LSD nights and days with a pyramid: Glastonbury Fayre 1971

This a chapter from my haibun/memoir. Listening to CBC Radio this morning I heard a news item about this year's line-up for the Glastonbury Music Festival and started reminiscing. I first published this in 1990 as a chapter in Eel Pie Dharma: a memoir/haibun with my poetry press Unfinished Monument. Tai Grove did a much more professional reprint with his Hidden Brook Press in 2012. We changed the title to Eel Pie Island Dharma: a hippie memoir/haibun so potential readers would know it wasn't a cookbook! 

As always, special thanks to fellow Eel Pie Island communard Weed for posting this online in the early 2000s. Check out his websites.     

EEL PIE DHARMA - a memoir / haibun -  © 1990 Chris Faiers

Chapter 24 - Glastonbury Magic Festival Word went out through the hippie grapevine of a magic festival to be held in Glastonbury.  Glastonbury was a legendary sacred site in England, with a cathedral where one of the apostles had planted a rose bush which bloomed all the year round.  Nearby loomed a mysterious conical hilltop, called a tor, which was rumoured to be hollow.  Glastonbury Tor was said to be a 'sending station' on the system of ley lines, a power grid which lay over the English countryside, and which is the planet's equivalent of the magnetic fields which surround the human body which acupuncturists use. Jeremy and I had earlier visited another of these mysterious tors, Michael's Mount off the Cornish Coast.  Another such tor is Mont San Michel off the French coast.  In the olden days festivals were held to replenish the 'dragon power', or earth magic which kept fields fertile and the inhabitants prosperous.  Supposedly the twelve signs of the zodiac were laid out around Glastonbury Tor, and from the small chapel on top of the Tor one could see the zodiac's unusual shapes blended in with the English countryside. This was an event not to be missed.  The festival was to be held for the summer solstice, June 21, and I left my dossing friends in Cornwall and began to hitchhike.  I got a ride as far as Salisbury, travelling quickly through the ancient fields of Stonehenge country.  Walking through Salisbury, a hippie/student came up to me, and gave me a hit of acid wrapped in foil.  He bragged how he and his mates had put hits of acid into the milk bottles which the local police used for their tea, and how that day a couple of cops had gone to hospital with hallucinations, while the other policemen wandered about in a happy daze all day, smiling at everyone. I thanked him for the acid, and not knowing what to do with it, and not wanting to be caught with it in my possession after hearing his story, I put the foil packet in my mouth and resumed hitching.  Rides followed quickly.  First a van full of black musicians on their way to a gig picked me up, hoping to score some dope.  Then a mysterious business-type man in a sleek Jaguar told me to hop in. As we sped through the darkening evening his conversation became more and more questioning.  He seemed to know a lot about the forthcoming festival, and was eager to know as much as I could tell him about it.  I realized that I was beginning to babble, and then it occurred to me that the acid had been dissolving in my mouth, depite the tinfoil.  So I was starting to trip, and at this point, speeding through the night, my mysterious driver told me he was the police chief for the area, and that he wanted to know what to expect from the festival goers.  I tried to put his mind at ease, that we weren't going to be smuggling dope or sacrificing virgins.  I also realized that I wanted to get out of the car before a full-blown acid trip took over. He let me out on the outskirts of Piltdown, after pointing me in the general direction of the farm where the festival would be held.  I wandered down the lonely highway in the dark with only starlight to guide me.  The white lines in the middle of the road began stretching and blurring in an effect I knew was the result of a mild acid trip, but the effects weren't overpowering.  At the juncture with the road I was to follow the next day, I slipped into a field and fell asleep, exhaustion overcoming the weak acid dose. I awoke late the next morning, still feeling some effects from the acid, and lay in the field watching the clouds make incredible patterns in the clear blue sky. Finally excitement at the thought of the festival overcame my lethargy, and I started to walk down the country road.  Surprisingly I got another ride, this time from a local who also had heard a lot about the festival.  He was dubious about the quality of our hippie magic, as the weather had been overcast for the past few days.  His tone wasn't ironic, and I realized how many of the British, especially in the countryside, still believe in magic and a lot of the Celtic mythologies. The road was becoming jammed with fellow festival goers, and when my ride let me out, I joined the throng.  This was a more serious and committed type of hippie.  We were the true believers for the most part, not just students growing their hair long for a wild summer. A local farmer let us use his fields, with his stone farmhouse as headquarters.  By the time I got to the site it was dinner time, and some self-styled diggers had set up a kitchen beside the farmhouse in the barnyard.  I ate some stew dippped from a huge iron pot, and soon was reviving old friendships with people from the Richmond scene and elsewhere. There was a magical excitement in the air, and the view over the festival site was typical of Somerset's hilly beauty.  I wandered from the throng at the soup kitchen, and fell asleep on a hill in the middle of a field.  A very odd snuffling noise awoke me very early the next morning: Asleep in a field     a browsing cow         my alarm clock I was too excited, for once, to fall back asleep, and made my way down the hill to where some vans were unloading around the base of an unusual structure.  The rock'n'roll bands were going to play on a platform part way up a scale model of the Great Pyramid of Egypt, which we were going to build with construction scaffolding which an enlightened builder had loaned us. Everyone was smoking dope and unloading trucks in a flurry of manic activity, and I joined in.  I was proud of the muscles I had developed as a gravedigger, and I spent hours unloading scaffolding.  After unloading, I joined the construction crews, and very quickly the pyramid began taking shape.  One job I had to perch on a rail high in the air and saw off the end of a piece of pipe with a hacksaw.  Halfway through the job, someone handed me a carrot carved into a chillum and stuffed with pungent hash.  We were a crazy looking construction crew, but somehow through the haze of hash smoke, the pyramid grew skyward.  Boards were laid for the performance area, about twenty feet off the ground, and the scaffolding continued to a peak about seventy feet above that. After working on the pyramid all day, I took off for a tour of the festival site.  The farm was about a hundred acres, with hedgerows dividing the area into several major fields.  Tents were appearing everywhere, and many hippies were building huts in the hedgerows.  Banners and tents and colourful people were everywhere, like some medieval camp before battle. For a bunch of spaced-out freaks, things were amazingly well organized.  Six-foot deep latrines were dug, and metal pipes were laid across them.  Another free kitchen sprung up towards the bottom of the site, and everyone looked like they were going to be housed and fed.  At the bottom of the hilly fields, the pyramid stretched into the sky, and after several days of building, the musical part of the festival was about to begin. I settled in a giant wigwam tent, at the bottom of the fields about a hundred yards from the pyramid.  Quickly our tent became a family, and I met a blonde girl who hitched into Piltdown with me to buy food for our tribe.  That night about ten of us dropped acid together while we sat huddled in blankets before the stage. Arthur Brown was the first performer, and he tried to bum people out.  He sang about how the Aquarian dream was a fake, and that we should all examine our consciences.  We countered his rock star negativity by staying in our group, and whenever one of us looked a little uncomfortable, the rest of us would put our arms over them and tell them they were in a big egg and about to be reborn. The positive group dynamics soon had us all on great acid trips, and we felt free to wander as a group.  We danced and listened to the music under the stars with hundreds of other stoned worshippers, and all was at peace.  Someone had gotten hold of a jug of scrumpy, a strong local cider, and that also helped ease any acid paranoias. Later in the evening, one of us had to take a dump, and so the whole gang of us dutifully trooped over to the open air latrines, and all of us sat in a long row on the poles and had a good shit or pee, men and women, young and old.  It was one of the most liberating experiences of my life, all of us sitting there in the open air under the stars, making the natural and rude noises we all must make every day of our lives without any embarrassment.  Some of us got the giggles from the acid, and the relaxing sound of laughter mixed well with the rock music and the sounds of nature. We all stumbled into the wigwam and fell asleep in each others' arms.  I slept with the blonde girl, but we wanted to remain celibate to keep the spiritual atmosphere.  In the middle of the night there was a commotion outside, and when we went to investigate, we noticed a giant shining star.  On acid it hung in the sky like a space ship  -  it was the morning star, and we all stood in awe for several minutes. After a week of wandering in the fields, listening to music around campfires and eating with our fingers, we were incredibly dirty.  I decided to walk the mile to a little pond where there were thirty or forty skinnydippers splashing around.  I slipped off my dirty bellbottoms, and swam around in naked bliss, the water cool under the high afternoon sun. Late the next morning a hippie gave me a hit of acid, and then suggested we walk across the fields to Glastonbury Tor.  It was a long hike, and after the usual hour the acid started coming on.  It wasn't enough to overwhelm us, though.  After several miles we came to a country road with a pub, and we stood and watched the swaying patterns the wind was making by sweeping through the ivy on the walls: Wind     through ivy mat         pub walls Finally we reached the Tor, and began the slow hike up.  After twenty minutes we completed the steep climb, and there below us was laid out the Somerset countryside.  Try as I might, I couldn't make out the mythical zodiac patterns, but the old chapel on the top of the Tor had a very magical aura about it, and the view itself was enough to make any other kind of magic irrelevant. The festival had lasted over a week.  It was much written about in the British musical and countercultural press, and I believe that the festival is still being held annually, almost twenty years after our inaugural event with the great pyramid. Eel Pie Dharma is protected by international copyright laws. Individuals may print off a copy of this work for personal use only to facilitate easier reading.

