Who was Sinclair Beiles?

The Idiot's Voice - a collection of previously unpublished poems by Sinclair Beiles

2012-01-25T23:47:00.000-08:00

The Idiot's Voice is a collection of 25 previously unpublished poems by Sinclair Beiles.

Published by Cold Turkey Press, France, the first edition is limited to 36 copies.

Cost is 15 euros, excluding postage.

For order information, contact coldturkeypress@gerardbellaart.com

Letter to Gerard Bellaart from Sinclair Beiles, 1970

2011-11-24T02:40:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of the Cold Turkey Press archive

Sinclair Beiles, Action Poet by Shaun de Waal

2011-10-29T12:33:00.000-07:00

South African poet and writer Sinclair Beiles has not always received favourable attention in his home country. Now, however, he and his work have been placed at the centre of a major celebration of the Beat Generation and The Beat Hotel.

The Institut Francais d'Afrique du Sud, in conjuction with the British Council, has put together a range of events that includes an exhibition of photographs by Harold Chapman, a partial reconstruction of the famous Beat Hotel, films including a documentary on Beiles, a multimedia show, and a lecture by Donald Moerdijk (born in South Africa, he is now a professor at Paris's Ecole Normale Superieure).

The Beat Hotel - a pension on Paris's Left Bank, at 9 Git-le-Coeur, run by the accommodating Mme Rachou - came to be nicknamed due to the transient artists and writers it housed, among them William Burroughs, Harold Norse, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, Gregory Corso and of course Beiles.

Beiles, a South African born in Uganda,collaborated with Burroughs, Gynsin and Corso on Minutes To Go, a slender volume of poetry made using a revolutionary method - the cut-up.

Burroughs, particularly, took to the concept of chopping up pieces of text and reassembling them at random. "Cut the word-lines" he would later urge, theorising that the bizarre new meanings thrown up by such a poetic method would help subvert the agents of social control, one of whose tools, it was believed, was "rational" language.

When I interviewed Beles some years ago, he began by flipping through some old volumes of his work, reading snippets from each, in arbitrary order, into a tape recorder - producing an impromptu cut-up.

This method of composition, however, was only one element of Beiles's work. His 1969 collection of poems, Ashes of Experience, which won the Ingrid Jonker Prize, has enough of a sense of detachment without requiring the physical fracturing of the text:

And the 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 in his likeness.

"I was coming from absolutely nowhere," Beiles told me. "I found myself an exile in Athens. No books, no clothes, no possibility of integrating myself into society. I had a notebook and a pencil, but knew hardly anybody. I started writing one or two poems a week in between wandering around aimlessly in Athens. Occassionally I showed poems to people in cafes and got a drink or something to eat in return."

(Published in Mail & Guardian, January 30, 1997)

Sinclair Beiles, 1972

2011-10-13T01:34:00.000-07:00

Courtesy: James de Villiers

Beiles's Sacred Fix and other hits on auction in New York, by Mike Alfred

2011-09-22T23:29:00.000-07:00

Sinclair Beiles, South Africa's own Beat poet, believes that when Paul Getty bought a first-edition Chaucer and Harry Oppenheimer bought the manuscript of Cry, The Beloved Country for large sums, such purchases marked a growing interest in the commercial exchange of literary memorabilia.

Beiles has just been invited to submit items to be included in a Sotheby's New York auction of Beat poets' original renderings and associated objects. The sale is scheduled for October 6 and according to Beiles is likely to signal the upsurge of a spate of millenial interest in the authors of the 20th century. "I think people are getting tired of bidding for furntiture," ventures Beiles.

Apparently not all that appreciated in South Africa, land of Beiles's birth and education at King Edward high school and Wits university, he is better known and recognised for his work in Europe where he associated with such notables as William Burroughs, Harold Norse and Allen Ginsberg.

Indeed, it is Bill Morgan, the archvist of the Allen Ginsberg Trust, who has invited Beiles to submit items for sale in association with other well-known Beat poets. Beiles observes that while his work features in the "Whitney Museum's handsome book on the Beats", his contribution has been ignored by the compilers of A Century of South African Poetry.

Among the items Beiles is submitting is his critically acclaimed Sacred Fix, published by Cold Turkey Press, Rotterdam, 1975. Also to appear is his current favourite, Springtime at Raubenheimer's, a limited edition of short, humorous poems published last November.

Sotheby's has placed a $1 000 reserve on each lot and Beiles is submitting a number hopefully calculated to alleviate the cliched plight of the impecunious poet.

Beiles asserts that it is high time poetry was recognised as offering some genuine financial worth.

(Published in The Sunday Independent, July 25 1999)

Glad of my Fever

2011-09-22T01:00:00.000-07:00

A poem card published in a limited edition by Cold Turkey Press, France

Beiles collection published in USA, by Percy Baneshik

2011-09-07T23:40:00.000-07:00

The poet most markedly without honour in his own country, Sinclair Beiles, has once again demonstrated that, as prophets go, he is distinctly not without honour in the outer world.

This time the recognition comes in the shape of a new book, published by Lapis Press in Venice, California, rounding up a selection of his verses over several decades.

Though the volume bears a somewhat uninspiring title, A South African Abroad, it comes with a resounding accolade from the publishers, who happen to be of a particularly selective frame of mind in their publishing. They specialise in publishing contemporary poetry by leading poets of the day.

The foreward to the book is contributed by Nanos Valaoritis, professor of world literature at San Francisco State University.

Why the rather flat title? Certainly the poetry is a reflection of Beiles's sojourns abroad in countries ranging from Greece to Spain, Italy, Tangier and a few other areas of reflective wanderering. But the title is a sort of poetic inversion.

In Valaoritis's lengthy introduction, the inversion becomes clear."Sinclair", says Valaoritis, "takes the South African experience as a springboard to symbolise all oppression, all persecution, all bad taste,all flattening-out uniformity, and all monsterous brain-washing..."

The professor categorises the Johannesburg poet as "an internal exile in South Africa", speaking of "the taste of euphoric exile in all of his poems" which derive from his wanderings, "always de passage from one place to another".

Valaoritis cites Beiles's "political moments", declaring downrightly "I wouldn't say Sinclair is a hero like Breytenbach... but he is, in his best moments, as good a poet..."

In light of this assessment, appearance of the collection in California strikes a special note. It underscores the fact that, strangely, Beiles has never been included in an anthology of South African poetry.

He has won prizes like the Ingrid Jonker Memorial Award, the William Plomer Award and the Lord Byron Award, a prize handed out by the French Friends of Lord Byron Poetry Society, which Beiles won for his 1976 collection, Sacred Fix. Other recipients of this award have been TS Eliot and Robert Graves.

But election to a locally compiled anthology of poetry has eluded him.

