Poet Arthur Rimbaud (October 20, 1854 - November 10, 1891)

Untitled. 8" X 10" unique photographic print. Fall 1981 (copy)

The original was "stolen" by Performance Artist Lorraine O'Grady in December 1981. It was submitted, along with some speed driven automatic writing,  as my final project for her Surrealist Literature class at SVA - it's in her archive at Wesleyan University now, after decades on her studio desk. I aced the class anyway - back in October of that year -  with my presentation of Cabaret Voltaire and the Dada Poets. Lorraine and I really understood each other and got along great. She is the only Female Performance Artist I have any respect for. She always kept it personal, so much so, that it became political.

I first read Rimbaud's Illuminations in the summer of 1975 when I was 15.  The Doors' Absolutely Live was my companion piece. It worked beautifully and I managed to learn something. Passions arose, when I finally got to study Surrealist Lit, I'd already read and digested most of the required reading. Thanks Arthur!

 

 

 

 

 

 

William Robert DeNoyelles Sr. (10/14/1925 - 05/04/1983)

 Dad n' me - Pearl River, NY 1962. 5" X 7" Mixed media/board.  c 2010

Arshile Gorky's Portrait of the Artist and His Mother. Collection  - Whitney Museum of Art.

Today is the date of my father's birth. And so I honor him with an old artifact from 1962 and my artistic rendering of it, my favorite photo of the two of us. I'm also posting a favorite Sinatra song of his - it is  him!  And he loved it.

One of my all time favorite artists is Arshile Gorky - an Armenian American who helped give birth to Abstract Expressionism. Willem de Kooning worshipped the ground he walked on, as did the poet Edwin Denby. The above painting The Artist and His Mother is my all time favorite work of art. As a young artist it was always my hope that someday I'd be able to go deep within myself and produce something as personal, emotional and honest as Gorky's beautiful portrait - done recalling a most tragic, traumatic event. This is as close as I came. Losing my father at age 22 under circumstances nowhere near Gorky's, but intense just the same,  had a tremendous impact on my life. Though compact as it is, for me it is a monumental work. 

https://www.nga.gov/collection/highlights/gorky-the-artist-and-his-mother.html

Also, today is Columbus Day!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kris Kristofferson (6/22/1936 - 9/28/2024)

My personal favorite. It just doesn't get any more real than this... 

Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down

 

 

 

 

 

Tom Veitch 9/26/1941- 2/14/2022

 

Part Spiritual Avatar & part reincarnated Extra-Terrestrial, Tom Veitch was born on this day 83 years ago in Bellows Falls, VT. During his time on Earth Tom was a poet, a prose writer, a cloistered Benedictine Monk (three years in Weston, VT) a spiritual journeyman, an auto mechanic, an electrical technician, a Jungian Scholar, a writer of Underground Comics,  a publisher, a printer, a book seller, a cult buster,  a script writer, a collaborator on graphic novels, a writer for Star Wars comics & books, a Consultant on Star Wars films, a Husband, a father...a guy who hung out with Grace Slick and Paul Kantner in Bolinas, CA and wrote promotional copy for Jefferson Airplane's Grunt Records label....damn, what didn't Tom do?

When I met Tom in August of 1985 (at a cabin by a lake outside Stockbridge, MA) he appeared to have stepped directly right out of one of his novels - with a brilliant iridescent aura and parallel light beams shooting from his eyes,  he carried himself with an unaffected humility w/ wife & child in tow. By then I'd read everything he'd published at least twice and had published a poem of his in my magazine Blue Smoke (edited with poet Phil Good).  He'd just returned from years living in the Bay Area and was working as a printer in MA. It was, without doubt, one of the strangest nights of my life (for a few reasons) and one I treasure in the ole memory vaults as sacred.  Getting caught up with old friends (the hosts of my visit to the cabin), it was like listening to someone read their psychedelic autobiography... And like listening to a long, exquisite Grateful Dead jam -  beautifully vivid & entrancing.

To read Tom is to be totally transported to an altogether other realm. His work defies categorization, as William Burroughs' does (in fact, they were friends). He has, at times, incorporated Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms & Jack and the Beanstalk into his prose. He broke the rules, storming the reality studio unafraid. I'd never encountered anything like it before (or after).  I am proud to say that I own three copies of Eat This including a signed copy. It is a tour de force printed by Don Donahue on pink paper at legendary Apex Novelties in San Francisco . Find it and read It!

Tom and I kept in touch throughout the years up until his death in 2022. He scolded me for feeling a devastating, almost crippling, sadness at the death of my Tibetan teacher Bardor Tulku Rinpoche in 2021, telling me that this act of transcendence was not a sad one but one to be celebrated. Already ill, Tom encouraged me not to mourn him but to be happy for his final journey as he himself was unafraid and sort of looking forward to the adventure. Amazing. The only mourning I did was purely selfish as Tom was about to take me on as a sort of (spiritual) student. Tom had a healthy contempt for ego. A contempt that made him value collaboration and the concept of the third mind.

In my 2015 Amazon review of  his book Visions of Elias I said Tom was a true (American) original deeply rooted in the underground literary scene of the 1960s. A post WWII, post Beat, Vietnam War era phenomena who had also collaborated on some wildly dark, irreverent underground comics with artist & tattoo master Greg Irons. Tom wanted to use my review, in part, as a blurb for a second, revised edition of Visions of Elias but it never came to be. So be it, I was honored just the same.

On a recent trip to Bellows Falls, VT  I couldn't help but think I was on a sort of secular, spiritual pilgrimage. And I guess I was. 

Tom's was a life well lived.  Truly worthy of celebration. 

 Tom Veitch reading in 1969

 

 https://www.instagram.com/giorno_poetry_systems/reel/CwDoZiNqJ46/