“Mess kit” is defined as “a portable set of usually metal cooking and eating utensils, used especially by soldiers and campers.” For Norman O. Mustill, America’s “messkit” consisted of silent weapons, play money, dancing the two-step, and industry in art. During the Vietnam War, when MESSKIT was published, that meant flamethrowers, napalm, Agent Orange, billions […]
#MeToo: ‘The No Holes Bard’
A bit of bawdy verse-and-drawing by Heathcote Williams. With thanks to Jay Jeff Jones, who sent it along. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
She Knows the Nuances of No
Hanne Lippard updates Molly Bloom. Audio kicks in at 1:23 on the video track. Wait for it. Some on the staff here call it a #MeToo moment before its time. Maybe. But whatever it is, prick up your ears. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Remembering Bukowski
The animation, directed by John Hodgson, dates to 1999. A tip of the hat to IT: International Times, The Newspaper of Resistance, for reminding us of it. The poem is included in The Last Night of the Earth Poems, published by HarperCollins in a 2009 reprint. The first edition was published in 1992 by Black […]
50 Ways to See the Middle Ages
Our tireless staff of thousands is often asked to review all sorts of books, and from time to time one or another seems worth noting. This one, for example, by Elina Gertsman and Barbara H. Rosenwein. Since the staff knows much too little about the Middle Ages — and even less about the 50 objects […]
Remembering Emmett Williams
These are not Fluxus poems. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Where Haughty Celia Sits
This poem was spurred by email exchanges among Liliane Lijn, Gerard Bellaart, and myself. It takes phrases from them and from the three sources noted below. The impulse to compose it arose from this blogpost. MUSE In the sawdust heart of a puppet world, where haughty Celia ingloriously sits, her failed prophecy is buried by […]
Valedictory in a Taxi Cruising Slowly
“Here are Sinclair’s ‘Last Words,’ written in Paris long before he would have been aware of any pressing need to devise a valedictory.” — HEATHCOTE WILLIAMS, from a tribute to Sinclair Beiles, in BONE HEBREW, a collection of Beiles’s writings published in 2013, in a limited edition, by Cold Turkey Press. Let me utter my […]
The Nova Machine, Redesigned
Gary Lee-Nova, who partnered with Johnny Strike on ‘The Nova Machine,’ writes: Thank you for posting an early version of page #1. After several pages had been rendered, I began to question the structure of giving a page five rows. I decided to reorganize all the existing pages into a structure of four rows, and […]
Talk About ‘Graphic Novels’ . . .
How about a Burroughsian blast of a graphic cut-up by Gary Lee-Nova? He is looking for a publisher for ‘The Nova Machine.’ Here’s an excerpt. Any takers? “In all my experience as a police officer I have never seen such total fear and degradation on any planet.” Click to enlarge. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
‘So Much Sour Salami’
Frank Scully, a long-forgotten journalist, was recalling the first time he met Luigi Pirandello in Paris in the cocktail lounge of a movie theater on the Champs Elysée. It was well before World War II, but he could have been writing about the here and now in Trumpistan. Pirandello was “on the lam from his […]
Q & A With Sinclair Beiles
“Incandescent poet in your solitary cell, answer please what no prayer or deity can tell.” * * * * * “To make sense of what is meant by your obscurities, the consequence— have little doubt— of an accident, your gospel may not be truth, but the clouds and planets, patterns in the sky. The proper […]
An Incandescent Poet in His Solitary Cell
Gerard Bellaart writes that after the South African poet Sinclair Beiles died, in 2000, “a wealthy collector who owns the largest holding of Sinclair’s manuscripts visited me” — this was in 2008 — “and assured me that he would sort out a proper gravesite. Seeing the grave now in the condition it is in makes […]
Old Misery at The Daily News
The decimation of The Daily News brings back memories of the two-and-a-half miserable years I worked there. I had been hired away from the Chicago Sun-Times, where I’d spent happy times during the early 1980s — actually thrilling years — before Rupert Murdoch bought it. To my ridiculously innocent surprise I discovered that a NYC […]
Loose Screws in Politics
![By Mike Ferguson (from IT: INTERNATIONAL TIMES, The Newspaper of Resistance) [July 18, 2018]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Mike-Ferguson-1-420-border-200x200.jpg)
Mike Ferguson’s permutation poem makes a whole lot of sense. It is also a reminder of the influence of Brion Gysin, who set the template for permutation poems back in the 1960s. Brion Gysin Let the Mice In includes texts by Gysin, William S. Burroughs, and Ian Sommerville. It is an expensive collector’s item these […]
Courage
Click each image to enlarge. “Corragio” — My old friend said. / And then he put / the gun to his head. / That’s what it took / to blunt the pain / with a hunk of lead. / It’s no walk in the park. / The night is cold, / and my friend is […]
Two Ways of Looking at a Poem
No shore receives them. / All the portents dog their ride. / Their bodies sink in rough seas. We surf on a gentle tide. / The shore awaits us. / No portents dog our ride. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit