Even for the Hipsters, Hustlers & Highjivers

The Noiret Tina Blog

2011-11-06T10:38:00.002-06:00

I was given this LINK from today from Noiret Tina. She lives in Brussels and is the Project leader in new technologies and knowledge management, who is more and more interested in the connection between literature and politics, technology and politics. She says, "Why not tell all this in the form of fables or poems?"

Please visit her blog and read her story.

The link to her site above is in English translation. For our French readers, please visit this link HERE.

Portrait by Noiret Tina

Some artists do not really know their talent.

Thus, she had casually made this portrait ...

She does not like to be quoted, so I do not quote.

I just wonder the mirror

and without permission,

I walk through the ages and their faces.

The Word Junkie by Ginger Eades

2011-03-15T13:50:00.002-05:00

Click player to listen to Spoken Jive.

Word Junkie: Spoken Jive by Ginger Eades

Poem by Ginger Eades read while spinnin' "Namaste" by the Beastie Boys in the background
The Word Junkie-

I was a highjivin' debutante, on the dole, tippin' along the stroll,
in boots of Italian leather; hustlin' words as Schedule II-Clever.
'Round midnight, I wound up down on Division Street
when I spotted Johnny Law walkin' that very beat.
I was hiding inside my head
when the officer came over and said,
"You're in possession of a meandering mind!
But I'm a cut you a break-- just this one time."
So the Law let me go with a clean break
But I had to hustle cos it was gettin' late-
See, I was a practicing "Word Junkie," if you catch my drift,
thought I had gotten away with a mere slap on the wrist;
So I copped some phrases, got a dime bag of wit
I was high on words; man, I was lit!
I shuffled uptown, and tipped along the stroll
I had my words and was ready to rock n roll
I put a poem in the pockets of my suit
When two rookie cops busted me for "intent to distribute."
The coppers didn't like my claim of "words for personal use"
So they cuffed me & added charges of "literature abuse."
I plead guilty at the arraignment and now I'm doing time:
Life without parole in the jail of my mind.

Click Here to Go to Word Junkie Player

Drowning Like Li Po in a River Of Red Wine: A D Winans Selected Poetry

2010-12-08T04:25:00.002-06:00

This is a career spanning book of poetry from A.D. Winans, 398 pages. This book covers the period from 1970 - 2010 and contains a selection of poems from all of his 51 books over a period of 40 years. Paperback edition, limited to 100 copies in wraps. Perfect bound. $20.00. Contact the publisher Bottle of Smoke Press HERE.

Below are a few excerpts:

from North Beach Poems (1977)

FOR PADDY O’SULLIVAN

Paddy O’Sullivan

home again wearing

the scars of the past

like an engraved bracelet

passed on from one lover to another

walking the streets of north beach

in search of old visions now only

memories in the nightmare mirror

of madness—swapping tales

with obscene priests hung over in

the drunkenness of eternal failure.

Paddy O’Sullivan of Kerouac tales

and Cassady visions

Paddy O’Sullivan walking
Washington Square
the bulldozer death lurking everywhere.

Paddy O’Sullivan does your typewriter

still talk to you in

the lonely hours of the night?

Paddy O’Sullivan alone in

San Francisco

city of suicides past and present

waiting for that lady poet

who will forgive you in the morning

for forgetting her name in

the hour of dawn when our needs are soothed

with the power of the written word

that stirs moves inside us

like a runaway express train stalled

on the freeway

like the haunting breath

of a hound dog closing in for

the kill.

Paddy O’Sullivan where

have all the poets gone walking

straightjackets trapped by time

the sun is not as you see it now

everything changes and yet remains the same

the streets are no more or less intense

the lines on your face are the lines

on my face as we move back into

the body into the inner flesh measured by

the amnesia of yesterday.

this town coughs up its dead most rudely

the raw nerves of time returning to haunt me

oblivious to the thirst lying still at

the edge of the river.

the blueprint of our life etched in

the dark shadows of

the soul.

from It Serves You Right To Suffer (1997)

FOR DINO

The Beach is dead

The blood thin red

Dino the bartender lives

In a graveyard

Chief undertaker

Dispensing pain

Like low grade cocaine

There was a time when

I might have invited him outside

Only the tough guy image

Long ago died

The Beach is dead

The poets have left

Dino the bartender

Walks with spade and shovel

Having found his niche in life

The Beach is dead

The ghosts cry in despair

Mad cowboys rope my visions

Hog tie my poems

The curse of Kerouac serenades

The demons of sleep

The Beach is dead

from Sleeping With Demons (2003)

EARLY MORNING INSOMNIA

sitting here alone with

a perpetual hard-on

4 in the morning

insomnia tearing at my guts

can’t sleep, can’t write

pussy on my mind

and people keep writing

and telling me I’m a legend

so why am I sitting here alone

staring into the dark

like a sniper fingering

a hair trigger

restless, unheroic

waiting on words that

won’t come

Photo of A.D. Winans by Alexsey Dayen 2010

POEM FOR MY FATHER

It took me decades after his death

Before I could write a poem about him

It was as if a small part of him

Had entered my heart

And remained behind the barbed-

Wire fence he so carefully constructed

Over those long years

Stayed there all that time

Building an invisible umbilical cord

Reaching out for un unseen love connection

Sending signals carried on the sealed lips

Of blackbirds circling invisible graveyards

Finding in death

What we had never known in life

Those ghostly white hands scratching upward

From the grave

Desperately trying to cup the tiny flame

Flickering inside the valve of my heart

Robert Branaman Exhibit in Los Angeles

2010-10-09T23:57:00.002-05:00

Virtual Slights copyright Branaman 2008

Bob Branaman is a film maker, printmaker and artist. He was an integral part of the Wichita Hipsters back in the Vortex of the 1950.., whose number included Bruce Connor, Charles Plymell, Roxie Powell, Michael McClure, Dave Haselwood and more. His art and films have been shown world wide. He lives in Los Angeles and is still being true to his school creating experimental and challenging art.

Robert R. Branaman aka Rapid Ronnie/Barbital Bob

Presents

Barbital Bites

Opening Reception November 6th 6-9pm

ART COYOTE GALLERY
640 Venice blvd.
Venice CA 90291

by appointment : info@artcoyote.com

Catching Up with Ngawang Choephel about "Tibet in Song": Re-posted from AVSTV

2010-09-18T05:11:00.001-05:00

Catching Up with Ngawang Choephel about ‘Tibet in Song’

Posted by: E. Nina Rothe from http://www.avstv.com September 17, 2010

Tibet in Song is a lyrical new film that will open in NYC, at the Cinema Village Theater, on September 24th and will play in the Big Apple for a week, before taking off for the rest of the world. I was privileged to see an advance screening of the film and was absolutely mesmerized by Tibet’s breathtaking views, its people’s courage and beauty and Tibet in Song filmmaker Ngawang Choephel’s strength and resilience in the face of adversity. I know that after seeing this film I’ll never complain about a rainy day I have to spend inside and I’ll respect my Tibetan brothers and sisters only that much more! I recently caught up with Choephel and he shared some of his insight into this very personal journey of a film.

AVS: What made you go back to Tibet? And what happened while you were there, if you could explain it to our readers?

Ngawang Choephel: While growing up in India as a Tibetan refugee there was always this feeling that we would one day go back to Tibet. But years went by, Tibet alive only in our imagination and Tibetans in India kept demonstrating against China’s invasion of our country. It seemed more and more unlikely that all the Tibetans in India would go back to Tibet soon. Of course I wanted to feel that sense of belonging in a place that you can call your own, but most importantly it was Tibetan music and culture that drove me to go back to there. I had so many questions, curiosity, excitement and emotions that I simply couldn’t wait any longer to see Tibet. When I arrived there, the first impression I got came from the warmth of the people, the intensity of our culture and raw beauty of our landscape. I never thought in my life that I would be one of the first Tibetans from outside Tibet to film Tibetan music. I was proud of myself to be on that mission and it was a prime time in my life to have most of the Tibetans I met share their music and their stories with me. They went through so much yet they shared their music with me in a most intimate way. I never thought my life would be so valuable to experience this journey and moment with them in Tibet. I found joy, as they do, in everything they did and the way they live.

AVS: During your visit there, you were then arrested and most of your work was confiscated. How did you manage to keep all the footage that you have in your film?

NC: Yes, after two months of traveling and recording music I was arrested. After one year of interrogation I was sentenced to 18 years in prison, accused of spying. They confiscated 7 tapes, but I was able to send 9 tapes to India through a friend of mine, before I was arrested.

AVS: Were there ever moments of doubt in your mind during your incarceration. Thoughts of ‘Why did I do this, why did I come here?’

NC: There were a few times I was thinking “If I had not done this or done that” but I never questioned that coming to Tibet was the wrong idea. I don’t remember ever feeling like that. Most of the time I was thinking and contemplating how my work could be a crime or why was I being held in prison and eventually I could feel the same pain and injustice of humanity for what all my fellow Tibetan political prisoners went through. I was in a way proud to be one among many who have sacrificed their lives and who were in prison at that time. I would forget to worry about myself most of the time and my main worry was for my mom and uncle. But then again as one of my closest friend, a late political prisoner said “What you are talking about? The only difference is you are inside and she is outside. That’s it”.

AVS: How were you finally freed?

NC: I was finally released in January of 2002, after my mother’s relentlessly solitary campaign, with the help 0f the US government, many international artist, the Tibetan government in exile and many other organizations that fought hard for my release.

AVS: You grew up in India, but then what made you move the US after you were finally freed from jail in Tibet?

NC: I was released to India via the USA in 2002. Since there is a strong philanthropic sense and interest in independent work in the US, I decided to resume my work here, continuing where I left off before my incarceration. I didn’t know it would take this long, but the entire process of making this film and meeting hundreds people in the business, sharing my story and getting their help was a journey that I believe would not have happened anywhere else except here in the USA.

AVS: What is the most important lesson you learned while making this film?

NC: I have learned so many things from making the film but the most important lesson was how important it is to collaborate with others. You can make films by yourself but working with others who really believe in the subject makes a film complete.

AVS: What do you think will be your next project, after this film it will have a tough act to follow…

NC: I am a very passionate person and my life is dedicated to what I can best do for the Tibetan cause and our story. I will most likely work on another Tibet related documentary.

AVS: What are some of the plans for this film, in the next couple of months?

NC: We are opening Tibet in Song in NYC at Cinema Village on Sept 24th for a one-week run and it will be in 12 different cities after that. I plan to attend most of opening nights to help promote the film.

AVS: Before you started filming in Tibet, before you were captured, what had you hoped to accomplish with your work? Did you know you would eventually make a film out of it?

NC: My mission was to go to Tibet to find the right location and people for our next crew which I was planning to bring during my next trip. I was collecting info and doing some short field research while filming in Tibet, but my main goal was to do pre-production work. I had already conceived the idea of making the film and I had made a presentation cut - to raise funds etc. - before I went to Tibet.

AVS: And finally, if you had to describe your Tibet to a person who knows nothing about your country, how would you do that?

NC: I would say that Tibet is highest country in world, a beautiful land with beautiful people. It has its own unique civilization, history and culture, but since the Chinese invasion in 1949, Tibetans have been victims of the longest cultural genocide, with the highest number of imprisonments, torture and deaths in this world. It’s like its climate is controlled by China’s totalitarian regime: Sometimes it’s sunny, sometimes it rains, but most of the time it’s dark and cloudy in Tibet.

All images above, courtesy of the filmmaker

The article above was originally posted on the AVSTV website AT THIS LINK by E. Nina Rothe. I have re-posted it above with hopes of making information about Ngawang and his film, "Tibet in Song" even more widely available to the public.

Charles Plymell Reading Charles Henri Ford Last Prints

2010-07-16T10:18:00.000-05:00

Charles Plymell with Charles Henri Ford at UBU Gallery

The Eve of Fluxus: Review by Hammond Guthrie

2010-07-15T18:46:00.000-05:00

The Eve of Fluxus: A Fluxmemoir by Billie Maciunas

Arbiter Press, Orlando, Florida ISBN 978-0-615-35216-9

Fluxus is a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"— often described as "intermedia," a term coined by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins in 1966. Fluxus as an artistic group was named and organized by George Maciunas, a Lithuanian-born American artist and founding member of Fluxus, an international community of artists, architects, composers, and designers - among them, George Brecht and Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins, Wolf Vostell, La Monte Young, Jonas Mekas, and Yoko Ono. Fluxus is an attitude ~ not a movement or a style.

"Fluxus is a Latin word George Maciunas dug up. I never studied Latin. If it hadn't been for Maciunas nobody might have ever called it anything. We would all have gone our own ways, like the man crossing his street with his umbrella, and a woman walking a dog in another direction. We would have gone our own ways and done our own things: the only reference point for any of this bunch of people who liked each other's works, and each other, more or less, was Maciunas. So Fluxus, as far as I'm concerned, is Maciunas." --George Brecht

Three months before his death, George Maciunas married his friend and companion, the poet Billie Hutching in a "Fluxwedding" held in a friend's loft in SoHo, February 25, 1978. Among the participants were artists Alison Knowles, La Monte Young, Jackson MacLow, and Louise Bourgeois.

Life as therapeutic fetish, the marriage of Billie and George was equal to the concept of Fluxus, and their union became the essence of the 'Fluxus perspective' ~ an exchange of deep-rooted intentions along with their clothing and characters, as bride and groom both wore white wedding dresses for the ceremony. Gender role playing and more, at George's request, would continue in private. George in drag acting as Severin von Kusiemski tied to the nuptial bed by Billie, his Wanda von Dunajew. "I'll beat you again," I say, "then I'll let you go." "You're wonderful," he breathes as she leaves.

With this first publication of The Eve of Fluxus, Billie Maciunas writes/sings of their brief yet intensely personal relationship in an expressive voice not unlike the late diarist Anais Nin. Perpetually ill, George developed cancer of the pancreas and liver in 1977, and their all too brief time together was to a large extent dominated by George's painful illness and fear of abandonment. In the most evocative passages Billie describes her attempts to help George with his significant discomforts by employing relaxing "immobilization" techniques, while at the same time working to preserve his place in the greater pantheon of Art.

George Maciunas died on May 9, 1978, and astride her significant grief following George's death, Billie was almost immediately confronted by adversaries over how to distribute her husband's estate, which included the artist's significant Fluxus archive.

My heart has outgrown, like magic,
the clamor of painful things...
Beneath the burnt heather are newborn roses...
I've put an end to my tears.

—from the poem: "Desert In Flower" © Billie Maciunas

Buy the Book:

Mail orders for "The Eve of Fluxus" (signed by the author):
Billie J. Maciunas
10152 Berry Field Ct.
Orlando, FL 32821
The Eve of Fluxus (web site)

Hammond Guthrie is the author of "AsEverWas..Memoirs of a Beat Survivor" and editor of The 3rd Page Journal of Ongrowing Natures.

Excerpt from The Iron Journals

2010-07-11T07:41:00.001-05:00

for years we'd been over it and over it. the abandonment the betrayal. the relatives the coaches the peers the feet the fists the spit the punches and the kicks. the graffiti the notes the winks the uncles the aunts the abandonment the betrayal and the violence. we'd been over the loss the drugs the alcohol the loneliness the dissociation the hallucinations the imaginary beasts the fractured visions the seizures and the abandonment and the betrayal and it seemed as always i was doomed to repeat the trauma. i said one day on the couch staring at the ceiling while secretly counting the specks and tiles again: goddamnit. i've had enough. i can't do it anymore. i can't come in anymore man. why? why do we have to keep going over it? we've wrung it dry. how many times? these are ghosts. demons. no one said it was going to be easy. otherwise everyone would do it and no one would be unhappy. you must find something. not a way out but a way through it. tell everyone you know if they don't like it to get off the boat. you don't need them on board if they can't handle it. now find something to help funnel all of this. something that's there when i'm not. twice a week for an hour i'm here. the rest of the time you're on your own. i said i don't know. i don't know man. it was the iron but it started off with myself. body weight. 120 pounds i had to manipulate. 71 reminded me that i needed to add not subtract but i had to forget that temporarily to clean out the system. to know the system and prepare for addition which unlike elementary school is harder to learn than subtraction. that meant starvation. caffeine. macrobiotic diet. running. sweating. jumping jacks and the removal of the infant body. i weighed 112 pounds in september 2005. i sold 700 books. i threw out bags and bags of trash. i cleaned starved and removed most everything. 71 said you must add now. you must add instead of subtracting. and i did.

