I spent more than a decade reviewing theater for a major metro daily and I'd never heard the term "nubbing (or taking the piss)." Hmmph. Heathcote Williams shows how it's done in a sweet folio about to be published by Gerard Bellaart's Cold Turkey Press. As my good friend N.O. Mustill says via email, "me nostrils flare, aquiver at the delicious line: 'Lest wind-filled sprites bequim the air.'" Sometimes an actor will find himself on stage Having forgotten what he’s meant to say. He’s dried completely; his prompter’s in the … [Read more...]

The other day a friend of mine said, "I'm not sure a living human has written a good poem since Bukowski died." His all-time Buk favorite is "The Best Love Poem I Can Write at the Moment." Coincidentally, I came across a review by Michael Hinds of The FBI’s Obscene File: J. Edgar Hoover and the Bureau’s Crusade Against Smut, in which Hinds begins with a poem by Catullus. The comparison between the "obscene" Bukowski and the "obscene" Catullus is too good to pass up. The Best Love Poem I Can Write at the Moment listen, I told … [Read more...]

This poem is not intended as a companion piece to "Music for the End of Time." The tone is entirely different, not at all apocalyptic. But it covers the same or similar ground, and I can't help thinking that the difference in treatment is a merely a matter of temperament. Which is enough: Death is a wind that will carry you off sometime before the following dawn. It may start with a lake-scented draft from the cane break behind the house, or a breeze through an open door filling your nostrils with your mother's party perfume: … [Read more...]

I remember meeting Stephen Schneck in San Francisco at City Lights Bookstore, where I was clerking at the time. He had published The Nightclerk, which won the International Formentor Prize, and I was starting a "little" magazine. He offered three "Not Poems" for the first issue. His novel, translated into 12 languages but banned in Australia, was about the erotic fantasies of a corpulent hotel nightclerk. (Orson Welles wanted to film it; didn't happen.) So Schneck's offer felt like a great piece of luck. Not in the same league as getting … [Read more...]

My staff of thousands tells me that if I post any more poems by Heathcote Williams, I will be making a mockery of this blog's stated purpose. I'm a small "d" democrat who rules Straight Up by popular consent, so I had to admit I've been banging on about his poems. But -- with a capital "B" -- what are his poems if not "arts, media & cultural news with 'tude?" More than mere 'tude, they're truth-telling CAT scans of historic figures and cultural history ("Shelley at Oxford," for example, or "The United States of Porn"); of political and … [Read more...]