The Singing Well is finished

After Note

Dear All:

This November, I participated in National Novel Writing Month, started by nanowrimo.org. The goal was to write a 50,000 word novel by the end of November, having started on November 1st. I wound up writing a 64,000 word first draft of a children's novel titled "The Singing Well" in eighteen days. This averages out to some 3500 words penned per day. This means that my novel is not three times worse than a Hemingway novel, but seven times worse.

I pursued the NaNo nonsense pretty restlessly the last three weeks. I woke and wrote at 5 AM every day, and even drank less. The infernal NaNo backwards clock got into my head. I felt as if each second were being tattooed on my skin, erased, and then tattooed again with the new time--one second less than I'd just had to accomplish the task! I guess I'll write one hell of a sloppy memoir on my deathbed if this is any indication.

Some of the remarkable things I noticed during this process were that my writing style changed considerably. Changed even from what I thought I would write, or would be able to write when pouring through a story at top speed. What I thought I'd be doing, since I am a poet and the story involves a good deal of singing and spell-recitation, was writing poems and witchy rhymes for the characters to use to change their reality. Most of my other prose work has some form of elaborate meditation on inner states, or ornate remembrances. So, I thought I'd have vast descriptive passages punctuated by snippets of limericks, etc. What came out instead was a fast-paced, character and adventure-filled narrative. I found myself chasing after the story, putting down only the minimal notations to forward the action. Shock! "The Singing Well" was not merely magical in its proposed subject matter, but magical in its effect as well.

Perhaps the most interesting thing of all is the love story that occurred. During the writing of this novel, I fell in love with a fourteen year old girl. Her name is Sarah, and she's the heroine of "The Singing Well." Her grit, her fidgety aloofness, her disdain and self-doubt all brought me up into her difficulties and sorrows. Whether these fibrillations are ultimately redemptive or damning, the reader must tell.

The entire production, first draft foibles and all is available online here: http://www.gregglory.com/singingwell/. Personally, I recommend waiting until the draft has at least been gone through once entirely for typos and simple grammar errors. Check back in December.

Happy holidays!

Sincerely,
Gregg

_____________________________________________________

Gregg G. Brown
324B Matawan Avenue
Cliffwood, NJ 07721
(732) 970-8409
http://www.gregglory.com

Directions: http://tinyurl.com/eknep
Latest Book: http://tinyurl.com/r553x
_____________________________________________________

gregglory.com ~~ Watch This Space

Dear All:

This November, I'm participating in National Novel Writing Month, started by
nanowrimo.org. The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel by the end of
November, having started on November 1st. This averages out to a little
over 1500 words a day that need to be written.

Hemingway at his top rate set himself the disciplined goal of writing 500
words per day for his novel-writing. By this math, my novel should be a
little more than 3 times worse than a Hemingway novel.

I figure, if I am to do this thing during National Novel Writing Month
("nanowrimo"), I may as well do it under the spotlight and on a highwire.
The home page of gregglory.com will be updated every day by noon. Oh, there
will be a farrago of spelling errors and plot drops! This is writing in the
raw. A keyboard, a brain, and a headcold.

Each day, yesterday's writing will be automatically deleted, and the new
day's barbaric yawp will be standing shining in its place, dew-lovely as the
dawn.

Suggestions for chapters are welcome. Just reply to this email. For those
of you who want to call, I will be home in bed every night by 10PM. I hope
to make each installment a short chapter for continuity's sake, and so I
don't have to bother remembering the plot as I plod along.

Why am I doing this? I have always wanted to write a kids' novel, and have
never done it. The title will be revealed tomorrow when the novel-writing
begins.

Sincerely,
Gregg

Love and Obligation

Induced musings on the coo and call (and backslap) of the creative process. Blame NJCreative for my thinking about this.

When pursuing a goal or inspired to begin a project, the feeling of pursuit is manifest, strong, and lovely. As if to catch the very air we run and scamper over the impeding rocks, unheedful of their danger. Success and adventure follow our unwearied steps. Songs lift from our labor as from the cricket's legs, the natural and high accompaniment of action.

Once well-in to the project, with either an end in sight, or the continuance of the chase yielding only more of the same, and not better or other,--not, certainly, anything new. Really delightfully, damnably new. Not the happy accidents of the first scamper, but the predicable results of knowing application. But one goes on because the project is incomplete without further results, and a sense of obligation arises. I shall spend so many minutes per on this project to see it to completion. Then the song huffs out of the accordion, and you're only left with the effortful pumping. You sell your guitar and you seek a new medium, fresh rocks, unclimbed hillocks and a dawn that does not so damnably always arise in the East.

What can transform this dull pile of stuff in your heart back to the glitter of its original gold? Where is the shine that first called you from your nest? Where's the fiddle that makes the dancers clap and thighs thump to the bump and the beat? Oh, yes, it's certainly somewhere. But where oh where, and how do I dare to find this time what was given times out of mind? How release the slap of happiness from the grip of obligation?

Well, I don't know how exactly, and I certainly don't know why, but love's the stuff that makes the obligation light, and keeps the work weighted with meaning which otherwise would pall. Then there's the joy of pure service rather than the ego of going, the I of accomplishment. The good things in the doing reassert themselves, and the experience returns to its open components, the hippy constituents of which it is knitted, and is not so knotted to the goal you've imposed. And yet the goal remains, and is not diminished. It simply shares the space of active doing with the humble propeller love provides.

So, fall in love with yourself, and in love with your whimsy which prompted the project first. Serve the girl who kissed you before she knew your name.

