32 The hungry i club at 599 Jackson was one of the key performance venues about which Beat society revolved, featuring socially aware comedians like Sahl, Gregory, and the drug-addicted Lenny Bruce amongst its dazzling roster of hip entertainers.

  33 This may refer obliquely to an episode in 1975 when Belner apparently lost a manuscript copy of Connor Davey’s debut novel, Coming Forth by Day in America, that Davey had left with Belner for the revered older writer’s consideration and comments. Possibly Davey’s work was one of the patience-nibbling ‘glyphic corpses’ referred to in footnote 7.

  34 These lines are an evocation of the long-vanished Bell Hotel at 39 Columbus, mentioned by Kerouac in Desolation Angels as a favourite stopover on his San Francisco visits. The inclusion of ‘hep Negro script’ would seem to be a glancing reference to sometime Bell resident, black working-class writer Al Sublette. We will find that in American Light, women, people of colour, representatives of the underclass and those of Irish extraction all seem to merit no more than glancing references, unless exempted through being friends of Allen Ginsberg. ‘Paradise’ is, of course, a reference to Sal Paradise, the self-based principal character of Kerouac’s On the Road.

  35 According to ancient Egyptian metaphysics, the human soul has nine separate components, or bodies.

  36 Here, Belner playfully misprises the Transamerica Pyramid at Washington and Montgomery as the tomb of a buried pharaoh named Transamerica.

  37 The khaibit is the part of the human soul corresponding to the shadow.

  38 The ba or heart-soul, another division of the Egyptian soul, was depicted as a hawk with a human head. From Belner’s reference to ‘capon’ here, along with the opening declaration of the fourth stanza, we should probably assume that the hawk representing the poet’s heart-soul has a stated fondness for chicken.

  39 These lines celebrate the Black Cat Cafe at 710 Montgomery, closed down after a Halloween-night raid in 1963. Its clientele of hard-drinking literary figures included William Saroyan, Truman Capote and John Steinbeck, depicted here metamorphosing into the famously alcohol-destroyed William Faulkner.

  40 Aside from its reputation as haven for drunken literati, the Black Cat is justly recognised as one of the earliest flowerings of American gay culture. Long before the Greenwich Village Stonewall Riots of 1969 sparked the modern gay pride movement, the Black Cat was, in the 1950s, an almost unique meeting place for openly gay individuals, presided over by drag artist Jose Sarria, who performed as the Empress Norton, in honour of visionary San Franciscan eccentric and self-proclaimed emperor of America, Joshua Norton. Norton was the titular spirit of Belner’s earlier San Francisco-based poetry collection, Norton’s Empire (Nailhead Books, 1970).

  41 Belner is here recalling the glory days of the Purple Onion, still there at 140 Columbus St. This quintessential San Francisco cellar club hosted the earliest performances of great entertainers and artists such as the Smothers Brothers and the Kingston Trio. Garry Goodrow, mentioned here, was a well-liked stand-up comedian and actor – his movie credits include 1973's Steelyard Blues – who also appeared at the Purple Onion. In the well-known group photograph of prominent Beats that was the cover of City Lights Journal #3, to which we will be returning, Goodrow is the figure standing on the far right with the comical hat and the admittedly ‘tragic grin’. The reference to ‘blackbirds singing from their low-wage cage’ is a by-now-predictable side-lining of the writer Maya Angelou, author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, who sang at the Purple Onion in the 1950s.

  42 The Committee Theater at 836 Montgomery was the venue at which Michael McClure hoped to present his play The Beard in 1966 after a previous theatre had been threatened with closure for the play’s brief inclusion of simulated oral sex. In the event, the performance at the Committee Theater was shut down after one night on the same grounds, this on a block otherwise crowded with topless bars and strip clubs.

  43 The ‘first-night Fenians’ referred to here are, unsurprisingly, McClure’s writer friends of Irish ancestry who were attending the play’s first (and last) night. The mention of ‘fawning’ might be specifically directed at the writer Connor Davey: The Beard’s performance at the Committee was the first occasion that Davey had met Belner, who at that point was the younger author’s literary hero. Belner may have interpreted this enthusiasm as mere fawning over a famous name – the name, or ren, being the eighth body of the ancient Egyptian soul.

  44 More divisions of the soul: the ab is the heart, the ka is the double, and the khaibit, as earlier, is the shadow.

  45 This is an inversion of the enigmatic phrase ‘noon-blue apples’, related to the Rennes-le-Château mysteries. Since this appears to have no relevance to Egyptology or the poem’s other themes, we can only suppose that its inclusion is solely for the purpose of underlining Belner’s one-stanza-per-hour structure.

