On Charley's 89th birthday, Park Theater Hudson is excited to welcome him and Gerard Malanga into the hallowed walls of our venue to share a lifetime of his poetry for his upcoming book release.

Charles Plymell’s poems in Over the Stage of Kansas are at times as quiet & thoughtful as a farmer’s field & then suddenly as bustling as a raging river or a crowded city street. This collection brings together some of Plymell’s best material written over several decades & places it under one giant circus tent of literary thrills for your enjoyment. The author of such classics as Apocalypse Rose & Last of the Moccasins, Plymell was born in Holcomb, Kansas at the height of the Dust Bowl & now lives with his wife Pam, in Cherry Valley, New York.

From the very beginning, Charles Plymell has always been a wild child, born in a converted chicken coop, in what would later become Truman Capote's infamous lonesome prairie, at a time when its blood-soaked landscape still meant a slow quiet death for the thoughtful young men and women of his generation.

His family would soon move to Wichita, where a young Plymell would later find himself at the center of a vortex of creativity that would shoot him out of the cannon of youth and later onto the streets of San Francisco in the early 1960's.

A friend and contemporary of such mythologized literary figures as Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, Plymell has always been a poet of both people and place, those he has chosen to let occupy a space in his heart and the restless geography of his life, that none of us can really shake, no matter how hard we try.

All of this is on full display in Over the Stage of Kansas, poems written between 1966 and 2023, but is really the product of an entire lifetime of memories, where every moment, whether comical, mundane, sad, or joyful, is vividly recalled and tucked inside the pages of this ample volume. Pages that swing open like the doors of runaway train cars, to reveal poets, long dead matinee idols and the Kansas girls of his dreams, that so many boys once pinned their hopes on before waking up in a larger universe, often feeling as empty and alone as a farmer's field.

And while the best poems are often narratives of self examination written to chase away old demons into the past, what Plymell offers his readers here, is not only a record of his own life, but brave glimpses into their own history, at their best when faced head on. He is giving them one last chance to run their fingers through the soil of their childhood-before everything gets swept away.

Charles Plymell is a force of nature, a husband, a father, a friend, a publisher, an educator and a poet, who could only have come out of his particular place and time. He is a vortex that has come full circle.

Brian Goss

Brian Goss

Brian Goss