HOWARD MARKS -The Origins of Smoking

PRECIOUS FEW ATTRIBUTES distiquish humans from animals.Sheep shag, monkeys wank,pigs snort, wolves piss, dolphins talk, tigers fart, dogs throw up,skunks drink,elephants sniff, horses count and leeches suck. But no animal smokes.It's not merely because they can't skin up. Animals, other than reindeer and dragons, are terrified of flames and smoke and stay away from chimneys and tobacconists. I began to research the origins of smoking.
There were two main theories, the first scientific, the second religious.
In the scientific theory ,the Welsh Wizard Merlin was the first human to smoke in the western hemisphere. Merlin shagged witches, used broomsticks as dildos, shat toadstools, and guzzled a mixture of liquid psychoactives from his Holy Grail. Merlin time-travelled to twenty-first century Cardiff and smuggled in a catatonic leek, a stereophonic spliff, a zygotic monkey, a slice of Caerphilly, a bag of magic mushrooms, a manic street preacher, two super furry animals, and a sixty- foot blow- up doll. Back at King Arthur's Round Table, one super furry got dizzy and started doing things backwards. Smoke poured out of his nostrils, the spliff went away from his mouth and he roared, " Drag On." The other super furry animals grew horns, had a huge piss and fucked off to the North Pole shouting,"Reign Deer, I'm a leek."Since then the Welsh haven't stopped drinking and smoking and producing things vaquely connected, like coal, resevoirs, crematoriums and sheep-shagging. That honour the smoking dragon and a leek after a good skinful.
Smoking wasn't exported from Wales until the twelfth century, when Price "Mad Dog" Madog ran aground in America long before Big Chief Lying Bullshit had thought of an Oval Orifice.Mad Dog's stash hadn't run out, so he offered a pipe of peace. Six weeks later, Mad Dog was back in Florida with a load of seeds, and all the Red Indians spent centuries having squaws rather than wars, bongs rather than bombs, and perfecting the art of communicating and signalling over vast distance by smoking enormous spliffs and emitting an ordered series of smoke rigs.
Due to the treachery of Big Chief Lying Bullshit, foreign tribes of Puritans,Prohibitionists and other Pricks were allowed to invade and gain control.Most ganja and ganja smokers were completely wiped out. Lucky ones (the Arawaks) fled to Jamaica and set up their culture over there. The Arawaks played ball games, sang ,feasted, danced, shagged, drank maize alcohol to get pissed, smoked dried leaves to get stoned, and snorted white powders through inverted Y-shaped tubes to get completely trolleyed. They wore sexy short skirts, tattoos, ornaments, necklaces and feathers. They had no wheels ( hadn't even thought of them)and no written language. They had a few words, including canoe (enabling transport)and hurricane (fucking up transport).Barbecue is also an Arawak word. So is hammock.So is tobacco. A typical Arawak day was up at any time, have a smoke, lie in the hammock and wait for some barbecue red snapper. Sorted.
Welshman Henry Morgan, through the devious route of rum, piracy,slavery and trade, managed to stock the island with weed-smoking Africans and hash-smoking shopkeepers from the Indian subcontinent, thereby ensurig a permanent ganja culture. St Bob Marley did the rest.


FROM: Howard Mark's Book of Dope Stories (2001)

