On the Scene: Into Space--Marginal Arts in Roanoke, Virginia--What in the World?

This week, 3rd-8th, Roanoke Va. will host the much anticipated Marginal Arts Festival.   Participating in the festival, The Unicorn Stables Project is a studio which will be showing a large variety of artists in an unusual promotional venue:

The showing corresponds with the Southwestern Virginia's Premier Science Fiction & Fantasy Convention, ShevaCon,  March 3rd-6th.  Local established and emerging artists are participating in the art event at Unicorn Stables.  Including Cathryn Hankla, Ann Glover, Judith Starchild, J.D. Whitney, Susan Jameson, Morgan Strong and many more.  A few examples of Strong’s art are included below:
   I


This previous Saturday, Feb. 26th,  the The Unicorn Stables Project Studio was a-buzz with activity as Cameron Niedermayer worked on finishing her sculpture:

Niedermayer explained her inspiration for the pyramid comes from the alien associations with monolithic man-made constructions.  Although she doesn’t intend for her art to have a political message, she is aware that the work she is doing can be seen in a new context due to the recent upheaval in Egypt.  The symbols shown in the picture below have a spiritual significance.  On the side not showing in the picture, Neidermayer has painted the Vulcan IDIC symbol from Star Trek.  IDIC stands for Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.  She was pleased to consider the symbol as applicable in a wide variety of philosophies, both theological and political. 


Another artist hard at work and the brain-child behind the project, Tiff Robinette.  Robinette explains that the showing will include: installations, live performances, a projection, 2-dimensional paintings, encaustic, sculptures, and sound pieces.  Of her own installation piece, which is a womb-like cave space (Saturday it was already filled with pink stalactites hanging from the ceiling, the stalagmites were still under construction) she explains, “I’m interested in female space, perceptions and traditions of gender.  My inspirations are mythology and literature, particularly biblical narratives of the end and of fear that comes from above.”


Robinette goes on to share that the imagery found in her art often comes from dreams.  As she is the oldest of nine children, only one of her siblings was a boy, it is no wonder her themes relate to gender and variations of this theme are repeated in symbolic motifs through-out her work.  “I create mythology,” her artist statement unapologetically proclaims.  The picture is a sculptural representation of Robinette’s take on a confectionary tradition called the “tea cake.”




Two other Unicorn Stables artists were busy at work this past Saturday, Julie Schneider with the help of Megan Robinson was preparing her instillation “Contemplations of the Universe at a Slumber Party in New Jersey, 1996”
The alien in the picture is Bob from the planet Bob.  He was a donation from Fenn and Jackson Walker, the youngest contributor to the showing at 8 years old dressed Bob in his own clothes for the exhibition.  

                                                        

 Another exciting contributor is Urban Artist, Toobz.  When entering into the Secret Histories of a Space Age, be sure to check out his sci-fi mural in the hallway. Here’s his work-in-progress space-creature:

A Reading List for the Egypt Crisis - NYTimes.com

From the New York Times:

A Reading List for the Egypt Crisis

By ALEXANDER STAR

It took only a few days for Egyptian protesters to bring the regime of Hosni Mubarak to near collapse. But it took decades for the conditions for revolt to ripen. A range of widely noted books offer clues to the country’s accumulated discontents and thwarted desires. Max Rodenbeck’s Cairo: The City Victorious is a cultural and social history of the Arab world’s largest city, written by the Economist’s Middle East Correspondent. Mary Anne Weaver’s A Portrait of Egypt examines Egyptian society in the 1990s, with an emphasis on Islamist opponents of the Mubarak regime.

