Desolation Angels

a painting by karl gallagher

2012-01-26T15:41:00.000+11:00

deletion

2012-01-19T20:01:00.008+11:00

♣♣♣

correspondence between me n richard krech

Hugh was a friend of richard krech both posted earlier in this blog.

I posted up richard, and followed with Melbourne poets

dave Ellison and david Shepherd. Then I posted another piece made up
of some email correspondence between richard and me. I have removed it.
he was very gracious about it.

here's a poem by his longtime friend hugh fox (deceased)

♣♣♣

SOMETIMES

Sometimes, wandering around in Chicago,
Brooklyn, Detroit, Gary, L.A., Lansing, I wonder if
the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves
ever happened, my cousins in Chicago telling
me “Don’t go to the south side where you used
to live, man....you’ll be a deadman fast, man...,”
OK, and then I come into class and if I close my
eyes I can’t tell the difference between blacks
and whites, the accent-jargon gone, future and
past surrounding me like time-travel on a daily
basis depending on big WHERES and HOWS.

Hugh Fox

posted earlier in this blog

♣ ♣ ♣

Correspondence:

2012-01-08T10:22:00.011+11:00

◈◈◈◈

In regard to the posting:

"Jack Keroauc & Jack Karlos' unpublished papers"

I see in this article a reference to Jack Kerouac's The Scripture of the Golden Eternity ([sic] 1953). It is my understanding that this sutra was composed in 1956, perhaps in Mill Valley, California--but certainly published by Totem Press in association with Corinth Books (1960) for the first print/edition. Other editions and printings have since been published. Nowhere have I found a 1953 reference.

The real question is: where is the original manuscript of this work? I know it was written in pencil, revised often, and not in Kerouac's noted manner, best illustrated in the book, On The Road.

Anonymous CassyDee

Jan 5^th 2012

◈◈◈◈

. . . good question.

David Blaine

2011-12-15T23:05:00.005+11:00

---original msg---

From: "David Blaine"

Dear Karl,

OK, I have attached the interview with Catfish and a photo of him and his daughter. It's an older photo, but it tied in well because Catfish had a flash fiction about her published at OutsiderWriters a while back, and I linked to it.

http://www.outsiderwriters.org/2009/trade-by-catfish-mcdaris

I also attached a poem Catfish published this at his blog, but shortly after that he closed down. So it's nowhere on the net for anyone to see anymore. If you like it that would be a great piece to have re-published, and if you really like it I can send you some more stuff some time. I don't go for grandiose long winded bullshit bongo bios.

"David Blaine lives in rural Michigan and works at the family hardware store with his wife, children and grandchildren." My blog is called "A. Hello Whiskey" and it's at

www.davidblaine.blogspot.com

Cheers,

Dave

≈
ps there is a story going round over here that you, through your mothers side, are related, by marriage, to
Billy-The-Kid, who rode with Charlie Boudrie down New Mexico way! is that true? forgive me for asking
I do so only because I have somewhat indirect connections with the Texas branch of the Ring.

∽ ∮≈ ≒ § ¶

David Blaine

A Small Death

You are too soon parted from here.
The August afternoon sun beats down,
softening the asphalt.
Aroma of decay wafts in the breeze.
Green bottle flies swarm and fire ants creep,
trespassing against your broken form of feathers.
The quills and vanes still tremble, slightly,
as air flows through and around them.
These wings once held you in the sky
as if pinned against the clouds.
Their colorful array of bars and stripes
are still in tact
but you are at once
morbidly still,
and curiously quiet.
No more does your shrill shriek
boom down from towering heights,
to send field mice scurrying to their dens.
No longer do you return from the hunt
bringing fresh meat to the nestlings.
The wind whistles in telephone wires
and plays a requiem for you.

The Luxury of Agony

He was a fledgling painter who came from a family of farmers. He said he couldn’t afford the luxury of agonizing over finishing touches. I noticed that his novice gaze tended to jump around a bit, but assumed he was looking at me, hoping for signs of arousal. This was what I’d been craving; this was what his art was all about. With each stroke I wished he would close his eyes, take his time. He’d end up taking it anyway. There was no promise about the outcome; that was part of his ethical code.

He told me that his work was all about breathing; you could do it anywhere. But he’d almost drowned once at a swimming party, when he was in the first grade. He believed we re-negotiate our roles daily and re-visit the lost battles in our sleep.

He taught me that context is key, and I realized how universal things are: How my mother used to cry waiting for Khrushchev to drop the other shoe. How we hold our breath now, when a jet flies too low.

He said that our insecurities allow us into this world, that in Afghanistan, the men write love poems to their friends. I’d long been longing for such an exotic way station, but he’d grown tired of being my back door man. He told me that impressionism actually peaks in the teen years. I worried how strangers, mere passersby, would view us. In the end this hadn’t been my best-laid plan. And he really couldn’t afford the luxury of agonizing over finishing touches.

death as a play in three acts

childhood

lurid leering boogies under the bed bad guy

with a gun car crash train wreck greasy bag o’ rags

and kitchen match waiting for midnight to burn my house down

khrushchev calls the cold war to order with his 9 ½ D gavel

bomb shelter in the neighbor’s basement sleep well tonight

god and guard are watching but it’s good friday

god’s kid got killed on a cross again

and they can’t watch all of the ruskies all of the time

adolescence

my girlfriend’s brother

first one on our block

came home in a flag

inside a box

the radio is my messiah

cuz’ i’d rather my country

than me

i’d rather red than dead

canada is only an hour away

but the draft is over

the month i turn eighteen

adulthood

success is killing me now

my beer and my steak

each twenty four ounces

death and I have smartened up

he’s out from under the bed

playing the ambassador

the diplomat

i know he’s no friend

but he’s not my enemy either

i can run and jump

but i won’t outrun my parent’s genes

i find myself wondering

what’s next after this?

the curiosity might kill this cat.

Ode to a Bad Example

A curious portrait of postman

as dog. Uncut,

cut from the same cloth as all

common men. Commonly

seen debauching his era—

pissing on everyone’s collective porch.

Falling through life or what passed for it:

A state of inebriation— drunk on the heady

and ordinary alike.

In loose association with loose companions

without peers

without friends

chasing off paternal memories

chasing skirts in a most non-paternal manner.

He was on track—

every day if he could—

burning through bets and betting on getting

loaded, laid,

fan mail.

A quarrelling brook, a roaring spring

of poetry and prose spilling

from a soft heart impaled

on the thorns of his own rose.

Impetus for perfection

in a love/hate relationship.

He commands, advises, implores,

even now, past his prime and

past his time:

Don’t Try.

To which I respond:

Why would I?

Maybe She Meant It

Was that a hatchet or a tomahawk that had just flown past,

grazed his ear, and embeded itself into the plaster?

He instinctively raised his hand to the lobe but hadn’t even noticed

the blood until she pointed to his fingers.

The next time

you touch

my sister

I’ll be giving you a vasectomy with a Bowie knife.

The McDaris Interview

David Blaine: I noticed that in all your biographical material Catfish McDaris is born in 1953 and then the story fast-forwards to the time he came home from the Army and started traveling America. Has he ever had a police mug shot taken? What name appeared on the placard?

Catfish McDaris: Steven Carl McDaris. I got busted at 13 for stealing soda bottles for their 4 cent deposit. I no longer drive, but I did for almost 40 years. I quit 7 years ago, when I quit drinking. After my younger sister died, I drove to the graveyard, opened a bottle of Cuervo & got stinkoed. Cops got me for O.W.I. even though I never drove drunk. I tried to take a cop's gun away; that's the only arrest as an adult.

DB: Tell me a bit about your early life. What did your parents do for a living?

CM: My dad was a master bricklayer. Mother was a mobile librarian, a manager at Sears, & Zale’s, & she worked for Norman Petty Recording Studios. (where Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, & Stephen Stills recorded) in Clovis, New Mexico.

DB: That connection to the Norman Petty studios, what did she do exactly?

CM: Mom kept the books for Norman Petty.

DB: Did you ever get to meet any musicians that an average Joe would recognize?

CM: I met Stephen Stills, Sam & Dave, Three Dog Night, & partied with Waylon Jennings. Our hometown band was Jimmy Gilmer & the Fireballs, their hits were Sugar Shack & Bottle of Wine. The Fireball drummer used to babysit me & later I was their roadie for awhile. Also I worked for The Shyguys & The Apple Glass Syndrome. I worked with my pal, Bennie Barrow (a relative of Clyde Barrow of Bonnie & Clyde fame) doing a few psychedelic light shows for Iron Butterfly & Strawberry Alarm Clock, but mostly The Flock & Zephyr. (2 super bands back then)

DB: Are you musically inclined at all? I don't mean at a professional level, but do you strum the guitar or blow the harp or anything? Cowbell?

CM: I used to try to play guitar & congas, but I sucked.

DB: Do you express yourself artistically in any other medium that writing?

CM: I do a bit of drawing, I had 3 sketches in a recent Nerve Cowboy.

DB: Do you consider writing an art form?

CM: Hell yes, writing is an art form, anything you pour your soul into is art.

DB: You mentioned a younger sister passing away, are there any other siblings?

CM: I have two brothers and two living sisters.

DB: Where did you go to school and what type of books did you read as a child?

CM: I went to school mostly in Clovis, New Mexico, except for a brief time in Monterrey, California. I read all the classics, my grandmother & I played Scrabble, & worked crosswords. I loved adventure books, especially about Geronimo, Sir Francis Drake, and Darwin. But I dropped out of high school in the 10th grade.

DB: Wait, you're talking about loving adventure books and reading the classics, then you say you dropped out of school in the tenth grade. That's not congruous at all. What drove you to that?

CM: I was in a hazing incident in the 10th grade. You were expected to buy a huge paddle made in purple & white (school colors) & have the dude's name & his lady's on each side & he was then supposed to try & break it on your ass. I refused & I almost took his life. I also had been taking too many drugs & I was a full fledged hippie, so school seemed like a waste of time.

DB: Did you have any jobs as a child, to earn spending money?

CM: After I dropped out of high school I became a journeyman bricklayer & I had lots of hustles on the side. I had a lawn mowing service (my pals with electric mowers), I had several pin ball machines, I had a matchbox business (not cars).

DB: Did you participate in any social activities like Cub Scouts or Little League?

CM: I was a Boy Scout, played football, threw shot put, ran track, I got along with the jocks & the heads. I belonged to the Tijuana Pussy Posse.

DB: How long did you live in New Mexico?

CM: I lived in New Mexico until I split for the army.

DB: Since you’re a couple of years older than me, I’m guessing you were drafted and served in Vietnam. Am I right?

