Acceptance: Blast Furnace Press

VISIT THE BLAST FURNACE


It is a tremendous thrill to have two of my poems (“Birch” and “Behavioral Drift”) accepted by Blast Furnace Press, run by its more-than-competent Editor, Rebecca Clever. This journal is, in itself, such a happy story. In 2010, I was lucky to find it setting up shop on the web. I knew right away BFP was going to be special (see my old blog entry!). Now, in 2014, Blast Furnace is a new member of CLMP, has almost 150,000 hits, and was recently put on a top ten list of internet poetry venues:

http://michaelalexanderchaney.com/2013/11/27/top-ten-literary-magazines-to-send-your-poetry-and-maybe-get-accepted/

More important than all that, Ms. Clever emanates a scintillant positive energy. She is excited by and intensely involved in the sheer beauty of poetry as an art form; and she is charismatic in sharing her enthusiasm with contributors and interviewees.

Speaking of which, her latest interview, with Susanna Childress, is an absorbing, emotional read. Childress effervesces with appreciation for the craft. She speaks with a noble virtuosity, spending a great deal of time on Barbara Hamby, who helped her organize the poems for her book, Jagged with Love. This book won two major prizes (one selected by Billy Collins, US poet laureate). But I want to go back to Childress’ praise of Ms. Hamby, which is so well-written and so full of candid appreciation that it touched me. There was something salubrious in this lack-of-egoism, something I don’t see much in the world today. And, indeed, Ms. Hamby seems another person who selflessly gives, completing a wonderful circle of mutual care.

The truth is, no poet is great alone. Great poets have opened up to feedback, suggestion and alteration. This takes an open heart, and a two-way empathy in a critical yet sensitive dynamic. An astute observer can sometimes see a soul-level ‘voice’ trying to break free, even before the author. We are subconscious creatures, after all, largely controlled by forces below our surface appraisal.

There are important lessons in this for humanity. Humble interactions, enriched by deeply listening, can lead to exquisite expressions of release and truth.

Indeed, we tend to deny the truth in ourselves daily, as part of the requirements of quotidian life.

Having gone on about this, I understand now what I most want to say. All editors are, by their position, giving people, who spend a great deal of time with others’ poems; but there are some who immerse in working with others, striving to bring about mutually beneficial relationships. The goal is not self-aggrandizement, nor is the behavior affected or artificial. As someone like Ms. Clever helps others, listens to others, promotes others, her own trajectory tends to rise on its own. This is the kind of magical chemistry that bolsters the success of Blast Furnace Press. I’m not a person who is naturally inclined to giddiness, but when I think of BFP’s journey, I can’t help but feel a little elevation in my pulse.

You’ll find this editor open to reading your submissions no matter your standing or status, beginner through veteran. It’s a very special venue, a true standout, in the poetosphere.

Many hoots of approval to Ms. Clever!

Owl


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'Parabellum' Gets Another Rave Review

Latest Review of Parabellum

Another review has come out of Kenny Cole’s Parabellum exhibit at the University of Maine Museum of Art, which includes several of my poems. All the reviews are tremendously positive, focusing on Kenny’s brilliance, the multi-layered, many-dimensioned nature of the artwork.

A wonderful aspect of this work of genius is its thoroughly anti-war, anti-jingoism theme.

My participation in this project is entirely due to Cole's generosity. He could have used any poet, or even his own phrases. Indeed, I consider him as much a poet as an artist, as I have stated in this blog (various links are below).

I do get mentioned in the reviews, which has been most heartening. For instance, from the latest review, by Daniel Kany:

The texts inside the paintings are from the poems of [Owl Who Laughs]. While I was trying to understand the poetic fragments, I read them out loud. It was only then that their tenderly plaintive lusciousness (imagine the tears of a beloved child) was fully – and movingly – revealed.

“Dense and Masterful ‘Parabellum’ at University of Maine Museum of Art”
http://www.pressherald.com/life/audience/Dense_and_masterful__Parabellum__at_the_University_of_Maine_Museum_of_Art.html

A link to another review is below, plus directions to Kenny’s website, where you can find samples from the exhibit. Over two-hundred surfaces were painted and organized into a layered format, including gouaches and authentic 19th century newspaper. Viewers were allowed to open/close the canvases, as you would a book, to reach various depths of presentation. My poetry occurs beneath all else, at the hidden-most point of thought and sensation.

