Jan Herman

As part of the Beat Hotel crowd in Paris during the late-1950s and early '60s, Sinclair Beiles collaborated on the first book of avant-garde cut-ups, "Minutes to Go," with Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, and Gregory Corso. While working at Maurice Girodias's Paris-based Olympia Press, he was a key editor who helped shepherd Burroughs's "Naked Lunch" into print. It is his incandescent poetry, however, for which he should be most remembered. But despite praise for his poetry from such luminaries as Burroughs and Leonard Cohen, his verse has rarely surfaced outside the small-press literary world. "Catastrophes Choisies" is Beiles's first poetry collection to appear in French.

A strong new issue of Beat Scene has just arrived from the U.K. Although the magazine is primarily devoted to the leading lights of the Beat Generation writers, the magazine covers many who were contemporaneous but not really part of their circle, as well as others who preceded them. Nor does it stint on writers who have followed in their wake. The unifying element that draws the magazine's interest seems to be that they lived and breathed and created their work outside the academy. And while many of their books have now been accepted into the canon, they are hardly academic.

And she gave Zeus a headache.

You spoke in biblical flourishes, assailed others with a rhetoric deadlier than the barrel of a gun. When you pulled the trigger, your power overwhelmed what lesser men most fear — the death of all and everything.

Electric Guitar Inventions by Chapan Hanspal Text & Poetry Inventions by Florian Vetsch Poetry Recitation by Jawant Hanspal Flugelhorn & Cornet Inventions by Markus Breuss