Al "Museless" Muzer Mutilates Memorial

Tribute show for the late lamented writer Chris Barry at The Saint in Asbury Park

Chris Barry was a man of words. In many ways, he was a man made of words. In his headlong, lusterless Lester Bangs way, he played a kind of broken jazz with his run-on observations and digressions. But he never stopped talking, and he played his broken jazz in a way that only he could--and a way that no one else would ever dare. I knew everyone would have stories and memories of this guy who we all knew as a ceaseless commentator--a commentator who drew you up into his dream of rock music. Chris was a kind of evangelist for the individual, and I couldn't wait to hear what all these other individuals had taken away from knowing Chris.

Everyone came in their long suits and happy faces. After all, this was a rock and roll show. Dark Heart played, and really wailed some punky tunes. There was a display on a table of some snaps of Chris, and bits of stuff from his life. His cousin was there. Everyone I talked to missed him, and seemed to want to share something. That was made difficult by the sound level, which put each mourner in a bubble of noise. But it was made impossible by the noisome nonsense of Al Museless.

Al Museless ranted and chanted on as MC for the evening--trying to drum up donations for the "fight against cancer." That's all well and good I suppose. The money was being collected in the red panties of a headless manikin, and Al kept urging the audience to "stick it in there." In between bands he would drivel on, sticking the microphone into the faces of a few of his musician buddies and making vacant observations on Chris' life. "Chris got a lot of bands their first review. Whatever that's good for." The musician's all played off of Museless' inanity, and kept their remarks terse. "Chris is dead. I'll miss him, I guess."

The one individual we got to hear from was Lazlo from BlowUpRadio.com, and that was only because he was sick, couldn't attend, and had sent Museless an email with a story about Chris Barry. Introducing the email, Museless remarked that "All annunciation errors are brought to you by Jaegermeister." He then proceeded to mangle the email, which told of Lazlo's gratitude that Chris gave him his first poetry-reading gig, and then quoted a note he had gotten from Chris Barry about the sudden demise of the Broadway Central Cafe. The Broadway was a much-beloved icon of the South Amboy scene, much as Chris was a Central New Jersey fixture. In Chris' note, he bewails the Broadway's demise, and laments the very sudden nature of its passing. He then says that he'll get over it, and that Lazlo probably is already over it. He closes with his usual footnote of humility (which rings a bit false and funny after one of Chris' immensely long harangues) that this is just his "two cents' worth."

And that's what I missed hearing last night--everyone's two cents' worth. And that's Al Museless' fault. He was a rotten MC, and a bad friend to Chris now that Chris is dead.

Museless then proceeds to analyze Lazlo's note, saying, "Whatever that means. I don't know why Lays-low included that letter. Doesn't make any sense. Oh well, whatever. Stick some money in the dummy."

"Because Broadway Central and Chris Barry both left us suddenly, without warning, and now we are left grieving. You moron. Duh."

"Oh, yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. I never was any good at guessing the answers on Jeopardy."

"They give you the answers on Jeopardy. All you need is the right question."

The Burning Anvil

Occassional essays and digressions surging up from the source.

I'm tempted to say that this prospective collection of thoughts and scribbles will veer from the ridiculous to the more ridiculous. But that would be a slur on the creator, and so I shall refrain from such malignity. Often, very often, I've been told that I over-introduce my tropical topics with a blizzard of disguising digressions. I'm informed variously that this is helpful, too helpful, not helpful at all, and by Jacko Monahan to "just shut up and read da po-EM."

Inexpicibly, I'm collecting these various thought-episodes into a short prose collection of essays and introductions (and, here and there, a stray letter let loose in the direction of an attentive ear). One feels that these tidbits and tiddlywinks must fare better on their own then when attached like an irreverent dingy to the majesterial ship of a book of poems. Much can already be spotted or skimmed from this website and the various collections from which these words were originally taken. I will be dusting them off and re-writing them for the sake of coherency and tang. What was only hinted at before in the emergent wood of a metaphor shall now be hunted down and turned to trophies.


Partial Contents list:

1. The Burning Anvil (Poem)


2. Intro


3. Meet Me in Botswana: What Is Blast Press?


4. Poets at War


5. Wheels Within Wheels


6. Why Corporations are Right-Wing


7. What, Me Talk About Terri Schiavo?


8. The Culture of Grievance


9. To All the Harried Angels of the Earth


10. Poetry and Science Essay


11. A Miers Meltdown


12. Fuck You, Glory


13. John Kochansky, an Appreciation


14. O Manifesto! (with Dan Weeks)


15. No Plato's Republic


16. Questioning the Questions


17. Reflections on Reflections


18. Stupendous Punk


19. Telephone Bar Reading


20. The Curse of the Gilded Lily


21. The Ideal of Perfect Love


22. Vim And Vitriol

Mad Hatter lies Hatless and at Peace

Chris Barry, Asbury Park Poet and Mad Hatter Dead at 54

J Keef Christian just called to let me know that Chris Barry, poet and longtime New Jersey music journalist, died last week. His only close relative, his brother, lives in Mexico, so it will be difficult to figure out what will be happening with Chris' writing etc. I volunteered to do what I could, and am reproducing the note I just sent to J Keef in case anyone with more information stumbles across it through a search engine. Please contact me if I can be of any assistance. I don't know what else to do. Presumably there will be an Asbury Park memorial show at The Saint or The Stone Pony sometime this summer.

Dear J Keef:

Brighton Poesy Show:
Wed May 24
'Maybe I Will'
Poetry Show

Sign up for Jacko's email list. There's a copy below of the most recent, which includes the poetry show noted above. I'll be in London kissing the dust of those poets who have gone before.

It was terrible to hear that the Mad Hatter himself has passed through the pearly gates. Chris Barry's name will echo awhile here below--just as his words always did. Please let me know of anything I can do to help caretake his literary legacy. I can scan documents, make electronic copies, store things on the web, etc. quite easily and will gladly take on any such task--including arranging storage space for any of his materials that have survived him. Silence was never his long suit in life, and in death it is an unseemly garment for a poet.