Dispatches From the Book Review

In recent years, scholars have fervently debated the evolution of Egypt’s main opposition movement, the Muslim Brotherhood. Does it seek to drastically remake Egyptian society along strict religious lines, or has it entered a “post-Islamist” phase characterized by moderation and tolerance? The latter argument is made by Carrie Wickham in her study of grass-roots activists, Mobilizing Islam. More jaundiced views of the movement in Egypt and its offshoots elsewhere can be found in a new collection edited by Barry Rubin entitled The Muslim Brotherhood. Even as the Brotherhood moderated its message and perhaps its worldview, some of its former members turned to acts of spectacular violence. Their doings are the subject of Giles Kepel’s Muslim Extremism in Egypt, and Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower, which suggests that Mubarak’s torture cells radicalized Egyptian Islamists such as the future al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, and helped bring about the Sept. 11 attacks. Lee Smith’s The Strong Horse explores the Mubarak government’s cynical efforts to manipulate popular sentiment and maintain power.
Though Egypt’s cultural prominence has faded, it remains the home of important literary figures, many of whom work in the shadow of the late Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy and Cairo Modern examine the ideological and erotic entanglements of Cairenes in the last years of British influence. Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Yacoubin Building is a popular novel about a Cairo apartment house whose fortunes reflect those of the country at large. Among the most admired Egyptian novels of recent years is Sonallah Ibrahim’s Zaat, which turns an office worker’s aspirations to become a world-class consumer into bitter comedy. A many-layered picture of 20th century Egypt emerges in the novelist Taha Hussein’s memoir The Days, which follows a poor, blind village boy who makes his way to Cairo, acquires an education, loses his university post for his controversial writings on Egypt’s pre-Islamic past, and eventually becomes a cultural hero.
Readers interested in assessing American influence in Egypt might turn to Master of Games by the longtime CIA officer Miles Copeland Jr.. Copeland, the father of Stewart Copeland, the drummer for the Police, and Miles Copeland III, the record producer, relates (and perhaps embellishes) his elaborate efforts to keep General Nasser from slipping into the Soviet orbit. In his classic Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, the historian Albert Hourani looked back further to a time in the early 20th century that seems especially relevant now — a moment when Egyptian and other Arab thinkers steeped in Enlightenment ideals hoped to see a robust democracy emerge from a moribund dictatorship.

 

Click here for link to book

**Also: Please consider "Letters From Cairo" By Pauline Kaldas
Kaldas offers insight into the complexities of Egyptian culture, alternately taking on roles of linguist and cultural interpreter and addressing everything from class issues and political activism to education and the impact of Western culture. But it is her moving, often entertaining letters and her children’s emails and poems that will charm readers and resonate with devotees of travel narratives and multicultural literature. This book captures the images, character, and passion of an extraordinary country. Marked by spare, graceful prose, drawing on observations and friendships past and present, Kaldas offers a unique lens for observing Middle Eastern societies, one that the reader will not soon forget.

Part Two: "Not here/Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.” – T.S. Eliot

Words. It occurred to me that in using words to determine the value of words I’ve created quite an impossible fix for myself, one which will be difficult to find my way out of. What are words, exactly? I’m no linguist so I can’t use that kind of terminology to determine their value. Here, these words are no more than pixel bits, lines and loops, dark dotted shapes and shadows of thought illuminated on the face of a plasma screen. I do not know how this plasma screen works. I don’t even know what the plasma consists of, yet I can push some buttons on my keypad and by some force completely foreign to me, the things I think become the words I type and these sentences you now can read.

Reality demands that I acknowledge the fact that words themselves are pretty worthless—

marks on a page, blips on a screen. You can’t smell them, taste them or touch them. I have heard it said many times and have read in several places that “words are food” and “poetry is bread” (for i.e. See Mary Oliver’s Poetry Handbook, which I quoted from in an essay I wrote for NYQ issue 65). They are not. I once thought this was true, but words actually have no nutritional value. You won’t find a calorie count on the back of any book. Words can not sustain a body. You can make a sandwich out of bread. You can spread peanut butter on bread. Try spreading peanut butter on a word. It’s not going to work very well.

So what makes them valuable?

And, at what point does a word obtain its value? Is it in the mind, in the way we construct meaning, how we think in words and images? Does a word only obtain value when it is spoken, or do words become something of value only when they are commoditized or written down? Perhaps (and it may be obvious to some) it is not so much words themselves which have value or not, but what determines their value is the use of them in communication, their role as the nuts and bolts of language
.
So now let's consider what it is about the nuts and bolts in the machinery of language which gives words their value--

A few days ago I was sitting and crocheting at my son’s baseball practice when an elderly Latino woman approached me. This is the second year her grandson and my son have been on the same baseball team, and although I’d smiled at her and said hello each time I saw her, it was clear from watching her interactions with her grandson that she was not very fluent in English and so we never really had a chance to strike up a conversation beyond “hello.” She stood over me and pointed to my sad attempt at a scarf and said a word in Spanish, then used her hands to mimic the act of knitting.
I smiled, and shrugged my shoulders to indicate I wasn’t sure what she was asking.