To Read More IRON JOURNALS click HERE

Michael Stevens - The Road to Interzone Interview

2010-07-07T08:19:00.011-05:00

Reading William S Burroughs Reading

Michael Stevens - The Road to Interzone Interview

by Paul Hawkins

The Road to Interzone is the result of a fascination with the works of William S. Burroughs and the literary influence that made his legendary canon of work possible. Here, the raw material of the shaping spirit of the imagination, is analyzed by presenting quotes and selections from Burroughs works (novels, interviews, criticism, etc.) alongside the primary literary sources that influenced him. Also contained herein are listings from the recorded archives of the books Burroughs read through most of his lifetime. Redacted from university archives and WSB s personal libraries, these listings attempt to catalog the source materials of what was to become Burroughs literary legacy. The Road to Interzone provides the skeleton for an interpretation of the operational processes of influence and the function of artistic inspiration.

Michael Stevens has found the right vein, circulating raw material of the mind of visionary genius in post modern literature and art. His exhaustive compendia and matrix is like the fractal's pattern bringing similarities that could reveal whole equation. He has provided the reader with the sources of allusion, influences, critiques, and the spirit of scatological obsessions of the late William S. Burroughs, the well-read innovator, inventor, and investigator in literature, art, culture and cosmology. Ezra Pound once advised readers who thought the Cantos too obscure, to just think of them as people throughout history sitting around talking. This book allows me the conversations with Uncle Bill that I unfortunately neglected in his presence.

Charles Plymell

Paul Hawkins: We spoke earlier about the significance of the Literary Outlaw you would always refer to, way back in your early days. In what way did you use that?

Michael Stevens: Yes, when I first became interested in Burroughs I used to refer back to Ted Morgan's Literary Outlaw a lot. I would make notes and seek out other authors to read based on Burroughs' recommendations or his mention of this author or that book. If I found a new lead I would always check to make sure it met WSB's seal of approval.

PH: And when would that have been Mike?

MS: 1990. Early 90`s

PH: What was it that made you bite on Burroughs?

MS: Oh, I picked up Naked Lunch in 1989 for the first time and I hated it. For some reason I picked it up again a few months later and still hated it. It wasn't until the third try that I got it. I was missing his humor. I didn't realize how funny he was at first and was using this satirical voice to get across or make people see the savage madness that is the world. Once I figured that out I was onto something. It took some time.

PH: Yeah, I had similar experiences with Naked Lunch. In that it took me some time to get it. So the humor was your door in. Mike, did that mean you then read Burroughs work voraciously?

MS: Once I got it, yes. I read everything in print, then I started seeking out the more obscure books. I became a Burroughs junkie. James Musser, out in Forest Knolls was sort of like my dealer. I spent a lot of my student loans and sold my car to keep up the addiction. In the meantime I was seeking out WSB's influences and his reading because I needed more.

PH: Wow! What was the most challenging area(s) of his work for you?

MS: That's a good question. The Ticket That Exploded was the most difficult book for me. I love the cut-ups, but that book was very challenging because it completely abandoned all narrative structure, as far as I could tell.

PH: Burroughs excelled in that, chopping up and throwing structure to the north, south, east and west, in order to create another narrative, a challenging one......did you get through that challenge?

MS: Maybe. I thought that I needed to approach it from a different perspective which is another reason I wanted to research the books/authors he was reading. I needed to know what was going in in order to understand what was coming out.

PH: Which led to some pretty hard core research on your part. Where did you start Mike?

MS: Well it all started with notes. I had no intention of putting a book together. I was working in bookstores in the late 90s and spending most of my time seeking out and discovering WSB blurbs on books and reading Burroughs looking for references to other works. I moved to Spicewood, Texas in 2000, which was when I decided to make it a full time job to compile my notes and put this book together. I carried around lists. I was a bookscout for ten years with lists falling out of my pocket crazily searching for these books. Most of my reading at the time consisted of what you see in The Road to Interzone.

PH: I like lists. Its an ongoing present time record of where one is within a certain task or discipline. Your book pulls raw data, magical connections and archeological literary research together. In short it`s like a never ending pool to dive into.......When were you aware that these lists would provide the backbone of your book?

MS: When I moved to Spicewood I decided to put these lists to some use. They would no longer just serve me, but anyone else who was interested in Burroughs, 20th century literature, books or research. I tried to see what it would look like in 2001, while in the thick of the work, by putting out a little chapbook called A Distant Book Lifted. That was just a listing of blurbs, intros and other Burroughsiana that I thought I would test out on the world. It was more successful than I'd expected it to be. Folks were interested and I had no idea. A Distant Book Lifted was sort of the rough draft for sections two and three of the current book.

PH: That would have been very encouraging for you Mike, there seems to be much interest in WSB; his motivations and areas of enquiry were so far reaching. That background reading, his reading from a long way back must have been a mountain to climb. How did you find the energy to follow your muse?

MS: Oh that wasn't difficult at all. If I have a passion for something there is no lack of energy. Our culture and time is different than what it used to be, obviously. What people refer to today as obsessive was once called research or a meticulous work ethic.

PH: That's a good point Mike.......

MS: People can call it what they want but I'll stick with meticulous and passionate. I learned more from my research and reading for this book than I did my entire time in public school and my nine years in college. Burroughs was a great teacher and I was willing to listen.

PH: That's a great energy to have. This supposition that JL Lowes had regarding his work on Coleridge began to resonate with you Mike and you cover that in your essay The Bladerunner and The Shootist. Tell me about the connection with WSB?

MS: Well, I discovered Lowes' book, The Road To Xanadu several years into my work. Burroughs was a student of Lowes at Harvard and I think it was in a letter to Allen Ginsberg that he mentioned the book. I found it, read it and realized that what Lowes had done so long ago was what I was doing. I immediately felt a connection to him, and the title, though not the method, is an homage to his book, The Road To Xanadu, which was an investigation into the reading and drug use of Coleridge during his writing of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

PH: Could you trace WSB`s drug use to have an enervating presence in his writing, in the same way Coleridge did?

MS: Yes, I think so absolutely. Burroughs' drug use was essential to his development as an individual and as a writer but, that isn't really my area of expertise.

PH: What were the conclusions of your essay The Bladerunner and The Shootist I just mentioned? You mentioned a relationship to what Lowes called `the deep well`.

MS: Lowes referred to the 'deep well' as being that place in the unconscious that somehow shapes the writers' experience, reading and input into what is later written. He saw influence as a shaping force of the imagination, as do I.

PH: Yes, I feel that gathering of information has to bear upon one`s creative or artistic output.

MS: I do believe that studying Burroughs' reading is as important, if not more so, than studying his life experience. In other words, I think it's an essential part of understanding the Burroughs mythology.

PH: I agree with you, you cannot place a great visionary and communicator in a bubble, without definite reference to the culture(s) he lived in and through. His command of letter writing and his ability to turn such correspondence into threads of his writing was especially poignant in Naked Lunch and other books.

MS: Yes, definitely. His letters were the source of all later output and if it weren't for his desire to communicate, his need to send and receive, I don't believe he would have ever been able to do what he did.

PH: When did you meet with Burroughs?

MS: I met him in August, 1995.

PH: How did that come about Mike?

MS: I'd sent him a painting I did and we went back and forth through letters concerning art and the Stendhal Syndrome. He invited me to stop by if I was ever in Lawrence. Well I found a way to be in Lawrence soon after. Wouldn't you?

PH: Yeah! I would be in Lawrence sharpish....like you.

MS: He was brilliant in real life too. He said his cats liked me. I think it was Jane who sat in my lap. I had orange spice tea and he had a tumbler of vodka and coke. He'd recently had the front of the house repainted red and was worried about the smell of paint. He talked about Brion Gysin, his cats and a boy who had been gutted by a bull, which he thought was funny and in context, it was.

PH: The boy was gutted?

MS: Yes, he had harassed the bull. He thought it quite humorous and it was great to hear him laugh. I couldn't stop looking at the books on his shelves though.

PH: OK, I see, please go on.....

MS: I found myself unable to listen to everything he was saying. I couldn't pay attention to him because I was too busy looking at his shelves.

PH: What did you see?

MS: Doctors of Death, Mark Twain, The Tibetan Book of the Dead was near the front door. Brian Stableford, random true crime and ghost stories caught my eye. William Lyon, the guy who wrote that great book about Black Elk was there. He was trying to find his copy of True Hallucinations by McKenna. Burroughs claimed he couldn't find it and looked at me with a grin and said, "scout's honor." The book was in his library when he died. I guess Lyon never found it.

PH: Were you taking notes?

MS: Mental notes, yes. I went back in 1998 to document the books. Mr. Jim McCrary of Burroughs Communications provided me with a list and I did some research while there with spiral bound notebook and pencil. Two of the greatest days of my life.

PH: I bet.....

MS: Everything I'd done up to that point seemed justified.

PH: Mike, where did you hear of the Naropa reading list Burroughs had compiled?

MS: I think John Bennett sent that to me when I discovered it among the Ohio State University archives. James Grauerholz provided the table of contents for the projected, but unpublished, Granta anthology that was to collect Burroughs' favorite bits. These lists were like holy grail stuff to me. I was in awe and spent months and months on them. Seeking, reading, researching. It was like discovering a new gospel man!

PH: Yeah, I can dig that sermon Mike! Getting back to your book, The Road to Interzone is a truly amazing, informative and depth charging handbook to me. It is in a 2nd edition now as well. You published it yourself Mike, tell me about that process?

MS: Thank you. I'm glad you like it. I had finished the book in 2004 and sent it off to Grauerholz, who made encouraging and helpful suggestions on the presentation and order of the book. I then spent another year putting it together in what seemed a comprehensible format. The book then floated around in the hands of the initiated for several years until early 2009, when I decided to start a publishing company called Suicide Press. I already had a book so I thought I would try it out. I called my editor friend, Brian Mcfarland, who lives in South Carolina to see if he'd be interested in polishing it up and helping me with the final months of editing. He was thrilled to do it and so from March until September of 2009 we performed those final edits. In the meantime, I was learning about formatting and design because I didn't want to just have a great book of research about Burroughs' reading, but also an interesting and artistic product to offer folks. My friend, the Australian artist, Peter Maloney is responsible for the cover art, which I find to be incredibly appropriate and beautiful. Now The Road to Interzone exists for Suicide Press, not the other way around.

PH: That's great Mike. the artwork is especially beautiful and captures the contents with energy and passion. Yeah, I see that.................

MS: And Supervert over at Realitystudio, was very helpful with publicity. He also published my essay The Bladerunner and The Shootist on his site.

PH: The Realitystudio website is a great resource. So do you have any other plans for Suicide Press?

MS: Oh yes, yes, thanks for asking. I certainly do. Upcoming books will make my work on The Road to Interzone look like a curious teenager in the shower. I'm very excited about future Suicide Press publications. I'm currently working with three separate authors for different projects that I expect to be wildly successful. All works of personal passion and love. I've spent the last couple of years getting Suicide Press ready and am also working on cataloging Larry McMurtry's personal library, here in Archer City. I've currently cataloged 20,000 volumes of his 28,000 volume collection, which is a Suicide Press activity in that it has helped fund current and future publications. Also, it's interesting and that's the whole point, isn't it?

PH: YES! energy and creativity, connections spiral into new works of love and meaning, I wish Suicide Press the best. I will be keeping a close eye on what the air bubbles contain as they rise to the surface! Any clues as to when a release may occur and by whom?

MS: Yes, I expect at least two books by year's end but cannot say who or what because I want to blow the lid off the world suddenly!

PH: Cool. I am looking forward to those releases and further Suicide Press activity

MS: Thank you for giving me this time and a big thanks to everyone out there who's helped me get this goddamned thing off the ground.

PH: That's kind of you Mike, its been a joy for me and very interesting. The Road to Interzone has great things in it, things that will provoke the rampant searching you entered into in new Burroughs fans, students and old hands around the globe.

A fascinating and richly helpful piece of literary archeology, tracing as broadly as possible the sources William Burroughs had available to him as he wrote. Both the title and the method echo the classic Road to Xanadu, John Livingston Lowes excavation of Coleridge s reading: Coleridge, like Burroughs, being more than a little interested in drugs. It is a work for which all Burroughs students should be grateful.

-Larry McMurtry

To scan Michael Stevens' bibliography is to dream of entering into William Burroughs' head from a new angle -- not from his writings but from his readings. You can't live Burroughs' life but you can read the books he read. You can infect yourself with the same word virus he picked up in writers ranging from Abrahamson (Crime and the Human Mind) to Yeats ( 'cast a cold eye on life, a cold eye on death...' ) Will these get you any closer to the mutations Burroughs performed on the word virus? Doubtless you'll understand the man and his work better. And perhaps, with the help of the creative reading Burroughs espoused, Road to Interzone will even put you in position to subject the same viral sources to a few new mutations of your own. -RealityStudio.org

Check out these sites for more info and to purchase The Road to Interzone by Michael Stevens

SUICIDE PRESS WEBSITE Click Here

SUICIDE PRESS ON FACEBOOK Click Here

FOLLOW SUICIDE PRESS ON TWITTER Click Here

SUICIDE PRESS MYSPACE Click Here

Read The Bladerunner & The Shootist by Michael Stevens on realitystudio.org

Click Here

A.D. Winans on A.D. Winans

2010-07-06T15:39:00.003-05:00

This was first published in a longer version by the Gale Research Autobiography Series.

A. D. Winans on A. D. Winans

photo by Aleksey Dayen 2010

I was born in San Francisco, and have lived here almost my entire life. I was born at home, premature. My mother said the doctor told her I would not live a long life. Now I’m 71 and the doctor is long dead.

My father was seventeen years older than my mother, and they fought constantly... When my mother wasn’t yelling at my father, she was yelling at me. This left deep scars which is reflected in my book Scar Tissue.

My mother was born in Canada and was smuggled illegally into the U.S. when she was three years old. When she later tried to become a U.S. citizen, she was told by immigration officials that there were no records of her entry into the country, and was advised not to pursue the matter or she might face deportation. She died a woman without a country.

My father had a difficult time expressing himself. It was my mother who took me for walks in the park and to the movies. My father didn’t like his job as a grip man on the Municipal Railway and frequently called in sick. The fondest memories I have of my childhood were the times we gathered in the living room to listen to our favorite radio shows. (The Green Hornet and The Lone Ranger) and the occasional weekend trips to Alum Park and the Russian River. However, the good times were few and far between, in what can only be described as a dysfunctional family.

I was a misfit in both grammar and high school. I was shy and largely kept to myself. I spent time at the public library, where I discovered the works of Jack London and day dreamed of shipping off to sea and writing of my own adventures.

I joined the Air Force in 1954 and was assigned to an Air Base Defense Unit, which doubled in peacetime as an Air Police Unit. I spent three years in Panama, where I saw the President of Panama assassinated and a dictatorship supported by the U.S.

There were three classes in Panama: The rich people who frequented the gambling casino at the Hilton Hotel; the middle class comprised mainly of Chinese immigrants who owned the shops and small restaurants, and the lower class who lived in squalor and poverty in the downtown area.

