Charles Plymell

He published former prisoner Ray Bremser and Herbert Huncke, whom he identified with from the hipster 1950s. He 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 received a citation for being a distinguished poet by Governor Joan Finney of Kansas and was cited in the 1976 World Book Encyclopedia as a most promising poet.

• Name — Charles Plymell • Birth Name — Charley Plymell • Born — 26 April 1935 • Birthplace — Holcomb, Kansas, United States • Occupation — poet, publisher, author • Movement — Postmodernism, Underground Comix

Charley Douglass Plymell was born in Finney County, Kansas during the worst dust storms of that time. He was born in a converted chicken coop near Holcomb. His grandfather, Charley Plymell, was deeded a homestead in Apache Palo lands by President Grover Cleveland. The stage line began in Plymell, a few miles south of Garden City where now stands the Plymell Union Church and Pierceville-Plymell Elementary School. Like many, his face was covered by wet rags as his mother went out to shoot jackrabbits and gather cacti for meals. His father and mother were later divorced, and his father bought a home for Charles and his sisters so they could attend school in Wichita while his father traveled. In Wichita in the 1950s Plymell dropped out of his first year at Wichita North High School, lied about his age, traveled the western states in a new car his father bought him, working on pipelines, dams, factories and riding bareback broncs and Brahma bulls in rodeos. Returning to Wichita he became a hipster, taking peyote, marijuana, and benzedrine, the drugs of the day. He listened to jazz, R&B, and “Race music” across the tracks in Wichita. He worked at factories and took courses at Wichita State University. Allen Ginsberg credited him with creating the "Wichita Vortex." Plymell's Vortex in his own words does not relate to Ginsberg's "Wichita Vortex Sutra" but took place west of Wichita near the center of the U.S. at Space Needle Crossing in the Chalk Pyramids. His Vortex is spiritual/mythical and based on when he heard the Voice of the Game Lord, which he later authenticated through his mentor and influence, Loren Eiseley. His other influences included Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, Robert Ronnie Branaman (1933–2024), and Samuel Coleridge. He did not meet the Beats until 1963 when associated with Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs. His Vortex is written about in his Tent Shaker Vortex Voice. Before that he considered himself a hipster and outsider.

Plymell moved to a quiet Russian neighborhood in 1962 at the corner of Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco. After the neighborhood filled with hippies and was taken over, Plymell moved to a famous flat, 1403 Gough Street. It was there at Plymell's LSD party that the Beats met the Hippies. Promptly Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady moved in with him where Plymell played Bob Dylan to Ginsberg for the first time. It was during that time Plymell made two films that were shown at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and his collages, which opened at the "Batman Gallery" where fellow Wichitans Bob Branaman and Bruce Conner had shown. Plymell's show sold out except for a few pieces that ended up in Australia. Billy "Batman" Jahrmarkt gave Plymell his classic 1951 MGTD. His work Robert Ronnie Branaman, published in 1964, is credited with being an early example of underground comix. Recently Plymell's book Benzedrine Highway was published by Norton Records/Kicks Books. He has been writing poems used as songs by Andrea Schroeder (Berlin); Mike Watt & Sam Dook (U.K.) They recently featured one of his songs on their CUZ tour. He has also written songs for Clubberlanggang, and is working on a book with his poems for Neal Cassady and Bob Branaman put to rockabilly by Bloodshot Bill of Norton Records. Plymell holds an M.A. Degree in Arts and Sciences from Johns Hopkins University. In 1967, Plymell created The Last Times, a tabloid underground newspaper published in San Francisco. It lasted only two issues, but included work by William Burroughs, Claude Pelieu, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Bukowski. The Last Times featured William Burroughs' text Day the Records Went Up, Claude Pelieu's Do It Yourself & Dig It, Allen Ginsberg's poem "Television Was A Baby Crawling Toward that Deathchamber", and a Charles Bukowski column. The Last Times #1 and 2 also contained articles by French avant-gardist Jean-Jacques Lebel and Man Suicided by Society by Antonin Artaud, translated by Mary Beach, Plymell's mother-in-law. Issue #1 also contains the first Plymell printed work of R. Crumb that Plymell had "lifted" from the second issue of Yarrowstalks (a Philadelphia-based underground newspaper). Plymell subsequently earned a bit of immortality in the underground press by publishing only the first printing of Robert Crumb's Zap Comix #1, which Don Donahue took over from Plymell when he purchased his Multilith 1250 printing press soon after.

• Mark in Time, New Glide Publications, San Francisco, CA, 1971. • And The Roses Race Around Her Name, Stonehill, NYC, 1975. • Turpentin on the Rocks, Maro Verlag, Augsburg, W. Germany, 1978. • A Quois Bon, Le Soleil Noir, Paris, France, 1978. • Planet Detroit, Anthology of Urban Poetry, Detroit, MI, 1983. • Second Coming Anthology, Second Coming Press, San Francisco, CA, 1984. • The World, Crown Publishers, 1991. • Editors' Choice III, The Spirit That Moves Us, New York, 1992. • The Age of Koestler, The Spirit of the Wind Press, Kalamazoo, MI, 1990. • Found & Lost Magascene, Vol. 1 / No. 0 & 1 [Contributor], Back Room/Temple of Man, 2010

• An outsider’s inside history of the Beat Generation, as told by Charles Plymell • by Jon Randall • Interview by Catfish McDaris • Charles Plymell: The Benzedrine Highway by Paul Hawkins • Benzedrine Highway revised especially for RealityStudio, the interview now contains additional material about Plymell and William S. Burroughs by Paul Hawkins • Charles Plymell and ‘Now‘, Reality Studio blog • Charley Plymell: Zap and S. Clay Wilson