The Mud-painted tribe slithers between tall blades Making ripples on the surface of a sea of grass. The elder moves forward, quiet in the breeze. Painted men follow his path. Bare feet on stone, Bare feet squeezing the feces of their prey between thick, calloused toes.
The elder raises a hand, the world stops to watch him. His hand strikes down, the tribe moves as one body Of water flowing forward, gathering speed Bare feet pounding the stones, pounding dung, Pounding the drum that summons food.
Their prey lifts brown eyes and studies the breeze As the stench of mud painted flesh reaches its nostrils, The prey bolts as one with its leaping cousins. Painted men attack, throwing spears and stones Their prey leaps and flies wild above the reeds
Mayhem ensues The drums of the hunt are beat by bare feet and hooves. But 2 feet are deadlier than 4 as Gazelle after gazelle fall under the fatal thrusts of piercing spears, Like ballerinas bowing to their final curtain.
Shrieks of joy now fill the air Proud guttural cries of victory Gratuitous grunts from hungry bellies In anticipation of the feast of flesh that will stave starvation Cheers and jeers float above the melee.
Mammalian blood paints the tundra red Sounds of a Saturday Night Sports Bar, A tribe-filled stadium jumps back in time to reunite with its origin, One among them doesn’t slow his gallop His eyes are fixed on his chosen prey, a swift 4 footed dancer.
He gains speed, closer and closer His spear raised above his head Poised to unleash the point of death. He pulls back his arm for the moment of truth and stumbles. He falls,
He falls through 10 million years He falls, bone splintered in red agony. His thick feet no longer propel him He falls to the ground between reeds, dust and the dung that is his history He screams white blinding pain, writhing in agony.
The mud-painted leader pauses to inhale the wind. He looks to his feet where the warrior of mud twists in pain, Holding his leg with both hands pressed to his chest. The elder surveys the blood-soaked tundra. He looks up at the sky and down at the earth.
Then a new thought flowers. He looks again at his fallen compatriot For the first time in his life, he feels his brother’s pain. The unfolding blossom takes root is his brain. The elder looks into the faces that are facing him.
He sees his tribe, He sees his woman sleeping silently in the corner of his mind’s mud-thatched hut. He sees sons that are yet to be born. He sees himself, his tribe He sees us all as we are. The elder approaches the fallen, writhing man He crouches on his haunches to view the blood-soaked fractured bone. He looks up at the sky. With two arms outreached, he brings his tribe closer to the fallen hunter. This fallen man’s comrades stare into the elder’s eyes.
The moment stops, and now there is only the elder, the fallen, and the tribe. Seen from a bird above Cradled in mud, they are all as one, Dirty, naked and submitting, Surrendering beneath the sun’s eternal glare
The elder grasps dry blades of grass with both his hands and pulls. He uproots weeds, shaking pellets of mud from their roots. He twists the reeds into a malleable rope and twists it firmer and firmer. Then scoops his hand into black mud. Grasping moisture with his fists,
He spreads muck on the twisted grass. Leaning over the fallen, who stares into his eyes. Moving the man’s hands away from his wound The elder wraps the grass rope round and round the broken bone. He wraps it, then ties it into a helix, then rises, standing above the man.
The elder picks up a stone and with his hand strikes it against another- A single glint of wisdom is born. That sparks the kindling others have gathered. Soon, a fire emerges like a newborn child. The men nurture the flaming child with the pieces of wood they had gathered, Soon there is a steady blue flame consuming dried grass, twig and wood.
Men cut the flesh from their slaughter Thrusting bleeding flesh into the hungry fire The sizzling smell of cooked meat fills the air. The fallen chews the meat with his pain and rubs the grass rope that binds his fractured leg. Under the steady gaze of his comrades, he comforts himself Knowing that he will not be left behind.
With a stick in his hand, the elder scratches the shape of his thoughts in the dust. The elder comprehends, we are all bound together like sticks of wood, Twisted ropes of grass. We are one bundle of wood. We are one rope of grass. In the dust between his feet, he scratches these symbols.
I translate for you here: “We are all here in one place. We are all one bundle of wood. We are all one rope of grass We are all stronger from our bond. We are all one bundle of wood and a stick on the ground.”
Civilization is born. Out of the mud and the shit, Out of the sweat and the blood. Out of the scratching of symbols in the dust, Out of the twisted bond that heals the fallen among us. Humanity is born.
The project is scheduled for release this MAY. It includes a deluxe limited edition hardcover. There is also a 14-track album featuring original music and spoken word. Additionally, there is a signed limited art print of the cover illustration by renowned Scandinavian surrealist painter Katarina Anderssen.
I think what I’m currently writing is new. It’s making classical or formal poetry conform to modern rhythms and structures.
I call the umbrella genre for both my prose, poetry and non fiction. Speculative Realism after the French Philosophical post Idealist school of thinking.
The bastard child of Magic Realism and Speculative Fiction, if SF asks the question “What if?”… Speculative Realism asks the question “What are you going to do when?”
In other words, the current rate of change and transformation has actually altered the nature of our perception and experience of time. The distance between what can be imagined and what comes about, which once took years or even decades, is now the blink of an eye.
The rate of diverse technological innovation is beyond what any one of us can fully grasp. It thus appears as the new “magic” in our experiential world.
What I write now is within the Speculative Realist context. Magic is now real. What I imagine to be possible is already happening.
My humble example:
Teeth
Hey, you don’t know yourself. You just Imagine yourself. Like someone who might just pass. As smooth as mustard Skating on a bread knife Spread between the slices of what you know and what you lie to represent.
Sandwiches… All let-us and may-oh! and barely a sliver of meat. Condiments are lies. Flesh is your spirit when it is glimpsed: All blood and sinew wrapped around bone. Icy snapshots of frozen Russian River.
Tear all substance with your teeth. Devour what is real. Vomit garnish like a canine Surrender to the hunger that chases scent. Drool on your prey. There are no just desserts. Just/unjust oceans of discontent.
Question (From Jim Means, a professor friend of mine I’ve known since High School): Paul Erdős–the most prolific mathematician of the 20th century, lived such a nomadic lifestyle. He would wander from continent to continent, knocking on the doors of other mathematicians and announce “My brain is open!” with the hope that they would invite him into stay in their home for weeks or months. Most would invite him in. They knew this would guarantee them a collaboration with Erdős. Consequently, they would get one or two academic papers out of it.
Perhaps you could do the same with other poets.
My Response: Well, it’s not a bad thought. However, there’s not much market demand for poetry. There’s also little demand for the works of poets. At least not as much as for mathematical or scientific papers. In Europe, poets rely on the state’s arts stipends to fuel their work. Poets, writers, and artists are considered respected vocational pursuits throughout Europe. This contrasts with the US; where saying one is a poet or a painter is basically to invite the retort, ‘why, can’t you get a real job?’
Art takes decades to master. It must be perfected into a discipline to produce value that a market will pay for. The problem in the quick-buck US is that there is no infrastructure outside of academia that permits an artist to practice and perfect their craft. We live under the delusion that artists either are born with it and immediately recognizably ‘geniuses’ or piddle away in isolation dying long before their work is recognized and cashed in on, ala Van Gogh.
The fulfillment from creating beauty is profound. It attempts to point at the eternal and universal. This beauty endures long after one has shaken off mortal constraints. It is worth the hard times and sacrifice.
It’s a stab at immortality, if you will. If you can’t take it with you, you might as well leave something worthwhile behind.
There is nothing I can rent, buy, or lay away that matches the genuine human connection art brings. This connection forms when a young person approaches me after a reading. They genuinely express their appreciation for the ideas and images I put in their heads. These ideas changed the way they saw things. This is when I realize my work is effective. And it is worth a million times more than some contrived award or accolade.
There is no greater enjoyment of humanity that I can muster.
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
“Igor, Why are you smoking and drinking your self to death? Smoking, if you don’t inhale cigars, can still give you bladder cancer. Tell tale signs are blood in your urine, often after about forty years of smoking.”
Writes Michael Brett
michael, thanks for expressing your concern and I will answer your question as thoroughly and honestly as I can.
Well, for one thing, I don’t have blood in my urine. Every body is different and reacts differently to different things. For example, my body does not respond well to cannabis although people are constantly praising its health virtues and persuading me to replace it for my consumption of alcohol and tobacco.
Maybe it works for them but not for me. I used to smoke cannabis, a lot of it. But if I smoke even a hit now, I lose focus for days. I become lethargic. I feel demotivated and lack self certainty.
I smoke strong chemical free cigarettes and high end Cuban cigars for. one main reason: The nicotine increases my focus. It also relieves the stress of coping with the seemingly endless stream of idiocies and obstacles that people and their bureaucracies hurl at me. If human beings weren’t so maliciously stupid, needlessly cruel, deliberately ignorant and undermining, I probably wouldn’t smoke at all!
Likewise alcohol, I now drink nearly every day, but only after I’ve finished working, so around 5 or 6 pm. I start work at 5-6 am each and every morning. 7 days a week. God took Sunday off which explains why the world is broken. Repairing the world is a 7/7 day a week vocation.
I drink only the best wine, tequila I can afford and only when I’m in Britain or Germany do I drink beer. British real ale and German Pilsners are living nutrients; unpasteurized and nourishing to the body as much as the soul.
I drink exceedingly but seldom get drunk and even more rarely suffer hangovers. The latter is down to the premium quality of the alcohol I consume. All natural, no additives. And yes, more expensive.
I drink for two equally valid reasons:
1. I’m in pretty constant pain in my extremities, mainly my legs and mainly my right leg. I was diagnosed with lymphedema last October. The American medical system has failed miserably in getting me even a lymphedema specialist. It also hasn’t provided a proper treatment for my condition. Nor even effective pain relief.
American medicine is only about money and the doctors, nurses and health practitioners care about little else than you insurance coverage. It is a disgusting, mercenary, greed-fueled system that should be scorch-earth, burnt to the ground and built from scratch based on a nationalized health model.
But money breeds greed which necessarily breeds incompetence. Beware getting ill or needing any kind of mental or physical health help in America.
You won’t get it unless you’re rich and even then, there’s no guarantees when it comes to American health care, None at all!
So I drink as much as I do as a means of self medication. When I find decent medical treatment for my condition in Europe, I will probably reduce, but not eliminate my alcohol intake.
In spite of my excessive drinking and smoking, my last physical in November, 2024 was according to my nurse practitioner, a 4 star ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ result!
Blood, urine, stool test all came up trumps (and I don’t mean Dumb-Hitler). Blood pressure a little elevated but within normal parameters, cholesterol down, liver super fit, lung capacity excellent, could lose about 15 pounds of excess wait but I apparently have the body of a 35 year old.
That’s what having the right genes from a mixed racial parentage and background gets you!
2. The second equally valid reason I have for drinking in excess is that I’m lonely. My last girlfriend, a Mexican beauty and mother of 2 from Jalisco dumped me because I wasn’t rich and had no intention of getting rich. We were still trying to be friends but I think she more recently decided that the time she spent with me was time she was losing finding a millionaire. She’s not greedy as she’s looking for a millionaire not a billionaire. But as with everything in America, money lies coiled at the roots of all value, even Love.
I am desperate for feminine companionship. Not overtly, but inwardly desperate. I prefer the company of women to men. I think that women in general, are better human beings than men are. I was raised by a strong, intelligent and independent mother and I am passionately attracted to the same type.
I loved my baby sister, Natasha, now deceased, am on warm speaking terms with my ex wife and love my 25 year old daughter Olivia, more than my own life.
I treat women with respect, with consideration, with affection and when they are open to it, passion.
However, this has proved no formula for success.
This is partly due to culture and geography. Being trapped in Southern California for the past 8 years has been an emotional and sexual nightmare.
California women are by nature, defensive, suspicious to the point of paranoia (much of which is justified, considering mentality of Californian men!), spiteful, callous, cruel and rarely know what they want romantically, socially and most certainly sexually.
It is akin to a pandemic level neurosis. I’m sure it is caused by the dominance of excessive consumption capitalism. America is a Nation run amok with Hungry Ghosts wandering aimlessly in constant hunger for commodities that never satisfy. So that the sad ghosts are compelled to consume more and more and more. As well as waste resources, energy and everything around them; including other people and even themselves.
I detect this neurosis most in women, because I am not physically attracted to men and therefore expose my self to more slings and arrows of overpriced fortune from women. Beautiful women; inwardly and outwardly. I say this because what underlines all the female Hungry Ghosts is money. An insatiable desire for money and the companionship of men who can provide it.
My experience and impression is that without money, the Californian branch of the human tree would wither and die from lack of procreation.
I’m not calling Californian women prostitutes. No, they’re far worse than that: they only give of themselves, their love, their affection, their emotional investment to the IMPRESSION of wealth and money.
Actual prostitutes are more transactional. California women are constantly playing games, with themselves as much as others. They live in a cacophony of mixed messages, confusion, self-loathing and passive aggressive spite.
Many appear to both fear and despise men at the same time. But rather than just leave us alone, they like to play cat and mouse games of allure and refusal as a means of compensating for a sublimated sense of power.
I am not the only man who thinks and feels this; btw, before you start hurling more misogyny cards in my hat. Men, especially foreign born men, confess the exact same conclusions about Californian women when there aren’t any women around to overhear.
Even feminist women, who I admire and prefer, have great difficulties expressing what they want and Don’t want from a man. There’s deep insecurity at the heart of the west coast female that more often than not, manifests as passive aggression and occasional overt aggression.
For evidence of this just read the comments from women that will inevitably follow in reaction to this post.
I will find a lover eventually, if not a partner, somewhere in Europe or possibly north Africa, soon enough. Of that I have no lack of self certainty! I was happily married to an English woman for some 18 years.