Sincerely,
Gregg
______________________________________________
Gregg G. Brown
324B Matawan Avenue
Cliffwood, NJ 07721
(732) 970-8409
gregglory.com
______________________________________________

"Sex Pistols" Play Debut in Northampton, England

"It's the Sex Pistols!!!", Gregg Glory's first verse play, will be debuting at the Labour Club in Northampton, England (directions).
Billed as "a play for audience participation," Glory is coming off a brilliant reading at the Word Fest 2006 in Metuchen, NJ. At least, that's what he's telling all of his friends who'll listen. Never interviewed concerning the origin or inspiration of the piece, Glory has nevertheless held forth on the topic of his midnight-to-three a.m. shift as a DJ at his alma mater's radio station "back in the day," saying how he used to love playing punk albumsides uninterrupted and then read a scene from Shakespeare aloud to the dreaming audience. This was known informally around the campus as "Tea Time with Gregg G. Brown."

 Sunday, May 21st, 2006, 8PM
 Northampton Labour Club
 97 Charles St, 
 Northampton, NN1 3BG, 
 United Kingdom
 01604 454280
   

The play was originally published by BLAST PRESS eons ago, and was a wall-eyed view of a moment of cultural history even back then. But, since history is a fiction that no number of half-and-halfs can erase, such vivid fictionalizing simply seems to be in the normal course of events. A sign of life itself,as it were. The play was collected into Glory's verse play doorstop book just three years ago, titled "A Million Shakespeares (737 pp)." It is available to read online here.

From the Prologue:

 Everything not incidental
 To a prince's birth in loathed ashes
 Shall be told in what we are about to speak:
 Mire costuming here a spirit as rare
 As any that went naked in greater ages
 Whose philosophers, incidents, and strange tales
 Whisper still in books passed down to us.   
   

Stupendous Punk

[15 Years of Alice B. Talkless]

Civilization herself could be considered a conspiracy. A conspiracy to recall our history, to keep us from making the same mistakes. All of civilization could, in this way, be considered a giant guilt-trip. From this weight, this burden of too great remembrance, too infinite recall that puts our every erratic action in quelling context, Alice B. Talkless offers no escape.

Their language is all the stuff of contemporary activity punctured by the knelling bell of recall. No deed of bravado or bald assertion occurs but that its opposite is limned by a phrase or implied by a wry title. I think of "Nicole Smith Addresses the Jury," which calls to witness the very aggrieved ghost of all history, the executed victim, and refuses to let the verdict of the newspapers stand untarnished by rueful doubt.

The music itself is often a wavery version of some gratuitous pop tune, sorted through the echelons of a conscience refined by a swiftening urge for shining Justice; this urge as overwhelming and permanent in the singer as any adolescent lust. It cannot live by itself in cool detachment, but must cleave, mollusklike, to the heaving ship of circumstance. This judgment, this compelling reconnivance of all an audience had considered settled or solved is at the very center of the punk act.

A rebellion of consciousness must insert a distance between the perceiver and its object for the sake of imposing an aesthetic shape upon all that occurs in the "performance space." It asserts both that "I know what it is," and "It is not what it is" at once. The dissonance of this assertion invokes a true tension in the audience that only a cogitation resembling meditation can resolve. And in punk, as in the whippet-wild customs of the fervid dervish, meditation must take place in the horrid whirlpool of a too-tempestuous activity, a storm of limbs and lights and outr?mages for the sight.

The thoughts of one's own mind become the only rock for setting forth, for all else is blaze and mayhem. And the only description of such self-centered activity in such a situation of sensory overload has always been called grace. Punk evokes grace from those who grapple with it. In the heat of the wrestling match, it is the coolest strategist who prevails, often by less than the advantage of an inch in the swale of sweats.

Down the long bowling alley of the past, a face comes hurtling: Scott Stamper, proprietor of a small rock club bunched in-between two abandoned businesses in the rotted-out Asbury Park of the early 90s. His hair was Hitler-dark, and his eyes a damaged periwinkle blue. At the time, I had been running a raggedy poetry reading betwixt rock acts on the long side-stage of the joint, where the black bar leaned toward the golden rail of the stage from no more than four feet away. The Thunderbird Cafe had that waxy look of a retired stripper stuck attending a laundromat to keep her ten cats in kitty litter.

"Hey there, Gregg. There's gonna be a good act in here next week. Something you would like. A kind of punk performance art thing. Two sisters, a little weird. You'll like it."

Seven nights later, behind the gilded bar of the stage, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth, with only a bass guitar and two querulous voices, Alice B. Talkless took the world to task with all the brazen bravery of any saint. Cheerleaders' struts and call-and-response echoes rocked the badinage between two sisters whose minds had the wired intimacy of a single soul. Their get-ups were Alice in Wonderland meets Bo-Peep -- at the sex shop. The strength and strangeness of their voices registered from a land beyond, as though one overheard the thoughts of a mountain at its own birth. Shepardesses of a herd that didn't know it was lost, they sang for their sheep.

I'm stitched in the rain
stretched from a hangin' twine
pink plastic coat without my feet
crawlin' as the night jumps
from maggoty sheep

One of the sisters in wideeyed and broadbrowed. Her operatic voice curls alluringly, alarmingly around nonsense syllables. She plays a funky-chicken bass that keeps the heady abstractions of patriarchy and personal values on track. Amy Mayhem by name, and she keeps up with her moniker.

