Skull Highway
Reviewed By John Pate

www.saintvituspress.com

This, his sixth book, “Skull Highway” (La Alameda Press, $12.00) is for Lawrence Welsh one that, in its picaresque nature reflects a number of journeys, many journeys. Things coalesce even more when the reader finishes the book of twenty nine poems – or expeditions – and considers the word ‘highway’ is in the very title. And while the majority of poems seem to be occasioned by travel, in every one there are stand-alone lines and phrases which at time surprise and arrest the reader. Poems like “Paper Lantern,” “For Robert Peters,” and “Fallen Ladders” are but a few examples.

To share what Jimmy Santiago Baca feels about Welsh’s new book, “Lawrence Welsh is a shaman with words. He whirls flowers and moons and skies and adobe mud around … and mixes them with his hard-won wisdom.” Lots of wisdom in this collection, and as often as not, as subtle as an ocotillo in bloom. That’s the paradox of wisdom: you have to already have it to recognize it when it’s encountered.

Welsh’s poems work powerfully off of one another due to his juxtaposition of Christian and native mythological symbolism. This poet’s eye wanders, not unlike a modern Buddha, from crucifixes to mockingbirds, from “lanes of eternal light,” to “a shapeshifter’s deer message.” Moreover, the dust of the Southwest permeates every one of these pages. And that dust settles nicely on each piece of Christian
iconography. Particularly nice is the contrast – or perhaps re-emphasis – between the two poems “The Crucifix Upstairs” and “Adobe.” The former’s lines of “tear them / o one / at the black gate / and then / its opening / its opening,” seems uncannily informed by the latter poem’s lines, “or always the open / door / invites / those in to repair / a lost art.”

Some of the great stand-alone lines and passages include, “overtake the flesh / become more than / a drowning you;” “she or he / who stumbles / prays for / the moon: it’s / silver / it’s blue / at least / a footpath / a securing / for moving / on;” “these streets / stripped bare of everything / folks with no credentials / not knowing bake off or poetry or anything else / just heat and work and minimum wage nightmares / in a minimum
wage town;” “the smoke of incense / or Tularosa sage / the skid marks / on a mountain road /going up up.”

Lastly, the poem “Gone Rattler” and the final poem “In the Desert Dead Things Go Away Quickly” underscore one of the key themes to the book – and the desert herself. In “Gone,” Welsh reveals his mysticism, his higher connection to this unforgiving, unrelenting land of scorpions, rattlesnakes, vultures and desert springs by rounding out the poem with a nice anthrocentric ontology. “…is shaded lamp / who knows / sees enough / of Mescalero ways / to realize earth / holds / its own booze, /
hallucinations / wipes off / the blood / and tosses it in / a local’s frame.” Wonderful. “In the Desert Dead Things” redoubles this hallucination imagery of the land’s seeming intangibility, its lasting impermanence. The poet’s pared-down delivery of such a large topic only adds to its mystical quality. “I’ve seen coyotes / under the moon /or a puma /
at noon / or the hawk and vulture / who really / own this land / what a great / place / to end / I thought /so clean / so little blood / the gone bones / by sunrise.”

And he’s right. There’s nary a bone left behind in the desert. Perhaps all that does remain is spirit. It brings to mind a Baca line from the book “Martin…”where the dead listen at windows to conversations held by women at their kitchen tables. Make no mistake. This is very much a land where the dead are never far off. The book’s title is proof of as much. What exactly is a skull highway? Spend enough time in the preternatural desert and you, like Welsh, will understand. When asked what he thought of all the overlapping motifs and themes, Welsh replied, in very Zen fashion, “It is what it is.” The same can be said of the sublime desert; it is what it is.

John Pate has been reviewing books for the El Paso Times for the
past four years and is also a lecturer at El Paso Community College. He’s currently working on a book about El Paso with a former mayor.

