Charles Plymell: Trashing

The Trashing of America is the testimony of a soul burning through the ‘zinc cities red sky" of the U.S.A. — from a a gas station in Kansas to the Cadillac chrome of L.A., from the hard neon rough-trade streets of San Francisco to the crisp acetylene of Baltimore, from the apocalyptic misery of Manhattan’s Bowery to the rural musing sleeping of upstate New York where the poet rests, finally, and survives. Charles Plymell is a poet of searing sensitivity and outrage. Something proud and defiant about a swiftly disappearing America is captured forever in these poems. The is a major collection, long overdue. — Anne Waldman

Spun out of that vortex which is Wichita, Charley Plymell reached San Francisco on that road that ran thru the astonished heart of America, riding his chopper (at least in my imagined midnight cowboy movie of him)—and these are the poems of his vision of the apocalypse rose of America-Brooklyn yellow pages, Hollywood black light sun, Second Hand Rose on the juke, Gough Street blues, wild rose of Utah, New York iron city, Kansas madman’s dream, eternity in the groin—Neal Cassady down, Kerouac down, all down the Great American Drain—and the vision goes on— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Plymell and his friends inventing the Wichita Vortex contribute to a tradition stretching back from Lamantia thru Sherwood Anderson to Poe and earlier American vibration artists of those provinces. I interpret his statement as prophetic fragment memory of innocence, visionary great fear, & Warm glimmer: a new species?— Allen Ginsberg