Neal's Town, Home of the First PodSlam
Why Denver? How could podSlam's
amazing, passionate, beat-like poetry
come out of what most people think is a cow town? Is there
anything more to Denver than a gateway to skiing and the home of
Broncomania? Check out the poets at podSlam.org and
you'll wonder too.
Maybe the first PodSlam is from Denver because Neal Cassady's
from
Denver. Don't know who Neal Cassady was? Few do. Dead these 37 years,
he was Jack Kerouac's
inspiration for Dean Moriarty in Kerouac's great American Road Trip
novel, On the Road.
But Cassady was more than the book's inspiration – he gave it
his
voice. Jack Kerouac was frustrated with the book's tone of voice until
he realized he had to write it using Neal's: "He picked the
project up again later, after a series of letters from Cassady gave
Kerouac the idea to write the book the way Cassady talked, in a rush of
mad ecstasy, without self-consciousness or mental hesitation. It
worked: 'On The Road' became a sensation by capturing Cassady's voice."*
So, while we call On
the Road Kerouac's book,
it's
really Neal's book. In fact, the area of Denver now known as "LoDo"
– Lower Downtown – Denver's skid row for
decades - was inseparable from Neal Cassady's reality. There's even
an online tour
of Neal's Denver, suggesting all its grime and grit and
passion and puke. It was put up a decade ago by Andrew
Burnett, himself
a poet. Here's his intro to Neal's Denver:
A Personal Exploration
and Beat Baedeker
by Andrew
Burnett
"...all the city was to become my playground..."
Neal Cassady, The First Third
"Neal is a colossus risen to Destroy Denver!"
Jack Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg, As Ever
"who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver
& waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded
& loned
in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now
Denver
is lonesome for her heroes."
Allen Ginsberg, Howl.
If you're visiting
Denver, or if you just wish you were, try one of these tours:
In
the winter of 1995, only two blocks remain of the Larimer
Street
Neal Cassady knew. For forty years Larimer used to stretch as one long
skid-row for most of its 25-block length, but today only two true
skid-row
blocks remain, between 20th and 22nd: bars that open at eight in the
morning
(signs say "No children after 5:00"); pawn shops where Cassady very
likely
pawned anything he could get his hands on for quick cash; a 12-step
recovery
shelter, three bars, two liquor stores, a barber shop, and a Mexican
bakery.
At most, maybe three men are unconscious now on any given morning,
where
once there'd have been fifteen or twenty (gentrification has moved the
shelters
almost ten blocks north). Instead of Larimer, the men wait for the sun
to come up at 23rd and Curtis.
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Read the whole
thing -
it's great. It makes you realize what no current visit can - that
Denver was to the Beat Generation – and modern American
poetry
– what Kansas City was to the Golden Age of Jazz and,
ultimately,
to BeBop. I find it amazing that these two midwestern cities were the
wombs for modern poetry and jazz, respectively.
As further inspiration to read Burnett's guide, here
are some more of his great phrases:
It's
hard to write about Denver and the Beats without persisting in a little
city-wide anti-karmic self-justification. New York and San Francisco
are true, hardcore beat sites -- anything about Denver is going to
sound as if somebody, somewhere is protesting just a little too much
about a provincial capital with only peripheral links to Beat authors...
It's
hard, too, to write about Neal Cassady. He-man mercenary, neo-Proustian
speed freak, devil incarnate, lost angel, part hipster, part huckster,
half lost, half found...
He's
our Rimbaud without the luck Rimbaud had -- and R. didn't have too
much. He's an American R. behind the wheel of one of our century's
automobiles going way too fast down one of our streets. Close to a
crew-cut, handsome as hell, jeans and a t-shirt, he's got our drugs,
our music, our idiom and our books...
It's my
guess that those who knew him and loved him were seduced by how vivid
he was; how vivid his now was. Larimer (or Van Ness, or 116th Street)
with Cassady was probably a pretty damned vivid, live and exciting
place...
Literary
Kicks curator Levi Asher talked about a mystique, too, in his original
Denver page ("I've never been to Denver, but I'm dying to go. I'd get
drunk on Tokay at a Larimer Street dive, and then go street-crawling in
search of Dean Moriarty's forever-lost father.")...
Growing
up in Denver, I always enjoyed having little secret Beat bits of
knowledge to myself: ten years ago I'd eat lunch leaning against the
Water Department building in Civic Center knowing that this was the
Carnegie public library when Neal Cassady was jailbait pure and simple,
in and out of juvy hall-- devouring Kant and Schopenhauer when he
wasn't stealing cars and attempting to put the nth line over on the nth
girl...
The best work of all about
Denver and the Beats are the central texts: Cassady's "The
First Third," Kerouac's "On
the Road" and "Visions
of Cody," Ginsberg's "The
Great Rememberer." Buy them, come to Denver, walk these
streets, get at American ghosts.
Or go to the podSlam,
filmed at
the corner of 15th & Wynkoop, right in Cassady's hood, by
(mostly)
young poets who may not know a central truth: many of the same old
white farts who now resent or regret the truth of the poet's
words
once nodded to Neal Cassady's words and spirit, channeled by
Kerouac.
Build that
bridge, and the generations can be healed.
6:16:03 PM 
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