Release: The Writing Disorder, Spring 2013

Check this. Five of my poems in the latest TWD. In case you're not hip on the haps, this mag is ultra-cool, turns contraries into synch. Retro/avant sassy/serious seminal/germinal. Click on this link. Go on, I dare you:

I HAVE A WRITING DISORDER

To read my review of TWD:

Neurotic Owl Rant


Salva Veritate,

CCC

PS: Here is an excerpt from one of the poems, as an enticement


(Excerpt from "Land Of the Crumbling Abacus")

it was a place that knew
the slope of every woman’s breast,
obscured in succulent heat waves.
hips reared out of the dunes for hours,
their trysts undulating into guitars.

Poem: Even Then

Trying to encapsulate the gist of the problem in a nutshell...

This was originally published in The Earth Comes First.


Owl


-------------------------------------------------


Even Then


The lesson of history
is that we don’t learn the lessons of history

Thomas G. Donlan


if the world blew up,
would we wake up?
would politicians admit their lies
as countries sizzled away?
would followers of Christ
drop their bloody Cross?
would the rich forsake gold,
and the gun-happy
shed their weapons?

who would dare to shout,
in that last minute,
that our ways of living
had been sick and perverse,
if only because they led
to everyone burning?
would we realize
that our friends
and family and god and culture
and everything on tv
and on our computers
had been infected with a sly form
of deceit?

could we tear off
the paper-thin straitjacket
that squeezed our minds
into little balls, turned us
into fetal prisoners
within the unmentionable asylum
of the work day?

could anyone be a hero, even then,
faced with the strongest evidence?
would anyone die
ashamed?

I'm featured in Philosophy After Dark!

TELEPORT to PHILOSOPHY AFTER DARK

I’m infatuated with this relatively new journal, run by its discerning and meritorious editor, Max Sipowicz. The poetry is engaging and, true to the spirit of the zine, whirls you down conceptual as well as emotional water slides.

I want to underscore, though, that there is nothing dull, humdrum or anally academic about this site. It is fresh and quirky in a playful-surreal kind of way, not afraid, for instance, to include in its roster an occasional “Historical Fact of the Week,” brought to you by Daniel Vancea. Not afraid to ask raw questions like, What is philosophy?, and provide links to idea-edged commentary. Not afraid to casually remark that a certain perspective in the Paris Review is pretty darn worthwhile, and send you off on a more-than-memorable sojourn of the mind.

I’m extremely honored than my quasi-existential poem, “Value Less” is currently featured. The speaker in the poem is anguished at the level of awful, enigmatic yet essential questions. Here is a teaser line:

she had sealed off wounds
even Equuleus could not soothe.


Go to the site for the whole thing. Even better, write to Editor Sipowicz to thank him for all the hard work he is surely putting in. Editors rarely if ever get unsolicited praise, and they deserve it more than most any single poet. This editor, I feel, is particularly worthy.

Also, think about submitting to Philosophy After Dark. And if you are a woman, please think even more about sending something in (all the recent authors are men). This young journal deserves to soar and garner all kinds of fans and ferment. Dare to reveal your deep-seated questions--or just comment on others’--and you will find a place here, one that welcomes you to haunt and screech.

Owl


PS:

Here are the recent poems offered at Philosophy After Dark :


Pavane at Twilight by Robert Gross

Four Metaphysical Errors by Askold Skalsky

1930 by Frederick Pollack

Acceptance: Bacopa Review

Eldon Turner, the Poetry Editor of Bacopa Review, has informed me that my poem "Plastic Shred" was accepted for the 2013 issue. Bacopa is run by the Writer's Alliance of Gainesville, and they look like a dedicated, passionate, and enthusiastic group of bards:

http://www.writersalliance.org

If you want to join WAG, you will be undertaking a serious and special event, making you eligible to join Critique Pods and participate in the apparently dynamic and vivacious functioning of the Alliance:

http://www.writersalliance.org/bylaws.html

I was born in Gainesville, so it's nice to return home in some sense! Thank you, Editor Turner, and best to all at WAG!

