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Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Charles Plymell Takes Stage for New and Selected Poems

May 21, 2024 by Jan Herman

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 […]

Recalling the Fierce Beliefs of Oriana Fallaci

May 11, 2024 by Jan Herman

Oriana Fallaci

The widespread episodes of pro-Palestinian antisemitism on American college campuses calls to mind an old blogpost about European antisemitism.

“I find it shameful,” Fallaci begins, “that in Italy there should be a procession of individuals dressed as suicide bombers who spew vile abuse at Israel, hold up photographs of Israeli leaders on whose foreheads they have drawn the swastika, incite people to hate the Jews. …”

‘There he was in a dream . . .’

May 7, 2024 by Jan Herman

“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

May 1, 2024 by Jan Herman

“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

April 26, 2024 by Jan Herman

Charles Plymell [photo by Gerard Malanga]

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

April 24, 2024 by Jan Herman

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.”

Beat Scene
All About Cut Up or Shut Up (and Weissner, Ploog & Me)

April 22, 2024 by Jan Herman

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!

Influenced by Limitations of a Lifeboat in a Tidal Wave

April 20, 2024 by Jan Herman

​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

April 18, 2024 by Jan Herman

My staff of thousands thinks of it as the “Moby-Dick” of modernism.

Genesis of a Poem
All That Would Ever After Not Be Said

April 13, 2024 by Jan Herman

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

April 11, 2024 by Jan Herman

Created by Polish artist Barbara Galinska.

Shadow Words
London Literary Critic Calls Them ‘Dark Diamonds’

April 2, 2024 by Jan Herman

‘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

March 30, 2024 by Jan Herman

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

March 25, 2024 by Jan Herman

‘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 …’

March 19, 2024 by Jan Herman

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

Downtown Scene
Reclusive Artist Elsa Rensaa Spreads Her Wings

March 17, 2024 by Jan Herman

The New York gallerist James Fuentes is presenting Elsa Rensaa’s paintings in a two-part exhibition: OUT OF THE WILDERNESS AND INTO THE BLUE. “Her paintings, rendered with meticulous applications of thin acrylic washes,” he says, “bring forth lush, syncretic visual portals. They draw from a vast and visionary range of references, including Ancient Nordic, Egyptian, and Eastern imagery, in addition to Renaissance, Art Nouveau, and Dada art movements, with a Lower East Side iconography that is distinctly recognizable as Rensaa’s own.”

Making a Living as a Writer Was Never Easy, But …

March 5, 2024 by Jan Herman

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.

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Jan Herman

When not listening to Bach or Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, or dancing to salsa, I like to play jazz piano -- but only in the privacy of my own mind.
Another strange fact... Read More…

About

My Books

Several books of poems have been published in recent years by Moloko Print, Statdlichter Presse, Phantom Outlaw Editions, and Cold Turkey … [Read More...]

Straight Up

The agenda is just what it says: news of arts, media & culture delivered with attitude. Or as Rock Hudson once said in a movie: "Man is the only … [Read More...]

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