Small Press History: Michael Hathaway/Chiron Review 1980s-Present

 

BE: It is my recollection that I was in Germany and I had already produced at least one perfect bound issue of Gypsy, some chapbooks and cassette collections of original poetry and music from many countries when I received a letter from you asking advice about starting a new magazine. Is that in your recollection too and what are a few other small mags you were following at the time and what did you like about them?

MH: I do remember writing you a fanboy letter and asking for advice after seeing Gypsy for the first time! I fell in love with it. Gypsy was among the publications that introduced me to the “small press,” when anyone asks about my favorite literary magazines, Gypsy is always on the list, you’re a publisher and poet I’ve always respected and looked up to.

I remember asking you once for Bukowski’s address, as he had poems in Gypsy, and I wanted to invite him to send some poems, which he did several times. I do believe publishing him put us on “the radar,” so I have you to thank for that!

I also remember a compilation issue that Gypsy did, which I thought was just brilliant and gorgeous. (When it’s my turn to host Poetry Rendezvous, that’s how we do our anthologies.)

To name a handful, other mags that I enjoyed back then were Calliope’s Corner, Fire!, Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream, Poetry Motel, Raw Bone, Wyoming: Hub of the Wheel, Forum for Universal Spokesmen, Raw Dog Press, Yellow Butterfly, Newsletter Inago, Mockersatz, The Devil’s Millhopper, Bogg, Impetus, Abbey, Gargoyle, Psychopoetica, Tears in the Fence, Atom Mind.

I liked them because they were all so individual, so different from each other in style, tone, subject matter, life experience, and voice. They didn’t censor, didn’t hold back. They were a refreshing antidote to mainstream literature. Some were intense, some profound, some irreverent, some funny AF (Mockersatz). The artwork was always interesting, all the different mediums of presentation fascinated me. And they came from all over the place! To a country bumpkin stuck in rural Kansas, all the return addresses on the envelopes were exotic places.

BE: What were some of the deciding factors to begin Chiron?

MH: I’ve told the story before, but history doesn’t change. My cousin Connie showed me a sheaf of poems she’d written. I thought they were wonderful, and tried getting publishers interested. Of course, being 19, I had no idea how such things worked and encountered one slammed door after another. (Two of Connie’s poems appear in the forthcoming All the Colors of Life: An Anthology coming very soon from Ruth Moon Kempher’s Kings Estate Press.)

A year after graduating high school, I took a job working as a typesetter at a nearby daily paper. After a year of working there, I realized I could publish Connie’s poems myself. And anything else I wanted! I wrote to a few friends and pen pals and asked for poems, stories, art and photographs, and that’s how the first issue was born. My supervisor, Jim, let me use the composing room to put the issue together, the guys in the press room printed it. I paid for the printing.

At one point, my supervisor told me I could use the photocopier and any of the machines in the composing room as much as I wanted at night, if I would stay as a typesetter until he retired. I typed 126 wpm, and he said I typed the cleanest copy he’d ever seen since he started in the newspaper business (1961). Whether that was true or not, I don’t know, but the praise did wonders for me at that young age. (And believe me, I took Jim at his word and gave that photocopier a workout!)

But I was extremely restless (still am). I quit work there and returned four times in 13 years. Even though I was immature and could be a pain in the ass, I think my work actually was good enough that he wanted to keep me on anyway. He (and his successor) would always hire me back. I did enjoy and take pride in the work, and had great respect for the role a free press plays in society.

My longest stint was three years. The last one saw me promoted from the composing room to society editor. That lasted six months. Chiron was actually the reason for that job ending permanently, but that’s another tempest in a teacup for another day …

BE: When did you first publish Chiron and how was it received? I remember most of us reviewed or mentioned other small mags in our publications. 

It was first published Feb. 19, 1982. I was oblivious to the small press world then. The first issue went to friends and family. It got mixed reactions. My great-aunt Goldia, was scandalized as was my elderly piano teacher, Mrs. Budge, and her sister. But a lot of people had positive reactions. Many readers liked Connie’s poems as much as I did; and there was experimental fiction and poetry that was fascinating and fun. I especially loved the work by my friend (now Rev.) Maggie Duval, who also created the beautiful unicorn that graced the cover of the first six issues. Robert O’Hara’s photography page was perfect and beautiful.

Then browsing at the Great Bend [KS] Public Library, I found a copy of Len Fulton’s International Directory of Small Presses and Little Magazines. That opened up the world to me and the magazine. I sent copies to them, got listed in that directory (“the Bible of the business”) and Small Press Directory. And ordered a few “sample copies” of the other mags, and sent copies of my magazine to them. I had no clue that was the beginning of the most amazing, far-flung, life-long network of writers, editors, publishers, and friends that I could have ever dreamed up.

