Charles Plymell
Encyclopedia
Charles Plymell is a poet, novelist, and small press publisher. Plymell has been published widely, collaborated with, and published many poets, writers, and artists, including principals of the Beat Generation
.
He was a "hipster" in Kansas in 1950s subculture, and became involved with the Beat Generation
in San Francisco, where he shared a house with Allen Ginsberg
and Neal Cassady
in the early 1960s. Plymell spent important, memorable times with Ginsberg, Cassady, and William S. Burroughs
, who wrote introductions to his work. He visited with Ginsberg and Burroughs in Lawrence the last time they saw each other, and in New York City with Jack Kerouac
and Ginsberg the last time they saw each other.
He has published, printed, and designed many underground magazines and books with his wife Pamela Beach, a namesake in avant-garde
publishing. He published Ray Bremser
and Herbert Huncke
, whom he identified with from the hipster 1950s. He was influential in the underground comix
scene, first printing Zap Comix
artists such as Robert Crumb
and S. Clay Wilson
, whom he first published in Lawrence, Kansas
.
Plymell received a citation for being a distinguished poet by Governor Joan Finney
of Kansas and was cited in the 1976 World Book Encyclopedia
as a most promising poet.
, where Charley was born April 26, "in a converted chicken shed built to protect us from the black dust storms that had long covered the once thriving Plymell stage lines a few miles away. My mother had to put wet rags over our faces so we could breathe. When she wasn't busy with us, she was gathering cactus and shooting jackrabbits ("Hoover steaks") to feed us. In my poetry, I speak of the madness that this desperation could, in frailer women evoke, and of seeing in a Washington, D.C., gourmet market a half-century later the kind of cactus she had gathered."
Plymell performed Peyote
rituals in Kansas in the 1950s and K.C. Jazz Benzedrine
scenes. Allen Ginsberg
credited him for inventing the Wichita Vortex. Plymell moved to a quiet Russian neighborhood, rented a flat on the corner of Haight and Ashbury in 1962, and watched kids appear one by one, playing sitars, smoking reefer
, ingesting Sandoz
, Owsley tabs and Mescaline
.
In 1963, Neal Cassady
and Allen Ginsberg
moved in with Plymell at 1403 Gough Street, and had a party where Beats
met Hippies. Ginsberg also said Plymell was the first to play Bob Dylan
for him at Gough Street.
Plymell made experimental films which were accepted at the Ann Arbor Film Festival
, and collages which were exhibited on the black walls of the Batman Gallery, along with works by Bruce Conner
and Plymell's friend from his Wichita days, Bob Branaman. Plymell met Billy (Batman) Jahrmarkt, who gave Plymell his classic 1952 MGTD Roadster.
Plymell had a profound impact on underground comix
by printing the first issue of Zap Comix
on his printing press in San Francisco in 1968, with Don Donahue
assisting (who would soon after take over his Multilith 1250). A few months earlier, Plymell printed a "lifted" R. Crumb "Head Comix" page from Yarrowstalks #2 in his tabloid newspaper The Last Times
before he actually met Crumb. (Plymell also published perhaps the second underground comic book ever, Bob Branaman's Robert Ronnie Branaman in 1963.)
Later, Plymell and his wife Pam traveled to Cherry Valley, New York
, to visit Allen Ginsberg's farm, and moved into the village. There they founded Cherry Valley Editions to print a series of books by William S. Burroughs
, Herbert Huncke
, Robert Peters
, Dick McBride
, and others, including Plymell's own work, that are now out of print and rare. Jazz pianist Paul Bley
moved to Cherry Valley at Plymell's suggestion and bought an old building once owned by Samuel Morse from Plymell.
Plymell underwent triple heart bypass surgery at the end of January 2009.
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
.
