(Ed Coletti's) NO MONEY IN POETRY
"There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money either." -- Robert Graves. This is sort of an online portfolio occasionally featuring a few samples of both my work and that of others. It also contains articles gleaned from the poetry presses. Have fun with it and comment frequently! Also please please let me know if you are seeing No Money In Poetry in a readable format on your device.
Saturday, March 30, 2024
The Bucks?/Hoo Doo Girl/War Birds/Sunny Spring Festival/Joseph Zaccardi/
Counting the bucks yet ?
This also is a kick!
Tuesday, September 26, 2023
Rare Footage of Jack Micheline Reading/A.D. Winans/Photos from Festival of The Long Poem/ Coletti Works/ Etc.
Jack Micheline and Al Winans (right to left in this cool painting by Jason Hardung)
click for Jack Micheline Reading
A. D. Winans Remembers Jack Micheline (part 1)
Jack Micheline, a poet of the Beat generation, died of a
heart attack on Friday, February 27, 1988 aboard a Bart commuter train. The
transit police at the Orinda Bart station discovered his body, which ominously
was the end of the line.Micheline was a “Street” poet who lived out his life on
the fringe of poverty, first in the Bronx neighborhoods of New York, where he
was born, and later in San Francisco. He saw the Beat generation as a media
created fancy, having little if anything to do with the creative spirit. He
hung out in Greenwich Village, in the early 50s, where, he met Langston Hughes,
the legendary Harlem poet. When Hughes was asked why he remained in Harlem, he
said he preferred the company of wild men to wild animals. Micheline would
adopt this motto as his own.
Langston Hughes was but one of many talented poets, writers
and musicians whom Micheline met and associated with in the 50s while living in
New York. In 1957 he received the Revolt in Literature Award. One of the
presenters was the celebrated Jazz musician, Charles Mingus. This resulted in a
lasting friendship between the two men, and they later performed together in
the seventies at San Francisco’s California Music Hall. It was around this
period of time that Jack Kerouac wrote a foreword for Micheline’s first book of
poems, River of Red Wine, and Dorothy Parker later favorably reviewed the book
in Esquire Magazine, which further enhanced his reputation.
The 50’s were an exciting time for Micheline, a period in
which he met Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Franz Kline, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory
Corso, Herbert Gold, and other noted poets and musicians of the Beat era.
He walked the streets of his hometown writing about the down
and out, the losers, and the dispossessed, and gave Street poetry new meaning.
He was included in Elias Wilentz’s Beat Scene and later in Ann Charters Penguin
Book of the Beats, which helped further his reputation as a poet.
Born of Russian-Romanian Jewish ancestry, under the name of
Harvey Martin Silver, he took to the road at a young age, working at a variety
of odd jobs. It was during this time that he changed his name, adopting the
first name of his hero Jack London, and, in part the surname of his mother
(Mitchell). He worked for a short time as a union organizer before devoting his
life to poetry and painting. He was 68 years old at the time of his death, and
for the last several years of his life had suffered from diabetes.
It has been said that in his younger days he had a “Bad Boy”
persona to him, and often took delight in his outrageous behavior. He would
frequently get drunk and make coarse passes at cultured ladies. “To go into a
café and go Boom, Boom, Boom and see some woman spill coffee on her skirt is a
revolution,” he declared to Fielding Dawson, a New York poet friend of his.
There is little doubt that publishers like City Lights and
Black Sparrow Press found his behavior offensive, which probably accounts for
why they never published one of the more than twenty books he published during
his lifetime. All of them published by small presses.
His reaction was to say, “I will never get any awards for
how to win friends and influence people. I’m not a politician. I don’t kiss
ass. I don’t play the game by the rules.”
A.D. Winans & Jack Micheline in 1976.I was privileged to
be his friend for more than 30 years. If there is such a word as Pure he can
lay claim to it, for sadly poetry has become a business world where public
relations and backstabbing have become finely tuned arts, and he wanted no part
of that kind of world. He refused to bow down to anyone, choosing to write
poetry for the people; Hookers, drug addicts, blue-collar workers, the
dispossessed, and he did it from deep inside the heart.
He frequently boasted to me that he had never taught a
creative writing class, held a residency, received a grant, or sought the
favors of the poetry “business” boys whom he regarded as the enemies of poetry.
In a 1997 interview I conducted with him, he talked about
the futility a poet faces in finding a large publisher. He said, in part: “I
don’t want to be published because I wear the same clothes that others wear, or
because I have the same ideas. I want respect for my own individuality, but it
doesn’t work that way.”
