Review by Michael Goldberg.
Lyon Street, Marc Zegans (Bamboo Dart Press, 54 pages)
Marc Zegans, a fan of punk rock since the late ’70s, has just had his seventh book of poetry published.
Lyon Street is, as author Jonah Raskin writes, “a Valentine to a City that never grows old.” The city is San Francisco. Influenced by the great Beat poets—Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso and others—Zegans describes his new book as “a love letter to a perpetually reincarnating city that often fails to remember itself.”
Zegans first discovered the Beats as a kid perusing the bookcases in his dad’s study “looking for books I wasn’t supposed to read when a cheap paperback copy of [Kerouac’s] The Subterraneans with an introduction by Henry Miller, fell off the shelf – a perfect Jungian synchronicity.”
In high school the Beat poets were the ones he actually cared about reading. He moved to San Francisco as a teenager, and often attended the Mabuhay Gardens punk club. As an apprentice at a SF recording studio, he worked on singles with the punk band Crime.
There’s nothing derivative about Zegans’ writing, and the poems here are by turn beautiful, moving and unique. There’s a lot of nostalgia in Lyon Street, remembrances of a waitress who wanted to be more than a waitress to the author, a now-slick bar that was once “full of funky Victorian couches and pitted floorboards…,” and of when “this room of Ferlinghetti’s was at the center of things, and the Purple Onion was across the street.”
A favorite of mine is “P(un)k Poets Too Fucked To Drink,” which I’ve heard Zegans read a couple times. The third through sixth graphs:
“Behind us, shirtless, gobbed
in maggot wriggle, Jello
admonishes black and stinking
pogo crowd to be Republican
never thinking
that one year hence, Kill The Poor
will find happy embrace in red
states more scared of welfare
than war, and tuck sunny Ron
in Washington”.
If you buy one book of poetry this year, make it Marc Zegans Lyon Street.
(Available at Bamboo Dart Press)