Fw: blog item about dave christy

ana, here is one of the tributes to Dave:

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Tuesday, February 09, 2010

(Mike Boyle wrote:)

Dave Christy, 1953-2010. RIP

Alpha Beat Press was a GIANT in the pre-internet lit zine days. Sure there were others, the big name literary magazines with their huge press runs, but they didn't speak to me. My first (poetry) publication outside my town was in the pages of Bouillabaisse, which was but one of the many magazines and broadsides they published.

In hindsight, I knew little of the craft. Had all these "pent up" feelings, things I would have put in songs, but it was coming too fast, and another band was falling apart anyway. No, it had fallen apart, that's right. Things fall apart. But this, writing, I needed no one else. I'm back in that day now, having received comp copy of Bouillabaisse.

And I'm like, ????, what is this. I'm in a magazine with Allen Ginsberg, and a whole lot of other "free wheeling" verse from people I'd never heard of. I'm in some shitty studio apartment I didn't notice was infested with fleas until I'd moved in, with a typewriter with half-dead ribbon. And they xeroxed the piece I'd sent, dead keys and all. With a little "junky" graphic on my page.

So there was some glee, because I'd stepped out of my provincial town into the "world at large," but also the ???? thing. As the years rolled out, I sent more to Alpha Beat. They were my window into the world outside my shit town. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to say Dave Christy was a lifeline.

The long letters and poems I sent, some published in broadsides. Some he said, I'm gonna hang on to these. How many people did he say this to. Is there really a pile of all those poems, because I sure don't have 'em. Point being, Dave always took the time for a personal reply, sometimes short, sometimes longer. We corresponded, off and on, for years.

It was hell nice to find him again last year. We traded email, and he said send me poems. I didn't know he was still publishing, but he was still doing the monthly broadside. I sent some poems, got comp broadside in mail some time later. I sent him my Dollhouse novel, signed, "I remember."

He liked it.

He was a friend.