To read the poems included in Parabellum, you can go to Kenny’s website. I’m greatly honored that he posted them:

http://kennycole.com/p-/the-poetry-of-parabellum

It is wonderful to get recognition, and yet much of my journey as a poet is quite painful. I steadily confront the saddest topics, and the greatest dangers to our future. Sometimes I question the importance of what I am doing. I simmer in doubt within my solitude. In the end, this is part of the gamut of psychic challenges I decided to accept. The poet, or artist, dares to ride a pendulum of feelings, and even tries to become more sensitive, attuned to laughter, rage or wailing, as these bubble up from the mind’s living caverns.

It is a complex pursuit. Perhaps I am somewhat like a monk flagellating himself. We all have many voices in us, and they are not always consonant. To balance their energies is to juggle pluses and minuses. I think poetry wears me down in some ways, and lifts me up in others. Am I ultimately selfish or sacrificial? I hope the truth lies somewhere between, beyond the false dichotomy.

Be good to yourself and seek the good,

Owl


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Link to Kenny Cole’s site, re: Parabellum:

http://kennycole.com/p-


Review links:

www.pressherald.com/life/Maine_artist_Kenny_Cole_opens_new_exhibition_.html

http://artnewengland.com/ed_review/kenny-cole-parabellum-prepare-for-war/



Some of my thought on 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/2014/01/my-poetry-with-kenny-cole-in-umaines.html



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Poem: Howl

This is a slightly altered version of a poem that originally appeared in Negative Suck.

Carry Forth (or should I say forthright?),

Owl

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Howl

a shock of straw
pokes a parchment maze.

out of cold boney muscles
a random scarecrow climbs,
its feet the aftermath of coyote
on rabbit.

free us say the curves
of a tarnished aluminum bay.
dreadnoughts of cumulus
hold the world against their fat.

under greenblack
bleachers of spruce,
conic skulls vie
with shit-out pips of raspberry.

sluggish deer
rue a bevy of ticks,
which nudge like little bishops
on a board of juicy squares.

tibias of birch, once the legs of a wolf,
which tribes, now dead, skinned
to clad the stomachs of sleek canoes,
long rotted,

howl.


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Acceptance: Hidden Animals

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Visit Hidden Animals


Hidden Animals attracted my attention with its title. It made me think of the shamanism hidden in our everyday mental processes. Barbara Kingsolver writes, “We live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.”

Once I visited the site, I liked the feel. The anonymous and humble editor(s) had done something right. This is a new zine, but cautious and perceptive. They are not trying to take the poetry world by churning out a number of issues quickly. The work is carefully chosen, and represents some well-known names, as well as soaring pieces by lesser known bards.

My guess is that Hidden Animals is a labor of love by those who are not doing this for social reward in any significant measure; but instead through a deep-seated draw to the elemental beauty at the nexus of semantics and symbols: the pure raison d'être of the craft. They find reward and magic in uncovering, via rarest word songs, the “disgused animal thoughts” we orbit in our routinized ways.

On the humble nature of the staff, the best I could do as far as identifying them was to find the name “Eric K” as the signature on the preface to the first issue. Noble, indeed.

I’m deeply honored to be part of this discerning journal’s journey, so glad that “Python,” “Colder Inside,” and “Perimeter View” will be appearing in a future issue.

This truly helps my heart as I wander the wending and sometimes forlorn road of the muses.


Owl


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Naked Ape Blues

The movie An Act of Killing recently won a British Academy Award for best documentary. It covers the mass murder in Indonesia of a million people in 1965, as part of a government coup. Astonishingly, the killers themselves are the stars of the movie, retelling how they did the killing, generally unfazed and proud of their act. They have never been punished. Their culture, that of the victor, sees them as heros. This demonstrates that humans can perform the most awful deeds and be fine, if their cultural programming says its fine, even heroic. It is reminiscent of the Nazi’s “banality of evil,” as Hannah Arendt called it.

Note that, when we do something awful, we often construct a big lie to make it sound like what we did was fine, even wonderful. Then we forget that we constructed this big lie, to hide from the pain of our wrongdoing, in the first place.

Pure psychology.

Adding another layer to the Indonesian genocide is the CIA’s role in staging the coup. The United States directly involved itself in bringing about this overthrow and the resultant mass murder. The US citizen however is pretty much immune to this information. Share it with the general public, rationally presenting facts, and you get a collective shrug.