I have a great deal to offer the “right” woman: intellect, humor, tenderness, insight and genuine affection. I have never been told that I am other than a passionate and satisfying love who gives more than he takes. Whose greatest pleasure is to give pleasure to the point of repeated climax. I am a gourmet chef for whom the greatest act of love (apart from the very act of love) is to cook a favourite meal for a friend for my family, for my lover.
I am very industrious, ambitious and am well on my way to making my career as that of a best selling author and successful poet.
But most of all I am kind.
I do not suffer fools gladly and I state the truth no matter how critical the truth is or how easily offended the recipient.
I feed and house the homeless when I can. I enjoy talking to young people both young men and young women who I speak the truth to regardless of what their elders or authorities think.
I am a critical thinker in the tradition and spirit of Socrates.
I question authority.
ALL authority.
I try my best to alleviate the suffering of others.
I regularly meditate.
I adore the arts and all forms of music (apart from breakfast cereal jingles).
I am the best Poet I have ever been in my life and my life is far from over!
I have very close ‘girlfriends’ and “admirers” in Holland, the UK, France and Algeria. Some are with partners and therefore our relations are Platonic for the time being. Others have issues of faith that prevent them from acting on their attractions and some. I just haven’t met…yet.
But I am actively looking, just not in California or the US, ever again. So for both health and romantic reasons, to quote Robert Hunter “I’m going where the weather suits my clothes”!
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!
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?
His schedule is as follows: Flying to London to see his lovely daughter Olivia Melanie Goldkind-Brooks who he hasn’t seen in nearly 3 years! A week with her and then a train to Alicante, Spain to visit the British Mad Dog Richard Torres for a little while and check out Alicante as my probable new home as of August next year. Then catching a leisurely train (or boat) to Athens to meet up with the musical genius, composer, producer Gilad Atzmon to record the new album of my poetry from FACING THE WAVES onto a down load, CD and Vinyl
I’m hoping the working title THE BROKEN STAR will become the actual title, reflecting my moral stance against the current state of Israel in its present non secular form. To reiterate, I am convinced that the only road to peace in the Middle East is if and when Israel reform its Constitution and reconstitutes itself as a non religious, secular state as well as provide haven for ALL refugees seeking oppression, not just the European Jews post WWII. Only then can Israel establish is true heroic nature d assert its true Jewish values of Compassion, Generosity, Equality and the upholding of Human Rights.
The Jewish people of Israel more than anyone else in the world must uphold the values of life and liberty freedom from bigotry and persecution because and in honor of the very memory of the Jews of the 20th century who were persecuted, murdered and then subjected genocide because of their ethnicity and non white European. We cannot let them impose the same bigotry, discrimination, murder and genocide upon the Arab peoples, not matter the excuse or justification.
Perhaps THE BROKEN STAR will shed light for at least a few who cannot yet see that imperative
Thu, Dec 26 — San Diego to LondonTotal Travel Time 15h:05min
Flight UA1827
Economy Flight duration: 5h 16min San Diego, SAN Lindbergh Intl Arpt United States Terminal: 20 7:15 AM Dec 26, 2024 Thu New York, Newark Intl Arpt United States Terminal: A03:31 PM Dec 26, 2024 Thu Meal options: FOOD_TO_PURCHASE2h 29min layover in New York
Flight UA110
Premium Economy Flight duration: 7h 20min New York, EWR Newark Intl Arpt United States
Terminal: C06:00 PM Dec 26, 2024 Thu London, LHR Heathrow Arpt United Kingdom
Terminal: 206:20 AM Dec 27, 2024 Fri Meal options: MEA
Tue, Jan 28 — Athens to Los AngelesTotal Travel Time 16h:30min
06:35 AM Jan 28, 2025 Tue Frankfurt, FRA Frankfurt Intl Arpt Germany Terminal: 10. 8:50 AM Jan 28, 2025 Tue Meal options: REFRESHMENTS/MEAL_AT_COST1h 35min layover in Frankfurt
Flight LH456 Premium Economy Flight duration: 11h 40min Frankfurt, FRA Frankfurt Intl Arpt Germany Terminal: 110:25 AM
Jan 28, 2025 Tue Los Angeles, LAX Los Angeles Intl Arpt United States Terminal: B 01:05 PM
Jan 28, 2025 Tue Meal options: REFRESHMENTS/MEAL
In LA Our hero hopes to meet with his new IT director, his nephew Francisco Hudson the budding film maker and his production team on The Mission monthly publication my good friends Amie and Jesse Horsting
Then it’s back to San Diego to move and being teaching poetry through the library system.
I swear listening in to this documentary it sounds exactly like my autobiography! Arrogance aside, I have yet to achieve anything even approaching the pinnacle of aesthetic mastery over the English language that Beckett achieved in his life time, but my aspiration and formative years in Paris are very similar.
In my humble opinion, Samuel Beckett was the greatest, most profound and impactful writer of the 20th century; if there could even be such a thing as a number one.
Like him, I too eventually skewed formal academia as too limited to reach the pinnacles of knowledge I wish to scale. I’ve always found academia to be a poor substitute for a real education and scholarly pursuit.
Too rigid and locked into its own political circus of bought credentials and peer review, where in your competitors get to judge your work and inevitably detract from it. Higher education is only available to those who can afford to pay for one and that in itself limits its virtues to privilege and social class.
Like Sam, I too have turned to art (first though the publishing industry), as embodying the best education a self-motivated scholar can pursue. There is no one to judge your work but the public who will either accept it by buying it or give you the feedback of ignoring both the work and you.
This is what the market is for: faceless, anonymous judges cloaked in long dark robes who sit in final judgement merely by virtue of their attention span.
They either get you or they don’t and if they don’t, it’s one’s own self that bears the blame.
The vocation of art is a noble one.
A lonely one, it is true.
It takes literally decades to get anywhere near the mastery of ones craft.
The living, selling, successful artist is a figure of endurance, one who has persisted beyond an ocean of failures to the remotest of islands where a little sun may some day shine down on him/her.
Where nourishment is reduced to whatever fish one happens on, in the sea. Perhaps some berries or figs or a coconut or two.
The only sustenance a career in art can bring is the nutrition present in the work itself. Be it writing, be it visualization, music, dance, theatre, media or another medium I can’t even imagine.
It is true of all art.
True art serves its own purpose; it is for itself and nothing else. Like a tree or a river or a boulder in the middle of the desert, it has no purpose apart from the expression of its own Being. Any “art” that is for something, e.g. illustration, decoration, entertainment is no longer art. It may be “artistic” in the language and meaning it conveys but it is not strictly speaking, real art.
Real art is lie a tree, a stone, a pebble, a cloud, a sand dune, a mountain, a river, an ocean or a new born child.
It is the work and the doing of the work that is the vocation.
Fame is for John Lennon and David Bowie to sing about.
It has no place in an artist’s cramped quarters, there’s barely enough room for love and respect.
Like my intellectual idol Sam Beckett, I have made great sacrifices to perfect my craft; and yet I am still lightyears from my goals. Socially, personally, emotionally and certainly financially impoverished, I have nearly lost my daughter on art’s sacrificial altar.
I am ultimately a Poet, a writer, a producer because there is nothing else I really know how to do. I am pretty good at making money for other people, but for myself, not so much.
I don’t take orders that I don’t understand.
I refuse to be treated as a machine and I generally question any authority that attempts to assert its will on me.
I am a free man, an outlaw and a warrior.
I have no choice but to pursue the vocation I was born to do.
Which I will pursue until I am dead.
I will emulate Da Vinci on his deathbed who legend recounts his last words to be “But I’m not finished yet! I haven’t finished!”
Nature is far more super than supernatural.
So when I am dead and buried (or burnt or lying at the bottom of the sea), my words, my projects will still be with and in the world. I will be immortal without having to endure the boredom of being awake for eternity!
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?
I’m a momma’s boy I’m a momma’s boy. Always was. Always am. Always will be.
I’m a momma’s boy. Momma gave me my name. After a passionate afternoon. Sun streaming through the blind My daddy on top of her Thrusting his bow to the strings of Stravinsky’s joyous rights of Spring
I’m a momma’s boy I’m a momma’s boy. Always was. Always am. Always will be.
I’m My momma’s boy. Sucking warm milk and egg from a plastic nippled bottle Eating the peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwhichs She made to watch over me at the school cafeteria No sloppy Joe’s for me I’m a momma’s boy.
I’m my momma’s boy. Dinner on the table Daddy gobbling his food Momma serving her family Loving her family with her food
I’m a momma’s boy I’m a momma’s boy. Always was. Always am. Always will be.
I’m a momma’s boy Daddy punched his fist through the living room wall, My momma plasters over Daddy cries at night While momma holds his head in her hands Ignoring the bruises on her cheeks.
I’m a momma’s boy I’m a momma’s boy. Always was. Always am. Always will be.
I’m a momma’s boy She slaps the faces of the mocking boys My daddy tells me to ignore As they kick me on the lawn Green grass staining jeans like blood
I’m a momma’s boy She’s my vengeful angel Who stares policemen in their eyes
I’m My momma’s boy When she stands behind me Telling teachers To love her boy Telling authorities To ignore her boy Telling Doctors To heal her boy. Walking 5 miles through the hot sweating jungle to fetch ginger ale for her little boy
I’m a momma’s boy I’m a momma’s boy. Always was. Always am. Always will be.
I’m a momma’s boy When I wake up in the hospital bed When I see her tears stream down her face. When I see my sister’s scared eyes. When I know like a freight train that I made the biggest mistake of my young life.
I’m a momma’s boy I’m a momma’s boy. Always was. Always am. Always will be.
I’m a momma’s boy When I catch a glimpse Of her cleavage Through the curtain of her night dress. When I see her clutch her dress to her breasts Ignoring my childish gaze
I’m a momma’s boy I’m a momma’s boy. Always was. Always am. Always will be. I’m a momma’s boy
Even when she closes her studio door And I beg her and beg her to come and play with me She kisses me on the top of my head and smiles Then closes her magic door, anyways.And I cry and I cry pounding my tiny fists against her magic door. How can there be something other than me that she loves more ?
I’m a momma’s boy I’m a momma’s boy. Always was. Always am. Always will be.
I’m a momma’s boy When daddy moves out I stay with her When she cries I hold her head In my hands, on my shoulder while her shoulders shake In the only love in the universe that will never leave me. Even when momma’s mind leaves me. Even when momma’s breath leaves her Even when her eyes leave me
To close forever. Momma never leaves me She never, ever, never ever leaves me. Momma was more Man than me or daddy will ever be, I’m a momma’s boy I’m a momma’s boy. Always was. Always am. Always will be.
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
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,
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.
Haven’t you noticed? I’ve been pulling my hair out not knowing who to call. They’ve suckered us all in with another used year! Sure, it’s been refurbished and looks a lot like a New Year, But don’t be fooled, This is a counterfeit New Year being passed off as a real one. The surface looks sharp but its purely cosmetic. It won’t load the latest Operating System It’s warranty has long since lapsed. And its components are no longer compatible. Don’t be fooled by fake years. You’ll wind up forgetting the real ones.
Do something! Call somebody. Don’t just sit there lamenting Demand refunds and store credits! Stomp your feet and threaten court actions. But whatever you do, don’t be taken in by second-hand years, When what we really all need is a new one.
A Brief History of Poetry Therapy From the collection of poetry, philosophy and art TAKE A DEEP BREATH: Living With Uncertainty by Igor Goldkind (Chameleon Publishing, 2021)
Poetry Therapy, or poetry which is used for healing and personal growth, can be traced back to primitive Man, who used religious rites in which shamans and witchdoctors chanted poetry for the well-being of the tribe or individual. It is documented that as far back as the fourth millennium B.C.E. in ancient Egypt, words were written on papyrus and then dissolved into a solution so that they could be physically ingested by the patient and take effect as quickly as possible.
The first poetry therapist of historic record was a Roman physician by the name of Soranus in the first century A.D., who prescribed tragedy for his manic patients and comedy for those who were depressed. It is not surprising that Apollo is the god of poetry as well as medicine, since medicine and the arts were historically entwined. For many centuries the link between poetry and medicine remained obscure. The poet John Milton wrote in 1671:
“Apt words have power to swage The tumours of a troubled mind And are as balm to festered wounds.” Pennsylvania Hospital, founded in 1751 by Benjamin Franklin and the first in the United States, employed many ancillary treatments for their mental patients, including reading, writing and the publishing of their work. Dr. Benjamin Rush, called the ‘Father of American Psychiatry’, introduced music and literature. The writing of poems was was encouraged, and the results were published in The Illuminator, their own newspaper.
On the battlefields of the American Civil War, Union field medic Walt Whitman would administer recitations of verse to fallen soldiers who were well beyond hope long before the use of morphine. He was later to pen the classic Leaves of Grass, the greatest celebration of humanity in the midst of its own despair. Pennsylvania Hospital employed this approach as early as the mid- 1700s.
In the early 1800s, Dr. Benjamin Rush also introduced poetry as a form of therapy to those being treated. In 1928, Eli Greifer, an inspired poet who was a lawyer and pharmacist by profession, began a campaign to show that a poem’s didactic message has healing power. He began offering poems to people as prescriptions, and eventually started “poem-therapy” groups at two hospitals with the support of psychiatrists Dr. Jack L. Leedy and Dr. Sam Spector. After Griefer’s death, Leedy and others continued to incorporate poetry into the therapeutic group process, eventually coming together to form the Association for Poetry Therapy (APT) in 1969.
Librarians also played a major role in the development of this therapeutic approach. Arleen Hynes was a hospital librarian who began reading stories and poems aloud, thus facilitating discussions on the material and its relevance to each individual in order to better reach out to those being treated and encourage healing. She eventually developed a training program for those interested in teaching poetry therapy.
