Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Against the Death Penalty

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Death Row Prisoner’s Statement:

« I do deserve to be executed, bottom line
I ain’t goin’ t’candy coat it
I deserve to be executed
by the law of the State of Indiana
I deserve to be executed. »

Double Trouble: Bacon Sometimes Meets Picasso

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This is what happens when you take a razor to a pair of images cutting them up in vertical strips. And this is what happens when the procedure is applied to a single image, then doubling the result upon itself. Jiří Kolář gave the name “rollage” to this kind of minimalist collage technique.

My Books

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Several books of poems are published by Moloko Print and Stadtlichter Presse in bilingual (American-German) editions, and by Cold Turkey Press in handmade chapbooks. “The Z Collection” appeared in three editions, by AC Books, Blue Wind Press, and Moloko Print.”

Poetry and Music at the Palace

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Florian Vetsch reads with Jan Heller Levi & Jan Herman on April 1, 2025, in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Vetsch has translated poems by both into German. During the evening, poems will be recited bilingually by the writers, and their backgrounds will be discussed. DJ Soulsonic (aka Mr. Wempe) will play music selected by the speakers. Special guest poet Clemens Umbricht will perform his translation of Jan Heller Levi’s poem “I Lost My Best Friend to Music” as well as his own New York poem.

Steff Signer / Cabinet Music — Frozen Duck Tears

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Concept & Music Vocals & Moniphonium Inventions:
Steff Signer, Switzerland
Photography: Mario Baronchelli, Switzerland
«Mother of Transgression» Poetry: Florian Vetsch
Brass Instruments & Tibetan: «singi»
Cymbals: Markus Breuss, Spain
Electric Guitar Explosion: Chanan Hanspal, England
Viola: David Schnee
Recitation Text: Liz Foulis, Scotland
Recitation Poetry: Jaswant Hanspal

The Ugly Spirit … with commentary

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I know where this image came from. It began with the random association of two photos that I sliced up longitudinally with a razor, then laid the resulting strips side by side. I subsequently photographed it, dropped out the background and very slightly manipulated the color and sharpness. The result seemed to me utterly surprising, just as confounding, and very disturbing. In a word, scary.

I’m With Amélie Cardy and Cézanne on This

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Cold Turkey Press is publishing an illustrated, four-page folio of “Frankly Speaking” with a drawing by the young British artist Amélie Cardy in an edition limited to 36 copies. And a poster of the poem with a drawing by Cézanne is seeking a publisher.

‘American Porn’ for the Orange Man’s Inauguration Day

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Here we go again. To mark the resumption of our long nightmare, my staff of thousands thought it apt to repost this from 2017:

On the day he is sworn in as the preening el presidente of a tin-pot United States of Trumpistan, enabling him to run the country like a division of his family-held company, Thin Man Press will release American Porn, a collection of “investigative poems about American history, culture and politics” by Heathcote Williams.

New in French Translation
Sinclair Beiles’s Selected Catastrophies & Other Poems

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As part of the Beat Hotel crowd in Paris during the late-1950s and early ’60s, Sinclair Beiles collaborated on the first book of avant-garde cut-ups, “Minutes to Go,” with Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, and Gregory Corso. While working at Maurice Girodias’s Paris-based Olympia Press, he was a key editor who helped shepherd Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch” into print. It is his incandescent poetry, however, for which he should be most remembered. But despite praise for his poetry from such luminaries as Burroughs and Leonard Cohen, his writing has rarely surfaced outside the small-press literary world. “Catastrophes Choisies” is not Beiles’s first poetry collection to appear in French, but it is the most elaborate..

They Live and Breathe Outside the Academy

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A strong new issue of Beat Scene has just arrived from the U.K. Although the magazine is primarily devoted to the leading lights of the Beat Generation writers, the magazine covers many who were contemporaneous but not really part of their circle, as well as others who preceded them. Nor does it stint on writers who have followed in their wake. The unifying element that draws the magazine’s interest seems to be that they lived and breathed and created their work outside the academy. And while many of their books have now been accepted into the canon, they are hardly academic.

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