p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Stevie Smith, interesting. We’ve been in touch about the PGL thing, and thanks so much! ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. I figured that you had known Ed one way or another. Yes, David is a super champ to put together that book. Ed’s work really needs to be out there and living. ** Bill, Hi, B. The Paris Ass Book Fair, you know, it was nice. Cool atmosphere. Most of the people sharing/selling their zines and books and things are kind of all doing slight variations on the same thing: juxtaposing somewhat edgy photos of cute alterna-trendy guys in collection form, so there was a sameness, although always sweetly and enthusiastically intentioned. Some exceptions. My friend Florent does this quite outstanding queer zine called Congrats! and was there with a new issue. The best bookshop in Paris, After 8, was there with a lot of great books. A few other highlights. No excellent stories, but a pleasant thing. Oops, the tempo, the scrambling, but that’s exciting, but that’s easy for me to say. Awesome! ** Kai, Hi, Kai! Yeah, it’s a great, must-have book, I think. I’m hoping we’ll have the Berlin PGL thing locked down in the next several days. Waiting for date and confirmation. No, Jürgen Brüning had nothing to do with this film. It was produced by a French production company, Local Films. Jürgen produced our first film, ‘Like Cattle Towards Glow’, and that was the end of that. Bon Monday, man! ** Misanthrope, Great! You won’t be sorry if you get his book, trust me. So interesting about your phobias. I used to know someone who was deathly afraid of dolphins and whales. Even a drawing of them would give her a nervous breakdown. I think my only phobia is extreme heights, of being in outer space. Especially space walks. Just thinking about them can give me a panic attack. Whenever I’m watching a movie that takes place in outer space, I have to grip the arms of my chair, and I get cold chills and vertigo. I think that’s all, phobia-wise. That I can think of. Well, sweet deal about the doc appointment and the new doc. Great news, man! ** politekid, Oscar! Hey! So cool to see you! Zac and I were just talking about you and wondering how and what you’re doing the other day. Wait, reading in a bookshop is an infraction? What kind of … wow. Good riddance? Is that okay to say? You’re going to do till work at the Tate Modern? That does sound intense in a kind of energy-involving way, but the prospect does cause a level of excitement. Maybe I’m giving ‘Tate Modern’ too much coolness, but, yeah, me, I’m into that job of yours. If you remember, report on what it’s like. Because I’m interested and can’t quite imagine what that’ll be like. Oh, shit, yeah, do whatever to ward off depression. Don’t go there. That’s no good. I’ve had terrifying nightmares pretty much every night of my life, but the good thing is, I don’t remember them except for about a second after I wake up. Anyway, I seem to be okay (if, yeah, weird) despite that, if that’s any consultation. Great about the two new scripts! I mean, I’m me, but they sound fascinating, and, yeah, ideally the staging and props issues aren’t yours, for better or worse. Man, I hope one or both of those gets green lit when the time comes. When do you hear about the competition result, fingers ultra-crossed? And, wait, the sound installation text. That’s exciting. Where is the installation? How do I find the instagram advert? (I’m not on instagram, but I can peek). I have this idea that I’d like to get to London to see some stuff like the Kathy Acker retro and maybe the Charlie Fox curated shebang and, if so, maybe the timing will be apt for your thing too? Yeah, I wrote about art for a long time. I was, and I think still am, a Contributing Editor of Artforum, although I haven’t written for them in over a decade. Some of the art writing stuff is in this book of my essays/journalism called ‘Smothered in Hugs’, and the rest is in old issues of art magazines like Artforum, Parkett, and others. That’s very nice of the Cabinet guy — Martin? — to say. Man, really, so good to see you! Let me know more when you feel like it. Take good care, and I hope all those things-in-waiting blossom. Blossom? Yeah, why not, blossom! ** _Black_Acrylic, It’s a wonderful book. Worth pre-ordering. Nice about the serious progress on The Call’s public face. I’m only on Facebook, but I’ll try to remember to check the Twitter feed, or … isn’t there an easy way to share one’s Twitter feed on Facebook? I feel like people in my feed do that a fair amount? ** James, Hi. Saw your email in my box. I’ll get to it pronto. ** Jeffrey Coleman, Hi, Jeff! We just became friends on Facebook, which is odd because I thought we already were. Huh. Hope stuff’s way cool on your end. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Yeah, what’s that saying … ‘cross that bridge when I come to it’? America’s good at facile statements. Actually, the French are too. I don’t think I’ve seen Penny Lane’s films, but I’ll try to rectify that absence. ** Okay. I thought I would give all of you what I hope will be charming break of a post today. See you tomorrow.
