Originally published in Pyrokinections.
Enjoy,
Owl
---------------------------
Heroins
in the twilight
people kept shriveling.
kissing wraiths.
what was real
began to hide in wounds less
than scum, entire worlds
crowded into ether
smaller than invisible,
less tangible than deja vu.
no ear saw,
chins couldn’t focus,
images outpaced tongues.
holes yawned
for faces soon childish
in the rabbit twists.
such ample blurs
of half-pleasant tunnels.
it was easy to
succumb and
jab the needle.
drone the ride.
----------------------------------------
Friday, February 28, 2014
Monday, February 24, 2014
Acceptance: The Nervous Breakdown
Click here to have The Nervous Breakdown of your life
The Nervous Breakdown is the journal-child of best-selling novelist Brad Listi, and has adventured over the years in various intriguing directions. There’s a book club and interviews with incredible people of presitgious accomplishment, and sneak-peek excerpts (one from a book by Scott Stossel, the editor of The Atlantic) and on and on--a lush tree of thought-sparking, edifying, and seductive offshoots. I can’t do true justice to this high energy site here, and I simply urge you to visit and look around. TNB is a major nerve center of ideas both infectious and salutary.
Listi’s charismatic knack at generating dialogue and community also extends to his series of podcast interviews with many talented, published authors. For details on this, wiki him.
A large team of editors contributes to making TNB an exquisite way to lose your mind. Working the poetry end are Rich Ferguson, Uche Ogbuji, Wendy Chin-Tanner and Zoe Tambling. Ms. Tambling was my primary contact and was very kind.
TNB deserves much more commentary than I am writing, and my gratitude runs heart deep. I am especially pleased because I am in a wheelchair in Los Angeles now, recovering slowly from an injury. To remember that my poem “Bites” will appear sometime in April truly lifts my spirits!
Owl
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
The US Empire's Modern Holocaust
The My Lai Massacre occurred during the Vietnam War. US soliders shot to death hundreds of villagers--men, women, children, infants--and also livestock, cows, chickens, whatever. A number of women were gang-raped before they were murdered. It was covered up by the military, and only discovered due to a few brave whistleblowers, who were denounced as traitors at first, even by the Chair of the Armed Services Committee. Eventually many soldiers were charged, including up the ranks to Generals, but only one was convicted, a platoon leader named William Calley Jr. Although he was found guilty of killing 26 people, he served only three and a half years under house arrest, due to the intervention of President Nixon.
Nick Turse, in his scholarly book, Kill All That Moves, argues convincingly that My Lai was not an isolated incident. Other such massacres occurred, as did individual killings and rapes by US soliders on a massive scale, so much so as to constitute the norm. There was also the CIA’s Phoenix Program, where over 80,000 were interrogated (read: tortured) and “neutralized” in "provincial interrogation centers." Between 20,000 and 40,000 of those who went in never came out.
Backing up all this hell-worthy horror was a mentality that the Vietnamese were subhuman “gooks” who deserved to die. This mentality was fostered in boot camp and expressed up through the chain of command. Turse gives plenty of examples of disgusting commonplace statements that are reminiscent of the mentality of Nazi prison camp guards.
If Turse is right--and his research looks impeccable--the US Empire sunk to a Hitler-like level during the Vietnam War. In WWII, Jews were subhuman. In Vietnam, “Gooks” were subhuman. The SS mass murdered Jews with rifle execution. The US 9th Infantry, Marines and others shot the life out of entire villages, or in random encounters, such as flying helicopters over rice fields. As Himmler’s “Final Solution” had different paths to extermination, so did the US in Vietnam. Rifles, helicopters, detention centers and grenades thrown into underground shelters. Although the US did not have a "final solution" codified somewhere, the mentality and behavior supported the imperative highlighted by Turse in his title: Kill All That Moves.
My reaction, like many of us, is still, How could this happen? I just don’t want to believe it. But Turse and others have done their job well. Books like Kill All That Moves and Killing Hope (William Blum) show systematic lack of conscience and malignant behavior via US Foreign Policy on a longterm and extreme scale.