It was while serving in Panama that I became disillusioned with the American system. Panamanian canal workers, who performed the same work as their American counterparts, were paid less than half the going pay. In the American controlled Canal Zone, the U.S. Governor refused to allow the Panamanian flag to fly alongside the flag of the United States. Elections were rigged and ballot boxes were found floating in the canal.

The Joseph McCarthy era, the struggle for civil rights, the treatment of the American Indian, and the Vietnam War all became fodder for later rebellion, which resulted in the many scathing political poems I have written. I was honorably discharged from the military in February 1958, and returned home to discover the Beat generation.

I found a part-time job working at the post office and attended day classes at City College of San Francisco, graduating in 1962 from San Francisco State College (now University).

I began reading the works of Camus, Steinbeck, F.Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and later became interested in poetry after discovering Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso and other Beat poets and writers.

While attending college, I spent my nights in North Beach, spending long hours at City Lights Bookstore browsing through underground magazines and books by established and emerging Beat poets and writers. I hung out at Mike’s Pool Hall and drank at the Coffee Gallery (now the Lost and Found Bar) and Gino and Carlo’s Bar. My favorite hangout was The Place, where “blabbermouth” night was presided over by Jack Spicer, an evening event where poets and philosophers could get up and speak their minds on any topic that came to their head.

I met Richard Brautigan at Gino and Carlo’s Bar and frequently saw Bob Kaufman at the “Co-existence Bagel Shop,” where he held court. I frequented the Anxious Asp, (a jazz establishment) and was the first feature poet at the Coffee Gallery, receiving five dollars and all the beer I could drink. Discovering North Beach opened up a new way of life for me. It was the training ground for my becoming a poet and writer.

In the sixties and into the early seventies I worked at a variety of jobs, none of which were to my liking. The lone exception was when I received a coveted CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) position with the San Francisco Art Commission, Neighborhood Arts program, where I worked from 1975 to 1980.

In the seventies, I started up Second Coming Magazine and Press, which began in 1972 and ended in 1989. I served three terms on the Board of Directors of COSMEP (Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers), which later became the International Organization of Independent Publishers.

These were exciting times, with annual conferences bringing together poets, writers, editors and publishers from all across the country. Thanks to my CETA position, I was able to organize poetry and music events throughout the city, including the 1980 Poets and Music Festival, a three county, seven-day festival honoring the late poet Josephine Miles and the late Blues musician, John Lee Hooker.

I met a lot of poet and musician friends and engaged in conversations that lasted into the early morning hours, but the truth is that I find it difficult talking about myself. I prefer to let my poems do the talking for me. Too many poets perceive their craft as a “holy” mission, seeing themselves as prophets. That’s a hard message to sell to the homeless and downtrodden souls that walk the streets of our inner cities, or the working-class men and women struggling to make ends meet.

My poetry largely addresses issues of concern to millions of Americans who spend the majority of their lives struggling to survive in a society bankrupt in spirit and moral fiber, where money is the only common denominator.

Early in my life I was influenced by the writings of T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams, but my mentors were the late Jack Micheline and Charles Bukowski, and to some extent, the Beat poet John Weiners, whose book the Hotel Wentley Poems (1958) moved me deeply.

I have never worn the label of poet well. It’s not a word I’m comfortable with. It carries a connotation that somehow the poet walks on a higher ground than the average individual. Too many of today’s poets are more concerned with publication credits than the human condition they write about. The truth is that I would not be a poet if it were not for these strange voices camped inside my head; demon voices that confront me and demand that I write down their thoughts. The finished poem often bears little resemblance to whatever I initially had in mind.

The demons simply invade my thought process and take over. In this, I share Jack Spicer’s philosophy that “verse does not originate from within the poet's expressive will as a spontaneous gesture unmediated by formal constraints, but is a foreign agent, a parasite that invades the poet’s language and expresses what it wants to say.”

I have been both blessed and cursed by the inner voices (demons) that possess me. I’ve never kept a notebook or used a tape recorder for future reference and I seldom write in long hand, although this may be in part due to my poor handwriting. Many people have called me a “street” poet. I suppose this is because much of my subject matter has dealt with life on the streets. I don’t think this is an accurate label. I have been writing for over three decades and my style continues to evolve. The subject matter is as diverse as life itself. The form and technique I employ can and has changed from time to time. The one constant is that people remain my favorite subject matter. If John Weiners was a poet’s poet, I’d like to be remembered as a poet of the people. My poems and my life are one and the same. They simply can’t be separated.

Being a native San Francisco poet, I know the streets of this city like a gambler knows when to hold and when to fold. Jack Micheline wrote in a foreword for A Bastard Child With No Place To Go:

“A. D. Winans is a man in search of his soul His compassion and love for his native city San Francisco shows in his poems. A. D. takes us on a journey of lost souls in the cruelty of a large city. He writes of the people he loves: poets, musicians, and the ordinary souls who have moved him. He knows the wars, the lost hookers, the crazies, the victims, and the ones gone mad. The system and the tragedy of America.”

There it is in a nutshell. I’m not a guru. I don’t go to the mountains looking for the Dalai Lama. I create largely in isolation. I write out of a sense of loneliness and sadness and anger, but also with love and humor, the latter for which I am indebted to the late Bob Kaufman

I write with the same observational intensity as Charles Bukowski, yet entirely unlike him. Like Bukowski, you will never have to search in a dictionary to understand my poems.

I try in the most direct manner possible to say the things I have felt and experienced in life, and hope that the reader will find the voyage a memorable one.

The noted writer Colin Wilson said: “Everything I read by A. D. Winans fills me with pleasure because of a beautiful natural and easy use of language—he seems to have an ability which should be common but which is in fact very rare to somehow allow his own pleasant personality to flow direct into the page.”

I believe this statement to be true, but acknowledge too that my personality is not always a pleasant one. Sometimes the anger cuts through and severs an artery, but I believe this only serves to make the poem stronger. In essence, I write about life, its ups and downs, the laughter and the tears, the real and the imagined, the good and the evil in man. I don’t pull any punches. I simply try to tell it the way it is, from the 9/11 tragedy to the homeless plight on the streets of America.

Poetry and writing have kept me going all these years. They have been the wife and children I’ve never had. I’ve had forty-five chapbooks and books of poetry and prose published and have appeared in several hundred literary magazines and anthologies. I’ve given countless readings and made lifelong friends. None of this would have been possible if I had not discovered the magic of poetry. I believe that in the long run my poems and prose will tell you most about who I am. As I said earlier there is no separating my poetry from my life.

I get up in the morning, have a cup of coffee and read the newspaper, spend a couple of hours at the computer, pick up the mail at the post office, take a forty five minute walk, return home, listen to my jazz records, put in a few hours of writing, and then it’s time to go to bed and get up in the morning and start all over again. That’s what life is pretty much about. The growing up, the learning, the wild years, the mellowing, the settling into a routine, and then one day it’s over. I’m satisfied with my life and the way I have lived. Writing poetry has helped keep lady death from my door. The demons are still there inside me, but I no longer let them control me.

I don’t think any one man’s life is really that important, but what he does with it and leaves behind is. I hope I have earned more good karma than bad karma points. I hope in the end I can look death in the face and say that I’ve played the game honestly and that I never sold my integrity. In the end integrity is all a writer has.

Sell your integrity and you’ve sold your soul to the devil.

Charles Plymell: GRIST

2010-07-05T20:53:00.002-05:00

A rare issue of GRIST edited, designed and printed by Charles Plymell on the same Multlith in San Francisco as the first ZAP. Plymell was involved with other GRISTS in Lawrence, KS, where he was first to print the work of S.Clay Wilson.

This issue he did on his own with material sent him, from Allen Ginsberg's father, Louis, to Bookwork. Inside are lost photos of Charles with false beard and his wife, Pam seeing Neal CassAdy, Ken Kesey and Tom Wolfe off on their bus FURTHER where Tom's book, Kandy Kolored Kool aid Acid Test took shape.

A.D. Winans: Love-Zero

2010-07-05T20:22:00.005-05:00

A. D. Winans is a native San Francisco award-winning poet. His work has been
published in over a thousand literary magazines and anthologies, and translated into
nine languages. He was nominated this year for the next Poet Laureate Consultant at the
Library of Congress.

Other honors include:
Winning a 1984 San Francisco Arts and Letters Foundation award for his contribution
to the alternative press community, a 2006 PEN National Josephine Miles Award for
excellence in literature, and a 2009 PEN Oakland Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2004
a poem of his was set to music and performed at Alice Tully Hall in NYC.

It’s been a busy year for Mr. Winans. Cross-Cultural Communications just released a
new chapbook titled Love – Zero, which is Winan’s fiftieth book and chapbook of poetry.
The book is available from the publisher and can also be purchased at City Lights
Bookstore.

LOVE - ZERO by A. D. Winans
Foreword by Neeli Cherkovski

Limited Regular Edition: $10, plus $5.00 S&H

New York Residents only add: 8 5/8% NYS Sales Tax.
Special Limited and Numbered 26 lettered (A-Z, as available) copies Signed by the author and publisher $25 (includes shipping and any sales tax)

Make payment to:
Cross-Cultural Communications
239 Wynsum Avenue
Merrick, NY 11566-4725
cccpoetry@aol.com

FROM THE FOREWORD BY BEAT BIOGRAPHER NEELI CHERKOVSKI

“Here, in a clear language that “hangs” tough while tipping toward the lyrical, A. D.
Winans delivers another surprise. In his life as a poet he has given us the working class
blues, poems of protest, the world of jazz, and surrendered to the elegiac, honoring the
creative artists, who, like himself, cared little for safe and sane poetics. Now he comes at
us with a book of love that echoes far back in time. I wonder if some Sumerian ancestor
felt the same way about a woman he had loved. Here is an honesty I have seen in Li Po,
who drank with the moon, Francois Villon, who held a poetic sword unlike any other, and
all those poets of love and of love lost who crowded my dreams with their music.”

This book of poems by Winans is an epic body of work. Copies are selling quickly and can be bought from the publisher above. Don't miss out on a great opportunity to have your own copy of LOVE-ZERO.

Click Here for Winans Site

Glenn Todd on Charles Plymell's NOW & Synchronicity

2010-05-14T17:37:00.005-05:00

Hold on a minute, I have to say something. I have to say “synchronicity”, defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “coincidence of events that seem to be meaningfully related; simultaneity”. I stumbled across RealityStudio, had never seen it before, and don’t remember how I got here, but was immediately snagged by a small reproduction of a magazine cover I remember well and once possessed, Charley Plymell’s NOW. So I began to read the article by Jed Birmingham on collecting William Burroughs. He wrote of the Olympia edition of “Naked Lunch”, the very one I cut my Burroughs teeth on in 1960. That particular copy belonged to Dave Haselwood. I wonder what happened to it: I think we simply read it to pieces. Or we no longer needed it when the Irving Rosenthal-edited Grove Press came out (incorporating a few changes that I was able to spot immediately, that’s how into Naked Lunch I was). Or maybe that copy still exists in Haselwood’s “rich chaos” of an office in the Cotati-farmhouse he has inhabited for about 35 years.

So I read the article, skimmed it rather, noting additions I could have made, like that painting LaVigne did of Peter Orlovsky had another life after Ginsberg fell rather fatally for its subject: LaVigne left it with me and it hung on my wall at 1403 Gough for years, until I sent it to him strapped to the bed of a pickup headed for NYC where he supposedly had a buyer for it. He didn’t. The next time I saw the painting was at the DeYoung Museum here in San Francisco in the travelling Beats show a few years ago. The painting is mythic, but a little overrated, (and I hope Bob doesn’t ever read this): it captures what there was of Peter’s boyish beauty to capture but it is really more LaVigne’s salivating imagination of the ideal Narcissy, that neat pick curve of his cock. There is a strange foreshortening of space in the painting, not intentional I’m sure, that finally began to bug me. I was glad to see it go.

Back to synchronicity. I skimmed the article — it’s very long and it’s very good, mostly about Charley, an old friend of mine I haven’t seen or corresponded with in years. I went on to read the comments posted (Karen is right about the two dayglos pink and orange of NOW; I wonder is that the Karen that turned Charley on to Dylan? I was there.) As I came to the end, reading the last comment, suddenly there appeared on my computer screen Charley’s comment of Aug 30, 09 (today) at 6:17 p.m. How odd is that? How unlikely? That after years of separation our fingertips would suddenly touch in cyberspace?

Okay, you’re not convinced. Try this for synchronicity. It’s better.
In the summer of 1963 I shared 1403 Gough Street with Charles Plymell and Dave Haselwood and Neal Cassady and Anne Murphy and Maggie Harms and Justin Hein and Patricia Ross and Dave Moe and Marian Weston and other people I could name but I’d run out of space. As a matter of fact I did most of the fucking cooking. And cleaning. I was losing my mind. Dropping acid and out. Trying to write a novel. You wouldn’t believe the chaos and energy and creativity – Charley writing poetry and reading it to whoever would listen, Justin painting sunburst murals in the hall, Ginsberg shaking his glory locks, Neal smacking Anne with a rubber hose. I thought life would be like that from then on, but, you know, it didn’t really last much past the sixties.

It got to be too much for me, so me and my two lovers, Justin and Maggie, jumped in the Volks — it was Mag’s car, she drove, with the baby on the top of a suitcase – and headed for Mexico. Bye, Charley, bye, it’s your scene, take it! Sad though, because the previous winter we had all bonded – Charley, Dave, Maggie, Justin, me – we were the Fool Troop, we called ourselves, stoned and holy.

So our little truncated caravan bounced up and down the Pacific coast of Mexico for a few weeks, we stuck a pin in the map and headed for it, run over by a Mexican truck that crushed the Volks, before we landed in the Merced Mercado in Mexico City where we were when we heard the news – eleven minutes after it happened – that Kennedy had been assassinated. We headed home, that was enough to put an end to the party. We drove up the middle of Mexico to some little border town in Arizona out in the middle of nowhere. We left the customs station and turned onto a US highway. A car was coming toward us, the first we met.

As we got closer somebody waved – both cars stopped. Believe it or not, it was Charley, headed for New York with his girl friend Anne Buchanan. The last person we said goodbye to when we left, the first person we see when we cross the border. Synchronicity. Charley went on to NY. We went on to SF.

I went back to 1403 Gough Street and lived there for about fifteen more years, a place where I sometimes find myself in dreams in the middle of the night. Oh yeah, when I was leaning into Charley’s car out in the middle of the Arizona desert, I noticed a magazine lying on the backseat. It was NOW, but it had a different cover from the first, pinker, more garish, more day-glo, cheaper looking. I was glad I had the original issue. -by Glenn Todd (First appeared in comment on Reality Studio about NOW)

Charles Plymell's "Eat Not Thy Mind" Reviewed by Paul Hawkins

2010-04-20T15:51:00.026-05:00

Charley Plymell is rightly thought of as one of the best poets within the Amerikan literary underground. He has seen a lot since his birth on the Kansas high plains in 1935 and the early memories of the sound of the wind in the cab of an Reo Speedwagon truck. His father was a cowboy, his mother once a stunt car driver. He stormed out of Kansas with the likes of Bob Branaman, S. Clay Wilson, Michael McClure, Bruce Connor and the Wichita Punks speeding through the vortex, wailing and roaring north, south, east and west. Plymell and the Wichita Punks had road tested speed, dropped LSD, held mescaline rituals and experimented with art and other creative forms in the 1950`s. All trail blazers.

He already had two volumes of poetry, Neon Poems and Apocalypse Rose out when in 1971 City Lights published his seminal novel, Last of The Moccasins.

This novel grips, gleams and glistens with his hobohemian prose-style; spinning tales of his life in and around Wichita, his road trips to and from the West Coast along the Rt. 66 Benzedrine Highway and beyond, his crazy Hipster years and the boho life of his elder sister Betty. His words became sparks of energy, sparring partners to the mind.