‘I’d like to use this opportunity … to introduce you to a poet you’ve never heard of before. Ed Smith. A common enough name. There are a zillion Ed Smiths on Facebook—I gave up counting them once I reached one hundred. But this Ed Smith was no ordinary Ed Smith, let me assure you. He was born in Queens, New York, in 1957; his family moved to Southern California in 1959. He grew up in Downey (the hometown of Richard and Karen Carpenter) and attended Pomona College in Claremont for one academic year (1975-76). He then made his way to Los Angeles, Hollywood specifically, where he worked as a paralegal and for an independent record and video company, became involved in the punk rock lifestyle, then finally found his niche as a poet in the scene that centered around Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center in Venice, California, when Dennis Cooper ran the reading series there in the early eighties. The Beyond Baroque scene has sometimes been called “hip,” sometimes “infamous.” It was lively, that’s for sure. Other young poets who gravitated to the literary liveliness were Amy Gerstler, Bob Flanagan, Jack Skelley, and myself.
‘Ed published two books of poetry in his lifetime, both with Cold Calm Press: Fantasyworld in 1983 and Tim’s Bunnies in 1988. You’ll probably have trouble finding either of these titles—Cold Calm Press was a very small operation. Ed also published his work in Poetry Loves Poetry: An Anthology of Los Angeles Poets (Momentum Press, 1985) and in what Bruce Hainley calls “the most rambunctious publications of the day: Barney, Mirage, Santa Monica Review, and Shiny International [later just Shiny], a magazine for which he conducted interviews with artists Jim Isermann, Mike Kelley, and Chris Burden and eventually served as West Coast editor.” Publishing poems in rambunctious magazines does not pay the rent, so Ed worked as a typesetter, a movie ad copywriter, and a math tutor at a private school. He moved to New York City in the late nineties, married artist Mio Shirai, and founded Creative Systems Architecture, Inc. (CSAI), a consulting firm meant to help companies apply W. Edwards Deming’s principles of emergent intelligence to their organizations. (Sounds crackpot, but there’s something to it.) Sadly, Ed took his own life in 2005.
‘At first I didn’t care for Ed. I mistook his irreverence for disrespect. And maybe there was some jealousy. He was slightly younger than the rest of us in the Beyond Baroque group, cute (almost everyone was infatuated with him at some point), and punkish (he had, after all, come of age in the punk rock scene). I thought he could be obnoxious, a brat. But after I got sober (in 1984) and calmed down a bit (I’d been an uptight alcoholic, which kind of defeats the purpose), I became quite fond of him. Underneath the brash exterior was a very sweet, guileless young man. …
‘And what of his poems? Ed’s poetry was exactly like he was: playful, free of inhibition and decorum, troubling in just the right way. And wrought with intelligence, brilliance even, though on the surface they may seem apathetic to loftier poetic aims. He wrote “Return to Lesbos” (most likely his longest poem) in a black-and-white composition book, scrawling the whole poem throughout it, often with only two, three, four words per page. Ed apparently never typed or tried to publish it. He read the poem at least once to my knowledge, at Beyond Baroque in 1982. Lucky for us this performance (which Amy remembers as a sublime consummation of Ed’s talent as a poet and performer) was filmed and included in Gail Kaszynski’s 1983 documentary about the Beyond Baroque scene, Fear of Poetry. It’s breathtaking to watch Ed stand at the mike, wearing a short-sleeved nerdish shirt he undoubtedly bought at a thrift shop, and read the poem from the composition book, swiftly turning its pages. He simply gallops through the poem, as if he’s uncomfortable with what it’s saying. Fitting, since “Return to Lesbos” is an emotionally charged onrush in which he repeatedly questions his responsibility as a poet: is he going to just hold that “fucking pencil” or use it to “cry for civilization.”
‘Ed is at his best in his short lyrics. They have the sense that they were jotted down on scraps of paper while waiting at a bus stop or standing in a club nursing a beer he’d bought with his last bits of loose change. They probably were. I’ve always thought of Ed as a punk Dorothy Parker. Bruce Hainley refers to Ed’s poems as “toy time bombs.” I think that’s perfect. Something does tend to “go off” as you read them. They delight and cause unease at the same time—they’re authentic, that’s why. There’s real pain and real experience in them, despite their apparent toy-ness.
