Eddie Woods
Encyclopedia
For the English footballer see Eddie Woods (footballer)
Eddie Woods (footballer)
Eddie Woods is an English former professional footballer. A striker, Woods joined Newport County in 1974 from Bristol City. Woods went on to make 151 appearances for the club, scoring 55 goals. In 1979 he joined Bridgend Town.-References:...



Eddie Woods (born May 8, 1940 in New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

) is a poet/prose writer, editor and publisher who lived and traveled in various parts of the world, both East and West, before eventually settling in Amsterdam, Holland, where in 1978 he started Ins & Outs magazine and two years later founded Ins & Outs Press
Ins & Outs Press
Ins & Outs Press is a small English-language publisher with international connections based in Amsterdam and registered in the Netherlands as a cultural foundation, or stichting. It was started in 1980 by Eddie Woods, Jane Harvey, and Henk van der Does as a natural extension of Ins & Outs magazine,...

.

According to Stanford University Libraries, which house Woods’ extensive archive: “In his role as a cultural impresario and artistic entrepreneur, Eddie Woods... is an important presence, both in American expatriate circles and among European avant-gardists, especially Dutch and Italian. Woods’ promotional activities made him, in short, a crucial center to the movement, and his archive documents his close connections with its leading figures...”

Early to middle years

After not quite finishing high school (he later took a number of university credit courses, but is essentially an autodidact), Woods worked for two years in Manhattan as a first-generation computer programmer, until in 1960 (“didn’t want to get my fingernails dirty as an Army draftee” but also to finally see Europe) he joined the Air Force for a four-year stint, three years of which were spent in Germany. Honorably discharged following a tour in Wyoming (“it was four years of guerrilla warfare, me against them, ending in a draw”), he returned to Germany, where he married twice, fathered two daughters, and successfully sold encyclopedias to US military personnel for five years, the entire time continuing to write poems, essays and short stories (a calling he first discovered at age 15).

In late 1968, Woods made his first journey to the East, remaining there until early 1973. During that time he was variously a restaurant manager in Hong Kong, a ‘kept man’ in Singapore (by a Chinese drag-queen prostitute), a features writer for the Bangkok Post (Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs...

, with whom Woods hung out and traveled, through Malaysia to Singapore and back, was but one of many celebrated personalities he encountered at that time), a stringer for both The New York Times and ABC Radio News, a disc jockey (Radio Thailand English-language service), owner of a gay bar (in Pattaya, Thailand) and the managing director of Dateline Asia (a Bangkok-based features service he launched with three other journalists). In Bali, where he stayed for six months, he was known as ‘ Durian
Durian
The durian is the fruit of several tree species belonging to the genus Durio and the Malvaceae family . Widely known and revered in southeast Asia as the "king of fruits", the durian is distinctive for its large size, unique odour, and formidable thorn-covered husk...

 Ed’ and ‘Mushroom Ed’ (having developed a unique method of liquefying psilocybin mushrooms and rendering them toxin-free). He was additionally in Laos, Okinawa, the Philippines, Macao, Java and Japan. Before returning to Europe, he explored much of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and spent several months as a lay devotee at the Theravada Buddhist Island Hermitage.

In June 1973, in London, he met Jane Harvey, with whom he would years later start Ins & Outs magazine. Shortly thereafter, in the midst of doing a variety of odd jobs for Gentle Ghost, an alternative work agency, Woods authored nearly 30 articles for Edward de Bono’s
Edward de Bono
Edward de Bono is a physician, author, inventor, and consultant. He originated the term lateral thinking, wrote a best selling book Six Thinking Hats and is a proponent of the deliberate teaching of thinking as a subject in schools.- Biography :Edward Charles Francis Publius de Bono was born to...

 Eureka! An Illustrated History of Inventions from the Wheel to the Computer. He and Harvey then traveled overland to Asia, cycled across large stretches of India, were journalists for the Tehran Journal (Woods as sports and night editor, Harvey as business and local news editor), and crisscrossed much of the sub-continent and beyond. 1976 saw Woods visit the USA for the first time in 12 years, where he wrote articles for the Berkeley Barb
Berkeley Barb
The Berkeley Barb was a weekly underground newspaper that was published in Berkeley, California, from 1965 to 1980. It was one of the first and most influential of the counterculture newspapers of the late 1960s, covering such subjects as the anti-war and civil-rights movements as well as the...

, published stories and poems in The Bystander, Odalisque, etc., and then hitchhiked across the South and up to New York. A two-year stretch back in London was exceptionally prolific: numerous poems and short stories, publication in Libertine, Iron magazine and other literary periodicals, as well as a series of personality profiles and features pieces for International Times
International Times
International Times was an underground newspaper founded in London in 1966. Editors included Hoppy, David Mairowitz, Pete Stansill, Barry Miles, Jim Haynes and playwright Tom McGrath...

