Charles Plymell

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Out of Wichita, Kansas . . .


                                                         

Charles Plymell

Charles Plymell grew up in Wichita on the Kansas plains. He lived in San Francisco in the sixties where he met Neal Cassady – among others. In 1963 Neal and his girl Anne Murphy, and Allen Ginsberg moved in with Plymell in the large apartment he rented at 1403 Gough Street in the Haight area. Later he lived in different locations in America, finally ending up in the state of New York where, with his wife Pam he settled in Cherry Valley, a couple of hours out of New York City. Plymell and Pam started Cherry Valley Editions – publishing - among many others - William Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, Allen Ginsberg, Janine Pommy Vega, Ray Bremser.

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Charles' father Fred Plymell, Oklahoma 1920s

The following poem was based on a dream of his father in 1984.

From Ancient Lands (Vernal Equinox Dream) Washington, D.C. 1984)

They walked the sunrise, soul-burned travelers,

wearing hats tilted like Autumn's landscaped hills.

Rough faced sailors, eyes laden like water rills

scanned the horizon till shorelined stars unfurled.

New wind in the air for those waft on the seas,

new smell of earth dug away to align the leys.

And they came forever wandering, as if set free

from cracks and rifts and vortices, as when some

great stone moves from its natural mortises; they

sailed the wind, a front of chaotic charges ignited,

careless in radiance of patterns of heaven unsighted.

(At 5:30 a.m. I awoke from a dream of Vernal Equinox

like a farmer called early for spring plowing, or a

driver with an early start knowing the aching miles

that stretch across the long heart of the prairie).

In the early days my father left his coffee pot

on the stove in his sod house, and he drove

cattle down to Galveston town, and he saw the

lights beckoning on the port side of the bow,

heading for Italy, brought back a color picture

of the Isle of Capri, and when he returned the

next year, the coffee pot was in the same place.

And the picture for years was the only decor in

the farmhouse room under angry rolling cyclones,

with their terrible pitched-moan to stillness,

silent as trowels through the loess and grass.

Blowing dust through cracks of doors and windows,

sculpted the still waves day and night. The house

took in the wind of the wolves' howl, the song

of the coyote, and the long train whistle dragging

the reptile's whispering scream of time; the pioneer's

pitch of desperation, first loud then soft, and

then distant into the stars where cowboys herded

the dark clouds out of the sky, where sailors lined

the beads like stars while the bodies of wanderers

happily grew again from the earth's bed with gentle flag

and stay; the blossom'd buds in May blew like many

visitors who come when the new wind comes that

keeps me half awake half dreaming... so very many.

My father rode down through the equinox in a perfect

visioned dream as if he had never been away. I

wanted to show him the nation's capital, but he

was here on other business; he wanted to find his

merchant marine papers, why, I don't know, maybe

to show passage through eternity and beyond,

like a journey pulling toward yet another shore.

'Look at the beautiful masonry,' I said to him, 'look at

the Merchant Marine Building with its exquisite work

of brick and tile, and bronze doors, and frontispieces.'

We went down to a little section of the city by the sea.

'Oh,' I said to him, 'this is just like Italy.' The marble

and the little streets and the glassworks and the women

who walked there, the women he joked with, and the sailors,

and the bricklayers, and the carpenters, and the threshers

from Kansas long ago, drifters passed in the street

recognized in memory, composite in chirality, patient

in formality; they, the lined-faced, the rough-hewn

people who walked the narrow streets by outdoor cafes.

He knew where to go, not up to the marbled entrance

but down a side street low, near a building, where,

in the dust of the sea bottom, beneath a small cupola

stood a woman by a counter of endless floating files.

'Draw me a picture of the last scene you remember

as a mariner,' she said. He drew a picture of himself

sitting on a bed, his sailor's hat cocked to one

side, a coffee cup on the table. He asked her jokingly,

'how do you want me, ma'am, hobbled and ironed?' She

helped him look. 'How far back?' He didn't know.