Eat Not Thy Mind`s lexeme glows incandescent in 21st century dark consciousness becoming the lubricant on which the freaky brain clouds part to reveal a head-on, vibrant and astute engagement with life. Charley`s words at once heady, seductive and intoxicatingly descriptive.

His Hipster years melded into his psychedelic ones and he hit the handbrake in San Francisco. Charley lived with Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, printed the first Zap Comix by Robert Crumb, wrote and wrote and wrote some more.

Having burnt rubber and seen through the Beats Inc. Charley licked his wounds and wound up in Cherry Valley. He condemned the National Endowment for the Arts and his sharp and intelligent analysis appeared in the NY Times and other print outlets, spilling the beans on the NEA`s inbred favoritism. With his wife Pam they started Cherry Valley Editions publishing Herbert Huncke, William Burroughs, Roxie Powell, Claude Pelieu, Mary Beach to name but a few. Charley still and always will remain very firmly a poet. And what a poet. Always sensing where to cross the tracks from an early age, Charley`s Eat Not Thy Mind sends energy pulses soaring round the readers mind, birth pooling a new view on the present day madness, anutha zone of interrogation, a fresh windblast for the head and heart to get tanked up on and soar. Charley Plymell`s Eat Not Thy Mind is supreme!

Eat Not Thy Mind is a piece of art. A collage by Claude Pelieu on the front cover and a foreword written by friend and bass spanker Mike Watt. This book comprises of 18 contemporary poems by the Outlaw Poet that is Charley Plymell. With love and care Glass Eye Books/Ecstatic Peace Library series editors Byron Coley and Thurston Moore have produced a beautiful artifact. And that`s just the outside!

"Charles Plymell remains a working poet before everything else, and his work is brilliant! His is a voice of a proletarian intellectual wise-guy-- funny, smart, loose, political, rhythmic, maybe a little high."

-Mike Watt

EAT NOT THY MIND by Charles Plymell is for sale HERE

Wanted: The Art of Robert Branaman

2010-03-24T21:46:00.002-05:00

WANTED: The Art of ROBERT BRANAMAN is a celebration of the life and work of artist, film maker and poet ROBERT BRANAMAN.

A Kansas native, Robert Branaman was an integral part of the WichitaVortex, a group of the beat generation that includes Bruce Conner, Charles Plymell, Roxie Powell, Michael McClure and Dave Haselwood.

Robert Branaman's work includes etchings, paintings, films, books, and most recently a series of limited edition digital/traditional prints.

Branaman showed at the legendary Batman Gallery in San Francisco, was part of Michael McClure’s play ! The Feast ! and his paintings were featured in Oliver Stone’s film The Doors.

Bob's films include Ginsberg (1966) and Goldmouth (1965) starring Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Bob will screen select films for this show which includes presentations by S.A. Griffin, Mike Watt on Bass and other surprise guests. Hosted by Richard Modiano.

Click on this link to view a short video of Bob's last show at artcoyote.com

The Poetry Bomb: by S.A. Griffin

2010-02-09T20:42:00.003-06:00

The Poetry Bomb is a former U.S. military practice bomb. The artifact will be completely converted into a beautiful object filled with poetry from around the world. When finished, it will have a primo paint job just as if it were a classic car, complete with pin-striping. It will also have a window or portal that will open and close making it possible to not only see inside of the piece, but to take poems out at performances to read out loud, and to add future submissions. Once converted, S.A. Griffin plans to take The Poetry Bomb on tour across the United States.

Griffin is soliciting financial donations and "backers" for this project at KICKSTARTER to help with the costs of creating The Poetry Bomb as well as for funding allocated to offset the costs of taking The Poetry Bomb on tour. He hopes to begin The Poetry Bomb Tour in late April of 2010.

Click the widget above to learn how to donate or to become involved with S.A. Griffin's Poetry Bomb project and for information on submitting your own piece of poetry to be included in the Poetry Bomb.

Giclee Printing by Hammond Guthrie

2010-01-30T15:09:00.001-06:00

"Inside-Outside Allen Kaprow"
by Hammond Guthrie

"Print Out Shred Out"
by Hammond Guthrie

Poem by Geraldine Green

2010-01-30T13:47:00.000-06:00

DRIVING LOVE HOME

she drove like a crazy she drove like a beast
she drove like footsteps tapping in the street
she drove all night and she drove all day
she drove all before her out the way
she drove like a virgin drove like the sea
drove like floodgates opening to me
she drove her heart right out her mouth
drove her hair right into the clouds
she drove like a torrent flowing downhill
drove like a steam train drove where she will

she drove like a demon on its way to eternity
drove like a sailor home on leave
she drove like a lambast drove like a frown
drove like the ocean driving the wind down
drove like a leaf like a doorknob like a spell
drove like a hound howling to be free
drove like politicians drive us mad
drove like governors shackled to their fears
drove like presidents some good some bad
drove like hustlers high on speed
drove like dumpsters drove like fleas
drove like mangy dogs let off their leads
she drove me to love drove me to drink
drove me to everything so ok i'm on the brink
she drove me to distraction drove me loose
drove me to hell and back

yeah so ok i'm in love with a phantom
in love with a ghost
love with a dream that'll melt in the post
she loves me like a railroad yard
she bangs me like a brass gong

yeah ok so i can't break free
her love is like a piston
like a piston driving her love home.
Click for More Info about Geraldine Green

Work by Hammond Guthrie

2010-01-30T13:40:00.070-06:00

HUAC 58 Years Letter

As my fingers plucked it from the letter box

the envelope and I began to sweat bullets -
HUAC was inviting me to attend the investigation

Cherokee DNA in my cellular magma,
Cousin Sam dead in the Alamo,
Cousin Woody singin' in heaven - and now this!

Grandma Ruchel came over from Minsk
Maybe we should go back -
back to standing in line?

Invited to answer questions about what I ask?
So - I walked a few peace demonstrations
wrote a few poems too - big deal!

I calmed my steel -
this isn't all that bad,
afterall -

I get a free trip to Washington
but the DC of peace parade
underground collectives is long over

In the old days I took target practice,
knew J. Edgar's ten best public enemies -
I was the genuine article trouble maker

Rotten apples running the show anyway,
buncha liars in dark panel suits -
who cares what they want?

Should I dress like an A-rab
carrying my own sand with me -
maybe show up with a camel or two?

Wait a second...
this letter is postmarked 1954 -
bit late don't ya think?

Now I remember, HUAC is deceased!
But - if HUAC sent me an e-mail
I'd answer it - and only if I wanted to

Falsifying paranoid dreams it seems
are still the price of security
here in the homeland

Now if I can just find my desk
I'll dive for cover!

Click for a Review by Stew Albert of Hammond's book AsEverWas: Memoirs of a Beat Survivor

Click here for another great review about Hammond Guthrie's book, AsEverWas

The Documentary Film Burroughs: A Man Within

2010-01-26T09:28:00.004-06:00

William S. Burroughs: A Man Within is a feature-length independent documentary by Chicago Director Yony Leyser, in collaboration with Bullet Proof Film, Inc.

The film features never before seen footage of William S. Burroughs, as well as exclusive interviews with his closest friends and colleagues including John Waters, Genesis P-Orridge, Laurie Anderson, Peter Weller, David Cronenberg, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Gus Van Sant, Sonic Youth, Anne Waldman, George Condo, Hal Willner, James Grauerholz, Amiri Baraka, Jello Biafra, V. Vale, David Ohle, Wayne Propst, Dr. William Ayers, Diane DiPrima, Penny Arcade, Donovan, Dean Ripa (the world's largest poisonous snake collector), and many others, with narration by actor Peter Weller.

The film investigates the life of legendary beat author and American icon, William S. Burroughs. Born the heir of the Burroughs’ adding machine estate, he struggled throughout his life with addiction, control systems and self. He was forced to deal with the tragedy of killing his wife and the repercussions of neglecting his son. His novel, Naked Lunch, was one of the last books to be banned by the U.S. government. Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer testified on behalf of the book. The courts eventually overturned their decision in 1966, ruling that the book had important social
value. It remains one of the most recognized literary works of the 20th century.

William Burroughs was one of the first to cross the dangerous boundaries of queer and drug culture in the 1950s, and write about his experiences. Eventually he was hailed the godfather of the beat generation and influenced artists for generations to come. However, his friends were left wondering, did William ever find happiness? This extremely personal documentary breaks the surface of the troubled and brilliant world of one of the greatest authors of all time.

William S. Burroughs: A Man Within is the first and only posthumous documentary about this legendary figure.

For more info visit the official site:Burroughs: A Man Within

Poem by Phil Scalia

2010-01-24T11:16:00.008-06:00

The Confessions of Saint Augustine, Florida
Or…
A Coney Island Hot Dog of the Mind

Losing sleep over silly things
like the butterfly effect and bracket creep
and what flesh eating disease can do
to the pedal extremities of a skinny-legged woman
and the unsightly marks left on my back
by the wet slats of an Adirondack chair.

Doing a fist pump like Archimedes in a bathtub full of gin
while cutting myself with a Burma shave,
the doctors ordered more tests
so my fantasia grew a dysplasia.

Grandfathered
with due diligence
calculating the gray areas
of a 3-4-5 right triangle,
solving The Crime Of The Century -
Who Shot J.R.?
Only his hairdresser knows for sure.

Given half a chance
I’d stuff the fortune back in the cookie
and give it to The Man Who Has Everything.

City Poet

2009-11-23T20:04:00.006-06:00

City Poet
By: A.D. Winans

Once Addiction sets in
There is no stopping it
You become a serial killer
Attacking the keyboard at will
Your mind working in shifts
Strange creatures live inside your head
Show no mercy give no ground
Forcing your fingers to do their bidding
Writing down your thoughts in your
Loose-leaf notebook
The city is your slaughterhouse
Like a wife it accommodates your moods
Doesn't seem to mind you giving
Her a bad name
You walk her streets a hungry vampire
Lapping up your own blood
On nights when blood transfusions
Are not enough

Photo by David Wright LaGrone

THE OUTSIDER

2009-10-20T02:32:00.005-05:00

"...I told Charles in Austria, he is reading like Iggy Pop is singing.."
Sprachsalz Literary Festival photo & wry observation : Florian Thiele

HALL TYROL, Sept 08, Journals Subtext to be buried deep in the vault, Sprachsalz
The Outsider

One thing struck me was how young people gave such importance to literary history and wanted to hear about my role in it. In the U.S., I could scarcely find a young person interested at all in what happened when, and if so, it would usually be in an academic setting. To converse openly at the bar or hallways about such things is no longer a part U.S. culture.

Due to language limitations, I could not communicate with them on the sub-text: Yes, I was associated with the Beats. I felt very close to Huncke, Burroughs and Bremser.

WSB's inscription to Charles Plymell

in the first Olympia Press publication

of Naked Lunch

Ray Bremser, Charley Plymell & Grant Hart at Ginsberg's old farm in Cherry Valley

The one-time Beat, Dr. Ferlinghetti (as he told the student to introduce him and not to mention him as beat....) was, to me, establishment. A naval officer, multimillionaire, etc. His poetry was of protest, yet within safe academic perimeters that others under that label also succumbed to. Though he was no Populist, his poetry became very popular. (His artwork deplorable).

In my case it wasn’t worth grappling with the definition. Better to be known as part of a label than not be known at all, I thought.. But as always, the sub-texts, what was going on in and around the scene from which the labels formed, was always my interest. I, the outsider of everything.

And I was there when the Hippies and the Beats happened together in San Francisco, 1963. I was still the outsider, living in the Tenderloin, an old whore district, working on the docks when Peter Orlovsky came by to drive me to Joan Baez’s ranch in Carmel. My work as a printer and being involved in the drug culture happening at the time gave me an insider’s vantage point. I participated to some extent. Nothing became my lifestyle. I wasn’t committed to fads and movements. My reality belonged to the outsider, an observer.

So the definition is always problematic, and as the years passed, it was simpler to let the labels do the work of language. I kept active, in touch with the factions that evolved from that period. For instance, to this day, I receive books from various poets who have excelled in their texts, cut-ups, concrete poetry, etc. Books from those who have become smug academic, obedient sycophants with their lucrative government awards, in their politically correctness, do good for the oppressed, eastern religious devotees, boy scouts, the Gary Snyders, the Ann Waldmans..politicians, Woodstock casualties, back to earthers, organic cranks, goatfuckers, etc. They learned to play the games. Their sycophancy rings in my ears today if I sit at their tables. But really, fuck ‘em all. Do they remember me when I printed their poetry and they begged me to write about them?

Allen Ginsberg & Neal Cassady outside the shared (w/Charley) Apartment 1403 Gough St. San Francisco 1963 photo by CP

I liked Ginsberg when he was in bed with poets (and publishers) rather than in bed with officials and gurus who control the institutions, but maybe that’s what he always needed. We remained cordial to the end. The Hippies? There is an ad on T.V. that depicts baby boomers from the Woodstock era now working on their IRA’s and 401K’s insurance forms. It pans from “we were there” to what they are doing now, basically squares, working the system until death. That’s that’s how it is.

I went to Woodstock to hear my old friend, the “woman of the Beat generation,” Janine Pommy-Vega. Robert Bly was on the program, too. He was the only one getting paid! I tried to listen to his poetry. Godawful! Janine’s friend, Andy, asked me what was the least I would take to come to Woodstock to read my poetry. I answered whatever it is, I’d be happy to pay that not to come.

My creativity did not attract the good fortunes of prizes and awards that advance the political correctness of fraternity, fellowship, sycophancy and inclusiveness. Part of my ancestry is Cherokee/Wyandotte and my realities lay again in the sub-text, outside of even the subculture itself, let alone the academic cronyism or new age of let’s do it all together where great amounts of money were thrown at mediocre poets. Prestige itself was awarded to C.K. Williams at Princeton. The part of me that is from the decimated native saw a phoney picture. By this time mainstream hacks like John Barth had not taken over writings programs in colleges to create an audience of workshop poets. In that writing of the mainstream and its supportive journalism good writers do sometimes appear.

Do not get me wrong. I admire great scholarship. To me, that is what the academic institutions are for. But they soon gave way to creative writing programs to build audiences. In so doing, the fluff of the workshop poem dominated. The germ of the end in itself. I worked in writing programs and English programs in the prisons until the subtexts became too horrible. I was given courses in local universities in creative writing, but the shock was too great....so I opted to be a tutor, to help students write their idiotic assignments for stupid professors. One university ask me to teach whatever I wanted, to design my own course. I said it was too late. Instead, I helped students write. That was at a college know for its education majors. As it turns out, the tutors had to help them write their job application letters. Thinking skills had vanished and we in turn elected idiots for leaders. The education system failed like futures in the economy. The subtext remained intact. The mainstream novels, academic workshop poetry supported by the journalism of the day, rules. Dust gathers on the pages of history.

Robert Crumb/Charles Bukowski inscription to their publisher/printer Charley

I then became more involved in the work of underground cartoonists, bringing S. Clay Wilson’s work into print and printing Robert Crumb’s first ZAP comics. My role in that movement is throughout the book, REBEL VISIONS - The Underground Comix Revolution, 1963-1975 by Patrick Rosenkrantz. I had an affinity to the graphic and visual arts and had a successful collage exhibit at the Batman Gallery in San Francisco in 1963 during the time of the beat and hippie intersection. While much of the poetry explored the Eastern religions, new age, and acceptable protest, “organic farming” at The Committee on Poetry in Cherry Valley, I found the subtext again in the Comix Revolution.

The 1st ever edition of Crumb's Zap Comix printed by Charley

I had written what I later called “The First Collage Novel” from that period after having quit working on the docks to accept a teaching fellowship at Johns Hopkins. Later, I realized I had given up a good job on the docks for the academe. I was given an opportunity to make use of my poetry in this situation but was shocked to find academic poetry dead in its arts programs and government outreach that preyed on timid, ego-laden souls who eventually help shaped the phony culture with the same power money and politics. What else is new. I don’t know what to do with the pile of books, from those whose poetry I dutifully brought into print, who list their awards and fellowships below their smug photos on their book covers that litter my room. Cronyism rules.