Another side of me sees how this Satan-worthy shit happens. It comes down to human psychology. We are malleable creatures who can slice our minds into many compartments, believing stubbornly what we are first trained to believe, and, after that, what we want to believe. The 19-year-old soliders in Vietnam (average age) were too young to legally drink but were given M-16’s, told to “kill, kill, kill” in bootcamp, saturated in “gook” hate-talk, and placed in a terrifying and deadly landscape full of boobytraps, snipers, and guerilla ambushes.
Harder for some of us to fathom is the utter lack of decency in Congressmen and military leadership. Some kind of situational psychopathy takes hold of them en masse. Grown adults who go to church, treat their neighbors well, give to charity, and so on--enforce a pogrom of mayhem on a country of millions, employing racism in a philosophy of monstrous wrong.
President Nixon gets special mention for pardoning a mass murderer and giving his imprimatur to the depravity-as-normal atrocity of US forces in Vietnam. I think future historians will categorize him with Hitler, and wonder at the US population's denial. In a similar position of great devil-bad atrocity is Henry Kissinger, who ordered the carpet bombing of three countries: Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Adding some perspective, more bombs were dropped by the US in the Vietnam War than were dropped in WWII.
Hannah Arendt called this “the banality of evil.” What it seems to me is that our leaders--and all of us--are vulnerable to becoming part-time psychopaths, as if we split our thinking into two parts for two separate worlds. Or maybe it is just that many people have a kill switch for their conscience, and flip it when they feel it is in their own self-interest to do so--how would this differ from a clinically diagnosable psychopath?
Human psychology is the big hurdle for a progress ethos that combines reason and empathy. Minds are not only highly adaptable, but gullible and fragile as well. Humans can turn off their conscience as if flicking a switch, and even forget they turned it off. Humans can lie in ways that are so deep they forget they are lying. We can partition our minds so that ‘the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing’. There can be so many tunnels in the psyche, dug by fear, pain and trauma, that not even the brightest light of truth can illuminate to heal them.
To deal with the frailties of human psychology at least two protections are required: education and also, just as important, therapeutic practices that enlighten people as to their own mental dispensations. We need to know how to have better relationships with our own minds. I think meditation is helpful here, or any spiritual practice of listening, respect or art that fosters compassion.
We need to make compassion a strong spotlight and turn that invigoration inward. As Plato said so long ago, "Know thyself." And also, I would add, Love thyself (while avoiding narcissism, which actually is devoid of self-love, merely a shell of it).
Knowledge alone is not enough. You can hand people perfect knowledge and they will spit on it. You also need to deal with human psychology. Empaths are needed, good listeners, counselors, and techniques for dealing with denial, disassociation, projection, and so on. If we want ethical progress, we must face what we truly are; and that is something far more complex than rational autonomous agents.
Owl
-----------------
Nick Turse, in his scholarly book, Kill All That Moves, argues convincingly that My Lai was not an isolated incident. Other such massacres occurred, as did individual killings and rapes by US soliders on a massive scale, so much so as to constitute the norm. There was also the CIA’s Phoenix Program, where over 80,000 were interrogated (read: tortured) and “neutralized” in "provincial interrogation centers." Between 20,000 and 40,000 of those who went in never came out.
Backing up all this hell-worthy horror was a mentality that the Vietnamese were subhuman “gooks” who deserved to die. This mentality was fostered in boot camp and expressed up through the chain of command. Turse gives plenty of examples of disgusting commonplace statements that are reminiscent of the mentality of Nazi prison camp guards.
If Turse is right--and his research looks impeccable--the US Empire sunk to a Hitler-like level during the Vietnam War. In WWII, Jews were subhuman. In Vietnam, “Gooks” were subhuman. The SS mass murdered Jews with rifle execution. The US 9th Infantry, Marines and others shot the life out of entire villages, or in random encounters, such as flying helicopters over rice fields. As Himmler’s “Final Solution” had different paths to extermination, so did the US in Vietnam. Rifles, helicopters, detention centers and grenades thrown into underground shelters. Although the US did not have a "final solution" codified somewhere, the mentality and behavior supported the imperative highlighted by Turse in his title: Kill All That Moves.
My reaction, like many of us, is still, How could this happen? I just don’t want to believe it. But Turse and others have done their job well. Books like Kill All That Moves and Killing Hope (William Blum) show systematic lack of conscience and malignant behavior via US Foreign Policy on a longterm and extreme scale.
