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Here is an article on Tom Kryss:
VAGABOND'S CURRENT OUTSIDER
T.L. KRYSS
www.eburg.com/%7Evagabond...utsider.html
T.L. Kryss is an outsider's outsider and as sweet a poet as I've ever encountered. He was part of the Cleveland poetry scene in the Sixties that had d.a. levy as its catalyst and got hammered hard by the police; the Cleveland scene back then had more outsiders per square foot than any poetry scene since or before.
Kryss, along with the Willie, Kent Taylor, Joel Deutsch, etc., made the exodus to California after levy's alleged and controversial suicide. Deutsch and Taylor stayed on in California, Willie disappeared from the face of the earth, and Kryss, still in his teens, returned to his blue-collar roots in East Cleveland, where he began leading what on the surface looks like a normal life. But in his poetry, Kryss:
"...rolls out the universe like an organ grinder's song and leads it into green pastures like a unicorn in heat; he finds it in all its splendor in a scrap of a small child's drawing blowing down a winter street. He rocks it like a baby in his gentle nature. He stares out the bus window on the way to work, and a vacant lot between two boarded-up buildings erupts into a field of sunflowers thirty feet high with heads as big around as the sun. The bus rolls on thru the grey streets of Cleveland..." (from: "Great Poets Do Not Do Great Things," essay by John Bennett.)
What Tom Kryss does, more than any poet I know, is strip away excess and cut to the bone. He staked out a modest turf and then hunkered down and stayed there. He has not squandered time and blurred his focus chasing down publishers and polishing his image. So that what he writes is unencumbered and fraught with the particular, which is the unique, which is the only way to get a handle on the universal. What he writes always gives you something and never takes anything away.
A number of limited-edition Kryss books have appeared and disappeared over the years. Two in particular stand out:
Sunflower River, arranged, designed and printed by Don Cauble and Lady Jess in Portland, Oregon in the spring of 1972.
I first ran across Sunflower River in 1974 and was blown away by it. The book kicked off a correspondence between Kryss and myself that goes on to this day. It also prompted me to publish a Kryss chapbook, Music in the Winepress, Parrots in the Flames, now out of print.
The Book of Rabbits, Ayizan Press, Cleveland. (Typical of the anarchistic, outsider, burn-it-behind-you Cleveland publications of the Sixties, Rabbits has no copyright and no publication date.)
You want the antidote to all this Harry Potter shuck and jive? Here it is. Here is the children's book of all time that--like all good children's books--speaks to anyone with ears to listen. Or, in this case, eyes to see. There are no words other than Kryss' brief introduction. There are only drawings, magical drawings of rabbits, some of which we will hopefully be able to scan and display.
Here is part of the Kryss intro:
To the children who may read this book and wonder why there are no words:
...I have drawn these rabbits without words so that you may pay close attention to the rabbits themselves. The words do not matter as much as the rabbits...you yourself will make up the stories, and each story will be different for every person who sees the rabbits. In this way the rabbits will speak to you in a way that only you can hear.
I will tell you a secret about these rabbits, and then I will say no more. (I have said too much already.) If you look hard, you will find yourself in the rabbits. If this does not happen with the first drawing, try looking at another and another until you find the rabbit that you can recognize from a dream you once experienced, or a happiness or a sadness you once felt. It will help you if you look with an open heart....
The one and only time I met Tom Kryss was in 1981. Cindy (my wife at the time) and I were spending the summer travelling around the country in a VW van. I was keeping a travel journal that turned into a book, Tripping in America. Here is the entry made the morning after meeting Tom in Cleveland:
"...Tom Kryss lives in the neighborhood he grew up in, just like Jack Saunders. He has a wife and three children. A year or two ago they cut him open, went into his lung which had collapsed due to a congenital defect. He still chain smokes Camels, sucks the smoke in deep. More than any poet I've met, he's the place his poems come from.
"We arrived about 9 p.m. and spent three hours sitting around the kitchen table with Tom and his wife Carol, drinking beer and talking. A two-story house, just like the other working-class houses on the block. Normal furniture, normal dishes, normal things on the walls. Tidy. Ethnic. A solid Polish neighborhood. The straw of life from which the poems are spun.