“Crochet?” I asked.

“Crochet?” She repeated.

When she repeated the Spanish word for crochet she made the motions with her hands again so I attempted to repeat the word back to her. Her face brightened and she giggled as if I’d told her a funny joke, or maybe my pronunciation was so awful that I said a dirty word and didn’t know it. She sat down right next to me, and my Spanish is very bad, but I did remember this at least:

“Hola’ me llamo Melanie, como te llamo?”

Her smile widened even further as she told me her name and then I think she asked me if I spoke Spanish.

“Porquita, me espaniol es muy mal.” I answered.

“My English, too, very bad. We help each, you, me?” She asked.

“Sure!” I replied, “Si!”

I tried to find a way to communicate with her, scanning my mind for what little Spanish I could remember, knowing somewhere rattling around behind a door with very rusty hinges there had to be a word or two I could use. Ding! Te gusta? Me gusta? Found two.

“Te gusta baseball? What is baseball in espaniol?” I asked.

“Baseball.” She answered.

“Yes baseball, in espaniol?”

“Baseball is baseball.”

“Baseball is baseball?”

“Si.”

Ah ha!! “Okay! Baseball is baseball! Te gusta baseball?” I repeated

“No, no me gusta, me encante baseball.” She replied, crossing her arms over her chest as if she were giving herself a hug.

“You love baseball?”

“Love? Encante is Love?” She asked.

“Si, encante, love. You love baseball?”

“I love baseball, si” she replied.





The next fifteen minutes I found out her English is much better than my Spanish. She asked me if I studied Spanish in school, I managed to pick out a few words I knew: escribe, libro, la professora, escula. It was humbling to become such a handicapped communicator, forced to use words that a two year old would use. We went over body parts, eye-oho, nose- narisa, mouth- boka, hands- manos. It was wonderful, miraculous even, how simple it was to form a connection…just the naming of body parts enabled us to relate to each other in a way that would not have been possible without the use of words. We giggled like fools as I kept mixing up the body parts, calling fingers hands and hands fingers. Near the end of our conversation she held her shoulder and grimaced dramatically, I did not understand a word in the sentence she spoke to me then but I understood quite clearly that she was telling me her shoulder was troubling her.

Language is more than words, obviously, but without words we simply do not have the tools to survive in this world. Words may not have nutritional value for the body, but at the end of our conversation my new amigo patted her hand over her heart and told me,

“Thank you. Is good— for here.”

I imagine the first spark in the first man (or woman’s) skull when a mark in the dirt or an etching on a rock wall became a symbol of something else. Evolution happened when man began using tools, yes, but this moment, to me, is the true mark of evolution—when man desired to share his thoughts and feelings using the tools of language, words, to project his thinking outside of himself.

Words are what make us human, and it is the way in which we use those words which proves if we are or are not.

But how does this relate to poetry, and what value it has beyond commodity?



Stay tuned for part 3 (Sea turtles and Eliot forthcoming)

Here's a preview of where we will be going on the next leg in this journey: (Thanks to the delightful Richard Bausch for giving me permission to use his quote.  He credits Conrad for the premise.)

"Every really good story, no matter how short or how long, carries something of its justification for being and all its attendant parts in every single line. It is a unified created work of word art and that is why it is so difficult to do. So let go of expecting it ever to get easier. It won't. Just get on with it. Be willing to stumble all over yourself trying to be splendid."

Arrowhead Press: Grasshopper by M A Griffiths

Arrowhead Press: Grasshopper by M A Griffiths:

by M A Griffiths

384pp Paperback
ISBN 978-1-904852-28-5
Published 14th January 2011

£12.00 post free in UK.

Add to cart to buy direct from publisher with your card or by cheque.

