The moon before the Ginsberg morning. Negro skies before a christian dawn My voice itches for cigarettes and Tibetan hymns. I want the circuit of Blake, Whitman, Ginsberg and Dylan To course through my limbs
Electrocuting my fears and lame desires for acceptance. I want to feel holier than a cantor Or a Muslim call to prayer. I want fuzzy peaches where my balls are And a giant fist of a cock thrusting upwards
Between my legs I will infiltrate the dreams of daytime sleepwalkers With hummingbird vibrations Of sound, soul and spirit.
I will wait to grab a discount Lyft Neal will be at the crazy wheel And no fucking GPS For Moloch to deviate our destination From paradise To damnation.
The Naked Allen Ginsberg in Morocco image that will ironically get me banned on 2025 social media. Nothing has changed from 1955, same censorship same McCarthyites
Masturbation is no sin In fact, it’s the most marvelous thing It will ease your stress Fulfill your life There is no need to sacrifice What every body finds so nice Masturbation is no sin it makes our lives worth living in It shines you hair cure your stutter It makes you feel like no other Person in the world can harm you now When you stroke yourself so close and tender. Masturbation is no sin Pay no heed to those who say other For they would pervert both nature and each other. Maturbation is no sin In fact it makes our lives worth living in.
Any time of day of night Is just as right for loving your self like another Do not worry about the mess you’ll leave Tissues and towels suffice, I believe. There is no shame in loving who you are Or touching your self like a falling star After all we are all who we are And loving one self is the start of loving each other from afar Masturbation is nothing In fact it is the most marvelous sin. Now, touch yourself in loving pride! For you are the center of all you abide.
The Mass market digital edition is out in April, but I’m only signing the $54.95 limited edition. $34.95 for the cheap, print on demand edition out in April, 2025
Original cover by Norwegian Surrealist Painter
Katarina Anderssen
(Also available as a fine art print, signed and numbered by Katarina )
Original music and spoken word album composed by the magnificent Israeli Jazz composer Gilad Atzmon available in March for download, CD and Vinyl entitled The Broken Star, a musical and poetic indictment of the current state of Israel.
Album cover design by the designer, illustrator, comics artist, visual god Dave McKean. (Arkham Asylum, Sandman, Cages).
International signing and performance tour of Spoken Word and Live Music coming in the Spring of ’25
This is Art. Sample the Stone Soup:
Rumi’s Mirror the reflection of a reflection is your reflection. upon the mirrored surface of a pool, that is being slowly filled by the very source of the life you reflect upon
Now jump in the pool!
Music by Gilad Atzmon Digital Graphics by Mayssan
Modern Haiku A boy goes to school And tears his schoolmates apart With metal piercing bullets.
This is normal now.
Facing the Waves Waves are your faces Crashing in real time, Raising the tide Against your complacent shore.
Waves are your faces Curved towards you: White-bearded men, Relentlessly knocking on your front door
Reality, an unknown intruder Upon your inner core, Beats rhythmically, poetically, Drowning you in what you do not know.
Waves are your faces Melting into one and the other; Beating, imploring you, To open your locked front door
Waves are your faces Beating on your front door Eroding your discomforts Seeking to drown your inner core.
Beating senselessly, endlessly Against locked doors, Waves are abandoned faces Beating on your front door.
(Email info@themissionarts.com To be added to our pre-order list. order in January for a 99.50% discount!!) Look for it sweetheart, you ain’t seen anything like this before!
(Email: igor@themissionarts.com To be added to our pre-order list order in January 2025 for a 99.50% discount!!) Hey, No one does math the way we do!
Felix the Cat is an existential hero. He best embodies the bridge between modernity and Post Modern in the last century. Felix inspired a generation of leading French and German philosophers shortly after WWII. His magic bag of tricks played a large role in this inspiration. Felix the Cat was the model for Camus’s protagonist Meursault in his most widely read work The Stranger. Felix went on to inspire Sartre, Beckett and Martin Heidegger. He served as the personifying primary answer to the question. Heidegger poses this question in his seminal work Being and Time, ‘What is Being?’
Heidegger answered his own question with, ‘why Felix the Cat, of course; and his Magic Bag of Tricks, silly”.
Few people know that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle originates from his experiments with Felix. He repeatedly tried to put Felix in a box with a capsule of cyanide gas. Felix was able to elude death my virtue of his Magic Bag but nonetheless was still able to serve as the model for modern quantum physics. Without Felix, there could not have been a moonshot nor Musk’s Tesla automobile.
Dashiell Hammet’s famous existential hero/detective Sam Spade is said to be loosely based on Felix. Humphry Bogart spent weeks absorbing all of Felix’s cartoons. He did this in preparation for his cinematic portrayal of the existential sleuth. The sleuth is forced to choose duty over love. He eventually overcomes his own choices by using his bag of magic tricks.
Much of Samuel Beckett’s work is set inside of Felix’s bag and the playwrite was often overheard muttering under his breath “where’s my bag? Where’s my bag? I can write nothing with out my bag of magic tricks”.
In February 2025, the University of Heidelberg will be hosting its annual Felix the Cat academic conference. Felix scholars from around the world will present their papers on the cat and his impact on 20th-century thinking. The conference is entitled Felix’s Bag: Magic or Science?
As an internationally renown Magic Bag expert myself, I was invited to attend but unfortunately have a prior commitment to take a cat nap on the day. Inside my Magic Bag, of course. The conference is free and open to the public who are encouraged to attend with their own magic bags-of-tricks
prelude to the storm San Diego is a city-by-the-sea with a population of 5 million. It has spaghetti freeways numbered like 5, 8 and 805. These firmly establish the metropolis as a driving town. I grew up in San Diego in the 60s and 70s. We first rented an apartment in Point Loma named Loma Palisades. I attended Barnard Elementary School, which has since been converted into high priced condos, like everything of value in San Diego. Life was relatively laid back. The beach, particularly Ocean Beach, was close by. I began attending the early Comic con meetings in Ken Kruger’s science fiction, comics, and porn bookstore. My new friend Barry Alphonso joined me at the nerd-meets. The founder Shel Dorf would regularly give his moral sermons to us geeks, freaks, and comic book hounds.
I didn’t actually read comics at the time. I was kind of snobbish about them. However, my friends Barry and Bryan Smith did. They consumed comics ravenously. My parents didn’t give me an allowance. They were strict about where their kids spent their hard earned money. Science Fiction was another story. This genre I consumed like a dehydrated camel at an oasis. First Edgar Rice Burroughs and A Wrinkle in Time but soon it was Harlan Ellison, Theodor Sturgeon, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick (who I barely understood), Philip Jose Farmer, Kurt Vonnegut and then there was Ray Bradbury. Of all the fantasy, horror and SF authors I read, it was Bradbury who spoke deepest into my soul. I saw Bradbury as a kindred spirit. Along with Baudelaire, Poe, Rimbaud, Malarme and Zola who I also consumed with ravenous glee.
But Bradbury’s poetic novels forge my writing and poetry to this day. The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles, and the devastating Something Wicked This Way comes. These stories infected my dreams. I recall having vivid dreams of sitting next to the illustrated man. I also dreamed of being on the carousel of youth in Wicked and meeting the Martians on Mars. It was his short film “Dial Double 0” about an actual artificial intelligence (NOT that misnomer marketing term AI!), born in a phone box haunting a terrified man with phone calls that animated my imagination. That and the first series of Star Trek (yes, I am old enough to have seen the first series when it was broadcast, sitting next to my dad who was equally mesmerized by heroic space exploration. My actual dad and I bonded over Star Trek AND Ray Bradbury.
Deeply profound imagery, is what Bradbury delivered and my being the son of a painter, it was the paintings he put in my head that I could not get enough of. My father, a professor of Anthropology at SDSU, encouraged me to read. He had taught me how to read English. I learned Spanish first in a Costa Rican Catholic school. My father loved Science fiction, being a scientist and he reveled in the fact that I would empty the SF section of the downtown library every two weeks when we took a family outing to the library. I eventually met Ray Bradbury at the age of 14 (or 13). It was thanks to my serving on the Comic Con steering committee. Walking up to the man in the ice cream suit and white fedora took all the nerve my nerd self could muster. He was standing by himself on the first morning of the Con, next to the El Cortez interior swimming pool. (Not in-door, but outside under a windowless sky light in the center of the hotel lobby. I walked up to Mr. Bradbury in terror. Here was this magician, this shaman of words who had entered my dreams at night and took me to far flung peaks of aesthetic bliss mixed with mystery and terror. Of course Mr. Bradbury was always Mr. Bradbury to me. Even when I got older and saw him briefly before his death, I never called him ‘Ray’. I deemed it to be a desecration of his powers.
I did summon the nerve to get him to sign my first edition paperback of Something Wicked This Way Comes and found him shining his benevolent smile into my eyes and face. He wasn’t a powerful, dark, intimidating wizard after all! Ray Bradbury was a kindly, warm, sincere man who cared about his fans. The artist as saint. He returned my paperback to me and smiled. I knew that I was safe from his dark magic. I could venture to ask him what I really, desperately needed to know.
“Mr. Bradbury”, I said before he turned to go to attend to his convention duties. “Mr. Bradbury, can I ask you a question?” Ray Bradbury stopped in his tracks. He turned back towards me. Leaning over my form, he replied, “Why of course, young man. What is it that you would like to know?” I hesitated for a split second. It occurred to me that he was mentally anticipating a question about one of his stories, some character, or plot twist. But I had a bigger question in my 14 (or 13) year old hungry mind.
“Mr. Bradbury, tell me, how can I become a writer like you? Is there a special school I need to go to?” Now it was Ray Bradbury’s turn to be enchanted; by little old me. Mr. Bradbury motioned me over to two pool lounge chairs cruxed by the blue fluoride pool of creation. He sat down and faced me. He examined my face intently. Then he uttered these words: “First, young man, you’ve got to get the name of my profession correct. It’s not writing, I’m not a ‘writer’, I’m a re-writer. The vocation is called re-writing for a very good reason. Because that, my son, is what you’re going to spend most of your waking life doing. Some of your dreaming life as well!” I became so mesmerized by meeting my hero. I didn’t remember what he said after that. It was about a 20 minute conversation and then he left to attend to his celebrity duties.
And That, My Friends, is how I became a writer. I was baptized by the worldly experience of a kindly, white-haired, be-speckled magician. He wore an ice cream suit and a white panama hat in the San Diego sun that blazed all around us, through the skylight at the very center of the El Cortez Hotel in the summer of 1972 (or 73). The El Cortez Hotel of legend, mystery, and comic book panel has become over-priced condos. This change happened because money is money. Culture and history are really just for the poor.
THE REAL STUFF NOW: (Hold onto your Horses!) As the previous heading sign-posted, this was all just the prelude to the true subject of my dissertation:
Which is in fact, the Poetry Futures Poetry Festival I attended only yesterday, hosted by the San Diego Poet Laureate Jason Perez and held at the Cross Cultural annex of the UCSD campus. There was no publicity covering the event, no posters or flyers to guide the poesie aficionados, but I was able to navigate my way to the upstairs set of conference rooms.
On my way up the stairs I found myself at pace with a young, well dressed Asian man with horned rim glasses. I asked him if he knew where the poetry festival was being held. He smiled an affable smile. “That’s where I am going as well,” he said. He reassured me that I was heading the right direction through this academic labyrinth.
Upon entering the reception room and pausing to shake Jason’s hand to thank him for inviting me, I found that the horn rimmed well dressed Asian man was actually the poet Lee Herrick! The Poet Laureate of California! Which I really cared nothing about. What I cared about was that he was an honest, good poet who had truth to tell in his writing. I had only read a few of his poems in an academic journal but he was the real thing. An adopted Korean child who had grown into a gentle, sensitive man.
Lee was not only a formidable wordsmith but the very man I had wanted to connect with in order to further my plans for the first international poetry festival to be held in San Diego: The Balboa Park International Poetry Garden Festival .
But more about that later. I plan to leave San Diego in 2025. However, I am also resolved to leave a lasting monument to the culture of quality in literary arts. A yearly Poetry Festival could continue long after I relocated back to more civilized climes. In conjunction with the festival, I also want to organize a poetry competition. The proceeds from this competition would go to building a Rumi’s Poetry Drinking Fountain in the center of the Prado. This fountain would be accessible to the general public. It would feature a stone sculpture of the Greek Pegasus, the symbol of poetry.
Donald (Dumb Hitler), Trump’s triumph in last November’s election convinced me. I realized that I was no longer suited to the American nightmare. For the first time, he secured a majority of the popular vote by only 175,000. I knew a nightmare was about to be unleashed. The day after the tragic election results, I made two long distance phone calls:
The first to my ex wife, Felicity Brooks, the Managing Editor of Usborne Books with whom I had a tempestuous separation some ten years previously. As soon as she answered the phone, I didn’t have to say a thing. “I’m so sorry, Igor, I’m so sorry about is happening to your country. What do you need to get out? I’ll help you with the home office to re-establish your residency and your work permit. I’ll even tell them that we’ve reconciled and are back together as a married couple. “Whatever it takes”, she continued.
“I’m so sorry, I know that you loved the US but the time has come to make the hard choices you have to make to survive”. My heart leapt at her kindness and generosity of spirit. How many men can count on their ex-wives as reliable friends? But I also understood what she was saying and why: Both of our parents had lived through WWII and understood the reality of political upheaval. They knew the plight of refugees escaping political oppression and tyranny. Now it was my turn to be a political refugee. My ex-wife knew that some forces in life are stronger and more important than mere marital squabbling.
The second call I made was to my never-actually-met-him Facebook friend, the musician Richard Torres. Richard was a punk rocker in the 1980s London scene and had had a hit. A big hit. But bad punk rocker that he was, he didn’t spend all his money on drugs, alcohol and womanizing. Instead, he betrayed his genre by buying a mansion in the Gothic quarter of Alicante, Spain!
What a loser!
3 years ago, I was illegally evicted from a house in Clairemont. This was after the passing of Louise Karsten. She rented me a cheap room in exchange for tending to her massive yard and building a vegetable garden. I also paid for the restoration of one of her three bathrooms. I had found myself vaguely homeless. Couch surfing from friend to friend and eventually anchoring myself to the outdoor couch of my bike mechanics overpopulated two bedroom rental.
His family and he were avid meth consumers. Every morning, I used the bathroom coming in from the front garden. I would be greeted by billowing clouds of smoked speed. I was invited to partake. Eventually, my polite abstinence proved to be an unalterable faux pas. I was inevitably asked to leave for not conforming to the social norms of their meth-smoking “community”. Which is directly relevant to my account of this festival.
After shaking hands with Lee, I wandered through the space. I was looking for poets to invite to my festival. They could teach as guest teachers at the Pegasus Poetry Workshops. It starts the last day of January 2025. They might even contribute to my new poetry journal, The Mission. I began to recognize some familiar figures of the San Diego Poetry “scene”. Poetry Underground had constructed a long table promoting their books and events. I avoided the eye contact of Anthony and “Sunny”. My last encounter with them was when they barred me from their underground open mic poetry reading. It was because I read my anti gun poem. THE BULLET FROM MY GUN. Anthony and Sunny founded Poetry Underground. They are proponents of the school of thinking that believes everybody who even tries to write a poem deserves accolade. I’ve always believed in support and encouragement for young artists; but support without critical discernment, without discipline, is no support at all.
