The Tenting Cantos
by R. Virgil Ellis
Desperado Press is pleased to announce the release of our first full-length book!
Friends, I want to tell you a story. Back before our poetry-printin’ days, we here at Desperado Press used to be chickenpunchers. Every summer, we’d drive them high into the Wisconsin mountains, the air laced with pine, their clucking like angels’ harps. Then every fall, we’d bring ’em back down, where Farmer D.’s axe fell as fast and sure as night. (Frontier life ain’t all snuff boxes and Sousa marches, pardners. Folks gotta eat.)
But during those summers, everything about life seemed infinite. We’d lie out under the stars, naming constellations after six-shooters, horses, and Annie Oakley. Or else we’d drift off to sleep to the glorious gurgling of the chickens, comfortable in our tents sewn of buffalo hides and moonlight.
On a particularly hot summer—1888 or 1988, it’s hard to remember these days—we met a fellow journeyman named R. Virgil Ellis. He, too, was fond of the outdoor life, away from all the consarned technological advances of our age, such as blacksmiths with ever-fancier hammers. He recounted how he would sit in his tent for hours, contemplating something as simple as a spider, or something as newfangled as Mandelbrot fractals (at least we think that’s what he said—we may have been drunk on cactus wine). He also said he wished to compress those experiences into a poetic project of epic length and vision—indeed, as infinite as the horizon as seen from Mt. Milwaukee.
Well, years passed. Everyone got older—especially us. Then, one day, we were at the bank. We had just exchanged gold we had removed from our teeth for coins of silver, with which we would buy newer, shinier gold teeth. As we were exiting, we met Ellis rushing in, dripping sweat in a wild abandon, so eager to store his freshly-completed manuscript in one of the bank’s whip-proof vaults. (We had argued with Mr. K., the bank president, that perhaps the vaults should be bullet-proof and blast-proof as well, since only the stupidest of criminals would attempt to open a vault with a horsewhip. Instead, he thought it cheaper buy us off with a Morgan dime each and tell us to keep quiet.)
We greeted Ellis heartily, and became immediately interested in the poetry he was so eager to safeguard. After convincing him we were now honest poetry publishers (despite having served four months in the county jail under Sherriff H.’s watch for rustling a few of Mr. W.’s poems from his herd), he let us scrutinize the manuscript with our silver-soured hands.
Friends, let me tell you The Tenting Cantos is like nothing you’ve ever read.
In this book, Ellis takes the familiar home of the hardy chicken wrangler—the tent—and uses it as a base to explore the very natures of our minds, bodies, and souls. Here are one hundred poems that have traversed vast territories to shock you out of your sleepy state. One might describe a chipmunk; the next might tilt toward a mythical flying turtle; the next will wing you into the circuitry of stars. They are meditations, emanations, investigations, and vocalizations of our lives and the way we choose to live them. Ellis has taken his lifetime of Wild-West enterprises and simmered it into a rich bullion of leaps, associations, and wild linguistic flimflammery—all while breathing comfortably in the tents we love so well.
These cantos are a charged assault on your life’s lassitudes. They are constructing a cosmology of consciousness. Yet in some ways, they are infinitely indescribable, as much as the sea or the wind. Out on the plains, our motto is: “Go right to the source and ask the horse,” so we encourage you to do the same by reading Cantos 10, 22, and 87:
Canto 10 Somewhere in the
middle
Canto 22 Who sings
Canto 87 And I was led in my wanderings
Friends, we are proud to release our first full-length book of poetry, The Tenting Cantos by R. Virgil Ellis. It’s 150 pages, 8” x 10”, perfect-bound, with a glossy, fractacular color cover. And all we’re asking for your very own copy is 15 buckaroos, buckaroos.
It is time to become the puncher to your soul, hefting it aloft, leading it to the greenest summer pastures, so high and far away that even Farmer D. (whom fairies hate) can’t find it.
Thus we say: Order now!
And while you most certainly should take our word for it (we're not ne'er-do-well roustabouts, you know), some fellow frontier folk have said some kind things about Ellis's work:
For in our time the gears are catching
the flesh, and Ron Ellis is there to record and reflect, to see the picture and
nail it before us. He rattles our memories while confronting us with the
violence of something not yet formed but looming from our future.
—William Stafford, foreword to The Blue Train
The surprise here is not that an
academic who publishes in university reviews has conceptually rendered the
ecstasy of electronics and Tao, but that such a seemingly retro vision can still
liberate consciousness—if briefly—from its scheming to find the next rush.
—Cynthia Cotts, The Village Voice
Canto 1 is tremendously rich in
association, filled with movement and energy. It's a virtual orgy of sound and
image, while still remaining grounded in the scene. Actually, I'm envious of
what Ellis is able to do here. Where Canto 1 talked to Dante, Canto 4 talks to
Pound with maybe a sidebar to Charles Olson. And it gives a touch of Herbert and
again, an echo of Dylan. Wonderful stuff.
—Joseph Lisowski, Ph.D.
Ellis is a great punster, a turner of
words and phrases, a craftsman, a carpenter, shaping, shaping, shaping.
—Helen Ruggieri