July 7th, 2009 / 3:34 pm
Author Spotlight

Gagaku Meat and Influence

SR93DoorMikeDaily

(Photo of Steve Richmond by Mike Daily, 1993)

A couple of weeks ago, Portland writer Mike Daily sent me a copy of a bound essay entitled Gagaku Meat: The Steve Richmond Story. It’s a hell of a thing, actually.

Daily discovered Richmond through the work of Charles Bukowski. They were (Richmond and Bukowski) on-again, off-again friends and fellow practioners of what some call the Meat School of poetry—masculine, direct, sometimes down on its luck. And where Richmond seems to have been influenced by Bukowski, Daily seems influenced by Richmond. Legacy.

Daily has contacted friends and publishers of Richmond’s work and interviewed them to cobble together the life of Richmond’s work—though biography of the man is a part of the essay, the biography of his development as a poet, the timeline of his struggles to publish, a cataloging of his prolificacy make up the structure of the essay.

And then, somewhere in the center, Daily’s life and Richmond’s life intersect. Daily discovers his work by chance.

Daily’s father is a collector of the ephemera of magic—posters and books—and having a meal with his father at a convention, Daily is introduced to Sun Dog Press’s Al Berlinski. This leads to his introduction to the Bukowski-approved Richmond.

Berlinski gave me a copy (one of 153 signed and numbered by Richmond) [of Richmond’s 5.0 L Poems] that night in the hotel bar in ’91. My Steve Richmond Mania had officially commenced.

After that, Daily collected his work, contacted him, was even inspired to try to publish both Richmond and Bukowski (successfully in 1994′ STOVEPiPER, Book One, and unsuccessfully with a Richmond memoir of his relationship with Jim Morrison—Richmond had owned a bookstore frequented by Morrison in the 60s).

The two were in seemingly close contact from 1991 – 1995—though Richmond admitted to Daily that his interest in their relationship was more “selfy” than Daily might suspect—but the breaking of the Morrison book’s contract put them out of touch. Years later, Daily found a copy of Ben Pleasant’s Visceral Bukowski and decided to look into Richmond’s progress. This article is what he found.

To read more, you can order Gagaku Meat here. (Gagaku, by the way, is the music of the Japanese Imperial Court. It’s spare, odd, and really quite beautiful.)

Portland HTML Giant readers interested should head out to The Tonic Lounge on Thursday, July 9, at 9pm. Daily has a musical project called Mr. Viced Honest (an anagram of Steve Richmond) that combines live music with spoken word pieces inspired by or based on Richmond’s work.

A recent Mr. Viced Honest video:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAu-4d6USN0

A nice interview with Richmond appeared on 3AM.

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16 Comments

  1. ryan

      this sounds pretty fantastic

  2. ryan

      this sounds pretty fantastic

  3. larry
  4. larry
  5. KevinS

      Gagaku Meat is a fantastic read (with a cool layout and lots of pictures)!

  6. KevinS

      Gagaku Meat is a fantastic read (with a cool layout and lots of pictures)!

  7. jereme

      yeah justin wrote about richmond in the early days of htmlg.

      i think it was a repost of cooper’s blog if i remember right.

  8. jereme

      yeah justin wrote about richmond in the early days of htmlg.

      i think it was a repost of cooper’s blog if i remember right.

  9. JW Veldhoen
  10. JW Veldhoen
  11. Nathan (Nate) Tyree

      I may be in love with this journal’s guidelines. I want to marry them and father mutant offspring with these guidelines.

  12. Nathan (Nate) Tyree

      I may be in love with this journal’s guidelines. I want to marry them and father mutant offspring with these guidelines.

  13. HTMLGIANT / Steve Richmond has passed.

      […] Richmond, the subject of Mike Daily’s essay Gagaku Meat which I wrote about here, passed away on the 20th of October. Daily’s Richmond tribute group, Mr Viced Honest, […]

  14. Shawn Wolfe Dully

      maniacal.
      obsessed
      bedeviled
      haunted
      beyond fanaticism
      sick, sick, this 20 year obsession
      now that richmond is dead
      what will daily do now?
      how much of him has died with his hero?

  15. Shawn Wolfe Dully

      maniacal.
      obsessed
      bedeviled
      haunted
      beyond fanaticism
      sick, sick, this 20 year obsession
      now that richmond is dead
      what will daily do now?
      how much of him has died with his hero?

  16. Chuck Taylor

      Today I came across an old red colored chapbook from Maelstrom Press that Steve Richmond and I shared in 1983. His side was called “Charlene Rubinsky… and the the Buk made woman. My side was called “Dry County in Texas” and is prose poems and poems set in East Texas when my wife and I were back to land hippies. Steve is gone now, I found out, closer to the muses.