Charles Plymell
Sunday Service of Sun and Clouds

There was a time when Charles Plymell claimed that Bob Dylan stole his Nobel Prize. Charley was full of blustering anger in those days, calling his old friend Allen Ginsberg a phony, his publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti a two-bit miser, and Jack Kerouac a Mama’s boy whose On the Road he never read. In more recent years Charley has apologized for his deprecation of Ginsberg and dedicated his latest book, Over the Stage of Kansas, to Ferlinghetti, though he still claims not to have read Kerouac. Because it would make poetic sense, I’d like to date his change of heart — not only metaphorically but literally — to the time he had a heart attack and wrote this majestic, never-published poem.

In fact, his apologies to Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti came later. As to that Nobel laureate? Well . . . I believe Charley still considers him a thief.