There is a specific group of poets who reflect the hardscrabble working-class ethos of my state. They don’t exactly form a tendency or a “school” (or, God forbid, write manifestos), so I have decided to give them a moniker: The New Jersey School of Two-Fisted Poetry. I’m thinking about poets like Eliot Katz, Joe Weil, Nancy Mercado, David Roskos, and the late Jack Wiler and Bob Rixon. Their work is ultra-direct, often in the reader/listener’s face, topical and seeks a readership beyond the coterie. Many poets went to Rutgers University studying with poets like Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Miguel Algarin, and Amiri Baraka. Local poetry heroes include Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg (who often read at Rutgers), William Carlos Williams, and Patti Smith (who grew up in South Jersey).
Origins of this bumptious grouping have parallel roots in the local 80s punk rock scene around college town New Brunswick. Prolekult Poetry Circus was a reading series that hosted events at the Court Tavern and the Melody Lounge—epicenters of the local music scene. Further north was the reading series at the Barron Art Center which is going strong 40 years later. I attended and read at these venues and the evenings were wild, spirited and, at times, raucous.
One of the better-known poets to emerge from this community is Danny Shot. A bit of a troublemaker in his suburban hometown of Dumont, he enrolled at Rutgers and after sampling a few majors, finally switched to the English Department. He studied with Ostriker, a pioneering feminist poet, and Algarin, the founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café. He made life-long connections with student poets like Katz, Wiler, and Mercado, which led to the creation of Long Shot Magazine (1982-2004). Although oriented towards the Beats and the poets around the Nuyorican Café, its range was eclectic, publishing poets ranging from Susie Timmons to Sean Penn. Affiliated with no institutions and allergic to applying for grants, the magazine was self-funded through benefits that featured local bands and poets and by just being a popular literary magazine. Issues sold out (with press runs of 1,500 copies) and a couple of issues were reprinted. Part of the appeal to its readers was that it was unselfconsciously multicultural, defiantly working-class, and always rooted for the bottom dogs of both literature and society.
Despite his activities as a publisher, organizer, and editor, Shot did not get around to publishing his first book of poetry until he was 60 years old with the publication of Works by CavanKerry Press in 2018. Shot is now back in the publishing game with two new books in 2025: a second book of poems, The Jersey Slide (CavanKerry), and a collection of prose, Night Bird Flying (Roadside Press).
The Jersey Slide has a cartoon panel-like cover by Robert Piersanti, which serves as a preview of what awaits the reader: the Jersey-side Hudson River waterfront, late model jalopies, poems from a child of a Holocaust survivor, the vast Meadowlands and a talismanic beer bottle. The title of the collection refers to an illegal steering move in which a driver goes from the far left lane of traffic all the way over to the exit ramp without using a blinker. It is also known as the Jersey Weave, Jersey Swerve and Jersey Shuffle and is joyfully practiced on our merciless, multi-laned highways.
In this book, Shot is like Whitman with an E-Z Pass in his satchel. He is, at turns, joyous, rueful, and politically aware. He reflects on the travails of aging: “give up on the notion of black hair / you’ll look like Gary Glitter.” He creates a compendium of excuses for not attending a reading in NY: “I didn’t want to run into Manny / Didi said you cancelled / I was watching Mrs. Maisel and lost track of time.”
There’s also a lot of “serious stuff” in The Jersey Slide: loss of friends and family, rising anti-semitism, and insight culled from a long career in the trenches of the NYC school system.
You see yourself as a bon vivant
A distinguished man of letters
In reality you are a retired English teacher
Still trying to find his place in the world
Does it matter you were once a punk?
(from “Presentation of Self as Performance Piece”)
Shot seems to have absorbed the advice that Allen Ginsberg told a teenaged David Shapiro: “Think about the pathetic local boys of Paterson.” He’s tuned in to local speech, local custom, and a strong sense of regional identity. My favorite sections of the book are two collections of short poems which act like an anthology of Jersey tanka. “What The Dog Walker Said” is a good example:Hoboken’s is like a cult
they Sit in their cubicles all day
working working working
then they turn into werewolves
Thursday and Friday night
It’s crazy they sure like to party
I wonder how they vote?
Night Bird Flying—the title is derived from a Jimi Hendrix song—is an excellent companion to Jersey Slide. The collection brings together essays, memoirs, and homages to deceased mentors, all of which adds up into a cubist Bildungsroman. The collection has the four stages of the genre covered: loss, journey, personal growth through conflict, and maturity—but not necessarily in that order. I love the Jerseyana pieces—Shot, too, notices the lack of benches in Hoboken—but the non-regionalist reader will be interested in his evocation of the Manhattan downtown poetry scene in the postpunk era. I found the memoirs of his relations with Allen Ginsberg, Miguel Algarin, and Andy Clausen to be both honest assessments and heartfelt remembrances. His remembrance for Clausen is particularly moving and enlightening. Clausen was probably Ginsberg’s most significant protégé and a standard bearer for all things Beat. He had a hard and tumultuous life, was a classic example of “a difficult friend” and “a character”—he boycotted his partner’s funeral due to some dispute with her adult children. The memoir chronicles long trips to the Catskills to tend to the ailing poet, who is entering palliative care. Clausen remains “a character,” even in illness. Shot is finally getting exasperated by his behavior:
My patience begins to wane. I am annoyed when Andy is not dressed and upright in his wheelchair on days I come to visit. I appreciate a show. I get mad when he doesn’t understand why I have to miss a visit to attend the funeral of my Hoboken friend and neighbor Aaron. It’s hard to stay angry at Andy, always has been, but still, I wait a couple of days before calling him again. As I write this, it becomes memory. Things get lost.
In 2024, Shot was made a Lifetime Beat Poet Laureate by the National Beat Poetry Foundation. It’s a fitting tribute. Danny Shot’s writings represent an advancement of the Beat Ethos—and he’s steered clear of sexist and racist cant that mars appreciation of first-generation Beats for some contemporary readers. And teaching literature to NYC kids for decades is the exact opposite of Bohemian squalor. Plus, he just celebrated his 40th wedding Anniversary and his two sons like him. With Shot’s delightful literary doubleheader out in the world, more eyes will be brought to his work outside of his loyal readership. In addition to wearing the honorific beret of the Beat Foundation, he also does double duty as a poet for people who never quite fit in... and don’t much care to.