I was totally enamored of other alternative/underground/small press publications, all of them. From the traditional to the experimental, to the hand-made stapled booklets with rubber stamp art, and collages, to the high-end glossy journals. I exchanged with other publishers frequently, was honored to promote them in Kindred Spirit/Chiron Review. We helped each other with “exchange subscriptions” and “exchange ads”. I wrote a column titled, “News, Etc.,” in which I tried to mention and quote from every single publication that crossed my desk. I didn’t live up to that, but tried.

One publisher told me back in the 90s, that a mention in my column would bring “$60-$100 in sales” (for publications that were 50 cents-$5 each back then). That made me happy. We ran lots of book and magazine reviews, I had a nice staff of writers who would review books I sent them, or books they obtained other ways. And we accepted unsolicited reviews. Being part of, and helping to foster the small press community was a marvelous joy. (I didn’t realize that’s what we were doing back then, I was just making friends, “participating in the dialogue,” having fun.)

BE: What were some of the high points in your publishing history, both Chiron and personally?

MH: High points were publishing great poets such as Bukowski, Wanda Coleman, William Stafford, Lorri Jackson, Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, Marge Piercy, Lyn Lifshin, Gerald Locklin, Robert Peters, Felice Picano, Charles Plymell … Lorri Jackson’s poem, “A Prima Donna Poet Replies” was selected by Robert Peters for Morty Sklar’s Editor’s Choice III anthology, back in the 1990s. That was the highest “award” we ever received. But we had lots of good reviews in various places, including Library Journal, and one by Merritt Clifton in the final issue of Samisdat. I was on Cloud 9 for weeks after that. Judson Jerome named us one of the “Top 100 Poetry Markets” in the USA in Writer’s Digest.

Other high points include making such amazing friends, and the poetry gatherings and parties, such as our Poetry Rendezvous, which started in 1988. It brings in poets from many other states, and since 1998, sometimes happens in other states. I’ve likened Rendezvous to seeing the pages of Chiron Review “come alive.” If you look on a map and see where St. John, Kansas is, you’ll see how isolated we are from civilization. Where they were a nightly, weekly or monthly occasion in the big cities, poetry readings here were nonexistent. These gatherings meant the world to Mom and me. She’s one of the reasons I kept doing them, to bring all these wonderful folks to central Kansas so we could meet them, hear them read, and enjoy their company.

And there were the cross-country travel centered around poetry readings/parties, meeting such wonderful poets, artists, musicians, and publishers all over the USA. 

BE: I remember how every small mag editor/publisher sent a contributor’s copy to each contributor as a matter of honor and respect and it was quite expensive. In the new era of POD the expense is now on the contributor to buy a copy and the editor/publisher makes a little money from the contributors by charging a couple more bucks over the print price. Many book and mag “mills” have popped up. While POD gives everybody a chance to publish whatever and EVERYBODY (who wants to) has books and POD is here to stay, I don’t see how they would ever be collectible and the vanity stench still lingers a little, to me. Any musings on the subject?

MH: I don’t think I can add anything new to that, you said it all, rather perfectly. But have a few thoughts on it. I only began noticing what you’ve described as “book and mag mills” in the last couple of years, the glut of publications due to Internet and POD. This won’t be a very popular opinion, but it somehow does make being published seem less special.

I recently saw a Facebook thread that discussed “contributor copies.” A poet was upset because he didn’t get a free contributor’s copy. The publisher was insulted and explosively hostile about the concept, which shocked me.

Like you say, contributor’s copies were always a matter of honor and respect. It was simply the custom, the unwritten rule. Since I couldn’t pay writers with cash, I figured the very least I could do is give a contributor’s copy. It was a matter of integrity, the mark of a credible publisher.

It is expensive to send contributor copies. But I never published Chiron for the money. With Chiron, it always balanced out. Writers frequently bought extra copies and subscribed when they could. I’ve always sent free or discounted copies to readers/writers who can’t afford it. Patrons who can give more support, do. If you let it, it will balance out. (And just for the record, I’ve never been rich. I work for our local history museum for $10.64 an hour.)

My thought is that if one can’t afford contributor’s copies, one maybe shouldn’t be publishing? It seems exploitive to give a poet nothing in return for use of their work, to make them pay to see their work in print. As you said, there’s a “stench of vanity press” to it.

But then again, things are changing, and I’m just an old dinosaur who will soon lumber off into the sunset, so what do I know?! haha

Interview with Featured Poet, Carlo Parcelli

 

Carlo Parcelli is a poet living in the Washington DC area. He has six books of poetry including ‘The Canaanite Gospel’, ‘Newton’s Scalder Prophesies the End of the World and Other Poems’ and ‘Canis Ictus in Exsilium’. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. But mostly he loves to perform. 

 

BE: On your website you referred to yourself as a “Poet Vaudevillian”. Are you primarily a satirist, entertainer or poet?

CP:  All three as regards the Canaanite Gospel.  The website is my vain attempt to get gigs – readings. But I’ve never been very astute at promoting myself. Witness – Vaudeville is dead.

(Sample Canaanite Gospel here.)

