ISBN: 0-88739-480-9
75 pp.
Size: 5.5 x 8.5
Pub Date: 5/2003
Paperback Original
Price: $15.00
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Old Pothead Poems, The
A Donald S. Ellis Book
Sam Abrams
Louis Armstrong said it, "Marijuana is an assistant, a friend." These poems riff off that theme, a fifty-year-long set of improv-collaborations between two old friends, Miss Mary Jane and her man, Sam.
Poems too of a classicist, on familiar terms with Sappho, Archilochus, Horace, Socrates - regulars in the audience along with Miles, Billy, Bessie, Woody - hard listeners for poems that are bluesy, bopsy, beat, Whitmanesque, funny, generous, passionately committed, intellectually rigorous, sometimes savage - poems that swing hard, come on hard, poems from Brooklyn, America, Greece, London - in-your-face poems. And always poems composed not in the head but "on the breath." Poems that can only - the author insists - be read aloud.
From Old Pothead's Experimental Method
I once got high turned on by
a detective lieutenant
at the home of the dean of students
a test of the old head's myth
that narcs have the best shit
it's true they do
they do doobie
doobie do
Bio: SAM ABRAMS has been a Fulbright Professor of American Literature at the University of Athens, one of the original workshop leaders at The Poetry Project, a longshoreman, a TV journalist, a union laborer, a communal organic farmer, and a jail cellmate of Dr. Spock. For the past twenty years, his second home has been Chania, Crete. Married to author Barbara Leeb, he has two sons and two grandchildren.
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