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© Paul Zarzyski. All rights reserved. These words may not be reprinted or reposted without the author's written permission.

From: Tom Russell’s Road Diary---  www.tomrussell.com

IV. Radical Poetics and the “Collisions of Reckless Love”
“Reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poet and have the richest fluency not only in words, but in the silent lines of it's lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
—Walt Whitman

I purchased the giant Oxford Book of American Poetry, and each morning I coffee-up, read a few pages before the sun comes up over the Franklin mountains. I want to track where we’ve been on the poetry trail—from Poe, Whitman, Melville, Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River,” to Dickinson and on down to Frost and T.S. Eliot and onward. The editors says modern poetry began with that line from Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:’

“Let us go then you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table”

These lines opened the door to modern American verse. A few pages later they include Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row.’ That set of lyrics effectively tops off and ends this era of great American verse and lyric. 1964. Over forty years ago. More or less. “They’re selling postcards of the hanging/They’re painting the passports brown” And then Dylan

effectively sinks Eliot and Ezra Pound on the Titanic within the lyrics of “Desolation Row.” Bye Bye Johnny Be Goode. Now they say Dylan has been “borrowing” from Henry Timrod, a black Civil War-era poet featured in the Oxford book. Poetry goes round and round. When I heard Dylan sing “Desolation Row” at the Hollywood Bowl in 1964, I was drilled to the marrow. Not much has happened since, except for vagrant lines and hack sentiments by dying, drunk gods of song and literature, who dream mostly about screwing grad students and getting published in The New Yorker.

Art and poetics and fiction writing seemed to die after World War Two.

Almost. Almost.

Then came the Beats. They survived awhile. Vilified by the media, ridiculed by mainstream reviewers and treated as a carny side show by Academia, the Beats have been reassessed and legitimized … long after most of them are dead. There are far more critical biographies of Kerouac then there are of Faulkner. Kerouac has had much more impact on several generations of youth culture. Someone said you cannot understand Dylan unless you understood The Beats. Not many people really understood Faulkner anyway. The Beats raged for a decade, as did Bukowski, but they came from outside the system and they died there. My friend Lawrence Ferlenghetti is still very much alive and riding his bicycle to City Light Books every day whilst composing his poetic masterwork, “Americus.”

Then we arrive at Paul Zarzyski. He’s my friend. I met him years ago at the Elko Cowboy Poetry gathering. He’s just released two different collections on CD: Rock ’n’ Rowel and Collisions of Reckless Love. Rock ’n’ Rowel reveals more of the “live” Zarzyski, the ex-bronc rider who has turned the cowboy world on its ass with his wonderful rock ’n’ roll attitude to western poetics and humor. “Charles Badger Clark crosses trails with George Carlin,” says the blurb. Believe it. From the whorehouse piano-backing, to jazz and rap, back to 1956 rodeo-ground organ … it’s an eccentric and entertaining ride. But Zarzo is just getting warmed up. It’s the second album that keeps hitting me like a rabbit punch from Roberto Duran. I believe Collisions of Reckless Love qualifies Paul Zarzyski for inclusion in the next edition of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. Zarzyski should be the goddamn America Poet Laureate. It’s been Zarzyski and Ian Tyson who have slapped the dead face of Western Song and “Cowboy Poetry,” and moved the ball forward and across the goal line. In such poems as “Luck of the Draw,” “The Hand,” “What of the Ugly?,” “Blue Collar Light,” “Shoes,” “Last Rematch,” and “Day the War Began,” Zarzyski proves he is one of the West’s great poets and, more importantly, a major American writer.

What begins in the light of the rodeo arena with “Luck of the Draw,” quickly ascends into a scorching look at racism in “The Hand,” then into a depth charge journey to the bottom of “pop Americana” and fashion culture in “What of the Ugly?,” onward and onward into “Shoes,” a Holocaust poem to turn your heart inside out. Journey from Auschwitz to Wounded Knee inside a deep and moving “western” poem with a savage ending. This is just a sampling.

Zarzyski doesn't seem so much to speak his crafted lines—as roll them around on his pallet and allow you to share the taste and the power in the meaning of each word. I am reminded of Dylan Thomas reciting “Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” or Kenneth Rexroth reading “Thou Shalt Not Kill!,” or Kerouac reciting “October in the Railroad Earth,” or Finbar Furey singing “The Green Fields of France,” or Luke Kelley singing “Raglan Road.” That ancient place where the singer is one with the song.

Time stops for that short moment when a great magician tells his tale. There are fourteen poems on Collisions, fifteen on Rock ’n’ Rowel, and this is not just “spoken word.” There is great textured musical backing on most pieces. This as “Jazz-Blues-Folk-Americana-World-Word Music.” Art-Rock and Roll. Buy these records. Zarzo has won the Governor’s Award in Montana as well as numerous other awards, and has appeared on TV and NPR radio. But you don’t need to hear that sort of hype. Try this: He’s a wop, ex- high school football player out of Wisconsin, with a lit degree from Montana, who rode bareback broncs and owns a massive collection of Western Ties. How more American can you get? This man would never lie to you. That fact is a small revolution in itself. He will entertain you. Then, when your heart is melting, he will tear it out, take a chaw out of it and hand it back to you in a popcorn box. You’ll leave the theater changed. Smiling. Moved. Gracias, Saint Pablo.

Both CDs are available at the Western Folklife Center (phone 775-738-7508, ext 2) and at CD Baby.