Eddie Woods

For the English footballer see Eddie Woods (footballer)

Eddie Woods 2007. Photo by Kirke Wilson.

Eddie Woods (born May 8, 1940 in New York) is a poet/prose writer, editor and publisher who lived and traveled in various parts of the world, both East and West, before eventually settling in Amsterdam, Holland, where in 1978 he started Ins & Outs magazine and two years later founded Ins & Outs Press.

According to Stanford University Libraries, which house Woods’ extensive archive: “In his role as a cultural impresario and artistic entrepreneur, Eddie Woods... is an important presence, both in American expatriate circles and among European avant-gardists, especially Dutch and Italian. Woods’ promotional activities made him, in short, a crucial center to the movement, and his archive documents his close connections with its leading figures...”

Early to middle years

After not quite finishing high school (he later took a number of university credit courses, but is essentially an autodidact), Woods worked for two years in Manhattan as a first-generation computer programmer, until in 1960 (“didn’t want to get my fingernails dirty as an Army draftee” but also to finally see Europe) he joined the Air Force for a four-year stint, three years of which were spent in Germany. Honorably discharged following a tour in Wyoming (“it was four years of guerrilla warfare, me against them, ending in a draw”), he returned to Germany, where he married twice, fathered two daughters, and successfully sold encyclopedias to US military personnel for five years, the entire time continuing to write poems, essays and short stories (a calling he first discovered at age 15).

In late 1968, Woods made his first journey to the East, remaining there until early 1973. During that time he was variously a restaurant manager in Hong Kong, a ‘kept man’ in Singapore (by a Chinese drag-queen prostitute), a features writer for the Bangkok Post (Tennessee Williams, with whom Woods hung out and traveled, through Malaysia to Singapore and back, was but one of many celebrated personalities he encountered at that time), a stringer for both The New York Times and ABC Radio News, a disc jockey (Radio Thailand English-language service), owner of a gay bar (in Pattaya, Thailand) and the managing director of Dateline Asia (a Bangkok-based features service he launched with three other journalists). In Bali, where he stayed for six months, he was known as ‘ Durian Ed’ and ‘Mushroom Ed’ (having developed a unique method of liquefying psilocybin mushrooms and rendering them toxin-free). He was additionally in Laos, Okinawa, the Philippines, Macao, Java and Japan. Before returning to Europe, he explored much of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and spent several months as a lay devotee at the Theravada Buddhist Island Hermitage.

In June 1973, in London, he met Jane Harvey, with whom he would years later start Ins & Outs magazine. Shortly thereafter, in the midst of doing a variety of odd jobs for Gentle Ghost, an alternative work agency, Woods authored nearly 30 articles for Edward de Bono’s Eureka! An Illustrated History of Inventions from the Wheel to the Computer. He and Harvey then traveled overland to Asia, cycled across large stretches of India, were journalists for the Tehran Journal (Woods as sports and night editor, Harvey as business and local news editor), and crisscrossed much of the sub-continent and beyond. 1976 saw Woods visit the USA for the first time in 12 years, where he wrote articles for the Berkeley Barb, published stories and poems in The Bystander, Odalisque, etc., and then hitchhiked across the South and up to New York. A two-year stretch back in London was exceptionally prolific: numerous poems and short stories, publication in Libertine, Iron magazine and other literary periodicals, as well as a series of personality profiles and features pieces for International Times (IT), the underground newspaper whose Amsterdam editor he would become during the early 1980s.

Ins & Outs years

After editing three issues of Ins & Outs magazine in 1978 (contributors included Allen Ginsberg, with the first-ever publication of his Plutonian Ode, William Levy, Ira Cohen, Rachel Pollack, Simon Vinkenoog, Hans Plomp, Mel Clay, Heathcote Williams, Marc Morrel, and Woods himself; while among the magazine’s international readership, beginning with issue #1, was Henry Miller), Woods and Harvey left Holland, passed through Paris and ended up in Barcelona. Ties to the Dutch capital were already too strong, however. In 1979 the couple (who by then were married, but separated in late 1981, while remaining the closest of friends and professional colleagues) rented an attic flat in the heart of Amsterdam’s red-light district and immediately got involved in publishing projects. Other World Poetry Newsletter, at once a historical evaluation of P78, the first One World Poetry festival (at which Woods performed, along with William S. Burroughs, Patti Smith, et al.) and a scathing critique of organized literary events, penned by Woods under the pseudonym Woodstock Jones and published/internationally distributed by Ins & Outs Press, caused a minor storm not only in Amsterdam but all the way to San Francisco. (The Newsletter and its years-long aftermath are covered in Woods’ Soyo Benn: A Profile and A Brief History of Ins & Outs Press.)

Early in 1980, Woods, Harvey and the Dutch bookseller Henk van der Does formed the Ins & Outs Press Foundation (known as a stichting in the Netherlands) and also opened the Ins & Outs Bookstore (with the latter continuing for two years; after which Van der Does started his own bookshop and Woods turned the ground floor of the six-story Ins & Outs building into a gallery-cum-performance space).