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CURRENTLY ONLY THROUGH US

Skull Highway
Poems
Lawrence Welsh
68 pages • 978-1-888809-51-0 • $12.00

Lawrence Welsh is a shaman with words.
He whirls flowers and moons and skies
and adobe mud around and around
and mixes them with his hard-won wisdom.
He scrapes his initials into them
with his soul’s white tooth,
his word chisel.
Jimmy Santiago Baca

The poems of Lawrence Welsh seem cut down to their driest song out of debris found along an arroyo used as a border crossing. These are minimalist sketches with long resonance. Each word shifts back and forth between an archetype and prophecy, then into the essential thing itself. You have to chew on them and put some of your own spit in the mix. This is the "southwest" as experienced by hitchhiking mystics or simply a person walking away from a civilization caught up in its own demise. Nobody escapes without a few wounds. We all have scars and they make the body more interesting. Sometimes a howl floats in the wind. Sometimes it is the roar of laughter. When you get to the spot where these poems live, you might find Charles Bukowski and Lorine Niedecker roasting a jackrabbit over a campfire while sipping cold springwater. Everyone stares at the universe looking for meteorites—on Skull Highway you count any and every speck of dust as a blessing.

Born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, Lawrence Welsh first hitchhiked to New Mexico and Texas in 1989. Five years later, he moved to El Paso, where he still lives. A first generation Irish-American, Welsh has published five collections of poetry, and his work has appeared in more than 175 national and regional magazines, including Puerto del Sol, The Louisiana Review, Hawaii Review, Rio Grande Review, The Texas Observer, Onthebus, The Wormwood Review, Nexus, Chiron Review, The Café Review, Poetry Motel, Pearl, and the book Das Ist Alles—Charles Bukowski Recollected. Welsh has worked as a newspaper reporter, editor, waiter, and graveyard stock clerk. A winner of the Bardsong Press Celtic Voice Writing Award in Poetry, he’s an associate professor of English at El Paso Community College. He’s married to Lisa McNiel, a poet and teacher, and they have two children, Megan and Patrick.

Photograph by Gloria Graham

Outrider: Poems, Essays, Interviews
A Review by Larry Smith

http://dogger-larry.blogspot.com/

Anne Waldman is what she is: a remarkable poet, performance artist, literary theorist, poet activist, feminist, and cultural organizer. Don’t expect her to also be a coherent essayist like E. B. White or Annie Dillard. Waldman’s stance as a writer, Buddhist, and rebel poet run counter to structured coherence, and bend toward construction by association, intuition, accumulation, and imaginative leaps toward inclusion. A child of Charles Olson’s open poetics, she discovers inner structure while mid-stream talking-consciousness, by circumambulating the subject: “Life and its forms are all moving in circles!” (67). And so her impressionistic prose-poems and essays on the mythic Outrider of alternative writing are inspired and often brilliant in segments yet incoherent in rational design:

“What the OUTRIDER desires is a return to urgency for the work
because we are trying to wake up the awareness of the world….
What we need, OUTRIDERS, is the modality of compassion.” (27-28)

“A stance is required that sets apart, yet co-exists with the notion of a
poetry of risk (sanity) and surprise (language)” (30)

These are whole paragraphs within her text of defining-describing the Outrider’s tribal role. Lacking development and logical connections, one finds here bursts of insight into the method of this engaged and engaging writing:

“The poet’s duty is to move the century forward a few inches towards Other. . . Colorful tattered bodhisattvas. With saddlebags, words at the center of mind, never banish thinking of Other.” (22-23)

One cannot help but connect this writing with that of other inside observers, Olson’s “Projective Verse” essay, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Populist Manifestoes,” and Kenneth Patchen’s brilliant “The Artist’s Duty” statement within his Journal of Albion Moonlight. Like these open declarations addressed to the writer tribe, Waldman’s own fast-speaking manifesto capture the spirit of this new poetry of engagement (1970’s to present).

Though the prose-poems contain brilliant fragments, when Waldman is interviewed (by Matthew Cooperman and of Nicaraguan poet Ernest Cardenal here) she gains coherence and momentum and delivers comments that are astute, informed, and comprehensive. The dynamics of her hard-earned poetics of inclusion and revolt are laid out as mosaic stones to walk along. Topics include how her vow of compassion and her performance method embrace in the “wild mind,” how women writers of poetics struggle to be heard, how alternative writers have gone unappreciated, including the whole mimeograph revolution of the 1960’s: “The ‘alternative poetics’ had to do with economics, with urgency, with getting work-in-progress out as it was written. Which then would engender a response and perhaps guide the way the writing would go. It enhanced the conversation as writers.” (83) Culture and art are linked.

The second half of the book contains many valuable Waldman tributes to female writers of the tribe Lorine Neidecker, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, H.D. and others, and a developed and revealing study of Neidecker’s work through linking it with the poetics of silence in John Cage and Henry Thoreau. There are filmic memoirs of “Beat Roots” and another built around the HOWL landscape. The book is enhanced by poet photos from the 1970’s on. As insider and spokesperson Waldman witnesses, reveals, and demonstrates the vision and method of Outrider writing and traces its lineage for us as readers and writers in this illuminating collection.

