WHISPERS
the face
that launched
a thousand ships
has sailed
and not in beauty
War Crime Outcomes —
Two Coverups in the Slaughterhouse of War
From the podcast IN THE DARK: “On November 19, 2005, a small group of U.S. Marines killed 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq. The case against them would become one of the most high-profile war-crimes prosecutions in American history, and then it would all fall apart. … No one was held accountable.” Why not?
On March 16, 1968, more than 500 Vietnamese men, women, and children in the village of Mi Lai were slaughtered by a platoon of U.S. soldiers. It became known as the Mi Lai massacre. The soldiers were led by Lieutenant William Calley. He was later court-martialed and convicted of murder after an Army cover-up.
Malaise . . . In the Middle of Nowhere
Not helped
by late disasters
and no idea
of what to do
but write these lines
and think of better times.
BEAT SCENE No. 110
Latest Issue Filled With Rich Tales
About Brion Gysin, Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassidy and Anne Murphy, Charles Bukowski, Herbert Huncke, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, Milton Klonsky, Alice Notley, Bernard Kops, Neeli Cherkovski, Emmett Grogan and the Diggers, Martin Bax, the influence of Gertrude Stein, the death of Joan Volmer, and more …
Whimsy and Philosophy: Pictures at an Artist’s Studio
On a visit to Paul Zelevansky’s studio in Manhattan, I took some pictures of the works he had there on display. These are some of the ones I photographed. I post them here without commentary other than their titles for you to decide how they strike you.
With Apologies to Gogol
Suddenly I felt
while massaging my skin
the skeleton within. …
Artists of ‘Harlem Renaissance’ at Metropolitan Museum
Glad I got to the Met for a glimpse before it becomes hotter ‘n hell. Although the museum was jammed, the show itself was comfortable. It was also much larger than I expected. I hadn’t realized how many accomplished painters there were among the Harlem group. For example, I had never heard of Archibald Motley Jr. who I thought pretty much sets the exquisite tone of the show, though by no means exclusively.
Käthe Kollwitz at MoMA
Finally got to see this intimate, brooding retrospective.
‘Tucked among the illustrious dead . . .’
‘… but still preposthumous, which I prefer to post mortem.’ — jh
That is Brion Gysin pictured on the cover of BEAT SCENE magazine.
Charles Plymell Takes Stage for New and Selected Poems
Plymell has as much in depth to say about death as Hemingway did and a lot more to say about it in terms of the present generation stillborn into a world that can offer nothing. — William S. Burroughs Plymell and his friends inventing the Wichita Vortex contribute to a tradition stretching back from Lamantia […]
Here to Entertain You
My staff of thousands is curious to know whether the music is actually being played or dubbed.
‘There he was in a dream . . .’
“He gives me a manuscript
on elegant stationery
with a letterhead of
raised black lettering
in typeface rare & delicate.
He’s terminal. We both
know it. …”
Álvaro Mutis on the Real Nowhere Man
“From his essential dullness,, his useless, worn-out gestures, his equivocal, tenacious desires, his ‘nowhere,’ his walled-in yearning to communicate, his continuous laughable travels, his raising his shoulders like a hungry ape, his conventional, fearful laughter, his impoverished litany of passions …” Or as The Beatles sang it, “He’s a real nowhere man …”
Over the Stage of Kansas
A Lifetime of Charles Plymell’s Inspired Poetry
![Charles Plymell [photo by Gerard Malanga]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Charles-Plymell-photo-by-Gerard-Malanga-e1437239454525.jpg)
UPDATED. The overwhelming number of comics, little magazines, books, posters, and all sorts of poetry and radical literature that Charles Plymell has printed during the last half-century is too many to count. All that time he was writing inspired poetry and prose of his own and having it published by a flock of small presses. Now in old age — he turns 89 today — Plymell is getting significantly renewed attention for his poetry with the release of “Over the Stage of Kansas: New & Selected Poems 1966-2023.” To celebrate the book, he will give a reading on May 18 in Hudson, New York. It’s bound to be a grand occasion.
Willem de Kooning On Escaping the Formulaic
Since today is the 120th anniversary of Willem de Kooning’s birthday, I am reminded by my staff of thousands of his fervent efforts “to break the willed articulation of the image.” Which, as it happens, is not dissimilar to the goal of the cut-up procedure in writing, intended by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs to free the mind and language itself from preconceived formulations. Nor is it a bad follow-up to yesterday’s blogpost about “Cut Up or Shut Up.”
Genesis of a Poem
All That Would Ever After Not Be Said
In 1952, when the late Gabe Pressman (dean of New York City’s local TV press corps) was a young staff writer at the New York World-Telegram & The Sun, he came across a story tipped to him by a woman from Montreal who’d taken a cab ride in midtown Manhattan. This was the human-interest feature he wrote up. And this is the poem it generated many decades later.
Term It Op Art or Visual Poem
This Is a War Protest in Red and Black
Created by Polish artist Barbara Galinska.