Dancing Naked On Bukowki’s Grave

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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

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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

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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

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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

 

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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

 

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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."
 
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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.

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Ben Smith

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  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.

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Purchase Information:

www.horrorsleazetrash.com

Ben John Smith

PO Box 806

Tullamarine, 3049

Victoria,

AUSTRALIA

ISBN 978-1-4467-1427-0

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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.

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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

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