Larry Smith is the author of Kenneth Patchen: Rebel Poet in America (A Consortium of Small Presses 2000) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Poet-at-Large (Southern Illinois University Press 1982).

NOW AVAILABLE

Outrider
Essays • Poems • Interviews
Anne Waldman
200 pages • 1-888809-48-5 • 978-1-888809-48-0
20 photographs • $18.00

Anne Waldman has been speaking about the “outrider” tradition since 1974 when she and Allen Ginsberg founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa, a Buddhist-inspired university in Boulder, Colorado. This book gathers several essays, poems & rants, an interview with her by Matthew Cooperman, and an interview by her with Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal in an attempt to further articulate a sense of this tradition from Walt Whitman to the present. Not a dry presentation, this book is an fierce and loving look at what poetry can be. Outrider is an iinvocation of “lineage” as a challenge toward examining the practice of poetry and the links of its history. This awareness of lineage encompasses both what has been inherited and what needs be passed on. Waldman’s Outrider will be a provocative contribution to a post-millennium poetics.

“The Outrider holds a premise of imaginative consciousness. The Outrider rides the edge—parallel to the mainstream, is the shadow to the mainstream, is the consciousness or soul of the mainstream whether it recognizes its existence or not. It cannot be co-opted, it cannot be bought. Or rides through the chaos, maintaining a stance of “negative capability”, but also does not give up that projective drive, or its original identity that demands that it intervene on the culture. This is not about being an Outsider. The Outrider might be an outlaw, but not an outsider. Rather, the outrider is a kind of shaman, the true spiritual “insider”. The shaman travels to zones of light and shadow. The shaman travels to edges of madness and death and comes back to tell the stories.”
—from the essay “Premises of Consciousness: Notes on Howl”

In this superb collection of recollections, meditations, interviews, poems, notes, and manifestos, Anne Waldman writes an indispensable chapter in the history of American poetry, one at once brilliant assessment and inspired exhortation. The “outrider,” edgy icon of post-Beat authority, becomes the trope for a poetic pedagogy involving avant-writers from Stein and Olson to Ginsberg and Ernesto Cardenal. And surely the term also invokes the rebel angel Gerard Manley Hopkins — he whose outride syllables “ride forward or backward from the line in another dimension.” Waldman maps this “out” dimension as a visionary poetic landscape where compassion and commitment are still possible.
—Michael Golston

From a life in which every aspect of the day is a radical act of poetry and community emerges — if we are lucky — a documentation of that very life. In Outrider, we encounter a relentless drive to know, revolt, and review with equal parts honesty and abandon, as only Anne Waldman can produce. Take this ride through geographies of ideas and conversations and come out with your hair aflame and your tongue out.
—Renee Gladman

In this dark era of un-ending wars, Outrider reminds us “there is no human dimension in any given period of history without poetry.” Anne Waldman convincingly reaffirms that poetry, essential element of human consciousness, state of mind, can take action as a witness to injustice and “speak to power” effectively. It stands opposite the ignorance of plutocracies that hold power over human life, and offers a rival government that can help save us from the tired, obsolete model of war killing, show us a different version of the world, and the inter-connectedness of all life forms. One comes away from this lucid and extraordinary book knowing — reminded, unforgettably — that poetry is a consciousness that can stop us from being “planetary fools,” if only we will pay attention, and can help humanity chart a necessary journey to a compassionate world in which we take responsibility for where we are going, and where we care for one another and the planet at the same time.
—Daisy Zamora

Anne Waldman, poet, performer, professor, cultural activist holds the lineages of The New American Poetry in her DNA. She is the author of numerous books of poetry including the mini-classic Fast Speaking Woman (City Lights) and the recent volumes In The Room Of Never Grieve (Coffee House Press) and the meditative Structure of the World Compared to A Bubble (Penguin Poets). She is also the editor of The Beat Book, and co-editor of Civil Disobediences: Poetics & Politics in Action. She is the Chair of the Summer Writing Program at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, faculty for New England College's low-residency MFA, and the pedagogical director for Study Abroad On The Bowery in New York City. Her extensive Archive resides at the Hatcher Graduate Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Allen Ginsberg has called her his "spiritual wife".