In 1980, all the leaders in the field were invited to a meeting to formalize guidelines for training and certification. At that meeting, the National Association for Poetry Therapy (NAPT) was founded. As interest grew, books and articles were published to guide practitioners in the practice. Hynes and Mary Hynes-Berry co-authored the 1986 publication Bibliotherapy — The Interactive Process: A Handbook. More recently, Nicholas Mazza outlined a model for effective 188 poetry therapy, also discussing its clinical application, in Poetry Therapy: 189 Theory and Practice.
The Journal of Poetry Therapy, established in 1987 by the NAPT, remains the most comprehensive source of information on current theory, practice, and research. There is also a relationship between psychological healing and incantations, either repeated as a musical chant by the patient or recited by the attending medicine man. Of course, modern medicine and science consider the notion of magical incantations possessing healing or restorative powers as so much superstition.
But this, of course, begs the question that if recitations and incantations had no evidential result and no beneficial property then why would have nearly every human culture have adopted the method and repeated it for thousands of years? Surely if there was no value to vibrating the air with the sound of one’s breath, rising from the abdomen, pushed upwards by the lungs, shaped by the throat, mouth and tongue, with the added stimulation of associative meanings being understood cognitively by the patient’s mind, we would have given it and its sisters, singing and chanting, up aeons ago.
I am not advocating a supernatural or spiritual causation for the effectiveness of poetry as a healing agent, but rather the supra-natural mystical cause which is grounded first in human nature and cognition, and for which there maybe a myriad of imprecise explanations, none of which can fully explain why it works. Today, poetry therapy is practiced internationally by hundreds of professionals including poets, psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, social workers, educators and librarians. The approach has been used successfully in a number of settings — schools, community centers, libraries, hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and correctional institutions, to name a few.
SO HOW DOES POETRY THERAPY WORK?
• Poetry is beneficial to the process of introspection, and can be used as a vehicle for the expression of emotions that might otherwise be difficult to express
• Poetry promotes self-reflection and exploration, increasing selfawareness and helping individuals make sense of their world.
• Poetry helps individuals redefine their situation by opening up new ways of perceiving reality.
• Poetry helps therapists gain deeper insight into those they are treating.
In general, poetry therapists are free to choose from any poems they believe offer therapeutic value, but most tend to follow general guidelines. Some poems commonly used in therapy are: The Journey by Mary Oliver Talking to Grief by Denise Levertov The Armful by Robert Frost I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman Turtle Island by Gary Snyder as well as the poetry of Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg and Antonin Artaud.
TECHNIQUES USED IN POETRY THERAPY Different models of poetry therapy exist and are being refined all the time, but one the most popular is the model introduced by Nicholas Mazza. According to this model, poetry therapy involves three major components: Receptive/Prescriptive, Expressive/Creative, Symbolic/Ceremonial.
I. In the Receptive/Prescriptive component, the poet merely introduces the subject of how to focus on their own issue. The aim is to establish concentration and cognitive focus on the details, none which is revealed to the poet. Only when the poet feels confident that the subject is cognitively attuned to and non-verbally focused on the problem or issue of concern does he or she begins to ask suggestive questions as to how the subject feels, not thinks, about their issue. This provocation of tangible emotions usually comes in three distinct phases of emotional content. First is the predicament, when the subject becomes aware of the existence of the issue. This is a gateway phase, where anticipatory feelings are illicit and registered by the poet.
II. Then there is a further stage when anticipation of the issue has given way to the full experience of all the emotions, anxieties and fears related to the issue. This is usually overwhelming (or it wouldn’t be ‘an issue’ in the first place), and it is paramount that the poet guides the subject through distinct words to describe the layers of emotions experienced by the subject. The poet must ground the subject’s emotions in language. Language and the use of words is the key here, because emotions always come in complex clusters that make it difficult for both poet and subject to distinguish them and focus on the underlying causes.
“What kind of anger do you feel?”, “How would you describe your sadness?”, “How much shame do you feel? What would you compare it to?” This is a sophisticated method of word association, but rather than creating bridges between seemingly disparate words the goal is to drill down to the core emotions of the issue by refining the language, as led by the subject. Achieving exactitude of description is the task at hand. The poet makes careful notation of everything the subject says in regard to describing their emotions. It is important to keep them focused and not to succumb to intellectual distraction. Thoughts are illusions and often lies, whereas emotions are facts. Get the subject to correctly describe the facts of the matter. All meaning is metaphorical.
III. The final stage is waiting for an exit strategy. How do the feelings begin to recede? How does the issue move back into the background? What are the parting emotions? Is there anxiety about the leaving? Anticipation of an issue yet unresolved? Or is the issue impermeable, and subject to a rhythmic return? Again, the subject’s wording, their adjectives, adverbs and phrases are the material of the poem. At this point there is usually a short break to give time for the subject to recover from the emotional transitions and for the poet to briefly skim their notes and begin to focus on the flow of adjectives. It is preferable, if possible, to compose what amounts to a first draft, a flow of words which the poet can read back to the subject to confirm its accuracy. At this first reading stage it is possible to start interjecting logical bridges between the emotional descriptors. This is the creative factor 194 unleashed. The poet, assisted by the subject, creates coherent sequences 195 between the emotional states. The poet suggests and the subject confirms or vetoes the phraseology, one line at a time. Now we arrive at a second draft which is the property of the subject. It is their poem. The preference is that the subject now reads the poem aloud and takes ownership of its content. The subject can redraft the poem a third time, or many more times, claiming it as their own. The poet has merely provided poesy prompts, the poem is the creation of the subject.
The expressive/creative component involves the use of creative writing — poetry, letters, and journal entries — for the purpose of assessment and treatment. The process of writing can be both cathartic and empowering, often freeing blocked emotions or buried memories and giving voice to one’s concerns and strengths. Some people may doubt their ability to write creatively, but therapists can offer support by explaining they do not have to use rhyme or a particular structure. Poets can also provide stem poems from which to work, or introduce sense poems for those who struggle with imagery. A poet might also share a poem with their subject and then ask them to select a line that touched them in some way, and then use that line to start their own poem. In groups, poems may be written individually or collaboratively.
Group members are sometimes given a single word, topic, or sentence stem and asked to respond to it spontaneously. The contributions of group members are compiled to create a single poem which can then be used to stimulate group discussion. The symbolic/ceremonial component involves the use of metaphors, storytelling and rituals as tools for effecting change. Metaphors, which are essentially symbols, can help individuals to explain complex emotions and experiences in a concise yet profound manner. Rituals may be particularly effective to help those who have experienced a loss or ending, such as a divorce or death of a loved one, to address their feelings around that event. Writing and then burning a letter to someone who died suddenly, for example, may be a helpful step in the process of accepting and coping with grief.
HOW CAN POETRY THERAPY HELP?
Poetry therapy has been used as part of the treatment approach for a number of concerns, including borderline personality, suicidal ideation, identity issues, perfectionism, and grief. Research shows the method is frequently a beneficial part of the treatment process. Several studies also support poetry therapy as one approach to the treatment of depression — it has been repeatedly shown to relieve depressive symptoms, improve self-esteem and self-understanding, and encourage the articulation of feelings. Researchers have also demonstrated poetry therapy’s ability to reduce anxiety and stress. Those experiencing post traumatic stress have also reported improved mental and emotional well-being as a result of poetry therapy. Some individuals who have survived trauma or abuse may have difficulty processing the experience cognitively and, as a result, suppress associated memories and emotions.
Through poetry therapy, many are able to integrate these feelings, reframe traumatic events, and develop a more positive outlook for the future. People experiencing addiction may find poetry therapy can help them explore their feelings regarding substance abuse, perceive drug use in a new light, and develop or strengthen coping skills. Poetry writing may also be a way for those with substance abuse issues to express their thoughts on treatment and behavioral change. Some studies have shown poetry therapy can be of benefit to people with schizophrenia, despite the linguistic and emotional deficits associated with the condition. Poetry writing may be a helpful method to describe mental experiences, and can allow therapists to better understand the thought processes of those they are treating.
Poetry therapy has also helped some individuals with schizophrenia to improve social functioning skills and foster more organized thought processes. It is important to note in many instances, especially in cases of moderate to severe mental health concerns, that poetry therapy is used in combination with another type of therapy and not as the sole approach to treatment.
TRAINING FOR POETRY THERAPISTS
Poetry therapists receive literary as well as clinical training to enable them to be able to select literature appropriate for the healing process. While there is no university program in poetry therapy, the International Federation for Biblio-Poetry Therapy (IFBPT), the independent credentialing body for the profession, has developed specific training requirements. Several studies support poetry therapy as one approach to the treatment of depression, as it has been repeatedly shown to relieve depressive symptoms, improve self-esteem and self-understanding, and encourage the expression of feelings.
However, the only qualitative measure of effective poetry therapy is in the poesy and the results. No accreditation can guarantee or substitute for the quality of cognitive empathy that is achieved during a successful session. Ultimately, there can be no real separation between the experience of the poet and the subject. This methodology provokes a meeting of mind in confrontation with universal truths. The poet is there merely to reassure the subject that there is no hocus-pocus, no supernatural or alternative reality, and that the cognitive associations that ring true are true in the present mind of the subject. The poet is on hand to reassure, to validate the responses of the subject to radical new perspectives into their own most intimate selves, and to relieve and dispel any accompanying trauma as grounded in the normalcy of human experience.202 203
CONCERNS AND LIMITATIONS OF POETRY THERAPY In spite of its widespread appeal and broad range of applications, some concerns have been raised about the use of poetry therapy.
Some critics have pointed out it is possible for people to analyze a poem on a purely intellectual level, without any emotional involvement. This type of intellectualization may be more likely when complex poems are used, as a person might spend so much time trying to decipher the meaning of the poem that they lose sight of their emotions and spontaneous reactions. Poems that are unoriginal or filled with clichés are unlikely to stimulate individuals on a deep emotional level, or challenge them to think in ways promoting growth.
Just always keep in mind that poetry therapy may have little or no value for those individuals who simply do not enjoy poetry.
References:
Chavis, G.G. (2011). Poetry and story therapy: The healing power of creative expression. Philadelphia, PA: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Gooding, L. F. (2008). Finding your inner voice through song: Reaching adolescents with techniques common to poetry therapy and music therapy. Journal of Poetry Therapy, 21(4), 219-229.
Mazza, N. (2003). Poetry therapy: Theory and practice. New York: Brunner-Routledge.
Olsen-McBride, L. (2009). Examining the influence of popular music and poetry therapy on the development of therapeutic factors in groups with at-risk adolescents (Doctoral dissertation).
Rossiter, C. (2004). Blessed and delighted: An interview with Arleen Hynes, poetry therapy pioneer. Journal of Poetry Therapy, 17(4), 215-222.
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:
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.
Death is in my garden again, Whispering to my flowers as he pulls away the weeds. Plotting and potting each stem as it grows Making certain that the roots are shaken of clinging regrets and life’s debris. Only to cut my life short more easily.
Does death have a sweetheart? I wonder. A beautiful woman who he woos and waters with my love? He gathers my blossoms into a beautiful bouquet Of lost souls and freshly cut lives. To gift to the one who holds him closest.
She presses his dead heart to her breast with one hand The bouquet that surmises my life with the other. She holds his weight against her body. Until death sighs and buries his head between her breasts So she is certain that he will return to his labours in the morrow.
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.
There are few shreds of dignity left When you drown face down in your own back street gutter. You can cry out as loud as an archangel’s horn, if you like. It won’t do you any good, or any harm either. You still can’t silence the wind or turn back the tide. Fate is nothing personal.
It’s just the universe catching up and then passing you by. Your dream of yourself evaporates, Forming clouds that obscure the night’s sky. The stars are leaving you now, blinking out one by one. This is the last moment of your own self-awareness. Your last chance to figure out what the fuck’s been going on.
It’s very much like the moment you first awoke Although your mother’s smile is nowhere to be found All that remains of her unlimited love is your fast fading memory The sound of her voice calling out to you to come home now, In the far distance, From where the stars have gone to mourn your passing.
So you think you’re going to Shoot Me? I got news for you goyim, You’ve been shooting at me for 900 years From arrows to bullets to canon and you still haven’t hit me. Because I am no other than you. How can I replace you when I am you? Open your eyes, you are shooting the gun at yourself.
You don’t get it. This must be the trick of the devils’ twisted tongue, right? The one that tries to deceive you With the facts of truth Poured from the grail of reason. Go on, have a gulpful .
No, you can’t shoot me, you can’t even aim straight. Your hatred is so predictably boring, Always looking for someone else to blame For your failure as a human being. Anyone should do, but Just like a bad movie cliche, you pick the Jew.
How can you shoot me, When most of us are already dead? Replaced, misplaced, driven from your nations’ borders. Baked in your ovens. Never even pausing To wonder what the difference ever really was.
Now we have nations, guns and missiles and Our own black-booted armies, to protect us from bad shots like you. To protect us from everyone but ourselves. Now we can sip from the same blood cup, While hating then shooting, All of the Other Jews.
You are our lady And now your dress Is flames. The beauty of your sunken dome from a drone Is a poem in itself. Written by us and Destroyed by chaos.
This is what we do that rivals the stature of the gods: To astound ourselves and each other, With the wonder of Pure enduring creation. The sacrifice we all make to our better selves Who gave buildings wings and Lay the foundation stones of Our own perfecting.
Epiphany is not found in the act of worship It is found in the insight gained by a gratitude for the world. Exactly the way we built it. Exactly the way we know it to be. Whispered prayers are but poetry That none other than you will listen to. It is good to talk to yourself, To sing in harmony with all the selves who are listening,
Wearing Not false, but true masks Revealing the kind of truth that can only be told with a lie. The subtler architecture that carves heavens into the spaces on this earth. Reconstructing what can be seen behind your faces, Behind all the saints who guard you, Behind the divine grace of your stature. The sensuousness of your catastrophe is breathtaking.
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.
I’m still choking on my own blood. As it slowly fills my lungs. I am drowning inside myself The blood is mine; the air is gone, Now so am I.
