One pleasure of walking the streets of St. Gallen, a town near the foothills of the Swiss Alps, was climbing its steep alleys and staircases through winding passages, and then, surprisingly, coming upon a kiosk that advertised the Wortlaut literary festival, where I would be reading alongside the American poet Jan Heller Levi.
In St. Gallen, Switzerland
Poetry and Music at the Palace in St. Gallen
They like poetry in Switzerland. Our readings went really well, and we had an enthusiastic crowd.
Seeking to Sue the NYPD
Noted Author Richard Kostelanetz Writes . . .
“On 9 May 2024, five days before my 84th birthday, twelve NYPD raided my studio/home in Queens, NY, looking initially for printed child pornography, following the receipt of a few mostly innocuous images from a book written by someone else that I tried to publish through Amazon KDP. Finding nothing in my collection of 25,000 books, they then filched all my MAC computers and backups — my lifework as a writer & artist — that I neglected to store externally. … [He has since learned that he’s not “a person of interest,” meaning he’s not suspected of a crime.] The NYPD still has invaluable material ten months later destroying my professional career. … I’d like to sue them for the return of my work and professional damages incurred.”
Kostelanetz is seeking an attorney to press his case.
Jim Jarmusch Talks About Kenneth Koch
The indie filmmaker was one of many notable speakers at “Kenneth Koch at 100: A Celebration,” held last month at The New School’s Auditorium in Greenwich Village. Kenneth Koch was Jarmusch’s teacher at Columbia, “a kind of godfather to me, aesthetically,” he said, noting further that the “so-called New York School of poets in general remain as my godparents in almost anything I create.” Among the more interesting tributes were Maxine Groffsky’s and, via video, Alex Katz’s. I found Jarmusch’s the most amusing.
Awards Mean Little Beyond Publicity
Are awards the staff of life? Of course not. But they certainly seem like food for the hungry.
My Books
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.”
More Resonant Than Ever
Heathcote Williams’s ‘The United States of Porn’
![Heathcote Williams [photo: JH]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/heathcote-williams-photo-280-200x200.jpg)
Heathcote was always prescient. But it is still astonishing to realize how relevant — and resonant — his dissident voice remains more than a dozen years after he recorded “The United States of Porn.”
Poetry & Prose
‘Wortlaut’ Saint Gallen Festival Salutes the Word
UPDATED: Jan Heller Levi & Jan Herman will appear on March 30, 2025 at the festival, where they will read and discuss their latest poems with Giovanna Caggiano and Julia Mülli from the Kantonsschule am Burggraben. Florian Vetsch will also read with Jan & Jan at the Palace on April 1.
A Kiss Is Still a Kiss
Which the Beauty? Which the Beast?
I’m With Amélie Cardy and Cézanne on This
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
!['American Porn' by Heathcote Williams [Thin Man Press, 2017]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/American-Porn-by-Heathcote-Williams-Thin-Man-Press-2017400-200x200.jpg)
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.
Not Like Frank O’Hara, But . . .
Since it’s very late
in the afternoon,
long past time for lunch,
please pardon my
dishevelment. . . .
New in French Translation
Sinclair Beiles’s Selected Catastrophies & Other Poems
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..
Poem Without a Hero
You spoke in biblical flourishes,
assailed others with a rhetoric
deadlier than the barrel of a gun.
When you pulled the trigger,
your power overwhelmed
what lesser men most fear —
the death of all and everything.
Once Again, What Would Daumier Make of Trump?
![Lithograph by Honoré Daumier [1831]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/daumier_honore_1-200x200.jpg)
Honoré Daumier went to prison for six months for his 1831 lithograph after its publication in a satirical illustrated periodical that appeared weekly in Paris, “La Caricature morale, politique et littéraire.”.
The Late Brion Gysin (1916-1986) Is Having a Moment
Over the years he had many, in fact, although few of them lived up to his expectations. But never mind. An updated model of his and Ian Sommerville’s Dreamachine was recently featured in a symposium on art, AI, and the humanities here in New York; and another will be installed in London at the Tate Modern, in the exhibition “Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet,”which will run from the end of this month (Nov. 28) to June 1, 2025. Meanwhile, Roger Knoebber has brought Gysin back to life in a shaggy, unconventional book-length profile, “Hysteresis.”
Buckminster Fuller’s Versified Prose
By my philosophy
The finite, but imponderable
Metaphysical Universe
Embraces the definite,
Ponderable, physical Universe.
‘Finite’ is not unitarily conceptual.
‘Definite’ is unitarily conceptual.
I have mathematical proof …