#fly catching

March 19 is the birthday of the most Beat of all Danish poets, Dan “Uncle Danny” Turéll, who would have been 73 today if the cigs hadn’t claimed him in 1993...

Turéll was the closest thing you could come to Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac all rolled into one straight poet/novelist/performer body. Uncle Danny was also the closest thing to a popular avantgardist, post-punk Buddhist drunkard - and his work ethic was second to none, which meant he wrote about a hundred books in his less than 50 years in this dimension. This tally includes 12 highly popular noir crime novels in a Chandleresque style, immortalizing the seedy side of Copenhagen long before anyone invented “Nordic Noir”...

Turéll also recorded several LPs worth of spoken word performance with various incarnations of his backing band The Silver Stars, and I never once saw him on TV or in real life without his trade-mark black nail polish. He was a great man!

Here is a poem from Alhambra Blues: 175 Diary Poems (1983) in the poet’s own hand-writing. It requires little by way of translation - only the title and dedication:

#111: On Fly-Catching

To T.S. Eliot - after bashing fourteen flies

Constantine and Kermit actually will take time to hang out and go fly-fishing together on some weekends.

…wait…not the ACTUAL sport of fly-fishing; it’s more like they fish for flies with their tongues.

So you know, they’ll go out to a lake and sit around waiting for some flies to zoom by for breakfast!