The South African emigré poet, writer, and editor Sinclair Beiles was born in Uganda of Russian-Jewish descent, in 1930, and grew up in Johannesburg from the age of six. An ex-patriate for most of his life, he lived at various times in Tangiers, Athens, London, Rotterdam, and Paris, and sporadically had himself committed to hospital wards to deal with his sometimes fragile mental health. Catastrophes Choisies is Beiles’s first poetry collection to appear in French.
As part of the Beat Hotel crowd in Paris during the late-1950s and early ’60s, Beiles collaborated on the first book of avant-garde cut-ups, Minutes to Go, with Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, and Gregory Corso. While working at Maurice Girodias’s Paris-based Olympia Press, he was a key editor who helped shepherd Burroughs’s Naked Lunch into print.
It is his incandescent poetry, however, for which he should be most remembered. But despite winning a prestigious South African literary prize in 1969 for his early poetry collection, Ashes of Experience, as well as praise for his poetry from such luminaries as Burroughs and Leonard Cohen, his writing has rarely surfaced outside the small-press literary world. By the time he died in 2000, two dozen collections of his poems, plays, and stories had appeared in print. Many are now rarities sought by connoisseurs. Here is a taste of the man and his work.
Two interior illustrated pages of Catastrophes Choisies.
