Eddie Woods
| Eddie Woods | |
|---|---|
Woods in 2007 (photo by Kirke Wilson).
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| Born |
May 8, 1940 New York, United States |
| Pen name | Woodstock Jones (limited) |
| Occupation | Poet, prose writer, editor and publisher |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | American |
| Spouse | Three marriages (including Jane Harvey) |
| Partner | Jenny Brookes (six years) |
| Children | Two daughters |
| Website | |
| eddiewoods |
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Eddie Woods (born May 8, 1940 in New York City) is an American poet, prose writer, editor and publisher who lived and traveled in various parts of the world, both East and West, before eventually settling in Amsterdam, Netherlands, where in 1978 he started Ins & Outs magazine and two years later founded Ins & Outs Press.
According to Stanford University Libraries, which house Woods' archive: "In his role as a cultural impresario and artistic entrepreneur, Eddie Woods... is an important presence, both in American expatriate circles and among European avant-gardists, especially Dutch and Italian. Woods' promotional activities made him, in short, a crucial center to the movement, and his archive documents his close connections with its leading figures..."
After not quite finishing high school (he later took a number of university credit courses, but is essentially an autodidact), Woods worked for two years in Manhattan as a first-generation computer programmer, until in 1960 ("Didn't want to get my fingernails dirty as an Army draftee," but also to finally see Europe) he joined the U.S. Air Force for a four-year stint, three years of which were spent in Germany. Honorably discharged following a tour in Wyoming ("It was four years of guerrilla warfare, me against them, ending in a draw"), he returned to Germany, where he married twice, fathered two daughters, and successfully sold encyclopedias to US military personnel for five years, the entire time continuing to write poems, essays and short stories (a calling he first discovered at age 15).
In late 1968, Woods made his first journey to the East, remaining there until early 1973. During that time he was variously a restaurant manager in Hong Kong, a kept man in Singapore (by a Chinese drag-queen prostitute), a features writer for the Bangkok Post (Tennessee Williams, with whom Woods hung out and traveled, through Malaysia to Singapore and back, was but one of many celebrated personalities he encountered at that time), a stringer for both The New York Times and ABC Radio News, a disc jockey (Radio Thailand English-language service), owner of a gay bar (in Pattaya, Thailand) and the managing director of Dateline Asia (a Bangkok-based features service he launched with three other journalists). In Bali, where he stayed for six months, he was known as "Durian Ed" and "Mushroom Ed" (having developed a unique method of liquefying psilocybin mushrooms and rendering them toxin-free). He was additionally in Laos, Okinawa, the Philippines, Macao, Java and Japan. Before returning to Europe, he explored much of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and spent several months as a lay devotee at the Theravada Buddhist Island Hermitage.
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Wikipedia