„Urge to come to terms with the“ Outside „, by
absorbing, interiorizing it. I won’t come out,
you must come in to me. Into my womb-garden
where I peer out. Where I can construct a universe
within the skull, to rival the real ”. *
That Jim Morrison was a snake charmer on stage we all know. His poetry, on the other hand, has become a no man’s land since his death: the myth of psychedelic rock’n’roll, of the rebellious, of dark eroticism, continues to eclipse the poet. The Lords & The New Creatures collects his first poetic work in a book that Morrison self-published in 1969 and that seduced Michael McClure himself, an immense beast of poetry and one of the few beats that remain alive.
The anthology is divided into two parts. In the first, The Lords (Notes on Vision) Morrison exposes his vision of the modern world through a network of images and associations of ideas that evoke the instinctive, the irrational. Among these visions about his perception of the immanent functioning of the world, he will search for the social essence of theater and cinema, relating them to the magic of shamans, to the most primitive of human beings. Voyeurism as a modus vivendi, the roles of actor and spectator in society, the role of television in human domestication and everything that hides behind the superficial impressions of reality and shapes our existence will be the pasture of its prose poetics. These texts, many of them quite cryptic, were probably born in his years as a film student at the University of Florida, a career that ended but was later disregarded.
In The New Creatures poetry gets more sullen. Myth, legend, religion, sex, horror, nature, death, everything that he invoked on stage before the masses, turned himself into a shaman and using music, gesture and word, is transformed here into message in code, enigma. In password to be able to cross the threshold and reach … the other side, of course.
* It is urgent to make peace with the „Outside“ / absorbing it, internalizing it. I will not go out / you must enter inside of me. Inside my womb-garden / from which I look out. Where I can build a universe / inside the skull, that rivals the real thing.
