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Scat
Poetry
82 pages, Spiral-bound
First published January 1, 1994
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 22, 2008
Lorri Jackson, Scat (Oyster Press, 1994)
When Lorri Jackson overdosed in 1990, she was just starting to get noticed in the small press world. Then she died, and, well, everything went downhill from there. For a while, at least. The manuscript for Scat, Jackson's third book, was sitting at Oyster Press, unreleased, the victim of financial woes from the press. 1994 saw its release, along with some excellent word-of-mouth publicity and some retrospectives in those magazines which had adopted her as a kind of patron soiled dove during her lifetime, and the short-lived, but heartfelt, Lorri Jackson revival was on. Here we are some ten years later and Lorri Jackson is about as obscure as ever.
At the risk of being somewhat profane, Jackson had a whole lot in common with Arthur Rimbaud. Sure, Jackson wrote free verse and Rimbaud wrote formal (though is sometimes credited with being the inventor of modern free verse). However, both were ignorant of, or ignored, he basic rules of poetry while writing, and both had such deep and abiding pools of raw talent that the throwing of the rules to the wind is sometimes no more than a minor annoyance, a kind of "this would have won the Pulitzer if it seemed more like actual poetry" nattering voice at the back on the mind. Both were roundly criticized by the grater poetic community during their lifetimes. We have yet to see if, as they did with Rimbaud, that greater community will end up coming to realize what a brilliant talent Jackson, in fact, was.
Jackson was around at the beginning of the eighties revival of "slam" poetry, a distinctly non-poetic form of writing that still somehow gets passed off as poetry. And she embraced it wholeheartedly, but Jackson didn't have the studied artlessness of years of slam poets who had come before to draw on; what she wrote was in a new style all her own (which, of course, was one of the first generations of work that has influenced others since). As with most movements in any medium, someone with great talent started the ball rolling, and legions of mediocre imitators have come since. So if you're disgusted with what you hear now, it's still worth going back to the source and seeing what could have been, and what was for a very brief period:
"I am bothered by snatches
bits of old motion
Motown choruses
mimed by gay men
refrains of betrayal made
catchy by fish hooks
and melody..."
("Breakdown 101")
Even the weakest of the pieces in Scat is full of internal rhythm, alliteration, and image, which so much of today's slam poetry has put aside in favor of political sound bites and rap hooks. There are pieces of Scat, a line here, an image there, that are breathtaking in their excitement. Were Lorri Jackson still alive, and this book just released, I might be proclaiming the emergence of the Next Big Thing, the next poet who actually had a chance to bring poetry back to the masses. Instead, I find myself in the role of carnival barker in a world of archaeologists. Find Lorri Jackson's work. Read it. *** ½
When Lorri Jackson overdosed in 1990, she was just starting to get noticed in the small press world. Then she died, and, well, everything went downhill from there. For a while, at least. The manuscript for Scat, Jackson's third book, was sitting at Oyster Press, unreleased, the victim of financial woes from the press. 1994 saw its release, along with some excellent word-of-mouth publicity and some retrospectives in those magazines which had adopted her as a kind of patron soiled dove during her lifetime, and the short-lived, but heartfelt, Lorri Jackson revival was on. Here we are some ten years later and Lorri Jackson is about as obscure as ever.
At the risk of being somewhat profane, Jackson had a whole lot in common with Arthur Rimbaud. Sure, Jackson wrote free verse and Rimbaud wrote formal (though is sometimes credited with being the inventor of modern free verse). However, both were ignorant of, or ignored, he basic rules of poetry while writing, and both had such deep and abiding pools of raw talent that the throwing of the rules to the wind is sometimes no more than a minor annoyance, a kind of "this would have won the Pulitzer if it seemed more like actual poetry" nattering voice at the back on the mind. Both were roundly criticized by the grater poetic community during their lifetimes. We have yet to see if, as they did with Rimbaud, that greater community will end up coming to realize what a brilliant talent Jackson, in fact, was.
Jackson was around at the beginning of the eighties revival of "slam" poetry, a distinctly non-poetic form of writing that still somehow gets passed off as poetry. And she embraced it wholeheartedly, but Jackson didn't have the studied artlessness of years of slam poets who had come before to draw on; what she wrote was in a new style all her own (which, of course, was one of the first generations of work that has influenced others since). As with most movements in any medium, someone with great talent started the ball rolling, and legions of mediocre imitators have come since. So if you're disgusted with what you hear now, it's still worth going back to the source and seeing what could have been, and what was for a very brief period:
"I am bothered by snatches
bits of old motion
Motown choruses
mimed by gay men
refrains of betrayal made
catchy by fish hooks
and melody..."
("Breakdown 101")
Even the weakest of the pieces in Scat is full of internal rhythm, alliteration, and image, which so much of today's slam poetry has put aside in favor of political sound bites and rap hooks. There are pieces of Scat, a line here, an image there, that are breathtaking in their excitement. Were Lorri Jackson still alive, and this book just released, I might be proclaiming the emergence of the Next Big Thing, the next poet who actually had a chance to bring poetry back to the masses. Instead, I find myself in the role of carnival barker in a world of archaeologists. Find Lorri Jackson's work. Read it. *** ½
July 19, 2017
This was Jackson's third collection, released sometime after her early tragic death.
I prefer the poetry to the prose. I read in a review somewhere of her collected work 'So What If
It's True: From The Notebooks Of Lorri Jackson' this description of her:
'Her language is gritty and gorgeous, her sensibilities stunning and exceptional. Jackson is a poet in the ilk of Patti Smith, Rimbaud, an impossible bastard child of Dylan Thomas mated with Bukowski and Joni Mitchell.'
I think this nails it.
I prefer the poetry to the prose. I read in a review somewhere of her collected work 'So What If
It's True: From The Notebooks Of Lorri Jackson' this description of her:
'Her language is gritty and gorgeous, her sensibilities stunning and exceptional. Jackson is a poet in the ilk of Patti Smith, Rimbaud, an impossible bastard child of Dylan Thomas mated with Bukowski and Joni Mitchell.'
I think this nails it.
June 28, 2007
i first came across lorri jackson's work when i was on a road trip about 15 years ago. i was staying at a friend's and his girlfriend handed me a few sheets of paper containing poetry photocopied from exquisite corpse after ms. jackson died. i was blown away. along the same lines as charles bukowski and jim carroll, her work is uniquely beautiful and angry and heartbreaking and i was consumed by it the first time i read it. she also has two other volumes of poetry, New Logic for New Sores & My Mouth is a Hole in My Face. some years ago i recieved word that her family was collecting her poetry into one volume and were going to try to have it published. it's highly unfortunate that this woman wasn't able to write more because she died so young, that it seems her words will eventually fade into absolute obscurity.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews