The Dumbbell Nebula (California Poetry Series, V. 3)
The first line of the first poem in the third part of Kowit's collection is "I died & went to Hell & it was nothing like L.A." Kowit has a baggy-pantsed sense of humor, yet he is more than a goofball. Poems on youthful doings in New York and San Francisco reveal him as a postbeatnik, prehippie bohemian who eventually fell into college teaching and marriage. Unlike Zorba the Greek, he has never felt his settled state as anything close to a "full catastrophe." He loves life, people, literature, art, jazz, food, drink, sex, hiking, gardens--all that good stuff. He hates war, poetry readings (his own, that is), and the deaths of friends. He realizes that living is such that it is best not to take yourself too seriously; hence, the shortest poem here, "Credo": "I am of those who believe / different things on different days." The best thing about his poetry, apart from his irrepressible humor, is that it swings, like the subject of his "Solo Monk" --Thelonious, of course.Ray Olson