the poem was read simultaneously in at least seven different languages, and read with Godfrey and Alice Notley at the Museum of Modern Art. Brodey’s animated reading style, which included using a range of voices, made his performances into bombastic theatrical events. At the 98 Greene Street Loft reading series, he gave an entire reading wearing a large panda head-shaped hat. Another time, he asked the poet Bill Zavatsky to accompany him on accordion, only to temporarily walk out of the reading, leaving Zavatsky to play solo for nearly 20 minutes. “Jim was like this messenger of chaos,” Myles remembers. “He just had this notion of poetry as performance way ahead of his time.”

Surrounded by his peers on the Lower East Side, and acting as a mentor to younger poets, Brodey’s work increasingly records his love for his friends and their poetry. This trend takes hold in Judyism with poems such as “To Mr. & Mrs. Inspiration,” about a reading given by Berrigan and Notley. His description of Notley’s performance reads like his late sixties music reviews: “Her works / were read at a melodic top speed of 12 knots. The lyric complexity / shone tenderly outwards. Tom Carey leaned over and whispered / to me (‘She holds her microphone like Mick Jagger, in control of / all our breathing’).” The poem “Myles Beyond,” also from Judyism, is one of Brodey’s best poems about friendship. His desire is so candid that the poem transforms into an explosive secret missive:

            I know I dispense daylight; I know I love
            the night; I still cherish the times I’m
            inspired by the exact way you frequently
            irritate me into believing in ‘something’
            very special beyond these clumsy bodies
            we gotta take care of and get fucked in.
            I wonder who’s kissing her now. I utterly
            adore you. want you. hate life
            for keeping us apart. dear
            sister Sagittarius, this poem
            will self-destruct in 30 seconds.

That Brodey “hate[s] life / for keeping us apart” despite their proximity points again to the deep sense of estrangement in his work. Though he constantly dedicates poems to friends and confesses the beauty of others’ work in his own poems, a painful and seemingly unbreachable detachment is carved into Brodey’s poetry. “Noh Play,” for example, stages a somber litany of what Brodey sees himself lacking, moving from the frustrating absence of common essentials—“No food in the freezer, just big ice hunk”—to the absence of entire landscapes and lives:

            No fog-colored Dover Beach or Agate Beach
                        stapled to Bolinas shorecrest.
            No more Kerouac, O’Hara, Duane Allman
                        Lee Crabtree, or Buddy Holly
            No winter in California.
            No use taking on so. No more. No more.

Strained to emptiness, Brodey’s resignation upon inventorying the deaths of his friends and idols is too much to bear. “No words,” the poem ends, an improbable conclusion for a poet with such unquenchable linguistic energy.

Though Brodey increasingly drifted away from the poetry community in the 1980s, he continued to write ceaselessly, sometimes composing up to 30 poems a day. Much of this work appears in the posthumous Heart of the Breath (1996), a nearly 400-page volume edited by Coolidge and published by Michael Gizzi’s Hard Press, that collects Brodey’s poems from 1979 until his death. This includes Brodey’s unforgettable “Panda Heart” series, a project culled from more than 1,100 poems, all titled with people’s names and each written in 10 tercets. The “Panda Heart” poems act as a kaleidoscopic index of Brodey’s friendships and obsessions, even as his separation from those sources of inspiration intensified. Charles North notes that the form became a lifeline for Brodey, a “testimony to his involvement—sometimes at a distance—with others, especially his fellow poets.” As associative and joyfully bizarre as Brodey’s earlier work, the “Panda Heart” poems describe “sidewalks of cloud that lead / To the Sky Church nestled in tofu” (“Joan Mitchell”); “every / Moment we breathe as one foaming / Mitt of slime” (“Kathy Foley 2”); and “The colors of St. Mark’s Place / Singing acid breeze through / Ego’s body thrill” (“Jack Kerouac 4”). Their devotional power is a remarkable record of Brodey’s fraying lineages.