IOLO MORGANWG (10/3/1747 to 18/12/1826) Conjurer Of Truth

Pilate Seith unto him: What is truth?- St .John, 19.38

Just remembered who I was thinking of, when I started this blog of randomness,Edward Williams, better known by his bardic name Iolo Morgannwg.Have been inspired by him for a spell now so time for a brief introduction.He was born in 1747 at Pennon ,Glamorgan and bought up in the village of Flemington. His father was an intelligent and literate working stonemason whose career he followed, his mother a descendant of Glamorgans dynasties of Welsh poets. She never let him forget his cultural roots and heritage.
After his mothers death he became addicted to laudanum for his ashtma, but also became addicted to the world of books. Like a magpie he began plundering libraries, collections, poets homes wholesale and built himself into the most learned man in Wales on medieval Welsh literature, folklore, history and antiquities.Words and all their associations consumed him, drove him ,fired him.Hunger was in the air!
In 1773 he moved to London and became a significant figure in the Welsh community. On his return to Wales in 1777 he married his long suffering wife Peggy and tried his hand at farming and shopkeeping. In 1789 he produced some of his first known literary sleight of hands, when he bought out a colection of the 14th Century lyrical poet Daffyd ap Gwilym. Included in this edition were a large number of previously unknown poems, Iolo had claimed to have discovered. They were as good as anything Daffyd ap Gwilym had ever wrote, and notablly survived critical attention for over a 100 years when they were discovered to be forgeries.
His success led him to return to London where he founded the Gorsedd, a community of Welsh bards and it was at Primrose Hill on the summer solstice of 1792 that the first Gorsedd, Gorsedd Beirdd Ynys was held. In 1794 he published his own poetry to popular acclaim, now believed to be his only genuine work. He went on to author many more substantial works many now thought to be forgeries. Chiefly their was a 3 volume collection " THE MYRVYRIAN ARCHAIOLOGY OF WALES" published between 1801 and 1807. Essentially a collection of medieval literature, it collected the Welsh Triads and material attributed to Saint Cadoc and poems claimed again to be the works of Dafydd ap Gwilym. It also contained a third series of Iolos forged triads as well as his alterations to the authentic ones.Again undetected.
His vision represented a fusion of Christian and Arthurian influences, a proto romanticism comparable to that of William Blake and the Scottish poet and forger James Mac Pershon and a revived enthusiasm for all things " Celtic" and these elements of bardic heritage have genuinelly survived among Welsh language poets. Part of his aim was to assert the Welshness of South Wales against the prevalent idea that North Wales represented the purest survival of Welsh traditions.
Fuelled on laudenum and an inner quest he dreamt of the primitive purity of an ancient druidic system, and in his forgeries woke not to forget but to evangelise. This was the time of Revolution. A time half of Wales was starved and rioting. A time when people discovered The People, when intellectuals stamped nations out of the ground and wove new tricolours out of old legends, when among " non histrionic peoples" to publish a dictionary was deemed a revolutionary act. In this last warm freethinking , sometimes pagan, glow from an old but awakening Wales , Iolo was reborn as " THE BARD OF LIBERTY".
It is important to note that fabrications aside, he was a major scholar, the first serious Welsh Folklorist, the first to call for a Welsh National Library, museum and eisteddfod. The shop he ran in Cowbridge was notorious as a " Jacobin den; he helped to launch the Unitarian associaton in 1802 at Merthyr, he lost a job with the Board of Agriculture because he was a democrat, and was deemed to have seditious views and if the government had ever read his letter on the French landing in Fishguard in 1797, he would have been transported.He also perpetuated the myth that the Welsh explorer Madoc had gone to America and had settled with the native Americans.Later historians have found no trace.
A subversive of his time then, taking liberties with the facts in his own laudenumbed cause of truth! A time when most of Welsh history had already been airbrushed and buried. If he could correctly identify a truth he would then again correctly identify a necessary connection between it and another truth; if he found no evidence in the record to warrant this connection, he would then supply it in brilliant historical mimicry.
He believed , that Welsh poets had not been "poets" as the English use the word. They had been the ribcage of the body politic. They had been a collective memory honed for historic action. Their function had been to enable a Welsh present to construct a usable Welsh past to serve an attainable Welsh future. They had been remembrancers.
A political and religious radical although he evemntually embraced unitarianism. He opposed the ' tyranny ' of state religion and vehemently opposed the leaders of the Established Church... he considered  people like the Bishop of St Davids' Thopmas Burgess ' representing ' a system of Idiotism, of madneess or of villainy'.
The English court had its King's Remembrancer and its own fabricators. Iolo wanted to create a cadre of People's Remembrancers, who he saw perhaps in his opium imagination overload as descendants of an ancient , noble and more natural religion. Burrowing like Merlin in his books, Iolo's Gorsodd was to be the directive and democratic elite of a new and democratic Welsh nation, concieved in liberty. They were to be the People's Rembrancers to a Welsh Republic.
His lasting impact on Welsh culture is felt today. His " Druids Prayer "(Gweddi'r Orsedd) still staple of the ritual of both gorseddau and Neo-druidism.A big influence too on Robert Grave's " White Goddess". Let us remember him as a friend of language, a brilliant debunker and spinner of myth, a friend of the mystical depths, a friend of mankind. In the end the only pockets he picked were his own. Its hard to deny his genius. apparently he was  a good flute player as well . At the moment  the friends of Primrose Hill want to remove a plaque to him that has recently been erected, still rattling his bones then. nice that a compatriat is still enraging the inhabitants of regents park.  A man high on laudanum, high on life, with his pockets full of mischief , sticking his nose up to the establishment, I think it's time for a revival. I'll drink to that.


Further reading:

Geraint Jenkins (ed ) 2005- A Rattleskull Genius:
the many faces of Iolo Morganwg
Cardiff: University of Wales Press

Damien Walford Davies ( ed ) 2007- Wales and the Romantic
Imagination
and Lynda Pratt Cardiff: University of Wales Press


THE GORSEDD PRAYER,called the Prayer of the Gwyddoniaid ( From the Great Book of Margam)

God, impart Thy strength;
And in strength, power to suffer;
And to suffer for the truth;
And in the truth, all light;
And in light, gwynfyd;
And in gwynfyd, love;
And in God, all goodness.


