Jim Morrison - The Collected Works of Jim Morrison

Courtesy of The George Morrison Family Partnership, L.P. and Courson Family Enterprises, LLC Rendering poetry in a digital format presents several challenges, just as its many forms continue to challenge the conventions of print. In print, however, a poem takes place within the static confines of a page, hewing as close as possible to the poets intent. Reading poetry on a small device will not always deliver line breaks as the poet intended and there are limits to what can be done with long lines on digital screens. At some point, a line must break. If it has to break more than once or twice, it is no longer a poetic line, with the integrity that lineation demands.

On smaller devices with enlarged type, a line break may not appear where its author intended, interrupting the unit of the line and its importance in the poems structure. We attempt to accommodate long lines with a hanging indent. On your screen, a long line will break according to the space available, with the remainder of the line wrapping at an indent. This allows readers to retain control over the appearance of text on any device, while also indicating where the author intended the line to break. This may not be a perfect solution, as some readers initially may be confused. We have to accept, however, that we are creating e-books containing poetry in a world that is imperfect for themand we understand that to some degree the line may be compromised.

Despite this, weve attempted to protect the integrity of the line, thus allowing readers of poetry to travel fully stocked with the poetry that needs to be with them.

Those who know James Douglas (Jim) Morrison only as the electrifying lead singer of The Doors, a sixties rock star with panty-dampening good looks, a penetrating voice, and a stage presence somehow both sultry and spooky, threatening and seductive (a living embodiment of that wounded dark angel who carjacks the midnight dreams of many a postpubescent girl), will likely be surprised to learn that throughout his short life (19431971) he considered himself first and foremost a writer. Of course, its well known that Morrison composed the lyrics of many if not the majority of The Doors hit songs, lyrics that still prowl the auditory hallways of legions of fans, and are included toward (appropriately) the end (... my only friend, the end) of this retrospective. Only recently, however, have surviving family members disclosed that from an early age Jim filled journal after journal (dozens of them!) with copious expressions of an obviously literary mind: that he professed, in fact, to have become a musician largely by chance. (These visions are not to be confused with the several real treatments, also included here, for films that Jim wished either to direct, star in, or both. (These visions are not to be confused with the several real treatments, also included here, for films that Jim wished either to direct, star in, or both.

These last seem influenced by old gunslinger and gangster movies, as do a few of the poems.) Energizing each and every page is the compulsive creativity of a kind of castaway on a potentially threatening shore, a lost but determined explorer who both courts danger and seeks to exorcize it; who goes out of his way to pluck the strangest fruits, only to polish them with a cotton cloth of innocence. Simultaneously atavistic and postmodern, these verses are fraught with evocations of our deepest fears, with poisonous vipers and stinging insects, with serial killers and nuclear clouds. Even as were pulled along expectantly from one lyric-like line to the next (as if passengers on one of Rimbauds drunken boats), we can almost feel the cobras tongue flick against our bare neck, sense the maniacs eager eyes peering in our kitchen window, listen for the air raid alarm. Yes, but theres another side to James Douglas Morrison. He flourished in California in the psychedelic sixties, a period like no other, a time when an entire generation seemed to flirt with its neurological destinyand without benefit of rocket science, sought to orbit the moon. Morrison wrote that we had a great visitation of energy, proclaimed that the ancient ones time has come again, urged readers to enter again the sweet forest / enter the hot dream.

While he deliberately drove down toad-squirmy backroads of primal terror, ecstasy was often naked in the shotgun seat, spinning jeweled pinwheels, peeling a peach. Poetsthe ones who actually matterhave seldom hesitated to play with fire. For Rumi, it was the fire of spiritual longing, for Whitman the celebratory heart-blaze of brotherhood. Rimbaud heated his images over live coals of voluntary madness, Blake could fantasize about an orange tiger burning bright, in the forests of the night (though Wordsworth seemed warmed enough by the pale yellow radiance of daffodil fields). The myriad, often disconnected verses of Morrison seem less like a bonfire than shower after shower of cerebral sparks, loosely associated embers setting the night on fire. Or maybe not.

Jims images, while certainly scattered, are more dense than sparks; less inclined to disintegrate or simply drift away. Lit by either a kind of existential dread, a mythological rapture, or both, they resemble more precisely swarms of cerebral fireflies: those existential lightning bugs that flicker on and off, off and on, down in the black velvety night of deepest human consciousness. Lantern lice of our lost Eden. Fireflies of the apocalypse. Tom Robbins

When people discover that I knew and worked with Jim Morrison, they invariably ask me, What was he really like?a seemingly simple question that is always hard to answer. I knew several Jims: the shy loner who was my classmate at the UCLA School of Film; the rock performer who was always raising the stakes of what was culturally acceptable; the lyricist, poet, and writer who surprised me with notebook pages of complex poems and gifts of self-published books; and the hitchhiker: Thoughts in time & out of season The hitchhiker stood by the side of the road & leveled his thumb in the calm calculus of reason This invocation, or incantation, appears as the opening lines of several of Jims poems.

As I read it, he is sketching a portrait of the mid-twentieth-century Dionysus, watching and waiting for the next ride on the infinite highwayhis thumb, like a compass, pointing to the next direction; his mind, empty of preconceptions; a man, secure in his calm and measured reason. Jim embellished this image of the hitchhiker in his film treatment The Hitchhiker: An American Pastoral and portrayed the character in his film, HWY. In life Jim traveled light and often alone, hitching rides on LA streets, open to whatever chance encounter might satisfy his limitless curiosity and his search for new boundaries. * * * Almost everything Jim wrote was first set down in a notebook or on any handy scrap of paper: a cocktail napkin, an empty page at the back of a book, a creased envelope. The notebooks came in a variety of sizes and shapes: from steno pads and old-fashioned ledgers to school composition books and leather-covered artists sketch pads. The wealth of material includes poems and songs, short monographs, theater pieces, scenarios, recalled dreams, epigrams, aphorismseven a diary of his (in)famous trial in Miami.

After Jims death, many of his notebooks were brought from Paris by Pamela Courson. When she passed away three years later, they were safely stored by her father, Columbus Corky Courson. Corky hired me and my then-wife, Kathy, to curate and transcribe works from the notebooks to create a manuscript he hoped to have published. He eventually found a publisher in Villard Books who brought out