Beerspit Night and Cursing Read Online Free PDF

Swedenborg and Edgar Cayce. Allen Ginsberg visited whenever he could, often bringing along a friend like Peter Orlovsky or Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In his 1966 poem “Iron Horse” Ginsberg recalls
    On Pacific cliff-edge
    Sheri Martinelli’s little house with combs and shells
    Since February fear, she saw LSD
    Zodiac in earth grass, stood
    palm to cheek, scraped her toe
    looking aside, & said
    “Too disturbed to see you
    old friend w/ so much Power”
    A year later Ginsberg visited Pound in Venice and asked a favor:
    “I’d like you to give me your blessing to take to Sheri Martinelli”—for I’d described her late history Big Sur, eyes seeing Zodiac everywhere hair bound up like Marianne Moore—which gossip perhaps he hadn’t even heard—“To at least say hello to her, I’ll tell her, so I can tell her,” and stood looking in his eyes. “Please…because it’s worth a lot of happiness to her, now…” and so he looked at me impassive for a moment and then without speaking, smiling slightly, also, slight redness of cheeks awrinkle, nodded up and down, affirm, looking me in eye, clear no mistake, ok.
    That blessing “brought tears to Sheri Martinelli’s eyes on the Pacific Ocean edge a year later, ’68.”
    One night at the beginning of November 1972, Sheri went out to check on the caretaker of the cabins when “a terrible wind came up. A bad wind. A whistling wind,” she later wrote. “One recalled that in Hawaii, not too far off westerly, such a wind is reported to come up when royal persons or sacred persons are about to die…One thought there was a talking sound something like: ‘Think ye hard on Ezra Pound’ but it didn’t make sense.” The next morning Sheri learned Pound had died the night before.
    There had been little or no contact between them in the fourteen years since they parted at St. Elizabeths, but for the rest of her life Sheri would think of Pound almost daily, endlessly rereading The Cantos , writing poems about him, sketching him, and trying to live up to the example he set of purposeful creative activity. She continued to produce poetry and drawings, periodically gathering them up into photocopied booklets, which she would send to friends. She apparently made no effort to publish her work through conventional channels or promote her art in any way, or apply for grants. That is, she had no interest in becoming a professional writer or artist. She did become something of a professional widow, however; in the late seventies she attended a Pound session at an MLA meeting in San Francisco dressed in black weeds like an Edwardian widow. When she thought Pound was slighted in an article in Paideuma in 1977 by her old acquaintance Reno Odlin (actually an attack on the academic Pound industry), Sheri fired off an enraged Mailgram to the journal demanding an apology (which was reprinted in facsimile in its winter 1977 issue). She also began to appreciate all the Pound materials she had saved—letters from Pound, drafts of “her” cantos, inscribed books—and began organizing all this material, both for her own continuing studies and for eventual sale to a library. (Yale’s Beinecke Library finally bought her papers from Gilbert in 1999.) As Pound studies proliferated in the seventies and eighties, she began to be approached by critics seeking information, but she regarded most of them with a wary eye. She felt their neglect of the anagogic possibilities of The Cantos in favor of more mundane matters was wrongheaded; she also felt slighted by their neglect of her art, especially the paintings mentioned in The Cantos .
    In 1983, at the age of sixty-five, Sheri decided it was time to retire and return back East. Both she and Gilbert had ailing mothers there to attend, so they left the Creek and drove out to New Jersey; after staying with relatives for a year or so, they finally settled in Falls Church, Virginia, just outside Washington, DC, where they lived for the rest of Sheri’s life.