For the first 35 years of my poetic life, I wrote in Ezra Pound’s Canto style where the balance was tenuous between Phanopoeia, Logopoeia and Melopoeia. I wrote thousands of lines in the Canto style. The poems are long and referentially and intellectually ambitious. I had a strong reputation as one who could write in this difficult style. Roxana Prada, President of the Ezra Pound Society and editor of Make It New, wrote that I was like a “shark” in that I and my poetry seemed to never rest. Another critic compared it to John Coltrane’s ‘sheets of sound’ always probing.  

As I’ve said elsewhere, my mentor at the University of Maryland was Rudd Fleming who translated Greek drama with Pound when the poet was incarcerated at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital here in Washington DC. Rudd thought my early style was suited to the Cantos. Working in such a highly referential form, I read widely.

Though I had some initial success, my first book, Three Antiphonies appeared in 1976, few publishers were interested in long ‘intellectually transgressive’ works. Cultural transgression as exemplified by the Beats or the Confessional movements was in vogue in poetry. But, for all the rhetoric to the contrary, the iconoclastic ‘intellect’ was held in disrepute in America, a line of thinking fostered both by the materialism of corporate culture and the forces that combated it. America just had to loosen up. It didn’t have to die.

The Canto style was indeed most amenable to my poetic project of exploring western philosophy and poetics spearheaded by philosophical approaches to experimental quantum paradoxes. The poetics of Charles Olson was aphoristically central in this regard. For example, his ‘field theory resembled the quantum conundrums found in ‘position/momentum’ paradox in sub-atomic physics.

But I quickly became concerned with the ‘scientific method’ itself specifically the mathematization/quantification of ‘reality’ especially the late Renaissance/Enlightenment acceleration of it.

My concern from the beginning veered toward the apocalyptic. The most obvious development was nuclear weapons. But gradually other scientific technologies, ones associated with ‘progress’ and progressive thinking began to ratchet up my concerns. Now, we have global climate change. Why bother about the mechanism destroying the planet if that mechanism is so rooted in the dominant, western epistemology that no matter the operator’s intentions the resultant solution will be inherently Apocalyptic.  

So I was looking to move on even though it was obvious if that canard Jesus ever did dare come back, he’d be playing to an empty house. 

I was the poetry editor of a literary magazine called FlashPoint . One of our favorite poets was the Welsh/English poet/engraver David Jones. One of our staff members, the 20^thcentury poetry scholar, Professor Brad Haas was a member of the David Jones Society.

It just so happened that Georgetown University here in Washington DC was bequeathed a huge collection of Jones material. The Jones scholars gathered here in DC for a 3 day symposium where it was decided that we would publish the papers being delivered.

In the process of  ‘editing’ the papers, I was energized to re-read much of Jones’ poetry. In a collection of ‘fragments’ called ‘Sleeping Lord’ Jones’ speaker is a Roman principalis. I always loved that voice. So I wrote a monologue along its style. It’s the first Severenus monologue in the Canaanite Gospels.

Eventually the work became the Canaanite Gospel with its 67 or so ‘voices’ all dealing with events surrounding Judea/Perea in 33AD. 

BE: What was your primary reason for writing the “Canaanite Gospel” and how are people reacting to it?

CP: The primary reason for writing the Canaanite Gospel was to abandon the Canto style which I had exhausted and had exhausted me. Also, there was the opportunity to utilize the voice Jones established in his two poems, ‘The Fatigue” and ‘The Wall’. But more importantly, I wanted the monologues to serve as an allegory for all empires especially the US imperialist empire which heavily resembles the brutal Roman version and its denouement.

This is where the swearing and the racist slang come in – both intimate facts of the language of empire and the clash of cultures it heightens. Empire ain’t pretty and neither are the Canaanite Gospels. This also helps to keep my readership down for as T.S. Eliot says in the Four Quartets, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality” -especially, poetry’s ‘humankind’.

As for reaction, I sent out about 200 invitations when I premiered the CG monologues. About 17 people, mostly old friends, came. After my hour and a half performance of 12 of the monologues, Gene Rosenthal who owns Adelphi Records offered me a recording contract. Now Gene is also the guy who released Patrick Skye’s “Songs That Made America Famous”. I was proud that Gene liked the monos after all he had had the guts to record Skye’s Luang Prabang. It seemed like good fit.

Another friend in publishing wanted to publish the CG. But nothing came of either project and Mark Kuniya and his Country Valley Press ended up publishing them in 2012.

Rosalie and I went to at least 100 open mics flogging the Gospels. Generally they were very well received especially by people who despised poetry. No one dosed off. No one was bored. Bars were the best. Patrons felt entertained by the humor AND the pathos – read Gesmas. The characters are real, not sentimentalized puppets rushing toward a two line sentimental bathos. 

I got to do my ‘intellectual transgression’ thing in an atmosphere that was entertaining for much of the audience and me. And I loved performing.

