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Skull Highway
Poems
Lawrence Welsh
68 pages • 978-1-888809-51-0 • $12.00

Lawrence Welsh is a shaman with words.
He whirls flowers and moons and skies
and adobe mud around and around
and mixes them with his hard-won wisdom.
He scrapes his initials into them
with his soul’s white tooth,
his word chisel.
Jimmy Santiago Baca

The poems of Lawrence Welsh seem cut down to their driest song out of debris found along an arroyo used as a border crossing. These are minimalist sketches with long resonance. Each word shifts back and forth between an archetype and prophecy, then into the essential thing itself. You have to chew on them and put some of your own spit in the mix. This is the "southwest" as experienced by hitchhiking mystics or simply a person walking away from a civilization caught up in its own demise. Nobody escapes without a few wounds. We all have scars and they make the body more interesting. Sometimes a howl floats in the wind. Sometimes it is the roar of laughter. When you get to the spot where these poems live, you might find Charles Bukowski and Lorine Niedecker roasting a jackrabbit over a campfire while sipping cold springwater. Everyone stares at the universe looking for meteorites—on Skull Highway you count any and every speck of dust as a blessing.

Born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, Lawrence Welsh first hitchhiked to New Mexico and Texas in 1989. Five years later, he moved to El Paso, where he still lives. A first generation Irish-American, Welsh has published five collections of poetry, and his work has appeared in more than 175 national and regional magazines, including Puerto del Sol, The Louisiana Review, Hawaii Review, Rio Grande Review, The Texas Observer, Onthebus, The Wormwood Review, Nexus, Chiron Review, The Café Review, Poetry Motel, Pearl, and the book Das Ist Alles—Charles Bukowski Recollected. Welsh has worked as a newspaper reporter, editor, waiter, and graveyard stock clerk. A winner of the Bardsong Press Celtic Voice Writing Award in Poetry, he’s an associate professor of English at El Paso Community College. He’s married to Lisa McNiel, a poet and teacher, and they have two children, Megan and Patrick.

Photograph by Gloria Graham

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Outrider
Essays • Poems • Interviews
Anne Waldman
200 pages • 1-888809-48-5 • 978-1-888809-48-0
20 photographs • $18.00

Anne Waldman has been speaking about the “outrider” tradition since 1974 when she and Allen Ginsberg founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa, a Buddhist-inspired university in Boulder, Colorado. This book gathers several essays, poems & rants, an interview with her by Matthew Cooperman, and an interview by her with Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal in an attempt to further articulate a sense of this tradition from Walt Whitman to the present. Not a dry presentation, this book is an fierce and loving look at what poetry can be. Outrider is an iinvocation of “lineage” as a challenge toward examining the practice of poetry and the links of its history. This awareness of lineage encompasses both what has been inherited and what needs be passed on. Waldman’s Outrider will be a provocative contribution to a post-millennium poetics.

“The Outrider holds a premise of imaginative consciousness. The Outrider rides the edge—parallel to the mainstream, is the shadow to the mainstream, is the consciousness or soul of the mainstream whether it recognizes its existence or not. It cannot be co-opted, it cannot be bought. Or rides through the chaos, maintaining a stance of “negative capability”, but also does not give up that projective drive, or its original identity that demands that it intervene on the culture. This is not about being an Outsider. The Outrider might be an outlaw, but not an outsider. Rather, the outrider is a kind of shaman, the true spiritual “insider”. The shaman travels to zones of light and shadow. The shaman travels to edges of madness and death and comes back to tell the stories.”
—from the essay “Premises of Consciousness: Notes on Howl”

In this superb collection of recollections, meditations, interviews, poems, notes, and manifestos, Anne Waldman writes an indispensable chapter in the history of American poetry, one at once brilliant assessment and inspired exhortation. The “outrider,” edgy icon of post-Beat authority, becomes the trope for a poetic pedagogy involving avant-writers from Stein and Olson to Ginsberg and Ernesto Cardenal. And surely the term also invokes the rebel angel Gerard Manley Hopkins — he whose outride syllables “ride forward or backward from the line in another dimension.” Waldman maps this “out” dimension as a visionary poetic landscape where compassion and commitment are still possible.
—Michael Golston

