You Can’t Kill a Dead Angel. —Chuck Oliveros

It did not occur to me when I met the poet Chuck Oliveros in Atlanta in the late 1970s that his friendship might become part of my life for almost fifty years and counting. I thought of him and his circle, Oren Johnson, Larry Sullivan, Alvin Burrell, Diane Kistner Katz, Harry Katz, as established figures on the scene. Before they knew me, Chuck and his coeditors used a poem I submitted for their anthology Finished Product (1978). His poem “Pterodactyl” had been published in the New York Quarterly Issue 25, 1979, which also featured a craft interview with Amiri Baraka and poems by Charles Bukowski and May Sarton. This was at a time when I was happy to get a rejection note that did not include advice that some people should stick to reading poetry instead of trying to write it.

A few years later Chuck, Gerry Caltagerone, who went by the initials GCC as his nom de poésie, and I began performing together at poetry readings. It was Chuck who proposed we publish a magazine to be called Dead Angel. Ostensibly a quarterly, Dead Angel appeared irregularly throughout the 1980s. Copies of issues #4, #6, and #7, dating from 1983 to 1989, somehow survive in my files. Issue #4 included cover art by Jim Brown, who would later paint as Jim Darlington, and #6 offered “You Can’t Kill a Dead Angel” buttons for only $1.50 each. The enterprise was somewhat half-baked but not without merit. We billed ourselves as The Dead Angels at poetry readings where we established a reputation without certain small circles, and our magazine published poems that hold up upon rereading some four decades later.

In 1992 when Chuck quit his job to devote himself full time to his novel in progress he asked if I would be willing to meet once a week for dinner. Otherwise, he said, he would never get out of his house. I agreed without hesitation and suggested Café Diem, which had recently opened on N. Highland Avenue between Manuel’s Tavern and Ponce de Leon, a short walk from my apartment in Little 5 Points. The café was owned by a French couple. My first time there Andy introduced himself and said, “I think you will like the menu. It is very French. Unfortunately so is the service.” He was right about the menu, and the service turned out to be fine.

Chuck and I would eat dinner there most Friday evenings for the next six years. As the weeks and months passed we got to know the staff and may have noticed that Andy tended to employ young women possessed of a certain je ne sais quoi charm. Our waitress on any particular evening would be a third dinner companion with whom we chatted amiably as she made her rounds while we lingered with a glass of red wine and good conversation about books and ideas, film, politics, basketball and baseball in their seasons. The conversations continued by phone and email after I split for Portland in August 1998.

From roughly 2005 to 2010 Chuck published the blog Hawking Up Hairballs where he weighed in on a remarkable array of subjects ranging from writing (Just Give Me a Box of Uni-balls) and books to politics, where he stands considerably to my left, religion, science, and mathematics (he has a master’s degree in math and for a portion of his life generated income as a computer programmer). In a post about Gregory Perelman, who had recently solved a mathematical problem known as the Poincaré Conjecture, he wrote,

Characters like Perelman intrigue me. I was a bright kid, and scored in the low genius range on IQ tests and such. However, I was by no means a prodigy, though I certainly envied them. It seemed that the whole world of the intellect was open to them, and that’s what I wanted. It was only much later, when I was an adult that I realized what it really was about prodigies that I envied. The life of the mind is the only thing that truly matters to me. (Gregory Perelman, September 12, 2006)

Hawking Up Hairballs is still out there in the internet aether. I returned to the blog for the first time in years as I prepared to write an introductory note about Chuck’s poems and am reminded of the keen intelligence, strongly held opinions, passion for learning, and inclination to buck the conventional wisdom of any and every establishment that have always marked his thought and writing. When I checked out a few posts whose titles caught my eye I found a nice piece about historian Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror (A Not So Distant Mirror, August 8, 2006) and another about three favorite novelists, Cormac McCarthy, Richard Powers, and Thomas Pynchon (He’s Back, July 24, 2006).

The first chapter of Buster Bungle’s Big Top appeared at Hawking Up Hairballs in February 2010. Three and a half years later Chuck described fruitless efforts to find a publisher for the novel (Hawking Up Something More Than Hairballs). Acknowledging that he was no longer a young man and wanted to get his work “out there,” he announced his decision to publish Buster Bungle’s Big Top as a Kindle ebook available at Amazon.