The ‘heavy’ accent as you call it, is my version of East End cockney. David Jones uses it in his epic poem ‘In Parenthesis’. This is all explained in the introduction to mark Kuniya’s publication of the Gospels. Also, I’ve tried to train my ear to Elizabethan prosody. It’s so much richer than any of the shit we spout now. 

Of course, with such ‘controversial material’ there are back stories galore; the city councilman who a decade after still raves about a performance of mine he attended.    

 

There’s the crowd that stared at me with grim hostility when I performed ‘Lazarus’. Turns out the jazz guitarist I was billed with was also a Deacon in his Baltimore church. So when Jesus says to his Uncle Lazarus “Don’ talks ta me maw like that, you fuckin’ lushy’ or ‘If he’s resurrect where the fuck is he’ for a moment things got tense. But it was a great experience. I got to feel what Lenny Bruce or Dick Gregory felt when they did their more risky bits.  

Sometimes I was flat out banned. A Christian biker bar outside of Annapolis proved inappropriate. I also was blocked from the stage at the Bossa Bistro round robin performance in the Adams Morgan neighborhood in Washington DC. I did the ‘Gesmas’ mono and then was physically blocked from retaking the stage.

This is notable because the MC was Shahid Bhuttar, the same who ran against Nancy Pelosi for the democratic nomination for Congress and is one of the country’s premier FIRST AMENDMENT, FREE SPEECH attorneys. 

Now, I know it wasn’t the government suppressing my speech, but still I couldn’t help feel that I was on to something when I got the bum’s rush from that bar with Bhuttar just letting it happen. No hard feelings. Shahid is a good man. 

There are dozens of other stories arising from experiences around the Canaanite Gospels and the more recent monologues of which there are legion with titles like ‘Henry Colburn Writes His Solicitor Concerning the True Authorship of ‘The Vampyre’’ or ‘Satan’s Imp in Milton’s Ear’ or ‘Jonathan Swift’s Letter to his Friend. Alexander Pope, Upon Lady Montagu’s Rejection of the Latter’s Protestations of Love’ which left a crowd of amateur poets slack jawed in a motel conference room in Darnestown Maryland. 

BE: Who are some of the poets who have influenced you?

CP:  Homer, Dante, James Joyce, Virgil, Hipponax, Sophocles, Ovid, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Pope, Swift, John Wilmot, Holderlin, Catullus, John Milton, Villon, Blake, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Mel Tolson, Charles Olson, David Jones.

But since my work, especially my earlier work is so heavily referential other influences include Adorno and Horkheimer, Hans Blumenberg, Bruno, Hegel, Kant, Hume, Schopenhauer, Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Turing, Godels. Bohr, Heisenberg, Paul Feyerabend, Smedley Butler, Francis Jennings, Richard Drinnon, Noam Chomsky, Lenny Bruce.

Negative influences include John von Neumann, Nietzsche, Willard van Orman Quine, La Mettrie, Leibniz, Descartes, Karl Popper, Edward Bernays, Philip Larkin, Walt Whitman, Allen Dulles, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Nobert Wiener, Marvin Minsky etc. ad nauseam.

BE: What bugs you about the poetry/poets of today?

CP: Their lack of ambition in and for the work itself. No interest in keeping an audience awake. Poetry that looks for nothing more than self-affirmation. Reliance on feeling, sentimentality. 

Dominant poetic paradigms that exclude outsider work. The CG flies in the face of current literary thought that the best poetry is written at elite institutions. There, I just made the ghosts of Pound, Eliot and Byron laugh.    

BE: What are some of your greatest accomplishments?

CP:  Predicting the global apocalypse of climate change THROUGH POETRY. Being on the right side of history when it came to the Vietnam War, Iran Contra, the Gulf Wars etc., Seeing America for the murderous, imperialist, bloody shithole that it is. Turning down an invitation to meet the Dali Lama. Being named Beat Poet Laureate for Maryland.

BE: Any advice for young aspiring poets?

CP:  Don’t let your resume be your best poem.

 

SHOOTOUT AT THE POETRY FACTORY by Lawrence Barrett, reviewed by Merritt Waldon

 

Available on Amazon

Once I started reading Shootout At The Poetry Factory, I was thrown aback by the honesty with which this book was written. It begins with a quote by Walt Whitman, “Re-examine all you have been told... dismiss whatever insults your soul.” 

10 Cancer 

I am a cancer 

of white and purple T-cells 

generations
roasted like tits on a spit 

a cancer of bars
and woods, moonless 

I stop, pass, and lean; 

musing, gazing, hounding, 

the lone glare of hunting, 

frothing, stretch’d & stiffening, 

leathered and lathered; 

a procreant world 

inviting end days - 

hands press the dark 

From the start Barrett’s voice is strong and clear, sharing intimate details of his life during a time of grave physical illness. There are also many reflections on his past, his military service, philosophy of life, dreams, all in one perfect batch of poems.