He has wondered about this, pointing out that publication in local anthologies is the most important way of getting known by students, who are the main readers of poetry.

The new collection, A South African Abroad, culled from volumes Beiles has brought out in South Africa over the years ... will be published by Lapis Press...Priced in the US at $12,95 (approx R33). It will be avaulable in bookstores in South Africa soon.

(Published in The Star, February 14, 1991)

Following the flight path of the poet's imagination: Robert Berold's review of A South African Abroad

2011-09-02T01:23:00.000-07:00

Sinclair Beiles grew up in South Africa and went into exile in his 20s. By 1958, aged 28, he was in the midst of the international avant-garde, working for the Olympia Press in Paris, living in the famous Beat Hotel, collaborating on the cut-up work Minutes To Go with William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Gregory Corso. In the 1960s he migrated to Greece and Tangiers: by all accounts one of the proto-hippies.

In 1969 Beiles's first collection of poetry, Ashes of Experience, was published in Souh Africa by Wurm. Five more books followed. Beiles returned from exile a few years ago and now lives in Johannesburg, where he is active in poetry readings and poetry/jazz performances.

This selection, elegantly produced by Lapis Press, is a mark of the international recognition that Beiles has received. It also begs the question why his work does not appear in any of the standard anthologies of South African verse. Could it be that South Africa is not ready for his knd of pransker surrealism?

This is not the kind of poetry we are used to, but that does not make Beiles a bad poet. The poems in A South African Abroad are literate and readable explosions. They are poems with a sense of humour - even better,a sense of fun. They work through a loose surrealism, like playfulness reminiscent of French poets like Cendrars or Michaux.

It may seem that the poems go off on tangents which go off on further tangents until the subject is lost. To look at them this way is to misread them. The real subect is the flight path of the poem's energy ( the aeroplane image is the poet's):

My condition is lamentable - to me anyway.
I keep a kind of old flying machine stability
On a cupboard full of drugs
And as I fly through the day
I can hear my nerves creaking...
If some small magazine editor happens to
drop into your office
Or into your soup in the form of a fly when
You eat at
The arts laboratory
Perhaps you can pull out this work for his
consideration.
Tell him I have terrible dreams.

(from 'Terrible Dreams')

Admittedly whem this type of poetry doesn't take off, it crashes: as in the rhymed poems about the crucifixion. But most of the time it is full of unexpected pleasures:

You can meet someone on the train
And forget about your brokenheartedness.
Now affairs on trains are permissible.
But they will break up.
There's either not enough money to pay for the fare
Or not enough love.
"Goodbye lost love alone on the railway station!"
Maybe you'll die on the railway station
Like Tolstoy clutching an icon.
Or maybe you'll start another affair
Perhaps with a farmer who's come to collect
A prize cow from the goods train.
Life on a farm is not too bad.
There are no traffic lights but there are compensations.
Both the railways and God help the brokenhearted.
See the view from the train window!
Poppies!Yellow grass!

(from 'Brokenhearted Travellers')

A South African Abroad, despite its title, has almost nothing in its content identifiably South African. But there is something about its style - naive recklessness, joller instinct - which is distinctly of this country. In this Beiles is as tuned in to the mind of South Africa as many a poet of irony or outrage. A selection of his work needs to be republished here, especially since the imported price of this book, about R50, is prohibitively expensive.

(Published in The Weekly Mail, 27 September 1991)

The passing of a poet: an obituary for Sinclair Beiles, by Shaun de Waal

2011-09-01T00:50:00.000-07:00

Sinclair Beiles, who died on November 3 [2000] at the age of 70 in Johannesburg Hospital, was one of South Africa’s more unusual and often underrated poets. He was the first winner of the Ingrid Jonker Memorial Prize for poetry in 1970, but in later years was reduced to photocopying his poetry and plays and donating them to libraries to ensure, as he put it, that they would go on record.

Beiles was born in Kampala, Uganda, and educated in South Africa. During the 1950s and 1960s he travelled the world, establishing links with the beat generation of writers, particularly William Burroughs. He collaborated with Burroughs and artist Brion Gysin on early experiments with cut-ups – work in which the text was chopped up and then reassembled semi-randomly. The results of their first experiments were published as Minutes to Go. Burroughs continued to use this technique throughout the Sixties. Beiles also worked with Burroughs on the composition of Naked Lunch, in Tangier in the late Fifties, along with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and helped get it published by Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press in Paris (where Beiles later stayed in the famous “beat hotel” along with Burroughs and Gysin). Naked Lunch went on to become one of the most influential texts of the Sixties counterculture and subsequently post-modern literature in general.

Beiles’s own poetry made less use of an intentional cut-up technique, but reflected a lack of concern with traditional poetic virtues, relying instead on raw energy and an immediate unedited apprehension of the poet’s reality. Beiles’s 1969 volume, Ashes of Experience, was his first substantial publication, written largely during a stay in Greece.

Beiles returned to South Africa in the Seventies and became a fixture of the Yeoville demi-monde in the Eighties. He often performed his poetry live, at venues such as the Black Sun, and was memorialised in Anton Kotze’s documentary Sacred Fix. He continued to write prolifically until his death. Among his later publications were the plays in verse, The Needle Vestel and Three Plays: Picasso as told by Max Jacob, and the poetry collections The Golden Years and Aardvark City. His selected poems were published in the US under the title A South African Abroad.

‘The Beats are traditional writers,’ said Beiles, ‘and among our tradition I am the only one who has chosen Chaucer as my model. Like Chaucer I am both classical and spontaneous. My role is as a pure poet. I don’t do anything but poeticise.’

He was buried on November 7 in West Park cemetery.

(Published in Mail & Guardian, November 10 2000)

To the Tribunal newspaper

2011-08-25T22:52:00.000-07:00

From Sinclair Beiles's Deliria, first published by Cold Turkey Press, Rotterdam, 1971, reprinted by Small Spaces Press, Johannesburg, 1995.

Sinclair Beiles entry on Wikipedia

2011-08-25T14:41:00.000-07:00

Sinclair Beiles (b. Kampala, Uganda, 1930, d. 2002, Johannesburg) - was a South African beat poet and editor for Maurice Girodias at the Olympia Press in Paris. He developed along with William S Burroughs and Brion Gysin the cut-up technique of writing poetry and literature.

Beiles was involved with American beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Brion Gysin, and Burroughs at the legendary Beat Hotel in Paris. The photographer Harold Chapman recorded this period in his book The Beat Hotel (Gris Banal, 1984). He co-authored Minutes to Go with Burroughs, Gysin and Corso (Two Cities Editions, 1960). Beiles helped edit Burroughs' Naked Lunch...Read more here

Last Words

2011-07-31T22:34:00.000-07:00

Poem card published in limited edition by Cold Turkey Press, France. The poem originally appeared in the collection Dowsings, 1982 ( publication date also sometimes given as 1979)

The Idiot's Voice

2011-07-09T02:12:00.000-07:00

A poem card published by Cold Turkey Press in a limited edition of 36 copies.

