Saturday Gallimaufry

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1. Chez Namastenancy reports of a new and important Thomas Eakins show in Los Angeles.

2. If you've ever been curious what the insides of the ironclad USS Monitor looked like, a tour of the vessel has been arranged for you right here.

3. Take a ride on the Berlin U-Bahn with Flickr photographer Berolino. My favorite is the U-1 line.

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Julia Morgan's Hearst Castle Drawing

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Julia Morgan's drawing of a proposed castle for William Randolph Hearst, in a collaboration with Bernard Maybeck.

From the Bernard Maybeck Collection, Online Archive of California.

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What’s wrong with modern poetry?

#2: Small Press Suicide

There are at least two good reasons to stay abreast of Ron Silliman’s Blog, the first being to review the list of 30-60 Internet links he posts from time to time on matters relevant to poets, poetry, and the publishing of poems.

The second good reason is to view the intermittently posted lists of  “Books received,” mainly small press poetry publications who are Jonesing I suppose for a review, or at least a mention, on his blog.

Ron’s books received list, paired with the new title listings at Small Press Distribution in Berkeley, is I think the best way to stay informed of small press output in the U.S. (Unfortunately publications from the U.K. are unrepresented, against whom you’d think some kind of small press book blockade must exist.)

The discouraging aspect of both lists is that the reader has no clue about the nature or quality of a writer’s work, much of it coming from new or unknown authors, arguably the best reason for the existence of small presses to begin with. The result is that most poetry books will never be sold, since book shops and libraries won’t take them and potential street customers have no idea what’s inside the book.

Last Thursday (July 22nd) Ron posted a books received list that included 25 book titles and seven journals. As it happens, I don’t recognize the authors, (excepting Alexander Pushkin). Being a small press enthusiast, my only recourse would be so spend $500 (32 titles times an estimated $15 for each), to see if there’s anything I’d like.

Some small presses have websites, but most are sketchy, few with samples of a book’s contents and a Paypal donation option. Small Press Distribution runs a recommended list, but again without informative samples or reviews.

Clearly this situation is ridiculous. You don’t need an M.B.A. to realize that this is a failed business model which defeats its own purposes—to disseminate the writing as widely as possible and gain revenue for publishers and authors.

You’d think that small press operators, progressive in most other matters, would stop flogging a dead animal and learn to make use of the astonishing opportunities available on the Internet.

By posting downloadable .pdf files on their websites with a Paypal voluntary donation button, or linking to the same text uploaded to issuu.com—both options without cost—publishers can make a text available to hundreds of interested readers, rather than sell a couple dozen books of printed matter.

Or you can upload the text and link it to Google Books, checking the option that all of it should be made viewable. If copyright concerns are an issue, the .pdf’s can always be made un-downloadable, as they are automatically on Google Books.

Poets and novelists need to understand that capitalism generally has no use for their texts, and that the only path to salvation rests not in trying to sell stuff, but reaching as many readers as possible. Printing paperback books and sending them in to Ron Silliman is not the way to do this.

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This week's poem

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     OVID

     --therefore I am
     a tree. Blue peaches
     drift between
     my lazy fingers,

     in the hot sun
     a cool breeze.

     Mom, help me.
     Up to my neck
     in your body
     I'm so lonesome
     it could die--

     a cool cemetery
     breeze, I've
     always been away,

     always just returned
     unappeased
     by opposites, kinships,
     and I think

     therefore I am
     a tree. Blue patches
     drift between
     my lazy fingers,

     in the hot sun
     a cool breeze.

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Robert Glück’s poem Ovid appeared in his collection entitled Reader, The Lapis Press, 1989.
Playing I suppose on the title of Ovid’s poem Metamorphoses, the lyric subject shapeshifts into a tree which sheds Matissean blue peaches on a warm sunny day in summer.

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An Entrance to Hell Found in Golden Gate Park

Entrance to Hell in San Francisco #874

A definitive solution to one of the most persistent questions facing humanity is soon likely to be resolved as a result of exhaustive investigations currently being conducted in Golden Gate Park.

For generations researchers have debated whether Hell is exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat). Proposed solutions have been formulated in reference to Boyle’s Law, which describes the inversely proportional relationship existing between the absolute pressure and the volume of a gas, assuming the temperature is kept constant within a closed system.

In other words, if gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed, what would be the pressure required to either maintain the burning temperatures or to steadily increase them?

