ALWAYS A WORD MAN
Jim Morrison’s literary legacy comes home.
“Listen, real poetry doesn’t say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you.” — Jim Morrison
ON APRIL 7, 1970, the notable publishing firm Simon & Schuster combined two previously selfpublished works by a young American poet and released them under the title, The Lords and The New Creatures. Although the poet’s work was barely known by the public at large, the company evidently decided that his notoriety at his other job — lead singer and lyricist/songwriter for a popular Los Angeles rock band — meant that the book stood a decent chance of selling.
Fifty-one years later, The Lords and The New Creatures, by Jim Morrison, has never gone out of print, and sales figures are estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. Similar success has greeted the volumes
Wilderness: The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison, Vol. 1, a
New York Times best seller in 1989, and The American Night: The Writings of Jim Morrison, Vol. 2. In 1991. In 1993, Morrison’s literary output received a robust critical appraisal by noted American scholar Wallace Fowlie, in his now-classic Rimbaud and Jim Morrison: The Rebel As Poet, in which he observed, “Morrison’s work appears as the reflection of great poetry, but the reflection is obsessive and subtle.”
The enduring critical and commercial engagement with Morrison’s work, says Frank Lisciandro, the de facto literary curator for Morrison’s estate, “affirms what many of us have known to be true for years: Jim Morrison is a significant American writer.” Lisciandro, an intimate of Morrison’s from his UCLA days and beyond (read his remarkable
Friends Gathered Together for first-hand accounts of the man behind the myths) has recently completed the Herculean task of compiling and editing all of Morrison’s known writings — including his poems, film treatments, essays, and aphorisms — along with handwritten excerpts from more than 28 recently discovered notebooks and some 160 drawings and photographs, into one single volume.
Weighing in at just under 600 pages,
The Collected Works of Jim Morrison (Harper Design) grandly fulfills one of Morrison’s deepest aspirations, as well as Lisciandro’s vow to help secure his late friend’s literary legacy and to educate the public. “My idea was to pull together a single volume that would live in every university and high school library,” Lisciandro says. It’s fitting, since Morrison practically lived in a library himself, and often worked in one. He was, by every account, exceedingly well-read, with an uncanny ability to retain entire passages of prose or poetry from writers as diverse as William Blake, James Baldwin, William Burroughs and Plutarch.
Still, Jim Morrison rarely let his intellect impede the immediacy and visceral thump of his poetry, which is nowhere more in evidence than when he read the poems himself, as he did on what would become 1978’s An American Prayer LP, a striking marriage of Morrison’s 1970 spoken-word recordings and fresh studio tracks by the remaining Doors, who co-produced the album with Lisciandro. That said, with their deliberate indentation and pacing, the words on the page carry a kind of spectral resonance, too.
In his poem “Ode to L.A. while thinking of Brian Jones, Deceased,” Jim responds to the 1969 drowning death of the Rolling Stones guitarist in words one could only hope providence applied to his own premature departure. “You’ve left your/ nothing to compete w/ Silence / I hope you went out / Smiling / Like a child / Into the cool remnant of a dream.”
“MY IDEA WAS TO PULL TOGETHER A SINGLE VOLUME OF JIM’S WORK THAT WOULD LIVE IN EVERY UNIVERSITY AND HIGH SCHOOL LIBRARY” — FRANK LISCIANDRO