Llyma Weddi'r Orsedd, a elwir Gweddi'r Gwyddoniaid (0 Lyfr Mawr Margam)

Dyw dy nerth, ag yn nerth Dioddef;
A dioddef dros y gwir,ag yn y gwir pop goleuni;
Ag yngoleuni pob Gwynfyd, ag yngwynfyd Cariad,
Ag ynghariad Dyw, ag yn nuw pop daioni.


"My sheets of transcript,the labours of many years, are for the most part unbound and in great disorder, like everything else with me. I have always had to many Irons in the fire, a llawer unhonynt yn llosgi'n ulw ( and many burning to a cinder )."

Iolo in a letter written 26th July 1800

PSYCHELIZARD by LION CRUSHER

WE HAVE ONLY ONE EFFECTIVE WEAPON:
THE POWER TO BLOW THEIR MINDS.-Mario Savio

Hakim Bey: RAW VISION

The categories of naive art, art brut , and insane or eccentric art,which shade into various and further categories of neo- primitive art- all these ways of categorizing and labelling art remains senseless:- that is , not only ultimately useless but also essentially unsensual, unconnected to body and desire.What really characterizes all these art forms? Not their marginality in relation to a mainstream of art/discourse...for heaven's sake, what mainstream?!What discourse?! If we were to say that theres a " post modernist " discourse currently going on , then the concept "margin" no longer holds any meaning. Post- post modernism, however,will not even admit rhe existence of any discource of any sort. Art has fallen silent. There are no more categories, much less maps of center and margin. We are free of all that shit , right?

Wrong.Because one category survives: Capital.Too-Late Capitalism. The spectacle, the Simulation, Babylon, whatever you want to call it. All art can be positioned or labelled in relation to this discourse.And it is precisely and only in relation to this " metaphysical " commodity-spectacle that outsider art can be seen as marginal.If this spectacle can be considered as a para-medium( in all its sinuous complexity), then outsider art must be called immediate.It does not pass thru the paramedium of the spectacle.It is meant only for the artist and the artist's immediate entourage( friends, family, neighbors, tribe); and it participates in a gift economy pf positive reciprocity.Only this non-category of immediatism can therefore approach an adequate understanding and defense of the bodily aspects of outsider art, its connection to the senses and to desire, and its avoidance or even ignorance of the mediation/alienation inherent in spectacular recuperation and reproduction.Mind you ,this has nothing to do with the content of any outsider genre, nor for that matter does it concern the form or the intention of the work, nor the navite or knowinness of trhe artist or recipents of the art.Its immediatism lies soley in its means of imaginal production.It communicates or is given from person to person, breast to breast as the sufis say, without passing thru the distotion-mehanism of the spectaculat paramedium.

When Yugoslavian or Haitian or NYC- graffito art was discovered and commodified,the results failed to satisfy on several points :-
1. In terms of the pseudo-discourse of the Art World , all so called "naivite" is doomed to remain quaint, even campey, and decidedly marginal- even when it commands high prices (for a year or two (.The forced entrance of ousider art into the commodity spectacle is a humiliation,

2.Recuperation as commodity engages the artist in negative reciprocity-i.e, where first the artist "received inspiration" as a free gift, and then made a donation directly to the people, who might or might not give back their understanding, or mystification, or a turkey and a keg of beer (positive reciprocity), the artist now first creates for money and recieves money, while any aspects of gift exchange recede int scondary levels of meaning and finally begin to fade (negative reciprocity). Finally we have tourist art, and the condescending amusement,and then the condescending boredom,of those who will no longer pay for the inauthentic.

3.Or else the Art World vampirizes the energy of the outsider, sucks everything out and then passes on the corpse to the advertising world or the world of popular entertainment. By this reproduction the art finally loses its aura and shrivels and dies. True, the utopian trace may remain, but in essennce the art has been betrayed.

The unfairness of such terms as insane or ne-primitive art lies in the fact that this art is not produced only by the mad or innocent,but by all those who evade yhe alienation of the paramedium. Its true appeal lies in the intense aura it acquires thru immediate imaginal prescence, not only in its visionary style or content, but most importantly by its mere present-ness (i.e it is "here" and it is a "gift").In this sense it is more, not less, noble than mainstream art of the post-modern era--which is precisely the art of an abscence rater than a prescence.

The ony fair way (or "beauty way,") as the Hopi say) to treat outsider art would seem to be to keep it secret, to refuse to define it-- to pass it on as a secret, person to person, breast to breast, rather than pass it through the paramedium ( slick journals,quarterlies,galleries, museums,coffee table books,MTV etc.).Or even better to become mad and innocent ourselves.For so Babylon will label us when we neither worship nor criticize it anymore, when we have forgotten it(but not forgiven it!), and remembered our own prophetic selves, our bodies, our "true will."