  46 Since 1010 Montgomery was the address at which Allen Ginsberg composed most of Howl in 1956, we must assume that he is ‘the undefeated sun’, an Anglicisation of late Roman solar deity Sol Invictus.

  47 The Sir Francis Drake Hotel at 450 Powell, witnessed while under the influence of peyote, was Ginsberg’s inspiration for the vision of Moloch that presides over one of Howl’s most memorable passages.

  48 Here, Belner equates Howl with an utterance of ibis-headed Egyptian writing-and-magic god Thoth, who was said to have created human speech after ‘the language of the birds’. This phrase was also used by alchemists to indicate a particularly rich and symbol-laden poetry whereby profound alchemical ideas might be conveyed.

  49 A trireme is a three-mast sailing vessel of the ancient world, and the overall sense of these lines would appear to be that Belner turned left on Broadway and headed towards Chinatown.

  50 This is a less than celebratory reference to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books at 261 Columbus Avenue which, since its inception in 1953, has been the vital central pivot of Beat literature. In its thirty-two years thus far as a publisher, however, it is yet to publish any of the works of Harmon Belner.

  51 The front cover of City Lights Journal #3, referred to above, is a group photograph by Larry Keenan Jr of many leading Beat figures gathered in front of the bookshop, with Ferlinghetti at the rear. Between Gary Goodrow on the far right and the white-hatted Richard Brautigan next to him, we can see one eyebrow and the side-parting of a young Harmon Belner. ‘Bunford’ was Allen Ginsberg’s contemptuous nickname for Brautigan.

  52 Apparently an admission that Belner has used City Lights as a potential pick-up spot for literary groupies, since the bookshop is as far as the poet gets from home in the course of the poem, this raises the possibility that the excursion described in American Light was conducted entirely in search of random sexual assignations.

  53 Here we have Belner finding his own reflection to be the only thing of interest in City Lights’ front window.

  54 An unusual passage, with Belner using the alleyway between Grant and Columbus as an excuse for this sudden veer into Egypt-inflected noir private-eye imagery. Interestingly, in 1982 and therefore six years after Connor Davey’s death, Davey’s widowed partner found a previously unsuspected draft copy of Davey’s presumed-lost novel, Coming Forth by Day in America, to be published by the Hillwood Press in 1986. We may usefully compare Belner’s lines here with the opening paragraph of Davey’s absurdist Egyptian-noir Beat novel: ‘The sun was a big Egyptian bastard that had finally caught up with Brendan O’Jaysus, after he’d been avoiding it for months. It came through his slatted blinds like gold planks, falling off of a delivery truck to bury the poor, nearly dead man as he slept there on the coffee-ringed sarcophagus that he was using for a desk. Startled awake, he came out fighting. “Up and Atem,” he unfathomabled, taking wild swings at the glittering intruder. But the thuggish cosmic phenomenon was too fast for him, and anyway was made of photons through which Brendan’s fists, made out of reinforced ham or the like, passed ineffectually. Still, he managed to punch almost all the other objects in his office, bedroom, kitchen and, if he was honest, sometimes bathroom, before giving up with a despairing cry of “How and why do I remain alive?” He sat on the edge of his fold-down coffin, located an unpunched cigarette, and bitterly accepted that he was a two- or even one-bit private eye in Ptolemaic San Francisco, where the bigshots were all beasts from the neck up. Sure, the whole city was a morbid Disneyland.’

  55 If we assume that ‘Gee almighty’ is a further reference to Ginsberg, and that ‘the Hibbing kid’ is Bob Dylan, born in Hibbing, Minnesota, then these lines refer to Ginsberg and Dylan being photographed in this same alley during the middle 1960s. Michael McClure, unmentioned here, was also present. The mention of ‘rolling thunder’ is a reference to the Rolling Thunder Revue tour that Dylan and Ginsberg undertook in 1975.

  56 Within the time frame of the poem, it is now approximately 1:00 p.m., and Belner has decided to have lunch at the Vesuvio Cafe, just across the intervening alley from City Lights at 255 Columbus. The Devourer of the Dead is an Egyptian funerary entity, sometimes depicted as a gigantic python arranged in intestinal loops and coils, that is said to ingest those souls whose hearts outweigh the feather of truth on the scales of judgement.

  57 While Belner’s repast doesn’t seem to derive from the regular Vesuvio menu, we cannot rule out that the establishment may have made exceptions for such a revered customer. Or he may have eaten somewhere else.

