TED JOANS LIVES! A Tribute, Page 11

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Ted Joans Lives! Online Tribute, Books & Resources

To contribute to the Ted Joans Lives! webpages, please email us.Pieces may be any length. All contributions received will be published online. You will retain the copyright to your work.

Please also see Ted Joans links & resources and Ted Joans books for sale.

Horace Lyle:

I didn't know Ted Joans had died until today. He was a freind, correspondent and brother surrealist to my father for many years,only about 50 or so. I would be interested to know more about where, when and how. My father John Lyle died 27 months ago now. He was the aditor and publisher of a small mag called Transformaction which featured contributions from Marcel Jean, Max Walter Svanberg, Tony Earnshaw, ELT Mesens and Jaques Brunius (co-founders with Lyle) Philip West, Ithell Culquohoun and many others. I was trying to find out about what Ted was up to when I stumbled across the news, too bad because he surreally lived it.

C. Edward Bernier:

Ted Joans came to us in the late 70s fresh from his wanderings throughout the Sahel. I was Cultural Affairs Officer at the US Embassy in Dakar. He began slowly, with poetry readings about town and in the countryside. Then he moved in with us. Brought his trunk full strange and mystical things from the brosse. Bird skulls, feathers, sticks, and other grigris. He left for an extended period of time, but his trunk with its contents remained in the storage bin in the basement of l"Immeuble BIAO.

Not a day went by but that we didn't think about Ted and his tales of wandering through the Sahel.

He returned for another round of high profile readings and appearances, then disappeared.

I would later encounter this genius in Lafayette Square in Washington, DC, when I heard his voice shouting, "Hey, brother Ed, what's going on?"

He was there between overseas jaunts. We promised to stay in touch.

Later I found myself in Cairo. Of course Ted came to visit. And then it was Algiers.

What I have left is what seems a lifetime of memories, that is, his memories of his growing up and becoming what he was that melded with my own memories. I was made richer by far.

Somewhere in my own trunks, stashed back in the far recesses of my attic here in Hilton Head Island, are programs of Ted's performances whereever we found ourselves together. And there is even a little booklet of his, poems that we published in Dakar, which Ted illustrated and annotated.

Stay in touch, Ted! We know that you live.

Ed

Mimi Burns McCartney:

The date was November 21, 1963. I met Ted at Constitution Square in Athens, Greece, at an outdoor table in front of the American Express office. In those days, you could use Amex as a mail forwarding address when you wandered around Europe or wherever. He was bright, funny, kind of an old-soul, and genuinely liked by those who surrounded him. He was interested in talking to me because I was a young woman traveling alone through Europe in the days when that was rarely done.

The following morning the hotel desk clerk told me that JFK had been shot; he had not been pronounced dead. I immediately went back to Constitution Square to meet with Americans that I'd met in days prior, hoping for more information than the clerk could provide.

Ted was the only American present and we sat together. A local taverna owner asked him to compose and recite a poem about JFK's assassination that evening. He was toying with it, writing a line or two when inspired, occasionally asking me to critique what he had written. He was disturbed because the taverna owner was going to put a sign in the window, "Texans Not Allowed." (For those of you who don't remember, Lee Harvey Oswald was a Texan.) Ted was going to tell the owner to remove the sign, that the 'No Texan' bit was both obnoxious and counterproductive to installing Lyndon Johnson (another Texan) as the next president of the US.

This was Ted's soft side. He could be militant but he could also be fair, rational, intuitive. I think I fell in love with him a little bit that day although he claimed to be married to a French cabinet minister's daughter and currently involved with a Scandinavian woman. Whether or not any of this is true, I don't know. I do know that he was such a cheerful iconoclast, so very different from anyone that I had ever met, someone whom I would forever remember. I left later that day for Mykonos.

He welcomed meeting American servicemen throughout Europe who had access to base PXs. He had three shopping requests and I'll be damned if I can remember the last on the list. He called them the three P's -- the first two were peanut butter and prophylactics. Anyone remember the third?

He gave me a list of people to call during the rest of my travels; Francis Bacon was among them. I didn't call.

I thought about Ted throughout the years and wondered where his next stop(s) were. On 9/11, there was talk about how you'd never forget where you were when receiving earth-shattering news such as JFKs assassination, Martin Luther King's assassination (I was at Heathrow) and finally, 9/11. I immediately thought of Ted and decided I'd try to contact him. There was a Washington State address listed on the internet but my letter to him at that address was returned. I contacted one of his publishers at a bookstore in Berkeley. The respondent said that the Washington address was all that he had.

About a month ago I thought of Ted again, googled him and found the memorial website. I wish I'd kept up with him through the years, wish I'd realized what fine work he'd done, wish I could have talked with him in his later years, wish I could have met Laura.

My condolences to family and friends.

Ted Joans Lives!

Mimi Burns McCartney
Sacramento, California

Billy Marshall Stoneking:

I never met TJ in the flesh, but we met many times...through his work...and my performances of his work, most notably "The .38," which I performed all over Australia and a good part of the English-speaking world between the late 1970s right up until ...this morning...at the Australian Film, Television & Radio School...where I work, disguised to myself as a screenwriting lecturer.

