Kansas-born writer Charles Plymell will give a poetry reading at 7 p.m. Monday at Milton’s, 920 Mass.

Plymell was born in 1935 in Finney County in a converted chicken coop during one of the blackest dust storms of that period. His father was a cowboy born in the Oklahoma Territory, his mother of Plains Indian descent. He completed his freshman year in high school and dropped out.

After working in most all the western states at many types of laboring jobs, he drifted between Los Angeles and Kansas City during his hipster years, steeped in jazz, race music, and country. He later attended Wichita State for a few years, not obtaining a degree.

While working on the docks in San Francisco, he was recruited by students and the founder of The Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars to earn a masters degree in writing. His master’s thesis at Hopkins was quickly published by City Lights, titled “Last of the Moccasins,” and then by Europa Verlag in Austria.

Plymell was cited by World Book for being the most promising poet of 1976. He opposes the National Endowment for the Arts and has criticized it in print. He claims it became a politicized, unjust system feeding on its own mediocrity and self-contradiction. His views were mentioned in The New York Times, and he was subsequently blacklisted. He has never received funding from any federal, state or academic agency.