It would be most useful in this respect to determine if the total mass of Hell is increasing or decreasing, and to estimate the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they could be leaving. But we may assume thereby that souls having once entered Hell are not destined to leave it, and also that an exponential increase of souls entering Hell exists in relation to the population increase on Earth.

We might therefore conclude that the temperature of Hell is increasing, because Boyle’s Law requires that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell would have to expand proportionately as souls are added, unless there is a corresponding release of the existing quantity of gas.

Empirical research now confirms the latter theory to be the case, as evidenced by empirical observation following the discovery of a sizeable vent hole exiting Hell shown as in the photograph above, exposed by accident near Lindley Meadow in Golden Gate Park at last year's Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival.

Sensor-activated video cameras now surround the grassy vacuity, and scientists eagerly await forthcoming photographic evidence depicting fugitive clouds of noxious gas erupting and escaping from the Fiery Pit beneath.

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Saturday Gallimaufry

It turns out that a new football is designed and used at each World Cup competition, and there is a neat gallery that pictures all of them right here.

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A Refudiation

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Congratulations to Sarah Palin for creating the best neologism of the year so far, refudiating other potential candidate entries such as "plangent," "crapitude" and "crassitude."

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What’s wrong with modern poetry?

#1. Sappho's Knees


There are so many problems with modern poetry, it’s hard to know where to begin, but let’s start with this: Modern poetry has all but totally separated itself from its own heritage. It lives almost exclusively in the present, finding no models or sources of inspiration older than a half-century, and those only occasionally, and often with dutiful reluctance.

It is almost the inverse of the college study of literature before post-modernism, in which students were be-foddered with no material that wasn’t at least a half-century old and therefore had not “stood the test of time.”

Poetry today doesn’t see itself as part of any ongoing tradition: it lives in a bubble of Time Present, oblivious to its own history, and therewith to its own future, to its larger destiny as a point of reference on a long line of literary development.

Creative art-making of course is a function of the present, but modern poets see nothing behind or beyond it. Conversely, there are few painters who don’t accept their work as a continuation of methods or techniques that originated before they went to art school. Symphonic composers similarly can’t help but see themselves as at the business end of a long process of artistic development.

And artists involved with singer-songwriting, an art form generally ignored by poets and critics of poetry, build instinctively on what’s been done before, and would probably be happy if their creations are seen to be rooted in the past. Think of early Dylan, for example.

But with poets, forget it, everything is ex novo or it is nothing.

Not to belabor the point, but check this poem by Sappho. It was discovered rather miraculously in Cologne in 2004 in a papyrus sheet used as cartonnage inside an Egyptian mummy. I’ve translated it rather loosely thus:


     The lovely gifts of the fragrant Muses
     now are yours, girls, and the resonant lyre as well.
     My body, once agile, is old now,
     my dark hair has now turned white.
     My mind is foggy and my knees, which used
     to dance like young fawns, are all messed up.
     I bitch about it, but what's to be done?
     If you're a human, you can't help but get old.
     They say that Dawn, eager for love, carried off
     Tithonus in her rosy arms to the end of the world
     when he was young and hot-looking—but old-age
     caught up with him too, though his wife was immortal.


So it’s 2010, and you’re a white-haired, middle-aged female college English teacher, and now it’s Spring again, and you’re looking wistfully out your office window at the young women dancing around and playing frisbee or quidditch or whatever out in the Quad, and you’re remembering how it used to be when you were young and loved to boogie like a bandit… now be honest, modern poet, could you handle this situation better than Sappho did 2000 years ago?

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Slide in a Paris amusement park, 1816.

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Il Cenacolo, by Lewis Ellingham

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Little House on the Prairie

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                                 -- by Jacek Yerka

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Yvan Goll's last poem

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Yvan Goll was born 1891 in the Vosges, a department in northeast France, close to the border with Germany. Being bilingual in French and German, he wrote poems in both languages throughout the first half of the last century. He is generally classified as a surrealist or expressionist, due to his association with the Zurich dadaists and with Andre Breton, but in my view it would be more accurate to see him as a successor to the symbolist poets.

Goll was deeply in love with his wife Claire, whom he met in 1917 and to whom he remained loyal his entire  life. That life ended in 1950, and Goll wrote the following poem to her on his deathbed.