Poetry takes work, not complacency. Each to their own but Poetry Underground’s so called “mental health” agenda leaves me a little bit worried. My concerns might not have a cause. However, it’s healthy to recognize your limits. By doing this, you can surpass them and grow as an individual and an artist. The slogan for Pegasus Poetry Workshops is straightforward. Poetry Underground blatantly rebuffed it. We will teach you the rules of poetry. Then, you will know how and when to break them. Poetry is not a nightclub, it’s a hard earned craft that requires discipline, focus and dedication, not constant applause.
My anti gun poem I read at my last ever ™”stand up tragedy” at Poetry Underground is reproduced above.
Anthony had took umbrage at my poem and its contents. He was especially upset at his audience’s reaction.
The audience was visibly excited by my heart-felt honesty. I had exposed the mental problems of gun obsessives. My poem highlights their detrimental impact on American society. We have too many guns and not enough gun control. The number one cause of childhood mortality in this country are gun deaths! That is obvious even to servicemen and women. However, Anthony did not see it that way. As MC, he seized the stage after my performance. He denounced my poem with a tirade about Second Amendment rights. My poem called out the gun nuts who want to spread even more death and mayhem. Gun violence is a reality, not an opinion in America. We experience a pandemic of gun violence every day in the US. This is a fact, not a perception. Gravity can be an experience, but it is not a perception or an opinion.
It is the truth.
I was pleased that my poem had triggered (sic) some kind of reaction but Anthony was adamant in his denunciation. As an ex military type, he had always eyed me with suspicion and barely concealed hostility. He could smell my liberalism and it made him sick. Some time later, I called Sunny to invite her and Anthony to my Pacific Beach Poetry Workshop. She found my invitation insulting. Her attitude towards me was evidently infected by the same hostility. She informed me that if I decided to return to their open mic ritual, “Anthony wants a word with you, first.”
That was enough for me.
Unlike some of the aspersions cast in my direction, I am an adamant pacifist and avoid conflicts at all costs. What I have learned is that if you turn away from “trouble” to avoid it, “trouble” will often follow you down the alley way anyways. It might even mug you from behind!
Needless to say, I never returned to the Underground. (Take notes, Dostoevsky!), These days, I keep my feet above, not under the ground.
The Poetry scene in San Diego is parochial at best; and that, relatively speaking is a compliment!
San Diego as a whole, is a metropolis sized city with the mentality of a small town. It has no real literary or arts scene comparable to San Francisco, LA, Oakland, Sacramento or even Fresno. In Southern California, artists are seen as stunted adolescents. They are treated as if they won’t grow up and get a real job packing groceries at Whole Foods. Most other major California cities have thriving poetry and expressive arts scenes. Poets stand together in brother and sisterhood and help and support each other.
San Diego Poetry “scene” has been and is still, more like an open dog fight between warring and self-aggrandizing factions. The gatherings and readings tend to be mutual admiration clubs of gratuitous glad-handing applause. It reminds me most of the participation awards of the 1990s when everyone wins just for having partaken. On a few occasions, I’ve heard a young poet with promise recite an amateur piece. I approached them afterward to encourage them to “Rewrite” and think about who they are writing the piece for. I am then admonished by the host poets and told off for being “negative”. Critical thinking is abhorrent to the San Diego poetry scene. Writing is too.
Curan was a rare exception. Sadly, he is now deceased. He was a white Buddhist gay poet. Curan ran the Mission Hills Library monthly workshop. He was genuine and real and we are publishing his work now posthumously in The Mission monthly. Curan was the exception. The rule in San Diego poetry readings is that there are featured “stars” backed by their publishers to sell products. And there’s the so-called “Open mic” monthly gatherings guaranteed for applause. This is regardless of merit, and discussion or feedback is profoundly discouraged. At one such “open mic” reading I asked the assembled audience of would be poets, to hold their applause. That if they wanted to give me feedback to approach me after the reading and tell me what they honestly thought. This caused the bah-bah-ing, amateur sheep to deride me as I was challenging their ritual. The veterans at the same reading openly mocked me for even suggesting such a trespass of their precious norm.
All of this petty-clique behavior is more worthy of a bad high school TV drama than a literary tradition. This has inevitably led to an impoverishment of poetry as a craft in San Diego. A vocation which in fact takes literally decades of hard work and endless failures to achieve anything of merit. Art is a vocation, not a dilettante’s hobby.
The owner of Verbatim Books was at the festival, there with her entourage. Of course, she avoided my path. I had tried to get her shop to stock my books. Then, on one occasion, I invited a homeless street poet reeking of alcohol. Former Beat Poet Laureate Chris Vannoy and I had heard him reciting incoherencies outside their reading. We asked him to come inside and recite his insane, psychedelic, beautiful ramblings. The owner did not take kindly to what she misconstrued as an attempt to sabotage her event. Apparently, you can’t be drunk and read poetry in San Diego. Sorry, Charles Baudelaire, Dylan Thomas, Charles Bukowski. You’re not wanted here!
After Avoiding the Poetry Underground & Verbatim, I said hello to Ted Washington who was going to be reading for the Fighting Poetry panel (which was my highlight of the festival. Ted and I have known each other for years. We do detect that we’re not exactly friends. However, we do share a begrudging respect for each other’s work. I would publish Ted Washington in a blink. His voice is angry, political and authentic, an African American raging against The Machine. Hey, we don’t have to be “Friends” with everyone. People don’t have to “like” each other; we just have to not kill each other. Poetry is a forum, a medium of expression wherein people with differences can air those differences in lyric, rhyme and reason. Jason’s Poetry Futures festival proved to be just that: political, engaging and inspiring. I met some great poets and some great human beings there. Mainly from LA, Portland, Anaheim and the Bay Area. I found myself applauding loudly, wildly at the voices of mainly women poets. I also found myself randomly running into complete strangers. We would exchange a line of verse in rhyme and reason.
“Strangers stopping strangers just to shake their hands.” Robert Hunter
The out of town readers were amazing, truly wonderful, sending shivers down my spine and music to my ears. In contrast, the academic poets both students and teachers, presented a stark contrast. Some of the UCSD graduates buried themselves in their own self-righteous academic graves. They pronounced their degrees like ancient Egyptian curses. These poets tried to conjure magic that wasn’t theirs or of any lasting potence. At best Art and Academia are uneasy bedfellows and can lead to abusive relationships as the only steady income an artist can muster while they perfect their craft is by teaching. Which is fine except that higher education in California (and probably throughout the US) is a business. The products are students and credentials that lead to paying jobs. That can be alright except when the credential is a token of conforming to an inorganic, bureaucratic entity that just wants to control the thoughts and actions of others. That’s when the relationship between art and academia becomes an abusive co-dependence.
Unrelated, Michael Klam and his San Diego Yearly Poetry Annual entourage of county editors were there too. I like Michael, even though I don’t have to. We’ve had over the years, a disagreement or two, but he’s always remained an affable sort. Besides, the Annual has published my poetry 4 years running and you don’t shoot the horse that lets you ride him. I gave up submitting to the annual a few years back mainly because ones poetry gets lost in its voluminous thickness. I don’t really know who actually buys the annual apart from the poets who are published in it. Some of its editors are friends and support what I do. Others despise me for my work, my dedication to critical thinking and my politics. I am devoted to Poetry and this poet’s life like it was my parent. Having lost both, Poetry has taken their place in loving me, in caring for me; poetry has nurtured my body, soul, and mind; without it I most likely would have taken my own life years ago. (If not for my daughter Olivia as well; who I could never inflict such trauma upon.
In the end, it is our children who save our lives from dissolution and despair.
The San Diego poet I now most admire is Sonia Gutierrez, who recognized me when she was first approaching the center, outside while I spoke to an Arab who happened to be the buyer for the La Jolla Barnes and Nobel and who I had given a copy of Is She Available? and was raving about it, asking where he could order more copies for his store.
Sonia Gutierrezwasn’t quite sure where she recognized me from but insisted that I was familiar to her. She asked me a question about where the event was (Signage, people, signage!!). Sonia Gutierrez peered at me and told me that I looked familiar. Later when I heard her read at the Fighting Poetry panel brilliantly hosted by Ted Washington, I recalled that the great Mexican muralist Victor Ocheo had introduced her to me over 5 years previous. Victor was always pushing me to celebrate my Latino, Costa Rican heritage. My uncle being the now deceased Costa Rican muralist, painter and sculptor Francisco Zuniga. (I come from Art Aristocracy!)
He wanted me to connect with other “Chicano” poets. This was the very first occasion I heard Sonia Gutierrez read. I was literally and pleasantly blown away. A non academic, self taught poet. She is now a poetry teacher. She exuded her culture like a wafting perfume. There are too many phony Chicanos in this world; too many Latinos laying claim to a uniquely Mexican American heritage. People like Peruvian painter Mario Torero who insists that he’s a Chicano “Artivista” when there isn’t a drop of either American or Mexican blood in him.
Sonia Gutierrez filled the room with sounds and almost smells of her Mexican heritage. She is a real poet in every sense of the term, as she serves her words up as a vehicle for her people’s history, her people’s culture, her people’s sounds. A woman’s sounds (like my mother singing in the bath tub, cantina songs), I wanted to embrace Sonia after her reading; and breath all of Mexico in. Instead, I invited her to come teach at the Pegasus Workshop as a guest teacher and gave her a blank cheque as to how to fill the two hours. I admired her spunk. She bluntly asked me if there was a stipend for teaching. There is not, as the workshop is a semester long and free to the public. The event is held on the premises of a public building, which the tax payers pay for. Poetry should be free. Poets do have to eat. Their words may feed the spirit, but the flesh is also wanting. Poets should be paid for their work. Buy their books, it makes a big difference!
So I told Sonia I would see what I can do. Her poem “Perspective” should be mandatory reading in San Diego’s classrooms. It is a monument to hypocrisy. It highlights the disingenuity of the new right as they sabotage our thinking, our ability to reason. They gaslight us into accepting racism and bigotry as just a matter of “perspective.” In today’s post Trump intellectual wasteland, all opinions are valid even house that would strangle opinion at its source.
Sonia Gutierrez filled the room with sounds and almost smells of her Mexican heritage.
The panel called Fighting Poetry was a little distracted by a ‘transitional” (transgender?) poet, who’s name escapes me. She was a striking woman with a beautiful face. But the transgender poet had marred her own face with a frozen smug, plastic smile. I have had friends within the transgender “community”, (Not my choice but It is their’s and I would fight to protect that human right.), But there was definitely something false, something wrong with this particular poet’s self presentation. She proclaimed the righteousness of her gender choice as if it was a weapon to be used on her audience. Her answer to fighting poetry, in which real truths were being told, was to lead the group in a contrived “breathing exercise in an off-the-shelf mindfulness.
Her poetry was mediocre although her pain and composed anger were real enough. If she had not taken affront I would have shared with her some constructive feedback. The politics of sex, of gender, and identity are volatile like nitroglycerin. A single misstep by a boring straight man like me could spell disaster. I chose to avoid the risk of confrontation.
A young Vietnamese poet, whom I have lost track of and could not find, breathed air into the room. She did this by reciting a poem that mixed English and Vietnamese words. The music beautifully infiltrated the comprehension of the poem. I am a devotee and follower of Thich Nicht Han, the monumental Vietnamese Zen monk. I have met, sat, and walked with him in London. I was well disposed to the sound of her vowels. Even without understanding the meaning of her words, they were sheer poetry.
The highlights for me were Jason himself. He bid farewell to his position as poetry laureate. Then I was captivated by the sublime psychological work of Lee Herrick. I had only read him before and never actually heard him read. His voice opened up his exploration of his own heritage, his own adoption and adaptation to my heart.
A lesson for us all: if you can always hear the poet read his or her work aloud, do it! The human voice carries the breath of the soul. Like Homer, we are all blind to the written word when it can instead take flight. It flies on the winds that come from within us into the wide, wild world. But don’t believe me when I sing Lee’s praises; Listen for yourself. Listen to the wings of poetry unfold and take flight!
Experience life’s moments on your own. The universe doesn’t expect much from us but it does want us to pay attention and listen….just listen. Thank you for reading this far, now please if you will, comment below.
Homeless Bound You’re a vagabond, a two bit clown You charlatan, Sleeping in your own feces What brought you to this hell-whole? This inner space of longing and despair? Longing for a warm embrace
Who are you man, with your upturned frown? With your magic crystal pipe and your temper’s dynamite? What happened to make you fall A-sleep through your own existence?
Who are these demons that have driven you here? Did you get their licence plate number? The ones you argue with all day on the street, The ones who drown you in fear and misery? The ones you are speaking to right now while I recite this poem. Who are the devils who make you shout and scream on the street corner on your pavement of shame? Who did this to you?
Which monster soiled your clothes? And chased you down the alleyway to where you hide from your life? Hide and huddle under your sleeping bag drenched in urine. Your Whole Food’s shopping cart full of dirty clothes and broken dolls. The dog you feed and care for more than yourself. Your debris of useless familiar possessions you could not bear to leave behind. Who drove you to this insanity, Or did you call an Uber? Was it me then, after all? Did I do this to you with my neglect? With my high minded judgement. With my stepping over your sleeping corpse? With my avoidance of your pleading gaze When I ignored you tripping over your own tied-together shoes? Was it me, because I did nothing when I could of? Because I was too preoccupied with my own useless, familiar self-possessions?
($85 a month of public storage). Is it because I ignored you when you tied your shoes together ?Or if I did see you and looked away, shaking my head At the slapstick clown you have become? Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin gone to seed Shitting in their own clown shoes.
You had a job once You had a wife once You served your country once. Now you serve the rats in your alleyways You’re a waiter serving up garbage and despair. A collector of cans and copper wire. Did you steal my bike today to trade to Judas for his silver? Are you Jesus betrayed so that the Romans might like us? (The best seats .at the orgy.) No, instead you are Sampson chained to the broken pillars of our “community”. You are David with a tangled slingshot, Daedalus with broken wings. You are my brother and my father. You are the son, I have forsaken. For the sake of a better car.
My shelter is my castle,
From who’s high, lofty turret towers I pour anguish down upon your head I pour my diarrhea of sanctimony Down upon your head! I write you off. I wish you were dead. Instead of haunting my street corners My pavements, my libraries and alley ways Plugging your phone in at Star Bucks Just to watch your cartoons all day With the phone Obama gave you to call for help. To call for your sanity to return.
I will call the police I will call the police I will call the police I will call the In-Sanitation department of human garbage. They’ll come in a truck to bag you up and haul you away, for the refuse that you are. They will throw you into jail cells without clocks or any measure of time. They’ll lock you up into tented cities far away from the children of humankind. Lest the children see what could happen to them if they will not tow the line.
Now you do have to live like a refugee! In these times of Oceanic Wealth That drown the poor in misery In squalor. In dead end jobs 3 at a time just to pay the uncontrollable rent. Who did this to you, you dusty pale ghost of your former self? Who beat your spirit down? Who lost you to become unfound? Who beat you to the ground? Who broke your holy crown?
Was it me? Did I do this to you? Was it me? When I forgot that you were me? Was it me? When I took silver for my humanity? Was it me? You are my father, you are my brother Was it me? You are my son that I have now forsaken For the sake of a better car. Was it me? Did I forget that you were me?
I have only had two editors in my life. One was the now deceased artist Eleanor Brooks. She was the widow of the great novelist Jeremy Brooks, and a friend of Ken Kesey’s and Robert Stone. Eleanor was a British Beatnik, an official Friend of Wales, and a former Duchess of Gloucester. She renounced her title and seat in the House of Lords to marry Jeremy, a commoner.
The other and now my current editor is Dr. Miles Krogfus. He won first place in a national poetry competition back in the 1950s. This achievement paid for his entire university education. AND his PHd in Yeats, an the Romantics. At 83, he can detect the Classical within the contemporary. He keeps my poetry disciplined within the legacy and structures of poetics.
