Babalon 156

by Harvey Bialy

Cult or court of love, sweet incenses of insidious beautiful tantras, the wild kill-society of Peire Vidal in the garage of Arthur Avalon, there's a muddle in these days here beginning to be resolved. This male-fascist thing of in women, hope to blast thru the proximate lady to, exactly what, here, one, at least, of us, them, tries to define. Modulo a crooked music. That here, in this scientist's hands, takes account enough of matter not to lose the woman in the Shape. As the patriarch said, Nice thing about piety is getting out of it, into the fresh air. Where even Salome comes to rest a while from her own fierce juices, no good, even out here among the sunflowers & the Impalas the grind of primal desire rehearses its lessons. Chug chug. The nakedness of woman is the work of God, says irish-american Wm Blake, we will never get away from it. Now here what to my sense o fit is happening is a hard edge appearing, some of the exactness of guarded ritual here edges into the poem, if we're quick enough to see it. Bialy engages with an utterly serious vocabulary, thinkable, closer the better, & his music is thought's tune also, locating the world. I like his geography. A test book. Try it on.
—Robert Kelly

65 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Harvey Bialy (AB Biology, Bard College; Ph.D. Molecular Biology, University of California at Berkeley) is an artist and poet who was editor of the Journal Nature Biotechnology. As an AIDS skeptic, he was one of the signatories to a letter to the editor by a group calling themselves the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV-AIDS Hypothesis. He was advisor to the Center for Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering in Havana, Cuba from 1986–1996.