‘Last year, Bruce Hainley edited a generous selection of Ed’s poems for Court Green (issue 10), a journal I co-edit at Columbia College Chicago. The feature was called, appropriately enough, “Memoirs of a Thrill-Seeker.” This year, in Court Green 11, we published a transcription of “Return to Lesbos.” At the publication party in March, we showed a clip of Ed reading the poem. The audience went wild. “Where can I find his work?” many in attendance eagerly asked. Students, in particular, showed irrepressible excitement. Young people love Ed; his work speaks to them, it’s pertinent. Amy Gerstler and I have been talking about co-editing a book of Ed’s work. I think this would please him—his poems gathered up by two poet friends he hung out with. I’m glad we can continue to hang out with him, and that you’ll be able to, too, since he let himself get caught “being words on paper.”’ — David Trinidad
‘In the very early ‘80s Ed was intimidatingly skinny and gorgeous and as reckless and charismatic as that guy in The Libertines who got caught doing coke with Kate Moss, but very, very talented and massively intelligent, and even when he was a little too wild, he was always so kind and heartbreakingly sweet and smart. Saying he was our Rimbaud is way too lazy, but there was that. I thought of him as LA’s John Wieners. Ed’s poetry has Wieners’s deep melancholy and low-key, note-perfect lyricism, mixed with Ed’s strange, bright ideas and his dead-pan, startling sense of humor. I‘m one of the many people who misses his poetry a lot.’ ― Dennis Cooper
‘Years ago my wife slept with Ed Smith and wrote him into her novel; we goggled, bemused by his ubiquity. It was a time when Ed was everywhere, or so it seemed, and his energy and taste for the zany and the outrageous fit right in with what we in San Francisco appreciated most about the heroic LA artists―Bob Flanagan, Mike Kelley, Amy Gerstler, Dennis Cooper, so many more. The present anthology is not only the best of Ed’s writing but contains in his notebooks the single greatest account of the genius brewing in the Southland at that moment. Hats off to David Trinidad for bringing it all back home―his exquisite care in selecting and contextualizing is the greatest gift he could have given his late friend. — Kevin Killian
‘Sappho invented civilization, and Ed Smith made it punk.’ — Tony Trigilio
‘Reflecting the heroic editorial efforts of David Trinidad, this collection of Ed Smith’s poems and journals makes me nostalgic for a lost era; sad that this talented if troubled poet took his own life; glad that we included his work in The Best American Erotic Poems, and in total agreement with David Trinidad that Smith’s poetry would have a salutary effect on a group of young writers, such as those attending a graduate writing program.’ — David Lehman
‘Ed Smith was this brilliant, handsome, charismatic, disarming, hedonistic, wounded math and science nerd who discovered punk music and art and poetry and was swept away, besotted with all three, and never looked back. He loved drugs and bands and science fiction and science and Sappho and poets and poetry. He liked to give people a little treatise by Alfred North Whitehead on mathematics for a gift. He loved being part of a cool scene. He introduced me to Prince’s music when his first album came out. I think he would have described himself as bi-sexual. He was intense and sensitive and wild. He burned hotly.’ — Amy Gerstler
_______ Gallery
Ed Smith and Mary Emerzian, December 3, 1981. Photo by Sheree Rose.
First row (left to right): Amy Gerstler, Ed Smith, Bob Flanagan. Second row (left to right): unknown, Michael Silverblatt, Mark McLaughlin, David Trinidad, Sheree Rose. (1985)
(L.to R.) Michael Silverblatt, Bob Flanagan, Tim Dlugos, Donald Britton, Dennis Cooper, Jeff Wright, Amy Gerstler, Ed Smith. (1981)
Ed Smith, Venice, California, 1980. Photo by Skip Arnold.
___ Page
_____ Extras
Dennis Cooper, Bob Flanagan, Jack Skelley, Amy Gerstler, David Trinidad, Ed Smith,, Sherree Rose.and Steven Hall. (very poor quality)
A poet and a comedian: Taylor Negron, Ed Smith (very poor quality)
____
Book
David Trinidad, editor Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World: Poems and Notebooks of Ed Smith Turtle Point Press
‘In Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World, David Trinidad brings together a comprehensive selection of Ed Smith’s work: his published books; unpublished poems; excerpts from his extensive notebooks; photos and ephemera; and his timely “cry for civilization,” “Return to Lesbos”: put down that gun / stop electing Presidents.
‘Ed Smith blazed onto the Los Angeles poetry scene in the early 1980s from out of the hardcore punk scene. The charismatic, nerdy young man hit home with his funny/scary off- the- cuff- sounding poems, like “Fishing”: This is a good line. / This is a bad line. This is a fishing line.
