Night Bird Flying: A Review

Sitting on the western bank of the Hudson River—the geographic and spiritual boundary separating New York and New Jersey—Hoboken, Danny Shot’s current hometown, connects to Manhattan Island by highway, tunnel, train, subway and the poet, editor, publisher, educator, and arts activist’s memory and imagination. Stand in Hoboken and look east and you see the seductive promise of the West Village, Soho, and beyond. Stand in Soho and look west and all you see is Jersey.

This clearly troubles Shot.

He concedes as much in “Ich bin ein New Yorker,” the lead essay in Night Bird Flying, a collection of ten autobiographical vignettes recently released by Roadside Press which spans Shot’s high school years through the present. Shot—who was born in the Bronx and spent about 30 years teaching high school in Harlem, the South Bronx, and Brooklyn—sees himself deeply rooted on both sides of the river. “As much as I might wish to the contrary,” he writes, “there’s no denying I’m a Jersey guy. But there’s also no denying I’m a New Yorker too. I’ve paid my dues.”

Indeed he has.

Beatdom readers will be familiar with Shot through the pages of Long Shot, the journal he and Eliot Katz co-founded in 1982. Volume 1, which received some of its original funding from Allen Ginsberg, was released in a run of 500 and was followed by 26 more editions, ending in 2004. Long Shot’s sensibility was part Beat, part Punk, and all Katz and Shot.

Over the years its pages included works by and about Amina and Amiri Baraka, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Andy Clausen, Ray Bremser, Charles Bukowski, Jim Carroll, Richard Hell, Tom Waits, Janine Pommy Vega, Anne Waldman, Tuli Kupferberg, Jack Micheline, Ed Sanders, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and a legion of lesser-known up-and-coming poets, some of whom appear in Night Bird Flying.

Reviewing doesn’t come naturally to me. Sure, no question I’m probably pompous enough for it, but I’ve always felt that writing, especially good writing—and Shot is a very, very good writer—is best experienced directly, not filtered through someone else’s biases. So, in the name of full disclosure, before I go any further, here are some of the biased baggage I bring to this review.

I don’t know Danny Shot, but at points in Night Bird Flying I caught myself thinking we had lived weirdly parallel lives. He lost a parent (his father) at 15, the same age I lost my mother. In many ways his New Jersey bears an eerie resemblance to my Detroit. He stumbled through lots of days and nights and so have I. Like mine, his past included later-period Greaser turf wars, leather Spanish wineskin botas full of Boone’s Farm, Annie Greensprings, or—on a flush night—Mateus Rose, windowpane acid, and whatever sex, drugs, and au courant incarnation of rock ‘n roll was on offer. So, as I read and reread Night Bird Flying I felt I was revisiting, if not a common past, at least a past with commonalities. There, you have it.

If those biases throw you off or take away from the “objectivity” you think a reviewer should somehow possess, tough. Quit reading. I’m not apologizing for who I am any more than Shot is. For those of you who are still with me after that thoroughly self-indulgent disclaimer and caveat, I have to say that there are parts of Night Bird Flying that made me laugh out loud, parts that made me tear up, and a lot of parts that caused me to nod and smile.

If “Ich bin ein New Yorker” explores Shot’s geographical identity, his second essay “72 Scars” maps his internal universe and the scars he accumulated during the 1972-73 year. “We all have them.” he writes. “I’d have to say that there is a limitless variety of scars a body can have.” Shot focuses on five he received that year although the first—a case of Acne Vulgaris so bad that it may have surpassed Charles Bukowski’s—actually started in 1971 and extended into the 1980s.

The second was a broken nose sustained in a boxing match when, having defeated all comers in his division, Shot moved up a weight class and was promptly wiped out in his first fight.

The third was a bad case of plantar warts on each heel, the fourth a thumb broken as it was slammed into a space between a bathroom stall door and frame following the announcement of the death of his close friend. The fifth was a scar to the heart suffered when his father died on October 22, 1972.

Each “external” scar was mirrored by an internal one. The acne led to an insecurity so deep he couldn’t take his shirt off even in bed with a lover. The broken nose served as a reminder of what happens when you (literally) try to punch above your weight class. The warts were a painful reminder of how easily what was gained can be lost and how long pain can endure, just as the final scar, his father’s death, reminds Shot that pain, even the worst pain, can be endured.