He didn’t attend college. His University was the streets,
where he majored in street smarts. He wasn’t concerned with semantics, or the
carefully arranged use of metaphors, as we can see from a poem titled Real
Poem:
A real poem is not in a book
It’s a knockout
A long shot
A shot in the mouth
A crack of the bat
A lost midget turning into a giant
A lost soul finding its own way…
I met him in the 60s, but it was not until the early 70s
that we became close friends. It was during this time that I was editing and
publishing Second Coming, and he became a frequent contributor to the magazine.
In 1975 Second Coming published a book of his poems Last House in America, and
in 1980 I published a small collection of his short stories, Skinny Dynamite.
He never received the acclaim that Ginsberg or Burroughs
received, not even the recognition afforded Lawrence Ferlinghetti or Gregory
Corso, but the body of work he left behind is considerable, and I have no doubt
that some day he will be given his rightful place in Beat history.
John Tytell, a professor at Queens College, New York called
him an Orphic figure, “a poet of urgency and exhortation in the tradition of
Jack London and Vachel Lindsey.”
A self-proclaimed lyrical poet, he frequently drew on old
blues and jazz rhythms, infusing the cadence of word music, while paying
tribute to the gut reality of the material he wrote about. I asked him how much
music influenced his poetry. His response:
“I was born to a poor family in the Bronx. I think if I had
been born into a cultured family, I would have been a composer. I write the
music first, not the words for it, before I write the poem. I hear the music,
the rhythms, and therefore I’m basically a composer, a musician. I can’t
remember when music wasn’t an important part of my life. Without music there is
no life.”
His poems ring true, because beyond the lines and stanzas
flow the energy of life. His voice was an original one and no one tried to
imitate it because it can’t be imitated. He was truly at home with himself, and
loved by both young and old alike. Although he exasperated many people with his
outspokenness, his true friends saw through this facade, and focused on his
genuine love for the common man and woman. In my interview with him, he said:
“I never wanted to be a poet. I still don’t want to be a
poet. I just want to live my life. The thing is people don’t understand poetry.
All they have is their football, baseball, and television. They’ve never had a
chance to see a real poet that relates to them. What they need are poems that
relate to their own way of life. In America, everything is profit motivation.
It’s the spirit that I relate to. The church doesn’t do the job. Television
doesn’t do the job. Everything in America is based on greed, money and
mediocrity.”
Ignored by the poetry establishment and the larger
alternative presses, he went about his writing, fighting off the
disillusionment and bitterness that have overcome so many poets his age. He
survived with the skills of a street fighter, his words resounding like a
hammer on a nail.
His poems were personal poems. Poems that came from the
heart and personal heartbreak; poems that were questioning, probing, and often
accusing, but which always rang out with the truth. They came from street life
experience, not from reading Charles Olson or Robert Creeley.
(To be continued)
AJ Winans Poem
I Kiss the Feet of Angels
by A. D. Winans
dark stormy night
fog creeping in
over the hills
raindrops falling
on the window
I see the faces of old friends
staring at me
ghosts from the past
freight trains steam ships
subway trains carrying their
cargo of death
Rimbaud the mad hatter
Baudelaire
Lorca fed a meal of bullets
Kaufman black messiah
walking Bourbon street
eating a golden sardine
Micheline drinking with Kerouac
at the old Cedar Tavern
Jesus wiping the perspiration
from his forehead
the fog horn plays a symphony
inside my head
I hear the drums
I feel the Beat
I kiss the feet
of angels
Japanese Lesson
dark stormy night
fog creeping in
over the hills
raindrops falling
on the window
I see the faces of old friends
staring at me
ghosts from the past
freight trains steam ships
subway trains carrying their
cargo of death
Rimbaud the mad hatter
Baudelaire
Lorca fed a meal of bullets
Kaufman black messiah
walking Bourbon street
eating a golden sardine
Micheline drinking with Kerouac
at the old Cedar Tavern
Jesus wiping the perspiration
from his forehead
the fog horn plays a symphony
inside my head
I hear the drums
I feel the Beat
I kiss the feet
of angels
Japanese Lesson
Lin Marie DeVincent Photos from Festival of The Long Poem Sept. 24, 2023
above - Dave Seter, Marty Lees Le Reynard, small bit of audience, Jonah Raskin with Greg Randall
From The North American Review (Fall 2023)There
ain’t much to being a ballplayer — if you’re a ballplayer.