Carry On and Forth and Around and All That,

Owl

Acceptance: Viral Cat

READ the SPRING 2013 ISSUE

Viral Cat has released its latest issue (Spring 2013), which includes my poems "Cassandra Reflects" and "Nameless Wife On the Flood." I love this zine. Of all the zines I know it most effectively combines modalities: poems, films, painting, illustration, media, mixed media and screenplay excerpts. I kid you not. All these forms are in the vcat, intermixed into a mind-whirling stream of idea, symbol, sound and art. This zine follows passion with agile metamorphosis through many rabbit- and wormholes!

Both of my poems are in my prophetic voice and appropriately society-stinging.

The editor prefers anonymity on the site, so I will offer that person phantom yet heartfelt kudos. Thank you for being!

Fly Well In the Dark,

Owl

Portrait of an Owl Who Laughs

Check out the portrait of me by artist Peter DeVeber!

Portrait of the Poet as a Young Owl


And here is the photo that goes with it:

Poem: Hetaera

Recently published in Danse Macabre Magaine.

Enjoy!

Owl

---------------------------------



Hetaera

it was necessary to
kept twisting, a painful
incessant slip.
she had to get free of
the jelly rolls of men
who defined what
she lived for,
what she would
have to need or try.
there were already
sacrifices of silence,
lubricious on the altar
of her cut/e heart.
the chest of any kingpin
pressed her ear like a wall,
fraudulent coos
and debauched loves.
it was necessary
to flee the grizzled grip,
to abjure the click-lock
of diamond circlets.
to sexually abdicate.
no trysts in chateaux
of complex elegant sin.
no more mornings
on blue horizons
of imprisoning yachts;
or high above the scurry
of everyone else’s night.
she wasn’t downing again,
or sinking on a lap
during ascent. she wouldn’t
pretend angelic
in the belly of a monster
in the sky.


---------------------------

"We are all vampires, consuming the light of living jewelry to survive."

Leonard Atwater Williardson, Comes a Spider

Orwell Warned Us About Republicans

In George Orwell’s 1984, the classic novel of utterdark dystopia, three slogans are at the core of the “ruling party.” This party is an ironclad dictatorship that depends on strict mind control. These slogans are: War Is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance Is Strength.

The bulk of the people in the novel embrace these contradictions as truth. They are so brainwashed that they deny they ever doubted these slogans, or had the ability to doubt them. The slogans are obviously true!

The people forgot the contradiction (and the pain of contradiction) and then forgot they forgot. Classic repression. Actually, Orwell’s concept of “doublethink” is even more elaborate:

“[Doublethink is] To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.”

To doublethink properly is to subordinate your conscious to your subconscious to the degree that illogical and deep wrongs seem completely right (at the conscious level). In tandem, the subconscious acts diligently to keep the conscious deluded. Sadly, the conscious originally gave permission for this, even demanded it, and then afterward became a slave to the initial instructions. It’s like someone saying to another, “Enslave me, take away my ability to think logically, and make me forget I asked for it. Never question this slavery and devote your existence to maintaining it."

There is a kind of sick freedom in this at the surface level, the freedom from feeling deep doubts or pangs of conscience. It is the freedom to lie without feeling the lie. The ignorance of the conscious, in this sense, could also be a kind of twisted strength.

Note, though, that the delusion perpetrated on the conscious by the subconscious was, in the beginning, disseminated and propagandized by a heart-stealing government, its purpose to degrade the mind’s resistance and gain totalitarian control. In other words, the ‘freedom’ granted by doublethink is in perverse and diametric relation to freedom in the sense of having an open and decent mind.

The Republican Party of the US Empire promotes a solid and dangerous form of doublethink. Let’s start with War is Peace. The Empire is currently muddling through the longest war of its history. And we also just finished another long ugly one, which took over a decade. Both these wars are insane. There is nothing substantial in them to brag about, and plenty to show in terms of horror, corruption, chaos, death, forced emigration, and atrocity. And yet Republicans, in lockstep, maintain that these long, nightmarish wars--tantamount to torturing a country--are essential. They are tools to combat some great concept of Evil.

Just as bizarre, these long wars are why we are Good.

It’s the same strategy laid out by Orwell. In the novel, there is always some capital E evil to attack; some great glorious fight that requires constant violence on a massive scale. Once you split the world into Them and Us, Evil and Good, you inculcate in your citizens an unthinking hatred for the “Enemy.” You get zombie patriotism at its finest worst.