The Last Of the Moccasins,
the "first collage novel"

Rebellion in music began the New Wave. Patty Smith loved William Burroughs, their progeny found poetry and punk music in the likes of Mike Watt, Thurston Moore and Grant Hart and I found poetry there, and they in turn, like S. Clay Wilson of the Comix fame, helped me along.

Charley & Thurston Moore

Byron Coley organized tours in Montreal, Amherst, NYC, Philadelphia and Baltimore that include me reading my poetry to respectful young audiences.
I was given an advance by Random House to write a book on Kansas, where I was born and spent some of my youth. My son and I set out for a part of the state high into the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains where Plains Indians had gathered at the north and south trails. It was near the farthest point north for the Navajo. On that vast plains, geological formations stood upright. Remnants from the time it was a sea. They called them Monument Rocks. As we stood in the sunset with only these outcrops on the horizon we heard a great voice, neither human or animal. It was as if from the White Buffalo itself. It sent chills through us. It was very evident that we should leave this area to the spirits who lived there for thousands of years. I later heard through the great palaeontologist and seer, Loren Eiseley, that other reports of “this strange melange” of wisdom of religious life of nature peoples had been witnessed. In his book, “The Star Thower, ” I found “Moreover, I had come to know something of the strange similarities of the ‘shaking tent rite’ to the phenomena of the modern medium’s cabinet.” We left that wilderness of the plains where the white man had decimated its peoples and buffalo as far as the eye could see and drove to what was familiar. I threw away my manuscript. Sometimes silence is the best compliment to other sacred sounds in time and space.

My writing is not under a label. It came, like with others, from traditional 1920's ex-patriot influences, Surrealism, Existentialism, etc., into the 50's while the Beats became famous ....in the popular coffee houses that produced such poets as Rexroth, Patchen and Rod McKuen. My creativity extended into collage, printing, graphic arts, avant garde magazines, comix, writing the first collage novel... my poetry and prose were translated into other languages, my recent poetry mixed with the poetry and music of punk. I find myself at the world’s foremost literary festival, Sprachalz, 08 trying to answer intelligent questions from an appreciative audience with an interest in what I’ve done. My only regret is that I didn’t spent more of my wasted youth studying languages. So how can I tell them that there are no sequels, that I lived the subtext. In the U.S. you have to get it when it’s good, ride it when it’s hot. Take the money and let history turn its own pages.

Charles Plymell Reviews "JAN KEROUAC: A LIFE IN MEMORY"

2009-10-12T15:17:00.005-05:00

Review of Jan Kerouac: A Life in Memory, edited by Gerald Nicosia, author of Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac

Jan Kerouac Could Drive a Stick Shift: by Charles Plymell

Jan Kerouac: A Life in Memory provides accounts of Jan Kerouac's life and her relationship with her father, Jack Kerouac, recalled by those who knew her. Jan was essentially a throw-away kid of the 60's and 70's following the down-and-out lifestyle of drugs but writing in a new style and for new times. Jack Kerouac, a Republican from a middle-class Catholic family, lied about her conception and had to live with that lie. Jan Kerouac also had to live with that lie. Her dad went home to his mother and drank himself to eternity; she tried to keep his spirit alive while trying to lift her mother and herself from poverty. Her father’s fame began with him finding the early subculture of the 50's; her experiences began in another subculture of the 60's. As she tells Gerald Nicosia,” Yeah, I took my first acid trip on February 14, 1965, which was two days before my thirteenth birthday ... Wait a minute! ‘65? That’s right, that’s right.” She was in the 7th grade, in a fabulous love affair with a tattoo artist who gave her one.

Wait a minute! What was her father doing in the 7th grade? In this book, perspectives arise, generations parallel. Her father had millions of readers turning on middle-class New England kids who were held captive by their parents, and his work spread like wildfire to San Francisco, and later to a new generation of hippies, then to mature academic elitists who rendered it safe, and even to famous people and the world in general. His daughter, Jan, tried to find a proper place for his archives. Aram Saroyan reminds us that John Sampas was selling off items piecemeal: “He had sold Kerouac’s raincoat and at least a couple of Kerouac letters to Johnny Depp for over $20,000.” She grew up in the psychedelic sixties, post-McLuhan, where medium was the message that exploded. He had the advantage of Time & Life newsstands along the roads of a simpler decade. She was left on the road in a media generation where Time and Life were relics. His archive brought millions. She had to scrape up money for dialysis.

Jan Kerouac in vamp makeup, age 13- Lower East Side, New York City- at a time when she was working as a prostitute.
At the crossroads of these parallel lifestyles, the craven vultures hovered from their safe perches to make sure this baby would not interfere with their industry. She couldn’t even rely on her godfather, Allen Ginsberg, a college student with marketing acumen, who began by shocking audiences with his naked, hairy body and made friends with hipster Herbert Huncke, who happened to remark in tired lexicon, “I’m beat,” apparently new words to the college kids who built a generation on them. Jack Kerouac, with an uncanny ear for jazz, developed his bop prosody that Jan obviously inherited. Phil Cousineau said about her last book: “Parrot Fever sounds like one of her bebopping, riffing word jags that endeared her to her friends.” She was aware of words and their sounds as she explored every detail of her world. Brenda Knight recalls, “Her prose is awash with layers of meaning and a matchless rhythm and flow.” By her friends’ accounts, she inherited the music/language gift. Lynn Kushel Archer recalls how she would do impressions of Aretha, The Doors, Billie Holliday, Patsy Cline and others that amazed listeners: “She could sing. I mean she could really sing!” And she observed people and places around her with the artist’s eye: “It was hard for her to maintain her independence with her illness, but she did. She would hobble to downtown San Anselmo to sit in a coffee shop and eat something delectable as she observed everybody and everything.” She was a true writer, but the times they had changed.

Jan Kerouac in vamp makeup, age 13- Lower East Side, New York City- at a time when she was working as a prostitute.

The old saying was that when New York City farted, San Francisco blushed, but no more. The Beats headed west to the city that would be built on rock-and-roll and had a far different mystique than the East Coast. Kids of eastern cities, bound in tradition, would feel the joy of getting their heads messed up, flocking to the city of freedom by the Bay. Jack Kerouac got on the road but couldn’t shift gears, so he found a driver who could. Neal Cassady learned to drive by stealing cars in Denver and griped to Jack Kerouac that Jack was ruining his transmission. The Beats struck gold in California. Ginsberg came howling about the evil spirits in government and money. Nakedness didn’t make a difference, but the local government was soon to make the Beats famous over the word fuck. How this happened with this overused word in today’s speech might puzzle the youth. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, publisher of Kerouac and Ginsberg, went to court to free fuck and this was covered extensively by the relics, Time and Life, the only news in town at the time. Allen Ginsberg, keen in marketing, appeared in one of his favorite venues, the court. Ferlinghetti, a lieutenant in World War II, instead of saying this was the way sailors talked, donned his beret and went to trial to publicize the Beat Generation. Tourists in North Beach would turn and point ... look, they were in Life!

But the Talibanish Beat Generation wouldn’t come to the rescue of the woman, Jan Kerouac. Godfather Ginsberg planned to get on the road himself to his new world of Aryan Wichita with his driver, Peter, in his Guggenhiemed VW bus and kept a good taunt going, howling into his Uher tape recorder Dylan had given him, “How big a prick has the president!” And I wondered, How big a prick has your guru? Later in D.C., I took him to the National Endowment for the Arts, where he wowed ‘em and got several thousands of dollars for him and his mate, Peter Orlovsky, and the Lower East Side poets who supported him. Ginsberg was learning just how good the government was going to be to him. He said the CIA needed a place to set up his guru. An accredited college would do! He and Anne Waldman, institutionally enlightened, named it after Kerouac, with a cute name I can never unscramble. Nicosia left Naropa when Trungpa, surrounded by his bodyguards, told the prostrate audience: “You will lap milk from the dish I give you like my little dog.”

Aram Saroyan recounts a meeting with the agitated authoritarian Allen Ginsberg at a book signing after mentioning Nicosia: “He was referring to my friend, Kerouac’s biographer, Gerald Nicosia, and while it was true I’d originally heard of Jan’s troubles from Gerry, he hadn’t had to coax my sympathy. Nicosia had in the meantime been organizing a fund raiser to help Jan with her medical bills and told me Allen had called friends like Gary Snyder and Michael McClure and discouraged their participation.”

And later about the Kerouac conference in Manhattan: “With some of the participants having a claim to be there far less valid than Jan Kerouac’s, she along with Gerry Nicosia were thrown out of the conference by campus police when she attempted to get on the podium and speak about her father’s archives.” Godfather Ginsberg got the Fuzz on her! Mary Emmerick recalls: “By June 5, 1995, Jan’s body had failed her. She was on dialysis four times a day ... It deeply hurt her that she had to write a check for $120 to NYU to attend a conference called ‘The Writings of Jack Kerouac’ honoring her father, and that her father’s friends turned their backs because she was contesting her grandmother’s will.” And later: “Outside and still crying Jan ripped off her-orange-and-white conference badge announcing THE WRITINGS OF JACK KEROUAC and underneath: JAN KEROUAC, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY. She threw it into the gutter debris.” I personally was happy to learn from this book that my dear friend, William S. Burroughs, who had said he never considered himself a Beat, gave one of his paintings to her for her cause. I could sympathize with her on that score. He gave us some of his paintings in Lawrence while we were traveling on limited funds. When we got home, we sold one over the phone sight unseen for $3,000. I’ll always remember his wisdom: “There are Johnsons and there are shits.”

Among the iconic photos in the book is one of Jan as a baby. It startled me to see Jack Kerouac’s face, as if it was super-imposed. As the elder Jacques Kirouac, the president of L’Association des Familles Kirouac of Quebec City, wrote: “After a few minutes, I met her, and I was immediately struck by her blue eyes, which were so shining they looked crystal.” Towards the end of her life he visits her again in her room with boxes and a mattress on the floor: “Amongst that mess, she was looking for pictures, and she gave me a wonderful one taken in a boat on the west coast of the United States. Though she had almost nothing, she offered me a loaf of bread that she had baked. It was too much for me, especially knowing she had so little food. So I took only half of it, but I was really impressed by that gift, which showed me how important it was to Jan to share with others.” A photo in the book depicts Anne Waldman sternly looking down from the podium at Jan and the elderly gentleman as they were blocked: “I was at her side when she stood up to walk toward the stage, intending to speak at the microphone. Her ‘godfather’ Allen Ginsberg was the master of ceremonies. Unfortunately, nervous and frail as she was, she didn’t reach the narrow staircase to the stage until her way was already blocked by the program director of NYU, Helen Kelly. Then the police escorted her and myself outside the hall to the sidewalk.”

Jan and Jacques Kirouac in Washington Square Park, NYC after being thrown out of NYU's JACK KEROUAC CONFERENCE June 5, 1995. Jan wears a t-shirt she had printed from the text of her father's (Jack Kerouac's) last letter (October 20, 1969) to Paul Blake, Jr., stating he (Jack) did not want the Sampas family to receive any of his estate.
Photo by Mary Emmerick

As Gerald Nicosia, editor of the book, later recalls that part of the story: “John Sampas was calling for the university police to arrest her, and Allen said, ‘Yes, take her out, she’s irrelevant.’ I stood up from the audience and started yelling at Allen: ‘Allen, you’ve got to let her speak! She’s Jack’s daughter!’ Sampas said, ‘Get rid of him, too!’... The day Jan was thrown out, June 5, 1995, was exactly one year before she died—June 5, 1996.” What is puzzling is why the pied piper of Whitman’s children turned religious Totalitarian and against freedom of speech? Was it because of the money and power invested in the academic elite? As Buddha (John Paul Pirolli) adds about the literary industry of Kerouac/Beats that was flourishing and Sampas was promoting: “He was going to let Ann Charters do the editing. In Jan’s eyes, this meant there would be censorship of her father’s writing, and that anything pertaining to Jack’s planned divorce from Stella (his last wife) or his bisexual experiences--among other things--would probably never see the light of day.” Let’s hope these travesties to American literature will eventually be reckoned with.

On a lighter side, one of Jan’s talents was as baker. Some recall her fabulous baking, and she dreamt of opening a little restaurant and pastry café in North Beach. There are some wonderful photos of her baking and serving pastries. But she never got any help. Godfather Ginsberg knew the numbers. She never got part of her father’s fortune in his estate. Not even a lousy state or federal grant. It all seemed political, an old ingrained American hatred for the poor. As she tells Gerald Nicosia in an interview: “Well it would be nice [to publish a successful book] after all these years of being on welfare and washing dishes. I wouldn’t mind a little money, and a change of pace. I’m sure I could find something to do with it. There are so many things that I want to do. If I had more resources, I could do more things. I could also help my mother out, who’s been in poverty for years and years and years and years. She’s been poorer than I have all this time. I’ve never had the experience like most young people, you know. Always going to their parents to borrow money and stuff. I haven’t the slightest idea how that is, because my mother has always been poorer than I am–and so when I come home, it’s like coming home to–I don’t even know how to describe it.” There would be no help from the literary establishment which is not about to recognize her writings. Lee Harris writes of the “Jack Kerouac Corporation of America. For that’s what it had become, an impenetrable monolith whose only purpose was to make money (and not for Jan). Worse, it had gained the complicity of Ginsberg, not only in sanitizing and embalming Jack’s legacy as part of the New York literary establishment, but in shutting Jan out of the process completely.”

John Cassady, son of Neal, the driver, who complained Jack Kerouac was ruining his transmission because he couldn’t use a clutch, writes about how he almost married Jan Kerouac. That would have probably happened if there was a third party who got them together again, or if he hadn’t taken her off guard. There is one iconic photo of the two of them. Sadly there wasn’t a wedding photo. I performed with John at the Bitter End in the Village and would have loved to be his best man. Here’s his account: “‘Think about it, Jan,’ I said with feeling, ‘it’s a no-brainer! You’re Jack’s daughter–I’m Neal’s son–and I’m sure they are looking down (sideways? up?) Smiling in approval!’ She looked a bit startled.” He saw her again some sixteen years later at the Spaghetti Factory and his first question to her was: “Do you remember me asking you to marry me that day?” He goes on: “To my surprise, she didn’t and seemed astonished that she couldn’t recall such an event, even from that long ago. I was mortified to hear her say, ‘Are you kidding? I would have married you in a heartbeat!’ Ouch!” Of all the tragedy, this hurts me the most. As the perfect movie script, it needed the few days of drama and then they meet again and conclude the scene in each other’s arms. As a romantic, this makes me cry. This is high tragedy and reminds me of the poem Pound’s distant relative, Longfellow, wrote about Hiawatha passing his lover unseen in a canoe or whatever it was. This existential ending where the two iconic children didn’t complete the script is the great tragedy for me. Why didn’t this end right?

In the “Editor’s Note,” Nicosia recalls a conversation with her asking what she thought her destiny would be: “Jan said, ‘My destiny is to be pulverized.’ I almost fell out of my chair. She was not joking that time. She was dead serious. She did not believe she would live long, and she felt she would be forgotten, dying unloved and unknown.” This country knows how to pulverize. Look around you. Sometimes it is in increments, unnoticed from the ground, like the vehicles crushing small animals on the road. Money can keep us from being pulverized. Even if it’s temporal, it gives us a chance--even if it involves knowingly pulverizing our ideas, our hopes, our loves, our creative spirit. Whether we lie prostrate at a guru’s feet or think we are unseen schmoozing, lying, politicizing, climbing on whatever will lift us from pulverization, we all succumb. Some get so caught up in avarice and greed they don’t want to admit what is happening. Recently, stock market derivatives fed that monster, far removed from real assets and with idiot complacency turning to Totalitarianism, Authoritarianism, threatening our very country, our culture. It’s the same psychology that accumulates, like a virus replicating, a derivative literature removed from real literature. We’ll never know how Jan would have fared without the derivative monsters at her door, ready to pulverize anything real. I think of that time in the 50's towards the end of the McCarthy hearings, when finally the senator faced Joseph McCarthy and asked intently: “Have you no decency?”