31 Brood of Veterans 

Dressed
in camouflage
and a cool black hat -
I am real like the prickly edge 

and cut smell of new grass; 

real like three IDs,
GPS locations,
and digital fingerprints; 

real like sadness,
alien abductions,
no phone calls,
sleeping in my car;
like sirens seizing my testicles, 

like a black horse of anxiety 

swift born, hot and fast, 

upon this floor of paradise 

This book is a conversation between the man, the poet, the world and all which is invisible and near the heart of history, leading us to a better understanding of one being’s journey through life.  I hold this book up and offer it is a worthy testament of a human being who has seen war, and the hardships of major illness. In poetic expression he displays understanding, hope and acceptance that ultimately all of it is fleeting and beautiful.  I wholeheartedly recommend reading this book which has the poet/man/warrior offering a unique voice. Indeed in Shootout at the Poetry Factory, this poet gives us all of himself, without blinking.

40 Swing of Trees 

lifting steins of forgetfulness 

and drinking the world 

glimmering names 

songs of living myths 

I slip into union 

calm and refuge 

hawks and crows 

I hear tongues

 

of hurricanes 

speaking 

angry rain
and eternal life 

careening off 

a lean of trees 

INTERVIEW: 

Merritt Waldon: Tell us a little bit about Lawrence, please,

and what was the original catalyst that led you to poetry?

Lawrence Barrett:  I was born in Washington D.C., grew up in Maryland and spent 20 years in the Army. I’ve lived all over the world. I have three beautiful grandchildren and a wonderful spouse. I am truly blessed. I feel that a little longevity has allowed me to grow spiritually as perhaps mirrored in my verse. Regardless, poetry is my journey.

I cracked open my first book of poems around the age of 14, It was a little green book of German poems translated by Walter Kaufmann. I discovered a world ordered by the beauty, depth and music of words. It was love at first sight. I knew I was a poet before I ever wrote a poem. Schiller, Goethe and Rilke led me to Shelley, Yeats and Keats and so on…

 

MW: What, if any would you say is your poetics? 

LB:   A good first line, a couple metaphors, syncopated rhythm, homemade words, run-on sentences, modern topics, classical themes, humor, layers of meaning, naked honesty, haiku-moments, color, sweat, tears, farts, and a good ending. The funny thing is that this personal conception of a poem is ingrained or natural. When I put the first word to a blank page I have no clue where it’s going – it’s a mental journey where I get to experience the discovery of new thoughts. My title is always last. Whether or not it’s a good poem, that’s a completely separate issue.

 

MW:  In a search on Google, a name that popped up with yours on one of the search results I found was John Updike.  Have you ever read any of his work? 

LB:   I was never really exposed to the writing of John Updike except for an occasional poem or quotation. I am honored that Google somehow associates me with such a super nova as John Updike but there is no real comparison.

MW:  I noticed a lot of repeated subject matter in some of your poems: pills, adult themes, and seemingly aloofness at times in the rhythmic performance of life. Did you have fun working on this book? It seems a lot of your writing is spontaneous.

LB:  From beginning to end this book was a happening. The poems just poured out like never before. Writing poetry is always fun, but its work. At times it felt like a duty or calling. Many times I’d be sitting in my car in a hospital parking lot composing (writing) on my cell phone. My poetry is more of a spontaneous act than a pre-planned one. About halfway through a piece I can see where it’s going.The repetition of themes I accept as part of the natural flow of life, day to day, much like recurring musical themes in a symphony. We always gravitate back to who we are and what works. It was a really chaotic time to write with all the different issues going on: COVID, cancer, PTSD, diabetes, wearing masks, friends arguing about statues, BLM, the downfall of liberalism and rise of American fascism, acceptance of death, and the natural feeling to strive on and reach for something higher…Yeah, it was fun…

 

MW: if you had one statement or had something to tell the whole world before it was too late....  What would it be?

LB: Write Damn It!

 

Lawrence Barrett, a retired U.S. Army and Iraqi war veteran, as well as a native Marylander and transplant El Pasoan, is the author of nine self-published works: Letters from the Meat Market of Paradise (2009), Drum Song (2012), Radical Jazz (2014); Threads of Latitude (2017), Love Poems for the End of The World (2018), Cosmic Onions (2019), Yell Louder Please (2019), Theory of Stealing Bicycles (2020) and Shootout at the Poetry Factory (2021). He has an MA in Human Resources from Webster University and has resided in El Paso for the last twenty years. Lawrence has been published in El Paso Magazine (Nov 2008), Mezcla: Art & Writing from the Tumble Words Poetry Project (2009), Calaveras Fronterizas (2009), Dining and Fun (2010), An Anthology of Beat Texas Writing (2016) and online at the Newspaper Tree.  He has been interviewed by Paperback Swap; and three of his books have been reviewed by Unlikely Stories. Lawrence Barrett has been a featured reader at the Barbed Wire Readings hosted by Border Senses. He has presented poetry workshops for the El Paso Writer’s League and the Tumble Words Poetry Project. He has had the honor of reading his poetry twice on the Monica Gomez “State of the Arts” Radio Program. Lawrence has also published art in magazines and online and in a self-publication of his art, INNERFREQUENCIES (2019). His works are available at Amazon.com.