FIRST MINISTER CHALLENGED OVER DRONES AT ABERPORTH

Heron
Originally uploaded by michael_junge

Amnesty International has serious concerns regarding unmanned drones flown from Parc Aberporth , an assembly Government - funded facility iin Ceredigion, West Wales.Elbit systems flew the Hermes 450 from Parc Aberporth in 2005 -" marking the first time a pilotless aircraft weighing more than 330 pounds had been flown in nonsegregated UK airspace."The site is now being used to test an adapted version for the Royal Air Force.
Amnesty has called on the UK government to suspend all military exports to Israel as there is substantial risk that UK- supplied arms and components could have been used to target civilians in the recent Gaza conflict.
The Hermes 450 is manufactured by the Israeli firm Elbit Systems, with engines made by its UK subsidiary UAV enginesLtd. Elbit Systems claims that the UK company produces engines only for drones destined for export, not for those used by the Israeli Defence Forces(IDF) in the recent Gaza conflict. Amnesty International is seeking assurances from the UK government that it has not licensed components for use in military drones, and that it has taken sufficient monitoring to ascertain that UK engines , parts and technology are not and have not been used in drone aircraft operated by the IDF.
The Cardigan and North Pembrokeshire Amnesty International Group is keeping an eye on the situation in Parc Aberporth, and will continue to press the first Minister and the Welsh Assembly Government to introduce to its industry investment programme.
Meanwhile fears about the safety of testing unmanned aerial systems at West Wales Airport have been expressed after a drone crashed just after take off.
MEP Jill Evans who met with members of Bro Emlyn for Peace and Justice said "I am very concerned about the safety issues, especially in relation to creating the extended airspace for testing. This incident highlights how important that is.They want to extend the airspace over a wide area and the main concerns is one of safety for the local population, which I will raise in the light of this incident. Now it is even more important that WAG looks at this".
Harry Rogers of BEPJ said " thank goodness this plane was not further ino its flight. It could have been over Cardigan or Aberporth before it dropped out of the sky. This crash could be a foretaste of what is to come if a 500- square mile area of West Wales is allocated to the testing of unmanned dreones. Next time it could be someone's home or a school that the plane lands on. We need to get WAG to scrap these reckless plans."
Des Davies member of local ACTYMA campaign group opposed to development said "UAVs are 50 times more likely to crash than military aircraft, and flying them over an inhabited area is irresponsible."


CIVILIAN TARGETS IN GAZA

"Children playing on the roofs of their homes or in the street and other civilians going about their daily business, as well as medical staff attending the wounded were killed in broad daylight by Hellfire and other highly accurate missiles launched from helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles,or drones, and by precision projectiles fired from tanks.
Disturbing questions remain unanswered as to why such high -precision weapons , whose operators can see even small details of their targetts and which can accurately strike even fast moving vehicles , killed so many children and other civilians."


From Israel/Gaza - Operation Cast Lead: 22 days of death and destruction, Amnesty International, 2009



other sources-

Tivyside Advertiser

Carmarthen Journal

Big eye fuel time.

Ivor Cutler- (15/1/23- 3/3/06) - Magical Surrealist

Ah Mr Cutler, beloved scotch poet, songwriter and humorist,I remember fondly listening to him under the bedclothes, on John Peels wonderful show.Cannot forget my first sighting of Cutler as Buster Bloodvessell ,in the Beatles Magical Mystery Show and later on one of Neil Innes television programmes and on Robert Wyatts records.I also remember him appearing on numerous occasions the Andy Kershaw show ( now what ever happened to him).No need for questions, he was a complete original. I think I passed my English "o " level with Ivor's help. Happy innocent days

WINDFALLS

On the turf ,below the tree of life, lie the windfalls.
They are tunnelled through, but the tunnells go
nowhere. If you ask a tunnell where it leads, you
get a bleak look." I am just a hole through a
solid. I was just eaten." The eaters lie on the turf,
little brown dessicated bits of nature, waiting for a
strong wind to blow up to the air and into
the hedge


A SLIGHT CURVE

An insecure man decided to live below a mountain,
so he dug a tunnell till he came to the middle, but
his ruler had a slight curve and he came out a
quarter of the way round. However, all the healthy
exercise inside the mountain cured his insecurity
so he laughed and went back to his wife and
children and grandchildren and in-laws.


MISS PRISM


She gave him, a glassy stare from the top of a
vitreous ladder.


WHAT ABOUT THE HORNS


In the middle of the moon, a huge man who
smells like your favourite granpa lights a candle
and settles down to read.


THE GREAT REFLECTOR

I sit in the dark dreesed in a formal suit. I am
waiting for the moon to reappear so that I can
continue my sketch of the kitchen.

