What is it about poets and pulps? The easy answer is imagination and vernacular. One might throw in a dash of ubi sunt just because it is truly about nostalgia, a nostalgia for a certain kind of storytelling that dispenses with the metaphysical and is driven by narrative inspiration and colloquial dialogue. The storyteller was not always defined by paragraphs and pagination. And poets are the ur-storytellers, singing of valorous and miraculous interludes in the myths of yore—it’s something poets, even contemporary poets, feel at their roots. Of course a lot has changed since, as Aram Saroyan once remarked, campfires were the first TV. In the post industrial world, the wood pulp paper used in the publication of disposable literature from newspapers to magazines to novels for most of the 20th century became the designation of a genre.
Pulp can also be an acronym for Popular Undervalued Literature Publications. There is something common, déclassé about pulps. That’s why that kind of reading is called “guilty pleasures.” All popular literature delights in the sordid and the vulgar in which the reader can catch a glimpse of themselves in de facto complicity.
Noir is often conflated with pulp, but there is a distinction. Penzler suggests that noir began with Hammett in the American canon. Police procedurals depict an unromanticized look at our venial selves, and thus the abysmal pessimism of “noir.” Noir can be characterized by irony and cynicism, the modern malaise.
Pulp writing, on the other hand, represents a certain naivety, a suspension of belief that speaks to a kind of anti-existentialism, an escape to the realm of fantasy and fanciful storytelling. With a few notable exceptions, the popular men’s magazines in the 1920s and 30s featuring lurid stories of crime, the unusual, and the future, “true” or otherwise, can be considered “pulp.”
Postwar, the pulp heroes and villains grew capes and fled to the comic books, leaving the field open to an angst driven sardonic despairing self-righteousness of the survivors of a world cataclysm, winners and losers, but mostly losers, now defined as noir.
It is not unusual to find poets engaged in writing or reading pulp or noir, or for a novelist to pen a collection of poems. As writers write, one or the other becomes their maître and is recognized as such. Almost a hundred years ago, the poet Kenneth Fearing published acclaimed crime fiction in the pulps. James Sallis, author of the Lew Griffin PI series, is an accomplished poet, yet it is for his skillful novellas that he is known. Jim Harrison, author of Legends Of The Fall and the Detective Sunderson novels, was also known for his poetry. Poet Alice Notley, an admitted fan of the genre, published an epic “noir” poem titled Negativity’s Kiss in France (where the word originated), managing to synthesize the bleakness of crime fiction with the abstraction of the avantgarde. Kerouac and Burroughs (Williams S.) wrote Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks, as a paean to the hardboiled pulps. Roberto Bolaño, a poet whose novels are more well known than his poetry, cashes in on the cachet of pulp and noir with the title of his remarkably dark narrative, The Savage Detectives. James Ellroy might fancy himself a poet, pushing the stylistic envelope as poets do. And for countless other writers, known and unknown, poets or novelists, the genre of imagination and vernacular holds a peculiar fascination. It is, in a sense, a return to the source. Just sayin’: scratch a poet and find a storyteller, and vice versa.
Two recent books, Woody Haut’s On Dangerous Ground and Jim Nisbet’s Pandemic Ditties, offer a case in point.
Woody Haut’s On Dangerous Ground, Film Noir Poems takes its title from the Nicholas Ray movie of the same name. As the 50 “film noir poems” illustrate, the poet is well informed in the both genres. The author of numerous critical studies of the noir genre including Pulp Culture: Hard Boiled Fiction and The Cold War and Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction as well as a couple of noir pot boilers, Cry For a Nickel, Die For a Dime and Days of Smoke, Haut’s poems take their titles from such classics as The Big Sleep, Nightmare Alley, and Touch Of Evil as well as the lesser known films like Where The Sidewalk Ends and I Wake Up Screaming. The poems themselves are prompted by dialogue, interesting camera work, the plot, a particular scene, the acting by the actor/actress, or their depiction of a time, place and social relevance which reveals the author’s knowledgeable immersion in a distinct American genre with a French name.
Woody Haut started out on poetry but soon hit the hardboiled stuff. And he even admits it! “Poetry had been my first port of call, though over the years my relationship had succumbed to disgruntlements and separations.” And yes, the poetry world is not an easy safe to crack, and even if you do, sometimes, although the safe may seem full, the rewards can be empty. Still carrying some of the baggage from that time, he confesses, “stretching back to the mid-1960s, in Los Angeles, then San Francisco, with various publications and a range of mentors, from the academic — Henri Coulette, Philip Levine, Jack Gilbert — to the peripatetic—Michael McClure, Charles Olson, Amiri Baraka and Ed Dorn. More recently, my interest veered towards the more linguistically-oriented, such as Clark Coolidge, Michael Gizzi, and Tom Raworth, and political screeds by the likes of Sean Bonney and Keston Sutherland.” And he is not above spilling the beans and implicating other writers in this amour fou: “Alice Notley, Robert Polito, Geoffrey O’Brien, Nicholas Christopher, and earlier, Weldon Keyes and Kenneth Fearing. Even Raymond Chandler began his writing career composing doggerel for the Westminster Gazette, while the great Dorothy B. Hughes garnered the Yale Younger Poets Prize long before she wrote such classics as In a Lonely Place or Ride the Pink Horse.” And of course the most damning testimony, besides his own words, are the poems themselves.