Part of The Mission is to publish the monthly Mission. My newly incorporated company will include comics, poetry, prose, and art. Mile’s work will feature in it and then after a year, we will publish a book of his poetry.
Not for his sake or mine. For the sake of the American people. This is especially true for Americans under the age of 30. They have been denied the richness of art and culture. They continue to be denied access. Art and culture are how any civilized society tends to its emotional and psychological challenges.
I am utterly certain that many Americans are mentally ill due to poverty in arts and culture. Some are lethally so. This society has ultimately commodified arts and culture into extinction.
It is difficult to pursue a career as an artist anywhere. However, it is next to impossible in America. It didn’t always used to be this way. It’s a change I’ve seen happen slowly, really just in the last 40 years. The only socially acceptable vocation in America today are institutional ones or corporate jobs. Or science, engineering and technology. because we value our tools more than we do our fellow human beings.
We treat dogs like people and people like dogs in America.
Anything else is derided as “not a real job”. With the rare exception of musicians and recording artists who are viewed as potentially money-spinning. Painters and writers and sculptors are treated like complete shit. We are advised to stop practicing our craft. Instead, we should get jobs loading paper bags at Trader Joe’s for rich hippie vegan scum.
Once when I was being processed after being arrested in San Diego for one of my many nefarious crimes (I will die before I tell them where I buried the 4th body!), I was at the booking desk and I was being asked what profession I claimed, I said “Poet” and the desk sergeant guffawed, laughed loudly and turned to the other deputy as they both belly laughed.
THAT is what Americans think of and how they treat the arts in this tragic land.
All to the detriment of the mental health and well being of our society. Yes, the word ‘Society’ does actually refer to a real thing, you just can’t buy much of it.
The last time America had an arts-based culture that pervaded society was from the late 1950s until the dawn of the 80s. This culture was admired and emulated by other cultures far and wide. Whats loosely referred to as the 60s. Nobel Prize Winning Poet Bob Dylan completely revolutionized the music industry with his songs and music. He turned the Beatles onto LSD, and we all know where that led: cultural, spiritual, and social Revolution!
Ken Kesey wrote Sometimes a Great Notion and then Cuckoo’s Nest, was experimented on by the US military with LSD and decided that not only did he like it, he would give it to everyone else!
And the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead were born, Giants of cultural upheavel and enduring art. Yes, I’m saying that Jerry Garcia wasn’t just a great guitarist like Jimi Hendrix. (Another America icon to the arts, our “Mozart” of the electric guitar.). He was an artist plain and simple. He intuitively grasped the dream nature of art, how to embrace chaos and allow the growth of form to emerge out of content. There was nobody ever like his band The Grateful Dead and there will never be another like them. Jerry Garcia was a Boddhisatava who changed the lives, improved the lives, alleviated the suffering of millions upon millions of people. For which he took no credit or accolade because he knew that it wasn’t him,, he had no ego, he was just Jerry doing what Jerry wanted to do.
Because “if you’re not having fun doing what you’re doing, you’re not doing it right!”
Jerry Garcia and Ken Kesey were artists using humanity and the people as their canvass. They improved people’s lives, period!
Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ton Carter, Sonny Rollins, Lee Morgan, Anthony Braxton (and too many more black musicians to list here), took the suffering and political humiliation of the African American people, absorbed it deep within their soul and then produced something more beautiful, more African American, more valuable than all the suffering of all their generations had endured could quell: Modern Jazz. The only uniquely indigenous American cultural product, ever. And it was our underclass, our N**g**s that produced it, that created our cultural heritage
White folk produced it and took most of the money and sometimes, on occasion aligned with it in emulation and imitation. But it was black people, African Americans who created it, from the blood and sweat of their masters lashes, the only lasting cultural worth America has every produced.
The Blues and Jazz will endure all of us for the next 2 thousand years. If humanity still exists in 2 thousand years, you can be certain. They will be listening to Jazz. Maybe ‘their’ Jazz, but they wouldn’t be listening to anything without the creative fountain of the African American artist.
Andy Warhol, Georgia O’Keefe, Jackson Pollock, (and please list painters that changed your life in the comments) didn’t just create visual art that sold for high prices. They changed the way people SEE and think about art. Consequently, they altered the way people viewed their lives as they are living.
Charles Olsen, Alen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Walt Whitman, Eugene O’Neil. John Reed, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Carver, Carolyn Forche, Jack Kerouac. Lillian Hellman, Shirley Jackson, Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein, Bessie Smith. Billy Holiday, Lenny Bruce etc. etc. etc.
These were all writers and artists creating the raw material that makes up our soul. They weren’t just singing songs or spinning rhymes. They offered up, from the depth of their souls, the remedies for living. They provided the cure for our social illness! They taught us how to live better. They guided us in leading more rewarding lives. They helped us overcome the slings and arrows of our outrageously over-priced fortunes.
They were and still are our shamans. They are our urban witch doctors, our counsellors, and our therapists. Without them, without more generations of artists, we are all going to languish. We will whimper and suffer in our straitjackets, in one big WHITE lunatic asylum. It is ruled by the insanest WHITE king of them all: mad Donald Trump.
Today “art education” consists of “you better pick up a skill you can fall back on”. It has taken me 40 years of hard graft. Daily work, rejection, and overcoming rejection have brought me to this point. Now, I can look the cop in the eye. I can proudly say, “yes, I’m a poet, I’m an artist. You gotta problem wid dat”?
These days I mainly talk to young people, meaning people younger than me. Guys and gals, working odd jobs, standing outside of restaurants barking customers. Because San Diego is so fucked up, the management gets weird when I talk to young women my daughter’s age. People give me hostile looks. I’m asked not to return to the establishment to spend my money. Generational isolationism is a real social problem in San Diego. But I don’t give a shit, I’ll talk to whomever, whenever I want regardless of their age or mine. Unless they don’t want to talk to me and then I apologize and go away. But young people need their elders to give a shit about them, to talk to them to ask them what’s on their minds.
That is how a civilized, healthy society functions. You go to any other developed nation in the world. You’ll find ancient town centers in England, France, Spain, Italy, and Greece. In these places, the neighborhood’s children run free. Their parents sit at outdoor cafes or at tables or around fountains gossiping away. The children run free, feeling both free and safe. They know, without even being conscious of it, that they are the village’s children. They belong to the community, and the community will care for and protect them.
Socialist? You’re damn right that’s socialist. It is much better and healthier than the fear and paranoia that dominates current American parenting. Our teachers are prison guards. Our parents are overworked overlords. Our police are soldiers. They view every citizen and every member of the public as an antagonist. How many cops does it take to change a light bulb? None. They’d prefer to just beat up the room for being dark!
America has lost its soul along with its way. Now it is just about the money; not even about what the money buys, just the frigging money.
When I last ran a company (or more accurately, ran after my company to make sure it didn’t go off its own rails!), I used to hire what were then a new breed of worker: the code, the computer programmer, the software developer. This was very difficult for me. Although I served my investor’s interests and followed my detailed business plan, I knew little about actually writing code. At the time, I didn’t even know how to write html. It’s not a code, but a mark-up language for the web.
So I had to hire some dozen coders very quickly to execute an array of electronic publishing projects, on CD-ROM at the time as DVDs had yet to be invented. So I interviewed everyone who came to apply for a poisition as I did with all of my staff. Anyone who ever works for me, who is paid by me, has a direct contact with me. A direct human to human connection is crucial in order to maintain a cohesive working environment. I do not delegate Human Resources. Because Humans come first, before even the money.
So I would typically take two strategies to discern whether or not I wanted someone working with me. The first was to sit in front of a screen and a keyboard with the individual and ask them to show me what they did that affected the screen,. Like I was an idiot. I called it my “Colombo” approach.
If the young candidate (typically college graduates in their early to mid 20s), balked and told me that I didn’t know enough to understand what they did; or try to waffle me with computer code jargon or resisted explaining anything to me; I would thank them for their application and say I’d be in touch.
I never was ‘in touch’.
If you can’t explain what you do to a 12 year old child, much less your potential employer, then you don’t really know what you’re doing yourself
My second approach is relevant to the point of this essay. At the time I had secured over a million and a half £s in corporate investment. Enough to develop, produce and market an electronic publishing platform of 8 new interactive titles. I coined the term INTERACTIVE DRAMAS to avoid the computer game association. Ironically, it was the computer Game MYST that was our great inspiration. It inspired the development of these interactive titles. I had the superb artist, designer and my aesthetic mentor Dave McKean as my nonsalaried Art Director. I also had a team of hard working, London working class designers.
They were “My Boys”. (along with a couple of girls). My Boys is my reference to Garth Ennis’s superb comics series and now Netflix series (The Boys; highly recommended if you hat super hero movies as much as I do)
So I was a happening dude in London in the early 90s. Which was a success that was all too shortlived, as all successes ultimately are. Nothing lasts forever, baby, apart from the Moon, the mountains, the ocean and the stars.
But back to the interview process relevant to my point about money and its intrinsic valueless-ness. So I had a company cheque book at the time when people still wrote cheques. My candidate would come into my office and sit in front of me and I would ask the usual questions about their backgrounds and experience. Then we’d do the computer screen test. Finally I would lean forwards and look them straight in the eyes (and smile).
“Tell me, what is it that you really want out of life, what is the real reason that you’ve applied for this job; what do you want?” Without exception, the candidate would drop their guard and answer with one word: “Money”
And these were British kids, mind you. Working class, self-educated or middle class college graduates. Not Americans. With Americans, its ten times worse. Now the lesson would begin: I would smile and say
“But of course, what would be the point of going to a job every day if you weren’t being paid. I want money,, I like what money buys me”.
The informality would open the candidate up:
“I want loads of money, I want to be rich by the time I’m 30 and I’m so good at what I do, I’m going to make that real” (or some paraphrase to that effect). So then I would start the game. I would look seriously at the candidate and say: “Would you consider a million pounds enough money?” Inevitably, they would be confused by the question. I would repeat myself while I opened my desk drawer and extracted the company cheque book. “Would you consider a million pounds enough money to make you happy to achieve your dream?” The answer was always the same. So I would begin to write out a cheque so that they could see my writing, for a million pound on the company cheque book, logo and all. Then I would rip the cheque out and being to hand it to the candidate.
“I’m going to give you this million pounds, it’s yours and you can call the bank right here and now to verify that the cheque’s good. It’s a real cheque for a million pounds and I’m going to give it to you, right here and right now on one condition.”
The candidate was never sure how real this game was but they knew for certain it was a real cheque; one guy actually called our bank and was told that the funds were liquid. But I wasn’t taking any pleasure in the startled eyes and nervousness of these young people. Instead I had an invaluable lesson to impart.
“One condition and the money is yours”, I repeated. And I would hand them the cheque so that they could feel reality in their own hands. Some would ask “What’s the catch”? Some wouldn’t. Then I would explain:
“You can have this cheque. You can have a million pounds on one condition. You must accompany me directly to the airport. We will go without interruptions and with no stops. At the airport, we will grab the first flight to Cairo. Once in Cairo there’s a helicopter awaiting us (there wasn’t, I lied). The helicopter journey will take some 3 or 4 hours to the heart of the Sahara (‘Sahara’ means desert, so to say Sahara desert is redundant). Once we have reached the centre of the Sahara, we will land. Or we will hover about 5 or 6 feet above the desert. You will jump a short distance. The sand will cushion your jump. And then we are going to leave you in the middle of the Sahara with your cheque but no water, no phone and at least a hundred mile walk to the nearest oasis.”
And then the punch line, which I would deliver while meeting the person’s eyes full on:
“So what is your million pounds worth to you now?”
The AHA! Moment (the one word that Allen Ginsberg wrote on my first edition City Lights copy of Kaddish when he signed it and invited me up into his room; I didn’t go, its another story. Always been a touch homophobic)
The day to day epiphany available to all of us any time of day, “if you look at it right”. The moment of realization of enlightenment and understanding happens when you grasp not just something new but when everything you had been thinking crumbles away. Everything that you thought to be true up to that moment crumbles away. Those scarlet begonias are a touch of the blues.
And your mind is just blown wide open to the fact that what you knew was certain wasn’t very certain at all. You can’t hide that moment on your face. And I knew with utter certainty that the look on my candidates face was their passing grade. If they ‘got it’ I could work with them.
I’m friends with some of my ex employees to this day and recently one of them, a girl now a woman, reached out to me to remind me of my little employment game and how it made her start to see her life in a totally different way.
I told her that no thanks were needed. That I was just doing my job The best way I knew how. Thanks for reading. Leave your comments below and I will respond. Still human that way.
Preamble: The blessing of an aching heart is that the music its beat makes conjures Poetry
Ricci!
You make my heart sing! That down-beat beatnik mad bongo love that makes my feet pump Makes my stomach sway. That pretty girl with golden curls is smiling at me! She likes my looks and digs my poetry! She’s the apple core of my eyes, the seeds in my pockets, The eternal sunrise.
She’s the love I’ve never known But always yearned and ached for She’s the girl in the window checking her make up On her way to break up With me again and again and again She’s the girl going up that up escalator Passing me by While I’m going down, down, down. All the way, sigh.
Now she’s out of sight And out of her mind. I couldn’t love her into loving me Not with these words Not with my poetry Not with my heart spread out on a rusty platter Pumping my blood to her music Dancing to that crazy down beat, beatnik Mad bongo love.
No, I couldn’t love her into loving me Not with my heart,
Not with my soul Not with my poetry.
Igor Goldkind, November 26, 2024 At 5 in the morning What else can I be doing?
My art is also poetry and short “fiction”. And I am head on confronting this very issue every day of my working life. I turned my back on academia where you can get paid to regurgitate curriculum while you do your real work.
Why? Because ultimately academia is a crutch that consumes your mind and soul after a while if you’re trying to be an artist. I call academia the artist’s meth. It feels great while you’re smoking it; status, paycheck, the admiration of the young….but ultimately your artist’s teeth fall out, you get uglier from compromise, and the admiration of youth makes you psychotic when you start actually believing it.
So I decided 6 years ago to starve to death.
No, let me tell you the truth. I determined that the undervaluing of poetry by the mainstream (commercial) was a social malaise, a symptom of a wider social problem compounded by the monetization of popular culture.
Cactus Flowers by Margarita Zuñiga. Fine Art for Sale: Enquire Below
I looked at who was actually reading and writing poetry first by hitting the poetry readings circuit. There I found the old clutching at reminiscences and the young clutching at life and strait jackets.
The number of young people 16-26 earnestly writing and writing confessional poetry struck me. Especially young women. They were confessing their angst and being young, about being raped, about being molested, about living in a world weighed down by the gravity of the male gaze. There were also cocky young men, rapping and slamming their hearts away.
So I started writing for them. The same age group that suffers from historic levels of suicide, anxiety and depression, gave me fodder for my writing. I wrote and read to them in public and my piece Suicide Note gained an audience of lonely girls who would approach me after my reading to highlight how that poem in particular struck them as they didn’t realize that other people felt as they did.
Someone I Missed
I also began carrying copies of my modestly selling my author copy books with me everywhere I went, signing and selling copies by hand at readings. But also if I met someone new in a cafe or party and the conversation got to the “and what do you do”? part, I’d answer, “let me show you” and pull out a copy of my latest.
“I’m a poet, would you like to hear a poem?”
IOW, regardless of the market, I decided to take my professional seriously and not try and disguise the thrust of what I do. I always have enough author copies of my books within reach so that when someone asks where they can buy one of my books, I list the usual Amazon, Barnes&Nobel, bookshops local to me and then I add “or you can buy a copy from me and I’ll sign it for you”.
