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Purchase in the White Botanica: The Collected Poetry of Piero Heliczer
This book offers the first collected works of the poetry of Piero Heliczer, an important underground poet, filmmaker, actor ( Flaming Creatures ), musician (he was present in seminal jams which evolved into the Velvet Underground) and small press publisher (Dead Language Press). Adapting Apollinaire's ambulatory present-tense notations to the postwar landscapes of London and New York, and projecting them through a delicate and humorous sensibility, Heliczer fashioned some of the greatest poems of the 1960s and 1970s, which are collected here for the first time.
- GenresPoetry
120 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2001
About the author
Piero Heliczer
9 books2 followersPiero Heliczer (June 20, 1937 – July 22, 1993) was an Italian-American poet, publisher, actor and filmmaker associated with the New American Cinema.
Heliczer was born in Rome to a German mother and a Polish father, both Jewish. His film career began at the age of four when, ironically, he won a contest indicted by fascist regime for the "most typical-looking Italian child." Acting under the name Pier Giorgio Heliczer, he played minor roles in Italian films as a child, including, by his own account, an uncredited supporting role in Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief (1948). When Heliczer was seven years old, his father, a doctor and resistance fighter, was tortured and executed by the Gestapo. The boy emigrated with his mother to the United States in the 1940s, graduated high school at the top of his class, and enrolled at Harvard in 1955. After two years he dropped out and moved to Paris, where he co-founded the Dead Language Press with his high school friend, the poet and composer Angus MacLise.
Heliczer published "alternative" authors, including himself, MacLise, the Finnish poet and translator Anselm Hollo, the Beat poet Gregory Corso, and the underground filmmaker Jack Smith, in whose film Flaming Creatures Heliczer appeared in 1963.
In 1960 Heliczer moved to London, where he collaborated on his first film, Autumn Feast, with Jeff Keen. After moving to New York in 1962 he became involved with the Film-Makers' Cooperative, appearing in films by Jack Smith and Andy Warhol. Eventually he bought his own 8mm camera and resumed making experimental films, including Satisfaction, Venus in Furs, Joan of Arc (in which Warhol appeared), and an "unfinished three-hour epic," Dirt. With their primitive technique, anti-Catholic bent, and depictions of alternative sexuality, his films are often compared to those of Jack Smith and were praised by Jonas Mekas.
Most of Heliczer's films were silent, with sound added later. In some cases he used live musicians to provide a soundtrack. One band, the Falling Spikes, who played for a Heliczer show called The Launching of the Dream Weapon in early 1965, later changed their name to the Velvet Underground. At Heliczer's multimedia shows, which he called "ritual happenings," his films were projected through veils hung in front of the screen with colored lights and slides superimposed on them, while dancers performed onstage and musicians played in the background. In November 1965, during the filming of Venus in Furs, the Velvet Underground and Heliczer were featured in a CBS News segment titled "The Making of an Underground Film," which aired the following month. This brief appearance turned out to be the only network television exposure for either Heliczer or the band. Venus in Furs was named after a Velvet Underground song inspired by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's eponymous sadomasochistic novel. It features Barbara Rubin, another underground filmmaker, dressed as a nun. Angus MacLise, who at the time was still the drummer for the Velvets, also appears in the film.
Many years after the murder of his father, Heliczer was awarded a sum of money by the German government in compensation. He gave much of it away to fellow artists, but kept enough to try and establish a filmmaker's cooperative in Paris like the one in New York. He also bought a small house in Normandy. The filmmaker's cooperative was not a success, so he moved to Amsterdam, where he lived on a houseboat for a time. Vandals sank the boat, leaving him homeless, and he spent some time living on the streets of New York. In 1984 he returned to Normandy, where he spent his remaining years working in a secondhand bookstore. He was killed in July 1993 when his moped was hit by a truck near Rambouillet. He is buried in Préaux-du-Perche, France.
Heliczer was born in Rome to a German mother and a Polish father, both Jewish. His film career began at the age of four when, ironically, he won a contest indicted by fascist regime for the "most typical-looking Italian child." Acting under the name Pier Giorgio Heliczer, he played minor roles in Italian films as a child, including, by his own account, an uncredited supporting role in Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief (1948). When Heliczer was seven years old, his father, a doctor and resistance fighter, was tortured and executed by the Gestapo. The boy emigrated with his mother to the United States in the 1940s, graduated high school at the top of his class, and enrolled at Harvard in 1955. After two years he dropped out and moved to Paris, where he co-founded the Dead Language Press with his high school friend, the poet and composer Angus MacLise.