After death, there’s nothing more than that same familiar empty space waiting for your thoughts to refill it Infinite & Eternal in every direction;. both up and down and beyond before. encircled by the horizon.
This emptiness where your awareness doesn’t so much ‘go’ as recollect that it’s always been here. Look through this persisting dream! there is no afterlife because nothing, not even memory, is really destroyed. just transformed.
Into particles into wavicles into higher frequencies, your mind no longer fathoms. so you leave it, your mind, behind.
Crystal liquid, gas, plasma. aware is the fifth state of matter.
I’ve started this post after returning from a 60-day ban from Posting, Liking, Communicating, Joining, or Connecting with anyone else in the Facebook Community.
Censorship, the suppression of words, images, or ideas that are “offensive,” happens whenever some people succeed in imposing their personal political or moral values on others. Censorship can be carried out by the government as well as private pressure groups. ~ The ACLU
What Was My Crime?
My posting one of my own published poems from my bookIs She Available? that had been posted in Facebook at least thrice before without repercussion. and is currently available in dozens of libraries and bookstores throughout California and soon to be released in the UK. The visual interpretation of a love poem by the Designer/photographer and internationally renown artist/typographer Rian Hughes entitled:
I Missed Your Scent in Paris
Although his image was a black and white stylized photograph of a woman where if you squinted and looked real close you could make out the shadow of half a nipple showing, (which is exactly what a Facebook employee would have had to have done in order to render judgement that Tian and my work contravened Facebook’s community standards.
Words by Igor Goldkind – Image by Rian Hughes Censored by Facebook
The Poem and Rian’s photo interpretation of the poem were not obscene, disgusting nor gratuitously offensive in any way. Unless of course, you consider the human body in itself to be obscene, in which case I strongly suggest you seek therapeutic help as you clearly entertain unhealthy, self-hating, anti-social thoughts.
Instead, if not the poem, then certainly the photograph of the semi-nude woman is a work of art. It is obvious to anyone who reads and looks that it had no other intention. Not being able to distinguish between pornography and erotic art is one of the great threats Facebook’s dumbed down lack of discernment poses to the thriving of a culture. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Art is the science of culture. Both are experiment–driven. ~ Igor Goldkind ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– As community-oriented and community-sounding Facebook professes to be (in its language and self-justifications of its censorship), Facebook is the enemy of culture. As well as the enemy of the community of humanity that shares the values that a free society comes hand in hand with expression free from censorship; as long as the expression poses no harm. Otherwise, it is not a free community.
“To destroy a people, first destroy their culture. ~ Mario Torero
What is it exactly about the half shadow image of a woman’s left nipples poses a threat to anyone? The last time I checked, a woman’s nipple is the source of nourishment for all of us, male and female at one time or another.
To censor the image of a human nipple is to censor the truth of what it means to be human. How can I prove this? Look for yourself! Apart from a minority of our fellow hairless apes who have lost them in accidents or horrific burns, we ALL OF US HAVE NIPPLES! It is the truth of who we are and as an artist, as a poet, I am only interested in the truth of who we are. Not the twisted Calvinist attempt at reversioning a reality where angels never fart and genies have no belly-buttons.
We Must Protect You From Yourself
I know for a fact that genies do have belly-buttons, I’ve seen them with my own eyes! And as far as angel farts go, they smell better than your own.
Article 10 of the United Nations Human Rights Act protects our right to hold our own opinions and to express them freely without government or private interference.
This includes the right to express our views aloud (for example through public protest and demonstrations) or through:
• published articles, books or leaflets • television or radio broadcasting • the internet and social media • AND WORKS OF ART • The law also protects our freedom to freely receive information from other people.
The US The Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment’s protection of artistic expression very broadly. It extends not only to books, theatrical works and paintings but also to posters, television, music videos and comic books and personal social media pages including FACEBOOK — whatever the human creative impulse produces.
The right not to be censored by an arbitrarily superimposed moral hypocrisy of a minority…. is articulated in the Human Rights Act signed by the US as treaty and thus bound by US federal law in 1964. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the United States renewed its commitment to the international human rights system by signing, though not yet ratifying, several major human rights treaties.
Including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the INTERNATIONAL COVENANT ON ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS (ICESCR).
Liberty, Freedom & Justice But Not From Facebook
These are the laws of the land that FACEBOOK has violated in unceremoniously and without warning censoring my work. Judgement without respite and only the cosmetics of appeal.
Facebook is not a community in any shape or form as long as its private owners impose their narrow, petty, puerile, and juvenile morals on us without listening to everyone, not just the complainers, who make up that community. That includes us good for nothing, when-are-you-going-to-get-a-real-job? artists.
There is no one to talk to at Facebook. No one to appeal to; no one to reason with and no one that takes responsibility for its actions. Human beings wrote the algorithms, built the servers and the browsers to increase the human bandwidth, not to distance us from ourselves!
There is no reason to fear the takeover of robots, algorithmic judgements and machines, for we have already surrendered.
Please repost this in part or in full on your wall and please share with your friends across all social media. Maybe Facebook will recall what it means to be a human with nipples one day and stop emulating the machines (who have no nipples).
PS You think that I’m overreacting? Just another crazy, good for nothing artist making pointless noise? The Modigliani nude, the Picasso, the Rubens and all fell foul of Facebook and are all pictured as depicted after being defaced by Facebook in the name of their hypothetical Community Standards.
There are still a few options available to you still, apart from death. Yours is a free choice. Your death is yours. No one is making you choose; Death is after all, inevitable.
Not so much an option as fast forwarding to the point where there are no further options. Living is dying anyway, so why speed up the process? To stop the pain? Many have endured much more Still clinging to any delay of the inevitable.
Regardless, suicide doesn’t stop the pain it merely passes the suffering on to someone else. Remember them? They remember you. They will remember you with pain.
You no longer feel of worth or of value anymore? To whom, exactly? yourself? Perhaps your judgement is drunk or wanting in discernment? Perhaps your judgement is just wrong and awaits over-ruling by a higher judgement. Who are you, really, to judge yourself so severely? If you are worthless then your judgement is suspect and certainly not worth acting upon.
What if you went and saw a movie instead? Or got drunk? Or went to sleep? Or made love until the dawn found another, better judgement to wake up to. A truer, more temperate version of yourself. One who can solve problems and get you out of the sweet jam you’re stuck in.
Do you long to die because life is absurd and void of meaning? What took you so long to notice? Does your slowness make you want to do things quicker? Instead of death, you could seek laughter, which is really a form of dying; A release from the known into the unknown by way of Catching your breath inside its own rhythm. Inwards and outwards.
What if you were about to hear a joke you’ve never heard before? That made you laugh so hard that it woke you up into the wide-eyed, open world that embraces this one? If you die now, you will miss hearing the eternal joke That would awaken you to a world where you no longer wanted to die Because you suddenly found yourself here, Where you belong Where you belonged all along, Not living or dying But blinking and breathing like this, Like this, like this, like this…
Hope is mortal, not eternal.
Though it may feel like eternity
Sitting in a chair by the window.
Gazing up and down the path that leads
Up the hill and down to the canyon on your doorstep.
Every morning, every evening, every day.
Waiting for an answer to your prayer for hope to be restored.
Resilience rewarded
Patience still burning brightly
Under your old photograph on the wall where you live now.
I’m not sad.
No, sadness is just passing rain to irrigate the eyes.
Instead, I’m a new planet
Ringedby the last halo of hope
The one wrapped tightly around my head.
Existence is a limitless screen of emptiness,
Jubilant celebration
And gratitude for the joyous exhaustion in the rolling of a boulder up a steep hill.
Tripping over our thoughts like loosened cobblestones,
The truth is a truce we struck with uncertainty ages ago.
After losing our desperate struggle…
To cling to some kind of hope buried deep at the root of our own awareness
I am fearful of fully failing myself.
But I love myself best when I am alone with eternity.
Secure and supported by this very clarity.
The healing effect of words has long been recognized. As far back as 4000 BCE, early Egyptians wrote words on papyrus, dissolve them in liquid, and gave them to those who were ill as a form of medicine. In more recent history, reading and expressive writing have been employed as supplementary treatments for those experiencing mental or emotional distress. Pennsylvania Hospital, the first hospital established in the United States, employed this approach as early as the mid-1700s.
In the early 1800s, Dr. Benjamin Rush introduced poetry as a form of therapy to those being treated. In 1928, poet and pharmacist Eli Griefer began offering poems to people filling prescriptions and eventually started “poem-therapy” groups at two different hospitals with the support of psychiatrists Dr. Jack L. Leedy and Dr. Sam Spector. After Griefer’s death, Leedy and others continued to incorporate poetry into the therapeutic group process, eventually coming together to form the Association for Poetry Therapy (APT) in 1969.
Librarians also played a major role in the development of this approach to therapy. Arleen Hynes, one pioneer in this area, was a hospital librarian who began reading stories and poems aloud, facilitating discussions on the material and its relevance to each individual in order to better reach out to those being treated and encourage healing. In 1980, all leaders in the field were invited to a meeting to formalize guidelines for training and certification. At that meeting, the National Association for Poetry Therapy (NAPT) was established.
As interest grew, several books and articles were written to guide practitioners in the practice of poetry therapy. Hynes and Mary Hynes-Berry co-authored the 1986 publication Bibliotherapy – The Interactive Process: A Handbook. More recently, Nicholas Mazza outlined a model for effective poetry therapy, also discussing its clinical application, in Poetry Therapy: Theory and Practice.
The Journal of Poetry Therapy, established in 1987 by the NAPT, remains the most comprehensive source of information on current theory, practice, and research.
There is also a relationship between psychological healing and incantations; either repeated as a musical chant by the patient or in fact recited by the attending medicine man. Modern medicine and science of course scoff at the notion of magical incantations having healing or restorative powers as so much superstition. But this, of course, begs the question that if recitations and incantations had no evidential resort and no beneficial property then why would every single human culture have adopted the method and repeated it for several thousand years? Surely if there was nothing to vibrating air with the sound of one’s breath as well as the added stimulation of associative meaning being read cognitively by the patient’s mind; we would have given it and its sisters, singing and chanting aeons ago.
I am not advocating a supernatural or spiritual causation for the effectiveness of poetry as a healing agent but rather the supra-natural mystical cause which is grounded first in human nature and behavior for which can be a myriad of imprecise explanations; none of which explain why it works.
Today, poetry therapy is practised internationally by hundreds of professionals, including poets, psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors, social workers, educators and librarians. The approach has been used successfully in a number of settings—schools, community centers, libraries, hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and correctional institutions, to name a few.
How Does Poetry Therapy Work?
As part of therapy, some people may wish to explore feelings and memories buried in the subconscious and identify how they may relate to current life circumstances. Poetry is beneficial to this process as it can often be used as a vehicle for the expression of emotions that might otherwise be difficult to express
•Promote self-reflection and exploration, increasing self-awareness and helping individuals make sense of their world
•Help individuals redefine their situation by opening up new ways of perceiving reality
•Help therapists gain deeper insight into those they are treating
• In general, poetry therapists are free to choose from any poems they believe offer therapeutic value, but most tend to follow general guidelines.
It is recommended selected poems be concise, address universal emotions or experiences, offer some degree of hope, and contain plain language. Some poems commonly used in therapy are: “The Journey” by Mary Oliver “Talking to Grief” by Denise Levertov “The Armful” by Robert Frost “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman “Turtle Island” by Gary Snyder The poetry of Alan Watt, Allen Ginsberg and others.
Although the selection of material is often by the therapist, those being treated might be asked to bring to therapy a poem or other form of literature they identify with, as this may also provide valuable insight into their feelings and emotions.
My Technique in Poetry Therapy
A few different models of poetry therapy exist, but the one I’ve had the most success with is a Four Phased Progression of Attention:
Recognition – Focus – Intention – Action
In the receptive/recognition phase, the poet therapist merely guides the subject to focus on their issue. The aim is to establish concentration and cognitive focus on the details of the issue which are not revealed to the poet/therapist. Only until the poet/therapist feels confident that the subject is cognitively attuned to and non verbally focussed on the problem or issue of concern that they begin to ask suggestive questions as to how the subject feels, not thinks about their subject.
This provocation of emotion usually comes in three distinct phases of emotional content:
I. First is the one of the predicament, then the subject first becomes aware of the existence of the issue. This is the gateway phase where anticipatory feelings are registered and ideally conveyed through the prompting of the poet/therapist.
II. Then there is the full throttle stage when anticipation of the issue has given way to full experience of all emotions related to the issue. This is usually overwhelming (or it wouldn’t be “an issue” in the first place), and it is tantamount that the poet/guide leads the subject through distinct words to describe the layers of emotions experienced by the subject. Language and the use of the words is the key here because emotions always come in clusters of complexity that make it difficult for both poet/therapist and subject to distinguish and focus on underlying and suppress emotions.
“What kind of anger do you feel?”
“How would you describe your sadness”
“How much shame do you feel?
“What would you compare it to?”
Are typical of the questions a poet therapist would ask the subject.
This is a sophisticated method of word association but rather than creating bridges between seemingly disparate words, the goal is to drill down to the core emotions about the issue by uncovering and refining the language the subject has chosen.
Achieving exactitude of description is the task at hand. The Poet/Therapist makes careful notation of everything the subject says towards describing their emotion. It is important to keep them focused and not to succumb to intellectual distraction. Thoughts are illusions, emotions are facts.
Getting the subject to correctly and precisely describe the emotional facts of the matter at hand is the objective
III. The final phase is the exit strategy.
How do the feelings commence to recede? How does the issue recede back into the background? What are the parting emotions? Is there anxiety about the leaving? The anticipation of an issue yet unresolved? Or is the issue impermeable and subject to a rhythmic return?
Again, the subject’s wording, their adjectives, adverbs and phrases are the material of the poem.