 (IT), the underground newspaper whose Amsterdam editor he would become during the early 1980s.

Ins & Outs years

After editing three issues of Ins & Outs magazine in 1978 (contributors included 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...

, with the first-ever publication of his Plutonian Ode, William Levy
William Levy
William Levy , known as the Talmudic Wizard of Amsterdam and Dr. Doo-Wop, is the author of such works as The Virgin Sperm Dancer, Wet Dreams, Certain Radio Speeches of Ezra Pound and Natural Jewboy....

, Ira Cohen
Ira Cohen
Ira Cohen was an American poet, publisher, photographer and filmmaker.Cohen lived in Morocco and in New York City in the 1960s, he was in Kathmandu in the 1970s and traveled the world in the 1980s, before returning to New York, where he spent the rest of his life...

, Rachel Pollack
Rachel Pollack
Rachel Pollack is an American science fiction author, comic book writer, and expert on divinatory tarot...

, Simon Vinkenoog
Simon Vinkenoog
Simon Vinkenoog was a Dutch poet and writer. He was the editor of the anthology Atonaal , which launched the Dutch "Fifties Movement"....

, Hans Plomp, Mel Clay, Heathcote Williams
Heathcote Williams
Heathcote Williams is an English poet, actor and award-winning playwright. He is also an intermittent painter, sculptor and long-time conjuror...

, Marc Morrel, and Woods himself; while among the magazine’s international readership, beginning with issue #1, was Henry Miller
Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...

), Woods and Harvey left Holland, passed through Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 and ended up in Barcelona. Ties to the Dutch capital were already too strong, however. In 1979 the couple (who by then were married, but separated in late 1981, while remaining the closest of friends and professional colleagues) rented an attic flat in the heart of Amsterdam’s red-light district and immediately got involved in publishing projects. Other World Poetry Newsletter, at once a historical evaluation of P78, the first One World Poetry festival (at which Woods performed, along with 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...

, Patti Smith
Patti Smith
Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith is an American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist, who became a highly influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses....

, et al.) and a scathing critique of organized literary events, penned by Woods under the pseudonym Woodstock Jones and published/internationally distributed by Ins & Outs Press
Ins & Outs Press
Ins & Outs Press is a small English-language publisher with international connections based in Amsterdam and registered in the Netherlands as a cultural foundation, or stichting. It was started in 1980 by Eddie Woods, Jane Harvey, and Henk van der Does as a natural extension of Ins & Outs magazine,...

, caused a minor storm not only in Amsterdam but all the way to San Francisco. (The Newsletter and its years-long aftermath are covered in Woods’ Soyo Benn: A Profile and A Brief History of Ins & Outs Press.)

Early in 1980, Woods, Harvey and the Dutch bookseller Henk van der Does formed the Ins & Outs Press
Ins & Outs Press
Ins & Outs Press is a small English-language publisher with international connections based in Amsterdam and registered in the Netherlands as a cultural foundation, or stichting. It was started in 1980 by Eddie Woods, Jane Harvey, and Henk van der Does as a natural extension of Ins & Outs magazine,...

 Foundation (known as a stichting in the Netherlands) and also opened the Ins & Outs Bookstore (with the latter continuing for two years; after which Van der Does started his own bookshop and Woods turned the ground floor of the six-story Ins & Outs building into a gallery-cum-performance space).

Ins & Outs magazine #4/5 was published in the summer of that year. Within its pages were Paul Bowles
Paul Bowles
Paul Frederic Bowles was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator.Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris...

, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers...

, Bert Schierbeek, Gerard Malanga
Gerard Malanga
Gerard Joseph Malanga is an American poet, photographer, filmmaker, curator and archivist.-Early life:Born in the Bronx, New York, Malanga graduated from the School of Industrial Art in Manhattan and attended Wagner College on Staten Island...

, Bob Kaufman
Bob Kaufman
Bob Kaufman , born Robert Garnell Kaufman, was an American Beat poet and surrealist inspired by jazz music. In France, where his poetry had a large following, he was known as the "American Rimbaud."-Biography:...

, Charles Henri Ford
Charles Henri Ford
Charles Henri Ford was an American poet, novelist, filmmaker, photographer, and collage artist best known for his editorship of the Surrealist magazine View in New York City, and as the partner of the artist Pavel Tchelitchew...

, Gregory Corso
Gregory Corso
Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers...

, Roberto Valenza, John Wilcock
John Wilcock
John Wilcock is a British journalist known for his work in the underground press, as well as his travel guide books....

