Huncke A Poem & Paintings

Originally published in 2008, this second edition of Huncke is a reconsideration. Many of the stanzas have been improved with care taken to keep the original narrative on track. That narrative, which uses Herbert Huncke as a scaffold for a gloss on American social issues, art, and history, has been extended with the “discovery” of a lost canto.

“An epic narrative poem where time is a many-layered thing, Huncke is a world-in-a-poem, where its titular hero/anti-hero, inspiration and name-giver to the Beat Poets, and low-life/high-life, infamous, indefinable, freewheeling rebel-without-a-category icon appears in many dimensions: in memory, in history, in the here-and-now, in poetry, in dialogue with “angels” and “ghosts”, in holographic animations, in real and fictitious characters of every stripe, all contained within the constraints of a medieval form (ottava rima to the cognoscenti) that creates the sense of a forest or a feast of cantos winding their way, stoned-soul fashion, through haunted catacombs or buzzing “red-yellow” honeycombs, an underground world that all begins at a poetry reading attended by Mullin himself.

This is clearly not the sort of poetry that “molders in the stacks / of storage rooms,” but the kind that actively creates a world whose ecosystem can’t help but stimulate a heightened awareness of the interaction between life, politics, and art; an ecosystem that also contains, for your reading pleasure a funhouse, where you will definitely get deliriously lost.” (Siham Karami)