‘Ed’s vibrant “gang” of writer and artist friends― among them Amy Gerstler, Dennis Cooper, Bob Flanagan, Mike Kelley, and David Trinidad― congregated at Beyond Baroque in Venice, on LA’s west side. They read and partied and per-formed together, and shared and published each others’ work.
‘Ed was more than bright and versatile: he worked as a math tutor, an animator, and a typesetter. In the mid- 1990s, he fell in love with Japanese artist Mio Shirai; they married and moved to New York City. Despite productive years and joyful times, Ed was plagued by mood disorders and drug problems, and at the age of forty- eight, he took his own life.
‘Ed Smith’s poems speak to living in an increasingly dehumanizing consumer society and corrupt political system. This “punk Dorothy Parker” is more relevant than ever for our ADD, technology- distracted times.’ — Turtle Point Press
Excerpts
UNTITLED
This is a good line.
This is a bad line.
This is a good line.
This is a bad line.
Here is a country,
an idea we share.
There is an idea for paying
all debts public and private.
This poetry is now in its own future,
and let me say as an eyewitness
that we are quite primitive back here,
sophisticated only in things we do not do.
My people roll their autos
over goddam asphalt.
This line is doing its best to remain indifferent,
but here it is in this poem.
1982
BENEDICTION
Fuck you.
Fuck your mom.
Fuck your cat.
Fuck your mom’s cat.
Fuck your cat’s mom.
Fuck your mom’s cat’s second cousin
from Schenectady.
1982
LETTER FROM THE GRAVE
This situation is so embarrassing
that i’m considering approaching it
sheepishly,
but i can’t cause i’m too numb.
Well, numb isn’t exactly the right word,
but it’ll do for now.
Anyway, this is called “Letter from the Grave”
cause i was supposed to have killed myself
last Tuesday,
but i didn’t:
i’m still here,
and next year i’ll be eleven.
1982
A LIST OF 3 LETTER WORDS
fun
sex
art
gin
you
1983
ODE TO A STREETLIGHT
O ye moon
who shines so bright
it hurts my eyes
1984
THE POEM THAT CANNOT BE
I want my whole life to be a poem.
1984
CHEATING THE STORK
We fuck
for pleasure alone.
1984
DEAR FUCKFACE ASSHOLE JERK,
I am writing you because of the bad review you wrote of my book in Magazine. Not that you thought the book was all that bad just that your review sucked. As an example of how inattentive and lame your supposed criticism was and without going into too much detail you didn’t even manage to get the goddam line breaks right in the quote you took. I won’t even bother demanding a formal apology from a jerk like you, but instead I’ll leave you with this curse: may you wake up with a ringing in your ears, hair in your teeth and Clayton Eshleman lying in bed next to you.
Most Sincerely,
Ed Smith
1984
YOU CAN’T LEGISLATE MATURITY
In 1986 I was arrested and charged with armed robbery, possession of a controlled substance, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, statutory rape, indecent exposure and lewd conduct (but not resisting arrest!). Fortunately, that year I was awarded a Literature Fellowship in Poetry by the National Endowment of the Arts and was able to use the Fellowship money to retain some state-of-the-art legal counsel. What with plea-bargaining and all I only ended up serving two years forty-seven days. Since my release I have attained the eighth Operating Thetan level in the Church of Scientology. My short-term goal is to have my civil rights restored so I can pursue my long-term goal of being elected President of the United States.
1985
You have to use a washcloth
on the hot water knob in
order to turn it hard
enough to get it all the
way off. I never told
you that. I just went
in every time after you took
a bath and did it myself.
1990
MY LAST BEER
It was a long time ago and
I don’t remember it. I was
sitting in a stuffy, dark bar
on a hot sunny afternoon and it
came in a mug. It was one
of those things I thought
I would enjoy more than I
actually did. And not the
first time either. One of
those many things. One of
those many things that just
gradually got replaced by
what’s become everything
else, everything else that’s
just always never enough.
1991
When I wrote
this poem rays
of sagacious
afternoon sun-
shine were
streaming in
through the
south-facing
windows, billowy
white clouds
billowed across
the azure dome
of the sky,
birds sang and
chirped to each
other gaily,
the kittens were
asleep in the
living room, one
on the couch,
one on the easy
chair and one
on the futon,
and the tv was on.
1991
15 LINE SONNET
You lie on your side back curved
legs bent your knees drawn
up in front of you. I nestle
behind you the two of us
like heavy silver spoons
wrapped in velvet my arms
reach around your tiny
shoulders my hands grip
my forearms securely.