He was a "hipster" in Kansas in 1950s subculture, and became involved with the Beat Generation
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
in San Francisco, where he shared a house with Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
and Neal Cassady
Neal Cassady
Neal Leon Cassady was a major figure of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic movement of the 1960s. He served as the model for the character Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road....
in the early 1960s. Plymell spent important, memorable times with Ginsberg, Cassady, and William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
, who wrote introductions to his work. He visited with Ginsberg and Burroughs in Lawrence the last time they saw each other, and in New York City with Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
and Ginsberg the last time they saw each other.
He has published, printed, and designed many underground magazines and books with his wife Pamela Beach, a namesake in avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
publishing. He published Ray Bremser
Ray Bremser
Ray Bremser was an American poet.Bremser was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. When he was 17 he went AWOL from the United States Air Force and was briefly imprisoned. The next year he was sent to Bordenstown Reformatory for 6 years for armed robbery...
and Herbert Huncke
Herbert Huncke
Herbert Edwin Huncke was a writer and poet, and active participant in a number of emerging cultural, social and aesthetic movements of the 20th century in America...
, whom he identified with from the hipster 1950s. He was influential in the underground comix
Underground comix
Underground comix are small press or self-published comic books which are often socially relevant or satirical in nature. They differ from mainstream comics in depicting content forbidden to mainstream publications by the Comics Code Authority, including explicit drug use, sexuality and violence...
scene, first printing Zap Comix
Zap Comix
Zap Comix is the best-known and one of the most popular of the underground comics that emerged as part of the youth counterculture of the late 1960s. While not believed to be the first underground comic to have been published, Zap is considered to mark the beginning of the "underground comix"...
artists such as Robert Crumb
Robert Crumb
Robert Dennis Crumb —known as Robert Crumb and R. Crumb—is an American artist, illustrator, and musician recognized for the distinctive style of his drawings and his critical, satirical, subversive view of the American mainstream.Crumb was a founder of the underground comix movement and is regarded...
and S. Clay Wilson
S. Clay Wilson
S. Clay Wilson is an American underground cartoonist and central figure in the underground comix movement. Wilson is known for aggressively violent and sexually explicit panoramas of "lowlife," often depicting the wild escapades of pirates and bikers. He was an early contributor to Zap Comix,...
, whom he first published in Lawrence, Kansas
Lawrence, Kansas
Lawrence is the sixth largest city in the U.S. State of Kansas and the county seat of Douglas County. Located in northeastern Kansas, Lawrence is the anchor city of the Lawrence, Kansas, Metropolitan Statistical Area, which encompasses all of Douglas County...
.
Plymell received a citation for being a distinguished poet by Governor Joan Finney
Joan Finney
Joan Finney , served as the 42nd Governor of Kansas from 1991 to 1995.She was born Joan Marie McInroy in Topeka, Kansas, the daughter of Leonard and Mary Sands McInroy. She graduated from high school in Manhattan, Kansas in 1942. In 1957, she married Spencer Finney, Jr...
of Kansas and was cited in the 1976 World Book Encyclopedia
World Book Encyclopedia
The World Book Encyclopedia is an encyclopedia published in the United States. It is self-described as "the number-one selling print encyclopedia in the world." The encyclopedia is designed to cover major areas of knowledge uniformly, but it shows particular strength in scientific, technical, and...
as a most promising poet.
Biography
In 1935, Charley Plymell's father took his family to Holcomb, KansasHolcomb, Kansas
Holcomb is a city in Finney County, Kansas, United States. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 2,094.-History:Holcomb is known for the murders of four members of the Herbert W. Clutter family, an incident which formed the basis of the Truman Capote book In Cold Blood.-Geography:Holcomb...
, where Charley was born April 26, "in a converted chicken shed built to protect us from the black dust storms that had long covered the once thriving Plymell stage lines a few miles away. My mother had to put wet rags over our faces so we could breathe. When she wasn't busy with us, she was gathering cactus and shooting jackrabbits ("Hoover steaks") to feed us. In my poetry, I speak of the madness that this desperation could, in frailer women evoke, and of seeing in a Washington, D.C., gourmet market a half-century later the kind of cactus she had gathered."