Interview with RON WHITEHEAD presented by Merritt Waldon

photo by Yunier Ramirez

Poet, writer, editor, publisher, professor, scholar, activist Ron Whitehead is the author of 24 books and 34 albums. In 1994 he wrote the poem “Never Give Up” with His Holiness The Dalai Lama. In 1996 he produced the Official Hunter S. Thompson Tribute featuring Hunter, his mother Virginia, his son Juan, Johnny Depp, Warren Zevon, Douglas Brinkley, David Amram, Roxanne Pulitzer, and many more. Ron has produced thousands of events and festivals, including 24 & 48 & 72 & 90 hour non-stop music & poetry Insomniacthons,in Europe and the USA. He has presented thousands of readings, talks, and performances around the world. He has edited and published hundreds of titles including works by President Jimmy Carter, His Holiness The Dalai Lama, Seamus Heaney, Wendell Berry, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Rita Dove, Diane di Prima, Bono, John Updike, Douglas Brinkley, Jim Carroll, Anne Waldman, Joy Harjo, Yoko Ono, Robert Hunter, Amiri Baraka, Hunter S. Thompson, and numerous others. The recipient of many awards, his work has been translated into 20 languages. In 2018 Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer presented Ron with a Lifetime Achievement for Work in The Arts Award. In 2019 Ron was named Kentucky’s Beat Poet Laureate and was also the first U.S. citizen to be named UNESCO’s Tartu City of Literature Writer-in-Residence. He is co-founder and Chief of Poetics for Gonzofest Louisville. Outlaw Poet: The Legend of Ron Whitehead movie will be released by Storm Generation Films/Dark Star TV in 2021. 

 

photo by Clayton Luce

Merritt Waldon: Hello Ron, please tell me about yourself. Who is Ron Whitehead?

Ron Whitehead: Hello Merritt! I’m a wild nature Kentucky farm boy who loves adventuring into the unknown. I’ve been blessed that poetry, my main vehicle of communication, has taken me across the USA and to at least 20 countries around the world. I love to travel to new places and meet new people. I admire and respect all our beautiful differences. And I’m forever searching for and discovering what we have in common. We’re all dirty potatoes floating in the same tub of polluted water and the more we bang into each other by openly honestly sharing the stories of our lives the more we come clean. I love to hear the stories of people’s lives. I have friends everywhere. When I was a boy I learned that to have friends I’ve got to be a friend. If I’m friendly then most other folks will be friendly too. 

 

MW: You lived in Iceland for 2 years. After climbing  The Viking Mountain you wrote “The Storm Generation Manifesto.” What is it like in Iceland? How did you meet Olafur Gunnarsson?

RW:  Iceland is majestic. It’s been 20 years since I lived there. But I’ve returned many times for performances and visits. In May 2008 Olafur Gunnarsson, Iceland’s most respected novelist, and I produced Iceland’s first Beat Generation Festival. We held the festival on his beautiful land, Storra Klopp, Big Rock, several miles outside Reykjavik. It was an amazing event. For 2 weeks I stayed in his guest house. Every time I stepped out my door I looked into the gorgeous valley with the crystal river and then across the valley to the legendary Viking Mountain. Olafur knows more than anyone I’ve ever met about the history of the Vikings, especially their history in Iceland. 3 days after the festival I solo climbed the mountain. When Olafur dropped me off at the base of the mountain he said, “Ron, be careful. I forgot to mention that several people have been blown off the top of the mountain to their deaths.” I stopped, turned and stared at him, then laughed. He said, “I’m serious.” I said, “Thanks for letting me know.” As I walked away light rain started to fall. 

The higher I climbed the harder the rain fell. 

Then the temperature dropped and the wind began to howl. The rain turned to hail. The hail turned to sleet. The sleet turned to thick snow. I continued to climb the now treacherous slope. I reached the summit and was nearly blown off the other side, which was straight down. I was staring down into the abyss the other folks had fallen into and died. I quickly turned and, crawling,  pulled myself down behind a giant boulder. For 15 minutes I had a non-stop series of epiphanies. Then I stood up, faced the howling screaming north wind, uncorked my 1.5 liter bottle of red wine, which is all I had in my backpack, drained half of it, thanked the Norse Gods for finally accepting and embracing me. Then I made my descent. 

Olafur and I had many way into the night conversations and with his inspired help, honoring all the previous cutting edge avant-garde generations and movements, which have helped us be here now, realizing we were being called upon to birth a new generation, “The Storm Generation Manifesto” was born. 