Let the Goodtimes roll, said San Miguel County voters this Election Day. Incumbent County Commissioner Art Goodtimes, a member of the Green Party, won a fourth term for District 3. Goodtimes, a Norwood, Colorado resident won by a large margin.

Traveling from Delight to Wisdom
with Art Goodtimes
A Review by Joseph Hutchinson

Poetry is not a democratic art. It is not a product of the demos, that is, but the fruit of solitary
labor—though honed, in some cases, by public performance. It is idiosyncratic, suffering in committee and dissenting—sometimes loudly, sometimes sotto voce—from every parade. It minds its manners only to sharpen the impact of its wit, which is always subversive. French scholar Jean-Yves Maleuvre has persuasively argued that even Virgil, traditionally viewed as a technically brilliant toady like Leni Riefenstahl, in fact filled his poetry with stealthy attacks on Augustus; according to Maleuvre, Augustus had Virgil murdered in retribution for his dissent. Of course, American poets live in a republic and so need not fear assassination (at least not yet). This is why the retreat of many poets into solipsistic wordplay or the plush billiard rooms of fusty traditional forms is so dispiriting: they are proving themselves to be joiners. The Committee announces that Derrida is de rigeur, and certain poets queue up dressed in bunting and balloons; others accept the complaint that poetry is “obscure,” and therefore adopt the simplistic tone of the anchorman or the snappy patter of the standup comic. Small wonder that when a book of genuine poetry comes along we find work that leads us, as Frost said it should, from delight to wisdom.

As If the World Really Mattered, a collection of poems by Art Goodtimes, is just such a book. Don’t be dissuaded by the author’s name: Goodtimes is no epicurean, although the ground note of his poetry is joy. This poet is a bard, an environmentalist, a social historian, and a scholar whose work reflects ideas drawn from a variety of traditions—including pre-Socratic philosophy, Buddhism, Catholicism, Dadaism, the Kuksu religion of Central California’s tribal peoples—and a variety of writers: Sappho, Neruda, Steinbeck, Edward Abbey and more. His poems entertain, but more importantly, they reveal—and their revelations spring from a profound moral vision rooted in a reverence for nature both outside and inside human beings.

“If we lived as if all that whirled really mattered,” he writes in the book’s invocation, “mirabile dictu, / what strange shape would our lives take?” In its own way, each poem that follows is an answer to that question—an answer out loud. “All are performance pieces,” Goodtimes tells us, “meant to be read aloud.” Readers bored by tame, “well-made” poems will be especially taken with Goodtimes’s measures. Take these lines from “Wildflowers”:

Fireweed. Tansy. Solidago odora.
Beside the bituminous asphalt’s edge
where the wild things grow lush
a hand searches for hues. Is it
necessary to know the names of things
to set stems in water? To make
colors leap like salmon from a fountain
of white porcelain? The map-followers
whiz by on their wheels. They have no
time for tints & shades. Enough
the pleasant blur of forms. Dutchbarn.
Billboard. Deer in the pines.

The world—all that’s whirled—is where Goodtimes takes us by ditching our maps. It’s a place full of things and creatures, names and colors, metaphors and subtle strains of music. Notice, too, that the poet insists on the value of these specifics: the world is not the map. In poem after poem, he reminds us that our addiction to the maps our culture provides has been a disaster for the natural world around and within. “Current Events” is just one example:

Toolmakers. Machinetamers. Twentiethcenturyclocks.
We bow obedient to the swing of our chromosomes.
All the time calling it destiny. Philosophy. Or better yet
consciousness & man’s (sic) rise to civilization.
Which translates into the vulgate as lording it over
the elephants & other mammals, minerals, Jurassic latebloomers
whose base elements may one day soon usurp command
& transmute the planet into pure meat. Hot spirit.
Even before we get our chance outproducing one another
to gag, glut, and gadget ourselves into ha-ha oblivion.
Heading as we are, ringaroundtheashes, fullspeed downthetubes
towards yet another less auspicious BIG BANG.
Unless of course someone pulls a rabbit out of the Edsel.
Saws the bicameral brain in half & presto! peacefully
puts Humpty-Dumpty back together better than ever.
Which is only to imagine some androgynous zen Houdini
handcuffed & submerged in the cells since childhood
leading us out from the locked jaws of plutonium
to leap uncharted circuits in a single bound
& just maybe once again connect us to the heart.
That ancient, though illogical & most highly-feared,
path of least resistance.