—
Honus Wagner
It’s
Easy
It’s
easy to be a sparrow
If
you’re a sparrow.
It’s
not easy to be human
When
you’re a man.
It’s
easy to be a tree sloth
If
you’re a tree sloth.
It’s
not easy simply being
When
you’re a human.
It’s
easiest to be a rock
If
you’re solid stone
not
struggling to define yourself
and
empty of thought.
It
was easy to be Everest
Still
unsurmounted,
Easy
to be lunatical
not
spacecraft landed.
Look
how easy breathing
plainly
inspires,
while
thinking about it
smothers
incidence.
It’s
easy listening to Neil
(now
old) Young
carrying
me on his younger
harvest
way, old me now.
It’s
easy for me to worry
always
about future things.
Easy
to forget about being
here
right now, sated smiling.
It’s
easy living
even
easier dying
or
at least letting go
when
I let myself do it.
,,,and Ed Coletti’s “It’s Easy” reminds us of the great Honus Wagner’s simple but hopeful tautological truth of existence: “There ain’t much to being a ballplayer—if you’re a ballplayer.
Thursday, September 07, 2023
Human life without some form of poetry
is not human life but animal existence.
**************************
Breaking News Washington, 9/7/23 (Huffington Post)
Sen. Tommy Tuberville Says He's Worried About Sailors Reciting Poetry
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said Wednesday that poetry is proof the Navy needs to root out “wokeness.”
“We’ve got people doing poems on aircraft carriers over the loudspeaker,” he said to Laura Ingraham on Fox News Wednesday.
The right-wing senator has been widely criticized for blocking military promotions to protest the Pentagon’s policy of supplying service members with paid leave and travel costs to get an abortion in another state.
Tuberville attempted to defend his monthslong blockade by fighting the culture war on “wokeness.”
“Right now we are so woke in the military, we are losing recruits right and left,” he said. “Secretary [Carlos] Del Toro of the Navy he needs to get to building ships; he needs to get to recruiting; and he needs to get wokeness out of our Navy. We’ve got people doing poems on aircraft carriers over the loudspeaker. It is absolutely insane the direction that we’re headed in our military.”
Tuberville did not specify the instance of Navy personnel reciting poetry on a ship. But he was likely referring to a spoken-word event on the USS Gerald Ford hosted by the Gay, Lesbian, and Supporting Sailors (G.L.A.S.S.) association in November. Tuberville previously griped about a nonbinary junior officer praising that gathering.
**************************
Coming on Sunday September 24, 2023 at 1PM
Dear Friends, Readers and Enthusiasts,
Don't
miss
Here is the reading order of truly great poets
this time
reading one
poem for up to
10 minutes.
- Ed Coletti reading
and hosting
- Jonah Raskin SSU
Professor
Emeritus and
writer
extraordinaire
- Elizabeth Herron current Sonoma
County Poet
Laureate
- Robert DeLillo who
shares in the
depth of his
famous cousin
- Greg Randall
bringing us a
new book
-
- Intermission
-
- Avotcja back here
from Oakland
- Dave Seter
environmental
engineer, poet
and translator
- Gwynn O'Gara
former county
poet laureate
- Pat Nolan who
never fails to
surprise and
impress
- Marty LeReynard lively
and once again
with us from
Great Britain
You
might also be
interested in
arriving at
Noon or before
to have lunch
and listen to
jazz.
I look
forward to
sharing this
final event
with you on
the 24th!
Cheers,
Ed
Coletti
PoetryLovers mailing list
PoetryLovers@lists.sonic.net
https://lists.sonic.net/mailman/listinfo/poetrylovers
Read Three Times
Charge yourself
to read a poem
three times at each
single session.
Discover depths
of richer substance
gifted you and other
readers over time.
Regard how the poet’s
one rare quatrain
calls to attention
all souls marking
time.
- Ed Coletti
**************************
...and now something completely different:
The Bucks?/Hoo Doo Girl/War Birds/Sunny Spring Festival/Joseph Zaccardi/
Counting the bucks yet ? This also is a kick! Ed and Justin Coletti performing David Madgalene's "HooDoo Girl" at Occidenta...
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Flash: Congratulations to our good friend Amy Trussell selected as a finalist in the Crazyhorse Linda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize competitio...
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Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays. Friedrich Schiller http://...
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A Visual Poem Congratulations, Elizabeth Herron, Sonoma County's New Poet Laureate (2022-2024) Here a...