  58 Here we have a recap of Vesuvio’s rich history: in the thirties and forties, the whole North Beach area was a haven for Italian anarchists. In 1960, a possibly nervous Jack Kerouac drank his way out of a dinner engagement with Henry Miller up in Carmel Highlands, while Dylan Thomas got ruinously drunk at Vesuvio during the same American tour that would end up killing him at New York’s Chelsea Hotel in 1953. Henri Lenoir, the café’s proprietor, had started out selling silk stockings to the neighbourhood’s burlesque performers.

  59 Carven into the cement outside Vesuvio’s front door are the names of those permanently barred by reason of their drunken behaviour. The ‘coarse Gregorian corsair’ on this list is obviously Gregory Corso, while ‘Shameless O’Sullivan’ is the itinerant San Francisco street-poet, Paddy O’Sullivan, to which we can only remark, ‘Again with the Irish’. We would also draw attention to those names gouged into Vesuvio’s doorstep that Belner does not make even derogatory reference to here, including the poet Janis Blue and the almost unique Beat writer of colour, Bob Kaufman.

  60 The café is also the place where, in 1954, Allen Ginsberg wrote ‘In Vesuvio’s Waiting for Sheila’, about his then girlfriend Sheila Williams, whom he would soon thereafter break up with before commencing his relationship with Peter Orlovsky and writing Howl.

  61 Here, at approximately 2:00 p.m. in the poem’s chronology, we see Belner’s spirits and those of the whole Beat movement declining as if in sympathy with the gradually sinking sun. Certainly, American Light seems to take on a darker and more regretful tone as the poem moves towards its sunset. The reference to ‘hearts quivering in their balance’ alludes again to the Egyptian concept of weighing the heart against a black vulture feather, symbol of the goddess Maat. Sometimes, presiding over, or at least present, at this ceremony, we find the cynocephalus, otherwise the dog-headed Ape of Thoth, whose arbitrary and apparently senseless interventions are at least impartial. There is a sense here that Belner’s concern is for how he – and by extension the Beat movement – might come to be judged by history and literary criticism in the fullness of time.

  62 The White House department store that stood between Sutter and Post had a jewellery department from which, in 1948, Neal Cassady had promised to buy a wedding ring for his pregnant girlfriend Carolyn, who would go on to write revealingly about her life with Kerouac and Cassady. Having arranged to meet Cassady and a friend of his outside the store, from her vantage, Carolyn watched Cassady’s friend buy the ring at the five-and-dime Woolworth’s outlet next door, then enter the White House by a side entrance to emerge from the front. This was the start of a difficult marriage, during which she returned home to find her husband in bed with swiftly evicted house guest Allen Ginsberg, and later found herself in a relationship with Jack Kerouac during those periods when Cassady was away from home.

  63 The ‘constrictors critical and intestinal’ is another reference to the Devourer of the Dead, perhaps in this instance seen as the literary critics who will digest and deliver their verdict on a writer’s work after he or she is deceased. The rest of these lines are derived from a section of The Egyptian Book of the Dead known as ‘the negative confession’, in which the soul being judged swears not to have committed a long list of offences. Why Belner, out of this lengthy list, should feel particularly uneasy about the ‘eating of cakes left for the dead’, or the ‘putting out of fires before their time’ is perhaps a question best left for another day.

  64 Belner slips from Egyptian mode to Greek here, becoming Odysseus on his home journey, with Caledonia St now become Ithaca, while Belner’s lover Paul Landesman transformed into Penelope.

  65 This alludes to the Charles Addams-style residence at 1350 Franklin, known as ‘the Ghost House’.

  66 The above residence, formerly a palatial mansion, was home across the years to poet Philip Lamantia and his wife the photographer Goldian Nesbit, film-maker Stan Brakhage who made The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, and long-term partners poet Robert Duncan and painter Jess Collins, who were the house’s principal occupants during the Beat glory days of the 1950s.