At this point, I am ahead of the market because I have numerous direct contacts with my buyers. I talk to them. I find out who they are and why they read and what they need from an author.
Laborious, yes. Low yielding revenue, yes. Time consuming, yes. But I would match my market research on my audience against any data crunching publisher, any day of the week.
I am determined to make poetry pay. Not a lot, but enough to make a bare boned living at. I stopped buying things. I stopped trying to be middle class. I live in a meager apartment. I collect food stamps and any other government assistance I can talk my way into and I have absolutely no shame. The government is paying me to be a poet, a writer and an educator.
That’s my government subsidized job, in the long standing, centuries old tradition of the patronized arts.
There is never any shame in survival. How many fast food jobs did Socrates work? Or Ovid or Homer. Did Dante pack groceries at Trader Joe’s in one of his circles of hell?
Break Out!
I teach independent poetry workshops at libraries for non mandatory donations. I lecture on poetry. I do readings and signings. I collaborate with a music producer in Stockholm, Frederic Iriarte who records my readings to mix with his music and publishes them on line as albums for download streaming. Do they make any money? No. Barely enough to justify the effort.
But I am getting paid to write and read poetry, just not very well. I love my work and the place it puts me mentally and spiritually to labor through, more than the comforts of middle class continuous consumption I have had to leave behind.
I am totally dedicated to improving upon and perfecting my work for the sake of an unseen audience. For the sake of readers I haven’t even met yet.
I am not unemployed, although I collect unemployment. I write and teach poetry and writing. That’s my job.
Here I am: http//igorgoldkind.com
Igor, the Poet
Don’t get me wrong, it’s much harder to be an artist than a businessman. But over 6 years, I have built an audience. I have 5,000 FB followers, nearly a thousand subscribers on other media, including my blog.
I now run into people both on and off line who knows someone who bought one of my books. I also get anonymous phone death threats, obscene emails and am persona non grata among my local amateur poetry community.
But these are small prices to pay for being to hold up my head and answer “Poet” when someone asks me what I do for a living.
I like to add “But I’m only in it for the money”.
Rebecca Behar:
“Igor Goldkind You are just describing the life of dropouts who succeeded, why not – my best friend was like this, but she went to Italia. Depends on the place. Also in some countries you cannot do anything directly with a bookshop or a library – the distribution is perfectly controled, no freelance accepted.
But it does not matter, I belong to this underground and we did wonders, and now slam and spoken word are still great. So I agree that it is very difficult to kill poetry – like weed. But just compare with Victor Hugo – not only his poetry paid for a big house in Guernessey, but for his expensive way of life. And anyway he believed that he was a kind of prophet. But there is something else which is what ppl can accept and understand, called “reception” in general. I think that a real poet provocative and misunderstood by definition.
About an audience and ppl reacting, this became quite easy with internet, but again all these video kids are relying on marketing. My concern is that written, hermetic, creative poetry is obviously confidential. PS – I just visited an exhibition on surrealism, this is exactly what is missing : a big bang, a scandal, a movement breaking all this business & technology boredom. I think that it is happening in Iran, with the movement “women, life, freedom”.”
Rebecca Behar, look at the life and lifestyle of Stephan Mallarme, at a time in Paris where Poets were rock stars. He didn’t compromise his art for the sake of his acquired wealth and fame. The Roll of the Dice, his last work was perhaps his greatest masterpiece inspiring CharlesOlsen and the Black Mountain Poets, as well as my first book, Is She Available?
Rimbaud was a great poet too, but died poor in Africa. And Charles Baudelaire lived off of his mother’s money his entire life. This didn’t qualify his genius nor the fact that he gave world our Edgar Allen Poe; who without Baudelaire’s promotion would have been buried in obscurity.
The Mind in Motion
The general point being is that financial reward and market value has very little to do with art and nothing to do with talent.
It’s funny that you would refer to my naked confessional as “Dropping Out”. I worked decades at corporates, in publishing in academia as a professor at the University of Liverpool. I always earned good money for marketing and publishing other people’s work. (Ever heard of the “Graphic Novel”? I coined the term in the mid 1980s and made publishers billions!)
And earned steady income teaching students how to be artists.
But I never had the balls to walk the line myself and it does take balls (or the equivalent female genitalia). And I was never completely happy with my life, having had wanted to write for a living since I was a child.
Now some 45 years later, I get to do this. And I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. Because now regardless of my food stamps, I know that every working hour I live is dedicated to my authentic being, to the truth of my experience.
In Flight With the Truth of My Experience
(I also live 4 blocks from the beach and go there a lot to swim and stare at the horizon).
So no, I haven’t dropped out; I was a drop out, I’ve dropped in. I’ve dropped out of the ‘real world’ of stable salary, constant consumption, obeying the dictates of fools and being happy chattel for human crushing machine Ginsberg named the demon Mollock, in Howl.
The Naked Poet: Allen Ginsberg “Death in Mollock, Cocksucker in Mollock”!
And I’ve dropped into the actual world, behind the real world, where poetry and art connect me intimately with 10,000 years of my compatriots from all over the world.
I’ve dropped into the world where me and Rumi can share a bottle of wine while watching the sunset.
In vino veritas.
You can call me a drop out if you want; but in my experience, I had to drop out to drop in.
I would like your permission to republish this dialogue on my blog. Igorgoldkind.com
From a Recent OxfordSEO Literary Representation Press Release:09/23/2022.
A lot of people don’t like our resident unarmed poet Igor Goldkind. Although hard pressed to detail exactly what the source of their antipathy is, when asked most people who’ve met or know him agree on one thing:
Igor is a pain in the ass.
Some would go as far as to say a Royal Pain in the Ass; although any association with the recent demise of Queen Elizabeth or the Royal family in general, is merely conjecture.
When asked about his reaction to this near universal judgement, Igor Goldkind tends to shrug his shoulders and agree:
“Sure, I’m a pain in the ass, especially to anyone wedded to static protocols, conformist mediocrity and any rule that should be followed blindly because ‘that’s the way we’ve always done it'”.
Let’s look at a recent example of his ass-painery. Due to enormous stress and harrassment inflicted by certain individuals (to remain nameless until the court dates), Igor was recently diagnosed with a minor heart failure. After initial panic and a visit to the ER, the initial diagnosis, although precluding an imminent heart attack did necessitate a referral to both cardiology and vascular specialists to eliminate possible causes.
Both were seen and a routine series of tests were scheduled for this week including a Stress Echo Heart test, a heart monitor and a spectogram. Igor called his daughter and without freaking her out, brought her up to date and then gladly picked up the dice to his destiny and gave them a roll.
3 tests were scheduled for this past Monday, Tuesday and then tomorrow. A hectic week to put one’s heart through the paces.
On his way to his first appointment for the monitor last Monday, Igor was surprised to receive a text cancelling the appointment 45 minutes before hand. This was followed by two more text messages cancelling all of his heart monitoring tests without explanation apart from the fact that his insurance provider Molina Healthcare had denied them. Pulling his Thunderbird to the side of the road in Mission Bay, Igor proceeded to telephone his consultant and then his insurance provider to determine the cause of the cancellations.
As light transpired the insurance company’s independent arbitrator had determined that the tests were unnecessary as Igor had never had a pacemaker or open heart surgery. An insurance company administrator who had never even met Igor Goldkind, much less examined him, could overrule the expertise of his health provider and two consultants he was referred to who had examined him.
Hours of being placed on hold, waiting for supervisors, lodging complaints, grievances and appeals, Igor was able to get a call back from a Molina administrator who apologized for the last minute cancellations and reinstated the tests, albeit now delayed by two weeks.
However, our resident pain-in-the-ass wasn’t satisfied with his own private victory. Now that he has a member of the insurance company’s management on the phone, he demanded to know why Molina could adopt this absurd and potentially life threatening policy of over ruling of health specialists by a bureaucrat intent only on saving money?
A grievance was filed on his behalf and this morning he received a telephone call from an executive VP of Molina, once again apologizing for his treatment and then assuring him that based on his complaint, Molina had reviewed its approval policy and would from now on no longer deny a test recommendation without first consulting with the specialist who had recommended the test in the first place….across the board for all members!
This is the benefit of being a pain-in-the-ass, when you’re acting not solely out of personal interest but out of precedent and principle.
So like him or not, Igor Goldkind leads his life based on George Bernard Shaw’s Maxim:
“A reasonable man expects to adapt to the world. An unreasonable man expects the world to adapt to him. Therefore, all human progress is made by unreasonable men”.
NOTHING
of the memorable crisis
or might
the event have been accomplished in view of all results null
human
WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE
an ordinary elevation pours out absence
BUT THE PLACE
some splashing below of water as if to disperse the empty act
abruptly which otherwise
by its falsehood
would have founded
perdition
in these latitudes
of indeterminate
waves
in which all reality dissolves
EXCEPT
on high
PERHAPS
as far as place can fuse with the beyond
aside from the interest
marked out to it
in general
by a certain obliquity through a certain declivity
of fires
toward
what must be
the Septentrion as well as North
A CONSTELLATION
cold from forgetfulness and desuetude
not so much
that it doesn't number
on some vacant and superior surface
the successive shock
in the way of stars
of a total account in the making
keeping vigil
doubting
rolling
shining and meditating
before coming to a halt
at some terminus that sanctifies it
All Thought emits a Throw of the Dice.
From Collected Poems (University of California Press, 1994) by Stéphane Mallarmé. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Take these seeds And thrust them deep inside your pockets So that when you die and your body becomes the earth Sunflowers will grow once again from the land you killed to claim.
Ballerinas and camouflaged beauty queens will greet you in the streets With pirouettes of spinning bullets behind barricades of sheets. My grandmother will serve you up Molotov’s cocktails. The orphans you murdered will dance around you sleepless until dawn So that sunflowers will grow once again from the land you killed to claim.
Do you fear for war? Ask of the stillness evermore, Ask of the field, or ask the breeze, and ask the birch and poplar trees. Ask of the children who now lie beneath the birch trees and the sky, and let their mothers tell you once more Whether or not you should fear for war.
They died so that the children from ev’ry shore might live without your fear of war. Ask those who fought, and those erased, ask those planted in the rubble of Mariupol and Donetsk Oblast Ask the women you embrace. ask your mother –ask my wife–, So that you will wonder never more Whether you have cause to fear for war.
Who longs for war? Who longs for war? No one but those who are no more. No one living longs for war But war cares not for your longing or yearning for living. Or your fears for war War will always arrive uninvited to your door.
When war comes calling to your front door. You cannot lock the war outdoors. You cannot run and hide behind your chair Or bury your head under the covers of your bed.
When war comes to your front door There is nowhere to run, nowhere to go The corpses of your neighbors will hinder your flight You cannot let fear become your general To give up the fight To surrender to might.
Instead, you must stand with the sunflowers in the golden fields Stand with our heads facing the sun. Pour your bravery into an empty coke bottle And pick up a gun. Stand for freedom, for the children we have lost Stand up for liberty, against the tide of tyranny. Stand up for yourself as much as any other.
Summon your courage to stand like man, Like a like a clown, like a woman, like a child. The cries of their answer rises loud and clear for all people, ev’rywhere, to hear. The message now is as before: Do not fear, Do not fear, Do not fear for war,
These are the rules to write by, to live by, escape the penitentiary of the mediocre into the wilder realm of raw living experience, Whitman’s sun burning warmth through the skin of our beings.
These are the rules to guide by, to breath by, to masturbate and fornicate by. Rules to die by.
These are the rules, the markers of life as it is lived as it can only be truly known. Believe it until it’s no longer true.
Accept That there is nothing you can do. Accept That you cannot control or know for certain the outcome of events. Accept That you are merely one of trillions. Accept That your parents are dying or already dead. Accept That you are dying and this all means nothing. Accept That you are vulnerable, shatterable to the winds of fate. Accept That even the mountains die. Accept That you are truly alone Accept That you will die alone. Accept That you will remember none of this. Accept What you will not accept.
Igor Goldkind 2020
Illustration by Rian Hughes 2020 from: Take a Deep Breath – Living With Uncertainty
A book of poetry and art, fables and philosophies aimed at the pandemic of crisis anxiety so many are facing.
In uncertain times people turn to uncertain means. This is a book of poetry and art, of fables and philosophies aimed at the pandemic of crisis anxiety so many of us are going through right now in our daily lives and in our inner spaces. We are all of us and each us in this together.
The sciences but also the arts do provide remedies. The ancient Egyptians wrote curative words on fragments of papyrus to feed their burnt ashes to the afflicted. Lacking morphine, Walt Whitman read verses to fallen soldiers on the battlefields of the first Civil War.
At their best, the right words are more than therapeutic, they can be curative. Take a Deep Breath emulates this ritual here in administering remedies for living in these times of crisis, in living with uncertainty.
Original Words, Music, Video and Antidotes for Living With Uncertainty
Internationally renown fine artist and producer Frederic Iriarte and American Poet Igor Goldkind have collaborated on 9 original tracks of musical interpretations based on Igor Goldkind’s forthcoming collection of poetry also entitled TAKE A DEEP BREATH. The album of 9 tracks is being launched as a complete work at this year’s International Beat Poetry Festival and will be released for download at midnight this coming Saturday, September 5th.
This unique multimedia work was written and produced during the pandemic in Stockholm, San Diego and Moscow. It is intended as an artistic attempt to help us live with uncertainty and survive catastrophe living.
“TAKE A DEEP BREATH is most important piece of Spoken Word Art to come along at just the right time: right when we all needed it the most!” – Henry Rollins
TAKE A DEEP BREATH and step out of your comfort zone. Just don’t look down.
2020 has been a year of both social, economic and psychological upheaval. Humans have been required to adapt to drastically changing circumstances without forewarning and without certainty as to the outcomes.
We are being challenged as a species to adapt. Adaptation is our genus but it is also painful and exhausting. TAKE A DEEP BREATH is a guidebook: a pause for a moment of reflection. Take a break from panic and get a clear view of where we are as individuals, as a people and as a species.
Covid-19 has literally attacked our humanity however in doing so has done us the service of reminding us of our shared humanity, our common mutual vulnerability. These are hard lessons to learn and uncomfortable changes to be made for us to survive. TAKE A DEEP BREATH is a pause in the gloom and a chance to regain our strength and resilience to all carry on.
TAKE A DEEP BREATHis a step backwards in time when poetry and music were used and appreciated as tools for contemplation, meditation and reflection on the most crucial factor in our lives. Now that we are being confronted and overwhelmed with multiple catastrophes, is the time to return to using poetry for what it is designed for:
“The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.”
― Franz Kafka
We quest for meaningful truths about our existence and what we bring to bear upon our environments. Mathematics, science and technology enable our mechanical ability to crunch big numbers, calculate near infinite possibilities and deliver probabilistic results.
To be able to knowledgeably predict the multitude of buying behaviors of literally millions of customers using Amazon is an impressive computational accomplishment, in the service of consumer capitalism. Or to be able to use peoples’ most personal and intimate preferences and tastes as unstructured data, to be sold onto those who would better manipulate our preferences for profit.
Profit motivates the interests of those who control data to use it in order to steadily limit the range of free (unpredictable)choices to achieve more predictable decisions. The more predictable the judgements of choice, the better the profit in meeting those wants. The freer the will, the wider the spectrum of discernment between what is needed and what is merely desired. Not ideal customer relations if your goal is for the customer to buy exactly what you tell them to buy and have already prepared them to buy.
But the truth is that we are all free to make choices, even when there isn’t much to choose from.
