Scat

Lorri Jackson

When Lorri Jackson overdosed in 1990, she was just starting to get noticed in the small press world. Then she died, and, well, everything went downhill from there. For a while, at least. The manuscript for Scat, Jackson's third book, was sitting at Oyster Press, unreleased, the victim of financial woes from the press. 1994 saw its release, along with some excellent word-of-mouth publicity and some retrospectives in those magazines which had adopted her as a kind of patron soiled dove during her lifetime, and the short-lived, but heartfelt, Lorri Jackson revival was on. Here we are some ten years later and Lorri Jackson is about as obscure as ever.

At the risk of being somewhat profane, Jackson had a whole lot in common with Arthur Rimbaud. Sure, Jackson wrote free verse and Rimbaud wrote formal (though is sometimes credited with being the inventor of modern free verse). However, both were ignorant of, or ignored, he basic rules of poetry while writing, and both had such deep and abiding pools of raw talent that the throwing of the rules to the wind is sometimes no more than a minor annoyance, a kind of “this would have won the Pulitzer if it seemed more like actual poetry” nattering voice at the back on the mind. Both were roundly criticized by the grater poetic community during their lifetimes. We have yet to see if, as they did with Rimbaud, that greater community will end up coming to realize what a brilliant talent Jackson, in fact, was.

Jackson was around at the beginning of the eighties revival of “slam” poetry, a distinctly non-poetic form of writing that still somehow gets passed off as poetry. And she embraced it wholeheartedly, but Jackson didn't have the studied artlessness of years of slam poets who had come before to draw on; what she wrote was in a new style all her own (which, of course, was one of the first generations of work that has influenced others since). As with most movements in any medium, someone with great talent started the ball rolling, and legions of mediocre imitators have come since. So if you're disgusted with what you hear now, it's still worth going back to the source and seeing what could have been, and what was for a very brief period:

“I am bothered by snatches
bits of old motion
Motown choruses
mimed by gay men
refrains of betrayal made
catchy by fish hooks
and melody…”
(“Breakdown 101”)

Even the weakest of the pieces in Scat is full of internal rhythm, alliteration, and image, which so much of today's slam poetry has put aside in favor of political sound bites and rap hooks. There are pieces of Scat, a line here, an image there, that are breathtaking in their excitement. Were Lorri Jackson still alive, and this book just released, I might be proclaiming the emergence of the Next Big Thing, the next poet who actually had a chance to bring poetry back to the masses. Instead, I find myself in the role of carnival barker in a world of archaeologists. Find Lorri Jackson's work. Read it.