Huncke: A Poem & Paintings

Originally published in 2008 this second edition of Huncke is a reconsideration. Many of the stanzas have been improved with care taken to keep the original narrative on track. That narrative which uses Herbert Huncke as a scaffold for a gloss on American social issues art and history has been extended with the discovery of a lost canto. An epic narrative poem where time is a many-layered thing Huncke is a world-in-a-poem where its titular hero/anti-hero inspiration and name-giver to the Beat Poets and low-life/high-life infamous indefinable freewheeling rebel-without-a-category icon appears in many dimensions: in memory in history in the here-and-now in poetry in dialogue with angels and ghosts in holographic animations in real and fictitious characters of every stripe all contained within the constraints of a medieval form (ottava rima to the cognoscenti) that creates the sense of a forest or a feast of cantos winding their way stoned-soul fashion through haunted catacombs or buzzing red-yellow honeycombs an underground world that all begins at a poetry reading attended by Mullin himself.This is clearly not the sort of poetry that molders in the stacks / of storage rooms but the kind that actively creates a world whose ecosystem cant help but stimulate a heightened awareness of the interaction between life politics and art; an ecosystem that also contains for your reading pleasure a funhouse where you will definitely get deliriously lost. (Siham Karami)