KLACTO, a Cold Turkey Press Special (LP)
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Publisher: Cold Turkey Press, Rotterdam
Year: 1972
KLACTO, a Cold Turkey Press Special LP 1972
album cover slightly damaged on the edge
This Cold Turkey Press edition is the original Cold Turkey/Klacto poetry LP, which was pressed on the occasion of the 1972 Poetry International Festival, Rotterdam.
The LP consists of 10 tracks of poetry readings by then leading countercultural poets who were recorded by Carl Weissner between 1966 and 1968.
LP with all exclusive material by
RAY BREMSER (Poem of Holy Madness, Part IV),
DIANE DI PRIMA (Goodbye Nkruma & Rent from a cool place),
TED BERRIGAN (from The Sonnets – nos. XXXVI & LXXVI), CHARLES BUKOWSKI (A report upon the consumption of myself & Something for the touts, the nuns, the grocery clerks and you),
CAROL BERGE (Piaf and Holiday go out),
ED SANDERS (Soft Man 1, Sheep Fuck Poem, Toe queen poems, & It’s all right),
JOHN WEINERS (Poem for Herbert Huncke & I dream..),
JIM SILVER (Johnny Magic),
JOHN GIORNO (For Fred Herko) & ALLEN GINSBERG (Kral Majales – King of May).
Produced for 1972 ‘Poetry International Festival Rotterdam.
includes 15-page stapled Xeroxed booklet with texts of the recorded poems. Ginsberg has commented on the performance (taped May 7th 1965) included here: ‘[The] first-ever reading of ‘Kral Majales’ was done, within weeks of writing the poem, for a small audience at Better Books, [..] London [..] I’d been kicked out of Cuba for private criticism of Castro’s gay-persecution polices and landed in Prague for a month. I’d gone on to Russia and Poland and on my way back home stopped in Czechoslovakia. There accidentally I was elected the King of May on May Day then expelled by Czech Police a week later. By May 9th while visiting with Dylan on the Thames Embankment he filmed ‘Don’t Look Back, ‘ and thereafter I found myself in a hotel room with him and the Beatles. I really was the King of May.’ Other dates & places of performances unknown, though Berrigan’s are likely from a 1968 Poetry Project reading. An exceedingly uncommon item (a few Bukowski sources refer to it as ultra-rare).
Cold Turkey Press is a legendary underground publishing house, which was active in Rotterdam from 1970 to 1976. Gerard Bellaart, artist and initiator, resumed the editing and publishing in 2006. Publications include a.o. Ira Cohen, William S. Burroughs, Heathcote Williams, Samuel Beckett, Sinclair Beiles, Jean Arp, Antonin Artaud, Kurt Schwitters, Ed Sanders, Ezra Pound and Gerard Bellaart himself. who is also responsible for the visual quality of all published Cold Turkey Press editions.