New in French translation: Sinclair Beiles’s Selected Catastrophies & Other Poems

Catastrophes Choisies is not Sinclair Beiles’s first poetry collection to appear in French, but it is the most elaborate. The South African emigré poet, writer, and editor was born in Uganda of Russian-Jewish descent, in 1930, and grew up in Johannesburg from the age of six. An ex-patriate for most of his life, Beiles lived at various times in Tangiers, Athens, London, Rotterdam, and Paris, and sporadically had himself committed to hospital wards to deal with his sometimes fragile mental health  ...  Read more.

Sinclair Beiles: Poet of Many Parts and Places, by Jan Herman

Dye Hard Press has re-issued Who Was Sinclair Beiles? in a revised and expanded edition. I posted an item about the first edition when it was published five years ago. It’s hard to believe so much time has passed. As I wrote then, Beiles was best known for his association with the Beats. He collaborated on Minutes to Go with William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Gregory Corso, and helped to shepherd Burroughs’ manuscript of Naked Lunch into print at the Paris-based Olympia Press, where he worked as an editor. “Best known” is a questionable term, though. If he was known at all, it was only among a certain segment of avant-garde expatriate writers and artists living in Tangier, Paris, London, Rotterdam, Athens, and other far-flung places, where he spent many years scraping by in various capacities....Read more

Gossip Column - a cut-up by Anne Rooney and Sinclair Beiles

Found in a drawer 44 years later, this cut-up first appeared in Jan Herman's arts blog Straight Up.

In Bone Hebrew, the White Kaffir speaks

A long-awaited copy of Bone Hebrew from Cold Turkey Press showed up in my mailbox. The title is taken from Paul Celan. The cover is by Antonin Artaud. The poems are by Sinclair Beiles. Here are two of them...read more here 

A First-Class Letter from the Lost and Found

When I read Heathcote Williams' description of a bizarre project that for a time obsessed the South African poet Sinclair Beiles, who wanted to plant "the barren Sahara desert" with "industrial quantities of  discarded tea-leaves", I remembered a letter than Carl Weissner once wrote ....read more here

Some evidence amongst the ruins: a previously unpublished poem by Sinclair Beiles from Jan Herman's Straight Up

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

Jan Herman on Who was Sinclair Beiles?

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