In 2013 I became godfather to amazing Icelandic musicians, Tanya Lind and Marlon Pollock. The pagan ceremony, led by the High Priestess of Icelandic HIgh Paganism, was held way out in nature, at the base of the volcano that shut down all European air traffic in 2010. My partner Jinn Bug and I climbed The Viking Mountain. I did several performances on that trip. A Storm Generation Films crew accompanied us and captured incredible footage, some of which will be included in the Outlaw Poet film. Jinn and I hope to return to Iceland later this year. 

 

MW: I watched the video of The Crystal River World Peace Sand Mandala Ceremony you did on the 2013 Iceland trip. How important to your poetics is the spiritual?

RW: I am spirit. I am matter. I am a spiritual warrior poet. The older I get the more I realize I don’t know anything, no one does. We’re all guessing, feeling our way, grappling for answers. But every day I have encounters with the spirit world. We are all in perpetual motion, in transition, even when we are still, silent, listening. Listening is the greatest art of all. Not-knowing is the fundamental plowed earth of our being, not-knowing. It is our life source. Embrace the wind. Embrace my heart. Born to die, there is no safety, all is demanded. Expose yourself completely. Accept the consequences of your successes, and your failures, as no other dare. Enlightened mind is not special, it is natural. Present yourself as you are, wise fool. Don’t hesitate, embrace mystery paradox uncertainty. Have courage. Through fear, and boredom, have faith. Be compassion. Embrace the wind. Embrace your heart. Not-knowing is the fundamental plowed earth of our being. It is our life source. Not-knowing.

Today ‘Specialization’ is sold on every corner, fed in every home, brainwashed into every student, every young person. We are told that the only way to succeed, here at the beginning of the 21st Century is to put all our time, energy, learning, and focus into one area, one field, one specialty: math, science, computer technology, business, government, the gaining of material wealth, the material world. If we don’t we will fail. We are subtly and forcefully, implicitly and explicitly, encouraged to deny the rest of who we are, our total self, selves, our holistic being. The postmodern brave new world resides inside the computer via The Web with only faint peripheral recognition to the person, the individual - and by extension the real global community, the real human being operating the machine. The idea of and belief in specialization as the only path, only possibility, has sped up the fragmentation, the alienation which began to grow rapidly within the individual, radically reshaping culture, over a century and a half ago with the birth of those Machiavellian revolutions in technology, industry, and war. And with the growing fracturing fragmentation and alienation comes the path – anger, fear, anxiety, angst, ennui, nihilism, depression, despair – that, for the person of action, leads to suicide. Unless, through our paradoxical leap of creative faith we engage ourselves in the belief, which can become a life mission that regardless of the consequences, we can, through our engagement, our actions, our loving life work, make the world a better, safer, friendlier place in which to live. Sound naive? What place does the antinomian voice, the voice that, though trembling, speaks out against The Powers That Be, what place does this Visionary Outsider Voice have in the real violent world in which we are immersed? Are we too desensitized to the violence, to the fact that in the past Century alone we have murdered over 160 million people in one war after another, to even think it worthwhile to consider the possibility of a less violent world? Are we too small, too insignificant to make any kind of difference? The power and greed mongers have control. What difference can one individual life possibly make, possibly matter?

Today the millennial generation is swollen with young people yearning to express the creative energies buried in their hearts, seeping from every pore of their beings. They ache to change to heal the world. Is it still possible? Is it too late? Is there anyone (a group?) left to show the way to be an example? To be a guide? A mentor? James Joyce, King of Modernism, said the idea of the hero was nothing but a damn lie that the primary motivating forces are passion and compassion. As late as 1984 people were laughing at George Orwell. Today, as we finally dwell in an Orwellian culture of simulation life on the screen landscape, can we remember passion and compassion or has the postmodern ironic satyric death in life game laugh killed both sperm and egg? Is there anywhere worth going from here? Is it any wonder that today’s youth have adopted Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, Gregory Corso, Neal Cassady, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Amiri Baraka, David Amram, Diane di Prima, Bob Dylan, Hunter S. Thompson, Patti Smith, The Clash, and all the other Beat Generation and related poets, writers, artists, musicians as their inspirational, life-affirming antinomian ancestors? These are people who have stood up against unreasoning power/right/might, looked that power in the eyes and said NO I don’t agree with you and this is why. And they have spoken these words, not for money or for fame, but out of life’s deepest convictions, out of the belief that we, each one of us, no matter our skin color our economic status our political religious sexual preferences, all of us have the right to live to dream as we choose rather than as some supposed higher moral authority prescribes for us. I choose to be a spiritual warrior poet.

Can poetry, music, film, dance, art matter? Are they merely a gold exchange for the rich? The crucible of the alchemical arts blends the terrible beauty of the natural world with questions of global social conscience. Poems stories songs films dance photographs art defy categorization. They are authentic original expressions of spirit dwelling in dynamic harmony with nature.

