The Sullen Art: Recording the Revolution in American Poetry
David Ossman
University of Toledo Press, 2016

The Old Man’s Poems: 75 Views of Mt. Baker
David Ossman
Egress Studio Press, 2019

Tales of the Old Detective and Other Big Fat Lies
Philip Austin
Bear Manor Media, 2021

T

he Firesign Theatre was a four-man American comedy troupe that came together in November 1966 and stayed active, with many side journeys and interruptions, until 2012 when founding member Peter Bergman died. Phil Austin then passed in 2015. David Ossman and Phil Proctor are the only two surviving members. While the group worked extensively in radio and on stage, and to a lesser degree in film, they are chiefly remembered for inventing a new kind of comedy album, one that took complete advantage of the modern recording studio to create works of remarkable depth and complexity. This is why they have been called “the Beatles of comedy.”

The Firesign Theatre was important, even central, to the youth culture and counterculture of the sixties and seventies. To give just one example, they organized the first Love-In. They were also important to me personally, inspiring me to become a writer and to form my own comedy troupe with some of my siblings, the Luchs Brothers. I became friends with all of them to one degree or another, but in particular with Ossman. He was both a mentor and an exemplar to me of how a writer could keep one foot in the world of humor and the other in the world of poetry, something he has done with grace his entire career.

Although Firesign Theatre no longer exists as a group, Ossman has kept their work alive by getting virtually everything they wrote into print with Bear Manor Media. At the same time, he has continued to pursue one of his other main interests, poetry. In the early sixties he worked in public radio at WBAI in New York, where he hosted “The Sullen Art,” a groundbreaking series of interviews with American poets. The title of the program and the book drawn from it namechecked the Dylan Thomas poem “In My Craft or Sullen Art.” In his introduction to the original 1963 edition, Ossman noted that the title “has no pejorative connotations . . . ‘sullen’ comes from the Latin solus—alone. These poets and all poets, despite their contacts with the world, are ultimately alone. One creates, after all, by one’s self.”

The irony here is that three years after these words were published, Ossman began working with—and creating with—his three Firesign compadres. And all the while he maintained a career as a poet. He published a series of highly original chapbooks and several full-length collections. He also oversaw the reissue of The Sullen Art in an expanded edition from the University of Toledo Press. The original 13 interviews have been doubled to 26. What was a meaningful sampling of the state of poetry in the early sixties, as it was in the midst of evolving, is now a comprehensive overview. Poetry has moved on, but this book has captured these poets in the act of making a literary revolution, or several revolutions, really. Its value as a historical document has only increased, and the CD included with the book gives a good taste of what these interviews sounded like on the radio.

One of the interviews added to the new edition is with Daisy Alden, founder of the influential fifties magazine Folder. She says this: “I’m very interested in the visual as well as the printed word. I think that having the poem or the story in an attractive setting is an important part of the literary experience.” That is the ideal segue into a review of Ossman’s latest book of verse, The Old Man’s Poems: 75 Views of Mt. Baker. Like most of his poetry collections, whether chapbook or full-length, it’s a work of art as well as literature, beautiful to behold and to read. Publisher Anita K. Boyle has adorned the text with six woodcuts that complement the poems perfectly. The book contains handmade paper and is handsewn. Although technically a paperback, the covers are of stiff cardboard overlain with a cardboard jacket, giving the effect of a hardcover. Anyone who loves the lost art of bookmaking will love this book.

More importantly, the book itself is more than worthy of the presentation. These poems are incomparably Ossman’s best, a fine distillation of everything he has been and done and known and is. A prefatory note makes clear his debt to classical Chinese verse—specifically, the book Five Tang Poets assembled and translated by David Young. Ossman’s idea was to write a series of nature lyrics using Mt. Baker as the focal point, celebrating his 75th birthday, which for the record was December 6, 2011. The poems were written between 2010 and 2012; the book did not appear until 2019. The mountain and the old man are the two main foils until a kitten shows up part-way through.