“And We Drown” chronicles adolescent battles of the heart, the fluid borders of friendship and loyalty, bodies colliding in lust and other dubious battles, alcohol and pharmacologically altered minds, hormones, and… oh, yes… the battle for a public park all served up as a tranche de vie of life in, to steal a line from The Who—who, along with the Grateful Dead make a cameo appearance—in the teenage wasteland of the 1970s.

Second full disclosure, “What a Wonderful World” stopped me dead in my tracks and brought me to tears. Like Shot, I’m not a guy who easily cries in public, but this is, in my opinion, the crown jewel of this collection.

“She is the one that I don’t want to write about,” Shot writes. “She is the thing. The one thing I must write about. She is dead now.” The “she” in question is Carla, Shot’s long-dead lover.

A lot of us have a Carla, or a Carl, in our pasts, and that’s what makes this story so powerful and at the same time so soul crushing. Spoiler Alert: Carla died, too young or maybe too old, on September 26, 1983, as she was recovering from both shooting up 13 bags of smack and whatever drove her to try to end her life in the first place. “But that doesn’t mean that on occasion my love for her doesn’t burn like an ember on a funeral pyre,” Shot writes. “I don’t tell my wife about these feelings. Of course not.”

Shot’s total love of Carla—or total obsession with her, as he himself agrees might have been the case—takes readers from New Jersey to San Francisco where the fatally star-crossed lovers hang with Gregory Corso, his son Max, and Jack Micheline in places like Vesuvio, Specs, and the streets. It ends at Carla’s grave behind a Catholic church in Titusville, NJ.

Earlier I said that I believe that great writing should be experienced directly, and there are passages within the 40-page “What a Wonderful World” that are some of the best writing I’ve run into in a long, long time. Consider this quote from the final few paragraphs:

I know that by writing this story I run the risk of forever losing the parts I choose not to tell. Maybe that’s for the best. That’s how it is with writers, what we put down on paper becomes the reality and all else gets lost in the ocean of forgotten memory. This is the story I had to write. Sometimes we must leave a piece of ourselves behind before we can move on. And I guess it’s time to move on.

For my money, “What a Wonderful World” is worth the full price of admission. Every one of these pieces is worth reading, but this is the one I know I’ll be going back to. Like I said, there’s a Carla, or a Carl, or maybe both, in lots of our lives, but most of us aren’t as brave as Danny Shot, so we keep them safely locked away.

If “What a Wonderful World” takes you down faster than a dime bag of bad dope or a double-handful of bootleg fentanyl, fear not. Shot follows it with an immediate emotional lifesaving dose of literary Narcan in the form of “Big Dick”—an absurdist, surrealistic fable of the tragic life of George and Duke, his increasingly growing penis which inexplicably takes on a life of its own. Initially a source of great pride, Duke continues to grow and grow, requiring George to resort to buying hand tailored pants and eventually leading the life of a total recluse. One day George’s apartment catches on fire, but Duke has grown so large that they are both lost in the flames.

“A South Bronx Tale” is another cautionary tale, one sadly much more real. No laughs or giggles here. It concerns Ron Joyner, a student at Samuel Gompers Vocational and Technical High School in the South Bronx where Shot taught. He describes Joyner as, “…a bright, energetic, eager student…” He lost track of Joyner after he graduated until 1995 when he saw him on television being arrested for a violent one-man crime spree that included beating one woman to death by pounding her head into the sidewalk, sexually assaulting another woman whom he beat into a coma, sexually assaulting a jogger, and attacking a fourth woman. Shot, renamed Scott in the story, testified on Joyner’s behalf as a character witness. It didn’t work. Joyner was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. His story was eventually made into an episode of Law and Order.

“Ginsberg Lives” is one of the two articles in the collection Beatdom readers may be particularly interested in. In it, Shot recalls how he and Eliot Katz first met Allen Ginsberg and developed a friendship that saw the sometimes parsimonious poet kicking in half the money he had earned from a reading with Shot and Katz to jumpstart Long Shot.

Shot details a last ride with Ginsberg and Katz to the Port Authority after Herbert Huncke’s 1996 funeral where the three poets laughed, discussing various plans for Allen’s funeral. The story ends the following year with Shot and Katz attending Ginsberg’s actual funeral.

