“if art does not
tear the sham from
all political thinking
and lead to
a truth to free the
mortal-material soul
if art does not
lead to revelation
or revolution
or beauty
or insight
or hilarity
over the pitiful
human race
if it does none
of these
art is only the ego
jacking off
the dead

- “The Ego Jacking-Off The Dead”

Of the unfortunate legacies of Bukowski and Thompson on so-called underground or gonzo literature, the accumulation of more young male angst and alienation than a Trench Coat Mafia convention or a Pakistani “training” school (present author not excluded) is perhaps the most aggravating.

This makes it a unique pleasure to discover poets who embrace the “outlaw” aesthetic but who are also unafraid to embrace their maturity. Doug Draime may be the best of these kinds of poets.

Draime has been a working poet since the late 60’s but Spiders and Madmen represents his fourth release in the last five years, meaning the ravages of time are not slowing his muse up that much. For poets who make it this far into the game, history and romance become intertwined archetypes that must be rendered real:

“I heard that the former owners of
the restaurant were followers
of Mussolini
and started the restaurant after he
was executed in 1943, and that
the waiters carried machine guns
under their
aprons. Some people believed the
stories, others didn’t.
To me the stories were as real as anything, real as
the drunks, the cops, junkies, speed freaks, alley sleeping
homeless, and the sex freaks and whores
walking in front of, and walking in and out of,
my place of employment.”

• from “4^th and Main”

Draime’s poetry is haunted by place, and his manuscript is shot full through with places whose unifying populace is, in fact, spiders and madmen.

The finest pieces in this collection (“Missing the Point”/”Who Built This Place”/”I Can Hear The Wind, It Is a Frozen Waste”/”The True Story of Noah”) mix bruising insights with a sardonic tone. This is the maturity that is so rare in what passes for the literary underground, but don’t be mistaking Draime for a sellout:

“if I stumble over the space trash and lies
between you and me,
don’t be too harsh with your judgement, and if you
are among the literary intelligentsia,
you already know with certainty this poem
will never appear in the American Poetry Review.”

• from “Missing The Point”

I’ll admit to being a bit biased because I feel Draime has a clear, “California” voice for poetry (witness the standard Buk tribute “More Details”) but what that means is an accessible voice that can be trusted by the reader who knows that veil of civilization is primarily a sham propagated to distort the fact of our species twin pre-occupations with death and sex.

-Paul Corman-Roberts