On Saturday, 10th June, in the 23rd Genoa International Poetry Festival Jim Morrison and his poetry will be the protagonists of a special tribute by Frank Lisciandro, American photographer, film maker, writer and musical journalist and one of the closest Jim Morrison's friends.
Lisciandro will read some texts, known and rare, among the poems that the "Lizard King" wrote during the years of The Doors. We asked him to tell us something about the relationship between Morrison and poetry.
Jim Morrison, poet
by Frank Lisciandro
In an interview Jim Morrison said: “Nothing can survive a holocaust, but poetry and songs. No one can remember an entire novel. No one can describe a film, a piece of sculpture, a painting. But so long as there are human beings, songs and poetry can continue.”
He was a rock singer, performer, and song writer. He was one of the brightest stars of 1960’s pop music scene, but the poetry he wrote was separate and distinct, for the most part, from the rock songs he crafted. He filled notebooks and journals with carefully crafted poems that owe their creative inspiration not to Chuck Berry or Little Richard, but to Arthur Rimbaud and Hart Crane.
He was born in Florida in 1943, the son of a career Naval officer and grew up all over the country: Arizona, Virginia, California, Washington, DC, Florida, and New Mexico. He attended UCLA where he earned a degree in cinema in 1965. During the years of his rock career he continued a steady pursuit of his poetic craft, submitting poems for publication to a number of underground newspapers, and music and teen magazines. They were not the usual venues for poetry, but Morrison used whatever opportunity was at hand.
He wrote and had printed a 73 line poem, “Ode to LA while thinking of Brian Jones, Deceased”, and asked ushers and ticket takers to hand out the poem to members of the audience of a Doors concert in L. A.
In 1968 he self-published two separate collections of his work. The Lords: Notes on Vision is comprised of poems and observations about visual perception, cinema, alchemy and theater; while The New Creatures is a book of poems. He printed 100 copies of each and gifted them to friends, fans, and journalists. In 1970 Simon & Schuster combined the two books and published them under the title The Lords and The New Creatures. The book has been continually in print since publication.
Morrison once said: “If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.”
The poems in Morrison's notebooks show the attention to detail, and the unswerving critical sensibility that he brought to the practice of his craft. In his notebooks there are multiple, distinct drafts of many of his works. Each draft condensing the language, sharpening the rhythm, and pushing the poem a little closer to sinewy elegance.
Many of his poems suggest a voyage to the subconscious and beyond to enlightenment or oblivion; a journey that would involve terrible self-knowledge and mythic terrors. Often the poems suggest the surrealism of a vision, or a drug trip, or a bout of insanity.
In his best work he was able to weave a strong theme through multiple surreal images. The theme unifying the disparate parts of the vision and imparting an immutable integrity. A strong characteristic of the poetry is an affirmation of sensuality; the poems are chock full of the sensory experience of things: trees, earth, flesh, water, booze. He wanted sounds, words, phrases and rhymes that would impart an immediate physical response and evoke a sympathetic sensory experience in the reader. He was sculpting the real physical world with words that did not always or necessarily stand for what they conventionally meant.
Jim Morrison was an American poet, part of the legacy of surreal and visionary American poets that begins with Edgar Allen Poe. The line continues through the transcendental & prophetic poets of the 19th century: Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. In the early 20th century Hart Crane reimagined ancient myths, and in the 50’s the beat poets expand on the form.
The words that Waldo Frank used to describe Hart Crane could easily apply to Jim Morrison , “...a man who through the immediate conduit of his senses experienced the organic unity between his self, the objective world, and the cosmos...”.
A good poem is usually an act of discovery, an insight clothed in memorable imagery and language. Judging from the poems contained in Morrison’s notebooks, as well as from the books of poems he published in 1970, judging from the positive reception received by Wilderness and The American Night, collections of his poetry published posthumously, Jim Morrison must be considered one of the finest American poets of his generation.
Morrison’s poems have been translated into many languages and he is widely read and admired, yet his poetry is rarely studied in American classrooms. Radio stations will continue to play his songs into the next century. “Rock ‘n’ roll is here to stay”; it has commercial value. But what will happen to Jim Morrison’s poetry? Will it be ignored and then forgotten? A newly completed 500 page collection of his writings, planned for publication in 2018, may answer those questions.