TO CLAIRE


           Written in hospice,
            December 1949 to January 1950

Did I pick you in the Gardens of Ephesus,
The curls of your hair like carnations
In the evening-bouquet of my hands

Did I go fishing for you in the lakes of dreams
I threw you my heart as bait
An angler on your willow banks 

Did I find you in the wastes of the desert
You were my last tree
You were my soul's last fruit

Now I'm embraced by your sleep
Embedded deep into your quietness
As an almond  kernel into its night-brown shell



____________________________


AN CLAIRE

         Geschrieben im Spital des Todes
         Dezember 1949 bis Januar 1950


Hab ich dich gepflückt in den Gärten von Ephesus
Das krause Haar deiner Nelken
Den Abendstrauß der Hände

Habe ich dich gefischt in den Seen des Traums
Ich warf dir mein Herz zur Speisung
Ein Angler an deinen Weidenufern

Hab ich dich gefunden in der Dürre der Wüste
Du warst mein letzter Baum
Du warst die letzte Frucht meiner Seele

Von deinem Schlaf nun umfangen bin ich
In deine Ruhe tief gebettet
Wie der Mandelkern in nachtbraune Schale 



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Often in the Night

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Often in the night my dead heart creaks
Like an old chest of drawers
Remembering its life as a cherry tree.

                           --  Yvan Goll


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Edmund C. Tarbell -- Three Girls Reading (1907)

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Nelson Mandela

It was great to see him at the World Cup final yesterday, being driven around the periphery of the football stadium, frail now, but still showing that beautiful smile he has.

Whenever I see him I'm immediately reminded of the many End-Apartheid demonstrations that occurred around town in the late 1980's, such as this one I photographed from the balcony of the Student Union Building at UC Berkeley:

I was working at the University intermittently in the 80's, and thus attended several demo's, which conveniently took place mainly at lunchtime. They were colorful and effective in a way that none have been since: in this case the University administration was eventually persuaded to divest its South African investments. And they were also part of larger international movement, one big highlight of which was the fabulous rock concert at Wembley Stadium in 1987.

It's painful that political demonstrations in the two decades since then have been completely ineffectual. It looked like the nation-wide End-the-War-in-Iraq campaign was finally gaining some momentum in 2007--shameful, when you think that war had been continuing for four years before a significant number of Americans finally took to the streets--but Obama's election put an end to all that.

Other international crises that you'd think any ethically-motivated individual would be horrified at--the ongoing Chinese occupation of Tibet or the active persecution of the Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of refugees in Darfur--have passed by with hardly any public response at all.


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Futbol 2010 — The Final Wrap

The big game was ok, but for me not all that exciting, since, bathing in the cool waters of perfect objectivity, I didn’t give a toss which side won, and also because it took a couple very long hours before Iniestra finally delivered the coup-de-grace to a game that almost went into penalty kicks. And if it does that, you might just as well flip a coin to decide the winner. For the rest of this game one could think each team was more interested in accumulating yellow cards than goals.

The game also clearly demonstrated a couple weak points which afflict the World Cup competition. First, if you take the world’s best players and put them on the field to go against each other, it’s going to be very hard for either team to score, which is what everybody wants to see happen, myself included.

Second, if you really wanted to have an authentic competition, you’d have to let the teams play one another for two out of three, or better three out of five games, to make some kind of reasonable determination which team was superior.

And that’s not considering the fact that most professional teams enlist players from different countries. So the whole idea of nations competing seems a bit farfetched, although that’s of course what attracts the fans. You can put on your war-paint and demonstrate your patriotism or revel in your repressed tribalism without anyone actually being killed.

What’s funny is to watch the players in the lineup during the national anthem: almost none of them know the words. In this respect the Dutch were absolute champions: every man-jack one of them had been trained to lustily sing forth the words to the Dutch national anthem. The tone-deaf Spaniards stood there stone-faced when their turn came.

Now the events of today will quickly sink into oblivion, in 2-3 years no one will even remember who won the 2010 world cup, and then in Spring 2014 distant drumbeats will be heard from across the ocean and from south of our borders, at first faintly before the vuvuzelas rise in chorus, and then the whole damn thing will start up again.

Paul the Octopus now seems have gone 7 for 7. I wonder if Paul also predicts horse-races?

