LOU BARLOW
And yet Personism lives. O’Hara’s thread has been picked up (unwittingly, no doubt) by a fellow inhabitant of Massachusetts. Listening to the song “High School” on Lou Barlow’s new CD, Winning Losers: A Collection of Home Recordings, it seems conceivable that, for entirely different reasons, Personism may yet be the death of literature. I mean if Frank O’Hara (or Walt Whitman or Arthur Rimbaud or Vladimir Mayakovski, for that matter) had come of age after 1965, he more than likely would have taken up a guitar instead of a pen. And conversely, if Lou Barlow had grown up prior to the Beatles, he might very well have made books instead of records. But the rock stage is a far more powerful and attractive forum than the bookshelf. The next potential generation of American poets is rocking, not writing.
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And while it’s easy to target some kind of unseemly human curiosity with Barlow’s subject matter, that’s not where his punches land. The world isn’t reducible or explainable in a Barlow song. On “High School” it enters its protagonist–Barlow, undisguised–as a random hailstorm of irreconcilable words and pictures and it comes out as “nervous diarrhea” and “a little tune on my flute.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Steve Gullick.
