Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Dwight Macdonald, the bearded literary critic, was aghast at the barroom bathos, but failed to argue Mailer off the platform. Macdonald eventually squeezed in the valorous observation that Ho Chi Minh was really no better than Dean Rusk. After more obscenities, Mailer introduced Poet Robert Lowell, who got annoyed at requests to speak louder. "I'll bellow, but it won't do any good," he said, and proceeded to read from Lord Weary's Castle. By the time the action shifted to the Pentagon, Mailer was perky enough to get himself arrested by two marshals. "I transgressed...
...burns his draft card and lets his hair down is beginning to dawn. Flowing locks were once a symbol of virility, as the story of Samson bears witness,* and it is no longer safe to disparage the vigor of the man in shoulder-length curls. He may be a poet. But he may also be a member of the Hell's Angels, a West Coast motorcycling fraternity whose maleness, however overexercised, lies beyond dispute...
...material as well as topic, they are timely, for the smoothly lacquered collages are built of magazine scraps and subway billboard posters painted, pasted together and occasionally combined by photomontage. Nonetheless, the pictures illustrate the difference between journalism and art, for Bearden brings to his panoramas a poet's fantasy, a professional's technique, and a philosopher's understanding of reality...
...poet named Bezdomny has brilliantly executed a commission, a poem on Christ, but although it is correctly derisive, his work commits the error of assuming that Christ actually existed. Bezdomny's editor, Berlioz, is straightening out his tame poet on his shaky ideology when the Devil arrives to straighten them both out. Beautifully dressed, learned and well-spoken (the Prince of Darkness being a gentleman), Satan is amused by their respectable atheism. To teach them a lesson about his powers-and about the reality of the supernatural-he turns soothsayer and predicts that the editor will be beheaded...
...which Moscow is virtually taken over by the Devil and his attendant demiurges. These take their supernatural business for granted, while, in contrast, many plain Soviet citizens are deprived of their Marxist grasp of material reality by the apparition of the Devil, and behave like lunatics. First the poet, then assorted officials, unhinged by their attempts to explain the inexplicable, wind up in the psychiatric center...