From a life in which every aspect of the day is a radical act of poetry and community emerges — if we are lucky — a documentation of that very life. In Outrider, we encounter a relentless drive to know, revolt, and review with equal parts honesty and abandon, as only Anne Waldman can produce. Take this ride through geographies of ideas and conversations and come out with your hair aflame and your tongue out.
—Renee Gladman

In this dark era of un-ending wars, Outrider reminds us “there is no human dimension in any given period of history without poetry.” Anne Waldman convincingly reaffirms that poetry, essential element of human consciousness, state of mind, can take action as a witness to injustice and “speak to power” effectively. It stands opposite the ignorance of plutocracies that hold power over human life, and offers a rival government that can help save us from the tired, obsolete model of war killing, show us a different version of the world, and the inter-connectedness of all life forms. One comes away from this lucid and extraordinary book knowing — reminded, unforgettably — that poetry is a consciousness that can stop us from being “planetary fools,” if only we will pay attention, and can help humanity chart a necessary journey to a compassionate world in which we take responsibility for where we are going, and where we care for one another and the planet at the same time.
—Daisy Zamora

Anne Waldman, poet, performer, professor, cultural activist holds the lineages of The New American Poetry in her DNA. She is the author of numerous books of poetry including the mini-classic Fast Speaking Woman (City Lights) and the recent volumes In The Room Of Never Grieve (Coffee House Press) and the meditative Structure of the World Compared to A Bubble (Penguin Poets). She is also the editor of The Beat Book, and co-editor of Civil Disobediences: Poetics & Politics in Action. She is the Chair of the Summer Writing Program at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, faculty for New England College's low-residency MFA, and the pedagogical director for Study Abroad On The Bowery in New York City. Her extensive Archive resides at the Hatcher Graduate Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Allen Ginsberg has called her his "spiritual wife".

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As If the World Really Mattered
Poems
Art Goodtimes
120 pages • 1-888809-49-3• 978-1-888809-49-7 • $14.00

Art Goodtimes is legendary along the Sourthern Rockies as poet, performer, ritualist, Rainbow Tribe and Green Party activist. In her introduction, “deep ecologist” Dolores LaChapelle describes him as part of the bardic tradition “which shows us how nature and human consciousness are but different aspects of one consciousness. Bards put mind and body together within the whole of nature.” In As If the World Really Mattered, we find poems which joyfully expound on the natural world and our relationship to it. Lyrical but root essential, Goodtimes speaks as one of the ancient storytellers—wise and sly. These poems could have been sung underground in the caves of Lascaux or atop a rock in a sacred grove. Political at heart, Goodtimes opposes the alienation of industrial culture from our interdependent life on earth. Much of his work has only been published in chapbooks, broadsides, “bundles,” and various ephemera, this is his first major collection.

“Poet Tree, as my friend Kush would say, with all its rich history/herstory, springs from storytelling. It is an art that allows us humans to speak, not just for ourselves but for the world around us in all its illusive facets — poor matchstick, poppycock, immortal diamond. For me, poetry’s simplicite’ is its charm. No techno gimmicks, celluloid tricks. No dazzling mechanical arrays. Just voice —expressed as language, that tantalizingly accessible chameleon whose shape runs the gamut from the mundane to the divine, from the idiotic to the elegant.” —from the author’s Preface.

