POLITICS BE DAMNED by Charles Plymell

Germs from the Old World
In chemical air over Brooklyn Bridge
Mob loansharking dates back to Rome
Little Caesar himself charged a hundred percent
thousands of years before James Cagney,
Little Italy or the Federal Reserve on a larger scale
Derivatives more invisible than usury
No real assets left
no more morality if there ever was
in New World Presidents
can’t help but rob the poor to give to the rich once more
In the world’s largest pyramid scheme
What else to do but put Cyalis in the water
and have a populist hard on for hours.

Christ will always forgive the evangelist in tears
or the confessor masturbating at the Cross
the armaments of altruism
ratified in the genes
of  Crown and the Conquerors
Captain Marvel’s holy moley hero now
In Eastern Lands of suicide bombers
blown up twat in Bagels and lox
Three C’s of the special Olympics.

Ho Hum of Buddha in the New Age
watching T V in a mortgaged home
the fairy tale with special effects
more easily understood than virgin birth
language lost to the T-shirt logo.

Wait for the attack, denounce the pacifists
democracy, parliament, dictatorship
it works the same in every country said Goering
So take your fucking America Bruce Springsteen

Your high yellow and Buffalo Bill too
…..the wasted buffalo killed for sport
true universes in their globed eyes
as has every innocent creature
who will forever watch the half politician reload.

Charles Plymell on Charles Plymell (part 7)

I taught at a Quaker school near Philly and one in Upper Darby on old Highway 1. The English teacher there never quite understood the purpose of the program. He insisted on lionizing me, telling this high school kids now they can meet a real poet in the flesh…ect and made them sit on the floor around me to listen to my poetry. I told him that they were going to write poetry themselves and would be more comfortable at their desk. It was a very posh high school. I saw a T.V. documentary years later about a high school teacher involved in a student/murder wherein the teacher looked all too familiar. I enjoyed the students in all the schools, and in one school far into rural Pennsylvania beyond the Susquehanna Chesapeake watershed, I was moved to write a book of poetry by a third grader. She was playing at recess with our class on a beautiful spring day. The grass was high and the kids were picking clumps of it and throwing it on others and rolling in it. I thought it irresistible poetic play, so I rolled in the grass and put a bunch of it in my hair. When I stood up, the little girl approached me with a puzzled look, eyes squinting in the sunshine and asked in an very inquisitive tone trying to determine a grown-up and asked simply, “Are you a kid?” I titled my book that. I found many poetic phrases and words and sometimes I couldn’t resist “borrowing.” I would use various techniques and materials with kids that other teachers soon adapted. Sometimes with lower grades, Instead of my T4 analogy experiment, I would use a book of Magritte plates I had separated to pass around. These were already visual juxtapositions so any descriptive words came out poetry. The philosophical founder of the program, Kenneth Koch had published his popular book, “Wishes Lies and Dreams” each of those words were used to stimulate the concepts and ideas of children that launched the programs.

Charles Plymell on Charles Plymell (part 5)

I became friends with a person through poetry circles who read in little newspapers that Huncke and Bremser and I read at a famous punk club on the corner in D.C. I also read at the Shakespeare Library and then introduced Ginsberg at a larger reading he gave in the Shakespeare Library.  I had applied for a NEA fellowship in poetry that year for the work that would eventually be published by Kulchur Foundation, NYC, in my book titled: Trashing of America. About a year later, I received a phone call from the NEA and thought I had finally got my grant after applying all these years. But the person on the other end asked me if I wanted to introduce William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg for their upcoming appearance in D C. I politely declined.

Eat Not Thy Mind Reviewed by Gerard Malanga

EAT NOT THY MIND
Charles Plymell
Glass Eye Books / Ecstatic Peace Library

by Gerard Malanga

Right from the get-go, Charles Plymell gets off the first shot in a spree of rhythmic vibrations in “The Theory of Wounded Dust” that betters even Ginsberg’s early thrusts.  And so Eat Not Thy Mind is a modest display in size only (29 poems packed into 34 pages), filled with BIG cautionary tales of doom and destruction and memories of planet Earth the way it used to be in more innocent times with waves of glowing wheat stretching as far as the crow flies in those dreams of Kansas.  I read this cozy little book cover to cover aloud to Ravel’s soothing “Gaspard de la Nuit” like in some scopitone flurry as if looking out a car window with Charley at the steering-wheel.

Charles Plymell on Charles Plymell–part 4

CURRICULA VITA

Later we moved down to the Bowery and stayed with our friends in a loft. At that time, lofts were restricted spaces for artists to work, but we managed to live there with our daughter. Pam worked downtown and we put our daughter in day care in the Lower Eastside. There were no clinics or doctors in SoHo at the time and when she had crying fits, I would soothe her with wet cloths and watch Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood.  Years afterward when we lived in D C area, lo and behold, Lady Aberlin from Mr. Rogers came to visit and stay overnight. She had married the poet, Seaborn Jones, from Georgia and they were on their way there. I commuted to Stamford Connecticut to teach High School. It was a well paying job, but I got an insight into compulsive state profitable monopoly rewarding non-performance enforced by police powers that I never forgot. It was a well-paying job and they waived my certification because of my graduate degree and my on-the-job experience as a printer (and they could find no one else to take such a position). It was a huge high-school complex larger than many colleges. They hired me to teach “Graphic Arts”.

Charles Plymell: The Rusty Truck Interview

Introduction to Charles Plymell by A.D. Winans

I met Charles Plymell at a small press convention back in 1976.  We have been corresponding on and off for over thirty years.  Plymell is often associated with the Beats, but he can’t be pigeon-holed into any label, be it “Beat or: Hip.”  Much has been written about Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, but Plymell was putting his foot to the pedal while Kerouac was still trying out for the football team at Princeton University.  He was born on the plains of Kansas, and his family moved a lot, so  there was no real long-term place to call home.  He didn’t attend high school except for one year in a military school in San Antonio, Texas.  By 1950 he was in his own words “driving more miles with four on the floor than Kerouac ever did or could.”  I should point out at this time that Plymell does not wish to be identified with Kerouac.  He feels they shared nothing in common, unlike Neal Cassady, whom he was able to identify with.

I have known too damn many poets who rail against the system while at the same time living at the public trough.  Plymel isn’t one of them.  During his travels, he worked at a variety of jobs which includes riding in rodeos, working on a pipeline, working with his mother at daredevil car shows in Oklahoma, working as an extra in Hollywood, working on a dynamite crew on the Columbia River, and later as a longshoreman on the San Francisco docks, a job he took personal pride in.

In 1951 he drove his new Chevy from San Antonio to Blythe, California, where his father had a farm.  The family also farmed in South Dakota, during which time Plymell took pride in owning a hot rod. He moved to San Francisco in late 1961 and stayed with friends from Wichita in an apartment on Ashbury, a half-block from the Haight, where I grew up as a child and teenager.  In 1962 he shared a flat on Gough Street with Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. He later moved to an apartment on Post Street, where he had a multilith press that printed the first issue of Zap Comics, with artwork by Robert Crumb.  He later became friends with poets like Lew Welch and David Meltzer, and early on frequented meetings at the apartment of Kenneth Rexroth who would later be dubbed the father of the Beats.  In 1971 City Lights published his book The Last Of The Moccasins, a delightful fast paced novel based on his road trips from Kansas to the West Coast.

Charles Plymell: A Video Introduction

Charles Plymell–reads Bennies From Heaven poem at the Wichita Art Museum