Sick Fly and Second Aeon

Trying to pull back something from the maw of the past can be the hardest thing. It’s more than thirty years since the poet William Wantling was around. He died in 1974. April 2^nd at 12.45 pm at Mennonite Hospital, McLean County in Illinois. It said heart failure on his death certificate. He was forty. Had I known him? I’d never met him. But we’d had a lot of contact.

Bill had stumbled on me. It was the sixties and I was on the wavetop with second aeon, trying to encompass the world, at poetry’s cutting edge. The magazine and its attendant wash of books, cards, posters and booklets were at the heart of the literary underground. Ignored by the TLS establishment, ridiculed by Poetry Review, made fun in Poetry Wales. But sought out by anyone who cared about what was really going on. Out of the blue in 1969 Wantling’s poems came through the letterbox. US stamp. Normal, Illinois return address. Could I use them? He’d picked up on my journal from Doug Blazek or Charles Bukowski or Len Fulton. Poetry mags were like radio hams, constantly exchanging connections, powering a mesh of contact that kept the whole scene alive. Web without internet. In the new world there’s nothing new. I took Lover, Dawn, Aquarius. “If the universe turns eternally / why confound the mystery?” A poem about flowers, girls, stars. In the scale of things safe enough.

Outside the underground was taking over the world. We were the people our parents had warned us against. Not Mingus but Jefferson Airplane. Not Bird but Byrds. Not Trane but the Pretty Things. Times of change. Spirits soaring. Beat nihilism turned to aching joy. Anarchy that worked. What Second Aeon wanted to do was find a literary strain that could take up where Kerouac and Ginsberg left off. Wantling sent in more poems. They were it.

Wantling poems appeared in every issue of Second Aeon from issue 8 to issue 17. While he lived he never stopped sending. Thick envelopes. Packets held down with tape and clips and string. It Was Tuesday Morning - “It took 2 months to ride the half-mile / to the liquor store & the fifth of 100-proof / vodka kept muttering under its breath / during the 100-mile ride home”. For Poetry For Chicago For Obscenity - “We have been to Babel twice / & back. Chased by mobs with torches in / their hands ….. “ He was possessed of that American excitement which was hard to find in drizzle drenched south Wales. He lived the life. Music, poetry, dope, drink, war, prison. The Head Shop – “the head shop / is getting ripped off so regular / theres hardly enuf bread / to pay salaries at the end / of the month”. I had to ask him to explain to me just what a head shop was. I didn’t know. They hadn’t reached us yet, in the coal metropolis, bound as we were, by traditions of clarity, honesty and knuckle raw work.

He sent me the poems for Sick Fly, Second Aeon’s first Wantling book. Eventually there’d be three. This was in august 1970. It had a quote from H L Mencken as a leader - “The Cosmos is a gigantic Flywheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.” Bill was as cynical about the purposelessness of life as John Tripp. Tripp had been born in Bargoed in 1927 and had been demanding to know why ever since. Bute Park, The Inheritance File, Diesels to Yesterday. A Second Aeon published Cardiff Wantling but without the dope.

Bill Wantling wasn’t, of course, an entirely new voice to me. In 1968 a selection of his work, drawn mainly from The Awakening, had appeared in Penguin Modern Poets #12 alongside Alan Jackson and Jeff Nuttall. Nuttall and he had corresponded. Wantling had become a fan of Nuttall’s Bomb Culture, an era defining and enormously underrated work if there ever was one. He’d even written his own Nuttall Poem. “telepathic wonderment frame- / of-reference / tribal outflank forces dislo- / cate society / FESTIVITY FUCK / shitpissfuck humanbeing / health & beauty”. A perfect lift of Jeff Nuttall’s style.

It’s important from the perspective of the unrespectful, all-hung-out new millennium to signal, despite all one might have heard, just how conformist the late 60s actually were. Most of society, British society anyway, was still stuck in an extended version of black and white post-war gloom and deprivation. Lack of resource. Scarcity of facility. Difficulty. To do anything cost and if you did it in a new way the risks of failure or ridicule, or both, were enormous. Not that any of this deterred the avant garde. And as far as poets were concerned it actually spurred them on.

