Tony O'Oneill american writer and friend!

Hi Tony

just received your book!
I read half of it at Starbuck...
I am sky-high! Wow!

read the introduction
very pertinent
and sincere
and instructive

1. You definitely have some Rimbaud in there
mostly «A Season in Hell»...
and a bit of «Illuminations»
and why not: also some of the early poems, with rimes:
1- MA BOHÈME
2- AU CABARET VERT
3. LE BATEAU IVRE

2. Walt Whitman... for sure!
He was a «landscape poet» with an American identity, point of view...
He would have not done H with us but he would probably understood...
In a way you are, in those poems, whitmanesque... the inner landscaping of soul-searching poetry...
He was a realist... in that sense you (and I and some of those we like) are a heavy-metal realist... with hard-core tenderness...

3. Baudelaire...yeah for «Les Paradis artificiels»... but he was a moralist in the purest sense of the word!
and sometimes in the aggravating sense of the word! «Les Paradis artificiels» is a book against drugs...
Like «Cocaine» by Clapton and JJ Cale (who wrote the song) is against coke... or maybe I should say: of a painfully truthfulness...

4. Céline in the s sense of the straight forwardness of the writing...

5. Burroughs for sure! and I would add Corso... and that poet who wrote Nirvana Hotel / City Light Ed.
and Kerouac, prose and poems... or poms like he would say...
the last books of his poems published by Penguin... from his notebooks!
and also Mexico City Blues
and Ginsberg but with a restrained «handwriting»... less words... but very type of «reality sandwiches» poetry...

6. And so many other... but not that much to think of it... it is easy to write about drugs etc... but not that easy to let yourself be
seen has the complex human being that you are (that we all are for that matter)... but if we say that Whitman's landscape is America the Beautiful... your poetic landscape is America the Deceitful...

7. Lou Reed yeah... but also Patti Smith... and Bob Kaufman...

If like they say we can judge a novel by its first paragraph... we can judge a poem by its last strophe (verses)... And what about that one last strophe of yours:

«I just lay there
the King of Purgatory
with all of his adornments:
blown shot, 6:30am»

and:

«then we can lay down on the sidewalk
with the cigarette buts
and the gum
and the old movie stars:
just you
me
Rita Hayworth
and the California
moon»

and on and on...

What Woodard did for you in telling you he would publish you with more poems
well when I was 21
the most important poet of Québec (the «national poet»,- hate the word national
but take it in the sense of «appurtenance», «cultural populist identity»)
GASTON MIRON
told me after reading 12 of my acid poems in a dinner
that if I would bring him more he would publish me
and he was the creator and director
of LES ÉDITIONS DE L'HEXAGONE
the most established poetry publisher of Quebec
and one of the 5 most major publisher in all the francophone territories...
Some of the «has-been» poets of his
freaked out!
and said he could not publish such garbage
and he did just that...
the book was called
MINIBRIXES RÉACTÉS (made up words...)
all the poems in that book were written
either on acid or cannabis
or in between trips
and listening to 4 albums
1. 2 first Doors
2. LET IT BLEED
3. ABBEY ROAD


I'll send you at least
one book
one cd

maybe more
in I can find...

amitiés

Francoeur
(Johnny Shivers)