Wilderness - Volume 1 - The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison

      1988; 212 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Full Title: Wilderness – The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison – Volume 1.  Genres : American Poetry; Diaries and Journals; Rock Stars.  Overall Rating : 5½*/10.

    Jim Morrison.  Born December 08, 1943.  Died July 03, 1971, age 27.  Lead singer of The Doors, and a stellar member of the “27 Club" (see the review here).  But he saw himself first and foremost as a poet, and in a “self-interview” at the start of this book, he says:

    “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.

    “…and that’s why poetry appeals to me so much – because it’s so eternal.  As long as there are people, they can remember words and combinations of words.  Nothing else can survive a holocaust but poetry and songs.  No one can remember an entire novel.  No one can describe a film, a piece of sculpture, a painting, but so long as there are human beings, songs and poetry can continue.

    “If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.”

    And that’s as good of a way to introduce Wilderness – Volume 1: The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison as I can come up with.

What’s To Like...

    According to the publishers, Jim Morrison left more than 1,600 pages of poems, lyrics, stories, film scripts, etc. when he died, yet not one page was ever dated, numbered, or identified chronologically.  So there’s no order to the poems given in Wilderness – Volume 1, indeed, most of them don’t even have titles.  There is an “Index of First Lines” at the back of the book to help if you’re searching for a particular poem, and I thought that was a nice touch.

    The publishers divide the book into 10 sections of unequal length.  By far the longest part is simply called “Poems 1966-1971”, and comprises of 125 pages of the 212-page book.  The section “Ode to LA while thinking of Brian Jones, Deceased” is both ironic and haunting, since Brian Jones is also a member of the 27 Club.  “For Arden” is unique in that it has a few lines that have both meter and rhyming.  And “As I Look Back” is eerily retrospective, almost as if Jim Morrison knows he isn’t going to live much longer.

    As a longtime lover of The Doors, I enjoyed finding “early versions” of some of the lyrics that were later incorporated into the songs.  There are four “rough drafts” of L’America, a track off of L.A. Woman, and none of them are even close to resembling the final version.  The snippet of poetry in Peace Frog, from Morrison Hotel, makes two early appearances in this book.  There’s a poem titled Horse Latitudes, which is also a song title on the album Strange Days, and even a line from the titular L.A. Woman track started out a poem here.

    A half dozen or so photographs of Jim are interspersed throughout the book, along with some scans of a couple of the original pages from Jim Morrison's notebooks.  There are also a number of blank pages.  To say this book is a "fast read" is an understatement.  You can probably read the whole book in an hour or so, although personally, I find poetry easier to read in small “chunks”.

    I think the best thing about Wilderness – Volume 1 is that it gave me a glimpse of the “real” Jim Morrison.  Let’s face it, his antics and gyrations as the lead singer of The Doors are all an act.  But the scribbled prose in his notebooks give us keen insight into the strange thoughts that were swarming around in his head.

Excerpts...

    Why do I drink?

    So that I can write poetry.

    Sometimes when it’s all spun out

    and all that is ugly recedes

    into a deep sleep

    There is an awakening

    and all that remains is true.

    As the body is ravaged

    the spirit grows stronger.

    Forgive me Father for I know

    what I do.

    I want to hear the last Poem

    of the last Poet.  (pg. 119)

    Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding

    Ghosts crowd the young child’s fragile eggshell mind

    We scaled the wall

    We tripped thru the graveyard

    Ancient shapes were all around us

    No music but the wet grass

    felt fresh beside the fog

    Two made love in a silent spot

    one chased a rabbit into the dark

    A girl got drunk & made the dead

    And I gave empty sermons to my head  (pg. 180)

Which of my cellves will be remember’d?  Good-bye America.  I loved you.  (pg. 209 )

    There were a couple of nits to pick.  First, there are four or five instances of cussing in the book, but that’s a lot less than I would have expected.

    Second, many of the “poems” seem to be nothing more than bits of streams-of-consciousness that Jim Morrison jotted down for later polishing and rework.  There is some good stuff here; as the two excerpts given above demonstrate.  But the bulk of the material seems like mere jottings, just lumps of clay that Jim Morrison would later develop into literary works of art.  I have a feeling that if he was still alive today, he’d forbid these poems being published “as is”.

    Also, some of these poems are short, sometimes having as little as three lines.  That adds to the significant amounts of blank space in the book, since the publishers seem averse to combining more than one poem on a given page.

    I suppose this means the reader has lots of room to scribble in his own thoughts about the poems, or maybe even to take a stab at polishing some of these, but I think a few trees could have been saved by making more efficient use of half-filled pages, and either adding more entries from the thousand-plus pages of Morrison-penned poesy or else combining Volumes 1 and 2 in this series into a single book.

    5½ Stars.  If you’re a Doors fan, I think Wilderness – Volume 1 will be a worthwhile read, giving you an honest look at a brilliant, yet sadly troubled mind.  But if you have no idea who Jim Morrison, or The Doors are, you might want to skip this book and go listen a couple of their albums instead.