Heliczer published "alternative" authors, including himself, MacLise, the Finnish poet and translator Anselm Hollo, the Beat poet Gregory Corso, and the underground filmmaker Jack Smith, in whose film Flaming Creatures Heliczer appeared in 1963.
In 1960 Heliczer moved to London, where he collaborated on his first film, Autumn Feast, with Jeff Keen. After moving to New York in 1962 he became involved with the Film-Makers' Cooperative, appearing in films by Jack Smith and Andy Warhol. Eventually he bought his own 8mm camera and resumed making experimental films, including Satisfaction, Venus in Furs, Joan of Arc (in which Warhol appeared), and an "unfinished three-hour epic," Dirt. With their primitive technique, anti-Catholic bent, and depictions of alternative sexuality, his films are often compared to those of Jack Smith and were praised by Jonas Mekas.
Most of Heliczer's films were silent, with sound added later. In some cases he used live musicians to provide a soundtrack. One band, the Falling Spikes, who played for a Heliczer show called The Launching of the Dream Weapon in early 1965, later changed their name to the Velvet Underground. At Heliczer's multimedia shows, which he called "ritual happenings," his films were projected through veils hung in front of the screen with colored lights and slides superimposed on them, while dancers performed onstage and musicians played in the background. In November 1965, during the filming of Venus in Furs, the Velvet Underground and Heliczer were featured in a CBS News segment titled "The Making of an Underground Film," which aired the following month. This brief appearance turned out to be the only network television exposure for either Heliczer or the band. Venus in Furs was named after a Velvet Underground song inspired by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's eponymous sadomasochistic novel. It features Barbara Rubin, another underground filmmaker, dressed as a nun. Angus MacLise, who at the time was still the drummer for the Velvets, also appears in the film.
Many years after the murder of his father, Heliczer was awarded a sum of money by the German government in compensation. He gave much of it away to fellow artists, but kept enough to try and establish a filmmaker's cooperative in Paris like the one in New York. He also bought a small house in Normandy. The filmmaker's cooperative was not a success, so he moved to Amsterdam, where he lived on a houseboat for a time. Vandals sank the boat, leaving him homeless, and he spent some time living on the streets of New York. In 1984 he returned to Normandy, where he spent his remaining years working in a secondhand bookstore. He was killed in July 1993 when his moped was hit by a truck near Rambouillet. He is buried in Préaux-du-Perche, France.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 8, 2014
What a charming, sexy, mysterious, confusing, enchanted, and unhinged poet. He reads to me like one of the least self-conscious of experimental poets, one for whom an odd disjointed language naturally emerged as he wrote. That is to say that there seemed to be no conscious attempt to be current or avant-garde in his poetry, it was just the way his mind was wired (or un-wired). Not that I don’t also like self-consciously odd and thoroughly artificial poetry, but there’s something fundamentally refreshing in a primal way about Heliczer’s poetry that no amount of self-conscious attempt can equal. So saying that, it’s a little sad he didn’t write more and for a longer time. All the poems in this book were written between the late 50’s and the late 60’s, but he lived on until the early 90’s, suffering from serious mental illness, fathering many children, and living on the streets at times, until he was run over by a truck and killed.
Some of his poetry reminds me of Peter Orlovsky’s (Ginsberg’s long-time partner). Orlovsky had a similar fresh and innocent view of language and the world combined with an ability to get down and dirty (see Clean Asshole Poems & Smiling Vegetable Songs); though Heliczer’s poetry is far more sophisticated, and provides a more complete and complex mirror of his inner world and the workings of his mind’s logic as it encounters the outer world and his experience of it and registers it in language.
And the language isn’t the only thing oddly unique about his poetry, even the line breaks are strange and often seemingly haphazard, but again in him this doesn’t come across as an affectation but rather as indications of how his mind naturally paused and started again as he wrote.
And, lastly – listening to a collection of recordings of him reading his poetry on the web simply seduced me – his voice was so gentle, drifty, dreamy, and trippy, with a trace of exotic accent.
Some of his poetry reminds me of Peter Orlovsky’s (Ginsberg’s long-time partner). Orlovsky had a similar fresh and innocent view of language and the world combined with an ability to get down and dirty (see Clean Asshole Poems & Smiling Vegetable Songs); though Heliczer’s poetry is far more sophisticated, and provides a more complete and complex mirror of his inner world and the workings of his mind’s logic as it encounters the outer world and his experience of it and registers it in language.