CM: I sold 2 kilos of Acapulco gold to an undercover cop, so I was going away for 2 to 10 years. I got the best lawyer in Clovis & paid $5,000, he was to get me off, but I messed with both his daughters & he found out. So, July 71 at the age of 17 I went to Ft. Polk, Louisiana (Little Vietnam) for boot camp. On our last weekend, I went to New Orleans with some amigos to party, we were late coming back, so we were recycled. (did 8 week boot camp all over) Then I was sent to Ft. Sill, Oklahoma for artillery training. I got a 2 week leave before reporting to Oakland for Vietnam. While on leave, Tricky Dick said no more troops to Nam, so I went to Germany for 2 1/2 years. I got out in July 74 & traveled & lived in the Jemez Mountains in New Mexico & lived around Santa Fe & Espanola.

DB: OK, when you started train hopping and hitching across America, did you stay any place for an extended time? Long enough to get a job and find a place to stay? What kind of work did you do?

CM: When I was 15 I hopped a train from Dallas to Clovis. (500 miles) I was with 2 pals & we got lost & an old hobo taught us how to survive. A year later I hopped a fruit express in Fresno into New Mexico. I've done lots of short rides & 1 not that long ago. I rode the rails while in Germany also. I've done a lot of hitchhiking especially to Denver, I've lived there many times. I worked at a metal shop, a skyscraper delivering steel doors to each floor. I hitched in Mexico to Guaymas & spent most of a summer fishing. The worst hitch hiking experience I had was in Slayton, Texas just east of Lubbock, a state cop took me & they shaved my head (I was 16). They put me on a work chain gang for 67 days with no phone calls. I wrote long detailed letters of my adventures in Europe. I got my G.E.D. in the army & took enough general college courses through the mail I wasn't too far away from a degree. Things didn't work out though. I worked in a zinc smelter in Amarillo, Texas. I did brick & stone work all over the southwest. I worked for the Santa Fe National Forest Service as a surveyor & firefighter, painting flag poles (that's scary), I worked for plumbers & carpenters. I washed dishes, cooked, bartended, bounced, I was a roadie. Finally I ended up at the main post office in Milwaukee.

DB: You say you almost got your degree but things didn't work out, what happened?

CM: I took courses from the Univ. of Maryland while in the army & when I got out I wanted to be a game warden, so I enrolled at Eastern New Mexico Univ. only to find out if I got a degree I'd have to run for office, so I abandoned that path. I had a trade (brick mechanic), but the Post Office was much easier than making a straight wall & fighting the elements.

DB: Judging from your bio statement that you’ve been writing for about twenty years, I’m guessing you weren’t writing yet at this point in your life. Were you thinking about writing at all back then? Were you keeping a journal or anything? I mean, besides in your head?

CM: I wrote long rambling letters to my grandmother (she was 3/4s Cherokee) describing the army & Germany & my travels (mostly to Holland) & castles. I used to go to a nudist colony outside of Frankfurt & to see all the concerts there. Many years later, when I was pen pals with my wife before our marriage, I started writing love letters, mostly in Spanish. Then I wrote protest letters to the newspaper. My 1st paying gig was Humor In Uniform ($75) for a story. I wrote a western in the Louis L'Amour/Zane Grey style, it never saw daylight. Then I started writing stories & a few poems & I discovered Bukowski & the small press. An Indian editor (Dave Low Dog Reeve) from Zen Tattoo took some words & I told him I wanted to quit the post office & start a catfish farm & that's where the Catfish handle came from.

DB: Well, there's one question I won't have to ask!

DB: Clovis, sounds a lot like a typical Midwest small town, aside from the geography. County seat, 30,000 people, two thirds white, one third Hispanic, agricultural economy. Again, except for the geographic differences, do you feel living in Wisconsin is similar, culture wise, to living in New Mexico? Is there a reason you settled in the upper Great Lakes besides the Post Office gig?

CM: Clovis has huge sand dunes (used to sand surf & have keg parties there) the Clovis man was found there. (prehistoric). Clovis was wet (had alcohol), Texas & the time change was 10 miles east & it was mostly dry for 100 miles, so lots of drunk cowboys. There was also a huge Air Force Base (Cannon), so lots of flyboys. My mom's only sister married a Milwaukee Polack (when I was 10) & that's how I eventually moved to the Brew City. Milwaukee is green & had lots of jobs, Clovis is arid & the railroad or government was the only great jobs.

DB: How long have you and your wife been married? Tell me about when and where you met. How does she deal with being married to such a wildman?

CM: I've been married for 28 years to a beautiful Mexican lady named Aida, after the opera. We met in Puerto Vallarta, we were both on vacation, her from Guadalajara & me from Milwaukee. While waiting for our first date, I ran into Elizabeth Taylor & her boyfriend lawyer, Victor Luna, I bought them a drink & got her autograph. I kept talking about that almost to the point where I blew my chance at a long & happy marriage. We became pen pals, after I met her parents, & she came to the U.S. a few times. She had studied English at the British Embassy for 8 years, so her English was different than ours. She has a degree in French & worked for a French mining company translating. Aida got her U.S. citizenship 3 years ago after we got hassled on a trip to Paris. We have a 23 year old daughter (Eli-short for Elizabeth), who is just about to get her Master's degree in Criminal Science. I'm not really so wild, I'm like an inside dog I only do it on paper.

DB: Lets move on to your writing. If I asked you to limit it to just three writers, who would you say most influences your own writing?

CM: My 3 writing influences are Bukowski, Louis L'Amour, & Edgar Rice Burroughs.

DB: What things going on in the world and in your life affect, influence, or inspire your writing?

CM: Anything & nothing can inspire my writing.

DB: How do you feel about the direction publishing is moving? Some of the things I'm thinking of are the death of independent book stores, the move to Print On Demand, and of course, e-books.

CM: I just did 2 hardcover joint books at Lulu.com, Dancing Naked On Bukowski's Grave with Australian writer Ben John Smith from Horror Sleaze Trash site, & Tales From A French Envelope with New Jersey writer Craig Scott from Ten Pages Press site. I love both books & stand behind them. I did an e-chap called 72 Magpies Fucking In Buffalo at Ten Pages. I still have a chap called Making Love To The Rain with Leah at Alt-Currents.

DB: Do you enjoy reading your work in public? Would you say that you enjoy hearing the spoken word any more or less than reading a page, or screen?

CM: I used to love to read my stuff, I needed a drop of liquid courage, now I take Xanax. Once I get started I can roll. I don't really like to hear poetry read, unless someone is exceptional.

DB: What's on the horizon for Catfish McDaris?

CM: I just got in Kerouac's Dog #5 the Passion issue. I'm working on some new stuff called Fucked Nine Ways From Tomorrow. I'm rewriting a play I did called Maria Takes A Powder & always working on a novel to escape the small press. I've been offered a tentative editor job (if it goes print) I haven't decided if I'll saddle that palomino.

CM: On my eastern horizon are steel heads leaping in Lake Michigan, to the west is a field of dancing horses.

DB: Sounds like a great place to be.

◈◈◈◈◈◈

Some Old Frens

2011-12-04T23:19:00.005+11:00

◈◈◈◈◈

                sonny n little max
                i met sonny in Fitzroy, early '59,
                just before my 16th birthday

             judy, benita, oliver, david, simon, john laurie,1972 Dromana
             first met judy late '65 thru pauline (walton)
             when i was a student at RMIT school of art

                 adrian,
                 first met him early '65 at Fat Black Pussycat in Sth Yarra,
                 a friend of judy

Joan Sedorkin

2011-12-04T22:28:00.003+11:00

♣ ♣ ♣

Dharma for Joan Sedorkin

five years ago she came to the art class I ran

with five different groups over four years

Joan came to the first and stayed till the last

it was two years before she told me she’d read

‘On The Road’ in 1958 and with a girlfriend hitched

north from Sydney n stopped at Cairns

met and married a Russian fisherman

made a home raised a family buried a husband

Then - aged seventy-eight she left Cairns

with two suitcases

to get away from demands of family

‘to find her self’

moved into a rooming-house in Brisbane

started to paint and write haiku

we had both lived a life knee-capped

by low self-esteem non existent self confidence

but over the years I’d learned how

to change that handicap

n learned how to dismantle

its power bit by bit

n I showed her how to do it

later I found out she was blind

in one eye - sight failing in the other

no wonder she couldn’t draw details

then an Indian doctor and laser surgery

restored the sight in her good eye

enter a king-tide of wild colour like a sudden burst

of parrakeets among a crush of blue blossoms

I watched her discover a sense of her Self

n become a terrific painter

she drew with an intoxicating fragile line

self-confident

admiring of her own work

no longer putting it down

her death a few months ago affected me

more than I would have thought

Dharma Bums was her favourite Kerouac book

for her I later wrote of the silent encounter

I’d had with Gary Snyder

her favourite poet

in a bar in Melbourne

in the later years of my alcoholism

Karl Gallagher, 2000

♣

A GHOST BETWEEN US (for Joan Sedorkin)

Around 1980, aged 37 I was standing
at the bar of the Albion in Carlton
taking notice of nobody
watching life passing by the window
in the early afternoon drinking alone
although several friends were around

I was away with my own thoughts
so long as I had a drink in front of me
and one on the way
that's all i really cared about.

Jukebox sounds came from the back bar
I was lightly swaying to the music
friends passed by saying hallo
smiling generously I replied
feeling good man feeling good
but I was disinterested

interested only in myself
listening to some hidden beat
some universal soul
alone in a crowded bar.

A voice I hadn't heard in years said
'Hey Karlos how are you man.'
I turn and face Nigel a sydney poet who's
grinning grabbing my arm telling me he's
here for the poetry festival
talking loud he says
'Why don't you say hallo to Gary Snyder, over there.'
which I don't believe but look anyway
I see two guys nearby leaning against the wall
drinks in hand watching me
one I recognise from photos as Snyder

it dawns on me

that maybe they have been there

for some time
for how long?
I've been at the bar for over an hour.

We are about eight feet apart
and for a few seconds our eyes lock
and suddenly I feel ashamed to be seen
getting drunk
alone in a crowded bar
at mid day

disinterested in the company of others.

I felt the ghost of Kerouac pass between us
Snyder takes it in
sees a well liked guy
sees that I am on the same greased slide
of alcoholism
that took Jack down
the path of bitter loneliness

the scrambled brains
the mindless bad mouth
the deep disconnection
the desolation

I didn't go over and say hallo
we both knew what we had seen
I turned back to the bar
picked up my drink, downed it
and ordered another.

karl gallagher
[13/10/00]

♣

2011-12-02T13:22:00.002+11:00

=

∮≈ ≒
§ ¶ δ∮◎◎◎≈◎◎◎∮

♣♣♣
∮≈ ≒
§ ¶ δ∮◎◎◎≈◎
◎◎∮

Kell Robertson

2011-11-18T15:38:00.009+11:00

= =

---------- Forwarded Message ----------

Subject: Kell Robertson
Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2011

Kell Robertson, 1930-2011: Cowboy-poet celebrated 'guns, guitars and women'

Steve Terrell | The New Mexican
Posted: Monday, November 07, 2011 –

Kell Robertson, a poet, songwriter, country singer, storyteller and local character, died Monday. He was 81. Robertson died on the property where he had lived for about 15 years, southeast of Santa Fe near N.M. 14. A friend and neighbor, Joanie MacCallum, said he'd had a peaceful night surrounded by loved ones.