On Dangerous Ground
(Nicholas Ray, 1952)
Why do you punks make me do it?
growls the cop as he beats the shit
out of a pathetic street hood. As if
the same old same old, aggressor
blaming victim, perking watch and
wonder. Law and order cracking as
inevitable as the saturated light, an
apartment filled with testosteronised
artifacts: what once was, will never
be. Violence, as always, feeding the
conundrum. If only it wasn’t so addictive,
or family of last resort. A jones exiling
him to a sparsely populated snow-
ridden town, viewed-a movie within
a movie-through a windscreen, the
schtumed backseat viewer cachéd
in their own private critique, bleached
out by the death of a young girl at the
hands of a teenager barely knowing
better. With darkness bleeding into
domesticity, a match is lit for unblinking
eyes, and a wounded plea to locate her
brother before revenge can freeze his
tracks. Frightened, the kid invariably
slips from higher ground, recycling a
geology of clichés, footnotes in an
expurgated history of crime and
punishment. Fifty years on, the screen-
writer, blagging in his local coffee shop,
tells a redacted story: how he’d simply
wanted the cop to return to the city a
different person. But the studio’s arc was
non-negotiable. After all, the politics of
money dictates that only a miracle can
suffice. A capitulation, however generous,
not quite more than barely nothing at all
As Haut explains, “the poems in On Dangerous Ground could be thought as distortions, often humorous, of the films under consideration, like scrambled film reviews that exist at a particular moment, distilled through time, whose shelf life will last until the next viewing, by which time another set of linguistic prompts or images might attract my attention.”
Woody Haut’s On Dangerous Ground is available from Close To The Bone Publishing
A longtime member of the Bay Area lit scene who passed away in 2022, Jim Nisbet was an internationally recognized novelist and poet, and a seminal figure in the West Coast Noir Renaissance. His many novels which include Lethal Injection, Windward Passage, Snitch World, and The Syracuse Codex (to name only a few) have been described as “Jack Kerouac meets Tarantino meets David Forster Wallace” which is some kind of hyperbole but fitting of the genre and the author.
Nisbet returned to his poetry roots (not that he was ever very far from them) to put the pandemic in pentameters in a selections of poems titled Pandemic Ditties. Jim, in the late 70s was a young poet in San Francisco who wrote and declaimed his poetry in coffee houses and bookstores. He even read at the historic San Francisco Punk Poetry Festival at Terminal Concepts Gallery with such luminaries as Andrei Codrescu, Gloria Frym, Darrell Gray, and the ravishing redhead femme fatale, Victoria Rathbun, straight out of a noir drama. Obviously, as it turns out, poetry wasn’t the only thing he was writing.
The poems, fifty five in all, collected in this slim volume from Molotov Editions, were written over a two year period (March 2020 through June of ’22) and distributed to his email contacts. Informed both by classical tradition and the immediate circumstances of the pandemic, these poems deal in matters political, spiritual, and cultural — but ultimately take the shape of an increasingly personal encounter with the phantasms of the pandemic.
Nisbet has a fine discerning ear and the Oxfordian vocabulary to go with it. The raucous ditties romp and roam, the pace hyperactive, reminiscent of the high wire antics of Nisbet’s prose, walking the line between doggerel and limerick, all the while juggling a ham on wry sense of humor. And like those internationally acclaimed novels, the poems are nothing but lively and thought provoking. An excerpt from “No. 19” written in July of 2020 gives an idea of the gyroscopic wit of the novelist as poet
Safe at home in 1958
We had Doctor Zorba
Who, his eyes turned away at last
From the jitterbugging babe
In The Asphalt Jungle, weekly chalked
On a dusty slate
“Man. Woman. Birth.
Death. Infinity.”
Today, not safe anywhere,
We have Subdoctor Schnorba
Sketching in thin air
“Person. Woman. Man.
Camera. TV.” Repeat ad
nauseum. Never mind
The incredulity. Expect
Rezids, directly deposited.
The poems in Pandemic Ditties (pace Defoe) demonstrate Nisbet’s great range, from highbrow to lowbrow at the flick of the tongue, resulting in fascinating frenetic high octane linguistic kaleidoscopic versifying. A seat belt, nay, a harness is recommended if you’re going along for the ride: whiplash may occur as the result of sudden sharp turns, changes in direction and orientation, and abrupt stops, all of it like an amusement park ride, entertaining as well as exhilarating. Anyone who has enjoyed Nisbet’s novels will appreciate this selection.
Jim’s Pandemic Ditties is available from Molotov Editions
There is no doubt, as it is quite obvious to the most casual of observers, the genre is infested with poets. Should the reader of pulp be concerned, put in a call to the exterminators? Probably not. Poets and pulps are in a symbiotic relationship, like Louis and Rick in Casablanca, it is a “beautiful friendship.”