A gay friend of mine makes mention of the fact that both Netherlands and Spain permit same-sex marriage, which shows I suppose what a big distance the U.S. has to go to catch up with both countries in other areas as well as futbol. (And World Cup host country South Africa also provides full marriage equality.)

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Saturday Gallimaufry

1. If it's hot where you are, why not cool off at BoingBoing's Antarctica.

2. Good news from Denmark: the site of Harald Bluetooth's palace has been located.

3. Everyone! To the Margins! Flee!

4. Happy Birthday, Peter Orlovsky, wishes the Ginsberg Project.

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My Allen Ginsberg — Part Four of Four

 ...the pure emerald flame streaming in the wake of our Auto....

I’ve always liked The Green Automobile, a love poem Allen wrote for Neal Cassady, first published in Reality Sandwiches in 1963. It expresses so much of what I really admire about the Beat poets: good humor, a poetics based substantively on experience rather than on mere imagery and linguistic manipulation or other formalisms,  and a confessionalist rather than fictive approach to content.

Much of what the poet talks about is described in detail in On the Road, which of course makes the reader already feel familiar with the poem. What’s being confessed to is far more intense, and Ginsberg’s irrepressible instinct to let it all hang out, no matter how horrifying the reception, is probably more evident here than anywhere else.

The poem was written in or around 1953, a good ten years before it was published. In the deeply homophobic Dark Ages of mid-century America, same-sex sexuality was illegal and imprisonable, a damnable offense in the eyes of organized religion, and a psychiatric illness in the eyes of the medical establishment. The collateral damage was in most cases worse: green-card holders were denied citizenship, students lost their scholarships, you couldn’t fulfill your dream of becoming a salesman for Gillette Razor Company, and I’ll just bet the Boston Public Library wouldn’t issue you a library card if it were known you were gay.

1953 was therefore not really a good time to be publicly expressing your gay pride, but no such considerations impeded Allen’s travels in the Green Automobile. Not only that: the poem delved into another embarrassing area of human concern, namely that of unrequited, or in this case probably unrequitable, love.

This is generally not a topic that anybody in his/her right mind wishes to read about, or write about either. It’s simply too painful to be contemplated, and if you’re the aggrieved party, the conventional solution is to abandon every thought of love’s misfortune as rapidly as possible. It’s a kind of diarrhea of the emotions, and best so approached.

But not for our poet, who transforms hopelessness into a glorious transcontinental angelic psycho-cosmic joy ride, offering the Green Automobile, a symbol of shared visions and emotions, but I think also of hopeless love, as a gift of the imagination to the admired comrade.

In 1967, I published a poem called the Red and Silver Motorcycle, not at all for the reasons that motivated Ginsy, but because I loved his Green Automobile poem so much. I meant it as a celebration of an affair I’d had with a friend with whom I went bombing around California on my red and silver motorcycle, a Kawasaki 250cc. I bought it at Whitey’s Bike Shop on Valencia near 14th, the first bike I ever owned. Steve Lowell died of AIDS in the early 90’s. Here is the poem I wrote:

I wrote my poem at age 27--the same age as Allen when he wrote The Green Automobile. Allen's poem can be viewed here at Google Books--you'll need to scroll around a bit. Below  is moi aboard the red and silver motorcycle parked in front of the Cafe Garuda, Haight Street, Summer of Love, 1967. In those days, bikes were actually built of metal.

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Thomas Campion: My Sweetest Lesbia

My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love,
And, though the sager sort our deeds reprove,
Let us not weigh them: heaven's great lamps do dive
Into their west, and straight again revive,
But, soon as once set is our little light,
Then must we sleep one ever-during night.


If all would lead their lives in love like me,
Then bloody swords and armour should not be,
No drum nor trumpet peaceful sleeps should move,
Unless alarm came from the camp of love:
But fools do live, and waste their little light,
And seek with pain their ever-during night.


When timely death my life and fortune ends,
Let not my hearse be vexed with mourning friends,
But let all lovers, rich in triumph come,
And with sweet pastimes grace my happy tomb;
And, Lesbia, close up thou my little light,
And crown with love my ever-during night.



This is a masterpiece among carpe diem poems, whose sweetly amicable and altogether reasonable message is: Let’s get drunk and screw, because we’re already on the way out. These are sentiments I find it hard to argue with, but I like the poem for its anti-military, make-love-not-war stance as well, and for the utter simplicity of its iambic pentamer lines, built mostly of monosyllables—“If all would lead their lives in love like me....”
Indeed.