"What you won't risk is not what you value," says Alice. Always the call is to a more genuine, more experienced, more involved and damnably emancipated life. And yet this is to be done with all the mental gear of post-post-modern irony, a wary awareness of our individual limitations and our solid responsibilities. Naturally enough, biology and time take up their paired, important roles in this cosmos. These unshakable, pillars of context shift the singers into a burdened responsibility that overmasters comprehension. They are the unslakeable Greek anake and a sure cure for useless hubris. When Alice B. took up the guitar along the yellow brick road of the band's metamorphosis from weird cheers to soul-searing rip-rock, the notes jangled and bent in a way that both demanded attention and yet refused to sound out the edges of the map for the fellow-travelers in the audience. You were always the cat thrown off the roof when Alice et al stepped from beneath the proscenium.

Once, with her voice on dire fire before the raw stop of a brick wall at some dump in hypocritical Red Bank, all of her soaring moral imperatives scanned the room like Zeus' lightning and left no exit. All the space between performer and feted evaporated and we were stuck and paired in the brick nothingness of the sonic moment. An instant empathy, so vast and relentless as to leave room only for nausea in the rigid psyche, was forced on all in the room; a miracle in that vain and vapid town.

Both the sisters are long with "stupid, straw-pale locks" that belie the tailor-fit, arrowy troubles or their female status. They play a three-card monte with words and sounds, and they use the apparentness of their commitment to being time-bound and female as just another card in the torrid shuffle. Self-aware as a surgeon equipped with a mirror, they keep themselves from developing the cancerous egos of other bands by excerpting the lump with a deft twist of the wrist.

The pair have traded out drummers over the years, but have acquired only one permanent new member of the band. Amy Mayhem's husband, darling guitarist and effects master. Oh, there is too much to say of all they may have done together, all that the world might have had at their bidding. Worlds and worlds have been wreathed and unwreathed in their sets. I should have described them better, their burning playing with fire, their solemn costumes and their diaphanous fixations on the ethereal. But my eyes turn inward at their approach, and I am made busy with the effort to save myself at this life-trial I had not realized was already on to its closing arguments. God grant me memory and long life to learn what they have already taught me.

4/1/2006

MEET ME IN BOTSWANA: WHAT IS BLAST PRESS?

A speech for national poetry month about BLAST PRESS.

by Gregg Glory

Come see and hear a special day of poetry and jazz at Flushing Town Hall on April 8th, 2006.

Flushing Town Hall
137-35 Northern Boulevard
Flushing, NY 11354.Take the 7-train to Main Street, Flushing. We are one block east of Main Street, at the corner of Linden Place and Northern Boulevard.

Ab li dolen in l'air [look up: beauty falls from the air]
"A book should be a ball of light in your hands." -- Ezra Pound

As we all know, April is "International Guitar Month." But my heart twangs for poetry, and I was invited here to tell you a little bit about a tiny poetry publishing company called BLAST PRESS.

Let's start with what BLAST PRESS is not. BLAST PRESS is not a community. It is not a community-building venture. It is not by, about, or for "the people." Unlike the pretentious anthologies that weigh down the shelves and slander the individual by gluing him into some historian's scripted story, BLAST PRESS is not a collection of individual voices expressing the vibrancy, meaning, and tradition of the creative community--nor of any community. In this respect, BLAST PRESS, as it critics have bitterly asserted, is nothing at all.

BLAST PRESS has published over 100 chapbooks by some twenty authors over the past two decades. Each author's work stands singularly alone and apart. BLAST PRESS does not take part in the mish-mosh of the magazine market, where a hundred tentative voices are corralled by brute binding into an ersatz herd. We go alone, each of us, to where the crocs swim alertly in the bulrushes and the nights are long. Meet me in Botswana, if you will meet with me at all.

What is a chapbook? A chapbook is a saddle-stapled booklet of plain paper stock folded in half with a sheet of colored card stock for a cover. In the first decade, booklets would be stapled together by hand, each staple closed with a bloody fingertip to save the two-cent per staple cost. All small publishers are unified in this regard: we are exceedingly cheap.

In the next few minutes, for a brief moment, we will hear the voices of some poets that have been published by BLAST PRESS. Their words have been put into chapbooks with a BLAST PRESS logo on the back, and my current address somewhere inside the front flap. Words torn from the air and swatted into print. That is all. But, that is everything.

The Curse of the Gilded Lily

The reading at The Telephone Bar was a blazing success. It's no exaggeration to say that I was smashed; I mean, that I was a smash. There's something about poetry reading events that ignite all the ambition and envy in my soul. Although, ambition and rivalry is nearer the mark. I don't really feel a negative envy of the other readers. I enjoy their soarings and homilies.

But I do feel a bit left out--seated on the curb as the parade rages on. Harold, the MC of the evening, walleyed and tall in his vintage red sweater, said I'd've fit right into Mardi Grais (from which he'd recently returned), and promptly furnished the fireplace with the remnants of my reader's notes. The goldenrod pages flared a moment and then joined the eternal ashes in the grate.

Somehow, even when people dig what I do, invitations to participate, or gestures of connection, rarely follow the brief fellow-feeling. It was quite unusual for Julie Androshick to ask me up to read after listening together to a previous poetry event which she hosted in the toasty backroom. Most people seem to think that I'm already some kind of success, or that I've got "my own thing" going on. That happened
even in college, when by definition every writer's just a callow hack full of egocentrically tender self-regard. My professors thought I didn't need or want any encouragement or too-close guidance or helpful hints simply because of the radiant bliss I experienced in poetry's presence. I'm the snagged and angry Daffy Duck, but come off as the brazenly bouncy Bugs.

It might just be that because I enjoy myself so immensely and intensely at these outings that people empurple with a wry shyness--almost as if I'd find them out as fakes or dime-store swamis. I'm always holding myself back, way back, yet am full of a very visible, if not risible, "mire and spark." I'm going to call this the curse of the gilded lily. Too much shine to actually be divine.