Another side of me sees how this Satan-worthy shit happens. It comes down to human psychology. We are malleable creatures who can slice our minds into many compartments, believing stubbornly what we are first trained to believe, and, after that, what we want to believe. The 19-year-old soliders in Vietnam (average age) were too young to legally drink but were given M-16’s, told to “kill, kill, kill” in bootcamp, saturated in “gook” hate-talk, and placed in a terrifying and deadly landscape full of boobytraps, snipers, and guerilla ambushes.
Harder for some of us to fathom is the utter lack of decency in Congressmen and military leadership. Some kind of situational psychopathy takes hold of them en masse. Grown adults who go to church, treat their neighbors well, give to charity, and so on--enforce a pogrom of mayhem on a country of millions, employing racism in a philosophy of monstrous wrong.
President Nixon gets special mention for pardoning a mass murderer and giving his imprimatur to the depravity-as-normal atrocity of US forces in Vietnam. I think future historians will categorize him with Hitler, and wonder at the US population's denial. In a similar position of great devil-bad atrocity is Henry Kissinger, who ordered the carpet bombing of three countries: Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Adding some perspective, more bombs were dropped by the US in the Vietnam War than were dropped in WWII.
Hannah Arendt called this “the banality of evil.” What it seems to me is that our leaders--and all of us--are vulnerable to becoming part-time psychopaths, as if we split our thinking into two parts for two separate worlds. Or maybe it is just that many people have a kill switch for their conscience, and flip it when they feel it is in their own self-interest to do so--how would this differ from a clinically diagnosable psychopath?
Human psychology is the big hurdle for a progress ethos that combines reason and empathy. Minds are not only highly adaptable, but gullible and fragile as well. Humans can turn off their conscience as if flicking a switch, and even forget they turned it off. Humans can lie in ways that are so deep they forget they are lying. We can partition our minds so that ‘the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing’. There can be so many tunnels in the psyche, dug by fear, pain and trauma, that not even the brightest light of truth can illuminate to heal them.
To deal with the frailties of human psychology at least two protections are required: education and also, just as important, therapeutic practices that enlighten people as to their own mental dispensations. We need to know how to have better relationships with our own minds. I think meditation is helpful here, or any spiritual practice of listening, respect or art that fosters compassion.
We need to make compassion a strong spotlight and turn that invigoration inward. As Plato said so long ago, "Know thyself." And also, I would add, Love thyself (while avoiding narcissism, which actually is devoid of self-love, merely a shell of it).
Knowledge alone is not enough. You can hand people perfect knowledge and they will spit on it. You also need to deal with human psychology. Empaths are needed, good listeners, counselors, and techniques for dealing with denial, disassociation, projection, and so on. If we want ethical progress, we must face what we truly are; and that is something far more complex than rational autonomous agents.
Owl
-----------------
Sunday, February 16, 2014
Acceptance: WHL Review
Irene Koronas at WHL Review took three of my poems for the upcoming issue of this Cambridge journal. These are: "Post Feast," "Burn Victim," and "Last Impressions of Some Clerk."
Without the support of Ms. Koronas and WHL over the years, I might well have given up poetry. The rejection weighs on the soul. Right now, I am heavily focused on my novel, which I'd like to finish before I die, with much less time for poetry submissions. There are a few special editors who know my work well, and I have had to rely on them more and more.
Below is a poem of mine from a 2007 issue of WHL.
Fly Well In the Dark
Owl
--------------------
Danger Zone
a bout of silence
bubbles in his head,
slaying heartburn and beaches,
stock options, bed bugs and football;
strangling even the faux-pas fearlessness
of his lust.
for a terrible brief quiet,
enough to show
he is urgently and
permanently scarred,
he can jump through
a manhole of jagged truth,
tunnel to expose warrens
of self-betrayal--
or he can close this vision
of mean hope, drown its purpose
in a detergent of shallow stress.
with automatic anger
and a fuisillade of excuses,
he puts on his best
quarterback-Batman face,
until at last, slow as the pummeled
rictus of the moon,
the ghosts of innocence past
go down.
------------------------------------
Without the support of Ms. Koronas and WHL over the years, I might well have given up poetry. The rejection weighs on the soul. Right now, I am heavily focused on my novel, which I'd like to finish before I die, with much less time for poetry submissions. There are a few special editors who know my work well, and I have had to rely on them more and more.