My version of "The .38" has frightened, astounded, devastated, provoked, and changed countless listeners who "never knew poetry could do something like that." I am proud to be associated with it, proud of our "collaboration" - a collaboration that resulted in the poem being featured many times on Australian National Radio, as well as in three or four major "poetry plays", from the Opera House to Montsalvat and all the way out to Uluru. I have often wondered what Ted must have thought every time he found a royalty cheque from Australia tucked in with the rest of his mail.

I knew (and know) many of the people and poets Ted counted as friends, and have heard so many anecdotes concerning him it's almost like we did know one another. It came as a shock today - yes, only today - to discover he's decided to sit this one out, or maybe he's just decided to play something else for a while. Let's play something, Ted. Let's play anything you want!

Billy Marshall Stoneking
Editor - Performance Poetry
http://earink.cjb.net

Antjuan Oden:

TED JOANS LIVES!!!!!!
send me what you can.....
IWISHIHADKEPTINTOUCHWHOKNEWYOUCOULDWOULDLEAVE
USHEREEMPTYUNFULFILLEDUNWORTHY.....

Michael Hayward:

True story: yesterday afternoon, writing at the window table in my favorite café (Caffé Buongiorno in Vancouver) I looked up to see Ted Joans running across the street towards me, and then carrying on, heading west, his eyes alight. I wrote about this visitation:

re: Birth

Ted Joans just ran past the café window,
where I wrestle with a piece on language,
and how poets speak to each other
in a secret code. He was back
from beyond the grave,
his eyes excited, and wild
with bright delight.
He was alive, man;
I tell you he was
alive!

I think he had fresh news
from the afterlife to share with us.
He had some Truth to tell us
of his visit there. And he was young
again, he was in his black prime,
his beard the beard of a younger man
again. He wore his poet's black beret,
and he ran past my window, smiling;
running fast towards another future;
running back towards his birth.

John Barbato:

Please click here to read The Teducated Mouth: An Interview with Ted Joans by John Barbato & Beth Kelly. It was also recently published in Zocalo magazine, which is based in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Hadani Ditmars:

I'm a musician/writer and friend of Ted and Laura's in Vancouver.

This audio archive of a tribute to Ted ran on CBC radio - it contains snippets of tributes/poems from his "memorial" evening at Bukowski's in Vancouver- as well as snippets of me performing "Gracias a La Vida" in his honour.

(This audio file features Hadani Ditmars as singer/guitarist, and Itamar Erez, also playing guitar.)

Click here to listen.

George Wallace:

DID NOT WRITE THIS POEM AMERICA TED JOANS WROTE THIS POEM AND TED JOANS LIVES

ted joans is the green bell pepper in the song of a trumpet i heard playing in a riverside club along the mississippi river
maybe it was davenport iowa or cairo illinois crisp as a midwestern morning in the spring
new folding money burning a hole in the pockets of jazz at dawn
what kind of morning i mean eating away at a man's heart like a jailed up woman or jalapenos in the souk
standing on a street corner in algiers or asleep on the floor in timbuktu with a bag of rice for a pillow
before i go on let me say that stage you saw him on was no stage america
anyone who says they saw ted joans standing on anything why it was a platform he was standing on
it was a street corner it was a soapbox it was a stepstool

he stood no ceremony

one time i walked up to him i was in paris for the first time it was the first time i had ever met him, ted joans!
so i say to him hey, you're ted joans the surrealist, 'sure i is' he answers and scrawls something on the wall

it wasn't the wall it was my back he was writing on
ted joans wrote his name or maybe it was bird's name
written like dada big african letters white chalk black jacket
ever since i have been a walking billboard for ted joans
i was a brick in a wall i just flew over from new york city

everyone knows how ted wrote 'bird lives'
as if he was writing his own name
even though ted wasn't dead yet
everyone knew bird was dead already
and ted knew something about that
all the true jazz-men of america
are always lined up in a line like that
waiting to die or perform or maybe
waiting for someone to announce
that they are dead or in the room
and they ought to be remembered

they ought to be remembered, hey
by everyone who sings in america
land of everysong land of no song
land of the one song you don't know
until you one day jump up out of it
out of your slumber and sing it

ted joans is alive ted joans is alive even if he is dead or living in vancouver ted joans in or out of america
don't you know surreal jazz-men sing to themselves on every street corner and corncrib in america?
don't you know sweet the be-bop dream songs in every alleyway trying to escape what is america in america?

wake up america the songs of your children are playing everywhere in your own hot kitchen
ted joans lives bird lives every man woman child all those who singing or wish to sing
or once having sung, all those playing or having played or been played on
all of them live and will sing to tell about it

for all your bread and good looks
and liquor and salt peanuts and women and cars
america ted joans was and is and lives
what lives? your mustard man saying 'yes i can'
what lives? your thrown away men and their deepest wounds
what lives? how to charm the snake out of the american woods

america like ted said to me in paris in maybe it was 1968
you really ought to open up your refrigerator heart
you really ought to let the good man out and sing!

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