At this point, there is usually a short break to give time for the subject to recover from the emotional transitions and for the Poet/Therapist to briefly skim their notes and begin to focus on the flow of adjectives. It is preferable if possible, to compose what amounts to a first draft, a flow of words which the poet can read back to the subject to confirm the accuracy of the flow.
At this first reading stage, it is possible to start interjecting logical bridges between the emotional descriptors. This is the creative factor unleashed. The Poet must be led by the subject to link coherent sequences between the emotional states. The poet suggests and the subject confirms or vetoes the phraseology, one line at a time.
Now we arrive at a second draft which is the property of the subject. It is their poem for which it is crucial that the subject now read the poem aloud and take ownership of its content. The subject can redraft the poem a third time in making it their own. But the physicality of uttering the words they have chosen to express their emotional state is an act of ownership and closure.
The Poet/Therapist can either email the finished poem to the subject, hand them his/her notes or rewrite the poem into a legible form. In any case, it is important that the Poet/Therapist ascribes the authorship of the poem to the client. If the client is hesitant to put their name to the poem than something is lacking in the poem and must be redressed or indeed started over again.
The key to the entire exercise is freedom of expression, honesty and then refinement; exacting the poem.
Other Approaches and Other Models
The process of writing can be both cathartic and empowering, often freeing blocked emotions or buried memories and giving voice to one’s concerns and strengths. Some people may doubt their ability to write creatively, but therapists can offer to support by explaining they do not have to use rhyme or a particular structure. Therapists might also provide stem poems from which to work or introduce sense poems for those who struggle with imagery. A Poet/Therapist might also share a poem with the individual and then ask them to select a line that touched them in some way and then use that line to start their own poem.
In group therapy, poems may be written individually or collaboratively. Group members are sometimes given a single word, topic, or sentence stem and asked to respond to it spontaneously. The contributions of group members are compiled to create a single poem which can then be used to stimulate group discussion. In couples therapy, the couple may be asked to write a dyadic poem by contributing alternating lines.
The symbolic/ceremonial component involves the use of metaphors, storytelling, and rituals as tools for effecting change. Metaphors, which are essentially symbols, can help individuals to explain complex emotions and experiences in a concise yet profound manner. Rituals may be particularly effective to help those who have experienced a loss or ending, such as a divorce or death of a loved one, to address their feelings around that event. Writing and then burning a letter to someone who died suddenly, for example, may be a helpful step in the process of accepting and coping with grief.
How Can Poetry Therapy Help You?
Poetry therapy has been used as part of the treatment approach for a number of concerns, including borderline personality, suicidal ideation, identity issues, perfectionism, and grief.
Research shows the method is frequently a beneficial part of the treatment process. Several studies also support poetry therapy as one approach to the treatment of depression, as it has been repeatedly shown to relieve depressive symptoms, improve self-esteem and self-understanding, and encourage the articulation of feelings. Researchers have also demonstrated poetry therapy’s ability to reduce anxiety and stress in people.
Those experiencing post-traumatic stress have also reported improved mental and emotional well-being as a result of poetry therapy. Some individuals who have survived trauma or abuse may have difficulty processing the experience cognitively and, as a result, suppress associated memories and emotions.
Through poetry therapy, many are able to integrate these feelings, reframe traumatic events, and develop a more positive outlook for the future. People experiencing addiction may find poetry therapy can help them explore their feelings regarding the substance abuse, perceive drug use in a new light, and develop or strengthen coping skills.
Poetry writing may also be a way for those with substance abuse issues to express their thoughts on treatment and behavior change. Some studies have shown poetry therapy can be of benefit to people with schizophrenia despite the linguistic and emotional deficits associated with the condition.
Poetry writing may be a helpful method of describing mental experiences and can allow therapists to better understand the thought processes of those they are treating. Poetry therapy has also helped some individuals with schizophrenia to improve social functioning skills and foster more organized thought processes. It is important to note in many instances, especially in cases of moderate to severe mental health concerns, poetry therapy is used in combination with another type of therapy, not as the sole approach to treatment.
Training for Poetry Therapists Poetry therapists receive literary as well as clinical training to enable them to be able to select literature appropriate for the healing process. While there is no university program in poetry therapy, the International Federation for Biblio-Poetry Therapy (IFBPT), the independent credentialing body for the profession, has developed specific training requirements. Several studies support poetry therapy as one approach to the treatment of depression, as it has been repeatedly shown to relieve depressive symptoms, improve self-esteem and self-understanding, and encourage the expression of feelings.
Concerns and Limitations of Poetry Therapy
In spite of its widespread appeal and broad range of application, some concerns have been raised about the use of poetry therapy. Some critics have pointed out it is possible for people to analyze a poem on a purely intellectual level, without any emotional involvement. This type of intellectualization may be more likely when complex poems are used, as a person might spend so much time trying to decipher the meaning of the poem that they lose sight of their emotions and spontaneous reactions. Poems that are unoriginal or filled with clichés are unlikely to stimulate individuals on a deep emotional level or challenge them to think in ways that promote growth. Just always keep in mind that poetry therapy may have little or no value for those individuals who simply do not enjoy poetry.
The Advertising Pitch:
Words are the Most Powerful Magic There Is
Sometimes Your Mind Has a Will of Its Own
With PEGASUS POETRY THERAPY you can
Learn How to Read Your Own Mind!
Confusion bringing you down?
Is manic depression touching your soul?
You know what you want, but you just don’t know how to get There?
Poetry therapy is what you need when the medication, the yoga, the guided meditation, the crystals, the chakra alignment and other Somatic treatments just aren’t working.
Some things only work when you let them work:
• Restore Self-Confidence
• Achieve Closure from Painful Relationship Breakups & Lost Loved Ones
• Find a More Meaningful Direction to Your Life
• Get Unstuck and Out of Your Own Way
• Overcome Fears and Anxiety
• Control panic attacks
• Change Addictive Behavior Patterns, like OCD
• Re-Write bad Scripts
Recognition > Focus > Intention > Action
There is no trick to listening to yourself and learning how choosing and rearranging your words can unlock darkened doors, de-clutter basements and clean out the attics of your life. Sometimes in merely one session.
Every Tuesday from 11:00 am until 6:30 pm at the
Inner Temple Inner Healing Center
at Eve’s Vegan Cafe 575 S. Coast Highway 101 Encinitas, CA
PEGASUS POETRY THERAPY has only recently launched its online version via FaceTime, Skype or Facebook video. Just add <poetry therapy> to your Skype contacts and schedule a date. Payments accepted through PayPal or Facebook cash. Here are some examples of the poetry achieved through PEGASUS POETRY THERAPY:
I.
Narcissus in a Nutshell
I’ve lost the person locked within the situation
Like a nut dwells within its hard shell of fearful anger.
Escaping vulnerability
Hiding from the unknown.
Hard shells, hard feelings, hardness itself
The excitement of living days in the present
Belonging to the past
I will not let go of what I can recall but not relive
My belonging to that which encompasses myself
Another nut within its shell.
To belong is to exist
Without belonging there is Nothing and
I fear nothing most of all because I do not know it
And I fear what I do not know more than
I would remedy the pain of this loss with trustworthy tools
When two liquids are bonded as one
A single drop of poison poisons the whole glass
And betrayal is always poison no matter how little or how much
The glass of Narcissus’s tears is now empty
He has blinded himself rather than drink his own poison.
Instead he has left me to sip the bitter poison
Of fading better days.
Like a cat
Poised in stillness
Distracted by nothing
Readyto pounce
I will not surrender the pain.
I will not surrender the pain.
Because the pain is my memory of the happiness
We’ve now lost
A sweet nut within a bitter shell.
II.
The Martyr
Last night I saw you beatify a martyr
With a magical brush of gold belief.
You were serious and determined
But your brush strokes were light caresses
On a sky blue span of canvass
As you gently coaxed another image into being.
You remind me of my mother earth
Stern in her compassion
Willing to tolerate just so much from me
Before reining in my love
With her brushes.
And where you have drawn your line
‘Be careful’, you said to me on parting
But all the care in the world could not stop
My bulb from bursting
Rendering me blind in the speeding night
But still seeing with the golden light
Of the martyr you have shown me.
III.
Snake Heart
This sadness, this hopelessness
Will not be swatted away
Nor drowned by the busy work
Of the day to day.
It persists
Even when I am submerged in my bathtub.
The warm water rising from the bottom of my lungs.
Until I lose the will to breath
And the sadness becomes anger
Rising to the very top of my horns
Of my red-hot raging exhaustion.
How good to be angry!
I used to be afraid of snakes but no longer. I am hissing from the centre of my snake-heart
As you try and step over me.
Your eyes fail to see as you tread on my tail.
On my snake heart.
On my resolution without confrontation.
Without the owning of emotion
All that’s left for us is the hissing sound of machinery.
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.
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.
Death and his brothers are in my garden again.
Moving my plants around.
They tend to the growth quite delicately
Careful to not reap the harvest until the plants mature
And begin to lose their hair.
Death and his brother are in my garden again,
Whispering to each other as they pull away the weeds.
Poting and repotting each plant as it grows
Making sure the roots are clear of regrets and debris
So that in the end, it’s life can be cut short more easily.
Does death have a sweetheart? I wonder.
A woman whom he woes with words of love?
As much as death can love any living thing, at all.
He gathers my plants into a beautiful bouquet
Of lost souls and freshly cut lives.
To gift to she who holds him near; squeezing his dead heart in one hand,
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
Burt and Astrid had sat down at one of the outdoor tables outside theEncinitas Cafe along the Pacific Coast Highway.
I sat down at the single table next to theirs
Burt, from his wheelchair, had noticed the bundle of books
I had dumped from my shoulder onto my breakfast table,
Startling some spoons and a left behind saucer, and remarked:
“You’re an author, aren’t you?”
“Why would you think?”was my reply.
“I don’t think, I know”.
Astrid tucked Burt’s napkin under his chin.
She was his nurse and his wife.
“Because nobody but an author would carry so many copies of the same book around”, Burt said.
“Burt used to write before he got sick”, Astrid explained.
Burt coughed long into his napkin.
“I’m sorry’, I said, just because I meant it.
Burt finished coughing and reached with his hand gesturing
To pass him my book.
I did and Burt leafed through the pages,
Feeling the clay surface of the paper with his fingers.
“You’re a poet!Very brave.”, Burt pronounced.
And then we talked about poets ancient and new.
We compared reading Rilke, Neruda, Pushkin,
and others both living and dead
I felt like I was visiting my old college roommate
Who had studied the exact same subject as me.
We spent nearly 2 hours over breakfast
Until Burt began to speak Yiddish to Astrid.
Astrid replied in kind.
The moment we shared peeled like a bell across time.
Awaking the ghosts of my ancestors.
Astridrose from her chair to roll back Burt’s wheels
And then they justleft
With my book on Burt’s lap in his chair.
Hi Igor
This is Astrid we had the pleasure to meet you my husband and I in Encinitas this summer and had a most pleasant conversation. You gifted us a copy of your book I just wanted to let you know Burt passed away August 23 We really enjoyed meeting you especially Burt….
When I sit at my desk in the barely blinking dawn,
I sit at the helm of a Starship.
Each dimension of time or space is available to me
To go anywhere I want to.
With the flick of a switch and a weird background sound
The course can be faithfully plotted,
At just the right warp speed to be there, be heroic and be back before dinner.
As safe as the hum of my engines.
When I sit at my desk in the mid-morning blue light that pierces
My east facing windows.
I pray that I can write something today,
I pray that I still have something to say.
My eyes are drawn to the street just beneath me,
That winds around the standing tree,
Just outside my window.
There is a spoonful of sunshine in my coffee.
When I sit at my desk in the midday sun
At the zenith of all of Creation,
I know that the bright light that now floods my room,
Will wash the shadows of doubt from these walls.
I still hear that first sound,
The Bang! that expands the spaces around.
I can feel how the act of creation was never just one moment long gone ago.
But a circus of new sensations, an ongoing show.
Will too soon leave us behind sleeping eternity away.
When I sit at my desk in the mid-afternoon sun
And the light of creation slowly dwindles,
I can reflect on all the things that I’ve done
While counting the tasks that remain to lie in the sun.
When I sit at my desk at dusk’s twilight time
When light and darkness are twined,
Each wrestles the other to the ground.
I know that darkness will eventually swallow,
The fading strength of the light.
The time for my bed is just insight
And the twin brothers have given up their fight.
When I sit at my desk in the heart of the darkness
I know that death is hiding in my closet.
I know that the covers I wrap so tightly around me
Offer no protection from what time has brought (me):
The drowning of the light by the darkness.
I bury my head in the night and dream of the return of tomorrow.
Caught in the Diamond Rain
Caught unawares in a diamond downpour.
When did Karma get so immediate and so personal ?
So judgment-like and familial?
When did I last escape from my room
And begin to orbit outside of time?
That vantage point that surrounds me,
Is not just this moment, But every moment you or I have ever lived.
A handful of jewels lie scattered at my feet.
Each crystal catching and tricking the light into
Reflecting each and every possible face of existence that there is,
All at once.
Each stone weighs down heavily on my stomach.
Forced downward by the sheer gravity of events.
When did I last step outside of myself again?
I am no longer there.
Or rather I am here, just not in this world.
Instead, I’m living in a different world
built on longing, solitude, and reflection.
Two mirrors face each other
One rag wipes the dust and the sweat from both our dirty faces,
Go on, reach out with your finger tips to
Caress every surface of this jewel
We call living.
Can you see over there, that distant surface we exist on?
That reflects the face of every other face.
On all the falling jewels that surround us.
THIS is what it is to be caught in the Diamond Rain.
Here’s your chance to come and hear me read from my collection of Graphic Poetry IS SHE AVAILABLE? and some new poems and a short story at ComicKhazi Comics Shop at Liberty Station, San Diego on September 1st starting at 6.00 pm.