, Steve Abbott, the photographers Diana Blok and Marlo Broekmans, Neeli Cherkovski
Neeli Cherkovski
Neeli Cherkovski: Neeli Cherkovski: Neeli Cherkovski: (born Nelson Cherry, 1945, Santa Monica, California, Cherkovski grew up in San Bernardino, California. Cherkovski has resided in San Francisco since 1975 where he is known as a poet and memoirist. In the 1970s he was a political consultant in...

 and many others. Further publications followed throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s: (Natural Jewboy by William Levy; Eddie Woods’ Sale or Return; an ambitious postcard series that included Ira Cohen’s famous Bandaged Poets; audio cassettes of live readings at Ins & Outs Press by Jack Micheline
Jack Micheline
Jack Micheline , born Harold Martin Silver, was an American painter and poet from the San Francisco Bay Area. His name is synonymous with street artists, underground writers, and "outlaw" poets...

 and Harold Norse
Harold Norse
Harold Norse was an American writer who created a body of work using the American idiom of everyday language and images. One of the expatriate artists of the Beat generation, Norse was widely published and anthologized.- Life :Born Harold Rosen to an unmarried Lithuanian Jewish immigrant in Brooklyn...

; limited-edition silkscreen prints by Kirke Wilson of Burroughs, Ginsberg, 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...

, Snuffie the Gangster Woof of Amsterdam, Xaviera Hollander and the ‘night mayor of Rotterdam’ Jules Deelder. After that the Press went into ‘suspended animation’ for more than a decade. Woods, who had secluded himself from 1987, reemerged in 1992 with a string of startling performances as ‘The Gangster Poet’ (North Sea Jazz Festival
North Sea Jazz Festival
The North Sea Jazz Festival is an annual jazz festival held each second weekend of July in the Netherlands at the Ahoy venue. It used to be in The Hague but since 2006 it has been held in Rotterdam...

, Zuiderstrand Festival, Crossing Border Festival, appearances with the Kali Quartet, etc.).

From 1995 through most of 1998, Woods organized monthly poetry-reading evenings at a small, working-class Amsterdam café that quickly became the literary talk of the town, written up in national newspapers and even featured on Dutch television. In the autumn of 1998, Woods relocated to Devonshire, England to live with Jenny Brookes, whom he had first met in India in 1975 but had not seen (prior to visiting her in May 1998) for 18 years. The relationship lasted for six years. Upon its collapse, Woods returned to Amsterdam and Ins & Outs Press resumed its publishing activities. Woods’ spoken-word CD Dangerous Precipice was released in 2004 and his book Tsunami of Love: A Poems Cycle (two long narrative poems and four shorter ones, chronicling ‘the rise and fall of an incredible love affair’) in 2005. The CD Tsunami of Love (Woods reciting the entire collection, with a special introduction added) appeared in August 2007.

In July 2009, Woods attended a major Burroughs symposium in Paris, NakedLunch@50, where he delivered his homage to Burroughs entitled "Thank God You're Not Eddie Woods!" and also participated in a special tribute to the old Beat Hotel
Beat Hotel
The Beat Hotel was a small, run-down hotel of 42 rooms at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur in the Latin Quarter of Paris, notable chiefly as a residence for members of the Beat poetry movement of the mid-20th century -Overview:...

 at 9 Rue Gît-le-Coeur, together with Jean-Jacques Lebel
Jean-Jacques Lebel
Jean-Jacques Lebel is a French artist, poet, poetry publisher, political activist and scholar born in Paris in 1936. He is known primarily for his work with Happenings, and as an art theory writer and art curator. He is the son of Robert Lebel, art critic and friend of Marcel Duchamp.-Life and...

, the poetess Nina Zivancevic, Scottish artist Elliot Rudie, and several others.

The Eddie Woods Archive was acquired by Stanford University in 2003, after he and the writer/radio disc jockey Bart Plantenga had worked for five years assembling it (with Woods regularly shuttling back and forth from England specifically for that purpose).

Quotes on Woods

“Ed Woods? / I call him the Gingko / slender and strange...” Ira Cohen. From his poem Honorable Discharge.

“Slim behind the desk, only a rush of hair / eddie woods, he’s got the goods...” Mel Clay, Ira Cohen, Ronald Sauer. From their Eddie Woods Memorial Poem.

“It would have been a much colder world without your poetry.” Plamen Arnaudov, poet, former New Delta Review poetry editor and Exquisite Corpse editorial assistant.

“Because it will not be content with a conventional language of expression, a profound love will produce a profound poetry, and it is precisely such poetry which Eddie Woods has achieved.” Richard Livermore, editor of Chanticleer Magazine (Edinburgh, Scotland), in his review of Tsunami of Love: A Poems Cycle.

External links

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