On Sunday, friends visited along with his daughter, Penelope Read, who flew in from San Francisco to be with the ailing poet, sit at his bedside and hold his hand. But though Robertson had been talking, joking and telling stories the night before, friends said, by Sunday afternoon he'd slipped into unconsciousness and never awoke. Robertson was hospitalized about three weeks ago for liver problems. On Saturday, the hospital released him, telling friends that he had only a few days to live.

He had lived since 1997 on the property of fellow poet Argos MacCallum — Joanie's brother-in-law. The two had met in 1989 at a poetry event at the Caravan of Dreams Performing Arts Center in Fort Worth. MacCallum allowed Robertson, who at the time was homeless, to move into a small building on his property. Robertson referred to it as a "converted chicken shack," though in reality MacCallum built it for Robertson three days before he moved in.

Robertson often described himself as "an old drunk." His songs celebrated a life of "Guns, Guitars and Women," as the title of one of his tunes said. He sang of saloons that were "cool and dark inside." Friends remember him with an ever-present cowboy hat on his head, a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. In a 2004 interview in No Depression magazine, Robertson said, "I've always thought that my biography is in my poetry and songs."

He said he was born in 1930 in Codell, Kan., the son of a saxophone player who abandoned the family when Robertson was a toddler. His mother remarried a man who kicked him out of the house at age 13. But that was not before his mother took him to see Hank Williams play in Louisiana. "I was a hood," Robertson told The New Mexican in 1998. "My biggest thought [up to that] time was I wanted to own a gas station or rob one, make some money, get a chick and ride across the South being Jesse James or something. But then I went to see Hank Williams and saw what he did with that audience. How he touched everybody so deeply. I figured to myself, somehow I've got to do something like that."

Through the years, he earned his living as an usher in a movie theater, a fruit picker, a dishwasher, a soldier in the Korean War, a disc jockey at country and jazz stations, a bartender and an insurance salesman. . . . He also fell in with San Francisco's North Beach scene in the 1950s and '60s, and he published a mimeograph poetry magazine called Desperado in the '60s.

Said MacCallum: "I think he should be remembered as a major American poet. To him, poetry was a job. And he did it with relish." Besides publishing several books of poetry, Robertson released three CDs of his music, all of which were recorded after he moved to Santa Fe. He performed locally in places like the now-defunct Oasis Cafe and on KSFR radio. Longtime musical cohort Mike Good, who flew from Ohio to be with Robertson on his final day, said Monday that he took at least four road trips across the country with Robertson. "We drove the back roads, just seeing everything and talking," Good said. "He really opened my eyes on how to perceive things. ... He was really connected up there where all that — poetry and music — comes from."

In one of his songs, "I Always Loved A Waltz," Robertson contemplated his own epitaph: "Just write on my tombstone, Lord if I get a tombstone/Or maybe just a honky-tonk wall/That he was crazy for ladies, Lord, and guitars and babies/And a damned old fool for the waltz." His most recent performance was a poetry reading in July at Teatro Paraguas Studio with MacCallum.

Robertson will be buried Tuesday in a private ceremony on the MacCallum property. MacCallum said a public memorial featuring music and poetry by Robertson's friends is being planned for February.

if you want to know how good kell robertson was then read

this assessment by the late tod moore, 2008

http://outlawpoetry.com/2008/06/29/kell-robertson-the-goofy-goddess-on-the-wall/

THE OLD MAN GOES HOME

Under the discount store
the fast food place
the furniture outlet
under all that asphalt
is one of the best chunks
of black bottom farm land
in southeast Kansas.
My grandad grew corn
wheat, oats and alfalfa,
rotating the crops by
his almanac and the taste
of the dirt, and there
under that corner
my grandma’s garden grew.
The house was somewhere
near the bicycle rack
and the barn was where
they have that bank
of video games.

Under all this asphalt and concrete
plastic and steel, I learned to cut
a calf, learned to drive a team of horses,
learned to work in this earth
and in that barn, learned
from a third cousin who
teetered on the edge of womanhood
another meaning for kisses
beyond the peck on the cheek
I got from grandma.

I close my eyes and see it,
butt my way under that old Jersey cow
squirt the hot steaming milk
into the cold tin bucket, hear
the hogs snorting around for slops
we saved for them.

I open my eyes and almost
get run over by a housewife
with a buggy full of disposable diapers
and sugar-coated cereals.

The security guard takes my arm, asks
if I’m alright, leads me out into the parking lot
asks me what I’m doing there if I’m not
going to buy anything.

I’m visiting my grandad’s farm I say
underneath all this crap
is the sweetest little farm
in southeast Kansas.

Walking away
into the shimmering heat
rising from the parking lot
I swear I hear
Grandma calling us for supper.
There’ll be beans and cornbread
and iced tea...tomorrow we’ll start
plowing the lower forty.
Then we’ll come home and sit
on the front porch, watching the dogs
playing in the yard, dreaming
of going to town next week
to sell some hay and get
a store-bought hat
to wear at the dance at the Grange Hall.
Maybe my cousin will be there
and she’ll teach me more
about this kissing business.

Right now
looking back at the parking lot
full of people doing something

all I can see is what we’ve lost.

Kell Robertson

=

Kell Robertson Interview

http://www.lummoxpress.com/lummoxpress/id21.html

this is a beauty, worth reading

=

Hugh Fox

2011-11-17T00:56:00.003+11:00

[This is a little late. I've been away for a month and after being back for a month I'm only just catching up. karl]

Hugh Fox, 1932 - 2011

Hugh Fox, East Lansing Born February 12, 1932 in Chicago, Illinois died on Sunday, September 4, 2011 at the age of 79. Hugh was Professor Emeritus at Michigan State University having taught in the department of American Thought and Language. He was a poet and writer having over 200 novels published.

(Lansing State Journal on September 6, 2011)

Hugh Bernard Fox Jr. (February 12, 1932 – September 4, 2011)was a writer, novelist, poet and anthropologist and one of the founders (with Ralph Ellison, Anaïs Nin, Paul Bowles, Joyce Carol Oates, Buckminster Fuller and others) of the Pushcart Prize for literature. He has been published in numerous literary magazines and was the first writer to publish a critical study of Charles Bukowski.

Fox was born and raised in Chicago as a devout Catholic, but converted to Judaism in later life. He received a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was a professor at Michigan State University in the Department of American Thought and Language from 1968 until his retirement in 1999. Hugh Fox died on September 4, 2011 in East Lansing, MI.

Fox was the author of over sixty-two books, including six books on anthropology. He wrote over fifty-four books on poetry and many volumes on short fiction, and published many novels. Fox also wrote a number of books on pre-Columbian American cultures and catastrophism. Some of these works were labeled in the pseudoarchaeological category, such as his book Gods of the Cataclysm: A Revolutionary Investigation of Man and his Gods Before and After the Great Cataclysm (1976). Some of his books with these themes have been compared to the work of Ignatius Donnelly.

His book Gods of the Cataclysm received a number of positive reviews. Editor Curt Johnson praised the book claiming “Hugh Fox’s Gods of the Cataclysm...ought to be required reading for cultural historians of all disciplines.”^[

The Ibbetson Street Press of Somerville, Massachusetts published Way, Way Off the Road: The Memoirs of an Invisible Man by Hugh Fox with an introduction by Doug Holder in 2006. This book recounts Fox's life and the people he knew from his extensive associations with the "Small Press" marketplace over the years, including Charles Bukowski, A.D. Winans, Sam Cornish, Len Fulton, and numerous other people.

Fox's novel e Lord Said Unto Satan was published in the spring of 2011 by Post Mortem Press (Cincinnati). His final novel was Reunion, published by Luminis Books in summer 2011.

(From Wikipedia)

Hugh Fox

SONG OF CHRISTOPHER

Writing these poems
becomes self-flagellation,
at the same time peoples
the vacuum with sparks of
his presence, please, God,
give him back to me for
just a handful of years
and I will give you a witness,
like Peter, Paul, Augustine,
Aquinas, Luther, Loyola, Wesley,
give him to me and I will give him
back to you shining with yourself,
not for me but for HIM,
to unfold the folded in the light of
Your being, so he can become what for all
eternity (in the madness of your pans)
he always was...and let me in my own
last years, move at last from JOB to
REVELATION.

(Clock Radio, 1987)

Dancing Naked On Bukowki’s Grave

2011-08-14T22:07:00.016+10:00

♣

REVIEW OF DANCING NAKED ON BUKOWSKI’S GRAVE

All night I dreamed of the poems of Ben John Smith and Catfish McDaris in their new book Dancing Naked on Bukowski’s Grave. I read non-stop the Catfish section which comprises the second half of the book, tore through it like the sex-crazed maniac I’ve always been, running down the street after that guilt-ridden fantasy bus headlined real life. Afterward on the bus, and in my tortured sleep, I began to understand the meaning of the ritual phrase that’s what I’m talking about. I formed words in my dreams to explain to Catfish how reading his amazing output was like looking into his soul, if anyone has such a thing, because oddly, he approaches soulful material through an outrage of the senses, because he talks about boogers and shit and glorious cunt-holes that most people lack the courage to discuss, yet isn’t that where we all live? In God’s lap? . . . where Catfish firmly sits while fervently invoking Him in the moving “Calluses”: “I believe in God/I just feel like/kicking his ass/sometimes, when/terrible stuff happens/to the innocent”.

Take for instance “Even Rats Party in Hell’s Kitchen”, a fantastical portrait of the toilet at Dangerfield’s Comedy Club, the cooking up of a poetic recipe that starts out with some possibly true measurements. 1) toilets in NYC and Paris are in “dim decrepit basements, swampy funk-ridden holes”; 2) “the stairway is rancid”; 3) “a cloud of maryjane fumes engulfed me”; 4) “I heard female laughter and an Asian language coming from the Men’s Room”; the rest could be called imagination straight from God when he introduces “a talking rat” with “a tiny hard-on”. With these ingredients Catfish leaves the kitchen and enters the inner rooms of the soul, a mystical journey to jolt the jaded and wise-up the weary.

