Crossing Kansas with Jim Morrison: Poems

I learned of Lindsey Martin-Bowen’s poetry collection, "Crossing Kansas with Jim Morrison," on a Facebook page for Global Writers and Poets.Serendipitously, I am a Doors devotee and was thrilled to get my copy featuring a revivified Jim. Apparently, she and I had both fallen in love with him after viewing Oliver Stone’s movie, “The Doors.” In his film, Stone had superimposed an image of the god Dionysus over Morrison’s face. Likewise, in the preface to No One Here Gets Out Alive, Doors aide Danny Sugarman had termed his boss a “modern-day god.” Drummer John Densmore described Doors’ concerts as “rituals” in Riders on the Storm.Martin-Bowen takes a different approach in her collection. Similarly smitten with Jim, she reincarnates his spirit out of her car radio and trips through the Kansas landscape seeking La Loba, a mythic native woman with the power to reanimate lives from their bones. Just as Jim was convinced of the Dionysian power of music to revive myth, Martin-Bowen’s poetry revives the Lizard King Jim. She knows all too well about his belief in a shamanic mission, set in place when he saw, in his own poetic words: “Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding Ghosts crowd the young child’s fragile eggshell mind.”As Morrison sang about Breaking on through to the Other Side, Martin-Bowen brings him back to life, her own poems breaking on through on a daily basis for a Facebook group she had joined in 2015. I would call this steady stream of creativity from the other side a tapping into right-hemispheric, poetic consciousness (see my "In Their Right Minds: The Lives and Shared Practices of Poetic Geniuses). Her poetry breaks on through “stoned, immaculate” as Morrison’s words resonate with her own sights, sounds, tastes and smells, a full panoply of sensation. You’ve come along for the ride of your life and you won’t want it to end. Music, literary discussions, quantum physics, and Ezekiel’s valley of the bones also sneak on through. With a world of depth in one slim volume, you will close the book with “Shaman voices reverberating in [y]our brains” and you’ll clamor for more.

An amazing fantasy trip across Kansas with rock icon and all around good-looking guy. His presence adds much to our already beautiful landscape.

Poetry is the painting of the literary world. Words are your colors and you have to use them thickly. The emotional impact upon the reader is much stronger than in longer forms such as short stories or novels. Lindsey Martin Bowen’s “Crossing Kansas with Jim Morrison” paints a mystical journey with Jim Morrison.The Jim Morrison that appears in “Crossing Kansas” is a personal Morrison that she met (like most of us) through biographies, documentaries, and films. Morrison comes to her, Martin-Bowen, or the unnamed female protagonist of the poems when he manifests out of her car radio. Her Morrison is more archetype appearing as the shaman, the literary scholar, Banshee, James Dean and even as a trickster spirit guide changing appearance at will. During the journey across the plains of Kansas they encounter the Indian myth of La Loba, the wolf woman or bone woman who gathers the bones of the dead to rebuild them so they have new life, and Morrison and Martin Bowen head off to Mexico in search of La Loba. Is Morrison seeking resurrection through his visitation with the poems’ protagonist?Martin-Bowen does paint those pictures upon the page, her words thick with imagery and meaning, “she rebuilds my throat/spine and all four femurs/wraps them with honey/an elixir, and I turn gold.” While Martin-Bowen’s poetic style is different from Morrison’s own poetic output, you can sense some of the same themes in her poems such as resurrection, examining our belief systems, and of course the Indian motifs.“Crossing Kansas with Jim Morrison” is available from Amazon in paperback format, as it should be, each poem creates a picture on the page, line against a blankness that provides form instead of electrons ordered on something more ephemeral and less substantial than a book of poems such as “Crossing Kansas with Jim Morrison”.Jim Cherry writes The Doors Examiner