Down in the sea dust of a bottom drawer they found

his papers waterstained brown. He pulled them out

and waved and yelled as if he had found passage

toward the wild fix of stars, or Isle of Capri.

http://www.thing.net/~grist/bove/new/plymell.htm

 

Neal Cassady and Anne Murphy,
photo by Charles Plymell, 1963

SONG FOR NEAL

Oh really really Neal

  first love the automobile

  drove a 34 Ford with suicide doors

and a stick shift on the floor

Ego pressing onward

  tight skirt in the night

Popeye Olive Oyl tryin to make it right

Dragging down the avenue

  checking asses in the rearview

Ann-Marie scored pills and didn't want to fight

One hand on the wheel

  the other copping a feel

stole a car in Denver

           Just to hear it peel

Clock on the dash reading 10:18

    past the neon diner

      last stop for Benzedrine

then another scene

  bobby soxer mommas

tarot card teens

   word surfers making a deal

 his addiction only to the wheel

one hand on the gearshift

       fastest word in the west

 Ann Marie was in theatre

but he jumped the parking meter

   flower children all over town

the fatsest word the found

     before he drove his bus further

 he traded her Chevrolet coupe

for an old Pontiac four on the floor

     drove to Bolinas to score

     up the hills around the curves

gear it down pump the brakes

     gone since speeding past the Avalon

Old Mother Ginsberg back seat drivin

        hanging out the window to keep from slidin

Back to Frisco he carried Ann Marie up the stairs

               unpacked his boxes full of tapes of past lives

         from a medium in Palo Alto

he didn't have any dough

     shoe box full of reefer though

and Ann in bed on top of him

             look at her teeth he said

lupine like on blood they fed

He scored a faster car from someone who

          wanted him to be true

   and telephoned from Denver, Cincinnati, Kalamazoo

he came back from seeing Kerouac in a hurry

               patrol cars in his mirrors still blurry

parked in front of Gough Street in a '50 Plymouth Fury

           saw Anne Marie with some pills

    heading out of town

he jumped in the driver's seat and spun that Fury around

His last drive was longer to the Mexican border

               generations passed like a long train

  with boxcars that he used to work on

    new railroad tracks seemed chromed with cocaine

The engineer's whistle was low and sad

  brought up memories of a young dad

     doing hard time for two joints

   given in generosity because he was that kind of guy

to undercover fuzz who gave him a ride and a lie

  not that different from the people he knew

who never came to his rescue

Maybe they thought San Quentin was good for him

           but I thought him better smoking boo

        he was the fastest road warrior

but what he did wrong he never knew

         his eyes looked liked a worried mind

as if he wouldn't arrive on time

   but Black Elk knew that for the wild

death comes always in the wrong season

   the beds of prison will lock down the reason.

                                
                                   Neal

           hey charley, did you bring the gloves

   

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The following are from Plymell’s recently published book Eat Not Thy Mind.

LOCKED IN SAVANT HARMONY

The snow fills the creek beds

loaves form in the night’s wind

where creatures gather seeds

in cauterized moon wounds and

smells of dark green open the solstice

the mind aligns life and death on the street

or in the heavens and on the horizon

where begins a search for lonely places

like the fools who take another drink and

drape their souls on a stool in another bar

still new for a second smile

into the debris of redundancy

wiping the bar of bad dreams

sorry again for the delusions

mistaking those two different

people youth and age

sunrise calling through the

window panes of skeletons

reveals a formula for motion and scale

depleted in morning’s commerce and enterprise

give me your many lips

flashing in presentiment

that I may catch the boat

to that part of space for charity

along an illuminated twilight line

to run out the knots of a shaded hemisphere

in sunset trace beneath the moon spilled wine.

GET LOST

First 80 degree day

After a long slice of silent ice

Stilettoed by the oily bowels of snowmobiles

Numbing their last drunk snowy reaches of the field.

The lawnmowers begin cutting

the commerce of the day

Dork peeled rubber

The small-town carnivals of June

Goonies come out and sit on stoops of river towns.

More asthma, more decay;

The air laden with chemicals

Greying New York faces from Manhattan

Airless days and nights

Old men’s oxygen and morphine

Loose grip on everything

spans the games you

loose your soul in

Meaningless material objects

a lifetime of deals coughing and dying,

either way losses all.