“While Bogart Played with Rock Hudson’s Balls” is another myth-buster. We knew Rock was gay but what about Bogart? I always suspected he was a real pussy with his various wives in spite of his tough guy image. I could imagine Lauren putting him to bed with a glass of warm milk. Sure, he smoked, but that only began as a way to show what a regular guy he was. Then he became addicted to sucking butts. Maybe Rock was the one with the real balls; gay, and enjoying his lifestyle to the hilt. Like the cops in stanza three. What’s this tough guy bullshit all about, anyway? Think about it with help from Catfish. Patricia Hickerson

♣

Humphrey Bogart Played With Rock Hudson's Balls

Two guys in the park were smoking

a blunt, one held on to it, his pal grew

bored, so he unzipped him &

sucked his big banana dick

The cops came just as the dude

did, he couldn't stop, it was like

Old Faithful, glug swallow glug

the cops tapped them both on

the head, then on the mushroom

They started to charge them with

possession & indecent exposure,

but they let them go, they could

hardly wait to get back to the

squad car.

Catfish McDaris

♣

To purchase this book go to this site

http://www.lulu.com/index.php

type in Dancing Naked On Bukowski’s Grave and click Get It

♣

Catfish McDaris is based in America and operates a poetry blog:

http://catfishgringoriver.blogspot.com/

Ben Smith is based in Australia and operates a poetry blog:

www.horrorsleazetrash.com

♣

PATRICIA HICKERSON

I grew up in NYC/Jersey. I graduated from Barnard College. Came to California in 1956. I was 28. I’ll talk about my writing . . . not my career as a Warner Bros. dancer, artists’ model, mother of three, teacher, reporter. I started with poetry at age 7, much later reading my poetry in San Francisco bars and bookstores. Got a masters in Creative Writing from San Francisco State, and a doctorate in education from USC where my husband was associate professor for 23 years. I became a paid propagandist for the Communist Party; sold pornography to various Penthouse publications such as Forum, Letters, Erotica, Variations. Then back to poetry; I came to the realization that literary trash, sleaze and the truth carried by these ideas are paintings of the world to come. These “paintings” have been published in the chapbook Dawn and Dirty and the broadside At Grail Castle Hotel, both from Rattlesnake Press; other poems have been published in Convergence, Medusaskitchen, poetrynow, Presa, Choices, Echoes, Passager, catfishgringoriver, poets for peace, living waters, Rattlesnake Review.

Here’s a couple of sites where Patricia’s work can be found:

http://tenpagespress.wordpress.com/tag/patricia-hickerson/

http://www.rattlesnakepress.com/Patricia_Hickerson.html

♣

Rumour Has It:

Patricia Hickerson is writer and at 83 a survivor and rumour has it that in the old days she knew them all - Kerouac, Mailer, Pollock, Kline, Billie Holliday, Charley Parker, Brando, Montgomery Clift, Corso, among others. . . in the bars and hipster joints around the Village in NYC.

"My husband was an addicted gambler from the age of 12, son of Communist parents. His father ran for Congress on the CP ticket in 1932. His mother was very beautiful and an intellectual. His parents are featured as Arthur Raymond and Rebecca Valentine in Henry Miller’s Sexus. Miller does a beautiful and fairly accurate job of describing them. My father-in-law had been a boyfriend of Henry’s in Brooklyn.
Because he was a gambling addict as well as a brilliant lecturer, my husband hung out with some very dubious characters in his constant quest for money and we all worked for the mob on a low level during the 70s and 80s, mainly counting the take in porn theatres around Northern California.

I started writing porn, first for small mags like High Society, Pillow Talk; then later through one of my mentors, novelist Mary Bringle who knew an editor at Penthouse Letters Michael Dorsey, I began to get published in Letters, Forum, Erotica, and V.K. McCarty’s Variations (for women). These stories are definitely fictional. At one point I wrote a sex advice column with the nom de plume Juanita Bottom. There had been several Juanitas before me; even the letters are made up. The pay was phenomenal."

♣

Catfish McDaris recently won a Flash Fiction contest at Buns & Barbs judged by the 2009 poet laureate, Jonathan Penton from Unlikely Stories; he has an interview with Charles Plymell; and a video with Belinda Subraman on Outsider Writer; he has work on/in The, and Black Listed magazines.

He has been published in New York Quarterly, Louisiana Quarterly, George Mason Quarterly, Main Street Rag, Pearl, Bukowski Review, Chiron Review, Haight Ashbury Review, Sho, xib, Lobster Cult, Thirteen Myna Birds, Beggars & Cheeseburgers, Sex & Murder, Gutter Eloquence, Naughty Girlx, Unlikely Stories. and many more.

He won the Uprising Award in 1998. He has won the Poetry Slam twice at the Green Mill in Chicago, birthplace of the poetry slam. His last poetry reading was at the Shakespeare & Co. Bookstore in Paris.

♣

lucien willingham - paintings and found images

2011-08-08T16:06:00.016+10:00

♣♣♣

paintings

Still Life With China Coffee-Cup.

(siberian acrylic paint on bangladeshi canvas)

♣

Still Life With Black Dots.

(siberian acrylic paint on bangladeshi canvas

stretched over a javanese pine frame)

♣

Man In Red Jacket Peeking Out The Window

aka Dancing On The Edge Of Eternity

regular acrlyic paint on regular canvas

♣

found images: some retitled

Espresso Coffee Machine 1856 Port Said.

♣

It Takes A Train To Moan By Chance.

♣

West Of The Wall 1962.

♣

Nude With Banjo

♣

♣

The Great Sacred Ritual Of The

St Kilda Bodgies & Widgies

♣

Marion Morehouse, by ee cummings, 1933,
oil on canvas board

♣

Noise Number 1, by ee cummings, 1919, oil on canvas

♣

Crayon on paper, by jack kerouac, 1953

♣
images for the ee cummings paintings sourced here:
http://www.eecummingsart.com/artwork/

♣♣

The Avatar

2011-06-15T12:33:00.012+10:00

◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈

1964

The Universal Message

I have come not to teach but to awaken. Understand therefore that I lay down no precepts.

Throughout eternity I have laid down principles and precepts, but mankind has ignored them. Man’s inability to live God’s words makes the Avatar’s teaching a mockery. Instead of practicing the compassion He taught, man has waged crusades in His name. Instead of living the humility, purity and truth of his words, man has given way to hatred, greed and violence.

Because man has been deaf to the principles and precepts laid down by God in the past, in this present Avataric form I observe Silence. You have asked for and been given enough words-it is now time to live them. To get nearer and nearer to God you have to get further and further away from “I”, “my”, “me”, and “mine”. You have not to renounce anything but your own self. It is as simple as that, though found to be almost impossible. It is possible for you to renounce your limited self by my Grace. I have come to release that Grace.

I repeat, I lay down no precepts. When I release the tide of Truth which I have come to give, men’s daily lives will be the living precept. The words I have not spoken will come to life in them.

I veil myself from man by his own curtain of ignorance, and manifest my Glory to a few. My present Avataric Form is the last Incarnation of this cycle of time, hence my Manifestation will be the greatest. When I break my Silence, the impact of my Love will be universal and all life in creation will know, feel and receive of it. It will help every individual to break himself free from his own bondage in his own way. I am the Divine Beloved who loves you more than you can ever love yourself. The breaking of my Silence will help you to help yourself in knowing your real Self.

All this world confusion and chaos was inevitable and no one is to blame. What had to happen has happened; and what has to happen will happen. There was and is no way out except through my coming in your midst. I had to come, and I have come. I am the Ancient One.

— Meher Baba

1943

1956

a photo of a painting by karl gallagher of Meher Baba's Samadhi (tomb shrine)
located at Meherabad, Ahmednagar, India

♣♣♣

Ben Smith

2011-04-14T20:49:00.009+10:00

≈◎◎◎

A Review by Catfish McDaris

Horror Sleaze Trash

by Ben John Smith

Horror Sleaze Trash is beautifully done 110 page hardcover book of poems by Ben John Smith. Simply put it is a loaded bazooka that fits nicely in your hands and fires round after round, guaranteed to knock down anything that moves. Ben is from Melbourne Australia, so his writing gives an insight into his country. He works construction, drinks with his mates, is true to his woman, and likes Elvis Presley. Ben runs one of the top “anything goes” on line literary and art zones at horrorsleazetrash.com. The poems in Horror Sleaze Trash, his second hard bound collection are each a bit different examining life under a poetic microscope and exposing it in many brilliant ways. In “Chump” the poem has a poet explaining to his woman (as all poets must do at some time with their loved ones) why most of his non-writing work mates won’t buy his books, but will blow loads of cash on drink and horse races. At the end of this poem he ends up sitting in the rain with a kangaroo with a broken leg until the cops show up to shoot it. Sadness made its debut in this poem, but there are plenty of happy ones and head shakers also. Words of too much drink, old men described perfectly, vaginas, sweaty dicks, folks going to church, Henry Miller, a black fella with lice, a dude that shits like a drainpipe in a thunderstorm. Ben John Smith writes as all educated men do or as Gary Snyder said “deeducated” which is uncivilized and barbaric. He’s well read and influences of Bukowski, the Beatniks, Travis Bickle, Joseph Conrad, and Galatians from the Bible appear, but Ben’s got an original voice and shows no fear. In “Foreskin” he compares a bulldog on ice cream to sticking his dick in a beer bottle. Included are three poems titled “Shaving My Balls Pt.1, 2, 3” and they end in a query to askjeeves.com about what to do about itching testicles. Australian English is a bit different from American English, which is refreshing and makes this book that much better. The slick cover by (ths) is the nicely shaped rear view of a near nude lady before a wall of graffiti. There’s a cool photo of Ben at end of the book standing in front of the Liberated X Bookshop and ladies, he’s easy on the eyes. I wholeheartedly recommend buying this book, you won’t be sorry.

◈◈

Purchase Information:

www.horrorsleazetrash.com

Ben John Smith

PO Box 806

Tullamarine, 3049

Victoria,

AUSTRALIA

ISBN 978-1-4467-1427-0

◈◈

Hey Guido mate,

Ahh thats a shame about . . .

but anyway love yr blogo

I have attached an image, if its okay let me know.

below are 4 poems from the book. Ben

Sea Shells in my Shit

It's my sister's going away party.

I eat a handful of sea shells

from a bottle on top of the toilet.

I want something to remind me of her.

I was drunk

and they were only very

small

but each mouthful

hurt my throat.

I swallowed them one at a time

very drunk,

half-expecting to vomit them up.

But I didn’t.

For the next few days I shit sea shells.

Thinking of her

when I stare at my turd.

Beautiful

spiral and round sea shells

floating in my shit,

like an island on the beach.

I sneak outside and have a cigarette.

Life always turns out

the way it should.

---

Hear What You Want to Hear

Deliberating another bottle

of wine

I ask her if we

can sleep in tomorrow

as late as possible.

She wakes up

from her sleep on the couch

and says,

“Somewhere over the rainbow?”

It's playing on the

television.

I say,

“What, you mean

like the song?”

