TED JOANS LIVES! A Tribute, Page 4

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Ted Joans Lives! Online Tribute, Books & Resources

To contribute to the Ted Joans Lives! webpages, please get in touchs. Pieces may be any length. All contributions received will be published online. You will retain the copyright to your work.

Please also see Ted Joans links & resources and Ted Joans books for sale.

Michael Löwy:

Long live Ted Joans,   sweet Black giant !    Let three continents awake in his dreams ! Let his surrealist poems run over the oceans as deeply as the Gulf Stream !    Let his words rise in the vulcanoes of the future !

Michael Hayward:

A reminiscence of Ted appears in a recent entry for my online web-log:
http://www.harbour.sfu.ca/~hayward/pretexts/archives/000120.html
also see: Ted Joans Lives!

Nick Piombino:

Saddened by the news about Ted Joans. We were introduced a few years ago by Charles Borkhuis in Paris. Ted immediately arranged for a wonderful reading for the three of us in the magnificent old Parisian villa and garden of a friend of his. An unforgettable evening that included a surprise performance by Phoebe Legere whose sultry accordion playing and singing has haunted me ever since. I learned that Ted loved to travel and frequently did book tours and readings including many in Africa. Ted liked to tell stories of his beat days, he was easy going and lots of fun to be around. He called one his favorite publishers "Nude Erections" (*New Directions*) I saw Ted once more a couple of years ago. We spent the day together going to some bookstores. I had told him about some signed books by him I had purchased from the Skyline bookstore downtown around 17th and 5th, and the owner, of course, knows Ted.Then Ted wanted ice cream and we went somewhere and they happened to serve blue ice cream.. Ted immediately named the day our "blue ice cream day." I've never forgotten that moment, and I realized that Ted knew something important about memory and imagery that I had planned to discuss next time I see him. Toni remembers another occasion when she and I went out with Ted and his companion, the warm and very lovely Laura Corsiglia to one of Ted's favorite Village coffee houses, the "Figaro." Ted gave us some drawings in exchange for some books. Toni just located a terrific photo of Ted, Laura Corsiglia, Charles Borkhuis, Toni and myself in an outdoor cafe in Paris.

Stephen Vincent:

I knew Ted Joans a little in England late summer and fall of 1967 where I read with him and others at the Edinburgh Festival and sometimes in London. I was young and probably intimidated not to get to know him as person. But he had a great playful energy that helped animate whatever scene he was around (and that time a great love of Hell as presented by Hieronymus B.) He had a lifetime dedication to the Bohemian margins and seemed to manage to put up a tent anywhere and practically survive (NY, Europe, Mali). Tho I admit it's been ages since I have revisited the books - the covers of which still have an innocently wonderful way of provoking a serio-comic kind of shameless attention. I don't know if we are left with the history of a public character & performer and/or someone whose poetry will also survive its performed moment as text.

The Bancroft Library at Berkeley acquired Ted Joans' archives a year or so ago.

Fabrice Pascauud:

Ted Joans, le soufle d'une mélopée sur la partition de la libertée. Une seule clef à la portée : celle des champs qui ouvre tous les possibles et notamment les territoires inconnus que chacun porte en soi.

Bastiaan David van der Velden:

As a young artist and writer I came to Paris in the late 1980s. The first person I met was an English surrealist living in Paris, who tried to make me a coffee at 6:45 in the morning, everything went wrong, I should have asked for a tea.

The second person was Ted Joans, we met at a gallery vernissage later that day, and he directly gave me the phone number of a certain Jim Haynes, although I'm not sure it was for me or my girlfriend. We went to Jim's place, where we fell into a big dinner party. At length we discussed vegetarianism, surrealism, totem animals, how to stay as long as possible in Paris (not necessarily in France), Dutch poets and the rest of the world. The next Monday we had to come to Shakespeare and Co. (where of course everybody could stay for a certain time, when they read a book a day). It was I great time, end in the years after this first meeting, our roads crossed once in a while. In Paris, in Dutch books, for example when the Dutch poet Jules Deelder used Ted's motto 'Jazz is my religion' on the title page of one of his books. One last time I came across his name. I bought a book on Internet by Ted, but it never arrived... Ted, poet, we don't walk away from you since you're only telling the truth.

Larry Sawyer:

I never met Ted but was influenced by his great poetry. Charles Henri Ford spoke highly of him (whom I knew). I wrote this spontaneous poem yesterday in Ted's honor.

______________________________

BLUNT EDGE

 

for Ted Joans

 

I wanted to give you a weapon

of onyx and saffron

implement it in the dark nights

when all alone among bad poets

while sipping cumulonimbus

and puffing stratosphere

poetry is better than anything else

its death has been pronounced repeatedly

but they'll never really nail it down

it is a cocaine rose

a rubble hurricane

balloon eyes above actual flags

flapping along infinity

with our tongues we put on the finishing touches. one -  two -  three -  four -  five -  six -  seven -  eight -  nine -  ten -  eleven -  recent