Below is a poem of mine from a 2007 issue of WHL.
Fly Well In the Dark
Owl
--------------------
Danger Zone
a bout of silence
bubbles in his head,
slaying heartburn and beaches,
stock options, bed bugs and football;
strangling even the faux-pas fearlessness
of his lust.
for a terrible brief quiet,
enough to show
he is urgently and
permanently scarred,
he can jump through
a manhole of jagged truth,
tunnel to expose warrens
of self-betrayal--
or he can close this vision
of mean hope, drown its purpose
in a detergent of shallow stress.
with automatic anger
and a fuisillade of excuses,
he puts on his best
quarterback-Batman face,
until at last, slow as the pummeled
rictus of the moon,
the ghosts of innocence past
go down.
------------------------------------
Friday, February 7, 2014
Reflection on Denise Levertov's "Tenebrae"
I found in Denise Levertov’s poem “Tenebrae” a perspective that connects with one of my early astonishments in life--an astonishment, I think, many of us share. As children (well, especially as children), we witness an awful contrast: while various rites of vanity go on about us, demanding much fuss and time, people ‘far away’ are starving en masse or otherwise suffering, through no fault of their own. We wax our cars and coiffure our hair while refugees trek like desperate demographic clouds, and entire cities get uprooted in slaughter. In our childish innocence, we experience a burning curiosity, along with sorrow, at this great imbalance: why is the color of one’s hair or the name of a car so much more important?
Getting a little older, we have an acute intuition: there is some link between our country’s “conspicuous consumption” (to use Veblen) and the places in which famine and war rage. We might also become aware of the brutal toil in sweatshops. Though we cannot express or reason it out, we sense blame in our country, and in the individual citizens as well.
Looking at the Vietnam War in retrospect, which was Levertov’s inspiration for “Tenebrae,” the argument given at the time for US involvement would be utterly silly if not fraught with murderous paranoia. Why did we go to war there? The so-called Domino Effect: if Vietnam falls to communism, so will the region, and then the world! The problem is not just the frailty of the asserted causal flow (countries being far more complex than dominos), but more importantly the US empire’s eagerness to align nations into obedience. Such obedience serves the profit of international corporations based in the US. The Vietnam War, by itself, generated lucre for the arms industry. Indeed, just before the war, President Eisenhower, in his farewell speech, warned about the “military-industrial complex.”
There are numerous examples of the US supporting cruel dictators as long as they follow our ‘free market’ directives. And, in general, how a country treats its citizens is not of much concern to us as long as the cash dynamic is efficacious. A modern example that extends far beyond the White House: “Made in China” is everywhere in stores.
As children, we see the incongruous vanity with wonder. In many, a remnant of this honest perception continues into adulthood: “how can we fixate on primping and status symbols while ignoring the horror of our wars, the exploitation due to our ‘manifest destiny’?!”
In “Tenebrae,” Levertov chooses “gowns of gold sequins” and “silver moiré” as images of numb ostentation. The poem starts:
Tenebrae
Heavy, heavy, heavy, hand and heart.
We are at war,
bitterly, bitterly at war.
And the buying and selling
buzzes in our heads, a swarm
of busy flies, a kind of innocence.
Gowns of gold sequins are fitted,
sharp-glinting. What harsh rustlings
of silver moiré there are,
to remind me of shrapnel splinters.
Levertov calls out “buying and selling.” As the poem proceeds and concludes, the fabric of our social life gets implicated in a grand denial:
And weddings are held in full solemnity
not of desire but of etiquette,
the nuptial pomp of starched lace;
a grim innocence.
And picnic parties return from the beaches
burning with stored sun in the dusk;
children promised a TV show when they get home
fall asleep in the backs of a million station wagons,
sand in their hair, the sound of waves
quietly persistent at their ears.
They are not listening.
Their parents at night
dream and forget their dreams.
They wake in the dark
and make plans. Their sequin plans
glitter into tomorrow.
They buy, they sell.
They fill freezers with food.
Neon signs flash their intentions
into the years ahead.
And at their ears the sound
of the war. They are
not listening, not listening.