PHILOSOPHICAL SPECULATION

How many anglers dance on top of the bin


A PERPENDICULAR ATTITUDE

When life gets too much , do not lie down and cry,
stand up and weep

THE CAKE OF LIFE

It is only in the autumn that I date the month in
Latin:-IX, X, XI, XII. And then return to Arabic:-
1, 2, 3. It's the icing on the cake of life . An ort of
schoolchild culture. As good as a degree in the
classics.

KENNETH REXTROTH -THOU SHALL NOT KILL ( a memorial for Dylan Thomas )

Kenneth Rextroth was born on December 22,1905, in South Bend,Indiana, and died on June 6,1982, in Montecito,California.He moved to San Francisco from Chicago in 1927 to become involved in leftist politics and began by helping to organize maritime labour unions. During World War II Rextroth was a conscietious objector, a political stance he shared with his friend , the Californian poet William Everson, who later summarized Rextroth's predominant influence on local writers in the essay "Rextroth: Shaker and Maker."

An Anarchist poet, critic, translator and playwright,Rextroth also wrote regular columns as the West Coast literary correspondent for the NATION and the Saturday Review. In particular ,Rextroth's interest in Asian literature and philosophy contributed to the Beat writers' study of what Ginsberg called "Bhuddha consciousness."Rextroth's translations of Asan poetry published by New Directions were a seminal influence on Gary Snyder and other young poets.

It was at one of Rextroth's weekly "seminars in his apartment at 250 Scott Street above Jack's Record Cellar that Ginsberg heard him read an early mimeographed version of his eulogy for the popular Welsh poet Dylan Thomas titled "Thou Shalt Not Kill."Rextroth wrote the poem shortly after Thomas's death from alcoholism on November 9, 1953. In "Thou Shalt Not Kill," Rextroth's scathing charge that capitalism had vanquished the century's most promising writers in it materialistic pursuit of power and its worship of the destructive god Mammon would reverberate in Ginsberg's' later poem "Howl."


AUTHOR'S NOTE......

This poem was written in one sitting, a few hours after a phone came from New York with the news that Dylan(Thomas)had died. It was circulated widely, mimeo'd to all my friends. The copies were all plainly labelled "NOT FOR PUBLICATION".Nevertheless it has been printed without my permission, in Japanese, Greek, French, English and several other languages, in a shortened form. In most cases I believe it was thoght to be effective ammunition in the Cold War. After seeing the last section in print a friend wrote me "You have a point, powerfully put, but the other side is much worse." The "other side "? Dylan and I are the "other side" The poem is directed against the twentieth, the Century of Horror. It says the same thing Holderin or Baudelaire said of the nineteenth century, but it has the benefit of what the philosophers call " an inclusion series ";one hundred more years. I am well aware that ther are no loger the suicides east of the Iron Curtain there used to be. The first wave was thorough and effective.
Kenneth Rextroth


1

They are murdering all the young men.
For half a century now, every day,
They have hunted them down and killed them.
They are killing them now.
At this minute, all over the world,
They are killing the young men.
They know ten thousand ways to kill them.
Every year they invent new ones.
In the jungles of Africa,
In the marshes of Asia,
In the deserts of Asia,
In the slave pens of Siberia
In the slums of Europe,
In the nightclubs of America,
The murderers are at work.

They are stoning Stephen
They are casting him forth from every city
in the world.
Under the Welcome sign,
Under the Rotary emblem,
His body lies under the hurling stones.
He was full of faith and power.
He did great wonders among the people.
They could not stand against his wisdom.

They could not bear the spirit with which
he spoke.
He cried out in the name
Of the tabernacle of witness in the wilderness.
They were cut to the heart.
They gnashed against him with their teeth.
They cried out with a loud voice.
They stopped their ears.
They ran on him with one accord.
They cast him out of the city and stoned him.
The witnessess laid down their clothes
At the feet of a man whose name was your name -
You.

You are the murderer.
You are killing the young men.
You are broiling Lawrence on his gridiron.When you demanded he divulge
The hidden trasures of the spirit,
He showed you the poor.
You set your heart against him.
You seized hin and bound him with rage.
You roasted him on a slow fire.
His fat dripped and spurted in the flame.
The smell was swwet to your nose.
He cried out,
"I am cooked on this side,
Turn me over and eat,
You
Eat of my flesh."

You are murdering the young men.
You are shooting Sebastion with arrows.
He kept the faithfull stadfast under
persecution.

First you shot him with arrows.
The you beat him with rods.
Then you threw him in the sewer.
You fear nothing more than courage.You who turn away your eyes
At the bravery of the young men.