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original Glastonbury Festival web page   |   official Glastonbury Festival web page

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comments to weed@wussu.com
revised 8 March 2017
URL http://www.eelpie.org/epd_24.htm

The Buddhist Monastery

Following is one of my favourite chapters from my memoir/haibun Eel Pie Island Dharma. It's about the fall of 1969, after I'd resisted the draft for the Vietnam War and escaped to England. It was first self-published in 1990 with Unfinished Monument Press, then professionally republished in 2012 with Hidden Brook Press (thanks publisher Tai Grove). Thanks also to fellow Eel Pie Island communard Weed who kindly posted this online circa 2003. I believe it's one of the earliest English language book length haibun.   

EEL PIE DHARMA - a memoir / haibun -  © 1990 Chris Faiers

Chapter 11 - The Buddhist Monastery Mark Valiant at first seemed an unlikely person to have a deeply religious side.  He was an ex-cop, and the story goes that as he was becoming more and more sympathetic towards the youth rebellion, one day he took the plunge, and took it in a big way.  Mark took a strong dose of STP, a psychedelic even more hallucinatory than LSD.  He tripped for three days, and after that experience he was a changed man.  He quit the police, grew a beard and took to hanging around L'Auberge Cafe. Mark was one of the regulars in Martha's crowd, sort of an older brother for Martha and a surrogate son for the Holmes.  He had been the unofficial "elder" who took charge when Martha's parents left on their holiday to Ibiza, the one I ruined with the flooding bathtub. A couple of times Mark led Sunday expeditions to a Buddhist monastery several miles away.  It was always exciting to get up early for a change, and to watch London slowly coming to life from the top deck of a double-decker bus. A path led down a lane to the monastery and the temple beside it.  The service consisted of all present sitting in meditation in the comfortable chapel for about a half hour or forty-five minutes.  It was very relaxing, and the meditations were led by a monk, who sat in front.  The layout of the chapel and pews wasn't that dissimilar from a Christian service - with the notable difference that no words were spoken, no hymns sung.  It was up to each of us to make our peace with the world. One morning a cat found its way into the chapel, and halfway through meditation it let out a yowl, and decided it wanted to go elsewhere.  It was amusing to see the startled look on all our faces at this unexpected interruption, but the monk calmly got up and let the cat out to wander off, and we resumed meditating. My impression of these mornings is of a tranquil blue atmosphere.  There was a subtle presence of blue energy always present after we had begun meditating, and my feeling was that the monk was pleased with the aura, which I'm sure he was very aware of. After the meditation session we would gather in the vestibule of the chapel, and drink tea and discuss religion.  Everyone present was offered an equal chance to speak, either to pose or to answer questions offered by the others present.  Not surprisingly, after the relaxing effects of the meditation, most of us didn't have much to say, the words would have just come between us and the immediacy of the experience of sitting calmly in the blue atmosphere of the chapel. One Sunday morning in early winter, when I was making one of my last visits to the chapel with a couple of other Eel Piers, it began to snow.  Many years later I still clearly remember the experience of walking down the narrow lane, crunching the white powder under my scuffed boots, when this haiku popped into my mind: walking to meditation  though fresh snow Eel Pie Dharma is protected by international copyright laws. Individuals may print off a copy of this work for personal use only to facilitate easier reading.

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how I came to live in the abandoned Eel Pie Island Hotel in 1969

This posting is a follow-up to yesterday's pic of the Eel Pie Island Hotel. Following is a chapter from my memoir/haibun Eel Pie Island Dharma. I self-published it in 1990 with  Unfinished Monument Press. Fellow Eel Pie survivor Weed posted it online in the early 2000s, and Tai Grove published a professional edition with Hidden Brook Press in 2012.  

 

Chapter 6 - Meeting Eel Pie

"Out of college, money spent  see no future, pay no rent  all the money's gone  no place to go ..."  Abbey Road, The Beatles

I nervously wandered off the curving streets of Richmond into the offices of the local newspaper to ask for a job.  I was surprised when I was taken seriously.  As a test assignment, the editor told me that a group of hippies had started a commune in an abandoned hotel in Twickenham, the next village along the Thames.  The directions were fascinating  -  the hotel was called Eel Pie Island Hotel, and it really was on a little island in the middle of the Thames.

I caught the double-decker bus to Twickenham, and quickly found the arched footbridge which led to Eel Pie Island.  It was about two hundred feet across the little bridge, with a beautiful view of the Thames.  When I had reached the island I felt I had entered a special place.  A footpath lined with neat little cottages wound through the centre of the island.  There was no missing the old hotel at the end of the footpath.  It was derelict, and I just walked in where the grand front entrance had once been.

Without any problems I quickly located the founder of the commune.  Cliff was an artist/cartoonist and an anarchist.  He was living with his American girlfriend, Ame, in a large room on the second floor of the hotel.  Cliff was a big bear of a man by English standards.  He had long, strawlike brown hair and an unkempt beard.  With his granny glasses he looked like a professor gone bad.  Ame was an All-American girl  -  fresh-faced and clean limbed with glasses  -  a professor's wife gone bad.

Cliff's easel and layout table and supplies spilled over one half of their large room, and in the other half was a big old mattress on the floor covered with quilts and blankets.  The scene was artsy and cozy and there was the musty smell of Thames dampness pervading.

It looked like an enticing way to live, very bohemian and independent and countercultural.  As I introduced myself to begin the interview, I was compelled to say, "I'm really a poet, not a reporter."

"What kind of poetry?" Cliff wanted to know.  "Mostly haiku poetry, it's a Japanese style," and I dug into my dolly bag to give them a copy of Cricket Formations.

"We want to build a commune of artists, especially politically conscious artists," Cliff explained.  "Why don't you pick out a room to use as a study and you could live here as part of the commune.  Only a couple of people have moved in so far.  You'd have your pick of rooms."

This was too good an offer to resist.  I dashed around the hollow building.  Too Much!  There were no flats available in the Greater London area.  I had been turfed out of two bedsitters in a week, and here I was being offered a room of my own in this picturesque setting.  Thoughts of the interview were forgotten.  I was a poet again.

EEL PIE ISLAND At first there were only a handful of hippies in the derelict hotel and I got a room instead of a story when I said I'm really a poet not a reporter Two years of my life sleepstoned hiding from the clammy Thames fog only our black and brown hashish smoke holding up the crumbling walls It's all so trite ten years later so far out and away from the foggy decay of spunksoaked mattresses Dougie, Crippled Eddie, Lorna Scotch John, Seamus Angie  -  Dominic Where are you now as the world discos towards 1984 to lift my head off the floor hand me a fuming chillum to kiss me tonight

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Eel Pie Dharma is protected by international copyright laws. Individuals may print off a copy of this work for personal use only to facilitate easier reading.

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Eel Pie Island (words & pics)   |   Cliff Harper - The Education of Desire

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May 15 is International Conscientious Objectors (CO) Day!

In 1969 I was 20 years old and living in the southern U.S. Although born in Canada I was eligible for the draft as a "resident alien"' (foreign national). I had applied for CO status to avoid serving in the unjust Vietnam War (the American War as the Vietnamese refer to it). I had organized a group  on my campus at Miami Dade Community College, The Student Action Committee (SAC, like Strategic Air Command).  I'd also been publishing a mimeographed anti-war paper titled "Papers" at the Miami Friends (Quakers) Centre. In June I received 3 draft notices in a week, and ended up living on the streets in squats in the UK for the next 3 years. My memoir about this was published in 1990 with Unfinished Monument Press and republished in a slicker edition in 2012 by Hidden Brook Press as Eel Pie Island Dharma.      

 Dear Friend of Conscience,  

May 15 is International Conscientious Objectors (CO) Day!

The Center on Conscience and War (CCW) invites you to join us in celebrating and honoring COs with a week of actions you can take to protect the right to conscientious objection for *all* COs - wherever they are.

Today, if you haven't already, please sign and share this letter to President Biden, asking his administration to end any further deportations of Russian COs.
 

After promising last year not to deport anyone seeking asylum from the war in Ukraine, the Biden administration suddenly deported a Russian CO earlier this spring, in what appears to be an incorrect or biased interpretation of US asylum policy regarding draft resistance.