Margaret Griffiths (1947-2009) was born and raised in London and lived for some time in Bracknell then later moved to Poole. Rather than seek publication through traditional channels, she was content to share her work with fellow poets on various Internet forums. On the rare occasions she submitted work for publication, it was typically to online venues. Also known by the Internet pseudonyms 'Grasshopper' and 'Maz', she began posting her poetry online in 2001. During the mid-2000s she worked from home, running a small Internet-based business, and edited the Poetry Worm, a monthly periodical distributed by email.
In 2008, her 'Opening a Jar of Dead Sea Mud' won Eratosphere's annual Sonnet Bake-off, and was praised by Richard Wilbur. Later that year she was a Guest Poet on the Academy of American Poets website, where she was hailed as 'one of the up-and-coming poets of our time'. She suffered for years from a stomach ailment which eventually proved fatal in July 2009. Almost immediately after her death was announced on Eratosphere, poets from all over the English-speaking world, from London, Derby, Scotland, Wales, Queensland, New South Wales, Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, Missouri, Maryland, California and Texas collected her work for this publication.


This publication is intended as an archive of Margaret's work and has been produced in alpha-numeric order. While this may detract from the immediate impression of her work, it was decided upon as an easy reference to individual poems. The book contains 316 poems, some scraps, some work in progress, but mainly finished poems if poems are ever completely finished. The book now resides in the National Archive at the British Library and in the main Copyright Libraries. The intention was to preserve her work, which previously was scattered around the Internet in dozens of different locations. The book will also be available for public access at the Saison Poetry Library in the South Bank Centre, London.

Readers who are interested in finding out more about Maz and her work can find information here.



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Part One: "Not here/Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.” – T.S. Eliot

Thanks to C.E. Chaffin for introducing this quote to me.

I saw a picture the other day. It was a picture of an eagle feasting on a mallard. It was gruesome. The mallard’s body was shredded into a mass of blood and feathers. In the eagle’s beak, held by a tenuous bright red thread of flesh, was the only intact part of the duck remaining— its iridescent green head. And its eye, focused on the camera, the eye—that eye was clear and bright. It was beautiful. It was horrible. It was life. It was death.

It was poetry.

Recently I’ve enjoyed a conversation concerning “value” in relation to words and more specifically, poetry. For the purpose of this essay, the picture I described may serve as a somewhat obvious visual metaphor for the mass marketing mentality in the publishing world. There are those who eat, there are those who get eaten. No? Simple fact of life. Knowing this, who is crazy enough to suppose they want to be a writer, especially a writer of poetry? If poets are anything in this scenario, poets are the ducks. So, the question is, are the only roles available to us in the landscape of modern publishing those of predator or prey? I’ll come back to this later.

First of all I don’t suppose to tackle the entire publishing market right now. No way. No how. I’d like to focus this first part on “value” as it relates to the process of writing and the publishing of writing, particularly, again…the value of writing and publishing poetry. Let me throw some facts at you:
According to http://www.bowkerinfo.com/bowker/IndustryStats2010.pdf

11,766 poetry/drama books were published in 2009. That’s up 105% since 2002.*[i]

What to do with all this poetry? More is less and less is still too much?

To quote a friend and fellow poet, Steve Bunch, “Poetry has become a commodity--not as lucrative as hog bellies, mind you, but a commodity nonetheless--and the more of it that gets produced, the cheaper it becomes.”

Others share Steve’s view, claiming that there is just too much poetry out there. In “The New Math of Poetry” published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, David Alpaugh tells us: 

"Len Fulton, editor of Dustbooks, which publishes the International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses, estimates the total number of literary journals publishing poetry 50 years ago as 300 to 400. Today the online writers' resource Duotrope's Digest lists more than 2,000 "current markets that accept poetry," with the number growing at a rate of more than one new journal per day in the past six months. Some of these journals publish 100 poems per issue, others just a dozen. If we proceed cautiously and assume an average of 50 poems per publication per year, more than 100,000 poems will be published in 2010."

