Closing the Doors (notes to the poem)
Because it's always helpful to have some context.
Throughout my work, I’ll make references to certain things from time to time; things which a lot of you may not get at first glance. So this will serve to give you the background of what comprises some of this poem’s context. Most of The Doors’ songs were highlighted for easy reference. So here goes…
“I found a poetry book…” America: a Prophecy – incredible anthology of American poetry I found as a teenager in the library of Weber high school in Chicago (now long gone, thankfully).
https://jacket2.org/commentary/america-prophecy-anthology-collage-dekanawideh-whitman-pound-stein
“I’d play the Farfisa like Ray…” Farfisa VIP 345 combo organ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Farfisa_VIP_345_MIM_5442.jpg
“I lived on Lorel avenue after all…”
Google’s picture of this street on a sunny day does not do it justice for capturing the working class depression that normally haunts this street. This is a random picture of one of its apartment buildings (similar to what I lived in).
“And once I learned you bought a subscription to the writings of The Beast…”
The “Beast” is infamous occult magician Aleister Crowley. That’s what he used to call himself, i.e. The Great Beast. A bust of him is featured on the back of the The Doors 13 album cover. This kind of creeped me out when I learned of this which suggested there may have been more darkness to Morrison than I naively thought.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleister_Crowley
“After so many nights of trying to die (O nice us),…”
Just a little wordplay for the Greek god Dionysus who’s behavior Morrison sort of styled himself after.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysus
“Where was your Drunken Boat? Your Vintage Month? your Howl?…”
The Drunken Boat (Le Bataue Ivre) is perhaps French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s most famous poem which is about the poet taking sort of a hallucinatory voyage out to sea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Bateau_ivre
Vintage Month (Vendemiare) poem by French poet Guillaume Apollinaire. One of my favorite poems by Apollinaire about how he’s wandering around Paris one evening by the docks and he has this mystical experience about hearing a song that Paris sings; a song that takes in all the activity of the city, the cities of the world and history such that he gets drunk from “having swallowed the entire universe” in this experience. He uses the imagery/metaphor of wine, vines, vineyards, etc. to convey all this. Truly an epic poem.
Howl – signature epic poem of American beat poet Allen Ginsberg that defined the Beat Generation; and if you want to read it…(it’s a long one!)
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/howl-parts-i-ii
Abbot and Costello…comedy team from the 1940s and 1950s who were popular in films and later in TV shows. They made several silly fun films about their “meeting” with Frankenstein (their most famous one), The Invisible Man and The Mummy.