You hold my erect penis
inside you. We rock together
lazily and twist our bodies
slowly. Your head bends
forward and I lick the
back of your neck.
1994
ART AND POETRY
Don’t kid yourself it’s
all about power and control
1995
SEAT 47K
The last time I was on an
airplane was when I was
leaving you.
1995
*
p.s. Hey. This book isn’t quite out in the world yet, but I wanted to give it a head start, and it can be pre-ordered now. Some of this is explained in David Trinidad’s intro text below, but Ed Smith was a close friend of mine and a member of the young LA writer gang that circled around Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center in the late 70s and early 80s and included, among others, Amy Gerstler, Bob Flanagan, Sheree Rose, David Trinidad, Benjamin Weissman, Jack Skelley, Michael Silverblatt, Kim Rosenfield, Ed, and me. Ed was the youngest, a very charismatic, attractive, brilliant, and complicated guy who wrote knock-out poetry and lived a wild life. He killed himself when he was still quite young, and his two poetry books, published with tiny presses, were long out of print by then. David Trinidad undertook the herculean and so very needed task of assembling Ed’s collected poems and journals, and the spotlit book today is the result. Ed’s poetry is really fantastic, influenced by the particular forcefulness of the punk rock scene that was absorbing LA at the time, and funny and reckless/perfect and deeply emotional. His work was often called Rimbaudian, but it reminded me more of the great John Wieners, although I don’t know if Ed ever read Wieners. Anyway, it’s a great, great thing that Ed’s work is now available to everyone, and in a book that’s beautifully designed and illustrated with photos of Ed and the world around him. I can’t recommend highly enough that you go ahead and pre-order this book. I hope you will. ** David Ehrenstein, Exactly, well said about Perloff/Ashbery. How great that you got to see Jeff Keen and his screenings. ** Kai, Hi, man. Yeah, lots going on over here, and lucky me. Next week, okay. Good luck with the prep. Wow, your kiddo is a year old! That’s crazy, great crazy. Nice, Kai, I’m really happy for you. Oh, we’re working on a screening of Zac’s and my newest film ‘Permanent Green Light’ in Berlin. i’m not sure when exactly when yet, but it would great if it’s while you there and that you could see it and we could finally meet up, flesh to flesh. Have a swell weekend. ** OfKeatonsFromAfar, Elegant. Two or more dates seems like a maxed out birthday to me. Sweet. Yeah, new Sunn0))) out in a week or something. Hope the writing demon swallows you. Most of you, at least. I guess your low half is free to cavort. ** Dominik, Hi, D! Oh, god, I spend a lot of time putting together the posts. I don’t keep track, but definitely every day. Basically, whenever I don’t have something else to do or have a break, I make blog posts. It’s nice in the sense that I never get bored. There’s always something to occupy my time. You might like Sunn0))). They’re an intense live experience. If they come through your area, go see them, and definitely take ear plugs even if you’re a hardcore listener. They redefine loud. No, hm, I didn’t get news about the rating. Huh. Sometimes our producer forgets to tell us stuff. I’ll email and ask. My week was good. Lots of work, though. Writer/d.l. Jeff Jackson is in Paris doing a residency, and we hung out. Saw some art, and … other stuff, but mostly work on the TV script. Wow, late happy birthday to you, pal! 27 is a good portal. It seems good that you saw a lot of people around your birthday. That feels right. Enjoy your solo weekend. My weekend? Work. Episode 1 of the TV series is finished and waiting for Gisele’s input. Episode 2 might be finished today. And then Episode 3 work will take over. Otherwise, see friends, do something. There’s the big annual Queer zine/press fair Paris Ass Book Fair this weekend at Palais de Tokyo. I’ll definitely go to that today or tomorrow. Take care, make the weekend your slave, and I’ll see you soon! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Yeah, he was a multi-talent — film, visual art, sound, … and all of it is pretty exciting. How very curious about EyeMobile. I’d never heard of that existing. Yeah, interested to hear how that works for you, obviously. When do you think you’ll get to experiment with it? ** Steve Erickson, Hi. It certainly seems like the Klonopin decreasing is the very likely culprit behind your mood crash. Logically, at least. I hope your biology evens right out. And that your weekend comes out on the way up side. ** Okay. Yes, I hope you’ll investigate Ed Smith’s book and work today. That would be lovely. See you on Monday.
David Trinidad, editor Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World: Poems and Notebooks of Ed Smith
Now available in North America 