Gino Sky

Gino Sky

Gino Sky has published two novels, a collection of stories, and a dozen books of poetry (including Hallelujah 2 Groundhogs & 16 Valentines, available from Limberlost Press). His novel Coyote Silk (North Atlantic Books, 1987) has been translated and published in Korea. Gino Sky is author of the novel Appaloosa Rising: The Legend of the Cowboy Buddha (Doubleday, 1980), which reflects on history, memory, and the power of poetry in bringing an end to the Vietnam War.

Born in Pocatello, Idaho, in 1935, Burt Gail Clays, grew up in the mind-expansive deserts and mountains of the Intermountain West as a dyslexic Mormon kid, who, despite his reading disorder, was compelled to tell—and write down—his stories. He changed his name, moved on to Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Bolinas, Santa Fe, Tucson, and places in between before roads led him back to Idaho and Salt Lake City again.

Publishing a Sixties underground literary magazine called Wild Dog that the FBI took notice of, Sky tells a story of all that swirled around the magazine during an eruptive time in America. First published by the poet Ed Dorn in Pocatello in 1963, Sky moved Wild Dog to Salt Lake City and then to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbery district right at the moment of the counter-cultural revolution. In Wild Dog Days, Sky exuberantly chronicles the time, the place, and the peace movement with hallucinogenic clarity. Illustrated with photos of some of the poets who helped hand-crank the pulse of a small press movement, Wild Dog Days is dedicated to “every man, every woman, every kid, every dog who marched for peace and stopped the war.”

Grammy Award-winning folksinger Ramblin' Jack Elliott once described poet Gino Sky as "An Idaho original. Mountain climber, poet, author, tracer of lost birds, keeper of the truth, horseman, scribe, whopping great liar, kind lover, high liver, old truck hero, keen observer—anything he writes, I want to read. If he leaves me a note on my wiper blades, I save it. I step around or over his tire tracks." In his inimitable way, Ramblin' Jack summed him up well.

Gino Sky's life as a writer in the Mountain West has been shaped by his experience growing up in a small town and vast landscapes of the mid-20th century American West, by his deep involvement in the literary mimeo magazine movement of the 1960s, by the chance of finding himself in the very center of the counter-cultural, psychedelic revolution of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury two years before the Summer of Love, and by his focus ever since on channeling through his writing an exuberant pursuit of peace, beauty, and resistance, pushing the literary envelope with humor and hallucinogenic clarity. As an editor of the legendary literary magazine Wild Dog in Salt Lake City and San Francisco after poet Edward Dorn handed off the magazine in 1964, Sky helped the magazine go on to be considered one of the great "underground" mimeo journals of the era, as noted in the New York Public Library's major 1998 exhibition of the 1960s-era small press literary movement, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side.

While writing, he made his way as a fine woodworker, gardener and itinerant handyman. He climbed the most technically challenging peaks of the Grand Tetons, canoed the entire Salmon River—more than 400 miles of undammed wild river from its source in Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains to its confluence with the Snake River—and poured all that experience into a life where he never compromised his muse.

He's the author of a dozen books of poetry, two novels, and a collector of stories, including, perhaps most notably, the novel Appaloosa Rising: The Legend of the Cowboy Buddha (Doubleday, 1980), now a western classic with a cult-like following. He created humorous characters within a mythology blending Eastern mysticism, a vision of freedom in the American West, and a no-holds-barred approach to the creative process that's probably most comfortable humming and hammering along on an IBM Selectric typewriter than on a word processor.

In the 1990s, he had a poetry radio show on "the lobe dial" on Boise's KBSU Public Radio called Poetry in Commotion, interviewing such poets and writers as Robert Wrigley, Terry Tempest Williams, Keith Wilson, Irish poet Medbh McGuckian, British travel writer Jonathan Raban, and many others. He toured with his lifelong friend, legendary folksinger Rosalie Sorrels, on seasonal holiday concerts, weaving his poems and stories with Rosalie's songs and stories for a memorable tapestry. For years he taught poetry in the schools to elementary and high school students, and he held workshops with emerging adult writers. He participated in and MC'd numerous poetry readings, and eulogized old friends as they passed.

At home today in Salt Lake City for the past 20 years after a circuitous journey through decades of friendships and landscapes, Sky tends to his projects with his wife Barbara Jensen—woodworking, gardening, occasional teaching, and writing. It's been suggested that if he ever wrote a memoir, it should be typed out on stencils, hand-cranked on a Gestetner mimeo machine, collated, stapled, and given away on the streets for free as the Diggers would have done in the heyday of San Francisco's Free Stores.

BY GINO SKY

Poems and Stories (Chapboooks)

The Year of the Fat Flower (Magdalene Syndrome Press, 1967) The Ball Tournament Specialist (Duende Press, 1973)

Sweet Ass'd Angels, Pilgrims and Boogie Woogies (Cranium Press, 1973)

The Great Medicine Trail (Cranium Press, 1973)

Jonquil Rose, Just One More Cowboy (Five Trees Press, 1975)

Spirit Bone (Limberlost Press, 199 1)

Christmas Dog (Limberlost Press, 1996)

Hallelujah Two Groundhogs & 16 Valentines (Limberlost Press, 1999)

Cowboy Buddha Christmas (Wolf Peach Press, 1999) Now That's a Peach (Acid Press, 1999)

Double Shot, Pocatello Blend, Rare Beans (with Ray Obermayr, Blue Scarab Press, 2004)

Wild Dog Days (Limberlost Press, 2010)

Novels

Appaloosa Rising: Or the Legend of the Cowboy Buddha (Doubleday, 1980; Reprinted by North Atlantic Books, 1987; Translated into Korean 199 1)

Coyote Silk (North Atlantic Books, 1987; Translated into Korean 199 1)

Short Stories

Near the Postcard Beautiful (Floating Ink Books, 1993)

As Literary Magazine Editor

A Pamphlet (Pocatello, 1960-62)

Portneuf (Pocatello, 1962)

Wild Dog (Salt Lake City, San Francisco, 1964-1966)

Out of Sight (San Francisco, Kamikaze Press, 1966)

References

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