Earlier, with unsurprising chutzpah, a younger Shot gave Ginsberg one of his poems to critique. There is a version of his response in “Ginsberg Lives” but Beat scholars will note that the actual message on a postcard dated May 8, 1976 read:

Dear Dan Schott (sic)—“It occurs to me I am America” —see by that touch, I avoided the dumb single-mindedness trap you fell into, once. I realized I was talking to myself, not an outside Boogie Man—that took a mind-jump, you gotta take that happy imaginative mind-jump out of your resentment into panoramic humor. Of course you do do that double-humor (mixed with deep part and generosity) in the poem you sent me—it’s built into the style and situation of the pome
Another thing you gotta remember is that each line should have some haiku or double-joke or image or mind-sound or Poetry in it, not be just flat prose—even if the original doesn’t do this. you can, & try to do better than the original, why not—remember it’s the mutual playfullnes, innate intelligence called forth, not just resentment complaint—but the happy mind wildly funny—Good luck & keep sharp and honest.    

I’d say it was advice well taken.

“Mom,” which chronicles aspects of Shot’s mother’s life and death, is a short but insightful riff on family, love, sibling loyalty, obligation, life, and death that will ring true to anyone who has lost a parent they cared about.

“Maestro” is another study of life and death, this time of Miguel Algarín Jr., the great Puerto Rican poet, educator, and co-founder of New York’s Nuyorican Poets Café. “How awesome it is to have him as a friend,” Shot tells us. “The void he hoped to avoid is now filled with love. Miguel is irreplaceable. Algarin (sic) has taken his place among the immortals. Camina suavemente por el camino a la eternidad, amigo.”

Roughly translated, the last sentence reads, “Walk gently on the road to eternity, friend.”

Beatdom readers may also be particularly interested in “Death of a Poet”—the final piece in the collection covering Shot and Raymond Foye’s efforts to help Andy Clausen manage his health, affairs, and poetic legacy in the eight months and three days separating the July 8, 2023 death of his lover and muse, the poet Pamela Twining, and his own on April 11, 2024. Their efforts resulted in the 2024 publication of Clausen’s final works, The Fabled Damned (Zeitgeist Press) and Two Hearts Beat: The Poetry of Andy Clausen & Pamela Twining (New Generation Beat Publications).

Foye, who lives in Woodstock, a half mile or so from Clausen and Twining’s former residence, has made any number of invaluable contributions to Beat scholarship. In addition to his own work he is the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, Beatitude 29, and The Golden Dot, a collection of Gregory Corso’s last poems.

Shot gives Foye the lion’s share of the credit for taking care of Clausen. “I joke that Raymond is the most competent person in all of Woodstock, but I’m not really joking,” Shot observes. “He physically helps out in a real way as opposed to the emotional support in terms of healing thoughts or dharma wishes on Facebook that much of Woodstock offers.”

“Death of a Poet” paints a sad portrait of Clausen’s final months which, following Twining’s death, were lived in squalor until he was moved into Golden Hills Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in Kingston, NY.

Andy made peace with one son, but his other two children weren’t interested in seeing him. He pulls a dresser on top of himself and can’t get up. One night he almost burns his house down. He’s broke. He doesn’t attend the lavish memorial Twining’s children throw for their mother. He answers their questions about Pam in monosyllables. He is weak but still manages to dazzle at a poetry reading in the garden of Shiv Mirabito, the proprietor of the Woodstock Shivastan Poetry Ashram: Book Store, Art Gallery & Giftshop (Woodstock, NY) and poet-publisher at Shivastan Press (Nepal/Woodstock). Like his longtime partner and friend Eliot Katz, Shot call Clausen “America’s greatest living poet.”

“I still believe that,” Shot tells us in the last line of Night Bird Flying.

Shot is clearly at his best when the emotional ground gets rocky. There aren’t low spots in this collection, but there are high spots where he is clearly deeply invested in the subject as in the cases of “What a Wonderful World,” “Maestro,” and “Death of a Poet.”

Shot is in his late 60s. It’s a point in life where it’s natural to look back on where you’ve been even as you plan where you’ll go next. In Night Bird Flying, Shot seems to be taking as much stock of himself as his subjects.

My bet? Most readers will recognize and thank him for his bravery.

Coda

Legend has it that it took Jimi Hendrix 32 takes to master his “Night Bird Flying” and that was before multiple overdubs were added. The tune was first presented at the opening party of Jimi’s Electric Lady studio on August 26, 1970.

Danny Shot nailed his version in one.

As I thought about what I wanted to say in closing about Shot, I was reminded of Hendrix’s line from his “Night Bird Flying”that goes, “Please take me through your dreams/Inside your world I want to be.”

In Shot’s Night Bird Flying, Danny has taken us into his dreams—and sometimes his nightmares.

Thanks for the invitation inside your head, Danny. It’s an amazing place.

Night Bird Flying by Danny Shot will be published by Roadside Press in February 2025.

Learn more here.