I’ll be reading, signing and dedicated hard cover copies and generally corrupting youth.
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.
There’s an emptiness at the heart of any space: The air that escapes a room; an unanswered echo, a vacant womb. There’s an emptiness in my heart That reminds me that All of my ideas are empty. Floating leaves from a fumbled folder. Coloured streams falling from the sky.
This emptiness reminds me How slight my desires really are How gently they fall from the sky A confetti of mercy and discarded emotions, They are in the end Compared to nothing, Merely the litter from an emptied mind.
People have been asking me why I chose the risk of first publishing a book of poetry before publishing my collection of short stories THE VILLAGE OF LIGHT and my first novel, THE PLAGUE. Why launch a writing career on the back of such a neglected and unpopular form of literature?
My first answer has been that as a keen admirer of the actor William Shatner, I wanted to emulate his career; first as a starship captain (in my mind), and second, as a genius of the Art of Spoken Word.
But the non comedic reason is worth explaining here: throughout every major epoch of human achievement and civilization,
Poetry has maintained a major position in the spectrum of human arts; true across society, cultures, oceans and centuries.
Until now.
This dawning century of technological, scientific and artistic achievement; this era we currently reside in, is the exception to the human rule.
We have exchanged our ability to appreciate Poetry for other more comfortable and lascivious sensations. We have unlearned the sensibility to immerse ourselves in the healing waters of an art that we, as a species have grown like a medicinal herb in the human garden, to salve the pains in our souls and our minds .
By turning our backs on those warm healing waters we have damaged ourselves. We are all in dire need of rehabilitation.
And that is exactly what Poetry mystically, delivers.
Poetry sets you free, for free!
If you know how to notice and pay attention to the subtler colors in the spectrum of your mind’s cognition.
Which is a Poetic thing to say in that it is both metaphoric and literal at the same time.
Poems allow the mind to synthesize (reconcile), apparent opposites and to understand the deeper resonances of our human experience, in the simplest of terms, arranging words like pebbles on a dry river bank and in the broadest, to enter the harmonic rhapsody of our humanity and its sense of rhythm in this universe.
That rhythm is the breath, which is true to us all who are living. Poetry is the sound of our breathing in this world. If you want to know who a people strange to you are, read their Poetry; the words they have chosen to express themes, that persist for us all: Birth, Death, Love and the swirl of illusions inbetween.
Poetry is a drastic intervention meant to make you better. Not just feel better, but actually see, understand and *be* better than you are, which may feel strange at first.
Only bad poetry is comfortable. Trying to be the best that you are, to overcome ones self, may take more than one lifetime to achieve. But so many Poems offer roadmaps of the soul. Guidebooks from which you can detect what is universal about humanity, about the human subjective experience, and your place in this present.
So that is why I chose to launch my writing career, with my current publisher (Chameleon), with a book of Poetry:
I chose to publish Poetry first specifically because it is the form of literature that has proven to be least popular at the moment, as this marketing study details.
I’ve always stood up for the underdog, be it in life or publishing. I stood up for Comics when they were largely looked down upon as adolescent drivel. I just never thought to myself in all my years on this earth, that I would need to stand up for Poetry, because it had now succumbed to more dominant dogs.
This is a great shame to me, as a reader of great Poets from virtually every culture and time period. I mean with Poetry it really is where all of humanity meets, outside of time and space. The very center of our collective space, where language is. Each one of us is both here and there: at the edge of meaning. The words of the poem are are written by and read by the singular mind that spans all of us to that edge of comprehension. Poetry is the very understanding that we seek, in our selves and in others.
It is passive crime against our own humanity to let this art subside, due to laziness, neglect and superficiality.
So do your soul a favour and read a poem. Not just mine, any poem will do. Any Poem will set you free, for free; or at least at the modest cost of your attention.
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:
This moment is dead. But your life is momentum. It’s the only life you know:
Everywhere you look
Is exactly where you’ll go.
(Paying attention like a fine, Sniffing out the muddied footprints of the divine.)
This ticket that you’re riding, Fare-less and Free, Is merely the impetus of your Desire Conserved, unaffectedly By any other force or sway Upon your singular trajectory through time.
For Tatiana Iosifovna Doubro who is ejected from planes and recites Pushkin by heart as she is flies through space.
Life goes on without you and within you: Round pink pebbles Polished by the constant flow of Bubbles that burst like dreams
Just above the stream.
All I am is the movement in between:
The pebbles and the burst-bubble dreams.
THIS IS THE HOLDING PAGE FOR THE OFFICIAL IS-SHE-AVAILABLE.COM WEB-HUB LAUNCHING DECEMBER 6, 2014
On this page you will be able to order the book directly in time for Xmas; Download the eBook; pre-order the Wall Print Portfolio and the Music CD IS SHE?
BOOK MARK THIS PAGE AND GET SPECIAL DISCOUNTS FOR BLOG-FOLLOWERS AND FACEBOOK FANS
CHECK OUT SAMPLE FROM THE EBOOK AT MADEFIRE.COM HERE
THIS IS THE COVER ILLUSTRATION FOR THE BOOK AND THE POEM THE DARK CLOUD
Basking in the Broken Down Casino of Americana the grated dead reside in.
Reading the Bones of old contentions…looking up at primary school-lights; the ones that never change…looking down at the floor tiles; an endless sea of wrinkled faces….too many people to breathe in…
where’s the Exit Jean mentioned?…
Sound…check…test…test1…test2…test3…
Now!
Go You Sun of a Gun!
Locomotive train thunders through your head…groping… stumbling…tripping forwards into that warm glowing rush of the great unknown. There’s a tunnel!… there’s a tunnel…there’s a tunnel up ahead. We’re goin’in…we’re goin’in…we’re goin’in.…watch your head!
Watch: Your Head.
Gone! Washed away under the Lowest Bridge:
The consummation of illusion onto the lockjaw of your reality.
Still falling forwards…forwards with time…moving…with no body…no mass…no mind…beating…truckin’…making that Bend-On-the-Road…past the Dooh-Dah man….Right turn….left turn…back turn…back-where-you-started-from turn…It’s happening man…all around you…all the time…with you…without you…no-you..no- more…no-you-no-more….KNOW-MORE-YOU!..Don’t look left…don’t look right…don’t get scared…
Dawn follows the Night…head straight into the Light… up ahead…right where you came from…another train comin’ down your track…Head On Tight!
One More Stop….
Farther Down the Road.
Just keep on truckin’… don’t fall ahead and do not fail…one…two…onetwo…want-to… want-to …onetwothree..….chugga-chugga-chugga-chew-chew…One-Two Three….chugga-chugga-chugga-chew-chew
recently returned some poems I had sent her from far, far ago when we ere young and in lust and barely able to bare the sight or scent of each other without fainting into reverie and floating together; clouds that had long since let go of their rain.
It is a gift to visit ancient ports and distant shores.
Time is as big as the world it passes by.
So it is with words:
mad dog
hiding in the rain.
sharp stone
never show your pain.
some kind of innocence
is nourished in your fears.
you don’t know how much
I’ve tried just to hold you near.
(there is no way out-
-there is no way out).
the poet earns his keep
from reading the pain in others eyes
while his eyes are fountains
of tear drops and shattered sunlight.
Igor Goldkind 1983
You love me, I know with your own hands
For I am faithful to your fingertips.
When you pierce me with your wide-eyed glances,
I am stilled.
The earth grows roots around my calves,
And my body is made of branches.
Your gaze shivers their leaves like an Autumn breeze.
My work in the late 80’sand 90’s in the British publishing industry led to the engineering and successful marketing of the Graphic Novel genre; a new format of hardcover and trade paperbacks of graphic fiction that bookstores would stack on their shelves. It was my job at Titan Books to do so, for which I was paid some £7,500 a year by my employer Nick Landau, to do.
After I was given a raise by Titan Books to £8K per annum , I learnt solely by chance, that my work had increased the revenue for my employer by some 7 figure sums and that the rest of the publishing industry were all cashing in on the work I was doing in promoting 9-5, the new publishing category. Cashing in, but not adhering to to the implicit quality standards the likes of Moore, Gaiman, Morrison, Speigelman and other auteurs were actively pursuing.
The Medium, as we used to call it back then, had failed to live up to its own promise.
So I got out; for that and personal reasons.
Now when I read the interviews with my former partners in CYNICAL-MARKETING-PLOY crime in the press complaining that the industry had failed and that the term Graphic Novel was just a manipulative tool wielded by the Moloch of Comics Publishing
(Batman in MOLOCH! Wonderwoman in MOLOCH! The Avengers, the Guardians of the Galazy, Superman and the Xmen are all drowning in the vomit of MOLOCH!)
Which I believe, the premise of the new cross over series written for DC by Grant Morrison.
The most admired (and crafted), writer in comics ever, in particular; (someone I worked with closely with on the presentation of his seminal forensic crucification of the American superhero genre to a mainstream audience, refrains from even addressing me by name in print when he lambasts the CYNICAL-MARKETING-PLOY that still pays him a living), has repeatedly condemned the publishing category Graphci Novel, as effectively, just another CYNICAL-MARKETING-PLOY from the publishign industry.
I have news for the revered scribe: you may have relegated me to the dark side, but take a look in the mirror, man: you’ve been here with me all along.
[Added 9.18 for context], I realise now that the above might be interpreted as some kind of opening volley against the distinguished author. Far be it. I will always both personally and publically assert that Mr. Moore was the change in comics back in the late 80’s. No single other artist in the medium at the time was so intelligently treating the medium like a literary and artistic platform for expression. Most craftsmen (and women), I met at the time were desperaely trying to hustle their next wok commission. Not Mr. Moore. His posture was different: he related to editors, collaborators and others as an auteur sans pretension. Intelligent, articulate and demanding of ones wit and focus. And from I observed, never intimidated or swayed by the money or more often, the promise of money from publishers.
Just to make absolutely clear about my statements regarding this author: I learned everything I know about comics by just listening to him, during interviews, casual conversations and direct discussions. A the time, this man was a walking sandwich board for the the new comics, the Graphic Novels, chiefly because it was only his writing (and that of a handful of there), that even came close to qualifyng as a novel or even literature. I never was nor have ever been a Comics Fan (Senator and members of the committee), but I have always been a fan of literature, drawn or undrawn. Which is why I cntinue to read, enjoy and learn from Mr. Moore’s work.
Although I do take exception (mildly, not really that seriously), to his most recent public damnations of the Graphic Novel, and it’s origins; it’s not that I object to his opinion as much as I question the accuracy of his recollection of events and of the times that he was actually there. I don’t take issue either with Mr. Moore’s take on the industry and publishing in general; in fact the more experience I gain the more my views align with his.
But regardless of the vocabulary used (or the fact that I was being paid a paltry wage at the time), I accomplished my task to his and his collaborator’s direct professional and financial benefit. Not to mention the real world benefits: the successfull dissemination of the term Graphic Novel into the mainstream brought to literally thousands of other free lances in the form of royalty checks for the graphic novel edition of their work; a now standard of the comics industry throughout the world.
I do not benefit from the use of the term of from the money generated by its use.
But I do not regret not hiring that CYNICAL-MARKETING-PLOY lawyer that would have secured my trademark on the use of the term and perhaps a penny off of every new Graphic Novel sale; which is what the business side of the industry tells me I shoudl have done.
I did not “create” the term graphic novel; as an outsider to the industry, I found the term on the back of a Will Eisner book and used it as the keystone of a campaign to bring new comics, well written, adventuerously drawn comics. But yes, I coined the term Graphic Novel; having borrowed it from the back of a low print-run Will Eisner compilation of The Spirit. His clever NYC publisher was struggling to get Eisner’s work into the bookshops too and had tried the term connotating Literary fiction: a novel. My use of the term was different as messieurs Gaiman and Moore can both attest to; Grant got it about the same time but more remotely, in Glasgow. Graphic Novel was meant to mean NEW Graphics, new graphic literature, new comics.
Coining, (in the sense of creating common usefulness; IOW: monetizing a vocabulary term into the common currency of language of transactional communication). It derives from the coining of money by stamping metal with a die. Coins (also variously spelled coynes, coigns, coignes or quoins), were the blank, usually circular, disks from which money was minted. This usage derived from an earlier 14th century meaning of coin, which meant wedge. The wedge-shaped dies which were used to stamp the blanks were called coins and the metal blanks and the subsequent ‘coined’ money took their name from them.
{Coining later began to be associated with inventiveness in language. In the 16th century the ‘coining’ of words and phrases was often referred to. By that time the monetary coinage was often debased or counterfeit and the coining of words was often associated with spurious linguistic inventions; for example, in George Puttenham’s The arte of English poesie, 1589:
“Young schollers not halfe well studied… will seeme to coigne fine wordes out of the Latin.”
Shakespeare, the greatest coiner of them all, also referred to the coining of language in Coriolanus, 1607:
“So shall my Lungs Coine words till their decay.”}
The NEW comics of the late 80’s and early 90’s that derived from Moore’s early work for DC, Spielgelman’s dabbling at biography in NYC, Miller’s pushing the edges out on Dare Devil and most of all (for me), Bill Sienkiewicz’s explosive rendering of ELEKTRA ASSASIN! I had never seen anyone take the convnetions of comcis illustration like Faugere Egg and take a sledge hammer to it the way Siekiewicz did, literally splattering the edges of the pages and frames with the remnants of comics conventions. Sienkiewicz brought commercial art and later fine art sensibilities to Graphic Novels, something his admirer and pioneer in his own right Dave McKean would further in his career just like in a real popular arts medium.
These were the Makers of New Works. I’ve forgotten everyone: Brendan McCarthy, Jamie Delano, Pete Milligan, Frank Miller, Joe Sacco, Harvey Peckar, Gilbert and Jamie Hernandez . . . . they all were making, new different work outside the stulpifying conventions aesthetic conventions. So like superheros, they need a new name and Guardians of the Galaxy was taken, so instead you got Graphic Novelists.