Are we about to be crushed under the weight of all these words? Perhaps the answer is the culling process of contests. Surely a sifting of chaff from wheat occurs there, no? Alpaugh continues his monolithic math equation:

 "Fifty years ago, the Yale Younger Poets was the only poetry-book contest in America. If this year's 330-plus contests continue to grow at the rate of just a half-dozen new ones per year, more than 50,000 prize-winning volumes will have been published by the end of this century. Add the hundreds of non-prize-winning chapbooks and collections with similar growth rates, and poetry books will easily top 100,000 by 2100."

Wait a minute. 100,000 poetry books by 2100??!! That’s assuming the ancient astronaut aliens don’t return to take over the planet, or that the meteors supposed to collide with the earth in 2012, leaving remnants of humanity huddling over open fires in caves and using a chisel and stone to write with, instead will glide right by us.

See, Aplaugh is actually being hopeful here!


Eh-hem…moving on. Or moving back, to regard the picture of the eagle and mallard again. Here’s a quote from Raymond Hammond, editor of The New York Quarterly,

“Contests and reading fees within the writing community are nothing more than a form of cannibalism.”

Oh, this just gets worse and worse, not even predator/prey, eagle vs. mallard, but ducks eating ducks??? Say it ain’t so!


You remember those funny signs you would read when you went swimming in the summer.


It seems as if Poetry may have become the P in the publishing pool. Realistically speaking, who cares about poetry besides the poets who are writing it? And do the poets writing poetry only care about their own publishing prowess, what more to the mallard/eagle scenario is there? Duck/duck/goose?


Should the gatekeepers be more selective?  How important are words? Do the value of words and poems directly relate to how often those words are read or how well they are understood?


I’ll tackle these questions and more as I continue to, um, dive (oh the horror, the horror, she's punning now)  into the “value” of poetry.

Stay Tuned for Part 2 of “Not Here/Not here the darkness, in this twittering world”

---

[i] Now here we have “poetry” lumped in with “drama” and I’m honestly not too certain why they are lumped together, but we might assume “drama” to mean plays and the like. I do not have data concerning the percentage of increase in published plays, however, looking at the production aspect, there does not seem to be a boom in the world of theatre in terms of extra productions via broad-way or local venues that I have noticed, (admittedly I’m no expert on this.) Still, the growth in this statistic seems more likely to directly relate to the increase of small presses and published poetry books and chapbooks. As I don’t have direct data concerning this issue, I’m going to just go ahead and run with that assumption and if I’m wrong…well, then I’m wrong.

Received/Reviewed Poetry Books 2010

http://www.amazon.com/Wrecking-Ball-Other-Urban-Haiku/dp/0984411828

Wrecking Ball and Other Urban Haiku, Barry George, Accent’s Publishing SPALDING SERIES
Barry George’s collection honors the ancient tradition of Haiku with careful attention to form. The form lends a tangible feeling of weight to each word and yet the imagery turns and turns again from dense and earth-bound to diaphanous and spacious (quite an achievement for 17 syllables, tiny little 5-7-5 moras). Each haiku in this collection is a work of art set like a painting on the page. In many places George twists the tradition away from its roots in nature to use modern visualizations of average people in everyday life. He creates characters which reflect the universality of living, not to recreate the haiku form, but, I believe, to give homage to the past while drawing it forth into a relevant and vibrant future. Each haiku is gift, a portrait of modern life and the vitality and energy of one of the earliest forms of poetry, syllabics, which has remained vibrant through the ages, is beautifully reflected in these meticulously polished jewels.

*A note on the Spalding Collection, these books are beautifully printed and put together by hand which adds a personal element to each edition not found in many of the larger presses. The interior design is zen-like. Kudos to Accent’s Publishing for valuing the art of bookbinding as well as the crafting of poetry.