Plymell performed Peyote
Peyote
Lophophora williamsii , better known by its common name Peyote , is a small, spineless cactus with psychoactive alkaloids, particularly mescaline.It is native to southwestern Texas and Mexico...
rituals in Kansas in the 1950s and K.C. Jazz Benzedrine
Benzedrine
Benzedrine is the trade name of the racemic mixture of amphetamine . It was marketed under this brandname in the USA by Smith, Kline & French in the form of inhalers, starting in 1928...
scenes. Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
credited him for inventing the Wichita Vortex. Plymell moved to a quiet Russian neighborhood, rented a flat on the corner of Haight and Ashbury in 1962, and watched kids appear one by one, playing sitars, smoking reefer
Reefer
- Transportation :* Reefer ship, a refrigerated ship* Refrigerator car, a refrigerated railroad boxcar * Refrigerated van, a refrigerated railway wagon * Refrigerated container, used for intermodal cargo...
, ingesting Sandoz
Sandoz
Founded in 2003, Sandoz presently is the generic drug subsidiary of Novartis, a multinational pharmaceutical company. The company develops, manufactures and markets generic drugs as well as pharmaceutical and biotechnological active ingredients....
, Owsley tabs and Mescaline
Mescaline
Mescaline or 3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamine is a naturally occurring psychedelic alkaloid of the phenethylamine class used mainly as an entheogen....
.
In 1963, Neal Cassady
Neal Cassady
Neal Leon Cassady was a major figure of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic movement of the 1960s. He served as the model for the character Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road....
and Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
moved in with Plymell at 1403 Gough Street, and had a party where Beats
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
met Hippies. Ginsberg also said Plymell was the first to play Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
for him at Gough Street.
Plymell made experimental films which were accepted at the Ann Arbor Film Festival
Ann Arbor Film Festival
The Ann Arbor Film Festival is an annual film festival held in Ann Arbor in the U.S. state of Michigan. Established in 1963, it is the third-oldest film festival in North America ; and the oldest experimental film festival...
, and collages which were exhibited on the black walls of the Batman Gallery, along with works by Bruce Conner
Bruce Conner
Bruce Conner was an American artist renowned for his work in assemblage, film, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography, among other disciplines.-Early life:...
and Plymell's friend from his Wichita days, Bob Branaman. Plymell met Billy (Batman) Jahrmarkt, who gave Plymell his classic 1952 MGTD Roadster.
Plymell had a profound impact on underground comix
Underground comix
Underground comix are small press or self-published comic books which are often socially relevant or satirical in nature. They differ from mainstream comics in depicting content forbidden to mainstream publications by the Comics Code Authority, including explicit drug use, sexuality and violence...
by printing the first issue of Zap Comix
Zap Comix
Zap Comix is the best-known and one of the most popular of the underground comics that emerged as part of the youth counterculture of the late 1960s. While not believed to be the first underground comic to have been published, Zap is considered to mark the beginning of the "underground comix"...
on his printing press in San Francisco in 1968, with Don Donahue
Don Donahue
Don Donahue was a comic book publisher, operating under the name Apex Novelties, one of the instigators of the underground comix movement in the 1960s....
assisting (who would soon after take over his Multilith 1250). A few months earlier, Plymell printed a "lifted" R. Crumb "Head Comix" page from Yarrowstalks #2 in his tabloid newspaper The Last Times
The Last Times
The Last Times was a tabloid underground newspaper published in San Francisco, California in 1967 by beatnik poet and printer Charles Plymell...
before he actually met Crumb. (Plymell also published perhaps the second underground comic book ever, Bob Branaman's Robert Ronnie Branaman in 1963.)