  67 These lines present what is arguably one of the most ignoble and shameful episodes in Beat history. In 1955, Neal Cassady – On the Road’s Dean Moriarty – persuaded his girlfriend Natalie Jackson to impersonate his wife Carolyn Cassady and withdraw $10,000 from Carolyn’s account. His plan was to multiply the money by betting it on a horse, then return the original sum to his wife’s account before she knew it was missing. Inevitably, the ‘horseplay played out the wrong way’, and the horse lost. Natalie Jackson was distraught over her part in the crime, and though Cassady left her in the care of Jack Kerouac, on 30 November she cut her own throat and then ran across the rooftops adjoining her apartment at 1041 Franklin, pursued by a police officer who was attempting to help her, before jumping or falling to her death. On learning what had happened, the terrified Cassady and Kerouac both claimed not to have known Jackson. What is interesting is Belner’s deployment of the tragedy at this point in his poem’s narrative. Belner seems to be in a state of penitence and seeking atonement, but the Jackson story presents this as if Belner is seeking forgiveness for the generalised sins of the entire Beat movement, rather than for any that might be his alone. Is Belner attempting to bury the specific in the general? The final reference to ‘Duncan’s coffin dance floor’ alludes to the above-mentioned Robert Duncan and the apartment that he shared with Jess Collins at the ‘Ghost House’, formerly the mansion’s ballroom.

  68 This would seem to refer to the hieroglyphic figure of a god with his head reversed that is found in The Egyptian Book of the Dead and known as ‘He who comes forth backwards’. In the context here, it appears to signify merely that Belner is in a reflective or retrospective mood as he begins to head back down Market St.

  69 If we assume that ‘Beat Amon’ is a further deification of Allen Ginsberg, then this passage commemorates the demonstration outside the Palace Hotel at 633–655 Market in October 1963, protesting against a visit by Madame Nhu, wife of Vietnam’s secret-police chief, which was the first political protest that Ginsberg attended. Also in attendance was poet Lew Welch, who liked to present himself as a Beat confidence-trickster.

  70 During the depression, the Federal Writers’ Project had its offices at 717 Market, where the poet Kenneth Rexroth worked as editor on the project’s American Guide Series for California and San Francisco.

  71 Moving a little further down Market, Belner here finds himself walking through the setting – at 721, where one of the street’s many movie theatres used to stand – of Allen Ginsberg’s most well-known photograph, showing Neal Cassady and the tragic Natalie Jackson embracing happily beneath a hoarding with the same show bill that Belner details here, just a few months before the events that would lead to Jackson’s death. Again, Belner seems unduly penitent over generalised Beat ‘betrayals’ to which he was in no way connected.

  72 The old Pacific building at 821 Market housed, in the 1940s, the offices of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, during the period when both Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac were working for Southern Pacific.

  73 Michael McClure, newly arrived in San Francisco in the 1950s, worked at the Vic Tanny Gym which stood at 949 Market. In his spare time, motorcycle-enthusiast McClure would work out using the gym’s facilities or would be writing poetry.

  74 This sudden associational leap from Golden Gate Avenue to the Golden Gate Bridge demands scrutiny. For one thing, throughout American Light, the locations that Belner passes through or even thinks about are chiefly employed as reasons to rhapsodise about the Beat history associated with those places, providing much of the poem’s substance. Here, however, we have roughly half a stanza that seems to contain no specific Beat references at all, and which instead appears to be a meditation on the Golden Gate Bridge as a favoured spot for suicides, once more informed by the sense of penitence and ambiguous guilt that we have noted in the preceding stanzas. Nor, if we exclude the mention of ‘Nile-wide waters’ and a further allusion to hearts being weighed against feathers, does there appear to be the same density of Egyptian reference in this passage as we have noted previously. Nevertheless, the notion of Sausalito on the bridge’s far side as a ‘next world’ can be usefully compared with this passage from chapter ten of Connor Davey’s Coming Forth by Day in America: ‘With a defiant yelp of pain, O’Jaysus drove the back of his head into the oncoming Egyptian ceremonial mace to show what he thought of it. A black pool of unconsciousness swallowed him, but very quickly retched him back up with a look of appalled disbelief. It came to him in depressing increments that he was in the back seat of a Ford Sarcophagus, tied up with sandy bandages, and being driven at ferocious speed across the bridge of Golden Fate by two dog-headed fellers who were jackaling his hackles fit to burst. “What is it with you underworld enforcers that you’re always dogs?”, he irrelevanted. “You’ve got Cerberus; you’ve got Anubis; you’ve got Pluto. I’d always thought the dog a relatively sunny animal. And where, might I ask, are you taking me, wrapped up as if I were all wound and damage?” His canine captors snickered their reply past flappy tongues and horrifying teeth. “Yer bound fer the hereafter, boyo, all the way to Sacred Sausalito and an afterlife that’s more an afterthought in your case.” Brendan haughted snortily, “Why, Sausalito’s just a fairy tale made up by Catholics. It’s an evasive metaphor for death, in my opinion.” “Have it your way,” gruffed the ruffians, and backed his head into another ceremonial mace. Darkness swallowed him again, but not without an apprehensive grimace.’