I resent nothing.
It was my own fault for being more naive and less carnivorous than my employers.
So instead I have to work for a living; for which I have no complaint as at least I have work to do.
I did learn something valuable (whenever someone fails, they always say that they learnt something valuble), and that is to sell a product whatever it might be, you have to create a place in people’s minds and desires where they want that product. The most intimate and subjective of products: the books we read, the music we listen to , the films we watch: you must give people a reason for looking an understanding for what they may see.
That is why a coded term like Graphic Novel works; it’s a cut through, short cut signifier that puts anyone who wants to know or needs to know in the picture immediately: you know what you know and now you know what it is.
In the case of Poetry, we have a different problem.
Everyone knows what Poetry is, right ? It’s that stuff you had to memorize in school and analyze with Mrs. Humphries who always crossed the naughty words out like ‘sweat’ and ‘blood’ and ‘toil’ with a thick, black, fascist marker pen.
Or it’s what you penned to your wife when you were courting her; or received form your husband, your boyfriend, you lover. Anyone one of those people in your life who felt such passion, such ardour for you that they could not tell you, they had to find words from some magic place to convince you, to persuade you, to seduce you into the beauty of the passion they could see in you.
Perhaps a Poem was the only form your shattered thoughts could take at the loss of someone so precious to you that you would choose the pian of being hewn by swords than endure the truth of their permanent absence from this world.
Perhaps you have nearly gone mad and found Poems, like steps out of the abyss of self-loathing into the stark light of realisation and hope for your self.
There is no greater hope to lose than the Hope for Yourself.
So Poetry has a signifier, a pretty universal one; unfortunately it doesn’t point towards anything like what Poetry actually is.
Poetry is an art form, not a craft.
Poetry an aspiration to derive music and pattern from our deepest thoughts, the language of our dreams and the whispering, the lamenting, the singing, the moaning and the laughter of our souls.
Poetry is Liberation. The words will set you free.
I am a Poet and to sell my ware (my GRAPHIC POEMS ;~), I must show people what it is that I do, that others do that is so far removed from the common currency of the term Poetry. So this is not only a CYNICAL-MARKETING-PLOY, but a sinister sales strategy as well! To get you to read my words, I must first who you what they are ouside the barriers of your preconceptions.
So, come to a picnic and hear what Poetry is and the vital importance it has always played in our social and political lives.
September 27th, 1 pm Balboa Park, World Beat Centre/ El Centro Cultural de la Raza
Come One and All, Come All in One, Come to the 100,000 Poets-for-Change Marathon! (Picnic & Reading)
This is from my upcoming collection of poetry, art and music entitled IS SHE AVAILABLE? (Chameleon; October 31)
Artwork by the incomparable Liam Sharp (an ostrich, a rhino? a toaster? a xylophone? See, you can’t compare him.)
This image, conjured from his reading of the poem below, is Copyright Liam Sharp 2014.
The poem GRAVITY’S CONQUEST may be reproduced widely without restriction, as long as it is intact, attributed and appears in a place likely to incite civil and/or psychological unrest. Please write it on lavatory walls and biology school books.
Don’t fall too far from your self.
Who else is going to bend over to pick you up?
GRAVITY’S CONQUEST
You know, you’ve already seen the inside of your guts Looking for a way out. You know, you’ve already seen what you’ve seen: You know what you know. You know the truth like an elder brother.
You know, it’s usually right ‘there’, The last place you looked. The last place you wanted to forget: Your bare feet, Pasted against the concrete; Gravity’s Conquest.
Nailed through the heels. Poised, Gracefully On the precarious cusp Between this death and that life.
This morning I did cry for Robin Williams. Not for long, I didn’t know the man except through his acting and performance persona.
But he was such a familiar fixture in my tube zone from the 70’s onwards. First as the alien Mork who merely by being an SF element on mainstream TV made me an instant fan. it was a silly show but reeked of that 70’s innocence I would pay hard currency to recover.
It was a memory and then I grew older and so did Robin and he became a hyper-ventilated, hyper-active, hyper-real stand up and I related to him.
By the time of Good Morning Vietnam, I knew and loved Williams as part of the anarchic fraternity that embraced him, Andy Kaufman, Eddie Izzard, Lenny Bruce, Groucho Marx: that fearless plunge into the surreal. Riding what we considered normalcy into its logical outcome: the absurd; he surfed that beach, skated that ice. Late,r I grew to like him less but forgave the absorbing amoeba of Hollywood we succumbed to; he deserved success, what of it? The drugs made him seem dangerous to me; that was atttractive once and then repulsive. Now I’m more indifferent. If I had been in his shoes, doing his career; sure, I’m sure I would have been a coke head too. And the Alcohol? I’ve got my own ghost stories to tell.
What made me cry for Robin Williams was that occasionally, during his film work or talk show appearance, he would let the Harlequin’s mask slip and we would briefly gimpse this quiet, very contemplative man, honing his sense of attack, thinking his next line . . . the timing. And I recall distinctly that look of vulnerable humanity and I felt touchd by him, like he would be someone I speak to if in the same room. It was this Robin Williams I wept for, because I knew exactly what he was feeling as he took his own life.
Or maybe it was nothing like what I felt when I took my own life at 16.
I felt bad for Robin because I could imagine the moments as he decided, as his intent hardened to resolve, and the long run off the short cliff of the emotional, psychic plunge that he took. I felt I was there with him like a ghost; out of reach, trying to connect—trying to just have a word with him.
I took my own life with a cocktail, over dose of my mother’s medications including lithium and barbiturates. What my father’s doctor had prescribed her for her anxiety and perpertual angst from living in a perfect suburb.
I say I “took” my life even though I am still alive writing this (barely). Because the intent was there. I was not pretending. I was not seeking attention.
I waited until my mother had left the house to go shopping. I crept upstairs to her medicine cabinet, took out all her plastic jars of pills and empied them into my mouth. Just what the doctor ordered. I then went downstairs to the den where my teenage years were to end. Lay down on my bed, crossed my arms and prepared to die. My typewritten note still in the manual typewriter on my desk. I was prepared.
Then my mother came home.
She had forgotten something and then noticed that I hadn’t done the dishes.
Se knocked on my door.
I ignored her.
[I’m dyng here, for chrissakes!]
She banged on the door, yelled at me and then came into my room. She wasn’t going to leave me alone to die or anything else. I was still her child, her responsibility, her burden of karma.
She made me get out of bed and go do the dishes.
I did.
You had to listen to my mother or a metal spoon might find your bottom; or the back of your neck might attract an open palm slap. Once my other slapped me full in the face in front of others. When I asked her why she told us that she didn’t like the look I had given her. My mother has always lived the intuitive life, dangerously.
I started to wash the dishes, laughed and then woke up in hospital.
That’s what it seemed like at the time.
I survived.
And recovered.
It was my mother’s insistence on engendering my self-discipline that saved my life. That, and the unwashed dishes.
I so deeply regretted my stupid, solipsistic, life-changing attempt to die, that I subsequently trained and worked as a suicide counsellor in San Fransisco in the early 80’s, while I attended SFSU.
A saw a notice on a board and I answered it.
I used to work shifts in a call centre-like set up near the Haight. I would spend 4 hours taking calls. Random calls. Calls from women mainly, but then there would be evenings, usually Saturday nights when it would be nearly all male voices. Long, lonely voices. Soft voices. Tearful voices. I took it all in. I was a young man but I had been where they were and I figured I owed dues. I owed dues to my mother, to my sister and to the ever loving pack of hairless apes that share my cage on this muddy spinning marble. I oed dues to the life I had so nearly come so close to squandering.
At first I was shy and repeated the same “I’m Listening” cues, over and over. But the one woman who’s husband came home each afternoon and beat bloodly her in front of her toddler. The patient dying of cancer. The executive who stole money. The teenager, like me: hurt, confused, in pain; not knowing where the pain is coming from.
Then, I got good at it.
I left the Suicide Center script behind and began to ask my own questions; harnessing Socrates and my own empathy and expereince of suicide to try and connect. I spoke to suicides from the place of wanting to kill your self, not trying to talk you out of it. When I left the center, the director gave me a certificate, a thank you and shook my hand in front of the team. He looks like Alan Watt’s in my mind’s eye, but I’m sure that I’m confusing images. He shook my hand and said “We are all fortunate to have had such an old soul amongst us”. I had no idea what the hell that meant.
Illustration for Sisyphus Shrugs (from IS SHE AVAILABLE?) ; by DIX
Suicide is never a cold, calculated choice. But it is a choice.
I’m sure there as many reasons as there are suicides; but the step that one takes across the line from intent into action is a huge ascent. It takes every fibre of ones will to align onesself to a task that goes against ones own body, one’s being. This is precisely what is so incomprehensible to non suicides ; that the act of taking ones life takes such a great force of will. If will is Life how can it will its own end? Your body will fight you every step of the way; *it* wants to survive. You, on the other hand, can think of better alternatives to merely surviving.
There are classes amongst suicides and we don’t rate religious or insane self-immolators at all. In fact we think they’re chicken-shits. They tell themselves a story or someone does and next thing they know, they think they’re getting off at 25th street when it’s actually the upper east side. KA-BOOM!!!
No. That’s not real suicide.
Real suicide is when you know absolutely that you have no idea what happens next. THAT’s the step into the abyss that takes a force of will. A will, an intent borne into action more often than not as an alternative to the fact of ones existence: A bully, a spouse, a bank statement. How can I describe the agony of hating the world? Chasing the orbit around the source of the confounding pain round and round like a mad dog chasing its own tail. Try chasing your own tail for year, two years, five years in agonizing concentric circles of self loathing and pain and self-repulsion and then tell me how selfish suicide is; ok??
Most of us contemplate or will contemplate suicide at one time or another in our lives.
Fact.
But when’s the last time you shared any of your darkest thoughts with anyone? What’s the matter, scared you won’t get an invite to the Prom? Well yes, precisely.
You may be thinking about it right now as you read these words.
It can just cross your mind, a wandering Jew of a thought. A casual, whimsical speculation that takes shape and form into something viable, no: necessary. Necesssary to allieve the agony of this existence.
It’s time to speak out about this.
It’s a good thing.
it’s a natural thing.
Yes it is, it’s a natural thing to contemplate killing yourself; people have been doing it for thousands of years.
It’s part of the process we go through in becoming human beings, in gaining a greater depth of understanding of what it is that we are so willing to chuck away. Life and Death are a mirage; it’s just 2 sides of the same deal, baby.
But what exactly is the deal, huh?
Do you know?
No, neither do I so who are you to tell me that you understand the value of my life better than I do?
I’m happy to reveal what so many of us hide from their own polite eyes: that we are deeply unhappy with our lives, that we do not know why and that we are suffering, mostly in silence. So many of us. So many of us continue and persevere; so many of us don’t. That’s the way the cookie crumbles
I am fortunate that I can translate some of these dark thoughts, impotent cries of anguish into words, poems that might invite you to open your heart and reflect: on your self, on your life, on your neighbor. What’s his or her life like, I wonder?
But I am just one lonely poet.
An obnoxious one, at that.
This existential torment I describe is the privilege of the intelligent, the sensitive, the insightful, the visionary, the artist, thinker, the Artist: All High Suicide Risks. Robin Williams was an artist and an artist uses their metier not so much to exorcize their demons, as uncover them. Williams crafted his art, I’d like to think, as a shield, as his own private shelter against the raging cold of indifference that surrounds us.
But we who lurk at the center of the cyclone, where our care and concern huddle at the tranquil center, are perplexed and confused. “He had so much to live for”.
That is why I try and describe these thoughts and ideas and sensations as best as I can, I do so not out of exhibitionism; on the contrary, I’ve kept these facts about myself secret for some time; I want to inform anyone who has been affected by suicide, either someone you knew or a loved one, or in fact yourself, what kinds of thoughts may cross your mind that make you want to take your own life. If this gives some small respite or comfort to someone in their moment of profoundest grief, then it is no chore on my part.
It may seem displaced; it may even seem selfish and insensitive; but there’s an arrogance to the suicide that does place us one step removed from the lives you are living. Impulse and sheer clumsy stupidity aside, the intent to take your own life, with all the thought that that act entails, is not an easy course to stay.
It is not, to the suicide, a real choice. In the Camus-like sense of choosing every day to either commit suicide or NOT commit suicide as an exercise of free will. To NOT committ suicoide is of course to choose Life and whatever else happens to you that day as something you have willingly chosen. No, the existential blanket is often clung to but the act itself requires more desperation than merely a wanting to know how to live.
The same with the code of honor or Bashido that motivated both Yukoo Mishima, Japan’s greatest post war poet and the executive in charge of compensation to the 400 families of the Japanese Boeing jet that went down in the water with no survivors. The verdict was pilot error and the compensation payments were in the millions. After filing the paperwork for the 400th claim, the airline executive neatly arranged his desk and then committed ritual seppukaas his personal apology to the families. In this way the samurai, the man of honour makes his entire life a gesture, a conscious act of volition in ending it. He knew what he was doing.
I did not.
I was a child growing up in 70’s San Diego. Down the street from me was the school where the shootout that gave Bob Geldof Why I hate Mondays. And of course there was Danny Alstadt.
I published my first poem entitled UNDER THE GIZMO in the California State Education Poetry Anthology describing my experience when my French teacher, a former Playboy bunny, discovered my poetry journal that had my imitations of Baudelaire and Nerval. She called the school counsellor who called my mother who then got browbeat her into taking me to a child psychiatrists. Upon the first ten mintues of meeting me and suggesting that a French Symbolist’s lifestyle was not compatibel with an academic career, he prescribed medication. Apparently, a 14 year old with a morbid interest in late 19th century French Symbolist poetry does not conform to the cirriculum standard and I was sentenced to be drugged.