Sinclair Beiles with Gerard Bellaart and family, England, 1978

2011-06-30T06:03:00.000-07:00

Nanos Valaoritis on Beiles

2011-06-24T13:39:00.000-07:00

"One can even characterise him as a post-modern author, thanks to the ironical distance of his tone. And there is a definite tone to his poetry, an unmistakable and recognisable style that belongs to him exclusively.

"Perhaps it is because of this that he has always been treated as an alien, a stranger,an intruder, which all importanrt poets have been in their own time." - Introduction, A South African Abroad: Selected Poems

Ballets?

2011-06-13T01:02:00.000-07:00

Small collection of poems published by Propwash Publications (Halfway House), 1978. Drawings by Jemima Hunt. In my opinion not one of Beiles's best works, however a copy (from poet Alan Ansen's library) is currently going for $108.63 (excluding postage) on Abebooks.com.

Renaissance

2011-06-12T23:30:00.000-07:00

Poem card published in a limited edition of 36 copies by Cold Turkey Press.

Burroughs on Beiles

2011-06-08T02:27:00.000-07:00

"The poetry of Sinclair Beiles is distinguished and long-distilled; its unexpected, striking images bring a flash of surprised recognition. These poems open slowly in your mind, like Japanese paper flowers in water." - Williams Burroughs

Greek Interlude by Marta Proctor

2011-06-03T07:06:00.000-07:00

Chabook of poems published in 1982. Two Cities Editions was a local imprint created by Sinclair Beiles and his wife Marta Proctor, mirroring Jean Fanchette's Two Cities, in Paris.

Thus, despite the location of the imprint on the cover given as 'Paris', my impression is that the chapbook was in fact published in South Africa.

Sinclair Beiles in Beat Scene

2011-06-03T07:03:00.000-07:00

Beat Scene No 64, features articles about Diane de Prima, William Everson, Jay Landesman, Anne Waldman, Janine Pommy Vega, Gary Snyder and William Burroughs, as well as a slightly shortened version of the eponymous chapter of Who Was Sinclair Beiles? by Gary Cummiskey, and more. Visit Beat Scene for details.

her conversation is utterly without interest...

2011-05-19T23:46:00.000-07:00

A poem card - part of series featuring poems by Sinclair Beiles - published by Gerard Bellaart's Cold Turkey Press, France.

’n Roerende chaos

2011-05-15T13:25:00.000-07:00

Indien jy wil weet hoe jy in die laaste dekade verander het, hoef jy net ’n boek of ’n gedig te lees waarvan jy tien jaar gelede gehou het. Só het ek agtergekom vele literêre helde het intussen saam met my jeugdige romantiek en boheemse versugtinge gesneuwel.

Onder hierdie dooie ikone tel die meeste skrywers van die Beat-generasie wat die wêreld- letterkunde in die 1950s onherroeplik verander en die deure afgeskop het vir die kontra-kulturele revolusie van die 1960s..Read more here

Collected works worth the effort: Fred de Vries interviews Gerard Bellaart

2011-05-13T10:17:00.000-07:00

A Dutch publisher has been the self-appointed custodian of the works of SA poet Sinclair Beiles — who, he says, is a vastly underrated peer of the likes of Kerouac and Burroughs

A HAMLET in rural France, surrounded by sunflowers and vineyards, isn’t the most likely place to find a huge archive of the writing, letters, photos and pictures of SA’s legendary “beat poet”, Sinclair Beiles (1930-2000).

It’s almost surreal to see Dutch artist and publisher Gerard Bellaart carrying box after box of Beiles material from his studio so his visitor can work his way through piles of typed and handwritten pages, and marvel at the picture of Beiles and his American chum, Gregory Corso, in Athens in 1967. “I have some 1200 pages of unpublished material,” says Bellaart, who first encountered Beiles in 1967 in Greece, and kept up a correspondence with him until his death in 2000.

“It includes some stunning work, like The Idiot’s Voice and Inmates, which he wrote in a loony bin in London, where he met actress Sally Willis. She started a kind of therapy for him by giving him four subjects every day, which he would then turn into poetry. I also have the correspondence between them, which is extremely beautiful and touching.”

Beiles has often been dismissed as a marginal character in the beat history that was spearheaded by American writer Jack Kerouac in the mid-’50s. Beiles was responsible for the editing of William Burroughs’s masterpiece, Naked Lunch. And, with Burroughs, Corso and Brion Gysin he wrote Minutes to Go (1960), a tiny book that heralded the cut-up experiment in literature: writers doing a kind of remix of existing texts.

Beiles was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1930, the only child of Jewish South African parents, who moved back to Johannesburg when their son was six years old. He studied at Wits University and left SA in the mid-’50s.

After time in New Zealand, Spain and Morocco he moved to Paris, which was then the centre of international bohemia. He stayed in the notoriously anarchic Beat Hotel on Rue Git-le-Coeur, a stone’s throw from the river Seine.

He became involved with the American beats. He also worked as an editor for Olympia Press, brainchild of maverick publisher Maurice Girodias, who not only gave us “forbidden” erotic pockets but also seminal literary work by the likes of Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov and Burroughs.

BEILES a beat writer? Way too facile, insists Bellaart. “I wouldn’t call him a beat poet. That’s such an empty phrase, it means nothing to me. Kerouac and those guys were no influence on Sinclair. I think he found them a bunch of country bumpkins.

“His cultural background was very European. They also didn’t have an eye for things visual. Sinclair had an exceptional eye for visual art.”

When the Paris scene fell apart in the early ’60s, most participants drifted south, doing the “karma circuit”, passing through Greece and eventually ending up in India, Kashmir and Tibet.

Beiles decided to stay in Greece, moving between Athens and the island of Hydra, where he befriended Canadian troubadour Leonard Cohen. “What you had in Greece was a wave of expatriates, writers, artists and aristocrats like Princess Zina Rachesvsky. All of them outsiders and drifters,” remembers Bellaart, who hitchhiked from Rotterdam to Athens after he fell in love with Greek music that a truck driver played when he gave him a lift in Finland.

He bumped into Beiles at a party in Athens. They immediately got along. “I visited his flat and still remember how I walked in and saw poems. Poems everywhere. One of them was called Notes from the Promised Land, which ended up in Ashes of Experience, for which he won the Ingrid Jonker Award in 1970.”