"Yeah,"

she says,

"something like that."

Then,

the bottle cracks

like a roar

of quiet

thunder.

---

My Monroe

She doesn’t want

what she's

got.

Doesn't want

to just stand there

and look

smoking hot.

Doesn't want to be

a wallflower.

Not just a pretty face.

She tells me this

while I sit on the couch

and sip at

another beer.

Probably the 13th

for the night.

I say,

“So you want me to

be like Bruce Willis

in Unbreakable?”

Pretending like

I'm anything more

than a bloke with a

shit head

and dreams of

being

remembered.

It's the beer talking

and I'm being

a little too honest

about it all.

We have a big fight

and

she smashes a glass.

In the morning we

cuddle

in a rainbow-sheeted

bed.

And I tell her

I think she

is just like Monroe.

I put my hands

into her silk

underpants

and tell her

she has a

pretty pussy.

She laughs and

tells me to write

an extremely

sad poem

and end

with those words.

She has

such a very

pretty pussy.

---

War Pig

War was perhaps

the best thing

to happen in this world.

It killed the falseness,

the pretence,

the immaturity

of love

in the modern sense.

In the sense without war.

It gave passion and

purpose,

and shadowed all the other

madness

of first dates and

“get me a chicken

sandwich”

quarrels.

It made

love worthwhile,

not the fickle

and intangible

show bag

it is today.

I wish war was

more plentiful.

It gave us

genuine life,

in all of its

death.

◈◈

BIO: Ben John Smith is a melbourne based dude

who wants to break into the world of horror and porn,

he pretends like he is a genius.

His blog is found here - www.horrorsleazetrash.blogspot.com

◈◈◈

Valli Poole

2011-03-01T22:23:00.010+11:00

◈◈◈

elizabeth st melbourne from the flinders st station building, 1920s

◈

Melbourne writer Valli Poole

photo by Rosie Hingston

I CANNOT HATE YOU AMERICA (2003)

I cannot hate you AMERICA

For you are alive in the culture of criticism

You produced BRANDO

WOODY GUTHRIE and the on-the-road trend of KEROUAC

I could sway to the jazz cool soul music of MILES

Cringe and then revel in the depths of DOROTHY PARKER or LOWELL

I cannot hate you AMERICA

When you throw your CLINT EASTWOOD arms

Around my tastes and hold me in close loving embrace

My laughter for MARX BROTHERS antics

Then losing myself in the flowered vulva of a GEORGIA O’KEEFFE

Tempered with the fevered hand of a JACKSON POLLOCK

I cannot hate you AMERICA

I dream of living in the CHRYSLER BUILDING

Of meeting GERTRUDE STEIN with her moustached companion

In the kitchen of the WALDORF ASTORIA

I cry for the small hands of the rain by ee cummings

The SCORSESE mean streets of NEW YORK

The pathways of KATHARINE HEPBURN in CENTRAL PARK

The bullet death prediction of HUNTER S. THOMPSON

GINSBERG and the ever-present CORSO in CITY LIGHTS

And MILLER the king of BIG SUR and moreover

JUNE my beloved JUNE MILLER of the safety pin punk accessories

With ANAIS NIN holding her desolate body ravaged by old age

I cannot hate you AMERICA

Drawn to the train jumping machismo of NEAL CASSADY

Wretched for his CAROLYN

WOODSTOCK shock of the unhappy HENDRIX death

Dislocated JANIS JOPLIN

KISS unleashing the vinyl DESTROYER

Awakens me to sounds of METALLICA

ANNIE LEIBOVITZ captures the faces while

PATTI SMITH seizes MAPPLETHORPE in the world

Of BUKOWSKI barfly and women ugliness

Gravel-tongued TOM WAITS on the wild side of LOU

And DYLAN wails stop!

I cannot hate you AMERICA

But I HATE

The war with IRAQ

MOONLIGHT–FLIT (PAXTON STREET IN THE 1960s)

My single mum and I lived together alone when I was growing up. Mum worked in an office as a secretary and I was a latchkey kid. I use that term because I feel it defined my existence at that time in my life. Latchkey time on most schooldays was from 3 pm till mum returned home at 8 pm. Five hours, with no TV. I was not to be trusted - could not, would not play the game of being a good child. I had some major clashes with school, especially on the subject of my feral freedom-embracing nature.

I was the archetypal wild child who was not aware of consequences. “Bugger The Consequences” was the motto I lived by. It caused me much physical pain since mum was of the generation who thought nothing of thrashing children.

Mum was good at her job and she enjoyed a cigarette and a drink to clear away the issues of the working day. Sometimes she drank too much and that’s when I came off second-best. Life for me was acting-out and acting-up – what else could I do? My thoughts ran wildly to plans of escaping from school and mum’s clutches. I lusted after adventure and the freedom of being my own boss.

I was forced by these circumstances to become a subversive, deviant, anti-social creature. Oh, I was bright, but school posed no challenges for me. It failed to arouse my interest in its architecture, the teachers and the teachings. I was an alien to that society. Believe me when I say I tried to fit in. I tried to be good and I tried to be a better student. I was bright enough to realise that if I did as I was told my life would improve exponentially. The thing is, I had a deep seated lust for drama and I was enthralled, bewitched even by the power I had to create havoc in any way I could. I was cursed with red hair, a recessive gene which brings with it stereotyping in terms of how my behaviours were received. Some part of me revelled in this, and I felt compelled to play the role I was assigned. Upon reflection, I realise my behaviours were pretty tame, as least by today’s standards. I was a liar - had to be to save myself. Interrogations were so common in my life, deservedly so, I now see. My other great naughtiness was skiving off from school – playing truant, which was fabulous while it lasted.

I ran away from home only once, but the shadow of punishment was inevitable. A mate of mine and I had taken the day off. I'd changed into clothes stashed under a bush near home. I often did this when truant. (My mate made do with her school uniform). First we hit the local milk bar (big mistake) to buy cigarettes, they refused to sell them to us, bummer. Then we did some door knocking – Bob-a-Job was a lucrative way to make some cash in those days, although we had money because before I left home, I’d broken into my money box and taken the quite substantial amount of cash therein. I remember one job was cleaning the silverware – fantastic, the work not too hard and the money great. I also remember that the old lady who wanted the job done gave us both food and drink – this was the life.

The day drew towards evening. We bought a massive serve of fish and chips and headed off to devour them at Gardiners Creek. Night was falling, and we nestled in a large pipe near the Creek, which I now realise was a stormwater drain. The adventure ended very quickly as the dark came down and scared us, forcing us to run back to the trouble that would no doubt be waiting for us at home. My mate copped it good, but I was safe for a while longer. As a latchkey kid, mum was not home yet, so I acted as if nothing were out of the ordinary. I was eventually found out, but not for weeks. To this day I wonder why my friend’s mother did not contact mine and spill the beans.

As it turned out, the man in the milk bar had informed the school that two girls had tried to buy cigarettes, and they sent a letter home to mum. How did they know it was me you might ask? Because I was the only redhead in the whole wretched school! I intercepted a few of these notes, but it all caught up with me and the cack hit the proverbial fan.

Mum was livid! Whenever I did anything that was considered really bad she got angry, but for some reason I’ve never been able to fathom, I did not get a beating for this major transgression. I was habitually beaten, even for small things.

I remained at the same school for a few months more until I received the usual message from mum that it was time to leave. A ‘moonlight–flit’ was again the order of the day. These adventures were not new to me. Mum would give the signal a few days in advance and we would carefully pack up our meagre belongings and take flight into the night. It was not until I was older that I realised we left these rentals in this way because the rent was due and mum did not have the money to pay.

What I deemed at the time to be a harmless adventure had a major effect on my learning. The reality of my situation only sank in many years later when I was trawling through my history in a reflective moment. How can you receive a useful education going to half-a-dozen new schools in the one year? But at that time, I thought everyone must behave like this! I also believed that every child was fatherless, wondering what a father could possibly be. I did not see fathers when I visited friends after school. I now realise they were at work. The mothers of my friends were always at home. My mother was an unusual phenomenon in the late 1950’s and 1960’s. She worked for a living, and there was no dad.

I had grandparents and I called my grandfather ‘Dad’. My grandfather took up this position with relish. He was kind, but there were limits to his influence. There was just my struggling mum and I, doing a moonlight-flit along the streets of the 1960s, with no goodbye. Latchkey memories of Paxton Street, please let me back in to say goodbye.

GUILTY

Guilty

You did not call for help

You were stubborn

You were in trouble

What about pride mum?

Pride is useless mum!

Abandoned

The family of deserters

Yes

I own up mum

I did the wrong thing

It did not occur to me

You just let yourself slide

Into a slow degradation

A slow death mum

Why

You had to always do everything

The hard way

What was that all about?

Punishment

You hurt everyone none

More than yourself

You queen of pain

Drink

You put drinking before

Human contact and love

Drinking became more important than family

Taste

You said the drink got a grip

You said the drink held you

You said the taste was

Addictive

Perhaps there was no choice

Involved

You were a prisoner

Forgive

Yourself me all of those who did

Not read the signs

Who did not connect to the real desperado in you

Love

Is not deep enough for what I feel

You understand I know

We’ve talked since your death

Connecting

Through the dance of storms

The raging is powerful in afterlife

I know you understand you are

Free

To be you and no questions asked

You were not at home on earth

People failed you

Time

Is on your side

Can no longer hold you prisoner

Or run out

All is as it should be

grey cat

purrs

a diesel train rhythm

Dylan’s lyrics - profound

sometimes

challenging our thoughts

sometimes

there’s edginess, yeah

edginess

Dylan’s voice puts some people

on edge

Meditation garden she announced

What’s in a name?

It’s the place that presents its use

Or perhaps the mind changes and in changing

The space becomes part of the mind

A response of the mind to the space

Or the space to the creative spirit

The gardener reflects upon

A seemingly natural progression in her life

Meditation is in the open

Secrecy has no place here

Everything is exposed

In beauty, in love

Her mind in meditation

Becomes empty of the past

Order replaces confusion

She finds release

write on the moon

write on the sun

write on

I lived the paradox of growing up poor in Melbourne's posh areas. The rent was surprisingly cheap in those fine, old, conservative and stodgy suburbs.

And mum was an English emigrant with a taste for solid old-style Victorian houses.

I felt drawn to my city environment, and was forever escaping the confines of home through my bedroom window – into the streets and off to the Yarra River, to Herring Island for a swim and succulent yabbies to eat, then into the Botanic Gardens for a wander and a sleep. In my late teenage years I was still escaping, clothes stashed under a bush, then off with a friend through the urgent night to acid rock discotheques – Berties, or the Thumpin’ Tum.