We are still free to deviate from the predictable norm and exercise our wider, human judgement in our choices. But to do so successfully is to break down the predisposed contexts to our decision making. We would need to embrace the fact of Uncertainty, unpredictability and see beyond the unreliable predilections of Causality. We must, so to speak, break our causal chains as they have been manipulated in advance by pragmatic and diabolic conventions.
To live outside of predetermined contexts, to break out of the “real world” into the actual world, where we really exist necessitates first the understanding of context in the service of truth. To understand the dichotomy between perception and interpretation we should adopt a new vocabulary: The study of interpretation is called Hermeneutics, which is the scrutiny of language mainly text, in the context of interpretation.
However, language is not limited to text. Much of human history (of consciousness), has been devoted to poring over sacred and heretical texts; but there is also the language of dreams and music which are open to both reading and expression.
Then there is of course, the language of the image. The useful lie of representation, predating photography by some 30,000 years.
In so far as hermeneutics is the study of text and its interpretations, Irrealism examines the language of images by posing that no one account or one representation of a reality can accurately account for that reality apart from that one possible narrative. But there are millions of narratives, millions of representations of any event or occurrence in reality. There exists a vast multiplicity of perspectives and vantage points of which no one of which can be designated the sole “true” representation. Namely because the quantum diversity of perspectives is fundamental to that singular truth. This is one of infinite possible worlds but the only truth that can be found in this assertion is within the context of an infinite number of real possibilities.
Thus we each stand on a ledge overlooking the infinite, the universe waiting for us to take a step in whichever direction we choose.
Irrealism casts light on this distinction. There is no one reality or real event, but a multitude of infinite possibilities, some more probable than others in terms of predictive outcome. But to understand this and sustain it visavis perception requires first a relinquishment of the notion of one sole truth or truthful perspective. The truth is not found in once account, one representation; nor it it found in accumulating and theoretically distilling all possible accounts and perspectives. Instead, the monotheistic idea of one truth needs to be exchanged for the greater truth of infinite diversity in limitless combinations.
Irrealism is a type of existentialist literary artform for which the means are continually and absurdly rebelling against the ends that we have predetermined for them. The whole causal relationship between means and ends is brought into question and we gain the insight of restraining from linking events, so as not to fill in gaps with significance.
If we can easily detach significance from coincidental events and understand their own phenomenal existence without added meaning, then equally we can detach significance from events that just happen to follow each other in time. By freeing events and objects from the phenomenal artifice of a causal chain of meaning, we gain an irreal insight into the true nature of events and objects as they exist.
Like existentialism, Irrealism has presented itself as both a philosophical argument and a work of art in which the philosophical principles are demonstrated by the fictional subjective experience of a protagonist. For examp0le, In THE MALTESE FALCON, Dashiel Hammet’s existential detective, Sam Spade is a free man as he is free from the compulsive and lethal greed of the antagonists. At the end of the film and novel, Sam chooses the virtue of duty over love .
By proving the reality of an existential choice as a empathetic human choice, the fiction delivers a more visceral universal understanding of the underlying principle.
Some lies reveal deeper truths.
Breaking attachment to one true account or representation permits the “irreality” of circumstance to become our context. This is akin to wavicle theory in which light is not reduced to one structural account but rather we adapt our contexts to fit the data. Sometimes light behaves like and can be measured as particles and sometimes it cannot. It can only be measured within the context of waves. So is light either a particle or a wave? Well neither, nor both. The truth is that light exists outside of our realm of contexts. It is not unreal to describe light as a particles, but it isn’t solely true either. Nor is the fact that light consists of waves soley true. This quantum perception version Schrodinger’s Cat does not dwell on the mortality of the cat but rather on our ability to perceive beyond uncertainty.
The awkward term “wavicle” is a contrivance of vocabulary: there is no such object as a wavicle. All there is, is a misleading name to make it easier for us to measure and understand the phenomenal nature of light, not its physicality. In this light, so to speak, Irrealism addresses the false dichotomy of physicality vs the phenomenal. Yes, the universe is a physical one and objects and events have gravitas and yes, the universe is merely comprised of what we perceive and subject to the limits of our own perception. The universe is neither singularly physical nor singularly phenomenal; nor is it both. As both interpretations hold weight in their individual contexts, neither are false but again neither by itself is true. The perception is not one of unreality (or falsehood or fantasy) but of irreality, reality is not above what we perceive and experience, but behind it.
So it is with irrealism. The philosophical premise of Irrealism is that both the physicality of objects and events is one context, whereas their phenomenal content, our perception occupies a separate but parallel context. Objects and events exist in both worlds’ the physical and the phenomenal.
Irrealism demonstrates the irreality of events and objects by demonstrating existence as neither/or. An irreality demonstrates objects and events outside of their contextual rules. Viscerally this can be expressed in Art & Music and cognitively, in philosophy and poetry.
In philosophy, the belief that phenomenalism and physicalism are alternative “world-versions”, both useful in some circumstances, but neither capable of fully capturing the other.
Irrealist art and literature features an estrangement from our generally accepted sense of reality. Which explains the often welcome sense of discomfort or unease that often accompanies taking in an irrealist perspective. SF and Horror are good examples of that unease and rumbling anxiety as entertaining.
An example of this would be Franz Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis, in which the salesman Gregor Samsa’s plans for supporting his family and rising up in rank by hard work and determination are suddenly thrown topsy-turvy by his sudden and inexplicable transformation into a man-sized insect. Such fiction is said to emphasize the fact that human consciousness, being finite in nature, can never make complete sense of, or successfully order, a universe that is infinite in its aspects and possibilities.
Irrealism is the Impossible and the Unexplainable laid as foundation for an art form that can directly communicate, by feeling rather than articulation, the uncertainties inherent in human existence and the irreconcilability between human aspiration and human reality.
This suspension of the temporal extrapolation of causality requires a vantage point outside of the law of causality, (that every phenomenon and corresponding qulia has a predetermining cause).
The balls falls down because you threw it up because of therule: what goes up must come down. This fundamental layman’s interpretation of Newtonian laws of motion of course derives from a specific time frame that is pre space travel. To travel back to this context and suggest that this law may not always apply universally and that there are contexts such as weightlessness for which the causal relation does not exist, is an example of irrealism.
To suggest to Newton that what goes up doesn’t necessarily come down is to express an unreality to Issaic based on the context of his understanding. Moreover as Newton’s laws of motion are universally adopted as convention, to assert this truth too loudly will get you locked up in a mental asylum.
Those of us living Newton’s Impossibility know that whether or not the ball falls down is completely dependent on the existing context. To suggest a state of weightlessness to Newton’s context is an irrealism. It is false within the given context but true in a greater but remoter context. What we call ‘real’ appears to be exterior to us and perception-independent when in fact, it is neither. Irrealism exposes the mythic unreality underlying our virtual fixed world, the world we manifest with our minds by responding to certain stimuli in our environment. These stimuli and their interpretation sketch the internal map of our presumed outer world experience.
It is because of this out of context impossibilities that Irrealism is considered to be dream-like in nature, which is a justifiable description so long as we remember that the Irreal representation does not relate a particular dream that we might have had but instead evokes aspects of the dream-state within the work. Irrealist objects occupy our dreams as props for symbolic meanings much as one reads the symbolism within a medieval painting or a film wherein every object captured is there for a meaningful reason.
To understand that reality exists both outside of and inside of perception,( not in one or the other soley nor both together), is to glimpse the tapestry of infinite possibility divorced from the coincidences of causality. Quoting the American philosopher Nelson Goodman “as much as we might try to order our world with a certain set of norms and goals (which we refer to as the real world), the paradox of a finite consciousness in an infinite universe creates a zone of irreality. The Irreal is that which lies beyond [or behind], the real”) that offsets, opposes, or threatens the real world of the human subject.
Irrealist art highlights this irreality, and our fascination with it, by combining the unease we feel from a world that doesn’t conform to our desires; with the narrative quality of a dream state wherein safe and familiar realities are being constantly undermined.
“We are not speaking in terms of multiple possible alternatives to a single actual world but of multiple actual worlds.] Goodman makes no assertions regarding “the way the world is” and that there is no primary world version i.e. “no true version compatible with all true versions.” nor world-versions” of the world”. Instead he describes worlds as “made by making such versions”. As Goodman says, “Not only motion, … but even reality is relative.”
Irrealist art shows us this.
A successful irreal work of art, music or literature confronts its audience with a perception that cannot simply be translated as merely a fantasy, speculative or as a symbolist work. . Thus cut off from the familiar context of what is possible and ultimately explainable, impossible, one is left alone in the company of the absurd. It is thus communicates directly, “by feeling rather than articulation, the uncertainties inherent in human existence or, to put it another way… the irreconcilability between human aspiration and human reality.”
The artist Tristan Tondino writes, “Realism is an Irrealism. Reality is plurality – we partially create it, and we must open our universes and our perceptions to all possible versions of it.
Irrealism is a vaccine for living with the truth of uncertainty
A new acquaintance asked me why I endured relative poverty and uncertainty in California when I could easily take a tech copywriting or PR job and be living comfortably.
I answered, for which I’m sure someone reading this might wonder the same.
The answer is not simple and all has to do with my commitment to art and to the art of writing. It’s somewhat like a religious or spiritual calling; certainly as requisite of sacrifice and discipline as a monastery. (Read James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, if you need further elucidation on the subject). To become a great artist, which is what I believe I am becoming at this late stage of my life (or will at least die trying to be), takes total focus and constant dedication.
Not just to creation but to observation. Many of my best friends are not just poets and artists but scientists and mathematicians because they are processing their own observations through their own disciplines. When we talk and share words they read me and hear me, they comprehend how we’re all pursuing the same thing: the truth about life and the lives we are living.
Science and Art are really just two different vantage points in the same universe. During our Rennaisance there was no such separation between science, engineering and art. Just look at Da Vincis’s sketches if you don’t believe me. And this underlines the true failing of the formal education systems. No purely structured system can account for, much less process the unstructured data of experience.
But one truth I have learnt along this way is that we are all connected; both as a species and as sentient beings. Not just to those existing in the moment we all share but for all of us, from the very beginnings of awareness and rational self-consciousness. We are all brothers and sisters of the same mind, the same awareness that is awake and cognicent.
We all share the same biology of the mind. I imagine that when extraterrestrial sentient life is contacted, it will be the poets and artists most open to the new who will not only best describe and communicate qualitative meanings with them but decipher their language(s) to communicate with them (more of “us”?), before the actual scientists can interpret their data and the military can rationalize the threat.
From the point of commonality; this sentience itself has a common shape or form in all of us throughout time and geography. It is our human nature.
My words try to sketch its outline.
Without needing to name a god, the Buddhists have been attempting to describe this commonality of all sentient beings, for thousands of years. In art and yes, in poetry too. It’s what poetry is for: to describe the indescribable that is true for all of us, to all of us.
The known shining its single torch down a darkened corridor to the unknown. The unknown (not the unknowable), has always been our mind’s final frontier.
We weren’t born yesterday. We did not just become aware of consciousness. The history of consciousness is the history of us, of the ‘you’ that is reading and comprehending these words.
You are no different in awareness than the Neanderthal who stumbled out of her cave and looked up at the stars in wonder. Every astronomer I have ever known harbors that exact same wonder. Our tools maybe bigger, faster and deadlier but our minds haven’t changed, just adapted to our tools. They’re physiologically still the same; and only enhanced by the evolution of language, both associative, symbolic and metaphoric.
This is where we alll connect. The commonality of our senses’ perception and their comprehension. This is what is meant by ‘realisation’. When we make the world real. When we realise that the truths we know from our senses connect us to the world as intimately as to each other.
These are the materials I use to create art.
But why not get a day job? I will have to. I have learned all I can stomach for now about the tangible reality of poverty. I have made some great and tragic friends outside my walls of privilege and comfort. But when I first detected my dwindling resources, I panicked. I borrowed gas money from friends, slept in beachside campsites for free and spent too many days in chic cafes nursing one cup of coffee and a refill just to write, just to connect with the non poverished. I. applied for every job I was qualified for and hustled my books even harder.
But this did not avert my panic and the fear, until it passed of its own. And you already knnow: nothing is ever as bad or as long as we first imagine it to be. That’s when I understood how many of my needs, weren’t needs at all and that I could live without the comforting requisites of a middle class existence, just fine. In some ways better.
Less consumption = less waste.
There’s what I want and what I can have and if I diminish my wants, I can have have everything I want.
When you don’t have any money, you don’t spend any money and that initself is a good thing.
The last argument that pursuaded me of the virtue of experiencing this lifestyle is that if I really wanted to write for wider audience in a profound and meaningful way, that I might need to understand and empathize with the truth of our human condition across the entire economic spectrum, not just those who can afford to buy books
And the truth is that the vast majority of “us”do not live a middle class lifestyle and that the majority of “us” struggle every day to earn what is called a living and yet seldom ressembles it.
I have met so many, so many poor people living on the streets in one of the wealthiest cities in the wealthiest state in the union, in the wealthiest nation in the world.
None of us can afford to rest within our illusion of justice and freedom until poverty is no longer the default state of the human condition in America. Remember, poverty is a prison from which escape is difficult. But if we truly want to say that we live in the land of the free, then we must free our citizens from the prison of poverty.
They are “us” as well. Not charitable”us”, not pitiful “us”, not lazy, drug taking, alcoholic “us”.
Just us.
I have talked in depth with enough of the so-called “homeless”. to recognize them for who they really are: The Poor. You know, those people Jesus was always talking about and Charles Dickens and Emile Zola wrote about? The idea that those without homes choose to live that way is a bigoted urban myth that need to be quashed.
Yes, may of the poor have real problems with alcohol, drugs and severe mental illness. But so does every other group and class of people I have ever known. The rich and the middle class aren’t exempt from alcohol, drugs and craziness; in fact they can afford more!
How then are we less connected as human beings? Or is “humaness” only measured by level of income?
When I moved back to California to look after my mother, I was immediately struck by the avalanche of poverty that had engulfed my home town. As is every other foreign visitor to California, by the way. No tour of Balboa Park or visit to Sea World can eradicate the open poverty that everyone can see on the streets of San Diego. Which now more closely ressemble the streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti or the extreme poverty that can be found in some places in Mexico, than any American city.
The first thing that went was the last vestage of regional or even national pride. It is a crime against humanity for so rich a city as San Diego to maintain the level of homeless poverty that is evident to anyone who visits us. It is “our” fault. Because we are also connected to the impoverished and the socially weak.
You know, what Jesus was saying.
If I am to write the truth for those who want to read or hear the truth, then I ought to know what is lying outside the walls my middle class habits and worldview. What is it really like, not just for the impoverished but for the vast majority of Californians who also now live beyond the walls of middle class sensibilities, paycheck by paycheck?
Haunted by the memories of its long gone comforts.
What does it mean to be a human being living in America right now, in 2020. Aren’t we all supposed to have jertpacks by now?
What is the Truth of our American selves?
As Tony Morriosn said “The whole point of freedom is to free others”.
To my friends who have offered their support, I thank each one of you. I will never forget your kindness and your humaness.
Yes I have a new book coming out in the fast approaching Spring. It’s entitled TAKE A DEEP BREATH, A Book of Remedies and will feature much of the writing and accounts of experiences of truth that I have had living in California these last 5 years.
San Diego poets are wet gutter snipers Taking pot shots at frivolous affluence and misspent eternities From the street corners and back alleys of our prematurely grey dementias.
San Diego poets cast lines like fishing reels Screaming curses at angels in heels while Humming blues tunes to the damned, under our breaths.