Beiles had a history of mental instability. Diagnosed with manic depression as a teenager, he was subjected to electroshock treatment, and spent many months in psychiatric wards in Athens, London, Paris and Johannesburg.

His illness made him unpredictable and occasionally volatile.

Publishers were reluctant to deal with the “mad South African”, who once, in a fit of anger, threw a suitcase full of poems at an important London literary star.

Bellaart, however, wasn’t afraid. In 1970 he started his own publishing company, Cold Turkey Press, specialising in maladjusted writers such as Charles Bukowski, Antonin Artaud and Ezra Pound. Beiles fitted the bill perfectly. Here was a poet who assaulted deadening reality through a descent into delirium and fantasy.

“I saw him as the Holy Fool in the Russian tradition, not loony, but very wise,” says Bellaart, who published limited editions of Beiles’s Sacred Fix and Deliria, both now highly collectable.

AFTER Beiles returned to SA in the late ’70s, he married fellow poet Marta Proctor. They moved into a house in Yeoville, Johannesburg, and Beiles became a genuine Yeoville character, whose star rapidly waned during that highly politicised pre-1994 era.

Few were interested in the surrealist poetry and plays of that sickly man who used to scurry down Rockey Street, bumming coffee off friends and acquaintances. Most people found him initially entertaining, but soon became fed up with his antics and fantastic stories.

“Eventually he became like an untouchable,” says Bellaart.

“So he started making photocopies of his poems, stapled them and published them in editions of 15 or something, and sold some to Unisa.”

Bellaart, who never saw Beiles after the mid-’70s, still refuses to see his friend in terms of mad and normal. “He was very lucid in his descriptions of insanity. Is someone like that mad or normal? Those extremes are not applicable to Sinclair.

“It’s very hard to grasp him. Like all those fantastic stories he used to tell. They all happened within his own reality.

“That was the source of his poetry. And most did have a source of truth in them.”

Largely due to his worsening bipolar condition, Beiles fell out with almost everyone. Bellaart was an exception. They had a brief quarrel about a prose poem called Aardvark, in which Beiles tackled the decadence of the Lost City. Beiles thought it was his ultimate tour de force and wanted Bellaart to publish it.

BELLAART, however, could not make head or tale of it. “He sent me at least five versions. Just when I read my way through the previous one, he sent me a new one. I tried to deconstruct it, all the different characters. But I just couldn’t.”

Towards the end of his life, in 1997, Beiles did finally receive some recognition when the French Cultural Institute organised a Beat Hotel exhibition in Carfax, which featured a reconstruction of the Beat Hotel facade and two rooms, complete with a replica of Gysin’s hypnotic Dream Machine. Beiles read poems and had his 15 minutes of fame.

THREE years later he died, dismissed as a footnote to the beat history. An unjust epitaph, says Bellaart, showing me some of the exquisite mid-period poems. “He was hugely cultured. He had an enormous curiosity and an incredible ability to absorb things.

“I see Sinclair as someone who was outside everything. He had no affiliation with any movement. He was the most original of that whole late-’50s Paris scene. But because of his unevenness and his chaotic personal life, he was also the easiest to marginalise, to neglect. And to treat with condescension.”

The archives of Burroughs, Ginsberg, Corso, Kerouac, Bukowski, all contemporaries of Beiles, have been bought for huge sums by American universities and collectors, who are proud of their writers and poets.

The Beiles files are stored somewhere in rural France, waiting to change ownership. “They belong in kind, caring South African hands,” says Bellaart.

(Published in The Weekender, 16 August, 2008)

Offerings of Fire by Marta Proctor

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Offerings of Fire by Sinclair Beiles's wife Marta Proctor, published in 1985 by Two Cities Johannesburg and Two Cities Paris. Sinclair wrote the introduction to this chapbook of 24 poems.

Whatever happens is meat for my poetry...

2011-05-10T23:09:00.000-07:00

"I can't tell whether I'm cynical or optimistic - whether there is something out there organising a life of pleasure or pain for us. It's beyond my scope. Things happen to me. I record what happens. I don't care why. Whatever happens is meat for my poetry. My poetry and my personality are synonymous. I enjoy reading cosmological works but haven't been able to discern any pattern to my existence or any rhythmical relation between myself and others. I don't hunger after being part of a total harmony or tragedy or feel 'alienated' in any way." - Sinclair Beiles, letter to Gerard Bellart, editor of Cold Turkey Press, May 1969.

Sinclair Beiles in his garden

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Sinclair Beiles, Yeoville, 1994. Photo: Lydia Herbst

The Idiot's Voice

2011-04-12T00:30:00.000-07:00

The Idiot's Voice, a poem card published by Cold Turkey Press, in a first edition limited to 36 copies.

Sinclair Beiles relaxing in the garden

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Sinclair Beiles relaxing in the garden of his house in Yeoville, Johannesbirg, 1994.

Photo: dawie malan

Sinclair Beiles with Gil Scott-Heron

2011-03-30T23:46:00.000-07:00

Sinclair Beiles with US poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron, Yeoville, Johannesburg, 1994.

Photo: Unisa library archives, manuscript collection number 143.

Sinclair Beiles: The Action Poet

2011-03-26T23:53:00.000-07:00

A poem card published by Cold Turkey Press, France. The first side is a photograph of Beiles believed to have been taken in Johannesburg in the early 1980s. The reverse is Beiles's poem 'The Action Poet' from the collection the Idiot's Voice, soon to be published by Cold Turkey Press, in both French and English.

Nothing is True: Everything is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin by John Geiger

2011-03-15T22:49:00.000-07:00

Nothing is True Everything is Permitted is a biography of Brion Gysin (1916-1986) - artist, novelist, poet and one of the collaborators with Sinclair Beiles on Minutes To Go.

As is usual with books dealing with the Beat Hotel and Minutes To Go, Beiles doesn't exactly take centre stage, but in this book he does get slightly more mentions. In addition to quoting Beiles, Geiger mentions that he was the author of several collections of poetry (usually only Houses of Joy - which was published in 1959 - and Minutes To Go are mentioned).

What is particularly noticeable is that his mental illness is not referred to, and overall there is a sense that Geiger treats Beiles with more respect than most Beat biographers.

Dispossessed by Sinclair Beiles

2011-03-07T00:25:00.000-08:00

A poem poster courtesy of Cold Turkey Press, France

Towers Open Fire - a film by Antony Balch and William Burroughs, 1963

2011-02-13T22:35:00.001-08:00

Familiar Strangers

2011-02-12T23:00:00.000-08:00

Familiar Strangers was a small anthology of poetry privately published circa 1991. It was co-edited by Sinclair Beiles and Marta Proctor Beiles, with thanks to Ian Tromp for his assistance. It contains work by Robert Berold, Walter Saunders, Marta Proctor Beiles, Sinclair Beiles and Martin Jacklin. The cover was designed by Marta Proctor Beiles.