Ins & Outs magazine #4/5 was published in the summer of that year. Within its pages were Paul Bowles, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bert Schierbeek, Gerard Malanga, Bob Kaufman, Charles Henri Ford, Gregory Corso, Roberto Valenza, John Wilcock, Steve Abbott, the photographers Diana Blok and Marlo Broekmans, Neeli Cherkovski and many others. Further publications followed throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s: (Natural Jewboy by William Levy; Eddie Woods’ Sale or Return; an ambitious postcard series that included Ira Cohen’s famous Bandaged Poets; audio cassettes of live readings at Ins & Outs Press by Jack Micheline and Harold Norse; limited-edition silkscreen prints by Kirke Wilson of Burroughs, Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, Snuffie the Gangster Woof of Amsterdam, Xaviera Hollander and the ‘night mayor of Rotterdam’ Jules Deelder. After that the Press went into ‘suspended animation’ for more than a decade. Woods, who had secluded himself from 1987, reemerged in 1992 with a string of startling performances as ‘The Gangster Poet’ (North Sea Jazz Festival, Zuiderstrand Festival, Crossing Border Festival, appearances with the Kali Quartet, etc.).

From 1995 through most of 1998, Woods organized monthly poetry-reading evenings at a small, working-class Amsterdam café that quickly became the literary talk of the town, written up in national newspapers and even featured on Dutch television. In the autumn of 1998, Woods relocated to Devonshire, England to live with Jenny Brookes, whom he had first met in India in 1975 but had not seen (prior to visiting her in May 1998) for 18 years. The relationship lasted for six years. Upon its collapse, Woods returned to Amsterdam and Ins & Outs Press resumed its publishing activities. Woods’ spoken-word CD Dangerous Precipice was released in 2004 and his book Tsunami of Love: A Poems Cycle (two long narrative poems and four shorter ones, chronicling ‘the rise and fall of an incredible love affair’) in 2005. The CD Tsunami of Love (Woods reciting the entire collection, with a special introduction added) appeared in August 2007. While in January, 2012 Tsunami of Love was again published, this time in an Amazon Kindle edition, by Barncott Press (London).

In July 2009, Woods attended a major Burroughs symposium in Paris, NakedLunch@50, where he delivered his homage to Burroughs entitled "Thank God You're Not Eddie Woods!" and also participated in a special tribute to the old Beat Hotel at 9 Rue Gît-le-Coeur, together with Jean-Jacques Lebel, the poetess Nina Zivancevic, Scottish artist Elliot Rudie, and several others.

In December 2011, Sloow Tapes (Stekene, Belgium) released the Eddie Woods spoken-word audio cassette The Faerie Princess & Other Poems.

The Eddie Woods Archive was acquired by Stanford University in 2003, after he and the writer/radio disc jockey Bart Plantenga had worked for five years assembling it (with Woods regularly shuttling back and forth from England specifically for that purpose).

Quotes on Woods

“Ed Woods? / I call him the Gingko / slender and strange...” Ira Cohen. From his poem Honorable Discharge.

“Slim behind the desk, only a rush of hair / eddie woods, he’s got the goods...” Mel Clay, Ira Cohen, Ronald Sauer. From their Eddie Woods Memorial Poem.

“It would have been a much colder world without your poetry.” Plamen Arnaudov, poet, former New Delta Review poetry editor and Exquisite Corpse editorial assistant.

“Because it will not be content with a conventional language of expression, a profound love will produce a profound poetry, and it is precisely such poetry which Eddie Woods has achieved.” Richard Livermore, editor of Chanticleer Magazine (Edinburgh, Scotland), in his review of Tsunami of Love: A Poems Cycle.

