Red Fez

Issue 59 of Red Fez is up today and along with it a new poem from me!

http://www.redfez.net/poetry/1881

New poems

happy hour indeed - two new poems penned by this gal over at The Camel Saloon!

http://thecamelsaloon.blogspot.com/

Fug You!

Fug You is the missing piece of the 1960s counterculture puzzle I didn’t know I was looking for. I started reading the Beats in high school and from there explored all the obvious alleys and backroads. I obsessed over Ginsberg, struggled in vain to reconcile Kerouac with the myth surrounding him, and learned magick by way of Gysin, Burroughs, and their cut-up approach to reality. I delved into the neurophilosophy of Timothy Leary, the transcendental love of Ram Dass, and the culture-hungry Zen of Alan Watts. I explored new worlds via City Lights, Grove Press, and Donald Allen’s New American Poetry anthology. I danced to the music, and I thought Kesey was Paul Newman-handsome. I thought I had as clear a picture of an era as possible for someone who wasn’t there. I felt the vibe, and that alone seemed to give my readings some glistering quality of the Real.

Then I came across Fug You and realized my mental syllabus was incomplete. Part autobiography, part scholarly historical documentation, Fug You is the book that will bring a new generation to familiarity with Ed Sanders, his avant-garde country-jazz band, and his contribution to American letters. The years described in this book span from 1960 to the early 1970s when Sanders pulled back from his work as a folk-rock star and poet to pen his book about the Manson family. As told by Sanders, the decade comes across as a roller coaster ride of highs and lows, victories and failures. Structurally, Fug You mirrors this wild ride. The whole account is broken down into short sections that rarely exceed two or three pages in length. This made for a slightly disjointed reading, but it worked – it made sense in terms of the content, and in an odd way it conveyed a sense of fun.

Fug You is Ed Sander’s life story. From small town origins, Sanders found himself in the Lower East Side of New York studying Greek and Egyptian at SUNY. He started writing poetry, contemplated a life as an academic, and ultimately took a fork in the road right before grad school. He pulled from his knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphics and classical poetry to reinterpret poesy’s inherent possibilities. 1962 saw the birth of one of his first claims to fame, Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts. Through this avenue, Sanders published his own poetry as well as material by Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, d.a. levy, Gregory Corso, Ted Berrigan, Diane DiPrima, Leroi Jones, and others. The magazine was a success and helped launch the 1960s literary zine culture. Poetry junkies can download complete issues for free at http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/fuck-you-press-archive/.

While building his resume as a poet and exploring the world of the underground press, Sanders formed with Tuli Kupferberg The Fugs, an avant-garde band preoccupied with political malcontent, the Civil Rights Movement, love, gropes, beauty, and poetry (They put several of William Blake’s poems to music.). They were weird, loud, crude, funny, and fantastic. They were an anomaly.

Freaky music scaffolding the background, poetry running out the margins, Sanders spread himself thin. He started work in the underground film scene, headed up LEMAR – an organization promoting the legalization of marijuana, partied with modern day god-icons like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, was witness to the horrors of the 1968 Democratic Convention, contributed to the protests led by the political rebels who would spawn the Yippies, organized a mass exorcism of the Pentagon with the likes of Kenneth Anger in tow, etc. etc. etc. The 1960s in America was a decade of high weirdness, fun, art, and love. All of this comes through in Fug You. In fact, this happy tome may be just the puzzle piece you were missing, too.

The Land of Laughs and Other Fictions

The Land of Laughs is a Thing in flux. It is a text-based retirement community for the heroes and bad guys of a Technicolor childhood. It is Calvinism in an afternoon juice box.  It is a glossy brochure of fear and obsession in Anywhere, America. It is a children’s book masticated and digested by lurching Cynicism in a trench coat. It is the buffer zone between desire and manifestation. Mostly, it is a reminder that reality in the hands of intention is totally malleable – we write our own stories as we go.

Obsession marks the connubial common ground Thomas Abbey and Saxony Gardner find themselves on. She: marionettes; he: indigenous masks. Both: the books of Marshall France, children’s books author, Jewish refugee in flight from the 20^th century’s land of monsters, across-the-board dog-hater, and former recluse (now dead and ever-dying). It is Marshall France that brings the two together and Marshall France that caravans them to Galen, Missouri, where France spent the last half of his life.

On leave from the New England school where he teaches English and in flight from a childhood in the shadows of a famous father, Thomas commits to doing a biography of the little-known children’s author. Saxony accompanies him in the capacity of research assistant, but their professional relationship quickly disintegrates into a mess of sex, resentment, and, of course, their mutual obsession with France. Things between them are further strained by the seductive and weird Anna France, Marshall France’s daughter and the single greatest barrier between Thomas and the end of his book.

As he and Saxony explore the town of Galen and its inhabitants, strange disturbances interrupt the otherwise syrupy flow of small town life. A child is hit by a car, but he isn’t laughing the moment before like he is supposed to. A man dies by electrocution almost fifty years before he was supposed to die by natural causes. And what’s with the cult of bull terriers that have taken up residence in Galen? Hints and suspicions scaffold narrative skeleton and there the pinking flesh: a shadow thread runs from the puckered bellybutton of France’s writings to the hidden navel of the town. Thomas Abbey is the tightrope walker that traverses it, guided by France’s books and his mysterious forty-odd volumes of the Galen Journals.

This novel is all about the magic of our own fictions. Thomas Abbey writes Marshall France. Marshall France writes the clowns and saints of cosmic Anywhere, America. And in closing with the possibility of Thomas writing his father’s biography, he finds the chance to finally rewrite his own childhood. I am left wondering at my participation in the writing of The Land of Laughs through my particular interpretations and visualizations. I am left wondering at the moments of my own life as they bloom pregnant fruit from the personal fictions that clutter my bookshelves and brain tissue.