I see this incrementally too. I picked up the New Yorker a year or so ago and saw an article by Douglas Brinkley and someone, maybe co-authored. It had stupid photos of irrelevant green road signs of the wrong era. The only real photo it had was the famous one I told Allen to snap of Neal when we were riding in the backseat of his Pontiac with a torn headliner when he was downshifting without brakes on the way to Bolinas. Their version had it as Jack and someone in the backseat of his Hudson somewhere in the East. They had the wrong time, wrong place, wrong people, wrong car. If it was supposed to be a symbolic illustration, that was one thing, but they put the photo as an integral part of the article. Another increment came today when I looked up Naropa on Wikipedia and something caught my eye under controversy. It was Elliot Weinberger’s insight (warning) that Ginsberg’s and his friends’ “fascination with Trungpa’s presentation of Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan theocracy created a dangerous exclusivity and elitism in literature.”

The treatment of Jan Kerouac by her famous literary peers might be an early sign of an academic elitism nourished by government and private monies to build committees and foundations to pulverize the individual spirit. Allen Ginsberg obviously succumbed. I can personally feel her oppression and have seen it in action in government funding of the academe. During the Republican era someone I knew heard a comment at the NEA: “They’ll publish what we tell them to.” We quit applying for publishing grants many years before that, but the money flowed to institutes to match any cost for poets to visit. I’m reminded of a C. K. Williams’ reading at Wichita University where I attended in the 50's. Apparently they flew him in from his regular Boston job to teach a course there. He told his captive audience of students and professors that “poetry is supposed to be boring.” I’m reminded of Jan because I was there to see my ailing mother and was short of funds. I see that the Poetry Foundation, a private organization that received millions of dollars as a gift, gave him a hundred thousand dollars. He is a full professor at Princeton, so he doesn’t need it, which suggests they want to follow in the totalitarian footsteps of the NEA, which doesn’t consider need, but only rules concerning “quality,” an elusive term defined by the persons in the position to pass the money to friends. I googled this Princeton poet to see what he was writing now and the example was what I expected ... pretentious reminiscences in Joycean prose with line breaks. They recently gave the Beat Generation’s Gary Snyder a hundred thousand dollars justifying it on his religious work. Not that they have to justify anything, but I don’t suppose they know that. To give it to a Baptist or a Muslim would not been politically correct at the moment. As an agnostic, I want mine! But there is something cruel about giving those large sums to those who don’t really need it, especially in these times. The last poet I knew personally, Dave Church, died a while back bent over the wheel of his taxi. Even private monies can’t consider love. Jan wrote from the love generation, but we’ll never see her unfinished works from a voice in the wilderness.

Jan Kerouac in Los Angeles, 1978
Photo by Marie-Andree Cossette.

The Poetry Foundation uses Pound as their mascot, but they probably don’t realize that he went to Europe to get away from the “pricks” of his day. Now who could that be? All the Beats grew up on Pound, who wrote: “But the beauty is not the madness/ Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me/ And I am not a demigod,/ I cannot make it cohere./ If love be not in the house there is nothing.” Jan was writing for the love generation. When will we learn? When will the foundations learn? Pound again: “Let him analyze the trick programs /and fake foundations.” I don’t know what happened to the Beat Generation. I see my name in “official” biographies like the one written by the librarian, Bill Morgan. Just leave my name out, please! I know City Lights published my novel and Ginsberg wrote an introduction to my first book of poems and he and Neal shared my flat in San Francisco, but I am not a Beat! Burroughs said he never considered himself a Beat. Like Jan, I have no use for the greed and avarice of liars, cheats, and politicians who keep all monies for themselves to pulverize those whose only power is their own. Please someone correct my Wikipedia entry! If you are going to label me, then give me some of your money! I know how Jan felt. Who denied her? The best minds ... the darkest minds?

To help understand the ruthlessness of money and power in literature, read Brad Parker’s account of him inviting Nicosia to Lowell in 1988, when the “official” Kerouac committee was planning to honor Jan’s dad: “Later I was stunned when one of the leaders of that committee tried verbal intimidation by telling me, via phone, that my plan had to change and that I should cooperate with him and his committee or I would become ‘a voice in the wilderness.’ Further, I was informed that they might find it necessary to play ‘hardball’ with me, and the hall I had reserved for Nicosia would be taken away from my organization.” This is indicative of an academic elite establishment that has sought to control literature today. I hope the voices in the wilderness take heed. Those voices are where real literature comes from. It is the voice Brad Parker heard: “In her last taped interview, Jan said that the only possession of her father’s that she owned was his DNA. Those who controlled Jack’s estate had given her nothing that had been his.” Brenda Knight recalls some young men gazing upon the photos of Jan, invariably speaking of her in the present tense, “Where is she? Let’s go find her!” Yes! She’s still out there, driving her stick-shift Caddie Matilda, if we just have the eyes to look.

Front Cover of "Jan Kerouac: A Life in Memory"

DESIRE

2009-07-10T23:59:00.003-05:00

DESIRE
By Ginger Eades

danger comes dressed
as my indecisive will-
it chases my vulnerability
as i run toward love

i lose myself
on a dark trail of consternation
and hide behind the rapture of
shared ecstasy

i search for the right path
yet i am caught between
passion and timidity-
paralyzed with fear,
like a deer,
blinded by headlights
before its death

Brion Gysin : Calligraffiti of Fire

2008-11-03T15:40:00.008-06:00

Brion Gysin
(Photograph by Harold Chapman, courtesy of TopFoto)

Brion Gysin : Calligraffiti of Fire 11th December 2008 – 7th February 2009

October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester Street, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 3AL Tel: + 44 (0)20 7242 7367 Fax: + 44 (0)20 7405 1851

Featuring the first UK showing of Gysin's rarely-seen painting, the 16.4-metre-long Calligraffiti of Fire. Calligraffiti of Fire is Gysin's magnum opus and final work.

A radical cultural visionary, visual artist, writer and performer, Gysin introduced his close friend, writer William S. Burroughs, to the techniques of "cut-ups" and "permutation". Together, they experimented in sound and image, using collage, tape recorder, light-painting, writing and film. They co-authored Third Mind, the term they used for such creative collaborations. Their work has had a pervasive influence in the arts and on underground and popular culture, affecting figures such as David Bowie, Patti Smith, Bill Laswell, Keith Haring, Michael Stipe, Genesis P. Orridge, and John Giorno.

October Gallery's exhibition complements the December Burroughs Live at the Royal Academy of Arts (GSK Contemporary), and Life File, Burroughs' illustrated private files, at Riflemaker. In the '60's, Gysin created The Dream Machine, which he described as "the only work of art designed to be seen with closed eyes", and a "drugless psychedelic experience". The Dream Machine rotates, and, through a flicker effect, evokes brainwaves which can produce spontaneous waking dreams. Gysin said, "...it gives an extended vision of one's own interior capacities, which could also be overwhelming." It was Gysin's point of view that those "interior capacities" are the next art form, superseding painting.

October Gallery was the first in the UK to show Gysin's work with a solo exhibition in 1981, and the first to show Burroughs' works of art in 1988, 1990 and 1992.

Gysin had a lifelong fascination with the juncture of word and image, and Calligraffiti of Fire (1985) is a culmination of a long series of his works inspired by hieroglyphics and calligraphy. He studied Japanese and Arabic calligraphy, and evolved his own style of word/image glyphs, supple as flames or tendrils of smoke. Calligraffiti was inspired by a makimono, a Japanese scroll, of fire in bamboo that, as a young man, he had seen at the Boston Museum of Fine Art.

Gysin was a charismatic raconteur and an avid student of history, art and gossip.

The New Museum in New York is currently planning a Gysin retrospective. Gysin's works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Boston Fine Arts Gallery, Massachusetts USA; Centre Georges Pompidou, Fonds National d'Art Contemporaine, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; and numerous private collections. Thames and Hudson produced Brion Gysin: Tuning into the Multimedia Age, edited by José Férez Kuri.

Calligraffiti of Fire is curated by Kathelin Gray, and produced in collaboration with The Academy of Everything is Possible.
For further information on Brion see www.briongysin.com

Brion Gysin , Calligraffiti of Fire (detail), 1985.

Thanks to the October Gallery

Charles Plymell : The Benzedrine Highway Interview

2008-06-21T05:29:00.000-05:00

Writer Charles Plymell is a legendary figure. He was involved with a loose gang of experimental writers and outsider artists centered around Wichita, Kansas in post war 1950`s America. Plymell and the Wichita Punks had road tested speed, dropped LSD, held mescaline rituals and experimented with art and other creative forms. Were they Beat before the term had risen, been marketed and branded out of the San Francisco joss stick hippie scene? The chronological order is important in understanding his work, as Charley makes clear in this interview. He has seen a lot since his birth on the Kansas high plains in 1935 and the early memories of the sound of the wind in the cab of an Reo Speedwagon truck. His father was a cowboy, his mother once a stunt car driver. He printed Robert Crumb`s first edition of the cult and famous Zap Comix in 1968. As part of the hip Wichita scene of the 1950`s he is also a contemporary of and, either a friend, collaborator or publisher of, some of the coolest and influential underground writers and artists to come out of the USA. He already had two volumes of poetry, Neon Poems and Apocalypse Rose out when in 1971 City Lights published his seminal novel, Last of The Moccasins. This novel grips, gleams and glistens with his hobohemian prose-style; spinning tales of his life in and around Wichita, his road trips to and from the West Coast along the Rt. 66 Benzedrine Highway and beyond, his crazy Hipster years and the boho life of his elder sister Betty. He has continued to walk his walk and talk his talk ever since and his writing has always displayed a vibrant and astute engagement with life and a heady, intoxicatingly descriptive allure. He condemned the National Endowment for the Arts and his sharp and intelligent analysis appeared in the NY Times and other print outlets. Because of this critique he was blacklisted and has never been awarded any funding, grant or financial support from any federal state or academic agency in the USA. He and his wife Pam run their own publishing house, CV Editions, which is a good place to start looking for more information on his novels, poetry and other writing.
Included in the interview are comments and thoughts on Charles Plymell from poet and lifelong friend Roxie Powell, writer Hammond Guthrie, film maker and educator Laki Vazakas, poet Ginger Killian Eades and musician Mike Watt.

What are you up to these days?
I like nittin'....next to nittin'...nuttin'.
What do you remember about growing up in Kansas?
Rattlesnakes, rattlesnakes winding in the dust while south winds sculpted fields of wheat, the hum of truck tires on warm asphalt back and forth to L.A. on RT66. Yucaipa (Green Valley) California to Plymell and Santana (Kiowa Chief) where my Grandfather ran a stagecoach down to Indian Territory (No Man's Land) now Oklahoma where President Cleveland deeded land to him. I remember sitting in the truck, an REO Speedwagon. I loved that truck. My Mom and Dad plowed the field into the space horizon. The wind in the cab played a hollow tune and I sang my favorite song from Hank William's radio show we listened to at home. "I'm just a happy rovin' cowboy/herding the dark clouds out of the sky/deep in the heavens blue."
That is simply beautiful Charley, what else?
We had to run from the farmhouse to the cellar many times when tornados came. I saw them rolling across the prairie. My folks always knew their vector. No warnings, just nature's ozone smells. We didn't have electricity, so I was not exposed to circuitry, only earth's magnetic source that isn't enclosed. My mother cooked on the coal range, the beef my father cut from the herd. We had a battery radio for the news where I heard Roosevelt's voice announcing WWII. We rode horses everywhere. I still have my pony blanket and cinch my mother made. That was in the early years on the Great Plains. Later we moved into town. My dad had bought a '39 Buick Century in Chicago that had tire mounts on each fender and a roll up window between backseat and front with a big straight eight motor and gearshift on the floor. He also had a baby blue '40 pre-war Packard Clipper. I could easily go a hundred mph in them. For running around he had a '41 Ford V8 coupe that could burn rubber in second gear and go over a hundred as well as a '42 Chevy coupe that my sister and I would steal and go spinning around.
He was born 3 months before me, in a converted chicken coop (converted to successfully keep out the micro dust from dust storms. Very effective as compared to the normal house in those days) and had a complete, nice neo-natalhood. Audrey, his mother, was the dearest lady you would ever want to meet. She was a tiny gnome who was as tough as the rawhide that bound up a bareback riggin'. I never knew she was part Indian, until CP wrote about it years later. Believe me, where we grew up during our youth, no one ever admitted to having Indian blood in them. Roxie Powell
When you dropped out from school, what were the choices for you at that time?
High School was not worth it for me. I went to Military School in San Antonio in my first year of high school and my father bought me a brand new 1952 Chevy coupe to get back to Wichita. I enrolled in North High there on the Arkansas River, an Indian Motif beautiful building. I soon realized that high school then and especially now are stupid unless one needs that structure. I didn't so I peeled out and got on the road and never looked back. Gasoline was only 15 cents a gallon. Why not go?
I can see you have a big thing about cars, the freedom and speed of traveling. You are filmed driving by Laki in his short film as well......
I had a 34 Ford hot rod too to go to drive-inns and pick up chicks. That was one of the hottest Fords ever. That and a 32 were classic hot rods. I had both with V8 and gearshift on the floor. (Just the other day I was responding to HANK III's invite to do 4x4 mud rally and I emailed him a lyric: I don't need no 4by4 / All I need is shift on the floor).

