Here the Oedipal drama of “The End” reaches its climax. In “Celebration of the Lizard,” Morrison tells a story that he has been developing since The Doors’ first album. The god of this universe is the Lizard King, with his leather pants, his tousled mane, his deep bluesy voice, and that boyish charisma that could found a cult. The development of this imagery can be traced back to his second self-published volume of poetry, The New Creatures, but it appears here in a more mature form in the poem, “The Desert.” The landscape of his new mythos is the desert of the American southwest. The collection begins with An American Prayer, the last of Morrison’s three self-published books of poetry and one of the performance pieces recorded between 19. The American Night combines performance pieces from The Doors’ discography with previously unpublished poems from his notebooks. The two volumes of poetry published posthumously as Wilderness and The American Night reveal the growth of Morrison’s poetic voice and his creation of an American mythos that is dark, hypnotic, and transgressive. Jim Morrison was a philosopher-poet, a mythopoeic visionary in the tradition of Blake, a Dionysian wild child who died before his time.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |