Sinclair Beiles, le poète excentrique du Beat Hotel, by Bruno Sourdin

Né en 1930, le poète sud-africain Sinclair Beiles a vécu à Paris dans les années 50. Il travailla pour Olympia Press, la maison d’édition de Maurice Girodias, qui publiait en anglais des livres sulfureux et subversifs, à la fois des récits érotiques (dirty books) et des oeuvres interdites aux Etats-Unis (parmi lesquelles Sexus d’Henry Miller, Lolita de Nabokov et Naked Lunch de William Burroughs). Sinclair lui-même a édité un roman érotique, Houses of Joy, sous le pseudonyme de Wu Wu Ming....Read more

The French Village, by Sinclair Beiles

Everything blue
Blue nuns
With hats like paper boats.
A boys' choir with open mouths
Like young birds wanting to be fed.
There's an old policeman
On a bicycle
And a girl shaking a rug
From a window
With a wisp of hair like a tendril
Hanging in front of her ear.
And there's also a woman wearing black stockings.

(from Ashes of Experience, Wurm Publishers, Pretoria, 1969)

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.

(from Ashes of Experience, Wurm Publishers, Pretoria, 1969)

Ari, by Sinclair Beiles

Ari lives with her mother
Spends Sundays with her lover
Under the pine trees on Lycabettus hill
While the church bells ring for mass in the valley.
Ari wears an engagement ring although she is not engaged
And dreams of meeting an American
Who will take her to New York
And so she sits at tourist cafés during the lunch hour

Wondering whether she can still have children
After that abortion in Piraeus.

(from Ashes of Experience, Wurm Publishers, Pretoria, 1969)