The word “innocence” appears twice: “a kind of innocence” and “a grim innocence.” Another repetition is: “the buying and selling” and “They buy, they sell.” This double pair of repeat words conjures a strained though staid consumerism. It reminds me somewhat of Hannah Arendt’s “the banality of evil”-- used to describe the middle-class lives of those in charge of the camps in Nazi Germany. They went to church, they picnicked with their kids, they had hobbies and pastimes, all the while wearing the smilely face of a neighbor--and they also overlorded the Holocaust.
Also in repetition, of course, is "not listening"--both on the same line and in separate stanzas; and also the "sequins" make the transition from a physical garment to a state of mind
We in America are not conducting a Holocaust. But our tax dollars go to insane wars that bring mass death and suffering, disrupt and derange entire countries, and benefit primarily elites. And we routinely purchase things made by workers in police states who are one step up from slaves. Oh, there is also the torture of millions of animals each year in factory farms.
Despite this dark cause-and-effect of our “buying and selling,” we spend a great deal of time worrying about expense and appearance vis-à-vis our daily rituals, which focus our attention so narrowly we avoid the decent path.
-----------
Getting a little older, we have an acute intuition: there is some link between our country’s “conspicuous consumption” (to use Veblen) and the places in which famine and war rage. We might also become aware of the brutal toil in sweatshops. Though we cannot express or reason it out, we sense blame in our country, and in the individual citizens as well.
Looking at the Vietnam War in retrospect, which was Levertov’s inspiration for “Tenebrae,” the argument given at the time for US involvement would be utterly silly if not fraught with murderous paranoia. Why did we go to war there? The so-called Domino Effect: if Vietnam falls to communism, so will the region, and then the world! The problem is not just the frailty of the asserted causal flow (countries being far more complex than dominos), but more importantly the US empire’s eagerness to align nations into obedience. Such obedience serves the profit of international corporations based in the US. The Vietnam War, by itself, generated lucre for the arms industry. Indeed, just before the war, President Eisenhower, in his farewell speech, warned about the “military-industrial complex.”
There are numerous examples of the US supporting cruel dictators as long as they follow our ‘free market’ directives. And, in general, how a country treats its citizens is not of much concern to us as long as the cash dynamic is efficacious. A modern example that extends far beyond the White House: “Made in China” is everywhere in stores.
As children, we see the incongruous vanity with wonder. In many, a remnant of this honest perception continues into adulthood: “how can we fixate on primping and status symbols while ignoring the horror of our wars, the exploitation due to our ‘manifest destiny’?!”
In “Tenebrae,” Levertov chooses “gowns of gold sequins” and “silver moiré” as images of numb ostentation. The poem starts:
Tenebrae
Heavy, heavy, heavy, hand and heart.
We are at war,
bitterly, bitterly at war.
And the buying and selling
buzzes in our heads, a swarm
of busy flies, a kind of innocence.
Gowns of gold sequins are fitted,
sharp-glinting. What harsh rustlings
of silver moiré there are,
to remind me of shrapnel splinters.
Levertov calls out “buying and selling.” As the poem proceeds and concludes, the fabric of our social life gets implicated in a grand denial:
And weddings are held in full solemnity
not of desire but of etiquette,
the nuptial pomp of starched lace;
a grim innocence.
And picnic parties return from the beaches
burning with stored sun in the dusk;
children promised a TV show when they get home
fall asleep in the backs of a million station wagons,
sand in their hair, the sound of waves
quietly persistent at their ears.
They are not listening.
Their parents at night
dream and forget their dreams.
They wake in the dark
and make plans. Their sequin plans
glitter into tomorrow.
They buy, they sell.
They fill freezers with food.
Neon signs flash their intentions
into the years ahead.
And at their ears the sound
of the war. They are
not listening, not listening.
The word “innocence” appears twice: “a kind of innocence” and “a grim innocence.” Another repetition is: “the buying and selling” and “They buy, they sell.” This double pair of repeat words conjures a strained though staid consumerism. It reminds me somewhat of Hannah Arendt’s “the banality of evil”-- used to describe the middle-class lives of those in charge of the camps in Nazi Germany. They went to church, they picnicked with their kids, they had hobbies and pastimes, all the while wearing the smilely face of a neighbor--and they also overlorded the Holocaust.