But, unlike the the Music Man with his biblical tarrada-tant-ta, I have not found a way to turn my spurious shine to good effect. Oh, poetry's just not about hosing the wogs in Iowa for sheckle. Not anymore, eh Homer? It's all about sifting the shiftless from the shineola; those moments of drifting like a thought, a golden straw flittering from the haypile.

If there's one thing I'm not, it's a success. 1200 rejections in a single year bear pop-eyed witness to that. Weary years of wringing words from turds have taken me precisely as far as I could walk in a desert unaided and unwatered. No phoenix will rear and arise here, only more of my alien longing for beauty will occur.

I'd love for my words to wend their way somewhere other than the fiery pit; to sigh a sonnet from a teleprompter, or band-aid my hands from book-signing injuries. Anything that would extend, enhance, or deepen those solid moments of eye-to-eye embarrassment that I live for. But those I meet who enjoy a buoyant success, only offer me their scorn and condescension. Ah, yes, it's the back of the hand for me--and you, too, my readers--and then the lily's in the wastebin.

The heat in the room was more oppressive than a Swedish sauna. It was Hell, with mittens. Women with their wonderful slopey breasts were in evidence, and I was a hit with the geriatric set. Those soonest to die love the poets best.

Signing off,
Prof. Harold Hill
Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]

3/7/2006

Reading at the Telphone Bar, NYC, March 6th, 2006

Directions to the Telphone Bar.

[Banquet and Ascent to be read aloud.]

Tonight's selection will be two poems of opposite tenor. They tell weird interior tales of consciousness stretched to the uttermost. The references beyond the dome of one soul's feelings are erudite, scattershot. The thread of the feeling must be noticed, and followed, for these experiments in lyrical insistence to work. Once the thread has been caught, and pulled tight between you and me, here in this room, tonight, together we may strike a chord and hear the heavenly music which is always part of poetry's supposing.

The first poem, "Banquet," is a dark, devilish core of exploded poet. A withering inward glance at the toothless uselessness of poetry. How, when the thread's not grasped, or when the poet in too hot self-contemplation incinerates the thread before it can be grasped-- only the drama of the pyre can satisfy. As when Hamlet, at the close of his trials, drowns the disaster with a refreshing blood-bath. This is how a failure to communicate must end.

The second poem is, instead, a "loaded ode to limitlessness and light." It has some beatific banter, and some instructive couplets. This is what may arise, phoenixlike, from the auto-da-fe of the first poem. There are longish passages of scenery; the inner feeling has suffused the world in its hopeful glow. The goal of universal love is presented as a given, and the world itself must be the context for that love, today as every day. The soulful voice in the second poem, "Ascent," seeks to incite a response to the poet's coo and call.

Good luck to us all.

Gregg Glory
[Gregg G. Brown]

Banquet

Sick ink 
vomited belly up on the throw rug
as if I had forgiven it,

the swallowed ball 
of my poisonous poem, a loaded ode 
to limitlessness and light-

What trash!  
as if the sky- vapid and superior in its  imperial blues
didn't know how to bite!

Mistakes, mistakes! 
The pen's a miracle of mayhem, wild slips
of a wrist once slitted;

the bleeding, careering nib,
a molt of details in the schizophrenic flow:
my mangy life,

my frozen embryo 
carelessly cast from the shelf, unlidded 
and palely little.

The cornflower fists 
ache to begin, the watery lungs 
two skinned, amniotic fish.

A bonfire, a bonfire! 
Something huge and ruinous with real red in it! 
That's what goes, what really goes

with this stone decor, 
this face hung in a mirror slashed to tears. 
Heat, heat

anything to exhaust 
this caustic blank in my being, torn calendar--
Journals, drawn loves, alien lines

poems mouthed from poems 
--dead-weight papers pushed to a death heap
 a Jew harvest at Dachau-

Perfect things 
as final as a corpse, 
ashes to ashes.

The matchsticks itch 
to finish it.
Irritable Rubicon  

of lava, language vulcanized on language, 
I cross you languidly. 
I am nearly asleep 

in the oxygenless air. I am tired, tired, 
tired of curses, tired of cures
tired of the alphabet.

The wall, infinite sheet, 
turns intense as an oven, the nails  
must be melting...

And here I stand 
awash and exhausted, perfumed in the rolls  
of corpse-smoke, 

words burned to whorls. 
Too tired to live, to die, to anything 
kilned in skin.

Ascent

Awake, awake!
For all the dear bay's glistening
In uneven light still listening
For whatever of utterance
Soul's chrysolm beauty may glance
Into willing water's dark,
My sweet meaning the whole of my bark.
Set sail, set sail, my soul, set sail
Let no hindrance, no halt, avail:
For we are the sweet of the tree,
Blossom and bole, shoot and root we three,
Myself, my soul, and me.
Nor does the shaping heart forego
To lend its beat to our argot,
My spirit a crystalline keel,
Inspiration a motion wind feels
Lifting in blessing ascent
All some deeper sleep had blent
With nightmare chimeras now forgot
By all within my steady boat.

Every morning wayfarer
Whose light boat cannot tarry
But pushes on out of darkness
With whatever of best and best
In tangles of light impressed
Bossing golds on waves' breast,
Plies resistless to the crest!

All last night my heart had lain
Upon this boat and silver stream
Until all memory became
Like the memory of a dream;
And there true life began
Beneath night's stars swirled to one
Past the extinguishment of suns
When realer dream draws us on
To dream of all we may have been
And in heart's solace draws us on
In dreaming dream to dream again!

