This poem was spurred by email exchanges among Liliane Lijn, Gerard Bellaart, and myself. It takes phrases from them and from the three sources noted below. The impulse to compose it arose from this blogpost. MUSE In the sawdust heart of a puppet world, where haughty Celia ingloriously sits, her failed prophecy is buried by […]
Valedictory in a Taxi Cruising Slowly
“Here are Sinclair’s ‘Last Words,’ written in Paris long before he would have been aware of any pressing need to devise a valedictory.” — HEATHCOTE WILLIAMS, from a tribute to Sinclair Beiles, in BONE HEBREW, a collection of Beiles’s writings published in 2013, in a limited edition, by Cold Turkey Press. Let me utter my […]
The Nova Machine, Redesigned
Gary Lee-Nova, who partnered with Johnny Strike on ‘The Nova Machine,’ writes: Thank you for posting an early version of page #1. After several pages had been rendered, I began to question the structure of giving a page five rows. I decided to reorganize all the existing pages into a structure of four rows, and […]
Talk About ‘Graphic Novels’ . . .
How about a Burroughsian blast of a graphic cut-up by Gary Lee-Nova? He is looking for a publisher for ‘The Nova Machine.’ Here’s an excerpt. Any takers? “In all my experience as a police officer I have never seen such total fear and degradation on any planet.” Click to enlarge. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
‘So Much Sour Salami’
Frank Scully, a long-forgotten journalist, was recalling the first time he met Luigi Pirandello in Paris in the cocktail lounge of a movie theater on the Champs Elysée. It was well before World War II, but he could have been writing about the here and now in Trumpistan. Pirandello was “on the lam from his […]
Q & A With Sinclair Beiles
“Incandescent poet in your solitary cell, answer please what no prayer or deity can tell.” * * * * * “To make sense of what is meant by your obscurities, the consequence— have little doubt— of an accident, your gospel may not be truth, but the clouds and planets, patterns in the sky. The proper […]
An Incandescent Poet in His Solitary Cell
Gerard Bellaart writes that after the South African poet Sinclair Beiles died, in 2000, “a wealthy collector who owns the largest holding of Sinclair’s manuscripts visited me” — this was in 2008 — “and assured me that he would sort out a proper gravesite. Seeing the grave now in the condition it is in makes […]
What a Beast!
“The Captain” is the best flick I’ve seen in years. If you need to read a review, you might as well read David Edelstein’s. My only demurral is that I see the setup as feral. He sees it as farcical. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Old Misery at The Daily News
The decimation of The Daily News brings back memories of the two-and-a-half miserable years I worked there. I had been hired away from the Chicago Sun-Times, where I’d spent happy times during the early 1980s — actually thrilling years — before Rupert Murdoch bought it. To my ridiculously innocent surprise I discovered that a NYC […]
Loose Screws in Politics
![By Mike Ferguson (from IT: INTERNATIONAL TIMES, The Newspaper of Resistance) [July 18, 2018]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Mike-Ferguson-1-420-border-200x200.jpg)
Mike Ferguson’s permutation poem makes a whole lot of sense. It is also a reminder of the influence of Brion Gysin, who set the template for permutation poems back in the 1960s. Brion Gysin Let the Mice In includes texts by Gysin, William S. Burroughs, and Ian Sommerville. It is an expensive collector’s item these […]
Courage
Click each image to enlarge. “Corragio” — My old friend said. / And then he put / the gun to his head. / That’s what it took / to blunt the pain / with a hunk of lead. / It’s no walk in the park. / The night is cold, / and my friend is […]
Two Ways of Looking at a Poem
No shore receives them. / All the portents dog their ride. / Their bodies sink in rough seas. We surf on a gentle tide. / The shore awaits us. / No portents dog our ride. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Weinstein’s Rehab Reading
“Harvey Weinstein entered New York State Supreme Court yesterday clutching a copy of A Talent for Trouble. Was Weinstein looking for someone to teach him about being a mensch?” — Leon Freilich He walked to the courthouse with a copy of “A Talent for Trouble,” the 1997 biography of “Ben-Hur” film director William Wyler, according […]
NNOI Festival = 90% Water
Living organisms are gathering near the old water mill in Groswaltersdorf, 70 kilometers north of Berlin. NNOI Festival 2018 July 12 — Crossposted at IT: International Times, The Newspaper of Resistance. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
‘… I floated by Daylight Donuts …’
Driving down 68 today the old van rose up a / few feet and flew into a windless corridor / and only then did I realize it had something / to do with you. / It was similar to driving down the road / but the fact that the tires were not touching the / […]
Delicate Ghosts
Almost 70 years ago in Prospect Park where the future waited like a whim my childhood slipped through. You held me with my arms around your neck. The carousel goes round with our delicate ghosts like shadows on a scrim. The terrible wind that carries us off has not blown them away. I smell the […]
Your Obituary Is Waiting
(for Philip Larkin) My ego prefers an obit published by the NY Times. But anywhere else will do, even etched into a headstone that nobody reads in a cemetery where nobody ever goes. I don’t know why I care, but I do. I don’t know why anyone should care, but it’s the custom to. —JH […]