In the 1970s chance led me through the inner city. Crashed a party in Fitzroy after a pub’n poetry reading – grew some wings then flew back home. This was a seemingly free/new/alive/edgy place with a pulse that sometimes frightened me to the core. Here my poetic aspirations, and my natural lust for knowledge were confirmed and stimulated. The writing’s flowed ever since. And into the now, my bed is a mattress on boxes of books – paradise.

I see my poet-self as a 'searcher' using writing as a way of making sense of the world and having a place in it. I aim to be confessional, with an antic turn of the larrikin wild child, forever escaping the confines of home through my bedroom window – into the streets and off to….

Thanks to Dave Ellison and Vera Di Campli San Vito for their feedback.

◈◈◈◈

karl gallagher

2011-03-01T15:24:00.019+11:00

◈◈◈

woman with a painting. 2002, karl gallagher

“A Flash Of Lighting In A Summer Cloud”

for Alison.

Terry

was the last time we were face to face
that shitty night in ‘71

when I was fetched to that big house
in the old money suburb?

we stood so close our bodies touched
our eyes inches apart
on a landing at the top of the stairs
at an open window

our eyes locked, for a moment
I was suddenly taken aback

I went out on the rooftop
where your wife sat at the far end
thirty feet above a brick courtyard
my oldest friend from art college days
I sat beside her and talked
of God knows what for what

seemed like an hour
then she smiled

aah fuck it

what does it matter now anyway?

this life is nothing more than a dream
a phantom reality
a flickering lamp in the night

◈

within months it all went mad for me
the days crumbled

old friends abruptly disappeared
the inner city Melbourne streets
had become chasms
that suddenly opened and closed

I was taken from the counter-culture scene
poems n paintings n Big Pink

those things
had to be set aside like a child’s playthings
other demands were made of me
older loyalties asked of me
a different season fated for me
to move among the densest shadows
right there on the midday Carlton streets
in front of everyone’s eyes
amidst everyday appearances
the disappearances

the treacheries
the killings
the mad-houses

the prisons
the living dead and the dead living
who could tell one from the other
everyday reality melted into dream
as effortlessly as sugar in tea

◈

I came out the other end of that decade alive
but broken and I thought unfixable
entered the eighties as a crazy drunken fool
talking gibberish after two beers

or standing at some bar arm in arm

with the phantoms of dead friends

deep in conversation

fuck it
what does it matter now
when I last saw you

2010

an earlier version was previously published on
http://collectedworks-poetryideas.blogspot.com/

◈

painting. 1984, karl gallagher

◈◈◈

Hugh Fox

2011-01-19T00:04:00.013+11:00

FROM THE EMAIL 23^rd June 2010

Karl,
Sounds great to me....

Let me send some poems along (some taken from THE COLLECTED POETRY OF HUGH FOX published by World Audience in 2008, others from the individual books themselves).
http://www.worldaudience.org/pubs_bks/HughPoetry.html

THE COLLECTED POETRY is 540 pages long...and that's only part of the story.....At the very end I'll send some I wrote last month in Brazil, in Portuguese, translated into English when I got back here.....
plus a few other recent ones.
Best,
Hugh

From 40 POEMS (Colecciõn Nuestro Tiempo, 1966):

Isdom
is
Accepting the inevitability of Moles and Paunches
Pressing the buttons that say
sun,
Avoiding the buttons that say
Bang.
Isdom is
Hating
The right kind of Spiders,
Knowing which alleys are for urinating
And which for love,
And where they
Sell the best
Chow Mein.

from EYE INTO NOW, Ediciones de la Frontera, L.A., 1967.

VEDANTA AND THE ERDGEIST

God un-God (matter)
Contentment    Dissatisfaction
Spirituality Materiality

Unholy,
   Finite,
   Not liking, wanting, accepting
   Now,
   The Me, the Mine, the Me-Word.
   Change,
   Thrash about,
   This is the path of perfection,
Into the room
the corer,
the closet,
the basement,
the cold, the cramped, hurt,
then
Explode ito duck ponds at dusk,
A row of eucalyptus
Sea, the channel birds,
The come and go of tides.

SOUL CATCHER SONGS
(Ediciones de la Frontera, 1967) --

Fog opaques the screams
and invisible snakes and ravens
become visible.
I paint snakes on my eye wall
and worship them.
Radioactivity deradioactivates
and the time-fugue precipitates out the
colloids of pollution.

Buriel frames circles the earth,
North Star descends
and South Star assumes
dominion.
Apocalypses have shuttered the moon
but plastic time-eyes
begin to circle in our veins,
our us-stuff energizes, and
we become the trajectory
of our beginnings.

Multiple acceleration breakthroughs
burn dichotomies of timewheels
and our outmost soundings
crack the crusts of eye-swirl expansions.
The nebulae of IS touch time-triggers
and our conjurings fulfill our
total activations, and still expand,
I am Coyote, Bear,
and all the metamorphoses of
TO BE.

THE HEADLESS CENTAURS: THEIR VOYAGE AND CONQUEST (Wormwood Review, 1968).

Quetzalcoatl-Tiki-Viracocha
sallies forth on the sunplain,
brandishing his war-axe
and God the Father,
lightning streaming from his palms,
raises his hands
and Qetzalcoatl-Tici-Viracocha
is stunned, stumbles to the
cloud edges and falls,
down,
in midfall extends his ars
which flower plumes
and arising he claps his wings
as the Spiritu Sanctus, black-bat winged,
its beak stained with blood,
swoomps down to meet him,
and when they touch the skies explode,
the clouds burn like dry grass and
Christ the Musketmaker takes aim,
but as Tepeyolohtli roars, the musket shatters
and Christ, raising up his punctured hands,
downs the world in his blood.
Santiago, patron of Cannons
orare pro obis
Arbitrator of Arquebuses,
orare pro nobis,
Master of the Crossbow,
orare pro nobis,
Forger of swords,
pickaxes and iron bars,
orare pro nobis,
Why pursue this war?
I am sorry to
have destroyed your cities
orare
and burned
pro
your people
nobis.

But I cannot, will not, leave; and even if I leave, or even if you
kill me, I will be replaced and the conquest will be accomplished,
because the destiny of the world is that
geometry shall destroy magic.

APOTHEOSIS OF OLDE TOWNE, Fat Frog Press, 1968.

Al Capone sitting in the first row crying
over Sierra's THE KINGDOM OF GOD
with autographed ($10,000 an autograph)
portraits of Washington, Lincoln and
William Hale Thompson in his wallet,
hears a twig crack in the sixth row and
drops to the floor as Old (Odd) Al Parson
starts throwing dynamite around like roses.

The Haymaket explodes,
and the four hanged innocents (November 12, 1887)
arise and sing the Cantata to the Gods of Oats, Rye,
Barley and Corn, written by Clarence Darrow in 1899, the
year he faked them out in court on the Thomas Crosby
trial, then the Union Stockyards explode ad out of the
blazing eyes of the stampeding cattle the Chicago auditorium
flowers into being and Mary Garde moves into the final pelvic
affirmations of the Dance of Seven Veils....

OLDETOWNE IS VAPORIZED
the geometrical inflexibility of the too wide,
too carefully attended-to profit-margin
boundary gone,
rigidity softens, bends,
   and all planned straightness swells
   splits   flowers spreads...
ORGANIC
INORGANIC FUSION WILL
GEOMETRIC FORM
ENERGY-CAPSULE
LIBERATING WILL    SEED-GERM
   AND THE APOTHEOSIS BEGINS.

We begin with UNITY GREEN SPACE GREEN EYE GREEN MIND,
PLAZA, PIAZZA, PLACE, PAVILION....
THE STOCK EXCHANGE BUILDING,,
expanded
exaggerated
brought to its limit
then passed
new limits created
then passed, past them again
limits after limits, afterlimits ...

I'm warning you,
push ERA/Ego Reorientation Activation
and the whole unit
hushes to a surf of green wilk chiffon
King (shaggy) Kong....

I need you blind and burnt
   orbis mundi
and the f(l)ight
across the blue world had
(prairies to hills, humps to mountains, drop down to
sand, to waves, to water, waiting)
begun.

ALMAZORA 42, Laughing Bear Press, 1982.

St. Martin

I buy a green Loden (Austrian) coat
in Madrid for 2,000 Pesetas
(half price), bring my 10 year old
raincoat with zip-in (and out)
fake fur lining back to Valencia with me
to give to this legless beggar on
the pedestrian bridge close to
my place, who I give a little money to
every day,
only wen I bring the coat over for him,
he's not there,
and it's not just one day
he's not there,
it's weeks, and there's no one else
around to ask what's
happened to him.

SONG OF CHRISTOPHER ,Clock Radio, 1987.

Writing these poems
becomes self-flagellation,
at the same time peoples
the vacuum with sparks of
his presence, please, God,
give him back to me for
just a handful of years
and I will give you a witness,
like Peter, Paul, Augustine,
Aquinas, Luther, Loyola, Wesley,
give him to me and I will give him
back to you shining with yourself,
not for me but for HIM,
to unfold the folded in the light of
Your being, so he can become what for all
eternity (in the madness of your pans)
he always was...and let me in my own
last years, move at last from JOB to
REVELATION.

TIME AND OTHER POEMS, Presa:S:Press, 2005.

BACK

Going back, back, back to the clouds and the
cypresses and smoke, trees, mouldering twigs
and edge-of-dusk bats, skunk-smells, wild turkeys,
everything wild, primal, before guns, torahs,
mosques, in the beginning was the sky and you
and I
evolving into the pre-buddhistic-
buddhistic
everything
NOW.

GESANGVOLL/SONGFUL , Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2010.

WISHING

Wishing none of us had ever left
the little Chi-town village called Chatham,
weddings, newborns, going to the same
sacred school asour newborns, every
Sunday Howyadoin? Mass and all the
high/low holidays, a little coffee-time,
arks, job-talk, politics-talk, stint and
prostate/uterine cancer-talks, clothes,
films, funeral asses, cemetery flowers,
the next generation(s) moving into the
same (spruced-up) Chatham village.

THE HAIR

The hair that never greys and breasts,
eyes, lavia, legs that never autumn, that
snow that spring melts every day, the word-hands
every day (byting) new found lands of daily
revelation that Homer, Tchekov, Verlaine it from
a forever deathlessness.

===============

The recent Brazil poems

DEPOIS

   Depois de anos asexuais a primeira vez que a vejo
   nua, oi corpo inteiro cheio de veias enormes, ela
   parece cento vinte em vez de 64, mas não importa,
   eu duzentos, já 92.4% morto, mas ambos ainda
   temos Nutella, Nescafé, mamão, um banheiro, coca,
   as caras dos netos/netas, as noticias sobre o ódio
   voando atraves do mundo, em todos lugares menos
   (vento, uns momentos de cuva, nossa Senhora de
   Fátima acordando na televisão)
aqui.