On the home front, Republicans support massive gun ownership. Why? Lots of machines for killing means less killing takes place. How contradictory is that? The illogic is especially vivid given our epidemic of school shootings and other mass-murderings.

Or just look at the basic math: if every house in a neighborhood has guns, the chance of gun violence will be far greater than if only a few homes have a gun. In a country that worships gun violence in movies, games, and cinema--entertainment that often makes the villain look ‘cool’--this is especially true and disturbing.

None of this slows down the GOP. In fact, it makes them argue even more vociferously for an endless flourishing of guns. When doublethink is involved, the more obvious and logical the rebuttal, the more illogical the doublethinkers get. They raise a mental shield that surges in twisted sophistry to compensate for the onslaught of healthy truth.

Moving on. Freedom is Slavery. The GOP currently leads the charge to destroy tens of thousands of good subsidized jobs in America. Why? We have to destroy jobs to create jobs. To grow the economy, we must shrink it. Crazy enough yet? Another way to put it is this: To make our citizens happy, we must make them unhappy.”

Unemployment is stressful, so another corollary: To make citizens less stressed, increase their stress.

A defender of the GOP could say, “The immediate pain is necessary for happiness later. We must treat the wound, painful though it is, to cure the whole.” However, this kind of argument, “the end justifies the means,” can be trotted out by anyone to justify anything. Our country has used such consequentialist canards, actually, to justify its wars.

At bottom, the Republicans worship two things: a patriarchal white conservative God, and (b) a purist economic theory developed by Milton Friedman at the Chicago school, never successfully tested, which says, via abstruse mathematical equations, that markets beautifully regulate themselves if government is very small and unobtrusive in the market. Friedman tried to prove his “free market” theory by working with Augusto Pinochet, the vicious dictator of Chile. It was a dismal failure. Social welfare and government jobs were slashed and slashed. The cruel police state tortured any protesters. Welcome to Orwellian freedom.

By the way, Friedman’s whole calculation rests on a disproven premise. He assumes humans are completely self-interested and constantly seeking more material gratification. Both psychology and history show that (a) humans are not purely selfish and (b) we are not locked into an incessant need to buy stuff (unless it is trained into us by consumerist advertising culture. How many logos have you seen lately?).

At bottom, what I offer you today, in contrast to the GOP, is simple logic and, more importantly, your own common sense.

Another point: the wealthy have quadrupled their wealth over the past decade, while the rest of the US citizenry has stagnated or sunk. Does this fact slow the Republicans down? No, they are adamant that larding the rich will, someday, help the poor. Research shows otherwise. Trickle down does not work. Even a previous Republican President of the United States, George H.W. Bush (1989-1993) called it “voodoo economics.”

It does not matter to the Republicans. For them, the Rich are Good. It follows, on their polar model of thinking, that the poor are to blame for their own plight--even though we live in a country where 50 million folks cannot afford a doctor.

Not surprisingly, Republicans think that government programs to give food directly to the poor are bad. The GOP wants to cut social welfare that directly helps the suffering. At the same time, they are fanatic about transferring money to people who own yachts and private jets.

Starve the poor to feed them. Eliminate access to doctors to cure the sick. All in the name of a “free market system.” Because big corporations, through legalized bribery, have become corrupting influences on our democracy, we can add: freedom is corruption.

Lastly, we have Ignorance Is Strength. The Republicans are trying to tear down the educational system. They claim it is wasteful. Indeed, this is what they claim about any social or governmental organization in their cold iron sights. And so we get this doublethink slogan: We must cripple education to educate.

The real GOP motive--which they will never admit because it is buried in the doublethink corridors of their minds--is to remove learning as a threat to their Orwellian techniques.

Look what the Republican Party of Texas wrote as part of its 2012 platform, in the section on education:

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas-gop-rejects-critical-thinking-skills-really/2012/07/08/gJQAHNpFXW_blog.html

Notice how they accuse educators of “behavior modification” when such a mechanistic term better applies to the irrational propaganda-driven tactics of GOP doublethink.

It is a classic defense mechanism of Orwellian autocrats to accuse others of what they themselves are doing. Not only accuse, but passionately believe these witch-hunts with fanatic blinkers.