Also in repetition, of course, is "not listening"--both on the same line and in separate stanzas; and also the "sequins" make the transition from a physical garment to a state of mind
We in America are not conducting a Holocaust. But our tax dollars go to insane wars that bring mass death and suffering, disrupt and derange entire countries, and benefit primarily elites. And we routinely purchase things made by workers in police states who are one step up from slaves. Oh, there is also the torture of millions of animals each year in factory farms.
Despite this dark cause-and-effect of our “buying and selling,” we spend a great deal of time worrying about expense and appearance vis-à-vis our daily rituals, which focus our attention so narrowly we avoid the decent path.
-----------
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Poem: Continuance
It is the anniversary of my brother's death, fourteen years now. I wrote this last night and post it here as a small reflection. Much more goes on in private, speaking and feeling--though as time comets onward, not as much as I should. However, in the winding longitudes of my depths, my brother will always be a very living, interconnected presence, with all that I am, and essential in inspirations and meanings.
Best To All,
Owl
-------------------
Continuance
i am sleeping on the same bed
my brother slept in
when he was depressed
before he took his own life away.
it has been years
and only now i wonder
about the history in things
we too seldom sense,
and the weight
of an invisible so generous
it engulfs us in splendid
long journeys,
so desirous to be close
and yet redolent with what will always
stir from afar, some song
on a hill
which touches us with warmth,
like a cherished hug,
and in the same movement
teaches us to know pain.
it bathes us, all the time,
this special magnetism
of essential connections,
especially when home.
------------------------------------
Best To All,
Owl
-------------------
Continuance
i am sleeping on the same bed
my brother slept in
when he was depressed
before he took his own life away.
it has been years
and only now i wonder
about the history in things
we too seldom sense,
and the weight
of an invisible so generous
it engulfs us in splendid
long journeys,
so desirous to be close
and yet redolent with what will always
stir from afar, some song
on a hill
which touches us with warmth,
like a cherished hug,
and in the same movement
teaches us to know pain.
it bathes us, all the time,
this special magnetism
of essential connections,
especially when home.
------------------------------------
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Poem: Fire Ants
Published recently in a Danse Macabre Anthology titled Morgenblatter~Abendblatter.
Good Night, Don't Let the TV Ads Bite,
Owl
---------------------------
Fire Ants
see-through ochre
leaky of pore,
a shawl of musky hairs,
they fondle with rods
more sensitive than nerves,
groping in quick lines
and wearing their sheen
of multi-flavored sweat,
a language for a breastplate of nostrils:
chemicals of fury and obedience,
ravage and xanex,
dopamine and pain.
Good Night, Don't Let the TV Ads Bite,
Owl
---------------------------
Fire Ants
see-through ochre
leaky of pore,
a shawl of musky hairs,
they fondle with rods
more sensitive than nerves,
groping in quick lines
and wearing their sheen
of multi-flavored sweat,
a language for a breastplate of nostrils:
chemicals of fury and obedience,
ravage and xanex,
dopamine and pain.
with
chunks of the mauled
in their pliers grip,
sharklike of moustache,
they run so fast
it would be big cat speed,
immune to god,
tender as a stone.
----------------------------------------
chunks of the mauled
in their pliers grip,
sharklike of moustache,
they run so fast
it would be big cat speed,
immune to god,
tender as a stone.
----------------------------------------
Monday, January 27, 2014
Portland Press Herald Article!
The article below discusses how my poetry is featured, in conjunction with the art of Kenny Cole, in a current exhibition in the University of Maine Museum of Art's Zillman Gallery. The project is called Parabellum, and is thoroughly anti-war.
I blogged about it recently, but this Portland Press Herald article, with hundreds of Facebook recommendations, really blew me away. It includes a video of Kenny discussing the thought-process behind the concept, a mini-biography of his life, and a great deal of his philosophy and its multileveled expression:
Click here to read PPH
This is so intensely moving. I'm dumbfounded, flabbergasted, and don't know what else to say.
Fly Well In the Dark,
Owl
I blogged about it recently, but this Portland Press Herald article, with hundreds of Facebook recommendations, really blew me away. It includes a video of Kenny discussing the thought-process behind the concept, a mini-biography of his life, and a great deal of his philosophy and its multileveled expression:
Click here to read PPH
This is so intensely moving. I'm dumbfounded, flabbergasted, and don't know what else to say.