From the wikipedia entry on the documentary:

The Act of Killing won best documentary at the 2014 BAFTA awards. In accepting the award, Oppenheimer asserted that the United States and the United Kingdom have "collective responsibility" for "participating in and ignoring" the crimes,[6] which was omitted from the video BAFTA posted online.[7] After a screening for US Congress members, Oppenheimer demanded that the US acknowledge its role in the killings.[8]

Again, on this theme, the recent book, Kill Anything That Moves demonstrates convincingly that the US military’s behavior in the Vietnam War was tantamount to genocidal mass murder. Nixon and Kissinger, if this book is accurate, are as bad as Hitler. They will be remembered by future historians as purveyors of paramount evil. However, there is no chance of the US citizenry, in large part, looking at this rationally, or even admitting it happened.

There are many other examples of US Foreign Policy instigating take-overs that emplaced vicious dictators. Subversion of democracy, death squads, murderous coups--all par for the course. Will the US citizenry ever fully face this, admit the extreme wrongdoing, even when presented with incontrovertible evidence?

No. We humans go into denial. We also project our own feelings of inadequacy onto others, without knowing. The former condition, denial, allows us to ignore even the worst atrocities. The latter condition, projection, allows us to commit them.

Bring up the genocide of the Native Americans, on which the United States is founded, and you will get the awesomely stubborn and irrational, "It's all in the past, nothing to do with now." End of conversation.

Another big problem: the devious folks who know how to play the rest of us for their own selfish ends. These are the charmers with tin hearts: charismatic narcissists and beautiful sociopaths. Using rhetoric like a dark alchemy, they work masses of denial and projection, transumting hate into gold. Unlike the medieval alchemists, their quest is often successful.

“The great masses of the people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one," says Hitler.

Hitler, understanding psychology, also says, in Mein Kampf, “What luck for rulers that men do not think.”

Furthermore, knowing the power of psychology, he says, “It is not truth that matters, but victory.”

As Hitler grasped, giving people rational arguments as a means to convince them is ridiculously weak. For example, here is a simple argument, given in steps:

1. Humans can be acculturated in diverse ways, as evidenced by our malleability over time and across cultures (recent studies of brain plasticity verify this).

2. It follows that we can be acculturated to live in better or worse ways. Aslo, good is better than evil.

3. Therefore, we should start an acculturation process that strives for the good, and we can progress far in that direction.


This argument for striving toward a better world will not influence a lot of minds in any serious way. Walls of cynicism, blockage and redirection kill its straightforwared point about human mental flexibility. Look how long it took to get women the vote. The conservatives of the time said it was unworkable, because human nature is fixed. They were extremely wrong.

Humans are flexible in their mental ways, and can change drastically. It makes a difference whether the source of the change is healthy or darkling, like a demagogue selling hate.

Oliver Stone, in his recent book, The Untold History of the United States, points out that after WWII, the leaders of the US had a chance to shape the world. Two doctrines were on the table. One was enlightened and pushed for a universal, educated peace. The other was cynical and strove to maximize US power and create a climate of manipulable (hatred for Russia) fear in the public. Guess which was chosen?

We live under this illusion, propped by the thought police invisible in our cultural norms, that human nature is largely fixed in terms of how good we can be.

If humanity is to survive: (a) We have to deal with denial and projection in healthy ways, (b) Prevent demagogues (charismatic narcissists, sociopaths, etc.) from manipulating denial and projection in unhealthy ways, (c) Create a leadership that works with the human being, the human psyche, in caring, respectful openness, not as if people were pawns toyed with (lied to, tricked, baited, hate-mongered, etc.) for a larger goal.

For the positive outcome, humanity must accept its status as non-rational. This does not mean humans cannot be reasonable, because psychological processes can act wisely, ethically, and sanely, with an eye on longterm goals. This is a critical point: a healthy psychology can be reasonable, and can, for instance, work with the scientific method to eliminate bias, reality-distortion, etc.

Right now, with demagogues in power, a culture of consumer narcissism, and entrenched denial of the Empire's monstrious abuses of power, we have a long, exasperating road ahead.


Owl


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The Primordial Verbal

In dreams, when the penumbra between seen and unseen fills the inner senses, emotions can speak to the sleeper directly, with their own language, one that eliminates the need for particular sounds and alphabets. This is how animals live, in this language of emotions and sensations. That it is a language, a rich and full mode of vast conveyance, we have forgotten, and experience ourselves only when much of the machinery of culture--culture as an accretion of thousands of years of human rebellion against nature--succumbs to the desuetude of night.

Vaasya Spiderstrum, Keysinger of the Amaranth

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Poem: Heroins

Originally published in Pyrokinections.

Enjoy,

Owl


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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.


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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

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



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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


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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.


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