Captain Poetry's Sucker Punch - A Guide to the Homeric Punkhole 1980-2012
released today!
Kenneth Warren has been working on this, along with other literary projects, including;
lectures, lecturing around the country and enjoying life since stepping from being the
director of the Lakewood Library for 25 years.
He has also continued publishing "House Organ" a quarterly letter of poetry and prose, which
he has published for the past nineteen years.
As Andrei Codrescu said of House Organ: HOUSE ORGAN, edited by Kenneth Warren, PO Box 466, Youngstown, NY 14174. We've probably said this before, but Ken Warren's cheap-looking garage band of a magazine is the best edited literary journal (outside of the very undertheground & online pub you're reading now) in all that arrives by mail and email here. And what arrives here is not inconsiderable, because fat quarterlies and skinny butterflies of despair arrive here regularly, like monarchs used to in Oaxaca. Number 77, Winter 2012, just blew in, and like all the ones before, I have devoured it. Sotère Torregian's anguished cosmic phonecall, Ed Sanders' elegiac but tonic Gloucester dinner, Paul Pines' meditation on symbolic incomprehension, Clayton Eshleman's grotesquely archaic yet tender ritual, even Lloyd Van Brunt's two-mllionth poem about being an Okie, and especially the savage and lovely ripping down from its pedestal of Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" by Roger Taus, all of these and more, are worth time. Yours and mine. Whereas the time we fritter on "technology," and we do fritter it, isn't worth the breath we waste on it. Or, in the words of the great Diane DiPrima, "Who is this crazy woman?" She is us, whoever we are.
Kenneth reads the "Squirrel for Breakfast" a story of Lakewood's black squirrels.
Ken reads one of many stories based in Lakewood with real people. This story was
"Still Lives: Kent and the Bloody Crucible of Civilization."
Steve Davis checks out another Lakewood story that features Mayor Summers called
"Pitching a Tent and a Golden Arch in the City of Homes."
Ken Warren and Steve Davis talk about Lakewood Observer issues.
A rare moment in these days, as the founders of the Lakewood Observer talk before
getting together formally. Ken came in from University of Maine, in Orono, Maine for this meeting.
From Blazevox.org
Called by Andrei Codrescu, “one of the few and great readers of American poetry,” Warren presents in this collection of more than one hundred essays an interactive history of poetic aspirations and punk protrusions. With a mytho-poetic, archetypal way of reading community, music, and poetry, Warren is a provocative exegete of humanity's typological inheritance. From Wrestlemania to the Cosmic Ethiopian King, from The Residents to Simon Weil, Warren has organized his criticism into four sections, including: Semiotic Sobriety, about the manipulations of language, money, music, property, and state power that squeezed the poetic mind into a punkhole dug by Baby Boomers during the Age of Reagan; Archaic Sexuality, analyzing the lunar circuits and somatic-bio rhythms that pulled poets toward chthonic depth; Alchemical Precision, in which he explores an Arcanum of poets ranging from Objectivists to the Western Occult; and Phamacological Utopia, in which he pays tribute to Charles Olson, A Curriculum of the Soul, Jack Clarke, and other poets of intuitive genius. The book covers the best of Cleveland’s underground bands, including Pere Ubu, Home and Garden,, The Floyd Band, and The Mice. The Dead Kennedys, The Residents, and Johnny Thunders are represented as well. There are essays on Beat poets Gregory Corso, Bob Kaufman, Jack Kerouac, Peter Orlovsky, and Ray Bremser. Other poets considered are: Kathy Acker, David Antin, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Robin Blaser, Richard Blevins, John Cage, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Sharon Doubiago, Robert Duncan, Larry Eigner, Stephen Ellis, Clayton Eshleman, Richard Grossinger, Jack Hirschman, Susan Howe, Lawrence Joseph, Yusef Komunykaa, d.a. levy, Lyn Lifshin, Harold Norse, Ed Sanders, Hugh Seidman, Gilbert Sorrentino, Stacy Szymaszek, Tod Thilleman, Anne Waldman, Diane Ward, Lewis Warsh, John Wieners, and many more.
Also featuring St. James Catholic Church, St. Paul's the Detroit Avenue Chow Line©, and
many, many other Lakewood based stories.
You can purchase the book online at: http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/news/captain-poetry%E2%80%99s-sucker-punch-a-guide-to-the-homeric-punkhole-1980%E2%80%932012-by-kenneth-warren-now-available-83/
and signed copies through the Lakewood Observer and at our book signing party.
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