under cover ladies night wallpaper: The winding life and uncoordinated epitaphs of the obscure 'Beat' poet John Thomas

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I think maybe today a poem I hope

after breakfast I start trying

pulling it out of my own gut

mostly by force – thin stuff

& careless, about people in Venice here &

things that happened to me once

most days even all my strong arming

doesn't help me & I

give up, read, or

whine about it in my journal

& piss away the day

swimming/eating/sneering around in a coffeehouse.

'Now here’s a difficult case: an undeniably excellent poet who died in prison, serving a sentence for having molested his daughter; a poet whose early work seems to show a visionary breadth and bounding imagination, but who barely published any new poems (or republished, times over, older poems) during the latter part of his life; and a poet Charles Bukowski called “the best unread poet in America” whose style synthesized elements of the most opaque of Olson’s Maximus poems or the collage aesthetic of the Tennis Court Oath (but who was also, at times, sexually frank, morally unambiguous in his amorality, and could tell a good story, like a West Venice West Georges Bataille).

'Outside of this small group (most of which also appear in his first collection, called John Thomas), Thomas published a chapbook of poems called Nevertheless in 1990, and contributed to the volume Abandoned Latitudes (with Paul Vangelisti and Robert Crosson) in 1983. A good, if not probing, obituary was published in the UK Independent (1); a much more detailed, and harrowing, account of his personality by his daughter, Gabrielle Idlet, appeared a little later in the LA Weekly (2). -- Brian Stefans, Free Space Comix

(1) from John Thomas: Beat poet known for his inability to write
Adrian Dannat, The Independent

"How does one review the work of a poet who mocks the societal role of the poet, who has no desire to publish his poetry and says that he has no interest in the familiar moral values of poetry and poets?" This was the question posed by Lawrence Lipton, fabled chronicler of the "Beat" group in California, about one of his most fascinating subjects, the poet John Thomas. In many ways Thomas was the antithesis of the hipsters, Bohemians and Beatniks chronicled in Holy Barbarians and sometimes seemed trapped by the wacky underground counter-culture he was widely assumed to be part of.

Indeed, he almost seemed an active enemy of the sprawling, self-indulgent alternative literary community of Los Angeles. He was something of an 18th-century figure, with a certain fondness for antique weapons (he collected sabres, dress swords and foils and, as any poet should, had a weakness for duels or the idea of them), orgies and satire; at 6'4" and weighing over 300 pounds, even his physical build betokened another, more heroic age.

A self-proclaimed "writer", one day Thomas was asked by the poet Maurice Lacy, "What do you write?" Without thinking Thomas replied, "I'm a poet", and thus had no choice but to write some of the stuff. Poetry certainly suited Thomas better than novels; as he admitted, "The novel-writing ambition was just sheer, vulgar pretence, wanting to be a great man." But even free verse was still a painful process for Thomas and his NOT writing and deep inability to write became his central theme if not celebrity.

The eponymous book John Thomas was put out in a limited edition of 405 copies, 30 of which were signed, numbered and even "sealed" by the author, presumably so they could not be read. This was published in 1972 and followed in 1976 by the elegant Epopoeia or the Decay of Satire. (In fact this second volume was the same as the first, except Thomas had deleted some works rather than adding any, further reducing his oeuvre.)

Thomas's last and perhaps fourth wife was Philomene Long, herself no small local legend, who had left her cloistered convent as a Catholic nun to escape to LA and as poetess/ film-maker documented the scene in such movies as Venice Beat and The California Missions, with Martin Sheen. Long also introduced Thomas to the Zen Center of LA, where they studied with the revered Maezumi Roshi, who gave her the Buddhist name "Gyokuho" or "Fragrant Jewel". In 1983, in a burst of activity, Thomas published Abandoned Latitudes, or rather he contributed a thin shard, "From Patagonia", to this collection of three LA writers. This was Thomas's most engaging finale, even if he was to live for almost 20 more years.

(2) from Hitting the Beats
Gabrielle Idlet, LA Weekly

My father, ”Venice West“ poet John Thomas, died of congestive heart failure on March 29 at the age of 71. His April 7 Los Angeles Times obituary describes him as ”the sage of Venice“ (Beyond Baroque executive director Fred Dewey), ”mentor“ (Wanda Coleman), even ”the best unread poet in America“ (Charles Bukowski). Another journalistic elegy, appearing in Los Angeles Magazine, depicted my father as a man with a ”piercing wit [and] generous spirit,“ for whom ”poverty and love were equal teachers in a life of wisdom.“ His obituary was carried by wire across the nation, even making news at the Washington Post.

No publication mentioned that my father was, at the time of his death, serving a sentence in Los Angeles County Jail for sexually molesting his daughter -- my half sister Susan. Posthumous descriptions of his life left out other significant information: that he was a fraud, a thief and an endangerer of children, and that, while he often bragged that he‘d ”retired at 28,“ he’d made an impressive career of consumption. In the nearly two decades my father spent with my mother, he didn‘t work, and he wrote virtually nothing except for ”From Patagonia,“ a prose poem about what he described as his inner landscape of desolation. Real-world decimation, however, was his true accomplishment.

His name changed frequently, in fact. A late-’60s issue of the men‘s magazine Oui published a feature on my father, celebrating him as the country’s leading perpetrator of mail-order fraud. Growing up, I watched him feast on raw hamburger, grabbing it straight from the Styrofoam package. In order to avoid taking out the garbage, he found two industrial-size trash cans for the kitchen and let scraps collect for months at a stretch. I knew it was summertime when I stepped barefoot onto a sea of maggots that dropped from the trash, wriggling toward the dog-hair-dense carpet.

Equally noxious and permeating was my father’s sexuality. While he made a game of insulting my mother and describing himself to me as her ”gigolo,“ he encouraged me to read his journals -- beautifully calligraphed legal pads filled with detailed sex fantasies. At his bedside, paperback porn invited attention -- one flashy spine read Father-Daughter Lust. Our walls were covered with photos of Hitler, outlaws, corpses and orgies. ”Tickle Time,“ a game that invariably ended with his giant hands making their way beneath the waistline of my underwear until I writhed in laughing confusion, punctuated our days at home alone.

In the early ’70s, my father flew his teenaged daughter Susan from his first marriage (whom he hadn‘t seen since she was 3) to Los Angeles, drugged her with a potent pharmaceutical hallucinogen, and submitted her to sexual abuse a several times over the course of her three-week visit -- on at least one occasion with the participation of my mother, who had also supplied the drugs. Afterward, my father bragged to friends about his conquest. In March of this year, thanks to a 1993 law allowing victims of child sexual abuse to file charges years later -- and my sister’s determination to find healing through justice -- he was convicted and incarcerated for his crimes.

While I lived with my father, he never pursued publication -- it was a point of honor for him. He responded to requests from editors, however, so his poems did make their way into the world. And his work was generally well respected. But as far as I can tell, his notoriety derives principally from two facts: He outlived many of his Beat cohorts, and he was friendly, for a time, with Charles Bukowski. Simply living long enough to be a rarity, though, should not give a person icon status. As for literary talent vs. humanity, Bukowski himself said it best: ”It‘s so easy to be a poet and so hard to be a man."