San Diego poets spit surreal spiels into ribbons of unfurling images That rain down like bright pathetic confetti Against a blank horizon of an empty human empathy.
San Diego poets slide their wild, horse hair bows Across taut, tied strings that sing Above a psychedelic landscape of the gradually worsening human condition
You and me are not blind instruments of self-immolation. We do not have to sit at the center of the fire to make it our home. We can play our songs on sad air violins And dance in the rain to drown our sorrows in the sea of greater uncertainty.
San Diego poets press our runny noses against The pained windows of badly lit coffeeshops and crafty bookstores, Hosting poetry readings for the over groomed; Those educated only in the blind arrogance of their own judgements.
San Diego poets litter the streets with our menial typewriters Preaching doomsday fire sales to tourists and Liberation to those still hounded by carnivorous ambitions In the current climate of fear that tries to pass itself off as survival.
San Diego poets never have enough money to buy you a drink But will spare you a cig-regret – –if you’re willing to spare the change you need you to make –to make your tomorrow just a little bit better.
San Diego poets are all clowns, fools and charlatans Keeping ourselves amused on the ragged streets of cold hangover dawnings Whilst skipping around and dancing through the circus of mediocrity that pervades us.
San Diego poets migrate like flocks of hummingbirds Seeking warmer climes and heartfelt compassions. Blurring our wings the whole distance in getting there.
Go Fuck Yourself, you pathetic failure. Leave the arts to the poets, the dancers and the painters Go get yourself a real job, a real vocation. Fuck off and leave those of us who fight for our culture alone. Fuck off and stop leeching the creative spirits of the secular martyrs who have sacrificed their lives on the holy altar of Art, Truth and Freedom. Go Fuck Yourselves! And each other in your sleazy stinking orgy of self-gratifying bigotry and weeping pustule aesthetics.
Go Fuck Yourself in the Ass With Your Own Extended Nose Go let yourself get fucked in the ass by all the bogus arts nonprofits that pocket tax money to further their own finances while cheating artists and reviewers out of their livings.
Go write yourself a grant.
Write up your mission statement in day-glow gold-gilded writing. Put on your ‘supporter-of-the-arts’ makeup Keep counting the coins in your bookseller’s till While prescribing the rules that determines who is in and who is other.
Go Fuck Yourself and try reading a book for a change. Go read Whitman, Bukowski, Anais Nin and Henry Miller on art. Let William Burroughs into your dreams. Go get yourself a self education. In the meantime, shut up, sit down and just listen: You are the enemy of art, the enemy of poetry, the enemy of life. And we’re coming for you. Because all you are is in the way.
She said Hii! I said hello She said let’s go for a drink. I said sure. She asked ‘what are you having’? I said, whatever you want. She said, thank you for thinking of me first. I said your pleasure is all mine.
Later she sent me a text. ‘Have you ever tried phone sex’? She said. I said ‘Sure’. She said how about now? I said I need to go home. She said she did too, She sends me a naked picture of herself.
“Are you hard”? She asks ‘Sure’, I said. “I want you to fuck me”, She said. ‘Shall I come over’? I say. “No”, she said. “Let’s meet and fuck tomorrow. But for right now, just this moment Can you just talk to me”? ‘Sure, ‘I said.
“Right now I just want you to tell me how you’d like to fuck me. ‘Do you want me to come over,’ I said again. “No,” she said, “Don’t come over Just talk to me and make me cum. I just love the sound of your voice”. ‘Sure’, I said. And she did. ‘Are we still getting together tomorrow by the fountain in the park’? I asked, after a while. ‘Of course’, she said. ‘Great’, I said.
The next morning she sent me a message: “I’m sorry but your age is something I just can’t get past, I’m not meeting you next to the fountain, I’m sorry. You’re just too old and I shouldn’t have let things go so far I just can’t get past that; your age” ‘Sure’, I said. ‘Neither can I without fatal results’. She did not laugh “I’m sorry, but that’s how I feel” She said. ‘That’s how you feel’, I said. Later that morning I died my hair black and left dark stains in the sink.
Everyone wants to be free. ven from the things that once gave us comfort. We are like children who swap our blankets For softer ground.
So why do you wait to be free When the keys to your cage Are hanging right outside your front door? Reach through the bars with your hand Stretch your fingers far and bend your will around the bars.
Your mind is your best friend, your best teacher, your best doctor, Whether you believe it or not. In spite of everything you’ve done to yourself, Your mind really does care about you and often thinks of you, quite fondly.
Just let your mind mend itself Heal yourself with a few choice words. Your own words. When you say:
The truth is not a cold tombstone The truth is not a judgement The truth is a flowering realisation inside your own living mind. Pulling you outwards, & forwards, enraptured by Time.
When my breath and My will are as one, The universe swallows me Whole.
13,200 brown children are detained. Taken from the arms of their parents by American immigration authorities. Infants are held tightly, cared for by other children In dirty, neglectful, and dangerous conditions That scar the southern border of the American Dream The SCOTUS Jenny Flores settlement mandates by law that children must be held in safe and sanitary conditions, “Moved out of Border Patrol custody without unnecessary delays”. This is the Federal Law Except children are taking care of children on the south side of Border Town
The conditions the human lawyers found, they found inhuman Flu and lice outbreaks left untreated, Children filthy, Sleeping on cold floors, Guarding each other from the guards. Most have been there for weeks. Constantly switching blankets between covers and floor mats. Everyone is crying, crying all the time Only children are taking care of children on the south side of Border Town
Across El Rio Grande; across that lazy river A scared little girl stands on the safe American shore; then jumps back in El Rio To reach her father and cling to him as he swims back to Mexican shore to retrieve her mother. El Rio’s currents care not of human intent; The river just flows and it flows and it flows, Until the little girl and her father are washed up, facedown on the shore. Her arm still protecting him, curled around his neck. You know, just like your daughters and mine have done countless times before. Dead children are taking care of their dead parents on the south side of Border Town.
A treacherous river divides this nation There are twisting bends and perilous nationalist waters to traverse. When death took the scared little girl and her father, I hope he took them together So that they can be forever together If only in the little girl’s dream. When will we stop murdering the poor just for being poor? The only document you need to prove you’re human is the record of your deeds While children are taking care of children on the south side of Border Town
A 2-year-old boy locked in detention, wants to be held all of the time. He has wet his pants and has no diaper He is wearing a mucus-smeared shirt. He does not speak. Two detained girls, ages 10 to 15, have been doing their best to feed and soothe the clingy toddler. Children taking care of children The 10 year old girl speaks for the quiet boy: “A Border Patrol agent came yesterday and asked me’: ‘Who wants to take care of this quiet little boy who nobody wants?’ So I said us. Because only children are taking care of children on the south side of Border Town
“Nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” ~ The US Constitution
Once again the ghostly powers of Facebook have judged me and found me wanting.
Or wanting of the veneer of non threatening, amiable posts. Nothing that would offend a Humming Bird of nerve endings. A Calvinist shaking in their boots. I’m not a Facebook post, you don’t have to like me!
My grave offence was to post a photograph of the great American poet Allen Ginsberg standing naked on a Moroccan beach. The original naked poet; metaphor and literal combined into one. His words, not his images were deemed obscene way back in the last century. There was a public trial and unlike Socrates, Ginsberg (and City Lights, the publisher) were both found not guilty of obscenity. Howl was deemed a work of art and protected under the first amendment. Why doesn’t Facebook abide by the first amendment instead of hiding like a coward behind their Emerald City curtain of Community Standards?
And why don’t Americans know their own history?
I had the opportunity to meet and talk with Allen Ginsberg during my Freshman year, when he had come to do a reading and lead a group meditation paying his dreadful table accordion. Was I 17 or 18? I was studying Heidegger and Charles Olsen, the Action Poet; Kandinsky’s New York roommate right round 1959 thereabouts, when the photo of Ginsberg on the Beach was taken. But I knew all of his work, inside and out. I was never gay but Ginsberg made me want to be!
I had stopped Allen in an outdoor corridor lined by lawn between two campus buildings. I was armed with my copy of the first edition City Lights Kaddish epic that I had found by blissful chance in the long gone used intelligentia bookstore at the corner of College and El Cajon Blvd, in San Diego, over a lifetime ago.
Allen looked at my book and gladly signed it. “I haven’t seen a first edition of these in years!” I told Allen about the used book store in San Diego where I had gone through all of his poetry and Kerouac and Cassidy’s First Third and Dylan’s Tarantula, Alan Watts, D.T. Suzuki’s 3 volume Essays on Zen, all bought and consumed at this temple to beatitude at the cross roads of the world. I didn’t tell him how in high school we used to climb to the top of Cowell Mountain and howl the words to Howl at the valley unfolding beneath us. We didn’t know what hungry junkies were quite yet, but it sounded good and it was real. As real as the suburbs of San Diego can ever be.
In the past present, Allen handed me my book, more of a pamphlet, back and looked me up and down and smiled. It was a genuine smile and not the least bit lecherous considering what he said next. “Would you like to come up to my room, it’s just over graduate housing? I can show you some poem books you haven’t seen. I knew what he meant but I was so stunned dumb by the proposition (Allen Ginsberg!). I stuttered something still trying to make up my mind before I spoke. But alas, fear of the unknown vanquished my curiousity or perhaps it was my vanity to be loved by a star that was defeated.
Nonetheless I must of said something because we went on our merry ways, my thanking him a little too profusely and the back of his bald head bobbing down the corridor.
So when I posted the photo a young Allen standing nude on a Morrocan beach, I kind of felt like I had earned the right to share his image, naked and vulnerable for the sake of a poetry reading which it was more than certain that someone would recite a Ginsberg-eque poem.
The Philistines may have conquered the machines but not me as of yet.
Existence is a limitless screen of emptiness Vibrant with jubilant celebrations. And gratitude for the joy in rolling a boulder blissfully up this steep hill. Tripping over our own thoughts like loosened cobblestones, We no longer see the reality directly in front of us.
The truth is a truce we struck with certainty ages ago. After losing the desperate struggle… To cling to some kind of hope buried deep beneath the root of ourselves. I am fearful of fully failing myself and yet I love myself best when I am alone with eternity.
This morning after sitting around and paying attention to nothing for a long while, the pedestrian thought that loitered and would not keep moving down the sidewalk became a realisation.
My self, which I know is an illusion, a trick of perception, occupies too much of my time. I know this fully with my mind even if my heart still clings to safe delusions.
The easiest thoughts to dismiss are the good ones, the comforting ones. The memories of past loves long gone. My mother’s unconditional love, my sister’s devoted, admiring love. The eulogies and compliments I’ve received over time from those who have borne the patience to get to know me just a little bit beyond our facades.
The pleasure I took in surprising my friends with my true nature is easily exiled, easily erased from the Book of Illusion resting on my dusty shelf. But today I awakened to the fact that so it is of the slings and arrows my memory flings at me. The regrets, the failures, the self-loathing for being so much less than I imagine myself to be.
I have welcomed hatred like a long lost friend. When I am targeted by malice or false accusations, I somewhere believe that I am well deserving of acrimony; that deep within me is a broken porcelain doll wearing a torn, stained dress. I have sought refuge in self-hatred, in depression, in the idle futility of it all.
After all, cynicism is just another mask worn by our own complacency.
This morning, the light shone on me and I laughed at how insidious my vanity could be. To soak in self-loathing is as deluded as celebrating false glories. None of my past is real apart from what I insist on carrying into this present like a troublesome burden; weighing down my footsteps. Stalling the will to keep on moving, with the current, a little further down the road. Misery, the sister of Narcissus, loves company and the good liquor I buy her. But she’s too needy and crazy and no real friend of mind.
I may feel brave wrestling with my demons but they are in truth, made of the same scattered dust as my angels.
My Buddha tells me that enlightenment lies in the transcendence of seeming dualities. The trick of mind in seeing beyond black and white to the full spectrum and subtleties of the colors surrounding me. I can hold my inner sense of self, both magnanimous and self-damning, one in each hand and then bring those hands together, accepting both as one simultaneous truth.
I can know myself completely, even the parts left out.
Rumi says that beyond right and wrong, beyond good and evil, lies the desert of disillusionment.
At the end of the desert there is an oasis and in the middle of the oasis is a fountain and that fountain is the source of all Life.
Do me a favour, next time you feel down about yourself, undeserving of love, miserable and useless; do not blow the feelings away but rather hold them in one hand. Then with the other hand conjure the feelings of pride, of self-worth of glorious love. Hold each sense of yourself like a ball in each of your hands while substituting either/or with both/and. Now bring your hands together in gratitude for the whole of who you are.
I didn’t get her name.
It was a hot and wet Saturday night;
So I left the screen door wide open
Hoping for a change in the weather.
She strolled in like the queen of Sheeba riding a breeze.
Her inspection was on schedule.
She allowed me to imagine that it was my company she was after.
Earnestly engaging my eyes with her face.
Which she put close to mine and stared into my eyes.
As if she were the only soul left on earth who still loved me.
All the while she scanned the kitchen floor out of the corner of her feline eye,
I became fascinated by her calm, steady gaze.
Once having assessed my meagre, modest, means
She walked straight back out the door she had walked through.
And out of my life again.
Leaving me to gaze at the space she had deliberately left behind.
In the end, it was the numbers that did us in.
They lined us up into military rows
And assigned us all numbers
One after one after one after one after one….
How many, nobody knows.
You see, it’s a numbers game
It’s all the same
You’re not your name
You’re your numbers.
Let me explain how it’s done,
And how this game can never be won.
See, there are good numbers and bad numbers
High numbers and sad numbers.
Sometimes high numbers are good and low numbers are bad
And sometimes low numbers are good and high numbers are sad.
It all depends on who is counting.
Not you or me
Not the numbers either.
They don’t know, they’re just numbers after all.
Although…
The numbers are counting on each other.
Just not you or me
Because we will never be free
Of Big Numbers and small numbers,
Negative numbers and imaginary numbers,
You see, it’s a numbers game.
It’s all the same
You’re not your name
You’re your numbers.
Let me explain
How it’s done.
And how this game can never be won. Prisoner number…
Credit Score number
GPA number
SAT Number
Zip code number
Blood pressure number
Heart rate number
DOB & TOD numbers
House number
Gas number
Phone number
Electricity number
Room number
Water number
Dog tags number
Social Security number
Bank account number
Table number
Sibling number
Temperature number
Flight number
License number
Vehicle registration number
Alcohol level number
Height, weight and age number
I hear you scream:
“I’m not a number, I’m a human being!!”
Sure you are,
Now take a number.
It’s for your own protection
There’s safety in numbers.
Numbers can answer all of your questions:
How far, how long, how deep, how high, how many,
How often?
Just not ‘how come’?
Anyone can count,
But you can’t count on anyone.
See, it’s a numbers game
That can’t be won
It’s a numbers game
It’s just how it’s done.
It’s all the same.
You’re not your name
You’re your numbers.
Now count to ten
And start all over again.
For Rob Thompson who asked me if Numbers occupy Space.
I am a paper bag, I am.
I am only as good as what I can carry.
I am a paper bag, I am.
I’m not the smart one,
I’m not the successful one.
I’m not the tall one who always won and
Then died.
I am a paper bag.
I’m only as good as what I can carry.
I am a paper bag,
I’m not plastic or burlap, not I.
I am paper: rough, brown and thin
I’m not waterproof, you know.
And I can’t hold any liquids or gases within.
I only have the energy for stuff that really matters.
I’m a paper bag.
I’m only as good as what I can carry.
I am a paper bag.
Wrinkled and used and too often abused
Thrown on the floor.
Buried deep inside your drawers.
I am a paper bag.
I cannot ask you for anything more
I’m only as good as what I can carry.