No more colors in the jam.

What are their titles and authories?

General Custer’s Junior G-Men

part jerk, part fuzz, part fink.  

                             

                                                        Collage by Charles Plymell

IVY

Hitch a ride from the gray area

Take a bend in the road going south

out of South Bend somewhere imagined

To the Delta dirt where the cotton is pure

and the polka dot shirt flies in the wind

Where blues are bad and words are dreams

And the random bells are always ringing

Like quantum operators in the binge of time bring

Echoes at night as sweet as first Phoebe Snow

But a blizzard rages up north

winds blow broken songs from a chain of paper doll line

the horizon each censored for emptiness and force

Black ice is on the asphalt and the street lights make it shine

The heart is always first to know the future before the body

And the brain bring the problems of a homeless mind

They say 23% of the universe is dark matter and

73% is dark energy and for all the rest, open your eyes

PRESENTIMENT IS IN THE WIND

Black ice is on the asphalt

and the street lights make it shine

Blue Iris is beginning to fall

and the night lights fakes its lines

The heart is always first to know the future

last to hold the problems of a homeless mind

We used to work together for the ancestral heart

My sister, Betty hitchhiked into Pocatello

where those who rode the rails left their signs

above their camps of embers

the last beans cooked in the cans

A century later a bird somehow knew

I was a soft touch and followed me for seeds

Its eyelids had not formed open and it fell prey

I named it Betty Broken Song

Only the wisdom of luck can follow the

tangled infinite numbers of paradise

that glisten and dance along Westbound rails

under the stars lay its darksome dins of clay.

A GREAT GREEN BANDANA AND A YELLOW BANANA

A member of the eternal road crew waves traffic

The guy in a dump truck eats a banana

the wind in the grass waves away the years

of minions finding a way home

some synchronicity in tiny desecrate units

Max Plank waved in the 20th century

Max Ernst had a screaming headache

a Scarab tapped gently on Jung’s window wanting sex

Coca Cola still contained the leaf.

Organic trends of the next century

upscale restaurants serve olive oil

Herodotus wrote that the Romans preferred oil to

the barbarians to the south who made butter

the green bandana waving out the Blue jay’s chipper song

and its lonely in the shadows when they close the open road

to dwell on ‘self’ will lead to peanut butter and colas

a Banana Republic emerged from and enlightened

Constitution, pre-emptive strikes and a mercenary army

it’s all over kids, compulsory education didn’t work

freedom didn’t survive illusion and greed & fat and corn syrup.

NO PAIN INTENDED

The theory of wounded dust like

A psychic fire-final transformation,

A virus after a brand new host to the final party,

                                                              There.

Cyanic voices and gray faces of didactic melancholy

Sappho without her cell phone popping a pill under the olive tree

Cleopatra among hot dwarfs and superstars, her

Eyelids inflamed by the disease of sunset on the orphan’d planet

Where seas tumble, trees are blown by broken hearts.

I’d rather be in Kansas where everything is dead and gone

Except the smell inside a 1948 Mercury with the soft green

Lights on the dash memories that await the children of a ruined world.

PHILLY DELPHIC

Get all those demons out of the white space, white noise

exorcize the white house Oh Nicola the Tesla coil

at the click of your mouse electricity will annihilate space

Orwellian conspiracies so subtle down the turnpike of

nothingness where power grids go black in virtual death

Until one day there is a message and it

is not on the phone, nor on the computer

It comes from signals deep down in the body

where the fortune teller lives, foot in one shoe

dangling off the bed of American future fucked

in the truck stop of nowhere down the chaos road.

Bend down America and kiss the asphalt, you voted for it.

The crusaders are robbing the peasants again

There is evil in their agenda, demons in their house

If you are born twice you can work in deadly Dick’s Iraq

and make seven thousand a week electrifying the showers.

don’t say there’s no future, son, for good criminals

hysterical religion in faces behind the candidates of guns

those slaughtered buffalo greedy eyes

eyes of agenda to lionize those lyin eyes

stolen eyes, waiting for the westbound train draggin home to

Toledo and Chicago on clacking Amtrak rails that flash past

cattle cars with hysterical death ribbed vision of strobe shuttered

savage rails over an historical mountain over there name Vinyl that

will be climbed a hundred years from now by Ronald rotten clown

ghost on endless telegraph poles of Custer the loser,

demon Dick’s propaganda, hype and hypocrites

in the last gasp of Democracy.