What impression did the music of that era have on you?
I could get radio stations that played race music on my Chevy radio. I remember driving to Joplin, MO with Hank Ballard and the Midnighters singing Work With Me Annie. Ike Turner was on the radio selling appliances. Real Deal then. Of course I had been steeped in Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb and honky-tonk blues as a kid and then Rhythm & Blues came from race music and it wasn't long before we went across the tracks for all our music. We knew musicians who played in combos in clubs that came out of Kansas City and were left from Stan Kenton's guys from Wichita. Fats Domino drove up from New Orleans in his '49 Caddy with bass tied on top to play the Mambo Club across the tracks to a handful of people who could talk and smoke with him. Hard times for him, but good for us. Maybe a dollar cover/or two drink minimum. We were under age, but who's gonna come over the tracks?
He met up with Jimmy Jammy and some other guys who hung out in a coupla places and they had a wild time. CP was always pretty cool. I met one guy from then, and even bought a car from him. His name was Johnny Mayes and he was older. I guess what these guys had in common was various forms of uppers and downers. Basically anything they could find. For years and years Bob Branaman mostly, but later Charley, took them continuously it seemed. They drank Cosanyl cough syrup. Bob B. and often Charley walked around with a paper bag with a couple of dark glass bottles of Cosanyl which they bought at any drug store - always changing stores. They also did a lot of uppers. Although from my observation CP never really went hog wild on any substances. For instance, he really never drank booze. He'd maybe have a little wine. Never beer as his sister Betty was an alcoholic and often drank beer. After she died I remember the day CP went out and bought a six pack and after that he would drink some Elephant beer from Denmark, I think. But although he took LSD quite a number of times while we were at the Claymont Apartments on Clayton St in SF, I never saw him have a bad trip. Once he agreed to go with me to one of "my" places in downtown SF. It was called Extension 21, owned by same guy from Berlin, where you sat at a table and looked at the map on your napkin and then called a lady who was at the location with a telephone indicated on your napkin map. There was an operator who sat high up looking down on the melee who, if the lady wanted to talk to you, would put you through. We stopped in during the afternoon when no one much was there. We were stoned on LSD. As we sat at a table with a little drink the operator had come in and she was checking all the phones. First one would ring behind us, then over to the left, then in front, then the next table and we thought it was the funniest thing we ever saw and started guffawing loudly until they told us to stop. Charley got up and walked over to the operator and started talking to her; I thought we would be kicked out for sure. But as usual he worked his magic and the next thing I knew the operator was agreeing to have a drink with us when she finished testing the phones. All we did was laugh and when people asked us what was wrong with us that we were so giggly (like on grass, sometimes) we would say "Well, we've gone to Lysidia." No one suspected a thing and, in fact LSD was legal at the time. We got it from Sandoz. Roxie Powell.
Charley, who else was around over the tracks?
Bo Diddley, Chuck Willis and other big names in Texas & Kansas City Blues. In the other part of town we'd go out to the Cowboy Inn where Little Jimmy Dickens or someone would be opening for Roy Acuff and whatever band would have mason jars full of Dexedrine or bennies that would keep us awake days and all night long, maybe then to my friend's club with a jazz combo where Mickey Shaughnessy would m.c. and after the gig with the band, Mickey would tell jokes and talk all night and into the next day. We'd drive around on bennies and park on Main still talking philosophy or the latest about Howard Hughes. We waited outside the forum after Elvis played and picked up all the chicks who would get into the car with their panties still wet. We'd walk down Broadway and see Count Basie at coffee getting ready to play at the Orpheum and say "hey man" to greet him and go into the drug store and get special nose drops that only we knew about that would make you head feel prickly and stay high for days. School? School was for squares!
In your novel, The Last of The Moccasins, first published by City Lights in 1971, you wrote a lot about the 50`s Wichita Hipster years. When was it apparent to you that a Beat Scene existed?
My hipster years were mainly through the 1950's up to I'd say 1962, the beginning of my psychedelic years, when I met Neal Cassady in North Beach at my girlfriend's pad and she told me he was the On The Road guy. I had heard of the beats a little before then, but I didn't get into them. I have never read On The Road, but Neal read me, in his high drama, the parts he was in, so I've listened to a lot of it and seen excerpts of it in journals. I was unaware of the Beats during my Hipster years and then I worked several jobs before I landed in San Francisco where my sister and aunt lived, though they didn't see each other.

1403 Gough St. San Francisco 1963 l-r Neal Cassady & Charles Plymell
I guess you could say that you along with Roxie Powell, James H. Jammy, Barbitol Bob Branaman, Bruce, Spoley Oley, Fast Car, Richard Rodent, that whole crew of Kansas hipster punks were the originals and preceded the Beats. When you hit San Francisco and your psychedelic years how did you connect with that scene?
I became aware of the Beats just before Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky came back from India in 1963 and met some of them when they came to my party with Ferlinghetti, McClure and Whalen, et al. Dave Haselwood who published my first book, Apocalypse Rose, had introduced me to other poets and their work he had published prior to my meeting those beats. He had published Lamantia, McClure and Conners who he went to school with in Wichita, and Whalen, maybe Duncan, and a book I really liked: The Hotel Wentley Poems by John Weiners. He took me to all the spots, including the Hotel Wentley, which was in "Polk Gulch," Polk Street above Foster's Cafeteria aka Foster Foods. Dave wanted to go back to Wichita, where he was from, so we did and then back to San Francisco. I thought the Beats were pretty square at the time. I hadn't met Burroughs and Kerouac yet. Pam and I met Burroughs at his Duke St. pad in London in 1968 and the same year Kerouac at the William Buckley TV show. I liked Neal and Burroughs immensely and thought Kerouac had a great ear for jazz. Though to me he remained a somewhat square Republican as far as I got to know him, not that the two are coupled. Later the Beat's French translator, Claude Pelieu said my Last of the Moccasins was better than Kerouac's Doctor Sax, and others immediately took issue, so I had to read that book.
And what did you make of Kerouac`s Dr Sax?
There was a literary difference. His book obeyed literary devices such as epiphany, alliteration, character development, etc. All the things one learns in an English department. He had a good ear for language, great jazz prosody in his poetry, I thought he was the best at reading to jazz, something a lot of others tried. I thought his prose imagery in that book sometimes tumbled into bathos. That's the only book of his I read. My book was quite different in that I had to invent the style: Hobohemian Prose, as well as the genre: Thematic Text Montage, to justify my writing.
I was talking with Allen Ginsberg over kaffeeklatsch some time in the late 80's the first time I heard the mention of Charles Plymell. I was living in the mundane metropolis of Mobile, where Ginsberg had given a reading on the previous night. A poetry reading which resulted in horrifying the orthodox, causing some women from the Junior League to clutch their pearls, purse their lips and saunter straight out of the building in shock. It was also a reading which resulted in fast approval from my teen-aged cohorts sitting on the edge of their seats beside me. I don't know if their appreciation and fondness of the reading was based on the literary worth of Ginsberg's writing or if it was the mere fact his opening poem contained expletives which the kids all thought was cool. My take was that, "a four-letter word doesn't equal a poem; not by itself." That next day, Allen and I talked about writing in general. We both mentioned folks we thought were good writers and he told me many tales of times spent with his friends in the era of that time. As far as meeting Charles, we ran into one another via cyberspace and suddenly,"we stole away to the dark end of the street; that's where we always meet." But unlike the James Carr song I am quoting, (Carr was a singer Charlie digs who was in prison where Neal Cassady once was, at San Quentin) Charlie and I have spent no face-to-face time together; instead, we meet daily/nightly at the end of our virtual street. We spend hours talking under the lamp post of my computer desk about subjects as diverse and personal and engaging and as interesting as the world is wide. Ginger Killian Eades
Hand on the Doorknob was your latest anthology of writing I think? It was published a short while back now. Charley tell me about your work in that book....
Yes, Water Row published it. And involves a section of dining and drinking with the Beats. Turns out it was the last time Ginsberg saw Kerouac and the last time Burroughs saw Ginsberg. There is some poetry in it from my other books, mainly Forever Wider and the elegy for my father that Allen said was on of the greatest elegies ever written. Turns out I wrote a poem to my father when I had a dream and he wrote one to his mother when he had a dream the same night. We discussed them after his reading at American University and the National Library where I introduced him. The other parts of the book are essays on printing the first Zap and some stories.
CP's writing continues to evolve and defies neat categorization. His novel, Last of the Moccasins, is impressionistic yet trenchant. It is kaleidoscopic, but contains prescient portents. His recent work incorporates philosophical impulses and challenges facile prescriptions...If I were to choose one poem of CP's of which I am particularly fond, it would be "Charles Henri Ford's Last Prints" which was published in Hand On The Doorknob. Laki Vazakas
(Charley`s writing is) like mercury on a warm glass. Hammond Guthrie
Charley, tell me some more again about Ginsberg.....
The most famous, the one who masterminded the Beat Generation. I knew him for several years in many different places. His ads still find their way to MySpace! I met him up on Potrero Hill, San Francisco and he immediately tried to court me as if we were in a 1920's literary soirée. It was a bit odd. He asked me about my sexual experiences as if it were from a textbook. It reminded me of what Huncke must have gone through with Dr. Kinsey. I treated it with humor and felt like he was the inexperienced one but didn't tell him that. We walked up to Ferlinghetti's house and Larry was in bed, so we drank some wine in his bedroom while he and Allen talked literary business. After we left, Allen told me that he thought Ferlinghetti wasn't a very good poet. Then he came to the party that Glenn Todd has written about in detail. Soon after he and Neal and Anne moved into the Gough St. flat and there began a lot of traffic. During that time on Gough St I met Mary Beach and Claude Pelieu and her children, Pam and Jeffrey. They had come from France at Ferlinghetti's invitation and were interested in my collage and translated many of the Beats. Huncke came to visit us in California with the introduction of Allen who was in Italy at the time. Back in New York years later through Allen I met Kerouac and Pam and I drank and ate with them the last time they saw each other. At Allen's farm I met Corso and others involved in the Beats.
You became good friends with Neal Cassady in San Francisco, didn't you?
Neal and Allen moved into my flat on Gough Street ostensibly to prepare Neal's book, The First Third, for publication. When Ferlinghetti and Allen sat down with him, Neal was hopelessly Neal...I called him The Fastest Word in the West...and he rolled a cigar shaped Panama Red and began free association, so I said to them, "why don't you just tape him and transcribe it?", but they were steeped in a more academic approach. Neal told me he was always slighted by the famous writers as a kind of errand boy or driver and wasn't taken seriously, but I thought his words were as what I had seen of Kerouac. Of course it's a matter of taste and I'm probably biased, Neal and I came from similar region and background, not one of ward-head mentalities.
I didn't know that much about the scene really but read Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Bukowski and dug it much. I saw lots of parallels with the punk movement I was part of - more than the hippie scene. Mike Watt
Charles, what else do you recall of that time in San Francisco?
The time was ripe for Ginsberg to re-enter the city that launched him to fame in the 50's over the word, "fuck." The backdrop for the Hippies was eastern religion of the new age. I remember going with Allen to explore various cults and sitting outside for a designated time until we were permitted to go in and join a rage. I left, of course. One of them was Scientology, which had tin cans attached to wires to transfer crude vibes. Eastern religions had been something that intellectuals and artist sought out since the twenties and before, so I was unimpressed, but the droves of youngsters rebelling against their lifestyles were fresh blood for the Frisco vamps. They were more ignorant than the beats in that few had formal education, certainly no street smarts, so their fates were predicable. Allen told me than when he got out of college he got a job as a market researcher, and I could see how that benefited him in his ongoing career and his desire to be a leader.
I suppose the first I heard of Charlie was via the booklet: "So Who Owns Death TV?" which included the work of Carl Weisner, Wlm. Burroughs and my friend (the late) Liam O'Gallagher among others. Back in the mid-60's in San Francisco when I met artists Mary Beach and Claude Pelieu who were then working with City Lights books to produce Beach Books, Texts, and Documents. I'm not really sure if the set (Beats) influenced general society, as 'they' didn't really want anything to do with 'us' - but certainly for those of 'us' (just-after-beats) who were coming up in SF shared their overwhelming sense of quirky alienation, as well as having a deeply rooted intellectual and spiritual curiosity, the Beats 'way' of approaching themselves and world around them was more than influential, it was essential. Psychedelics did the rest. Hammond Guthrie
I was not very familiar with Beat literature before I met Huncke in New York. Shortly after getting to know Herbert, I met and befriended Gregory Corso, Marty Matz, Jack Micheline, Roger and Irvyne Richards, and many folks in this circle. Huncke helped me to look at the world in a new way. He had so much compassion and was exceptionally generous with his time and his stories. This is not to say that Herbert didn't bust my balls on occasion; it was, at times, an Unsentimental Education. My connections with all of these folks who were integral to the formation and evolution of the Beat movement had a tremendous influence on how I live. It's difficult to measure influence, but suffice it to state that I continue to take sustenance and inspiration from the work of my friends. I acknowledge the groundbreaking work of many of the Beat writers. But I'm wary of the on-going mythologizing of some of these artists, especially of Kerouac. This impulse has obscured the accomplishments of many writers who helped the word evolve - Charley, Janine Pommy Vega and Alexander Trocchi, for example. Huncke, Corso and Marty Matz were all approachable, and to various degrees were in touch with their dark sides. I understand how their creativity was integral to the way they lived, and vice-versa. They were human. Laki Vazakas

Charley, I wanted to briefly talk about a particular aspect of the arts: Money. In recent years the arts have become more and more inundated with polluted funding streams from big business, as they slap their branding iron on the ass of writers, musicians and artists. Avenues of public funding have always been available to apply for as well. Charley, you had a bad connection some time ago with the National Endowment for the Arts, didn't you?
The NEA has been a terrible thing in my life. I took Ginsberg to their offices when we lived in D.C. when he came to visit. He wooed them and they put someone with friends of lower eastside poets in power, many who had been here to Cherry Valley to see me. But they handed it ($$) to their other friends and couples like Allen & Peter netted about 40 grand. This when we had to sell our house here and move to D.C. to find jobs. When we were financially able to return here, I got a part-time job in a university as a tutor and saw a full professor and his wife who were millionaires groveling and slobbering in front of state grants people to the extent I never recovered from the scene. The NEA became safe academic types who are not poets, but they have to con kids into thinking they are so it continues in a vicious scam of departments to keep the fraud and Sallie Mae (student loans) going. I still receive books from poets inscribed to me as their great teacher and they list several grants and it's pretty easy to see who their friends were who gave it to them. I just wanted a fairer system about 30 years ago, but jealous poets, opportunists and arts systems and organizations invaded all federal, state and local programs to the extent it bred more like a pyramid scheme or Scientology, etc. They changed the cultural landscape forever just like everything else in this country. They are they same ones who rant at Bush while they do the same thing and are comfortable in their ignorance and greed that brought down culture and a country.
Money always changes people, sometimes to the extent that they can't recognise themselves or the smell of their own shit...
I could get into several examples over the years, but it would take a book and it's not worth my time. In short, the state is right as always. I applied every year for 30 years and watched the generations receive money I had never dreamt of. I'd be lucky to see a thousand dollars after I quit working on the S.F. docks. Someone like Burroughs gave me things out of his generosity. Now, I just want to pay for my burial out in Indian country next to my mother, so I won't have to burden my wife and kids. After my union job, I made the wrong career choices. Even those who howled against the system enjoyed its fruits. I separated myself from it long ago. Elite professions provide little fellowship for mixed blood white trash, daring to call themselves poets. Some bust the game, like a Bukowski or a Jackson Pollock, but for every one of those case studies, there are thousand for the greed, avarice and status quo of the state that it supports. While toilets flush to the sound of tapping toes, the misery of the poor contributes to the phonies and liars. Or Rimbaud said it better: while public funds evaporate in feasts of fraternity, a bell of rosy fire rings in the clouds. Proof is easy. Maya Angelou, the hallmark verse queen and self acclaimed ex-whore used her talents when she saw suckers to become a multi-millionaire on the cover of Forbes magazine. She rode the system for all she's worth and like Cheney and Bush and Bubba Bill, her John ghost benefactors, she`s well insulated against the truth. Clinton had her read for his inauguration! You can see the history of this country in the shit flushing down the toilet. I feel sorry for younger generations yearning to be free. Nothing like that great open slate of the Western Lands.
My take is that I essentially agree with his take. Hammond Guthrie
He has deserved more recognition for decades, as well as some bread to help sustain him as he cuts through the veins of his life to pour the blood of a poet onto paper. If I were to implore CP to dress up in a monkey suit, or ask him to put on any other costume that one could pin a moniker on as the "latest and hippest fad," he would defer to his own faculties and gently tell me he couldn't fulfill my request and for me to lay off my morphine script cause it would be obvious I wasn't thinking clearly!! He has no intentions of donning a robe of "appearance" to utter words eagerly awaited by those with money and power so he could fit into the tight box of some seem-scene. Charlie ain't no poser; he's no pawn. As a young man, rolling into dance halls across the tracks, he was hip before the word fell into nomenclature. Nobody had to tell CP what was hip. As a part of the marketing strategy of ANY "scene," you've got the man behind the man behind the man who doles out the dough for what that puppet-master believes is gonna be the next best thing on the street. I feel with respect to the NEA, they missed the boat. Charles' writing is exceptional and his work speaks for itself. Does it deserve NEA funding? Res ipsa loquitur. Power and politics should not dictate allocating funds to artists if it is contemporaneously concerned with its marketing strategy. Some writers rid themselves of a cumbersome integrity in order to fit nicely into that hand-crafted box. CP is loyal and faithful and sincere. But most importantly, he is "real." He would never amputate his integrity. Ginger Killian Eades
Going back to early 1960`s and Gough Street then Charley, were you working then?
Neal and I had regular jobs. I worked as a printer and Neal a tire changer. We had fun in the new age that swept the city, but we were older. Little things like dancing was something I didn't get into much. When Allen took the stage in Golden Gate Park, the well-documented be-in, dancing in a kind of Shiva contortion, I and those with me quickly blended in the crowd. Neal was also in Berkeley taunting the leaders of the famous free speech rally until someone asked who is that nut and Allen said he was just a crazy Zen Buddhist.
And what about the marches and demonstrations, you must have been on some of them?
Pam and I joined the march to People's Park. She was pregnant and I assessed the scene quickly and wanted to take her over to someone's house instead of demonstrating. The troops had lined up on both sides of the designated parade route and wouldn't let anyone go down a side street. I had to call the bluff of the young guardsman who quickly got my message and called his superior and let us go down a side street. The troops had lined the designated route with barbed wire, tanks and fixed bayonets. The Berkeley "radicals" had made a deal prior to stay on certain streets. Neal was just out of San Quentin, and I had enough common sense from drifting about the country to know that the protesters were sitting ducks and it wasn't a good move under any flag, another example of intellectual ignorance that could have gotten themselves killed, and did at Kent State. I knew better and had been down to the Peace and Freedom Party headquarters in San Francisco, which was across the hall from the Black Panther Party. I used to help them read propaganda pamphlets to sort out which ones were written by agents. I saw the Black Panthers as legitimate radicals willing to lay down their lives and demonstrated that by marching on the Reagan governor's mansion armed with bullets draped over their backs. I returned to the parade and went down to ground zero where Gary Snyder (who reminded me of a boy scout) and other poets and the radical organizers were doing their theatrics. Of course they lost. My thoughts were re-enforced again when Pam and I were near the Chicago convention and decided not to go to ground zero.
What happened on that particular one?
Sure enough a young radical tore down the flag and all hell broke loose culminating in getting us Nixon in the white house. I don't suppose the kid had the sense to detect that some of the older cops in the riot squad, or their superiors, may have been veterans of Omaha Beach, or Iwo Jima. Not a very sensitive tactic for the organizers either, who became stockbrokers in the new republican era. Neal was real. We were from that geography and time between St. Louis to Denver where one could tap into a real person.
The real people can be hard to find........
After the end of flower power, I took Neal a new pair of driver's gloves. He was on the Further Bus with Kesey, whom I had met before when Neal brought him to parties, and with Tom Wolfe, who seemed a nice guy. Neal was to prove himself again when inevitably the cops stopped the bus down south. Neal talked to the cops in such a way as they ended up liking him. It was kind of reminiscent of Boone Co. and the sheriffs and Hasil Adkins. It was more the culture of the '50's where speed and a line of talk saved the day.

