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Gerald Locklin's review of 'June 30th, June 30th'
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Life through Child's Eyes

by Gerald Locklin

What's there ever to say about anything as exasperatingly uneven as a Richard Brautigan book of poems? This one is the result of a trip to Japan, and here's what Brautigan himself says of it: "They are different from other poems that I have written. Anyway, I think they are but I am probably the last person in the world to know. The quality of them is uneven but I have printed them all anyway because they are a diary expressing my feelings and emotions in Japan and the quality of life is uneven."

As, for instance, in the poem, "American Bar in Tokyo":

"I'm here in a bar filled with
young conservative snobbish American men,
drinking and trying to pick up Japanese women
who want to sleep with the likes of these men.
It is very hard to find any poetry here
as this poem bears witness."

That's Brautigan for you, forcing a poem where it's least likely to be found; still, I always have the feeling that if he didn't operate in that way, he and we would miss out on such poems as, "On the Elevator Going Down":

A Caucasian gets on at the 17th floor.
He is old, fat, and expensively dressed.
I say hello I'm friendly. He says, "Hi."
Then he looks very carefully at my clothes.
I'm not expensively dressed.
I think his left shoe costs more
than everything I am wearing.
He doesn't want to talk to me anymore.
I think he is not totally aware
that we are really going down
and there are no clothes after you have
you have been dead for a few thousand years.

He thinks as we silently travel
down and get off at the bottom floor
that we are going separate ways.

Yes, I'm glad that Brautigan is around, and I'm more than willing to put up with his misses for the sake of his connections with the Zen-Dada screwball that no one else would even have realized had been tossed. It is difficult to get the batting averages from poems, but men are beaned each day for want of what is found here.


Independent Press-Telegram? [Long Beach, CA]
October 1, 1978: L/S 3.



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