"Upstairs, a room in which he keeps his books and his mimeo. The last of the mimeo poets, one of the best poets the country has, as close to being totally unknown as a poet can be. An expert on sunflowers and linoleum, children and clowns, rabbits, rivers and trains. A recluse, a citizen of a reality that has nothing to do with the six o'clock news....
"Round about midnight we all got up and went out into the yard to look at Tom's birdhouse. Tom build his birdhouse entirely from newspaper and glue; it hangs under the eaves of the garage. It's been there for two months, but no birds have taken up residence in it. It's large, as birdhouses go--it probably weighs 100 pounds.
" 'I went to the library and got a book that told me how I could make just about anything out of newspaper and glue--furiture, boats, birdhouses, you name it,' Tom says. 'Structures so sturdy they last 100 years! But unmarketable, of course, because--well, not many people want something made of newspaper and glue in their living rooms...'
"He squints critically at his birdhouse hanging still in the light of the moon. 'Maybe I have to relocate the hole,' he says. 'Maybe then the birds will come.'
"We walk out to the van. Tom has to get up at 4:30 and go to work. Over a decade ago, down and out, just back from the west coast, he walked into an employment agency. Since that time he's worked as a dispatcher for an alarm company. Alarms in four states are hooked up to the room Tom sits in, and an average of 100 alarms a day go off. One hundred alarms. 100-pound birdhouses with 100-year life spans. One hundred years of solitude. Tom responds to the blinking red lights by contacting the appropriate police station somewhere in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio or Indiana; then he goes back to his book. At the end of the day he rides the bus home to his wife and children. He does not drive a car. Occasionally, as he moves thru life, he writes a letter. A poem. Rarely now, he'll print a page or two on his Rex-rotary mimeo. He imagines in technicolor, paints in watercolor, and makes collages.
"At the curb we shake hands, and then Cindy and I cross the street and get into the van. I start the engine and U-turn, pulling up to the curb alongside Tom and Carol. I roll down the window but find there's nothing more to be said....I release the clutch and go bumping over the railroad tracks that until then I'd known only thru the poems. The tracks don't seem more real as we cross them; perhaps even less so."
You want your young genius poet of the 20th Century? Scrap Rimbaud. I give you Tom Kryss.
~John Bennett
VAGABOND'S CURRENT OUTSIDER
T.L. KRYSS
www.eburg.com/%7Evagabond...utsider.html
T.L. Kryss is an outsider's outsider and as sweet a poet as I've ever encountered. He was part of the Cleveland poetry scene in the Sixties that had d.a. levy as its catalyst and got hammered hard by the police; the Cleveland scene back then had more outsiders per square foot than any poetry scene since or before.
Kryss, along with the Willie, Kent Taylor, Joel Deutsch, etc., made the exodus to California after levy's alleged and controversial suicide. Deutsch and Taylor stayed on in California, Willie disappeared from the face of the earth, and Kryss, still in his teens, returned to his blue-collar roots in East Cleveland, where he began leading what on the surface looks like a normal life. But in his poetry, Kryss:
"...rolls out the universe like an organ grinder's song and leads it into green pastures like a unicorn in heat; he finds it in all its splendor in a scrap of a small child's drawing blowing down a winter street. He rocks it like a baby in his gentle nature. He stares out the bus window on the way to work, and a vacant lot between two boarded-up buildings erupts into a field of sunflowers thirty feet high with heads as big around as the sun. The bus rolls on thru the grey streets of Cleveland..." (from: "Great Poets Do Not Do Great Things," essay by John Bennett.)
What Tom Kryss does, more than any poet I know, is strip away excess and cut to the bone. He staked out a modest turf and then hunkered down and stayed there. He has not squandered time and blurred his focus chasing down publishers and polishing his image. So that what he writes is unencumbered and fraught with the particular, which is the unique, which is the only way to get a handle on the universal. What he writes always gives you something and never takes anything away.
A number of limited-edition Kryss books have appeared and disappeared over the years. Two in particular stand out:
Sunflower River, arranged, designed and printed by Don Cauble and Lady Jess in Portland, Oregon in the spring of 1972.
I first ran across Sunflower River in 1974 and was blown away by it. The book kicked off a correspondence between Kryss and myself that goes on to this day. It also prompted me to publish a Kryss chapbook, Music in the Winepress, Parrots in the Flames, now out of print.