That`s a great way of putting it Charley. What was turning your ears at the time on the west coast?
During that period in San Francisco and L.A., a lot was happening. New music was born e.g. The Doors and Janis Joplin. When we were printing Zap, someone we knew came running in saying there was a new group in town he was managing that he wanted us to meet. They had a strange name...Pink Floyd.
Oh yeah..... Did they throw any bricks at the wall back then I wonder?
Janis and Big Brother were playing the new hall on Fillmore and two complimentary tickets were left for us at City Lights. We were too stoned and involved in so much partying, we didn't make it a few blocks over to the Fillmore.
And I know you have always been into real honky tonk country music and that you grew up with Woody Guthrie, what about other stuff though?
The Beatles, Beach Boys, Bobby Dylan....Cash. As an old cowpoke would say: "Makes my ass wanna dip snuff!" So I listen to all music, but I'm very selective in what I like, and I admit that sometimes I miss a generation as I confessed in my "We Jam Econo" tribute I wrote on Mike Watt's Hoot Page
Charley did write a beautiful essay on the We Jam Econo Minutemen documentary film. I felt very, very honored. I've got two recordings of live readings by Charley I dig a lot - don't know the names of the poems. I've read both The Last of The Moccasins and Hand on The Doorknob which I love much. I would be up for doing anything and everything with Charley, it would be a mindblow for me! Mike Watt
That is a great piece on the film about Watt`s old band, The Minutemen. I have seen some photos of you with some other musicians that came out of that SST hardcore scene too Charley.....
I met Grant Hart at Burroughs' funeral in Lawrence and was supposed to give him a ride to St. Louis for the Burial and Patti Smith's goodbye, but my friend overslept. Later we saw Grant again when he took us to Patti Smith's concert at the Bowery Ballroom in which he performed. It was in sight of the old Bowery loft we used too live in. Ferlinghetti came to read at a nearby university when Grant Hart and I went to the party afterward and Grant sniffed his ass. Larry and the English professor were shocked as Grant said that dogs make friends that way. The kid at the university told me that Ferlinghetti said for him not to introduce him as a Beat, but as Doctor Ferlinghetti. Now that's worth getting a PhD for if nothing else! Thurston Moore asked me to read at a performance he was involved with in Montreal and then later in Northampton and again, recently with Grant Hart and Mike Watt. Recently, Thurston gave my son and me passes to Sonic Youth and Flaming Lips gigs. Then Grant Hart and I were invited to the festival in Northampton where Grant introduced me to Mike Watt. And so I went back to make up for what I missed in the 80's. Other than that, Kathleen Haskard, who I found in time/space.
In November of 2007 I was asked by Thurston Moore to be part of a poetry reading and my old friend Grant Hart introduced me to Charley. That was the first I heard of him... he said very kind things to me about my poems. I conked at Thurston's and the next day he lent me his copy of "The Last of the Moccasins" and told me about his association with the beats. I read it on the flight home... and then read it again. I loved it! Mike Watt
I first heard of CP from Herbert Huncke, whom I met in New York in the late 80s. Soon after meeting Huncke, I purchased a copy of his book "The Evening Sun Turned Crimson", which CP and his wife Pamela had published as a Cherry Valley Edition. I didn't actually meet CP until the summer of 1998, shortly before the Cherry Valley Arts Festival. CP's friend, Janine Pommy Vega, had suggested that I get in touch with CP regarding my documentary, "Huncke and Louis." I sent Charley a VHS of my work, and we had a few phone conversations. We met in Albany, New York at the local PBS affiliate's TV studio, where CP and Breath Hand were hyping the arts festival. Laki Vazakas
You have also published work from some seminal authors from Huncke to WS Burroughs, tell me about the publishing Charley....
We published a couple of Charles Henri Ford`s books and he then wrote a diary which is a most interesting account of those he knew closing out the days of Surrealism pre WWII. We saw him again at Huncke's memorial at St. Mark's and I went to his collage opening as well as Gerard Malanga. He had stayed with us in Cherry Valley at a house in town which is now a restaurant. Burroughs also stayed with us there as well as Carl Solomon, Victor Bockris and others. During that time Huncke and Louis came up because we were publishing Huncke's first book. Allen insisted on contributing 600 bucks or so for his advance, which helped greatly because we thought Huncke was of great stature. Huncke visited us in Baltimore and Washington where we read together with Ray Bremser whom we also published. I had deep affection for Burroughs, who was always entertaining and receptive when we visited and he gave us his loft in NYC while he and James were abroad; to say nothing of his paintings and manuscripts he gave us. He was always generous and said he didn't consider himself a Beat. Unfortunately we had to sell his treasures as fast as he gave them, but he was like that with money himself.

And did you hang out at the Chelsea Hotel Manhattan ever at all?
Yeah, my mother-in-law, Mary Beach and her husband Claude Pelieu lived there. We were put up there for a couple of nights for the reading at The Bitter End. John Cassady, Neal's son, rehearsed there before the gig at the Bitter End. I used to drive a milk truck into the city and deliver cash to Herbert Huncke from his foreign publishers.
Did you ever get involved with films and visual stuff over the years?
Underground films were the rage. I remember taking Robert Frank on my motorcycle down to the S.F. premier of (Fellini`s) 8 1/2. Flaming Creatures was playing in North Beach and there was a party for its opening. Someone sent a limo for Lew Welch and me. As a cab driver, he dug the ride. Stan Brackage, another kid from Kansas, came by the print shop. I did two 8mm movies that were in Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Jonas Mekas at the New York Film co-op showed them until they wore out and notified me through Harry Smith that I had some money they earned! I didn't expect such attention and care! I made some collages and had a show at the Batman, a notorious gallery where Bruce Connor had shown after he came back from Mexico. Neal was at the Goldwater convention at the Cow Palace that night and came by my opening with straw hat and cane. It was a costume opening anyway.
I've been casually shooting footage of CP since we met in 1998. This is both work and play. We've had some fun roadtripping--out to Kansas and in and around Cherry Valley. I cut together a short video that is on his MySpace page and is up on YouTube. I'd like to work with Charley to shape some of this material into a larger piece. We collaborated on an email dialogue that was published some years back in Night Magazine. Laki Vazakas
How did the Batman show go?
I sold all my collages except a couple. The show was mentioned in Art in America. Billy Jharmark, the owner of Batman Gallery gave Pam and me his classic 1950 MGTD. We were leaving for Europe and sold it on the street for $250! A book was later written about the Batman. I don't think it mentioned my show. There was a story about Billy Jharmark giving Michael McClure a wristwatch!
Nothing about that MG he gave you and Pam?
These are but a few examples of my poor marketing skills. I began to think my marketing skills weren't up to par. It seemed to end when Neal came running into the Gough St. flat yelling, "Charley turn on the TV! Kennedy's been shot!" That Thanksgiving was gray. We had a big dinner and invited a stranger off the street. My sister and her husband Frank were there. Later he helped get me a job on the docks. Ginsberg's poem talks about me and some of my friends from Kansas who lived in the pad above that one called "The End Pad." It was a sign of the times for me. Certainly that fling with youth had ended.
This interview was put together whilst I was traveling in the States and knocked into shape over some of the days of April and May `08. I had the good fortune to be able to spend time with Charley`s long time friend, the artist and film maker Robert Branaman when I was in LA. With thanks to Charley and Pam Plymell, Roxie Powell, Bob Branaman, Ginger Killian Eades, Mike Watt, Hammond Guthrie and Laki Vazakas.
Charley and Pam`s publishing company is Cherry Valley Editions and you can also read more at Charley`s myspace page.
Charles Plymell is still kicking against the pricks, writing and performing at spoken word gigs with musician and artist Grant Hart, Sonic Youth`s Thurston Moore and the legendary Minutemen bassist Mike Watt. He will be reading at the Sprachsalz Literary Festival Innsbruck, Austria on 12-14 Sept and will be making further spoken word appearances, some with either one, some or all of the three men aforementioned in the USA later on this year.
This postcript was written by Glenn Todd, artist and writer who was deeply embedded in the Wichita Scene along with Charley Plymell, Robert Branaman, Bruce Connor, Michael McClure, Dave Haselwood and many more. The Wichita Vortex website is a good reference point.

POSTSCRIPT
This is Charley, swinging. The time is spring-summer, this year, 1963. The place, Wichita, Kansas, where the golden wheat has just been harvested and the trees are bursting greenery touching tips over the center of the streets. Charley stands in a combination teenage twist and gay bar done up in coral walls lined with gilded store window manikins. He stands at the front of the dance floor before a juke box that has a waterfall behind it and light flowing down its sides, so that he appears to be coming from a neon grotto. His hair is falling over his forehead in a mass of curls, he is wearing dark glasses, a blue-and-silver sport shirt, a metallic gold tie, black tight pants slung low on his hips, and black-and-white saddle oxfords. One hip is slung outward. Up go the hands in the air.
TWIST!" shouts Charley.
Up his back runs a ripple like a snake moving, fast. His hips are inscribing a frenzied half-circle in the air. His head bounces and bobbles with jazz-drummer ecstasy. His arms flail, he's almost flying but his feet are planted in the floor, sucking up great electrical currents of earth vibrations.
"It's the vortex!" He shouts. "Can't you feel the forces! Pulling you in! It's twisting in twister land!"
Across the floor toward him dances his blonde college-girl goddess, and she's out of her mad gold pony-tailed head. She's all Charley could dream of exploding into, she's Miss Freeswinging Kansas, Caucasian aflame, descendant of hot-blooded fairy-tale princesses, she moves with classic American grace, she's poised and pure and fashion-hip, she has round arms of love, ready to grab, she won't be brought down, and above the rock and roll, sweet cello strings play for all eternity in that gold head of hers.
They're back at the table where a crowd of us are sitting. They're arm in arm, together again, and I turn on to their beauty aglow with sex.
"This is where it all comes from!" Shouts Charley. "Can't you feel the vibrations? Man, there is so much energy here that you just get near it and flooom! It's got you and swinging you someplace else."
This is Charley's hometown, the land that produced him, and he's back to turn everyone on and get recharged. Everywhere he goes crowds of youth follow him, turning him on. Now the brown-limbed teenagers in cutoff jeans and bouffant hair have taken the floor. Their bodies are strong, sunbeautied, and swimming-pool clean, they're eager-high on beer. They are dancing dances they all know, no one touching, boys with girls, girls with girls, boys with boys. All the steps are perfect and harmonious. They are all oh God so beautiful and I know we cannot lose, beyond all certitude of mind mankind will take the stars and crush time with these golden kids, born of our bodies and spirit.
Here Charley is big, here with youth. He is vibrant with sex that knows no separation from love, and hope for and beware of the day its dancing force is turned on you, my friend. Crowds follow him, he is alive with scheme and dream, and he will make it happen now. Are you ready? He will, like the morning glory but more aware, unfold himself in the sunburst of today.
Crowds follow him, turned on. He's having a show of his collages at a weird place, the New Mission Care, in the skidrow-trainstation section of Wichita. Charley aggrandizing making bright the legend. Is it a game? How much is glory and how much is morning glory? (He quotes Cocteau: "All art is a card trick.") He has made the Wichita scene happen: bright-eyed campus beauties, long-haired students, careful college professors, waiting-in-limbo artists, shimmy-shake drag queens, long ago pillhead buddies, strange inhabitants of the outposts of Beatsville--all come to soak up Charley energy, to be angered, to be inspired, to lift him up or put him down, but always to be stirred.

Glenn Todd
San Francisco, 1997

Charles Plymell

Books:
# Apocalypse Rose, Dave Haselwood Books, San Francisco, CA, 1967.
# Neon Poems, Atom Mind Publications, Syracuse, NY, 1970.
# The Last of the Moccasins, City Lights Books, San Francisco, CA, 1971; Mother Road Publications, 1996.
# Moccasins Ein Beat-Kaleidoskop, Europaverlag, Vienna, Austria, 1980.
# Over the Stage of Kansas, Telephone Books, NYC, 1973.
# The Trashing of America, Kulchur Foundation, NYC, 1975.
# Blue Orchid Numero Uno, Telephone Books, 1977.
# Panik in Dodge City, Expanded Media Editions, Bonn, W. Germany, 1981.
# Forever Wider, 1954-1984, Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ, 1985.
# Was Poe Afraid?, Bogg Publications, Arlington, VA, 1990.
# Hand on the Doorknob, Water Row Books, Sudbury, MA, 2000
Anthologies:
# Mark in Time, New Glide Publications, San Francisco, CA, 1971.
# And The Roses Race Around Her Name, Stonehill, NYC, 1975.
# Turpentin on the Rocks, Maro Verlag, Augsburg, W. Germany, 1978.
# A Quois Bon, Le Soleil Noir, Paris, France, 1978.
# Planet Detroit, Anthology of Urban Poetry, Detroit, MI, 1983.
# Second Coming Anthology, Second Coming Press, San Francisco, CA, 1984.
# The World, Crown Publishers, 1991.
# Editors' Choice III, The Spirit That Moves Us, New York, 1992.
# The Age of Koestler, The Spirit of the Wind Press, Kalamazoo, MI, 1995.
Paul Hawkins
for hesterGlock
June '08