Telegram from San Francisco by Sinclair Beiles and Annie Rooney

Published in New Departures, bumper edition, numbers 7,8,9 and 10, London, 1975. Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Ball. 

Sinclair Beiles, London, 1985

Photo courtesy of Raymond Foye

 

Two poems by Sinclair Beiles in the Insect Trust Gazette

 The Insect Trust Gazette, Summer 1968, published by Robert Bassara, Bekerley, California.

Courtesy: Richard S.E. Aaron

Minutes to Go advertised in Two Cities journal

 

Two Cities, Summer 1961, advertising the publication of Minutes to Go, published by Two Cities Editions.

Ashes of Experience

                                                                                        

Not only Sinclair Beiles's first poetry collection, but also the first winner of the Ingrid Jonker Poetry Prize, in 1969. Incidentally, Ingrid Jonker would have been 87 yesterday, 19 September.

Happy this exile, by Sinclair Beiles

Happy
This exile.
In unfamiliar streets
Canaries sing
And women smile from their doorways
At the stranger
Who carries his heart
In his hand.
He walks about the marketplace
As if risen from the dead
An ancestor
Come to see his people
Trading old coins
Stamped with his likeness.

Published in Ashes of Experience, Wurm, Pretoria, 1969

Minutes to Go Redux

Minute to Go Redux, by William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Sinclair Beiles and Gregory Corso, published by Moloko Print, 2020. Edited and introduced by Oliver Harris.

 

From 'The Exodus' by Sinclair Beiles

'And God was an Indian
Who did not kill insects -
And so without our toothbrushes
And our moustache mugs
We were savoured in the wilderness
Though we had these cachous to sweeten
Our breath and the tempers
Of Austrian hotel managers.'
 

From 'The Exodus', published in Ashes of Experience, Wurm, Pretoria, 1969

Houses of Joy in Danish

 

A Danish translation of Houses of Joy, published by Olympia Press in 1966.

Sinclair Beiles in The Outsider, 1961

A cut-up collaboration between Sinclair Beiles and Stuart Gordon, published in The Outsider, Fall 1961. I am not sure if the Stuart Gordon he collaborated with was the film maker (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, etc) in his younger days.

Pages from Universal Truths Revealed in White Tobacco Fumes

Published by Bob Cobbing's Writers' Forum, London, January 176

Signed copy of Minutes to Go, 1960

Copy of the original 1960 Two Cities edition of Minutes to Go signed by Sinclair Beiles, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Two Cities publisher Jean Fanchette.

Minutes to go (second edition)

Published by Beach Books, Texts & Documents, San Francisco, 1968.

Minutes to go

Published by Two Cities Editions, Paris, 1960.

Photo: James Pennington

Sinclair Beiles and John Lennon

I had a dream recently that Sinclair Beiles had hooked up with John Lennon in London, in 1965, and together they had worked on some cut-up prose poems.

As Mike Hardaker has pointed out, such a meeting would not have been impossible.

And on the subject of music, Beiles once maintained that he had read poetry at a Grateful Dead concert at the Great Pyramids in Egypt. The Dead had indeed once played there, sometime in the 70s, but had Beiles shared the stage with them? Who knows ...

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