HOWELINGS

She Ran With Neal Cassady

By Mark Howell

Aside from Ernest Miller Hemingway who wrote “For Whom the Bell Tolls” between boxing bouts in town, plus Thomas Lanier“Tennessee Williams” who wrote“A Streetcar Named Desire” while listening to Billie Holiday records on Duncan Street and Hart Crane dreamed up “The Bridge” in between sailors and Robert Frost worked in his cottage and Ralph Ellison worked invisibly and John Dos Passos wrote in between fishing strips and TrumanCapote came up with the catastrophic “Answered Prayers” at the Pier House and James Leo Herlihy and Thomas McGuane partied hard with Elizabeth Ashley and Margot Kidder and Peter Fonda and Jim Harrison and Richard Brautigan too, even as Elizabeth Bishop found her rooster on White Street and Charles Olson composed in his field and Wallace Stevens fixed the idea of order here, not to mention Ann Beattie’s chilly scenes from up north and Annie Dillard’s pilgrim from the creek and ultimately Judy Blume’s hello to God, not to mention Shel Silverstein and his sidewalk’s end and the fact that Jimmy Buffett and Lawrence Ferlinghetti never did get to greet each other on Duval Street — aside all of the above, there is but one other poet we have yet to include in such a list.

Tina Flowers once ran with the famed Neal Cassady, bad boy of the Beats. She died in Key West just this month. Flowers was born in1944 in Tennessee but was truly a New York City poet. She moved to Key West in 1986 and lived with John Billera at his home in Bahama Village ever since; they have known each other since she was 7 years old, when both their parents were remarried to each other. Typically and interestingly, Flowers died without a social security number: Last of the free women!

It was in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s, at the subterranean Gaslight Café — hangout of hipsters that included William Gaddis, author of “The Recognitions” and a Key West connection himself — that Flowers first met Cassady (the “Dean Moriarty” of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”). She fell for him hard, she once confessed, and he vice versa, which was invariably the way with Neal.

What attracted him must surely have been Tina’s amazing witchery, a wild mix of the pornographic and the sweetly enlightened. Tina was way ahead of her time.

Flower’s poetry was latterly written in couplets: Two lines separated by a space, a format favored among the Buffalo poets of the 1970s.

What always distinguished her spare verse was its tumultuous eroticism. She last published several decades ago and subsequently took to the life of a recluse, although maintaining daily connections with family and friends.

Tina Flowers will be missed and deserves a place among the historic writers of the Keys.

 

*****

Americans spend on average 8 hours and 44 minutes in bed, according a new survey by the federal government’s Bureau for Labor Statistics.                                                               ****

More statistics from the American Time Use Survey:

The state that sleeps the least:

Wisconsin at 8 hours and 35 minutes.

The states that sleep the most:

Alabama and Mississippi at 9 hours and 8 minutes.

The states that personally groom the most:

Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and South Carolina at 45 minutes.

The state that personally grooms the least:

Vermont at 28 minutes.

*****

Quote for Week:

“What is the nature of the universe?

“If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists.

“Then we shall all, philosophers and scientists and just about anyone, be able to take part in the discussion of the question why it is that we and the universe exist.

“If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would know the mind of God.”

— Stephen Hawking (1988)

 

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