Letter from Sinclair Beiles to Jay Jeff Jones, April 1975

Victims Wanted

Universal Truths Revealed in White Tobacco Smoke, after Tristan Tzara

Universal Truths Revealed in White Tobacco Smoke, after Tristan Tzara, by Sinclair Beiles,  published by Cordelia Editions, Johannesburg, in 1976. Artwork by Bob Cobbing. More details of this edition can be found at The Artists' Book.

The first edition of this book was published by the London Poetry Poetry, in 1974.

When I visited Beiles in 1994, he showed me a third edition of this work, which instead of a book was a boxed set of cards. He said it had been produced in Italy. I am unable to remember the exact details, but I was under the impression it had been produced in the late 1980s.

A photo by Xristos Aggelakopoulos

Robbie, a short story published in Bomb magazine

A small notice about "Robbie", a short story by Sinclair Beiles published by Bomb magazine #6, Summer 1983. The story concerns a love-struck man speaking to a detective and a washerwoman. Click here

Sinclair Beiles, Yeoville, Johannesburg 1994

Terrible Dreams by Sinclair Beiles

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.
I look over the side of the cockpit
And below I see the horrors of enemy territory
- the mental hospitals.
All I can think of is writing as much as I can
While a semblance of sanity and strengthen
remains for me,
I fear the fate of Artaud
Of Nietzsche
Of Nijinsky.
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 Ashes of Experience, Wurm, Pretoria, 1969)

Advert for Nova Broadcast titles, 1968

Nova Broadcast press was run by Jan Herman back in the late 1960s. As indicated by this advert, it was originally planned as a venture in collaboration with Beach Books, Texts & Documents and the literary journal The San Francisco Earthquake. Among others, Nova published works by Ray Bremser, Norman O Mustill, Carl Weissner, Dick Higgens and Wolf Wostell. However, some of the titles announced in the advert did not make it to publication - including  Alice in Progress by Sinclair Beiles and Annie Rooney, his first wife. (Joyce Mansour's Flash Card was later published by Cherry Valley Editions.)

And she brought a little boy to me, by Sinclair Beiles

And she brought a little boy to me
to make love to
and when his tears
welled up in his eyes
she said to him
come to mother.
her breasts were smeared with honey
and I said to her
alright you can take me
to America.

(First published in Ashes of Experience, Wurm Publishers, Pretoria, 1969, then in Porno Literature, ed. Christo Doherty and Sarah Mills, Bobbejaan Pers, 1989. Reprinted in my ghost in the bush of lies, Paul Wessels, Deep South, Grahamstown, 2005.)

As he had no oil, by Sinclair Beiles

As he had no oil to stop
the door from squeaking
he stuffed its hinge with wild honey.
Soon the living room was filled
with wild bees which settled
along the inner edge of the door.
When he tried to chase them away,
they set on him and stung him.
So severe were the stings that in a day
he was dead
And then the bees began to build
a hive in his open mouth.

(From The Idiot's Voice, Cold Turkey Press, 2012)

The San Francisco Earthquake Vol 1, No 3

The San Francisco Earthquake, Volume 1, Number 3, published  San Francisco, 1968.  78pp. Contains writings by Jacob Herman, Robert Duncan, Rod Padgett, Tom Veitch, Jean-Pierre Duprey, Harold Norse,  Gerard Bellaart and Sinclair Beiles, as well as collages by Carl Weissner, Liam O'Gallagher, Mary Beach, Jean-Clarence Lambert, Norman O. Mustill and Pelieu. 

Beiles's contribution is an 8-page film scenario called 'The Last Procession'.