Above all there are the poems, inventive, hard-edged, humorous, not infrequently dark. An iconoclast at heart, Chuck’s contrarian temperament comes with a fierce sense of moral and intellectual integrity. He never shied away from vexing tender sensibilities, goring sacred cows, or transgressing dictates of political correctness. He reveled in it. The captain of hell, a “crapulous wretch” with “his grin all fishooks / and urine,” and “The Mechanical Master” which comes to a close with “How time quits when the gears get jammed, / and your heart comes apart in a strange man’s hands” were staples of his performance repertoire.

That is only one side of Chuck. There is something considerably more to be found, for instance, in the four pterodactyl poems that open his book The Pterodactyl in the Wilderness (1983). The title poem begins with the pterodactyl, a trope for the poet, striking fear when he goes to town for raw beef and salt pork:

the women, but also the men,
stare at the wings
hunched on your shoulders
like the baggage of hell.
They cross the street
to avoid you.

then unexpectedly moves on to evoke a sense of wonder, the winged creature “soaring / through the windows of the moon” while the eyes of mothers “bob like circus balloons, / and they whisper / to their children, / ‘Lookit there, an angel.’”

Pterodactyl

She hadn’t intended to love you.
It was simply this.
You had fallen from storming skies
in a rumble of canvas wings,
so she took you home
in her shopping bag.
When the sun shook off its greatcoat,
you soared again over the trees,
making sounds that unsettled the neighbors.
You wouldn’t explain,
but she made peace,
and never badgered you
when you returned
only to brood
as fiercely as a gargoyle.
On the first day of spring,
the two of you picnicked.
Your leather, gothic wings
drew terrible shades from the sun.
She was lost to herself.
She called the blue sky birth skin.
“When it swells and bursts in June,”
she muttered,
“we’ll all bloat and explode
in the black vacuum.”
Milkweed was spilling
in currents about your feet
and on down the hill.
You spread your enormous wings for sail,
and scudded into the trees.
She turned and trudged home.
You came to rest in a dark hollow,
but your grotesque wings
continued to rise
like sudden smoke
curling about the sun

Chuck in his prime was stocky, barrel-chested, with a booming voice that has softened in this 2020 reading at the Ancient City Poets open mic in St. Augustine but still conjures memory of performances at events in Little 5 Points and Normando Ismay’s Little Beirut Art Space.

The Old Copernicus Hoax

Now it can be told.
The whole Copernicus thing was a hoax,
the Earth circling the sun a convenient fiction.
The Church had it right all along.
The sun rises. The sun sets.
It is thus because I have willed it.

I lean forward, chin on my fist,
in the manner of Rodin’s “Thinker”.
My face is red, getting redder.
Veins are bulging in my temples.
I wouldn’t be surprised
if my eyes popped like fire crackers.
This is what it takes
to bring the sun up in the morning.
I can tell you though, it’s taking its toll.
I’ve got blood pressure problems,
capillaries bursting in my extremities,
doctors nagging me about apoplexy.

Spent like a wrestler,
I put wet towels about my head,
about my shoulders.
My throat’s so dry that I reach for beers,
a six-pack or more, all before noon.
I think I’ve developed an alcohol problem.

I don’t mind the sacrifice.
I’m a thorough-going altruist,
more than a saint to my own mind,
but if you want to know the truth,
I’m damned grateful for rainy days,
for long spells of wet weather.

Chuck posted a Friday poem on Facebook from July 2020 until October 2023, some I remember from the old days, many new to me. After noticing that the Friday poems had ceased appearing and no other new posts showed up, I managed to contact him by phone and his nephew by text in December and learned that he had moved to a nursing home in St. Augustine. He had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s a few years earlier, the disease was progressing as it does, and he no longer felt he could live on his own.

Oren Johnson emailed me an update about a visit he and his wife, Karen, had with Chuck a few months ago when they spent several hours with him over two days. It is to Oren I owe the suggestion to use some of Chuck’s poems at Portable Bohemia. On a whim he asked Chuck if he would mind, to which Chuck replied it would not bother him though there were no expectations. This prompted my return to his poems and renewed appreciation for a strong and distinctive poet who deserves to be more widely known.

Chuck is presently confined to a wheelchair. Parkinson’s makes speaking difficult so the phone is no longer a good option for staying in touch. Oren reports that despite this he is still the same Chuck. When asked if he would like some reading material, he requested some books on late-stage capitalism. That is the Chuck I know. Lookit there, an angel.

Keep the faith. Hold the line.
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt