New in our Collectible catalogue:
By SACRED FIX I mean the fix on and with Madness – that sanctified condition when all has meaning and the madman is a poet living a poem. Apart from LEAR IN LOS ANGELES, I have enclosed ‘The Needle Vestal’, ‘The Rake’s New Progress’… all of which were written either in asylums or when I was under psychiatric supervision. Indeed these have been the conditions in which most of poetry has been written. In many ways the conditions of an asylum are ideal for a poet, for he is surrounded by other madmen subject to all kinds of poetic visions and hallucinations. The vibes are right. Also he has a highly sympathetic audience in his fellow madmen.
(Sinclair Beiles in a letter to the publisher)
South African poet Sinclair Beiles, who “ran through psychiatrists like boxes of Kleenex” according to Heathcote Williams, suffered from bouts of mental illness and was admitted to various institutions during his lifetime. Beiles himself maintained that his brain had become unhinged in 1962 after having been part of one of Takis’s sculptures, in which a powerful magnetic field had kept him suspended in mid-air while he proclaimed a poetic manifesto. Whatever the cause, Beiles’s fragile mental condition played an important part in his life, much of which was spent in institutions, and in his work, much of which was written under the influence of prescribed and unprescribed drugs. Beiles, the first poet in space, the madman who had nailed carrots to the car of a member of the Greek junta, died virtually unknown and penniless in Johannesburg in 2000.
This copy of the 1975 Cold Turkey Press edition of Sacred Fix is in fine condition. The spine tape has retracted a bit over the years, but for the rest the book is flawless. Read more & order →