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thanks flickr user every-seven.

Jouissance, by Rich Tagett

(Click vigorously to embiggen.)

Deutschland, Deutschland, Bumsfallera!

A hugely satisfying experience of course to watch Germany advance to the semi-finals, after routing Argentina 4-0. Then Spain squeaked past Paraguay (1-0), but gave such a lackluster performance that Germany has every reason to hope for a quick victory against them next Wednesday. But as in baseball, just because you’ve got the best team in town doesn’t mean you’re going to win the next game, so semper paratus and so forth.

Entrances to Hell in Berkeley: The Golden Toad

     Wisps of fog lingered over the fast stream, the gurgle mixed with a few bird voices through the very damp air. Silently the golden toad jumped from a rock to a patch of grass near the flowing water. Bufo periglenes—it was the last time a human eye saw the golden leap, the bright wonder, above Monteverde in Costa Rica mid-spring of 1989. Some say a fungal amphibian virus the cause, some say the warming earth, but disease is not in doubt.

      Despite the more than twenty years since that quiet landing at creekside in Costa Rica’s high forest, during which the species is spoken of as extinct, equally is it clear that this and no other, though vastly grown in size, basked in the slated shadow of the gate, throat rippling with panting breath. The spirit leaped, even while the heavy scent of death surrounded both creature and the few leaves blowing nearby. Unblinking eyes stared from its face; parted lips issued a wee noise, a rattling, gasping, scraping, and gradually words were clear, first in Spanish, then in English, “I have come, yes, to end all suffering. Mine is gone, washed into a distant landscape, but now no other shall be. Dis-ease has turned to mercy. The lives that bathe in suffering shall join me in gold.”

                                    -- by Lew Ellingham

My Allen Ginsberg — Part Three of Four

I’ve often wondered why we think of some people as charismatic, how much of it rests in the eye of the beholder, or if the person so designated is broadcasting on some secret wavelength that the rest of us are not supposed to know anything about. I’m sure it’s not just their visibility—there was something about Bob Dylan’s voice in the early 60’s that jerked you right to attention, though he certainly wasn’t much to look at. The 1965 Pennebaker film was about as far as the image-makers ever got with him. Other charismatic people I’ve known – Suzuki-roshi at SF Zen Center or Stephen Gaskin, for example— could look at you sideways and you knew somehow they owned you.

AG in his prime lubricated everyone’s attention; even when he was silent and reflective, which he often was. Sitting alone in a corner, people gathered round him as if by instinct. I remember that a ceramics artist had a shop on Grant Avenue and displayed a pot in the window for years with a sign that said, “This Pot has been touched by Allen Ginsberg, Price $10,000,” or some such. One supposed the potter would never sell it at any price.

After the Wales Visitation reading, I saw Allen three more times, all in the late 60's or early 70’s. One evening in 1969 I entered the Capri, a favorite watering hole for young gentlemen in North Beach, and there was himself on a corner barstool playing with an electric yoyo that lights up in the dark. I bravely went up and introduced myself.

He was in a rather pensive mood, so it wasn’t much of a conversation. He told me how he got started by mimeographing his own poems, and we talked a little about Jack Kerouac. He also told me that his poetry royalties—he was at the time the biggest selling poet in the U.S. since John Greenleaf Whittier—weren’t enough to pay the $80 monthly rent on his slum apartment on the Lower East Side.

A year or two later there was a warehouse on Grove Street near Franklin that functioned as a gay community center. They had constructed a little theater upstairs, and Hibiscus and the Angels of Light were performing something preposterously complicated and very under-rehearsed. Allen appeared as a totally strange-looking “yiddische Mama,” playing his Hindu harmonium and performing self-composed songs to words of Wm Blake. One of these had the refrain – “and all the hills e-cho-éd”—which he chanted over and over for a good half-hour or more, to the point of mental stultification.

At that period in San Francisco’s cultural history, public life had become so absolutely silly that hardly anyone was surprised by much of anything. I took refuge instead in the traditional biological verities and went up on the roof to have sex with somebody. It was rumored that Allen was having an affair with Hibiscus at the time, but I thought personally it was rather unlikely—although I certainly wouldn’t have put it past Hibiscus.