Rejecting asylum claims based on draft resistance upholds the legitimacy of the draft, while undermining rights of conscience. As people working for an end to war and the right to freedom of religion and belief, we are called to protect the right to conscientious objection under US law. Without an active draft in the US, the Russian asylum seekers are bearing that burden for us right now. We are called to stand with them.

More actions you can take during this CO day/week of action:
 

1.After you sign the petition, you can call the White House (202-456-1111) and let them know you are concerned that deporting conscientious objectors seeking asylum in the US sets a bad precedent for all people of conscience.
2.Reach out to your member of Congress to alert them about your concerns and ask them to exercise their oversight and investigative authority to find out why COs are facing detention and deportation when they seek asylum in the US.
3.If you are in the northeast US, you can join War Resisters League and St. Francis Catholic Worker House on Wednesday, May 17, from 9:00-10:30 am at the US Coast Guard Academy in New London, CT, outside the gates at McKinley Park, corner of Mohegan Avenue and Williams Street. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas will be speaking, as we deliver the message, End the inhumane border conditions, new restrictions and fast deportations.  Welcome Asylum Seekers!
4.Share the petition and letter with your friends and networks.  
 

Thank you for all you do to support conscientious objectors to war!




Sent via Action Network, a free online toolset anyone can use to organize. Click here to sign up and get started building an email list and creating online actions today.

New TV Series "1969" based on Chris Faiers's "Eel Pie Island Dharma" memoir

 

Well, it isn't official yet, and the rights are still very open for bidding. But I thought I'd better put the concept out there while I'm still alive and kicking. (and make sure my copyright is honoured when some smart producer twigs to this idea)

I'm a latecomer to binge watching TV. In fact I haven't watched TV for most of my life, and I haven't owned a TV set for decades. But during the pandemic I began binge watching TV at a friend's house to pass the time, and I've enjoyed quite a few of the current series, which was a new cultural experience for me. In fact I am so impressed with some of the political content in the new 1923 series that I wrote my first blog post about TV yesterday. Several years ago two young English actors and novice script writers wrote an extensive movie script based on my memoir/haibun Eel Pie Island Dharma about my hippy, commune living adventures in the late 1960s. I self-published this book in 1990 as Eel Pie Dharma with my Unfinished Monument Press, and it was republished in a professional format in 2012 by Hidden Brook Press as Eel Pie Island Dharma. Considering the incredibly vibrant music of the times, the sound track to 1969 is a no-brainer. 

Yep, drugs, sex, rock'n'roll, adventuring through the late 1960s - the chapter titles tell the tales:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

A Psychedelic Basho 144 Piccadilly Squat The Day We (Sort Of) Met George Harrison The Isle Of Wight Concert Bedsitters & Jools Meeting Eel Pie Eel Piers More Eel Piers Alice Eel Pie Days The Buddhist Monastery The Schoolgirls Dominic And The Gnome Homes Twickenham Cemetery

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

The Clap Clinic Tripping Formentera The Night The Hog Farmers Got Swamped Skinheads The Three Fishes Tripping To Cambridge Lavenham Hare Krishna Glastonbury Magic Festival Ireland Wales The Rich Hippie Mescaline On The Barbican

 

 

UK interview about Eel Pie Island commune

 Yesterday I had an enjoyable trans-Atlantic interview with Marnie Woodmeade for a podcast about the Eel Pie Island commune of half a century ago. Great to have the chance to reminisce and it was helpful that Marnie had read Eel Pie Island Dharma to prep for the interview. 

 On 14/04/2022 10:29, Marnie Woodmeade wrote:
 

 Hello!
 I am a trainee podcast producer at Transmission Roundhouse. Transmission Roundhouse is a socially engaged podcast platform powered
 by the Roundhouse. A home for niche, innovative and groundbreaking
 audio-led content that champions the voices of underrepresented young
 creatives.
 I am making a series of podcasts about how people find alternative
 communities and versions of home in the face of unworkable housing
 systems. I am doing an episode that focuses on the commune on Eel Pie
 island and would really like to interview someone who was part of it.
 I would basically like to speak to as many people as possible, and I
 can make this as easy for you as possible.
 I'm happy to have an informal chat with anyone who's interested!
 All the best,
 Marnie

--
Marnie Woodmeade (she/her)
Trainee Podcast Producer

Roundhouse
Chalk Farm Road,
London, NW1 8EH

                           
                                                                ~    ~    ~

 

Hi Chris,

It was lovely to speak to you! You have a way of talking that really transports you, so it was great to hear your stories.

Thank you! I may take you up on that, I realise I totally forgot to ask you a few questions so I'm sure I'll be back in touch soon.

Sending positive vibes your way,
 Marnie

                                  . . . . . . 

On Thu, 12 May 2022 at 19:28, Chris Faiers <zenriver@sympatico.ca> wrote:
 

Hi Marnie,

l really enjoyed reminiscing about the Eel Pie Island days!

Best of luck with your podcast. If you need any missing pieces I'd love to add more memories  ;  )

peace & love,
Canadian Chris
                

Memory Lane: fan letter reminiscing about Three Fishes Pub

On 02/07/2021 20:21, Martin wrote:
Hello mate, hope you are well.
I was feeling nostalgic for my youth growing up in Kingston upon Thames and did a search for the Three Fishes pub, a place that holds many dear memories for me. This search turned up chapter 20 of your Eel Pie Dhama series. I read chapter 20, went on to chapter 21 and then started back at chapter one and read through the whole lot without stopping. What can I say? I loved your writing and enjoyed every minute of the read. I just finished chapter 28 and was saddened to realise there wasn't a chapter 29 and onward. I wish it was a whole book man.
Anyway, as you gave me such pleasure with the read I thought the least I could do was to let you know how much I enjoyed it. I hope this message reaches you mate and that life has been good to you since those days.
/ Cheers!/
/Martin/

 

EEL PIE DHARMA - a memoir / haibun -  © 1990 Chris Faiers

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Chapter 20 - The Three Fishes

Pub life in London reflected the British tendency to divide into classes and areas of interest.  There were upper class pubs, right wing pubs, Irish Republican pubs, working class pubs, and one unique pub where all the regulars were very short, young males who only listened to Eddie Cochran on the juke box.  There were skinhead pubs and of course hippie pubs.

The Three Fishes was a hippie pub, located on the corner next to the Kingston-Upon-Thames rail station.  The lights were dim, the music blaring rock'n'roll, and the clientele longhairs of both sexes.  At that time in Britain, kids as young as fifteen could get away with going into pubs, although the legal drinking age was eighteen, so there was the expected quota of schoolgirls and boys.

It was just the sort of atmosphere I loved after a hard day of digging graves.  On one of my first visits, a gorgeous young girl of about sixteen came and knelt before me, as if before a medieval knight.  She clasped her long hippie shawl about herself, and even I found I couldn't take advantage of her, and offer the expected walk home through the park:

Young girl     in an old shawl         kneeling

One summer evening I made the long ride into Kingston on my bike after work, and had a pint or two at the Three Fishes.  It stays light very late in Britain in summer, and so dusk was just turning to dark when I left after 9 p.m., and began undoing my bicycle lock.

In the half light I noticed something very strange.  There were several police vans parked outside, and more arriving every second.  In the dark I made out the shapes of several dozen policemen, and I realized that a raid was about to take place.

I wasn't drunk, only stupid, and some sense of hippie brotherhood won out over common sense.  I walked back into the Three Fishes and began yelling "It's a raid! - It's a raid!"

The office in charge followed me through the doors, and I was the first one grabbed.  "You're nicked," he snarled, and passed me to another bobby.  Bustled back out the door, I caught a glimpse of the pandemonium as drugs were dumped under most of the tables.  I was pushed onto a bus, much like a large tour bus, which the bobbies had requisitioned for the occasion, and soon I was joined by thirty or forty other longhairs.  Then the bus and several van loads of miscreants were taken down to Kingston police headquarters and booked.

I didn't get to sleep that night, as it took the police all night to process so many of us.  In the early morning light I found my way back to my locked bicycle, and slowly wound my way back towards Twickenham.

Our case didn't come up for a month, and the courtroom was a mob scene.  When my turn came, I pleaded "Guilty, Your Honour" to the charge of interfering with the raid by warning everyone, but I added, "I don't feel guilty, though."  The courtroom burst out laughing, both at the oddity of my charge, and at my unusual plea.  I was given a fine of thirty pounds, which was then my wages for about three weeks.

Hash aroma     and stale beer         under the table

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my thread in Haiku Canada (and in English language haiku)

Former President of Haiku Canada Terry Ann Carter is in the process of writing and publishing a history of Haiku Canada. Over the years I've sent her a number of chapbooks from the early days, and also replied to her questions as best I can. Following is a recent email I sent her to try to clarify my role in and perspective on some history of Haiku Canada (as well as on English language haiku in general).
 