I my own bright soul create
Nor did this fascination make
To slave it to a universe
I, living, gaze on as a hearse.
My silver hand in dawn's lake
Dips, its own soul to take;
From this sweet enlivening
Come my symbols unquestioning:
Crown upon my crown rests cherishing,
The sword in my hand unperishing.

Do not dispraise the light
That, singing whatever's brightest,
Undoes the theft of night--
In soul-enchanting soliloquies
Enmansioning aerial ways
That we might thrive there all our days
In realms of spendless purity
Absent nations' perfidy
Heart to heart for sole surety;
This our pledge, this our guarantee
That all's well with humanity
Once these bleak constants, fear and dread,
Lay to light exposed, and dead,
The human plant may only mend,
Think to create, and speak to praise,
Throughout the endless paradise of days
--Touch to caress, or move to love,
As this thoughtless rhyme does prove.

And if all the world condemn
What all the heart commends
What matter, so that heart sail on
In self-discovery without bourne
Through mystic waters, blue and calm?
What does pleasure's grieving echo give
But light to dark-hearted lives?
O when the trembling hand may shiver
And some momentary joy deliver
To thought-locked face and brow
What passes from that hand to bless
In an unending tenderness
As paradise were with us even now?
Memory makes no bounty of the scorn
Dementia attempts to ripen on
In sold human hearts since we're born;
Whatever slender wing endeavors
Be communicant with the treasure
One heart may hold forever
Will find such wind in chambers there
Beyond conjoining woe or care
That they may sail infinity
In the air of that one heart's ease.
Pleasure alone may live within
The human bound of life given
As light within these waters:
Ungrieving, crystalline, faultless.

2/25/2006

Anne Coulter's Ode: Julie Androschick Debuts Polemical Broadsheet

Julie Androschick is debuting on BLAST PRESS and this website with a harsh, hilarious polemical anti-neoconman
poem. The broadsheet is a large 11" x 17" heavy bond paper with a full illustration on the verso.
Julie runs, along with a few other key players, the Poetry Reading at the Telephone Bar in NYC, now in its tenth year.

Anne Coulter's Ode

Julie Androshick


Neocon man, oh neocon man
Just seeing you makes my day 
Your shirt is starched and your jacket is straight
Your hair is Kevlar grey 

Your lips are thin and your voice is tin
You stride with unswerving decision
Your twisted plans for foreign lands
Ignite me like nuclear fission

Neocon man, oh neocon man
I’m intoxicated with your power
I giggle and blush and feel the rush
Of a blossoming Clauswitzian flower

Neocon man, oh neocon man
Could you possibly fancy this girl?
We could drink ourselves drunk with discussion
Of dominating the world
   
I shudder with the thought 
Of everything that you could teach me
Of liberals who fear and tremble
As you trample them with Nietzche 

Talk to me of places 
That you will handle with a bomb
Of soldiers who will meet their death
In a war that won’t be won

Take me in your arms
And caress me with ideology
Whisper to me of death and doom
And explain it through tautology

Your Imperial bedroom is black and blue
Your bed is made of steel
The women you bed there (besides your wife)
Are paid to make you feel

Your photos of Leni Reifenstahl 
Are authentic to be sure
Your recordings of McCarthy 
Are music to my ears

Neocon man, oh neocon man
You’re the answer to my dreams
Your sadistic ways and hip hoo-rees
Change the cruelest of regimes

After you have climaxed 
To the sound of your own delusions
We’ll cuddle up and have a smoke
And block realities intrusion

Alas, my little neocon man
This is just a silly game
I wouldn’t dare go near someone 
Who’s categorically insane

Neocon man, oh neocon man
Please don’t look at me that way
Your game’s deceit and I complete
The way you like to play

Of the fact that you want to fuck me
I’ve never been more sure
But my forked tongue and mendacious fun
Are only meant to torture

2/25/2006

Tolerance, to a Fault

Letters to the Editor
letters@nytimes.com
The New York Times
229 West 43rd Street
New York, NY 10036

Dear Sir:

In Michael Kimmelman's 2/8 article "A Startling New Lesson in the Power of Imagery" about the Muslim reaction to the Danish cartoons, he says the world is dealing with a "new molotov cocktail of technology and incendiary art." He neglects to mention another key ingredient, namely incendiary Imams.

His article cites numerous examples of people defacing art objects they find objectionable, but no other examples of harm to life and limb because of a piece of art.

The argument that pervades this article is, "well, after all, those cartoons did hurt people's feelings." I am sorry that their feelings were hurt. But as any kindergarten teacher can tell you, it's okay to express strong emotions, if it is done responsibly.

It is one thing to boycott goods and withdraw ambassadors from a country. It is another thing entirely to set buildings on fire, and beat up news photographers and journalists who happen to look like they might be Danish, or have some Danish ancestry.

Going back to the boycotting of goods and withdrawal of ambassadors from a country: it is within bounds of responsible behavior, in that it is nonviolent. However, it does not entirely make sense: after all the Danish government did not create the cartoons, a free newspaper did.

So what do the all the violent demonstrations mean to accomplish? The underlying message is that the Danish government should exercise control over its press. If they do not exercise that control, they will suffer the consequences.

I would think this message would outrage a newspaperman. This is, in effect, cultural terrorism. It is an attempt to beat the western world into submission to Muslim ideals, Muslim way of life, a way of life that involves a tight conjoining of church and state, with government controlling the workings of the press. A way of life in which Imams can demand execution or amputation for people doing things which offend their aesthetic sensibilities.

Mr. Kimmelman brings up the "cynicism and hypocrisy" these events have brought about, citing the joint chiefs of staff writing a letter to an editor about an objectionable cartoon that featured a soldier with all four limbs amputated. But writing a letter to an editor about a cartoon is precisely exercising free speech - there is nothing hypocritical in this. The joint chiefs of staff did not, however, suggest that the cartoonist be executed. There's a crucial difference.