http://www.amazon.com/Across-Grid-Streets-Quincy-Lehr/dp/0955534631

Across the Grid of Streets, Quincy Lehr, Seven Towers Publishing
I’ll start by saying I am not of big fan of neo-formalism. I’m not a fan of long poems that rhyme written after, oh, the 18th century because it seemed to me rhyme itself was a cliché’ and historically speaking, formal poetry had been used, not to capture life, truth or history but to encapsulate stories which promoted whatever political agenda (usually misogynistic in tone and patriarchal in topic) was relevant to whatever ruling cast paid the pipers (so to speak.) But okay, then. Where did that chip on my shoulder come from? I don’t know. Anyhow, I got over it. Lehr's talent with story telling draws the reader in and the pacing in his book is equal parts Wordsworth and Wilde, on crack maybe, but I mean that in a good way. Lehr also tackles the urban landscape bringing us face to face with the utter isolation of a singular vision caught up in multiple agonies. Cancer and death are topics delved with raw and unflinching clarity. These are not your momma’s lyrical love poems but the well honed lyricism I surprisingly found fitting to the topics and actually framed them in such a way which made the investment in reading worthwhile.


http://www.amazon.com/Venison-Thorpe-Moeckel/dp/0981968716/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1293700291&sr=1-1

Venison: A Poem, Thorpe Moeckel, Etrusian Press
A book length poem? In couplets no less--what was he thinking!? That’s what I thought when I began reading Venison, doubtful one poem could be sustained through an entire manuscript. Well, I was wrong and pleasantly surprised. Moeckel’s Venison engages in sustainability and substance, not to mention sustenance. On the other hand, let’s mention sustenance. The poem (book) is part reverently meditative, part treatise on the natural order of life and death, predator and prey, part recipe on authentic living. There are sometimes delightful, sometimes humorous, sometimes disturbing revelations which parallel the common activities of preparing food and feeding one’s family. A fascinating journey from hoof to table, from the forests to the kitchen, from regret to gratitude with a tender reckoning of the grace and responsibility involved in each life we come in contact with.  Probably one of the most unique poetry books I've ever read.


http://www.amazon.com/Bright-Felon-Autobiography-Cities-Wesleyan/dp/081956916X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1293700421&sr=1-1

Bright Felon, Kazim Ali, Wesleyan Press
I’m not often stunned, but Bright Felon, an autobiography, stuns me. Not because the topic is a difficult one but because of the rare glimpse of torment which is balanced somehow by the ability to express that torment. Heart-wrenching, yes, but there is also beauty, yes there is much beauty here in the approach to the subject matter and in the honest, unflinching look at self in relation to tradition and what happens to the self when all the constructs of tradition began to crumble. A journey into self-acceptance, it isn’t quite clear if the journey is completed as at the end of the book Ali leaves us with the haunting missives:

             Will I find myself or fine myself stopped in the street for stumbling for
             not living in a place, not being bound anywhere to a family,
             nation, or god...

             Are you Muslim or will you love.

             I will not answer.

Declaring himself separate and orphan, isolated and set adrift, there is still a hopeful tone (which I found remarkable) in the concluding two lines:
           
            Fathered by sound I am.

            Kind mother your kin.

Bright Felon is not your normal autobiography, prose and poetry crafted with precision and passion make this book a must read.


http://www.amazon.com/Cold-Wind-Idaho-Lawrence-Matsuda/dp/0982636407/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1293700508&sr=1-1

A Cold Wind From Idaho, Lawrence Matsuda, Black Lawrence Press
I’m going to gush on this one, but I’ll try hard to restrain myself and be all professional and what not. I grew up in Idaho, was taught the state history in fifth grade. We learned about the abandoned sliver mines, Lewis and Clark, Sacagawea, the Snake River and the commerce of farming; we learned Boise was the capital and the Mormon trail brought several settlers up from Utah. What I did not learn, what I knew absolutely nothing about until receiving this remarkable book was this: Mindoka. A dark secret in my home state that no one talked about. How did I not know about Mindoka??? I didn’t. It makes me feel ashamed, for myself for not knowing and for the community, the government for creating the tragedy and the schools for not even mentioning it as part of the state’s history. Mindoka was one of ten Japanese concentration camps in America during World War II. Matsuda revisits the site of his family’s captivity and reclaims his past. The poems in this book stitch together a family history which creates an epic, or an epistle of timeless importance. Matsuda delves into difficult topics, poverty, isolation, discrimination, family tragedy, with touching humor, sadness, and an elegant brushstroke of poeticism, redemption through language in a very literal sense.