I'll take a few mins now to try to fill in a few gaps in my background and role in haiku for you, as you sound confused about Unfinished Monument Press and other activities about where and when I was active in the haiku community, and especially how my history may fit in with the greater picture you're trying to uncover. Of course what I'm writing will be a bit solipsistic, but that's the best I can do, and I have been active in writing and publishing haiku from 1967 onward (now over half a century!)

You've also given me a great excuse NOT to go on the planned bitterly cold evening walk on the towpath by the Crowe, and I've poured a glass of chiraz to keep me inspired.

I was born in Hamilton (1948), but only lived there for a few months when I first returned to Canada in 1972 after living in a commune in London, UK and traveling around Europe. This story is told in my memoir "Eel Pie Dharma", first self-published with my Unfinished Monument Press in 1990 (one of the earliest English language book length haibun), and then republished with Tai Grove's Hidden Brook Press in a professional edition in 2012.

I didn't meet the Hamilton haijin, or any other haiku poets in person, until that first founding gathering of what became Haiku Canada at Eric Amann's apartment in the late 1970s. This is where I connected with Margaret Saunders, and it was probably through her that I also connected with Herb and then Jeff.


college days,  anti-draft activism and intro to haiku and Eric:

My intro to haiku happened while sitting in the library at Miami-Dade Junior College in 1967 (now Miami-Dade College) and I found an ad in the Village Voice classifieds for "Haiku" magazine. I'd been writing short poems, and the editor of the M-D lit mag, "Southwind", told me they resembled haiku. So I wrote off for a copy of "Haiku", and this is how I connected with Eric. Eric was a med student or doing his early hospital residencies in NYC, and had discovered haiku as a lonely expat Canadian. (Have you read Eric's autobiography, "The House on Fountain Street" - Can't find my signed copy right now in the dark of my study)

"Haiku" duly arrived and I immediately identified with the haiku form. My family had moved back to Key Biscayne (island off Miami) after living in a suburb of Atlanta during my high school years. I'd mistakenly registered with the draft board in Atlanta, which cost me dearly when I became very active in opposing the Vietnam War. I organized a campus group to counsel against the draft, and also began applying for conscientious objector status. Jim Christy has a parallel background with opposing the war. As one of the highest profile anti-war activists in Miami, the draft board, way off in Atlanta, soon went after me.

I was extremely stressed in this period (circa 1967-69), and I began writing haiku as an outlet for the stress and began sending haiku to Eric. Eric rejected my first attempts, but soon started accepting them for publication in his influential mag. I also began practicing yoga and meditation at this time.

Eric's "Haiku" was a leader in the very small field of haiku practitioners and small mags and broadsheets. There were a handful of these, but Eric's mag was acknowledged to be at the forefront in developing a modern, English language version of haiku. In the 1960s almost all haiku were written in the rigid 5-7-5 form, but Eric bravely promoted a shorter, looser form. He was my mentor, and I did my best to write haiku which fit into his forward thinking views. My haiku were published in all the small North American mags and broadsheets. But . . . in June 1969 the draft board caught  up with me and sent 3 induction notices in one week. It was time for me to leave the U.S. I was a permanent resident (green card holder) from age 7 or 8 until I left just weeks before my 21st birthday. As a foreign national they would have deported me rather than jailed me anyway I assume  : )

hippie street life in a commune and first 2 haiku collections in 1969:

Rather than return to Canada, my father thought I should go to England, which was a horrible idea. I stayed with my snotty older cousin and his doctor wife for a month or so, and then they unceremoniously threw me out into the street. I ended up living in the nearby Eel Pie Island Hotel hippie squat for the next 1 1/2 years. With the last of my small savings I self-published two chapbooks of haiku (I sent you one of these, "Cricket Formations") in the summer of 1969. The haiku in CF were all non-standard haiku, and most of them have stood the test of time and half a century later they are as publishable now as they were then considered cutting-edge in the small haiku community of the late 1960s. Michael McClintock, who remains a staunch haijin, published a selection of my haiku in one of the Amerikan haiku mags, with a very nice bio note and intro. This would have been circa 1970, and "Southwind", the Miami-Dade lit mag, also did a full page feature of my haiku. All of this didn't mean as much to me as it might have, as I was literally scrambling to find enough food to eat and a blanket to keep me warm in small room in the abandoned Eel Pie Island Hotel.

Return to Canada and poetry:

After 3 years of hippie street life and wandering about Europe (all detailed in "Eel Pie Island Dharma: a memoir/haibun) I desperately needed to  change my life at age 24. I decided to visit Canada. After all, Canada couldn't be any less impoverishing or squalid than my young life had become in England. I enrolled at university, but after years of smoking hash and dropping acid, the academic life didn't suit me. I ended up joining The Canadian Liberation Movement, a Maoist/Stalinist sect that was anti-imperialist as well as staunchly pro-Canadian culture. Too much happened to write about here, but in CLM I met one of Canada's leading poets, GG winner Milton Acorn. Friendship with Milton encouraged me to return to writing poetry, which I've continued to do ever since.

I did a variety of jobs to survive, including working as a steelworker/union organizer in Guelph and then a cook at the Univ. of Toronto. I even got chef's papers through George Brown College, but my calling continued to be poetry, including haiku.

I managed to get a few of my politikal poems published in leftwing papers and mags like "Alive" in Guelph and "the Red Menace" in Toronto. Around this time, 1976-77, I met Toronto poet Ted Plantos through a mutual friend, Tom Clement. Tom was working as manager with the remains of the publishing arm of the CLM after it disbanded circa 1975, and it was through Steel Rail Press publishing and meetingTed that I realized I could start my own small press, as Ted had done with his Old Nun Press.

Unfinished Monument Press and The Main Street Library Poetry Series:
Following Ted's example, I self-published a collection of my poetry, "Dominion Day in Jail", by founding Unfinished Monument Press in 1978. The monument referred to is a memorial to two of the martyrs in the 1838 Rebellion, a holdover from CLM days.

There was a burgeoning poetry scene in Toronto and other poets asked to share my Unfinished Monument imprint. Sometimes the poets did all the work themselves, and sometimes I did most of it. UMP published first collections by such prestigious poets as Robert Priest ("The Visible Man"), my friend Tom Clement ("Superman"), Jim Deahl's first work ("Real Poetry"), Margaret Saunder's first ((haiku "A Flock of Blackbirds"), Lynne Kositsky's first ("PCB Jam"), Bruce Hunter's first ("Selected Canadian Rifles") etc. etc. . UMP published quite a Who's Who of the Toronto poetry scene from its founding until I gave it to poet Jim Deahl in the early 1990s.

Ted Plantos had also coordinated a poetry series at a Cabbagetown branch of Toronto Libraries. He had recently folded the series, and as there was only one other ongoing poetry venue in Toronto at the time, The Axle-Tree Readings, I decided to again follow Ted's example and in 1979 I started the monthly Main Street Library Poetry Series at my local branch of Toronto Public Library (TPL).

By accident I had become a bit of an amateur impresario on the Toronto poetry scene, and I was able to first publish poets, or discover unpublished poets through the readings, and then feature them. I was also able to wrangle a job as a low paid desk clerk at the library through my volunteer work as the poetry series organizer. As the series was successful, I was further able to encourage many of my house poets by getting them onto the Canada Council list of sponsored readings (e.g. they could get paid to travel and do a few readings a year).

back to haiku:

So it was during this creative period of publishing poetry with UMP and featuring poets at the readings that Dr. Eric Amann and George Swede decided to hold an informal meeting of other haiku writers. As the founder of both UMP and the reading series, I was able to give various haiku poets the ability to publish and to perform their work.

On Oct. 21, 1981 I featured George Swede and the Haiku Workshop. Reading the signed guest book under flashlight, I can find George's name, Keith Southward (he was the original editor of HC's mag/newsletter "Inkstone), Denise Coney (she and Keith were a 'power haiku' couple for a while), Irene Mcguire, Jan Dawson, Nancy Prasad, Shaunt Basmajian, and myself of course. Probably others whose names I can't read or remember.

Many other major and minor poets read at the series, and there would have been features of other haiku poets. The series ran for 6 years and 62 readings. The readings played an important role in introducing poets to each other, and among the featured poets at a glance I see Milton Acorn, jones, Herb Barrett, Jeff Seffinga, Margaret Saunders. In total over 100 poets, and much of the creativity, the plotting, building and destruction of poetic empires, occurred at various pubs after the readings.