Fortunately my father had returned from his conference and was able to intervene where my mother’s English could not.
So I wrote a poem about the dehumanization of the state educational system.
So the state educational system published it in their journal state-wide.
My long term social alienation had been augumented by my parents disintegrating marriage.
It was the summer of 1975 that my father moved out and it was later that summer that I took my own life.
When I went to 10th grade, before I was expelled for organizing a student demo (another story), I fell in with a group of older students who seemed to appreciate SF, poetry, classical music and art as much as I did. They adopted me as a sort of odd mascot and I took pleasure in finally have found a social niche I felt welcome in.
B became my best friend and it was B who enthisiastically invited me to the library after school one day to introduce me to S, his new girlfriend. I had never met anyone like S before; half Armenian, half Jewish; S was the girl I had been dreaming of since I first started dreaming about girls. And she was my best friend’s girlfriend. And beautiful. And intelligent. And she new everything about Matisse!
Needless to say this fated triangle would not hold. That summer was a Shakespherian torture of frustrated libido, yielding to honour. Eventually B “gave” S to me. It was during one of those ridiculous emotional roller coaster rides that S had called me to tell me that she had reached a final decision and was choosing to stay with B.
We were all children at 16 and 17. Children playing with fire.
I accepted this, hung up the phone and sat down to my typewriter to write my goodbye.
When I awoke in hospital, stomach pumped, having endured the enagelism of an all night Christain nurse wo kept waking me up to tell me how much I had disapppointed Jesus.
[HE”S disappointed? I would shout at her now.]
When I awoke to the pair of clear blue confused yes of my little sister looking at me, anxious and scared I realized like a freight train what my life was really worth. At the time, it seemed like the only thing to do. That morning, I hated myself and when I looked at the hurt confusion in my mother’s eyes, I knew that this could never, never ever happen again.
These days it merely takes a split second of my daughter’s face in my mind to assure my immortality.
But I’m with Robin Williams. I know what that step entails. I know what it means to make the final choice. And it is something we must air out. It is something we must allow to enter the public sphere. We are all masters of our own destiny and the ability to choose to take our own lives is an act of assertion; an act of identity. To label it as weak or sick or wrong is to deny your own awareness of your own identity and the need to control and detmin who and what it is that you are on your terms. There are many things worse than death and there are at least a billion living it. But is life is deemed to be precious, indeed the only value there is, then that value must be defined by its limits.
It is my life to choose to live it as I choose and to choose to die as I choose to.
Robin’s chocie may be tragic to us, but it is also a reminder that death rests waiting on all of our shoulders. There is no way out, is what we all share in common.
. . . in nervous anticipation of the world. Curiousity, tempered by peer acquired knowledge butts against the barricades of adulthood. We’re ready to storm the Citadel of your privilege! We are the next generation and that world you’re holding hostage belongs to us! (Now hand it over before anyone gets hurt.)
My daughter, Olivia is 15 and visting me from just outside Oxford, England where she lives with her mother and has never had less than a straight A+ report card. She just took a flight by herself from London Heathrow to San Diego, at 15.
When I was 15 my parents were getting divorced, badly.
So I ran away from home.
I told my mom, my dad had moved out, that I was going camping with my friend Barry Alphonso for a few days and I asked her if she could give me a ride to Pacific Beach where Barry lived and where his mom was driving us from.
I didn’t see my mother again for another 12 weeks. I met Barry alright in PB near the freeway on-ramp onto 5 heading north. I had an overstuffed backpack, a golf club (for walking and protection), about $40.00 I had stolen from my mother’s purse: the source of all comforts. At 15 I found myself standing on an on-ramp in Pacific Beach holding my glof club in one hand and sticking out my thumb with the other. Barry lingered, somewhat doubting I would hitch a ride and curious as to my sticking my toes over the precipace into the unknown. Would I really jump or just go home?
Me, all I had was the certainty I needed to leave my broken family behind. There was too much incomprehensible grief, the loss of our house, our income, our home. My mother and father’s loving looks twisted into evil eyes of anger, hatred and contempt for each other. But me and my sister couldn’t help but suspect that we were the root of the problem. After all, if they hadn’t had us; they could split up and both be happy somewhere else, with someone else. Idiots think that children are somehow less responsible.
That’s not the problem. A child is much too responsible, in our minds we feel responsible for the world.
A delusion I have heartily welcomed back into my life at this late age.
At 15, I find myself standing on the verge of an open highway with my thumb sticking in the wind: the greatest gesture of hope and faith I have ever made in my life. I had never hitchiked before and all I had were vague images of an Emerald San Francisco where my dad had driven us to years ago and near where my older brother was dodging tear gas on his way to class at Berkeley. I had the swirling images of Bob Dylan songs and Paul Simon melodies to sing to my self on the side of the road. If you really hit the groove on the song, you were always guaranteed a ride. The joy of music and singing is infectous and hits the bubbled drivers like a laser, traveling 80mph!
This was also still the time of war and the rice paddies and tunnels of Vietnam were making their way underground into the California bread basket.
Lots of people I met on the road were veterans. I hear its the same on the road today. An army comes home to a lost highway. Damaged souls with haunted eyes. Hanging with flea bitten ex fighting dogs and still wearing their green fatigues. Some even still wore their dog tags that flickered in the sun and the sterno-light alike; chained butterflies at the end of a beaded neck chain .
Some of the sad were mad and would wander way from the fire or the on-ramp or under the bridge and howl at the sky. No one ever paid them any mind. it was impolite to comment on a soldier’s anguish. These lost souls, these fragmented men taught me so much about hitchhiking and rail car hopping, how to get a free meal at a road side McDonald’s in exchange for picking up the litter . . .
Which Jesus shelters were tolerable and which to steer away from. (Generally, a meal, a sermon and a bed were tolerable. Anythng more than that was considered risky. I had a Christian woman visit me several times in one night in my bunk bed trying to convince me to accept Jesus while she roamed her hands under my bed clothes.
Religion is allot like sex except that unlike sex, it gets it wrong.)
Most of all those lost soldiers, ghosts of events everyone wanted forgotten, they taught me how to forgive my father, another broken soldier who had taken out his white light rage on me and my brother, with his belt and with his fists. Those men, may killers, taught me at 15 what I needed to know for real, so I could later tell my father what he had done to me and I could look him I the eyes and forgive him because I knew and understood that wasn’t his fault.
It was the War, the same fucking War that had crippled him. The same War that crippled the ghosts from Iraq and Afghanistan. The same War that is manufacturing new ghosts in Israel, in Gaza, in Syria. It’s the same fucking War peeps, the same fucking War from the desert to the frozen tundra, through the jungle, to the rice paddies, to the streets of downtown LA.
It’s the same fucking War, peeps: when we going to call it quits?
How much more do we have to endure of your arrogant greed, your inhumanity, your thoughtless disregard for Life?
I had adventures on that road to Oz.
Through the valleys of the Jesus people.
On the highway, pulling all sorts of motorised vehicles with my magnetic thumb.
Drinking beer for the first time at the cowboy ranch Bacchanal after the rancher’s hand picked up 5 of us hitchers in the back of his pickup truck, just to give us beer and music at the farm. Being kissed by a girl who’s name I never would know, or need to, for the very first time—There is no thrill greater than a fleeting one. In the back of the Wizard’s goatee-ed van who dressed his poodle in a bright green doggy sweater and offered to buy me dinner later if he could show me his doggy tricks.
The biker under the bridge who’s hog had broken down in the downpour near the Oregon border. And me, a drowned puppy carrying a golf club for protection, drenched to my bones and shaking like the Devil at Communion.
The big, bearded, bike-bear stared at me under the bridge for awhile and made me nervous.
This was his bridge.
After awhile, he broke his stare and waved me silently over across the road. The only bikers I knew anything about were the ones that put Hunter S Thompson in the hospital because they didn’t like what he had written about them in his book. Shit!
But ‘Lucky’ was a quiet mountain. He gave me a green wool army blanket from his bike’s saddle bag and a Camel straight from his half empty pack; my first ever. The rain was coming down steady, heavy and cold. I had “smartly” chosen the month of November to make my break to freedom. Lucky had a can of sterno, a metal cup and Nescafe. There was water, water, everywhere and more than enough to drink.
Lucky didn’t say much but when I stopped shaking he poured from a bottle of Wild Turkey 101 into the hot metal nescafe cup and we shared it. I did not know this quiet dark bearded man, where he came from, what his story was or even it was safe to hang with him under this bridge in the rain. But he was my older brother in the moment we were in and when Lucky finally did say something to me it was a 3 word question:
“Do you play?”
I glanced down at the the minature wooden chess set Lucky had extracted from his saddle bag.
“Sure, I play. I play ALL the time”.
Paying chess with a leather suited biker under a bridge under the pouring Oregon rain.
Last Minute Re-Versioning. I think it works better now. Soon we will be launching the animated version of the illustration for the piece by the intensely wonderful and visually lyrical Jeff Christenten. Thanks to Evan@Madefire. As well as an original composition for the entire multimedia piece from the intense genius of Gilad Atzmon. Please stay tuned. Please enjoy. Please comment good or bad. What’s the difference ?
THE REVOLUTION IN ONLY 2 DIGITS
Home again.
Thomas, you were wrong to doubt it:
You Can Go Home Again and
Bask in the healing sun of Osiris
This isn’t home
This is recovery.
From the fevered scurvy of my own forgetfulness.
I eat limes for breakfast, lunch and dinner now;
My bowels move regularly now.
And I feel just like Thomas Payne
His bursting desire to model the ideal citizen
Not our uniforms, but our blood, sinew and muscle.
To present to the Crowning Glory and
To the Revolutionary Congress and
To the Revolutionary French Senate
Thomas and his Pain made the American struggle a personal fight:
The universal pull of the upright ape on the chains holding him down.
Chains forged by the forgetful hairless ones.
The ones we will overcome.
But we are not revolutionaries!
We are the Revolution.
We are what happens next.
The R/Evolution of our Selves: the inner/outer seeing through Alice’s mirror
Into mindful awareness
Into homage to our honored masters and their children:
The ever loving human race.
We have already won the revolution.
We have already won the revolution.
2 Shots were fired from far, far ago:
One from Lovelace’s boudoir,
Another from Giordano’s spinning wheels and the memory of his funeral pyre.
And from the bit of the apple Alan choked down,
We have already won the revolution.
We just need to take charge.
We have already won the revolution.
In only 2 digits.
THE REVOLUTION IN ONLY 2 DIGITS
Home again.
Thomas, you were wrong to doubt it:
You Can Go Home Again and
Bask in the healing sun of Osiris
This isn’t home
This is recovery.
From the fevered scurvy of my own forgetfulness.
I eat limes for breakfast, lunch and dinner now;
My bowels move regularly now.
And I feel just like Thomas Payne
His bursting desire to model the ideal citizen
Not our uniforms, but our blood, sinew and muscle.
To present to the Crowning Glory and
To the Revolutionary Congress and
To the Revolutionary French Senate
Thomas and his Pain made the American struggle a personal fight:
The universal pull of the upright ape on the chains holding him down.
Chains forged by the forgetful hairless ones.
The ones we will overcome.
But we are not revolutionaries!
We are the Revolution.
We are what happens next.
The R/Evolution of our Selves: the inner/outer seeing through Alice’s mirror
Into mindful awareness
Into homage to our honored masters and their children:
The ever loving human race.
We have already won the revolution.
We have already won the revolution.
2 Shots were fired from far, far ago:
One from Lovelace’s boudoir,
Another from Giordano’s spinning wheels and the memory of his funeral pyre.
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. 
Flight UA1827
Flight LH1285
Poetry therapy has been used as part of the treatment approach for a number of concerns, including borderline personality, suicidal ideation, identity issues, perfectionism, and grief. Research shows the method is frequently a beneficial part of the treatment process. Several studies also support poetry therapy as one approach to the treatment of depression — it has been repeatedly shown to relieve depressive symptoms, improve self-esteem and self-understanding, and encourage the articulation of feelings. Researchers have also demonstrated poetry therapy’s ability to reduce anxiety and stress. Those experiencing post traumatic stress have also reported improved mental and emotional well-being as a result of poetry therapy. Some individuals who have survived trauma or abuse may have difficulty processing the experience cognitively and, as a result, suppress associated memories and emotions.
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.
Secure and supported by this universal clarity.
Depression is merely an afterthought.
We are slaves to our memories
the National Association for Poetry Therapy (NAPT) was established.
not advocating a supernatural or spiritual causation for the effectiveness of poetry as a healing agent but rather the supra-natural mystical cause which is grounded first in human nature and behavior for which can be a myriad of imprecise explanations; none of which explain why it works.
There is no trick to listening to yourself and learning how choosing and rearranging your words can unlock darkened doors, de-clutter basements and clean out the attics of your life. Sometimes in merely one session.
Just add <poetry therapy> to your Skype contacts and schedule a date. Payments accepted through PayPal or Facebook cash. Here are some examples of the poetry achieved through PEGASUS POETRY THERAPY:
Prisoner number…
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.
I pray that I still have something to say.
Caught in the Diamond Rain
But every moment you or I have ever lived.
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.
What is this thing that you can’t speak of?
igorgoldkind
FACING the WAVES
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March 29, 2025 | Categories: books, comments about poetry, death, Existentialism, Igor Goldkind, Illustrated books, jazz, literature, Meaning of Existence, Meditations, Mindfulness, new poetry, poetry, Poetry Therapy, Self-Therapy, sex, spoken word, Transmedia, Transmedia. multimedia, Uncategorized, world jazz music | Tags: consciousness expansion, Existence, Existential, Igor Goldkind, Jazz, literature, Love Poetry, philosophy, Poem, Poetry Therapy, Self, Spoken Word | Leave a comment