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it,
Perry O’Dickle
for Dime Pulp,
Ron Goulart may be viewed as a lightweight by the toting crowd but the sheer volume of his engagement in the pulp/comic genre allows him to claim the turf he helped established. He was the author of over two dozen compendiums on comics and golden age pulp fiction illustrating the comic book’s emergence from the fantastic pulp genre and the Sunday Funnies. He wrote numerous futuristic novels that played off the unintended Schumpeterian and most often hilarious consequences of mechano-tech—he was the gleeful saboteur of a Popular Science future. Of the over two dozen nonseries novels, including Clockwork Pirates (1971), The Robot in the Closet (1981), and Now He Thinks He’s Dead (1992), most are of a whacky dysfunctional Murphey’s Law universe. His Barnum System series of novels is a planetary circus of its own with such titles as Spacehawk, Inc. (1974) and Galaxy Jane (1986) among numerous other linked and obtuse permutations his agile mind could hatch: Hail Hibbler (1980), After Things Fell Apart (1970). Goulart’s era was the twenty years span from the mid-70s to the early 90s in which he wrote under many pen names (Chad Calhoun, Zeke Masters, Jillian Kearny) as well as his own, collaborating on a range of projects in the pulp comic book genres which included penning Flash Gordon stories, Vampirella, and Avenger. In the 1970s, he wrote several novels based on Lee Falk’s The Phantom (“the ghost who walks”), a character incorporating proto-super heroes, essentially Tarzan as Batman with a brace of 45’s, for Avon Books under the pseudonym “Frank Shawn”.
Both PIs, Sughrue and Milodragovitch are hard drinkers, and hail from the cowboy states, Texas and Montana, the author’s home turf. They are the giants from the north exacting their version of justice in a particularly cockeyed world. A natural born storyteller, Crumley spins tales of mishaps and bad luck death defying scrapes that are often hilarious in their telling but also tragic in their own right as a history of bad choices. His characters inhabit a world of regret and wounded psyches. Often times the graphic violence seems gratuitous, yet no one would doubt the authenticity of the pictures Crumley paints. Crumley’s is a world of right and wrong with a lot of leeway gray viewed from the other side of the tracks where there is honor of a kind among outlaws and where some situations can only be resolved by violence. The plotting of the novels allows Crumley’s penchant for the shaggy dog tale and wide ranging hair of the dog that follows.
Lew Griffin, Sallis’s PI, is portrayed realistically, not as a knight in shining armor, but as gritty, a survivor in spite of himself, haunted, flawed. Griffin is featured in six novellas, all titled after insects (companions of the loner or lonely man) beginning with The Long Legged Fly in 1992 and including Bluebottle in 1999, and Ghost Of A Flea in 2001.The action is often muted, viewed in the aftermath or off camera, the consequences telling the story that led to them. Lew Griffin is a black man, obviously self-educated and fond of quoting French authors, living in or on the edge of poverty in and around New Orleans. He finds people or saves them or kills them but always with lengthy soul searching consideration. He’s a tough guy because he is forced to be not because he wants to be. He has no illusions, thus the basis of his sustained noir ennui.. The tang of adrenaline is rare in Sallis’s crime fiction yet the depictions and progressions of the stories are always satisfying, literate contemplative ruminations on the human condition.
—Perry O’Dickle, chief scribe 
Deep in the redwood wilds along the Corkscrew River, someone is shooting neighborhood dogs. The year is 1985 and Lee Malone, former fashion model, queen of the runways from Paris to Milan, once dubbed the most beautiful woman in the world, now a part-time reporter for The Corkscrew County Grapevine, is looking for a story to sink her teeth into. When Lee finds the owner of Kelly’s Seaside Resort brutally murdered, it leads her on an adventure that includes a mysterious gray van, another murder, extortion, pornography, sex slavery, and a shadowy organization of militant feminists known as SAPHO. In the process, Lee Malone’s notorious past catches up with her. 
Once again from Hard Case Crime, the imprint that is doing it’s darndest to resuscitate pulp nostalgia with it’s tantalizing cover art and reprints of of crime fiction classics as well as original contemporary genre fiction comes Max Allen’s Collins’ continuing saga of master thief Nolan and his young, comic book-loving partner, Jon, matching wits with mobsters while trying to hang on to their lives as well as their stash of bank heist loot. This installment of Dropping A Dime takes a look at the origins of the Nolan and Jon team in Bait Money as well as the contemporaneously penned wrap-up curtain call (but not “curtains”) for the duo in Skim Deep. 
Hard Case Crime has reprinted four novellas from that late 80s period, Two For The Money and Double Down (reviewed in Dropping A Dime Two) each in the twofer format, which will be joining another two (four) titles slated for publication in 2022 and 2023. Skim Deep, the encore curtain call for Nolan and Jon, is novel length in its own right.
Can an author go back to a character thirty three years later and pick up where he left off? What will have changed in experience and maturity of style? These are question the curious reader might ask as they dip into Skim Deep, the epilogue to the Nolan saga, the last ride into the Acapulco sunset.
Dime Pulp 