Review of Who was Sinclair Beiles? by Christopher Nosnibor

2011-02-11T22:55:00.000-08:00

Sinclair Beiles was a friend of the Beats, lived at the Beat Hotel when it was all happening, had a hand in editing William Burroughs’ seminal novel Naked Lunch, was a prolific poet and led an eventful life. Yet strangely, he remains largely unknown. Who Was Sinclair Beiles? attempts to address this matter. This volume may be slim, but plugs a very big gap in the coverage given to the criminally underrated poet Sinclair Beiles...Read more here

Covers of Deliria and Sacred Fix, published by Cold Turkey Press

2011-01-22T02:36:00.000-08:00

Photo: courtesy of Cold Turkey Press archive.

Deliria was first published by Cold Turkey Press, Rotterdam in 1971, then reprinted by Small Spaces Press, Johannesburg in 1995. Sacred Fix was published by Cold Turkey Press in 1975.

Sinclair Beiles in New Writers 3, published by John Calder, 1965

2011-01-21T07:44:00.000-08:00

Sinclair Beiles was one of the writers featured this issue of the New Writers series published by John Calder in the 1960s. Beiles's contribution is small - just four poems covering 15 pages in an overall volume of 130 pages - but the fact that he was recognised and included by such a prestigious avant-garde publisher of that time is evidence of the value of his work.

The other contributors were David Mercer, Alexander Trocchi and Nick Rawson.

Sinclair Beiles on surrealist poetry

2011-01-20T01:56:00.000-08:00

'Most surrealist poetry became mannered and in its quest for unusual relationships between words, and ideas, was set down at the expense of feelings and motives. The poems became beautiful seashells devoid of life.'

Sinclair Beiles, from the introduction to Marta Proctor's Offering of fire.

Some evidence amongst the ruins: a previously unpublished poem by Sinclair Beiles from Jan Herman's Straight Up

2010-11-15T22:43:00.000-08:00

This report from Athens under the Greek junta 42 years ago turned up in a batch of old letters and postcards that a friend found the other day in a forgotten file. "How I come to have it," he writes, "is a mystery."

Well, mystery solved: He and I were doing VDRSVP at the time, and we had published several other Sinclair Beiles pieces in it. We must've put this one away for future use. So here 'tiz, nearly half a century later.

Sinclair is a cherished memory....read the typescript poem here

Gregory Corso, Judy Shaw and Sinclair Beiles, Athens 1967

2010-10-25T23:33:00.000-07:00

Courtesy: Cold Turkey Press Archives

Sinclair Beiles: The first poet in space by Heathcote Williams

2010-09-04T04:55:00.000-07:00

"The poetry of Sinclair Beiles is distinguished and long distilled; its unexpected striking images bring a flash of surprised recognition. The poems open slowly in your mind, like Japanese paper flowers in water.”

William Burroughs

Despite Burroughs’ impressive recommendation Sinclair Beiles often fell asleep during his own poetry readings thanks to a hefty diet of prescription drugs which Sinclair would carry around in a large plastic bag and which were always placed beside him on-stage so as to be within easy reach. This was a pity since Sinclair’s poems, as Burroughs had attested, were worth listening to, once he could be aroused...Full text available as a PDF here

(This piece was first published in The Raconteur. Copyright: Heathcote Williams)

Qui était Sinclair Beiles? - Dionysos Andronis

2010-08-21T00:16:00.000-07:00

Avec cette collection d'essais le poète Gary Cummiskey rend hommage posthume à son compatriote homologue Sinclair Beiles (1930-2000). Nous avions écrit un article sur le dernier recueil de Cummiskey Aujourd'hui est leur Créateur (voir notre Kagablog du mois de décembre 2008). Cette fois, nous aimerions tirer votre attention sur cette collection essentielle. Nous avions acquis une bonne impression de Cummiskey comme critique littéraire par sa revue Green Dragon. Maintenant avec cette collection d'essais notre première impression est confirmée.

Ce n'est pas parce que Beiles est resté longtemps en Grèce que nous avons été motivés pour écrire cet article mais par le fait que Beiles était un proche des beatniks américains et qu'il est resté pendant un moment à Paris. Il avait co-habité avec eux à l'Hôtel parisien Beat (aujourd'hui renommé "Relais Hôtel Vieux Paris"). "Le fait que Beiles avait une collaboration avec les écrivains Beat à Paris était une coincidence brève. Le fait aussi qu'il était plus un fan qu'un similaire dans cet hôtel Beat ne renverse pas son identité Beat" (une citation de Eva Kowalska, op.cit., page 85).

Le critique littéraire américain George Dillon Slater écrit : "Sinclair à Athènes faisait son autopromotion et pratiquait la psychanalyse dans un café près de la place Kolonaki. C'était une bonne idée parce que les Grecs s'autoproclament extrêmement intelligents", op.cit. page 67. Cette touche ironique de Slater vient compléter notre estimation personnelle de cette "inteligentsia du café expresso" grecque et pourrait justifier la dépression nerveuse de Sinclair Beiles en Grèce : "Souvent Sinclair était interné dans une clinique grecque pour retablir et après il venait chez moi dans l'île de Hydra pour reposer" (op.cit. page 63).

Gary Cummiskey est un poète important et avec ce livre il nous confirme qu'il est aussi un grand humaniste des lettres.

Sinclair Beiles's unmarked grave, Westpark Cemetary, Johannesburg

2010-08-14T00:41:00.001-07:00

Letter from Sinclair Beiles to Dawie Malan, Unisa Library, February 1997

2010-04-16T06:36:00.001-07:00

Courtesy: Unisa library archives - manuscript collection ACC143

Letter from Sinclair Beiles to Dawie Malan, Unisa Library, June 1996

2010-04-16T06:32:00.000-07:00

Courtesy: Unisa library archives - manuscript collection ACC143

Excerpts from Who was Sinclair Beiles? on RealityStudio

2010-03-18T05:32:00.000-07:00

The following is an excerpt from Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska, Who Was Sinclair Beiles?, published in 2009 by Dye Hard Press. The book contains interviews and essays that create a portrait of Sinclair Beiles, the South African poet who worked for Olympia Press, helped to edit Naked Lunch, and collaborated with William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Gregory Corso on the first cut-up book, Minutes to Go."...Read more here

Review of Who was Sinclair Beiles? from The Beat Scene

2010-02-26T06:45:00.001-08:00

Jan Herman on Who was Sinclair Beiles?