You.
The hyena with polished face and bow tie,
In the office of a billion dollar
Corporation devoted to service;
The vulture dripping with carrion,
Carefully and carelessly robed in imported
tweeds,
Lecturing on the Age of Abundance;
The jackal in double-breasted gabardines,
Barking by remote control,
In the United Nations;
The vampire bat seated at the couch head,
Notebook in hand, toying with his decerebrator;
The autonomous, ambulalatory cancer,
The Superego in a thousand uniforms;
You,
The finger man of behemoth,
The murderer of the young men.

II

What happened to Robinson,
Who used to stagger down Eighth Street,
Dizzy with solitary gin /
Where is Masters, who crouched in
His law office for ruinous decades?
Where is Leonard who thought he was
A locomotive? And Lindsay,
Wise as a dove, innocent
As a serpent, where is he?
Timor mortis contubat me.
What became of Jim Oppenheim?
Lola Ridge alone in an
Icy furnished room? Orrick Johns,
Hopping into the surf on his
One leg? Elinor Wylie
Who leaped likr Kierkeegaard?
Sar Teasdale, where is she?
Timor mortis conturbat me.

Where is George Sterling, that tame fawn?
Phelps Putnam who stole away?
Jack Wheelwright who couldn't cross the bridge?
Donald Evans with his cane and
Monocle, where is he?
Timor mortis conturbat me.

John Gould Fletcher who could not
Unbreak his powerful heart?
Bodenheim butchered in stinking
Squalour? Edna Millay who took
Her last straight whiskey? genivieve
Who loved so much; where is she?
Timor mortis conturbat me.

Harry who didn't care at all?
Hart who went back to the sea (Hart Crane 1899-1932)
Timor mortis conturbat me.

Where is Sol Funaroff?
What happened to Potemkin?
Isidor Schneider? Claude McKay?
Who animates their corpes today?
Timor mortis conturbat me.

Where is Ezra, that noisy man? ( Ezra Pound)
Where is Larsson whose poems were prayers?
Where is Charlie Snider, that gentle
Bitter boy? Carnevali, (Italian poet)
What became of him?
Carol who was so beautiful, where is she?
Timor mortis conturbat me.


III

Was their end noble and tragic,
Like the mask of a tyrant?
Like Agammemmon's secret golden face?
Indeed it was not. Up all night
In the focsle, bemused and beaten,
Bleeding at the rectum, in his
Pocket a review by the one
Colleaque he respected, "If he
Really means what these poems
Pretend to say. he has only
One way out-." Into the
Hot acrid Caribeann sun,
Into the acrid, transparent,
Smoky sea. Or another, lice in his
Armpits and crotch, garbage littered
On the floor, grey greasy rags on
The bed. " I Killed them because they
Were dirty , stinkin Communists.
Ishould get a medal." Again,
Another, Simenon foretold,
His end at a glance. " I dare you
To pull the trigger." Sheshut her eyes
And spilled gin over her dress.
The pistol wobbles in his hand.
It took them hours to die.
Another threw herself downstairs,
And broke her back, it took her years.
Two put their heads under water
In the bath and filled their lungs.
Another threw himself under
The traffic of a crowded bridge.
Another, drunk, jumped from a
Balcony and broke her neck.
Another soaked herself in
Gasoline and ran blazing
Into the street and lived on
In cutody. One made love
Only once with a beggar woman.
He died later of syphilis
Of the brain and spine. Fifteen
Years of pain and poverty,
While his mind leaked away.
One tried three times in twenty years
To drown himself. The last time
He succeeded. One turned on the gas
When she had no more food, no more
Money, and only half a lung.
One went up to Harlem, took om
Thirty men, came home and
Cut her throat. One sat up all night
Talking to H.L Mencken and
Drowned himself in the morning.

How many stopped writing at thirty?
How many went to work for Time?
How many died of prefrontal
Lobotomies in the Communist Party?
How many are lost in the back wards
Of provincial madhouses?
How many on the advice of
Their psychoanalysts, decided
A businss career was best of all?
How many are hopeless alcoholics?

Rene Crevel!
Jacques Ricgaut!
Antonin Artaud!
Mayakofsky!
Essenin!
Robert Desnos!
Saint Pol Roux!
Max Jacob!
All over the world
The same disembodied hand
Strikes us down.
Here is a mountain of death.
A hill of heads like the Khans piled up.
The first born of a century
Slaughtered by Herod.
Three generations of infants
Stuffed doen the maw of Moloch

IV

He is dead.
The bird of Rhiannom.
He is dead.
In the winter of the heart.
He is dead.
In the canyons of death,
They found him dumb at last
In the blizzard of lies.
He never spoke again.
He died.
He is dead.
In their antseptic hands,
He is dead.
The little spellbinder of Cader Idris.
He is dead.
The sparrow of Cardiff.
He is dead.
The canary of Swansea.
Who killed the bright-headed bird?
You did, you son of a bitch.
You drowned him in your cocktail brain.
He fell down and died in your synthetic heart.
You killed him,
Oppenhemer the Million-Killer.
You killed him,
Eintein the Grey Eminence.
You killed him.
Havanahaana, with your nobel prize.
You killed him,General,
Through the proper channels.