Luxuriating in “the glorious yuk,” as he writes in “Thinking,” Heart of the Breath keeps up the pace of Brodey’s frenzied poetics. “[M]elodious clods reckon energy loose,” he writes in the book’s incredible opening poem “Real Life”: “Goldilocks     meet     the human shredder.” Yet while these poems are still “animated with blowtorch / Of desire”—a totally Brodey-esque image from “Song of the Open Mind”—they are tempered by a beatific acceptance of his physical limits. The Ashberyean “Spirits of the Everyday” begins to articulate these tensions, describing “the lush bombed territory // Of the body” that is “caught / In the lens opening click of some more eternal logic’s grasp.” The poems take on a nostalgic and philosophical cast that, though still driven by a centrifugal energy, deliver a nearly saintly acceptance of his suffering. “Pain is a worker, too,” he writes, “And love.” Brodey was writing to save his life, though he seems increasingly to know he could not do it.

“The Voice in the Tunnel of Light,” the long poem transcribed from Brodey’s last notebook, is an astonishing account of the poet’s approach to death. Like New York School poet Tim Dlugos’s “G-9,” which also documents the experience of dying of AIDS, “The Voice in the Tunnel of Light” is a masterpiece overfull with pain, humility, desperation, and love. “[W]e eat these names” Brodey begins, citing the deaths of Berrigan and his daughter Kate, Joseph Ceravolo, Steve Carey, Edwin Denby, Michael Scholnick, James Schuyler, Kerouac, and O’Hara, among others, a litany of losses that focuses Brodey’s suffering into an excruciating and direct submission:

I can’t wait not to survive
 
calling this the next step, whatever
awaits: Ted & Steven, Michael
& Joey C., Allen Katzman, Edwin
Jimmy & Frank
                         how many will
be there for me.

Though Brodey does not name AIDS outright, the worsening of his condition, how “the body develops into a dysfunctional / mushroom of evening,” begins to regulate his ability to write. “[M]y meds come on & am gone,” Brodey concedes. Amidst the daily labor of surviving, both bored and thankful, afraid and agonizing, the unavoidability of dying is ever present: “no body / comes back.” Still, “I’m happy to be breathing / bleeding,” he writes, swinging between levels of despair and lucidity that articulate the complexity of his experience of death, both physically and spiritually. “[F]orget about wasted selves,” he writes, “they are wasted in forgiveness,” an ambiguous declaration that folds our requests for, rejections of, and beliefs in forgiveness into a painful knot. Nevertheless, or perhaps because of such refusals, joys persist. “Come on,” Brodey pleads, “feed me that / captured / iridescence.”

Twenty-five years earlier, the first issue of The World contained a breathless one-page excerpt from Brodey’s novel, The Horrible. “O Life is wonderful,” the narrator announces, “even as it’s horrible and thus this novel is the novel of the sleepless world and here I’m really out of my clouds.” Like so much of his work, the novel was never published, a result of Brodey’s fleeting approach to posterity as well as the terms of his death, obscured through the combined erasures of substance abuse and the AIDS crisis. While other “disappeared” poets of his generation, such as Ceravolo and Dlugos, have recently been brought back into circulation, “the sleepless world” of Brodey’s writing remains scattered across decades of little magazines and poetry journals. Though many of these poems are uncollected, they constitute some of Brodey’s most brilliant and interesting work. An editor assembling a book of Brodey’s selected poems should look to his early poems in Berrigan’s C as well as the even more ephemeral Ear, to his collaborations with writers as various as O’Hara and Vito Acconci, all the way up to the work published in Myles’s magazine Dodgems. His long collaborative poem with O’Hara, “Acid Rock,” written in 1965, is a dizzying collage of wit and ecstasy in which “the mouth be truly mystic.” One can hear O’Hara’s casual luminosity and agile juxtapositions accompanying Brodey’s rock-and-roll vision:

And we’re dying of loneliness like some goddess of San Francisco
our only guitar has been smashed & lost dripping silver paint in the rain
that lights up this darkened afternoon with thoughts of flowers,
           muskrats, jokes, pianos, bombs & souls
 
bubbling up through drizzling foam that sucks us free of any energy
to picture such weather in either our time or their nexts
 
which is already wet, & tremblingly free

By all accounts, hundreds more unpublished poems exist in the care of Clark Coolidge. Making Brodey’s experimental and irreverent poetry accessible to new readers may not guarantee that it will be brought in from the margins. But that might not be the point. As Brodey writes in “There and Back,” the last poem before his death, “The boundaries / are gleaming.”