I agree with Mr. Kimmelman's observation that "art...like words...can cause genuine pain." Reading his article caused me considerable heartache. However, I am not planning to go out and set a building on fire over it. Instead, I am exercising my right of free speech, which is a mainstay of civil society and actually helps keep violence to a minimum.

At a recent Muslim conference, a speaker referred to the Danish cartoons, expressing a "concern at the rising hatred against Islam and Muslims." I am concerned about that too, but I wonder how inciting violence can possibly be the path to gaining the world's love and respect.

Sincerely,

Carrie Pedersen
New York, NY

Guest Editorialist

Vim and Vitriol. Born into the Wrong Civilization

Attend with me a modern poetry reading. The audience is well-versed in literature, its current trends and attendant ills, but without the careworn weight of erudition that makes for a joyless or too-careful listener. Friends have come to hear friends, and life-long readers arrive in a steady flow for the pleasing frisson of hearing an ancient art touched and propounded by its living practitioners. This is no high-school event, where poetry erupts as naturally and plainly as a pimple. This is no mere excess of passion, or blind pursuit of an ideal more sensed than certain. This is a gathering of votaries, long-time acolytes, lovers who have shared years of glances and passion and have retained a complex togetherness in spite of all.

In the temperature-controlled building, a library, five thousand years of literature sit in taut attendance. All has been arranged with energy and ingenious diligence. A table by the door has a beige cash box, and hopeful pyramids of books written by the night's readers sit quietly stacked there. A local fellow from channel one-hundred and thirty documents the entire affair, archiving the very faintest waves of sound and sight for channel-changing generations yet unborn. Here, if anywhere, the artful origami of the heart might be attempted.

A scribble of hates, and a mashed trash of imprudent, and yet hidden, loves, are in evidence as the speakers proceed. One has serial contempt for her progenitors, snide, sly, and slimy all at once. All the personality of the pieces comes from them, their habits, their wretched, wrenching cowardice as seen through the adult eyes of their too-quiet child. Another speaker confesses an undue love of her vacation time in France. Photos of Matisse's famous chapel appear and we are whisked away to vestigial references to greatness; not allusions precisely,-- a formulaic, rather than formal, fortune-cookie Confucianism.

The recaller of childhood slights contends that the weight of details carries all her story, and not the coalescing consciousness that hones these details to home in the repeating breast. She's angry, impatient with her students, who make a brief appearance in her talk as examples of clueless youth. "They take flight with their ideas.... Oh, it's enough to make me and Marjorie boil sometimes...." Maggots are the Maginot line in her example. "Stop there," she implores her students in her didactic poem, "stop at the erupting, spoiled sack of yams. We do not need to know more." The audience hums a mobile appreciation--their minds full of the sacks she has, with hard art and suffering effort, placed there.

In such a case, it is as though one is watching the high art of poetry turned into a Seinfeld episode; all the wit and concision of fine comedy displayed with a peacock's pride, but centered on a vacuity. All the order and greatness of art churned into the claustric chaos of a hurricane. All is agitation without either cause or destination.

Such riled ranting seems to me to be starkly marred by a deeply frivolous approach to reality, a viciously superficial finesse that forgets the poised purpose finesse first flourished to display. The only way such an attitude can manage to excuse the dowdy hours laboriously burned in pursuit of such fine technique and then pissed away on such minor whims, sadly, is not to rear up and embrace some grand passion, some stirring triumph fought for by one drummed into the gutter.... No, that is not the way of such self-convinced trivializers. In such a case as this, where the wallpaper takes supremacy over the wall, the only cure for the imposed claustrophobia of the artist's perspective is to tear down the edifice itself--each slash of the bush must rip down a wall as well as display an erudite decoration. The harp of discord is sounded in all such efforts, and the horn of war herself is never very far behind this recourse to insult. For how can one sing even of one's own virtuosity, when pride himself has been assailed as impermissible, when praise is pidgeon-holed as a madman's gambit and not known as the due beautiful things demand?

So seemed the evening to me as I cried in my car. All the horror that the best of our efforts had hobbled themselves to here. That this was our articulate pinnacle, and not some wayward way-station on the trail to grace. Had our civilization only heaped itself thus high? A diminished soul aghast in perished light, marking time with sardonic jokes bolstered by biblical texts and a deconstructionist's exegesis equally? This was not the Dadaist's protest of a civilization viciously off-track. This was the exquisite dingus itself. This was the fullness of our self-story presented in all the timeless trimmings of an artist's hardest artifacts.

I grew convinced, as the night fell down on my humming Subaru, that I had been born into the wrong civilization.

Gregg Glory
[Gregg G. Brown]
January, 2006

John Kochansky, an Appreciation

John Kochansky died last fall, suddenly and in his grown prime.

 

John and I were good friends, and daily spoke and sought solace for life’s twistings in our discussions and toyings with art and poetry for a time.  Eventually we fell out of touch, but not out of favor with one another.  When we met on a sudden moment, we’d share the green cheer of a Heinekin and go off on a tear about this or that moment in the omni-ball of perceptions that is the artist’s life.  Some years back, while we were apart, I wrote a remembrance of John, an old-fashioned chant to bring the man before my eyes and recall his qualities, an appreciation.  I’m re-printing it below from a chapbook of my “Autobiographies.”  Below that is a one-off poem, “The Artist Surprised in His Lair,”  a short monolog, which I wrote with John jokingly in mind, hoping for an indulgent chuckle when he read it.

 

When I first met John, long ago among dusty aisles of books, he drew, rather than wrote, his name and number for me to get in touch with him, saying something to the effect of “Why not play with the boundaries of the known?  With a letter you know what to expect.  When is a JK, unrecognizable?  When does it move from the known to the unknown?  What is that boundary?”