You strangled him, Le Mouton,
With yor mains etendus.
He confessed in open court to a pince-nezed skull.
You shot him in the back of the head
As he stumbled in the last cellar.
You killed him,
Benign Lady on the postage stamp.
He was found dead at a liberal weekly luncheon.
He was found dead on the cutting room floor.
He was found dead at a Time policy conference.
Henry Luce killed him with a telegram to the Pope.
Mademoiselle stangled him with a padded brassiere.
Old possum sprinled him with a tea ball.
After the wolves were done, the vaticides
Crawled of with his bowels to their classrooms
and quarterlies.
When the news came over the radio
You personally rose up shouting, "Give us
Barrabas!"
In your lonely crowd you swept over him.
Your custom built brogans and your ballet slippers
Pummelled himto death in the gritty street.

You hit him with an album of Hindemith.
You stabbed him with stainless steel by Isamu
Noguchi
He is dead.
He is Dead.
Like Ignacio the bullfighter,
At four o.clock in the afternoon.
At precisely four o'clock.
I too do not want to hear it.
I too do not want to know it.
I want to run inyo the street,
Shouting,"Remember Vanzetti!"
...And all the birds of the deep sea rise up
Over the luxury liners and scream,
"You killed him! You killed him.
In your God damned Brooks Brothers suit ,
You son of a bitch."

jim carroll- R i P lower East Sides unofficial laureate.(August 1st 1949 to September 11 2009)

Just found out,that Jim Carroll (James David ) died at his desk last week. An author , poet , autobiographer and punk musician.Perhaps best known now for 1978 autobiographical work the Basketball Diaries, which was made into 1995 film starring Leonardo Di Caprio as Carroll.A ,true original, innovator, harnessing the spirit of rock and roll like a hurricane. For many years Carroll struggled with heroin addiction, and addiction did remain a concern of his many poems.
His books of poetry included " Living at the Movies" (1973), "The Book of Nod " (1986) and " Fear of Dreaming" (1993). These books reflected Carroll's poetic stance as an outsider and bohemian in the tradition of Arthur Rimbaud or Charles Baudelairre.
In his role as a performance poet I saw him as someone who carried forth the mantle of the Beats. Allen Ginsberg himself saw Carroll as the lower East Sides unofficial laureate.
He bought a beautifully sensitive yet visceral edge to the poetry scene. His streetwise style and life on the edge experience giving him credibility.But for a Rock and Roll poet, (his group , The Jim Carroll Band,issued a popular album Catholic Boy, in 1981 )his work was markedly literally.
His influences were drawn from poets of the New York School, especially Frank O Hara and Ted Berrigan.It was Berrigans list poem " People who died " that provided inspiration for Carrolls most celebrated song of the same name.
As a singer and songwriter he had been compared to Lou Reed and Patti Smith ( a life long friend and it was her band he first performed his poetry " a la Rock and Roll).
Recently he had returned to performance poetry and was writing a novel " The petting Zoo ".Some say heroin stopped him reaching greater heights yet the body of work he left us reveal a poet of depth and vision.His readings continually sold out. He never did ,the facts speak for themselves.
Well he's caught the rock and roll train now, it will be one hell of a party. Slice up the moonlight, mainline some poetry ,offer some benediction, dont forget to pass on the joint. R I P , Jim Carroll.

Paregonic Babies - Jim Carroll

Clocks blue seconds fold over me
Slow as swamps dream I feel
heavy like metal shade pre-dawn thickness
I sit
in my chair of nods shivering
from a sickness I took years to perfect

dark paddling in the wave membrane
the monkey woman's dream sreams
are places of shy creatures, head, infants
I had born on a whim and abandoned ... my eye

drips the strain to the sweet March air, frozen
pure as my blood refuses to flow ...
stilled, sweat that shines the breath of my poem.



I Write Your name -Jim Carroll

I write your name
With thick blue ink
On stones I throw just to watch 'em sink

I write your name
On a great wood beam
On an ancient ship in a fading dream

I write your name
On every move I make
On the things I fake ,on my own mistakes

I write your name
On my naked fright
For the final time, I write your name tonight

I never knew a word
Could take it all away
And I wish I never heard
The words you had to say

But there is nothing left to find of you
I left behind the final clue
But I still have this pen
And every now and then
I write your name
I write your name
I write your name

................................................................

JOHN CLARE (13/7/1793 -20//1864) - They called it madness Clare

Oh sweet John Clare, much maligned, poet, romantic, lover, I say genius.
He was born into abject poverty in a roadside tenement on the edge of Deeping Fen, Helpston, Northamptonshire (July 13 1793). He minded horses ,did odd jobs, learned his letters, fell in love, liked a drink, a good read, joined the militia, courted gypsies, an ordinary man .