Analee Struggles to Understand Diversity (1st Grade)

     

*Another excerpt from my Inspiration Journal which I kept a few years back in Cathryn Hankla’s Image and Word course at Hollins University. *

“Do we celebrate Hanukkah?”

“No.”

“Why? Because we’re not Irish?”

“No, because we’re not Jewish.”

“Do we celebrate Kwanzaa?”

“No.”

“Why? Because we’re not Jewish?”

“No.”

“Do we celebrate Christmas?”

“Yes.”

“Do Jewish people celebrate Christmas?”

“No.”

“Why? Because they’re not Irish?”

Analee doesn’t wait for me to answer but starts cheerfully singing “Light the Menorah” and then closes with this final question:

“What’s a dreidel?”

John Sweet, "More Words in Short Choppy Lines" + Photography

broken hand w/ mirror

in this world where

almost everything is beyond

your control and your

choices are limited to false

god, slave, impotent king

vote or don’t vote

shoot or don’t shoot and

                      either way

the starving continue to starve

grow old

then

die

eat handfuls of dust

send postcards back to

your loved ones, to

your enemies

let them see you

                finally

for the empty threat you

                   always were

 

 the refusal

shoot the doctor in the

back as he walks away then

tell him he’s a coward while he

dies at your feet

it’s an addiction,

like humor

it’s a punchline

you capture the soldier, a

boy of fifteen or sixteen, and

then you torture that fucker

until he’s on the floor in a

pool of his own shit and blood

this is how wars are won

make your children

understand this

tell them how much you hated

your own father,

how much he hated you

show them the scars

explain how they can only

grow up to

repeat your mistakes

 blue skied surrender

you near an ocean

          not my own

and what we have between us

                                 is silence

choices are made

absences explained

you tell me not to tell you there was

never any hope

but what does it matter?

i have these pictures

and my faith in sunlight

the train tracks here

echo the curve of the river

men with the heads of carrion birds,

with fangs and claws,

live in the trailers up in the hills

money is power and

               power is god

death is death, but there are

better and worse ways

to approach it

i choose running away

choose willful blindness

have only ever been brave

when there was nothing

valuable at stake

pythagorus, dismantled

and grey skies and

almost rain

no need to worry

no pain no

fear when the pills

take hold

woke up alone on

the living room floor

feel asleep with no

need for god

thought i had enough

money,

but the children

         were gone

thought i had enough

food, but my hands

just kept bleeding

the bottle was empty

fought through the

past to reach this

moment and then found

out there was no

way back

a man hung of his

own free will

can never be a nation

darkness offers

no safety

boil up whatever

splintered bones

you can find and let

this last meal we

share be a feast

postcard to california

and you and i like

forgotten kings cutting wires,

like ghosts in empty fields

you and i staring

blindly into the sun

drowning, but slowly,

five years and then ten,

blood turned to amber,

empires to dust and

then you and i like

open flames

you and i like ashes

all of the years we will

spend growing cold

 splendour

grow up fearing

men w/ answers

grow up fearing

growing old

reach the age at

which you are

no longer any use to

                     anyone

sit beneath the

dull yellow heat of

august skies and

consider suicide

consider sleep

the fear of dreams

of waking up

one day closer to

                 winter

of not

waking up at all

 the obvious

you, still w/ the

taste of poison coating

your mouth

still w/ the need to write

these meaningless goddamn poems

about metaphorical deserts

so what if you’re lost or

if you’re never found?

so what if the middle is

worse than the end?

we’ll all be dead and

forgotten soon enough

 into view

not blindness

but the sky gone dark

porch lights

bitter wind

in any story, you

are only the sound of

dead leaves down

sleeping streets

in any dream, i am

only the moment

of despair

you wake up

sweating and see with

absolute clarity how

all of our kingdoms

will fall

 

 ex

just kill yrself a little,

maybe, just to see how it

feels, just to be able to still

step back out of that room

into pale april sunlight

just to have something to

talk about when your

lover starts to turn away

untitled, grey on grey

and you can feed your children

the poison or you can wait

for someone else to do it for you

and, beyond this, you

have no choices

beyond this,

your life is good