AFTER

   After years of asexuality the first time I see her
   nude, her entire body full of enormous veins,
   she seems more like a hundred and twenty instead
   of 64, but what’s the difference, I’m two hundred
   already, 82.4% dead, but we both still have Nutella,
   Nescafé, papaya, a bathroom, coca, the faces of
   the grandsons and granddaughters, the news about
   the hate flying across the world everywhere except
   (wind, a few moments of rain, Our Lady of Fatima
   waking up on the television)
   here.

=

   IGUATEMI

   Um senhor que não conhecemos aparece, nós
   tomando cafe e casadinho (chocolate e leite
   doce solido) em frente de Ponto Frio (lojia de
   televisão) e Cavalira (ropa masculina fina, fina,
   fina) ele para, “Tudo bem?,” “ Tudo bem,”
   “Voce é...?,” “Jesus Criso,” olhando a suas
   mãos, nada de cicatrizes, “Nada de cicarizes
   nas mãos?,” “Tudo curado fazem milhares de
   anos...e o tempo nas não conta!,” “E para nós?,”
   a voz muda para mim todo o shopping “Meu
   pai, eu e o meu irmão fizemos tudo, mais voces
   melhoram tudo tanto , nunca vi tanto luxo, eu o
   Jardim de Eden ao lado de seu mundo computorizado,
   nem su, meu pai ou irmão fizemos nada tão
   milagroso, e a comida daqui e, possivilene, é
   tempo de casar-me com uma mulher dessas com
   pernas de espadas, tetas devacas, olhos de buracos
   pretos entre as estrelas...començar não de novo mas
   tudo construido sobre a realidade daqui...,” de
   repente nos manda um beijo e desaparece, um
   momento na tela da televisão (Sansung) na janela
   de Ponto Frio
e

A Deus

   IGUATEMI

   A man who we don’t know appears, we’re
   having coffee and casadinhos (chocolate with
   solid sweet milk), in front of Ponto Frio (a
   TV store) and Cavalira (fine, fine, fine men's
   clothes), he stops “Everything OK? “Everything
   OK,” “You are?” “Jesus Christ,” looking at his
   hands, no scars, “No scars on the hands?,” “everything
   healed thousands of years ago...and time doesn’t
   count for me!,” “And for us?,” “The mute voice
   fills the whole mall, “My father, me and my brother
   created everything, but you people improved everything
   so much, I never saw such luxury, me and the Garden
   of Eden next to your computerized world, neither I
   or my father or my phantom brother ever made anything
   so miraculous, and the food here, I’m going to
   reincarnate myself in order to eat the sweets here, and
   its positively time to marry a woman with those sword
   legs, cow breasts, eyes of black holes among the stars...
   begin again but everything based on the reality here..,”
   and suddenly he throws us a kiss and disappears, a
   moment on the TV screen (Sansung) in the window
   of Ponto Frio

   and

   God bye

=

   AMAR

   Amar as caras na televisão, os computadores,
   drogas, onibuses, as igrejas, aviões, carros,
   as jóias, os orgasmos, cafe, cerveja, os tambores
   e guitarras, cantando-gritando, os radios a noite
   toda, o dia todo, o céu combustivel-electrico,
   os morros, o mar, todos as florestas já invisíveis,
   inaudíveis.

TO LOVE

   To love the faces on the TV, computers, drugs,
   buses, the churches, planes, cars, jewelry, orgasms,
   coffee, beer, drums and guitars, singing-screaming,
   radios all night long, the whole day, the electric-
   furnace sky, the hills, the sea, all the forests already
invisible, inaudible....

=

PROCURAR
   Gritar-cantar
   Policia lutando contra as drogas
   O êxtase sexual
   As drogas mesmas
   Pistolas & Motocicletas

   TO GET
Scream-sing
   Cops fighting against drugs
   Sexual ecstasy
   The drugs themselves
   Guns and motorcycles

   =

   EVITAR

   O silêncio
   Passarinhos
   A solidão --a natureza natural
   Furtos de veículos
   Unindo-se com o divino amanhecer

   TO AVOID

   Silence
   Birds
   Solitude -- natural nature
   Car thefts
   Merging into the divine dawn

=

   OS DOIS DEUSES LUTANDO

   O quase silencio total de Cheia de Graça, o Espirito
   Santo, uma neblina que quase anula tudo
   e si mesmo, o filho agora voando atraves
   universos inteiros meditando “Devo começar
   tudo de novo” versus “Os leões divinos carnivalescos
   samba-rugindo,devorando ttodas as plantas/sementes
   divinas andinas que abrem as portas do universo
   rugindo, contraçao versus expansão, quem
   ganha aqui, os centros nucleares de terminar tudo
   amanhã...”

   THE TWO GODS FIGHTING

   The almost total silence of Full of Grace, the Holy
   Spirit, a mist that almost wipes out everything and
   himself, the son now flying across entire universes
   thinking “Must I begin everything again” versus
   “The divine carnival lions samba-bellowing,
   devouring all the divine Andean plants and seeds
   that open the doors of the bellowing universe itself,
   contraction versus expansion, who wins here, the
   nuclear centers terminating everything tomorrow.”

=

   FINALMENTE

   Finalmente ao lado do mar eterno, os morros atras
   de nós cheios de verdejancia florestal, o ar cheio de
   urubus rodeando a gente tomando, comendo,
   falando, eu falo com um, “Eu sou um agente astral
   de uma planeta ao lado de Venus, A Deusa de Amor...
   e as vozes celestais me falaram dizendo ‘E tempo de casar-se
   e começar uma família..,’” ele toca a barriga de sua esposa
   “Ela já esta gravida, uma filha...de onde vem voce?,”
   “Da Universidade de Michigan State,” “Interesante, passei
   um ano lá no departmento de Portugues...sou poeta....,”
   lhe cumprimento, depois le dou o meu e-mail, ele me da o

          seu...vamos ver onde vai isso, com certeza não existe mais
   nenhum senhor poeta aqui que conhece
           East Lansing, Michigan,

                                 de tudos os lugares do mundo.

   FINALLY

   Finally next to he eternal sea, the hills behind us
   full of crazy green forest, the air full of vultures
   flying around the people drinking, eating, talking,
   I talk to one of them, “I’m an astral agent from a planet
   next to Venus, the Goddess of Love...and sometimes
   celestial voices talk to me saying ‘It’s time to get married
   and begin a family...,” he touches his wife’s stomach
   “She’s already pregnant with a daughter...where are
   you from?,” “Michigan State University,” “Interesting,
   I spent one year there in the Portuguese department...I’m
   a poet..,” we shake hands , I give him my e-mail, he gives
   me his...let’s see where this goes, for sure there’s no other
   poet around here who knows East Lansing, Michigan
   of all the places in the world.

=

Não

   Não quero nunca voltar ao meu planeta natal
   mas queroi submerge-me no mar de camarões e
   tubarões aqui, voltar a ser mar mesmo, liquido
   infinito que escuta e evita o munto terrenal inteir

   I don’t want to ever go back to the planet where I
   was born, but want to submerge myself in the sea
   of shrimps and sharks here, become the sea itself,
   eternal liquid that listens to and avoids the whole
   earthly earth.

=

   TUDO MUNDO

   Todo mundo com sua cocaina e crack, eu com Nutella,
   mais e mis a lingua volvendo a ser penis, a colher
   de paraiso achocolatado, a vagina fresca da Virgem
   Maria (Costa), minha esposa caindo juntos através do céu
   chocolate, boca a boca, o resto do mundo/os corpois
   eterno vazio.

   EVERYBODY

   Everyone with their cocaine and crack, me with Nutella,
   my tongue more and more becoming a penis, the spoon
   chocolatized paradise the fresh vagina of Virgina Maria
   (Costa), my wife, falling together through the chocolate
   heavens, mouth to mouth, the rest of the world/bodies
   eternal emptiness.

=

   CADA DIA

   Milhares de orgasmos cada dia, nas praias, nas
   igrejas, nas vaginas miando felinamente, “Agora
   o universo inteiro so tem mais uma hora, podemos
   mudar-nos para oi presente divinamente cada dez minutos,
   subir as montanhas de areia de minhas pernas
   siliconizadas, as tetas são picos onde oi sensualismo
   espera os fieis e depois os olhos, o cabelo, as caras
   selváticas pristinas.

   EVERY DAY

   Thousands of orgasms every day, on the beaches,
   in the churches, in the vaginas that are felinely
   meowing, “Now the entire universe only has one
   hour left, we can move divinely into the present
   every ten minutes, climb the sand mountains of
   my siliconized legs, the tits are peaks where
   sensuality awaits the faiful, and afterwards the
   eyes, the hair, the pristine jungle faces.

=

   VISITANDO

   Eu fiz tudo isso? Arvores com folhas flamejantes
   sem chamas, Hibisco, agora lembro mais ossos em chamas,
   morros, quais são os seres que se atrevem a construir
   casinhas pequenasde madeira le, vemk a chuva e tudo pode
   cair, as árvores, milhares de tipos diferentes, e
   vem e vão as chuvas, outras lugares (não aqui) tudo
   deserto, e a gente preta, branca, crianças por todos
   lado, e esqueço o que é “fazer amor,” “fazer
   criancas,” “fazer dormir...matar...morrer...,” bem --
   o que se tornar a ser -- o que? Preciso de um dicionário
   universal, os animais falndo tambem, mas o que dizem?
   Bombas nucleares, porque criar radioatividade?
   Possivelmenteé tempo de començar de novo, dar aos
   angos corpos, criar um sol novo, nada de Eden, filhos
   crucificados, doi principio ate o fim só beatitude, e
   vamos esquecer o assunto de UM FIM

   I made all this? Trees with flaming leaves without
   flames, Hibiscus, now I remember more flaming bones,
   hills, who are the beings that dare construct little wood
   houses there, the rain comes and everything can fall
   down, trees, thousands of different types, rain comes
   and goes, other places (not here) totally desert, and blacks,
   whites and children all over the place, I forget what it
   means to “make love,” “make children,” “to sleep, kill,
   die..,” OK, and to become what? I need a universal
   dictionary, the animals talking too, but what do they say?
   Nuclear bombs, why create radioactivity? Maybe it’s
   time to start over, give the angels bodies, create a new
   sun, no more Edens or crucified sons, from the beginning
   to the end only beautitude, and let’s forget the business of
   AN END.

=

TUDO

   Tudo “normal” aqui, laranjas, goiabas,
   os cheiros, chiqueiros, folhas, passarinhos,
   a chuva, os morros, desenho, desenho, desenho,
   cada folha diferente, com cada tronco, cada galho
   diferente, tanto desejo de ampliar, embelezar a
   vida, porque incluir morte?

   EVERYTHING

   Everything “normal” here, oranges, guava, the
   smells, pigstys, leaves, birds, rain, the hills, design,
   design, design, every leaf different, with every trunk,
   every twig different, so much desire to amplify
   and beautify life, why include death?