This blog is now my sole cognitive link to the outside world.
At least today it is.
I can’t physically be where I need to be so I’m posting here thinking that if enough people read my status, that it somehow puts me in the real world of social transactions and mini Games of Thrones.
Victory is not defeated but ailing.
I put my black steel steed in the hands of Spencer, the young mechanic who plays my Sancho Panza in this story. He’s humble because all of Victory’s afflictions are his fault. But I don’t rub it in.
“Sancho,” I say. “There’s no point in wasting time in pointing fingers. It’s never really just one cause, usually a combination of factors. I’m just glad that you’re willing to drive out here at 7 in the morning to take a look”.
I help Sancho Panza push my bike up into the back of his truck.
One good reason I’ve found for being nice (or civil, as I used to call it), is because so few people really are. Oh, they want to be taken for nice people alright; and would be highly distressed to find that others might think otherwise. Being nice provides a tactical advantage.
Although, I liked Spencer the young bike mechanic. An engineer in practice if not in credentials. My bike is first up this morning so if it can be fixed, it will be fixed in time for me to hit the 5 for San Diego and the Pancakes and Booze Art Market where I’m exhibiting some of my mother’s works for sale right next to Mario Torero. Sell some watercolours, some pastels and loads of books I hope.
I enjoy the role of an “art-barker”.
It feels like an honest effort for very little pay; however, the rewards are luxurious.
There are so many jobs that aren’t so and so many professions that once were and have since gone astray into the mercenary end of pure commercial exploitation. Marketing people use the term ‘exploitation’ to refer to the product they’re peddling but what they really mean is the market they want to buy it.
“Don’t say you support the arts, buy some!” is my shill.
So if my Victory is assured and returned to me by 3, I will make my way south on the 5 lane asphalt ribbon to the City on the Bay.
Last night I missed the ceremony for the official induction of 3 copies of IS SHE AVAILABLE? into the central library’s local author collection. Not just me, but that of my historic friend Chris Ernest Nelson, as well. His book Harvest lying right next to IS SHE? in a glass case.
Just like William Blake at the British Library when it used to be a separate building from the British Museum. And Joe Orton’s mutilated library books for which he spent prison time inside, now under glass inside the Islington Library in London, the very library he stole them from in the first place. In England, they put both the author and the work behind glass. In England, people go to jail for unpaid library fines. And mutilating books into art collages.
So I missed by success at convincing the library to take my book which they rejected at least twice. Once because it didn’t fit into their category system, the second because of Michael S Kane‘s Andy Warhol/Jack Kirby Madonna and child. But no child, just Mother Mary nurturing a revolver.
It’s been the image that has caused the most alarm and offence amongst bookstores, book buyers and of course libraries. I have been closing high order deals with chains on more than one occasion, only to have the buyer happen to land on Shaky’s spread and immediately handing my book back to me. Atta-boy Shaky, I’m living on desperation row thanks to you!
The irony is that our intention from the beginning was to apparently offend. There is nothing specifically offensive or pornographic about the image of a pre-pubescent blond girl holding a big pink gun. Not even the word ‘Vagina’ standing out in Rian Hughes‘s sculptural typography of the text to the poem.
In fact, there’s nothing offensive or shocking about the image at all, just the impression that one will be shocked. And of course, the real content, the real meaning of the poem and the illustration is that gun-violence is what we should really be offended and shocked by and yet are no longer. Judge for yourself below.
At any rate, I am home alone; sound but unsafe, calmly nervous by events beyond my control that are inevitably unfolding. G/d will pretend, when the time comes, that the end of the world was what he had planned all along.
Has been entered int the Realistic Poetry Contest and thus is no longer available on my blog as it is defined as non-exclusive or previous publication by the contest rules.
Who knows, I may even win.
Either way, it returns once the contest is over in February
Tune In.
Last night was kind of my XXXmas eve, being a Saturday night, with no ghosts to placate until Monday morning. So I took my Victory out for a long ride, 46 miles down to Chula Vista to drop in on my drunken-angel-poet-brothers Alex Bosworth and Chris Vannoy. As I told them, I’ve never stopped in Chula Vista before, only passed through it; well on my way to crossing the border between Mexico and Madness.
Back in the Beatnik Days, when America was still a Great Shining Beacon of Golden Intentions and jail-breaking freedoms, going south of the border was a euphemism for leaving the straight rational world and exploring the psychedelic corridors and hallways of the unconscious mind, where the muses played poker to the sound of Gabriel’s saxophone under a streetlamp, playing for spare change, playing for the end of time. Kesey, Cassidy, Timothy Leary had all spent time south of the border, hiding from the authority.
But I wasn’t going all the way south or crossing any borders. Instead, like a Boddhisatva practising the discipline of worldly compassion, I was riding south on the great American highway stopping just short of going over the edge. Stopping long enough for the rest of my sentient species to hop on board and cross over with me. How long I gotta wait? The blur of the wind in my eyes transforms Inter-state 5 into a two-lane river of white headlight diamonds on one end heading towards but past me and on the other end, a torrent of glistening rubies speeding with me, flowing around me, carrying me forwards in one high speed direction.
I was carried on a slipstream of glistening rubies last night. Chilled legs wrapped around my angel in flight, carrying me aloft above all thought, beyond all hesitation, in that dangerous living moment when every half second of thought is solid and real with consequence; and any distraction is a trap door thumping open under the hangman’s rope.
That is the fury of mediation. That is my arrival in this moment that we all share. The calm at the center of chaos. Join me, dear reader, at the centre of chaos.
So I’m heading south armed with an unopened bottle of rye, the spirit of the season travels with me. Good whisky is about as spiritual as I get these days. It is my usual Xmas tradition to grab a bottle of good booze and head down to the Greyhound station, or the street corner, outside a homeless shelter or an alleyway or anywhere I can find and join a cluster of the disaffected, the homeless, the pointless, the ones left out of family portraits. Just to share a drink, a joke and the dregs of our mutual humanity.
But this year, not particularly in contrast, I’ve chosen the company of Deadbeat poets, failed self-construction workers, mental hospital misfits, suicide skippers and gravel-voiced prophets capable of predicting the present with uncanny accuracy. Cassandra’s children muttering under their condensed breaths, scratching their prophecies from the oracle down for the benefit of anyone who still remembers how to read; or how to listen. Tonight these are my brothers (and sisters), in arms. Raging against a sea of struggles, believing that by opposing them, we will end them and wrap our soiled blankets of peace around this cold, shivering world’s shoulders.
Dead Beat Poets
I make it to Main Street much too early and agree to meet my comrades in a bar called Sanctum. I have no currency apart from my still untried bottle of rye so I stand outside on the pavement near but not too near two young women smoking butts and laughing. ‘Merry Xmas’, I venture.
‘Merry fucking Xmas to you too’, is their reply. So I listen. A skill I am still mastering. The raven-haired beauty of the pair is recounting her love life to her friend. Telling her how she had met her intended’s eyes at work, a burning penetration in time and how happy she was that at least she knew, that she knew that she knew that there was an unstated passion, thrilling at the unstated, as yet unenacted attraction between them.
The bittersweet anticipation of passions yearned for but still yet to come.
I wanted to tell the dark-haired young woman how lucky she was to be free to express such yearning to another woman. Jealously, I wanted her to pity my poor lame masculinity and the political mindfield I had to traverse to even come close to sharing such a pure moment of true emotion and affection. But I didn’t. Who wants to hear another pitiful man’s story anyways? This was the year of raised female voices. Voices raised in anger, in righteous retribution for all the wrongs accrued., in demand of recognition. Voices of freedom insisting on justice, insisting on equal treatment without unwanted trespass.
Poor me, poor me, pour me another drink. . . .
So instead I pulled out my weapon of virtue, my great equalizer of man and woman, my bottle of rye from my bag and asked if ‘You ladies would like a drink”. “Hell yes”. And for a brief instant, I felt just like St. Peter patrolling the earth and giving comfort to lost souls.
This murdered the time until my wordly brothers finally arrived. We poured from the bottle into bright red dixie cups, swigging them down in the parking lot before entering the warmth of Sanctum Ale House to talk poetry, performance, and what we were going to do with the rest of our lives. This was beginning to feel a lot like a rendezvous of fallen angels pausing for a drink and brief reflection before hitting Hell.
Beatnik Approved!
There was no reason to take a picture or a selfie or even take note of the time. We drank, we talked, we tried to make each other laugh and we indulged in our common humanity; a focus on what we shared more than what we didn’t.
My mind spun back in time to the many drinking conversations I had with my late great friend, the writer David Halliwell. The only man I had ever met who had got drunk with Sam Beckett. So David told this story of buying a bottle of good Irish whisky and taking the train to London, from Yorkshire. Easily a 4-hour journey. On the trip, David got nervous opened the bottle and drank half the contents on the way down arriving completely cut up the King’s Road party where San Beckett would be. He did find Beckett apparently and immediately sat down to finish the rest of the bottle he’d brought. David got so drunk he couldn’t remember a word that Sam Beckett had said to him.
Last night, I told Chris and Alex about the year that David called me up to join him for a Xmas drink and The Bull Tavern in the little North East Oxfordshire village of Charlbury, whose village council insisted on calling it a town because it had 4 pubs, a pharmacy and a post office.
I walked down the unpaved bumpy road to the tavern, past the Egyptian cottage with the papyrus reeds of Isis, the Goddess, not the terrorists. I reached The Bull pub and Inn, Opened the heavy oak door and walked into a movie. The pub was nearly empty save for the bar that featured David on his bar stool holding court with his mates. Only his mates were images burnt on my retinas since childhood: John Hurt, Ben Kingsley, David Warner, Freddie Jones and his son, then unknown now better known than him, Toby Jones. I remember blinking in disbelief. I might as well have walked in on Lewis Carrol, Tolkien and CS Lewis downing pints all who had also frequented this pub some hundred years previously.
I remember David smiling, laughing his phlegmatic cough and motioning me over to introduce me to these faces from the screen. “This is Igor, he’s another writer; he’s a Yank but he’s alright”. I was just another writer in the company of actors, everyday workers taking a break from toiling in the star-maker factories behind the popular film. I was handed a bulbous goblet of glowing ruby wine and the rest is hard to remember. But I do recall making them laugh and David Warner towering over me and reminiscing about his one appearance in a two-part Star Trek opposite Patrick Stewart that had earned him enough to comfortably return to the stage for 7 continuous years. Apart from young Toby, these were board strutting actors; indifferent and virtually contemptuous of their movie work save for the vast sums Hollywood paid them for peddling their trade of packaged emotions.
The next year most of them would be dead, David Halliwell included. I would empty his cottage with a Scottish actor of his while his Yorkshire sister wept inconsolably on his stairwell. In England, people let you weep and leave you to the dignity of your grief out of respect for the exceptional display of emotion. If you openly weep in England its because the pain is so hard that you really can’t hold it in.
Back in the Sanctuum, I explained to my companions how David had taught me the true meaning and value of the literary arts, which for David included actors who tell stories with their faces. Storytelling’s place in the human universe, keeping the stars locked in their firmament and the cosmic spheres in perfectly balanced and meaningful rotation. David Halliwell wasn’t famous. He died a virtual pauper, alone, estranged from his sister, a Yorkshire man with an RSC accent from wanting to be an actor, who wrote every day of his life before heading down to the pub to argue with me.
But he was a great success, albeit not by any kind of American Calvinist standard. Rather he succeeded in staying true to his art. He never sold out to better-paid mediocrity. He stayed true to his art, to himself and he survived with the respect and admiration of his fellow artists. When he died, I wrote and read this eulogy at his memorial, after Harold Pinter came up from Hampstead to say a few words about his departed friend. As did Stephen Frears and Scott Hampton (author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses).
I read this poem to David to my friends Alex Bosworth and Chris Vannoylast night. And in my mind, I went hunting and visiting my own xmas ghosts to remind me of the true joys of this season.
Daedalus Afraid to Fly
David, you bastard, you’ve left me
Understanding here alone,
With only these words falling out of my hands
When it is yours I want to hear again.
Words of your mastery, not mine.
So what was all the swearing about then, David?
What were all those Northern fumes really burning from?
I told you the songs of Yorkshire would never play in LA
Or London for that matter):
Two cities equidistant from your Yorkshire mother.
Tell me, David, why didn’t you just sell out?
You could have bought yourself a much better pint of beer
With all that money for old knotted ropes and
Still, have coughed up the phlegm to laugh at us all.
Is death your idea of some kind of joke?
Did you finally track down the film rights to Malcolm, David
And cash them in?
Are you really, secretly living in Barbados,
Making beautiful women miserable?
To think of all this wasted sorrow and
Empty glasses of beer.
You did say that you always wanted to visit other places.
But Daedalus, you were afraid to fly.
If you had been born upside down in America
You would have been a southern writer living in some Northern town.
Spilling your southern drawl over a rum and coke in a New York City bar.
Sitting elbow to arm with Williams, O’Neill, Baldwin and them all.
Your America was always an America of the mind.
So why fear the flight?
Your America David was where Charlie Parker
was forever sharp shooting pool with Humphrey Bogart
in some room behind a neon-splattered bar
Where Chet Baker never jumped or fell but flew, man!
He just flew away.
Just like you.
So you’re off then, David?
Back up the bumpy road,
Turning the corner around the Little Egyptian cottage
Navigating the reeds of Isis, Long past the close of time.
A brown duffle coat ship, bobbing on an unpaved surface,
Weaving a few well-spoken thoughts into your
Captain’s cap.
Can you tell me, David:
Were you X-Centric, or
Merely Eggs Essential?
How about this time I tell you, David:
The spark was always there.
But not like Daedalus, like Prometheus.
The living punishment of Truth,
Chained to your bar stool,
That eternal pint of Carlsberg lager gnawing at your liver.
Like Prometheus David,
The spark is always here.
For the late, great David Halliwell; poet, playwright,
Recent rewrite. When I first wrote and posted it, no one seemed to know what I meant by it. But now it’s becoming a favoured read aloud piece:
Insomniac Awareness
We who are hiding in our second bedrooms,
Licking the silver from the backs of our screens,
Are living in a different time zone
Of Insomniac Awareness.
Sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes four or more
Lives are lived and lost each night.
In our rooms, by ourselves
Sitting precariously on the edge of our beds.
This is our legacy
The lasting perpetuity of our sensory species:
The glow that contests the light that once shone from our eyes,
Right up to the surface of our understanding.
What is not yet known.
Or what was known and long since forgotten.
Dances across the screen you stare into.
Tripping over your coded memories; in Real Time.
Who are you reading this?Do you know
What perturbs your sleep-walk into the night?
Or are you merely waiting for the screen to pull you through?
Into your own quiet world,
Where things that count never change.
And no one is dreaming you but your mother,
Who has left you now for another child.
NOTHING has prepared you for This. Nothing ever will.
Because whatever is happening Now has never happened before.
This is a web-nurtured collaboration with 27 artists, sculptors and musicians from the world of Comics, Fantasy, Fine Art and Jazz, including Bill Sienkiewicz, David Lloyd, Liam Sharp, Glenn Fabry, Shaky Kane, Lars Henkel and the cutting edge sculptural typography of the highly acclaimed book designer Rian Hughes.
This illuminated book is a contemporary Dante’s Divine Comedy; a journey through the confessional landscape of a masculine identity. It uses poetry to construct a narrative that explores themes of death and loss, sex and love, and the modern American and Jewish identity design: by the UK’s eminent graphic designer, typographer, illustrator Rian Hughes.
The music is composed and produced by iconoclast, ex-Israeli, Middle-Eastern jazz virtuoso Gilad Atzmon, along with five other jazz artists.
