He died Sunday, May 21, 2023. He was 77. After theater studies and acting with The Mime Troupe in San Francisco, he moved to England, where he mostly lived since. In London he worked for Transatlantic Review, the British Drama League, and Running Man Press — and later edited the quarterly New Yorkshire Writing and co-curated (with Douglas Field) the exhibition “OffBeat: Jeff Nuttall and the International Underground” at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, which drew 130,000 visitors. He published poetry, essays, reviews, and fiction in many magazines and anthologies. His poem “Passion” was recently published by Cold Turkey Press in a folio entitled Silenian Odes. Have a look at his poem “ET IN BOHEMIA EGO.” His 1970s-era play about Jim Morrison, “The Lizzard King,” was published as a chapbook in 2021. The Wind Pours By Like Destiny, his uncommonly rich meditation on the poets Sylvia Plath and Asa Benveniste and, as the subtitle puts it, “the poetic afterlife,” was published as a chapbook in 2022. And here at Straight Up, the staff was proud to post much by and about him. You can seek it here.
Damn Jan! And I had just read a poem of his Gerard sent me and really liked it and wanted to read more and wanted to ask you about him and now I hear this! I hope he was looking in the direction of that photo when he left!
cody — he was also a mensch to the max. v. good to hear from you. sad that this brought such shitty news.
I only just got to know Jay through his essay on Plath. I was lucky enough to meet him last year and his loss hits so hard. A wonderful and deeply thoughtful writer and person. I won’t see his like again.
thnx, ruth. he told me he how fascinating it was to meet you.
Hi, Jan. It was actually Sunday the 21st when he passed. I was with him. Nice article. Thankyou.
Hi Wes — Thanks for the correction. I’ve fixed the day and date. — Jan
Wesley,,
I sent your mom a condolence card yesterday (June 17th), which should come from Washington State in a few days. I was with you when you were picked up after film school to get a ride home. I would not have known about this loss except for this Jan Herman blog (thanks Jan Herman!). Devastation all around. I have notified Brian Milton, who is working on a remembrance. He could use some help. There are three emails from me sitting on your dad’s computer. They aren’t important, but your welcome to look at them – if you can look at them – but why would you want to do that? I became concerned when I didn’t hear back from him. He was such a good friend. Always a reply. Devastation all around. Hard to explain to you what a long silence this engenders.. Best love to you and Fran. I don’t have an email address for you or your Mom. Send it if you have any reason to ask me anything: michaelwinecoff@gmail.com ..
Hi Mike. Good to hear from you. Fran posted a letter to you but obviously hasn’t arrived yet. Still waiting on someone to unlock his laptop (he took the password with him), so I’ll check his emails in due course. Devastation all round indeed. Hope you are otherwise keeping ok.
Best wishes and stay in touch.
Wes
Wesley,
Thank you for responding in your grieving time. Hope the computer wizard shows up.
Michael
Hi Mike
I’ve sent a couple of emails.
Cheers
Wes
I met Jay in San Francisco in 1964. We were both copy boys together on William Randolph Hearst’s SF Examiner, and lived in a wooden cottage in the Haight Ashbury district that had been conbstructed from wreckage from the 1906 earthquake. At the end of 1965 I hitched across the USA and took a boat to Southampton, and was living in a one-room bedsitter in West Kensington in 1966 when Jay came to London. We both lived there together until joined by another ex-copy-boy, Mike Winecoff and his wife, Susan Hadley. Jay and I would go for a walk when Mike and Susan wanted a cuddle All three of us young men were writers, ands worked as security guards to make living money while we wrote. It was then that Jay wrote ‘It takes guts to play a fiddle’ published by the Transatlantic Review (it can still be found there). I bought a 1935 Austin 7 called Alexa, fell in love with a South African born girl called Fiona Campbell, and when she went there – having left at birth – I drove Alexa across Europe, the Sahara and most of the Congo to give Fiona Alexa as a present, but the car didn’t make it out of the heart of Africa. I took an airliner from Entebbe in Uganda to Johannesburg, and we were writing our wedding invitations when – under Apartheid – the South African police threw me out of the country. I went back to England and into journalism, but my friendship with Jay (and Michael and Susan) endured. Jay married a Yorkshire girl called Fran and lived in Prince George in Canada for a few years, but came back to England and settled, first in the West Country, later in Heptonstal in West Yorkshire. He and Fran had a son called Wesley
I was in correspondence with him just a few weeks ago, and intend to write his Obituary for The Times and the Daily Telegraph. But I need contact with Wesley and with Fran. I need Jay’s date and place of birth, to confirm that his father ‘Red’ Jones, was an oil-wildcatter in the 1930, that Jay, an only child, was one-sixteenth Souix Indian. I know he and Mike worked on a novel together about the culture in Europe in the 1960’s, about which Jay was an authority, and he wrote a play centred on Jim Morrison called ‘The Lizard King’.
More colour would be welcome