There was a time when Charles Plymell claimed that Bob Dylan stole his Nobel Prize. Charley was full of blustering anger in those days, calling his old friend Allen Ginsberg a phony, his publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti a two-bit miser, and Jack Kerouac a Mama’s boy whose ‘On the Road’ he never read. In more recent years, though he still claims not to have read Kerouac, Charley has apologized for his deprecation of Ginsberg and dedicated his latest book, ‘Over the Stage of Kansas,’ to Ferlinghetti. Because it would make poetic sense, I would like to date his change of heart, not only metaphorically but literally, to the time he had a heart attack and wrote this majestic, never-published poem.

“Jan Herman was inspired to create these deformed sonnets by a desire to challenge conventional notions of poetry and to express himself under what he saw as ‘duress and necessity.’ Their uniqueness lies in the evocative and sometimes elusive content where the poems become reflections on selfhood, transience, and perception, This approach allows him to use the sonnet label while subverting expectations, making his work feel both familiar and radically new.”