Fly Well In the Dark,
Owl
Friday, January 24, 2014
My Chapbook Rebellion Relaunches at TMR!
Click here for Rebellion info
Jennifer Hollie Bowles & Co. have relaunched The Medulla Review Press, and with it my chapbook, Rebellion, which won first place in a TMR competition. Every poem in this volume is previously published, somewhere or other, and they are some of my favorites in over a decade of obsessive scribbling.
The title comes from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, which has a chapter of the same name. Like Ivan in the novel, my voice here is damning, crisp, passionate, and half lost to madness, as I challenge the horrors hidden in the status quo. Ivan is eventually seduced and mentally destroyed by a psychotic visitation from the Devil, and maybe that will happen to me someday: but, in truth, the only Devil I see is metaphorical, a poetic descriptor for the lack of conscience and superabundance of greed that infests the US Empire.
Please consider purchasing Rebellion, either in physical form (recommended) or for Kindle download:
GET A COPY OF REBELLION
To find out more about Medulla's relaunch, go to the site:
http://themedullareview.com/
This is an exciting time for the editors as they begin to build a press whose philosophy blends aesthetic excellence with spiritual healing and psychic journey. One reason I am so glad to be affiliated with TMR is the wonderful ethos that underlies their literary aesthetic.
We need to support venues like this. If we want to survive our techological push, we need a mature ethic: we need an empathic and sane psychology, a progressive awareness that seeks mental health and self-candor in leaders and citizenry.
We have been programmed by a reckless 19th-century version of industrial capitalism. It trojans a fanatic dogma of 'money first' that encourages narcissists and sociopaths to rise to the top. It promotes a most sad practice: shallow competition for material goods in the name of an insidiously instilled vanity. Marketers and advertisers use deep-mind techniques to dumb us down. They sell illusory fixes for manufactured neuroses. It's pernicious, a mind assault that cripples our potential to think about what is right and decent, what is compassionate and virtuous. The system of logo-commercial saturation impedes the evolution of our collective conscious. At the same time, profiteers speed the growth of technological power.
In the early 21st century, we are still like thirteen-year-olds in terms of our moral proficiency. We are easily provoked punks with nuclear weapons.
Consider some great moments in the history of civilization: the quantum leap from pre-democratic to post democratic culture; from no human-rights to an assortment of human rights. This is the sort of transformational gestalt we need. We need new concepts to inform and govern the integrity and wisdom of our behavior, both as individuals and nations.
We are so much more than the petty bickering consumers that the exploiters want us to be. We can advance the Good. By this I mean a Good beyond any one religion. It is touched on, as an archetype, in all religions; but the Good is secular as well as spirit-laden, and advances through a trio of empathy, ecstasy, and philosophy.
We do not have to be Selfish. We can transcend this bankers' concept, and seek, instead, something noble and environmental: the Good.
That is the crucial--absolutely necessary--message of our time.
The enemy? Narcissism, product-hunger, vanity, avarice, sociopathic demagoguery.
Evil? Evil is these forces riveted into an imperial culture machine that sacrifices human life and soul-beauty for the profit and supremacy of a very few. As we proceed into the nuclear age, the genetic-weapons age, the age of sophisticated robots, we can't afford to act in the way Peter Gabriel lays out in his song, Games Without Frontiers.
Carry On,
Owl
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Owl
Saturday, January 18, 2014
My Poetry, with Kenny Cole, In UMaine's Art Museum!