He came across James Thomsons- "The Seasons" and began to write verses, full of streams of consiousness. I love it.

At his best he suggests the tiny detail of nature, nest and eggs of wild birds, insects in the pools, markings on leaves, "and full many in a nameless weed, neglected, left to run to seed," when in hot july " e'en the dew parched up from the teasels jointed cup" . He had the eye of a countryman and delighted, like a painter , to show the slightest detail of nature. His muse: ......... "sits her down. Upon the molehills little lap, Who feels no fear to stain her gown. And pauses by the hedgerows gap."

so sensitive, too sensitive for his times,they bloody well got him for this. This was the time of the enclosures, he wrote about their injustices ,

"It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill.

And hung the moles for traitors,

though the brook is running still,

It runs a naked stream cold and chill."

Perhaps they punished him for this , sure he fell into tormented love, but love alone is not a crime, is it ?

He married a local lass, Patty Turner , in 1820 and had 7 children. Unfortunately he liked a drink and was prone to depression. He also had not forgotten his first love, Mary (Joyce), who he clearly loved dearly, with perhaps too much devotion. Is not all true love blind, possibly today with some kind of therapy he could have left it behind.

In 1820 his first book was published- " poems descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery" and the following year, followed it up with "Village Minstrel and other Poems."

Similar to todays modern celebrities, courted by admirers, fans. Fame was a fickle game, they liked a good peasant poet at the time, yet as soon as the fad was 'passe' , he was dropped like a lead balloon. After pawing him with affection, they grew tired, yearning for a new sensation and deserted him.

This and poverty alienated him and his increasing devotion to a past flame was perhaps tippng him towards an edge, towards what today is termed a nervous breakdown. He internalised and drove himsef too hard, complaining of;

"a confounded lethargy of low spirit that prisses on me to such a degree that at times makes me feel as if my senses has a mind to leave me."

In 1836 he was cruelly sectioned, imprisoned at High Beech Asylum, Essex. He became reborn, reaching further into his inner torment , his yearning for his lost love Mary. Isolated , in fear, he stated "I'm John Clare now "

" I was Byron and Shakespeare formerly". He was very self aware and became "a half mad melancholy dog".

Over the years he became prone to even more distraught thoughts , increasingly alienated from family, friends and love. He started to believe he was married to two wives . At this time asylums were essentially prisons. He turned himself into a warrior poet, fighting against tyranny and oppression, waging war on cant and lies. I believe he peeled away the veneer of civilised gentility and unveiled the lust, greed, envy ,deceit and malice that lay beneath.

"Never act hypocrisy " he wrote " for deception is the most obvious knavery in the world."

For years he had to mind his ' P's and Q's' amidst his love for nature and his two wives.

In 1841 he escaped, aided by his friends from the gypsy community, walking 100 miles back home to Northampton. It is worth noting that while walking home, not one person mistook him for an escaped lunatic. He returned to his wife , until someone grassed him up and was admitted to Northampton Lunatic Asylum.

Here he remained for the rest of his life, isolated , talking to himself, leaving poems unfinished, undeciphered . He continued to write, and letters reveal a man in some kind of control, demonstrating tender passionate love. Twenty years of quality poetry proved this.

This was a time of slavery, this was also a time of trade in lunacy, when many were improperly locked up. A privatisation of madness, in Clare's case there was profit to be made.

Where once he had been independent and proud, he was powerless, dispossessed, forced into solitude,occassionally visited and treated like a freak and puppet. There was money to be made, poetry on tap.

Sure he suffered from delusions, but was he actually mad/insane? With pen or pencil in hand he wrote the most beautiful poetic effusions, no indication of insanity in his poems.

There was no attempt to cure him or discharge him, no therapy , lest this encouraged delusions, introspection or over excitement. His life passed by almost like an unbroken poetic dream.
Oh sweet John Clare, long may his stature grow. Let's never forget him. his sentiments echo today in these disturbing times, a metaphysical strength , a vision of truth.

I AM (sonnet)

I feel I am;- I only know I am,
And plod upon the earth, as dull and void:
Earth's prison chilled my body with its dram
Of dullness, and my soaring thoughts destoyed,
I fled to solitudes from passions dream,
I was a being created in the race
Of men disdaining bounds of place and time:-
A spirit that could travel o'er the space
Of earth and heaven, - like a thought sublime,
Tracing creation, like my maker, free,-
A soul unshackled - like eternity,
But now I only know I am,-that's all

Further reading
Jonathan Bate - John Clare, a Biography. picador 2003

Iain Sinclair- The edge of the Orison. Hamish Hamilton 2005

Alan Moore- Voices of the Fire- Victor Gollanz