And the language isn’t the only thing oddly unique about his poetry, even the line breaks are strange and often seemingly haphazard, but again in him this doesn’t come across as an affectation but rather as indications of how his mind naturally paused and started again as he wrote.
And, lastly – listening to a collection of recordings of him reading his poetry on the web simply seduced me – his voice was so gentle, drifty, dreamy, and trippy, with a trace of exotic accent.
May 1, 2012
"The Death of Stephen Ward" blows my mind time and time and time again. I will re-read this collection for a lifetime. One of my favourite poets of all time. He is on the same level as the best of Joseph Ceravolo.
January 7, 2025
If I were just to give a rating on the poems alone, I would give this 4 stars but considering how criminally underrated and unknown this poet is, I wish to bump it up to 5.
This book, A Purchase in the White Botanica, purports to be a 'collected poems' of Piero Heliczer. It's somewhat of a misnomer as this book does not contain any of the poems from his early, almost-impossible-to-find 1957 first major book Imprimatur 1281 (which also featured The Complete Works of Angus Maclise, an obvious red herring title for a first publication from the poet-musician and first drummer of The Velvet Underground), as well as his much later 1981 collection, Abdication of the Throne of Hell, nor any of the poems that featured in little journals and mags in the late 50s and 60s. However, this book does contain his best known poems and the ones that are (sometimes) available. These poems were previously published in girl body (a broadside), you coul[d] hear the snow melting and dripping into the deer's mouth, & I dreamt I shot arrows in my amazon bra, the first battle of the marne and the soap opera (Heliczer's books are as rare as hen's teeth - it took me a long time to track down some of them). This book also contains one of his many plays.
He is the 'beat' who got away. I'm not even sure we can call him a 'beat' even though Piero himself probably would have liked the label. Ira Cohen called him the "last of the medieval poets" and there are plenty of medieval motifs throughout, which sets him apart a little bit from the beats.
Some of Heliczer's poetry is obscure but when I could figure out what he was trying to say, boy it really blew me away. One of the difficulties is the lack of punctuation. He is like e. e. cummings to the nth power. Unlike Cummings who used commas and other punctuation marks in a very unorthodox way but to create a visual effect for the reader, Piero's poetry is stark when it comes to punctuation. There are no commas, very few fullstops, and no capital letters. There are line breaks but some of them are deceiving. To make his poetry even harder to follow, he has his own form of the 'cut-up' but different from the cut-up technique used by Burroughs, Gysin and other beats. He uses what I call incomplete phrases or 'syntactical pivots' in which he begins a thought, it suddenly breaks off and another thought begins. This gives the reader a collection of fractured images placed side by side, a technique I believe he adopted from film (Piero was also an experimental filmmaker) which are called 'jump cuts' in cinema. This means it's more of a visual cut-up than Burroughs' work. Most of his poems, due to these difficult aspects, need to be read at least twice. The more often you read them, and try to read them differently each time, the more they 'open up' and reveal themselves. I will put all these thoughts down in an essay soon in order to share with the world my thoughts on Heliczer's fascinating and highly singular poetry.
Even when I couldn't follow Heliczer's poetry, I found some lines breathtakingly beautiful. The poem "The Beautiful Ambush" (about a medieval ambush) was stunning in its vivid imagery, to the point where I would say it's one of the best poems in the whole beat canon. Not all of his poetry is difficult. The poems called "England" and "English girls" were relatively straightforward and easy to follow. Finally, one of the strongest aspects of his poetry is how musical it is - there is so much alliteration and internal rhyme (vowellic rhyme) throughout. If you read the poems out aloud, you'll notice this even more. Many of the poems were written for the ear I believe and some of the obscure poems, that is the poems I couldn't find any meaning or sense to, were very pleasant to the auditory senses.
Piero Heliczer is really one of the forgotten "footnotes" (to borrow his friend and fellow poet Gerard Malanga's term) of 20th Century poetry. Perhaps because he spent much of his life in his beloved France, he was not as widely celebrated or known in the US but if there's one favor I have to ask of you, whoever is reading this, please remember his name - Piero Heliczer (pronounced 'He-le-cher'). Even this book has become hard to find. Hats off to Granary Books for publishing this great collection and here's hoping they will reissue it sometime soon.