Here is a summary of some of the GOP doublethink points:

We must destroy jobs to create jobs.
We must remove access to doctors to cure the suffering.
We must starve the starving to feed them.
More guns in every home is less violence.
We must torture countries and their citizens because we are Good.

Should you be afraid? Remember, the Republicans shut down the government last year by refusing to raise the debt ceiling on purchases already approved. They did this in service of their fanatical Orwellian beliefs, heedless of the consequences for the country. As a result, the credit rating of the US was downgraded by Moody’s. Once you accept doublethink, you are locked into the soul-crunching momentum of an illogical mind control, one far greater than you, one that demands complete obedience from both your surface and deep levels of being.

The battle against doublethink occurs in the minds of every citizen in American. It is taking place all around you, right now, through various media. It is taking place through conversation, innuendo and body language right there in your own community.

Fly well in the dark.

Owl

I'm Working With Artist Kenny Cole!

It is a great honor and pleasure that I will be providing a poem for Kenny Cole’s Parabellum project, scheduled to display at the University of Maine at Augusta in early 2014. Cole is well-known and highly productive artist, with recent shows across the State, in both public and private universities and galleries. His productive energy and the turmoil of his genius produce intense, norm-cracking drawings, gouaches, murals, and columnar installations. For recent shows and examples of his dynamic and evolving style, seek his web page:

COLE WEBSITE

From my perspective, the greatness of his unfettered conscience rivals his visual prodigy. If a brilliant artist without an ethical edge asked me to participate in a project, I would be happy about it, but somewhat reserved. But Cole is more than a mere Picasso. Cole has the added and heart-soaring trait of moral courage.

If you read over my blog, it is unavoidable, sooner rather than later, that you will learn something stubborn about me. I am an inveterate foot-stamper and lambaster when it comes to serious injustice, one of my greatest sore points being this: denial and willful ignorance in matters political and global. I embrace Noam Chomsky’s statement, “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies." Furthermore I extend this exhortion to artists and poets as well. Let me just quote Chomsky right out:

Intellectuals [I would add poets and artists] are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us. The responsibilities of intellectuals, then, are much deeper than what Macdonald calls the "responsibility of people," given the unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy.

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19670223.htm

The US empire has overthrown elected leaders to install tyrants; it abetted the murder of tens of thousands of people through such coups and strategems; it initiated horrifically wrong and dysfuctional wars; and of course the genocide of the native Americans. The Phillipine War is an outstanding example of a little-known atrocious brutality. (See the book Killing Hope for the scores of US invasions, coup attempts, and so on). Most recently we have the Afghanistan War, still ongoing, and the longest in US history. No one knows what the hell we are doing there, besides seeking a claim on vast mineral deposits. Parallels between the Afghanistan War and the Vietnam War are striking. The CIA’s Phoenix Program in Vietnam was a mass murder, concentration camp mill. Also recent is the Iraq War, another long crazy debacle that fed the guts of giant corporations while brutalizing an entire country for over a decade. Our accomplishment? Removing Saddam Hussein, who was an ally before we decided to attack him. We even supplied him with chemical weapons while he used them to gas his own people.

All the above is just the tip of the infernal iceberg. So, there are a lot of cover-ups and lies to expose, as Chomsky would say, and there are a lot of truths to be told. Kenny Cole is doing it. His art screams accusation and does it through fantastic beautiful dark tempestous canvases. Additionally, the man is humble, kind, down-to-earth and just all-around unpretentious. This is the essence of a true champion.

I don’t know what to say (though I have tried) to properly thank him. I never can. He didn’t need to choose me or anyone else to write a poem for Parabellum. I have argued, in fact, that Cole is so permeable in his dimensional shifts that he is as much a poet as an artist. He doesn’t need another wordsmith because he is a consummate one.

These are unstable times and speaking out in our partisan country can be highly uncomfortable or even deleterious to personal security. But, like Chomsky and surely Cole, I feel it is a responsibility. Let art and philosophy and poetry stand together to lead us out of the barbarity of militarism and into a future of hope.

Owl

PS: to visit the Parabellum website or my review of Cole:


PARABELLUM

COLE REVIEW