Kenny Cole’s Parabellum, which includes my poetry, launched at the University of Maine Museum of Art (UMMA) on January 17 and will feature in its Zillman Gallery until March 22. I’ve blogged about Kenny’s art before--his ferocious criticism of war; his utterly original style that crosses dimensions and mediums; his manic prolific intensity; and his brilliant modulations of satire and caricature--and yet nothing can describe how I felt when I saw the folding, three-layered canvases of Parabellum. Keep in mind that this exhibit covered four walls of a fairly small room, certainly an inundative effect. Given the Zillman Gallery's position in the museum, near the front, and its shadowless lighting and hermetic feel, the space was clearly designed to showcase a single artist with encompassing force. Here is a photo of the two of us at the opening, “co-conspirators” according to Kenny:
The canvases behind behind us co-conspirators are like books in that they swing open to reveal layers. The bottom layer behind all the canvases, on all four walls, contains my writing (see the links to some images below). It is quite impossible to truly express how special this felt: my words so wonderfully encapsulated by someone whose fiery inspiration wells up from the tempestuous madhouses of the subconscious--much in the way I seek out my muses when I write. Kenny had to break my poems into blocks of phrase, and decide which blocks to put inside which square blocks of canvas. He informed me that he spent a great deal of time on it, immersing in my voice. Witnessing how he chose to parse me, I think he has brilliantly engaged with my ecstatic process, perhaps more than anyone else (with one exception: artist Shanna Wheelock, with whom I have lived with for the last fourteen years); and, therefore, he has heard my heart in a fascinating and unique way, the gift of a full psychic embrace.
Leaving aside Kenny’s genius and sui generis expression, there is a further sense in which he alloyed with my thoughts: on the level of justice. We are both horrified by war and the extreme sickness of behavior inside and around it. War is the most obvious, violent, and disgusting expression of a great psychological blockage in the collective conscious of our society. Somehow--and this is so astounding--we citizens casually accept war, unthinkingly take it up as a practice, support it with our tax dollars, even as the entire bellicose ritual, greased with killing and hate, murders, maims or displaces great masses of people, not to mention the desecration of animals and Earth--all of it exploited by Big Money.
The classic book on this global tragedy of blood continues to be ignored and ultra-marginalized: War Is a Racket written by Smedley Butler. Butler was a Major General, received two Congressional Medals of Honor, a Distinguished Service Medal, and ran as a Republican candidate for Senate in 1932. You can read his entire treatise here:
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
Here is a quote from page one:
In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
Kenny Cole knows war is a racket, and he brings three powerful strands together: his genius, its expression, and, in the footsteps of Butler, a vivid castigation of the infernal ways of organized massive bloodshed. Of critical import, Kenny conducts his condemnation so as to draw the audience into his red-emphasizing work. We are trained by the media not to hear, not to see, not to react, even when presented with the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents. Kenny chips away at the colossal shields of denial with a mighty skill. His paintbrush is also a psychic chisel, expertly applied.
Perhaps the greatest part of Kenny's approach is this: he leads his audience not only see war's evil, but also to keep the door of insight open, if only a crack, long after viewing his fantastical illuminations.
Congratulations, Kenny Cole, on Parabellum!
Owl
PS: Below are some links to Kenny's art. Also, below is one of the poems that was used in Parabellum.
Kenny Cole’s main website:
kennycole.com
The current UMMA description and official photographs of Parabellum:
http://umma.umaine.edu/exhibitions/current-exhibitions/kenny-cole/
Another UMMA link (one that might last after March 22, when Parabellum closes):
http://69.195.124.94/~aucocisc/2014/01/15/umma-kenny-cole-parabellum-1-17-14-3-22-14/
And Kenny’s catalogue associated with Parabellum:
http://media.icompendium.com/kennycol_gallery-InstallationVie.pdf
Kenny’s work-blog on Parabellum:
http://parabellum2013.blogspot.com/
My previous reviews of Kenny Cole and/or Parabellum:
http://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2009/11/incredible-artistpoet-kenny-cole.html
http://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2013/02/im-working-with-artist-kenny-cole.html
http://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2013/02/im-working-with-artist-kenny-cole.html
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Here is the poem “Weapon Possessed," one of several used in Parabellum:
Weapon Possessed
bitten by his rifle,
the trigger a sting
swelling into his finger,
he can’t retreat, only shoot,
wherever he goes they
tell him to shoot,
and his gun agrees,
poisons his kindness,
owns him like a scorpion
that whips across culture,
between the eyes.
he can’t accept
this werewolf life
of murder and being a scared father,
of serving peace but cradling
a metal demon-baby instead--
knowing it wants
to jump in and fight,
to kick angry in his arms,
get hot, snarl, rage.
and when it is done vomiting death
it goes back to its coffin
in a metal locker,
below the picture of his wife
and child.
("Weapon Possessed" was originally published in Raving Dove, and nominated for the Best of the Net Award)
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