SHOOTER: A Fragment is the tale of Jerry Crane, a photographer for the tabloids. Born Jiri Kiranek, he’s a truthtelling fabulist, tall and lean, a refugee from wealth and privilege. In his younger days he was often high on speed, always riffing, full of imagination. Having reached almost middle age, he still has a facile street-smart intellect. He tells ambling, long-limbed tales. It’s a peculiar form of truth-telling. When he decided to ambush Rod Bangs for a tabloid shoot, he expected the usual rock star excess: party drugs, sex, fancy toys, bad taste. But white supremacy did not make the list … until now.
The Complete Poems: 1965-2020
Michael Butterworth’s Radical Legacy in Verse
For more than half a century the dissident British author, editor, and underground publisher Michael Butterworth has been “a quiet unobtrusive voice in poetry, with roots both in the small press poetry journals of the 1960s and ’70s and New Wave science fiction.”
‘Shall we be lighthearted . . .’
‘Or shall we / bite our elbows / to the bone?’
A Great One Died 11 Years Ago Today
And there he was in a dream. We are in some restaurant, a San Francisco dream. He gives me a manuscript to read on elegant Mary Beach / Claude Pélieu stationery with raised black lettering in delicate type. He’s terminal. We both know it. He’s being objective about it. He indicates, somehow without words, not to get worked up about it. Take it as it comes. Happens to all. End of dream.
Éditions Béringuer
Newly Released Bellaart Drawings Connect the Centuries
A graphic narrative with a vocabulary of influences from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first.
‘Benevolent Loitering’
‘Unheard and Unseen’ in Istanbul
Having never been to Istanbul, I’ve done the next best thing — or so it feels upon reading ‘The Pleasures of Empty Lots’ by Efe Murad, poet, translator, and scholar extraordinaire. “This humble chapbook,” he writes, “is a record of the unheard and the unseen, which can only be experienced by those who find pleasure in ephemeral escapades. It is a longing for a clean slate, a tribute to benevolent loitering.” It is also more than that. It is in the most vivid, personal terms a manifesto for artistic freedom and — necessarily — social and political liberty.
Pleasurable Reading: Turgenev’s Literary Reminiscences
It is filled with wisdom like this: “Life itself is nothing but a contradiction that has to be constantly overcome.”
Alfred Chester, a Double Reading
Who reads Alfred Chester these days? Anyone? His huge, posthumous volume of Moroccan letters is worth every page (even the ones I felt like skipping).
Greed, Cheating, and Lies
Top Shitholer Goes Whole Hog at the Public Trough
“This case is about greed and cheating on taxes,” the chief of investigations for the Manhattan District Attorney, told the court and promised the jury it would get the ‘inside story’ of how the scheme was carried out. Unfortunately, the trial has been delayed due to a Covid infection. Until it resumes, here’s the outside story. This item has been updated.
Do You Remember ‘do you remember’ by Emmett Williams?
And is it the most rigorous piece of lyrical whimsy in the American poetry canon? I think so.
The poem, “structured by six vertical progressions,” was first published in “Underground,” in 1966. It appeared the following year in “An Anthology of Concrete Poetry,” published by Something Else Press, and most recently appears in “A Something Else Reader.”
do you remember
when I loved soft pink nights
and you hated hard blue valleys
and I kissed mellow red potatoes
and you loved livid green seagulls
and I hated soft yellow dewdrops
and you kissed hard pink oysters …
A Something Else Reader
Newly Discovered, It Was Hidden Away for 50 Years
” ‘A Something Else Reader’ is a previously unpublished anthology edited by Dick Higgins in 1972 to celebrate Something Else Press, the publishing house he founded in 1963, and to showcase Fluxus and other experimental artistic and literary forms. … He assembled the table of contents and an introduction into a proposal, which went into his archive, where it was found by scholar and curator Alice Centamore, who compiled the works and assembled it.” — Primary Information
Tent Shaker Vortex Voice
A Poet Inspired by Lucretius and Lauren Eisley
Charles Plymell’s extraordinary chapbook “Tent Shaker Vortex Voice” has just been released in a fourth printing by Bottle of Smoke Press. In a new prefatory essay to the long poems “We Heard the Game Lord Speak …” and “Planet Chernobyl,” he writes that he has “drawn upon Lucretius and Loren Eisley,” along with “many great thinkers from Darwin to modern atomic theorists” as well as Shakespeare. Plymell, who recently turned 87, is the author of two dozen books of poetry and prose.
‘The archetypes are in us, and eternal’
“I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. The night-time solitude and the dark were my hell.” — Charles Lamb, as quoted by John Gross.
Lamb believed that superstition could have generated the apparitions he feared. But at bottom he discounted that. “These terrors are of older standing. They are transcripts, types—the archetypes are in us, and eternal,” he wrote. I thought of him last week when I saw this painting.
A Great Writer of Spy Thrillers Told the Awful Truth
‘Men had learned to sniff the heady dreamstuff of the soul and wait impassively while the lathes turned the guns for their destruction.’
— Eric Ambler
When a Poet Takes a Walk With Book and Camera
A I R F I E L D
‘Now that my hand just
reached into the book shelf
and grabbed your book,
it looks like you’ll be walking
out on the airfield with me …’
Rimbaud’s Death Is Still Traveling
Efe Murad’s Turkish translation of “Rimbaud. Death in Marseille” has just been published. Carl Weissner’s small masterpiece — small only because it isn’t longer — is now a Turkish delight. Murad is a poet and historian, as well as a translator.
Asa Benveniste: Sylvia Plath’s ‘Afterlife’ Neighbor
“If Sylvia Plath would likely not have chosen to be buried in Heptonstall, Asa Benveniste definitely chose the location of his own grave, having spent the final years of his life in Hebden Bridge, the valley town that adjoins Heptonstall.” — Jay Jeff Jones