= = =

Recent Others

FAMILY

What I need most,
in the midst of Torah
scrolls, blessed wine, onegs,
mystic candles, remembering
the dead, strolling into ancient
sanity,
the sense, anywhere, anytime
meeting one of us and the
immediate sense not just
of family, but the world as
erratic, at the same time,
ordered brotherhood,
sisterhood, fatherhood,
motherhood
fun-ness.

SOMETIMES

Sometimes, wandering around in Chicago,
Brooklyn, Detroit, Gary, L.A., Lansing, I wonder if
the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves
ever happened, my cousins in Chicago telling
me “Don’t go to the south side where you used
to live, man....you’ll be a deadman fast, man...,”
OK, and then I come into class and if I close my
eyes I can’t tell the difference between blacks
and whites, the accent-jargon gone, future and
past surrounding me like time-travel on a daily
basis depending on big WHERES and HOWS.

Day- instead of Noct-urne

Slavic blonde, watch out for those
shoulders getting burnt, cutting the
dead peonies from their stalks,
two backyard grammar schooler
girls fooling around with a basketball
and a fancy backyard hoop attached
to the garage, a skinny law-school type
sitting on his front steps, a laptop on
his lap, talking on a cell phone,
my old Lebanese pal out watering the
roses, front yard half a block away from
my hospital, up to mid-seventies after
an upper sixties rain-week, not a cloud
in the sky, and you’re gonna tell me
that all the bird-claws, fingernails, brains,
tongues, seeds and eggs, bowels and
bones are all just “by chance,” a sense
of eternality in the air, as if everything
around me would be around here just
as is,
forever.

TIME TRAVEL

Time travel drifting over remote farm country,
not one house, barn, silo less than a hundred
and twenty years old, thinking about Civil,
Revolutionary, World War, Atomic War whats
as the winter wheat turns harvestable and the
corn is up to my ankles, deer here and there,
grouse, a couple of redbirds, turkeys, even one
peacock, wanting to throw down an anchor from
my balloon and stay, stay, stay…

= = =

HUGH FOX

   ALIEN

Czech potato pancake grandma in
   a jak se mas world, school-surrounded
   Irisher nuns with solid stone brogues,
   violin beginning age 6, P. Marinus Paulson,
   also a composer (educated in England)
   who would teach me “Let’s look at chords,
   the key of C, the key of....let’s play around
   with b-flat, left-hand chords, right-hand
   melody, let the keyboard talk to you...,”
   Latin Mass, Italian pastor at San Francisco
   de Paulo church, concerts every week,
   immersions in Bach, Beethoven, Vaughan
   Williams, and then German, French, Italian,
   marrying a Peruvian, months in the Peruvian,
   Bolivian, Chilean Andes, a year in Valencia,
   Spain, another studying Latin American literature
   at the University of Buenos Aires, learning
   Quechua, the language of the Incas, then
   Maya, the Art Institute in Chicago, galleries
   in Paris, Florence, Rome, learning some
   Romanian, writing a book on French film
   after ten years of immersion every night,
   even relating to grandfather homesteaders
   out in Montana, ten years in L.A., two years
   in Caracas....married thirty years to a Brazilian,
   two trips a year to the island of Santa Catarina
   in southern Brazil. O que posso fazer?

= = =

Bibliography:
If I was to include Fox's biblio here it would literally be a seventy page word doc.
A good idea would be to Google his name.

But a better idea would be to get hold of his book:
THE COLLECTED POETRY OF HUGH FOX published by World Audience in 2008

http://www.worldaudience.org/pubs_bks/HughPoetry.html

http://www.worldaudience.org/publications.html

= = =

Drowning like Li Po in a River of Red Wine - - a Review by Charles Plymell

2010-12-19T12:58:00.010+11:00

◈◈

charles plymell, photo by phil scalia

From the shadows of a home town always rising from ashes with eternal fog lying in them like a heavy spirit comes... The Frisco Kid! An appreciation by Charles Plymell

Drowning like Li Po in a River of Red Wine by A D Winans is a book to be proud of. It’s a pick-it-up-random poem book that gets right to it, with selected poems organized chronologically from past publications, 1970-2010. One might think that 364 pages of verse (and colophon page) would be a lot to take in, but it is not. Everything is all right, like the years went by, exactly right, bringing it all back home. San Francisco was home to us all. She opened her doors to everyone, alone, weary, and timeless... from Jack Black to Jack Micheline. Everyone got a taste of that home, but Winans is the only one I’ve met who was born there. He must share her coiffed comeliness and spiritual highs, splashing her nacreous pearls from deep black water splayed into the fog of love, the mist from her eddies pressing back the lusty egalitarian thrust until it obeys. It always seemed a small town because it’s vertical, on different planes, each neighborhood seething with scenes. During my limited tenure, it seemed I lived on every street, if not neighborhood, or knew someone who was in this or that scene. And floating through those different planes were layers to its natural beauty that gave off the essence of love but could also sink down darkly and cruel as hell. Through Winans’s eyes one can live those streets again, like a Bob Kaufman looking out the window of a Muni bus in silent study of all action passing on her streets to the last window-framed panorama.

The book too, is exactly right, as a book should be made. The poems aren’t tucked in as a filler to the pretentious pages of slick magazines; they are presented in the best selection of typeface, the poems placed correctly on the page. Li Po would have approved. It has the right feel, the right dimension, and the right geography to go back to and turn the pages like wrapping dreams.

Winans and I are about the same age, and we both discovered the Beats in the late 1950s. We both had unconventional childhoods. My best times were in the fifties. We heard the McCarthy hearings in real time. We developed a similar political philosophy somewhere between Li Po and Upton Sinclair. Like most poets in the Bay Area grown into the sixties there was politics in our poetry. He served time in the service. Mine in the ROTC ... a Clinton/Bush deferment. I arrived in his old middle class neighborhood, the Haight, as the decade of the sixties began, before the kids took over the streets from little Russian ladies. He knew poets I did and the bars they read in, and the magazines they published in. San Francisco was constantly changing, sometimes overnight.

I didn’t know Winans in San Francisco but met him later at an Independent publishing event, “Small Press.” We took part in some of their organizations. We learned how the game was played and over the years watched it change into the “Politburo of Poetry” as all things government do with friends rewarding friends. Over the years, we’ve corresponded and shared our views on poetry, political scams and awards. We spot the phonies and neither of us much cares for labels. We’ve seen “revolutionary” poets & middle class kids get permission to protest. We’ve seen famous poets howl against Moloch and the government only to receive several thousands of government money and keep the Beatnik flack, not black, flying at the landmark tourist bookstore in North Beach. We’ve seen hypocrisy in all flavors in all the poets the city spawned. I’ve often wondered how he sees the invasion on his home turf.

My biggest regret is that I wasn’t with him when the great jazz clubs flourished in the days of Billie Holliday that he remembers in his poems, or the great blues legends like Johnny Lee Hooker. Yes, the times were always changing there. By the time Pam and I went to Mike’s Pool Hall with Ferlinghetti (Pam was underage), the GoGo girls were dancing in every joint. I got to see Sonny Rollins at an embarrassing two-drink minimum gig in North Beach when he was either too sick or too broken to wail. Yes, the city was built on Rock n’ Roll, Fillmore and the Avalon et. al. But the poets knew that it was really re-built, again and again. It all comes back in the works of Winans. It comes back as subtle and real as Bo Diddley’s words at the Avalon, a thriving line-in the street psychedelic hall bringing us the new sounds and lights. His words haunt me when he came to play to a handful, this “unknown” who said “and here I am now playing for you. Mercy Mercy Mercy.” I think I know what he meant. You will get the full history with Winans’s poems. They tell it real. San Francisco was always home to the outcasts from any origin. They became family. The moon on the water beckoning for all comers. The sun over the hills and bridges all bringing commerce, ships going to war. Friends and families living and dying. A changing city like the long nights and sunny days. My sister died in that Chinese Lantern of the Western Moon.

Jack Micheline came by to rally me to read and bring the “word” to the people. I had a good job on the docks and was starting a family. Besides, I said to him, how would you compete with the fame of sensational book trial no matter the poet and poet storeowner were (out of town) and let the Japanese-American clerk who sold the book stand trial, just in case it backfired. The days of Life and Time are over. They just want the tourist version. Micheline left dejected, but hopefully to Gino and Carlos bar to have a drink with Winans and revitalize the words again. Or the Anxious Asp to hear poets insult the poets from Cleveland in their hippy drag. It was like that. It could be a tough town. We didn’t walk to the docks with Longshoreman hooks in our belts for nothing. The town was built on many layers of compassion and destruction, giver and taker, almost religiously. I wonder sometimes how a poet would live all his life there. Probably by writing lines to William Wantling, an example of the many poets who walked the streets of his town: “Looking into the cracked lips of sorrow/I walk the harsh streets of tomorrow.” (Pg. 297) Pick it up and open it anywhere. But to really find out how the poet down South who wrote about the poet up North and what happens with the poets from the East who come to the West and drank at the bars in Winans’s home town, you’ll just have to open the book in a river of red wine on pg 183.

◈◈

some links for charles plymell and his early publishing ventures in san francisco in the early sixties
http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/charles-plymell-and-now/

http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/charles-plymell-and-now/archive-of-charles-plymells-the-last-times/

◈◈

And a review - by Neeli Cherkovski - can be found on here:

http://www.bigbridge.org/BB15/index3.html

here's a piece of it

Among A.D.’s direct antecedents are Jack Micheline and Bob Kaufman, two outlaw literary characters, even among the outlaw beats. From them, the poet was inspired to define his poetic stance from the power of ordinary speech. . . [h]e began to hone a keen and original sense of observation, a matter-of-factness standing in direct contrast to literary trends of the 1970s and beyond. There is a theme of opposition in these poems -- an opposition to literary standard-bearers. This is evidenced dramatically in an elegy for Kenneth Patchen . . . “where were they when you lay in your deathbed/crippled and dying/where were they when you lay starving and broke?” . . .

The poems dive deep into the past -- memories -- hidden moments or scenes on the raucous streets of San Francisco’s North Beach . . .

old men and women leaving behind their sins

dressed in simple hats and death black shawls

bowing to the holy eternal mumble

of dead saints dressed in gold thirsting

for the wine that is denied them

This rich language hovers on the edges of the surreal. The poet floods us with finely-drawn portraits. They draw on time bumping into time, rip-tides of images, observation torn out of pathos.

the heads of the masses staring always

staring searching for paradise

fat and content smoking tijuana slims

stone faced magicians. . .

◈◈

Neeli Cherkovski is an applauded poet, critic, memoirist and literary biographer.

http://www.neelicherkovski.com/

cherkovski, photo by jannie dresser

◈◈