Another time I saw AG at a reading he gave at Everett Jr High School (on Church Street near Mission High). It was during that peculiar period when hippies were emigrating from the cities and moving to the country. AG had bought a farm at Cherry Valley in Upper New York State and was growing organic beans or something, and running around in overalls. The encounter with him at Everett JHS I duly recorded in the following poem, which I’m sure is self-explanatory:


     MEETING ALLEN GINSBERG IN THE BOYS' ROOM
     AT EVERETT JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL


     "Hello," he said, peering intently into
     my face. "What happened to your leg,
     Allen?" "I slipped on the ice in New York
     and broke it." "Oh dear," I said,
     as he hobbled on his crutch into
     a stall, undid his farmer's overalls,
     revealing a perfectly round tummy
     half-enveloped by lemon-colored
     Jockey briefs, like a soccer ball
     resting in a vanilla pudding.
    "It will be all right soon," he said,
     lowering himself onto the crapper.
     "Good," I said, and returned
     to the crowded auditorium.


I showed my poem to Richard Baker-roshi at SF Zen Center, who said that he liked it. B-r said later he had shown it to Allen, who termed it “libelous.”



Photo: "Allen at the Cherry Valley Farm, upstate New York, Summer 1969," by Elsa Dorfman, from the excellent website The Allen Ginsberg Project.

My Allen Ginsberg — Part Two of Four

"Heaven balanced on a grassblade."

In the 50’s and 60’s poetry readings happened not only in coffee-houses and local art galleries, but also before large audiences numbering several hundreds. I remember hearing T.S. Eliot reading at Jordan Hall in Boston around 1959 or so, and Kenneth Rexroth’s last major San Francisco poetry reading at Herbst Hall, and I’m thinking also of the first time I’d heard Ginsberg read in San Francisco, around 1968-69.

Allen read together with Gary Snyder before a packed audience at Nourse Auditorium (in the old School District building at Fell St and Franklin, now closed since the Loma Prieta earthquake), and I think it was the first time either of them had read in San Francisco in a good many years.

It was a spectacular event. I’d never heard Allen read before, and the effect of his sonorous vocalisms completely filling the auditorium as he worked his way from one crescendo to another overwhelmed me. I’d heard poets (my poet-friends Paul Mariah and Hunce Volcker among them) read their works in a musical fashion, but it most cases it was a sort of chanting and crooning which emphasized short phrases, up-and-down lines, and off-beat accents – rather like jazz and poetry without the jazz.

Allen’s style was more dramatic, because it coincided with his enthusiasm for and recollection of the experience that was being articulated – it seemed that he was transforming himself backward in time to re-live the same event that had inspired the poem, subjecting the listener to whatever shamanic agencies might have been operative in the moment. It was confessionalistic, visionary, utterly convincing somehow, and the exact opposite of today’s brainless poetic formalism.

His reading of Wales Visitation in San Francisco was simply mind-blowing. I don’t think anybody had heard him read it before, and so it came rather as a surprise. I would post it here, but I think “Ginsberg, Inc.”—as Jack Micheline used to call AG’s management interests—might be unhappy with my doing so, so if you’re interested you can read the poem right here.

Now anybody who has taken LSD a few times would know exactly what’s going on with Wales Visitation. Practically everyone in town could and in fact did go out to Land’s End or up Buena Vista Park when the fog was rolling in and drop acid and have similar visions. But there are few indeed who could combine that mastery of imagery and musicality of language in Allen’s poem, combined with some ancient cultural allusions to add a bit of English intellectual history to the mix.

I thought it was a great poem, and I still do. I think Ginsberg peaked with Wales Visitation, but it wasn’t clear then that his writing would gently lapse into a kind of business-as-usual quasi-surrealist/expressionist travel narrative in the years to follow (quite readable, but not equally inspired).

I remember in those years Bob Glück telling me he thought AG was a “master,” an estimation from which he and other friends perhaps pulled back from later on. But in 1969 Allen was at the top of his form, and everyone waited to see what he would do next.

In the same year I put my own queer shoulder to the wheel and started up a gay-lib poetry magazine called Sebastian Quill, about which more later. I wrote to Allen asking him for a submission, and he sent me a little poem called Please, Master—a miniature S&M phantasy, which of course I was delighted to publish. The manuscript was nicely calligraphed with some pleasantly innocuous phallic drawings. I donated it to the SF GLBT Historical Society in 1997 when Allen died.