This book, A Purchase in the White Botanica, purports to be a 'collected poems' of Piero Heliczer. It's somewhat of a misnomer as this book does not contain any of the poems from his early, almost-impossible-to-find 1957 first major book Imprimatur 1281 (which also featured The Complete Works of Angus Maclise, an obvious red herring title for a first publication from the poet-musician and first drummer of The Velvet Underground), as well as his much later 1981 collection, Abdication of the Throne of Hell, nor any of the poems that featured in little journals and mags in the late 50s and 60s. However, this book does contain his best known poems and the ones that are (sometimes) available. These poems were previously published in girl body (a broadside), you coul[d] hear the snow melting and dripping into the deer's mouth, & I dreamt I shot arrows in my amazon bra, the first battle of the marne and the soap opera (Heliczer's books are as rare as hen's teeth - it took me a long time to track down some of them). This book also contains one of his many plays.
He is the 'beat' who got away. I'm not even sure we can call him a 'beat' even though Piero himself probably would have liked the label. Ira Cohen called him the "last of the medieval poets" and there are plenty of medieval motifs throughout, which sets him apart a little bit from the beats.
Some of Heliczer's poetry is obscure but when I could figure out what he was trying to say, boy it really blew me away. One of the difficulties is the lack of punctuation. He is like e. e. cummings to the nth power. Unlike Cummings who used commas and other punctuation marks in a very unorthodox way but to create a visual effect for the reader, Piero's poetry is stark when it comes to punctuation. There are no commas, very few fullstops, and no capital letters. There are line breaks but some of them are deceiving. To make his poetry even harder to follow, he has his own form of the 'cut-up' but different from the cut-up technique used by Burroughs, Gysin and other beats. He uses what I call incomplete phrases or 'syntactical pivots' in which he begins a thought, it suddenly breaks off and another thought begins. This gives the reader a collection of fractured images placed side by side, a technique I believe he adopted from film (Piero was also an experimental filmmaker) which are called 'jump cuts' in cinema. This means it's more of a visual cut-up than Burroughs' work. Most of his poems, due to these difficult aspects, need to be read at least twice. The more often you read them, and try to read them differently each time, the more they 'open up' and reveal themselves. I will put all these thoughts down in an essay soon in order to share with the world my thoughts on Heliczer's fascinating and highly singular poetry.
Even when I couldn't follow Heliczer's poetry, I found some lines breathtakingly beautiful. The poem "The Beautiful Ambush" (about a medieval ambush) was stunning in its vivid imagery, to the point where I would say it's one of the best poems in the whole beat canon. Not all of his poetry is difficult. The poems called "England" and "English girls" were relatively straightforward and easy to follow. Finally, one of the strongest aspects of his poetry is how musical it is - there is so much alliteration and internal rhyme (vowellic rhyme) throughout. If you read the poems out aloud, you'll notice this even more. Many of the poems were written for the ear I believe and some of the obscure poems, that is the poems I couldn't find any meaning or sense to, were very pleasant to the auditory senses.
Piero Heliczer is really one of the forgotten "footnotes" (to borrow his friend and fellow poet Gerard Malanga's term) of 20th Century poetry. Perhaps because he spent much of his life in his beloved France, he was not as widely celebrated or known in the US but if there's one favor I have to ask of you, whoever is reading this, please remember his name - Piero Heliczer (pronounced 'He-le-cher'). Even this book has become hard to find. Hats off to Granary Books for publishing this great collection and here's hoping they will reissue it sometime soon.
October 22, 2007
Piero Heliczer's writing occupies a space layered within planes of metaphysicality, insistently searching for a compromise between the physical and the abstract. A Purchase in the White Botanica is an anthology of several of Heliczer's self-published chapbooks and other work published during his lifetime. A tonal regularity spans across the collection, and much of the work serves as a diaristic excursion into the sexually-charged, surrealistic, fragmented mind of the poet. In an essay provided at the end of the book, Heliczer's sister recounts some of the poet's eccentricities, spawned by a battle to control his schizophrenia. I didn't read the book as overtly biographical, but many of the struggles described by Heliczer's sister surface throughout the pages of the book. Heliczer's speaker can be taken as both unreliable and wayward, intensely searching the personal cavity of human thought.
One finds a dualistic split roaming throughout the collection. The early poem "england" begins with the lines, "then i realised we werent in england / but in a british movie // leaving behind two poppies / we went to england" (27). The speaker is simultaneously attempting to inhabit am artificial, or cinematographic England while questioning what it means to be the real England. This compounding narrative tangles into the meta-narrative as the poem deploys a mix of vehicles, all set to travel in different directions: "heading for the sea it is hard / to write on a motorcycle / the airplane took off just like that / there was a pain of delight under my skull / i remembered cambridge and my first / bicycle ride me and bicycle" (27). The associative leaps across enjambed lines mimics the notion of writing on a motorcycle, and the cinematography flies across scenery. Heliczer's speaker is conscious of his own oxymoronic delight in composition, fully aware of that the jarring transitions between place will inflict chaos and awe, panic and sublimity. As the poem nears the end, the speaker states, "we were really leaving london as we approached it / so we never got there / we decided it was / the end of the trip" (32). Aside from being a drug-induced trip, the narrative travel is meditative, knowledgeable of the poet's wanderlust. The speaker knows he is in a fictive world, but defining reality through writing, an artifice, is an intricately difficult task. Heliczer's speaker must compromise life and poetry, erecting a sort of porous boundary between reality and imagination.