2010-02-23T12:11:00.000-08:00

Who was Sinclair Beiles?Good question. It's the title of a new book, just published in South Africa by Dye Hard Press. Although Sinclair Beiles was a prolific poet, novelist, and playwright, "there is very little information available" about him and even less about his work, co-editor Gary Cummiskey writes in the introduction...Read more here

Watercolours by Sinclair Beiles

2009-12-13T00:17:00.000-08:00

(Courtesy of www.111.co.za)

Writing on the margin from the margin: Who was Sinclair Beiles?

2009-12-02T05:12:00.000-08:00

Gary Cummiskey

Gary Cummiskey, Michael Titlestad

Gary Cummiskey, Michael Titlestad

Fred de Vries

Eva Kowalska, Fred de Vries

From left: Gary Cummiskey, Michael Titlestad, Eva Kowalska, Fred de Vries.

All photographs courtesy of Arja Salafranca

Beat Hotel documentary trailer

2009-11-26T22:25:00.000-08:00

Sinclair Beiles, name-dropping, shame and self-hatred ( Paul Wessels)

2009-11-04T00:15:00.001-08:00

we criticize in others that which we most fear in ourselves. The trueism comes, i think, from pirsig's gorgeous zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. perhaps it was freud he was paraphrasing, i don’t know, but i like it anyway. so i want to apply this to the charge of name-dropping. sinclair beiles is often accused of having been a name-dropper. most recently by stephen gray, who himself name-drops allen ginsberg. but that’s another story. here, i want to talk about what we fear in ourselves. we fear invoking the consequences (im-press by association) of a sign (big name) we feel we are simply unworthy of (or something like that). we feel unworthy. so stephen feels unworthy of associating himself with a god of the stature of allen ginsberg (even dylan bowed to ginsberg). but, because he fears the wrath of his own censure, he criticizes sinclair for name-dropping. and then, parapraxis: he namedrops allen ginsberg.

anyone who knows anything about allen ginsberg knows that he was a tireless promoter of kerouac, burroughs. his generosity of character lived long into his life and beyond it.

and here, i do not think it a valid issue to ask why belies was never promoted by ginsberg. well, perhaps the fact of the matter was that belies was not quite of the same stature as kerouac and burroughs. clearly he was not, or, clearly ginsberg felt he was not. who cares and who would like to criticize allen ginsberg for his own opinions? why didn’t you promote sinclair shamelessly? huh? now that’s the question. its noones fault, but certainly not ginsbergs, but you, you reading this, why didn’t you shout sinclairs name fro the rooftops – before he was dead!

the great dambudzo marechera got it right ages ago when he said that he was not a walking tribe. we need mediators, we need intercessors. without that, them, those, us, forget it.

the question we need to ask of ourselves, is this: why are we so terrified of promoting those we admire, like, respect, whatever you want to call it? perhaps sinclair would not have given into the black hole of madness, the infinite regress of madness (if only extreme neurosis) if he had promoters down here, earlier, before the lampposts and dustbins started making threatening gestures – or whatever his personal demons were. besides, writers are allowed to be difficult bastard pieces of shit. we owe them that much. we owe ourselves the generosity of spirit to namedrop the worthy. perhaps philip zhuwao may not have had to die in his little room in zimbabwe with his tens and tens of books piled behind the door if some of you reading this had perhaps passed his name along, and along with some buffalos, namedropped him in the twilight of his twenty odd years on this radioactive, cop-ridden planet as burroughs puts it. momentum, even if its only like aryan saying my name (paul wessels) out loud by writing it down. and only my reading that, my experiencing his generosity of spirit, got me to forget about myself long enough to forget about breaking my shin bone and severely dislocating my ankle; getting pneumonia whilst trying to recover; getting punched in the face with a pulmonary embolism and heart attack in quick succession, and to bother writing this, connecting with you who are reading here, right now. my demon lover, kathy acker, says that a book needs a reader to come alive, without the reader, it’s dead. she told me that all writers are orpheus looking for their eurydice. what applies to books applies to writers.

the great bessie head (who is not a feminist icon) said that she wrote because she had the authority from god to do so, that she was going to build a fucking ramp right up there to the stars. we wouldn’t know this, us who are gathered here, now, reading this if it weren’t for ntone edjabe.

aryan didn’t save my life by mentioning my name. but in a way he did, because he gave me the authority to share some stuff i’ve been wanting to share but didn’t know how to. turn it into fiction? write a confessional i feel so sorry for myself? what? how? send everyone i know an email? start a blog? maybe just start going backwards and inside out cause i’ve forgotten how to connect.promote your friends and those you admire.

i admire aryan kaganof.if i weren’t me, i’d like to be him.

john whiteside parsons got the description of those who fear or hate themselves right.

question is, what are you doing about it?

‘and man, self-castrated and self-frustrated, flees down the corridors of nightmares, pursued by monstrous machines, overwhelmed by satanic powers, haunted by vague guilt and terrors all created of his own imagination. he escapes into absurdity, drowns his spirit in pretence, worships tin gods of success. then, shamed by his pretenses and frustrated by his self-denial, he frenziedly projects his horror on imagined enemies, seeks release in scapegoats and false issues, and propitiates anthropoid gods, the blackened and shattered eidolons of his spirit, with sacrifices of blood.'

Writing on the margin from the margin: Who was Sinclair Beiles?

2009-10-29T04:32:00.000-07:00

Dye Hard Press, in conjunction with WISER, invite you to

Writing on the margin from the margin: Sinclair Beiles

Who was Sinclair Beiles?, a compilation of writings about the South African Beat poet who died in 2000, was recently published by Dye Hard Press.

Co-editors Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska, along with contributor Fred de Vries, will discuss issues about the book, such as:

· Why has Sinclair Beiles’s work been neglected in South Africa?
· Why has there previously been no serious attempt to evaluate his work, and why has it fallen to a small publisher to make the first attempt at doing so?
· What are the challenges involved in trying to evaluate a marginalised writer such as Beiles?
· What is the purpose and relevance now, in 2009, in writing about Beiles?

The panel discussion will take place in the Seminar Room at WISER, 6th Floor, Richard Ward Building, East Campus, Wits University on Monday, 9 November 2009, at 18:30

Copies of Who was Sinclair Beiles? will be on sale at the event

Title page of Minutes to Go ( 1960)

2009-10-26T06:38:00.000-07:00

Beiles's signature is conspicuously absent here.

Title page of Deliria

2009-10-23T01:04:00.000-07:00

Title page of Deliria, second edition published in 1995 by Small Spaces Press, Johannesburg, with inscription by Beiles.

Stephen Gray and Sinclair Beiles: which is the real literary con man?