The jumbo laugh of a dying empire with so much bad karma

electromagnetic torrents of toxic sunsets more beautifully

seen in the morality of the dead eyes scanning for security in

the crimson sky like old day glo tinctures in the summer of love

Pete’s lost plaint I ain’t gonna study war no more

in dead afternoons beyond banging winds of Interstate

of no escape on poisoned exit ramp

Johnny Cash in his coffin all dressed in black

westbound trains roll on

Eat not thy mind young father in the trailer park over there under

the power lines contemplating suicide, mother on pills, baby crawling

toward the television’s arts program of grandmothers’ quilting party.

Brother kept driving on speed to make a dime addicted to the wheel

sister scream bid in a shear wind cold voice at her lost house deal

streetwise Jones found dancing in crack whore bones mute and blue

and may you sleep tonight with jazz in your grave, Claude Pelieu.

Hard luck and hard looker, mean hooker, deep heart, dark mind

commercialized vagina Cum Laude from tattooed neon school

faded mascara in glamorous midnights, too

slow jazz and melancholy words of last love for you

Albany news sexual battery beating homeless murder robbery.

Bend down America and kiss the asphalt, you voted for it.

They are murdering the flowers again

destroying the poppies in Afghanistan

machetes drawn, ATVs pulling iron harrows

full battle camouflage narc state uniform

real colors blood reds and dark greens

crushed into landscapes and set aflame

beauty tangled in charred grey faces

hip hag muppets in red and pink crepe

while the young farm girl cries at her

favorite red and gold shawl burning

her mother leans against the trees

her eyes turning toward the heavens crying.

If we can’t destroy the enemy we can damn sure

destroy their flowers in photo ops the goonfaced

joker criminal of high order looks from helicopter

view and thinks to himself that it’s one less

shipment for the cargo planes to smuggle away.

Less risk for the contractors to handle it, anyway

less hands to pay in coffins like from Vietnam

while campaign ads about who is sleeping safely

blurs the visual numb realities in capitol scandals.

But remember we can always smash your flowers!

like spraying weed with toxins and chopping them

down in Central America, defoliation in Vietnam.

kids who kicked the can on down the road have gone

to war again in the latent gene the paranoid dream

of every town, camouflaged to capture the weed and win

Leaning on their rusted pickups they change like

transformer toys from Bud to bullets when the call is out

imprison the most helpless and forsaken strays among us

ready to destroy again for whatever the authorities preach

NAME OF HOTEL

It began as a visit to San Francisco after many years. We checked into a famous hotel. I can remember its name because I was having a dream that typified Alzheimer’s. I realized in a dream fashion how horrible it is.

Somehow I ended up in a district where my sister died on the street. I can only describe as a combination of Portrero Hill and the Marina only it resembled how I remembered the Filmore over thirty years ago: Dark, burned out, vacant, and crumbling.

I began walking and walking seeing only shadows of old Mini rails and cars. The streets were black noir as if it had been raining many nights. Occasionally a fleeting figure would pass and I would ask it where the hotel was but I couldn’t remember its name. I would ask to please help and I went through the names of famous hotels I could remember, but none of them sounded right.

I climbed a hill of burned-out tar rooftops still smoldering and heard a voice in the distance comment that it was the kids who set them afire. I found a path down the mound and was exhausted when I saw some figures standing in front of some dim neon clubs. A taxi seemed to be approaching when one of the women outside the club hailed it at the same time. I asked her to please let me take it because I was so tired I could go no farther and I had to get back to the hotel. She said they were tired too and needed the taxi.