If you’ve ever heard Art Goodtimes in full voice, you can bring that resounding onto these pages. If this is your first Artful moment, which I doubt since everybody knows Art, you’re in for delight. The names Blake, Hopkins, and Snyder come to mind, and the mind here is a vast outdoors of heart-intellect. I read the notes and Intro first because I couldn’t resist. I emerge from the attendant poems under the influence, my consciousness lifted to places I needed to go, big time, thanks to Goodtimes.
—Joan Logghe

Poet, shaman, artist and activist, Art Goodtimes gives us poems that are precise and generous and true. They sing and bring us new marvels of understanding. Some poets work inside the tradition, others outside. Art Goodtimes is one of those rare maker poets that help define a fresh, evolving tradition. These are songs of Earth and our human condition that lift as they illuminate. They serve a larger purpose: the encounter of the real, the sacred and the moment. In the splendid mess we call “human,” Art Goodtimes catches the heart-wood we all need. He gives voice and song and poem to the wilderness of possibility rising. He reinvents and makes it new. You are holding poems of authentic engagement. Goodtimes knows a growing thing when he feels it, and has the skill to help it grow into your ear and heart and mind.
—Jack Mueller

Huzzah! Important to have Art Goodtimes’ collected work elegantly in hand—an ecstatic basket of intricate, ambidextrous poems! His place-passionate poetry roars in on a polyphonic resonant frequency—bold harmonics, lit by fierce, tender intelligence, reverb con brio. This is audacious, plumed, lucid, and lyrical wildmind writing shaped by uplift and running strong as snowmelt. These are poems that praise and rail and shimmer; ancient & au courant, erudite and faithful; re-voicing the broken, disappeared and forgotten. All honors to Art Goodtimes, one of our great bardic rememberers, singer of the San Juan songlines, peaceforger, heroic worker bee, potato farmer, whose poetry most definitely matters.
—Judyth Hill

Some books tell us what we don’t know; this book reminds us of what we may have forgotten or come to ignore, the mystery of deep current hinted at by a slow river’s surface. Art Goodtimes’ poems “plunge their green thumbs into / the plundered soil of the interior landscape” with grace and flashing color, the lyric valuables of a pied bard piping us back into the moment so we become “the flow reinhabiting the rock.” Go ahead, delight yourself: read this book.
—Chris Ransick

Poet, journalist and third-term Green county commissioner, Art Goodtimes is a former poetry editor for Earth First! Journal and Wild Earth. He served as poet-in- residence for the annual Telluride Mushroom Festival for 25 years and continues as founder/director of the annual Talking Gourds poetry gatherings.He's lives near Norwood on Wright's Mesa at the western edge of the San Juans with his wife and children.

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Home Among the Swinging Stars
The Collected Poems of Jaime de Angulo
edited by Stefan Hyner
176 pages • 1-888809-47-7 • $18.00

Jaime de Angulo (1887-1950) was born in Paris of Spanish parents. He came to America in 1905, found work as a cowboy and ended up in San Francisco the day before the Great Earthquake in 1906. A picaresque life followed as a homesteader in Big Sur, medical doctor, psychologist, renowned linguist, and novelist. As a linguist, de Angulo contributed to the knowledge of many Northern Californian languages, as well ethnomusicological investigations. He lived among the tribes he studied and tried to become integrated into their daily lives. Much of his life and work exemplifies his recognition of the trickster wisdom in their native “coyote tales.” Invited by Mabel Dodge Luhan to visit Taos, he turned out to be a vivid chapter in her artistic circle. Brilliant and eccentric, Ezra Pound called him "the American Ovid." Bohemian to the core, he was friend and colleague to poets, composers, and scholars such as Harry Partch, Henry Miller, Robinson Jeffers, Henry Cowell, Franz Boas, Carl Jung, D.H. Lawrence, and many others. Renderings of Pit River lore in his book Indian Tales had a distinct influence on Beat literature, especially Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac. Besides prose, there exists an abundance of poetry which is collected in Home Among the Swinging Stars and includes the out-of-print Coyote’s Bones, versions of Shaman Songs, translations of Federico Garcia Lorca, and unpublished poems.

Edited by German poet and translator, Stefan Hyner who was educated at the Universities of Heidelberg and Taipei where he studied Sinology and East-Asian art history. Teaching and writing in Asia and America from 1981 to 1989, he visited China, Tibet, Korea, Japan, the United States, Mexico and Canada. Author of numerous poetry books and translations from Chinese and English, Hyner is currently at work on the archives of Italian Swiss artist/poet Franco Beltrametti (1937-1995).

This book is published with the cooperation of the Literary Estate of Jaime de Angulo.