The Book of Rabbits, Ayizan Press, Cleveland. (Typical of the anarchistic, outsider, burn-it-behind-you Cleveland publications of the Sixties, Rabbits has no copyright and no publication date.)
You want the antidote to all this Harry Potter shuck and jive? Here it is. Here is the children's book of all time that--like all good children's books--speaks to anyone with ears to listen. Or, in this case, eyes to see. There are no words other than Kryss' brief introduction. There are only drawings, magical drawings of rabbits, some of which we will hopefully be able to scan and display.
Here is part of the Kryss intro:
To the children who may read this book and wonder why there are no words:
...I have drawn these rabbits without words so that you may pay close attention to the rabbits themselves. The words do not matter as much as the rabbits...you yourself will make up the stories, and each story will be different for every person who sees the rabbits. In this way the rabbits will speak to you in a way that only you can hear.
I will tell you a secret about these rabbits, and then I will say no more. (I have said too much already.) If you look hard, you will find yourself in the rabbits. If this does not happen with the first drawing, try looking at another and another until you find the rabbit that you can recognize from a dream you once experienced, or a happiness or a sadness you once felt. It will help you if you look with an open heart....
The one and only time I met Tom Kryss was in 1981. Cindy (my wife at the time) and I were spending the summer travelling around the country in a VW van. I was keeping a travel journal that turned into a book, Tripping in America. Here is the entry made the morning after meeting Tom in Cleveland:
"...Tom Kryss lives in the neighborhood he grew up in, just like Jack Saunders. He has a wife and three children. A year or two ago they cut him open, went into his lung which had collapsed due to a congenital defect. He still chain smokes Camels, sucks the smoke in deep. More than any poet I've met, he's the place his poems come from.
"We arrived about 9 p.m. and spent three hours sitting around the kitchen table with Tom and his wife Carol, drinking beer and talking. A two-story house, just like the other working-class houses on the block. Normal furniture, normal dishes, normal things on the walls. Tidy. Ethnic. A solid Polish neighborhood. The straw of life from which the poems are spun.
"Upstairs, a room in which he keeps his books and his mimeo. The last of the mimeo poets, one of the best poets the country has, as close to being totally unknown as a poet can be. An expert on sunflowers and linoleum, children and clowns, rabbits, rivers and trains. A recluse, a citizen of a reality that has nothing to do with the six o'clock news....
"Round about midnight we all got up and went out into the yard to look at Tom's birdhouse. Tom build his birdhouse entirely from newspaper and glue; it hangs under the eaves of the garage. It's been there for two months, but no birds have taken up residence in it. It's large, as birdhouses go--it probably weighs 100 pounds.
" 'I went to the library and got a book that told me how I could make just about anything out of newspaper and glue--furiture, boats, birdhouses, you name it,' Tom says. 'Structures so sturdy they last 100 years! But unmarketable, of course, because--well, not many people want something made of newspaper and glue in their living rooms...'
"He squints critically at his birdhouse hanging still in the light of the moon. 'Maybe I have to relocate the hole,' he says. 'Maybe then the birds will come.'
"We walk out to the van. Tom has to get up at 4:30 and go to work. Over a decade ago, down and out, just back from the west coast, he walked into an employment agency. Since that time he's worked as a dispatcher for an alarm company. Alarms in four states are hooked up to the room Tom sits in, and an average of 100 alarms a day go off. One hundred alarms. 100-pound birdhouses with 100-year life spans. One hundred years of solitude. Tom responds to the blinking red lights by contacting the appropriate police station somewhere in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio or Indiana; then he goes back to his book. At the end of the day he rides the bus home to his wife and children. He does not drive a car. Occasionally, as he moves thru life, he writes a letter. A poem. Rarely now, he'll print a page or two on his Rex-rotary mimeo. He imagines in technicolor, paints in watercolor, and makes collages.
"At the curb we shake hands, and then Cindy and I cross the street and get into the van. I start the engine and U-turn, pulling up to the curb alongside Tom and Carol. I roll down the window but find there's nothing more to be said....I release the clutch and go bumping over the railroad tracks that until then I'd known only thru the poems. The tracks don't seem more real as we cross them; perhaps even less so."
You want your young genius poet of the 20th Century? Scrap Rimbaud. I give you Tom Kryss.
~John Bennett
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