Sharp wit, subversiveness, references ranging from James Tate and Superman to Julian Jaynes and Mother Goose, all designed, I think, to serve as a counterweight to the poem’s essential pessimism about our species—an undercurrent throughout the book that Goodtimes consistently opposes with sheer verbal energy and invention.

Clearly, Art Goodtimes’s poetry is “engaged,” as we used to say, in a way that goes beyond sneering at some political incompetent or tossing out bromides of the left or the right. In fact, serves in the unglamorous role of Green party county commissioner in Telluride, Colorado. “I do politics by matching / fixed attention with free intention,” he tells us in “Basketweaving,” whose controlling metaphor is significantly both process and product. The aim, he explains, is not to exercise power, but to offer up “[a] vision / tied into shape & formed / for the benefit of all.” Even the poems that draw on particulars of the poet’s life—from his adventures in Catholic schools to the pain of an auto accident to the pleasures of lovemaking—go far beyond personal expression: they touch on the life we hold in common. I’ve never killed an elk, for example, much less helped to skin one, but Goodtimes has—and what he shares about the experience (or through it) is a genuine revelation:

SKINNING THE ELK

“There’s a whole lot of life in these animals,”
George nods, almost lie a prayer
as I hold the hoofed leg
steady for the knife,
mist rising from the gutted belly,
skin still warm.
Tempered steel peels back
thick hide. Fur.
The dark meat of the interior.
Secret organs slide steaming into full moonlight
on the bed of Greenbank’s battered pickup.
I can stop peering
into the glazed crystal
of those antlered eyes.
Two perfect rivets
welded to the girder of that
skeletal moment when
the bullet’s magic
cut life short.
Later,
after the carcass is hung
in a cottonwood tree,
I go inside to wash my hands.
But the blood won’t come off.
There’s no mistake.
I am marked for life.
I wear the elk’s tattoo,
as its meat becomes my meat
& its blood stains my blood.
Spirit leaping
from shape to shape.

Nothing here of “liberal guilt,” no Disney-fication of the animal, only a deep and honestly inspiring respect for the fleshly presence of the sacred.

La Alameda Press has done a fine job of honoring the art of Art Goodtimes, in part with its beautiful book design, in part by providing space for both a prefatory “Invocation” by Dolores LaChapelle (which correctly places in the tradition exemplified by Gary Snyder) and for Goodtimes’s own detailed commentaries on nearly every poem in the book. (I hasten to add that these are not like Eliot’s erudite but coy notes to “The Waste Land”; they are genuinely helpful, expansive and intriguing, as if the poet were engaged in conversation with the reader.) As If the World Really Mattered is a performance no lover of poetry should miss.

AVAILABLE NOW

As If the World Really Mattered
Poems
Art Goodtimes
120 pages • 1-888809-49-3• 978-1-888809-49-7 • $14.00

Art Goodtimes is legendary along the Sourthern Rockies as poet, performer, ritualist, Rainbow Tribe and Green Party activist. In her introduction, “deep ecologist” Dolores LaChapelle describes him as part of the bardic tradition “which shows us how nature and human consciousness are but different aspects of one consciousness. Bards put mind and body together within the whole of nature.” In As If the World Really Mattered, we find poems which joyfully expound on the natural world and our relationship to it. Lyrical but root essential, Goodtimes speaks as one of the ancient storytellers—wise and sly. These poems could have been sung underground in the caves of Lascaux or atop a rock in a sacred grove. Political at heart, Goodtimes opposes the alienation of industrial culture from our interdependent life on earth. Much of his work has only been published in chapbooks, broadsides, “bundles,” and various ephemera, this is his first major collection.

“Poet Tree, as my friend Kush would say, with all its rich history/herstory, springs from storytelling. It is an art that allows us humans to speak, not just for ourselves but for the world around us in all its illusive facets — poor matchstick, poppycock, immortal diamond. For me, poetry’s simplicite’ is its charm. No techno gimmicks, celluloid tricks. No dazzling mechanical arrays. Just voice —expressed as language, that tantalizingly accessible chameleon whose shape runs the gamut from the mundane to the divine, from the idiotic to the elegant.” —from the author’s Preface.

