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.