In 1968 London the longhairs were rolling marbles under police horses. In Paris the students had manned the barricades. In America they surrounded the Pentagon with flowers and put up a pig for election to the Oval Office. This was all Wantling’s territory, along with dope and booze and fighting with family members.

Sick Fly was published with enormous transatlantic encouragement. Put a bomb on the cover, Bill insisted. H-bomb mushroom. I did. Collaged on top of it a snap of the author looking like Allan Sherman. Production was poor. Second Aeon was poor. The thing was run using a carbon-ribbon golfball typer, working directly onto papermade offset plates – text sans-serif Helvetica. No chance to manipulate design, no text justification, error correction impossible. Yet Bill loved it.

lover rune haiku innocence blues paranoid dopefiend hymn lent obscenity rejoice notes dawn white zen vomit lunchbox acid pulse absurdity absurdity actually actually actually actually actually actually actually actually actually actually actually actually actually actually actually actually actually actually yes

Why Wales? Bill had messed around a bit with cynghanedd, discovered that Dylan Thomas had too, sought out the poetics himself. Was in awe of ancient Welsh poetic forms. Wales, land of bards. Bearded Wantling, the one-remove mystic.

“You guys over there are bearing the brave torch when it’s being born at all. Even the underground here is putting down poetry, favoring polemics or propaganda over art. Hope it’s just a cyclic thing but it grates to know that the only worthwhile scene is going down across 5000 miles of water. Keep on truckin’ Bill.” (from a letter)

When Bill came up with the script for the follow up, 10,000 r.p.m. & digging it, yeah! things had moved on. Hippidom seemed to be offering society, in particular American society, genuine alternatives. Bill, sicker now than MenckenCould and ever deeper into dope (like Burroughs he used heroin), was taking full advantage. The poems were more open and faux-beat than they’d ever been. You could read into them, as well as from the stream of letters that accompanied their sending, the way that Bill’s life was falling apart. The drugs, the busts, the falling out with his wife Ruthie, the drugs again.

10,000 rpm was a model of hippie values. Every one was signed (Bill had signed a ream of paper and shipped it over to have a sheet bound into every copy), the copyright was reversed “anyone may reprint anything” and the book was dedicated to Gracie Slick’s Starship. Unfashionable now but right on the soaring button then. The work was the genuine article. Open letters to the underground, robots, dope, Jesus freaks, motherfuckers, Jack Spicer, drunks, pounding the underwood to write the great American novel, Bukowski, acid, valium, mescaline, “I was born / I will die, I am not contained.”

At the end of 1972 the book hit the market, got in-awe reviews and sold like a space ship. Second Aeon became a magnet for every wannabe hippie hungout hangout doped-up froth-mouthed imagined poet in the UK country. They phoned up, turned up, sent in their stuff by the lorry load. I sent a letter of congratulations to Bill but he was too out of it to reply.

“It’s lamentable that one of our strongest poets has to be showcased in Britain” wrote American cultural commentator Rich Mangelsdorff.

A few months later Trevor Reeves from Dunedin in New Zealand contacted me suggesting that Second Aeon and his own small publishing operation, Caveman Press, co-operate on a sort of best of William Wantling. San Quentin’s Stranger, spine-bound decent production, pic of Bill in orange on the cover, appeared in 1973. Serious Bill in 12 point Baskerville but still the archetypal underground man beneath.

death row fuck it missing-in-action cool hot white port cancers dullness rose sweet bitter emptiness hare nibble player-piano treason teeth laughing salaries stare grunt squeal scrupulously scrupulously scrupulously scrupulously scrupulously scrupulously scrupulously scrupulously scrupulously scrupulously scrupulously scrupulously scrupulously scrupulously clean

Just after the book had appeared Jeff Nuttall rang, urgently, late at night, Bill is dead. Overdose. Saw it coming. Loss. I was stunned. Even more the following night when Bill himself rang to tell me that Jeff had rather exaggerated. Could you look out for any UK obits that might appear? Still here. I haven’t died.

Then a while later, six months maybe, he did.

Heard it from Ruthie. The era was over. Jeff wrote a real obit.