References

• Norse, Harold. Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: A Fifty-Year Literary and Erotic Odyssey. New York. 2002. ISBN 1-56025-385-1
• Codrescu, Andrei. Raised by Puppets, Only to Be Killed by Research. Addison-Wesley. 1989. ISBN 0-201-12183-2
• Hart, Malcolm. William Levy: Beyond Criticism. Biopic film (2006).
• The New Millennium. A Good Friend. Vol. 2, No. 2, Spring 2003. Kerala, India.
• The New Millennium. Buddhist Intimations. Vol. 1, No. 3, Summer 2002. Kerala, India.
• Norse, Harold. Memoirs of a Bastard Angel. William Morrow. 1989. ISBN 0-688-06704-2
• P78 Anthology. Poetry & The Punks: An Apocalyptic Confrontation. Mandala 1112. Uitgeverij In de Knipscheer. Haarlem, Netherlands. 1979. ISBN 906265 037 6. ISSN 0165-1234.
• Harvey, Jane. Pedalling to Puri. The New Millennium. Vol. 1, No.2., Spring 2002. Kerala, India.
• Exquisite Corpse. So-So. Issue no. 51. 1995. Baton Rouge, LA.
• Exquisite Corpse. Poems for Corry. Issue no. 36. 1987. Baton Rouge, LA.
• Chanticleer Magazine. Issues 12, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19 (2006-2008). Edinburgh, Scotland. ISSN 1478 0704.
• Lust Will Tear Us Apart. The Brooklyn Rail. November 2007. Review by Jim Feast of the Tsunami of Love: A Poems Cycle CD.
• Tsunami of Love CD. Evergreen Review no. 115. January 2008. Review by Jim Feast.
• de Boer, Sacha. Retour New York-Amsterdam. Interviews, with Eddie Woods and 15 other artists (bilingual, English-Dutch). Uitgeverij Atlas. Amsterdam, 2009. ISBN 978-90-450-1485-2.
• Beat Scene Issue no. 61 (February 2010). Coventry, England.
• The End Is The Beginning: Elegy for the Carnivorous Saint. Harold Norse memorial collection (February 2010). Todd Swindell, editor. Sebastopol, California.
• Sjoman, N.E. art: the dark side. Black Lotus Books. Calgary, Canada. 2010. ISBN 978-0-9736162-3-1.
• Sensitive Skin #3. Online literary and arts magazine, featuring the story behind and film adaptation of the Eddie Woods poem Bananas.
• Beat Scene. Issue no. 63 (Winter 2010). Coventry, England.
• Beat Scene. Issue no. 64 (Spring 2011). Coventry, England. Features Eddie Woods' review of the Francis Ford Coppola claymation film adaptation of the William S. Burroughs short story "The Junky's Christmas."
• Beat Scene. Issue no. 66 (Autumn 2011). Coventry, England. Features three Gregory Corso anecdotes by Eddie Woods.
• Surviving the Love Flood Parisiana magazine. Review by Richard Jurgens of Tsunami of Love: A Poems Cycle.

External links

• The Faerie Princess Erotic fairy tale in verse.
• A Gift from the Goddess Kali-inspired novella.
• New Antique Records Podcast Eddie Woods reading Harold Norse
• Do You Mind If It’s Menthol? A memoir of tobacco smoking.
• Either Poetry or a Machine Gun: An Interview with Jack Micheline
• Dangerous Precipice Video clip.
• Beuy’s Own, or Another Kind of Wound Review of William Levy's Impossible: The Otto Muehl Story.
• Confessions of a Lascivious Durian-Eater Erotic short story.
• A Place to Change Trains Paris' Shakespeare & Co. bookshop revisited.
• Two Poems "Metaphor for America" and "Execution Poem" (both on capital punishment).
• The Ladybug Man Everything you wanted to know about ladybirds but were afraid to ask.
• Shoot to Kill Poem in memory of Jean Charles de Menezes (killed in London on July 22, 2005 by Metropolitan police officers).
• The Wages of Innocence Political essay on the Iraq War.
• Bananas Video clip. Cinematic portrait of a famous Eddie Woods poem, by Israeli filmmaker Yaron Ben-Nun.
• Smugglers Train Adventurous journey across the desert badlands of Baluchistan.
• Mary Video clip. Eddie Woods reciting his classic poem at Ana Montana’s sAlon dAdA in Amsterdam (May 2011).
• Bloody Mary Telephone prose poem.
• Bloody Mary Video clip. Eddie Woods reciting the piece at sAlon dAdA in Amsterdam (May 2011).
• Remembering Harold Norse Personal reminiscence portrait of 'the bastard angel of American poetry.'
• The Road to the Beat Hotel Video clip. Eddie Woods and others in a special Beat Hotel tribute on the Rue Gît-le-Coeur, Paris (July 2009).
• This Anatomy of a Burning Heart 60-minute audio. Eddie Woods on Radio Joy reciting the two long narrative poems from his book Tsunami of Love, with an added soundscape plus musical interludes.
• Back In No Time: Jajouka, Bou Jeloud and the Moroccan Magic of Brion Gysin. Music review.
• Irreverent Homage Poem for Roberto Valenza.
• The Bullfighter Hitchhiking around France and Germany in the early 1970s, then tossing tossing bulls in a traveling carnival.
• "Thank God You're Not Eddie Woods!" Lays to rest the misconception that the poet Eddie Woods, of Ins & Outs Press fame, is the same Eddie Woods who witnessed the fatal shooting in Mexico City of Joan Vollmer Burroughs by her husband, William S. Burroughs.
• How Do I Get to Carnegie Hall? Interview with the painter Claude Ponsot.
• A Good Friend Thanks to circumstances, a writer of detective stories finally comes to terms with himself.
• Chocolate Delight As always, New York City is full of wonderful surprises!
• No Man Is An Island Essay on the politically-motivated execution in Iran of Zahra Bahrami.
• A Brief History of Ins & Outs Press
• The Eddie Woods Archive
• Eddie Woods official website