PerfectlyWritePoetry: Herschel Silverman –‘Beat Poet Candy Man’

Friday 9 October 2015

Herschel Silverman –‘Beat Poet Candy Man’

Below is a clip of a reading by US Beat poet Herschel Silverman who died last month aged 89.

If you rub your chin and confide that his name does not readily spring to mind along side those of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and co, then you’re in good company!

How could the humdrum, stable life of a sweet shop owner with a wife and children to support possibly compete with those of the crazed but starred founders of the beat generation?

Even the obituarist in The Telegraph wrote that Silverman worked “to little fanfare” while running his ‘luncheonette’, Hersch’s Beehive, in New Jersey.

But he became a long-time pen-pal of Ginsberg and his verse developed to combine Beat themes like jazz with details from his domestic life. So while influenced by his better known peers, he managed to produce what Ginsberg called an “inventive energy, New Jersey beauty and charm in his compositions”.

This excerpt from Nite Train Poems as discussed on CultureCatch displays Silverman’s skill for raising the mundane to the level of art:

i run away in mind

                         in nite train

again and again

                         and again

something bugging me

                         money maybe

a need to scream   to cry out

                         and curse with verbs

     to release the utter   Frustration

                        of a rent due

     and electric gas bill --

     the lack of tears so inhibiting

            the train carrying me

     filling with a nervous gas

                 the hang-ups

          coming to a halt

                 for a while

          in a bottle of Fleischman's

               and some ginger ale

I conclude with an excerpt from Section VI of Jazz & the Changes, which the poet dedicated to his wife, neé Laura Rothschild and addressed to her:

“i told her

there's no Jazz

Real Jazz

without Gut

without Love

or Zen statement

no ear

without Jazz

no Jazz without Ear,

that Jazz is the daily statement

an unincorporated

release

      of the condition of

an individual's soul

                              in relation

      to God”

[*The four poems in the recording, documented by Mitch Corber, are Crazy She Called Me, Cittee Cittee Cittee, For Jim Brodey and To Construct the Blues for Moe. Perry Robinson is on clarinet.]