OCR Text |
Show Shaman Fowler Calls for Cultural Rebp! ii By J. Bauman The man Gene Fowler came from the west with his hair wild, a tear in. his shirt, his leotard-clad wife at his side; came through a cynical, Dadis-tic, Dadis-tic, nialistic hard-glittering wasteland of acid and pot and culturless nudie movies and death. And the man and woman wom-an stopped at a cluttered table with us and talked of life with us and went up on a mountain with us. And there he stood on a windy shelf of land and looked far below at the cold smoggy city and looked high above at wet sliding gray clouds, white crystline peaks, a red and white and blue kite. And the man began to speak of himself and poetry, his jacket jack-et plastered to his back in the wind, his mad hair fluttering v. against his forehead, his voice booming above the straight streets of the city. He was a mystic, a shaman a poet; he read his work to us: My ancestors were shamans. But I am not my ancestors. I am shaman to a tribe recently come. A tribe with gas-turbines. A tribe with horrors about Being homosexual. A tribe with a Bomb. A tribe with fear of t h e Other: Foreign man. Black man. Sexed man. High man. Other. A tribe with fear of the Other. I wear animal skins and cast huge shadows on the wall. And old men sit in council, Sit at their fire. They wonder if I a mtheir shaman. Or if I am the other. Gene and Hilary Fowler are poets, but they are a new breed of poet. They speak of rebirth. They speak of sunsets and ducks and oceans and people, in the wake of Ginsburg's tortured tor-tured "Howel" of death. They are the new generation of poets that has emerged from the unfurnished flats and dingy coffee houses to blink at the sun. They have discarded dark shades and instant-nirvana and dispair; high above Salt Lake City they sing of the poets to come: stronger shamans than i, shamans whose eyes burn as suns in the sky shamans whose u eyes burn as staff ' rf night h will come. There Is someJMp. man's rJ:" uncanny lief that peel "Jr, hand out free Pen's t0 ffH S fjand: 1 Utah joir- Poems of obs JV and comPf' set. So they P G. j places uepJiV New York's W and along ' waterfront. K |