Eddie Woods - Ins & Outs Years

Ins & Outs Years

After editing three issues of Ins & Outs magazine in 1978 (contributors included Allen Ginsberg, with the first-ever publication of his Plutonian Ode, William Levy, Ira Cohen, Rachel Pollack, Simon Vinkenoog, Hans Plomp, Mel Clay, Heathcote Williams, Marc Morrel and Woods himself; while among the magazine's international readership, beginning with issue #1, was Henry Miller), Woods and Harvey left Holland, passed through Paris and ended up in Barcelona.

Ties to the Dutch capital were already too strong, however. In 1979, the couple (who by then were married, but separated in late 1981, while remaining the closest of friends and professional colleagues) rented an attic flat in the heart of Amsterdam's red-light district and immediately got involved in publishing projects. Other World Poetry Newsletter, at once a historical evaluation of P78, the first One World Poetry festival (at which Woods performed, along with William S. Burroughs, Patti Smith, et al.) and a scathing critique of organized literary events, penned by Woods under the pseudonym Woodstock Jones and published and internationally distributed by Ins & Outs Press, caused a minor storm not only in Amsterdam but all the way to San Francisco. The Newsletter and its years-long aftermath are covered in Woods' Soyo Benn: A Profile and A Brief History of Ins & Outs Press.

Early in 1980, Woods, Harvey and the Dutch bookseller Henk van der Does formed the Ins & Outs Press Foundation (known as a stichting in the Netherlands) and also opened the Ins & Outs Bookstore (with the latter continuing for two years; after which Van der Does started his own bookshop and Woods turned the ground floor of the six-story Ins & Outs building into a gallery-cum-performance space).

Ins & Outs magazine #4/5 was published in the summer of that year. Within its pages were Paul Bowles, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bert Schierbeek, Gerard Malanga, Bob Kaufman, Charles Henri Ford, Gregory Corso, Roberto Valenza, John Wilcock, Steve Abbott, the photographers Diana Blok and Marlo Broekmans, Neeli Cherkovski and many others. Further publications followed throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, including:

• Natural Jewboy by William Levy
• Sale or Return by Woods
• a postcard series that included Ira Cohen's Bandaged Poets
• audio cassettes of live readings at Ins & Outs Press by Jack Micheline and Harold Norse
• limited-edition silkscreen prints by Kirke Wilson of Burroughs, Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, Snuffie the Gangster Woof of Amsterdam, Xaviera Hollander and the "night mayor of Rotterdam" Jules Deelder

After that the press went into "suspended animation" for more than a decade. Woods, who had secluded himself from 1987, reemerged in 1992 with a string of performances as "The Gangster Poet", including at the North Sea Jazz Festival, Zuiderstrand Festival, Crossing Border Festival, appearances with the Kali Quartet, et al.

From 1995 through most of 1998, Woods organized monthly poetry-reading evenings at a small, working-class Amsterdam café that quickly became the literary talk of the town, written up in national newspapers and even featured on Dutch television.

In the autumn of 1998, Woods relocated to Devonshire, England to live with Jenny Brookes, whom he had first met in India in 1975 but had not seen (prior to visiting her in May 1998) for 18 years. The relationship lasted for six years.

Upon its collapse, Woods returned to Amsterdam and Ins & Outs Press resumed its publishing activities. Woods' spoken-word CD Dangerous Precipice was released in 2004 and his book Tsunami of Love: A Poems Cycle (two long narrative poems and four shorter ones, chronicling "the rise and fall of an incredible love affair") in 2005. The CD Tsunami of Love (Woods reciting the entire collection, with a special introduction added) appeared in August 2007. In January 2012, Tsunami of Love was again published, this time in an Amazon Kindle edition, by Barncott Press (London).

Since 2005, Woods has made several on-stage appearances at the annual Whitsun weekend Fiery Tongues literary festival, held in the artists colony village of Ruigoord, near Amsterdam.

In July 2009, Woods attended a major Burroughs symposium in Paris, NakedLunch@50, where he delivered his homage to Burroughs entitled "Thank God You're Not Eddie Woods!" and also participated in a special tribute to the old Beat Hotel at 9 Rue Gît-le-Coeur, together with Jean-Jacques Lebel, the poetess Nina Zivancevic, Scottish artist Elliot Rudie, and others.

In December 2011, Sloow Tapes (Stekene, Belgium) released the Eddie Woods spoken-word audio cassette The Faerie Princess & Other Poems.

The Eddie Woods Archive was acquired by Stanford University in 2003, after he and the writer/radio disc jockey Bart Plantenga had worked for five years assembling it (with Woods regularly shuttling back and forth from England specifically for that purpose).