Such a simple setup, about as simple as Waiting for Godot, yet Ossman finds so many ways to “make it new,” as Pound said. The language is direct, spare and supple, capable of many effects, such as sudden beauty:

bright piece out of pale sky
Mountain slips away then
the bone Moon    struck    the bay

There is also warmth, sentiment and humor:

old man’s boys give a gift
of kitten
infinitely smaller than
Mountain but
with the same sharp claws

As one might expect in a book inspired by Chinese poetry, there are occasional sparks of Buddhist thought:

Mountain is there and not-there
the habit of mountains

In this case I believe he’s referring to D. T. Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism, a book he certainly knows. Yet he could also be thinking of the charming calypso-infused Donovan song from 1967, “There Is a Mountain” (“First there is a mountain / then there is no mountain / then there is”). The outside world presses in at times—there are several references to the then-current war in Afghanistan—but the framing of everything in the shadow of the mountain, and the shadow of the cat, keeps these lovely poems grounded in a much more personal present. The book is divided into seasons, again something typical of classical Chinese verse. Then, too, within the seasons are times of joy and grief. He includes one poem about the son of his who died on a different mountain, Mt. Rainier. And there are moving elegies for his Firesign partner Peter Bergman and his creative mentor Ray Bradbury.

Ossman’s poetic roots go in many directions. However, I think his work has felt the strongest influence from the Black Mountain poets, especially Robert Creeley, as well as Gary Snyder and Hispanic poets such as Federico Garcia Lorca, some of whose work Ossman took it upon himself to translate. Like Yeats, he just keeps topping himself.

Tales of the Old Detective and Other Big Fat Lies by Philip Austin began life as an audiobook in 1995. I wrote about it for the audiobook newsletter I was producing at the time, Talking Book Review. I was delighted when the publisher asked me and Chevy Chase for cover blurbs and even more delighted when he gave mine top billing (after all, I’m Kurt Luchs and he’s not). In 2021, six years after Austin’s death, this almost-lost classic became a book proper, thanks to Bear Manor Media. There’s a brief, poignant introduction by the author’s widow, Oona, the “big beautiful blonde” sometimes mentioned in these deliciously noir and surreal stories.

“The Old Detective” referred to here is clearly a later version of Firesign Theatre’s best-known character, Nick Danger, played and co-written by Austin. The character draws on many sources, including old time radio programs like Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, and several hard-boiled mystery writers. More than anything, though, he comes as a response to the prose of Raymond Chandler. The group used to begin their writing sessions by reading his work out loud. Firesign’s last studio album for Columbia Records was In the Next World, You’re on Your Own, the only album performed by the group but written by the duo of Austin and Ossman. That album was dedicated to Jorge Luis Borges and Raymond Chandler, a dedication that would work equally well for this book.

These 17 stories can start anywhere and end anywhere, with plenty of strange doings in between. Take “We Three Kings of Tacoma Are,” one of several surprisingly moving Christmas tales in the collection, which begins like this: “Not too many years past, in that region of the Pacific North where people have settled, wisely or not, around the base of the great volcano Tahoma, and specifically in the misspelled city of Tacoma, in the State of Washington—and on a dark and stormy night—the sodden figure of a drunken man fell to its knees in the humble neighborhood near St. Bart’s mighty old dark brick church set high up one of the seven hills above the twisted mystery of the lower Puget Sound.” Now that’s an opening sentence! If you are any kind of red-blooded American you will want to know what happens next.

Or take “School Lunch Menus,” a non-detecting bit that could have come straight from Firesign’s Dear Friends radio series/album, and which opens like this:

PLAIN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

MON: Paper stack; Boneless Burrito; Paste;Kitten on a stick; Milk-a-roni
TUES: White bread on toast; Glass of Sugar; See-through Lettuce; Liquid Milk
WED: Cake Sponge; Sugar Sandwich; Butter Plate; Cloth Pudding; Milk
THU: Simple Pie; Banana Splat; Sugar Mound; Blanched Cookie; Whey
FRI: Diaper Surprise; Clear Peaches; Steamed Cereal Boxes; Sugar; Milk

Someday, perhaps, Austin’s long-awaited novel Beaver Teeth may become a book, and his screenplay about the Grateful Dead, two projects that have yet to see a real release. Until then, though, it’s a genuine delight to have Tales of the Old Detective and Other Big Fat Lies, as pure a product of his unique imagination as we could wish for.