I walked farther to a food stand and ordered a dish of something with a side of something. It came out turned over resembling a slice of pizza upside down. Though it wasn’t what I ordered, I decided to take it anyway and got out my billfold to pay. Photos that I didn’t know I had began falling on the ground along with my credit cards. I tried to pick them up to look at them as more fell out. I saw what looked like a wallet lying at the corner of the counter. A heavy woman moved in front of me just as I was able to recover my pile of contents to place on top of the billfold on the counter, thinking I would cop the whole pile and the left wallet. Then someone copped the whole pile and ran. I asked an old black man standing nearby if he saw who took it. He motioned to a doorway across the street and said he thought the person went in there. I went to the door to look in. It was another club, and I asked the black man at the door if someone just came in. He asked me to describe him, which I did. Then he said no one of that description had come in and that there was no need to assume the person I was describing was black. I said of course not and he shut the door in my face.

One of the women didn’t take the cab, so I started walking with her hoping she was going in my direction because I couldn’t keep going without help. I pleaded with her to let me walk with her. She asked where I was going and I told her I couldn’t remember the name of the hotel. Then I thought of Glenn’s address at 1403 Gough Street but realized he hadn’t lived there in years. We walked toward her place. I hugged her and told her I needed help. Her body became like an empty bag. I hugged her more and asked to go home with her and kissed her. Her mouth was hollow.

Image of unknown origin in an email
from Bob Branaman to Charles Plymell.

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The young Charles - Wichita, mid 1950s

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Charles' mother Audrey Plymell, Oklahoma 1920s.
Her great-grandmother was on The Trail Of Tears
when the Cherokee were driven out of the Southeast,
she later married a white man in Arkansas.

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Charles Plymell was born on the high plains in Finney County, Kansas in 1935 . His father was a cowboy born in the Oklahoma Territory, his mother of Plains Indian descent. After working in most all the western states at many types of laboring jobs, he drifted between Los Angeles and Kansas City during his hipster years, steeped in jazz, race music, and country. Later he settled in Upstate New York with his wife and children teaching and tutoring courses in institutions where he could apply his knowledge and experiences. Many of them were courses in prisons until their population, increasingly victimized, due to the unconstitutional mandatory sentencing and the terrorizing political war on drugs made the experience too overwhelmingly emotive.

His master's thesis at Hopkins was quickly published by City Lights titled Last of the Moccasins and then by Europa Verlag in Austria. After it went out of print, it was reissued with the Los Angeles' artist Robert Williams' painting on the cover (now available as an ebook). Williams went against his own policy of never doing covers only because Plymell was the first printer of Robert Crumb's Zap Comix. A few copies remain in print and are available from Water Row Books in Sudbury, MA, which has published a Plymell Reader titled Hand on the Doorknob. Many books, among them the Scarecrow Press book, Forever Wider, edited and introduced by Robert Peters.

Plymell was cited by Governor Finney of Kansas for his contribution to the people as well as the World Book for being the most promising poet of 1976. He opposes the National Endowment for the Arts and has criticized it in print. He claims it became a politicized unjust system feeding on its own mediocrity and self-contradiction. His views were mentioned in the New York Times in " Notes on People" and again in "Washington Talk". He was subsequently blacklisted and has never received any funding from any federal, state, or academic agency to pursue his creativity. http://www.cherryvalleyeditions.com/html/charles_plymell.html

 

 

Eat Not Thy Mind published by Glass Eye Books / Ecstatic Peace Library, 2010. Cover illustration a collage by Claude Pelieu. Available from
http://yod.com/yodstuff/product_info.php?products_id=6469

Charles Plymell has 12 books of poetry published.

The following are only a few of the sites where Plymell’s work can be found; from these sites there are many connections - including interviews with Plymell.

http://www.thing.net/~grist/bove/new/cpinterv.htm

http://www.vlib.us/beats/

http://rustytruck.wordpress.com/

http://www.jackmagazine.com/interview-ch-paul.html

 

re the photo of Neal laughing in the bus:

 "I took a pair of gloves to Neal for his bus drive. He was joking about his hands on the old steering wheel made of carbon black. He introduced me to Tom Wolfe. I had already met Kesey with Neal at parties, but they were all getting ready to drive trip etc." Charles.

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five bullet hit of the week ●●● ●    ●  http://catfishgringoriver.blogspot.com/ 

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