2009-10-14T13:51:00.000-07:00

Stephen Gray, in his review of Who was Sinclair Beiles?, (Mail & Guardian, 07/09/09) implies that Sinclair was “some sort of impostor? A scam?” Gray’s egregious insinuation is further developed in the article: “In the classic accounts of the period, James Campbell’s The Beat Generation and Barry Miles’s The Beat Hotel, “our boy” merits only a footnote or two, and no listing of his works, if there were any, in the bibliographies.”... Read more here

Fred de Vries on Sinclair Beiles

2009-10-11T07:38:00.001-07:00

I did not know my subject. Or more accurately: I’ve never consciously met Johannesburg poet Sinclair Beiles, who was born in Uganda in 1930 and died seventy years later in the Johannesburg General Hospital. I may have bumped into him in Yeoville in the mid-nineties, but I have no recollection of that...read more here

William Burroughs interviewed by Kathy Acker - 1988

2009-09-29T02:50:00.000-07:00

Burroughs mentions Sinclair Beiles a few times in the later part of this interview.

Interview with Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska about Who was Sinclair Beiles? on Litnet

2009-09-17T00:46:00.001-07:00

Interviewer Janet van Eeeden: I found Who Was Sinclair Beiles? a fascinating read. It was so interesting to read about Sinclair Beiles, someone I didn't know much about, from so many different perspectives. The interviews between Beiles and Gary Cummiskey and Beiles and dawie malan especially throw much light on the nature of the man himself. The essays by Cummiskey, malan, Earle Holmes, Alan Finlay, Eva Kowalska, George Dillon Slater and Fred de Vries serve to delve behind the man's words and give us a glimpse into a unique character. I'd be grateful if you answered a few of my questions about this enigmatic man....
Read more here

Two Sinclair Beiles poems, translated into Greek by Yannis Livadas

2009-09-13T03:05:00.000-07:00

ΥΠΑΡΧΕΙ ΕΝΑΣ ΤΡΟΠΟΣ

Υπάρχει ένας τρόπος να αυτοκτονήσεις
που λέγεται ποίηση
Υπάρχει ένας τρόπος να πάρεις ένα μαχαίρι
και να σκαλίσεις στο άπειρο τίποτα του ουρανού
ένα μοναχικό κελί
που μέσα του κάποιος περνά τη ζωή του κόβοντας βόλτες
πετώντας περιστασιακά μηνύματα...

Read more here

Berold on Beiles

2009-09-12T15:43:00.000-07:00

Poet Robert Berold writes about Who Was Sinclair Beiles?:

I thought the Beiles book was excellent - nice balance of interviews and essays, thorough bibliography, well edited, good design, readable and inviting. And as far as I know the first non-academic book about poetry to appear in South Africa for years (ever?). Definitely not a booklet as Stephen Gray called it in his M&G non-review. I wish all our poets got such attentive treatment.

It's sad that Beiles's work and his mental state went kind of downhill. But he did write some good poems -the best of them of full of startling images, going off on tangents in interesting ways. An aesthetic that no other South African was doing. And he wrote about his madness with courage and humour.

I had a few meetings with him, and like everyone else, had to deal with his erratic attitude (which started with his proclaiming me a great poet and degenerated over time to the death threat 'by spells' quoted in Dawie Malan's essay).

Once when I was visiting him, he said "Would you like a suitcase?" and produced a very battered very heavy leather suitcase. Which my computer monitor now sits on - so I live with a reminder of Beiles every day.

Perhaps in his later years, his real creation was a character called Sinclair Beiles. But I hope Dye Hard will prove there was also a poet called Sinclair Beiles by publishing a 'best of' selection.

Howling to be a Beat

2009-09-06T00:26:00.001-07:00

Kaganof on Who was Sinclair Beiles?

2009-08-31T09:38:00.001-07:00

eventually one has to love gary cummiskey. he does not give up. he’s the kind of irascible soul that always draws trouble. something about his pugnacious nature attracts difficulties. if it can go wrong at a printer it will. twice. gary’s often stuck in traffic. the waiter dusts more flies into his soup. but unlike most people you’ve ever met who share this streak of disaster-attraction - cummiskey hasn’t got it in him to throw in the towel. you would have thought after years of publishing small press editions to little or no acclaim from the precarious south african literature “establishment” that gary would see the light and stop bothering. thank the gods he’s not that sort of bloke. gary persists. his persistency is the stuff of local literary legend.

green dragon 6 is the best edition of his literary journal to date. and this volume about the late yeoville beat poet sinclair beiles is worth its weight in genetically modified stem cells. it keeps beiles alive. a collection of essays by the likes of alan finlay, fred devries, co-editor eva kowalska and gary himself, the book sheds shards of splintered, diffused and hazy light on the figure of beiles whose reputation is based largely on memories of his surly frame sitting truculently outside coffee society in rockey street, chain smoking irritably - has anyone ever read any of his poems?

in yeoville in 1994 to film nice to meet you, please don’t rape me i was introduced to beiles by my co-screenwriter peter j. morris, himself an equally taciturn, sour-bellied type. the two of them found things to grumble about. it was impossible for me to talk to beiles. he just seemed too far gone in a vinegary disposition exacerbated by the brutal disappointment of never having ‘made it’ (whatever that means to a poet). but this volume opens the man up. dawie malan’s exquisite essay “the trouble with sinclair beiles” resuscitates the poet, gives him a fragile, vulnerable soul - and reveals librarian dawie to be one of our most sensitive writers.

this book is essential. one day somebody will be collating a set of essays asking the question “who is gary cummiskey?”he deserves better. he deserves to be lionised now.

First published here

Visit to the Jung Library in Switzerland

2009-08-15T07:55:00.000-07:00

Editors' introduction to Who was Sinclair Beiles?

2009-08-15T01:13:00.000-07:00

The idea for Who was Sinclair Beiles? originated in early 2008, after an edited version of an interview I had conducted with Beiles in 1994 was finally published in the literary journal New Coin. I had intended to put together a small number of previously published pieces about Beiles that had been written by Alan Finlay, dawie malan and myself – the latter two had been written for a feature on Beiles published on the donga website (now offline) that challenged his exclusion from the South African literary canon. However I did not feel these would be enough to create a bound book. On the other hand I did not wish to publish about 300 pages of contributions about ‘crazy Sinclair’, with an emphasis on his erratic behaviour as a result of his mental illness, although I realised it would be impossible not write about Beiles’s illness, because it was intrinsic to his work. Instead I wanted a compilation of writings that focused mainly on Beiles as a poet by people who had met him and/or respected his work.

In biographies of the major American Beat writers, such as William Burroughs or Allen Ginsberg, Beiles is often given a mere walk-on part. For example, in Barry Miles’s detailed The Beat Hotel, more attention is given to writers who were not even involved in the Minutes to Go collaboration. Thus Beiles is represented as, to use Joyce Johnson’s phrase, a minor character. Even in South Africa his work is almost totally ignored, and it is hoped this book will lead to some serious consideration of Beiles the poet.

