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by John Thomas (Author)
John Thomas, perhaps Los Angeles' greatest underground poet, in the years I came to know him, was a big man with a wise and lined countenance, piercing wit, deep, resonant voice, and always slightly stunned, gentle eyes. Inseparable from his wife, poet and filmmaker Philomene Long, his Muse, Thomas radiated a passion for books and poetry, watching from a respectful distance all that transpired around him. This fueled the poetry; it was as if he, with Philomene, filled with life that lost and real realm behind the cliche we call the bohemian life. They inhabited the depths. One early image is stuck in my mind: Thomas squeezing out of their tiny, classic Volkswagen beetle in front of Venice's poetry center, Beyond Baroque, for the debut of Stuart Perkoffs posthumous Voices of the Lady: Collected Poems. The couple had been close to Perkoff, Philomene as Perkoffs partner at the end, Thomas as his friend. Now, decades on, John and Philomene were like intertwined trunks in a single, majestic, flexible, and bending tree. They had withdrawn from ordinary society, following their vow of poverty, forming a compact with each other outside material considerations and virtually all practicality. When you entered their book and quote-lined refuge three stories up at The Ellison on Paloma Avenue, off the Venice boardwalk, you felt like you were enveloped in an incredible force; they made it safe again to talk about meaning. "The poem" bound them and permitted no rivals. Generally, Thomas spoke very little; he seemed more often like a bystander perplexed by extraordinary and sometimes horrible times. Two things were never in question: deference to the Muse, to Philomene, on all matters; second, tending to a precious cargo, carried, I suspect, from an early visit to Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths. Thomas, had against the tumults of the years, a deep commitment to reading and to clear and poetic knowledge. Thomas in his very existence embodied a kind of deep, cultural transmission. I believe this was one of the grounding premises of his life's work. It required constant attention, learning, and a storyteller's sensibility-that the mundane and not so mundane, the reassuring and entirely embarrassing, the profound and very light, and all his companions, real and unreal, in this rich journey, be brought forward and told. With works ranging from Epopoeia and the Decay of Satire and John Thomas to the late chapbook Feeding the Animal, Thomas became the raconteur, generator of epigrams, tall tales, and haiku, a restless experimenter with language, subject matter, tone, and purpose, always acting, or as he said "pretending," as if "he doesn't care." Thomas in his way symbolized a clear and generally unexamined divergence of Los Angeles's historic underground from its better known Northern Californian and Eastern counterparts. Charles Bukowski, a close friend, and one never given to pretension, admired Thomas for his poetry and for digging. A diffidence, born of a hard-scrabble life contesting the machinery of money, success, and unreality meant that, for Thomas, in our vast and cruel desert, the poem is a "true and rooted cactus. / Most real and tough." Fred Dewey, writer. He was director of Beyond Baroque Literary / Arts Center in Venice from 1996 to 2010 and was curator of the Venice Poetry Walls.
Author Biography
John Thomas was member of the Venice Beats, a little-known group described as "an outlaw strain in Southern California letters", by the historian John Arthur Maynard. The Venice beats were outsiders who rejected popular culture and fame, preferring lives of poverty and art. According to Maynard, instead of wanting to change the world like other beats, "what they really wanted to do was to write their poems, paint their paintings, take their drugs, love their friends and keep from getting busted by the police." Thomas' first collection of poems, Apologia was published in 1972 in a limited edition of 405 copies. Thirty of the copies numbered, signed, and "sealed" by the author, presumably so they could not be read. Four years later Thomas published Epopoeia and the Decay of Satire which consisted of the same works, except that some of the poems in the first collection had been deleted from the second. For most of the 1970s and early 1980s he stopped writing poetry at all, and instead "listened to the trees" and wrote a journal. Thomas published another collection of poetry, "Abandoned Latitudes" in 1983. Thomas's poem "The Ghosts of the Poets" is engraved on wall of the Venice boardwalk. Thomas met the poet Philomene Long in 1983 at a poetry reading. The couple were inseparable in his last years, and Thomas dedicated his final poems to her. He said she "resurrected him." They lived together on the edge of American society, maintaining a lifestyle of "living poor" based on the ancient Zen recluse poets. "I would feel uncomfortable and irritable living any other way. I have Philomene, a pen, a pad, shirt and pants. If you start wanting more, it fills you up, leading to a poverty of the heart and mind." Thomas's poetry was praised for its grace and clarity, and he was an exceptional reader of his own work. He was influenced by Ezra Pound the Chinese poet Li Po and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. His poetry demonstrated his wide reading and immense imagination in spare, uncluttered forms. He was an exacting and ruthless critic of the work of others, which made him unpopular with others at times. Neeli Cherkovski called described him as "by far the greatest underground poet in Los Angeles for the last 35, 40 years".
