TIME TRIPPING

 
This photo, shared recently by poet friend Greg Masters, I think is from a display of Dennis Cooper's Little Caesar Press archives at NYU, back in the 2000s. NYU also houses my archives, but fortunately I found a copy of this Little Caesar magazine #11 from 1980, on my bookshelves.

The cover photo is by early SNL photographer and friend, Edie Baskin, and inside part of the contents are two interviews Tim Dlugos did with me, one extended daytime session and a shorter one in his car at night riding back to Manhattan from a poetry reading we'd done (with Kevin Killian) on Long Island. 

We were stoned  for the latter and I probably was for the daytime one too. I hadn't read it since the mag came out over forty years ago and felt like a visitor from a distant planet, trying to decipher meanings and tone and intentions and pretensions and self awareness and self indulgence.

Made me miss Tim more than ever. Those were the days. As are these.

ME AND MY SIBS

 
Another photo of me and my siblings during World War Two. Back row, left to right, Buddy, Tommy holding me, Robert; front row, Irene and Joan. They're all gone now, but what an impact they had on me as a boy.

JOHN SINCLAIR R.I.P.

I first encountered the poet John Sinclair in 1965 through the mail while I was still in the military stationed outside Spokane, Washington. I wrote in my latest book, SAY IT AGAIN (#76 in The Spokane Sonnets), "John Sinclair, editor of a Detroit little mag, rejects / some poems I submit but writes: Who are you? / I reply angrily I’m the writing you rejected."

I didn't know at the time he was my age, 23, but as we both became anti Vietnam war activists in the years that followed I admired his attempt to  bring the rock-n-roll world we grew up in into the anti-war movement. I organized some anti-war rock shows in DC, but he managed the MC5 and co-founded The White Panthers as allies to The Black Panthers, and fought for legalizing marijuana.

He got a ten year prison sentence for sharing two joints with an undercover cop in 1969, and the campaign to free him succeeded in '71. I finally met him in person shortly after when we did a poetry reading together and he was sweet and supportive. A 'sixties icon. Rest In Poetry brother.

 

EASTER 1944

 
My siblings and me (another one, between me and my closest sister, died as an infant thus the bigger step down to me) on Easter 1944 during WWII. Me soon to be two, and my two oldest brothers joining the military before the war ended. All gone now, except for me.

MARJORIE PERLOFF R.I.P.

 
Marjorie Perloff was an unparalleled scholar and interpreter of the avant-garde in the arts of the 20th century, especially poetry. I first encountered her in my DC days of the early 1970s. I take pride in her championing my early poetry book ROCKY DIES YELLOW and the poetry anthology I edited NONE OF THE ABOVE, praising my most notorious poem then, "My Life", in The Washington Post.

She was more critical of my later work and we had other differences of opinion, which I arrogantly gave her shit about when we both lived in L.A. in the '80s and "90s and I went to her home there. The thing I appreciated most about Marjorie was the twinkle in her eye when she gave me shit back.

She was an extraordinary person, someone to learn about for women's history month, which is every month for me, just like black history month and poetry month and pride month etc. 

[And if you're wondering, my blog obits are about my take on my personal connection to the subjects, the facts of their lives otherwise available online.]  

WORLD POETRY DAY

 

HAPPY SAINT PADDY'S

Here's my top five favorite Irish films in chronological order based on the era they're set in:

BLACK 47

THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY

THE SECRET OF ROAN INISH

THE COMMITMENTS

ONCE