life is / kkkkrrrraaaazzzzy / for reasons / having nothing / to do with / rasPUTIN but / he could spitball / a nuke our way / in the time / it takes to say / ”oh shit.”
‘Escuela de Corte’ — ‘Last Time We Play Hooky’
A still shot from Rich Allen’s latest movie. If you look at the shoes .. well, the sneakers … you can see these kids were not actors.
‘A Poem for Patriots’ and ‘Upside the Morning’
Two books by Mark Terrill have arrived with ekphrastic poems of great appeal: “The Salvador-Dali-Lama Express” and “Great Balls of Doubt.” Here are two poems with images from daily life and the thoughts they arouse.
World of Trouble
New Folio from Cold Turkey Press
The epigraph (“I’ll do penance with farts and groans / Kneeling on my marrowbones”) comes from a poem by James Joyce. The folio includes four deformed sonnets (“Cursed,” “Her Days All Flee,” “World of Trouble,” “Mirage”) and a poem (“After Carl”).
A Documentation by Florian Vetsch
The Garden by Paul Bowles
Paul Bowles wrote a short story called “The Garden” in 1963. Three years later Joseph McPhillips asked him to dramatize the story for students at the American School of Tangier. Bowles, who was in Thailand at the time and about to leave for Morocco by ship, wrote scenes for the play on his way back and airmailed them to McPhillips, who immediately started rehearsals. Following Bowles’s advice, McPhillips involved artists and writers such as Marguerite McBey, Ira Belline, Brion Gysin, and John Hopkins. The play was staged in Tangier in April 1967, but was never published. This documentation offers the original text of the play (translated as well into German) with an evocative motherlode of illustrations that trace the play’s genesis from page to stage.
Let’s All Say Goodbye to Spotify
The music-streaming service claims that “listening is everything.” But it’s tone deaf. And many agree. As do we.
A Tale by Mohammed Mrabet
As Told to Paul Bowles and Transcribed by Mark Terrill
Mohammed Mrabet, a young Moroccan painter from Tangier, met the American ex-patriate composer and writer Paul Bowles in 1965. Bowles, who lived in Tangier for decades, taped many of Mrabet’s spontaneous stories and translated them into English, eventually resulting in the publication of more than a dozen books. Mark Terrill, himself an American ex-pat writer and poet, recalls that during a kif-fueled visit with the two of them, in 1985, Mrabet began “improvising some of his crazy tales while Paul simultaneously translated for my benefit, and I quickly jotted this one down.” Terrill bought several of Mrabet’s drawings, including the one that illustrates this newly printed poster from Cold Turkey Press.
Translator, Author, Cherished Friend
A Great One Died 10 Years Ago Today
Carl Weissner was a “little magazine” editor, a radio playwright, German translator of more than 100 books (but principally of Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs, Nelson Algren and J.G. Ballard, also of Frank Zappa and Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Charles Plymell, Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen), as well as a literary agent who spread the work of dissident writers even further. “Le Regard d’Autrui,” published posthumously in 2019, shows him to have been as magnetic a storyteller as any of the celebrated writers he translated.
Four Books That Recently Came Our Way
Poetry by Leia John, by William Cody Maher, by Ira Cohen, and a memoir by Theo Green. Have a look and please don’t take offense at the explicitness of John’s lines.
(Yesterday this blogpost disappeared from the site, inexplicably, so the staff has re-posted it. Apologies to all who clicked on it and were directed to a dead end.)
Pandemic Ghosts?
Not long before the pandemic this was the artwork at the entryway to a pub on Fifth Avenue located directly across the street from the entrance to the main branch of the New York Public Library, famed for its vast holdings and archival collections. Like many enterprises here in the city, the pub is now gone. So is the artwork. It’s reassuring to report, however, that the library and its holdings are still there.
After Carl
I awoke from a bad dream with these lines drumming in my head long after he died. I mean Carl Weissner, cherished friend and writer sans pareil. A staffer here recently found the lines written down among drafts of unfinished poems.
News as Muse
David Erdos: ‘A Penis for Christmas’
In the grand tradition of Heathcote Williams’s verse polemics, the poet David Erdos rounds on British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the latest scandal of his corrupt administration.
A Frosty Vision
MIRAGE
Walking solo
in frigid weather
through familiar woods
past rolling hills
and fields now turned
to chill of winter . . .
Youth + Talent + Dedication
Amélie, An Artist in Her Own Right
A precociously talented student artist — Amélie by name — drew our attention in 2020 with her studies of a Daumier drawing and again with studies of natural forms. Now 15, she has achieved such splendid results that it is perhaps no exaggeration to say she is already an artist. Recent drawings and sculptures testify to that.
‘I Am That I Am’ ‘I Am That, Am I?’
Brion Gysin and the Divine Tautology
“The whole idea of the permutations came to me visually on seeing the so-called Divine Tautology in print. It looked wrong, to me, non-symmetrical. The biggest word, That, belonged in the middle but all I had to do was switch the last two words and It asked a question: ‘I Am That, Am I?’ The rest followed.” — Brion Gysin
The Brooklyn-based publisher DABA Press is bringing out the most complete edition of Brion Gysin’s permutated poems published and recorded to date. The book is gorgeous to look at, sets the poems in their rightful context, and does justice to Ian Sommerville’s computer collaboration.
Q&A with Lucy Glendinning
Extraordinary British Sculptor Works from Inside Out
Her sculptures, to be exhibited at Art Miami, have a striking “innerness,” an interiority of gaze and stance, as well as a primal quality that seems a function of their feathery or furry surfaces. In all their variations, they express a human connection to animal origins.
‘so unlike the realm of / love and ardor’
In a world of trouble
so unlike the realm of
love and ardor
the singularity of death
has come to this —
we shrink,
abandoned, into history. …