“the children of ferocity dance through the stubble glides dead as a cabbagehead
of Insurance Towers dance through the rubble over the massive postures of the
of High Rise Slums dance through the newspapers dance the broken bones destroy
issued through the mouths of witches burning in the backlots “

Amon Liner
(May 29, 1940 – July 26, 1976)

You may be wondering why I titled my blog, “Dirge for Amon Liner”. Who the hell was Amon Liner? To the best of my knowledge, he was only the greatest poet to ever emerge from the urbanized, industrialized forest, farmlands, and Native American burial mounds of Charlotte, North Carolina. I have only read two of his great works, and those are, “Marstower” (Red Clay Press, 1972) and posthumously, “Rose, a Color of Darkness” (Carolina Wren Press, 1980). I stumbled across (no, really I did… I’m a klutz) “Marstower” in 1996 on the discontinued/book sale rack of the Charlotte-Mecklenberg Public Library. Twenty five cents for a first edition. By the looks of the large, stapled paperbound cover, I was already sold. The cover was black with white letters in a computer inspired font that read “Marstower” up and down the front. The words inside sang as if by a choir, danced as Russian peasants loaded on vodka like Ginsberg, were monumental in scope like Patchen at his most unrelenting, mischievous and disarming like Brautigan inventing his own world with an entirely new language. It shattered me where I stood, how Liner shook hands with technology and industry, dissecting the misappropriations by man and his religious-political strongarming of society and how they dare call it “progress”. I have been a fan ever since.

I have only seen one photo of Amon Liner. It’s a group shot that consists of him and a smattering of other local poets that appears to have been snapped in a parking lot at UNCC sometime in the early 1970’s. In addition to that, there is a really nice pen and ink sketch of him in the back of his second volume, “Rose, a Color of Darkness”. He was gentle of stature and bespectacled, with thinning hair that fell close to his crown. In those days, at first blush, he looked like the quintessential, textbook nerd; the English professor who stayed home most nights grading papers and writing the syllabus for the next semester. In our current world where nerds and geeks have been elevated to sex symbol status, a cat like him would be getting more Carolina cream pie than the Avett Brothers. That’s just the way the ball bounces, I reckon.

“The Children of Ferocity” by Amon Liner