If you’ve ever heard Art Goodtimes in full voice, you can bring that resounding onto these pages. If this is your first Artful moment, which I doubt since everybody knows Art, you’re in for delight. The names Blake, Hopkins, and Snyder come to mind, and the mind here is a vast outdoors of heart-intellect. I read the notes and Intro first because I couldn’t resist. I emerge from the attendant poems under the influence, my consciousness lifted to places I needed to go, big time, thanks to Goodtimes.
—Joan Logghe

Poet, shaman, artist and activist, Art Goodtimes gives us poems that are precise and generous and true. They sing and bring us new marvels of understanding. Some poets work inside the tradition, others outside. Art Goodtimes is one of those rare maker poets that help define a fresh, evolving tradition. These are songs of Earth and our human condition that lift as they illuminate. They serve a larger purpose: the encounter of the real, the sacred and the moment. In the splendid mess we call “human,” Art Goodtimes catches the heart-wood we all need. He gives voice and song and poem to the wilderness of possibility rising. He reinvents and makes it new. You are holding poems of authentic engagement. Goodtimes knows a growing thing when he feels it, and has the skill to help it grow into your ear and heart and mind.
—Jack Mueller

Huzzah! Important to have Art Goodtimes’ collected work elegantly in hand—an ecstatic basket of intricate, ambidextrous poems! His place-passionate poetry roars in on a polyphonic resonant frequency—bold harmonics, lit by fierce, tender intelligence, reverb con brio. This is audacious, plumed, lucid, and lyrical wildmind writing shaped by uplift and running strong as snowmelt. These are poems that praise and rail and shimmer; ancient & au courant, erudite and faithful; re-voicing the broken, disappeared and forgotten. All honors to Art Goodtimes, one of our great bardic rememberers, singer of the San Juan songlines, peaceforger, heroic worker bee, potato farmer, whose poetry most definitely matters.
—Judyth Hill

Some books tell us what we don’t know; this book reminds us of what we may have forgotten or come to ignore, the mystery of deep current hinted at by a slow river’s surface. Art Goodtimes’ poems “plunge their green thumbs into / the plundered soil of the interior landscape” with grace and flashing color, the lyric valuables of a pied bard piping us back into the moment so we become “the flow reinhabiting the rock.” Go ahead, delight yourself: read this book.
—Chris Ransick

Poet, journalist and third-term Green county commissioner, Art Goodtimes is a former poetry editor for Earth First! Journal and Wild Earth. He served as poet-in- residence for the annual Telluride Mushroom Festival for 25 years and continues as founder/director of the annual Talking Gourds poetry gatherings.He's lives near Norwood on Wright's Mesa at the western edge of the San Juans with his wife and children.

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Home Among the Swinging Stars
The Collected Poems of Jaime de Angulo
edited by Stefan Hyner
176 pages • 1-888809-47-7 • $18.00

Jaime de Angulo (1887-1950) was born in Paris of Spanish parents. He came to America in 1905, found work as a cowboy and ended up in San Francisco the day before the Great Earthquake in 1906. A picaresque life followed as a homesteader in Big Sur, medical doctor, psychologist, renowned linguist, and novelist. As a linguist, de Angulo contributed to the knowledge of many Northern Californian languages, as well ethnomusicological investigations. He lived among the tribes he studied and tried to become integrated into their daily lives. Much of his life and work exemplifies his recognition of the trickster wisdom in their native “coyote tales.” Invited by Mabel Dodge Luhan to visit Taos, he turned out to be a vivid chapter in her artistic circle. Brilliant and eccentric, Ezra Pound called him "the American Ovid." Bohemian to the core, he was friend and colleague to poets, composers, and scholars such as Harry Partch, Henry Miller, Robinson Jeffers, Henry Cowell, Franz Boas, Carl Jung, D.H. Lawrence, and many others. Renderings of Pit River lore in his book Indian Tales had a distinct influence on Beat literature, especially Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac. Besides prose, there exists an abundance of poetry which is collected in Home Among the Swinging Stars and includes the out-of-print Coyote’s Bones, versions of Shaman Songs, translations of Federico Garcia Lorca, and unpublished poems.

Edited by German poet and translator, Stefan Hyner who was educated at the Universities of Heidelberg and Taipei where he studied Sinology and East-Asian art history. Teaching and writing in Asia and America from 1981 to 1989, he visited China, Tibet, Korea, Japan, the United States, Mexico and Canada. Author of numerous poetry books and translations from Chinese and English, Hyner is currently at work on the archives of Italian Swiss artist/poet Franco Beltrametti (1937-1995).

This book is published with the cooperation of the Literary Estate of Jaime de Angulo.