Written by San Diego native Igor Goldkind, this illuminated book will revolutionize the way you view poetry by meshing comics, art, music and animation in a truly unique way. It uses poetry to construct a narrative that explores themes of death and loss, sex and love, and the modern American and Jewish identity. The book is available for download on the iTunes Store andGoogle Play, as well as in a 166 page, fully illustrated in colour hardbound edition available ORDER HERE.
The eBook edition pushes the edge of what is possible with present EPUB3 technology. It is not an App, it is a true book that marries pop art, comics, avant-garde, jazz, spoken word poetry, video and animations, and type design in a manner that we have not seen before IS SHE AVAILABLE? has the feel of an artefact from the near future – a seminal work of a new genre-fusing poetry, graphic art, music, and animation.
Sample interior pages:
IS SHE AVAILABLE? RRP is $34.95, SHIPPING INCLUDED Educational Discount for Students and Teachers:$29.95
Both deluxe hardcover edition PLUS animated and musically scored eBook App edition of Is She Available? bundle: $39.95
Shipping included in orders within the US and its territories.
If you are in Britain and/or Europe, please contact my European wholesaler Fanfare Productions who will take your order and dispatch to your address the same day: stephen@fanfareuk.demon.co.uk
Reviews ? Sure We Got Reviews. Why You Wanna See Them? Be my guest.
“Igor’s “Illuminated Book” is like a new genre.It is a wonderful ekphrastic expression; a fusion of the arts.” — Poet Mel Takahara
“His collection Is She Available? has the feel of an artefact from the near future – a seminal work of a new genre-fusing poetry, graphic art, music, and animation.” —(San Diego’s) City Beat
“Is SHE Available?” is an experiment, and reading it feels more like an act of discovery… nonetheless there’s a thrill to scrolling through its pages. It’s an ambitious step toward what digital media can (and will) be.”—The Chicago Tribune
The166 full colour, fully illustrated hard cover deluxeedition is available in discerning and eclectic independent bookstores everywhere.Including Fahrenheit 451 in Carlsbad, Soulscape Bookstore in Encinitas, the Upstart Crow in San Diego, Verbatim Booksand Mysterious Galaxy also in San Diego, City Lights and the Cooperfields chain in Marin County and Sonoma County, amongst a growing number of independent book stores.
Order direct from PayPal and shipping is included!
The only way to explain Zen is by describing the sleepy mind. The sleepy mind describes a tree in terms of attributes and data: the number of leaves, the leaf shape, the number of branches, thickness of the trunk, the colour of bark. Which birds make use of the tree etc.
All these observable and measurable attributes are assembled as data by the sleepy mind and voila! the sleepy mind thinks it knows what a tree is. The sleepy mind can give arguments with citations about the validity of its data. The sleepy mind works well with other sleepy minds.
And the sleepy mind isn’t totally wrong, the data it compiles in reference to ‘tree’ are all real and quantifiable features of the tree. But no matter how exact or comprehensive, the data is not the tree nor even the experience of the tree.
The awoken mind merely says “Look, a tree”, and points.
Because there is no data that conveys the experience of that tree in the moment of your apprehension. The awoken mind, sees the leaves, the branches, the colour of the bark, the thickness of the trunk, which birds fly in and out of the tree as much and as well as the sleepy mind does.
But the awoken mind also sees that the spaces between the leaves are part of the tree. The negative space surrounding the tree. The unseen roots spread beneath the ground are part of the tree. The sunlight reflecting off the green of the leaves are part of the tree. The seat waiting to rest your back against the trunk is part of the tree. The awoken mind ‘see’s the tree; the form of the tree; the tree itself in all its ‘tree-ness’, the tree as a child sees a tree; not what the sleepy mind contrives to substitute as its surrogate.
I think this is the closest I can come to describing the Zen disposition. I say disposition because too much is made of practice and the philosophy of Zen when all are merely aids to assist in the unravelling of illusion and self-deception. Zen is not an acquisition of skills, rituals, garments or ideology; instead, Zen is relinquishment. It is a reminder to keep paying attention.Not acquiring but letting go: unravelling, stripping away layers of calloused skin, leaving your baggage behind and not looking back over your shoulder. In the words of the bard:
“My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip My toes too numb to step”.
Buddhists will talk about the Buddha-nature as universal, the same as our original nature. Don’t listen to them. The face that first looked up at your mother’s face is still there, submerged and (sometimes suppressed), within you. All that Zen suggests is that we are encumbered by needless worry, anxiety, expectations, daydreams and nostalgias that have buried your true self under the rubble of your crumbling castle and keeps you from seeing the world and your place in it, with any clarity.
We are all distracted by anxieties and worries about money, about jobs, about partners and children. That distraction is manufactured by the powerful in the society we live in to keep us consuming, acquiescent and very sleepy! It doesn’t matter if you meditate or not; if you read poetry or not; if you drink tea or practice martial arts or not. It doesn’t matter how you get there or what you wear; just that you wake up and experience the miracle of persistent and unwavering creation. The universe is created, then destroyed then resurrected millions of times a second, faster than you can blink; so try and keep your eyes open!
I leave you once again with the immortal words of the Nobel Prize laureate:
“Then take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
You don’t need Seymour Chwast, Chip Kidd and other designers to tell you that cartoons and comics are vital sources of creative inspiration (although they do that here). So maybe you’re thinking about exploring the graphic novel realm, but you’d like something more exceptional than usual, more out of the ordinary. Well, here’s the first of a series of suggestions that either defy or disregard categorization as comics. And the first, Is She Available?, is an eBook that also challenges conventional book classification in the process.
As you scroll through, you hear 1950s cool jazz in the background. Then gunfire blasts out of nowhere. A choir sings. Dogs bark. Bombs drop from the sky. And all the while, letterforms unexpectedly appear, tilt, transform, and vanish while spoken words interweave with the music and sound effects. Is She Available? is a trans-media poetry collection, one that pushes at the limits of eBook technology. It’s also comics, kind of.
Its author, Igor Goldkind, is a 2000AD comics sci-fi writer. He describes his 50 or so poems as “a contemporary Dante’s Inferno… that explores themes of death and loss, sex and love.” He’s included a couple of standard, panel-sequenced comic book narratives, including one rendered by V for Vendetta’s David Lloyd. But the bulk of the book is enlivened with music and other effects that enhance the moody illustrations and minimalist animations from a diversity of other skilled artists. The lineup notably includes Judge Dredd’s Liam Sharp and Shaky Kane as well as Bill Sienkiewicz of Daredevil/Elektra fame. Most impressive is the overall design, by accomplished comics illustrator and self-described “commercial artist” Rian Hughes. With graphic flair and acuity, Hughes proves himself to be a worthy digital age successor to Stéphane Mallarmé and Robert Massin.
If you’re interested in comic books, chances are you’ve heard the names Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. After all, their partnership paved the way for the Golden Age of comics beginning in the 1940s. With The Art of the Simon and Kirby Studio by Mark Evanier, learn more about the duo who invented noteworthy characters like Captain America and Sandman, conceived the idea of romance comics, and created a new standard for the genres of crime, western, and horror comic books. Take a look inside the various aspects of their career, and see some of the works that defined them.
I can honestly say, this is like no other book we have ever seen before; we think perhaps – like no other you may have seen as well.
31 March 2015
For Immediate Release
IS SHE AVAILABLE? PUSHES BOOKS AND PUBLISHING FORWARD THROUGH POETRY, ART, AND MUSIC
Southern-California based publisher Chameleon Publishing releases its first major publication: Is SHE Available? by Igor Goldkind April 1 via the iBooks store.
Is SHE Available? pushes the edge of what is possible with present EPUB3 technology and how books are created and made. It is not an App, it is a true book that marries pop art, comics, avant-garde, jazz, spoken word poetry, video and animations, and type design. Its creative journey was more than a year in the making, growing from the collaborative work of artists, musicians, editors, and designers on two continents.
The poet, Igor Goldkind, is a San Diego native who lived in France and the UK for two decades while promoting the work of today’s most notable comic and graphic novel authors and artists. As a teen, he was one of the co-founders of San Diego’s legendary Comic-Con.
According to Bleeding Cool, “It was Goldkind who popularized the phrase ‘graphic novel’ with the media and found that gave them permission to cover the previously-considered childish medium of comic books . . . . Now, Goldkind’s vision of what graphic novels could be, is returning.”
Is SHE Available? was produced using an international collaborative model, but the book is one man’s voice and one man’s story. Goldkind’s words and voice inspired the art of over 26 internationally-known artists, including cover art and interior illustrations by Eisner-winner Bill Sienkiewicz (Elektra Assassin, Daredevil and more), additional interior illustrations from other graphic novel illustrators and award-winners including Glenn Fabry (Hellblazer, Preacher), David Lloyd (V for Vendetta and many others), Liam Sharp (Judge Dredd/2000 AD/Madefire), fine artists and illustrators Lars Henkel, Mario Cavalli, Mario Torero, Wendy Farrow, and many more.
Music and spoken word were recorded in New York with UK Jazz Album of the Year winner, author and ex-Israeli Gilad Atzmon. A US-based jazz and spoken word tour is scheduled for July 2015.
The type design and hardcover book are created by the eminent London-based designer Rian Hughes (2000 AD, Vertigo, Dan Dare), who includes an afterward about the collaborative design process. E-book production, incorporating Madefire animations, audio and additional animation, were provided by Chameleon Publishing in Southern California.
Due to the inclusion of video, audio and animations, and fine type design, it is playable only on Apple devices, and available only through the iBooks store. The hardcover (without music, spoken word or animations) will be published July 15, 2015.
Other “enhanced e-books” have been produced with budgets of $100,000 or more, and few have sold well. The “wisdom” is: poetry doesn’t sell. Enhanced e-books don’t sell. Most jazz doesn’t sell, either. Comic and graphic novel artists struggle to show their fine art to the public. And what publisher would take on a completely unknown poet whose claim to fame was selling fancy comic books to grown-ups and co-founding a big comic/media/scantily-clad women-fest like Comic-Con?
Twenty percent of North Americans regularly buy and read books. Nearly a hundred percent can read. Chameleon’s mission is to make books for everyone, not just a selected few.
Published April 1, 2015, in honor of National Poetry Month.
-END-
For more information and to obtain a copy of Is SHE Available? eBook for review (EPUB3 only on iOS devices – iPad, iPhone and Apple computers) or an advance reading copy of the hardcover edition contact the publisher:
After shaking hands with Lee, I wandered through the space. I was looking for poets to invite to my festival. They could teach as guest teachers at the Pegasus Poetry Workshops. It starts the last day of January 2025. They might even contribute to my new poetry journal, The Mission. I began to recognize some familiar figures of the San Diego Poetry “scene”. Poetry Underground had constructed a long table promoting their books and events. I avoided the eye contact of Anthony and “Sunny”. My last encounter with them was when they barred me from their underground open mic poetry reading. It was because I read my anti gun poem. THE BULLET FROM MY GUN. Anthony and Sunny founded Poetry Underground. They are proponents of the school of thinking that 
San Diego Poetry “scene” has been and is still, more like an open dog fight between warring and self-aggrandizing factions. 
Beatles onto LSD, and we all know where that led: cultural, spiritual, and social Revolution! 
A new acquaintance asked me why I endured relative poverty and uncertainty in California when I could easily take a tech copywriting or PR job and be living comfortably.
I have sought refuge in self-hatred, in depression, in the idle futility of it all.
Depression is merely an afterthought.
We are slaves to our memories
Prisoner number…
The irony is that our intention from the beginning was to apparently offend. There is nothing specifically offensive or pornographic about the image of a pre-pubescent blond girl holding a big pink gun. Not even the word ‘Vagina’ standing out in 
Do you know
The seat waiting to rest your back against the trunk is part of the tree. The awoken mind ‘see’s the tree; the form of the tree; the tree itself in all its ‘tree-ness’, the tree as a child sees a tree; not what the sleepy mind contrives to substitute as its surrogate.
Buddhists will talk about the Buddha-nature as universal, the same as our original nature. Don’t listen to them. The face that first looked up at your mother’s face is still there, submerged and (sometimes suppressed), within you. All that Zen suggests is that we are encumbered by needless worry, anxiety, expectations, daydreams and nostalgias that have buried your true self under the rubble of your crumbling castle and keeps you from seeing the world and your place in it, with any clarity.
If you’re interested in comic books, chances are you’ve heard the names Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. After all, their partnership paved the way for the Golden Age of comics beginning in the 1940s. With The Art of the Simon and Kirby Studio by Mark Evanier, learn more about the duo who invented noteworthy characters like Captain America and Sandman, conceived the idea of romance comics, and created a new standard for the genres of crime, western, and horror comic books. Take a look inside the various aspects of their career, and see some of the works that defined them.
s) will be published July 15, 2015.
igorgoldkind
Pre-Order FACING the WAVES: Art & Music Edition by Award Winning Poet Igor Goldkind
The Mass market digital edition is out in April, but I’m only signing the $54.95 limited edition. $34.95 for the cheap, print on demand edition out in April, 2025
Original cover by Norwegian Surrealist Painter
Katarina Anderssen
(Also available as a fine art print, signed and numbered by Katarina )
Original music and spoken word album composed by the magnificent Israeli Jazz composer Gilad Atzmon available in March for download, CD and Vinyl entitled The Broken Star, a musical and poetic indictment of the current state of Israel.
Album cover design by the designer, illustrator, comics artist, visual god Dave McKean. (Arkham Asylum, Sandman, Cages).
International signing and performance tour of Spoken Word and Live Music coming in the Spring of ’25
This is Art.
Sample the Stone Soup:
Rumi’s Mirror
the reflection of a reflection is your reflection.
upon the mirrored surface of a pool,
that is being slowly filled
by the very source of the life
you reflect upon
Now jump in the pool!
Modern Haiku
A boy goes to school
And tears his schoolmates apart
With metal piercing bullets.
This is normal now.
Facing the Waves
Waves are your faces
Crashing in real time,
Raising the tide
Against your complacent shore.
Waves are your faces
Curved towards you:
White-bearded men,
Relentlessly knocking on your front door
Reality, an unknown intruder
Upon your inner core,
Beats rhythmically, poetically,
Drowning you in what you do not know.
Waves are your faces
Melting into one and the other;
Beating, imploring you,
To open your locked front door
Waves are your faces
Beating on your front door
Eroding your discomforts
Seeking to drown your inner core.
Beating senselessly, endlessly
Against locked doors,
Waves are abandoned faces
Beating on your front door.
(Email info@themissionarts.com
To be added to our pre-order list.
order in January for a 99.50% discount!!)
Look for it sweetheart, you ain’t seen anything like this before!
(Email: igor@themissionarts.com
To be added to our pre-order list order in January 2025 for a 99.50% discount!!)
Hey, No one does math the way we do!
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December 18, 2024 | Categories: art, beat, book launch, books, bubbles, comments about poetry, death, Depression, Emptyness, Existentialism, Faith, Gilad Atzmon, Healing, Igor Goldkind, jazz, La Jolla, literature, Math, Meaning of Existence, Meditations, mental health, Mindfulness, new poetry, physics, poetry, Poetry as therapy, Poetry Therapy, politics, Self-Therapy, sex, spoken word, story-telling, Suicide, Therapy, Transmedia, world jazz music, Zen | Tags: Anti Fascist Poetry, Award Winning Poetry, Contemporary, Contemporary American Poet, Contemporary Poetry, Modern America Poetry, Modern Poetry, New Poetry, Social Activism, Social Activist Poetry | 5 Comments