samuel

beat poet

Of all the Beat poets, samuel remains the most mysterious. His date of birth, current whereabouts and even his surname are all unknown.

samuel's poems have never been published in any formal sense of the word. He believed that the culture of the publishing world was fatally toxic to the poetic spirit. Instead, his poems were delivered to their audience by more personal and spontaneous methods. Thus the citizens of his native San Francisco could expect to find a samuel pinned to their car windshield, scrawled on a men's room wall, tucked into the lining of one of the coats cleaned at the Chinese laundry which backed onto his favourite drinking alley, or, most likely, screamed hoarsely at them while they rode on the city's famous trolley cars.

Recently, however, a large collection of documents was discovered in the trunk of a '57 Chevy in a wrecker's yard in Houston, Texas. Scribbled onto countless paper napkins, laundry ticker stubs, beer coasters, peeled-off wine labels and diner menus were literally thousands of poems in samuel's inimitable style. It is with great pride that Big Tank presents a small selection from this great fountain of poetry.

the poems

technical notes

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