Phewww

Terry, I don't know if the above babble is going to help or confuse you!  Writing a history, even my own perhaps, will always have an element of revisionism. The complex intertwining of personal stories, serendipitous meetings, and a pint or two of lubrication makes the task of accurately documenting history, even as ephemeral a one as Haiku Canada's, an almost impossible task.

GOOD LUCK!!!

Chris/cricket

    

        

My Summer of 1969 -

Chris on the deck of China Tea Steam Navigation Company, Thames River, Richmond, England - summer of 1969.


Following is the first chapter of my memoir/haibun of that  tumultuous and magical year, 1969. I self-published this as Eel Pie Dharma in 1990 (while the memories were still fresh). Tai Grove republished a professional edition in 2012 with Hidden Brook Press as Eel Pie Island Dharma. Fellow Eel Pie Islander "Weed" kindly posted this online in the early 2000s. The first draft of a movie script based on my memoir was completed last summer by Tom Hanson and Sam Gillett of Twickenham.

 

Chapter 1 - A Psychedelic Basho

At community college I began writing bad poetry around 1967.  When I realized that I was not cut out to be a science student, I immersed myself in arts courses and declared myself a poet.  Some poems submitted to the student magazine reminded the editor of haiku.  Having never heard of haiku, I didn't know what to make of the comment, but browsing through a literary magazine I found a classified ad offering copies of Haiku magazine from a Toronto address.

Haiku duly arrived, and I fell in love with the haiku form.  The similarity between haiku and the brief poems I had been attampting was obvious, and soon I was submitting haiku to the editor of Haiku, Dr Eric Amann.

After initial rejections.  I was thrilled when Eric Amann accepted several haiku for his magazine.  Encouraged, I began to devote myself to writing haiku.  Basho, the wandering haiku poet/priest of medieval Japan, was added to my role models.  The lonely life of a commuting college student in Florida presented a few of my early poems:

Christmas vacation tame ducks starving   by the campus lake

Rain   gray doves  strung on a wire

Light breeze     striding across campus           a thin professor

Almost from the beginning of my student days I had been fighting an appeals battle with the draft board.  Unfortunately I had registered in Georgia, just before our family moved back to Florida.  In retrospect, and after corresponding with former classmates many years later, I believe that I was an easy target for the Atlanta draft board.  Living out of the state, drafting me wouldn't stir up any local antagonisms, and the fact that I was also a resident alien (as a Canadian citizen by birth) probably didn't help my cause.  Ongoing struggles to keep my student status caused me to intensely question the Vietnam War, and I was living day-to-day with the life-and-death questions of duty to country versus participation in an unethical war.  This personal turmoil provided a fertile ground for writing haiku poems.  Often I had insomnia, and I would think back over my life.  A family vacation in the Blue Ridge Mountains provided:

Cavern pool   tourists watching                    blind fish

Memories of a far off Halloween in Canada when I was five years old inspired:

Halloween     a young boy   in a skeleton suit

Some days I would escape to the beach after class:

                                                                     blue sea
                                                               bobbing red and white
                                                                 lobster trap buoys

Summer moonlight     rotting on our roof         a starfish

As I became more and more disillusioned with the Vietnam War, I began to hang around with the other radicals and longhairs on the campus.  Miami was, and is, a very reactionary city, and psychedelia, which had flowered in California in 1966, was just reaching Miami in 1968.  I was one of the first long hairs on campus, and the second guy on Key Biscayne to grow long hair.  The centre for the slowly evolving hippie community in Miami was Coconut Grove, an artistic haven located around the Dinner Key docks and the adjacent waterfront park:

Bay wind blowing   Coconut Grove sailboats         tinkling rigging

First green appearing     buds on the new stake hedge           and chameleons

The flower     of this old tree         a treehouse

At the peak of the Vietnam War, in June 1969, I received three draft notices in a week.  It was time to leave.  I flew from Miami to Nassau:


                                                         lobster antennas
                                                     waving from the twin caves
                                                            of a cement block
                          

Mounted sailfish   lining the walls   of Nassau airport

From Nassau I caught a flight to Luxemburg, and then I caught a train from Brussels to London:

Luxemburg  black paint on pink brick              U. A.

I lived with my cousin and his wife on the outskirts of London for several months.  It wasn't a comfortable arrangement for any of us.  I continued writing my haiku, always carrying a notebook with me in a tote bag.  One of my first visits was to Piccadilly Circus, where the traffic island in the centre of the world's busiest intersection had become an international hippie rendezvous under the statue of Cupid.  The day I visited Piccadilly there was a bust for hash smoking.  A bobby was about to arrest me when he spied my London guide book, and he let me go:

Piccadilly Circus     Cupid's fountain spraying                hippies

By now I had a large collections of haiku, many of them published in Haiku and numerous other small haiku journals which had sprung up in the United States.  I spent many days visiting Kew Gardens, and after one afternoon of meditation, I explored a side road on my way back to Kew Station.  I found a little printing company, and somehow got the courage to go in.

I'd like to publish a collection of my poems, I shyly told the balding, potbellied printer.  Despite my hippie appearance, my American accent tipped him that I might have money, and he got me to show him what I wanted.

When he saw my Luxemburg poem with the swastika, he wanted to know if I was a fascist.  I convinced him that I wasn't a fascist, only a poet, and he agreed to print my poetry in little booklets for £50 for 500 copies.

A week later I went back and picked up the box of my first chapbook, Cricket Formations.  I lugged the booklets down the hill to the post office in the hamlet of Kew, and spent the afternoon mailing them all over the world.

---

60s Commune Survivors

Two Twickenham screenwriters are writing a screenplay based on my memoir Eel Pie Island Dharma. As part of the creative process they are having email and long distance interviews with me about my background and experiences in the Eel Pie Island commune. The following emails are part of this exchange. The first was written by me, the second by Weed - I can't find Weed in the photo, so maybe he took the pic? That's me on the far left (where else) - I'd loaned my camera to another commune member to take this pic of the wedding of four of the Eel Pie islanders. Fall 1969!

Hi Tom & Sam,

Congrats on making major progress on your screenplay!

I was thinking of Cliff and Ame the other day, obviously because your project is stirring old memories. There were so many unresolvable contradictions in the late 1960s and the things we were involved with. Cliff was a consummate artist, and being an artist really didn't fit in with the hippie/commune lifestyle. Artists need time and space to create, whereas the hippie thing was about 'live for the moment', carpe diem.

I remember one of the commune women, Angie, who wanted to be a children's author. She commented how none of us were creating art - I wasn't writing much, the musicians were just getting stoned on hash all day, so I know Cliff must have had a hard time focusing on drawing his political cartoons and art. Weed has met with Cliff in fairly recent years, and he would have an interesting insight into Cliff's personality as well.

The concept of combining a hippie commune with an arts lab is laughable in hindsight. The psychedelic/hippie thing was created by artists and professors like Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey, via the beats like Kerouac, and then popularized by pop stars like The Beatles and The Stones. But as the culture filtered throughout society, it became increasingly watered down to the lowest common denominator. I remember someone snarking that I was wasting my time and money reading a book on psychedelics, rather than doing them. Well, shit, I'd done enough of them to know what the experiences were all about, but it's also helpful to be evaluative and creative as well as stoned and tripping all the time  ;  )- 

Cliff was one of the main founders of the EP commune, but none of us, esp. the artists, wanted to be "leaders". There was a definite vacuum of leadership because we all wanted to be equal AND stoned all the time, so no one was interested in assuming responsibility. Occasionally someone would move into the hotel and decide to be a "leader", but they soon found the responsibility of caring for all the runaway kids, heroin addicts, wannabe bikers etc. was not really very fulfilling  ;  )    (plus the pay was lousy)

Back to Cliff - I believe Cliff was more interested in the arts lab culture than creating a commune, but the sheer numbers of people moving in quickly overwhelmed the artsies among us. Also we were all poor, sometimes borderline starving, and I think Cliff mentioned in a book or an interview, that he had to do some petty hash dealing to survive. No money, no food, no privacy or place to create sure isn't conducive to artistic endeavours.

Hope this blather helps!
peace & continued creative energy!
Canadian Chris

p.s. I'm usu. available for long distance calls at short notice

                                          ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

hi Tom, Sam

>> what was Clifford Harper like when you first met him? And
>> what do you think his goal was for the commune?
> Weed... would have an interesting insight into Cliff's personality...

i take it you've already read his Wikipedia entry? -

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Harper )

Clifford talks a lot about Eel Pie in his book "The Education Of Desire - The Anarchist Graphics of Cliff Harper" (Anarres Cooperative, 1984) -- it's in the form of a long interview with Adam Cornford -

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Cornford

if you can't get hold of it, let me know and i'll scan the relevant pages for you

[from the book] "Eel Pie I intended as an armed camp. I dropped that idea within two weeks because the people didn't want to know, so I just let it go the way it wanted to go."

