Kick Books Presents ... Charles Plymell

Poet/author/artist/small press publisher (legend!) Charles Plymell roared out of Kansas with tires blazing while the Beat scene was still in training wheels. Weaned on jump blues, true grit and Dr. Gimmy Gommy’s Goodies, Plymell redefined the fast track with blunt force, map zap and brute strength forged of desperation and attitude. 

Born on the high plains in Finney County, Kansas in 1935 in a converted chicken coop during one of the blackest dust storms of the day, he would spend his sprouting years kicking up even more sand. His father was a cowboy born in the Oklahoma Territory; his mother was of Plains Indian descent. Life on the loose had more appeal than classrooms for young Charles, who dropped out after ninth grade. He worked at various laboring jobs throughout the western states, then racing the highway between Los Angeles and Kansas City during his hipster years, stoked on hillbilly howls and race music-- R&B, blues, and jazz. 

Charles Plymell lived in San Francisco in the early 1960’s, sharing a house with Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. Plymell spent important, memorable times with Ginsberg, Cassady, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac. His writings from this period are collected in APOCALYPSE ROSE, which appears, complete, in BENZEDRINE HIGHWAY.

Plymell eventually settled in upstate New York, where he taught writing to prisoners.

He has published, printed, and designed numerous underground magazines and books with his wife Pamela Beach. He published Ray Bremser and Herbert Huncke, whom he identified with from the hipster 1950s, and was influential in the underground comix scene, first printing Zap Comix artists such as Robert Crumb and S. Clay Wilson, whom he first published in Lawrence, Kansas. Plymell was the first printer of Robert Crumb's Zap Comix. 

Plymell got the nod from Governor Finney of Kansas for his contribution to the people and World Book Encyclopedia named him the most promising poet of 1976. He opposes the National Endowment for the Arts and has criticized it in print. He claims it became a politicized unjust system feeding on its own mediocrity and self-contradiction. He views were mentioned in the New York Times in "Notes on People" and again in "Washington Talk". He was subsequently blacklisted and has never received any funding from any federal, state, or academic agency to pursue his creativity.

Kicks Books now presents BENZEDRINE HIGHWAY, which includes the first ever republication of Plymell’s long out of print first book of poetry, APOCALYPSE ROSE, his first prose book, LAST OF THE MOCASSINS, and a new autobiographical introduction which speeds you into the wild world of Charles Plymell where his words warp one’s horizontal, and stand one’s vertical on its pointed little head.
 
For more information about Kicks Books, please contact Andrea Bussell (abussell@shorefire.com) or Rebecca Shapiro (rshapiro@shorefire.com) at Shore Fire Media, 718.522.7171