Sacred Fix: a portrait of beat poet Sinclair Beiles

Sacred Fix is a documentary on Sinclair Beiles by Anton Kotze. It was broadcast on South African television in 1998.

Brief excerpt from Anton Kotze's documentary Sacred Fix

Going Cold Turkey (in Cyberspace), by Jan Herman

The computer screen has become a substitute for reality, dominating us not just by way of social media but — old news — by making artifacts like books on paper seem obsolete. I plead seriously guilty, witness this blogpost with its images and descriptions. A package that came in the mail with several new items from Cold Turkey Press got me to thinking more than usually about this. Issued in minuscule editions, Cold Turkey chapbooks, folios, and cards compose a rare yet necessary archive that subverts the ordinary in literary content and artistic quality. Their scarcity notwithstanding, they are essential cultural documents — scholarly without being academic, exotic but not obscure, their intelligence distinctive. To be truly appreciated, however, these hand-made manifestations of the publisher’s mind must be experienced in the material world and not as digital simulacrums in cyberspace...More here 

Sacred Fix at the Librarie Shakespeare and Company, Paris

Thank you to Yannis Livadas for sending me this photo: Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and George Whitman at the Librarie Shakespeare and Company, Paris. Photo by Francois Lagarde. However, Yannis's eagle eye picked up what the unidentified man on the right is reading ... Sacred Fix by Sinclair Beiles. Date unknown. Sacred Fix was published published by Cold Turkey Press in 1976, and I think Ginsberg still had his beard till the mid-'70s. So maybe late '70s or early '80s?

during the rush-hour, by Sinclair Beiles

Original page from Sacred Fix, Cold Turkey Press, Rotterdam, 1975

whatever we do, by Sinclair Beiles

Original page from Sacred Fix, Cold Turkey Press, Rotterdam, 1975

there is a way of committing suicide, by Sinclair Beiles

Original page from Sacred Fix, Cold Turkey Press, Rotterdam, 1975

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

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)

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

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.