Charles Plymell was born on the high plains in Finney County, Kansas in 1935 in a converted chicken coop during one of the blackest dust storms of that period. His father was a cowboy born in the Oklahoma Territory, his mother of Plains Indian descent. He completed his freshman year in high school and dropped out. 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. He later attended Wichita State for a few years, not obtaining a degree.While working on the docks in San Francisco, he was recruited by students and the founder of The Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars to earn an Masters in Writing. He then 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; and other items including a collage book by 12 Gauge Press are listed in collectors' catalogues such as Water Row, Ken Lopez, or on Bibliofind or e bay.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. He 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.
Myspace Layouts - Myspace Editor - Image Hosting
"Through introspection, criticism, social
comment and idylls, this work serves notice
that Plymell is ready to receive his due. Few
poets today so consistently mine the depths of
our shared consciousness in so many areas of
concern."
John Roe, Wichita Eagle-Beacon"The book is hilariously funny and the best
evocation of the Beat Scene since Kerouac. I
think Last of the Moccasins will become a
minor classic among those who are interested
in what really happened in those days that
seem so long ago."
Jerry Kamastra, The San Francisco Chronicle"Spun out of that vortex which is Wichita,
Charley Plymell reached San Francisco on that
road that ran thru the astonished heart of
America, riding his chopper (at least in my
imagined midnight cowboy movie of
him)—Kansasmadman's dream, eternity in the
groin—Neal Cassady, down, Kerouac down,
all down the Great American Drain—and the
vision goes on—"
Lawrence Ferlinghetti"Plymell and his friends inventing the Wichita
Vortexcontributeto a tradition stretching back
from Lamantia thru Sherwood Anderson to
Poe and earlier American vibration artists of
those provinces. I interpret his statement as
prophetic fragment memory of innocence,
visionary great fear, * Warm glimmer: a new
species?"
Allen Ginsberg"From the first paragraph the reader is drawn
into the writer's space. Plymell has as much in
depth to say about death as Hemingway did
and a lot more to say about in terms of the
present generation stillborn into a world that
can offer nothing...death from an OD...Death
from a plane crash...Computerized death...He
is saying a lot about life which has become the
chewed over leftovers of death...a manifesto
of ashes' A very readable manifesto."
William Burroughs"The book made me think of both: Tropic of
Cancer and Naked Lunch with maybe a little of
Castle to Castle for good measure which is to
say that you've got a lot going for you in your
own voice. Keep 'em flying."
Tom Wolfe"Your Last of the Moccasins was circulating
among the Yorkshire poets, a single copy
exchanging hands, working its way through the
City Lights sub-culture and has become the
centre of a cult in its own right."
Andrew Darlington, Ludds Mill, West Yorks,
England"It's amazing. I had not the slightest idea of
the speed depth and strangeness of our curious
relationship in Kansas space hallucinatory
phantasmagoria...of Kansas light...on barques
that are more curious than any from outer
space...that dip below and above horizons not
mapped...nor known in linear verbalism. Your
novel is wonderful."
Meridel LeSueur"Charles Plymell has already established
himself as an important young American poet
with his two volumes of verse, Apocalypse
Rose and Neon Poems. In Last of the
Moccasins he has written the most powerful
'Down and Out' prose since Algren &
Kerouac."
Reed Fry, Nola Express"Plymell was born in Kansas and over a dozen
years ago was a member of that incipient and
later to be influential cultural circle which
subsequently migrated en masse to San
Francisco."
George Kimball, The Boston Phoenix"But Plymell writes a more speculative
novel—or 'memoir' if you like—than On the
Road. It's more poetictoo; honest as a caustic:
meticulously worded, designed with the pace
and rhythm of a master potter pedaling his
wheel. Joyce's epiphanies are instants of
entelechy: while they don't cause the future
they do make sense of what happens
continually. Ezra Pound's Cantos also observe
this principle repeating themes in various
disconnected contexts. It's a theory Plymell
adopts to free his book from mechanicaltime."
Charles Dawe, The San Francisco Fault"Moccasins becomes a case-book/textbook,
modelof contemporary stylethat Americanizes
Joyce,Genet, Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet and even
stylistically 'explicates' the whole dizzying
language-stance of Naked Lunch Burroughs.
The only 'beat' novels that even approach the
stylistic stature of The Last of the Moccasins
are, in fact, Naked Lunch and (to a much lesser
degree) Kerouac's Doctor Sax. You find a
little bit of this in Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs,
but never anywhere any better—the use of
bringing the whole English word-hoard to bear
in one multiple-associated semantic barrage,
anthropomorphically expanding a place into
the dimensions of mythical super-person."
Hugh Fox, MOTA"By 1964 a new generation had arrived in San
Francisco and made City Lights their
rendezvous . . . and Charles Plymell, a jazzy
poet from Kansas, onetime editor of Now, who
did sadistic collages. The two Bulletins from
Nothing and Grist from Wichita give the
prevailing mood ... Funk in San Francisco,
rather different from Ed Sanders's blithe
scatology and the total sexual gluttony of
Tangier, has at least something to do with the
toughspirit that Kansas give to the West Coast.
(JeffNuttall, Bomb Culture, DelacortePress, 1968
COMMENTS ON MOCCASINS, Europa
Verlag, Vienna"A very topical book which in years to come
may acquire the status of a vital historical
document·"
STEIRISHES LITERATUREMAGAZIN,
Austria"Notations of an individual experience, but a
transcending scope and significance, dealing
with a time of fundamental change...dazzling
in its deadpan humor, excessive in its
metaphors, honestly felt, passionate in its
hopes and expectations."
TIP MAGAZINE, Berlin"Stark realism, visionary exuberance, and a
surprising touch of melancholy. An honest,
gripping document of post-beat bohemian
life."
ARBEITER-ZEITUNG, Vienna
"Snapshots from the lives of workers and
intellectuals, artists and victims of a sick
society, drug addicts and alcoholics, madmen
and visionaries...always graphic and to the
point ... images poetic and brutal, descriptions
of ecstatic experience and existential tristesse
... book traces 20 years of its protagonists'
personal history in a language that knows
neither taboos or restrictions."
DER ABEND, Berlin"Plymell is a lineal successor to Burroughs,
Kerouac and Ginsberg and he proves that the
literature of the Beat Generation hasn't lost
anything of its freshness and unfailing honesty
in talking about personal experience and self-
assessment. A kaleidoscope of phantasies, a
delirium of words jelling into a sociological
essay impressive in its outspokenness."
MITTEILUNGSBLATT FUR
OFFENTLICHE BIBLIOTHEKEN (Library
Journal) West GermanyWeb pages:
www.cveditions.com
