SPRUNGS und Alles

This collection Beat Poetry is meant to be spoken aloud, performance is key. It is the final book in La Charity's trilogy, following Litanies Said Handedly and Blood Vertigo. It is richly illustrated with original collages by the author. According to the La Charity: "Breath neither sees nor does it consent to last. Print lasts as its singular job, soundlessly so. And the vain attempt to simultaneously straddle both the seen and the heard was not in the cards back when Poetry was birthed - back then, printed books like this one weren't even in the picture. And even when printed collections did get into the picture, they did so principally as aids to Memory - which, come to think of it, and prior to the rise of print media, was the specific & profound province of the Poets. Ah but, once memory was usurped by the written, editors became figures of unwonted influence & breath-bound poets ended up as lesser beings. Hence the marginalization of sound itself, the very heartbeat of what Poetry had always been, since the Dawn of Breath's Shaping of the manswarm's speech into Song. The fact that Poetry is a verb, actively brief in its occasions, is Breath's decree: Print has a wholly other agenda, one under the rule of editorial decree. What determines the value of the Poet's output ? Used to be ears were the judge of that, but, since the rise of print, the eye has gained supremacy - and the eye is where editorial fiat resides, now & since the written made it so, oh so many silent centuries ago. Ultimately, the work in this book mustneeds be heard by its Poet to be believed . . .ah but still, and even then . . ."

About the Author :
RALPH LA CHARITY. . .currently bills himself as a poet in private practice. The cover collage on his earlier Dos Madres book, litanies said handedly, and the cover collage on the next of his Dos Madres imprints, BLOOD VERTIGO, give the lie: those two books are the first two volumes of a three-book project. This book in hand, SPRUNGS und Alles, constitutes the concluding entry of a trilogy he considers to be his defense of Open Poetry readings.

Review :
a particular kind of modernist exploratory engagement, engaged in by those who proved themselves worthy of having been born vocally equipped... certainly the population flung across that stretch of land had been explosively leavened by historical accelerants and really needed to be made sense of, not by fashionable theories, but by being expressed in heart-searching speech... I can imagine there was need for live vocal access to the heart of that moment's experience, by people whose ability to elicit each other's heightened speech proved that they belonged together. I tasted only a bit of that later, out of state, too late to live it as a full life arc. - Dennis Mair