Each poem feels like a living creature, an amalgamation of lines in perpetual motion. Many of the poems are built in the form of a series, perhaps in an effort to execute in the anarchic imagery a kind of organizational coherence, or, conversely, to realize the competing facets of a psychologically fractured individual. By the end of the book, the author has conceived a great diversity of lifeforms, populating the botanica. In the collection's title poem, Heliczer writes, "white i cried white white in a word" (104). The line, a sort of incantation for one of our language's most symbolically charged words, white, falls in the 22nd section of a 30 part poem, 30 being a transitional year in the passage of human life. White can represent any number of things, from the fertility of milk or semen, to sand and salt and teeth, to the polarities of life and death. White acts as a canvas for Heliczer's speaker, as the poem ends with the words, "i began my new life" (105). In the book's introduction, Wittgenstein is quoted with the passage, "Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information" (10). Words are abstractions of reality, and might be best enjoyed as gestural renditions of our world. Heliczer is a poet whose language flows over his body and mind without disrupting the corporeal or mental structures of self.
One finds a dualistic split roaming throughout the collection. The early poem "england" begins with the lines, "then i realised we werent in england / but in a british movie // leaving behind two poppies / we went to england" (27). The speaker is simultaneously attempting to inhabit am artificial, or cinematographic England while questioning what it means to be the real England. This compounding narrative tangles into the meta-narrative as the poem deploys a mix of vehicles, all set to travel in different directions: "heading for the sea it is hard / to write on a motorcycle / the airplane took off just like that / there was a pain of delight under my skull / i remembered cambridge and my first / bicycle ride me and bicycle" (27). The associative leaps across enjambed lines mimics the notion of writing on a motorcycle, and the cinematography flies across scenery. Heliczer's speaker is conscious of his own oxymoronic delight in composition, fully aware of that the jarring transitions between place will inflict chaos and awe, panic and sublimity. As the poem nears the end, the speaker states, "we were really leaving london as we approached it / so we never got there / we decided it was / the end of the trip" (32). Aside from being a drug-induced trip, the narrative travel is meditative, knowledgeable of the poet's wanderlust. The speaker knows he is in a fictive world, but defining reality through writing, an artifice, is an intricately difficult task. Heliczer's speaker must compromise life and poetry, erecting a sort of porous boundary between reality and imagination.
Each poem feels like a living creature, an amalgamation of lines in perpetual motion. Many of the poems are built in the form of a series, perhaps in an effort to execute in the anarchic imagery a kind of organizational coherence, or, conversely, to realize the competing facets of a psychologically fractured individual. By the end of the book, the author has conceived a great diversity of lifeforms, populating the botanica. In the collection's title poem, Heliczer writes, "white i cried white white in a word" (104). The line, a sort of incantation for one of our language's most symbolically charged words, white, falls in the 22nd section of a 30 part poem, 30 being a transitional year in the passage of human life. White can represent any number of things, from the fertility of milk or semen, to sand and salt and teeth, to the polarities of life and death. White acts as a canvas for Heliczer's speaker, as the poem ends with the words, "i began my new life" (105). In the book's introduction, Wittgenstein is quoted with the passage, "Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information" (10). Words are abstractions of reality, and might be best enjoyed as gestural renditions of our world. Heliczer is a poet whose language flows over his body and mind without disrupting the corporeal or mental structures of self.
July 26, 2007
Fabulous forerunner of flarfiness. Surprising & funny poems, lyrical and goofy. Masterpiece
November 11, 2013
Nomadic verse, like the author. Didn't understand a thing, but there was music, which was enough. And I would rather this than accessible and dull. Not that being one means the other, of course.
November 23, 2023
Crazy
Really insane
Hard to read. What the fuck was he thinking abt
Inspiring but definitely on the extremes of abstract poetry
Really insane
Hard to read. What the fuck was he thinking abt
Inspiring but definitely on the extremes of abstract poetry
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews