Turn and Face the Strange

This thin sliver of 2016 has already seen a mass exodus of well-known humans from our planet. Many of us have remarked on this seemingly weird phenomenon. Sure, someone is dying every second. But I picture David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Glenn Frey, Dan Haggerty, Pat Harrington, Jr., and AI pioneer Marvin Minsky all standing together in an elevator — and it does feel surreal.

The natural extension: You don’t have to be famous to get in the elevator, and one day it will be me. One day it will be you. Maybe we will ride together, or maybe one of us will end up with the guy who played Screech on “Saved by the Bell”. The strangest part: all of it.

Which seems worth commemorating with Uppagus' first-ever theme issue: Bowietry (i.e., poetry — and short prose and visual art — inspired by David Bowie). We'll launch the special issue in January of 2017. Please let us know when you submit your work that you want it to be considered specifically for the Bowietry issue (even if it might seem obvious).

One day this January, a less widely known but highly notable figure joined the star-studded crowd. He was a good friend of our good friend Michael Wurster, so I’ll let Michael talk about him.

Remembering Bill “Grapie” Welsh

You may remember that I worked with the poets at Western Penitentiary in the '70s and '80s. There were four major figures in the organization, the Academy of Prison Arts. One of these was William “Grapie” Welsh, a young man who had been sentenced to life imprisonment for first-degree murder.

At the time he was incarcerated, Bill had completed one class at the University of Pittsburgh. During his incarceration, he completed a bachelor’s in English, a master’s in communications, and started a PhD in economics — all through Pitt.

He was a model prisoner. During those days we were sometimes able to get the prison poets out on a weekend furlough to do readings with national poets. We brought in national poets such as Joseph Bruchac, Michael Hogan, Laurel Speer, and Diane Wakoski. These poets would do a reading and workshops with the inmate poets in the penitentiary, plus a reading and workshop on the outside — frequently with one or more of the inmate poets, most frequently Bill Welsh.

I got to know Bill quite well. He was able to get a furlough for the COSMEP Conference, a weeklong writers conference held in 1980 at California University of Pennsylvania. Some of the other poets there included Hogan, Speer, Alan Ginsberg, Wakoski, and yours truly.

I remember Dennis Brutus one year sponsored a poetry marathon at the University of Pittsburgh to commemorate the Sharpeville massacre. Grapie read before me and preceded his reading by plunging a dagger into the lectern. That was a hard act to follow.

During his term as governor of Pennsylvania, Richard Thornburgh only issued one commutation of a prison inmate. That was Bill. After serving 10 years of his sentence, he was released. After his release, he completed the PhD in economics and continued to be a poet for a while. He frequently did his writing at the Cricket Lounge, a strip bar in Shadyside. Whenever he would do a reading he would have an entourage of gorgeous young women who were his fans.

Bill did not return to a life of crime of any sort. He did a little bit of teaching at Pitt, but found construction work more suitable.

He died on January 5th of this year. His obituary did not mention his having been in prison. It did mention his book of poems, You Can’t Get There from Here, which was published by Noumenon Press of Austin, TX in 1987. That book is almost certainly out of print, but it is worth looking for on the Internet or on Amazon because it’s a terrific book. Bill wrote about prison life, but also the world and its reality as he saw it.