What is involved in the process of artistic creation? And how is that process related to space and time? What makes it possible for a handful of poets, musicians, filmmakers, dancers, artists to maneuver in a molecular universe, where immersion at will into things and being other than self is readily accomplished, rather than the dreary chore of drudging through the thick cellular world? The answers are simply complex and like truth, time and water they constantly slip through fingers away, away but the past recalled becomes present again and in a sense when we look anywhere including back into the past we are looking with some form of anticipation which is an attribute of future time so where are we really? How do how will poets, writers, musicians, artists, filmmakers, photographers, inhabitors of the creative realms of the 21st Century respond to these questions? Some respond with ironic, comic faith, some with passion, with compassion, without which the intelligent sensitive creature will inevitably traverse the Valley of The Shadow of Death encountering Angst, Despair, Ennui, and possibly Suicide. The sensitive individual poet writer musician artist filmmaker photographer prophet, the empath whose natural ability is negative capability, ineluctably chooses the life-game quest of self-creation in the possibly infinite probability of possible realities in the self-contained inter-connected Ocean of Consciousness.

There are no answers, only questions.

My argument for The Ocean of Consciousness reaches back to the early experiential understanding of holy while reaching forward beyond the limits of dialectical gnosticism to an alchemy that also transcends divisions inherent in the alienation the fragmentation of Deep Modernism and the superficial chaos of postmodernism. Even if you are a cryptanalyst and are able to turn into plain text the coded messages of Lacan but also the utterances of French existentialists, deconstructionists, poststructuralists, and all the other sibilant schools that flowed out of postwar France what leads you to believe that the deadly serious egocentric humor of postmodernism where theory is lauded as more important than text (whatever text might be: book, song, painting, film, life, etc) can possibly be the final word? Deconstructing a text does not designify does not make the text less than what it was before you playfully surgically took it apart and, if you’re a good mechanic, put it back together again even if you gave it new features. No matter how much taking apart deconstructing you do there will always remain something, a meaningful essence that cannot be destroyed.

The poet writer musician filmmaker photographer dancer artist deconstructs realism. She employs the innovative technique of intercalation: the juxtaposition of scenes in time. She is Elus Cohen, Elect Priest of Expressionism, Cubism, Modernism, Dadaism, Surrealism, postmodernism but she is more. She is Master Alchemist, Master Magician. Her long slender hand reaches towards me, grabs my throat, and pulls me into the text, the book, the song, the art, the film, the photo, the dance. Manger du Livre indeed! I not only consume the book: the book consumes me. Now I, with her, am Elus Cohen juxtaposing scenes in time and space in her, in me. My original perception, awareness, and senses are fractured, fractalled, and exiting the poem, the song, the film, the dance, the art I find I am rearranged. I now have new perspective, awareness, senses. I look at others. Are their expressions different as they look at me? I must look different. I feel different. I am different. Me. And me now. I,I. Ha. Aha! Now as my hand moves this pen across this page I change. I am transformed. I am never the same. My molecules jump, sway, swoon, dance across the page, giggling, laughing, singing, happy to be new! It’s spring again! They shout Yes Yes Yes!!!

Poetry, music, film, dance, art create new resonant myths. Knowledge, from the inception of Modernism and through postmodernism to The Ocean of Consciousness, is reorganized, redefined through literature, music, art, film, photography. The genres are changing, the canons are exploding, as is culture. The mythopoetic  the privileged sense of sight, of modern, contemporary, avant-garde poets, writers, musicians, filmmakers, photographers, dancers, artists are examples of art forms of a society, a culture, a civilization, a world, in which humanity lives, not securely in cities nor innocently in the country, but on the apocalyptic, simultaneous edge of a new realm of being and understanding. The mythopoet, female and male, returns to the role of prophet-seer by creating myths that resonate in the minds of readers, myths that speak with the authority of the ancient myths, myths that are gifts from the creative realms of being, gifts from the shadow.

MW: What does it mean to be an outlaw poet? 

RW: "To live outside the law you must be honest." 

--Bob Dylan, Outlaw Poet

"An outlaw can be defined as somebody who lives outside the law, beyond the law, not necessarily against it. By the time I wrote Hell's Angels  I was riding with them and it was clear that it was no longer possible for me to go back and live within the law. There were a lot more outlaws than me. I was just a writer. I wasn't trying to be an outlaw writer. I never heard of the term, somebody else made it up. But we were all outside the law, Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey, me. I didn't have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized my allies, my people." 

--Hunter S. Thompson, Outlaw Writer 

 

MW: As a Kentucky poet, what was the greatest moment in your life so far?

RW: Every moment of my life has been a gift, a treasure beyond measure. Without any one of those moments I would not be who and where I am today. 

 

MW: If there was one thing you wanted to tell the world what would it be?

RW: Never Give Up

Never give up

 No matter what is going on

 Never give up

Develop the heart

 Too much energy in the world 

is spent developing the mind 

instead of the heart 

Develop the heart 

Be compassionate

 Not just to your friends

 but with everyone

 Be compassionate

Work for peace

 In your heart and in the world

 Work for peace

And I say again

 Never give up

 No matter what is going on around you

 Never give up 

Ron Whitehead & His Holiness The Dalai Lama