The Blaster, self-portrait, postmarked 30 December 1998, courtesy of paghat.com
“Blaster” Al Ackerman died on Sunday. He was a general in Baltimore’s literary avant garde—though
it occurs to me that assigning him a rank is way too straightforward for Blaster’s interstellar brilliance.
He was a presence. He was the sort of guy, he walked into a room, everyone noticed. He moved through
Baltimore like he knew what he was talking about, and what he was talking about was, like,
“It’s a curse you’re from low testicle tapin land” or something.
He had more original thoughts by bananas A.M.
than I’ll have this year. He could marry words in the funniest ways. What’s “low testicle tapin”? He was
so great at reading his poetry that the last
half-dozen times I saw him read at Rupert Wondolowski’s Shattered Wig Night, he performed with a bar of soap in his mouth.
He gave me a John O’Hara book once, a dime store edition. We’d never talked about it, but when he handed it to me I had just finished Cape Cod Lighter, which was the first O’Hara book I’d read. Maybe it was coincidence or maybe he intuited my interest. He often seemed shamanic like that. He had a big beard.
He wrote lots of books, including one called Corn and Smoke, which I used to see laid out prominently in the home of every self-respecting Baltimore reader. Finally I picked it up off someone’s table. I was stunned by the ecstatic language, so unexpected and jangly alongside the actually-damn-interesting storylines he wove together. To say the least, if art creates worlds, Blaster was an adventurer beyond and between them all.
Much of what he wrote was published by friends and their small presses. Much more of it was published through the postal service: Blaster did a lot of mail art. He would always write “Get to:” above the address on envelopes, which seemed so wishful, as if his words could make it there on their own. He even made his own stamps, which featured his own paintings, which, like, come on.
I didn’t know him well enough, but I knew him well enough to know I was lucky to know him at all. He seemed like the kind of person who prioritized making strange things and sharing them with interesting people, and in this was the fullness of life. I sort of feel like he’s still adventuring beyond and between all these worlds he created.
Here’s a poem of his, published in the Shattered Wig. Read it. It ends, “We cannot be correct/We haven’t time” – well, huh. I hope someday to be as incorrect as “Blaster” Al Ackerman was. Nicely done, sir.