He was also very influenced by The Living Theatre -

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Living_Theatre

tho he wanted to create static bases rather than have a mobile one -- [from the book] "But my idea was that it be a centre from which we raided society. With experience, theatre and vibrant agitation."

in general he's scathing about the middle-class apolitical hippies of the late 60s :) "...I was nagging away about working class revolution... I was forced to become a foreign body within the commune... Eventually I was up against the mass ranks of hippiedom."

he also talks about his life as a dope dealer there, "making money hand over fist" (though this might have been relative, not so much Havana cigars, as being able to afford tobacco rather than having to roll up dogends lol)

Clifford was active as an artist at the time, and as well as developing his style, was contributing artwork to magazines (i think "Idiot International" may have been one of them), tho i don't know how often

however all that was over 30 years ago, and today he'd probably have other perspectives to add, though his political ideas and ideals are still very much intact

in a 2007 interview he was asked if he would ever consider rejoining a commune, and replied, "Now that is an interesting question. Anytime before now, if you had asked me that I would have answered with a hollow, cynical laugh, 'Ha, Ha' but considering it now, for the first time in some years, I’m surprised to say that, 'Yes, I would'. I must have a think about this."

my personal memories of Cliff from Eel Pie days are very positive -- he was for the most part unflustered by the surrounding chaos

the group that initially moved in with him (Ame, Simon, Jonathon, Brennan, Anna and possibly one or two others) provided a political sensibility and at least a semblance of stability for the first few months -- i'm pretty sure that Cliff would have been the one to notify BIT about the occupation of the Hotel, and about it being available as a crashpad for people who were homeless or were passing through London without a place to stay -

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIT_(alternative_information_centre)

coincidently i got an email from Clifford earlier today, more of a circular, saying that he was going into hospital this coming monday (23rd Oct) to have his bladder removed -- because of the weak condition of his heart the operation is riskier that usual -- however if all goes well he will be back home by the end of the month -- (if you've not already been in contact with him, then when he's sufficiently recovered i'm happy to check whether he's interested in talking to you about that period of his life)

Weed

nice mention in Contemporary Haibun Online review of Eel Pie Island Dharma

| Current Issue | About CHO | Editorial Staff & Guidelines | Submissions | Articles | Archives | Search |
April 2017, vol 13 no 2

| Contents This Issue | Next Article or Haibun |

---

TITLE

Review of Journeys 2017: An Anthology of International Haibun, Dr. Angelee Deodhar (ed.)

Journeys 2017: An Anthology of International Haibun, Dr. Angelee Deodhar (Editor), Paperback: 390 pages, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 1st edition (February 24, 2017), ISBN-10: 1541387031, ISBN-13: 978-1541387034.

review by Bob Lucky

 

 

This latest incarnation of Journeys is ambitious, massive, endlessly fascinating, and informative. And at times, it may be too much. For me, reading haibun demands a certain kind of attention, much like reading prose poetry or a collection of short stories. It's something best done slowly, allowing plenty of time for reflection and processing. This is not an anthology, a tome (literally, even if you have a digital version) that you begin at the beginning and proceed with the end in sight. It's too rich. You have to pace yourself as if at an elegant buffet or else you run the risk of getting unpleasantly full before you've had a chance to sample everything. Maybe a bit of dessert to start your meal?

Which leads me to this observation. As an editor, I understand why the three main sections of the anthology – Early Adapters, Contemporary Writers of Haibun, and Excerpts from Japanese Books (a slightly misleading heading) – are in the order they are in, but as a book reviewer, my advice to the reader is to start with Section III, the Japanese background. Rich Youmans, who also wrote the introduction to Journeys 2017, kicks off Section III with an excellent essay on diaries, especially travel diaries, kikobun, and their relationship to the development of haibun. The final section of the essay, while noting that many English-language haibun are travel episodes or vignettes, does acknowledge that a few writers have attempted to write a kikobun in the fashion of Basho, "narratives that weave individual episodes into a rich tapestry, often in varying styles of prose." The works Youmans discusses are Tom Lynch's Rain Drips from the Trees: Haibun Along the Trans-Canadian Highway, William J. Higginson and Penny Harter's Met on the Road: A Transcontinental Haiku Journal, David Cobb's The Spring Journey to the Saxon Shore, Ken Jones' Stallion's Crag: Haiku and Haibun, John Brandi's Water Shining Beyond the Fields: Haibun Travels Southeast Asia, and Jim Kacian's Border Lands: Travels in the Old Country.

The entries that follow Youmans' essay trace a genealogy of the modern haibun that hinges on Basho. We read about and work from his predecessors Saigyo and Socho, as well as those who in turn were influenced by him, Kobayashi Issa, Kurita Chodo, Masaoka Shiki. The last two pieces focus on Japanese women diarists and on Japanese-Canadian Kaoru Ikeda's Slocan Diary, an account of her time in a "relocation camp" during World War II.

While Section III is a good place to start because of the historical and culture background it provides, especially Youmans' essay, it feels oddly disconnected from the general purpose of the anthology. Partly this is because every piece is excerpted from a book and a direct tie to the development of haibun is assumed. Readers new to haibun and those unfamiliar with Japanese culture and literary history may have difficulty seeing how, except in a vague way, what this has to do with English-language haibun. Again, at the risk of sounding like a broken record (and I think most readers of haibun will understand that simile, and mercifully forgive the cliché), Youmans' "Travel Diaries and the Development of Modern Haibun" is the place to start.

From there you go to Jeffrey Woodward's reprinted essay "Form in Haibun: An Outline" in the introductory section. With the history of Japanese diaries and kikobun fresh in your mind, Woodward's essay will give you a good idea of what to expect, regarding format, in the next two sections. Woodward has contributed significantly to the promotion and dissemination of English-language haibun. In this essay he explores the forms modern haibun often take, most of which are found in this anthology. If there is a modern definition of haibun it would describe a combination of prose and haiku, one or more. It's more complicated than that, or can be. The term haibun can loosely include tanka prose and various other prosimetra. It can even be haiku-less, verseless (though I can't help but think we already have designations for that kind of 'haibun': prose poetry and short short fiction).

The Early Adapters Section starts with John Ashberry's haibun, which I've always admired as prose poems while wondering how they might have become haibun or at least better haibun if he had only known how to write a haiku. However, his pieces remain fresh and poetic (and his haiku a kind of model for many writers new to haiku and haibun). In contrast, the works of Paul F. Schmidt and Edith Shiffert seem self-consciously "Japanese" in theme and tone and their predilection for 5-7-5 haiku, self-consciously Zen-like (which seems un-Zen-like to me). Granted, that is perhaps due to the time in which they were written and to the fact Shiffert lived most of her life in Japan. The haibun of Jerry Kilbride and Rod Wilmot, on the other hand, feel/sound/read as contemporary haibun, at least to my ears. They both write in the vein of the traveler, but Kilbride is the wanderer out to collect experiences while Wilmot is the participant-observer in his own domain. It was inspiring to read their work.

One thing that struck me about the haibun in this section compared to most of the haibun I read today is their length, pages and pages. Ashberry kept his to one page, which is almost the norm now, but I think he was aware of the tension a prose poem can bear, how much poetic language a reader can handle in one sitting. The other writers in this section were writing mostly narrative haibun or highly lyrical variations of that. The haiku (or other poetic form) within the prose narrative has a tendency to slow the reader down, which is why it's there, isn't it, moments of reflection on the relationship between the haiku and the prose, the link and shift? Longer haibun, unless well written, can sometimes fail to hold the reader's attention. We could blame it on our shrinking attention spans, but I think it may also have something to do with the attention poetic language demands of the reader. Longer haibun, kikobun-length haibun, have the space in which to develop a narrative, explore a conflict or theme, create characters. In Jim Kacian's Border Lands, the reader wants to know if the narrator is going to make it, literally and figuratively; whereas in Paul F. Schmidt's nine-page "Kyoto Temples", despite some beautiful writing and insightful observations, nothing much happens from a narrative point of view. There's no classic narrative arc (not even the abbreviated arc of a flash piece). One might argue, well, it's like a journal or a diary, but generally who wants to read a diary by someone they don't really know or whose character does not somehow come to life in the diary. I mean, why would someone read Kafka's diaries? Isn't it because they're interested in Kafka or at least know something about him? I'm over-simplifying, but I do think it's one of the weaknesses of 

non-narrative haibun.