Who was Sinclair Beiles? is not a biography, nor does it pretend to be an authoritative work about him. It is intended rather as a tribute, and was produced while keeping both financial and time constraints in mind. When I invited Eva Kowalska – who is completing her Master’s degree on Beiles’s work – to come on board as co-editor, she, like myself, was restricted by the demands of a fulltime job and other responsibilities. So, with a few exceptions, we opted to use previously published or readily available material.

The first part consists of memoirs about, and interviews with, Beiles by malan, Earle Holmes, George Dillon Slater and myself. In the second part of the book, Kowalska examines Beiles’s poetry with an emphasis on his relationship to the American Beat poets, while in a review of the Beat Hotel Exhibition in Johannesburg, Finlay provides a snapshot of Beiles in the Rockey Street milieu in the mid-1990s. Fred de Vries, who is working on a biography of Beiles, describes some of his journeys and interviews in Africa, England and Europe as part of his research. Lastly, we examine some of the reasons for Beiles’s relative obscurity and provide a bibliography of his publications.

There is some overlap in the book, particularly in the interviews. Editorial cuts have however been kept to a minimum.

Gary Cummiskey

My experience of undertaking a study of Sinclair Beiles’s writing has been frustratingly, but intriguingly, devoid of much useful secondary material. There is very little information available about Beiles, much less so about his work. Many people know of him, though not really about him, and, aside from a handful of reviews of his earlier collections, notably Ashes of Experience, he seems to have become a name without a presence in South African literary culture. This is
unfortunate, because in addition to a colourful reputation Beiles left behind a considerable amount of poetry and plays. Though admittedly it is uneven in quality, I have found his writing to be innovative, humorous, and genuine. Though he is remembered primarily as a poet, his plays and dramatic fragments, a handful of which were staged during his lifetime, reveal a versatile writer with a talent for satire and an unusual outlook which remains interesting beyond its original context.

My involvement in this project came as a result of perceiving a lack of material on Beiles, be it factual biography or any real consideration of his work. I see Who was Sinclair Beiles? as an opportunity to do something towards remedying that gap. Secondly, it was out of a desire to assert Beiles as a poet worth considering, remembering, studying, writing about – someone who should not continue to be left out of our conceptualisation of South African and/ or Beat literature.

Rather than being a complete summary of Beiles as a person and a poet, which would be impossible, or a thorough appraisal of his life and his writing, which would be a vast and entangled project, I hope that this book is a start in the right direction. I hope that it will encourage others to reinvestigate Beiles’s writing, and that it might be useful to them in doing so. I feel that it goes some way towards establishing the worth of a poet who has been almost systematically ignored on his home ground. Through the previously published texts and new perspectives offered it might provide a context or a framework for understanding and appreciating a writer who has long been preceded by his reputation to the detriment of knowledge and appreciation of his art.

Eva Kowalska

A cup of coffee with Sinclair Beiles

2009-08-15T01:09:00.000-07:00

It is a rainy afternoon and I am sitting at Times Square Restaurant in Yeoville together with Sinclair Beiles, South Africa's very own beat poet, who has just walked in out of the rain, carrying his umbrella. Sinclair has just turned seventy. Since 1959 he has had 25 books and 8 plays published and has one festival held in his honour - "Sinclair Beiles at the Beat Hotel - and he is also a candidate for the Nobel Prize for poetry (at the time of this interview around 2000)...Read more here

Send a bushman...

2009-08-15T00:58:00.001-07:00

Credit: University of South Africa library archives, manuscript collection number 143

Keeping the Bicycle Away

2009-08-15T00:54:00.000-07:00

Credit: University of South Africa library archives, manuscript collection number 143

Who was Sinclair Beiles? is an amazing book...

2009-08-03T13:57:00.000-07:00

Who was Sinclair Beiles? is an amazing book, something like a reportage, concise biography with extra interviews. It is written with objectivity but also with real respect for this, so peculiar, poet - from writers with exceptional attributes. It brings the Beiles case in the limelight with an excellent way, the way dawn changes its colours leading to the golden light of day….

Yannis Livadas, Greek poet,editor and translator

Sinclair Beiles reading his poems - Yeoville, 1994

2009-07-26T12:41:00.000-07:00

The Road to the Beat Hotel

2009-07-26T12:39:00.000-07:00

Cover of A South African Abroad, Lapis Press, 1991

2009-07-21T00:56:00.001-07:00

Contents page of Who was Sinclair Beiles?

2009-07-18T03:27:00.000-07:00

A collage by Sinclair Beiles

2009-07-17T06:43:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Sarah Hills. The collage was received from Beiles when Hills and Christo Doherty were co-editing the first and sadly only issue of Porno Literature, in which Beiles had two poems published, in 1989.

Sinclair Beiles with William Plomer, 1969

2009-07-15T13:56:00.000-07:00

Sinclair Beiles receveing a medallion from William Plomer for the first Ingrid Jonker Poetry Prize in 1969 for his first collection, Ashes of Experience.

Who was Sinclair Beiles? - soon available in bookstores throughout South Africa

2009-07-15T03:36:00.001-07:00

New publication from Dye Hard Press: Who was Sinclair Beiles?

2009-07-15T03:30:00.000-07:00

Who was Sinclair Beiles?
edited by Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska

ISBN:978-0-620-42792-0

In 1960, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin and Sinclair Beiles collaborated on the now legendary collection of cut-ups, Minutes to Go. Readers of Beat literature know of Burroughs, Corso and Gysin, but who was Sinclair Beiles?

Sinclair Beiles was a South African poet and playwright, born in Uganda in 1930. He moved to Paris during the 1950s, where for a time he was an editor at Olympia Press and a resident at the Beat Hotel. He later spent several years in Greece and his first poetry collection, Ashes of Experience, won the first Ingrid Jonker poetry prize in 1969. Many other collections followed, published either overseas or in South Africa, to where he returned in the late 1970s. Beiles died, generally ignored by the mainstream South African poetry anthologies, in Johannesburg in 2000.

Who was Sinclair Beiles? brings together a collection of interviews, memoirs and essays about Beiles and his work by Gary Cummiskey, dawie malan, George Dillon Slater, Earle Holmes, Eva Kowalska, Alan Finlay and Fred de Vries.

The book also includes previously unpublished photographs of Sinclair Beiles. Perfect bound, 136 pages. Beiles's work is in danger of sliding into obscurity forever, and it is time for a renewed assessment of his contribution to South African literature.

Who was Sinclair Beiles? will soon be available at bookstores throughout South Africa, estimated retail price R160. If purchased directly from the publisher, the price is R100, including postage (South Africa).

E-mail dyehardpress@iafrica.com for more order details.