![](\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Charles-Plymell-photo-by-Gerard-Malanga-e1437238716945.jpg\" "\\"Charles")
<\/a>Charles Plymell Charley may be the most inside outsider around. It seems there\u2019s no cultural\/artistic\/what-have-you outsider he hasn\u2019t known at some point in his long life — he recently turned 80 — from Neal Cassady to William Burroughs and Herbert Huncke, from Ray Bremser and Peter Orlovsky to Robert Peters, from Bob Branaman and Bruce Conner to S. Clay Wilson, from Gerard Malanga to Aram Saroyan, from Paul Bley to Thurston Moore. And that’s leaving out dozens of other writers and artists he has rubbed shoulders with. Furthermore, Charley is always full of outsider projects or the subject of outsider projects. <\/p>\n Recently, the outsider German publisher Peter Engstler sent me a beautifully produced bilingual pamphlet of Charley’s \u201cPlanet Chernobyl.\u201d The poem shows the strong influence of Ginsberg, despite Charley’s case against the man. It also quotes from “Howl.” And while it echoes other outsider writers more strongly, like Burroughs and Claude P\u00e9lieu, it seems to me most of all a latter-day coda to the outsider poem that made Ginsberg famous.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, another project, Charley’s \u201cCat Man Do,\u201d is soon to be published. It will have a cover by another outsider artist, the late Mary Beach, who happens to have been Charley’s mother-in-law. I\u2019m told the text may also be produced as an opera. Have a look:
[Photo by Gerard Malanga]<\/font><\/p><\/div>Charles Plymell (Charley to those who know him, Charlie to those who don\u2019t) has been an outsider for decades, self-declared and otherwise, railing against everything that smacks of the inside — especially the arbiters of government arts grants, who have unfailingly overlooked him, even against his old friend Allen Ginsberg, whom he relentlessly excoriates for having become an insider. <\/p>\n<\/a><\/a> <\/p>\n
\nPlymell’s text follows.<\/font><\/p>\n