Section II, a selection of haibun from twenty-two contemporary writers (five haibun from each writer except one), is a veritable who's who. The one writer I was unfamiliar with was Chris Faiers. The English-language haibun world is small, so I feel guilty and a little surprised I didn't know of him or his work. (As an exercise, compare his "The Buddhist Monastery" with Schmidt's "Kyoto Temples" to see the importance of a little narrative tension.) This is a varied collection of haibun, most of them wonderful. And I'm going to leave it there. Anyone interested in the history of haibun and wanting to read some of the finest work of contemporary practitioners of the form would be remiss to skip getting hold of Journeys 2017. As the series continues, and one hopes it does, it may settle into a best of series. That is fine. What won't change is both the historical and literary value Journeys 2017 will have as a document exploring the development of English-language haibun.

---

I was at the '69 and '70 Isle of Wight festivals ...

The Guardian newspaper in the UK has been publishing archival photos from the seminal hippie pop festivals of the 1960s and early 1970s. Worth checking out - here's another chapter of that time from my memoir.

EEL PIE DHARMA - a memoir / haibun -  © 1990 Chris Faiers

Chapter 4 - The Isle of Wight Concert After a couple of months of unpleasant co-existence, my cousin asked me to leave, immediately.  I was flung out with nowhere to go in a strange country.  I wandered around the suburban village of Kingston upon Thames for the evening, and finally made a camp out of a suitcase and towels in a vacant lot: Making camp in a vacant lot with outcast cats I survived the night, and the next day I ran into Martha at L'Auberge.  Martha's parents were going to Ibiza for a week with her younger sister.  Supposedly it was ok for a few of us to stay with Martha for company.  Soon the house was full of hippie crashers.  Martha's someimes boyfriend Canadian Peter, family friend Mark Valiant, myself and assorted L'Auberge regulars took advantage of the of the Holme's hospitality. The week flew by in a stoned haze.  One night a group of the Richmond dossers dropped acid.  One of them stabbed at the kitchen table with a knife for hours.  So much for peace and love.  A group of us trooped out into nearby Richmond Park, and cavorted in the moonlight all night. Another memory of that week is of being awakened on the sofa by Canadian Pete sticking a huge joint in my mouth.  I toked and then fell back asleep against the expensive stereo cabinet. The day the Holmes were due to return Mark organised frenzied work teams.  We vacuumed the whole house, scrubbed floors, cleaned out the roach-filled ashtrays, did the dishes.  For a final touch I decided to have a bath.  While the bath was running, I continued with the massive clean-up.  I was working in the livingroom when someone noticed a strange bubble forming on the ceiling.  It was like something out of a horror movie, and in our permanently stoned state we first thought it was a group hallucination.  And then the hallucinatory bubble began to drip.  Panicked, I remembered my bath filling upstairs.  I rushed up to find a foot or two of water flooding the bathroom. I cut off the faucets, and somebody tried to lance the huge boil growing just above the dining table. At this juncture the Holmes arrived!  All our hours of cleaning were destroyed by my forgetfulness.  In an amazingly controlled voice Mr. Holmes ordered me out of his house.  I limped off to Richmond Park, where I sat on the side of a hill overlooking a field and cursed my stupidity. In this depressed state I had nowhere to go, no one to turn to.  I remembered hearing about a giant rock festival featuring Bob Dylan which was going to be held soon on the Isle of Wight.  Having nothing better to do, I started walking in the general direction of Southampton, the crossing point for the Isle.  I only made it to the edge of Richmond by dark.  A lot of other young people were heading for the Isle of Wight, and I hooked up with a group of guys and walked with them for a mile or so before we decied to kip down for the night beside the Thames.  We washed down sandwiches with a shared bottle of soda, and soon the fog and the darkness surrounded us.  I woke up early in the morning.  Through the dawn mist a pair of Thames swans swam majestically towards us; an omen for a better day: Through dawn mist     floating         pair of Thames swans Someone gave me a lift to Southampton, which wasn't really that far away.  I only had a few pounds left in a post office bank account, and I withdrew my last worldly assets.  I spent part of the day mooning around Southampton, trying to track down a girl I had met at the Plumpton Festival.  Her parents must have got wind of her plans, or else she had lost interest in me, because I wasn't able to arrange a meeting by phone.  So I crossed over to the Isle of Wight on one of the giant tourist ferries. The whole ferry was crowded with young people on their way to the concert. Hippies, students, and would-be hippies like myself trying to grow their hair.  When the ferry docked, I joined the long trail of hikers winding towards the concert site.  Along the way locals had set up lemonade stands in the British tradition of combining shopkeeper capitalism and hospitality. I fell in with two girls and another guy.  When we reached the muddy concert site, it looked like a refugee camp.  Thousands and thousands of young people were camping in open fields.  This was just after the Woodstock Festival took place in New York State, and apparently there were more people at the Isle of Wight Festival than there were at Woodstock.  However, as Woodstock took place in the United States, and was thus more important to the growing anti-Vietnam peace movement, Woodstock has gone down in history as the seminal and most important rock concert of the period.  But it also happened, on a possible larger scale, in the beautiful fields among the dramatic hills of the Isle of Wight. We spent hours helping the girls raise their tent.  Exhausted from the excitement and the trek, we curled up inside.  The girl I was paired with rubbed against me most of the night, but she wouldn't do much more than that.  We probably both found the other only marginally attractive, and I found the experience frustrating. The next day I wandered off on my own into the huge crowd, and I soon found a welcome place in an earthen hut which housed a whole troupe of early arrivals.  Rhino was one of the leaders.  He was a rough looking but kindhearted guy, and there was also a gorgeous blonde heroin addict from Scandinavia.  For some reason she liked me, and when I told her I was a writer and journalist, she was fascinated.  All night we sat round a roaring campfire, telling our life stories and hopes and dreams: Talked all night   ashes at dawn     girls asleep The next night was the feature of the festival, Bob Dylan.  I sat at the back of the hundreds of thousands of kids, and Dylan was just a doll-like figure hundreds of yards away, whose music barely reached me. Crowds, dope, sleeping in the open air, smoke in our tangled hair.  Sexual frustration, still.  Weaving back in a queue of bodies miles long, past the lemonade stands to the ferry.  Back to Southampton, where I again hooked up with the gorgeous heroin addict, who bragged that she was heading to New York, because it had the best smack in the world.  We all piled into a van headed for London, and somehow I was in.  I had survived some rite of passage, and the ten of us crowded in the back of the van sang and banged time on the tinny walls all the way back to Richmond.  My beautiful heroin addict got out first, and I never saw her again. Eel Pie Dharma is protected by international copyright laws. Individuals may print off a copy of this work for personal use only to facilitate easier reading.

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Eel Pie Dharma - contents   |   previous chapter (3)   |   next chapter (5)

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Plumpton 1969 (beware popups)   |   Woodstock 1969   |   Isle of Wight 1969

Glastonbury Fayre 1971 - When I was a naked, tripping hippie Starchild!

I was surfing the web last night and read an article in THE GUARDIAN about Glastonbury Music Festival.  Memories! memories! (mine follow) Fellow Eel Pie Island communard Weed posted this online in 2005, from my self-published 1990 book, EEL PIE DHARMA. Tai Grove, publisher of Hidden Brook Press, encouraged me to do a professional reprint in 2012 as EEL PIE ISLAND DHARMA. There's now a great selection of pics online about this seminal festival, and I've pasted one I found of our pyramid below.

EEL PIE DHARMA - a memoir / haibun -  © 1990 Chris Faiers

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Chapter 24 - Glastonbury Magic Festival

Word went out through the hippie grapevine of a magic festival to be held in Glastonbury.  Glastonbury was a legendary sacred site in England, with a cathedral where one of the apostles had planted a rose bush which bloomed all the year round.  Nearby loomed a mysterious conical hilltop, called a tor, which was rumoured to be hollow.  Glastonbury Tor was said to be a 'sending station' on the system of ley lines, a power grid which lay over the English countryside, and which is the planet's equivalent of the magnetic fields which surround the human body which acupuncturists use.

Jeremy and I had earlier visited another of these mysterious tors, Michael's Mount off the Cornish Coast.  Another such tor is Mont San Michel off the French coast.  In the olden days festivals were held to replenish the 'dragon power', or earth magic which kept fields fertile and the inhabitants prosperous.  Supposedly the twelve signs of the zodiac were laid out around Glastonbury Tor, and from the small chapel on top of the Tor one could see the zodiac's unusual shapes blended in with the English countryside.

This was an event not to be missed.  The festival was to be held for the summer solstice, June 21, and I left my dossing friends in Cornwall and began to hitchhike.  I got a ride as far as Salisbury, travelling quickly through the ancient fields of Stonehenge country.  Walking through Salisbury, a hippie/student came up to me, and gave me a hit of acid wrapped in foil.  He bragged how he and his mates had put hits of acid into the milk bottles which the local police used for their tea, and how that day a couple of cops had gone to hospital with hallucinations, while the other policemen wandered about in a happy daze all day, smiling at everyone.

