Kevin Ring, the indefatigable editor of Beat Scene magazine, emailed me a few months ago to ask about the new reprint of “Cut Up or Shut Up” released by the German publisher Mokolo Print in a facsimile edition in English with a new cover design by Robert Schalinski and a modest intro by yours truly. Ever curious about all things Beat, Ring wanted to know the back story of the book’s origin and development. Et voilà!
Beat Scene
Influenced by Limitations of a Lifeboat in a Tidal Wave
Before I needed to earn a living from writing, I was a member of the avant-garde — fervent and full of high opinion. The other day I came across a typescript of “Synchronic Non-Causative Agent,” an unpublished paper of mine written more than half a century ago. Reading it over, I got the bright idea of posting it here despite its age.
A Marathon Reading
Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans
My staff of thousands thinks of it as the “Moby-Dick” of modernism.
Something to Surprise You: Everywhere You Look
A. Robert Lee is such a prolific author in both his creative and academic books that I won’t try to characterize his writings other than to say they invariably illuminate life and literature with a wealth of scholarship, intelligence, and linguistic mastery. I will add, however, that his sense of humor is one aspect of his writings that I most treasure.
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.
Shadow Words
London Literary Critic Calls Them ‘Dark Diamonds’
‘These poems are free sonnets of experience that even Blake would favor. They are tears for the tongue to be savoured once tasted, and like a drop for the eye, ear, or mind, they restore perception to its rightful place. They are dark diamonds.’ — David Erdos, MÜ Magazine, London
Book Thief
Nothing like some biblioklept mischief to brighten the day.
‘I have stolen books
from friends and family
books they never cared for
books they never read. . . ‘
‘Selected Catastrophies’ from Beiles’s Sacred Fix
‘Sacred Fix’ was published in 1975. ‘Selected Catastrophies’ is the fourth section of the book. The author is an incandescent South African poet, who died in 2000. The poem begins:
“society!
I will not support you
when you shed your hideous electronic disguises
and stagger through the alleyways of oblivion
looking for shelter.
o society you betrayed me
with your promises of paradise . . .”
‘The trick is to get out of your own dead body …’
Cold Turkey Press continues to publish handmade posters printed in editions limited to 36 copies, specializing in avant-garde poets and artists of the past as well as the present. Here is one of the latest, LUDION’S LAMENT.
‘The trick is to get out of your own dead body in one piece. One quick hard twist and you’re out. Next, you turn black all over and taper at the extremities.’ — Roger Gilbert-Lecomte
Making a Living as a Writer Was Never Easy, But …
When I was a salaried reporter, I did pretty well over the course of more than two decades at three major metro dailies in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. It always helped to get freelance work, however.
Carl Weissner Letter to Sinclair Beiles
On the Hitlerology of ‘the Biggest Rat of Them All’
I’ve come to the conclusion that my computer is great at hiding things from me. What prompted me to think so is a letter I came across that I didn’t know I had since it had never turned up before. My great good luck is that I found it by accident, and greater still is that anything written by Carl Weissner is a delight to read. The recipient of the letter (if in fact Carl ever mailed it) was Sinclair Beiles, himself a writer of no small humor. (Fans of William Burroughs will recognize the reference to one of his notorious fictional characters).
Mashup of Amanda Gorman and Bach at Carnegie Hall
If I had been asked who would be the main attraction of Saturday night’s Carnegie Hall mashup between the poet and the composer, my guess would have been Amanda Gorman. I would not have guessed it would be the cellist Jan Vogler. As it turned out, however, his performance of three of Bach’s cello suites, more or less interrupted by Gorman’s rap-inflected poetry, made him the star of the show.
Dissident Poetry Festival to Delight Mind and Tongue
In a rare poetry reading organized by Efe Balıkçıoğlu and Sibel Erol and focused on often unacknowledged voices in contemporary Turkey, the works of three dissident authors are to be presented as a serious Turkish delight.
The presentation at NYU on Feb. 23 — both in person and on Zoom — will feature the feminist poet and artist Sevinç Çalhanoğlu, the gay Kurdish poet Fırat Demir, and Nicholas Glastonbury, who has translated the work of the late queer leftist poet Arkadaş Z. Özger.
Because It Is So Touching
“A face long unloved will at some point grow ugly,
As unkissed features untended will as with an unkempt
Garden grow wild . . . ”
— David Erdos
The Bishop and the Butterfly
Political Thriller or True Crime Whodunit? You Decide
“Vivian Gordon went out before midnight in a velvet dress and mink coat. Her body turned up the next morning in a desolate Bronx park, a dirty clothesline wrapped around her neck. At her stylish Manhattan apartment, detectives discovered notebooks full of names—businessmen, socialites, gangsters. And something else: a letter from an anti-corruption commission established by Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. … Had Vivian Gordon been executed to bury her secrets?” — Union Square & Co. (the publisher)
In His Strike Zone: A Tale of Tangier Ghosts
At last a first-class appreciation of the recently published ULTRAZONE. When I first read the novel in proof copy, it had me doing cartwheels . Naturally, I wondered how it would be received elsewhere. Now I know.
‘There are things closer than rain / that keep hope alive’
This ‘deformed sonnet’ was written in memory of Carl Weissner, a great one who was so rudely interrupted 12 years ago today.