 

John and I collaborated on a cartoon too, Fido Diablo, Devildog.  The character’s tag line was “A dog cursed with the head of a man.”  Fido’s Joycean adventures combined a dream-text with a set of blazingly varied panels of illustration.  The day John stopped by my old home to crank the collaboration into fine-tuned reality, he left behind a totem item, a sunflower-headed Barbie, to connect our toils on a spirit plane and draw down from some hidden realm the good ju-ju into our winsome sport.  In all the years that have separated that day from this, she has not failed in her mission.

 

From Autobiographies:

A sliced strawberry or kiwi fruit halved could provide an hour's worth of conversation for that kind man without pause or fatigue. Unexhausted talk flowed from him as naturally as sleep follows prayer, as the saying has it.

He approached each canvas or projected scheme with a methodical incertitude, a patient abeyance of judgment that, in his case, came I think, from a deep dejection, developed by a too-long brooding over the pathological isolation all the arts in this nation must suffer under as long as it lack a sustaining tradition. His buoyant manner and whirlwind of activities withheld from view some central simplicity, some nexus, some weighted center acting as keel that served as a base for all his actions. He was all for the confusion of the mass and the packed canvas. No meaning could be extracted from the palimpsest. He talked of "paranoid flat spaces" and the obsess ional drawings of the mentally ill. Marginalia, echolalia, glossilalia. Pollack's revolutionary compression of space as an expression of "liberating density." But all of his own graphic work, no matter how fiendishly pressed into the frame, had always a simple clarity, a straight and generous enough character to endow the moodiest Cyclopes with a charmed eye that must laugh in the world's despite. His dogs with reversed heads and Pharaohnic glance, pastel fish suspended on a heavily worked surface of conflicting symbols, his proud women sporting flowered heads, his grave distortions of human form, and all of his linework carried that quality and energy of waking up refreshed after some long night-struggle with the faceless.

He told me once of a textile project of his to impose on a pattern of flowers the recurrent outline of a girl's face, as in Dali's illusionist works. To him it was the simple doubling of positive impulse and positive impulse,--- as he had once half-humorously described the troika of beer, yeast, and women, and told of how that supreme triad had stolen his fate from his own hands and consigned it to their fertile substances. But we can see in that faint flickering between slant petal and female smile on the pillow, as between ant and saint in Dali, a shift in our perceptual paradigm. First the lovely girl, then all is exuberant blossom swirled with shadow. Looking again, petal and face have again exchanged their places. The sovereignty of the imagination to designate its objects is coaxed by a trick of the light, a suavity of line. Caravaggio, in his canvas of the conversion, has the stunned man crawling away amazed from the glossy side of a rioting horse, having seen, in some moment that mixed ecstasy and grace, some portion of God's countenance in that great glistening square of skin rearing in triumph over his lapsed and piteous body. But what besides that fallen saint's imagination had put it there? A shift in his ideas of the universe's central theme allowed him to see some discrete omnipresence in that reality which was before fit for nothing save the carrot or the spur. It is for this reason that my friend, when too full of the world and the world's affairs, clambers at dawn onto a limber trampoline to shake some new mystery down; and it is why, however troubled the life, the consummate artist must, like the straight wake of the turbulent swan, leave no unperfected image after him.

But I must see him, even now, half in the air, and smiling still, squabbling with me over some point of medieval church decoration or peasant folktale, and tossing a squeaking ball back to the madly circling dog.

 

The Artist Surprised in His Lair

"In this drawing of an apostle's nirvana

I gave a charming native girl christ's

fivefold power hand, a santa rea item.

The bone dice of fate are chiseled on her skin,

her breasts are docile rounds to those twinned squares,

her pubic matt preadolescently slim. Note

the use of black, another power totem,

which oil slicks in India ink the right or damned

hand side of the visual field; out of its night soils

burst pumpkins, and watermelons halved

for the easy licks of the naked girl who lies

with crossed arms at their side. Calabeza bianco

says the stylized head joined to the anointed

torso which hovers clubfooted in this dream

which I fancy St. Jerome on an off day may have painted."

--Gregg Glory 

  [Gregg G. Brown]

 

 

 

 

The Poets Voice Box

Gregglory.com has been updated with MP3s of over a dozen poems.  Also included are sniggering outtakes from the studio session for the next CD Waxy Caskets.  The first CD, Platinum Lips, will be ripped into MP3s and placed on the site over the next month or so.

1/3/2006

Floaters Novel Ready to Submit to iUniverse

Brandi Scollins-Mantha's Novel, Floaters, is ready to start the submission process to iUniverse. As a micro-publisher, BLAST PRESS has neither the capacity nor the need to house several hundred copies of a massive manuscript. We specialize in small-run chapbooks of poetry, essays, and novellas.

By using iUniverse for all of our more ambitious projects, we get all of the advantages of a big print-on-demand publishing house, while still staying true to our authors. The entire cost is under-written by BLAST PRESS, so even though iUniverse advertises itself as a self-publishing option for authors, it becomes a useful printer's resource for BLAST PRESS. The manuscript is issued an ISBN, and is maintained as available-to-order on the web.

BLAST PRESS sets up an iUniverse account in the author's name, and manages the initial set-up, look and printer/publisher communications and edits for the author. Once the book is printed, BLAST PRESS turns the account over to the author so that all copyrights and future revenue go directly to the writer. Any profits from the book are first sent to the author, who then sends them back to BLAST PRESS until initial costs have been recouped. Any profit after that remains, like the iUniverse account itself, with the author.

This set-up allows BLAST PRESS to take on novels and other full-size book projects at minimal cost, while maximizing the benefits to the author.

1/3/2006