I thanked him for the acid, and not knowing what to do with it, and not wanting to be caught with it in my possession after hearing his story, I put the foil packet in my mouth and resumed hitching.  Rides followed quickly.  First a van full of black musicians on their way to a gig picked me up, hoping to score some dope.  Then a mysterious business-type man in a sleek Jaguar told me to hop in.

As we sped through the darkening evening his conversation became more and more questioning.  He seemed to know a lot about the forthcoming festival, and was eager to know as much as I could tell him about it.  I realized that I was beginning to babble, and then it occurred to me that the acid had been dissolving in my mouth, depite the tinfoil.  So I was starting to trip, and at this point, speeding through the night, my mysterious driver told me he was the police chief for the area, and that he wanted to know what to expect from the festival goers.  I tried to put his mind at ease, that we weren't going to be smuggling dope or sacrificing virgins.  I also realized that I wanted to get out of the car before a full-blown acid trip took over.

He let me out on the outskirts of Piltdown, after pointing me in the general direction of the farm where the festival would be held.  I wandered down the lonely highway in the dark with only starlight to guide me.  The white lines in the middle of the road began stretching and blurring in an effect I knew was the result of a mild acid trip, but the effects weren't overpowering.  At the juncture with the road I was to follow the next day, I slipped into a field and fell asleep, exhaustion overcoming the weak acid dose.

I awoke late the next morning, still feeling some effects from the acid, and lay in the field watching the clouds make incredible patterns in the clear blue sky.

Finally excitement at the thought of the festival overcame my lethargy, and I started to walk down the country road.  Surprisingly I got another ride, this time from a local who also had heard a lot about the festival.  He was dubious about the quality of our hippie magic, as the weather had been overcast for the past few days.  His tone wasn't ironic, and I realized how many of the British, especially in the countryside, still believe in magic and a lot of the Celtic mythologies.

The road was becoming jammed with fellow festival goers, and when my ride let me out, I joined the throng.  This was a more serious and committed type of hippie.  We were the true believers for the most part, not just students growing their hair long for a wild summer.

A local farmer let us use his fields, with his stone farmhouse as headquarters.  By the time I got to the site it was dinner time, and some self-styled diggers had set up a kitchen beside the farmhouse in the barnyard.  I ate some stew dippped from a huge iron pot, and soon was reviving old friendships with people from the Richmond scene and elsewhere.

There was a magical excitement in the air, and the view over the festival site was typical of Somerset's hilly beauty.  I wandered from the throng at the soup kitchen, and fell asleep on a hill in the middle of a field.  A very odd snuffling noise awoke me very early the next morning:

Asleep in a field  a browsing cow   my alarm clock

I was too excited, for once, to fall back asleep, and made my way down the hill to where some vans were unloading around the base of an unusual structure.  The rock'n'roll bands were going to play on a platform part way up a scale model of the Great Pyramid of Egypt, which we were going to build with construction scaffolding which an enlightened builder had loaned us.

Everyone was smoking dope and unloading trucks in a flurry of manic activity, and I joined in.  I was proud of the muscles I had developed as a gravedigger, and I spent hours unloading scaffolding.  After unloading, I joined the construction crews, and very quickly the pyramid began taking shape.  One job I had to perch on a rail high in the air and saw off the end of a piece of pipe with a hacksaw.  Halfway through the job, someone handed me a carrot carved into a chillum and stuffed with pungent hash.  We were a crazy looking construction crew, but somehow through the haze of hash smoke, the pyramid grew skyward.  Boards were laid for the performance area, about twenty feet off the ground, and the scaffolding continued to a peak about seventy feet above that.

After working on the pyramid all day, I took off for a tour of the festival site.  The farm was about a hundred acres, with hedgerows dividing the area into several major fields.  Tents were appearing everywhere, and many hippies were building huts in the hedgerows.  Banners and tents and colourful people were everywhere, like some medieval camp before battle.

For a bunch of spaced-out freaks, things were amazingly well organized.  Six-foot deep latrines were dug, and metal pipes were laid across them.  Another free kitchen sprung up towards the bottom of the site, and everyone looked like they were going to be housed and fed.  At the bottom of the hilly fields, the pyramid stretched into the sky, and after several days of building, the musical part of the festival was about to begin.

I settled in a giant wigwam tent, at the bottom of the fields about a hundred yards from the pyramid.  Quickly our tent became a family, and I met a blonde girl who hitched into Piltdown with me to buy food for our tribe.  That night about ten of us dropped acid together while we sat huddled in blankets before the stage.

Arthur Brown was the first performer, and he tried to bum people out.  He sang about how the Aquarian dream was a fake, and that we should all examine our consciences.  We countered his rock star negativity by staying in our group, and whenever one of us looked a little uncomfortable, the rest of us would put our arms over them and tell them they were in a big egg and about to be reborn.

The positive group dynamics soon had us all on great acid trips, and we felt free to wander as a group.  We danced and listened to the music under the stars with hundreds of other stoned worshippers, and all was at peace.  Someone had gotten hold of a jug of scrumpy, a strong local cider, and that also helped ease any acid paranoias.

Later in the evening, one of us had to take a dump, and so the whole gang of us dutifully trooped over to the open air latrines, and all of us sat in a long row on the poles and had a good shit or pee, men and women, young and old.  It was one of the most liberating experiences of my life, all of us sitting there in the open air under the stars, making the natural and rude noises we all must make every day of our lives without any embarrassment.  Some of us got the giggles from the acid, and the relaxing sound of laughter mixed well with the rock music and the sounds of nature.

We all stumbled into the wigwam and fell asleep in each others' arms.  I slept with the blonde girl, but we wanted to remain celibate to keep the spiritual atmosphere.  In the middle of the night there was a commotion outside, and when we went to investigate, we noticed a giant shining star.  On acid it hung in the sky like a space ship  -  it was the morning star, and we all stood in awe for several minutes.

After a week of wandering in the fields, listening to music around campfires and eating with our fingers, we were incredibly dirty.  I decided to walk the mile to a little pond where there were thirty or forty skinnydippers splashing around.  I slipped off my dirty bellbottoms, and swam around in naked bliss, the water cool under the high afternoon sun.

Late the next morning a hippie gave me a hit of acid, and then suggested we walk across the fields to Glastonbury Tor.  It was a long hike, and after the usual hour the acid started coming on.  It wasn't enough to overwhelm us, though.  After several miles we came to a country road with a pub, and we stood and watched the swaying patterns the wind was making by sweeping through the ivy on the walls:

Wind    through ivy mat       pub walls

Finally we reached the Tor, and began the slow hike up.  After twenty minutes we completed the steep climb, and there below us was laid out the Somerset countryside.  Try as I might, I couldn't make out the mythical zodiac patterns, but the old chapel on the top of the Tor had a very magical aura about it, and the view itself was enough to make any other kind of magic irrelevant.

The festival had lasted over a week.  It was much written about in the British musical and countercultural press, and I believe that the festival is still being held annually, almost twenty years after our inaugural event with the great pyramid.


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Ed Baker has left a new comment on your post "Glastonbury Fayre 1971 - When I was a naked, tripp...":

those WERE the daze.... eh ?
and the festival... there in England...
did you know, that England is the northern-most
point of land that is above water of what was Atlantis ?
(see Donnelly)
so... this kind of celebration/festival is fitting.
a fun read. cheers, Ed

Posted by Ed Baker to Riffs &amp; Ripples from ZenRiver Gardens at 9 June 2015 at 13:25

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On Jun 9, 2015, at 4:39 PM, Chris Faiers <zenriver@sympatico.ca> wrote:

thanks, Ed  ;  )
It was kinda sad finding the article in The Guardian about the current state of the Glastonbury Festivals - it's VERY commercial now - believe it's the largest muzak fest in the English speaking world. But ... once upon a time ... at the northernmost edge of Atlantis, 7,000 stoned hippies celebrated the Summer Solstice the way we used to millennia ago!!!

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On 2015-06-10, at 12:04 AM, Dr. John wrote:

Great memoir, Sensei. You vividly recreated the early 70s for those who, ahem, don't clearly remember them. And yes dammit, there WAS a pyramid. I thought for sure you had conjured that up in a flight of poetic fancy. But no, the latter day Druids built it, and come they did.

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Conrad DiDiodato has left a new comment on your post "Glastonbury Fayre 1971 - When I was a naked, tripp...":
This is the best protest song ever by 10 Years After
Your haibun kinda reminded me of it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg6xaFZStEI&index=80&list=PLsOVMhzv5cZOHXfdvqWYN3A0sZMCvWf3Y

Posted by Conrad DiDiodato to Riffs &amp; Ripples from ZenRiver Gardens at 11 June 2015 at 04:59