Synopsis "Beat Scrapbook"
Beat Scrapbook, Gerald Nicosia's sixth book of poetry, looks back on his five decades in the Beat world, both as Jack Kerouac's biographer (Memory Babe) and as a member of the San Francisco post-Beat group of poets and writers. The 42 poems in the book are combination tribute/eulogies to people Nicosia loved--most of whom he knew personally, yet a few like Kerouac whom he never met but had a powerful influence on his life. Some of his subjects are famous writers--Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti among them--others are fellow writers who never acquired much renown, such as Jack Mueller. Tony Scibella, and Reginald Lockett, but whom Nicosia sees as great spirits and mentors nonetheless. There are also poems for icons and guiding spirits in his own life--people he saw as living the Beat ethic--including the short-lived Chicago folksinger Steve Goodman, a charismatic prisoner called Sugar Bear on Pennsylvania's Death Row, a demon-driven ex-girlfriend, and a Vietnam veteran martyred by the California legal system. Nicosia also looks at how he came so deeply under the Beat influence, tracing it back to his own father, who grew up on the streets of Chicago and hitchhiked to California at the age of 27, to follow in Jack London's footsteps; when Nicosia was just ten, his father told him that everything he needed to know about life could be found in London's book The Iron Heel. Awakened as a poet by Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, Nicosia has for years been pioneering his own genre of poetry, which he calls "people poems." With Beat Scrapbook, he has taken those "people poems" to a new level, something akin to a full-spectrum portrait of the American outsider community. Gerald Nicosia is the author of Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac, widely regarded as the definitive work on the father of the Beat Generation. Beat Scrapbook proves again, as Lionel Rolfe wrote in the Huffington Post, that "he also is a real poet, very much in the San Francisco tradition of Ferlinghetti, Patchen, Rexroth and Ginsberg." "Beat Scrapbook is a remarkable celebration of life and a haunting elegy for family, friends and fellow poets. In a truly Beat extension of the great tradition of poetic remembrance, Gerald Nicosia homages the people he has loved and admired in his life. These poems take the reader through loss and grief to a hard-fought reconciliation with mortality, honoring friendship and passionate affection, moving from melancholy to the conferring of blessings, with poignant grace notes. Mourning and rapture merge in these fine portraits of lives lived creatively and on the edge. This is a profoundly moving and validating work. It is nothing less than a poetry of life and love over death." --Ian MacFadyen