Later, Plymell and his wife Pam traveled to Cherry Valley, New York
Cherry Valley, New York
Cherry Valley, New York is the name of two locations in Otsego County, New York:*Cherry Valley , New York*Cherry Valley , New York...
, to visit Allen Ginsberg's farm, and moved into the village. There they founded Cherry Valley Editions to print a series of books by William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
, Herbert Huncke
Herbert Huncke
Herbert Edwin Huncke was a writer and poet, and active participant in a number of emerging cultural, social and aesthetic movements of the 20th century in America...
, Robert Peters
Robert Peters
Robert Louis Peters is a poet, critic, scholar, playwright, editor, and actor born in an impoverished rural area of northern Wisconsin in 1924. He holds a Ph.D in Victorian literature. His poetry career began in 1967 when his young son Richard died unexpectedly of spinal meningitis...
, Dick McBride
Dick McBride (poet)
Richard William McBride is an American beat poet, playwright and novelist. He worked at City Lights Booksellers & Publishers from 1954-1969.-Life:...
, and others, including Plymell's own work, that are now out of print and rare. Jazz pianist Paul Bley
Paul Bley
Paul Bley, CM is a pianist known for his contributions to the free jazz movement of the 1960s as well as his innovations and influence on trio playing.-Biography:...
moved to Cherry Valley at Plymell's suggestion and bought an old building once owned by Samuel Morse from Plymell.
Plymell underwent triple heart bypass surgery at the end of January 2009.
Books
- Apocalypse Rose, Dave Haselwood Books, San Francisco, CA, 1967.
- Neon Poems, Atom Mind Publications, Syracuse, NY, 1970.
- The Last of the Moccasins, City Lights Books, San Francisco, CA, 1971; Mother Road Publications, 1996.
- Moccasins Ein Beat-Kaleidoskop, Europaverlag, Vienna, Austria, 1980.
- Over the Stage of Kansas, Telephone Books, NYC, 1973.
- The Trashing of America, Kulchur Foundation, NYC, 1975.
- Blue Orchid Numero Uno, Telephone Books, 1977.
- Panik in Dodge City, Expanded Media Editions, Bonn, W. Germany, 1981.
- Forever Wider, 1954–1984, Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ, 1985.
- Was Poe Afraid?, Bogg Publications, Arlington, VA, 1990.
- Hand on the Doorknob, Water Row Books, Sudbury, MA, 2000
- Eat Not Thy Mind, Eye Books Ecstatic Peace Library, Florance, MA, 2010
- Found & Lost Magascene, Vol. 1 / No. 0 & 1 [Contributor], Back Room/Temple of Man, 2010
Anthologies
- Mark in Time, New Glide Publications, San Francisco, CA, 1971.
- And The Roses Race Around Her Name, Stonehill, NYC, 1975.
- Turpentin on the Rocks, Maro Verlag, Augsburg, W. Germany, 1978.
- A Quois Bon, Le Soleil Noir, Paris, France, 1978.
- Planet Detroit, Anthology of Urban Poetry, Detroit, MI, 1983.
- Second Coming Anthology, Second Coming Press, San Francisco, CA, 1984.
- The World, Crown Publishers, 1991.
- Editors' Choice III, The Spirit That Moves Us, New York, 1992.
- The Age of Koestler, The Spirit of the Wind Press, Kalamazoo, MI, 1990.
External links
- Cherry Valley Edition Website
- Charles Plymell, from Kansa, Land of the Wind People, Autobiographical sketch, 12/02
- Charley Plymell, from Last of the Moccassins, Vortex excerpt
- Charles Plymell Collection, Wichita State University Libraries
- Charley Plymell portrait by Gerard Malanga, May 2010
- Beat Generation Poets & Artists, City Lights bookstore, August 1963, San Francisco; Photograph by Charley Plymell includes Pat Cassidy, Philip Whalen, Robert Branaman, Alan Russo, Ann Buchanan, Bob Kaufman, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti